Philosophy, et cetera

Read Anything on Kindle

2009-07-08T14:55:00.005-04:00

After a year of use, I must say that my Kindle has turned out to be even more useful than I'd expected. I used to read a lot on my (backlit, eye-straining) laptop screen, but I've now found ways to shift pretty much all my heavy reading on to the Kindle. Here are some of the most useful (non-obvious) tricks and tips I've found for extracting online content:

(1) RSS feeds: Use kindlefeeder to read your favourite blogs or other content with a full RSS feed (e.g. NDPR reviews). Highly recommended.

(2) Partial feeds: Alas, not all content providers are so considerate as to provide users with the convenience of a full RSS feed. If they provide a partial RSS feed (e.g. Philosopher’s Digest, and most newspapers), you can use Calibre to automatically track the feed and extract the full text from the website, though setting this up requires some tinkering at first.

(I should note that Calibre also converts text-based [i.e. non-scanned] PDFs to kindle format, which is a convenient alternative to emailing papers to your Amazon account for conversion.)

(3) Single pages: Other times, you come across interesting stand-alone articles, e.g. in newspapers, blogs, magazines, or the SEP. In such cases, you can use the Instapaper bookmarklet to instantly save the page. Instapaper then (daily or weekly, as you prefer) automatically extracts the text from your saved pages, and delivers them to your Kindle. Very useful!

(4) Multiple pages: Sometimes online books are rendered in html, but you probably don't want to save each page one at a time. Fortunately, it's easy to automate the process. For example:

(i) Use a website mirroring tool to download all the pages, and if you have (or create) a "table of contents" page that links to each other html file in the correct order, then Calibre can easily compile this into an e-book. (I did something like this to get Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics on to my Kindle last year.)

(ii) Alternatively, if the URLs are suitably systematic, you can use bash scripts to run a loop that downloads the text directly from each page in turn. For example, the following code extracts the text from each of "http://WEBSITE/p1.html through to p250.html, into a plain text file "book.txt":

for (( c=1; c<=250; c++ ))
do
 lynx -dump -nolist -width=800 http://WEBSITE/p$c.html >> book.txt
done

(You might then need to do a quick global 'search and replace' to cut out any extraneous header/footer text from each page, before transferring the file to your Kindle.)

(5) Scanned PDFs: see the instructions in my old post, JSTOR to Amazon Kindle.

Wanting to Improve (but not artificially)

2009-07-07T13:35:00.005-04:00

Robin Hanson recently wrote what strikes me as a rather misleading post, claiming that according to this paper, "the more people considered a feature to be a key part of their identity, the less they wanted to improve it." Various commenters on his blog offer cynical explanations for why this might be so, and other bloggers have since linked to Hanson's post, repeating the claim that "few people want to improve their empathy." Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), the scientific paper in question does not support this claim at all. Read the abstract:

Four studies examined young healthy individuals' willingness to take drugs intended to enhance various social, emotional, and cognitive abilities. We found that people were much more reluctant to enhance traits believed to be highly fundamental to the self (e.g., social comfort) than traits considered less fundamental (e.g., concentration ability)... Ad taglines that framed enhancements as enabling rather than enhancing the fundamental self increased people's interest in a fundamental enhancement, and eliminated the preference for non-fundamental over fundamental enhancements.

Now, while transhumanists may not think there's any normatively significant difference between 'artificial' enhancement and 'natural' improvement (through better nutrition, training, etc.), it must be acknowledged that the vast majority of people do see things differently here. So the mere fact that they aren't willing to take drugs to artificially enhance their empathy is not at all the same thing as not wanting to improve their empathy.

I don't see anything here to suggest that people wouldn't be willing to improve their empathy by (what they consider to be) more 'natural' means. (The paper even explicitly notes that people are happy to improve their empathy again so long as this is framed as "enabling" their true self to shine through, rather than externally imposing a new personality on them.) Am I missing something, or are some people just way too keen to be cynical?

Update: Note that according to Table 3 (at the end of the paper), only 25% of subjects reported that they "do not even wish to be better on this trait."

Philosophers' Carnival #93

2009-07-06T21:46:00.005-04:00

Welcome to the 93rd Philosophers' Carnival!

A new blog, 'Rational Imperative', introduces itself and what the contributors see as The Role of Philosophy. (Though they unfortunately repeat the common misconception that "academic philosophy [has abandoned] metaphysical and ethical questions." Grr.)

Russell Blackford argues against banning the burka -- and also, for that matter, bans on public nudity -- on grounds of individual liberty. (Though, as he notes towards the end, this begs the question how many burka-wearing women have a genuine choice in the first place.)

Kevin Lande explores how to understand people who affirm contradictory beliefs. Should we say that they really have inconsistent beliefs, or are they simply misreporting what they believe?

Avery Archer criticizes Setiya On Intentional Action, on the grounds that a theory of intentional action should extend beyond persons to also include goal-directed behaviour by non-linguistic animals.

Heine Holmen presents 'Knowledge in Explanation: A Reply to Avery Archer'.

Kenny Pearce posts a draft paper on 'The Homonymy of Predicative Being':

Aristotle famously claimed that "being is said in many ways." This has traditionally been understood as a claim about existence. However, the interpretation of Aristotle's theory of being under this assumption has proven problematic. In this paper, I argue for an alternative reading which identifies the core uses of 'being' as copula uses with primary substances as subjects.

Meanwhile, Thom Brooks seeks feedback as he re-drafts his popular Publishing Advice for Graduate Students.

The blog 'Minds and Brains' offers A Jaynesian Perspective on Language and Thought, describing an anthropological study supporting the conclusion that "changes in language, culture, and metaphor have profound psychological ramifications."

The Experimental Philosophy blog discusses experimental logic:

In cases at the vague borderline between 'near' and 'not near,' people felt that it was perfectly acceptable to consider an object 'both near and not near.' In fact, they were just as willing to say that an object was 'both near and not near' as they were to say that it was 'neither near nor not near.'

More intuition-probing experimental philosophy can be found over at Public Reason, on 'Distributive Justice in the Abstract and Concrete', which concludes with an interesting methodological question:

if our intuitions in the abstract case differ from those in the concrete case, which sort of intuition should we trust when we are actually doing philosophy?

Finally (inspired by a post from Tamler Sommers), I ask, what are the philosophical 'data' to be explained? Is it enough to explain the psychological fact of our having certain intuitions (e.g. that it's wrong to torture babies for fun), or might the content of the intuition -- the [putative] fact that it's wrong to torture babies for fun -- itself be a datum that requires explanation?

That's it for this edition of the carnival. If you have a philosophy blog, be sure to submit a post for the next edition, to be hosted by Parableman Jeremy Pierce. Oh, and we need more volunteers to host subsequent editions, so do email me if you're interested!

Normative Moral Concepts

2009-07-02T18:19:00.003-04:00

I'm interested in practical normativity, and hence the concept of what we ought or have most normative reason to want and to do. I generally use moral terms in this "all things considered" normative sense. (On this way of talking, it's analytic that we ought to be moral, but a wide open question what this amounts to.) Sometimes people prefer to use words differently, so that 'morality', like 'etiquette', has a fairly transparent (almost stipulative) content -- making it clearer what's morally required, but at the cost of making the concept non-normative. Is there a better way to understand the concept of 'morality', so that it neither collapses into general practical normativity, nor dwindles into normative irrelevance?

One option would be to define 'moral reasons' as a subset of our normative reasons. For example, we might say that some reasons are 'prudential', in the sense that the reason exerts its force for the agent's own sake, whereas all other reasons will count as 'moral'. I guess that's okay as far as it goes, and maybe there are some contexts in which this distinction could be philosophically useful, but for the most part I don't really see the interest in such stunted normative concepts. Why philosophize about a merely "some things considered" ought? To restrict the content of the fundamental normative concept is also to restrict its interest.

A more intriguing possibility is suggested by Parfit: perhaps there is a second primitive (undefinable) normative concept, besides that of a normative reason, for which Parfit uses the phrase "mustn't-be-done". The thought seems to be that certain acts have the primitive feature that they mustn't-be-done, which may create - rather than merely signal - a (decisive?) normative reason against so acting. The question whether this generated reason is decisive is just the debate over whether morality is overriding -- a debate that seems less substantive on alternative conceptions of 'morality'.

Utilitarians (like Egoists) might be best understood as nihilists about 'morality' in this undefinable sense of mustn't-be-done. Rather than offering a 'moral' theory, they offer a normative theory to rival morality. As Parfit writes (On What Matters, chp 7):

These people may be convinced that it matters greatly how well things go, and they may be strongly motivated and often moved to act in ways that prevent or relieve suffering. But they may be doubtful whether any acts are duties, or mustn't-be-done, and doubtful about blameworthiness, and about reasons for remorse and indignation. That is one way in which this form of Consequentialism might be an external rival to morality.

Some questions: Can you make sense of the indefinable, substantive moral concept of "mustn't-be-done"? If so, do you think it is applicable, i.e. that some acts actually possess this feature? Is this the best way to distinguish 'moral' concepts?

