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Is Education a Public Good?
8 Feb 2012 at 6:29pm
While higher education is generally regarded as a good (mainly because folks with college degrees make more than folks who lack such degrees), there has been considerable debate in the United States as to whether or not higher education is ?
Towers of Ivory, Towers of Gold
6 Feb 2012 at 5:19pm
Academics in general and philosophers in particular are often accused of dwelling in ivory towers that lift them out of the ?real world? (which is, presumably, everything outside of academics). Being a philosophy professor, I do have some sympathy to ?
The Atheist?s Guide to Reality: An Interview with Alex Rosenberg
6 Feb 2012 at 5:50am
Reality, notes philosopher Alex Rosenberg, is ?completely different from what most people think? stranger than even many atheists recognize.? And having spent some 40 years trying to work out ?exactly how advances in biology, neuroscience and evolutionary anthropology, fit together ?
Corruption, Gravity & Litter
3 Feb 2012 at 5:08pm
The Daily Show recently featured an interesting interview with Yale Law School professor Jonathan Macey. One part of the interview that I found especially interesting was Macey?s ?defense? of capital firms like Bain in terms of what seemed to be the necessity ?
The Separateness of Persons: Commensurability without Fungibility
by Richard Chappell
3 Feb 2012 at 10:43am
It seems to me that the famed "separateness of persons" objection to consequentialism rests on the confused assumption that commensurable values (ones that can be compared and traded off against each other) are thereby fungible values (such that a loss to one is not merely outweighed, but actually cancelled, by a greater gain to another). I'll explain in a moment why this is a mistake. But first, let's motivate the objection with a simple case:
Connie has just enough anti-venom to save one of the two poison victims before her. Now, faced with their pleading faces, but realizing it makes no difference to the total welfare, Connie finds herself totally uninterested in the question of who to save. It strikes her as no more normatively significant than the choice between a $20 bill or two tens.
To many -- myself included -- such indifference seems inappropriate. We think that which person survives is a matter of normative significance, so that Connie is (in her thoughts) making a kind of moral mistake.
I take this scenario to exemplify the worry that consequentialists see people instrumentally, as mere "receptacles" of value, or that they neglect the separateness of persons. Critics are assuming, in effect, that consequentialists must follow Connie in treating the welfare of distinct persons as a mere number, free-floating and fungible.
But once we realize that the fitting consequentialist agent would desire each good (separately), we can see the mistake in this way of thinking. The problem with Connie is that she doesn't appreciate that each individual's welfare is a distinct intrinsic good. She, in effect, only sees a single token good -- the aggregate welfare -- whereas a more plausible consequentialist view holds that the aggregate is merely an abstraction from a great plurality of distinct intrinsic goods (namely: each distinct person's welfare).
Since the fitting consequentialist will have distinct intrinsic desires for each person's welfare, they will not react with indifference, but rather ambivalence, when faced with tradeoffs like Connie's. They will be pulled in both directions, torn by the distinct importance of the two lives (only one of which can be saved), and whichever one they do save, they will still see something regrettable about the loss of the other.
In this way, the consequentialist can fully appreciate the separateness of persons. They make tradeoffs between lives, seeing that a greater benefit to one outweighs a lesser cost to another, but that does not entail seeing the two as fungible like money. For the benefit to one does not cancel the loss to another, which is instead seen as a unique and irreplaceable source of regret. But it is not as regrettable as it would have been to forsake the greater (and also unique) benefit to another.
In short: We can make tradeoffs between distinct intrinsic values, recognizing that some may be more important than others, without thereby turning them into merely instrumental values (fungible means to some further end of "aggregate" value). This is demonstrated by the distinction between indifference and ambivalence -- or, more generally, between tradeoffs where the cost is cancelled by the gain, vs. those where the cost remains distinctly regrettable, and is merely outweighed by the gain.
Language Games: An Appeal On Behalf of Dave
31 Jan 2012 at 8:23am
?I?m going out with my pal Rick for a beer tonight, he?s got himself into a spot of bother with the police again. Fighting.? said Dave. I think for a minute: ?Rick, I don?t think I know him do I??. ?
Don?t blame me, I didn?t want anything to do with this book?
31 Jan 2012 at 2:20am
This is the second in my very occasional series about amusing Prefaces (the first is here). I came across this one while browsing John Walker?s 1847 translation of and commentary on Murray?s Compendium of Logic. It seems he wasn?t a ?
The Media, Gotcha Questions and Tacos
30 Jan 2012 at 1:49pm
It has long been a common practice on the right to accuse the media of having a liberal bias. Sarah Palin added a new spin on this approach by popularizing the notion of the ?gotcha? question. As might be imagined, ?
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.
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.
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.
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