Freedom and actual/ideal Preferences

Survey time! I have three questions for you, dear reader:

1) Suppose I am weak-willed, and will regretfully fail to do X even though I judge X to be for the best and indeed would prefer to do it (if only I could find the willpower). Does it violate my freedom when you force me to X for this reason?

2) Suppose I am misinformed, and refuse to do X because I fail to appreciate that it is a necessary means to achieving my heart's desire. If I knew better, I would choose to do X. Does it violate my freedom when you force me to X for this reason?

3) Suppose my values lack coherence. I refuse to do X because it isn't something I think I care about. But further reflection would bring me to care non-instrumentally about X after all (say my other values implicitly commit me to this). Does it violate my freedom when you force me to X for this reason?

Further: in each case, is my idealized self rationally bound to endorse your paternalistic intervention? What does the answer to this tell us about the moral status of intervening?

Moral Judgment ≠ Moral Fact

Oh dear. William Saletan of Slate magazine reports the latest neuroscientific breakthrough: to make judgments, people use their brains! Shocking, I know. But you won't believe the philosophical implications:

According to the neuroscientists, philosophers on both sides are wrong, because morality doesn't come from God or transcendent reason. It comes from the brain... The war of ideas is a war of neurons.

It seems a little conflation goes a long way when you're a journalist.

Divine Double Standards

Another problem with the "free will" theodicy is that it rests on a double standard. No-one thinks it impedes free will problematically when humans -- e.g. the police -- prevent acts of intentional evil. Why would it be any worse for God to do the exact same thing?

To take another example, we think it would be wrong for Bob to fail to save the drowning child. So why is it okay for God to do nothing? Again, this seems a plain double standard.

The Problem of Unfreedom

I've never understood how anyone could be at all convinced by the "free will" defence against the problem of evil. It seems obvious that any cosmic designer did a shockingly poor job of designing us to be free agents. There are all sorts of barriers to human choice and free action that no perfect being could tolerate. Let's call this "the problem of unfreedom".

Here's the problem: humans are not ideally free agents. Due to our imperfect biological design, we suffer a variety of internal maladies -- from cravings and addiction to mental illness and simple irrationality -- that impede the rational exercise of our will. Our brains are far from optimally designed for rational decision-making. If God existed, he would free us from the bondage of addiction, bias and other mental defects.

Note that we had no choice over our own design -- our initial desires and predispositions. When we are moved by built-in desires that we wish we didn't have, this is a violation of our autonomy as free agents. Yet we are limited in our ability to shape our own desires. We can't change our innate dispositions through sheer force of will. A perfect God would have given us this ability -- to simply purge ourselves of violent, selfish, or lazy inclinations. Our bad design is not our fault, after all. The bad decisions and behaviour caused by this bad design are, likewise, not wholly our own responsibility. If humans had been created with the values of autonomy, self-creation and responsibility in mind, we would be very different creatures.

Again, every flaw we have was built into us (at least as a disposition ready to manifest itself upon exposure to the wrong environmental influences). Why would a perfect being do that to you? Even assuming that we have free choice within certain bounds, those "bounds" are not the ones that any remotely benevolent designer would have set. Clearly, we are not "designer babies".

One day, I hope, biotechnology will advance to the point where we can improve these flaws ourselves. But the very fact that we need to "play God" indicates that the job is vacant.

Kripke and Kryptonite

In response to news that a "new mineral found has [the] same composition as fictional kryptonite", Pete Mandik reminds us of Kripke's argument that unicorns are essentially mythical, and hence metaphysically impossible. But I wonder whether Kryptonite's presumed status as a mineral kind may complicate this story. We appear to have an inconsistent triad:

(1) Kryptonite is (numerically identical to) the mineral "sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide" [according to the label shown in the film Superman Returns]

(2) Kriptonite is essentially fictional

(3) Sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide is actual (and so not essentially fictional)

Is the triad truly inconsistent, and if so, which claim should we deny? I'm inclined to ditch (1). Kryptonite isn't really a mineral. When the fiction claims that Kryptonite is sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide, it is misrepresenting its essential nature. Kryptonite is a fictional, rather than mineral, kind. (It is only according to the fiction that Kryptonite is a mineral with such-and-such chemical composition, rather than a fiction. The fine thing about fictions is that they can claim things - like this - that just aren't true.)

