Evaluative Non-Integration

There are many possible targets for consequentialist evaluation: acts, rules, motives, etc. This might lead one to ask which should be privileged: should we be act, rule, or motive consequentialists? But the question is ill-formed. The only principled answer is offered by global consequentialism: none is to be privileged; each of these targets may be assessed in terms of their consequences.

One may object: "Don't these perspectives offer conflicting normative advice?" An example (from Parfit, I think): suppose that Dad's love for Son is overall for the best. But on particular occasions, it leads him to make sub-optimal choices: e.g. benefiting Son when he could have netted a greater benefit for some strangers. One is tempted to ask, "How are we to assess Dad? Is he good because he has the best character of those available to him, or did he act badly in failing to perform the best action available to him?" Call this 'the integration problem'. But note that - again - the question is ill-formed. Those two assessments are perfectly compatible, so the answer is 'both'. He has the best character, and this led him to fail to perform the best action. What's the problem?

It's tempting to think that agential evaluation must be perfectly integrated, such that the best character (or motivations) will inevitably lead one to perform the best actions. Now, it's true that there is some connection here: acting on good motivations can be expected to lead to good consequences more often than acting from some alternative motivational set -- that's precisely what makes the former motivations 'better'. But this integration is imperfect, as the above example illustrates. The various targets for moral evaluation can come apart, and when they do it would be arbitrary for a consequentialist to assess all others on the basis of how well they integrate with a privileged one. When the best motivations pulls us away from performing the best acts, we are neither wholly good nor wholly bad. Accurate evaluation requires differentiating the quality of the motives from the quality of the act.

My best attempt at achieving a wholly integrated perspective was to consider the agent's life as a whole (thus including their every act, motive, and all the rest). This seems to obviously be a privileged viewpoint, and - moreover - one that fully integrates all other perspectives. After all: any divergence from the aggregation of acts and motives specified in my best (most utility-promoting) possible life will necessarily lead to a worse outcome.

But while that might work for perfect agents, extending the theory to non-ideal agents complicates matters. After all, if my future self cannot necessarily be trusted to do the ideal thing, this could radically alter what current decision would be for the best. Suppose my currently φ-ing could lead to (i) the best possible outcome if I were to follow this up with a series of acts S which I could, but actually won't, perform; and (ii) the worst possible outcome otherwise. In those circumstances, it is not best for me to φ -- doing so would have very bad consequences, due to my subsequent failure to S -- even though it's part of the best possible life. The divergence arises because at any given time I can only choose how to act then; I cannot perform a lifetime's aggregation of acts with a single decision. And so we find that even our evaluations of acts and of act-aggregations fail to fully integrate.

The only way to preserve integration is to embrace implausibly fatalistic theses. For example, if my decision to φ renders it impossible for me to later S, then there is no ideal 'φ+S' life available to me. More generally: if each act entails the full lifetime's aggregation of acts, then since the two cannot come apart, neither can the evaluations. Similarly, if it turns out that one's motivational set strictly determines each of one's actions, then it's no longer true that Dad acts sub-optimally in favouring Son. The only way he could possibly do otherwise, on this account, is if he had a different motivation set, which ex hypothesi would lead to worse outcomes overall. Forcing the coincidence of acts and motivations in this way could dissolve the integration problem, but again this narrow form of determinism (whereby future outcomes are fixed by a mere part of present reality) is not remotely plausible.

So we should accept evaluative non-integration. The best motivations may pull us away from the best actions, which in turn may steer us away from the best life. And the best decision-procedure might tell us to ignore all of this! So it goes.

Presuppositions Aren't Premises

A questioner at AskPhilosophers points out that we rely on contingent empirical facts (e.g. about the reliability of our short-term memory) when working through and assessing allegedly 'a priori' proofs. So, they ask, does this mean that our justification for believing the proof's conclusion is not really a priori after all?

The short answer, I think, is 'no'. This argument for empiricism mistakenly conflates (i) the justificatory basis for a belief, with (ii) the presuppositions or prerequisites that must be met in order for one's justification to not be defeated.

(Another common version of this mistake is to claim that a priori justification is impossible because experience is required to acquire the concepts with which we think in the first place. It may well be true that experience is a prerequisite for concept-possession and hence thought. But that does nothing to undermine the possibility of a priori justification, i.e. the claim that the basis for believing P needn't include any reference to experience. Experience may play an essential role in belief-formation, without it thereby playing an essential justificatory role. But I'll return to the more subtle mistake, since that is more interesting.)

I discussed this issue further in the last section of my post 'Arguing with Eliezer'. But I'll reproduce it here, since the comments to that post focused on other issues, and I'd be interested to hear what others think of this one...

---

Eliezer writes:

When "pure thought" tells you that 1 + 1 = 2, "independently of any experience or observation", you are, in effect, observing your own brain as evidence.

I responded:

It's just fundamentally mistaken to conflate reasoning with "observing your own brain as evidence". For one thing, no amount of mere observation will suffice to bring us to a conclusion, as Lewis Carroll's tortoise taught us. Further, it mistakes content and vehicle. When I judge that p, and subsequently infer q, the basis for my inference is simply p - the proposition itself - and not the psychological fact that I judge that p. I could infer some things from the latter fact too, of course, but that's a very different matter.

In discussion, Eliezer emphasized the demands of (what I call) 'meta-coherence' between our first-order and higher-order beliefs. If you reason from p to q, but further believe that your reasoning in this instance was faulty or unreliable, then this should undermine your belief in q. I agree that reasoning presupposes that one's thought processes are reliable, and a subjectively convincing line of thought may be undermined by showing that the thinker was rationally incapacitated at the time (due to a deceptive drug, say). But presuppositions are not premises. So it simply doesn't follow that the following are equally good arguments:

(1) P, therefore Q
(2) If I were to think about it, I would conclude that Q. Therefore Q.

