We desire things for reasons. Often we want something because we judge it to be good. The desire thus stems from an evaluative belief, which in turn is answerable to reason. In other cases, the reason for our desire is a brute taste, e.g. the fact that we find the taste of chocolate to be pleasant. We desire chocolate for the pleasure it brings us, but this taste (unlike our values) is not further answerable to reason. It is simply given.
Is it possible to have a brute desire? A desire for chocolate, say, not for the pleasure it may bring, nor because there's anything about it you judge to be valuable, but simply because you (inexplicably) want it? I submit that this is not possible. You may be able to program a creature to pursue certain ends for no reason, but it is not really an agent with desires in the fullest sense unless it could make sense of them on reflection.
Consider it from the perspective of the agent in question. You find yourself pursuing some object X, even though you see nothing redeeming about it. You have no taste for X (it does not bring you pleasure). Nor do you judge it to be good or valuable for any other reason. You are, in short, completely indifferent to it. And yet there your hand is reaching out for X. Why is your hand doing that? You can't make sense of it. The behaviour does not stem from your attitudes in any way you can make sense of. It would seem more like your body is possessed, moved by some compulsion outside of your self. Whatever your behavioural outputs, so long as you neither value X nor have a taste for it, there's no way your pursuit of it can be properly characterized as reflecting a "desire" on your part.
The situation seems even more odd when we consider that the alleged "desire" is supposed to govern not just bodily movements, but also internal deliberation. That is, you should find yourself engaging in instrumental reasoning, forming elaborate plans about how best to obtain X. But again: why are you reasoning in such a way? It makes no sense, unless you think that X is worth getting for some reason (hedonistic or otherwise).
If you have a genuine desire that P, then (ceteris paribus) you will accept an offer to make it the case that P even on the condition that this fact is wiped from your memory and so you never get any subjective satisfaction out of it. (If you don't accept this offer, that shows that what you really desire is not P per se, but rather the subjective satisfaction of believing that P.) But, in the above case, can you imagine voluntarily accepting such an offer to secretly bring about X? Such a choice seems incomprehensible (unless you actually valued X, contrary to our stipulated set-up). So brute desires are likewise incomprehensible.
Or am I missing something?
Monday, May 12, 2008
Brute Desires
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Excuses and Responsibility
John Gardner gave an interesting talk yesterday, arguing that excuses are not merely a means of avoiding responsibility (for an act), but also a way to claim responsibility (as a moral agent).
Compare other cases, e.g. insanity pleas, where one abdicates responsibility entirely. We hold each other to normative standards only insofar as we see each other as moral agents, capable of responding appropriately to reasons. But the insane are not even within the space of reasons. They are no longer considered persons at all. They thus escape legal responsibility, because it makes no more sense to hold them accountable than to hold a wild animal to account.
It is deeply shameful to be regarded as a non-agent, however. Some defendants have therefore sought to portray themselves as reasonable people, even though they admit they acted unjustifiably. This may at first seem paradoxical. Instead of offering either justifications or an abdication of agential responsibility, they try a third way: a reasonable excuse. A provocation defence, for example, might seek to establish that the defendant's emotional response (rage/anger) was a reasonable reaction to the situation. This reasonable anger then led them to act unreasonably -- killing the victim, say. But it is not as though their actions here are totally incomprehensible, such that we must regard them as a non-person, a mere force of nature. Rather, it is the response any reasonable person would have had to the situation. It is a kind of rational irrationality, or blameless wrongdoing.
I agree with Gardner that this 'third way' makes conceptual sense. (It's a further question whether the law should allow it, of course.) Indeed, it's a familiar point for consequentialists that a good character might on occasion lead one to perform bad actions. So we can make sense of the intransitivity of reasonableness if we say that a reasonable emotional response (or disposition) is one that will tend, in general, to lead to better (more reasonable) actions. This is clearly compatible with the disposition leading one astray in particular circumstances.
(I should note that Gardner wasn't entirely satisfied by this suggestion; he thinks there are some cases where it won't suffice. But I'm not sure what those cases are.)
A practical upshot: we may be able to determine what excuses should be allowed as legal defences, depending on which dispositions we wish to encourage in the general population. For example, there is nothing to be said for encouraging jealousy, so finding your lover in bed with another should not be considered a legitimate 'provocation' to murder. But perhaps it is good to feel righteous anger in response to domestic violence. So a battered spouse might have a legitimate excuse for perpetrating their revenge (even in cases where they lack the full-blown justification of self-defence). Food for thought.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Swinburne on Desire
"There is a natural contrast often made in ordinary language between the actions which we do because we want or desire to do them, and the actions which we do although we do not want to do them. It is a contrast which has been ignored by much modern philosophy of mind which has seen desire as a component of all actions, and the reasons for all actions as involving desires of various kinds. The ignoring of the distinction between desire and the active component in every action (call it 'trying' or 'seeking' or 'having a volition') leads a man to suppose that he can no more help doing what he does than he can help his desires. But 'desires', in the normal ordinary language sense of the word, are natural inclinations to actions of certain sorts with which we find ourselves. We cannot (immediately) help our natural inclinations but what we can do is choose whether to yield to them, or resist them and do what we are not naturally inclined to do. When we resist our natural inclinations, we do so because we have reasons for action quite other than ones naturally described as the satisfaction of desire -- e.g. we do the action because we believe that we ought to, or believe it to be in our long-term interest."
-- Swinburne (1985) 'Desire', Philosophy vol. 60, p.429.
See also: Agency and the Will
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Revealed Preference?
