Philosophical Pluralism and Modest Dogmatism

Philosophers are sometimes prone to excessive skepticism, especially in the face of persisting disagreement. People often seem really bothered by the lack of consensus in philosophy (including, e.g., Derek Parfit, Jason Brennan, and most recently, Liam Kofi Bright).  But a large portion of such worries seem to stem from a failure to appreciate when actual disagreement is (distinctively) undermining:

In cases of what we might call 'non-ideal' disagreement, there's a presumption that the disagreement is rationally resolvable through the identification of some fallacy or procedural mis-step in the reasoning of either ourselves or our interlocutor. The disagreement is 'non-ideal' in the sense that we're only disagreeing because one of us made a blunder somewhere. We are sufficiently similar in our fundamental epistemic standards and methods that we can generally treat the other's output as a sign of what we (when not malfunctioning) would output. The epistemic significance of the disagreement is thus that the conflicting judgment of a previously-reliable source is some evidence that we have made a blunder by our own lights, though we may not yet have seen it.

Many philosophical disagreements do not have this crucial feature.  This is because "(i) there are many possible internally coherent worldviews, (ii) philosophical argumentation proceeds through a mixture of ironing out incoherence and making us aware of possibilities we had previously neglected." As a result, many philosophical disagreements simply reflect different substantive starting points rather than any purely procedural blunder.  And the fact that somebody exists who holds different substantive starting points than you has zero epistemic import over and above the prior observation that there are coherent alternatives to your own view (which you really should already know!).

Now, it's totally fair to worry about the epistemic significance of coherent alternatives. As I put it previously, it follows that "(iii) even the greatest [philosophical] expertise... will only help you to reach the truth if you start off in roughly the right place. Increasing the coherence of someone who is totally wrong (i.e. closer to one of the many internally coherent worldviews that is objectively incorrect) won't necessarily bring them any closer to the truth."

Good reasoning provides no guarantee of truth. There's a real possibility that we're irreparably mistaken, in which case no amount of procedurally conscientious reasoning would see us right.  Moreover, there's no neutrally-recognizable standard by which we can determine whether we are irreparably mistaken in this way. (If there were, the error wouldn't be so irreparable, after all!)  These facts may be disheartening to those who hoped for a transparent light of Reason to guide our way; but epistemic maturity requires us to recognize that such Cartesian hopes were never really reasonable or realistic in the first place.  We muddle by as best we can, and hope for the best.  If we successfully reach (or at least approximate) an internally-coherent position, it's possible that the one we reached is the one true view of the matter, but we cannot expect to be able to prove this to any who doubt us -- not even ourselves.  The most we can hope for is to be, in a sense, philosophically lucky. (But that's a fine thing to hope for!  Nothing is gained by holding out for unattainable Cartesian certainties.  It remains well worth striving for coherence, since that at least gives us a chance at being right.)

Once the above lessons are properly internalized, viewpoint diversity and philosophical dissensus comes to seem entirely appropriate. We need advocates to work out all the options, after all. (Nothing is gained by having a coherent alternative view be routinely ignored or overlooked: a merely sociological uniformity of opinion is no "consensus" worth having.) And if a view is internally coherent, you shouldn't expect to be able to argue a sophisticated advocate out of that position. Nothing forces them to share your premises!

Rather than seeing this as some deep failure of "analytic philosophy" (as if different training would somehow break the logical symmetry between modus ponens and modus tollens), I'd encourage clear-eyed acceptance of this reality, combined with default trust or optimism about your own philosophical projects. After all, unlike all those fools who disagree with you, YOU'RE beginning from roughly the right starting points, right? ;-)

Querying vs Dismissive Objections

It's worth distinguishing two very different ways of presenting an objection, and the two associated dialectical roles that an objection can play.

(1) Constructive* Querying objections serve the role of creating a dialectical opening, posing a challenge to which the target is invited to respond.  Questions like: "How would your view deal with X?" or "How much of a problem do you think Y poses for your view?" are paradigmatically querying objections, as I'm using the term here.  A key feature of querying objections is that they are not presented as presumptively decisive; if anything, the opposite might be the case: the critic may well presume that their target has a good response available, and they're curious to learn what it is.

(2) Dismissive objections, by contrast, aim to shut down the dialectic, demonstrating that the target view is hopeless and that no further time should be wasted discussing it.  They may typically take the form of statements rather than (genuine, non-rhetorical) questions.  By their nature, dismissive objections are presented as presumptively decisive, though of course the critic need not be dogmatic about this: while expecting that the target has no good response, they should still remain open to being surprised.

