Belief as a Hybrid Notion

I'm always puzzled when I read philosophers who treat belief and knowledge as philosophically important states. I find it much more natural to think of [rational] credences (degrees of belief) as fundamental, and to define 'belief' derivatively as, say, "sufficiently high credence for the purposes at hand" (and, similarly, 'Knowledge' as Sufficiently Safe Belief). So understood, belief and knowledge are philosophical outputs, not inputs. Indeed, considerations of stakes-sensitivity suggest that they aren't even purely epistemic notions, but rather a hybrid of the epistemic (rational credence) and the practical (how much credence is required to justify certain actions).

To bring this out, consider the following kind of case. Sally from sales knocks on the door of an abandoned-looking house. Nobody answers, so she concludes that nobody is home and goes on her way. A few minutes later, Dan the demolition worker does likewise, and concludes likewise, only he returns to his wrecking rig to commence demolition. Fill in the background details so that it seems that Dan (unlike Sally) isn't justified in acting on the belief that the house is empty.

Now, if you think that all-out belief is philosophically significant, it seems you're faced with two possible interpretations of how stakes-sensitivity is affecting justified action in this case:
(1) It could be that Dan is, like Sally, perfectly justified in believing that the house is empty, but that the higher stakes of the situation render his justified belief 'unactionable' until supported on firmer grounds; OR
(2) It could be that the higher stakes render Dan's belief unjustified.

But surely it's clear on reflection that this is a distinction without a difference. The only real question here is what degree of rational credence is required to justify action in the face of this or that risk. We capture everything of philosophical significance by noting that Dan and Sally both have rational credence of around (say) 80% that the house is empty, and that this degree of belief is sufficient for purposes of taking your sales pitch to the next door, but not sufficient for demolishing the house and killing anyone who may still be inside. Moreover, it is in virtue of these practical normative facts that we may attribute justified all-out belief / knowledge (that the house is empty) to Sally but not to Dan.

Philosophical 'Meta-gaming'

Metagaming is the use of out-of-character knowledge in an in-character situation...

Though originally defined in relation to role-playing games, similar phenomena may arise in philosophical debates. That is: when engaging in hypothetical reasoning, we need to be careful not to illegitimately import external information (e.g. the external fact that we are engaging in hypothetical reasoning) into the space of hypothesized claims. Let me illustrate with a few examples.

(1) Conflating the supposition that p with the supposition that the supposer supposes that p (as discussed here). Note that conditional proof begins by supposing that p, noticing that q follows, and hence concluding that if p then q. This would go badly wrong if one were to reason as follows: Suppose that p. So, you're supposing that p. Hence, if p then you're supposing that p.

This is bad reasoning because we began by merely supposing that p, and not that anyone is supposing it. It happens to be true, "externally" speaking, that in the process of making this argument we were indeed supposing that p. But that wasn't included among the hypothesized facts, and hence isn't eligible for inclusion in the conditional proof (which draws only on hypothesized, not external, facts).

(2) Conflating actual with hypothesized judgments. Sometimes we face the opposite problem. Rather than drawing on external information when we shouldn't, in this case we get so wrapped up in a scenario that we fail to draw on our independent/external judgments when we should. In moral philosophy, especially, we often need to evaluate counterfactual scenarios in which our counterparts are massively deluded or have manipulated desires/values. In such cases, it is vital to appreciate that our considered judgment about how we prefer the scenario to unfold, need not conform to the counterfactual desires that we are stipulated to have in the scenario. As explained here, there's an important difference between 'I do desire that, were I in situation S, P' and 'In situation S, I would desire that P'. (I suspect that this conflation often underlies knee-jerk subjectivism.)

(3) Fleshing out schematic arguments. As recently noted, when discussing arguments indirectly (e.g. by way of a schema with mere placeholders 'P' and 'Q'), it's crucial that one understands what features are built into the fleshed-out argument, and what features are merely used 'externally', e.g. in selecting and setting up how the argument is to be fleshed out. The linked post explains in more detail how this applies in case of the zombie argument in particular.

The key insight to note is that there's a world of difference between (i) conceiving and reasoning from an opaque statement like 'the complete specification of the [non-]physical base facts', and (ii) conceiving and reasoning from the actual specification P [or NP] -- which is selected to be, as it happens, a complete list of the [non-]physical base facts, though there might be nothing internal to P [NP] itself which specifies its completeness. Failure to appreciate this distinction can lead to some very sloppy reasoning, as further explained in my linked discussion.

(4) Other metaphysics/epistemology mix-ups. You can fill in your own favourite examples here. They all seem to share the common feature of conflating what is supposed to be true with what is supposed to be supposed (believed, known, etc.). I wonder whether the 'metagaming' metaphor would help students to better understand (and hence learn to avoid) this common mistake? (It seems helpful to me, but is the idea still as clear to those less-geeky souls who've never had the pleasure of playing RPGs?)

On Rosen's MR-Skepticism

[I might end up expanding the following sketch into a real paper at some point, so any feedback would be most welcome...]

In 'Skepticism About Moral Responsibility', Gideon Rosen argues for the view that confident positive judgments of blameworthiness are (almost) never warranted. The argument proceeds in two parts. First he argues that blameworthiness can only originate in akratic action, whereby the agent acts in full knowledge of their wrongdoing (and its normative significance). In the second part, Rosen suggests that we rarely have sufficient grounds for confidently attributing such full-blown akrasia to agents who have acted wrongly. I will focus only on the first part of the argument, since this is where the main philosophical action takes place.

Why think that blameworthiness can only originate in akratic action? Rosen's argument is quite intricate, but the core idea is that non-akratic wrongdoing is merely done “from ignorance”, and is thus excused unless the agent is to blame for her state of ignorance. But if the agent also acted from ignorance in bringing about this prior state, then that act will likewise be excused, unless ... etc. The agent's excuses will only run out if we can stop the regress at a point where she acted in full knowledge of her normative error: that is, if she acted akratically.

