What the Hell is Epistemic Humility? More on the Philosophy of Bullshit

Difficulty: What the hell

What the hell is epistemic humility?

Epistemic humility sounds like the sort of phrase that philosophers would use to make a simple idea sound annoying. But the underlying idea is actually pretty ordinary.

To be epistemically humble is not to be timid, self-abasing, or allergic to strong opinions. It is not to say, “Well, who knows?” every five minutes, or to pretend that every claim is equally uncertain. Rather, epistemic humility is a willingness to let inquiry correct you.

In practice, that means being willing to say things like:

I might be wrong.
I don’t know.
That objection matters.
This evidence really does count against me.
I need to rethink this.

That may sound modest. But it is actually quite demanding. It requires that one do more than merely sound reasonable, careful, evidence-based, or open-minded. It requires that one genuinely allow reasons, evidence, and criticism to constrain what one says and how one proceeds.

Why bullshit hates epistemic humility

This is where bullshit enters the picture.

Harry Frankfurt famously argued that bullshit differs from lying because the liar must pay attention to the truth in order to avoid it, whereas the bullshitter treats truth as beside the point. That insight is important. But I think there is another way to see what makes bullshit epistemically bad.

Bullshit often performs seriousness while insulating itself from serious correction.

That is, the bullshitter may speak in the language of evidence, rigor, nuance, clarity, realism, or practical wisdom, while refusing to let the standards associated with those words do any real governing work. Bullshit, in this sense, is hostile to epistemic humility because it wants the appearance of answerability without the vulnerability that real answerability requires.

To answer a question seriously is to risk exposure. It is to risk finding out that you do not know, that your view is weaker than you thought, or that the objection really does succeed. Bullshit tries to keep the social benefits of seriousness while evading that exposure.

That is why bullshit can be epistemically harmful even when it does not straightforwardly implant false beliefs. Sometimes its damage is deeper and more diffuse: it weakens the habits of mind by which we remain answerable to truth in the first place.

Not all bullshit is cynical

One reason bullshit is so hard to resist is that it is often sincere.

We are often tempted to think: if a person really means it, then it cannot be bullshit. But that is too quick. A person can sincerely believe that she is being careful, rigorous, helpful, realistic, or evidence-based, while the relevant standards are doing little or no actual guiding work.

That matters because sincerity and genuineness are not the same thing. Sincerity is a matter of what I feel: do I mean what I say? Genuineness is something else: is my activity actually being guided by the standards I invoke?

If I say that I care about evidence, then evidence should be able to count against me. If I say that I am being rigorous, then criticism should be able to threaten my argument. If I say that I am trying to get things right, then getting things right should matter more than merely sounding as if I am doing so.

Bullshit begins where that vulnerability ends.

A simple example

Suppose someone says, with great confidence, “I’m just being realistic,” or “I’m following the science,” or “I’m keeping an open mind.” Those phrases can be perfectly legitimate. But they can also function as a kind of epistemic camouflage.

Sometimes the speaker is not really opening herself to correction, reality, or science. She is borrowing the prestige of those things. She is using the appearance of intellectual virtue as a substitute for the real thing.

And when that happens often enough, the damage is not confined to one bad claim. It affects the surrounding culture of inquiry. Words like evidence, clarity, rigor, and nuance remain publicly praised, but they increasingly function as ornaments rather than constraints.

What makes this dangerous

A lie is often easier to understand morally and epistemically. The liar tries to get you to believe what she herself takes to be false. The betrayal is relatively legible.

Bullshit is often slipperier. It does not always aim to replace the truth in your mind with some specific falsehood. More often, it cheapens, bypasses, or exploits the norms by which truth is ordinarily tracked. It is vaguer, more atmospheric, more deniable.

That is why bullshit can be so culturally corrosive. Once it becomes common, people become less willing to say “I don’t know,” less willing to expose their views to genuine criticism, and less willing to distinguish between what merely sounds plausible and what has actually survived disciplined scrutiny.

A society saturated with lies is dangerous. But a society saturated with bullshit may be worse in another way: it gradually loses the capacity to notice what it has lost.

The anti-bullshit virtue

If that is right, then the remedy is not simply “more sincerity.” We already have plenty of sincerity. Nor is it enough to demand “more facts,” because facts can be selected, arranged, and performed in bullshitty ways.

What we need, rather, is a renewed willingness to be answerable to the standards our words invoke.

If I say I am following the evidence, then I should be willing to let evidence count against me. If I say I am being realistic, then I should be willing to ask whether reality is actually guiding my judgment. If I say I am open-minded, then I should be willing to let my mind be changed.

The enemy of bullshit is not permanent suspicion, clever debunking, or performative cynicism. Those can become their own species of bullshit. The enemy of bullshit is something quieter and more difficult: a genuine concern to get things right.

And sometimes that means saying the thing bullshit is designed to avoid:

I do not know.

I was wrong.

That objection matters.

That reason does not support what I wanted it to support.

That is not weakness. It is one of the conditions of serious thought.

What the Hell is Wrong with Presumptuous or Exploitative Bullshit? Here’s Another Species

Difficulty: What the hell

Defining another species of bullshit

So somebody just called me for the second time in three days–past 10 p.m., no less. The first time, I answered her call reluctantly. This time, I refused to pick up, so she called yet again. Then she texted my wife, telling her to let me know that I’d missed the calls.

I knew what the caller wanted: unpaid labor, outside normal hours, framed as if it were an ordinary and acceptable request. She was presumptuous. She was exploitative. She unfairly attempted to impose upon me an illegitimate expectation disguised as something normal. In other words, what she was doing was presumptuous, exploitative bullshit.

This got me thinking: could my own definition of classic representational bullshit somehow be applied to this case? Recall my definition:

Bullshit is (a) speech or deed that simulates adherence to standards of reasoning or truth without a genuine concern to get things right, or (b) speech or deed that displays indifference to any relevant standards of representational correctness.

Unless we do some tortuous argumentative gymnastics, the answer is: not really. So instead, I am setting out to capture this different species of bullshit with a different definition, one that will hopefully help explain the conceptual connections between presumptuous or exploitative bullshit and the classic representational species I’ve already defined. Here it is:

Presumptuous or exploitative bullshit is speech or deed that simulates the legitimacy of a request, expectation, or social claim without being genuinely guided by the norms of fairness, reciprocity, or boundary-respect that would make it appropriate.

