Stay-at-home moms fare worse than employed moms at every income level in terms of sadness, anger, and depression. On the other items Gallup measures — laughter, enjoyment, happiness, worry, stress, learning something interesting, and having a high life evaluation rating — middle- and high-income stay-at-home moms for the most part do as well as employed moms.
However, low-income stay-at-home moms do worse on all of these items than their employed counterparts. These moms — with annual household incomes of less than $36,000 — are less likely than employed moms at this income level to say they smiled or laughed a lot or experienced happiness or enjoyment “yesterday.” They are also slightly less likely to say they learned something interesting.
via Stay-at-Home Moms Report More Depression, Sadness, Anger.
In light of feedback some of you have sent to the editors over the past several months, we have finally been able to make a few improvements to PEA Soup. You've likely already noticed the most important ones, but just to make it "official," a brief description is below the fold:
On September 6-8, 2012, Purdue University will host an interdisciplinary conference entitled "Challenges to Religious and Moral Belief: Disagreement and Evolution".
The conference will focus on three main challenges to religious and moral beliefs:
The field of experimental philosophy tends to be dominated by graduate students, with many of the most important discoveries in any given year coming from people who are still very early in their careers. So I thought it might be a good idea to put up a quick post just to congratulate some of these experimentally oriented students on their job market successes.
Here are a few graduate students and post-docs who published papers in experimental philosophy and then got jobs this year. (Each person's name is followed by the area in which that person has done experimental work.)
Then there are a couple of people who already had jobs but are now moving to other jobs.
A huge congratulations to all of these people - their successes are very well deserved, and it will be exciting to see what they all come up with next!
[I'm sure that I am forgetting at least some people here, so be sure to send me an email if you think of someone I've omitted.]
[cross-posted on Think: Just Do It!]
I am wondering what readers think about the following analogy:
perceptual judgments : perceptual illusions :: intuitive judgments : intuition pumps
The way I picture this analogy is the following (these are just two examples):
Intuitive judgments elicited by thought-experiments, such as the Trolley Problem, are unlikely to be correct just as perceptual judgments elicited by perceptual illusions, such as the checkerboard illusion, are unlikely to be correct, since both perceptual illusions and intuition pumps are cognitively unusual scenarios.
What do you make of this argument?
Update: For those who are interested, there is a follow-up post on my blog. Comments are more than welcome.
Here is a nice piece by Jason Stanley on the supposed distinction between practical and theoretical knowledge.
At a recent symposium on Victor Tadros's book The Ends of Harm, Victor and I were debating whether the Means Principle (MP) is best thought of on a subjective interpretation (for A to use B as a means, A has to intend that B play some role in bringing about a good) or an objective, causal-role-based interpretation (for A to use B as a means, B has to serve as a causal means in bringing about some good that might be offered to justify A doing what she does). Victor argues for the subjective interpretation; I argue not exactly for the objective, but for the relevance of causal roles in a principle that has more or less the same range of application as the means principle.
This led to our discussing whether the critics of the subjective view--principally JJ Thomson, Frances Kamm, and Tim Scanlon—have ever offered any good reasons for their views (no, says Victor) or whether they have, or at least whether their arguments provide a good starting point for building an argument that the subjective interpretation faces an uphill battle (yes, say I). Victor then suggested that I post this as a topic for debate on Pea Soup. So here we are.
I want to begin, then, by rehearsing the classic arguments. I then address two cases that Victor offers to argue that we need to appeal to intentions to understand our judgments about permissibility (this is taken from my reply to Victor, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of Law and Philosophy). Finally, I offer a liberal, anti-perfectionist argument—which I draw from a paper I published in Philosophy and Public Affairs, “The Doctrine of Illicit Intentions”—that we should not think of intentions as fundamentally relevant to permissibility.I. The Classic Arguments
As I read them, the classic arguments have two threads. The first makes room for the idea that we can do without intentions, at least on a basic deontic level. The second presents a reason to accept that we should do without them on that level.
A. Thread one: Making room
I like the way Tim Scanlon framed the first thread. He argued that intentions have only derivative or secondary significance. In the context of discussing and rejecting the Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE), and in particular in the context of discussing its use in the law of war and the prohibition on terror bombing, he says that dropping bombs where there is no munitions plant or other legitimate military target, but where noncombatants would die, is impermissible “because the circumstances do not provide a justification” for killing people in that way. (Moral Dimensions, p. 29.) In other words, there is some appropriate principle of justification that needs to be appealed to, and it would refer to harms causes in a particular context; it would not refer to the intentions of the agent causing the harm.
What is important is how Scanlon articulates what he means by saying that intentions are not fundamentally relevant, not whether he has actually found a principle that can do without intentions. He puts the point this way:
[A] person who intends to kill noncombatants in order to shorten the war ... acts wrongly—she has intentions that she should abandon. But this truth should not be taken to suggest that intention has a fundamental role in determining the impermissibility of this action, in the way claimed by the [DDE]. The intention is wrongful because the act intended is wrongful, and the act is wrongful because of its likely consequences, not (fundamentally) because of the intention. (id)
Again, this presupposes that some principles can be articulated that would plausibly explain why the acts that agents might intend would or would not be wrongful independently of the intention with which they are performed. Such principles would have to do more than pay attention to likely consequences. They would have to capture much of what the DDE and other intention-focused principles capture. But if we assume for the sake of argument that such principles can be found—part of what I presented at the symposium was an abbreviated version of what I call the Restricting Claims Principle, which claims to be an objective, causation-focused alternative to a subjective interpretation of the MP—then the point is that we can understand the misleading appeal of intentions by seeing it as based on a confusion. Their appeal is based on confusing a sort of secondary significance that they do have—that it is wrong to intend to do that which is wrong—with the thought that they do primary work making acts wrong.
In support of this, Scanlon argues that we can understand a number of ways in which intentions are relevant to the permissibility of actions that are clearly secondary to other primary wrong-making features of a situation. In that vein, he describes what he calls expression and expectation cases. These are cases in which one presents oneself as motivated in a way that others will find acceptable, when one is really motivated in another way. What is really doing the moral work in such cases is the right of others, in certain limited circumstances, to demand that those with whom they interact have certain motives—for example, if you want to socialize with me, it must be because you like my company, not because you want me to give you money—and the right they have not to be deceived. These rights do not specially concern intentions. They could just as well concern clothing: if you want to socialize with me, you have to dress informally, as I’m an informal person and I choose not to socialize with people who dress formally.
In other cases, the “predictive significance” of an intention—that it makes it too likely that an agent will do something impermissible—can explain why it is impermissible to act on some intentions. My favorite example of this—not, I believe, one of Scanlon’s examples—is the intention of a doctor to help her patient die, the intention in play in physician assisted suicide. It is at least plausible that such an intention can be the basis for a legal ban on such actions, on the ground that if we allow physicians to act this way, too many of them will help people to die rather than offer them help which would allow them to regain the desire to live. In other words, from the state’s point of view, it might be predictable (a) that more patients will die, who should be helped to live, if doctors are allowed to act intending to aid their patients in dying; (b) that this loss will outweigh the gain of helping patients to die who should be supported in their decision to end their lives; and (c) that there is no way to effectively carve out a small range of cases where this balance would be reversed. I don’t actually believe this, but I grant that it is plausible.
