I've previously suggested that schools should focus more on developing cognitive skills rather than the rote memorization of facts. As another aspect of this, we might consider how the facts are taught. Typically they're simply presented as unsupported testimony, ultimately resting on the authority of the teacher or textbook. This is lamentable in two respects: (1) It fosters bad intellectual habits: students should be taught to probe and question, not merely accept assertions at face value. (2) It does little to advance students' understanding of the topic at hand. Rather than baldly reporting the facts as we take them to be, educators should also impart how we came by the knowledge in the first place, and thus how curious students could (at least in principle) test it for themselves.
Situating knowledge in its historical context would give students a greater understanding and appreciation for their disciplines, and for how intellectual progress is made. It is no longer a "black box", as if facts found their way into textbooks by some inexplicable magic. By showing progress and discovery to be an ongoing human endeavour, more students could come to fully realize that this is an endeavour that they could contribute to also. For example: for many school students, the "scientific method" - the way they're taught to do science - consists in memorizing textbooks and rotely performing predefined lab tasks. Sometimes they're told to write up a lab report in terms of "hypothesis testing", but this seems tacky and artificial when it's so divorced from the way that everything else in their science class has been presented. Teaching science as a closed book fails to make clear to young students the vital role waiting for them if they choose to pursue the subject further. (And of course the same could be said of other fields too. A history textbook might be presented without any explanation of where it came from, or how actual historians go about their work.)
A more engaging style of teaching might go something like this: Begin with a problem, and explain why it's important. Brainstorm possible solutions, or ways one might begin to inquire further. (In early sessions, students may have no idea what to say here. But hopefully they would develop the skill after further exposure to this teaching method. If so, that would be a significant educational achievement in itself.) A skilled teacher might be able to subtly guide the class discussion in the right direction, ultimately enabling them to "solve" the problem themselves. In any case, you can offer a basic account of historical methods for resolving it. The crucial point here is that you teach more than just the end result -- the "brute facts" accepted by relevant authorities. You also teach how they know it.
By teaching disciplinary methods to young students, the hope is that, in addition to better understanding the discpline, they will also be better prepared to use the methods themselves. Science classes should teach students how to be scientists, not merely indoctrinate them with what The Scientists have said. Similarly for history, and so on. Of course, part of this has to include a healthy respect for past research, and an adequately comprehensive knowledge of what those findings were, so I'm not advocating a total upheaval here. But it does seems to require an important change in perspective from the pure fact-imparting model of contemporary "schooling".
Sunday, July 30, 2006
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Democracy and Power: the question of 'who'
One often finds participatory democracy presented as taking a relativistic "will of the people" as its ideal, in contrast to the more "principled" rule of a managerialist elite. But this confuses outcomes with methods. It would certainly be a mistake to say that the right result is whatever follows from a popular vote. It would be just as silly to define the right in terms of whatever the managerialists happen to prefer. Normative politics is surely not so arbitrary. We should understand "right outcomes" as an independent ideal. The question is who would most reliably pursue it. Should we invest decision-making power in a few flawed politicians, or distribute it more evenly amongst the populace?
This question may also be conflated with that of the scope of political power. Unrestricted mob rule is often presented as an alternative to liberal constitutionalism and individual rights. But what has that got to do with participatory democracy? Giving absolute power to elected politicians would be silly too, but no-one takes that as an objection to managerialism. Perhaps the problem is that some demagogues actually advocate unrestricted populism. They should be opposed, along with anyone else who would seek to strengthen political power over individuals. But their position shouldn't be confused with participatory democracy itself.
So there are three political axes to distinguish here. The first dimension concerns the objectivity of right outcomes, or 'what' to do. The second concerns the rightful scope and strength of political power. Finally, we can ask about the distribution of that power: the question of 'who'. This, I suggest, is how the democratic question should be understood. It's merely about who should wield power, not how much power they should get, nor what they ought to use it for. Those are entirely separate questions.
This question may also be conflated with that of the scope of political power. Unrestricted mob rule is often presented as an alternative to liberal constitutionalism and individual rights. But what has that got to do with participatory democracy? Giving absolute power to elected politicians would be silly too, but no-one takes that as an objection to managerialism. Perhaps the problem is that some demagogues actually advocate unrestricted populism. They should be opposed, along with anyone else who would seek to strengthen political power over individuals. But their position shouldn't be confused with participatory democracy itself.
So there are three political axes to distinguish here. The first dimension concerns the objectivity of right outcomes, or 'what' to do. The second concerns the rightful scope and strength of political power. Finally, we can ask about the distribution of that power: the question of 'who'. This, I suggest, is how the democratic question should be understood. It's merely about who should wield power, not how much power they should get, nor what they ought to use it for. Those are entirely separate questions.
Ideal Appearance and Reality
Objective reality, we might think, is evidence-transcendent. It goes beyond simply how things appear, to us, to be. No matter how careful our inquiry, the evidence may be misleading. So our justified conclusions may still diverge from the truth of the matter. This is in tension with any view that defines truth (perhaps in a restricted domain of discourse) merely as the end-point to which rational agents would ultimately converge. We might reasonably expect to converge on the truth, of course, but we shouldn't rule out from the start the possibility of insuperable error. Not if we take ourselves to be describing facts that hold independently of anyone's opinions about the matter.
Is that right? Or could there be a domain of objective reality that is transparent to rational inquirers, and this fact of transparency is itself transparent? For in the latter case, we could be in a position to know that ideal judgments couldn't diverge from the truth after all. But that needn't lead us to deflate its objectivity at all. The order of explanation still comports with realism: ideal agents would agree on P, presumably because P is (independently) true. But perhaps in this case the preclusion of ideal error is not really made 'from the start'. It's only after judging that we (somehow) have epistemic access to the independent metaphysical reality that realists can make such claims.
In contrast, quasi-realists (idealists? constructivists? I'm not sure what the best label is) reverse the order of explanation, and hold that P is true merely because ideal agents would converge on this result. So the notion of ideal error really can be dismissed right away, simply by definition, before we begin any kind of extra-linguistic investigation.
The modal rationalist -- who links possibility with ideal conceivability -- must decide which of these two paths to take. The constructivist line seems almost eliminativist, though. Intuitively, I would think, our concept of possibility is realist in nature. We think that possibility claims are objectively about the world (and how it could have been), rather than merely about our idealized opinions. But if we want to be realists, do we have any grounds to rule out the possibility of modal error persisting to the limit of ideality? Or should we instead be skeptical of whether ideal conceivability suffices to guarantee possibility?
Is that right? Or could there be a domain of objective reality that is transparent to rational inquirers, and this fact of transparency is itself transparent? For in the latter case, we could be in a position to know that ideal judgments couldn't diverge from the truth after all. But that needn't lead us to deflate its objectivity at all. The order of explanation still comports with realism: ideal agents would agree on P, presumably because P is (independently) true. But perhaps in this case the preclusion of ideal error is not really made 'from the start'. It's only after judging that we (somehow) have epistemic access to the independent metaphysical reality that realists can make such claims.
In contrast, quasi-realists (idealists? constructivists? I'm not sure what the best label is) reverse the order of explanation, and hold that P is true merely because ideal agents would converge on this result. So the notion of ideal error really can be dismissed right away, simply by definition, before we begin any kind of extra-linguistic investigation.
The modal rationalist -- who links possibility with ideal conceivability -- must decide which of these two paths to take. The constructivist line seems almost eliminativist, though. Intuitively, I would think, our concept of possibility is realist in nature. We think that possibility claims are objectively about the world (and how it could have been), rather than merely about our idealized opinions. But if we want to be realists, do we have any grounds to rule out the possibility of modal error persisting to the limit of ideality? Or should we instead be skeptical of whether ideal conceivability suffices to guarantee possibility?
Book Mashups
The rules of the game:
1. Rearrange and combine the titles of two books, adding punctuation as needed. (It probably helps if at least one of them is fairly well known.)
2. Whoever is first to guess an original pair can replace that mashup with two of their own.
Here are three to get the ball rolling:
- Crime, Reason, and the Realm of Punishment
- From Animal Ethics to Farm Metaphysics
- Beyond Liberty: on good and evil
1. Rearrange and combine the titles of two books, adding punctuation as needed. (It probably helps if at least one of them is fairly well known.)
2. Whoever is first to guess an original pair can replace that mashup with two of their own.
Here are three to get the ball rolling:
- Crime, Reason, and the Realm of Punishment
- From Animal Ethics to Farm Metaphysics
- Beyond Liberty: on good and evil
Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Looking Ahead
Two important deadlines are beginning to loom large as the year progresses: (1) finishing the work for my honours degree, and (2) applying for grad school. I'm mainly writing this down just to get my thoughts/plans all straightened out. But any feedback or advice would be a welcome bonus.
On the first point, I have three pieces of assessment:
(A) 2500 word essay on aesthetics (compulsory honours seminar). We've only just started, but I might look at the question of objectivity, ideal convergence, etc., as that could tie in with some of my meta-ethical interests [cf. (b) below]. Otherwise, something on the philosophy of fiction could be fun. [Due early October.]
(B) 5000 word essay on effectively any topic [due end of Oct.]. I quite like the idea of further exploring the sort of meta-ontological deflationist picture I outlined here. Or else perhaps some political theory -- especially deliberative democracy or Benkler's work on "peer production" [cf. (d) below]. I might also sit in on some philosophy of mind lectures, and see if anything there captures my attention.
(C) 10-15k word sub-thesis. [Due mid October.] This is on the link between apriority and necessity. I've been slowly narrowing down exactly what it'll cover, and am just getting starting on actually writing it now. The first chapter will be mere exposition, outlining Kripke's arguments for the necessary a posteriori, and the Chalmers-Jackson response from 2-D semantics. (The sort of stuff I discussed here.) The second chapter might look at the challenge from nomological necessitarianism (which attempts to collapse metaphysical possibility down to the nomological space), with reference to Bird's and Shoemaker's arguments. From what I've skimmed of them so far, they look fairly Kripkean, and so should be vulnerable to a similar 2-D response. For something a bit more original, I might also address the world-essentialist claim that our world couldn't have had different laws. Could be fun. Finally, in the third chapter I'll discuss the objection from "strong necessities" or primitive modality, and see whether my reconciliation strategy pans out.
Should be a busy couple of months! October will be dreadful. What's worse, that's when I'll have to sit the GRE too! (The next one is in February, but if the results aren't available till March, I'm guessing that's too late for the American grad schools?)
As for grad school, I'm told I should have a fairly safe spot here at ANU (though of course nothing's certain), so should probably only bother applying to those American schools which I'd prefer to here. I think NYU and Princeton would have to be the top two, based mostly on their reputations (plus the pretty pictures from here, ha), but I don't have very settled (or well-informed) views on the matter. After those two, I'd pick Rutgers, Michigan, and perhaps MIT. I guess ANU fits in soon after. (Should Harvard and Stanford sneak in ahead? Pittsburgh? Columbia? I really know very little about these places...)
I'd ideally like somewhere that's strong in both ethics and metaphysics, with bonus points for political philosophy and cognitive science. (Some deficits might be covered by a nearby complementary department, as per Harvard and MIT?) I don't yet have any definite idea of what I want to write my thesis on, or even what broad subfield, though here are a few possible topics that capture my imagination at present:
a) Metaphilosophy: conceptual analysis, the reliability of intuitions, how substantive a priori knowledge is possible.
b) Metaphysics: "realism"/correspondence vs. idealized Peircean "constructivism" about truth. (This is a nice one since it also touches on apriority and metaethics.)
c) Ethics: Perhaps "welfarism" would make a nice umbrella topic here, letting me pursue both issues about welfare/harm (which I've blogged about quite a lot recently), as well as interesting questions about whether there are other fundamental values besides welfare.
d) Political philosophy: "free culture" vs. intellectual property rights, commons-based peer production (wikis, etc.), and the implications for democratic participation. Such fun topics, so they must be philosophical, right? A little out of the mainstream, maybe...
e) CogSci: (i) "neuroethics" is a nice mix of fields. Brings up interesting issues about moral responsibility and such. Alternatively: (ii) AI is always fun to think about. (iii) Can cognitive science shed any light on a priori reasoning?
f) Metaphysics /philosophy of science: the idea of "levels of explanation" (say, between the micro and macro realms, physics vs. social science, neuroscience vs. psychology, etc.) is an interesting one which I'd like to know more about. Also, questions of whether, say, chairs or the atoms that comprise them are more "fundamentally" real. Dennett's 'Real Patterns', etc.
g) Epistemology: understanding and explanation. They seem like important philosophical goals, but I'm in want of an explanation that'd help me better understand exactly what they amount to. (This is more just an area of curiosity, I guess, I can't really see myself writing a dissertation on it.)
The first three are perhaps the most serious contenders at present, though it's all very speculative at this stage.
ANU vs. America:
The biggest difference is between ANU and all the rest. American grad schools have an extra 2 years of coursework, which I think is a big advantage given my broad interests, current indecision, and unconscionable ignorance of both philosophy of science and history of philosophy. The extra teaching opportunities would be a plus, and exposure to a different philosophical climate might be an eye-opener (shifting to ANU from Canterbury certainly has been!). Overall, I'd guess that graduate education from a top U.S. school would probably help me become a more well-rounded philosopher. I also hear that their degrees are generally favoured on the job market.
On the other hand, the sheer level of philosophical activity here, and the general atmosphere for grad students, is reputed to be pretty hard to beat. Especially if I want to write about conceptual analysis, this would seem the ideal place, with Chalmers and Jackson both here. Another student recommended taking a year off midway through the degree to teach (adjunct?) in a U.S. department, which might ameliorate some of the disadvantages mentioned earlier.
