Some argue that Lewisian realism fails as a reduction of modality because in order to meet some criterion of success the account needs to invoke primitive modality. I defend Lewisian realism against this charge; in the process, I hope to shed some light on the conditions of success for a reduction. In §1 I detail the resources the Lewisian modal realist needs. In §2 I argue against Lycan and Shalkowski’s charge that Lewis needs a modal notion of ‘world’ to ensure that worlds correspond to possibilities. In §3 I respond to Divers and Melia’s objection that Lewis needs to invoke primitive modality to give a complete account of what worlds there are. In §4 I ask what it is for a notion to ‘involve’ modality. I conclude that the question is either in bad standing or at best offers little traction on the debate, and propose a different way of assessing when materials are appropriately included in a reductive base.

 

posted by KT 

Our topic this week:  Philosophy for the young – corrupting… or empowering?  We asked that question in front of an audience of high school at Palo Alto High School, in Palo Alto, California.  We record this program there last May, at the invitation of a teacher,  Lucy Filppu, an English teacher by training,  who teaches a special humanities course.  We had a blast and we’d very much like to thank the students and teachers at Paly, as it is affectionately called,  for having us.  We’d love to go back sometime. 

Now the The charge that philosophy actually corrupts the young is nearly a old as philosophy itself.  Over 2,400 years ago, in one of the most famous trials of all times, Socrates, one the founding fathers of Philosophy, was condemned to death for corrupting the youth of Athens.  Now I have no doubt the young men who followed Socrates all around Athens being tutored by him were royal pains for the authorities.  But Socrates didn’t corrupt the young; he empowered the young.  He empowered them to think for themselves, to question received wisdom, and not to be cowed by authority.  No doubt, they made the authorities uncomfortable.  But making the authorities uncomfortable isn’t the same as being corrupt.

Of course, the attitude that the wisdom of your elders is something you can take or leave, that no one has authority over you unless you grant them authority – that’s a dangerous attitude for a young person to have.   No doubt Socrates instilled that attitude into his young pupils.   And you could say that’s a dangerous thing.  But it’s more dangerous to those who claim to be authorities than to the young themselves,  I would think.

Of course,  I don’t want to deny that philosophy has to be used carefully and that it can be dangerous if used wrongly. Done wrongly, philosophy can be highly corrosive to one’s life.  It can lead you to doubt everything.  It can cause you wonder whether life has meaning, to question your religion, your country, your parents, and even your teachers.  Do we really want to cast the young out onto the sea of philosophical doubt and uncertainty?  Don’t we want to teach them to how to thrive and succeed in the world?  To do that, they sometimes have to accommodate authority, not question it or reflexively rebel against it.  

Of course,  we really shouldn’t be promoting reflexive rebellion against all authority, just because it’s authority.  But that sort of rebellion wouldn’t display a philosophical attitude; it displays an adolescent attitude, and an arrogant one at that.  Philosophy isn’t about intellectual arrogance; it’s about intellectual honesty and humility.  Philosophy demands that you subject not just the beliefs and prejudices of others, but also your own beliefs and prejudices, to the light of critical reflection.

Socrates himself actually exemplified that kind of intellectual humility in fact.  He was a seeker of knowledge, wisdom and enlightenment.  He didn’t claim to possess them already.  Of course, there’s the paradox that his intellectual humility actually made Socrates the wisest man in Athens, according to the Oracle at Delphi.  He didn’t know anything, but unlike all the other supposed wise men of Athens, he knew that he didn’t know anything.   They, on the other hand, thought they knew it all, but actually knew nothing.

Though our schools don’t, in general, do much teaching of philosophy to the young, it seems to me that the young are natural philosophers.    Given where they are in their lives, the young are bound to be gripped by philosophical questions.  Young people are in the business of trying to figure out who and what they are.  Philosophy is devoted to answering just the sorts of questions that will grip any reflective human engaged in such a process:  “Who am I?”  “What's right, and what's wrong?”   “What things are worthy of my deepest allegiances and affections?”  “What is my place in the social world?

Moreover,  we adults sometimes pretend, like the supposed wise men of Athens, that we have all that answers and that all the young need to do is listen, learn and obey.  But by the time they're in their mid-teens,  they see through that pretense.  Young people are going to experiment with philosophizing.  We just have to live with that fact.   I  certainly did when I was young.  And I have no doubt that many of you who are reading this did it when you were young too.  Since it wouldn’t do us a bit of good to avert our eyes and pretend that it isn’t happening, it’s our job as the older, wiser, more experienced ones to make sure they do it safely.

What better, safer way for the young to philosophize than out in the open, on the radio, in the company of a couple of experienced practitioners like John and me?  But we also wanted  someone younger and cooler to help us out, someone with more experience speaking directly to the young.  So to help us out we invited someone who fits that bill exactly --  Jack Bowen,  author of the best-selling novel  The Dreamweaver, who also teaches philosophy to high school students.

It was fun time.  Hope you give a listen. 

 

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 20, IN CASE ANYONE WHO (SENSIBLY!) DOESN'T READ BLOGS IN THE SUMMER MIGHT BE INTERESTED I have posted on SSRN a review essay of Brian Tamanaha's interesting recent book Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide: The Role...

One can only hope this is a joke, or that the data will be ignored once collected. (We've noted this fiasco-in-the-making previously.)

by Neil Van Leeuwen

I’d like to talk frankly about why research on the topic of self-deception hasn’t made much progress—as far as I can see—despite a steady-stream of on-going interest. There’s been some excellent work, but it doesn’t seem to me that the topic on the whole has moved forward all that much.

In both philosophy and psychology there has been a tendency to talk about self-deception as if it were one thing. If it’s one thing, we can just figure out what that is. Right?

 The philosopher’s approach is to try to solve the paradox of self-deception and come up with an analysis of self-deception in terms of necessary and/or sufficient conditions.

 The psychologist’s approach is to try to demonstrate experimentally that certain behaviors require positing a mental state of “self-deception.” (This approach is excellently illustrated by the classic 1979 article from Ruben Gur and Harold Sackheim, entitled “Self-Deception: a Concept in search of a Phenomenon.”)

 Neither approach is exactly wrong. But here’s the problem. “Self-deception” is a term that only loosely refers. If we were to survey all the psychological states that the term can aptly be applied to, we’d find vast differences within that set of perfectly real phenomena. There are, at least, what I would call classic self-deception, self-inflation bias, semi-pretense, and false emotion, all of which seem to me to be distinct—but all of which get loosely termed “self-deception.” I’ll turn to those shortly. For now, let’s stay focused on the methodological problem.

 The implicit assumption that self-deception is a unified phenomenon creates problems for philosophers and psychologists in different ways.

 For philosophers: any good analysis of one of the self-deceptive phenomena (which ends up being an “analysis of self-deception [full stop]”) is subject to apparent counterexamples from someone who points to one of the other self-deceptive phenomena. For example, theorist number 1 (who has classic self-deception in mind) may produce an “analysis of self-deception” that theorist number 2 (who has false emotion in mind) presents a “counterexample” to. The two theorists are in fact talking past each other without realizing it, because of this mistaken assumption of unity. They are both talking about “self-deception.”

 For psychologists: the problem is even simpler to describe. Bodies of data can seem to contradict when they in fact don’t, simply because a data set about one phenomenon is labeled under the same heading (“self-deception”) as a data set that’s in fact about a distinct phenomenon. Something like this may be what happened in the debate in the 1990s consisting of Shelley Taylor (and colleagues) versus Randy Colvin (and colleagues). The “self-deceptive” phenomena that Taylor found conducive to success and happiness are just not the same mental states as the “self-deceptive” phenomena that Colvin found detrimental to social well-being. (I do some untangling of that particular debate in “Self-Deception Won’t Make You Happy,” in case you’re interested.)

 This whole situation impresses upon me one thing that Robert Trivers told me once. He said that what I should be doing with my time and philosophical ability is logically analyzing and distinguishing different kinds of self-deception, which could be a benefit to everyone. I think he was implying that it was a mistake to look for one holy grail analysis of self-deception.

 So here I’d like to make some progress on his suggestion. The following four phenomena are distinct, although they could all (in some cases more loosely than others) be called “self-deception.”

 Classic self-deception. This is a phenomenon of motivated irrationality, in which motivational forces in the agent somehow drive him/her to form a belief that runs contrary to the wealth of evidence that she possesses. The mind is in some sense divided. Thus, classic self-deception is rightly said to involve some sort of epistemic tension. This is the phenomenon that philosophers are most focused on, since it seems paradoxical. But being focused on classic self-deception hasn’t saved us from accidentally labeling cases of the other phenomena as “self-deception.”

 Self-inflation bias. We often hear statistics along the following lines. “94% percent of college professors believe they are above average in their scholarly abilities.” “85% of people think they are above average at driving.” And so on. These statistics are evidence of a general tendency people have to think better of themselves than rigorous analysis of the evidence would warrant. Importantly, I don’t think this self-inflation bias needs to involve an epistemic tension like self-deception does. The self-inflator is wholehearted in her high opinion of herself. Furthermore, this general tendency isn’t motivated by specific desires and insecurities, as is the case in classic self-deception.

 Semi-pretense. Often we go about imitating others without any intention to imitate or pretend. Sartre’s waiter is a great example of this. We take on the trappings of a certain character, without even being aware that that’s what’s happening. If the character I’m unwittingly imitating is inappropriate to my actual circumstances, someone might say I’m deceiving myself. But I prefer to call this phenomenon semi-pretense, because it’s in between plain action and full pretending. (But note that semi-pretense can contribute to classic self-deception, if the agent goes on to form beliefs on the basis of the semi-pretense.)

 False emotion. As Robert Frank discusses in Passions within Reason, people often have emotions for strategic social reasons. Often that’s good. We may cry because we genuinely need help. But crying may well be disproportionate to the amount of genuine need—a way of manipulating other parties into doing one’s will. Importantly, such manipulative false emotion needn’t be (and perhaps usually isn’t) consciously planned. The agent is convinced by her own false emotion! This, again, may be loosely called self-deception, although it is rather different from the preceding three phenomena.

 There are other distinct phenomena, too, that pre-theoretically get thrown into the basket of “self-deception.” Progress will require greater precision going forward.

I’d like to close this blog with a note to anyone who, like me, takes an interest in the evolutionary status of “self-deception.” I have argued in various places that self-deception is not an adaptation evolved by natural selection to serve some function. Rather, I have said self-deception is a spandrel, which means it’s a structural byproduct of other features of the human organism. My view has been that features of mind that are necessary for rational cognition in a finite being with urgent needs yield a capacity for self-deception as a byproduct. On this view, self-deception wasn’t selected for, but it also couldn’t be selected out, on pain of losing some of the beneficial features of which it’s a byproduct. This view seems opposed to the view of Robert Trivers, who maintains that self-deception is an adaptation to facilitate interpersonal deception. But it could be, in light of the foregoing distinctions, that Trivers and I were talking past each other.

I hereby wish to suggest the following. Self-inflation bias and false emotion are evolutionary adaptations that serve interpersonal deception, as Trivers has theorized. But classic self-deception and semi-pretense are in fact spandrels. Whether or not I am right in these particular hypotheses, I think the methodological point of this blog still stands.

I commented on Jonah Goldberg’s most recent LA Times column at Democracy in America, but not on the part where he mentions me:

There’s been a lot of debate , largely in the context of the so-called ground zero mosque, about the evils of American identity. Will Wilkinson, an influential liberal-libertarian writer, sees opposition to the proposed mosque as a reprehensible expression of the “cult of American identity” and the “zaniness of right identity politics.” The upshot of his argument is that it is preposterous for Americans to see themselves as a people.

Well, Americans certainly aren’t “a people” in the sense that the Japanese, the Kurds, or the Jews are a people. There is no American ethnicity; the U.S. is a resolutely multicultural (and multilingual) country. The usual idea is that American identity is creedal, or organized around a distinctively American set of ideas and value.s Even the State Department says so! This piece on American identity on a government propaganda website summarizes its message like so:

Since the United States was founded in the 18^thcentury, Americans have defined themselves not by their racial, religious, and ethnic identity but by their common values and belief in individual freedom.

The trouble is that even when there is widespread agreement on nominally common values, conceptions of those values vary wildly.

Take the belief in individual freedom. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as freedom from all non-defensive physical force and fraud. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as implying roughly equal voice in the democratic process, which straightforwardly requires the redistribution of resources and state regulation of spending on political speech. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as a condition of robust autonomy or self-governance that requires universal government-financed education and a minimum of material resources necessary to ensure that individuals are able actually to exercise their liberty and are not caged-in by necessity. And none of these are the conception of individual liberty that prevailed among the Founders. Anyway, there was heated disagreement among the Founders, too. Some them took the ideal of individual freedom to be consistent with chattel slavery while others correctly found human bondage obviously at odds with liberty. Some defended a robust conception of freedom of conscience while others wished to ban the practice of certain religions for freedom’s sake. And so on.

Not only do appeals to the values of the Founders fail to settle anything,  many such appeals are simply ignorant of what this or that Founder actually believed. Consider the State Department piece by Michael Jay Friedman. He writes:

Franklin instructed the would-be immigrant:

People do not inquire concerning a Stranger, What is he? but, What can he do? If he has any useful Art, he is welcome; and if he exercises it, and behaves well, he will be respected by all that know him.

Franklin’s remark was grounded in first-hand observation: As early as 1750, German immigrants outnumbered English stock in his home colony of Pennsylvania. The newcomers were perceived as industrious and law-abiding. Skillful farmers, they improved the land and stimulated economic growth.

So Franklin was, like, Welcome Germans! Except he totally wasn’t. Check this out:

Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

Sound familiar? Change a few words and Ben sounds like he’s campaigning for sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona. So which is the relevant American value: tolerant openness to industrious foreigners or xenophobic hostility to swarthy, unassimilable, babbling invaders? (Yes, Franklin thought Germans were swarthy!)

If you ask me, both are time-honored American values. But that suggests its misguided to appeal to the American creed as the basis of the American identity of the American people. There are multiple conceptions of American creed equally consistent with American history. That’s why movements to glorify, elevate, and honor a particular conception of American identity based on a particular conception of the American creed necessarily  marginalize equally or more historically plausible conceptions and therefore tend to suggest that citizens who favor those conceptions are less or even un-American. It seems pretty clear to me that this is exactly how the conservative politics of American identity works.

So, turning back to Jonah’s passage, I guess I don’t think it’s entirely preposterous for Americans to see themselves as a people. But any conception of the American creed sufficiently general to encompass most widespread American conceptions of individual freedom, equality, tolerance and so on is going to be so general that it will do very little to distinguish American identity from, say, Canadian identity. And that’s clearly not what Glenn Beck or the staff of National Review have in mind when they talk about American values, promote a conception of American identity, or encourage Americans to see themselves as a people. (I’m not sure if they’d consider my nominalist view of the American people–that the American people is the set of Americans–better or worse than that.)

The conservative conception of American identity is so selective and so specific that it tends to suggest to its adherents that many (maybe even most!) Americans aren’t real Americans, or are Americans who betray real American ideals. Birther and Muslim Obama memes crudely reify the logical upshot of the right’s fixation on its favored version of American identity. Most conservatives don’t need to believe that Obama is literally an un-American non-Christian. They’re just content to nod along with Glenn Beck when he implies, or outright asserts, that a guy who adheres to a mundane version of liberal politics slightly to the right of the typical “This American Life” fan is hell-bent on destroying the special Americaness of America.

“God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: “This is my country.” -Benjamin Franklin, letter to David Hartley, M.P. December 4, 1789

History of Global Governance

At the pinnacle of its power, in 117 A.D., the Roman Empire exercised control over 2.5 million square miles of real estate surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Another three-hundred and sixty years would pass before the Achaemenid Empire of Persia could lay claim to a greater one. Still, both of them added together pale in comparison to the British Empire of 1922 which lasted for a century and still holds the “world” record with 458 million people and 14.2 million square miles, about a quarter of the earth’s total land area.

Caligula, Genghis Khan, William the Conqueror, Ivan the Terrible, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin and hundreds of others, both individuals and states, have at one point in history laid claim to what they thought would be an ever increasing control of the world and its people. Some even justified themselves by saying that it was their aim to make the world a better place, or like Generalissimo Franco and Marshal Tito were heralded as benevolent dictators. Nevertheless, Aesop has taught us well that “The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny.”¹ There is no argument that I have encountered that should cause me to believe that the characters and motives of those who presently advocate for global government are any less flawed. Nor am I prepared to discount Lord Acton’s admonition that “[a]ll power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”²

Arguments for Global Governance

Many arguments for global governance are compelling. Jon Mandle³ notes factors such as the internet, a virtually instantaneous global communication system, and the World Trade Organization, which along with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have created a worldwide economic system.⁴ The internet is itself managed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) an international organization comprised of representatives from several groups and subcommittees that work together to manage the protocols for international connectivity.⁵ The proliferation of multinational corporations that have created an business environment that operates easily across or perhaps above national borders that may lead one to the conclusion that these borders are no longer of any consequence.⁶

The growing threat that nuclear and biochemical weapons of mass destruction may become available to rogue states and extremist NGO’s is another factor driving the trend of national security agencies to share information freely and cooperate closely with one another.⁷ Recently the President of the United States signed an executive order giving Interpol broad privileges to operate within the United States.⁸ This effectively removed all borders for the International Criminal Police Organization and undermined the basic protection that civilians have enjoyed against the abuse of police authority, that the ultimate police authority is vested in the county sheriff who is accountable to the electorate in their county.⁹ Interpol is also exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests under this amendment to Executive Order 12425. Actions of this kind, which some may decry as traitorous, are no doubt driven by the perception that globalized threats require a globalized administrative response.

