Yeah, OK, But Still

The Meno and Homeric Virtue

2012-01-27T19:38:00.000-08:00

I've been writing a lot (academically) about role-based virtue, it's an idea that excites me. The idea might be summarized thusly: there is no full-stop virute or goodness, rather, evaluative concepts are, implicitly or otherwise, indexed to types of activity or to social roles.

As it turns out, the bits and pieces of Homeric Greece we can put together seem to indicate that their society, like many contemporary ancient societies in the middle east and northern Africa, held this idea in some esteem. In fact, they did not know of its contrary: virtue,or arete (ἀρετή) in Homeric greek, was meaningless when spoken of in an unqualified manner. Rather, there was virtue-for-warriors, virtue-for-women, virtue-for-slaves, and so forth. We (apparently) do not find the term ἀρετή appearing in an unqualified manner in Greek texts until two or three hundred years after The Odyssey and the Illiad.

So, when Plato, around this very time, Socrates asks Meno (in The Meno) what virtue is, the question would have contained a culturally informed ambiguity that it does not have for us. The first couple of times I read the Meno, I laughed inwardly at the first answer provided by the title character, which seemed obviously silly, like a set-up for the inevitable Socratic smack-down:

It is not hard to tell you,Socrates. First, if you want the virtue of a man, it is easy to say that a man'svirtue consists of being able to manage public affairs and in so doing tobenefit his friends and harm his enemies and to be careful that no harm comes tohimself; if you want the virtue of a woman, it is not difficult to describe: shemust manage the home well, preserve its possessions, and be submissive to her husband;the virtue of a child, whether male or female, is different again, and so isthat of an elderly man, if you want that, or if you want that of a free man ora slave. And there are very many other virtues, so that one is not at a loss tosay what virtue is. There is virtue for every action and every age, for everytask of ours and every one of us--and Socrates, the same is true for wickedness.

I now realize that Meno is not simply spouting something he believes personally. Rather, he represents, in the text, an ethical tradition of which Plato's intended readers would have been very aware. Socrates, in his usual condescending an evasive way, tricks Meno into accepting the contrary proposition: that every virtuous man, woman slave and child has some property above and beyond the performance of their role that makes them virtuous or just.

It is fair to say that this very conceptual shift has won the day, and that we are all Socratics now. The dictionary is illustrative on that point: " 'Good'... the most general term of commendation." But what if this concept is not like this? What if it only appears to be so because of the distorting influence of Platonic-Christian morality? What if, in spite of all appearances, the only coherent way to use evaluative concepts is by linking them, implicitly or explicitly, to a context? What if Meno, while clearly wrong about certain details, is basically right?

Instanbul, 1670

2012-01-21T20:31:00.000-08:00

Near dawn, my guest delighted me by saying that he'd loved my story, but adding that he had to disagree with certain details... he agreed that we must seek the strange and suprising, as in my story; yes, perhaps this was the one thing we could do to combat the exhausting tedium of this world. [...]

But we should search for the strange and suprising in the world, not in ourselves! To search within, to think so long and hard about ourselves, this would only make us unhappy. This is what had happened to the characters in my story: for this reason, heroes could never tolerate being themselves, for this reason they always wanted to be someone else... I was silent.

Little by little, by writing these sorts of tales, by searching for the strange within ourselves, we, too, would become someone else, and, God forbid, our readers would as well. He did not even want to think about how terrible the world would be if men spoke always of themselves, of their own peculiarities, if their books and their stories were always about this one thing.

- Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle

"Religion", Utility and Origin

2012-01-10T20:39:00.000-08:00

A little while ago I wrote that Nietzsche's condemnation of the "English style" of genealogy has, apparently, fallen on deaf ears. Rereading On The Genealogy of Morals, I notice another lesson he tried to teach us:

There is for historiography of any kind no more important proposition than the one it took such effort to establish but which really ought to be established now: the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart;... however well one has understood the utility of a thing, this means nothing regarding its origin.

Now, this sentiment is downright heretical: it is anti-Darwinist (edit: I'm not so sure about this particular point, and Nietzsche's opposition to Darwin is a matter of some contention). In the case of simple phenotypic traits, it appears as though Nietzsche was importantly wrong: hands do exist because they are good for grasping, in spite of his repeated denials.

Yet, in the case of psychological elements, or cultural practises, his argument has much more force. We commonly hear today, from the extraordinarily uncreative circles that say these kinds of things, that "religion" (as such, whatever that means) has survived because it had a certain utility, for example, it promoted social cohesion. In the nearly comical words of the leading proponent, it "cohered with an existing memeplex".

We hear the same thing about altruism: game-theoretic models sometimes demonstrate that given certain population dynamics the group is better off when its members are altruistic: this economic utility as such is then projected into the past without any other evidence.

Yet, this simply does not follow. It is one possible explanation amongst many. The alternative Nietzsche provides is that institutions like monotheistic religion (and the corresponding self-denying value of altruism) arose at the outset of civilization because people were tortured by the new and necessary suppression of their instincts within society. The practice and advocacy of self-denial could help to make sense of this suffering, and so huge masses adopted religious values without realizing what they were for.

Eventually, the values of guilt and self-denial spread to the noble classes, not because they had any utility for them, but because great cultural wars were waged at varios levels: Christian values in particular have usually been spread by force, with the leaders of pagan nations subdued and converted in the usual style.

Soon, whole societies began to be organized around Christian principles. It is at this stage that the social cohesion and fortification became a reality, but the origin of religion had nothing whatsoever to do with these utilities. Rather, the God was initially a balm for a deeply wounded animal, a beast that was being forced, by the earliest powerful organizers of city-states, to become tame. It was a way for mankind's instinctual aggression to be redirected at the self.

Logically, historically, there are so many more possible explanations, and each of the tenable ones will be massively complex. Yet, when we just project, in a very simple fashion, the current utility of a social form into the past, asserting that "this must be why it arose", we gravely underestimate the distance that exists between us and our early ancestors. Their world is not our world, and when it comes to psychological tendencies or cultural practises, it is not necessarily the case that our utility is their utility.

Indeed, we cannot know the origin of such things until we inquire into the cultural context which produced them. I really wish that certain lazy evolutionary psychologists would just admit that it's way easier to rake in the publishing bucks by publishing vacant nonsense than to actually undertake to study these things.

2011

2012-01-09T20:18:00.000-08:00

This is of course late, but I thought I'd compile a list of what I think are my best posts from 2011. You should definitely read all of these...

...if you're philosophically inclined and very, very bored.

There Is No Such Thing As Art

Continental, Analytic and Logical Atomism

Why The Dawkins Scandal is About Meta-Ethics

Psychoanalysis

A Process Ethic
Perception And The Will

Bernard Williams and Shaming

On The Alleged "Question" of Homosexual Sex

An Odd Thing

2012-01-08T15:40:00.000-08:00

There is a reasonably well-defined set of questions which constitute the philosophical enterprise. This list of questions is fluid: it is shortened and lengthened at various points in the discipline’s history. Yet, at a given time in history, there is a general consensus within the field about the basic issues that are being addressed.

Now, it is a prerequisite for being a philosopher that you disagree with huge swaths of people on a great many of these issues. A philosopher, generally, must have a view, a collection of answers to the Greater (and Lesser) Questions that constitute the discipline.

Yet, without philosophical enemies, a philosopher is nothing. It is possible, if difficult, to imagine a scientist busily working alone, constructing and testing hypotheses in total isolation from any colleagues or interlocutors. Yet, a philosopher is always responding to his or her interlocutors, those colleagues present and past whose disagreement is essential to their own position’s substance.

The odd thing is that we are generally scornful of these opponents: we see them as hopelessly misguided, as labouring under false assumptions, as unable to see what we think is right in front of their faces. I am not speaking here of tone, but rather of the way it feels to hold to a philosophical position. Yet, without our enemy’s allegedly nonsensical positions, our own positions have no sense, they have no context, they do not really say much. A position without other positions is an extensionless point in a vacuum.

Nonetheless, it is impossible to shake the sense that it would be best if one’s opponent saw the light of reason, came over to your side, and stopped writing such silly things. How could one say otherwise? Of course, if every enemy did this, we would vanish as philosophers, as participants in a discussion. There would be no-one left for us to be. And so, there is something self-deceptive and almost paradoxical in this hatred of one's philosophical enemy: it is a kind of will to the annihilation of one's own identity.

The English Genealogists

2011-12-27T17:16:00.000-08:00

Nietzsche: "altruistic evaluation... which Dr Rée, like all English genealogists, sees as the moral method of valuation as such." (On the Genealogy of Morals)

I am consistently astounded by the morality=altruism equation that permeates all discussions of morality's origins. Today, 120 years after Nietzsche rightly taught us that 'morality' is many different things at many different times and places, our scientific philosophers can still say things like this:

How does a non-realist like me proceed?... I go rather with the late John Rawls in his Theory of Justice, thinking that natural selection put morality into place. Those proto-humans who thought and behaved morally survived and reproduced at a better rate than those that did not. (There are all sorts of good biological reasons why cooperation can be a much better strategy than just fighting all of the time.) (Michael Ruse, "Scientism Continued")

Yup, morality is co-operation, co-operation can be selected-for, and that's basically all we need to say about 'morality'. I am not picking on Ruse: the number of books and papers published every year which cleave to this hypothesis and this hypothesis alone is staggering.

Were Nietzsche alive, he would almost certainly be livid with frustration: in his day, perhaps only a dozen persons fit the bill, but it appears as though we are all English Genealogists, now.

A Request

2011-12-14T13:20:00.000-08:00

REDUCTIONISTS: stopping at atoms is arbitrary. Stopping at electrons or quarks is arbitrary. Find me the uncuttable or be silent.

Nose-Flickers, Unite!

2011-12-13T15:08:00.000-08:00

This SMBC comic is extraordinary. The more I think about it, the more I realize that it encapsulates my entire philosophical "mission" (such as it is). I am a nose-flicker.

On Famous People Telling You To Become Who You Really Are

2011-12-05T08:29:00.000-08:00

So, the normally wonderful Open Culture blog has a somewhat troubling post called Conformity Isn't A Recipe for Excellence. It features video links of such luminaries as Stephen Fry, George Carlin, Steve Jobs and (...shudder...) Bono pontificating on what they've learned over the course of their lives. The themes are fairly clear: Carlin tells us to follow "who we really are", Fry says that the power of the internet to change our lives comes down to expressing "our personality", Bono tells us to "take risks", and Jobs gives us this little pearl:

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

One way to start thinking about why this is so troubling is to simply look at the word "excellence". Conformity, we are told, is not a recipe for excellence. Well, this is very nearly what some philosophers have liked to call an analytic truth: true simply by virtue of the meanings of the words. In other words, it's vacuous, boring, uninteresting. "Excellence" is a comparative term: in a given populace, only a select few can count as excellent. Therefore, any activity in which you simply do as others do is one in which you cannot excel.

These are the kinds of thoughts that can start to draw out the absurdity of allowing famous people to hold forth on practical wisdom. Famous people absolutely love to tell us to follow our true selves or to find our inner bliss, because to them it appears as though doing so was the cause of their own success. They almost uniformly ignore the underlying reality: they were in the right place at the right time, their particular ambition found the right outlet, and they became famous. They turn around, examine their lives, and think: good thing I was true to myself. Well, yes, but if Steve Jobs had been born just 5 years later, he would have arrived too late on the scene to become THE Steve Jobs. He might have found his talents realized as a middling programmer, he would have made a bit of money, maybe got married, had some kids, and when cancer came, the more humble Steve would probably have just gone for chemotherapy instead of allowing a hyper-inflated ego to divert him, terminally, into "alternative" medicine.

The lesson? Famous people are not good sources of practical wisdom. Their outlooks are almost universally distorted by an inability to percieve the real social context which allowed them to flourish, and as such they nearly always end up espousing some "become who you really are" mantra that is disastrous advice for people who aren't so lucky.

For example, oh, let's see, a completely random example: should the repressed, suicidal, underpaid Chinese workers who assemble the Apple machines "follow their bliss"? Can they "change" or "influence" their world, Steve? Can they "build their own things that other people can use"? Seems like they can't, Steve, because it seems like their governments imprison or kill them when they try to do things like that.

Fig 1. Apple workers following their bliss.

So, man from rich, free country believes he's a visionary, gets rich by constructing shiny toys built in horrible factories in poor, totalitarian countries, turns around and tells everyone that they, too, can get rich by following their dreams.

World-Historical Irony: without those poor, repressed people who could not follow their dreams, Famous Man would not have become successful at all.

Now, how about us? Ordinary Western persons looking for something to do with their lives? Should we be "true to ourselves"? Well, on some level, perhaps we should. But should we expect that doing so will bring us worldly success? Should we expect our lives to resemble in any way the lives of these profoundly confused luminaries? No. Authenticity, if it is to be a valuable way of life, must be its own reward. It must go hand in hand with the realistic acceptance that one's life may turn out to suck, and suck hard, no matter how nonconformist you are. And, to play on an old Socratic refrain, it's better to be a nobody in touch with reality than a profoundly deluded someone.

Embedded Ethics and Keeping Score

2011-12-01T11:23:00.000-08:00

I sometimes encounter a certain anxiety in philosophy when I suggest that we should not be constructing ethical theories. Indeed, I very recently discovered that the idea makes a certain professor of mine very anxious, as it lead this particular professor to make the unwise proclamation that constructing ethical theories is just "what philosophers do". As though Susan Wolf, Harry Frankfurt, Bernard Williams and Elizabeth Anscombe were discardable footnotes in the annals of modern ethics.

Elsewhere in conversation, a different professor I know has voiced the concern that ethical decisions made without the aid of ethical theory might be "arbitrary". When a person is in a tough spot, and when they need to choose between two difficult alternatives, the decision to just pick one on the basis of instinct or feeling is alleged to be problematic, because that person might have consulted the correct ethical theory instead.

The anxiety, I suggest, may be produced by the pretensions of moral theory itself: because a correct theory is supposed to produce a very general set of coherent ethical principles which are to 'cover' all decision-situations, because ethical theory purports to capture the true meaning of "goodness" or "rightness", the absence of ethical theory provokes the anxious response: how can we accomplish these goals without it? What resources remain?

It is, after all, a fair question, one that deserves an answer. Yet, I think that the best thinkers of the past 100 years have been patiently reminding us that in focusing so narrowly on theory, we are neglecting the huge number of resources that are quite literally at our fingertips. We are human beings. We are embedded in a massively complex social context, and within this context there exist many powerful sources of reasons. We are social creatures: The roles we play, the relations we enter into, the norms we accept, and the ideals with which we identify are constantly interacting with our practical thought, our judgment and our action. We are also organisms with basic needs: the mere fact that we are embodied generates an enormous number of important practical imperatives for us, individually and collectively. We are also citizens: we live under laws and institutions that shape our perogatives and which can provide reasons for action on their own. We are also goal-driven: a human life is probably not complete without the active prusuit of coherently organized ends. Also, we love: our identities become intertwined with the identities of particular others through processes of mutual identification and care. We are also thinking things, and our epistemic patterns of judgment can be correct or incorrect, logical or illogical.

Gee, look at that! No moral theory, yet somehow we can still speak of acting for good reasons, we can still praise and blame one another, and we can still hold each other responsible for what we do according to various standards.

"OK," says the ethical theorist, "so Fred is a good father and a lousy workmate and a decent husband and a terrible painter and an upstanding citizen and a high-functioning alcoholic. Fine. But how good is he?" My main thought is that this final question is entirely superfluous, unnecessary, pointless. It only seems like an important question when we allow the pretensions of theory to induce myopia in us, such that we are unable to see our own radical embeddedness, our existence as human beings in a human world.

Perception and the Will

2011-11-23T20:06:00.000-08:00

One of the great false idols of the Cartesian tradition, magnified by the empiricists and brought straight down to us through the many guises of positivism, is the Idol of the Spectator. You barely have to turn around in the philosophical world before you run into a conversation where it is assumed, without argument, that the human mind is a "passive receptor". That is to say, that as regards the "external world", we sit and watch as successions of impressions pass through our minds. We are left in their wake, to make sense of what they mean, but ultimately we have no other data from which to construct a general picture of the world.

It is no accident that the two greatest minds of this tradition, Decartes and Hume, wrote in the 'meditative' style. They did not write of their everyday experiences, of their working lives or of their social relations. Rather, they attempted to escape those ordinary frameworks, to assume as little as they could, and to quite literally just see what happened. Both, unsuprisingly, were lead to scepticism about the external world, because both suspended the use of the very faculties which regularly bring us into contact with the world.

When I think about my own philosophical education, I am startled by the ways in which the Idol of the Spectator has dominated many of my courses. We have spoken so freely of 'sense-data', of successions of perceptions, of Humean 'bundles' and of our bodies as "receptors". How little are we encouraged to think about the ways in which we create these experiences. Not in the idealist or Kantian sense, but in the simple, ordinary sense in which we choose to have experiences. We decide to look at something, and lo, our visual field is enveloped by its features. We choose to put our hands in warm water, we choose to pop Stravinsky into the CD player, we choose to squish our toes in the mud. The sensations we experiences are a direct result of our decicions, and without an independent external world towards which we could direct such attention, it is hard to know how we could explain the regularities so experienced.

I sometimes wonder whether the fact that philosophy is done by people sitting down in bland seminar rooms determines what those people see as obvious or 'intuitive' methodological presuppositions from which to begin. When one is engaged in productive activity, it is quite literally impossible to feel as though you are in the Cartesian theatre, with a series of ideas and impressions playing out on an invisible screen. You can only entertain this fantasy when you are not doing very much at all. Just pick up a book and open it, look out the window, hell, do anything and you will see that you have some kind of direct control over the content of your perceptions. It follows, at the very least, that we are not mere "bundles of perceptions", and that if we really are to construct a picture of the world from our sensations, that we may have a much more powerful set of resources than we thought.

Bernard Williams and Shaming

2011-11-04T08:20:00.000-07:00

Philosophy’s relation to its own past is distinctively peculiar. The modern astronomer may solemnly and respectfully lay Ptolemy to rest, while by contrast the modern philosopher must concern herself with the possibility that Plato is not only alive but also, as it were, kicking. The greats of philosophy are always with us, and it was in this spirit that Jonathan Lear and Mark Hopwood organized their memorial conference on Bernard Williams this past weekend. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the conference and take in the presentations and discussion that resulted from the gathering together of various luminaries in the field of ethical philosophy.

The conference afforded its attendees a unique opportunity to reflect, not just on the legacy of Williams’ critique, but also on the ways in which his voice is, as Lear put it, “absent from the philosophical landscape.” A gadfly and a persistent critic he was, but behind Williams’ negative appraisals of modern moral philosophy lay the conviction that if we could correct our persistent errors, philosophy could be, as he put it, “thoroughly truthful and honestly helpful”. This leads us to a difficult question: in the eight years since Williams’ passing, have we followed his lead and begun to approximate this ideal? Or have we regressed into the modes of philosophizing which he caustically described as “unhelpful, boring, [and] sterile”?

I want to argue that a good portion of Williams’ ethical philosophy was distinct from more common modes of analysis and argumentation. This is because many of Williams’ most important arguments were exercises in shaming, a first-order moral performative speech-act designed to invoke in its targets a sense of having failed to meet the basic ethical standards of a community. By contrast, the most common modes of ethical critique in professional philosophy are second-order conceptual exercises, designed to expose logical fallacies or destructive conceptual unclarity in their targets. Neither activity is more important than the other, and Williams’ own texts demonstrate that they can be instantiated in the same line of thought, but in noting an absence of shaming in philosophy, we are recognizing one way in which Williams’ distinct voice has indeed faded from the philosophical landscape.

Consider a famous few pages from Williams’ “Persons, Character and Morality”. His targets in these passages are D.A.J. Richards and Charles Fried. Richards argued, incredibly, that people should not show love to one another unless that love is based on ‘traits of personality and character related to acting on moral principles’. Williams responds, in an unmistakably acidic tone:

This righteous absurdity is no doubt to be traced to a feeling that love, even love based on 'arbitrary physical characteristics', is something which has enough power and even authority to conflict badly with morality unless it can be brought within it from the beginning, and evidently that is a sound feeling.

Here, there is a suggestion that love is just the kind of emotion that can come into conflict with the demands of impartial morality, and therefore that Kantians, as impartial moralists, are right to be concerned with love. Of course, Williams’ ironic tone indicates that he takes the priorities that lead to this kind of concern to be misguided. The idea that morality should enjoy this kind of priority over the necessities of love is just absurd, and the absurdity in question does not take the form of a reductio; Richards is not logically forced to give up his doctrine. Rather, the absurdity is evaluative in nature. I believe that Williams is calling upon us, as an actual community of persons, to recognize that the implication is absurd. Not contradictory, but unacceptable.

A few paragraphs later, we find Williams tousling with Fried, who believes that in a case where one must choose between saving a drowning stranger or one’s drowning spouse, that some kind of “sufficient randomizing event” can justify giving preference to one’s spouse. Williams’ caustic tone appears again:

Surely this is a justification on behalf of the rescuer, that the person he chose to rescue was his wife? ...[this is] an explanation which should silence comment.

Williams notes that many moral theorists will not be satisfied here, that they will have in mind a higher-order justification which goes beyond the mere silencing of commentary. He argues, famously, that this higher-order justification must embody “one thought too many”.

We might well ask about the logical structure of this argument, and in taking it as an argument we might be lead, as many have, to theories and conceptions which will accommodate what has come to be called the “One Thought Too Many Problem”. But we should not ignore what Williams himself seemed to think was sufficient, here: the thought that the woman is my wife is supposed to silence comment on my decision. What does it mean to "silence comment"? Surely not that Fried or anyone else has been convinced by reason alone that his position is incorrect. Rather, Williams' wants Fried to be shamed into silence.

And what about the rest of us? Well, we may be philosophers reading Williams’ texts, but we are also persons with first-order evaluative beliefs. Can we, as a community, wholeheartedly endorse the theoretician’s concern to provide moral justifications for acts of love?

Importantly, Williams’ performative shaming is effective because it is embedded in a larger, more traditional philosophical argument about practical identity and about the centrality of ground projects in relation to that identity. On its own, this kind of shaming is problematically conservative; it invites us to take common ethical feeling as a fixed standard for philosophical evaluation. Yet, in context, Williams’ sarcastic tone is extremely important. It conveys the possibility that a concern for theoretical integrity can bring a philosopher into territory which is unacceptable, not because the territory is logically absurd, but because we cannot join him there. And this, in any ethically functioning society, is a source of shame.

There is No Such Thing As Agency

2011-11-02T21:02:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking of making a list of words falsely reified by modern philosophical practise. Having argued that 'normativity' is one, I've come to suspect that 'agency' is another.

This is one of those words that carries such importance in moral philosophy that to raise questions about it might almost seem heretical, but really, why should any of us be called upon to explain 'agency'?

I am familiar, first-personally, with action and with occasional deliberation about action. I have acquaintance with motivations and with principles that I sometimes use to deliberate. I have a keen sense of needing to reach out into the world and to see myself reflected in it, and I understand that I have a sense of the importance of perceived states of affairs.

Third-personally, I am familiar with the action of others, and I hear a great deal about their own experiences of deliberation, and I understand that their own judgments and feelings of importance will differ from mine.

I am most certainly not familiar with any phenomenon or property called 'agency'.

Note: this is not a positivist-inspired rejection of things I can't point to, for my net is far wider than that older one. I am completely willing to accept the existence of all kinds of objects and properties, and if science can't find the phenomenal character of my emotions or of your deliberation, then tough goddamned cookies for science.

If 'agency' is just a signpost-word, something we use to indicate the presence of an entitity that can act, then no questions are begged. In fact, before 1950, the word was almost exclusively used in just this way: 'an agency of social change', which does not reify the term but merely points to an entity's ability to act. In 1973, however, Gary Watson's "Free Agency" appeared, and the title alone indicates that a shift towards our current situation was beginning. Watson repetaedly used the term as a substantive noun to which we could attach adjectives and qualifiers. In a closely related field, psychologists were suddenly arguing for things like 'the centrality of a self-efficacy mechanism in human agency'... not only was agency a thing, now it had parts.

As is the case with the term 'normativity', this is no harmless reification. Rather, various important views pride themselves on being able to make sense of agency, and some even consider the state of being an agent as having a kind of ultimate value. For example, arch-Kantian Christine Korsgaard (2009) is clear: to act contrary to the Categorical Imperative isn't just to act immorally, as old Kant would have said. It's something more profound: it's to lose your agency.

Oh, NO! Not my agency! What will I ever do without that?

Answer: exactly what I have always done.

7 Billion Hysteria

2011-11-01T06:57:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note from a non-scientist on the almost obligatory round of population-panic (see here, for example) that's accompanied the U.N.'s recent announcement that there are 7 billion of us on this big ol' ball.

Since 1950, global birth rates have been slashed, from 4.95 to 2.45 children per woman. The replacement-level birth rate for any population is, as a simple matter of mathematical logic, 2.1. This trend is occurring all over the globe without exception. It is slowest in Sub-Saharan Africa (where birth rates have stubbornly declined just 66% in 60 years), and most dramatic in China, where birth rates have fallen from 6.11 to 1.56, an extraordinary drop of almost 400%. [Source, United Nations, not A Right-Wing Think Tank]. Again, I'm no scientist, but this must count as the most dramatic shift in global birth rates in recorded history.

Now, as a caveat, death rates have also dropped significantly, and so as a matter of statistical fact it will take a while (some say 3-4 decades, others 150 years) for the world's population to smooth out. But the fact remains that barring some bizarre and improbable change, it will smooth out. Baby 7 Billion may even live to see that happen. According to the U.N., a reasonable estimate is that 8.5 billion will be the peak. But is that really a problem? Could the real problem be something else?

In fact, rising demand for resources is so clearly the major problem here that one really has to wonder why all of the focus is on population. It's easy to worry about population as an academic, blogger or science writer in the affluent West: we don't have very many children at all, why are they having all those babies? It's an easy cop-out, one that conveniently disguises the fact that it is we, not they who are the problem. Our lifestyle, and the loads of people on Earth who are trying to emulate our lifestyle, is stripping the planet bare. That's just bloody obvious.

In fact, it's so bloody obvious that one almost wants to formulate a moderate Chomsky-style conspiracy theory. What could be more convenient to an established economic order than for people to descend into panic about mythical over-fertile foreigners instead of panicking about their own overconsumption? Why weren't there headlines when the global mean consumption rate passed 2.0 times replacement-level, for example?

However, that's just speculation. The primary problem here is an ethical one. Can we pease avoid displacing blame on to an ill-defined mass of foreign people and refocus on ourselves?

I Learned Something About Normativity This Weekend

2011-10-30T17:44:00.000-07:00

30 years ago, no-one in philosophy used the term "normativity". Now, it's everywhere. We investigate its nature, its sources, its psychological power.

