Ramesh Ponnuru writes:

What renders atheism incompatible with a coherent account of morality, when it is incompatible, is physicalism (or what is sometimes described as reductive materialism). If it is true that the universe consists entirely and without remainder of particles and energy, then all human action must be within the domain of caused events, free will does not exist, and moral reasoning is futile if not illusory (as are other kinds of reasoning).

This is a stupefyingly widespread view that flows from an elementary error in thinking.

Suppose you know that there is free will or that moral reasoning is not futile. Next, suppose you find that the universe is made out of only whatever the universe is made out of. What do you infer? You infer that free will and moral reasoning, which occur inside the universe (or as aspects of the universe), whatever they may be, are made possible because of whatever it is the universe is made out of. And there you are.

Here is what you do not do. You do not start with a mystifying conditional like “If the universe is only physical (or whatever), then there is no free will,” because how do you know that? You don’t. But you may think you do and so you get caught in a retarded ponens/tollens showdown: the universe is physical, ergo no free will, or… free will, so the universe is not physical. But, again, through what method of divination do we validate this conditional? None. Because we already know it is false.

Here are two things you know:  free will exists (it is obvious: go ahead, touch your nose) and the universe is made of whatever it is made of (obvious, if anything is). Therefore, you know the conjunction of those two things. Therefore, you know that the crazy proposition that says that one of them must be false isn’t true! There’s no need to get hung up on an arbitrary conjecture about the trascendental conditions for the very possibility of the existence of something when things you already know rule it out. P & Q  implies ~ (P —> ~Q). Logic: try it!

If we find out tomorrow that the universe is made of jello, all we will have learned about morality is that it, like everything else, is ultimately jello-dependent. 

There is no better way to memorialize a philosopher than argue with him. So here’s a bit from one of the only things I ever wrote about Rorty, from a 1999 Institute for Objectivist Studies online seminar. This, I think, would have been my first year in the PhD program at Maryland, so please keep that it mind. 

Richard Rorty’s “Objectivity or Solidarity” is a case study in the use of false alternatives for rhetorical gain. The essay begins by presenting us with an awfully weird and unappealing choice. Rorty claims that there are just two main ways to “give sense” to our lives. Either one can make up a story about oneself in which one’s life figures in the life of a bigger community, or one can think about standing in a certain direct relationship to the mind-independent world. If you go in for the first, then you like solidarity. If you go in for the second, you like objectivity. Now, reader, pick sides!

It really is a weird choice. First, we might not care that much about being embedded in a tradition or community. And so fitting into one might not be central to some people’s sense of meaning in life. But these people don’t thereby have any overriding interest in eyeball to eyeball contact with the world-out-there. I’m sure you can give meaning to your life without questing primarily for either truth-for-its-own-sake or my-place-in-something-bigger-than-me. How about giving meaning to your life by trying to do something that makes you, the individual, happy?

It is important for Rorty to cast his argument against objectivity in terms of the meaningfulness of our lives, because Rorty’s “pragmatism” will forbid him from saying that the ideal of objectivity is objectively unworthy of belief, because false. He will be required to say merely that objectivity is not so good for us to care about, that we’ll be better off if we don’t care about it and care about solidarity instead. His way of setting up the question in terms of what “gives sense” to our lives allows him to plump for solidarity by saying that seeking solidarity (without trying to ground solidarity in objectivity) lends itself better to a meaningful life. As we shall see, he really can’t coherently claim that either. But first things first.

And I think this bit is relevant to the Yglesias/Linker debate:

As it turns out, it does not look like Rorty is articulating the commitments of liberal, western intellectuals, such that when he speaks to that audience, they are bound by those commitments to endorse what Rorty says. Rather, it looks like he is trying to dictate those commitments, to cause us to revise them. It looks as though he is pretending to be a member of our community, but that in reality he is standing outside of it, looking in, and suggesting we change our commitments in rather radical ways to suit his ideals. Rorty himself refuses solidarity with the Western Enlightenment ideals and the community centered in those ideals. So he makes up a story that will disintegrate that community and its ideals by persuading its members that it has been committed to Rorty’s ideals all along.

When Rorty says, “There is, in short, nothing wrong with the hopes of the Enlightenment” he means that there is nothing wrong except for the entire picture of man’s relationship to reality through reason upon which the Enlightenment was based. He is saying that there is nothing wrong with the hopes of the Enlightenment, except for those hopes and ideals at odds with his own. Clearly, some notion of objectivity is essential to the Enlightenment vision. Rorty’s attack on objectivity just is an attack on the Enlightenment ideals based on its conception of objectivity. But he cannot put the debate in those terms, lest he show himself too clearly as a dissenter to our ideals. Rather, he must put the debate in terms that permit him to characterize himself as someone who is articulating Enlightenment ideals and making them coherent from within. But he is, in fact, merely a wolf in Enlightenment clothing.

I have since come some way in Rorty’s direction in seeing the contingency of the Enlightenment ideals of rationality and objectivity. (In my Objectivist period, I would have seen them as something like self-evident, or immanent in the very idea of thinking. I don’t now see it this way at all.) But I’ve hardly come to be ironic about them. Grasping a thing’s contingency can be the same as grasping its rarity and preciousness — can be a reason for treating it very seriously, without irony. The ideals of rationality and objectivity in practice actually are our means of discovering what the world is like, and actually do explain a large part of the enormous moral progress humankind has made in the last few hundred years. Because I now see these ideals as more contingent and fragile than ever, I now think Rorty’s assault on objectivity is even more discreditible than I did before, and even more a violation of solidarity with those who hold fast to the norms of reason, progress, and social hope. 

“The idea that philosophy could be kept apart from the sciences would have been dismissed out of hand by most of the great philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries. But many contemporary philosophers believe they can practice their craft without knowing what is going on in the natural and social sciences. If facts are needed, they rely on their “intuition”, or they simply invent them. The results of philosophy done in this way are typically sterile and often silly. There are no proprietary philosophical questions that are worth answering, nor is there any productive philosophical method that does not engage the sciences. But there are lots of deeply important (and fascinating and frustrating) questions about minds, morals, language, culture and more. To make progress on them we need to use anything that science can tell us, and any method that works.”

– Stephen Stich, from Steve Pyke’s lovely collection of philosopher portraits.

My kind of philosopher!

