The Philosophers' Cocoon

Two posts and an open letter on AI development

I have a couple of new Substack posts up on the moral hazards of AI development:

• Big Tech's Unethical AI Experiment on Humanity
• No one knows how to reliably test for AI safety

There's also a new open letter that anyone can sign advocating for a pause on giant AI experiments. For an earlier post on why I think the current path of AI development is unacceptably dangerous, see here.

Are AI developers playing with fire?

You can read about why I think so here. (Also, check out this Twitter thread by philosopher Toby Ord). 

'Ineffective altruism' blog (by David Thorstad)

David Thorstad (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) draws my attention to his new blog, "Ineffective altruism", which advances doubts about effective altruism and longtermism.

As someone who shares many of these concerns (and more), I welcome the turning of a more critical eye toward these movements. To be clear, I very much support altruism and long-term moral thinking. I just happen to think that the prudent way to do the most good in the long-term is to treat people fairly here and now, and that this involves not concentrating wealth in the hands of supposed altruists to distribute (since this is all too likely to happen).

Instead, doing the most good that we can, or so I think, involves reforming the domestic, international, and the global socio-economic-political domains in fair ways so that all people enjoy similar rights, opportunities, and a fair division of wealth, so that we can work together (fairly!) to combat existential risks and not dominate, exploit, or (yes, rip off) each other.

Teaching Mill's Colonialism (and Other Great Mistakes of Great Philosophers)

By Sam Duncan

I made a mistake in my ethics class this semester: I canceled John Stuart Mill. To be quite honest it wasn’t entirely Mill’s history as an administrator for the East India Company or the fact that he was the author of an unsuccessful defense of the company and its (mis)deeds in the wake of the Indian rebellion that made me drop him from the syllabus. Mill’s Utilitarianism was on the bubble. Mill has an ability to turn a phrase yes, but students are often confused by the meandering presentation of Utilitarianism where he spends much more time arguing with an imagined opponent than presenting the theory itself, and it is hard to overstate how much the higher/lower pleasures stuff muddies the water while also solving no problems whatsoever. But Mill's history as a colonialist and defender of colonialism pushed Utilitarianism over the line for me. The fact that J.S. Mill spent most of his working life involved in a project of injustice and oppression and devoted some of his considerable intellectual and literary gifts to defending that project seemed to settle what would otherwise be a close call. In retrospect, I realize that Mill’s colonialism is actually a powerful reason to keep him on the syllabus. He made huge mistakes, and if someone wants to tear down statues of him I won’t argue against that. But like many mistakes made by great philosophers, and Mill is certainly that, there is much to learn from his mistakes. By dropping him from our syllabi we would deprive students of the opportunity to do just this.

A case for medium-termism

There has been a lot of discussion of ‘longtermism’ recently—in TIME, The New York Times, and social media. Some people think longtermism is great. Others think it’s dangerous. I have concerns about how it is likely to be misused too. But mostly, I just think it’s philosophically mistaken.

The idea that we should care more about the long term sounds great, inspiring even—and I think it’s true, at least with a bit of moderation. But, on that note, I think something a lot less sexy sounding—medium-termism—is more defensible. More defensible, ironically enough, from a long-term perspective!

Longtermism gives moral priority to the long-term future. One major idea is that the number that people that might exist in the future could be vastly greater than the number of people living now. We might colonize other planets, or even create vast numbers of digital people in simulations who could live happy lives—happier lives, perhaps, than us.

So, the thought is, the future matters more from moral point-of-view than the present or near-future (i.e. the medium-term). Morally speaking, every person matters equally. But there are vastly more possible future people than people who live today or have lived in the past. So, the future should matter to us more than the present, the short-term, or even the medium term.

Never mind that digital people probably aren’t possible (consciousness appears to be fundamentally analog, not digital). But setting this aside, to see what I think is wrong with longtermism, imagine applying an analogous line of reasoning to your own life as an individual.

The wagon has three wheels: Reimagining philosophy of action from a working class perspective

This is a guest post by Deborah Nelson

Bio: Deborah Nelson received a Master’s Degree in Philosophy from Brandeis University in 2014 and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from UCR in September 2022.  Her dissertation examined the philosophy of action literature for class-centrism and proposed advancing this literature by balancing the current focus on stability with flexibility in order to address increasing complexity in agents’ lives. She now works as an Instructional Designer at XCITE, UCR’s center for teaching and learning.

--

There’s a story my family likes to relay about my father as a child that has had a formative impact on how I approach claims about knowledge, rationality, and the evaluation thereof.  The one-sentence summary of the story is that, when he was five years old, my dad took an IQ test and only got one question wrong.  The more interesting facet of this story, though, is revealed by examining that one question.

The test question displayed a picture of a wagon with only three wheels and asked what was wrong with the wagon.  It just so happened that there was a three-wheeled wagon in regular use in my father’s household, which still functioned perfectly well, so he could not identify the problem with the wagon.  Needless to say, when I learned this story at a young age, it gave me early ideas about the ways that experience can affect how people perceive and understand the world, and the discussions in recent years of problems with IQ testing, as well as other standardized tests, have only added fuel to this fire.  These intellectual proclivities have clearly inspired my research interests and I just recently defended a dissertation at UCR which reflects them.

In my early days in philosophy, I was excited to learn that there is a whole subdiscipline dedicated to how people reason about which actions to take, but became less enthused as I learned that the concerns within it did not resemble my experiences.  Within the philosophy of action, the concerns seem to reflect that of people who enjoy economic advantage.  The agents described (directly or indirectly) as ideals in this literature are self-complete entities, who consistently resist temptation, retain stable intentions and characters, and have life-defining projects and plans, etc.  This focus seems, to my working-class-inspired mind, to ignore some central concerns and ideals for which my background prepared me.  

For the present, however, I don’t plan to criticize the current state of the literature.  Not only does it take a significant amount of space to argue for the structural biases that would inform this kind of gap between theory and experience, I just defended a whole dissertation on this topic.  Instead, I want to explore what taking up the perspectives of economically disadvantaged agents could add to the dialectic.  To that end, I want to propose three concerns which would likely garner more attention were the philosophy of action literature written by people whose backgrounds more resemble my own.  In doing so, I am not implying that the current literature could not take up these norms, but I am suggesting that were they to be taken up in a more substantial way, it would help to make that literature more salient to economically disadvantaged agents.

1. Flexibility

One of the more prominent ideals in the existing literature is that of stability; reasoners should keep their intentions and plans stable, display stable traits and characters, and must resist giving into temptation. 

'Black Nihilism and Antiblack Racism' (APA blog)

The APA Blog has a nice discussion of my colleague Devon Johnson's recent book, Black Nihilism and Antiblack Racism. Having read the book, I can confirm that it's a fascinating and worthwhile read. Chapter 2 in particular struck me as one of the more original and thought-provoking pieces of philosophy that I've read in a long while. Do check it out!

Is teaching meaningful?

In a post over at Philosophical Disquisitions last week entitled, 'The Trouble with Teaching: Is Teaching a Meaningful Job?', John Danaher (National University of Ireland) gives a mostly negative answer to his title question, concluding not that teaching is totally meaningless, but rather "It’s just not as noble or inspiring as some people suppose." Still, Danaher is open to having his mind changed, writing "I hope that someone will convince me that I am wrong." So, let me try to give it a shot.

I agree with much of what Danaher writes. I agree that teaching is "a job and often a frustrating one." I also agree with many of Danaher's negative arguments, such as the general purposes and value of education are dubious, that teaching tends to fail to achieve its aims (viz. 'student learning outcomes'), that the feedback we receive as teachers is of dubious value, that there are institutional constraints that can seriously undermine the meaningfulness of teaching for those who engage in it, and so on. I agree with virtually all of this. And yet I still find teaching profoundly meaningful. Why?

The answer, for me, is grounded in a phrase that (surprisingly to me, at least) does not occur in his post: namely, making a difference in at least some of our students' lives. I not only think that teaching does make a meaningful difference in some of our students' lives, and in ways that probably few other occupations do. I also think that teaching can meaningfully approximate Platonic love (agápe, or empathetic universal love) and Aristotle's conception of true friendship. Allow me to explain.

Are philosophers serious? Should they be?

In our December "how can we help you?" thread, a PhD student asks:

Do philosophers typically think philosophy is real? As in: do you honestly believe the philosophical positions you hold, or believe that the field you work in is pursuing real things?

I've been in graduate school for five years, and always struggled with this question. I always assumed people knew philosophy was an intellectual flight of fancy and picked philosophical positions arbitrarily. I also have always assumed that philosophical issues are fantasy. But the people in my program seem to think that the positions they hold are actually right. Am I the outlier? Do other people have similar inclinations?

I think these are really good questions. Before I weigh in and open things up for discussion, here are three response comments that readers submitted:

PhD student: nope, you're not an outlier. Your fellow grad students need to grow up. Some people never do. - by Overseas Tenured

I would not have dedicated over a decade of my life, and many 60+ hr work weeks, to philosophy, if I thought "philosophy was an intellectual flight of fancy" or if I was "pick[ing] philosophical positions arbitrarily". There are, of course, some topics researched in philosophy that I might characterize as "intellectual flights of fancy", but I avoid those and work on what I take to be serious, important issues. I also try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and assume there's something in those others topics that is important that I'm missing. As far as I know, all of my friends take either their own work, or at least much of what they teach, reasonably seriously. Some may take it more seriously than others, and I know everyone at some point struggles with feeling like their work is actually worthless, but I don't know anyone who openly takes such an extreme and sweeping view of philosophy --- e.g., seeing their own work as a mere kind of game detached from reality or anything important, and also seeing basically all of philosophy that same way. Here are some questions addressed in philosophy: How do we have a just society? Is a specific policy X just and fair? Do animals feel pain and should we eat them? When is it appropriate to believe something based on the evidence? What makes something "fake news"? These (and variations of them) are all questions studied by philosophers. I would have thought they are all clearly important and asking about objective features of reality. - by Mike

Kieran Setiya's podcast "Five Questions" asks most (or all?) of the people he interviews whether they believe the philosophical positions they hold. So you can check out that podcast for various answers to that question. - by Daniel Weltman

My own position here is somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, I wouldn't do philosophy if I didn't think the questions we address are real, and if I didn't think there is something to the views that I defend. On the other hand, I very much appreciate skeptical concerns about traditional philosophical methods. As Jason Brennan argues in his 2010 article, 'Scepticism about philosophy', "Widespread disagreement shows that pursuing philosophy is not a reliable method of discovering true answers to philosophical questions. More likely than not, pursuing philosophy leads to false belief." I advance similar concerns here about traditional methods in moral philosophy. My own preferred answer to this kind of skeptical challenge is that philosophy should use better methods, drawing on science and the methods of the sciences, vis-a-vis natural philosophy. Which is why I think rising interest in metaphilosophy and experimental philosophy is especially valuable. Finally, as many have noted, I think it is impossible to avoid taking philosophical stances on things--for example, on what morality or justice are. We have to simply do our best, though again I think we should use better methods rather than worse ones. 

But these are just my thoughts. What are yours? Do you side with PhD Student and Overseas Tenured in thinking of philosophy as little more than flight of fancy, or do you think philosophy is serious business? And, do you believe the views you defend? If so, how do you grapple with skepticism about philosophy's methods?

