Rational Justification vs. Objective Warrant

I'm trying to make sense of how a foundationalist can reject coherentism (or 'wide reflective equilibrium'). I interpret those latter terms fairly broadly, and perhaps that's the problem. But here's the key thought: surely if you have a maximally coherent belief set then you are not open to any rational criticism? Or again: if you are open to rational criticism, it must be that you can improve the internal coherence of your beliefs. Rational persuasion just is coherent persuasion -- after all, any rationally compelling argument must start from premises that one accepts (even if they go on to radically undermine one's other beliefs -- that just shows there was some initial incoherence there to exploit).

Can the foundationalist deny this? Do they even try? Perhaps they mean something different: their concern is not rational justification, but something more 'objective' -- call it warrant. Maybe there are certain foundational beliefs or priors that are objectively warranted, in the sense that they're what we really ought to believe, but one may fail to believe appropriately without thereby making any rational error (or being susceptible to any rational improvement).

A further application of this idea would be to distinguish proper proof from other deductive arguments. A proper proof will establish the conclusion from warranted premises. Otherwise, it is a mere 'rational argument' that may persuade (ad hominem) those who accept the premises, but it doesn't establish that they really should believe the conclusion, because they shouldn't have accepted the premises either.

[Two worries: (1) Is there really a theoretical role for 'warrant' and 'proper proof' to play here, distinct from simple 'truth' and 'soundness'? I'm not sure about this. I guess truth doesn't come in degrees, whereas warranted credence presumably would. (2) I'm not sure whether this relates to the distinction between ideal vs. non-ideal rationality. It appears independent, I guess, since even 'perfect internal coherence' is an unattainable ideal; but I feel like there's some important connection here nonetheless.]

P.S. Of course, this isn't how foundationalists have traditionally portrayed their view. They talk of rational "self-evidence", etc., but if they just mean that they assign near-certain credence to a claim (such that it will readily swamp almost any contrary beliefs) then (again) the coherentist can accommodate this. In fairness, I guess a 'self-evident' claim is meant to be one such that anyone who understands it can thereby see that it must be warranted/true. But how could this be, if not that its negation is incoherent?

Comments Broken?

Blogger has officially released the 'embedded comment form' I'm using below, so it should now be working (one would hope). But I've had one reader email in to let me know that it's still eating his comments. Is anyone else still having problems posting? (You're welcome to try leaving a test comment on this post.) Please email me if you notice it not working -- if it's not an isolated problem, I'll revert to the pop-up comments window.

Recognizing Incompetence

The aptly named In Socrates' Wake links to research suggesting that people don't know when they don't know much. Or, as the researchers put it:

* Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
* Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
* Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.

They found, for instance, that "individuals who scored in the 12th percentile believed that their general reasoning abilities fell at the 68th percentile". Curiously, even the top students "tended to overestimate" the incompetent ones. But at least they were better at assessing themselves. (I wouldn't be surprised if there was actually a reverse effect at higher levels -- cf. Colin Marshall's 'Why Smart People Often Think They're The Dumbest Person in the Room').

Should such research lead us to place less weight on subjective (self-)assessment, and more on external indicators of success?

Reflecting on Relativism

I previously considered a kind of sophisticated moral relativism according to which 'X is wrong' is true for you iff your idealized self would hold this position. But to truly count as relativism, this must apply even at the level of fully specified token acts. So (for example) we can say that Sally acted wrongly in getting an abortion is true for Anne but not for Sally, if their idealized selves would disagree in this way about the merits of Sally's action. But I wonder: could Anne's idealized self coherently maintain her position, or would the truth of relativism undermine her first-order judgments of impermissibility?

If an act is morally wrong then the actor lacks sufficient moral reason (and arguably sufficient non-moral reason either) to so act. But can it really be a 'relative' matter what (moral) reasons Sally has for acting? Surely the relevant standpoint here is Sally's own. She has (moral) reason to act as her idealized self would (morally) recommend, and - ex hypothesi - her idealized self recommends abortion. So Sally has sufficient reason to get an abortion. So it cannot be morally wrong for her to do this.

