Conference report: Norms and analysis
July 19th 2007 05:57
Visit the conference website for some absolutely brilliant limericks by Rachael Briggs. Visit Dave Chalmers' blog for photos.
***
Basically, this was about metaethics and personhood, and if you're not a sucker for philosophical punishment, then you shouldn't read this post (consider yourself warned).
So the conference was held in the "Professorial Board Room" in the Main Quad (follow the mysterious stairs up from the Nicholson Museum). The room itself is a bizarre cross between an arena and a courthouse -- there are two jury-stands of seats facing each other -- as if the point is to unnerve a speaker.
The professorial board for some reason hadn't equipped themselves with heating, and this was a miserable, rainy week in sunny Sydney. Three weeks before, the Hunter Valley had been flooded, and the MV Pasha Bulker had run aground in Newcastle (with the result that a friend's newly-born narrowly avoided the middle-name "Pasha").
David Braddon-Mitchell ("DBM"), one of the organisers, continually apologised for the cold, and it became one of the running jokes of the weekend (clever allusions to "philosophers in an icebox", etc).
The other running joke seemed to be references to Stephen Stich and doing empirical research by surveying undergraduates.
And what was the deal with the Asian lady who sat in the front, close by each speaker, and giggled continuously, loudly, and beautifully inappropriately, throughout the entire freaking conference? Was this the court jester of philosophy, especially employed to ridicule the royalty, puncture folly, and keep arrogance in check?
Anyway, I was mostly there to pig out on the free morning and afternoon tea -- there were ridiculous amounts of fruit, muffins, portuguese tarts, lamingtons, danishes. ("The law faculty would have made you pay for this", said a friend, AM.)
I couldn't actually follow any of the papers.
But here's some short remarks on a few of them.
***
2.30pm, Tuesday 26 June -- "Sentimentalism and psychological necessity" by Julia Driver (Dartmouth College)
(1) That, metaphysically speaking (rather than semantically or epistemologically), what makes something wrong is that it's disapproved of.
Instantly, Kant's head pops up: But we all have different sentiments! We all have different aversions and attractions. And these are simply "contingent" -- they're simply accidents of biology and social conditioning. No morality based on feelings deserves the name.
Well, to reach the required universality, Driver's move is to idealize the sentiments -- to talk about the sentiments that you would have, that the idealized human being would have, that the idealized species would have, that idealized social beings would have -- or that God would have. (In similar fashion, some prudential theorists want to say that the good life means satisfying the choices of the most rational and well-informed version of you.)
Like any metaphysical claim, it's probably difficult to say what would prove or disprove it. Objections from the audience basically pointed to the practicality of the standard and problems with the whole vague project of idealizing. For instance, is there really an objective set of sentiments for social beings -- aren't there a variety of models for functioning societies? Do we really have anything to say to the giant space spiders as to why they shouldn't eat us?
(2) At the end of Enquiry concerning human understanding, Hume speaks of the extreme Pyrrhonian skeptic. And he gives the reply that, sure, there's very little that you can prove to the standard of perfect certainty -- there's little logical necessity for believing in anything -- but, then again, there are some things that you can't for practical purposes doubt.
To get a coffee from the kitchen, said Driver, you need to believe in the external world. And then Dave Chalmers walks in, an unignorable tall figure with leather jacket and Jesus hair, wheeling luggage with one hand (presumably he'd just got off a taxi from the airport), and carrying a cup of coffee in the other (but he must have stopped by one of the university outlets). -- "I couldn't have planned it any better," Driver remarked.
Driver's second claim is that moral beliefs (like "It's wrong to kill babies for fun") are similarly necessary -- practically, psychologically. For instance, they're necessary "to function" in the world, necessary "for a commodious existence", necessary "for things to work out well", they "cannot be abandoned by human beings", people "can't get along without them", people "can't in practice doubt them", you "create a problem for yourself" if you deny them, "well-functioning humanity is impossible without them" and to believe that killing babies for fun is right is "just not robust" and "can't be used in practical reasoning" (there were various formulations).
