Recently, my friend told me about a girl she knew —call her Lila— who went to a very loud rock-music concert. Lila was standing with my friend in the front of the crowd, by the speakers on the right of the stage. When the band came on, the crowd clapped and shouted, and the noise was deafening. My friend was surprised to see Lila gently clicking her fingers instead of clapping like everyone else. My friend shouted in her ear, asking her why. Lila explained that clicking is more inclusive for people who suffer from sensory over-stimulation.
At first, it might seem that Lila is being silly. Someone who suffered from over-stimulation is unlikely to be at the concert— they would have been having a bad time long before the crowd started clapping. But her actions can also be seen as resulting from a powerful idea that is often implicit in moral reason and advocacy, an idea that I will call already being there.
Lila is acting as though she is already in the world that she thinks would be better, the world where people click rather than clap. Sure, even in the perfect world, clicking your fingers at a rock show wouldn’t help anyone. But a world without clapping might be better— this is the world Lila is emulating.
I don’t think that this picture of morality is as silly as it first seems. Already being there is a common justification or motivation for a variety of behaviours. Sometimes it is a useful persuasive tool, sometimes it may even be necessary to create a better world. More strangely, it seems that consequentialists, the people who are most inclined to reject Lila’s reasoning, actually engage in similar behaviour themselves.
Complacency and adaptability
Immanuel Kant thought of morality as universal, a process that would flow in the same way from each person’s reasoning (if they reasoned correctly). In one of the formulations of his categorical imperative (the means to correctly reason about ethics) he talks about an imagined “kingdom of ends”, arguing that to act morally is to treat yourself, and others, as if you were inhabitants of this imagined place. In this kingdom, each person is treated as an autonomous agent, and allowed to make their own rational decisions. Everyone acts in accordance with the moral law. This may sound like something of a clockwork world, but Kant still allows room for our inclination, for some people to be more virtuous, or interesting, or talented than others. But in the kingdom of ends there would never be lying, cheating, stealing or killing.
To act constantly as if you are in the kingdom of ends is the most extreme version of already being there. It entails having a morality that is invariant to the state of the world. Lying, stealing—and for Kant, suicide and masturbation—would be just as wrong in the perfect world as they are now.
But this pushes against what I find most compelling in consequentialism, the value which Dale Jamieson, in his article when utilitarians should be virtue theorists, calls “non-complacency”. As Jamieson puts it:
“Non-complacency refers to the fact that ways of life and patterns of action should be dynamically responsive to changing circumstances, taking advantage of unique opportunities to produce goodness, and always striving to do better”
Defined less negatively, we might call it adaptability.
Those who are motivated to become consequentialists take as their premise that we are thrown into an imperfect world at birth. We are surrounded by sources of suffering, and we are asked to engage in imperfect practices every day. The ways we eat, buy our clothes, choose our careers; all these practices begin at a point very far from perfect. The task of the consequentialist is to adapt their behaviour to this world, to use its processes to do the most good that they can, individually and collectively. Consequentialists shouldn’t accept these processes or these sources of suffering. They should do their best to get out of them. But the way out is often through.
In the consequentialist view of the world, acting as if we are already there seems like the definition of complacency. It brings to mind environmentalists who dream of living a zero carbon life for themselves, never buying single use plastic, and spending money constructing a perfectly insulated house with reed beds for disposing of human waste. Perhaps in the perfect world of these environmentalists, each person would be able to live such a life, but in this one, all the effort and resources these lifelong projects take could be better employed reducing carbon emissions for everyone, not just the environmentalists themselves. With an adaptable theory the environmentalists can be more ambitious, getting involved in protest movements, donating their money or working directly on scaling alternative energy.
This is the knee-jerk consequentialist response to already being there. But the consequentialist shouldn’t deny the fact that this idea does describe a compelling motive in ethics, and even, to an extent, their own behaviour.
