Deciding What to Do and Deciding What One Has Reason to Do

R. Jay Wallace: "The task of practical deliberation, after all, is the task of determining what one has reason to do." A page later, however, he refers to "the deliberative standpoint we adopt when deciding what to do."

Now, would you say that these are equivalent?

The second claim, that in deliberation we are deciding what to do, seems true by definition: that's just what deliberation is. But the first claim, that deliberation involves determining what we have reason to do, strikes me as obviously false. For one thing, I don't think we ever deliberate about things we do not already take to be reasons; if I don't think I have a reason to fail a student, then I will not deliberate about whether to fail the student. (Though there is another possibility, which may be somewhat Davidsonian: if I have a desire to fail my student, I thereby have a reason to do so. This view isn't so popular any more, and I think correctly; the mere fact that I desire to do something does not give me a reason. Davidson may have held it to be a reason, but not a strong one; but Frankfurt, Bratman, Korsgaard, and others place stricter requirements on reasons, such that to be a reason a desire must be endorsed, involve or at least not contradict a volitional necessity, etc.)

But more to the point: (A) "Should I do X or Y?" is just not the same question as (B) "Do I have reason to do X or Y?" Nor is it the same as what I take to be a more reasonable interpretation of B: (C) "Do I have more reason to do X or Y?" Aside from the objection mentioned above, it seems clear that deliberation is not merely about what I have reason to do; in any case, if the aim of deliberation is to decide what to do, then certainly deliberation must involve choosing among reasons. Thus, I will drop B and stick to the question of whether A or C may differ. (Of course on some interpretation of "reason", B and C mean the same thing: if I decide that, all things considered, it would be better to spend my last three dollars on ice cream than on a subway ticket, then I have a reason to spend it on ice cream. But talking in this way makes it a bit difficult to explain what it is that might rationally incline me in favor of the other course of action if not a reason, or a consideration in favor of it.)

It seems to me that they may differ. I can answer A without considering C at all; on reflection, I might recognize that I decided to do X—through deliberation—without taking myself to have a reason to do X rather than Y. A lot of people—as diverse as Davidson and Korsgaard—dispute this claim. They think that if I decide, through deliberation, to do X, I must normally have more reason to do X (if I decide that I have more reason to do Y but then do X, the situation is no longer normal, but akratic). And I think there is a sense in which this is right: if we reconstruct my deliberation, we can describe me as deciding that I had more reason to do X, and that explains why I did X; or we describe me as having more reason to do Y, and this explains why doing X was akratic. But the fact that I can describe a situation in reconstruction in a certain way does not mean that that is what actually goes on in the situation; the description is a machinery I bring in to make sense of what I did.

So it seems like "deciding what one has (more) reason to do" and "deciding what to do" come apart: we may settle the questions in isolation from each other; neither question necessarily implies an answer to the other. Moreover, only the latter seems to be the question normally at issue in practical deliberation. It may well be that in some cases of practical deliberation (call it rationalistic deliberation) we do ask "what we have reason to do" or "what we have most reason to do." But this is a very different kind of deliberation: it is, for one, deliberation that does not resolve the question of what to do without some further process, one that either involves further deliberation ("should I do what I have most reason to do?") or a choice ("I will do what I have most reason to do")—a point Wallace discusses extensively in "Normativity, Commitment, and Instrumental Reason." At the same time, it is possible to redescribe standard deliberation in terms of "deciding what one has (more) reason to do." But that I can describe my actual deliberation in terms of a rationalistic model of deliberation does not show that my actual deliberation just is rationalistic deliberation, any more than describing relations between bodies in terms of gravity need imply that there is indeed a mysterious sui generis, mathematically constituted force governing their respective motions.

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Regan on Animal Rights

This has been bothering me for years. Tom Regan's "Case for Animal Rights," as far as I can tell, comes to the following:

If animals do not have rights, then harming them is not doing a wrong to them. But harming animals is doing a wrong to them. Therefore, animals do have rights.

