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"Intellectual History" and my interdisciplinary problem
I have a really hard time explaining what I do. Part of the problem with being an interdisciplinary scholar is that there isn't an obvious answer to the question, "What are you studying?" The answer for my undergraduate work was easy enough. "I do philosophy." The answer now is a little more complicated. I do a lot of work in philosophy; it is obviously my passion. But I do a lot of work in neuroscience, too. [I can't really talk about theories of mental representation without talking about neural networks and their structure, for example. My commitment to parts of Paul Churchland's approach to representation definitely commit me to a level of neuroscientific rigor.] But since I've started working in the so-called "social studies of science" I've spent a lot of time looking at contemporary social theorists as well, doing a lot of research on sociology and anthropology. But that's obviously not really an answer to the question.
"I do a bunch of things." is not an answer that you can give your parents' friends at a dinner party. "I do philosophy." is an answer that I'd like to give; it isn't, strictly speaking, the whole story, but it is about as close as I get. "I do neuroscience/cognitive psychology." better explains the actual areas of research in philosophy and social sciences that I'm interested in, but miscommunicates the sorts of research methods I employ. There's really no way to explain exactly what it is I do in a way which is also an acceptable answer to the question.
That's a good thing and a bad thing. As a good thing, it often forces a conversation on the substance of what I do when I want to have one. As a bad thing, it often forces a conversation on what I do when I'm feeling obligated to give the more complicated answer and don't want to have one. [There are circumstances where I just accept the miscommunication elicited by the expression and go with one of the over-simplistic answers.]
But even what is discussed above isn't a good assessment of my position within my peer group in social studies of science, the "humanities," or the sciences. I'm profoundly interested in intellectual history; I have been since [at least] my sophomore year as an undergraduate, when Pedro Amaral explained to his logic class, in a wonderful tangent, the importance of understanding the historical context of various forms of logic, and what tools various systems had access to, or were not able to access. Perhaps it goes back further, to the very historically oriented philosophy course I took in high school, with Craig Sutphin, where we read a diverse body of philosophical works, each situated in a fascinating context that informed their ideology. [e.g. the peculiar protestantism of Kierkegaard; the rabid anti-theism of Nietzsche; the radically different fascisms of Locke and Hobbes]
A professor of mine last semester [who will remain unnamed at this point, as I vent my disagreement] told me that I ought to get more comfortable just being lost in the text itself, in not trying to immediately historically orient myself and just allow the confusion to be a part of my reading as it sinks in. I'm probably not capable of doing this, but even if I was, I'm not sure I think that this is a good way to do reading. My ability to read Wittgenstein's Tractatus in the way that I do is a direct result of my comfort with his historical situation, his position as a student of the writings of Russell and Frege, and my familiarity with the way that he viewed them. Knowing the intellectual history, and the flexibility of such history, is the way that I come to read a piece of text; so situating myself historically is my default position when it comes to approaching a text. I can turn it off, and there are some contexts where I have to, but I generally don't want to. It is such a useful approach.
A few of my peers have joked playfully that I'm like the Encyclopedia when it comes to history of philosophy and intellectual history; playfully referring to me as "Encyclopedia Brown" partly because of the age difference between me and most of my peers [in their late-20s and early-30s]. I don't think that I have all that peculiar an aptitude for intellectual history, but I've definitely made a point of learning as much of it as I can, and of actively employing it as a method for assessment, which is a very different theoretical tool than it is for most outside of history of philosophy. [I'm always amazed by the familiarity of some folks in philosophy with the intellectual history of their sub-discipline; my passing conversations with Michael Devitt and, especially, Stephen Schiffer have illustrated to me how powerful a tool that knowledge can be.]
I don't know that I could comfortably do the sorts of interdisciplinary projects that I do without the background in intellectual history. I probably could; a lot of my peers manage pretty successfully. But it certainly impacts the way that I do the work now. It definitely informs my current approach. If it were a possibility to write a book on intellectual history, at some point in my future, I might well jump on that; some of the better pieces of scholarship I've read have been, at heart, projects in intellectual history. In any case, it is an angle on some very challenging interdisciplinary fields that I'm starting to appreciate having access to, and wanted to expound the virtues of a bit.
mind under Matter; because even the dualists are shaking their heads
Because my friends hate me, they like to send me published articles by people who they know I don't like, or people they assume I won't like, saying silly things about philosophy of mind. The most recent entry in the "Let's see if we can make blood come out of Josh's ears." contest was a post by William Lane Craig on Benjamin Libet's famous "action precedes cognition" experiments. I phrase them that way because, as we will see, articulating the results of the study can be easy, and it can also be done in ways which are hugely speculative and confused.
You can read the full text of the Craig article here. Unlike my commentary on the Rosenberg debate, I won't quote Craig in full. In reality, much of my criticism of Craig here would be largely redundant if I responded exhaustively. Also, I have term papers that require more time and care than I think Craig's arguments deserve.
First, let's look at what the Libet experiments show. Craig gives a fairly straightforward account of the conclusions:
"In Libet's initial experiments people were instructed to press a button with one of their fingers while he monitored their brain activity. Libet discovered that prior to a person's awareness of his decision to press the button, a brain signal had already occurred which resulted in his finger's later moving. So the sequence is: (1) a brain signal occurs about 550 milliseconds prior to the finger's moving; (2) the subject has an awareness of his decision to move his finger about 200 milliseconds prior to his finger's moving; (3) the person's finger moves."
Craig is right that there's a lot of speculation about this result, most of which is totally absurd. The problem is that Craig doesn't count himself among those who are speculating absurdly; he just thinks that [for example] Daniel Wegner's claim that these results support determinism is superfluous. Dualist philosophers have long felt obligated to lodge some sort of response to the result; Craig is among those philosophers
Now, Craig cites J.P. Moreland as the person that he goes to when he needs an expert in philosophy of mind, and perhaps this explains why Craig's stabs at philosophy of mind are so totally lost. We see this in the way that he answers his physicalist opposition.
"As I contemplated Libet's results, it struck me forcefully, this is exactly what the dualist-interactionist would expect. The soul (or mind) does not act independently of the brain; rather, as the Nobel Prize-winning neurologist Sir John Eccles put it, the mind uses the brain as an instrument to think. So, of course, the soul's decisions are not simultaneous with the conscious awareness of them. How could they be? Given the soul's reliance on the brain as an instrument of thought and the finite velocity of the transmission of neural signals, of course there is a time lag between the mind's decisions and the awareness of them. In Libet's experiment, since neural processes travel at finite velocities, of course it takes time for the mind's decisions to come to consciousness. This is exactly what we should expect on a dualist interactionist view."
Craig has said some truly bizarre things about philosophy of mind, but this observation is perhaps the strangest, on a few levels.
The first is that Craig, who just finished making a complaint about those overreaching analysts trying to make more out of the free will issues allegedly raised by these experiments, is now claiming that the argument isn't just about the causal power of the will, it's about the causal power of the whole darn mind! The issue under discussion for philosophers was whether conscious deliberation was causally primary to physical action; Craig is saying that the result shows causal powers at work apart from both cognitive causal functions and basal motor functions (which are the only mental processes under discussion in the Libet result). He's giving an even more speculative result than those who provisionally associate the cognitive functions with "will." (And those folks do deserve some skepticism.)
The second is that Craig is begging the question against his own account of dualism, and the reason that the cognitive and the "will" are coextensive not just on the view of some sketchy free will theorists, but on his own view as well. Craig's view is that the "soul/mind" has some originative causal power, and that this has some salience for discussions of free will, because it allows the "soul/mind" to be causally independent of the physical systems and thus its choices to be freely made. This is fine if, and only if, the forms of the thing that are happening in the soul/mind are deliberative judgments, or isomorphic with deliberative judgments. Libet's results show that the only thing resembling a deliberative judgment occurs later in the causal story; it isn't originative. So, on Craig's account of how interactionism would have to be plausible, he is just simply mistaken. This is not the sort of thing that interactionism would predict.
The third is that the notion that Craig wants to give of mental states is completely incompatible with the view that such mental states would "come to consciousness" discretely from their formation proper. If mental states, on Craig's view, are states which are available to introspection (and he does assert that they are) then the fact that a mental state would be psychophysically caused to become conscious refutes his position that mental states are causally originative and not physically caused. He doesn't get the freedom to grant that by virtue of moving through the brain the psychological process becomes mental.