At what step can Anne disagree? Anne's idealized self opposes abortion, but that is merely a reason for Anne to not get an abortion; it is not a reason that is relevant to Sally's action. Anne can see that Sally is perfectly justified in her beliefs and actions. So she can't maintain the claim that Sally's act was wrong; all Anne can claim is that it would be wrong for her to perform a similar act of that type. Sally, seeing Anne's standpoint, will agree: it would be wrong for Anne to get an abortion. But now there is no disagreement over token actions. So the moral truth isn't 'relative' after all: it's absolutely true that Sally may get an abortion and that Anne may not.

You might dispute my assumption that what practical reasons S has is a non-relative matter, determined by S's standpoint and no other. But even if you dispute that, so that Anne may (as yet) hold Sally's actions to be unjustified, Anne presumably cannot deny that Sally has rational beliefs (insofar as they would survive idealization). But now we can appeal to Clayton's principle for moving from Theoretical to Practical Reason:

(1) If a subject judges that she should Φ and it’s not the case that she should refrain from judging that she should Φ, it’s not the case that the subject shouldn’t Φ.

Anne must grant Sally the antecedent -- Sally judges that she should have an abortion, and makes no mistake in doing so -- so Anne must also grant the practical consequent, that Sally didn't act wrongly.

We thus find that moral relativism is incoherent. On the assumption that relativism is true and applies to some token act, it turns out that it doesn't apply to that token act after all. Contra the assumption, moral status is perfectly 'absolute': if the agent commits no (theoretical) error in thinking their action permissible, then it's permissible. Since the former is a non-relative matter of fact, so must be the entailed consequent.

Bipartisanship and In-Betweenism

A commenter recently criticized a post of mine for being 'partisan'. This strikes me as illustrating a common confusion regarding civic virtue and various senses of 'partisanship'. It's easy to clear up the confusion if we simply remember that one should always exercise critical judgment and be intellectually honest in pursuit of the truth. So if one political party really is better than another at present, then our judgments should accurately reflect this. It's entirely appropriate to be 'partisan' in this weak sense of preferring (what one judges to be) the better party. Indeed, it would be frankly irrational not to -- that would be to sacrifice one's critical judgment in the service of a sick image fetishism that treats appearing 'neutral' as more important than actually getting things right.

Partisanship is only objectionable when it becomes an obstacle to the truth. That is, when one becomes a closed-minded partisan hack, concerned with promoting the party line by any (rhetorical) means, regardless of the true merits of the case. The hack treats reasons as mere ammunition, not principled considerations that they'd recognize as having equal weight even if the party roles had been reversed.

Anyone who cares about truth will despise partisan hackery and bias. This much is generally acknowledged. What is less widely recognized is that bipartisanship or 'in-betweenism' is yet another 'tribe' or uncritical ideology. Just as there are blind, uncritical partisans, so there are blind, uncritical fence-sitters. There's nothing inherently better about adopting an 'in-between' position (or suspending judgment altogether). What matters is ensuring that (i) you end up in the position that is best supported by reasons, whichever position that may be; and (ii) you remain open to any new reasons or evidence that may come your way in future.

We should take care to distinguish:
(1) The first-order content of one's present political beliefs/preferences.
(2) Various quantitative dimensions internal to the first-order state, e.g. strength of credence (current confidence level), and weight of preference (or believed importance).
(3) The external 'robustness' of one's current state, i.e. a measure of stability, or how likely one of the above factors is to change in the near future.
(4) One's dispositional commitment to retaining an open mind, i.e. being receptive to reason, and willing to revise one's current beliefs/preferences in light of new reasons/evidence (should such arise).

I've previously noted the unfortunate tendency to conflate strength of credence (#2) with closed-minded 'dogmatism' (#4). These are two very different things, and should not be confused. One is a first-order judgment about the weight of evidence, and the other is a higher-order commitment to revisit this judgment if new evidence comes along in future.

I think similar confusions may be found in common talk about 'bipartisan' politicians. We should take care to distinguish (i) a higher-order commitment to cooperating with whoever is right (no matter their party), from (ii) a first-order commitment to "in-betweenism" or compromising with the other party (no matter whether they're right). Obviously there is nothing particularly laudable about the latter. It is not intrinsically better to "reach across the aisle" than to reach in the opposite direction; it all depends on which potential collaborators could better help you pass good legislation. So a mere disposition towards the middle is no sign of civic virtue. What matters is one's being receptive to cooperating with sane and competent people regardless of their party.

