Unwin's Idiocy

Wow, it's not every day you read something this stupid (HT: B&W):

It is clear that on the question of God's existence Dawkins comes down firmly on the side of certainty. His dismissal of Pascal's wager (which is that, given the uncertainty, one has everything to gain and nothing to lose by belief in God) is a stark indication of his commitment to certainty.

I haven't read Dawkins' book, so I guess it's possible that the reason he dismisses Pascal's Wager is because he thinks it certain that God does not exist. But surely a far more likely reason is that Pascal's Wager is, very obviously, logically invalid. Even "given the uncertainty," it simply doesn't follow that "one has everything to gain and nothing to lose by belief in God". As I point out here, Pascal's Wager fails because it's possible that God might punish believers and reward atheists. So it's possible to "lose" by believing in God after all. Obviously. Really, there's nothing more to do here but smack your forehead a few times. The argument really is that bad. So the only thing "indicated" by one's dismissal of it is the possession of a minimal level of logical discernment. A pity Unwin shows no such indication.

He continues:

As for Dawkins' assertion that moral behaviour for believers is simply "sucking up to God", or that morality doesn't need faith, I feel that such observations miss the more fundamental question of why we have moral or aesthetic values at all - such as the ones by which Dawkins, myself and others venerate rational analysis. This is among the questions that, to my knowledge, no science is on the verge of answering compellingly.

There are two quite distinct questions in this vicinity. One is merely a question about contingent human thought and behaviour ("why do we care about stuff?"), and thus to be answered by psychology, obviously. This appears to be the question Unwin is asking, so it's quite incredible that he doubts it has a scientific answer.

The second possible question is more general, asking why there is real value in the world at all, if indeed there is. ("Why is stuff worth caring about?") This is a deeply philosophical question, of course. And since religion has no more place* in philosophy than it does in science, I don't see that this option is any friendlier to Unwin.**

* = In either case, religion may be a topic for investigation, of course. But religious methodologies -- e.g. revelation, and clinging to otherwise indefensible views by appeal to "faith" -- are no help in conducting science or philosophy.

** = (Really, it pisses me off no end when people stupidly assume that just because a question goes beyond the scope of science, it's therefore a matter to be settled by religious dogma. Quite how they imagine licensing the step from scientific ignorance to accepting the random guess of your local priest, I just don't know.)

Categories:

• religion

Boycotting the Needy

Can someone explain to me what's wrong with economic exploitation, such as sweatshops and prostitution? It's terrible that people are ever in such desperate need to begin with, of course, and we should endeavour to alleviate this -- a major reason why I support the UBI. But given that these people are so desperate that they prefer to be "exploited" in order to relieve their desperate poverty, how does thwarting their preference through an economic boycott actually help them at all? Rather than demonstrating a genuine concern for those in need, the moralists risk engaging in the far less admirable activity of fetishizing their own purity. Is this charge justified?

Case 1: Sweatshops

An article at Inside Higher Ed describes the influence of the anti-sweatshop movement on campuses. We can all agree that forced labour, being a form of slavery -- and making people worse off than they otherwise would be -- is utterly unacceptable. We should certainly avoid supporting that in any way, no question. But here I'm interested in voluntary exploitation, i.e. those who prefer to work in a sweatshop, due to the lack of any better alternatives. On this point, I agree with Matthew Yglesias (HT: Joe Miller):

The problem... is that the people who don't have sweatshop jobs are miserable. So miserable, in fact, that the terrible conditions in sweatshops are better than their best other alternative. Closing down the sweatshop option would seem to just force everyone to stick with misery, which doesn't sound very appealing.

Though, to be fair, the campus anti-sweatshop folks described in the IHE article sound like they're trying to bribe sweatshops into improving their working conditions, rather than shutting them down. So hopefully they really are doing more good than harm. If so, this model demonstrates that boycotting the needy isn't always as counterproductive as capitalist orthodoxy might suggest. The key is that whilst boycotting some, you invest more in others. That extra investment is a good thing, like any form of charity, but I don't see any reason to think that anyone is obliged to adopt this particular form of charity over any other. (That is, there's nothing here to suggest that buying cheap sweatshop products is strictly immoral.)

This raises an interesting question: is creating market demand for expensive but humane working conditions the best way to achieve this goal? Or would activists be better off buying cheaper goods and investing their savings in a charity aimed at relieving the underlying 'misery' that Yglesias points to? (Though even if the latter would be more economically efficient, the former approach might be more psychologically effective in eliciting charitable action.)

Case 2: Prostitution

Patrick Smith has a mostly good post in which he dissects Feministing's odd assumption that it's somehow intrinsically worse to commodify the genitals than the other parts of us that employers make use of. This is something I've discussed a bit before. So far, so good. But along the way, Pat suggests that it is 'very obviously condemnable' to engage in exploitative economic exchanges, e.g. employing a prostitute who was 'driven to it by economic hardship and a lack of opportunity.'

But this is not obvious to me at all. It's obviously bad that she has so few opportunities, of course. What I don't see is why we should insist on depriving her of yet another one. If a poor woman is so miserable that she'd prefer to sleep with you in order to make some money, and you like the sound of that too, then what harm is done by acceding to her wishes?

No doubt it would be even better to help her out without taking anything in exchange. Charity is good, for sure. But we're not obliged to donate to charity at every opportunity -- it wouldn't even be possible! It permissible to let some sad cases pass us by. But if it is permissible to do nothing, and employing the prostitute is better for her than doing nothing, then mustn't this also be permissible?

I have to admit that my emotional response gets left behind by this analysis. I'm pretty uncomfortable with the thought of personally engaging in such exploitative relations, even if it would benefit the other person.* But for someone of more liberal character, who could procure pleasure here without any accompanying discomfort, I'm not sure if there are any compelling grounds for criticizing them. What do you think? Perhaps virtue ethics (or character-based indirect utilitarianism) could ground such blame: is the liberal character likely to live a worse life overall, outweighing the local benefits his business provides to prostitutes? It's not obvious, at any rate, though the prerequisite lack of empathy might be cause for concern.

* = Here I'm tempted to ask, how could you enjoy sex in the knowledge that your partner was hating every second of it? Wouldn't that put a damper on things? But perhaps self-deception could come to the rescue, especially if the sex worker was a good actor. And it's not as if (even non-exploitative) prostitution was ever going to provide an emotionally satisfying connection. That's plainly not what their customers are after!

Conclusion:

To reiterate, the moral problem is not with particular acts of consensual exploitation, but rather the underlying 'miserable conditions' that make it possible in the first place. We definitely should work to dispel desperation. But while we're in the unacceptable situation whereby some people are desperately needy, to the point where degrading work is a step up from their current position, and a step that they want to take, then I can't see what is gained by denying them this. However inadequate an improvement it may be, it is at least better than nothing at all. So it doesn't strike me as especially praiseworthy to boycott the most desperately needy if this is done simply to avoid "complicity" in mutually-beneficial "exploitation".

Of course, it's better to help the same people without exploiting their desperation at all. Charity is a very good thing. We're arguably obligated to engage in some or other form of charitable giving. But paying extra costs (or abstaining from proffered benefits) in order to locally counterbalance exploitative relations is but one form of charity among many. At least, that's the perspective I've explored here; it's probably this claim that critics will wish to dispute in comments. So, have at it...

Categories:

• ethics
• economics
• politics
• freedom
• paternalism
• charity

Confusing the Cogito

Timothy once suggested that I should write a series of posts clearing up "common philosophical misconceptions". An obvious place to start, as he notes, is with the most famous line in philosophy, Descartes' cogito: "I think, therefore I am."

The popular misunderstanding is evident in the following joke:

Descartes is sitting in a bar, having a drink. The bartender asks him if he would like another. "I think not," he says, and vanishes.

The current Wikipedia article dismisses this move as sheer logical fallacy (denying the antecedent), but I think there is something deeper going on. We see this when people joke, "I drink, therefore I am", intending their comment to reveal something about their person (e.g. that social drinking is central to their lives, or something they highly value). This indicates that they were interpreting Descartes as claiming that thinking is, in some sense, the reason why he exists. After all, that does sound like something a philosopher might say -- compare Socrates' claim that "the unexamined life is not worth living."

