Tendentious Terminology in Ethics

Ethical theorists may sometimes engage in "persuasive definition": re-defining an evocative phrase for their own purposes, in a way that their opponent will reasonably regard as inaccurate and unfair.  Two examples that always annoy me are "treating someone as a mere means" and the "separateness of persons".  Opponents of consequentialism all too often trot out these phrases to indicate deep flaws in consequentialism. But it only works for them if they first redefine these terms to mean something that has nothing to do with the literal meaning of treating someone as a mere means or the separateness of persons.  You might as well redefine "terrorist" to denote adherents of the opposing views, and then complain that your opponents are all terrorists.  It's dishonest rhetoric, and ought to be avoided.  In this post, I'll explain my two examples, and why I consider them so misleading.  Others are welcome to comment with other examples -- especially any that you think consequentialists may be guilty of!

Normative vs Metaethical (constitutive) Wrong-making

Melis Erdur, in 'A Moral Argument Against Moral Realism', asks "whether it makes moral sense to take the dictates of some independent reality to be the ultimate reason why genocide is wrong." (p.7) She continues:

[S]urely, the existence of an independently issued verdict – if there were such a verdict – that genocide is wrong would not be the main or ultimate reason why it is wrong. Genocide is wrong mainly and ultimately because of the pain and suffering and loss that it involves – regardless of whether or not the badness of such suffering and loss is confirmed by an independent reality.

It's a mistake to think that moral realism implies that possession of the mind-independent property of moral wrongness is the "ultimate reason why" an act is wrong, in the ordinary (normative) sense of "reason why".  It's a common mistake, though.  Matt Bedke writes something similar (though I gather from correspondence that he doesn't really intend it to be read this way) in 'A Menagerie of Duties?': "Is it because they are causing [...] pain that the action normatively matters in the way it does, or because there is some non-natural property or relation at play? Surely the former." (p.197)

Thinking Realistically about Policy Outcomes

If we want to know whether a certain policy or legal change would be a good idea, we should presumably consider the expected consequences.  Very roughly speaking (abstracting away from uncertainty and hence the need to weight various possible options by their probability), we should carefully assess what would happen if the policy is / isn't instituted, and we can then assess which result is morally better.  (I don't mean to assume consequentialism here -- if a policy violates rights, for example, one might deem it morally "worse" on those grounds.)  Call this approach "thinking realistically about policy outcomes."  (Also known as "thinking like an economist.")

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...

Why We Needn't Hold Politics Hostage to Metaphysics

Oh dear -- Reason Online has just (re)published a morass of philosophical confusion:

The brain is a physical organ. As such, it follows the laws of biology, chemistry, physics, quantum physics, and of any other hard science we have yet to discover. The brain cannot make choices. It is not free. So when someone says that mind is nothing but brain, he is saying that the things we associate with mind—choosing, preferring, thinking—aren’t real.

In philosophy this is called epiphenomenalism.

Empty Definitions

One of the most frustrating aspects of non-philosophers' attempts to dabble in philosophy is that they tend not to clearly separate terminological and substantive questions. They often claim that disputes (from ethics to philosophy of mind) are just a matter of how we choose to "define" our terms. This is not so. How we define our terms will of course affect what claim we are making (or what proposition we express) when we assert some sentence. But the claim itself may concern some entirely language-independent matter of fact.

Anti-Consequentialism and Axiological Refinements

Many common objections to utilitarianism -- e.g. cases involving unexperienced harms or sadistic majorities -- are really objections to a particular theory of the good, rather than to the core idea that we ought to promote the impartial good. So when faced with such objections, it's worth asking not just whether the action seems wrong, but whether the outcome is really desirable in the first place. If not, the consequentialist has a simple response: the act is indeed wrong, precisely because it doesn't maximize what's (genuinely) good.

Co-operation vs. Benevolence

It's worth distinguishing two superficially similar but fundamentally different answers to the traditional question 'why be moral?'. They are superficially similar in that both support benevolent behaviour in ordinary circumstances. And both involve some revision to traditional conceptions of rationality. But the precise nature of the called-for revision differs significantly between the two approaches, in a way that may also lead to significant practical differences in certain (neglected) cases.