(1) Quoting an Open Letter to ABC:
The debate was a revolting descent into tabloid journalism and a gross disservice to Americans concerned about the great issues facing the nation and the world.... For 53 minutes, we heard no question about public policy from either moderator. ABC seemed less interested in provoking serious discussion than in trying to generate cheap shot sound-bites for later rebroadcast.
Alex Tabarrok responds with a lame 'revealed preference' argument: "who would want to rebroadcast something the public didn't want?" He really needs to read, um, Alex Tabarrok:
Early on Slee makes a good point about preferences and outcomes:
"The prisoner's dilemma shows how, as soon as one person's choice alters the outcome for another person... choices do not reveal preferences... instead of thinking about choices as revealing preferences, it pays to think of choices as 'replies' to the actions or likely actions of others. The best choice you can make is the best reply to the likely actions of others."
Given that public debate is so degraded and sub-rational, partisans will reach for every weapon in their rhetorical arsenal, including 'gaffe bombardment'. No one dares risk unilateral disarmament. But it obviously doesn't follow that they prefer this situation to some alternative where gaffe bombardment was safely off the table. Political discourse could very easily be a prisoner's dilemma in this way.
(2) Another problem I'd like to consider for sloppy appeals to 'revealed preference' is that of intra-personal conflict. Consider the unwilling addict, who is compulsively moved to seek drugs, even though he would prefer (on reflection) to be able to withstand this compulsion. Robin Hanson denies that there is any normatively relevant structure to our preferences. Instead, in a case like this, we can simply watch the addict's behaviour to see which preference is the more weighty. 'Might is right.'
But this is plainly misguided. Mere behavioural drive has no normative impact; the mere fact that my body is disposed to move in such-and-such a fashion is at most defeasible evidence - and does not strictly entail anything - about my mental states, or what I really desire in any normatively significant sense (viz. reflective endorsement). You can see this by imagining a brain implant that grants a mad scientist remote control over my body. It's not so different in principle if the source of my unfreedom is internal -- an inner demon such as mental illness, addiction, etc., may be every bit as constraining as an external obstacle. My resulting action may be no more an instance of my "getting what I most want" than when the mad scientist was controlling me.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Problems for Decision Theories
Andy Egan has a great paper, 'Some Counterexamples to Causal Decision Theory', which effectively makes the case that we (currently) have no adequate formalization of the intuitive principle do what's most likely to bring about the best results.
We begin with Evidential Decision Theory and the injunction to maximize expected value, but it turns out this is really a formalization of the subtly different principle, do what will give you the best evidence that the best things are happening. Suppose you believe that watching TV is very strongly correlated with idiocy (but does not cause it). You want to watch TV, but you really don't want to be an idiot. We can set up the numbers so that the expected value of watching TV is lower, because then it's most likely you're (already) an idiot. So EDT says it's "irrational" for you to decide to watch TV. But that's ridiculous -- whether you decide to watch TV or not won't affect your intelligence (ex hypothesi). That's already fixed, for better or worse, so all you can change now is whether you get the pleasure (such as it is) of watching TV. Clearly the thing to do is to go ahead and do so.
Causal Decision Theory (a la David Lewis) tries to get around this by holding fixed your current views about the causal structure of the world (i.e. ignore the fact that choosing to watch TV would be evidence that you instantiate the common cause of idiocy and TV-watching). This solves the previous problem, but introduces new ones. Suppose that instead of correlating with idiocy, TV-watching correlates with a condition X that makes one vulnerable to having TV turn your brain to mush. If I don't watch TV, I'm probably fine and could watch TV without harm. If I initially assign high credence to this causal structure, then - holding it fixed - CDT advises me to watch TV. But that's nuts. Most people who end up deciding to watch TV have condition X. So if I decide to watch TV, that's new evidence that I'm susceptible to having my brain turned to mush. That is, if I make that decision, I'm probably seriously harming myself by doing so.
So, neither evidential nor causal decision theory is adequate. Though I should note a proviso: all these objections assume that the agent has imperfect introspective access to his own mental states. Otherwise, he could discern whatever states (e.g. beliefs and desires) will cause him to reach a certain decision, and those mental states will provide all the relevant evidence (as to whether he is an idiot, or has condition X, or whatever). The decision itself will provide no further evidence, so these problems will not arise. (Once you have the evidence that you're an idiot or not, you can go ahead and watch TV. In the second case: whether you should watch TV will be settled by the evidence whether you have condition X.) But a fully general decision theory should apply even to agents with introspective blocks.
Andy proposes and then rejects a view he calls lexical ratificationism. The idea is that some decisions are ratifiable (i.e. conditional on your choosing it, it has the highest expected value). You should never choose an unratifiable option (e.g. refraining from watching TV in the first 'idiocy' case) if some ratifiable alternative is available. But sometimes there are no self-ratifying options (as in the 'condition X' case), in which case you should simply follow EDT.
The objection to this view comes from Anil Gupta's 3-option cases. Suppose that most people who smoke cigars have some background medical condition such that they would benefit from smoking cigarettes instead, but suffer great harm if they chose to not smoke at all. Similarly for cigarette smokers -- they would likely benefit from changing to smoking cigars, but suffer harm if they did neither. So neither option is ratifiable (each recommends the other instead). Non-smokers, on the other hand, do best to refrain from smoking, so this option is ratifiable. Still, the thought goes, if you're initially leaning towards cigar smoking, you may have some reason to switch to cigarettes instead, but the one thing you can be sure of is that you shouldn't be a non-smoker. So ratificationism, too, yields the wrong results.