More precisely: Rosen begins by distinguishing derivative and original responsibility for an act or event. For example, if Jekyll intentionally takes a pill that makes him berserk, then he is (derivatively) responsible for the resulting damage in virtue of being (originally) responsible for the negligent act of taking the pill. Rosen then claims that “an action done from ignorance is never a locus of original responsibility.” Let's call this the RAID principle (responsibility for actions done from ignorance is merely derivative). Rosen supports this principle by appeal to ordinary examples of factual ignorance, such as accidental poisoning. If someone secretly plants arsenic in my sugar bowl, it is not my fault that I end up poisoning you. But if I routinely store arsenic in unlabeled sugar bowls in my pantry, this prior negligence puts me back on the hook for causing the accident. Crucially, Rosen takes the RAID principle to be fully general, applying to normative as well as factual ignorance.

The RAID principle tells us that an act done from ignorance cannot be a locus of original responsibility. But any agent who non-akratically acts wrongly thereby acts from ignorance of some kind: either they aren't aware of the factual considerations that make the act wrong, or they aren't aware of the normative significance of those facts: that they make the act wrong, and that they thereby count decisively against so acting. If an agent were to know all these facts and yet still perform the act, then their act would qualify as 'akratic' by Rosen's definition. RAID thus straightforwardly implies that blameworthiness can only originate in akratic action. That is: for X to be blameworthy for A, A must either itself be an akratic act (if X is originally responsible for A), or else be the upshot of an akratic act (if X is derivatively responsible for A). To avoid this conclusion, we will need to undermine RAID.

In order to see why RAID is false, we need to clarify our understanding of 'original' and 'derivative' responsibility, which will bring to light two very different kinds of culpability in ignorance. In particular, I will distinguish 'diachronic' and 'synchronic' cases of culpable ignorance, and argue that RAID holds only of the former. The intuitive plausibility of the principle derives from neglecting the latter class of cases, which – we will see – provide ample intuitive counterexamples to the RAID principle. I will close by considering what Rosen might say about these neglected cases.

Rosen's loose talk of 'original' and 'derivative' responsibility suggests a picture on which responsibility is a two-place relation, between an individual and the acts or outcomes that they are “responsible for”. But this occludes some important structure which I want to bring to the fore. Responsibility is better understood as a three-place relation between an agent, an act of theirs (which I will call the 'focal act'), and an event (or set of events) for which the agent's action renders him liable. Intuitively: we are responsible, in acting a certain way, for various outcomes. The focal act is the exercise of agency in virtue of which we become liable for praise or blame. That is to say: it is the locus of original responsibility. But we can now see that there is no such thing as a locus of 'derivative responsibility', so that old distinction seems inapt (or at least potentially misleading). Rosen would have us say that Jekyll the pill-popping berserker is derivatively responsible for vandalism due to being originally responsible for pill-popping, but the “responsible for” locution is used here equivocally. It would be clearer just to say that Jekyll is responsible, in taking the pill, for the subsequent damage.

This makes it clear that (in the described case) there is only one occasion of Jekyll exercising his agency in a blameworthy manner. His berserk vandalism is not itself a blameworthy act (assuming it is an act at all), it is merely an event for which his blameworthy act of pill-popping renders him liable. (Notice that he would still be blameworthy in exactly the same way even if he had slipped the pill to an innocent third party who then went berserk in the china shop. The innocent person's berserk vandalism isn't blameworthy, and neither is Jekyll's. It's his pill-popping, in either case, that is the sole blameworthy action, though it makes him liable for downstream events – including the event of himself or others acting in berserk fashion.)

Rosen may grant all this, but ask why the terminological precision matters. Well, for one thing, it helps us to see more clearly what sorts of considerations are eligible to excuse the agent. Sometimes ignorance is a legitimate excuse, but only if it is concurrent with the focal act. It would clearly be absurd for an agent to plead innocence on the grounds that, despite knowing full well the risks of their action as they performed it, they later forgot this (by the time the risked outcome actually eventuated). And this remains true even if the risked outcome in question was another act of theirs. Granted, their ignorance – like Jekyll's incapacity – might excuse the downstream act from qualifying as a second occasion of blameworthiness. But it obviously does nothing at all to excuse the earlier “benighting” act (to borrow Holly Smith's term), or to cast doubt on whether the “unwitting” outcome falls within its scope of liability (that is, as an event for which the agent, in performing the benighting act, became liable). So, in many of Rosen's examples, the kind of 'ignorance' involved – whether culpable or not – was never even prima facie eligible to serve as an excuse, at least insofar as we are treating the earlier act as focal. To properly understand the excusing potential of ignorance (and its limits), we need to instead focus our attention on cases of ignorance concurrent with the focal act or exercise of agency that is to be assessed.

Let's return to the original case of the accidental poisoning. We can imagine two very different ways in which an agent might be 'culpable'¹ for their failure to recognize the risk of arsenic poisoning. In one case, the culpability is wholly 'diachronic': suppose I planted the arsenic myself, and then took a pill that wiped my memory of this event. My subsequent decision to spoon white powder (now reasonably believed to be sugar) into your tea is itself an intrinsically innocent, blameless act. As in the Jekyll case, it is only my earlier 'benighting' action that is blameworthy (and renders me liable for the eventuating damages). This sort of case supports the RAID principle, which effectively claims that actions done from ignorance are never themselves blameworthy [qua act], but are at most events which some earlier blameworthy act may render us liable for.

Alternatively, we can imagine a case of 'synchronically' culpable ignorance, where my unwitting poisoning no longer seems even intrinsically wholly innocent. Suppose my roommate left the arsenic in a labeled bowl in the pantry. When I grab what looks like a sugar bowl, my eyes flit briefly over the label ('arsenic'), without fully taking it in or consciously registering the significance of this. Further suppose that the reason why I don't fully process the visual evidence available to me is just because I don't really care very much about you. Maybe I even want you dead, on some subconscious level. In any case, we can stipulate that there is evidence available to me that the bowl contains arsenic, and my ignorance depends upon my callous disregard for your welfare. If I cared more, as I morally ought to – or if I had all the beliefs that I rationally ought to, given my evidence – then I would never have so thoughtlessly spooned the white powder into your tea. I didn't appreciate the risk at the time, but I should have,² and so in this sense my ignorance is 'synchronically culpable'. Intuitively, in this sort of case, I am still blameworthy in acting so thoughtlessly. Unreasonable ignorance does not (fully) excuse.

