Perhaps the most interesting question in metaphysics, to my mind, is whether identity facts are among the base facts; whether worlds or their constituent objects are prior; whether de dicto or de re modality is fundamental. (I take these to be different angles on the same core question.) We can illustrate the issue by way of my old example of duplicates Bob1 and Bob2 in the perfectly symmetrical universe. Although this possible world contains two of everything, presumably things could have been different. In particular, there might have been no duplication. But now we ask: how many ways are there for a world to be exactly like the mirror world, minus the duplication?
(A) The Kripkean Answer: Many. At the very least, you might have just Bob1's half of the universe, or just Bob2's half of the universe. So that's two possibilities. We might even mix and match, conceiving of a possibility containing precisely Bob2's world except that Bob1 exists in Bob2's place. To generalize: if there are n independent objects in each half of the symmetrical universe, then there will be 2^n ways to populate a possible world containing just one of each object. (Essentialists may deny that all the objects are independent in this way, though: perhaps Bob1 could not have been born to Bob2's mother. Such details needn't concern us here, though.)
(B) The Lewisian Answer: There is really just one possibility here. There is no difference between the various possibilities mentioned in the Kripkean answer. They are all describing one and the same way for a world to be. What we have imagined is a world which contains but a single Bob counterpart (and similarly for each other object in the mirror world). Whether he is really Bob1 or Bob2 is an empty question. In the strictest sense of identity, he is plainly neither. But as a counterpart, he can play a truthmaking role for counterfactual claims made about either. (E.g. "Bob1 might have existed without Bob2," and vice versa.)
I lean heavily in the Lewisian direction, since the idea that there could be any number of qualitatively identical worlds which nonetheless differ in the identities of their constituents strikes me as completely nutty. (There's nothing there to ground such a difference -- nothing in Bob's metaphysical makeup that could fix whether he is Bob1 or Bob2. Well, unless you care to introduce a 'haecceity' for just this purpose, but haecceities seem mysterious and insufficiently motivated posits.)
"That's nuts" does not, however, seem to convince the Kripkeans of my acquaintance. Can anyone suggest a better way to make progress on this issue? (Or some good papers to read? I'm not at all familiar with the literature.) I think Jack is with me on the specific case of time-points, at least, so maybe I just need a few more compelling examples to form a base from which to generalize...? More seriously, though, it seems like such a central issue that it cannot be settled on its own. Rather, we must do the hard work of exploring the implications for whole systems of Kripkean and Lewisian metaphysics, to see which approach ultimately bears fruit. What do you think?
Friday, February 01, 2008
The Ultimate Question: Kripke or Lewis?
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
What is Democracy?
I think it is possible for majority rule to be, in an important sense, undemocratic. Imagine a society split 60/40 into two comprehensive factions, such that people in the same faction always vote together, and against the other faction. In such a situation, I think it would be misleading to describe a system of majority rule as 'democratic'. It is not the people (generally) who rule here; what we have instead is a mere oligarchy, however large: 'rule by the majority faction'.
What more is required for democracy, then? Total consensus is an unrealistic ideal, and democracy still ought to be possible in the face of robust disagreement. I'd suggest that we instead understand 'rule by the people' to mean that everyone is able to make a meaningful contribution to the collective decision-making process, over time. The votes of a permanent minority are pointless, as they never have a chance of making a difference. But in a more flexible political culture, "the majority" is constantly in flux. Each person will be in the majority on some issues (and in the minority for others), so their will is at least sometimes heeded. In this sense, they all contribute to the state's decision-making. Even if they do not always get their way, there is still a meaningful sense in which we can describe this as a polity ruled by all (diachronically).
However, it is consistent with such 'diachronic democracy' that everyone be completely dogmatic. At least there are no stable factions, and thus no consistently oppressed (or effectively disenfranchised) subclass of the citizenry. But it would still be the case that for each particular decision, those in the minority were simply disregarded, their "contributions" effectively nullified. The system is effectively a rotating oligarchy, where everyone gets to take a turn.
This raises the question: is synchronic democracy - rule by all at once - possible? I want to suggest that it is possible, so long as the political system is sensitive to and responsive to reasons that any may put forward. In the absence of faction and dogmatism -- better, in the presence of civic respect -- even those who are initially in the minority have a real chance of affecting the outcome, by convincing others of the virtues of their position. Since the outcome is influenced (ideally: determined) by the strength of reasons, and these reasons may be contributed by anyone, it follows that any can make a meaningful contribution. 'Democracy' in the fullest sense is thus realizable in the form of deliberative democracy.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Regulating Aims
Railton offers some interesting thoughts on the paradox of hedonism (and self-defeating consequentialist aims more generally) in his 'Alienation' paper (Facts, Values, and Norms, p.156):
However, it is important to notice that even though adopting a hedonistic life project may tend to interfere with realizing that very project, there is no such natural exclusion between acting for the sake of another or a cause as such and recognizing how important this is to one's happiness... while the pursuit of happiness may not be the reason he entered or sustains the relationship, he may also recognize that if it had not seemed likely to make him happy he would not have entered it, and that if it proved over time to be inconsistent with his happiness he would consider ending it.
So the sophisticated hedonist (SH) may take the goal of hedonism to regulate his other ends, but nevertheless regards those first-order contingent desires as non-instrumental for as long as he retains them. Railton continues (p.157):
It might be objected that one cannot really regard a person or project as an end as such if one's commitment is in this way contingent or overridable. But were this so, we would be able to have very few commitments to ends as such. For example, one could not be committed to both one's spouse and one's child as ends as such, since at most one of these commitments could be overriding in cases of conflict. It is easy to confuse the commitment to an end as such (or for its own sake) with that of an overriding commitment, but strength is not structure.
I don't think that is an "easy" confusion to make at all. It would be downright silly for someone to think that a desire must be instrumental merely because it was overridable. As I see it, the worry here is not that hedonistic concerns may outweigh SH's other desires; it is that they may extinguish them utterly. (Non-hedonistic ends seem to be treated as in some sense providing merely prima facie rather than pro tanto reasons.) We do not find this in ordinary cases of conflict: a parent will still care about their spouse, even as they favour their child. But SH, on my favoured reading, would cease to recognize an end if it proved clearly detrimental to his long-term happiness. So the structural relations of these desires is unusual, and this should be recognized.
We do not here have two first-order desires (on a structural par) weighing against each other. Nor - it is argued - do we have derived desires that are merely instrumental to one's hegemonic "true aim" of hedonism. Rather, in the case of SH we have first-order desires that are largely non-hedonistic, yet - despite being non-instrumental - they are contingent on the 'regulating aim' (let us call it) of hedonism. Hedonism is treated as a higher-order desire. It does not guide one's actions directly, but it guides the acquisition and maintenance of one's first-order desires. That's how I would want to explicate the idea, at least.
