2007: My Web of Beliefs

This annual tradition makes slightly less sense now that I'm in the northern hemisphere and we're only half way through the academic year. Oh well.

Overview: Aside from a few handy lessons in moral theory, I think my general views are not much changed from last year (but see also 2005, 2004).

My 'Research Interests' post outlines the topics that most interested me going in to grad school (and still do - it's only been a couple of months). 'Beyond the Ivory Tower' describes my extracurricular interest in bringing philosophy to a wider audience, in hopes of building a more rational society. Here is my interview with The Philosophers' Magazine on philosophy and blogging.

'Core' analytic philosophy 

As far as metaphysics is concerned, I've mostly been developing my ideas about Constructivism and meta-ontology. (For example, I'm skeptical that questions of persistence through time have substantive answers.) My most questioning post is here (hopefully next year I'll have some answers).

In phil mind, Dualist Explanations defends property dualism as a better theory than materialism. Why do you think you're conscious? then deals with the paradox of phenomenal judgment.

Representational Content explains some Jacksonian views at the intersection of mind and language. Linguistic Paternalism relates my (partly) subjectivist views about meaning and reference.

Is Normativity Just Semantics? shows how to rebuff claims that different theorists of welfare (etc.) are merely engaged in a terminological dispute. This post defends the possibility of rational persuasion occurring through philosophical argument.

Science
- Does Philosophy Need Science? (short answer: no, but it helps). See also my skeptical take on 'Experimental Philosophy'.
- Scientism laments the common failure to appreciate the possibility of a priori or non-scientific rational inquiry (i.e. philosophy).
- Some pitfalls of evolutionary psychology are exposed in Darwinian Blinkers.
- Finally, this post repudiates a scientist's claim to have found something relevant to the ethics of abortion.

Moral Theory
- In Intention and (Im)permissibility, I learn an important lesson from Scanlon: surprisingly, intentions are rarely relevant to questions of moral permissibility.
- From Raz I learnt that rational capacities include more than just reasoning, and that practical reasoning cannot be defined by its end point (action or intention rather than belief, as some would have it). - Agency and the Will looks at why there must be more to our psychology than the mechanistic interplay of beliefs and desires.
- Regulating Aims infers from Railton an important lesson about moral psychology and how to understand the so-called "sophisticated hedonist" (and, similarly, the indirect utilitarian!)
- Examples of Irrational Desires: worth having on hand in case you happen across a Humean.
- Evaluating (and Enumerating) Pains - an holistic perspective leads to some surprising conclusions.
- Value, Alienation and Choice applies my ethical holism to the problem of demandingness and vocational choice.
- Imperfectly Right reiterates my old concerns with maximizing consequentialism.
- Context and Relativism clarifies an important distinction that seems to confuse many people.
- Moral Asymmetries of Existence uses my indirect-utilitarian framework to refute Benatar's arguments from Better Never to Have Been that it is bad to exist.
- In Half-pie Atomism? I suggest that we can construct interpersonal (communitarian) values in much the same way as we do intertemporal persons.
- Finally, in What is "collectivism", and why is it bad? I argue that libertarians are confused and mistaken when they call their utilitarian opponents 'collectivists'.

Applied Ethics 

I don't have very systematic offerings here, but the recent discussion of Handicapping Children was fun, as were my earlier posts on Virtual Rape, Posthumous Procreation, and Is Corporal Punishment So Bad?. On a more mundane note, problems inherent in Splitting Chores and Doing Your Fair Share led to many a scratched head. The Examined Life assesses Socrates' famous maxim, in light of the value of autonomy. Self-Idolatry looks at the risk of virtue-fetishism, or 'conceited good intentions', i.e. how a concern for seeming good can get in the way of actually being good.

One issue that continues to bother me is the extent to which we should accommodate unreason in others, especially as it approaches the point where we would be denying their agency or responsibility for their own actions. - I'm also not too sure what to think about self-exposure and Nagelian reticence, as discussed here. - Finally, I offer a moderate defense of moderated comment threads, guided by the value of free speech inquiry.

Politics: proceduralism and rationalism were two common themes here, again.
- Opinions are worthless, it's reasons that we should care about.
- This post, on broad vs narrow conceptions of deliberative democracy, received some helpful comments.
- What is Democracy? explores the question of what it would take for a state to be truly describable as one that is 'ruled by (all) the people'. (In particular, I explain why majority rule is insufficient.)
- Implicit Interference exposes the fallacy behind the common assumption that wealth redistribution reduces negative liberty (and, along the way, shows that Pettit's non-domination is a merely derivative value). Indeed, I'm convinced that most popular thought on Property and Coercion is simply confused.
- Banning Smacking: a rare topical post analyzing current legislation that was under consideration (and, lamentably, passed).
- Bad Means Have Consequences defends my liberal-proceduralist values, and the importance of intellectual honesty.
- Conservative Progressivism likewise emphasizes the long-term consequences we should be especially concerned about.
- Patriotism and Tough Love defends patriotism, properly understood.

Economics:
- Is Spending Ever a Waste? - an untutored attempt to reason about the implications of my (potential) spending habits.
- Fair Pay and Price Signals warns against the inefficient means that leftists too often advocate in the pursuit of social justice.  

Social Commentary and Miscellany
- Reading Benkler's Wealth of Networks - a 6-part series on the internet and society.
- The Multicultural Mystique reviews H.E. Baber's book on the downsides of multiculti ideology from a liberal perspective.
- Gender as Cultural Specialization offers a sympathetic reading of Baumeister's notorious article debunking the explanatory power of "patriarchy" in the social sciences.
- Untouchable highlights one of the most pressing (and yet rarely acknowledged) cases of systematic sexism still prevalent in modern society: the treatment of male primary school teachers.
- My thoughts on how parents (and children) should treat the Santa myth. (Relatedly: Merry Christmas! defends the secular appropriation of this holiday, and the reconstruction of cultural meaning more generally.)
- Exclusive Philosophy questions what it would mean for the discipline to be more "inclusive", and whether this is necessarily desirable.
- "Protesting" Philosophy laments an absurd call for feminist philosophers to start "protesting" against their colleagues for making philosophical arguments that might hurt others' feelings. (Less Sensitivity, please!)
- 'Misfit' is a relative term highlights a neglected social symmetry, and so suggests a rethinking of certain social norms and assumptions.

