tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66420112024-03-13T11:09:56.345-04:00Philosophy, et ceteraProviding the questions for all of life's answers.Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.comBlogger64125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-57534324642607518252021-06-02T13:09:00.000-04:002021-06-02T13:09:29.483-04:00Philosophical Pluralism and Modest Dogmatism<p>Philosophers are sometimes prone to <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/02/skepticism-rationality-and-default.html">excessive skepticism</a>, especially in the face of persisting disagreement. People often seem really bothered by the lack of consensus in philosophy (including, e.g., <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2010/12/actual-vs-possible-disagreement.html">Derek Parfit</a>, <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2012/10/unreliable-philosophy.html">Jason Brennan</a>, and most recently, <a href="https://dailynous.com/2021/05/24/analytic-philosophys-triple-failure-of-confidence/#comment-423867">Liam Kofi Bright</a>). But a large portion of such worries seem to stem from a failure to appreciate <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2010/12/ideal-disagreement.html">when actual disagreement is (distinctively) undermining</a>:</p><blockquote>In cases of what we might call 'non-ideal' disagreement, there's a presumption that the disagreement is rationally resolvable through the identification of some fallacy or procedural mis-step in the reasoning of either ourselves or our interlocutor. The disagreement is 'non-ideal' in the sense that we're only disagreeing because one of us made a blunder somewhere. We are sufficiently similar in our fundamental epistemic standards and methods that we can generally treat the other's output as a sign of what we (when not malfunctioning) would output. The epistemic significance of the disagreement is thus that the conflicting judgment of a previously-reliable source is some evidence that we have made a blunder <i>by our own lights</i>, though we may not yet have seen it. </blockquote><p>Many philosophical disagreements do not have this crucial feature. This is <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2018/02/philosophical-expertise-deference-and.html">because</a> "(i) there are many possible internally coherent worldviews, (ii) philosophical argumentation proceeds through a mixture of <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2007/06/coherent-persuasion.html">ironing out incoherence</a> and making us aware of possibilities we had previously neglected." As a result, many philosophical disagreements simply reflect <i>different substantive starting points</i> rather than any purely procedural blunder. And the fact that somebody exists who holds different substantive starting points than you has <i>zero</i> epistemic import over and above the prior observation that there are coherent alternatives to your own view (which you really should already know!).</p><p>Now, it's totally fair to worry about the epistemic significance of coherent alternatives. As I <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2018/02/philosophical-expertise-deference-and.html">put it previously</a>, it follows that "(iii) even the greatest [philosophical] expertise... will only help you to reach the truth if you start off in <i>roughly the right place</i>. Increasing the coherence of someone who is totally wrong (i.e. closer to one of the many internally coherent worldviews that is objectively incorrect) won't necessarily bring them any closer to the truth."</p><p>Good reasoning provides no guarantee of truth. There's a real possibility that we're irreparably mistaken, in which case no amount of procedurally conscientious reasoning would see us right. Moreover, there's no neutrally-recognizable standard by which we can determine whether we are irreparably mistaken in this way. (If there were, the error wouldn't be so irreparable, after all!) These facts may be disheartening to those who hoped for a transparent light of Reason to guide our way; but epistemic maturity requires us to recognize that such Cartesian hopes were never really reasonable or realistic in the first place. We muddle by as best we can, and hope for the best. If we successfully reach (or at least approximate) an internally-coherent position, it's possible that the one we reached is the <i>one true view</i> of the matter, but we cannot expect to be able to <i>prove</i> this to any who doubt us -- not even ourselves. The most we can hope for is to be, in a sense, philosophically <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/ELGLTB">lucky</a>. (But that's a fine thing to hope for! Nothing is gained by holding out for unattainable Cartesian certainties. It remains well worth striving for coherence, since that at least gives us a <i>chance </i>at being right.)</p><p>Once the above lessons are properly internalized, <b>viewpoint diversity and philosophical dissensus comes to seem entirely appropriate</b>. We need advocates to work out all the options, after all. (Nothing is gained by having a coherent alternative view be routinely ignored or overlooked: a merely sociological uniformity of opinion is no "consensus" worth having.) And if a view is internally coherent, you shouldn't expect to be able to argue a sophisticated advocate out of that position. Nothing forces them to share your premises!</p>Rather than seeing this as some deep failure of "analytic philosophy" (as if different training would somehow break the logical symmetry between modus ponens and modus tollens), I'd encourage clear-eyed acceptance of this reality, combined with <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/02/skepticism-rationality-and-default.html">default trust</a> or optimism about your own philosophical projects. After all, unlike all those fools who disagree with you, YOU'RE beginning from roughly the right starting points, right? ;-)Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-54532708747517026332021-01-18T14:46:00.002-05:002021-08-27T07:56:16.287-04:00Lessons from the Pandemic<p>It's generally recognized that our (American) response to the Covid-19 pandemic was disastrous. But I think far fewer appreciate the <i>full </i>scale of the disaster, or the most significant causal levers by which the worst effects could have been avoided. (Yes, Trump was bad. But his public health disinformation and politicization of masking -- while obviously bad -- may prove relatively trivial compared to the mammoth failings of our public health institutions and medical establishment.) Much of the pandemic's harm could have been mitigated had our institutions been properly guided by the most basic norms of cost-benefit analysis. Consider:</p><p><span></span></p><a name='more'></a><p></p><p><b>(1) The dangers of blocking innovation by default.</b> In ordinary circumstances, the status quo is relatively safe and so untested medical innovations present asymmetric risks. That is, until they are proven safe and effective, it may be reasonable to assume that the potential risks of an untested product outweigh its potential benefits, and so block public access to such products until they pass stringent testing requirements. (There are arguments to be made that FDA regulations are excessively onerous even in ordinary circumstances, but I remain neutral on that question here. I take it that there is at least a reasonable case to be made in the FDA's defense ordinarily. No such case for the FDA's stringency seems possible in a pandemic.)</p><p>A pandemic reverses the asymmetry of risk. Now it is the status quo that is immensely dangerous, and a typical sort of medical intervention (an experimental drug or vaccine, say) is comparatively less so. The potential benefits of innovation likely outweigh the potential risks for many individuals, and <i>vastly</i> so on a societal scale, where the value of information is immense. So the FDA's usual regulations should have been streamlined or suspended for potential pandemic solutions (in the same way that any <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAPET-3">ethics barriers beyond the minimum baseline of informed consent should have been suspended for pandemic research</a>). <b><i>This should be the first thing the government does in the face of a new pandemic.</i></b> By <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2020/12/combining-experimental-vaccines.html">blocking access to experimental vaccines at the start of the pandemic</a>, <i>the FDA should be regarded as <a href="https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/12/the-simple-math-of-fda-delay.html">causally responsible</a> for every Covid death that is occurring now </i>(and many that occurred previously).</p><p>Just think: if any willing member of the public could have purchased themselves a shot of the experimental Moderna vaccine back in the first half of 2020, its effectiveness would have been proven <i>much</i> sooner, and production and distribution ramped up accordingly, bringing about an end to the pandemic <i>many</i> months sooner than we will actually achieve. The sheer <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2020/12/scale-and-symmetry-in-covid-debates.html">scale</a> of the avoidable harms suffered here is almost impossible to over-state. (If the FDA managed to prevent a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal">Thalidomide</a>-scale disaster <i>every year</i> for several decades, it still would not be sufficient to outweigh the harm of extending this pandemic by many months. But of course the real choice facing us is not so "all or nothing". There's no reason we can't reap the benefits of FDA protection -- if it is a benefit -- in ordinary circumstances, while sensibly suspending policies that are <i>very obviously</i> inapt in the face of a pandemic.)</p><p>Of course, we couldn't know in advance which (if any) experimental vaccines would work. Even so, the <i>expected</i> <i>value</i> of <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2020/12/combining-experimental-vaccines.html">my recommended policy</a> (encouraging experimental vaccination followed by low-dose viral inoculation to confirm immunity) strikes me as clearly positive, even just given what we knew back in March. (If you disagree, please comment there -- and show your working.) If nothing else, consider how many lives would have been saved simply by requiring immunity certification for anyone working in elder-care. Providing targeted immunity to high-risk transmission vectors in a pandemic should be an obvious policy priority. I'm appalled that it proved to be beyond our medical policy establishment.</p><p>I've focused here on the error of blocking opportunities for early immunity (whether through experimental vaccines or viral inoculation -- and of course the failure to run vaccine challenge trials also belongs on this list), but the underlying lesson applies to many other errors in pandemic policy, including banning early Covid tests (in Feb 2020), banning quick tests throughout the summer, etc. In future pandemics, the FDA should only be allowed to ban a pandemic-alleviating product after first producing a cost-benefit analysis to justify their intervention. In a pandemic, <i>innovation must be permitted by default</i>.</p><p><b><br /></b></p><p><b>(2) Misguided perfectionism:</b> Closely related to the above mistake is the implicit assumption that it's somehow <i>better to do (or allow) nothing than to do (or allow) something imperfect</i>. Letting the perfect be the enemy of the good in a pandemic is disastrous. Blocking quick Covid tests for having lower accuracy than slow ones is an obvious example of this form of stupidity. Deciding in advance that a vaccine must prove at least 50% effective in trials to receive FDA approval is another. (Obviously a 40% effective vaccine would be better than nothing! Fortunately it didn't come to that in the end, but this policy introduced extra risk of disastrous outcomes for no gain whatsoever.)</p><p>Compare <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/too-much-caution-is-killing-covid-patients-11606238928">Dr. Ladapo's argument in the WSJ</a> that "Doctors should follow the evidence for promising therapies. Instead they demand certainty." (<a href="https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-current-treatment-for-Covid-19/answer/Steve-Kirsch">Steve Kirsch expands on the complaint</a>.) Again, this is a very basic form of irrationality that we're seeing from the medical establishment. </p><p>Misguided perfectionism has also damaged the vaccine rollout due to prioritizing complex allocation schemes over ensuring that as many people are vaccinated as quickly as possible. (Some are letting doses spoil rather than "risk" vaccinating anyone "out of turn"!)</p><p>More examples are discussed <a href="https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/post/2020/12/31/how-perfectionism-has-made-the-pandemic-worse">here</a>.</p><p><b><br /></b></p><p><b>(3) Agency bias. </b>Sometimes the pressure to do nothing seems to stem from inflating fears of potential downside, while disregarding missed potential gains. Relatedly, we tend to blame people for harms that stem from action (whether performed or allowed), and ignore or downplay harms that stem from inaction (& so are seen as built into the status quo). While this bias leads to avoiding policies perceived as "risky", I don't call it "risk aversion" because while <i>some </i>risks are inflated, others are irrationally neglected. It seems closely related to the <a href="https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/12/the-omission-commission-error-is-deadly.html">omission-commission error</a>. Whatever its roots, it strikes me as a very deep-rooted psychological bias, and one that is plausibly behind much bad thinking about the pandemic.</p><div>One recent example of this mistake: holding second doses of vaccine in reserve instead of giving out <a href="https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/first-doses-first-show-your-work.html">first doses first</a> (and trusting that stockpiles would be replenished in time to provide booster shots before initial immunity waned). It's easy to imagine how "first doses first" could go wrong. But it's harder to see how that slight risk could mathematically outweigh the likely benefits of quickly vaccinating twice as many people, in "expected value" terms. As I <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2020/12/scale-and-symmetry-in-covid-debates.html">previously noted</a> (in relation to inoculation), it's not enough to just flag a potential down-side of a policy proposal. Every option in a pandemic has downsides. We need to assess which option is the <i>least bad, </i>or the most promising, in expectation.</div><p>Many of the world's problems (e.g. <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-megafires-why-wont-anybody-listen">California's wildfires</a>) may ultimately be traced back to a kind of asymmetrically-biased blame-aversion incentivizing a bad status quo over even mildly "risky" solutions that would obviously be worth trying according to a neutral cost-benefit analysis. Foolish inaction is frustrating enough in normal circumstances. It is outright disastrous in a pandemic.</p><p>(See also my companion post on <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2021/01/epistemic-calibration-bias-and-blame.html">the epistemic analogue of this asymmetric bias</a>.)</p><p><br /></p><p><b>(4) Status-quo bias. </b>This is really just a summary of the previous points. But I cannot possibly emphasize enough what a mistake it is to <i>privilege the status-quo in a pandemic</i>. It's just nuts. Quietly maintaining the status quo in a pandemic kills thousands upon thousands of people, and indirectly harms millions more. Yet everyone behaves as though it's somehow intolerably "<a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2020/04/pandemic-moral-failures-how.html">reckless</a>" to even consider unconventional policies that have any potential downside (no matter how disproportionately greater their potential upside). Meanwhile, the only people I see outraged about the FDA's obstructionism are libertarians who are always outraged by the FDA. How is it not obvious to all that obstructing medical progress is the single greatest threat in a pandemic? (If only this could inspire a fraction of the outrage that was directed at ordinary people for going to the beach...)</p><p><br /></p><p><b>(5) Other failures of cost-benefit analysis. </b>This all seems to come down to a failure to even attempt a proper cost-benefit analysis. This failure also took other forms. One of the most striking involved the blind prioritization of physical health over social, economic, and mental welfare. One saw this in the commonly-voiced idea that it was somehow "<a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2020/04/against-conventional-moral-decency.html">indecent</a>" to question whether lockdowns might do more harm than good all things considered, for example. (Not to mention the <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2020/12/against-bad-government-pandemic-edition.html">Covid "security theatre" of closing parks</a>!) N.B. I'm not here claiming that lockdowns were all bad. I'm claiming that cost-benefit analysis was needed to answer the question, and it's bad of people to deny this.</p><p><i>Aside:</i> I'm aware of studies showing that people are <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/116/22/10723">biased against experimentation</a>, and <a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/Sol3/Papers.Cfm?abstract_id=1682569">more risk-averse for others than for themselves</a> (both via <a href="https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/why-do-experiments-make-people-uneasy.html">Marginal</a> <a href="https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/we-are-more-risk-averse-for-other-people.html">Revolution</a>). I'm sure there must be similar studies on what we might call "health bias" -- prioritizing quantity over quality of life, and direct physical health threats over <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2020/12/scale-and-symmetry-in-covid-debates.html">indirect effects</a> on welfare -- any pointers would be most welcome.