Crazy Jerry (I)

I’m gonna do something pretty stupid and weigh in on the controversy surrounding Fodor’s recent salvos against ‘Darwinism.’ Fodor has argued that adaptationism is wrong, and that the theory of natural selection is in the midst of a crisis. Figures in the field now seem to be wondering whether Fodor has merely gone bonkers, or whether he has finally come out as a Dark Lord. To make matters worse, the few positive reviews have been from places like this.

On the other hand, I managed to re-read his latest essay this morning, and I’m just not seeing what all the fracas is about. So this is my attempt to clarify the issues as I understand them:

Contrary to what has sometimes been implied, Fodor is not dismissing most of what we understand by the concept ‘evolution.’ This is how he concludes his most recent essay ‘Against Darwinism’:

“None of this should, however, lighten the heart of anybody in Kansas; not even a little. In particular, I’ve provided not the slightest reason to doubt the central Darwinist theses of the common origin and mutability of species. Nor have I offered the slightest reason to doubt that we and chimpanzees had (relatively) recent common ancestors. Nor I do suppose that the intentions of a designer, intelligent or otherwise, are among the causally sufficient conditions that good historical narratives would appeal to in order to explain why a certain kind of creature has the phenotypic traits it does…It is, in short, one thing to wonder whether evolution happens; it’s quite another thing to wonder whether adaptation is the mechanism by which evolution happens.” ('Against Darwinism')

So Fodor does not think that he is arguing against Darwinism per se, or against evolution, or against the idea that species adapt themselves over time to their environment. His thesis, rather, is the following: “the theory of natural selection can’t explain the distribution of phenotypes in biological populations.” This is a bold claim, probably too cavalier, and most likely wrong…but it’s not crazy. His beef is about how, not whether evolution happens.

So, what then is Fodor’s problem with adaptationism? As far as I can tell, it has less to do with the idea that species adapt over time to their environment and more to do with the notion that phenotypes are selected for (an important term of art) in a lawful way. Here in skeletal form is the argument:

1) Natural selection via adaptationism is plausible only if it can distinguish between the selection of creatures that happen to express some phenotype, and those that are selected for expressing some phenotype.

Why (1)? The argument is long, but it boils down to the fact that nature has no way of making the distinction. And yet, according to adaptationism, natural selection determines that certain phenotypes persist while others die out by selecting for the former against the latter. More on this below.

2) This distinction rides on the plausibility of relevant counterfactuals.

If we confine ourselves only to the actual world, we will never know whether our large brains were selected for the robust social cognition they allow, or whether those among our ancestors who happened to have big brains were selected for some other reason, and enhanced social cognition is a just a(n) (un)fortuitous byproduct. Or a different example: our elongated jawbones were selected for (some purpose), while our chins we get for free because they are the necessary result of an elongated jawbone. Hence, to distinguish selection from selection for, we need to consider the relevant counterfactuals: would large brains have resulted iff brain size played no role in social cognition; if social cognition played no role in fitness, would large brains have developed anyway? And so on…

3) There are only(!) two suggested ways to make sense of such counterfactuals: a) taking the phrase ‘mother nature’ quite literally; or b) positing laws of selection.

Fodor just asserts that these are the two options, but I’ve not found anyone disputing this. Now, 3a can’t be right, because there is no mind governing selection (again, this is just an assumption, but it’s surely right). To use Fodor’s example: Granny sells zinnias at the market, and selects them for their high prices. The high-priced zinnias happen to come with large roots. If we want to decide whether large roots, or high prices, are selected for, we just ask ourselves whether Granny would sell high priced plants with small roots. Of course she would. Thus, high-price is selected for, and large roots (in this world) just happen to be selected. This is all fine and well only because Granny has a mind, and she is making the choices. But nature does not have a mind, so 3a can’t be right.

