Defining (Gender) Dysfunction

Helen drew my attention to a fascinating NPR story on transgender children: young boys who desire to wear dresses, and more generally self-identify as girls. One psychologist (Zucker) recommends trying to socialize them out of it -- take away their dolls and dresses, and pressure them to act more like boys. Another (Ehrensaft) is more liberal, suggesting that it's a non-issue, and children should feel free to develop however they're inclined, so long as it isn't causing other - real - problems. The article notes:

This divide is so intense that there is very little common ground. There is little common ground even in the ways that the issue is conceptualized.

Sounds like a call for philosophy! Only, there's not much room for pure (a priori) ethical theory here. It's clear enough that we should prefer whatever will best serve the interests of the child, and help them to grow into a happy, well-adjusted adult. So it's really an empirical issue: what are the consequences of the two approaches likely to be? How burdensome is it to grow up transgendered, and how does this compare to Zucker's coercive therapy? (Might the cure be worse than the "disease"?)

Any remaining philosophical dispute lies more in what we might call the philosophy of psychiatry, concerning what counts as a mental "disorder", in contrast to "normal" human variation. Ehrensaft likens transgenderism to such "natural" variations as homosexuality, whereas Zucker compares it to racial identity disorder:

If a black kid walked into a therapist's office saying he was really white, the goal of pretty much any therapist out there would be to make him try to feel more comfortable being black. They would assume his mistaken beliefs were the product of a dysfunctional environment — a dysfunctional family or a dysfunctional cultural environment that led him or her to engage in this wrongheaded and dangerous fantasy. This is how Zucker sees gender-disordered kids. He sees these behaviors primarily as a product of dysfunction.

This strikes me as badly confused. Presumably a disorder is to be defined as that which tends to impede one's living a flourishing life. But that's an entirely forward-looking dispositional property; it does not matter how it came about, so this talk of "products of dysfunction" seems confused and irrelevant. Indeed, given a sensible forward-looking conception, it's not clear why adopting a different ethnicity must be a "disorder" at all. (It's not like losing a limb.)

Maybe the thought is that the expressed desire is actually just a symptom of some more deep-rooted unhappiness or self-loathing, which would survive the desired change and cause more psychological problems down the road? That would be an intrinsic or internal problem. Alternatively, one might think that the desire is problematic purely for extrinsic, situational reasons, e.g. if one lives in a community of Xs, the desire to be not-X might make it more difficult for you to flourish in this particular context. This appears to be at least part of Zucker's objection:

He explained that unless Carol and her husband helped the child to change his behavior, as Bradley grew older, he likely would be rejected by both peer groups. Boys would find his feminine interests unappealing. Girls would want more boyish boys. Bradley would be an outcast.

But there's nothing inherently wrong with outcasts. ('Misfit' is a relative term, remember!) The problem is with the society which doesn't accept or accommodate them. So it's really just the social stigma we should be worried about. But then I wonder why Zucker rejects the homosexuality analogy?

A final possibility is that he thinks it is a disorder in virtue of resting on false beliefs, or an inaccurate conception of the situation (in some sense). The black child who wants to be white may have internalized false beliefs about the inherent inferiority of blacks which explain (away) his preference. We may hold that preferences based on false beliefs lack normative weight and fail to qualify as 'true values', so it is better to change the misguided preference than to cater to it. But this normative principle isn't obviously true: we cater to poor taste and religious preferences all the time. Sometimes it's a better idea to just go with the flow rather than to insist on improving people.

But the point is moot because it doesn't seem that transgender-inclined children have false beliefs in any case. They don't, so far as I'm aware, believe that their birth sex is objectively "inferior" or anything like that. They just feel more drawn to the gender norms of the opposite sex. They're not making any error. So, again, I think Zucker's stance doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

Blog Navigation Tweaks

You may have noticed I'm still playing around with the blog template a bit.

[Update: I've added a new sidebar list of 'recommended posts' from other blogs, to supplement my 'commenting elsewhere' list.]