We thus have a counterexample to the RAID principle. It may be true that acts done from merely diachronically culpable ignorance, being intrinsically (synchronically) reasonable, are never blameworthy. But, intuitively, it looks like we can be blameworthy – 'originally responsible' – in acting from 'synchronically culpable' or unreasonable ignorance. So the fully general RAID principle lacks intuitive support after all, leaving us with no reason to think that blameworthiness must originate in akratic action. It can just as well originate in unreasonable action. And note that even if we're rarely in a position to attribute akrasia to wrongdoers, we're very often in a position to know that they acted unreasonably. Hence Rosen's argument fails.

At this point, Rosen might respond by giving up his claim to ordinary case-based intuitions, and instead seeking to defend RAID on purely theoretical grounds. As he observes in a footnote, it's one thing to say that a person “should have known better”, and another to say that they are culpable for this failure. So he at least has the theoretical resources to coherently reject the commonsense view gestured at in my previous paragraph. It just remains to motivate his more radical view. As with most skeptical arguments, this will require appealing to intuitive-sounding abstract principles (rather than cases). Here are two that together imply RAID:

1. “If X does A from ignorance, then X is culpable for the act only if he is culpable for the ignorance from which he acts.”
2. “X is culpable for failing to know that P only if his ignorance is the upshot of some prior culpable act or omission.”

Why believe (2)? It follows from the general principle that only acts (including mental acts, but excluding internal 'occurrences' with respect to which we are 'passive') are eligible to serve as loci of responsibility. Since ignorance isn't an exercise of agency – something you do – it can't be a site of blameworthiness. At most, it can be an outcome that some prior act made you liable for. (It may also indicate that one is vicious, much as a brain scan might, but to be a bad person is not yet to be blameworthy, since the latter kind of evaluation concerns what you've done.)

Suppose we grant all that. Why would we then accept (1)? It might be confused with the more plausible claim that reasonable ignorance excuses, and hence that an act done from ignorance is blameworthy only if the agent was unreasonable in believing as they did. But (1) is a much stronger claim since, we are supposing, even unreasonable ignorance can't originate blameworthiness. Even so, we may still think that an act done from unreasonable ignorance, manifesting a lack of good will (in case of motivated ignorance), may yet serve as a locus of blameworthiness. If we think this is possible – as certainly appears to be the case in the 'synchronic' cases I've highlighted – then we will reject (1).

Our final assessment of skeptical arguments typically depends on whether we are more inclined to trust intuitions about cases or abstract theoretical principles (e.g. that knowledge requires certainty, that an epistemic [e.g. inductive] rule cannot justify itself, etc.). In this instance, though premise (1) may be prima facie plausible-sounding, I think that once we see understand what it actually claims, and how radically opposed it is to our ordinary case-based intuitions, we should simply reject it as unmotivated.

1In a broad sense; we'll later see that this isn't quite the right term.

2Limitations of space prevent me from further exploring whether it is the moral or the epistemic vice that is relevant here. I will use the term “reasonable” broadly to cover both kinds of normativity. I should also mention that the alternative label 'synchronic culpability' turns out, as explained below, to be something of a misnomer.

Hedonism vs. Qualia Preferentism

It's worth distinguishing 'happiness' (positively valenced experience) from preferred experience. For example, an ascetic monk may wish to avoid strongly valenced experiences, or a self-loathing individual might even want to feel miserable (i.e. have negatively valenced experiences). More interestingly, we might feel attached to our current tastes (hedonic likings), and so be averse to the idea of inducing satisfactions of other tastes.

Imagine, for example, an aesthete who loves opera and fine wine, and utterly detests Britney Spears and cheap bubbly. Suppose a mad scientist offered to rewire their tastes and have them enjoy listening to Britney for hours on end. It's entirely conceivable that the aesthete would find this prospect abhorrent. While acknowledging that he would - in the proposed scenario - be deluded into experiencing great happiness, from his actual perspective the aesthete strongly prefers not to undergo this experience. He prefers not to enjoy the experience of listening to crap.

Is this preference unreasonable? I think that Derek Parfit may be committed to saying so. Parfit holds that hedonic likings and dislikings (unlike desires) are not responsive to reasons. They are simply brute psychological facts. We can have reason to want to like fine wine, if it has a greater potential for intense liking/enjoyment than does cheap bubbly. But there is no reason to like fine wine (any more than there are reasons to bleed), if 'liking' is a brute, reasons-insensitive state: something that happens to us, rather than something we do.

Anyway, if Parfit is right that there are no reasons for liking aesthetically superior objects more, then it's hard to see why we should care about the objects, as opposed to the intensities, of our likings. That is, it looks like the only reason to want to like fine wine more is insofar as it would yield a more intense liking. This might seem to devalue aesthetic evaluation. Beethoven's symphonies no longer merit appreciation. They're just cheesecake. Really, really enjoyable cheesecake. And if you could find Britney just as enjoyable, then that would be just as good.

I wonder about applying this to the moral case. It seems intrinsically bad to derive pleasure from others' suffering (even if you reflectively prefer that others not suffer, and would never act to cause suffering, or anything like that). If a mad scientist offered to rewire your tastes to make you enjoy child porn, say, that would seem very undesirable indeed (and again, I think, not just on instrumental grounds -- though that would surely be part of it). Are these intuitions mistaken?

Internalized Contingent Norms

People sometimes seem to have 'absolutist' deontological intuitions. For example, they may object to consequentialism on the grounds that there are possible circumstances in which it would mandate murdering innocent civilians (if this would in fact serve the greater good). A standard consequentialist response is to say, "I'm glad you're so strongly opposed to murdering innocent people. I am too. This is a good (utility-promoting) attitude for people in our world to have, and I suspect it is really this 'local' (contingent) moral fact that your intuition is latching on to. So that's no reason to doubt the consequentialist's claim that there are other possible worlds, wildly different from ours, in which this norm would no longer apply." Is this a legitimate response?