Religion

My most substantial post here would be 'New Atheism as a Positive View' (for background, see: The Atheism Wars). In hopes of improving the sloppy quality of public discourse on this topic, I expose the Radical Skepticism vs. Anything Goes false dilemma that desperate theists are so fond of employing. I also question the popular assumption that Faith is somehow preferable to knowledge. As a positive atheistic argument, I develop The Problem of Unfreedom (and related worries about Divine Double Standards). Finally, 'The Idea of God - who needs the reality?' delivers a devastating riposte to those who think we need God to ground "objective standards" for morality and whatnot. All the same objective standards may be grasped via the counterfactual, "what would God have recommended, if he had existed..."

Done. Hopefully this overview of the year's postings provides you with a better indication of the overall structure of my views (or at least some interesting new posts to read). Feel free to take pot-shots -- preferably in the comments thread of the appropriate post...

Rational Pluralism

I'm inclined towards the view that necessary/a priori truths lack worldly truthmakers, and are instead constituted by the epistemic facts of what it would be ideally rational to believe (truth as the end of inquiry, and all that). One common response people make at this point is to raise the possibility that there is no uniquely rational end-point to philosophical inquiry. Maybe the disputes between Kantians and Consequentialists, mereological universalists and nihilists, etc., would persist even under conditions of ideal rationality. There could be two (or more) equally maximally coherent belief sets. What then?

If the reasons in favour of either view are perfectly balanced, i.e. there really are no possible arguments that would decide the issue one way or another, then it seems intuitively right to me to say that there is no objective fact of the matter which of them is true. Right? (It's not as though we're just incurably ignorant about some contingent matter of fact. The matter under dispute is supposed to be logically necessary, true no matter how the world might turn out, so it really ought to be knowable by reason alone.) So constructivism yields precisely the right result here, it seems to me. It's independently plausible to think that a determinately true philosophical view ought to be determinately rationally superior. So if a philosophical question has no uniquely rational answer, nor does it have any uniquely true answer.

Matters become more complicated if we imagine, not a plurality of views that equally qualify against the standards of ideal rationality, but a plurality of rational standards (each of which leads to a different view, let's say). I'm not sure I can even make sense of this idea. But supposing it were true, should we conclude that there are likewise multiple truth predicates, one for each form of ideal rationality? P is true1 iff P is ideally rational1, true2 iff ideally rational2, etc. It all sounds a bit crazy, but I guess it wouldn't be so bad if there was a large amount of overlap between all the rationalities. We could then supervaluate and say that P is true, simpliciter, iff it qualifies according to all the ideal rationalities. Otherwise, it is just relatively true, depending on which form of rationality you assess it against.

Is that the best way to interpret these scenarios, do you think?

Open Thread

To do as you like with. Some (non-exhaustive) possibilities:

(i) De-lurk: say 'hi' and introduce yourself if you haven't commented here before
(ii) Request a topic for a future post
(iii) Remind me of an old comment (or post elsewhere) you'd like me to respond to
(iv) Raise a question or discuss a philosophical puzzle that's on your mind

Handicapping Children

Is it permissible for deaf parents to intentionally bring it about (e.g. through genetic screening of embryos - but let's forget about the non-identity problem for now) that their children also be deaf? Laurence Thomas argues the negative:

Quite simply this is none other than a most heinous form of narcissism. The issue is not whether deaf people can have an enormously rich and meaningful life. Obviously they can. They can live a life so rich and meaningful that they are not mindful of their deafness. Indeed, it is impossible that a deaf person may succeed in ways that he would not have succeeded has he not been deaf... [But none of this changes] the fact that by and large hearing is an extraordinary asset. It is precisely because it is such an asset that we marvel at people like Geoff Herbert; for he flourished mightily without it. More accurately, he flourished mightily in spite of a considerable biological disadvantage. He has not shown that there is no difference between being deaf and having hearing. Not at all. Rather, what he has shown is that it is possible for a person to surmount that biological disadvantage with considerable majesty...

Just as there can be no excuse for treating the blind or the deaf as lesser human beings—as surely they are not, there can also be no excuse for turning this truth into what it is not, namely a license to ignore the reality of the difference between a body all of whose parts are functioning properly and one where this is not the case. To render a child deaf or blind at birth is to make it the case that a child is born with body parts that do not function properly. There is no amount of success on the part of any deaf or blind person that defeats this truth.

Does 'proper function' have any intrinsic normative significance, though? Suppose that, for whatever reason, deaf children could be expected to live better and more successful lives than children whose ears worked 'properly'. (Imagine some fantastical affliction that spreads via sound waves, and so affects only those who can hear. Or a world filled, inescapably, with the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard!) Deafness would then be an advantage, and presumably perfectly permissible to gift to one's children, no matter the subversion of biological proper functioning. Indeed, I'm tempted to say, of such a world, that it would be impermissible to intentionally bring one's children to be of able hearing!

It's tempting, then, to think that the morally relevant factor is simply the expected impact on the quality of the child's life (and the impact on others, if there are significant externalities). But here's a trouble case: what if the "disadvantage" is socially constructed, and only arises because others act unjustly? Imagine, for example, an interracial couple in a racist society. Because others in society are racist, dark-skinned children are at a considerable disadvantage. Does that mean it is impermissible for the couple to intentionally bring it about (through genetic screening, etc.) that their child be dark-skinned? (Maybe they think this will help their child 'belong' most fully to the black community, which the parents value so.)