[Photo: Copyright Steve Pyke. I hope he won't mind my borrowing the Stich picture if I promise to buy one or two of his prints, and tell my readers to consider it. I really think I could use a Quine!]

Andrew Sullivan publishes an intelligent letter from a reader on how Sullivan and Sam Harris are talking past each other — Harris talking about truth, Sullivan talking about meaning — and suggesting that they refocus and take this issues head on.

I, personally, as an atheist, find meaning in my own possibility and will to act in this world. I have the opportunity to interact with others and to create things. I have the chance to leave this world a bit better than when I came into it… for my children and for the rest of humanity. I don’t do this because a particular flying spaghetti monster ordained that I do it and will punish me with his noodly appendage if I don’t. I do it because I have the power and I believe that it is better for me if I help those around me. What else would give my life more meaning than that?

Sullivan replies:

But why is that more meaningful than flying a plane into the World Trade Center?

The obvious retort is: how is Catholicism more meaningful than flying a plane into the World Trade Center? Does Sullivan really mean to lob a meatball for Harris to hit out of the park?

The 9/11 terrorists were religiously motivated, and no doubt did what they did not out of a sense of secular nihilism, but out of deep and no doubt meaningful religious conviction. I think part of Harris’ point is: what’s so meaningful about a system of beliefs for which there is no evidence? Well, there’s no doubt that people find meaning in all sorts of false things, and those false things don’t have to be true to find meaning in them. If Sullivan is a Catholic, then he believes that all other religions are false. Does he deny that they are meaningful? Is his point just that you have to believe that the false thing you believe is true in order to find meaning it? But Muslim suicide bombers, and suicide pilots, believe, too. More importantly, if you believe that something is true, and it is, then why can’t you find meaning in that? It almost seems like Sullivan thinks that you have to believe something that is false is true, and also sort of believe it is false, but beautiful or good, at the same time, in order to draw meaning from it, which makes no sense.

It’s totally mysterious why something that is true and beautiful and good can’t be equally meaningful. Indeed, it’s mysterious why the commitment to something beautiful and good, like truth, can’t be exceedingly meaningful in its own right. Obviously, the problem with running a plane into the WTC doesn’t turn on whether or not it was meaningful. It turns on whether it was morally monstrous, which it was–and you don’t need Jesus to see that. And, the fact is, many of the most morally monstrous things people have ever done were meaningful to them–and often for religious reasons.

Anyway, what a totally stupid and disgusting thing for Sullivan to say.

I took a huge number of metaphysics courses during grad school and, over time, I changed my mind about pretty much everything, other than my dogged commitment to the law of non-contradiction. Then I stayed stuck, because, of course, I eventually landed on the correct answers. I thought the NYTM article on free will was pretty good, but I also no longer find the question very interesting. There are lots of uninteresting metaphysical questions. Here are a few obviously correct metaphysical conclusions not worth thinking that much about (to me).

Free will: The universe is either deterministic or it isn’t. This has nothing to do with free will. We have it. Yes, we often make mistakes in attributing agency to ourselves and others. But often we don’t. It is frequently possible to have done other than what we did in fact do. The trick is understanding the relevant sense of “possible,” which has nothing to do with ultimate issues about the nature of causation.

Ontology: Quine is right. To be is to be the value of a bound variable. That is, if something plays a role in our best explanation of some phenomenon, you should believe it exists. Otherwise, not. God, for instance, is the best explanation for nothing. That’s why you shouldn’t believe in God, or the posits of string theory. (People like Megan who hesitate to call themselves atheists because they cannot “prove” nonexistence are simply confused about ontological commitment. If Megan’s p for “God exists” is so low (”vanishingly unlikely”), then God must play no role in her economy of explanation, which is all there is to being an atheist. You don’t just get to decide whether or not you are one.)

Universals: There are “repeatable” fundamental “kinds”, which explains why there are relations of causal necessity. Realism about universals confuses the semantic generality of concepts for ontological generality. “Instantiation” and “exemplification” relations add nothing useful to property instances (tropes). There are individuals and that’s it. If two are in different locations but it would have made no difference whatsoever to the history of the universe had they been switched, then they are two of a kind. We can have essentialist scientific realism without essences. But it really doesn’t matter much: choosing a particularist or universalist ontology is just a Carnap-style choice of vocabulary. It’s an open question whether the more elegantly parsimonious vocabulary works out better in the work of explanation. It’s probably easier to think like a realist.

Modality: There is exactly one possible world, the actual one. Pace Lewis, more than one possible world is the best explanation for nothing, so that’s that. “Possible” means “not inconsistent with the fundamental laws that govern basic kinds.” Modal statements about fundamental kinds (”gold might have had a different atomic weight”) may be grammatical but are not meaningful. Whereof we cannot speak, etc. Bonus: modal epistemology is just epistemology, and epistemology is the psychology and sociology of truth-tracking. Unless there is reason to think that our haphazardly evolved and organized and imaginative abilities for some bizarre reason happen to reliably track truths about the fundamental laws governing ultimate kinds, it’s hard to see what thought experiments about transparent iron or a molecular duplicate but non-conscious Zombie me are even supposed to be about, much less explain.

Qualia: Yes! They play a computational function. (This is a joke! I don’t know that at all!)

Don’t mean to bore you. It’s all pretty obvious when you just come out and say it like that, huh?

Also, it has come my attention that some readers of this blog find philosophical jargon forbidding. Sorry! But if a man can’t use clubby, exclusive, abstruse jargon on his own blog, where can he? Anyway, if you end up on a game show, and they need the answer to the problem of universals, you’re in luck. OK… Back to hard, interesting stuff, like happiness and inequality.

I accept a more or less functionalist account of the mind, according to which mental states are individuated by their functional role in the economy of cognition and behavior. I also believe in the possibility of what is sometimes called the “Cartesian Fallacy,” the assumption that our own mental states are transparently accessible to consciousness. Functionalism together with anti-Cartsianism about introspective access imply that we may not know what words in our language mean, even if we use them correcly, and that we may have false beliefs about what we believe.

I’ve brought this up before in an earlier discussion of “meta-atheism,” [pdf] roughly the idea that people may sincerely believe they believe in God when they do not in fact. The disposition to avow a belief that P is neither necessary nor sufficient for believing that P. Actually believing P requires that one is generally disposed not only to say that one does, but that one is disposed to make certain inferences, to behave in certain ways, and more. This raises the possibilty that people may sincerely believe that they are happy or unhappy, when they actually aren’t.

