Ubuntu

I must thank Andrew Cullison for introducing me to Ubuntu ("Linux for Human Beings") last month. To pass along the favour, I'd introduce it as follows:

Ubuntu : Windows  ::  Firefox : Internet Explorer

It's free (and open), easy to install and customize, very fast, extremely secure -- what more could you want? The OS comes with all the essential free software -- Firefox, Open Office, etc. -- and you can easily download more from the 'Add/remove' item in the main menu. You can even download 'Wine', a Windows emulator, in case you have programs that only run on the inferior Microsoft product.

One minor annoyance is that because it only comes with support for open formats, there's a bit of extra setup required if you want to be able to play mp3 files, commercial DVDs, etc. But the instructions are easy enough to follow, and it only takes a minute. Another minor difficulty is that certain proprietary packages (e.g. Skype) are not initially accessible through Ubuntu's package managers at all, but again it is easy enough to add outside applications when desired (as I was relieved to recently discover). My next task is to learn how to use the terminal.

Any other downsides? There aren't many commercial games made for Linux, so hard-core gamers probably won't be converting any time soon. But there's plenty there for casual use -- including free clones of Civilization, SimCity, etc. I guess the main negative factor is just the bother of switching. It doesn't take much work though, and the advantages are pretty significant.

One big plus for me was that my old OS (Windows Vista Home Edition) didn't have networking capabilities. Once I switched to Ubuntu, I could log on to the Princeton network and create my university webpage from my laptop. Very convenient.

But again, in the long run it's probably the extra speed and security that are the main advantages of Ubuntu. (And perhaps the feel-good factor if you like to support the Open Source movement!) No more viruses, system crashes, and other staples of computing on MS Windows.

To get Ubuntu, simply follow these installation instructions. (Note that you can try out Ubuntu from the installation CD, to make sure you like it, prior to installing.) Pass it on.

Inline Comment Form

At long last, the folks at Blogger have created an inline comment form, which I'm now testing out.  Email me if you have any problems using it.

Campaign Finance Reform

Should campaign donations and spending be regulated, and if so, how? Limiting donations makes sense, in hopes of preventing regulatory capture and the other terrible consequences of moneyed interests gaining influence over politicians. But if one can raise large sums from a multitude of small donations, is there any reason to want to cap this?

One might defend spending caps by pointing out that campaigns that spend more on advertising gain an "unfair" advantage. We don't want something as vulgar as money to influence our elections. But there will always be non-rational factors influencing voters; if not advertising exposure, then plain old name recognition. That's surely no better (and maybe worse; at least advertising has some informational content).

Rather than seeking to limit campaign spending, it might make sense to offer extra public funds if needed. (One possibly tricky question is how to set the qualifying criteria, though I guess they already do this somehow -- I'm not familiar with the details.) But spending caps just don't make any sense, unless you think that official campaign advertising has zero or negative informational content at the margin. (Maybe they just spread lies.)

But rather than directly funding the candidates, couldn't we find a better use of public funds, i.e. some form of political spending that would increase the rationality of the election more than subsidizing ads for the underdog? (That's not exactly asking a lot.) For example: how about funding ads for FactCheck.org and similar non-partisan civic groups? (I guess such groups always face the risk of partisan takeover, and the allocation of such funding would be highly contested, but surely there must be some transparently fair way to arrange this?) Or, better yet, institute Ackerman and Fishkin's idea of a nationwide "Deliberation Day":

Registered voters will be called together in neighborhood meeting places, in small groups of fifteen, and larger groups of five hundred, to discuss the central issues raised by the campaign. Each deliberator will be paid $150 for the day's work of citizenship. ...

If Deliberation Day succeeded, everything else would change: the candidates, the media, the activists, the interest groups, the spin doctors, the advertisers, the pollsters, the fund raisers, the lobbyists, and the political parties. All would have no choice but to adapt to a more attentive and informed public

Confusing 'Collectivism'

Some further thoughts on Boaz's op-ed:

Obama and McCain are telling us Americans that our normal lives are not good enough, that pursuing our own happiness is "self-indulgence," that building a business is "chasing after our money culture," that working to provide a better life for our families is a "narrow concern."

They're wrong. Every human life counts. Your life counts. You have a right to live it as you choose, to follow your bliss.

(1) It's actually not clear from the proffered quotes that both candidates really are 'collectivists' as opposed to anti-egoists who think that we should care about other individuals' interests besides our own. Only McCain speaks of "a national purpose that is greater than our individual interests [plural]." I don't see anything in Obama's remarks that is inconsistent with a utilitarian's concern for all individuals as such. (He says, "our individual salvation depends on collective salvation." I'm not entirely sure what this means, but a common theme of Obama's is how people's interests are interrelated -- e.g. racism makes everyone worse off, not just blacks -- so I'd guess what he means is simply that our self-interest is aligned with making others in society better off too.)