Environmental concerns seem to be among the most popular arguments for global governance. As early as 1959 physicist Gilbert Plass concluded that the average temperature of the earth would rise over time as a result of increasing levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.¹⁰ The issue of climate change became a significant political issue in the 1970’s when three scientists, F. Sherwood Rowland, Paul Crutzen, and Mario Molina reported that man-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were destroying the ozone layer.¹¹ Since that time various global meetings and committee’s have been established to deal with the issue of climate change, most recently the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change held in Copenhagen, Denmark. While the deadline for joining the accord has passed, over one hundred and twenty-four countries including the United States and the member states of the European Union have indicated agreement with at least the target levels for reduction of greenhouse gases.¹² However, a particularly embarrassing accusation directed toward the panel was made by Britain’s Lord Christopher Monckton, who warned “Copenhagen climate change treaty represents a global government power grab on an “unimaginable scale.” by a “sinister dictatorship.”¹³ This included provisions to levy a 2% tax on all financial transactions and upon the cumulative global gross domestic product, as well as to levy financial penalties for non-compliance which would have the cumulative effect of creating the largest, most well-funded bureaucracy the world had ever seen.¹⁴

Forms of Global Governance

If global governance is to be a foregone conclusion, there is still much to be discussed regarding the form it shall take. An obvious route is to attempt to organize existent global institutions into a formal world government. Professor Peter Singer of Princeton advocates the full militarization of the United Nations, eliminating the veto power of the so called “superpowers” in the Security Council, and recasting of the General Assembly into a cosmopolitan model; representation proportional to the population of member nations and directly elected by the citizens of those nations.¹⁵ Singer recognizes the difficulties in superimposing a matrix of representative democracy upon hierarchical states but also recognizes that excluding them “would be more destabilizing than conducive to world peace.”¹⁶ Singer’s ideas regarding world government also seem to include aspects of the deliberative (discursive) model as described by Professor Anthony McGrew, democratizing the world institutions that are already in place.¹⁷ While his appeal is elegant enough, Singer does not suggest by what process all the nations of the world might be convinced to endorse such a solution.

Singer argues that “the limits of a state’s willingness and ability to protect its people are also the limits of its authority.” This is an excellent argument as far as it goes and is in fact one of the arguments used by the signers of the Declaration of Independence as a justification to nullify the titular sovereign’s authority saying that the King “ has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.” So Singer is correct that this argument may be used to nullify the authority of sovereign national governments just as it may be used to nullify the absolute authority heads of households who stand guilty of neglect, domestic violence, or abuse. Singer makes two claims that I find problematic. The first is that a global ethic should not stop at, nor give great significance to national boundaries, and the second is that national sovereignty should be given no intrinsic moral weight. Both claims seem to smack of an elitist tyranny. National sovereignty, as I as I see it, is a function of individual Sovereignty. Those of who, as a result of our pledge of allegiance to the republic, are de facto Americans exercise our individual sovereign power corporately in doing so, and may choose to reassert our individual sovereignty “to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to us shall seem most likely to affect our Safety and Happiness.” ¹⁸ Therefore because of basic human rights of self-determination, it must always be the local individual people who are to be considered what Singer calls “the protectors of last resort.” If outside assistance should become available from some global legislative body, it must not intervene unless requested by legitimate local authorities, and must be subject to their authority lest the populace find that they are merely replacing one tyrant with another. Neither of Singer’s claims seems compatible with the institution of a global deliberative democracy.

Other views on what form transnational government might take have also been categorized by Professor McGrew in his essay “Models of Transnational Democracy” and include liberal-internationalism, radical pluralist democracy and cosmopolitan democracy.¹⁹ Liberal-internationalism focuses more on rehabilitating the global institutions that are in place than democratizing them, by making participation available to all, and making their decisions and operations a matter of public record.²⁰ In my opinion, Liberal-Internationalism cannot be called be rightly called democracy. It is as if someone has said “this is our playing field and our game, and anyone may play, and learn the rules.” In this it is perhaps more liberal than the current state of affairs where global institutions conduct much of their business in secret, and membership is determined by power and money. But if it is not democracy, what is?

At a lecture at Hilla University for Humanistic Studies in January of 2004, Professor Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University listed the four following characteristics of a democracy:

A system for choosing and replacing the government through free and fair elections.
The active participation of the people, as citizens, in politics and civic life.
Protection of the human rights of all citizens.
A rule of law, in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens.²¹

Given these prerequisites it is easy to see that Liberal-Internationalism does not qualify because it fails in points one and four. “Shorn of the requirements of electoral politics” as McGrew describes it does not provide for selection of its leadership by the people. Because it is a loosely associated collection of international organizations it seems unlikely that each organization’s rules and regulations could apply equally to all the individuals affected.

The theory of radical pluralist democracy is focused on the inclusion of numerous overlapping associations that exist in society such as trade unions, environmental, local, transnational, cultural, gender-based, religious and civic organizations. McGrew comments that the idea of radical pluralism is that “democracy, therefore, is to be found in the juxtaposition of a multiplicity of self-governing and self-organizing collectivities constituted on diverse spatial scales — from the local to the global.”²² While it seems as if it would easily fit qualifications one through three of the definition of democracy previously given, it seems to me that it would be very difficult to apply a rule of law, in which the laws and procedures apply equally to all citizens, it seems to me that such a diverse arrangement would be difficult to manage if only because of the overlapping nature of associations and differences of geographic scope. The deeper, wider and more varied the set of pluralistic factors, the more complicated and difficult to manage the laws and procedures relating to that set.²³ McGrew quotes Hutchings who noted that one of the ‘great fallacies of political theory is the assumption that a centralized management of power. . . is necessary to assure political order’. But I find this problematic in that the idea of a fair and equitable political system and a rule of law seems to infer a centralized administration if only to act as umpire. In his article “Does Democracy Really Require Complex Equality?” Professor Peter Breiner of SUNY Albany quotes De Tocqueville who remarked that:

[S]omewhere and somehow authority is always bound to play apart in intellectual and moral life. The part may vary, but some part there must be…Therefore we need not inquire about the existence of intellectual authority in democratic ages, but only where it resides and what its limits are.”²⁴

One cannot consider pluralism without recalling President Madison’s discussion of factions in Federalist 10. He defined a faction as “ a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed (italics mine) to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Madison also posited two solutions for “curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.” Now the first remedy he decried as being “worse than the disease”, for in plain English it means permanently eliminating the offending opposition. The other more agreeable solution was the implementation of constitutional controls afforded by a republic so that the unwanted effects of factionalism would be controlled, whether the faction was in the minority or the majority. Again this must be recognized as a centralized management of power and conclude that the theory of radical pluralist democracy is flawed in this aspect.

Touching again on the theory of cosmopolitan democracy embraced by Singer, Anthony McGrew says that “central to this model is the principle of autonomy for both individuals and collectivities, to be upheld through development of a cosmopolitan democratic law.” Frankly this sounds to me like double-speak for a far-reaching attempt to nullify the actions of individuals who have or had established for their posterity sovereign nation-states. As noted before, one of the projects under consideration for the reform of the United Nations is the creation that would directly represent individual world citizens rather than sovereign nations.²⁵ Representatives for such a body would be presumably assemble by globally publicizing and holding elections at local levels, irrespective of the authority of the sovereign nation within which they were being held. If we consider that a constitutionally established sovereign nation is created and maintained by the collective will of the individual sovereign citizens who have sworn allegiance to, and promised to protect and defend that nation, the act of presuming to be a representative of one’s fellow citizens to a overarching world government may justly be considered act of treason, and its promotion by an foreign agency an act of war. What must be overcome is the established idea that in a Westphalian world, “[i]ndividuals have no role in the international community, except as citizens of a state.”²⁶ The idea of being a citizen of world is intellectually attractive, but it makes as much sense as being a voter who has registered as an independent. Without association one is powerless.²⁷ I gain personal power from the fact that I am member of a family and a church. Both that are ready to support me emotionally, financially, spiritually, and should it come to that, militarily.²⁷ As a member of the Republican Party, I have an opportunity to directly influence county and state political policy and perhaps through conversations with my elected officials at party functions, national policy.

Jefferson said: “It should be remembered as an axiom of eternal truth in politics, that whatever power in any government is independent, is absolute also; in theory only at first while the spirit of the people is up, but in practice as fast as that relaxes.”²⁸ The two-tiered system of government may have started out well in the United States but in later years it has become a disaster. If we have learned anything in the grand experiment that is the United States of America it is that federal power is invasive, overbearing, and apparently uncontrollable. We are engaged now in a great political battle to regain the states rightful power, which in a very real sense represents the power and liberty of the individual citizens of those states, who have full and complete control over those states, whether they frequently exercise it or not. I think that there is a great danger that this struggle may yet degenerate into civil war if the Federal Government continues to ignore the will of the States, imposing agendas that already seem to be driven in a great part, by a global consensus. Just a few days ago, Norm Chomsky expressed his concern at the rising activism of the Far Right as a result of the “frustration, disillusionment and the justified anger combined with the absence of a coherent response,” to current national problems.²⁹ Therefore I must reject cosmopolitan democracy fearing that the present confederation that is the United Nations based on the ultimate sovereignty of member nations would ultimately be replaced by a federal global Leviathan.³⁰

Finally, McGrew addresses the theory of deliberative (discursive) democracy which, I must admit as a trained parliamentarian, I find the most attractive. McGrew describes it as “a genuine transnational public sphere of democratic deliberation”, and by this I understand precisely what he means, for it is the mechanism by which men have obtained protection for their rights and liberty since the dawn of European history. The term “deliberative assembly” was first used to describe the English parliament by the British statesman and philosopher, Edmund Burke in 1774.³¹

James Madison wrote in Federalist 47 that “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny” When the accumulation of all powers in the hands of many it is called “tyranny of the majority.” We also have another name for it. It is called “Democracy.” Now it is important to note the double meaning of the word “Democracy” which generally means government by the people. But more specifically it is the name for a form of government, one where the majority has the absolute power to do whatever it wants. The government of Ancient Greece and the present parliament of Great Britain are examples. French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville gave several reasons why the Tyranny of the Majority is a bad idea some of which are:

The majority uses its power to deprive the rights of the minority. (For example by forbidding where and when a person may pray, or whom they may marry.)
The pursuit of pleasure causes the majority to neglect its duty to restrain the government.(As when the people spend their time listening to music or watching entertainment while the chains of their slavery are being forged.)
The majority votes to surrender its own freedom in exchange for equality.(The government promises to provide bread and circuses [or healthcare] for all.)

If this should sound familiar, the good news is that there is a solution. Instead of a Democracy, a Republic is established with a constitution that imposes a set of rules that protect the rights of everyone, including those in the minority. The foundation below this process, which brings us back to our discussion of deliberative (discursive) democracy, is another set of rules that protect the rights of everyone called parliamentary procedure. The development of this process began on or about 750 B.C. in the democratic halls of ancient Greece.³² In 400 A.D. when Saxon warriors sent representatives to a regional tribal council, in 1066 William the Conqueror assembled a “Great Council” to give him advice about the rule of his new kingdom, in 1215 with the signing of the Magna Carta, to forty-three years after that in 1258 when King Henry III of England was “forced to accept the Provisions of Oxford, effectively ending the absolute monarchy in England by requiring the calling of the first parliament.”³³ In the 14th century parliament gained the right to consider petitions for the redress of grievances and to submit such petitions to the King.³⁴ Think of it! Hundreds of years before the birth of our nation, the seed is planted for our First Amendment right to petition the Government. All along the way rules of deliberation, debate and common courtesy were agreed upon, by trial and error, sometimes as a result of tragic circumstances. Finally in 1774, the First Continental Congress met and through the arduous process of deliberative democracy began to forge a new nation. An entry in John Adams’ “Autobiography” dated June 1775 reads as follows:

“By conventions of representatives, freely, fairly, and proportionately chosen . . . the convention may send out their project of a constitution, to the people in their several towns, counties, or districts, and the people may make the acceptance of it their own act.”

Later in 1789 the United States Constitution was ratified by the people of the several States through ratifying conventions in each State created for this express purpose. This is our legacy and our history. It is a legacy of freedom, and the history of our struggle for liberty. Without parliamentary procedure it would never have happened. Without exception, every nation that has risen out of the sewer of totalitarianism has been assisted by the process of deliberative democracy, it would not have been possible, and without rules of order to facilitate deliberative democracy in private meetings, in political clubs, and executive committees it will be impossible to take the bold action; to make the terrible choices that are occasionally necessary to preserve liberty.

McGrew describes a global deliberative democracy has being based on the principles of “non-domination, participation, public deliberation, responsive governance and the right of all affected to a voice in public decisions that impinge on their welfare or interests.”³⁵ It is characterized by a recognition that stakeholders at every level of government and society have a right to participate by providing input and having their concerns addressed.

The main problem associated with deliberative democracy is related to the discourse aspect. Cultural diversity, language and idiom make conversation and understanding difficult, even when debate is taking place among individuals who are citizens of the same country. This difficulty can only be magnified a thousand fold at the global level, and as McGrew acknowledges, translation services do not begin to address the problem. This is readily obvious to those who have had occasion to observe the proceedings at the United Nations or any other international body. The solution, if there is one, can only be found in the deliberative aspect, where progress is made slowly, calmly and politely sometimes over the course of many seasons. Critics are quick to point out that this process does not lend itself to rapid decision making during times of crisis. In fact, our own system of government is especially designed to prevent hasty decisions. This is why we have an executive branch whose portfolio presently allows a rapid response to danger, which the legislative branch may ratify or condemn at its leisure. Nevertheless, if someday there is to be authoritative, global governance that shall exist with the reasonable expectation that it will not constantly be under attack from patriots of the many nations desiring to secure their true liberty, it must be a deliberative, discursive, democracy.

And yet show I to you a more excellent way.³⁶

An alternative view of Global Governance

In The Politics Aristotle writes, “The basis of a democratic state is liberty; which, according to the common opinion of men, can only be enjoyed in such a state; this they affirm to be the great end of every democracy.”³⁷ Our primary concern is our personal liberty. I awaken and I take comfort that I can rise to my feet unimpeded. I am thankful that I am not wanted by the authorities, or in prison, and can do what I want for the most part in the morning. I am satisfied that I have been able to easily make provision for myself and my family, that there is a roof over my head, running water and electricity, and food in the larder. I do not have to struggle for my basic survival and this enhances my liberty. I have a sizeable piece of property and a home where I can live unmolested and in peace and quiet, but should I wish, I can drive to Miami or Atlanta and be in the thick of the crowds and the nightlife.