It is hard to believe that one could make a mistake about whether one was in a state of pain, say. But happiness probably isn’t like that. If happiness is a complex, partly historically and socially constructed condition composed of dispositions to experience certain basic emotions and moods in a distinctive combination, togteher with dispositions to have certain thoughts, and to behave in certain ways, then it may be pretty plausible that we could just be wrong about whether we are happy, or about how happy we are.  

I don’t think I want to press this view very hard, but it strikes me as a real possibility, and another reason why self-report is not the most promising technique of measurement.  

I came into my office this morning and discovered a fly trapped in my Nalgene. It can’t find its way out. What can this possibly mean?

Here are a few thoughts about what I’ve learned from interdisciplinary research.

The more interdisciplinary investigation I do, the clearer it becomes that different disciplines have quite different standards for evidence and argument. Some very traditional analytical philosophy papers on happiness (or whatever) are next to useless, so thoughtless are they, despite their impressive dialectical rigor, in the assumption that philosophers’ intuitions about the meanings of words, or about our judgments in counterfactual cases, is any kind of reliable guide to truth. Thankfully, this is dying in philosophy. Economists are exceedingly careful about their formalisms, but exceedingly careless about what their formalisms are supposed to be about. Psychologists are (well some of them) very careful about experimental design, on one level. But they are often stunningly naive about the interpretation of the data they have gathered. It is perhaps my own disciplinary prejudice, and perhaps I am being self-serving, but I find that the most enlightening work is often by analytically trained philosophers who are skeptical of traditional analytical methods, and apply their diaectical and analytic skills to the interpretation of scientific results. I’m thinking of philosophers like Daniel Dennett, Stephen Stich, the Churchlands, Kim Sterelny, Paul Griffiths, Andy Clark, Jesse Prinz, David Buller, J.D. Trout, etc. There are a bunch of philosophers of biology and physics that one could add here, but they don’t leap to my mind, since those aren’t my areas. But I think it’s worth pointing out that philosophy and philosophical training really are good for the advancement of real knowledge. And I think we’re going see more and more philosophers, armed with a kind of conceptual training that scientists do not normally get, making the transition into primary empirical research, and making major contributions. Here for example is a paper of U of Maryland philosophy professor Chris Cherniak. Where did the “philosophy” go? Who cares!

I think we see similar value-adds from other disciplinary fusions. Economists like Kevin McCabe who have moved into neuroscience are making real contributions to neuroscience as well as economics. It is getting increasingly difficult to tell the difference between some forms of political science and economics. This kind of convergence is very, very good. Despite the stupid institutional impediments caused by the departmental structure of universities, we’re on a track to see the resurgence of the old fashioned “moral sciences.” It is getting and harder harder to tell the difference between philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, economics, political science, and the worthwhile branches of anthropology and sociology. There is considerable value in disciplinary differences in the precise way questions are tackled. But there is even greater value in the fact that all these disciplines are increasingly tackling overlapping sets of questions with increasingly compatible intellectual tools.

If you haven’t read Anthony de Jasay’s The State, then do. (”What would you do if you were the state?”) There is a class of books that I like to call “smartifying.” That is, you are actually smarter after reading them, by which I mean you can think better about a set of issues and problems. You can better find the edges of arguments, the contours of assumptions, better feel the rhythms of inference. The State is one of those books, as are all de Jasay’s books. Thomas Schelling is smartifying. So is Nozick. The first blog I visit each day is Marginal Revolution, because I leave there smartified more often than from any other blog. Now I’m trying to think of other smartifying authors, and I guess I think game theory is smartifying, since I just came up with David Gauthier and Ken Binmore. Derek Parfit! There you go. Also liable to leave you smartified. David Lewis, too! Will leave you smartified and incredulously staring.

Anyway, I meant to give you a de Jasay quote:

When we think we are opting for equality, we are in fact upsetting one equality in making another prevail. Love of equality in general may or may not be inherent in human nature. Love of a particular equality in preference to another (given that both cannot prevail), however, is like any other taste and cannot serve as a universal moral argument.

. . . Very few of the countless inequalities people are liable to resent lend themselves to levelling, even when the attack on difference is as forthright as Mao’s Cultural Revolution. It is no use making everyone eat, dress and work alike if one is still luckier in lover than the other. The source of envy is the envious character, not some manageable handful of a countless multitude of inequalities. Envy will not go away once chateaux have all been burned, merit has replaced privelege and all children have been sent to the same schools.

“The souce of envy is the envious character.” That is our lesson for today.

One of the thinest spots in the classical liberal corpus is the role of the family in a free society. Steven Horwitz steps up to offer us “The Functions of the Family in the Great Society.” [pdf]

ABSTRACT. Criticisms by Hodgson and others that Hayek and other Austrians cannot offer a theory of the family are responded to with a discussion of the functions of the family in a market society. The family can be understood as a bridge between what Hayek terms ‘organisations’, or face-to-face social institutions and ‘orders’, or the anonymous social institutions of the Great Society. The family’s necessary role is then linked to familiar Hayekian themes of knowledge and incentives. Families help us to learn the explicit and tacit social rules necessary for functioning in the wider world, and families are uniquely positioned to do so, because it is those closest to us who have the knowledge and incentives necessary to provide that learning.

Looks like good stuff.

This one’s for my homies over at The Austrian Economists.

As Julian just pointed out to me the other day, Mises says that praxeology, the logic of human action, may not actually apply to all humans. Buddhists, for example, our Schopenhaurian pessimists.

Some philosophies advise men to seek as the ultimate end of conduct the complete renunciation of any action. They look upon life as an absolute evil full of pain, suffering, and anguish, and apodictically deny that any purposeful human effort can render it tolerable. Happiness can be attained only by complete extinction of consciousness, volition, and life. The only way toward bliss and salvation is to become perfectly passive, indifferent, and inert like the plants. The sovereign good is the abandonment of thinking and acting.

Such is the essence of the teachings of various Indian philosophies, especially of Buddhism, and of Schopenhauer. Praxeology does not comment upon them. It is neutral with regard to all judgments of value and the choice of ultimate ends. Its task is not to approve or to disapprove, but to describe what is.

