Calvin and Hobbes and Kant

One of the best comic strips ever:

A Synopsis of Singer’s The Life You Can Save

In this article on Scholardarity.com I provide a synopsis of Peter Singer’s book The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, in which he tries to get his readers to consider, or reconsider, the question of what their obligations are to those who are trapped in extreme poverty. I write the synopsis in the hope that it may convince you to think about these issues for yourself, and also to go on to read Singer’s book.

Should Scientists Ignore Philosophical Theories of Evidence?

In a new article on Scholardarity.com, I  examine Peter Achinstein's critique of philosophical theories of evidence as they relate to science. I argue that scientists should not ignore philosophical theories of evidence--not all of them, anyway. To read it, click here.

Here's an excerpt:

In his article “Why Philosophical Theories of Evidence Are (and Ought to Be) Ignored by Scientists,” Peter Achinstein argues that philosophical theories of evidence are ignored by scientists because they rest on assumptions which make their concepts of evidence too weak for scientists to work with, or which entail that the truth or falsity of evidential statements can be determined a priori. Given that, as Achinstein argues, the truth of many evidential statements can only be determined empirically, this “a priorist” assumption makes scientists consider philosophical accounts of evidence irrelevant to their work.

In what follows I will examine the value of evidence, its nature, and its relation to science. I hope to show that, while Achinstein’s conclusions are mostly right, the arguments and examples he gives to support them are flawed in some of their details. Specifically, I propose an account of evidence according to which, though evidential claims are objective to a large extent, something counts as evidence only if, ultimately, it has a relation to beings for whom it counts as evidence. On this view something’s status as evidence does not derive merely from people’s beliefs, but from shared practices that are embodied in what I call contexts of inquiry. I also propose that this concept of evidence is one according to which evidential claims, though defeasible, are in one respect a priori. I argue that this account of evidence is one that should be of interest to scientists.

Objectivism and the Corruption of Rationality -- Now available for free at Scholardarity.com

As co-founders of Scholardarity.com, Peter Krey and Jason Zarri are happy to announce that Scott Ryan’s book Objectivism and the Corruption of Rationality: A Critique of Ayn Rand’s Epistemology is now available for free at Scholardarity.com, in the Epistemology section

Description:

Ayn Rand presented Objectivism as a philosophy of reason. But is it? That is the question Scott Ryan seeks to answer in this careful examination of the Objectivist epistemology and its alleged sufficiency as the philosophical foundation of a free and prosperous commonwealth. Sorting painstakingly through Rand’s writings on the subject, Mr. Ryan concludes that the epistemology of Objectivism is incoherent and debases both the concept and the practice of rationality.

[Note: Some of the formatting of the text has been corrupted and differs from the print version]

Scott Ryan has been a guitarist, singer, and songwriter, a mathematics teacher, a writer and editor, a computer programmer, a Sherlockian, and a husband and father. He holds a master’s degree in mathematics and a juris doctor, and has had a lifelong interest in philosophy. He currently works as a software developer and lives in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, with his wife.

How to Know What Should Be So: Ethical Guidance and Ethical Theories

If one is in a moral quandary it is wise to look for ethical guidance if one has the time to do so. Ethical theories are, among other things, intended to be one possible source of ethical guidance. If such guidance is valuable, then in ethics there is an embarrassment of riches: There are multiple, well-accepted, yet mutually inconsistent theories. These include utilitarianism, Kantianism, virtue ethics, contractarianism, libertarianism, natural law theory, some forms of moral particularism, and more. The disquieting thing is that, at present, it seems that we are not at all close to being able to determine which of them, if any, is right. How can you know what you should do when ethicists, those who devote their careers to studying such theories, cannot reach a consensus on which one we should accept? Those who look to ethical theories for ethical guidance are apt to be disappointed. This situation is problematic, for if ethical theorizing is to have relevance to real-world ethical behavior, and not just be a way of examining ethical issues out of a love of arguments or puzzles, it must be possible for us to use ethical theories to inform ourselves of what we should do.

