Neurath's Boat

Meta-reasons and subjectivism

J. L. Mackie's classic work on ethics begins by saying "there are no objective values... The statement of this thesis is likely to provoke one of three very different reactions. Some will think it not merely false but pernicious; they will see it as a threat to morality and to everything else that is worthwhile, and they will find the presenting of such a thesis in what purports to be a book on ethics paradoxical or even outrageous. Others will regard it as a trivial truth, almost too obvious to be worth mentioning, and certainly too plain to be worth much argument. Others again will say that it is meaningless or empty, that no real issue is raised by the question whether values are or are not part of the fabric of the world."

I am in Mackie's third class; I do not believe that there is a real issue here. But I do agree with Mackie when he goes on to say "precisely because there can be these three different reactions, much more needs to be said." Those who think that there are real differences do, after all, give arguments. If I am right, there must be some problem with the arguments. So I shall try to explain what's wrong with Richard's argument.

I confess that I can't see how meta-reasons are supposed to become "mere" for the subjectivist in Richard's argument. Why treat meta-reasons any differently than any other reasons? They do, after all, have consequences, just like other reasons. For example, if things are as Richard describes, and I phi, there seems to be a very good chance that I will come to regret my actions later. This is not to say that potential regret is the sole reason not to phi, only to point out that meta-reasons seem to be connected to my interests and values, just like normal reasons; defying them seems to carry the risk of my interests and values not being served, just like normal reasons.

Of course, in Richard's example, exactly how doing phi conflicts with my values is opaque to me. This is unfortunate, no doubt, but hardly unusual. Probably unconscious reasons have more influence on our behavior than conscious reasons, after all, and unconscious reasons are ipso facto also opaque to us. It is clear to me that the subjectivist is committed to thinking it would be better if one could see more clearly, and so that one should, when possible, figure out what one's unconscious motivations are, or in Richard's case figure out what it is that the meta-reasons are pointing to, but I don't see any way in which the subjectivist is committed to saying that if one can't pierce the opacity, one is required to simply ignore those reasons.

Nozick's experience machine

I have long wondered just how much Nozick's case shows, and really whether it's very convincing at all (sure, most people say they wouldn't plug in, but look at how many hours they spend playing World of Warcraft, and that's not even as good as the Experience Machine). But for some reason it had not occurred to me to ask the question Felipe De Brigard decided to ask, which he briefly describes here. It didn't occur to me even though I always mention "The Matrix" when I discuss the experience machine, and always mention how strange I find it that anyone would want to leave the matrix given the setup in the movie. The results are what I think I would have expected, though that's what we always think when we see experimental results.
Technorati Tags: ethics, hedonism, utilitarianism, Nozick, Matrix

I shouldn't really be surprised

Nietzsche tells us that our central motivation is to exercise our power.  Of course, Nietzsche had a more sophisticated understanding of power than many; generosity can be a display of power.  So this interesting study is perfectly comprehensible on a Nietzschean view.

I suppose it may also give some insight into an unusual friend of mine.  It is fiercely difficult to get him to split the cost of any shared meal or outing; he will go to great lengths to pay for everyone himself.  Clearly he's ruthlessly exploiting his friends for his own pleasure.  I wish I had enough money to do that (actually, I do tend to be pretty generous when I'm feeling financially secure, but sadly that hasn't been the case for a while).

Tufts colloquia

On Friday, I attended a talk by Claire Finkelstein on contracts under coercion.  I've been trying to attend a lot of colloquia recently, as they can be a source of ideas and it seems to be a good thing to be getting out and talking to other philosophers.  Discussion at this one was spirited.

Finkelstein's argument centered around an example; a robber threatens to kill me unless I can pay him, and I have no money on me, so I promise I will get the money and pay him tomorrow.  Obviously, this is of no value unless the robber actually believes I will pay, so in order for this move to save my life, I must somehow bring it about that the robber believes this.  It would thus be very much in my interest if it were possible for me to call on some external enforcement mechanism, to sign a guarantee of some sort which, say, the state would compel me to honor.

Of course, as the law stands now, I could not do such a thing; contracts entered into under coercion are unenforceable.  And so my situation is hopeless; I can't provide the money now, and my promises to do so in the future are not credible, so the robber will shoot me.  It seems that I should wish that the law did not take this stance on coerced contracts.

Finkelstein supposes that the reason we do not enforce coerced contracts is that we wish to discourage people from engaging in coercion, by reducing the rewards, but she notes that this not only imposes a cost on the one engaged in coercion (who is denied access to some rewards) but also on the victim (who is denied the possibility of a less bad escape).  She considers it quite unfair to impose this further cost on the victim, and so suggests that we really ought to be increasing the penalty to the robber in other ways (since there are always other ways to ramp up punishment), finding ways that don't impose a cost on the victim.  So she argues that coerced contracts should be enforced.

Endless complications and debate arose, and my own general reaction was that, as usual, sorting through the strained and tortured logic of consent and voluntary action and rationality reinforced my fondness for utilitarianism.  It may be hard to figure out what will produce the best outcome, and sometimes the advice is unpleasant, but other approaches seem to provide even sillier results, when they provide any results at all.