The subject matter of praxeology is human action. It deals with acting man, not with man transformed into a plant and reduced to a merely vegetative existence.

Now, this is a really delightful passage. It reminds me of some of Rand’s passages in “The Objectivist Ethics” about the impossibility of living as a parasite, despite the gobsmackingingly obvious fact (for Washingtonians especially) that millions upon millions successfully, and happily, live as parasites. Here we have Mises telling us that praxeology is purely descriptive, and then writing billions of people (you know, all those Hindus and Buddhists) out of the human race with a definition of “man” so dense with normative weight that it’s about to collapse in on itself.

The passage is really ripe in light of the preceding paragraphs. There Mises writes:

For praxeology it is enough to establish the fact that there is only one logic that is intelligible to the human mind, and that there is only one mode of action which is human and comprehensible to the human mind. Whether there are or can be somewhere other beings–superhuman or subhuman–who think and act in a different way, is beyond the reach of the human mind. We must restrict our endeavors to the study of human action.

But wait! Buddhists apparently think and act in a different way, right?! Oh no they don’t, Mises says. Unless a being’s behavior accords with the a priori logic of praxeological law, determined by the transcendental structure of the human mind, then it’s not really action, it’s just, what? Motion? And if it’s not really acting, but just moving–a face flapping its lips and making noises, but not really speaking–then it’s not really human. And so . . . a distinctively human life in accord with the teachings of the great world religions of mindfulness is LOGICALLY IMPOSSIBLE!

So here’s a joke:

Q: What does Mises call beheading a room full of meditating yogis?

A: Gardening!

I have to admit, I’ve never made it past the first chapter of Human Action, because the badly undermotivated a priorism drives this naturalist up a wall. Boettke has some story about how alll this is really consistent with a Quinean, fallibist, naturalist “web of belief” view of things, but not only don’t I see it, I see the opposite of that. Anyway, because I don’t think Reason (theoretical or practical) is a basic function of the human mind, but is instead a culturally evolved assemblage of other basic functions, the idea that we could transcendentally deduce it’s structure, or posit its structure as the essence of humanity, seems silly.

What say you, Miseans? Is it really value neutral to say that if I pick Nirvava as my ultimate end, then I’ve opted out of human life? Economic principles only apply to Buddhists insofar as they aren’t acting like Buddhists?

Daniel Dennett’s NYT essay on intelligent design is spot on from beginning to end. If you’re confused about this issue, this is the place to go.

Dennett concludes:

Since there is no content, there is no “controversy” to teach about in biology class. But here is a good topic for a high school course on current events and politics: Is intelligent design a hoax? And if so, how was it perpetrated?

OK, that’s a good high school question. But how about a question for adults? Has the hegemony of secularism in public institutions, such as the schools, generated it’s own backlash? Is intelligent design a symptom of a much deeper problem: the failure of our public institutions to embody the ideals of liberal neutrality?

In an actually useful HuffPo post, Michael Shermer discusses intelligent design, offering an updated version of Philo’s objections in Hume’s Dialogues. Namely, if the best explanation of various phenomena is design, then we require a theory of the designer. And the best theory may simply be a committee of super-intelligent but fallible aliens. Which, clearly, get us no closer to the God of Abraham than we were before.

Here’s Hume:

Now, Cleanthes, said Philo, with an air of alacrity and triumph, mark the consequences. First, By this method of reasoning, you renounce all claim to infinity in any of the attributes of the Deity. For, as the cause ought only to be proportioned to the effect, and the effect, so far as it falls under our cognizance, is not infinite; what pretensions have we, upon your suppositions, to ascribe that attribute to the Divine Being? . . .

Secondly, You have no reason, on your theory, for ascribing perfection to the Deity, even in his finite capacity, or for supposing him free from every error, mistake, or incoherence, in his undertakings. There are many inexplicable difficulties in the works of Nature, which, if we allow a perfect author to be proved a priori, are easily solved, and become only seeming difficulties, from the narrow capacity of man, who cannot trace infinite relations. But according to your method of reasoning, these difficulties become all real; and perhaps will be insisted on, as new instances of likeness to human art and contrivance. . .

And what shadow of an argument, continued Philo, can you produce, from your hypothesis, to prove the unity of the Deity? A great number of men join in building a house or ship, in rearing a city, in framing a commonwealth; why may not several deities combine in contriving and framing a world? This is only so much greater similarity to human affairs. By sharing the work among several, we may so much further limit the attributes of each, and get rid of that extensive power and knowledge, which must be supposed in one deity, and which, according to you, can only serve to weaken the proof of his existence. And if such foolish, such vicious creatures as man, can yet often unite in framing and executing one plan, how much more those deities or demons, whom we may suppose several degrees more perfect!

Or, try this. ID, even if true, puts us in an explanatory spiral, an unclosed regressive loop.

Assume ID is the best explanation for ordered complexity. That means, our best theory of ordered complexity posits the existence of an intelligent designer, meaning that we posited intelligence as an explanatory fundamental. However, intelligence as we know it is a property of biological beings, and a form of the kind of ordered complexity we initially sought to explain.

If it is suggested that “higher” intelligence is not a form of ordered complexity analogous to our own intelligence, then there is no ground for calling it intelligence after all. If it is itself a form of ordered complexity, then we have made no explanatory advance, for we will be left positing an even higher order intelligent designer for each higher order intelligent designer.

If it proposed that we stop the explanatory spiral by positing an undesigned designer then a new question arises: What explains the emergence of the undesigned designer? Whatever the explanation for the ordered complexity of the undesigned designer may be, then it seems that that explanation could be applied to first order ordered complexity, and Occam demands we excise the useless proliferation of higher order designers.

If it is replied that there is no mechanism that gave rise to the undesigned designer, then first order ordered complexity is still unexplained, only it is now more elaborately unexplained.

Even if it’s the best explanation, ID would get us nowhere, which means its probably not.

My take on ID is that if there were any evidence for it, then the probability of intelligent extraterrestrial life would be non-zero. We would then have a proximate explanation for ordered complexity as it appears on Earth. But we’d be no closer to an account of ordered complexity as such.

Camille Paglia attempts to explain the absence of women in the BBC’s ridiculous philosopher popularity contest.