There seems something a bit suspicious about reinterpreting someone else's intuitions for them. (Anne: "You're not really intuiting that murder is necessarily wrong." Bill: "Eh? Since when did you become a mind-reader?") Each individual is, of course, the final authority when it comes to their own intuitions. Still, there's nothing wrong with highlighting the differences between two easily conflated claims, and so encourage others to carefully re-assess whether their intuition is really of the one or the other. I think that the sorts of scenarios discussed in my post 'The Contingent Right to Life' should convince most people that the ordinary norms they've internalized only hold contingently, just as indirect utilitarians claim.

(There might be the odd absolutist holdout, but you can never convince everyone. The important thing, I take it, is to explain how consequentialism needn't be at odds with ordinary intuitions, which I think mostly just concern what moral norms apply in ordinary circumstances.)

Confusing Welfare and Happiness

Larry Solum "highly recommended" the paper 'Welfare as Happiness' by legal scholars Bronsteen, Buccafusco and Masur. I'm not sure why. As Solum himself explains in a follow-up post, the paper's main argument (that hedonism must be true because our lives are constituted by subjective experiences, and hence nothing can affect our life unless it affects our experiences) rests on an equivocation. Much of the paper continues in this vein. For example:

What it means for something to be a bad experience for an individual is for it to make the individual feel bad. Negative feelings define bad life experiences, whereas positive feelings define good ones.

It could be argued that whether a moment is positive or negative for a person does not depend solely on that person's physiological experience of it. Indeed, disagreeing with our thesis may well require such an argument. But what else could make it positive or negative?

This passage neglects the fact that there are two different things we might mean in talking of 'bad life experiences'. We might mean to talk of subjectively unpleasant experiences, as the authors do. (But then their claims are tautological, when surely they had hoped to establish a substantive conclusion.) Alternatively, we might mean to talk of a life experience (or event) that was bad for you, i.e. undesirable for your sake. For a possible example of the latter, consider the experience of being subtly mocked (without realizing it). Though the undesirable feature of this circumstance is not subjectively transparent to you, nonetheless you (and others who care about you) generally have reason to hope that no such event actually befall you -- or so one might plausibly claim. This is the substantive question of welfare, which the authors fail to address or - it seems - even recognize.

In Solum's follow-up post, the authors set out their core argument as follows:

each of us has a veil of experience, and anything that happens outside that veil of experience and never affects it (even indirectly) has no effect on our lives.

Here they appear to confuse the metaphysical question whether an event "affects" you, in the sense of altering your intrinsic properties, with the normative question of welfare: whether it "affects" you in the sense of being an event that you have self-interested reasons to care about. (In fairness, I think even Shelly Kagan may have once made a similar mistake.) These are wildly different questions, and if one thinks that they are linked in any way, this would require substantial argument. It is far from obvious that welfare supervenes on our intrinsic properties. (Presumably only hedonists will believe this.) Sometimes people talk of one's "life" or "life story" in a broader sense that includes all of the external events and relations that could conceivably be relevant to assessing one's life along any dimension (one's success, popularity, and - of course - welfare). It would then follow trivially that one's welfare supervenes on the intrinsic properties of one's "life" in this broad sense. But this is compatible with any of the main theories of welfare, since one's "life" in this broad sense includes all manner of external events and relations.

I was also struck by the authors' self-defeating arguments against objectivism. Consider the following:

According to the objectivist view, not only don't the individuals know what's good for them, but their view of what's good for themselves doesn't determine what's good for them--no matter how considered or accurate (in terms of happiness) a view it is.

But the authors' own view is no different in this regard. They are hedonists, not preferentists. Even if I care about truth more than happiness, the authors will paternalistically insist that happiness is in fact what's good for me. For them, individuals' own views of "what's good for themselves" are strictly irrelevant -- no matter how "considered" and well-informed our self-regarding preferences might be. (Of course, even preferentists think that people might have false beliefs about welfare: some people believe the competing theories, after all! But there's no avoiding that.)

Their main objection to preferentism is that people may have preferences about distant events that are intuitively irrelevant to their welfare. (They mention 'Sheila the environmentalist', who passively hopes that a rare foreign squirrel avoids extinction.) But this merely shows that preferentists need to restrict which desires count in determining one's welfare, say to those that concern one's own "life story". One might wish to critically examine whether various such proposed restrictions are sufficiently well-defined and non-circular to do the job. But the only such view that the authors consider is the explicitly circular view according to which only "self-interested" preferences count for determining your self-interest. They then respond:

A self-interested, restricted theory of welfare demands that the individual actually receive some benefit before one can say that her welfare has increased; this conception of "benefit" is rendered meaningless unless the individual actually experiences the benefit. To claim otherwise--to argue that an individual's welfare can improve without that improvement registering subjectively--is to welcome Sheila and her Sri Lankan squirrel back into the fold.

But this is effectively just to assert that no independent restriction can be found. There's no argument here, and they appear completely oblivious to the fact that philosophers like Derek Parfit (with his "success theory") have actually proposed some prima facie plausible candidates for this role -- proposals that they're really obliged to engage with. It's extremely frustrating.

[Compare 'psychologists mangling philosophy'. As a general rule, if you're going to attempt scholarly work that's beyond your disciplinary expertise, it would seem wise to consult with a colleague from the relevant discipline, so that they might flag these sorts of problems.]

Stakes and Sakes

What does it mean to talk of individual interests or welfare? To expand on my earlier post, I think we need to distinguish descriptive and normative concepts in this vicinity. For example, there's a purely description notion of biological interests or natural "flourishing" that has no inherent normative significance (at least prima facie). On the other hand, I suggested, we can understand a genuinely normative sense of 'interests' as meaning something like what's desirable for the sake of an individual (where being 'desirable for the sake of S' does not immediately entail being desirable tout court). This requires some clarification.

For one thing: talk of X being 'desirable for the sake of S' naturally suggests the following two-part interpretation: (i) you have reason to desire X, and (ii) S is the normative source of this reason.