Railton's most vivid explication comes on p.159:
An individual could realize that his instrumental attitude towards his friends prevents him from achieving the fulles happiness friendship affords. He could then attempt to focus more on his friends as such, doing this somewhat deliberately, perhaps, until it comes more naturally. He might then find his friendships improved and himself happier. If he found instead that his relationships were deteriorating or his happiness declining, he would reconsider the idea. None of this need be hidden from himself: the external goal of happiness reinforces the internal goals of his relationships. The sophisticated hedonist's motivational structure should therefore meet a counterfactual condition: he need not always act for the sake of happiness, since he may do various things for their own sake or for the sake of others, but he would not act as he does if it were not compatible with his leading an objectively hedonistic [i.e. maximally happy] life. Of course, a sophisticated hedonist cannot guarantee that he will meet this counterfactual condition, but only attempt to meet it as fully as possible.
Discussing this in Michael Smith's seminar today, it was initially suggested that this 'counterfactual condition' - by implying that SH would never act on his non-hedonistic desires when doing so would be inoptimal - required a kind of overdetermination: although actually motivated by concern for others, SH's stronger hedonistic desire is waiting there in the background, ready to override the others just in case they fail to fall into line. But this just looks much like the simple hedonist. So I think we do better to interpret the sophisticated hedonistic desire as a purely higher-order one, which does not have any direct motivational force at all. (Note that the counterfactual condition may still be true due to finkish dispositions. Though it probably calls for a slightly looser interpretation in any case, i.e. SH may act inoptimally at times, so long as this doesn't too greatly undermine the happiness of his life as a whole.)
This is vital for seeing the difference between Railton's characters of John and Juan. Both feel great affection for their respective wives, and recognize the impersonal demands of utilitarianism as having ultimate moral weight in some sense. But John justifies his good treatment of his wife in directly utilitarian terms: "I've always thought that people should help each other when they're in a specially good position to do so. I know Anne better than anyone else does, so I know better what she wants and needs." (p.152) He thus seems troublingly 'alienated' from his personal concerns and relationships. Juan, on the other hand, responds simply: "I love Linda... So it means a lot to me to do things for her." (p.163) He adds the utilitarian justification only when further asked how in principle his marriage fits into the greater scheme of things.
Due to the assumption of structural parity, and thus motivational overdetermination, many in our class concluded that John and Juan were much the same, differing only in which of their two aligned desires were causally operative. But I don't think that's the right way to look at it. Juan isn't directly motivated by impersonal utilitarian considerations at all (we may say) -- not even waiting inoperative in the background. He has a quite different motivational structure, full of deeply personal and non-alienated concerns; it is just that these concerns are regulated by (or contingent on) a higher-order requirement that they align with the impersonal goals of morality.
Sound plausible?
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Scientism
Many otherwise-intelligent people have an unfortunate tendency to dismiss entire realms of inquiry out of hand. Perhaps the most common example of this is the failure to appreciate the possibility of a priori or non-scientific rational inquiry, i.e. philosophy. The prevalence of ignorant scientism in this thread (bashing Nick Bostrom's simulation argument) is remarkable -- though sadly not atypical.
One commenter suggests that an untestable hypothesis must consequently be classified as either 'myth' or 'garbage'. (He did not tell us how to test this very suggestion. I can only assume he was storytelling.) Another calls Bostrom's argument "pseudoscience gibberish". Yet another chimes in:
This is very much like saying the earth might really be only 3000 years old and $DEVIL just made it seem like its much older to fool everyone.
IOW, it is all hocus pocus claptrap what ifs and doesn’t belong in any science discussion.
The blogger (Peter Woit) himself writes:
I don’t see what the problem is with “lumping Bostrom’s ideas in with religion”. They’re not science and have similar characteristics: grandiose speculation about the nature of the universe which some people enjoy discussing for one reason or another, but that is inherently untestable, and completely divorced from the actual very interesting things that we have learned about the universe through the scientific method.
Really, if people can't tell the difference between a reasoned philosophical argument and random "hocus pocus" or religious proposals... well, let's just say it's further evidence of the urgent need for philosophical education in schools!
If you think that Bostrom's argument is flawed, then by all means put on your philosopher's hat and expose its errors. But this requires actually engaging with the argument. To dismiss it just because it didn't involve any labwork is the worst kind of scientism.
I should add a disclaimer. Sometimes people attack "scientism" when their real target is epistemic standards in general. (See the comments here, for example.) Not me. I'm all in favour of having rationally justified beliefs. What I'm attacking here is the lazy assumption that science is the only source of rational justification. This assumption is simply false (and indeed self-defeating). This should be too obvious for words, but apparently it needs to be said: rigorous philosophical argumentation can also provide rational support for a conclusion.
Hat-tip: Robin Hanson (who offers some incisive criticism of his own).
See also: Explaining Beliefs. (It's the same core issue, really: dogmatic dismissal is no replacement for reasoned inquiry. You can't tell whether a question is answerable until you try.)
Tuesday, August 07, 2007
Brand Value
Advertising makes us want stuff. What's the normative significance of this fact? The most obvious thought is to see it as a bad thing: marketing manipulates our preferences, effectively brainwashing us into wanting things that don't necessarily cohere with our most deeply-held values. On the other hand, it might be argued that advertising "creates value" by increasing the satisfaction we get from advertised products. (Cf. The Visible Hand -- apparently food tastes better if it comes in a McDonalds wrapper!)
Marketing aims to shape the cultural meaning of a brand. If someone wants to associate themselves with a particular lifestyle, buying an appropriately advertised label may be an easy way for them to send the desired signal. Advertised consumer goods thus serve people who want to brand themselves, perhaps to affirm their cultural identity or to gain status. Does this make advertising worthwhile after all? (I've always thought that marketers were scum... should I revise my opinion?)
This ties in with important debates over intellectual property and "trademark dilution". See Boing Boing:
It used to be that trademarks were intended to protect "consumers" (that's us) from being tricked into buying goods under false pretenses. If it said "Coca-Cola" on the can, there had better be Coke inside, and not Pepsi or Crazy-Bob's-Discount-House-of-Soda brand. When a competitor of Coke's shipped a bottle of stuff that was misleadingly packaged or labelled, Coke's authority to sue its competition derived from its need to protect us, not its bottom line. It didn't get to sue because it owned Coca-Cola, but because it was acting as a proxy for its customers, who were being decieved by con-artists who mislabelled their goods...
But as time went by, trademarks stopped being about us and started being the embodiment of brands (which, as Surowiecki points out, are on the wane and were probably never as important as we thought to begin with).
This meant that trademarks weren't just things that helped the public know what they were buying -- they are a kind of pseudo-property. Pseudo-property that could be defended on the basis that it "belongs" to a company, who need to be protected from having the value of their marks "diluted" or "tarnished."
