Guest Post: Animal Population Ethics

Evan Dawson-Baglien wrote to me with some interesting thoughts on the challenge of incorporating non-persons into (non-total views of) population ethics. I asked him if he'd be willing to compose and share his thoughts as a guest post, and he generously agreed. Here's the result. Enjoy!

Philosopher Spotlight: Hrishikesh Joshi

I'm delighted to introduce another great "philosopher spotlight" entry, this time from Hrishikesh Joshi!

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My work focuses on neglected topics and perspectives within moral and political philosophy. I often employ a philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE) approach, by using tools from the social sciences in trying to analyze philosophical problems. In my view, there are these large vistas of underexplored terrain, and what motivates me to do philosophy is the desire to explore that terrain by using the methods and distinctions our discipline has developed. It’s a Wild West out there and I’d rather settle that territory than remain in the crowded coastal cities.

Philosopher Spotlight: Jess Flanigan

Thanks to Jess Flanigan for contributing this guest post, sharing her interesting and provocative work, as part of my ongoing "philosopher spotlight" series.  Enjoy!

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My published research falls into three categories. I am interested in rights and their enforceability, public health policy, and economic justice issues. In this post I’ll say a bit about my research, hopefully in a way that explains how these topics are all related. Then I’ll talk a bit about the things I’m working on lately. Instead of listing the titles of each paper, each link will just say what the paper is about. If you’re interested in that argument you can click through to see where it’s published.

Guest Post: 'Save the Five: Meeting Taurek’s Challenge'

[My thanks to Zach Barnett for writing the following guest post...]

At its best, philosophy encourages us to challenge our deepest and most passionately held convictions. No paper does this more forcefully than John Taurek’s “Should the Numbers Count?” Taurek’s paper challenges us to justify the importance of numbers in ethics.

Six people are in trouble. We can rescue five of them or just the remaining one. What should we do? This may not seem like a difficult question. Other things equal, you might think, we should save the five. This way, fewer people will die. 

Taurek rejects this reasoning. He denies that the greater number should be given priority. In effect, Taurek challenges us to convince him that the numbers should count. Can we meet his challenge?

You might be pessimistic. Even if you yourself agree that the numbers do count, you might worry that... just as it’s hopeless to try to argue the Global Skeptic out of Global Skepticism... it’s equally hopeless to try to argue someone like Taurek, a Numbers Skeptic, out of Numbers Skepticism. But that’s what I’ll try to do.

Guest Post: The Problem of Large Distances in Value Holism

My thanks to long-time reader Evan Dawson-Baglien for contributing the following guest post on 'The Problem of Large Distances in Value Holism':

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Value holism in population ethics appeals to a number of strong moral intuitions that human beings possess. By allowing one to reject the principle of Mere Addition, it in turn allows one to reject the Repugnant Conclusion. It also allows rejection of smaller-scale versions of the Repugnant Conclusion which are perhaps even more repugnant, such as the idea that it is morally neutral to kill someone and replace them with a new person whose life will contain the same amount of utility as the first person’s remaining years.  However, value holism also conflicts with strong intuitions about the relevance of distant events to the creation of new people.  It seems strange to say that we need to have fewer children if we somehow discovered that there was a utopia beyond the light cone of our universe, or that the correctness of the Many Worlds Theory of quantum mechanics might have some bearing on the question in either direction.

Philosopher Spotlight: Eden Lin

I'm delighted that Eden Lin agreed to contribute the following post to my "philosopher spotlight" series.  Enjoy!

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Most of my work has focused on the normative ethics of well-being or welfare, which investigates (i) what counts as a life that is going well or badly for the individual whose life it is, (ii) what determines how well or badly someone’s life is going, and (iii) what things are good or bad for individuals in the most basic way.

Student Spotlight: Intrinsically Irrational Instrumental Desires

I had always assumed that only ultimate ends, or telic / final / non-instrumental desires, could be intrinsically irrational.  (Think Future Tuesday Indifference.)  Instrumental desires, by contrast, may happen to be irrational if based on a false and irrational means-end belief, but then the problem is extrinsic to the desire itself -- the problem instead lies with the false belief, and one could presumably imagine circumstances in which the means-end belief would be true, thus making the instrumental desire in question a perfectly reasonable way of achieving one's goals.