And the beliefs that are necessary, presumably, are those that correspond to idealized sentiments.
At this point, there was mention of (though no reliance placed on) a phenomenon called "imaginative resistance", which is something like -- if you tell a story about magic rings and talking mice, people are quite prepared to go along with you, but if you say, "Imagine a world where it's fine to kill babies for fun", they suddenly take umbrage -- "That's ridiculous. That's absurd. You're talking complete nonsense."
(A friend, JR, gives the example of the philosophy tute where the lecturer says "Imagine your sister had an abortion", and a student responds "But she wouldn't" -- "No, just imagine that she did" -- "But she wouldn't" -- etc. And I do think some of the comments on my listing of ethical thought experiments were along similar lines.)
During the Q&A, the basic reaction was to question in what sense moral beliefs are necessary. Couldn't a tyrant get away with killing babies for fun? Do moral claims have the same sort of compelling character that beliefs about identity or causation do?
Driver's response was that the necessity is of sentiment, and not of action. If you reflect, you can't doubt, in the process of practical deliberation, that killing babies for fun is wrong -- but you can still do it. The perverse person who tortures kittens still realizes they shouldn't.
Summarises Rachael Briggs of Michigan:
Between sentiment and conviction
There really is no contradiction.
To make you agree with me,
I'll call on the deity
And other examples from fiction.
Some of my own thoughts:
-- I don't think it was clear which idealized standard Driver was recommending, or whether she was leaving it open, though most of the discussion seemed to be about the standard of the idealized society.
-- Why does Driver need sentiments at all? If she spoke of the principles that are necessary for well-functioning societies, there'd certainly be a question as to how to spell out "well-functioning", but wouldn't this be one step simpler? -- The current account might require a spelling out both of the ideal society, and of the sentiments of the ideal citizen.
-- Regarding the necessity claim, how do you determine which unshakeable sentiments are moral? And what counts as a "sentiment" anyway? There's a variety of wants, aversions, attractions... Do my fear of heights and my compulsive gambling count as moral?
-- There could be biologically necessary tendencies. Human beings might be built in such a way that they'll want to revenge themselves, pay debts, assist their kin, and avoid sex with their mothers.
Now, Driver was making an metaphysical claim. But it might be relevant to point out the epistemological problem that if you took natural tendencies as the standard of the moral, you would be deriving an ought from an is.
-- Was Hume correct in the first place? Do you need to believe in an external world to get a cup of coffee? Do dogs need to believe in other minds to growl a threat?
I want to argue that, yes, belief in an external world is necessary if you're using "belief" to describe action or functional state or behavioural disposition. But no, it's not necessary, if you're talking about the "belief" of verbal commitment and propositions in reasoning chains. For one thing, the need to hold a position on any matter is "discourse" or "vocabulary" relative (as Foucault and Rorty would put it) -- the problem of external world only arises given particular views of perception and mind.
-- On the one hand, you've got the standard of the sentiments that some ideal x would have. On the other hand, you've got the standard of necessary sentiments -- sentiments that you can't shake, or that you have to take into account in the process of deliberation.
Well, are these the same standard (is Driver's second claim a restatement of her first, is the necessity the necessity that obtains when you idealize), or are they inconsistent standards?
***
4.30pm, Tuesday 26 June -- "Norms, kinds, and functions" by Michael Smith (University of Princeton)
In Good and evil, Peter Geach argued that when you use the word "good", the adjective is really attributive, not predicative, and you're making reference to a kind. So when you say that x is a good knife, or a good car, or a good student, the standard by which it's "good" depends on the type of thing it is and its function or role.
The ethical upshot is Aristotelian -- human beings also have a function. And Philippa Foot claims that that function is to be characterized as the "achievement of deep happiness" (which is then spelled out in terms of shared human reactions to home, family, work, and friendship).
Smith suggests four problems with Foot's account, including: (1) why couldn't you give any number of other characterizations of human function, like "replication of genes"; and (2) doesn't Foot's account make virtues, and therefore ethics generally, species-relative (Martians might be made deeply happy in very different ways from us).