Moral Failure ≠ Military Defeat

Peter Levine offers a conciliatory narrative on the Iraq War:

Whether or not we should have invaded Iraq in the first place, we succeeded in removing a hateful dictator and smashing a major army halfway around the world with hardly any casualties on our side. That is a sign of enormous strength. A civil war then broke out. That conflict is morally our responsibility, because we might have been able to prevent it. In any case, we are accountable for what happens to a population whose nation we chose to invade. Nevertheless, there is very little we can do to end the civil war. We lack the necessary skills and knowledge. More important, civil conflict is just not something that can be resolved by an outside force; it must be negotiated by the parties. Possibly, if we imposed an effective martial law for many years, the factions in the Iraqi domestic conflict would run out of energy and resources. But the odds favor disastrous results even from such an enormous investment of our resources. Therefore, it is past time to leave. This is a moral failure but not a military defeat, and it is certainly not a "surrender."

(An interesting way of putting things, though it reminds me of a certain Monty Python sketch...)

Perpetuating Gender Norms

Brit Brogaard, summarizing Elizabeth Minnich, writes:

[T]he problem of the status of women in philosophy... wouldn't have been solved if there were 50% women but the 50% felt pressured to behave like men and do male-style philosophy.

While I agree in part (see below), I don't like the implication that there is a particular way that "men" behave, or a peculiarly "male style" of philosophy (or anything else, for that matter). Such labels risk perpetuating existing gender norms, which impose oppressive expectations on men and women alike.

Don't get me wrong, I agree that women shouldn't be forced into becoming analytic metaphysicians, or participating in "the 'old-boy's' network of drinking & smoking and forming bonds", as a precondition for career success in philosophy. But my objection is that it's not essentially a gender issue. Nobody -- male or female -- should have to conform to a parochial mould.

The virtue of "difference feminism" is that it casts a critical eye on previously unquestioned norms, exposing their parochial nature. This is hugely valuable. But while the lens of gender may prove a useful investigative instrument in this regard, it may distort our subsequent evaluations if we're not careful. Uncritical relativism should be avoided -- for example, if logic and violence are gendered as "male", that doesn't make either illogic or violence defensible. Gender is fundamentally irrelevant; the underlying norms should be assessed on their own merits. And if found to be unreasonable, they shouldn't be imposed on anyone.

Related posts: on affirmative action in academia, the liberal case against "diversity", and indirect or "implicit" discrimination.

The Atheism Wars

There's a lot of mud-slinging at present between two atheist camps: those who support the Dawkins/Dennett/Harris approach of aggressively criticising religion, and those who think we should be more accommodating. Aside from that rough characterization, I'm not entirely sure what's in dispute here. Here are two possibilities:

1. Religious belief is irrational. (More precisely: given what we now know about the universe, it is generally epistemically unreasonable to believe the truth-claims made by any of the world's major religions. The epistemically responsible agent has every reason to reject pop theism.)

2. We, as public actors, should criticize irrationality -- in general, and in its specific instances -- and seek to promote epistemic virtues (e.g. believing things based on good reasons and evidence) in society.

Personally, I think that both these claims are true. I assume that makes me an "aggressive atheist". To any accommodationists out there, which of the two claims do you reject, and why?

Carnivals

The 46th Philosophers' Carnival is here, featuring a "keynote address" from Prof. Dennett. Enjoy!

N.B. the next carnival, to be held at nichomachus.net on May 14, is a special edition dedicated to practical philosophy. The host writes: "Anything from environmental ethics to aesthetics to the absurd to the meaning of death and dying is fair game." Submit your most practical philosophy here, by the May 12 deadline.

Also note that the Citizens' Symposium #2 on "political regimes" (is democracy the best, and if so, why?) is coming up -- essay submissions are due by May 4th. Follow the link for further details.

