Philosophy, et cetera

Review of Parfit, On What Matters

2012-05-12T15:57:00.000-04:00

[My first attempt at a book review: 1300 pages distilled into 1600 words. Comments/suggestions welcome!]

Derek Parfit’s On What Matters is arguably the most important work in moral philosophy since Reasons and Persons. Its two massive volumes offer a comprehensive and densely-argued presentation of Parfit’s views in metaethics and normative theory, with occasional forays into other areas of philosophy -- including a probing analysis of the classic metaphysical question: ‘Why anything? Why this?’

Part One introduces Parfit’s “reasons-based” framework for normative theorizing, along with a number of important distinctions: (belief-relative) rationality vs. (fact-relative) reasons, subjective (desire-based) vs. objective (desire-independent) accounts of reasons, object-given vs. state-given reasons (generalizing the familiar distinction between epistemic and practical reasons for belief), and hedonic (dis)likings vs. meta-hedonic desires. This background should prove invaluable to anyone wishing to catch up to the state of the art in normative theory.

Parfit goes on to offer compelling thought-experiments (including his classic “Future Tuesday Indifferent” agent) to cast doubt on subjective theories of reasons, arguing instead that we have objective reasons to avoid agony, whatever our desires might be.

Parts Two and Three comprise the normative core of On What Matters, arguing that adherents of the three major traditions of Kantianism, Contractualism, and Consequentialism are “climbing the same mountain on different sides.” Parfit argues that the best forms of the former two theories converge on rule consequentialism, thus culminating in Parfit’s Triple Theory (p.25): “An act is wrong just when such acts are disallowed by the principles that are optimific, uniquely universally willable, and not reasonably rejectable.” (Those last three clauses representing Consequentialism, Kantianism, and Contractualism, respectively.)

Highlights from these sections includes Chapter 9’s discussion of what it is to treat someone “merely as a means”, and Chapter 13’s exploration of some complexities underlying the question, “What if everyone did that?” In the latter, Parfit concludes that we must look for principles of which it is true that it would be better for any number of people to follow the principle than for none to do so. In the former chapter, Parfit offers compelling counterexamples to standard Kantian interpretations of what it takes to treat someone merely as a means, arguing that it is better understood as a matter of failing to give someone due moral consideration. On this understanding, killing one to save five may not constitute treating the one “merely” as a means, if the agent is taking the one’s interests into consideration, and would not use her so to achieve just any old (less morally pressing) goal. Parfit is, however, careful to remain neutral on the question of whether harming someone as a means (regardless of whether “merely” so) might make some acts of utilitarian sacrifice wrong.

In these central sections, Parfit offers many interesting and insightful arguments for why Kantians and Contractualists should develop their theories in a more “consequentialist” direction. He says much less about why he thinks consequentialists should be moved towards his (rule-consequentialist) triple theory. Parfit mentions in passing that rule consequentialism captures more of our intuitions about cases than does act consequentialism, but this observation is unlikely to move those primarily motivated by the theoretical intuition that what ultimately matters is making the world a better place. (And it seems likely that consequentialism’s appeal most often has a theoretical basis such as this, rather than depending upon its ability to match our intuitions about cases.)

The second volume of On What Matters kicks off in Part Four with a series of commentaries on the first volume from Susan Wolf, Allen Wood, Barbara Herman, and T.M. Scanlon. Parfit’s responses follow in Part Five. I found the exchange between Scanlon and Parfit to be of particular interest. Parfit argues that Scanlon’s opposition to aggregating the interests of distinct people (“the numbers don’t count”) yields implausible conclusions, such as that in a society where all have a life expectancy of merely 30 years, we ought to give one person forty more years of life, rather than a five year increase to all the millions of people in the society. Parfit suggests that Scanlon’s motivation for disallowing aggregation -- namely, to avoid greatly burdening some in order to slightly benefit many more others -- is better accommodated by a prioritarian concern for the worst-off.

Part Six, on metaethics, comprises the bulk of the second volume. In it, Parfit sets out and defends the non-naturalist cognitivism that he takes to be a precondition for substantive normative inquiry. Analytical naturalism he swiftly dispenses with on the grounds that it would make the assertion of the correct normative theory a mere “concealed tautology” rather than a substantive truth. Non-analytical naturalism provides a more serious foil, against which Parfit presents a barrage of interrelated arguments in chapters 26-27.

Parfit begins this task with a careful analysis of how it is that cognitive significance and metaphysical distinctness can come apart in standard Kripkean cases of the necessary a posteriori (an analysis that is much in the Fregean spirit of Chalmers’ epistemic two-dimensionalism, though without reliance on the technical apparatus of primary and secondary intensions) in a way that shows their inapplicability to alleged identities of natural and normative properties. Most crucially, whenever identity claims are informative, this is because they tell us that two distinct properties are co-instantiated by a single object. The cognitive significance of ‘water’, say, may be given by a certain complex functional property: roughly, being the clear drinkable liquid found in lakes and rivers around here. This differs from the cognitive significance of ‘H2O’, which is instead given by a certain chemical property. The claim ‘water is H2O’ is informative rather than trivial because it relates these two distinct properties. This is possible because the concept water is “gappy”: it refers to whatever actually fills the associated functional role. This functional role could, for all we know a priori, be filled by all manner of chemical substances. Hence it is informative to learn that H2O is the particular chemical property of the watery stuff.

This analysis provides the basis of Parfit’s attack on non-analytical normative naturalism. To begin with, our concept of a normative reason, unlike water, does not seem to be “gappy” in the way required to give rise to informative identity claims. (There’s no reference-fixing functional description of “reasony stuff” for a Kripkean to rigidify.) More generally, Parfit challenges the naturalist to specify just what further information is imparted when they identify natural and normative properties. For naturalism to be true, the further information must be a natural fact (rather than an irreducibly normative fact), but then we seem left with the “Hard Naturalist” view that normative concepts are (in principle) dispensable. Parfit takes this to be a mere terminological variant of nihilism, trivializing normative claims in much the same way that analytical naturalism does.

Space constraints prevent me from detailing Parfit’s related Fact Stating and Triviality arguments against metaethical naturalism, though they greatly reward closer attention, and will surely play a central role in future debates about metaethical naturalism’s viability.

Here and elsewhere in Part Six, Parfit presents a forceful presentation of how the metaethical terrain looks from the perspective of a well worked out non-naturalism, and what the central flaws of the rival views look, from this perspective, to be. This may at times prove frustrating to those who do not share Parfit’s basic perspective, as defenders of the rival views will be apt to think that he has given their views short shrift. The chapters on expressivism, especially, seem likely not to satisfy anyone antecedently sympathetic to that view. Parfit’s criticisms are by and large “external” ones, depending on assumptions that his opponents will not share. But they are valuable criticisms nonetheless, for they do a good job of honing in on what, if non-naturalism is true, constitute the central flaws of the rival views. As in so much of philosophy, this may be insightful and important work, even if it happens to be dialectically ineffective.

Let me wrap up this review by noting a point of incongruity between Parfit’s metaethics and normative theorizing. His robustly realist metaethics, along with his arguments against subjectivist views of reasons, commit him to the possibility of (procedurally) ideal disagreement: One might valorize agony or make other normative errors whilst being perfectly internally coherent, and hence impervious to rational persuasion from one with different (even objectively correct) normative views. For normative knowledge to be possible despite this dialectical stand-off, our normative knowledge must not depend upon securing the general agreement of (procedurally rational) others. But in his normative theorizing, Parfit is in fact highly concerned by the argument from disagreement, which provides a major motivation for his development of the convergence results leading to his “triple theory”. This is puzzling. If a possible pro-agony agent is no threat to our normative knowledge that pain is bad, why should actual Kantians be any threat to our knowledge that (say) we ought to lie to the murderer at the door? We already know that there are internally coherent normative views that conflict with ours, and hence could be reached by procedurally rational agents engaging in reflective equilibrium, should their starting points happen to differ enough from ours. What epistemic difference does it make whether those views should happen to have actual advocates?*

Still, whether well-motivated or not, the first volume of On What Matters is a treasure trove of compelling thought experiments and incisive normative analysis. And the second volume provides what will no doubt come to be regarded as the definitive statement and defence of non-naturalist cognitivism.

* I expand upon this point in my ‘Knowing What Matters’, forthcoming in P. Singer (ed.) Does Anything Really Matter? Parﬁt on Objectivity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Professional Update

2012-05-03T21:26:00.000-04:00

It's been a crazy year. Helen turned down two tenure-track offers, and me one (from St Andrews), for "two body" reasons. Fortunately, things have worked out very well for us even so. Helen has accepted a Bersoff fellowship from NYU for next year, while I have a bioethics postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania. And in Fall 2013, I'll be joining the wonderful philosophy department at Bowling Green as an assistant professor, where we look forward to finding a permanent solution to our two-body problem!

We've also had some recent good news regarding publications: Our co-authored 'Mind-Body Meets Metaethics: A Moral Concept Strategy', and Helen's 'Circularity in the Conditional Analysis of Phenomenal Concepts', have both been accepted by Phil Studies. My two other acceptances this year were for 'Fittingness: The Sole Normative Primitive' (forthcoming in Phil Quarterly) and 'Knowing What Matters' (forthcoming in Peter Singer's edited collection, Does Anything Really Matter? Parfit on Objectivity, to be published by Oxford University Press).