So it could be pretty good to stay here. But I expect the very top American schools would be even better. The main question is: which ones? How many should I apply to? Feel free to add your 2c below, or email me if you prefer. (I'm especially interested in info that's not reflected in the PGR rankings, such as teaching quality, general "atmosphere" and openness of the department and grad student community, etc.) Though of course I'll be sprinkling the comments with plenty of salt prior to consumption... ;-)
On the first point, I have three pieces of assessment:
(A) 2500 word essay on aesthetics (compulsory honours seminar). We've only just started, but I might look at the question of objectivity, ideal convergence, etc., as that could tie in with some of my meta-ethical interests [cf. (b) below]. Otherwise, something on the philosophy of fiction could be fun. [Due early October.]
(B) 5000 word essay on effectively any topic [due end of Oct.]. I quite like the idea of further exploring the sort of meta-ontological deflationist picture I outlined here. Or else perhaps some political theory -- especially deliberative democracy or Benkler's work on "peer production" [cf. (d) below]. I might also sit in on some philosophy of mind lectures, and see if anything there captures my attention.
(C) 10-15k word sub-thesis. [Due mid October.] This is on the link between apriority and necessity. I've been slowly narrowing down exactly what it'll cover, and am just getting starting on actually writing it now. The first chapter will be mere exposition, outlining Kripke's arguments for the necessary a posteriori, and the Chalmers-Jackson response from 2-D semantics. (The sort of stuff I discussed here.) The second chapter might look at the challenge from nomological necessitarianism (which attempts to collapse metaphysical possibility down to the nomological space), with reference to Bird's and Shoemaker's arguments. From what I've skimmed of them so far, they look fairly Kripkean, and so should be vulnerable to a similar 2-D response. For something a bit more original, I might also address the world-essentialist claim that our world couldn't have had different laws. Could be fun. Finally, in the third chapter I'll discuss the objection from "strong necessities" or primitive modality, and see whether my reconciliation strategy pans out.
Should be a busy couple of months! October will be dreadful. What's worse, that's when I'll have to sit the GRE too! (The next one is in February, but if the results aren't available till March, I'm guessing that's too late for the American grad schools?)
As for grad school, I'm told I should have a fairly safe spot here at ANU (though of course nothing's certain), so should probably only bother applying to those American schools which I'd prefer to here. I think NYU and Princeton would have to be the top two, based mostly on their reputations (plus the pretty pictures from here, ha), but I don't have very settled (or well-informed) views on the matter. After those two, I'd pick Rutgers, Michigan, and perhaps MIT. I guess ANU fits in soon after. (Should Harvard and Stanford sneak in ahead? Pittsburgh? Columbia? I really know very little about these places...)
I'd ideally like somewhere that's strong in both ethics and metaphysics, with bonus points for political philosophy and cognitive science. (Some deficits might be covered by a nearby complementary department, as per Harvard and MIT?) I don't yet have any definite idea of what I want to write my thesis on, or even what broad subfield, though here are a few possible topics that capture my imagination at present:
a) Metaphilosophy: conceptual analysis, the reliability of intuitions, how substantive a priori knowledge is possible.
b) Metaphysics: "realism"/correspondence vs. idealized Peircean "constructivism" about truth. (This is a nice one since it also touches on apriority and metaethics.)
c) Ethics: Perhaps "welfarism" would make a nice umbrella topic here, letting me pursue both issues about welfare/harm (which I've blogged about quite a lot recently), as well as interesting questions about whether there are other fundamental values besides welfare.
d) Political philosophy: "free culture" vs. intellectual property rights, commons-based peer production (wikis, etc.), and the implications for democratic participation. Such fun topics, so they must be philosophical, right? A little out of the mainstream, maybe...
e) CogSci: (i) "neuroethics" is a nice mix of fields. Brings up interesting issues about moral responsibility and such. Alternatively: (ii) AI is always fun to think about. (iii) Can cognitive science shed any light on a priori reasoning?
f) Metaphysics /philosophy of science: the idea of "levels of explanation" (say, between the micro and macro realms, physics vs. social science, neuroscience vs. psychology, etc.) is an interesting one which I'd like to know more about. Also, questions of whether, say, chairs or the atoms that comprise them are more "fundamentally" real. Dennett's 'Real Patterns', etc.
g) Epistemology: understanding and explanation. They seem like important philosophical goals, but I'm in want of an explanation that'd help me better understand exactly what they amount to. (This is more just an area of curiosity, I guess, I can't really see myself writing a dissertation on it.)
The first three are perhaps the most serious contenders at present, though it's all very speculative at this stage.
ANU vs. America:
The biggest difference is between ANU and all the rest. American grad schools have an extra 2 years of coursework, which I think is a big advantage given my broad interests, current indecision, and unconscionable ignorance of both philosophy of science and history of philosophy. The extra teaching opportunities would be a plus, and exposure to a different philosophical climate might be an eye-opener (shifting to ANU from Canterbury certainly has been!). Overall, I'd guess that graduate education from a top U.S. school would probably help me become a more well-rounded philosopher. I also hear that their degrees are generally favoured on the job market.
On the other hand, the sheer level of philosophical activity here, and the general atmosphere for grad students, is reputed to be pretty hard to beat. Especially if I want to write about conceptual analysis, this would seem the ideal place, with Chalmers and Jackson both here. Another student recommended taking a year off midway through the degree to teach (adjunct?) in a U.S. department, which might ameliorate some of the disadvantages mentioned earlier.
So it could be pretty good to stay here. But I expect the very top American schools would be even better. The main question is: which ones? How many should I apply to? Feel free to add your 2c below, or email me if you prefer. (I'm especially interested in info that's not reflected in the PGR rankings, such as teaching quality, general "atmosphere" and openness of the department and grad student community, etc.) Though of course I'll be sprinkling the comments with plenty of salt prior to consumption... ;-)
Monday, July 24, 2006
Essence and Identity
Essentialists take seriously the idea of de re modality, and claim that "the modal properties of an individual (properties such as being essentially F or possibly G) are had independently of the way in which the individual is referred to." (Della Rocca, p.226.)
I once outlined a couple of Quinean anti-essentialist arguments in this old post:
Such concerns may be countered by noting that description (2), but not (1), is a rigid designator, referring to the same object X -- the number 9 -- in all possible worlds. There are possible worlds in which description (1) would be satisfied by some object other than X, but this does nothing to show that the object X itself could fail to be greater than 7.
But note that rigid designation presupposes trans-world identity. You can't pick out the same object in all possible worlds unless there's some criterion to determine which other-worldly objects are the same as each other. It requires that possible worlds come with objects' identities "built in", so to speak. (Kripke proposes that we simply stipulate that we're talking about the possibility in which this very man wins the election, or whatever.) Well, perhaps that's too strict. Really all we require is that there be an objective answer to the question of "which object is X?" in any given possible world. The answer needn't be explicitly "built in", so long as we can extract it, say with an appropriate counterpart theory. If the counterpart relation is objective and determinate, then the essentialist could obtain something close enough to "rigid designation" simply by adopting that intension which picks out the counterpart of X in each world where one exists.
What the anti-essentialist requires, then, is a relativistic counterpart theory. That would mean that there's no uniquely correct answer to "which object is [the counterpart of] X?" in a possible world W. Rather, it will depend on which actual properties of X are most salient in the present context. The counterpart of X in W will be whatever W-object is most relevantly similar to the actual X, but what's "relevant" can vary from context to context. So one cannot hope to rigidly designate X any longer, since there's no objective fact as to which W-object is X. (Sometimes you'll want Y as the counterpart, and other times, Z.)
On this view (recently mentioned in passing here), there are no haecceities, or deep metaphysical facts about identity. Of course it's trivially true that each object (in world w at time t) is self-identical. But there are no objective facts about trans-world identities (nor presumably cross-temporal ones either -- compare Parfitian reductionism about personal identity). There are merely distributions of property-clusters across space and time, and there is no "further fact" about whether two such clusters are really the "same" object. Once we settle the qualitative facts, there is no further work to do. If it's agreed that the Twin Earth scenario is possible, no deep question remains as to whether the watery stuff in the lakes and rivers is really water. The difference is merely semantic.
We can still talk about modal properties, but they really belong to the words, not the objects. To say that water is necessary H2O is merely to say that our terms 'water' and 'H2O' have the same (secondary) intension. It's a metalinguistic claim, not a metaphysical one. To say that I'm "essentially human" is merely to say that anything non-human is excluded from the intension of 'RC'. It's not really saying anything deep about me, or my nature across other possible worlds. For the anti-essentialist, there's nothing deep to be said. (That's not to deny that there can be practical reasons for adopting some intensions rather than others.)
Suppose the world could have been such as to contain nothing but a pair of qualitatively indiscernible dice. We can give a full description of them: red with white pips, a certain size, etc. Are they the same dice as the ones on my desk? Or a pair that happen to actually be in Las Vegas? Or are they not to be identified with any actual dice at all? The anti-essentialist suggests that these are empty questions. The qualitative description gave you the possibility. There aren't any further "identity facts" to settle. There aren't different possibilities corresponding to each possible identity of the dice. No, there's just the one scenario being described, and we've already said what it contains.
I find that part of the story pretty plausible. Here's a more radical step: the dice roll, and one lands on '3', the other on '4'. Might it instead have happened that the former landed on '4', and the other on '3'? Is that a different possibility? It could be if this time the '4' lands first, or in a different position, or otherwise involves a different distribution of qualitative properties through space and time. But suppose all that remains the same. What we're considering is a switch in identities alone, with all else held fixed. If you think identity is a "further fact", then such an haecceital "switch" should be possible. But I think I want to deny this, and again claim that there's just the one scenario here, so that once the full qualitative description is given, there's nothing more left open.
After all, if you allow the two dice to switch identities without any outward symptom of the change, where do you draw the line? Couldn't just one of them switch identities with another non-existent die? Or perhaps the other could become the Las Vegas die? There would be an infinity of qualitatively indiscernible possible worlds, and that seems a tad excessive.
Are there any serious disadvantages to the anti-essentialist, anti-haecceitist view? One might worry that it returns the wrong probability verdicts: we should think it twice as likely to roll a 3 and 4 than two 4s, presumably because there are two ways the former can occur. But you don't need haecceities to recognize that. When you look at the full range of qualitative possibilities, including some where the 3 lands x seconds before the 4, and vice versa, there may be indefinitely many qualitatively discernible possibilities. If we look at the ratios of resulting frequencies, we'd presumably find that twice as many of these scenarios involve a 3 and a 4, as opposed to two 4s. No haecceities needed.
P.S. I think this view might be equivalent to a super-essentialist view which sees all -- even extrinsic or relational -- properties as "essential" to an object. We could effectively deny that anything in other possible worlds is identical to the actual me, just like, strictly speaking, my future temporal parts are non-identical to my past temporal parts. We have no essence that endures through time, nor across modal space either. You can construct four-dimensional spacetime "worms", and if we add other possible worlds into the mix then that could give a fifth dimension. But there's something a little bit arbitrary about the resulting entities. Some are more gerrymandered than others, and we'll generally find it more useful to talk about the less blatantly gerrymandered ones. But we might deny that these are wholly natural divisions of reality in the first place. We might have at least some discretion to divide up the worlds into 5-D "objects" as we please. And of course when you draw the lines yourself, it doesn't mean a lot when you later note that they never cross certain boundaries. You're merely commenting on your own classificatory habits, not the deep structure of reality-in-itself.
I once outlined a couple of Quinean anti-essentialist arguments in this old post:
Quine points out that a single object X can be equally well specified by either of the following two descriptions:
(1) The number of planets in our solar system
(2) 7 + 2
Now, he asks, is it a necessary truth about X that it is a number greater than 7? Well, it depends which specification you use. Of course [7 + 2] is necessarily greater than 7; but [the number of planets in our solar system] surely is not. So, it seems, we can't really say anything about X objectively, i.e. independently of how we specify it.
Such concerns may be countered by noting that description (2), but not (1), is a rigid designator, referring to the same object X -- the number 9 -- in all possible worlds. There are possible worlds in which description (1) would be satisfied by some object other than X, but this does nothing to show that the object X itself could fail to be greater than 7.
But note that rigid designation presupposes trans-world identity. You can't pick out the same object in all possible worlds unless there's some criterion to determine which other-worldly objects are the same as each other. It requires that possible worlds come with objects' identities "built in", so to speak. (Kripke proposes that we simply stipulate that we're talking about the possibility in which this very man wins the election, or whatever.) Well, perhaps that's too strict. Really all we require is that there be an objective answer to the question of "which object is X?" in any given possible world. The answer needn't be explicitly "built in", so long as we can extract it, say with an appropriate counterpart theory. If the counterpart relation is objective and determinate, then the essentialist could obtain something close enough to "rigid designation" simply by adopting that intension which picks out the counterpart of X in each world where one exists.
What the anti-essentialist requires, then, is a relativistic counterpart theory. That would mean that there's no uniquely correct answer to "which object is [the counterpart of] X?" in a possible world W. Rather, it will depend on which actual properties of X are most salient in the present context. The counterpart of X in W will be whatever W-object is most relevantly similar to the actual X, but what's "relevant" can vary from context to context. So one cannot hope to rigidly designate X any longer, since there's no objective fact as to which W-object is X. (Sometimes you'll want Y as the counterpart, and other times, Z.)
On this view (recently mentioned in passing here), there are no haecceities, or deep metaphysical facts about identity. Of course it's trivially true that each object (in world w at time t) is self-identical. But there are no objective facts about trans-world identities (nor presumably cross-temporal ones either -- compare Parfitian reductionism about personal identity). There are merely distributions of property-clusters across space and time, and there is no "further fact" about whether two such clusters are really the "same" object. Once we settle the qualitative facts, there is no further work to do. If it's agreed that the Twin Earth scenario is possible, no deep question remains as to whether the watery stuff in the lakes and rivers is really water. The difference is merely semantic.