Working on abstract topics in turbulent times

In our November "how can we help you?" thread, two readers wrote in with similar queries:

If you haven't discussed this already, how to focus on abstract philosophical work that has no practical connection to the world whatsoever with so much happening politically and socially around the world? - Posted by: Tom | 11/03/2020 at 11:06 AM

I have a question similar to that of Tom. I am working in the philosophy of language, but sometimes I lose the excitement about my area since it has no direct impact on the world. I doubt that, differently from moral and political philosophy, my research will help someone to clarify better their thoughts or a way to live. I have started to feel in this way particularly since the beginning of the pandemic. Thanks! - Posted by: Alessio | 11/03/2020 at 11:56 AM

I wonder how many other readers have found themselves in a similar situation and how they responded. Here are three obvious possibilities:

1. Look for ways to relate your abstract work to real-life problems
2. Work on more practical/applied topics on the side
3. Shift your area of focus altogether

To take one example of a philosopher who has done some combination of these things, consider Jason Stanley, who began his career focusing on abstract topics in philosophy of language and epistemology but has transitioned into more political topics, such as the nature of propaganda and fascism. I also think there are philosophical choices one can make in abstract areas of inquiry that can make one's work more practically relevant. For example, one of the things that has long frustrated me about a lot of work in metaethics is that dominant strands in the field aim to detach metaethics from empirical matters (such as the science of moral cognition, motivation, and social psychology). I've argued that this is not only epistemically problematic, but that an empirically-informed approach to metaethics (and by extension normative ethics) has a lot of practical import that traditional metaethics lacks, such as a better understanding of how to motivate people to act on their moral reasons, what sound moral education should look like across childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and how governments and other organizations (including businesses) should be structured to generate better compliance with our moral obligations. To put it simply, I suspect there are often choices one can make--even in very abstract fields--that can make those fields more relevant to matters of practical everyday interest.

But these are just my thoughts. What are yours? Have any readers out there grappled with these issues?  

The ethics of Supreme Court nomination and confirmation

It is almost certainly a foregone conclusion that Amy Coney Barrett will be confirmed to sit on the US Supreme Court. However, how should we think about the ethics of her nomination and the confirmation process? Was it ethical for President Trump to nominate her to the Court? Is it ethical for the Senate to confirm her? Should Barrett take herself to be under an ethical duty to step down or issue a public statement calling for a halt to her nomination process, as called for in an open letter by many of her faculty colleagues at Notre Dame?

I published an article, 'The Rationality of Voting and Duties of Elected Officials', addressing these kinds of questions several years ago, and figured I'd briefly share some of the main line of argument here. It won't make a difference, of course, and the argument itself is almost certainly open to question, as virtually all philosophical arguments are. But, be that as it may, it's worth reflecting in times like this on what ethics requires. How, then, do I think we should think about this case?

In a 2010 article in Philosophy & Public Affairs, 'The Paradox of Voting and the Ethics of Political Representation', Alex Guerrero argues that it is rational vote in order to contribute (if only in a small way) to the manifest normative mandate (MNM).  for elected officials. In rough outline, an elected official's normative mandate is the extent to the official (and by extension their political platform and policy decisions) is supported by their constituents. In democratic theory, there are grounds for taking such levels of support (or lack thereof) to have normative ethical implications: namely, that elected officials have a standing ethical duty to represent the will of the constituents they govern. Guerrero then argues that election results represent this mandate, as vote totals indicate how many constituents support a given official (and their political platform). That is, election results are the manifest normative mandate indicating how much support an official has if elected to office. The more votes they win by, the stronger claim they have to represent the will of the govern. Conversely, if they win only by a little bit (or lose the popular vote), then they have a weaker claim to represent the will of the governed. Finally, Guerrero argues that this has important normative ethical implications. The greater an elected official's MNM, the more moral justification they have for functioning as a trustee of the people entitled to make their own decisions while in office (in pursuit of their political platform). Conversely, the smaller an official's MNM, the more they have a moral duty to function as a delegate, acting in deference to what their constituents prefer while they are in office.

Giving philosophy its due?

A few weeks ago, a number of colleagues on social media shared the following piece, "Want a good job? Major in Philosophy", by Kristina Grob (University of South Carolina - Sumter). I think it's a great, concise summary of why philosophy isn't the kind of 'useless' degree many students and parents think it is, and in my experience information like this can really help attract majors. Just the other day, however, this piece appeared over at New Statesman arguing that it's "an offense against humanism" to try to rebrand higher education in terms of job-training. 

Like many philosophers I've spoken to, I suspect that giving students and parents information about how philosophy degrees can pay off is probably the best short-term way to 'sell the discipline': an important thing to do, I think, given the increasing number of philosophy programs and departments that are being shut down or threatened with closure. That being said, I really wonder whether it is the best long-term strategy, and for broadly the reasons the New Statesman piece points out: it plays right into the narrow set of values and priorities that philosophy and the humanities can get students to question--the latter of which is sort of the point of a liberal arts education: to develop well-cultivated citizens!

However, on that note, I'm inclined to think that the best kind of case for philosophy--at least in the longer-term--may be more than what the New Statesman piece mentions. The NS piece, after all, is not about philosophy per se, but rather higher education more generally. What does philosophy have to offer specifically, in addition to employability and personal cultivation? The answer, I'd like to suggest, is (broadly speaking) that the extent to which societies flourish or fail seems to be a matter of their animating philosophies.

Take for example ancient Athens. It was for a time the preeminent power in the Mediterranean, possessing nearly unparalleled wealth and power. And yet, as we see in Plato's dialogues and in the historical record (such as Pericles' infamous funeral oration), its citizens and political leaders became progressively corrupted by broadly the values that Thrasymachus defends in Book I and Socrates details in Book VIII of The Republic--the belief that justice is power ('might makes right')--as well as by the values that Gorgias, Polus, and Callicles all affirm in Gorgias: that the ability to speak persuasively (rhetoric) is the most important thing for young people to learn. The historical record here seems pretty clear: it was, broadly speaking, these philosophies that sowed the seeds of Athens' downfall. Athenians became so preoccupied with power and rhetorical ability that it enabled Pericles (whose rhetorical skills were legendary) to convince the populace that it would be a good idea to conquer Sparta--a completely unnecessary and reckless plan that set conditions for a plague (!) to decimate Athens, lose the war, and be taken over by the bloody tyranny of the Thirty Tyrants.

Why, then, should people value philosophy? Why should we fund it? Perhaps because in addition to making people good critical thinkers who can get jobs as well as cultivated people who can think about the 'big questions', we should care about it because philosophy really is socially important. Make no mistake about it: Nazism, slavery, colonialism, etc.--these were (and are) all philosophies, ones that have done untold damage. Philosophy, then, is not a luxury. Good philosophies can  improve civilizations, and bad philosophies can destroy them, leading to untold suffering. This, I think, is the deeper story we should be telling. It may well be a hopeless endeavor, of course, for broadly the reasons Socrates detailed in the Allegory of the Cave. But, for all that, I'm inclined to think this is the story we should tell: because it's a true one. Jobs are important. Personal cultivation is important too. But to focus on these things alone is, I believe, to vastly undersell the importance of what we philosophers do. History and the present alike make it all too clear: philosophy matters for the good of society and for the good of us all--and societies that fail to pay appropriate heed to this can and do pay a big price.  

Or so say I. What say you?

Good things you've read recently?

Like many of the Cocoon's readers, or so I suspect, the COVID pandemic has taken a bit of a toll on me. Social distancing, teaching online, and worrying about loved ones have all left me exhausted, and so I've tried to fill my time with healthy distractions, such as recording music, reading for pleasure, and catching up on some television series and films I never got around to seeing. Anyway, one of my distractions has been to read a bit more widely in philosophy than I normally do, and it occurred to me that it might be fun to run a thread on the most interesting philosophy you've read recently, and why. I'll try to kick things off, and hope some of you choose to chime in with your own examples down in the comments section.

Although I don't normally read a whole lot in the philosophy of religion, one article that caught my eye recently is Dylan Balfour's, "Second‑personal theodicy: coming to know why God permits suffering by coming to know God himself", which is forthcoming in the International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion. Although I think it's only fitting to share Balfour's paper here, given that he's a first-year (!) PhD student at Edinburgh and this is a blog focusing on early-career philosophers, I really wanted to share his paper because I think it's great, displays a wonderful amount of epistemic integrity, addresses a problem that has always been very dear to my heart, and provides a solution to that problem that coheres pretty well with my own rather odd path through life. Let me first say a few things about Balfour's paper before I say why I personally find the answer he gives to the problem of evil oddly compelling.

The methods of normative externalists

I came across this NDPR review of Brian Weatherson's new book, Normative Externalism, and wanted to share a few thoughts on the methods of normative reasons externalists. The thoughts that follow are prompted in part by the review, but also by a reaction to it that I came across on social media and previous work defending normative reasons externalism by Derek Parfit, TM Scanlon, and others.

For those of you not familiar with this literature, normative reasons externalism is, very roughly, the idea that the reasons we ought to do particular things are not 'mind-dependent.' That is, the reasons we should act (or believe, etc.) do not depend on what any particular person values or prefers--but rather, on features of the world outside of our minds. To take one example I've heard commonly given, a normative reasons externalist may say that when I step on your foot, the pain I cause you is a reason why I shouldn't keep stepping on it...regardless of whether I actually care.

I think normative reasons is a completely bizarre (and false) view--and, when I gave a paper at a recent interdisciplinary conference, every scientist in attendance seemed to be totally taken aback by it (they often said as much during their talks). From their perspective, it seemed just obvious that the reasons why someone should do something or other have to depend on whether the person has any psychological interest or values favoring the thing in question. I think those scientists are right, and want to briefly say why by discussing concerns I have about the methods of normative externalists.

Has philosophy made progress?

A few of my philosopher friends on social media have been sharing this interview with Tim Maudlin (NYU), where Maudlin contends that philosophy has made plenty of progress. This issue comes up time and again, and Daniel Stoljar wrote a recent book defending the existence of philosophical progress. On the other hand, there are a number of works arguing that philosophy has made no real progress and has no good claim to truth-aptness. See for example:

• Jason Brennan (2010). Scepticism about philosophy. Ratio.
• Eric Dietrich (2011). There is no progress in philosophy. Essays in Philosophy.
• Peter Slezak (2018). Is there progress in philosophy? The case for taking history seriously. Philosophy.

The last of these works, for what it's worth, directly addresses Stoljar's work. I'm curious what readers think, especially given broad and persistent divisions over what the most defensible answers are to most (if not all) basic philosophical questions.

My own view is that while I think some real progress has been made, it's probably a lot less than defenders of philosophical progress seem to think. Moreover, how one views the matter depends, presumably, on one's own substantive views. For example, Maudlin sides with the the 59% of philosophers or so today who report leaning toward or accept compatibilism about free will--even going so far as to say, "I think Locke and Hume nailed free will, and since then there has been no interesting debate about it." Notice, first, that this only indicates that majority of philosophers lean toward compatibilism (hardly a ringing endorsement), leaving a full 41% of philosophers who think it's not the right answer. Second, surveys of ordinary laypeople show a similar split. Consequently, there are at least two possibilities here: (1) philosophy has made real progress on free will, or (2) about 60% of people are psychologically inclined to compatibilism, and that's just a psychosocial fact about human beings, not a form of real philosophical progress. How are we to discriminate between these two hypotheses, especially when some of us suspect that compatibilism may be the worst of all answers to the free will problem?

Similarly, consider moral philosophy. Does it make progress? Well, here are some relevant philpapers results:

Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?

Accept or lean toward: moral realism	525 / 931 (56.4%)
Accept or lean toward: moral anti-realism	258 / 931 (27.7%)
Other	148 / 931 (15.9%)

Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?