Can anybody tell me which logical fallacy Regan is committing?

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Oops.

I don't know if this belongs on Philosophers Anonymous, the Philosophy Smoker, or (alternatively) the recent Women in Philosophy blog, but since nobody's picked it up I'll just have to throw it out there as a warning to maybe have a native speaker proofread little things like job postings. Two consecutive lines from a German job post (they seem to use these in all their postings):

We welcome applications from severely handicapped people. We particularly welcome applications from women.

Uhm. Oops?

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What Should We Learn From Arguments for Atheism?

In his recent contribution to NYT's "The Stone," Gary Gutting wrote a somewhat bland column on philosophy of religion. Perhaps bland isn't the right word: I am guessing plenty of non-philosophers may have appreciated it. It is only uninformative to someone who has taught philosophy of religion and may thus be puzzled by just what Gutting is recommending (actually, I read it with great interest up until the last few paragraphs, and then felt a bit let down). While his argument—that reason has a place in making sense of faith—is appreciated, one may have liked to see a stronger defense of that point. His claim here is mainly that reason and philosophy are needed in helping believers to justify their own particular religious narrative against other traditions. This is a legitimate point, but I think far stronger defenses for the place of reason in religion can be found in classic sources like Augustine, Anselm, Averroes ("the Law has rendered obligatory the study of beings by the intellect"), Maimonides, and Aquinas, among others. While Gutting is surely right that students—especially those already strongly committed to a particular faith tradition—need a hook to help them see the value of philosophy for faith, I wonder whether such a hook is something that needs to be given to them up front, or whether it is not best to help them uncover it through a study of the texts themselves.

In any case, here I want to take a look at Gutting follow-up article, where he attempts to defend his claim that defenses of atheism by Dawkins (and others) are "entirely based on demonstrably faulty arguments." Two points in particular interest me; while I am no fan of the so-called new atheists, I find the arguments Dawkins uses persuasive. Dawkins is not, of course, the originator of these arguments; they are ones many atheists immediately and naturally appeal to, and I've found them fairly compelling since long before I had even heard of Dawkins. They've been around for a while, and I am not likely to say anything new about them here. My aim is only to look at the appeal of the arguments (and not at Dawkins's formulation or use of them), take a glance at Gutting's responses to them, and suggest that he is far more dismissive of them than he should be: they say something important about the relation between theism and atheism and, also, about the relation between reason and faith, that both theists and atheists too often overlook. The two arguments are (1) the complexity argument and (2) the "no-arguments argument." Let me take them up in turn.

(1) The basic idea behind the complexity argument goes something like this: The world is complex. If God is to serve as an explanation of the world—as its creator—then God must be, if anything, even more complex than the world. But if so, then an appeal to God helps us explain the world's complexity only by means of inserting an even more complex explanandum—God—and thus fails to provide a satisfactory explanation of the initial perplexity. Gutting's response is that the argument begs the question by postulating that God is complex and material, or at least functions in a way similar to creatures. But, as Gutting correctly notes, there is a long history in the philosophy of religion of attempting to explain how a simple God can create a complex world, of trying to make sense of God's simplicity, and so on, and by failing to address these issues, Dawkins fails to make his case. This may be right as far as it goes, but a deeper problem lurks here. The conclusion that God must be even more complex than the world and thus fails to provide an explanation of the world's complexity is only one direction we could go here. What happens, from the atheist perspective, if we claim that God is simple, immaterial, and so on? Well, from the atheist perspective, this takes us nowhere: for now we have gone from trying to explain natural phenomena to trying to explain a supernatural phenomenon. But the argument seems to depend on a theist premise: that (a simple and immaterial) God can explain the complexity of the natural world. If you've granted this premise, you are already at least half-way to being a theist. But most atheists would simply reject it: they would respond that it makes no sense to try to explain natural phenomena by means of an appeal to supernatural ones. So the atheist response here could be that the theist argument doesn't even get off the ground unless one has already accepted the theist perspective, or at least something like it. So what we have here is not a genuine argument, but an incommensurability of perspectives: on one perspective, it makes sense to think of God as providing a feasible explanation of the world's complexity; on the other perspective, it does not. Whether or not one then moves on to defend some version of such an explanation, then, depends on whether or not one is already a theist. But then we run into a problem: the world's complexity can function as support for the existence of God only for someone who is already disposed to believe in God. There is no argument genuinely addressed to the atheist.