So now you have Visa going after eVisa.com -- a company that helps you get travel visas -- and Air Canada going after shareholders who used the Air Canada logo on communications about problems with Air Canada management. Disney's one of the worst, of course, going after daycares that paint Mickey on the walls -- even though there's not an instant's danger that anyone will mistake a nonprofit daycare center for a Disney operation and be misled into patronizing it. Most recently, of course, some of Nintendo's lawyers got a wild hair up their ass because someone mentioned some game titles on a profile-page on a porn/community site and freaked out because the association might damage their brand.
All these new and exciting uses of trademarks -- shutting up critics, blocking new entrants into the market, and controlling the speech of private individuals -- are justified by the importance of brands.
If branding is just a way for companies to manipulate consumers and rip us off, then such heavy-handed legal "protection" is simply evil. But if brands create real (cultural) value for consumers, then there's some trade-off here, and so a real debate to be had.
Actually, even granting this value, I think the pro-marketing argument fails. It shows the value of imbued significance or cultural meaning -- but there's no reason to think that this meaning is best shaped by advertisers. A far more attractive alternative would be for such meanings to emerge from the distributed contributions of cultural citizens, as per my old post: 'Democratizing Culture'. We don't need advertisers to impose cultural meanings from On High. So, my low opinion of them remains...
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Parity of Value: a formal model
Over at Ethics Etc, S. Matthew Liao presents Ruth Chang's argument for a fourth relation of comparative value - 'on a par' - to supplement the standard 'better than', 'worse than', and 'equal to' relations:
1. Mozart is neither better nor worse than Michelangelo, with respect to Creative Genius (CG).
2. A Mozart who has some small improvement that bears on CG (Mozart+) is better than Mozart, with respect to CG.
3. Mozart+ is not better than Michelangelo, with respect to CG.
4. Therefore, Mozart and Michelangelo are not related by any of the standard trichotomy of relations, with respect to CG. (This is the Small Improvement Argument)
5. Mozart is better than Talentlessi, a very bad music composer, with respect to CG.
6. Michelangelo is also better than Talentlessi, with respect to CG.
7. Therefore, Mozart and Michelangelo are comparable, with respect to CG. (This is the Chaining Argument)
8. Given 4 and 7, there must be a fourth comparative relation; Chang calls it the parity relation. (This is the Parity Conclusion)
The premises all seem intuitively plausible, yet it may be initially puzzling how they could all be true -- at least if we conceive of value as a point on a scale.
The idea seems to be that CG is some kind of holistic value, constructed from a composite of various partly-commensurate dimensions (e.g. music and art). That could explain why Mozart+ beats Mozart (the slight increase is on the same dimension, so Mozart+ strictly dominates Mozart, being better in some ways and worse in none) yet Mozart+ does not beat Michelangelo, being better in some ways but worse in others, with the tradeoff being, in some sense, "too close to call". But note also that the two dimensions are at least comparable at the extremes: Michelangelo's artistic genius outweighs Talentlessi's sorry musical skills. In sum: Mozart and Michelangelo both excel along different dimensions of Creative Genius, which places them 'on a par' in such a way as that a minor improvement to either would not affect their relative standing.
It's an intuitive enough picture, but is it theoretically consistent? Liao expressed doubts. But I think we can construct a formal model which exhibits all the theoretical properties Chang needs here, i.e. showing the premises (1, 2, 3, 5, 6) to be mutually consistent. Here is my model:
(A) Let 'x' and 'y' denote two dimensions of Creative Genius, and let Proto-CG be composite value combining x and y but with some vagueness as to their relative weightings.
Assign base values:
* Mozart = 100x + 0y
* Mozart+ = 101x + 0y
* Michelangelo = 0x + 100y
* Talentlessi = 1x + 0y
Hence, the following facts hold concerning ordering relations with respect to the proto-CG scale:
1-p. It is not determinate whether Mozart is either better or worse than Michelangelo.
2-p. Mozart+ is determinately greater than Mozart.
3-p. It is not determinate that Mozart+ is better than Michelangelo.
5-p. Mozart is determinately greater than Talentlessi.
6-p. Michelangelo is also determinately greater than Talentlessi.
Liao raised an important objection to my model at this point:
If it is vague as to whether Mozart is better or worse than Michaelangelo or equally good, then, it is not true that Mozart is neither better nor worse than Michaelangelo or equally good.
Granting this point, it is important for me to emphasize that the #-p facts hold merely with respect to proto-CG, and do not yet speak to the ultimate CG relations which we are interested in. What we need is some schema to translate these vague Proto-CG relations into the determinate CG relations stated in the original premises. That is the role of the second part of my model.
(B) We may now construct CG orderings from Proto-CG orderings as follows:
For the standard trichotomy of positive ordering relations ('better than', 'worse than', and 'equal to'), let us say that the relation holds with respect to CG iff it is determinate that the relation holds with respect to proto-CG. (I'll call this the "axiom of determination" unless anyone can think of a spiffier name.)
This axiom establishes entailment relations from each #-p to the corresponding original premise #. For example, from the fact (1-p) that it is not determinate whether Mozart is either better or worse than Michelangelo with respect to proto-CG, we can infer from the axiom of determination that (1) Mozart is neither better nor worse than Michelangelo, with respect to CG.
Closing Remarks: My formalization raises some intriguing questions of philosophical methodology. E.g. what philosophical interest can such a formal model have? What does this style of argument really show? It's not as though the process I've described is meant to literally reflect the fundamental metaphysics of values. It's merely a model. (In particular, it seems implausible that my internal 'proto-CG' variable corresponds to any significant value in reality! I employ it as a purely technical 'fix', to get my model to yield the right outputs.)
But I think it has philosophical worth in the following respect: it establishes that Chang's premises about value are mutually consistent. This model shows one possible way that they could all be true. Perhaps reality provides another. But at least we can dispel our initial skepticism about whether they were consistent at all.
Friday, June 29, 2007
Dualist Explanations
Peter writes:
Chalmers posits that the non-physical mental properties parallel the information processing properties of the system. But if they parallel them perfectly, and thus explain the mind, why not just identify them? ... the dualist explanation posits something more than the materialist version of the same theory does: it must posit additional laws governing a new domain of mental stuff that makes it behave in this way and stick to the right sort of physical systems.
On the other hand, the (type B) materialist theory posits ad hoc 'strong necessities', which we have no independent reason to believe in. (Kripke's "necessary a posteriori" is no help.)
Consider the question: why aren't we non-conscious zombies, mere hunks of matter that exhibit complex behaviour without any "lights" on inside? The materialist answers that zombies are impossible; that consciousness is nothing above and beyond the complex arrangements of matter that our bodies (brains) comprise. But this strikes me as an unsatisfying explanation, that doesn't really do justice to the phenomena.