But this interpretation is no good, for it makes it impossible to express non-benevolent views like egoism, according to which we have no reason to care about others' interests. Such views may be false, but they should at least be coherently expressible. So we had better not analyze 'interests' in such a way as to rule out egoism from the start. Instead, we need to pin down the sense in which an egoist might allow that X is - or would be - "desirable for S's sake", without thereby committing himself to thinking that he, personally, has any reason to want it.

A promising answer, I think, is to combine the modal and normative senses of 'desirable'. The modal sense means "can be desired". The normative sense means "should be desired" -- or at least that there's some reason to desire the object. The hybrid view I have in mind thus concerns whether there can be reason to desire X for S's sake (i.e., at least for agents who care about S). This seems to solve the problem: an egoist can agree that anyone who cares about S thereby [for S's sake] has a reason to desire X, without thereby committing himself to having such reasons, since he personally may not care about S. (This analysis also seems to satisfy the other desideratum motivating my previous post, namely, that plants and other non-sentients don't have normative interests. Even if you care about plants, they just aren't capable of sourcing reasons in this way. You may have reason to tend to your garden, but it will be for your own sake, rather than the plants'.)

But now consider a second puzzle: mightn't we act for another's sake, in a way that's independent of the other's welfare? I especially have in mind symbolic acts expressing "respect" for another's deepest concerns. Once we recognize the distinction between 'Good To' and 'Good For', the following possibility arises: I might, out of respect for S, be motivated to promote some end that is a good to her (i.e. something she values), though it is not good (or bad) for her.

For example, suppose Sally cares passionately about philosophy. After Sally dies, Bob might honour Sally's memory by making a donation to promote philosophical education. He does not thereby think that he is making Sally better off. (She's dead, and even if we accept a 'success theory' of welfare that allows for posthumous benefits, we can stipulate that this action doesn't affect the success of Sally's life efforts.) Nevertheless, there seems a clear sense in which he's acting for Sally's sake. Is this a counterexample to my analysis?

Maybe. I'm not entirely sure what to think of this, so I'd welcome your thoughts. Here's a tentative response: perhaps Bob is like the gardener. Although motivated by considerations outside of himself (plants, or Sally's memory), those considerations aren't really capable of sourcing reasons, so any reason for Bob to so act instead stems from elsewhere (perhaps from Bob himself). Consider the question: 'Why is it good for Bob to honour Sally's memory in this way -- who benefits?' We may think this is just another way of asking, for whose sake does the reason exert its normative force? And the answer is presumably not 'Sally', since we have already stipulated that she does not benefit posthumously. It might be 'Bob', or it might be 'the world as a whole' (on this view: such moral acts make the world a better place, independently of the welfare of the individuals in it).

A third and final puzzle: mightn't we have reasons to act for the sakes of impersonal entities? I can easily imagine being motivated by my love of philosophy, for example. And it seems plausible that such acts will often be normatively justified. But wouldn't it seem a category mistake to say that the discipline of philosophy has welfare interests? Perhaps. But we may doubt that my motivating reason is itself the normative reason here. As in the case of Bob, it might instead be that any normative reason in this case is sourced either in myself, or in 'the world as whole'.

Even so, isn't 'the world as a whole' itself an impersonal entity? So if I think it might ultimately ground moral reasons, doesn't my earlier analysis then imply that the world has interests? This seems very strange. But then, 'the world' is an odd sort of entity. It might be better to instead say that such reasons rely on no particular (contingent) source at all, so that talk of 'the world' here is just a verbal convenience. (As the term 'zero' illustrates, it can be useful to talk of nothing as a kind of something, so long as we are careful not to be misled.) For a reason to exert its normative force 'for the sake of the world' is just for the reason to exert brute normative force, without needing this to be "grounded" in anything else (in particular, the interests of any being).

But I'm not sure how plausible this all sounds...

Suffocating Significance

Hilzoy is, as usual, spot on:

This is an instance of something that generally bothers me about many discussions of politics: the assumption that political figures are not doing things for normal human reasons, but should instead be seen as communicating in a sort of code. Everything they do has a symbolic meaning: it's a symbol of disrespect for this, or craven obedience to that, or whatever; and if we want to understand them, we should not try to figure out why some comprehensible human being might have done what they did, but try to crack this code.

This is, in my view, silly. It's what leads to things like outrage over Obama's shaking hands with Hugo Chavez: if you view that handshake as the normal civil response to someone's extending his hand to you, it seems completely innocuous; but if you see it as a Fraught With Meaning, it looks like a sign that Obama thinks that Chavez is a wonderful guy.

I'm reminded of Nagel on Cultural Liberalism (original here):

Forty years ago the public pieties were patriotic and anticommunist; now they are multicultural and feminist. What concerns me is not the content but the character of this kind of control: Its effect is to make it difficult to breathe, because the atmosphere is so thick with significance and falsity...

Liberalism should favor the avoidance of forced choices and tests of purity, and the substitution of a certain reticence behind which potentially disruptive disagreements can persist without breaking into the open, and without requiring anyone to lie. The disagreements needn't be a secret -- they can just remain quiescent.

Back to Hilzoy:

If we wish to construe anything other than clear expressions of disdain or horror as "legitimizing" Chavez, we deprive politicians of the option of being basically civil and non-committal. Is there any earthly reason to suppose that narrowing their options in this fashion would be a good thing? That it would advance America's interests, or those of anyone other than people who thrive on perpetual outrage? I can't see how.

Zombies and Other Minds

Soluman asks:

I wonder if you think there is any interesting connection between conceiving of zombies and approaching skeptical "other minds" scenarios...

His idea seems to be that, since the type-A physicalist thinks the physical facts analytically entail the qualia facts, they must think that future science will conclusively dispel skeptical worries about other minds. (All they have to do is establish the physical facts about Bob's brain, and it'll logically follow that he's conscious [if he is].) But it doesn't seem like the skeptical worries here could ever be conclusively dispelled by science in this way. (This is closely related to my 'New Knowledge Argument': some questions just don't look like they could be settled by facts of the sort uncovered by science.)

I guess the type-A physicalist will just bite the bullet and insist that science will surprise us here. But it's a nice case to bring out how radical the view really is.

