You Don’t Need a Definition for Everything
Or, that which can be understood need not be defined
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To understand what an essay in the realest sense means, we have to reach back to Michel de Montaigne, who is 1580 published a book of what he called “essais.”
He was doing something quite different from what modern essayists do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer in French means “to try” and and essai is an attempt.
An essay is something you write in order to try to figure something out. It’s an enquiry.
Figure out what? You don’t know yet. And so you can’t begin with a thesis, because you don’t have one. In fact, you may never have one.
An essay doesn’t begin with a statement, it begins with a question.
In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You notice a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.
Today’s essay is an “essay” in the realest possible sense. And it’s a longass one indeed! About 3500 words.
My original goal was to explore the differences between Deontology and Consequentialism. That’s how I started out at least. But by the time I finished putting my thoughts down, it turned out to be something completely different.
To be honest, the final piece became much much more interesting than what I had initially imagined. It’s undoubtedly one of the best pieces I’ve written in recent times. I wouldn’t have been able to do it had I started with a thesis or a statement.
Only because I started with a question (or rather a dilemma) that I wanted to explore myself, did I stumble upon new insights.
Hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!
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Q: Is it better to be a deontologist or a consequentialist?
In How Will You Measure Your Life, Clay Christensen tells a story that addresses an interesting dilemma related to morality.
Many of us have convinced ourselves that we are able to break our own personal rules “just this once.” We have rules, but like all rules, we are okay with making exceptions from time to time.
“I came to understand the potential damage of ‘just this once’ in my own life when I was in England, playing on my university’s varsity basketball team. It was a fantastic experience; I became close friends with everyone on the team. We killed ourselves all season, and our hard work paid off — we made it all the way to the finals of the British equivalent of the NCAA tournament. But then I learned that the championship game was scheduled to be played on a Sunday. This was a problem.”
Christensen was a deeply religious man. And at the age of sixteen, he had made a personal commitment to God that he would observe Sabbath and never play ball on a Sunday.
Christensen explained his situation to the coach, who was naturally unconvinced. “I don’t know what you believe, but I believe that God will understand,” his coach said.
On top of that, Christensen was the starting centre, and the backup centre was out as he had dislocated his shoulder. His teammates were stunned. “You’ve got to play,” they went to him and pleaded.
Christensen’s big dilemma was this: can’t he break the rule, just this one time?
It was a difficult decision. The team would suffer without him. They’d been dreaming about this game all year. The guys on the team were his best friends. They would be hurt.
Christensen decided to pray. And as he thought more and more about it, he became more and more convinced that he needed to keep his commitment. So he told the coach that he wouldn’t play in the championship game. His decision was final.
“In so many ways, that was a small decision — involving one of several thousand Sundays in his life. In theory, surely I could have crossed over the line just that one time and then not done it again. But looking back on it, I realise that resisting the temptation of ‘in this one extenuating circumstance, just this once, it’s okay,’ has proved to be one of the most important decisions of my life. Why? Because life is just one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over and over in the years that followed.”
He argues that if you give in to “just this once,” you’ll regret where you end up. It’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time. The boundary — your personal moral line — is powerful, because you don’t cross it. If you have justified doing it once, there’s nothing to stop you from doing it again.
Christensen philosophy is simple: Decide what you stand for, then stand for it all the time. No exceptions!
Today, let’s talk about moral dilemma. More precisely, let’s take a closer look at two different schools of thought — Deontology and Consequentialism — and try to explore what they really mean and why they have always been locking horns with each other.
But first, consider this thought experiment.
Imagine you’re sitting at home. It’s a Sunday afternoon. You’re relaxing on the couch, drinking some lemonade, maybe watching a little Netflix. You’re laughing at something on the TV, and all of a sudden you hear a knock at the door. It startles you. “Ah, that’s odd! I’m not expecting anyone. It’s Sunday afternoon. Who’s at my door?”
You answer the door. Standing before you is a disgruntled, really scary-looking man. You know right away that something is off with this guy. Maybe it’s the dirt-caked clothes he’s wearing. Maybe it’s the greasy, long hair. Or maybe, it’s the axe he’s wielding in his hand.
You get this vibe that he has taken a human life before and he’s about to do it again. And if there was any sort of doubt in your mind, he removes it by saying in a deep rusty voice, “They call me The Decapitator. You may have heard of me in the news. I’m the friendly neighbourhood psycho killer. And I’m here to kill your kids. Is there any way you could direct me to where they are so that I could get on?”