Reasons-Talk and Fitting Attitudes

'Reasons' are typically introduced as 'facts that count in favour' of an action or attitude. But this invites confusion, insofar as both fittingness and fortunateness considerations may be taken to 'count in favour' in some sense. For example, there's a sense in which the truth of a belief counts in its favour (it renders the belief fitting or correct), and another sense in which the benefits you'd receive from having a certain belief count in its favour (it makes the belief fortunate or good to have). But it would be messy and unhelpful to call both of these 'reasons for belief'. Better to talk exclusively in terms of fittingness reasons -- and then when we want to note the fortunateness of a belief, we may do so by saying that it would be fitting to desire that one have the belief.

Dimensions of Normative Inquiry

There are a number of different 'dimensions' of normativity that call out for investigation. (Below I'll describe three: the criterial, epistemic, and structural.) These dimensions are largely independent of each other, so to make progress on one dimension we might as well make simplifying assumptions about the others, just for sake of exposition. (One could always restate one's point without making any such assumptions, but the result might be more clunky and long-winded.) It's important for readers to understand these differences, so as to avoid raising "objections" that aren't really relevant to the discussion at hand.

Philosophical 'Meta-gaming'

Metagaming is the use of out-of-character knowledge in an in-character situation...

Though originally defined in relation to role-playing games, similar phenomena may arise in philosophical debates. That is: when engaging in hypothetical reasoning, we need to be careful not to illegitimately import external information (e.g. the external fact that we are engaging in hypothetical reasoning) into the space of hypothesized claims. Let me illustrate with a few examples.

(1) Conflating the supposition that p with the supposition that the supposer supposes that p (as discussed here). Note that conditional proof begins by supposing that p, noticing that q follows, and hence concluding that if p then q. This would go badly wrong if one were to reason as follows: Suppose that p. So, you're supposing that p. Hence, if p then you're supposing that p.

This is bad reasoning because we began by merely supposing that p, and not that anyone is supposing it. It happens to be true, "externally" speaking, that in the process of making this argument we were indeed supposing that p. But that wasn't included among the hypothesized facts, and hence isn't eligible for inclusion in the conditional proof (which draws only on hypothesized, not external, facts).

(2) Conflating actual with hypothesized judgments. Sometimes we face the opposite problem. Rather than drawing on external information when we shouldn't, in this case we get so wrapped up in a scenario that we fail to draw on our independent/external judgments when we should. In moral philosophy, especially, we often need to evaluate counterfactual scenarios in which our counterparts are massively deluded or have manipulated desires/values. In such cases, it is vital to appreciate that our considered judgment about how we prefer the scenario to unfold, need not conform to the counterfactual desires that we are stipulated to have in the scenario. As explained here, there's an important difference between 'I do desire that, were I in situation S, P' and 'In situation S, I would desire that P'. (I suspect that this conflation often underlies knee-jerk subjectivism.)

(3) Fleshing out schematic arguments. As recently noted, when discussing arguments indirectly (e.g. by way of a schema with mere placeholders 'P' and 'Q'), it's crucial that one understands what features are built into the fleshed-out argument, and what features are merely used 'externally', e.g. in selecting and setting up how the argument is to be fleshed out. The linked post explains in more detail how this applies in case of the zombie argument in particular.

The key insight to note is that there's a world of difference between (i) conceiving and reasoning from an opaque statement like 'the complete specification of the [non-]physical base facts', and (ii) conceiving and reasoning from the actual specification P [or NP] -- which is selected to be, as it happens, a complete list of the [non-]physical base facts, though there might be nothing internal to P [NP] itself which specifies its completeness. Failure to appreciate this distinction can lead to some very sloppy reasoning, as further explained in my linked discussion.

(4) Other metaphysics/epistemology mix-ups. You can fill in your own favourite examples here. They all seem to share the common feature of conflating what is supposed to be true with what is supposed to be supposed (believed, known, etc.). I wonder whether the 'metagaming' metaphor would help students to better understand (and hence learn to avoid) this common mistake? (It seems helpful to me, but is the idea still as clear to those less-geeky souls who've never had the pleasure of playing RPGs?)

Understanding (Zombie) Conceivability Arguments: Part I

The zombie argument for dualism is commonly misunderstood. [For a broad overview and assessment of the argument, see my 'Zombie Review'.] In particular, misunderstanding the precise role conceivability plays in the argument often leads to overly hasty dismissals. In this post, I want to set out and correct three such misunderstandings. Let me begin on a conciliatory note by emphasizing that many conceivability arguments are no good. Each of the common mistakes discussed below begins by correctly noting a certain way that conceivability arguments can go wrong. But in each case, I will show, the zombie argument -- properly understood -- avoids the identified pitfall.

