Blood is Thicker

Was Biden right to pardon his son? How much should we favor those we love?

This is a slightly revised version of a paid-only post I released about six months ago. I’m sending it out now, to all subscribers, because of Biden’s decision to pardon his son.

A while ago, I visited the Cornell Psychology Department to give a talk and was invited by a couple of friends to lead a graduate seminar that they co-taught. The conversation was wide-ranging and smart—Cornell Psych grad students are terrific—and we ended up talking about research ethics.

At one point, I asked the students to imagine discovering that one of their lab mates was running analyses that made their findings look stronger than they actually were. This is not as bad as making up data, but it violates good scientific practice.

“What would you do?” I asked.

Several students immediately said that they would confront the student and ask them to clear up their act.

“Makes sense,” I said. “But what if they just ignored you?”

The students answered that they would reluctantly tell the professor who leads the lab about what was happening. They’d turn the student in.

Playfully, to push them a bit, I asked: ”What if it was your friend? Would you still turn them in?”

Many students said yes.

That surprised me, so I ramped it up.

“What if it was your best friend? Actually, what if it was your wife or your husband? Would you still blow the whistle?”

The same students said yes.

“Really? You’d turn in the love of your life? Are you serious?”

They were. They stared at me, puzzled—like I was the weird one.

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Maybe I am the weird one. Sure, under some extreme circumstances, I could imagine ratting on someone I loved. I respect David Kaczynski, who read the Unabomber’s manifesto, recognized his brother’s writing, and contacted the FBI. If I discovered that someone I loved was a murderer who planned to kill again, I wouldn’t stay quiet out of loyalty.

But I’d keep my mouth shut for lesser crimes. I want to be the kind of person who would stand by the people he loved even if they were wrong, the kind of person who would help them even if it involved bending or breaking the rules.

I thought about this issue when reading about a choice that President Biden has to make. As you’ve probably heard, his son, Hunter Biden, has been convicted of violating gun laws. Hunter lied when he filled out a form to buy a gun, attesting that he wasn’t using drugs even though, according to many witnesses and his own memoir, he was. (Hunter almost certainly wouldn’t have been charged if he wasn’t the president’s son, but that’s a separate issue.)

Suppose Hunter is sentenced to prison time. Biden has said that he will not pardon his son, though he has the power to do so.

But what if Biden changes his mind? How would that affect your opinion of him? I asked this question in a Twitter poll.

For every person who said they would view Biden more positively, about 15 others said they would view him more negatively. I’ve conducted many Twitter polls, and I’ve never seen such lopsided results.

My own response is, “I don’t know.” I would think less of Biden for using this extraordinary power in a biased and self-serving way. But I would think more of him because he is willing to do so for the benefit of his son. Bad president; good father.

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Is it moral to value loyalty? I told my wife and colleague, Christina Starmans, about my struggles with this issue, and she pointed out that I wrote a book, Against Empathy, that made the case for the importance of impartial morality. Empathy's big problem, I argued, is that it’s too biased; it plays favorites. And, in Just Babies, written several years earlier, I summarized and endorsed Peter Singer’s position on the value of impartiality.

Peter Singer points out that explicit statements of impartiality show up in every religion and every moral philosophy. They are expressed in the various forms of the Golden Rule, as in Christ’s command “As you would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise” or Rabbi Hillel’s statement, “What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary thereof.” When Confucius was asked for a single word that summed up morality, he responded, “Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.” Immanuel Kant proposed as the core of morality: “Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” Adam Smith appealed to the judgment of an impartial spectator as the test of a moral judgment, and Jeremy Bentham argued that, in the moral realm, “each counts for one and none for more than one.” John Rawls suggested that when ruminating about a fair and just society, we should imagine that we are behind a veil of ignorance, not knowing which individual we will end up as, and Henry Sidgwick wrote that “the good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view of the Universe, than the good of any other.”

