Philosophy, et cetera

Modest and Immodest Patriotism

2010-09-09T13:33:00.000-04:00

In 'Modesty Without Illusion', Jason Brennan argues for the (Adam Smith inspired) Two Standards Account of modesty, according to which:

The wisest person focuses on the ideal. His respect for that ideal combined with his intense self-awareness and self-control drives him progressively more to approximate that ideal. On the other hand, the immodest person focuses his attention primarily on the second, commonplace standard. A person who ranks better than average in moral worth might focus on this standard, and thereby become arrogant and contemptuous of others. The modest wise person attends to the gap between his moral worth and the worth of the ideal. The immodest person attends to the gap between his worth and the worth of others below him. (p.120)

I'm reminded of the contrast between liberal and conservative conceptions of patriotism...

Back from NZ

2010-09-09T12:35:00.002-04:00

Well, that was a fun trip. We were staying with family in Christchurch for the 7.1 magnitude earthquake, but our house was undamaged. (Incredibly, one of my brothers slept right through it!)

Here are a couple of scenic photos from our visit to Marlborough Sounds:

I've also been tweaking the website for Mum's new campervan business, CampaSouth Rentals. So let me recommend it here for anyone visiting New Zealand and looking for a Christchurch-based motorhome / campervan hire!

Collective Harms from Bad Voting or Abstaining

2010-08-26T06:15:00.002-04:00

Jason Brennan argues that it's impermissible to vote 'badly' (i.e., voting without sufficient reason for harmful or unjust policies -- but misleading evidence may be exculpatory here). As he puts it in the abstract for his 'Polluting the Polls' paper, "This duty to avoid voting badly is grounded in a general duty not to engage in collectively harmful activities when the personal cost of restraint is low." (Basing the duty on the collective harm done is necessary for Jason, as he takes the expected impact of an individual vote to be negligible -- easily outweighed by any warm fuzzies the bad voter might get from voting.) But I wonder whether this principle might "prove too much", by equally establishing a duty to vote well rather than abstain (whereas Jason considers the latter to be perfectly permissible).

Consider an election between two fellows with the apt names 'Good' and 'Bad'. Suppose that voter turnout is low, but Bad is winning by a sizeable margin. One Ms. Voter is walking by the voting booth. Suppose she knows that Good's policies would better promote the common good, but she just doesn't like the guy and so isn't very motivated to vote for him. What are her permissible options? According to Jason, she may not vote for Bad. For though her individual vote is negligible, she would be part of a collective (namely, the Bad-voters) who bring about significant harm that they could have avoided at low personal cost.

Okay, let's consider abstaining then. Can't the same thing be said of this? By this (in)action, Voter would be part of a collective (namely, 'the abstainers' -- or, more broadly, 'those who failed to vote for Good') who collectively bring about significant harm that they could have prevented at low personal cost. The members of this collective could have voted for Good (at minimal personal cost), and thereby collectively prevented Bad's election and subsequent bad policies.

Perhaps one could escape this argument by appealing to the doing/allowing distinction. The initial principle invoked the idea of 'collectively harmful activities', and you might think that abstaining or failing to vote is not a (positive) activity, but rather a failure to engage in an activity. And maybe it's okay (on this view) to be part of a collective failure to act, even if this collective failure is harmful. This all sounds rather dubious to me, but then so did the original principle, so I'd welcome any responses from those more sympathetic to the Collective Harm principle as to whether they would be inclined to interpret it in this more limited way.

Human Nature is Depressing

2010-08-24T23:36:00.000-04:00

... at least, if this is accurate:

Parks and Stone found that unselfish colleagues come to be resented because they "raise the bar" for what is expected of everyone. As a result, workers feel the new standard will make everyone else look bad.

It doesn't matter that the overall welfare of the group or the task at hand is better served by someone's unselfish behavior, Parks said. "What is objectively good, you see as subjectively bad," he said.

3QD Philosophy Nominations Open

2010-08-23T06:04:00.000-04:00

The folks at 3 Quarks Daily asked me to share the news that they've opened nominations for the 'best philosophy blog post' of the last 12 months (to be judged by Columbia's Prof. Akeel Bilgrami, after a round of public voting to narrow down the field). Self-nominations are encouraged, so if you have a philosophy blog, head on over and share the link of your favourite recent(ish) post.

I'm thinking of sending in one of the following three posts:
- Species and Cognitive Enhancement (fun and interesting, though I don't say anything particularly original)
- Can Death Harm Non-Persons? (slightly more sophisticated, whilst still a topic of general interest)
- Acquired (Non-instrumental) Value (more theoretically insightful, I think, but of less general interest)

I'm currently leaning towards the middle option as a kind of compromise, but remain open to suggestions...

Two Forms of Lexical Priority

2010-08-21T22:50:00.000-04:00

J.S. Mill famously held that 'higher pleasures' are lexically prior to 'lower pleasures' in the utilitarian calculus. ("Few human creatures would consent to be changed into any of the lower animals for a promise of the fullest allowance of a beast's pleasures...") But distinguish two versions of this view:*

(1) Weak (global) lexical priority: No amount of lower pleasures can compensate for the total lack of higher pleasures. (Better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, and all that.)

(2) Strong (local) lexical priority: Whenever one has a choice between additional higher or lower pleasures, one should always prefer the higher pleasure, no matter the relative quantities on offer. (That is: choose quality over quantity, without exception.)

The weaker version of the view seems much more plausible. (After all, isn't Mill right that few of us would look kindly on the prospect of being turned into a pig, no matter how blissful the pig might feel?) The stronger version is less so: as pointed out in lectures, it seems absurd to think that an extra moment of philosophizing would always outweigh the pleasure of relaxing on a lazy Sunday morning. But then, is there actually anything in Mill to suggest that he held the stronger view?

* Thanks to Helen for this idea.

Recent Work

2010-08-15T23:49:00.001-04:00

Long time no blog! (Internet access is still a scarce resource in the antipodes...) Anyhow, as a quick update:

(1) I presented my 'Value Holism' [pdf] talk at the University of Canterbury 'Philosophy Discussion Retreat' in Kaikoura (a very fun trip!).

(2) I then gave an ANU 'PhilSoc' talk titled 'Moral Primitives: fitting attitudes for consequentialists' -- the content of which should end up being the first chapter of my dissertation. (This paper grew out of my earlier stuff on global consequentialism, but I'm reworking it to focus on the more general question of how acts are normatively assessable in importantly different ways from mere evaluands.)

(3) I've also been prettifying my CV in LaTeX, and getting back into using Ubuntu over Windows -- I might end up writing some tips for the latter in the future post.

Any additional feedback on the linked papers (especially the second) would be most welcome!

Tech tip: if you hate opening PDFs because Adobe Reader takes so long to load, uninstall that resource hog and download the near-instant Sumatra PDF viewer instead. Or, if you prefer in-browser viewing, try this Google Viewer bookmarklet (from here) before clicking the pdf links above.

Abortion Review

2010-07-17T15:23:00.000-04:00

Is it wrong to kill embryos -- do they have (morally significant) interests that would be violated by their untimely death? I think that reflecting on spontaneous abortion strongly suggests that embryonic death is not an intrinsic bad (though it might be bad for the would-be parents, if they dearly wanted a child). The central challenge for the pro-lifer is to explain how it is that non-sentient embryos have greater moral status than other non-sentient entities like plants and bacteria. There are two basic strategies they can offer in response, but I think that both ultimately fail.

1. The Humanity argument: First, one might appeal to the idea that individuals inherit a baseline moral status just in virtue of the kind of being that they are -- in technical terms: what matters is the substance, and not just the phase, sortal. (So, for example, even severely retarded humans still have rights in virtue of being human.) But embryos are human individuals too -- that's a biological fact. So embryos have the basic rights / moral status that go along with this.

