Why do you think you're conscious?

If consciousness is epiphenomenal, then it plays no part in the actual causal explanation of why we believe ourselves to be conscious beings. That seems problematic, or so Peli Grietzer argues in an interesting email [quoted with permission]:

There's one aspect of the Zombie argument that I always felt was a tough bullet to bite, though, and I wonder if you have any thoughts: While various non-causal accounts of knowledge can handle the core-analytic kind of epistemological issues about phenomenal beliefs that arise from epiphenomenalism, I often fear that it leaves us with no decent scientific hypotheses as to the evolution of phenomenal beliefs, other than the amazing luck of humans evolving to believe they are not zombies coinciding with humans really not being zombies.

The obvious counter-argument is that it's no different than the "lucky coincidence" we assume when we reject brain-in-a-vat type sceptical scenarios despite lacking any good probabilistic reasons to do so, but there's a possibly critical difference. At least if our beliefs about the external world are true there is a natural story about how we came to have such beliefs and that story involves the external world, while if epiphenomenalism is true we still have no natural story about how we came to have beliefs about phenomenal consciousness, that [the story] involves phenomenal consciousness.

The technical version of the Zombie argument doesn't commit to epiphenomenalism in the same way the more vivid "zombie world" way of telling it does, though, so maybe it's more of a problem for epiphenomenalism than for the zombie argument.

Chalmers offers a neat answer: "The content of a conscious being's direct phenomenal beliefs is partly constituted by underlying phenomenal qualities. A zombie lacks those qualities, so it cannot have a phenomenal belief with the same content." For example, my concept of phenomenal 'redness' is grounded in the phenomenal quality of redness that I experience. My Zombie twin talks about 'redness', but in actual fact his concept is empty, ungrounded. So he doesn't mean what I do by the term.

On this account, phenomenal qualities (consciousness) can influence what we believe after all. Not causally, of course, but more directly, through constitution. The physical facts alone do not suffice to fix the intentional facts (i.e. what our thoughts are about). Phenomenal properties are part of what it is to have a phenomenal belief -- a belief that's truly "about" those very qualities. So, although a zombie would make all the same noises, their words and cognitive processes (arguably not really "thoughts") wouldn't have the meaning that ours do.

So much for particular phenomenal beliefs like 'this is red'. The original challenge was to explain our general self-attributions of consciousness. Can "phenomenal properties and the capacity to have them [still] play a crucial role in constituting its content", as Chalmers suggests? Seems plausible enough; there's nothing in the zombie's mind for his alleged concept of 'consciousness' to latch on to, for example. Surely it must be empty, again. The upshot: if we weren't conscious, we wouldn't believe it after all. Sure, we would still utter things like "of course I'm conscious!" -- but they would just be so much meaningless babble.

So, zombies are incapable of any positive conception of consciousness (and thus derivative concepts such as zombiehood). But I can think of a residual problem: what of the even more general claim that physicalism is false (i.e. a minimal physical duplicate of our world is not a full duplicate of our world)? This claim involves no phenomenal concepts, and so presumably can be thought without any need for phenomenal properties -- they aren't constitutive of this belief, at least. But that leaves us with only physical factors to explain why we disbelieve in physicalism! Odd, no?

The only way out that I can see is for the epiphenomenalist to adopt the strong position that consciousness grounds all genuine intentionality, so that zombies can't have any real concepts, beliefs, or mean anything at all. This way, even our non-phenomenal beliefs (e.g. about whether physicalism is true) are partly constituted by -- or otherwise depend upon -- phenomenal properties.

[Correction: an alternative option has been pointed out to me: the belief against physicalism inherits its epistemic warrant from the phenomenal beliefs from which it is inferred. In case of zombies, there is no such warrant to be transmitted.]

Consciousness explains why we have the beliefs we do, because without it, we wouldn't have any genuine beliefs at all.

Truth as an Epistemic Construct

BV has an interesting post on the claim that "p is true =df p would be accepted in cognitively ideal conditions." The obvious problem is that being in cognitively ideal conditions would change what's true -- a classic demonstration of the conditional fallacy. Still, it isn't hard to find a work-around for this technicality; simply ask what an ideal spectator would think is true of our world. We might frame this in terms of ideal advice -- what would my idealized self advise me to believe in my actual condition? (Surely that I'm non-ideal, for one thing.) So, one way to overcome the problem is to isolate the idealized vantage point from the actual situation being assessed, i.e. by situating the ideal observer in a different possible world.

BV preempts this response:

But if cognitively ideal conditions are never attained, but are merely possible conditions, then it is difficult to see how the actual truth of any proposition could be identified with what investigators in some merely possible circumstances accept. How can what is actually true be explicated in terms of merely possible judgments?

I take it BV is understanding these ideal agents to be merely investigating their own, non-actual, world. Even then, it doesn't seem so problematic if we've stipulated that their world is a perfect duplicate of ours in respect of the particular details under investigation. (It doesn't seem that bizarre to have the truth be fixed by the best judgment of all possible agents in identical situations.) Note that the normative status of an ideal judgment is unaffected by its existential status. So the only problem would be that their judgments concern unreal things; it's not a judgment's being "merely possible" that's cause for concern, but rather that a judgment is of the merely possible! But this is no longer a problem if the possibility under assessment is a duplicate of ours in the relevant respects, since then the discerned non-actual truth will exactly mirror the actual truth.