Some deaf people want to claim that this is precisely their situation. Is it? If so, does it follow that it's permissible for them to have intentionally deaf children after all?

What is Democracy?

I think it is possible for majority rule to be, in an important sense, undemocratic. Imagine a society split 60/40 into two comprehensive factions, such that people in the same faction always vote together, and against the other faction. In such a situation, I think it would be misleading to describe a system of majority rule as 'democratic'. It is not the people (generally) who rule here; what we have instead is a mere oligarchy, however large: 'rule by the majority faction'.

What more is required for democracy, then? Total consensus is an unrealistic ideal, and democracy still ought to be possible in the face of robust disagreement. I'd suggest that we instead understand 'rule by the people' to mean that everyone is able to make a meaningful contribution to the collective decision-making process, over time. The votes of a permanent minority are pointless, as they never have a chance of making a difference. But in a more flexible political culture, "the majority" is constantly in flux. Each person will be in the majority on some issues (and in the minority for others), so their will is at least sometimes heeded. In this sense, they all contribute to the state's decision-making. Even if they do not always get their way, there is still a meaningful sense in which we can describe this as a polity ruled by all (diachronically).

However, it is consistent with such 'diachronic democracy' that everyone be completely dogmatic. At least there are no stable factions, and thus no consistently oppressed (or effectively disenfranchised) subclass of the citizenry. But it would still be the case that for each particular decision, those in the minority were simply disregarded, their "contributions" effectively nullified. The system is effectively a rotating oligarchy, where everyone gets to take a turn.

This raises the question: is synchronic democracy - rule by all at once - possible? I want to suggest that it is possible, so long as the political system is sensitive to and responsive to reasons that any may put forward. In the absence of faction and dogmatism -- better, in the presence of civic respect -- even those who are initially in the minority have a real chance of affecting the outcome, by convincing others of the virtues of their position. Since the outcome is influenced (ideally: determined) by the strength of reasons, and these reasons may be contributed by anyone, it follows that any can make a meaningful contribution. 'Democracy' in the fullest sense is thus realizable in the form of deliberative democracy.

Marimba Masterpieces

Oh my god... I love this piece! It's Don Skoog's wonderfully rhythmic Attendance to Ritual, performed by my legendary little brother, Scott Chappell:



See also his solo performance, Memories of the Seashore (I think the section from 2:40 to 3:20 is especially cool).

Merry Christmas!

A puzzling thing about America is that some people seem to think that Christmas is an exclusively Christian holiday, such that anyone who celebrates it is ipso facto celebrating the religion. So we hear "Happy Holidays" and similarly bland, neutral greetings. It's very boring. I heartily recommend that you join the rest of the Western world and treat Christmas as a cultural celebration that anyone can partake in.

Stephen Law has a nice post that highlights the value of community rituals and traditions. He concludes:

Christmas is a celebration of peace and love, and a time to think of others, especially those less fortunate. It is a time at which we come together, at which we feel solidarity and empathy with the rest of humanity. But of course these are values and aspirations that can be shared by non-Christians too. Much of the true meaning of Christmas is open to everyone, whatever their religious beliefs.

I'm suspicious of the idea that there's any one "true meaning" for a cultural tradition like Christmas. It's presumably going to mean different things to different people, and I don't see that anyone has the authority to impose their preferred conception on anyone else. Cultural significance and shared meaning are socially constructed in the strongest sense: it's up to us to make of them what we will. If you imbue the holiday with great religious significance, that's fine. If you don't -- if you just cherish the opportunity to spend time with loved ones, and to participate in tree-decoration, gift-giving, and other fun rituals passed along through the generations -- that's fine too. The meaning(s) of Christmas emerge, bottom-up, from how we choose to conceive of it. To think otherwise is the same fallacy as thinking that dictionaries fix what words mean (and don't get me started on grammar rulebooks!). There is no such top-down authority. "Prescriptivists" might like to boss others around, but we're not obliged to listen to the petty authoritarians.

I leave you with the greatest Xmas song ever:

Have yourself a merry merry Christmas
Have yourself a good time
But remember the kids who got nothin'
While you're drinkin' down your wine

And remember, you can still join the UNICEF Facebook Chain, here.

Atheists at the Gates!

Oh noes! (HT)

The archbishop said "atheistic fundamentalism" was a new phenomenon.

He said it advocated that religion in general and Christianity in particular have no substance, and that some view the faith as "superstitious nonsense".

Shocking, isn't it! Because nobody ever criticized religion before, I'm sure. And only "fundamentalists" are ever critical of others' beliefs. "Some view the faith as 'superstitious nonsense'" - imagine that! Nice people know they're not supposed to think - let alone mention - that the emperor has no clothes. It wouldn't be respectful, you see. Well then, I'm sure his outfit is just splendid. Otherwise he'd feel bad, so it must be true.

The article's tagline tells us: "The Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, has described a rise in 'fundamentalism' as one of the great problems facing the world." I'm curious. Let's hear more:

In his Christmas message, the archbishop said: "Any kind of fundamentalism, be it Biblical, atheistic or Islamic, is dangerous."

Islamic fundamentalists fly planes into buildings. Christian fundamentalists blow up abortion clinics. But most frightening of all is the atheistic variant:

He said it led to situations such as councils calling Christmas "Winterval", schools refusing to put on nativity plays and crosses removed from chapels.

Dangerous stuff.