Does Philosophy Need Science?

I reckon not. (Well, perhaps in practice, e.g. as an imaginative aid, but not in principle.) Whenever you're tempted to appeal to empirical data, simply conditionalize it out and you can safely carry on philosophizing in the a priori realm of possibilities.

Of course, we may be most interested in actual-world problems, e.g. interpreting modern physics, addressing salient ethical and political issues, etc. But there doesn't seem any reason why they couldn't in principle be addressed just as well from an empirically neutral position which entertained our actual situation as a merely hypothetical scenario. Indeed, given sufficient imaginative and rational powers, the armchair philosopher (or even the disembodied, floating-in-the-void philosopher) should be capable of achieving a kind of "limited omniscience", knowing everything there is to know about the various possibilities (except for which one happens to be actual -- but never mind that one little fact).

It might be objected that science brings to light new possibilities that would otherwise seem inconceivable -- e.g. space-time relativity. But this is merely to note that experience is a useful imaginative aid; it plays no necessary role in the actual justification of our philosophical beliefs. Einstein's theory is enough; it need not be borne out by the empirical data. His conceptual scheme alone is enough to show how space and time could turn out not to be absolute. (Unless there's really a hidden contradiction in there, in which case ideal rational reflection should suffice to expose the impossibility.)

Am I wrong? (And do you have to conduct an experiment before you can tell?)

P.S. Thanks to Jack for getting me thinking about this topic.

Philosophy, de dicto and de re

There are two things I really want to know. Unfortunately, I'm not too sure what they are. (So maybe that makes three!) The de dicto/de re distinction seems relevant to both. Let's see if writing this post can help me get a grasp on them at all...

1) What's the story with philosophical analyses? What's the relationship between a concept and its analysis, which provides necessary and sufficient conditions for something to fall under the concept? For example, suppose I could mentally grasp the entire set of all possible knowledge-instances, or goodness-instances. Do our concepts of 'knowledge' and 'goodness' invoke anything beyond these infinite sets (or their compression into systematic formulae)? Aren't the concepts normative in a way that their object-involving intensions cannot be? Is this what allows there to be substantive disagreements involving the concept? What's the central issue here?

*pulls hair*

2) What's the deal with numerical identity? Is there even any such thing, fundamentally, I mean? Or is all modality fundamentally de dicto, concerned with the distribution of descriptive qualities across the Humean tapestry of spacetime, with other possible "me"s bearing a relation to me that's merely a counterpart-theoretic construction? In what sense is this really the same chair as it was a moment ago? There's a certain physical continuity between the two temporal parts, of course. But does the fact of numerical identity -- being one and the same object -- consist in anything over and above this? My clearest thinking on this topic is here, but I suspect even that is hopelessly confused.

Combining the two problems: what does our concept of identity add to the raw, bleeding reality -- the set of temporal parts and counterparts that we'd classify as belonging to a single object? Where's the interpretation? What meaning do we project onto this raw stuff through our classification of it as numerically identical? (And is this merely a projection on our part, or something independently real?)

Argh! I really need to do more metaphysics and philosophy of language. (Though if anyone out there is able and willing to clarify these issues in a comment, that'd be just grand...)

Brainwashing

Jeremy Stangroom (Talking Philosophy) discusses some difficulties in analyzing our concept of brainwashing. Some would consider religious schooling to be a (perhaps mild) form of brainwashing, for instance, drawing on an understanding of brainwashing as dogmatic instruction. To this, Jeremy raises the History Teacher Objection:

My teacher was an old style facts and dates kind of guy. He taught by writing notes onto a blackboard. We copied them down. There was no questioning, no dissent. Nothing to suggest that the details of history were contested, etc. But presumably people would not want to claim that I was being anything like brainwashed by my history teacher…

My suggestion: legitimate instruction exhibits epistemic sensitivity, or - more loosely - is responsive to reasons and evidence. If the facts and dates of history had been different, then so would the History Teacher's instruction have been. His teaching, though itself apparently 'dogmatic', is embedded in a broader academic system (of textbook writers, etc.) that is broadly reliable and responsive to evidence.