I feel like I have a slippery grasp of the intended idea (it seems very deontological), but perhaps it should ultimately be abandoned as senseless, or at least inapplicable. It may be easily confused with the derivative notion of an act that is prohibited on indirect consequentialist grounds -- i.e. an act that we ought to rule out of consideration. But this isn't a new primitive concept. It instead derives from the ordinary normative concept employed by utilitarians, simply applied to decision procedures.

The Deliberative Question

2009-06-23T21:54:00.009-04:00

What exactly do we mean when we ask the deliberative question, "What should I do"? It's surprisingly elusive. With a bit of work, we can pin down a behaviouristic kind of answer -- specifying when it's appropriate to offer and to challenge various responses to the question. But I suspect that in a more fundamental/philosophical sense, it isn't really a well-formed, determinate question at all.

First, note that we're not asking what would be objectively best. (Consider Parfit's Mineshafts case. You know that one of option A or B will save all ten lives, but the other will save none, and you don't know which is which. Option C is guaranteed to save nine lives. Clearly, the answer to the deliberator's question is "choose option C", even though this is the one option we can know is not objectively best.)

Perhaps we're asking (roughly) what would maximize expected value for the agent. This explains why option C is the answer in the ordinary Mineshafts scenario: relative to the agent's knowledge, it is worth 9 expected lives, whereas options A and B each have expected value of only 5 lives saved. But (as Kolodny and MacFarlane point out) this standard view has trouble accommodating our assertoric practices. For suppose Informant comes along and tells Agent that he's made a mistake, and in fact it's option A that is guaranteed to save nine lives, and options B and C that are the all-or-nothing gambles. Informant claims to reject (disagree with) Agent's previous answer to the question what he ought to do, and Agent himself seems likely to acquiesce in this by repudiating his previous response. ("I was mistaken to think that I should pick option C; really I should do A.") What's worse, we can further imagine an omniscient observer saying, "No, really he should pick option B -- that's the one that'll save all ten lives."

Here's the dilemma: is there a single, constant question, to which these various responses offer conflicting answers? Theoretically, it's difficult to see how this could be so. There's the question what maximizes expected utility relative to this evidence or that -- but these are different questions, so the diverging answers don't really conflict. On this picture, Agent should respond to Informant by saying, "Ah! You've changed my epistemic context in a most helpful manner. Granted, I answered my initial question [what ought I to do relative to my then-available evidence] correctly. But now I can ask an even better question: 'what ought I to do relative to my now-available evidence?' And, I agree, my answer to this question is 'pick option A!'"

(Compare ordinary context-dependent terms like the indexical 'now'. If tomorrow I say, "It is raining now," I won't thereby have to retract my current assertion that it isn't raining now. There is no single, constant question "Is it raining?" to which these are competing answers. There are only the more specific questions whether it is raining at this or that time and place.)

Unfortunately, when it comes to the deliberative question, this isn't how our linguistic practices seem to actually work. Instead, it seems, Agent will repudiate his previous answer, implicitly treating it as a competing answer to one and the same question (what should he do, period). My question is: does this make sense?

The relativist formally accommodates this behaviour by positing a semantics for 'ought' on which the truth of any token assertion 'Agent ought to phi' varies across assessors. We effectively end up understanding the deliberative question as having the constant meaning 'What should I do relative to the relevant evidence?' whilst allowing the relevant evidence to vary across assessors. Disagreeing as to what evidence is relevant thus translates into disagreeing about the deliberative question. But there's no absolute fact of the matter as to which evidence really is "relevant", and hence the correct answer varies from perspective to perspective, even when assessing a single token utterance.

I actually think that this 'relevant evidence relativist' (unlike the moral relativist) gets it right as a pragmatic account of when it's appropriate to make, challenge, and retract assertions. Intuitively, it seems appropriate for everyone involved to behave as if there was a single constant question here (unlike in the 'raining now' case). For example, it seems appropriate for Agent to initially judge that he ought to go with Option C, and then to retract [not merely "move beyond"] this judgment when faced with new evidence.

But does that really answer my initial question? I guess Wittgensteinians would think so -- "meaning is use", and all that. But intuitively, it seems like there's a further question here: not just about what assertoric behaviours are appropriate, but the more 'metaphysical' question of what is really meant, and really true.

If we think this is a genuine further question, we may be unsatisfied by the relativist's answer, since it seems most plausible that, strictly speaking, substantive answers exist only for complete or 'absolute' questions -- "Is it raining at such-and-such time and place?", not just "Is it raining?". The general question, "What should I do?" is likewise incomplete until we fill in the missing parameter of whose evidence we're assessing this against. Granted, we can offer a sociological story about how it's useful for a community to adopt linguistic norms that allow us to treat this incomplete question as though it were complete -- "disagreeing" in practice even when there's not really any substantive proposition at stake. But then it looks like this really is just a "language game", lacking in philosophical substance. (As MacFarlane himself concludes in 'Relativism and Disagreement': "From lofty philosophical heights, the language games we play with [relativistic words] may seem irrational. But that is no reason to deny that we do play these games, or that they have a social purpose.")

Really, we should conclude, there isn't any single question here. Strictly speaking, it doesn't really make sense for Agent to retract his earlier judgment. And the apparent 'disagreement' (of Informant or the omniscient observer), though "appropriate" according to the rules of the game, is - in a more important sense - philosophically empty.

Parfit on Epistemic and Practical Rationality

2009-06-16T23:21:00.031-04:00

My previous post argued that acts and desires can inherit the irrationality of beliefs on which they are based. Why does Parfit deny this? Here's what he says about the smoker who so acts because he irrationally believes it to be good for his health:

[I]t would be misleading to call my act practically irrational, since my mistake is only in my failure to respond to my epistemic reasons not to have this belief. It would also be misleading to call this act epistemically irrational, since it is not in acting in this way that I am failing to respond to these epistemic reasons.

We should not, I suggest, make either of these misleading claims. When some belief is epistemically irrational, this irrationality can be plausibly and usefully claimed to be inherited by any other belief that depends on this belief. But it is not worth claiming that some beliefs' irrationality is also inherited by any desire or act that depends on this belief... Our desires and acts are best called irrational only when, in having some desire or acting in some way, we are failing to respond to clear and strongly decisive practical reasons or apparent reasons not to have this desire, or not to act in this way.

I find this rather puzzling. After all, the fact that smoking is bad for your health is a genuine practical reason not to smoke (and, we may suppose, a "strongly decisive" one), to which the agent is failing to respond. So whether the smoker qualifies as practically irrational would seem to depend on whether this reason -- that smoking is bad for your health -- is sufficiently "clear" to the agent. But we have stipulated that this health fact is indeed "clear" according to the agent's evidence, such that they are epistemically irrational in failing to believe it. So why doesn't Parfit consider this a case of practical irrationality, by his own definition?

(Perhaps by "clear" he really means "believed", just as earlier he defines apparent reasons as "false beliefs about the relevant facts whose truth would give us some reason." But then we're missing any argument against the competing view that assesses practical rationality against evidentially "apparent" reasons. It sounds compelling -- undeniable -- to say that practical rationality must have something to do with the practical reasons we "appear", in some sense, to have. It's far less compelling to just assert that the relevant 'appearance' is found only in our explicit beliefs, rather than also being implicit in our evidence, and in what we rationally ought to believe.)

On my view, the smoker is making a mistake that relates to his (evidentially apparent) practical reasons. Granted, the mistake wholly derives from a prior epistemic misstep. But that doesn't mean that his mistake is "only" epistemic, since the epistemic error leads him to make a practical error: he smokes when he has clear practical reasons not to. The epistemic error becomes a practical error. That is to say, the agent makes an epistemic misstep that renders not just the initial belief, but also the downstream action, rationally unjustified or unwarranted. (Compare: in the belief case, I go wrong not "only" in believing that p and that if p then q; I am also rationally unjustified in my inferred belief that q -- though of course this rational error is wholly derivative of the earlier ones. There's a sense in which I haven't committed any additional missteps. But the flaw in my prior beliefs has "become" a flaw shared by my later belief also. The same flaw or misstep can infect - and render unjustified - multiple states. Since Parfit grants this in the case of beliefs, it's unclear why we shouldn't say the same thing in case of the practical "states" of desire and action.)

The best way I can make sense of Parfit's view is by attributing to him a distinctive method of carving up epistemic vs. practical rationality. I've been assuming that practical rationality is a matter of responding (e.g. acting) appropriately in light of the evidentially apparent [facts that would constitute] practical reasons. But note that there are two broad ways that one might fail to act appropriately: one might fail to believe the (evidentially) "apparent facts" in the first place, or one might incorrectly (perversely) interpret the normative significance of these factual beliefs. The former failure is the epistemically-derived practical irrationality we've been discussing. The latter is the more 'pure' form of practical irrationality found in malicious evildoers, Future-Tuesday indifferent agents, etc.