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>(6) Epistemic obtuseness</b>. The medical establishment's demand for certainty (mentioned under #2 above) is one kind of epistemic obtuseness. There are others worth mentioning. A big one is the assumption that we can have "no evidence" for P until a trial specifically testing for P has been conducted. (As <a href="https://www.facebook.com/robert.wiblin/posts/916998946645">Robert Wiblin jokes</a>, "We have no data on whether the Pfizer vaccine turns people into elves 12 months after they take it.") The <a href="https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/immunity-passports-in-the-context-of-covid-19">WHO trumpeted</a> that there was "no evidence" that Covid antibodies conferred any immunity, when in fact we had perfectly good (albeit uncertain) evidence of this based on (i) what we know of similar viruses, and (ii) the absence of large numbers of confirmed reinfections that we would expect to see after X months of a raging global pandemic if recovery did not confer any immunity whatsoever. (The latter evidence obviously got stronger the larger the value of X became.)</p><p><br /></p><p><b>(7) Mundane practical failures. </b>This post has focused on what I think are <i>philosophically interesting</i> lessons from the pandemic -- mistakes that stem from systematic biases in our thinking, for example. There are more mundane errors too: failures to plan for the logistics of vaccine distribution, and other "<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/18/opinion/biden-covid-19-plan.html">maddeningly obvious</a>" stuff. As a philosopher, I don't have any special expertise to add there, but readers are very welcome to contribute in the comments with whatever they take the biggest mistakes (and associated lessons) of the pandemic to be...</p><p><br /></p><p><b>UPDATE: </b>See also <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2021/01/the-risk-of-excessive-conservatism.html">my follow-up post</a> on why, even if you disagree with me (on various empirical details) you should nonetheless agree with me (on the more general need to guard against excessive conservatism in a pandemic). Or, for a more academic version, see my paper, '<a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/vi4x4s5fikwolpm/Chappell-StatusQuoRisk.pdf">Pandemic Ethics and Status Quo Risk</a>'.</p>Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-23445086376692863302020-05-30T15:07:00.005-04:002021-06-02T09:20:55.377-04:00What Makes Your Papers Worth Reading?Given how many academic papers are out there, it would be useful to have more filtering and discovery mechanisms for helping us to find the ones we might be most interested in. One thing that could help is if authors themselves offered a concise 'overview' of what they think makes their various papers worth reading (when they are). Many of us already <a href="http://yetterchappell.net/Richard/papers.html">list our papers on our websites</a>, but (i) standard academic abstracts rarely do a good job of explaining why a paper is worth reading, and (ii) who reads academic websites anyway? So I'm going to take a stab at doing this in a blog post, and invite others to follow suit (whether on Facebook or wherever you like: feel free to additionally post your response in the comments here, especially if your research interests overlap with mine at all). What lessons from your work do you wish were more widely appreciated?<br />
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Ordered by how much I happen to like each paper today:<br />
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<a name='more'></a>[Updated to add a new, 'zeroth' entry:]<div><br /></div><div><b>(0)</b> <b><a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/CHATRW-3">The Right Wrong-Makers</a> </b>(forthcoming in <i>PPR</i>) argues that the right- and wrong-making features of modern ethical theories needn't be as abstract as everyone tends to assume. We can thus avoid Stocker's charge of "moral schizophrenia" (or disharmony between our motives and our normative reasons) -- in striking contrast to those who hew to the orthodox consequentialist assumption that criteria of rightness and decision procedures bear no relation to each other. (Down with orthodoxy!)<br /><br />
<b>(1) <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAVR">Value Receptacles</a> </b>(<i>Noûs, </i>2015) argues that (i) the "separateness of persons" is best understood in terms of <i>fungibility</i>, and (ii) by recognizing each person as being of distinct (yet comparable) intrinsic value, <a href="https://www.utilitarianism.net/" target="_blank">utilitarianism</a> can appropriately avoid treating people fungibly, and hence avoid any "separateness of persons" objection that's worth worrying about. This is important because the SOP objection is a standard reason for rejecting aggregative <a href="https://www.utilitarianism.net/types-of-utilitarianism#consequentialism" target="_blank">consequentialism</a>. This paper shows (I believe decisively) that such moves are a mistake: contra Voorhoeve and others, respect for the separateness of persons provides no reason whatsoever to incorporate any kind of "non-aggregative perspective" into our moral theories.<br />
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(See also my <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2018/07/acts-attitudes-and-separateness-of.html">response to Lazar's objections</a>. I should probably turn that post into a proper follow-up paper someday.)<br />
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<b>(2) <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/CHADPA-8">Deontic Pluralism and the Right Amount of Good</a> </b>(forthcoming in <i>The Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism</i>). As previously summarized <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2019/04/deontic-pluralism-draft-paper.html">here</a>, this paper argues that the debate between maximizers, satisficers, and scalar consequentialists can be <i>dissolved</i>: each is instead correct about a different component of the overall moral terrain. This is another paper that I feel is pretty decisive, and could reshape its corner of the literature if the other participants happen to notice it.<br />
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<b>(3) <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAKWM">Knowing What Matters</a></b> (OUP chapter, 2017). This paper makes the case for a "flat-footed" response to Street's famous debunking arguments against normative realism. Few others seem to like this, but I think it's the way that realists should go, and I show that it's entirely coherent and internally defensible. What's more, I show that it follows from this that <b>Street's view is self-defeating</b>. Finally, I offer a diagnosis of when actual (as opposed to merely possible) disagreement matters, which I think undermines Parfit's motivation for seeking convergence amongst actually-existing philosophers and philosophical traditions. (See also <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2018/03/on-parfit-on-knowing-what-matters.html">my response to Parfit's response</a>.)<br />
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<b>(4) <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/CHASBE-4">Willpower Satisficing</a> </b>(<i>Noûs, </i>2019). This paper is more exploratory than decisive, showing how to improve satisficing consequentialism so as to (i) disallow the gratuitous prevention of goodness, and (ii) offer a principled account of where to "draw the line" for being satisfactory.<br />
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<b>(5) <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAFAF">Fittingness: the sole normative primitive</a> </b>(<i>Phil Quarterly</i>, 2012). This is by far my most cited paper, for all the wrong reasons. People cite it in passing as a representative of the "fittingness first" view, but the main purpose of the paper is instead to show what normative theorists can <i>learn</i> from taking fittingness seriously: most strikingly, that <b>global consequentialism is an empty view</b> (and, perhaps less surprisingly, that rule consequentialism is a structural mess). Originally titled 'Fitting Attitudes for Consequentialists', the heart of the paper is an argument for why consequentialists should really all just be Act Consequentialists.<br />
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<b>(6) <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAANR-2">Why Care About Non-Natural Reasons?</a> </b>(<i>APQ</i>, 2019) explains why a common objection -- that non-natural properties <i>aren't the right things to care about</i> -- is not a good objection to non-naturalist normative realism. It's a simple paper. (At some point I should turn my blog post on <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2019/06/ambiguously-normative-testimony.html">ambiguously normative testimony</a> into a follow-up paper, as I think I offer a pretty decisive refutation there of Bedke's latest paper pushing the opposing line.)<br />
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<b>(7) <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/CHARTA-5">Rethinking the Asymmetry</a></b> (CJP, 2017). Very exploratory. Defends the claim that there <i>are</i> (non-instrumental) moral reasons to bring good lives into existence, and that this isn't threatened by the datum that we typically aren't <i>obligated</i> to procreate. Also explores how best to accommodate our intuitive <i>partiality towards antecedently existing people</i>. A fun and interesting paper, I think, but unlikely to be "essential reading" for anyone.<br />
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<b>(8) </b><a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAVAS-3" style="font-weight: bold;">Virtue and Salience</a> (co-authored with <a href="http://yetterchappell.net/Helen/">Helen</a>, <i>AJP</i>, 2016) offers two main contributions: (i) it shows how we can preserve the intuition that letting a child drown is "worse", in a sense, than failing to save lives via charity, compatibly with the core Singerian claim that we've equal moral reason to prevent either harm; (ii) it argues that so-called "virtues of ignorance" (from Driver, Keller, Stroud, etc.) are better understood as virtues of (non-)salience, reducing the putative conflict between moral and epistemic norms.<br />
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<b>(9) <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAFOT-11">Fittingness Objections to Consequentialism</a> </b>(OUP chapter, 2019). This paper was reframed to better fit with the volume's theme, but at heart it's about the relation between decision procedures and criteria of rightness. It offers: (i) an account of why consequentialist orthodoxy, including Railton's sophisticated consequentialism, is an inadequate response to character-based objections, and (ii) a more charitable account of what a "subjective" (or fitting) consequentialist agent would look like. A key idea I defend is that our moral theory provides the morally fitting aims or motivations, whereas the fitting "guiding dispositions" (concerning the role of explicit calculation, etc.) are instead a reflection of instrumental rationality, not moral theory at all.<br />
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<b>(10) <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/YETMMM">Mind-Body Meets Metaethics: A Moral Concept Strategy</a></b> (co-authored with Helen, <i>Phil Studies</i>, 2013). We argue that there are important parallels between the debates over physicalism and metaethical naturalism, that the former are better-developed (due to taking conceivability arguments more seriously), and suggest how the latter could learn from this.<br />
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<b>(11) <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAAQL">Against "Saving Lives": Equal Concern and Differential Impact</a></b> (<i>Bioethics</i>, 2016) Addresses the objection that QALYs are objectionably "discriminatory". Very simple, but people (esp. bioethicists) do tend to make simple mistakes when they don't like the practical implications of an impartial moral principle.<br />
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<b>(12) <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAPET-3">Pandemic Ethics: The Case for Risky Research</a> </b>(co-authored with Peter Singer, forthcoming in <i>Research Ethics</i>). Uses parity principles to argue for the permissibility of conducting risky but promising pandemic research (e.g. human challenge trials, variolation) using human volunteers. Again, very simple and straightforward.<br />
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<b>(13) <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/CHAIPC">Incentivizing Patient Choices: The Ethics of Inclusive Shared Savings</a></b> (<i>Bioethics</i>, 2016). Boring policy paper, only worth reading if you're <i>really</i> into healthcare policy.<br />
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* * *<br />
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Well, that's all I've got for now. Over to you: Which of <i>your</i> papers do you regard as most "worth reading", and why?</div><div><br /></div><div><b>UPDATE: See <a href="https://www.philosophyetc.net/2020/12/philosopher-spotlight-series.html">here</a> for a list of others' entries in the series!</b></div>Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-54513416338561551102012-04-10T21:18:00.005-04:002021-06-02T12:35:35.433-04:00Singer's Pond and Quality of Will<a href="https://www.utilitarianism.net/utilitarian-thinker/peter-singer" target="_blank">Singer</a> argues that, just as we're obliged to save a drowning child at modest cost to ourselves (e.g. ruining an expensive suit), so we're obliged to help the distant needy when we're in a position to do so (e.g. by donating to <a href="http://www.givewell.org/">GiveWell</a>-recommended aid organizations). People often balk at this comparison, but I <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2012/04/when-is-significant-self-sacrifice.html">don't see any plausible grounds for escaping the conclusion</a> that we have similarly strong reasons to act in either case.<br />
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What's more, I don't think this particular result is really all that counter-intuitive, either. <i>Of course</i> we have incredibly strong reasons to save innocent lives whenever we can! What could be more important, or more worth choosing, than that? This claim about the strengths of various reasons for action -- call it <i>the Act Evaluation</i> -- is eminently plausible.<br />
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What is counter-intuitive, I think, is the putative implication that when we fail to donate to effective charities we are thereby <i>just as bad</i>, or as blameworthy, as a person who lets a child drown before their eyes. <a name='more'></a> (Call this <i>the Character Evaluation</i>.) Such a person, we feel, would have to be monstrously callous. As for ourselves, we may not be saints, but at least we are surely not moral monsters. Thus the comparison strikes us as preposterous.<br />
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I think this objection to the Character Evaluation is spot on. Consider a <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/05/evaluating-character.html">quality of will</a> account, on which we are blameworthy to the extent that our actions manifest an insufficient degree of good will (e.g. concern for others). And now notice that differences in what strikes us as salient may lead us to act differently even if there's no difference in our quality of will (or altruistic concern). In particular, our concern for others is much more likely to trigger altruistic action when another's need is made vividly <i>salient</i> to us -- as when we see a child drowning right before our eyes, as opposed to hearing abstract descriptions of the needs of distant strangers.<br />
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It seems to be a fact of human psychology that you would need to be <i>a much more callous person</i> to neglect a child drowning before your eyes, than to neglect the needs of distant strangers. I think it is this fact that we are correctly picking up on when we look askance at Singer's analogy. But this fact also shows us why the Act Evaluation does not entail the Character Evaluation, so that our intuitive resistance to the latter should not prevent us from accepting the former. After all, while facts about salience and the psychological vividness might well affect how blameworthy an act of apparent neglect is (since to neglect vivid and salient needs is to manifest a greater callousness than is found in our commonplace neglect of distant strangers' needs), these facts about our own psychologies can't plausibly be taken to affect how <i>choice-worthy</i> the various actions are.<br />
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Some confusion may arise due to the ambiguity of 'obligation' talk. Obligation is often understood as <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2011/12/scalar-consequentialism-and-constructed.html">closely related to blameworthiness</a>. (Roughly: you're blameworthy if you violate an obligation without an excuse.) Maybe that's the most natural reading. But this moral category ends up being a somewhat <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2011/12/scalar-consequentialism-and-constructed.html">convoluted construction</a> that fundamentally concerns <i>character</i> rather than <i>act</i> evaluation. And Singer's argument really only works if we're talking about basic act evaluation (i.e., choice-worthiness, or reasons for action). So perhaps it's unhelpful for consequentialists to speak of 'obligation' here when we're really concerned with the 'ought' of choice-worthiness.<br />
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Terminology aside, though, I take it that in practical deliberation we should be concerned with making choice-worthy choices, rather than just avoiding blameworthiness. (Akratic as we are, we might at least adopt the latter standard as a minimum "baseline" that we must meet to maintain our self-respect as moral agents. But it's always better to do better...)<br />
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In summary:<br />
<br />
<b>(1) The Character Evaluation is intuitively mistaken</b>, because blameworthiness depends on quality of will, and equally choiceworthy acts might exemplify different degrees of moral (un)concern if the morally relevant features are psychologically much more vivid and salient in one case than the other. In particular, letting a child drown before your eyes plausibly exemplifies (at least in typical human agents) a much greater degree of callousness and lack of concern for others than is involved in our failure to save distant strangers.<br />
