Re: noodling request: Faustian bargains

Jonathan L Cunningham wrote:
Maybe yet another metaphor (YAM?) may help. When you burn natural gas,
you release energy. If you want energy, this is good. But natural gas
(methane) is a compound. If you want to calculate how much energy you
get by burning it, you go to tables of chemical data, and look up the
enthalpy of formation of water, carbon dioxide and methane. Then you add
the enthalpies of formation of the water and carbon dioxide and
*subtract* the enthalpy of formation of the methane. IOW, you get energy
making the water and CO2, but it costs you energy (is bad) because you
are destroying methane.[*]

You may say that the overall reaction is exothermic, and that it doesn't
make sense to say part of the reaction is endothermic ... but it makes
sense to me. That's how you calculate it.

It's a very useful metaphor, because it actually _doesn't_ make sense to me to say that. :)

The enthalpy of formation of a compound is not an absolute number; it's referenced to some arbitrary set of "starting" components (which are often, but not always, chosen to be the most stable form of each pure element -- which is why you neglected to mention looking up the enthalphy of formation of the O2 in the reaction). Depending on the choice of starting components, the enthalpy of formation of a compound may be positive or negative -- but that doesn't affect the actual physical reaction at all.

More particularly, what's going on in that calculation is that you're using the convenient fact that the energy released in going from methane and oxygen to reference compounds, when added to the energy released in going from reference compounds to water and carbon dioxide, is equal to the net energy released in any other way of getting from methane to water and carbon dioxide (such as, for example, the way the physical reaction gets from one to the other).

Thus, it is, in point of strict technical fact, false to say that there is a methane-destroying part of the reaction that's endothermic. What you mean is that the reaction from methane to reference compounds is endothermic -- but this is _not_ a reaction that is physically part of the actual chemical behavior that's happening. It's a fictitious part of the mathematical framework you're using to calculate things, and the truth of the statement depends on some very arbitrary choices within that framework.

Now, in thermodynamics, pointing this out is a pedanticism -- if you say "the methane destruction is endothermic", everyone knows that what you mean is that, in this fictitious reaction that's part of the formalism for computing the energy released by the whole physical reaction, that particular contribution is endothermic when using some standard set of reference species. And so any reasonable person would not object to phrasing it that way.

However, let's go back to the thing that this is a metaphor for.

With moral goodness and badness, that sort of shorthand doesn't work, even if I grant that "good" and "bad" can be treated as a sum of components. If you say "affecting brain chemistry is bad", then it is _not_ going to be clear to very many people that what you actually mean is "affecting brain chemistry, when considered separately from the particulars of the benefits or detriments of that alteration, is something that is a negative contribution to the matter of whether something that includes it is overall morally bad or not".

Instead, it generally means to a lot of people, "anything which affects brain chemistry is necessarily morally bad, and thus should be avoided unless it's absolutely impossible not to, and should carry a moral stigma and be considered a personal failure if is impossible to avoid."

(At least, that's my personal experience of what that phrasing means, and is the conclusion that I've drawn from watching other people's responses in this thread.)

This is, in my estimation, a part of why your _opinion_ is that of someone who is very much in favor of appropriate treatments for mental illness, and yet your _expression_ of that opinion is being seen by many people as being quite offensive with regards to such treatment; you are using words that do not mean to your audience what you intend them to mean.

I think that the other part of the offense people have is that you seem to be defining all means of treating an illness like certain forms of depression as "bad" _because_ they treat the illness -- that is, because they change the aspects of the "'soul' of the mind" (as you put it) that are the root of the depression. Considering that a bad thing with justification, rather than a good thing, appears to value the damaged- and-unchanged person more than it does the healed-and-changed person. I am not sure if that's a separate issue, or if what you actually mean here is just that changing a person is, by itself, bad -- but, when combined with a situation where the unchanged person is ill and the changed person is healed, the net effect _of that change_ is morally good (in which case this is the same miscommunication).

Similarly, the (failed) argument was meant to ask: if taking Prozac is
an unalloyed good, why don't people take it when they don't need it?
That's actually a very weak argument because (and this is a point you
mentioned earlier, but I didn't respond to) I do *not* think that the
consequences of an act are a linear sum of the individual consequences.
They are a sum, not a linear sum. And also (as you pointed out) actions
and consequences have to be evaluated in context. And taking Prozac in
the wrong context could be detrimental (eating chocolate is good: eating
chocolate instead of real food when you are suffering from protein
deficiency is not good).

But I don't think that anybody is arguing that taking Prozac, when considered independent of context, is an unalloyed good -- so that question is meaningless.

The point that I am making is that, _in certain contexts_, taking Prozac is something that I think should be considered to be an unalloyed good.

Splitting the analysis of that into a "bad portion" and a "good portion" is using a set of reference states for your morality-of-formation that have little to do with the situation at hand, and lead to making statements about the part-reactions (part-moralities?) that are entirely misleading if one tries to get any intuition out of them -- much like using iron as the reference state for everything [1] would give you bogus intuition about the comparison between methane combustion and acetylene combustion. Sure, you can get the "right" answer in the end, but the implications of the parts in the middle are all screwy. And, in language as opposed to thermodynamics, the implications of all the parts of what one says are critical to meaningful communication.

So, it could be said that what's happening to offend people is that you're choosing an offensive set of reference states for the morality of formation. In particular, the reference state for "person-changing" should be considered to be the whole healed "person", which is not necessarily the same as the "person" as they currently exist. Thus, changing the "person" _towards_ that healed state, even though it changes them, should be counted as a good partial-morality, not as a bad one that gets justified by other things. The sum is the same either way, but the separated parts are different, and that's important.

- Brooks


[1] Which I have seen done, for an analysis that was including nuclear reactions.

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