Of course, there's a simpler response, which is to have the ideal agents investigating our possible world. Then it's no mystery at all how their (non-actual but ideal) judgments could be relevant to what's actually true. [Granted, you must be part of a world to investigate it using empirical methods, so our ideal observers can't do that. But they can draw implications, i.e. given the totality of experimental data about the actual world, what should we conclude?]

And then there's an even simpler account, which steers well clear of the conditional fallacy by avoiding any kind of conditional analysis at all. Rather than defining epistemic normativity in terms of primitive modality ("what an ideally rational agent would believe"), we may just as well take normativity (ideally rational beliefs) as primitive -- and, if we like, derive modality from there. Epistemicists can then simply define 'p is true' as 'p is epistemically ideal', without appeal to confounding counterfactual situations.

So, I don't think BV has posed an insuperable problem for epistemicists about truth. A bigger problem, to my way of thinking, is that we can clearly conceive of possible worlds where the base facts elude all epistemic grasp. Contingent truths are made true by the world, which is objective / mind-independent / evidence-transcendent. Still, I'm sympathetic to a circumscribed form of epistemic constructivism, concerning necessary (a priori) truths. As I put it here, "philosophical truth just is the ideal limit of a priori inquiry; it does not answer to the sort of independent reality that might sensibly be considered beyond all epistemic reach." After all, it's awfully hard to see what in the world philosophical truths are meant to correspond to. (That big rock over there?) Far more natural to see it as a rational construct, or intangible ideal, that doesn't literally correspond to any mundane thing.

Dualist Explanations

Peter writes:

Chalmers posits that the non-physical mental properties parallel the information processing properties of the system. But if they parallel them perfectly, and thus explain the mind, why not just identify them? ... the dualist explanation posits something more than the materialist version of the same theory does: it must posit additional laws governing a new domain of mental stuff that makes it behave in this way and stick to the right sort of physical systems.

On the other hand, the (type B) materialist theory posits ad hoc 'strong necessities', which we have no independent reason to believe in. (Kripke's "necessary a posteriori" is no help.)

Consider the question: why aren't we non-conscious zombies, mere hunks of matter that exhibit complex behaviour without any "lights" on inside? The materialist answers that zombies are impossible; that consciousness is nothing above and beyond the complex arrangements of matter that our bodies (brains) comprise. But this strikes me as an unsatisfying explanation, that doesn't really do justice to the phenomena.

The dualist can do better. She may acknowledge the depth of the problem -- that consciousness is something new, something that goes beyond merely material properties. She can also acknowledge the modal fact that zombies (non-conscious physical duplicates of ourselves) are possible. So, rather than merely rebuffing the question "why aren't we zombies?" as empty or ill-formed, the dualist takes it seriously, and offers an answer:

The reason we're not zombies is because of the contingent natural laws that govern our universe. There are psycho-physical bridging laws, which ensure that matter gives rise to consciousness. (Note how intuitive this claim is: we think that consciousness emerges from the brain; not that it just is the brain!) The zombie world has no such bridging laws. Its laws are merely physical, so that brains and other matter causally interact without giving rise to genuine consciousness in addition. That's the difference.

Materialists can't explain this difference, because they don't take the zombie intuition seriously. Once the brain matter is there, they think that's all there is to consciousness -- there's nothing further to explain. Most of us think there is something still to be explained, and dualism can achieve this by positing bridging laws that cause 'mind' to emerge from 'matter'.

Even dualists can agree that in our world (i.e. given the actual laws of nature) complex brain states suffice for consciousness. The briding laws make zombies nomologically impossible. And that's all science is concerned with. As philosophers, though, we're interested in a broader sense of possibility, in which we can't just take the natural laws for granted. So, once our familiar psycho-physical bridging laws are taken away, we should ask: does matter alone suffice for consciousness? The zombie world demonstrates that the answer is no. Take away the bridging laws, and our physical stuff might no longer give rise to any conscious experiences.

In summary, it's worth emphasizing three points:

(1) Materialism - perhaps surprisingly - turns out to be theoretically extravagant, due to its modal ambitions. It posits 'strong necessities', which we have no independent reason to grant, and indeed goes against everything else we know in philosophy. Dualism is thus the more philosophically modest theory.

(2) Additional laws are worth positing, to explain why we're conscious rather than zombies. (The unsatisfying alternative is to merely dismiss the question.)

(3) Contrary to popular belief, dualism need not be in tension with science. It only diverges from materialism in its extra-nomological implications -- i.e. matters that concern philosophers, not scientists.

Getting the Most Out of Grad School

Show me the argument points to a recent survey of responses to the question, "Knowing everything that you know now, what advice would you give others entering or in the early years of graduate school?" Most of it concerns the admissions process. With that behind me, I'm now more interested in the question of how to get the most out of grad school once I'm there. For example, should I take as many classes as I can fit in, or focus more on individual research? (What's the best balance of seminars, reading, and writing?) Is it worth attending seminars in other disciplines? (Generalize or specialize?)

Any advice welcome!

