Monthly Archive

Taurek once wrote that, when choosing between saving one life or saving five, we ought to flip a coin, giving each person an equal chance of survival. Saving the five, he thought, was unfair, giving the one person no chance of survival at all.

The debate over this nicely mirrors some thoughts on democracy. Richard takes it that if 60% of a population always vote the same way, then this is really oligarchy and not democracy. It's unfair, you might say, to never pay any attention to the wishes of the minority.

One solution in the democratic case is to copy Taurek's suggestion. We could have "lottery democracy": Each election, pick a voter at random, and they get their way. This might be pragmatically a terrible idea, but, you might claim, it has fairness in it's favour, if nothing else.

Another solution is to hold a weighted lottery: If 60% of the voters vote one way, 40% the other, then you arrange things so that there is a 60% chance that the majority get their way, and a 40% chance of the reverse.

But there's another way of looking at things, that I think meets this fairness constraint, and allows us to stick with traditional majoritarianism. I like it, but I'm not sure if I yet endorse it.

Imagine that we ask a democratic Taurekian to give guidance for elections in ten years time. Well, they might reason, going with the majority in ten years time gives everyone now the greatest chance of getting their way - each of us is most likely to be in the majority in any vote.

So there's a sense in which going with the majority is fair (and therefore, I take it, not oligarchic). It's fair in a Rawslian sense. Behind a veil of ignorance, where you don't know whether you'll be in the majority or not, you'd hope that the majority get their way, because that's where you'll probably end up.

So majoritarianism is not so crude as it's made out to be. It's the embodiment of fairness, since it gives everyone the greatest chance of influencing the decision made.
(Equivalent remarks stand on Taurek's original point: Always save the greater number now, because that's where every person should now expect to find themselves eventually)

This will interest anyone in the UK system, but might be of interest to other readers as well. The AHRC is the main body for funding philosophy research (both postgraduate and staff) in the UK.

This link has the full statement, not much longer than my abridged version below, but more detailed nonetheless.

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"The results of the Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) were published in October 2007. [...] the AHRC received the following settlement:
· 2008-09 - £103.5m
· 2009-10 - £104.4m
· 2010-11 - £108.8m

[...] The settlement is not sufficient to continue funding the present volume of awards.

Success rates in research grants, which have ranged from 22% - 29% over the last three years, will temporarily decline to about 15% [...]

The success rate in Research Leave grants will also decline to about 15% [...]

we will need to cut new Postgraduate awards from 1500 to 1000 in 2008 and to about 1325 for the following two years [...]

This is disappointing news for the AHRC and the research community. The AHRC remains committed to funding world-class research, and will continue to make the case to Government of the importance of the arts and humanities subject domains, and the need for a sustainable research base to benefit the UK’s economy, culture and creative industries."

[I'm not sure peddling philosophy as a culture industry is quite the right way to see things, but nevermind]

The naturalistic fallacy is when you invalidly infer facts about what ought to be the case only from facts about what is the case. ("only" because facts about what is the case can, of course, be relevant to what one ought to do! They just can't be the whole story)

So, one implication is that, even if people are psychologically, culturally, evolutionarily or neurologically wired up to do something, this doesn't show that this thing is right. Perhaps people are just wired up in ways that they shouldn't be.

It struck me the other day that this fits in well with the Euthyphro dilemma. Recall:
Either (a) God decides what is good, or (b) goodness is fixed independently of God's will and he merely passes on his knowledge of it to us.

The problem with (a) is precisely that it is an instance of the naturalistic fallacy. Sure, God might command X, but this is a fact about what is the case, not a fact about what ought to be the case. In order to move from "God commands X" to "you ought to do X", we need the premise "You ought to do whatever God commands". And this premise cannot be secured by God without circularity, and so we're forced onto horn (b), that some facts about what you ought to do are fixed independently of God.

That, of course, is not something an omnipotent God can live with.

Update: Fixed. It was a problem with my hosting company, but they tell me it's now resolved.

Sorry about this, it should hopefully be resolved shortly..

Here's something I found myself puzzling over.

When you believe something, what is the content of the belief? A fact? The problem here is finding something to say when we have a belief about a fact that doesn't obtain. The belief: "I believe that the present King of France is bald" cannot have the fact that the present King of France is bald as its content, because there is no such fact. Further, presumably whatever the content of false beliefs is, it's also going to be the content of true beliefs. If I believe that it is raining outside, the content of that belief is the same whether it's true or false.

