Some people judge that homosexuality is immoral, because they find it intuitively repugnant. They must also be aware that a few short decades ago people thought that interracial sex was immoral, on the same basis. This suggests that such intuitions provide a very flimsy basis for discrimination. Indeed, I find it completely baffling that homophobic conservatives fail to realize that they are the modern day equivalent of yesterday's racist conservatives. Why are they not humbled by history? What makes them think that their disgust-based moral intuitions are any more reliable than their grandparents' were? Andrew - I meant the ‘permissible by default’ thesis to be fundamentally metaphysical in nature. That is, an act is permissible unless there is in fact some reason why it’s wrong. The methodological implication is that we shouldn’t expect any explanation to be given of why permissible acts are permissible (except for the trite “it harms no-one”, etc. — cf. the ice cream case). If we are to engage the moral question philosophically, the only way to do this is to see if there are any arguments for impermissibility that stand up to scrutiny. As an epistemic point, of course, people don’t always need to do moral philosophy before having justified moral beliefs. But it’s also obviously true that your mere intuition isn’t enough — just look at all the past bigots to whom it “seemed” that interracial marriage was wrong. I’d guess the epistemic question must be settled by factors external to the immediate phenomenology, e.g. whether your moral intuitions are actually reliable, or something along those lines. That still doesn’t speak to the practical point, of what subjective guidance one can give an agent here. How about this: if it seems to you that X is wrong, then you may tentatively suppose this to be so, BUT if other epistemically responsible agents call this into question, you ought to put aside your mere intuition and see whether there is any actual reason that can ground it. (If, at the end of inquiry, you can find no good arguments for the impermissibility of X, this would seem pretty strong evidence that in fact you are in the same position as the racists of yesterday.)
There was some discussion of this on the Missouri philosophy blog a while back. I suggested that actions are "permissible by default", and that constructing a positive argument for the permissibility of homosexual acts is as superfluous as arguing for the permissibility of eating icecream. The onus is on the moral scold. Andrew Moon responded that we may be justified in believing something to be wrong even if we can't immediately produce an argument to support this belief. I clarified my point as follows:
Unfortunately, no-one ever responded to these suggestions, so I reproduce them here instead. Any thoughts?
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Bigoted Moral Intuitions
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Thought Experiments and Begging Questions
Adam Rawlings has an interesting post complaining that common philosophical thought experiments are "hopelessly question-begging":
The zombie scenario just assumes, without argument, that a fully-specified physical world contains no consciousness. The amoralist case just assumes, without argument, that full knowledge of morality will not give sufficient motivation to act. The Frankfurt-style examples just assume, without argument, that being under the control of a counterfactual demon is still a case of genuinely free choice in action. And the direction of fit metaphor just assumes, without argument, that these two directions of fit must both exist. In other words, the cases are structured in such a way as to appeal solely to intuitions favourable to one side of a philosophical dispute, bypassing the inconvenient "giving an argument" stage completely.
All very true, I grant, but there's nothing wrong with this. To see why, suppose I were to claim that 'bachelor' is defined to mean 'unmarried man'. You might respond with putative counterexamples, e.g. pointing out that the Pope is an unmarried man, but (intuitively) not a bachelor. It would be odd for me to complain, "You're just assuming, without argument, that the Pope is not a bachelor!" True, you say, but I'm missing the point. You merely wanted to draw my attention to a possibility that I may have neglected. Do I really deny that the Pope is no bachelor, you ask? If so, we must look elsewhere to resolve our disagreement. But it was not unreasonable for you to offer the suggestion that you did: you had every reason to expect that it might inform my view, even though I did not antecedently agree with your conclusion that there could be unmarried men who aren't bachelors.
Compare Stalnaker's wonderful insight:
With riddles and puzzles as well as with many more serious intellectual problems, often all one needs to see that a certain solution is correct is to think of it--to see it as one of the possibilities.
Sometimes a vivid illustration is all we need to advance our understanding, and so make philosophical progress.
With this in mind, I think it helps to understand 'begging the question' in dialogical (rather than purely logical) terms. Every valid argument contains its conclusion in its premises, after all. So that alone can't be grounds for complaint -- there's nothing wrong with drawing out implicit commitments which one hadn't previously appreciated. Rather, what's problematic is if an argument is not going to be rationally persuasive to anyone who doesn't already accept the conclusion. Fruitful debate merely calls for arguments that are dialectically effective for logically non-omniscient agents such as ourselves. Some arguments aren't going to help advance the dialectic at all, so it's those which I would call 'question begging'.