A third kind of case—one that Scanlon does discuss—involves collective bad effects of acting on a certain kind of intention. The most obvious example is racism as a basis for action. It makes sense both for law and morality to say that it is impermissible to make decisions over a wide range of matters that are normally open to the public—going into stores, buying houses, applying for jobs—on the basis of race (leaving open the Q of whether affirmative action might sometimes be appropriate). But to be clear, the problem is not that discriminating on the basis of immutable features is always impermissible. If someone wanted to run a shop and let in only people over 6 feet tall, that would be seen simply as odd. The problem with racism is that it has been so pervasive that it needs to be prohibited quite thoroughly to provide people of races that have suffered from racism a fair chance at a good and dignified life.
None of this is not to say that all of what Scanlon says on this topic is plausible. What he says about attempts, in particular, is rather implausible: that it is wrong to do something attempting to commit a wrongful act because one is making it more likely that one will commit the act (the “predictive significance of intent.” (id., p. 43)). This seems a poor account of why attempts are impermissible. It would be better simply to say that it is impermissible to form and act on the intention to do something impermissible. Nonetheless, I think Scanlon was right to say that whenever intention seems to be relevant to the permissibility of acts, one can always explain its relevance in terms of some prior judgment of wrongness, or some independent right that a others have that a person not act on a particular intention in a particular situation.
It is important to be clear about the logical structure of the argument before moving on to the second thread in the classical argument. And it may help to establish just what the point is to say more about the contrasting view found in the DDE, which holds that there are two possible wrong-making features of actions. One is the balance of harms and goods; the other is the intention of the agent. The DDE holds that even if an act will cause more good than harm, it is impermissible if the agent intends the harm. And it holds this to be true not because an agent who intends the harm is disposing or committing herself to do impermissible things, but because it is a basic principle of morality that such intentions are impermissible. Theorists who support the DDE offer reasons to accept it: it disrespects persons or basic human goods or something like that to intend harm. Nonetheless, according to the DDE, there is no way to get a full account of the range of impermissible acts without appealing to the intentions of the agents who perform them, and thus intentions cannot be secondarily relevant to permissibility. They make acts impermissible, just as causing harm can make acts impermissible. The view Scanlon and I embrace, in contrast, holds that intentions may make acts impermissible, but only because they dispose or direct agents to perform acts that can independently be determined to be impermissible, or they have a tendency, when widely shared, to cause harms or injustices, or others have a right, in limited contexts—a point that will be explored in part III—that agents not act on certain intentions. In all of these ways, intentions are of secondary importance to wrongful action.
B. Thread two: Proper focus of concern
The second thread in the classic arguments is that the view that intentions are a fundamental wrong-making feature of actions directs an agent to think too often, in the wrong cases, about the intention with which she is acting. Agents should, according to this view, not focus inwardly on their intentions, but outwardly on how to act in ways consistent with the respect that others deserve. J.J. Thomson deserves credit for pushing this line (See her “Self-Defense,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 20 (1991): 283-310).
One way to bring the point into sharp relief is to think about an expression and expectation case, when it does make sense for an agent to focus inwardly on the intention with which she acts, and to contrast that with another case when it doesn’t. So let us start by thinking about an agent who wants to be social with me, and whose reason for doing so is that she hopes that I’ll give her money. Especially if I have made it plain how much I would resent such mercenary socialization, she should respect my right to restrict the circle of people with which I socialize in that way. She should therefore look into her heart, as it were, and take not of her reasons for actin. If she sees what I just said was there, then she should choose not to socialize with me. Alternatively, if she can find that she values my friendship after all, for the joy it brings her or for the affection she has for me, then she can permissibly seek my company.
Contrast that case with someone dropping bombs on strangers. Does it really make sense for him to be looking into his heart and saying that he may not drop the bombs if he would do it for bad reasons, such as hatred or the desire to use the lives lost to promote victory for his side? I say no. The cases are simply different. On the one hand, it is true that such a bomber should say to himself that there is something wrong with him if he values the deaths of civilians from an enemy nation, either intrinsically or instrumentally. He should try to work on his values, to bring them more in line with those that are morally sound. But, on the other hand, when it comes time to fly his mission, if he happens still to have those bad values, he need not say: “I must stand down unless I can either change my values or choose not to act on them.” He can permissibly say: “It doesn’t matter for the permissibility of what I do what my reasons are; what matters in this kind of context is that I am dropping bombs where it is permissible to drop them. No one can complain that I performed an act that was not justified, and no one has any rights over the intentions with which I act—this is not a consensual type of interaction.”
There is room to object that I am simply wrong here about the ill-motivated bomber. I will return to consider this in the third part of this post. For now, I want simply to conclude that this is, as I see it, the core of the classic set of arguments that intentions are not fundamentally relevant to permissibility.
II. Victor’s Cases for Intentions
Victor now comes back with a set of examples that he thinks show that intentions are, at least sometimes, fundamentally significant for judgments of permissibility. I will start by describing two cases that he develops, then give a reply in terms of my Doctrine of Illicit Intentions, then consider an objection from Victor, and offer a reply.
A. Victor’s cases
The first example involves a duress case. Victor imagines a gang of criminals who have each pledged to kill the family members of anyone in the group who tries to back out of group activities. He then imagines that the group has decided to rob a post office. We are to suppose that all but one member of the gang think that this is a good idea, but one member has decided that she does not want to engage in criminal activities. Still, given the threat to her relatives, she engages in the robbery. She should be able to make use of the defense of duress; the others, despite facing the same threat, should not. In other words, she acts permissibly (with justification, not just excuse—I’ll assume, for the sake of argument, that armed robbery can ever be justified by the necessity defense) because she acts for the reason that she is trying to save her family; they act impermissibly because they don’t act for that reason, despite the fact that they have the same sort of reason to act. What determines the permissibility of the act—what distinguishes the two sets—is the reason that is motivationally active in them.
Victor’s second case involves two people, A and B, who independently put poison into the water pipe leading to a victim, V’s, house—the Poisoned Pipe case. They each put in sufficient poison to kill V, and they are each aware of the other’s actions. Moreover, “A’s poison alone or B’s poison alone would lead to a very slow and painful death for V. Their poison together kills V swiftly.” (The Ends of Harm, p. 159) If they were both acting trying to kill V then they would both be acting wrongly. But we can imagine that B acts with benevolent motives. She can’t stop A or in any other way save V, but she can add her poison to the water to provide V a quicker, more painless death. It is at least plausible that the beneficent B is acting permissibly. (Again, I am willing to accept, for the sake of argument, that this would be permissible. But there are good reasons to doubt it. It would not be permissible to poison someone, without her consent, who is dying a slow, painful death of cancer. It is hard to see why this situation should be different.) If so, then in this case, as in the duress case, what is permissible depends on the intention of the agent.
B. Reply with the DII
The Doctrine of Illicit Intentions (DII) provides an alternative explanation that allows us not to have to say what Victor says about the significance of these cases. This is not the place to spell out the DII in detail. What I can do is spell out the basic idea and show how it applies to these cases.
A core distinction the DII makes is between an illicit reason and an illicit intention. An illicit reason is a reason for action that flouts the limits of moral permissibility. The bomber who drops bombs on an acceptable target area because he wants to kill the noncombatants who live there acts on an illicit reason. An illicit intention, in contrast, disposes an agent, in ways that depend on the circumstances she finds herself in, to perform impermissible actions. This same bomber would not act on an illicit intention as long as he is committed to dropping bombs only where they can justifiably be dropped. He would have an illicit intention if and only if his intention would direct him to drop bombs where they may not permissibly be dropped, at least if circumstances unfold a particular, foreseeable way.
