The PPPH Hack
Continuing from the previous post, modernity’s first and most fundamental hack is the PPPH Hack.
Picture one’s “moral reality matrix” as the most important perceived realities (facts) that drive one’s moral judgments. For medievals, I think the matrix was this:
Virtue and sin were the most important internal realities, and God and Satan were the most important external realities. Statements like “God exists” and “murder and blasphemy are wrong” were statements of fact, not fundamentally different in kind from 2+2=4. This matrix was so thoroughly supernatural, however, that it withered under the physics equations. What replaced it, I’d say, is this modern matrix:
The most important internal realities are now Pleasure and Pain, and the most important external realities are Power and Harm. Power is any mechworld reality that helps a creature (health, wealth, intelligence, allies, etc). Harm is the reverse. (I’m using the color orange to indicate “psychologically exposed and vulnerable to mechworld reductionism”, and blue to indicate “psychologically sheltered from mechworld reductionism”.)
PPPH seems real, despite mechworld
There are several reasons PPPH feels intuitively more real than VSGS to us now, under shadow of mechworld and the equations. These include:
1. Power and Harm are tangibly real configurations of matter (health, wealth etc), while God and Satan are not. Pleasure and Pain as experienced by a creature seem like undeniable facts about the creature’s experience, while Virtue and Sin are subjective interpretations outsiders can dispute. Is X actually being virtuous by praying to Mecca three times a day? Outsiders may scoff, and X isn’t the final word on that in the way he’s the final word on “this causes me pain” and “this feels good”.
2. PPPH seems amenable to arithmetic in a way VSGS does not. It feels natural to imagine a utilitarian sum of happiness or well-being as measured by aggregate societal PPPH, and with that sum in mind, we can imagine making policy decisions that try to increase that aggregate. But it feels odd to imagine a “sum of overall societal morality” as measured by Virtues minus Sins. Virtues and Sins feel too individual and complex to combine so simply—and if we’re truly optimizing then our goal is zero Sin, not some optimal tradeoff between the two as with Pleasure and Pain: “no pain, no pleasure/power gain!” This sense of arithmetic optimization makes PPPH feel modern, rational, and scientific.
3. Pleasure and Pain seem to offer a universal mechanstic theory of motivation, akin to Newtonian gravity. The theory extends down to animals, making it seem more real, natural, and reductive. Alligators are immune to priestly brainwashing, so anything they’re feeling is “real”. The theory also extends up to religion and saints, thereby subsuming them into its reductiveness. Saintly compassion and self-sacrifice, it is argued, are also just selfish pleasure-seeking: the saint enjoys the feelings of love and good conscience they give him. Neat! Perhaps a bit glib, but we need a theory of our opponents and this works well enough to satisfy PPPH believers.
Without going further into it here, let me just mention that Hobbes (1651) and Locke (1690) each taught a universal PPPH theory of human motivation—and consistent with that, each took this reductionist stance toward self-sacrifice and compassion as ultimately selfish.
In short, as we gaze out on a bleak mechworld universe: VSGS shrivels, but PPPH abides. It’s not that medievals were unfamiliar with PPPH: they liked their pleasures too. They just believed PPPH was subsidiary to VSGS. It’s as if the equations burned away the top layer of VSGS, exposing the PPPH below.
As the equations burned away VSGS and exposed the underlying PPPH, there was an explosion of hedonic philosophizing. See the Declaration of Independence (1776): “pursuit of happiness”; the utopian socialist Robert Owen (1816): “greatest sum of happiness”; the utilitarian John Stuart Mill (1863): “The Greatest Happiness Principle”. And as the parents of gay children so often say: “We just want you to be happy”.
A 2018 book by David Wootton covers some of this ground on the positive side of Power and Pleasure. It’s called Power, Pleasure, and Profit, his “Profit” being another form of “Power” in my terminology: he means real profit, of course, not spiritual profit. While it’s great on the positive side, I think it misses how crucial Harms have been in driving our negative “real-igion”. Harms are way more important drivers of our major league morality today, than Pleasure and Power. Grandiose harms like racism and warming are self-evidently indecent and hence able to create absolute moral imperatives, even in a cold mechworld universe. (But more on that elsewhere, under the Panic Hack).
PPPH supports value judgments, despite mechworld
The beauty of PPPH is that the value judgments seem almost built-in. They require no philosophical or theological handwaving:
Even in a cold mechworld universe, isn’t it better to have more Pleasure than Pain?
If creatures have to exist, isn’t it better for them to have more Power (resources, health, intelligence…) and less Harm (disease, starvation, injury…)?
What kind of monster would disagree? If we can simply hand out licenses to Pleasure and Power like this, why would anyone withhold them?
And so PPPH value judgments feel practically self-evident to us moderns: Pleasure + Power GOOD, Pain + Harm BAD.
Compare that to the crazy amount of handwaving required to support VSGS value judgments: a God who writes moral rules for us on tablets, immortal human souls, an unseen Heaven, an unseen Hell. That worked when we believed supernatural revelation was plausible: Moses parting the Red Sea, witnesses who saw Christ’s resurrection, saints’ relics curing medieval diseases. But the equations made such events seem like dubious violations of natural causality, and our faith in their witnesses withered accordingly. VSGS seemed too far out on a limb. PPPH feels close to the tree trunk.
PPPH is the basic building material for all three chambers on the right
Panics is our major league “real-igion”, which is all about real PPPH Harms like slavery, warming, and abortion. Supernatural harms like heresy don’t count: they are outside the psychological protection of the PPPH Hack.