But let's get to the most intellectually offensive part of Craig's article:
"The problem with Rosenberg's attack upon introspection is that introspection is not intended to be a guide to brain states but to mental states. It tells us how things appear to someone. So in blindsight experiments the person correctly reports, for example, that nothing yellow appeared to him. In Libet's experiments the person correctly reports when he has an awareness of deciding to move his finger. In fact, ironically, these very experiments presuppose the reliability of introspection! For how do you know that the blindsighted person has no visual experience of yellow? Because he tells you! How do you know that the person has consciously willed to push the button rather than think about his summer vacation? Because he tells you! These very experiments actually presuppose the veridicality of one's introspective reports."
The problem is that, sentence for sentence, pretty much everything that Craig says here is false. I can give an exhaustive account, and I want to, partly to demonstrate why I think that taking someone like J.P. Moreland, rather than someone much more rigorous, as a primary source for information on philosophy of mind is an enormous mistake, and partly to demonstrate what systematic and intellectually honest philosophy of mind can say about these things, without being the least bit controversial with regards to even most of the radical theorists in the field. [Unless qualified otherwise, nothing that I'm saying here is going to come as a surprise to theorists across a huge spectrum of literature in the subdiscipline.]
"The problem with Rosenberg's attack upon introspection is that introspection is not intended to be a guide to brain states but to mental states."
False. Introspection, as we will see, is not a guide to mental states proper; it is a guide to a special class of mental states, phenomenally conscious states, that are of interest to a number of theorists in philosophy of mind. But those are a special case of mental state which have a particular set of properties including having their content (or part of their content) available to first-person reporting.
No one believes, for example, that you can introspect into how your mind performs sophisticated computing tasks like forming recursive grammar or individuating objects. The vast majority of mental states are non-conscious and so not available to introspection. Further, introspection often leads us to believe things that are just false about the contents of those non-conscious mental states. We'll come to that in a second.
"It tells us how things appear to someone. So in blindsight experiments the person correctly reports, for example, that nothing yellow appeared to him."
And now we see the equivocation. Craig has confused phenomenology with mentation. All phenomenal experiences are mental states; but not all mental states have phenomenal character. Certainly the kinds of spontaneous task performance that many cognitive scientists have studied since Libet fall under this description, and there are lots of other interesting examples. Blindsight happens to be another interesting case, where there is a mental representation available to the individual, despite the fact that the blindsight patient doesn't have a phenomenally conscious experience of that representation.
"In Libet's experiments the person correctly reports when he has an awareness of deciding to move his finger. In fact, ironically, these very experiments presuppose the reliability of introspection!"
They don't presuppose that the person has a comprehensive account of mental states available on introspection. It just presupposes a trivially true claim; that mental states are conscious under aspect of reporting when they become available to first person reporting. The features of motor cognition that are at work in actually initiating the motion (and eventually the conscious recognition of the 'decision' to move) are not originated by the functions of cognition engaged in reporting. Rather, the deliberative functions, which are associated with reporting, are activated post hoc. (This is the minimal reading of Libet.) All of these functions are equally mental; it isn't as though only once the awareness of the functions becomes available to reporting does it become mental. This is what Craig, for some confounding reason, seems to think.
"For how do you know that the blindsighted person has no visual experience of yellow? Because he tells you! How do you know that the person has consciously willed to push the button rather than think about his summer vacation? Because he tells you!"
Again, this is simply wrong. We expect introspection to function in terms of reporting a particular feature of the representation, that it be conscious at a particular time. In the blindsight cases, we are concerned that the person has no conscious experience of yellow. The fact that the person has a visual representation of the field in some of his mental functions is indisputable, because the contents of that representation can be put to use in various tasks. (It turns out that what blindsight serves to show, very generally, is that motor cognition and sensory perception are not necessarily tied to conscious experience, and in fact that they can function reasonably well for certain purposes without conscious experience.)
"These very experiments actually presuppose the veridicality of one's introspective reports."
And, yet again, we see that Craig has enormously overstepped. Introspection provides a relevant datum about an important part of mental life, that is phenomenology and phenomenal consciousness. It doesn't give us a mode of assessment for all mental phenomena. In fact, we can take it fairly easily, as we see in the blindsight cases, that the person who says "I don't see the yellow." is actually just mistaken. They aren't having a phenomenal experience, but their visual sensory inputs are working just fine.
There's a lot that we can conclude from this look at Craig, and I had to hold back a good deal, despite the length of the post. I think the most important thing, especially for those who read Craig with an eye towards apologetics or his general use in philosophy, is this: When he's talking about philosophy of mind, steer clear. His qualification that this isn't a specialty is not nearly a strong enough warning.
the C-word: consciousness and cringe-induction
One of the things that I've been noting lately is the use of a term that has, since I started studying academic philosophy of mind, made me uncomfortable. "Consciousness." It shows up in course readings from non-philosophers in the social studies of science [especially] and it shows up in popular media. Setting aside its appearance in the heinous hackery of people like Deepak Chopra and those with whom he associates, it appears as well in some science writing put forward by actual neuroscientists like Olivia Carter in ways that are pretty tortured.
I should say that, unlike Chopra and the woo warriors, I do think that the question that Carter is asking in her article "Are babies conscious?" is a viable one. I don't think that the question is stillborn [pardon the metaphor] based on the intractability of the concepts or the silliness of the method. I think we really have to take seriously the way that a serious science that purports to talk about consciousness is going to yield an account of consciousness in developmental psychology. As someone who thinks that the varieties of consciousness and some of its psychological features are important for domains like ethics, I have to acknowledge that there is a lot at stake in such an account.
The problem with Carter's discussion is not that it is incoherent; it is that, like so much science writing that attempts to offer this much of a gloss on an incredibly challenging subject, it takes for granted far, far too much about the world. [I do have ideas about how science writers can avoid this; that's not best raised here directly, though I'll allude to it a bit throughout the comment.]
Carter comments:
Readers may be interested to know that, until my, my unwavering certainty that my one-year-old baby Max is conscious had not been backed up by a single shred of scientific evidence.
Indeed, the famous philosopher Daniel Dennett still maintains that it's impossible for any of us to know for certain whether adults - let alone children - around us are in fact zombies that just "appear" to be conscious. Dennett is correct that we still have no way to prove with 100% certainty your friends are not zombies.
Perhaps I should cut Carter a break here. She's not a professional philosopher; she's a neuroscientist. Dennett is a big name among neuroscientists as one of the prominent philosophers of mind. [This is by design; Dennett works aggressively to insert his philosophy into neuroscience and neuroscience into his philosophy. He is rather good at both.] But Dennett didn't propose the so-called "zombie problems." In fact, these problems are incredibly old. They start with Descartes; they show up in the automata arguments of T.H. Huxley; the actual term "zombie" starts to come into popular usage with Chalmers in the 90s, from what I can tell from the literature.
Where Carter looks suspiciously like the citation- and quote-light Chopra [or Bill Craig] is in her attribution that Dennett is an advocate of such arguments. He's not. Dennett thinks that the metaphysical argument against physicalism that the zombie arguments are supposed to be a part of fail, and that zombies as presented by Chalmers are incoherent. That's basically an undergraduate level course discussion.
What's the more important discussion? What's more troubling? Someone getting something in the history of philosophy wrong isn't a good reason for me to be cranky. [As though I need reasons to be cranky.]
The problem comes when Carter starts to discuss consciousness. There is a hotly contentious area of philosophical theory about how to talk about consciousness in scientific terms; I have a lot of opinions [mostly minority opinions] on those issues, but hose debates are far from closed. Neuroscientists are aware of this and, as a result, often attempt to remain non-committal on these sorts of issues. But Carter is not non-committal in the article. She jumps the gun fairly overtly.
The new Science paper, and many other studies attempting to identify the elusive "neural correlate of consciousness", use a type of illusion called "masking." This involves presenting an image briefly on a screen before replacing it with a second image or texture.
It is known that people generally report seeing the first image if the time gap between the first and second image is greater than 100 milliseconds, but they report no awareness if the gap is less than 50ms.
Things become more interesting between the 50-100ms window when people sometimes report conscious awareness and other times don't. It is only in trials that people report awareness that neural responses to the stimuli are found to persist and extend into areas of your brain located beyond your forehead.
In cases when no conscious awareness is reported, the neural responses are only very short-lived and limited to a relatively small area of the brain dedicated to early visual processing.
In the new study, the authors show this neural signature of consciousness is seen in babies at 12-15 months and to a lesser extent - but still clearly visible - in babies as young as five months...
Simplistically, the idea is that basic features in the environment, such as colour and light intensity, may be experienced but without the rich and complex meaning and emotions that are central to the conscious experience reported by adults.
