Actions, Consequences, and the Phenomenology of Responsibility

There is an all too common view according to which we can only be responsible for actions that we have chosen in some sense freely, or autonomously. If the consequences of our actions matter, it is because we were, or should have been, aware of those consequences. On this view, the consequences of our actions make a difference to our responsibility only insofar as we can or could have foreseen those consequences. This is the picture, then, on which free will or autonomy has primacy; responsibility, in turn, is grounded in it.* I want to argue for a different picture, one according to which the phenomenology of responsibility is intrinsically such that the autonomy or freedom of the agent with respect to an action depends in large part on her future estimation of the rightness or wrongness of its consequences. A deliberative decision—at the time it is made—is largely arbitrary; if it were not, deliberation would have been unnecessary. It ceases to look arbitrary only from the standpoint of one’s future self.

There are doubtless many questions to raise with regard to the condition that we must know or be able to know the consequences of our actions in advance. And there are questions, too, about the related issue of our conative attitudes—how deep must our desires go, how “wholeheartedly” need we accept them, to be held responsible for the execution of action on their basis? Something about this sort of approach certainly seems right. What I want to suggest is that what is right about it, however, is not that there is some unified entity, or even some coherent set of volitional attitudes and beliefs that constitutes the agency necessary for responsibility. That is, I want to question both the common libertarian premise about free will and the common compatibilist one. The libertarian often claims that to be responsible, an agent must directly (or indirectly) and indeterministically choose to perform an action. The compatibilist typically looks for something less demanding, namely, that the action be caused by agency-constituting features, such as rational deliberation, endorsement, cohering attitudes, or desires with which we are fully satisfied.

To say that the compatibilist approach is “less demanding”, of course, is not entirely right. It is only less demanding in the sense that it does not require us to rely on the idea that (1) some events can be caused indeterministically, (2) that the indeterminism in physical processes somehow corresponds to an indeterminism in our deliberations, and in such a way (3) that it is primarily the deliberation, and not the physical indetermistic causation that gives rise to the choice of action. This picture is likely too complicated to be true; and, moreover, it relies on assumptions about the physical world that are, given our current state of knowledge, probably false. In any case, the compatibilist has a further argument: that indeterministic decisions are necessarily arbitrary in such a way that agential responsibility is undermined.

To avoid this last problem, compatibilists typically try to fortify our choices with the aforementioned agency-constituting features. But this, too, ends up being a bit too demanding. I think psychology is slowly uncovering the unlikelihood of our actions being caused through such coherent dispositions; but here I want to pose a phenomenological challenge. It requires noticing that questions of responsibility for an action—and so the accompanying questions of whether the agent was free or autonomous in performing the action—come up only in contexts (sometimes, but not always, moral) where the rightness or wrongness of an action is at issue.

Here is an example: I am taking an exam. I am facing a particularly tough problem, where two answers strike me as possibly right, but I am not sure which one is right and don’t have the time to work it out further. I pick one on a hunch. If all goes well, and the answer is right, I may never think about it at all; or, in thinking about it, I might believe that due to my understanding of the material, my hunches tend to be good ones. But what if I end up getting the problem wrong? I will then blame myself for my stupidity, and for making a bad choice where I should have known better. Although my choice was, for all intents and purposes, arbitrary, whether I praise myself or feel guilt over the bad decision I made depends on the outcome. I would suggest that, in more or less complicated ways, the vast majority of our decisions are of exactly this kind.

A more complex example: I am largely set on graduate school. But the thought that it would be nice to have a decent life—one that has some redeeming features other than the occasional published paper—nags at me; law school becomes a competing option. We can sketch out such a conflict in any number of ways. Perhaps I have different beliefs about what would constitute a good life and different desires regarding my future. If I cannot adjudicate between these sets of beliefs and desires, then my resulting decision is—take your pick—as autonomous as it could be (given the circumstances, i.e., a lack of wholehearted identification with one of the options) and at the same time entirely arbitrary: it could have gone either way. To make this more of a challenge to compatibilist approaches: Let us say that I am wholehearted about going to graduate school; something nags at me, though, urging me to apply to law schools as well. This nagging feeling may appear to me as entirely external—as an affect that I do not identify with—but I humor it and apply anyway. If, in the end, I do not get into any decent graduate schools, but do get into a great law school, it is pretty easy to decide what to do.

So what of this situation? On what grounds can we reasonably say that the decision to go to law school was not autonomous? You will perhaps have guessed that I think there are no such grounds. Imagine that, ten years later, I am miserable with the legal world and wish I could go back and remake my decision to get into it in the first place. Why did I apply to those law schools? Why didn’t I do what my heart told me to do? Why didn’t I stick with the attitudes that defined my “real self”? On the other hand, imagine that, although I would have preferred graduate school, I quickly get into law school—I enjoy having definite problems to solve, clear rules to work with, easily demarcated rules of competition, and the high-paid lifestyle that results. And here I might be glad that I acted autonomously, followed my real self, and went to law school instead of indulging in a post-adolescent intellectualist fantasy of academia, however central that fantasy once seemed to who I am. In evaluating my responsibility for my choice, then, I now look at it not from the perspective of a conflicted self making a largely arbitrary decision, but from the standpoint of my current situation, one in which my satisfaction or dissatisfaction with my choice—its rightness or wrongness—has shaped my perception of what my real, autonomous self should have done.

I suggest, then, that the currently dominant structural theories of autonomy are largely false. There is no real self that is responsible for its decisions. The self responsible is, rather, the future self, the self that is a product of situations brought about as consequences of the initial decision. We cannot eliminate arbitrariness from our choices; we can make them autonomous only by looking back on them. One might, of course, object in the following way: this is a merely phenomenological critique. How we see or experience ourselves has, in the end, nothing to do with whether or not our choices are really the products of some coherent real self. To make this objection work, however, one would need to produce a notion of something like a real self, a coherence of our preferences, or identification with a desire that does not rest on an agent’s self-apprehension. It would be a notion of a choosing self that is understood independently of how this self experiences itself. And that such a picture could be coherent is dubious.

* Strawsonian accounts that base responsibility on our reactive attitudes are not immune from these considerations. Those reactive attitudes depend on our estimation of the agent’s intentions in performing the action for which we judge her. So even if we think that judgments of responsibility derive primarily from the framework of reactive attitudes we have toward others, these judgments still get their appropriateness from considerations about the agent's psychological profile.