Other	301 / 931 (32.3%)
Accept or lean toward: deontology	241 / 931 (25.9%)
Accept or lean toward: consequentialism	220 / 931 (23.6%)
Accept or lean toward: virtue ethics	169 / 931 (18.2%)

Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?

Accept or lean toward: naturalism	464 / 931 (49.8%)
Accept or lean toward: non-naturalism	241 / 931 (25.9%)
Other	226 / 931 (24.3%)

By my lights, its hard to even know what to make of these results. First, in the best cases (questions 1 and 3) the leading positions in these polls only indicate that approximately 50% of philosophers lean toward the view. Second, the views all seem in tension with each other. Moral realism is generally understood to to be the position that there are objective moral facts that don't depend upon us for their truth--thus constituting a form of non-naturalism. Yet, the answer to (3) indicates that nearly 50% of philosophers lean toward naturalism, and the answer to (2) shows that philosophers are widely split on what the moral facts are (deontology, virtue ethics, and consequentialism being vastly different normative positions). 

Let me be clear, I don't mean to say that there's no moral progress. I wouldn't do philosophy myself, writing books and articles defending new theories, if I didn't think there to be some truth the arguments. What I am inclined to think, however, is that confident pronouncements about philosophical progress go too far. We should admit, as Russell does in the passage below, that philosophy has serious epistemic limitations:

Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority…All definite knowledge—so I should contend—belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man’s Land, exposed to attack on all sides; this No Man’s Land is philosophy. (Russell 1945: xiii)

We should then aim to improve upon those limitations by doing better metaphilosophy and putting that metaphilosophy into practice, including testing empirically whether the kinds of premises philosophers appeal to really are ones that people in general take to be true.

Or so I'm inclined to think. What do you all think?

Constructive vs. destructive philosophy

In my recent post discussing our dialectical obligations in research and publishing, Amanda writes:

The overall point that I can't stand about philosophy these days is this: it is not a philosophy paper unless you are disagreeing with another philosopher and showing them how they are wrong. The idea that a philosophy paper could be about improving the views of someone else is just a laughable concept (unless you are doing that through the conduct of showing that another critic was wrong.)

Mike then responded:

While some people (editors, referees, philosophers sitting in a Q&A) may think that "it is not a philosophy paper unless you are disagreeing with another philosopher and showing them how they are wrong", I think there's enough room within the philosophy publishing ecosystem for creative, constructive papers that are "about improving the views of someone else".

I'm curious what other people think about this. Has academic philosophy become too 'destructive' instead of constructive?

What are our dialectical obligations?

I took part yesterday in a very interesting methodological discussion with other philosophers on social media that got me thinking about some questions I have long wondered about as a reader and journal reviewer: namely, questions about what our dialectical obligations are when writing and publishing our work. Let me explain.

Sometimes when I read a paper in a journal or serve as a reviewer, I find that a paper seems to me in certain respects dialectically unfair. Here are a few examples of what I have in mind:

1. The paper presents itself as refuting a particular view, but only by appealing to a premise that proponents of the view supposedly being refuted will clearly reject given their background commitments.
2. The paper predicates its argument on a view that some people have defended previously, but which has been subject to numerous refutations (claiming to show in pretty clear terms that the view in question is not supported by any good arguments).

"Now", you might say, "I don't see anything dialectically unfair about that. We're entitled to base our work on premises and positions we find compelling, and as far as we can convince reviewers and editors of this, all is well and good!" And indeed, as I have thus far described the above cases, I would agree. The questions I have about dialectical fairness arise rather with how articles that adopt the above approaches sometimes appear to present themselves. For example, it would be one thing if in case (1) the paper recognized explicitly that proponents of the position being criticized would reject one of the author's central premises; and similarly if, in case (2), the paper recognized that the view they are taking as their starting point has been argued by others to be based on serious confusions. But, my sense is that sometimes this doesn't happen. Instead, sometimes case-(1) papers seem to present themselves as though they are based on premises that anyone (including proponents of the view being argued against) accept or should accept as true, even when (by hypothesis) it seems clear that that is precisely what proponents of the view being criticized would contest. Similarly, sometimes case-(2) papers don't even seem to recognize that the position they are adopting as their starting point has been the subject of multiple claimed refutations.

Now, you still may be wondering what the issue is. In case (1), if the paper in question is published, isn't it just open to proponents of the view being criticized to argue in follow-up papers that the initial paper was based on a premise they reject? Similarly, in case (2), isn't it possible for people to respond in the literature, pointing out the paper in question is based on a presupposition that others in the literature have claimed to definitively refute? My answer is that of course these things are possible--but I still think there is a problem, and here it is: In almost every philosophical field at any given point in time, there are dominant positions that seem to 'run the dialectic' to the exclusion of minority voices (see e.g. here, here, and here). Those in the minority position who think the dominant dialectic is badly mistaken in some way are already at a dialectical disadvantage. They may have already published claimed refutations of the dominant position, only to see the refutations never engaged with or mentioned in papers coming out in the dominant position. Then, when yet another paper is published defending the dominant dialectic but (in type-1 cases) ignores that those in the minority position reject a premise they are appealing to, or (in type-2 cases) ignores that the dialectic being assumed has been vigorously criticized, the result is another new contribution to the literature that makes the dominant dialectic look stronger than those in the minority position think the overall literature supports (since their favored premises and refutations are in effect being 'suppressed' in the paper's mode of presentation).

For my part, I think the answer to this issue is straightforward: when writing and publishing things, we have some real dialectical obligations--specifically, to be as perspicuous as possible about what we are and are not doing. If we write something appealing to a premise that those we are criticizing would reject (as in case 1), we should flag that, making it clear that we know they would have a problem with it. Similarly, when adopting a starting point that others have argued to be confused (as in case 2), we should recognize that our starting point has been argued to be confused, even we disagree with the supposed refutations (which we can also note). These, it seems to me, are ways to be dialectically fair to our readers and interlocutors. As an important final note, I do not claim myself to be beyond all reproach here--as it's entirely possible that readers of my work might find errors of the above as well (I'm not sure!). The epistemic difficulties we face in appreciating whether the dialectic we adopt seems fair to others in the above senses is, I think, exacerbated by our present approach to peer-review. In our present peer-review regime, it's standard to get 'feedback from your friends' (who may share your general outlook on things), and then submit for anonymized review. In this process, there is precious little opportunity to address potential cases of dialectical unfairness. In the kind of more public ArXiv-approach to pre-publication peer-review that some of us advocate, this might be less of an issue--as people in a more public setting could draw attention to these kinds of dialectical issues prior to journal review.

But these are just some of my thoughts, and may be totally off-base (I'm willing to listen!). What are yours?

G.E. Moore and posterity: a different hypothesis

I assume some of you may have come across Ray Monk's recent article, "He was the most revered philosopher of his era. So why did GE Moore disappear from history?". I want to explore Monk's title question further, as I am not quite satisfied with his explanation and think there may be something more to learn.

I've long been fascinated by the sociology of philosophy. This is for many reasons. First, unlike the sciences, philosophers don't typically base their arguments or theories on any hard data. There are exceptions to this, of course, such as experimental philosophy (where philosophers run studies) and naturalistic philosophy (which aims to root philosophical theorizing in empirical science more generally). But this isn't how most philosophy is done, either in human history or in the present. The vast majority of philosophy--ranging from Plato's dialogues, to Kant, to modern analytic philosophy--has been done from the armchair. This manner of doing philosophy raises serious epistemic questions, such as whether philosophy actually gets at the truth or merely at what a certain group of interlocutors 'finds plausible' (but may have no real relation to the truth). It also raises questions about whether there is any real philosophical progress, and if so whether the 'progress' philosophy makes is actually truth-apt or instead a matter of largely sociological forces (such as being spurred along by the intuitions of people in positions of power and prestige).

These are heady questions, and I don't pretend to have good answers to all of them (though I have defended particular answers to some of them). Nevertheless, my interest in the sociology of philosophy isn't just a matter of these abstract questions. My other interest is more concrete. When I was a younger philosopher (an undergraduate, and then a graduate student), there were particular names who enjoyed immense stature in the field: people whose work was published in top journals, widely regarded as "truly important", and all the rest. I don't want to name particular names, as I don't think that would be polite. But what I've found absolutely fascinating is that many of these figures now--just a few decades later--seem to be largely forgotten. Their work is mostly no longer engaged with, and I would wager that a good number of younger philosophers might not even know their names. Now, of course, this could just be how academic disciplines and the world more generally works: very few names in most fields are ever remembered decades, centuries, or millennia down the line. But still, I think it is worth asking: what is it that distinguishes figures who are remembered over the long-term compared to those that fade from view? 

I suspect there is no simple answer to this question. But let me hazard one hypothesis that I think may be worth thinking about. To clarify in advance, the hypothesis I will advance is merely a descriptive hypothesis, not a normative one. For all I say, it may be bad that people who satisfy the hypothesis tend to be forgotten. We can have that normative debate. But, for now, I just want to focus on the descriptive issue. Anyway, on to GE Moore.

On the evolution of a research project - part 1 (epistemic and moral concerns)

Most of my recent posts on this blog have been about transitioning to online teaching, the job-market and other issues in the profession. It has been quite a while since I have talked actual philosophy. This little series will try to do some of the latter, and I hope readers will find it an interesting change of pace (I don't know about you, but being stuck at home all day due to COVID-19 is getting pretty tiresome already!). In brief, my plan in the series to discuss some of the motivating ideas behind my two books, Rightness as Fairness: A Moral and Political Theory and Neurofunctional Prudence and Morality: A Philosophical Theory. My hope here is two-fold. First, I'll be very curious to hear what readers think of the motivating ideas, particularly once I make the history of the project and its intended future trajectory clearer. Second, my hope is that the discussion will help readers of both books better understand what I am really up to and why.

Both of my books argue that normative moral philosophy should be based (at least in the first instance) on (1) instrumental ('means-end') normative rationality and (2) empirical moral psychology. Both of these claims have been met with resistance, for fairly obvious reasons. First, there are many in moral philosophy today who think (following Kant) that moral reasons are fundamentally different in kind than prudential ones (moral reasons being categorically binding, prudential reasons not - though see this). Second, there are those (including TM Scanlon) who argue that empirical psychology can have nothing useful to say about normative matters, since (supposedly) the empirical and normative are fundamentally different kinds of phenomena. Readers may be a bit surprised to learn than when I began my first book, I was actually sympathetic with both of these positions. As you can see on my university's faculty webpage (which I really need to update!), Rightness as Fairness initially had a very different title, "Reconstructing the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals." Early iterations of the book (right up to three months before the final manuscript was due) had nothing to do with instrumental rationality or empirical moral psychology, but instead defended my normative moral theory--Rightness as Fairness--on classically Kantian constituvist grounds (viz. categorical moral reasons).

Why did the aim of the project change so fundamentally? It will take a few posts to lay out the full details, including why I hope to return to the Kantian side of the project in future work. But let me conclude this first post by giving some hints. One of my main intellectual concerns dating all the way back to my undergraduate days has been to avoid what I take to have been a very (epistemically and morally) problematic trend in intellectual history: the trend of engaging in purely armchair speculation about matters of practical importance. Let me explain.

Why should you want to be in heaven?: The theology of Vaikuṇṭha

We all know so many clever jokes about how hell should be preferred "because of the good company" and about how boring should heaven be. Let me take the chance to focus on the Śrīvaiṣṇava heaven, i.e., Vaikuṇṭha, and see whether they apply also to it.