It seems that philosophers have usually tried to address the issue of how one should act by advancing arguments for or against these theories (or certain parts of them). I want to approach this issue from a different angle. The question I will address is this: Can you get ethical guidance about what you should do in certain situations without knowing, or even having good reasons to believe, that any particular ethical theory is right?

I know of at least one philosopher who thinks you can. In the following passage from his article “Hunger, Duty, and Ecology”, which was the inspiration for the ideas I express in this article, Mylan Engel Jr. rebuts an objection to the obligatoriness of donating to famine relief:

One of the most common reasons that I have heard philosophers give for rejecting the arguments of Singer and company [for contributing to famine relief] runs roughly as follows:

Singer’s preference utilitarianism is irremediably flawed, as are Kant’s ethics, Aieken’s theory of human rights, and Rawlsean contractarianism. The literature is peppered with devastating objections to these views. Because all of the aforementioned arguments are predicated on flawed ethical theories, all these arguments are also flawed. Until someone can provide me with clear moral reasons grounded in a true moral theory for sending large portions of my income to famine-relief organizations, I will continue to spend my money on what I please.

Such a self-serving reply is both disingenuous and sophistical. It is disingenuous because, as noted earlier, utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, human rights-based ethics, and contractarianism are among the most widely accepted theories in normative ethics. In other contexts, philosophers typically embrace one of these four theoretical approaches to ethics. It is sophistical because a similar reply can be used to “justify” or rationalize virtually any behavior. Because no moral theory to date is immune to objection, one could, for example, “justify” rape on the grounds that all of the arguments against rape are based on flawed ethical theories.

The speciousness of such a “justification” of rape is obvious. No one who seriously considers the brutality of rape can think that it is somehow justified / permissible simply because all current ethical theories are flawed. But such specious reasoning is often used to “justify” allowing millions of innocent children to starve to death each year. [footnote omitted] (Environmental Ethics, p. 462).

Engel goes on to justify his conclusions about donating to famine relief by appealing to what he takes to be almost universally shared commonsense beliefs about morality.

My approach will be different. My idea is that if you compare all the viable ethical theories that you know of, and find that all, or at any rate a great majority of them agree about whether an action you're considering is right, wrong, or permissible, then you know that it is at least highly probable that that action really is right, wrong, or permissible. For if all ethical theories agree about the moral status of an action, it can only fail to have that status if they are all false. And if a great majority of ethical theories agree about the moral status of an action, it can only fail to have that status if all of the theories that agree about its status are false, which becomes more and more improbable as the number of the theories that agree increases. Note that I’m not arguing that if a great majority of ethical theories agree about the moral status of an action then it automatically follows that it very probably has that status. The argument is rather that if some ethical theory or other is true, then majority agreement implies that the action very probably has the moral status that the majority of theories agree that it has. The upshot is that my approach should be a good guide as to what you should do as long as some ethical theory or other is true.  So by using my approach you can be guided by ethical theories without having to attempt the difficult task of determining which of them is right.

To clarify, my idea is not to put different ethical theories together to get a composite theory, but to help someone figure out what they should do in a fairly specific situation. By comparing different ethical theories you might find that they agree about what you should do in a situation, but they might not agree about why you should do it. If you try to “combine” the guidance you get across diverse situations the result would probably not be cohesive enough to yield an ethical theory. And if you find that a sufficient number of ethical theories don't agree even about what you should do in a given situation, I think the most you can conclude is that you don't know what you should do, and in such a case you would not have any determinate guidance. So I think that in some cases my approach will give you guidance and in other cases it won't.

Nevertheless, on my view, you would have a reason to explore as many different candidate ethical theories as you can, even though there is no need to determine which of them is right. This is because the more of them you consider, the more certain you can be that you have a representative sample of all the possible viable ethical theories, and the more representative the sample is, the more certain you can be that an action really has the moral status you think it does given that the majority of ethical theories agree that it has it.