(Related issues are raised in my post on 'Meta-Evidence' [update]. See also my argument for the inescapability of a priori justification.)

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Any objections?

Open Thread

Open thread! Comment here if you have any thoughts, questions, or fundamental disagreements that don't really fit in any of my other (more specific) threads.

Blogging and Protecting the Innocent

I often find that interesting ideas arise in discussion with others. But this suggests a possible tension between three prima facie legitimate interests:
(1) Blogging about interesting ideas,
(2) Giving credit where it's due,
(3) Privacy interests.

I tend to assume that prepared talks (e.g. conference presentations) are considered 'public', so there it's unambiguously appropriate to identify the speaker by (full) name -- much as if I were discussing a published paper.

But I think unprepared or 'off the cuff' remarks (e.g. questions from the audience, informal class discussions, etc.) come with the reasonable expectation that they will not be attached to one's "permanent (Googleable) record". So I tend to balance 'credit' and 'privacy' in such cases by using first names only, or perhaps merely initials. That way anyone who was part of the original discussion can easily follow along (and I suppose an interested reader could probably make an educated guess as to the identities involved), but it's protected from the all-seeing eye of Google, and so from third-party general searches.

Does that seem like a reasonable default practice to follow? (To anyone I've mentioned before: please let me know if you have a different preference, e.g. to be identified in full, or for that matter to be fully anonymized.) I guess to be completely safe I could explicitly ask each such person their personal preference, but that seems kind of a hassle and mildly awkward to boot. It would be worth it nonetheless if anyone's likely to be significantly bothered by my above policy, but I find that hard to imagine. What do you think?

Sidgwick's Pluralism

Sidgwick was no fan of pluralism: he objected to 'intuitionism' or common-sense morality on the grounds that the various prima facie principles can conflict, in which case we must appeal to some more authoritative, fundamental principle -- e.g. that of utility -- to decide between them. Similarly, part of his case for a hedonistic interpretation of value is that if we admitted other sources of value in addition then we would need some way to compare and weigh these plural values against each other when they conflict. Yet by the end of the Methods of Ethics, Sidgwick is forced to admit a pluralism (or at least 'dualism') within practical reason: both egoism and utilitarianism seemed to Sidgwick to provide ultimately reasonable (albeit competing) principles of action.

Now, in class today MS raised an interesting ad hominem point against Sidgwick: if pluralism is unavoidable in any case, doesn't that undermine Sidgwick's earlier arguments? In other words, why does he settle on merely a 'dualism' of practical reason? If he can't ultimately decide between egoism and utilitarianism, then why can't common-sense intuitionism make a comeback? Or some kind of value-pluralist consequentialism? The permissibility of pluralism would seem to leave things wide open -- an even more "chaotic" moral order than Sidgwick, for all his pessimism, ever feared.

My response (on Sidgwick's behalf) is to propose that we distinguish pluralism within a single method of ethics, versus pluralism between the various self-contained 'methods'. Perhaps Sidgwick can consistently refuse to tolerate any hint of the former, even as he ends up committed to the latter.

PS points out that we may think this distinction is artificial. Rather than categorizing intuitionism as a self-contained method, we might just as well break it down into the 'gratitude' method, the 'justice' method, etc. I'm not sure about this though. There seems to be some greater aspect of unity here, insofar as the intuitionist thinks these various principles all contribute or speak to the common question of what one ought (according to common sense morality) to do. Principles of justice and gratitude do not seem to offer competing complete 'worldviews' in the way that (say) utilitarianism and egoism do. Put another way: the various intuitionistic principles call for mutual integration. But it's not as though we need to somehow balance the egoistic and utilitarian principles into one all-encompassing rational perspective (contra Roger Crisp). The whole point, for Sidgwick, is that they offer alternative rational frameworks.

MS (drawing on NB) suggests a different objection: perhaps even Sidgwick's preferred methods can be shown to admit of internal imprecision or indeterminacy (which brings the same need as pluralism for more authoritative adjudication). Given that personal identity is vague, Sidgwick would seem forced - by his own principles - to reject egoism (a concern for one's enduring self) as a fundamental method.

This might be just what Sidgwick needs. Assuming that impartial utilitarianism is subject to no such imprecision,* Sidgwick can avoid any kind of pluralism after all. For the only of his three 'methods of ethics' left standing is utilitarianism.

* It's not clear whether even utilitarianism can wholly avoid such objections though. NB floated the idea that it might be indeterminate what acts are available to us, posing trouble for the utilitarian principle ("perform that act, of those available to you, that will maximize utility"). MS suggests an example: you can hit the target, but you can't hit the bullseye. So start with the whole target and remove the fine-grained concentric circles one at a time -- somewhere in the middle will be borderline cases, whereby it is simply vague whether 'hitting the reduced target' is an available action you can intentionally perform.

Bootstrapping the value of a rational will

There's a vaguely Kantian line of thought which goes something like this: in exercising practical reason -- or asking the question, 'What should I do?' -- one implicitly presupposes that this exercise of rational autonomy is itself important or worthwhile. So, for example, there seems something vaguely inconsistent about deciding to impair your future capacity for rational decision (at least if all else is equal). I'm not sure that's true -- this bootstrapping move is arguably fallacious -- but let's just suppose for now that there's a compelling argument somewhere in this vicinity. My question is: why think this yields any kind of deontological constraint ("never act so as to obstruct another's rational autonomy"), rather than a value to be promoted ("do that act that will maximize the general realization of rational autonomy")?