There are two things to note when charitably interpreting this argument. Firstly, it does not imply that any old human cells (e.g. fingernail clippings) have moral significance, as critics commonly assert. Moral status is here only attributed to whole organisms, and a human fingernail is not a human organism, or 'individual human life', the way that a human embryo is. Secondly, it isn't a purely biological notion of 'humanity' that we're working with, because non-conscious zombies would be biologically human organisms, yet few think that they matter morally in the way that conscious persons do. So the relevant 'kind' here should really be understood as something more like 'sentient, rational animal' (SRA). Then the argument runs as follows: SRAs matter morally; embryos are (merely an immature, underdeveloped phase of) SRAs; hence embryos matter morally.

The problem with this view is that it runs afoul of our 'end of life' moral intuitions. Irreversible loss of conscious surely marks the end of the person's existence (in any morally significant sense). But the human organism (SRA) might live on, on life support, while in a (permanently) non-sentient 'phase'. Does anyone really want to say that this permanently non-sentient body retains a 'right to life'?

2. The Deprivation / 'Future Like Ours' argument. Marquis gets around this problem by saying that what matters to the morality of killing is not one's general 'kind', but rather your individual future (that death would deprive you of). The brain-dead patient has no future to look forward to, which is why biological death does no further harm to them. But an embryo has a whole lifetime's worth of experiences that death would deprive it of. So embryonic death is a most grievous harm.

The problem with this argument is that there's no good reason to think that the embryo would be the subject of the future experiences anyhow. That is, it presupposes the (clearly false) bodily conception of personal identity. As I put the argument in a previous post:

If a mad scientist scanned my brain, disintegrated my body, and then wiped your brain and implanted all of my mental traits (memories, beliefs, values, personality, etc.) in its place, then it seems that I have gotten the better half of the deal. I have survived and you have not. Though your body is the one that lives on, it is our minds that matter, and it seems that your mind has been replaced by mine. In making this judgment, we implicitly judge that it is the content of a mind that matters -- the memories, beliefs, desires, and so forth -- not its "location" in a particular body, or even a particular brain.

Suppose this scenario goes ahead. I awake in your body and return to my old life (as best I can). Does this make any difference to you? Suppose you're told beforehand that after your mind is wiped and replaced with mine, I'll go on to live a happy life. Or maybe you're told that I'll be killed the next day. You might for altruistic reasons prefer the former news, but do you think that you are harmed if the latter outcome occurs instead? If not, this goes to show that preventing future pleasures from being experienced in your body is no harm to you, if you are not the one who will get to experience them.

Any kind of psychological view of personal identity (or what matters in survival) straightforwardly implies that mindless embryos do not "survive" in the morally relevant sense. So they never had any 'future like ours' of which they could be deprived. In other words: since they will not be the ones to experience the future life in any case, it is no harm to them if that possible future life is prevented by means of abortion.

Personal Identity Review

2010-07-14T18:28:00.001-04:00

Here I want to motivate and defend two Parfitian theses. The first is anti-haecceitism or 'reductionism' about identity: the qualitative facts exhaust the facts, and in particular, there remains no "further fact" about the identities of things. We could give a complete description of the world without using identity-talk at all. Talk of identity over time is just a convenient shorthand for talking about various kinds of continuity and counterfactual dependence. The second thesis, then, is that when it comes to the persistence or identity of persons across time, the kind of continuity worth caring about is psychological continuity.

I. Anti-Haecceitism.

Consider a world (w1) containing two qualitatively identical soccer balls. Now consider the distinct possibility (w2) that just one such ball ever existed. Once we specify all the qualitative details -- e.g. the size, shape, and mass of the ball -- is there any further matter that we remain ignorant of? In particular, could we sensibly wonder about the identity of the ball, e.g. whether it is "really" either of the two balls that would have existed in possibility w1? Presumably not. It is difficult to comprehend what in the world a mere difference of identity would consist in. One proposal is that there are 'haecceities' -- properties such as being ball_1 or being ball_2, which float free from the qualitative natures of the objects. But then it is hard to see what in this theory precludes such seemingly nonsensical behaviour as objects switching haecceities from one moment to the next -- or even instantiating multiple such properties at once.

What's more, once we shift our attention from trans-world to trans-time identity, we can construct fission cases that seem to pretty conclusively establish that identity across time is not intrinsic. In short: Fred would survive if just his left brain hemisphere were successfully transplanted into a new body ('Lefty'), and likewise if just his right hemisphere were transplanted into a different body ('Righty'); but if both Lefty and Righty survive, then - since they are distinct from each other - they cannot both be identical to Fred. Hence, whether Fred (at time t1) and Lefty (at t2) are the "same person" does not depend just on the intrinsic properties of the respective person-stages; it also depends on whether there is any other stage (e.g. Righty) with an equal or better claim to being Fred's closest continuant at t2.

So the identity facts are not "built into" the objects themselves. They are better understood as merely conventional: we may say that "Lefty is Fred", when Lefty is a sufficiently close continuant of Fred and there are no real competitors for the title; but we aren't tracking any "deep further fact" about the world when we do so. If Righty exists as well, then we may refrain from bestowing the title of '[closest continuant of] Fred' on either of the equally-eligible candidates, but of course Lefty himself is not any different for lacking the title. It is merely a difference in how we talk, not a difference that Lefty need regard as having any real significance.

This deflationary, reductionist view may also be supported by examples like the Ship of Theseus, or the following example (adapted from Parfit): Suppose Jim has fond memories of a now-defunct social club that he founded as a youth. He decides to start a similar club, with the same name and membership rules as his old club, but new members. Once we have all these qualitative details about the connections between the two clubs, it'd clearly be vacuous to ask whether or not they are really "the same" club. It's not as though there are two open possibilities here. We know what the situation is; the only remaining question is how we choose to describe it. (See also: 'Arbitrary Persistence'.)

The counter-intuitive step comes when we apply this same reductionist understanding to questions of personal identity. When faced with teletransporter cases and the like, we're inclined to think that there must be some deep further fact about whether the person that emerges on the other side is really the same conscious experiencer as the person who went in, or a mere replica. (I'm tempted to phrase the intuitive worry in terms of whether the same 'stream of consciousness' continues on, or whether a new 'stream' begins where the last one left off. But that can't be quite right: we ordinarily think that disconnected streams of consciousness -- e.g. before and after sleeping -- can be experienced by the same enduring person or 'subject of experiences'.)

This way of thinking seems endemic to our self-perception: we don't just think that there will exist a future stage, related to our present stage in various ways, who will experience such-and-such. We anticipate experiencing that future ourselves. And so puzzle cases like teletransporters and fission cases strike us as puzzling precisely because we assume that there is an important first-personal difference between whether those futures are experienced by us or instead by other minds that merely happen to be very similar to ours. Those seem like distinct possibilities, in a way that alternative answers about the identities of inanimate objects (like the Ship of Theseus, or Jim's social club) do not.

I feel the force of this intuition, but I think we should ultimately reject it as a mere psychological confusion. The previously mentioned theoretical reasons for rejecting haecceitism in general strike me as extremely powerful, and they would seem to apply no less strongly when it comes to the identities of mental entities. (See also Velleman on the illusion of endurance.) But I'd be interested to hear how others respond to this dilemma.

[Aside: Parfit himself seems to regard reductionism as merely contingently true. I'm inclined to the stronger view that non-reductionism about identity isn't even a coherent possibility.]