3b is where we hit the rub. Things hinge on how we should understand ‘law,’ because Fodor’s claim, remember, is not that evolution does not happen, but rather is that there are no laws that govern of natural selection. Fodor argues that if there were laws of natural selection, then we would be able to decide lawfully whether, given any two phenotypes, P1 and P2, which one wins out. But there is no way to do this, because no phenotype in and of itself is fit; it is only fit within a certain environment. As Fodor puts it, the fitness of a phenotype is “massively context dependent.” In other words, Fodor’s point seems to be that there is no law concerning the fitness (selection for) P1 and P2 per se, because P1 wins out over P2 (or vice versa) only within some environment.

Eliot Sober asks, why is this a problem? Once we do control for environment, isn’t there a necessary answer for which one wins out? The contention between Fodor and Sober seems to be on the role and status of laws in science. For instance, economists might argue that, all things being equal, an increase in the money supply will lead to inflation. Of course, there are so many intervening variables in the real world that this correlation rarely if ever holds, and when it does hold, there is always someone who can argue that the correlation is accidental, not lawful. In other words, all things are never equal, so in what sense can we call this a ‘law’ that relates increases in the money supply to inflation? At this point, I think that the debate becomes somewhat ad hoc. Economists will respond, as Sober does, by saying that they are constructing models, that the models help both to predict and explain phenomena, and that whether you want to call the rule-sets that govern variables in a model ‘laws’ or not is just a function of how strongly you want to interpret ‘natural law.’So, the contention seems to be, when we can something determinate in terms of natural selection only by specifying a context, whether we should count this a law or not, and this in term seems to ride upon how 'universal' you want your 'laws of nature' to be. For something to be a law, must it hold unconditionally across the entire universe, or can may one still speak of a law even when conditions and contexts have to be set? It's a very interesting question--it seems to me that most sciences now are fine talking about models rather than laws--but I don't think that one is crazy for coming down either way.

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Causal Theories of Action (I): Difficulties With Acting for a Reason

In defending Davidson’s causal account of reasons, Mele suggests that the strongest defense for this account is provided by a challenge Davidson raises to non-causalists: “If you hold that when we act intentionally we act for reasons, provide an account of the reasons for which we act that does not treat (our having) those reasons as figuring in the causation of the relevant behavior.” (Mele 2003, 69) Davidson does make quite a lot of this challenge, arguing that the causal account—i.e., an account on which reasons are causes of actions—gives us a way of explaining why an intentional action occurred. Lacking any other explanation, we must take up the causal account as the best one. One might add, also, another common point to strengthen this one: a non-causal account in principle cannot explain, or fully explain, why something occurred (Honderich, Chapters 2 and 4).

Mele goes on to claim that “the challenge is particularly acute when an agent has two or more reasons for A-ing but A-s for only one of them” (Mele 2003, 70). Mele illustrates this with an example:

Al has a pair of reasons for mowing his lawn this morning. First, he wants to mow it this week and he believes that this morning is the most convenient time. Second, Al has an urge to repay his neighbor for the rude awakening he suffered recently when she turned on her mower at the crack of dawn and he believes that his mowing his lawn this morning would constitute suitable repayment. As it happens, Al mows his lawn this morning only for one of these reasons. In virtue of what is it true that he mowed his lawn for this reason, and not the other, if not that this reason (or his having it), and not the other, played a suitable causal role in his mowing his lawn? (Mele 1997)

Mele’s point is that if I have more than one reason for acting but act for only one of these reasons, it is unclear how we could explain this occurrence without seeing the reason for which I acted, but not the other reason(s) I had, as playing a causal role in the production of my action. Let’s call examples of this sort Multiple Reasons Scenarios (MRSs).

Interestingly, very much the same MRS can be used to defend a non-causal account of reasons. Witness the following, from John Searle:

[One] way to see the existence of the gap is to notice that in a decision making situation you often have several different reasons for performing an action, yet you act on one and not the others and you know without observation which one you acted on… Suppose for example that you had a whole bunch of reasons both for and against voting for Clinton in the presidential election. You thought he would be a better president for the economy but worse for foreign policy. You liked the fact that he went to your old college but didn’t like his personal style. In the end you voted for him because he went to your old college. The reasons did not operate on you. Rather you chose one reason and acted on that one. You made that reason effective by acting on it… The remarkable thing about this phenomenon is: in the normal case you know without observation which reason was effective, because you made it effective. (Searle, 16)

Unlike Mele, who uses an MRS to demonstrate the need for a causal account (or, rather, to point to an explanatory problem that—in his view—is best resolved by a causal account), Searle uses an MRS to show that, as far as our experience is concerned, there is a gap between our reasons and our actions. There are, of course, ways of bringing these accounts together—some libertarians (e.g., van Inwagen, Kane), for example, accept that reasons cause actions, but insist that they do so indeterministically. Both the causal theory and the gap are thus preserved.