Three ways of rejecting moral intutions

People often assume that there's a basic difference in philosophical-methodological temperament between (say) utilitarians and "common-sense" deontologists.  Deontologists, it is said, feel strongly constrained by their intuitions about particular cases, whereas utilitarians are more wedded to theoretical virtues of simplicity and parsimony, and hence are willing to endorse their theory despite its counterintuitive implications.

I'm somewhat resistant to this characterization.  My own (roughly) utilitarian views are, I think, more driven by intuition than by concern for parsimony or the like.  (I don't think that parsimony really counts for very much at all in philosophy.  Though avoiding ad hoc or unmotivated distinctions certainly does.)  I think it's important to accommodate common sense, though this needn't involve just taking common sense at face value.  Thinking more about this, I figure there are three importantly different ways of rejecting a prima facie intuition that goes against your view.  In order of decreasing palatability, they are:

The Value of Life

Robin Hanson (sensibly) finds it bizarre that asymmetry-based anti-natalism is taken at all seriously: "I mean, really, the whole human race should go extinct to avoid the risk that some future kid might suffer at some point?!" If people have lives worth living -- such that they do not regret being born -- then (all else equal) their life is a good thing, even it happens to contain some sad or unfortunate elements. But rather than just relying on this substantive (and obviously correct) normative judgment, Hanson made a couple of unconvincing attempts to justify this substantive conclusion on purely formalistic grounds.

Moral to Non-moral inferences

It generally seems illegitimate to infer empirical conclusions from moral premises -- imagine, for example, a utilitarian inferring that killing Bob would fail to maximize happiness from their antecedent moral belief that killing is wrong. Or an incompatibilist arguing that determinism must be false because we're morally responsible. There seems something objectionable about the 'direction' of these inferences. (Consequentialists should start with empirical facts and infer moral conclusions; likewise for incompatibilists.)

But I wonder if we can legitimately draw some non-moral conclusions from moral premises. It doesn't seem so bad if the non-moral conclusions are still normative conclusions. I have in mind two examples in particular:

Who has intuitions about whether there are state-given reasons?

In 'Why Disallowing State-Given Reasons for Belief Might Be the End of the World', Andrew Reisner argues that "theorists who deny that there are any state-given reasons at all are forced to bite a large and very counter-intuitive bullet: in some circumstances, the only way for an agent to act and be in accord with reason will lead to the otherwise avertable end of the world."

Here's the situation: a demon provides you with credible evidence that p is false, and then tells you that he'll blow up the world unless you believe that p. On the fittingness view, this provides no reason to believe that p; at most it provides you with reason to desire this belief, or to act so as to bring it about. But now we suppose that the demon adds a further clause: he'll also destroy the world if you perform any such action. So you no longer have any reason to so act. Is the fitting-reasons theorist forced to conclude that there's nothing to be said in favour of believing p, then, even though that's the only way to save the world?

Reversing Metaphysical and Epistemic Priority

Ross Cameron asks a great question: what distinguishes legitimate from illegitimate appeals to the claim that "metaphysical priority isn’t epistemic priority"? To illustrate, consider Lewisian modal realism: although the Lewisian takes the possibility of talking donkeys to consist in the concrete existence of another spatiotemporally isolated world in which there is a talking donkey, he can claim to know the concrete fact in virtue of his prior knowledge of the modal one. On the other hand, it would be absurd for a Utilitarian to analogously argue that his prior moral knowledge that murder is wrong can ground his non-moral belief that murdering Bob would reduce unhappiness in the long run. Such reasoning would seem backward: in this case metaphysical and epistemic priority must coincide. Why the difference?

Imagining the Unseen

Consider what preferences you have over unseen outcomes. (For example, are you indifferent to the idea of your corpse being secretly donated - without warning - to the necrophiliacs society, or would you prefer that this not happen even if you're never told about it in advance?) To assess such questions, you likely try to 'picture' or imagine what the hypothesized state of affairs would be like, and then introspect your (actual) affective reaction to this mental exercise. If negative, as seems likely, then it seems you're not indifferent after all. You really do care about some things of which you could never learn. You would prefer that your corpse not be defiled, even if it has no impact on your experiences while you're alive.

Hedonists may object that this imagination-based methodology doesn't really get at your preferences concerning unknown and unseen outcomes. After all, they may say, all that this episode really establishes is that you are unhappy when you see, in your mind's eye, your corpse being defiled. Since you are imagining (mentally perceiving) the event in question, this corrupts your judgment concerning what was supposed to be an unperceived (by you) event. The hedonist may agree, after all, that this is unpleasant to think about. They just don't think that the event itself is bad (or undesirable for your sake).