Now, I take it that Parfit wants to understand the latter, 'pure' kind of practical failure as the only genuinely practical failure. On this view, practical rationality is not a matter of "responding" (in my broad sense) to our evidence-relative reasons for action -- first noticing, then non-perversely interpreting them. It instead concerns only the interpretive element. We might say that (on this view) practical rationality is a matter of not being perverse. (Note that there's certainly nothing perverse about the smoker who irrationally thinks he's helping his health. The guy is acting stupidly, but -- given his beliefs -- hardly perversely. "At least his heart is in the right place," we might say. "Too bad he's such an incompetent fool.")

In support of this interpretation, I notice that Parfit later writes (in discussing an exception to the general rule that epistemic and practical rationality are independent) that "if we have irrational beliefs about practical reasons, and about what we ought rationally to want or to do, our having such beliefs makes us in one way practically irrational." This makes sense if by 'practically irrational' Parfit just means perverse. It's certainly true that someone who falsely believes that they ought to do evil (or be Future-Tuesday indifferent) is thereby "in one way" perverse. But merely having this belief doesn't suffice to make them practically irrational in the ordinary sense. After all, they might instead be rational akratics, and act entirely appropriately despite their crazy notions.

So, is this just a terminological dispute? It would be if Parfit meant his use of the term to be stipulative. But that is not the case. Instead, he writes:

I am using 'irrational' in its ordinary sense, to mean, roughly, 'deserves strong criticism of the kind that we also express with words like "foolish", "stupid", and "crazy"'. ... If we believe that one of two preferences deserves much stronger rational criticism, we shouldn't say that only the other preference is irrational.

So it seems we're disputing the character of a certain normative role (roughly: what makes an act/desire foolish). Parfit's view, if I've understood him correctly, is that perversity is what makes an act or desire foolish. I agree that this is one way that an act can be foolish. But an act can also be foolish in a way that derives from a prior epistemic error, as when an agent smokes for the sake of benefiting their health. If we believe that the smoker's act deserves rational criticism, we should reject Parfit's understanding of the epistemic/practical distinction. Perversity has an important role to play in our normative theorizing, but it isn't this one. Acts and desires can be foolish -- "deserve rational criticism", in the ordinary sense -- without being perverse.

Postscript: I think that what Parfit is really getting at here is a distinct but related role, namely, what makes a mis-step practical rather than epistemic. It's important to note that this is a distinct question from what makes an act or desire deserving of rational criticism, since -- as I've argued -- an act or desire can be foolish or unwarranted in a way that derives from a fundamentally epistemic mis-step.

Perhaps it's best to say that there are really two significant 'epistemic/practical' distinctions to consider in our theorizing about rationality. There is the ordinary state-based distinction between the rational status of epistemic states (beliefs), on the one hand, and the rational status of practical 'states' (acts or desires), on the other. Then there is Parfit's step-based distinction, between fundamentally epistemic missteps (stupidity), and fundamentally practical missteps (perversity).

What I've effectively been insisting is that an act might be irrational (in the ordinary sense -- unjustified and deserving of certain sorts of criticism) even if the agent's only mis-step was epistemic in nature. Contra Parfit, it doesn't follow that only their epistemic states are liable to rational criticism, for a single misstep may set awry multiple states, and an epistemic misstep may set awry downstream practical states. So long as we're clear on the difference, each distinction may well be "worth" talking about (depending on our purposes), and neither can be dismissed as necessarily "misleading" -- though of course either can be misleading, if conflated or used for the wrong theoretical role.

Inherited Irrationality

2009-06-11T17:29:00.004-04:00

Beliefs may inherit the irrationality of other beliefs they are based on. (If I irrationally believe that p and that if p then q, and so conclude that q, then this validly derived belief likewise lacks rational warrant.) What about acts or desires that are based on irrational beliefs?

Parfit (On What Matters, chp 5) discusses the case of a man who irrationally believes that smoking would be good for his health, and on this basis desires to smoke. I think this desire is irrational, since it should be clear (given his evidence) that in fact he has every reason not to smoke. This fact about his evidence makes the agent liable to rational criticism if he smokes: doing so is "stupid", "unwise", "foolish", etc. -- though of course the agent himself might fail to realize this.

But instead of assessing the rationality of desires/actions against the agent's evidence, Parfit claims that desires (acts) are rational iff they are based on beliefs which, if true, would provide sufficient reasons to so desire (act). Since if it were true that smoking is good for your health, this fact would provide sufficient reason to [want to] smoke, Parfit concludes that the act/desire is rational even though the belief is not.

I find this puzzling. Since it is irrational for the agent to believe that smoking is good for his health (and we may stipulate that there aren't any other relevant considerations), it is presumably likewise irrational for him to believe that he has any reason to smoke. He rationally ought to believe that he has no such reason, and hence that smoking is irrational for him. This normative fact seems to conflict with the claim that in fact smoking is rational for him. Consider the following principle of rational transmission:

(RT) if S rationally ought to believe that it is irrational for her to Φ, then it is irrational for her to Φ.

One might respond by arguing that the act only becomes irrational once S actually has the beliefs that she ought to have. That is, we should merely grant the weaker claim:

(RT-actual): if S believes (as she rationally ought) that it is irrational for her to Φ, then it is irrational for her to Φ.

Since the smoker doesn't have this rational belief, but instead irrationally believes that he ought to smoke, it may be claimed that in these circumstances it is perfectly sensible of him to go ahead and smoke. But that doesn't sound particularly sensible to me. (Sure, it's consistent with his irrational beliefs, but acting in ways consistent with irrational beliefs is not necessarily sensible.)

Parfit says, "Our claim should be only that, since these irrational beliefs are false, [the smoker has] no reasons to act in [this way]." But this seems too weak. Suppose the evidence is misleading and it turns out that smoking actually is good for your health after all. So it turns out that the smoker does have objective reason to act in this way. Still, his act is irrational (unwise, stupid, etc.) since all his evidence suggests that he would do better not to smoke. Even if he turns out to be lucky, we can -- contra Parfit -- still criticize his act. It wasn't rationally warranted, given his evidence.

Curiously, Parfit grants something close to this. He writes: "We should still claim that, when I want to smoke, I am being irrational, but the irrationality is in my belief, not my desire." But what does it mean for a person to be irrational "when" they X, but that the irrationality is not "in" their X-ing? We might take it to simply mean that they exhibit some (possibly unrelated) rational flaw at the same time as they X. But again, this seems too weak.

Suppose that I'm in the midst of eating dinner when I form the desire to smoke. It would be misleading to say that "when I eat dinner, I am being irrational". It's literally true, in a sense: I am being irrational at this time. But the irrationality is in no way related to my eating dinner. Rather, I'm irrational in forming the desire to smoke. There's an important asymmetry in the rational significance of these two events, which isn't captured merely by noting that they are concurrent with my having an irrational belief. The irrationality of the belief infects the related desire, in a way that it does not infect my unrelated act of eating dinner.

So it looks like we need to say something stronger than that the agent is "being irrational" merely concurrently with their wanting to smoke. The connection is tighter than that. They are specifically irrational for wanting to smoke (not for eating dinner, or whatever else they might be doing at that time).

It's true that the irrationality here is merely derived from the irrationality of the basing belief. So there's a sense in which the desire doesn't introduce any further irrationality that wasn't already there. (Unlike, say, if the agent had taken his irrational belief that smoking is healthy to be a reason for jumping off a building. Then his desire would be irrational in an entirely new and further respect.) But this is just like the uncontroversial epistemic case, where my concluding that q doesn't introduce any further irrationality that wasn't already present in my prior beliefs (that p and that if p then q) -- unlike, say, if I had concluded in some unrelated proposition r.

Inherited irrationality need not make you "more" irrational, on some global scale, than you would otherwise have been. It's just to say that the downstream states or actions lack rational justification, just like the upstream states on which they are based.

"Contributive Justice"

2009-06-10T23:53:00.005-04:00

[P]hilosophers have thought that justice is about what people get; I think it is about what people are able to do, particularly how they are able to develop their abilities, give back to society, and be respected for their contributions.

-- Paul Gomberg, How To Make Opportunity Equal, quoted in NDPR

I can't say I see much interest in "justice" talk, but if translated into a claim about welfare / the good life, this is certainly a sentiment I'm sympathetic towards.

Respecting Pseudonymity

2009-06-08T00:51:00.005-04:00

Hear hear:

Many people who first venture out into the blogosphere do so under the cover of pseudonymity, even if they later blog under their own name. There are good pseudonymous bloggers who really are in positions that make it so that they would not blog at all if they had no such protection. If those protections don't exist, if we do not protect the pseudonymity of others, that contributes to an atmosphere of hostility in the blogosphere, many good bloggers will be lost, and we will all be the poorer.

When considering these sorts of cases, people often seem to end up only focusing on the particular case at hand, and so determine whether the 'outing' was justified by assessing whether they dislike the outed blogger enough to trump his putative privacy rights. But it's also important to consider the broader impact, as Brandon highlights in the above quote.

