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"Yesterday's meditation has thrown me into such doubts that I can no longer ignore them, yet I fail to see how they are to be resolved. It is as if I had suddenly fallen into a deep whirlpool; I am so tossed about that I can neither touch bottom with my foot, nor swim up to the top."
(Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy, meditation two)

"Oh, and among the "classic" writers, Hume and most translations I've read of Descartes are way up there, though the blog-like style of the Meditations and Discourse is not something that most students should emulate (if only because they're unlikely to do it well)."
(from the comments thread at The Leiter reports, on writers whom students should try to emulate)

I like the idea of Descartes as an early blogger. The commenter is correct that he writes in that format (those more intelligent than I could probably write a decent parody of him in modern style), but I take it that it's also true that he wanted to publish in a format that was accessible to many people. Perhaps blogging isn't so ultra-new as we like to think.

A while back at In Socrates Wake I seem to remember there being an interesting post about imaginative resistance. I stupidly didn't save the link, and now I can't find it. Still, some thoughts:

One problem that sometimes arises when discussing philosophy with students, or non-philosophers, is that they don't "get" the point of examples. One raises an issue like the trolley case, and they expect it to be a trick question, with some further option available you've hidden in the description somewhere. The idea that one will have to let some people die seems unimaginable: there must be some third option with a happy ending.

I'd always imagined this to be purely a result of the fact that in real life, options usually aren't limited to two possible courses of action, and even when this is true our chances of knowing it are very slim. (In what follows, I shouldn't be read as saying that this isn't part of the problem)

But the interesting suggestion in the post (that I've failed to link to) was that there is some imaginative resistance here. People don't want to consider hard cases, because it's not nice to think that there can be such difficult decisions. (This means that imagining hard decisions difficult, let alone true moral dilemmas where all available acts are wrong.)

(Relatedly, I've sometimes wondered if the film industry harms clarification of the deontology vs. consequentialism debate. Heroes in films are often given dilemmas between doing the "right" thing and doing the "best" thing. They often choose to follow the right and not the good, but magically and unexpectedly this always brings about the best outcome anyway.)

I suppose one could make the effort to find some actual real life situation of the relevant kind. Perhaps the idea that such a dilemma occured would make consideration of it easier. This might be something to bear in mind when discussing some philosophy, and particuarly ethics.

So, over the summer, amongst other things, I intend to (re-)read:
Mark Schroeder's Slaves of the Passions
Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
Anscombe's Intention

Are any readers are interested in working out some form of online reading group on any of these? (Either here, elsewhere, or a mixture.) If so, let me know either in comments or by email, and we'll see how best to organise things.

(Half post / Half bleg)

There are many relations of making true. At the limit, we have material conditionals. But there are also causal relations, constitutive relations, and presumably more.

Now, with respect to something like constitution, I can see how this relation says more than a material conditional. It says that the parts come together to make the whole true, and we have a pretty good independent grasp on the concepts of "part" and "whole". So I can understand why "atoms constitute physical objects" says something more than the material conditional "if you have some atoms, then you have a physical object".

But what about with cause? What makes "A caused B" more specific than "if A, then B"? Tempting suggestions involve reference to temporal order and spatial proximity. But I take it that these are not necessary for a relationship to be causal, since I thought modern scientists were happy to claim that backwards causation and causation at a distance were possible (wikipedia confirms). I don't think it would be right to accuse them of conceptual confusion.

So - and here's the bleg - what is it that makes a causal relation more than a material conditional? References to literature are more than welcome. (For the Ethicists: This is interesting since it's not clear what the debate about "reasons as causes" is actually about unless we have an answer to this question.)

"[W]e appear to have the following dilemma. If practical rationality and morality are a matter of reason or cognition, which are objective and universal, they must lack the power to motivate, since that power depends upon the presence of the relevant contingent desires. If, on the other hand, practical (including moral) reasoning is confined within the limits of the agent's contingent desires, there can be no universal or objective reasons for action. Hence either objective reasons exist but lack the power to motivate, which seems absurd, or reasons are not objective but merely a function of an agent's actual desires. [...] Nagel would appear to have a way out of this dilemma [he rejects the Humean view]."
(Bond, Reason and Value (1983), p6-7)

Either we are cognitivist externalists, or we hold that practical requirements are requirements of desire (very roughly, non-cognitivism), or otherwise we must be anti-Humeans.

(Posting may be sporadic for a little while. The power supply on my computer worryingly smells of burnt plastic, so my own PC is out of use until I fix the problem.)

So I previously put forward an argument I called a parity argument. The basic structure was this: Prudence is like this, so morality must be like this too. Such arguments claim that there is parity between the properties of prudential and moral reasons.

Such arguments need work, in many ways. But I can't claim that they're entirely my creation. Very closely related is this. In Reasons and Persons, Parfit claimed that the self-interest theory was objectionable because it was a hybrid view. It requires us to be person-partial and time-neutral. But why think that we should treat times and people similarly anyway? These are very different kinds of entity. Here's what I take to be Parfit's answer to that question:

"this analogy [between persons and times] holds only at a formal level. Particular times do not resemble particular people. But the word 'I' refers to a particular person in the same way in which the word 'now' refers to a particular time […] given the analogy between 'I' and 'now' a theory ought to give both the same treatment." (p140, his emphasis)

This does not seem like a strong argument. The ways in which words refer does not obviously give us insight into how we ought to treat the things to which they refer.

