Philosophy bites: July 2007
April 14th 2009 12:38
Some of the points I found interesting or thought-provoking from the July 2007 podcasts.
Anne Phillips on Multiculturalism
* Phillips understands multiculturalism to involve three components. Firstly, it's the recognition that people's culture identity matters to them, so ignoring or disparaging cultural identity is a harm. Secondly, the implication is that if you're in a society that contains a diversity of cultures, it's not appropriate to expect everyone to adopt the values, practices, traditions of the majority or dominant group. Thirdly, it's also likely that the laws and institutions will reflect the values and practices of the majority group, so that's a bias that needs to be justified or undone.
* Phillips is careful to emphasize that it's dangerous to talk about a culture (for instance, "Turkish culture") as if it's a monolithic, unified thing that's represented by spokespeople (usually older men) who explain its values and practices. Rather, there's huge variation within "a culture". Talking about cultures as monolithic itself encourages communities to close in and define themselves in a narrow way.
* Why multiculturalism and not monoculturalism? Phillips notes that multiculturalism derives from liberal principles, including:
-- equality;
-- freedom (you should be free to live life according to your own values and beliefs, whereas a monoculture gives you limited options and is oppressive if not outright coercive);
-- toleration (respecting even those differences that you find challenging).
* But are there limits to toleration? What if someone is living in circumstances that others regard as extremely oppressive, but either seems to be happy or says, "This is my choice"? Should they be "rescued"? Or what happens if one culture wants to engage in female circumcision? Should others prevent them?
* Phillips' take on this goes:
-- The "happy slave" -- someone who has grown to like their slavehood -- Phillips thinks is mostly philosophical mythology. Oppression usually goes noticed.
-- But if, after discussion, someone eventually says to you "This is my choice", then you have to listen to them.
-- What's important is that there are things in place -- like housing provisions, educational policies, legal services -- to make it more real for someone to say "Yes, I can see the alternatives, but this is my choice."
-- Similarly, if someone chooses to stay in a community, you don't have to interpret this as meaning that they endorse that life. "They chose to stay there, so it's their problem if they're oppressed." Perhaps they hate the oppression, but hope for change within that community. Or perhaps they lack genuine alternatives -- ability to find jobs elsewhere, other places they could move to, other support networks they could draw on.
-- Public authorities should listen to adults' choices, but should protect children. At what point between, say, 12 and 18 is a person capable of deciding, and at what point are they so much at the mercy of parents and the community that one must step in to protect them? -- Phillips says she doesn't have a secure answer, but this is not a problem particular to multiculturalism; rather, the law deals with such instances all the time (the concept of consent has a lot of grey areas).
-- In what ways do you protect them? One criterion is the reversibility of decision. This is one reason to oppose female circumcision.
Edward Craig on What is Philosophy?
* The word "philosophy" can name both the process and the results.
* In the results sense, everyone is a philosopher. Everyone has beliefs about knowledge and what counts as a good reason for claiming knowledge; everyone has beliefs about right and wrong; everyone has a take on God and souls.
* The difference between a pub conversation and university philosophy isn't all that great. The main difference is degree of self-awareness. For instance, the university conversation will be conducted with greater awareness of what's been said in the past, whereas if someone says something original or important in the pub, it might go unnoticed, people mighn't appreciate its significance (conversely, if someone says something that's already been said two thousand years ago and discussed a lot since then, they might not realize it).
* Craig compares playing the piano. Both the amateur and the concert pianist are "playing the piano", but the professional has more awareness, and can talk about why they're doing what they're doing, their intentions and choices in playing a particular way, etc.
* The experience of doing philosophy itself has a value, just as playing the piano is an experience with a value.
Roger Crisp on Utilitarianism
* People think that it's absurd to try to measure pleasures and pains. Crisp notes that, in a basic way, we measure them all the time. For instance, we say that this is more painful than that.
* Bentham believed something like: there is a single mental state called pleasure, and we should try to maximize it in intensity and duration. Mill is often interpreted as renouncing Bentham's narrow hedonism -- there's not one desirable mental state, but several, and some mental states are intrinsically better than others. This is why "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied."