I think this is not so much an objection as a cautionary note. It's true that someone might, if they're not careful, mistakenly conclude that they disprefer some X when really all that they disprefer is thinking about X. For example, when I imagine the sound of scratching a blackboard, I shudder in aversion. But that obviously doesn't commit me to disprefering a state of affairs in which a tree falls against a blackboard in an empty forest. As long as nobody is pained by the sound, it obviously doesn't matter. And, indeed, 'indifference' is precisely the response I have when I reflect carefully on what that state of affairs is like.

So, although it is easy to conflate conceiving that X and conceiving that X is conceived, it is not by any means inevitable. We can train ourselves to be careful in distinguishing the two. And we may then find that even if some of our preferences are purely hedonic in nature, many others are not like this. (It would certainly be a mistake to think that we can never have preferences about anything other than our experiences, or that we cannot identify such preferences via careful consideration of the hypothesized outcomes.)

For example: If you learn that there's a serious risk of blackboards being scratched in your vicinity after you die, that doesn't really call for any response. But if there's a serious risk of your corpse ending up in the hands of necrophiliacs, you might want to do something about that. (Just sayin'.)

The Importance of Implications

A recent discussion of wellbeing over at Go Grue reminded me of how easily philosophical debates can degenerate into mere terminological disputes and "concealed tautologies" (as Sidgwick and Parfit warn against) if we're not careful. For example, a hedonist might be tempted to define 'wellbeing' as 'the felt quality of a life'. But then they are not actually saying anything of substance when they assert that 'wellbeing is the felt quality of a life'. Given what they mean by the former term, this claim becomes logically equivalent to the empty tautology, 'The felt quality of life is the felt quality of life,' which is hardly a claim worth making.

In order to make our affirmation of a particular theory of wellbeing substantive, we must have some independent grasp of the meaning of the term. For example, we might analyze S's interests in terms of what's desirable for S's sake. But even if we lack a full-blown analysis of the concept, we should at least have some sense of its conceptual role, i.e. what implications it has for other philosophically important concepts.

I think it's very dangerous to just test one's linguistic intuitions in isolation. Often, people seem be drawn to hedonic (or 'mental state') theories of wellbeing simply because they think it sounds wrong to say that someone was "harmed" by an event that they never learned of (or that otherwise impacted their subjective experiences). This does not strike me as a philosophically interesting or relevant consideration. Instead of assessing what combination of words sounds natural to our ears (as if we were mere grammarians), we should be assessing the real content of the claim, as revealed by its philosophical (e.g. normative) implications.

The concept of 'wellbeing' seems important only insofar as it has implications regarding what we have normative reason to want and to do when we care about a person (including ourselves). If we do not think that a loving parent would (qua loving parent; bracketing all other motivations) want to plug their child into a Nozickian experience machine to live a meaningless life of pleasant delusion, or that a prudent person would want this for themselves, then we shouldn't be hedonists about wellbeing. It's that simple.

Philosophical Moves

I find it interesting to learn new philosophical 'moves' or strategies that can be applied in a range of circumstances. Examples I've previously discussed include:

(1) Scanlon's strategy (in Moral Dimensions) for disarming the apparent significance of intent in moral principles (e.g. the doctrine of double effect).

(2) Arpaly's shift from explicit judgments to implicit, deep-rooted responsiveness (in assessing moral character, blameworthiness, rationality, etc.).

(3) Noticing 'Derivative Objections', e.g. when people object to consequentialism on the basis of paradoxes in axiology.

(4) The moves and countermoves available when theorists make use of certain idealizations or counterfactual conditionals in their analyses (potentially falling afoul of the "conditional fallacy").

What (more or less general) philosophical strategies do you find most useful and/or interesting?

Philosophical Data

I've previously noted that some of the deepest philosophical disagreements are traceable to differing assumptions about what needs to be explained.

A reductionist might assume that we simply need to explain the third-personal empirical data: e.g. the facts that we have certain brain states, make certain vocalizations, etc. They then deny the reality of any further philosophical phenomena (e.g. irreducible qualia, normativity, etc.) on the grounds of parsimony: none of that is necessary to explain the scientific data. You don't need to posit moral facts in order to explain the occurrence of moral intuitions.

That's true enough. I don't think scientific inquiry should lead us to believe in moral realism. But I also don't think that science exhausts all there is to know. The philosophical 'data' may be more expansive than the empirical data, since we may know things other than third-personal observational facts. For an obvious example, I know that I'm phenomenally conscious. This datum calls out for explanation. For another example: we can (I assume) also know various moral/normative truths, in which case the search for a systematic moral/normative theory would be well-motivated (despite the fact that it wouldn't help explain the limited subset of data that the reductionist exclusively concerns himself with).

