Philosophy, et cetera

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

2011-11-28T23:45:00.002-05:00

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 also added a new submission form (powered by google docs) to the Philosophers' Carnival homepage that you can use if you prefer.

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.

Links via Twitter

2011-11-08T10:40:00.000-05:00

Google Reader has annoyingly removed their "shared items" functionality, which I'd used to generate the "Elsewhere" links that used to populate this blog's sidebar. So now I'm trying out Twitter for sharing links instead. So, if you want to see the links that have struck me as particularly interesting recently, you can find them on my Twitter page. Or, for those who (like me) prefer RSS, here's the feed.

What's Fit for the Fallible (draft)

2011-11-07T13:26:00.002-05:00

PDF draft available here. Abstract:

What would a utilitarian agent look like? Some have taken the answer to describe an agent so incompetent and perverse that it casts doubt on utilitarianism itself. In this paper, I develop the strongest form of this 'self-effacingness' objection to utilitarianism, based on the idea of a constitutive link between rationality and normally competent agency. Assuming this understanding of rationality for sake of argument, I then suggest two ways to defend utilitarianism. One appeals to a Railtonian 'sophisticated' or two-level utilitarian psychology, though I suggest some potential problems for this approach. The second involves showing how we can develop a direct utilitarian psychology within rational constraints. In the course of distinguishing these two alternative paths, I make a distinction between dispositions that are 'extrinsically desirable' and those that are desirable in virtue of being 'well calibrated for action' -- a distinction that I then employ to illuminate the Gauthier-Parfit debate about whether it's rational to act on rationally desirable dispositions.

Comments welcome! (Especially since I expect to use this for my job talks, with it being a fairly natural sequel to my writing sample on 'The Fitting and the Fortunate'.)

NY Times spreads anti-contraceptive lies

2011-10-26T12:49:00.000-04:00

According to the NY Times, proposed legislation to call zygotes legal persons would...

bar some birth control methods, including IUDs and “morning-after pills” that prevent fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus.

Contrast the Journal of the American Medical Association:

The authors of such claims [that Plan B prevents implantation] have offered no supporting evidence regarding Plan B's mechanism of action. On the contrary, what has been offered are assertions that “the exact mechanism of action of Plan B is unknown” and that “the dirty little secret is, nobody really knows.” Such sweeping statements of uncertainty not only directly contradict the claim that Plan B's anti-implantation action is “proven” but also promote general misunderstanding and misuse of doubt in science. [...]

Published evidence clearly indicates that Plan B can interfere with sperm migration by altering the cervical and uterine environment, and that preovulatory use of Plan B usually suppresses the LH surge either completely or partially, which in turn either prevents ovulation or leads to the release of ova that are resistant to fertilization. Epidemiological evidence rules strongly against interruption of fallopian tube function by Plan B. Evidence that would support direct involvement of endometrial damage or luteal dysfunction in Plan B's contraceptive mechanism is either weak or lacking altogether. Both epidemiologic and clinical studies of Plan B's efficacy in relation to the timing of ovulation are inconsistent with the hypothesis that Plan B acts to prevent implantation. [...]

[A]ll women should be informed that the ability of Plan B to interfere with implantation remains speculative, since virtually no evidence supports that mechanism and some evidence contradicts it. Women should also be informed that the best available evidence indicates that Plan B's ability to prevent pregnancy can be fully accounted for by mechanisms that do not involve interference with postfertilization events.

Thanks to Helen for informing me on this topic. Does anyone know if the claim about IUDs is similarly misleading? Links welcome!

P.S. Medical disputes aside: Is there a standing legal obligation even to let "people" implant in your uterus? Seems odd.

Dear Philosophy Departments: Next Time Please Use AcademicJobsOnline.org

2011-10-23T20:46:00.002-04:00

Some observations on the philosophy job market from my wife Helen:

Almost every single school that does applications online uses the same (horrible) software. And yet for every single school, you must create a new username/password, and fill out the same forms over again, and upload all the same documents.

