Meta-ontology talk

We had some fun discussion at Canterbury last Friday on the question of 'what is existence?'. Philip generously recommended this blog when he introduced me, so I should probably direct any new visitors to the post on which my talk was based: here. Other related posts may be found under the 'metaphysics' category on the left sidebar. (Comments and counterarguments welcome, as always!)

Update: My central argument could be summarized as follows:

1. Ordinary existence claims (e.g. denying that the tooth fairy exists) serve to distinguish between rival possible worlds, whereas ontological disputes instead concern how best to describe a (qualitatively) given world.

2. Substantive inquiry into the nature of the world requires narrowing the possibilities, with the ultimate aim being to discern which possibility has been actualized. (This is arguably the job of empirical science.)

3. So, ontology is lacking in worldly 'substance'.

Meta-ontological projectivism: My positive view is then that ontology (and the rest of philosophy, for that matter) is better understood as a rational construction: it concerns the question of how to carve up the world - or project our concepts onto it - most coherently. The ultimate end (truth) is fixed by the ideals of rationality, rather than any thing in the world. The proposed meta-philosophy in this sense privileges the epistemic over the ontic.

Accommodating Unreason

Is it ever appropriate to manipulate people on the assumption that they are unreasonable? It strikes me as problematic, but it's also exceedingly common. Just think of all the white lies we tell to avoid causing offense, or the rhetoric of a political partisan who doesn't trust her compatriots to listen to reason alone, or the general practice of trying to impress people through non-rational means, say by dressing up. (Monogamy itself may be another example.) I assume none of these would be necessary if people were just a bit more reasonable. But if our pessimistic predictions are accurate -- as they often are -- is that enough to justify acting on them?

I suggested before that the assumption of unreason denies agency to the target. Sure, people are often unreasonable. But not inherently so. Anyone could do better, if they made the effort. And wouldn't they be the better for it? The choice is theirs, and insofar as people live up (or down) to expectations, we should do our bit to help them make the best choice, by expecting nothing less of them.

The alternative is to treat them as a mere object, disrespecting their rational autonomy. By taking it upon yourself to effectively make their decisions for them, you turn them into something less than fully human. Unless, I suppose, they were already that way to begin with. If someone truly is unreasonable, then they have no rational autonomy for you to usurp. They are animals already; you may as well make them comfortable.

What about the more realistic case of a person who is merely unreasonable in a few particular respects? (That presumably covers all of us!) Are we to pretend that we're all perfectly rational agents? That seems dishonest, and silly besides - the pretense surely wouldn't last long. Still, it at least seems like an ideal to aspire to; and cause for mild embarrassment insofar as we fall short. Anyway, the question is: how should others relate to us in those specific cases where we are predictably unreasonable? Two responses suggest themselves.

(1) They could accommodate our unreasonable natures, as is standard practice. But, as noted above, this seems disrespectful -- at least if they cannot be certain that we wouldn't have risen to the occasion.

(2) They could demand perfection from us. (It would be ridiculous to expect perfection always, of course. Nobody can deliver that. But perhaps it is reasonable to demand the best in each particular case, even recognizing that there's no way we can manage this in all of them. Note the difference: we are bound to screw up sometimes, but not any time in particular.)

Given the fundamental value of autonomy, perhaps what really matters here is ensuring that we improve in this respect as much as possible. It's then an empirical question what the most productive response to failure is.

Or is it unreasonable of me to place such value on reason?

Referrer Tracking

Here's a handy new discovery: Check out ReefeRSS if you want to keep track of where visitors to your website are coming from. (Unlike Sitemeter, it automatically converts google urls to search strings, making them far easier to read!) Like everything good on the internet, it's free.

Just for fun, I've used the RSS feed to add a "Last 5 Referrers" section to my sidebar. It's a nice way to automatically reciprocate if anyone links to this blog.

Warning: I do notice some disturbing google searches from time to time. I can remove the display if it gets too offensive.

Does everyone hate drudgery?

H.E. writes on the badness of work:

I looked at the women in the background, while Howser was interviewing the manager, sorting avocados and it wasn't that hard to imagine their lives. 8 am you go to work, get out onto the floor and start sorting the avocados--the ones and twos. And that's what you do for the next 8 hours--ones in this bin, twos in that one. Nothing to learn, no way to achieve, nothing of interest, no future, no way to excel, no chance of advancement, no scope for originality, no long-term goals, and nothing to show at the end of the day. Then you go home and cook, do some cleaning, go to bed, wake up and the cycle starts again. That's life, that's all there is. How can anyone watch this and not be moved--this is the life most people live and only a few of us, by plain dumb luck, have managed to escape it.

This is work--and I'm agin' it. I'd pay 10 times as much in taxes to see to it that no one is forced to do that work day after day, year after year with no hope and no possibility of escape--largely I suppose because it could so easily have been me: sorting avocados, scanning groceries, inputting data, working fast food. People look at pictures of starving kids and are moved. They read sob stories in women's magazines about dying children, feel compassion, and give until it hurts. Somehow they can imagine poverty and sickness, and empathize, but they can't seem to imagine the sheer misery of being locked into a life of endless drudgery, which is most people's lot. How can anything make up for being trapped in a restricted space for 8 hours a day, doing a job like this, buried alive?