People commonly imbue conditionals and inferences with metaphysical significance. For example, the claim "if it is raining then the grass is wet" naturally suggests a causal relation between the two: it's raining, and that's why the grass is wet. Similarly, one might interpret "I think, therefore I am," as meaning something like, "I think, and that's why I am." This interpretation explains why people are tempted by the converse inference from non-thinking to non-existence. It's not so illogical after all.

But it is a mistake all the same. Descartes isn't claiming here that thought is the reason for his existence. Rather, it's simply an infallible indication of it. An evil demon might deceive you about all manner of ordinary facts, but from the mere fact that you're thinking or having mental experiences at all, it logically follows that you must first exist. You couldn't possibly be mistaken about that, at least, no matter what the demon might try.

Note the crucial distinction between epistemology and metaphysics. Epistemology is about evidence and what we can know. Metaphysics is about reality in itself. The two can easily come apart, as when we imagine a hypothetical scenario involving deception: we imagine that something is true in fact, though nobody knows it because the evidence is misleading. We can similarly imagine someone being psychologically certain that they "know" something, when in fact their belief is not true at all.

Now, the Cogito highlights the logical relation between "I am thinking", and "I exist". If the first is true, this logically guarantees that the second must also be true. This has epistemic significance. But it is not metaphysically loaded. The abstract logical relation says nothing about how the two facts are connected in the structure of reality. In particular, it is not to claim any metaphysical dependence of the second on the first, i.e. that I exist only because I'm thinking, such that if my thinking were to cease then so would my existence.

(N.B. A Cartesian [from Descartes] Dualist will actually agree with the metaphysical thesis that we are essentially mental beings. But this is based on other arguments, not the cogito.)

Disclaimer: I'm no historian, so bear in mind that my purpose here is to clarify the logic of the cogito and related concepts, not to faithfully represent the historical Descartes. Take any claims about the latter with a grain of salt.

Categories:

• philosophy
• epistemology
• metaphysics

Want Free Money?

Then join the growing movement of academics, economists, and social activists advocating the institution of an Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) paid to every citizen without exception.

It would overcome the “poverty trap”. Conventional welfare schemes and unemployment benefits create perverse incentives that breed dependency. (Getting a job doesn’t sound like such a good idea if it means your welfare checks dry up!) Replace conditional welfare with a UBI and more people will want to work.

The UBI increases the real freedom and bargaining power of the worst-off, who can then afford to walk away from exploitative employers. With the security of a UBI, workers can negotiate fairer wages and working conditions. (Note that this relieves the need for minimum wage laws and labour regulations. We can free up the market and hence boost the economy, counterbalancing the taxes needed to fund the UBI.)

You might worry that some would bum off the UBI without contributing anything back to society. I have three responses: (1) The above benefits of the UBI outweigh this cost. (2) Societal contributions need not be economic in nature – by reducing the need to work, a UBI would enable people to spend more time parenting, studying, creating art, or volunteering in their communities. (3) If you really envy the bum, you have the option to join them. What, you don’t want to after all? The fact is, most of us want to achieve something with our lives, and contribute to society in some way or another. The UBI better enables us to do just that.

[P.S. The above is my latest attempt at philosevangelising to the locals, reprinted here to allow for comments. But you're probably better off reading this old post instead.]

Categories:

• philosophy
• politics

Homework

Your task for today is to devise a procedure such that, for any two competing moral or political claims, it can determine which is the more justified without begging any questions.

(Partial credit will be given for imperfect solutions that come "close enough".)

Extra for experts: Implement your procedure in a society near you.

Blogoscoping Lurkery

I was commenting over at Freshblog about how carnivals and memes can develop blogging networks/communities, and it struck me that, while carnivals are great for topical communities, I also read a few blogs that are different enough that it's unlikely we'd ever interact through that medium. Perhaps simple memes are better suited for getting beyond your immediate topical 'microsphere'?

With that in mind, I'd like to propose a dual meme (take your pick):

1) Any lurkers out there with blogs of their own are invited to announce their lurkery of Philosophy, etc. on their own blogs, and then repeat the challenge anew (i.e. for any lurkers of their site).

[As always, I'm curious to learn who - if anyone - is reading this that I don't already know of... If you don't have a blog, feel free to leave a comment!]

2) Else, simply offer a unilateral confession of your own lurking elsewhere. For example, I secretly read Many to Many, The Democracy Movement, and - a new discovery - How to Live.org. How about you?

Categories:

• blogging
• fun

Mailbag: Dualism and Causal Exclusion

[István Aranyosi writes in with the following remarks...]

Karen Bennett has recently been working on showing that the exclusion problem cannot be escaped by the dualist. I think this is a quite widely held view nowadays. I have recently been working on showing the contrary: that it does not even arise for dualism, correctly understood. As Karen rightly points out [PDF], the exclusion problem is the fact that the following five propositions seem to be inconsistent, so one of them has to be denied:

1. DISTINCTNESS: mental events are distinct from physical events.
2. COMPLETENESS: every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause.
3. EFFICACY: mental events can cause physical events, and can do so in virtue of their mental properties.
4. NON-OVERDETERMINATION: effects of mental causes are not systematically overdetermined in a bad way (unlike the death of firing squad victims).
5. EXCLUSION: no effect has more than one sufficient cause unless it is overdetermined.

I argue in my paper [PDF] that one of the theses that a dualist should uphold is that behaviour itself is not purely physical, but it is ‘mentally enriched’, as I like to put it. The idea is not ad hoc: think of ‘my arm’s rising’ versus ‘my raising my arm’; the first is a purely physical effect, the second, according to me as a dualist, is both physical and mental. This yields a premise to be added to the five above:

6. Some effects of some mental causes are not purely physical.

I then try to show that adding 6 to 1-5 yields a consistent set of propositions. Take an effect e of a mental cause c, say ‘my raising my arm’ as caused by ‘my wanting to raise my arm’. The cause is both physical and mental: it’s both a wanting and a neural property. The effect is both physical and mental: it’s both a mere upward motion and an intentional raising. All this is compatible with:

1. Distinctness: wanting is a distinct property from the neural one.
2. Completeness: it holds for purely physical causes and a qualified version holds for not purely physical events: ‘the instantiation of the physical aspect of every effect has a sufficient physical cause’.
3. Efficacy: again it is interpreted as: events with mental aspects can cause events with physical aspects (and can do so partly in virtue of their mental aspect)
4. Non-overdetermination: the mental aspect of the cause is responsible for the mental aspect of the effect, mutatis mutandis for the physical aspect, so there’s no overdetermination
5. Exclusion: the effects of mental causes do not have either a physical or a mental sufficient cause; both aspects of the cause event jointly cause them.

Finally, let me clarify why I speak of some effects of some mental causes in (6). Paradigmatic mental causes are those like believing, wanting, desiring, etc. These are the ones for which (6) is true. Non-paradigmatic or derivatively mental causes are the ones that are effects of paradigmatic ones, for example ‘raising an arm’. Raising an arm can cause ‘destroying the spider’s web’, and this effect is purely physical even if caused by a mentally enriched cause.

Does Conceptual Analysis Have Practical Significance?

I've been puzzling over the proposed motivation for Carrie Jenkins' fun paper on the philosophy of flirting. She writes:

What is it to flirt? Do you have to intend to flirt with someone in order to count as doing so? Can such things as dressing a certain way count as flirting? Can one flirt with an AI character? With one's own long-term partner? With an idea?

The question of whether or not an act of flirtation has taken place is often highly significant in our practical decision-making. For example, one may want to know whether or not one's partner has been flirting with other people in order to decide whether to continue the relationship. Or one may want to know whether two of one's friends have been flirting with each other in order to decide whether to give them some time alone. To facilitate such decisions, it would be helpful to have a secure grasp on what flirting actually amounts to.

Is that really true? Surely what's significant here is the underlying behaviour, not whether it falls under our concept of "flirting". If you're wondering whether to give two friends some time alone, presumably you should consider their desires, as reflected in their behaviour; I don't see what's gained by consulting your linguisitic intuitions about how to describe their behaviour. You know, "a rose by any other name..." and all that.

Of course, if you're interested in exploring a concept for its own sake, I have no objection to that. I'm merely puzzled by how it could prove "helpful" in any broader sense, since as a general rule only extra-linguistic facts have practical significance, right? (It can be theoretically useful to clear up conceptual confusions, of course, but that's a different matter.) When we care about flirting, i.e. the behaviour actually referred to by the word 'flirting', it's the behaviour we care about, not how we refer to it. (If it turns out that 'flirting' actually means something different from what we thought, that shouldn't change how you treat your friends!) Or am I missing something here?