Or so I assumed. (And I think it's a fairly common assumption.)

University of York undergraduate philosophy student Lorin Thompson (mentioned here with permission) drew my attention to an interesting class of counterexamples.  We can obtain intrinsically irrational instrumental desires if we consider instrumental desires that are essentially self-defeating.  His example is the "desire to think of a number, in order to not think of a number (simultaneously)."  The implicit means-end belief -- that one can achieve avoiding thinking of a number, by means of thinking of a number -- is logically incoherent, and the resulting instrumental desire is thus intrinsically (rather than merely extrinsically) irrational.

It's a cool case!  At the very least, I'll need to re-write my essay question for future years to ask something like whether there are "unworthy" ultimate ends rather than just "intrinsically irrational desires", as it now turns out that even Humean subjectivists should make room for the latter.

Does anyone know whether such cases have been discussed before, or could it potentially be a new contribution to the literature if Lorin were to write up his paper for an academic journal?

Killoren on Pets, Livestock, and Narrative Value

[Guest post by David Killoren...]

I’m very grateful to Richard for allowing me this space to hash out some ideas about pets and livestock. I’ll try to be relatively quick here (although I recognize this post is a bit too long as-is). In the spirit of blogging, I will avoid footnotes, references, and acknowledgments. But I do want to say that I got a lot of great ideas and feedback from the folks at the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress in Boulder this past August. If you’re one of those folks, please feel free to chime in in the comments below. (During the conference, I was trying to keep a list of the people who gave me feedback, but now I’ve misplaced the list.) When I have a new version of the paper on this topic, I hope that Richard will allow me to link it from this post. In the meanwhile, I eagerly welcome any objections, suggestions, off-the-wall ideas, references, etc.

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In the recent past, the United States had (and perhaps still has) a racial caste system. White people occupied a higher caste. Nonwhite people occupied lower castes; there was not just one lower caste. For example, black people with lighter skin generally found it easier than darker-skinned black people to gain status, were considered eligible for a wider range of jobs, etc. So, we should say, the American caste system had several tiers: White people—or perhaps just white men, or white wealthy men, or whatever—were in the top tier, and other people were put into various lower tiers.

Something similar is true of our treatment of non-human animals.

Guest Post: Famine, Affluence, and the Bystander at the Switch

[Guest post by BGSU's Bradley Gabbard...]

I would like to thank Richard for a chance to share a brief summation of one chapter of my dissertation.

In the classic Bystander at the Switch Case, roughly 90% of us have the intuition that it is morally permissible to divert a runaway trolley to save five innocent lives although it means that we will kill one innocent victim. Call the intuition that it is morally permissible to divert the trolley in the Bystander at the Switch Case the Trolley Intuition. I argue that the Trolley Intuition paired with three highly plausible moral principles justifies compulsory aid to innocent victims of famine and preventable disease across the globe.

Guest Post: Nebel on Parfit's Rule Consequentialism

[The following is a guest post by Jake Nebel...]

I’m very grateful to Richard for letting me write a guest post, which I am shamelessly using to solicit feedback on a paper. I’ve summarized the central argument below. I’d greatly appreciate any comments on this blog or via email.

Parfit argues that the most plausible versions of Kantianism and contractualism coincide with the following consequentialist principle:

(UARC) Everyone ought to follow the principles whose universal acceptance would make things go best.

Guest Post: An advertisement for Individual Concepts

[This post is by guest blogger Tristan Haze of Sprachlogik.]

We have concepts of particular objects. The recognition of this piece of common sense enables us to solve a cardinal problem in the philosophy of language. Millianism, the view that the semantic content of a proper name is simply its referent, is apparently refuted by Frege's Puzzle (cf. Frege 1952). The major alternative, descriptivism - which comes in several varieties - is apparently refuted by Kripke's famous arguments (cf. Kripke 1980). The very natural view that names are associated with individual concepts allows us to solve Frege's Puzzle and accept Kripke's arguments against descriptivism, as well as his rigid designation thesis, with remarkable ease.

Guest Post: 'What is Constructivism?'

[The following is a guest post by Jeff Sebo -- now blogging at 'The Dear Self'.]