It sure sounds intolerable to me. But then, so does small talk, partying, etc. Fortunately enough, my incomprehension doesn't seem to stop others from enjoying those activities. Perhaps mundane work likewise isn't the tragedy it initially seems, so long as it allows for social interaction. I've heard rumours, for instance, of people who enjoy their jobs more for their co-workers than the work itself. And I suppose those who lack Peter's "will to excellence" may even prefer to gossip than to excel. What if the avocado-sorters are among them?

The pursuit of excellence is so central to my vision of the good life, I'm not sure what to think. It's certainly depressing to think of human potential being squandered by circumstance. Indeed, a major reason why I like the idea of a basic income is that it would enable more people to actively pursue their interests and develop their talents. But would they? (Or would they just get drunk and watch TV, like your average college student?) The only thing more depressing than thwarted ambition is no ambition at all. But it seems common enough, don't you think?

On your blog, anything goes?

Clay Shirky offers a good partial defense of blog comments. But I was puzzled by two aspects of the following:

I have long thought that the ‘freedom of speech means no filtering’ argument is dumb where blogs are concerned — it is the blogger’s space, and he or she should feel free to delete, disemvowel, or otherwise dispose of material, for any reason, or no reason.

1. The ‘freedom of speech means no filtering’ view is dumb for reasons that are not specific to blogs. The value of free speech lies in its contribution to reasoned debate, as J.S. Mill himself recognized. We're not infallible, and so rational progress is made more likely if critics are allowed to question the conventional wisdom. (And even if we're right, reasoned challenges keep us on our toes, and prevent the truth from becoming a 'dead dogma'.)

But "no filtering" won't necessarily advance this end. If someone in a town meeting is yelling so loudly that no-one else can be heard, their unfiltered contribution is in fact preventing reasoned debate from taking place. In this way, they are violating the spirit and purpose of free speech. So it may be necessary to silence the loudmouth precisely for the sake of (everyone else's) free speech. The same goes for blog comments: nonconstructive or abusive comments should be deleted precisely for the sake of ensuring that the blog can remain a venue for reasoned debate.

Not all forms of speech are valuable. Strictly speaking, we should replace 'free speech' as a slogan with the 'free exchange of reasons/ideas'. Abuse is not an idea. And it merely serves to scare off those who might actually make a positive contribution to our discourse. So, while we ought to tolerate any civil disagreement (no matter how strongly we disagree with the substance of the view expressed), the arguments for free speech do not extend to the protection of abusive or otherwise unreasoned discourse.

2. I'm also puzzled by the suggestion that there are no ethical limits to what a blogger might do in "their space". Imagine, for example, a blogger who deletes civil but critical comments -- merely because the blogger doesn't want his mistakes to be exposed. Surely such intellectual dishonesty is unethical in any situation. It's possible to act badly even in your own home, after all!

This does seem a remarkably common view, however. For example, earlier this year NZ blogger Span (in an otherwise excellent post, which noted that accusations of spin have become a too-common substitute for reasoned counterargument) wrote:

What do bloggers owe their readers? Do we owe you honesty? Do we owe you truth? No, not really.

A comment Make Tea Not War made (on a post she wrote about phalloblogcentrism at What We Said) challenged me to think about the annoyance I feel when other bloggers don't link or hat tip - we don't even owe each other that. There is no code of ethics for nz pol bloggers.

No Right Turn concurred, adding that he chooses to "maintain some basic intellectual standards" - as if it were just a personal quirk - YMMV, and all that. I don't think he really believes that, fortunately, as he's quite scornful of the 'sewer', and isn't shy to denounce their lies and bullshit. But then I'm puzzled by his claim that there are no "obligations" in the blogosphere. (Why so critical of the sewer-dwellers if they haven't done anything wrong?) Perhaps he was talking about enforceable obligations.

People have the "right" to act like jerks, in the limited sense that it would be wrong for others to coercively prevent them. But the mere fact that we are at liberty to act in some way, says little about whether we should so act, or whether it's even morally permissible. The relevant question is not, 'Are others allowed to stop me from doing this?' but 'Is this something that any minimally decent human being would do?'. Morality obliges us to be minimally decent people. Blogging, like any other arena in life, provides ample opportunity to violate this most minimal standard, e.g. through abusive or intellectually dishonest behaviour.

(That's not to endorse proposals for a blogging 'code of ethics'. Rules are tedious and often stupid. We can merely point to some general virtues - civility, honesty, etc. - and let people discern for themselves how these apply in any particular situation.)

Metaphysical Production

Is the future in some sense produced or generated from the present? Our intuitive folk metaphysics seems to assume so. The present moment is taken to be metaphysically privileged -- until the laws of nature do their work, generating the 'next' moment out of the raw materials of the present one. This generative process constitutes the passage of time, as the past is literally transformed (in the deepest fabric of its being) into the future. According to this 'presentism', the old times are not simply passed, but wholly replaced.

It's a difficult subject to make sense of. We're used to talking about objects within time, and it's not so clear that our familiar concepts (process, change, replacement), which compare an object between times, can be extended to apply to time itself -- not without regressive appeal to some 'meta-time' during which the manipulation of time-as-an-object occurs. (More here.)

These concerns lead us towards 'Eternalism', or the view that all moments are ontologically on a par. Time is understood to be simply another dimension, not so different from space, and 'now' is an indexical with no more metaphysical import than 'here'.

It seems that this forces us to give up our intuitive beliefs about metaphysical production. If the future already exists, it doesn't need to be generated out of the present. Laws of nature are stripped of their productive power, and instead serve the merely passive purpose of descriptive generalization.