(2) The no-arguments argument is one I have always found appealing, and I want to quote at some length from Gutting's summary of and response to it:

To say that the universe was created by a good and powerful being who cares about us is an extraordinary claim, so improbable to begin with that we surely should deny it unless there are decisive arguments for it (arguments showing that it is highly probable). Even if Dawkins' arguments against theism are faulty, can't he cite the inconclusiveness of even the most well-worked-out theistic arguments as grounds for denying God's existence?

He can if he has good reason to think that, apart from specific theistic arguments, God's existence is highly unlikely. Besides what we can prove from arguments, how probable is it that God exists? Here Dawkins refers to Bertrand Russell's example of the orbiting teapot. We would require very strong evidence before agreeing that there was a teapot in orbit around the sun, and lacking such evidence would deny and not remain merely agnostic about such a claim. This is because there is nothing in our experience suggesting that the claim might be true; it has no significant intrinsic probability.

But suppose that several astronauts reported seeing something that looked very much like a teapot and, later, a number of reputable space scientists interpreted certain satellite data as showing the presence of a teapot-shaped object, even though other space scientists questioned this interpretation. Then it would be gratuitous to reject the hypothesis out of hand, even without decisive proof that it was true. We should just remain agnostic about it.

The claim that God exists is much closer to this second case. There are sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being, and there are competent philosophers who endorse arguments for God's existence. Therefore, an agnostic stance seems preferable atheism [sic].

I haven't heard Russell's orbiting teapot suggestion before, but have been using a similar analogy for some time, and Gutting's response once again strikes me as the sort of response that could make sense only to a theist. The comparison he gives is with a physical object, and surely we know what it means to have evidence of a certain kind of physical object. But the difference between God and physical objects seems to vitiate the comparison: what would it mean to have evidence suggesting that God exists? In the case of a physical object, we might have eyewitness testimony ("several astronauts reported seeing something that looked very much like a teapot") and data ("showing the presence of a teapot-shaped object"). But God is not physical, and we haven't got a clue as to what could count as analogous evidence of his existence. Gutting seems to disagree: "sensible people who report having had some kind of direct awareness of a divine being" and "competent philosophers who endorse arguments for God's existence" are his analogues. But are these analogues? For one, I recognize that there are people, even sensible people, who claim to have had direct awareness of a divine being. But I don't have a clue what that could mean. This is, after all, an appeal to some kind of experience, and it falls into some well-known standard traps: How could these people know that their experience is an experience of a divine being? I've had all sorts of experiences that I've interpreted in various ways; perhaps their experiences are like some of these, but they interpret them differently. And surely "competent philosophers" endorsing arguments are not like "competent scientists" endorsing an interpretation of data. For one thing, although scientists might disagree about especially vague data, provided there is more data to be gathered, the scientific community should be able to come to a consensus. Non-scientists, ultimately, must rely on expert testimony (either that or become experts themselves). But in the domain of philosophy, we philosophers are the experts and can evaluate for ourselves whether or not the arguments are worth endorsing—after all, if an argument genuinely makes no sense to me and I can correctly use all the terms that make it up, I am unlikely to accept "X is a sensible philosopher and X finds this a plausible argument" as convincing; instead, I am likely to simply be puzzled by why X would find this plausible, or even to doubt whether X is sensible across the board. In fact, if expert consensus is the issue, surely Gutting is on the wrong side of this one: a recent survey of philosophers shows 72.8% of philosophers are atheists compared to only 14.6% theists, surely a fairly decisive consensus! (I am not, of course, claiming that philosophical debates can be resolved by appeal to majority views; my claim is only that Gutting's response to the no-arguments argument rests on a problematic analogy.)

