Rescuing Maligned Views in Phil Mind [HYC]

Epiphenomenalism and Idealism are two of the most maligned views in philosophy of mind. So it's kind of funny that Helen defends both.  Something I really like about her papers is that they really bring out why these views are much more defensible -- or even appealing -- than others usually realize.  This comes through especially strongly in her two latest papers:

(1) 'Get Acquainted With Naïve Idealism' (forthcoming in The Roles of Representations in Visual Perception) argues that only idealists can truly secure the putative epistemic benefits of direct realism about perception, as the only well-developed conception of direct acquaintance on offer in phil mind involves the objects of direct acquaintance (i.e., phenomenal experiences) being literal constituents of our thoughts.  Helen shows how idealists can extend this account to make sense of direct acquaintance with "physical" objects (that are themselves ultimately made of phenomenology, and hence apt to enter our minds in the relevant way), while traditional materialist accounts of physical reality can't make sense of this.  The resulting theory of perception -- naive idealism -- is completely wild, but a lot of fun to think about! 

(2) 'Dualism All the Way Down: Why There is No Paradox of Phenomenal Judgment' (forthcoming in Synthese) should instantly become required reading for any class that covers epiphenomenalism.  In this paper, Helen expands upon Chalmers' classic defense of epiphenomenalism against the paradox of phenomenal judgment ("how can you know you're conscious, if qualia can't cause this belief?"), emphasizing that the paradox -- including Kirk's post-Chalmers development of it -- loses its force when one takes care to adopt a systematically dualistic conception of the mind, such that you are not your brain.  This putative "paradox" is usually taken to be the objection to epiphenomenalism, and this paper basically offers a knock-down refutation of it (and a half-dozen closely related variants of the objection).

Enjoy!

Pandemic Ethics and Status Quo Risk (forthcoming in PHE)

My latest paper, 'Pandemic Ethics and Status Quo Risk', has just been accepted for publication in Public Health Ethics. Here's the abstract:

Conservative assumptions in medical ethics risk immense harms during a pandemic. Public health institutions and public discourse alike have repeatedly privileged inaction over aggressive medical interventions to address the pandemic, perversely increasing population-wide risks while claiming to be guided by “caution”. This puzzling disconnect between rhetoric and reality is suggestive of an underlying philosophical confusion. In this paper, I argue that we have been misled by status quo bias—exaggerating the moral significance of the risks inherent in medical interventions, while systematically neglecting the (objectively greater) risks inherent in the status quo prospect of an out-of-control pandemic. By coming to appreciate the possibility and significance of status quo risk, we will be better prepared to respond appropriately when the next pandemic strikes

The central idea is that heuristics of ambiguity-aversion and favouring inaction over (potentially risky) action can be expected to backfire terribly in circumstances -- such as a pandemic -- in which "business as usual" is leading us towards disaster.  Instead, I suggest that our policy and institutional responses to such emergency circumstances need to be rebalanced towards (i) liberalizing access to experimental treatments and vaccines, and (ii) requiring an explicit cost-benefit analysis to justify any sort of vaccine obstructionism (e.g. failure to immediately grant Emergency Use Authorization to any credible candidate vaccine early in the pandemic, and of course any post-authorization suspensions).

Other key points of the paper:

Num Nums

My paper 'Negative Utility Monsters' is now forthcoming in Utilitas.  It's a very short and simple paper (2500 words, expanding upon this old blog post), but kind of fun.  Here's the conclusion:

Nozick’s utility monster should no longer be seen as a damning objection to utilitarianism. The intuitive force of the case is undermined by considering a variant with immensely negative wellbeing. Offering significant relief to such a “Negative Utility Monster” plausibly should outweigh smaller harms or benefits to others. Our diverging intuitions about the two kinds of utility monsters may be explained conservatively as involving standard prioritarian intuitions: holding that benefits matter more the worse-off their recipient is (and matter less, the better-off their recipient is). This verdict undermines the distinctiveness of the utility monster objection, and reduces its force to whatever level one attributes to prioritarian intuitions in general. More ambitiously, the divergence between the two cases may be taken to support attempts to entirely explain away the original utility-monster intuition, e.g. as illicitly neglecting the existence of an upper bound on the monster’s wellbeing. Such an explanation, if successful, suggests that our intuition about the original utility monster scenario was based on a mistake. Either way, the force of Nozick’s objection is significantly undermined by the Negative Utility Monster.