O.K. Hopefully you followed that. That's basically the entire paper as presented by Carter in the writing. Presumably, one of the reasons that the authors of the study refrain from talking about consciousness in the study is that it is a problematic result with regard to consciousness, for both neuroscientific and philosophical reasons. I want to focus on some of the philosophical reasons, rather than the technical neuroscientific ones, since I think they're a bit easier to follow.
The first thing that we ought to do is look at the structure of the masking studies. What do the masking studies show us? Well, they show us two pretty cool things. They show us that upwards of 100ms, pretty much any visual stimuli is going to be available to reporting generally speaking. If you see a picture of a bear for 100ms, you're going to be pretty confident that it's a bear. And below 50ms, these experiences are definitely not available to reporting. Then we get a mixed result in between. That's pretty cool.
The second thing is that we see prefrontal activation in higher levels when the stimuli is available to reporting. A research subject is going to have greater prefrontal activity in the 100ms cases, and much less in the 50ms cases. We are positively correlating availability to reporting with this prefrontal activity.
Carter doesn't explain how this gets us to consciousness. She just sort of asserts that it does, and of course that's understandable in a popular article. I'm not really trying to be popular, in that sense, so I'll try and explain how the move works. One of the features of a certain understanding of consciousness is that information which is conscious is information which is available to multiple sorts of processing; that is, my visual experience of the picture of the bear is conscious in virtue of the fact that it is available to a number of other processes apart from the visual system, like for example the linguistic apparatus. On this description of consciousness, the moves that Carter is making seem very plausible.
Interestingly, this is very similar to Dennett's account of consciousness in the [poorly titled] Consciousness Explained and the [for my money, much better] Sweet Dreams. More directly, though, these accounts of consciousness are what the philosopher Ned Block calls "access consciousness." He makes this distinction [one that I am becoming suspicious of as all that definitive] in order to show that accessibility doesn't necessarily bear on phenomenal consciousness, the philosophically interesting [and ethically important, for my purposes] sense of consciousness that sparks all of this discussion in the zombie problem.
Certainly phenomenal zombies [the kind Chalmers is interested in] that are behaviorally identical and physiological identical to humans are going to have this neural and cognitive architecture that makes information available across processing systems. That's how reporting tasks are accomplished. The problem is that it doesn't seem to bear at all on the philosophically interesting question, which is whether or not they have mental states that have qualitative character, whether they have a subjective experience. Whether there is something it is like to be them.
I should say that I reject most of the zombie discussions as not all that relevant to things that I think are interesting about minds. But a big part of that is because I think that the phenomenal consciousness that Chalmers and Dennett are having this argument about is a trap. I think that there is something that it is like to be me, or you, but that the account is, at this point, best discussed on a very basic level, at the level of the way representations are formed, and how the contents of those representations make themselves available to us. The more committal discussions about consciousness are really problematic.
I think that babies are conscious, for what it is worth, in the sense of having a subjective experience. But I don't think that's an interesting observation. I'm pretty confident that all mammals, and reptiles, and many clades, have subjective experiences as well. The question is just the salient features of the way that those experiences manifest, and how those experiences are available to the organism more holistically. I've given an argument in a paper about the salient features of experience of time for a species of crows based on problem-solving capacities; I think that those sorts of conversations, which take for granted the presence of some subjectivity and phenomenal content, are definitely engaging while the attempt to figure out whether or not babies are "conscious" in some ethereal, unified, and potent sense is just not a good use of energy.
Critique and Criticism of Wagner on abortion obligations
A friend recently posted an article on his site [1] regarding what many in the "Justice for All" camp take to be the strongest argument for the legal and moral permissibility of abortion. The article is written by Steve Wagner, with the help of Tim and Josh Brahm, and some others who I likely haven't met. I don't know Steve [just Josh and, more casually, Tim], and that is probably good for the purposes of our commentary here, because if I felt the need to pull punches, I likely wouldn't be able to write much of anything.
If I were giving an academic response, it would meet a particular professional standard to be dispassionate and simply set in motion the lines of criticism of this article. But I should note the venue here matters a bit. This is more of an academic response, in terms of content, than most of what I post, but this is far from something I would submit to a serious ethics journal. I have no intention of writing such an article; as will become apparent, this article would need to be significantly stronger before a response would be publishable in such a venue. Further, I am not just presenting an academic critique, but also some [rather harsh] criticisms of the philosophical self-styling of the article which, generally, would not be made explicit in a mainstream philosophy publication.
I provisionally broke this criticism up into several sections, since there are a few rather significant chords of critique that jumped out at me on the first reading. There is, as always, some overlap between those problems. I've divided those sections by the order in which they occurred to me during that first reading, so you may note that the problems actually emerge a bit earlier. We'll call these lines (a) the naïve intuitionist line, (b) the legal intuitionist line, and (c) the general non sequitur attribution line. I don't generally like to gloss, especially on criticisms, and so this is gong to be a ponderously long post, even by my standards. Still, because of the disassembled nature of the article, which lends itself rather well to assessments of particular snippets of the article, I will work to keep each segment rather brief, as sort of a preface to each line of objection.
Without further shenanigan, let's get this show on the road.
the naïve intuitionist line (or: how to warn off ethical philosophers in the first page of an article)
Wagner begins the article by presenting a thought experiment in which a hypothetical woman is subjected to a behavioral psychology experiment in which she put in sole care of an infant for some arbitrary period of time. [2] Wagner notes that in such a case, he holds that the mother has a moral obligation to care for her child. In a case where the woman, Mary, abstains from helping the child and/or kills the child, Wagner writes, "I take it to be a basic moral intuition that what Mary did... in the cabin was seriously wrong. She has a moral obligation to feed the child." [3] So begins Wagner's case for the impermissibility of abortion.
Those who have training in ethics should grow immediately suspicious of what is going on here. Wagner has given us a case, given us his moral intuition, and asserted that this moral intuition is "basic" without some qualification of exactly what that is supposed to mean. For religious reasons, I strongly doubt Wagner is actually a moral intuitionist. However, the way that he presents the case, and the way that he continues to use intuitions throughout the article falls prey to a serious objection. I don't deny that ethical intuitions can be valuable, [4] but it is fairly easy to deny that they can be basic, either causally or inferentially, and that they can be sufficient grounding for the assertion of some sort of moral fact.
In the first case, it is clear that moral intuitions are not basic in any interesting causal sense. While there is some ongoing debate in moral psychology, it is uncontroversial that there is some set of psycho-physical causes for moral intuitions. Commonly attributed causes range from hormonal and neurophysiological factors, [5][6] as well as psychological features of individual affective character [7] and inferentially available beliefs. [8] Personally, I have a rather mean and energetic dog in the fight over how moral intuitions and judgments are formed; that's the subject of an article in process, though, and not really relevant here. All that we need here is an obvious observation about moral psychology, which is that moral intuitions are psycho-physically contingent and not primitive.
In the second case, a basic sampling of literature in moral philosophy shows that moral philosophers do not grant a privileged status to general intuitions. [9][10][11] The skepticism about intuitions is a long dead issue; very, very few take intuitions to be a sufficiently basic grounding for interesting moral claims and we see in the historical body of literature why. In short, it turns out that there are no good reasons to hold that moral intuitions, even by those with some form of training, are likely to be insightful since there are features that bear on such intuitions which are not causally related to the truth-conditions of the intuited belief, or on various truth-conditions of related propositions. It doesn't tell us at all whether the proposition that it is morally impermissible to kill a fetus, for example, is true. [Of course, Wagner feels the need to make lots of inferential moves here; we'll see where they fail along this line as we move through the critique.]
But presumably Wagner means that it is basic insofar as it acts as a basic starting point for the movement of his argument. The problem is that there are likely a fair number of folks who don't share the intuition. The black sheep for many of these "pro-life" advocates is their insensitivity to the libertarian position, or, rather, a particular variety of the libertarian position. This version of the libertarian position, let's call it L*, takes as primitive the notion that only positive acts can be morally impermissible. [Of course, this begs the question against the distinction between killing and letting die, but Wagner seems to acknowledge that there is such a distinction, however marginal.] Given that L* maintains this position, we can see that someone whose positions are derivative of L* or a set of psychophysical states which would instantiate L* would simply take Wagner intuition to be misguided in the "letting-die" cases.