(1) In ordinary language, to call something 'conceivable' is just to say that you're not certain it's impossible. But such mere prima facie conceivability does not entail metaphysical possibility. There can be non-obvious or unknown necessities -- just look at mathematics. So clearly 'conceivability' in this sense doesn't prove anything much at all. That's true enough, but the zombie argument does not invoke 'conceivability' in this loose sense. Instead, it invokes the technical notion of ideal conceivability, or what can be conceived without (even implicit) contradiction. This stricter sense of conceivability more plausibly entails possibility. (The flip side of this is that it makes the premise [zombies are conceivable] more controversial!)

(2) Another common objection is that Kripke's discovery of the necessary a posteriori shows that some claims (e.g. "water is not H2O") can be ideally conceivable without being metaphysically possible. That's true, but a proper understanding of the Kripkean necessary a posteriori reveals that it is limited in scope. Kripkean complications arise only for concepts (like 'water') where the primary and secondary intensions diverge. Importantly, we can tell by conceptual analysis whether this is the case. We can tell, for example, that our water concept rigidly designates "the substance ___, whatever it is, that is the actual watery stuff of our world." But then to run a valid conceivability argument we simply need to take care to avoid those problematic concepts, and employ only their 'semantically neutral' (purely descriptive/qualitative) analogues: e.g. the qualitative term 'watery stuff' in place of the kind term 'water'. (Most everyone agrees that it's metaphysically possible that watery stuff be other than H2O: Twin Earth itself is an example!) Since the zombie argument can likewise be stated using semantically neutral terms, this suffices to defang the standard Kripkean objection.

[Since this post is getting overly long, I've shifted the third section to a new post.]

Being true vs. Judging true

[O]n the view that there is no generally privileged position from which to judge whether someone’s beliefs are true, there is no clear general distinction between beliefs and knowledge.

-- Russell Hardin, How Do You Know?: The Economics of Ordinary Knowledge

I'll have to remember this fallacy for the next time I'm teaching intro philosophy students the Metaphysics-Epistemology distinction.

But what do you think is the best way to explain and clear up this misunderstanding? (I might say: "All that follows from our fallibility in judging whether someone's beliefs are true, is that we may be similarly fallible in judging whether their beliefs constitute knowledge. But that's entirely compatible with there being a clear general distinction here, as revealed by the fact that we can perfectly well understand what the underlying difference between the two possibilities would be. It's just to say that we may not be in a position to uncontroversially recognize which of the two we're actually dealing with in any given case." Does that seem clear enough?)

Skepticism, Rationality and Default Trust

Intellectual virtue lies between the two extremes of dogmatism and radical skepticism. The irrationality of dogmatism is generally appreciated; less so the irrationality of radical skepticism (at least among my intro M&E students!). Let's attempt a remedy.

The global skeptic insists that we should question everything, trusting nothing: apparent perception, memory, "rational intuition", even methods of reasoning -- anything that can be doubted must be suspended from our minds and considered 'guilty until proven innocent'. The obvious problem with this stance - if followed assiduously - is that it entails rejecting everything, leaving one with no mind at all. This is the crucial point: just as a pure 'blank slate' cannot learn from experience, so must we rely on various assumptions if we are to learn, reason, and act rationally at all.

That's not to say we should dogmatically refuse to question our beliefs and practices. It's just that we cannot question them all at once. Any individual belief or assumption may be tested in light of the other things we (provisionally) take to be true, and revised if some incoherence is found. But we have to reason from the beliefs we have -- as Neurath famously put it, our mind is like a ship at sea, and even as we replace a faulty plank we must trust our weight to others.

The mere fact that those other beliefs can likewise be questioned does not suffice to show that we can't reasonably accept them (again, provisionally) in the meantime. The skeptic's claim to the contrary is itself a questionable belief, and not one we have any reason to accept. (It may seem intuitive at first, but once we fully understand the implications of this claim, it would be crazy to accept it -- or so I argue.)

To begin with, it's worth emphasizing that global skepticism is self-defeating, insofar as it implies that we should not trust its recommendation to trust nothing. Or, as Railton writes (in 'How to Engage Reason', Reason and Value, p.186):

Hume observed that [the sceptic] displays a touchingly unsceptical attitude towards the power of argumentation and his own powers of thought and memory. We might add: toward his own command of language and the content of this thoughts. Remove this default confidence, and he can no more declare his words to be 'giving an argument for scepticism'--an intentional action--than 'giving a recipe for haggis' or 'scat-singing without a tune'.

