On the impossibility of Newtonian ethics and justifications that cannot be: A Gazan case study
Not very long ago, I was coerced by my millennial impulses to jump into a brief but intense Facebook brawl. The arena was a branching comments section tethered to a post from Dr. Gad Saad, a vociferous right-wing psychologist and academic. The post of his that prompted my, on hindsight, admittedly uncouth reaction was this one:
“If Hamas had not butchered, raped, and kidnapped 1200+ innocent people on October 7, what percentage of the innocent Palestinians who died as a result of Israel’s retaliation would still be alive today?”
Before moving forward, let me be absolutely clear about some of my positions concerning this matter. I think Hamas is an abhorrent terrorist organization and consequently it should be dealt with as such, which is to say, it should be dismantled. I believe that after October 7, Israel’s leadership not only had the right to militarily go after Hamas, but had an obligation towards its citizenry to do so. However, I don’t believe that destroying or permanently incapacitating Hamas is a goal worth pursuing at any human and material cost whatsoever. And finally, I believe that as the conflict keeps running its course the magnitude of Israel’s reaction keeps growing well beyond what is morally tolerable. Naturally then, I see Mr. Saad’s attempt at justifying Israel’s retaliation as grotesque.
Allow me also to dispatch a potential and certainly disingenuous protestation, a retort to the effect of: “but Gad justified nothing, he was just posing a question!”. Alright, if you, in your heart of hearts, honestly believe that, then God bless your iron-clad commitment to textuality. There really is nothing outside the text for you, and I won’t spend time persuading you to embrace the interpretative conventions that most language users tacitly and effortlessly accept. One does not need to lock a squinting gaze onto the blank spaces between Mr. Gad’s lines to read the ‘hidden’ message in what ostensibly poses as a question. The message is a clear attempt to justify, one which might be rendered as follows:
Every innocent Palestinian killed by Israel’s retaliation died because of Hamas’ actions on October 7.
The implication being that all blame for their deaths should be placed on Hamas, and none of it on the IDF and their commanders.
Much of what I’ll say is an unapologetic argument to lay waste on the idea that Mr. Saad’s post is indeed an authentic justification. It is not, not even a bad one. It is my ancillary opinion that what he is trying to achieve by mistakenly thinking he has produced a justification is outrageously immoral. But my central purpose is not to substantiate that opinion, rather, it is to demonstrate that his exculpatory attempt is but a specimen of a large class of statements that parade as being justifications, but which are too congenitally flawed to perform as such.
Fake justifications
I’ll use the example of a blood feud to exhibit how, at an intuitive level, we tend to agree that it is absurd to pretend that statements like Mr. Saad’s have no exoneration power whatsoever. A blood feud — Google tells us — is a “long-standing conflict between families or groups, characterized by a cycle of retaliatory violence often triggered by perceived wrongs or insults”.
Alright, let’s imagine that my family, the Gonzalez and, say, the Marquez family, have been embroiled in a blood feud for at least a couple of generations. The specific event that originated the inter-familial hatred is irrelevant, what matters is that the hatred persists. Fast-forward to an alternative present in which a senior member of the Marquez family has just murdered my son; thinking that his action restores the evasive justice that my family’s unsettled chain of transgressions has denied to his family.
Now, imagine that, with the clear intention of justifying what has just happened, someone tells me “well, your kid would still be alive if your [insert Gonzalez’s ancestor] had not done [insert ugly deed] to [insert Marquez’s ancestor]”. Am I supposed to wager the exculpatory merits of what’s just been said to me as one would do while evaluating the validity of a justification? Sunken in bottomless grief as I would surely be, I would have to nevertheless concede that my late ancestor’s misdeed set off a causal chain of tits-for-tats that, as it stands, culminates with my dead kid. But am I to pretend that a statement that merely highlights such a causal connection, as factual as it might be, has the capacity to absolve Mr. Marquez from his guilt? Should it even lessen his moral burden? I very much don’t think so — and yet, that’s exactly what Mr. Saad assumes his post does, i.e. that guilt can be lessened or eliminated by signaling that there’s a deterministic causal connection joining a past morally transgressive event to a more recent one.