II. Psychological Continuity

Given that there are no "deep further facts" about identity for our concerns to track, what should we care about in survival? As Parfit argues, one thing that fission cases show is that we shouldn't care about conventional identity ascriptions, since identity depends on extrinsic facts, whereas Fred's attitude towards Lefty should depend only on their intrinsic features and relations. Since Fred would regard himself as 'surviving' if just Lefty (or Righty) survived, he should regard the outcome where both Lefty and Righty survive as a kind of "double survival", even if we can't strictly speaking identify him with either survivor. [See also 'Fissioning in Prospect and Retrospect', where I argue that fissioning followed by the painless death of Righty is about as good as ordinary survival.]

Okay, so we should care about some (multiply instantiable) relation of similarity/continuity. But which one? The possibility of surviving as a 'brain in a vat' seems to rule out considering one's body as essential. So the serious contenders seem to be:
(i) the physical continuity of your particular brain (whatever general psychological qualities it might give rise to), or else...
(ii) the continuity of your general psychological qualities (memories, values, personality, etc.), whatever physical entity these might be based in.

The first option might seem intuitive to the extent that one retains the Cartesian picture of an enduring self. But once we accept reductionism, the second option seems to make a lot more sense. I care about my memories, values, etc., and I want to see my intentions carried out and my projects brought to fruition. It doesn't make any difference to me whether the Richard-like mind that takes care of my future business is a mind that's grounded in a brain physically continuous with my current brain, or whether future-Richard's brain is instead reconstructed from all new atoms on the other end of a teletransporter 'journey'. I don't necessarily have any argument to offer to someone who finds that they continue to intrinsically care about the persistence of their particular brain even after accepting reductionism; such a response just seems inexplicable to me, so I assume that responses favouring the psychological view will be much more common.

P.S. One might not even need to accept reductionism in order to be drawn to the view that psychological continuity is what matters in survival. Locke pointed out that however seriously we entertain the hypothesis that we share a bare "soul" with Hector of Troy, so long as we are not thereby supposed to inherit any of his memories or other psychological qualities, we find ourselves unable to really consider ourselves the same person as Hector in any sense that matters. On the other hand, if a Cobbler inherits the memories and personality of a long-dead Prince (completely overriding any trace of the Cobbler's mind), for everyone involved it is as if the Cobbler has been killed and the Prince resurrected in his place -- no matter whether there has been a change of haecceity (or identity of the immortal "soul" that we imagine to inhabit the body).

Non-Physical Questions

2010-07-11T17:54:00.003-04:00

Would you still be conscious if your neurons were replaced by (functionally identical) silicon chips?

It seems like this is an open question. But how do physicalists accommodate this datum? We know (by stipulation) all the physical facts of the story: we know that the resulting "brain" is functionally/computationally no different, but that the matter it's made of is different. If the physical facts exhaust the facts, then it doesn't seem that there's anything left for us to wonder about the situation.

But clearly there is something more we can wonder about. We can wonder whether silicon brains would still give rise to qualia (phenomenal consciousness), as biological brains do. We can similarly wonder whether Block's "Chinese Nation" (a functional analogue where individual humans communicating via walkie-talkies play the role of neurons) is really conscious. There's not any physical fact we're ignorant of here. So if there's a substantial fact we remain ignorant of, it must concern a matter over and above the physical facts. That is, it must be a matter of non-physical fact.

Update: Brad DeLong is puzzled. The following may help. We can distinguish two kinds of questions. Semantic questions concern which words pick out which properties. Substantive questions concern what properties are instantiated by various worldly entities. The question whether my cyborg twin is conscious or not is surely a substantive question: I'm picking out a distinctive mental property, and asking whether he has it. Now, the problem for physicalists is that they can't really make sense of this. They can ask the semantic question whether the word 'consciousness' picks out functional property P1 or biological property P2. But given that we already know all the physical properties of my cyborg twin (say he has P1 but not P2), there's no substantive matter of fact left open for us to wonder about if physicalism is true. It becomes mere semantics.

Utilitarian Policy

2010-07-10T16:35:00.000-04:00

I think the world would be a much better place if public policy debates were more focused on cost-benefit analysis. Too often, people refuse to acknowledge trade-offs or opportunity costs (health and military spending are obvious candidates here). Other times, people seem more interested in harming out-groups or "looking tough" than in actually securing better outcomes for everyone (think immigration, prisons, torture). And then there are the obvious cases of legislative capture by special interests (farm subsidies, retroactive copyright extensions). It seems like there's a lot of scope for "no brainer" policy improvements that every reasonable person should be able to agree on. But maybe I'm missing something. So let me take a stab at outlining some of the issues where the answer seems to me completely obvious -- and I hope that others will add more suggestions in the comments, and/or explain where you think I'm going wrong.

Foreign Policy and the 'War on Terror'

War is a hugely expensive negative-sum game, almost never worth getting into if you can possibly avoid it, and probably worth withdrawing from as soon as you can. (You may leave behind a mess, but surely more good could be done by reallocating the saved money to more effect forms of humanitarian aid.)

Military action also seems incredibly counterproductive to the nation's security interests: inflaming anti-American sentiment and hence aiding terrorist recruitment. Security interests would seem better served by investing in "PR" -- e.g. Fulbright scholarships for Arab students to immerse themselves in American culture before returning home to share their (hopefully positive and liberalizing) experiences. Whatever the details, the aim should be to improve America's image abroad, and especially among Muslims. (Torturing their neighbours seems unlikely to help with this.)

Also, let's stop overreacting to terrorism. We're something like twenty times more likely to be struck by lightning than to die in a terrorist attack. It's not worth clogging up airports or abandoning civil liberties over. (You could save a lot more lives by reducing the speed limit to 10 mph, but who thinks that would be worth it? Of course, we don't have front page headlines and official hand-wringing every time someone dies in a car accident.) As Brad Templeton puts it, "The goal of counter-terrorism is not to stop the terrorists from attacking and killing people, not directly. The goal of counter-terrorism is [or should be] to stop the terrorists from scaring people."

Subsidies and Corporate rent-seeking

Farm subsidies, coal and oil subsidies, etc., are obviously detrimental. Likewise retroactive copyright extensions -- which, in the absence of backwards causation, do nothing to incentivize production. IP laws more generally have swung much too far in the direction of regulation. I'm sure there's much more that could be added to this list.

It may be worthwhile, even from a "limited government" perspective, to invest in public financing of elections to help prevent such regulatory capture. (This is not such a "no brainer", admittedly, but at least highly plausible, I think.)

Medical spending

Given limited resources, we should allocate public spending so as to do the most good -- in case of medical spending, that means maximizing quality-adjusted life years. (Of course, people should be free to spend their own money on less-efficient treatments. But they shouldn't expect taxpayers to foot the bill. Personally, I'd rather die peacefully in hospice care than be plugged into life-support and fighting to the bitter end.)

Immigration

... should be encouraged. However, given widespread misperceptions among conservatives that immigrants are a "burden" on the economy, it might be worth considering Will Wilkinson's proposals to end birthright citizenship and vastly increase the number of temporary worker visas instead.

(Charter cities sound like a promising idea, too. Worth exploring, at least.)

Transportation

Introduce congestion pricing, price curbside parking at market-clearing rates, relax zoning regulations to allow for increased residential density, and invest in effective public transport -- basically all that sensible stuff that Matt Yglesias goes on about.

Tax and Redistribute

Increase taxes on things that are better used less: carbon / gasoline, alcohol, cigarettes, soda, etc. -- and then redistribute the proceeds.

In general, redistribution seems preferable to government spending (more efficient, respectful of individual autonomy, etc.). Implementing a full-blown universal basic income may be ideal, especially if combined with labour deregulation (abolish the minimum wage, etc.).

Criminal Justice System

End the war on drugs. Legalize (and tax) marijuana. Prison costs a lot of money and ought to be a last resort; alternative punishments should be found for non-violent offenders and others who do not pose an ongoing risk to society. The focus should be on rehabilitation rather than punishment for its own sake.

