Parfit's Cat

My favourite story from Simon Beard's Parfit Bio:

"Like my cat, I often simply do what I want to do." This was the opening sentence of Derek Parfit's philosophical masterpiece, Reasons and Persons. He believed that it was the best way to begin his book because it showed something important about people. Often we are not as special as we think we are. For instance, when people simply do what they want to do they appear to be utilizing no ability that only people have. On the other hand, when we respond to reasons, we are doing something uniquely human, because only people can act in this way. Cats are notorious for doing what they want to do, and the sense of proximity between a cat and its owner pleasingly heightens our sense of their similarity. Hence, there could be no better way for this book to begin. 

However, there was a problem. Derek did not, in fact, own a cat. Nor did he wish to become a cat owner, as he would rather spend his time taking photographs and doing philosophy. On the other hand, the sentence would clearly be better if it was true. To resolve this problem Derek drew up a legal agreement with his sister, who did own a cat, to the effect that he would take legal possession of the cat while she would continue living with it.

MacAskill on Aid Skepticism

The whole paper is great, but I especially wanted to share his concluding remarks:

Often, critics of Peter Singer focus on whether or not aid is effective. But that is fundamentally failing to engage with core of Singer’s argument. Correctly understood, that argument is about the ethics of buying luxury goods, not the ethics of global development. Even if it turned out that every single development program that we know of does more harm than good, that fact would not mean that we can buy a larger house, safe in the knowledge that we have no pressing moral obligations of beneficence upon us. There are thousands of pressing problems that call out for our attention and that we could make significant inroads on with our resources. Here is an incomplete list of what $10,000 can do (noting, in each case, that any cost-effectiveness estimates are highly uncertain, with large error bars, and refer to expected value):

• Spare 20 years’ worth of unnecessary incarceration, while not reducing public safety, by donating to organisations working in criminal justice reform (Open Philanthropy Project 2017b).

• Spare 1.2 million hens from the cruelty of battery cages by donating to corporate cage-free campaigns (Open Philanthropy Project 2016).

• Reduce the chance of a civilisation-ending global pandemic by funding policy research and advocacy on biosecurity issues (Open Philanthropy Project 2014).

• Contribute to a more equitable international order by funding policy analysis and campaigning.

In order to show that Singer’s argument is not successful, one would need to show that for none of these problems can we make a significant difference at little moral cost to ourselves. This is a very high bar to meet. In a world of such suffering, of such multitudinous and variegated forms, often caused by the actions and policies of us in rich countries, it would be a shocking and highly suspicious conclusion if there were simply nothing that the richest 3% of the world’s population could do with their resources in order to significantly make the world a better place.The core of Singer’s argument is the principle that, if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do so. We can. So we should.

E.J. Lowe on the Inescapability of Metaphysics

"How is it possible for creatures like us to chart the realm of possibilities? Of course, this is a curious question, to the extent that it is, itself, a question -- addressed to ourselves -- about the very realm of possibilities, access to which, by us, is being put in question.  Suppose, however, that we were to come up with an argument whose conclusion was that it is not possible for us to chart the realm of possibilities. That conclusion would seem to undermine itself, because the conclusion itself concerns the realm of possibilities, maintaining that that realm does not include the possibility of our charting it.  We could thus only have reason to believe the conclusion if the conclusion were false: so we can have no reason to believe it.  Is this just a trick? I don't think so; rather, it is yet another example of the unavoidability of metaphysics. As rational beings, we cannot but consider ourselves capable of knowing at least something about the realm of possibilities. This should not be surprising. Reasoning itself depends upon a grasp of possibilities, because a valid argument is one in which it is not possible for the conclusion to be false if the premises are true -- and a rational being is a creature which can discern the validity of at least some arguments." -- p.137 of 'Metaphysical Knowledge', in Matthew Haug (ed.) Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory?

Parfit on Aggregation and Iteration

People often claim that a large harm to one person is more important to prevent than a very great number of smaller harms to different people.  But this "anti-aggregative" view (that we ought to prevent the one great harm rather than the many smaller ones that quantitatively outweigh it) is indefensible for the straightforward reason that repeated iterations of such a choice would make everyone worse off.  As Parfit explains in 'Justifiability to Each Person' (p.385):

[W]e might claim that
    (1) we ought to give one person one more year of life rather than lengthening any number of other people’s lives by only one minute.
And we might claim that
    (2) we ought to save one person from a whole year of pain rather than saving any number of others from one minute of the same pain.
These lesser benefits, we might say, fall below the triviality threshold.

