Boundaries of Moral Policies
by Joseph Rowlands

Objectivists often think of moral principles as a kind of policy telling you how to behave. I think this is problematic. One of the biggest issues is how these moral policies deal with scenarios where they aren't in your rational self-interest.

The most irrational treatment of the policies simply claims that you must act according to the rules no matter what. We can call this the intrinsicist view. So if you thought the principle of honesty requires you to always tell the truth, you would treat it as an absolute requirement in all cases. Objectivists recognize that there are appropriate times to lie, such as when a murderer is at your door asking where to find your family. So how does this treatment of policies work in this case?

Since it is recognized that in some cases it actually is in your interest to lie, these intrinsicists narrow the meaning of the moral principles. They require that the policy always be rational to follow, regardless of context. So they may change the principle of honesty to only describe your own recognition of the truth. It would be a kind of internal, intellectual honesty. You might run around lying to everyone, but you would never lie to yourself. Honesty would be an internal commitment to the truth.

Similar approaches work for other virtues. Independence becomes a kind of mental independence, divorced from action. It would mean drawing your own conclusions instead of deferring to others. You may be financially dependent on others, or dependent in many other ways, but in your own mind you'll retain a strict level of independence.

Integrity can also be interpreted as an mental virtue. Sure you might act in a way that is opposed to your best judgment, but you will never allow emotions or social pressures or anything else override your judgment about what is right or wrong. Justice would be internal, and would focus on identification, but not action. Pride also would focus on internal factors.

In short, in order to make these policies immune to context, the intrinsicist will create a mind-body dichotomy, and take the side of the mind. The mind, divorced from body, is divorced form consequences. It can promote a 'pure' form of morality that need never be concerned about cases that might be against your self-interest. But this leaves the morality severed from action, and that means it is severed from life. It may be a morality that is compatible with living your life, but it is not a morality where living your life is the goal.

There is a different approach that is often taken to deal with the problem of broken policies. Instead of trying to change the definition of the policies to gut them of any potential problems, the second approach tries to define their appropriate contexts. And in practice, this means they specify contexts in which the policies are said not to apply. We'll call this the boundaries approach, as they try to place boundaries around the principle/policy.

The honesty and murderer at the door example provides a reasonable starting place. For this boundaries approach, the scope of honesty is not gutted. They aren't defining it away to be purely a mental action. They are including physical actions. So in this view, honesty as a policy means always telling the truth. In fact, honesty is more than simply telling the truth. It excludes any faking of reality. But telling the truth is part of the policy.

So how does the boundary approach deal with this murderer problem? If the policy says to tell the truth, how do they get out of it in this situation? They do it saying that when force is being initiated against you, the context is qualitatively different. The policy/principle of honesty no longer applies. So the use of force is one of the boundaries of the policy, and when force is being used, the policy no longer applies. Rand mentioned something about morality ending at the point of a gun.

That sounds plausible. But are there other contexts in which you don't have to be honest? Certainly. Emergency situations are another context in which the policy doesn't apply. There may be many reasons why lying may be necessary in a disaster. Maybe you have to lie about help being on the way in order to keep people from panicking. Maybe you have to lie about how much food is left, or where the food is stored, or whether you ate the food. Emergency situations are not typical, and lives are at stake, so it is another context where honesty may not apply.

So we have force and emergency situations. Those make sense as exceptions, because lives could be on the line. But what about keeping secrets. What if you're building a product for your business, and you can't let other people know what it is or they might copy it. Even if you say that secrets aren't a kind of lie, you may have to lie in order to keep a secret. So is that okay? Yes it is. The new get-out-of-jail-free card says that dishonesty can be used to protect your values when someone else is trying to take them illegitimately. In this case, force isn't being used, but they have no right to have that knowledge.

We're starting to strain a little. Force and emergencies make sense. But now you can be dishonest to protect your values? Isn't there really a distinction between protecting values and pursuing them? Perhaps.

But after three examples of boundaries, it's not really clear whether there are other exceptions or not. Maybe lying to protect other people is okay. Maybe lying in a poker game is okay. Maybe lying to spare someone's feeling is okay. Maybe it's okay to lie and say you got a gift on sale so they don't feel obligated to pay you back. If I said I have come up with 9 other contexts where the policy of honesty doesn't apply, would you say that was impossible? Or does that sound plausible?

