Hypothetical Imperatives

The distinction between categorical and hypothetical imperatives is typically said to be that only the latter depend on our desires. This is potentially misleading. Certain categorical imperatives may also be conditional on our desires, after all. E.g. "if you want to torture children, you should seek psychiatric help." Of course, here the required course of action is not merely a means to fulfilling the antecedent desire. But we could imagine a (perhaps not very plausible) view -- somewhat akin to ethical egoism -- according to which we're categorically required to act so as to fulfill our present desires, whatever they may be. How are hypothetical imperatives different?

Does Ad-blocking Hurt Websites?

Ars Technica writes:

There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue. Because we are a technology site, we have a very large base of ad blockers. Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn't pay. In a way, that's what ad blocking is doing to us.

I'm not convinced. What's wrong with the following reasoning: Advertisers are paying for the chance to increase sales. They'll pay for ads when the expected benefit exceeds the cost. But, just as the incidence of 'click fraud' (clicking an ad link just to drive up advertising costs, without any intention to buy the product) causes advertisers to pay less per click than they otherwise would, so the incidence of what we might call 'dud views' (i.e. page loads where the ads won't be clicked or even attended to) reduce the price that advertisers will be willing to pay per pageview. If ad-blocking users have a prior disposition to ignore ads anyway, then convincing these users to disable their adblockers will simply serve to increase the number of 'dud views'. It does nothing to increase the expected sales for advertisers, and hence they won't be willing to pay for these extra views. They'll just react* by cutting the price they pay per view, to keep their expenses commensurate with the expected benefit.

Williamson on Dialectic

"Faced with a skeptic about reason, or about everything except reason, many philosophers would be willing to start a conversation, out of politeness, curiosity, competitiveness, or the desire to save a soul. But their inability to achieve a dialectical triumph over such a resourceful opponent does not oblige them to become skeptics about reason, or everything except reason, themselves. There is no bad faith in continuing to claim (and have) knowledge of the contested truths. For the anti-skeptic is not obliged to treat dialectic as the measure of all things. Indeed, the claim that dialectic is the measure of all things faces self-defeat, for it cannot triumph dialectically over its denial; even if it appeared to be getting the better of the argument, would not taking that to establish its truth beg the question?"

-- Timothy Williamson, The Philosophy of Philosophy, p.240.

Holism and Metaphysical Grounds

[Some thoughts inspired by Shamik's recent talk 'On the Plurality of Grounds'...]

Suppose comparativism about mass is true, i.e. "the fundamental facts about mass are facts about the mass-relations between things". Absolute mass claims, such as that my laptop is 2 kgs, must ultimately be grounded in mass-relational facts, such as that my laptop is twice as massive as the standard kilogram weight in Paris. Of course, no single such relation suffices: the standard kilogram might have been twice as heavy as it actually is (in comparative terms: mass-related to the vast majority of other objects at double its actual ratios), in which case the aforementioned relation would imply that my laptop was 4 kgs rather than just 2. So the full ground of my laptop's being 2 kgs must instead be massively plural, perhaps depending on the entire universe of comparative mass facts.

At this point, Shamik worries that the universe of comparative facts can't ground the single absolute fact about my laptop's mass, because it includes facts that are (intuitively) explanatorily irrelevant. For example, the mass relation between my laptop and some particle on Alpha Centauri seems irrelevant to my laptop's being 2 kgs. Shamik's solution is to introduce plural grounding: no single absolute mass fact has a ground, but the set of all such facts is plurally grounded in the set of all relational mass facts. Neat enough, but I wonder whether we should really accept the intuition of explanatory irrelevance that prevents us from simply grounding each individual absolute mass fact in the set of all relational mass facts.

Forms of "Being Active"

An interesting excerpt from Matthew Boyle's NDPR review of Lucy O'Brien and Matthew Soteriou (eds.), Mental Actions:

Co-operation vs. Benevolence

It's worth distinguishing two superficially similar but fundamentally different answers to the traditional question 'why be moral?'. They are superficially similar in that both support benevolent behaviour in ordinary circumstances. And both involve some revision to traditional conceptions of rationality. But the precise nature of the called-for revision differs significantly between the two approaches, in a way that may also lead to significant practical differences in certain (neglected) cases.

Peer Review for Open Access Textbooks

I'm a big fan of open-access publishing: Philosophers' Imprint, NDPR, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy are all wonderful resources.  I only wish that we could add to this list a respected source for open-access philosophy textbooks.  One can always self-publish, of course, but then readers lack the quality-control assurance that selective publishers provide, and the author won't get as much professional credit for their efforts (e.g. at tenure review time).  I can see a few possible solutions:

Sleep Schedules and Equal Consideration

People generally appreciate that sleep is important, and so one shouldn't make a lot of noise in residential areas late at night. That's great. What bothers me is that people often treat the mornings rather differently. Scheduling maintenance work on campus housing for 7:45am somehow doesn't strike the university as grossly inconsiderate, the way that scheduling it for 11pm surely would. Of course, one can imagine circumstances in which this would be perfectly reasonable, i.e. if one had a reasonable expectation that everyone would ordinarily be awake at that time anyhow. But we're talking about graduate student housing here, and it should be common knowledge that there's a fair bit of variation in the sleep schedules of graduate students. Many find that they work better at night, and so don't ordinarily wake up until fairly late in the morning.

Desiring Each Good

Some critics allege that the utilitarian agent has but a single desire: to maximize welfare. This would seem to embody an objectionably instrumental attitude towards individual persons. Rather than caring about each of Tom, Dick, and Harry in their own right, the utilitarian (allegedly) just cares about helping them as a constitutive means to promoting aggregate welfare. Tom serves as a faceless 'receptacle' of utility, rather than mattering for his own sake.

The obvious response for the utilitarian is to deny that their psychology is accurately characterized, at the fundamental level, by such a totalizing desire. They don't just desire a single thing (namely, goodness in general). Rather, they desire each possible good, in proportion to its value. They value Tom's welfare in particular, and also Dick's, Harry's, and everyone else's. And it's just a mistake -- a gross mischaracterization on the part of critics -- to confuse this vast collection of particularized desires with the single, extensionally equivalent, generic desire for aggregate welfare.

Philosophers' Carnival #103

Welcome to the 103rd Philosophers' Carnival: a round-up of recent philosophical blog posts from around the web.