This is outrageous, not primarily because it's so damned cumbersome, but because there already exists a centralized jobs site: academicjobsonline.org

AcademicJobsOnline is an extension of the centralized service created by the American Mathematical Society, which is open to academics in any field. You upload your documents and personal information once. After that, it takes about 30 seconds to apply to a job. You just check the boxes for the materials you want to include (and have the option of uploading more materials), check the boxes of the letters you want to include, and presto!

Additional benefits to candidates: You can be notified when your letters are uploaded, and it's easy to tailor what you want to send to specific schools (e.g. if you want to send extra teaching letters to certain schools but not to others, all you have to do is check an extra box).

There's also a huge potential benefit to departments: Currently the poor person in charge of sending out letters has to upload letters for (number of applicants) x (number of letter writers per applicant) x (number of schools applied to per applicant). Maybe 2000 letters?? If departments all used this already existing service, this would be cut down to a maximum of (number of applicants) x (number of letter writers per applicant) = maybe 50ish? And I suspect that it could be cut down even further with this service, since it has a box you can check if someone is uploading letters on behalf of the writers, potentially allowing for all the letters to be uploaded in a single bundle.

Seriously, philosophers, the mathematicians already created the service! Let's give [our department administrators] (as well as the applicants) a break!

Having done a quick search of recent JFP listings, let me just say kudos to Duke, Tufts, Yale, Stanford, Tulane, Oregon, and Washington Tacoma, for leading the way. Hopefully next year many more philosophy departments will join them in doing the sensible thing here!

The Kripke-Harman Dogmatism Paradox

2011-10-06T16:54:00.000-04:00

Some thoughts inspired by yesterday's epistemology seminar...

If I know that h is true, I know that any evidence against h is evidence against something that is true: so I know that such evidence is misleading. But I should disregard evidence that I know is misleading. So, once I know that h is true, I am in a position to disregard any future evidence that seems to tell against h.

-- Gil Harman, Thought, p.148.

Apparently the standard solution is to distinguish what you know at various times: at t0 you know that h is true, and hence also know that any evidence against h is misleading. But once you actually acquire such evidence at t1, your total evidence no longer supports either fact, which is why you're no longer in a position to disregard this new evidence against h.

I think this is right, but it might help to say a little more to further dispel the air of paradox. (I don't have Gil's book so I'm not sure to what extent, if any, this actually goes beyond what he says...)

Suppose your current evidence E supports h (to a degree sufficient for knowledge), and consider some possible piece of contrary evidence e such that E+e would no longer sufficiently support h. Since E supports h, it likewise supports the entailment that "any evidence against h is misleading", and hence, in particular, "if e obtains, it is misleading". Now it's important to stress that this is merely a material conditional. Recall that your justification for believing h is contingent on the absence of e. This justificatory constraint is presumably inherited by the inferred conditional. That is, your justification for believing "if e obtains then e is misleading evidence" is likewise contingent on the absence of e -- or, in other words, the falsity of the antecedent. You're justified in believing the conditional only insofar as it is vacuously true.

More generally: You're only justified in believing that "any evidence against h is misleading" insofar as you're justified in believing that there isn't any such (sufficiently weighty) evidence against h. After all, if there were sufficiently weighty evidence against h, then that'd undermine your basis for believing h, and hence for believing that the evidence against h is misleading. And, indeed, that's exactly the position you end up in if such evidence later comes to light.

So there's no paradox -- no grounds for "disregarding" evidence. If you initially know that h is true, but later uncover some evidence e that would undermine belief in h, then you can't appeal to h as grounds for disregarding e. You were never justified in believing the subjunctive conditional that were e to obtain it would be misleading evidence. (You initially believed h only because you believed e to be absent. You may well have believed that in the nearest possible world where e obtains, it serves as accurate evidence of h's falsity in that world. You just never expected to find e in the actual world.) The same may be true of the indicative conditional, though I'm less confident in assessing that. (Plausibly, if your justification for believing h is contingent on the absence of e, then you're not justified in believing the indicative conditional "if e, then h is true".)