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<b>(2) The Act Evaluation is plausibly true</b>, since the choice-worthiness of an act depends just on the morally relevant features of the situation, and not on how psychologically vivid and salient these features are to us.<br />
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<b>(3)</b> Once we clearly distinguish the Act Evaluation from the Character Evaluation, we may find that only the latter is counter-intuitive, whereas the former is actually quite plausible.<br />
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On a more practical note, I hope that by explicitly severing the connection to negative moral emotions (guilt, blame, etc.), the Act Evaluation becomes less apt to provoke defensive responses from people -- You can accept it without thinking yourself a horrible person! Yay! -- and I think it can even start to sound positively appealing. And from there one might be inspired to take some initial steps towards making more of these incredibly choice-worthy decisions, e.g. by <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2010/11/giving-what-we-can.html">joining Giving What We Can or similar philanthropic movements</a>. And that would be cool. Not because you're a moral monster if you don't. But just because it's really worth doing.Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-11388305863071510492012-02-03T12:43:00.002-05:002013-03-29T09:36:43.034-04:00The Separateness of Persons: Commensurability without FungibilityIt seems to me that the famed "separateness of persons" objection to consequentialism rests on the confused assumption that <i>commensurable</i> values (ones that can be compared and traded off against each other) are thereby <i>fungible</i> values (such that a loss to one is not merely outweighed, but actually cancelled, by a greater gain to another). I'll explain in a moment why this is a mistake. But first, let's motivate the objection with a simple case:<br />
<blockquote>
Connie has just enough anti-venom to save one of the two poison victims before her. Now, faced with their pleading faces, but realizing it makes no difference to the total welfare, Connie finds herself totally uninterested in the question of who to save. It strikes her as no more normatively significant than the choice between a $20 bill or two tens.</blockquote>
<a name='more'></a><br />
To many -- myself included -- such indifference seems inappropriate. We think that which person survives is a matter of normative significance, so that Connie is (in her thoughts) making a kind of moral <i>mistake</i>.<br />
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I take this scenario to exemplify the worry that consequentialists see people instrumentally, as mere "receptacles" of value, or that they neglect the separateness of persons. Critics are assuming, in effect, that consequentialists must follow Connie in treating the welfare of distinct persons as a mere number, free-floating and fungible.<br />
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But once we realize that the fitting consequentialist agent would <a class="vt-p" href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2010/02/desiring-each-good.html">desire each good (separately)</a>, we can see the mistake in this way of thinking. The problem with Connie is that she doesn't appreciate that each individual's welfare is a <i>distinct</i> intrinsic good. She, in effect, only sees a single token good -- the aggregate welfare -- whereas a more plausible consequentialist view holds that the aggregate is merely an abstraction from a great plurality of distinct intrinsic goods (namely: each distinct person's welfare).<br />
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Since the fitting consequentialist will have distinct intrinsic desires for each person's welfare, they will not react with <a class="vt-p" href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/08/equal-vs-identical-value.html"><i>indifference</i>, but rather <i>ambivalence</i></a>, when faced with tradeoffs like Connie's. They will be pulled in both directions, torn by the distinct importance of the two lives (only one of which can be saved), and whichever one they do save, they will still see something regrettable about the loss of the other.<br />
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In this way, the consequentialist can fully appreciate the separateness of persons. They make tradeoffs between lives, seeing that a greater benefit to one <i>outweighs</i> a lesser cost to another, but that does not entail seeing the two as fungible like money. For the benefit to one does not <i>cancel</i> the loss to another, which is instead seen as a unique and irreplaceable source of regret. But it is not <i>as</i> regrettable as it would have been to forsake the greater (and also unique) benefit to another.<br />
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In short: We can make tradeoffs between distinct intrinsic values, recognizing that some may be more important than others, without thereby turning them into merely instrumental values (fungible means to some further end of "aggregate" value). This is demonstrated by the distinction between indifference and ambivalence -- or, more generally, between tradeoffs where the cost is cancelled by the gain, vs. those where the cost remains distinctly regrettable, and is merely outweighed by the gain.<br />
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[For a more developed version of this argument, see my paper, '<a class="vt-p" href="http://philpapers.org/rec/CHAVR">Value Receptacles</a>'.]Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com32tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-3346273203113231892011-11-30T21:07:00.002-05:002012-02-03T12:51:28.417-05:00Satisficing by EffortSatisficing Consequentialism aims to capture the intuitive idea that <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2007/09/imperfectly-right.html">we're not morally obligated to do the best possible</a>, we merely need to do "good enough" (though of course it remains <i>better</i> to do better!). Ben Bradley, in '<a href="http://philpapers.org/rec/BRAASC">Against Satisficing Consequentialism</a>', argues convincingly against forms of the view which introduce the baseline as some <i>utility level</i> n that we need to meet. Such views absurdly condone the act of gratuitously preventing boosts to utility over the baseline n. But I think there is a better form that satisficing consequentialism can take. Rather than employing a baseline utility level, a better way to "satisfice" is to introduce a level of <i>maximum demanded effort</i> below which one straightforwardly maximizes utility. That is:<br />
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<b>(Effort-based Satisficing Consequentialism)</b> An act is permissible iff it produces no less utility than any alternative action the agent could perform with up to <i>X</i> effort.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Different theories of this form may be reached by fleshing out the effort ceiling, <i>X</i>, in different ways. It might be context-sensitive, e.g. to ensure (1) that it's never permissible to do just a little good when a huge amount of good could be achieved by an only <i>slightly</i> more effortful action; (2) that vicious people can't get away with doing little just because it would take a lot more effort for them to show the slightest concern for others; or (3) that your current effort ceiling takes into account your past actions, etc. I'll remain neutral on all those options for now.<br />
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To preempt one possible misreading, I should stress that this theory <i>doesn't</i> require (or even necessarily permit) you to "try hard" to achieve moral ends. That would be fetishistic. If you can achieve better results with less effort, then you're required to do just that! It merely places a <i>ceiling</i> on how much effort morality can demand from you. Within that constraint, the requirement is still just to do as much good as possible.<br />
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Some other features of the view worth flagging:<br />
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* Unlike traditional (utility baselines) satisficing accounts, it never condones going out of your way to make thing worse. Such action is rendered impermissible by the fact that there are better outcomes that you could <i>just as easily</i> -- indeed, <i>more</i> easily -- bring about (i.e. by doing nothing).<br />
<br />
* It respects the insight that the "demandingness" of maximizing consequentialism cannot consist in its imposing excessive <i>material</i> demands on us, since <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/08/fair-shares-and-others-responsibilities.html">the material burden on us is less</a> than the material burden that non-consequentialism <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/08/moral-demands-and-compliance-effects.html">imposes</a> on the impoverished (to remain without adequate aid). Instead, if there is an issue of "demandingness" at all, it must concern the <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2007/09/ego-depletion-and-moral-demands.html">psychological difficulty</a> of acting rightly.<br />
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* It builds on the idea that there's <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2011/02/natural-agents-and-status-quo-bias.html">no metaphysical basis</a> for a normatively significant doing/allowing distinction. The only morally plausible candidate in the vicinity, it seems to me, is <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/05/doingallowing-and-effortful-willing.html">effortful willing</a>.<br />
<br />
* It provides a natural account of supererogation as <i>going beyond the effort ceiling to achieve even better results</i>. (As others noted in class, traditional utility-baseline forms of satisficing consequentialism have trouble avoiding the absurd result that lazing back in your chair might qualify as "going above and beyond the call of duty", if you have inferior alternative options that nonetheless exceed the utility baseline.)<br />
<br />
So, all in all, this strikes me as by far the most promising form of satisficing consequentialism. Can anyone think of any obvious objections? How would you best flesh out the details (of how X gets fixed for any given situation)?<br />
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P.S. My <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2011/12/scalar-consequentialism-and-constructed.html">next post</a> will look at why we might be led to a view in this vicinity, over (or as a supplement to) straightforward scalar consequentialism.<br />
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[<b>Update:</b> Cross-posted to <a href="http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2011/12/satisficing-by-effort.html">PEA Soup</a>.]Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-62155708207409111932011-04-01T17:39:00.002-04:002012-02-03T12:51:28.419-05:00The Puzzle of the Self-TorturerWarren Quinn's (1993) 'Puzzle of the Self-Torturer' can be described <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dynamic-choice/#1.3">as follows</a>:<br />
<blockquote>Suppose someone — who, for reasons that will become apparent, Quinn calls the self-torturer — has a special electric device attached to him. The device has 1001 settings: 0, 1, 2, 3, …, 1000 and works as follows: moving up a setting raises, by a tiny increment, the amount of electric current applied to the self-torturer's body. The increments in current are so small that the self-torturer cannot tell the difference between adjacent settings. He can, however, tell the difference between settings that are far apart. And, in fact, there are settings at which the self-torturer would experience excruciating pain. Once a week, the self-torturer can compare all the different settings. He must then go back to the setting he was at and decide if he wants to move up a setting. If he does so, he gets $10,000, but he can never permanently return to a lower setting. Like most of us, the self-torturer would like to increase his fortune but also cares about feeling well. Since the self-torturer cannot feel any difference in comfort between adjacent settings but gets $10,000 at each advance, he prefers, for any two consecutive settings s and s+1, stopping at s+1 to stopping at s. But, since he does not want to live in excruciating pain, even for a great fortune, he also prefers stopping at a low setting, such as 0, over stopping at a high setting, such as 1000.</blockquote><br />
This is generally framed as a puzzle for <i>rational choice</i>: what setting should the self-torturer rationally select? But I think it is illuminating to first consider the question of objective value: which outcome would in fact be <i>best</i> for the agent?<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
The described scenario is one in which indiscriminability is intransitive. This implies that indiscriminability is <i>not sufficient</i> to establish phenomenal identity (since identity must be transitive). It cannot be that setting 0 feels the same as 1 which is the same as 2 ... 1000, if setting 0 does not feel the same as 1000. So it may well be that setting 1 is actually <i>more painful</i> than 0, and to that extent worse for the agent to experience, even if he cannot <i>tell</i> that this is so.<br />
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So, supposing that pain and wealth are perfectly commensurable, there will be some setting <i>s</i> that is objectively best for the agent -- i.e., representing the ideal tradeoff between pain and wealth -- even though superficial introspection would lead the agent to consider <i>s+1</i> a better option (offering more wealth and <i>seemingly</i> no more pain). So far so good: there's nothing particularly puzzling about the idea that non-omniscient agents may fail to recognize the best option.<br />
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But once we've secured the result that there is some fact of the matter as to which stopping point would be best, this also dissolves the 'puzzle' about rational choice. It is just like any other case of decision-making under uncertainty. The agent shouldn't determinately prefer each <i>s+1</i> to the previous <i>s</i>, since he knows that at some point along the way there will be an <i>s</i> that is the optimal choice, even though the next <i>s+1</i> will superficially <i>seem</i> like a better option to him.<br />
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In short: the puzzle is dissolved by recognizing that the agent shouldn't take pairwise indiscriminability to necessarily show that two experiences are phenomenally just as good. The puzzle arises because we're tempted to think that if you can't distinguish two experiences then they must feel the same way. But if one's ability to distinguish between experiences isn't transitive, then the tempting principle must be false. (The temptation is amplified by the ambiguity of 'seeming'. We might say that two experiences 'seem' the same when (i) the agent <i>judges</i> them alike, i.e. cannot tell them apart, or (ii) when they are phenomenally identical, i.e. have the same phenomenal <i>feel</i>. These two criteria come apart in the case under consideration!)<br />
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<blockquote>* My thoughts here arose in the course of class discussion, and are especially indebted to John Hawthorne.</blockquote>Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com25tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-79298629853487772582011-02-24T16:04:00.003-05:002014-01-19T12:51:39.882-05:00Personal Concern and Chains of CounterpartsIn chapter 9 of his forthcoming book <i>The Limits of Kindness</i> (cited with permission), Caspar Hare offers an ingenious argument for the view that transitivity + minimal decency (i.e. preferring pareto-superior alternatives, whereby some people are better off and nobody is worse off) actually commits us to <i>anonymous benevolence</i>, i.e. preferring world A over world B whenever the inhabitants can be put into a 1:1 correspondence such that the person in A is sometimes better off, and never worse off, than their paired member of B. So, for example, it commits us to preferring (contra Taurek) that we save the many rather than the few in rescue cases, and that we bring into existence better-off rather than worse-off people in non-identity cases. Very roughly, it's an argument that moves us from personal to impartial concerns.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Here's the gist of the argument: We can construct a 'morphing sequence' from any one person into another, whereby each step in the sequence involves just a tiny tweak to the person's qualitative characteristics, and hence (assuming that essence is not 'perfectly fragile', as Hare puts it) each step contains a counterpart of the person in the previous step. (The argument can be restated without relying on counterpart theory, but I won't get into that here.) It is an 'upslope' sequence if each step also features an improvement in welfare. Hare illustrates:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a class="vt-p" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JQ6-PO7pCDA/TWa_PZxpcPI/AAAAAAAAAPM/V3zpFuIs4kM/s1600/upslope-morphing.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="167" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JQ6-PO7pCDA/TWa_PZxpcPI/AAAAAAAAAPM/V3zpFuIs4kM/s640/upslope-morphing.png" width="640" /></a></div>"Each world contains a baby, and is succeeded by world in which a counterpart of that baby is better off." (p.172, Jan 2011 draft)<br />
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Since each world W_i+1 pareto dominates the previous world W_i, minimal decency requires us to have pairwise preferences for the latter of each such pair. Transitivity of rational preference then commits us to prefer the last world, W_Jill, over the first world, W_Jack, <i>even though there's no particular individual who exists in both worlds that is better off in the latter</i>.<br />
