I find it interesting to learn new philosophical 'moves' or strategies that can be applied in a range of circumstances. Examples I've previously discussed include:
(1) Scanlon's strategy (in Moral Dimensions) for disarming the apparent significance of intent in moral principles (e.g. the doctrine of double effect).
(2) Arpaly's shift from explicit judgments to implicit, deep-rooted responsiveness (in assessing moral character, blameworthiness, etc.).
(3) Noticing 'Derivative Objections', e.g. when people object to consequentialism on the basis of paradoxes in axiology.
(4) The moves and countermoves available when theorists make use of certain idealizations or counterfactual conditionals in their analyses (potentially falling afoul of the "conditional fallacy").
What (more or less general) philosophical strategies do you find most useful and/or interesting?
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Philosophical Moves
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Psychological Inputs
Brian Parks has a puzzling post over at GFP. He invites us to consider the following manipulation scenario:I implant in your brain a radio-controlled neurological device that allows me to manipulate all of the psychological forces (PFs for short) that guide you in your choices—that is, all of the feelings, emotions, sensitivities, motivations, dispositions, desires, aversions, beliefs, and so on that hold sway in your mind. Using the device, I can make you feel pleasure, pain, guilt, pride, calm, anxiousness, anger, compassion, and so on, each in response to whatever stimuli I specify. I can make you love a certain kind of food, I can make you hate members of a certain race, I can make you romantically attracted to a certain person, I can do all of that. More importantly, I can control the degree and intensity of each of your states of mind.
The one thing that the device does not allow me to control, however, is your ability to choose. You retain that ability. Though I determine your psychological inputs, you determine the choices that follow from those inputs.
This makes it sound as though one's psychological "inputs" don't exhaust the facts about one's psychology. Perhaps we can draw a distinction between input states or internal stimuli (feelings, etc.), on the one hand, and processes (dispositions to make certain inferences, or to be moved in certain ways by certain stimuli) on the other. We can thus make sense of the idea of controlling one's psychological 'inputs' whilst leaving free their ability to choose. (Different people process their feelings in different ways, after all.)
Unfortunately, this does not appear to be what Parks has in mind. Here is how he describes the upshot of using the device to imprint you with Madoff's psychological inputs: "In physical terms, I put your brain in the exact same neurological state that his brain was in, and I let things go from there to see what happens." So, contrary to my initial interpretation, the device doesn't just fix some subset of your psychological makeup (namely, the "inputs", leaving be the "processes"). Rather, it fixes your entire psychology -- decision procedures and all.
This seems like an important distinction to me. At least, if we want to draw on the intuitive picture of psychological 'inputs' as contrasted with 'choices', then we need to take care to interpret the 'inputs' sufficiently narrowly as to not exhaust our minds in their entirety. In physical terms: our brains include not only 'input' states, but also the mechanisms for processing these states so as to yield decisions.
But I guess it's a further question whether we should draw on the intuitive distinction I've elucidated here. My old post 'Agency and the Will' offers a quick argument to suggest that at least if we understand the inputs to be exhausted by 'beliefs' and 'desires', understood in some fairly stable sense, there's got to be more to our brains than just that. (Again, two people might have all the same beliefs and desires, but come to different decisions depending on all sorts of other factors -- attention, distraction, salience, not to mention brute differences in their habits of thought. It at least isn't obvious that all such differences can be traced to a difference in belief or desire.) But perhaps there's no principled reason to consider those other factors to be 'procedural' psychological elements rather than 'inputs'?
What do you think -- is there a principled distinction to be made here? If so, what is the best way to draw it?
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Read Anything on Kindle
After a year of use, I must say that my Kindle has turned out to be even more useful than I'd expected. I used to read a lot on my (backlit, eye-straining) laptop screen, but I've now found ways to shift pretty much all my heavy reading on to the Kindle. Here are some of the most useful (non-obvious) tricks and tips I've found for extracting online content:
(1) RSS feeds: Use kindlefeeder to read your favourite blogs or other content with a full RSS feed (e.g. NDPR reviews). Highly recommended.
(2) Partial feeds: Alas, not all content providers are so considerate as to provide users with the convenience of a full RSS feed. If they provide a partial RSS feed (e.g. Philosopher’s Digest, and most newspapers), you can use Calibre to automatically track the feed and extract the full text from the website, though setting this up requires some tinkering at first.