So it is really very stupid when conservatives object that Obama must not be capable of 'bipartisanship' because he is a left-leaning liberal. They are hankering after some worthless notion of centrism (in-betweenism), when what really matters is being bipartisan in the 'good' sense that Hilzoy documents:

Obama tries to find people, both Democrats and Republicans, who actually care about a particular issue enough to try to get the policy right, and then he works with them. This does not involve compromising on principle. It does, however, involve preferring getting legislation passed to having a spectacular battle.

In sum: we shouldn't let party affiliations muddle our thinking. One form of failure here is to uncritically favour one's own party. Another form of failure is to uncritically favour some 'in-between' bipartisan compromise. In both cases, one is irrationally adopting a position for reasons to do with party affiliations rather than assessing the issues on their merits. The reasonable agent assesses matters on their merits, and if they happen to end up agreeing more with one party than another, so be it. It'd be daft to adopt an unwarranted view just so as to appear independent. That's like the "non-conformist" who slavishly adopts the most unpopular fashions. If he were truly independent of the crowd, he wouldn't care whether they end up in the same place.

Explaining Higher-Order Desires

The unwilling addict has an overwhelming first-order desire for heroin, but wishes that this were otherwise. How are we to explain this second-order desire? Presumably it is not an intrinsic, brute desire. We might think it instrumental: the addict desires good health, etc., and ridding himself of his desire for heroin would help bring about this desired end. But here's a puzzle: in that case his first-order desire for heroin, being stronger than his desire for health, should give rise to an equally overwhelming second-order instrumental desire to be rid of his desire for health (for the sake of the more-desired end of using heroin). As pointed out in class last week, the first-order weightings should replicate themselves all the way up the hierarchy, if higher-order desires are instrumental. After all, instrumental desires are not really additional desires at all; they are simply the pairing of an underlying (intrinsic) desire with a means-end belief. They are in this sense 'transparent' -- mere placeholders for an underlying desire, which provides the entire motivational force (filtered by one's degree of credence in the means-end belief). So understood, instrumentalism cannot explain the emergence of substantive desire hierarchies, where our higher-order desires govern (rather than merely reflect) our first-order ones.

Yet even if higher-order desires cannot be purely instrumental, it seems clear that they depend in some sense on first-order desires. Plausibly, his desire for health is the reason why the unwilling addict is unwilling. There is some explanatory relation here. But what? We might opt for a mere causal-historical explanation: the desire for health happened to give rise (through some non-rational process or psychological quirk?) to a new (intrinsic) 2nd-order desire to be rid of the addiction. But this implies that the desires are now independent, so even if he ceased to care about his health and all that, the addict would retain his brute desire to be rid of the addiction. That doesn't sound right.

Is there a third option? Perhaps the desire for health not only created, but also sustains, the second-order desire. Can we make sense of this proposal without collapsing it into the first failed account (i.e. transparent instrumentalism)? I think we can, on the model of conditional desires. The higher-order desire to be rid of addiction is implicitly conditional on one's desiring of other goods in life (e.g. health). If one loses those other desires, then the higher-order desire is neither thwarted nor satisfied, but simply 'cancelled' -- it no longer applies. Nonetheless, so long as the condition (of one having those other desires) is met, this does count as a further desire in addition, with weight of its own that is not simply inherited from others.

I should note that this still doesn't answer the comparative question why one came to have this higher-order desire rather than some other; but perhaps that is not a fact in need of explanation.* What this account succeeds in explaining is how higher-order desires can in some sense depend upon first-order desires, without merely replicating their weightings (as instrumental desires would, given their 'transparent' nature).

* = Having said all that, I think we would do better yet to abandon strict Humeanism and allow that value judgments can give rise to desires. The stronger higher-order desire to be rid of the addiction thus reflects our cognitive judgment that health (etc.) is better than heroin.

Actually, I'm inclined to deny that the addict really desires heroin (non-instrumentally). It seems more plausible to say he desires to be rid of the unpleasant craving sensation, and either taking heroin or somehow losing the addiction would equally satisfy this negative desire. The difference between 'willing' and 'unwilling' addicts is then not a matter of second-order desire at all, but simply a refinement of the negative first-order desire, by further specifying which of the two possible means is preferred. (Maybe I'm working with an overly intellectualized sense of 'desire' here, but I guess that depends on what you want to do with the concept.)

