A Brilliant Scientist and an Evil Demon Walk into a Reason

While working on my next post, I had the following completely vacuous realization (I’ve decided for the moment that I’d be better off blogging it than throwing it into my dissertation as a footnote, though I think my advisor would love it): in constructing thought experiments, contemporary philosophers tend to use “brilliant scientist” in the same way that Descartes once used “evil demon.” Now I admit that, sometimes, the two are a bit hard to distinguish, but simple confusion is probably not the reason behind this change of thought-villain. I have a feeling that something a bit more insidious might be.

1. The context in which I encounter the “brilliant scientist” most frequently is in various thought experiments related to free will and determinism, or action theory and practical deliberation. If the discussion is really about determinism, then the scientist example makes sense: it makes us conjure up an image of a scientist poking at our neurons with electrodes, thus controlling our deliberations from the (physical) ground up. The scientist in these thought experiments stands in for the laws of nature, moving us from state of affairs A to state of affairs B without our having any choice in the matter. So maybe the brilliant scientist example really belongs in an essential way to what these thought experiments are trying to do.

Maybe, but not likely. Just throwing a brilliant scientist into the mix doesn’t really create a thought experiment, or at least not one clear enough to yield any intuitions. The scientist’s role needs to be explained more clearly. But once it is, the sort of thought experiment in question can tend to fall apart. If the scientist really is supposed to be a determinism replacement, and to show that determinism would strip me of my deliberative freedom (or, conversely, to show that my ability to deliberate proves that I am free), then this doesn’t quite seem to work. Either the brilliant scientist is manipulating my thought processes in a rational manner or not. If yes, then some sort of (at least scientifically) undetermined practical deliberation really is going on, just not on my part—since the scientist must, then, be deliberating. If not, then my neurons are doing something that is a bit harder to call deliberation at all, so once again there is no determined deliberation going on. (1) That is, the brilliant scientist may work better than the evil demon for pumping our intuitions, but often does this precisely by obscuring the very point our intuitions are supposed to be about in the thought experiment at hand.

2. Is it, then, just that we don’t believe in the existence of evil demons, whereas we do believe in the existence of brilliant scientists? That isn’t quite it, since I’m pretty sure Des Cartes no more believed in the existence of evil demons than do most contemporary philosophers (no doubt an evil demon was deceiving him into not believing in the existence of evil demons). And yet, the “brilliant scientist” somehow seems to make the thought experiment more believable, somehow easier to swallow, for a contemporary audience. Personally, I find it significantly easier to believe that an evil demon makes me get a McDonald’s cheeseburger after some drunken dancing than that a scientist is responsible. In fact, I even know the demon’s name (Jack) and hometown (Tennessee), although I doubt he’s particularly evil: he helps me with all sorts of small tasks like dancing and smiling, and makes a great foreign-language coach to boot.

Maybe what’s going on is actually quite simple: we don’t believe in demons. Thought experiments with demons look silly. We also don’t believe that scientists are controlling our thoughts, but we do believe that someday they will be able to. What is concealed in the thought experiment, then, is the contemporary philosopher’s (really, our society’s) typical, almost endless faith in science. Yes, a scientist, particularly a brilliant scientist, can do anything! But does this faith in science really need to come out in our thought experiments? And, more importantly, does that faith in science itself manipulate the intuitions that the thought experiment is designed to yield? If so, then we might be better off going back to the evil demon: he’s far more philosophically neutral and, besides, he’s got that southern drawl.


(1) This point is suspiciously identical to Daniel Guevara’s criticism of Korsgaard in Kant’s Theory of Moral Motivation.

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Critchley and Leiter on Continental Origins

In a recent post on his blog, Brian Leiter takes issue with Simon Critchley. In the course of defending himself against some of Critchley’s remarks, Leiter adopts the strategy of attacking Critchley’s credentials as a philosopher, especially a continental one. He does this, partly, by taking issue with two of Critchley’s characterizations of continental philosophy:

1. The goal of philosophy in the continental tradition is emancipation, whether individual or societal.

2. “It was felt by post-Kantians like Maimon and Jacobi, and by the German idealists, that Kant had established a series of dualisms in the Third Critique—pure reason and practical reason, nature and freedom, epistemology and ethics—but had failed to provide a single unifying principle which would bring those dualisms together. German idealism, then, can be seen as a series of attempts to provide this principle.” (quoted by Leiter; similar claims can be find in Critchley’s Continental Philosophy) Critchley presents this goal as central not only to German Idealism (which it certainly is, as Dieter Henrich, Karl Ameriks, and numerous others have demonstrated), but as definitive of the continental tradition as such.

Leiter dismisses both claims as demonstrating an ignorance of the tradition and, I admit, they look odd at first. But let’s look at them more carefully.