At the dinner after the talk, I was pointed toward a presentation of an extraordinary view.  Finkelstein told us that Richard Posner had argued that criminal activity in general could be seen as all involving bypassing of efficient market mechanisms, and so that the interest of the state in enforcing criminal law could be seen as entirely concerned with protecting the market.  He actually suggests in one paper that even rape fits this model; it can be seen as bypassing implicit markets in dating.

Posner considers the possibility that the rapist may want non-consensual sex specifically, something in which there is not (and cannot be) a market, and on that issue Finkelstein was actually slightly unfair to him; she reported him as saying that it was too hard to distinguish such cases from other cases of rape, so although the state had no interest in discouraging rapes of that form as such, they should still as a practical matter be punished like other rapes.

In fact, Posner isn't quite that silly in the paper, though I can see where Finkelstein gets that impression.  He does suggest the approach Finkelstein reported, but he also allows that there are situations where people's interests are in conflict, where there is no consensual market solution to the conflict.  He does not actually say the state has no interest in such cases; he suggests that when leaving it up to the people involved to resolve it without interference produces decreased utility, that also constitutes a form of inefficiency, and he explicitly puts rape in this category.  However, this seems to undermine Posner's central point, since it concedes that bypassing market mechanisms isn't really the only way to go wrong.  Perhaps Finkelstein was charitably seeking a more consistent interpretation of Posner.

The selfish pose

Wow, it has been a long time since I've posted anything.  I've been teaching an ethics class this fall, and at the moment I'm discussing ethical egoism with my students.  As a result, I've been thinking about why people advocate selfishness.  Certainly people can behave selfishly just because they are selfish, but what would make someone advocate everyone being selfish?  Surely a truly selfish person wouldn't want others to be selfish.

Part of the reason no doubt is that the selfish person wishes his behavior to appear normal and acceptable, but I think that is not the whole story, or even the most important part of it.  Rather, I suspect the major reason is that we have come to associate selfishness with cleverness.  Thus, while ordinarily one would have thought a selfish person would want to avoid advertising the fact, in practice people's desire to appear clever, or at least to avoid appearing stupid at all costs, leads many of them to want to be thought of as selfish.  Hence, they advocate selfish principles in order to try to signal that they are selfish, and so not stupid, and no doubt in some cases they even try to act more selfish than they actually want to be, again because they expect this to be viewed as sophistication.

I wonder how much of the popularity of libertarian views on the internet owes itself to this phenomenon.

IDAHO

It is apparently International Day Against Homophobia.  The day was chosen to commemorate the date, only 17 years ago, when the World Health Organization removed homosexuality from its list of disorders.  IDAHO's site talks about the many places in which homosexuality is still a crime, sometimes of course a capital crime.  Pam's House Blend alerted me to this occasion.   I don't post much on this topic (I could only find two posts), but it is an important issue.  While the happiness of the hundreds of millions of gays and lesbians themselves is enough of a reason to care on its own, those like me who are not personally affected should remember that those who favor restricting the rights of gays and lesbians are probably not happy with a lot of things we do in our bedrooms either, and eager to come after us as well.  Many of the places that criminalize homosexuality also criminalize adultery, or extra-marital sex in general.

Homoeroteleology

I had to post on this just because I love the terminology.  My recent Kant readings, with all the technical terminology of uncertain and sometimes downright dubious meaning and significance, has perhaps left me with a desperate desire for technical words that actually mean what you'd expect them to mean.  This one came up in a post on natural law and homosexual activity.  Of course, my sympathies for Thomism are fairly limited, but I do make a place for some forms of teleology, since I'm pretty much a teleofunctionalist.  However, unsurprisingly, the anti-homosexuality arguments don't work any better on teleofunctionalism than on the natural law model.  In Millikan's terminology, I'm quite confident that many homosexual acts are "Normal," as it seems clear that there are proper functions for such acts.

Not that it would matter if there weren't.  I suppose an advantage of modern teleofunctionalism over Thomistic natural law is that since the teleology has an evolutionary basis, rather than being grounded in a divine plan, the temptation to derive any moral conclusions from it is much reduced.  Plenty of abNormal activities are morally acceptable or even praiseworthy, and some Normal activities are morally unacceptable.

The Dirty Harry response

I was glancing at some of the philosophy journals at the Rock not too long ago, and came upon an argument on the issue of torture.  I can't remember the journal or the author; I'll fix the cite when I get that info.  Recent discussion of further disturbing pro-fascist statements from our Attorney General brought it to mind again, though.

In essence, the argument of the paper was that, of course, in ticking time-bomb scenarios, one ought to torture.  I tend to agree with this; I am, after all, a raving consequentialist, as regular readers will know.  However, the article went on to argue that it is nonetheless never a good idea for a government to have policies that permit torture.  Even if Dirty Harry's actions were, all things considered, the best options available, government policy should punish them, as having strict, exceptionless policies against torture in order to prevent abuses is much more important than rewarding Dirty Harry's heroism.  This I also agree with; after all, the world sadly contains a lot more brutal thugs than it contains heroes, and there's no good way to protect a hero's freedom of action without protecting quite a lot of brutal thugs.