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It's a neat argument, but we can put pressure on it by observing that a similar argument would seem to imply that minimal decency commits us to <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/04/rationality-and-reflective-endorsement.html">preferring that more perfect people existed in place of our loved ones</a>. Maybe we should prefer it, if impartial consequentialism is true, but it sure shouldn't be <i>that</i> easy to establish. So, what's gone wrong?<br />
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Suppose that Jack is your beloved disabled son. The natural place for the partialist to get off the boat is to draw our attention to the last world in the sequence that contains a counterpart of Jack -- call it W_j. The loving parent certainly prefers W_j to the actual world W_Jack, since Jack is better off there and all else is equal. But must they prefer W_j+1 to W_j, as Hare supposes? It's true that <i>if</i> W_j were actual, then we'd have to prefer W_j+1. But given that W_Jack is actual, our personal concern has latched onto this person, Jack, who has no counterpart in W_j+1. The loving parent of Jack could thus reasonably prefer the world W_j where Jack exists (albeit with significantly different characteristics from those he actually has) and is pretty well-off, over the world W_j+1 which instead contains an even better-off person <i>who isn't their Jack</i> (though they are a close counterpart of the person who would have "been Jack" had W_j been actual).<br />
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Similar objections can be raised in rescue cases: at some point in the morphing sequence, there will be an individual who is not a direct counterpart of any actual person, but merely a counterpart-of-a-counterpart of an actually existing person. The partialist might reasonably prefer that (counterparts of) actual people exist rather than better-off other people. They can thus break the chain of pairwise preferences that Hare relies on.<br />
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In short: if it's rationally permissible for us to be '<a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/04/rationality-and-reflective-endorsement.html">biased towards the actual</a>', and prefer that the actually-existing people exist rather than slightly better-off different people, then Hare's morphing argument fails. Hare's "minimal decency" requirement is not so minimal as it sounds.Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-1716730338255539962009-10-12T18:08:00.012-04:002009-10-12T22:11:33.139-04:00Consequentialist Agents: Fittingness and Fortune[This is something of a manifesto for my current research project...]<br /><br />Critics of consequentialism often object to <i>how a consequentialist agent would (allegedly) think</i>. They claim that the consequentialist agent is, in some sense, a <i>bad</i> character. Defenders of consequentialism typically dismiss such objections by citing the distinction between 'criteria of rightness' and 'decision procedures'. (Utility provides the criterion that determines the moral status of an act; it's a further question whether agents ought to attempt to calculate utilities themselves.) This is not entirely satisfactory. There remains a real objection here that needs to be addressed, not just dismissed. As I will explain, consequentialists still need to say something about what a 'rational' or fitting moral (consequentialist) agent would look like -- and when they do, this leaves room for others to object that the agent thus pictured is not in any sense morally 'rational' or non-instrumentally ideal.<br /><a name='more'></a><br />To begin, we must distinguish two very different kinds of normative evaluation: the 'fortunate', and the 'fitting'. On the one hand, we can ask whether an agent's psychology is recommended by the normative theory as something to aim <i>at</i> -- roughly, whether it is desirable, or ought to be pursued, or such like. This is to ask whether it is a good or fortunate psychology to have. On the other hand, we can ask whether the agent's psychology <i>embodies</i> or "fits with" the normative theory -- roughly, whether the agent is responsive to the reasons posited by the theory: whether he desires what the theory says is desirable, etc. This is to ask whether the agent is, in a sense, rational or (as I will say) fit.<br /><br />This distinction is illustrated in cases of '<a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2005/03/rational-irrationality.html">rational irrationality</a>', where the best disposition to have is one that embodies irrationality. Parfit's threat ignorer (for example) is irrational, but his psychology is rationally recommended or fortunate, since by being intrinsically defective in this way the agent is more likely to attain rational goods (he will no longer be vulnerable to threats or blackmail).<br /><br />Similarly, a hedonist might say that only desires for pleasure are fitting, but it's fortunate -- better achieves the goal of pleasure -- to have other desires besides. Hedonists will think there's some sense in which an agent with other desires is rationally <i>defective</i>: they're desiring things which don't really warrant desire, after all. But, they'll say, it's fortunate to be defective in this way.<br /><br />Finally, in case of ethics, we should likewise <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/05/evaluating-character.html">distinguish</a> 'morally fortunate' from 'morally fitting' character. The fortunate character is that which serves to promote the good. The fitting character is that which embodies an orientation <i>towards</i> the good. This is the sense in which someone might have "good intentions", even if the intention has bad consequences, and so is unfortunate. Talk of "virtuous" character also plausibly concerns the 'fitting' mode of evaluation.<br /><br />To aid your intuitive grip of the distinction, we can identify two families of evaluative terms. In the first family, we find terms like 'desirable', 'fortunate', 'good [on net]', and their opposites. These mark a kind of evaluation that is at least partly instrumental. In the second family, we find terms like 'rational', competent, virtuous/vicious, fitting/perverse, well-meaning, 'well-functioning'/'defective', and <i>perhaps</i> 'intrinsically good'. I should emphasize that, while these terms mark a kind of <i>intrinsic</i> evaluation (whether an agent is rational, virtuous, etc., does not depend on the outside world), one needn't think that there is any <i>value</i> to being in this fitting state. That's a substantive axiological question.<br /><br />We're now in position to distinguish two anti-consequentialist objections. One claims that the fitting consequentialist psychology is <i>unfortunate</i> or 'self-defeating'. This is a very poor objection, as I explain in my old post, '<a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/11/whats-wrong-with-self-effacing-theories.html">What's wrong with self-effacing moral theories?</a>'<br /><br />But when deontologists complain about the bad character of a committed consequentialist agent, there is something else that they might mean. They might mean that the fitting consequentialist psychology is (contrary to the consequentialist's claims) <i>not actually morally fitting</i>. For example, they argue that the "ideally rational/virtuous" consequentialist agent is incapable of friendship or commitment to projects -- but, they add, this seems like an intrinsic defect: surely <i>genuine</i> virtue and rationality are not incompatible with these important goods. So, they conclude, the consequentialist's conception of rationality (virtue, fittingness) must be in error.<br /><br />This objection is the real challenge. Consequentialists have typically neglected it, because they have focused exclusively on evaluations of fortunateness. They haven't appreciated that their theory also commits them to a conception of the morally <i>fitting</i> agent. To take up this challenge, we must either (i) bite the bullet and insist that what the deontologist identifies as moral 'defects' are not really so, or else (ii) argue that, properly understood, the fitting consequentialist agent would not in fact possess the identified defect. (See, for example, my response to Stocker: '<a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/09/satisficing-and-salience.html">Satisficing and Salience</a>'.)<br /><br />Of course, the first step towards a solution is recognizing that you have a problem.<br /><br />[One might understand the developers of 'indirect' or 'sophisticated' consequentialism as working in this vein. But they have not always been clear about whether their theory commends the 'indirect' decision procedure as <i>fitting</i> or merely <i>fortunate</i>. Hence my previous post exploring the relation between <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/10/are-sophisticated-consequentialists.html">sophisticated consequentialism and 'rational irrationality'</a>.]Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-19792064771588324802009-09-14T15:59:00.005-04:002010-09-12T17:59:20.946-04:00Reasons Deflate Global ConsequentialismI'm beginning to think that <a class="vt-p" href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/11/evaluative-non-integration.html">global consequentialism</a> isn't really a distinctive position in its own right. It may be better understood simply as <i>act</i> consequentialism that takes care to <a class="vt-p" href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/08/what-global-consequentialism-isnt.html">not make straightforwardly false claims</a> about the consequential value of other evaluands (like rules, motives, etc.). Global consequentialists recognize that these other evaluands might bring about good or bad consequences by "external means" other than the agent's own downstream actions. But the denial of this is not anything so principled as an opposing <i>position</i>. It's just an oversight. <br />
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Here's the structure of my argument. I take as a premise the assumption that substantive normative claims <a class="vt-p" href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/08/importance-of-implications.html">must fundamentally concern normative <i>reasons</i></a> (of one kind or another). The core of my argument thus hinges on identifying what categories of practical reasons there are, about which consequentialist theories may then make substantive claims. When we do this, I argue, we find that there is nothing more for global consequentialism to <i>be</i> besides act consequentialism that avoids silly oversights.<br />
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Okay, let's begin. There are normative reasons for all sorts of judgment-sensitive states: beliefs, emotions, etc. But core moral theory is concerned with two categories in particular, the right and the good. 'The good' we may understand as a matter of <i>desirability</i>, or fitting reasons for desire. 'The right' concerns reasons for action. Consequentialist moral theories are those that treat the former class of reasons as having logical priority. Our reasons for action derive, in some sense, from considerations of desirability (value). Different consequentialist theories offer different derivations. Act consequentialists claim that our reasons for action derive directly from the value of <i>so acting</i>. Others (e.g. rule or motive consequentialists) suggest a more circuitous route, claiming that reasons for action instead derive from the value of possessing (say) the <i>character traits</i> that would dispose one to perform the action.<br />
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Global Consequentialists agree with Act Consequentialists about our reasons for action. (The right act is simply the one that's best.) But then they purport to make <i>further</i> claims, which is where matters become puzzling. As Pettit and Smith define the view:<br />
<blockquote>Global consequentialism identifies the right <i>x</i>, for any <i>x</i> in the category of evaluands -- be the evaluands acts, motives, rules, or whatever -- as the best [available] <i>x</i>, where the best <i>x</i>, in turn, is that which maximises value.</blockquote><br />
We previously saw that 'the right act' can be understood in terms of reasons for action. But what does it mean to call other evaluands, e.g. character traits, 'right'?<br />
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It is important to note that by (say) 'the right character', Pettit and Smith do <b>not</b> mean 'character such that the agent has decisive reason to <i>act</i> so as to bring it about.' The claim is not about reasons for action. It is just a claim about reasons for desire: the 'right' character is the best (most desirable) of those available. (Note that it may be desirable that Bob have some character trait X, without Bob thereby having sufficient reason to act so as to bring about this state of affairs, since the act may have costs -- including opportunity costs -- which render it not the best act available to him at this time.)<br />
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But this claim about desirability is not substantive. It's just a stipulation about how to apply the term 'right' to other evaluands. The fundamental normative theory differs not a whit from act consequentialism. Consider: Act consequentialism presupposes a theory of the good (desirability), and makes one new substantive claim: we have most reason to perform the act that would have the most desirable outcome. Global consequentialism agrees with this, and adds a bunch of stipulative claims in addition: e.g. we can call those character traits 'right' that would have the most desirable outcomes. But there's no new substantive claim here. <br />
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Anyone can happily assent to a tautology. A fortiori, Act Consequentialists can happily assent to the claim that we have most reason to desire that people have those traits [of those available] which are such that we have most reason to desire that people have them!<br />
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For Global Consequentialist claims (e.g. about the rightness of character traits) to be substantive in the way that Act Consequentialist claims about the rightness of actions are, it would have to be the case that we have basic "reasons for character" like we have reasons for action. But we don't. You can't reason your way to having a character trait. At best, you can reason your way to <i>wanting</i> to have a certain character trait, or else to <i>acting</i> so as to bring it about that you have a certain character trait. There are reasons for action and for desire, in relation to character traits, but there are not reasons directly "for" character traits.<br />
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Global consequentialists want to be consequentialists about everything. Since consequentialists treat value - desirability - as fundamental, to be a consequentialist about everything would be to treat all other kinds of reasons as deriving from reasons for desire. But the only other kind of reasons (within core moral theory)* are reasons for action. Given this limited domain available for consequentialists to make substantive claims, we find that <i>act consequentialists are already consequentialists about everything</i>. There's really nothing more to be a consequentialist about.<br />
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* = Unless one extends the view beyond the domain of core moral theory. One might be a consequentialist about belief, for example, by claiming that our reasons for belief derive from the desirability of holding a belief. But that's an absurd view. (At least, once we take care to <a class="vt-p" href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2005/09/acting-upon-yourself.html">distinguish</a> reasons <i>for belief</i> from reasons <i>for acting</i> upon oneself in a way that will causally produce belief.)<br />