There are also various facts about epistemic normativity which call out for explanation. For example, I take it as given that rational induction is possible. We ought to believe that an emerald first observed after 2020 will be green, not grue. Such differences in 'projectability' may motivate positing objective structure: arguably, the reason why we can project 'green' but not 'grue' is because the former property is metaphysically privileged in an important sense. It is a more "natural" property, in the sense that collections of green things are (in respect of their colour) objectively more similar than collections of grue things.

So, realists (of various stripes) will dispute the reductionist's limited construal of 'the data to be explained'. This raises the difficult question: how can we make dialectical progress in resolving such fundamental disagreements? Are there generally acceptable moves for supporting or undermining the inclusion of a particular claim as "given"?

It seems there must be some constraints here. Something has gone badly wrong with the person who takes the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as a datum. This seems like a belief that should be undermined by skeptical probing, if it does no essential work in explaining anything else. But then why can't the skeptic likewise dispense with any other self-contained cluster of beliefs (say, normative beliefs; or even empirical beliefs!), if they do no essential work in explaining anything else? What is it that makes empirical beliefs (and, arguably, normative beliefs) indispensable in this way?

I'm unsure what to say about this. My best attempt at an answer is to appeal to transcendental / "may as well" arguments. At least in case of epistemic normativity: anti-skepticism is a precondition for successful inquiry, so we may as well take it on faith. If we're wrong, we're screwed anyway; but if we're right -- if we have any chance at all of attaining knowledge -- then this assumption positions us to make the most of it. (Cf. Intellectual Black Holes.)

A similar argument applies to practical normativity: we may as well assume there's something we ought to do (then work out what it would be, and act accordingly). It's only on this assumption that our choices matter -- that we ever act rightly or wrongly -- so this is the only possibility that is worth taking into account.

It's less clear whether any such neutral justification can be given for the assumption of first-personal subjective experience. In this case, it's more of a Moorean fact: something we're more certain of than we are of any argument to the contrary. The inescapability thus looks to be merely psychological: there's little I could say to someone with different beliefs -- e.g. a self-identified "zombie" -- to convince them that they're really conscious. (One of my undergrad professors insisted that he has no idea what all this talk of 'subjective experience' is about.)

This shouldn't necessarily undermine the belief. We have little option but to reason from what personally strikes us as true -- even if others think differently, that shouldn't make it impossible for us to come to justified beliefs. But, on the other hand, nor should we want subjective certainty to suffice for justification: someone might be irrationally certain that the FSM exists, after all. The difficulty is that, at the bedrock level, there are no neutral arguments left to distinguish between the various positions. It looks like we must simply make a stab in the dark and insist that certain views (our own, if we're lucky) are brutely justified and others aren't.

It would be nice if we could say something a little more illuminating.

Accommodating Common Sense

Kenny Pearce has an interesting post contrasting Locke's and Berkeley's diverging approaches to common sense:

Locke's goal, it seems, is to turn our ordinary beliefs into a system of metaphysics... Berkeley's project is, as he famously put it, to "think with the learned, and speak with the vulgar." His metaphysical system, he is well aware, bears no resemblance whatsoever to common sense. Nevertheless, he claims, his system preserves the correctness of common sense within its own domain.

It's a nice distinction, and I'm with Berkeley at least in thinking that we shouldn't read too much into the platitudes of common sense. "Folk ontology", for example, strikes me as an oxymoron: the folk don't have anything to say about the questions that interest contemporary ontologists. Ordinary talk of 'existence' invokes the 'superficial', non-ontological sense of the word. I'm skeptical whether there is any sense to ontology at all, but even if there is (say we can make conceptual sense of the objective structure of reality), that sure isn't a domain the folk are concerned with in their everyday talk of how many chairs are in the room. (It would miss the point to answer, "None; there are only atoms arranged chair-wise." This is not a difference of any concern to the folk.)

I think we also need to be careful about how we seek to integrate "common sense" moral intuitions into our moral theory. The folk concepts of 'right' and 'wrong' again strike me as fairly superficial, and so not of great philosophical interest. Moral philosophers (of my stripe) are instead concerned with the most fundamental normative questions, e.g. about what we have most reason to do. To say it's intuitively "wrong" to push the fat guy in front of the trolley is neither here nor there. The vague intuitive idea being expressed here may correspond to any number of more precise claims (e.g. that it's a bad rule/decision procedure to allow killing innocents, or that we should censure someone for acting so) that are quite compatible with consequentialism. So, properly understood, I don't think consequentialism is really counter to common sense at all. It's orthogonal -- addressing a different, deeper, question.