It is important to note that the DII presupposes that intentions often are not simple linear affairs with the shape: Do act A to achieve goal G. They are often complex affairs with a shape more like this: To achieve goal G, do A1 in condition C1; do A2 in C2; do A3 in C3, etc.; and if you have done A1, then do B1 in C1a, do B2 in C1b, etc.; and look out for conditions K1-Kn, in which case do nothing to pursue G. I call the range of actions that an intention might direct its holder to perform an intention’s scope. The thought behind the DII is that an agent normally has no good reason to form an intention with a scope that includes impermissible actions. Because it is easy for an agent to restrict the scope of her intentions so that they exclude the performance of impermissible actions, at least those that she can easily see she might be directed to perform, and because she can have no good reason to include impermissible acts within the scope of her intentions, it is reasonable for morality to require her not to form intentions with impermissible acts in their scope.
It is also important to note that the DII does not direct agents to focus inwardly on their intentions; it directs agents to focus only on what they will do. It involves their intentions only insofar as it directs them to commit themselves to framing intentions that exclude impermissible acts from their scope. It does not matter how they do that; it matters only that they do that. Yet the DII still concerns intentions because it gives us a ground for condemning someone who performs an otherwise permissible act on an illicit intention. It says not that the final act itself was impermissible, but that acting on an illicit intention, one that could well have directed her to perform an impermissible act, was itself an impermissible choice.
Now we can apply this to Victor’s two cases. Start with the case of the gang members, one of whom is robbing a post office under duress. The one who is acting under duress is acting on an intention whose scope seems intuitively to contain no impermissible acts. We can assume that the only reason she is robbing the post office is to protect her family, a condition under which that action is, we can assume, permissible. If freed from such coercive threats, she would presumably not engage in post office robbery or any other impermissible actions. By contrast, her fellow gang members are ready and willing to engage in post office robbery. Even if the mutually enforcing threat were to drop away, they would still rob the post office because they think the money they get is justification enough for them. Thus they act on illicit intentions; she does not.
The same thing is true of beneficent B in Poisoned Pipe. Assuming that her act is permissible, it is permissible only in this odd circumstance in which by adding poison to the pipe, she helps V suffer a less bad death. Beneficent B would add poison to the pipe only in such a highly unusual circumstance, so her intention is licit. By contrast, her maleficent counterpart would perform the act of poisoning whether it would help V or not. She then clearly acts on an illicit intention, and that is why she and not her beneficent counterpart act impermissibly.
C. Victor’s objections and my replies
In the symposium on his book, Victor objected to the DII on two grounds. First, he said that I can’t distinguish someone who would order coffee willing to shoot the barista if she doesn’t sell him the coffee, but ready to pay normally if she does, from the bad actor in Poisoned Pipe who kills for the money: the acts are objectively justified in both, and both are ready to perform acts that aren’t. Second, he says that I’m just getting the wrong in Poisoned Pipe wrong: it’s killing, not acting on an illicit intention.
Here I must pause to say how grateful I am to Victor, as I hadn’t thought about the DII paper in some years, and I didn’t deal with this problem or the problem of comparative culpability in it. Nonetheless, I now have the following view. Taking the second problem first, let’s assume the poisoner is not aware of the justification for the act—assuming again that the justification is successful. He is adding the poison to kill and get the money. I say that if he kills and was unaware of the justification for doing so, he is guilty of attempted murder. Why attempted murder and not murder? My answer is that no death was caused that could not justifiably be caused. Thus murder does not fit. But from the agent’s point of view, he was trying to cause an unjustified death. Thus he should be held culpable for attempted murder.
Now what if he is aware of the justification but it was just a fortuity of the case; he would have killed anyway? Then we’ve got the coffee case in view. But I think a big difference in culpability can be traced to the reason acted on. If the reason is a murderous one, and the person got lucky, finding that in this case it turns out that the act is permissible, then the act is culpable on the level of attempted manslaughter. Why manslaughter? Because the intention was reckless, and but for good luck, he would have killed impermissibly. (And such a reduction in culpability might not be available in cases like that of the gang, where people set it up that they have the reason to do the crime—much as one cannot escape mens rea requirements by getting drunk so that one doesn’t know what one is doing.)
If, however, the reason is itself innocent—to get coffee—then acting on the illicit intention is still morally impermissible, but the culpability is low enough that the law should be reluctant to criminalize it at all. I’d say that the law should criminalize acting on an illicit intention, grounded on a morally neutral or good reason, only if the person was essentially taking active steps to be ready to act impermissibly.
Victor can still object that this view is quite peculiar. I would have those who kill with nothing but bad intent in cases like Poisoned Pipe guilty only of attempted murder. This just shows, he can say, that I’m getting the cases wrong. Again, I treat the wrong as one of acting on an illicit intention, but the wrong is killing.
Here I must simply acknowledge that my view is in this way counter-intuitive. We are not used to thinking of such cases as involving anything less than murder. But he and I both agree that it would be permissible to encourage the person to add the poison in such a case (again, assuming the justification works). And in that regard my view is less counter-intuitive. For all I have to say is that I’m encouraging someone to attempt to perform an impermissible act, while actually performing a permissible and good act. He has to say that it is permissible to encourage someone to murder. This is not to say that my view is now intuitive. It is only to say that there are peculiarities however one slices the terrain up, which probably indicates that our intuitions don’t all make sense. Therefore I am not too worried if I have to admit that my view is somewhat counter-intuitive.
III. The Liberal Anti-Perfectionist Case Against Intuitions
Let us go back to the terror bomber who drops bombs where they may permissibly be dropped. And let us suppose that he was committed to constraining his actions to conform to those that would be performed by a tactical bomber who only hit targets where the civilian damage would not be disproportionately high. One might say: why not require him not to act on the illicit reasons that he accepts?
There are a number of bad answers worth rejecting before spelling out my answer. One such bad answer is to say that if he accepts illicit reasons for action, then he cannot know that they are illicit, and thus he cannot be acting impermissibly. But there is no gap between intentions and actions on this score. One might think it is permissible to hit noncombatants where there are no legitimate targets in the area. That mistake does not make one’s action permissible. So why should a mistake about what reasons are morally licit?
One might also say that if he thinks that he has sufficient reason to target noncombatants, then he cannot choose not to do so, at least not while still performing the bombing run. Scanlon makes this argument: that an agent cannot have a reason for an action and choose not to act on it without also choosing not to perform the act that the reason would direct her to perform (Moral Dimensions, pp. 56-61). But Victor and I both reject this claim. We both think that an agent can take herself to have a reason R1 to do X, take herself to have another reason R2 to do X, and choose whether or not to do X acting on R1. That is, we both think that, at least in many cases, she can frame an intention to do X by appeal to R1 or not, as she chooses.
But now if the bomber could choose to fly the mission—which, we should suppose, there is good reason for him to fly—and if he could choose to do so without acting on his desire to kill enemy noncombatants or his belief that doing so would be a good thing, then why not say that he must fly the mission for better reasons, such as that it will take out legitimate military targets? Why not say that he acts as a murderer if he flies it for bad reasons?
Indeed, one might think that as a supporter of the DII, I should be quite open to this, as I think that one can be guilty of something close to murder, attempted murder, if one acts on illicit intentions that would lead, under some circumstances, to actual murder.
But I reject that view because I think there is a meaningful difference between illicit reasons and illicit intentions. The latter concern disposing oneself to perform acts that are impermissible. That seems to me to inherit the wrongfulness of simply choosing to do something impermissible. It is a close cousin of that other choice, and the presence of permissible acts in the scope of the intention does not seem enough to neutralize the wrongness of having impermissible ones there—especially given that it is not hard to frame an intention that excludes foreseen or easily foreseeable impermissible acts from its scope.