Template Revamping

I'm trying out a version of Hackosphere's NEO template, which should make it faster and easier to navigate between posts. Let me know what you think.

Update: Added sidebar poll.

I've also (somewhat haphazardly) categorized around 600 old posts. The rest can be found under the "compendia" category (as I maintained manually updated "category" posts for my first year or so of blogging).

Finally, I've replaced the old 'blogroll' with a list of 'neighbours' (i.e. people I tend to argue with!). I expect it'll change over time. Feel free to email if I've missed you out.

Conservative Progressivism

Looking at the 'big picture', should utilitarians care less about (present) welfare? John Broome argues [PDF] that the population effects of global warming will ultimately dwarf any direct suffering caused. More generally, impacts on present people dwindle to near insignificance when one considers the indefinitely many people that are yet to come. A dangerous thought. For example, does it mean that we should care less about temporary suffering, so long as an end is in sight?

Consider the vegetarian's arguments against factory farmed meat. The present system causes huge and unnecessary suffering to animals. But, we may think, it's only a matter of time until the industry is replaced by bioengineered meat (no animal required). If so, perhaps vegetarianism isn't the pressing moral issue Peter Singer says it is. Factory farming causes massive suffering today, but very little in the grand scheme of things.

The most pressing issue, on this way of looking at things, is to promote 'viral' or compounding goods (e.g. wealth and education) and the social/moral infrastructure that will support continued progress.

There's a sense in which this 'progressivism' is deeply conservative. We should be less concerned about making progress ourselves, than in ensuring that progress may continue to be made in future. Procedural liberalism trumps social justice. We should care more about improving the state of public debate than pushing our particular agendas. (The two aren't necessarily exclusive, of course.)

Further, perhaps we should embrace some degree of perfectionism, and prioritize excellence over mere welfare (assuming that high attainment is more likely to benefit future generations -- think scientific breakthroughs).

Plausible?

Against Hostage Negotiation

The case against negotiation is simple: it provides an incentive for people to take hostages. If we instead making a public and binding commitment to ignore such threats, there'd be no reason for anyone to threaten us in future. Perhaps a few hostages will needlessly die in the meantime, while criminals test our resolve; but more will be saved in the long run. We would favour this policy from behind a veil of ignorance, so we ought to implement it in reality.

Any counterarguments?

Philosophers' Carnival #49

... is here!

Owning Dispositions (by degrees?)

The Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments may be taken to suggest that we are all disposed to act wickedly in certain situations. How should this fact be understood? Is there a little seed of evil lurking inside us, just waiting to get out? Or is it instead that some situations are so extraordinary that they would cause us to behave abnormally, "out of character" with our "true self"? Is this a real distinction? If so, what is its basis, and how do we tell whether any given counterfactual has import for one's "true character"? (I asked a similar question here.)

Another example may help bring out the problem. Suppose a mad scientist could rewire my brain so that I became a crazed serial killer. It seems absurd to say that I already have the disposition to become a crazed serial killer "if rewired". The antecedent condition is one that changes who I am - my character and dispositions - so the counterfactual doesn't really reflect at all on my actual character and dispositions. (Cf. the conditional fallacy.)

I guess the key issue here is whether my current state contains the "causal basis" of my counterfactual behaviour, or whether this is something that's newly introduced by the antecedent condition. Drastic neural rewiring alters the causal basis of my behaviour. But all thought and experience involves some degree of neural rewiring - our brain changes, that's how we learn! So how can we draw any strict line here, between changes that merely draw on our existing dispositions, and changes that introduce whole new ones? Our terms suggest a difference in kind, when the neurobiology may merely differ in degree.

The above discussion seems lacking in conceptual clarity. There must be a better way to understand these issues. Any suggestions? (Quick thought: perhaps dispositions should be understood more exclusively as general tendencies, manifest in a much broader range of behaviours. Then we may discard the above cases as too isolated and specific to justify invoking 'dispositions'.)

Similar issues arise for dispositional beliefs. Peter distinguishes between dormant actual beliefs ("my name is Peter") and merely derivable beliefs ("25 - 11 = 14"). He suggests that the difference consists in whether the proposition is "directly integrated into the person’s mental operations", and so "immediately available when needed". He adds:

It is natural to say that plain beliefs are always in mind, although usually unconscious, but derived beliefs are not usually present in any way, except when they are consciously derived from plain beliefs.

This sounds like the above distinction between owned (internal) and disowned (external) dispositions; those that are already present in the agent, and those that aren't (but would be given the right stimulus). But aren't integration and availability likewise matters of degree?

Pandering Contests

Bryan Caplan writes:

Almost everyone takes this for granted, but it still freaks me out: Audiences in presidential debates applaud just because a candidate says something they agree with... Why not just hold up big signs that say: "TELL US WHAT WE WANT TO HEAR"?

Keep this in mind the next time someone blames politicians for the low quality of political dialogue. The hard truth is that politicians are just responding to the perverse incentives that the people give them.

Democracy is only as bad as the demos. Unfortunately, at present we suck. Not intrinsically; I don't think the general public is irredeemably stupid, or anything like that. It's a simple attitude problem. Most people, it seems, don't care about honest inquiry. Our social norms encourage pandering, close-mindedness, and intellectual dishonesty. It's shameful.