We can still talk about modal properties, but they really belong to the words, not the objects. To say that water is necessary H2O is merely to say that our terms 'water' and 'H2O' have the same (secondary) intension. It's a metalinguistic claim, not a metaphysical one. To say that I'm "essentially human" is merely to say that anything non-human is excluded from the intension of 'RC'. It's not really saying anything deep about me, or my nature across other possible worlds. For the anti-essentialist, there's nothing deep to be said. (That's not to deny that there can be practical reasons for adopting some intensions rather than others.)
Suppose the world could have been such as to contain nothing but a pair of qualitatively indiscernible dice. We can give a full description of them: red with white pips, a certain size, etc. Are they the same dice as the ones on my desk? Or a pair that happen to actually be in Las Vegas? Or are they not to be identified with any actual dice at all? The anti-essentialist suggests that these are empty questions. The qualitative description gave you the possibility. There aren't any further "identity facts" to settle. There aren't different possibilities corresponding to each possible identity of the dice. No, there's just the one scenario being described, and we've already said what it contains.
I find that part of the story pretty plausible. Here's a more radical step: the dice roll, and one lands on '3', the other on '4'. Might it instead have happened that the former landed on '4', and the other on '3'? Is that a different possibility? It could be if this time the '4' lands first, or in a different position, or otherwise involves a different distribution of qualitative properties through space and time. But suppose all that remains the same. What we're considering is a switch in identities alone, with all else held fixed. If you think identity is a "further fact", then such an haecceital "switch" should be possible. But I think I want to deny this, and again claim that there's just the one scenario here, so that once the full qualitative description is given, there's nothing more left open.
After all, if you allow the two dice to switch identities without any outward symptom of the change, where do you draw the line? Couldn't just one of them switch identities with another non-existent die? Or perhaps the other could become the Las Vegas die? There would be an infinity of qualitatively indiscernible possible worlds, and that seems a tad excessive.
Are there any serious disadvantages to the anti-essentialist, anti-haecceitist view? One might worry that it returns the wrong probability verdicts: we should think it twice as likely to roll a 3 and 4 than two 4s, presumably because there are two ways the former can occur. But you don't need haecceities to recognize that. When you look at the full range of qualitative possibilities, including some where the 3 lands x seconds before the 4, and vice versa, there may be indefinitely many qualitatively discernible possibilities. If we look at the ratios of resulting frequencies, we'd presumably find that twice as many of these scenarios involve a 3 and a 4, as opposed to two 4s. No haecceities needed.
P.S. I think this view might be equivalent to a super-essentialist view which sees all -- even extrinsic or relational -- properties as "essential" to an object. We could effectively deny that anything in other possible worlds is identical to the actual me, just like, strictly speaking, my future temporal parts are non-identical to my past temporal parts. We have no essence that endures through time, nor across modal space either. You can construct four-dimensional spacetime "worms", and if we add other possible worlds into the mix then that could give a fifth dimension. But there's something a little bit arbitrary about the resulting entities. Some are more gerrymandered than others, and we'll generally find it more useful to talk about the less blatantly gerrymandered ones. But we might deny that these are wholly natural divisions of reality in the first place. We might have at least some discretion to divide up the worlds into 5-D "objects" as we please. And of course when you draw the lines yourself, it doesn't mean a lot when you later note that they never cross certain boundaries. You're merely commenting on your own classificatory habits, not the deep structure of reality-in-itself.
Reference: Michael Della Rocca (2002) 'Essentialism versus Essentialism', in Gendler and Hawthorne (eds.) Conceivability and Possibility.
Sunday, July 23, 2006
Improved Recent Comments (maybe)
I'm trying out a new "recent comments" hack from Freshblog. It looks to have a lot of potential -- even picking up on new comments to old posts -- except that my new "comment blog" isn't auto-publishing properly. It only worked for the first comment that was forwarded to it. To get the other two to display I had to post them manually, which is far too much bother! Anyway, if I can't get it fixed soon, I'll have to revert back to the old hack. But I hope that won't be necessary...
Modal Quasi-Realism
In his paper 'Morals and Modals', Simon Blackburn extends his quasi-realism into the realm of modality, apparently inviting us to simply identify possibility with ideal conceivability:
He clarifies this by analogy to his meta-ethical position (p.70):
Yet I think I can make something of the idea that ideal conceivability and metaphysical possibility might come apart. Talk of how the world could have been, and talk of what can be coherently imagined (with idealized cognitive powers), are not obviously synonymous. There's plausibly a link of sorts: we typically take conceivability as at least a guide to possibility. There may even be a perfect coincidence between them, so that all and only logical possibilities are ideally conceivable. But does that really mean that apriority and necessity are one and the same thing? Or can we somehow separate them, even without any metaphysical divergence that we can latch on to? (Might there be a sense in which one holds "in virtue of" the other, for instance? Or are they the same thing just under different "modes of presentation"? How else might we make sense of this?)
The context here is that Craig had demonstrated decisively the imaginative block that faces us when we try to conceive, in proper detail, of a counterarithmetical reality. The projectivist is then poised to see this imaginative block as something expressed when we insist upon the necessity of arithmetic. But Wright commented, 'If as Craig makes plausible, we are unable to conceive of how any alternative determination might be viable, then that is how things are with us; it is a further, tendentious step to inflate our imaginative limitations into a metaphysical discovery'. And Craig, acknowledging that he and Wright agree that we should not ask the imagination to do too much, concedes immediately: 'It certainly is a further step'. Is it so clear that there is a further step? Only if claims of necessity are 'metaphysical discoveries', and this the projectivist will query. (Essays in Quasi-Realism, p.60)
He clarifies this by analogy to his meta-ethical position (p.70):
We do not find it trivial to cross from a sentiment to a moral judgment. Only certain sentiments -- those of a certain strength, or with certain objects, or those accompanied by sentiments about others who do not share them -- form a jumping-off point. We are also conscious that there are doubtless flaws and failures in our sentiments, which are perhaps capable of explanation in the same way that we explain the defects of those who are worse than ourselves. But when the sentiments are strong and nothing on the cards explains them by the presence of defects, we go ahead and moralize. We may be aware that our opinion is fallible, but that is because we can do something with the thought of an improved perspective, even when we are fairly certain that one will not be found, and here as elsewhere commitment can coexist with knowledge that we may be wrong. The 'step' from a fully integrated sentiment of sufficient strength to the moral expression now becomes no step at all: the moral is just the vocabulary in which to express that state. Avoiding it would not be an exercise in modesty, but an impoverishing idiosyncracy of expression.
Why should it not be like this with logical necessity? We have arrived at the residual class of propositions of whose truth we can make nothing. We cannot see our failure to make anything of them as the result of a contingent limitation in our own experience, nor of a misapprehension making us think that their truth should be open to display in a way in which it need not be. We express ourselves by saying that they cannot be true -- that their negations are necessary. There is the bare possibility of being shown wrong -- perhaps our search into the causes of our imaginative block was inadequate, or perhaps we were under a misapprehension of what it might be for the proposition to be true. We may be uncomfortably aware of even great philosophers who mistakenly projected what turned out to be rectifiable limitations of imagination -- the a priori has a bad history. But as Wright notices, we should have no wish to make ourselves infallible when deeming things a priori. We make the commitment in light of the best we can do. There is no step, and no illusion.
Yet I think I can make something of the idea that ideal conceivability and metaphysical possibility might come apart. Talk of how the world could have been, and talk of what can be coherently imagined (with idealized cognitive powers), are not obviously synonymous. There's plausibly a link of sorts: we typically take conceivability as at least a guide to possibility. There may even be a perfect coincidence between them, so that all and only logical possibilities are ideally conceivable. But does that really mean that apriority and necessity are one and the same thing? Or can we somehow separate them, even without any metaphysical divergence that we can latch on to? (Might there be a sense in which one holds "in virtue of" the other, for instance? Or are they the same thing just under different "modes of presentation"? How else might we make sense of this?)
Wednesday, July 19, 2006
Is it always good to prevent harm?
Short answer: no. Of course, there's the obvious case where preventing one small harm would cause a greater one. But I'm not talking about that. Even when we consider the original harm in isolation, it may not even be pro tanto good, or locally beneficial in any way, to prevent it. That is one lesson that can be drawn from my recent discussion of our obligations towards future and potential persons. (Though I must credit Serge's prodding for bringing it to my attention.) Here's how it works:
Typically, in preventing a harm we thereby make someone's life go better than it otherwise would have. In such cases, preventing harm is beneficial, and that's why it is usually a good thing to do. But there is another way to prevent harms: you can prevent the subject who would have been harmed from ever actually existing. There's nothing particularly good about that.
My Pinocchio world can again help clarify our understanding of these issues. If someone damages a wooden statue, is it later wrong for the Priestess to bring that statue to life? (Assume the damage is moderate enough that the resulting life would still be well worth living.) Presumably not. It does mean that the earlier act of damage caused harm to the resulting person. And failing to bring Pinocchio to life would have been one way to prevent this harm. But it would not have been an especially good* way to prevent the harm. There is no real benefit to it.
So, there you have it. Although preventing harms is typically beneficial, this need not always be the case. There is also the rare possibility of preventing a harm by precluding the existence of he who would be harmed. The praiseworthiness of the beneficial kind of harm prevention need not carry over to the atypical, non-beneficial kind. (I'd say the latter is morally neutral, at least when considered in isolation.)
Typically, in preventing a harm we thereby make someone's life go better than it otherwise would have. In such cases, preventing harm is beneficial, and that's why it is usually a good thing to do. But there is another way to prevent harms: you can prevent the subject who would have been harmed from ever actually existing. There's nothing particularly good about that.
My Pinocchio world can again help clarify our understanding of these issues. If someone damages a wooden statue, is it later wrong for the Priestess to bring that statue to life? (Assume the damage is moderate enough that the resulting life would still be well worth living.) Presumably not. It does mean that the earlier act of damage caused harm to the resulting person. And failing to bring Pinocchio to life would have been one way to prevent this harm. But it would not have been an especially good* way to prevent the harm. There is no real benefit to it.
* = If there is the option to bring a different, "healthier" statue to life instead, then that might be a better choice, even though no individual is made better off than they otherwise would've been. It would be a case of "goodness without benefit" (if 'benefits' are understood to accrue only to individuals). But these complications can safely be set aside for now.
So, there you have it. Although preventing harms is typically beneficial, this need not always be the case. There is also the rare possibility of preventing a harm by precluding the existence of he who would be harmed. The praiseworthiness of the beneficial kind of harm prevention need not carry over to the atypical, non-beneficial kind. (I'd say the latter is morally neutral, at least when considered in isolation.)
July Open Thread
1) Another Philosophers' Carnival approaches! Get your entries in by the end of the week.
2) I've enjoyed Ricardo's visit. Feel free to suggest any other topics you'd like to hear his views on.
3) This is an open thread -- feel free to raise a philosophical puzzle, or talk about whatever else interests you at present.
2) I've enjoyed Ricardo's visit. Feel free to suggest any other topics you'd like to hear his views on.
3) This is an open thread -- feel free to raise a philosophical puzzle, or talk about whatever else interests you at present.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
The Temporal Acrobatics of Harm
I'm not sure why some people are so shocked by the idea that we can be harmed by actions that take place before we exist. An event harms us if it causes our life to go worse than it otherwise would have. That is, if the nearest possible world in which the event does not occur, is a world in which our life goes better for us. It is obviously possible for this modal condition to be satisfied by events which precede our existence. (If you're feeling unimaginative, see the "wooden statue" example below.)
But if the issue is so simple, why are others making mistakes about it? Here are a few possible explanations:
(A) We are used to scientific properties, e.g. force and momentum, where action at a distance - let alone a distant time! - is considered "spooky". One might think of harm analogously as a kind of metaphysical "stuff" that gets "transmitted" from the cause to the recipient of the harm. I then seem committed to weird time-travelling stuff. (Hint: ethical relations don't need to move! There's no "stuff" getting "transmitted", except in a very metaphorical sense. And without that metaphysical baggage, there's nothing especially problematic about cross-temporal relations.)
(B) One might have a different concept of "harm" in mind. (But what, exactly? A rival analysis to my counterfactual account is demanded here.)
(C) Some of KTK's comments betray a commitment to presentism: the misguided view that only the present moment exists. Granted, there cannot be cross-temporal relations of harm (or anything else for that matter) if other times -- and their inhabitants -- do not exist. So much the worse for presentism.
(D) Ideological commitments regarding abortion might cloud one's judgment of related issues. This is a less charitable explanation, but one might be suspicious that KTK appears motivated to establish that it's okay for women to do anything they like to their fetuses. Or witness the gleeful accusations from pro-lifers that I needed to resort to "metaphysical gymnastics" in order to "justify [my] pro-abortion stance". Partisanship and wishful thinking blinds them to the more general nature of the problem.
To overcome at least this last problem, let me offer a thought experiment which cuts to the core of the issue. Suppose that babies grow on trees. Actually, they're not really babies (yet), but just baby-shaped pieces of wood: life-sized wooden statues. Real babies are made by a priestess asking God to turnPinocchio the statue into a real boy. God then breathes life and vitality into the statue, transforming it into a flesh-and-blood baby. But here's the crucial bit: the baby inherits the general form of the wooden statue he was "made" from. In particular, if you saw off the statue's limbs before bringing it to life, the resulting baby will likewise be limbless.
Here are some obvious facts about the situation, which absolutely everyone (no matter their views about real-life fetuses, abortion, or whatnot) ought to agree with:
1) Wooden statues do not have moral interests.
2) You can damage a wooden statue, say by sawing its limbs off.
3) Some wooden statues are "vitalized", or turned into actual persons, who inherit the damage.
4) Actual persons have interests, so the damage does harm them, and is hence morally bad.
5) So, it can be morally bad to damage a wooden statue, if the statue will be turned into an actual person, even though the statue itself lacks moral significance.
6) However, no harm is done by damaging a statue that will never be vitalized. (It's just wood, after all.)