I leave for work each morning and am momentarily annoyed that I must secure my personal weapons rather than bear them as I do at all other times, because I work for a state agency. It is a restriction upon my liberty, but after all, I am not compelled to work where I do. I still have the liberty to quit my employment at will, to seek another employer or if I wish to be self-employed. Besides, I know that I have legislators and PACs who are working on my behalf to repeal such onerous laws, and that I can speak with them if I so desire, and even run for office myself. In most ever aspect of life which pleases me, it is because I luxuriate in my liberty. John Stuart Mills says it well:

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.³⁸

With a view toward ensuring that a cooperative global administration does not degenerate into unresponsive non-representative tyranny, I offer the following program to ensure the greatest possible opportunities for simultaneous global cooperation and personal liberty. I propose that all the nations of the world be encouraged to forever renounce the idea of a global hegemony. In its place shall be the encouragement and establishment of a global deliberative body and an international university and research facility to be handsomely funded but forever without any authority except for the passage of ethical resolutions and the publishing of scientific papers for the use and information of all mankind. These resolutions and discoveries could come to be received by the people of the world as purely altruistic acts because they would be offered without condition, without sanction or any hope of excessive avaricious gain or dictatorial power. Because they would be offered freely and without threat it is more likely that they might be accepted as a standard for ethical practice bearing great political weight, which along with the scientific data provided could become the basis for deliberate decisions at the national and local levels. Such institutions may be of benefit to the world by publishing their findings and recommendations in ways that people at all intellectual levels may clearly understand and access them. All findings, data, and hard intelligence should be available to all governments and individual citizens alike. All scientific and medical discoveries made by this global body, even those that might be used for military purposes should be available to all governments, and all individuals without charge and without copyright. These free and open lines of communication would make it virtually impossible for hierarchically based nations to participate without the information also being available to the citizens of those nations which in turn should convince of the efficacy of deliberative, democratically governed, constitutional republics if we are to believe Thomas Jefferson who writes:

“The most effectual means of preventing [the perversion of power into tyranny are] to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts which history exhibits, that possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes.”³⁹

Any standard to be acknowledged as binding upon all the nations of the world in matters appropriate for such consideration must always be a matter of diplomatic consensus based on decisions ratified by individually sovereign nations. Matters considered to be appropriate for global consideration are those that most properly cannot be managed in any other manner except through global cooperation, the traditional and most readily agreed upon subject being maritime law. It seems to me a reasonable progression to include the monitoring of air quality, and the management of the upper atmosphere and near outer space as concerns the control and management of fixed satellites and unwanted objects. Conversely, issues such as human rights, hunger, and poverty, health care, are all best managed at the local and national level where cultural norms may be considered and incremental change applied if desired.
In a like manner, federal governments should concern themselves primarily with foreign diplomatic policy and such international agreements that are absolutely necessary for management of the oceans and the atmosphere, sea and air travel and the like. All such international agreements should require the ratification of the states or regions comprising each nation and should sunset requiring re-ratification from time to time. This should not be particularly difficult task if such agreements are kept to the bare minimum. Immediate problems, wars and other catastrophes may be dealt with by ad-hoc committees and temporary alliances that are purposely designed to evanesce, thus eliminating economic and political millstones like NATO.
Federal governments would do well to operate in the same manner as global entities serving as a clearing house of information for the states and regions that comprised them, providing data scientific evidence and non-binding resolution for the information of citizens and state legislatures. Again to quote Jefferson:

“And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government or information to the people. This last is the most certain and the most legitimate engine of government. Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.⁴⁰

National governments should not as a rule maintain agencies of any kind, issue regulations, make laws, or collect taxes except those that are absolutely essential for the minimal operation of national government and the security of the nation. Today it has become clear that physical mail is best handled by private entities, although operation of the Internet and perhaps other utilities might overseen by the government/ However, given government’s propensity for operating everything it touches at a loss this is a dubious proposition.
The citizens of the individual states nations must be encouraged by rational argument and irrefutable scientific fact to compel their own legislatures to make responsible decisions. As Justice Louis Brandice wrote in his dissent to New State Ice Co. V. Liebmann, 285 U. S. 262 (1932), “ It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.”

While it must be admitted that Justice Brandice was not hesitant to overrule the decision of state governments, yet he was still quick to recognize that within the limited laboratory of the states new policies can be adopted and tested. I would suggest that if unsound, such policies may quickly be amended or repealed and if sound, they are likely to be quickly adopted by other states by virtue of their obvious success.

The military or military intelligence agencies should never be deployed against civilians in a free Republic unless it is matter of civil war. The F.B.I. must always operate under the authority of the local sheriff, unless it is the sheriff himself who is under investigation and then this should be supervised by a state court. During catastrophic events federal forces should never be used unless their command has been relinquished to the Governor of the state affected. Such use should be in cooperation with the state guard and local county sheriffs who are the primary civil authority in their areas. In every case the federal government should be strictly in conformance with the restrictions placed upon it by its constitution. State law should take precedence unless basic human and civil rights are forfeit.

The court system should be used by citizens to bring suit against the government, not by the federal government against states on behalf of the citizens. Laws rather than agencies and regulations should address the behavior of individuals and corporation in such matters as employee rights, worker safety and environmental protection. The laws should be actionable in civil or federal court for compensatory damages or prison sentences but in no case should punitive damages be awarded. In all civil cases, courts should strictly apply the law and the articles of the state and federal constitutions, rather than interpret them. Constitutions should be amended, not reinterpreted.

The idea of deliberative, democratically governed, constitutional republics should be held up as a standard of excellence and a principle of solidarity and unity by all nations that have embraced it and should be publicized and promulgated diplomatically and through private trade. This can only be accomplished if a culture that celebrates the idea of deliberative democracy and solidarity is promoted and taught to children and made part of the national identity hand in hand with the idea of personal sovereignty and individualism. At the same time, indoctrination of this type cannot be mandated; it can only be celebrated and encouraged by those who willingly embrace it. This then, is the responsibility of citizenship to, like that famous bell in Pennsylvania, “Proclaim Liberty throughout the Land.” Conservative author, Pat Buchanan writes:

“The nation-state is dying. Men have begun to transfer their allegiance, loyalty and love from the older nations both upward to the new transnational regimes that are arising and downward to the sub-nations whence they came, the true nations, united by blood and soil, language, literature, history, faith, tradition and memory.” ⁴¹

He goes on to quote Michael Lind, policy director of the new America Foundation who says:

“not only are nations subdividing, losing their monopolies on the love and loyalty of their peoples, but they are being superseded by “non-state actors” that are challenging the monopoly on warfare enjoyed by the nation-state since the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War.”

It is essential to realize that the transference of loyalty and allegiance flows both upward and downward. Remember well the city-states that existed before the consolidation of Italy. The county, the state and the nation are naturally occurring polities that come and go as conditions fluctuate. A large impact event caused by an asteroid could within a few hours reduce all the nations of the earth to bare subsistence levels. Rather good for the species, if there remain any strong among us who survive. The economic collapse of the Soviet Union should easily demonstrate how quickly an empire can falter, while all those Baltic States reasserted their sovereignty and promptly abrogated it by joining NATO. Earlier this month, Sheriff Arvin West of Hudspeth County, Texas advised all the citizens of his county to arm themselves because his department considers itself unable to protect them from spillover violence from criminal drug gangs in the Mexican Juarez Valley.⁴² You may believe that those citizens are in fact armed and their concerns now are focused on issues of sovereignty and solidarity. It is in the public interests that societies are well organized locally, and it seems to me that the nation with its subsidiary states and counties, appear to be the most efficient method of doing so while continuing to maintain personal liberty and deliberative democracy.

In August of 2009 Tibor Richard Machan, professor emeritus in the department of philosophy at Auburn University, penned the following:

“Over the last several decades of American political life the idea of liberty has taken a back seat to that of democracy. Liberty involves human beings governing themselves, being sovereign citizens, while democracy is a method by which decisions are reached within groups. In a just society it is liberty that is primary – the entire point of law is to secure liberty for everyone, to make sure that the rights of individuals to their lives, liberty and pursuit of happiness is protected from any human agent bent on violating them. Democracy is but a byproduct of liberty. ⁴³

In the summary report of the United Nations Commission on Global Governance issued in 1995, the word “democracy” is used three times and an emphasis is place on the idea that “the democratic principle must be ascendant.” The word “liberty” is used once, while the word “leader” or “leadership” is used thirty-three times.⁴⁴ I would suggest that liberty and leadership are mutually exclusive. To cover just a few of the committee’s recommendations, they advanced the following:

That notions of territory, independence, and non- intervention have lost their meaning.
That the production and trade in arms should be controlled by the international community including a provision for a mandatory Arms Register.
That action must be taken to regulate population growth within acceptable limits.
That a system of global taxation to provide for global needs be established.
That all member- states of the UN that have not already done so should accept the compulsory jurisdiction of the World Court.
That an international criminal court be founded. (This was done in 1998)
That the General Assembly should agree to hold a World Conference on Governance in 1998, with its decisions to be ratified and put into effect by 2000.

The last suggestion has not yet occurred to the best of my knowledge, and I cannot say but that I am greatly relieved. Nevertheless this committee rose in 1995 and I suspect that the situation with the U.N has not gotten any better. It pains me to say so, because I know that to say it puts me on the short end of a global stick and perhaps on one or two lists as well, but I find myself willing to do anything, absolutely anything to see such an agenda fail.

To again quote Lord Acton, “Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.”⁴⁵ Therefore in order to secure the blessings of liberty including freedom from hunger, disease, slavery, oppression, and poverty, whenever possible decision making, the rule of law, the observance of civil rights, and the protection of those rights must originate from the grassroots, between neighbor and neighbor, family to family, who covenant among each other to preserve it and promulgate it no matter what the cost may be.
…………………………………………………………………………………
1. Aesop (c. 550 B.C.),the Wolf and the Lamb
2. Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg, and M. Creighton. Acton-Creighton Correspondence (1887). 2009. .
3. Department Chair and Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University at Albany, SUNY
4. Mandle, Jon. Global Justice. Key concepts (Polity Press). Cambridge: Polity, 2006. Pg 126.
5. http://www.icann.org/
6. Ibid 129
7. Singer, Peter. One World: The Ethics of Globalization. The Terry lectures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
8. Washingon Examiner Editorial, “Obama gives Interpol free hand in U.S.” December 30, 2009

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/Obama-gives-Interpol-free-hand-in-U_S_-8697583-80291137.html#ixzz0m4EsBC83

9. Printz, Sheriff/Coroner, Ravalli County, Montana v. United States – 521 U.S. 898
10. Plass, G.N. (1959). “Carbon Dioxide and Climate.” Scientific American, July, pp. 41-47.
11. Fluorocarbons and Stratospheric Ozone: A Review of Current Knowledge. R. S. Stolarski. The American Statistician, Vol. 36, No. 3, Part 2: Proceedings of the Sixth Symposium on Statistics and the Environment (Aug., 1982), pp. 303-311
12. http://www.usclimatenetwork.org/policy/copenhagen-accord-commitments
13. Watson, Paul Joseph. Monckton: Secretive Copenhagen Treaty Creates Larcenous Global Government Tax. Wednesday, December 9, 2009 http://www.prisonplanet.com/monckton-secretive-copenhagen-treaty-creates-larcenous-global-government-tax.html
14. Ibid
15. Singer, Peter. One World: The Ethics of Globalization. The Terry lectures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Pgs 145-149
16. Ibid
17. Held, David, and Anthony G. McGrew. The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2003.Pg 504
18. The Declaration of Independence
19. Held, David, and Anthony G. McGrew. The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2003.Pg 501
20. ibid
21. http://www.stanford.edu/~ldiamond/iraq/WhaIsDemocracy012004.htm
22. Held, David, and Anthony G. McGrew. The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization
23. Does Democracy Really Require Complex Equality? Peter Breiner Department of Political Science SUNY Albany Albany, NY 12222 (518) 442-5277 ## email not listed ## A paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, August 28-31, 2003
24. De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol 2, part 1, ch. 2
25. The Reform of the UN and Cosmopolitan Democracy: A Critical Review Author(s): Daniele Archibugi Source: Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp. 301-315
26. ibid
27. It’s not just the Muslims who are armed. Presbyterians played a large part in the American Revolution and still remember why.
28. Thomas Jefferson to Spencer Roane, 1819. ME 15:213, Thomas Jefferson page at the University of Virginia. http://guides.lib.virginia.edu/content.php?pid=77323&sid=572858
29. “Chomsky Warns of Rise of the Far Right in the U.S.” Pravda, RU. April 24,2010. http://english.pravda.ru/society/stories/23-04-2010/113161-chomsky_warns_of_far_right_us-0
30. Archibugi,Daniele. “The Reform of the UN and Cosmopolitan Democracy: A Critical Review”. Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp. 301-315
31. RROR (10th ed.) Roberts Rules of Order, Newly Revised. Pg. XXV
32. Demeter, George. Demeter’s Manual of Parliamentary Law and Procedure; For the Legal Conduct of Business in All Deliberative Assemblies. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969.
33. http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/timeline/Parliament
34. http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry/Parliame
35. Held, David, and Anthony G. McGrew. The Global Transformations Reader: An Introduction to the Globalization Debate. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2003.Pg 506
36. 1Corinthians 12:31
37. Aristotle. The Politics of Aristotle. Translated by J.E.C. Welldon D.D. London. MacMillan and Co. Ltd. 1912
38. Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. London. Longmans, Green, and Co.. 1913
39. Jefferson, Thomas. Diffusion of Knowledge Bill, 1779. FE 2:221, Papers 2:526
40. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787. (Forrest version) ME 6:392
41. Buchanan, Patrick J.The death of the nation state. http://www.theamericancause.org/print/052206_print.htm
42. Burnett, John “Sheriff to Texas Border Town, ‘Arm Yourselves’. NPR. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125737965&sc=emaf
43. Machan, Tibor R. The Value and Limits of Democracy, Chapman University. http://mises.org/journals/scholar/machan4.pdf
44. Report of the Commission on Global Governance (ISBN 0-19-827998-1; Published by Oxford University Press, 1995)
45. The History of Freedom and Other Essays. London: Macmillan, 1919.

Just a quick note: have finally begun to add some stuff to the RPE Flickr page (see widget to the right) - or http://www.flickr.com/photos/58244916@N00/ - hope to add some more soon...

Edward Burtynsky's large-scale colour photographs, which are taken with large format field cameras, explore the way that nature has been transformed through industrial work and manufacturing--eg., railway cutting, mine tailings, quarries, scrap piles and the oil industry. Burtynsky's toxic sublime work lacks the raw anger and the muckraking impulse of...

Not by self-report, at least. Here's a bit more data from a survey Josh Rust and I conducted of ethicists, non-ethicist philosophers, and comparison professors in other departments in five U.S. states. (Other preliminary survey results, and more about the methods, are here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

In the first part of the survey we asked respondents their attitudes about various moral issues. One thing we asked was for them to rate "Not keeping in at least monthly face-to-face or telephone contact with one’s mother" on a nine-point scale from "very morally bad" (1) through "morally neutral" (5) to "very morally good" (9). As it turned out, the respondent groups were all equally likely to rate not keeping in contact on the morally bad end of the scale: 73% of ethicists said it was morally bad, compared to 74% of non-ethicist philosophers and 71% of non-philosophers (not a statistically significant difference). There was a small difference in mean response (3.4 for ethicists vs. 3.7 for non-ethicist philosophers and 3.3 for non-philosophers), but I suspect that was at least partly due to scaling issues. In sum, the groups expressed similar normative attitudes, with perhaps the non-ethicist philosophers a bit closer to neutral than the other groups. (Contrast the case of vegetarianism, where the groups expressed very different attitudes.) 

In the second part of the survey we asked respondents to describe their own behavior on the same moral issues that we had inquired about in the first part of the survey. We asked two questions about keeping in touch with mom. First we asked: "Over the last two years, about how many times per month on average have you spoken with your mother (face to face or on the phone)? (If your mother is deceased, consider how often you spoke during her last two years of life.)" The response options were "once (or less) every 2-3 months", "about once a month", "2-4 times a month", and "5 times a month or more". Only the first of these responses was counternormative by the standards of the earlier normative question. By this measure there was a statistically marginal tendency for the philosophers to report higher rates of neglecting their mothers: 11% of ethicists reported infrequent contact, compared to 12% of non-ethicist philosophers and only 5% of non-philosophers (chi-square, p = .06). (There was a similar trend for the non-philosophers to report more contact overall, across the response options.) 

Second, we asked those with living mothers to report how many days it had been since their last telephone or face-to-face contact. The trend was in the same direction, but only weakly: 10% of ethicists reported its having been more than 30 days, compared to 11% of non-ethicist philosophers, and 8% of ethicists (chi-square, p = .82). We also confirmed that age and gender were not confounding factors. (Older respondents reported less contact with their mothers, even looking just at cases in which the mother is living, but age did not differ between the groups. Gender did differ between the groups -- philosophers being more likely to be male -- but did not relate to self-reported contact with one's mother.) So -- at least to judge by self-report -- ethicists are no more attentive to their mothers than are non-ethicist professors, and perhaps a bit less attentive than professors outside of philosophy. 

Maybe this isn't too surprising. But the fact that most people seem to find this kind of thing unsurprising is itself, I think, interesting. Do we simply take it for granted that ethicists behave, overall, no more kindly, responsibly, caringly than do other professors -- except perhaps on a few of their chosen pet issues? Why should we take that for granted? Why shouldn't we expect their evident interest in, and habits of reflection about, morality to improve their day-to-day behavior? 

You might think that ethicists would at least show more consistency than the other groups between their expressed normative attitudes about keeping in touch with mom and their self-reported behavior. However, that was also not the case. In fact the trend -- not statistically significant -- was in the opposite direction. Among ethicists who said it was bad not to keep in at least monthly contact, 8% reported no contact within the previous 30 days, compared to 13% of ethicists reporting no contact within 30 days among those who did not say that a lack of contact was bad. Among non-ethicist philosophers, the corresponding numbers were 6% and 27%. Among non-philosophers, 4% and 14%. Summarized in plainer English, the trend was this: Among those who said it was bad not to keep in at least monthly contact with their mothers, ethicists were the ones most likely to report not in fact keeping in contact. And also there was less correlation between ethicists' expressed normative view and their self-reported behavior than for either of the other groups of professors (8%-13% being a smaller spread than either 6%-27% or 4%-14%). It bears repeating that these differences are not statistically significant by the tests Josh and I used (multiple logistic regression) -- so I only draw this weaker conclusion: Ethicists did not show any more consistency between their normative views and their behavior than did the other groups. 

