Aristotle and Spinoza Were Primarily Analytic Philosophers. Haven't You Heard?

Alexander Pruss presents a fairly silly line of thought on his blog, in which he attempts to assimilate much of the history of philosophy under the analytic wing. To be fair, his goal is not to denigrate continental philosophy, and he does admit complete ignorance of it. Yet this does not prevent him from thinking that continental philosophers might also be able to trace themselves a philosophical history—he just thinks that history would be a bit different. But a bit of analytic re-colonization of history is clearly behind his thoughts, particularly when he says without basis that, “By and large, continental philosophy strikes me as a more recent development.” Oddly enough, continental philosophy also strikes me as a recent development. But then again, it is exactly as recent as analytic philosophy. An excellent response to Pruss is offered by Michael Pakaluk at Dissoi Blogoi. Readers of this blog, on the other hand, may be familiar with my response to such exercises in selective historical forgetting.

Pruss writes:

It seems to me that Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Sextus, Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, ibn-Rushd, al-Ghazali, Maimonedes, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Hume, Kant and Frege all practiced analytic philosophy for a significant part of their philosophical lives—some of these, indeed, for just about all of their philosophical lives. When I read these people, I find them kindred souls, clearly engaged in the same rational pursuits, using pretty much the same tools, as I am.

There is a sense in which I always smirk when analytic philosophers claim to see Plato and Socrates as “kindred souls.” This isn’t because I think they are closer to continental philosophy, but because seeing Socrates and Plato as analytic philosophers involves overlooking much of what motivated those thinkers, and the way in which they understood philosophy. Wisdom is not exactly the concern of most philosophers today, and the ancient invocation of self-knowledge hardly involves a directive to study the first-personal mode of access to certain kinds of propositional knowledge. Plato’s use of myth, too, is hardly akin to the contemporary myths about zombies and fission. I am reminded of a former student of mine, who wrote that he enjoyed reading the Phaedo because “it was pretty damn easy.”

Nor does the claim that continental philosophers are likely to have a different history all that cogent: Scotus, Descartes, and above all Aristotle, via both Hegel and Heidegger, are indispensable. And given the much more prominent role accorded to the pre-Socratics in the continental tradition, the idea that continental philosophy has a later history goes down the drain. There are perhaps some pre-20^th century philosophers who play a greater role in the analytic than the continental canon, but such impressions often turn out to be illusory. Heidegger had nothing but contempt for the empiricists, but certainly both Husserl and Deleuze were lapping it up. Mill is a far more important figure for the analytics than the continentals, largely because utilitarianism never caught on across the pond (with good reason, I tend to think), and yet Mill’s influence surfaces in the social science interests of Dilthey, Gadamer, and Habermas.

What really bugs me, though, is the attitude we find in Pruss’s comment that,

most of the great medieval figures (especially Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham) are clearly primarily analytic philosophers and analytic theologians. Likewise Sextus and Spinoza. Since obviously continentals consider these figures as part of their history, it follows that a part of the history of philosophy for continentals does include some very analytic thinkers.

It is almost as if the Fregean legacy traveled back in time to claim large swathes of the history of philosophy, so that continental thinkers who took up these figures were secretly drawing upon an Anglophone heritage. The problem with this sort of thinking should be clear: Pruss treats “analytic” as describing not a 20^th century approach to philosophy, but as a methodology, which he unsurprisingly finds (given that he has a broad enough conception of it) throughout the history of philosophy. But since he does not know the continental side of things, it turns out that there are no distinctive continental methods that those past thinkers might also have been drawing on. Historical figures are “clearly primarily analytic philosophers” in much the same way that the Earth is clearly flat.

By the way, I've made this point before, but it bears repeating: if you've been trained in a particular way of doing philosophy, and have studied historical figures as the precursors to this way of doing philosophy, of course you are likely to find them engaged in an enterprise similar to your own! And if certain figures have been left out—as Hegel is often left out of analytic versions of history—it is no wonder that one will see them as belonging to a very different mode of doing philosophy. One value of the continental obsession with difference, as I see it, is precisely this: if you pay attention to the sorts of things in historical figures that you've been trained to pay attention to and recognize as continuous with your projects, your reading will be infected by confirmation bias. The more you focus on the surprising aspects of historical texts—those points where the thinkers say something you really have trouble wrapping your brain around—the more you are likely to learn something from them that you didn't already know. (Yeah, I happen to think that everyone, regardless of philosophical orientation, has a great deal to learn from Gadamer, if not with regard to concrete problems, at least with regard to how one can understand a philosophical text without turning it into a mere projection of one's own prejudices. Chunks of Truth and Method really should be standard reading in any graduate philosophy program.)

