Al's notepad

Posting has been light recently, and will continue to be so as I head to varous conferences. If anyone is going to Edinburgh on Practical Reasoning, Leeds on Williams, The Joint Session at Norwich, or BSET at Reading, come and say hello!

A small puzzle about beliefs: I think I'm somewhere around 5ft 10" tall. So my belief that I'm that tall is one that I place a fairly high degree of credence in.

In contrast, I don't think that I'm only 5ft 8" tall. Still less do I believe that I'm 5ft 6" tall. The same applies upwards in height: I don't think I'm 6ft tall, and still less do I think I'm 6ft 2" tall. More generally, the further any height is from 5ft 10", the less credence I place in the belief that I'm that tall. (The credence will reach 0 at some point: At the extreme, I know that I don't have a negative height.)

So my credence in my being 5ft 8" tall is something a little less than the credence I place in my being 5ft 10" tall. What about 5ft 9"? Presumably, the credence I place in my being that height is somewhere between the other two. The same will apply again for the credence I place in my being 5ft 9.5" tall. And the very same will apply again for the credence I place in my being 5ft 9.75" tall. And so on.

It seems to follow that I have an infinite number of beliefs about my height, each with a different degree of credence. Is that right? Wouldn't it imply, for instance, that either my degree of credence in my being 5ft 10" tall is infinitely low (zero, perhaps), or else that my credences for all the relevant possibilities must add up to more than 1?

"Everything is relative: it just depends on what you believe".

Few (if any) serious philosophers hold this view. But some non-philosophers, or starting philosophers, profess to hold it, so it's nice to sometimes think about the most simple ways to show that it's wrong. One is to ask whether this statement is itself just a matter of opinion, or whether it's supposed to be more than that: supposed to be true. But perhaps there are other equally short and decisive objections.

I realised the other day that such people are always happy to take facts about what people believe for granted. But why? Can't it be just as relative just whether someone believes X or not? So when I assert that murder is wrong, and such a person disagrees, they might say: "Oh, it's wrong for you. But people in culture Y believe that it's morally ok." But why can't I respond: "Oh, sure, for you they believe that it's morally ok, but for me they believe that it's wrong."?

If all truth is relative, then whatever truth is relative to is itself also relative. So if all truth is relative to X, then truths about X must also be relative to X. I'm not entirely sure what that shows: incoherence, triviality, or something else?

An appealing (compatibilist) account of what it is to act freely is to say that you act freely when you are sufficiently responsive to the reasons that you have to act in certain ways. So what makes hypnotism impair freedom of the will is that you will do whatever you're told to regardless of what reasons you have to act in various ways.

It's tempting to understand this counter-factually: You're reasons responsive iff in some (sufficient number of) counter-factual scenarios where your reasons are different, you act differently.
(This no doubt needs much tidying, but all of it is irrelevant to what I say below)

But there is a fatal flaw in this, which is that there might be no counter-factual scenarios where your reasons are different. Perhaps the reasons you have are necessary. So, imagine that one should never permit torture. No matter what the circumstances are, one should not permit such acts. Then, in preventing some act of torture, am I acting freely? Not according to the definition above. For there are no counter-factual scenarios where my reasons are different and I act differently.

(Consequentialism is irrelevant here: Consequentialists agree that you should never fail to maximise the good. So take a case where an agent does this. There are no counter-factual scenarios where they have sufficient reason to fail to maximise the good and they act differently.)

So it seems as though - even if reasons-responsiveness is a good account of freedom of the will - we shouldn't understand reasons-responsiveness in counter-factual terms.

"My outlook is a model of the modern metaphysical:
I doubt that all the mental can be nothing but the physical;
I've nageling doubts that science has a place for subjectivity-
That what it's like to be a bat can be just brain activity.

All physicalist options I've surveyed are problematical:
That atoms and the void are all that's real is just fanatical;
Behaviour isn't proof, I am persuaded, of mentality,
And people can act riled when they are placid in reality.

The armstrong tactics may be smart, yet Kripke shows that entities
(Including pain and state of brain) aren't linked by chance identities;
And even if pain's physical, it cannot be advisable
To say it's not in different kinds of matter realisable."
(Penelope Mackie)

I recommend reading the rest, it's only short. You can find it here.

"[I]f moral judgements were not prescriptive, there would be no problem about moral weakness; but there is a problem; therefore they are prescriptive." (Hare, Freedom and Reason, p68)

Interesting little sentence. Though it's a little odd, since there must be some resolution to the problem of weakness of will, and so it can't be an objection to naturalism that it resolves it. Another way to phrase this is that the naturalist might insist that the problem of weakness of will is simply that we are wrongly inclined to think that morality might be prescriptive.

(This is all assuming that naturalists do have no problem with weakness of will. The argument, so far as I understand it, is that naturalists have to be externalists about motivation, and externalists have no problem with weakness of will. This seems correct to me, though I obviously admit that more needs to be said.)

One dispute in meta-ethics is that between naturalists and non-naturalists. Naturalists think that moral facts are natural facts. Non-naturalists deny this.