In sum: I think that much of the intuitive force of the paradox rests on our implicitly inflating the material conditional ("if e obtains then it's misleading evidence") into some more robust conditional that we could retain belief in, and subsequently reason from, even after learning that e actually obtains. But our initial material conditional is not like that -- it is immediately undermined by the appearance of e, which is why we can't then use it to disregard e.

Williamson on Intuitions

2011-10-06T15:30:00.000-04:00

In general, the objection "That's only an intuition" is ill-posed in the same way as the objection "That's only a judgment". Some judgments are indeed objectionable, but the mere fact that a proposition is judged is not even a prima facie reason for doubting it.

-- Timothy Williamson, The Philosophy of Philosophy, p.220.

New Jobs Listing site for Philosophers

2011-09-19T15:39:00.001-04:00

... at http://phylo.info/jobs:

Phylo Jobs is a free listing of job openings for academic philosophers. Listings are accepted from department or search committee chairs (or their authorized representatives) and verified for accuracy before appearing below. To find a listing, enter any information the search box below, or use the advanced search to filter listings based rank, AOS, or other criteria. For unofficial, user-provided information on the status of a position, please visit http://phylo.info/jobs/wiki.

Since the old JFP is completely dysfunctional, I hope departments will take advantage of this new (and greatly superior) option for getting word out about the jobs they're offering!

Update: And now there's PhilJobs (from the good folks at PhilPapers).

Too many options! Either looks great, though, and a huge improvement on the status quo, so I guess we'll just need to wait and see which one departments end up gravitating more towards...

Elite Normativity

2011-09-05T20:11:00.001-04:00

One way the metaethical naturalist might be tempted to respond to the Open Question, Triviality, Normative Knowledge, and Moral Twin Earth arguments is to appeal to Lewisian "elite" properties (which represent objective natural similarity / unity, and function as "reference magnets" when linguistic dispositions / "use" underdetermine meaning). According to what we might call Elite Moral Naturalism, 'right' refers to the most natural (/simple/"elite") natural property that systematizes the moral platitudes that capture our common use of the word. Suppose this turns out to be the property of maximizing happiness. Elite Naturalism avoids the standard anti-naturalist arguments because it's a non-analytic and yet observer-independent fact that maximizing happiness is a more "elite" property than other moral candidates (conformity to such-and-such list of duties, etc.). Nonetheless, I consider it an unappealing view. Let me explain why...

Firstly, some might question whether appeal to this mysterious higher-order property of "elitehood", over and above the qualitative natural facts, really fits with the spirit of traditional metaethical naturalism: "Haven't we just replaced one kind of magic halo with another?" I feel like there's something to this concern, but the Elitist can at least respond that we're already committed to elite properties (insofar as we want to privilege green over grue, plus over quus, etc.), so the view is at least more metaphysically parsimonious than the non-naturalist's insistence on taking normativity to be an entirely new primitive category of being.

Next, one might put pressure on the proposal by noting that in the paradigm cases of elite properties (green vs grue, etc.), the elitehood facts are fairly transparent to us. Reasonable people don't argue about whether green or grue is simpler, whereas we do argue about rival moral theories. But perhaps not all elitehood questions are as straightforward as the paradigm cases. Biologists might argue about whether the most natural definition of 'life' is one that extends to viruses, or only to more self-sufficient reproducers. It's not clear to me that there's really anything substantive at issue there (i.e., whether we can speak of "the" uniquely most natural biological classification, as opposed to various candidates that are more or less useful for different purposes), but perhaps it's enough to give the Elitist some wiggle-room.

I think their central problem is instead found in the flat-footed objection that Lewisian elite properties just aren't normative enough. Note, for example, that the Open Question Argument arises all over again: "I know that maximizing happiness is the most natural systematization of our moral platitudes (say), but is it right?" When I wonder what I should do, I'm not just wondering about taxonomy (or the comparative simplicity of various candidate classificatory codes), the way that I am when I wonder whether viruses are alive.