Anyway, just another utilitarian response to torture besides the (also correct, of course) pragmatic arguments that it generally proves counter-productive.

Expressivism, Kantian views, and A Priori Ethics

I've been thinking further about Carnap, as I've just read Michael Friedman's A Parting of the Ways, and also because I've been thinking about my dissertation, in which I borrow heavily from Carnap.  Friedman's discussion of the Kantian influences on Carnap's thinking has led me to return to a thought I've had before.  Carnap of course subscribes to what Quine called the "linguistic doctrine of logical truth," logical and mathematical truths for Carnap are established by implicit linguistic conventions.  They are prescriptions of language, chosen for pragmatic reasons.

Though Carnap wrote very little about ethics, he shared the general positivist enthusiasm for expressivist meta-ethical views; when he presents his own view of ethics in response to one of the papers in his Schilpp volume, the view is clearly expressivist.  In particuar, normative ethical claims generally involve the expression of commands or prescriptions.  Naturally, this is not to say that there are no reasons for them; there can of course be pragmatic reasons for expressing particular endorsements.

Though I cannot think of any expressivists who have made this connection explicitly, I see a fascinating parallel here.  Many philosophers have, of course, maintained that ethics is an a priori discipline.  Sometimes this is claimed because of a feeling that the a priori is more secure, or more universal, or somehow more exalted, but not infrequently another reason that is given is the more prosaic observation that it's hard to think of what could possibly count as empirical evidence for or against basic ethical principles.  Certainly with respect to my own normative views (utilitarian, of course, as regular readers of the blog will know), I cannot think of any evidence I could give someone who didn't already find happiness valuable to convince them that they were mistaken.

So, the conventionalist maintains that logic and mathematics are expressions of the norms and prescriptions of our linguistic practices.  This is the conventionalist's account of the paradigm cases of a priori knowledge; to the extent that a conventionalist can be said to have a theory of the a priori, that is how the conventionalist thinks a priori knowledge works.  The expressivist maintains that moral claims are expressions of the norms and prescriptions of our moral practices.  Would that not make ethics a priori, in the conventionalist sense of that notion?

This must have occurred to Carnap, even if it seems to have escaped many of the other positivists.  One of the main goals of his efforts to construct ever more sophisticated logical devices was to facilitate mutual understanding; he dreamed of universal languages which would insofar as was possible remove barriers to communication by enabling everyone to express themselves accurately in ways comprehensible to everyone else.  I cannot imagine how he could have missed the parallels to the Kantian project of finding a universal morality to remove barriers to cooperative effort.  Further, there seems no necessity for imagining Carnap to have been that dense, as despite the silence of his published work on the topic, his letters and other private communications of which I am aware suggest strongly that he did believe that there was just such a connection.

Analytic philosophy is commonly accused of having become immersed in dry technical details and having lost touch with the purpose of philosophy in connecting to life.  Carnap no doubt made himself more vulnerable to such charges by his efforts to avoid making any explicit statements about the political or personal consequences of his views in his writings.  No doubt this was wise; he was associated with communism anyway, and would likely simply have been dismissed on the basis of his socialist views had he explicitly drawn the connections he believed to obtain between his logical system-building and his socialist ideals.  However, he clearly believed such connections to exist, and I tend to agree.  As Stephen Colbert says, reality has a well known liberal bias.  Getting technical issues and matters of methodology right will have a natural tendency to advance the cause of the good.  Further, focusing on such issues, rather than merely engaging in partisan preaching, will help shield one from charges of bias.  Perhaps Carnap's approach still has some merit in modern times.

Ethics

I think I've become a rule utilitarian.  I don't know if being a rule utilitarian is any different from being an act utilitarian; I'm still somewhat inclined to think not, but I guess these days more in the sense that I think act utilitarianism may call for us acting like rule utilitarians always said we should, rather than vice versa.

I increasingly feel that not only is there obviously a difference between how we evaluate public policies and how we evaluate individual actions, but that this is entirely appropriate.  That would be my reason for my increasing rule orientation; the rules for individuals seem to me like they should be different from the rules for society, even if all rules are justified by the underlying principle of utility.

So, for example, I think most public policy issues should be decided by naked appeal to consequentialist considerations.  This is actually a view that many people seem to implicitly accept.  I think we should be utilitarians about public policy just because utilitarianism is right, but less controversial motivations seem to often lead others to the same view.  Those who are democratic and egalitarian in their political inclinations, as most liberals at least are, are going to tend to think that public policy should take the interests of everyone into account.  That there are considerations other than people's interests tends to often be ignored in public policy, even by non-utilitarians, perhaps because they expect people to vote their interests, so satisfying interests seems like the democratic way to go.

On the other hand, as far as my own individual morality, and what I expect from others, there seem to be problems for ideologically pure utilitarianism.  The famine relief arguments of Unger and Singer suggest that if our standard for individual action is that we should always do what will maximize utility, then nobody ever lives up to those standards.  Nor does it even seem possible.  At least, I'm sure I couldn't; perhaps someone could be brainwashed to do so, but I don't even particularly want to so brainwash myself, and as I am now, I'm too selfish to be a saint, and any effort to train myself to follow such heroic standards would be likely to be killed by the resentment I'd develop at the ingratitude of people I'd be trying to help, and at how those people would be blithely making the world a worse place as I was trying to make it better for them.