Perhaps the ethicists were simply more honest in their self-described behavior than were the other groups? -- that is, less willing to lie or fudge so as to make their self-reported behavior match up with their previously expressed normative view? It's possible, but to the extent were were able to measure honesty in survey response, we found no trend for more honest responding among the ethicists.

[Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind.]

Edouard Machery and I are looking into starting a yearly experimental philosophy conference and workshop between ETSU and Pittsburgh.  The idea would be to have a friendly meeting at a leisurely pace, emphasizing community building through talks, workshops on experimental methodology / data analysis, and outdoor activities (perhaps including mountain hikes, white-water rafting, horse-back riding, etc.).  The goal would be to have the first meeting at ETSU (near the Appalachian Mountains of Eastern Tennessee) in Fall of 2011, depending on scheduling conflicts with other conferences.  If successful, additional meetings would then occur annually, either continuing at ETSU or alternating between ETSU and Pittsburgh (or possibly other locations in the middle-East of the country).

Before beginning preparations, however, we wanted to get a sense of whether there is interest in such meetings.  Would ya’all be interested in participating?  Wiling to pay your own way (although we will attempt to secure some funding to provide beverages / snacks and ease graduate student travel)?  Expressions of interest, comments, and suggestions can be left here or sent to me by email at jmsytsma@gmail.com.

Many thanks!

Cora Diamond's work in ethics will be the focus of an upcoming conference, "Ethics, Imagination, Forms of Life," to be held September 13-15, 2010 at the Université de Picardie, Aiens, in the North of Paris.  Professor Diamond will be commenting on the papers and participating in the ensuing discussion.  You can find more information here: http://www.u-picardie.fr/labo/curapp/

 

In a recent post on if: book, the blog of The Institute for the Future of the Book, Bob Stein looks at what will replace the book in the futurist digital landscape. He refers to the flattening of all media types and experiences into varieties of apps: I started to...

I read this article a few weeks ago now from the New Yorker and was both moved and impressed by it. Its content is very powerful, and if you are disturbed by stories of the dying, then I wouldn't suggest you read it, but if you do have the courage and the time (it isn't short), then I would really recommend you do.

Perhaps one of the greatest achievements of Western Civilization over all others is the systemic body of scientific knowledge that has been collected over the past few centuries. Yet what kind of knowledge can be sufficiently called scientific? Certainly most would not venture to call astrology a science. I am indeed treading upon familiar problems within the Philosophy of Science, that of demarcation…

What makes a discipline scientific? Is it the methodology, the questions asked or is it the results? Does a science require a sufficient degree of mathematics? Does a field require a sufficient degree of explanatory power to make it scientific? Predictive power, or maybe reach a reasonable level of verification. What level of empirical work should the field pursue in order to cross the threshold required for science? How much control should the researcher have over the environment? Lastly, should the questions of the discipline be falsifiable? (Can any empirical question ever been sufficiently falsified?) It is because of these questions that I have come to question deeply the ‘scientific’ status of economics and to a lesser degree astronomy. (Although I have more to say about economics than astronomy)

I will go ahead and address each field separately.

Economics

The majority of economists go at great lengths in order to inform repeatedly of the scientific nature of their work. Every economics textbooks from the standard entry level Principles, through the intermediate level and graduate level starts chapter 1 with the declaration of the scientific status of economics. But why? Gregory Mankiw, a very influential Harvard Economist, says that it is because economists

“…use the data that history provides. Consider an astronomer studying the creation of galaxies or an evolutionary biologist studying the development of species. These disciplines, like economics, are primarily observational rather than experimental, but they are clearly scientific.” [1]

That is merely hoping that the audience will accept astronomy as a science and in so do liken the methodology of astronomy acceptable and similar to economics. However, this audience member calls into question the scientific status of astronomy as well, what now?

Most economists fall back upon Karl Popper’s notion of a science as a field in which its propositions are falsifiable. Most economists also believe that their work is empirical, that is describing something going on in the world. Some economists, such as those of the Austrian School shun empirical work for case studies. These Austrian reject the use of mathematics in the field and instead rely on pure reason. Yet when those economists are using pure reason to describe what is going on with prices and wages, inflation and unemployment, are they not talking about facts in the world? If they shun empirical work, then what is economics to be, metaphysics? This is an interesting question, perhaps for another post.

Returning to the previous inquiry, are the propositions of economics falsifiable? Certainly, the laws of Chemistry are falsifiable for there the researcher can control the environment and isolate the particular variable responsible for the causation in question. Can economics and other observational sciences say the same? I do not think so. At this point economists play apologetics and philosophers begin a quibble about the ontology of evidence and observation. Economists are quick to point out that theirs is a field of dynamic processes that are stochastic and thus they must rely on statistical and not deterministic models. Philosophers begin questioning observation and bring into the argument of quantum uncertainty and the effect of the observer on the experiment, thereby questioning the notion of control within the experiment. I do not find this convincing at all.

Without a reasonable, or rather at least sufficient, level of control over the environment the researcher encounters issues of verification of theory. Every phenomena encountered has an infinite number of explanations attributable to it. That is why Chemistry and Physics, when I say physics I mean everything but theoretical physics which is perhaps closer to metaphysics than empirical work, seek to control the experimental environment. They are experimental sciences rather than observational, those fields can influence the variables relevant to the causation at work. Without an experiment holding some important factors constant, how can the researcher adequately construct a theory that identifies the variable responsible for the causation in question? The observational sciences must then compensation for this by means of extra assumptions that makes the work further removed from empirical merit. At this point, the economist will falls back upon statistical inference and the background claim of ceterus paribus while the philosopher calls into question the assumptions assumed when controlling variables. The philosopher is perhaps also apt to remind me of the observation effect that is the observer influencing the results of the experiment by merely observing the experiment. To the former I merely point out the removed from reality nature of ceterus paribus. Changes in one economic factor always change other economic factors. Ceterus paribus is a fantasy, a removed idealization, much like perfect competition. Responding to the latter, the laws and effects of quantum reality are really a non-sequitor for our dryer-sized goods phenomenological experience.

So then, is economics a science? Well, sort of?

Price Theory, microeconomics, is I think the closest that we get to a science within economics. Microeconomics deals with individual actors, not the aggregate figures of macroeconomics. Price theory makes predictions about the choices that rational agents make when confronted with limited resources and unlimited wants (again some assumptions, but I venture to guess these fair assumptions) For the most part price theory makes good predictions, reliable predictions. There are of course instances where standard price theory falters. A sub-branch of microeconomics called Behavioral Economics is currently investigating those difficulties. The sub-field beings economics back in touch with empirical psychology in order to investigate the decision-making processes of economic agents. Microeconomics makes good predictions based upon a reliable methodology that yields results greater than that of pure chance reasoning.

Is the same true for macroeconomics? Is macroeconomics a science? No. The past 50 years of macroeconomic policy failure makes this type of economics not scientific. The sheer level of aggregation based upon individual human actions makes even statistical inference from observation unreliable. This coupled with the fact that the researcher cannot control the environment makes macroeconomics very unscientific. If there ever was a case for the uselessness of ceterus paribus, the prima facie example is macroeconomics.

Astronomy

What about astronomy, is it a science? Maybe, first let us consider the claims of Astronomy. First, that the universe is 14 billion years old, that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, and that the number of stars in the universe is roughly the same number as grains of sand on the Earth. These and other claims of what perhaps is hubris are substantiated by mainly observation and reliance of assuming the validity of physics. Astronomy assumes that the laws of physics on Earth are uniform throughout the entire universe, what a claim! Astronomy makes some of the greatest existential claims, that the universe is the sum of all matter while claiming at the same time that the universe is expanding…but into what? Is there a sign at the edge of the universe that states ‘Universe Ends Here.’ The methodology of astronomy relies heavily upon mathematics and the results of chemistry as justification for astronomical claims. Yet my issue with astronomy is the lack of empirical results relative to the claims made. Where is the empirical work to show the existence of black holes, of neutron stars, pulsars, and other galaxies? These are for all intensive purposes theoretical constructs with backing only from other theoretical assumptions from physics, chemistry and mathematics. We have no way to ostensibly point at the phenomena and measure it; Astronomy mainly bases its claims from the telescopic observation. The number of assumptions that astronomy makes are far too many given the poverty of empirical underpinning.

Definitions

Normally a good philosopher, I am not a philosopher, gives definitions at the outset of his paper. However, science is a notoriously tricky endeavor to define! I am not sure as to what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a field to be truly a science. Perhaps the following are some useful heuristics:

• That the discipline make good predictions.
• That the discipline employs a reliable methodology.
• That the discipline displays sufficient explanatory power.
• That the discipline controls the environment to a sufficient and reasonable degree.
• That the discipline has several active research programs.

Does this mean then that science is more like a continuum rather than a sharp break-off point?

Perhaps, but even to include astrology and phrenology on that continuum appears to me a front to the spirit of science. Have I diminished the value of economics or astronomy by taking the word science away from them? No, I do not fancy that at all. Philosophy is not a science by any means, but does that take away from the value of philosophy, I think not. (That said, I think a naturalized epistemology is best for philosophy, let’s drop the philosophical methodology) Perhaps given more empirical import to the said fields will I acknowledge those fields as truly capital S sciences.

*Oh, I posted the comic because I find it quite amusing.*

**I changed the original picture because this one is funnier**

---

[1] http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/05/is-economics-science.html

Thomas Paine, Agrarian Justice

Synopsis:

Proposed system

Paine proposed a detailed plan to tax property owners to pay for the needs of the poor, which could be considered as the precursor of the modern idea of citizen’s income or basic income. The money would be raised by taxing all direct inheritances at 10%, and “indirect” inheritances – those not going to close relations – at a somewhat higher rate; this would, he estimated, raise around £5,700,000 per year in England.

Around two-thirds of the fund would be spent on pension payments of £10 per year to every person over the age of fifty, which Paine had taken as his average adult life expectancy, with most of the remainder allocated to making fixed payments of £15 to every man and woman on reaching the age of twenty-one, legal majority. The small remainder would then be able to be used for paying pensions to “the lame and blind”. For context, the average weekly wage of an agricultural labourer was around 9 shillings, which would mean an annual income of about £23 for an able-bodied man working throughout the year.

Philosophical background

The work is based on the contention that in the state of nature, “the earth, in its natural uncultivated state… was the common property of the human race”; the concept of private ownership arose as a necessary result of the development of agriculture, since it was impossible to distinguish the possession of improvements to the land from the possession of the land itself. Thus Paine views private property as necessary, but that the basic needs of all humanity must be provided for by those with property, who have originally taken it from the general public. This in some sense is their “payment” to non-property holders for the right to hold private property.

posted by KT

Our topic this week is self-deception. 

Self-deception is rampant in human affairs.  And although too much self-deception is probably a bad thing, a little self-deception may be just what a person needs to get through the day.   One should never underestimate the power of positive illusions.  For example, psychological studies show that people who are overly optimistic about their own abilities often have enhanced motivation, which enables them to do better in the face of challenges than people with more realistic assessments of their own talents.

Of course, it may be that for every one person who benefits from self-deception, there are scads who are burned by it.  Think of the pathological gambler who goes bankrupt betting on a “sure thing” or a battered wife who keeps returning to her abuser, confident that he won’t do again. Or think of the mass self-deception that causes the American electorate to believe we can have lower taxes, more government services, and a balanced budget all at the same time.   Clearly,  people subject to this sort of self-deception run a real risk of ruin.

Still,  I’m prepared to say that self-deception always leads to ruin.   I suspect that self-deception, like many facets of human life, has both a dark side and a light side.  Perhaps key to happiness is to staying on light side and avoid the dark side.  But doing that would be no easy task.   I doubt that there could be a formula or even a set of rough principles that told you when it would be happiness making to deceive oneself and when one needed to be relentlessly honest with oneself.

Moreover, when you stop and think about it, self-deception borders on the paradoxical.   It’s easy to see how you can deceive somebody else.  Maybe you hide or distort some evidence or maybe you straight-out lie to them and, like a fool, they believe you.  There may be something morally wrong with deceiving others, but there’s nothing incoherent about it.  It can certainly be highly advantageous for me to get you to believe what I know to be false.    But in the case of self-deception the deceiving party and the deceived party are one and the same.  That’s what makes it so puzzling.

At first blush, it looks as though in order to be self-deceived you have to believe things that you know to be false.   But if you know something to be false, how can you believe it?  You can’t just self-consciously will yourself to believe things you already know to be false.  You can certainly pretend to believe things that you know to be false.  But self-deception doesn’t seem like a form of pretense, not exactly anyway.   Though some have denied it, self-deception seems to involve straight-out believing and believing something that, at some level,  you know to be false.

That suggests that when you are self-deceived you simultaneously believe and disbelieve the same thing.  At some level that gambler mentioned earlier knows he’s betting on a losing proposition.  But at another level he really believes he has chance of winning.   That sounds pretty darned irrational.   It’s not immediately obvious how such irrationality is even psychologically possible. 

That’s  one question that a good theory of self-deception needs to answer. Self-deception is pretty obviously possible,  but explaining just how it’s possible is not a simple matter.

A good theory of self-deception had also better explain how self-deception manages to be so pervasive.  Self-deception is not a rare and exceptional thing for us humans.     We humans pride ourselves on being paragons of rationality.  And there is more than a little justification for that pride.  After all, our brains have created science, art, mathematics politics and philosophy.  But the problem is that right along side all these amazing capacities sits a capacity for rampant self-deception.   Why do we have such a capacity in the first place?   Did natural selection specifically design our brains for self-deception?

And then there’s the original question that I started out with.  Can self-deception sometimes be the key to human happiness or will self-deception always lead you to misery and ruin, at least in the long run? Those are just some of the questions we’ll put to this week’s guest --   Neil van Leeuwen.  Besides being one of the world’s up and coming authorities on self-deception,  Neil has deep connections to Philosophy Talk.   When he was a graduate student at Stanford,  working on his very fine dissertation on self deception – he served as Philosophy Talk’s  Director of Research.  He’s now gone on to bigger and better things, obviously.  But we’re really pleased to welcome him home. 

Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin Wilson is reinterpreting witty romantic songs from one of the masters of The Great American Songbook. One track is "I've Got Rhythm" that becomes a rockabilly tune: What is interesting are the two Wilson/Gershwin “co-writes”, based around a clutch of George G’s unfinished songs. “The Like...

Australia has a hung parliament with the balance of power being held by three regional independents as a result of a growing discontent with the Westminster system of two party system of liberal democracy and a desire for multilevel democracy. Australia is taking the first hesitant steps towards recognizing that the world as a whole is changing towards more complex and multi-party politics. The reforms requested by the three regional independents are contained in this letter to the Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Opposition. Though limited---they do not address the executive being in a powerful position relative to the legislature, nor proportional representation for the House of Representatives--they are significant and they may help to sway some more voters and politicians towards backing reform. TO JULIA GILLARD and TONY ABBOTT Requests for information 1. We seek access to information under the ‘caretaker conventions’ to economic advice from the...

I’m generally sceptical of the value of surveys, as currently conducted by practitioners of ‘experimental philosophy’ as a way of getting clear about what’s going on in philosophically interesting thought experiments. The most systematic reason for this scepticism comes from thinking about what exactly is going on in thought experiments.

Following Jonathan Ichikawa and Ben Jarvis, I think examples in philosophical works should be thought of as small fictions. In particular, they’re a type of genre fiction. The genre is the same one, broadly, that fables and parables fall into. (This way of thinking about thought experiments makes Aesop an important figure in the Western philosophical canon, which isn’t a bad result I think.) Like any kind of genre fiction, there are important interpretative constraints on these fictions. If you present the story in a different ‘mode’, it should be, and will be, interpreted differently.

The way in which fables/parables/thought experiments should be interpreted has some particularly quirky features.

At least some of the time, realism isn’t important. We don’t object to Aesop’s stories because they feature talking animals. We don’t object to parables if the story doesn’t really make sense from the perspective of non-central characters. (The striking effect we get when retelling a familiar biblical or mythical story from the perspective of a non-central character is something Nick Cave has made good use of over the years.) And we shouldn’t object to thought experiments because they require a curious series of coincidences. Indeed, the best fables/parables/thought experiments are often quite unrealistic because everything about the back story is so ‘neat’. They don’t have characters like Ulysses’ M’Intosh who simply don’t fit into the story, and people simply know, in a way that doesn’t leave the possibility of doubt even open, the things that are stipulated as true.

