Category: Philosophy

Bryan offers the most extensive version of his view I've seen him blog.  On overall method and meta-ethics, I'm not so far from Bryan (and someday he will get a post in praise of him).  But I usually disagree with his applications of the method.  For instance he seems to argue that because employees are allowed to discriminate against employers, we should allow for a reciprocal right of employer discrimination.

My first objection is that we cannot judge an argument like this outside of a particular historical context.  In some cases employer discrimination rights may be fine, in others not.  I don't think ethical intuitionism, as could be represented by abstract reasoning from analogy. can do the hard work here.  Rather we must look to the history to understand the meaning and long-term effects of the discriminatory act under question.  In some cases the discrimination is effectively perpetuating a regime of evil and thus it is morally wrong.

Here is another part of Bryan's argument:

Suppose A and B be are dating.  A has an equally good outside option. 
B can't bear to live without A.  A therefore has some bargaining power
– vastly more than most employers, in fact.  Yet almost everyone thinks
it would be wrong to force A to stay with B.

If there is one intuition that many reasonable people have, it is that family and personal relationships are not, in moral terms, exactly like commercial or work place relationships.  I get nervous when I see ethical intuitionists serve up simple analogies across these various realms.  (In general I think Bryan creates too much license for analogical reasoning of this kind.)  This is also why I am not convinced by all of the arguments in Steve Landsburg's Fair Play.

My overall view is that ethical intuitionism settles many fewer issues than most of its proponents like to think.  That said, there is often nowhere else to go.  We somehow need to come to terms with two propositions at the same time:

1. We need to think more rather than less ethically.

2. The content of ethical philosophy tells us less, in reliable terms, than most people would like to believe.

Michael Nielsen has two of them:

Question 1: What’s the most notable subject that’s not notable enough for inclusion in Wikipedia?

Let’s assume for now that this question has an answer (“The Answer”), and call the corresponding subject X. Now, we have a second question whose answer is not at all obvious.

Question 2: Is subject X notable merely by being The Answer?

Do you see where this is headed?  Must Wikipedia include everything?  There is more analysis at the link and note that the more these questions are asked, the more likely we encounter a paradoxical answer:

…suppose I went to great trouble to convene a conference series on The Answer, was able to convince leading logicians and philosophers to take part, writing papers about The Answer, convinced a prestigious journal to publish the proceedings, arranged media coverage, and so on. The Answer would then certainly have exceeded Wikipedia’s notability guidelines!

I wonder, as do you, whether this notoriety extends in transitive fashion to the seventeenth round of deciding who or what is the marginally deserving entry: "Well, you're not really notable, or even close, but all the others who were marginal became famous through the process of having had their lack of fame debated.  Mick Jagger now invites you to his party."  Not!

At some point these people under debate, once there are enough of them, all turn into a big group of Wikipedia nobodies.  

This is one of the best "time wasters" I've come across in some time.  Here is the upshot:

The email edition of the British Psychological Society's Research
Digest has reached the milestone of its 150th issue…To mark the occasion, the Digest editor has invited some of the world's leading psychologists to look inwards and share, in 150 words, one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves.

Here is Paul Rozin's answer:

I generally believe that we learn from experience. However, a recent study
I did with Karlene Hanko repeats a finding from Kahneman and Snell,
that people are very poor at predicting how their liking will change
for a new product (in our case, two new foods and two new body
products) after using it for a week. We predicted that the parents of
our college undergraduates would be better than their children at
predicting their hedonic trajectory, but 25 more years of self
experience did nothing for them. Nor for me. Every night, I bring home
a pile of work to do in the evening and early morning. I have been
doing this for over 50 years. I always think I will actually get
through all or most of it, and I almost never get even half done. But I
keep expecting to accomplish it all. What a fool I am.

Here is Norbert Schwarz on incidental feelings:

One nagging thing I don’t understand about myself is why I’m still
fooled by incidental feelings. Some 25 years ago Jerry Clore and I studied
how gloomy weather makes one’s whole life look bad — unless one
becomes aware of the weather and attributes one’s gloomy mood to the
gloomy sky, which eliminates the influence. You’d think I learned that
lesson and now know how to deal with gloomy skies. I don’t, they still
get me. The same is true for other subjective experiences, like the processing fluency resulting from print fonts
– I still fall prey to their influence. Why does insight into how such
influences work not help us notice them when they occur? What makes the
immediate experience so powerful that I fail to apply my own theorizing
until some blogger asks a question that brings it to mind?