Does a focus on loyalty clash with valuing impartiality? At first glance, it does. You’re favoring one person over the rest for personal reasons; you are being partial.

But it’s not as simple as that. Yes, if I were to argue

everyone should value my children more than everybody else

that isn’t a moral principle in any sense, and there’s no way to justify it.

But this is not what it is to value loyalty. The moral view I’m exploring here is that the right thing for me to do is favor my children, the right thing for Biden to do is favor his children, the right thing for you is to favor your children, and so on. That is:

everyone should value their own children more than they value everybody else

You might disagree with this, but it is a rule that applies to everyone, and so, in an important sense, it’s impartial. It’s an injunction to play favorites, but it’s an impartial injunction to play favorites.

Or consider the Golden Rule: “As you would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.” A loyalty-based morality doesn’t necessarily clash with this. I think it’s right for me to favor my children over you—but, consistent with Jesus’ injunction, I also think it’s right for you to favor your children over me. There’s nothing necessarily hypocritical about valuing loyalty.

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Some are more hardcore than I am about the weight we should give to family ties. In his book Against Fairness, the philosopher Stephen Asma writes the following:

I like Asma’s book. (Here is a video of us talking about it.) But I don’t share his intuitions.

Do you? Suppose you have a 4-year-old who was born with damage to her heart and who will soon die. A mobster friend of yours says that for a large sum of money—you are very rich in this thought experiment—he will have his henchmen kidnap a child of the same age, kill the child, and then have a team of trained surgeons remove her heart and give it to your daughter. Your daughter will be perfectly healthy, and nobody will ever discover what you’ve done.

For me, it’s a hard no.

(I am curious if others have different intuitions here—reply in the comments.)

I think, though, that most people would agree with Asma if you tone down his examples quite a bit. Some preference to save those you love over others seems right. Peter Singer tells a story about William Godwin, a committed utilitarian (and the father of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein). Godwin once asked his readers to imagine that we could rescue only one person from a fire—an illustrious archbishop whose work brings pleasure and insight to thousands … or the archbishop’s valet, who happens to be our father. Godwin concluded that the right answer was to leave Dad behind.

That’s not my answer, and I bet it’s not yours. Most people would save Dad. Here are some other examples of how we privilege those close to us, from a passage in Just Babies.

I read every day about the suffering of strangers in faraway lands, and I know I can improve their lives, but I rarely make the effort. When I’m in a big city, I often find myself in the position of the Good Samaritan in the tale from the Gospels, passing someone slumped on the side of a road, probably sick, hungry, plainly in need of assistance. If the person were my kin—my sister, my father, my cousin—I would rush over to help; if they were in my in-group—my neighbor, a colleague from my university, someone I play poker with—I would also help. But it’s always a stranger, so I usually turn away and keep walking. Most likely, you do the same.

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The question of why our sentiments favor those we are related to has a clear answer. This is how natural selection operates. Genes that lead animals to favor their kin are more likely to spread through the population than genes that lead animals to be impartial. If Gene A causes an animal to devote much of its energy to helping its child (who has a 50% chance of possessing Gene A) and Gene B causes an animal to devote equal time to helping every child around it, giving no special attention to its own genetic kin, then, generations later, there will only be Gene A. For more details on this process, known as kin selection, see, again, my Just Babies.

A harder question is why we moralize this preference. We don’t just favor our own; we think it’s right to do so. This is particularly true for societies that are not WEIRD (Western Educated Rich Industrial Democracies). As Joseph Henrich argues in The WEIRDest People In The World, most societies have moral systems where favoring your kin is considered the just thing to do. If you have a government position and you refuse to use your power to help your brother get a job, you’re not virtuous; you’re a bad brother and a bad person.

WEIRD people are unusual in the relatively low priority we give to family and friends. Here is how Henrich puts it.