What immediately jumps out is that both classic bullshit and presumptuous or exploitative bullshit involve a simulation of normative legitimacy without being properly guided by the relevant norms. Indeed, this points to something Frankfurt explained in On Bullshit: that while bullshit products are often defective, they need not be.

My definitions have also tracked the genuineness—or lack thereof—of the bullshitter’s concern. Genuineness is not the same as sincerity: a bullshitter can sincerely believe that she is following the norms or standards she must follow given what she is engaged in. But that doesn’t mean she’s not producing bullshit–that just means she’s bullshitting both you and herself.

Thus, the caller might be so deep into her own bullshit that she sincerely believes that she’s not doing anything inappropriate. Still, “This is fucking bullshit” seems like exactly the right response to her conduct.

Note that presumptuous and exploitative bullshit is not the same thing as being simply presumptuous and exploitative–an asshole is presumptuous, but assholes often do not even simulate conformity to a relevant standard or norm. Someone who employs child labor is exploitative, but that also doesn’t mean she simulates adherence to some standard or norm. So the defining feature of presumptuous or exploitative bullshit is not merely the absence of genuine guidance by the relevant norms. It is the simulation of legitimacy under those norms.

The ethical implications of presumptuous or exploitative bullshit

Now we get to the crux of the issue: why do we find presumptuous or exploitative bullshit morally objectionable?

Recall that classic representational bullshit is morally objectionable for at least three reasons:

(1) It is disrespectful because the bullshitter treats her victim as a means to an end.

(2) It is unfair because the bullshitter seizes the social authority that comes with sounding as if one is trying to get things right, without taking on the burden of actually doing so.

(3) It is socially corrosive because it makes it hard to distinguish genuine inquiry from empty performance, degrading the very practices on which intellectual and civic life depend.

I argue that presumptuous or exploitative bullshit is bad for similar reasons.

First, it is disrespectful–the presumptuous or exploitative bullshitter, in virtue of her arrogance or exploitative conduct, treats the victim as a means to an end. She acts as if her own wants automatically generate claims on other people’s time, labor, or goodwill, while the other person’s competing claims are treated as secondary or negligible.

Second, it is unfair–the presumptuous or exploitative bullshitter, by cheapening or bypassing the norms of fairness, reciprocity, or boundary-respect, undermines the level playing field that governs social norms. Further, she turns the tables. I didn’t have to answer her calls, and I didn’t have to do what she wanted. But by refusing to pick up or call back, I now look like the asshole.

Third, it is socially corrosive–because many of us find it so awkward to confront this kind of bullshit, it often goes unchallenged. That makes the tactic socially easier to repeat, and over time it can normalize a culture of entitlement and imposition.

I’m embarrassed to say that after refusing to pick up the phone, I texted the caller back. As expected, she promptly called me again, and I, disgusted at myself, answered her call.

Why, though, is this embarrassing? My guess is that by tacitly condoning her conduct, I submit myself to an authority she does not really have and thereby undermine my own dignity as a person. I allow her to use me. And by doing so, I also risk contributing to the proliferation of bullshit.

To be sure, the caller was polite on the phone, as she always was. She also asked if it was a good time to call me. But she did so after the fact, which suggests that her adherence to social norms was merely a simulation.

The reason this matters philosophically is that this sort of bullshit often works precisely by making resistance feel rude, disproportionate, or socially awkward. This is why bullshit is so insidious and pernicious. Because we tend to condemn liars more readily than bullshitters, we are often ill-equipped to deal with the bullshit that is so prevalent in our lives. We let it slide. And that’s not right.

What the Fuck Is Morally Wrong with Bullshit? From Burger King Bullshit to Social Corrosion

Difficulty: What the fuck

Burger King bullshit

So I was at Burger King today, and after waiting forever for my food, I couldn’t help but mutter, “This is bullshit.” Then I recalled how I had been defining “bullshit” in the last few days:

Bullshit is (a) speech or deed that simulates adherence to standards of reasoning or truth without a genuine concern to get things right, or (b) speech or deed that displays indifference to any relevant standards of representational correctness.

And then I thought: how does this apply to “Burger King bullshit”? I pondered this question for hours and finally had what seemed like a eureka moment:

Burger King bullshit is (a) speech or deed that simulates adherence to standards of Burger King without a genuine concern to get things right, or (b) speech or deed that displays indifference to any relevant standards of Burger King correctness.

Obviously, this is not bullshit in quite the same sense as propaganda, bad-faith punditry, or empty philosophical posturing. And if it turns out that we could use my definition of bullshit as a template for calling anything that annoys or frustrates us “bullshit,” then the definition would be too ad hoc. As Karl Popper put it, “A theory that explains everything explains nothing.”

But, you might ask: so what if we could easily plug in whatever we want to explain Burger King bullshit?

Well, then dentist-office bullshit, airport-security bullshit, thermodynamics bullshit, etc., become mere rhetorical punching bags. We would find it difficult to explain what differentiates bullshit from incompetence, dysfunction, insincerity, institutional hollowness, hypocrisy, bad service, fraud, laziness, ordinary failure, and a whole lot of shit that annoys or frustrates us—and risk contributing to philosophical discourse a definition that is, well, bullshit.

The ethics of bullshit

That said, Burger King bullshit and representational, or “classic,” bullshit do have something in common. That is, both suggest that the bullshitter simulates adherence to some standard while not actually trying to get things right in accordance with that standard, or that the bullshitter is indifferent to some standard of correctness.

This might explain why we get upset when we are on the receiving end of bullshit: not only has the bullshitter failed to uphold some standard, but she either (a) pretends to uphold it or (b) doesn’t even try to pretend. And that, I will argue, is a moral failure.

First, recall this passage from On Bullshit, where Harry Frankfurt discusses a verse from Longfellow:

“In the elder days of art
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part,
For the Gods are everywhere.”

This means to say that people in the old days didn’t cut corners. They paid attention to details in their craftsmanship even if such details would normally be invisible, or else it would bother their conscience. “[O]ne might perhaps also say,” Frankfurt states, “there was no bullshit.”

The trouble is that not every failure of craftsmanship is a moral failure. A bad carpenter may simply be incompetent. A lazy Burger King employee may be rude, apathetic, or badly trained. So if bullshit were nothing more than failure to meet a standard, that would not yet explain why classic bullshit is morally distinctive.

The moral issue appears when we move into representational practices—assertion, inquiry, reporting, argument, testimony, and the like. In these practices, one does not merely produce an object or perform a service. One presents oneself as answerable to norms of truth, evidence, and getting things right. And that changes the moral landscape.