Quick thought on reproductive ethics

Everyone agrees it would be a good thing if fewer children were born into poverty (and more born into financial security). The ideal way to achieve this would be for no-one to be in poverty to begin with. That would help the older generation as well as the new. But the benefit to the new generation could also be achieved by another route: namely, by poor people having fewer children, and financially secure people having more children.

That's clearly an inherently desirable outcome (pro tanto, at least -- and 'all things considered' if it is achieved by morally permissible means, e.g. the voluntary choices of all involved). But I suspect many people would not be willing to actually admit this -- perhaps due to the perceived association with eugenicists and other "unsavoury" types. (But remember, Hitler was a vegetarian!)

Anyway, I was struck by this the other day in class when we were discussing an author who claimed the following asymmetry: that although there's some (epistemic) chance that in having an abortion we violate weighty moral reasons, supposedly nobody thinks there's any such moral risk involved in carrying a child to term (at least excepting rare cases of severe disability, such that the child's life would be utterly miserable).

I find it interesting that most people seemed willing to accept this claim without a second thought. Because it seems to me very obviously false. We have pressing moral reasons to increase the average quality of life of future generations. And one way to achieve that is for people in less fortunate circumstances to bring fewer children into those circumstances. This will help bring about less poverty, crime, etc., and that is surely a very good thing indeed.

(To preempt any misunderstandings, I'm not suggesting that abortion is obligatory. It would certainly be inappropriate to demand this choice, or to censure poor women who have many children despite the evidence that they will have worse-than-average lives. That's their business, not anyone else's. But insofar as they are trying to decide for themselves what to do about their pregnancy, I think in many circumstances -- e.g. so long as it wouldn't be traumatic for them or anything -- it really would be best were they to abort.)

Understanding (Zombie) Conceivability Arguments: Part II

So far we have established that a legitimate conceivability-possibility inference must start from the ideal conceivability of a semantically neutral statement. The final requirement I want to discuss is that the statement to be conceived should be specified in transparent, uncontested terms.

What do I mean by a 'transparent' specification? I mean to exclude broad general terms (like 'physical' or 'non-physical') whose extensions might be controversial. This helps us to avoid pointless terminological debates. Note that it's a bit sloppy to argue, "Conceivably a world could be physically just like ours but lack consciousness, therefore physicalism is false," because it is unclear exactly what we are meant to be conceiving: the phrase 'physically just like ours' is too opaque: different people might take it to mean different things. [Plus, its invocation of actuality - 'our world' - technically violates the semantic neutrality requirement.] So, for maximum rigor, it should be replaced by a precise microphysical description P that - without making any explicit reference to qualia - is accepted by the physicalist as true of our world. We can then argue from the conceivability of (P & ~Q) to the precise conclusion that the qualitative properties in Q are not reducible to the properties specified in P, and so must be explicitly added as further primitives to the base facts.

It is important to note the precise conclusion here. It is not that Q is non-physical, or that physicalism is false. It is merely that Q does not reduce to anything included in P. Importantly, none of the premises say anything about whether P exhausts the physical properties. (We chose P so that the physicalist should agree that it does exhaust the physical properties, but that occurs outside of the scope of the argument itself. This is a vital point that I will return to.) So one could, in principle, respond that Q is a primitive "physical" property that doesn't reduce to any of the other ones listed. This "physicalist" will insist that a full specification of the physical base facts P* must include Q as a basic conjunct, in which case (P* & ~Q) will be straightforwardly inconsistent, seeing as how it would be equivalent to ((P & Q) & ~Q) for some P. Clearly, this "physicalist" is completely immune to refutation by the kind of conceivability argument discussed here.

That's fine, except that this is to be a "physicalist" in name only. Once you grant that qualia are primitive, and must be explicitly included in the base facts, that's all the dualist cares to establish. Whether you call these primitive mental facts "physical" or "non-physical" is mere semantics.

The target of the zombie argument is instead the strict physicalist, who refuses to countenance primitive mental properties. He believes that we can fully specify the base facts of the world without any explicit mention of qualia. P alone will suffice for Q, on his view, just as P suffices to fix the macroscopic table and chair facts. But since P (unlike P*) makes no explicit mention of Q, we have some chance of running a conceivability argument against this view, since it looks like (P & ~Q) could be conceivable. It's not a knock-down argument, of course: one could reasonably deny that it really is ideally conceivable at the end of the day. But at least the zombie argument has a chance, unlike in the previous case.

Why am I harping on about this at such length? Well, I think this background can help us diagnose the misunderstanding implicit in Richard Brown's dismissive parody:

I am conceiving of a world that is just like this one in all non-physical respects except that it lacks consciousness. Therefore dualism is false.

This exhibits the same sloppiness exhibited by the sloppy version of the zombie argument discussed at the very start of this post. The difference is that while the zombie argument can (as demonstrated) be made more precise, this parody -- what RB now calls his "zoombie argument" -- cannot.

What's the problem? Well, as before, it's entirely opaque what we are supposed to be conceiving, since there is no uncontested specification of the "non-physical respects" of the world that we can plug in to the argument. I take it Brown wants to plug in the actual non-physical description 'NP', whatever it may be. But dualists and physicalists have wildly differing ideas about what this description will end up looking like. Physicalists presumably think it will be empty (i.e. tautologous: devoid of information), whereas dualists think it will list all the qualia facts Q. Let's consider these two possibilities in turn.

• Suppose NP states nothing (i.e. is tautologous). The argument is then as follows: "It's conceivable that (TAUT & ~Q). Therefore dualism is false." Well, that's clearly invalid. The possibility of ~Q is clearly compatible with dualism!


• Suppose NP just states Q. Then the argument is: "It's conceivable that (Q & ~Q). Therefore dualism is false." But in this case the first premise is transparently false.

So, you see, whichever way we fill out the precise details of the parody argument, it very clearly fails (unlike the original zombie argument which, though controversial, can at least get off the ground, since "P & ~Q" is neither trivial nor trivially false).