This pretend-play in which we act as if explanations, by virtue of establishing causal connections, suffice to solve moral conundrums is absurd, and as with everything stemming from a kernel of absurdity, this confusion is ripe for comedy. Recently I stumbled across a joke from comedian Bill Burr which capitalizes on precisely this absurdity. Burr says:
“It’s still socially acceptable to shoot a missile in the general direction of someone you’re upset with. Pheeeewwww! Plahhh! [sound of a missile flying and exploding]. You’re like ‘dude, there was like kids over there!’… This is my favorite response: ‘well, you know, they’re using kids as human shields!’, it’s like ‘well, you gotta work around that!’… Jesus Christ, if I’m mad at my neighbor and I want to beat the shit out of him but he’s holding a baby, right? I wouldn’t come in and punch him through the baby!”
That’s definitely dark, and definitely funny. The humour (which I am about to kill) lies in highlighting how ridiculously absurd, and evidently immoral, is to pretend that redemption can be gleaned from ethically barren causal determinism. And yet the comedy of this absurdity is entirely lost and replaced by righteous seriousness in the minds of many, like that of Bill Maher, himself a comedian, who, when confronted by news commentator Ana Kasparian with a figure of 83 % of IDF’s fatal victims being Palestinian civilians, replied in protest “because they [Hamas] hide behind them [civilians]!”. It is so tragically natural to mistake an explanatory “because” for an exculpatory one.
Overwhelming causality
If a snippet of cognitive processing deserves the title of “most crucial for human survival”, one could hardly do better than to nominate our instinctive mental capacity for linking causes to their effects. If our mental representations of the world rushed like a turbulent stream of phenomenal anarchy, like the great buzzing and blooming confusion William James talked about, then we wouldn’t have made it very far as a species. Without an intrinsic preference for defaulting to causal representations of the world over non-causal ones, our evolutionary fitness would be damningly close to null.
Is the causal structure of the world real though? Or is it just a convenient software adaptation to give some, if not most, animals the opportunity to thrive? To the dismay of the couple of Humeans (not a typo) who might be reading this, I unapologetically side with the view that rather than imposing a causal structure upon what is perceived, minds endeavor to mirror the inherent causal structure of what is there to be perceived. In fact, it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the success of science is due to a resolute rejection of the Humean stance on causality. The idea that physical laws are inextricably interwoven within the fabric of the universe — ‘nomological realism’, if you will — might be the most preeminent premise in the foundations of science.
Physicists, for the most part, are so confident about the objective existence of a network of interlocking causal links connecting all events in the universe, that only a few mavericks would disagree with Bertrand Russell’s assessment that “the aim of physics, consciously or unconsciously, has always been to discover what we may call the causal skeleton of the world”. The primacy of causality in physics translates, unvanquished, into the domain of human psychology. “It is essential […] to our survival in the world” — writes the philosopher John Searle — “that the representing capacity of the mind and the causal relations to the world should mess in some systematic way”. The expectation that certain effects must naturally proceed from appropriate causes is the single most determinant feature that a ‘representation engine’, natural or artificial, must have in order for its owner to thrive. It is such an overwhelming expectation that it creates noxious cognitive illusions, like the belief that establishing causation not only brings order to our apprehensions of the physical world, but of the moral world as well.
The causal nature of explanations and justifications
What would be an explanation if its phrasing didn’t make reference to a causal relation? Well, it would simply not be an explanation. At a basic level, the structure that underpins explanations goes like this: this-event-happened-because-that-event-happened. I’ll refer to this speech template as “causal grammar”. Furthermore, I’ll label as “consequence event” the first event referred to in the causal grammar (the “this”) and refer to the latter event (the “that”) as the “context event”. In an explanation, the work of the “because” nested within its causal grammar is to allude to a mediating mechanism between the context event and the consequence event; a mechanism that is ultimately vouchsafed by physical laws.