Illicit reasons, on the other hand, are not about acts, they are about how one thinks, how one reasons. I don’t deny that morality has something to say about this process. But I do deny that it can say it in the voice of a judgment of impermissibility. I think our basic freedom of conscience and of thought precludes that sort of deontic judgment.
What I am saying here is that there is an important sense in which we have a right to do wrong. And contrary to the dominant view of that right, the right is not just about what others can do to us. It is not primarily a right to be free from outside interference. It is fundamentally a right to choose to be immoral in certain ways. And this right is grounded in our right to lead our own lives, and to decide how and when to work on perfecting ourselves. There are limits to our permissible self-indulgence. We may not indulge vice to such an extent that we lose our ability to respect the rights of others and otherwise do what we are morally required to do. But within those limits, we are basically permitted to be vicious. The obligation not to be is an imperfect one, an obligation to take as one of our ends our own perfection. But that imperfect obligation does not give rise to perfect duties—to duties that it is impermissible to violate—unless, again, one needs to act to enable oneself to conform to the perfect duties that otherwise exist.
Now it can be objected, drawing on the inspiration of Warren Quinn, that people do have rights to the intentions of others. On Quinn’s view of the DDE, the terror bomber who kills by dropping bombs where a tactical bomber might permissibly drop them wrongs his victims because they have not only a claim not to be killed, but an especially strong claim not to be killed by a person acting on a vicious or illicit reason.
My response is that this objection seems deeply illiberal. Generally speaking, people have rights over the intentions of others only when the interaction should be consensual and they can withhold their consent to have the interaction on a variety of grounds, including that the other is acting on an intention they object to. But in cases that involve inherently nonconsensual interactions, like dropping bombs that kill people near military facilities, or turning trolleys away from some and onto others, it’s hard to see why those who are affected have any extra claim over the intentions of the actors. I think society has a claim that the actor at least know that the act is permissible; otherwise the actor is essentially recklessly or intentionally killing, and that should be a crime. But if the actor knows the act, abstracted from the intention with which it is performed, is permissible, and there is no other problem with her intention (like racism or having other impermissible acts in its scope), then it is hard to see why the victim gets to dictate what reasons the actor may act on.
The victim may claim that it adds insult to injury to be acted upon by one who thinks so hatefully or instrumentally about him. But we just aren’t entitled to demand that others not have insulting thoughts about us. Take a variant on a racism case, where no collective action problems will arise: suppose someone doesn’t like me because I remind her of a past lover who she now hates because of the shabby way he treated her. She chooses not to sell her house to me because of her irrational dislike for me based on my physical resemblance to someone else. If I want the house, I could reasonably be insulted. But I have no right to demand that she sell it to me. She is permitted by law to refuse to sell on that idiosyncratic reason. And in truth I think she is morally permitted to refuse to sell to me for that morally idiosyncratic reason. She shouldn’t take out on me her feelings for someone else. But if she has those feelings, she is morally entitled to indulge them in this way. It is her house, her feelings, and her choice to make.
At bottom, I cannot see why the fact that one is a victim of a harm worse than not being able to buy the house one wants—being killed—gives one more right to control the reasons for action of another. There are reasons to be concerned with intentions, to prohibit people from acting on them. But from what I can see, the right not to be thought of badly as another does what she otherwise has a right to do does not give rise to a new basis for saying that intentions matter quite generally to the permissibility of actions.
CODA: some are also tempted by a sort of Aristotelian position that acts are to be distinguished from reflexes by the fact that they are performed with an intention, and often it is the intention that defines the act as the type of act that it is. For example, burglary is distinguished by the specific intent with which one enters a building: the intention to commit a felony therein. Banning burglary is banning an action that can only be identified by the intention of the actor.
To this I say yes, but we can still describe physical act types, like entering a building, and we can still describe relevant circumstances, like doing it without permission, and we can still identify a range of conditions that would justify or fail to justify such an act, all without knowing the intention with which the person entered the building. We can then add to the considerations the fact that the person performed an act with a particular intention to see if it makes a difference. Sometimes it might, sometimes it might be relevant only to level of culpability if the act is already on the impermissible side of the line. None of that undermines in any way what was said above.
(Also posted on Flickers of Freedom.)
I am a fan of attributability as a conception of responsibility. The trick, as we all know, is to get clear on just what that means. Even if you don't think attributability is a conception of responsibility, it is surely necessary for responsibility, so getting clear on what it consists in is in everyone's interest. One popular theory of attributability is a kind of evaluative judgment view: an action or attitude is properly attributable to me just in case it is ultimately dependent on my evaluative judgments. I'm wondering, though, about the following possible counterexample to this view.
Over at the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, we're running a symposium this week on the topic of "Libertarianism and Land," featuring essays by Eric Mack, Hillel Steiner, Fred Foldvary, Kevin Carson, and David Schmidtz.
The first essay went up this morning: "Natural Rights and Natural Stuff," by Eric Mack. The other essays will go up one per morning for the rest of the week.
Where | FCH Campus, Room TC007, Swindon Road, Cheltenham, United Kingdom |
Description | Does Spirituality Make Us Stupid, Selfish & Unhappy? A talk, and discussion, as part of the Bible & Spirituality Seminar Series. The talk will begin with an assessment of "non-religious spirituality", and conclude with a plea for a critical, existentialist, atheism. |
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I like a broadly Kratzerian account of conditionals. On this account, the function of if-clauses is to restrict the space of possibilities on which the rest of the sentence is evaluated. For example, in a sentence of the form 'the probability that if A then B is x', the if-clause restricts the space of possibilities to those where A is true; the probability of B relative to this restricted space is x iff the unrestricted conditional probability of B given A is x. This account therefore valides something that sounds exactly like "Stalnaker's Thesis" for indicative conditionals:
Thesis: P(if A then C) = P(C/A).
On the account I like, if you say 'P(if A then C)' in English, you almost inevitably end up saying something that denotes the conditional probability P(C/A), rather than the unconditional probability of some proposition expressed by 'if A then C'.
So it's interesting that Vann McGee and Stefan Kaufmann have found intuitive counterexamples to Stalnaker's Thesis. One of Kaufmann's examples in "Conditioning against the grain" goes as follows. There are two bags. In bag X, most balls are red, and most of the red balls have black spots. In bag Y, few balls are red, and few of those balls have black spots. You are 75% confident that the bag in front of you is bag Y. Now consider the statement:
(1) If you pick a red ball, it will not have black spots.
Many people apparently intuit (1) to have fairly high probability. I take that to mean that they would assent to
(1') Probably, if you pick a red ball, it will not have black spots.
This contradicts the Thesis, because getting a red ball is evidence that the bag in front of you is bag X, in which case it is rather likely that the ball has black spots.
As Kaufmann observes, if these facts are made salient -- if one points out that picking a red ball is much more likely if it's bag X rather than Y, and that most red balls in bag X have spots -- then people's intuitions switch and they deem (1) to have low probability. So it looks like the Thesis is right about some contexts, but not about others.
Kaufmann's explanation is that there are two ways of evaluating conditional probabilities, one "local" and one "global". Globally, 'P(if A then B)' denotes P(B/A); locally, 'P(if A then B)' denotes the expectation of P(B/A) relative to a certain parition, here the partition of bags { X, Y }:
(L) P(if A then B) = P(B/AX)P(X) + P(B/AY)P(Y).