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Are We Post-Moral?

For a while now I've been claiming to anyone who cares to listen that we live in a more or less post-moral age. I don't really have a developed argument, and in fact, I'm not even exactly sure what a 'post-moral age' means, but here's a brief attempt to explain.

I don't mean anything too profound by 'post moral.' For instance, I don't think that moral obligations have floated away, or that they have ceased to matter. For all I know, that may indeed be the case, but it's irrelevant to the notion I'm getting at. I also don't mean to suggest that the moral world has been supplanted by something newer, fresher or more 'authentic.' Again, this might be case, but it doesn't matter for my purposes. Finally, I am also not denying that many of us (although a decreasing number, I suspect) ask ourselves moral questions from time to time, perhaps even daily. Should I cheat on my taxes? Is it okay to distort my colleagues record in order to gain an advantage over her? Is it wrong for me to skip my friend's wedding for a vacation in Vegas? As I intend the term, it is perfectly consistent to recognize that people ask themselves questions like these but maintain that our world is post-moral.

I think I can best describe what I mean by 'post moral' by pointing out that few of us (post-moral persons) take our moral character or standing as something important and overriding in our lives. Becoming a moral person is not a task that, when suggested, most people recognize for themselves. Maybe I'm wrong about this. Maybe I'm projecting my own shoddy self-understanding on the world around me--but I don't think so. It seems to me rather that morality, to the extent that it is effective in the average person's life at all, operates as a constraint (however constructive) in the pursuit of goals. For example, Jones hopes to become a successful researcher, but believes that, morally, it is wrong to achieve this end by plagiarizing another colleagues work. It's not that Jones is just afraid that he might not get away with it; get away with it or not, he does not believe that it is right to plagiarize for the sake of self-advancement and to the injury of another person. But the point is that it never occurs to Jones that it is important to act this way because it is important to be a good person. Jones really has no interest in being a good person. He wants to be a successful researcher, but he recognizes that there are certain things one ought not do in the pursuit of that goal.

Now, I also realize that there are ends or projects that many of us work towards achieving, and to which some of us even dedicate our lives. Ending world hunger, helping displaced refugees, working to promote human and civil rights--these are all, in some sense, moral ends that lend purpose to many people's lives, and that many of us, to some extent at least, identify with. But again, it is completely compatible to work for such ends, even strenuously and with dedication, without concern for whether or not, in so doing, one is or is becoming a good person.

Alastair MacIntyre we know was all the rage for a while because he argued that some important moral knowledge--the importance of character and virtue, and habit--had been forgotten sometime on or about May, 1641. I'm not making this argument. I don't think that the desire to be a good person commits one to a virtue-theory of ethics. Kant is no virtue theorist, yet Kant certainly recognized that we ought, morally, try to be good persons. I'm just saying that while many of us worry about doing the right thing, few of us worry about being the right sort of person, and that this makes us 'post-moral.'

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Is There an Ethics of Belief?

Recently I’ve been coming across some thinkers promoting an ethics of belief. Initially the idea sounded a little strange to me: ethics concerns actions—intentions to act, dispositions to act, consequences of action—and beliefs matter ethically only insofar as they are relevant or involved in action, right? As I said, this was my initial reaction, and after some reflection, I still hold to it, although with an important caveat. So let me say what I think this notion gets right, and what it misses.

Take for example Colin McGinn’s claim that his atheism results in part from an ethics of belief. I’ll let him say why in his own words:

“It is often forgotten that atheism of the kind shared by Jonathan [Miller] and me (and Dawkins and Hitchens et al) has an ethical motive. Or rather two ethical motives: one is ethical repugnance at the cruelty, tyranny and oppression of organized religion over the course of human history; the other concerns the ethics of rational belief—how we are obliged to form our beliefs about the world. The first motive is familiar and needs no commentary from me. The second is less widely appreciated, but for some of us it is crucial to the whole discussion. We believe, as an ethical principle, that beliefs about what reality contains should always be formed on the basis of evidence or rational argument—so that “faith” is inherently an unethical way to form your beliefs.”

I will focus on the latter principle. McGinn asserts as a ethical principle of belief (formation and retention) that:

“beliefs about what reality contains should always be formed on the basis of evidence or rational argument”

Let’s call this principle ‘MG’. I see some problems with MG as stated. For one thing, it is too vacuous for serious universal application. Most theists, after all, claim that their belief is informed by serious evidence and argument. Thus, in an empty way, their beliefs satisfy MG. Another problem concerns the concepts of ‘evidence’ and ‘rational argument.’ What are we to make of these? By ‘rational argument’ are we committed to making as many of our beliefs as possible consistent with one another? If so, MG is surely too strong. Is it irrational, and therefore, unethical, for someone to be a dualist? As stated by Descartes, for instance, I take it as a truth of reason that dualism simply cannot be correct. Was Descartes—worse than wrong—immoral? By MG, it would seem so. A similar problem emerges with the notion of evidence. I’m not sure exactly what McGinn means by this term, but presumably he means something like verification, demonstration or proof. But many of our beliefs, especially the most interesting and profound ones, nevermake it to the stage where evidence in that sense applies. I, for instance, don’t think that a belief in God is a false belief—it is a confused belief. Most of the new atheists with whom McGinn aligns himself spend way too much time going straight away to arguments about why the belief is false, and skip over the really hard work of unpacking the confusions involved in the concept of God itself. Let me get personal for a moment and say why I think that one argument for the existence of necessary being is very hard to get around—it is one of Aquinas’ five proofs.

From nothing, nothing is caused. Something must always have existed if anything exists. This universe exists (assumed). Thus, something must always have existed, ie something exists necessarily.

Now, of course this is only a proof that something must necessarily exist, not that a personal God with intentions and an interest in human affairs exists. But so what? It is a theological claim, and even though I don’t believe it, I have a hard time saying why. Am I unethical? Not for this reason, I think.

We should also consider that for many of our beliefs we simply lack any decisive evidence or demonstration either way. Is it consistent with MG to form a belief on such matters anyway? For instance, should I believe that quantum mechanics is a correct description of reality? After all, we have yet to solve the puzzling fact of apparent particle-wave duality, and we still haven’t unified gravity with the electromagnetic forces. More importantly, we have no really good idea how this might be possible. Is it wrong to have beliefs on these matters, then? Perhaps McGinn would suggest that we append a rider to MG, such that in cases where sufficient evidence is lacking decisively for or against the truth of a belief, one ought to withhold judgment. Let’s call this MG’. Well, ok, but how do we apply MG’ to cases like the axiom of choice? Doing set theory requires that one take a stance on the axiom of choice--a 'leap of faith,' as it were--without any rational justification. Is this an example of the intrinsic conflict of goods in the domain of belief? Maybe, but this conclusion seems way overwrought.