Why exactly is Vaikuṇṭha such a great place? For the mystical poets who first mention it (the Āḻvārs) the main reason seems to be that one is in the same world with one's beloved One. The 14th c. philosopher Veṅkaṭanātha adds some more theology to it, speaking of the fact that one does not only share sālokya 'being in the same world [with God]', but also paramasāmya 'supreme identity [with God]'. This last state seems to violate exactly the residual dualism necessary in order to allow for love and service to God, and therefore, Veṅkaṭanātha explains that this paramasāmya is not tādātmya (as for the philosophers of Non-Dual Vedānta), but rather sādharmya 'having the same characteristics'. Still, the person having attained sādharmya is not equal to God in every respect. For instance, they cannot create the world. So, the sādharmya regards other aspects, most notably bhogasāmya 'equality of enjoyment'. In other words, one enjoys all the blessing experiences of God in Vaikuṇṭha, although one does not have the same level of independent agency (but still a lot of freedom, according to Veṅkaṭanātha, Tattvamuktākalāpa 2.63).

The idea of equal enjoyment with God raises the problem of embodiment, since it seems difficult to imagine enjoyment without a body. Veṅkaṭanātha in the Tattvamuktākalāpa says that in fact the soul can at their own will get a body, which is not determined by karman and is therefore not a vehicle of bondage.

Within the sādharmya there is also the attainment of omniscience, which in fact was the natural condition of the soul but was temporarily blocked by karman. (So, in Vaikuṇṭha you will finally be able to understand perfectly Tamil and Sanskrit and solve any philosophical puzzle you wondered about!)

Why should it not get boring at a certain point? Veṅkaṭanātha does not directly address this question, but his Rahasyatrayasāra seems to point to the idea that one would be busy with a continuous flow of beautiful experiences, all connected with the fact that one is with nice people (the other liberated ones) and especially with the object of one's love, Viṣṇu.

Does it sound convincing? Or would one still eventually get bored? Eternity is long… Yes, but one might also speculate that during cosmic dissolutions everything is reabsorbed in Viṣṇu, so that eternity is long but always interrupted. I will get back to this in future posts.

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I was prompted to write this post by a Twitter remark of Helen De Cruz.

Cross-posted, with more Sanskrit and Tamil passages and more historical background, at the Indian Philosophy Blog.

Teaching Bullshit and Assholes - Part 1 (Guest Post by C. Thi Nguyen and Imree Parma)

Teaching “On Bullshit”

by C. Thi Nguyen

I recently taught a "Bullshit and Assholes Week" in my introductory ethics class, and just had a lifetime peak teaching experience. It was for my first attempt at teaching Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit". Raw, pure, unrefined teaching ecstasy.

I was actually prepping for the class the day before and totally freaking out that I'd picked something too hard for gen-ed, intro ethics – that it was too dry and too tediously analytic. But it turned out to be a TOTAL DELIGHT. It is, in fact, a perfect way to introduce students to conceptual analysis. Because the article is, I now realize, this perfect escalation of gradually improving attempts at getting the right analysis of "bullshit," in a wonderfully teachable sequence.

First pass: is bullshit the same as lying? The answer: no, because there's plenty of bullshit (administrative red tape) that's not lying. Second pass: is bullshit pretentious lying? No, because some bullshit is pretentious, but not lying (excessively precious artisanal-signaling food). And some bullshit involves lying, but no pretension.

The moment the article really hit, for my students, is when Frankfurt proposes the account that bullshit is bullshit because it is sloppy. And the students all saw it at the same moment: that excessively precious artisanal-signaling food may be bullshit, but it is certainly not sloppy. In fact, it is bullshit because *too much care has been put into it," perhaps in the wrong sort of way. And so "bullshit" needs to be an abstract enough concept so that it encompasses some bullshit which is bullshit because it is sloppy, and other bullshit which is bullshit because it is too carefully crafted.

When the students saw it, they were, like, jaws agape in illumination and pleasure. I think they went from laughing at the fact that the professor was talking about bullshit, to laughing at how deep the analysis could go.

Inert and alive substances: Alternative classifications in Veṅkaṭanātha

In case you want to taste some South Asian ontological ideas which will remind you of Greece, but at the same time be different, please continue reading.

In a work called Nyāyasiddhāñjana and in the Nyāyapariśuddhi, the 14th c. philosopher Veṅkaṭanātha discusses some fundamental ontological topics in order to distinguish his positions from the ones of the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika school.

The Nyāya school proposes a fundamental division of realities into dravya ‘substances’, guṇa ‘qualities’, and karman ‘actions’,¹ with the former as the substrate of the latter two. This leads to two difficulties for Veṅkaṭanātha’s agenda. On the one hand, the radical distinction between substance and attribute means that Nyāya authors imagine liberation to be the end of the connection of the ātman ‘self’ to all attributes, from sufferance to consciousness. By contrast, Veṅkaṭanātha, would never accept consciousness to be separated from the individual soul and even less from God. The other difficulty regards the theology of Veṅkaṭanātha's school, called Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, which accepted among its sacred texts also the Pañcarātra texts. Since the beginnings of Pañcarātra, one of its chief doctrines has been that of the manifestations (called vibhūti) of God, which are dependent on Him but co-eternal with Him and in this sense are unexplainable according to the division of substances into eternal and transient.

Veṅkaṭanātha opposes to the Nyāya one more than one classification, so that it is clear that Veṅkaṭanātha's main point is addressing the above-mentioned problems with the Nyāya ontology, rather than establishing in full detail a distinct ontology. For an instance of alternative classifications see, e.g., the opening verse in the Nyāyasiddhāñjana, chapter on inert substances:

``Substance is of two types, [according to this classification:] inert or alive, or [according to this other classification:] innerly [luminous] or what is its opposite. [Furthermore,] it is of six types, according to the division in [natura naturans having] three qualities, time, individual souls, God, the ground for [God's] enjoyment (i.e., His manifestations, vibhūti) and [His] cognition. Some distinguish reality as of three types, in order to distinguish the Lord, the individual soul, and the self (as the material cause of the universe) because they do not want to include cognition, time and the ground for [God's] enjoyment, since these have the nature of qualities''.

(Cross-posted, with some modifications, on my personal blog and on the Indian Philosophy blog)

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1. There are in fact further categories, namely sāmānya ‘universal’, viśeṣa ‘individual’, and samavāya ‘inherence’. See for the fact that these latter categories have been added at a later stage of the evolution of the school. The Navya Nyāya school adds also abhāva to the categories. (see Eli Franco and Karin Preisendanz, "Nyāya-Vaiśeịṣika", Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy)↩︎

Against 'commonsense'

I was reading this review of Timothy Williamson’s new (introductory-level) book recently when I came across this striking remark: “philosophy, Williamson tells us, starts from common sense, that is, 'what most members in a society know' (p. 8)”. This sentiment should be familiar to anyone who does academic philosophy. During conference talks and in books and articles, one often hears the phrase “that seems counterintuitive” as a strike against an argument or theory. Yet although this appears to be a very common view—that philosophy should begin with and ‘answer to commonsense’—it really could not be further from my own conception of what philosophy should do or the methods it should involve.

My concerns about philosophy ‘starting with commonsense’ are partly rooted in history. To put it bluntly, commonsense has a terrible track record, both in the sciences and in philosophy. Begin with science. Here, we learn that Galileo was basically run out of town from the University of Pisa because his mechanistic philosophy contradicted the Aristotelian ‘commonsense’ of the time. (Cropper, pp. 5-6) Then of course there was Darwin, whose theory of evolution by natural selection was assailed by numerous critics as an assault on the ‘commonsensical’ idea that humans are unique, divine creations. (Clark, pp. 135-41) Then there was Einstein, whose theory of relativity was mocked by a number of eminent scientists—most famously Philip Lenard—for flouting the “simple, sound common sense” that space and time must be absolute. (Hillman et al., pp. 37, 55, 57) As physicist Sir Oliver Lodge once put it, relativity is just "repugnant to commonsense." (Brian, p. 102) Suffice it to say, all of these affairs (and many others) turned out to be a pretty bad look for commonsense. Throughout the history of science, commonsense has a pretty awful track record.

What about philosophy? Here, ‘commonsense’ hardly fares better. For example, in 17^th Century England, Sir Robert Filmer enjoyed widespread fame for defending the ‘commonsensical’ idea that God endowed kings with a divine right to rule. However, this ‘commonsense’ did not stand the test of time. Instead, it was John Locke’s heretical idea that all people have natural rights—contrary to the classist and religious prejudices of the time—that served to influence future political and philosophical thought. Similarly, if we go back much further, to ancient Greece, we find that Aristotle took it to be simple commonsense that some people are fit to be slaves; Pythagoras thought it simple commonsensical that one should not eat beans, look in a mirror beside a lamp, or worship without shoes on. (Baird, p. 16) And so on. What we find here, again—throughout philosophical history, as in scientific history—is that what one generation takes to be commonsense the next takes to be foolish prejudices.

This is illustrated perhaps nowhere better than in the neo-Platonist Thomas Taylor’s satirical response to Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman entitled, “A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes”—where Taylor satirically argues, ‘if women have rights, why not animals too?”. Yes, in Taylor's satire, we get the following gem, where Taylor openly mocks the idea of moral equality:

IT APPEARS AT FIRST SIGHT SOMEWHAT SINGULAR, that a moral truth of the highest importance, and most illustrious evidence, should have been utterly unknown to the ancients, and not yet fully perceived, and universally acknowledged, even in such an enlightened age as the present. The truth I allude to is, the equality of all things, with respect to their intrinsic and real dignity and worth.... (p. 5)

And thus much may suffice, for an historical proof, that brutes are equal to men. It only now remains (and this must be the province of some able hand) to demonstrate the same great truth in a similar manner, of vegetable, minerals, and even the most apparently contemptible clod of earth; that thus this sublime theory being copiously and accurately discussed, and its truth established by an indisputable series of facts, government may be entirely subverted, subordination abolished, and all things everywhere, and in every respect, be common to all. (p. 28)

Of course, Taylor and his followers thought that extending rights to animals was so obviously antithetical to commonsense that it sufficed to demonstrate the absurdity of extending equal rights to women--not to mention the basic principle most of us now take to be obvious: that everyone is entitled to equal moral concern.

More broadly, if we look at philosophical history, it’s simply not ‘commonsense’ theories that have survived the test of time. In their time, Thomas Reid and William Whewell—commonsense moral intuitionists—were considered leading moral philosophers. However, moral philosophers today hardly study or engage with them. Why? Because, as John Stuart Mill put it, in his time 'commonsense' was used to defend the divine right of monarchs, the superior status of aristocracy, and the power of the church. (Reeves, p. 164) Mill found this repugnant, arguing that, “the regeneration required, of man and society…can never be effected under the influence of a philosophy which makes opinions their own proof, and feelings their own justification.” (Ibid.) For Mill, ‘commonsense’ is little more than “an apparatus for converting…prevailing opinions, on matters of morality, into reasons for themselves” (p. 241).

I am with Mill, Hume, Patricia Churchland, Dan Dennett, and other naturalistically-inclined philosophers. I don’t think philosophy should be in the business of ‘beginning with’ or ‘answering to’ commonsense at all. Commonsense is often (usually, I’d say) mistaken. Our task should be to place philosophy on better evidential foundations than that--specifically, on the findings of natural science, or at least on the kinds of principles of theory-selection that govern scientific practice. I know that not everyone shares my enthusiasm for ‘natural philosophy.’ Still, for all that, I am increasingly inclined to think it’s the best way to ensure that philosophical arguments and speculation are rooted in facts rather than in ill-founded, regressive prejudices of 'commonsense'—the former of which the world, it seems, now needs as much as (if not more than) ever.