(I should note that Calibre also converts text-based [i.e. non-scanned] PDFs to kindle format, which is a convenient alternative to emailing papers to your Amazon account for conversion.)
(3) Single pages: Other times, you come across interesting stand-alone articles, e.g. in newspapers, blogs, magazines, or the SEP. In such cases, you can use the Instapaper bookmarklet to instantly save the page. Instapaper then (daily or weekly, as you prefer) automatically extracts the text from your saved pages, and delivers them to your Kindle. Very useful!
(4) Multiple pages: Sometimes online books are rendered in html, but you probably don't want to save each page one at a time. Fortunately, it's easy to automate the process. For example:
(i) Use a website mirroring tool to download all the pages, and if you have (or create) a "table of contents" page that links to each other html file in the correct order, then Calibre can easily compile this into an e-book. (I did something like this to get Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics on to my Kindle last year.)
(ii) Alternatively, if the URLs are suitably systematic, you can use bash scripts to run a loop that downloads the text directly from each page in turn. For example, the following code extracts the text from each of "http://WEBSITE/p1.html through to p250.html, into a plain text file "book.txt":for (( c=1; c<=250; c++ ))
do
lynx -dump -nolist -width=800 http://WEBSITE/p$c.html >> book.txt
done
(You might then need to do a quick global 'search and replace' to cut out any extraneous header/footer text from each page, before transferring the file to your Kindle.)
(5) Scanned PDFs: see the instructions in my old post, JSTOR to Amazon Kindle.
Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Wanting to Improve (but not artificially)
Robin Hanson recently wrote what strikes me as a rather misleading post, claiming that according to this paper, "the more people considered a feature to be a key part of their identity, the less they wanted to improve it." Various commenters on his blog offer cynical explanations for why this might be so, and other bloggers have since linked to Hanson's post, repeating the claim that "few people want to improve their empathy." Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), the scientific paper in question does not support this claim at all. Read the abstract:Four studies examined young healthy individuals' willingness to take drugs intended to enhance various social, emotional, and cognitive abilities. We found that people were much more reluctant to enhance traits believed to be highly fundamental to the self (e.g., social comfort) than traits considered less fundamental (e.g., concentration ability)... Ad taglines that framed enhancements as enabling rather than enhancing the fundamental self increased people's interest in a fundamental enhancement, and eliminated the preference for non-fundamental over fundamental enhancements.
Now, while transhumanists may not think there's any normatively significant difference between 'artificial' enhancement and 'natural' improvement (through better nutrition, training, etc.), it must be acknowledged that the vast majority of people do see things differently here. So the mere fact that they aren't willing to take drugs to artificially enhance their empathy is not at all the same thing as not wanting to improve their empathy.
I don't see anything here to suggest that people wouldn't be willing to improve their empathy by (what they consider to be) more 'natural' means. (The paper even explicitly notes that people are happy to improve their empathy again so long as this is framed as "enabling" their true self to shine through, rather than externally imposing a new personality on them.) Am I missing something, or are some people just way too keen to be cynical?
Update: Note that according to Table 3 (at the end of the paper), only 25% of subjects reported that they "do not even wish to be better on this trait."
Monday, July 06, 2009
Philosophers' Carnival #93
Welcome to the 93rd Philosophers' Carnival!
A new blog, 'Rational Imperative', introduces itself and what the contributors see as The Role of Philosophy. (Though they unfortunately repeat the common misconception that "academic philosophy [has abandoned] metaphysical and ethical questions." Grr.)
Russell Blackford argues against banning the burka -- and also, for that matter, bans on public nudity -- on grounds of individual liberty. (Though, as he notes towards the end, this begs the question how many burka-wearing women have a genuine choice in the first place.)
Kevin Lande explores how to understand people who affirm contradictory beliefs. Should we say that they really have inconsistent beliefs, or are they simply misreporting what they believe?
Avery Archer criticizes Setiya On Intentional Action, on the grounds that a theory of intentional action should extend beyond persons to also include goal-directed behaviour by non-linguistic animals.
Heine Holmen presents 'Knowledge in Explanation: A Reply to Avery Archer'.
