tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post7929013819987537275..comments2023-10-29T10:32:36.914-04:00Comments on Philosophy, et cetera: Utilitarianism and Reflective EquilibriumRichard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-20253582308990861852022-02-13T20:31:13.910-05:002022-02-13T20:31:13.910-05:00Ah, I see. I thought that by, "what fundament...Ah, I see. I thought that by, "what fundamentally matters" you meant to refer to some common ground between deontologists and utilitarians, not employ a different way of stating what's at issue from what deontologists typically use. My mistake.willcombs10https://www.blogger.com/profile/02166714552981829309noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-24311929076657557712022-02-13T18:58:57.038-05:002022-02-13T18:58:57.038-05:00(I mean, overlap between different people regardin...(I mean, overlap between different people regarding what they find intuitive, etc...)Richard Y Chappellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-22129873970628326302022-02-13T18:57:53.592-05:002022-02-13T18:57:53.592-05:00Deontologists typically makes claims about what...Deontologists typically makes claims about what's right or wrong, not what's important. My suggestion is that their claims sound much less plausible when re-stated in terms of <i>what's important</i>. Of course, it's always possible for someone to reject an argument like this by "biting the bullet" and just accepting the verdicts that I think sound crazy. (In just the same way that a utilitarian could dismiss any putative counterexamples by biting the bullet and saying nothing more than that they aren't bothered by those implications.)<br /><br />Argument can get no grip on someone who isn't the slightest bit bothered by the implications of their view that seem bothersome to others. But in practice, there tends to be pretty strong overlap between what people find prima facie intuitive or bothersome, which is why philosophers don't usually just "bite the bullet" without saying at least <i>something</i> more to try to weaken the apparent force of the objection (as I did with the putative counterexamples to utilitarianism, for example).Richard Y Chappellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-1514044061551219292022-02-13T17:07:01.439-05:002022-02-13T17:07:01.439-05:00BTW, I don't mean "Is this just an 'i...BTW, I don't mean "Is this just an 'incredulous stare'" to come off as accusatory here. Some people think that's a fine philosophical response - I'm simply wondering if that is indeed the response you're giving here.willcombs10https://www.blogger.com/profile/02166714552981829309noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-63335731782417222572022-02-12T03:43:13.225-05:002022-02-12T03:43:13.225-05:00"* Most importantly, deontology makes incredi..."* Most importantly, deontology makes incredible claims about what fundamentally matters. It seems completely wild to claim that keeping a deathbed promise (to borrow one of Huemer's examples) is seriously more important, in principle, than the entire lives of many innocent people. So either deontologists are stuck making completely wild claims of this sort, or their normative prescriptions (concerning what we allegedly ought to do) bear no relation to what really matters."<br /><br />Is this just an "incredulous stare"? Why couldn't the deontologist simply say right back that your claims about what fundamentally matters are "incredible" and "wild"? Or do you intend the links to do the argumentative work and this remark is just a summary of your conclusions?willcombs10https://www.blogger.com/profile/02166714552981829309noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-74259982493956926352022-01-25T00:13:41.069-05:002022-01-25T00:13:41.069-05:00Not sure if this is objectionable self promotion b...Not sure if this is objectionable self promotion but I wrote a ten part series responding to Huemer's argument here https://benthams.substack.com/ <br />I addressed each of the specific thought experiments. Deliberation Under Ideal Conditions https://www.blogger.com/profile/04561344275433727965noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-43067771536814732702022-01-24T10:04:07.521-05:002022-01-24T10:04:07.521-05:00One obvious downside to being a Bond villain is th...One obvious downside to being a Bond villain is that the rest of society will judge you to be a (highly unpredictable) threat, and react accordingly. That alone is sufficient reason for utilitarians to instead focus on more co-operative (less rights-violating) sorts of endeavours, of which there are plenty. Moral uncertainty is another reason (not to mention the obvious empirical uncertainty).<br /><br />That said, I've argued since the start of the pandemic that <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2020/04/pandemic-moral-failures-how.html" rel="nofollow">conventional morality is deadly in a pandemic</a> and we should be more open to exploring the possible benefits of (consensual) deliberate infection to allow for early targeted immunity (before vaccines were available). So while I wouldn't go all the way to your "Bond villain" position, I do agree that there's plenty to criticize in folk morality here.Richard Y Chappellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-12862152685372339332022-01-24T09:47:15.503-05:002022-01-24T09:47:15.503-05:00This will be one of those weird comments about uti...This will be one of those weird comments about utilitarianism in which I ask you to assume the truth of a whole bunch of probably-false things. The first of these is to suppose that the Omicron variant of COVID-19 will act as a relatively benign, self-administering COVID vaccine that quickly sweeps away the far more dangerous variants from the entire world, essentially ending the pandemic by replacing the lung-damaging COVID-19 variants with an new coronavirus-caused cold (possibly true; too soon to tell, but suppose). Second, suppose that the utilitarian scientists who created Omicron in their secret island compound and then released it in Africa knew enough about virology to be justifiably confident that this would be the result of the genetic changes they made to the Wuhan strain, and they were justifiably certain that it wouldn't kill more people than the non-engineered alternative and its likely descendants. Of course, scientists did not engineer Omicron. Omicron got all its mutations from the Wuhan strain infecting mice who passed the virus