Unattainable standards are problematic.  If people can't be good, then they will have considerable inclination to just turn their back on morality, either actively ignoring it or taking the view that they're evil and there's nothing they can do about it.  This is an issue for Christianity, for example; Christianity provides terrible moral guidance both because what it calls for isn't actually all that valuable (most obvious in the case of the stupid rules on sex and the deference to any political authority whatever) and because even though they're not good, the Christian standards are impossibly difficult to follow.  Utilitarian standards are at least good, of course, but if they're impossibly difficult to follow, that's no good.

So I advocate a much milder standard.  A bare minimum standard, vaguely suggested by some interpretations of the Kantian tradition, would be that I should choose the easiest for me set of moral rules which satisfies the condition that if everybody followed those rules, the world would overall be better off.  It is truly depressing how low that standard is, of course.  Certainly there's no question of it being impossibly difficult.  Indeed, if there's any difficulty following it, it is that the standard is too easy; one is likely to become bored with it, and cease to pay attention and so to accidentally fall short even of this.

Thus, there is reason to go higher than the bare minimum.  I suggest that the way to go is to take the bare minimum as a starting point, and try to aim at a target some substantial distance above that starting point, though still not at the absurd Singer/Unger level.  We are inclined to judge ourselves too leniently, and others too harshly, so aiming a little higher is probably good to correct for that mistake.  Thinking of ourselves as better than others is flattering to our vanity, so raising the aim a little further beyond the correction level is likely to be quite sustainable in practice; if the resentment at ingratitude for heroic effort would be intolerable to me, the resentment at ingratitude for moderate effort is not, since it's easily counter-balanced by my pleasing opportunity to feel superior.  Finally, again, people like challenges, if not impossible ones, so raising the standard to a level where it takes some effort to follow is likely to make it more rather than less motivating.

Thus, I think there's a case for setting one's personal target some large, but not absurd, distance above what I identified as the bare minimum.  If one sets such a target and lives up to it, of course one also sets a realistic good example for others.  Further, if people can be encouraged to set and try to reach such standards, then this is a practical step toward the utopian utilitarian ideal; since the goal here is to be well above the bare minimum standard, and the bare minimum standard is to do what would, if everybody did it, make the world overall better off, if people in general start following standards like this, the standards can't help but raise over time (the world will become better off, so the standards for what would need to be done to improve it further would go up).

So this is probably all just a rationalization for my being lazy and wanting to follow relatively easy moral standards.  But I thought I'd put it out there, since writing things down always helps me clarify them in my mind, and since it's always possible somebody will have interesting comments.

EC

This blog post about difficulties obtaining EC has been discussed all over the blogosphere.  It of course makes a good argument for making EC non-prescription.  Though most of the issues raised have been mentioned by others, I thought I'd weigh in about the class issues involved in all these contraceptive debates.  I was at Brown's health services today to have my blood pressure checked, and noted on the table in the waiting room a little poster about emergency contraception.  It basically indicated what EC was, listed a 24 hour number to make an appointment if EC was needed, and mentioned that "anticipatory prescriptions" were available.  Now, it is hardly surprising that an Ivy League school would take the implied attitudes toward its female students (namely, that their health is important and their sex lives none of the school's business).  Still, many in the blogosopher have noted that the various restrictions on reproductive rights which states have squeezed through or which are imposed by self-righteous health care providers or whatever overwhelmingly hurt poor women, which is no doubt why there isn't as much opposition to the various restrictions as there should be.  The restrictions don't affect the privileged much or at all, so they don't see any reason to worry about the restrictions, and when the privileged aren't worried about something, politicians rarely do anything about it.  This is one more bit of data supporting that observation.

A good series

There have been a number of good posts recently on Philosophy, et cetera about utlitiarianism, deontology, and libertarians.  The latest is here.  The propertarians are, as people might have noted from earlier posts, something of a pet peeve of mine.  For those who haven't followed enough anti-libertarian blogs, the propertarians are the people who claim that their position is all about protecting people's fundamental rights, who write as if the only right worth mentioning is the right to property.  In other words, most libertarians.

Imaginative Resistance

I consulted my philosophically innocent person about another popular issue in philosophy recently.  All right, so I suppose I consult her often enough that she probably doesn't count as philosophically innocent any more.  She does have some wild intuitions, though, so she's very valuable from the perspective of shaking my complacency about what is or is not really intuitive.

In any event, the issue is that many philosophers have claimed that there is an interesting difference in our ability to imagine the truth of factual claims vs. moral claims.  We're easily able to imagine things we know to be false; Nelson losing at Trafalgar, humans having been placed on earth by aliens rather than evolving, time travel, wizards with the ability to alter reality by the force of their wills.  It is claimed that we have more difficulty imagining the truth of moral claims we hold to be false; imagining that Hitler was a good person (without changing any of his deeds, obviously), imagining that enslaving those of different skin color is morally right, imagining that suffering is good for its own sake.