Proving Grue's Temporality

Background: we define 'grue' such that it applies to any object satisfying the disjunctive condition: either the object is first observed prior to 2020 and it is green, or the object is not observed prior to 2020 and it is blue. For example, every emerald so far observed has been grue, and so (presumably) is a sapphire that's first dug up in 2021. Define 'bleen' conversely. Goodman's new riddle of induction is to distinguish which of the following two inductive inferences is a good one, and why:

(MORE GREEN) All emeralds so far observed have been green, so an emerald discovered in 2021 will also be green.

(MORE GRUE) All emeralds so far observed have been grue, so an emerald discovered in 2021 will also be grue.

The obvious answer is that 'grue' is a gerrymandered predicate which makes reference to a particular time, whereas 'green' applies consistently to the same colour throughout. The standard objection to this proposed answer is that in fact the temporal reference is merely an artifact of our language, since we happen to be 'green'-speakers. We can imagine a 'grue'-speaker, whose natural language takes 'grue' and 'bleen' as the fundamental notions and defines 'green' and 'blue' as time-relative disjunctive predicates. (E.g. they define 'green' = grue if first observed before 2020, bleen otherwise.)

Now, I want to show that this linguistic defense is inadequate, and in fact even the natural grue-speaker must admit that it is their colour terms, not ours, which are really time-relative. Importantly, this is not a linguistic claim, but a metaphysical one. I'm willing to grant that they may take 'grue' rather than 'green' as their linguistic primitive, not to be defined in terms of any other words (relative to times). But words don't matter. What matters is that their word 'grue' denotes a temporally gerrymandered property or thing in the world.

Here's my demonstration. Let us fast-forward to the year 2025. Suppose it turns out that all emeralds are still green, in which case all those discovered from 2020 onwards are called 'bleen' rather than 'grue'. Suppose I take an emerald to a grue-speaker, and let him look at it as closely as he likes, in the clearest possible viewing conditions (good lighting, etc.). Surely he should then be able to tell what colour it is. He has adequate epistemic access to how the object is in itself. He can see it just fine. Yet when I ask him, "What colour is this emerald?" he cannot say. He must ask for more information: "When was it first observed?" The grue-speaker thereby reveals the implicit time-relativity of his colour concepts. It is not enough to look at the object in itself; whether it is grue or bleen depends on the further, extrinsic question of whether it was observed prior to 2020 or not.

The green speaker needs no such further information. We can tell the emerald is green just by looking at it, without needing to also know any temporal information. This shows that 'green' denotes a temporally neutral property, whereas 'grue' denotes something that is time-relative or temporally gerrymandered.

(This seems like an obvious point, so I imagine some other philosopher must have beat me to it. Can anyone recall seeing this argument before in the literature? Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.)

Universal Prescriptions and Preference Utilitarianism

R.M. Hare held that moral judgments are universal prescriptions. Thus:

it is a misuse of the word 'ought' to say 'You ought, but I can conceive of another situation, identical in all its properties to this one, except that the corresponding person ought not'. (MT p.10)

This places certain constraints on sincere moral judgment. You can't think it's okay to hurt another, unless you also endorse being hurt yourself when in their situation. But what if you will endorse this? Consider the fanatical Nazi, so committed to the cause that he's willing to prescribe his own extermination were he to turn out to be a Jew himself. Is Hare then committed to saying that the fanatic makes no error when he says that all Jews should be exterminated?

I think his view does entail this, though Hare himself thought otherwise. Universalizabilty requires that we can endorse the outcome even after imagining ourselves in others' positions, with their desires, preferences, and moral ideals. Crucially, Hare thought that in doing this, we would inevitably come to share their preferences about the situation they are in. So, in thinking about what we can endorse after considering all positions equally, we must ultimately prescribe preference utilitarianism: maximizing the net weight of preference satisfaction across all involved.

However, Hare's 'crucial step' seems simply mistaken. It conflates counterfactual desires with desires about counterfactuals. Note the difference:
(1) In situation S, I would desire that P
and
(2) I do desire that, were I in situation S, P.