It is important to note that ethical theories properly so called need not be the only kind of ethical view that one might have to take into account on my approach. Timothy Chappell has introduced the different yet related notion of an ethical outlook, which he characterizes as follows:

Anybody who is going to live a genuinely worthwhile and a fully human life will have to live out a set of views and commitments about the central questions concerning value: what is worth living for and what is worth dying for, what is really admirable and what is really contemptible, what we must do at all costs and what we must not do no matter what; and so on. This set of views and commitments need not be very explicit; but it must run deep—must be sincerely and indeed passionately held. And it need not be very systematic; but it must be as considered, rationally defensible, and coherent as possible. Any such set of views about value is what I will call an ethical outlook.[1]

The notion of an ethical outlook is, in principle, broader than the notion of an ethical theory, for it can include ethical theories as well as ethical views that are less systematic. In Chappell’s opinion, mainstream ethical theories[2] are not credible ethical outlooks, because he thinks they are ill-suited for any of the four roles that he regards as important ones important for ethical outlooks to play.[3] I am not convinced by his arguments, but I don’t have the space to address them here, so I will proceed on the assumption that mainstream ethical theories are credible ethical outlooks and leave the analysis of Chappell’s arguments for another occasion

Related to this is the important question of whether ethical outlooks that are not ethical theories are eligible to be included among the views that my approach takes into account.  For now I will simply say that, though I cannot see a priori any reason why not, I think their eligibility must be determined on a case by case basis, and in order to make such determinations I would need a more fully developed account than I now possess of the criteria of viability that I will present next. The development of such an account is something that I must also leave for another occasion.

Given that there may be ethical theories that have not yet been thought of by anyone, it is not certain how many of them there are. But it is certain that not all of them are created equal. Thus, in order to carry out a project like mine, it will be necessary to develop criteria of viability that one can use to eliminate theories that are inadequate and thus narrow down the range of theories one will have to consider.  In this section I will list some of these criteria.

One criterion is cohesiveness. Ethical theories cannot contain contradictions, but more than that, their components must be mutually supporting and fit together well. That is, an ethical theory can’t just be some arbitrary set of statements about what one should do that happens to be logically consistent. Some parts of the theory must provide a rationale as to why such-and-such is right, wrong, or permissible. Furthermore, these parts and their rationales must be subsumed under some common principles, or be such that relevantly similar actions receive relevantly similar evaluations, and for relevantly similar reasons.

Another criterion is comprehensiveness: An ethical theory cannot merely tell one what one should do in just a few cases. It should give one guidance that applies to a large number of cases of various kinds.

 

An ethical theory also has to have verifiable implications for one’s behavior. That is, one’s obligations must be such that it is in principle possible for one to discover what they are if one makes the effort to do so. If an ethical theory says, for instance, that in cases having feature F one should do x and in cases having feature G one should not do x, there must be a way for one to  recognize that one is in a case which has feature F or a case which has feature G. If this were not so, one could only do x or fail to do x in the appropriate kind of case through a lucky guess. Even if one assumes that one really would have obligations in such a skeptical scenario, it would be pointless for one to try to find out what they were.

Yet another criterion derives from the old but venerable principle that “‘ought’ implies ‘can’”. Ethical theories must be psychologically plausible: One cannot be obligated to do something if it is psychologically impossible for one to do it. And if doing something is possible but difficult, an ethical theory which prescribes doing it is less viable the more difficult it is to do it.

As with any kind of theory, ethical theories should not contain any statements that have been shown empirically to be false. They should, in other words, be empirically adequate. This seems obvious enough, but if one takes one’s theorizing seriously it requires that one should make the effort to see if the ethical theories that one is considering are consistent with any relevant scientific theories or bodies of knowledge.

The guidance that an ethical theory provides must also be appropriately specific, that is, it should not be so vague that it doesn’t really recommend anything in particular.

Finally, however specific an ethical theory’s guidance may be, when considering it one needs to ask oneself, “Do those who know this theory best agree about what it recommends and what it doesn’t?” The more difficult it is for the relevant experts to agree on how to interpret the theory, the more it lacks interpretational stability and the less viable it is.