Now I just need to finish my dissertation...

Confucian Moral Psychology

2012-04-29T18:49:00.000-04:00

Inspired by recent lectures from Kwong-loi Shun, I want to explore a number of interesting structural concepts and distinctions in ethics and moral psychology. (Note: As a total neophyte, I may have misremembered or misunderstood parts of Shun's interpretation of Confucian moral psychology. So I make no claims to historical accuracy here. I just think that there are some interesting concepts in this vicinity worth exploring.)

(1) Ethical Self-Commitment. This may be understood as a sense of moral honour. This contrasts with both (i) non-moral honour, as when one is concerned with insults or other slights to one's social status; and (ii) neutral impartiality, where one is no more concerned about one's own virtue or moral honour than anyone else's. The agent with moral honour is particularly concerned to herself act justly, and so to avoid bringing moral disgrace upon herself. (It's an interesting question whether this constitutes an objectionable form of self-obsession.)

(2) Detachment: Third-Personal Reactive Attitudes. In rejecting non-moral honor (or what Shun calls "the physical form of anger", in contrast to the ethical form), the virtuous agent ceases to feel distinctively first-personal reactive attitudes such as resentment (where the focus is on the fact that a slight or injustice was done to oneself). Instead, one feels the same sort of moral indignation that one could feel on behalf of anyone else who was similarly wronged. (And this may be a very strong emotional response that's called for.)

Note that the details of one's response may turn on relational facts, e.g. the fact that the person who was harmed happens to be you, or your friend; but this relational fact doesn't consume your attention, or alter the qualitative nature of your emotional response. In this sense, you retain a kind of detachment or aloofness from your own ego (and the distinctively first-personal emotions that it would otherwise give rise to).

(3) Equanimity: The virtuous agent will have strong emotional reactions when appropriate to the circumstances, but will at the same time possess a kind of higher-order poise, ensuring that she is not engulfed by the emotion, and that it passes when the circumstances change.

This is connected to the idea that the agent's own virtue is what most matters, and this core interest of theirs is not threatened by mere external circumstances. One may still suffer grave harms, of course, but equanimity may follow from the recognition that your core interest remains inviolable. (There seems something attractive about this attitude, at least for its practical utility, though it really makes the "self-obsession" objection loom large: Is your virtue really more important than the life and wellbeing of your loved ones?)

(4) Mental discipline / 'purity' of thought: Here the thought is that it isn't just our actions that matter, but even the smallest mental impulses. The virtuous agent should not even be tempted by wrongdoing, nor should she experience vindictive emotions (schadenfreude, etc.). This calls for constant vigilance over one's own thoughts, though eventually the right habits of thought should become effortless and automatic.

The 'vigilance' aspect faces tricky "don't think of an elephant" issues for implementation. I think it's also an interesting question whether we should want morality to be so all-encompassing. Contrast Nagel's Concealment and Exposure, and its idea that the human psyche is inevitably messy, and our responsibility is just to refrain from expressing any of our less-pure, socially disruptive thoughts. This more relaxed view could be motivated by either (i) a practical concern that attempts at repression would be psychologically unhealthy, or (ii) a more principled concern that morality should be restricted in scope, rather than encroaching into all areas of life (e.g. some may wish to carve off a "protected sphere" that includes humour, as well as private thoughts, etc).

(Though I should flag that an all-encompassing private morality is still compatible with Nagel's cultural liberalism, for the latter is just concerned with preventing other people from trying to police your thoughts. That leaves it an open question whether you still ought to police them yourself!)

I was very struck by the kind of "two-level" psychology that emerges from this picture, with automatic first-order responses kept in check by higher-order reflection that's triggered only when necessary: it's very much akin to the kind of psychological analysis which many consequentialists (from Hare to Pettit) have proposed, and which I draw on myself in recent work. I'd be interested to see if/how a "Confucian Consequentialism" might be developed, i.e. taking the consequentialist's core normative commitments, and fitting them into the structure provided by a "Confucian"-style moral psychology, to develop a picture of the consequentialist agent.

Anyway, aside from that, I'd be curious to hear what others think of the various "choice points" that emerge from the above analysis. In which respects does the "Confucian" position (scare quotes because, again, I make no claims to historical accuracy) seem especially appealing or unappealing?

Individual vs. Political Feasibility

2012-04-22T21:25:00.000-04:00

Matt Zwolinksi thinks there's something odd about philanthropists like Warren Buffett calling for higher taxes when their own philanthropic efforts are instead directed towards funding non-governmental organizations. But there's nothing remotely odd about this. It is exactly what we should expect if what's politically feasible is more constrained than what's individually feasible, such that:

(i) It is individually, but not politically, feasible to direct funds to one's favoured NGO. That is, you can do it with your own money, but you don't expect to be able to redistribute (much) taxpayers' money to this end.

(ii) Increasing government revenue is believed to be the best of the politically feasible options for large-scale redistribution -- in particular, better than the alternative of a marginal increase in consumer spending that would arise in the absence of additional taxation/redistribution.

I'm not here going to argue that (ii) is true. My point is just that it is obviously believed by those who advocate for higher taxes. And there's nothing particularly surprising that it should be believed by them concurrently with (i), i.e. that there are NGOs that they would prefer to be funded, whenever feasible.

This obvious point seems to have been largely neglected in the broader blogospheric discussion, which has focused more on standard "coordination problem"-type justifications for non-voluntary taxation (see, e.g., Will Wilkinson, and Matt's reply). That works fine for explaining why people might reasonably advocate for higher taxation while being unwilling to engage in any individual acts of philanthropy themselves. But it doesn't address Matt's question of why even philanthropists don't voluntarily donate money to the government.

The answer to that is simply: there are better philanthropic options available to them as an individual to donate to. But, contra Matt, this really doesn't tell us anything about whether we should force others to pay into the public treasury, because those better options may not be politically available. (I'd certainly rather that tax increases instead went to fund GiveWell, were that an option!)

We have less control over others' money than we do over our own, and the public treasury may, in practice, be our only option for redirecting it. And the mere fact that we have better options for our own philanthropic efforts does nothing at all to suggest that the public treasury is a worse place for the marginal dollar than consumers' wallets -- assuming that most consumers are not otherwise going to direct those marginal dollars to superior NGOs. (Of course, there might be other reasons for thinking that taxation has bad consequences on net, but that would be a different argument.)

The Value of Life

2012-04-21T16:16:00.000-04:00

Robin Hanson (sensibly) finds it bizarre that asymmetry-based anti-natalism is taken at all seriously: "I mean, really, the whole human race should go extinct to avoid the risk that some future kid might suffer at some point?!" If people have lives worth living -- such that they do not regret being born -- then (all else equal) their life is a good thing, even it happens to contain some sad or unfortunate elements. But rather than just relying on this substantive (and obviously correct) normative judgment, Hanson made a couple of unconvincing attempts to justify this substantive conclusion on purely formalistic grounds.

First, Hanson proposes, Morality Should Exist -- which sounds like a category error, but what he really means is that "there should exist creatures who know what is moral, and who act on that." But this is much less intuitive as a substantive principle than the previous intuition that happy people should exist. And as a formal constraint, the proposal that any (morally eligible) utility function must assign utility to agents using this very utility function seems baseless. After all, it seems perfectly coherent to care only about the welfare of sentient beings, and not at all about whether their welfare is achieved by means of explicit attempts to promote welfare. If Hanson is looking for an uncontroversial principle to rest his case on, gratuitously ruling out traditional consequentialism like this seems like a bad place to start.

Next, Hanson proposed that Morality should be adaptive:

[M]orality evolved to help us survive [... So if] we apply that morality in such a way as to make ourselves go extinct, that seems a rather dysfunctional broken application of such morality!

But this conflates moral belief with truth, as well as evolutionary with normative goals. The fundamental moral facts, if there are any, did not evolve: like other abstract truths (e.g. mathematics), they just are. Perhaps our moral beliefs/dispositions were shaped in part by evolutionary selective pressures. But even if the evolutionary "purpose" of our moral beliefs (like everything else) is to help us survive and propagate our genes, that doesn't make it a "purpose" we must share. Normatively speaking, belief aims at truth, so the purpose of our moral beliefs is to accurately represent whatever the moral truths are. And whether it's good for us to survive is a substantive normative question -- albeit one that's plausibly settled by whether our lives tend to be good for us on net.

Hanson concludes with a challenge:

The evolutionary context of our moral intuitions gives a rich detailed framework for defining and estimating moral error. If you reject that framework, the question is what other framework will you substitute? How do you otherwise define and estimate the error in your specific moral intuitions?

As always in philosophy, the only way to proceed is by means of reflective equilibrium: starting with what we judge likely to be true, and seeing how these judgments cohere with other (specific and general) claims that strike us as plausibly true, resolving any conflicts in whatever way strikes us as most plausible.

Hanson's proposal is but a particular instance of this, where you start with overwhelming confidence that moral goals should coincide with evolutionary goals. But I have no such confidence in that assumption. I find it more plausible to start with such substantive claims as that happy, flourishing lives are good, and misery is bad. Hanson's hope for a purely formal moral framework offers but a wild goose chase, ending in the smuggling of (less plausible) substantive moral assumptions through the back door.