For the pointer I thank Michelle Dawson.  By the way, I wonder if those are their real answers; I wouldn't tell you mine.

The Required Reports Prepared by State Agencies and Institutions of Higher Education is not itself listed in the Required Reports Prepared by State Agencies and Institutions of Higher Education.

That is from Texas, where they must file a report on all the reports they have filed.  Here is more.  That report is itself 580 pages and it recommends the abolition of 318 reports and the consoldiation of 58 others.  It is promised:

The next edition of this report will contain a full assessment of all required reports.

I thank Catfish for the pointer.

Probability is the oil of rationalisation.

You'll find it here.  And there is this:

The closest thing you can have to free will is for your actions to be
determined purely by the state of your brain. Free will is determinism.

Things can be obvious if they are simple. If something complicated is
obvious, such as anything that anybody seriously studies, then for it
to be simple you must be abstracting it a lot. When people find such
things obvious, what they often mean is that the abstraction is so
clear and simple its implications are unarguable. This is answering the
wrong question. Most of the reasons such conclusions might be false are
hidden in what you abstracted away. The question is whether you have
the right abstraction for reality, not whether the abstraction has the
implications it seems to.

That's from Katja Grace.  Here is a good post on murder and evil.

Addendum: I liked this bit too:

Perhaps mysterious forces are just more trustworthy than social
institutions? Or perhaps karma seems nice because its promotion is read
as ‘everyone will get what they deserve’, while markets seem nasty
because their promotion is read as ‘everyone deserves what they’ve
got’. Better ideas?

Today he writes:

Every day, I check a blog called Marginal Revolution, which is famous
for its erudite authors, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, and its
intelligent contributors [TC: that's you!]. Last week, one of those contributors asked a
question that is fantastical but thought-provoking: What would happen
if a freak solar event sterilized the people on the half of the earth
that happened to be facing the sun?

His Burkean answer is here and I very much agree with it.  Excerpt:

Without posterity, there are no grand designs. There are no high
ambitions. Politics becomes insignificant. Even words like justice lose
meaning because everything gets reduced to the narrow qualities of the
here and now.

And:

If millions of immigrants were brought over, they would populate the
buildings but not perpetuate the culture. They wouldn’t be like current
immigrants because they wouldn’t be joining a common project, but
displacing it. There would be no sense of peoplehood, none of the
untaught affections of those who are part of an organic social unit
that shares the same destiny.

Here is the original inspiring MR post.

I agree with Will Wilkinson's point that real social inequality has (mostly) been falling for some time in the United States.  Today many an upper middle class person is plausibly happier than many a billionaire.  Yet most self-made billionaires work very hard to get to that position, which creates a possible tension between cardinal and "observed choice" or "ordinal" metrics of welfare.  Why work so hard for so little?  Presumably many of these billionaires really want to "be there," even if they are only marginally better off or in some cases worse off.

Here are a few possible implications, not all of which are (or can be) true:

1. Higher marginal tax rates aren't very unjust, because lower incomes don't make wealthy people much less worse off.

2. Higher marginal tax rates are very unjust, because they undo results that the wealthy have worked very hard for and cared very deeply about.

3. Work is fun for the (self-made) wealthy, so higher marginal tax rates won't much discourage their work effort.

4. Greater wealth is barely worth it for the wealthy, so higher marginal tax rates will very much discourage their work effort.

Will's paper convinces me that the distinction between ordinal and cardinal measures of human welfare is more important than ever. Conservatives often cite #2 and #4, or in other words they have an ordinal normative theory and a cardinal predictive theory.  Liberals are more likely to cite #1 and #3, giving them a cardinal normative theory and an ordinal predictive theory.  In neither case is there an outright contradiction, but arguably both groups end up holding an odd mix of positions.

It would be interesting to take each group aside and present them with the abstract questions of cardinal vs. ordinal understandings of well-being, yet without explaining to them the possible policy implications of their answers.