Yet, the very idea that there is a phenomenon which deserves the singular name 'normativity' carries substantive philosophical presuppositions. It invites us to think that there is a phenomenon or property in question here, and it thus presupposes a kind of realism. Furthermore, it masks complexity, and this is very convenient for certain philosophers who are fond of the word. If there really are, as Isaiah Berlin thought, irreducibly plural sources of value, then there is no full-stop "normativity". Monism and realism about value are smuggled into philosophical ethics via this new term.

So, friends, the next time someone accuses your meta-ethical account of being unable to "account for normativity", you go right ahead and thank them for the compliment.

EDIT: Ah. I see this post has been (kindly) selected for the Philosopher's Carnival. I direct readers from that forum to my previous post about the carnival. I also offer the following clarification:

The concept "value" is ambiguous. It can be used to refer to a purported property (x has value), OR to a mental state (I value x)). Philosophers, perhaps still under the (unconscious?) sway of their analytic forefathers, often think that conceptual clarity is a good thing and conceptual ambiguity is a bad thing. This is not necessarily so, especially in the case of our most general concepts. "Normativity" is surely less ambiguous, insofar as it only refers to a property, and not to a mental state or to an activity of a person. Activites and mental states may have the property of normativity, but a property it remains.

This, I claim, is not a useful ambiguity, because it encourages us to see philosophical questions as settled before they even start. We need general concepts to be ambiguous so that we may construct answers to those very philosophical questions (i.e. the question of the nature of value) without begging any questions.

Nihilism

2011-10-26T09:42:00.000-07:00

Nihlism cannot be true. For if it were true, its truth would be a fact of significance. But then there would be at least one fact of significance, and nihlism would be false.

Poor Dora

2011-10-20T21:35:00.000-07:00

Today, I see it reported in the news that over 1 in 10 Americans are on antidepressants, and that women make up two thirds of this group. I think immediately of poor Dora.

I have written in here of my tentative support for psychoanalysis, for the (disappearing) idea of therapy as conversation, against common views of psychic health that reduce persons to objects. I have also tried to emphasize that even if every single one of Freud's particular interpretive hypotheses turned out wrong, he would still be justly regarded a philosopher of the highest order, perhaps even on the scale of Hume or Rousseau. No thinker of the past 100 years has done more to deepen our idea of the mind, to make us understand just how mysterious and meaningful our inner life is.

Yet, in spite of all of this, it must also be said that sometimes, Freud could be a total dickbag.

I am not fond of the way certain sympathetic commenters gloss over the details of Freud's most disastrous patient, 'Dora'. Surely, we ought to face Freud as he was, not as we would like him to be. Dora was an 18 year-old Viennese girl who was sent to Freud by her father. She had been experiencing hysterical symptoms--which at the time were quite real, no less real than multiple personality disorder in the 1980s--symptoms which turned out to revolve around a terrible family situation.

Her father was having an illicit affair with one Frau K., and part of the arrangement between the father and Herr K. was that the father would allow Herr K. to associate freely with Dora. This he did from a very early age, showing a prurient interest in her in her early adolescence. Now, this would be traumatic for any young person, though it is not entirely uncommon and would not really explain the intensity of Dora's hysterical symptoms.

What happened next? Well, gosh, Herr K. actually contrived to be alone with Dora when she was 14, forced a kiss on her, causing her to withdraw violently. Later on in her adolescence, she slapped Herr K. again when they were alone, no doubt fearing the same treatment. When called upon to explain this outburst, she tried to tell her family about the kiss, but she was roundly disbelieved and scolded for concocting stories about a family friend. Worse, she was even accused of projecting her sexual desire for Herr K. onto the poor man, punishing him for not making love to her by inventing the kiss.

Now, to his minor credit, Freud believed Dora's story, but had other interpretations of her hysteria. Instead of judging that the poor girl was in a sick situation with an emotionally abusive family and a borderline rapist following her around, Freud interpreted her violent reaction towards being kissed by Herr K. this way:

This was surely just the situation to call up a distinct feeling of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen who had never before been approached. But Dora had at that moment a violent feeling of disgust, tore herself free from the man, and hurried past him to the staircase and from there to the street door.

And then, somehow, it gets worse.

I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable... The elucidation of the mechanism of this reversal of affect is one of the most important and at the same time one of the most difficult problems in the psychology of the neuroses.

Freud tells us that a "genital sensation" should obviously have been felt by Dora in this situation, assuring us that Herr K. is quite a hunk, or, in Freud's terms, "still quite young and of prepossessing appearance". Jesus, Freud.

So much has been written of this case that it is pointless to recite it all. However, it is worth noting that Dora was constantly hostile and mistrustful towards Freud, a fact he could never quite understand. He invented a psychoanalytic term called "transferrence", one which remains at the center of the discipline today and which refers, in this case, to Dora's transfer of Herr K. into Freud's position, to her unconsciously seeing Freud as Herr K and thus mistrusting him.

All her life, Dora had been confronted with older male figures who pretended to take an interest in her well-being but who eventually used her as a prop for their own gratification. When Dora is once again confronted by an older male figure who claims to take an interest in her well-being, to say that she "transfers" anything at all on to Freud is to give an unnecessarily clinical and derogatory name to something we would normally call inductive reasoning. The assumption that the future will be like the past, given relevantly similar factors, is a hallmark of rationality, and Dora passes this test with flying colours. She percieves, not entirely incorrectly, that Freud is just another dickbag using her for his own gratification.

After a few difficult weeks, Dora abruptly broke off the treatment, and, as a matter of fact, confronted her family again with renewed force. Her family broke down and admitted being unfair, the situation improved, and Dora's "symptoms" vanished.

Today, I see it reported in the news that over 1 in 10 Americans are on antidepressants, and that women make up two thirds of this group. I do not care to know what kinds of ridiculous stories have been cooked up by various dickbags to explain this fact, but we should not let Dora's voice fall silent on this issue. Sometimes, guys, it 'aint the women. It's us.

Davidson's Abdication

2011-10-15T11:38:00.000-07:00

I honestly can't remember the last time I threw a book across a room. Yet, something Donald Davidson said near the end of his life made me so angry that I found the temptation irresistable. The heavy thunk against the far wall, the pages damaged under the weight of the fallen book, the startled looks of fellow library patrons... so satisfying.

Those who know Davidson know that only Quine outstrips his influence in the analytic world over the past 50 years. His central project takes human communication as a given and asks how it is possible. His answer is, on the face of it, extremely exciting: in order for communication to be possible at all, we have to share a huge number of beliefs, and those beliefs must be about an external world.

BAM. Goodnight, other-minds skepticism. Fare thee well, global skepticism. Brains in vats, don't let the laboratory door hit you in the cerebellum on the way out. As Davidson put it, we can now "re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false". Things are as we think they are, everyday realism is enthroned, and philosophy can finally rest. Damned exciting stuff.

But then, as the years wore on, Michael Dummett began to press a series of objections against Davidson concerning the total remoteness of Davidson's "Radical Interpretation" from our actual practises of communication and linguistic understanding. Fodor and Lepore, in 1987, strongly echoed this criticism. It seemed bizarre to them that anyone would think that Davidson's model could possibly be instantiated in the real world. Davidson had this to say:

I do not think I have ever conflated the (empirical) question how we actually go about understanding a speaker with the (philosophical) question... I have focused on the latter question, not because I think it brings us close to the psychology of language learning and use, but because I think it brings out the philosophically important aspects of communication while the former tempts us to speculate about arcane empirical matters that neither philosophers nor psychologists know much about.

And, elsewhere:

...I assume that there must be many alternative approaches to interpretation. I have outlined one; others may be less artificial or closer to our intuitions concerning interpretive practise.

The logic of the situation is this: where many took Davidson to be offering an account of the necessary conditions for real human communication, at best he was only offering a few jointly sufficient conditions for the abstract possibility of communcation. The account is not supposed to be reflected in any actual situation of communication. This essentially makes his life's work extraordinarily unexciting, perhaps even totally uninteresting, insofar as philosophy aims to clarify actual human thoughts and practises.

The situation is like that of a scientist who claims to have explained global warming by saying that temperatures are being willed to rise by Gaia the angry earth-goddess. Indeed, this is an explanation: it is sufficient for the phenomena in question. It is a coherent explanation that can be used to account for any feature of the situation. What separates real inquiry from pointless inquiry is that it tries to establish necessary connections as well: it must be shown why the angry-goddess hypothesis rules out alternatives, why it is necessary, in some sense, that we accept it. Not just that we could if we are in a certain mood.

Davidson seemed to sense, at the end, that this was an abdication:

But one should not take for granted that the procedure I have sketched is totally remote from what is practised.

And he was still fond of drawing explicitly realist metaphysical conclusions from his method:

If we can communicate with [a] creature on a range of topics in our natural environment, it is conscious and it is thinking.

Which, of course, only follows if the procedures of radical interpretation are necessary for this real-life communication to occur. If they are merely sufficient, no such extraordinary conclusion follows.

The question then becomes: why are we studying you, Donald? Why should one isolated account of interpretation now be taken as a tool for philosophers to use more generally? I am not asking that we all become field linguists, but surely this abdication, if I am right in identifying it, represents yet another detestable retreat by analytic philosophers from the conditions of the actual human world.

On The Alleged "Question" Of Homosexual Sex

2011-10-10T11:57:00.000-07:00

Nearly everyone realizes that it is ethically problematic to raise certain questions in certain contexts. You don't, for example, walk into a holocaust memorial and start asking questions about the legitimacy of the evidence for the holocaust.

Now, the writer over at the Philosophical Disquietations blog (note: who does NOT oppose homosexuality!) doesn't feel the same way about the "question" of gay sex. There is something, apparently, called the "Impeded Function Argument" against this kind of sexual activity, and to be fair to the (excellent) blog in question, John thinks we should try to understand the argument because it is (apparently) "gaining traction" in some quarters.

However, there is a problem, here. To admit that it is worth our time examining the argument is to supply it with a certain credibility, or to imply that its conclusion is not absurd. If we saw that an argument had the conclusion: "thus, there are square circles" we would not feel the need to look at the premises. We can know, via the absurdity of the conclusion, that the premises must be false or irrelevant.

The conclusion of the "Impeded Function Argument" is there is something morally wrong with a person's freely chosen consensual activity which harms no-one and which is an necessary expression of a central part of their psychological identity. The conclusion is absurd. Why, then, look into the premises?

I can hear the standard philosophical objections already, but consider this: to admit the barest possibility that I might be swayed by the argument, or by any other argument with the same conclusion, is to loosen my grip on some of my deepest ethical principles. Isn't there something troubling about that?

Finally, to bring things back to where I began, there must be a point at which the very asking of a question is ethically wrong. If a blog has 1000 readers, we can be sure that 50 of those readers identify as homosexual. Is it not their right to live in a society which does not belive that they must supply a justification for what they do, when the activity in question is (1) freely chosen, (2) harms no one, (3) is an expression of their identity, and (4) is an important component of a healthy and happy life?

If I were one of these 50 people, my thought would be something like: "I shouldn't have to even encounter such arguments, let alone engage with them. Furthermore, the proper response to those who make them is not rational discussion, it's a refusal to admit that they even have a viewpoint worth discussing. And if someone actually tries to stop me from being myself, I will not meet them with words, I will meet them with bullets."

As philosophers, we tend to think that any and all questions are open for discussion. However, if we are also to be ethical beings, we should admit that some questions should not be raised, particularly when the raising of the question constitutes a profound insult to an already marginalized group of peoeple who deserve far better. And a natural way of offering this love and respect to them is to say that there is no question at all.

Romano, Ludlow and The Philosopher's Toolkit

2011-09-25T12:12:00.000-07:00

Over at Leiter Reports, a debate has erupted over a talk given by Carlin Romano, one of Leiter's favourite favourite punching-bags and philosophical provocateur of the highest order. In this talk, Romano accused analytic philosophers of being out of touch with social and historical reality, of being needlesly abstruse, and of employing techincal jargon that served to alienate them from the rest of humanity.

The following day, Peter Ludlow rose to offer a stirring defense of the philosopher's "toolkit", the concepts, distinctions and jargon that he or she uses to communicate to others in his or her special field. Not only did Ludlow argue that this form of linguistic expertise is essential to the "conceptual mining" that characterizes our field, but he also suggested that it was extremely unfair to require of philosophy (and not of physics or geometry) that it defend its use of specialized linguistic tools.

Now, if I wanted to defend Romano on this score, I might offer the following short argument. Ethics is a major part of philosophy. Therefore, if Ludlow is right about "philosophy", it must be the case that the philsophical ethicist is justified in using linguistic tools and contstructing theories that the rest of the population cannot use or understand. Yet, something insidious lurks in this suggestion. It is the thought that a trained philosopher can, simply by virtue of his training, know more about concepts like goodness, rightness and virtue than an untrained person.

This seems to follow from what has already been said. If a central purpose of philosophy is to clarify and extend our use of concepts, then the justification for constructing an abstruse specialized theoretical toolkit will presumably lie in the understanding and practical wisdom that it enables. Yet, ex hypothesi, this is a specialized toolkit, one which is designed to be for those who wish to study philosophy in an especially dedicated and rigorous way. It follows that specialists will know more about central ethical concepts than ordinary people, even intelligent and sensitive ordinary people. This can't be right, can it?

It will be objected that this is too quick: surely I am equivocating on two senses of "know". There is the philosopher's ethical knowledge, which involves a theoretical characterization of the ethical life, and there is the ordinary person's ethical knowledge, which is rightly nonreflective and "intuitive". Yet, consider what is being attributed to the two persons in such a description. The ordinary person lives and acts in a basically correct way, but she does not know what makes her actions and dispositions the correct ones to have.

Indeed, the reasons for which she acts will most often not connect up in any significant way with the philosopher's special theory¹ (how could they?). This vision of specialized philosophical ethics still implies that ordinary people are quite often radically mistaken about why they are good. The mother believes that caring for her child is good, and she believes this because her child's welfare has, for her, intrinsic value. The Kantian, looking down from his vaunted position in the academy, knows that in fact she is fulfilling her imperfect duty of beneficence towards the needy. The consequentialist knows that she is acting on a character trait which, if generally shared, will tend to maximize general welfare. The virtue ethicist knows that what makes her caring right is that it instantiates a trait that will reliably lead to her flourishing. The meta-ethicist...

...well, this is too easy, isn't it?

By contrast, we readily accept the notion that scientific concepts and terminolology will almost certainly outstrip the ordinary person's understanding. This is because our conception of science builds in the idea that the scientist can improve ordinary thinking. That he can, in Sellars' words, displace the manifest image in favour of the scientific image. Similarly, the idea of an "easily understandable" language of metaphysics seems absurd. We suspect that a full description of "reality" is likely to require finer and more delicate tools than ordinary language can provide.

No such supposition is built into ethical thought. We do not generally suppose that there is ethical content lying below the caring mother's authentic expression of love. Her love is that foundational ethical content, the very stuff that ethicists are supposed to make sense out of. The suggestion that there is room to displace it seems at best dogmatic and at worst tyrannical. As soon as those ethicists begin to distance themselves from her lived experience and from her beliefs about what makes her life a good one, they begin to parody themselves.

A "toolkit" is just one of the ways that this absurd distance can be created, as is an ethical theory. It isn't necessarily the case that all specialized language must alienate in this way, but the tension here does appear to run very deep in ways that it may not for epistemology or metaphysics. I do not know how to resolve it, but I suspect that Ludlow's across-the-board dismissal of Romano's position only makes sense if we forget (as a frustrating number of philosophers seem to when talking about their discipline) that ethics is and has always been a central part of philosophy.

-----

¹ I take this to be one of the major thrusts of Michael Stocker's paper, "The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories", though Stocker does appear to want to exempt Aristotle from the charge.

Moral Philosopher Doesn't Know Anything About Moral Philosophy, More News at 11.

2011-09-19T07:43:00.000-07:00

Full disclosure: I'm a Bernard Williams fanboy. No doubt about it. I never had the chance to meet him before he died, but when I read his works, I found that a huge number of issues began to make sense. I am really just starting my philosophical career, but I do hope to follow up on his.

Speaking of great philosophers, Jussi Suikkanen is also an awesome philosopher, much more awesome than I am. Jussi posted an interesting question about Williams' account of reasons and thick concepts on the excellent PEA Soup blog. The question was quickly answered in the blog comments, but good on everyone for getting involved in Williams' work.

He's watching you.

I mean, after all--I somehow feel I should mention this--Williams essentially remade moral philosophy during his career, proposing arguments, distinctions, concepts and thought-experiments that play a dominant role in ethical philosophizing today. I've taught him in 1st year classes, in 3rd-year classes, and in graduate seminars. In a month, there is a conference on his work featuring Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Lear. No-one in the field would deny his importance. Except, maybe, Patricia Churchland, who appears to know about as much about Williams as I do about basket-weaving. Straight up: this ignorance is inexcusable. After all, Churchland is an A-list philosopher who has recently written a book on morality (and, you guessed it, neuroscience).

She chose Jussi's post as the 3rd-best philosophy blog post of the year. Which it may well be. But her ignorance of the issue and of Williams' philosophy is disheartening to say the least. Selections from her "commentary" on the post:

Hence, if you wanted to, I guess, you could say that being called a coward provided you with a reason to stiffen your spine. Or a motive? Whatever.

"Reasons? Motives? What's the difference? Who knows? Whatever."

Obviously not all humans respond with negative affect to disapproval. It may be because they have no respect for the person judging, or perhaps because their current affective state blocks the response, or even because their brain is such that they have abnormal social responses in general, not merely transiently.

"I'm going to babble randomly about responding to disapproval without connecting my thoughts to the question at hand. Then I'm going to throw in the word 'brain', because I am Patricia Churchland."

Or sometimes what you may regard as a negative epithet, I do not — e.g. “pragmatist”, “feminist”.

OMG, SO true! It's like how "bad" used to mean, like, bad, you know, but then Michael Jackson wrote "Bad" and people started using it to mean good or cool? Isn't that weird?

Abbas, I know you're reading this: please get a better judge next year. Churchland's "writing" about that post is flat-out embarassing. The appearance of such drivel from a contest's judge can only serve to confirm the cynical opinions of the enormous group of practising professional philosophers who think that internet philosophy is a waste of time.

And for the sake of full disclosure: no post of mine was up for judgment by Churchland. The reason I'm writing about this is that one of my favourite websites has put together a spectacularly good competition, a competition that will move philosophy on the internet forward by leaps and bounds every year... unless it becomes a showcase for ignorance, in which case it undermines its own objectives.

Also, since he's dead, someone has to stand up for poor Bernie, y'know.

I Can't Believe It's Another Post About Indirect Consequentialism

2011-09-18T18:03:00.000-07:00

Long-time reader(s?) of this blog know how much I hate indirect consequentialism. God, how I loathe it. As such, I'm constantly alert for new ways to portray it in negative ways. It's kind of this thing that I do. I hope, someday, to get paid to do it, and to giggle at people who actually have to work for a living.

SO. There is this important distinction in knowledge. It's the "by acquaintance vs. by description" distinction. The idea is that you know some things by being in some kind of direct or relatively unmediated contact with them, while you know others simply via descriptions of them.

An example will illustrate. I remember my grandmother saying the following in conversation: "Oh, yes," she said, "the internet is a powerful tool, isn't it?" I was taken aback, as I knew quite well that my grandmother had no idea what she was talking about. Well, in a way, she did, because she'd read the recent TIME magazine cover article about the internet and how powerful it was. She had knowledge by description, but since it was not supplemented by any knowledge by acquaintance, it was a hollow, empty kind of knowledge.

The point generalizes. We don't think, really, that knowledge by description is a particularly robust or interesting kind of knowledge. It's the skeleton upon which we may hang the flesh of real acquaintance, but it's really only a skeleton.

Indirect consequentialists think that "goodness" is such that all of our knowledge of it is necessarily skeletal in this sense. They think that, for a bunch of reasons having to do with the paradox of hedonism and the cognitive limitations of human minds, that we ought to be generally content with merely characterizing the good as it relates to our everyday lives in various distant ways. We should not attempt to actually engage with the good, for in doing so we actually undermine the good.

There is no other area of philosophy that I can think of which would even dream of admitting a result like this about one of its central concepts.

If, for example, metaphysicians told us that we stand in the proper relation to "the real" or to "substance" or to "laws of nature" when we refrain from actually engaging with these concepts and remain content with descriptions of them, we'd think they were crazy. If I want to know about the real, I'm allowed to simply kick a stone. Any theory that claimed that kicking the stone distances me from the real would be seen as prima facie ludicrous.

Similarly, at least since Wittgenstein, it has (rightly) seemed crazy that we can say much about language in isolation from the actual practise of language-use. At the very least, engaging with the way people actually talk is not seen as something that hinders one's knowledge of the field. If anyone suggested otherwise, we might reasonably suspect that they just didn't know what language is.

Imagine a philosopher of aesthetics telling you that in order to really get art, you should stay away from the Louvre and read his purely descriptive book about the Louvre instead. You might stop to wonder if his conception of "art" was the problem: he sees art as intellectual enrichment, you know it's not just that, so you know not to stay away from the Louvre.

Yet, this is exactly what the indirect consequentialist tells us about our relation to the good. He claims that the good is such that to actually engage with it (that is, to incorporate it directly into our practical lives) is to undermine or destroy it. That as confused, cognitively limited beings we should just accept a philosopher's description of the good and live our lives without much thought for it. In other words, our best working knowledge of the good is exactly like my grandmother's working knowledge of the internet.

I hereby offer a challenge: If any indirect consequentialist will allow my grandmother to do his internet banking for one year, I will become an indirect consequentialist. Any takers?

A Short Blog About Neuroscience

2011-09-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

Scenario A: you're in a lab, with a bunch of sensors attached to your skull. You're instructed to choose one of eight cards, you choose one. Afterwards, the scienctists tell you that they correctly predicted which card you would choose.

Scenario B: a speeding truck is heading right for you, and you jump out of the way. Afterwards, I say to you: "Hey, I knew you were going to jump out of the way."

Scenario C: I call you and tell you that I'd like to interview you for the prestigious position you applied for. I tell you that the interview is at 11 AM. The next day, you come into my office at 11 AM, and I say: "Ah. I predicted that you'd be here around 11."

Anyone see the problem, here? Why is prediction in the first case supposed to be more significant than in the second and third?

A Davidsonian Critique of neo-Kantian Metaphysics

2011-09-11T14:22:00.000-07:00

In 1971, Donald Davidson provided a powerful argument against an idea that was (and still is) very popular in many intellectual circles. The idea is quite basic: that we can speak or think meaningfully about "conceptual schemes", which are ways of seeing, interpreting or organizing the world. At the time, Kuhn's insistence that scientists working in different paradigms "live in different worlds" was making waves all over the place. Kuhn insisted that during scientific revolutions the very fabric of experience and linguistic meaning changed, such that an old paradigm was basically incomprehensible by the lights of a newer one.

Davidson calmly and quietly pointed out that the whole idea appeared to be bollocks. At one level, his argument was complex, but at another it was quite simple: what gives someone like Kuhn the right to talk about older paradigms at all? If a conceptual scheme is what provides our very bedrock categories of experience, then other schemes will be utterly incomprehensible to us. To say that we know anything whatsoever about other paradigms/conceptual schemes is to presume that we share something with those schemes, some common language with which to express that knowledge. But then, as Davidson says, we do not live in different worlds at all.

And that, as Douglas Adams might have said, pretty much wraps it up for Kuhn.

Less ambitious than Kuhn were neo-Kantian metaphysicians like Peter Strawson. Strawson saw himself as trying to delineate "our" conceptual scheme, that is, the scheme shared by all human beings. Strawson (Individuals, 1950, The Bounds of Sense, 1962) thought that our scheme was comprised of two "basic types of particulars", those categories which allow us to identify and describe all other kinds of particulars. Material bodies and persons were, for Strawson, this bedrock of all experience.

Let's set aside the category of "persons" for now. Material bodies, existing (and persisting) in 4-dimensional spacetime were the sorts of things that we just couldn't possibly get by without, cognitively and perceptually speaking. Our conceptual system presupposes this "framework" of objects in space and time, objects which (crucially) we must be able to re-identify at various times even if we lose sight of them for stretches of time.

Davidson is not impressed: "if only one conceptual scheme, then none at all". He means that there is something very odd in claiming that we have a single conceptual scheme and in presenting arguments designed to tell us what it's like. We can begin to appreciate this line of criticism when we think about a simple descriptive term like "red". Now, would it make sense to say that anything is "red" if we didn't have some idea of colours other than red? Obviously not. As Davidson might say, if everything is red, then nothing is red.

(note: here, things get a little technical, thought the main point has been made. read on for elaboration.)

What right, then, does Strawson have to describe our conceptual scheme, a scheme he repeatedly admits we cannot transcend? Let's take a look at page 35 of Individuals, where this problem begins to haunt Strawson. He is trying to answer the Humean skeptic who argues that in the case of non-continuous observation (that is, when we see a thing, stop seeing it and then think we see it again) we have no conclusive rational grounds for inferring numerical identity, the judgment that the two qualitatively identical objects are in fact the same object.

Now... there is no doubt that we have the idea of a single sptio-temporal system of material things; the idea of every material thing being spatially related, in various ways at various times, to every other at every time. There is no doubt at all that this is our conceptual scheme.

Strawson is affirming that this is how we think: this is the character of our conceptual scheme.

Now I say that a condition of our having this conceptual scheme is the unquestioning acceptance of particular-identity in at least some cases of non-continuous obvervation.

In other words, the ascription of numerical identity (NI) is a necessary condition for having our conceptual scheme (CS). How does he prove this?

Let us suppose for a moment that we were never willing to ascribe particular-identity in such cases. Then we should, as it were, have the idea of a new, a different spatial system for each new continuous stretch of observation. Most of the common concepts of material things that we have would not exist...

Strawson goes on to argue against the skeptic, but the foundation of his anti-skeptical argument lies in this reductio: assume ~NI and see what you get.

There is a very simple Davidsonian argument against this entire procedure. It runs as follows. If Strawson is right and NI is a necessary condition for CS, then logically CS is a sufficient condition for NI. That means that our conceptual scheme forces NI upon us: we have no choice but to ascribe numerical identity to qualitatively identical objects at least some of the time.

But if this is so, what possible sense can there be in asking a reader to imagine ~NI? This is tantamount to asking a reader to step outside his own conceptual scheme and see what follows from doing so. But, as Davidson has shown in the case of Kuhn, the idea of stepping outside a conceptual scheme is incoherent: if you can step outside of it, it's not your conceptual scheme. Strawson therefore faces a dilemma. If his thought-experiment is posssible for us, then NI is not a necessary feature of our conceptual scheme. If it is not possible for us, then he cannot prove that NI is true via the thought-experiment, for the very possibility of the experiment undermines what is being proved.

So it is with many attempts to describe a "conceptual scheme". Kant is the grandfather of all such attempts, and one of the strongest early criticisms of his account was that it includes the problematic "noumenal realm", the land of things-in-themselves to which we are not supposed to have any access at all. By what right, asked Schelling and Hegel, did Kant posit entities that were unknowable yet somehow known (by Kant) to be the cause or ground of our experience?

