[Guest post by Barry.]
Let me begin by saying that these remarks are extremely sketchy, just a recording of a recent whisky-fueled conversation. I have hitherto taken myself to be a naturalist, so these remarks are in the spirit of self-examination. Any help will be very warmly welcomed.
Suppose we take naturalism to be the research project whose goal is the reduction of everything to matter. Reduction is supervenience, say; or something tighter. Everything includes all the troublesome phenomena: modality, mind, normativity, maths. Matter is whatever the theoretical physicists tell us the world is made of (never mind that they consider this a deep mystery).
Now imagine some Fukuyama-esque article of the future, triumphantly announcing the end of metaphysics. In this article it will be demonstrated, compellingly, that every single recalcitrant phenomenon has been reduced. (I do not intend the term 'demonstrated' here to be factive.)
What then?
According to our putatively final metaphysics, the world is one big chunk of matter. I think this leaves us with two questions, which the naturalist lacks the resources to answer. (1) Why is the world made of this stuff, and not some other stuff? (2) Why is there this stuff and not nothing at all?
Our explanans must always be explanatorily broader than our explanandum. You cannot explain alpha with alpha; you must explain it with some beta that may include alpha. (The fact that the girl crossed the road does not explain the fact that the girl crossed the road, but it might explain the fact that the girl crossed some part of the road.) As the Aristotelians say, explanations must involve not just the 'that' but also some 'because.'
The worry is that naturalists can explain a lot in terms of matter, but they cannot explain matter in terms of matter.
Perhaps I am being childish; perhaps explanations do have to come to an end somewhere; perhaps the answer to 'why is there something rather than nothing?' is: 'there just is.' Or perhaps this isn't a meaningful question, or it is incoherent some other way. But it doesn't seem to be. It just seems hard.
And here's a possible diagnosis of the naturalist's error. The privileging of matter is just another manifestation of the human mind's craving for fixity - for an Archimedean point. And its perhaps just as misguided as the Cartesian response to this craving, or the religious.
So should we go back to old-school metaphysics? Or embrace some sort of aesthetic scepticism?
- Barry
[See also: Why does the universe exist? -- RC.]
Saturday, May 31, 2008
Guest Post: Naturalism
Monday, May 26, 2008
Open-ended deliberation
As I wrote last month:
These [normative] skeptics usually presuppose a kind of naive Humeanism, according to which preferences are 'given' and automatically combine with beliefs to yield action. But that can't possibly be right, because it leaves no room for the familiar phenomenon of deliberation. We are agents with the capacity for practical reasoning, i.e. the assessment of reasons that count for or against various courses of action. This is a self-consciously normative process of decision: just as theoretical reasoning addresses the question what should I believe?, so practical reasoning addresses the question what should I do? Insofar as you think of yourself as a rational agent at all, you must be engaging with these normative questions; the alternative is to be a mere automaton, a reflexive stimulus-response machine. Most of us are more deliberative; but deliberation is inherently normative: it addresses a question for which there may be better or worse answers.
Robin Hanson responded that he has no problem reflecting on what he wants. But I think that is insufficient to capture all practical deliberation.
One way to bring this out is to note how constrained deliberation on Robin's question must be. If our 'wants' or desires are given prior to deliberation, then an answer to the question 'what do I most want?' is limited to the contents of your pre-existing desires. Your ends are already fixed; all that remains to be determined is which desires are strongest (a mechanistic process which does not seem to call for any kind of choice or decision in any case), and then the instrumental question how to fulfill them.
But as agents with fully general rational capacities, it is possible for us to engage in open-ended deliberation. Our practical conclusions are no more determined by our prior states of desire than our theoretical conclusions are determined by our prior states of belief. (Though both will be of significant influence, for sure.) Regardless of my prior ends, if you can convince me that some new end is more worth pursuing, I must -- on pain of irrationality -- come to adopt that end myself.
The desire theorist may insist that this just shows that you have come to have a new desire, and it's still this desire which is responsible for motivating your eventual action. But this is an empty claim: the desire was a product of your rational deliberation, rather than an input to it. So it is your reason which is the ultimate source of motivation in this case.
The Claims of Emotion
When you are angry, for example, the anger you feel contains the thought that (e.g.) some other person has done you an injury... and ought to be made to suffer in return. If your reason thinks differently... you are internally not just pulled in different directions; you are thinking ultimately contradictory thoughts, one through your anger [and] the other through your reason.
So writes John Cooper in 'Some Remarks on Aristotle's Moral Psychology' (Reason and Emotion, p.245, bold added). He continues:
For reason to persuade anger (in this particular case, or in general) is for it to get its own view of what is good to prevail, in the sense that this conception comes to be adopted by the nonrational part itself, as well. To cause this to happen, even intermittently, may require practice and training, of course, but in that process reason is not just exercising brute force, as one might in training an animal. it is, among other things, addressing one's anger, trying to direct its attention to features of the situation that will show one's anger... that it would be, or was, wrong to feel in that way. [If this process is successful...] The way you then feel about what has happened and about what should be done about it, is exactly also the way you think, for reasons, about it.
