I have previously been confused about the future being “unknowable”. When people say that, do they really, really mean it? Or do they think that we merely don’t know the future? I think that in some cases, they don’t really mean it. Here is one way of putting it, in this case as an objection to consequentialist ethics:
“it is impossible to know the future. This means that you will never be absolutely certain as to what all the consequences of your act will be.”
The person who says this is Shelly Kagan [1]. The puzzling thing is that he is a philosopher, so he should be expected to actually mean exactly the thing he’s saying. Whereas it seems obvious to me that it’s fine to not be certain about the future. And if you use a sufficiently strong definition of “knowledge” (e.g. one that includes certainty), then that means that you don’t, and maybe can’t “know” the future. Well, anyway, the thing that I’m concerned about is a much stronger claim: the one that we’re not just uncertain about the future, but that we actually have not the faintest clue about it.
Brief summary of how James Lenman [2] puts it: Actions that are “identity-affecting”, i.e. that influence which people will live in the future, have a host of completely unforeseen future consequences, given that they might cause someone to live who in turn affects lots of people in lots of ways (the core example is: I save someone’s life because I think it’s a good thing to do so, but actually it turns out that their child is the next terrible world dictator and kills many million other people. So it seems like my action wasn’t actually good, although, who knows, maybe among the victims of this dictator there was someone, or the ancestor of someone, who would have caused even worse suffering, so it was great they didn’t come to exist – which means that we don’t even know if that dictator did something that was overall good, or bad). Further, basically all actions affect the identity of future people in some way, even just by subtly changing the timing of when people conceive children, and so on.
I don’t really (or maybe really don’t) want to think about what this means in terms of moral theory – I’m not too fussed about whether the entire goodness of my actions is determined by its consequences (and I’m probably not really a consequentialist if I think that I can be a good person even when I do shitty things, but also maybe… anyway). But I am concerned about consequences in some way. I mean, I would like my lifetime efforts to, on balance, produce something good. That would be kind of nice.
To figure out now
- Does that also mean that actions cancel each other out, so that our actions don’t matter either way? (It seems like it doesn’t, or at least I think I remember Hilary Greaves saying that it doesn’t, but I don’t remember why this would or would not be the case)
- Or do our actions matter, only it is utterly impossible for us to know in which way they do?
Unknowable things
Mm, brief note on the “unknowable” thing, again. Does us being radically clueless actually imply that things are “unknowable”? Right, maybe I and these other people just think of different standards for unknowable. I am thinking of “unknowable” as a claim about how the world works, saying something like “some events in the world are not governed by cause and effect, and therefore unpredictable even in principle”. A bit like early modern accounts of miracles (I am thinking of Leibniz, really, but am worried of paraphrasing him wrongly) – God sets up the world to work according to natural laws, but also has the power to break the regularity by making miraculous things happen. And I think even in the case of radical human cluelessness, we could imagine a sort of philosophical God (i.e. an entity that has all the information there is) that would be able to know that we should intercept X on the way to her date for exactly 35 seconds to prevent Y from being born (or maybe teach her date how to put on condoms properly) etc etc. I guess that people who say that the future is unknowable don’t mean that thing. So either they’re using sloppy language, or maybe they think this whole “knowable in principle” spiel is useless anyway, and it’s obviously implied that we’re talking about human standards here (which is plausible when I think of the analogous debate of “unobservable” entities in the philosophy of science, where people (is it Van Fraassen? Oh, yes, here it is.) make that argument). Glad I got this sorted.
I mean, basically I want to know whether we actually are clueless and what to do if we are. How on Earth do I go about solving this?
This more open-ended blogging format presents me with a problem: it’s hard to know when to stop. In the meantime, I spent an hour reading Hilary Greaves’ “Cluelessness” [3]. It was gratifying, up until Section 5: explaining the whole problem better than I did, and circumventing the whole confusion around “unknowable” things with a mere “Assume determinism” (I don’t regret the time I spent working this out for myself, though – otherwise, I wouldn’t have understood so vigorously why she put that phrase where she did).
I did remember correctly that she discusses cases where the long-term overall effects supposedly approximate zero, and I was also correct to think that she doesn’t think this true. For now, I’ll take it on her authority that the cancelling out thing not going to work out, even though I don’t yet get it intuitively.
Another point that seemed noteworthy was the distinction between “simple” and “complex” cases of cluelessness, where in “simple” cases I might randomly cause something to happen by, say, sneezing at a certain time. “Complex” cases are those where we actually have good reasons or arguments for either course of action and we don’t have a clear way of coming up with a solution. For example, I might think that saving people from malaria is good, but I might also think that this might cause overpopulation, while believing that overpopulation has bad consequences.
Now, she has a nice way of making the “simple” cases unproblematic, which I won’t go into because the thing is that the complex cases are still problematic. And those happen to be the cases I’m concerned about. How unfortunate (that’s where the reading experience started to be somewhat less enjoyable).
Time to stop for today (I know, I was just getting started!), and take a brief step back. Today, I’ve mostly thought about that part of my question that is about what we can know about the future (as opposed to what we do, in fact, know, or what we should do). I am still moderately clueless myself on this whole cluelessness matter, but at least I’ve satisfactorily dealt with sub-question (1.3), “Are there things that are literally unknowable?”. I guess that’s not too bad for a day. Remains to be seen whether I should investigate the philosophical matter more tomorrow, or instead go onward into more practical terrain. How exciting!
Readings
[1] Kagan, Shelly (2000). Normative Ethics. Mind 109 (434):373-377.
[2] Lenman, J. (2000). Consequentialism and Cluelessness. Philosophy & Public Affairs,29(4), 342-370. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2672830
[3] Greaves, Hilary (2016). Cluelessness. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 116 (3):311-339.
Random other note
If nothing else, I came across this wonderful piece of information today:
Clue. late Middle English: variant of clew. The original sense was ‘a ball of thread’; hence one used to guide a person out of a labyrinth.
ronjalutz.com 
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