What can be done? Two things, I suppose:
(1) Model good practice. "Be the change you want to see in the world," as Gandhi put it.

(2) Apply social pressure to create better norms. Praise intellectual virtues, and scorn those who wallow in cognitive vice.

Sound right?

Fixed!

Oops -- apparently my main page wasn't loading properly in Internet Explorer. All fixed now.

(Maybe I should get one of those "this page is optimized for Mozilla Firefox" stickers.)

Untouchable

There's an interesting article in the latest Canterbury magazine (vol.4 no.1) about Penni Cushman's research on male primary school teachers. The entrenched sexism in play here is so blatant and pernicious that I'm amazed the issue doesn't receive more attention (especially among those who care about social justice and gender equality). As Cushman says:

It's frightening what men have to deal with in schools now. They don't want to touch children and they're afraid of being alone with a child. A climate of mistrust around male teachers has been created and that puts a lot of stress on men in schools and creates confusion among children.

Her survey of male teachers [PDF] uncovered an "overriding sense of hopelessness and regret" about the social norms governing their contact with children. As one teacher wrote:

It is sad that I feel I can’t put my arms round a child to comfort them the way a female teacher or parent does.

Indeed. Worse than sad, I'd say, the underlying gender norms and social attitudes are downright immoral. Cushman summarizes the findings:

Although there were teachers among the survey respondents and focus group participants who set aside the ‘no touch’ policies, they were very much a minority. Most teachers chose to endure the concomitant anxiety and humiliation associated with avoidance of touch rather than engage in practices that left them vulnerable. The resultant hands-off behaviour is, of course, the very behaviour advocated in the code of practice. However, adherence to these NZEI guidelines was seen by some teachers to be invoking ‘paranoia’, and there was fear that the children themselves might develop an unreasonable suspicion of male teachers. Despite the suggestion in the code of practice that teachers explain why they cannot respond to physical contact, most males did not heed this advice, or were unaware of it. As one pointed out, how, exactly, does a male teacher explain to children that because of his gender he is untouchable?

See also: A Climate of Fear.

N.B. This is in a New Zealand context -- I'm not sure whether other countries are quite so bad.

Coherent Persuasion

Peter argues that no-one has "ever been convinced to change their mind by a rational argument". I'm not convinced.

No rational argument then can be constructed to ever change a person’s mind, because we can never get to premises that people must accept.

Even if we grant this premise (must we?), the conclusion simply doesn't follow. At most, it shows that arguments won't necessarily rationally convince everyone. It remains an open possibility that some people will indeed be rationally convinced, since they may well be more committed to the truth of the premises than to the conclusion's falsity.

Still, I think there is something artificial about an argument's directionality, as demonstrated by the adage that "one man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens." Valid arguments are easily inverted, simply by switching the conclusion with a premise and negating each. Validity is preserved; the contraposed argument is logically equivalent to the original. (This refutes the common claim that logic tells us how to reason. At most, logic can provide us with wide-scope norms against inconsistency, but it cannot tell us which of the conflicting claims to give up.)

So, philosophical debate should be thought of as producing... not "arguments" per se, but logical maps -- "inconsistent triads" and the like -- to show which claims cohere best with certain others, which ones rise and fall together, etc.

It should be quite clear that this process can be rationally persuasive. We feel rational/psychological pressure to have a coherent belief set. So if someone can show that some claim P coheres better with our other beliefs than does our present belief of not-P, this may bring us to change our minds about P. And, indeed, this happens all the time.

People often hold opinions due to conceptual misunderstandings. (Think of the popular false dilemma between relativism and dogmatism.) These are easily cleared up, and any half-rational agent will change their mind upon learning of their error. Much if not most philosophy is simply a matter of overcoming sloppy thinking -- appreciating possibilities or implications that we'd previously missed.

Peter is implicitly assuming that we already have maximally coherent belief sets, so that no argument (logical map) would have any new information to give us cause to update our beliefs. But this assumption is patently false. We can - and do - learn things from others' arguments, and change our minds accordingly.

P.S. I've previously, in response to a reader's challenge, given examples of changing my mind in response to rational arguments. The issue of normativity and ultimate ends is the big one. More recently, learning about 2-D semantics radically changed my opinion of conceivability arguments. So, those are two very fundamental changes right there. (Of course, it's open to Peter to insist that the changes had non-rational causes. But that would seem unmotivated and uncharitable. I certainly think that my views have improved with time, and didn't merely "shift" in a rationally neutral fashion.)

Question for regular readers: have any arguments on this blog ever led you to revise your beliefs?

Denying Agency

OB solidly criticizes the "tendentious manipulative hostile language" in reports about Salman Rushdie's knighthood. Apparently the event "provoked" protests from angry Muslims. OB thinks this is unfair on Rushdie. But it's also worth pointing out how appeasement disrespects Muslims. ('Shouldn't we know better than to prod the animals?' one imagines the journalist asking. 'They might bite!')

Human beings have agency; we make choices. When someone says or does something we don't like, we can choose how to react. We aren't animals, to respond to any 'provocation' with a bloodthirsty snarl, threatening violence. Such behaviour is not to be expected of decent human beings. To consider it par for the course for Muslims, then, is soft bigotry. It denies them agency, and treats them as mere animals.