I'm not sure about this objection, for reasons Helen brought to my attention. Note that it can't just be the initial inclination towards one option that is the evidence here -- otherwise you could note your inclination for cigars and decide to smoke cigarettes, no problem. Instead, it must only be your ultimate decision (post-deliberation) that's evidence of the relevant medical condition (never mind how radically implausible this is). But then there's nothing wrong with the ratificationist answer after all. If you're susceptible to being persuaded by ratificationism not to smoke, then (ex hypothesi) that's very strong evidence that you don't have the other medical conditions, and so not-smoking really is most likely to be best for you. A mere initial inclination towards cigars is no evidence to the contrary.
An interesting point Andy made in response is that this might work for first-personal guidance, but we also want a decision theory to apply third-personally, i.e. to tell us when others' decisions are rationally criticizable. And it would be bizarre, in this case, to tell a cigar smoker that they should have chosen to be a non-smoker instead, when (given that they ultimately chose to smoke cigars) they probably have a medical condition that would make non-smoking harmful to them.
I think the upshot of all this is that we can't give any third-personal advice in these problem cases until we see what decision the person themselves made. Until then, the only normative guidance on offer is first-personal, and lexical ratificationism gets that exactly right.
What do you think?
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Standard Reasons, Adaptive Reasons
[I wrote the following in an exam for Michael Smith's class last semester. It explains some helpful distinctions that I want to be able to refer back to in future posts...]
In 'Reasons: Practical and Adaptive' Raz makes distinctions between, on the one hand, practical and adaptive reasons, and on the other, standard and non-standard reasons. Explain these distinctions using examples.
Imagine a biology student whose parents threaten to disown her should she ever come to believe in evolution. This situation exposes her to what look to be two very different kinds of reasons regarding her belief. From her biology class, the student receives epistemic reasons, i.e. reasons which speak to the truth of the thing believed. From her parents, she receives practical reasons, i.e. reasons which speak to the (dis)value of holding the belief in question. There are a couple of noteworthy differences revealed by this scenario, which form the bases of Raz’s two distinctions.
First, consider how reflecting on the various reasons will affect the student’s beliefs. Faced with compelling evidence that evolution has in fact occurred, she may - as a rational agent - come to believe it. That is, her rational faculties may respond to her apprehension of epistemic reasons for a belief by directly producing the recommended belief. This marks epistemic reasons as instances of what Raz calls standard reasons, or reasons that “we can follow directly”. Practical reasons for belief, by contrast, are non-standard in that they cannot be directly followed. Much as the student might wish to please her parents, no amount of reflection on their threat will suffice by itself to change her scientific beliefs.
What if people could respond directly to practical reasons for belief by changing their belief? It seems like this should be possible. At least, we can imagine a scenario in which reflecting on the practical benefits of holding a belief has a similar neurological effect as what actually happens when we reflect on evidence suggesting the truth of a belief. One might argue that the resulting neurological state, being sensitive to non-epistemic reasons, no longer qualifies as ‘belief’. But this seems implausible so long as enough of the functional role of belief remains intact: the person still sincerely asserts the proposition when asked what they believe, draws inferences from it, and behaves in ways that could be expected to fulfill their desires if the proposition were true, etc. So I think we must allow that this scenario is properly described as involving belief. But does it involve following a reason? This seems more questionable. Raz suggests, of a similar case, that the agent merely deceives themselves into believing that they followed the reason. They have not really done so, for that would be impossible -- it is not the kind of reason that can genuinely be followed in such a fashion. Of course, to assert this without argument risks begging the question, as Raz well recognizes. What we need is some independent basis for determining which reasons can be followed and hence qualify as standard reasons.
One thing we can tell right away is that this is not simply an empirical matter, to be ‘read off’ the neuro-psychological data. Not all forms of influence qualify as rational influence, and information may make its way into our heads without doing so under the guise of a reason. The other lesson from the above scenario is that, as Raz puts it, “whether one follows a reason is not purely a matter of how the agent understands his situation.” Combining these: the agent may cite a practical reason why he holds his belief, and it may indeed have played a central causal role in his neuro-psychology, but this still does not count as following the practical reason, in the normative sense we’re interested in here.
But why not? Raz appeals to “the nature of that reason” to settle the matter. This works most clearly in the case of reasons that are such that it would be self-defeating to try to follow them. For example, I may offer you $100 to hop on one leg for non-pecuniary motives. The prize-money is a reason to hop, but not one you could follow directly without thereby disqualifying yourself. The self-effacing nature of the reason is a logical fact which explains why it cannot be successfully followed, and thus why it is non-standard. But the previous case of practical reasons for belief is less clear. Raz claims that “the fact that non-epistemic reasons cannot serve to warrant belief shows that they cannot be followed.” It is not entirely transparent why this should be so. But I think it is most plausibly understood in reference to the normative character of reason-following, where this is taken to essentially involve a response on the part of our rational faculties (rather than just any old psychological process). Standard reasons are thus understood to be those that rationally justify or warrant the attitude they recommend. Or, if we are willing to take rationality itself as a primitive: standard reasons are those that our rational capacities respond to (insofar as they are functioning properly). Of course, even non-standard reasons may be rationally responded to in a different way: they warrant acting so as to bring about their target attitude, for example. This confirms Raz’s point that non-standard reasons for one thing are standard reasons for something else.
(Aside: there may be some exceptions to this claim. Suppose that God will reward those who are saintly, but to qualify as a saint you must never act from self-interest. This sounds a lot like the other non-standard reasons we’ve discussed, so it would seem ad hoc to deny that it really is a reason. But it cannot be redescribed as a standard reason for anything. However indirectly you bring about your sainthood, if you do it for the reason of the heavenly reward, then you’re no saint after all. So this looks like a non-standard reason without any corresponding standard reason. To hold onto his view that “the fact that they can be followed is what makes reasons into reasons”, Raz had best deny that “non-standard reasons” are really reasons at all. There are no practical reasons for belief. There are just standard reasons for acting to bring about a belief.)