These stories are meant to have a point, or a moral. The intended point guides interpretation of the story. We’re meant to interpret the story in a way that makes it a fitting illustration of the moral. It would be wrong to interpret the story of the fox and the grapes as one in which the fox gets evidence that the grapes are sour and therefore leaves. And that would be wrong in part because the point is about our attitude towards what we cannot have.

The same thing is true in philosophical experiments I think. It would be wrong to interpret the Gettier example as one in which the subject has independent evidence for the justified true belief that isn’t known, or in which they aren’t justified in inferring the target proposition because the evidence for it is from a source they have independent reason to doubt. It isn’t even really necessary to state this in the example, because once we know it’s an attempt to show that justified true belief without knowledge is possible, general principles of interpretation will fill in the details.

But that means we have to know what principle the example is meant to show. And that’s why I suspect there’s a deep problem here for experimentation on the examples. We suspect that telling people the point that an example is meant to show will seriously interfere with how they evaluate the example. (I assume this is why subjects in existing surveys are not normally told what hypothesis is being tested.) But not telling people the intended point of the example will interfere with how they interpret the example.

I suspect the best way out of this problem is to investigate people who do know the intended point of the example, and hence who know how it is meant to be interpreted. But I don’t think they are suitable subjects for a controlled experiment.

This point is related to the worry that it takes a bit of training to be able to distinguish between different hypotheses that the thought experiment might be intended to show. But I suspect it goes a little deeper. In principle we could explain the distinctions without telling people the intended outcome of the experiment, and hence ‘contaminating’ it. Not so if the intended outcome is an essential part of interpreting the story being told.

Having said all that, I want to strongly agree with something that Alan White said in the previous thread. Experimental work on subjects who aren’t familiar with the debate can tell us a lot about how people interpret these thought experiments. And that can be incredibly useful for communicating the results and arguments, either to colleagues in other disciplines, or to students. I know that’s not what experimental philosophers are aiming to show, but I think it’s a valuable side-effect of their work. Indeed, if I’m right about thought experiments being genre fictions, and the genre being one philosophical training makes you much more familiar with, we’re probably all making lots of mistakes about how people interpret our examples. Experimental work is an incredibly good way of correcting these misimpressions.

To be sure, I know that experimental philosophers are aiming much higher than merely clarifying philosophical examples. But I think those of us who are sceptical of some experimental work should not overlook its values that aren’t affected by extant criticism.

There was a fair bit of back and forth in the previous thread on just what us stakes-sensitive folks were claiming to be stakes-sensitive. So I thought I’d list what I thought was stakes-sensitive, and perhaps others who thought there is stakes-sensitivity somewhere can chime in either in comments or on their blogs/sites.

Three qualifications before I start.

First, I’m really interested in odds-sensitivity, not stakes-sensitivity. I think you get some stakes-sensitivity effects when you have to decide whether to bet $20 against a few seconds work. For instance, you might double check on your phone something we’d ordinarily say you knew, because the act of checking has a positive expected return. I think that’s a case of long odds defeating knowledge. That doesn’t mean I think of losing $20 as a high stakes situation of course.

Second, I’m primarily interested in the way in which various things are constitutively dependent on stakes. If the stakes raise, then I collect more evidence, and then my credence/belief/knowledge/evidence changes, that doesn’t in itself mean the kind of sensitivity at issue here is displayed. I also think that ‘thinking through’ a question is often a way of collecting more logical/mathematical/epistemological evidence. So this kind of causal dependency of belief etc on stakes is not what’s at issue here, but is surely a central feature of our epistemic life. Any theory that said that for ordinary humans, stakes raising doesn’t have a causal impact on how much we collect and think through evidence is surely too absurd to be taken seriously.

Third, it’s very important to distinguish various ways in which beliefs can be strong. There are plenty of pairs of propositions p, q such that:

• There are odds that I would regard as favourable for a bet on q, but not for a bet on p. In that sense, my credence in q is higher than my credence in p.
• In the ordinary sense, I believe p but not q, so in the ordinary sense, I have a stronger degree of belief in p than in q.

Here’s one instance of that. Let p be that in the weekend’s election, the seat of La Trobe was won by a college friend of mine, and q be that this particular lottery ticket will lose.

This means that phrases like ‘degree/strength of belief/confidence/credence’, are systematically ambiguous. By ‘credence’ I mean the state that bears a close relationship to betting behaviour, and by ‘belief’ I mean the state such that someone who believes p takes p for granted when making theoretical or practical decisions.

Having said that, here’s what I think is stakes-sensitive.

• Credences are not stakes-sensitive, since credences are defined in terms of dispositions over decision possibilities that include high stake situations.
• Beliefs are stakes-sensitive, since in high stakes situations, less is taken for granted by rational actors.
• Evidence is stakes-sensitive, since in high stakes situations, different sources are rationally relied upon.
• Knowledge is stakes-sensitive for at least both of the last two reasons.
• Fixing credence, knowledge is still stakes-sensitive since of course credences don’t vary with stakes.
• Fixing belief, knowledge is still stakes-sensitive.

In my original paper on pragmatic encroachment I hinted that the last claim is false. But I’ve changed my mind. I think that in cases where the agent is wrong about what the stakes are, or even have mistaken credences about stakes, knowledge can be affected by stakes even fixing everything else. Those cases are rare, and haven’t been much discussed in the literature. (They certainly haven’t been tested in any experiments.) But I think they are important for getting the details of stakes-sensitivity right.

Are we shifting from the “front end” of browser-centric computing to the “back end” of apps, closed networks and proprietary connections between massive data servers and specialized clients--from open to closed digital network systems? In The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet at Wired Magazine Chris Anderson argues that...

I'm delighted to announce that Allan Hazlett, currently at Fordham, will be joining us later this year to take up our new Lectureship in Epistemology. That's a fantastic hire for us I think, and it will be great to have Allan as a colleague.

Nominations are open for the second philosophy blog writing prize at 3 Quarks Daily.  Follow this link for details.

Posted by John Perry

Our topic this week  is Humanism.  The program was recorded live at at meeting of the American Humanism Assocation, in San Jose.

 Well, one might wonder, what controversy can we find in Humanism?  We usually think of Humanism as that glorious movement in thought that began in the Renaissance, with the rediscovery and re-appreciation of the texts and art of the Greeks and Romans.  Human life, in this world, moves to the center of attention, while God, Heaven, angels and the like, the focus of medieval thought, move aside.  Humanism led to the Enlightenment, to Locke and Hume and Kant, to democracy and science and progress.  Not to mention to Humanities Divisions in modern universities, with philosophy departments, and philosopher hired to teach and think.  Three cheers for Humanism!

Descrbied this way, Humanism doesn’t seem very controversial.  For one thing, it doesn’t seem opposed to religion in general or Christianity in particular, as long as it pays suitable attention to humans.  Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel.  Leonardo da Vinci painted the Last Supper.  Locke wrote a book about the Reasonableness of Christianity.  So all these important Renaissance and Enlightenment humanists seem to have been Christians. 

But that raises the question:  why are religious types, and fundamentalist Christians in particular, so upset these days about Humanism -- calling Humanism a plot to take over our schools, introduce relativism into morals, and all sorts of other evil things?

Well, they are thinking of Secular Humanism. So is secular humanism an alternative to Humanism, or a species of it, or what? Secular humanism, or scientific humanism, is really a species of humanism in the more general sense.  But many see it as the natural development of the ideas implicit in all humanism.  Secular humanism doesn’t just move the focus of attention from God and heaven and angels to humans, it drops God and heaven and Angels from the picture altogether.  It doesn’t just appreciate science, it takes the reality science discloses to be all the reality there is. 

So secular humanism really goes beyond appreciating human-oriented art; it involves a set of philosophical doctrines.  And in fact the philosopher John Dewey was instrumental in drawing up The Humanist Manifesto -- first version, 1933.  It’s pretty philosophical!  Here's a rough sketch.  The universe wasn’t created by anyone; humans are part of the natural world; mind and body dualism is rejected; there are no supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values; the end of human life is the here and now, not some afterlife, and a lot more.

So how about the Humanists spread out in the audience before us  as we recorded this program, humanists of the American Humanist Association.  -- are they just old fashioned, "Humans are sort of important and the Greeks and Romans were cool” type humanists, or are they secular humanists?  Defnitely the latter.   The American Humanist Association descends from Dewey and his friends.  You can find Manifesto One on their website, as well as Two and Three.  We we're definitely in the presence of secular, scientific, God-not-fearing, capital-H Humanists.

That means, according to Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and Bill O’Reilly, and quite possibly the Pope too, these people are bound and determined to undermine the moral basis of America, subvert values, educate a generation of atheists, and God knows what else -- or maybe I shouldn’t put it that way…

But we don’t need Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Bill O’Reilly, or even the Pope, to tell us what the American Humanist movement is about, because our guest was one of their intellectual leaders --  Jennifer Bardi, editor of The Humanist magazine. 

 Here are the fifteen points of the original AHA Manifesto --- for later revisions, see their website.

FIRST: Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.

SECOND: Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as a result of a continuous process.

THIRD: Holding an organic view of life, humanists find that the traditional dualism of mind and body must be rejected.

FOURTH: Humanism recognizes that man's religious culture and civilization, as clearly depicted by anthropology and history, are the product of a gradual development due to his interaction with his natural environment and with his social heritage. The individual born into a particular culture is largely molded by that culture.

FIFTH: Humanism asserts that the nature of the universe depicted by modern science makes unacceptable any supernatural or cosmic guarantees of human values. Obviously humanism does not deny the possibility of realities as yet undiscovered, but it does insist that the way to determine the existence and value of any and all realities is by means of intelligent inquiry and by the assessment of their relations to human needs. Religion must formulate its hopes and plans in the light of the scientific spirit and method.

SIXTH: We are convinced that the time has passed for theism, deism, modernism, and the several varieties of "new thought".

SEVENTH: Religion consists of those actions, purposes, and experiences which are humanly significant. Nothing human is alien to the religious. It includes labor, art, science, philosophy, love, friendship, recreation--all that is in its degree expressive of intelligently satisfying human living. The distinction between the sacred and the secular can no longer be maintained.

EIGHTH: Religious Humanism considers the complete realization of human personality to be the end of man's life and seeks its development and fulfillment in the here and now. This is the explanation of the humanist's social passion.

NINTH: In the place of the old attitudes involved in worship and prayer the humanist finds his religious emotions expressed in a heightened sense of personal life and in a cooperative effort to promote social well-being.

TENTH: It follows that there will be no uniquely religious emotions and attitudes of the kind hitherto associated with belief in the supernatural.

ELEVENTH: Man will learn to face the crises of life in terms of his knowledge of their naturalness and probability. Reasonable and manly attitudes will be fostered by education and supported by custom. We assume that humanism will take the path of social and mental hygiene and discourage sentimental and unreal hopes and wishful thinking.

TWELFTH: Believing that religion must work increasingly for joy in living, religious humanists aim to foster the creative in man and to encourage achievements that add to the satisfactions of life.

THIRTEENTH: Religious humanism maintains that all associations and institutions exist for the fulfillment of human life. The intelligent evaluation, transformation, control, and direction of such associations and institutions with a view to the enhancement of human life is the purpose and program of humanism. Certainly religious institutions, their ritualistic forms, ecclesiastical methods, and communal activities must be reconstituted as rapidly as experience allows, in order to function effectively in the modern world.

FOURTEENTH: The humanists are firmly convinced that existing acquisitive and profit-motivated society has shown itself to be inadequate and that a radical change in methods, controls, and motives must be instituted. A socialized and cooperative economic order must be established to the end that the equitable distribution of the means of life be possible. The goal of humanism is a free and universal society in which people voluntarily and intelligently cooperate for the common good. Humanists demand a shared life in a shared world.

FIFTEENTH AND LAST: We assert that humanism will: (a) affirm life rather than deny it; (b) seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from them; and (c) endeavor to establish the conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely for the few. By this positive morale and intention humanism will be guided, and from this perspective and alignment the techniques and efforts of humanism will flow.

 

 

 

 

 

Congratulations to two of our PEA Soupers who have made the list of the top ten philosophy articles from 2009.  Jamie Dreier's "Relativism (and Expressivism) and the Problem of Disagreement," from Philosophical Perspectives v. 23, and Mark Schroeder's "Hybrid Expressivism: Virtues and Vices," from Ethics v. 119 both made the list.  (This is Mark's second year in a row in the top ten!)  Well done, gentlemen!

The Financial Times is hosting a debate on the new austerity on the new austerity which they've constructed in terms of austerity v stimulus. This is a debate in economics in which the stimulators say the danger lies in spending too little and the austereians from spending too much. Each side also has their own economic champion: the stimulators follow the banner of Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, while the austereians are forming up behind the recently reformed former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial Greenspan argued that the best economic stimulus would be for the world’s leading debtors (the United States, U.K., Japan, Italy, et al) to rein in their budget deficits, a strategy dubbed “austerity” by the press. Greenspan explains that because lower deficits will restore confidence, diminish the threat of inflation, and allow savings to flow to private-sector investment rather than public-sector...

Australian conservatism has a neo-liberal strand and a statist one. These can be seen in its responses to the welfare state, which is celebrated by social democrats as civilizing capitalism. However, the underlying ideas behind the smokescreen of election battles is up against a preliminary difficult of the key terms of political theory now having a very wide and often contradictory set of meanings. The term "the welfare state," commonly denoted an industrial capitalist society in which state power was deliberately used (through politics and administration) in an effort to modify the play of market forces. There are three types of welfare state activities: provision of minimum income, provision for the reduction of economic insecurity resulting from such "contingencies" as sickness, old age and unemployment, and provision to all members of society of a range of social services. In Australia, as in Britain, where the crisis of the 1970s was...

I am intellectually persuaded by the arguments for Consequentialism. However, like most people in that situation, by my own lights I fail to live up the demands of that moral theory by a wide margin. And again, like most in my situation I suspect, this is a source of disquiet but not persistent hand-wringing. But there is another moral view one might attribute to me. It is more deontological in tone. And this other moral code is connected much more directly to emotional reactions such as guilt and moralized anger. If others cheat in a business deal or steal (except in desperation) and I am close enough to the situation, I will likely have an engaged moral reaction to such a person. I will speak badly of them, refuse to hang with them, and think poorly of them. Yet the decently well-off person who fails to contribute much money to an effective charity does not elicit such reactions in me to a similar degree. Similarly, while I myself regularly fail to be governed by consequentialist morality in my actions or my emotional reactions to my or other’s actions, I am quite effectively governed in both my actions and my emotions to this other moral view. My conscience, let’s call it, effectively keeps me from doing a wide range of things such as lying, cheating, stealing, hurting and so on. In most cases I simply would not dream of doing such things and if I did somehow do some such thing (or even fear that I did) I would likely feel really bad about it. Such governance in deed and action would, if I believed in commonsense (more deontological) morality, pass for tolerable moral motivation.

We are used to wondering if a moral judgment necessarily motivates. This is the debate about judgment internalism. I don’t do research on this question, but for my money those who argue against judgment internalism, such as Svavarsdottir, are winning. But they win partly by positing the coherence of an amoralist—someone who makes sincere moral judgments but sees no reason to live their life by moral standards. I however will just ask you to take on faith that I am not an amoralist. Since the usual way the judgment internalist debate goes is to wonder whether a person necessarily has at least some (possibly quite small) motivation to act in conformity to their moral judgments, I likely pass this test anyway. But a stronger test seems appropriate for the role that morality plays in the life of someone who is not an amoralist. It strikes me as plausible to say that, in the life of a person who is stipulated to not be an amoralist, a case could be make that a person’s moral view is the one that governs in the right way their behavior and emotional life rather than the moral view that they argue for in journal articles. By that standard I am not a consequentalist and I have yet to meet many who would count as consequentialists by that standard. Let me try out the hypothesis that a person’s moral view is the one that governs their actions and emotions rather than the one that governs what they say and write in intellectual circumstances. If that is right, there are very few consequentialists out there. I don’t think this shows that consequentialism is defeated as a moral view, only that it is much harder to count as believing such a theory than we may have thought and harder to genuinely persuade someone of the truth of a moral proposition than we tend to suppose. (I should mention that several years ago Steve Wall, Dan Jacobson, and I talked about these issues and, it seemed to me, were all initially drawn to the conclusion I outline here. Some of the ideas presented here are perhaps as much theirs as mine.)

Elizabeth, Robbie and I have received a grant from the AHRC for a three year project on metaphysical indeterminacy. We are very excited about this! Part of this includes a PhD studentship. This will be an excellent opportunity, as the PhD student attached to the project will benefit from contact with the excellent group of international and UK philosophers we've got signed on to be involved! Unfortunately, there's a very short time until applications are due. Application details follow.

AHRC Project Doctoral Studentship, Metaphysical Indeterminacy

The Department of Philosophy at the University of Leeds invites applications for an AHRC-funded doctoral studentship, tenable from October 2010.

