I'm interested in practical normativity, and hence the concept of what we ought or have most normative reason to want and to do. I generally use moral terms in this "all things considered" normative sense. (On this way of talking, it's analytic that we ought to be moral, but a wide open question what this amounts to.) Sometimes people prefer to use words differently, so that 'morality', like 'etiquette', has a fairly transparent (almost stipulative) content -- making it clearer what's morally required, but at the cost of making the concept non-normative. Is there a better way to understand the concept of 'morality', so that it neither collapses into general practical normativity, nor dwindles into normative irrelevance?
One option would be to define 'moral reasons' as a subset of our normative reasons. For example, we might say that some reasons are 'prudential', in the sense that the reason exerts its force for the agent's own sake, whereas all other reasons will count as 'moral'. I guess that's okay as far as it goes, and maybe there are some contexts in which this distinction could be philosophically useful, but for the most part I don't really see the interest in such stunted normative concepts. Why philosophize about a merely "some things considered" ought? To restrict the content of the fundamental normative concept is also to restrict its interest.
A more intriguing possibility is suggested by Parfit: perhaps there is a second primitive (undefinable) normative concept, besides that of a normative reason, for which Parfit uses the phrase "mustn't-be-done". The thought seems to be that certain acts have the primitive feature that they mustn't-be-done, which may create - rather than merely signal - a (decisive?) normative reason against so acting. The question whether this generated reason is decisive is just the debate over whether morality is overriding -- a debate that seems less substantive on alternative conceptions of 'morality'.
Utilitarians (like Egoists) might be best understood as nihilists about 'morality' in this undefinable sense of mustn't-be-done. Rather than offering a 'moral' theory, they offer a normative theory to rival morality. As Parfit writes (On What Matters, chp 7):These people may be convinced that it matters greatly how well things go, and they may be strongly motivated and often moved to act in ways that prevent or relieve suffering. But they may be doubtful whether any acts are duties, or mustn't-be-done, and doubtful about blameworthiness, and about reasons for remorse and indignation. That is one way in which this form of Consequentialism might be an external rival to morality.
Some questions: Can you make sense of the indefinable, substantive moral concept of "mustn't-be-done"? If so, do you think it is applicable, i.e. that some acts actually possess this feature? Is this the best way to distinguish 'moral' concepts?
I feel like I have a slippery grasp of the intended idea (it seems very deontological), but perhaps it should ultimately be abandoned as senseless, or at least inapplicable. It may be easily confused with the derivative notion of an act that is prohibited on indirect consequentialist grounds -- i.e. an act that we ought to rule out of consideration. But this isn't a new primitive concept. It instead derives from the ordinary normative concept employed by utilitarians, simply applied to decision procedures.
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Normative Moral Concepts
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
The Deliberative Question
What exactly do we mean when we ask the deliberative question, "What should I do"? It's surprisingly elusive. With a bit of work, we can pin down a behaviouristic kind of answer -- specifying when it's appropriate to offer and to challenge various responses to the question. But I suspect that in a more fundamental/philosophical sense, it isn't really a well-formed, determinate question at all.
First, note that we're not asking what would be objectively best. (Consider Parfit's Mineshafts case. You know that one of option A or B will save all ten lives, but the other will save none, and you don't know which is which. Option C is guaranteed to save nine lives. Clearly, the answer to the deliberator's question is "choose option C", even though this is the one option we can know is not objectively best.)
Perhaps we're asking (roughly) what would maximize expected value for the agent. This explains why option C is the answer in the ordinary Mineshafts scenario: relative to the agent's knowledge, it is worth 9 expected lives, whereas options A and B each have expected value of only 5 lives saved. But (as Kolodny and MacFarlane point out) this standard view has trouble accommodating our assertoric practices. For suppose Informant comes along and tells Agent that he's made a mistake, and in fact it's option A that is guaranteed to save nine lives, and options B and C that are the all-or-nothing gambles. Informant claims to reject (disagree with) Agent's previous answer to the question what he ought to do, and Agent himself seems likely to acquiesce in this by repudiating his previous response. ("I was mistaken to think that I should pick option C; really I should do A.") What's worse, we can further imagine an omniscient observer saying, "No, really he should pick option B -- that's the one that'll save all ten lives."