I will make no claim that the above list of criteria is complete, but one has to start somewhere. However, I will claim that these criteria are both necessary and useful for my project.

To read the full article, please go to Scholardarity.com, How to Know What Should Be So: Ethical Guidance and Ethical Theories.

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[1] “Ethics Beyond Moral Theory,” p. 7.

[2] Chappell actually uses the expression “moral theory,” which I take to be equivalent to the expression “ethical theory” as I use it.

[3] Here is Chappell’s characterization of these roles:

We want our ethical outlook to be something which, in real time, can be the source of our reasons to act (motivation), and which can structure our thinking and deciding about how to act as it actually happens (deliberation). We also want our ethical outlook to be something which, offline, can articulate and deepen our understanding of what counts as good or bad and right or wrong action, and why (explanation); and we want it to be something which can explain what will or would be good or bad and right or wrong action, in future or hypothetical situations that we ourselves have not actually met, but which we or others might conceivably meet (prediction) (“Ethics Beyond Moral Theory,” pp. 12-3).

What Counts as a Genuine Message from God?

Suppose Fred is a Christian who is facing a moral dilemma, and prays to God for advice. Now, we commonly suppose that some apparent messages from God are real, and others not. So how is someone like Fred to know which messages are really from God and which are not?

However, I think this way of thinking may presuppose a concept of God that is too anthropomorphic. Granted, if God exists He wouldn't have a bodily mouth or anything like that, and I think most reflective theists realize that. But once we set aside such a picture, if we grant that God created (and sustains) all things, what would the distinction between something's being a genuine message from God and its being a spurious one consist in?

Here it is tempting to think that, though God doesn’t speak with a bodily mouth, He still engages in some spiritual (immaterial) activity that we would perceive as a voice giving advice, or at least as a feeling that we should do such-and-such. This could be understood in different ways, of course, but if we interpret it as meaning that in order to give advice God has to do something outside of the normal course of nature, I think it is false. If all good things come from God, and the advice that Fred (thinks he) got through prayer was good moral advice, it seems it follows that the advice must have come from God in some sense. What Fred "heard" may be the result of natural processes rather that a miraculous, special revelation to him, but if one believes in Divine Providence, that need not make it any less of a message from God. For Fred's receiving that advice at that time, though by means of certain natural processes, could still on this view have been part of God's eternal plan. Arguably, all Fred really needs to know in order to tell that the message is genuine is that God exists, that God is benevolent, and that the moral advice he got was sound.

On John Searle's Chinese Room Argument

Check out my YouTube video critiquing John Searle's Chinese Room Argument, as read by Philosobot: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhKlqfkIoB0

Live long and philosophize!

Julia Loo on Virtue, Knowledge, and the Craft, Art, and Science of Healing

Julia Loo examines the “'quality of care' crisis in modern Western medicine," relating it to virtue ethics and virtue epistemology, in a new Scholardarity article: Virtue, Knowledge, and the Craft, Art, and Science of Healing: Can Virtue Epistemology Create Better Physicians? 

Also available as a (PDF)

Quantification without Quantifiers (or Epsilons): A New Scholardarity Article

I believe I've  found a way to say everything that one would normally say in predicate logic using quantifiers, but without actually using any, and also without using Hilbert’s epsilon operator. (See "Hilbert's Epsilon Calculus", here.) To begin with, instead of saying that something holds for all x by binding x with a universal quantifier, one can say it by capitalizing all of x’s occurrences in a sentence that would, in “standard notation”, be in the scope of the quantifier. And instead of saying that something holds for some y by binding y with an existential quantifier, one can say it by leaving all of y’s occurrences un-capitalized. Thus, in “variable notation”—so called because it expresses quantification by modifying variables—instead of ∀x (Fx) one would write FX, and instead of ∃y (Gy) one would write Gy.

Immediately a problem presents itself. In standard notation the order of the quantifiers in a sentence can make a big difference to its meaning. How can one make up for this loss if we discard quantifiers? My solution is to use scope brackets, ‘[’ and ‘]’. For every distinct variable in a sentence there is a pair of scope brackets that determine the scope of the claim involving that variable. Where, in standard notation, a quantifier would be within the scope of another quantifier, in variable notation the scope brackets of the former quantified claim are inside the scope brackets of the latter quantified claim. The brackets should enclose no more than they need to.