NUM: just imagine that the cookies are people, and the monster only looks so happy because this is his first respite from torture for several centuries...

Parfit's Ethics (manuscript)

Over the last few months, I've been working on a short book manuscript on Parfit's Ethics, for Cambridge University Press' Elements in Ethics series.  I've finally completed a (rough) first draft, which interested readers can view or download here.  (Comments welcome!)

The chapters cover:

1. Rationality and Objectivity
2. Distributive Justice
3. Character and Consequence
4. The Triple Theory
5. Personal Identity
6. Population Ethics

I've always thought that Parfit's Reasons and Persons contained the highest ratio of important insights per page of any philosophical work.  It stands to reason that a summary of this work, if done well, might be able to surpass that record.  So that's my (overly ambitious) hope for this little book.  On the other hand, Parfit's work notoriously defies easy summary.  So... see what you think.

Right Wrong-Makers (forthcoming in PPR)

My latest paper, 'The Right Wrong-Makers', has been accepted for publication in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research!  I actually think this is the best (and most significant) paper I've written.* The basic setup:

Stocker (1976) famously lamented the "moral schizophrenia", or disharmony "between one's motives and one's [normative] reasons," that he associated with modern ethical theories. Our moral theories appear to furnish us with highly abstract fundamental justifications--invoking the likes of aggregate utility, reasonable rejectability, universalizable maxims, or the balance of prima facie duties. Ordinary moral motivation, by contrast, often involves concern for particular, concrete individuals--and rightly so. This divergence between justification and apt motivation is all the more striking because many contemporary moral theorists explicitly endorse principles linking the two. Others (especially consequentialists) have responded by disavowing this link, effectively embracing the charge of schizophrenic disharmony. But I think such disavowals are a mistake. 

This paper offers a different kind of response to Stocker's charge. We can reject the assumption that our moral theories furnish us with highly abstract fundamental justifications, normative reasons, or moral grounds. Our theories may advert to highly abstract properties in specifying their criteria for right action: that which fills in the blank in statements of the form, "An act is right iff __." But we need not take those canonical criteria to themselves be the theory's fundamental moral grounds. Instead, I propose, we should interpret them as summarizing the full range of moral grounds posited by the theory. Highly abstract summary criteria are compatible with appropriately concrete and personal ground-level concerns. Harmony may thus be restored. 

What Makes Your Papers Worth Reading?

Given how many academic papers are out there, it would be useful to have more filtering and discovery mechanisms for helping us to find the ones we might be most interested in.  One thing that could help is if authors themselves offered a concise 'overview' of what they think makes their various papers worth reading (when they are).  Many of us already list our papers on our websites, but (i) standard academic abstracts rarely do a good job of explaining why a paper is worth reading, and (ii) who reads academic websites anyway?  So I'm going to take a stab at doing this in a blog post, and invite others to follow suit (whether on Facebook or wherever you like: feel free to additionally post your response in the comments here, especially if your research interests overlap with mine at all). What lessons from your work do you wish were more widely appreciated?

Ordered by how much I happen to like each paper today:

Deontic Pluralism [draft paper]

Abstract: Consequentialist views have traditionally taken a maximizing form, requiring agents to bring about the very best outcome that they can.  But this maximizing function may be questioned.  Satisficing views instead allow agents to bring about any outcome that exceeds a satisfactory threshold or qualifies as "good enough".  Scalar consequentialism, by contrast, eschews moral requirements altogether, instead evaluating acts in purely comparative terms, i.e., as better or worse than their alternatives.  After surveying the main considerations for and against each of these three views, I argue that the core insights of each are (despite appearances) not in conflict. Consequentialists should be deontic pluralists and accept a maximizing account of the ought of most reason, a satisficing account of obligation, and a scalar account of the weight of reasons.