Further, on pp.246-7:
Now because Aristotle thinks that the truth about such matters -- matters of value in general -- is properly settled by reasoning, he thinks that this is the direction that the resolution of such contradictions should take. Your anger was caused not by what you rationally thought, nor by what you would rationally think if you gave reason a chance, but by (possibly obscure) causes lying in your recent or distant past experience. ... There is no good reason to think that your anger reflects the truth about the matters about which it is making claims...
However, it is important to bear in mind that the resolution can go in the other direction, both in individual cases an in general orientation. Faced with a conflict between how you feel about things in some respect and how you think about them, especially if this persists for a long time despite efforts on your part to adjust the way you feel, you will, faute de mieux, tend to adjust it in the other direction, by adopting in your rational thoughts a view about good and bad and right and wrong that conforms to the way you habitually feel: it is as if, under pressure from your stubborn desires, you decide on reflection that the correct way to determine what is good is simply to accept as authoritative how you feel. (Perhaps you then figure out some reasons to suit.) What forces us to take one of these two alternatives is the central fact that being rational creatures we cannot very readily or contentedly let the contradiction stand. We are moved, because we are rational, to resolve it in one direction or another.
But are there limits to the claims reason may make against our emotions? Cf. Moral Roots and Alienating Aspirations
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Is Knowledge (Ever) Indefeasible?
My old thread on the surprise examination paradox has seen an interesting revival of discussion. Along the way, Pablo claims:
If someone knows that Q, that person cannot be thrown into a state of epistemic confusion regarding Q.
I doubt this. It seems that in many cases knowledge can be undercut when we acquire further (perhaps misleading) beliefs. I may see (and hence know) that the widgets are red, until I form the defeating belief that they are irradiated by red light. Similarly, if an apparently infallible source ('God') tells me that I can't know that Q, his assertion may be self-fulfilling, by raising doubts and plunging me into a state of epistemic confusion and uncertainty that is incompatible with full-blown knowledge.
On the other hand, the unrestricted claim that epistemic doubts are self-fulfilling leads to contradiction when combined with other plausible assumptions (introspection and closure under known entailment). Perhaps the two most promising options are then:
(1) Allow only justified doubts to act as defeaters; or
(2) Restrict the claim, so that only undoubted doubts are automatic defeaters. If you come to believe that your doubts [about your belief that p] are unjustified, then those doubts no longer undercut the justification for your belief. (The defeater is itself defeated.)
Remaining questions: Which of these options is right? If (1), will that make some knowledge indefeasible after all? Or is the doubt and confusion raised by God's testimony justified, so that it may defeat your knowledge in any case?
Williamson on Telescopes
Philosophers who refuse to bother about semantics, on the grounds that they want to study the non-linguistic world, not our talk about that world, resemble astronomers who refuse to bother about the theory of telescopes, on the grounds that they want to study the stars, not our observation of them. Such an attitude may be good enough for amateurs; applied to more advanced inquiries, it produces crude errors. Those metaphysicians who ignore language in order not to project it onto the world are the very ones most likely to fall into just that fallacy, because the validity of their reasoning depends on unexamined assumptions about the structure of the language in which they reason.
-- Timothy Williamson, 'Must Do Better' [pdf], p.9.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Doing/Allowing and Effortful Willing
In 'Natural Baselines' I discuss a way to ground (a revisionary version of) the doing/allowing distinction in modal facts. Another suggestion I've heard is to consider the ratio of possible physical movements that are open to you: if most ways of moving lead to X, and fewer to not-X, then this means that you would be 'making' not-X true, and merely 'allowing' X to happen. Neither of these distinctions seems to have much ethical import, though. So in this post I'd like to suggest a more morally relevant distinction in this vicinity, based on the idea of willpower or ego-depletion:
Humans have limited executive cognitive control or 'willpower' (cf. the psychological literature on ego-depletion). Decision-making and conscious action is draining. It's hard work. The immediate concerns of everyday life can be burdensome enough without adding all the world's ills to one's plate. Again, so long as one is leading a basically decent life, it just doesn't seem reasonable to condemn them or demand that they attend to more pressing concerns elsewhere. Most people have more than enough to attend to already!
So perhaps we should say that one would be 'doing'/bringing about X (or 'allowing' not-X) iff the X option requires more effortful decision-making (i.e. is more ego-depleting) than the not-X option. This could make sense of why bringing about harms is more blameworthy than merely allowing them.
Any thoughts? (Counterexamples or problem cases especially welcome!)
Quick Poll
Commenting on Richard Brown's post, GNZ writes:
I honestly am curious if anyone else besides Richard C could actually read all exchanges between the two of you and leave with the impression that Richard C seems to have of what happened.
I guess there's one way to find out.* What do y'all think?
[See also: Zombie Review, Assessing Arguments and Begging Questions.]
* = Then I promise to waste no further time or blogspace on this silly dispute. It just annoys me to be subjected to unjustified insults. Confirmation from impartial spectators might lead the misguided accuser to reconsider. And I know I would want to be corrected if I were ever in the situation of making unjust claims myself.
Judging People
To quote Sebastian out of context:
I don't know if you've ever noticed people fighting, but when they are both screaming at each other you tend to dismiss them both regardless of the merits. When one appears to be acting reasonable you tend to side with them just a touch (even if on the merits they aren't as grounded).