Some examples will make this clear. Consider (1) and (2), and their counterparts (1’) and (2’):

1. ∀x ∃y (Rxy)                        1’. [RX[y]]

2. ∃y ∀x (Rxy)                        2’. [R[X]y]

In (1’) the scope brackets for y enclose only y, and the scope brackets for X enclose the entire sentence, indicating that the existential claim is governed by the universal claim. In (2’) the reverse is true, indicating that the universal claim is governed by the existential claim.

If you want to see this idea worked out in more detail, please see the full article at Scholardarity, Quantification without Quantifiers (or Epsilons): A New Notation for Quantification in Predicate Logic.

A new article on Singer’s “Famine, Affluence and Morality" at Scholardarity.com

I've published a new article at Scholardarity.com, Singer’s “Famine, Affluence and Morality”: Exposition and Appraisal.

Quote of the Day: The Real Source of Moral Motivation

Nobody sane generally or standardly acts so as to realise utility, or “on the motive of Duty” (Kant’s own phrase), or “for the sake of virtue itself” (Aristotle’s own phrase). Even people who only act occasionally in these ways can be in danger of looking priggish, and out of touch with what really matters in life, to the rest of us.

            As I hinted in the last section, what really motivates most of us, most of the time, at least if we are moderately good people or better and are not being distracted by false motives like concern about “what others will think”, is love: love for spouses, love for children and parents, love for friends, love for God, love for ideals, love for valued places or artworks or possessions, love for pet projects, love for pets. The centrality of love is a striking feature of any typical credible ethical outlook. The marginality of love in typical moral theories, and more broadly in contemporary philosophical research, is equally striking. Love is at the heart of our ethical outlooks; it is love, and not concern with what is right and wrong, that mostly drives us into action. In that sense love puts us “beyond good and evil”, and beyond morality; while morality is a constraint on what motivates us (and a constraint: there are others), love is the very engine of motivation. 

[footnote omitted]--Timothy Chappell “Ethics beyond moral theory” Philosophical Investigations 32 (3):206-243.

Natural Patterns: The Nonad — A New Book For Sale through Scholardarity.com

In a new book for sale through Scholardarity.com, John Krey, a chemistry instructor with many years of experience, presents a discovery of patterns in nature as well as patterns in the organization of knowledge, which are helpful for the educational purposes. You can check out his book here: Natural Patterns: The Nonad.

A Primer on Logic: Interlude -- A New Scholardarity.com Article

I've published a new article on Scholardarity, A Primer on Logic: Interlude, the latest installment of my introduction to formal logic. In it I explain some of the inadequacies of Aristotelian logic.

Also, in case you missed Parts 1, 2 and 3, which respectively cover logical preliminaries, propositional logic, and Aristotelian logic, you can check them out here:

Part 1


Part 2
 

Part 3

On Searle's Chinese Room Argument -- A New Scholardarity.com Article

I've posted a new article in Scholardarity.com, On Searle's Chinese Room Argument: A Defense of the Systems Reply.

Scholardarity.com is now publishing papers for free!

Scholardarity.com, a new e-publishing website for scholars, is now publishing papers for free!


Peter Krey and I, as co-founders of Scholardarity.com, are happy to announce that we are now accepting submissions. Subscribe now and publish your work free of charge. You can choose whether to sell your work or make it available for free. This promotional offer lasts only until June 2nd. We invite you to subscribe to Scholardarity, and put your writing to work for you!

You can subscribe here.

To submit contributions, please see our submissions page.

If you want to take advantage of this excellent, limited time opportunity to publish your work for free, please don’t hesitate to contact us: jlzarri@scholardarity.com

A Critique of Alison M. Jaggar on Abortion -- A new Scholardarity Article

I've just posted a new article at Scholardarity.com, A Critique of Alison M. Jaggar on Abortion.