Here's the dilemma: is there a single, constant question, to which these various responses offer conflicting answers? Theoretically, it's difficult to see how this could be so. There's the question what maximizes expected utility relative to this evidence or that -- but these are different questions, so the diverging answers don't really conflict. On this picture, Agent should respond to Informant by saying, "Ah! You've changed my epistemic context in a most helpful manner. Granted, I answered my initial question [what ought I to do relative to my then-available evidence] correctly. But now I can ask an even better question: 'what ought I to do relative to my now-available evidence?' And, I agree, my answer to this question is 'pick option A!'"
(Compare ordinary context-dependent terms like the indexical 'now'. If tomorrow I say, "It is raining now," I won't thereby have to retract my current assertion that it isn't raining now. There is no single, constant question "Is it raining?" to which these are competing answers. There are only the more specific questions whether it is raining at this or that time and place.)
Unfortunately, when it comes to the deliberative question, this isn't how our linguistic practices seem to actually work. Instead, it seems, Agent will repudiate his previous answer, implicitly treating it as a competing answer to one and the same question (what should he do, period). My question is: does this make sense?
The relativist formally accommodates this behaviour by positing a semantics for 'ought' on which the truth of any token assertion 'Agent ought to phi' varies across assessors. We effectively end up understanding the deliberative question as having the constant meaning 'What should I do relative to the relevant evidence?' whilst allowing the relevant evidence to vary across assessors. Disagreeing as to what evidence is relevant thus translates into disagreeing about the deliberative question. But there's no absolute fact of the matter as to which evidence really is "relevant", and hence the correct answer varies from perspective to perspective, even when assessing a single token utterance.
I actually think that this 'relevant evidence relativist' (unlike the moral relativist) gets it right as a pragmatic account of when it's appropriate to make, challenge, and retract assertions. Intuitively, it seems appropriate for everyone involved to behave as if there was a single constant question here (unlike in the 'raining now' case). For example, it seems appropriate for Agent to initially judge that he ought to go with Option C, and then to retract [not merely "move beyond"] this judgment when faced with new evidence.
But does that really answer my initial question? I guess Wittgensteinians would think so -- "meaning is use", and all that. But intuitively, it seems like there's a further question here: not just about what assertoric behaviours are appropriate, but the more 'metaphysical' question of what is really meant, and really true.
If we think this is a genuine further question, we may be unsatisfied by the relativist's answer, since it seems most plausible that, strictly speaking, substantive answers exist only for complete or 'absolute' questions -- "Is it raining at such-and-such time and place?", not just "Is it raining?". The general question, "What should I do?" is likewise incomplete until we fill in the missing parameter of whose evidence we're assessing this against. Granted, we can offer a sociological story about how it's useful for a community to adopt linguistic norms that allow us to treat this incomplete question as though it were complete -- "disagreeing" in practice even when there's not really any substantive proposition at stake. But then it looks like this really is just a "language game", lacking in philosophical substance. (As MacFarlane himself concludes in 'Relativism and Disagreement': "From lofty philosophical heights, the language games we play with [relativistic words] may seem irrational. But that is no reason to deny that we do play these games, or that they have a social purpose.")
Really, we should conclude, there isn't any single question here. Strictly speaking, it doesn't really make sense for Agent to retract his earlier judgment. And the apparent 'disagreement' (of Informant or the omniscient observer), though "appropriate" according to the rules of the game, is - in a more important sense - philosophically empty.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Parfit on Epistemic and Practical Rationality
My previous post argued that acts and desires can inherit the irrationality of beliefs on which they are based. Why does Parfit deny this? Here's what he says about the smoker who so acts because he irrationally believes it to be good for his health:[I]t would be misleading to call my act practically irrational, since my mistake is only in my failure to respond to my epistemic reasons not to have this belief. It would also be misleading to call this act epistemically irrational, since it is not in acting in this way that I am failing to respond to these epistemic reasons.
We should not, I suggest, make either of these misleading claims. When some belief is epistemically irrational, this irrationality can be plausibly and usefully claimed to be inherited by any other belief that depends on this belief. But it is not worth claiming that some beliefs' irrationality is also inherited by any desire or act that depends on this belief... Our desires and acts are best called irrational only when, in having some desire or acting in some way, we are failing to respond to clear and strongly decisive practical reasons or apparent reasons not to have this desire, or not to act in this way.