Compare the analogous view in philosophy of mind: the Elite Materialist holds that consciousness just is the most natural way of systematizing our ascriptions of consciousness. So when I wonder whether a silicon-chip-based "brain" would be conscious, I'm really just wondering (something like) whether a functional description of my brain is more natural than a biological description. But such a view seems clearly wrong: Consciousness is something in the world, not just a way of classifying what's already there. Similarly, I think, for normative talk. Facts about Lewisian naturalness/elitehood might be taken as evidence for taking the normative properties to track one natural property rather than another, but these facts do not straightforwardly settle our normative questions, because we are asking about something over and above the classificatory question.

Moral Twin Earth

2011-09-05T17:08:00.000-04:00

Horgan and Timmons (1992) suggest the following argument against metaethical naturalism: First, note that the naturalist is committed to there being some semantic story about how the reference of our moral terms gets fixed. For example, perhaps ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ refer to those natural properties of actions that causally regulate our practices of praise and blame. So, if the consequentialist property of maximizing happiness is what causally regulates our praising practices, then ‘right’ will refer to the natural property of an act’s being happiness-maximizing.

Second, Horgan and Timmons point out that we can imagine a "Moral Twin Earth" -- a society very similar to ours but where the features identified in the naturalist's moral semantics play out slightly differently, such that they end up picking out a different natural property. So, in our above example, we might imagine a world much like ours except that the deontological property of conforming to the categorical imperative is what causally regulates our counterparts’ practices of praise and blame. So, in that world, ‘right’ will refer to the property of conforming to the categorical imperative.

This naturalist theory then implies that we are talking past each other -- both speaking the truth in our own moral language -- when we affirm consequentialism and our Moral Twin Earth counterparts affirm Kantianism. This seems an unacceptable relativistic result, and violates our semantic intuition that the two parties are -– despite their different answers -– addressing the same moral question. Intuitively, we are disagreeing with our Kantian counterparts, not merely speaking past one another. (Contrast the standard case of water/H2O: In regular Twin Earth, we have no semantic intuition that speakers genuinely disagree when we say “water is H2O” and our twins say “water is not H2O”. The standard Kripke/Putnam intuition is that the two parties are talking about different substances. This difference strongly suggests that it would be a mistake to model our moral semantics on the semantics of natural kind terms.)

Horgan and Timmons further hypothesize that this result can be generalized to any semantic story the naturalist might offer about how the reference of our moral terms gets fixed. Whatever the details of the reference-fixing story, they argue that it will be possible to construct an alternative “Twin” world where the same reference-fixing story picks out a different property than it does in the actual world.

Perhaps the most promising way for naturalists to respond (following Merli 2002) is to preclude the possibility of divergent moral reference by way of the following two claims: (1) The right reference-fixing story appeals not just to our actual (possibly irrational) theories or practices, but rather to an idealized version thereof. (2) All possible agents, when suitably idealized, would converge on the same moral theories or practices.

But this raises the question of whether the appropriate idealization is substantive or merely procedural in nature, posing a dilemma for the naturalist. Any purely procedural process of idealization is too weak to secure moral convergence amongst all possible agents. There are surely multiple possible internally-coherent moral views, any one of which might be endorsed by agents engaging in wide reflective equilibrium, depending on their starting points.

The naturalist might instead turn to a more substantive idealization (appealing to the fitting rather than merely procedurally rational agent). But this begs the question of which internally coherent moral viewpoint is the substantively correct one. The whole problem for the naturalist is that they have no basis for claiming that any particular one of the competing, internally coherent moral theories is the one true moral theory. After all, given the natural (non-moral) parity between us and our Moral Twin Earth counterparts, what in the two worlds can the naturalist appeal to as the basis for a moral or rational asymmetry between us?

Fun / Mind-bending Philosophy?

2011-09-02T19:38:00.000-04:00

Helen and I have been thinking we'd like to put together a syllabus for an undergrad course that isn't bound by any unifying theme or topical focus, but each week simply assigns an awesomely fun paper / topic in philosophy to discuss. We want papers/topics that are fun to read, and sure to stimulate vibrant discussion -- the kind where you end up sticking around talking long after class has "officially" ended. (I have a penchant for "mind-benders", but other fun and gripping topics are also fair game.)