Now consider this question: isn’t it the case that explanations and justifications are both perfectly and routinely expressible in causal grammar? In fact, isn’t this structural identity to blame for plenty of frustration in this world? How many times have we all had to reassure an outraged conversation partner that we are not justifying something but merely explaining how that something came to pass? If we recognize that the phrasing of explanations and justifications can be rendered in pristine causal grammar, how do we differentiate between them, sometimes even without explicitly issuing disclaimers to reassure our audience that we have not turned to the dark side?
If the difference between explanations and justifications is not necessarily found in their grammatical structure, then it must lie in a non-structural factor. One possibility is that, since the utterer must know whether they are trying to justify or to explain, then, the differentiating factor could be found in the mind of the utterer. The speaker’s intentionality seems an obvious candidate. Readers familiar with the work of the philosopher H. Paul Grice are undoubtedly aware that I am entertaining the idea that his concept of ‘speaker’s meaning’ might solve the explanation-or-justification dilemma.
Shall we then consecrate the speaker’s intentionality as the sole arbiter that decides whether their statement is an explanation or a justification? I don’t think so. I believe that there’s at least one intrinsic, non-intentional and non-structural factor exclusive to justifications that explanations lack. Failure to acquiesce by this factor can ‘delude’ us into thinking that valid explanations can infallibly add up to valid justifications. We are strongly predisposed to mistakenly promote explanations to the level of justifications for at least two reasons, both of which have sturdy evolutionary roots. First, we have an overbearing impulse to moralize about the world and its contents, and second, our overriding predisposition to understand causality in a predominantly Newtonian fashion tends to interfere destructively with our ability to gauge ‘moral causation’ properly.
By a Newtonian understanding of causality, I mean the most mechanical and deterministic way to mentally represent how an event instigates another. It’s a default cognitive paradigm that confers feelings of inevitability and naturalness when, for example, we picture the last domino stone along a chain of equals falling moments after the first one has been toppled. Newtonian causality is the predominant form of causal reasoning imbued into the pivotal word “because” in every explanation, and as such, it’s the gold standard that gives currency to our explanations. It is inadequate, however, to fulfill the same pivotal role in moral reasoning, since when it comes to justifications, Newtonian causality, while necessary, is not sufficient.
‘Sontag’s criterion’ and the unconditional functionality of free will
Explaining something is doing either of two things: describing a tiny piece of the humongous causal skeleton of the universe as accurately as possible or making statements about why its joints hold together the way they do, namely, about the nature of physical laws. The latter kind of explanation validates the former. An explanation can nevertheless be valid and yet bad, or even useless. For instance, operating within a Newtonian paradigm, it would be valid to claim that the meteor that sealed the fate of the dinosaurs explains why Hamas committed the atrocities of October 7. Nothing I’ve said disallows such a pedantic statement from being a valid explanation. The meteor crashing against our planet 65 million years ago is simply an arbitrarily chosen ‘primal domino stone’; once tumbled over, a set of events culminating on October 7 was thunderously afoot. And yet this explanation is trash because it is spread too infinitesimally thin over a ridiculously humongous expanse of spacetime. For an explanation to be good, its context and consequence events must be sufficiently close to each other, so that by applying our world-knowledge we can infer the intermediate joints that unite them.
The writer and critic Susan Sontag expressed an idea that resonates with what I’ve just discussed about the desirable spatiotemporal proximity between the events featured in an explanation, but since she is talking about justifications, this desirability hardens into necessity. She wrote:
“[A] justification is an operation of the mind which can be performed only when we consider one part of the world in relation to another — not when we consider all there is”.
Let’s refer to this concise dictum as “Sontag’s criterion”. It might not be readily apparent, but Sontag’s criterion can only work provided that we unconditionally accept the idea that moral agents are endowed with a non-deterministic free will. One can embrace this idea happily or succumb to it begrudgingly, the only option that’s not available to us is to reject it, unless of course, one prefers to forfeit the ‘right’ to ever justify anything. Allow me to explain why, as authoritative as that claim sounds, I believe it to be unassailable.