In any case, whenever I hear philosophers say things like, "That's counterintuitive", "That's a serious bullet to bite", or "commonsense dictates", my inclination is not to find a way to make philosophy consistent with commonsense, but instead to figure out whether--given the actual facts that can be posited consistent with sound principles of theory-selection--commonsense has any truth to it at all!

Feminist Philosophers is closing down - reflections on blogging as service to the profession

Feminist Philosophers is closing down. I'm sad to see yet another blog go. It played such an important role for me when I was an early career scholar, a postdoc with little job security navigating an uncertain environment. For me as for many other people, Feminist Philosophers was an authoritative and distinct voice in the profession, providing a valuable service.

As I wrote in a blogpost for the Daily Nous on philosophy blogs, I see the main value of philosophy blogs as service to the profession, and perhaps also as service on a broader scale, to people who are interested in philosophy and want to learn about it in a low-threshold, friendly and open environment, away from paywalls, specialist terminology, and pleasing referees.  

Have philosophy blogs run their course? I want to briefly respond to a few points by Jennifer Saul in her farewell post on FP, not in a way to contest or criticize their decision, as I think the blog's existence was already supererogatory and I'm very grateful for the service the bloggers did over the many years of its existence. I want to just briefly look at these points to see to what extent they might apply to blogging in general, particularly blogging conceived of as service to the profession.

Originality and the pursuit of truth

In an interesting interview, Les Green (Balliol College) says:

I’m hostile to the pursuit of originality in legal philosophy—and also in most other areas of philosophy. By this I mean that one should not set out to say something new; one should set out to say something true. I’ve seen too many graduate students hobbled by the anxiety that their ideas are not original, even though they are very illuminating, and I’ve read far too many books where the only conceivable explanation for their curious doctrines is that they were written in order to be original.

Of course, everyone’s work should be original in the sense that it should be authentically one’s own, not cribbed from the internet or stolen from your graduate students. But ‘originality’ in the sense of being unique, unprecedented etc. is something that should emerge, if at all, only as a by-product of the search for truth. 

I think I agree with much of this in principle--particularly that philosophical originality should ideally emerge in pursuit of truth. I also think I've had the experience that Green alludes to here: of reading philosophical works that seem to me to seek originality for its own sake, arguably leading away from truth rather than toward it. Nevertheless, I have a very different attitude towards originality: I adore it, in part because of how skeptical generally am about the received 'truths' of any given time in philosophy, and in part because of how originality can unexpectedly lead to greater philosophical understanding later if, if not demonstrably truth (which, I hope we all know, is tantalizing elusive in most areas of philosophy).

Anti-depressants do work: reply to Stegenga

In a piece at Aeon linked to at Daily Nous, philosopher of science Jacob Stegenga (University of Cambridge) contends that "we simply have no good evidence that antidepressants help sufferers to improve." I don't think the evidence available supports Stegenga's argument, and I made a comment to that effect in the comments section over at Aeon (which Stegenga replied to). Because I think this is a very important issue--one that could potentially affect people's choices and public attitudes regarding anti-depressants--I want to address Stegenga's argument here at the Cocoon.

I want to begin by noting two things. First, this issue is very personal to me. Mental illness not only runs in my family, affecting multiple people I am close to - it has also affected friends of mine. Second, I have experience working in the mental health field. As an undergraduate, I interned for a year in an out-patient day program utilized by dozens of individuals with serious mental illnesses: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, borderline personality disorder, and so on. Then, after graduation, I was Assistant Director of a group home that housed around a dozen residents with serious mental disorders. Among many other things, I was responsible on a day to day basis for dispensing medications, including importantly changes to patients' medications.  

Bearing this in mind, let us turn to Stegenga's basic argument that "we simply have no good evidence that antidepressants help sufferers to improve." He contends, first, that "the best evidence about the effectiveness of antidepressants comes from randomised trials and meta-analyses of these trials." I will explain below why--on methodological grounds--I believe this to be false. Stegenga's argument then is that in randomized trials and meta-analyses, observed mean effect sizes are tiny:

In meta-analyses that include as much of the evidence as possible, the severity of depression among subjects who receive antidepressants goes down by approximately two points compared with subjects who receive a placebo. Two points...We saw above how clinical guidelines have held that drugs must lower severity-depression scores by three points to be deemed effective. On this standard, antidepressants do not pass.

Hyman's analysis of atheism and some interesting Indian parallels

Gavin Hyman explains in his 2007 contribution to Martin's Cambdride Companion to Atheism as well as in his 2010 A Short History of Atheism that atheism is always the refusal of a given form of theism. In particular, in European history, atheism is the refusal of theism as conceived in modern times, with God as one "thing" among others. This claim might raise the eyebrows of readers of Julian Baggini, who in his 2003 Atheism. A very short introduction maintained that atheism is independent of theism, since it is tantamount to naturalism. The two claims are, however, less far than it might look like.

Modern atheism as naturalism refutes God because it considers him as a natural cause and shows (or believes to show) that there is no need to accept his existence, since the other natural causes are more than enough to explain the world.

By contrast, Hyman explains that the transcendental God of negative theology or of analogical theology* could not be attacked by atheism-as-naturalism. In short, Richard Swinburne's God can be attacked by atheism-as-naturalism, whereas this would have much less to say against the God of Meister Eckhart (the example is mine).

Why analytic philosophers of religion might want to be a little less orthodox

I recently accepted to be an executive editor for the Journal of Analytic Theology, and will be joining the team with Mike Rea and Oliver Crisp (senior editors) and Kevin Diller (executive editor). JAT is an open-access, interdisciplinary journal that fosters analytic approaches to theological topics, including analytic philosophy of religion. I'm excited to be a part of this, and it will be my first major editorial role (I'm on the board of other journals but it's not quite the same as co-managing a journal).

One thing I've noticed among analytic philosophers of religion is that they are fairly orthodox. You don't see analytic philosophers of religion (hence aPoRs) defending, say, Arianism or Pelagianism. Indeed, you will often see aPoRs arguing at length something like "Now at first, my approach may seem Pelagian, but it's really in line with the Catholic tradition"--or something to this effect. I even saw the acknowledgment section of an article in aPoR where the author thanked two other philosophers from saving him from heresy. 

A.I. ethics piece at Medium

My first stab at public philosophy, "We're programming A.I. psychopaths - and how to avoid it", is now up at Medium. Hope you all find it interesting!

Methodological problem: How to reconstruct a (missing) theory in comparative philosophy

While discussing a theory which is well-known in Europe and in the Anglophone world in comparison to (one or the other theory within) another philosophical traditions, say, premodern Indian philosophy, one can be faced with two alternatives: Either the theory is easily recognisable also in premodern Indian philosophy or it appears to be completely missing (with many steps in between).

Both cases involve risks. In the first case, one may be driven away by the easiness of the comparison and overwrite the Indian theory with one's own, more familiar one. This is a risk one runs when, for instance, discussing theology in an Indian setting, if one does not question whether God could mean something different in both contexts. The other case is also risky, since it leads one to a difficult situation. The clue to the answer is asking what is really meant by the question at stake.

For instance, let us suppose that one is investigating the topic of free will and wishes to compare what has been written about it in Europe and in the Anglophone world and in premodern India. Free will has been debated in thousands or millions of titles in Europe and America but not a single monograph is dedicated to this topic alone in premodern India. Here, one needs to think what exactly is meant by the question, so as to approach it, so to say, from the side. One will therefore notice that the question about free will arises out of a contrast, be it between one's will and God's one or between one's will and neuroscience data about the process of decision making. Having taken notice of that, one will realise that the topic of free will can be found in theistic traditions (and in fact it is discussed in Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta), but not in monist ones. In this way, therefore, one understands both why a given topic is dealt with and why it is not.

This also leads me to one of the advantages of a comparative approach: At the very least, it enables you to gain clarity and become better aware of the complexities hidden in each given topic.

Did you ever understand X better through comparing it with the approach to X of a different tradition? How did it happen?

Popular mechanics on the "proof" we're not simulated

Like I said, Popular Mechanics nicely explains it was #fakenews! ;)

Did physicists show we're not living in a simulation? No.

A number of philosophers (including Justin at Daily Nous) have been sharing this article today claiming a new physics paper demonstrates we are not living in a computer simulation.

Readers may recall that I have a little bit riding on the simulation hypothesis, as I've argued that a new version of the hypothesis--the peer-to-peer (P2P) simulation hypothesis--might not only provide a unified explanation of quantum phenomena, but also open up conceptual room for a new theory of free will capable of reconciling interactionist dualism with physical-causal closure.

Does the new physics paper really show we're not in a simulation? Consider a simple summary of the paper's results:

They discovered that the complexity of the simulation increased exponentially with the number of particles being simulated...The researchers calculated that just storing information about a couple of hundred electrons would require a computer memory that would physically require more atoms than exist in the universe.

If this is indeed their argument (and it is - see comments below!), then no, their paper does not show that we're not living in a simulation. As one commenter put it here, the problem with this form of argument is simple:

This argument is underwhelming to me...Consider if Pacman took some time to study physics. He analyzes Ghost behavior and realizes it would take more than 255 levels worth of data to describe it. Pacman concludes that he must not be in a simulation, because clearly there are only 255 levels in the world.

In other words, it's absurd to claim we're not in a simulation because it would take more data and memory than we have in the simulation. This is akin to arguing that 1GB hard-drives are impossible because it's only possible to build a 1KB hard-drive in Minecraft. 

Am I missing something?

How should we think about the moral risks of philosophy?

There's something I've had in the back of my mind lately that I'd like to float out there for discussion. I'm curious to hear what everyone thinks. The question I have is how we should think about the potential consequences and risks of philosophy. While I'm no historian, from what I do know philosophy often seems to make a real impact in the world--sometimes in horrifying ways. Socrates, if I recall, was put on trial not simply because challenged the status quo but in part because his arguments against democracy were thought to be partly responsible for the bloody rise of the Thirty Tyrants. Similarly, I trust many of us have heard that Rousseau's political philosophy influenced the Jacobins and Robespierre, who were responsible for French Revolution's Reign of Terror. And of course there are the not-exactly wonderful forms of government inspired by Marxism; the ways in which Nietzsche's and Heidegger's philosophies have been utilized in the service of Nazism; and so on.

Given that philosophy can be (and often has been) used in the service of evil, how should we think about the moral risks of engaging in it? This question has long been in the back of my mind, and surfaced again the other day when I read this article about how Richard Spencer and others in the "alt-right" have again twisted philosophical ideas in support of what many of us regard to be a dangerous and harmful social movement. One possible answer as to how we should think about the moral risks of philosophy is that bad people will find resources to support evil ends regardless of what we philosophers do--so, what we should do is simply seek the truth and do our best to make sure our ideas aren't twisted by evil people. Another possibility is that we have a duty to do more than that: to be careful to defend morally good ideas--ones that cannot easily be twisted to serve evil ends.

Omniscience in Indian thought---some preliminary thoughts

Dear readers, I have not been contributing much in the last months, since I focused almost exclusively on South Asian philosophy, which is not the main interest of most of you. Nonetheless, I thought of offering you a glance of a topic I worked on. I would be very grateful to read comments, criticisms and even just American-European parallel and constrasting views. Thus, comments are more than welcome! Please let me also know what just sounds crazy (so that I can see what I have not been able to convey ---Sanskrit authors are not crazier than other human beings).

"Omniscience'' (sārvajñya) assumes many different meanings in the various Indian philosophies. The understanding possibly most common in European and Anglo-American thought, which sees omniscience as including the knowledge of any possible thing in the past, present and future, is neither the only, nor the most common interpretation of omniscience.