We should want to uphold norms that enable pseudonymous blogging. The most straightforward candidate norm would be to respect a blogger's pseudonymity unless there's some pressing reason why the public needs to know their true identity (e.g. to expose sockpuppetry, undisclosed conflicts of interest, etc.)

One might propose a less accommodating norm, e.g. to respect pseudonymity only insofar as the blogger remains civil and inoffensive, and expose them if they piss you off. This may be motivated by the idea that if people want to engage in verbal attacks, they should have to own their words, rather than hide behind the veil of their virtual persona. Or, if retributivism isn't your thing, perhaps such a rule would have the happy consequence of reducing the amount of vitriol that gets thrown around online. People can still feel safe blogging under a pseudonym; they simply need to take care not to be jerks while they're at it.

The obvious problem with this proposal is that "offensiveness" is rather subjective. Is maintaining a polite tone sufficient to guarantee your pseudonymity, or might an opposing partisan decide that your views are substantively offensive, 'beyond the pale', and that you "deserve" to suffer real-life censure for them? If we grant everyone too much discretion in determining whether or not another's pseudonymity ought to be respected, someone is sure to judge poorly, so we'll end up with much weaker protections than originally intended.

So I think we're probably better off sticking with the straightforward norm to basically always respect pseudonymity (except in the very rare and uncontroversial cases of sockpuppetry and the like).

Philosophical Data

2009-06-07T15:03:00.009-04:00

I've previously noted that some of the deepest philosophical disagreements are traceable to differing assumptions about what needs to be explained.

A reductionist might assume that we simply need to explain the third-personal empirical data: e.g. the facts that we have certain brain states, make certain vocalizations, etc. They then deny the reality of any further philosophical phenomena (e.g. irreducible qualia, normativity, etc.) on the grounds of parsimony: none of that is necessary to explain the scientific data. You don't need to posit moral facts in order to explain the occurrence of moral intuitions.

That's true enough. I don't think scientific inquiry should lead us to believe in moral realism. But I also don't think that science exhausts all there is to know. The philosophical 'data' may be more expansive than the empirical data, since we may know things other than third-personal observational facts. For an obvious example, I know that I'm phenomenally conscious. This datum calls out for explanation. For another example: we can (I assume) also know various moral/normative truths, in which case the search for a systematic moral/normative theory would be well-motivated (despite the fact that it wouldn't help explain the limited subset of data that the reductionist exclusively concerns himself with).

There are also various facts about epistemic normativity which call out for explanation. For example, I take it as given that rational induction is possible. We ought to believe that an emerald first observed after 2020 will be green, not grue. Such differences in 'projectability' may motivate positing objective structure: arguably, the reason why we can project 'green' but not 'grue' is because the former property is metaphysically privileged in an important sense. It is a more "natural" property, in the sense that collections of green things are (in respect of their colour) objectively more similar than collections of grue things.

So, realists (of various stripes) will dispute the reductionist's limited construal of 'the data to be explained'. This raises the difficult question: how can we make dialectical progress in resolving such fundamental disagreements? Are there generally acceptable moves for supporting or undermining the inclusion of a particular claim as "given"?

It seems there must be some constraints here. Something has gone badly wrong with the person who takes the existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster as a datum. This seems like a belief that should be undermined by skeptical probing, if it does no essential work in explaining anything else. But then why can't the skeptic likewise dispense with any other self-contained cluster of beliefs (say, normative beliefs; or even empirical beliefs!), if they do no essential work in explaining anything else? What is it that makes empirical beliefs (and, arguably, normative beliefs) indispensable in this way?

I'm unsure what to say about this. My best attempt at an answer is to appeal to transcendental / "may as well" arguments. At least in case of epistemic normativity: anti-skepticism is a precondition for successful inquiry, so we may as well take it on faith. If we're wrong, we're screwed anyway; but if we're right -- if we have any chance at all of attaining knowledge -- then this assumption positions us to make the most of it. (Cf. Intellectual Black Holes.)

A similar argument applies to practical normativity: we may as well assume there's something we ought to do (then work out what it would be, and act accordingly). It's only on this assumption that our choices matter -- that we ever act rightly or wrongly -- so this is the only possibility that is worth taking into account.

It's less clear whether any such neutral justification can be given for the assumption of first-personal subjective experience. In this case, it's more of a Moorean fact: something we're more certain of than we are of any argument to the contrary. The inescapability thus looks to be merely psychological: there's little I could say to someone with different beliefs -- e.g. a self-identified "zombie" -- to convince them that they're really conscious. (One of my undergrad professors insisted that he has no idea what all this talk of 'subjective experience' is about.)

This shouldn't necessarily undermine the belief. We have little option but to reason from what personally strikes us as true -- even if others think differently, that shouldn't make it impossible for us to come to justified beliefs. But, on the other hand, nor should we want subjective certainty to suffice for justification: someone might be irrationally certain that the FSM exists, after all. The difficulty is that, at the bedrock level, there are no neutral arguments left to distinguish between the various positions. It looks like we must simply make a stab in the dark and insist that certain views (our own, if we're lucky) are brutely justified and others aren't.

It would be nice if we could say something a little more illuminating.

Manipulation and Rationality

2009-06-04T20:15:00.005-04:00

Supposing you want to calm down a raging bull. Is it "manipulation" to remove the red flag from the bull's sight? You're certainly influencing how the bull will behave. But it seems that you're achieving this precisely by removing a source of manipulation (in some sense), and so enhancing the bull's own self-control.

Or, for a human case, consider how we might move the chocolates out of sight, to where they'll be less tempting. Cases like this seem importantly different from, say, brainwashing ourselves (or being 'manipulated' in any problematic sense). What's the relevant difference? Arguably: rationality-enhancing influences (e.g. that counteract prior biases) are innocuous, whereas problematic manipulation consists in influence that detracts from our rationality and self-control. (What about 'rational akrasia'? Perhaps we should understand 'self-control' here as consisting in authentic rather than deliberate-judgment-driven action.)

If this is right, then it seems we shouldn't consider Sunstein and Thaler's "nudges" to be problematically manipulative (or 'Orwellian'), at least if done right. It's surely true that our heuristics and biases can be exploited in manipulative fashion (cf. advertising). But that doesn't mean we have to just ignore our biases. Better to counteract or accommodate them, i.e. set things up so that our everyday heuristics will more often succeed in 'nudging' us in the right direction (by our own lights).

Of course, the "if done right" proviso is a big one. I haven't said anything here to argue against pragmatic libertarian "slippery slope" concerns. I just don't think there's anything inherently problematic with intentionally influencing choices in the modest ways Sunstein and Thaler describe (e.g. changing from opt-in to opt-out organ donation). Like the bull with the red flag, we are being constantly manipulated by our environment into making senseless decisions. We should welcome 'interference' that serves to mitigate the stupidity caused by our natural biases, enabling us to make more rational decisions instead.

What should I be reading?

2009-06-02T18:25:00.003-04:00

It's time for me to start preparing for my pre-dissertation "generals exam". Probably the trickiest thing here is pinning down an appropriate topic and reading list for the exam to be based on. So I figure I may as well try appealing to the collective wisdom of the Internets (that's you) for advice. My (tentative) topic is 'evaluating non-ideal agents', insofar as this suggests questions like the following:

In light of our fallibility, should we have less credence than would be ideally warranted [arguably: 1] in logical and purely normative truths?

Is there a difference between rationality and reasonableness? (Might we fruitfully analyze the former as an 'ideal' notion and the latter as a kind of normativity more tailored to 'non-ideal' agents?)

Can purely normative ignorance affect what's rational? Praise/blameworthy?

If it is rational to commit to a policy, is it thereby rational to act on the policy in each instance? Is it praiseworthy?

What is the relation between (ir)rationality, virtue (vice), and (blame/)praiseworthiness?

Are the above (e.g. rationality or virtue) types of evaluation in conflict with ordinary consequentialist evaluations of character?

Is consequentialism self-effacing? Is the pluralistic motivational structure of "indirect" or "sophisticated consequentialism" coherent/possible, or does it collapse into crude subjective consequentialism (with its single ultimate aim)?

Does virtue consist in concern for the ultimate right-making feature [viz., maximizing utility], or just the surface [prima facie] right-making features possessed by typically utility-promoting acts [e.g. promise-keeping, respecting rights and autonomy, helping others in need, etc.]?

Follow the original link for further explanation, and for my first pass at a list of relevant readings. (Some I haven't read yet, so may be removed if they turn out not to be so relevant after all.) Please leave a comment here or email me if you have any further suggestions for readings I should add to my list!

(I'm also open to suggestions for tweaking my topic questions, though I'm less likely to change them in the absence of compelling reasons.)

Belief as a Hybrid Notion

2009-05-31T18:30:00.003-04:00

I'm always puzzled when I read philosophers who treat belief and knowledge as philosophically important states. I find it much more natural to think of [rational] credences (degrees of belief) as fundamental, and to define 'belief' derivatively as, say, "sufficiently high credence for the purposes at hand" (and, similarly, 'Knowledge' as Sufficiently Safe Belief). So understood, belief and knowledge are philosophical outputs, not inputs. Indeed, considerations of stakes-sensitivity suggest that they aren't even purely epistemic notions, but rather a hybrid of the epistemic (rational credence) and the practical (how much credence is required to justify certain actions).