When a bullshitter merely simulates adherence to those norms, she does more than perform badly. She exploits a shared practice while refusing to be governed by the standards that make the practice possible. She takes the benefits of looking serious, informed, careful, or rational without submitting to the discipline that those appearances are supposed to signal.

That is morally objectionable for at least three reasons.

First, it is a kind of disrespect. The bullshitter treats her audience not as fellow participants in a truth-/reason-directed practice, but as people to be managed, impressed, manipulated, or pacified.

Second, it is unfair. The bullshitter wants the social authority that comes with sounding as if one is trying to get things right, without taking on the burden of actually doing so.

Third, it is corrosive. Bullshit makes it harder for all of us to distinguish genuine inquiry from empty performance, and so it degrades the very practices on which intellectual and civic life depend.

Note that within our framework, all three reasons for why bullshit is morally objectionable can also be used to explain what is wrong with lying. Lying is also disrespectful and manipulative. Lying also gives the liar an unfair epistemic advantage. Lying is also corrosive to any dialogue in which we might partake.

So why the difference in moral judgment?

Why do we treat bullshitters more leniently than we treat liars?

This points to a distinction between Frankfurt’s moral argument against bullshit and mine. Rather than attributing the bullshitter’s moral failure to disrespect, unfairness, and corrosion, Frankfurt argues that bullshitting is a greater enemy to truth, and that it is thus more reprehensible than lying, which requires the liar to at least respect truth.

Truth, admittedly, seems like a loftier ideal for philosophers. But Frankfurt also says:

“The problem of understanding why our attitude toward bullshit is generally more benign than our attitude toward lying is an important one, which I shall leave as an exercise for the reader.”

We can now try to answer that question.

In response to Frankfurt, I will argue that the reason our attitude toward bullshit tends to be more benign than our attitude toward lying is not that bullshit is harmless, but that lying typically involves a more direct epistemic and interpersonal wrong. A lie aims to replace the truth with what the liar takes to be false. Bullshit, by contrast, often works less by directly overturning the truth than by cheapening, bypassing, or exploiting the norms that are supposed to guide truth-/reason-directed practice.

Recall that during his grand jury testimony in 1998, Bill Clinton parsed his earlier statement that “there is no improper relationship” with Monica Lewinsky by saying, “That depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” By quibbling over the word “is,” Clinton was not seriously trying to get things right. He was performing fidelity to standards of reasoning and truth while using those standards as a shield. That is a plausible case of insincere bullshit.

But suppose Clinton had said, instead, “There is and never was an improper relationship with Monica Lewinsky.” This would be an instance of lying.

Now further assume that Clinton had achieved his goal of getting away with deception in both cases—bullshitting and lying—and that in both cases there was not enough evidence to hold him legally accountable.

The Clinton example gives us a useful way into the broader question of why lying is often judged more harshly than bullshitting.

Epistemic harm

First, bullshit is often easier to see through than a successful lie. In Clinton’s case, his evasiveness may frustrate us, but it need not destroy our grasp of the underlying truth. A successful lie, by contrast, more straightforwardly aims to replace the truth in the audience’s mind with what the speaker takes to be false. If Clinton had instead lied and succeeded in fooling us, we would have been even more furious at him for distorting our very perception of reality—namely, that he did have an affair with Lewinsky.

Disrespect and unfairness

Second, lying is usually more sharply interpersonal. The liar intentionally tries to get you to believe what she thinks is false. She directly recruits your trust against you. This is much more manipulative and disrespectful than bullshitting, which tends to involve merely putting on a show, as Clinton did. Lying is also more sharply unfair. The liar aims to replace the truth, in the hearer’s mind, with what the liar takes to be false. Bullshitting is often more like reckless disregard: it may not aim to destroy the truth outright, but it is willing to endanger the norms and practices by which truth is ordinarily tracked.

Clinton’s bullshit manipulates by performance and evasion; a lie would have manipulated more directly, by asking the public to accept as true what he himself took to be false.

Bullshit can be sincere; lying can’t

Third, a liar must, on some level, know that she is trying to get another person to accept what she herself takes to be false. That structure makes the wrong especially legible: the liar is betraying the audience’s trust on purpose. Bullshit can have that structure too, but it need not. A bullshitter may be vain, careless, tribal, self-deceived, or carried away by appearances. She may honestly believe that she is being serious and responsible. That does not excuse the bullshit. But it can make it seem less vicious, because the wrong is not always one of straightforward intentional betrayal.

I do not mean to suggest that Clinton’s own bullshit was sincere. The point is rather that bullshit as a category leaves room for sincerity in a way that lying does not. That helps explain why the moral profile of bullshit is often less stark than that of lying.

So this, I think, is part of why we often judge liars more harshly than bullshitters. Lying is necessarily insincere. Bullshit need not be. Still, bullshit remains morally objectionable because even when it is sincere, it exploits, cheapens, or corrodes the norms that make truth-/reason-directed practices possible.

A brief note on corrosiveness

Sharp readers may have noticed that I mostly set aside the corrosiveness point in the previous arguments. I did so because it is unclear whether bullshitting is more or less corrosive to civic discourse than lying. That said, I’ll take a stab at it.

When Frankfurt condemned bullshitting as more morally reprehensible than lying, his argument was that bullshitting, in virtue of the bullshitter’s indifference to truth, is a greater enemy to truth. That’s a nice idea, but how does that fit within my framework?

My take is that, while bullshitting is a less direct epistemic threat than lying, it may be the more insidious one. The bullshitter is like a reckless driver: she does not have to aim at truth in order to endanger it. The liar is more like a driver who deliberately targets a pedestrian: the threat is more direct, more intentional, and therefore more immediately legible as a wrong. Our outrage at premeditated murder tends to be stronger than our outrage at reckless endangerment or negligent killing. We are therefore often quicker to condemn the liar than we are to condemn the bullshitter. But that does not settle the deeper question of long-run social danger.

A liar, like a killer driver, is more likely to be punished severely. A bullshitter, like a careless driver, more easily gets dismissed as merely sloppy, frustrating, or irresponsible. But that does not mean bullshit is any less dangerous for society. Once we cultivate a culture of bullshit, the carelessness proliferates. We do not want to live in a society where certain pedestrians are deliberately targeted, but neither do we want to live in one where any pedestrian may become the hapless victim of recklessness. By the same token, we do not want liars killing the truth. But neither do we want truth to be unintentionally run over by bullshitters.