Singer's Pond and Quality of Will

2012-04-10T21:18:00.004-04:00

Singer argues that, just as we're obliged to save a drowning child at modest cost to ourselves (e.g. ruining an expensive suit), so we're obliged to help the distant needy when we're in a position to do so (e.g. by donating to GiveWell-recommended aid organizations). People often balk at this comparison, but I don't see any plausible grounds for escaping the conclusion that we have similarly strong reasons to act in either case.

What's more, I don't think this particular result is really all that counter-intuitive, either. Of course we have incredibly strong reasons to save innocent lives whenever we can! What could be more important, or more worth choosing, than that? This claim about the strengths of various reasons for action -- call it the Act Evaluation -- is eminently plausible.

What is counter-intuitive, I think, is the putative implication that when we fail to donate to effective charities we are thereby just as bad, or as blameworthy, as a person who lets a child drown before their eyes. (Call this the Character Evaluation.) Such a person, we feel, would have to be monstrously callous. As for ourselves, we may not be saints, but at least we are surely not moral monsters. Thus the comparison strikes us as preposterous.

I think this objection to the Character Evaluation is spot on. Consider a quality of will account, on which we are blameworthy to the extent that our actions manifest an insufficient degree of good will (e.g. concern for others). And now notice that differences in what strikes us as salient may lead us to act differently even if there's no difference in our quality of will (or altruistic concern). In particular, our concern for others is much more likely to trigger altruistic action when another's need is made vividly salient to us -- as when we see a child drowning right before our eyes, as opposed to hearing abstract descriptions of the needs of distant strangers.

It seems to be a fact of human psychology that you would need to be a much more callous person to neglect a child drowning before your eyes, than to neglect the needs of distant strangers. I think it is this fact that we are correctly picking up on when we look askance at Singer's analogy. But this fact also shows us why the Act Evaluation does not entail the Character Evaluation, so that our intuitive resistance to the latter should not prevent us from accepting the former. After all, while facts about salience and the psychological vividness might well affect how blameworthy an act of apparent neglect is (since to neglect vivid and salient needs is to manifest a greater callousness than is found in our commonplace neglect of distant strangers' needs), these facts about our own psychologies can't plausibly be taken to affect how choice-worthy the various actions are.

Some confusion may arise due to the ambiguity of 'obligation' talk. Obligation is often understood as closely related to blameworthiness. (Roughly: you're blameworthy if you violate an obligation without an excuse.) Maybe that's the most natural reading. But this moral category ends up being a somewhat convoluted construction that fundamentally concerns character rather than act evaluation. And Singer's argument really only works if we're talking about basic act evaluation (i.e., choice-worthiness, or reasons for action). So perhaps it's unhelpful for consequentialists to speak of 'obligation' here when we're really concerned with the 'ought' of choice-worthiness.

Terminology aside, though, I take it that in practical deliberation we should be concerned with making choice-worthy choices, rather than just avoiding blameworthiness. (Akratic as we are, we might at least adopt the latter standard as a minimum "baseline" that we must meet to maintain our self-respect as moral agents. But it's always better to do better...)

In summary:

(1) The Character Evaluation is intuitively mistaken, because blameworthiness depends on quality of will, and equally choiceworthy acts might exemplify different degrees of moral (un)concern if the morally relevant features are psychologically much more vivid and salient in one case than the other. In particular, letting a child drown before your eyes plausibly exemplifies (at least in typical human agents) a much greater degree of callousness and lack of concern for others than is involved in our failure to save distant strangers.

(2) The Act Evaluation is plausibly true, since the choice-worthiness of an act depends just on the morally relevant features of the situation, and not on how psychologically vivid and salient these features are to us.

(3) Once we clearly distinguish the Act Evaluation from the Character Evaluation, we may find that only the latter is counter-intuitive, whereas the former is actually quite plausible.

On a more practical note, I hope that by explicitly severing the connection to negative moral emotions (guilt, blame, etc.), the Act Evaluation becomes less apt to provoke defensive responses from people -- You can accept it without thinking yourself a horrible person! Yay! -- and I think it can even start to sound positively appealing. And from there one might be inspired to take some initial steps towards making more of these incredibly choice-worthy decisions, e.g. by joining Giving What We Can or similar philanthropic movements. And that would be cool. Not because you're a moral monster if you don't. But just because it's really worth doing.

When is Significant Self-Sacrifice Obligatory?

2012-04-06T14:40:00.002-04:00

A popular way to deny Singer's conclusion that we ought to donate all that we can afford to the most effective international aid charities is to posit an agential prerogative, or 'moral liberty', to pursue our own projects. Requirements to aid in one-off rescue situations (e.g. drowning children) are compatible with this, but ongoing requirements to reshape the world are not.

This sounds like an appealing result. But I wonder if it can be sustained on further examination: Could it really be true that we are never morally required to sacrifice our control over the general shape of our lives?

Perhaps the most obvious counterexample would be if we were sometimes required to sacrifice our life itself. And it does seem clear that this can be required: I may not steal the cure to a deadly disease from a chemist who is about to mass-produce it to save millions, even if I'm sure to die without immediate treatment.

Less dramatically, we may also be required to sacrifice our long-term liberty and/or living standards: A convicted felon, sentenced to life in prison, may not murder his guards for the sake of escaping to freedom. A wealthy slave-owner, whose wealth and way of life depends on the ongoing exploitation of his slaves, is obliged to set his slaves free even if this would spell the end of his life of leisure.

If morality can demand all this, is it really so incredible to think that it might also require the wealthy to sacrifice their lifestyle to free those who are enslaved, not by people, but by poverty? Indeed, would it not be more incredible to think that it would demand one but not the other?

The best hope for the opponents of Singer may be to combine the above approach with the (notoriously difficult to pin down) distinction between harming and failure to benefit. That is: we can be required even to benefit, in one-off rescue cases, but life-shaping demands can only be negative: requiring us not to harm, rather than to positively benefit.

This hybrid response is certainly stronger than taking either route in isolation. But I still see two major hurdles for it:

(1) Is it really plausible that we're never required to make life-shaping sacrifices to help (and not merely avoid harming) others? Suppose another agent is unjustly imposing great harms on others, and I could successfully fight this evil if I dedicated my life to doing so. Isn't it clear that I should? But now what difference does it make if the harms are imposed by circumstance, rather than agents?

(2) I'm not at all confident that the putative distinction between harming and failure to benefit can be metaphysically vindicated (cf. Kagan, Unger, etc.). Note, for example, that the doing/allowing distinction won't help if your bank account is set up to donate your savings to charity by default. Reducing your charitable donation is then something you do with each purchase, but intuitively should still count as "failure to benefit". But doesn't this intuition just rest on our question-begging presumption that our money is rightly ours to spend, rather than any natural (pre-moral) distinction? Perhaps one could appeal to the global counterfactual of whether others would be better off on net had you never existed? If 'yes', then you qualify as harming them, and if not, then you merely fail to benefit. But this seems messy and vulnerable to counterexamples of its own (e.g. saving someone's life and subsequently enslaving them so that they're only slightly better than dead).

Any suggestions?

Procreative Ethics

2012-04-04T18:56:00.001-04:00

There's an interesting article in the New Yorker exploring whether it's wrong to have kids.

The author's main concern seems to be overpopulation, but would-be parents can easily offset their impact on global population size by making an appropriate donation to Population Services International or the like. If the result of their choices is that more children are born into prosperity, and correspondingly fewer born into poverty, then that can only be a good thing. And even without such an 'offset', I'd expect the marginal child born to upper-middle class Americans to produce more positive than negative externalities over their lifetime. (As Caplan says, "More people mean more ideas, the fuel of progress.")

A better argument against procreating may be the lost opportunity for adopting/"saving" children from orphanages, etc., where they would otherwise lack the sort of care and opportunities that you could offer them. Adopting children in need is certainly exemplary, though presumably supererogatory if anything is. Setting this ideal option aside, then, I think we can at least say that for many people it is better for the world that they have and raise biological children rather than doing no parenting at all.

Guest Post: Nebel on Parfit's Rule Consequentialism

2012-04-02T23:38:00.005-04:00

[The following is a guest post by Jake Nebel...]

I’m very grateful to Richard for letting me write a guest post, which I am shamelessly using to solicit feedback on a paper. I’ve summarized the central argument below. I’d greatly appreciate any comments on this blog or via email.

Parfit argues that the most plausible versions of Kantianism and contractualism coincide with the following consequentialist principle:

(UARC) Everyone ought to follow the principles whose universal acceptance would make things go best.

Moral principles, according to Parfit, are intended to state facts. We accept a principle just when we believe that it is true. We follow a principle when we succeed in doing what it requires. This distinction allows that we might not follow or want to follow all or any of the principles that we accept. The principles whose universal acceptance would make things go best are UA-optimific.

On Parfit’s view, the fundamental normative truths are true in all possible worlds. But UARC is false in at least one world.

Consider a world in which no one’s moral beliefs have any motivating force at all. In this Indifference World, no one cares about the moral facts, even those of which they are aware. Indifference World might contain people who act (by our standards) morally, but not because they believe their acts to be right: perhaps they fear retribution or believe that kindness is in their own interests. In Indifference World, the consequences of accepting one set of principles would be no different than the consequences of accepting any other set of principles, because no one’s motivations would change as a result of changed moral beliefs.