Consider the possibility of 'Rational Irrationality'. Suppose a madman will lobotomize me unless I take a pill that will just temporarily render me mentally incapacitated. Clearly, I should take the pill. I should temporarily forsake my rational autonomy, for the sake of protecting my capacity for autonomy into the (slightly) more distant future. This seems perfectly consistent with the bootstrapping line of thought. In asking myself, 'What shall I now do?', (let's grant that) I presuppose the value of my own rational autonomy. So I want to preserve my ability to continue to ask this question in future. And the best way to do that is to incapacitate myself (temporarily) in the present.

How would a Kantian disagree with this? How would they put the bootstrapping argument differently? It seems to me that the bootstrapping argument at best establishes the value of a rational will. I don't see how it has any bearing on the question how one ought to respond to this value (i.e. whether to 'respect' or 'promote' it). So I'm probably missing something...?

Morality in a Multiverse (revisited)

Chad Orzel argues (ht) that 'multiverse' type hypotheses (e.g. suggesting that every possible cosmos exists concretely) have no moral implications:

Knowing that some alternate-universe version of me will kick a puppy doesn't make it all right for me to kick puppies, any more than knowing that George Bush is down with waterboarding makes it all right to torture prisoners. The right thing to do is the right thing to do, regardless of what anybody else does or doesn't do, in this universe or any other.

This argument suffers from the twin flaws of (i) resting on a blatantly false general principle, and (ii) badly misunderstanding the opposing arguments. I'll tackle the latter point first.

Nobody's arguing that it's okay to do bad things just because someone else does. It's bad to torture people, even if GWB does, for the obvious reason that mimicking his harmful actions will cause even more harm to result. But in the multiverse case, we are supposing that every possibility will be realized exactly once. This leads to a vital point of disanalogy. We are supposing that my otherworldly counterpart will kick a puppy if and only if I don't. So whether I kick the puppy or not makes no difference to the total outcome. Whatever I do, the multiverse as a whole will contain exactly the same number of kicked puppies. That is why, as a concerned advocate for the welfare of puppies everywhere (and not just in my corner of the multiverse), the multiverse hypothesis implies I have no reason to refrain from kicking puppies. It's a consequentialist argument, not a "But if Georgie did it why can't I?" whine.

As for the general principle: others' actions are in fact highly relevant to determining what one ought to do. This is because the ultimate outcome of my actions may depend in part on others. For example, if my neighbour is suffering from a rat infestation, I might well offer him some rat poison. But this is no longer so advisable if I learn that he desires to poison his wife. So it's just false to claim that right and wrong are determined "regardless of what anybody else does or doesn't do". Other actors can affect the downstream consequences of my actions, and downstream consequences matter.

Although Chad's stated argument fails, perhaps the underlying idea can be saved. In a non-consequentialist spirit, we might claim that one ought to be virtuous, even if this does no good. For example, some have claimed that we shouldn't invest in unethical industries (tobacco, etc.) even if our abstention drives the price down, causing others to invest correspondingly more in our place. To abstain in this way is to be what Vera Bradova calls a 'Moral Dupe': "one who makes sacrifices on behalf of his/her own conscience... and in so doing aids and abets those who do not."

My views on this haven't significantly changed since writing my earlier post on this topic, so I'll just echo the concluding passage:

The most plausible ethical views allow that actions have other morally relevant features besides consequences, but nevertheless recognize that these other features are ultimately grounded in consequential concerns. Ethics is important because (we assume) our choices can affect others and change the world. If this assumption is false, as modal realism [or the multiverse hypothesis] would have it, then our decisions - and hence the norms governing them, i.e. ethics - are inconsequential, in the most derogatory sense. To care about ethics even when it makes no difference would be arbitrary and fetishistic.

The only escape, I think, is to embrace a more 'partialist' value theory, and say that what matters are the consequences around here, never mind the puppies over yonder. I don't think much of that option, though.

World Consequentialism

What is the ultimate locus of value, or 'end in itself'? I see two tempting answers:
(1) Each particular individual.
(2) The world as a whole.  

Utilitarianism is, I think, most naturally developed as a type-2 view. We commonly assume that what's good for persons is good for the world (though for some possible exceptions see my post on 'Welfare and Contributory Value'). But Parfit's Non-Identity Problem really brings out the difference, as does the 'value receptacle' objection (advanced most coherently by G.A. Cohen). Utilitarians -- or 'world consequentialists' more broadly -- ultimately act for the sake of making the world a better place, and this is different from ultimately acting for the sake of Tom, Dick and Harry (or any other particular individuals).

Of course, world-consequentialists are in favour of making life better for individuals, just like utilitarians are in favour of helping your friends. It's pro tanto good. But just as, from a utilitarian perspective, helping your friends is ultimately desirable because your friends are people (and we want to make all people better-off), similarly making all people better-off is good because it makes the world better -- and that's what ultimately matters.

Some will consider this a distastefully 'instrumentalist' moral stance. But in light of my above analogy, I don't think this objection should particularly bother utilitarians. Once you accept impartialism, is the step to impersonalism really such a leap?

[P.S. It's worth emphasizing that utilitarianism doesn't recommend we adopt this perspective in our everyday lives!]

Update: I should note that holistic views (e.g. average utilitarianism) can only be stated in impersonal (type-2) terms. But 'total utilitarianism' could potentially -- if awkwardly -- be cast as a person-affecting (type-1) theory, if we were willing to claim that we harm a merely possible person when we fail to bring them into existence.

Do Merely Possible People Matter?