The dualist can do better. She may acknowledge the depth of the problem -- that consciousness is something new, something that goes beyond merely material properties. She can also acknowledge the modal fact that zombies (non-conscious physical duplicates of ourselves) are possible. So, rather than merely rebuffing the question "why aren't we zombies?" as empty or ill-formed, the dualist takes it seriously, and offers an answer:
The reason we're not zombies is because of the contingent natural laws that govern our universe. There are psycho-physical bridging laws, which ensure that matter gives rise to consciousness. (Note how intuitive this claim is: we think that consciousness emerges from the brain; not that it just is the brain!) The zombie world has no such bridging laws. Its laws are merely physical, so that brains and other matter causally interact without giving rise to genuine consciousness in addition. That's the difference.
Materialists can't explain this difference, because they don't take the zombie intuition seriously. Once the brain matter is there, they think that's all there is to consciousness -- there's nothing further to explain. Most of us think there is something still to be explained, and dualism can achieve this by positing bridging laws that cause 'mind' to emerge from 'matter'.
Even dualists can agree that in our world (i.e. given the actual laws of nature) complex brain states suffice for consciousness. The briding laws make zombies nomologically impossible. And that's all science is concerned with. As philosophers, though, we're interested in a broader sense of possibility, in which we can't just take the natural laws for granted. So, once our familiar psycho-physical bridging laws are taken away, we should ask: does matter alone suffice for consciousness? The zombie world demonstrates that the answer is no. Take away the bridging laws, and our physical stuff might no longer give rise to any conscious experiences.
In summary, it's worth emphasizing three points:
(1) Materialism - perhaps surprisingly - turns out to be theoretically extravagant, due to its modal ambitions. It posits 'strong necessities', which we have no independent reason to grant, and indeed goes against everything else we know in philosophy. Dualism is thus the more philosophically modest theory.
(2) Additional laws are worth positing, to explain why we're conscious rather than zombies. (The unsatisfying alternative is to merely dismiss the question.)
(3) Contrary to popular belief, dualism need not be in tension with science. It only diverges from materialism in its extra-nomological implications -- i.e. matters that concern philosophers, not scientists.
Monday, May 07, 2007
Property and Coercion
Over at Cato Unbound, Daniel Klein draws on the traditional conception of coercion as "the initiation of physical aggression" to argue that minimum wage laws (and the like) are coercive:It threatens physical aggression against people for engaging in certain kinds of voluntary exchange. To me, that is coercion. Just imagine if your neighbor decided that he would impose a minimum wage law on us. Wouldn’t we all agree that he was coercing us? If it is coercion when he does it, why isn’t it coercion when the government does it?
While I have some sympathy for his general project, Klein's essay risks reinforcing three conceptual errors of libertarian ideology:
(1) It neglects the coercion inherent in the very institution of property. To claim ownership of a resource is to prevent others from making free use of it. If another attempts to use the resource in the same way as you do, you can call it "theft" and initiate force against them (or have the police do so on your behalf).
That's not to say that property ownership is necessarily wrong, of course. But you can't pretend that laissez faire provides any sort of neutral starting point. It involves coercion, just like every other system. The real question, then, is how significant are the impediments created by each institutional framework, and whether the opportunities they open up are worth it.
(2) It neglects other kinds of constraints that can impede us, leading to an impoverished conception of "freedom" that fails to track what really matters to us (namely, capability). Negative liberty is fine as far as it goes, but it makes for a rather one-eyed approach to evaluating policy. A better maxim would be to seek to enable people to achieve their goals. Economists (like everyone else) should be concerned with opportunities, not merely interference.
(3) It conflates personal and institutional action. This is the difference between vigilantes and magistrates. Just because it would be illegitimate for your neighbour to do something in their role as an ordinary citizen, doesn't necessarily mean there's no legitimate way it could be done.
A well-ordered society is governed by the rule of law. This means that there are institutional processes to govern certain classes of action. The outcome of a just institutional process -- whether it be a guilty verdict, or minimum wage legislation -- has a different normative status than the corresponding action of a neighbour who takes it upon himself to unilaterally impose his will on others.
The upshot: yes, instituting a minimum wage involves an element of coercion. But not in the same way as if your neighbour did it. More in the way that instituting property itself involves an element of coercion. Whether either set of laws counts as "coercive in any significant sense" will depend on context. It's not as cut-and-dried as someone who makes the above three errors might assume.
Finally, I should emphasize that the alternative to ideological libertarianism is not a blank cheque for statism. I wouldn't claim that "whatever stuff you have really belongs to the government", or anything like that. It's possible to set up an unjust institutional order, and even within a largely just order it's possible for government agents to violate their (e.g. constitutional) obligations. So there's plenty of room for political criticism. The point is simply to warn against the complacent assumption of laissez-faire as the "natural" or default system, to be contrasted with all the "coercive" alternatives. In principle, it ain't so different. As with every other system, it must be assessed on its practical merits.
Sunday, May 06, 2007
The Examined Life
I went along to an interesting discussion group the other day, on whether "the unexamined life is not worth living." I think the strongest affirmative argument concerns autonomy: if you don't reflect on your life and values, and instead are merely "going through the motions", then there's an important sense in which your life is not even really yours. You're a cog in the machinery of the universe; a mere animal. Experiences happen to you, for better or worse, and may trigger this or that quasi-reflexive "response". But you're not a true agent until you stop and question your own drives and actions, reshape your character into a mould of your own devising, and thereby craft a life that makes sense to you as you live it.
The story of a life is a credit to the author. But an unexamined life has no author. It's a mere force of nature, no more meaningful than a hurricane. So, to live a meaningful life, one must first claim it as their own, and actively author the rest of the story. That's why the unexamined life is not worth living.
But there's probably no such thing as a wholly unexamined life in this sense. Everyone questions themselves, to a greater or lesser degree. So the real question would seem to be: how far should we take this?
Brandon recently pointed out the need for a local/global distinction here. It would be absurd to try to maintain a state of rational self-examination at every local moment. Rather, it is the global exercise of rationality we should endorse, whereby the agent considers the "big picture" of their life as a whole, which will certainly include many local moments at which critical reflection would be wholly inappropriate -- "one thought too many", as Williams put it.
This issue was brought up in our discussion, as one student wondered what to make of a person who, upon reflection, decides that they wish to live an unexamined life henceforth! Would this one moment suffice to establish a considered "global preference", that they spend the rest of their apparently thought-free life acting out? It's a troubling case! I reflectively prefer a life that contains much more actual reflection; but maybe that's just me?
Finally, I was surprised by the assumption of hedonism that drove much of the group's discussion. There are many things I want out of life, and happiness is but one of them (and not necessarily the most important). I'd expect most people to agree. Better to strive for excellence, or help others, than be a blissful couch potato.