Crisp gives a different interpretation here. If I'm understanding properly, the suggestion is that Mill never in fact renounced narrow hedonism. Mill still believes in a single mental state to be aimed at. Mill wasn't saying that there's a mental state difference between philosophising and playing in the mud, but rather there's a problem of measurement, whereby finite amounts of the former count for more than infinite amounts of the latter.
Anthony Grayling on Atheism
* Our culture is functionally secular. There's a small number of people who are regular churchgoers -- perhaps seven or eight per cent of the population. And yet they get huge airtime, their schools get special funding, and so forth.
* What if there were no life after death? Grayling suggests this might be a "wonderful rest from it all", whereas a believer would emphasize the horror of finitude and annihilation.
I take this as an example of the way that there's always numerous attitudes and perspectives you can take on a thing. There's always a positive spin to be found. Is eating faeces horrendous? Well not completely, because it's satisfying that you're not wasting anything.
Other examples. Eternal recurrence could be seen as the heaviest weight, or you could say to the demon "You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine". Determinists will often talk about how liberating it is to give up belief in free will. And against the idea that food without meat is less tasty, Peter Singer writes (Animal Liberation, 1975): "When we eat plants, food takes on a different quality... Without meat to deaden the palate we experence an extra delight in fresh vegetables taken straight from the ground. Personally, I found the idea of picking my own dinner so satisfying that shortly after becoming a vegetarian I began digging up part of our backyard and growing some of my own vegetables".
* No God, then no morality. I think when people say this, usually they're just throwing mud -- "You're not a believer, so you can't be moral, so I'm better than you are."
But sometimes they're apparently arguing along the lines of:
1. We must have morality.
2. You can only have a morality when you believe in a deity.
3. Therefore, you must believe in a deity.
My personal inclination is to focus on premise one -- why must we have a morality; why can't we all take a trip down the nihilist abyss, etc, etc. Grayling responds to premise two.
Grayling notes that there's always been a rich secular ethical tradition (for instance, though Grayling doesn't mention this, the Greeks and Romans believed in gods, but their gods were just like normal people -- Zeus went around having affairs -- the gods didn't necessarily have anything to say about good and bad, right and wrong). Grayling also thinks that there's plenty of people who behave well to others mainly because of their liking and sympathy for their fellow human beings, and it's a calumny on these people to say that their conduct is non-moral because it's non-theist. In fact, those who think for themselves are more honourable and admirable than people who simply buy a box of pre-made beliefs from the supermarket shelf.
* Grayling suggests that the case for atheism is a matter of what it is rational to believe. Judged by the standards of rationality, belief in a deity or deities has the same respectability as belief in fairies in the garden. In particular, it's non-falsifiable, and is therefore an empty assertion.
Well, I have a number of reactions to this. Here's three.
Firstly, are there no good reasons for believing in a deity? For instance, I never know what to say to the person who claims, "I feel God is real, and His presence is as concrete as tables and chairs." Non-believers are rightly skeptical of arguments from feeling, but from a first-person perspective it's hard to ignore this sort of intuitive, revelatory-type reason.
Secondly, I'd want to inquire further into the meaning of rationality. What are the conditions of it (how do you judge what is the rational thing to do), what is the compulsion of it, are there different types of rationality, could something be rational from one perspective but irrational from another, and so forth. I think, for instance, of sorites problems, or the idea that what is rational over the short-term might be irrational over the long-term.
In the particular case, Grayling seems to be suggesting that the default position should be lack of belief, and the onus is on the believer to prove -- but why couldn't the default position be belief, and the onus on the disbeliever to discredit? Is this a question of rationality, or a question of parsimony and practicality?
Thirdly, I'm interested in the connections between holism and religious belief. If you buy into a Quinean picture, then beliefs travel in groups rather than individually (any one belief is supported by others), and some beliefs are closer to the centre of one's web of belief, and less liable to be junked when the entirety of one's beliefs wants correction.