Consider the claim that the moral status of an act in world w depends only on the w-people. So, in particular, the moral status of actual actions depends only on actual people. This 'indexical principle' may be motivated by the thought that we don't have any obligation -- or any non-instrumental reason at all -- to bring more (possible) people into (actual) existence. The indexical principle implies this desired conclusion. But it also has other, less palatable, implications, as Melinda Roberts (drawing on Casper Hare?) pointed out in comments to a recent talk. In particular, the indexical principle implies that if we refrain from bringing into existence a bunch of slaves that would boost our welfare, we have done the wrong thing. This is because all the actual people (the only people that matter, according to the principle) would - ex hypothesi - be better-off in the slave world. The slaves might live intolerably bad lives, but since they are non-actual that is apparently of no moral relevance. Absurd.

Curiously, it looks as though the indexical principle further implies that whether an action is wrong or not may depend on whether we actually perform it (i.e. which world we end up actualizing). That violates the principle that Moral Status is Modally Robust:

(MSMR): if it is wrong to φ, then it would have been wrong to φ. (Put another way: if φ-ing is wrong in a world w where one doesn't φ, then in the nearest world w* where one does φ, one acts wrongly in w* by φ-ing.)

On the supposition that we refrain from bringing the slaves into existence, we saw above that the indexical principle determines this to be 'wrong'. Yet if we had acted differently, i.e. if we had actually brought the slaves into existence, they would then be actual people who mattered too, and so it would have been wrong to do that (and instead would have been right to do what we actually did, namely, refrain from actualizing the slave world). More generally, in a situation where w1 people do better in w2, and w2 people do better in w1, then when faced with a choice to actualize either w1 or w2, the indexical principle implies that whatever we actually choose will thereby be 'wrong', and the unchosen action will be 'right' (although it would have been wrong had we chosen it). This is doubly absurd.

To avoid the first absurdity, we must at least grant that harms to merely possible people in the worlds where they exist are morally significant. It's good to refrain from actualizing the slave world, because in doing so we prevent some morally significant harms: harms to the slaves in the slave world. Must we go all the way to accepting that the benefits of existing give us reason to bring (well-off) merely possible people into existence? Roberts rejects this last step, hoping to instead secure a 'middle ground' view. If I understand her view correctly -- i.e. as a more moderate version of the indexical view -- it would still seem to lead to some violations of MSMR: for example, supposing we will bring happy Jill into existence, it is wrong for us not to (since that would remove benefits for an actual person - Jill), but it wouldn't have been wrong had we chosen not to (since then Jill wouldn't have been counted among the actually existing).

The MSMR principle reminds us that a plausible moral theory cannot assess harms and benefits differently depending on which world is actual (or which choice one actually makes). So one cannot appeal to the mere 'actual non-existence' of Jill as a reason for not counting the benefits that would accrue to her were she to be brought into existence. Instead, if one really wants to hold on to this conclusion, one must make the universal claim that no-one is benefited by existence.

(Personally, I think we often will have reason to bring more good lives into existence, but I guess I don't really think this is for the sake of the otherwise non-existent person. Instead, it is an impersonal reason -- a benefit for the world.)

A New Knowledge Argument

Some philosophers reject Jackson's Knowledge argument by claiming that Mary does not really learn a fact (what redness looks like) when she sees something red for the first time; she merely acquires a new ability (to recognize redness). But I think the argument is easily tweaked to pre-empt such responses. Consider:

1. It is a factual question whether you and I experience the same color sensations when looking at an object.
2. This question cannot be settled by any physical information (or scientific inquiry).
3. So there are non-physical facts.

This strikes me as a pretty strong argument. The only response I can immediately think of is the 'old fact new guise' response, which claims that the phenomenal fact mentioned in #1 is actually identical to some physical fact, albeit in a new (hence unrecognized) guise. But which physical fact is it? I find this claim very mysterious.

Authentic Affect

Ben Casnocha writes:

It's astonishing how effective pharmaceuticals are today with only very minor side effects. But there's one side effect yet solved and I suspect it's the most potent for some drugs: the identity confusion of whether the you on drugs is really "you."

For drugs that deal with personality issues or depression, I imagine even a successful patient must grapple with whether their newly improved state is artificial. (Artificial in a more serious way than the effect of myriad everyday things like coffee.) Am I really happy or is it just the drug that's tricking me into thinking so?

Such questions have the ring of conceptual confusion, so perhaps analytic philosophy can have some therapeutic benefit after all. What, exactly, is the question in italics asking? What is the difference between being 'really happy' as opposed to being 'tricked' into such feelings? The only real question I can see in this vicinity is whether one's situation warrants the emotions one is feeling. If your affect matches your evaluative judgments, and these in turn are not unreasonable, then there is nothing left to worry about. (If you're feeling chirpy at a funeral, then you should be worried. But if you are, say, enjoying the company of good friends -- sharing in their cheer and good humour -- then that seems entirely appropriate, and as authentic as anything. How could it not be?)

The 'artificiality' of the cause is neither here nor there. In fact, we might expect genuine 'identity confusion' (or incoherence between one's evaluative judgments and emotional affect) to be more common without medication. I've never been on antidepressants myself, but at times when I have felt slightly depressed what's struck me is how out of sync such feelings seemed to be with my evaluative judgments. And I guess similar things can happen even now if I'm simply feeling a bit socially anxious or uncomfortable: those are feelings I take to not be warranted by my situation, and so it is they which strike me as alien and artificial. To be free of such impediments is to be more truly ourselves, or so I would think. What say you?

Philosophers' Carnival #82

Welcome to the 82nd Philosophers' Carnival -- a collection of some of the best recent philosophical blog posts from around the web.