Categories:

• semantics
• metaphilosophy
• life

More Announcements

I'm gonna get a sore throat at this rate.

1) Many thanks to Chris Dillow for his engaging guest posts on left-libertarianism. Visit Stumbling and Mumbling for more -- including the "real causes" behind his left-lib views.

2) While recent guests have been solicited, you're also welcome to email me out of the blue if you have something suitable you'd like to see published here. (Though I reserve the right to decline, of course.)

3) The 36th Philosophers' Carnival is here. Enjoy!

4) I really wish more bloggers would pick up the Metapolitical Go-meme. Go on, it'll only take you a minute, and getting more people to think about these issues can't be an entirely bad thing...

Against the statist left

[By Chris Dillow]

Last week, I argued for leftism against classical liberalism. This week, I'll take the other line, and argue why leftists shouldn't be statists.

1. Patterned conceptions of equality are inadequate. It's not good enough to take a snapshot of the distribution of income and declare it to be too unequal.
I say this for three reasons. The first, as both Hayek and Nozick argued, is that it justifies endless ad hoc interventions, an incessant busyness. Too many leftists fail to see that political activity should stop somewhere.
Secondly, it reduces justice to a question of taste. You say a Gini coefficient of (say) 0.4 is too high. Someone else thinks it acceptable. How do we adjudicate? It's a simple slip from patterned conceptions of equality to woolly-minded post-modernist relativism.
Thirdly, it fails to see that what matters is how inequality arose. I have no problem with the fact that Thierry Henry earns 100 times more than I do. He hurts no-one (of importance) in his work, exploits no-one. His income comes from a fair process - subject to the proviso that we would, in a veil of ignorance, contract to pay out insurance if we were lucky enough to have such a high income. But I do have a problem with incomes - even much lower ones - that arise from the exploitation of power inequalities. The incomes of rent-seeking managers, or those of the beneficiaries of historic injustices, are more troubling.

2. Information is limited. Hayek was right. Central agencies just don't have the knowledge to intervene well in the economy.
Take, for example, New Labour's anti-poverty policies - the minimum wage and tax credits. How can we set a minimum wage that reduces poverty wages without destroying too many jobs? What withdrawal rate do we apply to tax credits to maximize the relief of poverty whilst reducing disincentive effects? Can complex tax credits be administered efficiently?
These questions make enormous demands upon our knowledge - too enormous.

3. Markets work. If information cannot be centralized, the case for a market economy - which makes best use of dispersed knowledge - emerges naturally. The case for free markets is not that they maximize static efficiency, but that they increase the potential to find new, better ways of doing things, and of producing new goods and services.
Simple empirics prove that markets are fantastic at giving us newer, cheaper, better goods. Just compare shops today with 20 years ago. Has innovation in state-provision really kept pace?
The question, then, is: can we make more use of this tool for increasing innovation? Can we introduce it into education and health? Can we use markets to spread economic risks, rather than rely purely upon a welfare state and macroeconomic management? A serious left would investigate these questions without prejudice.

4. There's a trade-off between big government and redistribution. In the UK, the top 10% get 32% of all UK pre-tax incomes (pdf here). Even if we could tax these at 75% and suffer no adverse incentive effect upon their labour supply, we'd only raise 24% of GDP in taxes. But actual spending is around 40% of GDP.
Simple sums, then, tells us that financing big government requires taxes upon people who aren't rich. And means the tax system can't redistribute income.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the rich have the power to shift the tax burden off their own shoulders. They can threaten to move offshore. They have more access to politicians to press their case. They can exaggerate the adverse incentive effects of high taxes. And their newspapers pretend that the wealthy are really only on "middle incomes", thus increasing public opposition to redistributive taxes.
The upshot of this is that the tax system is not redistributive. In the UK, the post-tax Gini coefficient is the same as the pre-tax one. And not just the UK. Vito Tanzi and Ludger Schuknecht say:

Public expenditure may often be a relatively inefficient instrument for equalizing incomes...Transfers are much better targeted in countries with small public sectors. In countries with big public sectors, only 22 percent of transfers benefit the poorest quintile. In France or Sweden, more than 20 percent of transfers go to the richest 20 percent of households. In countries with small governments, one-third of transfers reaches the poorest quintile.

5. States get captured. This highlights a more general problem - states, like any monopoly, encourage rent-seeking. The pushy and the powerful benefit at the expense of the poor. We see this in the EU's proposed imposition of tariffs on Asian shoes. Powerful and rich-ish European shoe manufacturers win. Poor European consumers and even poorer Asian shoe workers lose.
But it's also true on a bigger scale. Remember the 1950s. White trades unionists got a goodish deal from the state. But racism and sexism were rife. Blacks and women didn't benefit much (initially) from social democracy, as they weren't organized. And even today, families with children do better from the state than do the single unemployed or the mentally ill - not to mention, of course, the genuinely poor in the developing world.

6. Hierarchies are inefficient. The state is a steep hierarchy - more so, I guess than private companies; I've heard of firms delayering management but not the state doing so.
This should deeply offend all egalitarians. For one thing, inequalities of status and power are inherently bad - at least as much so as income inequalities - on top of the fact that they are, literally, deadly.
And hiearchies just don't work. As Kenneth Boulding said in this great essay:

Almost all organizational structures tend to produce false images in the decision-maker, and that the larger and more authoritarian the organization, the better the chance that its top decision-makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds...no matter who is the role occupant, the decisions will be much the same.The inference of this theory, of course, is that fools in high places will make just the same decisions as wise men.

One big problem with hierarchies is that they are brittle - when weight is put upon them, they break horribly. We saw this most spectacularly with the fall of the Soviet Union. But a similar thing happened in the UK in the 1970s, when the post-war social democratic settlement collapsed. As unemployment and inflation both rose, statists had no good answer to the Thatcherite critique. The upshot was that workers who had looked to the state to guarantee them jobs were horribly disappointed.
The contrast here is with cybernetic principles, whereby feedback mechanisms allow systems to be stabilized by self-regulating forces, not external "expert" intervention.
What sort of policies would all this lead to? I suggest the left should support simple redistribution - a citizens' income - over complex interventions such as tax credits and minimum wages - and should consider ways in which public services can be delivered not by a monolithic state, but by competing co-operatively run schools and hospitals.
But policy-wonking is second order. The bottom line here is that the egalitarian left should oppose the state more and the market less.

Torture: for and against

For:
- makes you sound "tough on terrorism"
- wins votes from cowards who crave any semblence of "security"
- might pay off if the ticking time-bomb scenario ever eventuates

Against:
- it's immoral
- impractical (leads to bad intel from false confessions, etc.)
- reduces your moral authority and international standing ('soft power')
- reduces co-operation from allies (who wants to share fallible intel that could lead to their own citizens being mistakenly tortured? Just ask Canada.)
- makes more people want to blow you up

Am I missing something? Compare this to a policy of randomly shooting Arabs (perhaps selected from a lottery). This would have comparable benefits -- just imagine a scenario where the would-be nuclear terrorist gets drawn from the lottery! Wouldn't that be so worth it! -- and you don't have to worry about the cost of false confessions. Boy, I could go a long way in the Republican party...

[On a more serious note, go read Obsidian Wings.]

Aiding Infidelity

I assume most people will agree that it's wrong to cheat on your partner. But is the person you cheat with doing anything wrong? Indeed, is it really the act that matters here?

Now, I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with non-exclusivity per se. Rather, I take "cheating" to essentially involve dishonesty. What's wrong is to mislead your partner into believing that the relationship is an exclusive one, only to violate that expectation behind her back. Such deceit implies a gross lack of respect.

So consider a would-be cheater who simply lacks the opportunity to act out their adulterous wishes. This person is no better, it seems to me, merely for being constrained by circumstance. It is the intention to cheat - should the opportunity arise - that constitutes disrespect. The act itself seems superfluous. (I think Jesus once said something similar about "committing adultery in your heart", right? Any Christians out there are welcome to comment with further details.)

If this is correct, then it seems that the wrongdoing has already been done long before the actual act of adultery takes place. Hence one's partner in infidelity is not really a participant in wrongdoing after all. Does that sound right?

One might object that the act has significance for the cheated partner. They would be more devastated upon learning that adultery actually took place. This is arguably irrational, at least if the above line of argument is correct; they should be just as devastated by the mere intention of their partner to betray them. But rational or not, the felt pain is real enough, and this may be a morally relevant factor.