Smith's solution is that we belong to the kind "rational and perceiving creature". This avoids species parochialism because Martians are in the same boat as us. And it avoids indeterminacy of characterization because it's privileged -- "it is the kind to which... any creature belongs insofar as it has reasons for action".
There were then various claims (won't go into them) about ideal rationalizers and perceivers, and how their ideal advice to us could lead to a consequentialist standard of ethics...
During the Q&A, the main response was to question the privilege. Is indeterminacy of characterization really avoided? And aren't there lots of kinds to which creatures belong so far as they have reasons for actions? For instance, couldn't you have "rational creature" instead of "rational and perceiving creature"? Or couldn't the fundamental kind be "evaluating creature"?
There was also an astute remark from Daniel Nolan, of the University of Nottingham: -- Why are you impressed by Geach's grammatical argument in the first place? And why go hunting for kinds? For instance, couldn't "good" supply a standard without supplying a kind? And doesn't the word "great" have exactly the same logic as "good", without meaning the same thing? Alexander the Great isn't Alexander the Good.
Smith's reply seemed to be that he wasn't committed to Geach's claim, but was simply assuming Geach was correct, and then following through to see what would result.
A minor irony transpired twenty-four hours later, when it turned out, in the course of Nolan's own paper, that he didn't believe in the project that he was elaborating either.
Says Rachael Briggs:
The things consequentialists teach
Can really be drawn out of Geach.
About my conclusion
There's little confusion.*
(The premise, I grant, is a reach.)
* Not none.
***
9.30pm, Wednesday 27 June -- "Persons as sui generis ontological kinds: advice to exceptionists" by Kristie Miller (University of Sydney)
The traditional answer, in the West, is to look for some kind of essence, and to talk about souls. And if souls exist, then you've got identity from moment to moment, and you've got justification for such practices as punishment (you can convict for a murder committed last year -- their soul makes them the same person even if their body makes them a stranger).
Now, soul talk has fallen into disrepute; and moreover it's common, in some circles, on the back of interpretations of relativity, to believe that we're four-dimensional space-time worms. We're extended in space-time -- we "perdure" -- in the same way that a road "goes" from Sydney to Melbourne.
Ergo, we're only partially present at any point, and the "person-slice" of today is a lonely creature and is not the same as the person-slice of tomorrow.
And this causes theoretical difficulties. Like many theoretical difficulties, it needn't cause practical difficulties, because you can go Humean and talk about what in practice can't be doubted or has to be accepted. But the result seems to be that if someone says to you, "Why should I save any money for retirement? Why shouldn't I spend it all right now on ice-cream?", you won't have a straightforward reply -- you can't say "It'll be you that suffers in the future."
Well, I didn't follow the paper in the slightest, but Miller's solution seemed to be to qualify the four-dimensionalism premise (and thereby perhaps, as DBM put it, to "illicitly use conceptual analysis to arrive at substantive truths").
During the Q&A:
-- Someone mentioned that if you transfer Moriarty's mind into Sherlock Holmes' body, it's not that easy to say where the person is.
-- Lloyd Reinhardt (formerly of Sydney Uni) made a claim I have a lot of sympathy with. Imagine that human animals lived on average for a thousand years, and that their personalities changed completely every century. Well, in this scenario, we might not hold them responsible for crimes committed a long time ago -- we might regard them as genuinely different persons.
What a "person" is depends on how normative practices ascribe personhood. Persons are "institutional objects", in the same way that checkmate requires the institution of chess, and votes require the institution of voting. Persons are not a matter of ontological type, clear lines, strict identity conditions.
(To cite Rorty again, from Philosophy and the mirror of nature: "Personhood... is... a matter of decision rather than knowledge, an acceptance of another being into fellowship rather than a recognition of a common essence.")
Miller's reply was something like, "But that leaves the question of justification open." Which I take to mean, Yes, you might be descriptively correct, Lloyd, but I want a rational prescription.