Hence my earlier claim that one who truly internalizes global skepticism is no longer capable of intentional thought or action at all. To accept global skepticism is to forsake any hope of rationality. It is the ultimate intellectual black hole. Railton (p.187) draws an important lesson:

Default trust, however 'blind', is not inherently blinding. On the contrary. If the sceptic trusts his ability to speak English and draw the conclusions demanded of his premisses, and I trust my own appreciation of his argument, we will both see (no longer be blind to) a problem that I have in defending my beliefs: Where I previously had hoped to be able always to have a reason for whatever I believe, taking nothing 'blindly' or 'without reason', I now realize that this hope is impossible--some things cannot, without regress or circularity, be argued for.

I trust the reader will by now agree that global skepticism is a non-starter, as any rational agent must take some things 'on trust' if they are to be capable of reasoning at all. Still, one might ask, what of slightly restricted forms of skepticism? Couldn't one consistently hold the more traditional skeptical view that it's just our sensory experiences and/or inductive practices that shouldn't be trusted? The traditional skeptic is willing to trust in reasoning as much as anybody is. They simply have different expectations about the external world (or "affirm a different prior") from the rest of us. In particular, they hold that all possible worlds are (a priori) equally probable, whereas we anti-skeptics consider some (perhaps simpler or more regular-seeming) distributions of properties across space and time to be more probable than others.

Sure, there may not be anything inconsistent about traditional skepticism, so defined. (Though such a skeptic has no reason to expect that they will continue to exist long enough to finish their thought.) But nor is there much reason to accept it, or indeed to find it any more credible than the claim that the world just came into existence 5 minutes ago. Admittedly, traditional skepticism is motivated by a premise that seems plausible at first glance, namely: "the reasonable 'default' view is to start off by assigning each possible world an equal probability of being actual." That sounds fairer and more reasonable than an a priori bias in favour of, say, worlds where memories are typically true--representing times and events that really did happen. But I suspect the intuitive plausibility of this is an instance of us being misled by overly-abstract principles. When we consider every more particular judgment or knowledge-attribution we are inclined to make, is it really plausible to think that the one abstract principle is more credible than all our conflicting particular judgments - and practices - combined? Colour me (cough) skeptical.

Upon reflection - in light of our actual beliefs - it seems we have most reason to reject the skeptic's principle. Though it seemed plausible at first, it is inconsistent with other claims that most of us find much more plausible. Here's another: rational agents should learn from experience. Skeptics -- even of the merely 'traditional' variety -- can't. As Railton writes (in 'Rational Desire and Rationality in Desire'):

It is well known that in order to learn about one's environment (whether one be human, animal, or teachable computer) it is not enough to have ample sensory input and plenty of memory registers to fill. The learner must also bring some expectations--such as expected dimensions of similarity (the "implicit quality space"). Otherwise, experience will simply accumulate in its infinite diversity, and all experiences will be equally relevant or irrelevant to one another. No lessons will be extracted.

Carnap gave an elegant demonstration of this point within the theory of logical probability. He asked us to consider a confirmation function that began (sensibly, it would seem) with no "prior bias", i.e., that assigned the same non-zero probability to every possible state of the world (what he called "state descriptions"). This function would, even given indefinitely large amounts of information about past states of the world, still assign the same probability to every logically possible way of extending this history into the future. In a fundamental sense, it could not learn from experience.

So I think it's pretty safe to conclude that (even the traditional form of) radical skepticism isn't rational. There's no guarantee that the rest of us are any better off, of course, but at least we have a chance. We do the best we can -- and we're yet to see any good reason to think that some other way is better.

One may be left feeling unsatisfied: the best we can do may not seem good enough. But since turning to skepticism is even worse, it seems we will just have to learn to live with tentatively trusting in the reliability of our perceptions, despite the uncertainty of it all. At least we can learn such things -- and that is something to be thankful for.

Moral Principles, Objective Generalizations

Folk often confuse the question whether morality is objective with the very different question of whether general moral principles, e.g. 'Stealing is wrong', are exceptionless. This is pretty silly, when you think about it. After all, nobody would think that the general biological principle "cats have four legs" is refuted -- or rendered merely 'subjective' -- by the existence of a three-legged cat. General principles may merely claim to describe normal cases, in which case they are not threatened by the odd exception.