I find this rather puzzling. After all, the fact that smoking is bad for your health is a genuine practical reason not to smoke (and, we may suppose, a "strongly decisive" one), to which the agent is failing to respond. So whether the smoker qualifies as practically irrational would seem to depend on whether this reason -- that smoking is bad for your health -- is sufficiently "clear" to the agent. But we have stipulated that this health fact is indeed "clear" according to the agent's evidence, such that they are epistemically irrational in failing to believe it. So why doesn't Parfit consider this a case of practical irrationality, by his own definition?
(Perhaps by "clear" he really means "believed", just as earlier he defines apparent reasons as "false beliefs about the relevant facts whose truth would give us some reason." But then we're missing any argument against the competing view that assesses practical rationality against evidentially "apparent" reasons. It sounds compelling -- undeniable -- to say that practical rationality must have something to do with the practical reasons we "appear", in some sense, to have. It's far less compelling to just assert that the relevant 'appearance' is found only in our explicit beliefs, rather than also being implicit in our evidence, and in what we rationally ought to believe.)
On my view, the smoker is making a mistake that relates to his (evidentially apparent) practical reasons. Granted, the mistake wholly derives from a prior epistemic misstep. But that doesn't mean that his mistake is "only" epistemic, since the epistemic error leads him to make a practical error: he smokes when he has clear practical reasons not to. The epistemic error becomes a practical error. That is to say, the agent makes an epistemic misstep that renders not just the initial belief, but also the downstream action, rationally unjustified or unwarranted. (Compare: in the belief case, I go wrong not "only" in believing that p and that if p then q; I am also rationally unjustified in my inferred belief that q -- though of course this rational error is wholly derivative of the earlier ones. There's a sense in which I haven't committed any additional missteps. But the flaw in my prior beliefs has "become" a flaw shared by my later belief also. The same flaw or misstep can infect - and render unjustified - multiple states. Since Parfit grants this in the case of beliefs, it's unclear why we shouldn't say the same thing in case of the practical "states" of desire and action.)
The best way I can make sense of Parfit's view is by attributing to him a distinctive method of carving up epistemic vs. practical rationality. I've been assuming that practical rationality is a matter of responding (e.g. acting) appropriately in light of the evidentially apparent [facts that would constitute] practical reasons. But note that there are two broad ways that one might fail to act appropriately: one might fail to believe the (evidentially) "apparent facts" in the first place, or one might incorrectly (perversely) interpret the normative significance of these factual beliefs. The former failure is the epistemically-derived practical irrationality we've been discussing. The latter is the more 'pure' form of practical irrationality found in malicious evildoers, Future-Tuesday indifferent agents, etc.
Now, I take it that Parfit wants to understand the latter, 'pure' kind of practical failure as the only genuinely practical failure. On this view, practical rationality is not a matter of "responding" (in my broad sense) to our evidence-relative reasons for action -- first noticing, then non-perversely interpreting them. It instead concerns only the interpretive element. We might say that (on this view) practical rationality is a matter of not being perverse. (Note that there's certainly nothing perverse about the smoker who irrationally thinks he's helping his health. The guy is acting stupidly, but -- given his beliefs -- hardly perversely. "At least his heart is in the right place," we might say. "Too bad he's such an incompetent fool.")
In support of this interpretation, I notice that Parfit later writes (in discussing an exception to the general rule that epistemic and practical rationality are independent) that "if we have irrational beliefs about practical reasons, and about what we ought rationally to want or to do, our having such beliefs makes us in one way practically irrational." This makes sense if by 'practically irrational' Parfit just means perverse. It's certainly true that someone who falsely believes that they ought to do evil (or be Future-Tuesday indifferent) is thereby "in one way" perverse. But merely having this belief doesn't suffice to make them practically irrational in the ordinary sense. After all, they might instead be rational akratics, and act entirely appropriately despite their crazy notions.
So, is this just a terminological dispute? It would be if Parfit meant his use of the term to be stipulative. But that is not the case. Instead, he writes:I am using 'irrational' in its ordinary sense, to mean, roughly, 'deserves strong criticism of the kind that we also express with words like "foolish", "stupid", and "crazy"'. ... If we believe that one of two preferences deserves much stronger rational criticism, we shouldn't say that only the other preference is irrational.