None of this shows that bullshit is less dangerous overall than lying. My point so far has only been that lying is usually judged more harshly because its wrong is more direct and more legible. The long-run corrosive effects of bullshit may, in some contexts, be just as serious—or worse.

So there may be no easy ranking here. Lying is often the more direct wrong; bullshit may be the more culturally pervasive one. Either way, a society that tolerates either too easily is in serious trouble.

The Experience Machine Part 3: Methodological Challenges, the Expertise Objection, and Other Considerations

Difficulty: What the fuck

This is Part 3 of a series on Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine Thought Experiment (EMTE), so make sure you first read Part 1 and Part 2. As I noted earlier, the philosophical discussion here is a simplified and slightly profane version of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article “The Experience Machine.”

So just when you thought things were complicated enough, there are more objections to Nozick’s EMTE argument. Here, we cover methodological challenges, the expertise objection, the experience pill thought experiment (an offshoot of EMTE), and newer variations of EMTE, before we conclude with a brief note on what the hell all this suggests.

Methodological challenges

First, what the hell does “methodological” mean? Here, “methodology” means the way a thought experiment or psychological study was set up. So, if it’s okay to sacrifice a bit of linguistic precision: methodological challenges are simply objections to how shit is done.

The first methodological challenge is raised against the previously mentioned psychological studies, which aim to see how participants make decisions when confronted with EMTE or EMTE-like scenarios. Specifically, the objection is that these empirical studies are not representative of the general population: they tested only students in Anglo-Saxon universities, so their results are not enough for us to conclude anything about how the rest of the English-speaking world would make decisions under EMTE, let alone how most people, globally, would make such decisions.

The flaw in this objection is that it misses the point. The goal of EMTE, REM, and stranger NSQ is not to understand what humans think in general—that’s a sociological or anthropological thing. Instead, the goal is to challenge how philosophers’ use of intuitions (like “I wouldn’t plug in”) to argue that we value reality, or that hedonism is false, might be unreliable because of our biases. In other words, we don’t need to know what the whole human race thinks in order to weaken Nozick’s abductive argument. It’s enough that these studies produce inconsistent results so that the old line of thought—”Oh, an overwhelming majority of people wouldn’t plug in, so they must value reality, and therefore hedonism is false”—starts to look much shakier.

The second methodological challenge is raised against the fact that these psychological EMTE studies did not set up hypothetical scenarios as real decision-making situations, but as outlandish scenarios: wouldn’t it be better, the objection goes, if the studies had made participants make decisions about more “real-world” situations rather than some fantastical sci-fi stuff?

The answer is “probably no.” In fact, the fact that EMTE is so different from real life may actually be a strength of the setup, not a weakness. Why? Because we are even more likely to exercise biased decision making when we are confronted with real-world situations. So the point of EMTE and its variations is not to see how we’d act if we were actually standing in front of a machine. The point is to examine our judgments in a setting that may be less driven by immediate emotions and pressures, and therefore better suited to philosophical reflection.

The expertise objection

The expertise objection basically says: “Hey, we should be using only academic philosophers’ responses in experimental philosophy because they are ‘better’ at thinking through thought experiments.” And if we believe that, we’d also believe that non-philosophers’ responses to these thought experiments are not meaningful for philosophy. This is a common challenge not only to EMTE, but to experimental philosophy in general.

The flaw with this objection is that empirical evidence shows that, for both EMTE and experimental philosophy in general, philosophers are not way better at thinking things through. When asked to respond to different versions of EMTE, philosophers gave inconsistent answers, and their answers were only slightly more consistent than those of non-philosophers. In fact, philosophers are around equally susceptible to imaginative failures as non-philosophers; those two populations disregard stipulations of EMTE at approximately the same rate.

Further, if philosophers really want to claim their status as the hot shits of thinking, then, if we are to remain democratic about things, the burden of proof lies on philosophers: philosophers must prove that they are better thinkers than non-philosophers, not the other way around. But the evidence, as noted before, does not support that claim.

Indeed, philosophers might be susceptible to other biases coming from within academic philosophy itself. For instance, given that the mainstream position in philosophy is that one should not enter EM, if a philosopher participant does not specialize in EMTE and thus relies on more muddled thinking, then that philosopher might more easily default to the anti-plug-in answer simply because that is what philosophers are “supposed” to say.

The experience pill

Then there’s the experience pill thought experiment, an offshoot of EMTE: would you take a pill that enhances your pleasure, but that does not distort reality like psychedelic drugs do? With this modification, pro-pleasure decisions increased from 29% to 53%. This might be because the experience pill thought experiment presents a much more familiar scenario and does not require pro-pleasure decision makers to abandon reality.

This points to an important difference between EM and the experience pill: while interesting, the experience pill shifts the question. It is no longer really about reality versus pleasure. Rather, it helps us analyze whether people prefer affective appropriateness—that is, having feelings that fit the situation—or pleasure.

A related issue: as is the case for much of experimental psychology and philosophy, changes in how you word a thought experiment often change participants’ decisions.

For instance, if I told you to “watch this video of a ‘car crash'” and then asked you to estimate how fast the car was going, you’d probably be more inclined to say that the car was going much faster than if I had worded the question using “car accident” or “fender bender.”

So, because EMTE is just as susceptible to inconsistent responses due to changes in wording, and the wording of EMTE varies widely across studies, it’s difficult to know just how much of the inconsistencies are due to mere wording variations rather than to the deeper biases we’ve already discussed.

New EMTEs

In the past two decades, philosophers have come up with new versions of EMTE so that a new and stronger argument can be made against hedonism. Specifically, one version of EMTE attempts to eliminate worries that EM would malfunction (imaginative resistance) and the status quo bias. In this version, you are asked to decide between two lives:

(1) Life A is “pleasant, rich, full, autonomously chosen, involves writing a great novel, making important scientific discoveries, as well as virtues such as courage, wittiness, and love.”

(2) Life B is identical to Life A except for the fact that B is lived inside EM.

This is called the experientially identical lifetime comparison.

The argument goes that this new version of EMTE isolates the variable that actually matters: our relationship to reality. By conducting the thought experiment this way, we can more easily see whether people care about reality. And because it seems that most people would not want to live Life B (the life in EM), this suggests that we do care about reality, which pushes the argument closer to the conclusion that reality might be an intrinsic prudential value.