Kenny Pearce posts a draft paper on 'The Homonymy of Predicative Being':Aristotle famously claimed that "being is said in many ways." This has traditionally been understood as a claim about existence. However, the interpretation of Aristotle's theory of being under this assumption has proven problematic. In this paper, I argue for an alternative reading which identifies the core uses of 'being' as copula uses with primary substances as subjects.
Meanwhile, Thom Brooks seeks feedback as he re-drafts his popular Publishing Advice for Graduate Students.
The blog 'Minds and Brains' offers A Jaynesian Perspective on Language and Thought, describing an anthropological study supporting the conclusion that "changes in language, culture, and metaphor have profound psychological ramifications."
The Experimental Philosophy blog discusses experimental logic:In cases at the vague borderline between 'near' and 'not near,' people felt that it was perfectly acceptable to consider an object 'both near and not near.' In fact, they were just as willing to say that an object was 'both near and not near' as they were to say that it was 'neither near nor not near.'
More intuition-probing experimental philosophy can be found over at Public Reason, on 'Distributive Justice in the Abstract and Concrete', which concludes with an interesting methodological question:if our intuitions in the abstract case differ from those in the concrete case, which sort of intuition should we trust when we are actually doing philosophy?
Finally (inspired by a post from Tamler Sommers), I ask, what are the philosophical 'data' to be explained? Is it enough to explain the psychological fact of our having certain intuitions (e.g. that it's wrong to torture babies for fun), or might the content of the intuition -- the [putative] fact that it's wrong to torture babies for fun -- itself be a datum that requires explanation?
That's it for this edition of the carnival. If you have a philosophy blog, be sure to submit a post for the next edition, to be hosted by Parableman Jeremy Pierce. Oh, and we need more volunteers to host subsequent editions, so do email me if you're interested!
Thursday, July 02, 2009
Normative Moral Concepts
I'm interested in practical normativity, and hence the concept of what we ought or have most normative reason to want and to do. I generally use moral terms in this "all things considered" normative sense. (On this way of talking, it's analytic that we ought to be moral, but a wide open question what this amounts to.) Sometimes people prefer to use words differently, so that 'morality', like 'etiquette', has a fairly transparent (almost stipulative) content -- making it clearer what's morally required, but at the cost of making the concept non-normative. Is there a better way to understand the concept of 'morality', so that it neither collapses into general practical normativity, nor dwindles into normative irrelevance?
One option would be to define 'moral reasons' as a subset of our normative reasons. For example, we might say that some reasons are 'prudential', in the sense that the reason exerts its force for the agent's own sake, whereas all other reasons will count as 'moral'. I guess that's okay as far as it goes, and maybe there are some contexts in which this distinction could be philosophically useful, but for the most part I don't really see the interest in such stunted normative concepts. Why philosophize about a merely "some things considered" ought? To restrict the content of the fundamental normative concept is also to restrict its interest.
A more intriguing possibility is suggested by Parfit: perhaps there is a second primitive (undefinable) normative concept, besides that of a normative reason, for which Parfit uses the phrase "mustn't-be-done". The thought seems to be that certain acts have the primitive feature that they mustn't-be-done, which may create - rather than merely signal - a (decisive?) normative reason against so acting. The question whether this generated reason is decisive is just the debate over whether morality is overriding -- a debate that seems less substantive on alternative conceptions of 'morality'.
Utilitarians (like Egoists) might be best understood as nihilists about 'morality' in this undefinable sense of mustn't-be-done. Rather than offering a 'moral' theory, they offer a normative theory to rival morality. As Parfit writes (On What Matters, chp 7):These people may be convinced that it matters greatly how well things go, and they may be strongly motivated and often moved to act in ways that prevent or relieve suffering. But they may be doubtful whether any acts are duties, or mustn't-be-done, and doubtful about blameworthiness, and about reasons for remorse and indignation. That is one way in which this form of Consequentialism might be an external rival to morality.
Some questions: Can you make sense of the indefinable, substantive moral concept of "mustn't-be-done"? If so, do you think it is applicable, i.e. that some acts actually possess this feature? Is this the best way to distinguish 'moral' concepts?