Why is the topic of omniscience relevant in Indian philosophy? Because of at least two concurring reasons. On the one hand, for schools like Buddhism and Jainism, it is a question of religious authority. Ascribing omniscience to the founders of the school was a way to ground the validity of their teachings. Slightly similar is the situation of theistic schools ascribing omniscience to God, as a way to ground His ability to organise the world in the best possible way. On the other hand, for other schools the idea of omniscience was initially connected with the the ṛṣis and with the result of yogic or other ascetic practices. As for the former case, ṛṣis are believed by most schools to have directly seen the Vedas in a mythical past and are therefore endowed with a superhuman ability to see also sounds. In the latter case, omniscience is conceptually not different from aṇimā 'the faculty to become as small as an atom' and other special powers of yogins (see Pātañjala Yogaśāstra, book 3).

Philosophical/scientific virtues and the history of inquiry

Last Friday, Justin Weinberg ran a post at Daily Nous speculating on what the virtues of a philosopher are, and proposing the following as an initial list:

• Humility – knowledge of the limits of one’s knowledge, including one’s knowledge of those limits
• Curiosity – the propensity to be dissatisfied with one’s lack of understanding, but not discouraged by it
• Charity – the disposition to first seek the wisdom in what others say
• Courage – the strength to not mistake uncertainty for danger
• Grace – gratitude to those who help save us from ourselves

Readers then chimed in with their own thoughts.  However, while such speculation may be fun, I cannot help but be skeptical of its epistemic value. Reality, after all, is no more obligated to conform to our untutored intuitions about philosophical virtue than it is obligated to conform to our intuitions about space and time, etc. The issue of which traits are in fact philosophical virtues is a partly conceptual question, and partly empirical. First, we need to settle what the proper aim(s) of philosophy are. Then we need to examine which traits or learned disposition are most conducive to achieving the aim(s) in question, using actual data rather than intuitions. So, let's think about these issues a bit more.

First, what are the proper aims of philosophy? One obvious problem is that different people have different conceptions. For some, I suppose the aim(s) of philosophy is truth (viz. true answers to philosophical questions). Others, however, might gloss the proper aim(s) of philosophy as 'understanding' (viz. Sellars' claim that, "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term"). And so on. I'm not sure there is enough agreement on the aim(s) of philosophy to settle what philosophical virtues are. However, offhand, I think it's plausible that the aims of philosophy are not that different than the aims of science--as the sciences aim for truth, understanding, and so on.

So, let's take science as a rough model. How might we collect data on scientific virtues? Well, we would need to determine which dispositions in individual inquirers tend to lead to the discovery of scientific truth and generation of scientific understanding. I do not have such data, and am not sure that anyone does (does anyone know of any good studies here?). What I do have, though, is a fairly good grasp of scientific history. As I've mentioned before, one of my favorite pastimes is reading intellectual biographies on famous philosophers and scientists from history. What, if anything, do those sources suggest? What types of traits and dispositions did scientists who contributed immensely to discovery of scientific truth and understanding tend to have? Did they tend to have the kinds of traits Weinberg proposes?

I cannot purport to provide anything like firm answers to these questions. However, as luck would have it, I purchased, "The Great Physicists: The Life and Times of Leading Physicists from Galileo to Hawking", this past Saturday and decided it would be fun to put together a compendium of reports on the traits and dispositions of different theorists. I've also used a couple of other sources, and here is what I found:

A true story, but also a parable?

The following is a true story:

Several years ago, my mother took our family dog (R.I.P.) out in the backyard to do his 'nightly business.' An unexpected rustle in the dark led the dog to growl and confront the intruder. It turns out the intruder was a mother raccoon with several of her babies. To protect them, the raccoon attacked the dog. To protect the dog, my mother the screamed and attacked the raccoon--and the raccoon attacked her. My father, who was in the shower, heard her screams and rushed outside naked with a baseball bat to protect my mother, who he feared was being assaulted by burglars. At that point, a next-door neighbor heard the commotion, and called to police to protect my mom "from a naked man wielding a baseball bat." Several minutes later, a number of police stormed the house like a SWAT-team with guns drawn, ordering my dad to drop then weapon. Finally, animal control showed up to capture and put the raccoon to sleep--and my mom and dog got driven to the hospital and emergency vet.

What a disaster, right? Yet here's the thing: so much of human life seems sadly analogous to it. Time and again, we see violent escalations arise from each side of a disagreement insisting that their standpoint is right--that they and they alone have discovered the God's Honest Truth. We see this throughout human history up to the present. In the Crusades, Catholics and Muslims both claimed to be 'in the right'--and so they fought. In the European religious wars, Catholics, Protestants, etc., claimed to be in the right--and so they too fought. More recently, both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict argue that their side is in the right--and so they fight. Democrats and Republican think they are in the right--and so we fight. And, of course, on blogs, social media, etc., we see broadly the same thing. Wherever we look--on the news, in politics, in academia, etc.--everyone argues they are in the right...and so we constantly fight.

When will we ever learn? Better yet, what do we need to learn if we want these kinds of horrible cycles to cease? Allow me to offer up an answer to the latter question, and then return to the former question.

Passions of philosophers outside of philosophy -- Mike Austin

One of my favorite things to do over the past 15 years has been coaching soccer. Thanks to my daughters, I’ve had the opportunity to coach. My passion for the sport has grown and I’ve been motivated to learn more about the beautiful game. Being a coach also gives me some justification for watching Arsenal and Sporting Kansas City matches in order to develop my knowledge of the game. Or so I tell myself.

One of my first memories of soccer consists of being in a field in Kansas, where we not only dodged our teammates in scrimmages and drills, but also had to dodge cow patties. I played soccer off and on growing up, was a referee for youth games, and helped run some clinics with my dad and younger brother.

I started coaching youth soccer when I was still a graduate student at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Our oldest daughter wanted to play, and they needed coaches, so I volunteered. She and our middle daughter both played soccer through their middle school years. After that, they focused on music and marching band. Our youngest daughter kept at it and truly loves the sport. I coached her at the youth level from U8 to U12, and enjoyed that a lot. Going into her 8^th grade year, her last year of middle school, they needed a coach and I took the job. After she moved on to high school, I kept coaching the middle school team because of how much I loved working with the young athletes and being around the sport as a coach. 

I’m very proud of the program I’ve helped build at the middle school. We compete against much larger schools, and for years the girls didn’t expect to do well against them. However, each of the past 2 seasons, we were undefeated in our league games. The girls now expect to compete with the teams from these schools, and it’s been rewarding to see them grow in skill and confidence. They play with so much heart and determination; it makes me proud to be their coach.

Just this month, I was named the high school girls soccer coach, which means I will once again coach my daughter, in her senior season with the team (I was granted permission by her, thankfully). We have some goals as a team related to different competitions that we’re in, but as a coach I also focus on doing what I can to encourage them to become better athletes and better people (as the Positive Coaching Alliance puts it, see here).

It is easy to make time for coaching soccer, because I love it. I do less (sometimes no) writing during soccer season, but that is an easy trade-off for me. My philosophical interests related to character and its relevance for different realms of human life cross over with my role as a soccer coach. Being a coach enables me to test out some of my views on character development and sport in the real world, and it gives me food for thought as I reflect on these issues. I’ve written papers on sports and neo-Aristotelian moral development, sport and humility, and I recently published a paper on sport as a means for cultivating the theologhttp://www.positivecoach.org/ical virtues of faith, hope, and love. I also hope to write a more popular-level book on sport and moral development in the near future.

I’m looking forward to many more years of coaching soccer, and hopefully a few more trophies along the way. But most of all, I value and look forward to the relationships I am able to have with these young athletes, encouraging them to see themselves as athletes, to value excellence, and to have some fun along the way.

Neural Correlates of Moral Judgment & Sensitivity

A new meta-analysis just appeared in the Journal of Moral Education on the neural correlates of moral judgment and moral sensitivity in parts of the brain associated with self-hood (full paper available here). Here are some of the key findings:

The default mode network regions were commonly associated with moral functions across diverse domains of moral tasks...The results showed that during [moral] judgment tasks, the ventromedial and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices, temporoparietal junction, middle temporal gyrus and connected superior temporal sulcus, middle occipital gyrus, temporal pole, fusiform gyrus, inferior temporal gyrus and precuneus were activated. In the moral sensitivity condition, the dorsomedial, ventromedial and ventrolateral prefrontal cortices, cingulate gyrus, temporoparietal junction, orbitofrontal cortex, middle temporal gyrus, middle occipital gyrus, fusiform gyrus, lingual gyrus, temporal pole, inferior temporal gyrus, precuneus, cuneus and amygdala were activated.

Allow me to try to parse this out a bit.

Morality, the Problem of Possible Future Selves, and Christmas Parables

In my 2016 book, Rightness as Fairness: A Moral and Political Theory, I argue that morality is a solution to a problem of diachronic rationality called 'the problem of possible future selves.'

To simplify (very) greatly, the problem--which is partially inspired by L.A. Paul's groundbreaking work on transformative experience--is that (A) our present selves have to make decisions on behalf of our future selves, but (B) we do not know which future selves we will actually be (particularly as the future becomes more distant), including (C) what our future selves' retrospective preferences will be regarding our decisions in the present. I then argue that this problem can be solved if and only if our various selves cooperate with each other across time--not just across seconds or minutes, but across decades--to act on principles that are rational for all of one's possible future selves to endorse in unison given mutual recognition of the problem.

The final part of the argument is that this cross-temporal agreement consists of principles of fairness--principles which require one to treat all of one's possible selves fairly, and by extension, all other persons and sentient beings. The reason for this is broadly as follows: because one has an infinite number of possible future selves--some of whom are selfish, others of whom care about other human beings, animals, etc.--the only principles that all of one's selves can rationally agree upon in unison are those that strike a certain kind of compromise between self-interest and the interests of others: a compromise comprised by four principles of fairness.

Anyway, I argue that a rapidly increasing body of neurobehavioral evidence supports picture (a little of which is nicely summarized here and here). In essence, it increasingly appears not only that (A) the neural mechanisms that enable us to care about our own possible future selves just are the neural mechanisms that lead us to care about others, but also that (B) moral behavior and (self-regarding) prudential behavior are simultaneously enhanced or degraded together in direct proportion to the extent to which we concern ourselves with our possible future selves.

Still, all of this is very abstract. Can a simpler, more down-to-earth intuitive case be made for how moral cognition and motivation are rooted in concern for one's possible future (and by extension, possible past) selves? I believe that Christmas parables, of all things, can help!

Analytical Philosophy of Religion with Indian categories

As part of my attempts to go beyond my confort zone, Wednesday and Thursday last week I enjoyed two days of full immersion in the Analytical Philosophy of Religion. In fact, the conference I was attending was about the ontological status of relations from the perspective of Analytical Philosophy of Religion and most speakers started their talk saying that they were not experts in the one or in the other field. I was neither nor, which made me the sub-ideal target for all talks ---and yet one who could learn a lot from all.