(2) "Every human life counts." What ridiculous rhetoric. Does Boaz seriously believe that Obama disagrees? Indeed, wouldn't this support his anti-egoism, if anything? (It's not just oneself that matters, but everyone else too.)

(3) How is it that so many libertarians seem incapable of recognizing the basic conceptual distinction between individualism and egoism?

Rights aren't Recommendations

A common response to moral censure is to insist that one had "a right" to act as they did. But that just means that they were at liberty to do it, which may never have been in dispute. We may all agree that the option was on the table, and just as well, but the question is whether it's the option one should have chosen. Note that your rights speak to the moral status of others' actions, not your own. From the mere fact that it would be wrong for others to obstruct you from doing X, it does not follow that X is something you should do.

So it is odd to see Cato VP David Boaz write:

Obama and McCain are telling us Americans that our normal lives are not good enough, that pursuing our own happiness is "self-indulgence," that building a business is "chasing after our money culture," that working to provide a better life for our families is a "narrow concern."

They're wrong. Every human life counts. Your life counts. You have a right to live it as you choose, to follow your bliss.

I also have a right to drop out of school and spend all day getting drunk and watching TV, but that doesn't mean it's a good way for me to live my life, nor that I wouldn't be open to censure for doing so. One might reasonably object to communitarian ideals, I suppose, but this would require philosophical resources that go beyond mere 'rights', to elucidate a positive conception of the good that supports individual interests and personal projects.

On any sane view, some ways of life are going to be better than others. So it's at least possible that "our normal lives are not good enough". That's going to depend on (1) your vision of the good life; and (2) how well 'normal lives' in our society are living up to this ideal. How we have a right to live is nothing to do with it.

Follow-up: Confusing 'Collectivism'

Annulment and the Essence of Marriage

How curious:

A French court has overturned an order annulling the marriage of a French Muslim woman who is accused by her husband of lying about being a virgin... Under the French civil code, a marriage can be annulled if a spouse has lied about an "essential quality" of the relationship.

I guess that makes sense. But it raises an interesting philosophical question: what determines the 'essential qualities' of a relationship? It would seem to largely depend upon mutual expectations. Though that's not quite right: one might have bizarre and baseless expectations, after all, and it's at least conceivable that both partners might - by sheer coincidence - fall into the same delusion that some X was central to their relationship, even when there's not any reason why this would be so (they've never even discussed X, it's not a common norm in their culture, etc.). So X might thereby be a mutual expectation in some (purely descriptive) sense, even though there's no way it could really be a norm governing their relationship. So we should revise this account to instead say that the 'essential qualities' of the relationship are determined by what would be reasonable expectations for all involved -- and not just any old epistemic expectation, but a reasonable belief about the internal standards or norms of the relationship.

To bring out the intuition that annulment is appropriate in such a case, suppose one's fiance has deceived you about their sex. You get married, and only later discover - to your surprise - that yours was actually a gay marriage (supposing this is legal). This would seem reasonable grounds for annulment (at least against our cultural background -- you might imagine a society where this wouldn't be considered significant): the 'marriage' lacked informed consent in a relevant respect - this isn't the kind of relationship you thought it was - and so should be considered void.

Are there any constraints on the substantive content of such norms? I don't see why there should be. It's possible to have perverse relationships, governed by bad or inappropriate norms. (The conservative norm of virginity seems such an example. We may disapprove, but I don't think we can very well deny that virginity really was a precondition for the marital relationship as the man in this case understood it. We might similarly imagine a norm of 'blue blood' governing aristocratic marriages, such that faked royalty might be grounds for annulling a royal wedding. You might even have racist norms governing the relationships between KKK members, I suppose.)

A further interesting question is whether the relevant norms can be peculiar to the individual couple, or whether they must be based on broader cultural norms. Suppose that instead of virginity, the man confessed a comparably inane obsession, say with blonde hair. After the wedding, he learns that his bleached spouse had lied to him about being a natural blonde. Could that possibly be grounds for annulment? That seems weird. But maybe the problem is not so much the unshared nature of his peculiar obsession, but rather its free-floating status in his worldview. Perhaps if blondeness was tied to other peculiar beliefs and practices of his, so that investing it with such significance would be somewhat more comprehensible, then we would be more sympathetic.

Any thoughts?