Rach Cosker-Rowland, in her 2017 paper “Our Intuitions about the Experience Machine,” presented a version of EMTE where the participant decides which of two hedonically equal lives a stranger should choose. But the IEP article this post is based on (following Buscicchi) claims that Rowland’s study contains a “macroscopic” methodological mistake that “severely undermines the significance of Rowland’s study.” The alleged mistake is that she did not provide participants with the option of answering that the two lives have equal value.

And then there’s Shelly Kagan’s deceived businessman thought experiment, which, though far less famous in philosophy, is considered by some within philosophy circles to provide the strongest case against hedonism, partly because it doesn’t require participants to imagine a life of virtual reality. Here it goes:

Deceived businessman thought experiment

Imagine that in life A, a successful businessman lives a happy life: his family loves him; his community and colleagues respect him.

In life B, the businessman lives an equally happy and pleasurable life, but he is completely deceived: though everyone around him acts the same way, they do so for their personal gain.

Hedonism would hold that these two lives are equal in value, but our intuition is that life A is better than life B.

But of course there are objections. Some philosophers argue that our intuition in favor of life A is being driven by moral considerations rather than purely prudential ones. We value life A more because, unlike life B, it contributes to the world. But again, moral questions are irrelevant and violate the stipulations of the thought experiment, which instructs us to consider only prudential (the “what’s good for me”) reasons.

Another possible flaw of this thought experiment is the freebie problem. First, it is irrational to have 100% confidence in the truth of hedonism. So if we are less than 100% sure that hedonism is correct, the rational decision is to prefer life A, which has a greater-than-0% chance of providing a prudentially more valuable life, since it gives us the freebie of life without all that deception. (And if we think back to Rowland’s study, which did not provide participants with the option of answering that the two lives are equally valuable, we see how forced dichotomies like that are even less helpful for tracking whether we value reality.)

Also, the original EMTE is arguably stronger than the deceived businessman thought experiment because the former requires participants to sacrifice one of two values on a much greater scale: to live a fake life in EMTE is not just to live a life in which you are deceived by others; you’d have to go for full-blown virtual reality for the rest of your life. And if you chose to live a real life, that would mean giving up a huge amount of pleasure that you could otherwise have had. By requiring participants to make great sacrifices like these, EMTE allows us to more clearly see what participants actually value. And compared to the original EMTE, the sacrifices required in the deceived businessman thought experiment are tiny.

Lastly, Kelly Inglis asks us to imagine, in her 2021 paper “The Universal Pure Pleasure Machine: Suicide or Nirvana?”, a universal pure pleasure machine (UPPM) that gives every sentient being in the world a constant heroin-like bliss. Then she asked her participants whether this is “a good future that we should desire to achieve?”, to which only 5.3% of participants responded positively. Inglis concluded from these results that UPPM can disprove hedonism, but not all philosophers are that confident about its implications. For one thing, moral judgments tend to be universal (for example, everyone should not commit murder). For another, UPPM might still make us susceptible to imaginative failures: people might disregard the stipulations and see the machine, which has no virtual reality, as boring (imaginative resistance), or go beyond the stipulations and think that its constant heroin-like high is disgusting (overactive imagination).

So WTF is the conclusion?

This is where I pick, more or less arbitrarily, what I take to be the most salient points of this series on EMTE:

Nozick’s EMTE went through two major stages. It began with the publication of Anarchy, State, and Utopia in 1974. Up until around 2010, an overwhelming majority of philosophers accepted EMTE as support for a knock-down argument against hedonism. Then, beginning in roughly the 2010s, a shit ton of philosophers came up with objections that attempt to weaken EMTE, making us question whether EMTE provides a good argument against hedonism at all. Our biases might have affected our judgments, the scenario might be too far-fetched, and our intuitions might not be tracking value as cleanly as people once thought.

This second phase is then marked by philosophers who devised different variants of EMTE, like Kagan’s deceived businessman thought experiment, in their attempt to revive EMTE’s goal of disproving hedonism.

So where does that leave us? The experience machine used to look like a decisive argument against hedonism. Now it looks much more like a messy intuition pump, one that reveals as much about our psychological biases and philosophical methods as it does about what actually makes life go well.

At this point, the debate is no longer just about whether hedonism is true. It’s also about whether our intuitions, especially about weird, sci-fi scenarios, are reliable enough to settle philosophical questions in the first place.

And that’s probably the most important lesson of all this. EMTE is still interesting as hell. It may still pressure hedonism in serious ways. But it is no longer the philosophical slam dunk that many people once took it to be.

The Experience Machine Part 2: Now We Poke (A Lot Of) Holes

Difficulty: What the fuck

This is Part 2 of a series on Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine Thought Experiment (EMTE), so you might want to read Part 1 first. This series is a simplified, slightly profane version of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s article “The Experience Machine.”

Now things get more complicated. We will backtrack a little and look at some of Nozick’s stipulations for EMTE and see if he’s cheating dialectically. We’ll then look at a few objections to the abductive interpretation of his argument.

Nozick’s stipulations

The stipulations: Nozick tells us to set aside questions like “What is reality?” and “How can we know it”? The first question is what philosophers call a metaphysical question; that is, it deals with what things are on a fundamental level. The second question is an epistemic (knowledge) question: how do we know that something is true? How do we know that life outside EM is any more real than life inside EM?

On to the first question: If there is no such thing as reality because all reality is is mental states, stuff that goes on in my head only, then EMTE is pointless: life inside and outside EM would be equally virtual and “fake.”

And about the epistemic question: René Descartes famously advanced the Evil Demon problem to argue for a view called global skepticism: How can I know that I’m not dreaming? How can I know that I’m not a madman, and my “hands” are, in reality, two deformed pumpkins or some other crazy shit? How can I know that anything I perceive is real at all?

If global skepticism (or a more local skepticism that targets EMTE) might be true, then without Nozick’s stipulation to set aside the epistemic question, EMTE would also be pointless: how could we say that the “virtual” world of EM is more, or less, real than the world outside EM?

Lastly, there is the contextual stipulation: Nozick says we should set aside the question of context when we think about EMTE. For instance, if a possible context is that life outside the EM is torturous and unbearable, that might make us decide that plugging into EM is preferable. Nozick tells us to set the contextual question aside and assume that the pleasures we experience outside EM are what the average Joe experiences, so, nowhere near super pleasurable, but also nowhere near unbearable.

Is Nozick cheating?

So is Nozick cheating here?

Well… maybe. But not in a stupid way.

Let’s look at what he’s doing. He tells us to ignore:

metaphysical questions (what reality really is)
epistemic questions (how we know what’s real)
contextual factors (like whether real life is miserable)

That’s a lot to set aside.

