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In comments here, Pablo quotes the following from Sidgwick:
"[T]he very indefiniteness of all hedonistic calculations, which was sufficiently shown in Book ii., renders it by no means unlikely that there may be no cognisable difference between the quantities of happiness involved in two sets of consequences respectively; the more rough our estimates necessarily are, the less likely we shall be to come to any clear decision between two apparently balanced alternatives. In all such cases, therefore, it becomes practically important to ask whether any mode of distributing a given quantum of happiness is better than any other. Now the Utilitarian formula seems to supply no answer to this question: at least we have to supplement the principle of seeking the greatest happiness on the whole by some principle of Just or Right distribution of this happiness. The principle which most Utilitarians have either tacitly or expressly adopted is that of pure equality--as given in Bentham's formula, "everybody to count for one, and nobody for more than one." And this principle seems the only one which does not need a special justification; for, as we saw, it must be reasonable to treat any one man in the same way as any other, if there be no reason apparent for treating him differently." (The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed., London, 1907, pp. 416-417)

And then Pablo said of it:
"It seems to me that, contrary to Rawls's interpretation, Sidgwick is not claiming here that utilitarianism requires one to choose the more equal distribution of good when the total aggregate of good is maximal, but instead that, as a matter of contingent fact, those philosophers who have been utilitarians have also embraced a distributive principle which assigns (subordinate) moral significance to equality."

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I had understood the Sidgwick quote somewhat differently. I'd be interested to know what others think.

I presume that his "as we saw" comment refers back to his argument on p380 (7th Ed.), where he says:
"the self-evident principle strictly stated must take some such negative form as this; 'it cannot be right for A to treat B in a manner in which it would be wrong for B to treat A, merely on the ground that they are two different individuals, and without there being any difference between the natures or circumstances of the two which can be stated as a reasonable ground for difference of treatment.' [the principle's effect is] merely to throw a definite onus pro-bandi on the man who applies to another a treatment of which he would complain if applied to himself; but Common Sense has amply recognised the practical importance of the maxim: and its truth, so far as it goes, appears to me self-evident. [...] the principle just discussed [is] more or less clearly implied in the common notion of 'fairness' or 'equity'"

So I take his overall argument on equality to be something like this:
If one treats two people differently, one must have some justification in mind (this follows from his argument on p381 about parts and wholes, and how they sum). Now imagine that one has a choice of three actions:
1) Person A gets huge benefit, person B gets very little.
2) Person B gets huge benefit, person A gets very little.
3) Persons A and B get equally middling sized benefits.
Further imagine that the total value realised in each is equal. Sidgwick's claim is that choosing (1) or (2) would require some further justification as to why A and B should be treated differently. So by elimination we should choose (3).

(For much of the book he tries his best to describe the theories in an impartial manner, and so often adopts the tone of a disinterested onlooker. I take this to explain why, in the passage Pablo quotes, he states his claim as "most utilitarians have..." and not "the most plausible claim is...".)

I heard this mentioned the other day, and had to check it out.

The putative counter-example:
It's election time, 1980. According to the polls, Republican Reagan is in the far lead. Democrat Carter is second, and Republican Anderson is third by some margin. Assess the following argument:

(1) If a Republican wins, then if it's not Reagan who wins, it will be Anderson
(2) A Republican will win
(3) Therefore, if it's not Reagan who wins, it will be Anderson.

The premises are true, and by classic logic they entail the conclusion, but, we ought to reject (3). So it seems to some.

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On seeing this, it took me a while to even see why someone might reject (3). It seemed to me obviously true given the premises. Here is why I failed to feel the pull of the example.

The argument is invalid iff (1) and (2) can be true when (3) is false. And (3) is false iff both Reagan and Anderson lose. So the argument is invalid iff:
(a) If a Republican wins, then if it's not Reagan who wins, it will be Anderson.
(b) A Republican wins.
(c) Reagan loses.
(d) Anderson loses.

These conditions cannot all be true. By hypothesis, Reagan and Anderson cannot both lose but the Republicans win. The argument is valid.

The confusion arises because an argument with necessarily false premises establishes anything whatsoever. "If 2+2=5, then I am the pope" is a valid argument. The premise can't be true and the conclusion false: nevermind that the premise is never true.