I've always found the distinction between the natural and the non-natural somewhat obscure. I've never seen any account of this distinction which seems anywhere near correct. And yet, at the same time, I've always taken non-naturalism to be the far more attractive view. I just don't see how moral facts could just be facts about desires or similar. Something seems to get lost in such reductive accounts. But this divergence in my views has always puzzled me: Why do I believe that non-naturalism is superior to naturalism if I don't understand what the difference between the two amounts to?

The other day it finally clicked that I was conflating two different issues. There's one debate as to whether moral facts are natural facts or not. But there's a second debate - which should *really* not be confused with the first - about whether moral facts are reducible to other kinds of fact or not. Moral facts might be natural but irreducible to any other non-moral facts, or they might be non-natural but reducible to some other non-moral facts. The natural/non-natural debate should not be seen as one about reductionism.

So when I think of non-naturalism as appealing, it's because I tend to think that moral facts are sui generis - of their own special kind - and not reducible to any other kind of fact. I don't much have a view on the issue of whether these sui generis facts are natural or not.

Of course, I'm not noting this solely autobiographically: I suspect that others conflate these issues as well.

Previously, I set up the problem that Mackie describes in her book. (I there described the book as "compressed". I confess that these posts are equally so.) It looks like there good reason to think that I have some properties which make me me. But the most plausible candidate for such properties - the matter from which I grew - could possibly be shared by other people. That property can't make me me if others could share it.

But note that the objection trades on the fact that, at a later point in time, the original matter from which I grew could be extracted from me and used to grow another person. So an obvious solution is to say that my essential properties are both the matter from which I came as well as the time at which I began to exist.

Mackie rightly notes that it's implausible to think that the exact time at which I was born is an essential property of mine. But why not say that there is a window of time in which I had to be born? This accords with common sense: I could have been born a few days earlier than I was, but it makes no sense to suggest that I could have been born a few centuries earlier than I was.

Does this view solve the problem? Couldn't a mad scientist watch me grow from a certain piece of matter, but then extract that matter and grow another person from the same matter, all within the time window that is essential to being me? If so, the problem remains: I could be born, and a twin be created from the same matter a few days later, and by the criterion which I'm suggesting, we'd both be the same person since we share both our original matter as well as a time window in which we were born. Again, it is incoherent to think that my individual essence could be had by other people.

The force of the problem all hangs on the period of time necessary for me to "outgrow" my original matter. How long is it until someone could theoretical remove all of the cells from which you came without killing you? If we intuitively judge that I could have been born, say, six months earlier or later but no more, then so long as it takes me over six months to outgrow my original matter, the problem is solved. Conversely, the time it takes for me to outgrow my original matter determines just how far off my original date of birth I could have been born.

If anyone knows just how long it takes for a newly conceived fetus, or newly born child, to have none of their original cells, I'd be interested to know. If it's sufficiently long, it seems that individuals might have individual essences: the matter from which they came combined with a window of time in which they came into existence. (Technically, one could make the view immune to this kind of empirical fact by holding that individuals come into existence at some point in time that is sufficiently late such that it takes sufficiently long for them to replace all of the cells in their body. This seems too ad hoc to be worth considering.)

A final note: Perhaps a mad scientist could destroy me, but then very shortly after use those exact same cells to create another person. On the view I'm suggesting, that would be a genuine case of reincarnation. That strikes me as strange, but not absurd. Here, as elsewhere, it's worth bearing in mind - as Mackie implies - that there don't seem to be any entirely acceptable views in the area. If Mackie's argument is correct, there are only four options here: individual essences, bare identities, extrinsically determined identity, or counterpart theory. If the view above is more plausible than any of these last three, then the view is the least bad option.

I'm reading through Penelopie Mackie's How Things Might Have Been right now. It's interesting, though heavily compressed. The following problem comprises the first chapter of the book, and the subsequent objection to individual essences comprises one half of the objections to individual essences in the second chapter of the book.

There are various ways I might have been. We can, somewhat metaphorically, think of this in terms of there being individuals in other possible worlds - the set of all worlds different in certain respects from the actual world - to whom I am identical.

Then the question "How might I have been?" becomes a matter of determining which possible individuals there are to whom I am identical.

One option is to say that there are "bare" facts about identity, irreducible and independent of my other features. A second option is to say that facts about my identity are determined by features of worlds other than facts about me. If we reject both of these[1], we are left with only one option: there are facts about me which determine who I am. That is, there is a set of properties I have which are necessarily both necessary and sufficient for being me. I have an individual essence.

One very plausible candidate for my individual essence is the matter from I developed. It's just not possible that a person beginning from a different sperm and egg might nonetheless have been me. But there's a problem here, which is that this is not sufficient for being me. Imagine a mad scientist waits, shortly after conception of person A, for A to be large enough that he can extract the exact cells from which A grew without destroying A. He could then put these together in such a manner as to recreate the matter from which A grew, and grow a second person - B. Then both A and B exist, and they should be the same person, since they each grow from the same piece of matter. But since there's two of them, this cannot be the case. It follows that having come about from a certain piece of matter may be necessary, but cannot be sufficient, for being who you are.

I'll offer a tentative solution to this problem in another post in the near future. The problem itself is interesting enough for now.

[1] Mackie also considers a fourth option: Rejecting the claim that there are individuals in other possible worlds to whom I am identical. We might do this by, say, adopting Lewis' counterpart theory.

My critical notice of Mark Schroeder's book has just appeared in Ratio.