So one reaction is: “Hold on, aren’t those exactly the kinds of things that might affect my decision?”

For example, suppose:

there is no meaningful difference between “real” and “virtual” experience
or we can never know which one we’re in
or real life is absolutely terrible

In those cases, plugging into the machine suddenly looks a lot more appealing.

So by ruling out those possibilities, Nozick might look like he’s stacking the deck, designing the thought experiment so that we’re more likely to say, “No, I wouldn’t plug in.”

But here’s the other side.

If we don’t set those questions aside, the whole thought experiment collapses.

If we start worrying about whether reality exists, or whether we can know anything at all, then we’re no longer evaluating hedonism; we’re doing skepticism and metaphysics.

And if we allow extreme contexts, like a life of constant torture, then of course we might choose the machine. But that doesn’t show that pleasure is the only thing that matters. It just shows that sometimes pleasure outweighs everything else.

So Nozick’s stipulations aren’t obviously cheating. They might just be a way of isolating the variable he cares about:

Does pleasure alone determine how well our lives go?

Still, the worry remains. If a thought experiment works only after you strip away enough complications, you might wonder whether it’s telling us something deep, or just guiding us toward a pre-loaded intuition.

The abductive argument, revisited

Now that we got that out of the way, let’s revisit the abductive interpretation of Nozick’s argument:

What’s the best explanation for the fact that many people care about reality, not just pleasurable experiences? One possible answer is that reality itself has intrinsic value.

The question we now focus on is whether “reality itself has intrinsic value” really is the best explanation for why many people care about reality. There are at least three possible sources that make us question the abductive argument: the hedonistic bias, imaginative failures, and the status quo bias.

Hedonistic bias

The hedonistic bias is the most speculative of these three potential biases. Really, it’s controversial as hell, because its core claim is:

You think the reason you don’t want to plug into EM is that you value not just pleasure, but also reality. But actually, all your desires, including the desire not to plug in, are still best explained by the fact that what ultimately drives them is pleasure.

Even more bluntly:

You don’t want to plug into EM not because you value reality, but because you unconsciously believe that reality would get you more pleasure than EM would.

Speculative and controversial as that claim might be, if it’s possible that the hedonistic bias might be true, then it’s possible that Nozick’s EMTE does not, contrary to what many philosophers in the 1990s believed, provide a knock-down argument against hedonism.

Sharon Hewitt shares similar views, arguing, in her 2010 paper “What Do Our Intuitions about the Experience Machine Really Tell Us about Hedonism?,” that it’s not enough to merely stipulate that our practical hedonistic reasons for not plugging in to EM are irrelevant; we must also “fill in the concrete details that would make them irrelevant.” In other words, you can’t just tell people to ignore their practical concerns; you have to show why those concerns don’t actually matter. Further, our intuitions about EM might not be reliable indicators of what is intrinsically valuable: rather than telling us about what truly matters, our intuitions about EM might just be telling us something about how our brain is wired.

Or to flesh it out a bit more:

Thought experiments target gut reactions: we’re trying to see what we intuitively prefer.
But those reactions are “pre-reflective”: we didn’t think it through, we just reacted.
The problem is that we don’t really know why we reacted that way.
So our reactions are not reliable evidence of what actually has value.

Imaginative failures

Let’s move on to imaginative failures. This is another source of bias, which can be divided into two separate confounding factors: imaginative resistance and overactive imagination.

Imaginative resistance

Empirical evidence shows that imaginative resistance, namely, the phenomenon whereby people disregard the stipulations of a thought experiment, is an actual problem when people decide whether they would want to plug into EM.

In his 2014 paper “Nozick’s Experience Machine Is Dead, Long Live the Experience Machine!,” Dan Weijers found that 34% of the participants who did not want to plug into EM were affected by imaginative resistance, disregarding some stipulations of EMTE by worrying about things like whether EM would malfunction, even though Nozick had explicitly stipulated that EM would never malfunction and would provide a perfectly blissful experience.

(This is where you might pause and say, “Oh, those people don’t know how a thought experiment works. You can’t disregard stipulations; that’s the whole point of a thought experiment!” But then again, even philosophers make that mistake at times. The philosopher Ben Bramble, in his 2016 paper The Experience Machine, ignored Nozick’s stipulation that EM provides a perfect simulation: Bramble argued that artificial intelligence is too primitive and that it thus cannot possibly give us a convincing simulation of loving someone and being loved in return. But with recent advances in AI, of course that argument sounds stupid, in hindsight.)

Overactive imagination

Then there’s the problem of overactive imagination, which, according to Weijers’ study, happened for 10% of people who didn’t want to plug into EM. People who have an overactive imagination when thinking about EMTE might be biased against plugging in due to reasons not stipulated by EMTE. For instance, if they’ve watched The Matrix one too many times, they might say, “Oh, no thanks. I don’t want to plug in because I don’t want to be enslaved by aliens.” This, clearly, goes beyond what EM stipulates.

Also, considering that a whopping 46% of anti-plug-in philosophers and 39% of anti-plug-in laypeople were biased by at least one of these two imaginative failures, it’s quite possible that EMTE is simply too far-fetched for us to reliably conclude anything about what we actually value. In other words, our judgments about extreme scenarios like this might be less reliable than we think.

a. Memory’s erasure

Now here’s another complication of possible imaginative failure, particularly one of imaginative resistance: Bramble argues that another reason people might not want to plug into EM is that doing so forces EM to erase some of our memories, making it seem like we would die if we plug in. And since most people don’t want to die, the threat of death might be their reason that they wouldn’t plug in.

If this is hard to wrap your head around, it might be easier to understand what Bramble is saying by thinking of the TV series Severance (if you’ve watched it), in which employees working at a company undergo a “severance” procedure that not only erases their memories of their lives once they enter the workplace, but also makes them forget, once they’ve entered, that they underwent the procedure at all. So if, hypothetically, an employee were to enter the workplace and never come back to the “real world,” the only place they can regain memories of life outside work, then their non-working identities would, in a sense, be dead.

In his 2012 paper “What’s Wrong with the Experience Machine?,” Christopher Belshaw raises an even stronger objection: for EM to work as intended, it would require not just some memory erasure, but invasive memory erasure. Since EMTE stipulates that you wouldn’t remember that you plugged yourself in, for the pleasures to be meaningful in EM, scientists would have to recreate your identity for the pleasurable experiences to be realistic enough.