I'm a huge fan of Reasons and Persons, as well as Parfit's work more generally. But as Parfit himself says, even great philosophers make mistakes. Is this one such mistake, or am I missing something?

(c.f. Williamson's interesting paper (via))

I just wrote mine, here: alsnotepad.com/aboutme.

Feedback is more than welcome, both on style and content. (Especially if you find it doesn't display correctly on your browser/machine.)

Any general thoughts on academic webpages are also welcome: What should they contain? What shouldn't they contain? Is a flashy one a good idea, or just distracting?

Edit: I just remembered that the egalitarian suggestion came from Philippe Van Parijs, and not Julien.

I attended a conference here in Reading the other week, and saw Julien Savulescu give an interesting talk on the issues surrounding having a market for organ trade.

Most of the talk consisted of responses to various objections you might have to the idea. But one interesting suggestion in favour of the idea was that we should endorse it from an egalitarian perspective.

After all, if organs become tradable for relatively large sums of money, then we've suddenly increased the wealth of everyone in the world by a large amount, regardless of their position now. This egalitarian windfall diminishes the gap between rich and poor.

Sure, organs would probably mostly migrate north and west. But still, money would migrate in the other direction, and it's not unreasonable to think that some people really do need a house (e.g.) more than their second kidney.

Via Crooked Timber, Bill Pollard and Soran Reader's excellent exam paper:

Philosophy Exam – First Year

Answer two questions

Two hours

1. Patch together some things you have heard in lectures, in no particular order.

2. Has this question vexed philosophers for centuries?

3. Create an impression of original thought by impassioned scribbling (your answer may be ungrammatical, illegible, or both).

4. Does the answer to this question depend on what you believe?

5. How much irrelevant historical background can you give before addressing this question?

6. Describe two opposing views, then say what you personally feel.

7. Rise above the fumbling efforts of others and speculate freely on an issue of your choice.

8. EITHER

(a) Answer this question by announcing that it really means something different (and much easier to answer).

OR

(b) Write out your answer to last year’s question on this topic.

9. Protest your convictions in the teeth of obvious and overwhelming objections.

10. Keep your reader guessing about what you think until the end. Then don’t tell them.

An argument begs the question, you might say, if it appeals to a premise that your opponent will - by definition as your opponent - reject.

So imagine I put forward an argument A against P. You then object to A, because of Q. Can Q beg the question? No. In fact, if it seems that Q begs the question, then A itself must beg the question. If my argument A relies on the falsity of Q, and Q is true iff P is, then my argument straightforwardly assumes that P is false before it begins.

That's too schematic, so let's have an example. I argue: Physicalism is false, because of this Zombie argument. Ah, you say, but the Zombie argument relies on this false premise: that zombies are possible. I rejoin: Your claim that this premise is false begs the question; those who accept zombie arguments are, by definition, bound to accept this premise because their argument relies on it[1].

I am, contrary to first appearances, in a poor position here. For I was the one who was meant to be arguing against physicalism in the first place. The burden of proof is on me to show that we must not accept such a theory. My argument to this conclusion cannot rely on a claim that is disputed by the people who accept physicalism. But that is precisely what my argument must do if I am able to call your rejoinder question-begging.

More generally, begging the question is when you put forward an argument that fails to move the burden of proof from one side of the dispute to the other. If I argue against abortion on the assumption that abortion is murder, then my argument transparently begs the question - those in favour of abortion are extremely likely to just deny the premise that abortion is murder. What's gone wrong here is that my anti-abortion argument assumes that the burden of proof is on you to tell me why abortion is not murder, and not on me to tell you why it is. And that's precisely what I'm meant to be doing, if I'm arguing against abortion in the first place. If the burden of proof was on you, I wouldn't need to present such an argument at all[2].

It's sometimes said that all arguments beg the question. For anyone denying P will, by definition, reject any argument for P. But this misses the point that an argument is an attempt to shift a burden of proof to your opponent. Arguments only beg the question when the burden of proof sits on the same side of the discussion for the disputed premise as much as for the disputed conclusion.

Think of it like a tennis match. A ball is on one side of the net. If I hit it, then my aim is to shift the ball to your side of the net. If I hit it too weakly, and it fails to cross the net, then my hit fails to advance the game: the ball is with me just as much as it was before my last effort to hit it. In this case, it's still up to me to hit it again, and not for you to hit it back. That means that my original hit was a pointless addition to the game.

[1] Here I should note that I take this example because it's fresh in my mind, and not because I have anything to add to all that zombie fevered discussion that's been around recently. The dialectic here is an example of the phenomena I have in mind, and not a diagnosis of that discussion.

[2] Again, note that I'm not intending to opine on abortion here. I'm merely pointing out how the dialectic might look if the burden of proof were in some place. It might be elsewhere: that's fine, and exactly my point. Where we locate the burden of proof in these discussions makes a big difference to the force of various arguments.