I don't hold L*, personally, but I can note that there are people who do hold this position. I used to be among them, and I do still have some sympathies with the position. (We'll delve more into that in the following section.) Wagner might point out that it seems to generate some counter-intuitive cases to say that it is universally morally permissible to refuse to act. But given that L* informs moral intuitions, all Wagner is doing is voicing a faultless disagreement about features of our individual moral intuitions. [12]
The problem here is that Wagner is taking the intuition as basic, and so if we reject the intuition then we have sufficient grounds for rejecting the whole of the argument. But it turns out his condition is even worse that this. Moral intuitions don't have a special status, as many ethicists have shown. [See the above sampling of literature in theoretical ethics, or anyone cited in those papers; it is a really expansive literature.] When we assert that, for polemical reasons, an intuition ought to give any polemical force to the assertion of an ethical position, in order to account for cases where an individual actually disagrees, or a case where an individual might plausibly disagree, we have to be able to give some sort of moral reason. In this sense, even in the way in which Wagner takes his intuition to be basic, it cannot be. Wagner is obligated to give a moral reason for the truth of the proposition "What Mary did was wrong." [And now you see why I've disowned L*, because, on my view, abstaining from giving reasons seems to be objectionable.]
What is odd is that Wagner's is a position that Josh Brahm, and several of his students, have chalked up as a relativistic one in the past. In a response to me they articulate a version of relativism that seems dangerously close to Wagner's view. [13] After all, their understanding of normative ethical relativism, as they've presented it to me in public and in private, is that it begins with the move that the presentation of ethical intuitions and cultural norms are sufficient reasons for the truth [insofar as there can be truth] of an ethical proposition. Steve has some writing on relativism himself, so it is obvious that this isn't a consequence of his view that he has actively built it, but it seems a fairly obvious methodological pitfall. [14]
While it may be terribly uncharitable of me, I take this to be an instance of methodological laziness on Wagner's part in advancing the article. Presumably he is capable of giving moral reasons, apart from his intuitions, for the impermissibility of infant starvation, and he just chooses not to, likely for polemical reasons. Still, it may very well be that this piece of methodological laziness leaves the piece a complete mess. While it can, theoretically, be rectified, the presentation of a moral reason on Wagner's part would leave the piece open to some significant probing for the transitivity of the reason to the alternative thought experiments, and to the abortion case.
the legal intuitionist line (or: social reality and the insufficiency of psychological facts)
One of the few areas of the paper that seems to be on the right track is the move Wagner makes to talking about the legal obligations. [15] We can easily imagine an individual who holds that abortion is morally impermissible, but that there ought not to be a legal prohibition against it. In fact, I've found this to be a fairly common position among my pro-abortion-choice friends who have an evangelical upbringing. Wagner seems aware that absent the strong commitment to the legal impermissibility of abortion, the version of the "pro-life" position he and his colleagues are taking fails.
One knee-jerk reaction I've come across is that it ought to be the case that society instantiates a legal obligation for every identified moral obligation. Often, this position has been put before me by conservative Christians. These sorts of positions are where my unabashed libertarian and anti-fascist leanings can be found. I find these sorts of positions repulsive; as a result I've taken to referring to its proponents as "theo-fascists" or "crypto-fascists." I'm willing to defend that characterization, but we don't really need to here. Wagner may rest his case on such a move, tacitly, given the brevity of section [IIb] of the paper. In this section, Wagner writes:
"A parent's moral obligations, at least for feeding and sheltering their children, are so strong that we say there should also be laws forcing parents to do these things. If the moral obligations of a parent, yet temporary, then they must also be legal obligations. In other words, it should not be legal for a person in the de facto guardian position to neglect the feeding and sheltering of the child."
I won't accuse Wagner of jumping in on a theo-fascist position at this particular moment, since it does not seem strictly necessary for his position. Let's just say that he is taking a position that there are a set of obligations that are sufficiently important that they demand social reinforcement, they demand a legal institution, and "guardian" obligations fall under this category. Now, Wagner's point here seems to be that his de facto guardian situation seems not morally different from the general obligations of the parent; but this seems just obviously false.
Let's say, contra my exhibition in the preceding section, we grant Steve's use of moral intuitions. One can easily show that there is a plausible intuition to the effect that it is particularly morally egregious for a parent not to provide for their child, rather than for an unrelated stranger to provide for their child. Piggy-backing on the intuitionist move, we might note that the intuitive discrepancy in moral abhorrence between the two acts separates the moral value of the two acts in such a way that Wagner has to give an account of why it is that the de facto guardian case is still sufficiently strong to require a legal obligation. The asymmetry renders his move invalid.
But I don't get to make this move, because I've already rejected Steve's strong moral intuitionism above. So what do I do, here?
Well, I'm inclined to start by pointing out that Wagner has explicitly drawn his case out as a de facto guardian status; but the use of the technical term "de facto" in this way draws us into the contrast of the de jure obligation. A quick exegesis of the use of terminology, via my undergraduate constitutional studies professor, the three lawyers in my immediate family, and every legal dictionary ever, will note that de facto is used to designate cases where the status factually adheres, but is not legally [i.e. social institutionally] sanctioned. By stating that the guardian is solely a de facto guardian, Wagner is noting that there is no legal [i.e. de jure] status being imparted on the guardian.
To ward of a point of obvious incoherence, Wagner might say that he isn't arguing that the person is matter-of-factually a guardian by virtue of legal sanction; after all, there is no institution giving this guardian the legal status, and so a necessary condition for de jure status is not met. [16] Rather, he's arguing that the person should be considered a guardian on the presence of the articulated de facto [i.e. non-legal] obligation. This line might turn out to be plausible, but I suspect it won't if we pursue it seriously. Why? Because when we get into the practice of giving reasons, the reasons for presentation of legal sanction are not going to recognize the reasons that Wagner is giving for the moral obligation as relevant.
What are the reasons for the presentation of the legal obligation? Well, the generally accepted legal obligation seems to (from what I can tell; I'm a philosophy student and not a law student) stem primarily from the special status of the parents as biological relatives of the child and secondarily from the caretaker status given special provision by the courts. [17] We take this to note that the de facto guardian case gives us a general special case response to a legal obligation for the guardian without extending this out into a general obligation to aid strangers unilaterally in more typical cases.
"Ah ha!" Wagner might exclaim. "I've got you! The obligations are instantiated by the parental status, and so we see the impermissibility of abortion in the legal sanction!" But, of course, this move doesn't function, since we might note that a mother would be legally prohibited from starving her own child to death, but is (a) not prohibited from having an abortion, simply as a matter of fact, and (b) can draw attention back to the substantive bodily rights issue, on which the case presented by Wagner only gives us a very tenuous answer, as we see in the set of objections to his use of intuitions above. Also, I don't take the primary condition, the biological relation, to be sufficient for the existence of parental obligation; neither does the law, by all appearances, since there are conditions under which the parental obligation can be recognized as severed in spite of the biological condition being satisfied.
I don't think that Wagner provides a strong case at all that he can successfully parlay the obligation for a special obligation of a de facto guardian into something isomorphic with the legal obligations of a de jure parent. And I don't think that he can parlay the obligation of a de facto guardian in an injunction against abortion. There seems to be far to much in the way, not the least of which is that his use of "de jure" precludes direct translation into legal obligation.
the general non sequitur attribution line (or: when the conclusion follows from nothing at all)
One of the most destructive things that can be noted about a line of argument is that it is a non sequitur. Strictly speaking, any argument which commits a logical fallacy or is incomplete commits non sequitur. All that is meant is that the conclusions do not follow from the premises and the allotted rules of inference. We generally set the barometer a bit lower in the case of ethical arguments, since we don't expect that the argument will necessarily be deductive. All the considerations here are concerned with particular inferences advanced by Wagner. (I've left some of the instances in pieces attributed to contributors out of this discussion, since I don't necessarily have access to the entire content of the discussion.)
Let's be charitable to Wagner and stipulate intuitions as evidence and stipulate that the "This Looks a Whole Lot Like Pregnancy" case actually looks like pregnancy. [18] I'd argue that they're not sufficiently similar, and that we ought to simply introduce the matter-of-factual conditions of pregnancy instead of some lazy reconstruction of conditions we take to be like pregnancy. [19] But leave that aside and say that that Wagner's case is close enough. Wagner asserts:
"This scenario resembles the severity of burden of a typical pregnancy, but isn't it obvious that Mary still has a moral and legal obligation to feed the child? Yes. If not, how could any of these changes to the level of burden change her obligation? Remember, the alternative to her having the burden is that the child dies. In light of this reality, it is difficult to conceive of a way in which the burden could be adjusted to change her obligation to feed the child."