1. Leiter dismisses this first claim as too simplistic, and as problematic for its exclusion of phenomenology. (He does, I think, unfairly overlook the general simplification of claims that takes place in the interview format.) Whether or not the claim excludes phenomenology is debatable (it certainly does not exclude all phenomenologists), but no one characterization is likely to capture everyone we call continental. While Husserl may not have been primarily concerned with emancipation, a number of his later followers (e.g., Levinas, Derrida, Sartre) clearly were. In French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Garry Gutting (a philosopher Leiter seems to respect) argued that philosophy in France during this period (a rather large chunk of continental philosophy) becomes a philosophy of freedom, which is suspiciously like emancipation. As for the Germans, I hope we can agree that emancipation was (and is) the major concern of Critical Theory. It is less clearly so in the case of German phenomenology and hermeneutics, but it is not obvious that all the thinkers in these traditions get left out (we’d have to do some work on figuring out the nuances of what “emancipation” could be—is Heidegger’s “authenticity,” for example, a kind of emancipation? What about Gadamer’s attempt to articulate our relationship to tradition through a merging of horizons?). Critchley’s claim, in any case, is by no means incredible overall.

2. What about the claim that continental philosophy largely comes out of problems raised by Kant’s Third Critique? I confess that, when I first read Critchley’s book, I found this claim somewhat odd (unfortunately Leiter does not mention Critchley’s other, quite cool, thesis there: that the analytic/continental distinction grows out of difference of sensibility historically present in the British mind, which Critchley illustrates through a look at Mill’s attitude to Bentham, on the one hand, and Coleridge, on the other). But it has grown on me, and I’d like to suggest that it is in fact quite plausible. Leiter remarks that,

Overcoming the dualisms of the Third Critique surely was an animating concern (among others) for some of the German Idealists, but it obviously was not for Nietzsche or for Marx. Hegel was a dead issue in German philosophy by the 1850s…and Schopenhauer's anti-Hegelian polemics informed a generation's perception of the mad system builder of Jena. What role "will to power" actually plays in Nietzsche's philosophy is, unbeknownst apparently to Critchley, actually a hotly debated scholarly topic, but there is no significant account of it on which it constitutes an "attempt" by Nietzsche to provide a "unifying principle" for the dualisms of the Third Critique. Assimilating Marx to this just-so story is even weirder, given Marx's spectacular hostility to the questions of metaphysics and epistemology that animated German Idealism

But this seems to miss the point. That German philosophers after 1850 may have rejected or lost interest in Hegel is neither here nor there—Critchley claims Kant, not Hegel, as the origin of the problem. Schopenhauer may have rejected Hegel, but he does identify the Will with the thing-in-itself, and I confess that I find it difficult to see how this might not be an attempt to resolve the dualisms we find in Kant. I would not wish to debate about Nietzsche with Leiter, who certainly knows the work much better than I do, but Nietzsche does seem to object to the idea of free will precisely because it creates a dualism, a separation of lightning from its flash. Leiter seems to think that Critchley means that continental philosophers in general adopted one particular approach to resolving Kantian dualisms; this, clearly, is false. Some attempted to assimilate practical norms to theoretical ones; others attempted the reverse (Henrich’s “The Concept of Moral Insight” gives a concise summary of these attempts in German Idealism). That is: the questions of whether the “unifying principle” must be theoretical or practical, and of whether the dualisms are genuine dualisms or false ones grounded on an underlying mistake, were part and parcel of the overall question of how the dualisms are to be unified.

Furthermore, Critchley certainly does not claim that all attempts to deal with the problems raised by Kant were metaphysical or epistemological attempts. As I just mentioned, some argued for the assimilation (in some way) of the theoretical to the practical. That Marx rejected all metaphysical and epistemological speculation that did not bear concretely on praxis does not mean that Marx belongs to an entirely different philosophical tradition from German Idealism, but that he develops a new notion of the practical in order to avoid the dualism. I do not believe that Critchley means that continental philosophers took Kant’s characterization of theoretical and practical knowledge at face value and then attempted to unify the two (that characterization would hardly be sufficient for any German Idealists, let alone 20th century thinkers). The search for a “unifying principle” may well have required both sides of the dualism to be redefined, or for the dualism to be rejected as an illusion. Any charitable reading of Critchley, or of German philosophy after Kant, seems to require such a recognition.

It should be clear, by now, that I have been interpreting the problem raised by Kant in a very general way as, essentially, a problem of the relation between the theoretical and the practical. This problem includes questions about which of these has priority, as well as questions about whether one might not simply be an expression of the other or, for that matter, whether both might not be expressions of some third category; any of these approaches would involve, in some way, producing a unifying principle of the sort Critchley refers to. Furthermore, it seems fairly clear that the relation between the theoretical and the practical does underlie a good deal of work in the continental tradition, including Heidegger (c.f. Gerold Prauss’s work on the topic), Gadamer, and a fair amount of Husserl’s later work. Moreover, the fact that in much of the tradition the practical has emerged victorious can be tied to the earlier claim about the concern with emancipation: the prioritizing of praxis over theory is a kind of emancipation, because what is in question is our praxis, our role in constructing theory and epistemology.

If we assume that Critchley meant that continental philosophers were concerned explicitly with the problems of Kant's Third Critique and in precisely the form in which Kant raised those problems, then he is of course wrong. But if he means that a major concern of much of the continental tradition was to address the division between theory and practice—a division that in Kant first became a fundamental problem for philosophy—we might wonder whether he is far off the mark.