If a justification must address what happens only within a circumscribed piece of the world, as opposed to dealing with everything there is, then we need a guideline telling us how to divide the world into spatiotemporal domains that function as self-contained mini-universes — as demarcated ‘moral jurisdictions’. If the basic substructure of the world is a causal skeleton made by a network of interlocking causal chains, then breaking the world into moral jurisdictions is equivalent to snipping its causal chains at pertinently selected joints, i.e. at events of a certain kind.
Here’s the crux of the issue: in a Newtonian universe all events are fully determined, which means that from a causality-based perspective, they’re all the same kind and therefore indistinguishable. There’s no basis for selecting out the events that demarcate the moral jurisdictions we need. This is an existential problem for justifiers. To obtain a guideline that ‘guarantees’ that the set of events we wish to justify has a moral dimension to it, we first need to subvert or suspend the Newtonian paradigm through which we apprehend the causal skeleton of the world, otherwise, no statement about any subset of its constituent events can count as a justification. We can do that by punctuating the streamlined deterministic contour of a causal chain with not-predetermined ‘causal discontinuities’ of the right type. The only type of events that can fit this requirement are what we call “decisions”, as long as we define a decision as a deliberation of freely-willed agents. A causal discontinuity introduced by a decision must be effectively thought of as the origin point of a mini-universe that is sufficiently morally independent from its parental causal timeline. Decision-born moral jurisdictions can be granted the required degree of moral independence from their past histories if we adopt a view of free will that acknowledges that moral agents could have decided to act otherwise if they so wished. Understood in this way, a decision becomes the antithesis of a deterministic event.
Summarizing bluntly: no anti-Newtonian free will, no freely deliberating moral agents, no decisions, no causal discontinuities in the universe’s causal skeleton, no breaking of the world into circumscribed sets of events to be considered moral jurisdictions (violation of Sontag’s criterion), no statements about them that can be justifications.
But is the will truly free? Much seems to be hinging upon giving an affirmative answer to this question, but that’s not the case. My view, shared by many, is that there’s no sound scientific or philosophical basis on which the notion of free will can stand. For us to be truly freely-willed, our agency would have to be the manifestation of a sovereign spirit that is either in control of us, or which is us. By “sovereign”, I mean that the workings of this entity must be unshackled from any physical law, deterministic, stochastic or anything in between. I simply don’t think there’s any reason to seriously believe such an entity exists, and conversely, there are many reasons to disregard it as fiction. And yet, overall, it is a fiction worth clinging to in a selective and responsible way. By which I mean that attaining a healthy apprehension of our own human condition depends on us being judicious about when to extricate ourselves from the illusion of the freedom of the will, and when to embrace it, or rather let ourselves be spellbound by it. Ethical reasoning is best done if our footing on either side of the free will divide is nimble; acquiescing to the illusion when guilt and blame must be assigned, and indeed, when actions are in need of justification, and breaking the spell when pondering upon what constitutes adequate punishment.
Explanations play along with Sontag’s criterion up to a point; they do so as a matter of convenience and of civility. Justifications, on the other hand, obey it by necessity, and in so doing, they violate our Newtonian understanding of physical law by bestowing an anti-deterministic, and therefore anti-Newtonian free will upon the moral agents whose actions we might deem in need of justification.
Searle, whom we encountered earlier, made a distinction between two modes of expression, the cognitive and the connative. The cognitive mode is that in which we “represent how things are”, while the connative is that in which we “represent how we want them to be, or how we are trying to make them become”. Evidently, explanations aim to be full-throated statements produced in the cognitive mode of discourse. Justifications, on the other hand, do not comfortably sit in one or the other, instead, they have traits that condemn them to exist in a grey area between both. Their form is that of factual propositions about how things truly are. However, their assured tone is at least partially a deimatic display, a wishful bluff. Their matter-of-fact form is not merely stylistic, it is quintessential to their purpose, which is to persuade their recipient that, really, this is truly how things really are! A justification, when it originates from a sincere conviction, is a wish that has convinced itself of being a fact because it is expressed in the grammatical form of one — a connative statement voiced as a cognitive one. Justifications are the ‘noble impostors’ of the world of discourse, covertly ushering a fairer world by declaring that it is already here.