Exemplars, and something more
Being vegan, or giving 10 percent of their income, are things that consequentialists sometimes do which are reminiscent of the logic of already being there. To seriously and consistently respond to the evils of factory farming would be to do more than merely removing meat from your diet. You would be ethically called upon to protest, exercise sanctions on people who disagreed with you, and dedicate your career and spare time to the cause. Defining veganism as purely a diet is world-invariant— the word ‘vegan’ would have the same meaning to a consequentialist today and to someone living in a world with no animal agriculture.
Likewise, giving 10 percent of your income is something you would do when everyone else did the same. In our world, a thoroughgoing consequentialist might feel called on to give far more, perhaps, as Peter Singer writes, to give to the point of marginal utility, where a pound spent on yourself does more good than a pound spent on charity.
A consequentialist could justify their lukewarm practices by appealing to the idea of persuasion, of being a good exemplar. In the world we live in, where the norms are so far removed from the point of giving the majority of our money to charity, or reacting with justified aggression to factory farming, doing either of these things would make us un-emulable. Changing our diet, or giving a small amount is achievable and marketable. Being vegan in diet only is more appealing, and often leads to the friends and family of the vegan making changes in their own life. Encountering a more morally and emotionally engaged vegan as a meat-eater is likely to promote self-defence strategies like casting the vegan as insane, a zealot, or a fanatic. In short— not someone to emulate. I have a similar intuition about donating 10%. If you meet someone who donates 10% of their income, but otherwise lives in a similar way to you, you are surely more likely to find their lifestyle choice appealing than if they donate the majority of their income, and live like a monk. The most emulable exemplar in our current world is someone who can show that living ethically doesn’t mean living a bad, unappealing life.
But perhaps, already being there can lead to more than a promotion of your own behaviour. Sometimes, it can be partially constitutive of a better world coming into being. In Ursula Le Guin’s (incredible) novel The Dispossessed, she imagines a group of people, the Odonians, who create a new social order through emulating it until it comes into existence.
These people, the followers of the anarchist philosophy of the fictional Odo, begin to live as anarchists even while they are part of a capitalist culture. They are imprisoned, mocked, and ignored, until they are so frustrating to the ruling class that they are transported to a dusty, barely habitable planet. There, they have a real chance of building their alternative world.
In her novel, Le Guin creates a compelling vision of an anarchist culture, with its own norms and a language - Pravic- which completely expels the idea of property from the conceptual landscape. Odonians have no possessive words, no “my” or “have”. Objects are referred to as “the pencil” not “my pencil”. They use “the speaker” to refer to the person that spoke last, not even allowing ideas to be identified with their speakers.
The first generations of Odonians, those who still lived on their home planet, or those in the first wave of colonists, didn’t find it easy to be Odonian. The language didn’t come naturally to them, it was still an exercise undertaken on purpose; the norms that undergird it hadn’t yet come into being. I imagine them slipping up, saying “my father”, chastising themselves, and repeating this ritual until the discipline is internalised. The norms of the Odonians only became real norms because generations spoke and acted them into being, before they had any real referent and before they reflected the true state of the culture.
We could reduce this process to the idea of being an exemplar, but I’m tempted to say that it represents something more. The first generations of Odonians didn’t offer a compelling alternative to their fellow citizens. Their life was difficult, and letting go of old ways of speaking and being was painful. But in the end, their sacrifice created a culture. Already being there made ‘there’ come to be.
Maybe alternative cultures and systems of morality have to be formed in this way. Maybe sometimes, nudging people within our current culture isn’t enough. Maybe sometimes, a vanguard group of moral reformers has to create a viable example before their better world can come to be. If this is the case, then already being there is a necessary moral motivation for certain kinds of change.
Tempering my enthusiasm
I don’t want to leave the reader with an overly rosy picture of already being there. I wrote this essay partially in an attempt to understand an impulse in ethics that I had assumed was totally misguided. Through looking more closely at it, I saw that it had ubiquity and appeal, but I’m still unconvinced that it is worth endorsing.