So, the challenge to the Socratic mantra doesn't come from blissful passivity, to my mind. Rather, it is the life of non-philosophical activity -- e.g. developing other talents, cultivating loving relationships, and providing for one's family -- that seems the most obvious counterexample. But, in light of the autonomy argument, could such a life still have (intrinsic) value even in the total absense of any self-reflection whatsoever?
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Is Normativity Just Semantics?
I'm over a year late responding to this one, but Computational Truth had an interesting post about whether disagreements over well-being are substantive. Suppose that we all agree on the empirical facts: Alan experiences more pleasure, but Betty has fulfilled more of her heartfelt desires. What are hedonists and desire theorists disagreeing about, then, when they dispute which of the two is "better off"?
The problem: According to analytical reductionism (or "descriptivism"), normative terms like 'wellbeing' simply mean whatever wellbeing reduces to -- happiness, desire fulfilment, or whatever the case may be. This would seem to suggest that the dispute is merely terminological. Either one of the theorists is confused about what their words mean, or else they're speaking subtly different idiolects. In that case, we can translate the apparent dispute:
H. "Alan is better off!"
D. "No, Betty is better off!"
into...
H. "Alan is happier!"
D. "No, Betty has fulfilled more of her desires!"
so that they're not really in disagreement at all. (At most, they disagree about what the term 'better off' means. But words aren't worth arguing over. It's the proposition, or what is said with the words, that really matters. We mean to argue about the world, not just the language used to describe it.)
This seems like a pretty good reason to reject analytical reductionism. Normative disputes, e.g. between theories of wellbeing, are surely more substantive than is allowed for by this account.
A proposed solution: recall my recent claim that philosophical truth just is the idealized limit of a priori inquiry. If we grant this rational normativity as primitive, I've previously suggested that we can use this to define our other normative terms. So, for example, 'wellbeing' means something like "what it is ideally rational to value for a person's own sake".
This yields the happy result that disagreements about wellbeing can be substantive after all. Hedonists and desire theorists disagree about what to value (or what it would be ideally rational to value for a person's own sake). That sounds right to me, at least.
Friday, January 05, 2007
Constructivism and Intuitions
A major issue in philosophical methodology concerns the use of "intuitions" -- perhaps as foundational premises, or else the initial data points which our theories then aim to systematize. The difficulty, as Alex recently pointed out, is that we don't have any obvious reason to think that such intuitions are in tune with the facts. Philosophers occasionally speak of a faculty of "rational intuition", which is supposed to somehow detect ("intuit") moral, mathematical, or other abstract truths of the Platonic realm. But it all sounds a bit wacky. (How is this mysterious faculty supposed to work, exactly?)
But perhaps the problem is not so bad if we reject Platonism. I tend to think that philosophical (as opposed to material) facts are not really things that exist out in the world. Though objective enough, their ontological status is better seen as that of a rational construction. According to this view -- call it "Conceptualism" [Update: "Constructivism" seems a better label] -- philosophical truth "just is the ideal limit of a priori inquiry; it does not answer to the sort of independent reality that might sensibly be considered beyond all epistemic reach." Whereas physical facts are made true by existing things in the world, philosophical facts are made true simply by the fact that they are what ideally rational agents would believe. For example: the truthmaker for "the cat sat on the mat" is a particular physical event involving a cat and a mat in the appropriate arrangement. The truthmaker for "2+2=4" is that ideal rational reflection would lead one to endorse the belief.
So what does all this mean for the reliability of our intuitions? Well, if they no longer have to answer to an independently existing realm of facts, perhaps they're not in such bad condition as we thought. Note that I'm not denying that there is an objective truth of the matter for many philosophical questions, so that our intuitions may in fact lead us astray (if ideal rational reflection would cause us to revise them, for example). Our intuitions must answer to this rational construction; the point is that the construction may not be wholly independent of them in the first place.
In short: the views we hold now, which are prima facie coherent and plausible, are reasonable - if fallible - guides to what we would find coherent and plausible on ideal rational reflection (which, for philosophical questions, is simply to say what is true). Intuitions have justificatory force because they're already on the road to constituting truths. Sure, obstacles might arise on further reflection that prevent the initial beliefs from being true after all. But otherwise, they're home free.
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Vigilantism and Civic Respect
I earlier distinguished two approaches to politics, which I ascribed to ‘dogmatists’ and ‘fallibilists’, respectively. But the essential difference between them lies not in their epistemic assumptions, but – more importantly – their civic attitudes. The question that divides them is whether politics is a fundamentally combative or cooperative endeavour. I think it is the latter conception that we ought to adopt. Civic virtue requires that we approach the political arena with a commitment to deliberate with our fellow citizens in good faith. The democratic process establishes the rules by which citizens cooperate to reach political decisions. Hence, the vigilante who violates this process is effectively engaging in a unilateral act of civil war against his fellow citizens. By "taking the law into his own hands", the vigilante assumes that he alone has the moral clarity to "see justice done". Instead of engaging with his fellow citizens, he dismisses them. They are seen as mere obstacles to justice: if he cannot convince them, he will coerce them. The vigilante’s attitude is thus seen to be fundamentally disrespectful towards his fellow citizens, denying them moral autonomy or political agency.
There may be rare occasions when such disrespect is warranted, however. For what are we to do when faced with a dogmatic sectarian majority that seeks to oppress minority citizens? In such a case, the majority has already forsaken civic cooperation. To preserve the value of respect, we must disrespect those who would betray this meta-political value. Hence, civic virtue and respect for humanity should arguably lead us to defend subgroups of our fellow citizens – by whatever means necessary – against those who would aggress against them. If a tyrannical majority has seized control of the democratic process, abusing it for nefarious purposes, then radical action may be legitimated in response. But it’s worth noting that this is not merely a first-order problem: rather, it is the political process itself which needs repair. If there is no hope of engaging the majority in reasoned discussion, then democratic procedures will no longer be responsive to reasons, and hence will fail to qualify as just procedures at all. So this concession to radicalism is consistent with procedural liberalism, understood as the prioritization of process over first-order substance.
Importantly, I hold that civic disrespect is not warranted simply in virtue of first-order political disagreements, no matter their importance. One might consider abortion to be a ‘genocide of the unborn’, or animal experimentation a form of ‘slavery’, and hence consider their defenders to be about as morally misguided as anyone could possibly be. Nevertheless, I suggest, civic virtue requires us to restrain these deeply held beliefs and concomitant attitudes. When engaging politically in the public sphere, we must self-identify as citizens first and foremost. Our commitment to civil society must trump all else. There is a sense in which we must be capable of bracketing our first-order concerns, to become an abstract citizen on a par with all others. This humble self-conception will guide our political action towards principles of cooperative reciprocity. We are led to treat our political opponents the way we would wish them to treat us. So when we believe them to be mistaken – even horrendously mistaken – we must respond with good-faith attempts to convince them of this, for as long as we should retain any respect for them whatsoever. The coercive imposition of one’s moral views is not an option for the virtuous agent who would treat her fellow citizens with basic respect.