What does it mean "to be closer to the centre"? Quine presumably had some idea of logical connection: the more beliefs for which a particular belief is a necessary condition, the closer it is the centre of one's beliefs. But perhaps the metaphor could also be explored simply in terms of the firmness with which a belief is held; and that firmness could be due to a rational probability weighting, or to irrational factors (genetic instinct, social pressures, etc; why is it that we treat causation and logical principles with such respect?).
So perhaps the existence of a deity isn't always a tidy matter of focusing on the rationality of a particular belief that you try to isolate. Consider the people who believe in a young earth rather than give up their literalist readings of the Bible.
***
Anne Phillips on Multiculturalism
Anne Phillips
* Phillips is careful to emphasize that it's dangerous to talk about a culture (for instance, "Turkish culture") as if it's a monolithic, unified thing that's represented by spokespeople (usually older men) who explain its values and practices. Rather, there's huge variation within "a culture". Talking about cultures as monolithic itself encourages communities to close in and define themselves in a narrow way.
* Why multiculturalism and not monoculturalism? Phillips notes that multiculturalism derives from liberal principles, including:
-- equality;
-- freedom (you should be free to live life according to your own values and beliefs, whereas a monoculture gives you limited options and is oppressive if not outright coercive);
-- toleration (respecting even those differences that you find challenging).
* But are there limits to toleration? What if someone is living in circumstances that others regard as extremely oppressive, but either seems to be happy or says, "This is my choice"? Should they be "rescued"? Or what happens if one culture wants to engage in female circumcision? Should others prevent them?
* Phillips' take on this goes:
-- The "happy slave" -- someone who has grown to like their slavehood -- Phillips thinks is mostly philosophical mythology. Oppression usually goes noticed.
-- But if, after discussion, someone eventually says to you "This is my choice", then you have to listen to them.
-- What's important is that there are things in place -- like housing provisions, educational policies, legal services -- to make it more real for someone to say "Yes, I can see the alternatives, but this is my choice."
-- Similarly, if someone chooses to stay in a community, you don't have to interpret this as meaning that they endorse that life. "They chose to stay there, so it's their problem if they're oppressed." Perhaps they hate the oppression, but hope for change within that community. Or perhaps they lack genuine alternatives -- ability to find jobs elsewhere, other places they could move to, other support networks they could draw on.
-- Public authorities should listen to adults' choices, but should protect children. At what point between, say, 12 and 18 is a person capable of deciding, and at what point are they so much at the mercy of parents and the community that one must step in to protect them? -- Phillips says she doesn't have a secure answer, but this is not a problem particular to multiculturalism; rather, the law deals with such instances all the time (the concept of consent has a lot of grey areas).
-- In what ways do you protect them? One criterion is the reversibility of decision. This is one reason to oppose female circumcision.
Edward Craig on What is Philosophy?
Edward Craig
* In the results sense, everyone is a philosopher. Everyone has beliefs about knowledge and what counts as a good reason for claiming knowledge; everyone has beliefs about right and wrong; everyone has a take on God and souls.
* The difference between a pub conversation and university philosophy isn't all that great. The main difference is degree of self-awareness. For instance, the university conversation will be conducted with greater awareness of what's been said in the past, whereas if someone says something original or important in the pub, it might go unnoticed, people mighn't appreciate its significance (conversely, if someone says something that's already been said two thousand years ago and discussed a lot since then, they might not realize it).
* Craig compares playing the piano. Both the amateur and the concert pianist are "playing the piano", but the professional has more awareness, and can talk about why they're doing what they're doing, their intentions and choices in playing a particular way, etc.
* The experience of doing philosophy itself has a value, just as playing the piano is an experience with a value.
Roger Crisp on Utilitarianism
Roger Crisp
* Bentham believed something like: there is a single mental state called pleasure, and we should try to maximize it in intensity and duration. Mill is often interpreted as renouncing Bentham's narrow hedonism -- there's not one desirable mental state, but several, and some mental states are intrinsically better than others. This is why "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied."
Crisp gives a different interpretation here. If I'm understanding properly, the suggestion is that Mill never in fact renounced narrow hedonism. Mill still believes in a single mental state to be aimed at. Mill wasn't saying that there's a mental state difference between philosophising and playing in the mud, but rather there's a problem of measurement, whereby finite amounts of the former count for more than infinite amounts of the latter.