Lastly, these attempts at historical colonization always remind me of a passage from Walter Kaufmann, with which I leave you:

Existentialism without Nietzsche would be almost like Thomism without Aristotle; but to call Nietzsche an existentialist is a little like calling Aristotle a Thomist.

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Qualia, First-Person Experience, and the Missing Black Hole

Defenders of reductionism have a tendency to make the following argument, to which I referred in my last post: Science has made all sorts of progress that was previously thought impossible. We therefore have good historical grounds for thinking that, with further progress, science will eventually resolve the remaining problems. At the very least, we have solid grounds for being skeptical about any a priori arguments to the effect that there is some domain of human experience that remains inexplicable from the standpoint of the sciences. There are two candidates commonly presented for such irreducibility: the raw-feels, or qualia, in our experience, and normativity. (In a later post I will discuss a third candidate, introduced by hermeneutics, which is in principle clearly irreducible, i.e., the horizon within which any scientific enterprise takes place.) Both candidates are sometimes grouped under the heading of first-personal experience, which is taken to be in principle irreducible. I want to question this grouping.

One common response to this line of thought is concisely stated by Richard, over at Philosophy, Etc, who argues that we cannot argue for the likelihood of successful reductionism on the basis of past scientific success because, “there are principled reasons to think these cases different. All those examples [that the reductionists] point to are instances of third-personal empirical phenomena. I grant that science is supreme in that domain. But, to turn the tables, it's never had any success outside of it. So there's no general reason to think that normativity or first-personal subjective experience are susceptible to purely scientific explanation.” (Similar arguments abound: Ricoeur points to something very much like it in the first conversation of What Makes Us Think? where he appeals to the first-personal lived body experience as irreducible to a third-personal one.) I absolutely grant that there is no reason to think that scientific cognition can fully grasp normativity. In fact, I seriously doubt that it can, since normativity governs the operation of scientific research. I am not sure the same goes for phenomenal properties.

It strikes me that one reason qualia are so mysterious and so dubious is precisely that they are not subject to any normative constraints whatsoever. Whether my mental state is one of jealousy or envy, fantasy or belief, malice or gratitude, is a question that might involve some normative factors. But I am tempted to think that qualia are entirely dissociated from such considerations. That I have a raw feel of some sort just tells me that I am having some sort of mental experience; what that experience is, on the other hand, will be determined by all sorts of other considerations, including normative ones. So I have trouble with questions such as “what is it like to have a belief,” or “what is it like to be outraged,” insofar as they are looking for a phenomenal description of these mental states. My problem is that I am not at all sure that there is anything “it is like” to be in such mental states. What there is, rather, is some sort of awareness that, within a normative framework of my psyche as a whole, becomes a mental state of a particular sort. But what makes that mental state a state of a certain sort, in turn, is normative.

So what do we do about something like the inverted spectrum argument, which would insist that there is also a first-personal raw feel that in turn is incorporated into a normative framework? For example, there is something it is like to see red, and it is only when I have that experience that I know that I am having an experience that falls under the concept of red experience. But Michael might, whenever he sees a fire hydrant, have a very different qualia—a qualia like the one I have whenever I see grass. And it is possible that, even when our brains are functioning in roughly similar ways, and we have roughly similar normative frameworks, my red and green experiences are completely reversed for him. The conceivability of such a scenario is supposed to show that something—qualia—is missing from whatever account of the world we have, even once normative factors are incorporated into the picture. But is it?

Here is what is suggested: you could have all the physical and normative conditions necessary for my seeing red, apply them to Michael, and, while he would be perceiving the same wavelength and processing it in the same way, something would be different. Does this make sense? Or does it make exactly the same sense as the following: We know all the necessary and sufficient conditions for creating a black hole. We reproduce these conditions. But it is conceivable that, although we now have a mass sucking up all forms of energy around it, behaving exactly like a black hole, yet we do not really have a black hole. I would submit that the two cases are virtually identical, and the second—the black hole case—makes no sense; nothing is missing, we have a black hole, not something identical to a black hole. The first seems to make sense, however. What has gone wrong? Could it be that the first case seems to make sense not because there is something over and above the physical and normative properties, but simply because we are still overly wedded to a view of the soul as a substance of an entirely heterogeneous kind?

What is the role of the first-person here? Well, I don’t think normativity is first personal: the entire point of norms is that they must apply intersubjectively. What about the supposed qualia? The first-personal aspect is supposed to be this: whatever third-personal knowledge we have about seeing red or feeling pain, there is a first-personal aspect we are missing. Is this irreducible? The idea is that when we know all the conditions for seeing red, we still don’t have the experience of seeing red. Similarly, if we know all the conditions for a black hole, we still don’t have the black hole. When we reproduce those conditions, on the other hand, we will have a black hole, and it is just odd to say that something—e.g., a real black hole—is still missing. Similarly, when we reproduce all the conditions for seeing red, we should be hard pressed to say that something is still missing from seeing red—because if we say that something is still missing, what we are saying is just that we haven’t produced all the conditions. What is inherently first-personal is just the result of reproducing all the conditions, just as the black hole is the result of reproducing all the conditions necessary for the existence of a black hole.

When we have all the natural (and normative) pieces needed for first-personal experience, we have first-personal experience. When we have all the natural pieces needed for a black hole, we have a black hole. The objection is: No, no! That’s just where you’re missing the point! When we have all the pieces needed for a black hole, we just have a black hole. But when we have all the pieces needed for first-personal experience, the experience is something superimposed on the pieces. What can this mean, I wonder?

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Joining the Herd by Bleating About Zombies

The philosophy blogosphere has been abuzz with zombie talk recently (Siris helpfully compiles some of the recent discussions here; and here are some I especially like), so I’ve finally decided to conform and throw a couple of thoughts out there, though I can’t promise they’ll be coherent. For those who don’t know, zombies are imaginary beings exactly like us in every physical respect, but lacking our phenomenal consciousness. And the zombie argument is supposed to go from the alleged conceivability of such beings to evidence that the phenomenal cannot be reduced to the physical. My own stance is roughly that zombie thought experiments are silly, as well as seriously problematic. They are problematic, on my view, not simply because (like too many thought experiments) they are set up to pump our intuitions about imaginary cases about which we don’t really have clear intuitions, but also because, by giving the illusion of clarity, they are designed to convince us that we really do have intuitions, reliable ones, about things we in principle cannot have reliable intuitions about. So here are a couple of thoughts.

I. Zombie arguments seem to me to presume that we have intuitions about what counts as physical. Atoms, apparently, do. The experience of redness or pain, on the other hand, does not. But what is the physical? Presumably, the physical domain is just the domain of that which can be studied by the physical sciences. If we grant that, however, then it turns out that our intuitions about what counts as physical are entirely dependent on which sciences we consider physical sciences, and what our understanding is of what those sciences do. In other words, the intuition that the domain of the physical cannot accommodate phenomenal properties seems to rest on the idea that the physical world is composed of little particles bouncing around in accordance with laws. Since physics has moved a bit beyond Newton, however, I wonder whether those intuitions really make sense.

Importantly: the counter-intuitiveness of quantum mechanics is frequently mentioned. At the very very micro level, physical entities don’t behave the way we would expect them to. So we know that our intuitions about how physical things behave are just wrong, according to what the physical sciences tell us. And it isn’t like there are no unresolved questions. Given this, it isn’t clear that we can or should trust any intuitions about whether or not the phenomenal is or is not reducible to the physical, because we cannot trust our intuitions about the physical. And this thought seems to me to undermine a basic presupposition of the zombie argument: that zombies are conceivable in some more robust way than square circles. Quite possibly, zombies seem conceivable to us just because we have no idea what it is we are conceiving. And the zombie argument, by pushing the possibility of this conceivability, makes its point by making us further confused about what it is we are conceiving.

II. Even if we do grant that zombies are possible—that the physical as we now understand it (again, assuming that we do understand it)—does not include phenomenal properties, this is hardly an argument against reductionism as such. That is: what it gives us is an argument that phenomenal properties (if they exist) are irreducible to the current subject matter of the physical sciences. But this point can just as easily be turned around. The point of the physical sciences is to provide confirmable theories with predictive power that apply to whatever sorts of things we encounter in reality. If our current physical theories cannot do this for phenomenal properties, that can only be taken to show that our current physical theories are still a far way off from giving us absolute knowledge. But we already know that, and it doesn’t give us grounds for a priori arguments that they cannot go beyond their present boundaries.

I once heard Chomsky make a remark that went something like this: At the end of the 19th century, scientists were convinced that chemistry was entirely irreducible to physics. Today, it is more or less common sense that this view is false, because a paradigm shift in the physical sciences made the move from physics to chemistry possible. Why, then, should we think that the same cannot be done for phenomenal properties and physics? There is one answer, which has to do with distinguishing between the third-personal methods of science and the first-personal features of qualia. I will save discussion of that thought for my next post.

III. As I understand it, the phenomenal realist’s claim is that there are two sets of laws in our world. First, there are laws that govern the behavior of physical entities. Second, there are laws that govern the relation of physical and phenomenal entities. The zombie world looks the same as ours from the outside because the first set of laws is the same there. But they don’t have the second set of laws. Implied is a metaphysical view according to which the universe is composed of some substances, like elementary particles, together with a bunch of natural laws. But I am not sure that is right. Speaking of substances and laws implies that both are contingent. One might have the exact same laws, but completely different substances. Alternatively, one could have exactly the same substances but different laws. This may be useful as a shorthand way of speaking about reality, but I doubt it makes much sense. Instead, it seems more likely that substances and laws are co-constitutive. Here is what I mean:

How do we know anything about fundamental particles? Well, we know what they are like because of the effects they have on other things: other particles, our instruments, and our brains. And it is not clear that there is anything else to these particles than their effects, or dispositions to bring about certain effects, with a marked regularity. My point is not the idealist one, that since we can only know anything about reality through our perception of it, there is nothing to reality aside from our perceptions. Rather, the point is that we have no grounds for attributing any properties to substances other than causal ones, and these causal properties are nomological. We know what a particle is like because of the law-like effects it produces, and we have no warrant to say anything about it other than that it produces such effects. (That the laws are sometimes probabilistic ones does not change this picture.) And the reverse is true as well. Our knowledge of natural laws depends on the actions of particles (or macro-phenomena composed of particles). Again, I am not trying to argue that laws are nothing apart from the behavior of substances. My point is that we have no warrant to speak of laws as literally something apart from substance. From the standpoint of the sciences, it seems to me, laws just are the formulae according to which substances behave, whereas substances just are what behaves in accordance with laws.

And this is why it seems strange to me to think that the very same substances could exist in two universes with radically different sets of laws. If qualia stand in nomological relations to matter, we have three options. (1) Qualia are different substances, and the second set of laws is missing from zombie world because there is nothing for physical substances to stand in relation to. (2) Something about the physical entities in zombie world really is different, since the entities don’t have the same effects. (3) There are no nomological relations between physical substance and qualia. I doubt anyone would accept the third option these days; the parallel clock argument has had its day. The first option is also not very tempting—once we start talking about two heterogeneous substances, we run into all sorts of problems about how nomological relations between them could be possible at all. So that leaves option two: zombie world is not composed of the same physical substances as our world. And this, of course, is what almost everyone (aside from the few hardcore zombie-philes) has been saying.

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Diderot, the Will, and the Self

For those who think that counterfactual arguments in discussions of free will are an invention of the twentieth century, here is a bit I just came across from Diderot’s D’Alembert's Dream:

What is this free will? … The latest impulse of desire or aversion, the latest result of all that a man has been from the time of his birth to the moment at hand…. You were reduced to a single point; you acted, but did not will. Can we will, all by ourselves? Will is always born of some motive, interior or exterior, of some present impression, or reminiscence of the past, or passion, or future project. That being so I have just one word for you about free will, which is, that the latest of our acts is the necessary effect of a single cause—the self; a very complex cause, but single.

This is an interesting account. On the one hand, Diderot accepts the Hobbesian view of the will: every action is the effect of the latest impulse in a causal chain. At the same time, however, Diderot adds to the Hobbesian doctrine: Instead of simply identifying the will with the last impulse before the action, he tries to avoid the disappearance of the agent; instead, he insists that these impulses are just part of the agent. The acting self is not supplanted by the desires to which it is reduced; rather, the self just is the complex cause consisting of the causal circumstance that causes an action. This doesn’t solve the disappearing agent problem, of course, but redescribes it in a way that makes the real problem more tractable. The question is not whether we can replace the agent by a chain of causes, but rather whether we can reduce the agent to them. These arguments, of course, are still very much around today.

Now here’s the kicker:

Since I acted thus, anyone who acted differently is no longer me; and to assert that at the moment I do or say anything, I can do or say something different is to assert that I am both myself and someone else.

Note the elegance of the argument: having defined the self as a complex deterministic causal circumstance, Diderot simply points out that, since a different action could only have resulted from a different causal circumstance, had I acted differently, I would not have been me. Libertarians who assert that an ability to do otherwise than I really do is a human power are thus committed to something incoherent: the claim that I can be both myself and not myself, both the causal circumstance that caused my action, and at the same time a different causal circumstance.

Libertarians typically deny the assumption that the causal circumstance involved is deterministic. But the argument is, of course, also massively question-begging on another count, since no libertarian (for that matter, almost no compatibilist today) holds that the self is reducible to the entire set of mental and physical states that make it up. There is nothing especially odd about the idea that, although at a particular moment in time I preferred steak to pork chops, I could just as well have preferred pork chops to steak without ceasing to be me. Even if the self is reducible to its character traits, it is not clear that every character trait, or every causal relation between those traits, is constitutive of the entity we call a self. But working out this kind of account, according to which the self, or what is crucial to it, is separated out from more incidental desires, has proven no easy task. Attempts at working out a notion of a “real self” (involving endorsement or wholeheartedness or some such), as well as of a functional self (where the self is identified with some function, such as selecting among motives, or just deliberative processes) have yet to yield anything like an uncontroversial picture.

One difficulty is that, given some commitment to holism, it is unclear how our “wholehearted” states might be demarcated from the “peripheral” or “external” ones. And with this problem in mind, we might also question whether the deliberation involved in establishing a self might somehow be a mental process over and above those peripheral motives—they must, after all, play some role in the overall economy of the self, and so it stands to reason that they, too, will play some role in influencing our deliberation.

Diderot’s challenge, which I have suggested extends not only to libertarianism, but also to most of the compatibilist approaches developed in response to libertarian criticisms, is thus still alive today. Although his positive view might strike many of us as crude, developing an alternative account has not proven easy, and I think his account concisely phrases one of the key problems at the heart of agency theory and free will.

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Who's Afraid of Idealism?

Today, it is usually enough to refute a theory just to demonstrate that it in any way implies idealism. There was a time, of course, when the reverse was the case, when it was enough to refute a theory just to show that it was close to empiricism, or possibly psychologism. Carnap seemed to regard pyschologism as just another of the basic informal fallacies, a sort of category mistake. One could go straight from, ‘This theory is psychologistic’ to ‘This theory is false’ without needing to go through the premise, ‘Psychologism is false,’ in the same way that one may go from ‘This theory begs the question’ to ‘This theory is false’ without needing to go through the premise ‘Begging the question is false.’

The problem with idealism seems to be that it violates a deep-seated intuition we all have, namely, that most of the universe (outside of fiction and imagination and maybe mathematics) is real, by which we mean, independent of the mind. However, transcendental idealism a la Kant admits this much. The apparently obviously false notion in Kant’s philosophy is that we have no access, period, to this really real world, and thus, in a certain sense, everything that we believe is false. Of course, Kant would reply that truth-predicates only make sense as applied to the phenomenal world, so in fact our basic picture of the world is true—but still, this is hair splitting. We are compelled, as it were, by this deep-seated intuition to believe that not only is there a reality out there independent of our own mind, but that, by some means or other, we must have access to this reality as it is really is an sich. As I mentioned at the start, I’m not convinced that this deep intuition results from anything more profound than a particular cultural milieu, but I admit that it’s there.

Let’s not forget that there are equally compelling, if not as deep-seated, reasons for thinking that some sort of (transcendental) idealism is correct. For however one explains it, it certainly also seems as if we bring pre-fabricated structures already to each receptive experience, and only after these structures have done their work do we have anything like objective perception or thought. Whether these structures are transcendental in the way that Kant suggested, or whether they are genetically encoded neurological protocols, or the existenielles of Dasein, or Gadamer’s tradition, is in some sense beside the point.

Can we do justice to both of these intuitions? Can we be both transcendentalists, in the sense just described, and realists, also in the sense just described? I think we can, so long as we are Husserlians.

Whether our transcendental intuitions can do justice to our realist intuitions depends in no small part on how we understand ‘transcendental.’ Kant explained his concept of transcendental through the concepts of universality, necessity, and a priori synthetic judgments. The categories, while not separable from experience in fact, are notionally separable, and must be deduced from the conditions for the possibility of full, objective apperceptive consciousness. Baldly put, Kant’s transcendental arguments have the form:

Given S
M is a necessary condition for S (If S then M)
Hence, M.

This gives rise to the problem that objective perception results only after (in a transcendentally logical sense) the categories have structured some non-categorically structured stuff, and thus, the objects that result are not the objects that, really, are there. Kantians don’t like this description, but there is no getting around the fact that, for Kant, consciousness in some sense creates the objects it is aware of. This is why Kant is an idealist. Ultimately, Kant’s idealism is incompatible with realism because it comprehends the ideal structures of transcendental consciousness as the condition of possibility for the real world objects of objective perception and thought.

The hardest methodological notion of Husserl’s to make sense of, but also the most promising, is his theory of phenomenology as an eidetic (or ‘formal’) descriptive science. Husserl is not interested in discovering or deducing the a priori conditions of possibility of objective experience; he simply wants to describe that experience as it manifestly is for us. This experience, let it be noted, is directly realist. I do not experience red sensations, or retinal stimulations, or the workings of my cerebellum. I see the red stop sign. Husserl has no interest in denying this obvious feature of phenomenological experience, nor of deducing its possibility; he just wants to describe it.

This notion of describing experience no doubt makes many uneasy, so let me say something about it. Of course, there is a very wooly notion of description, such as if I were to ask you to describe your favorite painting. You would not be communicating to me any fact, but rather your impressions (I like the theme; the colors are pretty; it makes me feel grand). If this were all there were to phenomenological description (as some phenomenologists unfortunately seem to think), then phenomenology would be silly. And yet this does help to expose what I think it is that really causes the unease among many for phenomenological analysis, namely, that we should expect there to be some way, objectively, to police our phenomenological descriptions, and it does not seem like we can do so in any way like one would expect from a proper science: by the use of publicly available evidence, by repeatable experimentation, by direct modeling, and so forth. Now, I cannot make the point often enough, that this same criticism would equally apply to each of the formal sciences. Mathematicians, too, cannot make appeal to public evidence (I cannot observe you observing the square root of two), nor can they perform repeatable experiments (perhaps they could, but what would be the point?). Husserl understands phenomenology as precisely this sort of formal science. Phenomenology is a transcendental science insofar as it seeks to describe the invariant structures of whatever type of experience (perception, memory, imagination, mathematical and logical thinking). Transcendental means for Husserl invariant, rather than condition of possibility. Thus, while Husserl does argue that transcendental structures are a priori, they are not prior to experience; they are a priori in the sense that they are independent of any particular experience, and not built out of any particular elements in experience, in just the same way that our concept of three is independent of any particular set of three objects and is not built up out of any particular experience of sets of three objects. If we apply this lesson globally to the problem of idealism, we see how one might, from a phenomenological perspective, be both a (transcendental) idealist as well as a realist: just as our concepts of arithmetic are invariant among and independent of all sets of actual objects, but in no way are conditions of possibility for those objects nor somehow inconsistent with the belief that these objects exist in full-blooded sense, so too for all the invariant structures of every sort of experience whatever.

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Langton on von Herbert's Challenge to Kant (II)

Continuing from the previous post, I want to address three broad points on which I think Langton is at least partially misguided, or at least the situation is not as clear-cut as she makes it out to be. First, should we really think that Herbert’s letters represent a moral saint’s criticism of Kantian moral philosophy? Second, is there a feminist objection to that moral philosophy contained here, or only a criticism of the sexist prejudices of Kant’s time? Third, did Herbert really raise purely philosophical issues that Kant failed to address, or was she also raising psychological issues that Kant could not be expected, and was in no position to address?

I. Langton is wrong, I think, in taking Herbert’s claim to being a moral saint at face value. What Herbert describes is an apathy to worldly pleasures; having no desires, she finds the moral law too easy to follow, and she complains that in the absence of struggle, morality loses its worth. This is an important point. But one might wonder whether there is not a difference between the value of a virtuous disposition reached through struggle, and one reached through heartbreak. Langton describes Herbert as doing her duty from the motive of duty; but it is not clear that this is the case. Herbert does her duty because she has no temptations to avoid it. But does this show—should we take it to show—that Herbert really has no non-moral motives and so must be acting from the motive of respect for the moral law? Langton interprets respect as having the purely negative function of silencing non-moral motives; and she insists that respect is neither itself a motive for moral action, nor a feeling. While the second of these claims is slightly debatable, it is almost certainly wrong (see Andrews Reath and Daniel Guevara on this point). The first claim is simply false—respect has a positive aspect, namely self-esteem. That Herbert does not feel self-esteem, in turn, might cast some doubt on her moral sainthood. For one thing: apathy of this sort might well itself be a passion, a passion that blinds one to its true nature.

Langton is also wrong, I think, to interpret apathy (at least as Herbert describes it) and nihilism as either products or correlates of the virtuous disposition. I see no reason to think that Herbert’s letter indicates a freedom from pathological impulses. And in this connection, it is not entirely clear that Kant was wrong to accept his friend’s diagnosis of Herbert as having suffered a romantic shipwreck. Let me suggest a possible diagnosis, based on the evidence, though without claiming that it is accurate. Imagine that you have been raised to fulfill moral norms. You have read a great deal of Kant, and this has reinforced your sense that it is important to follow those moral norms. But something goes wrong in your life: your great love goes sour. (It is true that there are all sorts of other issues, issues of gender inequality and the de-personification of women, that are involved in Herbert’s love loss. That does not, however, change the psychological effect of it as a heartbreak.) And so you lose interest in life. The things that once you enjoyed, you no longer enjoy. Nothing holds any interest for you. By the time the possibility of love is rekindled, you no longer care—you have become dead to it. But you still go on living and moving in the world, and so you live and move based on those rules, those moral norms you have always followed. Now that you want nothing that tempts you away from them, they are easy to follow; but you follow them simply as learned responses, acting on auto-pilot. If this is a feasible picture—and I submit that it is more feasible than the idea that Herbert was a moral saint, as such are rare, if even existent—then the state she describes is pathological, it is feeling laden, and it is a derangement (though not in the patronizing sense Kant seemed to have in mind). This apathy is not the strength not to be tempted by one’s sensible inclinations that Kant describes; it is, rather, a complete surrender to them.

II. I suspect that Langton unhelpfully conflates two issues. First, Kant’s commitment to treating persons as ends in themselves. Second, Kant’s views of women. There is no doubt that Kant thought women were inferior, that patriarchy was the proper form of society, and that relations between the sexes are not pure relations between persons. It is true that these views likely influenced Kant’s behavior in this situation. (It goes without saying that Kant was not exactly unusual in this regard, which is obviously no excuse, but also not a condemnation of his philosophy.) It is true that, had Kant been committed to treating all persons, regardless of gender, as ends in themselves, he would have acted differently. But this means it is also true that, had Kant fully worked out the implications of his moral philosophy in opposition to his social prejudices, he would have been a better man. If anything, though, this is a point in favor of his moral philosophy, if a large point against his anthropology. (But admittedly, this seems tied to a deeper feminist criticism of Kantian-style ethics, which I never fully understood.)

Langton argues, in a deeply evocative manner, that Herbert was struggling with a society in which, as a woman, she faced the constant threat of losing her status as person in the eyes of others. I fully agree that this kind of society is not a good society; that all human beings deserve the chance to be judged on their acts regardless of gender. And so there is much to consider in Langton’s further argument: if Herbert had to lie in order to go on being treated as a person, then her lie may be justifiable. Perhaps this is so—I do not think Kant’s prohibition against lying should be taken as universal, and were he better attuned to the gender politics of the time, and their wrongness, he may have recognized this as a problem case. But this is also not so clear cut. The lying in question is lying about a former relationship to a person with whom Herbert has developed a deep mutual trust. Herbert is right to fear that telling the truth would undermine her status as person in the eyes of the other. But we might note also that she tells the truth, and does so because she cannot bear withholding it and violating the trust. And this is precisely as Kant says it should be: to withhold the truth would corrupt her soul. Her situation may be a lose-lose one, and one that is perhaps not best framed in terms of the negative consequences of the truth (loss of personhood before the other) versus the negative consequences of the lie (corruption of the soul). But for Herbert, certainly, the situation is already in those terms. And Kant is not entirely wrong to point out that, if her love does not finally come to respect her, then perhaps he never really loved her, or at least not enough.

III. Langton is wrong, I think, in the criticism that Kant’s failure to offer a compelling reason to live—Kant’s failure, in other words, to reply to Herbert’s initial question—is a failure of his philosophy. Herbert writes to Kant—a man whom she asks whether he never thought it “to be worth the bother to marry, or to give your whole heart to anyone, or to reproduce your likeness”—with a mix of request of moral guidance and relationship advice. That Kant had no idea how to deal with the latter—or how to deal with the former as applied to the latter—was to be expected.

I am aware of many students—perhaps some readers of this are or were such students—who, when encountering a particularly impressive professor, start to think of that professor as having the answers to all of life’s questions, as a person that they can come to with all their problems. In the student’s mind, the brilliant professor becomes sage, psychologist, counselor, friend, parental figure, etc., all rolled into one. Such a feeling appears in the background of Herbert’s letters. Kant failed to live up to this standard; most of us do. Perhaps it is not wrong to expect philosophers to have better thoughts about “the meaning of life” than others; but few really do, and it is certainly wrong to expect philosophers to be able to give answers with the proper degree of sensitivity and psychological insight. It is fairly apparent—especially from her second letter—that Herbert is hoping to learn something specific from Kant: how his philosophy, particularly his moral philosophy, can act as substitute for love and marriage. But certainly Kant never offered it as such a substitute. It is reasonable to assume that if Kant remained a loveless bachelor, this was not as a result of his moral views, nor was it seriously aided by them. What Herbert wants from Kant, Kant the man cannot give, and Kant the philosopher has no grounds for giving.

Let me note a brief analogy: Langton might reply that I, like Kant, am simply trivializing Herbert’s serious philosophical objection to his moral philosophy through a patronizing dismissal of her letters on psychological grounds. I hope that I am not doing that. But I am recognizing something fairly obvious—that there is a psychological level to Herbert’s letters that Langton simply leaves out. Keep in mind that today, philosophy professors are given clear instructions: if a student comes to you with suicidal tendencies, you should refer them to the Mental Health office; the people there are trained professionals (yeah, ok, universities also have legal concerns). I suspect that, had he had such an option, Kant would have taken it. But he did not have this option, and he failed to deal with the situation appropriately.

But it is also true that Kant did not offer psychoanalytic tools. And the moral law is not a complete prescription for living a full life. That it fails in this regard is hardly a good criticism; morality places limits on the interests we ought to pursue, and it imposes some positive duties on us, but it does nothing else. It does not tell us how to spend a Saturday afternoon any more than it tells us how we are to find pleasure in life, or a positive reason to go on living, after having lost it. Why should we expect this of Kant? If anything of this is to be found in his moral philosophy, it is only in the sense that morality offers self-esteem as its own reward. Herbert felt none of this. Should we conclude that Herbert’s apathy was pathological, and so blinded her to the proper feeling for the moral law? Or should we rather conclude that Kant was wrong in thinking that virtue does reward us? I leave the question open, but I do not find evidence in Herbert’s letters to support the latter interpretation.

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A Feminist Critique of Kant? Langton on Maria von Herbert (I)

A few years ago I glimpsed Rae Langton’s “Maria von Herbert’s Challenge to Kant” in some ethics reader, but did not have time to read it then. Today I encountered a link to an online version of the paper. Here I want to throw out some of my initial responses. Mainly: while I agree with much of what Langton says, I wonder if she is not conflating the critique of Kant the man, one who failed to recognize women as equal partners in dialogue, with a critique of Kant the philosopher who demanded the treatment of all persons as ends. Certainly there is a deep tension here, but I am not convinced it is a threat to Kantian moral philosophy, as opposed to a (justified) criticism of Kant’s application of that philosophy. Second, in building her critique, Langton more or less canonizes Herbert as a saint, based entirely on Herbert’s word. Third, Langton seems to want from Kant something he never claimed to offer nor should have been expected to, something akin to existential psychoanalysis.

To save space, I’ll refrain from summarizing too much. I would certainly advise those interested in Kant’s ethics to read Langton’s paper (and I certainly would advise against taking my word on all this: I can only address so much here, and my reading is no doubt biased). Basically: Maria von Herbert wrote to Kant, whom she has read, studied, and deeply admired, asking for help. She had chosen to confess a lie to someone she loved, and this person had turned cold to her. She asked Kant why she should go on living. Instead of addressing this last point, Kant went into the moral importance of not lying, suggesting that the truth now told, the one Herbert loves will either return to her with greater respect or, if not, well: you can’t always get what you want, and such is the way of the world. Herbert wrote back, a year later, saying that indeed the man had offered her, after a period of coldness, his intimate friendship. But she no longer cared: she had turned cold to worldly pleasures. She lived now only for the moral law, but she found the moral law too easy—she could do everything it demanded, but she had no pleasure to live for. And again she inquired why such a life should be worth living.

Kant inquired with a mutual friend, and was told that Herbert “has capsized on the reef of romantic love”. She told her lover about a previous lover, and things did not go well. Kant’s response: instead of writing Herbert again (as far as we know), he passed on the correspondence to another female friend with a note that this should remind her to guard against “the wanderings of a sublimated fantasy.”

Langton is certainly right: Kant seems to base his final (to our knowledge) judgment not on Herbert’s second letter, but instead on the friend’s evaluation of Herbert as having suffered a romantic misfortunate. Langton interprets the friend’s letter as providing an evaluation of Herbert in the traditional terms of “feminine hysteria”, but this strikes me as wrong. It is rather Kant who refers to “the lady’s curious mental derangement.” The friend says nothing of this sort: he simply gives the background for Herbert’s letters. If Kant, in turn, takes the background as fully undermining Herbert’s own thoughts, this is an error. But Langton simply makes the reverse error: she seems to think that the romantic circumstances behind the letters should not even serve as explanatory material. This is clearly wrong. I myself have certainly written—under the influence of romantic disappointment—certain things that I firmly believed at the time were true and justified independently of my particular mental state. Obviously such judgments are mistaken. We need not resort to interpreting Herbert’s letters as signifying “feminine hysteria”; being driven to despair and apathy by a failure of a relationship is hardly unique to women, as the novelists of Kant’s time well knew. To be clear: I am not defending Kant’s “derangement” account; and I am fairly certain that this analysis itself was likely prompted by Kant’s awareness that his correspondent was a woman. Nor do I deny that there were extremely interesting points in Herbert’s letters—particularly concerning the apparent dependence of moral worth on the desires it battles—that Kant fails to take seriously. My point is merely that the other extreme—one on which Herbert’s mental state is to be evaluated independently of the situation that gave rise to it—is also untenable.

Thus I agree with many of Langton’s points: Kant certainly fails to address some of the pressing issues in Herbert’s letters. He does not deal with suicide; and he reduces the problem to a simple moral dilemma of whether honesty is morally required, and dishonesty morally reprehensible; a dilemma which, given the content of Herbert’s letter, is neither here nor there. And I agree with Langton that Kant absurdly and improperly ceases to treat Herbert as a person (in the moral sense), reprehensibly passing on her personal correspondence to a third party as a cautionary tale, a case study of a woman led astray by her imagination. All this I grant. But having set this up, let me address the other part, the part where I disagree with Langton, in my next post.

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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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