Consider the 'Humean mosaic': the static, 4-d spacetime "loaf" that comprises the entire expanse and (future) history of the universe. The distribution of properties is taken to be fundamental and inexplicable. The way of things is just a brute fact. It just so happens that there are plenty of regularities -- "constant conjunctions" -- to be found in the mosaic. Dropping an object is followed by its falling to the floor. There's not really any deep reason for this (it's just the way the mosaic happens to be drawn), but we can come up with physical "laws" that describe these regularities.

So, what are we to make of all this? Can the luscious garden of common-sense metaphysics be saved? Or should we embrace the desert landscape of the Humean mosaic? I guess David Lewis' project was to show how, with the help of some fancy analytical footwork, we can still assert the truths of common-sense within the desert. Present events still "cause" future ones, and all that. It's just that causation isn't what we thought it was. (Rather than a fundamental notion of generative powers, where the cause brings about its effect, we appeal to a sterile analysis in terms of counterfactual conditionals, which are in turn reduced to facts about other - similarly 'deserted' - Humean mosaics.)

I'm awfully suspicious of that kind of philosophy, as explained in my old post: The Limits of Truth Conditions. I guess I'm assuming some kind of semantic transparency here: we have some idea of what it would take to make our claims true, and the desert just ain't it. I mean, nobody ever read Lewis' On the Plurality of Worlds and thought, "Exactly, that's what I meant when I said that Humphrey could have won the election: just that somewhere out there, in another universe, there's a guy a lot like Humphrey who does win a similar election!"

So I have some secondary questions: Should we be satisfied by crazily counterintuitive analyses, so long as they yield the (truth-conditionally) right results? Why allow that common-sense intuitions are a guide to what's true, but not to what those truths consist in (i.e. what's real)? On the other hand, is it a legitimate objection to Lewis to simply insist, "But that's not what I mean by that term!" -- is meaning so introspectable? How much leeway do we have when assigning truthmakers to a class of claims?

Answers, please!

Parity of Value: a formal model

Over at Ethics Etc, S. Matthew Liao presents Ruth Chang's argument for a fourth relation of comparative value - 'on a par' - to supplement the standard 'better than', 'worse than', and 'equal to' relations:

1. Mozart is neither better nor worse than Michelangelo, with respect to Creative Genius (CG).
2. A Mozart who has some small improvement that bears on CG (Mozart+) is better than Mozart, with respect to CG.
3. Mozart+ is not better than Michelangelo, with respect to CG.
4. Therefore, Mozart and Michelangelo are not related by any of the standard trichotomy of relations, with respect to CG. (This is the Small Improvement Argument)

5. Mozart is better than Talentlessi, a very bad music composer, with respect to CG.
6. Michelangelo is also better than Talentlessi, with respect to CG.
7. Therefore, Mozart and Michelangelo are comparable, with respect to CG. (This is the Chaining Argument)

8. Given 4 and 7, there must be a fourth comparative relation; Chang calls it the parity relation. (This is the Parity Conclusion)

The premises all seem intuitively plausible, yet it may be initially puzzling how they could all be true -- at least if we conceive of value as a point on a scale.

The idea seems to be that CG is some kind of holistic value, constructed from a composite of various partly-commensurate dimensions (e.g. music and art). That could explain why Mozart+ beats Mozart (the slight increase is on the same dimension, so Mozart+ strictly dominates Mozart, being better in some ways and worse in none) yet Mozart+ does not beat Michelangelo, being better in some ways but worse in others, with the tradeoff being, in some sense, "too close to call". But note also that the two dimensions are at least comparable at the extremes: Michelangelo's artistic genius outweighs Talentlessi's sorry musical skills. In sum: Mozart and Michelangelo both excel along different dimensions of Creative Genius, which places them 'on a par' in such a way as that a minor improvement to either would not affect their relative standing.

It's an intuitive enough picture, but is it theoretically consistent? Liao expressed doubts. But I think we can construct a formal model which exhibits all the theoretical properties Chang needs here, i.e. showing the premises (1, 2, 3, 5, 6) to be mutually consistent. Here is my model:

(A) Let 'x' and 'y' denote two dimensions of Creative Genius, and let Proto-CG be composite value combining x and y but with some vagueness as to their relative weightings.

Assign base values:
* Mozart = 100x + 0y
* Mozart+ = 101x + 0y
* Michelangelo = 0x + 100y
* Talentlessi = 1x + 0y

Hence, the following facts hold concerning ordering relations with respect to the proto-CG scale:
1-p. It is not determinate whether Mozart is either better or worse than Michelangelo.
2-p. Mozart+ is determinately greater than Mozart.
3-p. It is not determinate that Mozart+ is better than Michelangelo.
5-p. Mozart is determinately greater than Talentlessi.
6-p. Michelangelo is also determinately greater than Talentlessi.

Liao raised an important objection to my model at this point:

If it is vague as to whether Mozart is better or worse than Michaelangelo or equally good, then, it is not true that Mozart is neither better nor worse than Michaelangelo or equally good.

Granting this point, it is important for me to emphasize that the #-p facts hold merely with respect to proto-CG, and do not yet speak to the ultimate CG relations which we are interested in. What we need is some schema to translate these vague Proto-CG relations into the determinate CG relations stated in the original premises. That is the role of the second part of my model.