Finally, what are we to do about counterfactual beliefs? Maybe there are some counterfactuals that we could exclude from reality, but surely not all of them. So what about someone’s belief that, had Napoleon not been defeated, then Germany would have democratized much earlier than it did? It’s surely fun to consider counterfactuals like this, and we can consider them knowledgably, but of course we really have no decisive way of determining their truth value. Again, is it immoral to believe a claim like this?

The fact is that most of our beliefs have no obvious actionable consequences, and because of this, I have a hard time thinking of them as ethical at all, and this in turn is why I think that my initial reaction is basically the right one. As of now, I can think of no morally sensitive consequence of either the belief that the universe is bounded or that it is infinite, and thus, this belief simply has no moral import. Now, we might suggest one further reworking of MG, to something like the following (MG’’):

Beliefs about what reality contains should always be formed on the basis of evidence or rational argument WHEN those beliefs potentially lead to morally sensitive consequences.

But this is just to say, again, and redundantly, that it is the actions or consequences that matter, not the belief per se. Suppose for instance that someone has a completely vacuous belief in a God—believing that some God exists, but who takes no interest whatsoever in human affairs and has prescribed no rules or norms. This belief, basically, is totally irrelevant to how one behaves and lives. It’s difficult for me to understand how such a belief could be moral or immoral at all--how one could be committing the 'sin of atheism' to believe it.

But let me conclude with my caveat. Despite all that I’ve said above, I do believe in a basically Kantian project of enlightenment, and this makes it requisite that I submit my moral and political beliefs to public, rational scrutiny and, when the public argument is persuasive, I ought, morally, to change my mind. So perhaps we could amend MG one final, less problematic way (MG’’’):

Beliefs about what reality contains should always be formed on the basis of evidence or rational argument WHEN those beliefs are morally or politically salient.

I have no problem with MG’’’, but I’m not sure that it says anything except that, insofar as beliefs are relevant to moral action or consequences, we have an obligation to ensure as best we can that those beliefs are, morally, right. But that’s obvious. I think. And again, this means that there is no such thing as a distinct ethics of belief; there is just ethics.

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Kant's Moral Psychology (III): Endorsement, Determinism, and Motives

In this series of posts I have been defending Kant’s moral psychology against Leiter and Knobe’s attack. Particularly, I have been contending that their target is not Kant at all: they are attacking the position of a naturalistic Kantian, but Kant himself was certainly no naturalist. In this post I want to wrap up the discussion by looking at three features important to Kant’s moral psychology: his view of determinism, the endorsement principle, and the role of the passions (or sensible motives) in moral action.

Let me review the main elements of L&K’s argument as it pertains to Kant. They first present findings that suggest a massive role for heredity in determining our moral behavior (p. 18), so already there is a big chunk of moral behavior that is not touched by our explicitly adopted moral principles. L&K then go on to cite studies that suggest in no uncertain terms that, first of all, the correlation between people’s beliefs and their behavior is fairly low. Second, in cases of correlation, it looks like usually the behavior determines the beliefs, and not the other way around (incidentally: I do think this is a fairly large problem for Velleman; I doubt it is a problem for Kant). And finally they take their parting shot: even though there may be a small number of people who act on the basis of consciously chosen principles, not all will be moral; conversely, there may be agents who look very moral, but don’t act on explicitly chosen beliefs. That is, there “may well be agents whose conduct otherwise manifests respect for the dignity and autonomy of other persons and comports with the categorical imperative,” but, if these agents do not act specifically on consciously chosen principles, they “lack the kind of motivation (e.g., respect for the moral law) Kant himself thought morally significant.” Consequently, a Kantian is “likely to have to treat as immoral a lot of apparently moral individuals because of the largely unrealistic demands of Kant’s moral psychology” (33). This is a web of tangles and poorly understood Kant.

And there is just a bit of distortion designed to make Nietzsche come out on top. Take, for example, the following: “Nietzsche puts forward the view that a person’s traits are determined, to a great extent, by factors (type-facts) that are fixed at birth” (15). (L&K slip immediately into showing how studies of heredity show Nietzsche to be right. But did Nietzsche talk about heredity and modern genetics? Or did he simply say that character is determined at birth?) If what Nietzsche says is just that our moral characters are determined at birth, then one might strangely enough discover that this notion is taken directly from Kant. Let us recall that Kant was a staunch determinist. Unlike contemporary determinists, Kant did not simply believe in the truth of determinism because the world just happens to look determined. Rather, Kant insisted that the world must look determined if there is to be a world at all: we can only perceive an event as the effect of some cause. So it is no wonder that Kant is heavily committed—and on stronger theoretical grounds than Nietzsche had—to the idea that our empirical character is determined by factors “that are fixed at birth.” So much for using heredity to make Nietzsche look more plausible than Kant.

What about the role of conscious beliefs? I have already indicated in the last post that Kant simply did not hold the view that the only moral action is action caused by consciously chosen principles—the principles involved (maxims) are rational, not psychological entities. But there is another confusion here to disentangle, namely, the confusion between that thesis and the idea (which, in keeping with contemporary convention, we might call “the endorsement thesis”) expressed in a clip from Paul Katsfanas that Rob Sica quoted to me in the original discussion at Leiter’s blog:

Contemporary philosophers often endorse a claim that has its origins in Locke and Kant: self-conscious agents are capable of reflecting on and thereby achieving a distance from their motives; therefore, these motives do not determine what the agent will do. Nietzsche’s drive psychology shows that the inference in the preceding sentence is illegitimate. The drive psychology articulates a way in which motives can determine the agent’s action by influencing the course of the agent’s reflective deliberations. An agent who reflects on a motive and decides whether to act on it may, all the while, be surreptitiously guided by the very motive upon which he is reflecting.

I don’t disagree with anything here (and I am very much looking forward to reading this paper). What I want to note, however, is that Kant would—in my view—agree with all of it (he probably would not have agreed with the part about Nietzsche, but mainly because he hadn’t read Nietzsche, the slacker!). Even though L&K seem to conflate the two issues, there is a difference between the idea that agents’ actions are determined by principles (which, as I’ve suggested, was not for Kant an empirical claim at all), and the very empirical claim that agents can achieve a distance from their motives and are thus not determined by them.