The idea, which sounds plausible, is that when we judge (1) to be probable, we hold fixed that P(Y)=0.75 and note that P(No Spots / Red & Y) is high, which by (L) means that the probability of (1) is high.
But why would we use (L) to evaluate conditional probabilities? The "global" evaluation that conforms to Stalnaker's Thesis is predicted by the general Kratzer-style semantics of 'if' and 'probability'. Where does the "local" reading come from?
Kaufmann suggests that the two evaluations corresponds to different ways of supposing A, and also that the local evaluation can be understood as giving the expectated conditional chance of B given A, since chance is credence conditionalised on the true member of a relevant partition. Both of these remarks suggest that (L) could give the subjunctive conditional probability of B given A, P(A\B), rather than the indicative conditional probability P(A/B). Indeed, the kind of compartmentalised conditioning that figures in (L) is precisely what Lewis uses in "Causal Decision Theory" to define the imaging function for subjunctive conditional probabilities.
So maybe that's what's going on: when people judge (1) to be probable, they read the conditional as subjunctive. This isn't too implausible, I think, because in English the distinction between the subjunctive and indicative reading is usually only marked in the past tense. Read subjunctively, the intuitive judgement about (1) is correct, as can be seen if one enforces this reading by saying "if you were to pick a red ball, it would not have black spots".
The hypothesis that the subjunctive reading is in play might also be supported by the fact that the intuition about (1) becomes much weaker -- I think -- if the sentence is put into the past. Suppose you've drawn a ball but haven't looked at it yet. Consider:
(1'') If you picked a red ball, then it does not have black spots.
The hypothesis also fits the phenomenon that people's intuitions flip when it is pointed out that picking a red ball makes it more likely that it's bag X than bag Y: this context, where the topic is what is evidence for what, makes the indicative reading salient.
So far, so good. Unfortunately, the present story does not work for McGee's examples. Here is one Kaufmann discusses as well. Initially, you believe that Murdoch died in an accident. Then somebody who you think is probably Sherlock Holmes says that Murdoch was killed, that Brown is probably the murderer, and that in any case
(2) If Brown didn't kill Murdoch, then someone else did.
According to McGee, most people now regard (2) as highly probable. However, if it turns out that Brown didn't kill Murdoch, then you'd lose your confidence that the speaker is Holmes, and thus return to your judgment that Murdoch died in an accident. So the (indicative) conditional probability corresponding for (2) is low.
Kaufmann doesn't find this problematic, since it conforms to his local evaluation rule (L), this time using the partition { he's Holmes, he's not Holmes }. But this application of (L) cannot plausibly be taken to give the subjunctive conditional probability of someone else killing Murdoch given that Brown didn't kill him. The subjunctive probability is surely low. If you think that Brown probably killed Murdoch, you will not judge it very probable that if Brown hadn't killed him then someone else would have. Moreover, it is anyway implausible that people are reading (2) subjunctively, because it is in the past tense.
The reason why Kaufmann's rule (L) here doesn't yield subjunctive conditional probability is that it uses a bad partition { Holmes, not Holmes }. (This also makes it implausible to describe (L) as computing expected conditional chance.) Roughly speaking, the cells of a good partition would say enough about the the world and its causal structure so that, combined with either the assumption that Brown did kill Murdoch or that he didn't, each cell would entail whether someone else killed Murdoch. Applying (L) to such a partition yields a low conditional probability.
(L) is partition-dependent: the "local" probability of a conditional depends on the chosen partition. By choosing a suitable partition, we can let the local probability have almost any value we like. Kaufmann stresses that not all partitions are acceptable for (L), and that the right partitions must somehow encode the "causal structure of the scenario" [p.598]. But it isn't clear why this makes { Holmes, not Holmes } acceptable.
Let's redescribe Kaufmann's first example with a different partition. Again, you get to draw a ball from either bag X or bag Y; X contains mostly red balls with mostly black spots, Y has few red balls, few of which have black spots; based on your evidence, you are 75% certain that the bag in front of you is bag Y. If the contents of the bags are precisely specified (as Kaufmann does), it is possible to calculate your probability for the hypothesis that you draw a red ball from bag Y. Let this hypothesis be called RY. Given your evidence, the probability of RY is quite low, say 0.05. So you're very confident that not-RY is true. Moreover, if not-RY is indeed true and you draw a red ball, then the ball can only come from bag X, in which case it probably has black spots. Now consider
(1) If you pick a red ball, it will not have black spots.
I suspect many would judge (1) to have low probability in this context, lower than P(No Spots/Red) and much lower than the subjunctive P(No Spots\Red). But the scenario is exactly the same as Kaufmann's -- I've just made a different partition salient.
Here is one lesson we might draw. There aren't just two kinds of conditional probabilities, indicative and subjunctive, but infinitely many, one for each choice of a partition. Every partition induces an imaging function and thereby a type of subjunctive supposition. We could then also fold indicative conditional probability into the subjunctive kind, induced by the single-membered partition. Context usually determines which partition is salient for statements about conditional probability (i.e. for statements that look like statements about the probability of a conditional).
Maybe. But if that's true, I'd like it to follow from the general semantics of 'if' and 'probability'. Neither of these, by itself, seems to be sensitive to the contextually salient partition -- at least not to the extent required for the present proposal to work.
I prefer another, perhaps more obvious, explanation: people who intuit that (2) is probable and (1) very improbable (in the revised context) have made a mistake.
Where does the mistake come from? In part, it may come from the fact that the (standard, indicative) conditional probability is a bit hard to determine in these cases, because one has to keep track of two factors that pull in opposite directions. For example, in the case of (2), the hypothesis that Brown didn't kill Murdoch supports that someone else did it within the "Holmes" cell of the partition, but simultaneously lowers the probability of that cell and thereby the probability that Murdoch was killed.
More importantly, I think the mistake comes from the grammatical illusion that a question about the the probability of a conditional is a question about the probability of a certain proposition. If A is a proposition and { X, Y } a partition, then of course
P(A) = P(A/X)P(X) + P(A/Y)P(Y).
So we can always evaluate the probability of a proposition by considering its probability under different hypotheses and then take the weighted average. The result never depends on the chosen partition. When asked about the probability that if A then B, we mistakenly apply the same recipe, not realising that 'the probability that if A then B on the assumption that X' denotes P(B/AX) rather than something of the form P(A->B/X).
Consider another of McGee's examples. Quantum mechanics entails that
(3) If all atoms in this table decay within the next second, then Z amount of energy is released,
for some particular value Z. McGee suggests that if we trust quantum mechanics, then we will assign high probability to (3). However, P(Z released / table decays) is low, since finding the table suddenly decay would dramatically lower our confidence in quantum mechanics.
If the probability of (3) is the probability of a certain proposition that's entailed by quantum mechanics, then it is clear why trusting quantum mechanics requires assigning high probability to (3). But on the Kratzerian account, there is no such proposition, at least not if the conditional is read indicatively. (It could also be read as a nomologically strict conditional, in which case the failure of Stalnaker's Thesis is unproblematic.) On the indicative reading, there is no proposition that is (i) entailed by quantum mechanics and (ii) whose probability is in question when we ask about the probability of (3). Perhaps it is the prima facie plausibility that there is a proposition satisfying (i) and (ii) that explains why we mistakenly think the probability of (3) must be high, even on the indicative reading.