So, there you go. No matter what you think of fetuses, everyone needs to follow my "metaphysical gymnastics" in order to make moral sense of the possibility of vitalizing wooden statues. Clearly, the early acts of damage can cause the future person's life to go worse than it otherwise would have. That is to say, it can harm them. It's no big deal that the person doesn't exist at the time of the damage. Things that happen before we exist can influence how well our lives go, and a negative influence on welfare is precisely the definition of "harm". So there's nothing especially mysterious about these "temporal acrobatics". Their occurrence is quite straightforward, and even to be expected.
I think everyone has to agree with what's been said so far. But there are more contentious issues at the intersection of time and welfare. Some of these are discussed in my old post 'Respecting Past Desires' (there's a really great discussion in the comments too). There I suggest that our welfare level at a time t depends on the desires we have at t being fulfilled. But if some of those t-desires are about past or future events, then those events will influence how well-off we are at t.* Indeed, I even hold that we can be harmed by events which occur after our deaths. As I once commented on another blog:
Desire-fulfillment theories of welfare hold, roughly, that what's good for us is to get what we most want. But some of the things we care about are not present. We care about the future, and even what happens after we die. My life goes better if my desires are fulfilled rather than thwarted. The future can influence the latter sorts of facts (about desire-fulfillment), and thereby also the former (about the quality of my life).
Again, I think there's nothing especially outrageous or surprising about any of this. Still, I grant that the view can at least coherently be denied. It isn't totally insane to deny that we can be harmed by events that occur after we cease to exist. On the other hand, I do think it's completely untenable to deny that we can be harmed by events that precede our existence.
But if the issue is so simple, why are others making mistakes about it? Here are a few possible explanations:
(A) We are used to scientific properties, e.g. force and momentum, where action at a distance - let alone a distant time! - is considered "spooky". One might think of harm analogously as a kind of metaphysical "stuff" that gets "transmitted" from the cause to the recipient of the harm. I then seem committed to weird time-travelling stuff. (Hint: ethical relations don't need to move! There's no "stuff" getting "transmitted", except in a very metaphorical sense. And without that metaphysical baggage, there's nothing especially problematic about cross-temporal relations.)
(B) One might have a different concept of "harm" in mind. (But what, exactly? A rival analysis to my counterfactual account is demanded here.)
(C) Some of KTK's comments betray a commitment to presentism: the misguided view that only the present moment exists. Granted, there cannot be cross-temporal relations of harm (or anything else for that matter) if other times -- and their inhabitants -- do not exist. So much the worse for presentism.
(D) Ideological commitments regarding abortion might cloud one's judgment of related issues. This is a less charitable explanation, but one might be suspicious that KTK appears motivated to establish that it's okay for women to do anything they like to their fetuses. Or witness the gleeful accusations from pro-lifers that I needed to resort to "metaphysical gymnastics" in order to "justify [my] pro-abortion stance". Partisanship and wishful thinking blinds them to the more general nature of the problem.
To overcome at least this last problem, let me offer a thought experiment which cuts to the core of the issue. Suppose that babies grow on trees. Actually, they're not really babies (yet), but just baby-shaped pieces of wood: life-sized wooden statues. Real babies are made by a priestess asking God to turn
Here are some obvious facts about the situation, which absolutely everyone (no matter their views about real-life fetuses, abortion, or whatnot) ought to agree with:
1) Wooden statues do not have moral interests.
2) You can damage a wooden statue, say by sawing its limbs off.
3) Some wooden statues are "vitalized", or turned into actual persons, who inherit the damage.
4) Actual persons have interests, so the damage does harm them, and is hence morally bad.
5) So, it can be morally bad to damage a wooden statue, if the statue will be turned into an actual person, even though the statue itself lacks moral significance.
6) However, no harm is done by damaging a statue that will never be vitalized. (It's just wood, after all.)
So, there you go. No matter what you think of fetuses, everyone needs to follow my "metaphysical gymnastics" in order to make moral sense of the possibility of vitalizing wooden statues. Clearly, the early acts of damage can cause the future person's life to go worse than it otherwise would have. That is to say, it can harm them. It's no big deal that the person doesn't exist at the time of the damage. Things that happen before we exist can influence how well our lives go, and a negative influence on welfare is precisely the definition of "harm". So there's nothing especially mysterious about these "temporal acrobatics". Their occurrence is quite straightforward, and even to be expected.
I think everyone has to agree with what's been said so far. But there are more contentious issues at the intersection of time and welfare. Some of these are discussed in my old post 'Respecting Past Desires' (there's a really great discussion in the comments too). There I suggest that our welfare level at a time t depends on the desires we have at t being fulfilled. But if some of those t-desires are about past or future events, then those events will influence how well-off we are at t.* Indeed, I even hold that we can be harmed by events which occur after our deaths. As I once commented on another blog:
I think a person can be harmed even after they are no longer (presently) existing. We just need to understand the harms as retroactive: your present actions are making the earlier person worse off. We are better off when our desires are fulfilled, but it doesn't matter when they are fulfilled.
Suppose you dedicate your life to preserving ancient works of art. Then, after your death, someone burns down the gallery where all your preserved work was stored. They have made it so that your life went worse, since you failed in your primary goal. The exact timing of the failure doesn't matter.
I think that those who dismiss the wishes of the dead tend to have a crudely hedonistic conception of wellbeing. But as you rightly note, we often feel that we can be harmed without our knowing (e.g. by people on the other side of the world). Why should a separation in time be any more significant than one in space?
Desire-fulfillment theories of welfare hold, roughly, that what's good for us is to get what we most want. But some of the things we care about are not present. We care about the future, and even what happens after we die. My life goes better if my desires are fulfilled rather than thwarted. The future can influence the latter sorts of facts (about desire-fulfillment), and thereby also the former (about the quality of my life).
Again, I think there's nothing especially outrageous or surprising about any of this. Still, I grant that the view can at least coherently be denied. It isn't totally insane to deny that we can be harmed by events that occur after we cease to exist. On the other hand, I do think it's completely untenable to deny that we can be harmed by events that precede our existence.
* = (But does it really make sense to talk about momentary welfare values? I'm now more inclined to see welfare more holistically as the value of a whole life. Then, although harmful events all occur at some time or other, there is no particular time at which the harm is received by the person. Again, letting go of the misguided "physical transmission" analogy makes the temporal issues much more straightforward.)
Monday, July 17, 2006
Possible Alternatives You Can't Possibly Take
Here's another way to illuminate the distinction between content-based and brute modality. The former is merely a matter of identifying alternatives ways for worlds to be. The latter is concerned with whether those ways really had a chance to be actualized.
Imagine yourself wanting to buy a Ford back in the days when you could have "any colour you want, so long as it's black." All the cars are black. But blue cars were still possible, in the sense that a car's being blue is an alternative to its being black. (On this understanding, "possible alternative" is redundant. Possibilities just are alternatives to the way things are.) But it's not an alternative you, as a car-buyer, have access to. It's not an option you can take. So a blue car is not a possibility in this more involved sense.
Of course, that latter sense is a lot narrower than metaphysical possibility, even of the brute sort that I have in mind. The analogy is imperfect. But I hope it is at least suggestive. We can imagine other world-states that are alternatives to this one. That gives us the standard space of possible worlds. But it's a separate question whether they're possibilities that "could have been taken" (by God, or the cosmos, or whatever). We can still ask whether they are really possible, in this more demanding sense.
The question can be reworded using the lump/property picture described in my previous post (but ignore the essentialism stuff). Each alternative is a property. But, we may think, that by itself is a merely ontological fact: these abstract states exist. One of them is actually instantiated by the world-lump. But what is the modal status of the other world-properties? They're alternative properties to the one that's actually instantiated, but are they ones that "could have been taken", that really could have been instantiated by the lump? (It probably isn't fair to make the word "really" do so much work here. Unfortunately, I can't think of any better alternatives...)
Some questions:
1) Am I making any sense here? Are there any clearer ways to get at this "brute modal" notion?
2) Is the notion itself fully coherent?
3) Does it correspond to reality? (Is this brute modal status held by some events but not others, say?)
4) Can we establish either way whether all possible worlds are "really possible" in this sense?
5) Are there any other questions I should be asking here?
Imagine yourself wanting to buy a Ford back in the days when you could have "any colour you want, so long as it's black." All the cars are black. But blue cars were still possible, in the sense that a car's being blue is an alternative to its being black. (On this understanding, "possible alternative" is redundant. Possibilities just are alternatives to the way things are.) But it's not an alternative you, as a car-buyer, have access to. It's not an option you can take. So a blue car is not a possibility in this more involved sense.
Of course, that latter sense is a lot narrower than metaphysical possibility, even of the brute sort that I have in mind. The analogy is imperfect. But I hope it is at least suggestive. We can imagine other world-states that are alternatives to this one. That gives us the standard space of possible worlds. But it's a separate question whether they're possibilities that "could have been taken" (by God, or the cosmos, or whatever). We can still ask whether they are really possible, in this more demanding sense.
The question can be reworded using the lump/property picture described in my previous post (but ignore the essentialism stuff). Each alternative is a property. But, we may think, that by itself is a merely ontological fact: these abstract states exist. One of them is actually instantiated by the world-lump. But what is the modal status of the other world-properties? They're alternative properties to the one that's actually instantiated, but are they ones that "could have been taken", that really could have been instantiated by the lump? (It probably isn't fair to make the word "really" do so much work here. Unfortunately, I can't think of any better alternatives...)
Some questions:
1) Am I making any sense here? Are there any clearer ways to get at this "brute modal" notion?
2) Is the notion itself fully coherent?
3) Does it correspond to reality? (Is this brute modal status held by some events but not others, say?)
4) Can we establish either way whether all possible worlds are "really possible" in this sense?
5) Are there any other questions I should be asking here?
World Essentialism
Recall the distinction between the singular world vs. the various possible ways a world could be. (The latter are misleadingly called "possible worlds", but are better understood as world-states, or maximal properties.) We may think of the universe as a "lump", and the actualized possible world as the maximal "property" instantiated by the lump. But note that in general, it isn't the case that every object could instantiate any property. The entity that I am, for instance, is essentially human, and so couldn't instantiate the property of being a poached egg. (If an evil wizard transformed me into a poached egg, then the resulting object wouldn't be me any more.) This then raises the question of whether the world-lump has any essential properties, or whether it could actualize any possible world-state whatsoever whilst retaining its identity. Put in more intuitive terms, we can ask: could our world have turned out in any possible way? Or are some possibilities so extreme that they could only be realized by a different underlying universe?
I'm inclined towards anti-essentialism here. It seems tidiest to say that each possible world-state is a way our world could have been. But to explore the alternative, I think the most likely candidates for essential world-properties would be the laws of nature. We would then say that our world could have turned out in any nomologically possible way. It remains true that there could have been different laws of nature, but not in our universe. A change so radical would disrupt its very identity, and turn it into a different universe. (Just like turning me into a poached egg. The radically different properties can be realized, but only by a different entity.)
One might also want to build in the "initial conditions" of the universe as being part of its essential nature. Then, if the laws are deterministic, we would reach the conclusion that our world couldn't have turned out differently at all. (Again, things could have turned out differently. But that would be because a totally different universe existed in place of ours.) If indeterminism is true, at least a few more possibilities are opened up for us. But they will still be extremely limited compared to what philosophers usually take to be possible ways our world could have been.
This narrow account of local possibility might line up with pessimistic accounts of primitive modality. It doesn't settle those broader questions though. We are still left wondering whether, say, another universe with different laws really could have existed in place of ours. (This lack of progress is unsurprising, though, since I'm inclined towards a deflationary understanding of de re modality and debates about essentialism as merely terminological. There are no deep facts about my not possibly being a poached egg. All this really means is that of any entity that was a poached egg, we would refuse to hold it in the extension (or intension) of 'Richard Chappell'. Haeccaeities or identity facts are not fundamental aspects of modal reality. But that's a post for another day.)
But for those who take essentialism more seriously, do you think anything is essential to our world-lump?
I'm inclined towards anti-essentialism here. It seems tidiest to say that each possible world-state is a way our world could have been. But to explore the alternative, I think the most likely candidates for essential world-properties would be the laws of nature. We would then say that our world could have turned out in any nomologically possible way. It remains true that there could have been different laws of nature, but not in our universe. A change so radical would disrupt its very identity, and turn it into a different universe. (Just like turning me into a poached egg. The radically different properties can be realized, but only by a different entity.)
One might also want to build in the "initial conditions" of the universe as being part of its essential nature. Then, if the laws are deterministic, we would reach the conclusion that our world couldn't have turned out differently at all. (Again, things could have turned out differently. But that would be because a totally different universe existed in place of ours.) If indeterminism is true, at least a few more possibilities are opened up for us. But they will still be extremely limited compared to what philosophers usually take to be possible ways our world could have been.
This narrow account of local possibility might line up with pessimistic accounts of primitive modality. It doesn't settle those broader questions though. We are still left wondering whether, say, another universe with different laws really could have existed in place of ours. (This lack of progress is unsurprising, though, since I'm inclined towards a deflationary understanding of de re modality and debates about essentialism as merely terminological. There are no deep facts about my not possibly being a poached egg. All this really means is that of any entity that was a poached egg, we would refuse to hold it in the extension (or intension) of 'Richard Chappell'. Haeccaeities or identity facts are not fundamental aspects of modal reality. But that's a post for another day.)
But for those who take essentialism more seriously, do you think anything is essential to our world-lump?
Sunday, July 16, 2006
"Self Defence" is not a Blank Cheque
It says something about the state of public debate in this country when newspapers report the Prime Minister's position on the Lebanon crisis as simply: "I believe that Israel has the right to defend itself." Is Howard's position really so simplistic, or do the press simply refuse to engage normative issues in any depth? (Perhaps both.) Either way, there are some painfully obvious points that need to be made here.