I understand metaethical constructivism* as the family of theories according to which

1. Our moral discourse is cognitive.
2. Some moral statements are true.
3. Moral statements are true or false in virtue of evaluative attitudes.

If this is right, then here's how constructivism relates to the other big "metaethical families":

1. Expressivism. Constructivism and expressivism agree that evaluative attitudes are what ground morality. But unlike expressivism, constructivism says that our moral discourse is cognitive. So whereas expressivism says that our moral discourse directly expresses evaluative attitudes, constructivism says that our moral discourse describes evaluative attitudes.

Relatedly, constructivism differs from expressivism in that, for expressivists, I always use moral concepts to express my evaluative attitudes, whereas for constructivists, I may also use moral concepts to describe others' evaluative attitudes. (More on this below.)

2. Error Theory. Constructivism and error theory agree that our moral discourse is cognitive. But unlike error theory, constructivism says that some moral statements are true.

3. Realism. Finally, constructivism and realism agree that our moral discourse is cognitive, and that some moral statements are true. But they disagree about the nature of moral truth: whereas realism says that moral statements are true or false in virtue of mind-independent moral facts, constructivism says that moral statements are true or false in virtue of mind-dependent moral facts, namely facts about evaluative attitudes.

Technically speaking, then, constructivism is a kind of antirealism. But since constructivism agrees with realism that moral facts are real (albeit mind-dependent), some constructivists prefer to avoid the potentially misleading label 'antirealism'. Korsgaard, for example, calls her view 'procedural realist' instead of 'antirealist', and she calls her opponents' view 'substantive realist' instead of 'realist.'

I should note that this is a very expansive understanding of constructivism; it makes constructivism a much larger family of theories than we might have thought. For example, it means that constructivists can disagree about:

1. Which evaluative attitudes are relevant to morality?

Constructivists have a lot of options here. They can say that the relevant attitudes are moral intuitions, moral beliefs, desires, preferences, aims, plans, choices, and much more. Some pick even more exotic options than these. For example, Rawls picks considered moral judgments. Korsgaard picks reflective endorsement. Street picks takings-to-be-a-reason. Velleman picks judgments-about-what-it-makes-sense-for-one-to-do-in-causal/psychological-terms. And so on.

2. Does morality depend on actual evaluative attitudes or ideal (i.e., fully informed) evaluative attitudes? And if the latter, what does it mean for one to be fully informed?

Most constructivists opt for the latter option here. Rawls says that the moral facts are determined by our considered moral judgments in reflective equilibrium. And in his political theory he idealizes by making people rational and self-interested and ignorant about who they are. Korsgaard says that morality is normative iff we would still see it as justified if we understood it completely. And she argues that humanity has value not because we actually value it, but rather because we would value it if we learned what our present values commit us to. Street argues that we have reason to do something iff it figures in our maximally coherent set of reasons, i.e. the set of reasons that we would take ourselves to have if we made our current judgments about reasons coherent. (Although she has a complicated justification for not calling this an ideal-judgment theory.) And so on.

Generally speaking, the appeal of ideal-judgment constructivism is that it helps us avoid the unintuitive implications of saying that we should do what we actually value doing. (After all, some of us value some pretty crazy things.) The problem is that constructivists have a hard time specifying the ideal conditions without presupposing any values, e.g., the value of knowledge, or consistency, or simplicity, etc. (As many commentators have pointed out, Rawls is especially egregious on this score, since he presupposes reasonableness in his supposedly neutral political theory.)

Usually, constructivists try to get around this problem by arguing that valuing knowledge, or consistency, or simplicity, etc. is constitutive of rational agency. So for example, Street argues that valuing means-end rationality is constitutive of rational agency: if someone says that (a) she takes herself to have reason to eat tacos, (b) she needs to go to Taco Bell in order to eat tacos, but (c) she has no reason whatsoever to go to Taco Bell, then she is failing to be a rational agent at all (as opposed to merely making a mistake about what her reasons are). Kant, Dreier, Railton, Velleman, and many others make arguments along these lines too. The upshot of these arguments is that every rational agent values knowledge, consistency, simplicity, or whatever, and therefore every rational agent values doing what she would value doing if fully informed (in the relevant sense).