I'm sure this is true (as a general tendency), but it seems kind of unfortunate. I've noted before that it's easier to seem reasonable than to actually be reasonable, i.e. to aptly judge issues on their merits. Further, if we tend to think badly of others for being negative, no matter how warranted their criticisms might be, that creates an unfortunate incentive against critical thought. Negativity is entirely appropriate in response to substantive flaws:
[According to popular subjectivism:] Criticism is mean and nasty, something only bad people engage in. Nice people are always happy and co-operative, appealing to our positive emotions rather than negative ones. So the story goes.
Once we reject subjectivism, however, a better alternative presents itself: not 'be positive', but be reasonable -- do what the situation calls for. If there is good reason to criticise the opposition, then do so. Otherwise, don't. Simple.
The upshot: you can't just complain that the other team is engaging in 'negative campaigning'. There's nothing wrong with negativity per se. The real question is whether their negativity is justified: i.e. whether their claims are important and true.
On the other hand, hysterical screaming does tend to correlate with substantive lunacy, so perhaps it's not wholly unreasonable to be prejudiced against angry-sounding screeds (at least until you're in a position to assess the actual content).
But it would seem rather unjust to think badly of someone who was actually clearly in the right (i.e. clear to anyone who bothered to examine the dispute on its merits). So should one instead suspend judgment if they can't be bothered assessing the matter more carefully? Should our attitudes towards others be governed by the principle of 'innocent until proven guilty'? Better a thousand fools be free of your inner censure, than one good person wrongly maligned? Or should we maximize the likelihood of true belief by engaging in statistical discrimination (generalizations) and using whatever evidence we've got?
Or maybe it doesn't really matter how we judge others? They're just thoughts.
Even so, better to have one's thoughts be accurate, no? (Perhaps it only matters when one will act on said beliefs, e.g. by supporting or condemning a disputant. In that case, it seems much clearer that one should take care to judge the matter aright.)
The Democratic Republic of Michigan
Hillary Clinton is worried that the will of the people is not being upheld (ht):
Hillary Clinton compared the plight of Zimbabweans in their recent fraudulent election to the uncounted votes of Michigan and Florida voters saying it is wrong when “people go through the motions of an election only to have them discarded and disregarded.”
Because when you hold a fake election with only one name on the ballot, it would be "undemocratic" not to support the inevitable winner, right? Because there's nothing more to democratic elections than "going through the motions". No need for active campaigning to allow the electorate to make an informed decision. Hell, no need to give them alternative options at all. That's all superfluous. As long as the ballot papers end up with a tick by your name, you are the legitimate elected leader of a "democratic" state, and the global community should recognize you as such.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Structural Incentives in Academic Work
Truepath argues that "Academic philosophy creates a structural incentive to be insufficiently critical and arrive at the wrong answers." I thought I should make a new thread to continue the discussion. His latest comment follows:Well no, I don't expect us to do without meta-discussions or the like. However, what I'm trying to get at isn't a distinction between substance and non-substance here (though that is where I think lots of philosophy is substantively wrong) but rather a bias towards theories with a certain flavor and complexity.
For instance I think Carnap does a truly excellent job of dealing with many meta-philosophical questions and while he certainly isn't entirely correct about everything (logical probability was a big mistake and he had some problems accepting some of the points Quine got right) I think many of his approaches are a much better choice than the more modern approach of throwing in lots of ambiguous concepts and building complex structures to talk about meta-philosophy.
Now I personally tend to think Carnap's approach of always taking philosophy to be postulating a certain model and then dividing up issues into internal quesitons and external ones is the right approach to take. I'm certainly not saying that others have to agree. However, I'm pointing out that it's odd that the answers a Carnapian approach would give to these problems have such an extremely small mindshare in philosophy today.
Now if I thought that this approach had died out because it had been out argued that would be fine. However, my impression is that it has lost mindshare for exactly the opposite problem: it answers questions to well. The Carnapian answer to the problem doesn't leave you any more interesting philosophy to do. You simply say, "well that's an external question, just pick whatever best suits your purpose," and that's the end of the conversation apart from debating the fundamental validity of the approach.
I probably made an explanatory error in bringing up another example to make my argument. I don't want the focus to be on any particular position because I'm not suggesting one couldn't reasonably disagree with these conclusions. What I am suggesting is that some philosophical analysis provides excellent fodder for others to cite and build upon while other types of analysis leave the problem sterile and dry, and even when the better arguments lie with the latter type of explanation sheer weight of publications will drive consensus opinion toward the earlier one.
Of course you can disagree but the problem is that continuing to have things to say (in general or about the disagreement) isn't evidence of correctness. In fact I think in general it is (weak) evidence against a view (more complex, more places for potential confusion to enter). However, a view which doesn't have anything more to say about an issue will be pushed out of the academic community because you can't keep publishing the same paper over and over again.
My hope with the examples is not that you would say, "hey yah that side is certainly correct" (though I wouldn't mind) but that you would say, "yah that position is not represented in the philosophical world proportionally to it's plausibility."