(1) I've moved the labels/categories list to the page footer, clearing more room in the sidebar. (The horizontal 'cloud' display is a bit harder to read than a vertical list, unfortunately, but I think it's probably worth the savings in screen space. How often do you use the list anyway?)

I've also made the basic list of 'recent posts' more prominent at the top of the sidebar, since that is probably more useful.

(2) Individual post pages now automatically list "related posts", i.e. recent posts tagged with the same category label. I imagine this could prove useful.

(3) I've upgraded the ratings widget with two new (experimental) features:
- My top rated posts are displayed in a sidebar list.
- By comparing and correlating ratings between posts, the widget automatically generates recommendations. Generic recommendations simply list other posts that were highly rated by the people who liked the present post. But if you have rated several posts yourself, the widget will cleverly offer individually tailored recommendations for you, based on the ratings of "people like you", i.e. who have made similar ratings to you in the past.

The more you (and others) rate, the better the widget will be able to recognize and cater to your 'taste' in posts, so the more useful it will be to you. How cool is that!

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?

Reducing Unnecessary Offense

Infinite Injury writes:

It isn’t racist now because it doesn’t suggest any prejudice or dislike and the last thing we would ever want to do is widen the class of comments that we decide express prejudice. We want to reduce the potential for accidental offense not increase it.

Hypersensitivity is a bad thing, and we'd all be better off without it. If you insist on turning yourself into a victim, perceiving slights at every turn, the world will offer ample opportunities to feed your paranoia. But why on Earth would you want to? Chances are: most people do not, in fact, hate you. But it's unnecessarily burdensome to expect them to constantly reassure you of this. Things would be much better if everyone could simply assume the best by default, and only take offense if someone was very clearly intending to insult them.

(Granted, it's perfectly understandable why someone who has suffered from others' malice in the past might be over-sensitized to it in future. I've had similar experiences myself. But it's still unfortunate, so we should want to help people to overcome their hypersensitivity, rather than encouraging it.)

Compare my response to Paul Gowder's suggestion that levelling down may be justified in cases where tolerating an inequality would express disrespect:

I agree that one shouldn't express disrespect. But we should increase freedom. Hence, to avoid unnecessary conflict here, it would be most inadvisable for us to adopt conventions of social meaning according to which increasing freedoms for some was understood as expressing disrespect for others. If such conventions are already present, we should do what we can to undermine and change them.

In Defence of Impractical Philosophy

A friend passed along the link to this vituperative rant against (a certain kind of) academic philosophy:

What possible use or relevance to human life can a discussion like this have? ... What a terrible waste of brainpower... How selfish. The author apparently feels no obligation towards others on behalf of his abilities. There is a longstanding tradition in several religions and many moral systems that to whom much is given much is expected: people of ability... who nonetheless spend it playing intellectual games are depriving others of what those abilities might be able to accomplish. They are indulging their own narrow and selfish desires, and perhaps flattering their own vanity: but they are allowing their abilities to bear no fruit for others.

The blogger, 'Protagoras', elaborates in comments:

I think that one central justification for theory in the sciences is that it can--and indeed has--proved itself to bear on practical concerns at some point, even if we don't know now how that will come about. My beef with this article, as with much, though not all, of academic philosophy today is that it has no similar justification going for it.

This strikes me as incredibly misguided, for several reasons:

(1) History teaches us that it's very difficult to predict in advance which areas of theoretical inquiry will ultimately yield practical payoffs. Who would've guessed that philosophical theorizing about the limits of formal logic and mathematics would eventually bring us the personal computer? Not every academic can be an Alan Turing, admittedly, but the sophisticated consequentialist will keep in mind the big picture. We should design our academic institutions so as to have the overall effect of producing important knowledge (even if that means that many individual academics end up doing "pointless" work, considered in isolation). This is the basic argument for academic freedom: we can expect the best results if we give academics free reign to inquire as their intellectual curiosity sees fit, rather than limiting them to socially "approved" avenues of inquiry. 