..a quick look at our moral landscape confirms that it is a much more appropriate description of the atheist liberal/hedonist behaviour: they dedicate their life to the pursuit of pleasures, but since there is no external authority which would guarantee them personal space for this pursuit, they get entangled in a thick network of self-imposed "Politically Correct" regulations, as if they are answerable to a superego far more severe than that of the traditional morality. They thus become obsessed with the concern that, in pursuing their pleasures, they may violate the space of others, and so regulate their behaviour by adopting detailed prescriptions about how to avoid "harassing" others, along with the no less complex regime of the care-of-the-self (physical fitness, health food, spiritual relaxation, and so on).
Today, nothing is more oppressive and regulated than being a simple hedonist.------------
Dr Roy Jackson, the RPE Course Leader has a new blog at http://www.godofphilosophy.com/ - which has loads of material on the Philosophy of Religion.
Feel free to look at the picture blog too (the Budha stuff may need you to look at some of the past pages, as there is a growing archive in them). You can also submit images to this gallery/photo-blog at http://dispirited-dave.tumblr.com/submit
MANCEPT Workshops in Political Theory - Ninth Annual Conference
Manchester Centre for Political Theory (MANCEPT), University of Manchester
5th - 7th September 2012
Workshop on Well-being and Public Policy: Call for Abstracts
David Cameron, in a recent speech on introducing national measures of well-being to inform public policy, claimed that the UK government is aiming to measure the progress of the nation, "not just by how our economy is growing, but by how our lives are improving; not just by our standard of living, but by our quality of life." In short, the UK government is looking to measure the nation's well-being in order to "help make a better life for people." Other governments and international organizations are also increasingly focusing upon well-being as a policy goal.
This workshop will focus on whether, and how, public policy can and should be informed, in some way, by considerations of the public's well-being. There will be up to 12 speakers in total, who will be invited to give a 30 minute presentation, followed by a discussion. Potential areas of interest include (but are not limited to):
If you are interested to present during this workshop, please send to one or both of us an abstract of no more than 500 words with your full name and institutional affiliation before May 15th.
Convenors:
Sam Wren-Lewis (University of Leeds): samwrenlewis@gmail.com
Tim Taylor (visiting research fellow, University of Leeds): phltet@leeds.ac.uk
Further details about the conference available at
http://manceptworkshops2012.wordpress.com/.
The first issue of Thought is out.
I was wondering whether it would be good to have comments threads on different papers in it. If anyone is interested, let me know and I’ll set them up.
From Mark Timmons, here is a call for abstracts for the Fourth Annual Arizona
Workshop in Normative Ethical Theory that will be held in Tucson, Arizona on
January 3-5, 2013. Abstracts are welcome in any area or on any topic in
normative ethical theory (to be distinguished as well as possible from
metaethics, political philosophy, and applied ethics).
Abstracts should be 2-3 double-spaced pages and are due no later than Monday June 4,
2012. Please send abstracts by email to Mark at mtimmons@u.arizona.edu.
Those who presented at the 2011 or 2012 workshops are not eligible for presenting at the 2013 workshop.
A program committee will evaluate the submissions and decisions will be finalized by early July.
Julia Annas (Arizona), Brad Hooker (Reading), and Shelly Kagan (Yale) are the 2013 keynote speakers.
Further information about the submission of abstracts and about the Workshop is
available at the Workshop website.
Recently Kevin Drum asked his readers for podcast recommendations. I learned two big things from his nice summary of the replies.
One is that the In Our Time archives have now been made available. This is a very nice thing for the BBC to do, and I suspect I’ll be spending a lot of time listening to them over the forthcoming months.
The other is that there is a lot of demand out there for philosophy podcasting. As well as In Our Time (which has over 60 philosophy programs in its archive), there were a lot of recommendations for David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton’s Philosophy Bites.
So in the interest of satisfying that demand, I thought I’d post a link to a couple more philosophy podcasts, and see if TAR readers had suggestions for more.
Philosopher’s Zone is a weekly philosophy show on Australia’s Radio National. It features a mixture of public lectures, interviews with philosophers, and programs on specific topics.
The 10-Minute Puzzle is a new podcast series out of the Northern Institute of Philosophy centre in Aberdeen. It basically does what it says on the tin: introduce a philosophy puzzle and some of the natural solutions to it in 10 minutes.
The links I’ve posted so far have a pretty high concentration of male presenters. But I’m sure that if I knew more about what was available, that imbalance would be somewhat corrected. So, any further suggestions?
A group of our PhD students here at Birmingham asked me to email details of a workshop on the conceptions of a good life which they are organising here in June. This should be of interest for graduate students following this blog as there is also a call for abstracts for them included. Here's the announcement:
Call for abstracts and registration
Workshop at the University of Birmingham, Department of Philosophy
The Good Life: Theory and Practice
8th June 2012
Confirmed speakers
Beverley Clack (Professor in the Philosophy of Religion, Oxford Brookes University)
Chris Megone (Professor of Interdisciplinary Applied Ethics, University of Leeds)
Mozaffar Qizilbash (Professor of Economics, University of York)
Stephen Wilkinson (Professor of Bioethics, Keele University)
James Wilson (Lecturer in Philosophy and Health, University College London)
Conceptions of the good life have an obvious place in normative theory, and a clear relevance for a wide range of practical concerns, from individual autonomy and embodiment to development ethics and welfare economics. This workshop will bring together interdisciplinary scholars and students working on a range of practical issues for presentations and discussion, with the hope of illuminating the relationship that theory has to practice here. Likely focal points for discussion include (but are not limited to) health and illness, capability and functioning, preference deformation and adaption, and objectification and commodification of the self.
Call for papers
We invite abstracts from post-graduate students in philosophy and cognate disciplines on the 'Good Life' theme, broadly construed. An emphasis on connections and/or transitions between theory and practice involving conceptions of the good life would be especially welcome. Papers will be 10-15 mins in length, followed by questions.
Please send abstracts (of approximately 500 words) to Ben Bessey (bjb076@bham.ac.uk) by 11th May 2012.
Register for the workshop
There is no cost to register for this event, but places are limited. If you wish to attend, please register your interest with Herjeet Marway at hxm447@bham.ac.uk. The deadline for registration is 1st June 2012.
Organised by: Ben Bessey, Sarah Louise-Johnson, Herjeet Marway, Peter West-Oram (PhD Students, Department of Philosophy, University of Birmingham).
I'm interested in how the New York Times struggles to cover stories on genetics. For example, they report that a "tiny fraction" of autism cases are explained by having certain rare genetic mutations. Scientists hope to explain 10-20 percent of autism cases by identifying yet more rare gene mutations in the next couple of years.
OK, first, why call them "mutations"? We're each born with different gene variants, that's what makes us unique. When I think of "mutations" I think of DNA damage caused by exposure to radiation, which it's not.
Second, the article complains that "There are likely hundreds, perhaps thousands, of rare mutations that could disrupt brain development enough to result in social and developmental delays."
So what? There's no single gene variant for autism. Instead, there may be thousands. But if you sequence someone's entire genome, it's no harder for a computer to scan for thousands of variants than it is to find one.
In other words, there's an emerging "signature" for autism in our genes, not a single gene. That might make it harder to develop a genetic test for autism, but not that much harder, especially when the price of a full genome scan falls below $1000.
At that point, anyone with a family history of autism will be encouraged to have a genetic test, similar to a test for Down Syndrome. It will be a test for the "genetic signature" of a disease.
Sam Wren-Lewis is organizing a conference on subjective well-being and public policy at Leeds in July that might be of interest to Peasoupers (indeed, several of us are speaking there). Here's the official announcement:
Conference: 'Measures of Subjective Well-being for Public Policy: Philosophical Perspectives'
Registration now open.