... Note that once you admit that the [surprise examination] paradox can't be stated formally you can only generate the paradox if I accept some other notion as meaingful/well-defined (rationality etc.). Thus it will always be a perfectly good solution to the paradox to simply be really really stingy and refuse to accept these non-formal notions. But can you see the stingy approach continuing to hold the interest of the philosophical community?
Even if the stingy approach has the better of the argument the approach which offers the opportunity for other philosophers to help build up a logic of announcements for true but unbelievable propositions will be the subject of greater attention by the community. It's this bias towards things which give rise to philosophy papers that troubles me.
Three quick thoughts: (1) Neo-Carnapians are not so rare, in my experience. (2) I doubt conceptual stinginess is ever a good response to anything. And (3) it's not entirely clear why the argument is targeted specifically at philosophy rather than academic publishing in general.
But, on the main point, I just don't think it's true that academic structures are biased against knock-down work that conclusively settles (or dissolves) an issue, leaving no further work to do in its wake. If Jones can successfully close an old and troubling issue X in one paragraph, he could get this published in Analysis and the next time anyone opened their mouth about X their colleagues would all say, "Go read Jones, then find a real issue to work on." Or so I imagine.
The reason this doesn't tend to happen is not because of any structural bias, but because it's not that easy to conclusively settle philosophical problems. Anyway, my core response is as follows: we have plenty of unsolved issues to provide us with "fodder", so there's no incentive to keep plugging away at solved ones.
Arguing by Degrees
Now that I think of it, a better way to make my point may be to replace talk of 'all or nothing' belief with credences or degrees of belief.
Even if you ultimately reject an argument, it may be that you were antecedently disposed to have greater credence in the premises (conjoined) than in the conclusion. Upon having this mild inconsistency pointed out to you by the valid argument, you will presumably revise your credal state by some appropriate combination of reducing your credence in the premises and raising your degree of belief in the conclusion.
If an argument can, in this way, be expected to lead many to rationally revise upwards their degree of belief in its conclusion, then it ipso facto has rational force (and is not question begging), in relation to this community of inquirers. This may be so even if their resulting credal state still falls short of full-blown belief.
I note that this approach also helps to refute a similar claim I addressed last year, namely: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.
My earlier points refute it well enough, of course, but 'credence' talk makes it even clearer. For this reminds us that we may change a person's mind even without changing their full-blown beliefs (though we may do that too). Even if we merely sway them from thinking a view wildly implausible to instead thinking it moderately unlikely, that is clearly dialectical progress.
Assessing Arguments and Begging Questions
What does it take to be a good (or at least rationally respectable) argument? Consider the 'zombie argument' against materialism I present here. It has provoked vocal denunciations from some quarters, with Richard Brown insisting that it is "a rotten argument", and more precisely that it is "question begging" and hence not "anything like an argument against materialism."
If you read that last post of his, you'll notice the entire basis of his diatribe is simply that he happens not to accept a premise of the zombie argument. He's quite explicit about this: A good argument starts from premises that everyone (in the debate) thinks are true and then show[s] that because of that they are committed to some other claim.
Anything else - the slightest hint of controversy - and an argument is ipso facto "crappy". This is a view which calls for no further refutation than its own clear statement.
It is possible to have a good (reasonable, respectable) argument that does not command universal assent. Indeed, it is even possible to respect an argument that you ultimately judge to be unsound. (I hold G.A. Cohen's argument against utilitarianism in high esteem, for example.) So I propose that we should instead assess arguments according to how well they advance the dialectic. So long as there are some opponents who are antecedently disposed to accept the premises of your argument, then it will have some rational purchase on them. A truly question-begging argument, on the contrary, is one that could not reasonably sway anyone who did not already accept the conclusion (because the conclusion is transparently contained within the premises in a way which makes the reasoning vacuous).
It should now be clear that the zombie argument is not, in fact, question begging. It has two controversial premises, but each is accepted by many prominent materialists. Moreover, there are at least a fair number of materialists-by-default, like my past self, who are disposed to find both premises very plausible, and hence to be rationally persuaded by the argument to reject materialism. It isn't vacuous, it begins from premises that many people -- including those who don't antecedently accept the conclusion -- find compelling, and from which the conclusion validly follows. What more could you ask for?
Now, I don't think it's a knock-down argument, since the premises are (as always) open to question. Indeed, I was very explicit in my overview post that I think people can reasonably disagree about whether to ultimately accept the zombie argument or not. But even one who ultimately rejects the argument should be able to recognize that it has some rational force (and certainly isn't 'question-begging' on any sane conception). Apparently that makes me a "fanatical property dualist". Go figure.
Dogville on Punishment
For those who feel some reluctance to affirm negative judgments about other people, the film Dogville really helps to illustrate a more retributivist viewpoint. Consider the following exchange: [spoiler warning]The Big Man: You do not pass judgement, because you sympathize with them. A deprived childhood and a homicide really isn't necessarily a homicide, right? The only thing you can blame is circumstances. Rapists and murderers may be the victims, according to you. But I, I call them dogs, and if they're lapping up their own vomit the only way to stop them is with the lash... Dogs can be taught many useful things, but not if we forgive them every time they obey their own nature.
Grace: So I'm arrogant. I'm arrogant because I forgive people?