You might wonder: if the parody is so atrocious, why would anyone have ever been tempted to take it seriously? I think the answer is just that they haven't fully appreciated how restrictive the form of conceivability inference relied upon by the original zombie argument is. If one assumed that the zombie argument must take the sloppy (opaque) form introduced earlier, then one may well be right to see the parody as being of the same form, and hence undermining that form of argument. I'm happy to grant this: opaque conceivability arguments are no damn good. But - once again - this does nothing to impugn the zombie argument, since it can be stated in a more transparent form (as described*).

* = (Of course, I've really only provided a schema of the argument. The real thing will have the placeholder 'P' replaced by a long, transparent description. But insofar as we have a rough grasp of what P will look like, we can draw tentative conclusions about whether the expanded version of 'P & ~Q' is likely to be conceivable.)

Compare Brown's recent response:

The zoombie world is a COMPLETE non-structural/non-functional duplicate of our world. NP is not just some random list of non-physical properties! It is a complete list of the actual non-physical properties. So, if there are no non-physical qualitative properties in NP then the actual qualitative properties that you and I enjoy are not non-physical properties.

I hope it's clear by now that this is a wildly different form of argument from the zombie argument I've given. Instead of using NP as a mere placeholder for some list of non-physical properties (neutrally and transparently specified), he is explicitly building in its status as "a complete list of the actual non-physical properties". So when he asserts that (NP & ~Q) is conceivable, this is mere shorthand for the same old sloppy, opaque conceivability claim as before (viz., that conceivably, "a world could have all the actual non-physical properties but lack qualia"). In effect, he is (unwittingly) pretending to give a precise, transparent specification by mimicking the superficial form of my argument, when in fact the underlying form and actual content of his argument hasn't changed a bit from the sloppy version.

To recap: a legitimate conceivability argument should begin by providing a transparent, uncontested specification of what is to be conceived. The zombie argument does this, by taking whatever specification 'P' the physicalist likes (which the dualist will not contest). The 'zoombie' parody, by contrast, does not meet this condition. This is indicative of further problems downstream -- and indeed, when we consider the two main candidates for fleshing out 'NP' (namely: TAUT or Q), we immediately see that neither has the faintest hope of grounding a conceivability argument against the dualist. The entire force of the parody argument rests on the opacity of 'NP', and -- unlike the real zombie argument -- it cannot survive being rendered transparent.

[This is all just to elucidate the objection originally stated in a couple of sentences in my 'zombie review'.]

Understanding (Zombie) Conceivability Arguments: Part I

The zombie argument for dualism is commonly misunderstood. [For a broad overview and assessment of the argument, see my 'Zombie Review'.] In particular, misunderstanding the precise role conceivability plays in the argument often leads to overly hasty dismissals. In this post, I want to set out and correct three such misunderstandings. Let me begin on a conciliatory note by emphasizing that many conceivability arguments are no good. Each of the common mistakes discussed below begins by correctly noting a certain way that conceivability arguments can go wrong. But in each case, I will show, the zombie argument -- properly understood -- avoids the identified pitfall.

(1) In ordinary language, to call something 'conceivable' is just to say that you're not certain it's impossible. But such mere prima facie conceivability does not entail metaphysical possibility. There can be non-obvious or unknown necessities -- just look at mathematics. So clearly 'conceivability' in this sense doesn't prove anything much at all. That's true enough, but the zombie argument does not invoke 'conceivability' in this loose sense. Instead, it invokes the technical notion of ideal conceivability, or what can be conceived without (even implicit) contradiction. This stricter sense of conceivability more plausibly entails possibility. (The flip side of this is that it makes the premise [zombies are conceivable] more controversial!)

(2) Another common objection is that Kripke's discovery of the necessary a posteriori shows that some claims (e.g. "water is not H2O") can be ideally conceivable without being metaphysically possible. That's true, but a proper understanding of the Kripkean necessary a posteriori reveals that it is limited in scope. Kripkean complications arise only for concepts (like 'water') where the primary and secondary intensions diverge. Importantly, we can tell by conceptual analysis whether this is the case. We can tell, for example, that our water concept rigidly designates "the substance ___, whatever it is, that is the actual watery stuff of our world." But then to run a valid conceivability argument we simply need to take care to avoid those problematic concepts, and employ only their 'semantically neutral' (purely descriptive/qualitative) analogues: e.g. the qualitative term 'watery stuff' in place of the kind term 'water'. (Most everyone agrees that it's metaphysically possible that watery stuff be other than H2O: Twin Earth itself is an example!) Since the zombie argument can likewise be stated using semantically neutral terms, this suffices to defang the standard Kripkean objection.

[Since this post is getting overly long, I've shifted the third section to a new post.]

Being true vs. Judging true

[O]n the view that there is no generally privileged position from which to judge whether someone’s beliefs are true, there is no clear general distinction between beliefs and knowledge.

-- Russell Hardin, How Do You Know?: The Economics of Ordinary Knowledge

I'll have to remember this fallacy for the next time I'm teaching intro philosophy students the Metaphysics-Epistemology distinction.

But what do you think is the best way to explain and clear up this misunderstanding? (I might say: "All that follows from our fallibility in judging whether someone's beliefs are true, is that we may be similarly fallible in judging whether their beliefs constitute knowledge. But that's entirely compatible with there being a clear general distinction here, as revealed by the fact that we can perfectly well understand what the underlying difference between the two possibilities would be. It's just to say that we may not be in a position to uncontroversially recognize which of the two we're actually dealing with in any given case." Does that seem clear enough?)

Blameworthy Utilitarians

[Followup to Evaluating Character]

Assume utilitarianism is true. Now compare three people:

(A) Eenie is a deontologist who is very concerned for human rights, fairness, justice, and all that good stuff -- not to mention his special concern for his friends and family. These concerns of his predictably lead to utility-promoting acts.

(B) Meenie is a hard-core utilitarian who cares only about maximizing utility. He is cautious of pro tanto harms like torture, but happy enough to condone them when (to the best of his ability to judge) the expected benefits outweigh the costs. He has no special attachment to his friends or family, helping them only when (it seems to him) doing so is the impartially best thing he can do.