Davidson, in his own way, is merely continuing this tradition. He wants people like Strawson to stop talking about "our conceptual scheme" and simply admit that they are describing reality. If we have discovered that space, time and material bodies really are, in Strawson's words, "basic particulars", then we haven't discovered anything about a "scheme". We've discovered that space, time and material bodies exist!

As some recent commenters have noted, Davidson is something of a Trojan Horse in analytic philosophy. Gliding into the field under the auspices of linguistic philosophy and firmly in agreement with Quine's critiques of empiricism, his own substantive contributions have quietly paved the way for the return of old-school Platonic or Hegelian metaphysics. It will be interesting to see who eventually wins the day, Quine, or Davidson.

Thomas Nagel on The Absurd

2011-09-09T15:13:00.000-07:00

Life, as we all know, is a full-time job. We spend an awful lot of energy on various actions, dispositions, and committments. But how can this energy be justified? Thomas Nagel, in an influential paper, argued that our lives are in from a certain perspective absurd. This is because we, as human beings, are capable of taking a perspective on our own activities which makes them look arbitrary:

...humans have the special capacity to step back and survey themselves... they can view [their committments] sub specie aternitatis-- and the view is at once sobering and comical.

This ability reveals that our ultimate values cannot be justified. We realize that

the whole system of justification, which controls our choices... rests on responses and habits that we never question and that we would not know how to defend without circularity.

The absurdity of our lives lies in the fact that we so passionately and consistently pursue things that we know we cannot justify.

Now, when you do philosophy for long enough, you start to retain personal "red flags", little warning-signs that alert you to the presence of a questionable argument you've seen before. The idea of a purely "objective" viewpoint from which a person could evaluate the entirety of their evaluative system is, for me, just such a red flag. It signals that a bad philosophical conclusion is about to follow.

Like Christine Korsgaard did 25 years later, Nagel is playing a trick on us using the idea of reflection. It is abundantly clear that human beings can evaluate particular desires, commitments and dispositions that they may have. We cannot, however, infer from this that they posess the extraordinary ability to occupy the godlike standpoint from which they can reflect on the totality of their evaluative system.

Now, there are times in our lives when we must make very important decisions, decisions which require us to evaluate our deepest committments. Yet, that we can evaluate them shows that we are still using some "baseline" set of values. What sense can possibly be given to an evaluative standpoint that lies outside our evaluative standpoint?

Nagel anticipated this objection, and tried to respond:

It may be objected that the standpoint from which these doubts are supposed to be felt does not exist- that if we take the recommended backward step we will land on thin air, without any basis for judgment about the natural responses we are supposed to be surveying... But this objection misconceives the nature of the backward step. It is not supposed to give us an understanding of what is really important, so that we see by contrast that our lives are insignificant. We never, in the course of these reflections, abandon the ordinary standards that guide our lives. We merely observe them in operation, and recognize that if they are called into question we can justify them only by reference to themselves, uselessly.

Here, Nagel's undeniable eloquence is masking a whole lot of confusion. We learn that the "purely objective" perspective is not evaluative, and (Nagel admits), cannot deliver any evaluative conclusions about our deepest committments. Instead, we are just observing them.

But, hold on: what can it possibly mean to say that you are observing the totality of your deepest committments "in operation"? How can a committment be "in operation" without the agent's acceptance of the values that guide it? A committment in operation is manifested in an agent with no questions about its value: that's just what it means to commit. How can an an agent's evaluative standard be "in operation" while the agent mysteriously remains objectively detached from it? The standpoint remains elusive.

Nagel tries to clarify the idea in the final sentence above: perhaps the problem is that we cannot justify our deepest committments in a noncircular fashion. Yet, as we've just seen, we cannot occupy the standpoint from which we could justify them in the first place. So the term "noncircular" is irrelevant, as are all terms which attempt to describe the proper kind of justification for our entire subjective evaluative system. You might as well say that a square circle would look best if it were teal.

The problem is that the claim about life's "absurdity" is an evaluative one, and therefore it logically cannot be reached from a standpoint that ex hypothesi excludes, suspends or otherwise disables all of our evaluative ideas. Either we can use our values, or we can't. If we can, life looks perfectly meaningful. If we can't, then we can't call life "absurd".

I do agree with Nagel that thinking about one's life in "cosmic" or "detached" terms can be troubling, and provoke a sense of absurdity that is difficult to describe. Yet, I think that we feel this way because we cling, covertly, to the fantasy that there is a standpoint from which we could magically evaluate all of our values. The only absurdity here is the the standpoint itself, and life begins to look pretty meaningful once we abandon it.

On "The Goal of Philosophy Should Be To Kill Itself"

2011-09-08T06:32:00.000-07:00

Luke, at the blog "Common Sense Atheism", has written a post that would be utterly unremarkable if it were not for the fact that it (1) is quite popular, and (2) contains some ideas that are themselves quite popular.

In essence, his contention is this: philosophy gives "vague and mysterious" answers to its questions. If it is dealing with questions of fact, these questions should be handed over to science. If it is dealing with conceptual questions, these questions should be reformulated so that they can be handed over to scientists and computer programmers.

He thinks that precision is what is at issue here: philosophical questions can be answered if their constituent parts are made precise. And, if they are made precise, they can be answered by very smart computers:

Do you know, precisely, what you are talking about? If so, show me precisely what you mean by programming it into a computer. If you know precisely what you are talking about, you will be able to explain it to a computer.

Any question that cannot be formulated in this manner is just not a real question. Philosophy should make its questions precise, hand them over to scientists and programmers, and then exit stage left.

Now, these contentions are of course stupid, indeed, they are so monumentally stupid that it is hard to imagine that someone actually believes them. One suspects that Luke is playing the provocateur, here, you know, just a bit. For as soon as we engage with this position, we find it quickly self-undermining: hordes of concepts used in various sciences are vague and imprecise, yet scientists find ways to approximate them in order to get results. Take climate science: "Mean Global Temperature" is not a measurement of the average kinetic energy of all of the molecules in the atmosphere. Other concepts (think about species, for example) are equally "fuzzy", and necessarily so. If precision is the standard, then very few scientific endeavours will pass the test.

Yet, as much fun as it would be to continue in the substantive vein, I want to launch a different critique, one which is slightly more fun. It proceeds as follows.

Let's (hey!) start with some science. Every year, tens of thousands of applicants take the Graduate Record Exams, which are generalized, high-level tests of analytical writing and verbal/quantitative reasoning. Every year, with alarming consistency, philosophers achieve the highest combined score, by a statistically significant margin. This is pretty strong evidence that the people we call "philosophers" are, in general, some of the smartest people on the planet.

It is not unlikely that this state of affairs is historically stable: as a matter of fact, philosophy has traditionally been the field that the most learned, most accomplished scholars have undertaken to study. It's not unreasonable to conclude that given, say, the total human population since 1800 or so, the tens of thousands of active, trained philosophers have been among the smartest people on the planet, generally speaking of course. This does not necessarily mean that they are right about everything, but it does mean that we are talking about some pretty sharp pencils. (I don't count myself in this group, my GRE score was pathetically low: around the average for, ugh, chemical engineers)

Now, let's take a look at Luke. He is, according to the internet, educated in computer and cognitive science, and his blog only occasionally references philosophical works. So, we can reliably conclude that the following has happened: one guy, with no special philosophical training, has claimed that tens of thousands of the smartest people who have ever lived have been wasting their time, because it's just occurred to him that all their talk of, quote "ontology and meaning and truth and free will" is not precise enough to be of any use to anyone.

I doubt that many of us have the imagination to fully appreciate the magnitude of this event. One guy, who does not even know enough about philosophy to know that a more sophisticated version of his own position rose and fell 75 years ago, has suddenly realized, on the internet, that Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, Immanuel Kant, JS Mill, John Searle, Gottlob Frege, Philippa Foot, GWF Hegel, Rene Descartes, G.E. Moore, Edmund Husserl, WVO Quine, Elizabeth Anscombe, Derek Parfit, Donald Davidson, Bernard Williams, and, oh, one or two or ten thousand other geniuses have all largely wasted their lives because of this idea he just had about precision. Astounding, eh? If he's right, that means that his idea about precision has occurred to none of these thinkers, and that none of them has ever subsequently given good reasons to reject it.

I mean, we can forgive them, I suppose, because very few of them knew how awesome computers could be. How lucky for us that we live within sight of that glorious age, when all the difficult problems those geniuses wasted their time on can be safely moved to the recycle bin.

Anyway, that's all I have to say about that. I'd love to write more, but I have a new post to work on, one that's going to blow the roof off the science world. You see, it just occurred to me the other day, as I was playing "Angry Birds", that global warning can easily be explained by the Earth's crust getting thinner. Obviously the Earth's crust is getting thinner, 'casue magma is hot and it will slowly melt the rock just above it. So you'd expect to see a slow, global temperature rise, right?

I can't believe I've never seen anything about this! I mean, I check my facebook and twitter every day, and there's been nothing about my hypothesis. Clearly, this "crustal thinning" post of mine will radically remake a centuries-old research programme full of people who are way smarter and better-informed than me about their field.

My god, these are exciting times to be a blogger!

Meta-Ethics and Scholasticism

2011-09-02T05:22:00.000-07:00

I've started to work on my PhD, and people have been asking me about meta-ethics, specifically about what my basic position is. I suppose that having 3 seminars on Meta-Ethics on my transcript and sending in a writing sample about meta-ethics gave one or two people the impression that I have a meta-ethical position or that I know what to say about it. Truth is, however, that I have absolutely no idea what to say about it in general. I've been puzzling over why this is so, and I've come up with a puzzle that I think ought to be causing some trouble in the field.

First, a little background. I've observed that some meta-ethical debates have direct implications for what might be called "first-order" or "normative" or just "ethical" questions. Take, for example, one's view about reasons for action. If, as I've argued, our reasons for action are deeply conditioned by contingent facts about who we are, then Moral Rationalism is false, and there are possible persons for whom it is rational to be immoral. This means, to use Bernard Williams' famous exmaple, that a nasty man who cannot be motivated to be nicer to his wife has no reason to be nicer to his wife. This is a serious first-order normative implication that falls out of a meta-ethical position about reasons. Just ask the guy's poor wife.

Other meta-ethical debates, however, don't seem to have this property. People have spent much time and energy, for example, trying to figure out if ethical claims have truth-conditions, whether they can be true or false. Not so, say non-cognitivists, who generally believe that ethical statements express attitudes or desires rather than beliefs. Of course, Cognitivists hold that ethical language expresses belief, and thus aims at a kind of truth.

Now, I have all kinds of reservations about they ways in which this debate is framed, not the least of which revolves around the extraordinary assumption that ethical language is homogenous enough to admit of such broad-brush generalizations. Nevertheless, I want to focus on an interesting dialectic that unfolds in this debate. Cognitivists sometimes accuse noncognitivists of holding a position that would somehow undermine first-order ethical activity: "You don't believe moral statements can be true? Then where do you get your confidence in your own moral feelings?" The noncognitivists rightly point out that their position has nothing to do with their first-order, "internal" experience of ethical life. As Simon Blackburn has put it:

Is it that we... at the crucial moment when we are about to save the child, throw ourselves on the grenade, walk out into the snow, will think, "Oh, it's only me and my desires or other conative pressures- forget it."? (Blackburn 1998)

Sensible participants usually end up agreeing on this point: one's position on the cognitive status of ethical statements (as being truth-seeking beliefs or mere expressions of attitude) shouldn't be taken to imply anything substantive about one's actual ethical life, or about the particular shape of one's ethical ideas.

But, hold on: if a debate has literally no substantive first-order implications whatsoever, then why are we having it?

Let me explain. I could, if I wanted to, spend the next 15 years counting all the grains of sand in Dubai. This example alone is enough to demonstrate that knowledge in and of itself is not intrinsically valuable. Inquiry is only valuable if it aims at knowledge that is itself determined to be valuable in some way, that is to say, it must be non-trivial knowledge. Yet, the question: "Is X valuable?" is a first-order ethical question. So, inquiry which makes no contact whatsoever with first-order normative questions is inquiry that cannot be justified.

The dilemma: Either the positions in the cognitivism-noncognitivism debate entail substantive and non-trivial normative propositions or they do not. If they do not, then the debate is literally non-justifiable. If they do, then a new uncomfortable question arises: why is this called meta-ethics? Why not just be honest with ourselves and admit that it is just another branch of ethical inquiry?

There's a lot that can be said for the first horn. I observe, for example, that two wildly disparate thinkers like Derek Parfit and Martha Nussbaum both count as "cognitivists". Parfit believes in timeless, objective moral truths that humans grasp intuitively, Nussbaum believes that morality is concerned primarily with emotions, but has a cognitivist theory of emotions (emotions are judgments of value that can be true or false). Both are a species of cognitivist, yet their first-order beliefs are noticably different.

From another angle, R.M. Hare, a staunch defender of morality's universal scope, was a non-cognitivist, which is kind of the last thing you'd expect. Williams, his arch-nemisis who began his career as a staunch non-cognitivist, eventually espoused a form of moderate cognitivism based on "thick" concepts. What substantive or important element are these labels picking out, here?

But the second horn has its own plausibility, and is equally vicious. The first meta-ethical debate I cited (about reasons for action and moral rationalism) was initiated by Plato with his Ring of Gyges example, and he certainly didn't take himself to be doing some form of "meta-" inquiry. He was just trying to answer Socrates' plainly first-order question about justice and happiness. But if this is all so, whither "meta-ethics"?

This dilemma arises, indeed it must arise, for any form of allegedly meta-ethical inquiry. I suppose one of the sources of my ambivalence towards meta-ethics is that I don't see the problem addressed in the literature I've read. Any ideas?

Theoretical and Practical Reason III: XKCD

2011-08-27T09:07:00.000-07:00

They probably don't quite realize it, but the editors of XKCD have written a perfect finale to my posts concerning the practical/theoretical distinction in reasoning.

In the first panel, a practical question is posed to an agent. The second panel sees him interpreting it as a theoretical question. The conflation of the two creates comic absurdity, but the fact that the absurdity is so palpable indicates that something might just be basically wrong with those (prominently, J. David Vellman) who want to paint practical reasining as a species of theoretical reasoning. No matter how you slice it, the woman's question is about an intention to act, not about a true or justified belief. Intentions are not predictions about one's future behavior, nor are questions about one's intentions reducible to questions about one's beliefs concerning that behavior.

In order to really understand all of this, just think about what's happening in the third panel. The man presumably says "yes" to the question of marriage. Does he do this, or does it just happen? Is there really any significant conceptual middle ground between those two possibilities, or is one conceivably reducible to the other? Hardly. Without something akin to the theoretical/practical distinction, we are unable to make sense of the difference between doings and happenings.

Psychoanalysis

2011-08-23T18:02:00.000-07:00

A few summers ago, my little sister was turning into a total bitch. Like, for real.

She had just turned 16, and was using her newfound confidence and sense of individuality to strike out at people, to cut them down, to attack their insecurities and their weaknesses. Her family members responded with anger or puzzlement, feeling increasingly alienated from the girl they used to love and trust.

One day, after bearing the brunt of one of her attacks, I turned to her and said: “Hey, sis, do you know what they say about people who cut others down all the time? They’re only doing it because they’re insecure themselves, because they need to lash out at others to hide their own self-hatred.”

I repeated this hypothesis to her on subsequent occasions, and she grew increasingly frustrated with me: “stop saying that!” she’d snap. “I don’t like it when you say that!” Clearly, the hypothesis was affecting her. By the end of that summer, she was noticeably less abrasive, and has since grown into a wonderful young woman.

Jonathan Lear has written this about psychoanalysis: “the truth-conditions for its hypotheses are practical, not theoretical” (Freud, 2005) That is to say, while an analyst is interested in uncovering the truth about a patient’s psyche, this truth is ultimately only instrumentally valuable, and can even get in the way of the final end of psychoanalysis. The final end is the successful restructuring of a patient’s attitude towards themselves and towards reality, a restructuring that is accomplished by both the patient and the analyst working in tandem. The analyst’s job is to know when to ask the right questions and say the right things. Even if (s)he has no conclusive theoretical grounds for believing in a particular hypothesis, it might be practically wise to propose it anyway, just to initiate the right kind of reflection in the patient.

Furthermore, the articulation of theoretical truths might even impede progress. Lear writes:

Freud might tell his patient, ‘You want to kill your father and marry your mother’ – but even if Freud is right, and even if his patient believes him because Freud is the expert, the words cannot make the right kind of difference… Indeed, this phrase can now be used to keep real self-understanding at bay. It can be used as an empty intellectualization which falsely persuades one that one already has self-knowledge. (Freud, 52)

Now, I don’t know if my sister was experiencing self-hatred or insecurity that summer a few years ago. It was a safe bet, given her age, but I can’t say that I had particularly strong grounds for believing it. Yet, my hypothesis seemed to hit home and have the right effect: she began to see her subjective life as layered and complex, as something she could ask questions about. In particular, she could ask what deeper, hidden motives were influencing her, and whether or not she ultimately approved of this subterfuge.

What I love most in Freud and Nietzsche is their insistence that no human life can be good without this kind of difficult self-criticism. However Freud represents a humanist-optimist alternative to Nietzsche’s pessimism. Maybe isolated individuals are too weak and stupid to begin this kind of deep psychological work. But Freud thought that huge possibilities lay in our shared ability to work together, to provoke the kind of conversational honesty that can help us to live better lives.

Nowadays it is indeed fashionable to sneer at psychoanalysts. We prefer Experimental Philosophers, neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists. We think that a Rutgers undergraduate's response to the trolley problem on a questionnaire is a reliable indicator of their actual moral psychology. We think that identifying the neural correlates of depression and wiping that brain activity out via pharmaceutical intervention counts as “curing” depression. We think that a phrase like "humans are naturally altruistic" means something.

I cannot help but think that in effecting this change of focus from the complex and deep to the speculative and superficial, we are losing our grip on something of extraordinary and enduring value.

The Roots of Metaphysics

2011-08-18T08:18:00.000-07:00

Bertrand Russell found an extremely helpful way to describe an ancient problem in philosophy, sometimes called "the riddle of induction". He noted that, logically speaking, no set of existential statments can entail a universal statement.

Existential statements are those of the form "there is a bat in the pantry", or "there are fifty bats in the pantry". Russell noted, glumly, that no matter how many bats you observe in that pantry, you can never validly conclude that "all bats are in the pantry". ("The Philosophy of Logical Atomism", 1956)

This is a serious problem, because we use universal statements all the time, particularly in the case of scientific laws. To take a simplified, somewhat banal example, physicists do not generally say things like"all 6,454,934 objects I have so far observed on planet Earth have fallen to the ground unless impeded by some other object or force". Rather, they say things like "mass attracts mass", the idea being that a massive object like the Earth will always pull objects towards its center. This is a universal generalization, a law. The problem of induction revolves around the essential difficulty in deriving such laws from a collection of individual instances. It is a pressing problem because our most successful model of epistemic activity, modern science, requires the articulation of universal generalizations or laws.

Yet, as Russell observed, the problem looks even more threatening in its logical form. Insofar as we are empiricists of any kind, existential statements are all we have. We want to give primacy to (or start with) individual observational experiences, and build our larger theories from on that foundation. It seems like a good foundation: I, for one, cannot really doubt that I have observational experiences of a certain character.

Yet, all such experiences are singular events, referring to a limited class of objects. As such, they must be translated into existential and not universal logical sentences. But these are just two different kinds of statements, and as such universal statements do not entail existential ones, and neither do existential statements entail universal ones. Consider:

[1] (Universal) "All bats are in the pantry"
[2] (Existential) "There is a bat in the pantry"

Even if it is a fact that everything that is a bat is in the pantry, there might not actually be any bats, so (1) doesn't entail (2). Conversely, even if a bat (or two bats, or 57 billion bats) are in the pantry, there might be another bat living in a cave far away from our pantry, so (2) doesn't entail (1).

Time and again in the history of philosophy, we see anti-metaphysical thinkers rising up and declaring that metaphysics is nonsense and that we ought to just "attend to the facts". Hume is perhaps the most sophisticated example, but this general position finds echoes both in modern positivism and in certain ancient skeptics. Yet, time and again in their writings, we see these philosophers running headfirst into universal generalizations that they can't justify via their own methods.

I derive a perverse enjoyment from watching thinkers convulse in these crucial moments: witness the otherwise brilliant Hume declaring that we have a natural "propensity" to believe such generalizations (T 1.3.14, 1.4.7), as if that settled anything. It is possible that metaphysics won't go away because, logically, it can't go away. Seen this way, the anti-metaphysician attempts to saw away the logical branch upon which he is sitting.

The Nature of Practical Reason, II

2011-08-16T17:08:00.000-07:00

Let’s follow up a bit on the distinction between practical reasoning and theoretical reasoning. I’ve got two more things to add to my general description of what distinguishes the two modes.

1. In the comments section to my previous post, I suggested that practical reason is in all cases irreducibly first-personal. This is not a metaphysical claim about the experience of such reasoning (a la Tom Nagel) but rather a defining feature of practical reasoning: that it is conducted from within a certain personal point of view. This is much like but the Sartrean dictum that even in cases of extreme coercion, one still technically has a choice. It may be an impoverished or a difficult choice, but from a strictly logical point of view if one is totally forced to do something by some external factor, then one has not done (or decided to do) anything at all.

I should hasten to add that no Sartrean metaphysic is implied by this observation. I remain neutral on the ultimate ontological status of the being that so chooses. Regardless, the contrast with theoretical reason should be obvious. Truths in theoretical reasoning are discovered, and while there may be extraordinary and peripheral counterexamples to this, theoretical truths are not, technically speaking, any one person’s truths at all. Moreover, the concept of choice plays a far more restricted role in theoretical reason. Epistemologists may puzzle over the details, but it seems clear that much of our theoretical knowledge is grounded in very basic seemings or perceptual events, and I am not at liberty to simply decide that such phenomenal objects exist or choose to have them exert no force on me whatsoever.

While this all needs a lot of clarification, it seems undeniable that we are responsible for the results of our practical deliberation in a way that we are not in the strictly theoretical case.

2. A second, related distinguishing feature is this: the theoretical mode permits us to suspend judgment while the practical mode does not.

Given almost any theoretical proposition, it is logically possible to suspend judgment on it, to earnestly say that one takes no position on its truth or falsity. In other words, to say that this indecision is one’s settled position. Is Venus really the same object as the morning star? Dunno. Will the new government initiative reduce homelessness? Not sure, don’t want to say. Should Bernie go out with Imelda? Fecked if I know, and I’m going to leave it at that.

However: should I go out with Imelda? Notice that the introduction of the distinctly first-personal pronoun changes the character of the question entirely, in accordance with 1. above. It moves instantly from the theoretical to the practical. Notice that, practically speaking, to settle on “dunno” as an attitude towards this proposition is to decide to not go out with Imelda. Practical reason forces its excluded middle on us with inescapable necessity. In Sartre’s words, we are condemned to be free.

As I mentioned in the previous post, this reasonably clear-cut divide between the theoretical and the practical should make us suspect any theory which draws too heavily on analogies between the two modes.

The Nature of Practical Reason

2011-08-13T07:45:00.000-07:00

What follows is (I hope) an interesting delineation of how my own position in ethical philosophy proceeds. It begins, as all philosophy should, with an examination of reason itself.

1. The first thing I discover is that reason appears to be seriously bifurcated into two modes: theoretical and practical. We find that people reason theoretically in order to decide what to believe, and that people reason practically in order to come to a decision about what to do.

I sense that this is no illusion, that we are dealing with two very different modes of thought and inference, and so I begin to search for definitive ways to tease the two modes apart. It would be unwise to stick with what I already have. The perception that there are two modes does not in and of itself establish that there are two distinct modes.

Nor can I insist that the two modes are exclusive: for it is clear that in reasoning practically we must rely on a huge collection of true or justified beliefs. Conversely, practical considerations may sometimes creep into theoretical concerns, as in the case of parsimonious theory-choice, where we ultimately adjudicate between two competing sets of beliefs on the basis of convenience.

The first thing to be said in favour of the “two modes” hypothesis is that it helps to explain—indeed, it may be constitutive of—the so-called “is-ought gap”. Now, it may be that the is-ought problem is solvable, but it must be said that the problem itself is probably the most notorious in all of modern ethical philosophy. It also has to be said that the gap is tidily explained by the deep divide between practical and theoretical reason. Perhaps it is so difficult to derive an ought from an is because the sorts of things that make ought-statements true are not the sorts of things that make is-statements true. This is explained by the fact that each kind of statement arises from a different mode of reasoning. While more would need to be said in this regard, it seems clear that the is-ought gap is strong evidence for the existence of something like a theoretical/practical split within reason itself.

Continuing on, I must look for some central distinguishing fact that helps to separate the two modes of reasoning. The most significant, I believe, is the undeniable fact that judgments of practical reason can be true relative to individuals, while judgments of theoretical reason cannot.

“Relativism” is perhaps the most maligned doctrine in all of philosophy. This despite the fact that, to a significant extent, we are all relativists in the practical sphere. No sane person could deny that what I have reason to do is often powerfully conditioned by contingent psychological and physiological facts about me. I ought not to pursue Olympic Weightlifting. For Jim, my neighbour, pursuing Olympic weightlifting just might be a good idea. I am a thin and frail person with little to no tolerance for physical strain, and I have skills which can earn me money and respect in other arenas. Jim is a powerhouse of a young man who works at a menial desk job and who (to all appearances) could lift weights with the best of them. The same practical course of action: “I ought to pursue weightlifting”, is true for Jim and false for me, and this is so because of contingent facts about each of us. There is nothing left to say.

It is virtually definitive of the theoretical sphere that this cannot be the case. “There is a Cadillac in this room”, says one of our friends. Another denies it. The rules of theoretical reason allow for this disagreement but absolutely forbid that it be the final word. One of us is right and one of us is wrong, or we are simply using the relevant terms differently. The function of theoretical reason is to resolve factual disagreement, to allow differing parties to use tested, reliable means in order to come to some agreement on what is the case. Another way of putting this is to say that the truths of theoretical reason are, ideally, categorical: binding on all agents.

If no-one else sees the Cadillac, if metal detectors and infrared scanners detect no trace of it, and if our friend continues to insist that it is there, we do not excuse him on the basis of contingent physiological or psychological features that cause him to believe this. We do not continue to think that he is justified in his belief. Rather, we point to such features as flaws in his theoretical faculties! The contrast with practical reason is, at this point, extreme.

This, then, is a defining feature of the two modes of reasoning: practical reason admits of genuine relativism about its truths while theoretical reason admits of no such relativism.

-----

2. Now, importantly, we can reason theoretically about practical reason. Indeed, this is what philosophical ethicists do, as well as psychologists and sociologists who study our practical faculties. All of them are trying to come to justified or true beliefs about the practical sphere, be they philosophical or scientific truths.

The converse is equally true: we can reason practically about theoretical reason. We can ask, for example, if it would be good or expedient to believe one scientific theory over another.