(B) We may now construct CG orderings from Proto-CG orderings as follows:

For the standard trichotomy of positive ordering relations ('better than', 'worse than', and 'equal to'), let us say that the relation holds with respect to CG iff it is determinate that the relation holds with respect to proto-CG. (I'll call this the "axiom of determination" unless anyone can think of a spiffier name.)

This axiom establishes entailment relations from each #-p to the corresponding original premise #. For example, from the fact (1-p) that it is not determinate whether Mozart is either better or worse than Michelangelo with respect to proto-CG, we can infer from the axiom of determination that (1) Mozart is neither better nor worse than Michelangelo, with respect to CG.

Closing Remarks: My formalization raises some intriguing questions of philosophical methodology. E.g. what philosophical interest can such a formal model have? What does this style of argument really show? It's not as though the process I've described is meant to literally reflect the fundamental metaphysics of values. It's merely a model. (In particular, it seems implausible that my internal 'proto-CG' variable corresponds to any significant value in reality! I employ it as a purely technical 'fix', to get my model to yield the right outputs.)

But I think it has philosophical worth in the following respect: it establishes that Chang's premises about value are mutually consistent. This model shows one possible way that they could all be true. Perhaps reality provides another. But at least we can dispel our initial skepticism about whether they were consistent at all.

Excessive Charity

This is funny. Three year old children assume that their knowledge is shared by everyone else (including God). Apparently, this has "led some researchers to conclude that children start out with an understanding of what a god-like, all-knowing perspective is like, and that for several years they mistakenly apply this to other people."

New research suggests that they also assume that everyone else (again, including God) shares their ignorance. I guess it's finally safe to conclude that children start out with an understanding of what their own perspective is like, and that for several years they mistakenly apply this to other people...

Consensus Politics?

In his post, Age of Janus, Timothy Burke laments the dearth of principle and good faith in contemporary political debate:

Mostly, it’s something grubbier and more depressing. People who argue that perjury is a grave crime against the rule of law, until it’s their own guy getting caught. People who have two completely different standards for reasonable judgements about evidence: absurdly stringent when the political opposition seems to favor a claim, promiscuously loose when it’s a case that favors their own perspective. People who have one view of what constitutes unwholesomely “political” interference with good governance when it’s the other guys (or some “corrupt” regime in the Third World) and another view when it’s the home team.

I don’t know what to say in those kinds of conversations any longer. I can’t just keep coming back to them with faith and hope that men and women who have the capacity to think clearly and behave ethically will eventually reconcile their political commitments with some kind of consistently held standards. All I need is even a small sign that this could happen to keep thinking it’s worth it to look for a way to talk. But I’m precisely the chump that I have been accused of being if I continue to agree that (for example) perjury is indeed a serious crime, and that Bill Clinton’s perjury was a serious issue if all that gets is derisive laughter when it’s time for others to pay off their own prior declarations of serious, serious concern with that crime.

It really is depressing. Given that civic respect is the core political virtue - the basis of a healthy democracy - partisan hypocrites are simply being evil. I'm serious: there's nothing worse. (All political evil is ultimately an extension of civic disrespect.) No matter how repugnant your first-order views, they will remain safely unimplemented as long as you respect procedural constraints and the normative acumen of your fellow citizens. But once we turn our backs on reasoned debate, and engage in rhetorical warfare designed merely to manipulate each other, all bets are off.

Outcomes decided by power rather than reason will, of course, be predictably worse. But, more than this, unreasoned politics is degrading -- a corruption of our potential as human beings. When partisans engage in lies and manipulation, they are treating us merely as a means, in violation of Kant's categorical imperative. They deny our political agency -- our ability to make discerning and ethical judgments, and to thus contribute to the collective decision-making process. They might as well spit in our faces while they're at it.

I'm encouraged that most people are turned off by partisan politics. They recognize the dishonesty and disrespect, and want no part of it. Unfortunately, most then turn away from politics altogether, leaving the vicious scumbags to reign supreme. Given that politics is the scene of important decisions - decisions that affect the lives of millions - we can't really afford to turn our backs on it like that. Instead, we must reclaim the public sphere in the name of consensus politics, deliberative democracy, and basic civic respect. (Easier said than done, perhaps. Yet all it would take is for more of us to speak up and insist on these minimal principles. Our present predicament only exists because our social norms don't yet recognize civic evil as beyond the pale. Silence is enabling.)

Philosophers' Carnival #50

The 50th Philosophers' Carnival is here.

A nice milestone -- we've come a long way since August 2004! There were a few fits and starts early on, but thanks to the support of early participants (e.g. Brandon and Chris) - and promotion on Brian Leiter's blog - the carnival eventually grew in momentum. So I'm pleased that it looks set to remain a valued fixture of the online philosophical community for some time to come.

Camus on White Lies

Camus' 1955 'Afterword' to The Stranger is interesting:

A long time ago, I summed up The Outsider [a.k.a. The Stranger] in a sentence which I realize is extremely paradoxical: 'In our society any man who doesn't cry at his mother's funeral is liable to be condemned to death.' I simply meant that the hero of the book is condemned because he doesn't play the game. In this sense, he is an outsider to the society in which he lives, wandering on the fringe, on the outskirts of life, solitary and sensual. And for that reason, some readers have been tempted to regard him as a reject. But to get a more accurate picture of his character, or rather one which conforms more closely to his author's intentions, you must ask yourself in what way Meursault doesn't play the game. The answer is simple: he refuses to lie.