So it seems we're disputing the character of a certain normative role (roughly: what makes an act/desire foolish). Parfit's view, if I've understood him correctly, is that perversity is what makes an act or desire foolish. I agree that this is one way that an act can be foolish. But an act can also be foolish in a way that derives from a prior epistemic error, as when an agent smokes for the sake of benefiting their health. If we believe that the smoker's act deserves rational criticism, we should reject Parfit's understanding of the epistemic/practical distinction. Perversity has an important role to play in our normative theorizing, but it isn't this one. Acts and desires can be foolish -- "deserve rational criticism", in the ordinary sense -- without being perverse.
Postscript: I think that what Parfit is really getting at here is a distinct but related role, namely, what makes a mis-step practical rather than epistemic. It's important to note that this is a distinct question from what makes an act or desire deserving of rational criticism, since -- as I've argued -- an act or desire can be foolish or unwarranted in a way that derives from a fundamentally epistemic mis-step.
Perhaps it's best to say that there are really two significant 'epistemic/practical' distinctions to consider in our theorizing about rationality. There is the ordinary state-based distinction between the rational status of epistemic states (beliefs), on the one hand, and the rational status of practical 'states' (acts or desires), on the other. Then there is Parfit's step-based distinction, between fundamentally epistemic missteps (stupidity), and fundamentally practical missteps (perversity).
What I've effectively been insisting is that an act might be irrational (in the ordinary sense -- unjustified and deserving of certain sorts of criticism) even if the agent's only mis-step was epistemic in nature. Contra Parfit, it doesn't follow that only their epistemic states are liable to rational criticism, for a single misstep may set awry multiple states, and an epistemic misstep may set awry downstream practical states. So long as we're clear on the difference, each distinction may well be "worth" talking about (depending on our purposes), and neither can be dismissed as necessarily "misleading" -- though of course either can be misleading, if conflated or used for the wrong theoretical role.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Inherited Irrationality
Beliefs may inherit the irrationality of other beliefs they are based on. (If I irrationally believe that p and that if p then q, and so conclude that q, then this validly derived belief likewise lacks rational warrant.) What about acts or desires that are based on irrational beliefs?
Parfit (On What Matters, chp 5) discusses the case of a man who irrationally believes that smoking would be good for his health, and on this basis desires to smoke. I think this desire is irrational, since it should be clear (given his evidence) that in fact he has every reason not to smoke. This fact about his evidence makes the agent liable to rational criticism if he smokes: doing so is "stupid", "unwise", "foolish", etc. -- though of course the agent himself might fail to realize this.
But instead of assessing the rationality of desires/actions against the agent's evidence, Parfit claims that desires (acts) are rational iff they are based on beliefs which, if true, would provide sufficient reasons to so desire (act). Since if it were true that smoking is good for your health, this fact would provide sufficient reason to [want to] smoke, Parfit concludes that the act/desire is rational even though the belief is not.
I find this puzzling. Since it is irrational for the agent to believe that smoking is good for his health (and we may stipulate that there aren't any other relevant considerations), it is presumably likewise irrational for him to believe that he has any reason to smoke. He rationally ought to believe that he has no such reason, and hence that smoking is irrational for him. This normative fact seems to conflict with the claim that in fact smoking is rational for him. Consider the following principle of rational transmission:
(RT) if S rationally ought to believe that it is irrational for her to Φ, then it is irrational for her to Φ.
One might respond by arguing that the act only becomes irrational once S actually has the beliefs that she ought to have. That is, we should merely grant the weaker claim:
(RT-actual): if S believes (as she rationally ought) that it is irrational for her to Φ, then it is irrational for her to Φ.
Since the smoker doesn't have this rational belief, but instead irrationally believes that he ought to smoke, it may be claimed that in these circumstances it is perfectly sensible of him to go ahead and smoke. But that doesn't sound particularly sensible to me. (Sure, it's consistent with his irrational beliefs, but acting in ways consistent with irrational beliefs is not necessarily sensible.)