The thought experiments Adam discusses aren't like that though. Many people are persuaded upon learning of zombies and Frankfurt cases. These thought experiments make vivid to us certain conceptual interrelations which we had not fully appreciated beforehand. That said, further argument will be required if someone sincerely disputes the proffered description of the scenario in question (as Adam suggests). But that merely shows that these thought experiments are not guaranteed to be dialectically effective. That's fine; there's plenty of space between 'knock down' and 'mistaken' for these arguments to occupy.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Thought Substitutes
I've recently lamented how logical formalisms and inductive meta-arguments risk being misused as substitutes for careful thought. It's also a major worry I have about (some) "experimental philosophy". Consider, for example, the following:
Does common sense morality assume objectivity? According to a recent study by Goodwin and Darley, most folk actually don't believe that their moral judgments are objectively true.
It's not clear how this fact is any response to the question. The question, recall, is not whether most folk believe in moral objectivism (which is all the survey can tell us). That's quite irrelevant. The real question is whether our moral practices rationally commit us to objectivism, and that is not a purely empirical question. It's a normative question, so there is simply no way to answer it without actually doing philosophy.
I don't mean to bash all attempts at empirically informed philosophy. If we are concerned with analyzing actual moral practices, it's an empirical question just what those are, i.e. what moralizing behaviours people in our society engage in. It's entirely appropriate to use empirical data as a starting point for philosophical inquiry, especially if that data is precisely what we're wanting to analyze. My point is simply that empirical work cannot substitute for philosophical analysis.
Further, it will rarely be worthwhile to ask folk for their theoretical opinions. Surveys like the above merely tell us what pop-philosophical theories are most prevalent in our public culture at present. Many people will profess a belief in relativism, for example, even if further probing would eventually reveal that they don't actually accept the implications of this view. As R.M. Hare once wrote:
If we want to find out what ordinary people mean, it is seldom safe just to ask them. They will come out with a variety of answers, few of which, perhaps, will withstand a philosophical scrutiny or elenchus, conducted in the light of the ordinary people's own linguistic behaviour (for example what they treat as self-contradictory).
So, next time you come across a study reporting the philosophical beliefs of non-philosophers, just remind yourself of the classic Onion study:
Monday, March 31, 2008
Logical Subtraction and Partial Truth
Stephen Yablo gave a very impressive series of lectures here last week. His core insight was that often we can communicate important truths by way of assertions that are literally false. The rough explanation for this is that the assertion, though false, may be "partly true", or "true insofar as it concerns a certain subject matter." For example, 'the number of dragons is zero' may be literally false if numbers do not exist. But it is partly true, i.e. true in what it says about dragons (namely, that there aren't any). If you take the literal meaning, and subtract the claim that there are numbers, the remaining content is wholly true.
Sometimes logical subtraction seems unproblematic, as the subtracted element is "perfectly extricable" from what's being said. Other cases, however, are more problematic. When you subtract the redness from scarlet, what's left? 'Tom [the tomato] is scarlet - Tom is red' does not leave any remainder that we can make sense of. It seems perfectly inextricable. Then there may be inbetween cases, such as Wittgenstein's famous question: "what is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?" We have some grasp of this, but as Jaeger has pointed out, "it is not the case that there is exactly one statement R such that 'R & my arm goes up' is logically equivalent to 'I raise my arm'."
Yablo's solution is to say that "P-Q always exists, but it doesn't always project very far out of the Q-region [of logical space]. Inextricability simply means that it is hard [or impossible] to evaluate P-Q in worlds where Q fails."
Intuitively, we can say that:
(i) P-Q is false iff P adds falsity to Q.
(ii) P-Q is true iff not-P adds falsity to Q.
(iii) If neither P nor its negation adds falsity to Q, then P-Q is undefined (lacks a truth value).
Yablo systematizes our intuitive judgments here by appeal to truthmakers, or the reasons why a proposition is true/false. P "adds falsity" to Q if it is false for a Q-compatible reason, i.e. there is a Q-compatible falsity-maker for P.
Example: Let P = 'The King of France is bald' and Q = 'France has a King'. Then P-Q is false, because of the following Q-compatible falsity-maker for P: the list of all the bald people, none of whom is a King of France. This falsity-maker could exist, and so make P false, even if Q were true and France did have a King. This shows that P is false for reasons over and above the falsity of its presupposition Q.
Here is a bit more technical detail. Let R be a potential candidate for P-Q. Yablo suggests that R is a successful candidate, i.e. R extrapolates P beyond Q, iff the following three conditions are satisfied:
- "Equivalence: within Q, R is true (false) in a world iff P is true (false)." That is, if R = P-Q, then it had better be the case that R&Q = P.