These claims, though plausible, are false. A year contains about half a million minutes. Suppose that we are a community of just over a million people, each of whom we could benefit once in the way described by (1). Each of these acts would give one person half a million more minutes of life rather than giving one more minute to each of the million others. Since these effects would be equally distributed, these acts would be worse for everyone. If we always acted in this way, everyone would lose one year of life. Suppose next that we could benefit each person once in the way described by (2). Each of these acts would save one person from half a million minutes of pain rather than saving a million other people from one such minute. As before, these acts would be worse for everyone. If we always acted in this way, everyone would have one more year of pain.

Williamson on Intuitions

In general, the objection "That's only an intuition" is ill-posed in the same way as the objection "That's only a judgment". Some judgments are indeed objectionable, but the mere fact that a proposition is judged is not even a prima facie reason for doubting it.

-- Timothy Williamson, The Philosophy of Philosophy, p.220.

Williamson on Dialectic

"Faced with a skeptic about reason, or about everything except reason, many philosophers would be willing to start a conversation, out of politeness, curiosity, competitiveness, or the desire to save a soul. But their inability to achieve a dialectical triumph over such a resourceful opponent does not oblige them to become skeptics about reason, or everything except reason, themselves. There is no bad faith in continuing to claim (and have) knowledge of the contested truths. For the anti-skeptic is not obliged to treat dialectic as the measure of all things. Indeed, the claim that dialectic is the measure of all things faces self-defeat, for it cannot triumph dialectically over its denial; even if it appeared to be getting the better of the argument, would not taking that to establish its truth beg the question?"

-- Timothy Williamson, The Philosophy of Philosophy, p.240.

Forms of "Being Active"

An interesting excerpt from Matthew Boyle's NDPR review of Lucy O'Brien and Matthew Soteriou (eds.), Mental Actions:

Foot on Courageous Wrongdoers

We might think of words such as ‘courage’ as naming characteristics of human beings in respect of a certain power, as words such as ‘poison’ and ‘solvent’ and ‘corrosive’ so name the properties of physical things. The power to which virtue-words are so related is the power of producing good action, and good desires. But just as poisons, solvents and corrosives do not always operate characteristically, so it could be with virtues. If P (say arsenic) is a poison it does not follow that P acts as a poison wherever it is found. It is quite natural to say on occasion ‘P does not act as a poison here’ though P is a poison and it is P that is acting here. Similarly courage is not operating as a virtue when the murderer turns his courage, which is a virtue, to bad ends. Not surprisingly the resistance that some of us registered was not to the expression ‘the courage of the murderer’ or to the assertion that what he did ‘took courage’ but rather to the description of that action as an act of courage or a courageous act. It is not that the action could not be so described, but that the fact that courage does not here have its characteristic operation is a reason for finding the description strange.

-- Philippa Foot, 'Virtues and Vices', p.16.

Scanlon on Rational Revision

What's the best way to introduce undergrads to the idea that one can reason about ethical questions? Suggestions welcome. In the meantime, here's a nice passage from Scanlon's What We Owe to Each Other (pp.66-67):

Parfit on Reasons and Normative Facts

From Chp 24 of Parfit's manuscript, On What Matters (lightly edited):

Distinguish facts that are normative and facts that have normative importance in the sense that these facts give us reasons. Two examples would be the facts that
(J) your wine is poisoned; and that
(K) the fact stated by (J) gives you a reason not to drink your wine.

Of these facts, (J) is natural and (K) is normative. But it is (J), the natural fact, which has normative importance, in the sense of reason-giving force... Whenever some natural fact gives us a reason, there is also the normative fact that this natural fact gives us this reason.

It is easy to overlook such normative facts... if we say that natural facts of certain kinds are reasons to act in certain ways, we may be led to assume that, to defend the view that there are normative reasons, it is enough to claim that there are natural facts of these kinds. That is not so. We must also claim that these natural facts have the normative property of being reasons. And this claim, property, and fact might all be irreducibly normative.

In subsequent chapters, Parfit similarly notes the importance of distinguishing right-making features of an act (e.g. maximizing happiness, or whatever) from the property of being right.