I trust that most academics are the best judges of what intellectual endeavours are worth their time and effort. (Cf. J.S. Mill's arguments for liberty.) But even if not, the few exceptions -- the Turings of the world, whose theoretical passions lead to invaluable insights -- are arguably so momentous as to justify the whole system that enables them.

(2) For this reason, among others, it is not generally 'selfish' or otherwise immoral to pursue your personal passions. On the contrary, I think it is to be encouraged. See my post 'Value, Alienation and Choice' for more detail.  

(3) The particular article in question tackles deeply interesting issues at the intersection of epistemology and philosophy of mind, arguing that:

the best bet for defending an internalist epistemology against Williamson's attack is to take there to be a tight, intimate connection between (to take one example) our experiences and our beliefs upon reflection about the obtaining of those experiences, or between (to take another example) the rationality of our beliefs and our beliefs upon reflection about the rationality of those beliefs.

As an anonymous commenter explained, [edited lightly:] the nature of rationality and our ability to know our own minds are topics 'relevant to human life.' Indeed, they concern our basic condition as humans. One suspects that Protagoras' incredulous response to the paper ("You have to be kidding me") is simply due to his not actually understanding what it says.  

(4) There's something incoherent about the crassly 'utilitarian' (in the non-philosophical sense) stance according to which things must be 'useful' to be of value. Note that useful things must be instrumental to some end or ultimate value. The ultimate ends, on the other hand, need not serve any other purpose, for they are valuable in themselves. They are that for which we do the instrumental act. But the confused instrumentalist is blind to non-instrumental values, and thus the point of the whole endeavour. He will thus criticize the direct realization of the ultimate good because it is not instrumental to something else. How backward!

Now, intellectual inquiry, truth and understanding are arguably among the intrinsic goods (i.e. the things we should value non-instrumentally). It would seem to me base and ignoble to deny this. But if this is so, it is backwards to demand that philosophy serve other purposes. (It happens that it does, as per my #1 above, but one shouldn't demand it.) To end on a provocative note: Depending on how it balances against other values, I think it entirely possible that society ought to be set up to serve philosophy! What say you?

Review: Amazon Kindle

I finally gave into temptation and bought myself a Kindle e-book reader, which I'm so far very impressed with.

I immediately went to manybooks.net and downloaded a couple dozen literary classics (Candide, Metamorphosis, Ulysses, etc.), all free. I also transferred a couple dozen philosophy PDFs that I've been meaning to read.

Unfortunately, one of these was a scanned-image pdf (JSTOR style), which didn't transfer at all well. The Kindle shrinks images to fit, so I could barely make out the words. So much for JSTOR. [Update: fixed!] But I was relieved to find that the others (including ordinary text-based PDFs) convert and display perfectly reasonably well. I think the only other downside to bear in mind here is that you lose page numbering. Kindle includes a replacement measure called "location", but that won't be much help if you're trying to sync with other people who are reading non-Kindle versions of the text. Oh, and logical symbols get mangled -- '$' in place of the existential quantifier, etc.

Other than that, I have no serious complaints. I find the Kindle very pleasant and comfortable to read from -- the main selling point is, after all, its ink-based display technology -- there's no glare, so it feels like reading a book, unlike backlit computer screens. (Minor aesthetic complaint: the background is a newspaperish gray rather than pure white.) It's small, light, and easy to hold. Some people complain that it's too easy to accidentally bump the 'next page' button, but I haven't found this a problem myself, so long as I put it to sleep when carrying rather than reading it.

I like the navigation a lot. It's actually quicker and easier than turning a page in a regular book. Granted, you can't flick through multiple pages nearly so well, but there is a 'search' feature which more than compensates for this. Other options allow you to 'highlight' text, 'add notes', or 'bookmark' pages for future reference. And you don't need to worry about losing your place, since whenever you open a document, it picks up from wherever you previously left off. (I should note that the tiny keyboard is made for thumbing, not typing, so you won't be writing treatises in the margins. But it's handy enough for jotting down quick thoughts as you read.)