UARC is false in Indifference World. In this world, the universal acceptance of any one set of principles would have no better outcome than the universal acceptance of any alternatives. We could say one of two things about this result. On the one hand, we might say that there are no UA-optimfic principles, so there are no principles (including UARC) that everyone ought to follow in Indifference World. On the other hand, we might say that every principle is UA-optimific, since they all make things go equal-best. But it is unlikely that everyone ought to rape, murder, and torture each other, and it is implausible that everyone ought to follow contradictory principles. It can’t be the case that everyone both ought to and ought not to rape, murder, and torture each other.

The easiest response is to claim that Indifference World is not metaphysically possible, and therefore not a counterexample to UARC: accepting a moral principle might require some corresponding motivation. But this response is not available to Parfit, and for very important reasons. In defending his convergence thesis, Parfit revises Kant’s moral belief formula into what later becomes UARC. He claims that belief implies acceptance:

“When people believe that some kind of act is morally permitted, they accept some principle that permits such acts.” (341)

If belief were not a sufficient condition for acceptance, Parfit wouldn’t have the crucial link between Kant’s moral belief formula and UARC. Parfit’s convergence argument therefore requires that belief is a sufficient condition for acceptance. And in Part Six, Parfit makes the following concession: if moral beliefs were necessarily motivating, then the Humean Argument for noncognitivism would be sound (Vol. II, 382-83). I think Parfit is right about that. So, on his view, moral beliefs are not necessarily motivating, so Indifference World is metaphysically possible.

I suggest that we go for a compliance version of rule consequentialism, instead of UARC. More specifically,

UFRC: Everyone ought to follow the principles of which it is true that, if they were universally followed, things would go best. (405)

The principles that have this property are UF-optimific. Indifference World is not a counterexample to UFRC. I think UFRC has other advantages, which I discuss in the paper.

UFRC is closer to act consequentialism because, when asking which principles are UF-optimific, we can ignore mistakes, self-deception, and akrasia. This makes it easier to evaluate the effects of various principles. I also believe that act consequentialism is UF-optimific, so UFRC may have a better chance of achieving convergence within consequentialism.
UFRC avoids Rosen’s “evil gremlins” objection. Unless there is nothing that anyone can do to stop the gremlin from destroying the world, there will be some UF-optimific principle. Rosen’s objection could only succeed if the gremlin’s wrath becomes inevitable, so it does not matter what anyone does. So his objection becomes trivial.

Questions: Can Parfit escape the Indifference World objection? Is UARC independently more plausible than UFRC? Is act consequentialism UF-optimific? Might there be other UF-optimific principles? Does UFRC escape Rosen’s objection to UARC?

Philosophers' Carnival #140

2012-04-02T14:31:00.002-04:00

Welcome to the 140th edition of the Philosophers' Carnival, a 3-weekly roundup of some of the best philosophical blogging from around the web.

The previous carnival edition linked to an open-access article in Ethics: Justin Clarke-Doane's Morality and Mathematics: The Evolutionary Challenge. PEA Soup now hosts an academic discussion of the article, kicked off by comments from Matthew Braddock, Andreas Mogensen, and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.

New APPS presents an interview with Ruth Chang.

Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber hosts an interesting discussion for teachers of philosophy: Evaluating students: the halo effect.

Brandon at Siris argues that the so-called Free-Rider Problem is better understood as more specifically a problem of responsibility-evaders, since there is often nothing wrong with some (e.g. infants) getting a "free ride" if the system is designed to accommodate this.

"Bleeding Heart Libertarian" Jessica Flanigan argues against the obsession with consensus in post-Rawlsian political philosophy, in her post 'A Defense of the Unreasonable'.

Jared at the Florida Student Philosophy Blog discusses The Revised Principle of Alternate Possibilities and Galen Strawson's Basic Argument.

Yeah, OK, But Still criticizes 'Naturalist' interpretations of Nietzsche.

NChen discusses the historical emergence of 'human rights' claims.

Morality's Random Walk discusses Jonathon Haidt’s New Book “The Righteous Mind” and Why We Ought to Talk to the Elephant.

That's it for this edition of the Philosophers' Carnival! To keep the carnival going, you can support it in two ways: (1) Email me to volunteer to host a future edition, and/or (2) use the form on the carnival homepage to nominate any interesting posts you write yourself, or read elsewhere, in the coming weeks. Thanks!

Consequentialist Decision Procedures

2012-03-05T14:29:00.001-05:00

Most character-based objections to consequentialism start from the assumption that a consequentialist agent would make decisions by making explicit "expected value" (EV) calcuations. Most consequentialists respond by pointing out that the bad consequences of fallible humans attempting to implement such a decision procedure ensures that consequentialism would actually recommend against such an "unfortunate" mindset. But this response doesn't address whether the EV decision procedure is, even if not consequentialist-recommended, nonetheless the consequentialism-exemplifying or fitting mindset. This then leaves us vulnerable to the Strongest Self-Effacingness Objection. So, to address this deeper problem, we need to show that the EV decision procedure is not even rationally fitting, according to consequentialism.

First consider why one might initially think that the (fitting) consequentialist agent would use EV. Presumably the thought is something like this: There's an isomorphism of sorts between moral facts and fitting mindsets (e.g., it's fitting to desire just what's good/desirable); the facts about what one ought (rationally) to do, according to consequentialism, are settled by the expected values of one's options; so it's rationally fitting to choose what to do by calculating the expected values of one's options.

I think that this rests on an overly simple view of the isomorphism between the moral facts and fitting mindsets. It's true that there's a straightforward isomorphism between the goods posited by a theory and what desires, or ultimate ends, are thereby shown to be fitting. But what about our capacities for "instrumental rationality", which take our ultimate desires as inputs, and -- guided by our available evidence -- yield concrete intentions or actions as outputs? Why think that our moral theories have any particular implications for these operations? On the contrary, I propose that we can give an independent (morally neutral) account of "instrumental rationality", with the upshot that fitting consequentialists aren't saddled with the EV decision procedure after all.

We may begin with the normal competence condition for instrumental rationality (in non-ideal agents): the dispositions that constitute our rational capacities are those that render us well-equipped to act in a wide variety of "normal" environments. This suggests the following feature list:

Well-calibrated expectations (i.e. epistemic rationality)
Well-allocated attentional resources (e.g. scanning for threats/opportunities)
Well-calibrated predispositions (e.g. to avoid pain, be cooperative, help others in need, etc.)
Executive faculty triggered when faced with novel or complex situations for which one’s predispositions are ill-equipped to handle (relative to one's ultimate ends)

[Compare the picture that emerges from “Dual Process” models of human psychology -- e.g., Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Since I'm theorizing about the preconditions for competent agency in human-like agents, it's reassuring to receive empirical confirmation that this is roughly how actual human agents work!]

The crucial observation underlying the above list is that "executive oversight" is an especially scarce resource in our cognitive economy, rendering conscious deliberation too slow to serve as our "default" mode of decision-making in normal circumstances. (There are also more principled philosophical obstacles, e.g. the regress problem inherent in "deliberating whether to deliberate", etc.) Instead, an instrumentally rational (normally competent) human-like agent must by default be guided by generally reliable sub-personal "predispositions" to act directly upon registering pertinent information, only triggering conscious deliberative oversight in those odd circumstances when one's sub-personal mechanisms aren't up to the task.

On this view, the fitting (human, non-ideal) agent rarely acts upon explicit deliberation at all, let alone explicit EV calculations. This is so even when we plug in impartial consequentialist values as the "ultimate goals" at which this instrumentally rational agent aims. Furthermore, even when conscious deliberation is triggered, the evidence that we are unreliable at EV calculations precludes us from accepting their verdicts too hastily and uncritically (especially when the verdicts are at odds with more reliable rules of thumb, e.g. against torture, harming innocents, etc.).

Question: My above distinction between "morally neutral" instrumental rationality and "morally determined" ultimate ends seems well-suited to consequentialist theories. But does this approach seem appropriate for deontological theories also? Should fitting deontologists be understood as simply having certain constraints ("don't lie", etc.) among their ultimate ends? Or are deontological constraints better understood as mirrored in the "decision procedure" that converts the agent's aims into actions -- providing, in effect, an alternative to standard "instrumental rationality"?

The Strongest Self-Effacingness Objection

2012-02-22T10:28:00.003-05:00

In What's wrong with self-effacing moral theories?, I explain why the basic self-effacingness objection to utilitarianism is no good. But I've recently come to the conclusion that we can formulate a stronger version of the objection, as follows:

P1 (The Normal Competence Condition): Rationality implies normal competence.
P2: Morally fitting agents can be rational (hence normally competent)
P3: A fitting utilitarian agent would lack normal competence.
thus C1: A fitting utilitarian agent is not a morally fitting agent.
P4 (The Truth-Fit Connection): If an agent that "fits" some theory X is not yet morally fitting, then X is not the true moral theory.
thus C2: Utilitarianism is not the true moral theory.

I take P4 to be analytic, and P2 to be uncontroversial (moral virtue is surely not strictly inconsistent with rationality). So that leaves P1 and P3.