I wonder, though, whether her analysis of personhood is built on assuming that current normative practices are justified in a vagueness-free way, and/or do have some ontology-grounded structure.
Says Rachael Briggs:
Identity matters a lot, so
All persons endure. Objects? Not so.
That's naturalistic
And relativistic,
No kidding! (You might not have thought so.)
***
4.30pm, Wednesday 27 June -- "Moral relativism and conceptual analysis" by David Chalmers (Australian National University)
But anyway...
The project was to reconcile an inconsistent triad of beliefs. A key tension was between (1) a commitment to moral truths; and (2) a belief that "no moral truths are a priori entailed by fundamental truths", which is in turn based on intuitions: (i) that if discussants are rational, they will tend to converge in their opinions, and (ii) that when people disagree in ethical matters, there is often genuine disagreement that can't be resolved by further argument.
Moral relativism was said to be able to perform the required reconciliation.
Regarding the genuine disagreement... When people disagree that "Eating meat is wrong", suggested Chalmers, they're bringing different standards to bear in assessing the claim, and that's why never the twain shall meet.
The position was distinguished from contextualism, and frankly I don't know what contextualism is. But I'm assuming it's something to do with Hilary Putnam, Twin Earth, and indexicality (have written a brief sketch in the previous post). So perhaps the idea (though I find the difference subtle) is that the two people don't mean different things -- "Eating meat is wrong" doesn't mean "Eating meat is wrong round here" -- but rather the same proposition gets evaluated differently.
Regarding the idea that there are moral truths... Chalmers introduced an operator, "A", for "Absolutely", and a system of upper and lowercase adjectives. "A (x is wrong)" if and only if x is wrong relative to all standards. An uppercase would be shorthand for the same thing -- "x is Wrong" would mean "A (x is wrong)". And, using this terminology, Chalmers returned to the inconsistent triad, and rewrote each of the premises as either an absolute or a local claim, and there were various ways to rearrange in order to get consistency.
The cost, noted Chalmers, is epistemic relativism. The rewriting process involved applying the same different-standards analysis of moral language to words like "true", "rational", and "a priori".
(Personally, I'm very uneasy about the rewriting. For what guarantees that any particular person will in fact hold a consistent mix of evaluatory stances? If they don't, how can you resolve an inconsistent set of commitments by showing that a completely different set of commitments is unproblematic? And how, in any case, do you judge -- what's the standard of correctness? -- whether the evaluatory stance that a particular person adopts towards a particular claim is absolute or local?)
During the Q&A:
-- Someone asked about the intuition of genuine disagreement. Do we really think that moral disputes can't be resolved by further argument. And don't most moral disputes turn out, on analysis, to be factual disagreements -- over whether there's a god, over what human nature is, etc?
Chalmers quipped in reply that he called the intuition an intuition to save himself the trouble of defending it.
-- Peter Railton (Michigan) asked something or other about aesthetics. Chalmers replied that he was hesitant to run the same case in that domain, because when people disagree in aesthetic matters, lack of objectivity is more easily swallowed -- discussants are a lot quicker to resort to "I guess it's tasty for you, and not tasty for me".
I'm unsure in what way Chalmers would vary his case for aesthetic language, but perhaps he'd go contextualist there.
Says Rachael Briggs:
Our standpoints may clash, but the two
Are equal from God's point of view.
My claim that no one
Should kill kittens for fun
Is lower-case true, but not True.
***
11.30am, Thursday 28 June -- "Prudence, or near enough" by David Braddon-Mitchell and Caroline West (University of Sydney)
An elegant argument, but perhaps there's plenty of points at which one can opt out of it.
Incidentally, click here for an earlier informal talk West gave on happiness (when positive psychology wasn't yet all over the media).
