Ways to Shut Your Brain Off

How people blind themselves to good arguments

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

—George Orwell.

Many good arguments are simple and straightforward. For example, the argument for veganism depends on the obvious premise that you shouldn’t hurt others a lot to benefit yourself a little—and yet, given that nearly all animals are horribly tortured in factory farms, this is what you do when you consume animal products in the standard way. Oftentimes, however, people have a way of shutting their brain off, so that they are unpersuadable even with very straightforward arguments. I thought I’d discuss some of these ways.

Obviously I won’t provide an exhaustive list. There are many different ways not to appreciate straightforward arguments (e.g. you might stop paying attention to the argument and start thinking about what you’re going to have for lunch). What the methods of brain anesthetization that I’ll discuss have in common is primarily that they allow, in response to a straightforward argument, one to begin thinking of other things instead of the argument. Often these other things are related, but are different in crucial respects from the original argument. It is hard to be convinced by an argument if, rather than thinking about the argument, you instead think about other things.

1 Assuming a broader ideology

Here is one common way that people shut off their brains. They hear some premise in an argument. That premise reminds them of some other broader ideology that they reject. Then they start talking about the broader ideology instead of the premise.

Michael Huemer is not a utilitarian. You can tell because he writes posts with titles like Why I Am Not a Utilitarian. However, Huemer sometimes makes arguments that contain some words that utilitarians use sometimes. When arguing against meat consumption, he appeals to the premise that it’s wrong to cause others a lot of pain and suffering for the sake of comparatively minor benefits to oneself.

This claim, you’ll note, is not utilitarianism. Utilitarianism says that one ought always and everywhere to take the action that maximizes total utility. That is different from the claim that you shouldn’t hurt others a lot for small personal benefit. And yet for some reason, Huemer’s critics love to accuse him of assuming utilitarianism.

Walter Block, when responding to Huemer, goes on at length about why utilitarianism is false, even though that is not a premise needed in Huemer’s arguments—and it’s not even one he accepts. Aeon Skoble accuses Huemer of presenting “a utilitarian argument of the pre-Millian, Benthamite sort: pains and pleasures do not differ in any qualitative way but are substantively the same and only need to be added up.” As Huemer put it:

Here is an analogy. Suppose you see a libertarian philosopher burning a baby with a cigarette lighter. You tell the libertarian that he should stop doing that, because he is hurting the baby. Now imagine this libertarian replies: “Aha, you appealed to the badness of pain; therefore, you are assuming utilitarianism! Furthermore, since the baby’s pain is purely sensory, you must be assuming a pre-Millian utilitarianism, wherein all pleasure and pain is of the same kind. But I reject utilitarianism; therefore, I am free to go on burning the baby!” My point here is not that animals are exactly like babies. My point is that you don’t have to be a utilitarian to be against inflicting great suffering for trivial reasons.

Here is what I suspect happens: when debating ideas we disagree with, we often start out trying to prove them wrong. This leaves us to latch on to whichever idea we have a rebuttal to that is in the nearest vicinity of the thing that our interlocutor is saying. So if our interlocutor has a premise that vaguely reminds us of utilitarianism, even if it does not assume utilitarianism, this might induce us to stop thinking about his argument and start thinking about utilitarianism.

But this is an error. To see if an argument is right, you have to think about the argument. You can’t just think about some other idea that repeats some of the same words as the argument. The claims “you shouldn’t throw baseballs,” and “you shouldn’t throw babies,” contain mostly the same words—even many of the letters overlap—but aren’t equally plausible.

Alternatively, people often treat simple and straightforward arguments as proxies in some broader ideological battle. If you appeal to a moral premise for a conclusion that people reject, they will often accuse you of assuming moral realism. But you don’t have to be a moral realist to make moral arguments. Nobody thinks that, say, arguing about abortion requires that one be a moral realist. It’s only when people make moral arguments for positions outside the societal Overton window that they’re accused of making contentious meta-ethical claims.

Or alternatively, if you make an argument about how your theory renders some fact more likely, you’ll be accused of assuming Bayesian ideology. This is bad reasoning. While Bayesian language might be the most precise way to operationalize standard claims of differential improbability, other theories are perfectly happy admitting the evidential force of facts that are likelier given one theory than another. It would not be reasonable for a young earth creationist to object to the claim that old earth better predicts convergent fossil dating by rejecting Bayesianism!

2 Thinking only about what your theory says

Suppose you are given an objection to your theory. One way to shut your brain off and not fully absorb it is to think only about what your theory says, rather than about whether the objection is substantively plausible.

Let’s say you are an average utilitarian, meaning you think the best action to take is the one that maximizes how well off people are on average. You learn that your theory implies that it would be good to proliferate miserable people in hell provided that they were marginally less miserable than the existing people. This seems like quite a forceful objection. It should cause you to abandon your view.

But here is one thing that you might think: “well, if I’m an average utilitarian, what I care about is average utility. Proliferating miserable people in hell raises the average, so by the lights of my theory, it’s good, rather than bad.” Instead of thinking about what is plausible, you start thinking about what your theory says.

Notice that this is a fully general response to any argument against any position. For something to be an argument against a position, it has to be inconsistent with (or at least lower the odds of) the position. If you treat your theory as the ultimate arbiter of what is true, outside argument can never get you to stop believing your theory.

Meat eaters also often employ this strategy. They will start with a dogmatic insistence that meat-eating must be okay. Then they will come up with some totally ad hoc theory about why animals’ interests matter infinitesimally compared to human interests.

The famed Caplan graph.