I feel women in general are less comfortable than men in inhabiting a highly austere, cold, analytical space, such as the one which philosophy involves. Women as a whole - and there are obvious exceptions - are more drawn to practical, personal matters. It is not that they inherently lack a talent or aptitude for philosophy or higher mathematics, but rather that they are more unwilling than men to devote their lives to a frigid space from which the natural and the human have been eliminated.

OK. There may be something to this. But she goes deeper.

Today’s lack of major female philosophers is not due to lack of talent but to the collapse of philosophy. Philosophy as traditionally practised may be a dead genre. This is the age of the internet in which we are constantly flooded by information in fragments. Each person at the computer is embarked on a quest for and fabrication of his or her identity. The web mimics human neurology, and it is fundmentally altering young people’s brains. The web, for good or ill, is instantaneous. Philosophy belongs to a vanished age of much slower and rhetorically formal inquiry. Today’s philosophers are now antiquarians.

Fascinating. But as far as I can tell, philosophy as traditionally practiced is at its high water mark. If I had to bet, I would put money on the claim that more books of philosophy were published in the last ten years than in any other ten year period of history. There are, without a doubt, more people well-trained in rigorous methods of philosophical inquiry than ever before. And as travellers to this little piece of the information superhighway may be aware, philosophical conversations and debates can be conducted over the internet, and they are. It’s probably a good bet that there were more words written last year in online discussions of philosophy than were written about philosophy in any other year of human history.

Now, Paglia wants to say that philosophy is no longer as culturally central as it once was. I think she’s right. But then again, nothing that used to be culturally central is as culturally central as it once was because we’ve got a more polyglot decentralized culture. At her AEI talk a few months ago, Paglia seemed panicked by the breakdown of institutions of cultural hegemony. Hollywwod films aren’t what they once were (and nobody cares about the Oscars). Elite universities have become so so. You can’t get classical music over the radio in Buffalo. Etc. She was agitated because, apparently, she passed into old-cooterism some time around 1994 and evidently doesn’t grasp that the age of centralization and hegemony is definitely over, doesn’t understand the new institutions and mechanisms of cultural transmission (other than the fact that this mysterious revolutionary thing, the internet, exists, and matters), and so sees the decline of HOLLYWOOD, and THE IVY LEAGUE, and NETWORK TELEVISION, and BROADWAY — the old familiar institutions of centralized cultural hegemony — as symptoms of general decline. The fact that philosophers aren’t being interviewed by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News means that philosophy is more or less invisible to Camille Paglia, despite the fact that it is flourishing by any historical standard, and despite the fact that women, such as Martha Nussbaum and Christine Korsgaard, are at the absolute top of the game.

Now, I agree that academic philosophy is insufficiently engaged with the public, and could hold a more priveleged place is the fragmented popular consciousness. And I think this is due to straightforward institutional reasons. Academia as it is presently constituted does reward a kind of bloodless scholasticism. One reason I decided to drop out of academia was that I thought direct engagement with current policy debates and cultural concerns would make me a better philosopher. Greats like Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Mill, Marx were not academics, but men involved in thinking through the practical political matters of their day. Our political philosophy would be more publicly engaging if more philosphers were directly involved in politics. We would be more likely to produce American BHL’s and latter day de Beauvoirs and Rands. But that is a long, long way from the claim that philosophy is a dead genre.

[Link from Chris Sciabbara, who brings out the Paglia's comments on Rand.]

Eugene Volokh comments on this passage from a Michael Shermer post:

In March of 2001 the Gallup News Service reported the results of their survey that found 45 percent of Americans agree with the statement “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” while 37 percent preferred a blended belief that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process,” and a paltry 12 percent accepted the standard scientific theory that “Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.”

Eugene says:

Well, if “the standard scientific theory” is that “God had no part” in the process of evolution — not just that human beings developed in a particular way, but that God didn’t guide this — then it seems to me that the theory of evolution is a challenge to many people’s deeply held religious convictions. And that’s so not just as to the young-earthers who believe the Earth was created several thousand years ago, but also to people who are willing to embrace the scientific evidence but see the guiding hand of God in the process.

What’s more, how exactly do scientists come to the conclusion that “God had no part in this process”? What’s their proof? That’s the sort of thing that can’t really be proved, it seems to me — which makes it sound as if scientists, despite their protestations of requiring proof rather than faith, make assertions about God that they can’t prove.

I think Quinean ontological principles can help us properly understand Shermer’s statement, and avoid what seems to me to be a confusion on Eugene’s part.

Quine says that to exist is to be the value of bound variable in the formal statement of our best explanatory theory of the world. That is, if your best theory of something requires you to posit some entity or property in order to state it, then you are ontologically committed to that entity or property; you’re saying it exists. The best explanatory theory of the emergence of life and the development of biological variety is the theory of evolution by natural selection. The statement of this theory does not require us to quantify over, or commit to, any supernatural properties. That “God had no part in the process” is straightforwardly implied by the fact that the theory does not mention God or God-properties. The “proof” that God is no part of the process is simply the statement of the theory, and the fact that the theory is the best, whatever our criteria for “best” are. You can tell that something has no part in the process by checking the list of things one is ontologically committed to by dint of accepting the theory. If it isn’t on the list, it plays no part. Surely Eugene would agree that God is not on the ontological list we would compile by scouring the formulation of the standard theory of evolution to see the kinds of things it quantifies over. But that is, I think, all Shermer is saying.

Now, the fact that the theory of evolution by natural selection doesn’t quantify over God-properties does not, by itself, “challenge” the conviction that god exists, unless that conviction is based on the explanation of biological phenomena. If no part of our OVERALL best theory (or collection of theories) of the world requires God-properties, than that is a challenge to the conviction that God exists, because commitment to God’s existence just is the belief in the claim that Godmaking properties figure in to the best overall theory of the world. If he doesn’t figure in, then he isn’t listed in the catalog of things we have reason to believe in.

It seems that Eugene almost flirts with Meinongian nonsense, where not existing is a property something can have, just like existing, so that something’s not existing requires that it exist, in a superspecial not-existing way, in order for there to be something that is doing all that not-existing. In that case, the claim that something doesn’t exist (or does) is substantive, since one is attributing a property to it, and it makes sense to ask for evidence that it does have that property. But to say that something doesn’t exist is not in fact substantive. It is simply to point out a formal absence, like the fact that there is no ‘p’ in ‘beer’. (If you’re lucky!)