Some possibilities we've come up with so far include: Dennett's "Where am I?", Parfit on split-brains and fission, something on time travel (preferably including Heinlein's short story, "—All You Zombies—"), something questioning the passage of time, maybe some classic phil mind thought experiments like the Chinese Room and/or zombies, some fun paradoxes: mere addition, infinite spheres of utility. Maybe some mindbenders like Bostrom's simulation argument, and Matrix-inspired discussions of radical skepticism and whether life in the Matrix is as good as reality. Something on "the meaning of life" (e.g. Camus or Richard Taylor on Sisyphus? Susan Wolf?). Some phil religion would be nice: maybe Sider's "Hell and Vagueness"? The classic problem of evil? (Not so fun, alas, but sure to get students talking, at least.) Something on free will?

Any other suggestions (including readings for suggested topics) welcome... Help us brainstorm!

Moral Judgments, 2Dism, and Attitudinal Commitments

2011-08-31T15:15:00.003-04:00

There's an interesting new paper in Ethics, Moral Realism and Two-Dimensional Semantics by Tim Henning, which offers a lot of opportunities for disagreement. The abstract:

Moral realists can, and should, allow that the truth-conditional content of moral judgments is in part attitudinal. I develop a two-dimensional semantics that embraces attitudinal content while preserving realist convictions about the independence of moral facts from our attitudes. Relative to worlds “considered as counterfactual,” moral terms rigidly track objective, response-independent properties. But relative to different ways the actual world turns out to be, they nonrigidly track whatever properties turn out to be the objects of our relevant attitudes. This theory provides realists with a satisfactory account of Moral Twin Earth cases and an improved response to Blackburn’s supervenience argument.

There are some clever formal moves in the paper, but on a substantive level it does not strike me as very promising. Here's why...

(1) Henning motivates an "Attitudinal Semantics" for moral terms by noting that when attributing moral concepts to other speakers, "the associated attitudes have more weight than the overlap of the sets of things to which the terms are applied." That is, we're more likely to take someone to judge that something is good if they approve of it and pursue it. Henning takes this datum to motivate a view on which the reference of a moral term like 'good' is fixed by "our" practical attitudes (leaving open for now the precise scope of "our" moral community).

But I think it's much more natural for realists to instead explain the datum on the normative (rather than semantic) level. If something is good, then it's desirable. So when you attribute goodness to a state of affairs, you are rationally committing yourself to desiring it (on pain of incoherence). If someone applies the term 'X' to a bunch of things we take to be good, but they do not appear to have any desire for the things they take to be X, then either they are rationally incoherent or 'X' in their mouth does not mean the same thing as 'good' in ours. Charitable interpretation thus bars us from translating their 'X' to mean good, if it is not connected appropriately with their pro-attitudes. This does not require us to adopt a reductive "Attitudinal Semantics" (in Henning's sense). It simply follows from the normative commitments one undertakes when making certain normative judgments.

(2) Henning claims that his account accommodates the realist's intuition of metaphysical independence, that "being good does not consist in being the object of people’s approval", because on his view "there is a clear sense in which ‘is good’ expresses, and ‘goodness’ refers to, an objective property, that is, a property, the nature and existence of which do not depend on our practical attitudes."

But this feels like a cheap technical fix. (Compare my objections to Eliezer Yudkowsky's metaethics, in comments here.) Sure, the natural property ultimately denoted (on this account) is an objective property, but our practical attitudes play an essential role in the reference-fixing story, which is clearly contrary to the spirit of realism. Most realists who feel strongly about the metaphysical independence datum will presumably feel just as strongly about an analogous (meta-)semantic independence datum: that our practical attitudes do not play a central role in fixing the reference of moral terms.

We might also insist upon a strengthened version of Henning's "Actual Independence", which we may call the datum of Fundamental Fallibility: that "the extension of the term ‘good’ may turn out to differ from the set of things toward which the relevant community has the relevant favorable attitudes" even if the relevant community has full information, imaginative capacities, etc. (If our actual moral community stably takes pain and suffering to be ends in themselves, then it should follow -- on any "realist" view worthy of the name -- that our actual moral community is just plain wrong.) Attitudinal Semantics straightforwardly violates this strengthened datum.