A good justification belies a good explanation, which is to say that it is desirable that the addressed events be proximate in space and in time. Nevertheless, justifications hover above the explanatory plane because they do something that’s beyond the reach of the latter: they sanction causal relations, while explanations merely establish them.
Something that must be said
How, then, can someone utter a statement intended as a justification but fail to see that it is merely an explanation and therefore moot about moral matters? This raises a corollary issue of equal importance: how come that so many of the recipients of an explanation are, in a way, deceived into taking it for granted that it’s got something of moral import to say? To begin tying straggling loose ends, allow me to reprise the ‘translation’ into causal grammar of Dr. Saad’s post:
“Every innocent Palestinian killed by Israel’s retaliation is dead because of Hamas’ actions on October 7”
The statement makes reference to two moral agents: Hamas and whoever from the Israeli side who’s responsible for the deaths of Palestinians (I’ll lump the latter into the “IDF” banner for expedience). However, since Hamas’ atrocities comprise the fixed context event to which the IDF is reacting, only the moral agency of the latter is of relevance. Dr. Saad’s post doesn’t meet the requirements derived from Sontag’s criterion because its formulation establishes a rigidly determined causal connection, impervious to having its continuity disrupted by an act of will, by a decision. Voiced with absolute Newtonian certainty, the statement fails to suggest the basic recognition that could promote it from being an explanation into becoming a justification. As a justification, it’s not even wrong.
Now, you might think that Israel’s military shouldn’t have acted differently, or that for whatever nearly inscrutable reason, if we were to run a ‘felicific calculation’ that accounts for both, the ethical character of the decisions enacted by the Israeli government (broadly speaking) as well as their destructive consequences, we would nevertheless obtain a morally acceptable balance. As abhorrent as I’d find any moral math that would yield an approbation of the magnitude of the Israeli response, an analysis of the moral algebra in question would still remain entirely beside the point. My argument (in case it’s still unclear) is that we can’t proceed with having that discussion because the rendition into causal grammar of Mr. Saad’s post stifles that kind of analysis instead of facilitating it. What his post essentially does, is to allude to a well-known succession between two events, October 7th and the Palestinian demise, as mediated by the actions of the IDF. This latter entity features almost as an amoral ‘force of nature’ instead of being recognized as a conglomerate of freely deliberating moral agents.
Of course, adjudications of guilt, responsibility, ethical character, moral praise or opprobrium, are only intelligible under the premise that moral agents have at least some autonomy over their actions. Of course, a justification has to reflect in some way a recognition of this autonomy. Of course, the idea of free will must be taken as valid if one attempts to condone or condemn somebody else’s actions. If we agree to all of that, then it should be a disorienting thing that the few of Mr. Saad’s fans I sparred with tried to defend his faux-justification by, in so many words, recurring to the old refrain “actions have consequences!”. Yes, they do! I’d grant that until the skin of my fingertips peels off. That doesn’t mean that this cliché defense works. Its inadequacies can already be gleaned from the preceding discussion, but I’ll lay them out in the open for ease of consumption.
Taken out of context, saying that “actions have consequences” is merely stressing that causal links exist, the phrase in itself does nothing to morally sanction any specific one. Of course, I am not so obtuse as to fail to comprehend that in the context of trying to defend Mr. Saad’s post, what his accolades really meant to say was that “in reacting to Hamas’ actions, Israel has unleashed devastating but ultimately righteous/tolerable consequences upon the Palestinians”. The difference between what they said and what they meant to say is as obvious as is paramount: in what was said, “consequences” feature as final and inexorable outcomes of a determinate causal chain set in motion on October 7th. In contrast, in spelling out what was meant, the same “consequences” are explicitly acknowledged as instantiations of the wills of moral agents. Only in the phrasing of the interpretation there’s moral substance to argue about, since in it, the consequences in question are recognized as products of a sanctioned decision.