Quite simply: there are limits to how much harm and violence can be justified by appeal to "self-defence". Perhaps Israel would be safer if it nuked the rest of the Middle East out of existence. The plain impermissibility of such action indicates the need for more considered reflection on the moral status of specific Israeli retaliations than merely asserting, "I believe that Israel has the right to defend itself."
As RadGeek writes (in response to an IDF commander's claims that "we are here to show that if, God forbid, any of us is captured by the enemy, the army will do everything to secure his return"):
Alonzo Fyfe insightfully argues that the right to "self-defence" is better understood, not in retributive terms, but more broadly as "a right (and perhaps a duty) specifically to defend the innocent from those who do harm to the innocent." He continues:
Applied to the current crisis:
Only, in this case, there isn't anything "lesser" about it.
Quite simply: there are limits to how much harm and violence can be justified by appeal to "self-defence". Perhaps Israel would be safer if it nuked the rest of the Middle East out of existence. The plain impermissibility of such action indicates the need for more considered reflection on the moral status of specific Israeli retaliations than merely asserting, "I believe that Israel has the right to defend itself."
As RadGeek writes (in response to an IDF commander's claims that "we are here to show that if, God forbid, any of us is captured by the enemy, the army will do everything to secure his return"):
The murder of civilians by Palestinian or Lebanese terrorists is criminal, and those who committed the murders can be stopped from committing further crimes through the use of violence, if necessary. But the right to use force against someone does not mean the right to use any amount of force necessary against anyone at all in the process of stopping her. It’s true that if you really are willing todo everythingin retaliation for the kidnapping of a soldier, or attacks on your forces, or attacks on civilians, then this is included. Any atrocity at all is included indoing everything,and that is precisely why the willingness todo everythingin retaliation for an attack, no matter what the cost to innocent third parties, is a moral crime of the first order. Destroying the lives and livelihoods of scores of innocent people in the process of trying to stop the murder of one or two other innocents is criminal. Destroying the lives and livelihoods of scores of innocent people in the process of trying to avenge the death or capture of a handful of soldiers in combat — the primary justification given by the Israeli government for these campaigns — is nothing less than an atrocity.
Alonzo Fyfe insightfully argues that the right to "self-defence" is better understood, not in retributive terms, but more broadly as "a right (and perhaps a duty) specifically to defend the innocent from those who do harm to the innocent." He continues:
[W]hen we define the “right to self-defense” as Israel is seeking to define it [this leads to...] a state of perpetual war with competing sides both claiming the the right to kill the other in the name of defending their own.
We get something entirely different if we define the right of self-defense as “the right to protect the innocent from those who would do them harm.”
Not, “the innocent Israelis from those who would do them harm.” Not, “the innocent Americans from those who would do them harm.” But, “The innocent.” Period. Full stop. From those who would do them harm.
Applied to the current crisis:
On this standard, the deaths, injuries, and economic and psychological harm inflicted on many of the people in Lebanon are moral failures. Many of those being made to suffer are innocent. Under the principle, “Protect the innocent from those who would do them harm,” every bit of harm suffered by the innocent is a moral failing. It can never be defended as truly good. It can only be defended as a lesser evil.
Only, in this case, there isn't anything "lesser" about it.
De-idealizing Conceptual Analysis
We can use the 2-D framework to illuminate conceptual analysis. We are given a priori access to the space of possible worlds, and hence can determine by reflection alone whether some thesis S (e.g. that knowledge is coextensive with justified true belief) is true in each of them.
As Chalmers and Jackson write in their canonical paper, 'Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation' (pp.7-8):
On this account, epistemic intensions are scrutable in the sense that we can determine a priori the extension of S in a given scenario V. If S is a statement, then we can determine whether S is true or false at V. Hence, if D is a canonical description of the scenario V, and the statement S is true at V, then the material conditional 'D -> S' is knowable a priori. And if we knew such a conditional for every possible scenario, then S itself would be knowable a priori.
It's a neat picture, but dependent on some fairly hefty idealizations. We mortals are in no position to learn infinitely many such conditionals, for instance. In her AAP talk, Magdalena Balcerak proposed that we could overcome this by seeing conceptual analysis as involving the sort of inductive reasoning familiar from scientific practice. Having formed the hypothesis (that S is true in all scenarios), one tests this against potential falsifiers (e.g. Gettier cases), which may confirm or lead us to revise our original thesis.
That's fine as far as it goes. But note that we can distinguish at least three stages of idealization here:
1) The agent identifies a genuinely possible scenario V (described canonically by D).
2) The agent assesses the truth of S at V (i.e. whether D implies S).
3) The agent repeats steps 1 & 2 for all scenarios, to determine whether S is epistemically necessary.
Inductive reasoning allows us to de-idealize step 3. But the first two steps still seem well beyond the powers of ordinary agents. (Note that D might contain a full microphysical description of a universe in the language of a completed physics!) So it remains an interesting challenge to complete this de-idealization project.
One problem that arises from our step-2 fallibility concerns the diagnosis of terminological disputes. In the idealized case, we can say that substantive disagreements simply concern the locative question of which scenario is actual. If two people disagree about whether S applies to some specified scenario V, then that simply shows that they have different concepts of S. (Some people -- especially in Eastern cultures -- think that Gettier cases still involve knowledge. That simply suggests that they mean something different by the term 'knowledge' than we do. They use it to pick out different possibilities than we do.) But in real life, the disagreement might instead be simply due to one or other party making a mistake. They might misunderstand the scenario, or draw fallacious inferences about what is true at it, hastily judging that D implies S, when in fact further reflection would disabuse them of this notion.
Let us distinguish metaphysical and epistemic interpretations of this problem. The metaphysical worry is that this leaves us with no fact of the matter as to what people really mean by their terms, and whether disputes are substantive or terminological. But this concern is baseless. We can still appeal to counterfactual facts, about what one would say upon idealization, etc. Even remaining within the actual world, there will be facts about one's drawing a fallacious inference, for instance, which might serve as truthmakers for the claim that one's disagreement (say about the Gettier case) is due to error rather than holding different concepts.
Those facts will typically be out of our reach, however, which brings us to the epistemic worry: how can we tell? Here it may help to bring in Chalmers' diagnostic test for terminological disputes: temporarily cut the contested word out of our shared vocabulary, and see if our disagreement persists when we translate our previous claims into uncontested language. (This won't always be easy, and won't work at all for "bedrock" concepts, e.g. perhaps normativity. But then that may indicate that the disagreement is substantive after all.) For instance, we might distinguish contra-causal "free-will_1" from reasons-responsive "free-will_2", so as to dissolve debates about compatibilism. (Though they might re-emerge in debates about genuine moral reponsibility.)
Step 1 may raise even more interesting issues, about how we can identify coherent possibilities in the first place. Perhaps inductive reasoning can help here once again. After all, a coherent possibility is simply one that cannot be ruled out a priori. So if we engage in some reflection, testing it in ways that might plausibly be expected to rule it out if it were incoherent, then surviving such tests provides us with inductive reason to consider the scenario coherent after all.
As Chalmers and Jackson write in their canonical paper, 'Conceptual Analysis and Reductive Explanation' (pp.7-8):
When given sufficient information about a hypothetical scenario, subjects are frequently in a position to identify the extension of a given concept, on reflection, under the hypothesis that the scenario in question obtains. Analysis of a concept proceeds at least in part through consideration of a concept’s extension within hypothetical scenarios, and noting regularities that emerge. This sort of analysis can reveal that certain features of the world are highly relevant to determining the extension of a concept, and that other features are irrelevant.
On this account, epistemic intensions are scrutable in the sense that we can determine a priori the extension of S in a given scenario V. If S is a statement, then we can determine whether S is true or false at V. Hence, if D is a canonical description of the scenario V, and the statement S is true at V, then the material conditional 'D -> S' is knowable a priori. And if we knew such a conditional for every possible scenario, then S itself would be knowable a priori.
It's a neat picture, but dependent on some fairly hefty idealizations. We mortals are in no position to learn infinitely many such conditionals, for instance. In her AAP talk, Magdalena Balcerak proposed that we could overcome this by seeing conceptual analysis as involving the sort of inductive reasoning familiar from scientific practice. Having formed the hypothesis (that S is true in all scenarios), one tests this against potential falsifiers (e.g. Gettier cases), which may confirm or lead us to revise our original thesis.
That's fine as far as it goes. But note that we can distinguish at least three stages of idealization here:
1) The agent identifies a genuinely possible scenario V (described canonically by D).
2) The agent assesses the truth of S at V (i.e. whether D implies S).
3) The agent repeats steps 1 & 2 for all scenarios, to determine whether S is epistemically necessary.
Inductive reasoning allows us to de-idealize step 3. But the first two steps still seem well beyond the powers of ordinary agents. (Note that D might contain a full microphysical description of a universe in the language of a completed physics!) So it remains an interesting challenge to complete this de-idealization project.
One problem that arises from our step-2 fallibility concerns the diagnosis of terminological disputes. In the idealized case, we can say that substantive disagreements simply concern the locative question of which scenario is actual. If two people disagree about whether S applies to some specified scenario V, then that simply shows that they have different concepts of S. (Some people -- especially in Eastern cultures -- think that Gettier cases still involve knowledge. That simply suggests that they mean something different by the term 'knowledge' than we do. They use it to pick out different possibilities than we do.) But in real life, the disagreement might instead be simply due to one or other party making a mistake. They might misunderstand the scenario, or draw fallacious inferences about what is true at it, hastily judging that D implies S, when in fact further reflection would disabuse them of this notion.
Let us distinguish metaphysical and epistemic interpretations of this problem. The metaphysical worry is that this leaves us with no fact of the matter as to what people really mean by their terms, and whether disputes are substantive or terminological. But this concern is baseless. We can still appeal to counterfactual facts, about what one would say upon idealization, etc. Even remaining within the actual world, there will be facts about one's drawing a fallacious inference, for instance, which might serve as truthmakers for the claim that one's disagreement (say about the Gettier case) is due to error rather than holding different concepts.
Those facts will typically be out of our reach, however, which brings us to the epistemic worry: how can we tell? Here it may help to bring in Chalmers' diagnostic test for terminological disputes: temporarily cut the contested word out of our shared vocabulary, and see if our disagreement persists when we translate our previous claims into uncontested language. (This won't always be easy, and won't work at all for "bedrock" concepts, e.g. perhaps normativity. But then that may indicate that the disagreement is substantive after all.) For instance, we might distinguish contra-causal "free-will_1" from reasons-responsive "free-will_2", so as to dissolve debates about compatibilism. (Though they might re-emerge in debates about genuine moral reponsibility.)
Step 1 may raise even more interesting issues, about how we can identify coherent possibilities in the first place. Perhaps inductive reasoning can help here once again. After all, a coherent possibility is simply one that cannot be ruled out a priori. So if we engage in some reflection, testing it in ways that might plausibly be expected to rule it out if it were incoherent, then surviving such tests provides us with inductive reason to consider the scenario coherent after all.
Obligations Beyond the Fetus
In "Obligations to the Fetus", KTK argues that it's okay to induce birth defects (e.g. by taking thalidomide), because fetuses don't have moral interests and thus cannot be harmed. The obvious problem with this argument is that he's forgetting about the future child who does have actual interests, and who certainly is harmed by antenatal negligence.
To diagnose KTK's central mistake: it looks like he is confusing temporal with modal absences, or non-presence with non-actuality. He writes:
Granted, we might say that an aborted fetus is a "potential person" who is non-actual. (We might think of him as existing in possible worlds other than our own.) The fetus could have grown into that person, if brought to term. But given that it actually won't, the interests of this merely "potential person" need not be given moral weight. The person does not actually exist, and so has no actual interests.
But not all fetuses are like that. Some will be brought to term, and develop into actual persons: persons that exist in the actual world. There's an important difference between actually existing in the future, and merely possibly doing so. Actual persons have actual interests, even if they exist in the future, and we need to take those interests into account. Although it's permissible to refrain from bringing a merely potential person into existence, there is something morally bad about damaging actual (albeit future) interests. It is bad to harm an actual future person, i.e. make their life to go worse than it otherwise would have. Handicapping them as a fetus is obviously one such way to make their life go worse. So handicapping those fetuses that will grow into actual people is morally bad. KTK fails to realize of the handicapped actual future person that she too "has actual interests that are thereby frustrated."
It is obviously possible to act in ways that will make a future person's life go worse, even if they don't exist yet. It should also be clear that we can have moral obligations to refrain from such actions. (Our obligation to future generations is precisely why environmentalism is so morally pressing!) For a crude example, it would plainly be immoral to magically attach a time-bomb to a fetus, wait for it to develop into a person and then *BOOM*. Less crudely, you might use a very slow-acting poison. Either way, it's no defence to say, as KTK does, that the fetus has no interests and therefore you can do whatever you like to it. You have to think beyond the fetus, to the actual future person who is or will be* made worse off by your actions.
(Here's a trickier case: what if you handicap a fetus, which the distraught mother for that reason decides to abort? Given my theoretical commitments outlined above, I must say that you didn't harm the potential person who would have been born were it not for your interference. For as it happens, they are not an actual person; they do not actually exist in the future, and so they have no actual interests. Instead, the harm you do is solely to the mother: you deprived her of the child she wanted to bear. Alternatively, if the mother doesn't care either, but the future is made a worse place than it otherwise would have been -- perhaps she has a "replacement" child whose life goes not so well as the aborted child's would have -- then this could be a case of badness without harm.)
KTK supports his misguided conclusion with two similarly misguided arguments. First, he writes:
Sure, it's better to be born than not. But of course that merely shows that birth is no harm. It's worse for a person to be fetally handicapped (or poisoned, or wrapped with explosives) than not, and that shows that fetal handicapping (or poisoning, etc.) is a harm.