So merely imagining a situation where I have some desire, doesn't entail my (now) endorsing it. The fanatical Nazi can say, "Wow, yeah I can see I'd feel really unjustly abused if I were a Jew. I'd certainly oppose the Final Solution. How misguided I would then be! Such unpatriotic preferences should not be given normative weight."

Peter Singer ('Reasoning towards Utilitarianism') notes that Hare's non-cognitivism may be used to undermine this last claim, for it means that no personal preferences/ideals are intrinsically superior to any others. So the fanatic cannot ground his stubborn preference on claims of objective truth or warrant. Fair enough. But did he ever need to? For non-cognitivists, preferences don't need to be 'grounded' or justified at all. So why not a higher-order preference to the effect that such-and-such other preferences -- even if they come to be one's own -- should be thwarted? It may be an uncomfortable preference to sincerely hold, but if the fanatic is willing to really bite this bullet, then I don't see how Hare has the resources to criticize him.

It's important to note that the fanatic really is making a universal prescription here. He's not just claiming that anti-Nazi preferences should be thwarted given that only other people have them. He's also willing to endorse this prescription for all possible situations that are relevantly similar, including that possible situation where he himself is anti-Nazi. This willingness to universalize is precisely what makes him a fanatic rather than an amoralist. Granted, when he fully and vividly imagines being Jewish himself, part of what he imagines is opposing the prescription of Nazism. But he can imagine opposing a prescription without thereby actually opposing its application to the imagined scenario, as we saw in distinguishing (1) and (2) above.

This is exactly like the point that I can imagine a scenario where I [perhaps falsely] believe that P, but it doesn't follow that I (actually) believe, of that scenario, that P is true in it. We must take care to separate the content of the scenario being imagined (including the attitudes I am stipulated to have within or according to the fiction) from the attitudes I have towards the imagined scenario. Once we're clear about this, I don't see how the non-cognitivist can accuse the fanatic of error in his (non-utilitarian) universal prescriptions.

Update: It's been pointed out to me that Hare was actually careful to distinguish (1) and (2). He just thought that a full appreciation of the first would necessarily bring about the second -- otherwise one must not have been imagining the counterfactual preferences vividly enough, or some such. That doesn't strike me as a plausible claim, though.

Cohen-Conservatism revisited

A few months ago I described G.A. Cohen's anti-fungibility objection to utilitarianism: intrinsically valuable things warrant cherishing, and thus preferring their preservation to replacement even by something more intrinsically valuable (within limits). It's a fascinating proposal, so it was great to hear Cohen discussing it with some of my other favourite philosophers in the 'Scanlon workshop' here yesterday. Here are some of the especially interesting ideas I recall:

(1) Michael noted that there must be some feature in virtue of which we reasonably prefer the less intrinsically valuable thing to the greater (but merely possible) replacement: perhaps its actual existence, or historical connection to us, or some such. But then it looks like we can reinterpret Cohen as claiming that that very feature affords the object with some extra, i.e. extrinsic, value. (At least on a buck-passing account, whereby value is defined in terms of what we have reason to desire.)

But I wonder whether a revised version of buck-passing could reduce value to a peculiar subset of reasons for desire -- namely, detached/universal impersonal reasons -- thus allowing that we might have other (more particular or personal) reasons for preferring the lesser good. Cohen could then resist the claim that the extrinsic reason bestows any additional value on the object. His conservatism is not intended to contest amounts of value, but rather the appropriate response to value. (Rather than promote it generally, we should cherish the particular things that have it. So the claim goes.)

(2) Liz compared Cohen's disposition to preserve existing things, or even to look forward to preserving future things, with the attitude of being glad that the past turned out as it did -- noting, in particular, that injustice is more of an objection to the former. We may now be glad that the pyramids were built (despite the slave labour), but nobody should tolerate slave labour at the time. (Or something along those lines. I wish I could remember the details better.)

Relatedly: Jack got me thinking about whether the Cohen-conservative would disapprove of time-travellers going back and changing the past (per impossibile) so that some more valuable thing originally came into existence in place of the lesser thing we now cherish and wouldn't replace. I suspect he would have no objection to this, and indeed I think Cohen's response to Liz involved the idea that only in cases of 'personal value' (e.g. children) do we have reason to be especially glad that history turned out as it did. In case of particular value more generally, though we should cherish the things that now exist - and resist their replacement - there's no reason to think badly of the alternative history where some even more valuable thing was created in the first place.