So there's nothing to prevent a moral objectivist from affirming that normally, stealing is wrong, but in special cases it may be justified. Indeed, 'particularists' go even further, and claim that there are no (useful, informative) moral principles at all. One can still be a moral objectivist, and hold that each particular ('token') action is either objectively permissible or impermissible, depending on the precise details of the situation in question. They're merely claiming that we can't usefully generalize from the moral status of token actions to general act types. This suggests that morality is complicated, but complexity is obviously compatible with objectivity. As I put it in an old post:

Any adequate theory must be sensitive to the morally relevant features of a situation. It would be morally obtuse to claim that lying (for example) is always wrong, no matter the specific context. But this isn't relativism, so long as we agree that there's an objective fact of the matter in any particular case. Some lies are permissible and others aren't; but there's no one particular (token) act of lying that is at once both right and wrong, "relative" to different observers.

One might object, "If you can't give a straight answer to the question whether lying is wrong -- an answer that's true for everyone, in all times and places, then isn't that practically the definition of relativism?" But no, that's just as stupid as demanding a straight and universal answer to the question whether cats are tabby. The fact is: some are, some aren't. In each particular case, there's a perfectly objective fact of the matter. It may vary from case to case, however, rendering the general question underspecified. (Which cat? Which instance of lying?) Point to a cat, and I'll tell you whether that one is tabby. Likewise, point to a particular instance of lying, and we may determine whether that action was wrong or not. Any more general questions may lack answers. This isn't "relativism", in any interesting sense. It's just the perfectly ordinary point that (to put it in slogan form) variation precludes generalization.

General lesson: to think clearly about such fundamental issues, focus on tokens, not types.

Ignoring Reality Ain't So Ideal Either

Paul is unimpressed with non-ideal theory that takes into account agents' own moral failings or unreliability when prescribing what they ought to do:

Moral obligations ought not to depend on an agent’s character. We ought to insist that an agent with a bad character act entirely like an agent with a good character...

That seems inadvisable. Cases like the bad squash loser show that we ignore our moral failings at our peril. For a more high-stakes example, suppose God offers me a deal that's a freebie for a saint, but insanely risky for the rest of us:

(SaintOrSinner) God will save one innocent life now, but if I ever fail to meet a moral obligation for the rest of my life then a million innocents will be tortured and killed.

Should I take the deal? If I'm a saint (and know it), then it's clearly obligatory: I can save a life at no real cost, since - as a saint - I'm sure to meet my later obligations whatever they may be. But since I'm not a saint, it's very clearly impermissible -- I'd almost certainly be condemning a million innocent people to torture and premature death.

More generally, it's fallacious to move from the fact that it would be good to do P and Q to it would be good to do P. Remember that evaluations of act-aggregations and of individual acts may diverge:

If my future self cannot necessarily be trusted to do the ideal thing, this could radically alter what current decision would be for the best. Suppose my currently φ-ing could lead to (i) the best possible outcome if I were to follow this up with a series of acts S which I could, but actually won't, perform; and (ii) the worst possible outcome otherwise. In those circumstances, it is not best for me to φ -- doing so would have very bad consequences, due to my subsequent failure to S -- even though it's part of the best possible life. The divergence arises because at any given time I can only choose how to act then; I cannot perform a lifetime's aggregation of acts with a single decision.

So we need to be clear about what normative question is being asked. It may be advisable both (i) to do P-and-then-Q, and yet (ii) not to do P (because one is unlikely to follow up with Q, and the consequences of P without Q would be disastrous). This is perfectly consistent, because the two answers address different questions: one concerning the aggregation of acts that would be best, and the other concerning what present individual act would be best. It's just a basic fact that in non-ideal agents, these may diverge.

Two postscripts:
1. Although we will typically be more interested in deliberating over individual acts than collections thereof (since we can really only perform the former), there may be exceptions. See, e.g., my complaints about illegitimate appeals to 'Political Reality': they may be fine from an individual perspective, but sometimes we want to deliberate from an explicitly collective perspective, about the question of what 'we' (rather than just 'I now') should do. This shift in focus can be vital for breaking out of a bad equilibrium.

2. My old post on 'Accommodating Unreason' offers some reasons why, at least in low-stakes contexts, it may be better to treat people as if they are morally more reliable than they really are.