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<b>Update:</b> more <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/10/ord-on-global-consequentialism.html">here</a>.Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-50292791861406909712009-08-22T17:00:00.008-04:002009-08-24T15:59:48.745-04:00The Mark of the InstrumentalHow do we distinguish intrinsic (<a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/01/three-or-four-distinctions-in-goodness.html">final</a>) value from merely instrumental value? <a href="http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2009/01/are-relationships-intrinsically-valuable.html">Simon Keller</a> argues that relationships are of merely instrumental value on the grounds that (i) unhappy relationships which lack all instrumental value seem to have no value at all; (ii) we don't seem to have any reason to create new relationships (e.g. between happy hermits) that would have no further beneficial consequences; and (iii) the badness of bad relationships is typically explained reductively ("it's making you both miserable"). Even granting these claims for sake of argument, I'm not convinced it follows that relationships are of merely instrumental value. That would imply that they are <i>fungible</i>; but a value could be contingent in all the ways specified above without thereby being fungible.<br /><span id="fullpost"><br />For clarity, let's translate value-talk into reasons-talk (cf. "buck passing"), such that 'X is valuable' becomes 'X is desirable', i.e. <i>there are reasons to want X</i>. If X has <b>merely instrumental</b> value, then the reasons to want X are wholly parasitic on our reasons to want some other Z (to which X is conducive). That is, we have no reason to want X <i>over and above</i> our reasons to want Z. Merely instrumental value thus consists in there being reasons only for <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/02/theorizing-about-desire.html">instrumental desire</a>. Reasons to take something as an ultimate end, by contrast, amount to "<a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/01/three-or-four-distinctions-in-goodness.html">intrinsic</a>" or final value.<br /><br />Now, why think that instrumental value must be fungible? Intuitively: one means is as good as any other, so long as it comes to the same in terms of our final goals. If we have no reason to want X over and above our reasons to want Z, then the fact that the latter goal is served just as well by some alternative means Y (without detrimentally impacting our other goals) entails that we can have no reason to prefer X to Y. It's just like swapping two $10 bills for a $20.<br /><br />But it seems bizarre to think that relationships are fungible in this way. Most people would not wish to swap spouses with a stranger, even if they knew this would have no effect on how happy (etc.) each person was. Even more dramatically, suppose that one's spouse was long ago kidnapped and secretly replaced by a cleverly disguised robot. (The real person is then set up in a duplicate world with a cleverly disguised robotic copy of you, etc.) This is clearly a terrible outcome. But all the instrumental benefits remain as before: each robospouse provides their human partner with happiness, and promotes their moral flourishing, etc. What's missing is the genuine personal connection. Since the loss of it makes no instrumental difference, the value here must be intrinsic.<br /><br />What, then, should we make of Keller's three arguments? I think they rest on a failure to distinguish the <i>content</i> of a reason and its <i>preconditions</i>. This is clearest in the case of (i) and (iii). Contingency of desire does not imply instrumentality -- as explained in my old Railton-inspired post on '<a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2007/09/regulating-aims.html">Regulating Aims</a>' -- and likewise for desirability. Some X may be non-instrumentally desirable only if it leads to Z. Given the absence of fungibility here, this is <i>not the same</i> as X being desirable merely as a means to Z.<br /><br />(We may also distinguish having Z-contingent or 'conditional' <i>reasons</i> to desire X straight out, versus having straight-out reason to <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/02/desires-with-presuppositions.html">conditionally desire</a> X given Z. But since neither of these is merely instrumental, the distinction is not essential for present purposes.)<br /><br />So the mere fact that instrumentally worthless ("unhappy" for short) relationships have no value at all does not imply that the value of other relationships is merely instrumental. It may be that only if a relationship is conducive to happiness do we have reason to want to maintain it; but nonetheless, what this reason mandates is a non-instrumental desire to maintain <b>this very relationship</b>, and not just any old means to equal happiness.<br /><br />Of course, if the reason were contingent in this way, that would also suffice to make sense of why one could reductively explain the undesirability of the relationship by citing the absence of this precondition. "This relationship is bad because it is making you both miserable" implies that if it were happier then you'd have reason to desire the relationship. It does not imply instrumentality (or that you would have reason to desire the relationship only <i>for</i> the happiness etc. it would bring): again, a contingent reason might just as well mandate a non-instrumental desire.<br /><br />So (i) and (iii) are invalid grounds for inferring instrumentality. This post is too long already, so I'll leave discussion of (ii) for the <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/08/acquired-non-instrumental-value.html">next post</a>...</span>Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-37281193954503570802009-05-27T15:59:00.005-04:002009-08-14T20:39:32.031-04:00On 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...]<br /><br />In 'Skepticism About Moral Responsibility', Gideon Rosen argues for the view that <u>confident positive judgments of blameworthiness are (almost) never warranted</u>. 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. <br /><span id="fullpost"><br /> 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 <i>also</i> acted from ignorance in bringing about this prior state, then <i>that</i> 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. <br /><br /> More precisely: Rosen begins by distinguishing <i>derivative </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and </span><i>original </i><span style="font-style: normal;">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 </span><i>in virtue of</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> 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 </span><span style="font-style: normal;"><b>RAID </b></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">principle (</span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><u><b>r</b></u></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">esponsibility for </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><u><b>a</b></u></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">ctions done from </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><u><b>i</b></u></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">gnorance is merely </span></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><u><b>d</b></u></span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">erivative). 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.</span></span> <br /><br /> 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. <br /><br /> 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. <br /><br /> <span style="font-style: normal;">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 </span><i>three</i><span style="font-style: normal;">-place relation between an </span><span style="font-style: normal;"><u>agent</u></span><span style="font-style: normal;">, an </span><span style="font-style: normal;"><u>act</u></span><span style="font-style: normal;"> of theirs (which I will call the 'focal act'), and an </span><span style="font-style: normal;"><u>event</u></span><span style="font-style: normal;"> (or set of events) for which the agent's action renders him liable. Intuitively: </span><i>we</i> are responsible, <i>in</i> acting a certain way, <i>for</i> various outcomes. The focal act is the exercise of agency <i>in virtue of which</i> 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, <i>in</i> taking the pill, <i>for</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> the subsequent damage.</span> <br /><br /> <span style="font-style: normal;">This makes it clear that (in the described case) there is only </span><i>one</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> occasion of Jekyll exercising his agency in a blameworthy manner. His berserk vandalism is not </span><i>itself</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> a blameworthy act (assuming it is an act at all), it is merely an </span><i>event</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> 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 </span><i>action</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, though it makes him liable </span><i>for</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> downstream events – including the event of himself or others acting in berserk fashion.)</span> <br /><br /> <span style="font-style: normal;">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 </span><i>later</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> 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 </span><i>second</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> occasion of blameworthiness. But it obviously does nothing at all to excuse the earlier “benighting” act (to borrow <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/02/culpable-ignorance-and-double-blame.html">Holly Smith's term</a>), or to cast doubt on whether the “unwitting” outcome falls within its scope of liability (that is, as an </span><i>event</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> 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 </span><i>concurrent</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> with the focal act or exercise of agency that is to be assessed.</span> <br /><br /> 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'<a class="sdfootnoteanc" name="sdfootnote1anc" href="#sdfootnote1sym"><sup>1</sup></a> 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 <i>only</i> 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 <u>actions done from ignorance are never themselves blameworthy</u><span style="text-decoration: none;"> [qua act]</span>, but are at most <i>events</i> which some earlier blameworthy act may render us liable for. <br /><br /> Alternatively, we can imagine a case of 'synchronically' culpable ignorance, where my unwitting poisoning no longer seems even <i>intrinsically</i> 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 <i>want</i> 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>I should have</i>,<a class="sdfootnoteanc" name="sdfootnote2anc" href="#sdfootnote2sym"><sup>2</sup></a> 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. <br /><br /> We thus have a counterexample to the RAID principle. It may be true that acts done from <i>merely</i> <i>diachronically culpable </i>ignorance, being intrinsically (synchronically) reasonable, are never blameworthy. But, intuitively, it looks like we <i>can</i> be blameworthy – 'originally responsible' – in acting from 'synchronically culpable' or <i>unreasonable</i> 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 <i>unreasonable</i> 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. <br /><br /> 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 <i>culpable</i> 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 <i>principles</i> (rather than cases). Here are two that together imply RAID: <br /> <ol><li>“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.” </li><li>“X is culpable for failing to know that P only if his ignorance is the upshot of some prior culpable act or omission.” </li></ol> Why believe (2)? It follows from the general principle that only <i>acts</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> (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 </span><i>do</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> – it can't be a site of blameworthiness. At most, it can be an outcome that some prior act made you liable </span><i>for</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. (It may also indicate </span><i>that</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> 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 </span><i>done</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.)</span> <br /><br /> <span style="font-style: normal;">Suppose we grant all that. Why would we then accept (1)? It might be confused with the more plausible claim that </span><i>reasonable </i><span style="font-style: normal;">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 </span><i>act</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> 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 </span><i>appears</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to be the case in the 'synchronic' cases I've highlighted – then we will reject (1).</span> <br /><br /> Our final assessment of skeptical arguments typically depends on whether we are more inclined to trust intuitions <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/12/arguing-from-ostension.html">about cases or abstract theoretical principles</a> (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.<br /><div id="sdfootnote1"> <p class="sdfootnote"><a class="sdfootnotesym" name="sdfootnote1sym" href="#sdfootnote1anc">1</a>In a broad sense; we'll later see that this isn't quite the right term. </div> <div id="sdfootnote2"> <p class="sdfootnote"><a class="sdfootnotesym" name="sdfootnote2sym" href="#sdfootnote2anc">2</a>Limitations 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 <span style="font-style: normal;"><u>culpability</u></span><span style="font-style: normal;">' turns out, as explained below, to be something of a misnomer. </span> </div> </span>Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-55796279724577015742009-05-10T16:12:00.005-04:002009-05-10T20:03:48.265-04:00Understanding (Zombie) Conceivability Arguments: Part II<a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/05/understanding-zombie-conceivability.html">So far</a> we have established that a legitimate conceivability-possibility inference must start from the <i>ideal</i> conceivability of a <i>semantically neutral</i> statement. The final requirement I want to discuss is that the statement to be conceived <i>should be <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/04/how-to-imagine-zombies.html">specified</a> in transparent, uncontested terms</i>.<br /><span id="fullpost"><br />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: <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/04/how-to-imagine-zombies.html">different people might take it to mean different things</a>. [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 <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/05/ontological-reduction.html">are not reducible to</a> the properties specified in P, and so must be explicitly added as further primitives to the <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2007/05/verification-and-base-facts.html">base facts</a>.<br /><br />It is important to note the precise conclusion here. It is <i>not</i> 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 <i>does</i> 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 <i>primitive</i> "physical" property that doesn't reduce to any of the other ones listed. This "physicalist" will insist that a <i>full</i> 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, <i>this</i> "physicalist" is completely immune to refutation by the kind of conceivability argument discussed here.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />The target of the zombie argument is instead the <i>strict</i> 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 <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/05/ontological-reduction.html">table and chair facts</a>. 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.<br /><br />Why am I harping on about this at such length? Well, I think this background can help us diagnose the misunderstanding implicit in <a rel="nofollow" href="http://onemorebrown.wordpress.com/2008/04/07/non-physical-zombies/">Richard Brown's dismissive parody</a>:<br /><blockquote>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.</blockquote><br />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.<br /><br />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 <i>actual</i> 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.<br /><ul><li>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!</li><br /><li>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.</li></ul><br />So, you see, whichever way we fill out the precise details of the parody argument, it <i>very clearly</i> 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).<br /><br />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 <i>how restrictive</i> 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 <i>right</i> to see the parody as being of the same form, and hence undermining that form of argument. I'm happy to grant this: <i>opaque conceivability arguments are no damn good</i>. But - <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/05/understanding-zombie-conceivability.html">once again</a> - this does nothing to impugn the zombie argument, since it can be stated in a more transparent form (as described*).<br /><blockquote>* = (Of course, I've really only provided a <i>schema</i> 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 <i>tentative</i> conclusions about whether the expanded version of 'P & ~Q' is likely to be conceivable.)</blockquote><br />Compare <a rel="nofollow" href="http://onemorebrown.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/ut-vos-es-bellator-victus-mortuus-tempus-fugit/#comment-3418">Brown's recent response</a>:<br /><blockquote>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.</blockquote><br />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 <i>building in</i> its status <i>as</i> "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) <i>pretending</i> 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.<br /><br />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 <i>not</i> 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 <i>neither</i> 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.<br /><br />[This is all just to elucidate the objection originally stated in a couple of sentences in my '<a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/04/zombie-review.html">zombie review</a>'.]</span>Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-80007765551040909992009-04-05T15:37:00.004-04:002021-06-02T05:04:12.779-04:00Parfit's Triviality ObjectionMeta-ethical naturalists hold that normative claims, e.g. 'You ought to phi', state purely natural facts, e.g. phi-ing would maximize happiness. Parfit objects that, unless we <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/04/parfit-on-reasons-and-normative-facts.html">distinguish</a> right-<i>making</i> features from <i>rightness</i> itself, our first-order normative ethical theories will be rendered trivial.<br />
<span id="fullpost"><br />Suppose we're <a href="https://www.utilitarianism.net/" target="_blank">utilitarians</a>. So we accept the following principle:</span><br />
<blockquote>
<span id="fullpost">(U) an act is right just in case it would maximize happiness.</span></blockquote>
<span id="fullpost"><br />A non-naturalist utilitarian may make the substantive claim that whenever an act has the natural property of maximizing happiness, it thereby has the <i>further</i> (irreducibly normative) property of being right. If a naturalist collapses these, then their assertion of (U) seems less substantive. They are simply asserting the fact that whenever an act has the natural property of maximizing happiness, it has this very property. But that's trivial.<br /><br />A complication: examples like (E) 'molecular kinetic energy is the same as heat' show us that metaphysically 'trivial' identity statements can nonetheless be <i>informative</i> or cognitively significant. This may be so if, although both sides of the identity statement refer to one and the same property, they refer to it <i>in different ways</i> (or by way of different reference-fixing descriptions). For then, in addition to the explicitly stated trivial fact, we may learn an <i>implicitly</i> stated substantive fact. Parfit explains:</span><br />
<blockquote>
<span id="fullpost">This claim [E] gives us important information because the concept of <i>heat</i> is the concept of the property that is related in certain ways to certain other, different properties. (E) can be restated here as:</span><br />