Sure, but everyone knows that in saying that “actions have consequences”, Mr. Saad’s defenders know that by “consequences” they are referring to the deaths of thousands of Palestinians. They also know that every Israeli that was instrumental in ushering them has agency. They know what they’re defending, and they know that we know it, and we know that they know that we know it… in an endless feedback loop of correct attribution of intentionality. It is crystal clear that an attempt to justify has been made, first by Mr. Saad and then buttressed by his defenders, and yet while explanations might have been advanced, no real justification has come forth. Why? In a technical sense, I’ve already explained why, multiple times, but I haven’t explained the reasons why the “why” I’ve already explained holds up.
I’ll lay out the ‘technical why’ one last time: a statement expressed in causal grammar, or which can be re-arranged into it without adulterating its meaning, can’t be a justification unless it expresses the consequence event as an instantiation of a decision made by freely-willed agents (this follows from Sontag’s criterion, as we’ve seen) and then proceeds to sanction it. But what does it matter that such recognitions are explicitly made if everyone knows that the utterer implicitly recognizes them? Well, it does matter — and here’s the deeper “why” that sustains the ‘technical why’ —, because the psychological experience of explicitly sanctioning the consequences of an action is very different from that of letting the sanctioning to remain implicit; inferable by everyone, but nevertheless unspoken.
As one voices or types a statement that explicitly condones, absolves, or underplays actions that in any other context one would find repellent or even unbearably horrifying, then one is taking a moral vow that at the moment of pronouncement is experienced as a commitment. Psychologically, this experience is significantly different in quality from that of stating something that leaves our moral stance merely implied, no matter how transparently, because by leaving it up for interpretation, however facile, one circumvents the act of publicly condoning an undesirable state of affairs in all its concrete ugliness and of openly expressing unequivocal sympathy for those who instantiated it. By avoiding to perform an act of explicit moral commitment that can find its way to the record, one has avoided what’s most vertigo-inducing and courageous about making a justification, which is to put one’s moral character on the frontline to fend for itself rather than sending an implicature decoy to lure the firepower of criticism.
I am aware I am setting a high bar for a statement to be unequivocally promoted to the status of justification, many a statement that were clearly intended as such do not clear it and are therefore relegated to live in the disingenuous limbo of duplicity, on the other hand, we gain the indisputable right to call out their evasive utterers for committing the sin of cowardice.
Now that’s a justification. Now it isn’t.
It’s easy to produce a statement rendered in spotless causal grammar that most of us, almost as a reflex, would interpret as a justification. Take this one:
President Trump accepted a 400-million-dollar plane from the Qatari government as a gift because the current Air Force One is 40 years old.
This statement is categorically different from Mr. Saad’s because the consequence event is presented as an instantiation of will, i.e. an acceptance which is a variation of a decision. It clears Sontag’s criterion by virtue of this acknowledgment; however, that’s insufficient to grant it the status of a justification since there’s nothing in it that can be interpreted as a sanctioning of the acceptance. Whoever were to utter such a statement — or of any equivalent variation of it, as Trump did — is not explicitly taking a moral stance while uttering it, and therefore is eschewing the psychological experience of grappling with the moral fallout of sanctioning the acceptance of the winged bribe… sorry, the gift. Be my guest and call that statement a “precursor to a justification”, or a “proto-justification”, or whatever else, that’s fine, just not a cut-and-dry justification.
Now, let’s take a look at this other statement:
President Trump accepted a 400-million-dollar plane from the Qatari government as a gift because it is stupid not to accept free stuff.
Now, that statement — a variation of which was also offered by Trump — constitutes a justification proper. The consequence event remains unchanged but this time it is sanctioned by a thoroughly moralistic argument, if we can call it that. It is not the case anymore that Mr. Trump ought to accept the Qatari flying mansion on utilitarian grounds, instead, he ought to take it because it is free of charge and it would be “stupid” to pass on it. A moral stance has been taken and sanctioned, one that can be spelled out as follows: only the wrong kind of person, a stupid one, would squander gifts, no matter how sumptuous and regardless of the jumble of strings attached to them.