Are we obligated to avoid causing people irrational mental anguish? I'm not so sure about that, actually. Appeasing irrationality may be a bad policy, as in being overly sensitive to "offending" homophobes or religious sensibilities. In general, I think it is important to uphold that individuals are not responsible for others' irrationality, and so not (wholly) responsible for their irrational suffering. But this may be a special case, for even if the cheated partner only has legitimate complaint against the intention, and not the act, still the two are closely enough related that causing pain by contributing to the latter might also be morally problematic. If they are already a victim, it may be callous (even if strictly true) to dismiss related hurts as "irrational", or to be careless about exacerbating their situation.

What do you think?

Categories:

• sex
• life
• ethics

Why Believe in the Past?

The universe could have come into existence just now, false memories and all. What basis do we have for ruling out this possibility, or even thinking it unlikely? It's a bit ad hoc, I guess. It seems that positing a real history provides us with a better explanation for why things are as they are now. But this apparent benefit may be illusory. After all, we have no further explanation of why the universe ever began at all. Many atheists simply take it as a brute fact. But if we are tolerant of such bruteness, then why wait? It seems arbitrary. Worse, it's less parsimonious than doing away with the past altogether would be.

In short: if you're willing to posit the existence of the entire (4-d) universe as a brute inexplicable fact, why bother with the past at all? Why not cut to the chase and simply posit the brute existence of the present timeslice (and nothing else)?

Categories:

• epistemology
• metaphysics

Buying Local

Is it better to "buy local" instead of cheaply imported products from third-world countries? One might argue that it's better to support your local community, but surely we ought to be more cosmopolitan than that. Third-world workers need your custom more than your neighbour does. Granted, favouritism might be justified in case of pre-existing personal connections, but most of us don't personally know the producers of local products. But what if buying direct could help foster such connections, thereby strengthening local communities (in a more robust way than merely benefiting a local individual)? That may be a better argument -- what do you think? (Of course, this won't apply to indirect/retail purchases.)

For an alternative argument: some worry about wasting fossil fuels by transporting goods halfway across the world. But does shipping really have that much impact, compared to other sources of carbon emissions (e.g. cars, industry, etc.)? Doesn't this argument risk ignoring price signals? The fact that foreign products remain cheaper than local goods, even after the cost of transportation, seems to indicate significant differences in production efficiency. Those goods are easier to produce overseas; our bumbling efforts can't compare, so we would do better to specialize in some other area that we are better suited to.

This counterargument is flawed, of course, because the environmental damage caused by emissions is not factored into the price. So we can't really know whether foreign imports are all-things-considered more efficient after all. (Damn corporate feudalists, thwarting the free market with their unprincipled opposition to eco-taxes!) If the cheapness of foreign imports is due to this environmental vandalism -- damaging our common property without permission -- then it would presumably be better to buy local. The cheaper alternative is no more truly "efficient" than buying stolen goods. It's only cheap because you aren't paying the true price.

But what of the other case? Suppose that, even after adding appropriate eco-taxes, imported goods would still be cheaper than local produce. Should we nevertheless buy local, just to reduce the environmental impacts? Correct me if I'm wrong, but my limited understanding of economics suggests not. The cheap price here indicates efficiency: relatively little (incl. environmental) cost is being imposed in order to obtain the benefit of the end product. If we want to reduce environmental impacts -- and of course we should -- then we should invest our limited resources where they would have a greater effect. That is, we should buy the cheap goods from overseas, transport emissions be damned, but then use the saved money to make a much bigger difference elsewhere. Perhaps we could bribe an inefficient industry to cut down hugely on their unnecessary emissions, for instance.

If you spent all your money reducing transport emissions by "buying local", you could no longer afford the much greater environmental benefits obtained by (say) reforming industry. In light of this opportunity cost, then, buying local -- like buying hybrid cars or solar panels -- might, ironically, be bad for the environment.

A final argument for localism might appeal to the security value of self-sufficiency. You might worry that the current global system is unsustainable, and that we need to invest locally now, so that the farmland is available and ready to feed us when the ships cease to arrive. This raises questions about how likely such a doomsday scenario is, and how much more difficult it would be to adjust if we remain dependent on foreign imports. (Also, it plausibly only applies to food imports. Our "reliance" on imports from less essential industries would hardly matter if we could live without them altogether.)

Which is the best of the offered arguments? Have I missed any better ones? What's the verdict: is it better to buy local?

Categories:

• economics
• environment
• politics
• ethics
• civics

Metapolitics Go-meme

How should politics be conducted? I've marked in my positions on the 7-point scales below. To participate yourself, simply copy this entire post (including links), and mark your choices accordingly before posting it to your own blog.

a) Liberalism   X - - - - - -   Radicalism (1/7)
Do the ends justify the means? Procedural liberals insist on the primacy of fair play and democratic process. Radicals care less about method, and more about getting the desired result.

b) Rationalism   X - - - - - -   Subjectivism (1/7)
Is there ever a "right answer" to political questions? Rationalists think that reasoned debate could, ideally, lead to consensus about the common good. Subjectivists see politics as a mere contest of wills, all rhetoric and power plays, where the goal is simply to have your individual preferences win through.

c) Direct   - - - X - - -   Representative Democracy (4/7)
Should power rest more with citizens or elected representatives?

d) Aggregation   - - - - - X -   Deliberation (6/7)
Should political decisions be reached by simply aggregating individuals' prior preferences, or by submitting reasons for deliberation and critical scrutiny?

e) Federalist   - - X - - - -   Globalist (3/7)
What's the most appropriate level for political decisions? Federalists favour local-level decision-making (which may vary across localities), in contrast to Globalists.

f) Libertarian   - X - - - - -   Authoritarian (2/7)
How much discretionary power should be allowed in politics? Libertarians favour greater (e.g. constitutional) constraints on the exercise of political power. Authoritarians (may include populists and paternalists) are the opposite.

g) Economic Left   - - X - - - -   Right (3/7)
How favourably do you view redistributive taxation and other typically "Left-wing" economic policies?

Track List:
1. Philosophy, et cetera
2. [Add link to your blog here]

Egalitarians for Resource Depletion?

Here's a curiosity. Suppose there is some scarce resource, which can either be used by us for a temporary boost in welfare, or invested for the greater benefit of all future generations. Further suppose that improvements in technology etc. mean that the standard of living is steadily improving, so that future generations will be better off than we are. Then it seems that egalitarianism recommends we deplete the resource, selfishly expending it on ourselves. Doesn't that seem odd? (Maybe it's just my utilitarian intuitions playing up again.)

P.S. For other curious facts, you should read Will Wilkinson: "while nominal inequality is increasing, material inequality continues to decrease. As market competition pushes prices down, goods at the bottom of the price range more and more closely approximate goods at the top of the price range." I hadn't thought of that before.

Categories:

• equality
• environment

Announcements

Many thanks to Jeremy Pierce of Parablemania, and Chris Dillow of Stumbling and Mumbling, for their recent guest posts. If you enjoyed their writing, be sure to follow them back to their home blogs for more! (Though I'm lucky enough to have Chris offer another post to appear here soon, following on from his last one.)

In other news, it's nearing time for the next Philosophers' Carnival -- you have until the end of this week to submit a post...

Performing Contradictions and the Problem of Evil

[By Jeremy Pierce]

I've been teaching an introductory philosophy course this semester with a new text for my God unit, Thinking About God by Greg Ganssle. It's designed to be usable for high school or introductory college/university courses, and it's just about the lowest level of detail that I would want to use for this course. I'm supplementing it some with other readings also, but it's nice to spend a lot of time just in one book after using lots of scattered readings in past versions of the course.

One thing that I found really interesting was in the section on the logical problem of evil. The logical problem of evil presents three traditional attributes of God (omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness) and then seeks to derive a contradiction if you admit to the existence of evil (which pretty much all traditional theists will do, and thus it's a problem even if the person presenting the problem doesn't happen to believe in evil, because the theist does, and it's supposed to be a contradiction for theism). Now it so happens that hardly any philosopher today accepts the logical problem of evil as a good argument, for several reasons, but in the process of explaining why Ganssle hits on an interesting issue that I hadn't thought of before. One way some people have resisted theists' attempts to respond to the problem of evil might actually help the theist in surprising ways.