* * *

Does that all sound right? What would you add?

Killing and Average Utility

2010-07-07T13:13:00.000-04:00

Towards the end of his (1983) 'Value and Population Size', Thomas Hurka considers the objection that value holism might sometimes mandate killing those of (positive but) below average welfare, so as to raise the average. He responds:

It is foolish to think that the consequentialist principles we use to assess the values of different populations could ever be the only principles in an acceptable moral theory. They have to be accompanied by supplementary principles setting constraints which we must not violate while pursuing our population goals and which we must not violate in particular by taking the lives of existing people. If we are to assess population principles as population principles, then we must assess them in circumstances where these constraints do not apply, that is, in circumstances where only increases and not decreases in the human population are in question.

This looks like the kind of mistake I had in mind when I wrote 'Anti-Consequentialism and Axiological Refinements': what Hurka interprets as a need to go beyond consequentialism, I see as a need to refine our axiology. If Hurka's right, then we should think something like the following: "Though it'd violate the moral rules to help bring about this outcome in any way, I must say it'd be really grand if all those happy folks of below average welfare would just drop dead. Here's hoping for some well-placed lightning strikes!"

But of course that's not what we think at all. It's not that their premature deaths are a good outcome that we simply aren't "allowed" to bring about. Rather, it'd be a bad outcome in its own right -- as we can see when we consider the scenario where the deaths are a result of natural causes. (Hurka's last sentence seems to neglect this possibility.)

Compare two very different forms of 'average utilitarianism':
(1) The value of a world is a function of the average happiness at each moment: e.g., the sum (or perhaps the average) of the momentary net happiness divided by the momentary population.
(2) The value of a world is a function (namely, the average) of the welfare values of each individual's whole life. (Welfare need not be temporally located.)

The "killing to promote average utility" objection only makes sense against the type-1, momentary view. On the second view, where we take a timeless perspective, killing someone does not reduce the (eternal) population. It merely makes one of the lives shorter than it otherwise would be. But that life still counts as one life in the history of the world, the same as it ever did. So, if death was bad for the person -- if it made their life worse than it otherwise would have been -- then, all else equal, it thereby reduces the average welfare of the world. It thus counts as a bad outcome. And doesn't this seem by far the more plausible view?

More generally: It makes a big difference if we understand individual welfare as a value that inheres in whole lives, rather than mere momentary timeslices. We've seen that it allows us to avoid the absurd result that harming some (by killing them), while helping no-one, could improve the world according to the average principle. It also helps against a related objection that applies even to the total principle: that killing someone and replacing them by someone slightly happier would increase utility. This may be true of chickens and other beings that lack a persisting identity, but you can't replace a person without cutting short a temporally-extended life, the disvalue of which might easily outweigh the increase in mere momentary happiness.

'Agential' and 'Outcome' Responsibility

2010-06-26T18:35:00.001-04:00

Randolph Clarke writes:

1) John sees a child struggling in the water but decides not to bother saving the child. The child drowns. Unbeknownst to John, a strong man standing at the shore was watching him. Had John run toward the water to attempt a rescue, the strong man would have tackled him and prevented him from saving the child. As it turned out, the intervention wasn't necessary...

Most people, I think, will say that in case 1 John isn't responsible for not saving the child.

Let's distinguish two questions. First, we can ask whether John is a 'free', morally responsible agent. Was he in control of himself, and hence answerable for his decisions during this episode, or was he temporarily brainwashed, hypnotized, or otherwise under some compulsion that prevents his behaviour during this episode from really being attributable to him as an agent? In other words: was John exercising his agency? Call this the 'agential' question. (I take it the answer to this question is straightforwardly 'yes'.)

Once we've established that the agent freely exercised their agency, we can ask a further question, namely: what subsequent events should be attributed to this exercise of agency? In this case, we're interested in doling out responsibility for the bad outcome of the child drowning. So the 'outcome' question is this: is John to blame for the child's drowning? Here the answer seems to be 'no', since it turns out John couldn't have saved the child even if he'd tried. (Of course, it still reflects poorly on him that he didn't care enough to try, so John is certainly blameworthy, even if not blameworthy for the drowning per se.)

So far, this all seems clear enough. The original question, "Is John responsible for failing to save the child?" strikes me as less clear. But I do not think there is any further question here; rather, it just strikes me as ambiguous between the two more clear-cut questions noted above. (Does that sound right? I'd be curious to hear any alternative interpretations here.)

A more general point: I'm wary of questions that seem to turn on the "guise" under which one describes an action. This just seems like a needlessly messy way of talking. Better to refer to actions de re rather than de dicto: we may speak of an 'exercise of agency', or 'what the agent did', and then it's a perfectly clear and determinate matter whether they were morally responsible "in acting as they did." No need to get into tangles about whether they're responsible for the action under this guise or that.

As previously noted, there seems a lot of unhelpful ambiguity in the traditional treatment of responsibility as a two-place relation between an individual and the acts or outcomes that they are “responsible for”. It seems better understood as a three-place relation between an agent, an action (or period of agency, picked out de re), and the outcomes for which their action renders them liable. This extra structure more clearly separates the 'agential' and 'outcome' aspects of responsibility.

(To illustrate: suppose Jekyll knowingly takes a drug which causes him to go berserk, and subsequently kills a man. We can then say that he is responsible, in taking the drug, for the man's death. This is much clearer than the traditional claim that he's "responsible for killing the man", since there's an important sense in which the killing was not a free act or 'locus of responsibility' at all, done as it was under the influence.)

RSS subscriptions

2010-06-26T16:43:00.000-04:00

Given my sporadic posting of late, perhaps it's a good time to remind any less-geeky readers of the wonders of RSS feeds.

In short: Rather than having to manually visit each blog or website you follow to check for updates, an RSS reader (like Google Reader) keeps track of the website updates for you, and collects any new articles for you to read in one convenient location.

So, rather than having to check the front page of philosophyetc.net for new posts, you can simply subscribe to my RSS feed, and my new posts will automatically show up in your RSS reader. (But if you don't follow enough blogs or news sites to make an RSS reader worthwhile, you can subscribe via email instead.) Most other websites -- including philosophy journals -- provide their own RSS feeds. One notable exception is NDPR Reviews, for which I created an unofficial feed here.

Anyway, I highly recommend making use of such feeds, if you aren't already.

P.S. You can also use RSS feeds to send new articles from your favourite blogs and newspapers to your Kindle, as explained here.

Fissioning in Prospect and Retrospect

2010-06-07T21:21:00.000-04:00

Suppose that I need to endure some moderately unpleasant experience in order to protect my future self against an otherwise fatal disease. I don't at all resent filling my present with unpleasantness, because I value my future existence: I think of myself as a temporally-extended being, rather than a mere momentary existent (even though I don't think my present self literally endures into the future). So far so good. Moreover, suppose I take a temporary amnesia drug, so that afterwards I will not recall the details of the unpleasant experience (nor any plans or intentions, etc., that I make during this time). This seems unobjectionable -- if anything, it probably makes the overall situation better: no unpleasant memories!

But now consider an alternative situation. Suppose that I'm instead given the chance to fission, cell-like, into two future selves. Lefty would go on to live a long and flourishing life, whereas Righty would endure the moderately unpleasant experience before being swiftly vapourised. Is this significantly different?

Some might think so. On my understanding of the Lewisian 4-d worm view, we should think of Lefty and Righty as distinct people who share some temporal parts. As one of the overlapping parts, my present self should have 50% anticipation of ending up as (just) Lefty, and 50% anticipation of ending up as (just) Righty. But that's terrible: a 50% chance of swift death! Much better, on this view, to avoid fissioning, and just keep all the experiences in a single, long life.