The crucial test for legitimate radicalism is thus whether one’s fellow citizens have forsaken good faith and civic virtue, effectively initiating civil war by precluding any hope of reasonable co-operation. If the political sphere becomes a battlefield, then radicalism is justified as the only available form of self-defence. We need not submit to the arbitrary coercion inherent in civilly disrespectful political decisions. That’s no part of any “social contract” that citizens (tacitly or hypothetically) commit themselves to. On the other hand, citizens arguably are committed to abiding by the conclusions of a reasonably co-operative political process. The project of politics as collective decision-making would be fatally undermined if participants could simply refuse to accept any outcome with which they strongly disagreed.
However, even generally well-meaning citizens might prove stubbornly unreasonable on particular issues. If civil war is not justified, then – I claim – neither is political vigilantism. Co-operation is still possible, so citizens ought not to undermine the social fabric through civilly disrespectful direct action. But then what can be done about those particular injustices to which society remains willfully blind? The ideal political system would incorporate a “failsafe” – some means of shocking the populace out of stubborn complacency when all the usual (read: legal) routes fail. Such a proposal faces two major challenges: to protect it against abuse from misguided vigilantes, and to reconcile it with fidelity to the rule of law. In the next section, I will argue that civil disobedience, properly understood, can meet both challenges.
Friday, October 13, 2006
Thesis Conclusion [draft]
[The concluding summary of my honours thesis. Links to the earlier chapters are interspersed with the text...]
It’s natural to expect that what can be known without needing to look at the world is closely tied to how the world metaphysically could or must have been. If we can only learn a fact a posteriori, through empirical investigation, we may expect that this is because there are other possible worlds in which the fact in question fails to hold. Assuming that possible worlds are wholly self-contained, we would not expect that examining the actual world could tell us anything informative about other, non-actual possibilities. Modal rationalism draws on these intuitive ideas by positing an intimate link between apriority and necessity, according to which an ideally rational agent could in principle grasp modal space – or apprehend what is possible and what is not – through the exercise of reason alone.
Kripke’s discovery of the necessary a posteriori casts doubt on this picture. There are some necessary truths – e.g. ‘water is H2O’ – which can only be known after empirical investigation. But the modal rationalist suggests that the problem here is merely semantic. We can know a priori how all the various possible worlds are in themselves; what we don’t always know is how to apply our words to them. Some terms, like ‘water’, are not semantically neutral – their application to counterfactual worlds is contingent on how the actual world turns out. That’s why empirical inquiry may be required before we can accurately assess various modal claims. The extra work is required to grant us semantic, not metaphysical, knowledge. We may avoid this need by restating a claim in neutral terms, for which the semantic values are unaffected by whether we consider a world “as actual” or “as counterfactual”. Chapter One thus established that the Kripkean challenge to modal rationalism is toothless after all; the link between apriority and necessity may be restored by restriction to semantically neutral vocabulary.
What’s needed to refute modal rationalism are “strong necessities”, i.e. claims that are true in all worlds considered as actual, despite being conceivably false. This requires that there be coherent scenarios that would not be verified by any possible world. Chapter Two explored this idea further, and assessed Yablo’s arguments for the claim that modal rationalists must recognize such strong necessities. Arguments from meta-modal conceivability provide the greatest challenge here, but I proposed that modal rationalists should respond by treating scenarios as epistemically fundamental, so that meta-modal conceivability is then uniquely determined by the sum of individually conceivable scenarios. Other arguments assume that there are unknowable necessities – an assumption we have no reason to grant, but that at least suggests the intuitive need for a non-epistemic foundation to modality.
Chapter Three set about exploring this idea further. I presented a metaphysically ‘realist’ understanding of metaphysical modality, and defended it against the conceptualist’s skepticism by highlighting its connection to our intuitive ideas about physical indeterminism, objective chance, and the open future. The realist’s primitive conception of modality forces us to take seriously the idea of strong necessities, but they need not give up on modal rationalism altogether. I suggest two principles of modal expansion – the presumption of possibility, and the consistency principle – which together serve to ground modal rationalism on a realist foundation. The end result is, I think, an attractive and defensible view, which preserves many of the intuitive claims we would wish to make about modality. And although it is arguably the conceptualist’s epistemic space that matters for key theoretical purposes, many would dispute this claim – which cannot be fully defended here – so it is worth establishing the viability of realist modal rationalism for those who would place greater weight on this metaphysical modal space.
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
The Temporal Acrobatics of Harm
I'm not sure why some people are so shocked by the idea that we can be harmed by actions that take place before we exist. An event harms us if it causes our life to go worse than it otherwise would have. That is, if the nearest possible world in which the event does not occur, is a world in which our life goes better for us. It is obviously possible for this modal condition to be satisfied by events which precede our existence. (If you're feeling unimaginative, see the "wooden statue" example below.)
But if the issue is so simple, why are others making mistakes about it? Here are a few possible explanations:
(A) We are used to scientific properties, e.g. force and momentum, where action at a distance - let alone a distant time! - is considered "spooky". One might think of harm analogously as a kind of metaphysical "stuff" that gets "transmitted" from the cause to the recipient of the harm. I then seem committed to weird time-travelling stuff. (Hint: ethical relations don't need to move! There's no "stuff" getting "transmitted", except in a very metaphorical sense. And without that metaphysical baggage, there's nothing especially problematic about cross-temporal relations.)
(B) One might have a different concept of "harm" in mind. (But what, exactly? A rival analysis to my counterfactual account is demanded here.)
(C) Some of KTK's comments betray a commitment to presentism: the misguided view that only the present moment exists. Granted, there cannot be cross-temporal relations of harm (or anything else for that matter) if other times -- and their inhabitants -- do not exist. So much the worse for presentism.
(D) Ideological commitments regarding abortion might cloud one's judgment of related issues. This is a less charitable explanation, but one might be suspicious that KTK appears motivated to establish that it's okay for women to do anything they like to their fetuses. Or witness the gleeful accusations from pro-lifers that I needed to resort to "metaphysical gymnastics" in order to "justify [my] pro-abortion stance". Partisanship and wishful thinking blinds them to the more general nature of the problem.
To overcome at least this last problem, let me offer a thought experiment which cuts to the core of the issue. Suppose that babies grow on trees. Actually, they're not really babies (yet), but just baby-shaped pieces of wood: life-sized wooden statues. Real babies are made by a priestess asking God to turn Pinocchio the statue into a real boy. God then breathes life and vitality into the statue, transforming it into a flesh-and-blood baby. But here's the crucial bit: the baby inherits the general form of the wooden statue he was "made" from. In particular, if you saw off the statue's limbs before bringing it to life, the resulting baby will likewise be limbless.