When the same kind of scenario, an MRS, seems to support conflicting positions, however, it may seem worthwhile to look at what sort of bedrock the scenario provides; is it really solid enough to support any conclusions whatsoever? I do not think so. There is a hidden assumption within any MRS that makes it, to my mind, impossible to use it as a premise in any argument.

The assumption is this:

Given multiple reasons R[1-n], agent S can act for/on reason Rp and not for/on any other reason Rq, where p,qЄ{1-n}

You might be thinking: what kind of hidden assumption is this? Of course we are capable of acting for some particular reasons out of a set of reasons we might have to do something! That’s obvious! But now, suppose you have to justify this claim. However you go about doing it, you certainly cannot appeal to the thing that makes it seem so obvious, i.e., introspection. I will deal with this in the next post. First, I want to point out that it is possible that, when we have multiple reasons for doing something, we never act on only one of them. If so, then it would be false that we play any active role in selecting one reason out of a group to act on, or that one reason out of a group causes us to act. That this is possible does not make it true, of course. But without a way of dismissing this possibility, one has no right to use it as evidence for anything else.

In the next post, I will look at various ways of defending the MRS in question and suggest that their failure may lead us to the thought that any causal account of action must be backed by a theory of the will.

Honderich, Ted. (2002) How Free are You?

Mele, Alfred R. (2003) “Philosophy of Action” in Kirk Ludwig, ed. Donald Davidson, 64-84.

Mele, Alfred R. (1997) Agency and Mental Action, Philosophical Perspectives, 11, 231-49.

Searle, John. (2001) Rationality in Action.

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Should Ethics Tell Us What to Do?

After posting a comment on Colin McGinn's blog, I was seized by the sudden urge to develop the thought more here. A commenter there (Hugh Millar), criticizing Kant, brought up the example of Gaugin, who discovered that he had to face a conflict between pursuing his art and sticking with his family. Millar's claim is that neither pursuing one's art at the cost of losing one's family, nor holding on to one's family at the cost of abandoning one's art, is a reasonably universalizable maxim. This yields the following criticism:

"Of what conceivable good is an ethic which fails to address such major moral problems?"

Before delving into the question, there is one possible point of confusion to note: It is indeed right that neither maxim is universalizable. Of course Kant did not think that any non-universalizable maxim is immoral, and I think this is a clear case where the moral law simply does not clearly say how one should act. The question, then, is whether the fact that Kant's moral philosophy cannot give a definitive answer to this dilemma should count as a serious strike against Kantian ethics.

That is, should we fault Kant for not telling us how to solve a conflict between the development of one's art and commitment to one's family? This I doubt. It seems dubious, to say the least, to suggest that any moral theory can--or should aspire to--tell individuals exactly how to act in any particular situation. This is so for a number of reasons, chief among which is that such conflicts can arise for very different individuals in very different circumstances. These context-specific details can be important. For example, if the art is terrible and the artist has zero potential, then the conflict arises only because of the artist's ego; a competent person should, seeing this, be able to see that there is a fairly simple solution. Conversely, imagine that the artist's family is a bunch of parasites, feeling no affection for the artist but merely hanging on in hopes of following her to the top. There, too, there is reasonably simple solution (though not as simple as in the previous case), which a competent moral judge should be able to see.

The issue of competence is important: moral judgment is unavoidable. Ethics, as Kant tells us, is concerned not with legislating actions, but maxims of actions. Though there is debate over how closely maxims and actions are supposed to be aligned for Kant, it is reasonably clear on his account that different actions can instantiate the same maxim (Anscombe brings this up as a criticism of Kant, as if he'd somehow missed the point). This means that, no matter how clearly the moral law dictates our maxims, there will still be a disjunct between the maxim and the action it demands. Moral judgment is supposed to fill this gap by finding the appropriate action with which to fulfill the maxim.