Parfit says, "Our claim should be only that, since these irrational beliefs are false, [the smoker has] no reasons to act in [this way]." But this seems too weak. Suppose the evidence is misleading and it turns out that smoking actually is good for your health after all. So it turns out that the smoker does have objective reason to act in this way. Still, his act is irrational (unwise, stupid, etc.) since all his evidence suggests that he would do better not to smoke. Even if he turns out to be lucky, we can -- contra Parfit -- still criticize his act. It wasn't rationally warranted, given his evidence.
Curiously, Parfit grants something close to this. He writes: "We should still claim that, when I want to smoke, I am being irrational, but the irrationality is in my belief, not my desire." But what does it mean for a person to be irrational "when" they X, but that the irrationality is not "in" their X-ing? We might take it to simply mean that they exhibit some (possibly unrelated) rational flaw at the same time as they X. But again, this seems too weak.
Suppose that I'm in the midst of eating dinner when I form the desire to smoke. It would be misleading to say that "when I eat dinner, I am being irrational". It's literally true, in a sense: I am being irrational at this time. But the irrationality is in no way related to my eating dinner. Rather, I'm irrational in forming the desire to smoke. There's an important asymmetry in the rational significance of these two events, which isn't captured merely by noting that they are concurrent with my having an irrational belief. The irrationality of the belief infects the related desire, in a way that it does not infect my unrelated act of eating dinner.
So it looks like we need to say something stronger than that the agent is "being irrational" merely concurrently with their wanting to smoke. The connection is tighter than that. They are specifically irrational for wanting to smoke (not for eating dinner, or whatever else they might be doing at that time).
It's true that the irrationality here is merely derived from the irrationality of the basing belief. So there's a sense in which the desire doesn't introduce any further irrationality that wasn't already there. (Unlike, say, if the agent had taken his irrational belief that smoking is healthy to be a reason for jumping off a building. Then his desire would be irrational in an entirely new and further respect.) But this is just like the uncontroversial epistemic case, where my concluding that q doesn't introduce any further irrationality that wasn't already present in my prior beliefs (that p and that if p then q) -- unlike, say, if I had concluded in some unrelated proposition r.
Inherited irrationality need not make you "more" irrational, on some global scale, than you would otherwise have been. It's just to say that the downstream states or actions lack rational justification, just like the upstream states on which they are based.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
"Contributive Justice"
[P]hilosophers have thought that justice is about what people get; I think it is about what people are able to do, particularly how they are able to develop their abilities, give back to society, and be respected for their contributions.
-- Paul Gomberg, How To Make Opportunity Equal, quoted in NDPR
I can't say I see much interest in "justice" talk, but if translated into a claim about welfare / the good life, this is certainly a sentiment I'm sympathetic towards.
Monday, June 08, 2009
Respecting Pseudonymity
Many people who first venture out into the blogosphere do so under the cover of pseudonymity, even if they later blog under their own name. There are good pseudonymous bloggers who really are in positions that make it so that they would not blog at all if they had no such protection. If those protections don't exist, if we do not protect the pseudonymity of others, that contributes to an atmosphere of hostility in the blogosphere, many good bloggers will be lost, and we will all be the poorer.
When considering these sorts of cases, people often seem to end up only focusing on the particular case at hand, and so determine whether the 'outing' was justified by assessing whether they dislike the outed blogger enough to trump his putative privacy rights. But it's also important to consider the broader impact, as Brandon highlights in the above quote.
We should want to uphold norms that enable pseudonymous blogging. The most straightforward candidate norm would be to respect a blogger's pseudonymity unless there's some pressing reason why the public needs to know their true identity (e.g. to expose sockpuppetry, undisclosed conflicts of interest, etc.)
One might propose a less accommodating norm, e.g. to respect pseudonymity only insofar as the blogger remains civil and inoffensive, and expose them if they piss you off. This may be motivated by the idea that if people want to engage in verbal attacks, they should have to own their words, rather than hide behind the veil of their virtual persona. Or, if retributivism isn't your thing, perhaps such a rule would have the happy consequence of reducing the amount of vitriol that gets thrown around online. People can still feel safe blogging under a pseudonym; they simply need to take care not to be jerks while they're at it.
The obvious problem with this proposal is that "offensiveness" is rather subjective. Is maintaining a polite tone sufficient to guarantee your pseudonymity, or might an opposing partisan decide that your views are substantively offensive, 'beyond the pale', and that you "deserve" to suffer real-life censure for them? If we grant everyone too much discretion in determining whether or not another's pseudonymity ought to be respected, someone is sure to judge poorly, so we'll end up with much weaker protections than originally intended.