Keynote Speakers:
These issues have been largely unexplored in part because of the lack of dialogue between philosophers and non-philosophers working on the role of subjective well-being in public policy. This conference seeks to bridge that gap, offering a unique opportunity to promote inter-disciplinary dialogue on how well-being research might best be applied to policy-making.
For more information on conference topics and speakers, please visit the conference website.
To register for the conference, please do so either directly by going to the relevant page on the IDEA CETL website here or indirectly through the 'registration' page on the conference website here.
Lastly, I have tried to send this message to as many people as possible who might be interested in attending the conference. If you could pass this on to anyone you think would also be interested, that would be most appreciated.
All the best,
Sam Wren-Lewis
We are pleased to present the next installment of Ethics at PEA Soup. Our featured article this time around is Justin Clarke-Doane’s “Morality and Mathematics: The Evolutionary Challenge,” which is available here. We are very grateful to Matthew Braddock, Andreas Mogensen, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong for kicking off the discussion with the following thought-provoking post (see below the fold). Questions and comments about either Clarke-Doane’s article or the post by Braddock et al. are most welcome.
“Comments on Justin Clarke-Doane’s ‘Morality and Mathematics: The Evolutionary Challenge’” by Matthew Braddock, Andreas Mogensen, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (Duke University)In “Morality and Mathematics: The Evolutionary Challenge” (Ethics 2012), Justin Clarke-Doane raises fascinating and important issues about evolutionary debunking arguments. He argues that insofar as our knowledge of the evolutionary origins of morality poses a challenge for moral realism, exactly similar difficulties will arise for mathematical realism. Clarke-Doane concentrates on the claim that we were not selected to have true moral beliefs, which he interprets to mean that we would have evolved the very same moral beliefs even if the moral facts were radically different from what we take them to be. He argues that an analogous claim holds with respect to our mathematical beliefs: we would have evolved the same mathematical beliefs even if the mathematical facts were radically different from what mathematical realists take them to be. However, even if Clarke-Doane is correct in this, we suspect that his points miss two other kinds of evolutionary debunking arguments, which look to pose a special problem for moral realism.
First, Clarke-Doane twice quotes this claim by Sharon Street: “to explain why human beings tend to make the normative judgments that we do, we do not need to suppose that these judgments are true” (Street, “Reply to Copp”, 208). We take Street’s point to be that one can give a complete explanation of why humans tend to make certain moral judgments rather than others without ever saying anything that implies that any moral beliefs are true. This claim is only about what needs to be said in a complete explanation. It does not assume that moral truths or facts could be different than they are now. Moreover, this claim has no parallel regarding mathematics, because arguably a complete explanation of why humans tend to make certain mathematical judgments (e.g. 1+1=2) rather than others (e.g. 1+1=0) would need to say or imply that 1+1=2 and 1+1≠0. Hence, an evolutionary debunking argument based on this claim by Street understood in this way is not affected by Clarke-Doane’s points.
Clarke-Doane could reply, “for any mathematical hypothesis that we were selected to believe, H, there is a nonmathematical truth corresponding to H that captures the intuitive reason that belief in H was advantageous is plausible. By nonmathematical truth I mean a truth … that does not imply the existence of a relevantly mind-and-language independent realm of mathematical objects” (332). This quotation seems to make what we call the ontological claim: that a complete explanation of why mathematical beliefs are advantageous does not need to imply a Platonic “realm of mathematical objects.” That ontological claim is weaker than what we call the semantic claim: that a complete explanation of why mathematical beliefs are advantageous does not need to include or entail any mathematical language. The ontological claim is compatible with the falsity of the semantic claim and hence with a crucial disanalogy between mathematics and morality, if a complete explanation of why moral beliefs are advantageous does not need to include or entail any moral language. Accordingly, we will assume that Clarke-Doane is making the stronger semantic claim, despite his reference to a “realm” of “objects”.
The non-mathematical truth that is supposed to explain why some mathematical beliefs are advantageous is stated in the text like this: “If there is exactly one lion behind bush A, and there is exactly one behind bush B, and no lion behind bush A is a lion behind bush B, then there are exactly two lions behind bush A or B.” (329-30) However, this formulation clearly uses mathematical language: the terms “one” and “two”. Hence, this formulation cannot establish the semantic claim. The real work is done by another formulation that occurs only in a footnote, where “there are exactly two lions behind bush A or B” is said to abbreviate “there is an x and a y such that x is a lion behind bush A or B and y is a lion behind bush A or B and, x ≠ y, and for all z, if z is a lion behind bush A or B, then z = x or z = y.” (330, note 41) Using this method, the whole conditional in the text can be restated without mathematical language. However, it is not clear what this conditional explains. It might explain why a particular person is not eaten by a lion (or two) on a particular occasion. However, what needs to be explained is a much more general truth: people who believe that 1+1=2 survive longer and reproduce more than people who believe that 1+1=0 (or do not believe that 1+1=2). This is not about lions or indeed any particular person or situation, so it is not at all clear how to explain this general truth without stating or implying that 1+1=2. In other words, even if mathematical truths are not needed to explain survival in the lions-behind-bushes case (or the geometrical case), why infer that this holds in general?
Moreover, here is a reason for doubting the strong semantic claim. If the mathematical facts are indispensable to our best physics—if the mathematical facts make an important empirical difference—then if the mathematical facts were very different, the laws of physics would be very different. But if the laws of physics were very different, then it is doubtful that we would arrive at the same mathematical beliefs. Hence the complete evolutionary explanation of our mathematical beliefs in general needs to cite or imply their truth. Since Clarke-Doane presumably does not want his argument to hinge on the denial of the indispensability of mathematics to physics, it is at least unclear how he would support his strong semantic claim.
Second, consider a different kind of premise:
Evolutionary Unreliability: our moral beliefs are products of unreliable evolutionary processes.
Evolutionary Unreliability, on a standard understanding of process reliability, implies the following: given different instantiations of the processes that have produced our moral beliefs (and holding fixed the actual process types and actual moral truths), we could easily have arrived at mostly false moral beliefs. Notice that, again, there is no reliance here on the tricky antecedent “if the moral truths were different.” Also notice that if Evolutionary Unreliability is plausible, then we have an undercutting defeater of our moral beliefs, since accessible unreliability qualifies as such a defeater. If plausible, then Evolutionary Unreliability packs a strong skeptical punch.
Is Evolutionary Unreliability plausible (on moral realism)? It seems to cohere with standard models of the cultural evolution of moral norms and the evolutionary biases that dispose us to accept particular moral norms over others. For instance, though today many of us accept harm norms that robustly forbid harm to most or all human beings, we might have easily accepted harm norms that by our current lights are morally detestable, as many of our ancestors did, such as harm norms that liberally permit or even obligate group members to harm out-group members, children, and nonhuman animals. We might recall detestable ancient moral norms that obligated men to kill enemy warriors and enslave their women and children. Far from threatening social stability, the acceptance of such norms could easily be quite beneficial to a group, as it plunders and eliminates its competition. Such discriminatory norms also resonate with various evolutionary biases (e.g. in-group biases) with which we have been endowed. History is littered with similarly detestable moral norms. Many still exist today. These empirical considerations suggest that given different instantiations of the processes behind our moral beliefs, we could have easily arrived at mostly false moral beliefs.