The same is not true, we may suppose, of most religious instructors. Even if Plantinga or other philosophers of religion established the truth of theism, they are too disconnected from most religious instructors to protect the latter against charges of brainwashing. The Sunday School teacher would teach much the same things no matter what the best philosophers discovered. Even if their teachings by some fluke happened to be true, it still fails to be the case that they are teaching it because it is true.

Just as a true belief may fail to constitute knowledge due to the holding and the truth of the belief not being related in the right way, so too a true or justified proposition may fail to be taught legitimately -- and instead constitute brainwashing -- because the act of teaching it fails to be properly responsive to these normative qualities of what's being taught.

Update: Could we be more explicit here, and say that legitimate instruction is precisely that form of teaching which is apt to produce knowledge? We can then pass the buck on the tough epistemological questions, whilst plainly distinguishing the history teacher from the sunday school instructor. However the details may go, those suspicious of religious brainwashing presumably hold that the religious instructor is not apt to produce knowledge in her students (even if her teachings happen to be true).

Banning Smacking

Background: New Zealand law currently accommodates smacking by allowing the use of "reasonable force" in disciplining a child to count as a legal defence against charges of assault. Occasionally, juries have acquitted serious child abusers on this basis. Green MP Sue Bradford has responded by proposing a bill that will remove this legal defence, thus effectively outlawing smacking. It's popular among politicians, but less so among the general public.

My analysis: Frankly, I'm amazed there's any controversy here at all. Given that no-one really wants to prosecute all parents for smacking, outlawing it just seems like an obviously bad idea, for two reasons. (1) It's patently unjust to remove a legitimate defence merely because the occasional "false positive" lets guilty people go free. Surely, if a defendent's use of force really is reasonable, then it's not abuse or assault. Justice demands that our legal system recognize this. (2) As a general principle, it's always a bad idea to have unenforced (or inconsistently enforced) laws. (It's asking for trouble to grant such discretionary powers to the police. Much better to leave them with jurors.)

National MPs have proposed instead to clarify what is meant by "reasonable force", rather than disallowing it altogether. This would solve the stated problem of child abuse acquittals, without creating any new problems. Yet Bradford et al oppose any such amendment, which suggests that they're being dishonest -- the "stated problem" isn't really what they're concerned about after all. Rather, they want to send a message that any form of physical discipline is unacceptable.

No Right Turn exemplifies this position with his blind insistence that "hitting people is assault." As if there were no relevant difference between a light smack and beating someone bloody. Such a failure of discrimination is, as PC puts it, "just insane." There are important distinctions to be made here. That's not to say that smacking is necessarily okay, but it is to say that no moral insight is to be found from those who think that the issue may be settled by simple-mindedly asserting that "hitting people is assault."

[Aside: I normally have a lot of respect for NRT, but that last post was a real disappointment. He blithely slanders opponents of the smacking ban as being in cahoots with "fundamentalist Christians", and characterizes them as "want[ing] bad parents to be able to continue to assault their children." That sort of bullshit is precisely what's wrong with political debate in our society.]

Now, I think we need to distinguish two issues:
(1) Is smacking (generally) bad parenting?
and
(2) Should smacking be illegal?

Personally, I think that smacking is rarely the best option. But that's just my tentative opinion. It's not obvious how to be a good parent -- and I doubt there's any one template that's universally applicable -- so I think we should give plenty of leeway for different parenting styles, including ones that involve some light physical discipline.

(Aside: I find it strange how some proponents get so fixated on the awfulness of physical pain, when psychological pain can be far worse - and more enduring - than a light smack that's forgotten a moment later. Emotional abuse thus strikes me as a far more serious concern!)

Is there any evidence that light smacking has harmful consequences (e.g. raising the likelihood that children will act violently later in life)? If so, perhaps it would be appropriate to attach some social stigma to it, publicly criticize the practice, and suggest better alternatives, etc. (Much as we might for other instances of tolerably bad parenting, e.g. swearing in front of kids.) But that still wouldn't justify criminalizing it.