Aside from comfortably reading e-books and online papers, the other great feature of the Kindle is free mobile internet. The display is a bit awkward, and - combined with the clunky little keyboard - you certainly wouldn't want to use it as your primary form of internet access. But it's nice to have access to email on the go, and my feed reader (bloglines) works tolerably well on it, too. (I'm sure the iPhone is much better in these respects, but I'm deterred by the price tag.)

[Update: it turns out I hardly ever use the Kindle's internet access -- it's just too slow and clunky. But note that you can use free services like Kindlefeeder.com (from your home computer) to convert rss/atom feeds to kindle format, and even automatically deliver the converted feeds to your kindle. See 'Read Anything on Kindle' for more detail.]

Other features are fun but superficial. There's an mp3 player, but the sound quality isn't great. There's a (black-and-white) picture viewer, and it's nice to be able to carry around photos of loved ones, but the resolution is far from photo-quality. I hear you can even play Minesweeper, but I fortunately haven't gotten that bored of reading yet!

Is it worth $399? It is for me, though it may not be for everybody. There's a lot of free digital content out there that I can now take full advantage of. In particular, my main reason for buying the Kindle was to read online philosophy papers, which it's great for. But now that I've got it, I find that I'm also appreciating the opportunity to read all those old literary classics that I wouldn't otherwise have gotten around to. I don't expect to buy much paid content from the Kindle store, since I don't tend to buy much of anything, but you might want to compare prices if you're into that kind of thing. (I gather the Kindle versions tend to be slightly cheaper than hardcopies, and they're conveniently "delivered" wirelessly to your device in minutes.) At present, selection seems to be limited mostly to new bestsellers and old public domain works. So be warned: anything in between may not be available.

Full disclosure: Amazon will give me a 10% referral fee if you buy it via this link!

Ontological Reduction

Is consciousness ontologically irreducible? Richard Brown thinks that the question is incoherent:

What [the identity theorist] says is that there is only ONE thing there, the brain and its various states, and you cannot reduce something to itself!

He goes on to contrast this with linguistic, theoretical reductions, and explains how those are irrelevant to the debate between physicalists and dualists. I agree with that part. But I think he's wrong to think that linguistic reductions are the only coherent form of reduction.

We can see this because, as I've been saying all along, the question is whether qualia are reducible in the same sense that tables and chairs are, whatever that may be. Now, it's an open question whether our talk of tables and chairs could be replaced by (perhaps complicated and long-winded) talk purely in the language of microphysical theory. But we don't care about talk. What matters is that the facts about tables are obviously settled by the microphysical facts. If you have a coarse-grained conception of 'facts', maybe they are even one and the same fact. Even so, we can get to a metaphysical notion of reduction by appeal to the truthmakers for our sentences. Regardless of whether table talk is linguistically replaceable by particle talk, there's no question that the microphysical facts are what make our table statements true (if they are true).

Once you've included the microphysical facts in your base facts, you do not need to add any further 'table facts' in addition. Those are already covered. It is in this sense that table facts are reducible to physical facts. And it is in this sense that the question of physicalism comes down to the question whether qualia are reducible. It is simply the question whether we need to add phenomenal facts to our fundamental base facts, or whether they "come along for free" (like tables do) given the physical facts P.

(I find it convenient to use the term 'reducible' to invoke this idea, but you're of course free to pick another word if you prefer. What's not helpful is to simply insist, "the debate between the dualist and the materialist is in no way a debate about reduction", and so ignore my underlying idea concerning what the debate is about. RB wanted to focus on what counts as 'physical' or 'non-physical', but that soon degrades into semantics. The substantive issue, as I see things, is whether we must include qualia as an additional primitive among the base facts. This understanding makes it clear why RB's "non-physical zombie" parody argument falls flat (to put it mildly). See my 'Zombie Review' for more detail.)