Why accept P1 - the "normal competence condition" on rationality? I accept that this is controversial, but it flows naturally from a conception of ("non-ideal") rational capacities as those capacities which render an agent well-equipped to act and function well in a wide range of "normal" environments.

N.B. By "normal" here I mean explanatory rather than statistical normalcy: the sense in which it's "normal" for cats to have four legs, even if a madman has amputated a limb from every actually existing cat. As a heuristic: suppose that there's an a priori objective probability distribution over the possible worlds, reflecting how likely any given world was to be actualized. Perhaps worlds like ours are relatively "probable", whereas BIV and Cartesian evil demon worlds are highly improbable. "Normal competence" would then require that an agent be capable of functioning well across a sufficiently wide range of high-probability (non-wacky) worlds.

On this conception, if an agent is ill-equipped to function effectively even when nothing "wacky" is going on, then there's something wrong with them -- more particularly, they lack adequate rational capacities. (I bracket the possibility of lacking adequate bodily capacities by including one's body type as one of the environmental variables specified as part of the "normal situation". So even a person who actually finds themselves in a paralysed body would not be paralysed in a wide range of normal circumstances, as I'm conceiving of them.)

So, while not obviously true, I think that P1 is at least reasonably plausible (which is more than can be said for most self-effacingness arguments!). One interesting feature of this conception of rationality is that it introduces an element of "relativity": the dispositions and habits of thought that are rational for us fallible human beings may be very different from those that are rational for Martians or gods. But this is plausibly a feature rather than a bug: any conception of "non-ideal rationality" is going to have to be sensitive to such particularities of our constitution.

Assuming we grant P1, then, defenders of utilitarianism are committed to denying P3: the claim that a fitting utilitarian agent would lack normal competence. P3 is most plausible if we accept the standard caricature that a (fitting) utilitarian agent would make decisions by means of an (often misguided) explicit "expected utility" calculation. In a future post, I'll explain why this caricature is mistaken.

But for now I'm interested in what people think of the presented argument. Do you agree that it's stronger (and more interesting) than the usual self-effacingness objections? Has anyone presented the objection in this form before? How plausible do you find P1?

The Separateness of Persons: Commensurability without Fungibility

2012-02-03T12:43:00.002-05:00

It seems to me that the famed "separateness of persons" objection to consequentialism rests on the confused assumption that commensurable values (ones that can be compared and traded off against each other) are thereby fungible values (such that a loss to one is not merely outweighed, but actually cancelled, by a greater gain to another). I'll explain in a moment why this is a mistake. But first, let's motivate the objection with a simple case:

Connie has just enough anti-venom to save one of the two poison victims before her. Now, faced with their pleading faces, but realizing it makes no difference to the total welfare, Connie finds herself totally uninterested in the question of who to save. It strikes her as no more normatively significant than the choice between a $20 bill or two tens.

To many -- myself included -- such indifference seems inappropriate. We think that which person survives is a matter of normative significance, so that Connie is (in her thoughts) making a kind of moral mistake.

I take this scenario to exemplify the worry that consequentialists see people instrumentally, as mere "receptacles" of value, or that they neglect the separateness of persons. Critics are assuming, in effect, that consequentialists must follow Connie in treating the welfare of distinct persons as a mere number, free-floating and fungible.

But once we realize that the fitting consequentialist agent would desire each good (separately), we can see the mistake in this way of thinking. The problem with Connie is that she doesn't appreciate that each individual's welfare is a distinct intrinsic good. She, in effect, only sees a single token good -- the aggregate welfare -- whereas a more plausible consequentialist view holds that the aggregate is merely an abstraction from a great plurality of distinct intrinsic goods (namely: each distinct person's welfare).

Since the fitting consequentialist will have distinct intrinsic desires for each person's welfare, they will not react with indifference, but rather ambivalence, when faced with tradeoffs like Connie's. They will be pulled in both directions, torn by the distinct importance of the two lives (only one of which can be saved), and whichever one they do save, they will still see something regrettable about the loss of the other.

In this way, the consequentialist can fully appreciate the separateness of persons. They make tradeoffs between lives, seeing that a greater benefit to one outweighs a lesser cost to another, but that does not entail seeing the two as fungible like money. For the benefit to one does not cancel the loss to another, which is instead seen as a unique and irreplaceable source of regret. But it is not as regrettable as it would have been to forsake the greater (and also unique) benefit to another.

In short: We can make tradeoffs between distinct intrinsic values, recognizing that some may be more important than others, without thereby turning them into merely instrumental values (fungible means to some further end of "aggregate" value). This is demonstrated by the distinction between indifference and ambivalence -- or, more generally, between tradeoffs where the cost is cancelled by the gain, vs. those where the cost remains distinctly regrettable, and is merely outweighed by the gain.

Migration and Sustainability

2012-01-21T20:32:00.001-05:00

In 'The Environmental Argument for Reducing Immigration Into the United States', Philip Cafaro and Winthrop Staples III argue that, given Americans' disproportionate "environmental footprint", environmentalists should want to halt population growth in the U.S., and hence to severely restrict immigration into the U.S.

Despite the authors' constant mentions of "population growth", migration of course doesn't (in itself) alter the global population. So what they're really objecting to is allowing poor people from dysfunctional countries the opportunity to increase their wealth (and hence consumption) through hard work in a place where their hard work will be better rewarded. Because material consumption is bad for the environment. So we should do what we can to keep people poor, including blocking their access to countries with better infrastructure, institutions, etc. After all, if they're stuck in a failed state, with no roads and barely enough reward from their work to put food on their family's plates, they'll use less gas! Yay! (Right?)

Cafaro and Staples seem unimpressed by such welfare-based objections. Besides the tradeoff with environmental values, they offer two responses that engage directly with concern for human welfare:

(1) They claim that "mass immigration drives down the wages of working-class Americans", and so is "unjust" to the latter. But immigration may actually raise native wages, and in any case the welfare gains so drastically outweigh any losses that a little redistribution to compensate any disadvantaged groups could easily bring about an outcome that's better for everyone. (General lesson: whenever an otherwise good policy might seem to unfairly "burden" the poor, just redistribute the proceeds. Environmentalists, of all people, should be aware of this from populist objections to gas taxes.)

(2) They claim that migration to developed countries "makes it easier for common citizens and wealthy elites in other countries to ignore the conditions that are driving so many people to emigrate in the first place." I have no idea why they believe this. It seems at least as likely that mass emigration ("brain drain") would call attention to the country's problems. Though I'm pretty skeptical that the likelihood of implementing needed reforms is going to be much affected, either way, by emigration levels.

Stepping back: If we want to get the most welfare "bang" for our ecological "buck", barring the global poor access to economic opportunities is surely not the way to go. (It's less extreme than outright killing them, but I think ultimately misguided for fundamentally similar reasons.) We should strive for improved efficiency in less humanly damaging ways: emissions taxes, reduced animal (esp. cattle) farming, increased urban density / efficient transit, etc. Not to mention investing in scientific research to uncover new solutions -- investments which are more easily made by a wealthier, better educated populace.

Parfit on Philosophical Waste

2012-01-17T14:10:00.003-05:00

It seems strangely common for commentators to misrepresent Parfit as claiming that a mistaken philosophical project (e.g. exploring and defending a false theory) lacks all value. Eric Schliesser previously attributed to Parfit the view "that there is no philosophic value (pure waste) in failure." (Sadly, Eric refused to correct this misattribution even when prompted.) More recently, Philip Kitcher writes:

If Naturalism is true, then many of Parfit’s claims are indeed wrong and his perspective is indeed askew. Does it follow that his efforts (and consequently much of his life) have been wasted? I do not think so. Almost all those who have engaged in any form of inquiry have been wrong and misguided...

But Parfit's concern is not that, if he's mistaken, then in virtue of being mistaken his philosophical work would have been a waste. Not at all. Rather, his worry is that if metaethical naturalism is true, then this would mean there are no substantive questions in normative ethics, and hence all his work in normative ethics would have been wasted -- not because it's mistaken, but because it was addressing empty questions. It would be a waste in much the same way that it would be a waste to dedicate your life to a merely verbal dispute: whether the pope is a "bachelor", say, or whether a tree falling in an empty forest makes a "sound".

Here's the relevant passage from On What Matters (vol 2, p.367):

Naturalists believe both that all facts are natural facts, and that normative claims are intended to state facts. We should expect that, on this view, we don't need to make irreducibly normative claims. If Naturalism were true, there would be no facts that only such claims could state.

If there were no such facts, and we didn't need to make such claims, Sidgwick, Ross, I, and many others [i.e. normative theorists] would have wasted much of our lives. We have asked what matters, which acts are right or wrong, and what we have reasons to want, and to do. If Naturalism were true, there would be no point in trying to answer such questions.

As is clear from this passage, it isn't mere falsity that renders one's philosophical work a "waste". There are two clear indicators of this. (1) Otherwise, he would already think that at least one of Sidgwick and Ross, in virtue of advocating conflicting theories, must have wasted their lives. And he certainly doesn't think that! (2) Naturalism is a metaethical view that Parfit argues against. But he isn't concerned that if he's wrong about this, it renders his metaethical work a waste. Rather, it's the value of his normative work that is under threat -- and at no point does he worry that his normative views are false. The worry is instead that the questions are empty -- that there is "no point" in answering them.