BM: My God. Can't you see how condescending you are when you say that? You have this preconceived notion that nobody, listen, that nobody can't possibly attain the same high ethical standards as you, so you exonerate them. I can not think of anything more arrogant than that. You... you forgive others with excuses that you would never in the world permit for yourself... you must maintain your own standard. You owe them that. You owe them that. The penalty you deserve for your transgressions, they deserve for their transgressions.
Grace: They are human beings --
BM: No, no, no. Does every human being need to be accountable for their action? Of course they do. But you don't even give them that chance.
Of course, even a utilitarian can agree with the first point -- that people must be held accountable for rehabilitative purposes, to shape and improve their character. But what do you make of the second argument, that respect requires us to hold others to the same high standards we would apply to ourselves?
As Strawson famously noted, to suspend the reactive attitudes altogether would be to no longer treat the other as a (moral/rational) agent at all:To adopt the objective attitude to another human being is to see him, perhaps, as an object of social policy; as a subject for what, in a wide range of sense, might be called treatment; as something certainly to be taken account, perhaps precautionary account, of; to be managed or handled or cured or trained; perhaps simply to be avoided... But it cannot include the range of reactive feelings and attitudes which belong to involvement or participation with others in inter-personal human relationships; it cannot include resentment, gratitude, forgiveness, anger, or the sort of love which two adults can sometimes be said to feel reciprocally, for each other. If your attitude towards someone is wholly objective, then though you may fight him, you cannot quarrel with him, and though you may talk to him, even negotiate with him, you cannot reason with him. You can at most pretend to quarrel, or to reason, with him.
I'm tempted by the thought that there's not much worse for a person than to have their agency denied, to be stripped of one's dignity or "recognitional respect" as a reasonable person. (On the other hand, the criminal facing punishment probably doesn't appreciate the respect we thereby show him.) What do you think?
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Miracle McCain
Inspired by hilzoy's post, I figure a quick renovation of the classic cartoon is in order:
Feel free to create your own variations, and leave a comment to share the link!
The Question of Conservatism: Is Value Fungible?
A common objection to utilitarianism is that it treats people as mere value-receptacles. I never thought this objection made any sense, as explained in the linked post. But G.A. Cohen does a wonderful job (in his 'A truth in conservatism') of clarifying this in terms of fungibility. He writes:
The conservative propensity is to conserve, to not destroy, and, therefore, to not replace, even (within limits) by something more valuable... Conservatism is an expensive taste, because conservatives sacrifice value in order not to sacrifice things that have value.
We all have a bias towards our actual loved ones, and so would not wish for a world in which we somehow had even better relationships with completely different people. I figure that just goes to show that love and personal attachments can distort our preferences in various (fortunate, even if not strictly rational) ways. But Cohen suggests a stronger view, elevating this bias to the status of principle: existing things of value ought to be cherished, conserved and not replaced, not in virtue of any personal connection we may have to them, but simply in virtue of their actual existence.
Hence, for example, even impartial spectators -- and not just the unfortunate teenage mother and others personally involved -- should be glad about her child's existence (once he exists; not, of course, beforehand).
Note that a Cohen-conservative may still be a maxmizing consequentialist of a sort. But what they want to maximize is the quantity of preserved or pre-existing value, rather than value tout court. The objection is thus not to consequentialism per se -- utilitarian sacrifice is unproblematic, so long as it is for the sake of a pre-existing beneficiary. The objection instead concerns the aspect of utilitarianism according to which:
the bearers of value, as opposed to the value they bear, don't count as such, but matter only because of the value that they bear, and are therefore, in a deep sense, dispensable.
This is, without question, the best objection to utilitarianism I have ever encountered. Cohen goes on to press his argument as follows:
1. A thing that has intrinsic value is worthy of being revered or cherished.
2. We do not regard something as being worthy of being revered or cherished if we have no reason to regret its destruction, as such.
3. If we care only about their value, we never have reason to regret the destruction of valuable things, as such.
Therefore:
4. We are right to be biased in favour of existing embodiments of value.
The third premise is analytic: utilitarians (i.e. those who care only about value) may regret the destruction of value insofar as this involves a net reduction in value; it is non-replacement, rather than destruction, that we must regret.
The second premise is also very plausible. As Cohen explains:
One can say, quite properly, upon acquiring a valuable thing, "I shall value this until something better comes along", but one cannot in the same way say "I shall cherish this until something better comes along": that could happen to be a correct prediction, but it could not express a decision to cherish...
So, for example, you do not cherish a Tintoretto if you happily replace it by a slightly better Picasso: you thereby treat the Tintoretto as something that has the merely instrumental value of being a vessel of aesthetic value.
So the issue really comes down to premise 1, i.e. whether all intrinsically valuable things warrant cherishing in their particularity, or whether, perhaps, only things with 'personal value', i.e. that we love or are otherwise personally attached to, call for such cherishing.
Related posts:
- Moral Roots and Alienating Aspirations
- Rationality and Reflective Endorsement.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
'Community' fluff
The Canadian-based What Sorts of People Should There Be? project, has 61 researchers from 15 different disciplines. The team also includes members of the community.