Sidgwick on the Naturalistic Fallacy

[I]n a sense, as Butler observes, any impulse is natural, but it is manifestly idle to bid us follow Nature in this sense... How then are we to distinguish 'natural impulses'--in the sense in which they are to guide rational choice--from the unnatural? Those who have occupied themselves with this distinction seem generally to have interpreted the Natural to mean either the common as opposed to the rare and exceptional, or the original as opposed to what is later in development; or, negatively, what is not the effect of human volition. But I have never seen any ground for assuming broadly that Nature abhors the exceptional, or prefers the earlier in time to the later; and when we take a retrospective view of the history of the human race, we find that some impulses which all admire, such as the love of knowledge and enthusiastic philanthropy, are both rarer and later in their appearance than others which all judge to be lower...

To an unreflective mind what is customary in social relations usually appears natural; but no reflective person is prepared to lay down "conformity to custom" as a fundamental moral principle...

-- Methods of Ethics (7th ed.) I.vi.2

(See also my old post on 'Human Nature'.)

The Claims of Emotion

When you are angry, for example, the anger you feel contains the thought that (e.g.) some other person has done you an injury... and ought to be made to suffer in return. If your reason thinks differently... you are internally not just pulled in different directions; you are thinking ultimately contradictory thoughts, one through your anger [and] the other through your reason.

So writes John Cooper in 'Some Remarks on Aristotle's Moral Psychology' (Reason and Emotion, p.245, bold added). He continues:

For reason to persuade anger (in this particular case, or in general) is for it to get its own view of what is good to prevail, in the sense that this conception comes to be adopted by the nonrational part itself, as well. To cause this to happen, even intermittently, may require practice and training, of course, but in that process reason is not just exercising brute force, as one might in training an animal. it is, among other things, addressing one's anger, trying to direct its attention to features of the situation that will show one's anger... that it would be, or was, wrong to feel in that way. [If this process is successful...] The way you then feel about what has happened and about what should be done about it, is exactly also the way you think, for reasons, about it.

Further, on pp.246-7:

Now because Aristotle thinks that the truth about such matters -- matters of value in general -- is properly settled by reasoning, he thinks that this is the direction that the resolution of such contradictions should take. Your anger was caused not by what you rationally thought, nor by what you would rationally think if you gave reason a chance, but by (possibly obscure) causes lying in your recent or distant past experience. ... There is no good reason to think that your anger reflects the truth about the matters about which it is making claims...

However, it is important to bear in mind that the resolution can go in the other direction, both in individual cases an in general orientation. Faced with a conflict between how you feel about things in some respect and how you think about them, especially if this persists for a long time despite efforts on your part to adjust the way you feel, you will, faute de mieux, tend to adjust it in the other direction, by adopting in your rational thoughts a view about good and bad and right and wrong that conforms to the way you habitually feel: it is as if, under pressure from your stubborn desires, you decide on reflection that the correct way to determine what is good is simply to accept as authoritative how you feel. (Perhaps you then figure out some reasons to suit.) What forces us to take one of these two alternatives is the central fact that being rational creatures we cannot very readily or contentedly let the contradiction stand. We are moved, because we are rational, to resolve it in one direction or another.

But are there limits to the claims reason may make against our emotions? Cf. Moral Roots and Alienating Aspirations

Williamson on Telescopes

Philosophers who refuse to bother about semantics, on the grounds that they want to study the non-linguistic world, not our talk about that world, resemble astronomers who refuse to bother about the theory of telescopes, on the grounds that they want to study the stars, not our observation of them. Such an attitude may be good enough for amateurs; applied to more advanced inquiries, it produces crude errors. Those metaphysicians who ignore language in order not to project it onto the world are the very ones most likely to fall into just that fallacy, because the validity of their reasoning depends on unexamined assumptions about the structure of the language in which they reason.

-- Timothy Williamson, 'Must Do Better' [pdf], p.9.

Philosophy and Disciplinary Boundaries

Interesting.

Should philosophy have something to say to non-philosophers? Should philosophy be pursued only by those trained in philosophy? Should academic teachers of philosophy consider themselves philosophers in virtue of the fact that they teach philosophy? And should analytic philosophers deny that continental philosophers are philosophers at all, or acknowledge that they represent different modes of philosophizing? Cogito poses some big questions to four prominent British and US philosophers.