It shouldn't be controversial that some philosophical projects are a waste of time -- and getting bogged down in a merely verbal dispute, or addressing otherwise "empty" questions, is surely the paradigm of such "wasted time".

What's more controversial, of course, is Parfit's claim that normative ethics can only be substantive if metaethical non-naturalism is true. Reasonable people can disagree about this. But it's hardly a surprising view for a non-naturalist to take, since the main motivation for non-naturalism is precisely the sense that it's the only way to take normativity seriously, i.e. to secure a domain or subject matter for normative ethics to be about.

I've similarly argued that questions about what entities are conscious (what we might call "first-order" philosophy of mind, by analogy to first-order ethics) can only be substantive if dualism is true. If physicalism is the true theory of "meta-mind", then once we know all about the physical functioning of my silicon-chip duplicate, there's nothing left to know about whether he's "conscious" or not. There's no further question there. So someone who dedicated their life to answering that (non-)question would be, naturally enough, wasting their time.

2011: My Web of Beliefs

2011-12-24T17:24:00.001-05:00

Time for another year-end summary! (Cf. 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004.) I'm posting it a little earlier this year because right after Christmas I'm off to the APA in search of a job. [If anyone happens to have a spare one lying around that they'd like to give me, that'd be most welcome!] So anyway, I expect this to be my final post of the year...

Normative Ethics

My favourite posts of the year were probably the series of three that I wrote on Caspar Hare's "morphing" argument for generalized benevolence. Good fun (including some contributions in the comments from Caspar himself).

Why Consequentialism? surveys some common arguments in favour of the moral theory (or family of theories). A taxonomy of various sub-options is presented in Varieties of Consequentialism. A couple of more recent posts explore the idea of Satisficing by Effort, and why we might be led beyond Scalar Consequentialism.

I posted drafts of my two central dissertation chapters, defending consequentialism against various "character-based" objections.

Consequentialism and Individual Impact explores various kinds of cases where act consequentialism seems to condone collectively bad outcomes because each individual's contribution appears to make no difference.

Natural Agents and Status-Quo Bias critically examines Sartorio's claim that there's some "moral inertia" against acting (e.g. to respectively cause and prevent two equally weighty harms).

Metaethics

The Moral Lottery critique's Street's epistemic objection to moral realism, arguing that the sense in which realists must consider themselves "lucky" to have true moral beliefs is not necessarily objectionable. This and related arguments are further developed in my paper draft, Knowing What Matters.

A reason by any other name... defends non-naturalist normative realism against the objection that non-natural properties couldn't possibly be of normative significance.

I then turn the tables by advancing The Normativity Objection to Metaethical Naturalism, including a normative version of Frank Jackson's famous 'Knowledge Argument'. This is followed by a defense of The Open Question Argument, and a sympathetic explanation of Horgan & Timmons' Moral Twin Earth argument.

Moral Judgments, 2Dism, and Attitudinal Commitments argues (against Henning's recent paper in Ethics) that 2-D semantics can't save moral naturalism. Nor can appeal to Elite Properties.

Epistemology and Metaphysics

In addition to the moral epistemology posts mentioned above, I also discuss The Kripke-Harman Dogmatism Paradox, and some thoughts on Formulating Theories of Peer Disagreement

Epiphenomenal Explanations points out a sense in which even causally inert properties (be they normative or phenomenal) can still feature in explanations.

Applied Ethics

I discuss The Puzzle of the Self-Torturer, suggesting that we can make progress on this puzzle for rational choice by first reframing it as an axiological puzzle.

What's Wrong With 'What Is Marriage?' offers a fairly thorough refutation of the latest anti-gay marriage arguments.

Neglected Interests brainstorms some of our most egregious failures to live up to ideals of moral equality.

Virtue and Anonymous Donation argues that it's not only consequentially better to publicize one's charitable behaviour, but it's also what the virtuous agent would do.

Welfarism vs. Appreciating Beauty explores the tension between the two.

Misc.

Fishy Relativism exposes some silliness from Stanley Fish in the NY Times.

Why We Needn't Hold Politics Hostage to Metaphysics responds to more philosophical confusion in another popular magazine.

A fun open thread invited readers to share what they judge to be my biggest philosophical mistakes.

What to Install on a new Windows PC -- self-explanatory. (Written largely for my own future reference, but hopefully others may also find some useful tips in there.)

Merry Christmas, all!

Welfarism vs. Appreciating Beauty

2011-12-24T13:55:00.002-05:00

An interesting trilemma...

(1) Welfarism: Only the welfare of sentient beings has intrinsic (non-instrumental) value.
(2) Fitting Attitudes: It's fitting to have non-instrumental pro-attitudes towards just those things that have non-instrumental value.
(3) Direct Appreciation of Beauty: It's fitting to directly appreciate objects of beauty -- great art, music, natural wonders, etc. (Where "direct appreciation" is a kind of non-instrumental pro-attitude.)

I take (2) to be analytic, so the question is which of (1) or (3) to give up. Both strike me as initially quite plausible, so it's not an easy choice.

Subjectivists about aesthetic value might offer a debunking explanation of why we find (3) plausible, suggesting instead that we are systematically deluded in our aesthetic experiences. We think that our experiences of beauty consist of latching on to objective properties in the world that warrant our awed response, but in fact it's just a more-or-less arbitrary matter of what clusters of sensory properties happen to push our buttons. Or so the story goes.

On the other hand, if we want to take our aesthetic experiences seriously, and trust that they are indeed warranted when they seem to be (at least some of the time), then aesthetic value would seem to provide a fairly direct counterexample to welfarism's claimed monopoly on value.

Might we reconcile welfarism with aesthetic objectivism by suggesting that objectively beautiful objects are valuable in the indirect sense that appreciative experiences of those objects are of greater value than equally pleasant experiences of less-genuinely-beautiful objects? This still fails to vindicate the pre-theoretic datum that the gushing waterfall warrants appreciation. Instead, what becomes warranted is the abstract desire to appreciate the waterfall. This seems too indirect to be fully satisfying.

So my inclination is to reject welfarism (1) instead.

One argument for welfarism draws on the intuition that all worlds lacking sentient creatures are equally (non-)valuable. The presence of phenomenal consciousness seems to be a fundamental precondition for genuine value. I'm no longer so sure of this principle, but it seems to me that we might hold on to it without thereby committing ourselves to the idea that welfare is the only thing of value.

Just as we can think that consciousness is a precondition for (normatively significant) welfare even while one's welfare itself is affected by more than just one's internal mental states, so we might hold that consciousness is a precondition for other -- e.g. aesthetic -- values.

Put more precisely, the idea here is that the waterfall itself is non-instrumentally valuable, but only conditional on its being observed / appreciated. So a world containing only the (unobserved) waterfall would not realize its value. But still the thing that warrants our pro-attitudes is the waterfall itself (assuming the condition is met), rather than just experiences of the waterfall. So attributing non-instrumental value to the object of aesthetic experiences in this way is significantly different -- and perhaps more plausible -- than attributing value (only) to the experience itself.

Scalar Consequentialism and Constructed Permissibility

2011-12-01T17:06:00.002-05:00

I take Consequentialism to suggest a fundamentally scalar picture. The most fundamental assessment of actions simply ranks them on a scale of better to worse, indicating our having more or less reason to perform them. That's what centrally matters.

But we may also be interested in other moral questions, such as whether we would be blameworthy for performing some act. Consequentialists traditionally haven't been much interested in questions of blameworthiness (as distinct from, say, whether it would promote utility to express blame in some circumstances), but I think there are real normative questions here, besides those that consequentialism addresses. For example, there are rational norms governing emotions and reactive attitudes, which we may reasonably theorize about. So we may ask whether certain negative emotional responses towards others are warranted, in light of their actions. This is to ask whether they are blame-worthy.

I think the best theory of blameworthiness is some kind of quality of will account, according to which people are praiseworthy or blameworthy, in performing some action φ, to the extent that their φ-ing manifests a good or bad quality of will (respectively). Here "bad" is to be understood as insufficiently good -- so acting in a way that isn't positively malicious, but demonstrates a lack of adequate concern for others, still qualifies as "blameworthy" on this account.

This distinction between adequate and inadequate concern introduces a binary element into our moral philosophy. [This comes with distinctive problems -- what determines exactly where the boundary is drawn? -- but I won't get into that here.] This can then be used to construct a derivative notion of 'rightness' or permissibility that could be of practical interest. For example...

(1) Impermissibility as hypothetical blameworthiness: There seems to be an intimate connection between wrong action and blameworthiness. But they're clearly not identical: Sometimes ignorance might excuse acting wrongly, and conversely, objectively harmless actions (e.g. voodoo) might be blameworthy if performed with ill intent. What's key to these cases of divergence is a mismatch between how things really are, and how the agent takes them to be. Quality of will (and hence blameworthiness) concerns the latter, whereas permissibility seems to be a more objective mode of assessment. But perhaps we can bridge the gap by defining 'impermissibility' in terms of acts that couldn't be blamelessly performed by competent agents who (momentarily) know all the relevant facts.