How are these two claims different? Well, simply put, the bit of empirical psychology that Kant employs in the second is just obvious: he does not say that we know our sensible motives don’t determine our actions, but only that they don’t directly determine our actions. And that seems hard to argue with. When your nose itches, you want to scratch it. But if you stop to think about it, you might, for whatever reason, decide not to scratch. Under some circumstances—for example, when you need both of your hands on the wheel in order to keep your car from spinning off the road into a deep ravine—you would even be very likely to resist the urge to scratch your nose if you thought about it at all. In other words, the thesis is just this: if I am aware of a motive, then I have a certain distance from it, and this means that the motive does not directly determine me to action. Of course some motives might determine us to action no matter how much we want to resist them; but insofar as we are thinking about what to do, the motives will do so surreptitiously, as Paul correctly notes. That is, our motives do not directly determine our actions, even though they might determine them indirectly. And certainly no research L&K cite speaks against this.

Actually, in keeping with the emphasis on determinism, it is worth remembering that Kant is explicit on the issue that only sensible motives can cause our actions. If the motives that caused our actions were not sensible ones, then actions would appear to us as uncaused. But then, for Kant, we could never experience them at all. There is a further issue here: are the motives that cause our actions moral ones? According to Kant, even at the level of empirical psychology we can never know our motives because we do not have perfect introspection. We can strive to be as moral as possible, and to always act on moral motives, but in the end we can never know whether in fact we have done so. Many think this is a failing in Kant; but it strikes me as a strength of his moral theory, one that too many contemporary moral philosophers overlook: agents who know that they are moral are likely to get complacent; agents who are striving to be moral but do not know whether they have ever succeeded are forced to retain moral humility.

But the issue of whether someone’s motivation is a properly moral one is thornier than this in Kant, and far thornier than L&K suggest. They use the example of a teacher who both cares about his students and believes that he ought to care about his students. And they take it as a given that, if the teacher’s inclination to care about his students causes his belief that he ought to (rather than vice versa), this is evidence that he is not a moral agent by Kant’s standards. But this is pure rubbish. What empirical test would L&K propose to determine whether the teacher’s inclination to care about his students is not itself the effect of the moral law working within him? At the empirical level, you would be insane to tell the teacher that he is an immoral agent. He may well be immoral if his motive is not a moral one, but that is not something you could possibly know. (Of course if it turned out that the teacher cares about his students a little too much, then you could be pretty sure that his motive isn’t driven by pure respect for the moral law. But in that case you probably wouldn’t be too likely to mistake the teacher for a moral agent in the first place.)

Of course there is another sense in which we could tell an apparently moral agent that he is actually immoral: if what we mean is that all human beings are immoral or, as the Christian doctrine goes, in Adam all have sinned. Something like this is indeed at work in Kant, for he does proclaim that (“due to the largely unrealistic demands of his moral psychology”) the human race is evil by nature. But nobody should go from that doctrine to going around telling people who hid Jews from the Nazis that, despite appearances, they are still evil. If this is what L&K are worried about, then their real worry is about the idea of a moral ideal that’s actually an ideal. That is: they’re really just seconding Bernard Williams’s rejection of the institution of morality. But that’s another argument, both for another time, and also not about the data on moral psychology.

Empirical moral psychology, in other words, is not the place at which one is likely to find effective tools against Kant or, at least, against Kant the philosopher as opposed to Kant the misinterpreted punching bag. It is also not the place where Nietzsche will likely come out on top without some editorial tweaking. Naturalists may be rightly (in their eyes) suspicious of Kant. But so long as there is any discipline of philosophy that is not fully reducible to psychology and physics, perhaps that had best be the domain where honest philosophers engage Kant’s ideas. Provided, that is, that honesty is a goal.

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Are You Preposthuman? If So, Are You a Simulant?

There are some people out there, many of them frighteningly intelligent, who look forward to the day when we humans are cared for by super-intelligent machines that we ourselves have created. These people are called transhumanists. They even have institutes--plural.

The really interesting philosophical question that this movement poses is, could there be anything more intelligent than a human being? I believe that the answer is no, but I’ll save that argument for later. Instead, I want to address a more quirky and fun speculation, put forward by Nick Bostrom, that we are all, more probably than not, simulants—that is, simulations run by some posthuman creature on a super-duper computer. In fact, it turns out that so long as you believe it likely that a posthuman civilization will develop someday, and also believe it likely that such a civilization will have an interest in simulating its ancestors, then you would be very irrational if you did not believe that you yourself were a simulant.

This ‘simulation argument’ can be stated quite simply. To begin with, the super-duper computer would not have to simulate the entire past universe, but only whatever is required to reproduce human experience to the degree that the simulated experience is indistinguishable from actual world experience. (We need to grant an extreme brain-internalism). Bostrom claims that we can even estimate the sort of computing power (in terms of operations per second) that would be required to do this: roughly 1033 - 1036. Secondly, Bostrom suggests that, even with current nanotechnological designs, a planetary-mass computer could complete 1042 operations per second. Thus, our posthuman descendants should have the computing power necessary to simulate (prepost)human experience. (In case you think that this is all just whacky, check out this story.)

Now, if we assume that this is correct, then there are three possible outcomes:

a) No human civilization is likely to make it to a posthuman stage.
b) The fraction of posthuman civilizations that will have any interest in running ancestor simulations (us-simulations) is very small.
c) We are almost certainly simulants.

Bostrom even provides a cute little formula for determining an exact probability that we are simulants. Let ‘fp’ be the fraction of human civilizations that make it to a posthuman stage. Let ‘N’ be the average number of ancestor-simulations run by a posthuman civilization. Let ‘fI’ be the fraction of posthuman civilizations interested in running ancestor simulations, NI the average number of simulations run by the interested civilizations, finally, let ‘H’ be the average number of humans that have lived in civilization before it reaches a posthuman stage. The probability that you are a simulant can be determined as the fraction of all likely simulant human beings over all likely simulant human beings plus H. Thus:

fsim = __fp fI NI H___ , thus, fsim = __fp fI NI ____
(fp fI NI H) + H ...... ...... (fp fI NI H) + 1

Given our assumption that simulant and actual human experiences are indistinguishable from the inside, the value of fsim is exactly the credence you should give to the proposition that you are a simulant.

