What You Don't Know

There has been an interesting debate going on at work over the merits of the Non-Aggression and Voluntarism Principles. Our resident Anarchist has been arguing that they're enough to base a workable and complete system of morality on, because everyone of sound mind and good will basically agrees on things like "what constitutes aggression" and whatnot.

He and I have been slipping into the same debate off and on for something about a year now, mainly because he is of the understanding that people have an innate moral sense, and that when taken together, this moral sense closely approximates an objective morality, and the disagreement is simply in the details and margins. I, on the other hand, being a moral anti-realist, believe that when left to their own devices, people come up with moral standards that are all over the map, and can easily be at cross purposes with one another.

When the Anarchist asked me for an example of how two people could have diametrically opposed understandings of what is permissible under the Non-Aggression Principle, I offered the following Alice and Bob scenario:

Alice: Abortion is a form of aggression against human beings who happen to not have been born yet.

Bob: Restrictions on abortion are a form of aggression against women who do not wish to be mothers, simply because they have become pregnant.

In this case, "aggression" is basically defined as violence, when employed for a reason other than preventing the violation of another's rights, which was accepted by the assembly. When he asked how I though that this conflict would play out in practice, I laid out scenarios under which Alice and Bob would come into conflict with other people, and each other, while each sincerely believing that they were acting in accordance with the Non-Aggression Principle, which allows violence for the protection of rights, either one's own, or someone else's. So Alice could use violence to prevent abortions, which she sees as aggression against the unborn, and Bob could use violence to prevent women being forced to carry to term, which he sees as aggression against the woman, and each would be within their sincere understanding of the principle.

And this is where the discussion took an unexpected, and illuminating, turn. The Anarchist replied:

Like I said, this is a grey area. Grey areas are dangerous, I admit that. But I do not believe anyone would be killing doctors who are about to perform an abortion.

He was, of course, immediately deluged with examples of just that happening. But that's beside the point. For me, the interesting piece of this is how the abortion debate in the United States, and the violence that has gone along with it, had somehow managed to get by a resident of the United States. Had he been living in a nation where the matter had been settled, because one side or the other simply dominated the public discourse, I could have understood it. I don't follow politics in, say, Italy. There could be the same sort of long-running social conflict there that I would have no idea about.

But his general premise of "everyone effectively has the same moral understanding" suddenly made a lot more sense. If he was literally unaware of a case like the abortion debate, in which, due to a fundamental difference in when a new "person" comes into existence, the opposing sides can come to blows which each honestly believing it is defending others against unwarranted aggression, it made sense that he had difficulty understanding something that's been clear to me for years: that people can see themselves as morally upright and virtuous regardless of their individual behavior, and how that maps to others.

It is, of course, a given that people can only incorporate information that they are aware of into their worldviews. But what I guess I hadn't realized before today was how variable that information awareness can be. It would never have occurred to me that a person could be unaware of the abortion debate in the United States if they had regular contact with other Americans. There is a case to be made that it was all an act, I suppose. I choose to be more charitable than that (especially in the face of his evident horror that this was actually a thing), but I accept that people may decide that he "must" have known.

In any event, it's a testament to the power of what one doesn't know. If information shapes worldview, then worldviews depend just as much on what someone is unaware of as it does on what they are intimately familiar with. And there's no way of knowing, in advance, what that might be.