So, accommodating the claims of commonsense is often less philosophically demanding than one might expect. Still, we shouldn't be too complacent. In particular, it is not enough to simply give an account on which the folk platitudes come out true, if this involves revising their meaning beyond recognition. One might think David Lewis guilty of this, for example, when he analyzes modality in terms of concrete spatio-temporal regions. Such regions just don't seem to be the right kind of thing to be that in virtue of which our ordinary modal claims are true. At least, this surely violates the folk understanding of what their modal talk is about. That's not an automatic disqualification -- I'm often sympathetic to philosophical revisionism -- but it is worth noting as a genuinely "counterintuitive" result. (Similar remarks may apply to Berkeley's phenomenalism.)

Arguing from Ostension

When a Skeptic claims that something (e.g. knowledge, free will) does not exist, a tempting response is to point to the world, and say, "There's some important difference between this case and that one, so I'm just talking about whatever it is that sets the former apart. You can't deny that there is such a thing." For example, there's an important difference between our ordinary actions and those performed out of compulsion -- e.g. hypnotic suggestion or mental illness. It is arguably just this difference that talk of 'free will' is supposed to track. Is this a legitimate anti-skeptical move?

It's always open to the Skeptic to argue that there isn't really any such "important difference" there. We assume there's a difference, but it may be superficial. A skeptic may argue that on closer examination we will find the various cases to be relevantly similar. That's a fine counter-response, if they can manage it. It shows that the anti-skeptical argument from ostension is never a knock down argument. But I think it may often serve an important philosophical purpose nonetheless.

Skeptical arguments often proceed in a very 'top-down' form. They start from a theoretical assumption (e.g. that knowledge requires certainty, or that free will requires ultimate sourcehood), and go on to show that nothing can meet this assumed requirement. That's fine as far as it goes, but if a requirement is impossible to meet, that should set off some alarm bells. In particular, it should make us question whether it's really such an important requirement after all. And that's where the argument from ostension comes in. It's a way to bring the Skeptic's theoretical assumptions into question. Maybe the Skeptic can meet the challenge, but it's often worth asking.

It's easy to make mistakes when one is engaging in a priori theorizing, after all. So the bottom-up (ostensive) method serves to keep us grounded, reminding us of the (apparently) important distinctions that our theorizing sought to capture in the first place. This assumes that intuitions about particular cases are generally more reliable than top-down theoretical intuitions; but that strikes me as a fairly safe assumption. (It is possible for systematic theorizing to override more particular judgments, of course; but some justification is required. Not just any old theoretical intuition will do.)

Psychologists Mangle Philosophy

Haidt and Bjorklund ('Social Intuitionists Answer Six Questions about Moral Psychology') suggest a model ('SIM') according to which human moral judgments typically result from gut reactions, post-hoc rationalization, and social conformity, rather than good philosophical reasoning (though the latter is also possible; just rare). No great surprise there, I should think. But at the end of the paper they grossly overreach in suggesting alleged "philosophical implications" of this psychological claim.

"1. Moral truths are anthropocentric truths":

On our account, moral facts exist, but not as objective facts which would be true for any rational creature anywhere in the universe. Moral facts are facts only with respect to a community of human beings that have created them...

Most people aren't philosophers, therefore moral realism is false? I'm not seeing the connection here. The core of the paper was talking about moral judgments or beliefs. Now they're suddenly drawing conclusions about the objects of those beliefs -- the "moral facts", not just our thoughts about them. Isn't this a whopping non-sequitur? Is it yet another instance of the lazy conflation of belief and truth (as suggested by their subsequent reference to the "moral truths held by members of [a] society") or is there some more charitable interpretation that I'm missing?

"2. The naturalistic imperative: all ought statements must be grounded, eventually, in an is statement" They offer as an example of a good is-to-ought inference:

Sheila is the mother of a 4-year-old boy, so Sheila ought to keep her guns out of his reach.

But of course even non-naturalists can endorse this (enthymatic) inference. That's because there are further moral premises implicit in the background, e.g. that mothers ought to keep their children safe from harm. This is not an example of empirical grounding of a moral claim, but of the empirical application of a more general moral principle.

This raises a more general worry I have about naturalistically inclined philosophers. When they claim that ethics must be "empirically informed", they could mean one of two things. If they simply mean that empirical contingencies affect how moral principles apply to our actual situation, then that's utterly uncontroversial. (A consequentialist will be interested to learn what would actually bring about the best consequences, for example.) But if they mean something stronger, that empirical findings should influence our first principles -- not just which conditional claims turn out to apply, but what should be conditionally claimed in the first place -- I don't see the faintest reason to believe this.