To bring this out, consider the following kind of case. Sally from sales knocks on the door of an abandoned-looking house. Nobody answers, so she concludes that nobody is home and goes on her way. A few minutes later, Dan the demolition worker does likewise, and concludes likewise, only he returns to his wrecking rig to commence demolition. Fill in the background details so that it seems that Dan (unlike Sally) isn't justified in acting on the belief that the house is empty.

Now, if you think that all-out belief is philosophically significant, it seems you're faced with two possible interpretations of how stakes-sensitivity is affecting justified action in this case:
(1) It could be that Dan is, like Sally, perfectly justified in believing that the house is empty, but that the higher stakes of the situation render his justified belief 'unactionable' until supported on firmer grounds; OR
(2) It could be that the higher stakes render Dan's belief unjustified.

But surely it's clear on reflection that this is a distinction without a difference. The only real question here is what degree of rational credence is required to justify action in the face of this or that risk. We capture everything of philosophical significance by noting that Dan and Sally both have rational credence of around (say) 80% that the house is empty, and that this degree of belief is sufficient for purposes of taking your sales pitch to the next door, but not sufficient for demolishing the house and killing anyone who may still be inside. Moreover, it is in virtue of these practical normative facts that we may attribute justified all-out belief / knowledge (that the house is empty) to Sally but not to Dan.

Philosophical 'Meta-gaming'

2009-05-30T17:37:00.004-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Rosen's MR-Skepticism

2009-05-27T15:59:00.004-04:00

[I might end up expanding the following sketch into a real paper at some point, so any feedback would be most welcome...]

In 'Skepticism About Moral Responsibility', Gideon Rosen argues for the view that confident positive judgments of blameworthiness are (almost) never warranted. The argument proceeds in two parts. First he argues that blameworthiness can only originate in akratic action, whereby the agent acts in full knowledge of their wrongdoing (and its normative significance). In the second part, Rosen suggests that we rarely have sufficient grounds for confidently attributing such full-blown akrasia to agents who have acted wrongly. I will focus only on the first part of the argument, since this is where the main philosophical action takes place.

Why think that blameworthiness can only originate in akratic action? Rosen's argument is quite intricate, but the core idea is that non-akratic wrongdoing is merely done “from ignorance”, and is thus excused unless the agent is to blame for her state of ignorance. But if the agent also acted from ignorance in bringing about this prior state, then that act will likewise be excused, unless ... etc. The agent's excuses will only run out if we can stop the regress at a point where she acted in full knowledge of her normative error: that is, if she acted akratically.

More precisely: Rosen begins by distinguishing derivative and original responsibility for an act or event. For example, if Jekyll intentionally takes a pill that makes him berserk, then he is (derivatively) responsible for the resulting damage in virtue of being (originally) responsible for the negligent act of taking the pill. Rosen then claims that “an action done from ignorance is never a locus of original responsibility.” Let's call this the RAID principle (responsibility for actions done from ignorance is merely derivative). Rosen supports this principle by appeal to ordinary examples of factual ignorance, such as accidental poisoning. If someone secretly plants arsenic in my sugar bowl, it is not my fault that I end up poisoning you. But if I routinely store arsenic in unlabeled sugar bowls in my pantry, this prior negligence puts me back on the hook for causing the accident. Crucially, Rosen takes the RAID principle to be fully general, applying to normative as well as factual ignorance.

The RAID principle tells us that an act done from ignorance cannot be a locus of original responsibility. But any agent who non-akratically acts wrongly thereby acts from ignorance of some kind: either they aren't aware of the factual considerations that make the act wrong, or they aren't aware of the normative significance of those facts: that they make the act wrong, and that they thereby count decisively against so acting. If an agent were to know all these facts and yet still perform the act, then their act would qualify as 'akratic' by Rosen's definition. RAID thus straightforwardly implies that blameworthiness can only originate in akratic action. That is: for X to be blameworthy for A, A must either itself be an akratic act (if X is originally responsible for A), or else be the upshot of an akratic act (if X is derivatively responsible for A). To avoid this conclusion, we will need to undermine RAID.

In order to see why RAID is false, we need to clarify our understanding of 'original' and 'derivative' responsibility, which will bring to light two very different kinds of culpability in ignorance. In particular, I will distinguish 'diachronic' and 'synchronic' cases of culpable ignorance, and argue that RAID holds only of the former. The intuitive plausibility of the principle derives from neglecting the latter class of cases, which – we will see – provide ample intuitive counterexamples to the RAID principle. I will close by considering what Rosen might say about these neglected cases.

Rosen's loose talk of 'original' and 'derivative' responsibility suggests a picture on which responsibility is a two-place relation, between an individual and the acts or outcomes that they are “responsible for”. But this occludes some important structure which I want to bring to the fore. Responsibility is better understood as a three-place relation between an agent, an act of theirs (which I will call the 'focal act'), and an event (or set of events) for which the agent's action renders him liable. Intuitively: we are responsible, in acting a certain way, for various outcomes. The focal act is the exercise of agency in virtue of which we become liable for praise or blame. That is to say: it is the locus of original responsibility. But we can now see that there is no such thing as a locus of 'derivative responsibility', so that old distinction seems inapt (or at least potentially misleading). Rosen would have us say that Jekyll the pill-popping berserker is derivatively responsible for vandalism due to being originally responsible for pill-popping, but the “responsible for” locution is used here equivocally. It would be clearer just to say that Jekyll is responsible, in taking the pill, for the subsequent damage.

This makes it clear that (in the described case) there is only one occasion of Jekyll exercising his agency in a blameworthy manner. His berserk vandalism is not itself a blameworthy act (assuming it is an act at all), it is merely an event for which his blameworthy act of pill-popping renders him liable. (Notice that he would still be blameworthy in exactly the same way even if he had slipped the pill to an innocent third party who then went berserk in the china shop. The innocent person's berserk vandalism isn't blameworthy, and neither is Jekyll's. It's his pill-popping, in either case, that is the sole blameworthy action, though it makes him liable for downstream events – including the event of himself or others acting in berserk fashion.)

Rosen may grant all this, but ask why the terminological precision matters. Well, for one thing, it helps us to see more clearly what sorts of considerations are eligible to excuse the agent. Sometimes ignorance is a legitimate excuse, but only if it is concurrent with the focal act. It would clearly be absurd for an agent to plead innocence on the grounds that, despite knowing full well the risks of their action as they performed it, they later forgot this (by the time the risked outcome actually eventuated). And this remains true even if the risked outcome in question was another act of theirs. Granted, their ignorance – like Jekyll's incapacity – might excuse the downstream act from qualifying as a second occasion of blameworthiness. But it obviously does nothing at all to excuse the earlier “benighting” act (to borrow Holly Smith's term), or to cast doubt on whether the “unwitting” outcome falls within its scope of liability (that is, as an event for which the agent, in performing the benighting act, became liable). So, in many of Rosen's examples, the kind of 'ignorance' involved – whether culpable or not – was never even prima facie eligible to serve as an excuse, at least insofar as we are treating the earlier act as focal. To properly understand the excusing potential of ignorance (and its limits), we need to instead focus our attention on cases of ignorance concurrent with the focal act or exercise of agency that is to be assessed.

Let's return to the original case of the accidental poisoning. We can imagine two very different ways in which an agent might be 'culpable'¹ for their failure to recognize the risk of arsenic poisoning. In one case, the culpability is wholly 'diachronic': suppose I planted the arsenic myself, and then took a pill that wiped my memory of this event. My subsequent decision to spoon white powder (now reasonably believed to be sugar) into your tea is itself an intrinsically innocent, blameless act. As in the Jekyll case, it is only my earlier 'benighting' action that is blameworthy (and renders me liable for the eventuating damages). This sort of case supports the RAID principle, which effectively claims that actions done from ignorance are never themselves blameworthy [qua act], but are at most events which some earlier blameworthy act may render us liable for.

Alternatively, we can imagine a case of 'synchronically' culpable ignorance, where my unwitting poisoning no longer seems even intrinsically wholly innocent. Suppose my roommate left the arsenic in a labeled bowl in the pantry. When I grab what looks like a sugar bowl, my eyes flit briefly over the label ('arsenic'), without fully taking it in or consciously registering the significance of this. Further suppose that the reason why I don't fully process the visual evidence available to me is just because I don't really care very much about you. Maybe I even want you dead, on some subconscious level. In any case, we can stipulate that there is evidence available to me that the bowl contains arsenic, and my ignorance depends upon my callous disregard for your welfare. If I cared more, as I morally ought to – or if I had all the beliefs that I rationally ought to, given my evidence – then I would never have so thoughtlessly spooned the white powder into your tea. I didn't appreciate the risk at the time, but I should have,² and so in this sense my ignorance is 'synchronically culpable'. Intuitively, in this sort of case, I am still blameworthy in acting so thoughtlessly. Unreasonable ignorance does not (fully) excuse.