Various ways of resolving the problem were rejected, including:
-- (a) taking the unavoidable-belief route ("on Caroline's more Humean days, she has sympathy with that view");
-- (b) that the only reason to care for your future person-stage is that you're in a better position than anyone else to do it (this is said to ignore the "distinctive kind of reason" we have for caring about ourselves, though frankly I don't know if, biological inclination aside, there are distinctive reasons);
-- (c) biting the bullet and conceding that prudential reasoning is irrational (William Carter and Hugh Mellor were said to take this line); and
-- (d) what was mentioned as being the orthodox answer (which DBM associated with Harold Noonan). If you point to a screen from two different places, it's not as if you're pointing to two different screens (and here DBM flashed his laser pointer from one side, then crossed to the other and flashed again). Similarly, each person-stage points to the same person. And the reason to save for your retirement and not to blow all your money on ice-cream is that you care about the whole person, and not just the slice.
The grounds for rejecting Noonan were that a four-dimensional space-time worm neither has unified experience, nor is capable of single acts of deliberation. It's person-stages that deliberate, and not persons. And therefore, said DBM, you have to give this person-stage a reason for caring about any other.
(But even if you accept the "persons don't deliberate" premise, does the conclusion follow? Why couldn't a person-stage think of itself as part of the whole person? Why does it need a reason specific to itself?)
Anyway, here's the DBM-West answer to the whole puzzle: -- Deliberation takes time, actions take time, and the fruits of action take time to ripen. The implication, therefore, is that "person-stages have tacit desires for the welfare of proximate future person-stages". Ie, the you of each moment adopts conclusions from the previous you, and at least cares about the next few you's -- and these are preconditions of being an ordinary agent.
But if current person-stage you cares about your next person-stage, then your care will include the cares of that person-stage. And among those cares will be cares for the person-stage after it, and so on. So, by an argument from transitivity, you should care for very distant person-stages -- although it's also rational to discount, to care less about them in proportion as their projects and desires are more different from your own.
In the course of outlining these steps, DBM launched pre-emptives on a whole swathe of objections. I can't really recall them, but I think they included that we don't care about the projects and desires of proximate person-stages. Or that if we really understood they were different entities, we'd give up caring.
Well, said DBM, in the case of the next few person-stages, this just doesn't seem to be plausible. We don't care simply about getting ice-cream in an hour, but also care whether or not the future person-stage enjoys the ice-cream. And seeing that we've experienced drift from past projects, we do make allowance, in planning for the future, that we might happen to change our minds. We do care about the projects of future person-stages, as long as the change in project occurs by way of an "approved change mechanism" (as opposed, for instance, to being brainwashed into having completely different desires).
We want our future person-stages to get what they want.
The lecture concluded with a concession that this model doesn't have anything to say in extreme cases. If a person is an "ultra-Buddhist", and lives completely in the moment, and really doesn't have any cares about the future, then you can't say anything to change them into a prudentially deliberating agent. And you can't say anything to the "future fetishist" (don't know why this name was chosen, but I suspect I might wear the label with pride), who has a plan for stuff without any care for the actual projects or desires of future person-stages. Nor can you say anything to the person who's ultra-rational about suicide.
DBM also made some sort of claim (I think) that transitivity of desire might in fact be the defining characteristic of personhood.
During the Q&A:
-- DBM emphasised that this was prescriptive, not descriptive. For instance, though he did want to say that the empirical pattern of discounting is explained by his model, he placed no reliance on that claim. Real people might well act irrationally.
-- Regarding transitivity of desire being essential for personhood...
DBM thought that people with certain types of mental damage (he was probably thinking of "Memento") don't count as "persons".
And someone also asked, "If you have desires for your partner's welfare, does that make them you?", to which DBM responded, "Yes, if you're so symbiotically connected."
-- The example of Ulysses lashing himself to the mast was given. I can't remember why, but I think it was to do with supporting the claim that we only care about future cares if they've evolved by approved change mechanisms, and they satisfy the standard of ideal rationality. Even though future-person-stage-Ulysses will want to rush out to the Sirens, current-person-stage-Ulysses won't let him satisfy that desire.
DBM mentioned that he'd been accused of wankerhood for this illustration, and that the more down-to-earth example is wanting to give up smoking.
-- DBM conceded, I'm not sure why, that perhaps there are some things that we want from our continuers regardless of what they want. But this wouldn't exclude that we also want what they want.
