It is important to separate the two kinds of intuitions. Suppose you are initially inclined to intuit thus: "the property of being a dog is intrinsic". This might well be because you are simply presupposing the worm view [of 4-d objects], and thus presupposing that 'being a dog' refers to the property of being a dog-worm, and metaphysically intuiting that this property is intrinsic. It might well be that, once the question is raised of whether the worm-view or the stage-view is correct, your initial conviction disappears, and is replaced with agnosticism about whether "being a dog is intrinsic", despite your certainty that being a dog-worm is intrinsic and being a dog-stage is extrinsic.
[From his paper on counterpart theory: 'Beyond the Humphrey Objection'.]
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"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
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Rosalind Hursthouse writes of The Virtues Project:
unlike anything we philosophers have managed to produce, it is an extremely detailed and practical educational program and well worth our attention. Its admirable pedagogy makes it clear that the actual doing of the virtuous acts is not all there is to "helping children to develop the virtues," important as this is, and contains two features that any Aristotelian should find striking...
[1] from very early days, there is the application of the relevant [virtue] words to a variety of imagined as well as real instances, and the beginning of reflection, a detailed picture of how the training is bound up with thought and talk, where the talk centers around the use of virtue words in specific circumstances. All of this is consistent with, but provides a much-needed supplement to, philosophers' reflections...
[2] the pedagogy [stresses] looking for something to be praised by a virtue word in a child's action (or reaction) rather than for something to be condemned. But it is not, thereby, permissive. In fact, it is markedly strict, by contemporary standards, about "setting boundaries" and offers a number of techniques for doing so by, once again, emphasizing the virtues (and hence "Dos" rather than "Don'ts")... The idea is that, rather than making children think of themselves as bad and lacking in virtue, the way poor Huck Finn does, they are enabled to think of themselves as potentially good, as able to recognize and practice the virtues and find pleasure in doing so.
This is from Hursthouse's '
The Central Doctrine of the Mean', pp. 113-4. She concludes:
All very homey stuff, you may say. Well, yes. It is more impressive -- very impressive I thought myself -- when you read the books and see Popov handling questions, but still homey. But how could bringing up children correctly be anything other than a homey business? Moreover, it encapsulates what I have claimed in this chapter are two of the insights shrouded in the doctrine of the mean: it starts by training children, not to follow general rules but to recognize their central target in particular circumstances, and it develops their natural dispositions towards virtue.
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After detailing substantive reasons for supporting Obama (see also my old post) Hilzoy concludes:
I sometimes wonder why, exactly, people go on saying all this stuff about Obama lacking substance. Sometimes, I suspect it's just laziness, as in the case of this dKos story in which mcjoan, who is usually much better than this, lists a whole lot of questions she wishes the candidates would answer, apparently unaware that Obama (and, for all I know, Clinton), has already answered most of them. I suspect, though, that part of it might be the assumption that idealism is necessarily woolly and misty-eyed and all about singing Kumbaya, while realism is necessarily cynical and disillusioned.
I have never believed this. There are certainly hard-bitten, cynical people who don't think particularly clearly about the world (Dick Cheney leaps to mind.) More to the point, I can't see any reason why there shouldn't also be people who are both genuinely idealistic and hardheaded at the same time. I suspect Obama is one of them. I do not for a moment imagine that he is perfect. (Cough, clean coal technology, cough cough.) But I do think that he's one of the best candidates I can remember, and that's good enough for me.
Do read the whole thing, though. The details are important, and not the sort of thing that's covered in our dumbed-down mainstream media.
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I've long thought that fairness is overrated, and often brought up in situations where it is completely unnecessary (e.g. the suggestion that one must flip a coin to decide which of two needy strangers to help). Rather, as Estlund argues, it is at most "an occasional value":
It can sometimes seem as if everything should be fair. The hegemony of fairness is partly owed to an unfortunate linguistic habit, in which anything that is not fair, but could have been fair, is called unfair. Since unfairness is, as the language works, so obviously a moral failing, it would follow that everything ought to be fair if it can be. But there seems to be a legitimate questions about this, which we should not let linguisitic habits settle. For example, to defend my choice to save my son from drowning rather than saving the stranger next to him, it is not obvious that I should need to show that doing so conforms to some appropriate standard of fairness. Or consider my giving five dollars to one beggar and nothing to the next. Is it obvious that this is only permissible if it is, in some way, fair? It is obviously not fair, but is it unfair? (We might call this the non/un issue.)