But I think that's the wrong way to think of the situation. There's not really any "risk" here (it's not like I've got an enduring soul that'll go just one way or the other). We know exactly what will happen in the fission case: I'll have a continuant who goes on to live a flourishing life, and another continuant who experiences some mild unpleasantness. In other words, it's effectively the same prospect as I had before: some mild unpleasantness for some person-stages psychologically continuous with my present self (a future 'continuant' of me), plus a generally flourishing future for other continuant person-stages that are not psychologically unified with the suffering stages. I should fully identify with all of these future stages, and hence be happy to fission: it secures my full survival just as well as the original case.

So much for the prospective judgment. What should my post-fission continuants think about the situation? Intuitively, one feels, it'd suck to be Righty: at that stage, all that one has to look forward to is some unpleasantness followed by death. But I wonder if this intuition is simply a vestige of Cartesianism, or the assumption that there's some deep sense in which my amnesiac self would "survive" but Righty doesn't. In fact, no momentary stages literally endure into the future. So the real question is just whether there are future person-stages that are related to my present stage in the right kind of way. Now, it seems to me that Righty and my amnesiac stage are similarly related to my respective 'flourishing future' stages. In particular, for both there are future stages that share their long-standing memories and plans for the future, though in neither case will their present experiences or decisions impact upon the future stages. Is that enough to secure their "survival" (in the morally relevant sense)? I don't see why not.

What really matters in survival, it seems to me, is that a future stage continues on my general "life story". I don't need my present stage to be psychologically unified with the future stages (in the ongoing sense of laying down new memories, etc., for the future stages) in order for it to be narratively unified. Righty should continue to "identify with" Lefty's future. So, even retrospectively, I think I (in the form of each of my 'Lefty' and 'Righty' continuants) should find the fission scenario unobjectionable.

What do you think?

Ambiguous Meta/Normative Theories

2010-06-02T17:10:00.000-04:00

Consider Divine Command Theory:
(DCT) An act is right iff (and because) God commands it.

Armed with Parfit's distinction between right-making features and the property of being right, there are two very different ways of reading this:

(1) as a reductive meta-ethical theory, where the right-hand-side provides an analysis of rightness (the property of being right) itself. On this interpretation, DCT claims that what it is for an act to be right just is for it to be commanded by God. (The simplest version of this view would have it be true "by definition". But Robert Adams has also suggested a more sophisticated version, which begins by analysing the conceptual role of 'rightness', and then claims that 'being commanded by God' is the actual property that best fits the role.)

(2) as merely a normative theory, which presupposes an understanding of what rightness is, and instead merely seeks to inform us of what things in the world have this property (and why). For example, suppose one thought that obedience to authority was the sole virtue. Then, if it turns out that God exists as the ultimate authority, then this prior moral principle might lead one to conclude that one ought to do whatever God commands. But this version of the view doesn't entail that God is the source of the moral truths, or anything like that. He merely features in their content.

DCT provides a simple illustration of the distinction, but it is by no means the only theory with this potential ambiguity. Compare Humean desire accounts of normativity, for example, or various forms of "moral relativism" (/"cultural command theory"). These may be interpreted either as reductive meta-ethical theories, or as autonomous first-order normative views. The latter would be rather unmotivated, of course. (If you're going to accept full-blown normativity, you may as well posit a more intuitive account of what things have it.) Though, personally, I don't find the meta-ethical versions all that much more appealing (such alleged "reductions" of the normative always look to me more like eliminations).

Anyway, I figure it's an interesting distinction to make explicit.

Objective and Subjective Oughts

2010-05-22T19:35:00.002-04:00

[I was just looking up this old exam answer I wrote for a class last year on 'subjective oughts', and I realized that I hadn't yet posted it to the blog. So, here goes -- lightly edited, but still lacking footnotes, etc.]

What is the distinction between what a person “subjectively ought” to do and what a person “objectively ought” to do? What is the best analysis of each notion? What objections are there, if any, to these best analyses? (You might discuss more than one attempt to analyze them.) Is the notion of the “subjective ‘ought’” a useful notion? If so, how? If not, why has it been thought to be useful, and what is wrong with that thought?

Suppose that a trustworthy demon threatens to kill ten innocent prisoners unless our protagonist, Sally, wins their freedom. He presents her with three buttons, and explains that the rules are as follows: Exactly one of the first two buttons (A or B) is fixed to set all ten prisoners free, while the other won't free any. Alternatively, she can play it safe by pressing button C, which is guaranteed to save nine of the ten prisoners. What should she do? [This is a variation on Parfit's “mineshaft” case, or Jackson's case of the three medical treatments.] Suppose that, though Sally does not know this, button A is in fact the one that will save all ten. It then seems that we can identify an 'objective' sense in which she 'ought' to press button A. That would be the best decision, in light of the actual facts of the situation. On the other hand, there's a straightforward (if more 'subjective') sense in which she 'ought' to play it safe and press button C. That'd be the most wise or rational decision, given the information available to Sally at the time of her decision. We can thus intuitively grasp a distinction between 'objective' and 'subjective' oughts, though it remains to be seen how we might precisely explicate or analyze these notions.

As a first pass, we might try to analyze what S objectively ought to do as what S would do if she were fully informed and morally perfect. But this will run into familiar difficulties (cf. Shope's “conditional fallacy”), since it might be that S ought to gather more information, or try to become more virtuous, whereas her idealized self S+ would, in virtue of her ideal condition, have no reason to do these things. We might get around this problem by asking instead what the idealised S+ would want or advise S to do, given her actual (non-ideal) condition. I find this a helpful enough explication, but as an analysis it seems to get things backwards: presumably, S+ would advise S to ϕ precisely because ϕ-ing is what S objective ought (or has most objective reason) to do. S's reasons for action ground the reasons for giving S this advice, rather than vice versa. So we may do best to simply take as primitive the notion of (objective, 'fact-based') reasons, and analyze the objective ought as a matter of what you have most reason to do.

The 'subjective ought' is slightly more elusive. Indeed, I think we need to further distinguish several more or less subjective concepts in this vicinity. On the one hand, we have the strict notion of what action is warranted, or perfectly rational, given the evidence about your empirical situation. We can call this the 'rational ought'. At the other extreme, we have the much watered-down notion of what you ought to do according to your (accessible) beliefs (however unreasonable they may be) – call this the 'belief-relative ought'. One might also identify various in-between notions. For example, if we think that agents can have justified but false non-empirical (e.g. logical or normative) beliefs, this creates room for a 'justified-belief-relative ought' that is weaker than what I have called the rational ought.

These different notions may be useful for different purposes. One traditional role for the 'subjective ought' is to enable us to evaluate the internal quality of an agent's decision. Return to our example of Sally and the demon. Though it would be fortunate if Sally chose to press button A, since this would actually save the most lives, such an irrational gamble would reflect poorly on Sally herself. Playing it safe with option C is a much wiser decision for her to make, and one that thus warrants a kind of positive evaluation on our part. I take it that the relatively strict notion of rationality is what we want for purposes of evaluating the internal quality of an agent's reasoning and decision-making. If Sally does what she rationally ought to do, this is evidence that she is a competent and reliable agent, who can be trusted to make wise decisions – and avoid disasters – in other cases too. (Consider: who would you prefer the demon to ask next time it plays this game: a gambler or someone who will play it safe?) The belief-relative notion certainly won't do here, because insane beliefs might render an agent deeply morally incompetent and unreliable, or even reliably bad. (Consider an agent who is certain that she has most reason to try to cause as much death and destruction as possible.)