Finally, let me add that I agree with Leiter on one point: there is no such thing as a continental tradition, but rather a range of different traditions, which I think ended up being lumped together when one tradition—that emanating from the Vienna Circle—became a dominant tradition against which all the others were defined. But this does not mean that the various thinkers in the various continental traditions might not have some similarities. We might recall that most French philosophers in the last century studied at the same place; those who were contemporaries often studied with the same people (particularly, some slightly idiosyncratic Hegel scholars) and knew each other well. Some continuity of thought among them therefore seems likely. As for Germany, most were influenced (positively or negatively) by Neo-Kantianism and, a little later, by Heidegger. Husserl, Hegel, and Marx were also major influences on large contingents. In any case, back on the Leiter/Critchley topic and the thought of Critchley's book that Leiter did not address: that the analytic/continental divide is not a "natural category," but an invention of the British mind. This, too, might suggest some need for charity in reading what Critchley has to say about the continental tradition (singular).

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Do Babies have Concepts?

Or are they just a jumbled garble of sensations lacking any purported intentional or representational content? Or something in between?

I recently found myself in a discussion defending the thesis that cuddly babies and cute puppies and fuzzy gorillas do not have concepts. Denying that they have concepts of course a fortiori denies that they have beliefs, and thus anything like knowledge, and further, anything like a world-view. I'm not sure that I'm convinced by my own cobbled-together argument, but here is the core of it:

Let's admit that babies and doggies have perceptual capacities that allow them to discriminate among and, in some loose sense, to classify objects in their environment. A dog, I was told, being trained not to poop in the living room at home, will not poop in the living room of a neighbor's house. The lesson here is that the dog recognizes certain salient and genearl features common to living rooms. What could this 'recognition of general salient features' be other than something like recognition according to the concept 'living room'? Similarly, babies 'know' that it is mommy or daddy who is holding them, not someone else.

I don't deny any of this. I am more skeptical about the baby than about the dog (the baby, I can well imagine, is just reponding in some phylogenetically appropriate way to a range of feel-good mommy-and-daddy stimuli; it is not recognizing anything 'as' anything; it coos and caws and gurgles just like I would if you tickled my tummy). The question, however, is whether this discriminating, loosely classificatory capacity enjoyed by infants and monkeys and canines really amounts to something we should call a concept.

First off, to say this seems to commit one to the position that concepts make sense outside of propositional content and propositional attitudes. It is, in effect, to assume the buliding-block semantics Wittgenstein criticized in Philosophical Investigations. Thus, to accept that babies have concepts is to deny, in some important respect, holism. Of course many would like very much to do so, but it is at least problematic.

Secondly, as long as one does accept the Wittgensteinian position, and accepts therefore either a truth-conditional or verificationist semantics, the thesis seems wholly implausible. For in this case it is impossible to individuate and identify conceptual contents outside of the relevant propositional structures and attitudes in which they play a role. In other words, anything like a concept must be defined by some specficiable function it is to play in a propositional structure, and this in turn is something to which a truth predicate applies. Either purported baby-concepts are defined by a propositional role or not. If so, then one is ascribing more than concepts, but also propositions, and thus propositional attitudes and hence beliefs to babies. If not, then can one make sense of the idea of applying a truth-predicate to one of these 'concepts'? Can these concepts be false?

Thirdly, if one does not adopt the Wittgensteinian theory, then it seems that one has to adopt some version of mentalese, and this is problematic for all the reasons Quine and Davidson and Sellars, et. al., have been saying it is problematic for over fifty years.

In short, I guess I was arguing that one can admit that something has the capacity to discriminate, classify, and in some loose snese, recognize objects, without needing to say that such a capacity requires positing concepts. Concept capacity, I would say, should be reserved for those beings able to form true or justified beliefs about itself, its environment, or others. I'm sure what to call what it that babies and animals have or can do, but its probably not concepts or conceptual capacities.

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Externalism and Self-Knowledge

Several items I’ve been doting upon recently concern incompatibilism. Incompatibilism is the thesis that a priori self-knowledge and externalism are incompatible. A priori self-knowledge would be knowledge of the content of an occurrent mental state that I can obtain simply by reflecting upon that state, without the need to examine my cultural or natural environment. Externalism is the idea that the content of at least some of my mental states is a function of the environment I happen to be in, whether I know it or not; ie. English speakers have for centuries been referring to water, but only in the last century or so have we been in any position to say meaningfully just what it is that we are referring to when we refer to water. If externalism is true, then one could not have knowledge about the content of one’s occurrent mental state without consulting one’s environment. Thus a priori self-knowledge--the idea that one could have such knowledge without such consultation--is incompatible with externalism for at least some thoughts.

Let me first get rid of the ‘for at least some thoughts’ qualifier. If externalism is true about the meaning of ‘at least some thoughts,’ it probably needs to be true for all thoughts. In order for this not to be the case, one would have come up with criteria delimiting contents that could be known simply by reflecting upon them from those which could be known only through consultation with the environment. For reasons that I won’t get into now, I find this to be unlikely.