The award will be held as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Metaphysical Indeterminacy’. The successful applicant will engage in research on a topic in the philosophy of indeterminacy, such as the metaphysics of indeterminacy, the logic or philosophy of language of vagueness, etc. The research undertaken by the award holder will contribute to the larger project, directed by Drs Elizabeth Barnes, Ross Cameron and Robert Williams. The chosen candidate will benefit from contact with national and international experts in metaphysics, the philosophy of logic and language and related fields through the programme of international visitors, seminars and workshops funded by the project.

Studentship Information

The studentship is tenable for up to 3 years (full-time) from 1 October 2010. Renewal of the studentship each year is subject to satisfactory academic progress.

AHRC regulations require that applicants must meet UK residency criteria or be ordinarily resident in the EU. EU candidates are normally eligible for a fees-only award, unless they have been ordinarily resident in the UK for 3 years immediately preceding the date of the award. Applicants should normally have, or be studying for, a Master’s degree in Philosophy. Further details concerning eligibility are available via the AHRC website. (PDF link)

Full awards cover academic fees at the standard UK rate and a maintenance grant for full-time study.

Applications

The closing date for applications is Friday 27th August 2010. You should also arrange for two academic references to be sent to us by this date.

Applications should be made using the standard postgraduate research degree application form, which is available for download (Word doc link). The following documents should be submitted with your application: 500 word PhD proposal; a copy of your degree transcripts (or a transcript of your marks to date if you are currently completing a degree); a sample of written work, consisting of a philosophical essay on a question of your choice, not less than 3000 words in length; CV.

All applications and references should be sent to Jenneke Stevens, Postgraduate Secretary, Department of Philosophy, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, email: J.M.Stevens@leeds.ac.uk, tel: +44 113 343 3263.

Intending applicants should contact Dr Ross Cameron (r.p.cameron@leeds.ac.uk) for information about the studentship.

The Pirate Bay is dead. And MiniNova has gone legal. Things are changing in the world of public BitTorrent trackers-- the millions of people who populated the large peer-to-peer file-sharing programs a few years ago is history. In this excellent article on bit torrent sites at Gizmodo Adam Frucci explores...

posted by KT

Our topic this week is Bodies for Sale.The buying and selling of vital organs is illegal in most developed countries.  But there is a thriving, global black market in body parts.  Should the buying and selling of organs be legalized and brought into the above ground economy?  Or is something inherently wrong about treating the human body and its parts as mere commodities?

One thing for sure.  There is huge pent-up demand for body parts.  In the US alone, according to the National Kidney Foundation, over ninety-five thousand people are currently waiting for an organ transplant, with another four thousand added to the wait list every month.  In 2006, more than six thousand people died awaiting life-saving organ transplants.  And of the twelve thousand dying people who could donate organs, only about half actually do.  The numbers are just staggering – utterly staggering.   In 2002, the World Health Organization pegged the number of people suffering from diabetes around the world at a hundred seventy one million.  By 2030 the number will climb to nearly four hundred million.  Those folks are prime candidates for kidney transplants.

So… we’ve got a huge global demand for bodily organs and an inadequate supply of donations.  Is it any wonder there's a thriving black market?  Legend has it that a healthy kidney can fetch up to a hundred fifty thousand dollars.  That’s a mighty tempting number.  Doesn’t that suggest that if there were open, legal, well-regulated markets in bodily organs the supply problem would just disappear?  And we might do a lot to alleviate third world poverty while we’re at it. 

But legend and reality don’t always match.  Take that hundred fifty thousand price tag for a kidney, for example.  Numbers like that are sometimes thrown around on internet chat rooms, but the reality is quite different.  In places like the Philippines or Iran -- where the buying and selling of organs is not against the law -- the price for a kidney is pretty low -- a few thousand dollars at most.  It’s true that black market brokers will sometimes charge as much as ninety thousand dollars to their rich Western clients for third-world kidneys.  But hardly any of that money reaches the person who offers up the kidney for sale.

You might think that the  problem is the black market itself, but it also could be that even an  open global market in kidneys might do more to enrich those who exploit the poor than it would do to help the poor themselves.    Even open global organ markets have great potential to exploit the poor and desperate around the world by turning their bodies into repositories of spare parts for the well-off, without really doing much to improve their own lot.  After all, not many middle or upper class Westerners are going to sell a kidney for a few thousand bucks -- even on a legal open market.   And not many of the world’s desperately poor are going to be able to afford to buy kidneys on ANY market.   So even in an open market the burden would fall disproportionately on the poor, while the benefit would fall disproportionately on the rich.   

So the situation is deeply morally fraught.  It seems pretty nearly completely upside down to the egalitarian liberal in me.  And then there’s the intrinsic yuckiness of  thinking about your own body parts as mere commodities.   I tend to be a Kantian and the Kantian in me tends to recoil at the very idea of treating my own body as a mere thing, a mere tool to be bought and sold like any other commodity.  Kant would probably say the buying and selling of organs is inherently wrong.  When you sell an organ, you're treating yourself as a mere means, rather than as an end in itself.  And Kant thought you should always treat yourself and others as ends in themselves.  And my gut instincts almost always go with Kant on these matters. 

But, of course, it turns out to be more complicated than Kant realized.  When I sell my labor, for example, I allow my employer to treat me as a mere means.  If it’s morally okay to sell your bodily labor, why isn’t it morally okay to sell your bodily organs?  I'm not sure the Kantian has a satisfactory answer to that question. 

We’ll put that question and much more to our guest,  Debra Satz,  author of the very fine book, Why Some Things Should Not Be For Sale: On The Limits of Markets.  Tune in to see what she has to say. 

Politics in liberal democracies with a neo-liberal mode of governance has become a manufactured reality that is little different from a reality TV show. Politics is now constructed as a mode of entertainment in which the political slogan is the substance, just as in corporate advertising. How can this manufactured...

I've just come across The Journal of Public Reason--one of the few open access e-journals in philosophy---via Public Reason, a blog for political philosophers. In the June 2010 issue there is a review of G.A. Cohen's Rescuing Justice and Equality (2008) by Kevin Gray. Cohen's text is insightful critique of elements of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice and on a certain strand of liberal thought that has emerged from dominance of A Theory of Justice. This is a liberalism that holds that, so long as the well-being of the worst off members of society is not made worse, any arrangement that increases the well-being of better-off members of society is morally acceptable. This is a liberalism that allows rampant inequalities and holds that justice does not in fact require equality. Cohen wants to rescue equality and justice from Rawlsian liberalism, and to restore the rightful place of social existence...

I've had moral dilemmas on my mind lately, and I'm troubled by a common argument given against the possibility of genuine moral dilemmas. I'm hoping people can help diagnose what's troubling me. And I apologize in advance for the disorganized thinking.

Here's the argument: Suppose an individual S is obligated both to perform act A and obligated to perform act B. S is therefore obligated to perform (A&B). Assuming that for S to be obligated to ø entails that S ought to ø, then S ought to A, ought to B, and ought (A&B). Applying 'ought' implies 'can,' then S ought (A&B) entails S can (A&B). But the circumstances of the world are such that S is metaphysically precluded from performing (A&B), so she cannot (A&B). Hence, it is both true that S ought (A&B) and false that S ought (A&B).

Skeptics about the existence of genuine moral dilemmas take this argument to be a reductio of the possibility of such dilemmas: It must, appearances to the contrary, be the case that S is not obligated to A OR S is not obligated to B. And the intuitive insight is simple enough: If I ought to do only what I can do, and I can only perform one of two acts, it can't be true that I ought to perform both. Thus, I can't be obligated to perform both.

But this argument has always struck me as fishy somehow. First, one might have doubts about 'ought' implies 'can' (OIC). Both Charles Pidgen and Geoffrey Sayre-McCord have papers that have convinced me that OIC is probably not a theory-neutral principle of deontic logic but a substantive normative commitment.  As Sayre-McCord notes, it seems suspect that a principle of deontic logic can rule out certain conceptions of morality (e.g., Calvinism) on the basis that they reject OIC.

My concerns lie elsewhere though. Contrast the role OIC plays in this dilemmas argument versus its role in arguments about moral blameworthiness . Here's a familiar sort of argument: Suppose I fail to perform some act A, like rushing out into the street to save a toddler who's wandering into the path of an oncoming bus. But as it turns out, I was much too far away to reach the toddler before the bus arrives. There is a sense then in which it was not true that I could have saved the toddler. Perhaps if circumstances had been very different, I could have. But in the actual circumstances, I could not have saved the toddler. To say that I ought to have saved the toddler seems misplaced then. Furthermore, this in turn shapes what reactive attitudes I and others rationally ought to have toward my action. For instance, I ought not to subject myself to self-reproach, and others should not hold me blameworthy.

But suppose the situation instead presents an apparent moral dilemma (You don't need to accept that this really is an intractable dilemma for me to illustrate my claim.): I am near enough to the wandering toddler to be able to save her, but to do so, I would have to leave my elderly grandmother, whom I'm escorting to her doctor's appointment and who suffers from dementia and confusion, at the street corner. If I choose to save the toddler and my grandmother ends up lost somewhere in the city, it would seem reasonable to hold me blameworthy for that outcome. Alternatively, if I remain with my grandmother and I opt not to save the toddler, it would seem reasonable to hold me blameworthy for that outcome.

What does this show? It reminds us that the 'can' in typical discussions of responsibility or blameworthiness is categorical: I ought to be held blameworthy for not having done A only if could have done A (or I ought not be held blameworthy for A unless I could have refrained from A). In contrast, the 'can' of 'OIC' in the dilemmas argument is conditional: I can't do A if I do B (or I can't do B if I do A). This is why we are more inclined to react to the dilemma situation with our characteristic reactive attitudes of praise, etc. than we are to react moral blameworthiness argument in the same way. That is, let us suppose that A violates a moral obligation. If I do A because I cannot, my act does not seem open to rational appraisal in the same way if I do A because I opted for A in order not to violate some obligation I would violate by doing alternative B. In the dilemmas case, I have endorsed A in a more robust sense than in the moral responsibility case. In opting for A over B, I have, in effect, invited the criticism that will come for failing to do B.

But this causes me to wonder if there aren't two OIC principles in play here. Moreover, I wonder if there isn't something question begging about the original argument that uses OIC to deny the possibility of genuine moral dilemmas. Help?!

Posted by JP

 

William James, the topic of this morning’s program,  is one of America’s greatest philosophers.  His career spanned the turn of the Twentieth century; he actually was teaching at Stanford at the time of the 1906 earthquake, and wrote an interesting essay about his experiences and feelings during the quake.

James was a precursor to contemporary philosophers, in that he was really a cognitive scientist / philosopher.  He was in both departments at Harvard.  His two-volume PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY was the bible of psychologists at the time.  It still makes fascinating and rewarding reading. His book THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE, which is a combination of philosophy, psychology and sociology, virtually originated the serious study of the psychology of  religion.

As a philosopher, James is best known for pragmatism.  I think there are two sides to pragmatism, one pretty plausible, one not so plausible

The plausible side is his pragmatic theory of meaning.  James illustrates it with a story.  Some campers are having an argument about this situation.  A squirrel is running around a tree in a certain direction.  A man is following the squirrel around the tree in the same direction.  Both the squirrel and the man are clearly going around the tree.  But is the man going around the squirrel?  He must be, since he is going around in a circle, inside of which the squirrel lies.  But he must not be, because he is always looking at the squirrel's back.  If you go around a squirrel you first see his back, then his side, then his front, and so on...

You can see that James hung around with a very intellectual crowd.  Apparently, instead of drinking beer and talking about sports, or movies, or even politics, they chose to discuss this rather arcane subject.   Anyway, according to James, there was a spirited argument, about whether it was true or not that the man went around the squirrel.  But James pointed out that the two hypotheses  --- that the man goes around the squirrel and that he does not --- don't lead to different observable consequences.

So he asked his friends:  what evidence, what observation, would show that one hypothesis was correct and the other incorrect.  And the couldn't come up with anything.  So they were really arguing about nothing.The pragmatic theory of meaning points out that both hypotheses have the same observable consequences; or, as one might put it, they both do the same work in predicting the future.  So they have the same meaning and the argument is empty.

This is similar to things that Hume said, and what later philosophers, like Carnap, called the verifiability theory of meaning.  The meaning of a sentence is basically the observations that would show it's true.  William James is a bridge between earlier empiricists like Hume and modern empiricism.  Hume looked for meaning of an idea or belief in the causes of an idea, the “sense-impressions” which gave rise to it.  20^th century empiricists, following James, look to later sense-impressions, the sense-impressions you will expect to have, if the belief is true.

I don’t think that the pragmatic theory of meaning is going to solve all of our problems, but there is something pretty plausible about it.  By my lights the same cannot be said for the pragmatic theory of truth.  This is the idea that what makes a belief true is that it works.  Here’s a quote:

            Truths are goods because we can "ride" on them into the future without being unpleasantly surprised. They "lead us into useful verbal and conceptual quarters as well as directly up to useful sensible termini. They lead to consistency, stability and flowing human intercourse.  They lead away from eccentricity and isolation, from foiled and barren thinking"

This  seems to me to have things just backwards.  If  you hold true beliefs you won’t be surprised by experience.  But the lack of surprise isn’t what makes the beliefs true.  It’s their truth that accounts for the lack of surprise.   At any rate, this dubious idea gave James an opening for beliefs like immortality and God; these beliefs may help your life go well …. But that doesn’t, in my humble opinion, make them true.

Our guest will be Russell Goodman from the University of New Mexico, who can take us a little deeper, and perhaps make James theory of truth a little more plausible. 

 

 

This post was originally published shortly after our episode on William James -- which is being rebroadcast this wee-- originally aired.  We're moving it up to the top of the blog in honor of the rebroadcast. 

Russell Goodman, who was our guest a couple of weeks ago, for our episode on William James sent the following remarks as a follow up to our on-air conversation. They are posted here with his permission.

I wanted to comment on that squirrel going around the tree story with which  James opens the second chapter of Pragmatism.  It's a great story, but it seems, from my experience, to itself provoke as much disagreement and puzzlement as the squirrel and the man themselves do.

At first blush, it seems like a good verificationist story- a dispute about  two terms or hypotheses that have the same empirical consequences.  James's  point would be then be that the dispute is idle (as you put it in your  introduction, the campers are “arguing about nothing.”)  This seems to be  James's conclusion in the second paragraph, where he writes:  “If no  practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.”  That's fine, and this statement fits Peirce's example (in “How to Make our Ideas Clear”) of a cup of wine that is allegedly Christ's blood but gives all the signs of  just plain wine.

But James's conclusion does not fit what he says in the first paragraph,  where the point is NOT that there is no “practical difference” between the  cases but rather that if one makes the distinction between two senses of  “going around”  (i. e. passing north of,  east of, south of,  west of, vs. facing the belly, then the side, then the back, then the other side of the  squirrel) there is no need for disagreement.  That's because each sense determines a DIFFERENT, empirically verifiable set of consequences, either for the man himself (if he can catch sight of the squirrel's belly, etc, it being a narrow tree) or certainly for the observers, who can tell whether  the man is facing the squirrel's back or belly (is the squirrel standing?) or merely circling a squirrel who keeps his belly facing the man.

So, James misinterprets his own example as one in which there is no practical difference between the two hypotheses, when there actually is. In either interpretation however, the example is meant to furnish a picture of traditional philosophy, as (in the words of one of James's heroes, George Berkeley) raising a dust and then complaining that one cannot see. In this guise pragmatism is a critical philosophy or therapeutic philosophy, freeing us from pseudo problems.  There's also a positive side (e. g. his 'humanistic epistemology') that the example doesn't seem to exemplify.

Another puzzling thing about James's example is the question of what it has to do with pragmatism, or why we need pragmatism to tell us this?  As James points out, the idea of making a distinction when we encounter a (seeming) contradiction is an old one in philosophy.  It's a funny idea to invoke at the beginning of a chapter where one expects to learn about what is distinctive about pragmatism.

From years of teaching this chapter I've learned not to start with the squirrel example,  but to pass to other points he makes in this really quite amazing piece of writing.  Last spring I gave a seminar on the chapter in North Carolina and we had a very lively discussion about the squirrel example for most of an hour, with people disagreeing about whether James really did misinterpret his own example!  We didn't get much further however.  What do you think?

Fundamentalism, at least in its U.S/Australian Christian form is related to the outdated values and repressive code of small-town Australia; it has an inclination toward the lowbrow and the vulgar; is s marked by authoritarianism; is characterized by a lack of historical consciousness and the inability to engage in critical thinking; is identified by literalism, primitivism, legalism, and tribalism; and is linked to reactionary populism and the "paranoid style." Is this a liberal stereotype of fundamentalism as a "cultural system"? One plausible argument is that religious fundamentalism can be seen as a counter-movement, or backlash, to the onwards march of secularisation, a process which ultimately leads to the political and public marginalisation of religion in liberal democratic societies. Karen Armstrong writes in the Harvard International Review: Religious fundamentalism represents a widespread rebellion against the hegemony of secularist modernity. Wherever a modern, Western-style society has been established, a religious counterculture has...