Second bad argument:
Um, no. The parents in the first case have no option to make their child healthy. The choice is exclusively between a disabled life or no life at all. The relevant act here is simply childbirth, and we've already seen that that is no harm. In the second case, by contrast, the parents also have the choice to refrain from handicapping their child, and allowing her to instead enjoy a healthy life. There are two very different actions they could take to prevent this. One would be an abortion, so that she (the potential person) never actually exists at all. That's fine. The other would be fetally handicapping the child so that she lives a less-healthy life. That's not so fine. The relevant act here is imposing a disability on an otherwise healthy person. There's a certain lack of discernment involved in claiming that childbirth and gratuitous handicapping are "essentially the same act." I don't mean to belabour the obvious, but we really should take care to distinguish the two.
To diagnose KTK's central mistake: it looks like he is confusing temporal with modal absences, or non-presence with non-actuality. He writes:
[Causing a birth defect] is different from the case of a person who is maimed or otherwise subject to limitations in life after they have entered the moral realm - that person has actual interests that are thereby frustrated.
Granted, we might say that an aborted fetus is a "potential person" who is non-actual. (We might think of him as existing in possible worlds other than our own.) The fetus could have grown into that person, if brought to term. But given that it actually won't, the interests of this merely "potential person" need not be given moral weight. The person does not actually exist, and so has no actual interests.
But not all fetuses are like that. Some will be brought to term, and develop into actual persons: persons that exist in the actual world. There's an important difference between actually existing in the future, and merely possibly doing so. Actual persons have actual interests, even if they exist in the future, and we need to take those interests into account. Although it's permissible to refrain from bringing a merely potential person into existence, there is something morally bad about damaging actual (albeit future) interests. It is bad to harm an actual future person, i.e. make their life to go worse than it otherwise would have. Handicapping them as a fetus is obviously one such way to make their life go worse. So handicapping those fetuses that will grow into actual people is morally bad. KTK fails to realize of the handicapped actual future person that she too "has actual interests that are thereby frustrated."
It is obviously possible to act in ways that will make a future person's life go worse, even if they don't exist yet. It should also be clear that we can have moral obligations to refrain from such actions. (Our obligation to future generations is precisely why environmentalism is so morally pressing!) For a crude example, it would plainly be immoral to magically attach a time-bomb to a fetus, wait for it to develop into a person and then *BOOM*. Less crudely, you might use a very slow-acting poison. Either way, it's no defence to say, as KTK does, that the fetus has no interests and therefore you can do whatever you like to it. You have to think beyond the fetus, to the actual future person who is or will be* made worse off by your actions.
* = It's a tricky question exactly where we should temporally locate the harm. Is the future person harmed now, or does your present act cause a later harm? This may be a curious philosophical puzzle, but whenever it should be located, there's no question that the harm in question does (at some point or other) occur. So the metaphysical puzzle has no real ethical import, at least on the issues we're discussing here.
(Here's a trickier case: what if you handicap a fetus, which the distraught mother for that reason decides to abort? Given my theoretical commitments outlined above, I must say that you didn't harm the potential person who would have been born were it not for your interference. For as it happens, they are not an actual person; they do not actually exist in the future, and so they have no actual interests. Instead, the harm you do is solely to the mother: you deprived her of the child she wanted to bear. Alternatively, if the mother doesn't care either, but the future is made a worse place than it otherwise would have been -- perhaps she has a "replacement" child whose life goes not so well as the aborted child's would have -- then this could be a case of badness without harm.)
KTK supports his misguided conclusion with two similarly misguided arguments. First, he writes:
A life with [disabilities] is still better than nothing at all... So such an infant has suffered no harm, even if it is disappointing or frustrating that it could have had a better life.
Sure, it's better to be born than not. But of course that merely shows that birth is no harm. It's worse for a person to be fetally handicapped (or poisoned, or wrapped with explosives) than not, and that shows that fetal handicapping (or poisoning, etc.) is a harm.
Second bad argument:
We do not blame parents of children with accidentally-acquired birth defects, even when those parents deliberately choose not to abort that fetus. The choice to create birth defects and then bring the fetus to term is essentially the same act.
Um, no. The parents in the first case have no option to make their child healthy. The choice is exclusively between a disabled life or no life at all. The relevant act here is simply childbirth, and we've already seen that that is no harm. In the second case, by contrast, the parents also have the choice to refrain from handicapping their child, and allowing her to instead enjoy a healthy life. There are two very different actions they could take to prevent this. One would be an abortion, so that she (the potential person) never actually exists at all. That's fine. The other would be fetally handicapping the child so that she lives a less-healthy life. That's not so fine. The relevant act here is imposing a disability on an otherwise healthy person. There's a certain lack of discernment involved in claiming that childbirth and gratuitous handicapping are "essentially the same act." I don't mean to belabour the obvious, but we really should take care to distinguish the two.
Saturday, July 15, 2006
Utility Comparisons and Disagreement
In the comments at Agoraphilia, I outline a rough specification of the sorts of objective facts that could serve as truthmakers for interpersonal utility comparison (IUC) claims, in hope of making them less mysterious. (Some people hold such comparisons to be impossible in principle. I want to claim that the difficulty is merely epistemic.) In short, my strategy is to convert the IUC into a hypothetical intra-personal utility comparison, by appealing to the global preferences of an idealized agent who gets to experience both lives sequentially. (Like my God, say.)
This seems clearly unproblematic at least for simple hedonistic theories of welfare. Our hypothetical agent can easily compare two experiences across the lifetimes, and determine which is the more pleasurable. But will it still work once we bring in other values? If the two original individuals had very different global preferences, with what "common currency" can we compare them? How could our idealized agent choose between them fairly? (To adopt either preference system would seem to unfairly exclude the other.) We might worry that the two are simply incommensurable.
Indeed, the same problem arises within a single life, if the person endorses different value systems at different times. Perhaps the young idealist most wants to have a positive impact on the world, whereas his older self would prefer to live a comfortable life and look out for his family. Each thoroughly rejects the values of the other. Which lifestyle would be "best" for this person? Here I learn towards the Parfitian response of considering them to be two distinct persons. That allows us to say what is best for each, but it remains unclear how we are to weigh the relative costs and benefits between them, so as to determine what would be best overall.
The problem could be overcome if we assume convergence of idealization. If there is just one maximally coherent and unified desire set, just one value system that an idealized (perfectly rational and fully informed) agent could hold, then the ideal agent could adjudicate the dispute. We could ask him: "Supposing that you will experience this life, first from the young man's perspective and then from the elder's, how do you want it to go?" This yields a determinate answer which can be used to weigh the conflicting interests authoritatively. The idealized young man and the idealized old man would both agree, for we have supposed that idealization would cause their preferences to converge.
But what if such ideal convergence would not, in fact, occur? The two idealized selves would continue to disagree about how to weigh the various tradeoffs. In cases of such persisting disagreement, it seems we must conclude that there is no absolute fact of the matter about which harm or benefit is the greater. In those -- perhaps rare -- cases, the welfare facts would be agent-relative (but in a sophisticated way).
That seems an odd result. Perhaps it arises because I am conflating the distinction between one harm "factually outweighing" another (i.e. being a greater harm) versus "morally outweighing" it (i.e. being the more important harm). Perhaps the appeal to idealized preferences really latches on to the latter kind of assessment. But then how are we to get a grip on the former class of facts? Suggestions welcome...
[Thanks to Blar for bringing these problems to my attention.]
This seems clearly unproblematic at least for simple hedonistic theories of welfare. Our hypothetical agent can easily compare two experiences across the lifetimes, and determine which is the more pleasurable. But will it still work once we bring in other values? If the two original individuals had very different global preferences, with what "common currency" can we compare them? How could our idealized agent choose between them fairly? (To adopt either preference system would seem to unfairly exclude the other.) We might worry that the two are simply incommensurable.
Indeed, the same problem arises within a single life, if the person endorses different value systems at different times. Perhaps the young idealist most wants to have a positive impact on the world, whereas his older self would prefer to live a comfortable life and look out for his family. Each thoroughly rejects the values of the other. Which lifestyle would be "best" for this person? Here I learn towards the Parfitian response of considering them to be two distinct persons. That allows us to say what is best for each, but it remains unclear how we are to weigh the relative costs and benefits between them, so as to determine what would be best overall.
The problem could be overcome if we assume convergence of idealization. If there is just one maximally coherent and unified desire set, just one value system that an idealized (perfectly rational and fully informed) agent could hold, then the ideal agent could adjudicate the dispute. We could ask him: "Supposing that you will experience this life, first from the young man's perspective and then from the elder's, how do you want it to go?" This yields a determinate answer which can be used to weigh the conflicting interests authoritatively. The idealized young man and the idealized old man would both agree, for we have supposed that idealization would cause their preferences to converge.
But what if such ideal convergence would not, in fact, occur? The two idealized selves would continue to disagree about how to weigh the various tradeoffs. In cases of such persisting disagreement, it seems we must conclude that there is no absolute fact of the matter about which harm or benefit is the greater. In those -- perhaps rare -- cases, the welfare facts would be agent-relative (but in a sophisticated way).
That seems an odd result. Perhaps it arises because I am conflating the distinction between one harm "factually outweighing" another (i.e. being a greater harm) versus "morally outweighing" it (i.e. being the more important harm). Perhaps the appeal to idealized preferences really latches on to the latter kind of assessment. But then how are we to get a grip on the former class of facts? Suggestions welcome...
[Thanks to Blar for bringing these problems to my attention.]
Friday, July 14, 2006
Opposite Day: abortion edition
[To continue a grand blogospheric tradition, the following is a guest post from my evil twin Ricardo. Be warned that he has some terribly misguided views. Hopefully commenters will point out the flaws in his arguments!]
Thursday, July 13, 2006
Demonstratives and Apriority
Can non-trivial thoughts involving demonstratives ('this' or 'that') be a priori? (By "non-trivial", I mean that the truth of the thought depends on what is being demonstrated; not just any old target will do.) Chalmers' epistemic space framework suggests not, since it treats what's demonstrated as variable across centred worlds. That means that there will be some epistemically possible scenarios in which the target of my demonstration will be "any old thing", and hence my thought will come out false at that scenario, and hence it actually fails to be a priori.
But we might've expected the contrary result to be possible. Consider the following passage taken out of context from Laurence Bonjour's In Defense of Pure Reason (pp.57-58):
(Bonjour uses this to show that a priori justification cannot be accounted for merely by "linguistic convention". My current purposes are completely different.)
Now, one way that I would be tempted to state the described a priori thought is as follows:
(D) Nothing could be that colour [mental nod towards first book] and that colour [mental nod towards second book] all over at the same time.
Is D a priori? It seems to depend on whether the demonstrated colours are themselves part of the tokened thought, or whether the demonstrations are mere placeholders. If the colours are "built in", then the resulting thought is certainly a priori. (Those two colours are themselves incompatible in all scenarios.) However, if the thought instead contains "placeholders", then it is not a priori, since this allows different targets to "fill the gap" in different scenarios. In particular, it allows a scenario in which we pick out the same colour twice. Such a scenario falsifies D, so understood, since things can of course be one and the same colour all over at the same time. Failing to be true at all scenarios, D thereby fails to be a priori.
As I understand it, Chalmers' framework requires that we adopt the second interpretation: demonstratives are variable placeholders, and so "non-trivial" demonstrative thoughts cannot be a priori. Is that a problem? Should we want to allow the first interpretation? We will at least want to allow some thought or other to have this "built in" content. But perhaps we should deny that those are "demonstrative thoughts" any longer. We might instead suggest that Bonjour was thinking something along the lines of:
(D*) "Nothing could be colour1 and colour2 all over at the same time." (Those "colour" labels might be replaced by appropriate items of direct phenomenology, say mental images of the colours in question. We want epistemically rigid designation, anyway, however that is done. The two colours should be held fixed across all scenarios.)
Note that there's nothing essentially "demonstrative" about D*. Lacking the vocabulary to express the thought directly, perhaps the best we could do verbally is to say something like D instead, and point to the two colours we have in mind. But really it is the two colours, and not the pointing, that we do in fact have in mind. So I think that provides some independent support for the claim that, contrary to my initial speculation, Bonjour's a priori thought is not a demonstrative one.
Is that the best way to make sense of this problem? (Is the answer to that question -- or this one -- a priori? Heh.)
But we might've expected the contrary result to be possible. Consider the following passage taken out of context from Laurence Bonjour's In Defense of Pure Reason (pp.57-58):
I am presently looking at two books on my desk. Both are darkish blue, but not quite the same shade of darkish blue, though my rather meagre color vocabulary contains no names for these specific shades nor any other way of indicating them linguistically. On this basis, I come to believe and, so far as I can see, to know a priori a certain proposition that I can only indicate indirectly but cannot adequately express in language, the proposition that nothing could be both of these colors all over at the same time...
(Bonjour uses this to show that a priori justification cannot be accounted for merely by "linguistic convention". My current purposes are completely different.)
Now, one way that I would be tempted to state the described a priori thought is as follows:
(D) Nothing could be that colour [mental nod towards first book] and that colour [mental nod towards second book] all over at the same time.
Is D a priori? It seems to depend on whether the demonstrated colours are themselves part of the tokened thought, or whether the demonstrations are mere placeholders. If the colours are "built in", then the resulting thought is certainly a priori. (Those two colours are themselves incompatible in all scenarios.) However, if the thought instead contains "placeholders", then it is not a priori, since this allows different targets to "fill the gap" in different scenarios. In particular, it allows a scenario in which we pick out the same colour twice. Such a scenario falsifies D, so understood, since things can of course be one and the same colour all over at the same time. Failing to be true at all scenarios, D thereby fails to be a priori.
