Agapism and cluelessness
In a previous post, I defended that agapism (the only moral law is to act through and for agape, a kind of unconditional, free and universal love) is better than utilitarianism. At the end of the post, as a bonus argument, I vaguely pointed to the idea that agapism can probably offer some answer to the terrible problem of cluelessness, but I didn't go into too much detail.
The problem of cluelessness is a problem that manifests itself in the fact that utilitarianism holds that a good action is one that maximizes “global” well-being (all sentient beings of all the universe and all the future), but that forming a non-zero expected utility (or an expected utility at all!) on that is impossible.
Philosophers try to escape the problem of cluelessness in all sorts of ways, whether by invoking the “principle of indifference”, distinguishing “simple cluelessness” from “complex cluelessness”, talking about “ripples on a pond”, “cancellation postulate”, and so on.
I don't want to dig too deep into this in this post, but I think no solution is viable for utilitarianism.
However, it seems to me that agapism can provide at least some form of solution to cluelessness.
The thing about agapism is that it doesn't ask you to try to accomplish this or that. Agapism asks you to cultivate agape. And if we make a quick and simple phenomenological analysis of agape, drawing on the work of Levinas for example, we can say that in agape, when we encounter the face of the other, we find ourselves overwhelmed by a call, an order to respond to vulnerability; a hole that pierces our world and sucks us outwards towards the other.
What this implies is that, no matter how much we don't know whether helping someone will increase or reduce the well-being of the whole of space-time, agape “pulls” us to his rescue.
But the situation becomes more complicated when we have “certain” evidence about the consequences of our actions on the far future. Jesse Clifton asked me, for example, “What if, when you were about to help someone, you were presented with a gerrymandered set of people in the far future who would suffer if you helped him?”
Here, it's difficult, because I could also feel the inner call of the people of the gerrymandered set.
I think there is, perhaps not a form of logical incoherence, but at least a kind of “performative inconsistency” in the idea that we should care, for example, about people of the far future such as people of gerrymandered sets. Here's what I mean.
Agape is characterized, by its very essence, by a movement towards the other in his vulnerability, by an élan, a self-giving. The only thing agape commands is “give yourself to the other”.
Now, if we're asking to care for people in gerrymandered sets, since we can build them for any action, what we're asking is “don't do anything”.
I don't think, as I used to, that people from the far future “aren't a possible object of love”. But if agape demands “reach out to the other” and caring about gerrymandered sets demands “do nothing” (thus “out of love, never give yourself”), then there's at least a performative inconsistency (if not logical incoherence).
A performative inconsistency isn't a logical contradiction, but it's still bad. Worrying about people from the far future, because of the problem of cluelessness, disarms, cancels, deactivates agape; the paralysis it provokes is a negation of agape.
For me, this leads to the conclusion that, strange as it may seem, for agape you shouldn't worry about certain beings (those from the far future, gerrymandered sets...).
But note here that it does provide a kind of real answer to the problem of cluelessness, one that utilitarianism cannot. What we've done is to derive a performative inconsistency between agapism and caring about beings in the far future, and thus to derive that for agape, we shouldn't care. The answer may be strange and disappointing, but it still solves the problem of cluelessness; for agape, you shouldn't be long-termist (or anything that generates cluelessness).
Agapism can afford this answer, but utilitarianism cannot. Utilitarianism says “seek to maximize general well-being”, and if we realize that we can't seek such a thing, utilitarianism collapses. Agapism says “revere agape, cultivate agape, act by and for agape”, and if we have to remove certain beings from our circle of concerns to prevent agape from dying, then we have to do so, and agapism doesn't collapse.
One could perhaps retort that agape is supposed to be universal love, and that if the conclusion is to exclude certain beings from the circle of concerns, it's not really agape anymore. But loving everyone is more of an imaginary ideal; rather, agape says above all to love as much as possible of a free love, to help whoever you can help.
For agape, we must not care about some beings. A tragic situation, but the only solution in a morally uncooperative world to prevent agape from collapsing. These beings are not unworthy, no one is. But stretching our souls across all space-time is to tear it apart. In a morally uncooperative world, where every action is haunted by spectral victims, the only way to preserve love is to close our ears to some of these ghosts. We don't deny their worth, but we must close the door to them in the temple of our concerns, because if we welcomed them all, the fire of agape would choke. Tragedy is sometimes the condition of endurance. To live, agape must look away, for it cannot look everywhere.