- "Reasons: within Q, a world is R (~R) for the same reasons it is P&Q rather than ~P&Q (...)" This is equivalence as applied to subject matter, rather than just truth conditions.
- "Orthogonality: outside Q, R is true (false) for the same reasons as within." This is the key principle, which really gets at the intuitive notion that we are genuinely extrapolating P rather than simply gerrymandering a proposition that happens to overlap with P in the Q-region (and then becomes wildly different beyond that point).
Example: The material conditional 'if Q then P' fails the orthogonality condition. Outside the Q region, it is true for the simple reason that Q is false, regardless of P. Compare the visual aid below: 'if Q then P' has truth conditions 'P or ~Q', so would include all the white region in R. The gerrymandering is visible in the fact that the R region would then turn a sharp 'corner' once it left the P & Q region. It should instead extrapolate cleanly as shown.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Derivative Objections
[I'm adding a new sidebar category on 'methodology', for posts where I assess certain forms of reasoning, or what I take to be common mistakes in philosophical methodology.]
Suppose I propose an analysis of X (welfare, say) in terms of some more basic phenomenon Y (e.g. desire satisfaction). One might try to object to this by pointing to various paradoxes that result. But it is important to check whether the analysis is really contributing to the alleged problem here. Often, I find, it is not. The problem derives from the underlying phenomena, and is nothing to do with the proposed analysis. The analysis merely enables us to redescribe an old problem in new terms. It doesn't really introduce any new problems. So it is unobjectionable (at least in this respect).
Here's a test: If we can replace all instances of 'X' with the proposed reduction basis 'Y', and the paradox still remains, then there's no objection to the analysis here. What's problematic is the underlying phenomenon Y, but that's going to be a problem for everyone who accepts the existence of Y, regardless of whether they believe that Y can ground X or not.
Examples of this fallacy in action:
(1) Claims that the desire paradox is a special problem for preferentist analyses of wellbeing. "I desire to be poorly off", if we accept preferentism, is just a redescription of the more basic paradox, "I desire that most of my desires be thwarted." It's clearly no objection to a view that it allows old paradoxes to be restated in new terms. It's only objectionable if a view introduces new paradoxes!
(2) All those objections to consequentialism that really derive from the difficulty of evaluating certain states of affairs (see, e.g., infinite spheres of utility, the population paradox, etc.). The consequentialist claim that right action maximizes the good does not add any further paradoxicality to our theorizing about the good. As R.M. Hare once wrote:
It is worth saying right at the beginning that this is not a problem peculiarly for utilitarians... The fact, if it is one, that there are other independent virtues and duties as well [as beneficence] makes no difference to this requirement. Only a theory which allowed no place at all to beneficence... could escape this demand. Anybody, therefore, who is tempted to bring up this objection against utilitarians should ask himself whether he is himself attracted by a theory which leaves out such considerations entirely.
So here's a handy methodological principle: when faced with an objection to a theory that relates X to Y, first check - via my above test - whether it isn't really just a "derivative objection" to Y itself. The theory of X may be a red herring, distracting the discussants from what's really at issue.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Arguing with Eliezer: Part II
[My promised concluding thoughts...]
Clearly our disagreements run too deep to do full justice to them in a mere blog post. But I at least hope I've succeeded in indicating where one might reasonably depart from Eliezer's reductionist line. There are also a couple of ad hominem points which struck me as noteworthy. (See my previous post for real arguments; this is mere commentary.)
One is that our beliefs are shaped in reaction to others. Intelligent non-philosophers typically only come across stupid, woolly-headed non-reductionists. The most prominent public intellectuals are typically scientists of a reductionist bent, like Dawkins, whose most prominent opposition is from anti-intellectual rubes and intellectually bankrupt religious apologists. From a purely sociological perspective, it's no surprise that intelligent people might initially be drawn to the former camp. (I know I was.) But that's no substitute for assessing the strongest arguments -- the ones you've probably never even come across unless you've spent a few years doing academic philosophy, or associate with others who have -- on their merits.
Since Eliezer's posts are mostly directed at a general audience - most of whom have not carefully reflected on their beliefs - I agree with 99% of his criticisms. Folks often commit the mind-projection fallacy, are fooled by an empty dispute that 'feels' substantive, and can be irrationally resistant to perfectly legitimate scientific reductions. These are all important insights (though hardly news to philosophers). But he overgeneralizes -- just as to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I think the core problem here is methodological. Eliezer assumes that a debunking explanation of a belief is enough to refute it. Rather than doing the hard work of philosophy -- assessing the arguments for and against P -- he shifts to cognitive science, explaining why I might offer such arguments even if P is false. But this is to commit the genetic fallacy. Any reflective non-reductionist will grant that you can explain all the physical facts (incl. their brain states and vocalizations) without reference to any non-physical facts. Of course. But that doesn't imply anything about whether their belief is justified. Explanation and justification are two completely different things.