Firstly, you can, and sometimes should, create a better world through means that would not exist there. I once heard a self-defined anarchist on BBC Radio 4’s The Moral Maze explaining that she had never voted because it would be wrong for her to give her consent to be governed by a candidate that didn’t share the entirety of her opinions. Anything that wasn’t total personal representation seemed totally wrong to her, a handing away of her freedom. Perhaps this was her promoting her vision of the world she wished to enter, but it seemed to me to be a very naive response to our world. Our world is one that is full of horrible problems, and suffering that we need to address. I was struck at this moment by the impression that this wasn’t a serious attempt to live in a better world, but rather a personal attempt not to end up with dirty hands— to remove her responsibility for the actions of the politicians who, with her consent or not, would be representing her.
Although acting as if we are already there is one good means to getting there, it isn’t the only one, and certainly isn’t always the best. Unless we are applying the strategy of already being there consistently and with a purpose, it can all too easily be a way of maintaining our individual moral integrity while allowing the world to continue as it is. It seems to me to be far more morally serious to act like the president of Mercy For Animals, Leah Garcés, who raises her children to be vegan, cares for rescued chickens in her home, but also actively engages with chicken companies and farmers to make them more humane. Perhaps she would have cleaner hands if she never interacted with these companies at all, but I don’t think that the world would be better if morally serious people acted in a way that was agnostic to the present state of the world.
The idea that they should can lead to frustrating absurdity. When Peter Unger published Living High and Letting Die, a book-length defence of Peter Singer’s argument that we are all obligated to do much more about global poverty than we assume, Martha Nussbaum—a philosopher I respect—wrote a quite ridiculous critique in the London Review of Books. Unger tells his readers to specifically donate to Oxfam and Unicef, charities that he took to be particularly effective at the time. Nussbaum, severely bought into the idea of already being there, attempted to counter his recommendation by imagining a world where every reader followed his recommendation.
In this world, she claims:
“Oxfam and Unicef would suddenly become very rich, receiving both an annual fraction of people’s incomes and significant amounts of their land and other property. Since Unger instructs us to choose these two above other charities such as religious groups and universities, for reasons I shall discuss, those other organisations would become impoverished.”
She bemoans that:
“Unger doesn’t even try to imagine this world, and he seems not to have asked himself any questions about what would actually happen if people took his advice. This would appear to be because he has assumed that people will not take his advice and that he will remain one of a small band of moral heroes, in a world of moral sloth and corruption.”
This argument seems to come from the perspective that all morally serious people must think of their recommendations as being universal moral statements, in the sense that I linked to Kant earlier in this essay. Unger is using his book to make a recommendation on the margin, in the current world, a recommendation that he knows will only be taken up by some of his readers. He isn’t part of Nussbaum’s small band of moral heroes, nor is he describing a perfect world. He is making an intervention in this world. If the world changed (as it has) so would his recommendations. Perhaps the assumption that moral thinking must occur under the notion of already being there accounts for Nussbaum’s mistake.
I should finish by returning to the case of Lila and her clicking. I do respect her attempt to live in her better world. Her one-person protest is admirable in that it stood in the face of overwhelming opposition, and although its triviality at a rock concert was humorous, I still think it can be a good instinct to have.
Acting as if we are already there can be a way to change this world, to model better behaviour, to exhibit our moral seriousness, or perhaps, as in Le Guin’s book, to create a new culture. But it has to be tempered with the adaptability of the consequentialist, it must be—at least potentially—justified by some achievable end. Else, it may just become a way to blinker ourselves from the real problems that surround us.
I think that this is a useful concept, but greatly dislike the tactic of reasoning from fictional evidence, and think it misleads greatly in this case. The "as if" approach is embracing morality of the savior, and Le Guin's tale shows that it works only if the morally relevant participants are all involved. In place of fictional evidence, or the idea that actors can choose what the future world should look like, I think the discussion of Unger's suggestion and Nussbaum's strawman attack seems to show that the concept of "already being there" is difficult to instantiate or determine in advance. It's not just a question of tempering the principle with adaptability. Instead, the optimal provision of resources in a complex system can't be intuited ex ante via moral principles, as the failure of communist central planning shows. Among other things, giving to Unicef isn't flawed because Unicef might become rich, as Nussbaum worried. Instead, it is flawed because the people impacted need to be active participants in determining what should be done - not as some moral principle about self-determination, but as a practical matter of our inability to pre-determine the right outcome for them.