The counter-example is just another argument of this kind. The premises can't be true and the conclusion false: nevermind that there is no world in which premise (2) holds and the antecedent of (3) is true.

As we know, necessarily false claims entail anything whatsoever. McGee's counter-example is just one instance of this.

(I understand McGee's aims were not to undermine the logicians sense of modus ponens, but the claim that modus ponens was the conditional used in natural language. This is fine, although if I am right, then this is just a local instance of the known truth that material conditionals allow for irrelevant entailment.)

I previously changed the "About" block, and made some comments about anonymity. After some thought, I've reversed that decision. My name now appears in the "About" block.

My reasons for this are threefold: One, given that google turns up this site, my chances of staying anonymous are slim anyway. I realised that my real choice is whether or not to delete the site. Second, this first point was made forceful when a fellow graduate student stumbled across this place and worked out it was me. Third, after a short discussion with my supervisor, I'm somewhat inclined to think that I needn't worry, so long as I don't say anything too outrageous.

So while I'm doing that, I may as well disclose a little about myself.

My name is Alex Gregory, I'm studying for my PhD at the University of Reading under Jonathan Dancy.

Reading is an odd university, in that it is good but not brilliant for most subjects (#25 in the UK), but the philosophy department here punches above weight generally (=#9 in the UK), and much more so for meta-ethics and normative ethics (Group 4 internationally for both, so roughly =#11 internationally, and below only Oxford in the UK).

The title with which I applied for my PhD was "Can we justify moral beliefs by appeal to the general nature of reasons?". This is one in sense vague, but does sucessfully convey my more general interest of connecting some of the abstract claims we make about reasons (and in meta-ethics more generally) with some determinate normative conclusions.

Here's something I've been thinking about recently, and I'm very keen to have thoughts on. I can't decide whether this is a good (original) argument, or whether there's something deeply wrong with it.

For now I'll just try to get the gist across: if it's deeply wrong, it will be visible from here. In the future I may well come to discuss particular premises.

1) There is some distinction between prudential reasons and moral reasons (e.g. reasons to do things for oneself, and reasons to do things for others).
2) Prudential reasons are all reasons to increase one's level of well-being.
3) Premise 2 needs an explanation.
4) The only (plausible, non ad-hoc) explanation of Premise 2 is that all practical reasons are reasons to increase levels of well-being.
5) All practical reasons are reasons to increase levels of well-being.

So:
6) Moral reasons are all reasons to increase the general level of well-being.

Here's the brief English version:

All the things that you should do for yourself, and the only things you should for yourself are things that increase your level of well-being. But there's something a bit mysterious about this fact: it needs explaining. One obvious explanation - if not the only explanation - is that all "should" claims (at least all those about action) are made true by facts about increased levels of well-being. But if that's true, then it follows pretty trivially that the moral should is also one of increasing well-being.

That is, some form of welfarist consequentialism is true.

(1) It can never be right to make the world worse than it could be (and it must always be right to make the world as good as it can be).
(2) Consequentialism says that the only reasons people have, and all the reasons people have, are reasons to maximise the good (==bring about the best state of affairs possible).

Therefore:
(3) Consequentialism is true.

I tend to think that the driving force behind consequentialism is something along the lines of (1). How can one be obliged to bring about worse, rather than better, states of affairs?

(2) is just pure definition; this is what people tend to mean by consequentialism.

Yet it's interesting to note that the conclusion (3) really doesn't follow from these two premises. Why not? It doesn't follow because (1) only says that one's strongest reason is always to maximise the good. It's perfectly compatible with the claim that one sometimes has other (weaker) reasons to do other things. But the definition of (2) explicitly rules out this possibility, and so (1) can't imply (3).

That is, the following position seems coherent, is compatible with the truth of (1), and is not consequentialism. I don't endorse it, but it is interesting.

Quasi-consequentialism: One has reasons to do many things: keep promises, not to kill people, to respect rights, to give people their just deserts, and so on, and of course, to maximise the good. But the strength of the last of these is always so great as to obviously outweigh any reason that one has to do anything else.