Reductionists make this error because they assume that all that stands in need of explanation is the third-personal data of science. Hence (they assume), if you can explain all the empirical data - including the vocalizations of your critics - then there's nothing left for said critics to base their arguments on. This type of genetic fallacy is no fallacy, on this view, because a full empirical explanation exhausts all possible justification.
But this is clearly question-begging, or worse. It assumes an indefensible scientism from the start. Non-reductionists take it as given that there is more than just third-personal empirical data that calls out for explanation. There is the manifest fact of first-personal conscious experience, and the normative facts about what we ought to believe and do, etc. A debunking explanation of why we believe in these phenomena is not sufficient unless one has also successfully debunked the phenomena itself. But that requires actually engaging with non-reductionists and the arguments we offer, rather than simply psychologizing us.
Reductionists, when short on real arguments, like to appeal to meta-arguments, e.g. induction on the historical successes of science. 'There have always been nay-sayers, who questioned the ability of science to explain phenomenon X, and every time they've been proven wrong!' It's a familiar sentiment. But it's also pretty weak. If you bother to look more closely, there are principled reasons to think these cases different. All those examples they point to are instances of third-personal empirical phenomena. I grant that science is supreme in that domain. But, to turn the tables, it's never had any success outside of it. So there's no general reason to think that normativity or first-personal subjective experience are susceptible to purely scientific explanation. So, again, these simplistic meta-arguments are no substitute for the real thing.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Is Logic Overrated?
Good reasoning is invaluable; it's what philosophy is all about. But I'm more skeptical of formal logic's value. Logic is a powerful tool we can use to structure our reasoning and highlight entailment relations. But - like any tool - it can be misused. In particular, I worry that it's just too easy for the manipulation of symbols to substitute for careful thought.
Modal logic is especially susceptible to misapplication, in my experience. The most famous example would have to be the S5 modal argument for God's existence. But it's also not uncommon to come across blog posts where the employed logical apparatus merely serves to build in misunderstandings. The formal steps of the argument may be flawless, but that's all for naught if the entire argument is based on a mistake -- due to failing to understand precisely what all those formalisms really mean.
If one opts to engage in formalism, the hard (philosophical) work lies in interpretation, i.e. ensuring that the formalism adequately captures the intuitive ideas we started with. It's easy to neglect this point, and so produce a formal 'proof' that doesn't really speak to the issue at hand. That's the risk of formalism. The advantages are more well known: they force us to make explicit intermediate steps in our reasoning, and allow these to be easily checked for validity. Do the risks or benefits tend to be greater in practice, do you think?
My tentative (and admittedly under-informed) opinion is that logical formalisms are rarely indispensible, and often well dispensed with. As a rule of thumb, I'd be wary of using formalisms as the central means of making your case. Their best use may instead be to provide a bare-bones outline of the argument's structure, as a supplement to the argument given in prose. Formalism may prove helpful, but it shouldn't be considered sufficient, since there is more to good reasoning than logic alone.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Shady Gambles
Roger White has proven, to my satisfaction, that perfectly rational agents could not have imprecise credences. In this post, I want to explain away a potential source of contrary intuitions. It seems perfectly reasonable -- and perhaps even rationally required -- to refrain from accepting bets on issues you are completely ignorant about. But if I were required to always have precise credence, then there are many (intuitively dubious) bets that I would have to accept. For example, suppose I have no evidence for or against a proposition P. If I must give it a precise credence of 0.5, then I must accept any better-than-even bet (e.g. costing $10 if P is false, and paying $15 if P is true).
The worry is that this leaves me very vulnerable to exploitation from more knowledgeable dealers. They might offer me deals that seem tempting in my ignorance, but which they have carefully set up so that the option I'm expected to choose is in fact a loser. The offering of a bet is itself a piece of new evidence: since the bookie is out to rip me off, an offer that looks "too good to be true" probably is. So it's a good practical rule of thumb to be disposed not to accept bets that others are keen to offer you.
Of course, we want to bracket these practical considerations for philosophy's sake. To avoid any fear of shady dealings or manipulation, we may suppose the details of the bet were determined by some completely random process. In that case, my intuitions sharpen up considerably. It no longer seems permissible to reject a better-than-even bet. Let me now offer an argument to back this up.