At this point, the IEP article accuses Bramble’s and Belshaw’s arguments of being victims of imaginative resistance themselves. That is, although EMTE doesn’t explicitly stipulate that identity would not be erased, nowhere does it insinuate that your identity would be erased. In EMTE, identity preservation is implicitly assumed, so by disregarding this implied stipulation, Bramble and Belshaw might be suffering from imaginative resistance themselves.

b. Moral concerns

Moral, as opposed to prudential, concerns are also stipulated as irrelevant in EMTE, though people disregard these stipulations and decide not to plug in anyway. This, again, is a case of imaginative resistance.

For instance, Weijers reported that a participant said that “I can’t [plug in] because I have responsibilities to others,” and Guido Löhr, in his 2018 paper “The Experience Machine and the Expertise Defense,” wrote that anti-plug-in philosophers stated, “I cannot ignore my husband and son,” “I cannot ignore the dependents,” and “Gf[girlfriend] would be sad.”

But EMTE stipulates that we should ignore moral concerns and think only of prudential reasons, that is, reasons for why something is good for me. So this disregard for this stipulation shows just how both laypeople’s and philosophers’ seemingly muddled thinking might render conclusions about what we value unreliable.

And imagine this: if someone told you to disregard moral concerns in a case of, say, sexual violence, would you be able to do so? Probably not. In short, the fact that someone stipulates the rules doesn’t mean you’ll follow the rules.

So what does all of this suggest? It suggests that all our crappy imaginative failures might be a big reason that most of us choose not to plug in. If, on the other hand, we were not affected by any of these biases, then our strong intuition against plugging in might weaken, or at least become less reliable as evidence. That would weaken Nozick’s argument that hedonism is false.

Status quo bias

Lastly, we come to the status quo bias, which means that we humans have a tendency to abide by the adage “when in doubt, do nothing,” especially when faced with complex decision making. We see this happen when people vote for an incumbent politician or decide not to trade in a car. And some studies have exposed just how powerful the status quo bias is during EMTE-like decision making.

Take, for example, the reverse experience machine thought experiment (REM), where participants are asked whether they would want to unplug from EM if they were already living in EM. Most people’s answers: no. Don’t unplug.

And then there’s the “stranger No Status Quo” (stranger NSQ) scenario, which attempts to remove the status quo bias from REM and see how people would respond. The stranger NSQ scenario is based on the idea that the more detached we are from the subject of a thought experiment, the more rational, and thus less biased, we would be. So, researchers asked people to make a decision for a hypothetical stranger: should the stranger, having spent 50% of his or her life in EM, be unplugged and enter reality? Given this scenario, only 55% of participants were pro-plug-in.

This is a problem for Nozick because the same basic preference can generate opposite answers depending on how the question is framed. That suggests the intuition may not be tracking value at all, but bias.

Conclusion (for now)

So what does all this say about Nozick’s abductive argument against hedonism? Recall that the abductive argument goes:

What’s the best explanation for the fact that many people care about reality, not just pleasurable experiences? One possible answer is that reality itself has intrinsic value.

Sure, that’s a possible answer, but is that really the best explanation for why most people choose not to plug into EM in EMTE as formulated by Nozick? Probably not. We’ve seen that there are many other good explanations for why people choose not to enter EM: the hedonistic bias, imaginative failures (including imaginative resistance and overactive imagination), and the status quo bias. And if any one of these explanations is better, or even comparably good, then the abductive case for saying that reality itself has intrinsic prudential value becomes much weaker.

In other words, EMTE does not straightforwardly show that hedonism is false. At the very least, it is not the philosophical knock-down argument that many people once thought it was.

That’s all for now. In Part 3, we’ll delve into EMTE even further. Meanwhile, keep thinking.

The Experience Machine Part 1: What the Hell Is It and What Does It Aim to Show?

Difficulty: What the hell

In 1974, Robert Nozick offered, in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a thought experiment, which he later revised in his book The Examined Life (1989). We will focus on this second version, which I’ve summarized:

You have access to a machine that could give you any experience(s) that you might desire. When plugged into this machine, you could experience writing a great poem, bringing about world peace, or loving someone and being loved in return, and you could feel “from the inside” the pleasures that these things bring. You could program this machine to give you experiences this week, this year, or for the rest of your life. If you should run out of ideas for pleasurable experiences, you could consult a library of suggestions taken from biographies and from novelists and psychologists. Would you want to be plugged into this machine for the rest of your life? If not, why not?

Further, Nozick stipulates that upon entering the machine, you will not remember having done so. You can optionally program uncertainty by using a randomizer built into the machine.

This thought experiment is Nozick’s attempt to refute the central argument for hedonism about well-being—that the goodness and badness of our lives, for ourselves, is wholly determined by the pains and pleasures we experience.

Simplified, Nozick’s argument can be formulated as a deductive argument:

Premise 1: If hedonism is true, then the vast majority of people would want to plug themselves into the experience machine.

Premise 2: It is not true that the vast majority of people would want to plug themselves into the experience machine.

Therefore, hedonism is false.

This argument is logically valid (it follows the form of modus tollens). The real question is whether Premise 1 is true.

Alternatively, we might reconstruct Nozick’s argument in a different, more controversial way:

Premise 1: The vast majority of reasonable people value reality in addition to pleasure.

Premise 2: If the vast majority of reasonable people value X, then X has intrinsic prudential value.

Conclusion 1: Therefore, reality has intrinsic prudential value.

Premise 3: If something besides pleasure has intrinsic prudential value, then hedonism is false.

Conclusion 2: Therefore, hedonism is false.

Here, “prudential” means “what is good for a person,” which corresponds to “well-being.” So something that has “intrinsic prudential value” is good for a person in itself, not merely as a means to something else.

Some quick examples:

Prudential values (good for you):

health
friendship
pleasure

Intrinsic values (good in themselves):

pleasure (for hedonists)
not money (since money is just useful for getting other things)

So something has intrinsic prudential value if it makes your life go better just by being part of it, not because it leads to something else.

The is-ought dichotomy

The deductive interpretation

The problem with this second interpretation is that it moves from what philosophers call an “is” to an “ought.” That is, just because something is the case doesn’t mean it ought to be the case.

For instance, it is the case that most people value money. That doesn’t allow us to conclude that people ought to value money.

This version of the argument assumes that what people happen to value determines what is genuinely valuable. That’s a controversial move, and without it, the argument doesn’t go through.