We thus have a counterexample to the RAID principle. It may be true that acts done from merely diachronically culpable ignorance, being intrinsically (synchronically) reasonable, are never blameworthy. But, intuitively, it looks like we can be blameworthy – 'originally responsible' – in acting from 'synchronically culpable' or unreasonable ignorance. So the fully general RAID principle lacks intuitive support after all, leaving us with no reason to think that blameworthiness must originate in akratic action. It can just as well originate in unreasonable action. And note that even if we're rarely in a position to attribute akrasia to wrongdoers, we're very often in a position to know that they acted unreasonably. Hence Rosen's argument fails.

At this point, Rosen might respond by giving up his claim to ordinary case-based intuitions, and instead seeking to defend RAID on purely theoretical grounds. As he observes in a footnote, it's one thing to say that a person “should have known better”, and another to say that they are culpable for this failure. So he at least has the theoretical resources to coherently reject the commonsense view gestured at in my previous paragraph. It just remains to motivate his more radical view. As with most skeptical arguments, this will require appealing to intuitive-sounding abstract principles (rather than cases). Here are two that together imply RAID:

“If X does A from ignorance, then X is culpable for the act only if he is culpable for the ignorance from which he acts.”
“X is culpable for failing to know that P only if his ignorance is the upshot of some prior culpable act or omission.”

Why believe (2)? It follows from the general principle that only acts (including mental acts, but excluding internal 'occurrences' with respect to which we are 'passive') are eligible to serve as loci of responsibility. Since ignorance isn't an exercise of agency – something you do – it can't be a site of blameworthiness. At most, it can be an outcome that some prior act made you liable for. (It may also indicate that one is vicious, much as a brain scan might, but to be a bad person is not yet to be blameworthy, since the latter kind of evaluation concerns what you've done.)

Suppose we grant all that. Why would we then accept (1)? It might be confused with the more plausible claim that reasonable ignorance excuses, and hence that an act done from ignorance is blameworthy only if the agent was unreasonable in believing as they did. But (1) is a much stronger claim since, we are supposing, even unreasonable ignorance can't originate blameworthiness. Even so, we may still think that an act done from unreasonable ignorance, manifesting a lack of good will (in case of motivated ignorance), may yet serve as a locus of blameworthiness. If we think this is possible – as certainly appears to be the case in the 'synchronic' cases I've highlighted – then we will reject (1).

Our final assessment of skeptical arguments typically depends on whether we are more inclined to trust intuitions about cases or abstract theoretical principles (e.g. that knowledge requires certainty, that an epistemic [e.g. inductive] rule cannot justify itself, etc.). In this instance, though premise (1) may be prima facie plausible-sounding, I think that once we see understand what it actually claims, and how radically opposed it is to our ordinary case-based intuitions, we should simply reject it as unmotivated.

1In a broad sense; we'll later see that this isn't quite the right term.

2Limitations of space prevent me from further exploring whether it is the moral or the epistemic vice that is relevant here. I will use the term “reasonable” broadly to cover both kinds of normativity. I should also mention that the alternative label 'synchronic culpability' turns out, as explained below, to be something of a misnomer.

Hedonism vs. Qualia Preferentism

2009-05-19T18:28:00.002-04:00

It's worth distinguishing 'happiness' (positively valenced experience) from preferred experience. For example, an ascetic monk may wish to avoid strongly valenced experiences, or a self-loathing individual might even want to feel miserable (i.e. have negatively valenced experiences). More interestingly, we might feel attached to our current tastes (hedonic likings), and so be averse to the idea of inducing satisfactions of other tastes.

Imagine, for example, an aesthete who loves opera and fine wine, and utterly detests Britney Spears and cheap bubbly. Suppose a mad scientist offered to rewire their tastes and have them enjoy listening to Britney for hours on end. It's entirely conceivable that the aesthete would find this prospect abhorrent. While acknowledging that he would - in the proposed scenario - be deluded into experiencing great happiness, from his actual perspective the aesthete strongly prefers not to undergo this experience. He prefers not to enjoy the experience of listening to crap.

Is this preference unreasonable? I think that Derek Parfit may be committed to saying so. Parfit holds that hedonic likings and dislikings (unlike desires) are not responsive to reasons. They are simply brute psychological facts. We can have reason to want to like fine wine, if it has a greater potential for intense liking/enjoyment than does cheap bubbly. But there is no reason to like fine wine (any more than there are reasons to bleed), if 'liking' is a brute, reasons-insensitive state: something that happens to us, rather than something we do.

Anyway, if Parfit is right that there are no reasons for liking aesthetically superior objects more, then it's hard to see why we should care about the objects, as opposed to the intensities, of our likings. That is, it looks like the only reason to want to like fine wine more is insofar as it would yield a more intense liking. This might seem to devalue aesthetic evaluation. Beethoven's symphonies no longer merit appreciation. They're just cheesecake. Really, really enjoyable cheesecake. And if you could find Britney just as enjoyable, then that would be just as good.

I wonder about applying this to the moral case. It seems intrinsically bad to derive pleasure from others' suffering (even if you reflectively prefer that others not suffer, and would never act to cause suffering, or anything like that). If a mad scientist offered to rewire your tastes to make you enjoy child porn, say, that would seem very undesirable indeed (and again, I think, not just on instrumental grounds -- though that would surely be part of it). Are these intuitions mistaken?

Internalized Contingent Norms

2009-05-17T18:03:00.003-04:00

People sometimes seem to have 'absolutist' deontological intuitions. For example, they may object to consequentialism on the grounds that there are possible circumstances in which it would mandate murdering innocent civilians (if this would in fact serve the greater good). A standard consequentialist response is to say, "I'm glad you're so strongly opposed to murdering innocent people. I am too. This is a good (utility-promoting) attitude for people in our world to have, and I suspect it is really this 'local' (contingent) moral fact that your intuition is latching on to. So that's no reason to doubt the consequentialist's claim that there are other possible worlds, wildly different from ours, in which this norm would no longer apply." Is this a legitimate response?

There seems something a bit suspicious about reinterpreting someone else's intuitions for them. (Anne: "You're not really intuiting that murder is necessarily wrong." Bill: "Eh? Since when did you become a mind-reader?") Each individual is, of course, the final authority when it comes to their own intuitions. Still, there's nothing wrong with highlighting the differences between two easily conflated claims, and so encourage others to carefully re-assess whether their intuition is really of the one or the other. I think that the sorts of scenarios discussed in my post 'The Contingent Right to Life' should convince most people that the ordinary norms they've internalized only hold contingently, just as indirect utilitarians claim.

(There might be the odd absolutist holdout, but you can never convince everyone. The important thing, I take it, is to explain how consequentialism needn't be at odds with ordinary intuitions, which I think mostly just concern what moral norms apply in ordinary circumstances.)

Confusing Welfare and Happiness

2009-05-15T23:48:00.012-04:00

Larry Solum "highly recommended" the paper 'Welfare as Happiness' by legal scholars Bronsteen, Buccafusco and Masur. I'm not sure why. As Solum himself explains in a follow-up post, the paper's main argument (that hedonism must be true because our lives are constituted by subjective experiences, and hence nothing can affect our life unless it affects our experiences) rests on an equivocation. Much of the paper continues in this vein. For example:

What it means for something to be a bad experience for an individual is for it to make the individual feel bad. Negative feelings define bad life experiences, whereas positive feelings define good ones.

It could be argued that whether a moment is positive or negative for a person does not depend solely on that person's physiological experience of it. Indeed, disagreeing with our thesis may well require such an argument. But what else could make it positive or negative?

This passage neglects the fact that there are two different things we might mean in talking of 'bad life experiences'. We might mean to talk of subjectively unpleasant experiences, as the authors do. (But then their claims are tautological, when surely they had hoped to establish a substantive conclusion.) Alternatively, we might mean to talk of a life experience (or event) that was bad for you, i.e. undesirable for your sake. For a possible example of the latter, consider the experience of being subtly mocked (without realizing it). Though the undesirable feature of this circumstance is not subjectively transparent to you, nonetheless you (and others who care about you) generally have reason to hope that no such event actually befall you -- or so one might plausibly claim. This is the substantive question of welfare, which the authors fail to address or - it seems - even recognize.

In Solum's follow-up post, the authors set out their core argument as follows:

each of us has a veil of experience, and anything that happens outside that veil of experience and never affects it (even indirectly) has no effect on our lives.

Here they appear to confuse the metaphysical question whether an event "affects" you, in the sense of altering your intrinsic properties, with the normative question of welfare: whether it "affects" you in the sense of being an event that you have self-interested reasons to care about. (In fairness, I think even Shelly Kagan may have once made a similar mistake.) These are wildly different questions, and if one thinks that they are linked in any way, this would require substantial argument. It is far from obvious that welfare supervenes on our intrinsic properties. (Presumably only hedonists will believe this.) Sometimes people talk of one's "life" or "life story" in a broader sense that includes all of the external events and relations that could conceivably be relevant to assessing one's life along any dimension (one's success, popularity, and - of course - welfare). It would then follow trivially that one's welfare supervenes on the intrinsic properties of one's "life" in this broad sense. But this is compatible with any of the main theories of welfare, since one's "life" in this broad sense includes all manner of external events and relations.