Your stomach drops instantly. No, not because some strange man is on your doorstep and he wants to kill your children. But, because you’re faced with an ethical dilemma here. You see, you pride yourself on being an honest person. And like Christensen, you had made a personal commitment to never lie on a Sunday.
Okay, before we go any further — even though this thought experiment is already interesting (read: ridiculous) enough — let me still add a bit of spice to it by introducing few constraints.
Let’s say you have two ways, and only two ways, to answer this man’s question. Assume two options have popped up in front of you, and based on which “path” you chose, you’ll meet with different results — just like in a video game.
Your options are these: If you tell him your kids are asleep in the bedroom, the inevitable will happen. But, if you lie, and tell this man that your kids aren’t here, in fact they are in the mountains on a vacation, this man would go away and never come back.
You’re faced with a tough decision here. You can tell the truth and see the man disembowel your kids in front of you. Or, you can lie to him and risk being a dishonest person. What do you do?
This is very similar to Christensen’s dilemma, only stretched to a ridiculous length. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge fan of Christensen, and my goal is not to ridicule his philosophy, but instead to stress test it. If there’s truth in it, it can stand a bit of ridicule.
It isn’t exactly Christensen’s philosophy that I’m after. I’m actually after a certain 18th century German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment era thinkers — Immanuel Kant.
What if I told you that Kant (and many others like him) thought that if you made that decision in that moment — instead of following a set of preestablished moral principles — you have acted immorally?
Let me elaborate.
Deontology and Consequentialism are two very broad, general, competing categories for how we should look at whether a human action is right or wrong.
Simply put, deontologists believe that whether an action is right or wrong should be determined by looking at the action itself and weighing it up against preestablished moral principles. The consequences are irrelevant.
Consequentialists believe the opposite. The action isn’t the end. It’s only a vessel. The action in itself is irrelevant. The consequences of the action determine whether it’s right or wrong.
If you are anything like me, you would straightaway diss deontology as being too rigid and hence stupid. When you made a commitment, even though it might have made sense at the time, you couldn’t have possibly been able to foresee every extraordinary circumstances — such as a psycho killer knocking at your door. And extraordinary circumstances do need extraordinary measures which may require breaking preestablished rules and morals.
For example, you may be against violence, but you might choose to kill to save your family. You might be dead against capital punishment, but you sure as hell might want Hitler to be punished with a gruesome death.
We are shaped by our situations. What is life, if not the sum of all the consequences of the actions we take in response to the situations we face.
Alright, now comes the fun part! Let’s take a shot at stress testing Consequentialism.
This is World War II. Imagine you’re living in the apartment where Anne Frank and her family were hiding in the attic behind the bookcase. Some Nazi soldiers come to your door and ask you, “Is there a family hiding in the attic of this house?”
Well, to a consequentialist, knowing that if they tell the truth, people will almost certainly die. Even if they typically wouldn’t advocate lying, it’s morally justifiable to lie to the soldiers in this situation because the “consequences” of doing so are good.
But, what if we shift this thought experiment just a little bit? What if now when the Nazis come to your door, asking if a family lives in the attic of your house, they also tell you that if they don’t find this family by the end of the day, their commanding officer would execute them?
No matter what decision you make standing in that doorway, human life will be lost. And if you’re a consequentialist, how do you make such a decision? What criteria do you use to determine what the best outcome is going to be? You may say, “Well, I’m just going to err on the side of the least human suffering possible.” Or, you may say, “Let these Nazis die, they are evil!” I would pick the latter.
But how about this? What if one of those guards, had they not been executed that day, would have eventually gone to find the cure for cancer? Obviously you could have never known this in advance. But if you’re being judged solely on the consequences of your actions — in this yet another ridiculous thought experiment — you have just committed a terrible moral atrocity.
Hence the moral dilemma!
In deontology, there are these rigid principles, and we have a duty to adhere to them, and sometimes that can run us into problems. And while consequentialism is really good in allowing for a lot of flexibility, it also comes with its own set of problems — the fact that the ends justify the means, regardless of whether it goes against basic human rights.
Would you still support Hitler (or Thanos for them matter) with his genocide even if you knew with absolute certainty that this would establish world peace for centuries?
The central question that I’m trying to address is this: How do we break out of this moral dilemma?
To try to answer this, we have to turn to a 19th century Austrian-British philosopher — Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. For our sake, we are more interested in his thoughts on language.