Members of what community? This sounds like a silly feel-good euphemism for non-academics, though note the unfortunate implication that academics themselves -- those 61 researchers -- are somehow not real members of "the community" (whatever that is).
The project website is also filled with corporatese buzzwords: their "innovative" work is generated by the "interactive synergy" of the project. There's even a Venn diagram of three overlapping circles to prove it.
But I shouldn't poke fun. The project itself actually sounds really interesting. There are many fascinating philosophical questions surrounding eugenics, genetic screening, selective abortion, etc. It's just a pity they felt the need to dress it up in such fluff. (I thought that's what bureaucrats and managers did when they couldn't sell their work on its merits. But perhaps it's universal. That would be unfortunate, because their unclarity makes it harder to tell when an idea or project is really worth attending to. My default response is to assume they're full of bunk, and I assume I'm not alone here.)
Friday, May 16, 2008
Against Moral Mindfulness
More from Janet's post:
Reducing our decisions to dollars and cents keeps us focused on the impacts of our choices to ourselves, financially. It distracts us from the impacts of our choices on other individuals, or on our communities more broadly. Recognizing that those others are of value -- that they have interests that matter, too -- is kind of at the heart of being an ethical human being...
I'd really like to nudge myself, and those around me, to a place where we make more of our choices with a mindfulness about how those choices change the choices available to others (and to ourselves down the road). I don't want it to fall to our water bills to make us be the people we ought to be.
I disagree. Sure, insofar as we are acting qua citizen -- engaging in public debate, political advocacy, voting, etc. -- we should be guided by concern for the general welfare. But we should prefer to avoid needlessly burdening private individuals with additional concerns in their everyday life.
Benign spontaneous order is the ideal: far better to set things up so that ordinary thoughtless actions will tend towards the public good without any special effort or knowledge required on the part of the individual. As I wrote in an old thread:
I'd be delighted if our societal systems were so well-designed that people rarely needed to consider impartial moral reasons at all in their daily living. There is plenty of room for that in the public sphere, and it seems a more personal focus (on one's close relationships, etc.) would do more to enrich the private sphere.
Besides, it strikes me as perverse virtue fetishism to oppose effective institutions (e.g. markets) on the grounds that their good results emerge without requiring private virtue. Policy should be geared towards actually improving the world, not getting people to try to improve the world. (Cf. opposing safe-swimming flags at the beach because they reduce the opportunity for heroic rescues!)
Tax and Redistribute
Janet Stemwedel had a post yesterday on water conservation:
If there's a drought looming, a water district would like water users to cut back their water usage. If they don't, the water district could run out of water, which is bad for everyone.
Ramping up the price of any water usage is one option, but it would fall unfairly on the folks with less money. Water is not something you can opt out of using if the price of using it passes a certain point. We are not a society that openly embraces dessicating the poor.
Since people need to use some water (to drink, to boil ramen noodles, to wash, etc.), a water district wants a policy that acknowledges the necessity of water usage while discouraging water usage that can be avoided.
She goes on to describe how alternative proposals, e.g. charging for relative increases in use, create bad incentives and are unfair on those who had previously "cut their water usage down to the bone." How, then, can a society ration scarce resources effectively without "dessicating the poor"?
Actually, it's easy. Ramp up the (tax) price of all water usage, just as initially suggested, and then redistribute the proceeds among all taxpayers. Those who use more water end up compensating those who use less, so the poor (and other low-consumption users, e.g. conservationists) can actually expect to make a net profit out of this system. (They receive an $(X/n) payout, which is more than enough to pay for their essential water usage, and they can then pocket the rest.)
Really, this should be a no-brainer. And note that the lesson generalizes. Whenever someone complains that an economic disincentive "unfairly burdens the poor", the solution is to redistribute the proceeds. (Example: worried that gas taxes are a burden to the poor? Solution: redistribute the proceeds. The poor will profit, as will the environment.)
Why is this not common knowledge?
Acting on Meta-reasons
Another way to bring out my contrast between 'Moral Roots and Alienating Aspirations' is to consider the practical significance of higher-order evidence.
Suppose it seems to you that you ought to phi, but you also think that your judgment in this case could well be biased or otherwise impaired. You believe that other people in similar circumstances to yours have turned out to be mistaken. Moreover, others you consider to be moral experts -- reliably more insightful than yourself -- are unanimous in insisting that you should not phi. What should you do?
Objectivists must allow that appearances can be misleading, and so higher-order evidence can undermine our first-order beliefs. In the above scenario, it looks like your all-things-considered judgment should be that the totality of reasons that exist weigh against phi-ing, even though you do not currently have access to all those reasons yourself. The reasons in your possession count in favour of phi-ing, but as a realist you acknowledge that there may be other reasons beyond your grasp, and the views of experts can give you some indication of what the totality of reasons really favours.
What of the 'rooted' conservative/subjectivist? Here it is less clear. There may still be some room for overriding your personal judgments, e.g. if they rest on some merely empirical or logical error, and so do not really reflect your core values. But if we accept the Vellemanian position that what fundamentally matters is making sense to oneself, then there seems something deeply problematic about acting on mere "meta-reasons", i.e. the abstract promise of reasons out there that you have not fully grasped. You can't really make sense of your action, because even though there is abstract evidence that you did what is for the best, you do not yourself possess the grounds for this judgment; you don't, in other words, understand why it is for the best. So it may seem that you acted for reasons that are not, in some vital sense, your own.