We are now in a position to see that the traditional complaint about ethical relativism—that it is somehow self-refuting—is vacuous. It is charged that the statement “ethical truths are relative to the (individual/culture/historical epoch)” is itself a statement of absolute, unqualified truth and is thus self-refuting. Yet, this common complaint evaporates when we see that ethical relativism is actually a theoretical observation about practical matters. It is of course absolute and unqualified, as all final theoretical truths must be. Yet, it is about practical reason (or a sub-set of practical reason called “ethics”), and there is nothing self-contradictory about that.

-----

3. Philosophers thinking about practical reason are often divided by a foundational question: is there a subset of practical reason called “morality” which is entirely immune from the relativism which infects the rest of the practical realm? In more familiar terms, are moral propositions just those practical propositions which are categorical, in that their truth-values cannot vary from individual to individual?

The moral realist believes that they are, and he usually comes to this conclusion by drawing an analogy between practical and theoretical reason. A common device in the moral realist literature involves speaking of a “perceptive” faculty in practical reasoning, one which detects moral properties in objects just as our eyes detect their shape and color. Failure to be moved by the suffering of another is no different than a failure to see an onrushing Cadillac: one’s faculties are simply broken.

The Kantian objectivist takes a different route to the same conclusion. She affirms the autonomy of practical reason, denying that there are any interesting analogies between practical and theoretical reasoning. Yet, she maintains that the very structure of practical reason itself generates certain categorical obligations that are binding on all rational individuals. Practical reason is not wholly relativistic.

My own position, call it Humean or Aristotelian or whatever, simply denies that there is any particular realm of practical reason which is any less relativistic than any other. All practical propositions are hypothetical ones, insofar as their truth-values vary according to contingent psychological or physiological features of individual persons.

Seen this way, the burden of argumentation is clearly on the moral realist and on the Kantian. For the Humean simply affirms what each of us already accepts: (1) that practical reason is relativistic and (2) that what you have reason to do is conditioned by who and what you are. My opponents believe something stronger: that there is a special form of practical reasoning for which this does not obtain, for which practical reason suddenly (and mysteriously) becomes much more like its theoretical cousin. Arguments abound for both sides of this debate, but I think this is a good way of carving out the logical space.

Why the Dawkins-Feminism Scandal is about Meta-Ethics

2011-08-03T07:20:00.000-07:00

So, Rebecca Watson, a guest speaker at a "Skeptics" conference was propositioned in an elevator just after giving a talk about how she and other women are objectified by the skeptical/atheist community. She calmly registered a standard complaint about this sexist behaviour on her blog, and the entire online "skeptic" community exploded in frenzied debate. Some agreed with the complaint, whereas some thought she was being totally unreasonable. Like, for example, none other than Richard Dawkins:

The man in the elevator didn't physically touch her, didn't attempt to bar her way out of the elevator, didn't even use foul language at her. He spoke some words to her. Just words. She no doubt replied with words. That was that. Words. Only words, and apparently quite polite words at that....Rebecca's feeling that the man's proposition was 'creepy' was her own interpretation of his behavior, presumably not his. She was probably offended to about the same extent as I am offended if a man gets into an elevator with me chewing gum.

I was mostly uninterested in the affair until I read what liberal-skeptic David Allen Green wrote about Dawkins:

Can Richard Dawkins still credibly pose as a champion of rational thinking and an evidence-based approach? In my opinion, he certainly cannot...

This, this right here, illustrates a profound limitation of this so-called "skeptical" movement, which loudly proclaims that "rational, evidence-based thinking" can be such a powerful source of change in our world.

Ask yourself: what evidence did Dawkins (or the man in the elevator) ignore? What law of reason did these two men supposedly violate? Dawkins is a very intelligent man and is surely aware of the relevant facts of the particular case. What is his failure?

Put simply, his failure is the same and the elevator-man's failure: one of imaginative empathy. In order to see why the propositioning was ethically problematic, you have to put yourself in the woman's perspective. You have to think first about the lifetime of sexualization and objectification she has endured. You have to think about the fact that she is trying to operate in a field that is vastly male-dominated. You have to consider what her state of mind was immediately after giving a talk on sexism and objectification. And, then, you have to consider what it's like to live in a world where fear of sexual assault constantly hangs over you like a sword you can't see.

And then, (this is the really tricky part), you have to care. You have to be moved by all of these things. Here's the meta-ethical punchline: no piece of evidence or law of reason can force anyone, even Dawkins, to care about Rebecca Watson's particular situation. In short, one can still be a perfectly rational douchebag. Which is what Dawkins, in this case, is.

I will not stoop to speculation about the kind of rampant social ineptness and austistic psychological tendencies in the male atheist/skeptical community that produce this shared blind spot of imaginative empathy. Though I certainly could go on about that for some time. Rather, it's important to see this case for what it really is: a reductio of the very foundational beliefs of the skeptical community. Given the choice between a world in which people know more and a world in which people care more, the latter is almost certainly the better world. This is because it is possible to be a rational douchebag but not a caring douchebag. Evidence and reason cannot make people care. Therefore, (*ahem*HUME*ahem*) evidence and reason are at best limited or secondary forces for positive change in our world.

That the skeptical community was so dramatically paralyzed by this incident simply substantiates my claim, here. Their methodology simply doesn't have the resources to resolve ethical problems.

Value and Poverty

2011-07-19T03:58:00.000-07:00

A 25 year-old Sudanese man is dying of malaria. He knows that he is dying, and he knows that no-one --not his family, not the local "hospital", not the local "government"--has the resources to save him. He may fight the deadly disease off, or he may not, but one thing is sure: his own health is of immanent, intrinsic importance to him.

As part of my ongoing campaign against objectivism about value, I offer the following salvo: objectivism about value is a luxury, an indulgence that only members of a privileged class could ever begin to take seriously. This means that, at the very least, we need an argument from the objectivist to show us why their affluent, hyper-reflective perspective has priority in such matters.

Writing in the undeniably affluent and luxurious west, intellectuals have offered these kinds of reflections about the value of human life or human activity:

From a very distant vantage point, the earth looks like a tiny speck, and this makes all of our activity, all of our straining and striving, look completely unimportant. (Carl Sagan)
Empirical studies show that while people may think their lives are valuable, they are in fact mistaken about this. (David Benatar)
We value the things we value because evolution has "programmed" us to do so. (E.O. Wilson, also suggested at various times by Dawkins, Pinker and Dan Dennett)

We should be concerned, very concerned, when popular, influential philosophical theories can only be taken seriously by affluent people. We need not be full-fledged Marxists to recognize that there is a problem, here: our 25 year-old malaria sufferer could not possibly be persuaded that the size of the earth--or the results of a psychologist's questionnaire, or the fitness-enchancing attribute of a distant evolutionary ancestor--has any bearing whatsoever on his judgment that his life is valuable and worth preserving.

No doubt, someone with an objectivist temperament will leap to offer an explanation of the man's evaluative mental state, indeed, the evolutionary-psychological account of it is so easy to construct that it borders on the banal. Yet, again, we must ask what this explanatory account could possibly mean to the Sudanese man, even if he is fully capable of understanding it?

The thing with an affluent life is that it is mostly free from the kinds of difficult experiences that tend to convince us of the intrinsic importance of certain lived experiences. When one's most pressing desire is for a tall americano, one is sufficiently free to distance oneself from one's desires in the way that the objectivist analyses require. The ubiquity of various human goods masks their immanent importance, allowing the affluent person to entertain hypotheses about value that seem positively comical to a person caught up in a more difficult life.

An impoverished life tends to throw the intrinsic importance and the deep fragility of human goods into sharp relief. An impoverished person simply does not have the option of reflecting on the relation between the size of the earth and their own values. Their own feelings, their own subjective instincts and intuitions, will appear to have singular authority in this matter.

I do not know of any argument that could possibly show that they are mistaken to feel this way. Certainly, no such argument is forthcoming from the people I've listed above, people who think that it is illuminating to strip away all subjectivity from value in order to study it "scientifically". In place of an argument, we have a kind of ideological blind-spot which allows a privileged class of thinkers to churn out profitable and fashionable nonsense.

On the Philosopher's Carnival

2011-06-30T00:56:00.000-07:00

As much as I would love to say that I pursue inquiry for its own sake, I am just as susceptible to the allure of ego-gratification as the next person. As such, I was somewhat excited when the Philosophers’ Carnival first chose one of my posts for its monthly list.

However, three chosen posts later, my attitude is decidedly more ambivalent. I am travelling in Eastern Europe at the moment, and was just able to check my email for the first time in a while. I saw that a haughty, aggressive and basically unhelpful comment from “anonymous” had appeared on one of my posts. This was followed by another comment which was puzzlingly aggressive in a similar way.

My immediate hunch was that someone had selected the post for the Philosopher’s Carnival, and sure enough, this was so. This kind of experience is the source of my newfound ambivalence: in a very short period of time, I have found that a large portion of the comments generated from the Carnival are unhelpful at best, downright abusive at worst.

I want to make something completely clear: I have absolutely no problem with being told that I am wrong. I warmly accept invitations to read further material, to clarify my arguments, to reconsider my assumptions. Indeed, it seems odd to practise philosophy without having these kinds of attitudes. They are essential to the intellectual humility that strikes me as entirely appropriate to the discipline.

Because of the Philosopher’s Carnival, I have been called a “fucking idiot about metaethics” and a “philosophical amateur”, amongst other things. More commonly, certain commenters have descended into this space to inform me that I am wrong without really telling me why.

These people are misguided in two fundamental ways. Their first mistake is basically cognitive: they make the entirely unwarranted assumption that a blog should be held to the standards of research and rigor that are found in academic journals. This is ridiculous, for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who thinks about the issue for 5 seconds. A blog is a space for contemplation, a place to hone one’s writing, to record one’s development. Many of us have professional careers, and it is ridiculous to expect that our blog posts be as cautiously crafted as our professional work. They will often be philosophically incomplete, and this alone cannot be a reason to attack or insult the blogger.

This leads to the second mistake, which is more motivational in character. If you find an error or a gap in a blogger’s knowledge, you have every right to inform them of what you see. However, it is entirely inappropriate to do so in a scornful or angry fashion. Anyone with even minimal experience in the field knows that in classrooms and seminars this attitude is pure poison. Of all the ways one can destroy a philosophical conversation, attempting to induce feelings of shame, guilt or anger in one’s interlocutor must surely be the most effective. The commenters in question on this blog (and, more importantly, on other blogs) know all of this. They are intelligent and educated, probably participants in positive philosophical discussions in their own “real” lives. Yet, the aggressive, angry, I-know-more-than-you comments appear, and I cannot stress enough that they indicate a troubling lack of attention to (1) the facts about what a blog is, and (2) the appropriate kinds of attitudes to take towards philosophy.

A philosophy blog post is, more often than not, an invitation to conversation, a heuristic attempt to push a few ideas out of the nest and see if they will fly. If the Philosopher’s Carnival is to have any lasting benefit, I would suggest that its readers pause every now and again to remind themselves of this.

Continental, Analytic, and Logical Atomism

2011-06-19T02:27:00.000-07:00

So much has been written about the alleged “analytic-continental” divide that it seems almost futile to attempt to contribute to what appears to be a highly confused debate. No-one quite seems to know what is meant by the terms “analytic” and “continental”, and since philosophers on both sides of the divide share so many ideas in common it can often look as though the whole split is a kind of disciplinary fantasy.

Richard Rorty seemed to hold something like this when he claimed that a continental philosopher is someone who reads Marx and Heidegger while an analytic philosopher is someone who reads Quine and Russell. Robert Audi’s Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy is no help, defining “continental” and “analytic” first geographically and then via a list of schools of thought that have existed on each side of the divide (phenomenology/structuralism/existentialism/deconstruction vs. positivism/ordinary language/conceptual analysis). Hardly helpful.

The issue can be clarified, I think, by examining the modes of philosophy that characterize philosophical activity on each side of the divide. Focusing on method (and not simply on content) allows us to see so much more, here. I want to focus on one major difference that I think drives much of the antagonism between continental and analytic philosopher.

There is a strand of “analytic” philosophy which Is mostly dead, one highly influenced by Russell and the younger Wittgenstein, and one which saw the goal of philosophy as the clarification of concepts used in language. Characteristically, this school attempted to break sentences down into their constituents and to determine the meaning and the reference of those constituents. Logical Atomism was the view that language could be partitioned and analysed in this general way, and the hope was that traditional philosophical problems could be solved (or possibly dissolved) by taking simple expressions, determining which bits of the world correspond to them, and by examining the entailment relations between those units of language.

Few living philosophers are logical atomists. It is generally accepted that linguistic meaning is highly context-dependent, and that it is necessary for two speakers to share an extraordinary amount of background knowledge in order to communicate with one another. As I understand it, the implication is that sentences cannot be isolated from their overall conversational context and disassembled for logical analysis. The elder Wittgenstein, John Searle and Donald Davidson have done much to solidify this idea.

Why, then, does the method of logical atomism continue to enjoy such prominence? In particular, why does the standard “analytic philosopher” seem to treat, by default, any text as a logical argument meant to demonstrate its conclusion by means of entailment relations between the individual units of language contained therein? Why can so many English-speaking philosophers rattle off huge lists of logical fallacies, seeming to think that this alone can lead them to discern philosophically valuable texts from bad or nonsensical ones?

I have often been guilty of a “default” adherence to this method, and this is due in large part to my training. Yet, I (and we) must acknowledge that other forms of argument exist, ones which have wholly different validity-conditions. Nietzsche argued, for example, that belief in a Christian god was no longer “credible” given the discovery of Christianity’s historical origins. An Analytic Philosophy Monkey will look at this argument , utter the phrase: “genetic fallacy”, and move on. If Nietzsche really intends to demonstrate, in a deductive fashion, the nonexistence of god, then he indeed commits the genetic fallacy.

Yet, surely he is trying to do something else. In telling us about the dark, angry, psychologically troubling origins of Christian Good and Evil, he is trying to affect a different kind of change in his reader. He knows full well that these considerations cannot entail the nonexistence of god. Yet his argument seems to have a kind of importance. This importance derives straightforwardly from its context: a Christian reader encounters it and is troubled by it. In order to understand why this is so, we must know so much more about this reader’s psychology, why he believes what he does, why his beliefs are important to him. If we treat the argument as a straightforward logical deduction , we miss what is essentially an invitation, an opportunity to delve into this person’s life and the significance that philosophy can have for him.

The method of logical atomism thus leads us to ignore and trivialize modes of philosophy which are not quite so simple as “all men are mortal, Socrates is mortal, therefore….”. I think that what defines a more “continental” philosopher is just their acceptance of this kind of principle: they do not seek to read texts and analyze ideas as though their component expressions can be analyzed in a logically atomic fashion. Rather, they emphasize context, embodiment and subjectivity.

Logical atomism is dead. After Davidson, we should not be tempted to assume that its assumptions are valid ones. This does not mean that we must accept the more extreme versions of relativism and/or idealism that some paradigmatically “continental” philosophers seem to slide towards. Nor does it mean that precise, logical argument cannot retain a central place in our thinking. But we must stop assuming that all philosophical texts are meant to do the same thing. We must accept that quite often, context is everything, and that the desire for “logical rigor” can result in a completely blinkered view of the possibilities that philosophy has for us. Such an acceptance would surely go a long way towards reconciling the two “schools” of philosophy.

Physicalism

2011-06-15T05:49:00.000-07:00

Over at Philosophical Disqusitions, a few entries on Physicalism have appeared which begin by defining physicalism as the thesis that "all facts are physical facts".

The physicalist thesis cannot be anything like “all facts are physical facts”. In what sense could a fact be physical?

So stated, the definition makes a mockery of itself, for it points to one of the most central (and, puzzlingly, one of the least-discussed) problems with physicalism itself. We so often hear about Mary the color-scientist, about zombies and about “qualia”, that we are lead to ignore a far more challenging difficulty for the physicalist.

For surely, what is meant by the physicalist’s doctrine is something like this: the objects and predicates referred to by genuine sentences are always physical objects and physical properties. This is a far more useful definition of physicalism. A paradigm case of a “genuine sentence” might be something like: “the temperature of boiling water on Earth is 100 Celcius”. The objects (water, the planet Earth) and the predicates (temperature, 100 Celcius) can be given fully physical descriptions, presumably involving a particular molecular structure and mean kinetic energy of molecules.

When we confine ourselves to sentences like this, physicalism seems eminently plausible. But, of course, there are many other types of sentences, even ones that appear regularly in the physical sciences, which are much more difficult to redescribe in the required way.

Take, for example, a sentence of mathematics like “1 plus 1 equals 2” or “A² plus B² equals C²”. Or, perhaps a theoretical sentence like Einstein’s “the passage of time varies according to the observer’s frame of reference.” Or even a philosophical sentence like “physicalism is true”. Surely, the proponent of physicalism wants to be able to use sentences like this. Yet, mathematical objects like numbers or variables and properties like equals leave us scratching our heads, searching for redescriptions that could possibly count as physical descriptions. Similarly, terms like time, observer and (perhaps most troublingly) true resist this kind of redescription to an enormous degree. Yet, these are sentences that must be valid ones, especially since they play central roles in the mature physical sciences, the very sciences whose success lead us to propose the idea of physicalism in the first place.

I think that this kind of problem itself deserves far more attention than it gets, and it is likely that it will reappear for any proposed definition of physicalism.

A Process Ethic

2011-05-15T03:50:00.000-07:00

I believe it is basically irresponsible to offer interpretations of Nietzsche without using Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a starting point. In a later work, Ecce Homo, Nietzsche described his Zarathustra not just as his best work, but as the "greatest gift ever given to mankind". Leaving aside this unfortunate grandoise rhetoric, we nonetheless get a clear sense that any interpretation which does not take Zarathustra seriously is not going to capture what Nietzsche was trying to tell us.

The very first substantial section of Zarathustra is called "On the Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit". This text does not make an appearance in many "analytic" readings of Nietzsche (Brian Leiter's Guidebook to Nietzsche on Morality is silent on the significance of this passage, for example). Nor does it offer much help to a philosopher who is trying to make Nietzsche into a standard ethical theorist. In this passage, Nietzsche describes what he takes to be the best and highest life, and what is most interesting about this life is that it is a process. In contrast to ethical theorists who specify a list of goods which human beings are standardly called upon to honor and promote, Nietzsche suggests that what one ought to pursue or honour is radically dependent on where you are in this process, on how far you've progressed along a certain path.

While a strong majority may never even start this process, those who do begin by becoming a "weight-bearing spirit", a person Nietzsche describes as a camel. The camel wanders alone in the desert, seeking the most troublesome and difficult burdens. This spirit is laden with the guilt, shame, self-sacrifice and suffering of conventional morality. The camel suffers illness, a "hunger of the soul" for the knowledge it acquires about life and values, and many such spirits are crushed under the combined weight of these burdens.

Yet, once the spirit has endured this "illness", it may become a lion: lord of its domain, seeking its greatest enemy. This enemy (embodied in the dragon whose scales read "thou shalt") is morality, Good and Evil, the tablet of laws that a culture holds sacred. It is the lion's task to defeat the dragon of "thou shalt" by genuinely confronting the hypocrisy, contingency and even the malice contained in his culture's values. He sees them for what they are: creations, and in seeing them in this way he devalues them. He gives "the sacred NO" to these highest values.

The third stage is perhaps the most interesting: Nietzsche tells us that we have not lived the highest life until we pass from the stage of the lion to a kind of renewed childhood. The child, for Nietzsche, is a being that lives in total joyous authenticity, who can replace the lion's "sacred NO" with his own "sacred YES", his own affirmation of life. A child does not submit its will to the validation of external moral standards. The child can simply play without asking for some justification, some "thou shalt" that sanctions its own will, and this is the most extraordinary ability that any person can posess. It is the ability to say YES to life in the most pure and unadulterated fashion.

I want to suggest that quite a few major interpretive problems surrounding Nietzsche's work begin to evaporate when we think about what he is trying to do here. Scholar after scholar has wondered exactly what Nietzsche thinks a gerat person (or "higher type") ought to pursue, specifically. What ends are good, and why are they so?

Well, let's take "Three Metamorphoses" at face value. Can I, an ordinary person, live the truly good life by becoming authentically playful like the child? Should I stand up and attempt to destroy my culture's values as the lion does? Absolutely not. At no point does Nietzsche suggest that this road contains a "shortcut". One must first do as the camel does, and take extraordinary psychological burdens on one's back. These burdens involve the kind of penetrating honesty and devotion to truth that will make your life extremely difficult, but enduring the guilt, shame, loneliness, social alienation and "illness" of Nietzsche's camel is clearly a prerequisite for becoming a lion, just as the titanic task of the lion is a prerequisite for being reborn as a child.

This is something we don't see a lot of in moral philosophy: an ethic of process. It does not suggest a set of admirable ends, values, character traits or moral rules. Rather, any end, goal or purpose is sanctioned so long as it can survive the psychological process I've just described. If you emerge from the most brutally honest and scathing self-criticism, if you've sincerely and truthfully confronted your culture's highest values and subjectively devalued them, and if you've had the playful strength to replace those values with new ones forged in the depths of your newly authentic will, then anything goes.

Here's the thing, though: Nietzsche clearly believes that some ends, goals, or purposes cannot survive this process. The first and second stages in particular involve the kind of penetrating, destructive truthfulness that must destroy, for example, a person's belief in an afterworld, their hatred of the body and of bodily pleasure, or their pursuit of money for money's sake. The important thing to remember is that Nietzsche does not think that a good or higher life simply involves coming to accept certain"correct" values. Indeed, two people may value precisely the same thing, but how they come to value it makes all the difference in the world.

We can contrast this notion of process-relative value most easily with ethical consequentialism. Under consequentialism, if a person acts in ways that reliably produce the most good, they're living the moral life. It doesn't matter much how they come to hold their values, nor does it matter what their state of mind is when they act on those values (except insofar as those states have some bearing on their ability to produce good effects). For Nietzsche, on the other hand, you must come to values in the right way.

This idea is not so strange. Consider a an ex-soldier and a protesting pacifist, both of whom firmly believe in the value of peace. When asked about this, both will give a direct, unqualified answer: "yes I believe that peace is good", "yes we should promote peace". Yet, there is something more admirable about the soldier's evaluative belief, something that seems to give him a right to it. He has lived through war, through blood and fire and the death of friends, whereas the protester has perhaps only read news reports and books. It is not at all mysterious to think that the soldier's belief carries a certain authority that the protester's does not, even if both individuals are equally effecacious in promoting it.

When we take the first section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra seriously, we realize that a Nietzschean can't just have values, goals or ends, he or she must to earn them. We may dispute the importance or characterization of the process Nietzsche recommends, but this idea is surely a fascinating one. What would it mean for moral philosophy, or for a culture in general, to take seriously the idea that a person must earn the right to express and display their convictions?

Value, Life and God's Shadow

2011-05-07T09:29:00.000-07:00

A "pure" subjectivism about value would attempt to articulate the position that value is somehow entirely located in the "private" mental activity of particular sentient subjects. While it is difficult to see exactly what this might mean, it would presumably imply the following: that I cannot be wrong about my sincere value-judgments, that you and I cannot coherently discuss values, and that the essence of value lies in some particular set of private mental experiences.

The pure subjectivist must deny that there are standards independent of an individual's perspective according to which his value-judgments can be measured. Yet, this position simply misses the entire purpose of the concept of "value", which is to act as an intersubjective adjudicator, to settle differences of ethical opinion, not to declare them unresolvable. The pure subjectivist is ignorant of Wittgenstein's important injunction against the idea of mental privacy: maybe such evaluative privacy exists, but it certainly could not be the subject of intersubjective communication. "Private value" is a kind of contradiction in terms, and therefore as a definition of value it leads inexorably to nihilism.

We must recognize, therefore, that those who have occasionally flirted with this kind of position have been mistaken to do so. We may concede that when it has reared its head, perhaps in certain "postmodern" circles, this kind of theory has been most unhelpful. However, we must recognize that pure value-objectivism is equally absurd, and that it can slip, unnoticed, under our philosophical radar, leaving us vulnerable to the most stunningly comical arguments.

That human life is itself a misfortune is the conclusion of one value-objectivist, David Benatar. Benatar's work stands as a profound example of what can go wrong when an intellectual culture affords automatic, unquestioning authority to any project that dons the trappings of "science". When objective measurement becomes the goal of value-inquiry, we have already embraced nihilism, because value-objectivism is no less absurd and meaningless than its polar opposite, value-subjectivism.

To see why this is so, consider that a key part of Benatar's argument is devoted to showing that people are mistaken in their retrospective judgments of life's value:

I dare to make such a claim partly because there is excellent empirical evidence for the conclusion that people’s judgements cannot be trusted as a reliable indicator of how good their lives really are. For example, research psychologists have shown that people are prone to optimism and to optimistic (that is, inaccurately positive) assessments of their own lives. There are many manifestations of this phenomenon. People are more prone to remember good experiences than bad ones; they have exaggerated views of how well things will go for them in the future...

Note: "how good their lives really are". What must we assume in order to let a phrase like this pass us by? What must we assume in order to think that research psychologists can "show" that people remember more "good" experiences than "bad" ones?

Benatar's work is occasionally reviewed in high-level journals. I count six reviews, all negative, but all engaging with the argument on its own terms. Yet, surely, we should not feel obliged to enter any mode of discussion whatsoever. I, for one, am no more willing to talk about the purely objective value of a human life than I am willing to discuss the existence of a square circle. Any discussion that assumes, right off the bat, a confused and self-contradictory definition of its central concept cannot produce anything worthwhile.

Just as the concept of value loses all meaning when described in terms that give pure priority to the subject and her "private" mental experience, the concept loses all meaning when it no longer makes any contact with that experience. When the "value" of my life is conceptually divorced from the feelings I have about its value, the concept no longer serves one of its essential functions, which is to motivate me to action. We have this word because we need to come to intersubjective agreement about what to do and how to live, and in order for this process to be efficacious at all, we must use the word "value" in ways that allow individuals to be consistently motivated by its use.

Since our motivational system revolves around our deepest and most enduring value-judgments, any definition of value which completely denies any priority to these judgments is just not using the word correctly. For what could possibly be more central to a human motivational system than the judgment that the system itself is valuable or worth preserving?

Note: this does not mean that people must be correct about their deepest value-judgments. This would involve the same mistake that is fatal to a pure subjectivism. However, it does mean that these judgments must posess some de facto authority: that I think my life is valuable must be evidence for its value. Benatar's thesis--that no human life is good--denies all authority to all such judgments, and does so in the name of "science". In doing so, it lapses into incoherence about value, which is the same thing as nihilism.

"God is Dead," wrote Nietzsche, "but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown." We understand much when we understand that the idea of "pure objective value" originated in Platonic-Christianity, and that any historical re-iteration of the idea is unlikely to be able to shed the implications that this same tradition had for human life. By pinning the concept of value to an otherworldly, mysterious and unknowable being, the Christian tradition slowly lost the ability to reliably motivate human beings in the actual world and paved the way for a kind of nihilistic disorientation. In the same way, pinning the concept of value to the fantastical chimera of pure scientific observation leads inexorably to nihilism, to an inability to use the word "value" correctly.

