The instrumenal and the intrinsic

how liberals, conservatives and torturers get it wrong

I've been harping on about this difference between conceptual and empirical questions for a while now, and have recently been stumbling on a related point of analysis regarding the intrinsic and the instrumental.

When posing hypotheticals, asking questions, or doing whatever philosophy in general, it's important to separate out intrinsic reasoning and instrumental reasoning. This is indeed similar to the conceptual and empiric analysis, in so far as methodology (you debate logic on one side, and you debate facts on the other) is concerned, and that it also provides for some clearing up of the conceptual brush that tends to infest and bog down so many debates.

To illustrate with a first case: torture. Now, you can be intrinsically in support of torture, in that you are a welfare or utility or hedonic or whatever maximiser and believe that using torture to obtain information that increases those good things and decreases bad things are (whatever they may be).

However, you can also be against torture instrumentally, in that torture has been shown repeatedly to be a relatively ineffectual method of actually obtaining high-value, actionable and verifiable information. (there's something to be said about related ill-effects, like the fact that you're reducing someone's utility by torturing them, the side-effects of radicalisation, the consistently poor approach of excessive and inappropriate torture, etc etc) There's nothing inconsistent or incoherent about these positions; it's perfectly reasonable to do so.

Now, what that case illustrates is that it's not we're against torture per se; we're against actions or objects that reduce our overall utility, and for actions that do the opposite. A couple of other cases I can think of is the love of 'tradition' within many conservative ideologies, and the love of 'diversity' among liberal ones. A third case is of 'democracy', which is beloved by pretty much all political stripes.

Many conservatives value 'tradition' (by which I mean something like continuity in cultural customs, practices and social attitudes) as somehow being sacred and valuable in its own right. But that doesn't make any sense; after all, racism and slavery have both had long and storied histories. What we value in 'tradition' is that there are certain cultural customs, practices, and social attitudes that are useful in certain ways (mostly because we think they increase utility or whatever) and we want to preserve those, and discard the ones that are damaging. This love of 'the way things were', regardless of what those actual things were, is missing the point: the distinction is that 'tradition' is primarily instrumentally useful, and not intrinsically so.

In a similar parallel, many liberals think to value 'diversity' (meaning something like political participants who have identifiable in backgrounds and lifestyles) in a comparable manner, as though it is a aim to be achieved for in its own right. It is not; it just so happens that instrumentally, 'diversity' serves us enormously well, in that you achieve more equitable outcomes, less fractious and more harmonious societies, greater welfare, and so on.

I'll go on with one more case, just to drive the point home: democracy. Everyone seems to love democracy, and I find increasingly that people have no idea or are just plain wrong on why they love democracy. Remember: "Democracy is the worst kind of government, except for the all other ones we've tried." Our belief and support of democracy come from instrumental means, not intrinsic ones; this means that democracies can, and often do, make decisions that are stupid or wrong-headed or insane (At the risk of Godwinning myself, Hitler was elected by a democracy). It's just that, in so far as we know, democracy is the least worst option of government - there may be a time in the future when we find a better one.

So, all these cases are making a point: whenever you do philosophy, figure out what your instrumental goals are, and what your intrinsic goals are, and adjust accordingly.

P.S. There's way more to be said about these 'intrinsic' goods/goals are, but that's much more a 'turtles all the way down' sort of proposition. For the record, I think i'm some kind of welfarist. More on this at some point, maybe.

P.P.S. I'm not going to post links or argue over the empirical points i've raised here; i'm too tired to do so, and I might do it later. For now, if you don't believe these points already, treat them entirely as hypotheticals - the general argument still makes sense.