(3) Seana[?] suggested that it would be interesting to explore precisely which valuable things are irreplaceable and why. A rosebush in your garden may be harmlessly replaced by another of comparable intrinsic beauty, but to change the entire garden seems to involve more of a loss. (Cohen tries to explain away the former judgment, but I take Seana's point to be that we might do better to grant it, and then investigate where lie the limits of Cohen's thesis.)

Jack pointed out to me that there's no intuitive pull to cherish particular valuable things that exist beyond the light cone (or to feel regret if God tells us he replaced them by something better). So this suggests that it isn't actual existence per se which does the work here, but some more tangible connection to us. On the other hand, I wonder about a 'pristine environment' (imagine a lost island or an Antarctic lake that's been frozen over for millenia), whose novel organisms might be made even more interesting if exposed to radiation or a "beneficial mutation virus". That sounds repugnant, despite our past disconnection from them; is it perhaps our acting on them to bring about the replacement which forges the intuitive connection here? I guess it doesn't seem so bad for God to do it, at least if he does so before we discover the pristine environment. Post-discovery divine replacement still seems to be a loss of sorts, though.

(This might be a fitting time to note Peter Singer's skepticism that any of these intuitions really show anything besides our contingent human biases. Maybe. But, in fairness, I think there's also significant theoretical appeal to Cohen's claim that "A thing that has intrinsic value is worthy of being revered or cherished" in its particularity, and not simply as a vessel of fungible value. So I think it's definitely an idea worth exploring.)

Bad Voters Should Opt Out

In yet another great diavlog, Will Wilkinson talks with Jason Brennan about his thesis that some people should refrain from exercising their right to vote. The argument seems clear enough: people who vote badly make the world worse, and you shouldn't do that without damn good reason. (See also the discussion at Crooked Timber.)

Now, you might claim that people are obligated to vote well. But as a matter of non-ideal theory, it doesn't follow that they should vote (simpliciter). Whether they should vote depends on whether they actually would vote well or badly. Clearly the ordering of the possible actions, from best to worst, is:
(1) Vote well
(2) Don't vote
(3) Vote badly
Merely saying 'vote', simpliciter, does not provide sufficient information to determine whether it's advisable or not. That's true even if you think option 1 is obligatory, because committing an egregious wrong [3] rather than a minor wrong [2] is all the worse -- not something to be advised.

In any case, I don't think there's any good reason to think that voting is obligatory. Most positive demands aren't. [See also my post 'Against Moral Mindfulness'.] Perhaps we have an 'imperfect duty' to serve the common good in some or other fashion, but there are obviously any number of ways to do that, and there's no particular reason to privilege voting above all the rest. (Jason makes this point nicely towards the end of the diavlog.) It takes a fair bit of time and effort to become a responsibly informed citizen, and it's not hard to imagine better things one might do with those resources.

Curiously (you might think), I actually think there's a strong case to be made for compulsory voting -- or rather compulsory attendance at a voting booth on election day. But that institutional recommendation is compatible with the above moral directives. Anyone likely to vote badly can fulfill their legal and moral obligations alike by turning in a blank ballot.

Finally, I want to raise some doubts about one of Will's claims. He infers from Jason's thesis that "many voter participation initiatives promote pretty straightforwardly immoral behavior." A couple of thoughts:

(i) They're not encouraging people to vote badly, but simply to vote. My above discussion suggests that this is neither determinately good nor bad, but rather morally ambiguous behaviour. Some people they encourage will go on to do good, others will do something bad. Hopefully the former group is larger. This brings me to my second point:

(ii) Encouraging a particular form of "immorality" in others is not necessarily itself a bad thing, if you can foresee that this will have good effects. As Will points out, the effect of voter turnout drives is to increase the Democrats' electoral chances. One might plausibly consider this to be a good thing. There are significant numbers of people who act immorally in voting for Republicans. (That's not to say every Republican supporter is unjustified or immoral.) It's not obvious to me that there's anything wrong with attempting to counterbalance their wrongdoing, even by means of encouraging comparably ignorant Democrats, so long as the people pulling the strings are really (and reliably) acting for the best. Two 'wrongs' might make a 'right' after all.