I feel like I have a slippery grasp of the intended idea (it seems very deontological), but perhaps it should ultimately be abandoned as senseless, or at least inapplicable. It may be easily confused with the derivative notion of an act that is prohibited on indirect consequentialist grounds -- i.e. an act that we ought to rule out of consideration. But this isn't a new primitive concept. It instead derives from the ordinary normative concept employed by utilitarians, simply applied to decision procedures.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
The Deliberative Question
What exactly do we mean when we ask the deliberative question, "What should I do"? It's surprisingly elusive. With a bit of work, we can pin down a behaviouristic kind of answer -- specifying when it's appropriate to offer and to challenge various responses to the question. But I suspect that in a more fundamental/philosophical sense, it isn't really a well-formed, determinate question at all.
First, note that we're not asking what would be objectively best. (Consider Parfit's Mineshafts case. You know that one of option A or B will save all ten lives, but the other will save none, and you don't know which is which. Option C is guaranteed to save nine lives. Clearly, the answer to the deliberator's question is "choose option C", even though this is the one option we can know is not objectively best.)
Perhaps we're asking (roughly) what would maximize expected value for the agent. This explains why option C is the answer in the ordinary Mineshafts scenario: relative to the agent's knowledge, it is worth 9 expected lives, whereas options A and B each have expected value of only 5 lives saved. But (as Kolodny and MacFarlane point out) this standard view has trouble accommodating our assertoric practices. For suppose Informant comes along and tells Agent that he's made a mistake, and in fact it's option A that is guaranteed to save nine lives, and options B and C that are the all-or-nothing gambles. Informant claims to reject (disagree with) Agent's previous answer to the question what he ought to do, and Agent himself seems likely to acquiesce in this by repudiating his previous response. ("I was mistaken to think that I should pick option C; really I should do A.") What's worse, we can further imagine an omniscient observer saying, "No, really he should pick option B -- that's the one that'll save all ten lives."
Here's the dilemma: is there a single, constant question, to which these various responses offer conflicting answers? Theoretically, it's difficult to see how this could be so. There's the question what maximizes expected utility relative to this evidence or that -- but these are different questions, so the diverging answers don't really conflict. On this picture, Agent should respond to Informant by saying, "Ah! You've changed my epistemic context in a most helpful manner. Granted, I answered my initial question [what ought I to do relative to my then-available evidence] correctly. But now I can ask an even better question: 'what ought I to do relative to my now-available evidence?' And, I agree, my answer to this question is 'pick option A!'"
(Compare ordinary context-dependent terms like the indexical 'now'. If tomorrow I say, "It is raining now," I won't thereby have to retract my current assertion that it isn't raining now. There is no single, constant question "Is it raining?" to which these are competing answers. There are only the more specific questions whether it is raining at this or that time and place.)
Unfortunately, when it comes to the deliberative question, this isn't how our linguistic practices seem to actually work. Instead, it seems, Agent will repudiate his previous answer, implicitly treating it as a competing answer to one and the same question (what should he do, period). My question is: does this make sense?
The relativist formally accommodates this behaviour by positing a semantics for 'ought' on which the truth of any token assertion 'Agent ought to phi' varies across assessors. We effectively end up understanding the deliberative question as having the constant meaning 'What should I do relative to the relevant evidence?' whilst allowing the relevant evidence to vary across assessors. Disagreeing as to what evidence is relevant thus translates into disagreeing about the deliberative question. But there's no absolute fact of the matter as to which evidence really is "relevant", and hence the correct answer varies from perspective to perspective, even when assessing a single token utterance.
I actually think that this 'relevant evidence relativist' (unlike the moral relativist) gets it right as a pragmatic account of when it's appropriate to make, challenge, and retract assertions. Intuitively, it seems appropriate for everyone involved to behave as if there was a single constant question here (unlike in the 'raining now' case). For example, it seems appropriate for Agent to initially judge that he ought to go with Option C, and then to retract [not merely "move beyond"] this judgment when faced with new evidence.
But does that really answer my initial question? I guess Wittgensteinians would think so -- "meaning is use", and all that. But intuitively, it seems like there's a further question here: not just about what assertoric behaviours are appropriate, but the more 'metaphysical' question of what is really meant, and really true.