A moral theory should, ideally, facilitate moral judgment, e.g., by providing values by which to orient oneself, by pointing to common sources of distortion (personal desires, self-deception and rationalization), etc. But these are only guidelines for moral judgment; they cannot and should not tell us exactly what to do in any particular situation. For example, the conflict in question involves such diverse elements as duties to honor legal contracts (like those involved in marriage agreements), duties to perfect oneself, and duties to seek the happiness of others (like one's family members, though perhaps also various art enthusiasts). Recognizing that these values and not, say, the value of satisfying one's desire to paint are the morally relevant features to take into account places limits on the moral judgment involved.

Let me here make a distinction between two kinds of moral judgment. First, there is value-determining moral judgment, i.e., judgment about which values (or ends, or maxims) are morally relevant. Second, there is ad hoc moral judgment, i.e., judgment about how to act in a particular case. What the criticism I am examining here seems to come to, then, is one of whether or not a good moral theory can stick to value-determining moral judgment but shy away from ad hoc moral judgment, or judgment about precisely how to act morally in any given situation. The criticism is supposed to tell us that the answer is no. An ethics that cannot tell us how to resolve such particular problems as Gaugin's dilemma (and an ethic of universal maxims is such an ethics) should be thrown out. A moral theory that leaves ad hoc moral judgment underdetermined is pointless. But I wonder whether the criticism is coherent. If I am getting it right, the criticism is roughly this:

P1. A good moral theory tells us how to resolve concrete moral conflicts.
P2. A moral theory that appeals to universals cannot resolve concrete moral conflicts.
C: Therefore, a good moral theory will not appeal to universals.

The problem is that if we get rid of universals altogether, then we will lose the guidelines by which to judge concrete moral conflicts. Not only that, but we still will not have a moral theory that tells us how to resolve every moral conflict, since without appeal to some universal "ought"s we will have to judge each conflict entirely on its own merits. (Of course we might still appeal to some regional values--commitment to family or commitment to art, for example--but if we can't adjudicate between those values by any more universal criterion, this doesn't get us very far.)

There is an obvious response here: I've painted a false dilemma, since I am begging the question against utilitarianism. I am assuming that without value-determining judgments, we get stuck with a theory of ad hoc judgments that is entirely decisionist in nature. But there is an alternative: we can have a moral theory that, by fixing a universal value (the greatest happiness) provides a criterion for making ad hoc moral judgments in each case. In practice, this likely stands no chance of giving a definite answer to Gaugin's conflict (calculate the hedonic value of family commitment vs commitment to art; now try this again in act-utilitarian terms!), but it seems to at least theoretically solve the problem. In theory, if not in practice, the ad hoc judgment is the outcome of a deliberation that is determined by a theory, not left hanging after theory has done its work.

But how does that work? What determines the judgment? Why would utilitarianism help? Again, unless we really think it is possible to perform a hedonic calculus here, we still don't get a clear moral judgment. That may not seem like much of a problem. After all, the fact that we can be wrong in the judgment we make does not mean that the criteria of making the judgment should be thrown out. There does seem to be an advantage to having criteria that at least in theory lead to a determinate judgment over criteria that in principle cannot lead to such a judgment. But what is the advantage? It seems to be this: the utilitarian, in making an ad hoc judgment, at least knows where to look--to the greatest happiness principle. He understands exactly what end he is trying to maximize. The Kantian, on the other hand, is stuck considering several different values.

The upshot of this is going to be question begging, I suppose. But let's ask what fits our intuitions about moral judgment. Calculation, or mediation between values? Trying to follow a definite criterion, or weighing among different criteria? To make this slightly less question begging: the difference is between two kinds of complexity. For utilitarianism, the complexity is in the calculation. For Kant, the complexity is in the relative weight accorded to morally significant features. Which kind of complexity better satisfies what we might think of as moral judgment?

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