So I think we're probably better off sticking with the straightforward norm to basically always respect pseudonymity (except in the very rare and uncontroversial cases of sockpuppetry and the like).
Sunday, June 07, 2009
Philosophical Data
I've previously noted that some of the deepest philosophical disagreements are traceable to differing assumptions about what needs to be explained.
A reductionist might assume that we simply need to explain the third-personal empirical data: e.g. the facts that we have certain brain states, make certain vocalizations, etc. They then deny the reality of any further philosophical phenomena (e.g. irreducible qualia, normativity, etc.) on the grounds of parsimony: none of that is necessary to explain the scientific data. You don't need to posit moral facts in order to explain the occurrence of moral intuitions.
That's true enough. I don't think scientific inquiry should lead us to believe in moral realism. But I also don't think that science exhausts all there is to know. The philosophical 'data' may be more expansive than the empirical data, since we may know things other than third-personal observational facts. For an obvious example, I know that I'm phenomenally conscious. This datum calls out for explanation. For another example: we can (I assume) also know various moral/normative truths, in which case the search for a systematic moral/normative theory would be well-motivated (despite the fact that it wouldn't help explain the limited subset of data that the reductionist exclusively concerns himself with).
There are also various facts about epistemic normativity which call out for explanation. For example, I take it as given that rational induction is possible. We ought to believe that an emerald first observed after 2020 will be green, not grue. Such differences in 'projectability' may motivate positing objective structure: arguably, the reason why we can project 'green' but not 'grue' is because the former property is metaphysically privileged in an important sense. It is a more "natural" property, in the sense that collections of green things are (in respect of their colour) objectively more similar than collections of grue things.
So, realists (of various stripes) will dispute the reductionist's limited construal of 'the data to be explained'. This raises the difficult question: how can we make dialectical progress in resolving such fundamental disagreements? Are there generally acceptable moves for supporting or undermining the inclusion of a particular claim as "given"?
It seems there must be some constraints here. Something has gone badly wrong with the person who takes the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as a datum. This seems like a belief that should be undermined by skeptical probing, if it does no essential work in explaining anything else. But then why can't the skeptic likewise dispense with any other self-contained cluster of beliefs (say, normative beliefs; or even empirical beliefs!), if they do no essential work in explaining anything else? What is it that makes empirical beliefs (and, arguably, normative beliefs) indispensable in this way?
I'm unsure what to say about this. My best attempt at an answer is to appeal to transcendental / "may as well" arguments. At least in case of epistemic normativity: anti-skepticism is a precondition for successful inquiry, so we may as well take it on faith. If we're wrong, we're screwed anyway; but if we're right -- if we have any chance at all of attaining knowledge -- then this assumption positions us to make the most of it. (Cf. Intellectual Black Holes.)
A similar argument applies to practical normativity: we may as well assume there's something we ought to do (then work out what it would be, and act accordingly). It's only on this assumption that our choices matter -- that we ever act rightly or wrongly -- so this is the only possibility that is worth taking into account.
It's less clear whether any such neutral justification can be given for the assumption of first-personal subjective experience. In this case, it's more of a Moorean fact: something we're more certain of than we are of any argument to the contrary. The inescapability thus looks to be merely psychological: there's little I could say to someone with different beliefs -- e.g. a self-identified "zombie" -- to convince them that they're really conscious. (One of my undergrad professors insisted that he has no idea what all this talk of 'subjective experience' is about.)
This shouldn't necessarily undermine the belief. We have little option but to reason from what personally strikes us as true -- even if others think differently, that shouldn't make it impossible for us to come to justified beliefs. But, on the other hand, nor should we want subjective certainty to suffice for justification: someone might be irrationally certain that the FSM exists, after all. The difficulty is that, at the bedrock level, there are no neutral arguments left to distinguish between the various positions. It looks like we must simply make a stab in the dark and insist that certain views (our own, if we're lucky) are brutely justified and others aren't.
It would be nice if we could say something a little more illuminating.