But this doesn't make such reasons redundant! When one is unsure which action maximises the good (or is sure that there is a tie between more than one action), then these reasons come into play. If, for example, you are faced with the choice of whether or not to keep a promise, and you have no idea which choice maximises the good, you should keep it, because you have unconditional reason to keep promises.

(Objection: "In those cases where one is unsure what to do, these non-consequentialist reasons do not correlate with what is right. Whether one keeps the promise for its own sake or not, one's action will be right or wrong for reasons independent of this. Therefore the reason to keep the promise is irrelevant to moral decision making." It is true that such non-consequentialist reasons will not correlate with what is actually right. But we are interested not only in acting rightly, but also in acting least wrongly (and most rightly). That means that such reasons are relevant to what one ought to do from a subjective point of view.)

One objection to the view that there really are moral truths is this: "Such truths would be so bizarre! They be about properties (or objects) totally unlike anything science tells us exist!"

The thought behind the objection seems to be something like this: Moral properties are nothing like other properties - they aren't like size, shape, weight, and so on. And we should be suspiscious of things of which are unusual.

I questioned the second of these statements before. Here I question the first.

The problem is that what most properties are like is itself already queer enough:

"there are very good reasons for thinking that there is more to space than we know or can understand. Even when I put aside the (already weighty) points that physical space is non-Euclidean, and is itself something that is literally expanding, and the non-locality results, I can't fully understand how space and time can be interdependent in the way that they demonstrably are. We are also told on very good authority that gravity is really just a matter of the curvature of space; and that string theory is an immensely promising theory of matter that entails that there are at least ten spatial dimensions." (G. Strawson)

The world really isn't the mostly solid, "medium" sized, blocky tangible thing that we ordinarily take it to be. In fact, we have little understanding of what's in the world. So how can we claim that moral properties are unlike other properties? We don't know what either of them are like!

"But moral properties aren't physical!" I'm not sure I understand what physical means here. "Not tangible"? Nor is gravity, most of the dimensions there probably are, or most of the matter in the universe. "They're hardly like trees!". True, but then nor are trees like how we think of trees. Further, trees are also unlike gravity, the brain, dark matter and everything else.

One difference is that moral truths justify things, whereas other truths tend to explain things. But this doesn't help the sceptic! This is a good reason to think that even if science become advanced enough to be able to call moral properties queer, we'd have good grounds to be suspiscious that their methods of inference to best explanation weren't rigged against finding anything like moral truth in the first place.

If I'm right, then there's no need to give up ontological commitment to moral facts. One can be a full-blooded realist, who thinks that there really are actual moral properties and facts. God knows what that means, but that's precisely why scepticism about it is so premature.

(I just finished reading Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. It's a good read. I'll split this topic into two posts: One on desire and the truth of evolutionary theory, and the other on progress in evolution. This is the second of those.)

Dawkins is sensibly and accurately clear about evolution for most of the book. He uses terms like "should", "ought", and so on, but is explicit (and repeats often) that these are metaphors for what will tend to happen due to selective pressures, and not judgements about what is really better or worse. Yet here he is on p190:

"[talking of cultural, or memetic, evolution] As in genetic evolution though, the change may be progressive. There is a sense in which modern science is actually better than ancient science. Not only does our understanding of the universe change as the centuries go by: it improves"

He's here slipped into drawing the normative conclusion from the factual premise. There's no guarantee that cultural evolution is progressive. Perhaps the ideas that survive are those that can survive, and not those that are better, or more accurate, and so on.

He even argues that religious belief may be evolutionarily successful despite its falsity, even though this is clearly at odds with the claim that all cultural evolution is progressive (p192-3 - note that he here means successful in that the belief is good at surviving and spreading, not that it benefits the believers).

Am I just being pinickity? Here are two reasons to think not:

1) It really might be true that some long standing ideas have lasted not because they at all accurately reflect reality, but because human minds are susceptible to believing them. This possibility seems both likely and worrying.

2) Richard recently mentioned "non-ideal" epistemic theory. This is an interesting case of just that. Evolution might well be a brilliant theory, but if even an intelligent expert like Dawkins can make accidents in drawing out its significance, perhaps some of us are better off avoiding belief in it. (I raise this as a thought worth considering, and certainly not as a policy recommendation!)