Back to the main argument: the problem with semantic externalism is that, if true, one cannot tell for sure what one is thinking without consulting the environment. Am I thinking about water or twater? Well, it depends on the world in which I happen to be. I may believe that I am thinking about water, only subsequently to discover that I’m actually on Twin Earth and therefore that I’m really thinking about twater. Such would be the case for all of my own beliefs about what I am thinking. Without some sort of empirical investigation into the world that I am thinking about, I might not know what I am thinking at all. That’s weird.

In my previous post I said that I would apply McDowell’s argument for the intrinsic intentionality of mental states to the issue of incompatibilism. Here goes. When it comes to knowing what I mean, there surely are more options than these:

(a) I know directly and apriori the meaning of my thought.
(b) I can discover the meaning of my thought only through empirical investigation, by discovering the relevant features of my environment that function as the meaning-relevant truth-conditions of that thought.

Much of the dispute between compatibilism and incompatibilism assumes that these are the two options. This is greatly restrictive.

Consider that I am thinking about the square root of two. A cursory familiarity with number theory let’s me know that I really have no firm understanding what I mean when I think the square root of two. That rules out (a). But for definitional reasons, there is no empirical field to be had where I could venture out to ‘discover’ what the world holds in regard to this thought. This rules out (b). I rather have to think through my thought. And this is not just the case with strange thoughts like the square root of two. For in fact, I would say that we very rarely are completely clear on just what it is that we are thinking or meaning. For further proof, just consider this question: are you happy?

This then is the problem with the dispute over incompatibilism: it is the assumption that ‘reflection’ or ‘introspection’ is a sort of looking inward in just the same way that seeing is a ‘looking outward.’ But this is a bad analogy. And this is McDowell’s point: if thoughts are intrinsically intentional, that means that they are intrinsically ‘deep.’ This is a metaphorical way of putting his insight that the ‘contents’ of our thoughts are not something that, once clear on, we have the further burden of comparing to the world; for the content of our thinking just is the world. I think that this is clear once we disabuse ourselves of our Cartesian prejudices.

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Are Mental States Intrinsically Intentional?

Discussing the problem of reference in his book on Husserl and Frege, Michael Dummett complains that for Husserl “the intentionality of mental acts was so axiomatic…that he perceived no necessity to demonstrate it in particular cases.” (Origins of Analytic Philosophy, Chapter 6, p55). Thus, whereas Frege developed a sophisticated if flawed theory of saturation in order to account for the meaningfulness of partial or incomplete expressions, Husserl--taking it for granted that any meaningful expression intrinsically enjoyed objective reference--failed even to problematize the issue. Since every thought, including partial thoughts, is intentional, and all intentional states have directness or reference (Bedeutung), there is no need to account for the specific reference of partial acts.

Dummett’s right. Husserl did take it for granted that mental acts are intrinsically and primitively intentional. I’m not going to argue here over whatever implications this might have for a Husserlian theory of reference (although Dummett is wrong that Husserl never saw this as a problem). I would like instead to consider the more fundamental gripe: can we assume that mental states are intrinsically intentional?

On the one hand, it seems obvious that we should. For what would it mean to speak about a belief, or perception, or desire that ignored what that belief, perception or desire were about. If we cannot think of what a belief, perception or desire would be like without it being about something—without it being intentional—then this is probably a good indication that mental states like beliefs, desires and perceptions are intrinsically (even ‘axiomatically’) intentional.

On the other hand, as Putnam points out, there’s a strong whiff of magical thinking somewhere in here. In that great Intro article of lore, “Brains in a Vat,” Putnam asks, suppose that the tracks of an ant happen to spell out WINSTON CHURCHILL, would this mark mean Winston Churchill? Certainly not by itself. But if marks and noises do not meaning anything ‘in themselves,’ what could it be, other than some magical mystery property, about thoughts (or brain states) such that they are intrinsically representational, ie intentional?

Putnam’s answer we know is that no mental state as such is intrinsically representational; there is no way to determine what a state represents simply from of features intrinsic to that state. The famous Twin Earth Gedankenexperiment is directed at precisely this point. What matters rather is how that state stands vis-à-vis its environment, and specifically, the causal lineage of that state in terms of its environment.

McDowell I think has an interesting response to this, one which, if plausible, lends support to Husserl. In “Putnam on Mind and Meaning,” McDowell argues that Putnam is led to deny an intrinsic intentionality to mental states because he sticks to a false dilemma regarding the following two claims: a) to know what a mental state means (represents) is wholly a matter of knowing about the subject’s mind; and b) that meaning determines extension. Since, as the Twin Earth Gedankenexperiment shows, two subject’s can be qualitatively indistinguishable by what we know from (a) but differ according to (b), Putnam thinks that we are forced to abandon (a) if we want to retain (b).

However, this is only because of Putnam’s unstated commitment to a psychologically “narrow” interpretation of (a), that is, the idea that a mental state...

“must in itself consist in the presence in the mind of an item with an intrinsic nature characterizable independently of considering what it represents.”