There's something troubling about saying that a policy must be practiced blindly in all cases, and then anytime a case is shown to be against your interest, you state after the fact that it doesn't apply in this new category of cases. It's not just that its piecemeal. There's nothing wrong with saying that as we encounter new situations, we may identify facts that make honesty a bad policy in those contexts. That's perfectly fine. We learn, we grow.

The problem is that these moral policies are supposed to be taken as absolutes within the contexts in which they apply. The alleged strength of the policy is that it informs you of what action is in your interests. But if there are plenty of contexts in which it doesn't apply, this is no longer true. Now instead of using the principle/policy to determine what actions you should take, you have to first decide whether the policy makes sense in this situation. But that means you have to judge whether you should take the action in order to determine whether you should follow the policy that says to take the action. You aren't saving anything. You're adding arbitrary levels of confusion. If you need to determine what is in your self-interest before you can decide whether to follow the policy, the policy adds nothing except a distraction.

There are other problems with this boundaries approach. One is that an absolute policy (within a context!) can't handle degrees. If you had a policy of helping your friends, for instance, how far would you go? Would you help them when it is not sacrificial? Or would you sacrifice everything? Or how about a policy of pursuing material wealth? Do you ignore your love life in the pursuit of money? Do you take vacations or pursue other interests?

The problem here is that these kinds of policies only really work when they are demanding inaction of some kind. It's easy to not lie. It's much harder to tell the truth, because you have to answer how much truth should you spend time telling? Should I tell you everything I know? Everything I think you might want to learn? A policy can't give me that kind of guidance. But it can tell me not to lie.

And so, like the intrinsicist approach, the principle/policies inevitably get redefined in a narrower scope. They have to be defined in terms of negatives. Don't do this. Don't do that. Don't evade. Don't initiate force.   Don't lie. Instead of principles guiding you to pursue values, they act as restraints.

A similar narrowing of the scope occurs for things like independence. Honesty can be easily interpreted in the form of a negative. In fact, I think that isn't really right, and that there are positive elements to honesty, but it is usually viewed as strictly a negative. But what about a virtue like independence? Everything is a matter of degrees. How independent are you? How dependent? Significant dependencies are obviously a problem, but smaller ones might not be. The idea that you must never have any kind of dependency on another person, or group of people, is crazy. It would require complete self-sufficiency, including farming your own food, making your own tools, defending your own land, etc.

So again, the scope gets narrowed. In order to interpret independence as a policy, it must be restricted to something that can be practiced consistently in almost every context. And so like the intrinsicist approach, the boundaries approach limits it to independence of the mind or the like.

Now lets switch to the view of principles as a recognition of a causal relationship, instead of as policies. From this perspective, the other two approaches are horribly flawed. They are attempting to restrict the information provided by the principle in order to convert it into a blind policy.

Consider the intrinsicist approach. They restrict the 'principles' to mere mental components. They don't deal with the physical world, since it has cases where a policy might break. But by restricting them to the mind half of a mind-body dichotomy, they lose all of the insights and importance of the policies to real action. They lose the insights about why you shouldn't lie to people. They lose the insights about why you shouldn't be overly dependent on people. They lose the insights about why acting on your best judgment, with integrity, is beneficial to your life. All of this is lost. They leave a few gutted principles that they can claim demand absolute and context-free obedience.

It's not even clear if what's left of the principles means anything, since they have severed the connection between the principles and action. If principles identify cause and effect relationships, and they sever the connection between mind and action, what's really left of the principles?

The boundaries approach doesn't fare much better. The first big problem is that they try to define contexts in which the 'principles' apply. But the principles actually apply in every context. The problems with dishonesty are true in all of the contexts described, even those that were viewed as out of bounds. Emergency situations? They apply. Use of force? They apply. Protecting values? They apply. The principles, meaning causal relationships, still exist. If you act on a lie, if you accept the unreal as real, your actions will lead to failure. That's true in emergency situations, when force is used, or any other time.

The boundaries aren't real restrictions for the principles qua relationships. They are only attempts at limiting the context of the blind policies. They tell you that in this middle area, you must obey them blindly, while in these other areas, you shouldn't. But they can't say that you shouldn't be honest in those situations. They can only say that you shouldn't be blindly honest.

By trying to equate principles with these moral policies, they are stuck saying that the principles don't apply in these cases past the boundaries. But principles qua causal relationships do still apply, and they are blinded to this fact by not distinguishing policies from recognitions of causal relationships.

The attempt at creating a morality based on policies that are verified once and practiced blindly is fraught with problems. This is why principles should be understood as the recognition of causal relationships, and they should be used as a method of moral forecasting and not a substitute for moral judgment.

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