So what, then, should we conclude from this? In the case of (1), I suggested that whether or not one finds the complexity argument decisive depends on whether or not one already has theistic leanings. The same seems to be the case in the no-arguments argument. The argument rests not (I think) on the claim that arguments for God's existence are inconclusive, but rather on the claim that the "evidence" in favor of theism only counts as evidence from the perspective of a theist. It is not that an atheist will not find the suggested "evidence" convincing; rather, the atheist will not recognize it as evidence. This is why debates about whether or not God exists tend to be massively unproductive: the theist will produce arguments; the atheist will accept them as arguments and respond to them as such. But both are speaking past each other: the atheist will not recognize the force of the arguments, that is, he will recognize them as arguments only because of the context in which they are presented. The evidence they adduce will not strike him as evidence: it will not be something that appears to him rationally sound, and he will—in puzzlement—attempt to figure out why someone could find this rationally sound. Meanwhile, the theist will take the atheist's rejection of his evidence as stubbornness, as if the atheist is intentionally failing to recognize good (or at least plausible) arguments as such. But I propose that the problem is more simple than that: theists take as conclusive, or at least strongly suggestive, propositions that to atheists are already loaded. To grant even the plausibility of either the claim that natural phenomena can have supernatural explanations, or that there are people who really do have experiences of the divine is already to go half-way toward abandoning atheism; but there is no argument available to convince atheists to take that step.

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Reason Says What?

One problem raised by Euthyphro is, of course, the question of why, if "good" is determinable independently of the gods, we would need the gods to tell us anything. If moral laws are rational, then we should be able to figure them out by using our reason; so why do we need divine revelation? Saadia Gaon, the first major systematic Jewish philosopher (post-Philo, at least), suggests that reason just isn't precise enough; it tells us what things are right and wrong, but doesn't give us the details regarding how to act rightly. That's where revelation comes in. Here is a particularly interesting example:

Whereas reason regards fornication as reprehensible, it does not define how a woman is to be acquired by a man in order to be considered as belonging to him. [It does not state, for example,] whether that is to be effected by means of a word only, or by means of money only, or with her consent and the consent of her parents only, or by the testimony of two or ten witnesses, or by having all the inhabitants of the town bear witness thereunto, or by marking her with a sign or branding her.

So one of the options is "her consent" while another option is "branding her." Apparently, reason alone doesn't tell us whether women are human beings or cattle. I find this a bit disturbing; if reason can't figure that out, I'm not sure about reason's prospects for anything else!

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Critchley: Sinking Like a Stone

What just happened? Critchley's occasional contributions to the New York Times have never exactly been prime content, but he's now been given a column and has decided to kick it off with a bang. Not, mind you, the sort of bang that one hears marking a celebration, but more like the bang of a very confused unfortunate choosing to step into the unknown. The most charitable reading I can give is this: Critchley is desperately trying to be as cool as Zizek, and he's got his tongue firmly in his cheek. See, the idea of the column, as far as I can tell, is that NYT readers are probably lawyers or pettifoggers who don't give a crap about philosophy--they must think it's all loony. So the best way to get the philosopher's revenge is to explain to them in great detail that, unlike them, the philosopher has time. See, if you just wasted five minutes reading this column and you're a philosopher, you won't feel bad about it, because what else would you have been doing instead? Grading? But if you're a pettifogger, well, the joke's on you: you just spent five minutes on a completely aimless fantasy that stands to Phil 101 in something like the relation that a dirty sock has to a Prada loafer.

That's the charitable reading, anyway. Less charitably, what the hell? Does the question "What is a Philosopher?" have to be answered by readings of Plato that, well, have nothing to do with Plato? I suppose it's better than actually drawing on Plato, not because Plato isn't great, but because philosophy has undergone a few changes in the past two and a half thousand years. But really it doesn't matter, because aside from masturbatory fantasies of philosophical self-aggrandizement, what we have here is a rehashing of almost every cliche you can come up with.