3. Whose evaluative attitudes are relevant to morality?

Most self-proclaimed constructivists are internalists, i.e., they say that you should do something iff you value doing it. But a constructivist could also be an externalist, i.e., she could also say that you should do something iff someone else values your doing it. This means that constructivism includes, e.g., divine command theory, which says that you should do something iff God values your doing it, as well as cultural relativism, which says that you should do something iff your culture values your doing it.

This is mainly what I had in mind when I said that this way of understanding constructivism makes it more expansive than we might have thought. I think most philosophers restrict constructivism to what I call internalist constructivism. And I can understand why: what I call externalist constructivism occupies a strange metaethical middle ground that seems not-quite-constructivist and not-quite-realist. On one hand, these theories share the constructivist intuition that value requires a valuer; but on the other hand, they share the realist intuition that value comes from something external to you. Ultimately, this is a terminological issue, and I could see it going either way. But on balance, I think these middle-ground theories have more in common with internalist constructivism than with realism, so I choose to call them a kind of constructivism too.

4. Is there something that you have to value if you value anything at all? And if so, what is it?

This is the question that separates what Street calls 'substantive constructivism' (or 'Kantian constructivism') from what she calls 'formalist constructivism' (or 'Humean constructivism'). Substantivists say that there is something that you have to value if you value anything at all. For example, Korsgaard says that you have to value humanity if you value anything at all. Formalists, in contrast, say that there is nothing that you have to value if you value anything at all. Street is an example of a formalist. (Well, almost: she thinks that you have to value taking the means to your ends if you value anything at all. She also thinks that you have to value constructivism itself, i.e., you have to affirm constructivism as a metaethical theory, insofar as it has normative implications.)

The virtue of substantivism is that it makes morality objective, in the sense that you have certain moral duties independently of what you value in particular (so long as you value something). The problem is that substantivism is hard to establish, especially a substantivism that gives you a robust set of moral duties independently of what you value in particular. And as a result, most (plausible) substantivisms are still quite formalist in spirit. For example, Sartre and Beauvoir are substantivists in the sense that they say that you have to value freedom if you value anything at all. But arguably, this is compatible with your doing anything at all, e.g. lying, killing, stealing, etc.

(To be clear, I don't mean to imply that Sartre and Beauvoir are full-blown constructivists. They don't seem to take a stand on the semantics of moral discourse, for example. But I do think that they come pretty close, and that we should include them in these discussions far more than we do.)

5. Do you have to value anything at all?

Korsgaard says the answer is no; she says that you can fail to value anything at all (even though she personally doubts that you do). Sartre, on the other hand, says that the answer is yes; he says that everyone has to value something.

Of course, how constructivists answer this question will depend on how they answer these other questions. For example, part of the reason why Korsgaard thinks you can fail to value anything at all is that, for her, the relevant attitude is reflective endorsement, which involves stepping back from your desires, asking if you endorse them, and saying yes. Arguably, this is something that you can fail to do. In contrast, part of the reason why Sartre thinks that you have to value something is that, for him, the relevant attitude is choice (if we can call that an attitude). And for Sartre, this is something that no rational agent can escape.

Notice, by the way, how this question interacts with the previous one: If a substantivist says 'yes' to this question, then she can claim an even greater kind of objectivity for morality than before: she can say that every rational agent has certain moral duties, period. Once again, Sartre and Beauvoir are good examples of this: they say that you have to choose freedom if you choose anything at all, and then they say that you have to choose something. Therefore, they might conclude, you have to choose freedom.

6. What kind of normativity are we talking about here?

Stepping back from constructivism about morality: I think that one of the main sources of confusion in discussions about constructivism is that different constructivists are talking about different kinds of normativity. Rawls is a constructivist about morality and political theory. Korsgaard is a constructivist about normativity and morality (insofar as she thinks that morality is normative). Street and Velleman are constructivists about reasons. And so on. (In this sense it might even be misleading to call constructivism a family of metaethical theories, as opposed to, say, a family of metanormative theories, or even something more general still.)

This is important, because one could be a constructivist about one kind of normativity but not about another. For example, one could be a constructivist about reasons but a realist about morality.