This book is just a philosophical/methodological disaster.

Layard cites a study by Carol Ryff that purports to show that “purpose in life, autonomy, positive relationships, personal growth and self-acceptance” are highly correlated with self-reported SWB. OK. No suprise. What does Layard think this shows? That Mill was wrong about the existence of qualitatively “higher” pleasures.

Thus Mill was right in his intuition about the true sources of happiness, but he was wrong to argue that some times of pleasure are intrinsically better than others

Of course, it doesn’t even begin to establish this. It might simply establish that people who have more intrinsically valuable experiences tend to report that they are happier on the whole. That’s what Mill thinks, after all.

Layard goes on to say that Mill’s high/low distinction is “inherently paternalistic.” But the only reason to say that is if you, like Layard, are an irremediable paternalist, and take the existence of higher pleasures as a reason to coerce people into having more of them and less of the lower. That is, Mills distinction is paternalistic only if you think the fact that something has special value on one conception of value immediately implies that the state should do something about it. Absurd.

More:

[S]ome unhealthy enjoyments, like that of the sadist, should be avoided because they decrease the happiness of others. But no good feeling is bad in itself–it can only be bad because of its consequences.

Now, I understand that that’s just a restatement of Benthamite egalitarianism among pleasures, but it doesn’t pass the straight face test, does it? Many emotions (or any “judgment sensitive attitudes”, in Scanlon’s terms) are themselves morally evaluable. And it strikes me as exceedingly dubious to assert that the problem with taking pleasure in the rape of children, the torture of kittens, or the betrayal of those who trust you has to do with their consequences for happiness.

The reason Mill distinguishes between higher or lower pleasures is that the distinction is real, he’s a good philosopher, and so sees that it must be accomodated within his theory. The problem with Mill’s move for Mill is that it points beyond utilitarianism toward the independent value of properties, such as beauty, cognitive complexity, and truth in virtue of which higher pleasures are higher.

Right now, I’m looking at Richard Layard’s Happiness. He’s an unreconstructed Benthamite, and his view seems to be that evidence on the neurological reward system provides an account of objective utility. And because there’s a neurological correlate to utility, we should think of utilitarianism as the most scientifically respectable of all moral theories, and use it as a guide to social policy, in just the way Bentham intended.

This got me wondering: is the reward system unitary, with a single architecture, or is the reward system implicated in different ways by different cognitive programs or difference kinds of decision tasks. (One possibility is that pleasure/benefit is determined by different systems than pain/costs, and so it may not be that units of plan and units of pleasure trade off in any simple on-to-one sort of way.)

In this article from Nature Reviews, neuro-ethicist Bill Casebeer argues that a virtue-theoretic approach best captures what’s going on in the brain. Moral judgment and motivation is not in all (most?) cases driven by judgments of utility. For example “hot” judgments in social contexts activating theory-of-mind systems probably don’t implicate systems that would calculate either individual or collective expected utility.

This may be important for a number of reasons. The most interesting to me has to do with possible conflicts social policy that is designed to maximize expected social utility and the affective/motivational systems that actually drive behavior. Rawls’s argument against utilitarianism, in a nutshell, is that it is inconsistent with our “sense of justice” and thus utilitarian principles will not gain our willing compliance, and will therefore fail to establish a stable social order. The utilitarian can retort that motivational dispositions are a constraint that utilitarianism must take into account. But then it seems that the principles of utility basically end up mirroring the principles that underlie actual human motivation, which will be doing all the work. At which point it seems otiose to say that what we’re trying to do with policy is maximize happiness, when it would just be more accurate to say that we’re trying to come up with principles people take themselves to have a reason to endorse, where those reasons are only sometimes reasons of utility. The fact that the dopaminergic system or whatever lights up whenever we do whatever we do has nothing interesting to do with what we take to be valuable, or what we should be shooting for socially.

I guess I’m trying to say something to the effect that nothing about the brain actually helps a utilitarian like Layard justify a Benthamite approach to social policy. The reasons for rejecting utilitarianism were never that we don’t know where utility is in the brain, but that it wreaks havoc with native moral judgment and cuts against the grain of our motivational dispositions. Brain science helps us understand why this is the case. We are natural-born Aristotelians (or maybe Humean sentimentalists) unlikely to be moved by comprehensive schemes of utility maximization. Does anyone who might know think the evidence supports this argument?

All this relativism talk. Velleman posts on relativism because he isn’t satisfied with what he sees. Me neither, even after reading Velleman. Allow me to ruminate.

The correct thing to say about relativism is that some version of relativism is true, and the correct thing to say about absolutism is that every version of absolutism is false. If you don’t think there is a BOOK OF RULES from the transcendent PLANE OF MORAL TRUTH, then you’re likely some sort of relativist. And that’s OK. Don’t worry.

Velleman’s use of “agent-relativism” is confusing. Generally agent-relative is contrasted with agent-neutral with respect to value or reasons for action. My reason to get a drink of water is agent-relative, because its MY thirst. My reason to go to dentist school is agent-relative because being a dentist is MY goal. Etc. Whether or not there are agent-neutral reasons, reasons not based in our individual aims, reasons we just have because we’re rational agents, or what have you, is a tricky question. (The answer is yes and no. You can have a reason to do something that is independent of your particular aims and projects. Your reason not to murder me is not agent-relative in the way your reason to go to scuba classes is. But agent-neutral reasons don’t get off the ground without the enterprise of coordinating agent-relative reasons.) Anyway, if you are sane, you are an agent-relativist in the sense that you believe there are agent-relative reasons. Some thing really are right for me and wrong for you, because you and I want different things.

Any non-transcendent moral standard is relative to SOMETHING, isn’t it. Aristotle, for example, is a species-relativist. What is right for me to do is relative to what natural kind I’m an instance of. In updated terms, you can be a genomic relativist. The right thing to do is relative to your genome. This is not, however, any kind of transcendent standard. The human genome, say, is a contingent kludge. Evolution could have taken a left and that species (not us) would have a different genome, and a different moral standard based in their “nature.” So, yes, if you believe in SCIENCE and believe in a human nature-based morality, then you’re a kind of relativist. But that’s not so scary, is it?