Did you know, for example, that according to Socrates, "the philosopher’s body alone dwells within the city’s walls"? This must be before the Crito, where Socrates seems to have more than a bodily obligation to Athens. But perhaps we should interpret this in light of the philosopher's absent-mindedness, since "It also does not occur to the philosopher to join a political club or a private party." Perhaps while we are on the subject of Socrates, we might remember his Pythagorean pedigree; but maybe starting a political party is an activity far removed from joining one. Philosophy's all about origins, right?

But maybe we are on more solid ground when we recall that "philosophy has repeatedly and persistently been identified with blasphemy against the gods," as the referenced cases of Socrates, Bruno, Spinoza, and Hume remind us. Of course we are! But only so long as we completely forget about all those other philosophers, like Augustine (who spent some quality time branding heretics), Aquinas, or Maimonides. Someone, of course, could always be ready to call them heretics, but if the point is just that anyone who takes a stance on a contentious issue is likely to be branded a heretic, this defines philosophers the way "green" picks out a single member of a large class of tree frogs.

The important thing to keep in mind throughout is that philosophy is dangerous. Yes, folks, you heard it here first! Taking this column seriously can threaten your credibility in some social circles, like the ones composed of just about anyone who has ever learned something in a philosophy class. But since I'm tired and down on my wit, the best laugh line I can provide is just by quoting Critchley: "Nurtured in freedom and taking their time, there is something dreadfully uncanny about the philosopher, something either monstrous or god-like or indeed both at once."

Of course maybe--maybe--popular writing about philosophy doesn't have to be simultaneously insulting to its readers and as defensive as a guard at the Alamo. Maybe it doesn't have to keep hammering in the idea that what philosophers do is completely pointless, since no philosopher would ever stoop to addressing anything of relevance to the non-monstrous, non-god-like mortal (at least, no philosopher worth her salt, right?). Ah, but to do anything other, the mythical philosopher would have to step down from his imaginary timeless throne and find immediately that "the water of time’s flow is constantly threatening to drown them." No indeed, the philosopher--sorry, I meant the tenured philosopher--doesn't go swimming in that stream.

Seriously, is this any way to apologize for being full of crap? And does every other philosopher have to get dragged into it? Don't get me wrong, I like Critchley. Sometimes I even like his philosophy. But not all Derrideans were born to be columnists, alas.

(Thanks to Lauren for the pointer.)

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Brief Comment on XPhi

Simon Cullen's recent 'Ok kids, let Daddy talk for a moment' take-down of experimental philosophy is not a simple rejection of xphi. His point is that it might be important, but not yet. Cullen's argues that X-Phiers have been blind to the pragmatics of survey interpretation, and therefore, are discovering less about the untutored intuitions of the folk and more about latent biases built into the surveys they administer.

I have little to say about that, other than that Cullen's argument seem persuasive to me and I'd like to hear an x-phier respond. But it did get me thinking about a related, if more amateurish point:

The assumption behind x-phi is that there are rules for basic but philosophically relevant concepts like knowledge, intention, value and so forth. They like to draw an analogy to linguistics: any English speaker effectively knows a whole lot about English grammar, even though most hard-pressed to tell you much about it. So too, reason the x-phiers, the average knower knows a lot about knowing, as the average valuer knows a lot about value, but they are unable to say a whole lot about it explicitly. That's why we have surveys, in the same way that linguists proffer tests to learn how a particular linguistic community deals with this word, or that transformation, or this sort of sentence, etc.

More importantly, there is an explicitly normative component to experimental philosophy. Lots of philosophical arguments seems to come down to the tutored intuitions of trained philosophers. But we philosophers are a weird bunch. So we likely have abnormal and biased intuitions. We should--argue the x-phiers--at the very least weigh our intuitions against the folk before deciding whether to trust them. A similar dynamic of course plays out in linguistics, where there is a strong feed-back relation between the normative and descriptive elements.

