RSSMix.com Mix ID 2300637
This feed was created by mixing existing feeds from various sources.
Education & Unions
25 Jan 2012 at 8:12pm
While there are many excellent schools, there are also serious problems plaguing American and other education systems. People are, of course, eager to point fingers and these fingers are often pointed at teachers? unions. Being a professor at a state ?
Disclosure. Deception. Duplicity. Defamation.
25 Jan 2012 at 4:07am
Here in Australia there is an interesting debate going on around the views of Melinda Tankard Reist (?MTR?), a high-profile anti-abortion and anti-pornography activist, and Jennifer Wilson, a relatively obscure (at least until now) blogger and occasional online op.ed writer. ?
Religion for Atheists: An Interview With Alain de Botton
24 Jan 2012 at 4:29pm
Alain de Botton, co-founder of London?s School of Life and author of The Consolations of Philosophy, has been kind enough to provide an interview for Talking Philosophy about his new book Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer?s Guide to the Uses ?
Migration and Sustainability
by Richard Chappell
21 Jan 2012 at 6:32pm
In 'The Environmental Argument for Reducing Immigration Into the United States', Philip Cafaro and Winthrop Staples III argue that, given Americans' disproportionate "environmental footprint", environmentalists should want to halt population growth in the U.S., and hence to severely restrict immigration into the U.S.
Despite the authors' constant mentions of "population growth", migration of course doesn't (in itself) alter the global population. So what they're really objecting to is allowing poor people from dysfunctional countries the opportunity to increase their wealth (and hence consumption) through hard work in a place where their hard work will be better rewarded. Because material consumption is bad for the environment. So we should do what we can to keep people poor, including blocking their access to countries with better infrastructure, institutions, etc. After all, if they're stuck in a failed state, with no roads and barely enough reward from their work to put food on their family's plates, they'll use less gas! Yay! (Right?)
Cafaro and Staples seem unimpressed by such welfare-based objections. Besides the tradeoff with environmental values, they offer two responses that engage directly with concern for human welfare:
(1) They claim that "mass immigration drives down the wages of working-class Americans", and so is "unjust" to the latter. But immigration may actually raise native wages, and in any case the welfare gains so drastically outweigh any losses that a little redistribution to compensate any disadvantaged groups could easily bring about an outcome that's better for everyone. (General lesson: whenever an otherwise good policy might seem to unfairly "burden" the poor, just redistribute the proceeds. Environmentalists, of all people, should be aware of this from populist objections to gas taxes.)
(2) They claim that migration to developed countries "makes it easier for common citizens and wealthy elites in other countries to ignore the conditions that are driving so many people to emigrate in the first place." I have no idea why they believe this. It seems at least as likely that mass emigration ("brain drain") would call attention to the country's problems. Though I'm pretty skeptical that the likelihood of implementing needed reforms is going to be much affected, either way, by emigration levels.
Stepping back: If we want to get the most welfare "bang" for our ecological "buck", barring the global poor access to economic opportunities is surely not the way to go. (It's less extreme than outright killing them, but I think ultimately misguided for fundamentally similar reasons.) We should strive for improved efficiency in less humanly damaging ways: emissions taxes, reduced animal (esp. cattle) farming, increased urban density / efficient transit, etc. Not to mention investing in scientific research to uncover new solutions -- investments which are more easily made by a wealthier, better educated populace.
Warbots
20 Jan 2012 at 3:05pm
The United States and many other nations currently operate military remote operated vehicles (ROVs) that are more commonly known as drones. While the ROVs began as surveillance devices, the United States found that they make excellent weapon platforms. The use ?
Parfit on Philosophical Waste
by Richard Chappell
17 Jan 2012 at 12:10pm
It seems strangely common for commentators to misrepresent Parfit as claiming that a mistaken philosophical project (e.g. exploring and defending a false theory) lacks all value. Eric Schliesser previously attributed to Parfit the view "that there is no philosophic value (pure waste) in failure." (Sadly, Eric refused to correct this misattribution even when prompted.) More recently, Philip Kitcher writes:
If Naturalism is true, then many of Parfit?s claims are indeed wrong and his perspective is indeed askew. Does it follow that his efforts (and consequently much of his life) have been wasted? I do not think so. Almost all those who have engaged in any form of inquiry have been wrong and misguided...
But Parfit's concern is not that, if he's mistaken, then in virtue of being mistaken his philosophical work would have been a waste. Not at all. Rather, his worry is that if metaethical naturalism is true, then this would mean there are no substantive questions in normative ethics, and hence all his work in normative ethics would have been wasted -- not because it's mistaken, but because it was addressing empty questions. It would be a waste in much the same way that it would be a waste to dedicate your life to a merely verbal dispute: whether the pope is a "bachelor", say, or whether a tree falling in an empty forest makes a "sound".