We saw in the previous post that a better-than-even Bet A can be combined with its converse Bet B (i.e. offering the same, better-than-even payoffs for the opposite result) to yield a sure win ($5 in the case of $15 vs. -$10 payoffs). So, even if you don't know anything else, you at least know that it's more desirable to take both bets than neither. The expected payoff is (say) $5 rather than zero.
But now suppose you are offered the following: we flip a coin, and if it lands heads you're committed to Bet A only, and if tails you get Bet B only. Is this a game you should accept? It seems so. If you play it over and over again, you can expect to make ever increasing winnings ($5 for every two games, on average). And it's perfectly random, so your one-shot expected utility must be positive too.
So, if you're offered Bet A alone (assuming the background conditions are such that the details of this bet were selected via some random, non-shady process), you should take it. A sharp credence of 0.5 won't leave you vulnerable in these properly sanitized conditions.
Friday, March 07, 2008
The Logical Problem(s) of Evil
Many theists seem to treat the 'logical' problem of evil as refutable simply by establishing that God's existence is compatible with (some possible instance of) evil. They then infer that the only real challenge is from the 'evidential' problem of evil, which even if it works merely shows there is some (pro tanto, defeasible) evidence against God's existence. So, nothing too threatening.
But this is poor reasoning. The mere fact that God's existence is compatible with some possible evils does not establish that we have only probabilistic evidence against his existence. For, obviously enough, it does not entail that God's existence is compatible with the particular evils we actually observe. Indeed, I think there's a very strong case to be made that God's existence is logically incompatible with the particular evils we observe.
Since my conclusion is that God's existence is impossible, not merely improbable, it would seem misleading to call this an 'evidential' argument from evil. It is properly considered a logical argument from evil. But it certainly isn't refuted by yelping, "free will! free will!" So it's a mistake for theists to claim that the logical argument from evil has been refuted. (At best, all they've refuted is the most simple, straw-man version of the argument.)
Sunday, March 02, 2008
Misleading Generalizations
The NYT Magazine has an article on single-sex schooling, filled with infuriating claims of the generic form, 'Boys like X, girls prefer Y,' etc. It's not until the 4th page that they actually acknowledge how hopelessly misleading this all is:
[Giedd says] gender is a pretty crude tool for sorting minds. Giedd puts the research on brain differences in perspective by using the analogy of height. “On both the brain imaging and the psychological testing, the biggest differences we see between boys and girls are about one standard deviation. Height differences between boys and girls are two standard deviations.” Giedd suggests a thought experiment: Imagine trying to assign a population of students to the boys’ and girls’ locker rooms based solely on height. As boys tend to be taller than girls, one would assign the tallest 50 percent of the students to the boys’ locker room and the shortest 50 percent of the students to the girls’ locker room. What would happen? While you’d end up with a better-than-random sort, the results would be abysmal, with unacceptably large percentages of students in the wrong place. Giedd suggests the same is true when educators use gender alone to assign educational experiences for kids. Yes, you’ll get more students who favor cooperative learning in the girls’ room, and more students who enjoy competitive learning in the boys’, but you won’t do very well. Says Giedd, “There are just too many exceptions to the rule.”
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?
Saturday, December 15, 2007
"Protesting" Philosophy
Hmmm.
The work done on disability by most bioethicists breeds contempt for disabled people and fosters condescending, dismissive and patronizing responses to their testimonials and subjective accounts about their own lives. Imagine what it is like to be a disabled undergraduate or graduate student trying to endure a semester of lectures in which you are given the message that your life is not worth living and should be prevented, that you are deluding yourself about the quality of your own life and the extent of your misfortune. I often wonder why more feminist philosophers are not protesting the fact that this blatant bigotry and prejudice is being written and taught in their departments.
I really detest these sorts of politicized anti-academic complaints. For the sake of the truth, intellectuals must be free to pursue lines of inquiry that some may find offensive. We grant academic freedom because we recognize that this is important, and beneficial in the long run. So if you want to criticize academic work, you should appeal to truth-indicative considerations, i.e. evidence that the claim being made is false or groundless, not sanctimonious moralizing about how "offensive" it is to assert some claims (whether they be true or not).
In this case, surely nobody really denies that a disabled life may well be worth living. But it is an interesting philosophical question whether disabilities in future generations ought to be prevented (through genetic screening and the like). It's an important moral question, and one we should want to learn the truth about. Hence the need for free inquiry. Prima facie, I would think there's a reasonable case to be made for screening out disabilities. If that's true, it can hardly be "bigotry" or "prejudice" to say so. To bandy about such accusations just seems intellectually dishonest -- an attempt to use the moral high ground to bully one's interlocutors into submission without doing the hard work of actually arguing against their position. Most distasteful.