Policy is all about optimizing our aggregate societal PPPH with legislation and regulation. Again, non-real considerations don’t count and are excluded from public debate.
Private has a three-fold reliance on PPPH:
individuals can better optimize their own real PPPH by being left free to choose their own placebos (religion etc).
individuals can cause no real PPPH harm to others with their chosen placebos, since use of force is banned.
even if some individuals are PPPH-harming themselves with their chosen placebos, government should avoid regulating Private placebos since this will create more practical PPPH problems than benefits: e.g., it would require an overly powerful and intrusive Magistrate that would cause PPPH harms in future elsewhere.
These three points provide a utilitarian PPPH justification for supernatural religion: a justification for tolerating it, so long as it remains in the Private chamber. This falls far short of a justification for imposing it, which is why we moderns no longer burn heretics and blasphemers. Such supernatural beliefs have gone extinct since there is no hack to shelter them from mechworld. The hacks create the chambers, and there is no chamber in which “heretics should be burned” can exist now. It faces the harsh radiation of mechworld head on, and so it gets mechsplained into nothingness.
Our modern inversion of PPPH and VSGS is very striking here. Previously, PPPH was subsidiary to VSGS. Now, PPPH forms the protective shielding that allows VSGS to continue at all: VSGS is now a sort of hothouse violet that can only exist behind utlitarian PPPH rationales in Private.
But the PPPH Hack is still a Hack
After giving you all those reasons why PPPH seems intuitively real and solid to us moderns, let me also highlight how it’s still just an incoherent hack.
1. PPPH only seems arithmetic; there is no aggregate sum of PPPH construed as Pleasure plus Power minus Pain minus Harm. Pleasures are incommensurable against pains, and against other kind of pleasure. What is the sum of 5 ego strokes plus 2 orgasms minus 4 paper cuts and 3 existential funks?
2. The shift from PPPH to value judgments is actually an unsupported logical leap. More Pleasure and Power is not necessarily good. Just ask our secular Panics! Our anti-racism Panic is shocked and horrified when whites selfishly seek their own privilege. Even as Hobbes and Locke say all creatures naturally seek their own Pleasure and Power. Are you starting to sense how incoherently hackish our use of PPPH is, as a building material?
Hobbes and Locke neuter supernatural moral imperatives by subsuming them into a reductive system of selfish PPPH-seeking: the saint selfishly seeks the pleasure of his own good conscience as he pursues Virtue. But Jurassic Locke sneaks such absolute moral imperatives in through a back door, under psychological cover of enormous secular Harm. The secular harms of racism/sexism/warming/etc are so appalling that any decent person should want to fix them, even at cost to their own PPPH self-interest. Locke’s Private and Policy chambers run on a cool utilitarian logic of PPPH optimization, but our Jurassic Panics chamber (not part of his original design) runs on an opposite puritanical logic of absolute moral imperative—though Panics are ostensibly built on the same PPPH.
This sharp Policy/Panics divide is visible in our response to homicide statistics. Hate crime homicides are in Panics (about 100/year), regular homicides are in Policy (about 25,000/year). We think the right number of hate crime homicides is zero: each is an affront to decency requiring societal education and awareness-raising until it stops. But no one thinks the right number of regular homicides is zero. In a nation of 330 million we accept some normal background level of homicide, since reducing it to zero would have costs that outweigh the benefits: massive police budgets, reduction of civil liberties, police state atmosphere, etc. The Locke 1.0 Policy chamber thinks in terms of utilitarian tradeoffs, the Jurassic Locke 2.0 Panics chamber thinks in terms of absolute moral imperatives. The overall structure is an incoherent makeshift.
3. Pleasure and Pain only seem to provide a universal theory of motivation through rhetorical sleight of hand. The theory implicitly relies on very simple pleasures and pains (like getting burned or eating something delicious) to make pleasure and pain seem like undeniable facts of experience that are universal to humans and animals. But as we move up the ladder to choices like the ones Mother Teresa faced (“Do I work in the slums or stay in my comfortable bed?”), it becomes quite unobvious that “pleasure maximization” is what she was doing. At the higher end, pleasure theory seems to devolve to a fallaciously circular “whatever they choose must maximize their own pleasure”.
4. Finally, did the purveyors of PPPH motivation theory even truly believe it themselves? Hobbes wrote Leviathan because he was distressed by the English civil war and wanted to avoid such destruction in future. Imagine he was given a red pill / blue pill choice:
You will die in a week. Take the red pill and England will embrace your Leviathan and have a peaceful and prosperous future, but your final week will be agony and you will have no consoling recollection that you made this choice. Take the blue pill and England will go to crap but your final week will be ecstatic and you’ll have no haunting recollection that you sacrificed England for your pleasure.
Which do you think he’d pick? My sense of him as a person is that he’d almost certainly take the red pill. Likewise Locke. They were ultimately well-intentioned, and (I suspect) valued those good intentions above their own pleasures. They were better and more moral than their reductive theories. PPPH theory is seductive and seemingly scientific, but do we really believe it ourselves?
Mechworld warps us, in various ways. Our moral sense still bursts through, but it must do so now in the shadows, under cover of hacks that are sometimes strange and ultimately strained. Hacks are just half-conscious intuitions that let us not think about mechworld, so we shouldn’t expect them to form a coherent whole.
PPPH was a sort of emergency building material that was available and at hand, in the crisis of meaning created by the equations. Hobbes and Locke were visionary architects of PPPH, and in a sense they saved Christianity by giving it a place it could still safely run in their systems. In Locke’s case in his Private chamber, behind PPPH shielding—but “outrage finds a way”, and we end up with the unintended consequence of quasi-religious Panics.