I was also struck by the authors' self-defeating arguments against objectivism. Consider the following:

According to the objectivist view, not only don't the individuals know what's good for them, but their view of what's good for themselves doesn't determine what's good for them--no matter how considered or accurate (in terms of happiness) a view it is.

But the authors' own view is no different in this regard. They are hedonists, not preferentists. Even if I care about truth more than happiness, the authors will paternalistically insist that happiness is in fact what's good for me. For them, individuals' own views of "what's good for themselves" are strictly irrelevant -- no matter how "considered" and well-informed our self-regarding preferences might be. (Of course, even preferentists think that people might have false beliefs about welfare: some people believe the competing theories, after all! But there's no avoiding that.)

Their main objection to preferentism is that people may have preferences about distant events that are intuitively irrelevant to their welfare. (They mention 'Sheila the environmentalist', who passively hopes that a rare foreign squirrel avoids extinction.) But this merely shows that preferentists need to restrict which desires count in determining one's welfare, say to those that concern one's own "life story". One might wish to critically examine whether various such proposed restrictions are sufficiently well-defined and non-circular to do the job. But the only such view that the authors consider is the explicitly circular view according to which only "self-interested" preferences count for determining your self-interest. They then respond:

A self-interested, restricted theory of welfare demands that the individual actually receive some benefit before one can say that her welfare has increased; this conception of "benefit" is rendered meaningless unless the individual actually experiences the benefit. To claim otherwise--to argue that an individual's welfare can improve without that improvement registering subjectively--is to welcome Sheila and her Sri Lankan squirrel back into the fold.

But this is effectively just to assert that no independent restriction can be found. There's no argument here, and they appear completely oblivious to the fact that philosophers like Derek Parfit (with his "success theory") have actually proposed some prima facie plausible candidates for this role -- proposals that they're really obliged to engage with. It's extremely frustrating.

[Compare 'psychologists mangling philosophy'. As a general rule, if you're going to attempt scholarly work that's beyond your disciplinary expertise, it would seem wise to consult with a colleague from the relevant discipline, so that they might flag these sorts of problems.]

Stakes and Sakes

2009-05-15T02:25:00.005-04:00

What does it mean to talk of individual interests or welfare? To expand on my earlier post, I think we need to distinguish descriptive and normative concepts in this vicinity. For example, there's a purely description notion of biological interests or natural "flourishing" that has no inherent normative significance (at least prima facie). On the other hand, I suggested, we can understand a genuinely normative sense of 'interests' as meaning something like what's desirable for the sake of an individual (where being 'desirable for the sake of S' does not immediately entail being desirable tout court). This requires some clarification.

For one thing: talk of X being 'desirable for the sake of S' naturally suggests the following two-part interpretation: (i) you have reason to desire X, and (ii) S is the normative source of this reason.

But this interpretation is no good, for it makes it impossible to express non-benevolent views like egoism, according to which we have no reason to care about others' interests. Such views may be false, but they should at least be coherently expressible. So we had better not analyze 'interests' in such a way as to rule out egoism from the start. Instead, we need to pin down the sense in which an egoist might allow that X is - or would be - "desirable for S's sake", without thereby committing himself to thinking that he, personally, has any reason to want it.

A promising answer, I think, is to combine the modal and normative senses of 'desirable'. The modal sense means "can be desired". The normative sense means "should be desired" -- or at least that there's some reason to desire the object. The hybrid view I have in mind thus concerns whether there can be reason to desire X for S's sake (i.e., at least for agents who care about S). This seems to solve the problem: an egoist can agree that anyone who cares about S thereby [for S's sake] has a reason to desire X, without thereby committing himself to having such reasons, since he personally may not care about S. (This analysis also seems to satisfy the other desideratum motivating my previous post, namely, that plants and other non-sentients don't have normative interests. Even if you care about plants, they just aren't capable of sourcing reasons in this way. You may have reason to tend to your garden, but it will be for your own sake, rather than the plants'.)

But now consider a second puzzle: mightn't we act for another's sake, in a way that's independent of the other's welfare? I especially have in mind symbolic acts expressing "respect" for another's deepest concerns. Once we recognize the distinction between 'Good To' and 'Good For', the following possibility arises: I might, out of respect for S, be motivated to promote some end that is a good to her (i.e. something she values), though it is not good (or bad) for her.

For example, suppose Sally cares passionately about philosophy. After Sally dies, Bob might honour Sally's memory by making a donation to promote philosophical education. He does not thereby think that he is making Sally better off. (She's dead, and even if we accept a 'success theory' of welfare that allows for posthumous benefits, we can stipulate that this action doesn't affect the success of Sally's life efforts.) Nevertheless, there seems a clear sense in which he's acting for Sally's sake. Is this a counterexample to my analysis?

Maybe. I'm not entirely sure what to think of this, so I'd welcome your thoughts. Here's a tentative response: perhaps Bob is like the gardener. Although motivated by considerations outside of himself (plants, or Sally's memory), those considerations aren't really capable of sourcing reasons, so any reason for Bob to so act instead stems from elsewhere (perhaps from Bob himself). Consider the question: 'Why is it good for Bob to honour Sally's memory in this way -- who benefits?' We may think this is just another way of asking, for whose sake does the reason exert its normative force? And the answer is presumably not 'Sally', since we have already stipulated that she does not benefit posthumously. It might be 'Bob', or it might be 'the world as a whole' (on this view: such moral acts make the world a better place, independently of the welfare of the individuals in it).

A third and final puzzle: mightn't we have reasons to act for the sakes of impersonal entities? I can easily imagine being motivated by my love of philosophy, for example. And it seems plausible that such acts will often be normatively justified. But wouldn't it seem a category mistake to say that the discipline of philosophy has welfare interests? Perhaps. But we may doubt that my motivating reason is itself the normative reason here. As in the case of Bob, it might instead be that any normative reason in this case is sourced either in myself, or in 'the world as whole'.

Even so, isn't 'the world as a whole' itself an impersonal entity? So if I think it might ultimately ground moral reasons, doesn't my earlier analysis then imply that the world has interests? This seems very strange. But then, 'the world' is an odd sort of entity. It might be better to instead say that such reasons rely on no particular (contingent) source at all, so that talk of 'the world' here is just a verbal convenience. (As the term 'zero' illustrates, it can be useful to talk of nothing as a kind of something, so long as we are careful not to be misled.) For a reason to exert its normative force 'for the sake of the world' is just for the reason to exert brute normative force, without needing this to be "grounded" in anything else (in particular, the interests of any being).

But I'm not sure how plausible this all sounds...

Suffocating Significance

2009-05-12T22:36:00.003-04:00

Hilzoy is, as usual, spot on:

This is an instance of something that generally bothers me about many discussions of politics: the assumption that political figures are not doing things for normal human reasons, but should instead be seen as communicating in a sort of code. Everything they do has a symbolic meaning: it's a symbol of disrespect for this, or craven obedience to that, or whatever; and if we want to understand them, we should not try to figure out why some comprehensible human being might have done what they did, but try to crack this code.

This is, in my view, silly. It's what leads to things like outrage over Obama's shaking hands with Hugo Chavez: if you view that handshake as the normal civil response to someone's extending his hand to you, it seems completely innocuous; but if you see it as a Fraught With Meaning, it looks like a sign that Obama thinks that Chavez is a wonderful guy.

I'm reminded of Nagel on Cultural Liberalism (original here):

Forty years ago the public pieties were patriotic and anticommunist; now they are multicultural and feminist. What concerns me is not the content but the character of this kind of control: Its effect is to make it difficult to breathe, because the atmosphere is so thick with significance and falsity...

Liberalism should favor the avoidance of forced choices and tests of purity, and the substitution of a certain reticence behind which potentially disruptive disagreements can persist without breaking into the open, and without requiring anyone to lie. The disagreements needn't be a secret -- they can just remain quiescent.

Back to Hilzoy:

If we wish to construe anything other than clear expressions of disdain or horror as "legitimizing" Chavez, we deprive politicians of the option of being basically civil and non-committal. Is there any earthly reason to suppose that narrowing their options in this fashion would be a good thing? That it would advance America's interests, or those of anyone other than people who thrive on perpetual outrage? I can't see how.

Zombies and Other Minds

2009-05-12T00:07:00.003-04:00

Soluman asks:

I wonder if you think there is any interesting connection between conceiving of zombies and approaching skeptical "other minds" scenarios...

His idea seems to be that, since the type-A physicalist thinks the physical facts analytically entail the qualia facts, they must think that future science will conclusively dispel skeptical worries about other minds. (All they have to do is establish the physical facts about Bob's brain, and it'll logically follow that he's conscious [if he is].) But it doesn't seem like the skeptical worries here could ever be conclusively dispelled by science in this way. (This is closely related to my 'New Knowledge Argument': some questions just don't look like they could be settled by facts of the sort uncovered by science.)