If we think this is a genuine further question, we may be unsatisfied by the relativist's answer, since it seems most plausible that, strictly speaking, substantive answers exist only for complete or 'absolute' questions -- "Is it raining at such-and-such time and place?", not just "Is it raining?". The general question, "What should I do?" is likewise incomplete until we fill in the missing parameter of whose evidence we're assessing this against. Granted, we can offer a sociological story about how it's useful for a community to adopt linguistic norms that allow us to treat this incomplete question as though it were complete -- "disagreeing" in practice even when there's not really any substantive proposition at stake. But then it looks like this really is just a "language game", lacking in philosophical substance. (As MacFarlane himself concludes in 'Relativism and Disagreement': "From lofty philosophical heights, the language games we play with [relativistic words] may seem irrational. But that is no reason to deny that we do play these games, or that they have a social purpose.")
Really, we should conclude, there isn't any single question here. Strictly speaking, it doesn't really make sense for Agent to retract his earlier judgment. And the apparent 'disagreement' (of Informant or the omniscient observer), though "appropriate" according to the rules of the game, is - in a more important sense - philosophically empty.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Parfit on Epistemic and Practical Rationality
My previous post argued that acts and desires can inherit the irrationality of beliefs on which they are based. Why does Parfit deny this? Here's what he says about the smoker who so acts because he irrationally believes it to be good for his health:[I]t would be misleading to call my act practically irrational, since my mistake is only in my failure to respond to my epistemic reasons not to have this belief. It would also be misleading to call this act epistemically irrational, since it is not in acting in this way that I am failing to respond to these epistemic reasons.
We should not, I suggest, make either of these misleading claims. When some belief is epistemically irrational, this irrationality can be plausibly and usefully claimed to be inherited by any other belief that depends on this belief. But it is not worth claiming that some beliefs' irrationality is also inherited by any desire or act that depends on this belief... Our desires and acts are best called irrational only when, in having some desire or acting in some way, we are failing to respond to clear and strongly decisive practical reasons or apparent reasons not to have this desire, or not to act in this way.
I find this rather puzzling. After all, the fact that smoking is bad for your health is a genuine practical reason not to smoke (and, we may suppose, a "strongly decisive" one), to which the agent is failing to respond. So whether the smoker qualifies as practically irrational would seem to depend on whether this reason -- that smoking is bad for your health -- is sufficiently "clear" to the agent. But we have stipulated that this health fact is indeed "clear" according to the agent's evidence, such that they are epistemically irrational in failing to believe it. So why doesn't Parfit consider this a case of practical irrationality, by his own definition?
(Perhaps by "clear" he really means "believed", just as earlier he defines apparent reasons as "false beliefs about the relevant facts whose truth would give us some reason." But then we're missing any argument against the competing view that assesses practical rationality against evidentially "apparent" reasons. It sounds compelling -- undeniable -- to say that practical rationality must have something to do with the practical reasons we "appear", in some sense, to have. It's far less compelling to just assert that the relevant 'appearance' is found only in our explicit beliefs, rather than also being implicit in our evidence, and in what we rationally ought to believe.)
On my view, the smoker is making a mistake that relates to his (evidentially apparent) practical reasons. Granted, the mistake wholly derives from a prior epistemic misstep. But that doesn't mean that his mistake is "only" epistemic, since the epistemic error leads him to make a practical error: he smokes when he has clear practical reasons not to. The epistemic error becomes a practical error. That is to say, the agent makes an epistemic misstep that renders not just the initial belief, but also the downstream action, rationally unjustified or unwarranted. (Compare: in the belief case, I go wrong not "only" in believing that p and that if p then q; I am also rationally unjustified in my inferred belief that q -- though of course this rational error is wholly derivative of the earlier ones. There's a sense in which I haven't committed any additional missteps. But the flaw in my prior beliefs has "become" a flaw shared by my later belief also. The same flaw or misstep can infect - and render unjustified - multiple states. Since Parfit grants this in the case of beliefs, it's unclear why we shouldn't say the same thing in case of the practical "states" of desire and action.)
The best way I can make sense of Parfit's view is by attributing to him a distinctive method of carving up epistemic vs. practical rationality. I've been assuming that practical rationality is a matter of responding (e.g. acting) appropriately in light of the evidentially apparent [facts that would constitute] practical reasons. But note that there are two broad ways that one might fail to act appropriately: one might fail to believe the (evidentially) "apparent facts" in the first place, or one might incorrectly (perversely) interpret the normative significance of these factual beliefs. The former failure is the epistemically-derived practical irrationality we've been discussing. The latter is the more 'pure' form of practical irrationality found in malicious evildoers, Future-Tuesday indifferent agents, etc.