Anthony Grayling on Atheism
Anthony Grayling
* What if there were no life after death? Grayling suggests this might be a "wonderful rest from it all", whereas a believer would emphasize the horror of finitude and annihilation.
I take this as an example of the way that there's always numerous attitudes and perspectives you can take on a thing. There's always a positive spin to be found. Is eating faeces horrendous? Well not completely, because it's satisfying that you're not wasting anything.
Other examples. Eternal recurrence could be seen as the heaviest weight, or you could say to the demon "You are a god, and never have I heard anything more divine". Determinists will often talk about how liberating it is to give up belief in free will. And against the idea that food without meat is less tasty, Peter Singer writes (Animal Liberation, 1975): "When we eat plants, food takes on a different quality... Without meat to deaden the palate we experence an extra delight in fresh vegetables taken straight from the ground. Personally, I found the idea of picking my own dinner so satisfying that shortly after becoming a vegetarian I began digging up part of our backyard and growing some of my own vegetables".
* No God, then no morality. I think when people say this, usually they're just throwing mud -- "You're not a believer, so you can't be moral, so I'm better than you are."
But sometimes they're apparently arguing along the lines of:
1. We must have morality.
2. You can only have a morality when you believe in a deity.
3. Therefore, you must believe in a deity.
My personal inclination is to focus on premise one -- why must we have a morality; why can't we all take a trip down the nihilist abyss, etc, etc. Grayling responds to premise two.
Grayling notes that there's always been a rich secular ethical tradition (for instance, though Grayling doesn't mention this, the Greeks and Romans believed in gods, but their gods were just like normal people -- Zeus went around having affairs -- the gods didn't necessarily have anything to say about good and bad, right and wrong). Grayling also thinks that there's plenty of people who behave well to others mainly because of their liking and sympathy for their fellow human beings, and it's a calumny on these people to say that their conduct is non-moral because it's non-theist. In fact, those who think for themselves are more honourable and admirable than people who simply buy a box of pre-made beliefs from the supermarket shelf.
* Grayling suggests that the case for atheism is a matter of what it is rational to believe. Judged by the standards of rationality, belief in a deity or deities has the same respectability as belief in fairies in the garden. In particular, it's non-falsifiable, and is therefore an empty assertion.
Well, I have a number of reactions to this. Here's three.
Firstly, are there no good reasons for believing in a deity? For instance, I never know what to say to the person who claims, "I feel God is real, and His presence is as concrete as tables and chairs." Non-believers are rightly skeptical of arguments from feeling, but from a first-person perspective it's hard to ignore this sort of intuitive, revelatory-type reason.
Secondly, I'd want to inquire further into the meaning of rationality. What are the conditions of it (how do you judge what is the rational thing to do), what is the compulsion of it, are there different types of rationality, could something be rational from one perspective but irrational from another, and so forth. I think, for instance, of sorites problems, or the idea that what is rational over the short-term might be irrational over the long-term.
In the particular case, Grayling seems to be suggesting that the default position should be lack of belief, and the onus is on the believer to prove -- but why couldn't the default position be belief, and the onus on the disbeliever to discredit? Is this a question of rationality, or a question of parsimony and practicality?
Thirdly, I'm interested in the connections between holism and religious belief. If you buy into a Quinean picture, then beliefs travel in groups rather than individually (any one belief is supported by others), and some beliefs are closer to the centre of one's web of belief, and less liable to be junked when the entirety of one's beliefs wants correction.
What does it mean "to be closer to the centre"? Quine presumably had some idea of logical connection: the more beliefs for which a particular belief is a necessary condition, the closer it is the centre of one's beliefs. But perhaps the metaphor could also be explored simply in terms of the firmness with which a belief is held; and that firmness could be due to a rational probability weighting, or to irrational factors (genetic instinct, social pressures, etc; why is it that we treat causation and logical principles with such respect?).
So perhaps the existence of a deity isn't always a tidy matter of focusing on the rationality of a particular belief that you try to isolate. Consider the people who believe in a young earth rather than give up their literalist readings of the Bible.
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