Can we analyze rationality in other terms? I expect not. It is widely appreciated that we can't simply define rationality as a matter of doing what we likely have most (objective) reason to do, since in cases like Sally's, we judge that it is rational to do the one thing that the agent knows isn't objectively best. The shift to maximizing “expected utility” gets better results, and may well accurately capture what is – as a matter of normative fact – rationally required (though we'll later consider whether such an account fails to provide adequate “guidance” to agents); but if so, this is more plausibly understood as a substantive claim than as any kind of reductive definition. As in the case of objective reasons, I think we should be happy enough to just take the concept of rationality as primitive.

A second important role for the 'subjective ought' is to track an agent's praise- or blame-worthiness. Sally seems praiseworthy for choosing option C, and would be blameworthy if she had instead gambled (even on A, the objectively best option). It's controversial whether this diverges from the previous role at all. I find it tempting to closely link blameworthiness with rationally unwarranted decisions. But one might think that agents can be reasonably mistaken about what rationality requires of them, and in such cases cannot reasonably be blamed for their failure. If that's right, then the 'justified-belief-relative ought' might better fill this role.

A third – and very different – role for the 'subjective ought' is to offer first-personal guidance to agents, delineating (as Holly Smith puts it) “a type of duty to which the agent has infallible access in his decision-making,” however confused or misguided he may be. This will clearly require a much more subjective 'ought' than the previously roles called for – perhaps something like what I earlier labelled the 'belief-relative ought' (noting, again, that we're only talking about accessible beliefs here). Indeed, I think it risks becoming so subjective as to no longer carry any normative weight.

Smith invites us to consider the case of Allison, who – despite overwhelming evidence – “cannot bring herself to consciously face the fact” that her daughter has a learning disability, though she knows this “in her heart of hearts”. Allison is offered testing that would help her learning-disabled daughter (but cause unnecessary teasing for an able child), and declines. Smith wants to say that Allison does the “subjectively right” thing, since she lacks access to her belief that her daughter has a learning disability, and so can't tell that she ought to accept the offer. Even so, I'm inclined to think that it is awful of Allison to decline as she does. At least on one natural way of fleshing out her underlying psychology, she is letting her own subconscious fears and hangups get in the way of doing what is best for her daughter. This seems blameworthy as well as unfortunate – the wrong decision whichever way you look at it. The decision manifests a poor quality of will (or bad underlying concerns on the part of the agent), and this is so even though the agent herself may fail to realize this. Quite apart from the external consequences, the agent's internal decision-making “malfunctioned”, or was morally defective, all things considered.

We might understand the most-subjective 'ought' as not denying this, but instead as merely claiming that there was some local well-functioning in the agent. This is like the way in which we might claim that someone who wants to bring about global catastrophe should try to trigger a nuclear war. Even someone with that malicious desire shouldn't really try to trigger a nuclear war. No-one should do that! The apparent claim to the contrary may instead be taken to indicate a wide-scope local consistency requirement: consistently desiring an end requires desiring the necessary means, so you shouldn't have the former without the latter. That's not to say that you should have the latter: maybe you should have neither! Still, if you desire both the end and the means, well, at least we can say one good thing about you: these two states, considered in isolation, are in compliance with this one rational requirement, considered in isolation. But of course that doesn't mean that you've done well all things considered. It may be that (other requirements establish that) desiring the end is completely crazy, in which case, again, you should give it up rather than desire the means. Desiring the means surely compounds your error, according to any properly 'global', all-things-considered normative evaluation. Likewise for doing what you 'ought', in the (accessible) belief-relative sense, if your (accessible) beliefs aren't what they ought to be.

So I think that this most-subjective sense of 'ought' is unhelpful. It sounds like an all-things-considered recommendation, when really the most that is justified here is a far weaker evaluation of local consistency. You might wonder: why would anyone think there is more to it? I think the main motivation derives from an exaggerated understanding of the sense in which morality aims to be “action-guiding”.

Even when considering the project of creating an 'instruction manual' that agents may use as a guide in making their way about the world, I think we should be satisfied by norms that will serve to guide a sufficiently competent and well-functioning agent in the right direction. Others have hoped to find moral norms that even the most incompetent agent can apply without difficulty. The problem with this hope is that incompetent agents will, being incompetent, inevitably end up doing rather poorly on many occasions. So if we want to tailor our instruction manual to cater to their limited abilities, we are going to end up instructing agents to act poorly. Any instruction manual that tells Allison to decline the test, for example, is offering bad advice. I can't see why we would want to do this. It may be true that, due to her rational failures, Allison won't be able to make use of any better advice. But that's no excuse to give her bad advice.

So we shouldn't feel compelled to write an instruction manual that's easy for anyone (however incompetent) to follow, because the resulting advice would no longer have any value. At the other extreme, I certainly acknowledge that there's little use for instructions that appeal to unknowable conditions (e.g. the Moore-paradoxical: “what to do if you believe that p but p is false at the time of reading this instruction...”). Still, there may be plenty of value to be found in an instruction manual that appeals to evidential conditions (e.g. “what to do if your evidence supports 0.2 - 0.4 credence in p”), since we are often able to judge our evidence correctly. Granted, if we are so ill-constituted as to be unable to respond appropriately to evidence, then we will be equally unable to be guided by these normative (rational) requirements. That'd certainly be unfortunate, but I think any complaint about this situation is more fairly directed at the world (for containing ill-constituted agents in the first place) than at our normative theory (for failing to achieve the impossible with them).

A final note: I've been implicitly assuming that the 'instruction manual' project is to be understood as inquiry into what advice an objectively well-constructed instruction manual would give us. (So, for example, the answers might be determined by the sort of 'Long Run principle' discussed here.) One might instead adopt a more 'Cartesian' project of showing how agents can build their own instruction manuals from scratch. Such a project seems likely to have much more 'subjective' results, being dependent on the agent's normative and logical starting beliefs, amongst other things. But again, I am suspicious about whether such extreme subjectivity is compatible with genuine normativity. Compare the analogous epistemological project: an insane agent might try to build up an epistemic system that began by rejecting modus tollens in favour of affirming the consequent, or that utilized “counterinduction” in place of induction. Suppose the counterinductivist believes that the sun has always risen in the past; is there any sense in which he really 'ought' to believe that the sun won't rise tomorrow? I would think not. Sure, it's supported by his first principles, but his first principles are insane.

I take the upshot of this to be that real normativity is inevitably laced with objectivity, in the sense that merely trying hard to be reasonable is no guarantee of success. Even in case of the relatively subjective 'ought' of rationality, an element of luck (beyond our control) is involved: we need to be well-constituted as rational agents to begin with. Otherwise: garbage in, garbage out.

Moral to Non-moral inferences

2010-05-16T14:20:00.000-04:00

It generally seems illegitimate to infer empirical conclusions from moral premises -- imagine, for example, a utilitarian inferring that killing Bob would fail to maximize happiness from their antecedent moral belief that killing is wrong. Or an incompatibilist arguing that determinism must be false because we're morally responsible. There seems something objectionable about the 'direction' of these inferences. (Consequentialists should start with empirical facts and infer moral conclusions; likewise for incompatibilists.)

But I wonder if we can legitimately draw some non-moral conclusions from moral premises. It doesn't seem so bad if the non-moral conclusions are still normative conclusions. I have in mind two examples in particular:

(1) Moral to Rational (all things considered practical reasons). The following seems platitudinous: If you had sufficient reason for acting as you did, then you didn't act wrongly. In other words: moral obligations are rational obligations. But if our views about moral and rational requirements initially diverge, it's an interesting question which way we should revise them: relaxing morality to match our lax view of rationality, or adopting more stringent rational requirements to match our moral convictions. The latter route, though open to question, is at least not obviously illegitimate. (See also the concluding sections of Michael Smith's 'Beyond the Error Theory'.)