It's a strange mindset - and one which has no place in academia - that would have us respond to philosophical opponents with "protests" rather than counterarguments.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Experimental Philosophy
If philosophers are going to appeal to facts about what seems "intuitive", should they first do empirical work to find out whether most folk actually share their intuition? So suggest the experimental philosophers. I'm skeptical, however. The epistemic force of an intuition depends on the coherence of the conceptual scheme that generates it. Philosophers are presumably better than layfolk at thinking clearly about philosophical concepts. So I don't really see that we have much to learn from their untutored intuitions. (Some complain that our intuitions are "corrupted" by theory - but mightn't this be better described as refinement?)
Doris and Stich (2005) 'As a Matter of Fact: Empirical Perspectives on Ethics' puts forward the case for experimental philosophy. Below, I reproduce my comments from a past (off-blog) discussion.
* * *
Insofar as philosophers are concerned with non-contingent matters, it seems that a priori analysis should suffice. Consider the internalist's question: is amoralism possible? We already have the challenge from Hume's imagined "sensible knave" -- what difference do real life psychopaths make? In either case, it seems like a question for conceptual analysis: given such and such a scenario, how are we to describe it? (Does the knave/psychopath really form moral judgments, or merely schmoral ones?)
Now, a central argument of the paper criticizes conceptual analysis on the grounds that empirical work (presumably: the "vignette" method favoured by the new "experimental philosophy" movement) is required to uncover *real* folk concepts. But this doesn't do justice to the normative element of analysis. They write:
Smith can reply that responses like those Nichols reports would not be part of the maximally consistent set of platitudes that people would endorse after due reflection. But this too is an empirical claim... (p.125)
How is this an empirical claim? What people would conclude on ideal reflection depends on what propositions are maximally coherent, etc. There's no experiment we can do to pin down what this is; any amount of actual reflection by third parties can always be rebuffed as insufficient to reach the ideal end-point -- "those participants," one may claim, "have not undergone *due* reflection." Maybe they've reasoned badly. The only way we can judge this is to engage in normative reasoning ourselves, and see whether the participants' answers correspond to what we've already determined to be true from the armchair!
Similar issues arise for the problem of persistent moral disagreement. The authors write:
the argument from disagreement cannot be evaluated by a priori philosophical means alone; what's needed, as Loeb observes, is 'a great deal of further empirical research into the circumstances and beliefs of various cultures'.
But I can't see how that would help, if in the end we can only judge others' rationality according to the substantive conclusions that they reach.
Besides, we should (in principle if not in practice) be able to tell from the armchair whether one position or another is rationally necessitated. Simply imagine all the conceivable cultural disagreements, and the difficulty of adjudicating between them. (Which ones obtain in the actual world seems quite irrelevant.) If we ultimately find a conclusion to be rationally necessitated after all, and others disagree (without providing any new reasons, since - ex hypothesi - we've already considered them all in reaching our previous conclusion), then that simply shows that they haven't engaged in fully ideal reasoning yet.
Matters are different in practice, of course, due to our own fallibility. Arguably, our credence in philosophical claims should be informed by the empirical (meta-)evidence provided by others' judgments of the issue. But can we ever hope to scientifically measure the rationality of their judgments, on purely procedural grounds (i.e. without begging the substantive question at hand)? If not, we may find that the real adjudicating work must still be done from the armchair.
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.)
Explaining Beliefs
Why do we believe the things we do? Fans of evolutionary psychology might be tempted to construct an evolutionary story about how such-and-such a belief might have proven beneficial to our ancestors on the African savannah. (Freudians and others might construct other stories.) But this is usually the wrong level to focus on. Evolution has equipped us with reliable general faculties of sense and reason. This means that the specific conclusions we reach are better explained by what's justified than by what's adaptive. In other words, if a belief is justified then no further explanation is necessary. It is only blatantly unreasonable beliefs that call out for special explanation -- perhaps in terms of evolved biases, developed disorders, social pressures, or the like.
This is important because people often treat evolution (and causal explanations in general) as an argument for moral skepticism: whatever caused our beliefs, it presumably isn't the abstract moral facts themselves!* But such arguments are question-begging, for they presuppose the skeptical view that our moral beliefs aren't justified.** Indeed, I think there's an important sense in which our philosophical beliefs are caused by the facts: we are responsive to considerations of rational coherence, which is precisely what the truth itself consists in.