According to Wittgenstein, people all throughout history have really been wasting their time by asking questions like, “What is the meaning of my life?” “What is a life well-lived?” “What is beauty?” “What is morality?”
Even after arguing back and forth, we can’t ever seem to come to a consensus on any of it.
Wittgenstein contemplates, what if it’s because philosophers have been using the wrong tool for the job? Asking transcendental questions like “What is morality?” using “language” — this tool that was haphazardly thrown together to primarily describe states of affairs in the world, such as the brightness of the sun, or the loudness of the music, or the thickness of a tree — is a false start in itself.
You can find an answer to such questions, but it’s just not going to be through language. Even if you end up discovering the answer, you’re never going to be able to describe it through language. It’s only something that you can experience, not define.
One of his most famous lines is, “The truth shows itself. It is not said or even expressed in thought. What can be said can be said clearly. Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent.”
What he’s saying is that language is insufficient at describing these transcendental concepts and that all these questions that philosophers have been agonising over is just a result of their thinking being tangled up and confused because of the limitations of language.
To Wittgenstein, asking a question like, “What is the meaning of my life?” is like asking something like, “How much red paint would it take to be funnier than sound waves?” If someone asks such a question, it only reveals that they are confused about the structure and limitations of language.
This limitation of language is at the core of the problem with Socrates’ philosophy.
You see, Socrates would go into the public square asking people to give him a definition of the word “beauty” or “justice” or whatever he was interested in that day. And he’d have conversations ad nauseum with his fellow citizens trying desperately to get to a perfect definition that includes any example of beauty any sane person can come up with.
Often in these dialogues, a person will try to give a perfect definition of the word. But Socrates somehow would always be able to find an example that doesn’t fit the definition, or an example that fits the definition that nobody would agree should be a part of it.
In one of Plato’s dialogues, Euthyphro, Socrates was outside the courthouse, awaiting the trial in which he was eventually put to death, when the eponymous Euthyphro, a religious expert and prophet of sorts, struck up a conversation with him. Big mistake!
Socrates started explaining that for the “activities” with which he was charged by the court, not only he did not charge a fee, but he was in perfect readiness to pay for people to listen to him.
It turned out that Euthyphro was on his way to charge his father with manslaughter — not a bad conversation starter. So Socrates started out by wondering how charging his own father with manslaughter was compatible with Euthyphro’s religious duties.
Socrates’ technique is to make the person, the one who started with a thesis, agree to a series of statements, then proceed to show him how the statements he agreed to are inconsistent with the original thesis, thus establishing that he has no clue as to what he is talking about.
Socrates used it mostly to show people how lacking in clarity they are in their thoughts, how little they knew about the concepts they used routinely, and the need for philosophy to elucidate these concepts.
In the beginning of the Euthypro dialogue, he catches his interlocutor using the word “piety,” characterising the prosecution of his father as a pious act and so giving the impression that he was conducting the prosecution on grounds of piety. But he could not come up with a definition that suited Socrates.
Socrates kept pestering the poor fellow as he could not produce a definition of piety. The dialogue continued with more definitions, until Euthyphro found some polite excuse to run away.
The dialogue ended abruptly, but the reader is left with the impression that it could have gone on until today, twenty-five centuries later, without it bringing us any closer to anything.
Wittgenstein uses the example of the word game to illustrate our inability to precisely define things.
What is a game? Can we get a strict definition of the word? Is a game a competition between two or more people? Well, solitaire’s a game. Is a game just a fun activity that somebody engages in? Well, riding a roller coaster’s fun. We certainly wouldn’t call that a game though. What criteria do we use to determine what a game is?
The problem lies in us trying to find those necessary and sufficient conditions that define every example of a game that we can possibly think of. But what if it doesn’t work that way?
Wittgenstein suggests that we should stop trying to find a perfect set of necessary and sufficient conditions, and instead, reflect on the very strange fact that everybody knows what a game is. If you say solitaire, somehow everybody knows it’s a game. But when you say roller coaster, somehow everybody knows that this shouldn’t be classified as a game.
What does that mean? How is that even possible if we don’t have some definition somewhere up in our heads?
You see, the meaning of a word is primarily derived from how it’s used by people in general. For example, if literally everyone literally started using the word “literally” to mean the same thing as “seriously,” the meaning of the word “literally” would change entirely.
Language is a complex, vibrant, living organism that’s constantly shifting and changing. The meaning of a word isn’t something that can be simplified into necessary and sufficient conditions.