At the end of his paper, Bostrom suggests that we split our credence evenly among (a), (b) and (c) above. I don’t know why he says this. I can’t imagine why, only at the end of an article trying to prove that we are all most likely posthuman SIM creations, he suddenly wants to sound reasonable. Here are the probabilities I would assign:

My guess is that it’s at least a 50/50 chance that some human civilization sometime will make it to the ‘post human’ stage, so I would assign fp a probability of .5. Secondly, I assume it quite likely that any civilization that did make it that far would want to run ancestor simulations, so I’d assign fI a probability of .75. Finally, I’m just guessing that, at the time when our posthumans create their super duper ancestor simulation machine, there will be around 20 billion posthumans and that they will want to run ancestor simulations for half of themselves (10 billion). Finally, I’d give ‘H’ a value of around, oh, 9 billion. With these values, my fsim is .99999999973. If you were to ask me, Do you wonder if you are a simulant?, I should respond that I am 99.999999973% certain that I am.

So, am I 99.999999973% certain that I am a simulant? Not at all. For one, I don’t believe in the extreme brain-internalism of the sort Bostrom presupposes, and so I don’t think that, given whatever computing power you like, human experience will ever be simulatable without just reproducing the world itself. But I think that this poses an interesting quandary for those who are committed brain internalists, insofar as, following Bostrom’s argument, they really should believe that they are simulants. Similarly, for reasons similar to ones Putnam expressed in ‘Brains in a Vat,’ at a basic level the very proposal doesn’t make sense—or, least it makes no more sense than a statement like ‘there might be golden rivers in heaven.’ Sure, I can imagine a vaguely pleasant place, somewhat like the Catskills, with rivers that flowed gold, but really, I have no idea what heaven is like nor whether it is terraformed—which is just to say that since I have no idea, really, what would even count as verifying my statement, I have no idea what I mean by it. The same could be said of ‘What would it be like to get sucked through a black hole’ and, so I presume, of ‘what is the likelihood that I am really a simulation’?

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Kant's Moral Psychology (II): Consciously Choosing Principles

In my last post I addressed some preliminary issues on the question of whether the findings of empirical psychology can legitimately be used to refute Kant’s moral theory, as Leiter and Knobe try to do. My contention is that they cannot be. This is not to say, of course, that no normative principles can or should be informed by empirical facts. We are natural beings, with natural desires and psychological processes. The specific normative considerations that inform our actions must have something to do with the facts about the beings we are. But this need not imply that normativity is wholly dependent on these natural processes. In this post I will argue that Kant’s claim that we act on maxims that we adopt is not an empirical thesis, and that we cannot take it as such without lobotomizing his moral philosophy.

Let me then begin by summarizing a point I raised in the comments on the last post. L&K are right to say that for Kant, “reason is the source of moral motivation” (2). But what Kant means by this is literal: it is reason, not any actual psychological process of reasoning, that is the source of moral motivation. We can draw an analogy to logic. Given two propositions of a modus ponens, I can provide the right conclusion. There are, of course, psychological and neuro-physical processes involved in my production of the conclusion, and these processes are open to various modes of empirical study. But the story we get through such means will be incomplete: the processes involved can explain why I gave an answer, but they cannot explain why I gave the right answer. And it seems like the logical form of the modus ponens—the way in which a right answer is rationally determined by the premises—has some explanatory role. If many more people are open to the possibility of logical truths that are immune from empirical refutations than to the possibility of similar moral truths, this may show that there are more skeptics about morality than about logic. But skepticism is not a reason to jump ship.

Now, moving on to L&K’s argument, which is roughly that recent studies strongly suggest that the major factors involved in influencing human behavior are heredity and environment, while upbringing and active adoption of principles play extremely minor roles. This, they claim, is good news for Nietzsche, bad news for Aristotle and Kant. Why is this bad news for Kant? Well, briefly, here’s how L&K gloss Kant’s moral psychology:

In the Kantian tradition of moral psychology, moral obligations are grounded in principles that each agent consciously chooses (6)

(1) agents impose moral requirements on themselves, and (2) these self-imposed requirements are motivationally effective. In order for the self-imposition of moral requirements to be genuinely autonomous it must presumably be a conscious process of self-imposition. And for these consciously imposed principles to be motivationally effective it must be the case that conscious moral principles are motivationally effective. (7)

we must presume that these consciously imposed moral “laws” have a substantial impact on behavior… On the Nietzschean view, by contrast, conscious beliefs play no such role in moral (or immoral) agency. People’s behaviors are determined not so much by their conscious beliefs as by certain underlying type-facts. (27)

One reason that I think the research L&K present poses no challenge whatsoever to Kant is just that it poses a challenge only to the Kantian view described here. But Kant held no such view; in fact, this view is highly improbable even before a single study is cracked open. L&K take Kant to be laying out a theory according to which human beings consciously impose moral principles on themselves and then consciously act on them. But keep in mind that the “principles” involved are what Kant calls maxims, which have the form “I will do X in case/in order to Y.” Typical Kantian examples of maxims are: “I will end my life in order to avoid prolonged suffering” and “I will make false promises in cases where I can profit by this.” These examples are well known. I think we need very few studies to realize that we do not, under normal circumstances, formulate such principles consciously before acting. We do have intentions. But cases in which those intentions are preceded by explicit formulations of principles, which we then use to guide our intentions, are incredibly rare. One could, of course, read Kant uncharitably, and simply say: “yes, his moral psychology is just obviously flawed!” But now consider the fact that Kant was much smarter than you (yes, whoever you are reading this, there is a pretty high chance that this is true). So maybe we shouldn’t take Kant to be giving us an obviously flawed thesis about the psychological processes by which people actually make decisions, but rather a thesis about how our actions are to be understood rationally.

Let’s say that you see Freddie promising to pay back a loan when, in fact, you know, and you know that Freddie knows, that he is actually planning to take the money and flee to Mexico, never to be heard from again. Of all the things going on in Freddie’s head, it is unlikely that the explicit maxim stated above is one of them. More likely, he simply wants to get some money so he can make a comfortable getaway, and he thinks that this is a good way to achieve that—and even these thoughts don't need to be explicit for his action to be intentional. But if you—or Freddie—wanted to see his behavior as an action, i.e., not as a process of being entirely pushed around by his motivational states, but rather as somehow rationally structured, then the maxim above would be a good way of formulating it. The maxim is implicit in the action, and to hold Freddie responsible for the action, we need to take him as acting on some sort of rational principle. But this is not the same as saying that this principle was consciously formulated and adopted by Freddie, and that this conscious action on his part was the mechanism involved in producing his behavior.