Here's the relevant passage from On What Matters (vol 2, p.367):
Naturalists believe both that all facts are natural facts, and that normative claims are intended to state facts. We should expect that, on this view, we don't need to make irreducibly normative claims. If Naturalism were true, there would be no facts that only such claims could state.
If there were no such facts, and we didn't need to make such claims, Sidgwick, Ross, I, and many others [i.e. normative theorists] would have wasted much of our lives. We have asked what matters, which acts are right or wrong, and what we have reasons to want, and to do. If Naturalism were true, there would be no point in trying to answer such questions.
As is clear from this passage, it isn't mere falsity that renders one's philosophical work a "waste". There are two clear indicators of this. (1) Otherwise, he would already think that at least one of Sidgwick and Ross, in virtue of advocating conflicting theories, must have wasted their lives. And he certainly doesn't think that! (2) Naturalism is a metaethical view that Parfit argues against. But he isn't concerned that if he's wrong about this, it renders his metaethical work a waste. Rather, it's the value of his normative work that is under threat -- and at no point does he worry that his normative views are false. The worry is instead that the questions are empty -- that there is "no point" in answering them.
It shouldn't be controversial that some philosophical projects are a waste of time -- and getting bogged down in a merely verbal dispute, or addressing otherwise "empty" questions, is surely the paradigm of such "wasted time".
What's more controversial, of course, is Parfit's claim that normative ethics can only be substantive if metaethical non-naturalism is true. Reasonable people can disagree about this. But it's hardly a surprising view for a non-naturalist to take, since the main motivation for non-naturalism is precisely the sense that it's the only way to take normativity seriously, i.e. to secure a domain or subject matter for normative ethics to be about.
I've similarly argued that questions about what entities are conscious (what we might call "first-order" philosophy of mind, by analogy to first-order ethics) can only be substantive if dualism is true. If physicalism is the true theory of "meta-mind", then once we know all about the physical functioning of my silicon-chip duplicate, there's nothing left to know about whether he's "conscious" or not. There's no further question there. So someone who dedicated their life to answering that (non-)question would be, naturally enough, wasting their time.
Freedom of Religion and the Secular State now published
16 Jan 2012 at 10:04pm
If we use Amazon?s date for it, at least the date that is there this morning, today is the publication date for Freedom of Religion and the Secular State. In practice, the book will be available at slightly different times ?
Remote Controled Assassination
16 Jan 2012 at 6:38pm
Assassination was, obviously enough, not invented by Americans. While we were rather late to the game in this regard (being a young country, we deserve to be cut some slack) we have added our own American touch to the practice. ?
Educating for Profit
13 Jan 2012 at 6:16pm
In the face of the economic mess, American states and the federal government have been cutting education spending. In some cases, this is no doubt a matter of legitimate necessity. In other cases the economic woes have been ?
Guardians of the Future
11 Jan 2012 at 10:42am
I went to the launch last night of a report by fellow tpm blogger, philosopher and green campaigner Rupert Read, under the auspices of the new think tank Green House. The report is called ?Guardians of the Future: a constitutional case for ?
Get That Chip Out of My Brain!
9 Jan 2012 at 12:26pm
There has of late been some discussion of free will and determinism, and particularly the relative merits of compatibilism versus incompatibilism, at various blogs. (See, for example, here, here and here.) I must confess that I?ve not followed these discussions ?
Pro-Life, Pro-Environment
7 Jan 2012 at 7:01am
Here in the States we are going through the seemingly endless warm up for our 2012 presidential election. President Obama is the candidate of the Democrats and the Republicans are trying to sort out who will be their person. The ?
2011: My Web of Beliefs
by Richard Chappell
24 Dec 2011 at 3:24pm
Time for another year-end summary! (Cf. 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004.) I'm posting it a little earlier this year because right after Christmas I'm off to the APA in search of a job. [If anyone happens to have a spare one lying around that they'd like to give me, that'd be most welcome!] So anyway, I expect this to be my final post of the year...
Normative Ethics
My favourite posts of the year were probably the series of three that I wrote on Caspar Hare's "morphing" argument for generalized benevolence. Good fun (including some contributions in the comments from Caspar himself).
Why Consequentialism? surveys some common arguments in favour of the moral theory (or family of theories). A taxonomy of various sub-options is presented in Varieties of Consequentialism. A couple of more recent posts explore the idea of Satisficing by Effort, and why we might be led beyond Scalar Consequentialism.
I posted drafts of my two central dissertation chapters, defending consequentialism against various "character-based" objections.
Consequentialism and Individual Impact explores various kinds of cases where act consequentialism seems to condone collectively bad outcomes because each individual's contribution appears to make no difference.
Natural Agents and Status-Quo Bias critically examines Sartorio's claim that there's some "moral inertia" against acting (e.g. to respectively cause and prevent two equally weighty harms).