* = It's also suspicious that only moral philosophy is singled out here. Logic is no less abstract, after all. Not to mention the belief in skepticism itself.
** = It works better as an argument against Platonism, though.
Here's the vital point: if philosophical truth just is what's maximally reasonable, then the skeptic needs to show that no moral views are more reasonable than their competition (for this would suffice to explain our knowing them). But of course merely pointing to Darwin does no such thing.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
Darwinian Blinkers
Oh dear. Via Robin Hanson, a "moral puzzle":
Consider two men, A and B. Man A steals food because he’s starving to death, while Man B commits a rape because no woman will agree to have sex with him.
From a Darwinian perspective, the two cases seem exactly analogous. In both we have a man on the brink of genetic oblivion, who commandeers something that isn’t his in order to give his genes a chance of survival. And yet the two men strike just about everyone — including me — as inhabiting completely different moral universes. The first man earns only our pity. We ask: what was wrong with the society this poor fellow inhabited, such that he had no choice but to steal? The second man earns our withering contempt.
Befuddled by his genes-eye view, Scott asks: "can any of you pinpoint the difference between the two cases, that underlies our diametrically opposite moral intuitions?" Of the 80-odd responses, only two or three struck on the answer (though no-one listened): try looking at it from a human perspective.
Many noted the obvious point that rape generally inflicts far greater harm than stealing a loaf of bread. But this is an inessential point, as Robin notes: "it might help to imagine a society where the person who lost the food was also in some, though less, danger of starving. But even then food and sex seem to be treated differently."
A related reason is that - consequences aside - they're actually very different kinds of acts. It's misleading to describe both merely as an instance of "commandeer[ing] something that isn’t his", because very different kinds of 'ownership' are being violated. Our intuitions reflect the fact that material property rights are - in a sense - "socially constructed", and if not done right they may fail to yield genuine (reasonable) obligations. In any case, there's no question that the actual distribution of material wealth in the world is historically contingent. A person's self-ownership, by contrast, is a more essential matter. Rape is not just "theft of a body", but a deeply personal violation.
But the central mistake, I'd suggest, is to think that there's any relevant similarity between the motivations for either act. A person does not really act "in order to give his genes a chance of survival." This simply illustrates the all-too-common confusion of biological and psychological teleology. What matters for moral assessment are the real psychological motives of people, not the metaphorical "motives" we attribute to their genes.
From a person's perspective, then, the "analogy" is a non-starter. The starving man needs to eat in order to survive -- a likely precondition for realizing any of his other values. The vital importance of this is beyond question. The second man's "need" for sex is hardly comparable. (It's perfectly possible for the celibate to still lead worthwhile lives.) So, only one of them has a genuine need that could reasonably justify imposing such burdens on others.
It's worth emphasizing that genetic 'goals' don't really have any moral significance, as ethics is instead concerned with the welfare of persons (psychological beings). I'm amazed by how easily evolutionary psychology can lead otherwise intelligent people to lose sight of this basic fact.
But, this particular pseudo-puzzle aside, I do think Robin is right to note that "our concern about inequality is not very general": we focus almost entirely on material inequality, even though non-financial factors arguably have a greater impact on welfare once our basic needs have been met. Should we also be concerned about the distribution of popularity, status, attractiveness, charisma, etc.? How about discrimination due to eccentricity, social awkwardness, or simple introversion? (There's no denying it's an extrovert's world!) It's harder to imagine how to address these matters, I suppose...
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Meta-ontology talk
We had some fun discussion at Canterbury last Friday on the question of 'what is existence?'. Philip generously recommended this blog when he introduced me, so I should probably direct any new visitors to the post on which my talk was based: here. Other related posts may be found under the 'metaphysics' category on the left sidebar. (Comments and counterarguments welcome, as always!)
Update: My central argument could be summarized as follows:
1. Ordinary existence claims (e.g. denying that the tooth fairy exists) serve to distinguish between rival possible worlds, whereas ontological disputes instead concern how best to describe a (qualitatively) given world.
2. Substantive inquiry into the nature of the world requires narrowing the possibilities, with the ultimate aim being to discern which possibility has been actualized. (This is arguably the job of empirical science.)
3. So, ontology is lacking in worldly 'substance'.
Meta-ontological projectivism: My positive view is then that ontology (and the rest of philosophy, for that matter) is better understood as a rational construction: it concerns the question of how to carve up the world - or project our concepts onto it - most coherently. The ultimate end (truth) is fixed by the ideals of rationality, rather than any thing in the world. The proposed meta-philosophy in this sense privileges the epistemic over the ontic.