One could also be a constructivist about one kind of normativity and then a different kind of constructivist about another. For example, one could think that one's reasons depend on one's own values, one's moral duties depends on one's culture's values, one's legal duties depends on one's fellow citizens' values, and so on. (I actually think that something like this is closest to the truth.)

* I'm not attempting to capture the way that everybody uses the term 'constructivism' here. (I actually think that this would be futile, since everyone uses it differently.) Instead, I'm merely attempting to capture the way that I use it. I think that at least some philosophers also use it this way; but more importantly, I think that using it this way makes constructivism a clear alternative to expressivism, error theory, and realism, and it also explains why people as different as Kant, Rawls, Korsgaard, Velleman, Street, etc. all count as constructivists. (But see the last section for a qualification about what kind of constructivist they are.)

What do you think? Does this capture the way you use 'constructivism,' or does it at least come close to doing that? Does it make sense? If this is right, what else might constructivists disagree about?

-- Jeff Sebo

Beckstead on Divine Coordination Schemes

[Guest post by Nick Beckstead]

It seems self-evident that one has most reason to always act in one’s own interest, and it seems self-evident that one has most reason to always do one’s duty; but both principles can’t be right if there are ever situations where one’s duty conflicts with one’s interest. Famously, Sidgwick thought that, in a case of conflict, there was no reason to prefer acting in one’s own interest to doing one’s duty. This problem, called “the dualism of practical reason,” was thought by Sidgwick to pose a great difficulty for the foundations of ethics.

A way out of the problem is to invoke some hypothesis that makes interest and duty align. For example, many religions propose that if a person always does his duty, he will be amply rewarded in the afterlife. Though doubtful that God’s waiting around to do this, Sidgwick believes that this would be a way around the dualism of practical reason.

A cute little transcendental argument lurks:

Since it is self-evident that I have most reason to do what is in my own interest, and it is self-evident that I have most reason to do my duty, both must be true. The only half plausible way for these two to align is if God properly awards duty following. So, the only half plausible conclusion is that God properly awards duty following. Hence, if my duty and my (non-supernaturally affected) interest seem unaligned, it would be best to do my duty.

This argument is certainly open to other objections, but here’s a particularly entertaining one. God could make sure that one’s duty and one’s interest are aligned by other means. For example, if one’s duty is always to maximize the total well-being of all sentient life, just suppose that whenever anyone acts in his own interest, God sees to it that everyone else’s well-being is astronomically increased. Provided that the benefit God provides to others is sufficiently significant, there is no conflict between one’s duty and one’s own interest.

It might be replied that this divine coordination scheme is less plausible than the standard one. But, if it really isn’t true that I have more reason to do my duty than act in my own interest, it’s tough to see why. So maybe this objection could be overcome if the defender of the transcendental argument will work out the theology for us, but I’m not going to cross my fingers.

Oh, and why do we tend to like the reward-style divine coordination scheme the best, anyway?

-- Nick

Guest Post: Epistemic Confessional

[The following is a guest post from Jack.]

Here is a fun experiment in philosophy. But first, let me define my terms.

Philosophers speak frequently about justified and unjustified beliefs. What does it take to believe justifiedly? That is a matter of controversy. But it is often supposed that another way of saying that a belief is (un)justified is saying that it is (in)appropriate for you to believe. It may be appropriate for you to believe that God exists, even if He doesn't, if you trust your parents and they told you that He does. It might be appropriate for you to believe both that all doctors are older than 30 and that some physicians are younger than 25, if you have reason to believe each and you have yet to realize that doctors just are physicians. It is, of course, appropriate for you to believe that the Sun is round, that chairs are frequently wooden, and that there were dinosaurs on Earth once upon a time. Justified beliefs are supposed to be fairly easy to come by.

Now for the experiment: Have you ever believed something unjustifiedly? If so when, and what?

I have done this experiment a couple of times before, always with philosophers and always with the same results. After a bit of attempted remembering, the subject says that they cannot remember a single time that they believed something unjustifiedly. (Justified beliefs aren't supposed to be quite that easy to come by!)

Of course, you will have changed your mind about something at some point during your lifetime. Perhaps you even regret believing as you once did. That would presumably make it unjustified for you to believe today what you believed before. That doesn't make your believing when you so believed unjustified.