That last was a bit of a leading question, though Jonathan Barnes offered an amusing response:

Well, most philosophers who belong to the so-called analytical tradition are pretty poor philosophers. (Most academics who do anything are pretty poor at doing it; and philosophy, or so it seems to me, is a subject in which it is peculiarly difficult to do decent stuff. A modestly competent historian may produce a modestly good history book; a modestly competent philosopher has no reason to publish his modest thoughts.) But there's a big difference between the analyticals and the continentals: what distinguishes the continental tradition is that all its members are pretty hopeless at philosophy.

See also Barry Stroud on alternative written forms:

Poems and aphorisms do not seem to me appropriate forms for carrying out philosophical work, even if they might be used to express or summarize certain philosophical conceptions developed by other means. Dialogue is a very good way to write philosophy, but it is difficult to do convincingly. I don't see much loss in trying to write philosophy in clear, connected, sharply focused prose. I wish more philosophers would try it.

And, on a more serious note, Raymond Geuss discusses the 'compartmentalization' of philosophical sub-fields:

The question is not whether a moral philosopher should or should not be interested in logic. Of course, in an ideal world moral philosophers would pay close attention to what all other philosophers said and wrote. They would also pay close attention to advances in biology, new forms of legislation, world history, economic theory, cosmology, and literature. We do not live in such an ideal world and so for us the real question is: given the limitations on human time and attention, what is the most useful thing for a philosopher who has a primary interest, say in political philosophy, to study? Is it more useful to study logic than economic history? To say that we know that this is the case a priori, by virtue of the fact that logic "belongs" to philosophy and economics does not, is to fetishize disciplinary boundaries that have no absolute standing.

That is one quote I wholeheartedly agree with. I'm no fan of strict distribution requirements, but I suspect many grad students would benefit from faculty advisors encouraging them to take appropriate courses in related "non-philosophy" disciplines. What do you think?

Sider on Semantic and Metaphysical Intuitions

It is important to separate the two kinds of intuitions. Suppose you are initially inclined to intuit thus: "the property of being a dog is intrinsic". This might well be because you are simply presupposing the worm view [of 4-d objects], and thus presupposing that 'being a dog' refers to the property of being a dog-worm, and metaphysically intuiting that this property is intrinsic. It might well be that, once the question is raised of whether the worm-view or the stage-view is correct, your initial conviction disappears, and is replaced with agnosticism about whether "being a dog is intrinsic", despite your certainty that being a dog-worm is intrinsic and being a dog-stage is extrinsic.

[From his paper on counterpart theory: 'Beyond the Humphrey Objection'.]

Swinburne on Desire

"There is a natural contrast often made in ordinary language between the actions which we do because we want or desire to do them, and the actions which we do although we do not want to do them. It is a contrast which has been ignored by much modern philosophy of mind which has seen desire as a component of all actions, and the reasons for all actions as involving desires of various kinds. The ignoring of the distinction between desire and the active component in every action (call it 'trying' or 'seeking' or 'having a volition') leads a man to suppose that he can no more help doing what he does than he can help his desires. But 'desires', in the normal ordinary language sense of the word, are natural inclinations to actions of certain sorts with which we find ourselves. We cannot (immediately) help our natural inclinations but what we can do is choose whether to yield to them, or resist them and do what we are not naturally inclined to do. When we resist our natural inclinations, we do so because we have reasons for action quite other than ones naturally described as the satisfaction of desire -- e.g. we do the action because we believe that we ought to, or believe it to be in our long-term interest."

-- Swinburne (1985) 'Desire', Philosophy vol. 60, p.429.

See also: Agency and the Will

Hursthouse on Moral Education

Rosalind Hursthouse writes of The Virtues Project:

unlike anything we philosophers have managed to produce, it is an extremely detailed and practical educational program and well worth our attention. Its admirable pedagogy makes it clear that the actual doing of the virtuous acts is not all there is to "helping children to develop the virtues," important as this is, and contains two features that any Aristotelian should find striking...

[1] from very early days, there is the application of the relevant [virtue] words to a variety of imagined as well as real instances, and the beginning of reflection, a detailed picture of how the training is bound up with thought and talk, where the talk centers around the use of virtue words in specific circumstances. All of this is consistent with, but provides a much-needed supplement to, philosophers' reflections...