My victim was inclined to deny the data.  To some extent, that is what I am inclined to do.  I am strongly inclined toward consequentialism, so if asked to imagine that some action normally viewed as reprehensible is good, I need only imagine that it increases overall happiness and I'm there.  Of course, this won't get me to imagining that suffering is good for its own sake, but I wonder if I should say that claim is conceptually impossible, because badness and suffering are too closely linked, and so imagining it is difficult or impossible for the same reason other conceptual impossibilities are difficult or impossible to imagine.

This does leave two issues, though.  My victim didn't think this much work is required; she thought it was unnecessary to specify, even vaguely, the worldly circumstances which would make a strange moral claim true; she thought you could just imagine it as easily as you imagine any other silly thing, with no more need to fill in the details than we have when we imagine time travel or magic.  I'm not sure if I agree with that intuition.

Secondly, if I'm right and my victim is wrong, then it should be harder for a deontologist to imagine crazy moral claims being true than for a consequentialist to do so.  I wonder if those who have made this claim have indeed been overwhelmingly deontologists.

More on abortion

If I correctly understand Amanda's point, then it seems to me that Thomson's pro-choice arguments  (violinists, people seeds, and such) should be more persuasive than Tooley's (the kittens).  Does anybody have any thoughts on whether that's actually the case (or on whether I'm applying Amanda's theory correctly, for that matter)?

Murder is wrong

This is highly recommended.

More on retribution

If I have a disagreement with what Angelica has to say here, it is tiny; I would say that encouraging the notion that wrongdoing will be punished can be justified on utilitarian grounds.  Admittedly, if we were all good utilitarians, it wouldn't be necessary to encourage faith in our institutions by such devious means, but then if we we all good utilitarians, then we wouldn't need many of our institutions to begin with.  Utilitarianism does not call upon us to ignore what people are really like.  Rather, we must try to find ways to come up with good outcomes despite the unfortunate failure of most people to be good utilitarians most of the time.

Given her further commentary, perhaps this was Angelica's point anyway, in which case I don't disagree with her at all.

Legal Punishment

Mark Kleiman advocates retribution, on the basis of reflection on an extreme case.  In general, I am suspicious of conclusions drawn on the basis of extreme cases.  Of course, one could question whether Kleiman is right that the punishment of Pinochet would be useless on the grounds of deterrence (he's on better ground in ruling out incapacitation arguments; it seems unlikely that Pinochet will commit further crimes if not locked up); one could argue that such a public case will provide a reminder of the reach of the law and have some benefit in discouraging other criminals, great or petty.  But perhaps that is unconvincing.

Of course, on utilitarian grounds (the sort of grounds I like to use), it could also be argued that Pinochet's suffering will make the friends and relatives of his victims happier.  Perhaps that's enough justification in this case, since they are so numerous.

Kleiman, however, proposes that making Pinochet suffer is something we owe to his victims, and it sounds like he means the dead ones.  I think the idea that we owe anything to the dead is not only false (on utilitarian grounds; we can't benefit or harm them, so we have no moral duties with respect to them), but also dangerous.  The idea that retribution for long past wrongs is morally required fuels many a cycle of warfare and oppression.  I think we should be trying to break those cycles, starting with the very idea of retribution.

Consistency

I assign my ethics students both "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" and "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" to read.  It is perhaps predictable that they mostly don't think they should be giving money away, but that they do think people should, and in some cases that they would, walk away from Omelas.  But how can it be right to sacrifice dozens or hundreds of children to painful deaths to keep one person moderately happy, and not right to subject only one child to a miserable fate to keep a whole society ecstatically happy?  I think this combination of views cannot be tenable.

Laws of war

In his discussion of justice in the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume tries to argue that justice is based entirely on usefulness, partly by arguing that in circumstances where justice is not useful, nobody thinks it should apply.

One of his examples concerns what he calls the laws of war.  He claims these, like all rules of justice, are justified by their usefulness, and that they can and should be ignored where they are not useful.  As an example of where they are not useful and should be ignored, he presents the case of fighting enemies, barbarians, who do not themselves follow the rules.

Obviously, this seems relevant to current circumstances; many people seem to agree with Hume's reasoning, and favor applying it to our dealings with terrorists.  Thus, I thought this passage would be a good one to spend some time on with my students.  I was a little disturbed at the result.

One student noted that the laws of war are presumably justified on the basis that following them reduces the damage done by warfare, and that one side following the rules would still reduce the damage somewhat, if not as much as both sides following them.  Thus, she said it seemed that only one side following the rules was still useful.

However, she was a lone voice in that cause.  Pretty much everyone else who expressed an opinion thought it made no sense to follow the rules if your enemy didn't.  Indeed, some seemed to think it made no sense to follow any rules of war at all; that if you're at war, you should do whatever will most quickly and efficiently bring victory.

These are university students, and so to be expected to be liberal-leaning, and they're in deep blue Massachusetts.  I did not expect to find such sentiments.  I don't know what to think about this.

Masters in the Republic

I'm wondering if I should reinvent myself as a Plato scholar.  I find every year that the part of my courses where I'm talking about his writing ends up being my favorite to teach, largely because it's where I'm most likely to discover something myself while preparing to cover the same material yet again.