Utilitarians may seem like absolutists. But the right thing to do for a utilitarian is relative to contingent empirical facts about what does and doesn’t cause pleasure in sentient beings. (Am I just playing with words?)

The Pope I suppose, is worried more about cultural relativism. Cultural relativism is a little bit true, though. Being a member of one culture rather than another can give you a reason to do something that you wouldn’t otherwise have. There ARE culturally relative reasons. Is it morally OK to impale kittens on pikes because your culture says so? Probably not. To kill your sister if she is accused of whoreishness? No. Does anybody think so? (People who think its OK to kill their allegedly whoring sister don’t think its OK because its THEIR culture that says so. They think its OK because that’s what they think the transcendent BOOK OF RULES says.)

Actually, I don’t have any idea what the Pope is talking about. It actually sounds like he’s sort of longing for the days of moral hegemony that died with Luther, and confusing pluralism for relativism.

Anyway, here are some things my reasons are relative to: my genome; my capacity for sympathy and moral imagination; my personal goals and projects; my social and family commitments; other parochial allegiances; the conventional terms of social cooperation where I live; lots more. And yours too!

I meant to say something usefully clarificatory, but oh well. Coherence will return in future posts.

My friend Stephen Hicks, a professor of philosophy at Rockford College, has written an outstanding book, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault. I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the subject. Steve is an incredibly lucid writer, and has a rare talent for making fordbidding ideas accessible. Steve traces the dismal fortunes of reason from Kant’s Copernican Revolution, through subsequent German philosophy, down to contemporary postmodernism. I especially enjoyed the clear explanation of the famously obscure Heidegger. Steve notes that postmodernism isn’t just nihilist or anti-rationalist, but is uniformly leftist. (If nothing’s true, there is no fact of the matter about the quality of reasons to believe things, and belief is just a commitment backed by power, then it makes just as much sense to be a money-grubbing natural rights minarchist as a turtlenecked chainsmoking Trotskyite.) His account of the way the increasingly evident failures of communism in terms of reason and evidence are tracked by the increasingly extreme postmodern rejection of reason and evidence is utterly compelling, and has influenced my thinking since I Steve first gave a talk on the topic to a student group I ran at Northern Illinois way back in 1997. Anyway, it’s a lovely little book, and if you’ve never been able to make heads or tails of postmodernism, or would just like to get a particularly sharp and fresh take on it, pick up Steve’s book.

I’m sure Blackburn isn’t being altogether fair to Sam Kerstein (a friend and former professor) in this paper [.pdf], but I very much liked the overall gist of his argument. And I liked the conclusion, which puts me in mind of an ongoing conversation I’ve had with Julian over the last few years.

…the kinds of [rationalist] argument [against expressivism or sentimentalism] I have been discussing, are very deep-rooted. Partly, they represent a noble dream. They answer a wish that the knaves of the world can be not only confined and confounded, but refuted – refuted as well by standards that they have to acknowledge. Ideally, they will be shown to be in a state akin to self-contradiction. Kerstein acknowledges that Kant and neo-Kantians have not achieved anything like this result. But it is still, tantalizingly there as a goal or ideal, the Holy Grail of moral philosophy, and many suppose that all right-thinking people must join the pilgrimage to find it.

We sentimentalists do not like our good behaviour to be hostage to such a search. We don’t altogether approve of Holy Grails. We do not see the need for them. We are not quite on all fours with those who do. And we do not quite see why, even if by some secret alchemy a philosopher managed to glimpse one, it should ameliorate his behaviour, let alone that of other people. We think instead that human beings are ruled by passions, and the best we can do it to educate people so that the best passions are also the most forceful. We say of rationalistic moral philosophy what Hume says of abstract reasonings in general, that when we leave our closet, and engage in the common affairs of life, its conclusions seem to vanish, like the phantoms of the night on the appearance of the morning.

Lovely.

From Lindsay Beyerstein’s comments in her post about freezing in line to see Harry Frankfurt talk about his book On Bullshit on the Daily Show, here’s the segment.

I found it delightful to see a real philosopher on The Daily Show. And I was pleased to see that Stewart was smart enough to have genuine respect for a genuinely erudite and wise man like Frankfurt.

For those of you who didn’t have to read any Frankfurt essays in grad school, he is a philosopher of unusual sensitivity, creativity, subtlety, and depth. He is most well known for his work on free will, especially his famous thought experiment designed to show that the openness of alternative possibilities is not a necessary condition for freedom. Frankfurt’s work on the structure of the self, and the relation between higher and lower order aims and desires, is central to contemporary discussion of the nature of agency. And Frankfurt’s ideas about care and love as sources of normativity I find to be more satisfactory than almost all the alternatives.

If you’re one of those people who thinks that contemporary analytic philosophy is obscure, scholastic, and irrelevant to real human concerns, you need to read Harry Frankfurt.

Here’s an interview with Frankfurt on “the necessity of love.” [.pdf]

And here you can see video of Frankfurt in his natural habitat giving a lecture on “Some Mysteries of Love” at UC Riverside in 2000. [Realplayer]

Books at Amazon:

The Importance of What We Care About
Necessity, Volition, and Love
The Reasons of Love

For some time I have been persuaded by Georges Rey’s account of meta-atheism. (Georges was one of my teachers at Maryland.) His claim is that many people who say they believe in God don’t really. It’s not that people are lying about what they really believe. It’s just that we’re often wrong about our own beliefs. (Our own beliefs are just another thing to have beliefs about, and we can get it wrong about our own beliefs just like we can get it wrong about anything else.)

This weekend, I had a thought which is a version of Georges’s point (6) in favor of meta-atheism. Here’s point (6):

(6) Betrayal by Reactions and Behavior People’s reactions and behavior (e.g. grief, mourning) do not seem seriously affected by their supposed “belief” in a Hereafter. Imagine a young “believing” couple. He is dying from a painful disease. Would she really rejoice at the prospect of his going to heaven, and of joining him herself when she dies, as though he’d just gone off for a great –eternal!- cure in a luxurious resort in Miami? I betcha she’d grieve and mourn “the loss” like anyone else. (Note that most all religious music and rituals surrounding death are deeply sad -seldom, if ever, joyous).

In a related vein, if people really believe in the efficacy of prayer, they should be willing to have the National Institute of Health do a controlled study of the effects of prayer, just as they would if they believed that soy beans cured cancer. (And why does no one expect prayer to cure wooden legs?)