Says Rachael Briggs:
At t, I will be a nonentity
With plans and desires that *went* to t.
Though I won't survive,
It's fine if I strive
For future goods. Who needs identity?
***
4.30pm, Thursday 28 June -- "Desires as reasons and rationality in desire: an unapologetic defence" by Peter Railton (University of Michigan)
Railton's project was to present the claim that desires can be spoken of as "rational" (against Derek Parfit, TM Scanlon, and others). So this dovetails nicely with virtue ethics. Says Aristotle (Nicomachean ethics, 1113a20-28): "Pursuit and avoidance in the sphere of appetition correspond exactly to affirmation and negation in the sphere of intellect... so that, since... choice is deliberative appetition, it follows that if the choice is a good one, both the reasoning must be true and the desire right; and the desire must pursue the same things that the reasoning asserts... [T]he function of practical intellect is to arrive at the truth that corresponds to right appetition."
Simplifying heavily again...
Why would anyone think desires are irrational? -- Well, because they are "mere psychological states", are simply a matter of what you happen to want and not what you ought to want, and they are no reason for action. They can serve as a reason only if you decide to take them as such.
Rejoins Railton: the same argument could be applied to beliefs -- that they are mere psychological states, are what you do hold rather than what you should hold, and they are no grounds for action or further belief unless you decide to take them as such. And then you get an infinite regress: taking a belief to be a reason is a mere psychological state, and so is the taking of the taking of a belief, etc... Or else the action of taking a belief to be a reason is arbitrary.
So Railton steps back from this unsatisfactory picture and begins a fresh look at what belief, as a psychological state, has to be like, and how it must connect to action. And if I'm paraphrasing fairly, he concludes that you rationally believe in some representation R, when: (a) you have a degree of confidence in it; (b) this confidence leads to expectations that things are or will be as R portrays them; and (c) this confidence is revisable -- it can be modulated depending on experience.
Irrationality occurs when the system breaks down. For instance, without degrees of confidence ("belief inertia") we'd be constantly second-guessing ourselves, and there would be no stable frame for decision-making. If confidence in representation doesn't lead to expectations, doesn't affect behaviour, then you get phobias. And if your opinions are resistant to experience, then you get dogmatism and inability to learn.
Railton then suggests that if this is what rational belief is, then one has no grounds for refusing rationality to desire, for desire is also representational, and it has the same structure as belief.
Says Kant (Metaphysics of morals, 212): "The faculty of desire is the faculty to be, by means of one's representations, the cause of the objects of those representations."
(Personally, I'm iffy about the role of representation in human behaviour, but whatever...)
Rationally desiring that R means that you have: (a) a "degree of positive affect" (a wanting, an attraction) towards some R; (b) this affect regulates motivation towards bringing about the state of affairs that R portrays; and (c) this affect is revisable based on experience.
So, if you're longing for some exotic fruit, but on tasting it find that it's disgusting, then if you're functioning rationally you'll change the "degree of positive affect" -- you'll stop wanting.
Railton then plays the empirical evidence card for his a priori model.
Regarding the "to-doness" that's built into the representation, there's apparently been a cognitive psychology view gaining currency since the 1980s that perceptions are coded positive or negative (and the sensory modality that's most connected with motivation is smell).
Regarding building revisability into desire, some neuropsychologists speak of two subsystems to motivation -- a "liking" and a "wanting" system. These are normally coupled, but can be teased apart experimentally. If a drug addict no longer experiences any pleasure in his addiction, then the liking system has been separated from the wanting.
Says Railton: "Thinking about rational desires conjures images of giving an a priori theory of reasons for desires, reasons from scratch, as it were, that begged no questions. Reasons a skeptic would have no room to question. But asking this of rationality in desire would be holding it to a higher standard than belief -- indeed, an impossibly high standard. Alternatively, talk of rationality in desire might conjure images of a sovereign individual, holding every desire in abeyance until it passes a test of reflective endorsement. This sounds to me more like rigid personality disorder than rationality in desire."