This is simply and obviously invalid. It does not follow that the consequences will not bear on our moral intuitions. Wagner simply takes it for granted (without explication or assertion as a premise for inferential use) that these changes are not sufficient to outweigh the death of the infant; there is no reason to hold this, though. Remember, the intuition is basically asserted, without reference to primitive causal factors. If it turns out that one of the psychological causal factors undergirding our intuitions in the first case is the perceived triviality of the act that the woman has to perform to sustain the child, then a change in the consequences will bear directly on the content of those intuitions.
It seems wrong to me to allow some other morally salient subject to die in order to prevent the suffering of a mosquito bite; I'd take this to be a trivial amount of suffering. However, it does not seem wrong to me to allow some other morally salient being to die in order to prevent myself from experiencing the pain of passing a kidney stone for a prolonged period of several months, or to prevent myself from being raped. These, it seems to me, are sufficient conditions which allow for the change in obligation, and there has to be some criterion of discrimination. We see that Wagner's inference is invalid because he does not provide such a criteria for maintaining the moral standing that is available for his inference. But clearly Wagner doesn't even believe this move, since he takes preventing death to be a sufficient reason for pregnancy termination. [20]
Perhaps Wagner's argument is that only when the suffering caused to the infant would be equal, or "same in kind," to the suffering prevented in the mother [i.e. death for one or the other] do we take the obligation not to stand, but I take this to trespass directly against both our intuitions and against direct moral principles. [21][22] But if this is Wagner's view, then he needs to state it explicitly in order to use it to infer the conclusion. Otherwise, the conclusion does not follow.
Let's take another case. There are several fairly serious non sequiturs in the article, and I think that an exhaustive account would have required simply focussing on them. I'll choose to present one more and allow the reader to pursue others.
Perhaps the most painful instance, because of its aggressive doubling-down on the importance of intuitions, is a passage after the discussion of J.J. Thomson's famous Violinist argument. [23] Wagner writes: [24]
"Imagine that Mary wakes up in the cabin and the baby is attached to her such that a short tube is protruding from Mary's stomach and entering the baby's stomach. Assume Mary has no formula but neither is she lactating. The only way for her to feed the baby is through the apparatus connecting them. The note tells her that she can remove the apparatus, but then the baby will not be able to eat, so it will starve to death. Does Mary have the moral or legal right to unhook? My intuitions are unchanged."
A bit of a jab here is necessary. Wagner's intuitions do not bear at all on whether or not someone has a legal right; this is a social fact of the kind discussed by Searle and others. There is a matter-of-factual assessment that can be given pre-theoretically about what will occur given the presentation of such a case, under a particular set of conditions. For Wagner to invoke his intuitions here is far more egregious than in the moral case, where there does not appear to be a ready pre-theoretical mode of assessment. But let's set that aside.
What Wagner has basically done here is to present a tailored version of Thomson's Violinist, where the violinist role is played by an infant, in order to off-set the disanalogies he discusses previously in the article, and assert that the withdrawal permissibility intuition is not met. Now, we will just presume that this is true for Steve. His intuitions are his; they belong to introspection. But what does he claim to derive from this as a conclusion? "Because the woman is a de facto guardian of a child, she should use her body to feed the child and can be expected by law to do so. She is obligated to stay pregnant."
I'm sorry, sir. But given that you make a point of setting apart the disanalogies in order to make your case, you do owe us a demonstration of the way in which you resolve these intuitions apart from simply the presentation of the case and forceful assertion of the conclusion. To do otherwise borders on literary (beyond just logical) non sequitur.
Now, to be fair to Steve, he might hold that some feature discussed in the disanalogies presented previously in the paper act as a sufficient reasons for the change in his moral intuitions; but it is, as in the previous case, not a stated inferential move, and so we see the failure of the argument to the conclusion. Further, he asserts explicitly that several of these disanalogies are irrelevant to his position, including the one discussed immediately prior to the rearticulation of the thought-experiment which primes his reassertion of his intuitions. The presentation of the argument assumes that the basic intuition is sufficient to count as some evidence for the conclusion, in spite of the fact that we have a previously acknowledged competing intuition in Thomson's experiment.
All that Wagner has shown in these cases is that there are competing intuitions between his intuitions about the cabin thought-experiment and many who advance the violinist thought experiment. He has asserted that these conflicting intuitions obtain even where the cases are sufficiently isomorphic in what appear to be all of the relevant respects; but he does not give resolution to the conflicting intuitions which would allow for the assertion of a strong conclusion.
some closing notes (or: before I go back to fantasizing about term papers)
I was warned that I would almost certainly not agree with any of the article by one of its contributors. I was told that I so whole-heartedly reject most of the premises on which the article would be based that I would probably be ideologically barred from accepting the conclusion even if I thought that it was a reasonably good work of moral philosophy. This assessment turned out to be more or less right.
Wagner succeeds in giving an articulation of a version of the intuitions surrounding bodily rights arguments and some of the objections to some articulations of bodily rights put forward by his friends, and showing how those objections accord with his intuitions under a certain set of crafted conditions. That is the extent of the success.
The paper is methodologically problematic. It begins and ends with the assertion of intuition as basic, a position which is fraught with difficulties so well known to the author that the dissonance is deafening for much of the technical content of the article. If I were writing a response in a scholarly journal (though such a response would necessitate the publication of the article in a scholarly journal prior to my submission, which seems unlikely) then I would numb myself through multiple readings and attempt to parse out the importance of a number of the technical claims about Thomson present in the body of the article and their relation to some conclusion about the moral content of abortion. Upon a second, third, and fourth reading of the article, I don't find any of the technical objections to Thomson compelling, and I don't find them weighing on my own intuition.
Insofar as the paper attempts to be a work in technical theoretical ethics, it fails. Obviously Wagner's point in constructing it in this intuition-heavy way is in part an attempt at lending rhetorical force; but it carries the consequences of what feels, at times, like an exercise in relativist allusion, where prior to post hoc rational justification the intuitions of the narrator are sovereign, the thing to which the truth-conditions of ethical propositions are, if not relativized, at least parameterized. This approach is simply ill-advised.
Most of this commentary was written in a stream of consciousness during a first bursts over the course of a day. I've proofed it, but it is likely to be a bit messy in terms of thought. That is, I suppose, one of the hazards of writing outside of the format of dispassionate philosophical critique.
I have access to all of the publications that I cite; unfortunately, for legal reasons I cannot distribute all of these texts. I've provided links that, in some cases, will take you to a full text and, in some cases, will take you to a site where you can purchase the texts. Otherwise, I've provided an academic citation.
[2] ibid pp. 2
[3] ibid pp. 3
[7] Haidt, Jonathan (2007) "The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology" Science 316.5827: 998-1002
[10] Ryle, Gilbert (1958) "On forgetting the difference between right and wrong" in Essays in Moral Philosophy
[11] Singer, Peter (1972) "Moral Experts" Analysis 32.4: 115-117
[15] Wagner, Steve (2013) pp. 5
[16] For a more extensive discussion of how these moves function, see John Searle (1997) The Construction of Social Reality, which (as far as I'm concerned) is the most systematic approach in establishing a social ontology.
[17] There can be some argument here regarding readings in the details of the Mays-Twiggs case. The various cases of child severance from biological parents is taken on the basis of special extenuating circumstances; see also Kingsley v. Kingsley. I take this to be evidence supporting my claim that direct parentage is primary as a legal rationale.
[18] Wagner, Steve (2013) pp. 7
[20] Wagner, Steve (2013) pp. 7
[24] Wagner, Steve (2013) pp. 18
Dennett's Articulation of Free Will
Daniel Dennett gives a response to some of the views on free will and determinism, and does it in terms of ethics. It seems like a good way to take a look at how many contemporary philosophers regard the neurological determinism discussions; as totally irrelevant to the interesting notions of free will and choice.
Principles of rational requirement and argument
I've had a number of debates with friends over the last few years about the circumstances under which we should be willing to engage with others; I have to admit, I'm not at all confident that I have a good grip on when it is a good idea, and when it isn't. The major point at issue, though, is often a matter of what we call an obligation of rational requirement.
Now, the idea of rational requirement emerges out of discussions in Kantian ethics. The way that the discussion goes in ethics is that a rational actor, given reasons that they accept as compelling for behaving in a particular way, is obligated to behave in that way. If you and I are having a disagreement about the best course of action, say you want to perform action A and I what you to perform action B, and I give you a reason which you accept as sufficient for performing action B that you consider better than your previous justification for performing action A, then you are (as the Kantian line goes) rationally required to perform A.