Lying is not only saying what isn't true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately feels threatened. For example, he is asked to say that he regrets his crime, in time-honoured fashion. He replies that he feels more annoyance about it than true regret. And it is this nuance that condemns him.

So for me Meursault is not a reject, but a poor and naked man, in love with a sun which leaves no shadows. Far from lacking all sensibility, he is driven by a tenacious and therefore profound passion, the passion for an absolute and for truth...

There's something quite endearing about Meursault's blunt honesty. (Though his indifference to worldly matters is often disturbing.) Consider the following passage from Chp.5:

That evening, Marie came round for me and asked me if I wanted to marry her. I said I didn't mind and we could do if she wanted to. She then wanted to know if I loved her. I replied as I had done once already, that it didn't mean anything but that I probably didn't. 'Why marry me then?' she said. I explained to her that it really didn't matter and that if she wanted to, we could get married. Anyway, she was the one who was asking me and I was simply saying yes. She then remarked that marriage was a serious matter. I said, 'No.' She didn't say anything for a moment and looked at me in silence. Then she spoke. She just wanted to know if I'd have accepted the same proposal if it had come from another woman, with whom I had a similar relationship. I said, 'Naturally.' She then said she wondered if she loved me and well, I had no idea about that. After another moment's silence, she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason. I didn't say anything, having nothing to add, so she smiled and took my arm and announced that she wanted to marry me. I replied that we'd do so whenever she liked.

What do you think of him? Does Meursault illustrate a good way to live, or should we be more embracing of the need for white lies?

Dictionary Game

Yeah, I knew I shouldn't have clicked the link (via Brandon)...

Richard Chappell -- [noun]: A level headed person who always makes the wrong decision 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?'

Flourishing of a Kind

Another common view that puzzles me is the notion that the criteria for a flourishing life are fixed by one's membership in a kind - be it a particular species, gender, or ethnicity - rather than one's individual characteristics. For example, a nurturing housewife might be thought to have lived an excellent life (for a woman), whereas domestic values would count for less when assessing the life success of a man. Success in a cutthroat business environment might be thought the epitome of white male success, whereas a black person might be criticized for not giving enough back to "their community", or a female disparaged for being childless. No matter the individual's own talents and inclinations, a particular identity is ascribed to them, limiting the forms of excellence or norms of success that are open to them to pursue. Why?

Perhaps there is an empirical assumption in play: that the individual's "own talents and inclinations" will always coincide with the ascribed identity. (Every woman really just wants to be a mother, never mind her protestations to the contrary.) But that's plain ridiculous.

Still, the normative claim seems even less plausible. So what's going on here? Why on earth would anyone believe in (e.g.) sex-specific virtues, norms, or forms of excellence? There's no denying that many do believe precisely this - men are told to "be manly" - but why?

A more rational society would surely do away with gender (or ethnic, etc.) roles altogether.

Authority

Some people seem to believe in a very strange kind of authority: one that can pull normativity out of a hat (or decide which of two incommensurable values is the greater). I don't get it.

I can understand what we might call "guiding authority", which derives from the utility of the rule of law, but that is clearly a very different matter. We grant guiding authority to legal institutions because we are too biased and ignorant to enforce justice ourselves through vigilante action. But this is a contingent matter; perfected super-humans would have no need of such guides. Note in particular that the kind of authority in play here is merely epistemic, rather than metaphysical. We need the authorities to help us find the truth; not to create it!

Contrast this with the pure authority that Pruss calls for on Right Reason. There are no objective grounds for deciding between vocations, so - he argues - if we want there to be a "right answer" for us to discern here, we require the pure authority of God to decide a vocation for us.

I find the notion absolutely ludicrous. Note that he's not claiming that an omniscient God could guide us towards the independently best option. Rather, the suggestion seems to be that God has the pure authority to just make up the normative fact of which option is best. Other theists seem to share this bizarre view. They hold that a pure authority can just decide stuff for no reason, and these arbitrary decisions would actually matter! The mere act of authoritative command suffices to create reasons ex nihilo.

Am I wrong in thinking that this view is absolutely insane? Can anyone defend it, or at least make it a bit more comprehensible to me...?

Truthmakers of Existence

I highly recommend Ross Cameron's paper on 'Truthmakers and Ontological commitment' [doc]. He rejects the Quinean dogma that allows "serious ontological questions [to be] decided by linguistic facts," and argues instead that a claim like "there are tables" may be literally true without committing us to the inclusion of tables in our fundamental ontology:

Once we allow that the truthmaker for <x exists> can be something other than x this becomes an option on the table: ‘there is a sum of A, B and C’ might be true – but perhaps we don’t need a complex object to make it true: perhaps A, B and C themselves are enough to make this sentence true.

I like it! (Cf. the representational fallacy.) Cameron allows that x exists in such a case, but insists that it does so derivatively, i.e. x doesn't really - fundamentally - exist. This then raises my old worry: what is it to exist fundamentally? This problem is brought out by the fascinating penultimate section of Cameron's paper, when he writes:

I suggested... a picture of the world whereby the only things that really exist are simples, but where we have complex objects as derivative existents. But of course, we can run something like the above story without it being the simples that are taken as fundamental. We could follow Jonathan Schaffer and claim that there is only one fundamental existent – the world – with the proper parts of the world being taken as derivative.