-- D. Estlund, Democratic Authority, p.67.
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Granting the law of non-contradiction, do we necessarily have reason to avoid holding inconsistent beliefs (as such)? If so, then our pre-existing beliefs, no matter how absurd, would 'bootstrap' reasons into existence. But that seems dubious: just because one believes that the world is 6000 years old, it does not follow that one has any reason whatsoever to refrain from believing that the world is over a billion years old. (One ought to revise the former belief instead!)
In 'The Myth of Instrumental Rationality', pp.20-1, Raz addresses the grounds of our lingering hostility to contradictions:
When we learn that there is a contradiction among our beliefs we learn (1) that some of our beliefs are false, and (2) that we hold some beliefs that if used together as premises in an argument may lead us astray in a special way [i.e. logical 'explosion']. Big deal! We hope that we all know that some of our beliefs are false anyway. And the risk that we will actually be led astray not by the logical implications of our false beliefs, but by their contradictory features, is, for all practical purposes, negligible...
To conclude: There is nothing wrong with holding contradictory beliefs as such, and the fact that one does is no reason to change one's beliefs. At most we could say that we should abandon our false beliefs. But that is so not because of the contradiction. Knowing that a set of propositions is contradictory has epistemic relevance: It tells us that the contradictory set contains a falsehood. It may be part of a case for believing that one particular proposition is false. But it is no such case by itself. Without such a case we have no reason to abandon any of them. For all we know, we may then abandon a true belief and remain with false ones. Nor do we have reason to suspend belief in all the propositions in the contradictory set. The cost, epistemic and otherwise, of doing so may be too great. That is why the logical paradoxes are rightly not generally taken as a reason to suspend our acceptance of the principles that generate them.
What do you think?
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By altering social and political arrangements we can lessen the disruptiveness of moral demands on our lives, and in the long run achieve better results than freelance good-doing. A consequentialist theory is therefore likely to recommend that accepting negative responsibility [i.e. for all the harms we let happen] is more a matter of supporting certain social and political arrangements (or rearrangements) than of setting out individually to save the world. Moreover, it is clear that such social and political changes cannot be made unless the lives of individuals are psychologically supportable in the meanwhile, and this provides substantial reason for rejecting the notion that we should abandon all that matters to us as individuals and devote ourselves solely to net social welfare. Finally, in many cases what matters most is perceived rather than actual demandingness or disruptiveness, and this will be a relative matter, depending upon normal expectations. If certain social or political arrangements encourage higher contribution as a matter of course, individuals may not sense these moral demands as excessively intrusive.
-- Railton, 'Alienation' (in Facts, Values and Norms), p.172.
I couldn't agree more: cf.
Ego-Depletion and Moral Demands and
Value, Alienation and Choice.
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It is not enough to point out that creatures with no rational capacities are not persons. Clearly there is nothing amiss with pigeons, even though they do not have rational capacities. A vindication of normativity has to show what is amiss with failing to conform to reason on this or that occasion.
At this point I have to admit that I no longer understand the sense of puzzlement. What is amiss with failing to conform to reason is just that. It can be specified further: it may be defrauding a person of his money, or it may be wasting one's talent, or missing an opportunity to make a lot of money, or remaining confused about black holes. It all depends on the nature of the reasons one flouted. But clearly that is not the puzzle. It has something to do with vindicating reasons or normativity in general, without assuming their cogency. So what is it? We do know that people who flout reason sometimes prosper. Is the desire for some further vindication of reasons a hope that philosophical argument can show this to be an illusion? But there is no illusion there.
- J. Raz, 'Reason, Reasons and Normativity', pp.28-9.
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The partisans of time often take it with such Spartan seriousness that they deny existence to virtually all of it
- Donald Williams (1951), 'The Myth of Passage', p.458.
Update: or for a little more substance, p.464:
"Taking place" is not a formality to which an event incidentally submits - it is the event's very being. World history consists of actual concrete happenings in a temporal sequence; it is not necessary or possible that happening should happen to them all over again. The system of the manifold is thus "complete" in something like the technical logical sense, and any attempted addition to it is bound to be either contradictory or supererogatory.
See also:
unchanging time and the infinite past.