Now, as McDowell emphasizes, this surely is a phenomenologically inaccurate rendering of what it means to be in a particular mental state. For it simply is not the case that, when I reflect upon the contents of my mental states all I find are sense-data, images, soundings or sensations. When I reflect, for instance, on the sound of dripping water, it requires a quite radical phenomenological conversion to consider that state simply as a sound, and not as the representing of dripping water.

McDowell's riposte to Putnam's false dilemma is to point out that the latter unjustifiably analogizes the representational powers of symbols (etchings and soundings) with the representational powers of mental states. Surely symbols do obtain their representational powers via surrogation, which is why we can describe them without reference to what they are about. But we cannot similarly do so with mental states as such, because they do enjoy their representational powers not by surrogation but intrinsically.

I think that the lesson to draw from these comments is that for too long the burden of proof has been placed upon those who, like Husserl and McDowell, want us to assume from the start that mental states are intrinsically intentional. The burden must be the other way around. If we both find it difficult if not impossible to understand clearly what a mental state might be without reference to what that state represents, and if in order to do so we must adopt a position that is quite phenomenologically artificial and, to be frank, inaccurate, then surely the problem ought to be placed upon those who insist that this is the natural place to begin. In other words, while the idea that mental states are intrinsically intentional might seem just to be an assumption, it is one I think we are still pressed to maintain until a better reason is given for dropping it, and that better reason is still wanting.

In a following post I'll try to apply some brief lessons this insight have on the issue of the seeming incompatibility of externalism and self-knowledge.

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Morality and Death: Hobbesian Immoralism (I)

In an interesting move in his Leviathan, Hobbes does not simply derive the need for a commonwealth from his account of a state of nature; he imposes first an intermediary: natural law, or morality. What is especially odd is that, although the transition from the state of nature to the commonwealth requires only two laws of nature—to seek peace and to give away one’s right in order to make peace possible (though only under the appropriate circumstances)—Hobbes articulates a further host of them, concluding that the science of these laws “is the true and only moral philosophy.” He thus seems to be articulating—or clearly takes himself to be articulating—a moral system. I want to suggest instead that it is not a moral system at all. What Hobbes articulates is not a morality that differs from some other moral systems and yet finds its place among them but, quite simply, an anti-morality. He is, in other words, the arch immoralist.

To avoid confusion from the start, I am not saying that Hobbes is an immoralist because he grounds moral laws in something heteronomous or prudential, or because he approaches morality from an empiricist standpoint. Many others have done similarly—Hume, Mill, and Aristotle, just to name a few. But none of them are immoralists. What makes Hobbes an immoralist is not just his consequentialism, but the specific end of that consequentialism, an end that is not just contingently opposed to morality, but is opposed to its very essence: the preservation of one’s own life.

But let’s be charitable now. Hobbesian morality involves natural laws, which right reason discovers as a means to our ends. But he stresses in this connection that we do not all have the same ends. In fact, the diversity of goods and evils among humanity is an important part of his argument:

Good and evil are names that signify our appetites and aversions, which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men are different (XV)

This, in fact, is why the state of nature is a state of war: we all want different things, and in the state of nature every individual has his or her own, individual good and evil. This is bound to lead to conflicts. Through some extra steps, which we need not go into, the diversity of individual goods and evils is precisely the reason why the state of nature is a state of war. And, in fact, following the passage just quoted, Hobbes does derive the need for peace directly from this diversity of goods and evils. We might thus question whether Hobbesian morality has one given end. Furthermore, his morality appears heteronomous, but not at all immoralistic. But this is of course not the whole story.

The extra step occurs to us when we ask not simply why the diversity of human goods leads to a state of war, but—as if the answer were not already clear—why the state of war itself is such a bad thing and should be overcome. Moral precepts, or natural laws, are the rules that reason discovers as means to escaping the state of nature, but the need to escape the state of nature, and the fact that this need is a need for all human beings, is grounded in the fact that, ultimately, all human beings really do have the same end, the same ultimate good and evil. Hobbes’s moral framework is, in other words, aimed to be universal. The diversity of individual goods does not mean that morality is reducible to particular individual appetites; rather, this diversity is the reason why moral laws must have a universality. So what is such a universal law?

A law of nature, lex naturalis, is a precept, or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same, and to omit that by which he thinketh it may be best preserved

[These laws] are but conclusions or theorems concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defence of themselves

In other words, although human beings do have a diversity of ends, the problem with this diversity is precisely that that diversity leads to a consequence—war—which opposes another end that we all share: the preservation of our lives. It is clear that Hobbes defines morality as a system of principles dictated by right reason given the purpose of preserving one’s own life. This, of course, is Hobbes’s attempt to account for the universality of moral laws: If all human beings by nature want to preserve their own lives, then the prudential principles that best lead to such preservation are universal principles. As I will discuss in the next post, Hobbes focuses on the wrong aspect of morality: what is crucial is not simply its universality (which may, after all, be contingent), but the necessity of its universality, which is why morality must be not prudential but unconditioned. This is not in itself enough to show that Hobbes is an immoralist, but we can best show this by looking at what is entailed in the idea of an unconditioned morality.