How, exactly, this rational requirement manifests itself is not entirely clear based on that articulation. It is, generally, a pretty vague notion. But I think it is useful to keep it vague here, because what I'm concerned with is a principle of rational requirement in the case of accepting arguments for the belief in a proposition.
Let's say that you and I are having a debate about some issue in philosophy; you believe that P and I believe that Q. You advance an argument from a set of premises that P, and I advance an argument that follows more clearly, more directly, or without some of the issues your argument has from a set of premises that establishes that Q. If you concede to me that I have furnished a better argument than you have, then it follows that you have some obligations to believe, or at least to consider more seriously, that Q. This seems like something we acknowledge in arguments entered into in good faith.
Here's the thing: Not everyone observes principles of rational requirement. Someone might say, "Well, that's a very good argument. It is certainly better than mine by all of the standards I'm using to assess the arguments, but I still don't feel like I ought to consider accepting it." This is the famous slip of many in reformed epistemology who say things like "... if, in some historically contingent circumstances the evidence that I have available to me should turn against Christianity, I don't think that that controverts the witness of the Holy Spirit. In such a situation I should regard that as simply a result of the contingent circumstances that I'm in and that if I were to pursue this with due diligence and with time, I would discover that the evidence, if I could get the correct picture, would support what the witness of the holy spirit would tell me."
These sorts of moves, many of my friends tell me, are indicative of folks who are set on not seriously arguing, who are set on not arguing in good faith. I think that this is likely correct; that these sorts of cases are illustrative of the definition of what it means to argue in bad faith. To assert that I might advance a position in a debate on rational grounds, giving reasons for the acceptance of such a position, when those reasons are not a necessary condition for my acceptance of the position, is just dishonest. Perhaps I think that the reasons I'm giving are a sufficient condition, and so they should compel others to accept the position [this is the position of many folks who argue in bad faith in this way] regardless of whether they are necessary for the acceptance of such a position, but even if this is the case one is obligated also to provide a set of rational conditions which are necessary for the acceptance of the position. Some necessary conditions, as well as some sufficient conditions, are necessary for the presentation of a substantive argument.
But does it follow from this analysis that we ought not to argue with people who are arguing in bad faith? I'm not convinced. I have folks who say, "Well, they're not going to accept the position, regardless of whether you advance it in a way which is successful by even the most potent standards. Even if you present the most forceful case, since they're not rationally required to accept it, they can just walk away." They note that this is a serious moral failure of the interlocutor, and so we ought not to take them morally seriously. So, again, I think that analysis is probably right. There is something morally defective about these sorts of positions. But that still dodges the issue.
Whether or not an interlocutor accepts principles of rational requirement doesn't mean that the interlocutor is incapable of getting something substantive out of the argument. Whether or not the interlocutor acknowledges that they ought to be rational in evaluating their own beliefs, they are liable to get something out of acknowledging the inferential processes that go on during arguments. The question, I think, is not really whether we ought to categorically disengage from those who deny rational requirement, from those who say that even given sufficient reason they are not going to accept the conclusions of a particular position. Rather, I think that the question is what sorts of cases we ought to consider it reasonable, or sensible, or not totally idiotic, to enter into conversation with someone who denies rational requirement. That, it seems to me, is a very difficult issue.
The Mereological Ontological Argument, and response
I have something of an attitude of taking on all comers in philosophy, especially in philosophy of religion and ethics. I'm fully willing to acknowledge when I'm new to an argument and need some time to try to wrap my head around it or poke it and see what is going on, but sometimes I just like to dive in, and that's sort of what I want to do with a new piece posted by a friend of mine. The argument that he sets out is not an original one; he attributes it to Graham Oppy. I think that it is interesting and worth taking a crack at, especially since I've started to actually learn something about mereology [one of the more obscure and oft maligned sub-branches of metaphysics].
He strings the argument, which he calls the "Mereological Ontological Argument", together as follows:
1. I exist. (Contingent premise; a priori)
2. Some things – at least one – exist. (From 1)
3. If some things exist, then there are some things that are all of the things that exist. (Premise; from the meaning of ‘all’)
4. Whenever some things exist, there is some thing of which they are all parts. (Mereological premise)
5. There is exactly one thing of which every thing is a part. (From 3 and 4)
6. The unique thing of which every thing is a part is God. (Definition)
7. So, God exists. (From 5 and 6)
So, firstly, what does the argument attempt to prove? Well, it offers a stipulative definition of what it means for something to be God, though that stipulative definition is not one that is going to be comfortable for most theists, because it likely precludes that God from having a number of properties that would be necessary to its being compatible with religious teachings. For instance, in order for free will to be possible on most interpretations, God's causal powers have to be separate from mental causation in the individual; that is, the causal forces associated with God have to underdetermine whatever psychology causes the agent to act in such-and-such a way. There are other problems, but that is just a fairly obvious one.
Secondly, does the argument follow deductively, given the definitions provided in premises (4) and (6)? I'm inclined to think that it does. John, the author of the post, points out that generally (4) is intended as something very strong, and as an assertion about the way in which the world fits together. This is the comment with which are most likely to take issue, so I want to spend some time unpacking that, but I think it is worthwhile to note that the argument is at least valid.
Thirdly, does it avoid begging the question? Yes, it seems to. We can actually show that this argument is true on a set-theoretical analysis, as opposed to the mereological part-whole analysis, as well; however, as will quickly become obvious, the theist is going to disinclined to take a set-theoretical version of this sort of argument. Let's say that we have, in the world, a collection of objects that are in the world. Since we take it that (1) is true, and everyone takes it as at least minimally true after Descartes, (despite people who think they have a problem with the cogito) we can accept that there is such a collection. If we enumerate that collection S1, S2, S3, ... Sn then we can come up with a set S = {S1, S2, S3, ... Sn} which contains all of the extant objects. This seems a really uninteresting exercise, though, and it is going to be wildly unsatisfying for the theist, or at least it should be, because all we've done is stipulate an entity that we can prove functions in this way and slap a name-tag on it to justify theism; it's a totally post hoc exercise and is actually going to explicitly undermine a lot of beliefs that are important to the theist.
So what's cool about the mereological argument, given that it doesn't seem to prove anything interesting about the world.
Premises (3) and (4) of this argument stipulate features of part-whole relations that are interesting, and I think probably problematic. I'm really interested in exploring part-whole relations as they related to properties of objects and the descriptions of those objects, so this has become a point of fascination to me. (I'm also really interested in a few questions which are not obviously mereological; those are a part of a term paper that I'm working on, which will likely stagger in some less technical form onto the site around mid-May.)
(3) asserts that if there are some things that exist, then we can definitely assert that there is an inventory of objects which exhausts the things that exist. This seems fine. Regardless of whether there are a finite or infinite number of objects, by virtue of specifying that there are any whatsoever, we note that the collection of those objects exists. That is just the set-theoretical observation I made above. "If we've got x, y, z, then we have a collection of x, y, z." or, more importantly for philosophical logic, "If we've got x, y, z, then we have a definite true conjunction of x, y, and z."
There is a way of reading (4) which is really trivial, in lieu of (3). That is to say, if we have an inventory of objects which make a set of propositions true, then we can acknowledge that the conjunction of those propositions about the objects will similarly be true. That is to say, given {p, q} then we get {p ^ q}. This isn't the reading that I think John or Oppy want to give. What they want to say is that for any inventory of objects, we can offer a definite description of another object which contains those objects as parts. Let's say I have two cups, then we would say that there is an object "two cups" which exists and of which each cup is a proper part.
There is a way of reading (4) which is really trivial, in lieu of (3). That is to say, if we have an inventory of objects which make a set of propositions true, then we can acknowledge that the conjunction of those propositions about the objects will similarly be true. That is to say, given {p, q} then we get {p ^ q}. This isn't the reading that I think John or Oppy want to give. What they want to say is that for any inventory of objects, we can offer a definite description of another object which contains those objects as parts. Let's say I have two cups, then we would say that there is an object "two cups" which exists and of which each cup is a proper part.
