Abortion Review

Is it wrong to kill embryos -- do they have (morally significant) interests that would be violated by their untimely death? I think that reflecting on spontaneous abortion strongly suggests that embryonic death is not an intrinsic bad (though it might be bad for the would-be parents, if they dearly wanted a child). The central challenge for the pro-lifer is to explain how it is that non-sentient embryos have greater moral status than other non-sentient entities like plants and bacteria. There are two basic strategies they can offer in response, but I think that both ultimately fail.

Personal Identity Review

Here I want to motivate and defend two Parfitian theses. The first is anti-haecceitism or 'reductionism' about identity: the qualitative facts exhaust the facts, and in particular, there remains no "further fact" about the identities of things. We could give a complete description of the world without using identity-talk at all. Talk of identity over time is just a convenient shorthand for talking about various kinds of continuity and counterfactual dependence. The second thesis, then, is that when it comes to the persistence or identity of persons across time, the kind of continuity worth caring about is psychological continuity.

Non-Physical Questions

Would you still be conscious if your neurons were replaced by (functionally identical) silicon chips?

It seems like this is an open question. But how do physicalists accommodate this datum? We know (by stipulation) all the physical facts of the story: we know that the resulting "brain" is functionally/computationally no different, but that the matter it's made of is different. If the physical facts exhaust the facts, then it doesn't seem that there's anything left for us to wonder about the situation.

Utilitarian Policy

I think the world would be a much better place if public policy debates were more focused on cost-benefit analysis. Too often, people refuse to acknowledge trade-offs or opportunity costs (health and military spending are obvious candidates here). Other times, people seem more interested in harming out-groups or "looking tough" than in actually securing better outcomes for everyone (think immigration, prisons, torture). And then there are the obvious cases of legislative capture by special interests (farm subsidies, retroactive copyright extensions). It seems like there's a lot of scope for "no brainer" policy improvements that every reasonable person should be able to agree on. But maybe I'm missing something. So let me take a stab at outlining some of the issues where the answer seems to me completely obvious -- and I hope that others will add more suggestions in the comments, and/or explain where you think I'm going wrong.

Killing and Average Utility

Towards the end of his (1983) 'Value and Population Size', Thomas Hurka considers the objection that value holism might sometimes mandate killing those of (positive but) below average welfare, so as to raise the average. He responds:

It is foolish to think that the consequentialist principles we use to assess the values of different populations could ever be the only principles in an acceptable moral theory. They have to be accompanied by supplementary principles setting constraints which we must not violate while pursuing our population goals and which we must not violate in particular by taking the lives of existing people. If we are to assess population principles as population principles, then we must assess them in circumstances where these constraints do not apply, that is, in circumstances where only increases and not decreases in the human population are in question.

This looks like the kind of mistake I had in mind when I wrote 'Anti-Consequentialism and Axiological Refinements': what Hurka interprets as a need to go beyond consequentialism, I see as a need to refine our axiology. If Hurka's right, then we should think something like the following: "Though it'd violate the moral rules to help bring about this outcome in any way, I must say it'd be really grand if all those happy folks of below average welfare would just drop dead. Here's hoping for some well-placed lightning strikes!"

'Agential' and 'Outcome' Responsibility

Randolph Clarke writes:

1) John sees a child struggling in the water but decides not to bother saving the child. The child drowns. Unbeknownst to John, a strong man standing at the shore was watching him. Had John run toward the water to attempt a rescue, the strong man would have tackled him and prevented him from saving the child. As it turned out, the intervention wasn't necessary...

Most people, I think, will say that in case 1 John isn't responsible for not saving the child.

Let's distinguish two questions. First, we can ask whether John is a 'free', morally responsible agent. Was he in control of himself, and hence answerable for his decisions during this episode, or was he temporarily brainwashed, hypnotized, or otherwise under some compulsion that prevents his behaviour during this episode from really being attributable to him as an agent? In other words: was John exercising his agency? Call this the 'agential' question. (I take it the answer to this question is straightforwardly 'yes'.)

RSS subscriptions

Given my sporadic posting of late, perhaps it's a good time to remind any less-geeky readers of the wonders of RSS feeds.

In short: Rather than having to manually visit each blog or website you follow to check for updates, an RSS reader (like Google Reader) keeps track of the website updates for you, and collects any new articles for you to read in one convenient location.

Fissioning in Prospect and Retrospect

Suppose that I need to endure some moderately unpleasant experience in order to protect my future self against an otherwise fatal disease. I don't at all resent filling my present with unpleasantness, because I value my future existence: I think of myself as a temporally-extended being, rather than a mere momentary existent (even though I don't think my present self literally endures into the future). So far so good. Moreover, suppose I take a temporary amnesia drug, so that afterwards I will not recall the details of the unpleasant experience (nor any plans or intentions, etc., that I make during this time). This seems unobjectionable -- if anything, it probably makes the overall situation better: no unpleasant memories!

But now consider an alternative situation. Suppose that I'm instead given the chance to fission, cell-like, into two future selves. Lefty would go on to live a long and flourishing life, whereas Righty would endure the moderately unpleasant experience before being swiftly vapourised. Is this significantly different?

Ambiguous Meta/Normative Theories

Consider Divine Command Theory:
(DCT) An act is right iff (and because) God commands it.

Armed with Parfit's distinction between right-making features and the property of being right, there are two very different ways of reading this:

(1) as a reductive meta-ethical theory, where the right-hand-side provides an analysis of rightness (the property of being right) itself. On this interpretation, DCT claims that what it is for an act to be right just is for it to be commanded by God. (The simplest version of this view would have it be true "by definition". But Robert Adams has also suggested a more sophisticated version, which begins by analysing the conceptual role of 'rightness', and then claims that 'being commanded by God' is the actual property that best fits the role.)

(2) as merely a normative theory, which presupposes an understanding of what rightness is, and instead merely seeks to inform us of what things in the world have this property (and why). For example, suppose one thought that obedience to authority was the sole virtue. Then, if it turns out that God exists as the ultimate authority, then this prior moral principle might lead one to conclude that one ought to do whatever God commands. But this version of the view doesn't entail that God is the source of the moral truths, or anything like that. He merely features in their content.

Objective and Subjective Oughts

[I was just looking up this old exam answer I wrote for a class last year on 'subjective oughts', and I realized that I hadn't yet posted it to the blog. So, here goes -- lightly edited, but still lacking footnotes, etc.]

What is the distinction between what a person “subjectively ought” to do and what a person “objectively ought” to do? What is the best analysis of each notion? What objections are there, if any, to these best analyses? (You might discuss more than one attempt to analyze them.) Is the notion of the “subjective ‘ought’” a useful notion? If so, how? If not, why has it been thought to be useful, and what is wrong with that thought?