Granted, some Islamic extremists (apparently including Pakistan's religious affairs minister) behave like animals, with their obscene death threats. But we should expect better of them. Their degraded state is not simply 'par for the course', or 'to be expected'. They're human. They should start acting like it. We should expect no less. Violent behaviour is, and ought to remain, remarkable. So, next time an extremist chooses to act like an animal, remark on it. Show them that much respect. They're not animals; their behaviour stems from their own agency, not our poking and prodding.

What we learn from surveys

Study: Alzheimer's Patients Say They Do Not Have Alzheimer's

Context and Relativism

Peter discusses 'kinds of relativism': "surely every ethical theory recommends different actions in different circumstances, and so in a way their recommendations are relative." I think it is helpful to distinguish such context-sensitivity -- whereby the truth is fixed by the particular circumstances -- from relativism strictly speaking. As I wrote in this essay:

I take relativism to be the view that the truth-value of a token claim varies depending on who assesses it. This should be distinguished from contextualism, according to which different tokens of a sentence type may have different contents, say depending on the speaker. Indexical content, for instance, is context-dependent in this way. But the resulting claims are typically not relative, because any token utterance will be absolutely true or false, no matter who assesses it. “I am RC” may be true when spoken by me but not you, yet even you must agree that my token utterance is a true one. So it is not 'relative' in the above sense. Similarly, whether bright colours (for example) enhance an artwork may depend on context, i.e. the rest of the work. But this aesthetic quality will only count as a relative value if a token instance of it varies in value across viewers – say, if two critics can, without error, disagree over the qualities of a single painting.

Similarly for ethics: any adequate theory must be sensitive to the morally relevant features of a situation. It would be morally obtuse to claim that lying (for example) is always wrong, no matter the specific context. But this isn't relativism, so long as we agree that there's an objective fact of the matter in any particular case. Some lies are permissible and others aren't; but there's no one particular (token) act of lying that is at once both right and wrong, "relative" to different observers.

Note that, on this understanding, the claim that people ought to abide by the norms of their culture is not actually a form of relativism. It's presumably an objective fact what your cultural norms are, after all. So even if someone in a different culture would - due to the change in context - be bound by different norms, they won't (if they accept the above claim) dispute which norms apply in your particular situation.

Cultural relativism should be understood differently. In contrast to the above "cultural command theory", relativists will claim that cultures have no special authority over their members. They simply provide one standard of assessment, and others may provide alternatives, and there's nothing to decide between them (after all, any such assessment would itself be made from some arbitrary perspective or other). The mark of relativism, recall, is that one and the same particular act merits conflicting assessments. It is both right (from one viewpoint) and wrong (from another).

[Of course, we should reject both these views. Arbitrary opinions don't magically become true simply because they're endorsed by "the culture" in general. And, contra the relativist, some perspectives are more reasonable than others -- differences aren't necessarily arbitrary.]

In sum, I agree with Peter that "there are some objective facts about societies that ethics must take into account when making recommendations as to how individuals should act." Context matters, and cultural context is part of that. But I don't think we should consider this any kind of relativism, "bounded" or otherwise.

[See also my old post on 'objective moral relativism'.]

Update: I should clarify a respect in which the quoted analogy to contextualism may be misleading. The semantic content of an indexical like 'I' depends on who utters it. The respect in which morality is context-dependent is not semantic in this way. The semantic content of 'morally right' doesn't vary. It is rather a substantive fact that the term extends to some tokens of a type but not others. See my more recent post: Moral Principles, Objective Generalizations.

Paraquoting

This post got me thinking: what do you do when you don't want to quote someone exactly -- say the formal apparatus of square brackets and ellipses would be too clunky to indicate all your minor changes -- but nor can you be bothered coming up with an original paraphrase? Our writing norms don't seem to accommodate this. Quote marks are taken to indicate exact quotation, and their absence indicates your own original words. Shouldn't there be a middle ground, a way to honestly acknowledge the "too-close paraphrase" and thus avoid the impression of either plagiariasm or misquotation?

Perhaps the simplest option would be to use quote marks, but prefix them with the label 'Roughly:', to indicate that the quotation is not exact. Or, in the other direction, you could add an explicit disclaimer explaining that the "paraphrases" throughout your post are actually 90% copy & pasted. What would be the least clunky way to express this? Descriptions are tiresome; is there a simple name for this cross between quoting and paraphrasing? 'Paraquoting' is tempting, though I gather some already use the term specifically to denote the paraphrasing of famous "quotes". Any other suggestions?

I'm assuming, of course, that full acknowledgment is necessary here. But one may question this. For example, the aforementioned blogger can't have thought there was anything inappropriate about his unmarked quotations,* since he links to the source that would immediately expose them. And yet I still found it outrageous. Why? I guess it's because, whether he intended it or not, as a reader I was misled by his post. I had taken it to be a substantial third-party summary, expressing the blogger's understanding of the source article. But it wasn't really his voice at all. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, of course -- selective quotation is a valuable service too -- but it would help avoid confusion to be more upfront about it. Helpful norms would ensure that readers are able to tell at a glance whose "voice" they're hearing.