In any case, I wanted to do a little online survey to see if others have the same reaction to the experiment. Comment either way. If you think that you have, at some point in your life, believed something unjustifiedly, please say what you believed and why you think it was unjustified of you then to believe as you did. If not, what does it take to believe unjustifiedly?

- Jack.

Vera on Sustainability and Moral Dupes

[Guest post by Vera Bradova.]

MORAL DUPE’S DILEMMA

A moral dupe is one who makes sacrifices on behalf of his/her own conscience in matters of the commons, and in so doing aids and abets those who do not.

A person who decides to do the “right thing” at some disadvantage to himself may be said to have the satisfaction that doing the right thing brings. But the moral dupe reaps no such comfort; he must admit that his having done the right thing actually makes it possible for the wrongdoers to do more wrong.

Garret Hardin spoke of this problem in his famous essay on the Tragedy of the Commons. He called it a pathogenic effect of conscience. He writes:

The long-term disadvantage of an appeal to conscience should be enough to condemn it; but has serious short-term disadvantages as well. If we ask a man who is exploiting a commons to desist "in the name of conscience," what are we saying to him? What does he hear? --not only at the moment but also in the wee small hours of the night when, half asleep, he remembers not merely the words we used but also the nonverbal communication cues we gave him unawares? Sooner or later, consciously or subconsciously, he senses that he has received two communications, and that they are contradictory: (i) (intended communication) "If you don't do as we ask, we will openly condemn you for not acting like a responsible citizen"; (ii) (the unintended communication) "If you do behave as we ask, we will secretly condemn you for a simpleton who can be shamed into standing aside while the rest of us exploit the commons."

Suppose my small community decides to put a lot of effort into reducing electricity usage at considerable expense (replacing old appliances, investing in low energy lighting, etc.). Let’s say these worthy citizens are successful in reducing yearly usage by half. They will not have saved anything for future generations! They will merely make it possible for some wasteful nearby employer to use up the “saved” electricity in a month. Our prudence, our economic sacrifice, and all our time and effort will only lead to some improvident person having more available to them to intensify improvident behavior.

But it gets worse. When the sacrifices of the moral dupe affect her reproductive fitness, then she also increases the chances her genes will over the long run be selected against, so that the “appeal to independently acting consciences selects for the disappearance of all conscience in the long run.” This is particularly obvious in the area of human population growth, where some people against their own preferences choose to have fewer children than they would otherwise aim for. In this situation the long term future goes to those who reproduce regardless of the burdens thus imposed on humanity as a whole or on the planet itself. As Albert Bartlett has pointed out, “unfortunately, the resources that the [people working on behalf of sustainability] save are not preserved for the use of future generations, but rather are used to support the continued growth of the population. Thus the net result of many of the actions of the sustainers is to accommodate and hence to encourage continued population growth.”

It is profoundly troubling for me to face this dilemma: Damned if I do, damned if I don’t. There are those who see no way out, advocating (perhaps slightly tongue-in-cheek) the idea that in order “to save the planet, we must waste it.” The idea of course being that the faster we overreach, the better chance we have to deal with the impending disaster. Michael Lardelli argues that “faced with the inevitability of resource limits the best scenario is to hit these limits with as small a human population as possible. Our waste and inefficiency then becomes a buffer of unused capacity. As resources decline we can reduce our consumption but still have enough to support life (maybe – if our supporting ecosystems have not collapsed completely). In contrast, if we hit our resource limits with maximal numbers of humans each living very frugally, then we have no spare capacity to fall back on and we will all perish.” He concludes that we should consume as wastefully as possible.

So is there a way out of this dilemma? Are there alternatives? Some commons have been managed well. For example, tribal chiefs had in pre-colonial days worked out good management of the Sahel grazing grounds. Various local fisheries and Alpine meadows have been managed well by nearby communities. The experts studying the problem of wise management of the commons say that local management by small, face to face communities is essential. But it is difficult to imagine how this advice would translate into good management of vast, impossible-to-fence-in resources of the global commons (e.g. clean air, viable oceans, healthy old growth forests, etc.) or even, on a smaller scale, the management of electricity supply and usage at the regional level.