In any case, my thought is this: why disparage our training? Joe Folk probably knows what he needs to know about knowing, and valuing, and intention-ascribing, and no more. Put Joe Folk in a weird, Gettier type situation, a situation he's never had to confront before, and he breaks down. X-Phiers will argue that giving Joe Gettier, or Old vs. Young Mary, or Truetemp situations is the philosophical equivalent of a wug-test. But it's not. Let me illustrate with the following analogy: Joe Folk also has intuitions about gravity. He knows that what goes up must come down. He knows that the farther things fall, the faster they go. Now physicists have some pretty strange intuitions about gravity and the shape of the universe. From what I can gather, lots of them think that the universe might well be a flat, and shaped like a donut, because, you know, donuts are flat. Suppose we ask Joe if he thinks that space is flat and shaped like a donut?Or suppose, because we want to wug-test him, we ask a question like 'Suppose that Jane starts out in a space ship in one direction from the Earth at light speed and travels for an infinite amount of time. At some point, continuing exactly in that direction, will she wind up where she started?' intending to get at Joe's implicit knowledge about space, time and gravity? I hardly need point out that Joe's answers to such questions, while interesting for folk-theories of space and time, are hardly important for physics.

My point is that, in some sense, Joe's theory of gravity and the physicists theory of gravity are the same thing and aimed at the same object: in some sense, they are both thinking about objects like rocks falling to the ground. But this hardly means that we should give equal weight to Joe's implicit beliefs about gravity. A better assumption to make is that Joe doesn't really have a 'theory' of gravity at all...he has whatever idea of gravity is necessary for him to get around in life, and no more. So too with Joe and philosophers. In some sense, sure, we share a basic understanding about knowledge, and value and intentions with Joe. But we are experts in the field, and so our intuitions are special. I would finally add that the field of mathematics relies upon intuition-based arguments quite often, and while this causes problems about the nature and possibility of proof, hardly any mathematician thinks that the right answer might be to go survey Joe and Jane Folk about Incompleteness and transinfinite numbers.

Let me briefly address a counter argument: one might argue that physicists' intuitions about space, time, etc., don't matter until they are testable and subject to public and verifiable scrutiny. The x-phier argument is that, in many philosophical disputes, intuitions themselves are the 'test' and 'verification', and since these are potentially biased, we should look to correct that bias. My reply is to iterate, what benefit do we get from extending our 'testing' to the folk. Many issues are insoluble and untestable in physics as well. Does anyone think that including the Folk in these disputes is going to clarify matters at all?

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Empathy and Moral Progress

Listening to the recent bloggingheads.tv discussion between Robert Wright and Steven Pinker, both countenance an idea I find hard to accept, namely, that the expansion of the moral imagination and empathy explain in large part human civilization's moral improvement.

Now, I have no problem with the idea that we humans are becoming better, morally. Anyone who denies this will have a lot of historical explaining to do. Wanton acts of cruelty, exploitation and deprivation just don't happen on the scale or percentage per capita today that they have in the past. We are kinder, more compassionate, less violent, and vastly less wasteful of both other humans and nature itself than our hunter-gatherer peers (and even our more recent peers). So, I accept the phenomenon. I just have hard time accepting the causal explanation given for this phenomenon.

Humans benefit from cooperation. The question is, why don't we cooperate in non-zero-sum partnerships more often? Why is it that humans have a tendency to compete and punish each other when both (or more) clearly benefit from cooperation? The answer recommended by Pinker and Wright is that our psychology isn't adapted to easily play non-zero sum games with strangers. But they both also observe that we as a society have gotten a lot better at this. The average American feels sorry for those who suffered in the 2005 Tsunami, and for the victims of protest in Myanmar and Iran, and for the poor in the inner cities. It bothers us when innocent Iraqis or Afghanis are killed because of our military action, and we are similarly disturbed by violence, like in Serbia, that doesn't really affect us other than morally.