* Example of source [1] followed by blogger's "paraphrase" [2]:

(1) At the opposite end of the spectrum lies what I call "organic culture." The most extreme examples of this form of social organization are the Amish and the Hasidic Jews.

(2) At the opposite end of the spectrum lies what LaTulippe calls "organic culture." The most extreme examples of this type of social organization, he says, are the Amish and the Hasidic Jews.

Doing Your Fair Share

Fairness seems to require that, in collaborative endeavours, each contributor pitches in with an equal contribution. But in what sense? Consider the old problem of household chores. We're told to split them "50/50", but what exactly are we measuring here?

Simply doing half of the listed chores is no guarantee of fairness, since some jobs may require more work than others. Similarly for spending equal time: a long pleasant job might reasonably be preferred over a short and nasty one. And what if the two people differ in how long it takes them to do a job, which value 'counts'? (Note also the moral hazard: if one spends all day mowing the lawn at a snail's pace, does that get them off the dishes?)

Perhaps what we seek is the nebulous measure of "effort". But, as in schooling, this incentivizes incompetence. (If you're going to be rewarded for your hapless "efforts" regardless, why bother taking steps to improve the efficacy of your future efforts?)

So, it seems like there's not actually any objective fact of the matter, in such a case, as to what a "fair contribution" would be. At least, if a problem can't be quantified, then there's no such thing as "50%" of it. Absent any such ideal result, the dispute must be resolved by bargaining, not inquiry. So, we may think, anything goes so long as both parties are happy with it. But what about lowered expectations or 'adaptive preferences' as a result of exploitation? Wouldn't that still be problematic? Arguably, justice requires that both parties begin with roughly equal bargaining power. (Having said that, I think it's worth emphasizing that - as a general rule - the injustice resides in the background conditions, and not in the mutually beneficial "exploitative bargain" per se.) Perhaps more importantly, in this context, decency requires giving due weight to one's partner's interests too.

In other words, perhaps some contributions are problematic, not due to the resulting distribution per se, but because they indicate selfishness, "free riding", or lack of concern for one's co-contributors. It's not as though there's some quantity (whether fixed or variable) that each person ought to contribute. It's more a matter of character, and dedication to the common project. So perhaps virtue theory would offer a better ethical analysis of this issue. Any suggestions?

Moral Asymmetries of Existence

The NDPR on Benatar's Better Never to Have Been is very interesting (HT: Siris). But I'm skeptical of the moral asymmetry proposed in the following example:

Suppose you can, as a package, bring seven lives into existence. Six will be good, one will be very bad. You might think it would be wrong to go ahead. Other things equal, starting good lives is permissible, but not starting bad lives is required. We can't justify starting this bad life by appeal to the good in other, separate, lives.

Predictably enough, I'm inclined to go 'indirect utilitarian' on this one, and grant it as a merely contingent moral principle. Context is all. As it happens, we have a high normal baseline: most lives in our society are pretty good. So, creating a good life is nothing exceptionally good, whereas creating a bad life is exceptionally bad. Given the more fundamental principle that exceptionally good or bad actions have greater moral significance (in virtue of their impact on the general form of society), we find that the contingent asymmetry in social circumstances leads to the above moral asymmetry.

But things could have been different. If we imagine a dystopian world where the normal 'baseline' is much lower, i.e. where most lives are rather awful, then it seems to me the moral asymmetry would be likewise inverted. Given the opportunity to bring about an exceptionally good life, people ought to do so. To prevent another typically bad one would be permissible -- good, even -- but not required. So, dystopians ought to embrace the 'package deal' of six good lives and one more bad one.

Benatar argues from the original asymmetry principle to the conclusion that no lives are worth living. (Even a mostly good life has some bad in it, so we are like the 6:1 package deal, squashed into one body.) But, ironically, his asymmetry principle only holds in the first place because of all the good lives that (future) people will have. In light of this contingency, Benatar's use of the principle is self-undermining. The prescribed "zero birthrate" would remove the grounds of its own justification.

In sum: the asymmetry principle derives whatever force it has from the more fundamental value of promoting the general welfare. So it cannot be used to subvert this very goal.

Opinions and Inquiry

Chris Dillow argues against opinion as "just prejudice". This is why raw 'public opinion' is not the proper foundation for democracy. It has no normative significance; the mere fact that people believe something tells us nothing about what is true or ought to be done.

Similarly, a liberal education is not just about enabling students to express themselves. (As Chris says, "Selves aren't interesting." I'd disagree, but it's true enough in these contexts, at least.) Rather, what's interesting is intellectual inquiry. Students should be encouraged to draw their own conclusions, not because any belief will be magically "validated" by the mere fact of their holding it, but because thinking for yourself is the way to develop your rational discernment. The take-home item of value here is not the 'opinion' one forms, so much as the reasons that led to it -- and, even more, the discernment that enables one to appreciate these.

If there is to be a positive case for democracy (as opposed to simply showing it to be less bad than every alternative), it cannot rest simply on 'one man, one vote'. To have all opinions count equally in the tally is a feeble sort of equality, given the general worthlessness of opinions anyway. But to be granted an equal opportunity to participate in democratic inquiry -- to seek, offer and assess reasons in deliberation about the common good -- now that's something worth getting excited about!

