Is fire hot inside the moral matrix ?

The "fire is hot" problem, you may recall, is my term for when someone needs to be convinced of something that is as obvious as is ever possible. If you're literally on fire, you ought to know that fire is hot - it's as self-evident as can be. Your sensory information is as direct and unfiltered as it's ever going to get. And yet some people - not necessarily in small numbers either - still need to be convinced of facts which are every bit as obvious as fire being hot.

There are plenty of good, careful guides to persuasion out there, but they all take it for granted that people will believe the evidence when it reaches a certain critical threshold. The fire-is-hot problem says that actually maybe they don't. They can remain ignorant or in denial even of the most obvious of facts and the strongest of evidence. How on Earth can they be convinced in such extreme cases ?

The example I gave originally was of Boris Johnson's election (this isn't going to be a protracted political rant, but I do need to state my position on the issue). Recently, for quite some time I was hoping that things might have changed - that the unprecedented national emergency and personal circumstances might have allowed his better qualities to shine forth and suppress his worst tendencies. I was hoping I'd have to write a retraction, or at least explain how the unforeseen situation had changed things for the better.

Alas, as events progress, it's becoming ever clearer that I was right in my first instincts, and that any correct actions taken by Johnson (instituting lockdown, changing course on unfair charges for foreign NHS staff, financially supporting workers - the latter something I would not at all have expected) are not part of any wider personal change. Witness the confused and confusing messages, denying they're confusing even though people have said, "we find this confusing". Witness the manipulation of data, removing charts comparing the UK with other countries the exact moment we reach the highest death toll in Europe. At witness the absurd defence of a nonsensical press conference in which advisor Dominic Cummings spouted a bunch of laughably absurd, truly ridiculous excuses for why he gets to ignore the rules.

But enough of the contemporary politics. What does all this have to do with a matrix ?

The idea behind this is that we all have different fundamental concerns : care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity. We each value these to different degrees, with, in general, liberals valuing care and fairness more highly, whereas conservatives prefer loyalty, authority, and purity. Our "moral matrix" is our world view, wherein those parameters define what we perceive as moral behaviour. Only by being aware of these parameters, say researchers, can we start to truly understand our own actions and beliefs as well as those of others. Neither of these major ideological positions, they say, is inherently immoral - something I do not dispute.

There's another possible point suggested in Frank Herbert's Dune. Herbert said, "respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality". This seems at least plausible. A person with no respect for the truth can do whatever they feel like, because they can - as the old saying goes - alter the facts to fit their views. With no respect for objective reality, all the other sliders on their moral equaliser become theirs to command : they can say without compunction, "I killed your wife as an act of care" or "I betrayed you because I was loyal to you".

There are of course many complexities, not least of which is the nature of objective truth - still more subjective moral truth ! Herbet himself added, "this is profound thinking if you understand how unstable 'the truth' can be". There's also the issue of whether this respect for truth would be another independent parameter or a multiplier for the others. But for now, seems safe to say that it is at least a key part of the moral matrix, even without saying exactly how it fits in.

How, then, does the fire-is-hot problem conflict with this complex moral matrix ?

Well, let's take healthcare. If we agree that it's important people have access to affordable healthcare, we can have an intelligent conversation. We may well disagree on how best to implement it - you might favour an insurance system, I might prefer single payer. But so long as our goal is the same, we can probably get along. Both of our stances can be said to be moral, and if one of us is proven incorrect, we may ascribe this to a mistake rather than malevolence.

If, however, you say instead that no-one deserves healthcare, that everyone should suffer horribly as much as possible, then we can't. I'll reject you not merely as disagreeing on policy, nor even on your moral stance, but as fundamentally, incontrovertibly evil. It is a fire-is-hot level of fact that your views are not based on a different moral system, but are innately immoral. The only sensible explanation is that you are actually being willfully malevolent.

Lies and a lack of respect for the truth are similar. Suppose I now say something very much stronger, that a single payer system is the only possible workable solution in any and all circumstances and anyone who disagrees is a corrupt tool of Big Pharma who should have flaming elephant dung forced up their backside. You, on the other hand, demonstrate with reasoned arguments and clear evidence that actually it's not as bad as all that, and that in some circumstances an insurance model can actually be the better option. If I insist on maintaining my self-righteous indignation, then I'm surely behaving immorally. Clinging to lies in the face of evidence is a malevolent, immoral act.

That's the problem for the moral matrix concept. It is absolutely correct to say that what we value defines what we think of as being moral, but there are some in-your-face, fire-is-hot level of behaviours that should be seen as immoral by any value system. Wanting to torture children isn't due to some "moral" obsession with safety. Telling lies to excuse your bad behaviour isn't the result of a "moral" respect for yourself. These things are simply wrong.

Now of course, this does not mean the matrix concept is without uses - far from it. I don't deny that a great deal of disagreements do arise as a result of different values between people who still appreciate the same end goals. And context, of course, is absolutely vital : both the pandemic and the financial crises were generally approached by highly socialist remedies - in the case of the former by highly illiberal, authoritarian social policies which would be thought horrendous in normal situations. So the moral matrix concept is certainly useful, but context can undeniably cause strange and highly complex effects.

But on the other hand, I cannot say that, for instance, valuing authority and not compassion is a legitimate moral viewpoint - that's how you get hilariously evil pantomime villains like Lord Shang. Whether we can decide if one of the major world views (liberal or conservative) is inherently more or less moral than the other is not the the point. The point is only that while people do have different value systems, and some combinations of sliders do lead to legitimate moral viewpoints, it does not follow that all such combinations produce valid moral positions. The point is how can we stand by and say, "he's only torturing kittens because his morality is different" or "he only told those lies because he values different things" ? Surely, not valuing truth and compassion are unavoidably immoral stances. If we have to choose between the fire and the matrix, surely sometimes we must choose the fire.