Our task, however difficult, is to steer a course between the poles of pure objectivism and pure subjectivism in order to find a way to talk about value that makes contact with subjective impressions while allowing for those impresions to be mistaken or inappropriate. The simple, easy, cowardly way out of this project is to make a god out of "self"... or out of "science".

There Are No Such Things As "Moral Intuitions"

2011-05-03T14:40:00.000-07:00

I'm fairly sure that Tomkow is the smartest person on the internet. His/Her recent post on the Trolley Problem continues his/her tradition of creative and incisive critcism. Tomkow argues that philosophers who want to do experiments in order to "test" for "folk intuitions" about morality have a lot more imaginative work to do. I agree: thought-experiments should not be taken to "demonstrate" or "establish" anything, principally because they articficially abstract away from real-world conditions.

This got me thinking about what exactly we are assuming when we claim to be "testing for" folk intuitions using such scenarios. The standard model appears to assume that when a person checks a "No" box next to the "push the fat man" scenario on a questionnaire, this indicates the presence of a "moral intuition" with definite propositional content. That content is allegedly something like "it is morally wrong to push the fat man".

Standardly, this intuition is logged and checked against other reported intuitions for consistency. Sometimes, the experimenting philosopher concludes that the average person's moral intuitions are hopelessly inconsistent, and usually proceeds to tell some mind-numbingly boring and uncreative story about how evolution made the average person this way.

Yet, when we, as ordinary human beings, give answers to moral problems, are we really reporting this kind of psychological entity? An alternative explanation would go like this: when we report that something is wrong, we are expressing a kind of on-balance emotion, one guided by a huge number of responses, most of which are not available as objects for our conscious reflection.

Crucially, Tomkow suggests that these would be responses to percieved features of the situation. If the situation as described does not say whether these features obtain in the thought-experiment, the subject's "background" mental processes may simply fill in these blanks. Given that our moral intuitions are formed by the real world and not by imagined scenarios, it is overwhelmingly plausible that such a "fill in the blanks" process goes on without our conscious knowledge. In real life, we must make a large number of "background" tacit assumptions about real-world situations in order to function. Since these are tacit, there is no reason to suspect that they are simply switched off when a person thinks about the trolley problem, or about any other ethical thought-experiment.

On this kind of model, there is no such thing as a moral intuition with the content: "it is wrong to X", and, a fortiori, no such thing as inconsistency amongst those alleged intuitions. Furthermore, without reasonably complete knowledge of exactly which tacit, background judgments are being made by subjects, experimenters cannot reliably infer what their subjects think about moral problems. This is because the answers they provide radically underdetermine the content of their background judgments. And surely it is those contributory judgments and feelings that we must be interested in as ethicists. It seems to follow that distributing surveys to subjects is simply not helpful in this arena.

Now, something like this problem occurs in all of the experimental sciences. When a physicist observes a confirming result, she does not know if it is due to the truth of her hypothesis or interference by "background conditions". However, there is a clear difference between the physicist and the experimental philosopher. The physicist posesses an extraordinarily detailed and well-confirmed prior theory about the nature of physical objects, and can use this theory to rule out background conditions in a basically probabilistic manner (see Bayesian Epistemology). The experimental philosopher has no such toolkit. Even the most optimistic appraisal of our current theories of mind could not claim that we posess anything remotely close to theory of mind with the predictive and explanatory power of Einstein's General Relativity.

It follows that the experimental philosopher must make an extraordinary number of largely untestable assumptions about what lead a subject to check a "yes" box or a "no" box. Yet, given that these mental causes are what we are actually interested in, any empirical methodology which must make strong assumptions about their character and content is at the very least unhelpful.

Depth psychology beckons.

Nietzsche, Elitism and Theory

2011-04-25T08:05:00.000-07:00

I do not oppose, as some do, attempts to form Nietzsche's ideas into something like a system. While it is not possible to see Nietzsche's corpus as a logically unified body of work featuring robust conclusions that follow from defined axioms, we can nonetheless try to see him as offering coherent answers to a few central problems. We can say, as Bernard Reginster does, that his "system" is a kind of general program meant to address the problem of nihilism in our culture.

I do object when such systematizing seems to violate something central to Nietzsche, some attitude or evaluation that reappears again and again in his texts. Nietzschean elitism--the view that human beings are divided into higher and lower types--is just such an attitude, and when people try to argue that Nietzsche has something like an ethical theory which is addressed to people in general or which draws on "human nature", they run headfirst into Nietzsche's elitism, an elitism that runs right to the core of his thought.

Reginster (2006) believes that Nietzche holds to an "ethics of power", which crucially involves excercising our will-to-power, our will to overcome resistance. This is an intriguing exigetical thesis, one with significant plausibility. Nietzsche seems to want us to value the suffering involved in overcoming resistance to our aims, to embrace the hard, rough, difficult activity of fighting for what we want. Our will is in constant process of self-overcoming, and we ought to embrace this process.

In support of this general interpretation of Nietzsche on willing and action, Reginster offers the extraordinary passage from The Gay Science, section 310:

The passage plays a key role in Reginster's interpretation. It seems to confirm this picture of human agency as a kind of continual, renewed striving, a process of unending overcoming. I was struck by its pristine lyricism, and decided to read the passage in its original entirety. As it turns out, after Reginster's selection ends, GS 310 takes quite a distinctive turn:

Uh, oh. Do we still have a picture of human willing? Or are we now dealing with a particular kind of willing, one that only "beautiful monsters" display? Readers of Nietzsche will know that these monsters are his beloved "higher types". Is it possible that moral psychology itself is somehow contingent on one's type, on one's position in a hierarchy that begins with the weak and world-weary and ends with the strong and life-affirming?

Nietzsche was most proud of one thing: he overcame acute illness and suffering, channeling his personal torment into enormous creativity, into philosophical and literary productivity. This "one secret" is something that only he and his higher types("high-spirited ones") have access to, and it is (plausibly) the secret of strength , of life-affirmation ("everything suits you"), of a will-to-power that engages and vanquishes resistance in an attempt to forge new values and new ways of life.

Yet, if this is the case, what can an ethic of will-to-power mean for us, we ordinary, plodding individuals who seek to be comfortable, well-fed, and entertained? If our wills don't have this structure, if they don't essentially display this endless surging and seeking, then can we reliably infer that Nietzsche has anything to say to us whatsoever? Given his value-system and his habit of addressing a select audience ("you and I are of one kind!", see also GM 1), why should we take him to be saying anything at all about what the Last Man has reason to do?

This point is telling against another fine Nietzsche scholar, Thomas Hurka. Hurka believes, contra Bernard Williams, that Nietzsche has a "positive moral theory", one which can be developed systematically as we might develop the thought of Aristotle, Hegel or Moore. Now, it seems undeniable that Nietzsche's vision of the good has the general structure that Hurka outlines:

Nietzsche’s positive moral views fall under the general heading of what today is called
perfectionism. They are centred on a conception of the good, which they commend actions for instantiating or promoting, but this conception does not equate the good with anything like pleasure or the satisfaction of desires; instead, it locates the good in objective human excellences that for Nietzsche centre on the concepts of power and strength.

Hurka persuasively argues that Nietzsche is something like a perfectionist about the good. Yet, an axiology is not a moral theory (or a "moral view"). A moral view also tells us what we ought to do (or what we have reason to do). I may say that the highest human good consists in drinking 1000 glasses of porter in one sitting, but since no-one can drink 1000 glasses of porter in one sitting, I have thereby said nothing about what people have reason to do. Given the facts about human beings, my axiology fails to amount to a moral theory.

Note that in the passage just quoted, Hurka smuggles the idea of right action in by making a brief reference to how Nietzsche allegedly will "commend actions". Yet, the closest he comes to defending this idea (that Nietzsche does commend actions in general) is to develop perfectionism along consequentialist lines, citing Nietzsche's repeated references to an ideal future.

Hurka finds Williams' suggestion that Nietzsche's philosophy is "booby-trapped against systematization" to be supremely unhelpful, but I believe that he has triggered one of those booby-traps by ignoring reasons for action. Nietzsche repeatedly recognizes that our reasons for action spring from our drives (or "instincts") and that our particular perspective on action is inevitably conditioned by and dependent on this particular collection of instincts. And what do the instincts of the herd require?

The strongest must be bound most firmly, watched, laid in chains, and guarded--if the instinct of the herd has its way. For them a regime of self-control, ascetic detachment, or "duty"... (WP 886-887)

So it looks like those of us who constitute the "herd" have every reason to resist the realization of the highest good. We have reason to construct elaborate moral schemes that will subdue the higher types and prevent them from exercising their will. Strange as this result sounds, it is not logically absurd. It is perfectly possible that some people may be so constituted as to be unable to perceive or desire the highest good. This is in fact one of Nietzsche's most profound and pessimistic suggestions, one which bears an ironical similarity to certain fatalistic religious systems: that real goodness is possible and that most human beings will not even have reason to pursue it. In Beyond Good and Evil, we hear him say that

Moralities must be forced to bow…before the order of rank…until they finally reach agreement that it is immoral to say: "what is right for one is fair for the other”' (BGE 221)...The demand of one morality for all is detrimental for the higher men' (BGE 228)

And again, in Will To Power,

Against John Stuart Mill.- I abhor his vulgarity, which says: "What is right for one is fair for another"; ...The presupposition here is ignoble in the lowest sense: here an equivalence of value between my actions and yours is presupposed; here the most personal value of an action is simply annulled.

This is not a moral theory, because this cannot provide us with a crucial link between its axiology and a coherent vision of what human beings in general have reason to do. Rather, we must accept that

Viewed from a height, both [master-type and slave-type] are necessary; their antagonism is also necessary-and nothing shonld be banished more thoroughly than the "desirability" that some third thing might evolve out of the two ("virtue" as hermaphroditism). (WP 886)

Moral theory, for Nietzsche, tries perversely to merge two perspectives which are necessarily antagonistic. His critique remains salient, today: what must we assume about human beings in general in order to make good on the promises of moral theory? Both Reginster and Hurka offer illuminating analyses of Nietzsche's ethical thought, but I fear that both have triggered precisely those booby-traps in Nietzsche's thought that prevent us from seeing him as a moral theorist.

Unmasking the Creationism Debate

2011-04-22T18:55:00.000-07:00

In Clinical Psychology, a common method of analyzing mental illness involves searching for instances when a person's motivational energy seems to be overly focused on one particular object, person or issue. By tracing this kind of mono-mania to a distinct psychological need, one can begin to address the illness itself, seeing it as a symptom of some unfulfilled need.

I--against my better judgment--pay passing attention to the "evolution-creationism-templeton-religion-atheism-dawkins-etc" discussion that dominates most of the intellectual blogosphere. While reasonable persons occasionally weigh in with important insights, the vast majority of the discussion is simplistic, under-informed, riddled with logical inconsistencies, and (most importantly) absurdly polarized. The interlocutors spend enormous amounts of energy asserting, over and over, that they are on the side of Truth and Reason, and that their opponents are morally corrupt and intellectually inferior.

Every week or so, one of the larger online academic forums erupts into frenzied, histrionic activity along these lines. Sometimes, the "atheist" crowd perceives that religion is behind some recent intellectual coruption or moral travesty. Sometimes, the creationist side believes that some recent tentative discovery or speculative metaphysical argument with dubious logical credentials overturns 200 years of biology.

Against this monsoon of blithering energy, a patient and rational person is powerless. However, no rational critique could possibly match the psychological one that seems to follow naturally from what I've just said. This becomes apparent when we realize that the concern that these people show for their little pet-issues is wildly out of proportion with their actual importance. This leads us to justifiably hypothesize that they suffer from a kind of intellectual mania driven by deep, unacknowledged personal needs.

Take, for example, the concern with teaching creationism in schools. This, no doubt, is an important issue. As many remind us, it is important because a society (trivially) needs good education for its children. Yet, if this value forms the rationale for the massive amount of debate over intelligent design, why do we not see a similar mountain of discussion over, say, racial inequalities in early education? Or rapidly declining funding for public schools? Surely, these two issues alone constitute major threats to the quality of education in this country.

By comparison, as if, as if the educational health of children depended in some vital way on their acceptance of Darwinian biology or Intelligent Design Theory. Any idiot, let alone anyone who knows anything about education, will tell you that the vast majority of educational value is realized from the ages of 5-12, long before any child is able to take in upper-level biological theory. Participants in this debate should not be worried about whether students will read Darwin. They should be worried about whether they will be able to read Darwin.

The reality of this situation begins to take on a depressingly obvious shape. We do not see proportional attention to various educational issues. Rather, we see monomania. The only rational explanation left is that these people don't actually care very much about education, despite repeated, chest-thumping claims to the contrary. We are forced to search for alternative psychological explanations.

Why the emphasis on ID? One reason that intelligent design recieves so much attention is that the issue offers the participants a luxurious chance to slot themselves into the modern equivalent of a tribe, an in-group which affords an enormous sense of belonging to its members. After all, taking a stand on racial inequality is boring... so 1962. Leave the teachers to argue for their funding themselves: I'm going to be an atheist or an anti-darwinist!

There are probably many more such "unmaskings" available, and I bet a lot of them have significant force, but I'll allow a friend to summarize my critique in a far more eloquent manner:

The efficient goals or causes of these pursuits have more to do with the psychological maladies and deficiencies that constitute the personalities of those involved. Here we are talking about the craving for validation, the desire to form an identity by applying various labels to oneself, the need to accommodate personal flaws by projecting them onto 'the other,' and the imperative that there actually be 'an other' so that 'we' can escape from the difficult work of genuine self-improvement through the distractions afforded by group membership.

This is our hypothesis. If you think about it, it could be empirically tested, and it should be.

"Justifying" Philosophy

2011-04-21T21:12:00.000-07:00

The question of "justifying" the activities of the humanities is one over which ink, real and virtual, continues to be liberally spilled. I admit, I don't know much about what "the humanities" are supposed to be or how to justify them, but I do know a little bit about the activity of philosophy as it is practised in the modern english-speaking world.

Here are the facts: When all the costs come in, an average institution will probably spend at least $250,000 to train a person for a PhD in Philosophy. Tuition, wages and insurance 'aint cheap. In many cases, much of this money will be public, or tied to the public coffers in certain important ways. My contention is that when it is viewed in isolation, this expenditure cannot possibly be justified for the average PhD. There is simply no way that the average (or even the above-average) trained philosopher will give enough back to society in order to justify this kind of support.

No, really, it's worth dwelling on this point: the average Philosophy PhD thesis is called something like "Motivational Holism and the Third Man Problem: From Plato to Strawson to Foucault and Back Again." Even an intelligent and well-intentioned taxpayer is perfectly justified in looking at this title and saying something to the effect of "what?". Furthermore, they will be perfectly justified in asking why tax money goes to support this obscurantism. I want to suggest that the actual answer will probably not be completely satisfactory.

We need to consider the possibility that the public resources consumed by the discipline cannot possibly be justified at the level of the individual. In other words, there will simply be no answer to the question "why philosophy?" at this level. For the individual, the answer will simply be: "because I like it and I'm good at it". It is impossible to definitively tie the obscure, scholastic reflections of a particular upper-level philosopher to the public good in a way that justifies the public support they recieve.

So I want to resist justifying academic philosophy at the individual level. I also want to resist the reductionism that permeates this debate, one which will have us assume that the sorts of reasons provided to justify the activities of philosophers must be of essentially the same type as those offered in support of welding, farming or stock-trading. There may be benefits of an abstract and esoteric kind that philosophy provides which other disciplines cannot, and there may be no way to reliably compare these various kinds of benefits.

Indeed, this seems undeniably true when we consider what the world might now look like without Marx, Plato, Locke, Kant, Confucious or Lao-Tzu. Few of us could honestly admit that some value we cherish has not been both delineated and promoted by some major philosopher. Pick your chosen social-political orientation and there is a philosopher who both defined and energized it; a philosopher who began his or her career as a brilliant, scholastic recluse surrounded by other brilliant, scholastic recluses. A philosopher whose work was, by all appearances, esoteric, strange and difficult.

The benefits provided by these thinkers are nearly impossible to articulate because they defined the terms in which we now articulate benefits. They helped to forge our worldviews, our values, our priorities. They fought tooth and nail to enshrine what now seems commonsensical. We can only express a kind of humble gratitude that they did, one which bears more resemblance to the dumbstruck admiration of a profound work of art than the careful tallying up of a ledger-sheet.

All of this suggests that we should be commited to the continued existence of an intellectual class, one which must remain mysterious and strange to that average person. This class must be allowed total intellectual freedom, and it must be comprised only of highly creative and intelligent people. We cannot expect to be able to measure the benefits provided by this class of persons over any stretch of time. For their task is, in large part, to refine and re-define what we think "benefits" are.

Crucially, no matter how esoteric and bizarre a particular thinker may appear, there is no way to tell in advance if their work will lead to this kind of paradigm-shifting result. To establish this about one philosopher would itself be the life's work of another philosopher, one who would require just the same kind of public support we are trying to justify. We can only make sure that they are very smart, very passionate, and free to study what they want.

This proposal may seem elitist: it is not. Elitism is the view that a certain class of persons is exempt from having to justify their activities to other classes. Under this proposal, the activities of a philosopher-class are not automatically justified or immune from criticism. We may perfectly well accuse philosophers of stifling their own creativity, of having low standards, of simply re-stating the same kinds of ideas over and over again. Indeed, these are criticisms that may well be levelled at much of the discpline as it now stands. The average person has a jusitification for supporting philosophy, it is just not the sort of justification that can be fed into a balance-sheet, nor can it help the average person to understand why a particular philosopher does what they do. The particular philosopher can only say: "I like it and I'm good at it". This must remain their final response, even if that response offends against certain egalitarian sensibilities.

On Plato

2011-03-28T19:32:00.000-07:00

I've been conducting a sort of guided self-study of Plato. Of course, you can't do "western" philosophy without learning Plato, but I know full well that nothing is a substitute for primary/secondary texts and discussion. So, I've recently read Phaedo, Crito, Apology, Euthyphro and Republic, along with some selections from the Cambridge Companion and Blackwell Guide to Plato.

Nietzsche lampooned Socrates as an "ugly buffoon". On Plato, he was even less ambiguous:

For heaven's sake, do not throw Plato at me. I have never been able to join in the admiration for the artist Plato which is customary among scholars... To be attracted by the Platonic dialogue, this horribly self-satisfied and childish kind of dialectic, one must never have read good French writers--Fontenelle, for example. Plato is boring. ("What I Owe to the Ancients")

While we might see this as the standard grandoise posturing that we know and love, we must not forget that Nietzsche was given a full professorship at the age of 26 because (in the Birth Of Tragedy) he completely re-made classical greek scholarship, proposing theses and interpretations of Plato that have become, according to Gregory Vlastos, "canonical" today. Nietzsche does not judge casually or lightly, here. He has his reasons.

We can begin to understand what those reasons are when we understand the way in which classical Greek scholars treat the figures they study. They do not, as a general rule, accept the common wisdom that moderns are culturally and intellectually "special" in any serious way. As one delves into a study of ancient Greece, one begins to understand why. The situation that Athenian intelletuals faced in Socrates' day is very much like our own. Traditional religions were eroding, scientific naturalists were attempting (with not much success) to construct new moral and metaphysical systems, and a shaky democracy wobbled its way from crisis to crisis, never quite losing its authority. Philosophers had already basically outlined the doctrines of materialism (Democritus) and idealism (Parmenides), the merits of most modern political systems were already well-known and hotly debated, and quite a bit of energy was spent trying to find out exactly what reasoning could do for human beings in general. Sounds familiar, no?

Given that Plato was the most famous and influential figure to emerge from this distant yet strangely familiar maelstrom, we might expect him to display impressive reasoning and correspondingly persuasive philosophical doctrines. Yet, when we dig into his most influential dialogues, we find bizarre errors in reasoning, baldly supressed premises, and a tendency to make Socrates' interlocutors say the strangest things in order to allow the Platonic doctrine to be "established".

For example, In Book I of the Republic, Socrates sets out to refute Theasymachus' suggestion that justice is what is in the interests of the strong, the ruling class. Socrates seems to think that because horsemen take care of horses, doctors take care of patients and ship's captains take care of sailors, there is no such thing as a ruler who rules for his own advantage (342a-e). One wants to scream at the text: "Why not? Why are these arts relevantly similar?", but no answer is forthcoming.

The Phaedo is one of Plato's most pessimistic and even downright disturbing dialogues. Here, Socrates proposes that the soul only attains knowledge when it grasps abstract Ideas, that the soul is immortal, and that the body is therefore a kind of teporary curse that distorts and biases our intellect, obscuring the nature of the pure Ideas. The philosopher, according to this version of Socrates, must welcome bodily death, for it frees us from the body and allows us a chance to grasp Ideas in their purest form and thus attain knowledge.

Socrates "proves" the soul's immortality to Cebes, but only by having Cebes agree to the following theses without argument:

1. The uncompounded may be assumed to be the same and unchanging (denied by Heraclitus).
2. One part of us is body, and the other part is soul (denied by Democritus).
3. The soul must be of the same type or "in affinity" with what it knows (the abstract, timeless Ideas).
4. Hades exists, and is where our souls travel after death (also denied by Democritus, along with many of his contemporary "naturalists" or phusiologoi).

All of these ideas had well-known detractors with whom Plato was intimately familiar, yet they remain wholly undefended in the text. Any genuine philosophical opponent would have demanded a proof for each of them. Yet, as countless others do in the dialogues, Cebes simply plays along, assenting to each statement as though he were under some kind of hypnotic trance.

When we drop the illusion that these Greeks were "innocent" or "naive", and when we correspondingly apply the same kinds of standards to Plato that we would to ourselves, we find that these "arguments" are startlingly bad. It no longer seems strange for Nietzsche to have called them "horribly self-satisfied and childish".

Alexander Nehemas (in The Art of Living) attempts to save Plato from this pessimism by ascribing a kind of ironical stance to him. Plato, Nehemas claims, knows that these are bad arguments, and wants us to dismantle them so that we might critically examine any and all arguments we encounter, including the ones in Plato's dialogues. In this way, Plato intentionally provokes us into the "examined life" that his teacher, Socrates, valued so highly.

Most scholars reject this interpretation, noting that nowhere in Plato (or in any of his contemporaries) do we find mention of such an intention. It is an exceedingly bold thesis, and it allows us to save Plato from some very harsh judgments. Yet, if we reject Nehemas along with the majority, we are faced with a daunting dilemma. Either we must find some way to make Plato's arguments appear more plausible than they are on the surface, or we are led to a Nietzschean condemnation of the father of philosophy. Plato scholarship, I am told, focuses on the former horn of the dilemma, but I suspect that it must be haunted by the latter.

Against Ethical Ideology

2011-03-14T16:00:00.000-07:00

While many philosophers have attacked the idea of an ethical theory, they are often asked what they do think about ethics if they don't hold to some particular moral theory.

Anti-theoreticians like Elizabeth Anscombe, Bernard Williams and Tim Chappell appear to philosophize in very different ways, but I would suggest that what unites them in ethics is a foundational aversion to ethical ideology. Speaking out against Kantianism, consequentialism and Aristoteleanism, these thinkers are sometimes accused of having a nihilistic streak. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Ethical nihilism asserts that there are no ethical considerations. In other words, nothing "matters". If I kick a rock down the street, it may end up bouncing on to the road or on to the grass. It also may end up striking a person in the back of the head, or it may not. Most of us believe that these two classes of considerations are different, because the difference between the first considerations (grass/road) is not particularly important, while the difference between the second class of considerations (striking/missing a person) is important. Nihilism denies that there is any distinction, here: the stone may strike a blade of grass, it may roll into the road, or it may knock someone unconscious. For the ethical nihilist, each of these considerations is equally important, for none of them is important at all.

We should be able to see, rather easily, that to reject ethical theory is not to embrace ethical nihilism. For just as the ethical nihilist denies that any consideration is important, the ethical theorist asserts that all ethical considerations are ultimately of the same type. Just as the political ideologist (Marxist, neo-liberal, feminist) analyzes all political issues in terms of one kind of consideration (economic class, individual liberty, gender), the ethical theorist thinks that anything that is ethically important acquires its importance from the same basic source. The theorist is, plainly speaking, an ideologue.

The less popular middle position here asserts that some classes of considerations are important in the ethical sense. It matters that a rock may strike another person, whereas it generally does not matter if my rock ends up on the grass or the road. Yet, such a thinker simply opposes the theorist's reductionism about ethical considerations: there is no single measure of ethical importance. Given the vast contingencies of human development, human society and individual psychology, there is no reason to believe that such a measure can be discovered.

None of this implies that there is nothing we can say about ethics, morality or the good life. We can say quite a lot. The anti-theoretician simply asks that we drop the idea of a reductionist ideology and get on with it.

There Is No Such Thing As Art

2011-03-09T07:56:00.000-08:00

As a musician, I have always found the study of aesthetics somewhat comical. I am no poet, I am no novelist, I am no playwright and I am certainly no painter. Yet, if I as a musician really do create this thing called "art", this thing that deserves its own unified field of study, then surely I should at least have some insight, as an artist, into the methods and aims of these other artistic pursuits?

Yet, I do not. My poetry is terrible, my novels are incoherent, and I count my visual art successful if all of the stick figures possess the requisite number of limbs. This suggests to me that aesthetics is based on a massive mistake, the illusion that these disparate creative fields have enough in common to be given a single name. That's right, folks, I'm saying it: there is no such thing as art.

This, however, is a little too fast. Of course, because we have solidified the study of aesthetics and created this impoverished social class of persons called "artists", there is such a thing as art. But this is pure convention. There is nothing in what we call "works of art" that forces this category on us, nor is there anything of significance common to the creative process of painters, musicians and poets. What does exist is an economic system that systematically forces certain individuals into a kind of romanticized poverty.

The history of what we call "art" in Europe is the history of the rise and fall of guilds. Prior to the industrial revolution and the explosion of capitalism, an artisan of any kind could only rise to prominence if he was accepted into a guild, which funded his work and gave him the means to continue working. Guilds were supported by the monarchical state, but also by various patrons. While often corrupt and self-serving, guilds provided systematic support for all manner of craftsmanship.

18th and 19th-century economists were loudly opposed to guilds. Adam Smith wrote that such institutions violated the spirit of competition. free enterprise and innovation. Ricardo complained that they stifled free trade. Karl Marx objected to the classism inherent in such structures. They needn't have worried: the rise of the factory was the end of the guild, as governments came to expect cheap, mass-produced goods that could be sold on a free market. While certain trades (such as carpentry) survived this change, the guilds of poetry, music, prose and theatre were completely annihilated. Without state funding, no such society could survive for very long, and these artisans became individual labourers. What many don't know is that the popular stereotype of the solitary, neurotic artist arose only after this development.