As I understand it, Chalmers' framework requires that we adopt the second interpretation: demonstratives are variable placeholders, and so "non-trivial" demonstrative thoughts cannot be a priori. Is that a problem? Should we want to allow the first interpretation? We will at least want to allow some thought or other to have this "built in" content. But perhaps we should deny that those are "demonstrative thoughts" any longer. We might instead suggest that Bonjour was thinking something along the lines of:
(D*) "Nothing could be colour1 and colour2 all over at the same time." (Those "colour" labels might be replaced by appropriate items of direct phenomenology, say mental images of the colours in question. We want epistemically rigid designation, anyway, however that is done. The two colours should be held fixed across all scenarios.)
Note that there's nothing essentially "demonstrative" about D*. Lacking the vocabulary to express the thought directly, perhaps the best we could do verbally is to say something like D instead, and point to the two colours we have in mind. But really it is the two colours, and not the pointing, that we do in fact have in mind. So I think that provides some independent support for the claim that, contrary to my initial speculation, Bonjour's a priori thought is not a demonstrative one.
Is that the best way to make sense of this problem? (Is the answer to that question -- or this one -- a priori? Heh.)
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Am I a Zombie?
A year ago I was amused by the prospect of zombie philosophers. But I never properly reassured my readers that I wasn't one myself. To conclusively settle the matter, see here.
[Update: link fixed!]
[Update: link fixed!]
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Public Philosophy
Three of the AAP talks I went to were about taking philosophy beyond the ivory tower.
Edward Spence described his project to engage the public in philosophy through theatre. His central theme was that to impact on the broader culture, philosophy must "engage the sentiments". There are many ways one might go about this, but his own approach is to incorporate philosophical elements into a wider cultural-entertainment experience, philosophy as a "night out", a performance in a restaurant while the audience wines and dines. This might be followed by a brief lecture from a philosopher who draws out the themes of the performance, and then invites public discussion. Apparently the project has proved reasonably popular, though one might entertain doubts about the depth of the philosophizing therein. Still, a worthwhile first step, perhaps, and it would be good to see more efforts to broaden public participation in philosophy. There are always worries about the tradeoffs and compromises inherent in popularization. I'm not sure what can be done about that.
Suzanne Uniacke tackled the question, 'What Can Philosophy Say About Public Policy?', suggesting that there were tensions between the two projects. In particular, public policy is constrained by such contingencies as popular beliefs (no matter how misguided), and is directed towards a specific audience. These features may clash with the impartiality and intellectual independence characteristic of philosophy. Philosophers might need to hide their true reasons for backing a policy if those would not be considered "socially acceptable". To some extent this is the old problem of pragmatic compromise that any radical faces: to make piecemeal progress they must endorse rather less than they would ideally prefer. But Uniacke seemed to think there was something especially problematic about this in relation to one's role as a philosopher.
Other interesting issues arose concerning just how philosophers should influence public policy. Theory may be indirectly influential through its effect on the public intellectual climate. (Cf. "think tanks".) But Uniacke focussed on the more direct policy input you might get, say, from a philosopher on a committee. Questions then arise about their competence and authority: should they restrict their input to the philosophical dimensions of policy? (Is there any clear-cut distinction here anyway? Just what sort of expertise does a philosopher bring to the policy-making table, if any?) Apparently Sydney Hook has proposed four facets to the philosopher's contribution:
1) A well-researched knowledge of facts
2) Methodological sophistication (disambiguate, clarify distinctions, etc.)
3) Philosophical sophistication (e.g. appropriate employment of the fact/value distinction.)
4) Critical distance or "disengagement" (to avoid bias).
This may lead to a picture of the "philosopher as technician", perhaps enabling a deliberative environment rather than offering substantive contributions themselves (as one might expect from the alternative picture of the "philosopher as expert"). Should there be a place for substantive philosophical advocacy of public policy positions?
Turning to the question of authority, Uniacke helpfully distinguished two forms of the distinction between "authoritative vs. advisory" contributions. In the first case, we might ask whether the philosopher's opinion should be treated as decisive on an issue (cf. a doctor's medical testimony). Presumably the answer to this is "no", since philosophers usually cannot even agree amongst themselves what the most reasonable position is. A second question is whether the philosopher's reasoning can be made transparent or accessible to the layperson, so that the latter may make their own reasonable assessment of the given advice, rather than taking the philosopher's verdicts as if from a "black box" which demands sheer faith (to whatever, perhaps limited, extent one is inclined to take its contributions into account at all).
Now, it seems that public policy must be grounded in publically accessible reasons, suggesting that the philosopher's role must also be advisory in this second sense. Again we face the difficult compromise between depth of rigour and broad accessibility. Given the complexity of the literature about killing and letting die, for instance, is there any hope for an informed public policy on end-of-life issues? Can philosophers always (or even often) make contributions to public debate that are both worthwhile and comprehensible? (Though as one person responded, it would be still worse to abandon this role to non-philosophers!)
There are also worries about courts (etc.) misapplying philosophical arguments. Apparently such distortion regularly arises through over-simplification, over-generalization, selective use, conflation or confusion, etc. Is this inevitable? (Is expert reasoning just too complex?) Or can something be done about it?
Many of these issues also arose in Steve Curry's talk on 'Philosophy as Research Methodology', which touched on interdisciplinary social-scientific work that he has contributed to as a philosopher. Again, the general intellectual skills of methodological critique and disambiguation, etc., were part of his contribution. But he also suggested that the philosopher's familiarity with the practice of reason-giving or justification can give us distinctive insights.
Curry described his involvement in gathering qualitative data (e.g. about whether various artistic or cultural programs have been successful in creating valuable experiences for people), which is often dismissed as "mere anecdote". They typically utilized a "Most Significant Change" (MSC) methodology, which elicits people's stories, which the group then discuss and eventually pick one to get passed back as the data from their group. However, drawing on his experience with modern Socratic Dialogue methods used by some teaching philosophers, Curry proposed that group participants immediately choose their favourite story, prior to discussion, and then have participants discuss the reasons for their choice. These are often initially hidden, so the discussion brings out much "deeper" information than is otherwise available, including implicit assumptions about value, etc. The group's considered judgments then go beyond "mere anecdote", and contribute valuable information that was previously inaccessible. You don't just get the anecdote; it is accompanied by the reasons explaining exactly why participants considered it significant.
So that was interesting. (Though Curry noted that such data should be "triangulated" with other, more traditional, research methods, and may not be worth much by itself.)
In sum, these talks seemed to be suggesting a somewhat deflationary picture of the philosophical enterprise. Rather than seeing reason as a reliable route to truth, most expertly navigated by professional philosophers themselves, I got the impression that these speakers would see philosophy's public role as more humble in nature -- perhaps as providing a method for clarifying and bringing structure to people's own views about the world. I would hope for more than that, though, I think. Philosophy may subvert widespread prejudices, question otherwise unquestioned assumptions, and thereby lead to a more radical rethinking of our ideas. At least, that's the ideal. The challenge, as ever, is how to implement it?
[I suspect that introducing philosophy at school would be a crucial step. Any other ideas?]
Edward Spence described his project to engage the public in philosophy through theatre. His central theme was that to impact on the broader culture, philosophy must "engage the sentiments". There are many ways one might go about this, but his own approach is to incorporate philosophical elements into a wider cultural-entertainment experience, philosophy as a "night out", a performance in a restaurant while the audience wines and dines. This might be followed by a brief lecture from a philosopher who draws out the themes of the performance, and then invites public discussion. Apparently the project has proved reasonably popular, though one might entertain doubts about the depth of the philosophizing therein. Still, a worthwhile first step, perhaps, and it would be good to see more efforts to broaden public participation in philosophy. There are always worries about the tradeoffs and compromises inherent in popularization. I'm not sure what can be done about that.
Suzanne Uniacke tackled the question, 'What Can Philosophy Say About Public Policy?', suggesting that there were tensions between the two projects. In particular, public policy is constrained by such contingencies as popular beliefs (no matter how misguided), and is directed towards a specific audience. These features may clash with the impartiality and intellectual independence characteristic of philosophy. Philosophers might need to hide their true reasons for backing a policy if those would not be considered "socially acceptable". To some extent this is the old problem of pragmatic compromise that any radical faces: to make piecemeal progress they must endorse rather less than they would ideally prefer. But Uniacke seemed to think there was something especially problematic about this in relation to one's role as a philosopher.
Other interesting issues arose concerning just how philosophers should influence public policy. Theory may be indirectly influential through its effect on the public intellectual climate. (Cf. "think tanks".) But Uniacke focussed on the more direct policy input you might get, say, from a philosopher on a committee. Questions then arise about their competence and authority: should they restrict their input to the philosophical dimensions of policy? (Is there any clear-cut distinction here anyway? Just what sort of expertise does a philosopher bring to the policy-making table, if any?) Apparently Sydney Hook has proposed four facets to the philosopher's contribution:
1) A well-researched knowledge of facts
2) Methodological sophistication (disambiguate, clarify distinctions, etc.)
3) Philosophical sophistication (e.g. appropriate employment of the fact/value distinction.)
4) Critical distance or "disengagement" (to avoid bias).
This may lead to a picture of the "philosopher as technician", perhaps enabling a deliberative environment rather than offering substantive contributions themselves (as one might expect from the alternative picture of the "philosopher as expert"). Should there be a place for substantive philosophical advocacy of public policy positions?
Turning to the question of authority, Uniacke helpfully distinguished two forms of the distinction between "authoritative vs. advisory" contributions. In the first case, we might ask whether the philosopher's opinion should be treated as decisive on an issue (cf. a doctor's medical testimony). Presumably the answer to this is "no", since philosophers usually cannot even agree amongst themselves what the most reasonable position is. A second question is whether the philosopher's reasoning can be made transparent or accessible to the layperson, so that the latter may make their own reasonable assessment of the given advice, rather than taking the philosopher's verdicts as if from a "black box" which demands sheer faith (to whatever, perhaps limited, extent one is inclined to take its contributions into account at all).
Now, it seems that public policy must be grounded in publically accessible reasons, suggesting that the philosopher's role must also be advisory in this second sense. Again we face the difficult compromise between depth of rigour and broad accessibility. Given the complexity of the literature about killing and letting die, for instance, is there any hope for an informed public policy on end-of-life issues? Can philosophers always (or even often) make contributions to public debate that are both worthwhile and comprehensible? (Though as one person responded, it would be still worse to abandon this role to non-philosophers!)
There are also worries about courts (etc.) misapplying philosophical arguments. Apparently such distortion regularly arises through over-simplification, over-generalization, selective use, conflation or confusion, etc. Is this inevitable? (Is expert reasoning just too complex?) Or can something be done about it?
Many of these issues also arose in Steve Curry's talk on 'Philosophy as Research Methodology', which touched on interdisciplinary social-scientific work that he has contributed to as a philosopher. Again, the general intellectual skills of methodological critique and disambiguation, etc., were part of his contribution. But he also suggested that the philosopher's familiarity with the practice of reason-giving or justification can give us distinctive insights.
Curry described his involvement in gathering qualitative data (e.g. about whether various artistic or cultural programs have been successful in creating valuable experiences for people), which is often dismissed as "mere anecdote". They typically utilized a "Most Significant Change" (MSC) methodology, which elicits people's stories, which the group then discuss and eventually pick one to get passed back as the data from their group. However, drawing on his experience with modern Socratic Dialogue methods used by some teaching philosophers, Curry proposed that group participants immediately choose their favourite story, prior to discussion, and then have participants discuss the reasons for their choice. These are often initially hidden, so the discussion brings out much "deeper" information than is otherwise available, including implicit assumptions about value, etc. The group's considered judgments then go beyond "mere anecdote", and contribute valuable information that was previously inaccessible. You don't just get the anecdote; it is accompanied by the reasons explaining exactly why participants considered it significant.
So that was interesting. (Though Curry noted that such data should be "triangulated" with other, more traditional, research methods, and may not be worth much by itself.)
In sum, these talks seemed to be suggesting a somewhat deflationary picture of the philosophical enterprise. Rather than seeing reason as a reliable route to truth, most expertly navigated by professional philosophers themselves, I got the impression that these speakers would see philosophy's public role as more humble in nature -- perhaps as providing a method for clarifying and bringing structure to people's own views about the world. I would hope for more than that, though, I think. Philosophy may subvert widespread prejudices, question otherwise unquestioned assumptions, and thereby lead to a more radical rethinking of our ideas. At least, that's the ideal. The challenge, as ever, is how to implement it?
[I suspect that introducing philosophy at school would be a crucial step. Any other ideas?]
Saturday, July 08, 2006
Analysing Terrorism
Frances Kamm gave a keynote talk on terrorism for last week's AAP conference, continued in yesterday's CAPPE seminar. She distinguished the conceptual issue of what makes an action "terrorism" from the nearby moral issues, and made some interesting remarks about each. I'll briefly sketch a couple of the highlights below.
We might initially think to define "terrorism" simply as intentionally causing harm and terror to non-combatants (NCs), whether as a means or an end, but not merely as a side-effect of some other purpose (cf. "collateral damage" from bombing military targets). But what if the intention was so constrained as to make no difference? Kamm asks us to imagine a "Baby-Killer Nation" that intends to kill NCs, but only on the condition that they have the "cover" of also destroying a legitimate military target. They will only act in situations licensed by just war theory, such that the harm to NCs is proportional to the military objective, etc., yet it's the harm and not the military objective that they truly care about. Does that count as "terrorism"?
Kamm claims not, and offers the following analogy: Suppose you intend to kill your Enemy, but only on the condition that you have the excuse of "self-defence". (But further suppose you don't really care about your self-defence; if anyone else tried to kill you, you wouldn't prevent them.) So you patiently wait until Enemy attacks you, at which point you seize the opportunity to kill him at long last. You intended to kill him, rather than defend yourself. It's the former outcome you really care about. Nevertheless, Kamm claims, your act is one of self-defence.
(I'm not really sure where my intuitions lie in these cases. They seem borderline -- I don't think my concepts are so well-defined as to determinately apply either way. Feel free to report your intuitions in the comments.)