Just for fun and staying on topic, let’s construct a statement about the same theme but which, just as the message conveyed in Mr. Saad’s post, is not even wrong as a justification:
The White House was gifted a 400-million-dollar plane from the Qatari government because the current Air Force One is 40 years old.
Here, there are two entities that could, in principle, pass as proxies for a collection of moral agents: “the White House” and the “Qatari government”. However, the role of both is thoroughly passive. The Qataris (just as Hamas in Dr. Saad’s post) are an accessory, however central, in fixing the context event. What they’ve done by offering tribute, is not the action in need of adjudication here. That assignment should fall on the consequence event, which is the acceptance of the gift on the part of the White House. Nevertheless, we quickly find that the adjudication can’t really be done, since the White House features merely as a passive receptacle of the good graces of the Qataris, it doesn’t decide to accept anything, instead, something is bestowed upon it. The White House is not presented as a moral agent vested with a will it can exercise. This statement is an explanation, never could it ever be a justification, regardless of how vehemently our imaginary utterer intends it to be.
The contradiction that wasn’t
Some perceptive readers might have the impression my argument has taken a wrong turn, thus becoming somewhat caustic against the framework that was supposed to sustain it. I understand where the impression comes from— I myself was startled by it during the drafting process and felt alarmed— but, to my relief, it is ultimately unwarranted.
Earlier, I wrote: “isn’t it the case that explanations and justifications are both perfectly and routinely expressible in causal grammar?”. The question strongly suggests an affirmative answer, thus, I surmised that the difference between explanations and justifications must be non-structural. Later, we saw that statements expressed in causal grammar can easily scurry away from doing what true justifications can’t afford to shirk, which is to explicitly commit the utterer to a moral stance so that they are forced to grapple, tame, and ultimately own the psychological implications of absolving an agent from perpetrating actions that would be otherwise condemnable. A rushed extrapolation from these two propositions urges us to conclude that in order to produce a justification proper, one needs to expressly append a verbal clause to an otherwise pristine statement of causal grammar; an additional declaration that amounts to an explicit act of sanctioning. But this conclusion is false, because we know that as a matter of fact it is not just possible, but overwhelmingly commonplace to find justifications whose verbal contents fit immaculately within the this-because-of-that template without a single letter spilling out of it. Ergo, it seems I’ve led us all into a contradiction, but don’t panic, because there isn’t one.
We can keep attributing the distinction between explanations and justifications to a non-structural factor that’s intrinsic to the latter but not to the former, without therefore conceding that the transmutation of an explanation into a justification must be consummated by grafting a declaration of sanction to its causal grammar. Instead, the necessarily explicit sanctioning can be intra-structurally accommodated, thus leaving the structural anatomy of the statement unaltered while radically changing its content by selecting terms that modify its meaning. These are the kind of terms which, in isolation, evoke the categories of “good” and “bad”, and which in conjunction, have the effect of transforming the otherwise declarative character of a this-because-of-that type of statement into the character of a judgment that’s being endorsed by the utterer. Naturally, moral stances can be openly and unequivocally assumed without having to utter the polar binary words “good” or “bad”; there’s a myriad other terms that can act as perfectly intelligible proxies for both of those archetypal moralistic words, just like the term “stupid” in the justification we constructed above. Regardless of how exactly the terms responsible for giving a justification its sanctioning character are distributed within its structure, they leave no smudges in its causal blueprint. All they do is build a semantics that can speak to our inner moral arbiter and not only to the part of our minds that only understands the language of the “cognitive mode”.