P.S. The original article reports some bizarre objections to the original annulment ruling. Conservative politicians claimed the ruling was somehow "incompatible with France's secular principles" -- as if secularism meant you weren't allowed to recognize the different norms and values that define different people's relationships? Or, even weirder:

The Lille court's decision has also angered feminists who say it amounts to a fatwa against women's liberty... Feminist groups said they were ashamed to see the ruling adding it would allow men legally to reject women on the grounds they were not virgins.

Can anyone make sense of this? The freedom to deceive someone into marrying you under false pretenses is not, I would have thought, a principle of "women's liberty" worth defending.

Suspecting Wishful Thinking

It's curious how often people accuse each other of rationalizing, or holding a position "because they want to believe it" rather than because they have genuine reasons for thinking it true. Sometimes people do engage in wishful thinking, of course. (Sometimes they even admit as much -- e.g. some theists explicitly cite pragmatic reasons, such as 'comfort', for believing in God.) So sometimes such accusations may be warranted. But often they're simply a result of ignorance of the other person's reasons -- if you don't really understand why they hold the position they do, it's all too easy to imagine that they do so for no good reason at all, in which case less charitable explanations will suggest themselves. Such dismissal carries an obvious epistemic risk, however, since you lose the opportunity to learn about their reasons if you assume from the start that they don't have any. I can think of two such misaccusations from my own experience:

(1) Consciousness. It's a common trope that "people" reject physicalism in favour of some form of dualism simply because they want to believe that humans are "special". No doubt this is true of some people. But it certainly isn't true of every critic of physicalism (much though some might like to pretend otherwise -- using a straw-man foil for rhetorical effect). If anything, I would prefer that physicalism be true (as you can see from my 'Wishful Thinking Alert' a few years ago). I've just come to the honest conclusion that the weight of arguments is against it. You can accuse me of bad judgment in this respect, but you can't accuse me of wishful thinking.

(2) Disputing alleged 'obligations'. Eric Schwitzgebel recently wrote:

I suspect that if, indeed, ethicists don't tend to consider voting a duty that may be post-hoc rationalization rather than genuine moral insight.

But, again, I personally enjoy voting and similar political acts (serving on a jury, etc.), so my belief that it is not morally obligatory certainly isn't a rationalization of personal preference.

I find the above quote particularly strange, because you would think the reasonable prior assumption would be to favour the experts over folk opinion in case of disagreement. (Several commenters raised similar concerns about Eric's project, here.) Surely if anyone has reasons worth considering on a controversial moral question, it's going to be moral philosophers! So that strikes me as an especially inadvisable case of alleging rationalization.

Are there any general rules on offer here? Wishful thinking is an epistemic vice -- a form of irrationality -- so I guess one's readiness to make such an accusation should reflect one's prior judgment of how unreasonable (how poor an epistemic agent) one's interlocutor is.

Recent Readings

• Philosophers' Carnival #71


• Jonathan Ichikawa's paper 'Who Needs Intuitions?'. (Highly recommended!) Jonathan argues against the common view that philosophers rely on intuitions (in any problematic sense), arguing instead that "it is the [propositional] content of the intuition, not the [psychological] fact of the intuition itself, that plays a key evidentiary role".


• Michael Gill's 'Moral Rationalism vs. Moral Sentimentalism: Is Morality More Like Math or Beauty?" Introductory, easy to read. Makes the nice point that even 'sentimental' aesthetic judgments may require a great deal of thought (to ensure that one's sentiments are responding to an accurate appreciation of the object in question). But I was bothered by the overly hasty argument that aesthetic claims are contingent because there are other possible worlds for which "what we see as beautiful on this world we will see as non-beautiful on that." What if the counterfactual judgments of non-beauty derive from insensitivity to the relevant (beauty-making) features of the object?


• Chris Heathwood's 'Subjective Desire Satisfactionism' points out that desire theories of welfare have a problem with 'changing desires' or intra-personal conflict. For example: what if one's past self stubbornly has an unconditional desire to have rock music play at her 60th Birthday party, though the 60-yr old self would hate this? Surely the past desire shouldn't count. On the other hand, Chris points out, we shouldn't ignore all desires about non-present times: "If I strongly want it to be true that, in my drunkenness last night, I did not disgrace myself, surely... this desire is relevant to [my] welfare." Chris' solution is subjective desire satisfactionism, whereby one is made better off by having a belief and a desire both directed at the same proposition at the same time. (Note that it's a form of hedonism: all that matters is your mental states, not whether they are true in fact.) I'm thoroughly unsympathetic to the theory in general, but it's a nice response to the temporal problem, at least.
  