What's the difference? The world is how it is, and this can be described from the perspective of various mereological 'levels' (from the greatest whole to the smallest parts), but - I'm inclined to suggest - at the end of the day there's nothing to decide between them. What would it even mean to privilege one level rather than another with a deeper status of 'being'? What is this difference supposed to consist in, exactly? I just can't get a grasp on what's being claimed here.

If forced to pick one, I'd go with Schaffer's suggestion that the world is fundamental. I don't think that anything else is. And I guess I can't very well claim that everything's derivative; the buck must stop somewhere. So maybe I'm committed to this view after all. I'm not sure, though. I'd really prefer to reject the fundamental/derivative distinction altogether, and simply say that claims are made true by the world - the way things are - without giving ontological priority to any particular aspect of it -- even the unitary entity "the world". In other words, I'd like to get by without any ontology at all (or with a moderately relativistic ontology, may be a better way of putting it). Have I any chance of getting away with this, or is the suggestion simply confused?

Advancing the Discipline

What constitutes "progress" for philosophy as an academic discipline? Where is it aiming to end up, and how can we help it get there? Jack writes:

I see philosophy as a young discipline (still young, like Elizabeth Taylor). What we need are more theories, not a verdict on which of the four that we have is superior/least inferior. This is not a call to abandon our scruples and jot down anything bordering on consistent. Theory proliferation needs to be bridled by our reflective judgments and our common sense. But in too many fields we have yet to cut the issue at the joints. In the dialectic we are far nearer to the brainstorming part than the conclusion-in-unanimity part.

At the end of the day, we presumably want knowledge and understanding of important issues. But philosophical exploration may be what we really need for now. If the existing options are inadequate, we shouldn't necessarily want everyone to converge on the "least inferior" one. This would seem to justify some degree of dogged perseverance even in the face of stronger arguments, at least if you think that further refinements to your position could prove fruitful. The risk, of course, is that becoming personally invested in a position could undermine your ability to recognize when it has turned into a dead-end.

Thoughts?

How to deal with telemarketers

Q. "Hello, is Mr. or Mrs. Chappell there?"
A. "Please hold." Then simply return to whatever you were doing.

It's not the worker's fault, of course, but wasting their time may spare others on their list, and serves to undermine the vicious industry. (Whatever you do, don't reward them!)

"Eugenics" or just family planning?

No Right Turn accuses Dr. Jim Flynn of advocating eugenics -- "putting contraceptives in the water supply to stop the poor from breeding." He goes on to insinuate that Flynn is sexist and illiberal. That's an awfully vicious misreading of what the guy actually said:

"The lower down the educational scale you go, the less people are in control of their lives, and less in control of planning for children," [Flynn] said. [...] Unplanned pregnancies by less educated women could be reduced, perhaps by future scientific advances.

"I do have faith in science, and science may give us something that renders conception impossible unless you take an antidote," he said. "You could of course have a chemical in the water supply and have to take an antidote. If you had contraception made easier by progress, then every child is a wanted child."

Contra NRT, this is not an attempt to "justify state interference and coercion" to "stop the poor from breeding." Flynn merely wants to reduce unplanned pregnancies, by making contraception the default state: in other words, switch to an 'opt out' rather than 'opt in' policy. There's nothing remotely illiberal or coercive about this (assuming the antidote - 'opt out' option - is widely accessible). On the contrary, the proposal is plainly intended to increase the control that poor people have over their reproductive options. Flynn's suggestion is akin to family planning, not forced sterilization.

Update: Flynn's clarification confirms my above interpretation.

Spurious Associations

The 'Live Earth' concerts were intended to raise awareness about global warming. Yet several performers sported t-shirts with the slogan: "Say No to Nuclear Energy". Is this the left-wing equivalent of linking Iraq with 9/11?

I wonder how common it would be for people to accept just one or the other alleged connection. Perhaps this could provide a quick test of tribal affiliation?

Reckless Punditry

Alonzo Fyfe suggests that "[committing] informal fallacies in public discourse is morally contemptible... a sign of intellectual recklessness."

Right now, people throw fallacies around with reckless abandon. Once upon a time, drunk driving was, for the most part, an accepted activity. This was until enough people got fed up with the harm done by those who engage in this activity that they decided to ‘raise the consciousness’ of society to those harms. I do think that we are long past due for a concentrated effort on the part of individuals to insist that people recognize the harms that result, and the moral problems associated with using, these fallacies.

He adds, "It should be considered a minimum standard of competence for any reporter that they can demonstrate capacity to recognize informal fallacies by name," but this seems excessively schoolmarmish. What we really want to promote is the art of good reasoning -- something not readily reducible to such mechanical competencies. This presents us with something of a catch-22: it takes broad rational competency to diagnose incompetence, so when everyone is incompetent, nobody quite realizes it. (Hence the need to promote philosophical education, to break the cycle of bad reasoning!)

Those quibbles aside, I'm definitely sympathetic to Fyfe's complaint. Public discourse is often of quite poor quality, and this ought to be considered a bad thing. Fallacies are just one symptom of this; the broader problem is a lack of meta-political principles or commitment to deliberative democracy, understood as collective inquiry into normative issues.

Metapolitical principles are ethical principles, which identify the bounds of healthy political behaviour. Pundits who flout these principles are behaving unethically, and should be recognized as such. Our democracy is a moral cesspool, polluted by those who show no concern for truth, reason, or intellectual honesty. It's about time we cleaned it up.