Given the social controversy over what constitutes good parenting, it seems entirely inappropriate for the state to be mandating any particular answer. Of course there are limits, as all reasonable people agree: we shouldn't tolerate serious abuse, or other gross harms. But smacking is plainly not in the same league. It's a trivial harm, if it's any harm at all. Bradford's proposal is like passing a law mandating what parents must tell their kids about Santa Claus ("Santa is a lie, and lying is wrong, end of story", blah). It's totally inappropriate, even if they happen to be right about what "the perfect parent" would do. It just isn't their place to say.

In a liberal democracy, the government shouldn't try to micromanage people's lives. It certainly has no business foreclosing public debate over such a contentious cultural issue, mandating one particular parenting style over another. For issues where reasonable people may disagree, the appropriate response for a liberal state is to uphold autonomy and pluralism. Let parents decide for themselves how best to raise their own children. I expect they'll do a better job than the government would.

Affirmative Action in Academia

There's some interesting discussion at the Leiter Reports over the role of race and gender in philosophy department hiring.

I'm tempted to say that it all comes down to the empirical question of whether the relative scarcity of female and non-white faculty causes otherwise promising students to feel unwelcome in the philosophical community. For if so, that would be really awful, and Weatherson's argument for affirmative action in hiring looks entirely reasonable (i.e. for the sake of "providing an environment where all students feel encouraged to do philosophy."). I'm pretty skeptical of the empirical claim, though.

Other underrepresented groups include conservatives, meat-eaters, and religious people, as Christopher Pynes points out. Should we thus endorse Horowitz's calls to hire more Republicans? I guess it's possible, but I'd expect that there are more important factors besides sharing group affiliations with faculty members that influence students' decisions here! [But what if many students really do feel (perhaps irrationally) discomfort on this basis? Should hiring committees accommodate student prejudices? This seems to be opening Pandora's box...]

Having said that, race and gender do seem to be especially salient characteristics in our society. That's really unfortunate. It'd be much better, I think, for everyone to generally disregard such traits in the same way as we would for (say) eye colour. But given that this isn't where we're at as a society, what is the best way to proceed? Should we act 'colourblind', and hope that students and others follow suit? Or should we play the "identity" game, and hope that we eventually reach a stage where it's no longer necessary?

Broad Deliberative Democracy

What does "deliberative democracy" really mean? At the broadest level, I'm committed to the notion that public debate has a vital role in flourishing democracies, such that "democratic legitimacy" derives from the free exchange of reasoned arguments rather than the whims of an ill-informed majority. In short, I think that politics should be driven by public debate about the common good. Call this position "broad deliberative democracy".

While I was in Arizona, Thomas Christiano pointed out to me that many prominent deliberative democrats today are really expounding a much narrower position, which adds further restrictions on what can count as 'public reason'. Any views which fall outside the 'overlapping consensus' must be excluded, for fear of forcing one's comprehensive moral views on others. But, Christiano pointed out, it's not clear what justifies the asymmetry here. In excluding the first group's views from consideration, isn't this effectively forcing on them the other group's rejection of their position? (This is, of course, a common argument against strict secularism.)

I'm not too sure what to make of all this. I'd like my position to remain as 'broad' as possible, but I wonder whether the internal logic of it entails further restrictions. I previously suggested that receptivity could guide us here. That is, we should welcome anyone (with any views) to join the public conversation, so long as they remain open-minded and receptive to the views of others. This criterion would at least rule out dogmatic sectarian groups that demand unshakeable faith (and hence are closed to opposing views). But is that enough? Is it really 'receptive' to offer the sorts of religious or otherwise 'private' reasons that you couldn't reasonably expect others to recognize? Or is it a precondition of reasoning together that we first commit to arguing only from the common assumptions that can be shared by all?

If so, what would that leave?