So much for Raz’s first distinction. What of the second? Harking back to our original case of the biology student, notice that only her practical reasons derived from the value of holding the belief. Epistemic reasons instead indicate that the belief would be warranted or appropriate to the way things are, but this does not depend on whether believing the truth would be in any way beneficial. This renders epistemic reasons a subset of what Raz calls adaptive reasons. The adaptive/practical distinction arises whenever we have states whose internal norms of correctness may diverge from their practical value. Emotions are another obvious example. Given that fear is meant to be a response to danger, evidence that we are in danger provides an adaptive reason for this emotion; fear is warranted in such circumstances, regardless of whether it would be beneficial (a question which instead concerns the practical reasons for and against it).
Raz offers what we may take to be three tests for the dependence of reasons on value: (i) the possibility of akrasia, (ii) shaping the world to fit the attitude, and (iii) presumptive sufficiency. Here I will discuss only the second, as it is most vivid. If there’s value in the state of affairs of your having warranted attitudes, then this should be so whether this state of affairs came about as a result of shifting your attitudes to match the world, or by changing the world to match your attitudes. But this is absurd: if you feel fear, for example, there is nothing at all to be said for manipulating your situation to match your emotion by gratuitously exposing yourself to danger. Danger is a reason for fear, but fear is not a reason for (bringing about) danger. This asymmetry demonstrates that the reasons we have for feeling fear when in danger are adaptive reasons -- they do not assume that there is necessarily value in the combination of fear and danger.
Now that I have introduced Raz’s two distinctions, one might wonder about the degree to which they overlap. From my original example, we saw that epistemic reasons are standard and adaptive, whereas the non-epistemic reasons for belief are non-standard and practical. But not all standard reasons are adaptive reasons: sometimes warrant derives from value, as we find for example in reasons for action. If leaping into the air would produce great benefits, then I may follow this reason and rationally decide to leap. So that is an example of a standard practical reason. There may also be non-standard reasons for action, as we saw earlier in the case of prize money given to those who hop from non-pecuniary motives. (Note that this would also be a standard reason to bring it about that you hop, say by stabbing yourself in the foot. The latter is a reason you can follow without self-defeation.)
There is at least some overlap between the two distinctions, however, for there is no possibility of a non-standard adaptive reason. Non-standard reasons for an attitude are really just standard reasons for bringing about the attitude, and this places them firmly in the practical domain. We have seen that the other combinations are all possible, however:
(i) standard adaptive reasons, e.g. scientific evidence as a reason for belief, or evidence of danger as a reason for fear;
(ii) standard practical reasons, e.g. ordinary monetary rewards as a reason for action;
(iii) non-standard practical reasons, e.g. self-effacing rewards as a reason for action, or threat of parental disownment as a reason for belief.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Desiring Thisness
Value-based theorists claim that (in standard cases) whenever it seems that desires provide us with reasons, it is really some valuable feature of the thing desired which provides the normative reason. Ruth Chang, in 'Can Desires Provide Reasons for Action?' (and class last Tuesday), tries to break the dialectical stalemate by discussing a desire for one of two qualitative duplicates, which have all their (intrinsic) features in common.
Think of Buridan's Ass, stuck between two bales of hay, or the ordinary experience of picking a can from the supermarket shelf. It's possible, Chang suggests, for you to just "feel like" one rather than the other, and not for any particular reason. You just feel an affective pull towards that particular object as such, desiring its "thisness" (haecceity or bare identity) rather than any generic feature it happens to exemplify along with the other duplicates.
I don't think this makes much sense, since I don't think haecceities make much sense. But, metaphysics aside, here's a quick counterargument to suggest that these ordinary desires do not, in fact, take bare identities as their objects: we wouldn't care if God secretly switched the duplicates. That wouldn't frustrate one's desire. Having obtained the second can from the left, I now have everything I wanted (so far as cans are concerned, at least). I would not feel in any way cheated to learn that the can has a different 'thisness' from the one I originally set my eyes on. So the 'thisness' could not have been the object of my desire.
(N.B. If you can imagine a case where switching duplicates would bother you, e.g. replacing your wife with a perfect copy, this is arguably because you value the particular causal history connecting you to the one and not the other -- which is just another qualitative feature, albeit a relational one. So there are still no grounds for attributing a desire for bare identity.)
Fortunately, Chang does not need to make such a strong claim. At least if I'm following the dialectic correctly, it should suffice to note that there are no normatively relevant differences between the options in the example, besides the fact that one is desired. (It doesn't matter if the desire is based on some unimportant relational feature rather than being a "feature free" desire for bare identity.)
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Theorizing about Desire
What do we want from a theory of desire? Should it match our intuitive judgments -- are we just analyzing the folk concept of 'desire'? Or are we aiming for a theory with some predictive/explanatory power? Or is it meant instead to have some kind of normative significance, so that fulfilled desires are pro tanto good for you? (These three options might lead us to focus on affect, drive, or evaluation, respectively.) Whether we opt for one of these, or something else entirely, seems to make a difference for how we deal with so-called "instrumental desires", for example.
Suppose I see a plastic apple, and - mistakenly believing it to be real - feel tempted to eat it. Should a theory of desire yield the result that I desire to eat it? Intuitively: sure. Normatively: no way. Behaviourally: whichever. (It's presumably just as explanatory to say that I desire some ultimate end -- a yummy taste, perhaps, or good nutrition -- and mistakenly believe that eating the plastic apple will serve these ends. This combination of attitudes suffices to explain why I might try to eat the plastic apple. If anything, it probably does a better job of explaining why I will stop eating it as soon as reality impinges itself on my beliefs!)