  (My own response is to insist that a bearer of welfare - a person - must not have temporally inconsistent global preferences after idealization. If young Ellie and old Ellie have different ideal preferences about the 60th birthday party, then - ipso facto - they are two different people: multiple personalities, you might say.)

Guantanamo

This may be old news to some, but if you haven't heard the 'Habeas Schmabeas' episode of This American Life, I highly recommend it. It describes how innocent people were turned over to U.S. authorities as alleged "Al Qaeda agents" in exchange for bounty money. They were transported to Guantanamo, tortured, eventually found to be innocent, and sometimes still not released nonetheless. From the transcript [pdf]:

HITT: As best as we can tell, Badr Zaman Badr and his brother were imprisoned in Guantanamo for three years for telling a joke. Actually, for telling two jokes. They ran a satire magazine in Pakistan that poked fun at corrupt clerics. Sort of the Pashtu edition of “The Onion.” [...] So after hearing the punch line explained 150 times, we finally got the joke, and sent Badr and his brother home. It had been three years since the Pakistani army surrounded their house in Peshawar, came into their living room which is lined with wall-to-wall bookcases, and arrested them. That’s Badr’s version of why we jailed him; here’s President Bush’s:

PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH: These are people that got scooped off a battlefield, attempting to kill U.S. troops. And, uh, I want to make sure before they’re released that they don’t come back to kill again.

Is Guantanamo a campful of terrorists, or a campful of mistakes? In a new study by Seton Hall’s law school, researchers simply went to the trouble of reading the 517 Guantanamo case files released by the Pentagon. Here’s what they found:

Only 5% of our detainees at Guantanamo were “scooped up” by American troops, on the battlefield or anywhere else. Five percent. The rest? We never saw them fighting.

And here’s something else: Only 8% of the detainees in Guantanamo are classified by the Pentagon as Al Qaeda fighters. In fact, Michael Donleavy, head of interrogations at Guantanamo, complained in 2002 that he was receiving too many “Mickey Mouse” prisoners.

In 2004, the New York Times did a huge investigation, interviewing dozens of high level military intelligence and law enforcement officials in the US, Europe and the Middle East. There was a surprising consensus: that out of nearly 600 men at Guantanamo, the number who could give us useful information about Al Qaeda was “only a relative handful.”

On the innocent detainees:

HITT: The government says that they would release Adel and the other Uighurs, if only it could find another country to send them to. I have an idea. Adel could go 90 miles north to Miami where’s there’s an entire city of anti-Communists. Or he could be sent to one of the largest Uighur ex-pat communities: in Washington D.C. So, why aren’t we going to be seeing Adel anytime soon? Here’s Willett [their lawyer]:

WILLETT: I’ll tell you what I think the answer is, although no one from the government would admit this. I think the answer is that if anybody actually met these guys, actually looked at them, and took their pictures and, you know, had them on TV shows or the radio, they’d be shocked. Because they’ve been told for four years that the people at Guantanamo are terrorists, that they’re the worst of the worst. And you take a look at Adel, you’re gonna suddenly realize you’ve been lied to for a long time. He struck me when I first met him like the kind of kid your college age kid would bring home – his roommate, his buddy from college, home for the weekend. People who meet Adel for the first time, they walk out of the meeting and, and, their jaws are a little unsprung. And they don’t say much, because it’s hitting them like a ton of bricks. You know, “This guy’s in Guantanamo?”

HITT: If Willett’s right, this gets to the heart of habeas. The whole point is that the king shouldn’t have the right to just detain somebody because it would be an embarrassment to have the guy free. The Pentagon has an acronym for people like the Uighurs. It’s pronounced “N-LEC”. It means No Longer Enemy Combatant. But, as Willett notes, it should be Never Was Enemy Combatant.

Thank goodness for the Supreme Court.

Inverting Democracy

In 'What is Democracy?', I argued that majority rule may, in certain circumstances, constitute a form of oligarchy rather than democracy. To truly qualify as rule by the people -- rather than some (however large) subset thereof -- it must be the case that anyone has the opportunity to significantly affect the outcome. One vote alone cannot do this, but if each voter is receptive to being persuaded by any other, then we each have the potential to persuade a large number of people (if we come up with a sufficiently powerful argument, say) and thus to exert significant political influence. I thus concluded that 'democracy' in the fullest sense is realizable in the form of deliberative democracy.

But it's worth noting that this is not to conflate 'democracy' and 'good governance' (as emerged in comments). Although deliberative democracy would ideally involve citizens being responsive to (good) reasons, it's possible to invert the normative substance whilst maintaining the democratic form. That is, we might have a citizenry that is receptive and reliably responsive to bad reasons. All you've got to do is come up with a sufficiently atrocious argument, and you can exert significant influence. This anti-rational society is surely democratic in the strongest sense, being formally identical to the ideal deliberative democracy. But it is a (substantively) terrible government nonetheless!