In fact, it is clear that Kant cannot mean—at least in general—that maxims are consciously chosen principles. This is clear from the fact that Kant believes that human beings choose what Kant calls their disposition (Gesinnung), which is the maxim from which all other maxims are derived; we adopt this maxim through an act of freedom. Since this maxim grounds all our other maxims, its adoption must precede all our uses of agency. And so the grounding maxim must actually be chosen prior to any rational action we might undertake in our lives; as Kant notes, we may represent it as innate. But of course we cannot choose an innate disposition consciously; and Kant is explicit that this disposition is chosen first in the rational order, not in the order of time. It should be obvious by now that Kant is giving us a metaphysical, and not an empirical theory. A theory, then, that can be attacked on metaphysical grounds, or through a rejection of metaphysics (preferably not one that simply encourages us to stick to science), but that it makes no sense to attack empirically.

We can confirm that Kant is giving us a metaphysical, and not an empirical, theory by his constant use of the locution “as if” (als ob). That is, what he is discussing is not how we are, empirically, but how we must see ourselves: we must see ourselves as if we have adopted these principles. This, on Kant’s view, is how we must see ourselves if we are to see ourselves as persons, and not just as complex mechanisms. And yes, this marks Kant as clearly opposed to the naturalism so dominant in contemporary analytic philosophy, and of which Leiter is so fond. But it is question-begging to simply adopt a naturalist position and, from there, argue against Kant. One must first prove that a thoroughgoing naturalism is both superior and justifiable. Anything else is just bad philosophy.

I want to conclude by asking why, if Kant is so very obviously not giving us an empirical moral psychology, do contemporary philosophers (many Kantians included) so often interpret him precisely as suggesting a model on which we consciously choose principles and then act on them? One reason is that the thesis that we can endorse our action, and which in some form Kant really does hold, is easily confused with the thesis I am considering here (I will look at this in the next post). Another lies in the philosophical culture. Rawls, who made Kant respectable in analytic moral philosophy after decades of groundless slander and neglect, explicitly bracketed the issue of moral psychology: he was only looking for a decision procedure for ethics. But his students wanted a Kantian moral philosophy that, first, would give us concrete principles for action and, second, could do so without making any (to them) exorbitant metaphysical claims. Onora O’Neill for example, interpreted maxims as psychological states. Korsgaard, meanwhile, has advanced what many have praised as Kantian ethics without metaphysics. But these projects are much like riding a bicycle without the wheels. Kant’s moral philosophy is metaphysical; the validity of the moral law is intimately bound up with issues of transcendental freedom and noumenal causation. Without these features, one has a radically weakened Kantianism, and one that is not simply vulnerable to empirical refutation, but is almost self-evidently false.

In my next post I want to address a few other features of Kant’s moral psychology, and question L&K’s claim to have provided arguments against Kant. In particular, I will say something about the role of determinism in Kant, as well as his almost wholesale acceptance of Hume’s view that only the passions can determine us to action, two features that are too often overlooked. And I will address the issue of endorsement, which does involve an empirical claim, one that might look very similar to the view that agents consciously adopt principles.

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The Meme, Ricoeur Style

For months I've been watching the silly 123-5 meme spreading around, wondering why it could have occurred to anyone to come up with this, what the point might possibly be, and why people bother to respond. But since I've now been tagged by both Fido and Gabriel, I find myself compelled to respond. Is this supposed to be a blog bonding thing?

The meme is this:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages)
2. Open the book to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence on that page
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five bloggers.

The book is Paul Ricoeur's Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology (the first book I reached for was Robert Kane's The Significance of Free Will, but page 123 didn't have enough sentences on it; then I realized I was already holding Ricoeur in my other hand--this is what I call "focused study"). Here's what I got:

Sunk into the midst of this nature, I experience myself as a "member of . . ." (Glied) this totality of things "outside me" (CM, p. 129:36). From this dialectic of the "outside me" and the "in me," which my body has instituted, proceeds the whole constitution of the alien "in" and "outside of" ownness.

How do we get from this admitted and accepted solipsism to the constitution of the Other?

How indeed? I do like the way Ricoeur basically re-reads Husserl in such a way as to make the sort of existential phenomenology in which the will takes primacy to representation a natural outgrowth, though also a reversal, of Husserlian phenomenology. And I wish that contemporary constitutivists, i.e., Korsgaard and Velleman, would take some time to go through Ricoeur, who carefully rejects both the notion that the will can be understood as an entirely reflexive capacity (Korsgaard) and that volitions ultimately share a kernel of sense common to representation (which, I think, is kind of Velleman's position). I also wish that I had some time to work this out myself... Well, soon I will. Hopefully.

And now, to tag some people. A bit hard, since I figure I can't tag either the people who tagged me, or the ones who tagged them. So, I tag Boram, Joe, Avery, Neil, and Joachim.

I don't know how people are supposed to find out if they've been tagged, though. I'm guessing not everyone regularly checks their Technocrati stats to cry about how unpopular their blog is.

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The Evil Demon Tortoise Chinese Room Trolley Problem

If you were very funny and wanted to shed some (unsympathetic) light on the intuition-pumping bent of analytic philosophy, you might come up with something like this cartoon. It's pretty old, but for those of you who, like me, haven't seen it before it's absolutely worth the three minutes.

I can't comment on this, because you wouldn't perceive the comment: In the blogosphere, no one can hear you laugh.

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Is Kant's Moral Psychology Implausible? (I): A Reply to Leiter and Knobe

In a cursory examination of Brian Leiter’s Nietzsche blog, I stumbled upon a small exchange that involved Leiter insulting Kant scholars (perhaps justified, since it was in response to the claim that Allen Wood insulted Nietzscheans). I was going to let this go, but then Leiter also suggested that Nietzsche’s moral psychology is more plausible than Kant’s, and I couldn’t quite let this go. The result was that people started arguing with me and giving me reading suggestions, and it felt wrong to keep responding to them on Leiter’s thread, which was on a completely different, Obama-related topic. So instead I promised to blog about it here. What I mainly want to do here is defend Kant in response to the sources that were suggested to me—Leiter and Knobe’s [L&K] article, "The Case for Nietzschean Moral Psychology", and (briefly) Paul Katsafanas’s Nietzschean arguments against Kantians.