* * *

New Draft on Right-Making Features

I've a new draft paper, 'The Right Wrong-Makers', which argues as follows:

Right- and wrong-making features ("moral grounds") play important normative roles, e.g. in morally apt or virtuous motivation.  They have, however, been systematically misidentified. Canonical statements of our moral theories tend to summarize, rather than directly state, the full range of moral grounds posited by the theory. Further work is required to "unpack'' a general criterion of rightness and identify the features that are of ground-level moral significance. Focusing on the simple example of utilitarianism, I show how careful attention to the ground level can drastically influence how we think of our moral theories.

I'm testing out the PhilPeople "sessions" feature with this paper, so you're welcome to comment over there if you also want to try it out.  (Blogged or emailed suggestions are also always welcome, of course!)

P.S. It seems PhilPeople automatically "invites" everyone you make a session visible to (which in this case was my entire PhilPeople "peer network").   So apologies to anyone who receives an unwanted email invitation -- I didn't intend that to happen!

Idealism Without God: a must-read paper!

... by the brilliant Helen Yetter-Chappell [forthcoming in T. Goldschmidt & K. Pearce (eds.) Idealism: New Essays in Metaphysics, Oxford University Press].

PDF pre-print available here.

I may be a tad biased, but I can't think of a more creative, ambitious, and interesting paper than Helen's 'Idealism Without God', which manages to improve upon Berkeley's original view in significant respects (especially regarding the nature of perception) whilst depending upon less controversial theoretical resources (as indicated by the title).  It's cool stuff.  A prominent philosopher of mind even declared it, "the coolest metaphysical view ever!"  It should especially delight those who worry that philosophers these days too often lose sight of the "big issues".

The paper's upshot:

Contemporary philosophers are overwhelmingly materialists (at least about the domain of physical objects). I think it’s unfortunate that this view is taken for granted, as idealism both has much to offer and need not be as radical in its commitments as it might first appear. In making the case for taking idealism seriously, I’ve outlined a non-theistic, quasi-Berkeleyan view. On this view, reality is a vast unity of consciousness that binds together the sensory impressions of every point-from-a-perspective. This does not do away with the physical world, but gives a unique account of its nature – one on which the world is fundamentally intelligible. Just as on materialist views, reality is governed by physical laws (the sorts of laws that physicists tell us about, and which it’s clearly not the business of philosophers to dispute). Because reality is phenomenal, we open up the possibility that we can have a very robust sort of direct contact with reality. I’ve offered a view of perception on which (in perception) our minds are literally constituted by threads of reality. If this is right, I can stand in the same relation to the blueness of the sky as I do to the pain in my thigh. 

While the idealist account that I’ve developed faces challenges – particularly worries about quantitative profligacy – it also offers some unique and intriguing benefits: (i) Due to the robust account it gives of our direct connection to reality, it yields an especially strong vindication of Johnston’s neglected epistemic virtue. (ii) It renders reality fundamentally intelligible in a way that materialism does not. (iii) It captures our common-sense intuition that the world is as it appears. While the theory doubtless faces challenges not addressed in this short paper, these advantages are such that the view surely merits consideration. 

In conclusion, idealism is awesome and everyone should take it more seriously.

Read the whole thing!

Forthcoming in Bioethics

... is my paper, 'Against "Saving Lives": Equal Concern and Differential Impact' [pdf].

It draws on many of my previous blog posts on the ethics of allocation, especially:

* Are QALYs Discriminatory? -- The basic argument against Harris's "discrimination" objection: It isn't objectionably discriminatory to prioritize greater harms/benefits over lesser ones, and that's all that QALYs are about.
* The associated mistake of conflating the worth of and to a person.
* Where Harris' Double Jeopardy objection goes wrong.
* Lives Can't be Saved -- why person-numbers saved have no intrinsic significance, over and above maximizing life-years or other general welfare measures.
* QALYs, DALYs, and Complete Lives -- Why some life-years are worth more to us than others.
* Where QALYs go wrong -- More on why not all life-years (even in perfect health) are equal.

Here's hoping it will lead bioethicists to rethink their lazy reliance upon Harris' objections to QALYs...