Then, each time you give them a counterexample, they will simply think about what their new theory says about it. For example, they might claim that the badness of your pain depends on how smart other members of your species are. Mentally disabled people and babies matter, but animals don’t, because babies and the mentally disabled belong to a smart species. Then, you point out that:

1. It doesn’t seem like how bad your pain is depends on facts about other people.

2. This view implies that if we learned that mentally disabled people and babies weren’t the same species as the rest of us, it wouldn’t be a big deal if they were tortured.

3. It’s not at all clear why this makes any difference to the badness of your pain. The badness of a headache seems to depend on how it feels, not all this other stuff.

In response, meat eaters often just dig in their heels and don’t really think through any of these counterexamples. Instead, they treat their theory as a self-evident truth and automatically reject any counterexample. Functional decision theorists do this a lot too. When you show that their theory licenses exploding yourself for no benefit, they just keep thinking about why their theory gives the recommendation—noting that it timelessly gets you more expected utility—without thinking if the judgment is substantively plausible.

Along these lines, people often just reiterate their theory in response to objections. When presented with an objection, they stop listening and start thinking about new ways to explain their view—as if you were too stupid to get it before. This is very common among non-philosophically-trained physicalists.

In response to the Mary’s room argument, they mostly just keep repeating their position without responding to the objection. They don’t explain which premise they reject, but instead act like you haven’t gotten their position and seek out new ways to explain it. People who think torture is worse than any number of dust specks are also fond of this technique—in response to the spectrum argument, they often just keep repeating their view that badness scales non-linearly with intensity of pain. You’ll notice that this is not a response to any premise in the argument.

3 Asking for definitions

Arguments are typically composed of words. Most words are a bit hard to precisely define. So one way to turn your brain off is to focus on the minutiae of the words used rather than the argument, even when the finer points of the definition don’t really matter for the core argument.

For example, Huemer’s argument for vegetarianism appeals to the premise: you shouldn’t cause others a lot of pain and suffering for small benefit to yourself. But what is suffering? This is an interesting question, but it’s irrelevant to the argument. Whatever suffering is, being castrated, locked in a cage, and forced to live in feces for months on end without being able to turn around definitely qualifies. When you castrate the pigs, they do not act like they’re having a nice time or having a satisfying workout. So if you start airily musing about how to define suffering, you are missing the point.

Similarly, you should not start quibbling over whether pain can be good if it’s enjoyed—e.g. the pain from working out is often thought to be enjoyable. Maybe this is right, but it doesn’t apply to castrating pigs without anesthetic. It’s irrelevant to the actual argument at hand.

You can ask for definitions if you’re genuinely unclear on how words that matter to the argument are being used. But you shouldn’t ask for definitions if the finer points of the definitions don’t matter to the argument. We use words all the time without having a precise definition of them. It’s fine to say things like “I know that the earth is round,” even if you haven’t nailed down the exact definition of knowledge.

4 Thinking about the effect of the argument being true

Suppose there’s some argument A. If A is true, it implies B. Imagine that B is logically downstream of A, so that B depends on A but A doesn’t depend on B. One way to shut off your brain is to think about B without thinking about A, feel skeptical about B, and then use that to reject A without thinking about A again.

For example, suppose that you are trying to decide whether insect welfare matters. You might think the following: “if insect welfare matters, then all sorts of ordinary human behavior might be really bad.” Intuitively, you feel skeptical of the claim that all sorts of ordinary human behavior might be really bad. So therefore you reject the claim that insect welfare matters.

Here, you have stopped thinking about the essential claim that if insects can hurt, their hurting matters for the same basic reason humans hurting matters. Instead, you have begun thinking about a surprising effect that would have. You feel skeptical of that surprising effect, so therefore you reject the claim that insect hurting is bad.

But this gets things the wrong way around. Your judgment about whether ordinary actions are bad depends on your judgment about the significance of insect pain. You shouldn’t start with the dogmatic assurance that ordinary action is fine, and then use that to tell you that insect pain doesn’t matter. Instead you should start by thinking about if insect pain matters and use that to decide if ordinary action is fine.

If your judgments about A should be derivative on your judgments about B, then you can’t use judgments about B to inform A. You don’t have direct access to whether ordinary actions are fine. Rather, your judgment about whether ordinary actions are fine should depend on whether they routinely lead to something bad.

If you could start with moral judgments about acts, and then use those to inform downstream judgments about acts, then you’d be able to deduce how the world is from moral claims. Suppose someone tells you that when you purchase certain products, you contribute to slave labor. Using this methodology, one could start with the assurance that buying the products is okay—and then from this learn that the products don’t use slave labor. Obviously this is wrong. You can’t get an is from an ought.

It is especially bad if you start thinking about how accepting some judgment would go against widespread societal attitudes. For most of history, the view that slavery is wrong ran counter to what most people thought. If you reject plausible moral premises when they imply that society is behaving badly, you will never be able to morally improve on the accepted practices of your society—and for most of history, you’d have tolerated conquering, genocide, and slavery.

5 Conclusion

Humans reason in a very motivated way. For this reason, if an argument is for a conclusion that we reject, our brain contrives clever little ways to avoid seeing its force. I’ve discussed some of these ways here. There are surely others.

How do you identify if you are shutting your brain off? I’m not sure if there’s any perfect universal method. But here is one thing that should tip you off. If you notice that, upon hearing some argument, you have stopped thinking about the argument itself and instead begun thinking about other related ideas, that is an alarming sign. The kind of shutting off your brain that I describe here just consists in not thinking about the argument in front of you. Good arguments do not come with tanks and artillery—they cannot grab you by the lapel. They cannot move you if you do not think about them.