Let me start with a preliminary: In keeping with the theme raised on that thread, my question will be whether Kant’s moral psychology is any less plausible than Nietzsche’s. The plausibility is to be assessed (at least in part) in light of current empirical knowledge of human decision making. I don’t want to claim that Nietzsche’s moral psychology is less plausible than Kant’s; I am very fond of it, in fact (or at least the little I learned back in the day). What I want to argue is that there are no good grounds provided in L&K’s paper for thinking that Kant’s moral psychology is any less plausible. And the main reason for this is that I think empirical evidence largely leaves Kant’s important points untouched; the parts that seem to support Nietzsche, on the other hand, strike me as largely compatible with Kant. I will get to this point in the next post; first I want to question the assumptions made by L&K, specifically the assumption that they are somehow criticizing Kant’s views. This post, then, relates more to meta-considerations about the debate, and particularly to the role of moral philosophy, than to Kant’s moral psychology itself.

Now my response is, in part (but I hope only in part), something Leiter will no doubt consider a cop-out. And this is because my response (again, in part) does tend to follow the lines of a long-familiar argument that L & K start out by dismissing:

Certain Kantians might say: “Kant’s theory is not intended as a psychological hypothesis. It should be understood rather as a statement of the conditions of possibility of moral agency. Hence, if we find that no one actually meets the conditions set out by the theory, we should not conclude that the theory itself was mistaken. Instead, we should conclude that no one ever truly is a moral agent.” Let us call philosophers who adopt such a posture Above-the-Fray Moral Philosophers. [AFMPs] Such philosophers are indeed invulnerable to empirical results: they tell us how moral agents ought to be, and they are indifferent to how moral agents actually are or can be. We reject such an approach in this essay. We assume that ought implies can is a reasonable aspiration in moral psychology; indeed, that ought implies realistically can is an even better aspiration… We assume with most moral philosophers (including many Kantians) that there are agents who perform morally valuable acts, and thus the question for moral psychology is not merely a question about the possibility conditions for such psychology, but how this psychology actually works. (2-3)

So, let me comment on this. If L&K use such a claim to preface what they take to be an attack on Kant, then they are being intellectually dishonest. And this is (partly) because they are failing to distinguish Kantians from Kant. Their objections in the paper do, I think, pose challenges to many contemporary Kantians. They do not—as I will show—pose any challenge to Kant. One reason is that Kant is, to a large extent, what L&K call an AFMP. L&K may well disagree with such a position, but an attack on Kant that assumes this disagreement cannot reasonably be taken to be an attack on Kant. I do not, to repeat, disagree that the paper poses serious challenges to many contemporary Kantians; but I think Kant himself poses equally serious challenges. To be sure, attacking Kant by inaccurate proxy is a time-honored tradition in 20^th century Anglophone moral philosophy. But someone who works on a figure in the history of philosophy (Leiter) ought to know the difference between attacking Kantians and attacking Kant. (What would Leiter say to the people who attack Nietzsche based on a reading of Heidegger and Deleuze?)

Second, L&K’s characterization of AFMPs certainly makes such an approach sound like silly, outdated, armchair stargazing nonsense. But it is a lot more appetizing if we stop to think about what Kant was trying to do instead of setting up a straw man for the fire (or whatever one does with straw men). We can approach this, I think, by noticing that L&K seem to simply conflate (as they also do later in the paper) moral theory with moral psychology. The first (roughly) being that branch of philosophy that tells us what principles of action or character traits or goals are good (I am trying to be neutral here with regard to moral theories; Kant’s own formulation of the moral question is: “What ought I to do?”), the second being the study of how human beings actually comport themselves with regard to morally relevant concepts or principles. By conflating the two, L&K essentially assert that morality must be utterly subservient to moral psychology. There is certainly reason for a Nietzschean to take such a position, but again: it kind of prejudices the argument from the outset. We can, of course, with Hume affirm that one cannot derive an ought from an is, that philosophy can only study what is, and that we can therefore throw the ought out the window. But doing that involves taking a stance within moral theory, and an argument against Kant has to occur at this stage, not after the stance has already been taken. True, L&K's “ought implies can” reference may be intended to forestall just such a criticism, but their move there is so fast and unsupported, that it cannot justify using empirical moral psychology to question Kant’s moral theory.

Third, there are good reasons for Kant to be an AFMP. Because what Kant was trying to do was, precisely, to (1) figure out how we ought to act, and (2) give the conditions of possibility for so acting. And the problem with the “ought implies can” principle is that either you base your moral philosophy entirely on moral psychology (people want x & y, therefore they should do p & q; alternatively, people have the psychological traits a & b, therefore they should do or can be expected to do p & q), or you figure out your morality independently of empirical data. Only the second approach allows you to say what we ought to do, rather than just what we should do, or what it would be best for us to do given what we are like as natural beings. And, in fact, you can only figure out what we ought to do by refusing to start out with how we are by nature. And this position becomes more tenable still, I think, if you ask yourself why we should reject psychologism in mathematics and logic, but maintain it with regard to moral philosophy. (Imagine: “Some philosophers claim that the square root of 2 has a determine value, regardless of whether human beings can calculate it in their head. I maintain that to have a determinate value is to have a value determined by actual human capacities.”)

Fourth, “ought implies can” is obviously a principle Kant takes seriously. It is, in fact, an a priori truth for him. Kant explicitly uses the principle to argue from the fact of the moral law to the human ability to follow it. Since the ought, for Kant, is derived from reason and not from nature, unsurprisingly the question of whether or not human beings can follow it turns out to be a metaphysical, not an empirical question. I agree with Kant that this is a step that has to be taken by anyone who wants to differentiate what we ought to do from what we, on some description, happen to want to do. Of course the metaphysics must be such that it is not contradicted by empirical evidence. And it will turn out that the empirical facts, as Kant sees them, are in no way contradicted by L&K. And this is partly because Kant does his best to make his empirical psychology as neutral as possible on moral questions. What he rejects, however, is the approach that limits all human knowledge to the empirical, and this is what allows him to posit a moral law in the first place. Kant’s grounds for rejecting the limitation of all human knowledge to empirical knowledge may, of course, be questioned. Almost all contemporary Anglophone philosophers reject them. But—and this is a very different discussion—his challenge to naturalism has yet to be answered directly (to my knowledge). And, in any case, the notion that philosophy is just there to clarify empirical claims and not to make ought-statements largely went out the door with logical positivism. Or did it?