Satisficing by Effort [draft]

I'm currently revising my paper, 'Satisficing by Effort: From Scalar to Satisficing Consequentialism', for the upcoming RoME conference.  It's due in a couple of weeks, so I thought I'd throw it out there in case any readers have suggestions to improve it...

Abstract:

Traditional forms of Satisficing Consequentialism risk condoning the gratuitous prevention of goodness above the baseline of what qualifies as "good enough". I propose a new, effort-based version of the view that avoids this problem, and that better fits with the motivation of avoiding an excessively demanding conception of morality. I further argue that the resulting view can be motivated even starting from the sparse starting point of Scalar Consequentialism, so long as we're willing to supplement our consequentialism with independent norms of blameworthiness. Effort-based Satisficing Consequentialism is thus shown to be both extensionally plausible and theoretically well-motivated.

[link to full pdf]

Comments welcome -- posted here or emailed!

Lessons from my Dissertation

Nobody ever reads dissertations, and while I hope to publish each of my chapters as stand-alone articles (the first has already been accepted by Phil Quarterly, and the second received an R&R from Nous), I figure that a convenient blog-post summary might help some of the key ideas to gain greater circulation. So, here goes...

What's Fit for the Fallible (draft)

PDF draft available here. Abstract:

What would a utilitarian agent look like? Some have taken the answer to describe an agent so incompetent and perverse that it casts doubt on utilitarianism itself. In this paper, I develop the strongest form of this 'self-effacingness' objection to utilitarianism, based on the idea of a constitutive link between rationality and normally competent agency. Assuming this understanding of rationality for sake of argument, I then suggest two ways to defend utilitarianism. One appeals to a Railtonian 'sophisticated' or two-level utilitarian psychology, though I suggest some potential problems for this approach. The second involves showing how we can develop a direct utilitarian psychology within rational constraints. In the course of distinguishing these two alternative paths, I make a distinction between dispositions that are 'extrinsically desirable' and those that are desirable in virtue of being 'well calibrated for action' -- a distinction that I then employ to illuminate the Gauthier-Parfit debate about whether it's rational to act on rationally desirable dispositions.

Comments welcome! (Especially since I expect to use this for my job talks, with it being a fairly natural sequel to my writing sample on 'The Fitting and the Fortunate'.)

Knowing What Matters (draft)

A pdf draft of my paper, 'Knowing What Matters' (forthcoming in Peter Singer (ed.), Does Anything Really Matter? Responses to Parfit) is now online.

Abstract:

Parfit's On What Matters offers a rousing defence of non-naturalist normative realism against pressing metaphysical and epistemological objections. He addresses skeptical arguments based on (i) the causal origins of our normative beliefs, and (ii) the appearance of pervasive moral disagreement. In both cases, he concedes the first step to the skeptic, but draws a subsequent distinction with which he hopes to stem the skeptic's advance. I argue, however, that these distinctions cannot bear the weight that Parfit places on them. A successful moral epistemology must take a harder line with the skeptic, insisting that moral knowledge can be had by those with the right kind of psychology -- no matter the evolutionary origin of the psychology, nor whether we can demonstrate its reliability over the alternatives.

Along the way, I also (1) argue against Street's "normative lottery" analogy; (2) argue that her constructivist view is self-defeating; (3) introduce an "internalist" version of reliabilism; and (4) offer an analysis of when it makes a difference whether some possible disagreement is actual.

I still have a couple of months to put on the finishing touches, so any suggestions would be most welcome!

Fitting Consequentialism draft

I've a post up at PEA Soup summarizing my latest paper [pdf] [view online with Google Viewer] defending consequentialism from character-based objections. Feedback welcome!

Recent Work

Long time no blog! (Internet access is still a scarce resource in the antipodes...) Anyhow, as a quick update:

(1) I presented my 'Value Holism' [pdf] talk at the University of Canterbury 'Philosophy Discussion Retreat' in Kaikoura (a very fun trip!).

(2) I then gave an ANU 'PhilSoc' talk titled 'Moral Primitives: fitting attitudes for consequentialists' -- the content of which should end up being the first chapter of my dissertation. (This paper grew out of my earlier stuff on global consequentialism, but I'm reworking it to focus on the more general question of how acts are normatively assessable in importantly different ways from mere evaluands.)