Now, I take it that Parfit wants to understand the latter, 'pure' kind of practical failure as the only genuinely practical failure. On this view, practical rationality is not a matter of "responding" (in my broad sense) to our evidence-relative reasons for action -- first noticing, then non-perversely interpreting them. It instead concerns only the interpretive element. We might say that (on this view) practical rationality is a matter of not being perverse. (Note that there's certainly nothing perverse about the smoker who irrationally thinks he's helping his health. The guy is acting stupidly, but -- given his beliefs -- hardly perversely. "At least his heart is in the right place," we might say. "Too bad he's such an incompetent fool.")
In support of this interpretation, I notice that Parfit later writes (in discussing an exception to the general rule that epistemic and practical rationality are independent) that "if we have irrational beliefs about practical reasons, and about what we ought rationally to want or to do, our having such beliefs makes us in one way practically irrational." This makes sense if by 'practically irrational' Parfit just means perverse. It's certainly true that someone who falsely believes that they ought to do evil (or be Future-Tuesday indifferent) is thereby "in one way" perverse. But merely having this belief doesn't suffice to make them practically irrational in the ordinary sense. After all, they might instead be rational akratics, and act entirely appropriately despite their crazy notions.
So, is this just a terminological dispute? It would be if Parfit meant his use of the term to be stipulative. But that is not the case. Instead, he writes:I am using 'irrational' in its ordinary sense, to mean, roughly, 'deserves strong criticism of the kind that we also express with words like "foolish", "stupid", and "crazy"'. ... If we believe that one of two preferences deserves much stronger rational criticism, we shouldn't say that only the other preference is irrational.
So it seems we're disputing the character of a certain normative role (roughly: what makes an act/desire foolish). Parfit's view, if I've understood him correctly, is that perversity is what makes an act or desire foolish. I agree that this is one way that an act can be foolish. But an act can also be foolish in a way that derives from a prior epistemic error, as when an agent smokes for the sake of benefiting their health. If we believe that the smoker's act deserves rational criticism, we should reject Parfit's understanding of the epistemic/practical distinction. Perversity has an important role to play in our normative theorizing, but it isn't this one. Acts and desires can be foolish -- "deserve rational criticism", in the ordinary sense -- without being perverse.
Postscript: I think that what Parfit is really getting at here is a distinct but related role, namely, what makes a mis-step practical rather than epistemic. It's important to note that this is a distinct question from what makes an act or desire deserving of rational criticism, since -- as I've argued -- an act or desire can be foolish or unwarranted in a way that derives from a fundamentally epistemic mis-step.
Perhaps it's best to say that there are really two significant 'epistemic/practical' distinctions to consider in our theorizing about rationality. There is the ordinary state-based distinction between the rational status of epistemic states (beliefs), on the one hand, and the rational status of practical 'states' (acts or desires), on the other. Then there is Parfit's step-based distinction, between fundamentally epistemic missteps (stupidity), and fundamentally practical missteps (perversity).
What I've effectively been insisting is that an act might be irrational (in the ordinary sense -- unjustified and deserving of certain sorts of criticism) even if the agent's only mis-step was epistemic in nature. Contra Parfit, it doesn't follow that only their epistemic states are liable to rational criticism, for a single misstep may set awry multiple states, and an epistemic misstep may set awry downstream practical states. So long as we're clear on the difference, each distinction may well be "worth" talking about (depending on our purposes), and neither can be dismissed as necessarily "misleading" -- though of course either can be misleading, if conflated or used for the wrong theoretical role.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Inherited Irrationality
Beliefs may inherit the irrationality of other beliefs they are based on. (If I irrationally believe that p and that if p then q, and so conclude that q, then this validly derived belief likewise lacks rational warrant.) What about acts or desires that are based on irrational beliefs?
Parfit (On What Matters, chp 5) discusses the case of a man who irrationally believes that smoking would be good for his health, and on this basis desires to smoke. I think this desire is irrational, since it should be clear (given his evidence) that in fact he has every reason not to smoke. This fact about his evidence makes the agent liable to rational criticism if he smokes: doing so is "stupid", "unwise", "foolish", etc. -- though of course the agent himself might fail to realize this.