So one solution to this is to say that the content of a belief is a proposition (that the kind of France is bald). False propositions still exist to be able to function as the content of beliefs. Both true and false beliefs have propositions as contents. (In part, this is why we talk of propositions in the first place.)

But haven't we merely forestalled the problem? What is the content of a false proposition? Again, it cannot be a fact, so it must be something else. And, again, this something else must be the same whether the proposition is true or false, to capture the truth that the sense of a proposition does not depend on its truth. But what? Let's call it proposition*. And what is the content of proposition*? It cannot be a fact...

The standard thought is that facts cannot be the content of beliefs, because a belief can have no basis in reality, and because true and false beliefs have their content in common. But the worry is that this exact same problem is going to apply to any content of beliefs we specify, and any content of their content, and so on. Either, (a) we stop this regress at the start, by claiming that true and false beliefs have differing contents (externalism), and that a belief can have a non-obtaining fact as content, or (b) we find some reason to think that these problems that plague beliefs do not do so for propositions.

I suspect that (b) is both possible and standard, but I've never seen anyone do it. One thought is that propositions do not have "content" in the same sense that beliefs do, but I am not sure about this. Thoughts?

So I've never done anything because I believed it to be right. Analogous arguments show that we also rarely do things merely because we want to.

We do, of course, do things because they are wantable, or desirable. Our desires aim to capture this fact, but don't thereby become our reason for doing the action.

If it looked odd with beliefs, this is going to look crazier with desires. But it is, again, relatively easy to show. If my reason for doing P was that I desired P, then I should say of hypothetical contexts, where I no longer have the desire, that I no longer have the reason. But this just isn't true of most reasons we take ourselves to have. An obvious example is desiring that I am happy in the future - I have reason to be happy whether I want to or not.

But let's take a harder case. If I imagine myself without the desire to enjoy the delicious taste of tea, it's just not true that I think I have no reason to drink tea in this case. I'd think that I'd have reason to enjoy delicious tea anyway. The deliciousness of tea provides me with reasons to drink it independently of my desires. Reasons aren't dependent on desires in this way.

(Again, in some cases, your reasons for actions do come from your desires. If I desire to play computer games all day, then this is a reason to work away from my computer. This satisfies the condition above: in hypothetical contexts where I lose this desire, I no longer have the reason to work away from my computer. But this kind of reasoning is obviously not the standard kind.)

There's a potential objection I can see coming. The relevant counter-factual is not imagining myself without the desire to enjoy the delicious taste of tea. It's to imagine myself without the desire for tea, period (in which case, without this desire, it seems that I have no reason to drink tea). The word "delicious", you might say, simply means "I desire it", so my counter-factual is really a cheat. If this definition were correct, then even in the counter-factual case, I still desire the tea, because it's been described as delicious.

But this can't be a correct definition. I desire many things without thinking that they're delicious (computer games, again). More generally, there's a temptation to think of all value-labels ("delicious", "fun", "exciting") as desires in disguise. But this just has everything backwards. I desire exciting things because they're exciting; they don't excite me because I desire them. What rationale could I have for my desires if they were always prior to the value that they drive us towards?

It's true! I have, on the other hand, done things because they were right. My belief aims to capture this fact, but doesn't thereby become my reason for doing the action.

This looks very odd, but it's relatively easy to show. If my reason for doing P was that I believed that P were right, then I should say of hypothetical contexts, where I no longer have the belief, that I no longer have the reason. But this just isn't true of most reason we take ourselves to have. If I imagine myself without the belief that being kind is good, it's just not true that I imagine myself in a situation with no reason to be kind. Reasons aren't dependent on beliefs in this way.

(In some cases, your reasons for actions do come from your beliefs. If I believe that everyone is out to get me, then this is a reason to get help. This satisfies the condition above: in hypothetical contexts where I lose this belief, I no longer have the reason to get help. But this kind of reasoning is obviously not the standard kind.)

Does this matter? Well, there are two upshots. First, it's not clear how theories of "motivation" come out after we think about things in these terms. People aren't motivated by combinations of beliefs and desires, as some (not all!) Humeans would have it. Second, I wonder if this is sometimes in the background for supporters of naive relativism. If people's reasons depended on their beliefs in this manner, then things are pretty relative to the agents opinions! Still, if this is false, then relativism loses this potential ground for support.

Probably more on both of these in the future.