Friday, June 08, 2007
Identifying your 'God'
Sometimes people argue about whether, say, Christians and Muslims worship the same God. (Islamophobes employ genetic arguments to suggest that Allah is "really" a Pagan moon god, for example. Because everyone knows the Christian religion was not at all influenced by its pagan precursors.) Anyway, there seems a remarkably simple way to settle the matter. Simply ask a Muslim whether, if it turned out that Christianity were true (the deity became incarnate as Jesus, etc.), this deity would still be 'Allah'.*
We can similarly ask a Christian whether, in the possible world described by Muslims, the deity is still 'God'. They might give a different answer, which would be curious, but given that trans-world identity is merely conventional, the disagreement doesn't really matter. The real question, in either case, is whether one's concept of 'God' is compatible with the state of affairs hypothesized by another. Different people's answers needn't be symmetrical, as different people might have different 'God'-concepts, associated with more or less restrictive identity conditions. Having said all that, unless there's some reason to prefer a more or less restricted concept here, the whole dispute seems a bit pointless and arbitrary anyway...
* = Jack similarly recommends this methodology:"for those of you who believe in God, if it turned out that there was a deity but that he was a jokester and far from omnibenevolent, would He be the one that you believed in or not?"
Monday, May 21, 2007
Radical Skepticism vs. Anything Goes
Surely this post's title is a false dilemma. Nevertheless, it seems to be a popular defense of religious belief, to say that "atheism is a faith position too", e.g. because we need to assume that our senses are a reliable guide to reality [HT: OB], or because objective morality is no less "mysterious" than God, etc. This strikes me as not so much an argument as a negotiation: "Your beliefs are unjustified too, so I won't say anything if you don't!" Let's all just lower our epistemic standards and be one big irrational family.
Or let's not.
Not all axioms are created equal. Some assumptions are more reasonable than others. Given our commitment to making sense of the world as best we can, we are rationally obliged to believe in the preconditions of our success, i.e. that our basic methods of inquiry (science and reason) are on the right track. This is an entirely reasonable assumption to make, and in no way does it legitimize making further - arbitrary - assumptions in addition.
This becomes even clearer if we reject the foundationalist model of justification in favour of coherentism. One's maximally coherent belief-set would contain the claim that one's senses are generally reliable. It would not (atheists argue) contain the claims made by pop theism. They just don't fit together so well with everything else we (take ourselves to) know about the world.
If it's really the case that we have no good reason to believe something, then we shouldn't believe it. So it would be irresponsible to accept the theist's cease-fire; their reasoned criticisms should instead be welcomed! But, I would argue, we actually do have good reasons to believe in those other things (e.g. morality, the external world) in the alleged analogy. On the other hand, we don't have such good reasons to believe in pop theism. So, I think we should simply reject the analogies.
Granted, even atheists must make some assumptions. But, again, some assumptions are more reasonable than others. It's not always obvious what we should (most reasonably) believe. It's not always easy to avoid falling off into either extreme of complacent skepticism or complacent relativism. But of course this challenge calls for more, rather than less, critical epistemic discernment. Don't throw up your hands -- think!
Monday, April 23, 2007
Does Philosophy Need Science?
I reckon not. (Well, perhaps in practice, e.g. as an imaginative aid, but not in principle.) Whenever you're tempted to appeal to empirical data, simply conditionalize it out and you can safely carry on philosophizing in the a priori realm of possibilities.
Of course, we may be most interested in actual-world problems, e.g. interpreting modern physics, addressing salient ethical and political issues, etc. But there doesn't seem any reason why they couldn't in principle be addressed just as well from an empirically neutral position which entertained our actual situation as a merely hypothetical scenario. Indeed, given sufficient imaginative and rational powers, the armchair philosopher (or even the disembodied, floating-in-the-void philosopher) should be capable of achieving a kind of "limited omniscience", knowing everything there is to know about the various possibilities (except for which one happens to be actual -- but never mind that one little fact).
It might be objected that science brings to light new possibilities that would otherwise seem inconceivable -- e.g. space-time relativity. But this is merely to note that experience is a useful imaginative aid; it plays no necessary role in the actual justification of our philosophical beliefs. Einstein's theory is enough; it need not be borne out by the empirical data. His conceptual scheme alone is enough to show how space and time could turn out not to be absolute. (Unless there's really a hidden contradiction in there, in which case ideal rational reflection should suffice to expose the impossibility.)
Am I wrong? (And do you have to conduct an experiment before you can tell?)P.S. Thanks to Jack for getting me thinking about this topic.