Death's Deprivations

Galen Strawson writes:

When I... suppose that my death is going to be a matter of instant annihilation, completely unexperienced, completely unforeseen, it seems plain to me that I – the human being that I am now, GS – would lose nothing. My future life or experience doesn’t belong to me in such a way that it’s something that can be taken away from me. It can’t be thought of as possession in that way. To think that it’s something that can be taken away from me is like thinking that life could be deprived of life, or that something is taken away from an existing piece of string by the fact that it isn’t longer than it is. It’s just a mistake.

I find this very puzzling. Surely if the piece of string had the opportunity to be longer, but we cut it short, then something -- the extra length -- is "taken away" from it in virtue of this.

Perhaps Strawson is assuming mereological essentialism, such that if an object were to have additional parts, it would ipso facto be a different object. It would then be metaphysically impossible for anything to be longer than it actually is. But this is surely not true of persons, or the kind of (perhaps metaphysically 'loose') identity we care about. We are not time-of-death essentialists: my Grandad could have lived an extra day, and he would still have been the same guy (in any sense that matters). If that extra day would have contained many joyful experiences that would have enriched his life, then it seems clear that death harmed him by depriving him of these experiences.

So I wonder what Strawson would make of the following simple argument:

(1) One is harmed by an event if said event makes one's life go worse than it otherwise would have.
(2) Death deprives one's life of certain experiences that it would otherwise contain.
(3) Experiences may enriched our lives, and so depriving us of experiences may make our lives go worse than they otherwise would have.
Thus: (C) Death can harm us.

He seems to want to deny premise 2, what with all his talk about how we don't "own" our futures. But that seems indefensible. Consider:

(i) My Grandad could have lived an extra day (were it not for his dying when he did).
(ii) If he had lived an extra day, he would have had certain additional experiences, which he did not actually have.
Thus: (iii) My Grandad's death meant that he did not have certain experiences that he would otherwise have had. [i.e. premise 2 above.]

What step of this argument could the death apologist possibly deny?

Do feelings reflect preferences?

It makes sense to be especially concerned (excited, etc.) about the near future. I previously suggested that once we distinguish feelings from preferences, this premise gives us no reason to doubt that we should be temporally neutral when it comes to the latter. However, Brad Skow argues [draft PDF, p.10] that "biased attitudes [feelings] will be rational just in case biased preferences are." Why? Because, he suggests, the former are typically generated from the latter: we are pleased, for example, when we think that our preferences have been satisfied. The fact that we are more affectively attuned to our future than past welfare is thus taken to indicate a temporally biased preference structure: we must want to be well-off in the future more than the past.

I'm not so sure about this. After all, our affective responses are designed to help us respond successfully to threats and opportunities in our environment, and this changes over time. I should feel fearful and alert when faced with a dangerous predator, and all my time-slices can endorse this. It does not follow that all my time-slices should themselves maintain such a state of arousal –- once the danger has passed, there would be no point. So I agree with Parfit that attention and affect should change over time, in sync with our changing circumstances. But preferences are another matter. I may feel greater excitement about an imminent lesser benefit, as I attend to it in the present, even though I judge the distant greater benefit to be preferable, and so would sooner give up the imminent benefit if forced to choose. Again, note that I do not later regret feeling mounting excitement in anticipation of some immanent event, whereas I would regret choosing a lesser nearby good over a greater distant one. This is a revealing difference. Changing feelings may be endorsed from a timeless perspective, and so are consistent with temporal neutrality, unlike changing preferences.

Still, it would be too quick for me to conclude that a feeling or affective attitude is rationally warranted just because it is advantageous (cf. practical vs. adaptive reasons). So I need to say more about what the adaptive reasons for our attitudes are, exactly, that justifies their temporal partiality without appealing to biased preferences. What facts do our emotions answer to? One possible (rough) answer is that they are to track the normatively salient features of our local environment. This will normally be useful, much as having warranted or true beliefs (tracking the descriptive facts) is normally useful, but warrant and utility may come apart in particular cases.

Anyway, on this view the reason why I shouldn't get too excited about the satisfaction of my past or distant-future preferences is because they're not really relevant to my immediate situation, and it's this that I should be affectively attuned to. This story seems oversimplified though: surely we may reasonably enjoy the thought of future benefits, or savour pleasant memories, etc. Perhaps a better answer is that our emotions respond to normative features of any situation under consideration, and it's just that our attention happens to be focussed more often on the present (and reasonably so).

What do you think is the best way to flesh this out?

How to win the War on Terror instantly

Stop being afraid (HT):

To us, America's fear of terrorism is like a cat being afraid of a mouse. Actually, it's worse than that, because all the terrorists in all the world amount to no more than an anemic mosquito on the snout of a whale. The fact is... We're in far more danger from our own cars than we are from terrorism.

Speaking of whales, The Dominion Post - a major NZ newspaper - has organized a petition against Japan's whaling programme (HT: Luke). I'm not sure whether it'll do any good, but one can always hope -- the issue seems to be gaining political support across New Zealand and Australia, at least...

Philosophers' Carnival #59

... is here!

Also worth checking out: the latest humanist symposium, and the "best of 2007" Carnival of the Liberals.

"Protesting" Philosophy

Hmmm.

The work done on disability by most bioethicists breeds contempt for disabled people and fosters condescending, dismissive and patronizing responses to their testimonials and subjective accounts about their own lives. Imagine what it is like to be a disabled undergraduate or graduate student trying to endure a semester of lectures in which you are given the message that your life is not worth living and should be prevented, that you are deluding yourself about the quality of your own life and the extent of your misfortune. I often wonder why more feminist philosophers are not protesting the fact that this blatant bigotry and prejudice is being written and taught in their departments.

I really detest these sorts of politicized anti-academic complaints. For the sake of the truth, intellectuals must be free to pursue lines of inquiry that some may find offensive. We grant academic freedom because we recognize that this is important, and beneficial in the long run. So if you want to criticize academic work, you should appeal to truth-indicative considerations, i.e. evidence that the claim being made is false or groundless, not sanctimonious moralizing about how "offensive" it is to assert some claims (whether they be true or not).