Update: Jason has more up at Public Reason.

Skepticism and Wacky Priors

I find it helpful to think about the challenge of skepticism from the perspective of Bayesian confirmation. We begin with (i) a space of 'possible worlds' or hypothetical scenarios which represent all the different ways the world could be, and (ii) your 'priors' or initial distribution of credence over these scenarios -- i.e. which ones you believe to be more or less likely. Then, when you acquire new evidence E, you update your beliefs by ruling out those scenarios that are inconsistent with E, and redistribute their old credence values over the remaining options so that your new degree of belief in each hypothesis X matches your old conditional probability X|E.

Now, the essence of the skeptic's challenge is that various 'skeptical scenarios' -- that I'm a BIV, or that the sun will not rise tomorrow -- would seem as well confirmed by our empirical evidence as common-sense hypotheses are. Compare three rival hypotheses:

(H1) The Sun exploded in 1999
(H2) Actual history + Sun doesn't rise tomorrow
(H3) Actual history + Sun rises tomorrow

Actual history lets us rule out H1, but as a matter of form it is neutral between H2 and H3. So if we think H3 is more likely, this must be reflected in our prior probabilities. We must hold, a priori, that some scenarios are objectively more probable or likely to eventuate than others -- e.g. that scenarios which start with our actual history and are followed by another sunrise are a priori more probable (collectively) than the other scenarios which start with our actual history but are followed by something different.

This is what the anti-skeptic is committed to. There's not necessarily anything wrong with affirming such claims, but it would be nice to have an explanation why some prior probability rather than another is the rational one to have. (Compare the "counter-inductivist" who assigns the opposite prior probabilities, and thus takes Actual History to count as strong evidence that the Sun won't rise tomorrow! Or the solipsist who thinks the BIV scenario is more likely than the external-world scenario we believe in. We think they're being unreasonable, but on what grounds?)

My hope is that general rational principles -- of coherence, systematic unity, simplicity, and the like -- can provide the basis we need for privileging some priors over others. Otherwise, we may be committed to thinking that it's just a brute, inexplicable fact which priors a rational agent ought to have, which seems a pretty wild claim -- and an awfully fortunate coincidence if the One True Prior happens to be ours! Still, if it comes to that, we may think there are worse things than dogmatism.

Does Skepticism have Practical Import?

A fairly common sentiment among my intro M&E students seems to be that the radical skeptic wins on the philosophical merits, but it doesn't really matter anyway -- it doesn't change what we should do in practice. Here are a couple of ways of challenging this assumption.

(1) Some (e.g. altruistic) actions are only worth taking because of their expected effect on others. If it turns out that you're a BIV (Brain in a Vat), and the rest of us mere figments of your imagination, then you'd do better to ignore the imaginary problems of starvation and disease, and simply aim at maximizing your own pleasure. If you are agnostic between the various possibilities, then presumably you should compromise in your behaviour too: donate to Oxfam occasionally, just in case, but also be a bit more hedonistic and self-absorbed than you would be if you were certain that the rest of us really existed too. This seems a pretty important practical difference.

(2) Further, what practical risks it is reasonable to take depends upon what probabilities it's reasonable to believe. You should only accept a bet, for example, if the payoff:cost ratio is better than the odds of losing -- i.e. if the expected value of the bet is positive. An essential part of that calculation is judging how likely you are to win or lose. If the inductive skeptic is right, and you have no reasonable grounds for making such a judgment about the future, then this may imply that ordinary betting behaviour is unreasonable too.

[My previous post discusses some more general links between theoretical and practical reason.]

A subtly different line of thought grants that we can't refute the skeptic, but suggests that we might as well assume they're wrong, and so carry on ordinarily. (Note the difference: the previous suggestion assumed that the skeptic was right, and sought to ignore them nonetheless. If we assume the skeptic is wrong, we avoid the above problems.) The key move here is what I call a 'practical' transcendental argument: anti-skepticism is a precondition for successful inquiry, so we may as well take it on faith. If we're wrong, we're screwed anyway; but if we're right -- if we have any chance at all of attaining knowledge -- then this assumption positions us to make the most of it.