Here are some obvious facts about the situation, which absolutely everyone (no matter their views about real-life fetuses, abortion, or whatnot) ought to agree with:
1) Wooden statues do not have moral interests.
2) You can damage a wooden statue, say by sawing its limbs off.
3) Some wooden statues are "vitalized", or turned into actual persons, who inherit the damage.
4) Actual persons have interests, so the damage does harm them, and is hence morally bad.
5) So, it can be morally bad to damage a wooden statue, if the statue will be turned into an actual person, even though the statue itself lacks moral significance.
6) However, no harm is done by damaging a statue that will never be vitalized. (It's just wood, after all.)
So, there you go. No matter what you think of fetuses, everyone needs to follow my "metaphysical gymnastics" in order to make moral sense of the possibility of vitalizing wooden statues. Clearly, the early acts of damage can cause the future person's life to go worse than it otherwise would have. That is to say, it can harm them. It's no big deal that the person doesn't exist at the time of the damage. Things that happen before we exist can influence how well our lives go, and a negative influence on welfare is precisely the definition of "harm". So there's nothing especially mysterious about these "temporal acrobatics". Their occurrence is quite straightforward, and even to be expected.
I think everyone has to agree with what's been said so far. But there are more contentious issues at the intersection of time and welfare. Some of these are discussed in my old post 'Respecting Past Desires' (there's a really great discussion in the comments too). There I suggest that our welfare level at a time t depends on the desires we have at t being fulfilled. But if some of those t-desires are about past or future events, then those events will influence how well-off we are at t.* Indeed, I even hold that we can be harmed by events which occur after our deaths. As I once commented on another blog:I think a person can be harmed even after they are no longer (presently) existing. We just need to understand the harms as retroactive: your present actions are making the earlier person worse off. We are better off when our desires are fulfilled, but it doesn't matter when they are fulfilled.
Suppose you dedicate your life to preserving ancient works of art. Then, after your death, someone burns down the gallery where all your preserved work was stored. They have made it so that your life went worse, since you failed in your primary goal. The exact timing of the failure doesn't matter.
I think that those who dismiss the wishes of the dead tend to have a crudely hedonistic conception of wellbeing. But as you rightly note, we often feel that we can be harmed without our knowing (e.g. by people on the other side of the world). Why should a separation in time be any more significant than one in space?
Desire-fulfillment theories of welfare hold, roughly, that what's good for us is to get what we most want. But some of the things we care about are not present. We care about the future, and even what happens after we die. My life goes better if my desires are fulfilled rather than thwarted. The future can influence the latter sorts of facts (about desire-fulfillment), and thereby also the former (about the quality of my life).
Again, I think there's nothing especially outrageous or surprising about any of this. Still, I grant that the view can at least coherently be denied. It isn't totally insane to deny that we can be harmed by events that occur after we cease to exist. On the other hand, I do think it's completely untenable to deny that we can be harmed by events that precede our existence.* = (But does it really make sense to talk about momentary welfare values? I'm now more inclined to see welfare more holistically as the value of a whole life. Then, although harmful events all occur at some time or other, there is no particular time at which the harm is received by the person. Again, letting go of the misguided "physical transmission" analogy makes the temporal issues much more straightforward.)
Monday, June 12, 2006
What is Existence?
We all have an intuitive grasp of what it is for entities to exist. My parents exist whereas Santa doesn't, and all that. But what of abstract objects? When philosophers argue about whether numbers truly exist, what is in dispute here? Even ontological debates about material entities seem dubious: does there exist an individual entity which is a table, or are there merely particles arranged table-wise? What's the difference? These don't seem to be debates about how the world is. Everyone agrees that there is table-ish stuff in the world. They merely dispute how to count or describe it.
Of particular concern are too-easy arguments like the following:
(P) There are nine planets.
(C1) So, nine is the number of planets.
(C2) So, there is a number that is the number of planets
(C3) So, there exist numbers.
They start with some undisputed fact, and show that it trivially entails a (seemingly substantive) ontological conclusion. But surely that's cheating! Trivial entailments can't produce substantive new results. They merely serve to highlight what is already contained in the premise. But counting planets shouldn't commit us to the existence of numbers in any deep sense, should it? At least, if the above argument is sound, then it's a marvel that so many smart philosophers could make such a simple blunder. Ontology would be easy!
At this stage, many philosophers appeal to a distinction between kinds of existence claims -- I'll follow Cian Dorr in calling these "superficial" and "fundamental". The idea, then, is that the above argument is valid only if 'existence' is used in the same sense throughout. The Platonist conflates the two, invalidly jumping from premises about superficial existence to a conclusion about fundamental existence. We can all agree that numbers "exist" in the superficial sense that follows analytically from sentences like "there are nine planets". But that says nothing about fundamental existence, which is what philosophers (at least, ontologists) are interested in.
So what do these two senses of 'exist' really amount to? I think the "superficial" sense is tolerably clear. It concerns those claims we can arrive at through conceptual analysis, analytic entailments from commonsense truths, and so forth. In this sense, the existence of abstract objects is an entirely trivial matter. It's not to claim anything substantive about how the world is. Rather, claims like "there exist numbers" are analytic: true simply in virtue of meaning, without needing any input from the world. They're more semantic than metaphysical in nature, telling us only about language and not reality. (Of course, they might be combined with a worldly component to form synthetic claims, e.g. "there are nine planets".) Scientists can look into the empirical component of such claims, but there's nothing of interest here for philosophers.
What of "fundamental" existence? This seems harder to characterize. It is meant to involve a substantive claim about how reality is. As such, claims of fundamental existence are never merely analytic. The trivial argument given above has no place in "serious ontology". Instead, perhaps, we may use inference to the best explanation, or Quinean indispensibility arguments, to conclude that we should posit some class or other of abstract objects. I follow that much. My worry is this: what, exactly, are we "positing" here? ("The existence of numbers." "Um, okay, and that means...?")
To restate the problem: how would a world with numbers be any different from a world without them? I take it the answer must be that my question is ill-formed. There are not two such possibilities to compare. Whether numbers exist or not, they have this status necessarily, and there simply is no sense to be made of the alternative proposal. But then it's still hard to see what the ontologists are disputing. (Perhaps "which of us is speaking nonsense"?)
Here's something I found helpful: In last week's reading group, Brendan pointed out that when we're speaking in the superficial sense (i.e. all the time in everyday life), we have a limited concern for the ways in which what we say might not be literally true. We're only interested in a restricted class of "relevant alternatives". His example: when I say "The board is white", we would consider it relevant if this turned out to be false because the board is really black or blue, or perhaps if I was merely hallucinating the board in the first place. But we are not concerned about the possibility that the claim is strictly false because colours don't objectively exist, say, or because there exists no fundamental entity that is a "board", but merely atoms arranged board-wise!