Now, this feels very counter intuitive because we naturally individuate cups, but it is totally reasonably on a part-whole analysis. After all, the truth conditions for any assertion that I make about "two cups" is going to be the same as the truth conditions for any assertion about the proper parts of "two cups." So we see that the conjunction of the parts actually mean (at least in the sense of truth-conditions; not in the sense of mode of presentation) the same as the proper parts taken together. The fact that this holds is, I think, interesting; but so is the fact that it only holds for truth conditions; it is worth recognizing here that I've pointed out, following a much smarter line of philosophers, that truth-conditions are not exhaustive of meaning, and so we have something that I think this mereological account has to consider.
cynicism, philosophy, and me... and also you
The more time I spend in academia, the more I realize that much of my emotional energy directed at the work I'm encountering goes through cycles. There is a lot of work in contemporary scholarship (whether philosophy, social science, psychology, whatever) that I like, and there is a lot of work that I think is ridiculous/bad/painful. Occasionally I vent about serious academics that I'm reading who I think do silly things, but my opinion of "the academy" is really more of a mood and fluctuates. Some days I get to spend my time reading Paul Churchland or Charles Parsons, and so I'm impressed and engaged and optimistic, and some days I spend my time reading Zizek or Bruno Latour. (Apologies to those who like those folks; I understand why they're popular, but I don't care for them in the least.)
I want to set that up as a contrast, though. I'd say that, when it comes to academic work, I'm not a cynical person. I don't find myself frustrated with absolutely everything. But when it comes to mainstream attempts at intellectualism, I have to actively keep myself from turning into grumpy cat.
I'm sorry. I love a lot of the people in my life, but I've become conditioned to hesitate when it comes to reading mainstream pieces of writing sent to me by all but a select group of folks (those who I've known for a while, who are fairly good at gauging my reactions and know my expectations when it comes to, say, science writing). Even sites run by or associated with people I respect, like The Creativity Post (directed by a cognitive psychology professor here at NYU) or the Daily Beast (which a friend of mine works for) manage to make me unwittingly cranky if I turn to them without taking a deep breath and reminding myself that the expectations of people outside of academia are very different.
My working theory is that academia, and philosophy in particular, are basically responsible for this cynicism. Why? Because they require an approach to reading a text that is very different than the way that most folks read; that approach is particularly heavy on checking the contents of each claim in an article to see how they fit into an argument and attempting to figure out whether anything of consequence follows from the argument(s) advanced by a given piece of writing. All writing is polemical, and so we analyze texts in a way that allows us to work out what it is that they're attempting to accomplish. It is a monumentally suspicious exercise; it also isn't a level of scrutiny that journalists, for example, or even academics writing op-eds for the New York Times, take into account.
The project of non-academic writing is very different than the project of academic writing. The things that you can get away with saying, or inferring, or assuming, are radically different. You can say things that are very imprecise, or even false, if they allow you to contribute something substantive to your point. (Friends in literary theory have pointed out to me that there are some areas of academia where this is allowed; my response is to say that this is why those areas of academia elicit groans so readily from fields of the academy where it isn't.)
But, given that the project of non-academic writing is just fundamentally different, it shouldn't bother me that I'm not finding what I'm looking for when I read the New York Times.
Actually, it should. The reality is that academic philosophers, and others who accept this approach to writing, do it for a reason that doesn't tie in with a particular mission. We take it that good writing is careful writing, good argument is thorough argument, good assertion is true assertion. It isn't actually that the coals of philosophical writing are different categorically, and so it is alright because it is a categorically different animal. It is that in mainstream writing you don't get punished by your readers for laziness or insipidity. You can occasionally be punished for saying something offensive, or getting a story completely wrong, but those are the drastic cases where laziness causes a much larger problem. In academia, the standards attempt to minimize laziness as much as possible across the board, not simply in cases where it causes a major issue.
The internet, as a sidebar, is a bizarre place that is a bastion feelings of cynicism, superiority, and condescension that I actively empathize with; but also with the laziness that instantiates those feelings in the first place. The meme culture is the most staggeringly lazy and powerfully cynical perfect storm of irony that my complicated desires to participate in it and to bash my head furiously against my keyboard lead me generally just to chuckle to myself.
So, what's the endgame here? It isn't as though I get to change the future of mainstream writing to make it like academic writing. [And, for reasons having to do with entertainment value, you should be grateful I don't have any power whatsoever in that regard.] The reality is that I get to live a boring cliché out in my attitude about the mainstream writing. I get to be a curmudgeon who points out that the things asserted by science journalists are excessively dramatized and that the discussions of particular political issues are absurdly oversimplified; I do it publicly (as well as privately) which is a little bit different. At some point I may also get to be a cliché with some cognitive dissonance, asserting that whatever mainstream writing I do is somehow qualitatively different from the stuff that appears in the New York Times.
As with academic writing, the reality is mixed; I really shouldn't be so unilaterally cynical when there are places like the Stone and certain features of mainstream media platforms that do promote some serious, critical thought. That's actually a reason to be optimistic, and I acknowledge it as a good reason, even if I don't internally feel that way in the same way I feel cynical when someone sends me an article from Psychology Today. The point, though, is that the public standards of criticism are very different from academic standards and so we don't tend to see the rigorous stuff in the Stone or the occasional thoughtful blog entry (nudge, nudge) wind its way through the message boards.
Why mention it? To many of the folks here, it might seem terrifically obvious. Or perhaps, now that it has been argued by a smart and handsome young man, it now seems as though no one can argue the contrary. The fact is, though, this is a position that generally goes unnoticed. Most folks I run into constantly mistake the mainstream commentary for academic commentary. In Fresno it means mistaking a blog post by their favorite apologist for a work in philosophy of religion; in New York it means mistaking a report on the new BRAIN initiative for an assessment of the state of play in neuroscience. That's a dangerous mistake to make, especially because it is self-perpetuating. Accepting sources as authoritative without that rigorous, incredibly cranky approach to reading (commonly called "being a nit-picking pain in the ass") is the underlying problem with the consumption of even what is really the best available mainstream coverage; it is a problem which is probably impervious to change, though we can always hope.
Faultless Disagreement and Ethics
I've commented a bit before on confusions about relativism, especially normative ethical relativism, but also a bit about stronger forms. I've had a lot of folks ask my why it is that philosophers find it (a) to be a position worth having, in some cases, and (b) a position that demands an answer, in other cases. I think that an answer to (a) is the best possible answer to (b). The fact that serious philosophers find a position to be acceptable for strong philosophical reasons means giving some sort of answer to those reasons. I don't want to hand wave at a position that I do think requires being taken seriously.
So I want to give what I take to be the strongest argument for moral relativism, as it is often articulated, why I reject it, and then explain how it does give us something useful for ethics. It turns out that the position is hugely important even for ethicists who end up rejecting the view; relativism, in those cases, notes something importantly true.
descriptive moral relativism, and how we get relative
When I was first taught about relativism in a lecture context, there was a lot of hay made out of the difference between descriptive relativisms and normative relativisms. It is very different to simply describe that cultures have different ethical systems relative to their social status and to claim that we ought to take into consideration moral relativism in our own assessment of these problems. The former, it was presented to me, was just an obvious truism; and we have to be sure that we're not fighting over that, because there's really nothing to fight over anymore.
I think that's basically right. And I like to illustrate it using subjective preferences. Cultural disagreements are disputed; some people will argue that they have a common genesis. I think that those lines of argument are bad, and that cultures do have serious disagreements about values, but there are some folks who disagree. [I'm currently developing an article attacking that view; but that's for another post.] Still, I think we can explain this solely using the concept of faultless disagreement. Take the sample excerpt:
Case 1
Alfred: This pie tastes delicious!Betty: This pie does not taste delicious!
The surface syntax suggests that these sentences are incompatible, but [as competent speakers of English] we know that this isn't a disagreement about a matter of fact. Right? The standard relativist line goes that both are asserting something true, in spite of the fact that they are asserting contradictory propositions. How can this be right?
Well, there are two explanations. The first is to say that the actual meaning of the utterance indexes the predicate "delicious" to a property of the experience of the pie, rather than of the pie itself. It is not as though the pie has the objective property of being delicious; that's not a feature that can correctly be ascribed to pies. [I think this first story is ultimately very compelling; it has some really serious problems, though, as a warning to those who want to take this line.]
The second is to say that being delicious is a predicate of the subject "pie" but that the predicate indexes with respect to persons, such that it is found to be true or false based on the experiences of the person, based on their subjective take on that predicate. Because Alfred attributes the property and Better doesn't, the truth value of the proposition is T for Alfred and F for Betty. There are some good reasons to except various parts of this story, especially the bit about the predicate attaching to pie rather than the experience; and I think if you can establish that the meaning of the statement really expresses a proposition about a property of the pie then this is a really plausible story.
how it gets smuggled into ethics, and gets rejected [sort of]
There are some very smart folks who argue that when we talk about ethical propositions, and disagreement over those propositions, we are talking about faultless disagreement. Why? Well, let's take another case:
Case 2Alfred: I think infanticide is morally impermissible under circumstances x, y, z.Betty: I think infanticide is morally permissible under circumstances x, y, z.
