By: Thomas Langan | Staff Writer
Imagine yourself standing in front of a clean table. Sitting on the table is a small bucket of dry sand. You take the bucket and pour it out onto the table. Setting aside the bucket, you examine your handiwork. Instead of a bucket, you have created a heap of sand.
If we can agree on that, consider the following. You remove a single grain from the heap and place it elsewhere on the table, away from the rest. Most people would agree that the existing heap remains a heap, while the separate grain does not constitute its own heap. You continue moving sand, grain by grain, from the heap to the other side of the table. Now you have a heap and a section of sand that cannot quite even be called a pile yet. The question is this: how many grains must you move over before the new pile is a heap, and how many grains must remain in the first heap before it is no longer one?
This seemingly mundane metaphor is actually a key visualization to help us understand what has happened to the social structure of our country as of recent years. The moral quandaries that divide people all come down to thresholds. How many immigrants can we willingly accept from our neighbor Mexico before it strains our economy? One seems reasonable. So does two. How about their whole population? How many cells qualify a developing fetus as a human being? How many misdeeds can someone commit before they are considered a “bad person”?
Whenever we look at a given example in our lives to make a moral judgment, we often find ourselves with the answer more quickly than seems appropriate. Our thresholds determine our immediate response, because we know what we don’t want to see, and what we are alright with seeing. We do not know where the line in the sand is between the two.
Consider another application of the heap problem (or to use its more academic name, Sorites Paradox), wherein we are looking at a color spectrum. The color blue has a clear section to it, and we can easily point to the middle of that section and say that it is blue. But then, as our finger strays closer to the green section, we begin to wonder where blue stops and where green begins. We can point to each section individually, but when forced to create a defined border between them, we are suddenly flummoxed.
An article by Dominic Hyde and Diana Raffman in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes the Epistemic approach to the problem, which would state that “the borderline or “penumbral” region of a sorites series for ‘blue’, where the boundary lives, some shade of blue is only incrementally different from, indeed may look the same as, a shade that is not blue; and we cannot know where this difference lies. Consequently, if we classify the former shade as blue, that classification is correct by luck, and so does not constitute knowledge” (plato.stanford.edu). In simpler language, the epistemic idea is that there is a true border between blue and green (or between “morally good” and “morally bad”), but we are incapable of seeing it.
To many, the epistemic approach is wholly unsatisfying, and for good reason. It purports the claim that the true boundary between morality and immorality is unfindable, and therefore foolish to look for. A more palatable approach comes from the semantic theories. This one, the Multiple-Range Theory, suggests that “Any adequate theory of vagueness must acknowledge the existence of permissible stopping places in a sorites series, since competent users of a vague term are required to stop applying it before the end” (plato.standford.edu). The Multi-Range Theory, in terms of the color analogy, says that there are several different places that one could stop in the vague section between blue and green, because eventually one would hit true green, and therefore no longer be pointing at blue.
So, what does this tell us about morality—and, as an extension—the state of political division in the United States today? Some will be satisfied with the epistemic approach, coming to terms with the fact that there are simply dilemmas too muddy to have a true answer. Others will prefer the Multiple-Range Theory, responding that there could be more than one acceptable answer to a given problem, though “a range contains only a permissible stopping place, whereas a precisification contains a sharp boundary”, and therefore all of these permissible stopping places will have their own flaws. There are, of course, many more ways of looking at Sorites Paradox, but those two seem (from personal observation) to be the most prevalent ideas in the society we see around us.
Now that we have at least a rudimentary idea of the root problem with the political debates we see on a daily basis, let us look into the practical side of this fairly abstract philosophical concept.
When we have debates in our personal lives about major political (and usually moral, in addition) issues, we tend to use language that suggests ‘Here is my view, and here is a piece of evidence that supports it’. On the surface, this seems like an excellent use of reasoning, taking a fact and using it to uphold one’s own view. However, just as often our argumentative opponent will use the same strategy; ‘My point is more valid because of this piece of evidence’. What we are seeing here is a triggering of Sorites Paradox. Effectively, one person is saying ‘This particular point is green. I know because it resembles this continuum of points leading back to the definitively green section’ and the other person is replying ‘But can’t you see? That point is blue, because it is part of a continuum that leads back to the definitively blue section!’. Such debates are tiresome, and rarely lead to a changing of minds for anyone, regardless of how impressive one’s logic might be.
How, then, can we apply what we know about Sorites Paradox to avoid these deadlocked arguments? We can argue using the theories we know answer the paradox. Either of the theories already discussed could be acceptable, but neither is particularly satisfying for most people, and neither constitutes a definitive answer. It is our responsibility, therefore, to embrace the vagueness inherent in the moral issues we face today. If there were one golden response to these questions, thousands of people would not be arguing over them every day online. It would also be worth doing your own research to see if there is another answer to the paradox that you find more satisfying. It might help ease some of the anxiety you might feel over issues you are more on-the-fence about. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article is linked here for your convenience.
To be quite clear, this is a gross oversimplification of the problems in the sociopolitical health of the United States. The goal here is not to cram every problem we deal with under one umbrella, but instead to illustrate how we can better approach some of the common and continually pointless debates we encounter on an increasingly regular basis.
If there is one thing you might want to take away from this read, it is that Sorites Paradox teaches us that it is okay to feel conflicted. It is permissible to be unsure. Allow yourself to see the spectrum, then pile your sand where you may.
Cover photo by Mike Walter on Unsplash