Responses to the logical problem of evil can involve explaining why a perfectly good, omniscient, omnipotent being would allow evil. For instance, free will is given as something important enough that God would want it, even if it means a fair amount of evil would be allowed. One kind of response to that (not taken seriously by most philosophers) is that if God is omnipotent then God should be able to give free will and also guarantee that people will freely do no evil. The standard response is that libertarian free will is incompatible with God guaranteeing what people will do, and God can't perform a contradiction, since contradictions are impossible. So God can't both give free will and guarantee what people will do, since guaranteeing what people will do violates free will. That would amount to performing a contradiction.

But isn't God omnipotent? Doesn't that mean God can do anything? The traditional answer is no. Rene Descartes is an extremely rare exception to the overwhelming consensus among theists that God cannot perform contradictions, because there is no such thing to be performed. Maybe you can define something called superomnipotence and then say that superomnipotent beings would be able to grant free will and then guarantee what people will do, but that's not the sort of thing theists hold to, because God is merely omnipotent. In fact, nothing could be superomnipotent anyway, and claiming that God is superomnipotent would already be claiming and impossibility.

What I found really interesting in Ganssle's discussion of this is that he thinks the superomnipotence objection to the problem of evil actually counts in the theist's behavior. What if the theist were to concede that God is superomnipotent? You might then think that God doesn't have a good reason for allowing evil anymore, since God could perform the contradiction to guarantee people's choices while maintaining their libertarian free will. But not so fast. Does God need a reason to allow evil if God is superomnipotent? Superomnipotence means God can perform contradictions. That means God can allow evil even if evil contradicts God's goodness, omnipotence, and omniscience. If you're going to allow contradictions with a superomnipotent being, then why is it at all problematic that God and evil contradict each other? This objection seems to fall flat if you allow God to be superomnipotent.

I had never considered that point before, and while I think Ganssle is right I do want to say one further thing. Once you allow contradictions, all logic goes out the window. Contradictions logically entail that every statement is true. So it's not going to be surprising if it turns out that the theist is not threatened anymore by the problem of evil, since every statement turns out to be true, including that one. But it's also going to be true that God is unjust and evil, since that's also going to be a statement, and every statement follows from contradictions. Once you allow contradictions you can prove that God doesn't exist just as much as you can prove that God is vindicated in allowing evil. In the end, I don't know if Ganssle's point establishes very much, since any statement follows as true once you allow contradictions. I do think it was an interesting observation, however. There's a reason hardly any philosopher has endorsed superomnipotence as a plausible interpretation of omnipotence. It's completely ridiculous to suppose that theists have ever meant that God can do something that makes God both exist and not exist, so omnipotence could never have meant that.

Cross-posted at Prosblogion and Parablemania

A Meta-Political Rant

As a deliberative liberal rationalist and all that, I think one of the most important goals in politics is to improve the quality of public debate. Probably the only way to achieve this is to encourage more people to embrace these civic values, and self-identify first and foremost as citizens rather than partisans. For as long as politics is dominated by partisan radicals who care only about winning, there seems little hope of improvement. To encourage positive change, gutter politics must be roundly condemned. (And by "roundly", I mean to include their political allies, not just the opposition who suffered the slander in the first place.) There needs to be a public backlash against duplicitous politicians. Indeed, our whole political culture is in sore need of improvement.

The mainstream media are hopeless subjectivists. Reporters focus on political characters and power struggles, rather than assessing policies on their merits. So-called political "analysts" discuss whether the latest scandal will cost this or that political personality come the next great popularity contest. They see politics as sport; the top players, celebrities. There's limited normative analysis. (See Chris Dillow on the media's "fact fetish".) Few seem much interested in what policies would be best, impartially considered. But this is the only question here really worth asking! All else is mere spectacle.

We should reject the metaphor of politics as sport, along with those who peddle it. Chris suggests that "there’s little demand for high intellectual standards" -- we need to create that demand. We need more rationalistic analysts, who are willing to really engage with the issues, advance public understanding, and offer substantive contributions to the public debate.

In the public sphere, we should hold ourselves and our "allies" to the same high intellectual and civic standards that we rightly demand of others. Attempting to shut down dialogue, say by slandering the opposition as "traitors" or "bigots", is hugely damaging to civic discourse. (Of course, such accusations may sometimes be accurate and justified; the point is simply that they shouldn't be thrown about so carelessly as at present.) A little interpretative charity and good faith would go a long way. And a long way away is precisely where those who lack these civic values ought to go.

Categories:

• civics
• democracy
• politics

Meta-Politics

The typical political quiz looks at your first-order political views: left or right, libertarian or paternalist, etc. But I'm growing increasingly convinced that this is of secondary importance, and that we should pay more attention to meta-politics, i.e. the way we think politics should be conducted. As in academia, your methods matter more than your conclusions: better to be reasonably mistaken than dogmatic if correct. At least, that's the view I'm coming to. Others might disagree. Try locating yourself according to the categories listed below:

[I'm hoping that this is an improvement on my slightly messy first attempt at identifying the important political axes.]

Meta-Political Ideals

1) Procedural liberalism vs. radicalism. Liberals share my above sentiments about the primacy of process, whereas radicals are primarily concerned with realizing their first-order objectives. (Follow link for a more thorough discussion with examples.)

2) Rationalists vs. Subjectivists. Rationalists understand (ideal) political debate as inquiry into the common good, to be guided towards consensus by the light of reason. They aim to rationally convince others of the truth. Subjectivists see politics as a mere contest of wills, all rhetoric and power plays, where the goal is simply to have your individual preferences win through.

Democracy and Power

Note that there are several questions to distinguish here. I leave aside the first-order question of what to do or legislate. Instead, we can ask the procedural questions: who should be entrusted with political power? How should they go about making decisions? And how much discretionary power should they be allowed?

3) Direct vs. Representative Democracy. Should power rest more with citizens or elected representatives?

4) Aggregative vs. Deliberative Group Decisions. Should decisions be reached by simply aggregating individuals' prior preferences, or by submitting reasons to the group's critical scrutiny and deliberation?

5) Constraints on Government. To what extent should political power be constrained, say by constitutional/civil rights, judicial oversight / separation of powers, etc.? (I guess this touches on libertarian issues.)

Have I missed anything important? It might be fun to turn this into a Go-meme, perhaps alongside the first-order "political compass". I might put that together tomorrow. In the meantime: any suggestions?

P.S. For the record, I'm a strong liberal proceduralist, rationalist, and deliberative democrat. My support for more direct democracy is conditional on its being deliberative (so probably small-scale) in nature; I favour citizens juries, but oppose merely aggregative popular referenda. I generally favour more constraints on government, but presumably these must themselves originate from a deliberative process.

Update: You can find the go-meme here. Note that I've replaced the "constraints on government" option with a general "libertarian vs. authoritarian" axis. There's also a standard Left/Right option, to indicate how favourably you view redistributive taxation and such. (Not exactly meta-political, but it could be interesting for comparative purposes.) Finally, following Jeremy's advice in comments, I've added in an option to indicate one's favoured level of decision making. I define Federalists as favouring more local-level decision-making (possibly varying from state to state), in contrast to Globalists.

Categories:

• politics
• democracy
• fun

A Worldly Metaphysics

I propose that we treat individual possible worlds or scenarios as (metaphysically and epistemically) fundamental. Doing so has interesting implications in either case. First, it grounds an attractive and plausible theory of ontological deflationism. On this view, disputes about what exists are only substantive if they involve carving up the space of possible worlds in different ways. If metaphysicians agree about which world is actual, but disagree about its constituents (e.g. whether it contains tables or merely "particles arranged tablewise"), their apparent disagreement is empty. It is whole worlds that are fundamental; we might break them down in any number of ways, and it is pointless to argue that any one of these is the One True Ontology. (See the linked post for further explanation.) Second, I think the epistemic fundamentality of possible worlds has important implications for meta-modal conceivability. But this will take a bit more explanation...

Let us begin with Yablo. In ‘Is Conceivability a Guide to Possibility?’, he isolates the particular kind of conceivability that best serves as evidence of metaphysical possibility. Note that any number of necessary falsehoods might seem conceivable in some sense. Consider the statement (P): "There is a greatest prime number." Mathematicians can easily prove the impossibility of P, yet you might have thought it conceivable in some sense. For example, you might not be certain that it isn't actually true. (As humble fallibilists, we might even be inclined to grant that absolutely anything is "conceivable" in this weak sense!)

