900 Racists

[This post was written in response to Martyr's original post. He has since significantly revised it. I have asked him to revert it to the original, which this post addresses (regardless of my direct response to his comment, I still refer to that original post). If he wants to create a new post to which I will chose to respond or not as and when I have time, that is fine. However what Martyr has done is completely unacceptable and extremely ironic given he is writing on ethics!]

Justin Martyr comments in my post responding to his supposed criticisms of Desirism that:

You spent a lot of time criticizing what is intended to be a high level intuitive overview of desirism. But you did not even make an attempt to engage my case of the 900 racists.

This was because by the time I had dealt with Martyr's errors on the basic ideas of Desirism, there was nothing left to comment on his 900 Racists argument, since it was one giant straw man. Further saying this was a "high level intuitive overview" does not excuse the errors made.

Nevertheless for clarification I will rise to Martyr's challenge in this post. He briefly summarised this in his comment:

The Case of the 900 racists. Small world of only 900 racists and 100
members of a minority group. The members of the minority group do not
have the power needed to change the desires of the racist majority via
praise, punishment, and condemnation. So why should the racists change
their desires such to allow the minority group to have more of their
desires fulfilled?

Well they are not going to are they? However this does not make such a society morally right, just because some are powerless to alter that society. The question is whether such a society is morally right or defective and this is the question that desirism can provide an empirically grounded answer to. Other approaches might also condemn such a society as being morally defective however desirism provides a ratio-empirical argument to make that case, which is why it my preferred approach, until or unless someone can provide better ratio-empirical grounds.

There really is not much more to say about Martyr's original post, as it gets so much about desirism wrong. So, instead, I will expand here based on his comment summary. Let us image two different scenarios:

• Scenario 1: 900 racists, 100 victims, the racists have power, the victims are powerless (theocracies such as Sharia law states  springs to mind)
• Scenario 2: 100 racists, 900 victims, the racists have power, the victims are powerless (apartheid South Africe springs to mind)

Now the question we are asking is whether the desire for racism is one to promote or demote. The phrase "desire for racism" is slightly odd (at least to me) and this might be better put by considering the question in reverse, is the "aversion to racism" one to promote or discourage?

• Case 1: Moral agents promote an aversion to racism
• Case 2: Moral agents do not promote an aversion to racism

Case 1 tends to fulfil more desires since both agents and recipients (regardless of how many there are in each category and whether some are in both or not) can fulfil their desires. Case 2 tends to thwart more desires, since either recipients would tend to have their desires thwarted or agents who lack this aversion would be thwarted by the laws of the land, for example. 

So we have reason to promote Case 1 over Case 2 and do this by both increasing the strength of an aversion to racism and by increasing the number of holders of this aversion. That is we have reason for this to be part of an efficient and effective device of morality.

We can now revisit both scenarios, where we are evaluating the device of morality as it functions in those societies. In both, the device of morality - the employment of the social forces of praise and condemnation, reward and punishment - tends to thwart desires not fulfil desires, to decrease an aversion to racism and decrease the holders of such an aversion. Our analysis has shown that in both scenarios the device of morality is defective, regardless of their own subjective and relative "moral" claims and justifications (such as it is in god's nature to be this way etc.).

It does not matter if either Scenario 1 or Scenario 2 comprised the only people that exists. The device of morality as it exists within those universes is still objectively flawed as the above empirical analysis shows.

Thats it. Over to the rest of you (either here or in the comment section of Luke's post).