"3. Monistic theories are likely to be wrong"

If there are many independent sources of moral value [Haidt classifies humans moral intuitions under 5 categories: harm, fairness, authority, purity, and ingroup/outgroup] then moral theories that value only one source and set to zero all others are likely to produce psychologically unrealistic systems that most people will reject.

Note, again, the sloppy conflation of descriptive and normative "value" (belief and truth). Haidt likes to accuse liberals of failing to "understand" anti-gay sentiment, for denouncing it as immoral 'homophobia' rather than "appreciating" that it's a moral judgment which derives from our evolved 'purity' module. We parochial liberals limit ourselves to the first two "sources of value", and "neglect" the latter three. But here's the thing: just because there's a mental module which inclines people to judge yucky things as immoral, doesn't mean they're right. (Duh.) Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.

4. Haidt and Bjorklund's fourth "implication" is that a moderate relativism is true:

If relativism is taken as the claim that no one code can be proven superior to all others, then it is correct, for given the variation in human minds and cultures, there can be no one moral code that is right for all people, places, and times.

Says who? Again, nothing in the descriptive theory of SIM implies any such thing; these guys are just making stuff up. (Aside: we should also take care to distinguish situation-sensitivity vs. relativism proper.)

They go on to reject radical relativism, understood as they claim that "no one code can be judged superior to any other code". Apparently a code that "radically violate[s] the values and wants of a large proportion of the people involved" fails to qualify as "well formed". It's nice that they don't want to endorse slavery and the like, but this ad hoc principle reinforces my sense that they're just making stuff up as they go along.

"5. The methods of philosophical inquiry may be tainted":

If the SIM is right and moral reasoning is usually post hoc rationalization, then moral philosophers who think they are reasoning their way impartially to conclusions may often be incorrect. Even if philosophers are better than most people at reasoning, a moment's reflection by practicing philosophers should bring to mind many cases where another philosopher was clearly motivated to reach a conclusion and was just being clever in making up reasons to support hear already-made-up mind... The practice of moral philosophy may be improved by an explicit acknowledgment of the difficulties and biases involved in moral reasoning. As Greene has shown, flashes of emotion followed by post hoc reasoning about rights may be the unrecognized basis of deontological approaches to moral philosophy.

This raises interesting issues about the genetic fallacy, and the extent to which explanatory reasons can debunk normative reasons. In assessing "clever" arguments, I don't usually care what "motivated" the author. Whether deontology is the most rational and systematically defensible approach to ethics seems logically independent from the question of its psychological "basis" in human proponents. I guess a spectator might draw on genetic considerations as a kind of Bayesian meta-evidence. But from within the practice of philosophy itself, I'm not sure these considerations are really all that relevant.

So, there you have it. Five alleged "philosophical implications", of which the first four are blatant non-sequiturs, and the fifth is at least dubious. Whether SIM is true or not doesn't really affect any of these questions. (Would the truth or falsity of SIM really influence your beliefs here, or even shift your credence in the slightest?) We need to do a priori philosophy to determine (1) whether there's a uniquely rational moral system, (2) which empirical contingencies have moral relevance, (3) whether disgust - as well as harm - can ground moral facts, (4) whether some moral codes are better than some or all others, and (5) in what conditions 'genetic' considerations are philosophically relevant.

Those are the fundamental philosophical questions here, and (so far as I can see) empirical psychology in general - and SIM in particular - doesn't have any implications for any of them. Certainly Haidt and Bjorklund haven't shown any. Perhaps other readers might have more luck?

Open Thread: fundamental disagreements

Sometimes, when reading a blog, you may get the feeling that the blogger's posts are infused by a fundamentally misguided assumption. But such deep-rooted disagreements can't typically be raised within the scope of any particular post. So consider this open thread an invitation. Do you find yourself raising an eyebrow at some of my basic presuppositions? Any disagreements that run so deep you wouldn't even know where to start? Try here!

Arguing by Degrees

Now that I think of it, a better way to make my point may be to replace talk of 'all or nothing' belief with credences or degrees of belief.

Even if you ultimately reject an argument, it may be that you were antecedently disposed to have greater credence in the premises (conjoined) than in the conclusion. Upon having this mild inconsistency pointed out to you by the valid argument, you will presumably revise your credal state by some appropriate combination of reducing your credence in the premises and raising your degree of belief in the conclusion.

If an argument can, in this way, be expected to lead many to rationally revise upwards their degree of belief in its conclusion, then it ipso facto has rational force (and is not question begging), in relation to this community of inquirers. This may be so even if their resulting credal state still falls short of full-blown belief.