However, Yablo suggests that it is whole scenarios (epistemically possible worlds) that are fundamental for modally-relevant conceivability claims. Used in this sense, the "conceivability" of a statement X consists in there being a scenario which we take to verify X. (That is, we endorse the indicative conditional "if scenario V is actual, then X is true", or we judge that the conditional probability of X given V is near 1.) This allows us to deny that the aforementioned P is conceivable in the relevant sense, since there is no scenario which we take to verify the claim. There is no way the world might turn out, such that if things did turn out that way, there would be a greatest prime number.

At best, we might imagine a scenario in which mathematicians report discovering such a "fact" -- but there is nothing in the given description to rule out this being a scenario in which the mathematicians are simply deluded. So even the mathematically ignorant should not take this scenario to verify P. Instead, they should suspend judgment; they are not sure whether P is true in the scenario or not. That is, they are not sure whether P is conceivable. Hence, their imaginings provide no evidence about the possibility of P -- which is just as it should be. Yablo's account seems spot on. (See also Chalmers' discussion of positive conceivability in section 2 of Does Conceivability Entail Possibility?)

Yablo works down from scenarios to the first-order claims that they verify. He thus treats worlds as fundamental, at least in this respect. But he could go further. I think we should also work upwards, from scenarios to the meta-modal claims that are true of all of them. Let me explain. First, some background context:

Yablo objects to modal rationalism -- or the claim that ideal conceivability entails (primary) possibility -- on grounds of meta-modal conceivability. Even if the modal rationalist is right about the scope of possibility, there are (Yablo claims) coherently conceivable alternatives. For example, it's conceivable that a necessary being exists, and the negation of this is likewise conceivable. But they cannot both be possible, for by S5, the possibility of a modal claim entails its actual truth! Conflicting meta-modal possibilities would thus entail actual contradictions. So there cannot be conflicting meta-modal possibilities. The conceivability of conflicting meta-modal claims thus provides a counterexample to the thesis that conceivability entails possibility.

However, I want to suggest that meta-modal claims are, in a sense, similar to mathematical claims like P above. Considered in isolation, you might mistakenly consider them to be conceivable, but this error is remedied by recalling the fundamentality of worlds (or scenarios). First-order claims require us to work down from the total scenario of which they are part. Similarly, I suggest, meta-modal claims require us to work up from the individual scenarios that comprise epistemic modal space. By treating scenarios as fundamental, we close the gap between epistemically possible necessity and epistemic necessity tout court. (S5 applied to the intersection of epistemic and metaphysical modal space?)

On this proposal, for a necessary being to be coherently conceivable, it must be the case that the being exists in every scenario one can coherently conceive of. The failure of the latter condition suffices to render the necessary being inconceivable. (Assume I can conceive of a Godless world. That possible world doesn't disappear when I turn to the question of whether God might necessarily exist. It can rightly influence my modal reasoning. In particular, it rightly precludes the possibility of God existing in every possible world, for I can see all along that he doesn't exist in that one.) More generally: there are not multiple conceivable modal spaces, for that would require, impossibly, that there be more than one maximal space of individually coherent scenarios.

This view effectively rules out from the start the challenge from meta-modal conceivability posed to modal rationalism. One might thereby complain that it is question-begging. But I think the picture I've presented is independently attractive, and so might be better described as disarming the challenge. At the very least, it may be employed defensively by the modal rationalist to explain why they are not troubled by the meta-modal arguments, even if the challenger remains unconvinced. What do you think?

Categories:

• metaphysics
• modality
• apriority
• epistemology
• philosophy

Why I'm not a classical liberal

[By Chris Dillow]

Why am I a left-libertarian? This question breaks into two parts: why, given that I'm a libertarian, am I on the left? And why, given that I'm on the left, am I a libertarian? First things first. Here are six reasons. I'll be brief; these are intended to be first words in a dialogue, not last words.

1. A missing theory of property duties. I say "duties" rather than "rights", as right libertarians or classical liberals do, for a simple reason. To justify inequalities of property, you must demonstrate that the poor have a duty to respect the rich's property. How can this be done?

John Locke had one answer. Private ownership, he said, was OK as long as it left "enough and as good" for others. We should therefore respect others' property simply because it's doing us no harm - there's enough and as good land for us to use.

Even if this proviso held in Locke's time, it obviously doesn't hold today. So how can we justify property inequality? I'll ignore Nozick's answer, which is pure gibber.

One answer comes from Israel Kirzner. Someone who discovers a new use for a resource, he says, has in effect created property out of nothing (pdf). And what, he asks, is wrong with the "finder's keeper's" rule? For example, Paul McCartney created songs out of nothing. He found them. So why shouldn't he own them?

The problem is, this only justifies a fraction of property ownership. Arab princes are wealthy not because they've discovered new uses for oil, but because they are lucky enough to own land under which there are oil deposits. And in many cases the history of land ownership is the history of theft, conquest and expropriation. How can we justify property ownership based upon this?

Here classical liberals suddenly become crude utilitarians. Here's Deepak Lal:

Most societies throughout history have recognized the chaos that would be caused by seeking to redress any fault in the historical descent of every current title to property...They have, therefore, correctly applied some form of statute of limitations. (Reviving the Invisible Hand, p186)

But would the chaos really outweigh the benefits? This must be an empirical question. And it's an open one - because there's some evidence that unequal property ownership is a barrier to economic development.

2.Autonomy is a real value, not a notional one. Classical liberals - I'm thinking especially of this book by Anthony de Jasay - devote much effort to defining liberty and justice as the absence of state coercion. They devote less effort to saying why these conceptions are so valuable.

Left libertarians, by contrast, believe values matter to the extent that they promote human development and thriving. In some (many?) cases, the mere absence of coercion does not suffice to do this.

Imagine a man dying of thirst in the desert, whilst a bystander has plenty of water, but no inclination to help him. Classical liberals say this is a just position - there's no state coercion.

But most of us would think things would be better if the state did intervene, to force the man with water to help the dying man.

3. Self-ownership doesn't justify inequalities. A cornerstone of Nozick's libertarianism is the principle that we own ourselves, so that any effort to tell us what to do is a form of slavery.

This principle, though, doesn't justify inequalities of income, because incomes are jointly produced by individual talents and social circumstances. Thierry Henry's skills as a footballer, Bill Gates' as a software developer or Paul McCartney's as a songwriter would have earned them little 100 years ago. Even if they own their talents, they've no right to the social conditions in which these talents can thrive.

4. Inequality is a form of market failure. This matters, because it shows that the wealth of these people is the result of luck - the luck of being born into the right time, or into the right society.

By the same reasoning, poverty is also due to bad luck - of being born Liberian rather than American, or being born "unskilled" (or into a time when one' skills are no in demand) rather talented.

Now, commonsense tells us that, where luck is so important, we can take out insurance to mitigate it's effects.

But we can't do so because we can't insure ourselves before being conceived against being born into the wrong society. This is merely a market failure. All but the most extreme libertarians would argue that there's a case for the state to correct market failures. So there's a case for some type of redistributive taxes, to replicate the insurance pay-outs that we would have entered into, had we been able.

5. Markets don't work perfectly. Classical liberals believe free markets do indeed promote human thriving. This is deeply true - up to a point. But there are problems. Markets generate creative destruction, imposing losses, albeit temporary, upon millions. They don't give people self-determination and autonomy at work, because most firms are ruled by a hierarchical managerialist ideology which might be out-dated. Path dependency and barriers to entry mean inefficient monopolies can continue to thrive. And, as Robert Shiller has pointed out, many markets in insuring big risks - recession, industrial decline - just don't exist.

Classical liberals often reply to this that, in the long-run, these problems disappear. This is a curiously Stalinist answer - it imposes a theoretical ideal upon a world it doesn't fit. People don't live in the long-run, but in the present. These market failures are another case for redistribution as insurance. The trick is to design the redistribution so as to minimize the disruption to markets that work well.

6. Demands for equality won't go away. There's another way in which classical liberals are strangely Stalinist. They seem to want to over-ride the huge public demand for state intervention. This ignores the question: how can we preserve and expand economic liberty in the face of this?