The rough idea (abstracting from the distorting effects of ignorance) is that an action is permissible if it is among the options compatible with exemplifying an "adequate" level of concern. (There are potential issues with the conditional fallacy here -- can it be avoided in this case by the proviso that the hypothetical agent is cognitively idealized only for the moment of decision?)

(2) We might also appeal to this notion of an "adequate" level of concern in order to determine a principled "effort ceiling" for Effort-Based Satisficing Consequentialism. Given a prior account of emotional norms, specifying what counts as an "adequate" level of concern (to avoid blameworthiness) in any given situation, we can then specify that the effort ceiling X is the amount of effort that an adequately concerned moral agent would be willing to expend (if necessary) in that situation. Thus explicated, EBSC amounts to the view that we're obligated to achieve the best results we can without being required to put in more effort than an adequately concerned moral agent would be willing to. And that sounds vaguely plausible, given the above noted connection between impermissibility and blameworthiness (inadequate concern).

Remaining Questions:

* Are (1) and (2) competing options? I'm hoping that (2) is what you naturally get when you supplement the general account in (1) with consequentialist norms, such that within the options compatible with one's limited degree of moral motivation, rationality requires that you choose the one with the best outcome. But it's a little slippery, so I'd welcome others' thoughts on this connection.

* I've suggested that even scalar consequentialists might be led to construct a derivative notion of permissibility, by way of an independent interest in (avoiding) blameworthiness. Do you think that this adequately captures the ordinary conception of permissibility and why it matters? (Or do you think, say, that permissibility is bedrock, and not to be analyzed in other terms? Perhaps its significance is supposed to be directly communicated through moral phenomenology? If so then I don't think I get it.)

* I'm drawing on non-consequentialist norms for emotions and reactive attitudes in order to construct this derivative notion of permissibility. Is this a problem? I'm inclined to think not, since I think that consequentialism only applies to actions (and intimately connected mental items like intentions and preferences). But others might think there's something illicit about mixing consequentialist and non-consequentialist norms in this way. If so, I'd be curious to hear the objection spelled out...

* Is it plausible that some non-optimal level of good will is "adequate" to avoid blameworthiness? How might the details of this go -- have theorists of blame said much about this? (If only perfect moral motivation is acceptable, then my proposed version of EBSC will collapse into maximizing consequentialism. Whereas if there are no objective norms governing the reactive attitudes, then it would seem we can't go beyond simple scalar consequentialism.)

Any other thoughts?

Satisficing by Effort

2011-11-30T21:07:00.002-05:00

Satisficing Consequentialism aims to capture the intuitive idea that we're not morally obligated to do the best possible, we merely need to do "good enough" (though of course it remains better to do better!). Ben Bradley, in 'Against Satisficing Consequentialism', argues convincingly against forms of the view which introduce the baseline as some utility level n that we need to meet. Such views absurdly condone the act of gratuitously preventing boosts to utility over the baseline n. But I think there is a better form that satisficing consequentialism can take. Rather than employing a baseline utility level, a better way to "satisfice" is to introduce a level of maximum demanded effort below which one straightforwardly maximizes utility. That is:

(Effort-based Satisficing Consequentialism) An act is permissible iff it produces no less utility than any alternative action the agent could perform with up to X effort.

Different theories of this form may be reached by fleshing out the effort ceiling, X, in different ways. It might be context-sensitive, e.g. to ensure (1) that it's never permissible to do just a little good when a huge amount of good could be achieved by an only slightly more effortful action; (2) that vicious people can't get away with doing little just because it would take a lot more effort for them to show the slightest concern for others; or (3) that your current effort ceiling takes into account your past actions, etc. I'll remain neutral on all those options for now.

To preempt one possible misreading, I should stress that this theory doesn't require (or even necessarily permit) you to "try hard" to achieve moral ends. That would be fetishistic. If you can achieve better results with less effort, then you're required to do just that! It merely places a ceiling on how much effort morality can demand from you. Within that constraint, the requirement is still just to do as much good as possible.

Some other features of the view worth flagging:

* Unlike traditional (utility baselines) satisficing accounts, it never condones going out of your way to make thing worse. Such action is rendered impermissible by the fact that there are better outcomes that you could just as easily -- indeed, more easily -- bring about (i.e. by doing nothing).

* It respects the insight that the "demandingness" of maximizing consequentialism cannot consist in its imposing excessive material demands on us, since the material burden on us is less than the material burden that non-consequentialism imposes on the impoverished (to remain without adequate aid). Instead, if there is an issue of "demandingness" at all, it must concern the psychological difficulty of acting rightly.

* It builds on the idea that there's no metaphysical basis for a normatively significant doing/allowing distinction. The only morally plausible candidate in the vicinity, it seems to me, is effortful willing.

* It provides a natural account of supererogation as going beyond the effort ceiling to achieve even better results. (As others noted in class, traditional utility-baseline forms of satisficing consequentialism have trouble avoiding the absurd result that lazing back in your chair might qualify as "going above and beyond the call of duty", if you have inferior alternative options that nonetheless exceed the utility baseline.)

So, all in all, this strikes me as by far the most promising form of satisficing consequentialism. Can anyone think of any obvious objections? How would you best flesh out the details (of how X gets fixed for any given situation)?

P.S. My next post will look at why we might be led to a view in this vicinity, over (or as a supplement to) straightforward scalar consequentialism.

[Update: Cross-posted to PEA Soup.]

Philosophers' Carnival Submission Method Update

2011-11-28T23:45:00.003-05:00

Since the BlogCarnival submission form no longer works, the Philosophers' Carnival is upgrading to an all new, more reliable system: Email!

From now on, to submit a post to the carnival, just send along the URL and post title (and preferably a short description) to r.chappell+carnival@gmail.com, with "Philosophers' Carnival submission" in the subject line, and it'll be automatically forwarded along to the next carnival host.

Update: I've added a new submission form (powered by google docs) to the Philosophers' Carnival homepage. Please use that instead!

Virtue and Anonymous Donation

2011-11-27T18:46:00.000-05:00

It's commonly thought (following, e.g., Jesus and Maimonides) that it's better -- more virtuous -- to give to charity anonymously rather than publicly flouting one's generosity. Nobody likes a braggart, after all, and ostentatiously trumpeted donations may suggest that the donor is more motivated to boost his reputation than to actually help others.

I agree that actions motivated by genuine concern for others are thereby more virtuous than actions motivated by petty reputational concerns. But I don't think this is any reason to hide one's philanthropic activities. Here's why:

Just as some people may give publicly for petty reasons, so one might choose to remain anonymous for petty reasons -- e.g. fear that others might consider one a braggart. In fact, someone motivated purely by altruistic concerns would be quite vocal about their philanthropic actions, since this is how they can help others most, as Peter Singer points out:

One of the most significant factors determining whether people give to charity is what others are doing. Those who make it known that they give to charity increase the likelihood that others will do the same.... We need to get over our reluctance to speak openly about the good we do. Silent giving will not change a culture that deems it sensible to spend all your money on yourself and your family, rather than to help those in greater need – even though helping others is likely to bring more fulfilment in the long run.

There may be special cases where having your name attached to your donation might have bad effects, e.g. placing the recipients in your debt, such that they later feel undue pressure to acquiesce to your requests. But even in such cases, one can be open about the general fact that one donates 10% (or whatever) to effective charities, even while one remains reticent about which particular donations one has made.

Of course, real people aren't angels: we're always going to have some degree of mixed motivation. So it's all a matter of degree. But the less we obsess over our own (real or apparent) "virtue", and the more we attend to real needs and opportunities out there in the world, the better. And that means doing what we can to promote a "culture of giving", making it easier for people to act on their philanthropic values.

So, on that note, I heartily encourage any philanthropically-inclined readers to join Giving What We Can, and encourage their friends to do likewise!

Epiphenomenal Explanations

2011-11-23T15:40:00.001-05:00

Explanations come in various different forms. Sometimes we are interested in strictly causal "actual sequence" explanations, which tell us which particular causal forces happened to bring about the outcome in question. Other times we want a higher-level, "robust process" explanation, identifying the broader patterns that secure similar outcomes across nearby possible worlds (though the particular "sequence" details may vary, compatibly with maintaining the same high-level pattern). These explanatory patterns might be considered 'causes' in a weaker sense -- they're certainly eligible to feature in true "because" claims, though there's an obvious sense in which such abstracta lack the direct causal "oomph" of their particular physical constituents. Further, I think we sometimes appeal -- esp. regarding ethics and phenomenal consciousness -- to what might be called "correlative" explanations, when we speak of some familiar epiphenomenal byproduct as being explanatory, even when strictly speaking it is a correlated physical state that provides the causal "oomph".

Consider the following picture of epiphenomenal consciousness:

We may think of mental states as having both physical and experiential components: their physical effects are due entirely to the physical aspects of our thoughts. The non-physical (experiential) component, on the other hand, constitutes what it feels like to be in that state. There's then an obvious sense in which our mental states have causal effects, insofar as their physical aspects do. That doesn't require that the causal 'oomph' come from the experiential aspect -- indeed, how could it? Experiential feels aren't the kinds of things that push atoms around. You need other particles to accomplish that!