So, current working theory of Republic, which may not be original but I don't think is completely orthodox either; the point of the book is an extended attack on what Nietzsche called the master morality.

To review, the master morality is the morality of Homer's epics, an invention of a proud aristocratic class.  According to the master morality, to be good is to be like the aristocrats, or at least like their self-image; strong, brave, honest, cunning, rich, and good looking.  Generally able to succeed in life, to get respect and to get your own way.  Badness is everything that is unlike the way of the masters.

So why think this is the target of Republic?  Well, here are a couple of interesting bits of evidence.  Very early on, of course, Cephalus voices the opinion that only rich people can afford to be honest, one of the central tenets of the master morality.  Somewhat later, Socrates says, and Polemarchus agrees, that the theory that justice is the ability to help friends and harm enemies was surely invented by some very powerful man, a Xerxes or the like.  Thrasymachus, of course, identifies justice with whatever advances the aims of the ruling class.  And the complaint of Glaucon and Adeimantus that justice is not advantageous to the just person seems to be based on thinking that it won't contribute to having the ideal aristocratic life.

Further, there's the whole of book X, which I feel is widely misunderstood.  It is commonly taken to be an attack on all art, but Plato picks Homer as his example over and over again in this book.  If I'm right about the master morality being the target, this Homer-bashing is of course exactly what we'd expect.

I'm sure there are aspects of the data my theory doesn't fit, but it seems to me at the moment that it works really well.  If so, perhaps I should try to write a paper on it, assuming nobody else has already done so.

Conceptions of political freedom

I've been looking forward to the next post in Elizabeth Anderson's series on freedom, and it is now up.  This one stresses the need for the rule of law in order to protect any kind of meaningful political freedom.

Subjectivism and Realism

While I apparently have some philosophical readers, I expect that my last two substantial posts might have bored any readers who came here for politics.  This post will not return to politics directly, but will address an issue often raised in the context of political debates.  I want to talk about ethical subjectivism (sometimes people use "relativism" to refer to the same thing) and ethical realism, and eventually connect that to larger philosophical issues.

It seems to me that the view that ethical principles are objective is not nearly as problematic as is often argued.  There's a view of how objective ethical principles can be discovered which has long been a part of the utilitarian tradition and which is, so far as I can tell, now held by many in other ethical traditions.  We can view our ethical intuitions, our judgments about particular moral cases, as data, and we can try to construct theories which serve to explain and unify those judgments.  It is difficult to see anything in such a procedure which is more problematic than the way we proceed in the sciences, by treating our observations as data and constructing theories to explain those observations.

Of course, people don't all agree about the data, but that's true in science as well.  Some phenomena are extremely difficult to observe, and some people simply have disfunctional sense organs.  Further, treating ethics on a par with science in this way certainly doesn't rule out reform; our scientific theories sometimes lead us to reject some of our observations, and likely a good moral theory will similarly entail some revision of what we count as reliable moral judgments.  Similarly, disagreement about what theory really does best explain the data is not much of a disanalogy; there is widespread agreement in some sciences about some issues, but certainly not in all sciences about everything.  If ethics is similar to science, it's surely similar to a science in which we haven't made much progress, but that's a far cry from an argument that there's nothing objective in ethics at all.

Still, having said all this in favor of the reasonability of ethical realism, I do not endorse that position myself.  It seems to me that everything which might make us think ethics is objective can be adequately handled by some kind of Humean view.  If what's right is determined by our individual feelings about things, that does not eliminate the need for ethical investigation and debate; very often, our feelings concern what outcomes we desire, and it can be very difficult to determine how to bring about or avoid particular outcomes.  It is unclear that productive ethical debate very often includes much more than that.

Of course, it is philosophers who worry if subjectivism accurately characterizes ethical debate.  The more common worry outside the seminar room is that if ethics is just a matter of our feelings, doesn't that mean whatever feels right to someone is right?  But surely lots of horrible things we don't want to endorse feel right to all sorts of bad people.

Partly, I think this is already answered by looking at the need to evaluate not only our feelings about outcomes, but the empirical questions of how those outcomes can in fact be brought about.  That doesn't resolve the whole issue, though; likely some people act in ways we'd want to condemn because they have fundamentally different feelings, not because they disagree about the methods for bringing about particular outcomes.  However, even in those cases, I'm not sure how badly off the subjectivist is.

It is often emphasized by ethicists that ethics is supposed to be a practical endeavor; the goal is to figure out the right way to live, and encourage people to follow it.  So I think it is instructive to ask, as a practical matter, what can be done about people with fundamentally different feelings.  Hume said sympathy was the most fundamental feeling relevant to morality; consider someone who lacks that, a sociopath.  To be consistent, it seems a Humean must say that when such a person engages in theft, say, or murder, they are in a sense not acting wrongly; their feelings don't oppose the actions they are taking.  But this sense is not very important to how the rest of us should deal with a sociopath.  Surely we need to defend ourselves; that the sociopath considers his actions justified is irrelevant to our concerns.  Many possible options are available, such as prison or simply killing the sociopath.  I have never been able to determine why anyone would think subjectivism rules out dealing with such problems in the same ways as other moral theories would recommend.