(3) I've also been prettifying my CV in LaTeX, and getting back into using Ubuntu over Windows -- I might end up writing some tips for the latter in the future post.

Any additional feedback on the linked papers (especially the second) would be most welcome!

Tech tip: if you hate opening PDFs because Adobe Reader takes so long to load, uninstall that resource hog and download the near-instant Sumatra PDF viewer instead. Or, if you prefer in-browser viewing, try this Google Viewer bookmarklet (from here) before clicking the pdf links above.

Objective and Subjective Oughts

[I was just looking up this old exam answer I wrote for a class last year on 'subjective oughts', and I realized that I hadn't yet posted it to the blog. So, here goes -- lightly edited, but still lacking footnotes, etc.]

What is the distinction between what a person “subjectively ought” to do and what a person “objectively ought” to do? What is the best analysis of each notion? What objections are there, if any, to these best analyses? (You might discuss more than one attempt to analyze them.) Is the notion of the “subjective ‘ought’” a useful notion? If so, how? If not, why has it been thought to be useful, and what is wrong with that thought?

Souper!

The editors at PEA Soup kindly invited me to join their blog. I'll continue my usual half-baked blogging here, but look forward to occasionally sending a more developed idea to PEA Soup for further scrutiny. (On such occasions, I may reproduce the body of the post here for archival purposes but disable comments so that the discussion isn't split. Or I'll just link to it.)

Update: my first post is up!

On Rosen's MR-Skepticism

[I might end up expanding the following sketch into a real paper at some point, so any feedback would be most welcome...]

In 'Skepticism About Moral Responsibility', Gideon Rosen argues for the view that confident positive judgments of blameworthiness are (almost) never warranted. The argument proceeds in two parts. First he argues that blameworthiness can only originate in akratic action, whereby the agent acts in full knowledge of their wrongdoing (and its normative significance). In the second part, Rosen suggests that we rarely have sufficient grounds for confidently attributing such full-blown akrasia to agents who have acted wrongly. I will focus only on the first part of the argument, since this is where the main philosophical action takes place.

Why think that blameworthiness can only originate in akratic action? Rosen's argument is quite intricate, but the core idea is that non-akratic wrongdoing is merely done “from ignorance”, and is thus excused unless the agent is to blame for her state of ignorance. But if the agent also acted from ignorance in bringing about this prior state, then that act will likewise be excused, unless ... etc. The agent's excuses will only run out if we can stop the regress at a point where she acted in full knowledge of her normative error: that is, if she acted akratically.

More precisely: Rosen begins by distinguishing derivative and original responsibility for an act or event. For example, if Jekyll intentionally takes a pill that makes him berserk, then he is (derivatively) responsible for the resulting damage in virtue of being (originally) responsible for the negligent act of taking the pill. Rosen then claims that “an action done from ignorance is never a locus of original responsibility.” Let's call this the RAID principle (responsibility for actions done from ignorance is merely derivative). Rosen supports this principle by appeal to ordinary examples of factual ignorance, such as accidental poisoning. If someone secretly plants arsenic in my sugar bowl, it is not my fault that I end up poisoning you. But if I routinely store arsenic in unlabeled sugar bowls in my pantry, this prior negligence puts me back on the hook for causing the accident. Crucially, Rosen takes the RAID principle to be fully general, applying to normative as well as factual ignorance.

The RAID principle tells us that an act done from ignorance cannot be a locus of original responsibility. But any agent who non-akratically acts wrongly thereby acts from ignorance of some kind: either they aren't aware of the factual considerations that make the act wrong, or they aren't aware of the normative significance of those facts: that they make the act wrong, and that they thereby count decisively against so acting. If an agent were to know all these facts and yet still perform the act, then their act would qualify as 'akratic' by Rosen's definition. RAID thus straightforwardly implies that blameworthiness can only originate in akratic action. That is: for X to be blameworthy for A, A must either itself be an akratic act (if X is originally responsible for A), or else be the upshot of an akratic act (if X is derivatively responsible for A). To avoid this conclusion, we will need to undermine RAID.