Left Libertarians pick up James Buchanan's suggestion:

The rich man, who may sense the vulnerability of his nominal claims in the existing state of affairs and who may, at the same time, desire that the range of collective or state action be restricted, can potentially agree on a once-and-for-all or quasi-permanent transfer of wealth to the poor man, a transfer made in exchange for the latter's agreement to a genuinely new constitution that will overtly limit governmentally directed fiscal transfers. (The Limits of Liberty, p171)

For example, wealth transfers (which could be annuitized) can be an alternative to intrusive and inefficient market interventions such as minimum wage laws or protectionism.

The question is: why, in the 30 years since The Limits of Liberty was published, has this suggestion not been followed? Here's my theory. Thatcherism and Reaganism won the class war, and so reduced the vulnerability of the rich man's claims thus making one-off transfers unnecessary. 

Classical liberals are happy with this. Some of us aren't.

Religion and Philosophy in Pro-Life Arguments

[By Jeremy Pierce]

John of Skeptic's Heaven said something in a comment on my Moral Pollution post that I thought deserved its own post in response, since it was really irrelevant to the post he was commenting on. What was irrelevant to the post but an important and common claim that I think ought to be addressed was the following:

I don't feel that embryos are "persons" at all, in fact the only reasons I've seen to be against stem-cell research are religious ones. I admit, I haven't comprehensively studied the issue, but from what I have read, that seems to be the case.

You don't need to know much of the abortion literature to know that this is wrong. All you need to do is pick up any of a number of standard applied ethics anthologies to know the most common argument for embryonic personhood. Most of them contain John Noonan's paper defending the traditional pro-life view, and that is indeed a philosophical argument, no matter how bad you might think the argument is.

The first premise is that a newborn is a person and has full moral status. The second premise is that personhood or the kind of moral status persons have is not the sort of thing that can admit of vagueness. But then there's no good place to draw a line between embryos and newborns that is not vague, and thus embryos must have the same moral status as newborns. You may disagree with the argument, and there are all sorts of ways to do so (but none that I know of that aren't question-begging). Even so, I don't know how anyone can deny that it's a philosophical argument.

I know lots of pro-life people who aren't exactly the philosophical type, and pretty much all of them will put forth something like this when questioned about why they think an embryo has full human rights, though they will do it without the philosophical sophistication of John Noonan's version (or especially of any more argument one that would be necessary given the literature that came after Noonan's). If anyone is going to stick with quoting scripture, it would be these largely unphilosophical people, and yet they're well aware of the philosophical argument that stands behind most versions of the pro-life view. I don't see anything in the argument that quotes scripture or gives a dictate from a religious authority of any other sort. [For a more detailed presentation of my own view on what I think the arguments on both sides can establish (or at least what I thought two years ago, since I may have changed a little on some points), you can see this post.]

I don't mean to suggest that religion can't provide anything that might help flesh out a pro-life view. I think the opposite is true, actually. I think religion can provide an account of exactly what the difference between humans and other animals are, a difference that gives humans what might be called deontological rights and animals what utilitarians might call rights (i.e. trumpable or rule-of-thumb rights). I explore that here, but I don't think my account of that is by any means the dominant one. It's just the one that makes the most sense to me consistent with what I do think reason can tell us and what I think the Christian scriptures teach. But I don't consider this to be an argument for the pro-life view, just an account of how to make sense of one of its views.

[cross-posted at Parableman]

Little League Ethics

[By Jeremy Pierce]

In little league baseball, there's a rule that every kid on the team needs an at-bat, or your team forfeits the game. What if you realize late in the game that you're going to win on score but lose by forfeit because one kid hasn't been up to bat and won't unless you let the other team score a run? This happened in a recent game between the state champions of Vermont and New Hampshire. The Vermont coach decided to let the other team score so they could then get another chance at bat to avoid the forfeit. The NH coach figured this out and told his players to refuse to score. Did the VT coach violate sports ethics? Did the NH coach? See the Ethics Scoreboard for the arguments in each case. I think I pretty much agree with their analysis. [hat tip: Eugene Volokh]

I think this is actually an interesting case of conflicting rules, because it's not just some abstract set of moral rules. These are actual rules that are explict and written down, and those playing the game have agreed to follow them. One clear commitment is to strive to win, and another is to do your best. But way hat happens when striving to win requires not doing your best at the normal game play? Or is it still doing your best because it's doing your best at winning the game? That does seem to me to be the intent behind doing your best. If a strategy at winning means walking rather than hitting a home run, that's not usually seen as a violation of ethics. So why would allowing the other team a run in order for you to win be a violation of ethics? I'm not actually sure if this is a real moral dilemma in the end for the Vermont coach, because it might turn out that fulfilling one of the principles does fulfill the other one in the end, even if it doesn't seem so at first. I do think the NH coach was violating the motivaiton behind the rules and thus violating the spirit of the rule. I'm not sure I agree with all the reasons given, e.g. the NH coach was trying to win but by making the other team forfeit, so it's not strictly speaking true that he was trying to lose, as #3 in the analysis says. It would be more accurate to say that he was trying to win by forfeit via losing by score. Still, I think the general analysis is correct. The Vermont coach did the right thing, and the NH coach responded in way that can't easily be reconciled with fair play.

[cross-posted at Parableman]

Moral Pollution

[By Jeremy Pierce]

Some people think the immoral origins of the development of racial terms should count as a reason to abandon racial terms altogether. I don't want to get into the issue of whether racial terms refer to anything, which is one of the major subjects of my dissertation, but I thought it might be nice to run through some thoughts on this secondary issue. I'll begin by asserting that I think this is an extremely poor argument for abandoning racial terms, and it's partly because I think some similar ethical arguments with very different subject matter also fail. These might take different forms, however, so I want to consider three different cases before bringing it back to race.

First, after World War II, scientists among the Allies rejected the use of the results of Nazi war crime experimentation on the grounds that the information had its origins in immoral acts. I think this argument is unfounded, relying on a confusion between two things: actions and the information that those actions happen to provide. The actions were surely wrong. But what can make the information itself bad? There is no plausible notion of moral pollution that can infect mere information without positing some spooky property Moral Pollution that somehow transfers from actions to information. I don't accept any such property. Thus this argument fails.

I want to note that it's a very different argument to say that retaining the information encourages others to do such experimentation. That doesn't rely on the magical property in question. However, it seems implausible that people will think they can get away with such awful experimentation just because information like this doesn't get burned. The scientists themselves were convicted of war crimes.

Second, archeologists have recently begun to raise questions about scientific research based on artifacts recovered from looters. Since the practice encourages looting and black market sales of artifacts, some universities and researchers are raising questions about allowing such materials to form the basis of research. If this argument is a merely pragmatic, utilitarian argument that we shouldn’t encourage such practices, I have no problem with it, but I'm not sure that it makes it immoral to study artifacts gained from looters. It might just make it immoral to procure them from looters illegally by paying them for them rather than having the government confiscate them and donate them to science.

I'm not aware of anyone giving the analogous argument to the Nazi research in this case, which I think is telling. It suggests that in the Nazi case people think the existence of the research itself is evil because it came into existence due to evil, whereas these artifacts were simply stolen after already having existed. There must be some notion of moral infection going on here, one that is completely implausible (even to people who think the first argument is plausible) in the artifact case. The only difference I can think of is the origin, but how can something's origin make it evil without some notion of moral pollution, and what could such a property consist of?

The third issue results from a pro-life conception of embryos as persons. On such a view, stem-cell research on embryos that have already been killed is often viewed as immoral, because it capitalizes on the death of a person. It’s possible to get an argument going relying on not encouraging the practice if the killing of embryos is indeed immoral (as pro-lifers think), but the argument cannot rely on some kind of moral stain on the embryo from having been murdered even if the action of killing embryos can correctly be classified as murder. The issue would more analogously relate to those who have donated their children’s bodies to science upon their death and then murdered them. The fact that a child was so murdered does not invalidate the donation to science of the body as if the action brings some moral infection. So why should stem-cell research on already-killed (or inevitably-killed) embryos count as immoral, even on the pro-life view?

Now the racial analogue takes a similar form. The origins of racial terms are indeed morally suspect. Practices of slavery, white supremacy, segregation, and so on did indeed serve to create the racial categorizations that we now have. They did lead to some of how racial classifications are thought of. But that doesn’t necessarily infect the categories with a stain of evil, as if the origins mean the categories are themselves immoral. One might think that there’s a necessary evil to the categories, that widespread wrongs cannot be addressed without thinking in terms of races but that we would be better off not having the categories. But that sort of view is not the stronger view I mentioned at the outset of this post. The original conclusion of the argument is that we simply ought to stop using race-related terms. At best, we can get merely the more moderate conclusion that we ought to hope for a time when the stronger view will be correct. Whether that is true depends on several factors that I don't want to get into in this post, but my point is that you don't get the stronger view from the fact that the origins of racial terms involve something immoral.