I'm most interested in the normative project, and this leads me to think that ultimate (non-instrumental) desires are the only desires we should count. Suppose I want to break out of prison, and believe that a hacksaw could help me achieve this end. Compare the following situations:
(1) I get the hacksaw, but it proves useless, so I remain imprisoned.
(2) I get the hacksaw and escape.
(3) I simply escape (no hacksaw required).
Surely the right thing to say here is that I get all that I want in situations (2) and (3), whereas in situation (1) I don't get what I really wanted at all. It's not as though I can console myself with the thought, "Well, at least I got this hacksaw I wanted!" I don't really desire the hacksaw at all; I just wanted to get out of prison. Similar problems arise when comparing (2) and (3). It's not as though I get more of what I want, in any interesting sense, in case (2) -- that would be double-counting! As an escapee in case (3), I won't feel the slightest frustration at having my 'desire' for a hacksaw remain unsatisfied.
So it is only ultimate desires that are philosophically interesting, I think. Sure, one could use the term in such a way that one counts as having a 'desire' for the believed means as well as the end. But what's the interest in that?
Another example: Liz Harman suggests that many apparent conditional desires, e.g. to be a fireman when you grow up, are really unconditional desires that simply weren't thought through all that carefully (i.e. one took the rationale / apparent 'condition' -- that you still want to be a fireman as an adult -- for granted). Maybe this fits better with folk intuitions, or a natural way of talking, or some such. But I don't really see why that should matter to us. Treating the desire as conditional gives us a neat explanation why it doesn't impact one's welfare when the condition isn't met. What does the alternative account give us?
Monday, February 18, 2008
Desires with Presuppositions
Kris McDaniel and Ben Bradley have a great article, 'Desires' (forthcoming in Mind), which argues that desire is a three-place relation between a person and two propositions: the object of the desire, and the condition on its applicability. (Though for ordinary unconditional desires, this is a mere technicality: the condition is the trivial proposition that any old thing is the case.)
This is motivated by the thought that some desires are neither satisfied nor frustrated, but simply cancelled (or inapplicable). Consider a child's desire for Santa to have a nice Christmas, or my desire to have an icecream later if I still feel like it. Even if these things never come about, it doesn't necessarily seem as though my past desire was thwarted. (Ask my earlier self: "Do you desire that, even if your future self no longer feels like it, you still get the icecream anyway?" I will answer, "of course not!") The desires come with certain presuppositions: that Santa exists, or that I will continue to want icecream, etc. When those conditions fail, the desire simply no longer applies.
McDaniel and Bradley compare their view to Strawson's suggestion about non-referring expressions: "the question whether his statement ['the king of France is wise'] was true or false simply didn't arise, because there is no such person as the king of France." So it goes, I suppose, for the person who desires that the king of France be wise. The question whether their desire is fulfilled or frustrated simply doesn't arise. To further illustrate, the authors suggest that conditional desires are like conditional bets: if the condition isn't met, you neither win nor lose; instead, the bet is off.
How should a utilitarian take cancelled desires to figure in the calculus? The obvious option is that cancelled desires have no normative significance, whereas fulfilled desires have positive value, and thwarted desires have disvalue. So if we can find a desire the thwarting of which doesn't matter in the slightest, that might be taken to show that it's a conditional desire which has been cancelled.
One thing I disagree with: the authors claim that ordinary desires (e.g. for Bob to be happy) are conditional on their not having terrible consequences (e.g. a billion deaths). But that just seems false to me. I still want Bob to be happy, it's just that I want to avoid a billion deaths even more. The former desire is outweighed, not cancelled. (One might restrict the term 'desire' to non-outweighed or 'all things considered' desires; but I can't imagine why we'd want to. I'm still going to lament Bob's unhappiness; this is importantly different from my cancelled desire for icecream.)
In general, I think it is tempting to over-apply the conditional apparatus. In class, someone suggested the example of a desire for tea on the condition that there's sugar. But this is more plausibly seen as an unconditional desire for tea and sugar. The absence of sugar doesn't cancel the desire, it thwarts it. (Again, the test is to ask whether lacking the object of the desire is in some sense bad from the perspective of the person with the desire.)
One thing I'm unclear on is precisely how a conditional desire (for P given Q) differs from the preference for (Q&P) > (Q&~P). The authors suggest that the conditional desire implies the preference, but not vice versa. Let Q be that you crave chocolate, and P be that you eat chocolate. If you are stuck craving chocolate, it's certainly preferable that you get to have some. You should have the above preference, then. But this needn't imply any actual desire - even conditionally - for chocolate. That sounds right, but then what more is required for desire, exactly? (Not a desire for the condition to obtain, else it might as well be an unconditional desire for P & Q.) Some current pro-attitude towards the object, perhaps? This just seems a little unclear to me.
Friday, February 08, 2008
Dimensions of Desire
Following Alonzo Fyfe, I once accepted the following thesis:
(BDI) People always act so as to fulfill their most and strongest desires, given their beliefs.
But this is either trivial or false.
It is trivial if we weight desires according to their eventual behavioural impact, so that BDI stipulatively defines 'desire'. But this is rather pointless, since it means that we cannot tell what desires someone has until we see which act they perform. (And if their decision is highly sensitive to trivial situational changes, as seems likely, then desires would seem not to have any stable prior existence.) So it seems like a bad definition. In any case, interesting truths cannot be arrived at by mere stipulation.