(2) Moral to Epistemic. In light of the links between theoretical and practical reason, we might also find our moral beliefs giving rise to certain epistemic commitments. Consider the bridging principle that it's reasonable to act on a reasonable belief. If we think that it could never be reasonable to act so as to gratuitously increase the suffering of innocents, then it seems we should likewise think that it could never be reasonable to believe that the suffering of innocents is intrinsically good. (This is part of what motivates my resistance to Huemer's phenomenal conservatism, for example.)

What do you think? Is something fishy about these sorts of inferences?

Huemer's Self-Defeat Argument

2010-04-25T18:15:00.003-04:00

Michael Huemer forcefully advocates Phenomenal Conservatism (PC), the view that intuitive 'seemings' are prima facie justified. That is: "If it seems to S that P, then, in the absence of defeaters, S thereby has at least some justification for believing that P." (We should further add that, for Huemer, any possible defeaters must themselves be grounded in appearances.) He takes the following "self defeat argument" [quoted from our seminar handout] to rule out all competing views:

1. (Almost) all beliefs are based on appearances. (Exceptions: faith, self-deception.)
2. A belief is justified only if it is based on something that is a source of justification.
3. Therefore, there are justified beliefs only if appearances are sometimes a source of justification. (From 1, 2.) (Faith and self-deception are obviously not sources of justification.)
4. If PC is false, then appearances are never a source of justification.
5. So if PC is false, then no belief is justified. (From 3, 4.)
6. So no one is justified in believing any alternative theory to PC. (From 5.)

I'm not sure that (6) follows from (5). Some philosophers who either haven't seen or aren't convinced by Huemer's argument may find that some alternative theory X seems right to them, and if PC is true then this undefeated appearance can justify their belief in X. But never mind that: the conclusion in (5) is strong enough to establish PC (just tollens on the further premise that some beliefs are justified).

A more serious flaw, I think, is premise 4. I think the most plausible alternative to PC allows that appearances are sometimes a source of justification. It just adds a further objective constraint: the content of the seeming must not be objectively crazy. This alternative view yields more plausible results than PC when we consider severely incompetent agents. PC seems to imply that any proposition whatsoever can be justifiably believed: it merely requires that the proposition seem true to the agent, and that they not have any other relevant seemings (which could potentially serve as defeaters on Huemer's view). But severely logically confused agents (for example) should not qualify as having justified logical beliefs. If it seems to you that 2 + 2 = 4, and it seems to me that 2 + 2 = 99, these two beliefs are not equally rational or justified -- even if we both have equally strong-seeming intuitions. In this case, your mind is functioning properly and mine isn't: my belief is just crazy, even if it doesn't seem so to me from the inside. As I keep saying, one can be irrational without realizing it.

So, this strikes me as an appealing alternative to Huemer's view which isn't undermined by his self-defeat argument. Intuitions justify, except when they're objectively crazy. We may add that the previous sentence is not itself on the list of 'objectively crazy' claims. Hence, if this view is true, then those who find it intuitively plausible can justifiably believe it. It isn't self-defeating. (One may be suspicious of the notion of 'objective craziness', and so reject the view on those grounds. But that's a different objection.)

[Disclaimer: As always, I'm not making any claim to originality or uniqueness here -- several others in our seminar seemed to be thinking along similar lines.]

Increasingly Subjective 'Oughts'

2010-04-24T14:43:00.002-04:00

Consider the following variant on Parfit's Mineshafts case. Suppose ten lives are in danger, and an agent is presented with five options (A - E), with the following information. Exactly one of options A and B will save all ten, while the other will cause all ten to die, and the agent has no way to discover which is which. Option C is guaranteed to save nine and kill one. Option D is guaranteed to save one and kill nine. Option E is guaranteed to save five and kill five.

I take it to be clear that the agent ought to opt for the safe option C, so as to save 9/10 lives. The standard concept of 'ought' (the one that's relevant to deliberation, etc.) is thus evidence-sensitive. We can stipulate a technical usage according to which the agent 'objectively ought' to choose option A (supposing that that is the one that will actually save all ten lives), but that doesn't seem as central as the evidence-sensitive 'ought'.

Let me add some further details to the case. Suppose that our agent was raised to believe that happy lives are bad whereas pain and death are good. (He finds this just as subjectively 'obvious'-seeming as we find the opposite claims.) Should this affect how we are to evaluate the agent's options? I'm inclined to think not. The agent should (in the standard, evidence-sensitive sense) still choose option C, but because he's so morally misguided he likely won't realize this. His messed up upbringing might excuse his error when he instead chooses D, but it sure doesn't justify choosing to bring about eight extra deaths.

Some philosophers - let's call them 'subjectivists' - respond differently. They say that, although the agent objectively (or with respect to the facts) ought to do A, he subjectively (or with respect to his beliefs) ought to choose D (not C), killing 9/10 people. This seems a serious cost to their view: surely we should not be attaching any positive normative status to such poor decisions. Objectivists can (and should) insist that it isn't rational to take the means to irrational ends like this.

The prospects for subjectivism look even worse when we add a further detail to the case. Let's suppose that the agent is logically, as well as morally, confused. So although he aims to cause as much death as possible, he confusedly believes that this end is better achieved by causing five deaths than by causing nine. Does this then mean that the agent rationally/subjectively ought to choose E?

Here the subjectivist faces a dilemma. If they endorse ever-increasingly subjective norms, then their view becomes empty -- it fails to accommodate the obvious datum that people can be irrational without realizing it. So suppose they instead draw a line in the sand, and insist that our logically confused fellow is irrational to choose E, and what he really ought to have chosen is D. But why stop there? Once we appreciate that people can be irrational without realizing it (maybe even blamelessly so), isn't it overwhelmingly more plausible to favour option C (saving 9/10 lives) as what any reasonable agent really ought to choose in this case?

(Note that there's a principled stopping point here at option C. The agent lacks access to the empirical evidence that could ground a reasonable belief that option A is better than C. But no such evidence is needed to appreciate fundamental moral truths, which are presumably a priori knowable if they're knowable at all. See also: Expecting Better of the Ignorantly Unreasonable.)

Outsourcing Lectures

2010-04-17T13:03:00.002-04:00

Interesting stuff in the NYT:

Some imagine a situation in which the bulk of introductory course materials are online, as videos or interactive environments; students engage with the material when convenient and show up only for smaller seminars. “In an on-demand environment, they’re thinking, ‘Do we really need to show up face to face at 8 a.m. with 500 other students to take Psychology 101?’ ” Mr. Schonfeld says. [...]

Mr. Schonfeld sees still more potential in “unbundling” the four elements of educating: design of a course, delivery of that course, delivery of credit and delivery of a degree. “Traditionally, they’ve all lived in the same institutional setting.” Must all four continue to live together, or can one or more be outsourced?

It's a good question. Large lecture classes are sufficiently impersonal and non-interactive that it'd make little or no difference whether you're there in person or just watching it on video. But of course some professors are much better at lecturing than others. These two points together suggest that the vast majority of large intro classes could actually be vastly improved by replacing their local lectures with links to videos of world-class lectures. The role of the local college would then merely be to provide the Teaching Assistants to (i) run small precept sections where students can discuss the lecture material, ask questions, etc., and (ii) grade assignments.

One possible obstacle to such reform, at least at high-prestige schools/departments, is that students may want to affiliate with famous professors (or "high status folks", as Robin would say), even if they aren't the best teachers. But that still leaves plenty of large lecture courses currently being led by people who are neither famous professors nor brilliant teachers. It seems that these, at least, would benefit from outsourcing the lectures.