Apparently, if Wright and Pinker are correct, this is all a very odd and recent phenomenon, to be explained by the fact that we have learned to expand the domain of our moral imagination. Our moral imagination, to give it a rough definition, is the ability to imagine ourselves in the circumstances of others, despite the fact that those circumstances might be very different from our own. Peter Singer has also recently championed this explanation. In short, we now include more people in our 'in-group,' where co-operative behavior is more likely and more rewarding. I went to talk just last Saturday where Frans de Waal also--albeit with scientific reservation--got in line, suggesting that humans as a whole are better learning to empathize with strangers, or to expand the in-group parameters, and that this explains in part better moral outcomes.

Again, I don't deny the phenomenon. To the extent that any of this is measurable, we are improving morally and we are also better at expanding the parameters of our 'in group,' to such an extent that most educated people, at least, have some inkling that they have a moral interest in the well-being of people not otherwise related to them beyond also being human. But Pinker, Wright et. al, want to explain the former by means of the latter, and this I just don't buy.

My basic argument is that cruelty is not the antithesis of empathy, but presupposes empathy. The moral imagination argument suggests a sort of moral blindness, relieved by an expansion of the moral imagination. Humans are cruel to one another because they do not see that the person they are victimizing feels pain, just like they do. When empathy is contracted, the victimizer is cruel to the victim because she is unable or unwilling to put herself in the victim's place, to understand the pain and suffering and humiliation that her action is causing. But this is precisely what cruelty does presuppose. In cruel acts, I take pleasure in the fact that I can empathize with your pain, helplessness and humiliation, I put myself in your shoes, understand that you are suffering, and delight in being the agent of that suffering. Such cruelty is not a failure of moral imagination or empathy, but a result.

One of the gifts left to us by the Ancient Assyrians is a trove of monuments and carved artifacts extolling the exploits of their kings. There is, for example, a monument remaining from King Asshuriziroal in the 9th century BCE that brags:

"Their men, young and old, I took as prisoners. Of some I cut off the feet and hands; of others I cut off the noses, and lips; of the young men's ears I made a heap; of the old men's heads I built a minaret.

Over fifteen hundred years after Asshuriziroal, an army of Goths savaged Milan, allowing the Byzantine garrison to depart unharmed but killing each and every male in the city while giving all the females over the Franks for slave labor and misuse. The siege of Milan is notable for not being particularly noteworthy at all, displaying the accepted mores, as it were, of siege warfare through most of human history. Such conduct, I believe, would not be tolerated today by even the most vicious of regimes. Only in the darkest depths of Hitler's genocide in Eastern Europe or Stalin's in the Soviet Russian Empire has anything approaching routine standards of ancient cruelty been witnessed by any living human.

I think it's clear that our 6th century peers were just as good at putting themselves in the heads of strangers as we are. The difference between our Gothic and Babylonian ancestors, I suspect, has less to do with an expanded moral imagination and more to do with the fact that we condemn what we experience in the exercise of our moral imagination. Perhaps it is true that an expansion of empathy is a necessary condition for treating strangers humanely, but it does not guarantee it. More to the point, perhaps, in-group/out-group distinctions are not drawn on the basis of who we empathize with. Humans can easily empathize with any other human. The difference that makes a difference to moral progress is not that we can imagine ourselves in the minds of strangers, but that we care about the strangers we imagine ourselves as being. This itself is not probably not a cognitve act, so I don't mean to suggest that in-group/out-group distinctions are drawn on a cognitive foundation (although that may be the case). I just think it unlikely that empathy alone explains that difference.

The morally disturbing fact about or predecessors were not that they couldn't put their heads into the minds of their victims, but that they could and were proud or honored by what they there imagined. Similarly, I think that the de-humanization argument often used to explain atrocities even today needs to be qualified: it's not that an SS officer simply did not understand that Jews and Slavs suffered, too, just like him; he did know that, he could visualize and imagine it--he just didn't care.