If we want BDI to be a substantive thesis, it must invoke some independent notion of desire (strength). The most obvious contender here is the felt strength of a desire in our conscious phenomenology. But then BDI is simply false: we are not always bound to follow that which most tempts us -- the will may override mere feelings.
Finally, there is the (more morally important) dimension of reflective endorsement, where we may more naturally speak of 'ends' than 'desires'. But again, this interpretation renders BDI false: unfortunately, we do not always pursue those ends we believe to be best. We may be waylaid by mere (unendorsed) desires.
This distinction is captured rather nicely in Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics (1890). The suggestion that "adoption of an end means the preponderance of a desire for it" - precluding the possibility of instrumental irrationality - is due, he suggests, to "a defective psychological analysis" (p.39):
According to my observation of consciousness, the adoption of an end as paramount -- either absolutely or within certain limits -- is quite a distinct psychical phenomenon from desire: it is to be classed with volitions, thought it is, of course, specifically different from a volition initiating a particular immediate action.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Can we choose our reasons?
The main objection to Scanlon's separation of intention and permissibility comes from the suggestion that we not only ought to do the right thing, but do it for the right reasons. Perhaps, one might suggest, this is the only permissible option. Not only is it impermissible to perform the wrong action, but it is also impermissible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. Scanlon responds (ch.2, p.20):
The agent's failure to be moved by the right reason reveals a fault in him, but it does not count against the permissibility of his action. The best explanation of this distinction seems to me to lie in the close connection between permissibility and the guiding of choice.
The question of permissibility is the question, "May I do X?" which is typically asked from the point of view of an agent who is presented with a number of different ways of acting. The question is, which of these may one choose? The question of permissibility thus applies only to alternatives between which a competent agent can choose.
And, Scanlon suggests, we cannot choose what we see as reasons. (Sure, we "decide whether something is a reason or not" (p.22). It is a judgment of sorts, and one we can be held responsible for. But it is not a willed choice, and so doesn't raise questions of permissibility.) We can choose whether to do X or not, but we cannot choose to do X for certain reasons rather than others.
Is that right? Scanlon continues (p.23):
This explanation may seem at odds with the very appealing idea that moral considerations are not esoteric but are available to any agent. If the reasons that a moral principle identifies as relevant are "available" in this sense, why is acting on them -- doing the right thing for the right reason -- not also available to the agent? The answer is that the availability of moral considerations simply means that a normally competent agent ought to be able to understand them and see that they provide reasons. It does not follow that an agent who, for whatever reason, does not see the force of such a reason, is nonetheless in a position to choose to see its force, or to act on it.
In our seminar, Michael raised an interesting comparison with epistemic obligation. It's usually thought that we ought to see or access all the epistemic reasons. Even though it is not strictly a matter of "choice", nonetheless, in failing to recognize the evidence available to us, we fail to believe as we should. So it seems that what matters for responsibility here is simply our rational capacities, and the fact that we could have accessed the relevant reasons (even if not simply by exercising our will).
So why the difference in the practical case? Do we have more freedom to inquire into facts than to change our internal motivations? Or are the resulting obligations different in nature, such that practical obligations have to meet a stricter form of the 'ought implies can' requirement? Any ideas?
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Conflicting Non-standard Reasons
[See my previous post for background.]
Raz writes:
While we may have epistemic reasons for a particular belief and a practical reason not to have it... The outcome of "conflict" between adaptive and practical reasons is not, as in genuine conflict between practical reasons or between epistemic ones, that the better reason prevails. They are not in competition, and reasons of neither kind can be better than reasons of the other. Rather, adaptive reasons, being the standard reasons for belief or for having emotions, prevail. Practical reasons, being non-standard, can 'win' only by stealth. (p.23)
He adds in a footnote: "Note though that standard and non-standard reasons for action, both being practical, do conflict in a straightforward way. And the same is true of reasons for intentions."
So how are we to assess a situation where your standard and non-standard reasons for action or intention conflict? Take, for example, Kavka's toxin puzzle. Clearly the thing to do is to bring it about that you have other (i.e. standard) reasons to intend to drink the toxin -- to keep a promise or to avoid some self-inflicted punishment, perhaps. But in the absence of those new reasons, i.e. reasons you can rationally follow, wouldn't it be irrational for you to form the intention? (It'd be fortunate, for sure, but that merely shows that sometimes it's fortunate to be irrational, right?) In what sense is this 'conflict' any different from the belief case?
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Following Reasons
Say I offer you $100 to hop on one leg for non-pecuniary motives. You cannot follow this reason directly, for that would be self-defeating. (I can read your mind, and so tell if you cheat.) Instead, it is a reason to hop for some other reason. It is thus a non-standard reason for hopping. Mind you, it could be a standard reason to bring it about that you hop, e.g. by stabbing yourself in the foot. You can stab yourself in the foot for the reason of the $100 prize, without this causing any (logical) problems.
The non/standard distinction is also seen in the contrast between practical vs. epistemic reasons for belief. The practical benefits of a rich ideologue's patronage might provide you with non-standard reasons to believe that global warming is a hoax. But if all the evidence is against it, then you have no standard reasons for the belief, and cannot come to hold it through the direct process of rational belief formation. (You might get yourself to believe by indirect methods, of course. Again, it could be a standard reason for some such action.)
In his 'Reasons: Practical and Adaptive', Raz makes the distinction as follows:
Standard reasons are those which we can follow directly, that is have the attitude, or perform the action, for that reason. Non-standard reasons for an action or attitude are such that one can conform to, but not follow directly. (pp.4-5)
This makes it sound like a contingent empirical matter, for isn't it up to psychology to tell us what considerations humans are able to act upon? But not really. Science might tell us what considerations humans can respond to, and even cite in folk-psychological explanations of their own behaviour. But there are normative elements to action (as opposed to mere behaviour), and to genuinely following a reason (as opposed to merely taking oneself to have done so), which return us to the philosophical domain.