This is the history of what we now call "art". A few disparate endeavours are now artificially lumped into the same category because our economic system doesn't quite know what to do with them. True to form, the academic class has attempted to justify this categorization via comical attempts to discern what is common to all "art" or to all "aesthetic experience". Yet, step away from this myopic prejudice and just ask yourself what novels, paintings and musical compositions really have in common. The answer is: not a hell of a lot. The process of creation is radically different, the products themselves are different, and the experience of them is different. "Art" doesn't exist.

Hegel, Stalin and Genocide

2011-01-20T11:54:00.000-08:00

A fundamental question in ethics and politics is this: who has the authority to say which human goals/aims/ends are worth pursuing? As it turns out, the way we answer this question can affect the future in profound and even horrific ways.

Classical liberal notions of "freedom" assume that an individual is ultimately the arbiter of this question. Ultimately, I am free if I can pursue my ends, and while my ends may be subject to many kinds of internal criticism, ultimately I am the one who says whether I ought to pursue them. No-one else has the right to say, unequivocally, that my final values are mistaken.

Hegel was the first major critic of this classical-liberal notion of freedom. Were he alive today, he might simply continue this critique by pointing to modern advertising, and to the bizarre desires that advertising can instill in us. Surely, he would say, freedom cannot consist in simply pursuing one's ends, because those ends can be of questionable authenticity. After seeing the hamburger commercial, I do not freely rush out to buy the hamburger. Rather, I seem to be in the grips of corporate control. No matter how strongly I feel the desire, it remains a problematic one.

However, Hegel didn't just level this critique, for without a positive conception of freedom, the critique would be empty. Rather, his story is one in which human cultures progressively ascend to greater and greater levels of rationality, and this, ultimately, is how freedom manifests itself in the world. For Hegel, many of the cultures of his day were unfortunately "stalled" in this respect. In particular, he pointed to the Orient and to various slavic nations in Europe who had, for various reasons, not properly moved towards the establishment of an enlightened democratic state.

This line of thinking should now be making perceptive readers nervous. Here is his ideological successor, Engels, writing in 1848 in a journal that Marx edited:

"Among all the large and small nations of Austria, only three standard-bearers of progress took an active part in history, and still retain their vitality - the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars. Hence they are now revolutionary... All the other large and small nationalities and peoples are destined to perish before long in the revolutionary world storm. For that reason they are now counter-revolutionary...

The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward...

The chief mission of all other races and peoples, large and small, is to perish in the revolutionary holocaust."

It is no mere coincidence that betwen 1921 and 1947, millions upon millions of innocent people were brutally murdered, tortured, and starved to death by Stalinist Russia. We are insufficiently attentive to the fact that Stalin's barbarism dwarfed Hitler's in many respects, and we ought to be puzzled about the fact that public displays of the swastika are now forbidden while the CCCP's hammer-and-sickle is a fetishized fashion symbol. As much as many on the far left would love to ignore this, the logic of Hegelian anti-liberalism points the way to this result.

I am not suggesting that Hegel's political position entails the actions of Stalin. No doubt there were falsifications and distortions at each successive stage. But we cannot ignore the sorts of positions that begin to arise when we deny individuals the ultimate authority over the value of their own ends or their ways of life. For we must then divide the world into those who live correctly and those who do not, those with the right values and those with the wrong ones. When this is combined with a progressive view of history, according to which it is the destiny of mankind to reach preferred, "higher" stages of development, it becomes an imperative for "right-thinking" individuals (those with access to the theory and thus to the "correct" view of human life) to move this process along.

Modern liberalism, with its emphasis on negative freedom, its rejection of teleology and religion, and its general fondness for capitalism as a mode of production, has been consistently subjected to withering criticism from modern Marxists, from environmentalists, from communitarians, from anyone and everyone who sees a "malaise" in this form of modernity. It may well be that this form of society is itself fatally flawed in some way. However, it must be said that Liberalism's foundational idea, that individuals must be allowed to define their own ways of life, is perhaps our greatest political defense against the totalitarian massacres of the 20th century. Modern liberal-capitalist life contains many evils. Those evils are utterly insignificant next to the terror visited on the world by the 20th-century descendents of Hegel.

Holodomor Victim, Ukraine, 1933

The Humanities

2011-01-07T09:57:00.000-08:00

I have become increasingly concerned with a recent spate of articles lambasting the decision to pursue a PhD in the humanities. At a time when the Humanities are said to be “in crisis”, when jobs are at an all-time low, when PhDs don’t earn any more than MAs and are said to be a form of “mass, cheap labour” for universities, many have seen fit to call into doubt the wisdom of pursuing such a path. The money, the effort, the time... how could it all possibly be worth it?

Hey: want to know why I’m trying to pursue a PhD? This may sound utterly quaint to the ears of these critics, but my love of philosophy actually plays a huge part in my ongoing plan. Unless someone knows of a better place to earnestly and effectively pursue philosophy at a higher level, I’m not sure how economic concerns are supposed to weigh against this love.

Hey, want to know another reason? I want to teach philosophy, and in order to teach it well, you have to know it well. How is my poor time-to-earning potential ratio supposed to weigh against this fact? Am I supposed to conclude that a more cost-effective use of my time would be to simply abandon my training after the MA level and find some place to teach? How many of us are supposed to come to this conclusion? Who will teach philosophy well?

Finally: I want to pursue philosophy because I want to become a good philosopher. If I could make just one significant and valuable contribution to the field, I would be extremely satisfied with my life. I do not think that life outside academia can provide the training necessary to accomplish this kind of goal.

The danger in attempting to quantify the value of a dedicated study in the humanities (via some economic, social or political metric) is that we alienate ourselves from the reasons each of us has to study at all. It may well be true that the humanities have beneficial effects on societies at large, though this hypothesis is far more difficult to test than many of its proponents may suppose. But I do not think that a person's choice to study ought to be held hostage to these kinds of considerations.

Privacy

2011-01-03T22:45:00.000-08:00

I must initially confess a private loathing towards the idea of “human rights”. I of course believe that people ought to be able to count on some basic goods, but the idea of a cosmic guarantee grounded in the subject’s identity as a human being has always struck me as bizarre, as so bizarre as to invite Nietzsche’s unmasking of such notions as ideological constructs of the weak designed to prevent the strong from exercising their will.

Yet, sometimes the idea of a “right” is given such absurd content as to invite even more damning condemnations. Such is the case with the notion of a “right to privacy”, something frequently cited in contemporary debates about body-scanning machines in airports. It is of course the case that some people feel violated or subjugated by such procedures, but that they would suggest that some objective moral rule is being violated by airport security measures is absurd.

The absurdity becomes palpable when we trace, as Nietzsche would have asked us to, the history of the notion of privacy. The very term “privacy” is so local to western-European cultures that some linguists regard it as untranslatable (Newmark 1981, Approaches to Translation). Unsurprisingly, privacy is a concept that had only a very restricted use until there arose a numerically significant class of economically privileged members of the human race. Certainly no-one would have thought that a person as such has a right to privacy until very recently in human history.

If privacy really is a fundamental human right, a right we are owed as humans, we ought to expect the concern for privacy to arise in a basically “organic” fashion in any human society. Yet, attention to history reveals that a concern for privacy does not arise “naturally” from some simple set of human needs, but is in fact strongly correlated with the accumulation of capital. We might also expect that such a fundamental right would be widely referenced in many areas of human experience, but a quick search reveals that a large majority of recent work on privacy focuses on—absurdity of absurdities—data privacy. The cynic's story is depressingly easy and effective: as capital becomes increasingly chained to electronically stored information, people have all-too-conveniently become concerned with how their “personal” information is secured.

This does not mean that defenders of privacy are “secretly” trying to protect their stuff when asserting their alleged right. No doubt, they are wholeheartedly offended at the notion of a body-scanner or an internet identity thief. Rather, they must face up to the origins of their revulsion, and tell us why we ought not to simply dismiss it as economic ideology. They must explain to society in general why this strange, ill-defined and altogether local convenience is in fact owed to all persons at all times. Until they do this, we are forced to conclude that privacy is in fact a convenience of luxury, and not a foundational human good.

(By the way, any list of foundational human goods will entail not being incinerated at 37,000 feet.)

Art, Ethics and Christmas

2010-12-25T02:32:00.000-08:00

On Christmas Eve, millions upon millions of Americans sat down to watch A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life, just as they did in 2009, 2008 and so on back into the decades. They found themselves captivated; weeping and laughing, alternating between righteous anger and warm-hearted approval. Many walked away from their television screens with a deep sense of moral strength, knowing in their hearts that that an insatiable lust for money will destroy a person and his community, certain beyond a doubt that greedy, irresponsible lending practices are the scourge of individuals and societies alike.

Hang on...“Insatiable lust for money?” “Greedy, irresponsible lending practices?” Haven’t those phrases been in the headlines recently?

In recent years, many have argued that the narrative arts—theatre, film and literature—are a great boon to the development of an ethical personality. Martha Nussbaum is perhaps the most respected advocate of this basic kind of position, arguing (in “Love’s Knowledge”) that to read a good novel just is to exercise our capacity for ethical judgment. Michael DePaul summarizes this idea when he suggests that literature can “supply the kind of experience needed to develop a person’s faculty of moral judgment”(DePaul 1993). It has been said that a heartfelt engagement with those arts expands our imaginative horizons, engages our emotions of sympathy, and allows us to see the world through other eyes. We project ourselves into the lives of others, and this broadening of perspective makes us more sensitive and empathic.

Plato, by contrast, was famously grouchy about art, specifically about mimetic art, that is, art which aims to portray or to represent:

Painting or drawing, and artistic imitation in general, when doing their own proper work, are far removed from truth, and the companions and friends and associates of a principle within us which is equally removed from reason... they have no true or healthy aim. (Republic, Book X)

His arguments in this section of the Republic have struck modern readers as bizarre or even childish, but we cannot deny that Plato was certainly right in one respect. The mimetic arts do not and cannot represent ethical reality. Because of this, we actually have reason to suspect that art degrades our ethical faculties.

Let me explain. When we read a novel or watch a film, we will usually find ourselves sympathizing with certain characters, despising others, and sensing a kind of deep lesson or theme in the narrative. However, there is, by necessity, one important character missing from any film, novel or theatrical production. That character is us. We are the audience, and an audience is precisely what real life does not have.

One of the pesky things about real life is that you cannot really “opt out” of the picture, choosing to view it from the sidelines passively. For this is itself a choice, a decision with character and consequence. In real life, there are no audiences, only actors.

While some philosophers have invited us to view mimetic art as a tool for ethical development, Plato’s basic insight—that mimetic art falsifies reality—makes enormous trouble for this proposal. The fact that we necessarily experience art as outsiders means that art cannot replicate a central feature of ethical experience. It cannot replicate what it is like to actually express ethical emotions and make ethical decisions. This probably explains how we can sit down every Christmas, en masse, to “learn” ethical lessons that we promptly ignore, destroying economies and communities in the process.

Now, it may well be that the novel or the play expands our imaginative powers or engages our emotions of sympathy, and it may well be that these are ethically useful functions. After all, a person without imagination or sympathy is a person incapable of ethical feeling. Yet, when we examine the ways in which mimetic art provokes these changes in us, we ought to become suspicious.

Mimetic art invites us to direct our ethical emotions (or "reactive attitudes") towards imagined simulacra, towards people and situations who do not exist and thus cannot even respond to us. These are simulated or "virtual" ethical experiences, experiences which contrast rather strongly with the actual experience of directing emotions and attitudes towards real, responsive flesh-and-blood persons.

For this reason alone, we should reject the idea that the consumption of mimetic art is ethical training. In fact, it might just be an invitation to ethical passivity. The obvious question here is this: in a world full of comedy and tragedy, a world filled with fantastical events and wild drama, in a world bursting at the seams with joy and suffering and love and hate and good and evil, why would anyone ever think that we need art to produce ethical situations for us? Surely we are all surrounded by such situations, and to engage with imaginary ones is to choose passivity over activity.

I, for my part, will continue to enjoy novels, plays, poetry and film for as long as I can. I will not, however, justify my enjoyment of art by reference to its supposed ability to make me into a better person. As a corollary, I will not justify the existence of humanities departments by clinging to this odd fantasy. Let us at least be honest enough to admit that we enjoy art for its own sake, and save ourselves the trouble of trying to uncover this strange and unlikely harmony between aesthetic experience and ethics.

Reflection and Practical Reason

2010-12-15T11:41:00.000-08:00

Practical reason is the general human capacity for resolving, through reflection, the question of what one is to do. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Practical Reason")

This assumption—that practical reason is essentially reflective—is both ambitious and troublesome. It is certainly the case that practical reasoning is only important because it can give rise to responsible action; if our capacity to decide what to do were impotent, practical reason would be philosophically uninteresting to say the least.

Yet, this very fact has the potential to make significant trouble for the idea that practical reason essentially involves reflection. Human existence is almost exclusively unreflective. In the course of an average person’s day, it is very difficult to pick out things they did under the influence of reflection.

It is a fact that our practical lives are almost exclusively automatic, and it would be an insane conception of practical reason that diagnosed this condition as one of constant a-rationality punctuated by a few rare, lucky instances of lucid reasoning. Our actions are by and large justified, motivated by reasons, and we can readily cite those reasons when prompted. The obvious conclusion is that reasons are not entities that need to be “summoned forth by consciousness” in order to play their proper role.

It might be argued that practical reasoning is in fact quite rare, and that while human agents do by and large act upon prior habits and dispositions, these dispositions are only rational insofar as they are the product of sound practical reasoning. There is in fact extraordinary convergence on this idea from a wide range of moral theorists. Sophisticated utilitarians have insisted that the majority of our practical lives ought to be lived according to the operations of unreflective disposition, and that only in the “cool hour” of reflection are we to consider the justification of our dispositions. Modern Kantians insist, as Kant did, that persons are not actually required to employ the Categorical Imperative in their everyday decision-making, but that the justification of their actions, dispositions or maxims derives from the conformity of those maxims to that same imperative.

This general view runs into deep difficulty when we consider the actions of ours that we feel are the most justified, or the actions of which we are most proud. I rush to my mother’s aid in a terrible crisis, and I support her through the crisis in spite of any damage this may do to other projects or interests (of mine or anyone else’s). The very idea of attempting to weigh competing considerations in such a situation seems ludicrous, for I am called by practical necessity to act upon one of my most central, identity-defining dispositions. If I stopped to reflect at any time on the justification of such a decision it would feel as though I am betraying a central part of the justification itself: that it simply must be done, that no other course of action could make sense.

The idea that there is some analytic connection between reflection and practical justification is quite odd under this light, and this impression only increases when we consider that no such reflection is required for ordinary beliefs in the theoretical case. I am justified in believing that an apple is red because it seems red, not because I have engaged in higher-order reflection concerning the property of redness and its interaction with my perceptual and cognitive mechanisms.

The way out of this labyrinth is to insist that ethics is concerned with action, that action is mostly unreflective expression of disposition, and that practical reasoning can be unreflective or unconscious. We can weigh alternatives in a snap, expressing our dispositions without thinking, and this process is what constitutes our character. Many questions will remain about the sources of practical justification, but we must at least admit to ourselves that reflection is not the sole source.

Depression and Freedom

2010-11-28T21:17:00.000-08:00

Depression is a state that philosophers ought to pay more attention to. This is because it is strongly connected to a lack of purpose or meaning in one's life, and also to a corresponding lack of motivation. A depressed person doesn't see different objects, persons, or states of affairs than everyone else. They simply do not see any of those things as particularly important, as worth improving, engaging with or otherwise being a part of. This often produces a nameless anxiety, a constant sense that something, some unknown thing, is dreadfully wrong.

Modern "liberal" societies display a remarkable focus, at all points of the political spectrum, on choice. Freedom is enshrined as a central ethical value, abortion-rights activists trumpet "choice" as an argument-stopper, and right-wing activists demand the freedom to spend just about every penny they make however they choose. People defend their chosen lifestyles simply by reference to the fact that they have chosen those lifestyles.

Yet, you cannot choose your way out of depression, and this is important. You cannot simply decide to find something in the world meaningful or worth your energy, your engagement. Choices and decisions presuppose a certain background. They presuppose that a person values something, that they see a range of activites, projects or actions as worthwhile and are able to decide which of them is most worthwhile.

Depression is just that state where a person does not see anything as particularly worthwhile, and as such, depression destroys choice. A person cannot intentionally create their own sense of purpose. Something in the world, at some point, has to call them out.

Thus, the central commitments in our lives are not really ours. We speak of our chosen career, our important decisions, our ways of living. Yet, those choices had to be out there for us, existing as meaningful potential decisions, before we could see any reason to make them. Context matters, and the ideas we bring to our context matter as well.

Common ways of thinking encourage us to see ourselves as ultimately in control of our lives, and to see the value of our chosen path as lying in the very fact that we chose it. No attitude could be more conducive to depression. For when you are struck, suddenly, by that terrible loss of motivation, by that sense of meaninglessness, you have no-one but yourself left to blame. You look around and you see others leading happy, fulfilling lives, and all you can think is: what's wrong with me? In fact, there is another question you can ask, one that is far more meaningful and helpful: what is wrong with my situation? Why is it such that I cannot find anything in it worthy of my energy?

This is not to say that depression has any easy fixes, or that there is some magical philosophical remedy for personal malaise. The central point is this: a sense of purpose is prior to free agency. You need to see things in the world as important before you can even begin to choose between them. An ethical view that sees individual freedom as a foundational value is extremely confused, and persons who (consciously¹ or unconsciously) adhere to such a view are basically defenseless in the face of depression.

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¹For example, followers of Ayn Rand, and adherents to a Kantian ethical view. Both kinds of philosophy valorize choice without saying anything at all about how we can come to see things as choiceworthy. Rand does not really deal with this problem at all, while Kant simply invented the logically absurd category of "duties to oneself" in order to account for the value of pursuing our projects.

Equality

2010-11-24T11:49:00.000-08:00

It's an old point, and I'll just state it right out front. If it is actually the case that people are equal in some respect, then what's the point of making that equality into a moral or ethical ideal? In other words, if something necessarily is the case, then what's the point of saying that it ought to be the case or that it's good that it is the case?

Nina Power, Roehampton University

This is a point that Nina Power manages to miss entirely in her recent piece, "The Equality of Intelligence". Citing Jacques Rancière as her inspiration, she writes:

...nothing is in principle impossible to understand and everyone has the potential to understand anything....equality is not just something to be fought for, but something to be presupposed.

Now, the factual claim is simply false, unless we illegitimately widen the scope of possibility to include the sort of sci-fi miracle that sees the developmentally challenged teenager's brain transformed into a marvel of intelligence. I'm going to go right ahead and say that this teenager will never be able to understand Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem. I don't understand it either, but I'm fairly certain that no amount of instruction will turn this poor kid into a modern version of the slave boy from Plato's Meno. He's just not going to get it.

While we don't need to dwell on this point, there is something vaguely disrespectful in Ranciere's (and Power's) doe-eyed assertions of equality. I wonder what the teacher of that disadvantaged teenager would think of these kinds of assertions.

No, the important thing is this. Suppose a complete theory of human psychology fell out of the sky, one which told us once and for all precisely how we develop and how we learn. And suppose that this theory directly implied that certain classes of humans were, on the whole, less intelligent or had less potential than certain other classes.

Would we then simply throw up our hands and declare that equality was a charade and that we should never try to ameliorate inequalities between persons? Obviously we would not. We would accept these initial limitations and we would work hard to make sure that everyone recieved the opportunity to develop whatever abilities or capacities they had. We would continue to make special efforts to ensure that the less fortunate among us would be able to lead the richest lives possible. Sort of like we do now.

Conversely, the more equality is established as a fact, the less important it becomes to fight for it. Indeed, if human beings really have absolutely equal capacities for learning, then there is no need for special efforts of any sort. All persons should be educated in precisely the same ways, and all persons should be blamed equally when they don't achieve their (supposed) potential.

The fact of inequality gives force to the ethical ideal of equality. No matter what Dr. Power thinks, you can't "fight for" what you've presupposed.

Women in Philosophy

2010-11-21T11:23:00.000-08:00

North American philosophy departments are beginning to grapple with the problem of gender skew. Despite becoming a majority in the academy, women have not flocked to philosophy departments as they have to anthropology, history, English or literary theory. For a discipline that aims to answer the fundamental, foundational questions of human life and the universe, this presents a serious problem. Many departments are doing what they have to do in such a situation: implementing "gentle" affirmitive-action at the MA and PhD level, drafting codes of conduct, and having serious discussions about general inclusiveness.

Enter "What Is It Like To Be A Woman In Philosophy?", a blog where women in philosophy are invited to share, anonymously, their experiences as women in philosophy. I think that we ought to be appreciative of attempts to bring varying perspectives to bear on all human practices, philosophy included. However, I am going to suggest that this particular attempt has serious problems. They come to light when we examine the subtle reference contained in the blog's title.

For very different reasons, Thomas Nagel wrote "What Is It Like To Be A Bat?" in 1976. His argument focused on the perceptual experience of bats. Perceptual experience creates one of the most foundational problems in philosophy, because it is obvious to anyone who has ever walked into a clear glass door that there is an essential disconnect between our perceptual experience and reality. In precisely the same way, a bat's echo-location system often provides it with "false positives", prompting it into all kinds of wacky behaviour. Philosophers have literally written a mountain of pages trying to specify the relationship between perception and reality.

One answer--call me crazy, but I'm hitching my pony to this particular wagon--is that we are organisms with perceptual systems that provide us with fallible information about the world. Husserlian attempts to reduce reality to perception, and Spinozistic attempts to reduce perception to objective reality inevitably run into that same old glass door. We need to keep perceptions and reality separate (somehow).

"What Is It Like To Be A Woman in Philosophy" presents us with the particular perceptions of various woman philosophers. Some are caustic and condemnatory: they present their experience as fraught with discrimination, harassment and patriarchal exclusion. Others worry about the lack of female colleagues, and about the feeling of isolation that this brings. Others, confusingly, deny any experience of harassment or exclusion of any kind, and that's something I've personally heard from a few female friends scattered around the discipline. Some report brutally sexist comments made publicly during meetings and conferences, others haven't heard any such things.

The explanation for this diversity is that there is no such thing as "what it is like to be a woman in philosophy". There are almost certainly particularly sexist departments, and those departments should be identified and steps should be taken to fix them. Yet, so much of the discussion around women in philosophy has assumed that there is this monolithic structure called "philosophy" about which we can say definite things. But this is just not true.

There is a related problem, an old one, that arises when we focus so exclusively on perceptions, on experiences, rather than on the reality that gives rise to them. When an anonymous writer characterizes her experience as fraught with "creeps, freaks, weirdos, patronizing incompetent ego-maniacs, and hysterics", and when another claims that a professor publicly and non-ironically used the phrase "damned dirty arabs" without being reprimanded, many of us will immediately suspect that there is a certain degree of exaggeration taking place here, even if it's not intentional.

Yet, how are we to know? If all we have is a perception, and no particular time, place and person to tie the perception to, the perception remains a perception, nothing more, and is of very little use in determining what is actually going on. In short, I am not entirely sure if What Is It Like To Be A Woman In Philosophy is helping this discussion to move forward, because it invites us to make generalizations about an entire discipline, rather than discuss particular problems within particular departments.

Technology

2010-10-05T11:33:00.000-07:00

My grandmother has a lot of difficulty adopting Facebook, despite the fact that she desperately wants to keep up with the lives of her grandchildren. The very concept of the interface is so alien to her that she feels that any communication via Facebook is empty or meaningless. For her it's as though her grandchildren aren't "really there".

This isn't a difficulty we can chalk up to simply being stubborn or "old-fashioned". It is a truism that digital technology is changing faster than any previous form of technology, and it follows quite naturally from this that those who grew up and matured in a digital world will find it much more sense in it than those who grew up in a different age. There are real limits to what we can expect an older person to understand.

I think that this presents us with a potentially devastating social problem. As technologies advance more and more rapidly, and as we continue to adopt new technologies as mechanisms by which we literally live our lives, successive generations of people will become increasingly alienated from one another.

The idea here is quite simple: if one new form of communications-technology arrives every 100 years, then at most a person can expect to have to adjust only once to this new way of interacting with others. Think here of the telegraph. If a new one comes along every 50 years, then a person might expect to have to undergo two such adjustments. My grandmother is on the crest of an even more advanced stage: she has had to witness the rise of the telephone, e-mail, and now social networking as primary forms of interaction and communication. Her sense of alienation only grows as successive forms reveal themselves.

This is a problem because norms, values and shared visions of the good are transmitted from older generations to newer ones via social interaction. Those of us in our 30s may not realize it now, but we are part of perhaps the first generation who will be almost incapable of understanding their own grandchildren, or communicating with them in ways that can reliably transmit our norms, these values. As social technology continues to spiral upwards into further complexity and interactive involvement, the average person can expect to see 4, 5, 6, maybe even more categorical shifts in how people interact over the course of their lifetime. How can a family, let alone a society, work towards any kind of coherent, unified vision of a better world if each successive generation literally has to figure everything out for themselves?

There has always been a deep distance between the old and the young: this much is recorded in literature and mythology throughout the ages. Yet, it must be fair to say that we are entering an age in which that distance is widening rapidly, and there is a point at which the logic of this process severs meaningful inter-generational discourse completely. We must accept the ethical significance of the fact that persons who lived through the holocaust, world wars and the cold war are finding it increasingly difficult to even speak to young people.

So, the next time you feel tempted to giggle at the sight of an older person fumbling around with the internet, remember: you're next.

America

2010-09-28T23:44:00.000-07:00

Whenever I visit America, I am always drawn in by its charms, its confidence, its diversity, its incredible dynamism. I do think, in opposition to most of my Canadian friends, that it might be the best place in the world to live, assuming of course that one is not dirt poor.

Yet, modern writers often go to great lengths to explain what might be wrong with America, why, given its strengths, it can be a such a hotbed of ignorance, violence and poverty. I want to make a small contribution to this literature, and I want to do so by telling a little story.

I visited a wine-maker in the Pacific Northwest whose wines retail for over $100 per bottle. He is, by all accounts, living an extraordinary version of the American Dream. He has bought and developed property, started a business, and has become a locally famous personality. He is exuberant, witty and kind, a joy to be around and a profound source of strength and laughter for those close to hm.

Yet, one cannot help but notice his distance from so many other kinds of people in America. His social circle is white, affluent, and basically conservative. This man's sons received an expensive college education. Everything about his life had a noticeable hint of insularity. I am close friends with good-hearted and brilliant people who would be shunned and ridiculed by this world of his, and that thought caused me some discomfort. In spite of his success, there are many who would hate this man and what he represents: white privilege, power, class structure.

But there is more. His life has recently been shattered by the loss of his wife. I could see that his family was still reeling from the force of it all, but his life-affirming exuberance made me respect him even more. I thought to myself: this is a good man, a wise man, a man who has been to hell and come back standing on both feet. A man who still embraces life with all the honesty, courage and energy he can muster, when many of us would retreat into lonely, empty shells and wither away.