A few random remarks:

1. "God" is an ambiguous term, in fact so ambiguous that I wonder why does not each study about philosophy of religion start with a discussion of what the author means by this word. I pragmatically distinguish (for instance, in my teaching) between god as devatā 'deity' (a superhuman being which is better than a human one, but only insofar as s/he has the same qualities of a human being in higher degree, like the Greek and Roman deities of mythology), god as īśvara 'Lord' (the omniscient and omnipotent being of rational theology), god as brahman 'impersonal being' (the impersonal Absolute of most monisms, including Bradley's one discussed by Guido Bonino) and god as bhagavat 'personal God' (the personal God one directly relates to in prayers, without necessarily caring for His/Her omnipotence or omniscience, but rather focusing on Him/Her as spouse, parent, child, etc.). Within this classification, Analytical Philosophy of Religion appears to focus on the īśvara aspect of God.
2. It is perhaps self-evident that this approach enables one to discuss logically about God and His/Her attributes. God is not a person one is in relation with (who could have whimsical desires etc.), but rather a perfect being who needs to be logically consistent. The only logical problem relates to God's alterity, so that one could wonder how far can human logic reach before crashing against its boundaries. Nonetheless, unlike in the case of God as bhagavat, one needs not worry too much about His/Her lying completely outside the realm of thinkability. The mysterium can be understood as a challenge to think deeper something which, at a certain point (in the liberated state) we will all be able to grasp.
3. Consequently, I could listen to several interesting discussions on God's temporality (does His/Her omnipotence include His/Her producing effects which are temporal, or is rather His/Her own activity itself which is temporal?) and on God's knowability (having said that God is not fully knowable by living human beings, the purpose of rational theology (continued in analytical philosophy of religion) is to find out whether what we can know about Him/Her is consistent with what we know through revelation).
4. The main topic of the conference was, however, God's being and its relation to His/Her qualities. Does God have wisdom? Or is wisdom (part of) God? The first definition leads to several problems, well-known to scholars of Sanskrit philosophy, insofar as one could always conceive a substance without its qualities (e.g., the soul in the state of liberation according to Nyāya) and, consequently, God's relation to His/Her wisdom would end up being adventitious. By contrast, the second solution leads to a different problem: How can one conceive of God as "being" wisdom? Marco Damonte suggested using Frege's distinction between sense and reference: All Divine attributes have the same referent (God), but different senses.
5. Summing up, it seems that the believers in a bhagavat do not gain so much out of their readings of rational theology or analytic philosophy of religion. This is, in Mario Micheletti's words "not foundational": one can believe even without theology (and, one might add, vice versa: one can enjoy theological thinking even without believing). Nonetheless, rational theology can persuade believers that what they believe can be rationally believed (and it plays a very important role in the metaphysical and philosophical discourse).

Long story short, I am very grateful to the organisers, Daniele Bertini and Damiano Migliorini. My only suggestion for a further improvement would be to allow for even more time for discussion (perhaps with the help of some leading questions by the organisers themselves?), especially insofar as their audacity in putting together physicists, theologians and historians of philosophy made the attempt to find a common language even more challenging than usual.

(cross-posted, with minor modifications, on my personal blog and on the Indian Philosophy Blog, where you can also read a few interesting comments)

Philosophical discussions: a metaphilosophical proposal

In my previous entry in this series, "Metaphilosophical concerns", I traced out some similarities between philosophy as it is practiced today and pre-scientific psychology. Several decades ago, before psychology increasingly adopted scientific methodology,

1. Theories in psychology were based primarily on how things "seemed" to different investigators.
2. Without any clear protections against forms of cognitive or emotional bias, motivated reasoning, etc.

This resulted in opposing theoretical camps--Freudianism, Jungianism, Behaviorism, Humanism, Instinct Theory--whose practitioners tended to think that their favored framework was better supported by arguments than their rivals. Unfortunately, this tended to result in very problematic forms of argument, such as post-hoc reasoning where each framework would marshall their own theoretical resources to "explain" the same phenomena. If, for instance, a patient resisted treatment, Freudians would say, "Of course - that's just what our theory of reaction formation predicts!"; Humanists would say, "Of course - that's precisely what one would expect from a humanistic drive to self-actualize!; and so on. The end result was a bunch of theoretical stalemates, in which proponents of each perspective maintained their framework was the most coherent with the evidence. The premises that one group of people found "plausible" did not seem all that plausible to people on the other side of the debate.

Philosophical discussions: metaphilosophical concerns

A few weeks ago, some of my philosopher friends were sharing this Chronicle of Higher Education article, "Is Philosophy Obsolete?", the tag-line of which reads, "No. It helps make us coherent to ourselves, and that's a never-ending project."

I don't think "seeking coherence" can be an adequate way of defending, or doing, philosophy.

First, there appear to be conclusive reasons to think that coherence per se is not truth-conducive (see sections 7&8 here). A set of beliefs can be as coherent as you like--but, for all that, they can be totally out of touch with the truth. This is a longstanding objection to coherentist theories of epistemic justification, and it seems to be a definitive one.

Second, while some might be willing to bite this bullet--suggesting that philosophy needn't be about getting at truth (I've heard a few people suggest this!)--I don't think that's a bullet we should want to bite. Making false views more coherent can be a very dangerous endeavor. Among other things, it can make false and harmful theories or belief-sets seem more plausible to those who already endorse them, as well as to others. To take just a few examples, consider Sir Robert Filmer's defense of the divine right of kings in his 1680 book, Patriarcha. Or consider young-earth Creationism or the views of the Flat-Earth Society. Or, of course, consider racism and white-supremacy. These doctrines can be rendered increasingly coherent, and indeed, their proponents have spun all kinds of coherent defenses of them--defenses which their proponents think constitute evidence for the view in question. But this, clearly, is a very dangerous thing to do. We should want to avoid approaches to inquiry that can lend an "air of legitimacy" to views that are false.

Finally, notice that coherence in one obvious sense lends itself to a kind of status quo bias. If our task as philosophers is to simply make our beliefs more coherent, we must begin with whatever beliefs we have--which is plausibly what led Filmer and those of his ilk to defend the divine right of kings. That doctrine fit with many status quo beliefs at the time, so of course it seemed defensible on coherentist grounds. Similarly, people resisted Copernicus' heliocentric theory of the solar system because it contradicted "commonsense" at the time. People resisted (and some still resist) the theory of evolution on such grounds. And yes, many physicists and philosophers initially greeted Einstein's theory of relativity not with open arms, but rather condemnation as obviously inconsistent with the "a priori fact" that space and time (obviously!) must be absolute.

For these reasons, I don't think philosophy or science should be in the business of rendering "commonsense" coherent. They should be in the business of discovering the truth--for, as we see in history, the truth often defies commonsense (or, at least, what people take to be commonsense at a given time). But how? What does it take for philosophy to be truth-conducive? And, are we currently using truth-conducive methods? Like a seemingly growing number of philosophers, I have a variety of concerns, some of which I would like to share here and explore in this post and several to come. 

On substances and qualities: An Indian perspective

The authors of the Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta school (a philosophical school flourishing in South India from the 10th c. onwards) claim that the whole world is made of God/brahman and that everything else is nothing but a qualification of Him/it. This philosophical concept, it will be immediately evident, crashes against the idea of a rigidly divided ontology, with substances being altogether different from qualities, as upheld in the more ancient school of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika. In other words, the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika world if seen from outside is similar to the world of today's folk ontology, the one influenced by scientism, while its structure resembles the one of Aristotle's ontology.

It is populated by subject-independent entities which are ontologically solid and persistent through time and to which qualities accrue which need them as their substrate. It goes without saying that this is a reciprocal distinction (substances are not qualities and qualities can never become substances), since it is grounded in an ontological difference (akin to Aristotle's ουσια). In other words, qualities cannot be further qualified by other qualities, since they cannot be their substrate (this leads to some complications, but I will not focus on the specific Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika answers now).

This scheme can not work if one wants to imagine the world as being constituted by just one reality (the brahman/God) with all the rest being an attribute of Him. In fact, this idea implies that there is one substance (God), which is qualified by further things which, however, cannot be called qualities, such as human beings and other material entities. One of the main authors of Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, Veṅkaṭanātha (1269--1368) is not afraid of stating explicitly that his school does not use the term 'quality' (guṇa) in a technical sense, like Nyāya did (see his Nyāyasiddhāñjana 4.4) and that for Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta everything can be considered a quality of something else when it specifies it.*

This, however, does not amount to say that qualities and substances are only subjective constructs. The ontological grounding is provided by God's existence as the world's foundation. The fact that all human beings are qualifications (viśeṣaṇa) of Him is not a subjective construct, since it is rather a state of affairs which exists independently of all subjective minds apart from God's one.

This brings us to the next step, namely, the importance of God's existence to ground the world. Given that Viśiṣṭādvaita authors have given up the subject-independent ontology of Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, they need another way to ground the objective existence of the world and this cannot be achieved but through God. He is ultimately existent and therefore we can opt for being and avoid plunging into nihilism. But what tells us that the world as we see it is also subject-independent? The fact that it is conceived by God. It is a content within God's knowledge. Thus, the main thing to be analysed for Viśiṣṭādvaita becomes the status of God's knowledge. Knowledge is said, in Nyāyasiddhāñjana 4 and before that in Rāmānuja's Śrībhāṣya ad 2.2.27, to be a substance. This seems a daring statement in a context which was used to the idea that cognitions are rather qualities of the self. Rāmānuja does not want, in fact, to deny that cognitions are qualities of the self, he only wants to state that they are also substances. They are, therefore, not kevalaguṇas 'sheer qualities' but rather dravyātmakaguṇas 'qualifications being substances'.

*As a homage to Veṅkaṭanātha I will also not try to render the Viśiṣṭādvaita guṇas with a term different than the one I use for the Nyāya guṇas. Viśiṣṭādvaita authors are not talking about other types of qualifications, they rather claim that what Nyāya authors call qualities are indeed not necessarily a different class from substances.

(a similar version of this post has been cross-posted on my personal blog)

Philosophical discussions - new series

Ever since the Cocoon's inception, its mission has been to provide a safe and supportive forum not only for discussing early-career professional issues, but also a place to discuss our work--a place to engage in philosophical discussion! In recent months, just about all of the blog's content has focused on professional issues. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and I very much plan to continue blogging about those kinds of subjects. Still, as someone who works in a very small department--and who rarely gets the chance to talk philosophy other than with undergraduate students--I thought it might be fun to talk philosophy for a change. But, what to discuss?

Because I don't like to compromise anonymized review, talking about stuff I'm currently working on is out as far as I am concerned. I also don't want to focus on stuff I'm not working on, as the best conversations typically result from discussing things one knows pretty well. Finally, I don't want to bore readers by simply presenting stuff I've published, because...well, that would be boring and self-indulgent! :) So, then, here's what I came up with instead. I thought it might be fun to begin a new series where Cocoon contributors discuss some broad philosophical issues they've been thinking about lately, whether in their published or unpublished work, sharing their thoughts on the issue at hand and inviting readers to share theirs. 

Does philosophy need to be less purified, or more?

Many of my friends on social media have been posting and discussing, "When Philosophy Lost Its Way", an article by Robert Frodeman and Adam Briggle over at the New York Times The Stone opinionator column (thanks to Robert Frodeman as well for drawing my attention to it). The post is also currently being discussed at Daily Nous, where a few commenters so far seem sympathetic with the main points of the, but many others report being unpersuaded.

Very roughly (and I'm paraphrasing a lot here), Frodeman and Briggle argue that:

1. Philosophy was once widely practiced, focusing on issues relevant to society and everyday life (e.g. wisdom, virtue, etc.).
2. It then increasingly migrated into the modern research university, where
3. It became increasingly specialized, modeling itself on the hard sciences, thereby
4. Coming to focusing less on issues relevant to society and everyday life (wisdom, virtue, etc.), and more on peer-reviewed publication and "its own arcane language" (e.g. conceptual analysis, etc.)
5. However, philosophy's attempt to model itself after the sciences not only divorced it from ordinary life and the humanities. It also lacks the virtues of the sciences--namely, reliable methods that lead to actual progress.
6. Thus, philosophy "lost its way": it abandoned its roots (messy, humanistic inquiry) in pursuit of a fool's errand (scientific precision), in a manner that both (A) marginalized philosophy as an academic discipline (alienating it from the humanities, but also from science, since scientist have their own, more productive methods!), and (B) alienated philosophy from everyday life and society.