In this case, surely nobody really denies that a disabled life may well be worth living. But it is an interesting philosophical question whether disabilities in future generations ought to be prevented (through genetic screening and the like). It's an important moral question, and one we should want to learn the truth about. Hence the need for free inquiry. Prima facie, I would think there's a reasonable case to be made for screening out disabilities. If that's true, it can hardly be "bigotry" or "prejudice" to say so. To bandy about such accusations just seems intellectually dishonest -- an attempt to use the moral high ground to bully one's interlocutors into submission without doing the hard work of actually arguing against their position. Most distasteful.

It's a strange mindset - and one which has no place in academia - that would have us respond to philosophical opponents with "protests" rather than counterarguments.

Daemons

Naturally, I'm a tiger at heart:


(Though I'm a little puzzled at how their questions map on to some of the resulting character traits...)

'Misfit' is a relative term

Some commenters here complain about how "Social misfits are really rife in philosophy." It can certainly be discomforting when the people around you do not share your social norms and expectations. But isn't it a bit quick to just assume that it's their fault (and so call them 'jerks', 'boors' and so forth)? Lack of fit is a symmetrical relation, after all. Consider the following complaint:

How many times as a female professor have I gone out to dinner parties with visiting speakers where there were several philosopher’s wives present (my other colleagues mostly being males), where the entire dinner table conversation was devoted to philosophical issues that excluded them? As a woman, I or perhaps simply as someone socialized to be more polite and empathetic, I face the choice then: should I try to join in with “the guys” and prove my mettle, thus ignoring half the people present at the table, or should I attempt to be more congenial and polite and talk to the women?

Now, from my perspective, the whole point of a bunch of philosophers going out to dinner with a visiting speaker is to discuss philosophy. That's what they're there for. To complain that "the entire dinner table conversation was devoted to philosophical issues" seems as bizarre to me as complaining that the entire seminar was dedicated to philosophy when some of the students might rather have discussed the local sports team. The problem does not necessarily lie with the topic of conversation; it could just be that the sports fans are in the wrong place.

More generally, it's nice to accommodate people and make them feel comfortable. But given that the lack of fit between 'nerds' and 'normals' is symmetrical, it's not clear why the norms of the latter group should always take precedence. I mean, there's no surer way to make me uncomfortable than to put me in a situation where one is expected to engage in small talk. That's just a fact about me and how I relate to others. Many people (outside of academia) seem to be just the opposite: uncomfortable with serious discussion, comfortable with small talk. That's a fact about them and how they relate to others. Each of these two personality types may find it difficult to relate to the other. Objectively speaking, that's the end of the story. But in practice the extroverts are socially dominant, so they lay fault on the nerds and introverts for failing to conform to their preferred (arbitrary) norms. What they don't seem to realize is that they are equally failing to conform to our preferred norms.

Biased Accommodations

As a society we tend to be much more accommodating of some commitments (e.g. religious or familial) than others (hobbies, etc.). Is this fair? Infinite Injury offers an example from UC Berkeley:

The clear sense these rules convey is that the instructor is expected to bend their rules if they might create difficulty or hardship for someone who wishes to respect a religious obligation but that a student who is going to be absent for some other extra-curricular activity undertakes a greater obligation if they want to miss class. Now one might justify such a policy on the grounds that some athletes or musicians are going to be out of town on a large number of dates or that religion is more important to people. However, it would be easy to give every student a certain number of absences they can exercise using the easier standard and there are many students who are more casual about the religious observances they ask to be excused for then athletes are about their games...

The things that we [non-believers] may really really care about get no accommodation while just someone has a ridiculous belief about some historical event we have to bend over to accommodate them. Now I fully understand that the potential for religious discrimination is great but if we weren’t implicitly endorsing religion as something more important than say a rocketry hobby we would use some fully neutral policy that gave everyone the chance to do what they really cared about.

That seems exactly right to me. For a more controversial example, then, consider the view that we ("society", i.e. employers and institutions) ought to make a special effort to accommodate those who choose to raise children. I'm sympathetic to this view. But is it biased? Why is the choice to raise children more worthy of accommodation than the choice to write a novel or compose a symphony in one's spare time? Perhaps we ought to be more accommodating in general, not singling out 'family support' as a uniquely worthy form of support. Fairer, perhaps, to enable individuals to pursue whatever projects are most important to them -- and for many this will happen to be childrearing, but for others it may not.

What is the best argument for singling out childcare? (I would look for consequentialist considerations, e.g. the impact that parenting has on the next generation. But let's bracket that for now.) Feminists sometimes claim that lack of support for women who want to both work and raise children is sexist. But it isn't entirely clear why this is so. (We can't always get everything we want. That's an annoying fact of life, not necessarily a sign of oppression.) Back to II:

The arguments given about the problems for women with babies in academia all focused on the extra time and energy women put into childcare. Now if women put more effort into children simply because they find raising children more rewarding (relative to men) the fact more women than men drop out to raise children is actually the desired outcome. It’s what would result from perfectly fair mutually beneficial trades. On the other hand if you think that the extra effort women put into childrearing isn’t the result of fair deals then the target should be on encouraging women to put less effort into childrearing, not making the unfair division of labor slightly less bad for women.

And a thought-provoking analogy:

Men are underrepresented in K-12 teaching. The reason most men abandon teaching is the difficulty of taking a high paying job in business and being a teacher. Therefore we should provide special benefits and accommodations to let men teach while still working as businessmen in the day. Obviously this argument is fallacious. If people are leaving some profession because they’ve found a better offer they don’t deserve special treatment as a result and it should only be fixed if luring them back provides a good value. Thus whether or not this is a leak we should be plugging is an empirical economic question and it’s only in the face of real data on marginal costs and productivities that we can answer whether or not we should address the ‘problem’.