Grasping Normativity

Some people (most commonly, economists) appear to have lost their grasp of the concept of normativity. Their use of the word 'should' is tempered by scare quotes, and appears to refer to mere conventional morality (i.e. whatever norms happen to actually be accepted by society) rather than philosophical morality (i.e. the norms we really ought to have). What do you think is the most effective way to help them reclaim their grasp of the latter concept? Here are a few possibilities...

(1) Reassure them that nothing 'spooky' is required. (I assume such fears are what motivated them to banish the concept in the first place.)

(2) Offer cognate terms. Scrap 'morality'. Try talking about what you really ought, all things considered, to do. What matters. Or consider what would be best, or what you have most reason to do; what's reasonable, or rational.

(3) Quote Sidgwick (1890: 39)

Even, finally, if we discard the belief, that any end of action is unconditionally or "categorically" prescribed by reason, the notion 'ought' as above explained is not thereby eliminated from our practical reasonings: it still remains in the "hypothetical imperative" which prescribes the fittest means to any end that we may have determined to aim at. When (e.g.) a physician says, "If you wish to be healthy you ought to rise early," this is not the same thing as saying "early rising is an indispensable condition of the attainment of health." This latter proposition expresses the relation of physiological facts on which the former is founded; but it is not merely this relation of facts that the word 'ought' imports: it also implies the unreasonableness of adopting an end and refusing to adopt the means indispensable to its attainment.

(4) Go procedural. Consider the possibility that a reflective equilibrium process might lead one to change their values/preferences in ways that could only be described as an improvement. For example, one might iron out any inconsistencies, reduce the number of ad hoc/arbitrary distinctions, add more general principles that enhance the overall coherence and unity of one's desire set, etc.

(5) Offer examples of irrational preferences, e.g. future-Tuesday indifference, only caring about your future self's interests up until 1/1/09, altruistically caring about all and only persons whose names begin with the letter 'A', etc. Intransitive preferences. Failure to pursue the necessary means (ceteris paribus) to some endorsed end. Preferring the acknowledged lesser good to the greater. And so on.

(6) Draw attention to their agency. These skeptics usually presuppose a kind of naive Humeanism, according to which preferences are 'given' and automatically combine with beliefs to yield action. But that can't possibly be right, because it leaves no room for the familiar phenomenon of deliberation. We are agents with the capacity for practical reasoning, i.e. the assessment of reasons that count for or against various courses of action. This is a self-consciously normative process of decision: just as theoretical reasoning addresses the question what should I believe?, so practical reasoning addresses the question what should I do? Insofar as you think of yourself as a rational agent at all, you must be engaging with these normative questions; the alternative is to be a mere automaton, a reflexive stimulus-response machine. Most of us are more deliberative; but deliberation is inherently normative: it addresses a question for which there may be better or worse answers.

(7) Compare epistemic normativity. For some reason, people seem to be more skeptical of practical reason than theoretical (epistemic) reason. Even the most hard-nosed science-cheering skeptic usually thinks that Creationists, say, are going wrong in their beliefs. This is not just to say that their beliefs are likely false, or that they are unsupported by evidence (though this is part of it); in response to someone who invokes practical reasons for belief (say religion makes them happy), the skeptic may make the further claim that they are being unreasonable. (Cf. Sidgwick in #3 above.) Practical normativity is like that, only applied to actions rather than beliefs. Performing bad actions is kind of like believing contradictory things. People manage it all the time, but they're cognitively malfunctioning in doing so.

An additional point of analogy: skeptics may initially be inclined to an inadequately narrow conception of rationality. Deductive logic gives us no reason to believe that the Sun will rise tomorrow, as per the famous problem of induction. But we clearly do have good reason to believe this, and indeed it would be unreasonable not to. This points the way to a broader conception of rationality which invokes considerations of coherence, etc., much as Future Tuesday Indifference and similar examples (#5 above) show the need to go beyond mere instrumental rationality in the practical sphere.

Any other suggestions?

Shady Gambles

Roger White has proven, to my satisfaction, that perfectly rational agents could not have imprecise credences. In this post, I want to explain away a potential source of contrary intuitions. It seems perfectly reasonable -- and perhaps even rationally required -- to refrain from accepting bets on issues you are completely ignorant about. But if I were required to always have precise credence, then there are many (intuitively dubious) bets that I would have to accept. For example, suppose I have no evidence for or against a proposition P. If I must give it a precise credence of 0.5, then I must accept any better-than-even bet (e.g. costing $10 if P is false, and paying $15 if P is true).