[2] the pedagogy [stresses] looking for something to be praised by a virtue word in a child's action (or reaction) rather than for something to be condemned. But it is not, thereby, permissive. In fact, it is markedly strict, by contemporary standards, about "setting boundaries" and offers a number of techniques for doing so by, once again, emphasizing the virtues (and hence "Dos" rather than "Don'ts")... The idea is that, rather than making children think of themselves as bad and lacking in virtue, the way poor Huck Finn does, they are enabled to think of themselves as potentially good, as able to recognize and practice the virtues and find pleasure in doing so.

This is from Hursthouse's 'The Central Doctrine of the Mean', pp. 113-4. She concludes:

All very homey stuff, you may say. Well, yes. It is more impressive -- very impressive I thought myself -- when you read the books and see Popov handling questions, but still homey. But how could bringing up children correctly be anything other than a homey business? Moreover, it encapsulates what I have claimed in this chapter are two of the insights shrouded in the doctrine of the mean: it starts by training children, not to follow general rules but to recognize their central target in particular circumstances, and it develops their natural dispositions towards virtue.

Defining 'Fair Use'

Tim Wu:

[I]t is time to recognize a simpler principle for fair use: work that adds to the value of the original, as opposed to substituting for the original, is fair use. In my view that’s a principle already behind the traditional lines: no one (well, nearly no one) would watch Mel Brooks’ “Spaceballs” as a substitute for “Star Wars”; a book review is no substitute for reading “The Naked and the Dead.” They are complements to the original work, not substitutes, and that makes all the difference.

This simple concept would bring much clarity to the problems of secondary authorship on the web. Fan guides like the Harry Potter Lexicon or Lostpedia are not substitutes for reading the book or watching the show, and that should be the end of the legal questions surrounding them. The same goes for reasonable tribute videos like this great Guyz Nite tribute to “Die Hard.” On the other hand, its obviously not fair use to scan a book and put it online, or distribute copyrighted films using BitTorent.

We must never forget that copyright is about authorship; and secondary authors, while never as famous as the original authors, deserve some respect. Fixing fair use is one way to give them that.

Hilzoy on Hardheaded Idealism

After detailing substantive reasons for supporting Obama (see also my old post) Hilzoy concludes:

I sometimes wonder why, exactly, people go on saying all this stuff about Obama lacking substance. Sometimes, I suspect it's just laziness, as in the case of this dKos story in which mcjoan, who is usually much better than this, lists a whole lot of questions she wishes the candidates would answer, apparently unaware that Obama (and, for all I know, Clinton), has already answered most of them. I suspect, though, that part of it might be the assumption that idealism is necessarily woolly and misty-eyed and all about singing Kumbaya, while realism is necessarily cynical and disillusioned.

I have never believed this. There are certainly hard-bitten, cynical people who don't think particularly clearly about the world (Dick Cheney leaps to mind.) More to the point, I can't see any reason why there shouldn't also be people who are both genuinely idealistic and hardheaded at the same time. I suspect Obama is one of them. I do not for a moment imagine that he is perfect. (Cough, clean coal technology, cough cough.) But I do think that he's one of the best candidates I can remember, and that's good enough for me.

Do read the whole thing, though. The details are important, and not the sort of thing that's covered in our dumbed-down mainstream media.

Estlund on Non-Fairness

I've long thought that fairness is overrated, and often brought up in situations where it is completely unnecessary (e.g. the suggestion that one must flip a coin to decide which of two needy strangers to help). Rather, as Estlund argues, it is at most "an occasional value":

It can sometimes seem as if everything should be fair. The hegemony of fairness is partly owed to an unfortunate linguistic habit, in which anything that is not fair, but could have been fair, is called unfair. Since unfairness is, as the language works, so obviously a moral failing, it would follow that everything ought to be fair if it can be. But there seems to be a legitimate questions about this, which we should not let linguisitic habits settle. For example, to defend my choice to save my son from drowning rather than saving the stranger next to him, it is not obvious that I should need to show that doing so conforms to some appropriate standard of fairness. Or consider my giving five dollars to one beggar and nothing to the next. Is it obvious that this is only permissible if it is, in some way, fair? It is obviously not fair, but is it unfair? (We might call this the non/un issue.)

-- D. Estlund, Democratic Authority, p.67.