WEIRD people tend to stick to impartial rules or principles and can be quite trusting, honest, fair, and cooperative toward strangers or anonymous others. In fact, relative to most populations, we WEIRD people show relatively less favoritism toward our friends, families, co-ethnics, and local communities than other populations do. We think nepotism is wrong and fetishize abstract principles over context, practicality, relationships, and empathy.

Still, even the WEIRD give loyalty some weight. Going back to Godwin’s example, it’s not just that most of us would save our fathers; it’s that we approve of the choice to do so, in ourselves and others. Here is the very WEIRD Adam Smith on this point.

The man who should feel no more for the death or distress of his own father, or son, than for those of any other man’s father or son, would appear neither a good son nor a good father. Such unnatural indifference, far from exciting our applause, would incur our highest disapprobation.

The hardest question of all is whether this moral feeling is defensible. A while ago, my friend Sam Harris and I discussed this on his podcast (here). If Asma is on one extreme, Harris is on the other. Harris grants that we are partial in our inclinations and he knows that many of us think that this partiality is morally defensible, even obligatory. But he believes we are wrong—less parochialism would make the world a better place.

My own, admittedly tentative, view is that it is impossible for humans to treat strangers the same as family, and a good moral system doesn’t demand that we do the impossible. (To put it as philosophers do: ought implies can.) A morality for humans has to allow for partiality of the sort we’ve been talking about.

Harris disagrees about our limits. He told me about a Hindu guru he had once met, known as Poonja-ji, who was said to be so impartial that he reacted to the news of his own son’s death just as he would react to the death of a stranger. I’m not sure what to make of this story. (One thing I wonder is whether Poonja-ji had any real love for his son in the first place.) But if it’s true, Poonja-ji is unusual indeed. Most of us just don’t—just can’t—work this way.¹

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Enough about the big questions for now. Let’s talk about me. I started with a story about how my intuitions differed from those of Cornell graduate students. At the time, I wondered if it might not really be about loyalty. Perhaps the graduate students took research malfeasance much more seriously than I did. Perhaps they thought of someone fudging their data analyses in the same way that I thought about someone sending bombs over the mail. But then I found that the same difference in intuitions showed up in a totally different case—between my Twitter followers and me regarding whether Joe Biden should pardon his son. So, what’s up with all this?

Now, part of the point of this post is that even if I am unusual, it’s a matter of degree, not kind. Everyone values loyalty to some extent—even graduate students. Maybe, unlike me, you would turn in your husband or wife if they were messing with their data—but you’d probably save your father before you went looking for the Archbishop, and I know that you would be more likely to help a friend than a stranger.

But still, how do we explain the difference in degree? It’s not a cultural difference—I’m as WEIRD as they get. I’m quite a bit older than the graduate students and maybe older than most of my Twitter followers. Perhaps that plays a role? Or maybe it’s not age in itself, but the fact that I’ve had children. Maybe that transforms a person. Asma writes: “The utilitarian demand—that I should always maximize the greatest good for the greatest number—seemed reasonable to me in my twenties but made me laugh after my son was born.”.

Perhaps it has to do with political orientation; I’m probably more conservative than graduate students (everyone my age is more conservative than graduate students), and there is some evidence that political orientation correlates with how much one values loyalty.²

Or maybe there’s no satisfying answer to this question. Perhaps what distinguishes the moral views of people within a culture is caused by some mysterious combination of one’s genes and one’s random personal experience, and there’s little more to be said about it. (This is what many people believe about more general differences between people, such as over how neurotic or extraverted they are—see my Psych: The Story of the Human Mind to read more about this.)

So, I am what I am. All I can add at this point is that my higher emphasis on loyalty is good news for those I love—and, well, potentially bad news for the rest of you.

1. Ted Chiang has an excellent New Yorker article discussing our podcast and offering his own views: What If Parents Loved Strangers’ Children As Much As Their Own?

2. However, most of this research, including the study I’m citing here, does not distinguish between loyalty to family and loyalty to one’s country, which are very different sorts of loyalty.