Philosophical Paradigms

How is (some) philosophy done? What examples spring to mind as classic illustrations of philosophical methodology? To get the ball rolling...

(1) Conceptual analysis, and counterexamples "intuited" through thought-experiments. E.g. JTB analysis of knowledge, and Gettier cases.

(2) The use of formal methods ("logic and language") to resolve ambiguities, and make claims clear and precise. E.g. Russell's joke. (Any better examples?)

(3) Mapping logical space, to correct mistaken assumptions -- in particular, highlighting ignored possibilities (e.g. unchanging time, or Parfit's distinction between 'equality and priority') and unseen implications (e.g. how property entails coercion).

[I think this is what most philosophy amounts to, really - which explains how philosophical progress is possible - it's simply a matter of overcoming sloppy thinking.]

(4) Perhaps a variation on #3, is just spinning a good story, i.e. offering a coherent theory that seems plausible or intellectually appealing, for lack of any more "objective" criteria. We find this in normative philosophy, I guess, whenever it appeals to the reader's "intuitions" about what's right or good (or whatever). [What would be a good example?]

What else can we add to this list?

Self-Idolatry

It seems plausible that a person should try to be the best that they can be, and that their "idealized self" serves as a normative ideal. But this runs the risk of self-idolatry, by which I mean a fetishistic concern for the mere image of virtue. We've previously seen one example of this: the 'Rambo fantasy' that leads some conservatives to care more about looking "tough on terror" than in actually achieving security. See also Laurence Thomas on "conceited good intentions":

With conceited good intentions, it is about “Look how wonderful I am for having helped you”. With genuine good intentions, by contrast, the accent is on you — and not that I have helped you...

When I think of white liberals, I am stunned by how interested they (initially) are in helping me and how much they admire me just so long as I underwrite their image of a white who just adores people of color.

Most significantly, I am stunned by how annoyed most white liberals are when it becomes manifestly clear that I can do rather well on my own.

Another case: I've always been bothered by the right-wing argument that private charity is morally superior to government aid. Surely the policy focus should be on helping those in need, not providing rich people with opportunities to be "virtuous"! (It's like pushing the Lifeguard aside so you can be the one to save the drowning victim. Ugh.)

Finally, for a more commonplace kind of example, see Publius' post at Obsidian Wings, about how self-described "Moderates" can be manipulated by partisan ideologues who exaggerate their position in order to shift the middle ground in their direction. I'm more sympathetic to this case: I can feel the attraction of bipartisan moderation as an ideal, and the heuristic of locating the truth in "the middle ground" may work more often than not. Still, heuristics are fallible, and in this case open to abuse. Moderation is itself an ideology, and no substitute for the hard work of honest inquiry and critical discernment.

It's easy enough to pick the position that looks, superficially, like what a reasonable person would endorse. Suggest a compromise, applaud the middle-ground (but not too loudly!), and you'll look good. These actions support a self-image that resonates with your vision of virtue. The only problem is that appearances can be deceiving. A deeper level of moral seriousness would require us to actually be that reasonable person, i.e. actively exercise our faculty of reason in assessing the first-order issues on their merits.

This gets better results. Further, it avoids the vice of self-idolatry. We find that the actual exercise of virtue involves an outward focus. You support X on its merits (due to appreciating its right-making features), not just because it reflects your desired self-image.

So, it seems, there's a sense in which we shouldn't fundamentally aim to be ideal agents after all. We should instead conceive of virtuous character as a mere means, a kind of guiding ideal that will help us realize true value in the external world (which is what really matters). This conception will hopefully make us less susceptible to 'image' hang-ups. Sure, we should all try to be better people, but it isn't the goal -- it's merely a first step.

Indeterminate Identity and Abortion

In response to Edelman's claim that embryonic brain development "involves a dimension of randomness," Mark Vernon writes:

It is the suggestion that not everything is present in the zygote and that external forces subsequently act on the foetus to eventually create human individuality that leads to the conclusion that human life does not begin at conception or kick in at any one time.

I'm not convinced that Edelman's new biological theory adds anything new to the ethical debate. I mean, it's not exactly news that genetic determinism is false. And everyone else recognizes that "not everything is present in the zygote" -- Edelman's "stochastic processes" aside, how we develop as individuals will at least depend upon the cultural environment we're raised in, etc.

Perhaps the thought is that the potential variance here is so great that we're not talking about a single person developing in different ways; rather, the differences are so vast that they would amount to distinct people. That is, it's not just indeterminate how the fetus will develop; it's indeterminate who the fetus will grow to be. And, we might think, if the fetus' future identity is indeterminate, it cannot presently be identical to either person, and so presumably isn't a person at all.

But again, it's not clear how this argument depends on Edelman's theory, given that most of us already believe that a newborn has the potential to develop in very varied ways (within genetic constraints, just as Edelman grants).

In either case, it remains open to the pro-lifer to deny that even vast psychological differences entail that the possible future persons are numerically distinct. (They are simply alternative future states that the one person could grow into.) After all, the most coherent pro-lifers will be animalists about personal identity, in the sense that they identify human persons with human organisms -- and there's no real question that the latter come into existence at conception.

Am I missing something?

What's So Great About Faith?

Dialogue snippet from many films/TV shows:

Skeptic: "Doesn't it bother you that there's no real evidence that God even exists?"