Perhaps childrearing and religion are presupposed as normal components of the good life, and so it is thought that they should not be subject to trade-offs in the manner of our (other) chosen values. Writing a novel is a choice you make, and a somewhat peculiar one at that; having kids, on the other hand, is simply par for the course in a 'normal' life. This difference in normality may be thought to underwrite the special obligation to accommodate the one choice more than the other. But why should normality matter?

Intention and (Im)permissibility

We often think that intentions play a crucial role in explaining the im/permissibility of actions. (Compare 'collateral damage' in strategic bombing vs. intentionally targeting the population. Or buying your neighbour rat poison to help him kill rats vs. to help him kill his wife.) But Scanlon offers a nice general strategy to undermine this position: (1) Consider the impermissible action. (2) Cut out the bad intentions, and suppose the agent is instead simply acting negligently. (3) Notice that the result is still impermissible.

For example, if you have good grounds for believing that your neighbour is trying to kill his wife, it's presumably impermissible to buy him some poison, no matter how empty (of bad intentions or good sense alike) your head is at the time. What matters to the question of permissibility is the expected consequences of the action, and your private intentions make no difference here. We are tempted to think intentions matter in the original cases because they covary with other factors that matter, e.g. what you can reasonably expect your neighbour to do with the poison. But once we separate them out (by appealing to cases of negligence) we see that it's these other factors, and not one's intentions, that typically matter for questions of permissibility.

To reinforce this conclusion, notice how bizarre it would be if perverse motivations could typically render otherwise permissible actions impermissible. Scanlon discusses the case of a doctor justifiably administering painkillers that will foreseeably end the life of a terminally ill patient. Supposing this is permissible in the ordinary case, does it change when the doctor happens to delight in having an excuse to kill his patients? Should he say, "Sorry, I can't deliver the lethal painkillers, because I know that if I did so I would intend not just the cessation of your pain, but also your subsequent death. Not that it would change anything, but you know, it's impermissible to intentionally kill people. Good luck finding a doctor who intends only the former of the two predictable consequences of the procedure!"

This is a second general strategy that can serve to undermine purported links between intention and permissibility: just combine the two contrast cases into one where the agent may have either intention in performing the action, and note that it would be completely bizarre for this to affect its permissibility. In the bombing case, for example, suppose a single potential missile target could serve both military and terrorist objectives. In deliberating about whether to press the launch button, must the general first introspect on her own motives? If she finds that she intends the civilian casualties, should she summon her more pure-of-heart lieutenant to press the button instead? Who could possibly care?

What matters for permissibility are the reasons for action that exist in the world. Once we establish that there is sufficient reason to bomb the target, we've established that the action is permissible. The actor's intentions don't change the moral status of the action. What they should influence is our assessment of the agent. But that is to raise questions of blameworthiness, not permissibility.

Dogmatism and Political Illegitimacy

Suppose a faction rises to political power, and subsequently imposes their will without regard for the claims of others in society. This looks to be an abuse of power. Why? I'm tempted by the following answer: political legitimacy requires that the State be sufficiently responsive to reasons. If it were not relatively reliable, it would have no claim to authority, for legitimacy attaches only to procedures that have an appreciable tendency to generate substantively good outcomes. (Cf. Estlund on Epistemic Proceduralism and the analogy with the jury system.) But to be unreceptive to others' arguments is one obvious way to lack the requisite sensitivity to reasons. The closed-minded exercise of power is thus inherently illegitimate.

(It's worth noting that such illegitimacy can arise even in a democracy: the "tyranny of the majority" is a very real threat in a democratic society where first-order sectarianism commands greater loyalty than metapolitical values. So it is not enough for a polity to hold elections and empower the majority. Much depends on the manner in which this power is wielded. In particular, a legitimate democracy must be guided by a widespread commitment to pursue the common good in co-operation with all others who share this commitment.)

I think the problem with dogmatic sectarianism is not just epistemic, though. There also seems to me something important about the idea of civic respect, i.e. respect for the capacity of other agents to contribute to collective decision-making. I'd be curious to hear what readers make of the following argument (which I first offered in comments elsewhere):

1. (Legitimate) Politics is the collective endeavour of co-existence, i.e. deciding together how we are to live together.

2. Receptivity and civic respect are preconditions for this collective activity.

Thus,
3. Dogmatism is inherently illegitimate in the political sphere.

Blame vs. Forgiveness

Suppose we accept Scanlon's account of blame as a matter of responding to another's blameworthiness by downgrading your relationship with them. Forgiveness may then be understood as involving the same judgment of blameworthiness, but where one's response is to instead choose to restore the relationship. Is this always better? Scanlon ('Blame', p.49) follows Pamela Hieronymi in suggesting that forgiveness is only warranted "provided that the person who is to be forgiven acknowledges the wrongness of what she did and takes steps to reestablish her relations with the injured party on an acceptable footing." He continues:

The complete rejection of blame would amount to unconditional forgiveness... Assuming that one's relationship with a person has requirements that he or she can fall short of, the rejection of blame would either involve denying that the other person's actions can have meaning that impairs this relationship or denying that when this happens some adjustment in one's own attitudes is appropriate. The former involves an attitude of superiority toward the person in question (something like the attitude of a parent toward a very young child) and thus represents a failure to take that person seriously as a participant in the relationship. The latter involves adopting an attitude of inferiority that is demeaning to oneself.

Is this excessively stringent? What if one decides to "let it go" on instrumental grounds, say because the psychological or social costs of blame simply don't seem worth it? I assume Scanlon would be okay with this, since it need not involve either of the problematic denials mentioned above.