Would the unreliability claim apply with equal force to our mathematical beliefs (on mathematical realism)? It does not seem so. Given greater first-order cross-historical and cross-cultural mathematical agreement than moral agreement, it is less plausible to suppose that given different instantiations of the processes behind our mathematical beliefs, we could have easily arrived at mostly false mathematical beliefs. Though these are very early days for mathematical psychology, the greater extent of mathematical agreement suggests that the processes behind our mathematical beliefs are not as contingent with respect to the content of the mathematical beliefs at which we could have easily arrived.
Thus, even if Clarke-Doane does show that some evolutionary arguments fail to distinguish morality from mathematics, a lot more work is needed to show that there is “no epistemological ground on which to be a moral antirealist and a mathematical realist” (340).
Michael Gazzaniga writes in Who's in Charge that "listening to people's explanations of their actions is interesting ... but often a waste of time." [p.78] "The left brain uses what it has and ad libs the rest." [p.88] Confabulation is the brain's hard-wired impulse for "giving a fictitious account of a past event."
In the book, Gazzaniga explores some of the hottest issues in the study of the human mind, including consciousness and free will.
"Consciousness is distributed everywhere across the brain," says Gazzaniga [p.64]. For example, patients with a localized brain stroke may lose conscious awareness of their left arm, even believing it belongs to someone else. "Consciousness involves a multitude of widely distributed specialized systems and disunited processes" [p.102] Any sense of unity in consciousness is merely confabulation.
To some extent, says Gazzaniga, we humans are hard-wired. "The medial frontal cortex gives one the feeling of the urge to move". [p.113] The lateral frontal lobes are responsible for "sequencing behavior" like planning [p.49]. Specific areas in the temporal lobe allow you to recognize animals and fruits [p.50]. We have specialized brain functions for detecting cheaters and making moral judgements [p.69].
However, Gazzaniga says that "social interactions make us free to choose" [p.215], which I find odd. Perhaps it would be better to depersonalize it. Human impulses come in sets or pairs. People constantly balance competing desires (using their frontal lobes). The desire to steal from a rich man is (usually) counterbalanced by the fear of punishment. The cortex mediates between competing impulses in the context of new information from the senses.
How does the cortex do this? Gazzaniga doesn't know. "These interactions will only be understood with a new vocabulary" [p.107]. "A unique language, which has yet to be developed, is needed to capture the thing that happens when mental processes constrain the brain." [p.220]
Gazzaniga believes in "emergence" but I have my own explanation, which is Resonance. Think back to the days when physicists explained black body radiation in terms of oscillators. Billions of neurons in the brain, each firing 200 times per second, are like oscillators that constrain all the other oscillators in the brain. The mind is a statistically emergent phenomena - the lowest-energy state of these oscillators - but it often takes time for the brain to re-adjust after it has been perturbed by new information. In a sense, the mind is a set of resonance frequencies (or standing waves) derived from the brain's activity, but the brain doesn't affect the mind deterministically, since there's always quantum uncertainty from one level to the next.
This also opens the possibility of genetic encoding of desires, fears and impulses. If indeed the cortex reduces our experiences to multidimensional resonance frequencies, perhaps the frequencies have a unique signature that can be coded in the genes and retrieved during brain development.
Gazziniga doesn't discuss human difference. Yet our genes constrain our impulse thresholds, and genetic variations among us are responsible for human individuality. Your genes define what you want, and who you are. While Gazzaniga admits that "overall [brain] connectivity pattern is under genetic control" [p.21] and "if the capacity is not built-in, it does not exist" [p.19], he shies away from the key question: Why do some people enjoy being serial killers and others don't? Why do some enjoying leading, while others enjoy following?
Finally, I don't believe that consciousness is required for free will. By my definition, free will is the freedom to follow your design, whether you're conscious of it or not.
Nobody sane generally or standardly acts so as to realise utility, or “on the motive of Duty” (Kant’s own phrase), or “for the sake of virtue itself” (Aristotle’s own phrase). Even people who only act occasionally in these ways can be in danger of looking priggish, and out of touch with what really matters in life, to the rest of us.As I hinted in the last section, what really motivates most of us, most of the time, at least if we are moderately good people or better and are not being distracted by false motives like concern about “what others will think”, is love: love for spouses, love for children and parents, love for friends, love for God, love for ideals, love for valued places or artworks or possessions, love for pet projects, love for pets. The centrality of love is a striking feature of any typical credible ethical outlook. The marginality of love in typical moral theories, and more broadly in contemporary philosophical research, is equally striking. Love is at the heart of our ethical outlooks; it is love, and not concern with what is right and wrong, that mostly drives us into action. In that sense love puts us “beyond good and evil”, and beyond morality; while morality is a constraint on what motivates us (and a constraint: there are others), love is the very engine of motivation.
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| 7:30am - a bit early to be on campus... |
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| The Swaminaryan Mandir in Neasden |
Then it was rather a long coach trip back - but overall this was a really good day out - there will be more pics on the course Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/RPEglos/ 
McTaggart aims to cause trouble for views on which there is a privileged present but it changes what time it is. The modal analogue of his argument aims to cause trouble for views on which there is privileged actuality but it’s contingent which world is actual. Prima facie, the arguments work against views which are realist about other times and worlds, but not against presentist or actualism. But this has been challenged in both directions. Nick JJ Smith argues that the temporal problem still afflicts the presentist: if he’s right, the modal analogue afflicts the actualist as well. Phillip Bricker argues that the modal problem doesn’t afflict the modal realist with privileged actuality: if he’s right, the temporal analogue doesn’t afflict the A-theoretic eternalist. I argue they are both wrong: there is a serious problem for eternalism with A-theory and for modal realism with absolute actuality, but there is no problem for the presentist or actualist.
It is natural to think of a possible world as something like an extremely specific story or theory. Unlike an ordinary story or theory, a possible world leaves no question open. If we identify a theory with a set of propositions, a possible world could be defined as a theory T which is
It is often useful to go in the other direction and identify propositions with sets of possible worlds. We can then analyse entailment as the subset relation, negation as complement and conjunction as intersection. Of course, we may not want to say that a world is a (non-empty) set of (consistent) propositions and also that a consistent proposition is a non-empty set of worlds, since these sets should eventually bottom out. But that doesn't seem very problematic, and it is easily fixed as long as there is a simple 1-1 correspondence between worlds and logically closed, consistent and maximally specific theories. In particular, one might suspect that on the present definitions, every logically closed, consistent and maximally specific theory uniquely corresponds to a possible world, namely the sole member of the intersection of the theory's members.
But it looks like this is false. Since there are infinitely many worlds, one can show (e.g. in ZFC) that there are sets of sets of worlds that are logically closed, consistent and maximally specific, but do not single out any particular world: the non-principal ultrafilters on the space of worlds. The non-principal ultrafilters contain the negation of { W } for every world W. So these theories are true at no world whatsoever. They are nevertheless consistent, since they don't contain any proposition together with its negation.
This is odd. I would like to say that although I sometimes define theories as sets of propositions and propositions as sets of worlds, one can (if one wants) just as well go in the other direction and define possible worlds as logically closed, consistent and maximally specific theories. But the two definitions don't seem to line up. I somehow need to exclude the non-principal ultrafilters, without talking about their set-theoretic construction (which would presuppose my own order of definition). I suppose this could be done by strengthening the closure condition, e.g. by saying that whenever T contains some propositions, then it also contains the (possibly infinite and uncountable) conjunction of those propositions. Would that work? Is there a better response?
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Updated on May 19, 2012 09:11 PM UTC. Entries are normalised to UTC time.
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