(3) Henning's view is that the property of goodness varies depending on which world is actual. If our moral community is actually utilitarian, then what's right (in all possible worlds, considered counterfactually) is maximizing happiness. But if we consider as actual a world full of deontologists, it follows that rightness is instead the property of satisfying various duties (or whatever).

But this seems crazy. Just as it's a datum that moral terms have an invariant secondary intension (if maximizing happiness is what's right, then it's necessarily right: right in all counterfactual worlds), so it is a datum that they are invariant in their primary intension: If maximizing happiness is what's right, then it's a priori right (if knowable at all): right in all worlds considered as actual. Absent any defense, the contrary result seems on the face of it to disqualify Henning's view from being a plausible metaethical contender.

(4) Henning claims that his view can respond to Horgan & Timmons' "Moral Twin Earth" objection to metaethical naturalism. Suppose our moral community is utilitarian, and then imagine a possible "Twin Earth" much like ours but where people's psychologies are slightly different (e.g. less prone to sympathy, more prone to guilt) such that they are largely deontologists instead. Most naturalist views imply that 'right' in our mouth refers to the property of maximizing happiness, whereas 'right' in the mouths of our Twins instead refers to the property of satisfying various duties. But this violates the semantic intuition that we are all talking about the same thing, namely moral rightness, and turns our substantive moral disagreement into a merely verbal dispute.

Henning responds that "it is reasonable for us to interpret Twin Earthlings as being engaged in the same kind of pursuit as we are, [so] we can interpret both our term and theirs as terms that pick out the best candidate to satisfy this common pursuit."

But fully-informed agents could not reasonably interpret their Twins as engaged in the same pursuit. Suppose we know full well that as a matter of empirical fact our community is unanimously pursuing aggregate happiness, whereas their community is largely indifferent to aggregate happiness and instead takes conformity with the Ten Commandments as their ultimate goal. Our respective moral terms might (on Henning's view) share the same "sense" or primary intension, applying in each centered world considered as actual to the property that is pursued by the moral community at the specified "center". But this is just like the commonality in sense between our term 'water' and Putnam's XYZ-referring twin's use of 'twater'. In the relevant sense, we are talking about a different property from our XYZ-twins, and so it is in the moral case (assuming, for reductio, that moral terms function semantically like natural kind terms). So Henning remains just as vulnerable as other metaethical naturalists to the Moral Twin Earth objection.

Philanthropy Interview

2011-08-23T18:03:00.002-04:00

I was recently interviewed about optimal philanthropy by Alex from OK So What Now?. Follow the link for the full episode (which includes interviews with a psychologist and an economist). Alex was kind enough to send me an mp3 of just our section to post here.

I should flag that this is an edited version, so the audio stream has been cut and moved around a bit. E.g. There's a bit early on where my answer shifts to a slightly different topic, but the question Alex had asked in the meantime was cut out, so I come off as inexplicably rambly! But other than that, I'm pretty happy with the result, and the interview itself was lots of fun.

Error-Adjusted Expected Value

2011-08-18T15:21:00.000-04:00

Holden at GiveWell has posted a very interesting analysis of Why We Can’t Take Expected Value Estimates Literally. I've always been suspicious of the idea that we should treat rough subjective estimates of risk (e.g., an "X% probability" that [insert scary futuristic technology here] will destroy the world) equivalently to robustly established probabilities (e.g., an X% chance that a large asteroid will hit the earth within a century). Holden's analysis backs up this intuition, by appealing to the idea that we need to adjust "explicit expected value" calculations by the variance in our "estimate error".

The upshot: robustly established estimates count for nearly their full weight, whereas highly uncertain estimates should barely move us away from our priors. To illustrate: "It seems fairly clear that a restaurant with 200 Yelp reviews, averaging 4.75 stars, ought to outrank a restaurant with 3 Yelp reviews, averaging 5 stars." Why? Because a mere three reviews is not robust enough evidence to shift us far from our prior expectation (i.e. that the restaurant is just average).

Anyway, this strikes me as a very important (and intuitive) result, which my rough summary here doesn't really do justice to. So, go read the whole thing!