In class, Michael raised a really interesting comparison to Nagel's 'Concealment and Exposure' (see my past discussion), and especially the point that past conflicts may be tactfully ignored (i.e. not raised to common salience, even as both parties remain privately aware of it) for the sake of maintaining smooth social interactions in the present. But is this sort of superficial tact a reason not to genuinely blame, i.e. revise one's conception of the relationship, or simply not to publicly express one's blame?

Blame and Disappointment

Scanlon suggests that to blame someone is to (negatively) revise one's relationship with that person due to judging that they are blameworthy, i.e. that "there is something about the person that impairs one's relationship with him or her" ('Blame', p.1). Given this close personal focus, Scanlon suggests that the positive correlate of blame is not praise, but gratitude. In class yesterday, Michael made the interesting suggestion that the negative correlate of gratitude, if that's what Scanlon wants to talk about, is more like disappointment than blame. In this post, I want to defend Scanlon's conception of blame, and clearly differentiate it from the broader category of disappointment.

First, note that we must distinguish the state of blame from censorious expressions of blame:

To modify one's expectations and intentions toward a person in the way I have described, in response to that person's deficient attitudes -- to conclude that one can no longer interact with that person as a friend -- is to blame that person in the sense I have in mind, whether or not one also feels resentful or indignant. One might just feel sad. (pp.14-15)

This can't be a sufficient condition as stated, for we may withdraw from another in response to their deficient attitudes without blaming them in any sense. Tristram suggests a nice contrast here between disrespect and low self-esteem. If a (supposed) friend is consistently disrespectful and inconsiderate, this is the sort of failing we consider blameworthy. But if another's low self-esteem makes them difficult or unpleasant to interact with, we may consider it a character flaw which justifies us in revising our attitudes towards them - it may reduce our desire to befriend them, say - but we wouldn't blame them for it. It is more like a case of brute difference in tastes or interests, a mere "drifting apart" that - although a response to "something about the person" - does not reflect any violation of the relationship on their part.

There was much discussion in class about the "reasonable expectations" that people may have of each other, and whether it is necessarily blameworthy to disappoint these. It seems clear that it is not, at least if your expectation is merely based upon general epistemic clues and not any kind of promise or other normative commitment on the part of the other person. But I don't think this is a problem for Scanlon's account; at least, I read him as being peculiarly concerned about the reasonable expectations that are internal to a relationship, deriving from its constitutive norms, and not just any old expectation that you might (however reasonably) have come by and hope not to have disappointed. Let me emphasize a key passage from p.14:

[T]he way in which a friendship can end when the parties drift apart [does not involve any] violation of the standards of friendship, and this is what differentiates [it] from the kind of impairment I am concerned with. Impairment of that kind occurs when one party, while standing in the relevant relation to another person, holds attitudes toward that person that are ruled out by the standards of that relationship, thus making it appropriate for the other party to have attitudes other than those that the relationship usually involves.

The answer to Tristram's objection, then, is that disrespect is a violation of the internal standards of friendship, whereas low self-esteem is not. The latter is still a flaw, to be sure, and one that may have the effect of impairing your relationship in some sense, but only in an 'external' or instrumental kind of way. It is not intrinsically antithetical to the norms of friendship in the way that disrespect is. This difference explains why the one flaw, but not the other, warrants the friend's blame. Both, though, may be disappointments.

UNICEF Facebook Chain

Peter Unger writes (via Brian Berkey):

Now that December is here, I’m contacting all my Facebook Friends, and then some, to help me generate a “Facebook Chain of Giving” for UNICEF.

Unfortunately, there’s a 4.5% multiple-party processing charge on any of these donations. So, for my recent Kick-Off donation of $1000 – to forge the first link of this chain – some $45 went to just lubricating the Facebook pipeline – and only $955 went to UNICEF. (Actually, it’s even a bit worse than that, but the details will bore you to death.) So if you give $10, then, in a parallel way, (over) 45 cents will go to lubricating that pipeline, and (less than) $9.55 will go to UNICEF.

Still, if we can generate a big chain, the lubrication money will be very well spent – gaining many first-time donors of record for UNICEF, quite a few of whom may go on to give quite a bit, over the next several decades: Of course, and as is all too well-known, when even cherry-picked charitable folks are approached by UNICEF in conventional ways –as with direct mailings – hardly ever do more than 1 percent of the recipients give any positive response at all, even as much as a single dollar. And, even with the likes of a Tsunami having occurred only recently, less than 3 percent will give even a single dollar.

So, let’s have a go at this – and see how we fare. To join the chain, you needn’t give more than $10 (for which amount you’ll receive documentation for a tax-deduction) and, you needn’t contact more than two of your Facebook Friends about this hopefully growing chain – who aren’t already links in the chain.

At least at this starting stage, I think you all may be nearly as optimistic as I am. It’s a fun thing – with lots of potential for many long Facebook News Feeds. Indeed, in the first couple of days, this effort has already seen a pretty impressive result - surprisingly impressive, in fact.

On behalf of the vulnerable children in the world’s horrendously poor “bottom billion”, and resolving to remain your Facebook Friend, in any event, I’ll presume to thank you in advance,

It's a neat idea. I've signed up and made a donation. If you would like to do the same, you can join my link of the UNICEF chain by clicking here! [From there you can: (1) join the group; (2) donate $10 or more; (3) invite your friends to do likewise.]

Philosophical Influences

Which philosophers have most influenced your thought? My top three would have to be:

1. Derek Parfit (moral philosophy, deflationary/"reductionist" metaphysics)
2. David Chalmers (deflationary metaphysics, 2-Dism, a priori entailments)
3. Michael Smith (rationality / coherence, ideal agents and constructed truthmakers) 

After that it becomes less clear, but I guess I could round out my top 5 with:

4. J.S. Mill / R.M. Hare (indirect utilitarianism).
5. G.A. Cohen / Liz Anderson (money and freedom)

There should probably be a deliberative democrat on the list there somewhere, but I haven't really noticed any one in particular. I guess Habermas has been influential here -- but I've never actually read him myself. Rawls on public reason is another possibility. Back to metaphysics, David Lewis (4d-ism, counterparts, etc.) makes ten. 