Metaethics
The Moral Lottery critique's Street's epistemic objection to moral realism, arguing that the sense in which realists must consider themselves "lucky" to have true moral beliefs is not necessarily objectionable. This and related arguments are further developed in my paper draft, Knowing What Matters.
A reason by any other name... defends non-naturalist normative realism against the objection that non-natural properties couldn't possibly be of normative significance.
I then turn the tables by advancing The Normativity Objection to Metaethical Naturalism, including a normative version of Frank Jackson's famous 'Knowledge Argument'. This is followed by a defense of The Open Question Argument, and a sympathetic explanation of Horgan & Timmons' Moral Twin Earth argument.
Moral Judgments, 2Dism, and Attitudinal Commitments argues (against Henning's recent paper in Ethics) that 2-D semantics can't save moral naturalism. Nor can appeal to Elite Properties.
Epistemology and Metaphysics
In addition to the moral epistemology posts mentioned above, I also discuss The Kripke-Harman Dogmatism Paradox, and some thoughts on Formulating Theories of Peer Disagreement
Epiphenomenal Explanations points out a sense in which even causally inert properties (be they normative or phenomenal) can still feature in explanations.
Applied Ethics
I discuss The Puzzle of the Self-Torturer, suggesting that we can make progress on this puzzle for rational choice by first reframing it as an axiological puzzle.
What's Wrong With 'What Is Marriage?' offers a fairly thorough refutation of the latest anti-gay marriage arguments.
Neglected Interests brainstorms some of our most egregious failures to live up to ideals of moral equality.
Virtue and Anonymous Donation argues that it's not only consequentially better to publicize one's charitable behaviour, but it's also what the virtuous agent would do.
Welfarism vs. Appreciating Beauty explores the tension between the two.
Misc.
Fishy Relativism exposes some silliness from Stanley Fish in the NY Times.
Why We Needn't Hold Politics Hostage to Metaphysics responds to more philosophical confusion in another popular magazine.
A fun open thread invited readers to share what they judge to be my biggest philosophical mistakes.
What to Install on a new Windows PC -- self-explanatory. (Written largely for my own future reference, but hopefully others may also find some useful tips in there.)
Merry Christmas, all!
Welfarism vs. Appreciating Beauty
by Richard Chappell
24 Dec 2011 at 11:55am
An interesting trilemma...
(1) Welfarism: Only the welfare of sentient beings has intrinsic (non-instrumental) value.
(2) Fitting Attitudes: It's fitting to have non-instrumental pro-attitudes towards just those things that have non-instrumental value.
(3) Direct Appreciation of Beauty: It's fitting to directly appreciate objects of beauty -- great art, music, natural wonders, etc. (Where "direct appreciation" is a kind of non-instrumental pro-attitude.)
I take (2) to be analytic, so the question is which of (1) or (3) to give up. Both strike me as initially quite plausible, so it's not an easy choice.
Subjectivists about aesthetic value might offer a debunking explanation of why we find (3) plausible, suggesting instead that we are systematically deluded in our aesthetic experiences. We think that our experiences of beauty consist of latching on to objective properties in the world that warrant our awed response, but in fact it's just a more-or-less arbitrary matter of what clusters of sensory properties happen to push our buttons. Or so the story goes.
On the other hand, if we want to take our aesthetic experiences seriously, and trust that they are indeed warranted when they seem to be (at least some of the time), then aesthetic value would seem to provide a fairly direct counterexample to welfarism's claimed monopoly on value.
Might we reconcile welfarism with aesthetic objectivism by suggesting that objectively beautiful objects are valuable in the indirect sense that appreciative experiences of those objects are of greater value than equally pleasant experiences of less-genuinely-beautiful objects? This still fails to vindicate the pre-theoretic datum that the gushing waterfall warrants appreciation. Instead, what becomes warranted is the abstract desire to appreciate the waterfall. This seems too indirect to be fully satisfying.
So my inclination is to reject welfarism (1) instead.
One argument for welfarism draws on the intuition that all worlds lacking sentient creatures are equally (non-)valuable. The presence of phenomenal consciousness seems to be a fundamental precondition for genuine value. I'm no longer so sure of this principle, but it seems to me that we might hold on to it without thereby committing ourselves to the idea that welfare is the only thing of value.
Just as we can think that consciousness is a precondition for (normatively significant) welfare even while one's welfare itself is affected by more than just one's internal mental states, so we might hold that consciousness is a precondition for other -- e.g. aesthetic -- values.
Put more precisely, the idea here is that the waterfall itself is non-instrumentally valuable, but only conditional on its being observed / appreciated. So a world containing only the (unobserved) waterfall would not realize its value. But still the thing that warrants our pro-attitudes is the waterfall itself (assuming the condition is met), rather than just experiences of the waterfall. So attributing non-instrumental value to the object of aesthetic experiences in this way is significantly different -- and perhaps more plausible -- than attributing value (only) to the experience itself.