<span id="fullpost"><br /></span>
<span id="fullpost">(F) having molecular kinetic energy is the property that can make an object have the different properties of being able to melt solids, turn liquids into gases, cause certain sensations, etc.</span></blockquote>
<span id="fullpost">
<br />Here is the challenge for the metaethical naturalist: they must explain what <i>substantive</i> natural fact is implicitly conveyed by the likes of (U), to make such moral claims informative.<br /><br />Parfit doesn't think this challenge can be met. But why not? I would have thought the obvious response for a naturalist is to adopt a kind of moral functionalism (<i>a la</i> Frank Jackson). The reference of 'ought' is fixed by its conceptual role R in our cognitive economy. Then, when the naturalist utilitarian claims that we ought to maximize happiness, they are implicitly conveying the substantive fact that the property of maximizing happiness has the (further) property of <i>being such as to fulfill role R</i>.<br /><br />The problem is made vivid in Parfit's example of the naturalist utilitarian who horrifies the hospital Ethics Committee by endorsing the <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2005/05/right-is-making-world-better.html">surreptitious murder</a> of a patient for purpose of stealing their organs and saving more lives on net. Parfit imagines the naturalist responding as follows:<br /><blockquote>
When I claimed that I ought to kill this patient, I was claiming only that this act would maximize happiness. I was not claiming that this act would have the different property of being what I ought to do. On my view, there is no such different property. Being an act that would maximize happiness is the <i>same</i> as being what we ought to do. Since I was claiming only that killing this patient would maximize happiness, no one has any reason to reject my claim.</blockquote>
<br />But this does not seem to capture how naturalists tend to understand their own view. (The imagined 'distancing' of oneself from the ordinary understanding of moral commitments seems especially inapposite.) When naturalists make first-order claims about which natural features are right-making features, they are not <i>only</i> claiming that these features are self-identical (though that may be the explicit content or truthmaker for their claim, just as when scientists claim that heat is molecular energy). Rather, they are conveying the additional, important information that this feature is <i>what the rest of us are ultimately referring to with our ordinary moral talk</i>. That is: maximizing happiness (or whatever) is the natural property that is ultimately picked out by the reference-fixing descriptions R associated with the normative terms 'right', 'ought', etc.<br /><br />There are other objections that could be made at this point, e.g. concerning whether the naturalist can really capture the full normative force of these claims. But I think the triviality objection fails.</span><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>Update:</b> It turns out I was a bit quick in dismissing this argument. Parfit appeals to the premise that a claim like (U) is not merely <i>informative</i>, but more specifically that it is a <i>positive substantive normative claim</i>, which attributes a <i>distinct normative property</i> to acts that have the property of maximizing happiness (or whatever). It's much less clear whether the naturalist can meet this demand, since the "further information" they take us to be implicitly attributing seems to be more sociological or linguistic in nature, rather than attributing any further <i>normative</i> property.</div>
Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-40022871351108616802009-02-25T17:58:00.005-05:002009-02-25T23:48:15.167-05:00Culpable Ignorance and Double Blame[Significantly updated and moved-to-front from Feb 7.]<br /><br />Suppose Adam wrongly - i.e. without sufficient reason - kills Bob. Though there's no real <i>justification</i> for killing Bob, such an action may nonetheless be <i>excused</i> if it was done unwittingly, at least if the agent's ignorance was itself non-culpable. But what if Adam was previously negligent -- i.e. his ignorance <i>culpable</i>* -- does this mean he's blameworthy for the action after all (at least to some degree)? I think the literature on this topic has been plagued by some serious conceptual confusions. Let me explain.<br /><span id="fullpost"><br />Holly Smith, in her seminal (1983) paper 'Culpable Ignorance' [<a href="http://philosophy.rutgers.edu/FACSTAFF/BIOS/PAPERS/SMITH/culpable.pdf">pdf</a>], considers cases in which an earlier, "benighting act" foreseeably causes our agent to later be deprived of evidence that would have led him to refrain from committing the bad "unwitting act". In one example, the agent impermissibly leaves behind his driving glasses, and so unwittingly runs over a pedestrian that he otherwise would have seen. (As will become clear, I think these are deviant cases of 'culpability' in ignorance, but more on that <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/02/negligence-and-culpable-ignorance.html">later</a>.)<br /><br />As HS points out, all can agree that Adam is blameworthy for the benighting act. (This is meant to be built into the specification of the case.) Further, there's a clear sense in which this makes him responsible for the ultimate outcome: "the unwitting act is a risked upshot of the benighting act", and we're responsible, roughly speaking, for the foreseeable risks that eventuate from our reckless actions (compare Russian roulette). HS thus diagnoses the debate over <u>whether culpable ignorance is exculpating</u> as just an instance of the moral luck debate, i.e. whether agents become <i>more</i> blameworthy if the foreseeable risks of their reckless or negligent acts actually eventuate.<br /><br />This seems a misdiagnosis.** Let's distinguish two ways in which Adam - already culpable for the benighting act - might come to be doubly blameworthy due to the occurrence of the unwitting act. It could be that the eventuating harms render him more blameworthy <i>in his earlier act</i> of negligence. That's 'moral luck'. Or it could be that he is now blameworthy <i>on more occasions</i>: not just in the benighting act, but in the unwitting act (qua act) as well. <b>That</b> would be 'culpable ignorance'* failing to excuse the unwitting act as a second occasion of blameworthy agency.<br /><br />Note that one might think that (even culpable*) ignorance excuses the unwitting act, in the sense that we cannot blame Adam <i>qua agent of the unwitting act</i>, whilst nevertheless blaming him (qua agent of the benighting act) more because of this bad outcome. So the question <u>whether culpable ignorance excuses the unwitting <i>act</i></u> is orthogonal to the 'moral luck' issue of whether the unwitting <i>outcome</i> makes the (earlier) agent <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/02/moral-luck-vice-and-culpability.html">more blameworthy</a>. <br /><br />[N.B. If you're suspicious of this talk of "earlier" and "later" agents, you can easily translate it into talk of how the later event makes the enduring agent more blameworthy "in" acting as they did earlier. That is, I'm not really making any metaphysical claims about persistence through time here. I'm just using such talk as a convenient shorthand for locating the agent's responsibility. We may speak of that exercise of agency <b><i>in virtue of which</i> one is eligible for moral assessment</b>; <i>in which</i> responsibility resides; or (equivalently) <i>to which</i> our moral assessment attaches. Call this the <b>focal act</b>. The crucial point is that one may be responsible <i>in</i> acting, in a completely different sense from how one may be responsible <i>for</i> an outcome or event (or even 'for an action', considered as a mere outcome or event, as opposed to a focal act). HS runs together 'focal actions' and 'acts-as-events' in a way which causes her to seriously misconstrue the issue at hand, or so I claim.]<br /><br />Another way to see this point is to note that it doesn't seem to make any difference for HS's cases who ends up performing the unwitting bad act. She is talking about blaming Adam for Bob's death in the exact same way that we would blame Adam for Bob's death <i>if he had negligently misplaced Cid's glasses, and Cid subsequently crashed into Bob</i>. That is, we're blaming Adam for the outcome of Bob's death, and not (in any further sense) the act of killing him. In either case, the <i>act</i> of Adam's to which our blame attaches - the focal act - is the reckless 'benighting' act of depriving a driver of his glasses. This is clearly to change the subject, if what we're interested in is whether ignorance excuses (blocks blame from "attaching to") <i>the unwitting act</i> (as a locus). On the other hand, if we're interested in whether Adam is blameworthy, <i>in his negligence</i>, for the event of Bob's death, any ignorance in the "later" actor -- whether Cid or Adam himself -- is just obviously irrelevant.<br /><br />Simply put: we are responsible, <i>though</i> (or 'in') a focal action, <i>for</i> various outcomes. If those outcomes are bad, there's a prima facie case for thinking the agent, in acting as they did, blameworthy. We may then ask whether there are any 'excuses' or defeaters for this presumption. These are things that may excuse the agent's action, rendering them no longer liable (again, <i>in</i> so acting) for various consequences. One possible excuse is ignorance. But note: By this it is not meant that if the agent becomes ignorant <i>consequently</i> from their act, this somehow blocks the agent from liability for any further downstream consequences of their focal act. That would be daft. No, the relevant 'ignorance' (ignorance that is eligible to excuse an agent's action) must be present <i>in the act itself</i> -- i.e. the act must have been done "from ignorance". It is ignorance <b>concurrent with the focal act</b> -- the exercise of agency in virtue of which the agent is prima facie eligible for moral assessment (positive or negative depending on, amongst other things, the consequences resulting from the act).<br /><br />So, if we are considering complicated examples in which one action has as its causal upshot another act's performance, we need to be clear if the former is being treated as the focal act, and the latter as a mere event. Because if we're interested in whether ignorance (e.g. of some feature or outcome) excuses the agent's action, we had better be talking about ignorance that is concurrent with the <i>focal</i> action, and not ignorance that is concurrent with the mere downstream <i>event</i>. But this is precisely what HS fails to do. Her examples all concern cases of ignorance downstream of the focal act. As such, they are not even formally eligible to serve as excuses for the agent's action. Her very question is ill-formed.<br /><br />P.S. My <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/02/negligence-and-culpable-ignorance.html">follow-up post</a> considers more appropriate cases, i.e. of culpable ignorance concurrent with a focal act.<br /><br />* I should note that 'culpable ignorance' is being used here in a potentially misleading way. HS really means something more like "self-inflicted ignorance", or "ignorance for which one is responsible in virtue of a <i>prior</i> culpable act". But that's just not the same thing as ignorance that is culpable or unreasonable <i>in itself</i> -- as I emphasize in my <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/02/negligence-and-culpable-ignorance.html">follow-up</a> post. A 'snapshot theorist' may hold, as I do, that self-inflicted but intrinsically reasonable ignorance is indeed wholly exculpatory in the relevant sense, whilst intrinsic or 'synchronically culpable' ignorance is no excuse.<br /><br />** [I owe the basic 'misdiagnosis' idea to Liz. The arguments - and broader conclusions - are my own.]</span>Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-20955726763575068572009-02-21T23:06:00.006-05:002009-02-25T23:33:37.210-05:00Skepticism, Rationality and Default Trust<a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2006/04/open-mindedness.html">Intellectual virtue</a> lies between the two extremes of dogmatism and radical skepticism. The irrationality of dogmatism is generally appreciated; less so the irrationality of radical skepticism (at least among my intro M&E students!). Let's attempt a remedy.<br /><br />The global skeptic insists that we should question everything, trusting nothing: apparent perception, memory, "rational intuition", even <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2006/08/most-radical-skepticism.html">methods of reasoning</a> -- <i>anything</i> that <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/09/supposing-impossible.html">can be doubted</a> must be <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/07/why-suspend-judgment.html">suspended</a> from our minds and considered 'guilty until proven innocent'. The obvious problem with this stance - if followed assiduously - is that it entails rejecting <i>everything</i>, leaving one with <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/01/intellectual-black-holes.html">no mind at all</a>. This is the crucial point: just as <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2005/10/native-empiricists.html">a pure 'blank slate' cannot learn from experience</a>, so must we rely on various assumptions if we are to learn, reason, and act rationally at all.<br /><span id="fullpost"><br />That's not to say we should dogmatically refuse to question our beliefs and practices. It's just that we cannot question them <i>all at once</i>. Any individual belief or assumption may be tested in light of the other things we (provisionally) take to be true, and <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2007/06/coherent-persuasion.html">revised if some incoherence is found</a>. But we have to reason from the beliefs we have -- as Neurath famously put it, our mind is like a ship at sea, and even as we replace a faulty plank we must trust our weight to others.<br /><br />The mere fact that those other beliefs can likewise be questioned does not suffice to show that we can't reasonably accept them (again, provisionally) in the meantime. The skeptic's claim to the contrary is itself a <i>questionable belief</i>, and not one we have any reason to accept. (It may seem intuitive at first, but once we fully understand the implications of this claim, it would be crazy to accept it -- or so I argue.)<br /><br />To begin with, it's worth emphasizing that global skepticism is self-defeating, insofar as it implies that we should not trust its recommendation to trust nothing. Or, as Railton writes (in 'How to Engage Reason', <i>Reason and Value</i>, p.186):<br /><blockquote>Hume observed that [the sceptic] displays a touchingly unsceptical attitude towards the power of argumentation and his own powers of thought and memory. We might add: toward his own command of language and the content of this thoughts. Remove this default confidence, and he can no more declare his words to be 'giving an argument for scepticism'--an intentional action--than 'giving a recipe for haggis' or 'scat-singing without a tune'.</blockquote><br />Hence my earlier claim that one who truly internalizes global skepticism is no longer capable of intentional thought or action at all. To accept global skepticism is to forsake any hope of rationality. It is the ultimate <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/01/intellectual-black-holes.html">intellectual black hole</a>. Railton (p.187) draws an important lesson:<br /><blockquote>Default trust, however 'blind', is not inherently <i>blinding</i>. On the contrary. If the sceptic trusts his ability to speak English and draw the conclusions demanded of his premisses, and I trust my own appreciation of his argument, we will both <i>see</i> (no longer be blind to) a problem that I have in defending my beliefs: Where I previously had hoped to be able always to have a reason for whatever I believe, taking nothing 'blindly' or 'without reason', I now realize that this hope is impossible--some things cannot, without regress or circularity, be argued for.</blockquote><br />I trust the reader will by now agree that global skepticism is a non-starter, as any rational agent must take <i>some</i> things 'on trust' if they are to be capable of reasoning at all. Still, one might ask, what of slightly restricted forms of skepticism? Couldn't one consistently hold the more traditional skeptical view that it's just our <i>sensory experiences</i> and/or <i>inductive practices</i> that shouldn't be trusted? The traditional skeptic is willing to trust in reasoning as much as anybody is. They simply <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/10/skepticism-and-wacky-priors.html">have different expectations</a> about the external world (or "affirm a different prior") from the rest of us. In particular, they hold that all possible worlds are (a priori) <i>equally probable</i>, whereas we anti-skeptics consider some (perhaps simpler or more regular-seeming) distributions of properties across space and time to be more probable than others.<br /><br />Sure, there may not be anything <i>inconsistent</i> about traditional skepticism, so defined. (Though such a skeptic has no reason to expect that they will continue to exist long enough to finish their thought.) But nor is there much reason to accept it, or indeed to find it any more credible than the claim that the world just came into existence 5 minutes ago. Admittedly, traditional skepticism is motivated by a premise that <i>seems</i> plausible at first glance, namely: "the reasonable 'default' view is to start off by assigning each possible world an equal probability of being actual." That <i>sounds</i> fairer and more reasonable than an <i>a priori</i> bias in favour of, say, worlds where memories are typically true--representing times and events that really did happen. But I suspect the intuitive plausibility of this is an instance of us <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/12/arguing-from-ostension.html">being misled by overly-abstract principles</a>. When we consider every more <i>particular</i> judgment or knowledge-attribution we are inclined to make, is it really plausible to think that the <i>one</i> abstract principle is more credible than <i>all</i> our conflicting particular judgments - and <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/10/does-skepticism-have-practical-import.html">practices</a> - combined? Colour me (<i>cough</i>) skeptical.