From Theoretical to Practical Reason

There's something incoherent or irrational about the following combination of attitudes:
(i) the belief that you would desire to phi if you were more rational
(ii) the desire not to phi [or, more weakly, the absence of any desire to phi]

The agent who holds both these attitudes is irrational by their own lights. So this opens a path from theoretical to practical rationality. If you're rationally required to have belief (i), then it would seem you're also rationally required to have the corresponding desire (or at least not to have the opposite desire).

I owe the above ideas to Michael Smith. Now, Clayton discusses a similar principle:

(1) If a subject judges that she should Φ and it’s not the case that she should refrain from judging that she should Φ, it’s not the case that the subject shouldn’t Φ.

Here's are a couple of variants:

(1a) If S ought to believe that she should Φ, then it's not the case that S shouldn't Φ.
(1b) If S ought to believe that she should Φ, then S should Φ.

The guiding thought here is that a practically rational agent does what she judges she ought to do. So it would place inconsistent requirements on her to prohibit Φ-ing even as we require her to judge she ought to Φ (which will lead to her Φ-ing on pain of irrationality). That would effectively be to require her to be irrational.

What do you think of these principles?

Teaching Philosophical Writing

What is the best way to teach students how to write philosophy papers? My current plan is to (i) assign Jim Pryor's guidelines as a prepared reading; (ii) offer a shorter handout highlighting the most important points, which I'll briefly talk through at the start of precept; and then (iii) get them to work through examples of good and bad philosophical writing, perhaps as a small group exercise, noting some of the differences.

Any other suggestions?

Half a Million Visits

Philosophy etc. just received its 500,000th visit a few minutes ago -- not bad for a philosophy blog!

Thanks for dropping by. (And if you have any suggestions for how to improve the blog further, feel free to leave a comment or email me.)

Are there non-moral reasons?

If we can divide practical reasons up into moral reasons and non-moral reasons, presumably the latter could come to outweigh the former, such that one has most reason to do the wrong thing. But that seems incoherent: insofar as you did what you had most reason to do, all things considered, you have made no practical error -- on the contrary, you did precisely as you ought to have. It's platitudinous that an immoral act is an unjustified act ("there's no excuse for immorality," we might say) so insofar as one has sufficiently good reasons to justify an action, that action is thereby shown to be morally permissible.

In other words: to say, "You morally ought to phi, but all things considered you shouldn't," strikes me as downright incoherent. The moral point of view is precisely that which takes all things into consideration. So there are no purely "non-moral" reasons, if by that it is meant a genuine normative reason that is nonetheless irrelevant to the question what you morally ought to do. If it's a reason at all, then it counts morally.

I take it people are sometimes tempted to deny this because we usually talk about moral reasons in relation to advancing others' interests, and instead call them 'prudential reasons' when the interest being advanced is our own. But can't this be explained in Gricean terms? Insofar as prudential reasons are a proper subset of moral reasons, it provides more information to specify a reason as prudential. To call it a moral reason, though technically correct, would be odd in the same way that it would be odd to call Fluffy an animal instead of a cat.

To bring out the difference, note that whether we "prudentially ought" to do something doesn't suffice to settle the question whether we should do it. Maybe there are other, non-prudential reasons, which outweigh the prudential ones. But, as noted above, the moral question is the final practical question. If something is established as morally wrong, it's off the table.

Perhaps a moral minimalist could accommodate all this whilst denying that all practical questions have moral significance. Maybe the moral reasons are primary, and cannot be outweighed, but are also limited in scope. That is, moral reasons might serve as "side constraints" to remove certain options from the table, but then remain silent on which of the remaining options we should choose. None are morally obligatory, but perhaps some of the remainder stand out on other -- e.g. prudential or aesthetic -- grounds. Such a hierarchy of reasons seems coherent (contra the opening sentence of this post), but it seems to rest on the implausible assumption that no finer-grained moral distinctions can be made besides the crude division of options into permissible vs. prohibited. That seems implausible: even among the permissible options, some might be (morally) better or worse than others. Plausibly, one might be the morally best option, the one we should pick, even if we wouldn't be blameworthy or failing in our obligations were we to pick some nearby alternative.

Is it merely a terminological dispute whether we are to say that the (all things considered) best option is thereby the morally best option too? Perhaps. But if it is a clearer way of thinking and talking then perhaps it's worth pressing the point all the same.