among themselves before reinfecting humans. We just got incredibly lucky that the mice accidentally made the almost-perfect pandemic solution for us humans. But if human scientists created it deliberately under the suppositions made, I claim that this would make them the greatest moral heroes of our generation. <br /><br />Here is my evidence that my very strong intuition about the heroic nature of that deed would be seen differently by the general public: Nobody was remotely even exploring this kind of deliberate pandemic-ending strategy, presumably because it's so ethically indefensible that it's not even worth contemplating. Sure, there was some talk about engineering contagious coronavirus vaccines *for bats and other wildlife* but never humans. I presumed that this was due to the inherent unpredictability of viruses in the wild, that we couldn't be sure the engineered virus wouldn't do something weird and become a killer. But then I looked into the actual immunology involved and found that while this is strictly true, we can make very accurate predictions about which systems a virus will affect in a human. What's more, we also can't be sure that the natural Delta strain won't do something weird and become an even bigger killer. It's not hard to suppose that Delta is far more likely to mutate into a catastrophic variant than a carefully engineered Omicron is. Still I feel like ordinary people who suppose all these things would say it's still *obviously* wrong for scientists to infect humans with Omicron, and that it's morally preferable to leave Delta circulating and try beating it back with masks and distancing and vaccines.<br /><br />Obviously, my intuitions go the other way. If we know enough about viruses to create something like Omicron (which isn't safe: it still kills people with co-morbidities; it's only far safer than the natural alternative), I consider it a moral crime that we didn't do it in 2020. In order to abide by ethical rules, we caused the needless deaths of millions and years of needless suffering for the survivors. A sentence like that seems genuinely paradoxical to me, but apparently, everyone else finds it simply right. I've never felt like more of a moral freak than I do when thinking about this, especially when arriving at conclusions like "being good requires becoming a Bond villain." I'd appreciate your thoughts.Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03638856877702739374noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-53542726742400520062022-01-22T23:49:58.511-05:002022-01-22T23:49:58.511-05:00To finish the typoed missing end to para 1: In som...To finish the typoed missing end to para 1: In some ways, such as measurement or identification of pleasure, even hedonism must rely on intuition, and is also incomplete: what about Einstienian relativity in physics? A fully explicit theory capturing the deontological morality that humans are born with could not be written down in a way humans could understand since it would be too complicated. Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08407005231454153248noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-46864196169609412362022-01-22T23:41:12.566-05:002022-01-22T23:41:12.566-05:00Amateur philosopher here. The comments below are b...Amateur philosopher here. The comments below are bit disorganized sorry, but I contend there's some good stuff in there.<br /><br /><br />Virtue ethics already captures intuitions excellently in many contexts, but it requires a lot of judgment to be exercised and is sort of silent in many important contexts as we get more tech at our disposal. I think part of the issue here is people put different weights on how much you put on sparsity vs. fit (to make the obvious statistics analogies). They say "the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience." There are tradeoffs here. I think most philosophers feel that no set of basic elements has yet been found (and perhaps never will) that captures intuition enough to trust it consistently over strong intuition. In some ways, such as measurement of utility <br /><br />The question becomes how one might try to work towards building a better set of basic elements to approximately capture most intuitions. The better such a theory we can find, the more we'd be willing to trust it when it goes against stronger and stronger intuitions?<br /><br />What would a good theory that approximated deontological ethics look like? It would need to use methods from economic theory and philosophical logic (including fuzzy logic) to describe 1) tradeoffs between different values and 2) different kinds of "relativity" that are inherent in deontology. It would need to talk about how much weight you give to the various deontological ideas in different situations (see in two sentences for a list of these). In principle some of these weights, parameters, and marginal rates of substitution could be elicited from asking people about cases and then calibrating models, but this will be extremely hard and will probably not be feasible in a serious way without at least another 1000 years of progress in various disciplines. The aforementioned deontological ideas include: desert, reciprocity, local egalitarianism, preference for humans, status quo preference, respect of institutions, history-dependence (e.g. redressing past injustice), prioritization of close-ones, honesty. Deontological ideas make use of other concepts like causation which are themselves tricky. <br /><br />I don't think reflective equilibrium, coherentism, or foundationalism are very helpful terms. It seems like Bayesian epistemology would be the natural thing to use try to make reflective equilibrium more precise though I know there's lots of difficulties there. There's a difference between one the one hand trying out a theory and seeing what it implies and comparing that with intuition and comparing this with the performance of alternative theories, and, on the other hand, "treating the theory as unrevisable" which is what Rawlsians usually accuse utilitarians of.<br /><br /><br />Some relevant references: <br />- Alan Thomas: Should Generalism be our Regulative Ideal?<br />- Horgan and Timmons: What Does the Frame Problem Tell us About Moral Normativity?<br />- Susan Schneider: The Language of Thought: A New Philosophical Direction<br />- Eyal Zamir: Law, Economics, and Morality<br /><br /><br /><br />Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08407005231454153248noreply@blogger.com