What I take away from this is that, in communication, we seek to narrow down the list of (epistemically) possible worlds which are candidates for actuality. When I say "the board is white", this serves to knock out those possible worlds which lack white board-ish presences. Think of it this way: we are given the various possible worlds, and we have to sort them into an "in" pile and an "out" pile. We all know how to do this, or what kind of instructions "the board is white" is meant to convey here, even if we don't know exactly how to define or describe the contents of the possible worlds that have been given to us. In particular, we don't know whether those white-boardish presences should be described fundamentally as individual objects that are white. Perhaps they shouldn't -- perhaps such macroscopic commonsense terms do not make it into "the final analysis". But we can still identify which worlds they are meant to pick out. We can tell which worlds contain stuff that fills the whiteboard role.
Another example: When I say that Santa Claus does not exist, I mean to reject those possible worlds which contain a certain qualitative character. This is the character we all associate with Santa: a red and white humanish presence usually located at the North Pole, which flies around the world delivering presents each Christmas Eve. I could draw a picture, if that'd help. ;-) Anyway, if you picture a possible world in your mind's eye, you can tell whether it contains the sorts of qualities I'm talking about here. (Or if you read a sufficiently thorough description in some idealized language.) It doesn't matter whether "Santa" is really just atoms arranged Santa-wise. So long as there's something(s) playing "the Santa role" in a world, then that counts as Santa "existing", for my purposes.
I welcome suggestions for how to express this notion more clearly, but hopefully you get the rough idea. (I feel like it's related to this post, but I can't say exactly how.) Substantive claims of superficial existence (say of concrete entities) serve to distinguish between various possible worlds. Fundamental existence claims are different. Ontologists don't discriminate between possibilities, telling us that world w1 is actual rather than w2. Rather, they fill out the possible worlds' contents, specifying what (exactly) we find in the given worlds w1 and w2.
If an ontologist says that Santa couldn't possibly exist because there are no composite objects but only arrangements of atoms, they haven't really said anything which narrows the space of possibilities. It's like Putnam's lesson from Twin Earth: the world we qualitatively imagine is still possible, it's just that we were misdescribing it. That watery presence shouldn't be called "water", and that Santa-Clausish presence shouldn't be called an individual.
Note that my analogy might be a little misleading, in that the ontologist isn't making a merely semantic claim about the meaning of our word "individual", or "exists". Rather, he's making a (purportedly) substantive claim about the contents of possible worlds. ("That Santa-ish presence is really not an individual entity! And there really are numbers -- and I'm talking about reality, not about our words!")
But we can grant that while recognizing my point that he's not really narrowing the possibilities in my sense. Since he's making claims about the necessary contents of possible worlds, if he's right then the alternative view doesn't invoke any genuine possibilities at all. It has the same kind of status as the "possibility" that there are finitely many prime numbers. This doesn't describe any coherent scenario -- it's just that not everyone realizes that.
Compositional nihilists don't really believe in a more restricted space of possible worlds than the rest of us, I take it. They simply dispute what those worlds contain. Pointing to a molecule of hydrogen gas in some possible world, they will deny that it is a third thing in addition to the two Hydrogen atoms that compose it. (Let's pretend that our so-called "atoms" really are indivisible.) They don't deny that this world (*points to a spot in the North-East of modal space*), that this world we're discussing is a possible one. They simply think we mistake its contents when we say it contains molecules as well as atoms.
I'm not convinced the difference between these views really is a substantive one though, since I can't see what the difference is. Sure, one philosopher says the two atoms compose a molecule, and the other denies this. But again, what is the content of this disagreement? What difference does it make whether we say there are three things here or just two? It seems to come down to the arbitrary matter of how you choose to count! So I'm skeptical that existence in this "fundamental" sense really amounts to much. Perhaps we should be pluralists about it, allowing that adopting different ontological frameworks might be useful for different philosophical purposes, but there's not really any deep fact of the matter. The important (even if "superficial"!) existence questions concern the differences between possibilites, and the empirical question of which one is actual.
(Though cf. Chalmers' more moderate view, which allows that there might be some determinate ontological truths, as well as some indetermine matters.)
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Why We Need to Idealize Ethics
Naive moral relativism is the view that 'X is wrong' is true for you iff you disapprove of X (or something along those lines). I don't think very highly of this view, largely because it entails infallibilism: the mere fact of your holding any (arbitrary) moral attitude suffices to make it "right for you". This makes moral progress impossible, and hence reflection superfluous. I find that repugnant. It implies that I'm already as morally discerning as I can possibly be. (What a depressing thought! I could've sworn there's much more for me to learn yet.)
Naive relativists sometimes ask what objective moral facts are meant to do. Abstract objects can't prevent murders, for example. (Of course, being causally impotent, they can't do anything. That's our job.) But I've explained before that this misses the point. We need objective morality not to causally influence the world, but to provide an ideal standard to which we may aspire. (Much like historical truths provide an ideal for historians to pursue.) Moral objectivism offers us a goal, not the means to get there. Note also that the reason for idealizing ethics is primarily to enable the (personal or collective) endeavour of rational self-improvement, not the political project of influencing others.
[Doctor Logic once objected: "The only basis you have for selecting an absolute morality is your subjective opinion." But, as my response explained, this is either trivial or false. It's trivial that our beliefs reflect what we ("subjectively") judge to be the case. But it's false -- or at least question-begging -- to claim that there are no reasons for concluding one thing rather than another. Morality is no different from any other form of inquiry in this respect. Unfortunately, the good Doctor continues to advance that argument, neglecting to note that he might just as well ask what historical truths are "really good for".]
Curiously, there is a more sophisticated form of moral relativism which can avoid these woes, as I learned from Andy Egan's pre-talk this afternoon. The key is to introduce idealization without removing the agent-relativity. The resulting view goes something like: 'X is wrong' is true for you iff your idealized self would disapprove of X. (The relevant idealization might concern what you would conclude under ideal rational reflection, if you had full factual knowledge and perfect reasoning skills, unlimited cognitive capabilities, etc.) It's similar to the kinds of constructivist non-cognitivism I favour, though Andy explicated it in a rather novel way:
Some (esp. indexical) statements are not about the world, but rather your location in it. By saying "I am in Canberra," you locate yourself as one of the in-Canberra people. The claim is not about which possible world is actual, but rather where (or who) you are within the actual world. Similarly, moral claims aspire to locate yourself according to attitudes that would be held under idealization. To say "Theft is wrong!" is to locate yourself as one of those people whose idealized selves would share that moral attitude.
The g