Another possibility is that a democratic society may be responsive to some other universal capacity besides reason: perhaps rhetoric, or humour, say. Again, these needn't be good political orders, but -- so long as each citizen had the opportunity to exert significant influence in this way -- such a state would presumably qualify as "ruled by the people" in the strongest sense.

These examples suggest that democracy is not strictly sufficient for political legitimacy. There's no reason to accept or abide by the rules of a reliably wrong, anti-rational system, and it's at least logically possible that a democracy might be unreliable (or reliably atrocious) in this way. I'd suggest that whether a government is legitimate is more a matter of whether it is sufficiently reliable and responsive to good reasons.

In short: democracy requires that citizens be receptive to each other's persuasion (somehow or other). Legitimate democracy further requires that what the citizens are receptive to being persuaded by is good reasons.

Emotion and Reflective Equilibrium

Another passage from Frazer's 'Two Enlightenments' paper raises the interesting question whether emotion is properly subservient to reason or a partner on equal footing in our mental economy:

Although Rawls sometimes seems to see the quest for reflective equilibrium as basically a cognitive process involving the weighing of pre-philosophical beliefs against philosophical theories, the sentimentalist conception of reflection involves a holistic attempt to reach an equilibrium on which the faculties of reason, feeling and imagination can all settle in harmony.

This may reinforce the thought that there's something fundamentally flawed about a conception of rational warrant that we wouldn't want to live by (because it contradicts preferences that stem from love, for example).

To relate this to the vexing problem of 'Moral Roots and Alienating Aspirations', I guess the sentimentalist will be more rooted by the emotions he starts with (though they may be revised to some extent), whereas the rationalist is willing to countenance a far more radical critique of her prior affective responses, in light of what can be justified by universal reason.

How would you assess the two competing views? (There's some sense in which I find the rationalist more admirable -- certainly more noble -- though sentimentalism might be advisable insofar as it's probably a stance that's more conducive to happiness, and perhaps even to 'living a good life' more generally.)

New Website

Crooked Timber has a post on 'The importance of Web sites for academics'. It seems like good advice, so I've composed this page (now linked in the sidebar, in place of the generic philosophy department homepage which is currently broken in any case). Design tips welcome.

Autonomy and Instrumentalism

I've been reading Michael Frazer's paper 'John Rawls: between two enlightenments', and was puzzled by the following passage about reasoning behind the veil of ignorance:

Facing the possibility that they will be deeply committed to a certain religious or philosophical vision of life, these actors [in the original position] must feel their way into the perspective of such committed believers, and consider the role that first principles play in the lives of those devoted to them. Upon doing so, Rawls argues, actors in the original position come to understand that any risk of not being allowed to live according to one's most cherished convictions cannot be compensated for by any degree of economic or political benefit. Such a rejection of the very sort of cost-benefit analysis characteristic of instrumental rationality cannot itself be the product of that very faculty, but must stem instead from an empathetic understanding of others, including those very different from oneself.

Where's the rejection of cost-benefit analysis? Isn't the point precisely that the costs of "not being allowed to live according to one's most cherished convictions" are considered to be so great as to outweigh any mere "economic or political" benefit? Given that one prizes autonomy (lexically) above material comfort, instrumental rationality recommends taking the means that will best accomplish the former goal, at any cost of the latter. Such lexical orderings strike me as insanely absolutist, but instrumental reason abstains from such judgments, and so can accommodate such preferences, however crazy they may seem. So what in the world does Frazer mean by calling this a "rejection" of instrumental reasoning?

I also don't get why he contrasts "empathetic understanding" as some completely distinct, non-rational faculty. Surely empathy is required here for simple informational purposes, i.e. to enable the veiled agent to fully understand what it would be like to experience the various lives that could (for all she knows) turn out to be hers. It thus serves as a kind of perceptual input to the rational faculties.

Good (Real) Food

I'm back from a lovely vacation in The Little Apple. Philosophical content will return shortly, but first I just wanted to share the wonderful news that broccoli can be made to taste good -- all you have to do is drizzle lemon juice over it. Who knew?

Pasta with chevre (goat's milk cheese) melted over it is also surprisingly delightful.

Any other simple tips for making real food taste good? (I think I like soy sauce; how is that best used?)

Philosophers' Carnival #70

... is here. (I submitted my post on "rooted" ethics, though it looks like someone also nominated my 'doing/allowing' post.)