In order to see why RAID is false, we need to clarify our understanding of 'original' and 'derivative' responsibility, which will bring to light two very different kinds of culpability in ignorance. In particular, I will distinguish 'diachronic' and 'synchronic' cases of culpable ignorance, and argue that RAID holds only of the former. The intuitive plausibility of the principle derives from neglecting the latter class of cases, which – we will see – provide ample intuitive counterexamples to the RAID principle. I will close by considering what Rosen might say about these neglected cases.

Rosen's loose talk of 'original' and 'derivative' responsibility suggests a picture on which responsibility is a two-place relation, between an individual and the acts or outcomes that they are “responsible for”. But this occludes some important structure which I want to bring to the fore. Responsibility is better understood as a three-place relation between an agent, an act of theirs (which I will call the 'focal act'), and an event (or set of events) for which the agent's action renders him liable. Intuitively: we are responsible, in acting a certain way, for various outcomes. The focal act is the exercise of agency in virtue of which we become liable for praise or blame. That is to say: it is the locus of original responsibility. But we can now see that there is no such thing as a locus of 'derivative responsibility', so that old distinction seems inapt (or at least potentially misleading). Rosen would have us say that Jekyll the pill-popping berserker is derivatively responsible for vandalism due to being originally responsible for pill-popping, but the “responsible for” locution is used here equivocally. It would be clearer just to say that Jekyll is responsible, in taking the pill, for the subsequent damage.

This makes it clear that (in the described case) there is only one occasion of Jekyll exercising his agency in a blameworthy manner. His berserk vandalism is not itself a blameworthy act (assuming it is an act at all), it is merely an event for which his blameworthy act of pill-popping renders him liable. (Notice that he would still be blameworthy in exactly the same way even if he had slipped the pill to an innocent third party who then went berserk in the china shop. The innocent person's berserk vandalism isn't blameworthy, and neither is Jekyll's. It's his pill-popping, in either case, that is the sole blameworthy action, though it makes him liable for downstream events – including the event of himself or others acting in berserk fashion.)

Rosen may grant all this, but ask why the terminological precision matters. Well, for one thing, it helps us to see more clearly what sorts of considerations are eligible to excuse the agent. Sometimes ignorance is a legitimate excuse, but only if it is concurrent with the focal act. It would clearly be absurd for an agent to plead innocence on the grounds that, despite knowing full well the risks of their action as they performed it, they later forgot this (by the time the risked outcome actually eventuated). And this remains true even if the risked outcome in question was another act of theirs. Granted, their ignorance – like Jekyll's incapacity – might excuse the downstream act from qualifying as a second occasion of blameworthiness. But it obviously does nothing at all to excuse the earlier “benighting” act (to borrow Holly Smith's term), or to cast doubt on whether the “unwitting” outcome falls within its scope of liability (that is, as an event for which the agent, in performing the benighting act, became liable). So, in many of Rosen's examples, the kind of 'ignorance' involved – whether culpable or not – was never even prima facie eligible to serve as an excuse, at least insofar as we are treating the earlier act as focal. To properly understand the excusing potential of ignorance (and its limits), we need to instead focus our attention on cases of ignorance concurrent with the focal act or exercise of agency that is to be assessed.

Let's return to the original case of the accidental poisoning. We can imagine two very different ways in which an agent might be 'culpable'¹ for their failure to recognize the risk of arsenic poisoning. In one case, the culpability is wholly 'diachronic': suppose I planted the arsenic myself, and then took a pill that wiped my memory of this event. My subsequent decision to spoon white powder (now reasonably believed to be sugar) into your tea is itself an intrinsically innocent, blameless act. As in the Jekyll case, it is only my earlier 'benighting' action that is blameworthy (and renders me liable for the eventuating damages). This sort of case supports the RAID principle, which effectively claims that actions done from ignorance are never themselves blameworthy [qua act], but are at most events which some earlier blameworthy act may render us liable for.