During the Q&A:
-- Railton mentioned Hume's picture of desires (and Hume thought a passion can be "unreasonable" if it's based on an erroneous fact -- for instance, if it's a desire for something that's impossible).
(-- A thought of my own -- it may be that Railton's picture must be supplemented to speak of the ways that desires interact with other desires and with beliefs. )
-- In arranged marriages, you sometimes learn to love your partner. Does this show that the desire system is irrational? -- No, said Railton. It's true that, after 20 years, the people in arranged and non-arranged marriages are equally happy with their partners. But there's nothing irrational about making the best of a bad situation, adjusting your expectations and desires to actual possibilities faced.
-- Can we desire killing babies for fun? -- I think Railton's response was that while any desire is defeasible, wanting to thrill kill babies isn't irrational per se. He cited something from Marx along the lines of "Nothing human is alien to me."
-- Railton mentioned the failure of utopian experiments as an example of desire corrigibility and learning through experience -- where you try to live a lifestyle that you think will be rewarding, but which turns out not to be. Another example was that some people do get off the hedonic treadmill when they realize it's going nowhere -- "selfishness turns to ashes in their mouths". And another example was that one suggested factor as to why there are few women in higher echelons (apart from entrenched patriarchy) is that females aren't prepared to make the same happiness vs status trade-off that males are -- they correct their desires based on experience (though this example might do more harm than good to Railton's argument -- it might suggest that the desire system in males can't be spoken of as rational, or that the description is less apt).
-- Belief and desire systems aren't parallel. Desires are hard to shake, whereas beliefs are easily correctable. -- Well, said Railton, some desires can change instantly -- a love for swimming can disappear once you discover that swimming causes loss of bone density. And some beliefs can be very hard to shake -- for instance, beliefs about how you rate yourself, or beliefs about probability -- there's a whole healthy area of investigation into such things.
-- Do desires display the same sort of convergence that belief does? -- Railton's response seemed to be: (1) that over the course of an individual's lifetime, his or her desires will tend to stabilize -- we learn what's important to us; and (2) at a "high level of description" there is convergence in aesthetics between different people -- for instance, different culinary traditions are accessible to us, and also different musical and literary traditions. But, based on his previous killing babies answer, if I interpreted that correctly, I don't think Railton thinks there's any necessity that different people's desires will converge (and personally I don't think that this sort of convergence is a prerequisite for rationality).
-- What about fear and disgust, alarm and aversion? -- Railton thinks that "negative affect" belongs to a separate system from desire. Our positive system doesn't learn that quickly, whereas the negative affect system is very open to change -- a once-off experience can have a permanent traumatic effect -- we're set up to not make the same mistake twice. (But how does one cleanly distinguish one system from another? How do you distinguish negative affect from positive affect? And how, in fact, do you distinguish desire system from belief system?)
-- Uriah Kriegel (Sydney) mentioned an idea (I think he attributed it to Stephan Hartmann) with which Railton expressed broad sympathy -- that every belief is foundational and "innocent until proven guilty" -- so my belief in an external world and in other minds "comes justified" until something challenges its status -- and perhaps desires have a similar structure.
Says Rachael Briggs:
You might have thought all things affective
Were brute (or at least were elective),
But Railton inquires
And finds that desires
Are subject to reason's directive.
| 68 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
subscribe to this blog
Comment by JohnDoe
Film & TV on DVD
It will take me a while to digest it's worthy contents.
Great work!
Comment by postmoderncritic
Postmodern Critic
Relativity Watch
Padsoc
I've read about half of your post now and just wanted to say that I appreciate the way you placed your own response to each paper in there- it makes for a much more engaging read.
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
JD -- Still digesting myself. I think the main paper that made an impression on me was the last one, on the rationality of desires.
PMC -- Was thinking of you when I put some of the Rorty references in.
Comment by postmoderncritic
Postmodern Critic
Relativity Watch
Padsoc
You should know that I'm going to be a USyd student this semester, and I joined the Russoc email list, so I'm sure we'll bump into each other sooner rather than later.