This practical difference marks a vivid distinction between the two metaethical views. Whether we act for the sake of making internal sense to ourselves, or to make the external world better, will influence our receptivity to meta-reasons, and hence what decisions we make.
I take this to count in favour of objectivism, since it seems clear that we should be receptive to meta-reasons. As Dan Moller writes in 'Meta-reasoning and Practical Deliberation' [pdf] (p.26):Failing to act on second-level reasoning means, by definition, acting on the basis of flawed deliberations when there is evidence of how improving those deliberations would affect the outcome. To return to the general [who is biased towards cowardice by the recent deaths of his friends], he presumably cares about discharging his duties as a soldier with integrity, so why shouldn’t he pursue every available opportunity to improve his decision-making? It is true that in that pursuit he may cut himself off from ultimate comprehension of the reasoning that leads to the conclusion to send in the troops, but accepting that limitation would in this circumstance express precisely a commitment to his deepest values and identity as a soldier, not any sort of compromise or abdication.
Isn't the alternative a bit solipsistic?
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Moral Roots and Alienating Aspirations
Morality is made for man, not man for morality
-- William K. Frankena.
I'm not sure what to make of Frankena's maxim. It's uncontroversial that human welfare is important. So let's interpret the maxim more strongly, as expressing a form of moral conservatism -- a rebuke of the radical and alienating demands of impartial consequentialism (to name just one example). An ethics for living, we may think, must be more firmly rooted in our actual condition, our personal concerns and interests.
There are many complex issues in this vicinity, but one way in is to ask whether there might be irreconcilable but reasonable conflict. I think not: I tend to conceive of the moral point of view as one that everyone can share, and thereby resolve any conflicts equitably, at least in principle. But if normativity must always be rooted in our particular perspectives, there's no reason to expect such compromises to always be possible. I may despise the frat boy as a boor, and he may despise me as an egghead, in a fundamental clash of values that is not susceptible to any common resolution. (The alternative is to think that one or both of us is making a mistake, and really ought to be more sympathetic to the other and their way of life.)
Rooted ethics implies a kind of relativism, since different people lay their roots in different places. But perhaps that's to be expected, and at the end of the day the most we can hope for is that our own values prevail in the culture wars. The metaethical conservative will not think that those who lay their roots elsewhere from his are in any sense mistaken or irrational. There is no shared ideal viewpoint for all to aspire to,* so those who disagree are not confused or misguided, but stalwart enemies.
* = Note that this abandonment of truth is what saves the metaethical conservative from incoherence
Another approach is to ask whether our prior dispositions (or perceived "common sense") place significant constraints on normative guidance. Could it possibly be the case that I ought to give up my most cherished projects and personal values? If my "idealized self" is radically different from me, so different that I can no longer recognize my self in him, what normative authority do his prescriptions really have over me?
If (the best account of) realism about value leads us to such conclusions as that newborns may be killed harmlessly, and that it would have been better if disabled persons (or children of teen mothers) had not been conceived, then some may wonder whether we'd do better to be anti-realists.
Indeed, this seems to be Velleman's position, in response to the apparent conflict between a parent's love for their particular severely disabled child, and their recognition that the creation of a severely disabled child is lamentable. He writes (in the conclusion to 'Love and Non-Existence'):
The parents experience their emotions as assessing the value of the child's existence in itself, apart from how it is conceived [i.e. under what guise or description], and the emotions cannot be simultaneously correct if so interpreted. But their emotions make perfect sense despite there being no consistent distribution of values that they would reflect, because emotions can only project value, and only when appearing to do so enhances their intelligibility.
The parents should therefore forget about evaluating their child's existence and feel the emotions that clearly make sense for them to feel. What's intelligible in their responses may cast an inconsistent set of shadows on the world, but they are, after all, only shadows.
On Velleman's view, what fundamentally matters is making sense to oneself. Making evaluations is one way of going about this, but one's personal narrative is primary, in line with Frankena's maxim.
But is it right? Or should we be realists about value, and think that what fundamentally matters is making the world a better place?
Aspiring to Objectivity
[Another post I'm working on reminded me of this note from last September that I never got around to posting...]
Is philosophy itself alienating? Excessive concern to achieve the 'view from nowhere' seems like an occupational hazard. Especially if one embraces an 'ideal agent'-type metaethic, this may lead to constantly second-guessing oneself: "would others ideally endorse this?" (Would I?) Perfection is too high a standard to try to live up to. But it's kind of hard to ignore if you spend all day thinking about it!
One worry is that many of our actual sentiments might not be expected to survive the idealization process. Yet ignoring or suppressing them may not be such a good idea. Someone in class today mentioned the 'bad squash loser' case: ideally, the loser should walk over to graciously congratulate the other player. But suppose that, due to his anger, were he to try he would more likely lash out violently. So he really should just walk away and cool off. That at least shows why we can't just ignore our contingent flaws. Is there a similarly clear argument against suppressing unwelcome emotions (e.g. if the squash loser were capable of distancing himself from his anger)? It seems a non-obvious empirical question what the consequences of this are likely to be. [I made a similar point in my recent post on the question whether to attempt to reshape a non-conforming child's gender preferences.]