I'm curious to see if anyone can make any better sense of this moral pollution view than I can, because it seems like a complete non-starter to me. Also, I'm interested in any thoughts on the different kinds of parallel arguments and whether what you say about any one of them must be true about the others. I did point out one difference already, but I'm curious what other differences there might be (or what other parallel arguments there might be, whether exactly analogous or not).

[cross-posted at Parableman]

Introduction: Jeremy Pierce

I guess I'll be the first guest blogger to introduce myself. My name is Jeremy Pierce, and I'm a Ph.D. student in philosophy at Syracuse University. My areas of specialization are a fairly unusual combination (metaphysics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of race), and I spend a lot of time thinking as well about ethics, epistemology, and certain periods of the history of philosophy because I regularly teach classes in those areas. I'm currently working on a dissertation on the metaphysics of race with the hope of finishing next summer. I contribute to Prosblogion, the philosophy of religion blog, and I have a personal blog Parableman. I was also a contributor to OrangePhilosophy before its current hiatus. You can see a more detailed profile of me here.

I thank Richard for inviting me on here, and I hope this leads to some productive discussion.

September Open Thread

Blogging might be light as I'm heading home for the next week or so. I've lined up a couple of guests who might also offer a post or two at some point, but I'll let them introduce themselves when they're ready. In the meantime, feel free to leave a comment here with whatever thoughts you wish to share...

Philosophers' Carnival #35

... is here!

Meta-Paternalism

It is paternalistic to make others' decisions for them. In addition to the usual first-order decisions, we sometimes face second-order, or "meta", decisions, wherein we choose whether to make a first-order choice. Sometimes we might rather not, and hence we make the meta-choice to abdicate responsibility and defer to another's first-order discretion. That is, we invite paternalism, or ask another to decide for us. In the extreme case, we willingly submit to slavery. What if the other refuses, insisting (for our own good) that we become autonomous at the base level? This determined anti-paternalist thereby treats us paternalistically at the meta level, by overriding our second-order preference for coddling. The wannabe slave is "forced to be free".

(Analogues may be found at the political level, e.g. imposing democracy on a country where the majority don't want it. Of course, Rousseau intended the quoted phrase rather differently, but never mind that...)

But what's a liberal to do? Faced with an informed and considered request for paternalism, you're damned if you do, and damned if you don't. But which level of paternalism is worse? This question may serve to clarify the value we see in autonomy. If we see autonomy as an objective value, then we may embrace meta-paternalism in our quest to see this good realized in the world. (Similarly for the imposition of liberal values on intolerant cultures.) This is a perfectly consistent position for liberal objectivists, and I have some sympathy.

Those more inclined towards the humility of relativism would refrain from ascribing any objectivity to the value of autonomy, and instead seek to respect others' ultimate values. If one of those ultimate values is servitude, then it seems like the humble thing to do is boss them around as they wish. (Democracy unpopular? Well then, the people have spoken. Who are we to deprive them of tyranny?) The most thorough anti-paternalist would accept mastery of the willing slave, accommodating their chosen lifestyle by depriving freeing them of any further choice.

Meta-paternalism is the deeper form of paternalism, violating the more central preferences of the person. Still, you might find it intuitively less objectionable. We think that people shouldn't be allowed to sell themselves into slavery, no matter how deeply they desire it. There could be utilitarian reasons in play here, but I will set this possibility aside for now. The alternative explanation is that we are really objectivists about value, and consider the autonomous life to be that which is most worth living -- no matter what the person actually living it has to say on the matter!

(As a welfare subjectivist but moral objectivist, my view is a bit more complicated, and requires treating the individual and societal cases differently. Each individual is the ultimate authority on their own wellbeing, but they're stuck with moral obligations to others whether they like it or not. Hence, I think we should respect people's ultimate values insofar as they don't harm anyone else. If you want to be my slave, go for it! But if you value pushing other people around, even if they form a sub-class of "your culture", then -- as with domestic violence -- I think we have to step in and lock you up. You may sell yourself into slavery, but not your sister. That's where cultural relativists go horribly, horribly wrong.)

(Actually, I think there are pragmatic reasons for disallowing even voluntary slavery, but I'll discuss that in a future post. This one is more concerned with the question of principle.)

Categories:

• paternalism
• freedom
• wellbeing
• ethics

Speakers Use Their Actual Language

This is a fairly trivial point, but it's worth noting that the words we use have particular meanings, and these actual semantic facts are unchanged by imagining counterfactual languages. So it's not really true that "whether something is good or bad depends on your definition of 'good' and 'bad'." The actual disquoted use of 'good' refers to a particular property, goodness, and whether something possesses that property is an entirely language-independent fact.

If 'right' meant wrong, then the sentence "murder is right" would be true, but that wouldn't make murder right. For my latter (disquoted) use of the word 'right' is spoken in my actual language. It picks out a property that murder lacks no matter what we call it. The earlier, quoted mentions of the word 'right' (i.e. my uses of ''right'') are not used to express this property. They instead refer to the word itself. And if this word were to pick out the property of wrongness, i.e. the property that is actually denoted by our word 'wrong', then the former word would extend to murder. That is, if 'right' meant wrong, then 'right' would pick out a property, namely wrongness, that murder has. But again, that obviously wouldn't make murder right. Murder would not gain the property that we actually refer to using 'right'. It would merely become describable using the word just mentioned -- a word that would then be used to mean the opposite of what it means in actual use.

So much for counterfactual languages. What about counter-actual ones, i.e. other languages considered as actual, say using indicative conditionals? To borrow an example from Yablo, compare:

(1) If 'tail' had meant wing, then horses would not have had tails.
(2) If 'tail' means wing, then horses do not have tails.

Clearly (1) is false, for the reasons explained above. But what about (2)? Yablo argues that it's true:

If 'tail' as a matter of fact means wing, then to say that horses have tails is to say that they have wings. Horses do not have wings. So if 'tail' means wing, then horses do not have tails. ('Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda', p.450)

Here's a puzzle: our actual use of 'horses do not have tails' is (near enough to) synonymous with 'horses lack post-trunk extensions'. But now consider:

(2*) If 'tail' means wing, then horses lack post-trunk extensions.

That claim is surely false. And substituting synonyms shouldn't alter the truth value of a sentence, so (2) should be false too. But perhaps this is an exception to that general rule, rather like:

(3) 'tail' has four letters.
(3*) 'post-trunk extension' has four letters.

But the obvious problem with (3*) is that the substitution occurs within quote-marks, wherein the word 'tail' is being mentioned rather than used. (What's being used is the string ''tail'', and the replacement string ''post-trunk extension'' is not synonymous with that. Rather than referring to one and the same body part, these two terms refer to two different words. Whereas 'tails' refers to tails, ''tails'' merely refers to 'tails'. Don't let the superficial similarity fool you!) The substitution from (2) to (2*) is not illegitimate in this way. So if it is illegitimate at all, we need some further explanation why. The mere fact that the word is mentioned earlier in the sentence does not suffice. For compare:

(4) 'Four' has four letters.
(4*) 'Four' has 3+1 letters.

There's clearly nothing wrong with moving from (4) to (4*), despite the early mention of the word that gets substituted when used later in the sentence.

If we accept the equivalence of (2) and (2*), then we will reject Yablo's first premise: "If 'tail' as a matter of fact means wing, then to say that horses have tails is to say that they have wings." This seems a tough bullet to bite, but perhaps it is defensible. After all, that horses have tails is the same proposition as that horses have post-trunk extensions. To say one is to say the other, as they are one and the same thing. But to say that horses have post-trunk extensions (tails), no matter what particular language one says this in, is not to say that they have wings.

My argument here is a little suspicious, since it seems like I'm not giving the antecedents of Yablo's indicative conditionals due weight -- it might be suggested that they undermine my synonymy claims, thereby blocking my response. I'm not too sure what to think of that. I guess there must be something wrong with the substitutions after all, but I'd welcome any clear insights into what exactly the rule broken by (2*) is...

Categories:

• semantics