Let it not be said that Georges is an ideal diplomat to the theistic community. Nevertheless, I believe his observations are sound.

In a fit of Beckerite rational choice reasoning, I decided that theists ought to have higher rates of death by accident. If I believe that heaven is infinite bliss, then I should be quite eager to join my maker. Suicide is a disqualification for paradise, but dying in a car accident isn’t. So, one should expect that theists who believe in perpetual Miami would take more risks than those who do not so believe, and that thus, death-by-accident ought to be higher among believer than non-believers.

My guess is that there is no difference in rates of death-by-accident among believers and non-believers. If my guess is correct, then there’s another reason to believe that many people don’t really believe in God, even though they think they do. Or, at least, there’s a reason for rational choice economists to believe meta-atheism.

All this was stimulated by a Ross Douthat post that touches on Orwell’s attitude toward a character in a Graham Greene novel. Orwell:

Scobie is incredible because the two halves of him do not fit together. If he were capable of getting into the kind of mess that is described, he would have got into it years earlier. If he really felt that adultery is mortal sin, he would stop committing it; if he persisted in it, his sense of sin would weaken. If he believed in hell, he would not risk going there merely to spare the feelings of a couple of neurotic women . . .

Douthat:

If he really felt that adultery is a mortal sin, he would stop committing it. This is astonishingly obtuse, and something that could only be written by the most bloodless and Puritanical of Christians — or by a devout atheist like Orwell. For him, I suspect (and perhaps for Hitchens?), the always-upright Christian is fairly comprehensible: he has his dogmas and he lives by them, with the same lack of nuance, backsliding, and self-doubt that Orwell brought to his staunch unbelief. Whereas understanding the tormented Christian, the questing agnostic, the atheist who takes a gamble on God and the Catholic who commits suicide — the stock-in-trade of Greene’s great novels, in other words — requires an imaginative leap into religious experience that an atheistic critic is often ill-equipped to make.

The Orwell’s astonishing bit of obtuseness (”obtusity”?) is the core of Georges’ point (6) and my little Beckerite addendum. Is Georges obtuse on this point? Am I? Well, let’s concede the possibility of weakness of will. Discount rates won’t help here because no matter how sharply you discount infinite bliss, it’s still infinite. But if I truly believe the hype about my celestial reward, or my infernal punishment, how can I fail so utterly to align my actions with my incentives. Ross’s point makes it sound like it is obtuse to question the coherence of a character who truly and hosetly loves life, but flings himself from a rooftop anyway.

I submit that meta-atheism is the key to understanding the “nuance, backsliding, and self-doubt” that Ross sets out as central to the religious experience. Many of us believe that we believe because the social and psychological benefits of appearing to be a believer seem to us greater than the costs, and the most compelling way to appear a believer, but to avoid the behavioral costs of actual belief, is to earnestly but falsely believe that one believes.

Our “faith” is shaken when we find we cannot stop cheating on our wife, or whatever our transgression may be, because, on some level, we know that if we really believed what we believe we believed, cheating on our wife would be psychologically impossible — like peeling the skin off your screaming baby out of sheer boredom. Yet the general value of our self-deception is so high that we cast about looking to preserve it. If our religion is a good one, well-adapted to survive in the forbidding habitat of a human psyche, it will tell us that we are fundamentally and irremediably broken, flawed, and unsuited to virtue. And THAT explains why we can be so abjectly and arbitrarily irrational. So grateful are we for the explanation of the possibility of our misbehavior, and thus the possibility of retaining the deep benefits of religious conviction and a religious form of life, we redouble our faith in our faith, and our religion tightens it’s embrace on us we tighten our embrace on it.

John Tomasi is right (see “Should Political Liberals be Compassionate Conservatives?: Philosophical Foundations of the Faith-Based Initiative” Social Philosophy & Policy 21/1, January 2004″) and Rawlsian political liberalism requires that if the state is going to provide certain services, then the state should also provide funds to non-secular providers of those services, otherwise, they get crowded out, and the comprehensive worldview common in the adminstrative state is, in effect, illiberally imposed.

So if the state pays for mental health services, they should also pay for alternative treatments, such as Scientology training (Scientology is rabidly anti-psychiatry), and Christian “treatments” for homosexuality. The state must not discriminate against those who do not believe in the secular mental health profession’s definition of our spiritual and behavioral woes, or those who don’t believe in Ritalin, Prozac and grief counseling as the cure for their spiritual ills.

Right?

In a monumental post on Stephen Toulmin, Michael Blowhard writes:

The impression I’ve gotten from a few timid looks into up-to-date philosophy is that it’s a matter of filling in the few remaining (and really tiny) squares — an activity for specialists and tenured-prof-wannabes only. Between you and me, and off-the-record only, my philosophy-prof friends giggle at the idea that anything major remains to be done in modern Western philosophy.

So what are philosophers good for? I think this requires a good long answer that I’m not going to take the time to assay, but it’s a question that deserves some reflection. Michael seems to be under the impression that the dialectic of the traditional problems of philosophy–free-will; realism vs. anti-realism; mind/body; etc.–is worn out. I agree, but that’s because I think there are right answers to this questions, or at least ways of framing them that dissolve the question (that shows the fly the way out of the fly bottle, I should say). And I think that the correct answer to many of these questions has practical import. If we get it right, it changes how we live, or at least stops us from worrying about something we shouldn’t have been worried about.

My naturalistic bent leads to me see the role of philosophy as that of clarifying traditional questions to the point that they can be approached with the tools of scientific method. When that occurs, a lot of the philosophy drops out. But science remains a kind of applied philosophy that requires the right kind of conceptual and inferential framework for asking the right questions, and for interpreting the results of experimentation. Philosophy of physics is an interesting field, for instance, because physics turns out to be so weird, and requires philosophical counsel.

And science tells us things that settles old philosophical disputes, and that helps reframe old scientific questions. Human beings are not, we now know, a blank slate. And the sciences of human nature help us reconceive old questions. The kinds of social order that are possible depends on what human beings are like, and we are learning a lot about what human beings are like. Philosophers, if they are doing there job, ought to be applying the results of the best relevant science and showing how that changes the way we think about old questions.

Anybody have any good ideas about areas where philosophers are making a really important contribution to knowledge, other than just filling in a few really tiny squares?