Christian: "Not at all. If God gave us proof, there'd be no room left for faith!"

That line's always a conversation-stopper, for some reason. I'd like to see the conversation continue, though, as the claim raises an obvious question: what's so great about "faith"? I'd have thought it a good thing to have one's beliefs properly confirmed. To have sufficient grounds for your beliefs seems like an improvement over having insufficient grounds, right? So why does the TV-Christian imply that such a transition would be a bad thing?

I guess the idea is that uncertainty enables trust to be expressed, tested, and confirmed. If you're accused of some misdeed, immediate proof of innocence would rob you of the chance to see who really trusts you. But there are two major flaws with this analogy:

(1) The need for virtue is contingent on imperfect conditions. Hume points out that generosity would be unnecessary in conditions of abundance. Likewise, trust is pointless for one (like God) who can always dispel uncertainty and reveal the truth. If virtue is an instrument for good, it would seem awfully backward to value the instrument more than the perfection it aims to attain!

(2) The analogy is a non-starter in any case. The question of God's existence is logically prior to whether he's trustworthy. We're not assessing God himself, but rather an abstract proposition - the question whether there's anyone there for us to assess. (This conflation also underlies the silly claim that "atheists hate God.") Granted, there's a loose sense in which one can 'trust' that a proposition is true -- let's call this "de dicto trust" -- but that's a completely different matter from trusting in a person, de re.

So even if we grant that de re trust in God's goodness has intrinsic value, it still doesn't follow that there's anything good about de dicto faith in the unsupported proposition that God exists. Theists should much prefer to have solid proof supersede their blind (de dicto) "faith".

Links

- The fourth humanist symposium is here.

- Michael Cholbi starts a new blog on teaching philosophy: In Socrates' Wake.

- One Good Thing posts embarrassing parenting stories. The funniest:

For hands-down humiliation, however, I haven't yet been able to top my neighbor's misery, when his three year old daughter interrupted his poker game by running naked into the room and screaming with a joyous voice of discovery, "DADDY! DID YOU KNOW? I COME WITH MY OWN POCKET! AND IT CAN HOLD A PEN! LOOK!"

Fair Pay and Price Signals

Social justice is a fine goal, but we should be careful how we pursue it. Too often, it leads people to manipulate economic exchanges in a way that disrupts the efficient functioning of the market. For example, they might oppose a Pigouvian tax on gasoline -- or, even worse, support gas subsidies (!?) -- "for the sake of the poor." Or they might advocate "pay equity" across diverse jobs, in hopes of ensuring that people are paid "what they deserve." But the idea that income should track desert is deeply misguided, as Elizabeth Anderson (drawing on Hayek) explains:

First, if you fix prices on a backward-looking standard [e.g. desert], they will no longer be able to perform their informational function. Producers will produce for what was demanded last quarter, even if it isn't demanded today. This creates enormous waste and generates huge opportunity costs. We'd be much poorer in an economy that worked like this...

[Second,] there is no coherent way to determine how much of what people get is due to luck, and how much is truly their responsibility...

[Third,] any attempt to regulate people's rewards according to judgments of how much they morally deserve would destroy liberty. It would involve the state in making detailed, intrusive judgments of how well people used their liberty, and penalize them for not exercising their liberty in the way the state thinks best.

Forget desert. Our economic institutions should be forward-looking, and use prices to incentivize socially beneficial behaviour. That means paying people for providing desired goods and services -- and paying more for what society needs more of. This won't necessarily track desert: just because engineers are in higher demand than librarians, doesn't mean there's anything especially virtuous about the former. Still, we need more of them, and offering greater rewards is the way society can induce its members to meet this need.

The price system serves to signal scarcity (relative to demand), and - thanks to the profit motive - provides incentives for individuals to respond accordingly. Hayek illustrated the economic principles with a simple example:

Assume that somewhere in the world a new opportunity for the use of some raw material, say, tin, has arisen, or that one of the sources of supply of tin has been eliminated. It does not matter for our purpose—and it is very significant that it does not matter—which of these two causes has made tin more scarce. All that the users of tin need to know is that some of the tin they used to consume is now more profitably employed elsewhere and that, in consequence, they must economize tin. There is no need for the great majority of them even to know where the more urgent need has arisen, or in favor of what other needs they ought to husband the supply. If only some of them know directly of the new demand, and switch resources over to it, and if the people who are aware of the new gap thus created in turn fill it from still other sources, the effect will rapidly spread throughout the whole economic system and influence not only all the uses of tin but also those of its substitutes and the substitutes of these substitutes, the supply of all the things made of tin, and their substitutes, and so on; and all his without the great majority of those instrumental in bringing about these substitutions knowing anything at all about the original cause of these changes. The whole acts as one market, not because any of its members survey the whole field, but because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all. The mere fact that there is one price for any commodity—or rather that local prices are connected in a manner determined by the cost of transport, etc.—brings about the solution which (it is just conceptually possible) might have been arrived at by one single mind possessing all the information which is in fact dispersed among all the people involved in the process.

Conclusion: If you want to help the poor, then just give them more cash. Far better to increase their purchasing power than to artificially deflate the market price for a particular good. Offering "cheap gas" is bad for society, as it disrupts the signaling function of market prices. Moreover, offering an unconditional basic income (or the like) is better for the poor. Redistribution is thus superior to price regulation in every important respect.

In other words: leftists should be left-libertarians.