Al's blog

There once was an X from place B,
That satisfied predicate P,
He or she did thing A,
In an adjective way,
Resulting in circumstance C.

More clever limericks here. You'll have to sift for philosophy ones, but they're generally good anyway. (via)

This post should be interesting for utilitarians, but I suspect that the criticisms and responses have application elsewhere also.

Here are two objections to utilitarianism:

First, utilitarians can make no sense of regret. They claim that one should always maximise the balance of pleasure over pain. But that means that one never has competing reasons: for we only have one reason to begin with.

Second, utilitarians value people only as receptacles of value. They value people only as means of maximising the overall good.

Here is a theory that seems to me to avoid both objections:

(1) For each possible pleasure for each possible individual, you have reason to realise it. For each possible pain for each possible individual, you have reason to prevent it.

(2) Each reason's strength is correlated with the intensity of the pleasure or pain. When reasons conflict, resolve conflicts by prioritising overall weight.

Regret is certainly possible now. For the original objection was that we had a theory that consisted of only one reason, and so reasons could never conflict. But this new theory certainly allows for conflict. (1) tells us that we have many reasons, and they will certainly conflict. Obviously, (2) tells us how to resolve conflicts, but that is not the same as saying that conflicts do not occur.

The value-receptacle claim also falls apart. (1) and (2) don't even mention the overall good, let alone treat individuals as means to it. I can't state that strongly enough: It seems to me that the value-receptacle criticism rests on a very crude understanding of what utilitarians say. The claims about overall goodness are not meant to be claims about some independent entity which individuals happen to have an effect on.

It may be the fault of some advocates of utilitarianism that these objections seem cogent in the first place. If utilitarianism is the theory that we only have reason to maximise the overall good, then these criticisms may succeed. And perhaps some utilitarians have phrased it this way. But I'm more charitably inclined to think that they describe it this way for brevity. The idea that there is some universal good to which we all contribute is possibly extensionally equivalent to, and is more succinct to state than, the two part theory I suggested above. That is probably why some describe utilitarianism in this manner. But I do not think that we should take this way of describing it too seriously.

But perhaps these criticisms can be made good, or I have said something silly. Comments, as always, are welcome.

"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.