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Philosophical Approaches and their Consistentcy with the History

I have occasionally seen philosophers make the claim that the analytic approach to philosophy is consistent with the way philosophy has historically been done. With this, I wholeheartedly agree. But I object to a further implication often drawn from this claim, i.e., that the analytic approach is more consistent with the history than continental approaches. That claim, I think, is simply false. My point, however, is not that some other approach, perhaps some continental approach, is instead more consistent. It is that both approaches are consistent with the way philosophy has been done historically, though perhaps not in the same way. Whether or not one thinks a particular approach is so consistent depends on the presuppositions with which one approaches the history of philosophy, presuppositions that are themselves the presuppositions inherent in one’s approach. Thus, any claim about the superiority of one or another approach to philosophy vis à vis the history of philosophy is likely to be simply circular.

A point central to hermeneutics: understanding requires presuppositions or “prejudices” (as Gadamer calls them). When I read a text, I already have some pre-formed ideas about what a text of this kind is supposed to be saying. I will thus interpret and evaluate the text in accordance with how well it does what I think it is supposed to do. If I am trained to think of philosophy as geared towards clear and precise arguments, I will likely find that the great figures in the history of philosophy have excelled at making clear and precise arguments (though I might be forced to assume that some historical elements—like Plato’s recourse to myth in the middle of an argument—are features extraneous to philosophy and rest on a confusion of that subject with another, such as religion). The presence of bias isn’t necessarily truth-distorting: the great figures really were interested in making clear arguments! But that may not be the only thing they were interested in doing.

Looking at some of the great philosophers in the history, we might note that they were in fact interested not only in making arguments, but specifically in making arguments for the correctness of a certain framework of thought, or way of seeing the world. Plato did not simply attack particular theses of Parmenides or Heracleitus: he argued that the world could not be properly grasped in its completeness either as a static unity or as a perpetual flux. Hume rejected all claims to non-experiential knowledge and suggested committing everything else to the flames. Kant, as is well-known, attempted to reconcile rationalism with empiricism, limiting the pretensions of each side to exhaustive and true knowledge of the world. These are, of course, not the only figures we find in the history of philosophy, and it is certainly false that the entire history contains nothing but attempts to articulate an overarching system or framework; to claim that would itself be an error induced by a certain set of pre-suppositions. My point is far more modest: the way philosophy has historically been done cannot be fully described by either perspective.

That articulating an overall framework of thought is a goal of many figures in the history of philosophy is implied by Peter Strawson’s distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics, since both types of metaphysics aim at setting up a framework of thought or way of seeing the world, though they do this in different ways. John Rawls wrote that

one of the benefits of studying historical texts—and of trying to get a sense of the writer’s view as a whole—is that we come to see how philosophical questions can take on a different cast from, and are indeed shaped by, the scheme of thought from within which they are asked. (1)

But few simply made arguments from within a pre-given “cast of thought”—rather, philosophers have generally tried to argue for the superiority of a particular cast of thought over others—a claim with which, I take it, Rawls would be in agreement.

If we look at some of the 20th century thinkers who have not belonged to the analytic tradition, we find that this concern—the concern with addressing our cast of thought—frequently takes precedence over argument. This is not to say that Husserl, Heidegger, Foucault, Levinas, etc., do not have arguments or think arguments to be unimportant. That is far from true. But what defines their respective projects seems to me to be primarily the articulation of a particular scheme of thought. The arguments are usually made in this context and with this goal in mind, which is why—when taken out of context—they often do not even look like arguments at all. I do not want to imply, on the other hand, that analytic philosophers are conversely uninterested in our overall schema or cast of thought—many certainly are, and most seem to me to be concerned to articulate at least a segment of our cast of thought. But this strikes me as being a secondary concern—what is primary is the laying out of arguments for a specific regional problem, and the “big picture” often follows as a secondary concern arising from the combination of these regional solutions.

My point, as I’ve stressed, is not to insist on either the superiority of one approach over the other, nor is it to suggest that one is more consistent with the way philosophy has been carried out historically than the other, and it is certainly not to provide a new way to see the tired issue of the analytic/continental divide. It is only to point out that neither side can legitimately claim to be more consistent with the history of philosophy. Anyone who cares about maintaining such consistency, furthermore, would do well to look carefully both to the arguments and their framework.

(1) John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 17.

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Evil and Akrasia in the Context of Authenticity

Davidson claimed to have been the first to separate the problem of weakness of will, or akrasia, from the moral context in which the problem is traditionally taken up. He is right to make this separation, though it is a separation that needs to be carried out consistently. Davidson’s interest is in separating out akrasia as a distinctive problem for philosophy of action. But it seems equally important from the standpoint of moral philosophy to separate the problem of akrasia from that of evil. Akrasia is not equivalent to evil, and here I want to suggest a way of distinguishing the two in a vaguely Heideggerian language.