But instead of assessing the rationality of desires/actions against the agent's evidence, Parfit claims that desires (acts) are rational iff they are based on beliefs which, if true, would provide sufficient reasons to so desire (act). Since if it were true that smoking is good for your health, this fact would provide sufficient reason to [want to] smoke, Parfit concludes that the act/desire is rational even though the belief is not.
I find this puzzling. Since it is irrational for the agent to believe that smoking is good for his health (and we may stipulate that there aren't any other relevant considerations), it is presumably likewise irrational for him to believe that he has any reason to smoke. He rationally ought to believe that he has no such reason, and hence that smoking is irrational for him. This normative fact seems to conflict with the claim that in fact smoking is rational for him. Consider the following principle of rational transmission:
(RT) if S rationally ought to believe that it is irrational for her to Φ, then it is irrational for her to Φ.
One might respond by arguing that the act only becomes irrational once S actually has the beliefs that she ought to have. That is, we should merely grant the weaker claim:
(RT-actual): if S believes (as she rationally ought) that it is irrational for her to Φ, then it is irrational for her to Φ.
Since the smoker doesn't have this rational belief, but instead irrationally believes that he ought to smoke, it may be claimed that in these circumstances it is perfectly sensible of him to go ahead and smoke. But that doesn't sound particularly sensible to me. (Sure, it's consistent with his irrational beliefs, but acting in ways consistent with irrational beliefs is not necessarily sensible.)
Parfit says, "Our claim should be only that, since these irrational beliefs are false, [the smoker has] no reasons to act in [this way]." But this seems too weak. Suppose the evidence is misleading and it turns out that smoking actually is good for your health after all. So it turns out that the smoker does have objective reason to act in this way. Still, his act is irrational (unwise, stupid, etc.) since all his evidence suggests that he would do better not to smoke. Even if he turns out to be lucky, we can -- contra Parfit -- still criticize his act. It wasn't rationally warranted, given his evidence.
Curiously, Parfit grants something close to this. He writes: "We should still claim that, when I want to smoke, I am being irrational, but the irrationality is in my belief, not my desire." But what does it mean for a person to be irrational "when" they X, but that the irrationality is not "in" their X-ing? We might take it to simply mean that they exhibit some (possibly unrelated) rational flaw at the same time as they X. But again, this seems too weak.
Suppose that I'm in the midst of eating dinner when I form the desire to smoke. It would be misleading to say that "when I eat dinner, I am being irrational". It's literally true, in a sense: I am being irrational at this time. But the irrationality is in no way related to my eating dinner. Rather, I'm irrational in forming the desire to smoke. There's an important asymmetry in the rational significance of these two events, which isn't captured merely by noting that they are concurrent with my having an irrational belief. The irrationality of the belief infects the related desire, in a way that it does not infect my unrelated act of eating dinner.
So it looks like we need to say something stronger than that the agent is "being irrational" merely concurrently with their wanting to smoke. The connection is tighter than that. They are specifically irrational for wanting to smoke (not for eating dinner, or whatever else they might be doing at that time).
It's true that the irrationality here is merely derived from the irrationality of the basing belief. So there's a sense in which the desire doesn't introduce any further irrationality that wasn't already there. (Unlike, say, if the agent had taken his irrational belief that smoking is healthy to be a reason for jumping off a building. Then his desire would be irrational in an entirely new and further respect.) But this is just like the uncontroversial epistemic case, where my concluding that q doesn't introduce any further irrationality that wasn't already present in my prior beliefs (that p and that if p then q) -- unlike, say, if I had concluded in some unrelated proposition r.
Inherited irrationality need not make you "more" irrational, on some global scale, than you would otherwise have been. It's just to say that the downstream states or actions lack rational justification, just like the upstream states on which they are based.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
"Contributive Justice"
[P]hilosophers have thought that justice is about what people get; I think it is about what people are able to do, particularly how they are able to develop their abilities, give back to society, and be respected for their contributions.
-- Paul Gomberg, How To Make Opportunity Equal, quoted in NDPR
I can't say I see much interest in "justice" talk, but if translated into a claim about welfare / the good life, this is certainly a sentiment I'm sympathetic towards.
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