The duck-rabbit character of the explanation-justification illusion
I’ve tried to show the reasons why every so often we perceive some statements as simultaneously being explanations and justifications, missing the crucial fact that these are distinct and non-fungible elements of discourse. When we recognize that a statement laying out a causal connection between a context event and its consequence has been offered with the intention to justify, we should have the sensibility to identify it for what it truly is and then engage in the cognitive paradigm that can adequately evaluate its aptness. If it’s merely an explanation, then its quality should be gauged from within a Newtonian paradigm: is the proposed causal relation compliant with physical law? If yes, the explanation is valid. Are the causally connected events proximate enough so as to give the impression that one mechanically determines the other? If yes, the explanation is good. However, affirmative answers to both questions do not promote the statement to the status of a justification; that evaluation must be made according to the strictures of an entirely different, and in fact, antithetical cognitive paradigm, an anti-Newtonian paradigm that grants the power to disrupt the deterministic continuity of the Newtonian paradigm to the decisive actions of free wills. A proper justification does two things: it presents this world as one among a multitude of possible worlds, any of which could have been if the agents mediating between circumstances and consequences had willed for things to unfold differently, and it explicitly sanctions the decisions these agents made to make this world what it is.
The famous duck-rabbit illusion serves to illustrate what, I think, is at the core of the explanation-justification confusion. When we contemplate a drawing of a duck-rabbit, our perception of it restlessly and fleetingly shifts back and forth between seeing it as a duck or seeing it as a rabbit. Our consciousness effortlessly apprehends the illustration as depicting either a duck or a rabbit, but it just can’t perceive it as a new type of yet-unknown creature or, even less, hold it as a transitional form between both animals. Our minds possess (or have quick access to) duck-schemes and rabbit-schemes, but no duck-rabbit-schemes.
Alright. Now imagine, if you dare, that our anatomy was much closer to that of a duck than to that of a rabbit. Maybe the dinosaurs never went extinct so that we can trace our ancestral line back to the duck-billed Parasaurolophus. By dint of having an avian facial structure, our pattern recognition machinery might be keener on recognizing representations of specimens from our closer bird-kin than of members from the more evolutionary distant mammalian class. When presented with the duck-rabbit drawing, a mind geared like that is presumably biased to see the illustration more persistently as a duck and more fleetingly as a rabbit. Interpreting the drawing as a rabbit would not be in any way disconcerting to such a mind, since it possesses (or has quick access to) rabbit-schemata that make rabbit apprehensions feel entirely familiar; it is just that such a mind is more incentivized to give precedence to duck apprehensions because having this bias conferred greater evolutionary fitness to our lineage.
A statement with the this-happened-because-of-that-happened form is a little bit like a duck-rabbit drawing, because our minds, like those of the bizarre hypothetical duck-humanoids I posited, are biased to prioritize one of its possible apprehensions over the other. We give precedence to its interpretation as a justification over its alternative as a morally neutered explanation, notwithstanding the fact both of these apprehensions feel perfectly familiar because we possess (or have quick access to) cognitive schemata within which both of them make perfect sense: an anti-Newtonian scheme governed by antideterministic free wills into which justifications effortlessly fit, and a Newtonian scheme governed by deterministic causality into which explanations nicely fit.
The analogy breaks down, however, in at least two crucial points. First, although we are incapable of catching our consciousness in the act of swapping from a state of rabbit-awareness to one of duck-awareness or vice versa, we always know of which of the two representations we are aware of at any given time, whereas when we appraise a statement of causal grammar we do not necessarily recognize that a shift in our apprehension of it has occurred, rather, an awareness of it as a justification dominates, but not entirely subsumes, our perception of it as an explanation. The second and most crucial departure from the analogy, is that both apprehensions of a duck-rabbit illustration are equally legitimate, none of them is an illusion insofar as it is impossible to claim that perceiving the drawing either as a rabbit or as a duck is wrong. Not so with causal grammar statements. This whole piece has been almost entirely devoted to identifying and fleshing out the reasons why, in plenty of cases, it is possible and indeed correct to discard as illusory the apprehension of a causal grammar statement as it being a justification. Orderly structure and the palpable intentionality of a speaker might put up a decent simulacrum of an absolution, but if upon closer inspection we find that it contains no recognition of the liberty of the will, nor an open commitment to a moral stance, then we should immediately denounce it as, at best, a mere mirage of a justification.