Victor Burgin's Hôtel D (2009) is a site-specific piece consisting of a digital projection loop inside a box installed in a principle room of the ancient former pilgrims' hospital, Hôtel-Dieu Saint-Jacques, in Toulouse. Hôtel D comprises four components: the two actual spaces in the Hôtel-Dieu, an image-track and a soundtrack....

Supervenience-based arguments for moral naturalism have tended to apply only to moral properties, not to relations.  One might have thought that they could easily be generalised so as to apply to relations as well.  However, as I'll argue here, this may not be so easy.

In the case of properties, it can be shown that the following is a valid argument.

(1) The A-properties (strongly) supervene on the B-properties; i.e. for any possible objects x and y, if x and y instantiate the same B-properties, then x and y instantiate the same A-properties.

(2) The B-properties are closed under complementation and arbitrary intersections and unions.

Therefore:

(3) Every A-property is coextensive with a B-property.

(Of course, this doesn't yet establish that the A-properties are B-properties, but it's a step in that direction.)

Suppose, then, we try something similar with relations.  The natural way to revise (1), (2), and (3) so that they apply to relations instead of properties seems to be as follows.

(1*)  The A-relations (strongly) supervene on the B-relations; i.e. for any possible objects x and y, if x and y stand in the same B-relations to the same things, then x and y stand in the same A-relations to the same things.

(2*) The B-relations are closed under complementation and arbitrary intersections and unions.

Therefore:

(3*) Every A-relation is coextensive with a B-relation.

In this case, however, the argument is invalid.  The following is a counter-instance.  Let B contain only the four relations "is identical to", "is not identical to", "is either identical or not identical to", and "is both identical and not identical to".  And let A contain the relation "is taller than".  B is closed under Boolean operations, so (2*) is true.  And (1*) is also true: the antecedent is false whenever x ≠ y (because then, e.g., x is identical to x but y is not identical to x), and the consequent is true whenever x = y.  But (3*) is false: "taller than" is not coextensive with "is identical to", because nothing is taller than itself; nor is it coextensive with "is not identical to", because some things are not taller than some other things; and so on.

The pictorial turn is a shift from word to images and represents the way that there is an engagement with the visual in politics and mass culture and the visual media. We are not dealing with just pictures in this turn. The picture is the material object--what we hang on...

I often say 'leadership is innate' or 'leadership traits are genetic'.  But what does it really mean for a trait to be genetic?

It clearly doesn't mean you're a leader from the moment you're born.  Nobody takes orders from a baby.  Leadership takes time to develop.  So 'leadership is genetic' is shorthand for saying 'the development of leadership traits over time is genetic'.

Yet not everyone is a leader.  Some people crave power, attention (status), and resources.  But others simply want to be followers.  So 'leadership is genetic' is also a shorthand way to say 'some people have the natural motivation to lead' and others have an interest in following, due to genetic differences.  Social skills are also genetic and vary across the population.

Richard Arvey and Stephen Colarelli posted a nice paper about the biology of leadership that I'll refer to next.

Leaders (monkeys and college fraternity presidents) have higher levels of the chemical serotonin in their brains than do followers.  So 'leadership is genetic' also means that our genes direct the manufacture of certain chemicals in the brain that correlate with leadership.  The more of a leader you are, the more serotonin is manufactured in your brain. Having high levels of serotonin is correlated with 'social ease' and 'calmer behavior in problem solving situations' and conflict management.  Brain chemicals can have a profound effect on behavior, because the brain is designed (by the genes) to be affected by these chemicals.

OK, so serotonin is correlated with leadership.  But does it actually cause leadership?  In some cases, yes.  Again, quoting from the paper:  Scientists conducted 'experiments where serotonin levels were altered with Prozac ... In leaderless all-male groups, monkeys that received Prozac emerged as alpha males'.

Since serotonin is a simple molecule, there's obviously no inherent 'leadership' in the chemical itself.  So artificially raising serotonin levels must trigger a capability that already lies dormant in the brain. Any gene variant that regulates production of more serotonin is essentially a leadership 'master' gene that exploits this pre-existing (genetically constructed) brain circuitry.

Let's step back for a moment.  Clearly the brain has the ability to recognize when you've attained a leadership role, otherwise the physical production of serotonin wouldn't have an 'on switch'.  In other words 'leadership is genetic' is another way of saying that genes develop a region of the brain that recognizes (via your senses) that you're dominant, and upon that recognition, manufactures and distributes serotonin in your bloodstream.  A different set of genes constructs another brain region that detects serotonin in the bloodstream, and triggers the interest, motivation and calm demeanor.

This brings us back to the question, can anyone become a leader?  Do your unique gene variants cause you to become a leader?  Or do you become a leader first (by having the right mix of qualities) and then innately realize your status, which causes physiological changes (like elevated serotonin levels).

My guess is that correlation and causation are both at work.  Some people are innately interested in acquiring status, navigating power hierarchies, and grabbing resources.  Such interests emanate from the more primitive amygdala region of the brain when you are younger, and the specific skills you acquire from practicing those interests (in these modern times) are stored in the cortex, which is a more general purpose learning engine.  Again, 'leadership is genetic' because your innate interests - which derive from genetically constructed regions of the brain - motivate you to practice and acquire the culturally proscribed skills and expertise to wield leadership. Leaders are thus selected (not trained) for their innate traits and interests, even as their skills have a modern flavor.

But 'born leaders' don't always succeed, and once they recognize their loss of stature, their serotonin level decreases by the natural process.  On the other hand, some people are appointed (or anointed) as leaders through little effort of their own (like hereditary kings and emperors), and once their innate brain circuitry detects this status increase, their serotonin level goes up.

A challenge for all you computational neuroscientists out there!  How are interests and motivations manifest in the brain?  How can our genes guide the development of brain circuitry that detects we are in a leadership position, and, upon detection, reduces (or encapsulates) that experience into a simple signal - the serotonin molecule?

We are pleased to present the fourth installment of PEA Soup's collaboration with Ethics, in which we host a discussion of one article from an issue of the journal. The article selected from Volume 120, Issue 4 is Mikhail (Mike) Valdman's "Outsourcing Self-Government" (open access copy here). We are very grateful that Steve Wall has agreed to provide the critical precis of Mike's article, and his commentary begins below the fold.

Thanks to the editors of Pea Soup for inviting me to comment on Mikhail Valdman’s excellent paper, and thanks to Dan Boisvert for posting these comments for me.  I am not an active blogger myself, but I am an admirer of the high level of discussion regularly found on Pea Soup.

Mikhail Valdman’s paper advances a provocative thesis.  The thesis is that there is no intrinsic value in being autonomous – that is, there is no intrinsic value in running one’s own life and making one’s own decisions.  As he explains, the value in question is prudential.  His thesis is that the goodness of our lives need not be set back in any way if our decisions about how to lead our lives were turned over to an appropriate individual or committee.  Among other things, an appropriate individual or committee would need to be one that respected our deepest commitments.  What we want, Valdman claims, is not just to fare well, but to fare well on our own terms.  The upshot is that it is not autonomous self-government that has intrinsic value, but rather the leading of a life that reflects one’s deepest commitments and values.

Even if autonomy has intrinsic value, Valdman may be on to something important.  It may be true that a large part of why we value self-government is that we want to lead lives that reflect and give expression to our deepest commitments.  It also may be true that in discussing the value of self-government many writers overstate the importance of being a decider in relation to the importance of leading a life that is acceptable to us.  These more modest claims could be true, even if Valdman’s thesis were false.

Let’s call someone who believes autonomy has at least some intrinsic prudential value an autonomy proponent.  Valdman suggests that autonomy proponents must see at least some cost in outsourcing self-government.  I am not sure about this.  What exactly is involved in outsourcing self-government?  Valdman mentions two ideas.  We outsource self-government when we cede final decision-making authority over our lives to others and we outsource self-government when we cease to exercise managerial control over our lives.  Valdman’s discussion suggests that the first of these ideas is the more fundamental one.  But an autonomy proponent need not think that a life in which a person had ceded final decision-making authority to others is worse in any respect.  Suppose you cede decision-making authority over your life to a committee.  The members of the committee might think autonomy has intrinsic value.  If so, then they may decide, on this or that occasion, to let you make a less good decision when they could have effively intervened.  The committee retains the final authority to make decisions of this kind.  As far as I can see, the autonomy proponent can allow that committees that do this job well – committees that give proper weight to autonomy – need not impose any prudential cost on those over whom they rule.

Turn next to the second idea.  When we outsource self-government, we cease to exercise managerial control over our lives.  We no longer make decisions about how to lead our lives.  Others make these decisions for us.  Does the exercise of this kind of control have intrinsic value?  Valdman says ‘no;’ but his discussion at points suggests otherwise.  In responding to the objection that if we outsource self-government we will not really be living our own lives, Valdman reassures us that his favored outsourcing agency – the Personal Expert Committee (PC) – need not be especially interventionist.  If the committee intervened extensively in many aspects of your life, he says, then you wouldn’t be leading your life.  The PC, then, is designed to respect the decisions of those over whom it rules when their decisions are not mistaken.  But this suggests that there may be value in letting people making their own decisions.  So long as their decisions are not mistaken, people should be left free to make them.

Consider now the decisions we each face for which there is a range of options that reason does not rank as better or worse.  To borrow some terminology from Joseph Raz, call these eligible options.  The autonomy proponent can say at least this much is true.  It is valuable for people to make their own decisions about which eligible options to take up, particularly if the options in question are not trivial.  In doing so, they determine, or help to determine, who they are and what matters to them.  At one point, Valdman suggests that choices between options of this kind are arbitrary and so it should not be important that we make them.   But this is a little misleading.  They are arbitrary in the sense that reason does not require that we make them.  But they need not be arbitrary in the sense that there is no good reason to make them.  (Notice that the same is true of the deep commitments that Valdman highlights.  I might know that my deep commitments are not required by reason and I might know that if I cared about very different things my life would go just as well, but it would not follow that I have no reason to care that my life is one that reflects my deep commitments.)

Suppose it is indeed important for us to make our own decisions about which eligible options to take up.  This would require explanation.  It is well explained by the fact that autonomy has some intrinsic prudential value.  Now it is possible that autonomy has only conditional intrinsic value.  It contributes to the goodness of a person’s life only if it is not misused.  And it is misused whenever a person makes decisions for himself that are not optimal.  I find this difficult to believe, however.  If autonomy has some value in cases in which a person confronts a choice between two eligible options, then it likely has some value in cases in which a person confronts a choice between two good options where one option is only slightly better than the other.  Valdman’s PC, having already committed itself to respecting the decisions of people when they don’t make mistakes, might well have reason to let them make their own decisions when they do make mistakes, at least when the mistakes are not too egregious.

Valdman’s case for PC government, in any event, does not establish his thesis.  The autonomy proponent can accept PC government without reservation.  Still, Valdman is surely correct in claiming that many who value autonomy will think, special cases aside, it would be a serious mistake for a person to turn his life over to a committee that never allowed him to make a mistake.  Can more be said on behalf of autonomy?  Valdman distinguishes the PC from an expert committee (EC) that would impose values on you when it judges that this would improve your welfare.  Unlike the PC, this latter committee is not concerned with allowing you to have a life that is acceptable to you (one that reflects your deep commitments).

We need to ask what explains the evaluative difference between submitting to these two committees.  To appreciate this difference, we need to know more about how people come to have the deep commitments that the PC must honor. (I assume that deep commitments are actual commitments that people have.)  If a child submits to PC rule, then in all likelihood the PC will not govern in a way that differs substantially from the EC.  The conditions for the child’s well-being remain substantially undetermined.  By contrast, if a 30 year old submits to PC government, then it will be significantly constrained to govern in ways that reflect her deep commitments.  Yet I imagine that this would amount to an important difference between PC and EC government only if the person had come to have her deep commitments in the right way.  I won’t try to say anything precise about this.  I take it that if her deep commitments were the product of hypnosis or tampering with her brain, then PC government for her would not be preferable to EC government.  Here, then, is a suspicion: to explain the evaluative difference between submitting to the two types of government we need to appeal to the value of people being governed by deep commitments that have not been imposed on them – deep commitments that are, in some sense, their own.  And to explain the process by which people come to have commitments of this kind we need to appeal to past decisions they have been allowed to make for themselves.  Some of these decisions may be ones that involve identifying with certain aspects of one’s psychology, but others will involve making choices, such as what goals to pursue or what relationships to enter into, that shape the kind of person one will become.  These are the kinds of decisions the autonomy proponent believes it is valuable for us to make for ourselves.  If this is right, then an adequate defense of PC over EC government will need to appeal to the value of autonomy.  Moreover, the process by which we come to have deep commitments that are our own is, at least for most of us, an on-going process.  So, if there is a value to making decisions that play a role in determining one’s deep commitments, then there will be a cost to PC government.  The cost will diminish as one’s deep commitments become more fixed as a result of past autonomous decisions.

Two final comments can be made briefly.  Valdman often characterizes outsourcing self-government as a decision we make.  We empower others to make our decisions for us.  This raises a familiar puzzle about autonomy.  Can we autonomously surrender our autonomy?  Some autonomy proponents will answer ‘yes’.  They will think that a decision to cede authority over one’s decisions would be one of the most important, if not the most important, decisions a person could make.  And they will insist that it is vital that this decision be an autonomous one.  I don’t mean to endorse this view, but only to point out that it is one that is consistent with the claim that autonomy has intrinsic value.  Valdman’s case against self-government is cleaner if we imagine that we do not get to decide for ourselves whether to outsource our decision making.  Second, Valdman points out that many autonomy proponents hold that self-government has intrinsic value, irrespective of a person’s desires.  This is true, but the autonomy proponent need not be an objectivist about well-being.  She might think that to the extent that you care about not only faring well, but faring well on your own terms, then you have reason to value autonomy.  Valdman thinks that you can fare well on your own terms without making autonomous decisions.  An acceptable life will do the trick.  The autonomy proponent, who is also a subjectivist about well-being, can claim that that it is not so.

Michael Christie at Eurhythmania makes an import distinction between neo-liberalism as ideology and governmentality in his Governing the biosphere post. He says that despite claims that the Global financial crisis is the death knell of Neoliberalism, as a set of practices and techniques that are combined with forms of reasoning and goals, Neoliberalism continues as the dominant governmentality, if not as the dominant ideology. Then he adds: The distinction I am making here between ideology and governmentality is essentially a Foucauldian one, and it seeks to cut through the seeming paradox of an essay in which Rudd professes his social democratic beliefs, offering a critical genealogy of Neoliberalism, while his government continues to practice key Neoliberal techniques of governing our conduct, such as an unemployment services sector where the unemployed person is subject to a barrage of self-monitoring and self-governing actions designed to empower and enable them to make choices...

I've never really clicked with Nick Cave's music since from Her to Eternity ----apart from a dip into Murder Ballads but recoiled from the posturing, blandness and sexism of this kind of syrup: I have yet to hear The Boatman's Call or Nor More Shall We Part or Abbatoir Blues/The...

The photos taken at the recent Episteme conference in Edinburgh are now posted on the conference webpage, here. (NB. I'm not responsible for the taglines).

posted by Ken Taylor

Our  topic this week is social realities.  I must admit that when I first brought the nature of social reality up as a topic for an episode of Philosophy Talk, the non-philosophers on our team all went  “huh?”   That phrase obviously doesn’t mean much to the person on the street.  But  social realities are all around us.  Think of cocktail parties, football games, bar mitzvahs, political rallies, and even nations.  These are all social realities.  

 And in connection with this sort of thing both parts of that phrase “social reality” are worth focusing on. All the things I just mentioned are things that really and truly exist.  They aren’t figments of anyone’s imagination; they’re real.  Really real.  Objectively real.   But at the same time, they're all made up entities, at least in a sense.   Cocktail parties exist only because a group of people get together and say “we're having a party now.”  People just sort of decide that these things are going to exist.  And so they do exist.  Seems kind of like magic.

It isn’t really magic,  but it is puzzling.  At bottom, social realities are just creations of the human mind.  Not individual human minds, but collections of human minds.   You can’t all by your little lonesome create a social reality.  Try it and you really will end up with something that’s just a figment of your own imagination.  But put a bunch of people together, let them exercise their imaginations together;  let them agree; and presto,  you’ve got a new social reality. 

What could, I suppose, make that sound a little like magic still is the fact that it takes at least two minds to make a social reality. If one mind can’t do it, why are two or more minds any better, you might ask.  Well the answer is that social realities are, by their very natures,  founded on agreement.   If a bunch of humans agree to create a club, then there is a club.  If a bunch of humans agree to form a nation, then there exists a nation.  And although clubs and nations are nothing but products of human agreement, they're not figments of our imagination.  To be sure they are products of our imaginations, but they’re real products, not mere figments.  Once we agree that they exist, they are  as objectively real as rocks and mountains.