Humility and Arrogance

I had an interesting discussion last month with a fellow prospective student, trying to figure out the nature of humility. But it may be easier to start with arrogance. The basic definition might be something like thinking that you're better than other people. But this needs finessing. No doubt you are better than many others at various particular things, and it could hardly be blameworthy to recognize this fact. So I take it that arrogance essentially involves some kind of distorted (read: inflated) self-evaluation.

There are two ways this distortion might go. The most obvious is a simple factual over-estimation, i.e. you think you're more talented than you really are. Alternatively, one might distort the normative significance of their particular talents, perhaps thinking that it makes them an intrinsically superior person. (This must be a distortion if we hold that all people are of equal intrinsic value.)

But I think it's broader than this. Couldn't someone be arrogant in particular respects -- e.g. dismissing the ideas of untrained students in their field (to adapt an example from Siris) -- without any presumption of overall superiority? There seems a close link between arrogance and disrespect, and I assume the latter can be 'particular' in this sense.

Turning it around, then, could we say that humility is simply the disposition to treat others with respect (take them seriously, etc.)? One advantage of this over "self-evaluation"-based analyses is that it doesn't risk conflating humility with low self-esteem. Plus, it doesn't require the humble person to avoid self-knowledge (regarding their talents). Any objections?

@

East of Dulwich cleverly came up with the symbol '@' to indicate claims or descriptions that don't correspond to the actual world.

It'd make for a nice red stamp, I imagine...

Can something be bigger than everything?

Ah, fractals... the video eventually zooms in so far that the entire expanse of the image you started with would now be larger than the known universe. (Kind of like powers of ten, but more purely mathematical, and so even "bigger"!) Pretty cool.

There's some fun discussion at Metafilter [hat-tip: Dillon] about how it is that anything could be larger than the entire universe. In response, one comment offered a nice analogy to highlight the merely virtual nature of the fractal space: "If you play Doom 3, the environment is larger than your house. How can that be when the computer is INSIDE your house?" Clearly, the universe can contain representations as of something bigger than the universe actually is, but the representations themselves -- bits in a computer -- have a more modest reality.

Is it our natural tendency to confuse the ontological status of representing and represented things that makes the fractal video so awe-inspiring? After all, in itself the sequence of images seems nothing all that special. But if you interpret them in such a way as to feel almost drawn into contradiction, and led to ponder the mysteries of the universe, that's something else entirely. Then again, perhaps the provided hint of incoherence plays no crucial role here -- it may be enough simply to vividly represent astronomical scales, and let the dwarfing effect run its own course. What do you think?

And the winner is...

*drumroll*

Princeton!

(See here for context.)

Citizens' Symposium #1

It's nice to see the Citizens' Symposium off to a strong start, with some very interesting discussion on the topic of free speech:

1. Steve Gimbel, “Free Speech, For What?” (with a reply from Lord).

2. Errol Lord, “The Respect Model for Freedom of Expression” (with a reply from Gimbel).

3. Omyma, “Censorship by Aggression versus Free Speech for Wimps: Don’t Throw out the Scales with the Blind Fold, Ms. Liberty”* (with a reply from Gimbel).

Comments are invited below each essay...

Odds and Ends

- Many thanks to Michael and David for their engaging guest posts during my absence!

- The latest Philosophers' Carnival is here.

- Apparently the PGR / Leiter rankings may not always show up on the first page of a google search for "Brian Leiter". That's a bit inconvenient for people searching for this information, so if you want to help out, feel free to "googlebomb" the name and link as follows: Brian Leiter.

- I'm home! My whirlwind tour of America was quite an experience. There wasn't time to see much besides the universities, though I did get to see a bit of New York City and the (almost as tall!) Saguaro cactii in the Arizona desert. Best of all, I met some really wonderful people -- faculty, grad students, and fellow prospectives -- everywhere I went.

(I only wish I hadn't been so exhausted, since that made things very difficult at times! I wasn't able to meet as many people as I'd been hoping to, and with those I did... well, hopefully no-one took it personally if I seemed a bit 'out of it' at times. I hadn't expected that -- it was quite disconcerting. But oh well, at least I managed to absorb lots of information and get a feel for each place during my visit, which was the main purpose, I guess.)