Scalar Consequentialism and Constructed Permissibility
by Richard Chappell
1 Dec 2011 at 3:06pm
I take Consequentialism to suggest a fundamentally scalar picture. The most fundamental assessment of actions simply ranks them on a scale of better to worse, indicating our having more or less reason to perform them. That's what centrally matters.
But we may also be interested in other moral questions, such as whether we would be blameworthy for performing some act. Consequentialists traditionally haven't been much interested in questions of blameworthiness (as distinct from, say, whether it would promote utility to express blame in some circumstances), but I think there are real normative questions here, besides those that consequentialism addresses. For example, there are rational norms governing emotions and reactive attitudes, which we may reasonably theorize about. So we may ask whether certain negative emotional responses towards others are warranted, in light of their actions. This is to ask whether they are blame-worthy.
I think the best theory of blameworthiness is some kind of quality of will account, according to which people are praiseworthy or blameworthy, in performing some action φ, to the extent that their φ-ing manifests a good or bad quality of will (respectively). Here "bad" is to be understood as insufficiently good -- so acting in a way that isn't positively malicious, but demonstrates a lack of adequate concern for others, still qualifies as "blameworthy" on this account.
This distinction between adequate and inadequate concern introduces a binary element into our moral philosophy. [This comes with distinctive problems -- what determines exactly where the boundary is drawn? -- but I won't get into that here.] This can then be used to construct a derivative notion of 'rightness' or permissibility that could be of practical interest. For example...
(1) Impermissibility as hypothetical blameworthiness: There seems to be an intimate connection between wrong action and blameworthiness. But they're clearly not identical: Sometimes ignorance might excuse acting wrongly, and conversely, objectively harmless actions (e.g. voodoo) might be blameworthy if performed with ill intent. What's key to these cases of divergence is a mismatch between how things really are, and how the agent takes them to be. Quality of will (and hence blameworthiness) concerns the latter, whereas permissibility seems to be a more objective mode of assessment. But perhaps we can bridge the gap by defining 'impermissibility' in terms of acts that couldn't be blamelessly performed by competent agents who (momentarily) know all the relevant facts.
The rough idea (abstracting from the distorting effects of ignorance) is that an action is permissible if it is among the options compatible with exemplifying an "adequate" level of concern. (There are potential issues with the conditional fallacy here -- can it be avoided in this case by the proviso that the hypothetical agent is cognitively idealized only for the moment of decision?)
(2) We might also appeal to this notion of an "adequate" level of concern in order to determine a principled "effort ceiling" for Effort-Based Satisficing Consequentialism. Given a prior account of emotional norms, specifying what counts as an "adequate" level of concern (to avoid blameworthiness) in any given situation, we can then specify that the effort ceiling X is the amount of effort that an adequately concerned moral agent would be willing to expend (if necessary) in that situation. Thus explicated, EBSC amounts to the view that we're obligated to achieve the best results we can without being required to put in more effort than an adequately concerned moral agent would be willing to. And that sounds vaguely plausible, given the above noted connection between impermissibility and blameworthiness (inadequate concern).
Remaining Questions:
* Are (1) and (2) competing options? I'm hoping that (2) is what you naturally get when you supplement the general account in (1) with consequentialist norms, such that within the options compatible with one's limited degree of moral motivation, rationality requires that you choose the one with the best outcome. But it's a little slippery, so I'd welcome others' thoughts on this connection.
* I've suggested that even scalar consequentialists might be led to construct a derivative notion of permissibility, by way of an independent interest in (avoiding) blameworthiness. Do you think that this adequately captures the ordinary conception of permissibility and why it matters? (Or do you think, say, that permissibility is bedrock, and not to be analyzed in other terms? Perhaps its significance is supposed to be directly communicated through moral phenomenology? If so then I don't think I get it.)
* I'm drawing on non-consequentialist norms for emotions and reactive attitudes in order to construct this derivative notion of permissibility. Is this a problem? I'm inclined to think not, since I think that consequentialism only applies to actions (and intimately connected mental items like intentions and preferences). But others might think there's something illicit about mixing consequentialist and non-consequentialist norms in this way. If so, I'd be curious to hear the objection spelled out...
* Is it plausible that some non-optimal level of good will is "adequate" to avoid blameworthiness? How might the details of this go -- have theorists of blame said much about this? (If only perfect moral motivation is acceptable, then my proposed version of EBSC will collapse into maximizing consequentialism. Whereas if there are no objective norms governing the reactive attitudes, then it would seem we can't go beyond simple scalar consequentialism.)
Any other thoughts?
|