As I polished off another bottle of expensive wine with him and his friends, I thought about America, and about the countless walls its people build around each other. It is a country particularly segregated by class, race, religion and creed, a country where my wine-making friend cannot expect to associate in any way with, say, an inner city ghetto kid. That same kid might look up from his violent, poverty-stricken life, and hate this man. Yet, the very walls that prevent genuine interaction between these two characters are the same walls that maintain this hatred, this distance.

No-one, whatever their class, race or orientation, could fail to be moved to sympathy and love by the sight of this man at his wife's grave, barely holding back tears. No-one could fail to recognize the essential, shared tragedies of human existence. "LIFE IS PAIN!", he roared to us all when the night had become particularly Dionysian, and I could not help but think later that a shared recognition of this basic fact is what begins a community, what founds and is the continuing foundation for civic life. But this shared recognition is blocked in a country which so fastidiously maintains its barriers, its walls.

"Life is pain: so, what are we going to do about it?" What other political question is there? If people have lost the ability to recognize it as one that binds any community or nation together, then there is a serious problem.

Morality and the Forbidden

2010-09-20T14:05:00.000-07:00

I suspect that most of us know what it's like to have a broadly "moral" reaction to something. In most cases, this kind of reaction requires that some person has to have done something intentionally, and we must believe that the person could have known that their action violated some very basic principles (such as harming others or intentionally disregarding their worth as persons).

I am interested in what we might call forbidden responses to these very same actions. I suspect that all of us, whether we wish to admit it or not, have experienced a kind of dark fascination with immoral acts, even while we simultaneously feel the usual moral horror or revulsion. I suppose this kind of response might be best classified as an "aesthetic" response, and the fact that is is forbidden is one of the most interesting things about it. It is unquestionably immoral to feel positively attracted, in any way, to something morally horrible; we can easily identify the shame and guilt that goes with consciously acknowledging such a response.

Many of us will be tempted to deny such forbidden responses. I think this is probably dishonest, and I think I can show that it is so. For example, the Nazi holocaust is pretty much the worst moral crime most of us can think of. We (rightly) feel moral horror in contemplating it or in seeing it depicted.

Yet why, then, do we not turn away in revulsion when, say, Schindler's List, The Pianist or Anne Frank is playing? Why are so many of us transfixed by those very same images in countless documentaries, museum presentations, and literary descriptions? We tell ourselves, just as the creators of those works often tell us, that we are reading and watching in order to maintain the memory of the horror, to collectively ensure that we do not forget about it. Yet, this explanation rings very hollow: memorizing something is not the same as being transfixed by it, and it is quite implausible to think that in this day and age we are in any serious danger of forgetting about what happened from 1932-1945.

We may tell ourselves that we are simply inspired by the courage and humanity of victims, by their bravery in the face of total and utter dehumanization. But bravery and courage is precisely what holocaust victims were not permitted to display: countless films and documentaries show us how the Nazis ruthlessly destroyed solidarity amongst their victims and deprived them of even the ability to resist effectively. Heroic redemption may have come for a few lucky individuals, but the overwhelming majority are not depicted as having any access to this kind of life. Rather, their lives were brutally degraded and cut short, and instead of looking away in horror, many of us remain utterly transfixed.

No, something else is going on, here, and if it doesn't happen for you while watching this kind of film, consider whether you've ever been transfixed by a crime-show like Law and Order, by a Stephen King novel or by a horror film. A moral purist might admit that they experience the forbidden responses, but still insist that it is wrong to experience them. They might argue for a corresponding prohibition on any art which seeks to use the horror of moral crimes to provoke forbidden responses. They might even note—and this is an important kind of consideration—that the forbidden response is far more likely to occur in someone who has not personally been a victim of the crime being depicted.

Yet, we must note a potentially fatal flaw in this kind of outlook. If it is wrong for us to do X, then it is possible for us to refrain from doing X. We cannot be blamed for the unavoidable. If the sort of forbidden response I'm pointing to is basically "natural" in a general sense, if it is something that creatures like us will inevitably experience at certain times in our lives, or perhaps if it just arises from areas of our mind over which we have no real control, then it cannot be wrong to experience the response.

I don't know how to resolve this question, but I do suspect that most of us underestimate how difficult it would be to purge our lives of forbidden, aesthetic responses to moral crimes. At the very least, we should be honest with ourselves on this point. For me, the sheer difficulty of this kind of confrontation reveals a kind of underlying schizophrenia, as I am driven to both affirm and deny certain very important things about myself.

Perhaps, here, we are simply getting a glimpse of the titanic effort involved in going beyond good and evil.

Nietzsche on The Past and The Future

2010-09-10T13:53:00.000-07:00

Nietzsche himself is of not too great an importance. But Nietzsche and ten sturdy intellectual labourers that do what he has merely pointed out would bring our culture ahead with a step of thousand years.
-Musil, Diaries

We may debate the ultimate value of ideas, but it is worth exploring what Nietzsche's challenge was to philosophers in particular. What did he want a philosopher to be? Two answers, answers which remain intriguingly relevant to us today, are: first, that Nietzsche wanted philosophers to look to the future, and not to the past or present, and second, he wanted the true philosopher refrain from narrow specialization. Here is the critical selection from Beyond Good And Evil (211-212) where he spells this all out most clearly.

I insist that philosophical labourers and men of science in general should once and for all cease to be confused with philosophers.

Here, he is not distinguishing (as we often do) between philosophy and science. Rather, he is proposing to distinguish between a true philosopher and essentially everyone else working in the fields of knowledge. What is the relationship between these two types?

It may be required for the education of a philosopher that he himself has also once stood on the steps which his servants, the scientific labourers of philosophy, remains standing--have to remain standing;

A true philosopher educates himself by studying the "philosophical labourers" who have come before him, spending his formative time in the same sorts of spaces that they inhabit. However, a true philosopher also does much more during his development:

he himself must also have been critic and sceptic and dogmatist and historian, and, in addition, poet and collector and traveller and reader of riddles and moralist and seer and 'free spirit' and practically everything, so as to traverse the whole range of human values and value-feelings and to be able to gaze from the heights into every distance, from the depths into every height, from the nook-and-corner into every broad expanse with manifold eyes and a manifold conscience.

In short, the narrow education of a standard philosophical labourer must not be the true philosopher's only activity. In order to prepare for his task, he must enter into a huge range of human activities. All of this in order to see "with many eyes": a favourite descriptor of Nietzsche's for one who sees rightly.

But all these are only preconditions of his task: this task demands something different--it demands that he create values. Those philosophical labourers after the noble exemplar of Kant and Hegel have to take some great fact of evaulation; that is to say, some former assessments of value, creations of value which have become dominant and are for a while called 'truths -- and identify them and reduce them to formulas, whether in the realm of logic or of politics (morals) or of art... to subdue the entire past.

Here, the crucial distinction is defined: a philosophical labourer is so enamoured with the value-systems of the present (and the past which has produced those values) that he works tirelessly to capture, systematize and immortalize those values as timeless, objective truths. For Nietzsche, Kant and Hegel worked tirelessly (though not without "genius") to justify the way we currently think and feel. Hegel's idea that history was coming to a sort of "end" with the modern democratic state might be exemplary, here.

Few philosophers alive today take themselves to be undertaking a Kantian or Hegelian project, but we might still ask about the spirit of the standard philosophical project today. Does it aim to simply capture currently popular assessments of value, or is it fundamentally creative?

It is clear as day that much modern philosophy, explicitly devoted as it is to conceptual analysis, or the description and analysis of words and concepts as we currently use them, fails Nietzsche's test miserably. Experimental Philosophy also leaps to mind here, as a field which is explicitly devoted to discovering what people currently happen to think about various concepts. Creativity is precisely what is missing.

Actual philosophers, however, are commanders and law-givers: they say, 'thus it shall be!'... they reach for the future with a creative hand, and everything that is or has been becomes for them a means, an instrument, a hammer...

The picture is filling in: the true philosopher does not immortalize current "truths", he uses them as tools, as weapons, as means to the end of creativity. In particular, he is concerned to point out the inevitable inconsistencies, insincerities and falsehoods inherent in current value-systems so as to reduce them to rubble and begin to clear the way for new values, for new ways of thinking. But this comes at a price:

The philosopher, being necessarily a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself and had to find himself in contradiction with his today: his enemy has always been the ideal of today. Hitherto these extraordinary promoters of mankind... have found their task, their hard, unwanted, unavoidable task... in being the bad conscience of their age...

While overtly despising them, Nietzsche was fond of these little hat-tips to figures like Socrates and perhaps even Jesus Christ, persons who questioned the present and in doing so completely remade the future in their image; all the while being persecuted, censored and eventually murdered for doing so. He recognized these philosophers as essentially creative, as being driven by a will-to-power which totally remade civilizations.

In face of a world of 'modern ideas' which would like to banish everyone into a corner and a 'specialty', a philosopher, assuming there could be philosophers today, would be compelled to see the greatness of man precisely in his spaciousness and multiplicity, in his wholeness in diversity... ...are there such philosophers today? Have there not been such philosophers? Must there not be such philosophers?

This last line is, I believe, most crucial of all. Of course there are such "true philosophers". There simply must be: our culture's values are always changing, and we can often easily identify the individuals who rose up from the mob and were leading forces behind such changes. The hard fact that Nietzsche wants the modern philosopher to face is that he is not one of them. He is a "labourer", a worker bee, busily plugging away in academia, synthesizing current value-judgments so as not to appear absurd, odd, or--to use a contemporary phrase-- "counterintuitive" to his superiors and his reading public.

Nietzsche is frustrating for so many reasons. The contradictions, the lapses into absurd egomania, and above all the frustrating lack of clarity regarding what exactly he thinks a better future would look like, all of these are strong reasons to reject his thought. However, I think his particular observations here ought to tug at the intellectual conscience of all of those who seek philosophical wisdom. Narrow, self-interested, culturally detached scholarship is increasingly characteristic of our age. We refuse to see with "many eyes", adopt different perspectives, and we are thus basically shut off from the kind of creativity that Nietzsche is gesturing towards. Is this a serious problem...? Possibly.

The Sokal Hoax

2010-09-09T18:40:00.000-07:00

A few years after the famous Sokal Hoax was perpetrated, Paul Boghossian wrote an article entitled "What The Sokal Hoax Ought To Teach Us":

First, that dubiously coherent relativistic views about the concepts of truth and evidence really have gained wide acceptance within the contemporary academy... Second, that this has had precisely the sorts of pernicious consequence for standards of scholarship and intellectual responsibility that one would expect it to have.

The first sentiment is echoed endlessly in public debates about the humanities, about science, and about the proper interaction between the two spheres of thought. One can hardly turn around in this arena without encountering a bold denunciation of the humanities for being "relativist" or "post-modernist", the implication being that scholars in the humanities are hopelessly naive and are best left floundering in the wake of those of us who have both of our feet firmly planted on board the U.S.S. Science¹.

Here's an interesting thought-experiment: what would a reverse Sokal Hoax look like?

Well, here's one way it could go. A piece would have to be submitted to a scholarly scientific journal, magazine or other public forum with an editorial staff. It would have to be contain many ideas which have been conclusively proven wrong by scholars in the Humanities, yet it would pass through the editors' filter and get published, presumably because the editors themselves would be so hopelessly uneducated in such basic results that they would publish the piece.

Hey, do you want to know the real "kicker" of this thought experiment? The reverse Sokal hoax happens all the time. How often do we see public pseudo-intellectuals parading certain ideas around (for example, that "falsifiability" is the defining characteristic of hypotheses in the sciences, that science has progressed uniformly throughout Western history, that natural selection has "goals" or makes "progress", that there is such a thing as direct, unmediated perception of a mind-independent reality) which are at least extremely unpopular in Philosophy and History departments, if not downright rejected unanimously?

We are surrounded by reverse Sokal Hoaxes, yet we barely even notice them as such. Furthermore, those of us in the Humanities certainly don't use them to periodically adopt a pretentious air of supreme epistemic authority over the sciences, nor do we consistently accuse science writing of being degenerate and hopelessly out of touch with the truth. To do these things would be unprofessional, arrogant and unfair to countless good science writers and scientists alike.

Is it really so much to ask that the Humanities be treated with the same respect?

----
¹ Here are a few fun tricks to play on people who say these kinds of things:

Ask them to name a "postmodernist relativist" and to give a basic outline of that thinker's views.
Ask them to specify which kinds of study fall under the label "The Humanities".
Ask them how an obscure, backwater journal that no-one outside of certain isolated lit-theory circles had even heard of is representative of "standards of scholarship and intellectual responsibility" in the humanities.

The answers will be, respectively:

1: Wrong,
2: Wrong, and
3: You might as well stare out the window and quietly hum "Hava Nagila" during this answer.

The Distortions of Ethical Theory

2010-09-08T21:03:00.000-07:00

I often see people present reasons for why consequentialism is wrong. Their consequentalist opponents often reply by citing some imaginary case or another in which someone clearly did the right thing, and where it seems clear that they did the right thing because their action had good consequences. Does this result support consequentialism?

Consider the choice between saving one human life and saving five lives. Which is the right choice to make? Well, all other things being equal, we ought to save five. This is as clear as daylight. And it is clear that the relevant difference between the choices lies in their consequences: one choice produces a world with four more living human beings than the other.

What mad, twisted theoretical gymnastics might so many philosophers be saved if they would recognize that this result provides no substantive support for consequentialism. For it is one thing to say, in a given situation, that consequences matter. It is another thing entirely to say that consequences are the only things that matter for all possible ethical decision or deliberation. The former claim is a sensible recognition of the facts. The latter claim is the rather absurd heart of consequentialist theory, and in no way follows from the former.

We might as well march out to a beach, pick up a stone, discover that it is white, decide that all stones must be white, and noisily declare that we are correct because we can see other white stones around us. In real life, this form of reasoning is a sign of insanity, in moral philosophy it is almost normal.

So it is with all ethical theory. We are tempted by striking examples to generalize towards all-encompassing, monolithic systems which might deliver answers to all ethical problems. We are beings with highly diverse, incommensurable values that developed via the essentially non-rational, contingent, arbitrary process of history. Why would we ever think that such an unwarranted generalization was possible without tremendous loss?

Winging It

2010-08-28T18:42:00.000-07:00

In "Him or Me" (American Philosophical Quarterly, 1986), Joseph Beatty poses the following problem:

I have in mind a rescue situation in which a) the death of one person is certain, b) there are two agents, both "innocent", c) no further considerations of greater or lesser utility, potential/actual personhood are relevant, d) either one or the other may be saved but not both, e) I am one of the two. Whose life ought, morally ought, I save, his or my own?

It is necessary to pause and think about this: does the fact that it is my life justify my saving it? Even if there is nothing importantly different between the two lives, does the fact that I am me justify abandoning him? In short, is there magic in the pronoun "my"?

Perhaps no-one has answered this question with a more resounding "no" than Immanuel Kant, who thought that the impulse to see oneself as more important than others was the wellspring of evil. While I won't force you to read Kant here, it will be instructive to go over his derivation of what he called the "supreme principle" of morality, or the Formula of Humanity:

What makes us human persons (rational beings) is only our capacity to set goals, to pursue ends.
You must value this capacity because it is a precondition for your very existence as an acting person. If you didn't, you wouldn't act, as you would have no motivation to pursue your goals.
Furthermore, all other rational persons must value their humanity on exactly the same grounds.
Therefore, you have no reason to value your humanity any more or less than anyone else's. Since there are literally no other grounds on which to value or respect humanity, you must recognize that each rational person is objectively valuable in precisely the same way. (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:429, liberally paraphrased)

When I teach this argument, I ask students to imagine that they are a goldsmith. So... imagine you're a goldsmith. A customer selects two bars of gold. You measure and weigh them, and discover that the bars have essentially the same mass, shape, composition and luminosity. There is almost no way to tell them apart, save for some extremely minor surface irregularities. According to the current price of gold, Bar 1 is worth $500. What prices might you reasonably offer the customer?

Unanimously, 1st-year students initially cannot imagine saying anything other than "$500". They probe and pry, asking about possible differences in atomic structure, in authenticity, etc. But I insist that no such differences exist, and not once in four years has a student come up with a scenario which changes the price of Bar 2. It's $500.

This is the state of mind that Kant needs us to be in in order for his derivation to work. We need to conceive of "value" in a very specific way: as determined by properties. He wants us to ask what property our humanity could possibly have which is not shared by all other human beings. He knows that since we cannot find such a property, since we are all basically just rational, goal-setting creatures, we will have no grounds to valuing our own humanity more than the humanity of another.

One question never fails to stop my students dead in their tracks:

"What if you made Bar 2?"

The lesson here is simple: even if two things are basically identical in their properties, individual human beings can still have differing relations to them. Most importantly, we can be creators, sustainers, even (in the case of living things) promoters of individual flourishing. We form these relational attachments to particular objects, plants, animals and persons that we simply cannot (for obvious reasons) form to all such things.

Why might I reasonably value my life more than another human life with all the same relevant properties? Because my life is mine. Not in the narrow economic sense of ownership, but in the sense that I have spent much of my time on this planet creating, sustaining and (hopefully) promoting the flourishing of my own human existence. These relations are the same sorts of relations I have to my children, my spouse, my family, my friends, and to my particular artistic/athletic/entrepreneurial/intellectual achievements. These are the relations that create the magic in the pronoun "my".

This, then, is an absolutely foundational fault-line in moral thought, between those who can see moral differences only in objectively recognizable properties, and those who wish to add that differences in relations matter. The fault-line here is quite significant, for one important difference between properties and relations is that properties are (in principle) objectively specifiable, whereas relations are irreducibly first-personal (or indexical). The truth of the statement "Julia weighs eighty pounds" does not depend on the identity of the speaker, but the statement "Julia is my daughter" is only true if spoken by one of Julia's parents. If we take relations seriously as sources of value, Julia's value is therefore at least partially relative, because she will be more valuable to her parents than to a total stranger, and there will be no way to decide who is "right" about how valuable she is.

If the reader may accept a playful analogy, consider the case of modern particle physics, which I will try very hard not to horribly misrepresent. As I understand things, experimental data suggests that we can say nothing about certain properties of very small objects until an observer attempts to measure them. In short, everything we can say about their ultimate nature at a given time is fixed by a relation, not by any prior properties or states. Many reject this conclusion and continue the valiant search for a unifying theory of quantum reality which explains the puzzling data via objectively determinate variables. Others cheerfully accept this counter-intuitive result and just keep plugging away, calculating data, refining models and remaining untroubled by the question of what is "really there".

If we accept, as I believe we must, that value arises from irreducibly first-personal and particular relations, then we are like those cheerful, agnostic particle physicists. We must accept that there may be no final, objectively specifiable answer to questions of goodness or value, and that our best strategy in thinking about how to answer such questions is to, well, wing it.

The Lessons of Natural Selection

2010-08-18T11:17:00.000-07:00

An organism's physiology and behaviour are dictated largely by its genes. And those genes are merely repositories of information written in a surprisingly similar manner to the one that computer scientists have devised for the storage and transmission of other information.

The Economist, 1999, 97

We continue to seek some universal and changeless bedrock for our common humanity. What is all the more remarkable is that we do so in the name of a biology remodeled on the Darwinian idea (that the characteristics of species evolve through a process of variation under natural selection) even though this biology teaches us that for no species does there exist an essence of its kind.

Tim Ingold, Against Human Nature

I am no biologist, but I do have some familiarity with contemporary literature on natural selection. These observations strike me as important.

While much ink is spilled over the scope of broadly Darwinian explanations, it strikes me that too many people ignore just how profoundly weak the theory is, in the sense that it says so very little. Whether we are speaking about the development of biological species, or about the development of cultural ideas, institutions or practises, the core idea of natural selection provides no general laws for determining why some replicating forms die out and others flourish. Any process of evolution, cultural or biological, is massively context-dependent.

Compare physics, where "mass attracts mass" is a true generalization, holding for all known times and places, regardless of particular context. Not so for evolution. The tiniest change in either an organism's ecology or its internal structure can have a profound effect on whether a given trait increases fitness.

While this does not mean (as Jerry Fodor thinks) that the concept of natural selection cannot help to explain, retrospectively, the development of certain phenotypes, it does mean that most such explanations teeter on the edge of uninformative tautologies: X survived because it survived. The true lesson here is so hard to swallow that perfectly respectable thinkers cannot bring themselves to adopt it: there is no blueprint, no global plan, and history in general is perhaps best described as "one damn thing after another".

Even today, we continue to believe that "human nature" is "coded" in our genes--in other words, that you can "read" a genotype off a phenotype--and that this "information" is transmitted from generation to generation, maintaining a kind of human essence. We believe that genes direct our bodies to be transformed in certain ways, when this language is (according to a majority of philosophers of biology) a false projection of intentional behaviour on to mechanisms that are doing nothing but attracting and repelling certain amino acids*. Genes no more "instruct" a person to become tall than a cold crocodile's nest "instructs" the baby croc to become a female, or than a fire "tells" smoke to rise. There are causes and there are effects, and genetic causes help to regularly produce certain kinds of effects (i.e. certain kinds of phenotypes) but there is no determinate blueprint, no essential plan, no direction.

The drive to discover a "human nature" which is "coded" in our genes is profoundly anti-Darwinian. Darwin was not a thinker who enabled us to say more about ourselves. If anything, a good post-Darwinian ought to be deeply humbled by just how little there is left to say.

----

* The theory of "teleosemantics" represents the last and best hope for rescuing the idea that genes "instruct" or "direct" development in ways that other causal forces (such as environment and epigenetic forces) do not. The theory is interesting and worth looking into, but it is by no means an established or accepted one, and as such we currently have no license to speak confidently about genes in this way.

Griffiths, Paul, (2001) "Genetic Information", Philosophy of Science. (2002)
Ingold, Tim, "Against Human Nature" in Evolutionary Epistemology, Language and Culture (2006)
Maynard Smith, J. (2000). “The concept of information in biology.” Philosophy of Science 67(2): 177-194.

Marriage

2010-08-12T11:35:00.000-07:00

That there will be romantic human companionship and that society in general must take an interest in the forms it takes: these are certainties. Too often, however, ethical-philosophical discussions about marriage pretend that it is a fixed concept, an "institution" which can be argued for and against. In fact, we are dealing with an essentially open-ended and evolving idea, with what Alasdair MacIntyre (1973) called an "essentially contestable concept". The task is therefore not to argue for or against "Marriage", but rather to decide what form it ought to take, both in general and in our particular lives.

Only those suffering from an infantile individualism will object to the fact that society in general wants to define and regulate family structure. Families produce and socialize people, the very fabric of society itself. Therefore, families are necessarily a foundational concern. If China, for example, had not been able to use the binding institution of marriage to regulate childbirth in 1979, the country might easily have been decimated by a demographic time-bomb.

From a more personal perspective, we must therefore recognize that the pressure to marry will always exist, and that if we are younger and unmarried that this pressure will often feel like an objectionable attack on our liberty. Yet, we must pause and consider that those around us (having fed, nurtured and socialized us, at enormous cost to their own liberty) will generally want us to repeat their culture-sustaining acts and start families of our own. We ourselves depend upon the healthy persistence of our societies for the very meaning of our lives. One fact about healthy families is that they require, amongst many other things, long-term, stable commitment to the overall project. It is therefore unreasonable to expect that those around us will be ultimately satisfied with casual, non-binding relationships. They will want some assurance that our serious romantic projects will last, especially if they are to invest further time and resources into helping sustain them.

None of this implies that the idea of marriage must be tied to its religious, sexist or homophobic roots. It simply means that whatever form we decide to give to the institution, it will almost certainly have to be legally binding in some fashion.

To some, this alone is enough to reject marriage as an institution, to decide to never participate in it. Especially given some well-known divorce statistics, the risk just seems like too much. Dan Moller has offered the following representative argument:

(a) most of us view the prospect of being married in the absence of mutual love with great antipathy; (b) the mutual love between us and our spouse existing at the inception of our marriage may very well fail to persist; and hence (c) when we marry we are putting ourselves in the position of quite possibly ending up in a loveless marriage of the sort we acknowledge to be undesirable, and this is a mistake. (Moller 2003, "An Argument Against Marriage")

This perspective involves two radical mistakes. It assumes that:

Love's "failure to persist" is just something that happens to us, rather than something we cause to happen, and that
General sociological facts about the prevalence of divorce can be reliably transplanted into the decision-making of particular individuals.

We cannot fault a naive person for thinking (1), for it is embodied in countless Hollywood-style myths about the way love develops and the way good marriages proceed. Rarely do movies or popular novels depict the kind of delicate sacrifice and renewal that successful married couples consistently describe as essential to their relationships. Rather, marital bliss is shown to occur because of brute attraction plus "compatibility" or "fit". If people change or if the brute attraction wears off, love is gone.

Against this conception, we must remember that marriage is in part a commitment to maintain and sustain love, not simply to exist together and hope it holds out. Yet, some may still be frightened by divorce rates and think that in spite of their efforts, their marriages will fail. What can we say to them?

Well, it turns out that we can say rather a lot. In fact, (2) is even more mistaken than (1). It would of course be foolish to believe, for example, that a diabetes rate of 50% in a given population entails that a particular member of that population is 50% likely to develop diabetes. Any responsible medical specialist would instead say that not only is each person different, but that each person can choose to minimize their risk in various important ways.

Fifty percent of marriages fail. Why are we tempted to believe that this entails that a particular marriage, even our own marriage, stands or falls on the flip of a coin? The logical gulf between these two ideas is quite demanding: it requires that we establish a set of dominant causes for failed marriages in general and then establish that the particular marriage in question will be subject to precisely those causes. Yet, no such definitive list of causes is likely to be forthcoming, and even if it were, only a tiny minority of particular cases would be subject to all or even most of them. Every situation contains its own particular factors which must be weighed and considered by the people who inhabit it.

Interestingly, (1) and (2) share a common denominator: the reduction of human beings to passive objects, analogous to objects studied in physics. In (1), people are simply objects who can "fit" (or fail to fit) together, producing (or destroying) love. The active, existential role in creating love is totally ignored. Similarly, in (2), we encounter the idea that objective, statistical data about social patterns in general can be a reliable predictor of how a particular person's life will go. In both (1) and (2), the particular individual is annihilated and replaced with a false idealization. Such are the mistakes encouraged by a society increasingly enamoured with the idea that "science" (sociological, psychological, Darwinian or otherwise) ought to play a central role in determining the values and decisions of its members.

A final, speculative note: I would wager that this sense of oneself as helpless, as helplessly buffeted around by objective facts (about our psychology, about society in general, about whether brute desire or "fit" occurs, about our family history, about what our evolutionary ancestors did) correlates with failed marriage. I am no expert, but I do believe that the only thing that guarantees a loss of love is one's inability to take final responsibility for love itself.

-------

MacIntyre, Alasdair., "The Essential Contestability of Some Social Concepts", Ethics, Vol.84, No.1, (October 1973), pp.1-9

Moller, Dan, 2003, “An Argument Against Marriage,” Philosophy 78(1): 79-91.