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A Refutation of Consequentialism? (I)

I'd like for someone to explain to me why the following isn't a sufficient refutation of consequentialism (at least of the maximalist or aggregative variety): One of the more over-reported anecdotes of the past century is Mao's retort to the question, "What was the significance of the French Revolution?" "It's too early to tell," Mao replied. Mao's point was partially tongue in cheek, but it managed to get across an important point: the effects of any action continue on into an indefinite, and at the limit, infinite, future. With that in mind, here's a refutation of consequentialism:

1) The right action in a given situation is a function of its net sum total consequences relative to alternative possible actions.

2) Sum net totals are calculated over total moments.

3) There are no total moments.

4) Hence, there are no sum totals.

5) Hence, there is no net sum total greater than all others.

6) Hence, there is no right action.

The key premise, obviously, is the third. It is also the least refutable. This is the insight captured in Mao's retort, and easily demonstrable: Let's take March 30th, 1794. You are Robesipierre, member the Committee for Public Saftey, deciding on the matter of Danton's execution. You think to yourself, What is the right thing to do? The answer, it is easy to demonstrate, depends upon what time frame is in question (and that, it should be stressed, is solely a matter of whim!). If the time frame is only through the end of the year, killing Danton will exacerbate the reign of terror (leading to your own execution!!), resulting in many more deaths. But, if your time frame is, say, up to 1814, it is precisely the excesses of the Reign of Terror and the Revolution that make Napoleon possible. Napoleon brings order finally to France, but he also harbingers war; yet without Napoleon there is no Congress of Vienna, which brings nearly a century of relative peace to Europe. But of course, without the developments that that century of peace engenders, there is no World War One and thus no World War Two. But without World War Two there is no United Nations....I could go on, but the point I take it is clear: whether it is right for you, Robespierre, to order the execution of Danton right now, in 1794, radically depends upon the time frame in question.

This is not an epistemic point. Of course it is hard to calculate out the consequences, and of course there is no reason whatsoever to believe that Robespierre could have made the considerations I just went over. But that is besides the point, which is that the consequentialist must be a realist about morality. The statement 'It is right in 1794 that Danton be executed' and its opposite, "It is wrong in 1794 that Danton be executed' must each have a determinate truth value. In general, any statement of the sort 'X is right' or 'X is good', if consequentialism is correct, must have a definite truth value, but no statement of that sort does. "It is right that Danton in 1794 be executed" is false in 1795, true in 1814, false again in 1816, true again maybe until 1914, false between 1914 and 1945, true again in 1946, and so on--which is just to say, "It is right that Danton is executed in 1794" has no definite truth value.

I suppose that one could argue that consequentialism is not a normative theory about what one ought to do, but is a descriptive theory that analyzes what we mean by statements of the sort 'X is right' and 'X is good'. But in that case, we have just shown that 'X is right' and 'X is good' have no definite truth values, and this, if any thing, speaks on behalf of error theory--and that, in turn, gets us to the same point: namely, that consequentialism is false.

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A Solution to Moral Luck?

Tomorrow I teach Nagel's 'Moral Luck' essay. I wonder if the solution to resultant, and perhaps circumstantial luck, is easily solved by the concept of moral risk. Winning the lottery is lucky, but it is not pure luck. Merely finding a winning lottery ticket in your coat pocket is pure luck. Playing the lottery and winning is something else. It is a risk one takes--deliberately accepting the cost of a few dollars for the low possibility of many thousands. It strikes me as perfectly reasonable to say that one deserves whichever outcome, even though that result is out of one's control. The outcomes may be widely divergent (a $2 sunk cost or $50,000 on the Pick 4), and yet equally deserved. Similarly, if I choose to drive over the speed-limit, I am taking a moral risk--and deserve whichever outcome, however divergent (getting to work on time vs. vehicular manslaughter). Not only is this a solution to resultant moral luck, but I believe that it's a fair exposition of our intuitions on the matter. Right?

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