Not only are things like clubs and nations real, they are  really important.  They have a huge impact on our lives.   We’re immersed in a universe of ever changing social realities.  And they play an immense role both in determining how we live and how well we live.   Our earliest forbears foraged on the savannah and huddled in caves. Civilizations have risen and fallen and with them, ways of life have come and gone.  Throughout these massive changes in the social world, the biological and physical worlds have changed too -- but not as radically, and mostly in ways that are more or less direct consequences of changes in the human social world. 

So the social world affects not only the way humans relate to one another, but also how we interact with the rest of the biological and physical world.   Science, for example, is really a complex social undertaking by which humans collectively seek to understand the physical, biological, and even the social world itself.

Now scientific understanding of the social world sounds like a good thing.  But it also sounds a bit like sociology or anthropology or maybe social psychology.  We’re philosophers.  Why should we philosophers worry about the social world?

Well for one thing, we want to understand just how the social world arises out the natural world.  

But wait a minute, you’re about to interject. You started out by saying that social realities are a creation of the human mind.  Doesn’t that suggest that the social world doesn’t arise out of the natural world at all?  In one sense yes; in one sense no.   The sense in which the social world is not part of  unaided nature is obvious.  The social world depends entirely on us humans and not on the blind and impersonal forces of nature.  But ultimately human beings are just parts of the natural world.  So the power of the human mind to create social realities must have its roots in human psychology, which must ultimately have its roots in human biology, which must ultimately have its roots in physics.

 This may sound a little reductionist.  Afterall, I  started out talking about the power of the human mind to create, almost out of nothing, all varieties of new social realities.  And now I seem to be suggesting that it all comes down to the chemical processes of the brain.   It’s definitely got to come from somewhere.   It’s not just magic.  And besides, even animals have some limited power to create social realities.  It would certainly be good to understand just what equips the human mind to build social realities of such a wide variety and just how those human capacities evolv ed from lower level capacities of social animals,

There’s obviously a lot to think about here.  Fortunately for us we had an excellent guest for this episode -- Berkeley’s own John Searle, author of Making the Social World. 

I should say that this program was recorded in front of live audience at the Marsh Theater – this time in Berkeley, California.  As a consequence, you won’t be able to join the conversation on air.   But you can join it here.   

In The Great Mortification: Economists’ Responses to the Crisis of 2007–(and counting) in The Hedgehog Review Philip Mirowski draws attention to an obvious point since the global financial crisis that those neo-classical economists with their “vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system” got things badly wrong. They'd been caught with their pants down. Mirowski says: Economists have not comported themselves with much dignity of late. Normally so quick off the mark to ferret out and expose irrationality in others, currently they have been distinctly loathe to recognize a pandemic within their own ranks. I refer here to the outpourings spewn forth by the economists themselves, provoked by the numerous embarrassments that have been visited upon them consequent to the onset of the world economic crisis...General interest magazines, from Business Week to The Economist to The New York Times—previously cheerleaders for the economics profession—turned openly hostile in 2008,...

We are pleased to announce the fourth installment of our collaboration with Ethics, in which PEA Soup hosts a discussion of one article from each issue of the journal, and the journal makes a copy of that article freely available (for a limited time) to our participants.

Our featured article is Mikhail (Mike) Valdman's "Outsourcing Self-Government" (Volume 120, Issue 4).  The article is now available here.  We are also very pleased that Steve Wall has agreed to provide a précis of the article to introduce the discussion, which will begin next Monday, August 2nd.

Professor Valdman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University and specializes in normative ethical theory and political philosophy.  He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Rutgers University in 2003, and he has since published articles in a number of journals, including American Philosophical Quarterly, Journal of Moral Philosophy, Utilitas, Philosopher's Imprint, Bioethics, Social Theory and Practice, and now of course Ethics.  This upcoming academic year, Mike will be Faculty Fellow at the Murphy Institute's Center for Ethics and Public Affairs.

Professor Wall is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona and specializes in political philosophy.  His recent publications include “Collective Rights and Individual Autonomy,” Ethics (2007), “Democracy and Equality,” Philosophical Quarterly (2007) and “Self-Ownership and Paternalism,” Journal of Political Philosophy (forthcoming).  He is the author of Liberalism, Perfectionism and Restraint (Cambridge, 1998) and has co-edited two books: Perfectionism and Neutrality: Essays in Liberal Theory, with George Klosko (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003) and Reasons for Action, with David Sobel (Cambridge, 2009).

We're all looking forward to a terrific discussion!

The relationship between photography and industrial landscape has a long history. As early as 1959, Bernd and Hilla Becher began photographing the disappearing industrial architecture in Germany, and over the next forty years continued to document numerous blast furnaces, water towers, boilers, storage silos and warehouses in Europe and the...

Interesting story in the NY Times:

Recently, forensic scientists in California used a genetic analysis procedure called “familial searching” or “kinship searching” to help the police identify a suspect in the “Grim Sleeper” serial murder case — and they did so by using a DNA sample collected for another purpose from the suspect’s own son.

Lo and behold, [the suspect's] son had recently been convicted on a felony weapons charge, and his DNA offered a partial match to crime-scene DNA. And for the first time in California, that kind of one-degree-of-separation search ultimately led to an arrest.

The risk is that the police, while looking for a suspect’s family members, might intrude on people who have not committed a crime. Some lawyers call it guilt by genetic association.

According to Bernard Williams, what is true about relativism is that the more distant cultures are historically and culturally, the less willing we are to make moral appraisals that concern them. We don’t think that their ethical views are incorrect, and we won’t adopt reactive attitudes of praise and blame towards the representatives of these cultures - no matter how well or badly they behave. Yet, we do make moral appraisals of cultures that are closer to us in the history, and we blame their people for their evil deeds. 

There is then a challenge of giving an account of moral appraisals (I’ll focus on blame) that carves up the joints of history at the intuitive places. Here I’ll focus on three accounts: Williams’s, Miranda Fricker’s, and Tim Scanlon’s. I’ll then develop my own proposal on the basis of Scanlon’s view. 

1. Williams himself began from confrontations between moral systems. Such confrontations happen when the systems come to different practical conclusions about some acts. He then made a distinction between ‘real’ and ‘notational’ confrontations. There are two conditions for being a real confrontation. First, another system of beliefs is in a real confrontation with ours if we could, as a community, adopt the beliefs of that system. Second, we should also be able to make rational comparisons between our system and the other system we could adopt. 

Williams thought that this explains why we do not blame Greek Bronze Age chiefs or mediaeval Samurais. Their ways of lives are not in real confrontation with ours because we have no way of living them (and thus the first condition is not satisfied). However, Miranda Fricker convincingly argues that the first condition is too demanding. As a community, we could not today really live the Victorian system either but we can still blame the Victorians for many things (their sexist and racist attitudes for instance). So, it cannot be required for the appropriateness of blame that a past culture is in a real confrontation with our moral system in Williams’s sense.

2. Fricker’s own solution is more appealing. She suggests that one cannot be blamed for failing to do something if one is not in a position to access the reason to do it. The idea is that accessing moral reasons depends on one’s conceptual resources. These resources are provided by the standard, routine moral thought of the ethical culture in which one lives. Fricker then claims that one cannot be blamed for behavior which is a product of thinking that is routine in one’s culture. Of course, there are people who do exceptional moral thinking and thus rise above the culture’s moral failures, and one could in principle at any given time do such a move. Yet, if some individual failed to do so in the past, we can only be disappointed in him or her, but blame would be out of order. So, the routine moral thinking of a given culture gives a criterion for when blame is appropriate.

My problem with this is that, if I think of the cultures in the distant past, many moral reasons would have been accessible in routine deliberation for them, and yet I don’t think that blame is appropriate in the relevant cases. The histories of ancient civilizations are full of stories of murder, destruction, rape, torture, slavery, and so on (consider even Williams’s examples). My sense is that we don’t blame the agents who took part in these wrongdoings. Now, could the responsible agents have been able to come to the conclusion that these things should not be done by routine moral reflection? This may be a bit naïve, but I believe they could have. First, not everyone at the time thought that these were the right things to do. Presumably the victims didn’t for one. Second, everyone should have been able to think that there are moral reasons not to act in these ways – merely in virtue of being able to put oneself to the other person’s shoes. It’s not such an exceptional leap to think that causing unnecessary unbearable suffering to another human being is wrong. Yet it still doesn’t seem that we blame the people who lived in these cultures for their wrongdoing.

3. You might think that Scanlon’s account is especially bad for understanding blame towards the past. On Scanlon’s view, you start from the presumption that people mutually recognize each other as fellow rational beings. Such recognition enables one to see the other person as a source of reasons, as someone to whom one should be able to justify one’s actions. Likewise, one begins to expect similar constrained behavior from the other person. Now, if the other person acts wrongly, this can be seen as expressing certain demeaning attitudes that are incompatible with the ideal of mutual recognition. This changes the way in which one sees one’s relationship with the other person. In fact, for Scanlon, to blame the other person just is to modify one’s relationship to a more distant one, to be less willing to interact, and so on. 

This doesn’t seem to work well for the past. Scanlon begins from symmetric relations of interaction. Blame then is to remove oneself from such a relationship. But, we cannot relate to the past people in relevant way in the first place. There’s a paragraph in which Scanlon recognizes this. He says that the ‘content’ of blame changes when we think of people in the past. He writes: “As our distance from a person increases, blame becomes simply a negative evaluation, or attitude of disapproval, and even this evaluative element can seem pointless grading unless we have some particular reason to be concerned with what the person in question was like.”

I think this is wrong. It’s true that we may disapprove the people murdering and raping in the very distant past. But, we should not call this blame with different content. Mere disapproval is never enough for blame. Furthermore, the initial intuition was that we don’t blame people in the very distant past. But, if mere disapproval can count as blame, then it’s not clear why we shouldn’t disapprove everyone in the past alike, no matter how distant they are.

I think Scanlon should stick to the original account of blame and use it to explain our intuitions about the past. There’s a spectrum of relationships we have towards past cultures. At the other end, we have the past cultures that are mainly presented as curiosities in historically orientated museums. Towards them, we take a more ‘scientific’ attitude similar to the one we would to alien species. In contrast, other cultures closer to us in time are alive to us in a different way. Their art is also shown in the art galleries, and their philosophical texts are not only studied as history of ideas but also as philosophy which speaks to the problems we still struggle with. Their literature is not only seen to tell us about their times but also teach us things relevant to our lives. And, of course, there are many cultures that are located between these ends.

Now, assume that we are thinking of blaming people in past cultures as distancing ourselves from them. With the first kind of cultures, we start from a situation in which we could not do so. We have already placed those cultures in the formaldehyde of museums. Yet, at least with the cultures at the other end of the scale, the move to distance ourselves from them is always available. Instead of interacting intellectually with the given culture, we can always distance ourselves from them if we find out that their attitudes express contempt towards other human beings who are like us in most respects. This is why blame is available and appropriate for wrongdoing. The wrongdoers reasons for wrongdoing may express attitudes that were common in the culture and which make us distance ourselves from it.

So, if we think of blaming as severing our relationships to others (be they individuals or cultures), we can explain why blame towards distant past is inappropriate. We need to start from a relationship from which we can distance ourselves in the first place, and in the more distant past cases this precondition just isn’t satisfied. 

posted by Ken

Our topic this week is the irrationality of human decision making.  As philosophers,   I’m sure that John and I would like to believe that we make  decisions in a perfectly rational way.   Indeed, I’m sure that most people think of themselves as pretty rational decision makers.   How would thoroughly rational decision making go?  Well, first, you’d  decide what things you want, and how much you  really want them.   Second, you’d survey your options for getting what you want.  Third, you would assess the upside benefits and downside costs of each alternative.  And last but certainly not least,  you’d choose the alternative that has either the greatest upside or the least downside, depending on whether you were risk-averse or risk seeking. It’s pretty simple really.

 Decades of psychological research has shown, thought,  that although philosophers may be paragons of rationality  --  ahem, ahen – in fact most people  (and probably most philosophers too)  are pretty irrational in their decision-making.   People go wrong at every turn.  We aren’t so good at figuring out what we want.  Our preferences aren’t very stable or coherent.  We’re bad at assessing risks and reward.   You name it, when it comes to decision making, we’re bad at it. 

Here’s a little game you can play with a partner that helps illustrate how irrational we can be. Let’s call it Sellers and Choosers.  If you’re reading this alone and you want to play along,  go get a partner now and let’s play the game together.  I’ll be the referee. I’ve got two mugs – one for you, one for your partner.  The mugs are exactly alike.  I’m just going to flat out give you one of the mugs.   (I can’t really do that over the internet just yet.  But use your imagination and play along.)  Anyway, the mug is  yours to keep.  It’s a really beautiful mug and very well made.  Or, if you like, you can sell it.   No doubt you’d be willing to sell the mug for the right price.  So go ahead,  write down the price at which you’d be willing to sell your lovely little mug. 

Now as for your partner.   I’m going to offer your partner a choice.  I’m not going to flat out give her (or him) the identical mug.  She or he has to choose.   She has to choose between an identical mug and a sum of money.  How much money, you ask?    Well, I’ve written an amount of money on the bottom of the mug.   She doesn’t get to see it.    Instead what she has to do is write down an amount of money such that if she had a choice between the mug and the money, the choice between the two would be a wash.   She gets the mug only if the price she writes down as a fair price for the mug is higher than price I’ve written on the bottom of the mug.  

You may be wondering going with this and what it has to do with irrational decision-making.  Don’t worry, the punch line is about to come.   Here’s the thing,  suppose we run this little experiment thousands of times and put people in different roles – sometimes the role of Seller and sometimes in the role of a Chooser.  You know what we find?    Well we find that people in the role of the seller place a significantly higher price – like more than twice the price -- on the mug than people in the role of the chooser do.    What that means is that if  the mug is already yours (and you have to set a sell price)  you’ll think it’s worth a lot more than a similar mug that isn’t yet yours  (on which you have to place a “willing to purchase it” price.)  

One way to think of this is as an instance of loss aversion.  You’ve got your precious mug in hand and you don’t want to lose it.  It means a lot to you.   And so you set a very high price on it.  That is,  people tend to value things they already have and might lose, much more highly than things they don’t have, but could get.

That seems pretty irrational, doesn’t it? Go back to what I was saying earlier about calculating upside benefits and downside costs.  It looks like those calculations are highly skewed, depending on whether we’re talking about gains or losses.  That doesn’t make any sense.

We’ve looked at just one tiny little example of apparent human irrationality.  There are literally hundreds of experiments that demonstrate that people are massively irrational in the way we make decisions.   And luckily for us, we’ve got one of the world’s leading investigators of human irrationality as our guest this week. Dan Ariely, author of the bestselling Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.    

By the way,  Ariely has a follow up book out – The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home.  We’d love to have him back on the show to talk about the new book.  This week’s episode, though,  is less about the upside of irrationality than the downside.  But I think one can get a glimmer of how irrationality might have an upside by considering last week’s topic – loyalty.  From pure self-centered cost-benefit analysis, it can be hard to make sense of loyalty.   You might even call loyalty a form of irrationality.  But without loyalty (and trust)  all kinds of relationships wouldn’t be possible.   So if loyalty is a form of irrationality,  it may be a darned good thing that we are irrational in that way.   But that’s a topic for another show.  

I'm delighted to announce that Diego Machuca and myself are going to be launching a new journal devoted exclusively to the discussion of skepticism. It will be called International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, and it will be published by Brill from next year. Diego and myself will edit it, and Baron Reed has agreed to be the reviews editor. All philosophical topics related to the issue of skepticism will be covered, including its history and its application to particular fields (e.g., ethical skepticism, etc.). More details to follow once we have them.

Steven Shaviro in The ‘Bitter Necessity’ of Debt: Neoliberal Finance and the Society of Control refers to Gilles Deleuze argument that we are in process of moving away from Michel Foucault’s disciplinary society, and towards a new sort of social formation, which Deleuze calls the control society. The differences between these two social formations, we may say that, where the disciplinary society is closed and hierarchical, the control society is open, fluid, and rhizomatic. He says that: Deleuze carefully points out that “this technological development is more deeply rooted in a mutation of capitalism” .... He goes on to show how the transition from discpline to control is coordinated with the major changes in capitalism that other commentators have noted: the transition from the welfare state to the ne- oliberal state; from Taylorism to Toyotaism; from Fordism to post-Fordism and flexible accumulation...; from demands for obedience on the part of...

In "Down These Mean Streets" Will Steacy wanders through battered urban areas with a big camera (Canham 5x7 field camera with a 4x5 back on the camera) taking these images of abandoned buildings, burned-out cars, neon signs and local residents. An interview. Will Steacy, Detroit 2009, from Down These Mean...

A talk by Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science, on her new book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with...