Moral Philosophy

Guy Kahane of Practical Ethics presents 'The Great Botox Experiment in Mood Enhancement', and raises some interesting questions about the ethical implications of emotional contagion.

Karl discusses what he calls a moral version of Moore's Paradox: the assertion, "P, but I (morally) must not believe that P." (It's not too clear where the paradox comes in, since it seems consistent to believe P whilst thinking oneself immoral for doing so. One might also question whether it's really the holding of a belief that's immoral per se, or whether certain beliefs are instead merely symptomatic of some other moral shortcoming. But the post raises some interesting issues, in any case.)

History and Culture

Michelle discusses Plato on the use of play in education.

Ashok of 'Rethink' explores the relation between philosophy and comedy, with reference to Aristophanes' The Clouds.

Kenny Pearce, inspired by Berkeley, raises the question: Does Philosophy 'Trickle Down'?

Metaphysics and Epistemology

Gualtiero Piccinini argues for the possibility of Self-Knowledge without Introspection, pointing out that we ordinarily act on our mental states without need for introspection, and self-ascribing attitudes is just another form of behaviour, so why must this case be any different?

Andrew Bacon asks: When do two objects touch? It's more complicated than you might expect.

Quee Nelson discusses radical skepticism, while Aaron at FSPB explores The New Riddle of Induction.

John Wilkins at 'Evolving Thoughts' discusses classification into superficial 'types' vs. more deeply related 'taxa' (natural kinds?)

Finally, let me highlight a recent post of my own, connecting the epistemological issues of Personal Bias and Peer Disagreement.

* * *

That's it for this edition -- thanks to all who submitted a post! Since the participation rate seems to be dropping off a bit of late, the carnival will return to a 3-weekly (rather than fortnightly) cycle. If you'd like to host a future edition of the carnival, check out the hosting guidelines and drop me an email.

The next edition will be hosted by The Uncredible Hallq on Dec 8. (Go here to submit an entry for consideration.)

What's wrong with self-effacing moral theories?

Utilitarianism is sometimes criticized on the grounds that it may be self-effacing: supposing that things would be worse if belief in the theory were widespread (say because people would incompetently misapply it), the theory recommends against bringing about such widespread belief.

I find this objection puzzling. Surely any sane moral theory is at least possibly self-effacing. This is because any sane moral theory includes a disaster-avoidance override, if the stakes are high enough. So suppose an evil demon will impose eternal torture on us all, unless we forget the true moral theory (whatever it is) and come to believe in (say) Kantianism instead. The appropriate response is, "Yikes, let's learn us some moral falsehoods," right? It sure beats torture.

So the mere possibility of self-effacement is no objection. And utilitarianism isn't necessarily self-effacing. So the only objection left seems to be that it happens to be self-effacing in our actual circumstances. I'm not sure that's true -- but if it is, that's a problem with our circumstances, not with the theory. (Otherwise, this objection would seem to imply that it's a contingent, empirical matter which moral theory is true. That can't be right for reasons explained here.)

Or have I misunderstood the objection?

Personal Bias and Peer Disagreement

The epistemic issues that arise when considering how to rationally respond to evidence of one's own bias are, I think, exactly the same as those discussed in the peer disagreement literature. The core issue, in both cases, is how to weigh higher-order evidence (of our own possible unreliability) against the first-order evidence. If I believe P when an epistemic peer judges my evidence to instead support not-P, this seems isomorphic to a case where I know 50% of people in my position will be mistaken due to bias [corrected, thanks Daniel]. So the same three basic positions suggest themselves in either case:

(1) Higher-order evidence trumps. This is called the 'Equal Weight View' in the peer-disagreement case. In the personal bias case, we might call it the 'Automatic Adjustment View', since it claims you should adjust your initial judgment to compensate for merely possible bias, no matter what the first-order evidence actually recommends. This is essentially the claim that you're in the same epistemic position whether you turn out to be actually biased or not. (After all, the argument goes, from the inside you can't tell which of the two positions you're in. So any rule you can follow will have to treat both situations the same.)

(2) First-order evidence trumps. In the peer disagreement case, this is called the 'Asymmetric No Independent Weight View' -- since the thought is that whoever is actually right about what the first-order evidence supports may thereby "stick to their guns", giving no weight to the opinion of their mistaken peer, but the mistaken person should of course change their opinion to what the evidence really supports. (And too bad if they don't realize this.) This is essentially the claim that learning of possible bias doesn't change your epistemic situation; either the evidence supports P or it doesn't, and your own (in)capacities don't change this fact.

(3) The Total Evidence View. Finally, we might think one is rationally required to take all the evidence into account. Neither first- nor higher-order evidence necessarily trumps the other; though in particular cases it may do so. Note that the inclusion of the first-order evidence introduces some 'asymmetry', but even the correct person may be required to compromise their initial judgment somewhat in light of the (misleading, as it happens) higher-order evidence of their unreliability.

Note that it would seem absolutely bizarre for someone to hold different views about peer disagreement and personal bias. If you think that first-order evidence trumps in case of peer disagreement, it would be terribly inconsistent to suddenly turn around and say the higher-order evidence trumps in case of personal bias. The two issues go hand-in-hand. I'll wrap up this post by noting two further points of correspondence:

(A) The 'equal weight' and 'automatic adjustment' views both gain their plausibility from considering perceptual (more precisely: non-inferential) examples. But this is misleading, because we're effectively imagining a case where there is no (other) first-order evidence; the judgment itself is all we have to go on, so of course unopposed higher-order evidence about the reliability of this judgment is going to be decisive.