A second worry arises from the concern for universal convergence. Many of our tastes may be thought idiosyncratic or merely 'subjective', but it would be unfortunate to devalue them for that reason alone. Perhaps we can resolve this by taking tastes as 'given', exempt from rational criticism, and recognize as universalizable the general desire to derive enjoyment from one's tastes (whatever they may be). Or, if such subjectivism is too extreme, at least allow for a plurality of standards of good taste.
Philosophy and Disciplinary Boundaries
Should philosophy have something to say to non-philosophers? Should philosophy be pursued only by those trained in philosophy? Should academic teachers of philosophy consider themselves philosophers in virtue of the fact that they teach philosophy? And should analytic philosophers deny that continental philosophers are philosophers at all, or acknowledge that they represent different modes of philosophizing? Cogito poses some big questions to four prominent British and US philosophers.
That last was a bit of a leading question, though Jonathan Barnes offered an amusing response:
Well, most philosophers who belong to the so-called analytical tradition are pretty poor philosophers. (Most academics who do anything are pretty poor at doing it; and philosophy, or so it seems to me, is a subject in which it is peculiarly difficult to do decent stuff. A modestly competent historian may produce a modestly good history book; a modestly competent philosopher has no reason to publish his modest thoughts.) But there's a big difference between the analyticals and the continentals: what distinguishes the continental tradition is that all its members are pretty hopeless at philosophy.
See also Barry Stroud on alternative written forms:
Poems and aphorisms do not seem to me appropriate forms for carrying out philosophical work, even if they might be used to express or summarize certain philosophical conceptions developed by other means. Dialogue is a very good way to write philosophy, but it is difficult to do convincingly. I don't see much loss in trying to write philosophy in clear, connected, sharply focused prose. I wish more philosophers would try it.
And, on a more serious note, Raymond Geuss discusses the 'compartmentalization' of philosophical sub-fields:
The question is not whether a moral philosopher should or should not be interested in logic. Of course, in an ideal world moral philosophers would pay close attention to what all other philosophers said and wrote. They would also pay close attention to advances in biology, new forms of legislation, world history, economic theory, cosmology, and literature. We do not live in such an ideal world and so for us the real question is: given the limitations on human time and attention, what is the most useful thing for a philosopher who has a primary interest, say in political philosophy, to study? Is it more useful to study logic than economic history? To say that we know that this is the case a priori, by virtue of the fact that logic "belongs" to philosophy and economics does not, is to fetishize disciplinary boundaries that have no absolute standing.
That is one quote I wholeheartedly agree with. I'm no fan of strict distribution requirements, but I suspect many grad students would benefit from faculty advisors encouraging them to take appropriate courses in related "non-philosophy" disciplines. What do you think?
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Natural and Projectible Predicates
Rachael remarks on the 'structure and similarity' discussion:
Should we distinguish between predicates that are projectable and predicates that are natural? "Green", "ultraviolety-looking to bees", "owned by Rachael", and "tasty to alpacas" are fairly projectable, but I doubt they're natural. I don't expect a bee to care which objects are green, a mouse to care which objects are owned by Rachael, or a human (who doesn't have a special interest in bees or alpacas) to care which objects are ultraviolety-looking to bees or tasty to alpacas. There's a sense in which all the above concepts are parochial, and are only worth adopting because they're convenient. Furthermore, there's a sense in which there's no conflict between these different ways of carving up the world: I don't think the alpacas are wrong, and I might find it very important to adopt their concepts when interacting with them.
Also, maybe "Having mass m before time t or mass m* after" is an example of a natural predicate that isn't projectable.
That last example sounds gerrymandered (i.e. not a natural way to carve things up) to me. I'd need to hear more about why we'd consider it 'natural'. (Note that complex predicates may invoke natural terms like 'mass' in a gerrymandered or non-natural manner.) On the other hand, I'm also unsure why green and ultraviolet are thought not to be very natural. There is a natural respect -- namely, surface reflectance properties -- in which all green things (or all ultraviolet things) exhibit a genuine similarity.
The other examples are plausibly less natural, but also (and, I imagine, to the same degree) unprojectible. Here I should clarify something that may not have been clear in my first post. 'Projectibility' does not just mean stability across time, i.e. that if something satisfies the predicate now, it will also do so in future. Any tenseless predicate, however gerrymandered -- e.g. 'exists in 1907 or 2008' -- will be temporally stable in this sense. Genuine projectibility is more general, since we can inductively project along dimensions other than time. If a bunch of Fs are green, that may be evidence that other Fs (and not just these same ones in future) are also green. On the other hand, if a bunch of Fs are owned by Rachael, that's probably not enough to justifably project ownership-by-Rachael onto any other arbitrary F.*
Overall, then, I remain of the opinion that 'natural' predicates, i.e. those that carve nature at the joints, or highlight objective similarities, are also those that will tend to support inductive projection.
[* = I'm not sure if that's the best way to explain projectibility. Any suggestions?]