At least, that's my opinion.

Identifying your 'God'

Sometimes people argue about whether, say, Christians and Muslims worship the same God. (Islamophobes employ genetic arguments to suggest that Allah is "really" a Pagan moon god, for example. Because everyone knows the Christian religion was not at all influenced by its pagan precursors.) Anyway, there seems a remarkably simple way to settle the matter. Simply ask a Muslim whether, if it turned out that Christianity were true (the deity became incarnate as Jesus, etc.), this deity would still be 'Allah'.*

We can similarly ask a Christian whether, in the possible world described by Muslims, the deity is still 'God'. They might give a different answer, which would be curious, but given that trans-world identity is merely conventional, the disagreement doesn't really matter. The real question, in either case, is whether one's concept of 'God' is compatible with the state of affairs hypothesized by another. Different people's answers needn't be symmetrical, as different people might have different 'God'-concepts, associated with more or less restrictive identity conditions. Having said all that, unless there's some reason to prefer a more or less restricted concept here, the whole dispute seems a bit pointless and arbitrary anyway...

* = Jack similarly recommends this methodology:

"for those of you who believe in God, if it turned out that there was a deity but that he was a jokester and far from omnibenevolent, would He be the one that you believed in or not?"

The Idea of God - who needs the reality?

Clayton makes a nice point:

According to Anselm, I'm a fool. I believe God exists only in the imagination. But even Anselm grants that God does exist in my imagination and that I have a grasp of what things would have been like had there been a God. Had there been a God, for example, God would have been very displeased with Hitler and commanded him to stop.

More generally, it's daft to think that God's existence is necessary to ground normative ideals, because the whole point of ideals is that they float free from the mess of our actual reality. The question of how things should be does not fundamentally depend on how things in fact are. Ideal standards can be grounded in counterfactuals, e.g. facts about what an ideal spectator would recommend; whether such an ideal spectator actually exists in the here and now is, quite simply, irrelevant. (This is a familiar point: one may ask, "What would Jesus do?" without requiring that Jesus actually be in that situation.)

Philosophy 'hooks'

A quick opinion poll: What do you consider to be the most engaging philosophical issues (for a general audience)? Relatedly, what is the best way to get undergrads "hooked" on philosophy?

Applied ethics and political philosophy are perhaps the most obviously relevant, being the sorts of issues that folk tend to argue about anyway. May as well learn how to do it well! On the other hand, "familiarity breeds contempt" -- I think much of the appeal of philosophy is the unique opportunity it offers to think about wild and wacky questions that just don't get addressed elsewhere. So even in these relatively practical subfields, I think the most fun can be had by looking at concepts in a new light, e.g. questioning common understandings of such values as 'democracy' or 'freedom'. (But maybe that's just me.)

Within epistemology, radical skepticism always struck me as the most obviously engaging topic. (Everybody loves the Matrix!) Anything else?

Metaphysics, similarly, seems a mixed bag. But I'd expect free will, personal identity, and time, to provoke immediate and universal fascination.

Philosophy of language seems like a tougher sell. I was always fascinated by scopal ambiguity, at least. Perhaps a puzzle-based approach ("how are we to make sense of this sentence...?") could serve to introduce the tools of the trade in an engaging way. Still, it's not quite so immediately gripping...

Same goes for formal logic, but paradoxes are an important exception. My all-time favourite undergrad course ("philosophical logic") in fact did nothing but explore, in an accessible, non-technical manner, various paradoxes and puzzles -- liar, raven, Zeno, Newcomb, surprise examination, sleeping beauty, the idle argument, etc. At least for one of my temperament, it's hard to imagine a better lure...

Meta-ethics comes close, though. It's just an downright fascinating question, whether "oughts" are objective and real. (Important, too.) Normative ethics can be gripping too, esp. disputes over what is good -- Nozick's "experience machine", Parfit's "repugnant conclusion", etc.

Philosophy of mind and science I'm less familiar with. Consciousness and Artificial Intelligence are obviously engaging, though. (Other areas I've missed? Aesthetics: the issue of emotional responses to fiction is interesting.) Further suggestions welcome...

Elsewhere

- Brandon discusses "value cocktails". Is 'democracy' equivocal, "a label for a mixture of different values", or can we pin down a unified understanding of 'democracy' that captures all the value we associate with it, at once?

- New blog "Ethics Etc." discusses Velleman's view that "unbearable pain" disintegrates the person. They point out a curious consequence: we cannot suffer unbearable pain (for our self would already have disintegrated)!

- TNR's Open University summarizes a recent panel on blogs and historical scholarship:

DeLong suggested that the basic point to understand with respect to the Internet is that the cost of scholarly communication has decreased dramatically over time and that this can't be bad.

- Chris at Mixing Memory discusses new evidence that monkeys have a theory of mind:

When they knew the experimenter couldn't see the containers, they chose the silent one so that they could get the food without the human noticing, but when they knew the experimenter could see them approaching, they preferred the noisy container. This implies that the macaques understood how both visual and auditory information would affect the experimenter's behavior, and furthermore that auditory information would only affect his behavior if he couldn't see what the monkey was doing.