I just finished reading Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. It's a good read. I'll split this topic into two posts: One on desire and the truth of evolutionary theory, and the other on progress in evolution This is the first of those.

Here is Dawkins talking about organisms without consciousness:
"The 'purpose machine', the machine or thing that behaves as if it had a conscious purpose, is equipped with some kind of measuring device which measures the discrepancy between the current state of things, and the 'desired' state. It is built in such a way that the larger this discrepancy is, the harder the machine works. In this way the machine will automatically tend to reduce the discrepancy [...] it may come to actually rest if the 'desired' state is reached." (p50)

It's striking how close this is to standard "direction-of-fit" views of desire: To desire is to see a gap between the world and one's mental state, and to try and reduce that gap by bringing the world into line with the mental state.

Yet Dawkins is explicitly talking about non-conscious "pursuit" of goals. I've been meaning to write for a while on why you might think that "motivating reasons" are not really reasons at all. That argument needs its own post, but the Dawkins quote illustrates it well. If non-conscious behaviour already looks like this, then what is the extra thing that distinguishes the supposedly more purposive motivating reasons from non-conscious "pursuit" of a "goal"?

"Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable" (p12, his emphasis)

Another striking passage. If the more fundamental law is survival of the stable, then this should explain the existence of all life with more accuracy than evolutionary theory (in particular, it should better explain conflicts between life and "dead" matter). So why haven't we rejected evolutionary theory in favour of this more general view?

'A former Oxford university student has said graduates can earns up to £30,000 a year by writing essays and selling them to school and university students. The writer, who is in his 20s and wanted to remain anonymous, said he was commissioned by a firm that sells essays by Oxford graduates on the web.

Students are charged between £70 for GCSE essays and £20,000 for PHD work. [...] The graduate said he gets paid about £500 for an undergraduate essay. [...]

"I don't have a problem with it - it's not selling drugs, just using your brain. I went to private school so I see it as recuperating some of those costs. I've spent a lot of money on my education. It's only fair enough if I can make a little bit directly off it."'
(BBC)

If true, this is stunning.

Though here's a reason to be suspiscious of the accuracy of this report: £20,000 seems like an oddly low figure for PhD level work. If such people earn up to £30,000 in a year, then it presumably takes them around nine months to write a passable PhD. That seems unlikely.

The quotes at the end are also obviously wrong. Having been to private school and university costs money precisely because it already priveleges you in life. You don't deserve further compensation for such advantages.

(Raz is currently top of my reading list, which is to say I haven't read the original work Richard refers to here)

"If there’s value in the state of affairs of your having warranted attitudes, then this should be so whether this state of affairs came about as a result of shifting your attitudes to match the world, or by changing the world to match your attitudes. But this is absurd: if you feel fear, for example, there is nothing at all to be said for manipulating your situation to match your emotion by gratuitously exposing yourself to danger. Danger is a reason for fear, but fear is not a reason for (bringing about) danger. This asymmetry demonstrates that the reasons we have for feeling fear when in danger are adaptive reasons -- they do not assume that there is necessarily value in the combination of fear and danger."

A minor note: Talking about the value of warranted attitudes is misleading, because those who hold the view Richard/Raz has in mind are those who think that being warranted just is being valuable. They aren't warranted first and then valued. But I'll stick with this terminology.

There are two responses the target of this objection could make:

First, if the combination of fear and danger is only valuable when the danger arrives first, then we could build this into our picture of the value of fear. Perhaps what is valuable is not (fear&danger), as Raz supposes, but (danger->fear). In English, perhaps what is valuable is to either avoid danger or to be fearful. One can't create this valuable outcome by seeking out danger when one is fearful.

Second, one might quite sensibly reject the very premise that the discussion is grounded on, namely that danger is a reason for fear. Isn't there something admirable or rational about the person who responds to danger calmly and without fear? (Sure, we might admit, for many of us fear is a good motivating force that, all things considered, helps us to be motivated to avoid danger. But this doesn't require that danger is a reason for fear: it requires that danger is best avoided (is disvaluable) and that the best means to minimise this disvalue might be the adoption of a disposition to feel fear in the face of fanger. These claims do not commit us to thinking that danger is an unconditional reason for fear, which is, I take it, what Raz has in mind)