(B) Any view which disregards the epistemic importance of first-order evidence is decisively refuted by the problem of implausibly easy bootstrapping. Here I adapt Tom Kelly's objection to the EWV to instead apply to Erica Roedder's automatic adjustment view:

Suppose I receive an incoherent C- paper, and irrationally misjudge it to deserve an A. If the author happens to be a black student and I have evidence that instructors are typically biased against black students, does that automatically mean that all things considered I should boost the grade and give it an A+? Surely not. My initial judgment may be some evidence that the paper warrants an A+. But it's not the only relevant fact. In particular, it can't make up for the fact that the details of the paper itself constitute overwhelming evidence that the paper should be given a C-. The presence of higher-order evidence doesn't excuse me from concluding what the first-order evidence demands.

In short, the AAV (if understood as making positive claims about what I rationally ought to judge) makes it too easy for me to get things right. No matter what loony judgment I initially make, if I then amend it slightly in response to higher-order evidence of bias, then my resulting judgment is guaranteed to be rationally justified! Too easy.

P.S. For background, see Tom Kelly's excellent paper: 'Peer Disagreement and Higher Order Evidence' [pdf].

Rational Objectivity

It's possible to be irrational without realizing it. Such a person can then be expected to misjudge what they rationally ought to do. So it's unsurprising that in some situations (e.g. if one is sufficiently muddle-headed), one has little hope of acting rationally. On the contrary, we should object to any theory that implied the opposite. If a theory implies that people can always work out what they (rationally) should do, no matter how muddle-headed they might be, something has gone wrong. It can't be a true theory of rationality, because rationality is sufficiently objective to allow the possibility of a 'no-hoper' -- a person so incompetent as to be beyond the reach of rational guidance.

I bring this up because people are sometimes tempted to treat rationality in an excessively subjective fashion. (See, e.g., here and here.) People say things like, "How could Bob be rationally required to believe that P, if he has misinterpreted the evidence in such a way that he's led to think it supports not-P instead?" (Imagine Bob is a counter-inductivist. He notes that the sun has risen every day in the past, and misinterprets this evidence as supporting the proposition that it will not rise tomorrow.) The answer, naturally, is that Bob's mangling of the evidence has led him astray. It's true that Bob doesn't realize this. There are no alarm bells ringing in his head. But that doesn't mean Bob is somehow rational after all. It merely means he's unaware of his own incompetence. He really should believe that P - that's what the evidence supports - no matter his failure to recognize this epistemic requirement. Ignorance is no excuse.

All this is to say that we should expect the possibility of a situation in which we're beyond the reach of rational guidance. Again, I hear people object to some proposed rational rule R, "but in some situations I will lack the competence to reliably follow rule R; I confuse it with P and Q; my best attempts will not be good enough." This is true, but it is not an objection. Trying hard is not enough to make one rational. This is entirely to be expected.

Now, there may be multiple standards of rationality, corresponding to different degrees of objectivity or idealization. In addition to the ideal norms followed by a perfectly rational agent, we may also need non-ideal norms to guide imperfect agents like ourselves. But my point is that even these must have some minimal degree of objectivity to them. Any norm for which effort entails success is not any kind of rational norm at all. Any rule that can infallibly be followed (no matter how muddle-headed the agent) is too empty to qualify as a genuine rule of rationality. If there's any real substance there, then we must be prepared to admit the possibility of no-hopers: people who violate the norms without realizing it, and so predictably fail to understand rationality's recommendations - or follow its guidance - despite their best efforts.

Initiating Force

Will Wilkinson is one of my favourite libertarians, and his sensible post on 'fake libertarian clarity' exemplifies some of the reasons why. There's one passage in particular that I want to discuss here:

[Some] libertarians are also notoriously guilty of pretending that their favorite kinds of coercion aren’t. Threatening force to deny another person use of one’s land, or one’s house, is coercion. A system of private property is a system of coercion. It may be justified coercion. It is justified coercion. But then the question is: What justifies it? The coercive protection of property is justified because people do better with it than without it. If people do better in a system that defines rights to property a bit less strictly, and coercively guarantees an economic minimum, then that is justified coercion.

Too right. At this point simple libertarians appeal to the distinction between self-defense vs. initiating force. But as I explain here:

Property-claims initiate force against others. The original privatization unilaterally removes others' access to what would otherwise be a common resource. That's an aggressive imposition of harm on innocent people, without their consent. We then threaten aggression against them, merely for wanting to use the resource in the same (peaceful) way as we do...

Again, one's attempts to claim exclusive use ("ownership") of a resource may well be a reasonable limitation to (attempt to) impose on others. But that doesn't change the plain fact that the claim to property is an (attempted) imposition. And of course it's logically necessary that their initial claim to ownership occurs prior to anyone else's interfering with their property -- otherwise it wouldn't be "their property" yet!

So there's really no possible way to deny this. It's a plain statement of fact: to claim a right of exclusive use (i.e. a "property right") over a resource, is to limit the options available to other people -- including people who have not yet done anything to you. This is a form of "coercion", in the value-neutral sense of the term.

Simple libertarians have difficulty appreciating this, because they think of property as a 'given', a basic feature of the natural world, rather than a human imposition -- or "social relations of constraint", as Cohen aptly puts it. These constraints are so thoroughly internalized that they fail to even notice them anymore.

So step back, and try to imagine seeing things from an alien's anthropological perspective. The alien has all sorts of physical and psychological concepts, but no explicitly moral ideas such as 'rights'. All he does is observe what is the case; he makes no judgments about what ought to be. So when he visits Earth, what will he see?