I have been a big fan of sustainability and only recently have come to recognize the subversive logic of the moral dupe’s dilemma. Am I doomed to either throwing out my moral principles and waste as much as possible, or resign myself to being a moral dupe, an enabler for precisely those behaviors to which I am opposed on moral grounds?

-- Vera.

Guest Post: Naturalism

[Guest post by Barry.]

Let me begin by saying that these remarks are extremely sketchy, just a recording of a recent whisky-fueled conversation. I have hitherto taken myself to be a naturalist, so these remarks are in the spirit of self-examination. Any help will be very warmly welcomed.

Suppose we take naturalism to be the research project whose goal is the reduction of everything to matter. Reduction is supervenience, say; or something tighter. Everything includes all the troublesome phenomena: modality, mind, normativity, maths. Matter is whatever the theoretical physicists tell us the world is made of (never mind that they consider this a deep mystery).

Now imagine some Fukuyama-esque article of the future, triumphantly announcing the end of metaphysics. In this article it will be demonstrated, compellingly, that every single recalcitrant phenomenon has been reduced. (I do not intend the term 'demonstrated' here to be factive.)

What then?

According to our putatively final metaphysics, the world is one big chunk of matter. I think this leaves us with two questions, which the naturalist lacks the resources to answer. (1) Why is the world made of this stuff, and not some other stuff? (2) Why is there this stuff and not nothing at all?

Our explanans must always be explanatorily broader than our explanandum. You cannot explain alpha with alpha; you must explain it with some beta that may include alpha. (The fact that the girl crossed the road does not explain the fact that the girl crossed the road, but it might explain the fact that the girl crossed some part of the road.) As the Aristotelians say, explanations must involve not just the 'that' but also some 'because.'

The worry is that naturalists can explain a lot in terms of matter, but they cannot explain matter in terms of matter.

Perhaps I am being childish; perhaps explanations do have to come to an end somewhere; perhaps the answer to 'why is there something rather than nothing?' is: 'there just is.' Or perhaps this isn't a meaningful question, or it is incoherent some other way. But it doesn't seem to be. It just seems hard.

And here's a possible diagnosis of the naturalist's error. The privileging of matter is just another manifestation of the human mind's craving for fixity - for an Archimedean point. And its perhaps just as misguided as the Cartesian response to this craving, or the religious.

So should we go back to old-school metaphysics? Or embrace some sort of aesthetic scepticism?

- Barry

[See also: Why does the universe exist? -- RC.]

Guest Post: Worlds and Times

[By Jack]

What is the relationship between the series of truths in the world and the times in that world? That is, imagine that: !, @, #, $, % are maximally complete sets of truths (like an ersatz possible world for a world that lasts only an instant) and that time is discrete. How many different possible worlds can there be with this series of truths?:

!, @, #, $, %?

I think the most intuitive answer is one. Here is what makes that answer problematic. There can be two distinct times even though all and only the same things are true at those times. To see this, consider the following series of truths:

!, @, #, $, %, $, #, @, !

Then ask, how many instants are there in this world? I find it exceedingly implausible to say that there are only 5 instants of time in this world, one corresponding to each of the different maximally complete sets of truths. For then, which came first, the time that is corresponds to $ or the time that corresponds to %? This suggests that two non-identical times can realize a maximally complete set of truths.

But now the slippery slope kicks in. Why just two? What about this series of truths?:

!, @, #, @, !, #, !,

This suggests that any number of non-identical times could realize a maximally complete set of truths. But this is unattractive as well. It doesn't seem that we should have possible worlds that differ merely in the identities of the times in their world. [Suppose that t1 can realize # and t2 can realize #, but that t1 is distinct from t2. Now, there might be two different worlds that correspond to the following series of truths: #. One world is simply t1 and the other is simply t2. But that is weird.]

Guest Blogger: Killing me softly with his political theory

[By David Hunter]

Social Change, Suicide and Political Theory

Political theorists typically argue that radical changes to society are necessary to achieve some goal such as justice, or the appropriate respect for freedom or minority cultures. So to take distributive justice for example just looking at the major theorists, Rawls argued that resources to be distributed via the difference principle, namely that the worst off should be as well off as possible. This would be a significant change, Nozick in contrast argues that a free market distribution is fair, if and only if the starting distribution was just. However, as Nozick acknowledges the present distribution isn't just because of historic injustice, thus he advocates an initial equal redistribution, so still radical social changes. Dworkin, in seeking a distribution which is ambition sensitive and endowment insensitive envisages a society that is equally radically different from our own.