Rock N' Roll

2010-08-11T12:09:00.000-07:00

I've just come back from an extremely successful tour with my band. I sat on the couch in the plush green room of a large German venue a few days ago and looked around me at the hundreds of band names scrawled on the wall. A few I recognized, and a few were even downright legendary, but the vast majority were bands I'd never heard of.

Much is written about what success does to a band's music, but few people know that success has an equally stultifying effect on the very identity of a band. As it is with all forms of entrepreneurial activity, success brings more responsibility, more investments, more requirements. Real freedom comes only when the success is improbably astronomical and the performers can live comfortably without any real time or investment. As it is with society in general, such people comprise a miniscule portion of the overall working population. The rest are left to simply deal with it.

Perhaps even more troubling is the social isolation that musical success brings. Increasing pressure to tour destroys a performer's relationships at home. Countless shows destroy their energy, and it becomes more and more difficult to have the kind of enthusiasm and openness that real interaction with people on the road requires.

My own group has seen these things happen to us. Things we never would have dreamed of (buying expensive gear, hiring a driver, getting a very large tour bus, etc.) now loom inevitably on the horizon, because the logistics of such things are essentially inescapable. We are still notable for our willingness to wade into huge crowds of people and simply make friends, but this happens less and less as our time is consumed with driving, planning, taking care of innumerable band-related tasks, and staying in touch with loved ones back home. Even internally, the drinking/playing/singing parties we used to have while driving from show to show are now replaced by sullen attempts to get as much sleep in the van as possible. The casual interactions of band-mates have turned into terse, businesslike transactions between business associates.

As I sat in that plush green room, surrounded by an ocean of band names (many accompanied by swaggering, blustering proclamations of musical superiority and sexual prowess) I thought about what really drives most of us in this business. I thought about the emptiness and futility of being an artist when what you really crave is attention and power. About what happens to anyone when their original reasons for engaging in something become utterly drowned in a sea of superficial, financial or prudential considerations.

I can say with utter certainty that when musical acts get big, they are uprooted, no longer embedded in a community but rather engaged in a game of global conquest. No matter how much money they spend trying to convince you otherwise, they are not artists in any real sense but rather a group of cultural conquistadors.

The beauty of certain forms of music (folk/roots, sometimes punk, sometimes blues) is that when they are properly embedded in a community, they can transcend this problem. This embeddedness is what people are groping towards when they speak of wanting to create "a scene" in a city or area. Yet, the very logic of success itself carries artists away from the "scene", away from this initial beauty, this first flowering of communal creation.

My amplifier broke before a show, and I asked the guitar player of the famous band we were playing with if I could use his. He said no. He said that his amp was extremely expensive and that he couldn't risk someone else using it. There, right there, is the problem.

Two Moralities

2010-08-01T08:16:00.000-07:00

When we think about our moral lives, about the times when we are forced to consider our actions and character in normative terms, we often encounter two radically different ways of thinking. I will call these public and private morality. The more I think about this, the more I believe that the reconciliation of the two is a central and incredibly difficult task facing us all. (I think that this was what I was trying to do with An Ethics of Honour.)

Public morality is general and abstract, private morality is particular and concrete. Taking the recycling out is (usually) an act of public morality, for it is motivated by a concern for the environment "in general", people we will never meet, or even people who are not yet even born. Caring for a sick child is an act of private morality. It is motivated by a particular concern for a particular person.

My labels "public" and "private" do not thus refer to any particular locations of moral activity, rather they designate certain forms of moral motivation. We may open a door for a disabled person in a crowded area: this is quintessentially private moral behaviour. Conversely, we may privately scold our children for stealing from the local store: this nonetheless is public morality at work, for it is motivated by a general concern for a particular principle: do not steal.

Personal experience has only reinforced my inherent distrust for those ruled by public morality. It would be rash to declare that all acts of public morality are mistaken or wrong, but it is so often the case that those focused on abstract, formal principles cause enormous difficulties for others. For example, I have recently worked with a person who is profoundly bad at actually caring for and maintaining relationships with those close to him, but who delights in informing others that, for example, they are using offensive language.

There is so much to say about these two kinds of thinking, but I would start by noting that while private morality nearly always invovles effort and dedication on our part, public morality is (often) comically easy. The gulf between reminding someone of certain abstract requirements and actually caring for and protecting their flourishing is simply vast.

This is not just in terms of physical effort: adhering to a list of rationally devised moral principles requires little to no cognitive effort. Simply run a potential action through the filter, if it passes, you may perform it. Private morality, on the other hand, requires a delicate sensitivity to the particular needs of particular people, needs which change from person to person.

Second, it may well be that public morality is parasitic upon private morality. I mean to suggest that unless the particular needs of particular people mean something to us, it is hard to see why we should even be moved to develop universal principles in the first place. Kant himself began his proof for the second formulation of the Categorical Imperative with the premise that we all care about our own ends. Thus, even the most abstract, formal, public moral principle ever devised could not be demonstrated without prior acceptance of a most private consideration.

Third, it strikes me that many so-called moral "dilemmas" can be fruitfully described as conflicts between public and private morality. Kant famously prohibited us from lying, no matter how difficult the situation, yet his reasoning seems absurd in the face of its most powerful counterexample: you have Jews hidden in your attic and Nazis knock at the door. We might initially think that this is simply a conflict between two public principles: do not lie and do not cause the deaths of innocents. Yet, it is undeniable that much of the force of the conflict arises when we think about having those particular people in our attic and how we would feel about violating that particular relationship of care. Such private considerations cannot be reduced to bare public principles.

Finally, it is certain that the public mode of thinking developed last in human cultural evolution, and that only in recent millennia has it sought to replace private morality. Earlier modes of thinking based on concrete ties of kinship and local tradition have found a new rival, one based on a broader, more reflective and (apparently) universal consciousness. Modern moral philosophy has enthusiastically embraced public moral thought, attempting at nearly every step to formalize, systematize and universalize moral thinking. Yet, before it can do this, it must show us why public morality is in fact superior to private morality, why our particular everyday considerations ought to be replaced by this new type of consciousness.

Many seem to have grasped at such a conclusion, often by arguing that the essence of the moral lies precisely in its universality and generality (see RM Hare, for example). Yet, such writers often find themselves forced into uncomfortable absurdities, such as the position that caring for a child is a morally neutral (non-moral) activity. That such people do not see such conclusions as troubling is itself a troubling sign.

Unmasking and Action

2010-07-16T00:05:00.000-07:00

"Depth Psychology", as embodied in Freud, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and (it is often claimed) certain great Russian novelists, has unmasking as its foundational activity. In psychology, to unmask an agent's action is to purportedly show that the action was not performed for the reasons that the agent believes or affirms.

Alasdair MacIntyre has called unmasking a "fundamentally modern" practice, and locates it in a diverse range of thinkers, from Marx's accusations of "false consciousness" to Derrida's "deconstructionism". Its function can be as strong as to accuse a person or group of naked hypocrisy, or it can simply work to expose complexities in human activity where people only saw simplicity. Nonetheless, its implication is always clear: a person may take themselves to be acting for a certain reason, but in actual fact they are acting for a different, contrary reason. We are thus handling a powerful tool, and like all powerful tools, we must both understand the source of its power and how to use it responsibly.

There are uncontroversial cases where agents can come to understand "deeper" motives for action, motives which seem contrary to those they would have initially affirmed. Take, for example, a person who finds herself eating far too much unhealthy food during a long evening on the couch. On simple reflection, she may think that they were unusually hungry and that they simply chose to eat for that reason. Yet, their spouse may point out that they seem to engage in this activity every Thursday evening, as soon as a certain anxiety-provoking crime-solving show comes on the television. The agent may reflect on this (and on other experiences) and come to understand that experiences of tension and fear drive her to over-eat. This, indeed, is why she was eating, even though she would not have affirmed or believed that they were acting for this reason. The unmasking is complete.

However, the simple and idealized conditions which obtain in this example and which allow us to make this relatively uncontroversial diagnosis rarely obtain in the more important and interesting cases of psychological unmasking. In our case, the agent comes to understand that, counterfactually, simply being quite hungry does not generally provoke overeating. On many occasions, she has been quite hungry and not overeaten in this way. She understands that, rather, her behaviour is strongly correlated with another experience: that of fear and anxiety, and she (or anyoine else, for that matter) can reliably judge that, counterfactually, she would tend to overeat in response to future fear and anxiety. We thus have met several conditions:

(1) The agent affirms that she A's because of situation/experience X
(2) We know that the agent rarely A's in response to situation/experience X.
(3) We know that the agent reliably A's in response to situation/experience Y
(4) X and Y are clearly distinct situations or experiences (hunger vs. fear).

By contrast, take an early example of unmasking from Schopenhauer, who believes that romantic inclinations are, in actual fact, expressions of the drive to reproduce:

Here then, as in the case of all instinct, truth assumes the form of delusion, in order to act on the will. It is a voluptuous delusion which leads a man to believe that he will find greater pleasure in the arms of a woman whose beauty appeals to him than in those of any other, or which, exclusively directed to a particular individual, firmly convinces him that her possession will afford him boundless happiness…The character of instinct is here so completely present, namely an action as though in accordance with the conception of an end and yet entirely without such a conception, that whoever is urged by that delusion often abhors it and would like to prevent the end, procreation, which alone guides it… (WWR II, 540)

Do any of our conditions obtain in this situation? The man in this situation, if asked why he is pursuing a particular woman, will affirm that he believes she will afford him "boundless happiness". The unmasker affirms, rather, that the end at which the man truly aims is "procreation". If our above conditions obtained in this situation, we would expect at least two things to be true:

The man will rarely pursue a woman in instances when he believes that she will afford him boundless happiness, and
The man will in fact reliably pursue a woman when he believes that she affords him a good chance to procreate.

Such a man is in fact almost unimaginable and certainly deranged. The motivational force of the belief: [that a romantic relationship with a given person will be accompanied by boundless happiness] is surely very difficult to resist. It is very difficult to see how a person could, all other things being equal, rarely respond to it. It is even more difficult to see how a person could be motivated to pursue the deep complexities of an adult romance simply because he is in the presence of someone who might afford him a chance to reproduce. Such a man would constantly be in the grip of romantic inclinations: each single woman of child-bearing age he met would inspire feelings of romantic tenderness.

Since Schopenhauer provides no examples of such individuals, and since he explicitly states that the man in question might even "abhor" the possibility of reproduction, we must conclude that his attempt to unmask romantic feelings as "really just" expressions of the reproductive drive fails miserably on simple logical terms.

Yet, such reductive explanations abound in our current explanatory discourse, and I believe that most of us rarely stop to examine their soundness in this way. To many of us, the logic of the following (more complex) account of heterosexual male romantic behaviour seems perfectly sound:

Modern men take themselves to be selecting a mate because they find her (for example) beautiful, kind and socially stimulating. In our evolutionary past, as a matter of contingent fact, women with traits who provoked these sorts of judgments were more likely to be fertile and nurturing. Men who made this association (i.e. those who found fertility/nurturing-correlated traits to be beautiful and stimulating)were thus more likely to successfully produce healthy children, and thus passed on thier tendency to make this association to their male children via simple heritability. Therefore, while most men take their romantic behaviour to aim at securing a beautiful, kind and stimulating female partner, they are actually seeking a fertile and nurturing female partner.

Sadly, this all-too-familiar sort of account is fraught with precisely the kinds of logical errors that doom Schopenhauer's reductive unmasking of romantic behaviour. Again, when a man finds a woman socially stimulating, kind and beautiful, he reliably pursues her. It is simply not the case that men in general fail to pursue women they make such judgments about. Furthermore, men (and women) are constantly confronted with potential partners who are both likely to be fertile and appear to be nurturing, yet they nearly always refrain from pursuing such people in any romantic sense. In what sense, then, do the attributes of fertility and child-nurturing count as the "real" reasons or motivations for the behaviour?

The responsible thing to say, here, is that heterosexual men pursue women because they find them beautiful, kind and socially stimulating, and that these judgments are (variously and often distantly) influenced by a host of factors, some bio-evolutionary, some socio-evolutionary, some particular to his situation. We thus preserve the explanatory power of various macro-level theories while refraining from unmasking the man's behaviour as "really" directed at some comically simple end.

In this way, evolutionary explanations can play a certain restricted role in describing general social behaviour. When properly wedded to an account of cultural evolution and an account of the particular social situation under discussion, human action can indeed be cast in various interesting and informative lights. But when such accounts seek to replace the sincere, common-sense accounts of action offered by agents themselves, the theorist assumes an extremely heavy burden of demonstration, one which is extremely unlikely to be met.

The more one delves into the Great Unmaskers, the more one encounters this uncomfortable problem. For Nietzsche, the Will To Power is the true wellspring of all action (no matter how apparently beneficent or self-abnegating). For Freud, the sexual drive and its repression lies at the heart of all neurotic behaviour and much everyday behaviour, no matter how apparently devoid of sexual context it is. And, finally, for Marx, most human action is in fact a response to one's membership in one of two economic strata, no matter how apparently devoid of economic considerations the behaviour in question appears to be.

Taken as cautious contributions to our collection of explanatory tools, such theories are incredibly valuable. Taken as final theories of action which are to replace everyday psychology, they are failures.

Skepticism

2010-06-30T09:17:00.000-07:00

This blog used to be called "the diary of a skeptic". However, I've come to realize that this label, skeptic, has connotations that I don't want this tiny corner of the internet to be associated with.

I have until recently been blissfully unaware that the "skeptical" movement. It is essentially composed of people who selectively target certain bizarre "fringe" beliefs (UFOs, ghosts, etc), certain not-so-fringe beliefs (creationism, global warming denial) and then immediately switch off their skeptical lights as soon as "science" or "reason" are on the table.

This form of a skeptic is an intellectual coward, plain and simple. They take enormous satisfaction in having refuted the claims of paranormals and UFO enthusiasts, despite the fact that this is about as easy as showing a 4 year-old why Santa Claus can't exist. Then, The God Delusion firmly in hand, they march up to any creationist, religious believer or mystic they can find and demand that they listen to Science and Reason, even though they can't tell us why "Science" counts as a singular thing that issues coherent decrees, even though they can't tell us why "Science" has superior epistemic credibility, and even though they have no idea what Reason actually is.

One wonders what these people think they are accomplishing. Work is done in the sciences. Results are published. So far, so good. Then, a group of people... what, exactly? Re-publish the results in different, glossier magazines, taking particular care to note that the results imply that the earth is more than 4,000 years old?

I always think of Hume at times like this, and I am never able to forget his troubling passage at the end of book one of the Treatise on Human Nature, written after he has subjected all of our beliefs to the most harsh, uncompromising lens possible. He thinks about his task:

Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap’d ship-wreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances. My memory of past errors and perplexities, makes me diffident for the future. The wretched condition, weakness, and disorder of the faculties, I must employ in my enquiries, encrease my apprehensions. And the impossibility of amending or correcting these faculties, reduces me almost to despair, and makes me resolve to perish on the barren rock, on which I am at present, rather than venture myself upon that boundless ocean, which runs out into immensity.(THN, 1.4.7)

Friend: you gotta go there first. Then you gotta find your way back. That's skepticism. I do hope that one day we rediscover the meaning of this word.

Defining Terms

2010-06-24T15:48:00.000-07:00

For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

The gift--and the curse--left to us by Wittgenstein is the reminder that many words do not admit of strict definitions and that their meanings are best understood by examining their use. We need not accept a full-blown conventionalism about meaning to accept the more obvious lesson here: Wittgenstein was clearly right, particularly in the case of popular philosophical terms. His resulting pessimism about our usual academic quarrels is something we must grapple with.

The problem becomes difficult when we realize that the majority of philosophy today is structured around answering questions of this form:

"Is {A} {B}-ism acceptable?"

Where {A} is some general field of philosophical study constituted by some definite problems, (Ethics: "How shall we live?", Metaphysics: "What is there?"); and {B} is some broad answer or approach to those problems, like "internalism", "naturalism" or "accommodationism".

The debates can spiral into nested complexity. I don't need to Google the paper "Is Metaphysical Naturalism Compatible With Ethical Internalism?" to know that it's out there, somewhere. However, such inquiry still triggers the basic Wittgensteinian problem, which arises whenever someone places an {A} and a {B} together and pretends that the terms they've referenced admit of definitions clear enough to allow a definitive answer.

"Naturalism" is just such a term. So are "religion", "science", "value", "substance", and many others.

Crucially, Wittgenstein was not making some kind of clarion call, directing us to define our terms more carefully. Rather, he was pointing out that such terms are simply used in certain ways and that definitions are not forthcoming. When this kind of problem arises, the modern philosopher's first instinct is to make distinctions (as in the popularly cited "methdological naturalism" and "ontological naturalism") in the hope that this will clarify the issue. They are often mistaken in thinking that this helps at all, for more devastating problems will always lurk beneath such distinctions.

For example, in this case, the inevitable reference to "science" made by both kinds of naturalism totally undermines their clarity, as "science" in fact has no fixed method nor a fixed metaphysical orientation. "Science" is a word we apply to a particular kind of practise or orientation when we see it , just like the words "religion" and "naturalism".

The idea here is not that we cannot say anything about these words and concepts. Characterizing their use and examining how they tend to interact in a given culture is a noble and necessary pursuit. We may note, for example, that there is a certain tension in the notion of "religious science", simply because (as they now generally stand) the practices designated by those words don't really help each other out and sometimes run into conflict in particular situations.

What we may not do is say that the idea of "religious science" is necessarily incoherent, coherent, mistaken or correct. We may not divide the world of inquiry into bounded groups of people, each with their own related -ism words and each either mistaken or correct. This would be to block the possibility that those words and associated practices can evolve, that (as Rorty might have said) we may become affected by revolutionary ways of speaking and thinking, ways which might even improve our lives or our social functioning.

Passive-Aggressivity

2010-06-20T13:59:00.000-07:00

Passive-aggressivity, it turns out, is very difficult to define. It is also very difficult to say what exactly is wrong with it. I would argue that it is a kind of low-level personality disorder characterized by precisely the kind of double-mindedness I've been critiquing in recent weeks.

We have all encountered passive-aggression, both in ourselves and in others, and we know that it essentially involves having certain values or beliefs while being unable to express them honestly to others when this involves some level of conflict. Rather than directly and actively asserting their values or beliefs, a passive-aggressive person will either (1) communicate their wishes indirectly so as not to personally experience any conflict, or (2) avoid expressing their wishes at all and simply allow their repressed wishes to re-emerge in some other unconnected situation as hostility.

Central to the behaviour is the unwillingness to honestly confront a conflict of values. Hence, my upstairs neighbor, rather than directly communicate her wish that I not hold a late-night party, purposefully begins to move furniture around at 6:30 AM the following morning: she knows that I will be awoken, and she feels justified in meting out this punishment, and never once considers honestly expressing her wishes.

From Nietzschean ressentiment to Freudian repression, this kind of phenomenon has been well-documented and discussed. While such behaviour may be rational (in certain extreme situations), general passive-aggressivity entails collective social dysfunction. It is nearly impossible to imagine a society of passive-aggressives who achieve their aims, simply because such aims inevitably require the kind of sustained co-operation and trust that none of them is able to secure.

However, beyond such diagnoses of passive-aggression as instrumentally disvaluable, we might say that it reflects a deeper, categorical loss of integrity. To affirm one set of values publicly and express a contrary set privately is to be essentially disunified, to create and maintain a schism in our most essential elements.

As a traveller, I would finally note that in my experience certain cultures seem to have far higher incidences of passive-aggressivity. They tend to be more affluent and better-educated, and they tend to see the behaviour of people in other cultures as inexplicable, wild or even "crazy". Yet, much of this impression arises from the fact that people in these cultures tend not to fear interpersonal conflict as much as we do. We (in our affluent, conflict-free shells) think that serious conflicts are afoot, when all that we are seeing are authentic expressions of personal wishes, candidly delivered and honestly confronted.

In a very real sense, I believe that the authenticity, integrity and self-unification advocated by some of the most esoteric "western" thinkers is in fact already highly realized in certain other cultures. This is of course an empirical question, but I would welcome the chance to study it. Such study might reveal that the apparent gifts of affluence, education and opportunity paradoxically undermine the very integrity that is required in order to properly enjoy those gifts.

A Note on Sartre

2010-06-20T12:04:00.000-07:00

The connection to Sartrean existentialism is clear: for Sartre, we just are our forward-looking projects, our aims and goals. These are the features of us that make us more than the sum of our facts. We stand in a reflexive relationship to facts about ourselves: whenever we learn that we are, say, more prone to anger, genetically or chemically predisposed towards it, we can decide not to express this tendency or even to suppress it. This is the essence of consciousness: it stands apart from the world and determines what meaning or importance to ascribe to things.

This is the ontology of the human being given to us by Sartre, and it is a powerful rival to more pervasive deterministic models. Its power lies precisely in its ability to provide an ontological grounding for the ethical value of authenticity. If the essence of the human is in free decision and radical responsibility, then a person who abnegates responsibility by conceiving of their action as determined--by prior causes, by psychological facts, by their membership in certain identity-categories-- is pretending to be something they are not. They are quite simply making a mistake, a mistake Sartre describes as being inauthentic or existing in "Bad Faith".

Therefore, when the modern moral theorist tells us that we must hold one set of principles theoretically and live by another practically, he is advocating a life of Bad Faith:

bad faith, for it is an ethics which is ashamed of itself and does not dare speak its name. It has obscured all its goals in order to free itself from anguish. (Being and Nothingness, 544)

Theory and Practise II

2010-06-14T20:42:00.000-07:00

In Sartre's Being and Nothingness, I discover the beginnings of an argument against self-effacing moral theories, theories which tell us, in Parfit's words, to "cause ourselves to believe another theory". The theory is (roughly speaking) true "in theory" but not true "in practise".

First, we must remind ourselves that these alternate "theories" are not esoteric sets of scientific or technical beliefs but rather core components of one's life and identity. They contain the values and principles we live by, such as, for example, "I must care for my son", or "I abhor sexual assault". On just about any valid account of personal identity, these "theories" are in fact core components of our identities.

Second, we must also remind ourselves that moral theories specify, amongst other things, criteria for right action.

Third, In order to be praised or blamed now for something you did then, it must be true to say, in some sense, that you have remained the same person over this elapsed time.

The result is clear: a self-effacing moral theory is incapable of attaining one of its principal aims, namely the capacity to assign praise or blame to persons who correctly follow the theory. To see why, consider the process advocated by Parfit: a person comes to believe in utilitarian/consequentialist principles. Some of these principles lead them to believe that they ought to, in face, believe a very different set of principles. This is the right action recommended by the theory.

They (somehow) "cause themselves to believe" this other set of principles so that they might live by them. Even if we make all of the dubious assumptions about human psychology that this scenario requires, we are left with something of a paradox: even though the person has (ex hypothesi) done the right thing, they cannot be morally praised for it, because in actual fact the person who acted rightly no longer exists. In their place is a new person, one with contrary values and principles.

This sounds strange, overly dramatic or even unconvincing until we consider just what these principles are. A person who wholeheartedly believes that the happiness of all persons is of equal value is very different from a person who believes that their son or daughter's happiness is somehow special. Multiply this kind of difference over the entire set of moral values and principles and we have a new person, plain and simple. Since this is a new person, they cannot be morally responsible for the act that brought them into existence. We thus have a moral theory that generates criteria for right action but at the expense of destroying the very agency that makes such criteria necessary in the first place. This is, I believe, a very bad place for a theory to be.

You need not accept the argument to see the more general problem: moral beliefs are absolutely central to our identities, and there is thus an inherent limit in the degree of revision which a theory can require of us. It must be possible, after the theory is applied, to point to those who have applied it and say that they are responsible. The more this application changes a person, the more difficult it becomes to make this kind of judgment.

Evolutionary Psychology, again

2010-06-11T11:13:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note from the "evopsych skeptics" corner:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/08/health/08hormone.html

The new story here is that they've discovered that ovulating women experience a spike in testosterone, which makes then (a) hornier, and (b) less trusting of men. Of course they have to give us a story about how this is an evolved adaption.

As a preliminary, ask yourself what the "adaptive story" would be if only (a) were true. 9999 times out of 10,000, the "researchers" would conclude that this testosterone-spike evolved to make women more promiscuous when they are fertile, thus increasing the chances that their genes will promulgate.

But, of course, (b) is also supposed to be true, so what is the story?

"Testosterone decreases interpersonal trust and in an apparently adaptive manner... Heightened skepticism about a potential mate’s trustworthiness also makes evolutionary sense in scenarios where a father’s ongoing support is crucial for the survival of the infant,” write Ryan T. Johnson and S. Marc Breedlove of Michigan State University.

So, class, we now clearly observe that given any psychic phenomenon, there is an adaptive story for it. All we have to do is change the environmental scenario to one where infants can't survive unless both parents are around.

Yet, in another part of this ever-burgeoning field, Steven Pinker has explained modern male promiscuity via the fact that in evolutionary history, men did not need to stick around to raise the child.

So, uh, which is it, fellas?

Oh, wait, it's neither, because none of the scientists involved has actually provided evidence for their speculations about the character of our evolutionary past. Rather, the process is this: (1) observe current psychic phenomenon, (2) deduce what evolutionary history must have looked like in order to make this phenomenon an evolutionary adaption.

In Philosophy of Science, this is called "saving the hypothesis", and it is generally agreed that a research programme is in dire straits if it must resort to this tactic.

Theory and Practise

2010-06-07T12:06:00.000-07:00

Suppose there were a complete theory of value: Theory X. Given any state of affairs, this theory will tell us how valuable the state is and what features of it make it so.

Now, suppose that people who actually attempt to use this theory practically end up producing less value. That is to say, when they are confronted with choices, they attempt to use the parameters of Theory X in order to produce the best outcome, but the very fact that they use Theory X undermines the values specified by Theory X. Theory X is, to use the jargon, "self-effacing". The unhappy consequence is this: it is better if Theory X is not believed.

This problem has haunted many modern ethical theories, particularly those of the consequentialist variety. The most common solution to the self-effacement problem has been to propose "two-level" theories (RM Hare, Derek Parfit, Peter Railton), where we are to accept Theory X in a theoretical sense, but simply use our common-sense when we are actually living our lives and making practical decisions. So, for Parfit it is no objection to a theory that it is self-effacing, that it actually tells us not to believe it practically.

Existentialist thinkers tend to be virulently opposed to the idea that a thinker ought to believe one thing theoretically and another practically. For them, unity in theory and practice is of paramount importance. This theme runs right to the root of existentialist thought, as we can see from Kierkegaard's early attack on "systematic" thought:

In relation to their systems most systematizers are like a man who builds an enormous castle and lives in a shack close by; they do not even live in their own systematic buildings. But spiritually that is a decisive objection. Spiritually speaking a man must be the building in which he lives--otherwise everything is topsy-turvy (Journals).

I sense that there is something right in this line of thought, but in this particular passage Kierkegaard is undeniably vague and even slightly juvenile. In the coming weeks I want to ask whether a more nuanced and well-defined argument can be made against the idea that our lives and our theories should be kept separate. I suspect that it will come from existentialist sources, this is the school of thought for which the unity of life and thought is most important.