Heidegger characterizes our being as a being thrown into the world into the midst of pre-given possibilities. Some of these possibilities we will live through; others we will bypass entirely. Some we will take up as authentic, as genuinely our own. Others we will see as foreign to our selfhood. Akrasia seems to me to involve acting on possibilities that we are living inauthentically, but which are opposed to other, authentic possibilities. For example: Let us say that I am a student and see studying as the authentic possibility of my life. Occasionally, instead of studying, I go out clubbing and drink until 5 in the morning instead of getting any work done. Let us say (there is obviously no necessity in this) that I do not see this partying as authentically my own. In other words, I see a certain kind of behavior as defining of my self, as genuinely mine, and yet I am capable of taking up a behavior that I see as foreign to who I am, to my self, and to my will. How is this possible? This, I take it, is a way of characterizing the akrasia problem.

But the problem of evil involves something different: it involves the question of how I might choose to act contrary to a law that I see as the law supremely binding on me. This law—and I am here using the Kantian model of morality—is a law that is genuinely my own insofar as I am a person. Sometimes I may be tempted to break this law, and I do so. It is, of course, possible that what is involved in my breaking the moral law is nothing but a weakness of the will; in cases of that kind we have to look for an explanation along the lines mentioned in the previous paragraph. But the more interesting question of evil is that of an evil that is specifically chosen as evil; that is, I am both aware of my obligation according to the moral law and of the fact that the choice I am making explicitly violates that law. Yet at the same time I make this choice, and do so not through any weakness, but in a fully intentional way.

The way to characterize the second problem, I think, is by seeing it as a conflict not between an authentic and an inauthentic possibility, but as a conflict between two authentic possibilities. Both the moral law and the incentive to deviate from it belong to my self. This seems like a correct characterization of moral conflict: the difficulty is not simply that I am not strong enough to act on my judgment of what is morally right, but that I myself have made the other incentive powerful enough to oppose the moral law. I have done this by making the incentive into an authentic possibility for me. Kant does sometimes imply that moral conflict boils down to a case of akrasia, which is why he defines virtue as the strength to resist non-moral incentives. But it is also clear that, for Kant, we are responsible for having chosen those non-moral incentives as powerful enough to need resisting. That the incentives opposed to the moral law are, in fact, incentives we have made our own is the pre-condition for a theory of virtue as strength.

Obviously this rough account is not sufficient to explain moral conflict: we will need, among other things, an explanation of why morality should be seen by us as authentic at all. My goal here was only to suggest a framework within which akrasia and evil can, I think fruitfully, be distinguished. Only by seeing evil as involving a choice in favor of a certain view of one’s own self, rather than a simple fleeing from the self-conception implied by the moral law, can we start to understand the sort of responsibility involved in a violation of morality.

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Ought and Can: What Implies the Implication?

The foremost question posed by libertarians to compatibilists is how a thoroughgoing determinism can leave room for moral responsibility. Another significant question, however, is how it can leave room for moral obligation, and what sort of obligation would be implied. One way to approach this question is through Frankfurt's rejection of the principle of alternative possiblities (PAP) as an obstacle in the way of making responsibility compatible with determinism. As David Widerker notes (1), it remains an open question whether Frankfurt’s rejection of (PAP) requires “renouncing the Kantian thesis that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’, i.e.

(K) An agent S has a moral obligation to perform (not to perform) an act A only if S has it within his power to perform (not to perform) A.”

Whatever the virtues of this debate, it is actually very clear that Frankfurt cannot accept the Kantian thesis (though he claims he can) for the simple reason that (K) is very obviously not a correct representation of that thesis. No understanding of the English (or German) language, however charitable the interpretation, is sufficient to yield (K) as an accurate restatement of the claim that “ought” implies “can.” Instead, as the wording of the implication clearly implies, the thesis is:

(K1) If an agent S has a moral obligation to perform (not to perform) an act A, then S has it within his power to perform (not to perform) A.

Of course the two are logically equivalent, so that (K1) entails (K): if we can establish on independent grounds that S cannot perform (not perform) A, then we cannot reasonably say that S has an obligation to perform (not perform) A. For example, if there were a species of beings that were rational but literally could not avoid constantly and intentionally killing each other (so, only a little different from human beings), then they could not have an obligation not to kill each other. So doesn’t this just mean that (K1) really boils down to (K)? I don’t think so. A Kantian might question the coherence of any such thought experiment, and do so on the following Kantian grounds: to be under an obligation is to be a rational being for which reason is practical. But if reason is practical, then it follows that we are able to act on it. (K) and (K1) differ precisely in their emphasis: Kant is not trying to derive obligation from ability (an “ought” from an “is”), but to show that obligation has implications for how we must see ourselves; more specifically, for what abilities we must attribute to ourselves regardless of lack of any possible other evidence for them. This, obviously, is a very different project. Logical equivalency does not guarantee identity of meaning.

(K1) is intimately tied to a project of giving what may be seen as a libertarian spin to freedom: it is determined entirely on the basis of our obligations, and established despite the truth of determinism (which also makes it completely different from any libertarian theories around today that I am aware of). Thus we come to Frankfurt, who happens to be a compatibilist. As a compatibilist, he can accept (K). There is nothing incoherent about accepting both that (1) our abilities place limits on our obligations and (2) the extent of our abilities can be fully ascertained within the scope of the natural sciences (whether deterministic or not). But (K1) meshes only with (1); it implies—strictly implies—that (2) is at least possibly false. It follows that Frankfurt would have to reject (K1). Would he have to do it on the basis of his rejection of (PAP)? I don't see how, except insofar as his rejection of (PAP) comes with other compatibilist assumptions.