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This post got me thinking: what do you do when you don't want to quote someone exactly -- say the formal apparatus of square brackets and ellipses would be too clunky to indicate all your minor changes -- but nor can you be bothered coming up with an original paraphrase? Our writing norms don't seem to accommodate this. Quote marks are taken to indicate exact quotation, and their absence indicates your own original words. Shouldn't there be a middle ground, a way to honestly acknowledge the "too-close paraphrase" and thus avoid the impression of either plagiariasm or misquotation?
Perhaps the simplest option would be to use quote marks, but prefix them with the label 'Roughly:', to indicate that the quotation is not exact. Or, in the other direction, you could add an explicit disclaimer explaining that the "paraphrases" throughout your post are actually 90% copy & pasted. What would be the least clunky way to express this? Descriptions are tiresome; is there a simple name for this cross between quoting and paraphrasing? 'Paraquoting' is tempting, though I gather some already use the term specifically to denote the paraphrasing of famous "quotes". Any other suggestions?
I'm assuming, of course, that full acknowledgment is necessary here. But one may question this. For example, the aforementioned blogger can't have thought there was anything inappropriate about his unmarked quotations,* since he links to the source that would immediately expose them. And yet I still found it outrageous. Why? I guess it's because, whether he intended it or not, as a reader I was misled by his post. I had taken it to be a substantial third-party summary, expressing the blogger's understanding of the source article. But it wasn't really his voice at all. Nothing intrinsically wrong with that, of course -- selective quotation is a valuable service too -- but it would help avoid confusion to be more upfront about it. Helpful norms would ensure that readers are able to tell at a glance whose "voice" they're hearing.
* Example of source [1] followed by blogger's "paraphrase" [2]:
(1) At the opposite end of the spectrum lies what I call "organic culture." The most extreme examples of this form of social organization are the Amish and the Hasidic Jews.
(2) At the opposite end of the spectrum lies what LaTulippe calls "organic culture." The most extreme examples of this type of social organization, he says, are the Amish and the Hasidic Jews.
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A nice quote in the Washington Post:
Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace.
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Select quotes from R.M. Hare's Moral Thinking:
Nothing is so difficult in philosophical writing as to get people to be sympathetic enough to what one is saying to understand what it is. (p.65)
[I]t is a misuse of the word 'ought' to say 'You ought, but I can conceive of another situation, identical in all its properties to this one, except that the corresponding person ought not'. (p.10)
The winner of a game of backgammon is the player who first bears off all his pieces in accordance with the rules of the game, not the one who follows the best strategies. Similarly in morals, the principles which we have to follow if we are to give ourselves the best chance of acting rightly are not definitive of 'the right act'; but if we wish to act rightly we shall do well, all the same, to follow them. (p.38)
[To directly employ act-utilitarian reasoning] is, as we have seen, a dangerous procedure; but sometimes we may be driven to it [e.g. if our prima facie principles conflict]. Anti-utilitarians make it their business to produce examples in which this is the only recourse, and then charge utilitarians with taking it (which is unavoidable) and with taking it light-heartedly (which is a slander). The good utilitarian will reach such decisions, but reach them with great reluctance because of his ingrained good principles; and he may agonize, and will certainly reflect, about them till he has sorted out by critical thinking, not only what he ought to have done in the particular case, but what his prima facie principles ought to be. (pp.51-52)
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). (p.80)
Since this is a problem which has to be faced by any theory of rational choice, and not merely by utilitarianism, those who clutch at it as an argument against utilitarianism in particular reveal only their own lack of interest in rational choice between alternatives. But it has to be faced all the same. (p.95, fn.4)
He wasn't talking about the Infinite Spheres of Utility puzzle, or the population paradox. But the point has broad application. And again:
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. (p.118)
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The love of non-"idolizing romantics" seems initially hard to explain, insofar as the non-romantic values especially someone that he recognizes to be (objectively) no more special than anyone else. Velleman's solution is that love isn't really about valuing the particular qualities of a person at all:
I argue that to love someone for the way he walks or the way he talks is not to value him on the basis of his gait or his elocution; it's rather to value his personhood as perceived through them. The qualities that elicit our love are the ones that make someone real to us as a person — the qualities that speak to us of a mind and heart within — and the value that is registered in our love is therefore the value of personhood. Wanting to be loved is like wanting to be found beautiful: it's a desire that others be struck by our particularities, but in a way that awakens them to a value in us that is universal.
-- David Velleman, introduction to Self to Self : Selected Essays
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