But now we have a problem. Suppose Bob mistakenly takes practical reasons to warrant belief. Anne offers him $100 to believe that the world is flat, and Bob manages to form the belief, citing the monetary reward as his reason. Does this mean that Bob follows the practical reason for belief? If that's possible -- if practical reasons for belief can be followed after all -- then they would (by definition) qualify as standard reasons.
Raz wants to deny this, which means that we need some independent basis for determining whether the reason was followed in such a case. (It would be circular to appeal to the fact of its being a non-standard reason to explain why it doesn't qualify as having been followed!) Recognizing this, Raz instead appeals to facts about "the nature of that reason" (p.19) to settle the matter. For example, if following a reason would be self-defeating, as in our original example, then that's a basic fact which explains why it cannot be successfully followed, and thus why it is non-standard. The case of practical reasons for belief is less clear. Raz claims (p.20):
the fact that non-epistemic reasons cannot serve to warrant belief shows that they cannot be followed. Ultimately, however, the explanation of the force of this point depends on understanding the normativity of reasons, their hold on us, a matter I deal with elsewhere.
Further direction would help. Oh well. That all seems a bit mysterious to me, so I wonder whether we might do better to just define standard reasons directly in terms of warrant. Or, if we take rationality as fundamental: standard reasons are those that our rational capacities respond to (insofar as they are functioning properly).
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Epistemic Akrasia
Is it possible to be weak-willed in one's beliefs, i.e. to believe other than what one takes oneself to have most reason to believe? It seems not: the possibility of weak-willed action arises from the gap between one's reasoned conclusions and the intentions to act that may be formed on their basis. But there is normally no such gap or further step involved in belief formation: reasoning concludes in belief (i.e. judgment about what is the case), without any further role for the will.
Raz offers a different argument, in his 'Reasons: Practical and Adaptive', p.7:
because there is no possibility that the lesser reason for belief serves a concern which is not served better by the better reason there is no possibility of preferring to follow what one takes to be the lesser reason rather than the better one. The possibility of akrasia depends on the fact that belief that a practical reason is defeated by a better conflicting reason is consistent with belief that is serves a concern which the better reasons does not, and which can motivate one to follow it.
The thought here is that in practical cases, there is at least something to be said for acting on the lesser reason. If I can save either one life or two others, there's something appealing about the former option, even if the latter is better on balance. The former reason is outweighed, but not entirely defeated. Epistemic reasons, in contrast, seem to be defeated and not merely outweighed. As Raz puts it (p.6):
The weaker reasons are just less reliable guides to one and the same end [viz., truth]. There is no loss in dismissing a less reliable clue.
Or, in other words, practical reasons are pro tanto reasons, exerting some degree of force, whereas epistemic reasons are merely prima facie reasons -- liable on further examination to turn out to be no real reason at all.
But I wonder whether it is true that "there is no possibility that the lesser reason for belief serves a concern which is not served better by the better reason". Sure, epistemic reasons serve truth, but practical reasons may be thought to serve a monistic good (e.g. human welfare), and that doesn't prevent tradeoffs between different instances of this end. So let's consider a case where there are competing truths (analogous to the competing lives in our earlier example):
Suppose I am assessing two competing belief-sets or comprehensive theories/ideologies (T1 and T2) regarding some area of discourse D. Though both seem flawed, I am aware of no alternatives which are more coherent and plausible than these two, and can see no promising way to combine them. Further suppose that T1 seems on balance the better theory -- more likely to be true, or true in more of the sub-areas of D that matter. However, I nonetheless think that T2 is much more plausible regarding some specific sub-area Ds. I am so drawn to T2's account of Ds, that I end up accepting (believing?) T2 overall, even though I judge that I have more reason to believe T1.
Does that sound like a genuine case of epistemic akrasia?
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Do feelings reflect preferences?
It makes sense to be especially concerned (excited, etc.) about the near future. I previously suggested that once we distinguish feelings from preferences, this premise gives us no reason to doubt that we should be temporally neutral when it comes to the latter. However, Brad Skow argues [draft PDF, p.10] that "biased attitudes [feelings] will be rational just in case biased preferences are." Why? Because, he suggests, the former are typically generated from the latter: we are pleased, for example, when we think that our preferences have been satisfied. The fact that we are more affectively attuned to our future than past welfare is thus taken to indicate a temporally biased preference structure: we must want to be well-off in the future more than the past.
I'm not so sure about this. After all, our affective responses are designed to help us respond successfully to threats and opportunities in our environment, and this changes over time. I should feel fearful and alert when faced with a dangerous predator, and all my time-slices can endorse this. It does not follow that all my time-slices should themselves maintain such a state of arousal –- once the danger has passed, there would be no point. So I agree with Parfit that attention and affect should change over time, in sync with our changing circumstances. But preferences are another matter. I may feel greater excitement about an imminent lesser benefit, as I attend to it in the present, even though I judge the distant greater benefit to be preferable, and so would sooner give up the imminent benefit if forced to choose. Again, note that I do not later regret feeling mounting excitement in anticipation of some immanent event, whereas I would regret choosing a lesser nearby good over a greater distant one. This is a revealing difference. Changing feelings may be endorsed from a timeless perspective, and so are consistent with temporal neutrality, unlike changing preferences.