The worry is that this leaves me very vulnerable to exploitation from more knowledgeable dealers. They might offer me deals that seem tempting in my ignorance, but which they have carefully set up so that the option I'm expected to choose is in fact a loser. The offering of a bet is itself a piece of new evidence: since the bookie is out to rip me off, an offer that looks "too good to be true" probably is. So it's a good practical rule of thumb to be disposed not to accept bets that others are keen to offer you.

Of course, we want to bracket these practical considerations for philosophy's sake. To avoid any fear of shady dealings or manipulation, we may suppose the details of the bet were determined by some completely random process. In that case, my intuitions sharpen up considerably. It no longer seems permissible to reject a better-than-even bet. Let me now offer an argument to back this up.

We saw in the previous post that a better-than-even Bet A can be combined with its converse Bet B (i.e. offering the same, better-than-even payoffs for the opposite result) to yield a sure win ($5 in the case of $15 vs. -$10 payoffs). So, even if you don't know anything else, you at least know that it's more desirable to take both bets than neither. The expected payoff is (say) $5 rather than zero.

But now suppose you are offered the following: we flip a coin, and if it lands heads you're committed to Bet A only, and if tails you get Bet B only. Is this a game you should accept? It seems so. If you play it over and over again, you can expect to make ever increasing winnings ($5 for every two games, on average). And it's perfectly random, so your one-shot expected utility must be positive too.

So, if you're offered Bet A alone (assuming the background conditions are such that the details of this bet were selected via some random, non-shady process), you should take it. A sharp credence of 0.5 won't leave you vulnerable in these properly sanitized conditions.

Misleading Generalizations

The NYT Magazine has an article on single-sex schooling, filled with infuriating claims of the generic form, 'Boys like X, girls prefer Y,' etc. It's not until the 4th page that they actually acknowledge how hopelessly misleading this all is:

[Giedd says] gender is a pretty crude tool for sorting minds. Giedd puts the research on brain differences in perspective by using the analogy of height. “On both the brain imaging and the psychological testing, the biggest differences we see between boys and girls are about one standard deviation. Height differences between boys and girls are two standard deviations.” Giedd suggests a thought experiment: Imagine trying to assign a population of students to the boys’ and girls’ locker rooms based solely on height. As boys tend to be taller than girls, one would assign the tallest 50 percent of the students to the boys’ locker room and the shortest 50 percent of the students to the girls’ locker room. What would happen? While you’d end up with a better-than-random sort, the results would be abysmal, with unacceptably large percentages of students in the wrong place. Giedd suggests the same is true when educators use gender alone to assign educational experiences for kids. Yes, you’ll get more students who favor cooperative learning in the girls’ room, and more students who enjoy competitive learning in the boys’, but you won’t do very well. Says Giedd, “There are just too many exceptions to the rule.”

Explaining Beliefs

Why do we believe the things we do? Fans of evolutionary psychology might be tempted to construct an evolutionary story about how such-and-such a belief might have proven beneficial to our ancestors on the African savannah. (Freudians and others might construct other stories.) But this is usually the wrong level to focus on. Evolution has equipped us with reliable general faculties of sense and reason. This means that the specific conclusions we reach are better explained by what's justified than by what's adaptive. In other words, if a belief is justified then no further explanation is necessary. It is only blatantly unreasonable beliefs that call out for special explanation -- perhaps in terms of evolved biases, developed disorders, social pressures, or the like.

This is important because people often treat evolution (and causal explanations in general) as an argument for moral skepticism: whatever caused our beliefs, it presumably isn't the abstract moral facts themselves!* But such arguments are question-begging, for they presuppose the skeptical view that our moral beliefs aren't justified.** Indeed, I think there's an important sense in which our philosophical beliefs are caused by the facts: we are responsive to considerations of rational coherence, which is precisely what the truth itself consists in.

* = It's also suspicious that only moral philosophy is singled out here. Logic is no less abstract, after all. Not to mention the belief in skepticism itself.

** = It works better as an argument against Platonism, though.

Here's the vital point: if philosophical truth just is what's maximally reasonable, then the skeptic needs to show that no moral views are more reasonable than their competition (for this would suffice to explain our knowing them). But of course merely pointing to Darwin does no such thing.