On this view, we may (speaking loosely) say that I pulled my hand away from the hot stove "because it hurt", and this can be perfectly informative, without implying that the hurty feel itself provided the causal force that moved my hand. It's a reasonably robust explanation because across a wide range of nearby possible worlds, I flinch away from things that cause me certain kinds of pain. This is so even though the underlying physical state is what's really doing the causal work, such that if you tweaked the psycho-physical bridging laws to turn this into a zombie world, my behaviour (following my brain states) would remain unchanged. (Of course, with the robust correlation gone, the explanation "because it hurt" would no longer be available in the zombie world. My point is just that this distant possibility of correlative breakdown doesn't undermine the use of correlative explanations in the actual world.)

I think that similar "correlative" explanations are available to metaethical epiphenomenalists. Even non-naturalists who deny causal powers to abstract moral properties can nonetheless follow the likes of Sturgeon and Railton in using ethical categories in robust-process explanations. It's (in part) because Hitler was evil that his rise to power led to such atrocities. It's (in part) because American slavery was so strikingly immoral that the abolition movement gained widespread support. This isn't to say that the property of "evilness" exerted physical pressure on the world. Again, the underlying natural properties (lack of compassion, etc.) provided the causal "oomph". It's just that the moral properties correlate with important patterns of natural properties -- patterns whose various possible instantiations may reliably lead to human suffering, and to righteous indignation and outrage on the part of fitting moral agents who are attuned to those patterns.

This is all to suggest that familiar objections to (phenomenal and metaethical) epiphenomenalism seem overblown. Sure, it'd be crazy to deny (e.g.) the commonsense idea that I pulled away from the stove "because it hurt". But we've seen that epiphenomenalists need not deny this. The question then becomes: Is it so clear that commonsense commits us to the stronger claim that the hurtiness is what must provide the causal 'oomph' in such a case? I think that this is not at all clear, and that the epiphenomenalist's rival account seems perfectly sensible on reflection. But perhaps my intuitions are corrupted by theory, so I invite others to chime in with their thoughts...

Why Consequentialism?

2011-11-14T17:51:00.001-05:00

People sometimes ask me why I'm a consequentialist. This is a difficult question to answer productively, since direct introspection merely reveals my deep-rooted sense that non-consequentialist views just don't make sense. There's probably no single argument that's responsible for this intuitive response. But it might at least be fun to brainstorm a few considerations that could plausibly lead one to favour consequentialism...

(1) The 'fundamentality of value' intuition: It seems very plausible that morality (insofar as it's worth caring about) is fundamentally concerned with making the world a better place. This seems a more attractive conception of action-guiding normativity than the old-fashioned conception of morality as a list of "do"s and "do not"s.

Put another way: Suppose you have a choice between two actions, one of which makes things better, and the other makes things (comparatively) worse. Doesn't that seem to settle the question of which action is most worth choosing? We may wonder: How could it be wrong to choose the action that (predictably) makes things turn out best?

(2) Skepticism about doing/allowing and related distinctions. Whether it's doing vs allowing, or intended vs merely foreseen, the kinds of distinctions that deontologists rely upon just don't seem significant enough to be able to pull such normative weight. As such, non-consequentialist views end up looking like mere flimsy rationalizations for status quo bias.

(3) The Paradox of Deontology: It seems somehow incoherent to hold that one shouldn't perform certain kinds of actions even to prevent the occurrence of more such bad actions. (As G.A. Cohen put it, "if such sacrifice and violation are so horrendous, why should we not be concerned to minimize their occurrence?") See also Parfit's argument that common-sense morality is collectively self-defeating.

(4) "God's eye view" arguments: It seems that an ideal (benevolent, omniscient) observer would want us to perform the actions that make things turn out best. And it's plausible that the prescriptions of such an ideal observer would coincide with those of morality (why would they differ?). Similar remarks apply to the Veil of Ignorance.

(5) Equal Concern: In light of points 2 and 4 above, consequentialist impartiality seems like the most principled way to treat everyone equally (thereby satisfying an appealing and plausible candidate, rivaling point #1, for 'what morality is fundamentally about'). Again, the rivals seem to rest on either some kind of status quo bias, or else confused notions about what constitutes treating people with equal concern.

Have I missed anything? What do you consider the strongest reasons in favour of consequentialism?

Why We Needn't Hold Politics Hostage to Metaphysics

2011-11-12T01:45:00.005-05:00

Oh dear -- Reason Online has just (re)published a morass of philosophical confusion:

The brain is a physical organ. As such, it follows the laws of biology, chemistry, physics, quantum physics, and of any other hard science we have yet to discover. The brain cannot make choices. It is not free. So when someone says that mind is nothing but brain, he is saying that the things we associate with mind—choosing, preferring, thinking—aren’t real.

In philosophy this is called epiphenomenalism.

Firstly: No. 'Epiphenomenalism' is not the view that "mind is nothing but the brain". That's physicalism. Epiphenomenalism is a kind of "one-way" dualism: the brain gives rise to the distinct phenomenon of conscious experience (or 'qualia'), but these qualia do not affect the physical world. Unlike interactionist (or "two-way") dualism, the view is thus consistent with the causal closure of the physical -- the principle that physical effects must have merely physical causes. For example, my writing about the experience of seeing red is caused, not by the experience itself, but rather by the underlying brain state.

(People often claim that this is counterintuitive. I'm not so sure. We may think of mental states as having both physical and experiential components: their physical effects are due entirely to the physical aspects of our thoughts. The non-physical (experiential) component, on the other hand, constitutes what it feels like to be in that state. There's then an obvious sense in which our mental states have causal effects, insofar as their physical aspects do. That doesn't require that the causal 'oomph' come from the experiential aspect -- indeed, how could it? Experiential feels aren't the kinds of things that push atoms around. You need other particles to accomplish that!)

More importantly: there's no reason to think that physicalism is incompatible with "making choices". The reference to physical "laws" suggests that the author may be specifically worried about causal determinism (which is orthogonal to the physicalism/dualism debate), but even then, note:

(1) Whether or not determinism is true, there is an obvious sense in which the brains of humans (and, in an attenuated sense, even many non-human animals) implement "choices", understood as a certain kind of information processing (involving decoupled representations) leading to goal-directed behaviour. Abstracting away from the experiential feel of it all, this cognitive-behavioural phenomenon is perfectly physical -- biologists and cognitive scientists study it!

(2) Perhaps the author is instead concerned about whether our choices are "free" in the strong sense necessary for moral responsibility. That's a more respectable worry, though it's worth noting (as the author seems unaware) it's also quite possible to view determinism and moral responsibility as compatible. After all, there's clearly some significant difference between the psychological processes underlying ordinary behaviour and compulsive behaviour, for example, and we can still track that difference (and accord it moral significance) even if determinism is true.

(3) Even if that is the worry, the author is way too hasty in leaping to political conclusions. He writes:

If mind is brain, there is no “psychological” freedom or responsibility—no humanity. And if those don’t exist, there can be no political freedom or self-responsibility. What does not exist cannot be violated. [...] The hard sciences are great human achievements, but for the sake of liberty, they must not be permitted to overstep their bounds.

But political liberty is an entirely different matter from psychological (let alone "metaphysical") freedom. The former is threatened by external coercion, whereas the latter is threatened by (e.g.) internal compulsion. These are different! Even if it turns out that moral responsibility is an illusion, that just means that people aren't to be held morally accountable for the things they choose. It's not a reason to impede those choices (given the usual proviso that they don't harm others).

There are plenty of (e.g. utilitarian) arguments for classical liberalism which clearly don't depend at all on assumptions about moral responsibility. And even some that might initially seem related actually aren't. Libertarian talk of "individual responsibility", for example, presumably concerns a particular kind of behaviour, and people can still behave more or less "responsibly" in this sense, even if there turns out to be no such thing as "moral responsibility" in the sense of moral desert.

In fact, the only clearly relevant libertarian argument that springs to mind is the claim (found only in the more conservative corners of the broad tent) that we shouldn't redistribute wealth because poor people "deserve" their lot in life. If nobody really deserves anything, then that argument is pretty swiftly undermined. But there is (thankfully) more to "liberty" than just the liberty to ignore those in need. Can readers think of any other (less morally repugnant) libertarian arguments that depend upon the existence of strong moral responsibility?

Formulating Theories of Peer Disagreement

2011-11-10T19:49:00.000-05:00

Just a quick thought... The "Equal Weight" View (roughly, that epistemic peers should "split the difference" between their credences) is often glossed as the view that you should give your peer's opinion the same weight that you give your own. But opponents of the view need not deny this (at least on one natural reading).

The best alternative views do not hold that your judging that p is better evidence for p than is your peer's judgment. Rather, they hold that this "higher order evidence" -- provided by the judgments of yourself and your peer -- does not exhaust the relevant evidence. While there's an epistemic symmetry at this level, we must also consider the first-order evidence (on which your original judgment was based), which might count in favour of one view over the other.

Indeed, even the most "steadfast" views give equal weight to your own and your peer's judgments (as such) -- for they give no weight at all to either psychological fact; they instead hold that the rational credence is entirely determined by the first-order evidence.

So it seems to me that we would do better to avoid this misleading way of formulating the issue. The question is not how to weight others' judgments against your own; it's about how to weight the higher-order evidence against the first-order evidence.