(1) “Frankfurt on ‘Ought implies Can’ and Alternative Possibilities” in Analysis, Vol. 51, No. 4. (Oct., 1991), p. 223.

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Kant on Freedom and Evil

An argument still frequently raised against Kant’s theory of freedom goes as follows: Kant seems to have two conceptions of freedom, which may be termed, following Sidgwick, the rational and the neutral conception. According to the rational conception, freedom involves acting on the moral law. It is only when we act on the moral law, the idea goes, that we are actually free of the determination of our will by natural desires. Rational freedom, then, seems necessary in order to account for our ability to act morally. The neutral conception, on the other hand, involves our choosing between good and evil; that is, knowing the law, we choose to act on it or to willingly violate it. Without this conception of freedom it becomes impossible to blame agents for their immoral actions.

The standard criticism (formulated in some way or other by Reinhold, Sidgwick, and Prauss) is that these two conceptions clearly can’t work together: either we are only free when we follow the moral law, in which case we cannot freely choose to violate it and are never responsible for immoral actions, or we are always free, in which case there seems to be no internal connection between freedom and the moral law. Nelson Potter and, more recently, Henry Allison, among others, have pointed out in response that Kant actually defines freedom as the ability to follow the moral law, which means that one can be free without ever actually acting morally, so long as one is capable of acting morally. But the misunderstanding (and criticism) keep coming back, and to address them I want to look at a passage in the Metaphysics of Morals, where Kant deals explicitly with the problem (or at least as explicitly as he ever deals with the major problems) and suggest two important consequences of this passage.

The sentence in question reads:

die Freiheit nimmermehr darin gesetzt werden kann, daß das vernünftige Subjekt auch eine wider seine (gesetzgebende) Vernunft streitende Wahl treffen kann (6:226)

Roughly:

freedom can never be located in this, that the rational subject can also make a contentious choice against his (lawgiving) reason

If we keep in mind the context—Kant is talking about the definition of freedom—this isn’t a particularly strange claim. In fact, I want to insist that it is much closer to plain common sense than to the wacky metaphysics of which Kant is sometimes accused.

Here is the first point: Kant is talking about the rational subject acting against his reason. It makes sense that freedom—as an ability of the subject—cannot be defined in this way. Why? Consider an ordinary object, like a chair. We may roughly define a chair as an object for sitting on. The definition is perhaps incomplete, but it would be a very strange mistake to complete the definition by adding that it is also possible not to sit in a chair. It is of course true that there are chairs in the world in which no one is sitting at the moment, but that is not a good reason to define a chair as an object for sitting on or not sitting on. The first part belongs to the definition of a chair, while the second part belongs to a description of how chairs are sometimes actually used in practice and has nothing to do with the definition. By adding the second clause we do not simply confuse the definition of a chair, but we in fact ensure that we are not giving a definition of it at all. “An object for sitting on or not sitting on,” you see, would be a description that does not apply in any essential way to chairs: it would also cover tables, beds, floors, elephants, other people, etc. Similarly, it would be very odd to define the freedom of a rational subject as the subject’s ability to act in accord with or in opposition to its reason. To be rational means that one’s freedom lies in the exercise of that rationality, not its abandonment.

But now let’s look at the second point: In parenthesis, Kant puts the important word “lawgiving” before the word “reason.” Why is this important? Because it seems to refute the claim by some prominent analytic Kantians (see, for example, Korsgaard’s argument in “Skepticism About Practical Reason”) that immorality is just a species of irrationality. It is not. There is, of course, something irrational in violating one’s reason. But it is not as obvious that there is something similarly irrational in violating one’s lawgiving reason. Kant is, in other words, tipping his hat to Hume’s famous quip:

‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my little finger. (Treatise of Human Nature, Bk. 2, 3, iii)

There is nothing contrary to reason in this. There is, however, something contrary to lawgiving reason. But this sort of contradiction is not a logical one: it is a contradiction between the standards set by reason, on one hand, and evil on the other.

Kant never denies that we can freely choose to act contrary to the moral law, and he does not claim that it is irrational to do so. This is implied by his account: if evil were nothing more than a species of irrationality, then we would not be responsible for our evil actions any more than we are responsible for an innocent mistake in multiplication. This raises a new difficulty, of course: how can we understand the freedom of a rational being as allowing for action contrary to lawgiving reason? I will not address the problem here. My goal has, rather, been to deal with two common misreadings by pointing out, first, that Kant’s definition of freedom in terms of the moral law does not, in fact, rule out the possibility of freely acting contrary to the law and, second, that action contrary to the law is nevertheless freely chosen and not simply an error of reasoning. The problems that remain with the conception of freedom, I believe, must thus be addressed through the problem of evil.

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