Your turn!

Philosophers' Carnival #58

... is here!

Democracy, Setup and Control

In our political philosophy seminar we've recently been looking at the question of how 'democracy', understood as a kind of popular control, might be realized through representation. One obvious possibility involves the use of (e.g. election) incentives, sanctions, etc., to encourage political representatives to track the popular will. But this won't extend to citizen's juries or statistically representative assemblies, where the participants are ordinary people selected by lot and so not subject to any such incentives. In Pettit's terms, they act as 'proxies' rather than 'deputies', indicating rather than responding to the will of the general population.

Pettit argues that this still constitutes a form of popular control. After all, the assembly was set up in this way (i.e. by lot) precisely because it may be expected to accurately reflect what the population wants. If it didn't, they would've set things up differently. Still, we need to be clear about the scope of the control implied here.

I think it's not really the case that the population controls the assembly's decision in any strict sense. After setting things up, they have no further influence on the assembly, and so (a fortiori) cannot raise the causal probability of this assembly's decision going as they prefer (as per Pettit's analysis of control). Rather, stepping back to before the assembly was chosen, we see there is some popular control over the decision-making process in the abstract. For, by instituting the assembly, the people may raise the probability that the subsequent decision is made as they would wish (in contrast to, say, letting the richest person decide). At this level of abstraction, the possibility of alternative setups (decision procedures) is part of the comparison class. But this is no longer the case once we start talking more specifically about the assembly's decision. Popular control does not extend to this local specification of the event. It is merely general: control over the initial setup, not over the decision reached by the particular procedure.

Indeed, as I objected in class, it isn't clear that the status of the agent (assembly) as "indicative" of the principal (broader population) is playing any essential role here at all. Instead, I think all the work is being done by the principal's control over the setup, i.e. their ability to select the agent. Although it makes most sense to choose an agent that you expect to mirror your own preferences, there are other options. A perverse principal might select an "anti-indicator" agent who is expected to choose precisely the opposite of what they want! The control exercised by the principal over the ultimate outcome is exactly the same in either case. So, as came out in further discussion, what matters here is not that the agent is an accurate indicator of oneself (as principal), but just that they exhibit some systematic predictability, which the principal can aim at (perhaps perversely) in empowering them.

See also: Jane Mansbridge on selection vs. control.

Implicit Interference

Does economic redistribution score badly in terms of negative liberty? A good friend recently suggested that I was advocating increased "interference" in people's lives on this basis. But this strikes me as mistaken (an incredibly common - almost universal - mistake, but no less wrong for that). As I explain in 'Wealth and Liberty', the institution of property is inherently coercive:

[I]n a wealthy society like ours, no individual lacks the physical or material capacity to meet their needs. There are plenty of resources nearby, sitting in shop windows. Anyone is capable of taking those resources. Their problem is that other people in society won't let them. Security guards will interfere, using force to block the individual's access, or to reclaim what they now call "stolen" goods.

(That's not to say we should do away with property, or anything silly like that. Some forms of interference are justified, after all. But we shouldn't let that blind us to its coercive elements, which - upon appreciating - we may seek to mitigate.)

Now, my friend objected that theft is relatively rare, and thus taxation licenses far more interference than do exclusive property rights. But this is irrelevant. Imagine a tyrant whose totalitarian control is so ubiquitous that nobody ever dares step out of line. He thus never actually has to actively exercise his power by interfering with people. That doesn't mean the people are free, of course. The violation of negative liberty instead comes from the threat of interference.

Contrary to my friend's suggestion, then, a relative lack of theft does not mean that property rights are less of an imposition against our negative liberty. Quite the opposite: the imposition is so complete that most of us would not dream of acting against it. We fully internalize the fact that we are not at liberty to take goods that are deemed to be "owned" by another. This societal ordering closes off to us actions that we could otherwise have performed. (Again, it's probably for the best, but one shouldn't pretend it's not a form of ubiquitous interference that has a huge impact on the options available to us every day of our lives.)

It's worth noting that this sort of implicit interference is distinct from Pettit's notion of domination (the modal capacity of one person to interfere with another). If Nora can do whatever she wants, but it is by her husband Torvald's leave - a general permission he could, but let us suppose won't actually, withdraw - then she has negative liberty but suffers domination. Pettit argues for the importance of domination by asking us to imagine that Nora learns of Torvald's power over her, and thus becomes servile, making extra efforts to please him and ensure that he never feels any need to exercise his power by interfering with her. Clearly, as Pettit says, Nora's freedom has not thus increased, even if active interference is now even less likely than before. But my earlier remarks show that this is no argument for non-domination. What Nora suffers here is an increase of implicit interference: the threat of potential interference shapes her behaviour, obstructing her from behaving the way she might prefer or freely choose to, were it not for the shadow of the tyrant.

The difference between negative liberty and non-domination is instead seen in cases where actual non-interference is guaranteed, e.g. by the potential dominator's reliable preference not to interfere. It may be that Torvald could interfere if he wanted, but so long as he actually doesn't want to (and this is certain not to change), who cares? David Braddon-Mitchell asks us to imagine a fantastic neuroscience which allows us to prove to Nora that there is zero probability of Torvald actually interfering with what she wants in life. Why, then, should she care about merely counterfactual coercion? (In practice, of course, there are no such guarantees. So we have very good practical reasons for fearing and opposing domination. But these thought experiments show that the value is instrumental.) Pettit responds that insofar as we think of each other as agents, such deterministic guarantees are ruled out. But that just shows the value of non-domination to be ineliminable, not non-derivative.