What Clinton Fights For

Hilzoy offers some lessons from the Great Gas Tax Pander:

Clinton is presently making a big deal about the fact that she is "a fighter". After this primary season, I don't think there can be any doubt about her willingness to fight. What Clinton's gas tax proposal tells me is what she's willing to fight for. She is not willing to fight for what she thinks is right in the face of public pressure. She's not even willing to restrict her compromises to cases in which public pressure to do something stupid already exists. She will sacrifice principle and the public good when it's expedient for her to do so.

Which is to say: she's a fighter, all right, but what she fights for is her own interest, not what she thinks is right...

If there's anything we should have learned from George W. Bush, it's that generalized combativeness is not a good thing in a President. We need not just someone who's willing to fight in general, but someone who's willing to fight for the right things. If you think that the right things just are the things that advance Hillary Clinton's political interests, then there's no problem. But if you want someone who is willing to fight for good policies that are in our national interest, that actually address serious problems, then it's worth recognizing that while she is more than willing to fight, she is not willing to fight for that.

Post Ratings and Template Changes

I've just added this cool widget to my blog and RSS feed, which lets you rate each post (out of 5 stars). It looks like a fun and convenient way to get more reader feedback...

Update: I just realized this won't function properly with my custom template, since the sidebar navigation lets you read posts other than the original page that the widget thinks you're still reading (rating). So, only those who read my blog via a feed reader will get to use this.

P.S. Perhaps I should revert to a more conventional template? I know that many readers were displeased by the change last year. Now that you've gotten used to it, what do you think?

Update II: Okay, I've fixed my template and reinstated the widget -- rate away!

I've also (1) added fade-in expandable posts, with thanks to Ramani; (2) restored author comment highlighting, as before; and (3) made various cosmetic tweaks (colours, borders, etc.). Do you like the new style?

Comments and Quality Control

I've written before about the value of filtering out abusive or otherwise unconstructive comments for the sake of promoting reasoned discussion. It's an easy decision to delete comments that don't contribute to the conversation at all. I'm less sure what to do about relevant but low-quality comments. At present I tend to just leave them there but ignore them. (Of course, sometimes I fail to respond to good comments for other reasons, e.g. lack of time.)

But this liberal policy has some unfortunate consequences. The inclusion of low-quality comments may bring down the quality of discussion overall. As Tyler Cowen observes, "the best comments come in the first fifteen or so, after which quality declines precipitously and often exponentially." Short comments are no problem, I think, but long rambling ones are a disincentive for later readers. (One may feel obligated to read the earlier comments before responding, or even feel less comfortable responding to the original post after the conversation has apparently "moved on" to the rambler's choice of tangent.)

The ideal solution would be to have graded levels of comment prominence. I like blog templates which highlight the blogger's own comments relative to the norm. It would also be helpful to be able to make some particular comments less prominent than the norm. The text might be 'greyed out', for example, paled or even completely hidden by default unless readers select to 'click here to display this comment', or some such. Most readers could thus easily ignore the comment, reducing the risk that it will derail the thread, without resorting to heavy-handed deletion (which risks provoking [misguided] complaints of "censorship").

[I've posted this feature suggestion to the Blogger help group, and anyone who likes it is also encouraged to tell Blogger, since they will be more likely to implement a feature for which there is more demand.]

In the meantime, I'm tempted by the following policy: if a comment is both lengthy (i.e. more than a couple of sentences) and unproductive (by my lights), I may delete it and invite the commenter to instead repost the comment on their own blog -- they are then welcome to post the link in my comment thread, since that is far less obtrusive and distracting. (I'm happy to email the person their deleted comment, of course, so they needn't worry about having to rewrite it from scratch.)

Feedback welcome: Is this a good policy -- would it serve to increase the quality of discussions on this blog (which I think is generally quite high to begin with)? Does it seem reasonable? All things considered, do you think I should implement it?