If I can't see where the problem is for the subjectivist view, it should come as no surprise that I equally can't see the advantage for the objectivist view; they are two sides of the same coin.  Sure, on the objectivist view the sociopath is just wrong about some moral facts.  But as far as the practical matter of how to deal with him, I can't see how that helps in the slightest.  Does anyone really think a sociopath could be brought around by being subjected to Kant's proof of the categorical imperative, or Mill's arguments from Utilitarianism?  Mill didn't think so; indeed, even for much easier cases he had doubts about how much could be done for the sufficiently morally confused.  That was why he emphasized early education so much.  And of course Plato, to take another prominent ethical objectivist, clearly believed that there were hopeless cases; part of the point of Gorgias and of book I of Republic is that Callicles and Thrasymachus are just such hopeless cases (and in the case of Thrasymachus, we're also shown how to deal with a hopeless case.  Thrasymachus is treated as a wild animal, pretty much how I say a Hume-style subjectivist should view a sociopath).  The practically available options are pretty much the same, either way; if someone's moral outlook is just too fundamentally off, you're pretty much left with brainwashing or violence as a response, whether you think that the outlook being off involved factual error or distorted feelings.

Because of this absence of any practical difference, I tend to favor subjectivism simply because it seems to make less extravagant claims.  However, the absence of a practical difference means I also don't think this issue is very important, certainly not nearly as important as some of the debates over it might have led one to believe.

I claimed I'd try to link this to larger issues, but I think this post is already pretty long, so I'll do that very briefly.  It is my suspicion that objectivity in general, at least in the deep metaphysical sense many philosophers intend, is not of any more value than the objectivity in ethics I discuss here.  So, in the end, I agree with Bentham and Mill that ethics is something like science, but not for the same reason.

Euthanasia

Thanks to Lindsay Beyerstein's post at American Street, I was directed to a New York Times article of interest.  Apparently some Dutch doctors have a proposal for standards for active euthanasia for infants whose circumstances are sufficiently hopeless that allowing them to live a little while longer would only serve to protract suffering.  The interesting thing about the article is that it comes off as favoring this proposal; the Dutch doctors are presented as possibly (probably?) representing a step in the direction of moral progress.  Being the raving consequentialist that I am, I tend to agree, of course, but I share Beyerstein's surprise that this viewpoint is being presented in a major newspaper in the current climate.

Freedom and Libertarian Politics

There's an interesting examination of the connection between freedom and property rights on Left2Right.  Elizabeth Anderson seems to be developing an argument that even if you consider freedom the ultimate value, libertarian politics will not ensue.  So far, her case looks promising, but I would like to try a different line of attack.  I would like to ask what version of freedom, if any, could justify libertarian political views.

I am, myself, a considerable fan of freedom, and I certainly agree with the libertarians on a number of issues.   I oppose censorship, support the legalization of drugs and prostitution, and so forth.  But I do not accept the libertarian elevation of private property to the status of seemingly the highest right there is.  Indeed, I don't believe in absolute rights of any kind.

Instead, when I advocate freedom, it is for Millian reasons.  Mill, of course, advocated giving people a large amount of control over their own lives in On Liberty, but his arguments were all consequentialist.  One theme that runs through much of the essay is that people are generally best placed to determine what will contribute to their own happiness and to determine how to get it, so in most cases they'll be happiest if left to take care of themselves.  He has many other arguments, of course, but the important point is that they all view freedom as a means to an end, as a way of increasing the general happiness.  As a result, they are also all contingent; if circumstances are such that in a particular kind of case freedom is not contributing to happiness, it ceases to have value.  To connect this to concrete policies, I am fairly certain that freedom from taxation does not have sufficient benefits to outweigh the benefits of a well-run democratic government with decent social programs.

Being a compatibilist, I cannot see how freedom could have value as other than a means, so for me the Millian view of freedom is the only one that can make sense.  But of course compatibilism is hardly uncontroversial.  Does a believer in contra-causal freedom have a better argument for libertarian politics than a compatibilist?  Nozick perhaps thought so.  Certainly, making freedom a more extraordinary thing might increase the plausibility of assigning it intrinsic value.

However, constructing an account of contra-causal freedom which gives the libertarians what they want is not as easy as might at first appear.  If one is a contra-causal extremist, a la Sartre, then it would appear that no political consequences whatever follow.  According to Sartre, our freedom is, by its nature, competely unlimited; we always have total freedom, in the sense of being totally responsible for what we make of our lives.  This view is, of course, not original with Sartre; Descartes also thought a free will had no limits.

But if freedom is absolute like this, government policies can't take it away.  Government policies thus can't be evaluated on the basis of how they affect freedom, because they can't affect freedom at all (well, with one possible exception; killing someone will take away their freedom according to Sartre, though not according to Descartes).  Thus, Sartre wasn't in any way compromising his belief in the importance of freedom in his sense when he endorsed communism.

What the libertarian needs, then, is some intermediate kind of freedom, between compatibilist freedom and the extreme freedom of Descartes and Sartre.  It must be somehow special, probably contra-causal, but still subject to being restricted by outside forces.  There have, of course, been efforts to describe freedom of exactly that kind.  I find all such accounts deeply problematic, unsurprisingly, but the important point is that this is where one's metaphysics are required to be if one is to use the intrinsic value of freedom to endorse libertarian politics.