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Manipulation and Rationality
Supposing you want to calm down a raging bull. Is it "manipulation" to remove the red flag from the bull's sight? You're certainly influencing how the bull will behave. But it seems that you're achieving this precisely by removing a source of manipulation (in some sense), and so enhancing the bull's own self-control.
Or, for a human case, consider how we might move the chocolates out of sight, to where they'll be less tempting. Cases like this seem importantly different from, say, brainwashing ourselves (or being 'manipulated' in any problematic sense). What's the relevant difference? Arguably: rationality-enhancing influences (e.g. that counteract prior biases) are innocuous, whereas problematic manipulation consists in influence that detracts from our rationality and self-control. (What about 'rational akrasia'? Perhaps we should understand 'self-control' here as consisting in authentic rather than deliberate-judgment-driven action.)
If this is right, then it seems we shouldn't consider Sunstein and Thaler's "nudges" to be problematically manipulative (or 'Orwellian'), at least if done right. It's surely true that our heuristics and biases can be exploited in manipulative fashion (cf. advertising). But that doesn't mean we have to just ignore our biases. Better to counteract or accommodate them, i.e. set things up so that our everyday heuristics will more often succeed in 'nudging' us in the right direction (by our own lights).
Of course, the "if done right" proviso is a big one. I haven't said anything here to argue against pragmatic libertarian "slippery slope" concerns. I just don't think there's anything inherently problematic with intentionally influencing choices in the modest ways Sunstein and Thaler describe (e.g. changing from opt-in to opt-out organ donation). Like the bull with the red flag, we are being constantly manipulated by our environment into making senseless decisions. We should welcome 'interference' that serves to mitigate the stupidity caused by our natural biases, enabling us to make more rational decisions instead.
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
What should I be reading?
It's time for me to start preparing for my pre-dissertation "generals exam". Probably the trickiest thing here is pinning down an appropriate topic and reading list for the exam to be based on. So I figure I may as well try appealing to the collective wisdom of the Internets (that's you) for advice. My (tentative) topic is 'evaluating non-ideal agents', insofar as this suggests questions like the following:
Follow the original link for further explanation, and for my first pass at a list of relevant readings. (Some I haven't read yet, so may be removed if they turn out not to be so relevant after all.) Please leave a comment here or email me if you have any further suggestions for readings I should add to my list!
(I'm also open to suggestions for tweaking my topic questions, though I'm less likely to change them in the absence of compelling reasons.)
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Belief as a Hybrid Notion
I'm always puzzled when I read philosophers who treat belief and knowledge as philosophically important states. I find it much more natural to think of [rational] credences (degrees of belief) as fundamental, and to define 'belief' derivatively as, say, "sufficiently high credence for the purposes at hand" (and, similarly, 'Knowledge' as Sufficiently Safe Belief). So understood, belief and knowledge are philosophical outputs, not inputs. Indeed, considerations of stakes-sensitivity suggest that they aren't even purely epistemic notions, but rather a hybrid of the epistemic (rational credence) and the practical (how much credence is required to justify certain actions).
To bring this out, consider the following kind of case. Sally from sales knocks on the door of an abandoned-looking house. Nobody answers, so she concludes that nobody is home and goes on her way. A few minutes later, Dan the demolition worker does likewise, and concludes likewise, only he returns to his wrecking rig to commence demolition. Fill in the background details so that it seems that Dan (unlike Sally) isn't justified in acting on the belief that the house is empty.
Now, if you think that all-out belief is philosophically significant, it seems you're faced with two possible interpretations of how stakes-sensitivity is affecting justified action in this case:
(1) It could be that Dan is, like Sally, perfectly justified in believing that the house is empty, but that the higher stakes of the situation render his justified belief 'unactionable' until supported on firmer grounds; OR
(2) It could be that the higher stakes render Dan's belief unjustified.
But surely it's clear on reflection that this is a distinction without a difference. The only real question here is what degree of rational credence is required to justify action in the face of this or that risk. We capture everything of philosophical significance by noting that Dan and Sally both have rational credence of around (say) 80% that the house is empty, and that this degree of belief is sufficient for purposes of taking your sales pitch to the next door, but not sufficient for demolishing the house and killing anyone who may still be inside. Moreover, it is in virtue of these practical normative facts that we may attribute justified all-out belief / knowledge (that the house is empty) to Sally but not to Dan.
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