Bob and Sally are stuck on a desert island, with a banana tree. Bob gets there first and claims it as his own -- maybe he mixes his labour with it a bit, waters and nourishes it, whatever you like. Later, Sally goes to eat a banana, and Bob stops her, pushes her back. Who aggressed against whom? From the value-neutral perspective of the alien, the answer can only possibly be that Bob was the one initiating force here.

For libertarians to offer a different answer, they must not be using 'force', 'aggression', 'coercion', 'liberty' etc. as purely descriptive, value-neutral terms that even the alien could understand. They must instead be loading their moral assumptions into the concepts, effectively collapsing 'aggression' into 'unjustified aggression'. These moralized concepts presuppose libertarianism, they therefore cannot be used to argue for libertarianism on pain of circularity. This is why simple libertarianism is more accurately called 'propertarianism'. What's philosophically fundamental to the view is property rights, not liberty.

Anyone who truly takes liberty itself as a basic concept (rather than redefining it in terms of some other moral conception like property rights) must acknowledge that property rights can infringe on liberty. And once you make that step, the only sensible response is to assess the various institutional systems on offer, including those which render property subject to some degree of redistribution, and opt for the one that best promotes human flourishing (or whatever we think is ultimately good).

'Philosophical libertarianism' thus looks to be incoherent. There's simply no avoiding ubiquitous coercion (understood in a value-neutral way). So we can't get anywhere by taking that as our fundamental evaluative principle. 'Propertarians' instead treat property rights as their fundamental value, but further reflection reminds us that it is not rights themselves that fundamentally matter, but the people they are meant to protect. And so we end up with utilitarianism, at least at the fundamental level. One may, of course, still be a 'political libertarian' in the sense that you think libertarian policies will tend to best promote the common good. But anyone who thinks capitalism is intrinsically or necessarily just is simply confused -- or am I missing something?

Childbearing and Incentives

Chris Dillow proposes a Pigovian tax on parents "whose children do badly at school." Some of his commenters complain that poor educational performance might be more the fault of bad schools than bad parents. But this misses the point. The tax is not meant as punishment for bad parenting. It simply serves as an incentive for those in a position of influence to prevent an unfortunate outcome, namely the existence of a child who will likely go on to be a burden to society. Even good parents shouldn't bear kids into a bad situation, i.e. one where it is foreseeable that they will go on to flunk out of school, become criminals, etc. It's not their fault, but if that's the situation they're in, it might nonetheless be better for society were they not to have children. And a well-tailored tax policy will seek to 'nudge' individual incentives into line with social utility, no?

Perceptual and Rational Bias

Suppose I learn that most (but not all) people have a condition which leads them to misperceive purple line segments as only being about half as long as they really are. Further suppose I have no special evidence regarding whether I myself am one of the people with this odd condition. Now I see a purple line, which seems to me about an inch long. How long should I believe it is? (Here I use 'belief' to simply indicate the bulk of one's credence. It is what one would choose if forced to bet one way or the other.) Two inches, presumably.

Next, suppose I learn that most academics in my vicinity have been exposed to a drug that leads them to make inverted evaluations without realizing it: they're inclined to give A grades to C-meriting papers, and vice versa. As before, I have no special grounds for expecting myself to be free of this condition. Now I read a paper by Joe Shmoe that seems hopelessly incoherent and deserving of a C. What grade should I give it? An A?

Erica Roedder proposes an analogy roughly along these lines, but I think the two cases are importantly different. In the first case -- what I'll call 'perceptual bias' -- the only reason for believing that the line is an inch long is the phenomenology of it seeming so. You only have access to the phenomenal 'output', and not to any of the raw data or 'inputs' that form the bases of this judgment. So once you learn that the phenomenology is actually evidence of something else -- namely, the line being twice that length -- that settles the matter. There is no further evidence in play.

However, in case of 'rational bias' -- cases like the second where we make bad inferences or otherwise misinterpret some independently available evidence -- we have more to go on. In addition to the output of our initial judgment, there is also the raw data of the paper itself. So presumably the epistemic fact of what we should believe depends on all this evidence, and not only the higher-order evidence provided by our initial judgment. My initial judgment of badness provides some evidence (due to the known likelihood of bias) that the paper is actually good. But that doesn't settle the matter, for surely the details of the paper itself are also relevant to what grade I ought to give it!

Let's consider the two possibilities in turn. Either I'm biased and the paper is actually good, or I'm unbiased and the paper is truly bad. If the paper is actually good, then both the first-order evidence provided by the paper and the higher-order evidence provided by my initial judgment agree: I should conclude that the paper is good. Simple.

Now for the more interesting possibility: suppose the paper truly is bad. It's still the case that my initial judgment of badness provides some higher-order evidence that the paper is actually good. But there is also the first-order evidence of the incoherent paper itself, which pretty strongly establishes its low quality. I have access not only to my initial judgment, but also to the paper itself and the fact that it reads as follows: (*insert copy of incoherent paper here*). It seems entirely possible that this latter evidence could outweigh the former, in which case I really should conclude that the paper is bad, and give it a C.

In summary: we should correct for the likelihood of perceptual bias, even if it turns out we weren't biased. This is because we have no other evidence to go on in such a case. But cases of rational bias are different, and the appropriate response is contingent on further details. If we are biased, then of course we should correct for it -- that's uncontroversial. But the actually non-biased person arguably should not recalibrate their judgments, or at least not to the same degree. This is not just because they happen to be non-biased (they obviously have no access to this fact), but because of other facts they do have access to, namely the first order evidence.