The abductive interpretation

So instead of interpreting Nozick’s argument as deductive, philosophers more charitably interpret it as abductive—an inference to the best explanation (IBE).

What the hell does that mean?

Say that you see smoke coming out of your car hood. You consider the following explanations:

You absent-mindedly left a cigarette in there.
Some part of the car is malfunctioning.
Criminals planted a stick of dynamite.

The best explanation is the simplest one: something is wrong with the car.

Applied to Nozick’s argument:

What’s the best explanation for the fact that many people care about reality, not just pleasurable experiences? One possible answer is that reality itself has intrinsic value.

This doesn’t prove that hedonism is false, but it gives us a reason to doubt it.

So there you have it: Nozick’s Experience Machine Thought Experiment (EMTE) in a nutshell. In future posts, I will present objections, counterarguments, and all that good philosophy shit. It gets complicated fast, so be prepared to move from “what the hell” to “what the fuck.”

Why Government Authority Might Be Bullshit (Huemer, with Minimal Jargon)

Difficulty: What the heck

This is a simplified version of Chapter 1 of The Problem of Political Authority by Michael Huemer.

The goal is the same as always: take something that’s usually taught in dense academic language and make it actually understandable. (Admittedly, though, Huemer is already great at making difficult philosophy accessible. This version just makes it even more accessible.)

The Problem of Political Authority

by Michael Huemer

Abridged by Raymond Chuang

PART I: The Illusion of Authority

1. The Problem of Political Authority

1.1 A political Parable

Let’s start with a story. You live in a small village. There is a lot of crime. Bad guys steal and destroy people’s things. It looks like no one is doing anything about it. So you and your family take some guns and go catch some bad guys. You point your gun at a bad guy and lock him in your basement. You do that for some other bad guys. You give the bad guys food so they don’t get too hungry. You plan to keep the bad guys in your basement “for a few years to teach them a lesson” (Huemer 3).

After doing the same thing for a few weeks, you go around your neighborhood. You ask your neighbor, “Have you noticed that there are fewer bad guys?” He nods. You say, “Well, you should thank me.” You tell him how you have been catching bad guys by using your guns and locking them in your basement. Your neighbor looks at you with a strange look. You continue: “Now, I’m here because you have to give me money…because I caught all those bad guys. This month, you have to give me $100.”

Your neighbor stares at you and doesn’t move. You tell him, “If you don’t give me the money, then you are also a bad guy, and I will lock you in my basement with the other bad guys.” You let your neighbor see that you have a gun, and you tell him that if he does not give the money, you will force him to give you the money.

If you did something like this, how would your neighbors react? Would they be happy to give you the money?

Not likely. Most likely, you would notice these things: First, almost nobody would think they owe you anything. Some people might pay because they don’t want to be locked in your basement. Others might pay because they hate the other bad guys. But almost nobody would think it is their duty to give you money. If some neighbor does not pay you, other neighbors would more likely say good things about them than bad things.

Second, most people would think that what you did was crazy. They would think that when you asked for money, it is extortion. And when you lock the bad guys in your basement, it is kidnapping. Because you acted so crazy, and because you think other people need to thank you and give you money, people will think you really are crazy.

“What does this story have to do with political philosophy?” (Huemer 4). In the story, you acted like a simple government. Of course, you did not do all the things that a larger government does, but you did two of the most important things that governments do: (1) you punished bad guys who hurt other people or don’t listen to you, and (2) you collected money so that you can keep catching bad guys. If the government does these two things, these two things are known as the criminal justice system and the tax system. If you do these two things, these two things are called kidnapping and extortion.

It looks like the things you did are the same things a government does. But most people would think it’s okay for the government to do these things, and not okay for you to do these things. Most people support the government when it catches bad guys, and most people feel like they need to pay their taxes. Most people also think that the government should punish tax evaders, and they think it is the government’s right to do so.

This shows how most people feel about the government. Most people feel that governments are ethically allowed to do things that other people can’t do. Also, most people feel that we have special obligations to the government. Most people think we don’t have these obligations to other people, even if these other people act the same way the government does. This is not just about the law. It is also not just about what people can get away with. “The point is that our ethical judgments” are very different when it comes to government and nongovernment people (Huemer 4). When nongovernment people do some things, people think it’s bad. When the government does some things, people think it’s good.

Why do we give the government this special moral status? Does it make sense to give them this special moral status? “This is the problem of political authority” (Huemer 5).

1.2 The concept of authority: a first pass

In ordinary moral thinking, what is the difference between your actions and the government’s actions? One idea is that, even though your actions and the government’s actions might look the same, they are actually different. That is, they are different behaviors. For example, you might think that a difference is that you didn’t give the bad guys fair jury trials. Maybe that is why what you did is bad, and what the government does is okay or good.

A second idea is that you are doing the same thing that the government does, but the only difference is who is doing those things. You are doing something bad in the story because, even if you acted just like the government, you are still not the government.

This second idea is what I call political authority. Political authority has two important aspects:

Political legitimacy: the government has the right to make laws and enforce them by coercion — “in short, the right to rule” (Huemer 5).
Political obligation: citizens must obey the government, even when they normally don’t have to obey other nongovernment people

“If a government has ‘authority’, then both (i) and (ii) exist: the government has the right to rule, and the citizens have the obligation to obey” (Huemer 6).

There is a difference between political obligations and moral obligations. For example, it is illegal to murder. When there is a government, it is both our political obligation and moral obligation not to murder people. However, if there is no government, then we do not have a political obligation not to murder, but we still have a moral obligation not to murder. But there are other things that we must do or not do just because the law says so. These are political obligations, not moral obligations. For example, if the government tells you to pay $1,000 in taxes, then, if you think the taxes are too high, you do not feel like you have the right to not pay that much. If you think the taxes are too low, you do not feel like you have to give the government extra money. So, from most people’s point of view, paying taxes is a political obligation.

If you believe that the government has political authority, you don’t have to think that political authority is unconditional or absolute. You also don’t need to think that all governments have political authority. For example, you might think that the government has authority only if it respects human rights and allows citizens to participate in politics, so you might think that tyrannical governments have no authority. You might also think that even okay governments cannot force you to do certain things, like committing murder, and that citizens don’t have to obey the government if it tells them to commit murder. So, if you believe in political authority, you don’t have to believe that political authority is unconditional or absolute.

However, we should still remember that most people think that the government has lots of political authority and that it can make people do things that would be wrong or unethical if a nongovernment person makes them do these things instead.