It still seems open to deflationary explanations, however. Mightn't the monkeys know that noises provoke responses from "eyeless" creatures, without grasping the underlying (mental) reasons why?

- Also interesting: David Ryfe on the sociology of deliberation.

Patriotism and Tough Love

Jason Kuznicki compares conceptions of 'patriotism':

Today, the word “patriot” can scarcely be distinguished from the word “nationalist;” a patriot is above all one who is loyal to his government, his country, and his fellow citizens... For most Enlightenment thinkers, to be a patriot was to favor the people of the country rather than the country’s rulers.

Given the simple definition of 'patriotism' as "love of country", I think the real problem lies not with the popular interpretation of 'country', but of 'love'. Too many Americans think that loving their country means coddling it, ignoring its faults, and proclaiming its virtue without regard for reality. Unsurprisingly, this produces a spoilt brat. But surely genuine love would not be so predictably destructive. Real patriots appreciate the great potential inherent in their country, and hope to nurture this and make it a reality. They stand by their country in hard times, not in the pretense that it is faultless, but in the faith that it can redeem itself.

(As Blar noted, the full version of the famous phrase is: "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; if wrong, to be set right.")

48th Philosophers' Carnival...

... is here!

Safekeeping Cyberspace

[Part Six in a series: Reading Benkler's Wealth of Networks.]

We've seen that the Internet, as a more open and accessible public media space, creates new opportunities and advances important democratic values. It makes the broader culture more transparent and responsive, it empowers citizens to express themselves creatively, and it enhances autonomy by broadening the range of possibilities open for us to choose between. The end result – if this opportunity is recognized – is a more ‘conversational’ public sphere, whereby citizens can deliberate together in an ongoing dialogue, at least to a greater extent than was possible under the mass-mediated industrial model that dominated the twentieth century.

These benefits are not inevitable, however. Private control over its physical infrastructure could threaten the democratic potential of the Internet, for example:

Clearly, when in 2005 Telus, Canada’s second largest telecommunications company, blocked access to the Web site of the Telecommunications Workers Union for all of its own clients and those of internet service providers that relied on its backbone network, it was not seeking to improve service for those customers’ benefit, but to control a conversation in which it had an intense interest. (p.398)

Possible solutions to this might involve public provision of broadband and/or open wireless network infrastructure, as several U.S. municipalities are currently investigating (pp.406-7). Public provision of this essential infrastructure would also help overcome the ‘digital divide’ that excludes non-connected residents from the full benefits of networked citizenship.

Other threats include excessive IP laws (e.g. copyright extensions) that diminish the public domain and crowd out peer-production in favour of incumbent commercial industries. Further, hardware "fixes" -- i.e. the crippling of information devices, so as to preclude the very possibility of copyright infringement -- inevitably overreach, equally obstructing "fair use" and other perfectly legitimate actions.

Past posts in this series have highlighted the Internet's incredible potential, based on the distinctive ease with which people can use it to produce and share information. If we don't want to see its value squandered, we need to be wary of lobbyists and legislators who would undermine these distinctive qualities of the Internet (thus precluding its distinctive benefits). So, this is an important political issue for citizens to be aware of. In light of the democratic potential of the Internet, it would be an awful shame for our laws to convert it into just another commercial medium.

Activating Citizenship

[Part Five in a series: Reading Benkler's Wealth of Networks.]

"The easy possibility of communicating effectively into the public sphere allows individuals to reorient themselves from passive readers and listeners to potential speakers and participants in a conversation. The way we listen to what we hear changes because of this; as does, perhaps most fundamentally, the way we observe and process daily events in our lives. We no longer need to take these as merely private observations, but as potential subjects for public communication." (p.213)

This leads to “a fundamental change in how individuals can interact with their democracy and experience their role as citizens” (p.272):

Ideal citizens need not be seen purely as trying to inform themselves about what others have found, so that they can vote intelligently. They need not be limited to reading the opinions of opinion makers and judging them in private conversations. They are no longer constrained to occupy the role of mere readers, viewers, and listeners. They can be, instead, participants in a conversation. Practices that begin to take advantage of these new capabilities shift the locus of content creation from the few professional journalists trolling society for issues and observations, to the people who make up that society. They begin to free the public agenda setting from dependence on the judgments of managers, whose job it is to assure that the maximum number of readers, viewers, and listeners are sold in the market for eyeballs. The agenda thus can be rooted in the life and experience of individual participants in society—in their observations, experiences, and obsessions. The network allows all citizens to change their relationship to the public sphere. They no longer need be consumers and passive spectators. They can become creators and primary subjects. It is in this sense that the Internet democratizes.

This ‘conversational’ approach represents a deliberative-democratic transformation of the public sphere itself (p. 180):

The Internet allows individuals to abandon the idea of the public sphere as primarily constructed of finished statements uttered by a small set of actors socially understood to be “the media” (whether state owned or commercial) and separated from society, and to move toward a set of social practices that see individuals as participating in a debate. Statements in the public sphere can now be seen as invitations for a conversation, not as finished goods. Individuals can work their way through their lives, collecting observations and forming opinions that they understand to be practically capable of becoming moves in a broader public conversation, rather than merely the grist for private musings.