Liberaltarians and Inequality

I attended an interesting panel discussion a couple of weeks ago, titled "Liberals and Libertarians: Common Ground or Separate Agendas?" Reason magazine has a good write-up of the discussion here. I especially enjoyed hearing from blog-famous Jacob T. Levy and Will Wilkinson, the latter of whom discussed what he calls the leftist's "Inequality Road to Serfdom" argument:

According to IRS, the wealthy convert their economic resources into political resources deployed to protect their advantages. Past a certain threshold of inequality, the gap in political resources is so vast that the wealthy–by means of insidious think tanks and the Republican Party–basically capture the democratic process and effectively disenfranchise the rest of the population, leaving us with a de facto oligarchy hiding inside a meaningless husk of democratic forms. Serfdom!

Will pointed out that the empirical premise here seems questionable. Plenty of rich people vote Democrat, precisely because they are so materially secure that they prioritize their (typically socially liberal) values instead.

[This doesn't touch on the more serious problem of post-election corruption / regulatory capture. But there I guess the problem is not inequality per se, but the way that flows of money shape the legislative process. So the solution is to reform the political process, not limit wealth inequalities.]

We should of course provide a 'safety net' (e.g. a basic income guarantee). But I don't see such a need for a wealth ceiling.

JSTOR to Amazon Kindle

Wonderful news: I've discovered an easy way to convert scanned PDF files (e.g. from JSTOR) so that they're readable on my Kindle. I simply email the PDF to my gmail account, and (thanks to Google's new OCR capabilities) from there I can "open as HTML" and save the result as a plain text file. As an added bonus, this process preserves page number information (normally lost in Amazon's conversions).

Before transferring to the Kindle, it might be worth tidying up the text file to make it more readable. This is especially easy using the command line in Linux -- I use the 'fmt' command to remove excess whitespace and line-breaks, and 'tr -d' to delete any annoying characters (in my case, asterisks) that one's browser saw fit to scatter throughout the saved text file. This is all taken care of by the single line:
cat oldfile.txt | tr -d \* | fmt -u -w 999 > newfile.txt

Perfect!

Update: a few further notes...
(1) Acrobat Reader is sometimes able to "save as text" even scanned-image PDFs. (I guess these must be "image+text" marked-up PDFs, rather than raw scanned images. But they look the same to the naked eye.)

(2) The method listed for JSTOR articles won't work for two-column scans (e.g. of books). Linux script 'unpnup' enables one to convert such files to single-column PDFs however. PaperCrop is a more powerful solution that works easily in Windows.

(3) Sometimes a book scan is of such bad quality that OCR just can't interpret it. In this case, one can use PDFread to cut up the images into kindle-sized bites, and assemble the images directly into a .prc or .mobi (Kindle-readable) file. This way one can read the scanned images themselves on one's Kindle, without them being shrunk to an illegible size. I've found that this works extremely well.

Philosophers' Carnival #81

The 81st Philosophers' Carnival is up at Arbitrary Marks -- very short and sweet this time around, with just five submissions making the final cut. Remember, if you would like to see more in future carnivals, it's up to you to submit something good (whether your own blog post or someone else's).

We've also run out of volunteer hosts, so I'll be taking care of the next one right here at Philosophy, et cetera. If you have a philosophy blog but haven't yet hosted the carnival, consider giving it a shot! (See here for hosting instructions/guidelines.) And even if you have hosted a prior edition of the carnival -- especially if this was over 6 months ago -- you're very welcome to host another.

Again, the carnival depends on your participation. So consider this a hypothetical imperative: if you think it's worth maintaining, then chip in. (If not enough people still find it worthwhile, then of course its 'retirement' would be no great loss. So it's really up to you, collectively.)

Welfare and Contributory Value

Distinguish two ways to evaluate a life: welfare value (how good it is for the person living it) and contributory value (what value it adds to the world at large). Might these come apart? Not according to 'crude aggregation', i.e. the view that the value of the world is simply the sum of the welfare values of the lives in it. But we should reject crude aggregation (for one thing, it implies Parfit's repugnant conclusion). I take it this commits us to the view that welfare and contributory value can come apart. But when?

Suppose average welfare matters. Then it could make the world worse to add a new life that has low positive welfare, if this drags down the average. At the very least, the contributory value would seem less than the positive welfare value -- if not negative, then perhaps simply zero; we don't think the extra mediocre life makes the world a better place than it otherwise would have been, even though it is better for the individual to exist than not. Still, there remains some connection: holding constant the fact of their existence, making the new individual significantly better or worse off would also (respectively) improve or worsen the world.

A more radical divergence in these values might be achieved if desert matters. Suppose it makes the world worse if good things happen to bad people (who instead deserve to suffer). Then the happiness of an unrepentant murderer has negative contributory value - it makes the world worse - even though happiness is presumably good for the murderer himself, i.e. it adds to the welfare value of his life.

Can you think of any other examples? I take it the common thread here is a kind of holism about worldly value, such that the contributory value of an individual life cannot be assessed in isolation from how it affects the overall pattern or 'shape' of the world as a whole. Whether it's good to add additional lives (of certain welfare values) to the world depends on how many other people exist, and how well-off they are. As I once put it: 'Adding one to a billion does not make the world a more beautiful shape. But a world with a person is surely more beautiful than the void.'

If we start thinking about the value of the world from this more 'aesthetic' perspective, even more possibilities arise. We may find value in symbolic historical events or 'narrative arcs', independently of how they affect individual people. I recently read a news story about a 109 year old daughter of a slave voting for Obama. There's something kind of cool about that -- like a spark of light that pushes back against the shadows of history -- something that makes the world a better place. And this might still hold true even if the woman personally found the experience merely a bother, and not something that improved her life (from a self-interested perspective) at all. (No doubt communitarians could come up with more along these lines.)

Which sorts of cases do you find most plausible?