Still, it would be too quick for me to conclude that a feeling or affective attitude is rationally warranted just because it is advantageous (cf. practical vs. adaptive reasons). So I need to say more about what the adaptive reasons for our attitudes are, exactly, that justifies their temporal partiality without appealing to biased preferences. What facts do our emotions answer to? One possible (rough) answer is that they are to track the normatively salient features of our local environment. This will normally be useful, much as having warranted or true beliefs (tracking the descriptive facts) is normally useful, but warrant and utility may come apart in particular cases.
Anyway, on this view the reason why I shouldn't get too excited about the satisfaction of my past or distant-future preferences is because they're not really relevant to my immediate situation, and it's this that I should be affectively attuned to. This story seems oversimplified though: surely we may reasonably enjoy the thought of future benefits, or savour pleasant memories, etc. Perhaps a better answer is that our emotions respond to normative features of any situation under consideration, and it's just that our attention happens to be focussed more often on the present (and reasonably so).
What do you think is the best way to flesh this out?
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Akrasia, Reasoning and Rationality
In 'Reason, Reasons and Normativity', Raz argues against the traditional view that practical reasoning is reasoning that results in a special kind of conclusion - action or intention, say, rather than belief. His key insight is that weakness of the will constitutes a failure to (intend to) act that "is not due to a failure of reasoning." (p.11) It is a failure of will, and that is something different.
Still, we think that weakness of will is a paradigm form of practical irrationality. So this goes to show that there is more to rationality than just reasoning. According to Raz's Irrationality Test: "if the exercise of a capacity can be non-derivatively irrational then the capacity is one of our rational powers." (p.4) So understood, our rational powers include not only good reasoning, but also measured emotions, decisiveness, strength of will, etc.
This also fits with his answer in 'The Myth of Instrumental Rationality' to the question "what are one's rational capacities?" (p.25)
They are those capacities that are involved in discerning which features in the world merit a response, and how to respond to them, including both intellectual and motivational capacities (such as deliberative capacities, ability to come to a conclusion and to stick to it).
Seems hard to disagree with.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Agency and the Will
Here's a simple model of human behaviour: we have beliefs and desires, and we act so as to fulfill our most and strongest desires given our beliefs. (I think Alonzo Fyfe holds something along these lines.) On this view, call it 'BDI', our intentions (the psychological precursors to action) are wholly determined by our prior states of belief and desire. But if that were so, there would be no need for practical reasoning or deliberation. The mechanism for converting beliefs and desires into intentions might as well be sub-personal, like an automatic reflex. Instead, the phenomena suggest that there is a further element to agency, not reducible to beliefs and desires, which we may call the 'will'. (N.B. It may be reducible to some other aspect of neurological function; I do not claim it is non-physical.)
Start with theoretical (epistemic) reasoning. Does anyone think that our conclusions (new beliefs) are wholly determined by our prior states of belief? They're a huge factor, no doubt; what we find plausible will depend on what we already accept as true. But what new conclusions I draw - if any - will also depend on how much attention I pay to various reasons, how carefully I consider the issue, and so (probably) what I had for breakfast, among other things. There is room here to identify a causally-embedded 'will', which weighs and assesses the various arguments and reasons that fall under the spotlight of its attention. The way it functions is presumably determined by the totality of my brain states, but not - I think - my beliefs alone.
Similarly with practical reasoning. Desires may now enter the picture, but they seem to make little essential difference. Much still depends, for example, on which desires (or other practical reasons) we attend to, and how we will weigh and assess them -- it is not predetermined by these states alone. There is a distinct psychological faculty in play here.
(This also explains how we can come to bad conclusions, failing to do or believe what we have most internal reason for. Sometimes we just overlook things.)
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Instrumental Rationality
In 'The Myth of Instrumental Rationality' (2005), Raz argues that there is no distinctive form of rationality concerning means and ends. Typical ways we might fail to take the means to our ends -- e.g. weakness of will, or chronic indecision -- may just as well be implicated in our failure to adopt the right ends in the first place:
If I believe that I ought to care about how well I teach my students, but I do not, I display weakness in adopting ends. If I do care about how well I teach my students, but I fail to give them detailed comments on their essays, in spite of my belief that commenting on their essays is essential to teaching them well, I again display weakness, which this time is a manifestation of instrumental irrationality. It seems plausible, however, that the standards by which I fail are the same in both cases. (p.26)
Smith offers a compelling response though, which is that Raz doesn't seem to have addressed the distinctive capacity to "multiply out" the strength of one's ultimate desire against one's degree of belief in the efficacy of the means, to yield an appropriately weighted instrumental desire. Is there any non-instrumental analogue to this?
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Affect, Drive, and Evaluation
One worry for simple belief-desire psychology is that it potentially conflates several importantly different kinds of motivation or pro-attitude:
(1) Affect - i.e. positive emotional valence, or pleasure.
(2) Drive - sheer behavioural/motivational force, e.g. compulsion.
(3) Evaluation - degree of reflective endorsement.
(Any others?) It seems at least logically possible that these could come apart. For example, one might compulsively act in a way which feels emotionally neutral to the actor, but which they rationally judge to be bad. Does the agent "desire" to so act? It depends which of the three meanings we have in mind.
It seems clear that mere behavioural drive has no normative significance. Affect is more promising, since we generally like to have positive emotions. But in that case, it is arguably deriving its value from #3: evaluation.
I wonder whether these distinctions can help us to make sense of so-called 'conditional desires', e.g. the desire for ice-cream, which seem in some sense to be conditional on their own persistence. (Shieva has a neat paper [doc] explaining why the notion is so problematic.) We feel a transient affective pull towards ice-cream, and we positively evaluate the goal of obtaining ice-cream while the feeling persists. This allows us to avoid self-reference, as the evaluation is instead conditional on the persistence of affect. Or something like that.
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?