Have I gotten their account right? In any case, Frodeman and Briggle suggest that the key is for philosophy to return to its messy, humanistic roots. They write:

Our claim, then, can be put simply: Philosophy should never have been purified. Rather than being seen as a problem, “dirty hands” should have been understood as the native condition of philosophic thought — present everywhere, often interstitial, essentially interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary in nature. Philosophy is a mangle. The philosopher’s hands were never clean and were never meant to be.

What should we make of their critique, as well as their proposed solution? A number of Daily Nous commenters find the critique inadequately supported:

21st Century Philosophy: In Crisis, a New Beginning, Both, or Neither?

Dan Hutto (University of Wollongong) has posted a nice, short little piece at academia.edu entitled, "21st Century Philosophy: In Crisis or New Beginning?" As my blog post from a while back, "Analytic Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, and Natural Philosophy" suggests, I very much agree with Hutto.

The general message of both pieces is roughly this: if we want to both (A) improve philosophy's methods, getting away from untethered intuitions (including empirically unsupported claims about folk psychology), and (B) help our discipline get taken more seriously and regarded as more relevant in the modern world (both of which, I think, we should want!), philosophy in the 20th Century is going to have to increasingly return to more naturalistic/anti-rationalistic modes of inquiry, increasingly drawing upon and interweaving with the sciences, rather than setting itself apart from the sciences as an a priori discipline (as analytic philosophy largely did during the 20th Century). This isn't to say that all forms of rationalism are bad, or that there is no room for a priori philosophizing. It is only to say that, in swinging so far in the direction of a priori/rationalistic methods in the 20th Century, analytic philosophy painted itself into something of a corner, both philosophically/epistemically (leaving little more than intuitions to motivate philosophical argument, with no clear tests of which intuitions reliably track truth), as well as socially, academically, and politically (distancing and isolating ourselves from the public at large, from other disciplines, and from current affairs). I, at any rate, have great hope that the 21st Century will be a "new beginning" of sorts for philosophy--a century of philosophy crossing disciplinary boundaries, drawing on the sciences, and drawing a more diverse body of philosophers, and different social and philosophical perspectives, into the fold. And indeed, there seem to me already clear signs of this occurring, with an increasing number of philosophers engaging more with the sciences, engaging more with issues of public interest, publishing in more public venues, etc.

How should we foster this new beginning? In addition to the above ways, I think we can do so in a number of related ways: by (1) continuing to question and move further away from methods (such as "the method of cases") that dominated 20th Century philosophy, but are increasingly seen as problematic, (2) increasingly insisting that areas of philosophy with empirical connections (e.g. moral philosophy, political philosophy, the philosophy of free will and agency) engage with, and be based on, a sound, thorough understanding of the relevant empirical areas, and (3) increasingly identifying a sound graduate education in philosophy with one that does not cordon off philosophy from empirical science, but instead draws upon, and merges, philosophical reflection and argument with scientific understanding (e.g cognitive neuroscience, empirical moral psychology, etc.). Or so I think. What do you think? Is philosophy in the 21st Century in crisis? Is it at the start of (potentially?, hopefully?) a new beginning? Both? Neither? 

Two papers critical of order effect research at Synthese

By Wesley Buckwalter

Several experimental philosophers have found that philosophical intuitions of both professionals and laypeople are sensitive to the order in which the thought experiments they come from are presented. A nice summary of the latest results about this by Schwitzgebel & Cushman can be found here.

But now, not one but two new papers critical of this body of research are set to appear in Synthese (what did order effects ever do to you, Synthese?). One paper “Ordering effects, updating effects, and the specter of global skepticism” by Zach Horne & Jonathan Livengood questions the assumption that order effects indicate philosophical intuitions are unreliable. Another paper, “How not to test for philosophical expertise” by Regina Rini claims to have identified a deep methodological problem invalidating most findings about order in philosophy!

When you have 'the wrong intuitions'

A couple of my facebook/philosophy friends shared this old post of mine a couple of days ago. The basic idea I explored in the post is whether dominant professional standards of 'philosophical rigor'--by requiring arguments to be situated in a prevailing literature, beginning with premises that others in the literature find 'intuitive'--function in a problematically conservative manner: one that effectively excludes or further marginalizes philosophical voices who are already marginalized, requiring members of marginalized groups to begin with premises a dominant majority finds 'intuitive', regardless of whether one finds that premises at all intuitive oneself. As I explained,

I think I've seen these [exclusionary] forces play themselves out in the classroom, in philosophy seminars, and in professional conferences. I've taught in classrooms, for instance, where -- after spending, say, an entire semester teaching "The Greats" on ethics, or epistemology, or whatever -- I'll assign something by a feminist, or a critical race theorist...and my students will seem so much more skeptical than they did about the "Greats". Why? Here again, my feeling is this: the students are skeptical because the things the feminist or critical race theorist are saying conflict with the received "body of wisdom" they have been steeped in. Similarly, I've sat in philosophy talks where someone -- often someone from a different background from the majority -- tries to raise an alternative point-of-view, and the "feel" in the room is something like, "Okay, can we get back to Kripke/Rawls -- the "real stuff" -- now?" Finally, I've sat in APA sessions on feminist philosophy or African philosophy, and here too a couple of things stood out to me. First, the audiences in the room were pretty homogenous, with few representatives of dominant backgrounds or philosophical viewpoints in attendance. People working within dominant traditions in philosophy, by and large, just didn't bother to even attend these sessions (at least the ones I have attended). Second, in these cases I was struck by just how unlikely it would be for many of the arguments given in these sessions to "fly" with, say, a journal referee or editor of a mainstream philosophy journal. The more I listened, the more it seemed to me that our disciplinary standards for what counts as a "good argument" would immediately rule out the arguments given as bad arguments. Why? In my view, very roughly: because the premises people were appealing to "conflicted with received wisdom." Few things could drive a person from a field more, I think, than saying to them, "Well, the premises you find attractive conflict with the premises we find attractive -- and our premises are the ones you must work with if you don't want to be an outsider."

Although I am not a member of a marginalized group myself, thinking about my post again got me thinking again about a broader issue I've discussed before: the sociology of philosophy, in particular the potentially problematic ways in which "philosophical progress" might be driven less my arguments than by sociological forces, such as "snowball effects" where an intuition (or set of intuitions) pushed by a few philosophers might lead other people to "jump on the bandwagon" with those intuitions, leading entire philosophical literatures in specific directions, not to much on the basis of argument quality, but simply as a kind of snowball, where Big Name argues X, everyone then takes X as  a jumping-off point, etc. 

Some questions about Killoren's Extended Narrativity Hypothesis

In my previous post, I presented an account of moral status in terms of final value and direct obligations. About a year ago, another featured author, David Killoren, presented his "Extended Narrativity Hypothesis" (ENH) to acount for a the different obligations we have towards livestock and our pets (which he sums up elsewhere as a reformed "animal caste system") (see more details here and here). He wrote,

f the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis is true, then there are at least three categories of morally important beings, which I label as follows: self-actualized persons (including intellectually normal human beings) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of their self-narration of their own lives; persons-by-proxy (including pets) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of others' narration of their lives; and non-persons (including livestock) who do not possess any non-fungible value.

 

This three-way division of morally important beings can be used to explain why humans, livestock, and pets seem to belong to distinct moral categories. This is a big advantage for the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis, in my opinion

- See more at: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2014/11/the-extended-narrativity.html#sthash.f8al4xOA.dpuf

f the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis is true, then there are at least three categories of morally important beings, which I label as follows: self-actualized persons (including intellectually normal human beings) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of their self-narration of their own lives; persons-by-proxy (including pets) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of others' narration of their lives; and non-persons (including livestock) who do not possess any non-fungible value.

 

This three-way division of morally important beings can be used to explain why humans, livestock, and pets seem to belong to distinct moral categories. This is a big advantage for the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis, in my opinion

- See more at: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2014/11/the-extended-narrativity.html#sthash.f8al4xOA.dpuf

If the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis is true, then there are at least three categories of morally important beings, which I label as follows: self-actualized persons (including intellectually normal human beings) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of their self-narration of their own lives; persons-by-proxy (including pets) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of others' narration of their lives; and non-persons (including livestock) who do not possess any non-fungible value.  

This three-way division of morally important beings can be used to explain why humans, livestock, and pets seem to belong to distinct moral categories. This is a big advantage for the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis, in my opinion.

f the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis is true, then there are at least three categories of morally important beings, which I label as follows: self-actualized persons (including intellectually normal human beings) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of their self-narration of their own lives; persons-by-proxy (including pets) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of others' narration of their lives; and non-persons (including livestock) who do not possess any non-fungible value.

 

This three-way division of morally important beings can be used to explain why humans, livestock, and pets seem to belong to distinct moral categories. This is a big advantage for the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis, in my opinion

- See more at: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2014/11/the-extended-narrativity.html#sthash.f8al4xOA.dpuf

f the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis is true, then there are at least three categories of morally important beings, which I label as follows: self-actualized persons (including intellectually normal human beings) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of their self-narration of their own lives; persons-by-proxy (including pets) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of others' narration of their lives; and non-persons (including livestock) who do not possess any non-fungible value.

 

This three-way division of morally important beings can be used to explain why humans, livestock, and pets seem to belong to distinct moral categories. This is a big advantage for the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis, in my opinion

- See more at: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2014/11/the-extended-narrativity.html#sthash.f8al4xOA.dpuf

f the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis is true, then there are at least three categories of morally important beings, which I label as follows: self-actualized persons (including intellectually normal human beings) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of their self-narration of their own lives; persons-by-proxy (including pets) who possess non-fungible value in virtue of others' narration of their lives; and non-persons (including livestock) who do not possess any non-fungible value.

 

This three-way division of morally important beings can be used to explain why humans, livestock, and pets seem to belong to distinct moral categories. This is a big advantage for the Extended Narrativity Hypothesis, in my opinion

- See more at: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2014/11/the-extended-narrativity.html#sthash.f8al4xOA.dpuf

In the wake of my previous post, I'd like to offer a reply to David. While I am very sympathetic to the attempt to account for different obligations based on other features than just an animal's intrinsic properties, and while the ENH seems to plausibly account for some widespread intuitions about pets and livestock, I take issue with the way David frames the kind of value grounding our obligations and with his argument for generally excluding livetsock from the realm of narrative value.

Moral status worth having

By Nicolas Delon

I first want to thank Marcus and the Cocoon for hosting me in the next couple weeks. I'm glad, after years following the Cocoon, to get the opportunity to write from the other side. Much of what follows draws from relatively recent work but much of it is also prospective work-in-progress.

In my first post I would like to map the territory of moral status*. I will not talk much about the grounds of moral status. Here I'm interested in the notion itself, how it is variably used by philosophers and others, and whether we should keep talking about moral status at all.

I would like to address a challenge raised by what I think is a plausible understanding of the notion of moral status, namely that is has no desirable use in moral discourse. I will start by introducing the central features of my account and why I think it is plausible. I then consider the objection that the account is not normatively neutral. Let me first note that, while my account is to some extent idiosyncratic, it reflects essential features commonly cited in ethics in the last decades: final value, welfare, and obligations.