Some hope to implement a 'proof of concept' by building alternative educational institutions rather than reforming the existing mainstream:

Edupunks — the term for high-tech do-it-yourself educators who skirt traditional structures — are piloting wiki-type U’s that stitch together open course material from many institutions and combine it with student-to-student interaction. [...] “Having a degree is a signal,” she says. “It’s a signal to employers that you’ve passed a certain bar.” Here’s the radical part: Ms. Paharia doesn’t think degrees are necessary. P2PU is working to come up with alternative signals that indicate to potential employers that an individual is a good thinker and has the skills he or she claims to have — maybe a written report or an online portfolio.

I'd like for this to work, but I suspect it won't, at least if Bryan Caplan is right that employers care about college degrees as a signal of conformity and not just intelligence. Home college makes one look 'weird', even if you can produce high-quality academic work. So I suspect that this is another one of those cases (like open access publishing) where reforming established institutions is more likely to lead to lasting success than is attempting to create new ones.

Marquis on Contraception and Identifying Victims

2010-04-16T19:57:00.001-04:00

Marquis' (1989) 'Why Abortion is Immoral' famously argues that abortion deprives the fetus of a "future like ours". Towards the end of the paper, he argues that "nothing at all is denied such a future by contraception" (p.201). I think this view is defensible, but not for the reasons he suggests.

In response to the claim that contraception "deprives both the sperm and the ovum separately of a valuable future like ours", Marquis writes:

On this alternative, too many futures are lost. Contraception was supposed to be wrong, because it deprived us of one future of value, not two.

This is too quick. We can imagine "fusion" cases where two people (A and B) merge together to share a single future C. (It helps if A and B are intrinsic duplicates, or at least extremely similar.) As in fission cases, we might not want to describe this as a case of strict "identity" across time, but it's clearly compatible with what matters in survival. That is, even if the logic of identity prevents us from saying both that C is A and that C is B (because A isn't B, and identity is transitive), we should still hold that C's life constitutes a "future of value" for each of A and B, such that it'd be harmful to each to deprive them of this future by killing them before they merge.

Since it's possible to wrongly deprive two people of a single shared future, Marquis' response here is insufficient: more work is required to explain why contraception doesn't deprive both the sperm and egg of a valuable future. (I think there are two respectable answers here. Pro-lifers should appeal to a kind of biological essentialism, and say that gametes are just a fundamentally different kind of entity from human beings, and hence do not develop into the conceptus, but rather are replaced by it. But my own view is that only persons have futures in the relevant sense, so I don't think fetuses are harmed by death any more than sperm are.)

Marquis continues (pp.201-2):

One might attempt to avoid this problem by holding that contraception deprives the combination of sperm and ovum of a valuable future like ours. But here the definite article misleads. At the time of conception, there are hundreds of possible combinations... there is no nonarbitrarily identifiable subject of the loss in the case of contraception.

The notion that victims need to be "identifiable" yields atrocious results. Suppose a large roomful of people are about to be gassed. A teleportation machine is set to randomly choose one of these people and teleport them to safety. Would Marquis have us believe that it'd be okay to turn off the machine and let everyone die, just because "there are hundreds of possible" beneficiaries, and no particular person we can pick out as the one who would have been rescued?

Again, we need a different explanation of why it is that mereological sums of sperms and eggs aren't harmed by contraception. In particular, we should say that these gerrymandered "objects" aren't the right kind of entity to be the subjects of future experiences. (Only persons, or organisms, or some such, exhibit the requisite internal unity.)

Birthday Gifts - GiveWell

2010-04-13T13:14:00.001-04:00

It's my birthday tomorrow, and if any readers are feeling in a generous mood, please consider donating a little something to GiveWell [through Facebook causes -- recommended to help promote philanthropic social norms -- or directly]. As I previously wrote of meta-charities: "rather than trying to directly help the less fortunate, we would do better to serve as a 'catalyst' that boosts the effectiveness of others' giving."

You can learn more about GiveWell's approach at their (always interesting) blog, now linked from my blogroll.

Update: $200 raised -- thanks all!

Maybe it's an April Fools Joke?

2010-04-11T19:43:00.002-04:00

Not sure how else a review like this could get published in NDPR:

In philosophy, the nonidentity problem has become the leading paradigm. In the succession of paradigms, as described by Thomas S. Kuhn, it is the "normal science" of today. In this anthology, virtually none of the articles explicitly labels the nonidentity problem as esoteric, far-fetched, or generally outlandish. What a pity. It would have benefited from such a radically sceptical view.

The nonidentity problem, if it were relevant, would be of utmost importance for moral judgements in areas such as climate change or reparations, and philosophers have remarked on that. Why is it, then, that outside philosophy there is no talk about the nonidentity problem at all? [...] Are non-philosphers [sic] just too dumb to recognize the problem or are Roberts and Wassermann misled when they claim that the problem is broad and deep?

After this false dichotomy, the reviewers (Jörg Chet Tremmel and Ned Chambers) go on to describe their two "objections" to taking the non-identity problem seriously. The first is reincarnation:

Nonidentity claims presuppose that humans are not reborn. But if we adopt the reincarnation view, the nonidentity paradigm is no longer applicable. Then, the disabled child could very well reproach its parents for having harmed it, because the same person might have been born with a healthy body if it had been born one year later.

Anything's possible, right?

Their second objection rests on a simple misunderstanding of the non-identity problem:

The nonidentity thesis can be rephrased as follows: "Because of an action by a present agent, a future individual came into existence. This action cannot have harmed this person since without it, she would never have existed."

The 'butterfly effect' argument takes issue with the 'because'. The question of which egg and sperm fuse depends on countless actions, so it is misleading to pick out only one that is detrimental to a future person and hold it responsible for the conception and birth of a child.

This is just confused. The non-identity argument does not rely on picking out a factor as solely responsible, or "the" cause, of a particular person's conception. What matters is the mere counterfactual: that if the one thing had been done differently, then this child would not have existed. This is obviously compatible with acknowledging a whole raft of similar counterfactuals, and so it in no way implies that the identified factor is uniquely responsible for the conception.

Depressing stuff.

Dorr on Modal Realism

2010-04-11T11:36:00.000-04:00

Lewis famously identified 'possible worlds' with spatiotemporally isolated regions (call them 'Lewis-worlds'). But, as Cian Dorr points out in 'How to be a Modal Realist', the view is much improved by jettisoning this claim. There doesn't seem any principled reason for taking spatiotemporal boundaries to be of any fundamental modal significance (and it makes it harder for Lewis to accommodate extra-worldly modal facts, like "possibly, there are at least two Lewis-worlds"). Instead, the best version of the view goes something like this:

Accept Lewis' ontology. So there's a plenitude of concrete objects, scattered across countless Lewis-worlds. This all actually exists (we're not going to arbitrarily limit the scope of the actual to the stuff around here -- restricted quantification suffices to make true ordinary assertions of "there are no talking donkeys"). For qualitative claims using unrestricted quantifiers, modal operators are redundant: possibly there is a talking donkey, just because there really is a talking donkey. (There's no need to add "in some Lewis world", any more than we would add "in some grassy field".) Then, to accommodate de re modal claims, we simply overlay the qualitative facts with an identity interpretation (or what Dorr calls a 'counterpairing': a function from objects to counterparts). So, for example, 'I could have been standing right now' is true because there's a guy X standing up at a time t, and a counterpairing relation R which pairs me with X and now with t.

(Note that it's then the pluriverse-spanning counterpairing relations, rather than the individual Lewis worlds, that play the role of "possible worlds". To be "true at" a counterpairing relation is to be true according to the implied assignment of identities to the qualitative pluriverse.)

It's a neat picture. I should clarify that Dorr himself doesn't think that it's true, but merely an improvement over Lewis' formulation. I'm inclined to agree with him on both counts!