<br /><br />Upon reflection - in light of our actual beliefs - it seems we have most reason to reject the skeptic's principle. Though it seemed plausible at first, it is inconsistent with other claims that most of us find much <i>more</i> plausible. Here's another: rational agents should learn from experience. Skeptics -- even of the merely 'traditional' variety -- can't. As Railton writes (in 'Rational Desire and Rationality in Desire'):<br /><blockquote>It is well known that in order to learn about one's environment (whether one be human, animal, or teachable computer) it is not enough to have ample sensory input and plenty of memory registers to fill. The learner must also bring some <i>expectations</i>--such as expected <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/05/structure-and-similarity.html">dimensions of similarity</a> (the "implicit quality space"). Otherwise, experience will simply accumulate in its infinite diversity, and all experiences will be equally relevant or irrelevant to one another. No lessons will be extracted.<br /><br />Carnap gave an elegant demonstration of this point within the theory of logical probability. He asked us to consider a confirmation function that began (sensibly, it would seem) with no "prior bias", i.e., that assigned <i>the same non-zero probability to every possible state of the world</i> (what he called "state descriptions"). This function would, even given indefinitely large amounts of information about past states of the world, still assign the same probability to every logically possible way of extending this history into the future. In a fundamental sense, it <i>could not learn from experience</i>.</blockquote><br />So I think it's pretty safe to conclude that (even the traditional form of) radical skepticism isn't rational. There's no <i>guarantee</i> that the rest of us are any better off, of course, but at least we have a chance. We do the best we can -- and we're yet to see any good reason to think that some other way is better.<br /><br />One may be left feeling unsatisfied: the best we can do may not seem good enough. But since turning to skepticism is even worse, it seems we will just have to learn to live with tentatively trusting in the reliability of our perceptions, despite the uncertainty of it all. At least we <i>can</i> learn such things -- and that is something to be thankful for.</span>Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-35563530003043992522009-02-05T16:15:00.008-05:002010-11-06T17:25:01.460-04:00Against a Defense of Future Tuesday IndifferenceHow should we understand Parfit's example of the hedonist with <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2007/09/examples-of-irrational-desires.html">future Tuesday indifference</a>? Sharon Street ('In Defense of Future Tuesday Indifference') distinguishes two possible interpretations, but I want to urge a third.<br /><span id="fullpost"><br />Suppose first that the agent is only indifferent to <i>future</i> Tuesdays, and on the stroke of midnight his preferences change so that he regrets his earlier decision to schedule an agonizing operation for <i>this</i> day. Such fundamental preference changes complicate the case. As Street points out, the different temporal stages of the agent would effectively be at war with each other -- the earlier ones plotting to ensure that the Tuesday-stage suffers agony (supposing this is necessary to spare their later stages, which they care more about, from some lesser pain), and then the Tuesday-stage trying to undo this plot against himself. That is, the Tuesday-agent has a diverging deliberative standpoint, from which he won't endorse or carry out the intentions of his earlier stages. In this sense, it's almost like a new agent temporarily takes over the body each Tuesday, which raises complications regarding whether the prior, Tuesday-indifferent stages are doing something <i>morally</i> objectionable in imposing suffering on the Tuesday stage against "his" will.<br /><br />To avoid such complications, we may instead suppose the agent is <i>tenselessly</i> Tuesday-indifferent. His reflective preferences remain the same, even on Tuesdays themselves. However, Street argues that when we imagine this agent in vivid detail, he is not so obviously irrational. For during his painful experience, he maintains his "meta-hedonic" indifference to the pain, and so we might think that he achieves a state of emotional calm, and so doesn't really "suffer" from his pain in the ordinary way. (Compare, e.g., a Buddhist monk distancing himself from the searing pain of hot coals.)<br /><br />However, this scenario too strikes me as containing some potentially confounding complications. In particular, it's no longer clear that the Tuesday experiences we've described are really <i>as painful</i> (hedonically bad) as the experiences felt on other days, and so rather than an agent whose preferences make arbitrary references to Tuesday <i>as such</i>, it seems we've instead described an agent with the more ordinary preference to experiences "pains" on days when they won't cause him suffering (and given his odd constitution, this happens to be Tuesdays).<br /><br />To clarify this, we need to distinguish two further versions of (tenseless) Tuesday-indifference. Street offers a <i>non-conceptual</i> interpretation, whereby the agent ('Indy') is simply constituted (perhaps due to some bizarre evolutionary story) such that he undergoes regular cycles of psychological transformation. In particular, Indy feels a Buddhist-like 'detachment' from any pain inflicted during special periods (that happen to coincide with Tuesdays), and this indifference naturally carries over to his prospective and retrospective evaluations of "pain" experienced during the special period. <br /><br />Note that Indy's pain-indifference is prior to his beliefs about what day it is. Locked in a dungeon and deprived of any other temporal cues, he might one day notice a psychological change in himself ("I no longer care about present pain experiences"), and thereby <i>infer</i> that it's Tuesday. This clearly isn't the kind of agent we normally have in mind when talking about Future Tuesday Indifference. Most importantly, Indy's <i>changing psychology</i> corrupts the thought experiment. His phenomenal experience of pain-on-Tuesday is qualitatively different from how he experiences pain on other days, so it could be this qualitative difference, rather than the purely temporal difference, that his preferences are tracking.<br /><br />So I think it is more worthwhile to consider a psychologically uniform agent with explicitly <i>conceptualized</i> Tuesday-indifference. That is, we should imagine an agent whose psychology is consistent across time, and whose preferences make special reference to "Tuesday" as such (under that description). This means that his beliefs about what day it is will affect his behaviour: in particular, if he falsely believes that today isn't Tuesday, his subjective experiences of pain will feel as agonizing as they do on other days.<br /><br />This strikes me as the 'pure' version of the thought experiment. After all, to assess Future Tuesday Indifference, we need to hold all else equal, and that means ensuring that the experiences in question are <b>qualitatively identical</b> -- not differing in any phenomenally discernible, and hence potentially hedonically relevant, respect from what he'd suffer on any other day. So let's ask the agent to choose between the following options:<br /><blockquote>(1) We will wait until Tuesday, and then hook him up to an experience machine that will give him the total phenomenal experience of intense suffering. (This may include brainwashing him into thinking it's Wednesday, or otherwise ensuring that he doesn't "dissociate" himself from the pain in any way that introduces subjective differences.)<br /><br />(2) We wait until Wednesday, and merely inflict moderate suffering with the experience machine.</blockquote><br />The genuinely Future-Tuesday Indifferent agent will choose option (1), by definition. Will Indy?<br /><br />This poses a dilemma for Street. Indy previously seemed less irrational precisely because we could interpret his Future-Tuesday Indifference as largely compatible with a kind of impartial hedonism: he wasn't really <i>suffering</i> on Tuesdays, after all. But this new choice prises the two motivations apart. He can sanely choose to minimize his suffering, by opting for (2), but then we see that he's not really indifferent to Tuesday suffering after all. (It was just never an issue before, due to his quirky ability to ignore pain on Tuesdays.) Or he can choose option (1), but then we see that his apparent reasonableness was an illusion.<br /><br />In any case, genuine Future-Tuesday Indifference seems (intuitively) as irrational as ever.</span>Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-52454087563792603532009-01-15T21:18:00.006-05:002009-02-02T19:31:07.322-05:00Ignoring Reality Ain't So Ideal Either<a href="http://uncommon-priors.com/?p=1224">Paul is unimpressed</a> with non-ideal theory that takes into account agents' own moral failings or unreliability when prescribing what they ought to do:<br /><blockquote>Moral obligations ought not to depend on an agent’s character. We ought to insist that an agent with a bad character act entirely like an agent with a good character...</blockquote><br />That seems inadvisable. Cases like the <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/05/aspiring-to-objectivity.html">bad squash loser</a> show that we ignore our moral failings at our peril. For a more high-stakes example, suppose God offers me a deal that's a freebie for a saint, but insanely risky for the rest of us:<br /><span id="fullpost"><br /><b>(SaintOrSinner)</b> God will save one innocent life now, but if I ever fail to meet a moral obligation for the rest of my life then a million innocents will be tortured and killed.<br /><br />Should I take the deal? If I'm a saint (and know it), then it's clearly obligatory: I can save a life at no real cost, since - as a saint - I'm sure to meet my later obligations whatever they may be. But since I'm not a saint, it's very clearly impermissible -- I'd almost certainly be condemning a million innocent people to torture and premature death.<br /><br />More generally, it's fallacious to move from the fact that <i>it would be good to do P and Q</i> to <i>it would be good to do P</i>. Remember that evaluations of act-aggregations and of individual acts <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/11/evaluative-non-integration.html">may diverge</a>:<br /><blockquote>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 <i>if</i> I were to follow this up with a series of acts S which I could, but <i>actually won't</i>, perform; and (ii) the worst possible outcome otherwise. In those circumstances, it is <i>not</i> 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 <i>then</i>; I cannot perform a lifetime's aggregation of acts with a single decision.</blockquote><br />So we need to be clear about what normative question is being asked. It may be advisable both (i) to do P-and-then-Q, and yet (ii) <i>not</i> to do P (because one is unlikely to follow up with Q, and the consequences of P without Q would be disastrous). This is perfectly consistent, because the two answers address different questions: one concerning the <i>aggregation</i> of acts that would be best, and the other concerning what present <i>individual act</i> would be best. It's just a basic fact that in non-ideal agents, these may diverge.<br /><br /><b>Two postscripts:</b><br />1. Although we will <i>typically</i> be more interested in deliberating over individual acts than collections thereof (since we can really only perform the former), there may be exceptions. See, e.g., my complaints about illegitimate appeals to '<a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2007/08/political-reality.html">Political Reality</a>': they may be fine from an individual perspective, but sometimes we want to deliberate from an explicitly collective perspective, about the question of what 'we' (rather than just 'I now') should do. This shift in focus can be vital for breaking out of a bad equilibrium.<br /><br />2. My old post on '<a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2007/07/accommodating-unreason.html">Accommodating Unreason</a>' offers some reasons why, at least in low-stakes contexts, it may be better to treat people <i>as if</i> they are morally more reliable than they really are.</span>Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-18439703955060555232009-01-07T22:55:00.007-05:002009-02-02T19:24:29.176-05:00Intellectual Black HolesThe value of freedom sometimes calls for constraint: against <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2005/06/freedom-and-markets.html">selling oneself into slavery</a>, for example. Is there an intellectual analogue of this? We generally value <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2006/04/open-mindedness.html">open-mindedness</a>, and a willingness to 'follow the arguments' wherever they may lead. But what if some ideas were so corrupting that to consider them seriously would risk undermining one's future capacity for rational thought? It would then seem that there are some ideas that we must close our minds to, if we truly value open-mindedness (and not just for the present moment). This seems a curious possibility.<br /><span id="fullpost"><br />Such 'intellectual black holes' might fall into either of two classes:<br /><br />(1) <i>Psychological traps</i> depend on contingent quirks of human cognitive architecture. These might (in principle) be completely arbitrary: we can imagine a creature whose head explodes if it comes to believe that cows eat grass. More realistically, it seems conceivable that some (even true) beliefs might interact to ill effect with our evolved heuristics, biases, and emotional dispositions.<br /><br />(2) <i>Rational traps</i>, on the other hand, are general to any rational mind. This makes them more philosophically interesting, insofar as they reveal propositions that are <i>essentially</i> (and not merely contingently) antithetical to rational thought.<br /><br />Now for the big question: <i>are</i> there any such 'intellectual black holes' -- ideas which, if accepted, would undermine one's rational capacities? (And if so, does that necessarily mean we are justified in believing the "trap proposition" to instead be false?)<br /><br />Perhaps the most obvious example is <i>epistemic nihilism</i>: the view that there is no such thing as epistemic rationality -- all beliefs and arguments are equally good (or bad), and <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2007/06/coherent-persuasion.html">rational persuasion</a> is impossible. Notice that if someone came to really, truly believe this, then it would be utterly impossible to reason them out of it: they would be incapable of treating anything you said as a reason worthy of consideration. Their mind could only be 'rescued' by some non-rational intervention: brain surgery, perhaps.<br /><br />What other such cases can you think of?</span>Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-53869279263145349882008-11-15T16:54:00.010-05:002009-02-02T19:24:29.178-05:00Personal Bias and Peer DisagreementThe epistemic issues that arise when considering <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/11/perceptual-and-rational-bias.html">how to rationally respond to evidence of one's own bias</a> are, I think, exactly the same as those discussed in the <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/03/meta-evidence-rationality-and-guidance.html">peer disagreement</a> literature. The core issue, in both cases, is <b>how to weigh higher-order evidence</b> (of our own possible unreliability) <b>against the first-order evidence</b>. 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:<br /><span id="fullpost"><br />(1) <b>Higher-order evidence trumps</b>. 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 <i>you can't tell</i> which of the two positions you're in. So any rule you can follow will have to treat both situations the same.)<br /><br />(2) <b>First-order evidence trumps</b>. In the peer disagreement case, this is called the 'Asymmetric No Independent Weight View' -- since the thought is that whoever is <i>actually</i> 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 <i>really</i> supports. (And <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/11/rational-objectivity.html">too bad</a> 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.<br /><br />(3) <b>The Total Evidence View</b>. Finally, we might think one is rationally required to take all the evidence into account. Neither first- nor higher-order evidence <i>necessarily</i> 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 <i>somewhat</i> in light of the (misleading, as it happens) higher-order evidence of their unreliability.<br /><br />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:<br /><br />(A) The 'equal weight' and 'automatic adjustment' views both gain their plausibility from considering <i>perceptual</i> (more precisely: non-inferential) examples. But <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/11/perceptual-and-rational-bias.html">this is misleading</a>, because we're effectively imagining a case where there <i>is</i> no (other) first-order evidence; the judgment itself is all we have to go on, so <i>of course</i> unopposed higher-order evidence about the reliability of this judgment is going to be decisive.<br /><br />(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:<br /><blockquote>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 <i>automatically</i> mean that all things considered I should boost the grade and give it an A+? Surely not. My initial judgment may be <i>some</i> 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.</blockquote><br />In short, the AAV (if understood as <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/04/rational-recovery.html">making positive claims</a> 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.<br /><br />P.S. For background, see Tom Kelly's excellent paper: 'Peer Disagreement and Higher Order Evidence' [<a href="http://www.princeton.edu/~tkelly/papers/Peer%20Disagreement%20and%20Higher%20Order%20Evidenc1.pdf">pdf</a>].