Fifth, we should, especially if we care about the ought question, take a second look at the conflation issue. The AFMP is characterized as saying that, “if we find that no one actually meets the conditions set out by the theory, we should not conclude that the theory itself was mistaken. Instead, we should conclude that no one ever truly is a moral agent.” And L&K reply that such philosophers “tell us how moral agents ought to be, and they are indifferent to how moral agents actually are or can be.” But L&K seem to be confusing three things here: (1) whether there actually are any agents that live up to the demands of moral theory, (2) whether actual human beings have the psychological capacities that might allow them to live up to those demands, (3) whether, given actual human capacities, human beings are capable of living up to the demands of morality. These are obviously distinct questions. If human beings really lacked the capacity to be moral, Kant tells us, there would be no morality. But this goes back to the previous point. In any case, the conflation is important because the point of the ought, once again, is to set an ideal above and beyond the goals we have by nature, so the moral psychology demanded by the moral theory will be at least in part non-empirical. At least one—though major—reason for this, is that the goal set by morality must be capable of overriding all other demands, and this means that it must transcend them. On this picture, the question is whether or not we are something more than merely natural beings; but it should be obvious that this is not an empirical question. Moreover, it would not be surprising, given such a picture of morality, if no one lived up to it; in fact, if anyone did live up to it, we could have no empirical evidence for this! Morality is, for Kant, very different from making a tasty pot of chowder or even getting a perfect score in a bowling match. Morality is something to strive for infinitely. But even if no one meets the conditions set out by Kant’s moral theory, this does not imply that no one meets the conditions set out by his moral psychology.

I know I seem to be making a mountain out of a molehill, and I certainly seem to be missing L&K’s point. The truth is, I am quite sympathetic to the project of bringing actual psychology to bear on issues of agency and ethics, and I find their paper very interesting. But if philosophy is to be something other than just psychology, or a tool for clarifying psychology (see my previous post, on Appiah and x-phi), then it is reasonable that it should have components that do no take their directives from the empirical evidence, but instead provide us with the directives for evaluating that evidence in the first place. Taking is questions to make important and valuable contributions is quite proper and healthy for philosophy. But taking is questions to provide counter-evidence to ought questions (and, really, taking ought questions to simply be varieties of is questions) often simply involves philosophical confusion. (See Michael's post criticizing the idea that moral psychology can replace moral theory.)

In the next post, I will address the actual issues of moral psychology in question, and argue that they do not cast doubt on the plausibility of Kant's moral psychology.

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Mind-Body Causation as Primitive

This is a completely off the cuff post--so be it. A long while ago I read an essay by Daniel Garber entitled, I think, something like 'What Descartes should have Told Elizabeth' (in any case, the essay is in his book, Descartes Embodied). Princess Elizabeth was apparently unhappy (following general trends) with Descartes' account of mind-body causation. If my memory serves me, Garber would encourage Descartes to reply that mind-body causation is primitively true, a clear and distinct idea in fact. Garber's purpose is to correct those who, ever since Descartes, claim that mind-body causation is an insuperable problem for his system, one that Descartes ignores, and one for which he has no good answer. By Garber's lights, none of this is true--he does recognize the problem, he does propose a solution, and it's a good one.

Now, before it's dismissed as a cop-out, I want to say that I sort of agree with Descartes, if indeed this is his answer. On a certain level, denying mind-body causation is self-defeating: it is just obvious that I do certain things with my body consonant with and often directly resulting from flows and deliberations in my mind. It is also obviously true that many if not most of the contents of my mind come to me in some way from a world outside and independent of me. It's of no use to deny this, and probably of little use to demand an explanation. What we ought to seek instead is clarification. Descartes is not alone in this. Rousseau makes much the same argument about human freedom, and in a more recent context, so does Chisholm (see Chisholm, "Human Freedom and the Self").

On the other hand, I don't deny that there are methodological issues that confront Descartes if he does indeed favor this solution--even if they aren't the ones we are more familiar with from the tradition. Specifically, it begs questions about clear and distinct ideas, and their adequacey as an index of truth. A clear and distinct idea is, I take it, just an judgment that I can't imagine being otherwise and can't imagine being false. For example, I have a clear and distinct idea (or more precisely, judgment) that the interior angles of a triangle equal two right angles. This thought is clear and distinct in that I cannot imagine them equaling any thing else, and I cannot imagine this judgment itself being false. Now, whatever the intuition is that makes mind-body causation obvious, I don't think it's that: the idea may force itself upon me, it may appear incontrovertible, but it's certainly not clear and distinct. For one thing, I can say why the interior angles of a triangle equal two right angles. If need be, I could demonstrate it. Not only can I not do the same thing when it comes to mind-body causation, I can't even begin to understand how such a demonstration might proceed. And this is not just because I don't know enough, for by the 6th Meditation, we are presumably apodictically certain that the mind and body are distinct substances. Of this truth we are absolutely certain.

We seemed forced to conclude then that there are brute facts--mind-body causation--that we must nonetheless incontrovertibly and indubitably accept. Presumably, such even enjoy the ratification of God. This is different than our knowledge of mental and physical substances. I do not accept as a brute fact that physical substance is extended, and thereby definitely denumerable and infinitely divisible, for here I grasp the essence of physical extension. I understand it through and through. The brute-fact of mind-body causation is quite different than this sort of insight into essence.

I don't have any obvious or interesting conclusion to these reflections, except perhaps one: what makes the mind-body problem so intractable is its articulation within a framework of causality. Ryle warned us against this type of confusion, and Chisholm helped to clarify what we really mean. So for starters, we might recognize that while mind-body 'interaction' (whatever that is) is primitively guaranteed, mind-body causation is not.

I might add one further coda: there seems to be interest, especially as of late, to decouple our notion of moral responsibility and even agency from the framework of causality: to be a moral agent or to be responsible for your actions need not (or in fact cannot) entail that one is causally responsible for that action or its results. I've no beef with this approach, but it doesn't get to what Descartes is suggesting. For while we might have to find a suitable substitute for the notion of 'cause,' it is nonetheless primitively true or obvious that I make certain things happen in the world, and that I do so by means of my mind. It might be wrong to conceptualize this 'making happen' in terms of cause, but it is for all that a force or power that I am evidently and certainly aware of.

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