I guess the type-A physicalist will just bite the bullet and insist that science will surprise us here. But it's a nice case to bring out how radical the view really is.

Quick thought on reproductive ethics

2009-05-11T13:28:00.000-04:00

Everyone agrees it would be a good thing if fewer children were born into poverty (and more born into financial security). The ideal way to achieve this would be for no-one to be in poverty to begin with. That would help the older generation as well as the new. But the benefit to the new generation could also be achieved by another route: namely, by poor people having fewer children, and financially secure people having more children.

That's clearly an inherently desirable outcome (pro tanto, at least -- and 'all things considered' if it is achieved by morally permissible means, e.g. the voluntary choices of all involved). But I suspect many people would not be willing to actually admit this -- perhaps due to the perceived association with eugenicists and other "unsavoury" types. (But remember, Hitler was a vegetarian!)

Anyway, I was struck by this the other day in class when we were discussing an author who claimed the following asymmetry: that although there's some (epistemic) chance that in having an abortion we violate weighty moral reasons, supposedly nobody thinks there's any such moral risk involved in carrying a child to term (at least excepting rare cases of severe disability, such that the child's life would be utterly miserable).

I find it interesting that most people seemed willing to accept this claim without a second thought. Because it seems to me very obviously false. We have pressing moral reasons to increase the average quality of life of future generations. And one way to achieve that is for people in less fortunate circumstances to bring fewer children into those circumstances. This will help bring about less poverty, crime, etc., and that is surely a very good thing indeed.

(To preempt any misunderstandings, I'm not suggesting that abortion is obligatory. It would certainly be inappropriate to demand this choice, or to censure poor women who have many children despite the evidence that they will have worse-than-average lives. That's their business, not anyone else's. But insofar as they are trying to decide for themselves what to do about their pregnancy, I think in many circumstances -- e.g. so long as it wouldn't be traumatic for them or anything -- it really would be best were they to abort.)

Understanding (Zombie) Conceivability Arguments: Part II

2009-05-10T16:12:00.005-04:00

So far we have established that a legitimate conceivability-possibility inference must start from the ideal conceivability of a semantically neutral statement. The final requirement I want to discuss is that the statement to be conceived should be specified in transparent, uncontested terms.

What do I mean by a 'transparent' specification? I mean to exclude broad general terms (like 'physical' or 'non-physical') whose extensions might be controversial. This helps us to avoid pointless terminological debates. Note that it's a bit sloppy to argue, "Conceivably a world could be physically just like ours but lack consciousness, therefore physicalism is false," because it is unclear exactly what we are meant to be conceiving: the phrase 'physically just like ours' is too opaque: different people might take it to mean different things. [Plus, its invocation of actuality - 'our world' - technically violates the semantic neutrality requirement.] So, for maximum rigor, it should be replaced by a precise microphysical description P that - without making any explicit reference to qualia - is accepted by the physicalist as true of our world. We can then argue from the conceivability of (P & ~Q) to the precise conclusion that the qualitative properties in Q are not reducible to the properties specified in P, and so must be explicitly added as further primitives to the base facts.

It is important to note the precise conclusion here. It is not that Q is non-physical, or that physicalism is false. It is merely that Q does not reduce to anything included in P. Importantly, none of the premises say anything about whether P exhausts the physical properties. (We chose P so that the physicalist should agree that it does exhaust the physical properties, but that occurs outside of the scope of the argument itself. This is a vital point that I will return to.) So one could, in principle, respond that Q is a primitive "physical" property that doesn't reduce to any of the other ones listed. This "physicalist" will insist that a full specification of the physical base facts P* must include Q as a basic conjunct, in which case (P* & ~Q) will be straightforwardly inconsistent, seeing as how it would be equivalent to ((P & Q) & ~Q) for some P. Clearly, this "physicalist" is completely immune to refutation by the kind of conceivability argument discussed here.

That's fine, except that this is to be a "physicalist" in name only. Once you grant that qualia are primitive, and must be explicitly included in the base facts, that's all the dualist cares to establish. Whether you call these primitive mental facts "physical" or "non-physical" is mere semantics.

The target of the zombie argument is instead the strict physicalist, who refuses to countenance primitive mental properties. He believes that we can fully specify the base facts of the world without any explicit mention of qualia. P alone will suffice for Q, on his view, just as P suffices to fix the macroscopic table and chair facts. But since P (unlike P*) makes no explicit mention of Q, we have some chance of running a conceivability argument against this view, since it looks like (P & ~Q) could be conceivable. It's not a knock-down argument, of course: one could reasonably deny that it really is ideally conceivable at the end of the day. But at least the zombie argument has a chance, unlike in the previous case.

Why am I harping on about this at such length? Well, I think this background can help us diagnose the misunderstanding implicit in Richard Brown's dismissive parody:

I am conceiving of a world that is just like this one in all non-physical respects except that it lacks consciousness. Therefore dualism is false.

This exhibits the same sloppiness exhibited by the sloppy version of the zombie argument discussed at the very start of this post. The difference is that while the zombie argument can (as demonstrated) be made more precise, this parody -- what RB now calls his "zoombie argument" -- cannot.

What's the problem? Well, as before, it's entirely opaque what we are supposed to be conceiving, since there is no uncontested specification of the "non-physical respects" of the world that we can plug in to the argument. I take it Brown wants to plug in the actual non-physical description 'NP', whatever it may be. But dualists and physicalists have wildly differing ideas about what this description will end up looking like. Physicalists presumably think it will be empty (i.e. tautologous: devoid of information), whereas dualists think it will list all the qualia facts Q. Let's consider these two possibilities in turn.

Suppose NP states nothing (i.e. is tautologous). The argument is then as follows: "It's conceivable that (TAUT & ~Q). Therefore dualism is false." Well, that's clearly invalid. The possibility of ~Q is clearly compatible with dualism!

Suppose NP just states Q. Then the argument is: "It's conceivable that (Q & ~Q). Therefore dualism is false." But in this case the first premise is transparently false.

So, you see, whichever way we fill out the precise details of the parody argument, it very clearly fails (unlike the original zombie argument which, though controversial, can at least get off the ground, since "P & ~Q" is neither trivial nor trivially false).

You might wonder: if the parody is so atrocious, why would anyone have ever been tempted to take it seriously? I think the answer is just that they haven't fully appreciated how restrictive the form of conceivability inference relied upon by the original zombie argument is. If one assumed that the zombie argument must take the sloppy (opaque) form introduced earlier, then one may well be right to see the parody as being of the same form, and hence undermining that form of argument. I'm happy to grant this: opaque conceivability arguments are no damn good. But - once again - this does nothing to impugn the zombie argument, since it can be stated in a more transparent form (as described*).

* = (Of course, I've really only provided a schema of the argument. The real thing will have the placeholder 'P' replaced by a long, transparent description. But insofar as we have a rough grasp of what P will look like, we can draw tentative conclusions about whether the expanded version of 'P & ~Q' is likely to be conceivable.)

Compare Brown's recent response:

The zoombie world is a COMPLETE non-structural/non-functional duplicate of our world. NP is not just some random list of non-physical properties! It is a complete list of the actual non-physical properties. So, if there are no non-physical qualitative properties in NP then the actual qualitative properties that you and I enjoy are not non-physical properties.

I hope it's clear by now that this is a wildly different form of argument from the zombie argument I've given. Instead of using NP as a mere placeholder for some list of non-physical properties (neutrally and transparently specified), he is explicitly building in its status as "a complete list of the actual non-physical properties". So when he asserts that (NP & ~Q) is conceivable, this is mere shorthand for the same old sloppy, opaque conceivability claim as before (viz., that conceivably, "a world could have all the actual non-physical properties but lack qualia"). In effect, he is (unwittingly) pretending to give a precise, transparent specification by mimicking the superficial form of my argument, when in fact the underlying form and actual content of his argument hasn't changed a bit from the sloppy version.

To recap: a legitimate conceivability argument should begin by providing a transparent, uncontested specification of what is to be conceived. The zombie argument does this, by taking whatever specification 'P' the physicalist likes (which the dualist will not contest). The 'zoombie' parody, by contrast, does not meet this condition. This is indicative of further problems downstream -- and indeed, when we consider the two main candidates for fleshing out 'NP' (namely: TAUT or Q), we immediately see that neither has the faintest hope of grounding a conceivability argument against the dualist. The entire force of the parody argument rests on the opacity of 'NP', and -- unlike the real zombie argument -- it cannot survive being rendered transparent.

[This is all just to elucidate the objection originally stated in a couple of sentences in my 'zombie review'.]

Understanding (Zombie) Conceivability Arguments: Part I

2009-05-10T14:43:00.002-04:00

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

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

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

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

Being true vs. Judging true

2009-05-09T17:27:00.006-04:00

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

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

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

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