(C) Miney is a sadist whose main concern is to spread pain and misery. But Miney lives in a world governed by a Trickster Demon who ensures that ill-intentioned acts turn out well, and well-intentioned acts turn out poorly. So Miney's vicious character is, in these circumstances, most fortunate.

Intuitively, the level of virtue decreases as you go down the list from Eenie to Miney. But this datum is difficult for utilitarians to accommodate. One obvious candidate for a utilitarian analysis of virtue would have us count an agent as virtuous just in case she has (explicitly) utilitarian motivations. But that would incorrectly imply that Meenie is more virtuous than Eenie.

As a second pass, we might shift to counting an agent as virtuous just in case her motivations are fortunate (hence desirable from a utilitarian perspective). But this incorrectly implies that Miney is virtuous.

What we need instead is a more refined view on which an agent counts as virtuous insofar as she is motivated by the surface-level or prima facie utility-promoting features. (That is, features like respecting rights or promise-keeping, that tend to promote the good in normal circumstances). This yields two desirable results: (i) intuitively virtuous non-utilitarians like Eenie are properly recognized as such, and (ii) direct utilitarians like Meenie are susceptible to deserving blame if they do something terrible.

I should say more about this second point. The basic idea is that engaging in rights violations in hopes of promoting utility is unreasonably risky. Most people who do this miscalculate, and end up doing more harm than good. So, like the person who plays Russian Roulette, they are responsible if the foreseeable risk eventuates.

Sometimes, it is sufficient excuse to say that you had good intentions, and didn't realize that things would turn out so badly. But this excuse only works if your expectations were reasonable. If you violate someone's rights (or other generally utility-promoting rules or laws) for the greater good, I think you forsake any such ignorance-based excuse. Since you are overriding the general rules and taking it upon yourself to get better results, you had better be right. If things backfire, that suggests that you were insufficiently motivated by the weighty utilitarian reasons to respect rights (etc.). This is an internal flaw in the agent, and thus eligible to qualify as a vice.

What if Meenie is a very cautious utilitarian, who acknowledges his own fallibility and so is never willing to condone torture or the like (albeit for transparently instrumental reasons, unlike Eenie)? Or consider Moe, a perfectly rational utilitarian who never makes mistakes in his utility calculations. Would these guys still count as less virtuous? It seems not. It might be unfortunate that they have the character they do, if this prevents them from forming loving relationships and so on. But that is really an 'external' flaw, not a problem with their quality of will (or moral reasonableness).

Overall, then, my preferred account of virtue for utilitarians would go something like this: an agent is virtuous insofar as she is motivated by those things, whatever they are, that her total evidence indicates to be utility-promoting. Two important points: (1) Total evidence includes higher-order evidence of our own fallibility, which is why for most of us it's reasonable to be more moved by generally reliable rules/laws than by our own attempts at directly calculating utilities. In particular, miscalculation can't get one off the hook for torture or other actually-disastrous acts. (2) There are a couple of ways to have the right motivations. One might, like the cautious Meenie, treat the surface features as merely instrumental to the ultimate goal of maximizing utility. Or else one might, like Eenie [or the sophisticated consequentialist], regard the surface features non-instrumentally. I'm tempted to say that either option is equally good from the internal perspective of 'virtue', but that the latter may be more fortunate (given plausible empirical assumptions about the external world).

What do you think?

Evaluating Character

Consequentialists are comfortable evaluating whether one's character is "morally fortunate" (beneficial). But people commonly evaluate characters on other dimensions also. To see this, imagine that a Trickster God sets things up so that the best consequences result from vicious desires (e.g. to gratuitously harm others). So it might be good to make ourselves bad. For this claim to be coherent, we must be talking about two different kinds of evaluation: it might be fortunate (rather than harmful) to make ourselves vicious (rather than virtuous). This disambiguation resolves the apparent contradiction. But it raises a new question: how should consequentialists analyze virtue and vice, as distinct from un/fortunate character? I think of virtue as "moral rationality", but this requires some unpacking.

As a first pass, we might think that virtue consists in aiming at or desiring the good. But do we mean 'the good' de dicto or de re? These interpretations come apart if someone has false normative beliefs (consider Huck Finn, who thinks he's morally required to report runaway slave Jim). I'm with Arpaly in thinking that it reflects better on the agent to act against their false normative beliefs ('crazy notions') in such cases. Since Huck Finn is moved by what is in fact morally important (namely, Jim's humanity), he thereby shows himself to be of virtuous (admirable) character, and his acts performed from this disposition of character are thereby praiseworthy.

So, as our second pass: virtue consists in concern for the [actual, de re] right-making features (or what I long ago called 'partial reasons'). This still isn't quite precise enough, since (as Liz points out) we can distinguish 'surface' and 'deep' right-making features. Most moral theories will agree that the "surface right-making features" include, say, respecting autonomy, keeping promises, helping others in need, etc. These are all things that can - all else equal, or in the appropriate combination - make an act right. But different moral theories will diverge in their underlying explanations of why these features are right-making: whether it is because they tend to promote utility, or respect the Categorical Imperative, or whatever.

This raises the question: does virtue require a concern for the ultimate right-making feature (so that, if utilitarianism is true, whole-hearted Kantians can't be virtuous)? Or is it enough to get the surface features (including their relative weightings, etc.) right? The former option seems excessively strict. But it is tricky to come up with a principled reason to prefer the latter.

One possibility is that we should think of the deep feature ("being utility-maximizing") as really a kind of higher-order property: it is merely alerting us to the fact that the act in question has other (surface) features in virtue of which it maximizes utility. The claim that φ-ing maximizes utility doesn't add anything further to the claims that φ-ing helps Bob, harms no-one, and has no significant opportunity costs. If surface features have explanatory priority in this way, that could explain why it is that proportionate concern for them, rather than the deep feature as such, is what's constitutive of good will (virtue).

I'm not sure how plausible that particular attempt is (feedback welcome!). But in my next post I'll explain how utilitarians had better be able to establish this result somehow or other, because it's essential to their theory's ability to get the right results on questions of praise/blameworthiness.