Modest and Immodest Patriotism

In 'Modesty Without Illusion', Jason Brennan argues for the (Adam Smith inspired) Two Standards Account of modesty, according to which:

The wisest person focuses on the ideal. His respect for that ideal combined with his intense self-awareness and self-control drives him progressively more to approximate that ideal. On the other hand, the immodest person focuses his attention primarily on the second, commonplace standard. A person who ranks better than average in moral worth might focus on this standard, and thereby become arrogant and contemptuous of others. The modest wise person attends to the gap between his moral worth and the worth of the ideal. The immodest person attends to the gap between his worth and the worth of others below him. (p.120)

I'm reminded of the contrast between liberal and conservative conceptions of patriotism...

Back from NZ

Well, that was a fun trip. We were staying with family in Christchurch for the 7.1 magnitude earthquake, but our house was undamaged. (Incredibly, one of my brothers slept right through it!)

Here are a couple of scenic photos from our visit to Marlborough Sounds:

Collective Harms from Bad Voting or Abstaining

Jason Brennan argues that it's impermissible to vote 'badly' (i.e., voting without sufficient reason for harmful or unjust policies -- but misleading evidence may be exculpatory here). As he puts it in the abstract for his 'Polluting the Polls' paper, "This duty to avoid voting badly is grounded in a general duty not to engage in collectively harmful activities when the personal cost of restraint is low." (Basing the duty on the collective harm done is necessary for Jason, as he takes the expected impact of an individual vote to be negligible -- easily outweighed by any warm fuzzies the bad voter might get from voting.) But I wonder whether this principle might "prove too much", by equally establishing a duty to vote well rather than abstain (whereas Jason considers the latter to be perfectly permissible).

Human Nature is Depressing

... at least, if this is accurate:

Parks and Stone found that unselfish colleagues come to be resented because they "raise the bar" for what is expected of everyone. As a result, workers feel the new standard will make everyone else look bad.

It doesn't matter that the overall welfare of the group or the task at hand is better served by someone's unselfish behavior, Parks said. "What is objectively good, you see as subjectively bad," he said.

3QD Philosophy Nominations Open

The folks at 3 Quarks Daily asked me to share the news that they've opened nominations for the 'best philosophy blog post' of the last 12 months (to be judged by Columbia's Prof. Akeel Bilgrami, after a round of public voting to narrow down the field). Self-nominations are encouraged, so if you have a philosophy blog, head on over and share the link of your favourite recent(ish) post.

I'm thinking of sending in one of the following three posts:
- Species and Cognitive Enhancement (fun and interesting, though I don't say anything particularly original)
- Can Death Harm Non-Persons? (slightly more sophisticated, whilst still a topic of general interest)
- Acquired (Non-instrumental) Value (more theoretically insightful, I think, but of less general interest)

I'm currently leaning towards the middle option as a kind of compromise, but remain open to suggestions...

Two Forms of Lexical Priority

J.S. Mill famously held that 'higher pleasures' are lexically prior to 'lower pleasures' in the utilitarian calculus. ("Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures...") But distinguish two versions of this view:*

(1) Weak (global) lexical priority: No amount of lower pleasures can compensate for the total lack of higher pleasures. (Better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, and all that.)

(2) Strong (local) lexical priority: Whenever one has a choice between additional higher or lower pleasures, one should always prefer the higher pleasure, no matter the relative quantities on offer. (That is: choose quality over quantity, without exception.)

Recent Work

Long time no blog! (Internet access is still a scarce resource in the antipodes...) Anyhow, as a quick update:

(1) I presented my 'Value Holism' [pdf] talk at the University of Canterbury 'Philosophy Discussion Retreat' in Kaikoura (a very fun trip!).

(2) I then gave an ANU 'PhilSoc' talk titled 'Moral Primitives: fitting attitudes for consequentialists' -- the content of which should end up being the first chapter of my dissertation. (This paper grew out of my earlier stuff on global consequentialism, but I'm reworking it to focus on the more general question of how acts are normatively assessable in importantly different ways from mere evaluands.)

(3) I've also been prettifying my CV in LaTeX, and getting back into using Ubuntu over Windows -- I might end up writing some tips for the latter in the future post.

Any additional feedback on the linked papers (especially the second) would be most welcome!

Tech tip: if you hate opening PDFs because Adobe Reader takes so long to load, uninstall that resource hog and download the near-instant Sumatra PDF viewer instead. Or, if you prefer in-browser viewing, try this Google Viewer bookmarklet (from here) before clicking the pdf links above.

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.