Quality of life

I came across this link recently, and of course being a cold, heartless philosopher, much like Singer, I immediately began to think about the philosophical issues involved.  The author claims that Singer's main mistake is in believing that disabilities reduce quality of life.  It is not completely clear whether she thinks no evaluation can be made of another person's quality of life, or if she only thinks most people's judgments about disabilities specifically are mistaken.

If she takes the former position, then I find that view quite implausible.  Further, I find the implications of the view very troubling.  It would seem to leave us without tools for evaluating public policy.  Surely the goal of many government programs is to make people better off.  And the goal of many laws is to prevent us from making one another worse off.  If we have no basis at all for making judgments about whether people are better or worse off, how can we devise these policies and laws?

On the other hand, if she does not wish to make the general point, but only wishes to make this claim about disabilities, then I have a different set of reactions.  First, it then strikes me that this is an empirical question.  Whatever tools we use to evaluate how well off people are generally, apply them to particular disabilities and see what results we get.  Second, the thesis that disabilities do not make people worse off still seems to have some unlikely consequences.  It suggests, for example, that there is no reason to put any effort into curing a disability; if there's a line of research which could conceivably repair spinal damage and so cure paralysis, it would seem on this assumption that we have no reason to fund such research, since it wouldn't make anyone better off.

I'm sure Singer presented arguments like this.  I wonder if there is any response to them.

Interesting

This  philosoraptor post argues plausibly that Bush should be impeached for having never read Euthyphro.

Actualist utilitarianism

I'm quite interested in utilitarianism, as to my mind it ranks as one of the most plausible moral theories.  There's an interesting discussion here  of some technical issues surrounding being an actualist utilitarian, which is to say a utilitarian who only takes into account the interests of actual people, vs. any version of utilitarianism which would take into account the interests of potential people.  I'm inclined to think the actualist option is the only option that is tenable, so it's fortunate that the technical issues seem to be mostly resolved.

Class Warfare

I assume most of those who are reading this have noticed that while the Republicans accuse any Democrat who speaks on economic issues of class warfare, they have themselves been engaged in an aggressive policy of enriching the already rich at the expense of the poor.  This has led me to think a bit about the history of philosophical discussions of the seemingly never ending class war.

One infrequently commented upon place in which the class war is discussed is in the writings of Nietzsche.  Nietzsche is famous for presenting his contrast between what he called the master morality and the slave morality.  They do end up roughly corresponding to morality as the rich would like the rules to be, and morality as the poor would like the rules to be.  But Nietzsche hardly ever mentions money.  His tendency to ignore money is a little bit odd, given what I'm sure some of his sources are.

I expect one of the primary sources of the great classical philologist's ideas has to have been Plato.  In Republic, we see a sophisticated attack on the master morality.  But Plato makes money central to his argument; the first spokesman for the moral theory Plato seeks to undermine, Cephalus, is notable almost exclusively for being wealthy.  Further, the theory of Cephalus that money is equivalent to virtue is one of Plato's main targets.  The argument Thrasymachus and eventually Glaucon and Adeimantus take up exploits the contradiction between the beliefs of Cephalus that being rich and being honest both are part of being good.  It is evident to all that one can become richer by being dishonest under the right circumstances, so since being rich equals being good, Thrasymachus argues that we should really think it is dishonesty that makes us good.

Further, the emphasis on money is not just present in the first book and a half.  More than two thousand years before Marx, Plato makes a very big deal of the importance of class struggle.  He argues that his ideal republic will effortlessly win in a conflict with any Greek rival, because in every city in Greece apart from his ideal republic, there are really two cities.  There are the rich and the poor, and they are ever ready to go to war with one another.  So all the republic needs to do to have an overwhelming advantage over any rival city is to make an alliance with one of the perpetually warring factions against the other.

Plato, in what is perhaps an over-reaction, seems to try to resolve the contradiction between saying wealth is good and saying honesty is good by ditching both; his philosopher-kings are supposed to not care about wealth, but are also supposed to freely lie for the good of the state.  However, the important point is that money is quite central to the discussion in Plato.  Why does it not appear in Nietzsche?

The innocent explanation would be that wealth is only important to the extent that it is a source of power.  Nietzsche certainly talks a lot about power, so it could be argued that he is simply concentrating on what is more fundamental.

However, there is another explanation, which reflects less well on Nietzsche.  Recognizing the degree to which master morality is morality as the wealthy would have us see it would involve seeing that the master morality is quite widespread in modern times.  While Nietzsche does not claim that the master morality has died out, he writes as if the slave morality were dominant in the modern era.  Further, while he is not an enthusiast for the master morality, almost all of his most pointed criticisms are directed at the slave morality, perhaps for this very reason that he saw the slave morality as dominant.  However, if the master morality is interpreted as morality according to the rich, it becomes apparent that it is still far more powerful than Nietzsche seems to have recognized.  It is not clear why Nietzsche didn't recognize this, but it seems to stand as one of his larger mistakes.