In this sense, it’s impossible to ever come up with a perfect definition for the word “game” or any word. What actually happens in reality is, we see things throughout our life like basketball and bowling and Call of Duty and hopscotch, and we hear the people around us use the word “game” to classify all these different activities. And our brain at some level recognises similarities between all these games, and we can sense it somehow. And that’s enough.
Remember that you don’t need a definition for the colour blue in order to experience it.
In Euthypro, Socrates was hellbent on defining the characteristics that differentiates the pious from the nonpious. But the fundamental question that Nassim Nicholas Taleb asks in Antifragile is this: Does one really need a definition to be able to conduct a pious action?
And by extension: Does one actually have to be able to tell in plain language what piety means to prove that they know what it means? What if they don’t know the definition in words, but actually knows what piety is? Isn’t that enough?
Taleb goes further down the road: Does a child need to define mother’s milk to understand the need to drink it? Does a dog need to define what an owner is to be loyal to him?
A dog uses instinct, but we are not dogs. But are we humans so fundamentally different as to be completely stripped of instinct leading us to do things we have no clue about? Do we have to limit life to what we can answer in language?
Why on earth do you think that we need to fix the meaning of things? What benefit does it have?
Now, if I have to argue (like Socrates), I would say, “But we need to know what we are talking about when we talk about things. The entire idea of philosophy is to be able to reflect and understand what we are doing by examining our lives. An unexamined life is not worth living.”
But if we have to strictly define things in order to be human, we are killing the things we can know but not express. For example, if I ask someone who is riding a bicycle just fine to give me the theory behind their bicycle riding, they would certainly fall off.
By bullying and questioning people, we don’t enlighten them. We only confuse and hurt them.
Socrates was put to death because he made people feel stupid for blindly following habits, instincts, and traditions. He disrupted something that was working just fine.
Socrates might have been right about a few things occasionally. But he confused others about things they’ve been doing just fine without getting in trouble. He was taking the joy of ignorance out of the things people don’t understand — without offering any answer in return.
Few things are too complicated to be expressed in words. By constantly pushing it, you kill the thing that makes us human — our innate ability to focus on the right things despite our inability to figure it out intellectually.
As human beings we can function pretty well without strictly labelling ourselves as deontologists or consequentialists. Without explaining everything using strict logic, we have the common sense to skip a Sunday game but lie to a psycho killer. In other words, we can go about just fine without a strict definition of morality.
We don’t need to define everything.
Today I Learned
Wood fibres conduct sound very well. This is why they are used to make musical instruments such as violins and guitars.
What is interesting is that you can do a simple experiment to test for yourself how well these acoustics work. Put your ear up against the narrow end of a long trunk lying on the forest floor and ask a friend at the thicker end to carefully make a small knocking or scratching sound with a pebble. On a still day, you can hear the sound through the trunk incredibly clearly, even if you lift your head.
Birds use this property of wood as an alarm system for their nesting cavities. In their case, what they pick up is not benign knocking but scrabbling sounds made by the claws of martins or squirrels.
The sounds can be heard high up in the tree, which gives the birds a chance to escape. If there are young in the nest, they can try to distract the attackers, though such attempts are usually doomed to failure.
But at least the parents escape with their lives and can compensate for their loss by raising a second brood.
Timeless Insight
Human beings are perishable. Life expectancy decreases as one gets older. When you see a 6 year old kid and her 80 year old grandfather, you can predict with confidence that the kid will survive the grandfather. But with projects and business ventures, you usually witness the opposite effect.
With something non-perishable, say a technology or an idea, it is very likely that the old is expected to have a longer expectancy than the young. If a business is eighty years old, and another one is ten years old, the older business is expected to live eight times as long as the new one.
If you want to know how long the non-perishable will endure, then the first question you should ask is how long it has already existed. The older it is, the more likely it is to go on surviving.
As the great Benoît Mandelbrot wrote: For the perishable, every additional day in its life translates into a shorter additional life expectancy. For the non-perishable, every additional day may imply a longer life expectancy.
What I’m Reading
If we could begin to see much illness itself not as a cruel twist of fate or some nefarious mystery but rather as an expected and therefore normal consequence of abnormal, unnatural circumstances, it would have revolutionary implications for how we approach everything health related.
— Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal
Tiny Thought
Left alone to our own devices, we can’t not worship something. You might worship god, you might worship social justice, you might worship Bitcoin, but you’re going to worship something whether you like it or not.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