I note that this approach also helps to refute a similar claim I addressed last year, namely:

No rational argument then can be constructed to ever change a person’s mind, because we can never get to premises that people must accept.

My earlier points refute it well enough, of course, but 'credence' talk makes it even clearer. For this reminds us that we may change a person's mind even without changing their full-blown beliefs (though we may do that too). Even if we merely sway them from thinking a view wildly implausible to instead thinking it moderately unlikely, that is clearly dialectical progress.

Assessing Arguments and Begging Questions

What does it take to be a good (or at least rationally respectable) argument? Consider the 'zombie argument' against materialism I present here. It has provoked vocal denunciations from some quarters, with Richard Brown insisting that it is "a rotten argument", and more precisely that it is "question begging" and hence not "anything like an argument against materialism."

If you read that last post of his, you'll notice the entire basis of his diatribe is simply that he happens not to accept a premise of the zombie argument. He's quite explicit about this:

A good argument starts from premises that everyone (in the debate) thinks are true and then show[s] that because of that they are committed to some other claim.

Anything else - the slightest hint of controversy - and an argument is ipso facto "crappy". This is a view which calls for no further refutation than its own clear statement.

It is possible to have a good (reasonable, respectable) argument that does not command universal assent. Indeed, it is even possible to respect an argument that you ultimately judge to be unsound. (I hold G.A. Cohen's argument against utilitarianism in high esteem, for example.) So I propose that we should instead assess arguments according to how well they advance the dialectic. So long as there are some opponents who are antecedently disposed to accept the premises of your argument, then it will have some rational purchase on them. A truly question-begging argument, on the contrary, is one that could not reasonably sway anyone who did not already accept the conclusion (because the conclusion is transparently contained within the premises in a way which makes the reasoning vacuous).

It should now be clear that the zombie argument is not, in fact, question begging. It has two controversial premises, but each is accepted by many prominent materialists. Moreover, there are at least a fair number of materialists-by-default, like my past self, who are disposed to find both premises very plausible, and hence to be rationally persuaded by the argument to reject materialism. It isn't vacuous, it begins from premises that many people -- including those who don't antecedently accept the conclusion -- find compelling, and from which the conclusion validly follows. What more could you ask for?

Now, I don't think it's a knock-down argument, since the premises are (as always) open to question. Indeed, I was very explicit in my overview post that I think people can reasonably disagree about whether to ultimately accept the zombie argument or not. But even one who ultimately rejects the argument should be able to recognize that it has some rational force (and certainly isn't 'question-begging' on any sane conception). Apparently that makes me a "fanatical property dualist". Go figure.

Bigoted Moral Intuitions

Some people judge that homosexuality is immoral, because they find it intuitively repugnant. They must also be aware that a few short decades ago people thought that interracial sex was immoral, on the same basis. This suggests that such intuitions provide a very flimsy basis for discrimination. Indeed, I find it completely baffling that homophobic conservatives fail to realize that they are the modern day equivalent of yesterday's racist conservatives. Why are they not humbled by history? What makes them think that their disgust-based moral intuitions are any more reliable than their grandparents' were?

There was some discussion of this on the Missouri philosophy blog a while back. I suggested that actions are "permissible by default", and that constructing a positive argument for the permissibility of homosexual acts is as superfluous as arguing for the permissibility of eating icecream. The onus is on the moral scold. Andrew Moon responded that we may be justified in believing something to be wrong even if we can't immediately produce an argument to support this belief. I clarified my point as follows:

Andrew - I meant the ‘permissible by default’ thesis to be fundamentally metaphysical in nature. That is, an act is permissible unless there is in fact some reason why it’s wrong.

The methodological implication is that we shouldn’t expect any explanation to be given of why permissible acts are permissible (except for the trite “it harms no-one”, etc. — cf. the ice cream case). If we are to engage the moral question philosophically, the only way to do this is to see if there are any arguments for impermissibility that stand up to scrutiny.

As an epistemic point, of course, people don’t always need to do moral philosophy before having justified moral beliefs. But it’s also obviously true that your mere intuition isn’t enough — just look at all the past bigots to whom it “seemed” that interracial marriage was wrong. I’d guess the epistemic question must be settled by factors external to the immediate phenomenology, e.g. whether your moral intuitions are actually reliable, or something along those lines.

That still doesn’t speak to the practical point, of what subjective guidance one can give an agent here. How about this: if it seems to you that X is wrong, then you may tentatively suppose this to be so, BUT if other epistemically responsible agents call this into question, you ought to put aside your mere intuition and see whether there is any actual reason that can ground it. (If, at the end of inquiry, you can find no good arguments for the impermissibility of X, this would seem pretty strong evidence that in fact you are in the same position as the racists of yesterday.)