</span>Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-73989956024785327182008-11-12T13:39:00.004-05:002009-02-02T19:24:29.180-05:00Initiating ForceWill Wilkinson is one of my favourite libertarians, and his sensible post on '<a href="http://www.willwilkinson.net/flybottle/2008/11/10/against-fake-libertarian-clarity/">fake libertarian clarity</a>' exemplifies some of the reasons why. There's one passage in particular that I want to discuss here:<br /><blockquote>[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 <em>is</em> 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 <em>that</em> is justified coercion.</blockquote><br /><span id="fullpost">Too right. At this point simple libertarians appeal to the distinction between self-defense vs. initiating force. But as I explain <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2007/05/property-and-coercion.html#c254016556952403934">here</a>:<br /><blockquote>Property-claims <i>initiate</i> force against others. The <a href="http://wwww.philosophyetc.net/2005/06/initial-acquisition.html">original privatization</a> 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...<br /><br />Again, one's attempts to claim exclusive use ("ownership") of a resource <i>may</i> well be a reasonable limitation to (attempt to) impose on others. But that doesn't change the plain fact that the claim to property <i>is</i> 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!<br /><br />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.</blockquote><br />Simple libertarians have difficulty appreciating this, because they think of property as a 'given', <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2006/05/property-is-unnatural.html">a basic feature of the natural world</a>, rather than a human imposition -- or "<a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2006/06/cohen-on-money.html">social relations of constraint</a>", as Cohen aptly puts it. These constraints are <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2007/12/implicit-interference.html">so thoroughly internalized</a> that they fail to even notice them anymore.<br /><br />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 <i>is</i> the case; he makes no judgments about what <i>ought to be</i>. So when he visits Earth, what will he see?<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <i>presuppose</i> libertarianism, they therefore cannot be used to argue <i>for</i> 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. <br /><br />Anyone who truly takes <i>liberty itself</i> as a basic concept (rather than redefining it in terms of some <i>other</i> 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 <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2006/05/institutional-rights.html">assess the various institutional systems</a> on offer, including those which render property subject to some degree of redistribution, and opt for the one that best promotes <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2005/07/enabling-humanity.html">human flourishing</a> (or whatever we think is ultimately good).<br /><br />'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 <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2006/05/contingent-right-to-life.html">further reflection</a> reminds us that it is not <i>rights themselves</i> that fundamentally matter, but the <i>people</i> they are meant to protect. And so we end up with <b>utilitarianism</b>, 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 <i>intrinsically</i> or <i>necessarily just</i> is simply confused -- or am I missing something?</span>Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-27848255909575862702008-10-19T22:42:00.006-04:002009-08-26T13:20:47.043-04:00Reflecting on RelativismI previously considered a kind of <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2006/06/why-we-need-to-idealize-ethics.html">sophisticated moral relativism</a> according to which 'X is wrong' is true for you iff <i>your idealized self</i> would hold this position. But to <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2009/02/moral-principles-objective.html">truly count</a> <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2007/06/context-and-relativism.html">as relativism</a>, this must apply even at the level of fully specified token acts. So (for example) we can say that <i>Sally acted wrongly in getting an abortion</i> is true for Anne but not for Sally, if their idealized selves would disagree in this way about the merits of Sally's action. But I wonder: could Anne's idealized self coherently maintain her position, or would the truth of relativism undermine her first-order judgments of impermissibility?<br /><span id="fullpost"><br />If an act is morally wrong then the actor lacks sufficient moral reason (and <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/10/are-there-non-moral-reasons.html">arguably</a> sufficient non-moral reason either) to so act. But can it really be a 'relative' matter what (moral) reasons Sally has for acting? Surely the relevant standpoint here is Sally's own. She has (moral) reason to act as her idealized self would (morally) recommend, and - ex hypothesi - her idealized self recommends abortion. So Sally has sufficient reason to get an abortion. So it cannot be morally wrong for her to do this.<br /><br />At what step can Anne disagree? Anne's idealized self opposes abortion, but that is merely a reason <i>for Anne</i> to not get an abortion; it is not a reason that is relevant to Sally's action. Anne can see that Sally is perfectly justified in her beliefs and actions. So she can't maintain the claim that Sally's act was wrong; all Anne can claim is that it would be wrong for <i>her</i> to perform a similar act of that type. Sally, seeing Anne's standpoint, will agree: it would be wrong for Anne to get an abortion. But now there is no disagreement over token actions. So the moral truth isn't 'relative' after all: it's <i>absolutely true</i> that Sally may get an abortion and that Anne may not.<br /><br />You might dispute my assumption that what practical reasons S has is a non-relative matter, determined by S's standpoint and no other. But even if you dispute that, so that Anne may (as yet) hold Sally's actions to be unjustified, Anne presumably cannot deny that Sally has rational <i>beliefs</i> (insofar as they would survive idealization). But now we can appeal to Clayton's principle for moving <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/10/from-theoretical-to-practical-reason.html">from Theoretical to Practical Reason</a>:<br /><blockquote>(1) If a subject judges that she should Φ and it’s not the case that she should refrain from judging that she should Φ, it’s not the case that the subject shouldn’t Φ.</blockquote><br />Anne must grant Sally the antecedent -- Sally judges that she should have an abortion, and <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2007/10/why-disagree-relatively.html">makes no mistake</a> in doing so -- so Anne must also grant the practical consequent, that Sally didn't act wrongly.<br /><br />We thus find that moral relativism is incoherent. On the assumption that relativism is true and applies to some token act, it turns out that it doesn't apply to that token act after all. Contra the assumption, moral status is perfectly 'absolute': <i>if the agent commits no (theoretical) error in thinking their action permissible, then it's permissible</i>. Since the former is a non-relative matter of fact, so must be the entailed consequent.</span>Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-35974509115885849172008-10-16T16:14:00.004-04:002009-02-02T19:24:29.183-05:00Proving Grue's Temporality<b>Background:</b> we define 'grue' such that it applies to any object satisfying the disjunctive condition: <i>either</i> the object is first observed prior to 2020 and it is green, <i>or</i> the object is not observed prior to 2020 and it is blue. For example, every emerald so far observed has been grue, and so (presumably) is a sapphire that's first dug up in 2021. Define 'bleen' conversely. Goodman's new riddle of induction is to distinguish which of the following two inductive inferences is a good one, and why:<br /><blockquote><b>(MORE GREEN)</b> All emeralds so far observed have been green, so an emerald discovered in 2021 will also be green.<br /><br /><b>(MORE GRUE)</b> All emeralds so far observed have been grue, so an emerald discovered in 2021 will also be grue.</blockquote><br />The obvious answer is that 'grue' is a gerrymandered predicate which makes reference to a particular time, whereas 'green' applies consistently to the same colour throughout. The standard objection to this proposed answer is that in fact the temporal reference is merely an artifact of <i>our</i> language, since we happen to be 'green'-speakers. We can imagine a 'grue'-speaker, whose natural language takes 'grue' and 'bleen' as the fundamental notions and defines 'green' and 'blue' as time-relative disjunctive predicates. (E.g. they define 'green' = grue if first observed before 2020, bleen otherwise.)<br /><br /><b>Now</b>, I want to show that this linguistic defense is inadequate, and in fact even the natural grue-speaker must admit that it is <i>their</i> colour terms, not ours, which are <i>really</i> time-relative. <span id="fullpost">Importantly, this is not a linguistic claim, but a metaphysical one. I'm willing to grant that they may take 'grue' rather than 'green' as their linguistic primitive, not to be defined in terms of any other <i>words</i> (relative to times). But words don't matter. What matters is that their word 'grue' denotes a temporally gerrymandered <i>property</i> or thing <i>in the world</i>.<br /><br />Here's my demonstration. Let us fast-forward to the year 2025. Suppose it turns out that all emeralds are still green, in which case all those discovered from 2020 onwards are called 'bleen' rather than 'grue'. Suppose I take an emerald to a grue-speaker, and let him look at it as closely as he likes, in the clearest possible viewing conditions (good lighting, etc.). Surely he should then be able to tell what colour it is. He has adequate epistemic access to <i>how the object is in itself</i>. He can see it just fine. Yet when I ask him, "What colour is this emerald?" he cannot say. He must ask for more information: "When was it first observed?" The grue-speaker thereby reveals the implicit time-relativity of his colour concepts. It is not enough to look at the object in itself; whether it is grue or bleen depends on the further, extrinsic question of whether it was observed prior to 2020 or not.<br /><br />The green speaker needs no such further information. We can tell the emerald is green just by looking at it, without needing to also know any temporal information. This shows that 'green' denotes a temporally neutral property, whereas 'grue' denotes something that is time-relative or temporally gerrymandered.<br /><br />(This seems like an obvious point, so I imagine some other philosopher must have beat me to it. Can anyone recall seeing this argument before in the literature? Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.)</span>Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-38965433892858502832008-10-12T14:03:00.005-04:002021-06-02T08:43:12.238-04:00Cohen-Conservatism revisited<p>A few months ago I described <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/05/question-of-conservatism-is-value.html">G.A. Cohen's anti-fungibility objection</a> to <a href="https://www.utilitarianism.net/" target="_blank">utilitarianism</a>: intrinsically valuable things warrant <i>cherishing</i>, and thus preferring their preservation to replacement even by something more intrinsically valuable (within limits). It's a fascinating proposal, so it was great to hear Cohen discussing it with some of my other favourite philosophers in the 'Scanlon workshop' here yesterday. Here are some of the especially interesting ideas I recall:</p><p><span id="fullpost">(1) Michael noted that there must be some feature <i>in virtue of which</i> we reasonably prefer the less intrinsically valuable thing to the greater (but merely possible) replacement: perhaps its actual existence, or historical connection to us, or some such. But then it looks like we can reinterpret Cohen as claiming that <i>that very feature</i> affords the object with some extra, i.e. extrinsic, value. (At least on a buck-passing account, whereby value is defined in terms of what we have reason to desire.)</span></p><p><span id="fullpost">But I wonder whether a revised version of buck-passing could reduce value to a peculiar subset of reasons for desire -- namely, detached/universal impersonal reasons -- thus allowing that we might have other (more particular or personal) reasons for preferring the lesser good. Cohen could then resist the claim that the extrinsic reason bestows any additional <i>value</i> on the object. His conservatism is not intended to contest <i>amounts</i> of value, but rather the appropriate <i>response</i> to value. (Rather than promote it generally, we should cherish the particular things that have it. So the claim goes.)</span></p><p><span id="fullpost">(2) Liz compared Cohen's disposition to preserve existing things, or even to look forward to preserving future things, with the attitude of <i>being glad</i> that <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/04/rationality-and-reflective-endorsement.html">the past turned out as it did</a> -- noting, in particular, that injustice is more of an objection to the former. We may now be glad that the pyramids were built (despite the slave labour), but nobody should tolerate slave labour at the time. (Or something along those lines. I wish I could remember the details better.)</span></p><p><span id="fullpost">Relatedly: Jack got me thinking about whether the Cohen-conservative would disapprove of time-travellers going back and changing the past (<a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2006/06/time-travel.html">per impossibile</a>) so that some more valuable thing <i>originally</i> came into existence in place of the lesser thing we now cherish and wouldn't replace. I suspect he would have no objection to this, and indeed I think Cohen's response to Liz involved the idea that only in cases of 'personal value' (e.g. children) do we have reason to be especially glad that history turned out as it did. In case of particular value more generally, though we should cherish the things that now exist - and resist their replacement - there's no reason to think badly of the alternative history where some even more valuable thing was created in the first place.</span></p><p><span id="fullpost">(3) Seana[?] suggested that it would be interesting to explore <i>precisely</i> which valuable things are irreplaceable and why. A rosebush in your garden may be harmlessly replaced by another of comparable intrinsic beauty, but to change the entire garden seems to involve more of a loss. (Cohen tries to explain away the former judgment, but I take Seana's point to be that we might do better to grant it, and then investigate where lie the limits of Cohen's thesis.)</span></p><p><span id="fullpost">Jack pointed out to me that there's no intuitive pull to cherish particular valuable things that exist beyond the light cone (or to feel regret if God tells us he replaced them by something better). So this suggests that it isn't actual existence <i>per se</i> which does the work here, but some more tangible connection to us. On the other hand, I wonder about a 'pristine environment' (imagine a lost island or an Antarctic lake that's been frozen over for millenia), whose novel organisms might be made even more interesting if exposed to radiation or a "beneficial mutation virus". That sounds repugnant, despite our past disconnection from them; is it perhaps <i>our acting on them</i> to bring about the replacement which forges the intuitive connection here? I guess it doesn't seem so bad for God to do it, at least if he does so before we discover the pristine environment. Post-discovery divine replacement still seems to be a loss of sorts, though.</span></p><p><span id="fullpost">(This might be a fitting time to note <a href="https://www.utilitarianism.net/utilitarian-thinker/peter-singer" target="_blank">Peter Singer's</a> skepticism that any of these intuitions really show anything besides our contingent human biases. Maybe. But, in fairness, I think there's also significant <i>theoretical</i> appeal to Cohen's claim that "A thing that has intrinsic value is worthy of being revered or cherished" in its particularity, and not simply as a vessel of fungible value. So I think it's definitely an idea worth exploring.)</span></p>Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6642011.post-5037451837507266702008-10-03T14:47:00.005-04:002009-02-02T19:24:29.187-05:00From Theoretical to Practical ReasonThere's something <a href="http://www.philosophyetc.net/2005/05/coherence-and-rational-desires.html">incoherent</a> or irrational about the following combination of attitudes:<br />(i) the belief that you <i>would</i> desire to phi if you were more rational<br />(ii) the desire <i>not</i> to phi [or, more weakly, the absence of any desire to phi]<br /><br />The agent who holds both these attitudes is irrational by their own lights. So this opens a path from theoretical to practical rationality. If you're rationally required to have belief (i), then it would seem you're also rationally required to have the corresponding desire (or at least not to have the opposite desire).<br /><span id="fullpost"><br />I owe the above ideas to Michael Smith. Now, <a href="http://claytonlittlejohn.blogspot.com/2008/09/if-youre-phenomenal-conservative-you.html">Clayton</a> discusses a similar principle:<br /><blockquote>(1) If a subject judges that she should Φ and it’s not the case that she should refrain from judging that she should Φ, it’s not the case that the subject shouldn’t Φ.</blockquote><br />Here's are a couple of variants:<br /><br />(1a) If S ought to believe that she should Φ, then it's not the case that S shouldn't Φ.<br />(1b) If S ought to believe that she should Φ, then S should Φ.<br /><br />The guiding thought here is that a practically rational agent does what she judges she ought to do. So it would place inconsistent requirements on her to prohibit Φ-ing even as we require her to judge she ought to Φ (which will lead to her Φ-ing on pain of irrationality). That would effectively be to require her to be irrational.<br /><br />What do you think of these principles?</span>Richard Y Chappellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16725218276285291235noreply@blogger.com4