However there is increasing evidence that there is at least a strong correlation between significant social change and increased suicide rates. This can be seen in the former Soviet States, and in Northern Ireland following the Good Friday agreement. Likewise China’s high suicide rates have been attributed to the changes following the economic reforms in 1978.

Nor is this only associated with what might be considered negative social changes, in Northern Ireland for example, the signing of the Good Friday agreement, which seems clearly a great social good, still has been correlated with an increase in suicide rates.

It should be noted that this is only a correlation it does not show causation. It might well be that actually suicide somehow drives social change or a more likely alternative is that something else is associated with both social change and suicide and is caused by or causes one and then causes the other, such as perhaps a general lack of social cohesion. A popular theory to explain this correlation is that of Durkheim’s, who holds that in times of social change the influence that society exerts on its members is weakened and people are left to their own devices. This state Durkheim calls anomie in effect normlessness. Significant social changes promote anomie because they typically represent significant changes in the norms governing a society.

This explanation, though plausible may be incorrect so it may well not be the case that social change causes increased suicide rates. However it is plausible that the correlation indicates causation, and since this is a presently unsettled (and perhaps unsettlable, given the difficulty of avoiding confounding factors in social science research) question, it is reasonable that as political theorists we ought to play it safe and for the time being treat it as if it is for the time being.

This clearly creates a problem for political theorists, considering that most of us, myself included, champion significant social changes but hardly want to cause suicides. So should we not argue for significant social changes? There are a variety of responses that can be made to this problem which I will briefly explore in my next blog entry... But for now what do you think? Is this a serious problem for political theorists?

PS if you really want to hear what I think sooner, well I'm presenting a paper on it on Saturday at ETHICS AT THE MARGINS OF LIFE one hitch for those of you who are in the States, or Oz or NZ, its in Ireland...

Guest Blogger: Moral Status of Rats

[By David Hunter]

I've written about the science of this more at the INPAB blog in this post: Rats have metacognition And the implications for medical research, here I want to concentrate on the theoretical issue.

Basically new research seems to have shown that rats are capable of metacognition, in other words rats can think about thinking. Now non-human animals have been shown to have metacognition before, but thus far this has been restricted to what we might think of as the higher mammals, namely apes and dolphins. To have discovered this in rats seems to suggest that many animals may be capable of metacognition, something that we thought was restricted only to the highest of intelligences.

This may present a challenge to common accounts of moral status (ie what ought to be counted morally). On many accounts various mental capacities such as self awareness, memory, a consistent sense of self over time, the ability to feel pain might give something moral status.

Classically on the first 3 accounts, rats would fall outside the moral realm. However if they, and other animals are capable are capable of higher cognition then they would now be included in.

Personally this comes as no great shock to me as my account of moral status is a set of three separately sufficient conditions:
1. Sentience (The ability to feel pain)
2. Self Awareness
3. Being capable of contract forming

I'm curious to see what you think about this theory of moral status, and for that matter what this means for how we should treat rats...

Another Guest in the House

[By David Hunter]

Hi all, Richard has invited me along to guest blog here as well. As much as I have been enjoying Michael's posts on education, I thought I would add a different slant. However before I begin its only polite to introduce myself. I'm a lecturer in Bioethics at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, and a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. My interests include bioethics (obviously), political theory (especially distributive justice & theories of freedom), research ethics and philosophy of religion.

While I don't have a blog of my own so to speak I have been a long time contributor to Prosblogion and I have recently been involved in setting up two group blogs, the first on ethical issues in resource allocation and the second on philosophy and bioethics

Both sites include something which I hope you will find useful, which I've called the Motherlode and can be found on the top left hand corner of the page. To open it you just click the + button. The motherlode compiles all the latest table of contents for bioethics journals, mainstream ethics journals, political theory journals and general philosophy journals as well as bioethics news & ethics related blogs into one place.

Right well onto a substantive rather than navel gazing post.