So, there are some ways in which we have something very similar between the two cases. Both cases express contradictory propositions. Both cases express something which can be understood as a simple assertion of a predicate that a subject has: That the act of infanticide, in a situation, has the property of being morally impermissible. Further, like the first case, there doesn't seem to be an obvious fact of the matter that settles the issue.
Unlike an argument that Alfred and Betty have about whether the cow is in the field, there isn't a part of the world that they can look at and settle the issue. The proposition doesn't refer to a part of the world. So it seems like we have another instance of faultless disagreement. That is to say, it appears that neither Alfred nor Betty are wrong about the assertion.
One of the responses is to say that there are cases in which Alfred and Betty could be wrong. After all, suppose that we ask one of them to give a reason for their claim about the moral status of the act, and Alfred gave as a principle moral reason a claim that "Babies have higher-order reasoning capacities that are the basis for a Kantian-style personhood criterion." Well, that claim is just false. Or Betty said, "Babies don't have operant pain centers." Also just false.
So, what's going on here? The moral claim requires us to give reasons, and the sorts of reasons that are sufficient for establishing the truth of the proposition entail some matter-of-factual assessment about the act. Those matters of fact can be false, and if they are, then we note that the person doesn't have knowledge of the proposition. We can show that their assessment fails.
The problem is that factual entailments in judgment seem to heavily underdetermine the truth value of the act. We could definitely imagine two assessments where both sides only take truth-evaluable propositions that are true, but still come out with contradictory answers. Do we have faultless disagreement in those cases? I suspect we do not because, as in the previous case, we can use methods of assessment to probe ethical reasoning to see how well it functions and evaluate the substance of foundational ethical claims. This pushes the underdetermination much further back down the line.
what's the lesson?
The lesson is that ethical judgments, in order to be the sort of thing that are intellectually interesting, require reasons. In order to have some contents for assessment, we have to talk about the truth-evaluable content of the belief, as well as the philosophically evaluable content of the belief. Then we can get ourselves rolling. In this sense, we can show that practical and theoretical ethics are very powerful branches of philosophy, and that they derive from attempts to set what is clearly not a faultless disagreement.
It also gives us an opportunity to talk about what sorts of positions impact the branches of ethics and these methods of assessment, as well as what we ought to privilege in our discussions of ethics. One of the arguments that I've advanced in my very short career [thus far] among professional philosophers is that matters of fact are more integral to matters of assessment than the theoretical features of an ethical position, because they are less open to hedging and because there can be more deductive assessment. Those allow for the sorts of assessment of ethical positions that I think are genuinely interesting.
methodological problems in Feser's Aristotelean proof
Edward Feser, a philosopher at Pasadena City College, recently gave a lecture entitled "An Aristotelian Proof of the Existence of God." The lecture is worth a watch for those who are interested in Thomist apologetics. Feser likes to position himself as a strong critic of a number of both theist and non-theist philosophers on his blog, so it is interesting to see him make a positive case for the existence of God that is open to critique. Below is the full content of the lecture. I've included some of my own comments in what follows.
I should note that there is an enormous part of the theoretical baggage that Feser expounds at the beginning that I think is mistaken. Feser is laying out a historical case, presenting historical arguments in the form of Aristotle, as well as counter-arguments. As an exposition, this is reasonable; but I do think it is worth noting that the frame that Feser uses is intentionally rooted in an intuitive approach to concepts. We justify Aristotle by the way in which we intuit the potentialities of our cup of coffee. [This is how he winds up in an extended conversations of potentialities; it's a fairly good exegesis of the Aristotelean position, but I don't grant the methodology as viable.]
The reason that I find it misguided, to paint in broad strokes a criticism against someone who habitually [and effectively] works in the details, goes something like this: The application a conception of potentiality such that we attribute properties based on what we experience or conceptually intuit is non sequitur. It does not follow from a conceptual analysis of "potentiality" or "change" that we learn something about features of the world; rather, what follows is that we learn about the conceptual apparatus. Now, that itself does have some epistemic value, but the value is far more constrained than Feser leads the audience to believe.
Even when Feser claims that he is moving "beyond common sense" (at about 14:00) he is actually doing no such thing; introducing the hierarchal ordering of causes is not methodologically different. Introducing the notion of dependency results in more-or-less the same folk-theoretic analysis, which is how he can get away with saying "It is not the brush that paints the painting, but the painter." This analysis is foundational to his reading of Aquinas, from what I understand, and his argument for the existence of God.
Unfortunately, the real question begging sets in at around 21:00, where Feser claims that by virtue of being successors in a set of ordered causal relationships there must be something which ultimately lends its potentiality in a non-derivative way. The intuitive appeal of Feser's argument is apparent, I think, given the examples that he presents. But there are a number of problems with doing a foundational analysis of such a claim.
So, let's take an analysis of a hierarchal ordered finite set, which is what Feser really wants to talk about, since he's arguing that such a set is sufficient to prove the existence of God. In this ordered set we have E1 which sufficient causes E2; E2 sufficiently causes E3; E3 sufficiently causes E4. In a formal analysis, we wind up with a set of discrete events {E1, E2, E3, E4} and a set of conditionals {E1 causes E2, E2 causes E3, E3 causes E4}. [Normally I would use a formal operator, but my blogging platform doesn't support one that I like, and it probably isn't necessary here anyway; I have removed the "If... then..." format in favor of 'causes' for reasons that have to do with the formality, for those who care.]
We can note, in the formal analysis, that we can deductively establish with that set of conditionals that E1 causes E3 and E4 through hypothetical syllogism. In this sense, Feser's notion holds up in formal analysis; the problem here is partly in the way that Feser tells the story that sneaks itself into the content.
Given the set of conditionals, E1 sufficiently causes E4, but it doesn't necessarily causes E4. We could easily have an additional event E0 which would independently sufficiently cause E2, and then the question is which conditional is matter-of-factually responsible for the realization of E2, and we realize that the conditional "E1 causes E2" is responsible only by virtue of the fact of that E1 obtains. [Possible world semantics serve to illustrate the relative weakness of Feser's claim.] What Feser has shown is that, if some event E1 obtains, then we can establish that E1 is causally responsible for all subsequent causes; but this tells us nothing interesting about E1, since the event is established only by its causal standing. [There are certain features of E1 which would be necessary by virtue of its causal standing as uncaused, but those features have to be restricted in deference to the sort of event and the sort of conditional, i.e. a sufficient, non-necessary condition.]
There then emerge lots of other formal problems for Feser. Given that E1 is a sufficient condition but not a necessary one, could we establish independent causal chains, or even interrelated causal chains with different points of genesis? I would be interested to here Feser's response to such a question. My expectation is that he will take issue with the characterization of E1 as only a sufficient condition, but that is a battle I am more than happy to fight since it seems likely to hold up both on a formal analysis and on Feser's folk-conceptual analysis. And unless Feser is able to independently establish the necessary condition, I suspect that the argument fails.
I realize that I've moved along quite a bit and have really only touched on the first half of the video. Hopefully, though, this has been something of a useful preface on a single approach to a rebuttal to Feser's argument. It isn't comprehensive, but one of the things that is worth noting is that in tangling with Ed one is also tangling with Aquinas and Aristotle, and sorting out whose baggage goes where and responding to only the problems which belong to Feser's arguments [rather than the more general theoretical problems of Aquinas and Aristotle] makes for a lot of parsing, which would take quite a long time.
I will note that there are some discussions that Feser uses to justify various features of God in accordance with arguments from Aquinas that are... well... far-fetched. At about 47:00 Feser gives an account of intelligence that would, and should, make any philosopher of mind cringe. "Having a form or pattern within you without being that kind of thing." This seems like an absurd approach to intelligence; are we then bound to say that genes are intelligent with respect to tissues, because they contain forms and patterns regarding tissues without themselves being tissues? Are we to say this of even more obviously concrete objects like computers, which contain forms and patterns regarding word-processing [however rudimentary or bad at spellchecking they may be] without themselves being tokened sentences? Obviously not. This analysis of intelligence, which doesn't consider things like the flexibility of use of various informational patterns, is totally unacceptable.
There are a number of other problems, but I'll end with that; either way, the video is worth a watch for theists and non-theists, as it does show a genuine philosophical approach to apologetics, which is pretty rare in a lot of the literature that gets flung around the internet; it is particularly good at avoiding the folk approach to time that makes Bill Craig's arguments [popular as they are] fail grandly, while lending itself as a case to an account of why folk analyses should be avoided in philosophy of religion.