Alternatively, we can imagine a case of 'synchronically' culpable ignorance, where my unwitting poisoning no longer seems even intrinsically wholly innocent. Suppose my roommate left the arsenic in a labeled bowl in the pantry. When I grab what looks like a sugar bowl, my eyes flit briefly over the label ('arsenic'), without fully taking it in or consciously registering the significance of this. Further suppose that the reason why I don't fully process the visual evidence available to me is just because I don't really care very much about you. Maybe I even want you dead, on some subconscious level. In any case, we can stipulate that there is evidence available to me that the bowl contains arsenic, and my ignorance depends upon my callous disregard for your welfare. If I cared more, as I morally ought to – or if I had all the beliefs that I rationally ought to, given my evidence – then I would never have so thoughtlessly spooned the white powder into your tea. I didn't appreciate the risk at the time, but I should have,² and so in this sense my ignorance is 'synchronically culpable'. Intuitively, in this sort of case, I am still blameworthy in acting so thoughtlessly. Unreasonable ignorance does not (fully) excuse.

We thus have a counterexample to the RAID principle. It may be true that acts done from merely diachronically culpable ignorance, being intrinsically (synchronically) reasonable, are never blameworthy. But, intuitively, it looks like we can be blameworthy – 'originally responsible' – in acting from 'synchronically culpable' or unreasonable ignorance. So the fully general RAID principle lacks intuitive support after all, leaving us with no reason to think that blameworthiness must originate in akratic action. It can just as well originate in unreasonable action. And note that even if we're rarely in a position to attribute akrasia to wrongdoers, we're very often in a position to know that they acted unreasonably. Hence Rosen's argument fails.

At this point, Rosen might respond by giving up his claim to ordinary case-based intuitions, and instead seeking to defend RAID on purely theoretical grounds. As he observes in a footnote, it's one thing to say that a person “should have known better”, and another to say that they are culpable for this failure. So he at least has the theoretical resources to coherently reject the commonsense view gestured at in my previous paragraph. It just remains to motivate his more radical view. As with most skeptical arguments, this will require appealing to intuitive-sounding abstract principles (rather than cases). Here are two that together imply RAID:

1. “If X does A from ignorance, then X is culpable for the act only if he is culpable for the ignorance from which he acts.”
2. “X is culpable for failing to know that P only if his ignorance is the upshot of some prior culpable act or omission.”

Why believe (2)? It follows from the general principle that only acts (including mental acts, but excluding internal 'occurrences' with respect to which we are 'passive') are eligible to serve as loci of responsibility. Since ignorance isn't an exercise of agency – something you do – it can't be a site of blameworthiness. At most, it can be an outcome that some prior act made you liable for. (It may also indicate that one is vicious, much as a brain scan might, but to be a bad person is not yet to be blameworthy, since the latter kind of evaluation concerns what you've done.)

Suppose we grant all that. Why would we then accept (1)? It might be confused with the more plausible claim that reasonable ignorance excuses, and hence that an act done from ignorance is blameworthy only if the agent was unreasonable in believing as they did. But (1) is a much stronger claim since, we are supposing, even unreasonable ignorance can't originate blameworthiness. Even so, we may still think that an act done from unreasonable ignorance, manifesting a lack of good will (in case of motivated ignorance), may yet serve as a locus of blameworthiness. If we think this is possible – as certainly appears to be the case in the 'synchronic' cases I've highlighted – then we will reject (1).

Our final assessment of skeptical arguments typically depends on whether we are more inclined to trust intuitions about cases or abstract theoretical principles (e.g. that knowledge requires certainty, that an epistemic [e.g. inductive] rule cannot justify itself, etc.). In this instance, though premise (1) may be prima facie plausible-sounding, I think that once we see understand what it actually claims, and how radically opposed it is to our ordinary case-based intuitions, we should simply reject it as unmotivated.

1In a broad sense; we'll later see that this isn't quite the right term.

2Limitations of space prevent me from further exploring whether it is the moral or the epistemic vice that is relevant here. I will use the term “reasonable” broadly to cover both kinds of normativity. I should also mention that the alternative label 'synchronic culpability' turns out, as explained below, to be something of a misnomer.

Value Holism draft

I've finally finished a rough draft of my paper on 'value holism' -- you can check it out here. Any feedback would be very welcome (even just to point out the sections that seem most unclear or in need of further work). Thanks!