It would be interesting if Kamm is right about this, as it suggests that intentions play less of a role in determining an act's "type" than we might normally expect. Instead, what's crucial seems to be whether one does or would (in counterfactual situations) act differently from how one with just military intentions would act. Though I should emphasize that the above only applies in cases where the "cover" is sufficient to make the act permissible. Kamm allows for intentions to influence the act-type of impermissible acts, so equivalence with unjust military intentions wouldn't help. (Analogy: suppose your retaliation against Enemy would cause many innocent bystanders to die, and hence would be impermissible in the first place. But if you went ahead, intending only to kill Enemy rather than defend yourself, this supposedly would not qualify as an act of "self-defence" after all.) So that's a curious purported link between the conceptual and moral issues.
On to morality, then. Is terrorism always wrong? Well, no, if the stakes are high enough it's always possible for a prima facie deplorable act to be all-things-considered justified (cf. "ticking time tomb" justifications for torture). But Kamm also pointed to a class of less fantastical counterexamples, by invoking the "principle of secondary permissibility": roughly, that pareto improvements on a permissible act yield another permissible act.
Suppose an act of terrorism could achieve the objective whilst causing a proper subset of the harms that would be caused by a justified military action. For example, you might target a subset of NCs who would otherwise die as "collateral damage" in any case; but the ensuing terror would cause the enemy to surrender just as the full-blown military strike would. Recall we have stipulated that the military strike would be morally permissible. But the terrorist strike is a pareto improvement: it is better for some, and worse for none (all those killed would have died anyway). So if the former is justified, then the latter surely is too. So the terrorist strike would be justified.
Kamm suggests that this might be true even if the latter act would have been wrong in the absence of the former. That is, it might generally be impermissible to achieve an objective by resorting to terror tactics. What's special in the above case is that it is a pareto improvement on another permissible act. Most terrorist acts lack this form. (They are not usually pareto improvements on other permissible acts. There is not usually any permissible way to kill the targeted individuals and more!)
I'm a bit dubious of that claim, though. If we're assuming factual omniscience here, then we might as well be full-blown utilitarians and accept optimal acts of terror even in the absence of the prior permissible military strike. (Indeed, hypothetical justification should be enough. If it would be permissible to kill those innocent people as collateral damage if doing so would destroy a hypothetical military target that would help us win the war, then surely an actual pareto-improvement on this justified hypothetical action will itself be justified? Why should it matter that there isn't actually any such military target here? Such absence precludes one of the imagined two permissible ways to win the war, but the second is still available in the actual case!)
Conversely, if we're assuming a more realistic human fallibility, then we can't be sure that the terrorist act would be a pareto improvement -- who knows what unforeseen consequences it might have? Who can be sure that all the victims would have been harmed anyway? Maybe some would have escaped the military strike? -- and so nor can we be sure that the terrorism would be permissible after all. We might have indirect utilitarian grounds to instead prefer a blanket ban on terrorism, even in cases where we think the principle of secondary permissibility might apply.
Three more issues of interest arose from Kamm's second talk:
1) Suppose the terrorists are aiming at political influence by scaring the citizenry. (Perhaps they wish to improve U.S. foreign policy.) Suppose the citizens have independently realized that their foreign policy sucks and ought to be changed, much as the terrorists would hope. Should the citizens instead hold firm, to avoid any risk of falsely appearing as though they can be influenced by terrorism? (That could otherwise create very bad incentives, after all!) Note that this problem also has application to the Muhammad cartoons controversy, as discussed in my old post "Exercising the Freedom to Offend". More generally, if reasonable demands are made in an unreasonable (e.g. violent) way, should we respond by spiting both them and reason? It's a tricky problem, but I think I incline towards the affirmative. (Discouraging unacceptable tactics may be more important than making the best decision on particular issues. Though I suppose terrorists might then try reverse psychology! What would Bush do if al-Qaeda demanded that U.S. troops remain in Iraq?)
2) While we focus on "standard terrorism", which involves harming NCs, it's also worth considering the status of "non-standard terrorism" which causes terror in a population by harmless means (say bombing a deserted park, or dropping spiders over an arachnophobic population, or teaching biology to children). While it's still prima-facie wrong to induce terror in people, this is presumably going to be a lot easier to override than cases of genuine physical harm. (Exceptions may involve ongoing and extended threats. Living in a perpetual state of fear couldn't be much fun.)
3) Kamm distinguishes "mechanical" from "non-mechanical" non-standard terrorism. Roughly, the former bypasses the targets' rational faculties, instead achieving the objective by getting targets to react on "reflex", e.g. a human stampede. The non-mechanical version instead exploits cognitive weaknesses, e.g. irrational fear, the salience heuristic, cowardice, etc., and thus in some sense partially offloads responsibility to the victims themselves. (Example: terrorists have indirectly made America a worse place. They've achieved this by scaring Americans into making America a worse place.)
Now, the question arises: which type of manipulation is worse? More generally, is it worse to directly usurp another's agency - say by orchestrating "mechanical" reflex responses - or to indirectly manipulate them by corrupting their agency, so that the person comes to freely, albeit irrationally, choose as you wish them to?
Plausibly, the latter is worse for the victims. It is worse to be corrupted than to be used, for in the former case you become partially responsible, and so inherit part of the blame. (One would be shamed to realize that they had helped the enemy when they could have done otherwise, if not so weak-willed. To be directly used, by contrast, would merely cause anger. "How dare they?" rather than "How could I?") Nevertheless, the former, "mechanical" manipulation is plausibly the morally worse act. It is more disrespectful to the victims' humanity. You control them, whereas in the non-mechanical case you merely let their own flaws work to your advantage. (This distinction may rest on invalid folk-psychological assumptions, however. One might question just how much control we really have over our psychological flaws, for instance. Perhaps it is no less manipulative. See my old post on Extended Mind-Control.) So that's potentially a case where degrees of harm and wrongdoing seem to come apart -- precisely because of the shift in responsibility.
We might initially think to define "terrorism" simply as intentionally causing harm and terror to non-combatants (NCs), whether as a means or an end, but not merely as a side-effect of some other purpose (cf. "collateral damage" from bombing military targets). But what if the intention was so constrained as to make no difference? Kamm asks us to imagine a "Baby-Killer Nation" that intends to kill NCs, but only on the condition that they have the "cover" of also destroying a legitimate military target. They will only act in situations licensed by just war theory, such that the harm to NCs is proportional to the military objective, etc., yet it's the harm and not the military objective that they truly care about. Does that count as "terrorism"?
Kamm claims not, and offers the following analogy: Suppose you intend to kill your Enemy, but only on the condition that you have the excuse of "self-defence". (But further suppose you don't really care about your self-defence; if anyone else tried to kill you, you wouldn't prevent them.) So you patiently wait until Enemy attacks you, at which point you seize the opportunity to kill him at long last. You intended to kill him, rather than defend yourself. It's the former outcome you really care about. Nevertheless, Kamm claims, your act is one of self-defence.
(I'm not really sure where my intuitions lie in these cases. They seem borderline -- I don't think my concepts are so well-defined as to determinately apply either way. Feel free to report your intuitions in the comments.)
It would be interesting if Kamm is right about this, as it suggests that intentions play less of a role in determining an act's "type" than we might normally expect. Instead, what's crucial seems to be whether one does or would (in counterfactual situations) act differently from how one with just military intentions would act. Though I should emphasize that the above only applies in cases where the "cover" is sufficient to make the act permissible. Kamm allows for intentions to influence the act-type of impermissible acts, so equivalence with unjust military intentions wouldn't help. (Analogy: suppose your retaliation against Enemy would cause many innocent bystanders to die, and hence would be impermissible in the first place. But if you went ahead, intending only to kill Enemy rather than defend yourself, this supposedly would not qualify as an act of "self-defence" after all.) So that's a curious purported link between the conceptual and moral issues.
On to morality, then. Is terrorism always wrong? Well, no, if the stakes are high enough it's always possible for a prima facie deplorable act to be all-things-considered justified (cf. "ticking time tomb" justifications for torture). But Kamm also pointed to a class of less fantastical counterexamples, by invoking the "principle of secondary permissibility": roughly, that pareto improvements on a permissible act yield another permissible act.
Suppose an act of terrorism could achieve the objective whilst causing a proper subset of the harms that would be caused by a justified military action. For example, you might target a subset of NCs who would otherwise die as "collateral damage" in any case; but the ensuing terror would cause the enemy to surrender just as the full-blown military strike would. Recall we have stipulated that the military strike would be morally permissible. But the terrorist strike is a pareto improvement: it is better for some, and worse for none (all those killed would have died anyway). So if the former is justified, then the latter surely is too. So the terrorist strike would be justified.
Kamm suggests that this might be true even if the latter act would have been wrong in the absence of the former. That is, it might generally be impermissible to achieve an objective by resorting to terror tactics. What's special in the above case is that it is a pareto improvement on another permissible act. Most terrorist acts lack this form. (They are not usually pareto improvements on other permissible acts. There is not usually any permissible way to kill the targeted individuals and more!)
I'm a bit dubious of that claim, though. If we're assuming factual omniscience here, then we might as well be full-blown utilitarians and accept optimal acts of terror even in the absence of the prior permissible military strike. (Indeed, hypothetical justification should be enough. If it would be permissible to kill those innocent people as collateral damage if doing so would destroy a hypothetical military target that would help us win the war, then surely an actual pareto-improvement on this justified hypothetical action will itself be justified? Why should it matter that there isn't actually any such military target here? Such absence precludes one of the imagined two permissible ways to win the war, but the second is still available in the actual case!)
Conversely, if we're assuming a more realistic human fallibility, then we can't be sure that the terrorist act would be a pareto improvement -- who knows what unforeseen consequences it might have? Who can be sure that all the victims would have been harmed anyway? Maybe some would have escaped the military strike? -- and so nor can we be sure that the terrorism would be permissible after all. We might have indirect utilitarian grounds to instead prefer a blanket ban on terrorism, even in cases where we think the principle of secondary permissibility might apply.
Three more issues of interest arose from Kamm's second talk:
1) Suppose the terrorists are aiming at political influence by scaring the citizenry. (Perhaps they wish to improve U.S. foreign policy.) Suppose the citizens have independently realized that their foreign policy sucks and ought to be changed, much as the terrorists would hope. Should the citizens instead hold firm, to avoid any risk of falsely appearing as though they can be influenced by terrorism? (That could otherwise create very bad incentives, after all!) Note that this problem also has application to the Muhammad cartoons controversy, as discussed in my old post "Exercising the Freedom to Offend". More generally, if reasonable demands are made in an unreasonable (e.g. violent) way, should we respond by spiting both them and reason? It's a tricky problem, but I think I incline towards the affirmative. (Discouraging unacceptable tactics may be more important than making the best decision on particular issues. Though I suppose terrorists might then try reverse psychology! What would Bush do if al-Qaeda demanded that U.S. troops remain in Iraq?)
2) While we focus on "standard terrorism", which involves harming NCs, it's also worth considering the status of "non-standard terrorism" which causes terror in a population by harmless means (say bombing a deserted park, or dropping spiders over an arachnophobic population, or teaching biology to children). While it's still prima-facie wrong to induce terror in people, this is presumably going to be a lot easier to override than cases of genuine physical harm. (Exceptions may involve ongoing and extended threats. Living in a perpetual state of fear couldn't be much fun.)
3) Kamm distinguishes "mechanical" from "non-mechanical" non-standard terrorism. Roughly, the former bypasses the targets' rational faculties, instead achieving the objective by getting targets to react on "reflex", e.g. a human stampede. The non-mechanical version instead exploits cognitive weaknesses, e.g. irrational fear, the salience heuristic, cowardice, etc., and thus in some sense partially offloads responsibility to the victims themselves. (Example: terrorists have indirectly made America a worse place. They've achieved this by scaring Americans into making America a worse place.)
Now, the question arises: which type of manipulation is worse? More generally, is it worse to directly usurp another's agency - say by orchestrating "mechanical" reflex responses - or to indirectly manipulate them by corrupting their agency, so that the person comes to freely, albeit irrationally, choose as you wish them to?
Plausibly, the latter is worse for the victims. It is worse to be corrupted than to be used, for in the former case you become partially responsible, and so inherit part of the blame. (One would be shamed to realize that they had helped the enemy when they could have done otherwise, if not so weak-willed. To be directly used, by contrast, would merely cause anger. "How dare they?" rather than "How could I?") Nevertheless, the former, "mechanical" manipulation is plausibly the morally worse act. It is more disrespectful to the victims' humanity. You control them, whereas in the non-mechanical case you merely let their own flaws work to your advantage. (This distinction may rest on invalid folk-psychological assumptions, however. One might question just how much control we really have over our psychological flaws, for instance. Perhaps it is no less manipulative. See my old post on Extended Mind-Control.) So that's potentially a case where degrees of harm and wrongdoing seem to come apart -- precisely because of the shift in responsibility.
Monday, July 03, 2006
Updates
[Update: Ben Miller lists the June/July philosophy journal articles here.]
The 32nd Philosophers' Carnival is here. Michele referred to an old post of mine when describing her submission, so I'll need to give that one a look when I have time.
More good news: my talk is over and done with! (Phew.) It was a bit messy -- I'm not much of a speaker -- but it wasn't a total disaster, at least. Some interesting discussion in the Q&A period, so I can't have put everyone to sleep ;-)
More on the AAP later...
The 32nd Philosophers' Carnival is here. Michele referred to an old post of mine when describing her submission, so I'll need to give that one a look when I have time.
More good news: my talk is over and done with! (Phew.) It was a bit messy -- I'm not much of a speaker -- but it wasn't a total disaster, at least. Some interesting discussion in the Q&A period, so I can't have put everyone to sleep ;-)
More on the AAP later...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