Unfortunately, no-one ever responded to these suggestions, so I reproduce them here instead. Any thoughts?

Thought Experiments and Begging Questions

Adam Rawlings has an interesting post complaining that common philosophical thought experiments are "hopelessly question-begging":

The zombie scenario just assumes, without argument, that a fully-specified physical world contains no consciousness. The amoralist case just assumes, without argument, that full knowledge of morality will not give sufficient motivation to act. The Frankfurt-style examples just assume, without argument, that being under the control of a counterfactual demon is still a case of genuinely free choice in action. And the direction of fit metaphor just assumes, without argument, that these two directions of fit must both exist. In other words, the cases are structured in such a way as to appeal solely to intuitions favourable to one side of a philosophical dispute, bypassing the inconvenient "giving an argument" stage completely.

All very true, I grant, but there's nothing wrong with this. To see why, suppose I were to claim that 'bachelor' is defined to mean 'unmarried man'. You might respond with putative counterexamples, e.g. pointing out that the Pope is an unmarried man, but (intuitively) not a bachelor. It would be odd for me to complain, "You're just assuming, without argument, that the Pope is not a bachelor!" True, you say, but I'm missing the point. You merely wanted to draw my attention to a possibility that I may have neglected. Do I really deny that the Pope is no bachelor, you ask? If so, we must look elsewhere to resolve our disagreement. But it was not unreasonable for you to offer the suggestion that you did: you had every reason to expect that it might inform my view, even though I did not antecedently agree with your conclusion that there could be unmarried men who aren't bachelors.

Compare Stalnaker's wonderful insight:

With riddles and puzzles as well as with many more serious intellectual problems, often all one needs to see that a certain solution is correct is to think of it--to see it as one of the possibilities.

Sometimes a vivid illustration is all we need to advance our understanding, and so make philosophical progress.

With this in mind, I think it helps to understand 'begging the question' in dialogical (rather than purely logical) terms. Every valid argument contains its conclusion in its premises, after all. So that alone can't be grounds for complaint -- there's nothing wrong with drawing out implicit commitments which one hadn't previously appreciated. Rather, what's problematic is if an argument is not going to be rationally persuasive to anyone who doesn't already accept the conclusion. Fruitful debate merely calls for arguments that are dialectically effective for logically non-omniscient agents such as ourselves. Some arguments aren't going to help advance the dialectic at all, so it's those which I would call 'question begging'.

The thought experiments Adam discusses aren't like that though. Many people are persuaded upon learning of zombies and Frankfurt cases. These thought experiments make vivid to us certain conceptual interrelations which we had not fully appreciated beforehand. That said, further argument will be required if someone sincerely disputes the proffered description of the scenario in question (as Adam suggests). But that merely shows that these thought experiments are not guaranteed to be dialectically effective. That's fine; there's plenty of space between 'knock down' and 'mistaken' for these arguments to occupy.

Thought Substitutes

I've recently lamented how logical formalisms and inductive meta-arguments risk being misused as substitutes for careful thought. It's also a major worry I have about (some) "experimental philosophy". Consider, for example, the following:

Does common sense morality assume objectivity? According to a recent study by Goodwin and Darley, most folk actually don't believe that their moral judgments are objectively true.

It's not clear how this fact is any response to the question. The question, recall, is not whether most folk believe in moral objectivism (which is all the survey can tell us). That's quite irrelevant. The real question is whether our moral practices rationally commit us to objectivism, and that is not a purely empirical question. It's a normative question, so there is simply no way to answer it without actually doing philosophy.

I don't mean to bash all attempts at empirically informed philosophy. If we are concerned with analyzing actual moral practices, it's an empirical question just what those are, i.e. what moralizing behaviours people in our society engage in. It's entirely appropriate to use empirical data as a starting point for philosophical inquiry, especially if that data is precisely what we're wanting to analyze. My point is simply that empirical work cannot substitute for philosophical analysis.

Further, it will rarely be worthwhile to ask folk for their theoretical opinions. Surveys like the above merely tell us what pop-philosophical theories are most prevalent in our public culture at present. Many people will profess a belief in relativism, for example, even if further probing would eventually reveal that they don't actually accept the implications of this view. As R.M. Hare once wrote:

If we want to find out what ordinary people mean, it is seldom safe just to ask them. They will come out with a variety of answers, few of which, perhaps, will withstand a philosophical scrutiny or elenchus, conducted in the light of the ordinary people's own linguistic behaviour (for example what they treat as self-contradictory).

So, next time you come across a study reporting the philosophical beliefs of non-philosophers, just remind yourself of the classic Onion study: