Wow, it's been a long time since I've blogged on here - about three years! That's what happens when you have two more kids come along and finish off your dissertation! So, update on what's happened since the last post:
October 3-4 2008: I participated in the first Midwest Philosophy and Theology Conference at Lincoln University and met some awesome people there in the process. My paper was entitled "A Mea Culpa for the Felix Culpa?: A Greater Goods Response to the Problems of Evil and Hell" and was an exploration of theodicy or defense without appealing to libertarian freedom (although, as I indicate at the end of the paper, I think the best theodicy or defense will probably need to combine these approaches in some way). The proceedings can be found here. I recommend Anderson and Lim's papers, which were very interesting.
Just a couple weeks later: new baby!!!
Spring 2009: Pacific APA in Vancouver. I gave an abridged version of half of one of my dissertation chapters. For the abstract, along with those of the rest of the meeting, see here.
March 2009: Move to the Bay Area.
Fall 2009: Finish dissertation! Time, Tense, and Mind: A Case Study in Metaphysics and Perspectival Representation is all done! Now if only I could get a job...
Spring 2010: Nope, instead, I get into the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley in their Masters of Biblical Languages Program (since the only logical thing after not being able to find employment is go back for another degree...). As a master's student, I am affiliated with one of the GTU's member schools, so my choice is the DSPT (Dominican School for Philosophy and Theology) - which is interesting since I'm not Roman Catholic - with Sister Barbara Green as my adviser.
Fall 2010: Start my new program. That's about where I am now. I'll post some more new stuff as I'm able (we had yet another baby in March!).
Showing posts with label UC Davis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UC Davis. Show all posts
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Graduate Conference on Essentialism
Well, blogging will probably be light for a while (in case you couldn't tell already!) - with dissertation work and job applications all in the mix, it's a wonder I ever find time to do anything else. That means putting a lot of future blog posts on the backburner as I try to finish up here at Davis and move on to the next stage of my career. The next few months will be extremely busy as I get application materials together, teach three sessions of phil religion and exegetical stuff at FBC, give a paper at the Midwest Philosophy and Theology Conference, TA for Minds, Brains and Computers here at Davis, work on chapter 4 of my dissertation, and so on. Already it's been busy. Last weekend we had a Graduate Conference on Essentialism here at Davis, organized by our very own Dana Goswick. It was a really fun time and I got to meet and have interesting discussions with some cool people from out of town (as well as some new incoming Davis grad students). I was a commentator for Melissa Ebbers' paper on Chalmers 2D argument against materialism. We also had some interesting papers concerning vague composition, quantifier variance, and other cool topics. The free food was pretty nice too!
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Bad Responses
Here is one category of things that I see a lot in papers (or even in print) that annoys me. I also often here people say these things as well. Usually, people use these sayings as an excuse or escape hatch to avoid having to actually think about or critically evaluate the issues at hand or as a rationalization for avoiding having one's beliefs challenged. In these sorts of cases, it's really a kind of intellectual laziness that gives rise to these. Now, don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that these are never the right things to say. There may very well be times where one of these actually is the appropriate response. But it takes a discerning, critical mind to tell when it is appropriate and it more often than not actually isn't. Indeed, to come to one of these as a conclusion about some matter ought in most cases to be a hard-fought, carefully won conclusion - not something that one should simply assume at the outset or use as an escape hatch from the conversation. I've written these up for my students in hopes that some of it will sink in and grouped them according to a few different types.
Lazy objections or responses to get out of having to actually think about the subject:
Gotta have faith - 'You just have to have faith', 'Everything they say is just based on faith', etc.
Who knows? - 'There's no way to prove either side', 'We'll never be able to figure this out', 'No one can understand this issue', 'No one has any evidence/proof either way', 'Not everyone agrees with this', etc.
Just obey - 'Don't question God', 'Who can understand why God does things?', etc.
I'm confused - 'What they say confuses me', 'What they say is vague/ambiguous/unclear', 'The other person's argument is easier to understand', etc.
Who died and made you king? - 'Who's to say/judge that p is the case?', 'What right have we to say that p?', etc.
Gotta have faith - 'You just have to have faith', 'Everything they say is just based on faith', etc.
Who knows? - 'There's no way to prove either side', 'We'll never be able to figure this out', 'No one can understand this issue', 'No one has any evidence/proof either way', 'Not everyone agrees with this', etc.
Just obey - 'Don't question God', 'Who can understand why God does things?', etc.
I'm confused - 'What they say confuses me', 'What they say is vague/ambiguous/unclear', 'The other person's argument is easier to understand', etc.
Who died and made you king? - 'Who's to say/judge that p is the case?', 'What right have we to say that p?', etc.
Friday, August 24, 2007
Some Teacher's Proverbs: Thoughts Thought While Grading a Bunch of Papers
Never underestimate your students' ability to misunderstand, misinterpret and confuse.
If you want some awful papers, ask your students to write about the nature of morality.
If you want some awful, confused papers, ask your students to write about God or religion.
If you want some awful, confused, torture-to-read papers, ask your students to write about the nature of morality and God or religion.
If you want some awful papers, ask your students to write about the nature of morality.
If you want some awful, confused papers, ask your students to write about God or religion.
If you want some awful, confused, torture-to-read papers, ask your students to write about the nature of morality and God or religion.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Some Criteria for an Adequate Moral Theory
From some notes I made for tomorrow's Phil 1 class I teach (anything else I should add?):
The more plausible a moral theory is, the more it should…
1. Give plausible answers as to which actions are right and which are wrong.
2. Give the right reasons for why an action is right or wrong.
3. Make moral thinking rational in some sense.
4. Help guide us in doing the right thing.
5. Be the sort of thing that can be followed by a perfect human being leading a full human life – it shouldn’t require us to be omniscient or omnipotent.
6. It should be difficult – morality should not be too easy but should be stringent and should set a very high standard for us to achieve. If a moral theory says we aren’t very good people, we should take that as an impetus to improve ourselves not to reject the theory.
7. Allow for error – sometimes we go wrong.
The more plausible a moral theory is, the more it should…
1. Give plausible answers as to which actions are right and which are wrong.
2. Give the right reasons for why an action is right or wrong.
3. Make moral thinking rational in some sense.
4. Help guide us in doing the right thing.
5. Be the sort of thing that can be followed by a perfect human being leading a full human life – it shouldn’t require us to be omniscient or omnipotent.
6. It should be difficult – morality should not be too easy but should be stringent and should set a very high standard for us to achieve. If a moral theory says we aren’t very good people, we should take that as an impetus to improve ourselves not to reject the theory.
7. Allow for error – sometimes we go wrong.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Notes on Self-Formation
Here are some notes for a presentation I gave three or so years ago at a meeting of Davis's Moral and Political Philosophy Group (now defunct). The talk took as a starting point a paper by Bernard Williams called "Moral Incapacity". It's a brief hint of the self-formation view of persons that I've slowly been developing on the side. Here it goes:
Here’s my own quick characterization of moral incapacity: Your moral character can sometimes constrain the set of actions you are able to take in any given circumstance. You are said to have a moral incapacity to do those things outside this restricted set. If the set in some situation is reduced to include only a single action, this is what Williams calls elsewhere a case of practical necessity – ‘I can’t’ might be replaced with an ‘I must’. In this paper, Williams just uses the term ‘moral incapacity’ and leaves practical necessity aside since it is basically just a limiting case of moral incapacity, where there is a moral incapacity to do all actions but one. I will do the same.
Let’s assume there is moral incapacity. If there is, that seems to upset a very natural idea many people have about moral responsibility – the idea that I am responsible for only what I can refrain from. It seems to upset the idea that I can be evaluated morally only in terms of those actions or omissions for which I had the capacity to do otherwise – if I lacked the capacity to do something or omit from doing something then I am not responsible for such an action and am not blameworthy.
In the case of actions or omissions arising from a moral incapacity (call them m-actions), one does not in a sense have a choice over whether to do them or not. What is odd, though, is that such an action is more of a result or expression of one’s character and one’s self than almost any other kind of action. The individual seems very much responsible for such an action, since it is so intimately an expression of his moral self and can be praiseworthy or blameworthy for such actions and the moral incapacities which give rise to them. What I can or cannot do seems directly to bear on how I am to be morally evaluated. And this seems to conflict with the idea that we are responsible only for our free actions and that something’s being freely chosen implies an ability to choose otherwise. So we can have snappy names for everything, I’ll call this the “Incapacity Problem”.
Given his other writings, I am sure Williams would be quite happy with this result. You can see evidence of this in the first footnote of this paper. But I would like to see what kind of headway we can make on this problem. One answer that immediately comes to mind is that we are responsible for our m-actions since we are responsible for our current character and since our character is what gives rise to these m-actions, we are therefore responsible for the m-actions as well. Call this the “Character Response” to the Incapacity Problem. We might think that we are responsible for our character just in case we are responsible maintaining it – if I can change my character or was myself the cause of it, then I am responsible for it and for all actions that come from it. I’m going to spend the rest of my time focusing on this line of thought.
Now consider the following case: John has an incapacity to do a certain action, A, and so omits performing it. John’s character, however, is “fixed” – that is, he is not able through his own choices to change his character in any way. He therefore cannot get rid of his current character or any moral incapacities he has. The question now is whether John can still be held responsible. This could be a problem for the Character Response – call it the “Fixed Character Problem”.
One response is that John really is responsible for his omission. His character presumably was not always fixed, so previous to this fixing it must have been possible for him to influence his own character. Since his character in the past was formed or at least maintained by his own actions up to the point where it became fixed, he is therefore responsible for his current character and so for his m-actions – prior to the fixing of his character, he could have changed his character so that it might be different than it now is.
Before looking at objections to this, let’s look at one of the pictures of responsibility and moral development that this line of thought so far seems to suggest. This picture will be rather speculative and highly idealized, but perhaps helpful nonetheless. I’ll call it the “Self-Formation Picture”.
On this picture, freedom and self-determination go hand in hand and ultimately imply the freedom to shape my own decisions, my character, myself. True freedom involves the ability to build for myself what I will be – I can form for myself a certain moral character. Those who are young can affect the direction of who are they to morally become more easily than those who are older – children go through rapid moral development just as they go through any other kind of development. But as we get older, our character becomes more rigid and less easily changed – we have developed and formed ourselves more and more and what we have made of ourselves becomes less and less reversible.
Take the idealized limit points at either end of the process and pretend for the moment that human beings are actually able to occupy these limit points. At one end, the beginning of life, we have no moral character whatsoever – personality and other traits maybe, but no moral character. The other end of the spectrum is where a person’s character is fixed – they have formed themselves fully and the process is over. Such a person, I’ll say, is fully made.
True freedom or self-determination as it is idealized here, then, involves being able to go through this process of self-formation. At the beginning, freedom expresses itself through the ability to form different characters and take a wide variety of actions. At the end, freedom or responsibility expresses itself through the inability to form a different character or choose from certain actions – the fixed character is itself a result of this freedom. On such a picture, we are entirely responsible for our fixed character and the actions that flow from it. So John really is responsible for his omission of doing A.
Consider two kinds of perfection: perfection as original flawlessness versus perfection as completion. The person at the first limit point is perfect in the first sense – there are no moral flaws since there is no moral character and such a person is utterly blameless. Now consider the other end. At this end, one might be perfect in the second sense by holding a fixed, maximally good moral character. Say Jack is on the road to completion – his character is neither fixed nor yet maximally good.
Since Jack is morally incomplete in this sense, he may choose wrong or not. The complete, however, cannot – they have completed the ethical project. So freedom expresses itself in flawlessness through the possibility of falling into vice while it expresses itself in completion through the impossibility. Our time of making, however, can be ended with ourselves ethically incomplete and so not able to go on to completion.
Say that John has flaws in his moral character. One objection to the picture I just gave would be that, prior to being fully made, John might not have known the full consequences of his actions for his moral character or that they were wrong. And now here he is unable to do anything about who he is now and so unable to refrain from not doing A. How could he be held responsible for his character or m-actions?
I’m not sure how convincing it is, but one reply might be that almost everyone is reasonably expected to find out what is right or wrong well enough to find their way to a morally good character prior to being fully-made. If they fail in this, then they are culpable and so still responsible for whom they end up becoming and the m-actions that come from this.
Another sort of response is that it doesn’t matter whether John is really responsible or not, since there seems no evidence to think that anyone in real life ever really gets to the point where they are fully-made. Both the beginning and end points of moral development were, after all, mere idealizations. Maybe no one ever actually occupies either of those points. They might get closer and closer to the end point as they get older, but perhaps no one ever actually reaches the point where they cannot change their character as a result of their own choices or actions. Perhaps the amount of character fixation at any point in the process of moral development could be analogous to the value for any x on the number line of the function x/x+1 – as the x gets larger, the value of the function increases more and more and gets closer and closer to 1 without ever actually reaching it. So perhaps character is never fixed and even given an infinite lifespan we would never reach that end point though we would get imperceptibly closer and closer. In that case, we would always be able to change, though it might be incredibly difficult. So perhaps we always are responsible for our character and thus our m-actions after all.
The Self-Formation Picture, then, might be able to get the Character Response out of the Fixed Character Problem and thus dissolve the Incapacity Problem as well. But I think all of it would need more spelling out to see whether the Incapacity Problem could really be dissolved in such a manner.
Let’s assume there is moral incapacity. If there is, that seems to upset a very natural idea many people have about moral responsibility – the idea that I am responsible for only what I can refrain from. It seems to upset the idea that I can be evaluated morally only in terms of those actions or omissions for which I had the capacity to do otherwise – if I lacked the capacity to do something or omit from doing something then I am not responsible for such an action and am not blameworthy.
In the case of actions or omissions arising from a moral incapacity (call them m-actions), one does not in a sense have a choice over whether to do them or not. What is odd, though, is that such an action is more of a result or expression of one’s character and one’s self than almost any other kind of action. The individual seems very much responsible for such an action, since it is so intimately an expression of his moral self and can be praiseworthy or blameworthy for such actions and the moral incapacities which give rise to them. What I can or cannot do seems directly to bear on how I am to be morally evaluated. And this seems to conflict with the idea that we are responsible only for our free actions and that something’s being freely chosen implies an ability to choose otherwise. So we can have snappy names for everything, I’ll call this the “Incapacity Problem”.
Given his other writings, I am sure Williams would be quite happy with this result. You can see evidence of this in the first footnote of this paper. But I would like to see what kind of headway we can make on this problem. One answer that immediately comes to mind is that we are responsible for our m-actions since we are responsible for our current character and since our character is what gives rise to these m-actions, we are therefore responsible for the m-actions as well. Call this the “Character Response” to the Incapacity Problem. We might think that we are responsible for our character just in case we are responsible maintaining it – if I can change my character or was myself the cause of it, then I am responsible for it and for all actions that come from it. I’m going to spend the rest of my time focusing on this line of thought.
Now consider the following case: John has an incapacity to do a certain action, A, and so omits performing it. John’s character, however, is “fixed” – that is, he is not able through his own choices to change his character in any way. He therefore cannot get rid of his current character or any moral incapacities he has. The question now is whether John can still be held responsible. This could be a problem for the Character Response – call it the “Fixed Character Problem”.
One response is that John really is responsible for his omission. His character presumably was not always fixed, so previous to this fixing it must have been possible for him to influence his own character. Since his character in the past was formed or at least maintained by his own actions up to the point where it became fixed, he is therefore responsible for his current character and so for his m-actions – prior to the fixing of his character, he could have changed his character so that it might be different than it now is.
Before looking at objections to this, let’s look at one of the pictures of responsibility and moral development that this line of thought so far seems to suggest. This picture will be rather speculative and highly idealized, but perhaps helpful nonetheless. I’ll call it the “Self-Formation Picture”.
On this picture, freedom and self-determination go hand in hand and ultimately imply the freedom to shape my own decisions, my character, myself. True freedom involves the ability to build for myself what I will be – I can form for myself a certain moral character. Those who are young can affect the direction of who are they to morally become more easily than those who are older – children go through rapid moral development just as they go through any other kind of development. But as we get older, our character becomes more rigid and less easily changed – we have developed and formed ourselves more and more and what we have made of ourselves becomes less and less reversible.
Take the idealized limit points at either end of the process and pretend for the moment that human beings are actually able to occupy these limit points. At one end, the beginning of life, we have no moral character whatsoever – personality and other traits maybe, but no moral character. The other end of the spectrum is where a person’s character is fixed – they have formed themselves fully and the process is over. Such a person, I’ll say, is fully made.
True freedom or self-determination as it is idealized here, then, involves being able to go through this process of self-formation. At the beginning, freedom expresses itself through the ability to form different characters and take a wide variety of actions. At the end, freedom or responsibility expresses itself through the inability to form a different character or choose from certain actions – the fixed character is itself a result of this freedom. On such a picture, we are entirely responsible for our fixed character and the actions that flow from it. So John really is responsible for his omission of doing A.
Consider two kinds of perfection: perfection as original flawlessness versus perfection as completion. The person at the first limit point is perfect in the first sense – there are no moral flaws since there is no moral character and such a person is utterly blameless. Now consider the other end. At this end, one might be perfect in the second sense by holding a fixed, maximally good moral character. Say Jack is on the road to completion – his character is neither fixed nor yet maximally good.
Since Jack is morally incomplete in this sense, he may choose wrong or not. The complete, however, cannot – they have completed the ethical project. So freedom expresses itself in flawlessness through the possibility of falling into vice while it expresses itself in completion through the impossibility. Our time of making, however, can be ended with ourselves ethically incomplete and so not able to go on to completion.
Say that John has flaws in his moral character. One objection to the picture I just gave would be that, prior to being fully made, John might not have known the full consequences of his actions for his moral character or that they were wrong. And now here he is unable to do anything about who he is now and so unable to refrain from not doing A. How could he be held responsible for his character or m-actions?
I’m not sure how convincing it is, but one reply might be that almost everyone is reasonably expected to find out what is right or wrong well enough to find their way to a morally good character prior to being fully-made. If they fail in this, then they are culpable and so still responsible for whom they end up becoming and the m-actions that come from this.
Another sort of response is that it doesn’t matter whether John is really responsible or not, since there seems no evidence to think that anyone in real life ever really gets to the point where they are fully-made. Both the beginning and end points of moral development were, after all, mere idealizations. Maybe no one ever actually occupies either of those points. They might get closer and closer to the end point as they get older, but perhaps no one ever actually reaches the point where they cannot change their character as a result of their own choices or actions. Perhaps the amount of character fixation at any point in the process of moral development could be analogous to the value for any x on the number line of the function x/x+1 – as the x gets larger, the value of the function increases more and more and gets closer and closer to 1 without ever actually reaching it. So perhaps character is never fixed and even given an infinite lifespan we would never reach that end point though we would get imperceptibly closer and closer. In that case, we would always be able to change, though it might be incredibly difficult. So perhaps we always are responsible for our character and thus our m-actions after all.
The Self-Formation Picture, then, might be able to get the Character Response out of the Fixed Character Problem and thus dissolve the Incapacity Problem as well. But I think all of it would need more spelling out to see whether the Incapacity Problem could really be dissolved in such a manner.
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Random Thoughts on Ethics, Society, Welfare, and Human Functioning
So in lecture today the vast majority of students thought doctors should perform amputations for the wannabes mentioned in my previous post, presumably in large part because they thought that having such amputations is morally permissible. Well in line with narrowly Utilitarian or Consequentialist thinking, they seemed to channel the oft-repeated mantras of our culture: "You can do whatever you want with your own body", "It's okay since it makes them happy", "It doesn't hurt anyone", etc. In discussion section tonight, however, I really pressed them and got to think of lots and lots of reasons against such amputations - reasons to think that they are in fact not morally permissible. At the end, the students were no longer so sure that such amputations were really as morally okay as they had initially thought. It's amazing what happens when you stop simply repeating the tired old lines of the overly-simplistic, feel-good pop morality that passes as public ethics these days and actually think about moral issues and moral reasons.
Some good reasons against that people came up with or that I came up with (some are just reiterations or slightly more nuanced versions of others):
It's being ungrateful for the body and abilities you have.
It's a very radical rejection of God's design of you in favor of your own.
It's a denial of the goodness of the whole of the healthy human body.
The benefits are outweighed by the risks.
It is harmful to the patient and reduces functionality.
It's medically unnecessary and doesn't help anyone else.
The desire for this sort of thing is just crazy or irrational.
It implants, encourages, and inflames other people's desires for similar things.
It leads to more of a burden on society's resources.
And so on.
Some of these are also good reasons against purely cosmetic surgery as well, which I'm okay with. I've always been bothered by cosmetic surgery and have long had a feeling that something just isn't right about it. It's not at all as bad (maybe) as voluntary amputation, but still has the feel of the frivolous, the ungrateful, the pseudo-gnostic denial of the goodness of the human body in its wholeness. It seems like a lot of the intuitions in favor of these sorts of things seems to involve the deep cultural influence of a kind of gnostic or extreme dualism. Gnosticism was an ancient heresy that taught that matter was evil and that spirit was good and thought of these are two completely separate, opposed realms. Unfortunately, the influence of this sort of view has survived to the present day.
Substance dualism is the view that there are two irreducibly distinct kinds of entities - material ones and immaterial ones - and the body is of the former kind whereas the mind or soul is of the latter. An extreme form takes it that I am simply my mind, a purely immaterial, nonphysical, spiritual object, and my body is just an instrument or tool that I happen to make use of for the time being. Both these views - gnosticism and extreme substance dualism - denigrate the body and make it somehow other than me and a mere possession to be used or disposed of as I see fit. Our society, I take it, has been profoundly influenced by such views, despite (or indeed sometimes precisely during) many people's protestations to the contrary.
One sees the influence of these sorts of views in many places. It's almost an orthodoxy, for instance, among many philosophers that human welfare is a purely mental affair - pleasure, desire satisfaction, or some other form of mental happy-crap. The body just doesn't matter - or at least it only does so insofar as it affects the mental stuff (which is the stuff, of course, which really matters). This sort of thing is simply a denial of our nature as physical beings - our design by God as living, material organisms. Plants and animals have welfare too, but it is implausible to say of them that their welfare is a purely psychological affair for them. This should be most obvious with plants since they really have no psychology in the first place. With them, our criteria revolve around the sorts of things they are and their abilities to function as designed - it revolves around a kind of health. I think we ought to say the same thing about human wellfare - my being well-off is a matter of my health, both physical and mental, and has to do with the sort of thing I am (a psychological subject yes, but also a living organism).
And of course relativism, overly cautious PC-tolerance of everybody and everything, the breakdown in moral education, and so on haven't helped matters as far as public ethical thought is concerned either. In the past disabled people were stigmatized, pitied, seen as less than human, etc. People thought their lives had to be less rich or full than "normal" people's and indeed less valuable. Most people probably still think that - consider Million Dollar Baby for instance. It could be the poster child for anti-disabled bias - the main character is an up and coming boxer and then becomes a parapalegic who ends her life with the help of her coach. Her life is portrayed as if it just wasn't worthwhile anymore and not valuable or worth keeping.
In response to this, people have, however, swung completely too far in the opposite direction. Disabled activists often won't even admit that the people they represent are disabled in the first place, that they have a hard time with anything, that there is anything whatsoever of disvalue about their condition, or that their functionality is impaired in any sense whatsoever (some among the deaf community are particularly guilty of this). It seems that we shouldn't go to either of these extremes - neither bigotry on the one hand nor blinded PC-fueled dogmatism on the other. Both of these, again, involve a denial in some way of our nature as living organisms. The bigoted side involves a denial that we can lead meaningful, valuable lives even when we are broken - even a broken body is a body designed by God and can be used for his glory. The PC side, on the other hand, involves a denial that we as humans have particular biological capabilities that are designed for us and which it is better for us to have than not. Both sides should be denied and we should break out of the assumption that both have nurtured that they are the only two options.
All of this is why I think it was wrong in the famous case for the two congenitally deaf lesbians to seek to have a congenitally deaf baby together (among other reasons) via genetic selection processes or genetic engineering - it involves a kind of intentional harm to the person so produced (though arguing that you can harm someone by creating them with deficits is a discussion for another day).
So anyways, that was a screenful. I'll stop now. I promise. Really.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
A Large Portion of My Class Says They'd Push Someone in Front of a Runaway Train
...if that would stop the train in time so that it wouldn't hit five more people further along the track. I find that rather disturbing and I think it shows that a lot of college students aren't very reflective about moral issues (as if that wasn't obvious enough already given the number who think relativism is a reasonable or even obligatory position to take). This is classic consequentialist sort of thinking.
Classic consequentialism says that the right action to take is the one that produces the most good consequences. So if we want to decide between action A and action B, we look and see how much good stuff will result from doing A and compare that with the result from doing B. Nothing else matters - that action A is a rape, for instance, and action B is helping a little old lady across the street is completely irrelevant to determining the rightness or wrongness of the two actions. All that matters is the consequences.
Here, what the students seem to be doing is weighing lives against each other - five lives are worth more than one life, so doing something that results in five living and one dead is morally better than doing something that results in five dead and one living. But that just seems morally reprehensible - human beings aren't mere commodities whose relative values can be weighed or compared with one another or to see what a single human being's life is worth. Human lives aren't the sort of thing that you can just add together to get more value - human beings are of infinite valuable or at least not additive value. The students' approach here, however, ignores the inherent dignity and incomparability of human value and treats human lives as mere objects to be bought or sold with no regard to the personal wishes, rights, or integrity of the individual human person.
Why are students (and some philosophers) tempted by this sort of picture, though? One reason, I suspect is watching too much TV or too many movies or reading too many books where the hero engages in consequentialist-permitted (but seemingly wrong) actions all for the greater good and succeeds in doing so. Passing no judgment on the hero, this sort of story can influence people's moral perceptions. Stories can make us sympathize with or root for evil people or want them to engage in their evil acts (consider, for instance, the thrill and narrative satisfaction one gets at the end of The Godfather, for instance, when all of Michael Corleone's enemies are gunned down and killed).
Alternatively, we may be influenced by these things in the following sort of way: we want to see X to happen since X is better than the other alternatives, so we root for the person involved to do action Y to bring about X even though Y might be wrong - and (this is the crucial part) we mistake this approval of X with approval for the action, Y, that brings about X. Take the TV show 24, for instance - few episodes go by where you don't have the hero, Jack Bauer, or one of the other agents torturing someone to get some key information to help save a bunch of other people. We all, of course, prefer a world where there is one torture and no murders to a world where there is no torture and many murders, so we may want Jack to do the torture so that the first world is the one that we live in rather than the second. But that doesn't mean that what Jack does is morally permissible. It is a mistake to go from "the world ought to be such that it includes Jack doing such-and-such" to "Jack ought to do such-and-such", but it is a very easy mistake to make - one many people, many of my students included, seem to have fallen into.
Classic consequentialism says that the right action to take is the one that produces the most good consequences. So if we want to decide between action A and action B, we look and see how much good stuff will result from doing A and compare that with the result from doing B. Nothing else matters - that action A is a rape, for instance, and action B is helping a little old lady across the street is completely irrelevant to determining the rightness or wrongness of the two actions. All that matters is the consequences.
Here, what the students seem to be doing is weighing lives against each other - five lives are worth more than one life, so doing something that results in five living and one dead is morally better than doing something that results in five dead and one living. But that just seems morally reprehensible - human beings aren't mere commodities whose relative values can be weighed or compared with one another or to see what a single human being's life is worth. Human lives aren't the sort of thing that you can just add together to get more value - human beings are of infinite valuable or at least not additive value. The students' approach here, however, ignores the inherent dignity and incomparability of human value and treats human lives as mere objects to be bought or sold with no regard to the personal wishes, rights, or integrity of the individual human person.
Why are students (and some philosophers) tempted by this sort of picture, though? One reason, I suspect is watching too much TV or too many movies or reading too many books where the hero engages in consequentialist-permitted (but seemingly wrong) actions all for the greater good and succeeds in doing so. Passing no judgment on the hero, this sort of story can influence people's moral perceptions. Stories can make us sympathize with or root for evil people or want them to engage in their evil acts (consider, for instance, the thrill and narrative satisfaction one gets at the end of The Godfather, for instance, when all of Michael Corleone's enemies are gunned down and killed).
Alternatively, we may be influenced by these things in the following sort of way: we want to see X to happen since X is better than the other alternatives, so we root for the person involved to do action Y to bring about X even though Y might be wrong - and (this is the crucial part) we mistake this approval of X with approval for the action, Y, that brings about X. Take the TV show 24, for instance - few episodes go by where you don't have the hero, Jack Bauer, or one of the other agents torturing someone to get some key information to help save a bunch of other people. We all, of course, prefer a world where there is one torture and no murders to a world where there is no torture and many murders, so we may want Jack to do the torture so that the first world is the one that we live in rather than the second. But that doesn't mean that what Jack does is morally permissible. It is a mistake to go from "the world ought to be such that it includes Jack doing such-and-such" to "Jack ought to do such-and-such", but it is a very easy mistake to make - one many people, many of my students included, seem to have fallen into.
Thursday, March 8, 2007
Moral Relativism and Really Bad Papers
I'm in the middle of grading one of the worst batches of papers I've ever graded. Somehow, out of all the TAs I'm the one who ended up with most of the really bad ones - vast confusions and misunderstanding, gross failures to actually read the text they are writing on, neglect in actually following the directions given by the topic prompt, rambling and incoherent paragraphs (or pages) with little or no apparent point, incomprehensible prose, lack of critical thought, lack of arguing for their own opinions, use of obviously circular or question-begging arguments, treating this as a book report rather than a philosophy paper, ignoring what was actually said or argued in class, and so on. And all this on almost all my students' papers!
I was especially dissappointed with the papers on the first paper topic. The students were asked to take a look at the part of Russ Shafer-Landau's article on ethical subjectivism where he presents and then destroys arguments for NES - normative ethical subjectivism (the view that an action is right for me if and only if I approve of it/believe it is right). They were then supposed to turn one of the arguments for NES into an argument for Cultural Relativism (the view that an action is right for me if and only if my culture approves of it/believes it is right) and then see whether Shafer-Landau's objections to the analogous argument for NES work here as well and whether the argument for CR ends up showing CR is true. Over half of the students on this topic supported CR but half of them did not even take into account Shafer-Landau's devastating objections which would work against CR just as well as NES and the rest either misunderstood Shafer-Landau, made a reply to him that we explicitly showed in class did not actually work, or said basically that Shafer-Landau's replies don't work because CR is true. So basically these were awful papers. Unsurprisingly, those advocating CR didn't actually have any good reasons to believe CR and they basically said that it was true because CR is correct. Ugh!
It's awful that so many students buy into NES or CR when they have so many problems and there's really no good reason or argument in their favor. Here's one sort of argument against these kinds of moral relativism (MR):
(1) Morality is not arbitrary.
(2) If morality is not arbitrary then MR is false.
(3) Therefore, MR is false.
Evidence for 1: Morality is a fundamentally rational, reasoned thing. People reason and argue and deliberate about moral matters and there are certain patterns to moral reasoning and justification - it's not just willy-nilly or anything goes nor is it completely random. It has all the hallmarks of non-arbitrariness, unlike something like, say, norms of etiquette or whether one likes chocolate ice cream or not.
Evidence for 2: Since morality is based on patterns of reasons and reasoning and people and cultures do not simply arbitrarily approve or dissapprove of actions but do so for these very reasons, it seems that these reasons, which explain these patterns of approval and dissapproval are what make something right or wrong, not the approval or dissapproval itself. And so if approval and dissaproval are not what morality directly depends upon, then MR must be false since it claims the opposite. So good-bye, MR.
I'm quite fond of this sort of argument. Down with MR!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)