Category: Philosophy

As a young teen I wanted to start with all of Plato’s Dialogues (yes including Parmenides, which I loved, but I didn’t finish The Laws) plus the major works of modern philosophy.  I used the old John Hospers text to identify Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant.  I read some Aristotle too, although he bored me.  Then I read lots of Karl Popper and Brand Blanshard, the old-fashioned defender of rationalism and critic of positivism.  I gobbled up George Smith and Antony Flew on atheism.  I was influenced by Ayn Rand’s moral defense of capitalism, though I was never impressed by her as a philosopher. 

Much later I read Nozick, Rawls, and Parfit.  Parfit made by far the biggest impression on me.  The other two, however smart, seemed predictable.

In graduate school I read Quine avidly.  George Romanos’s book on Quine I found more useful than any single Quine work, although Word and Object and the essay on "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" are the places to start.  Quine remains a major influence, including on how I think about blog posts.  Which thicket of assumptions might lead one to a possible conclusion?  I took a class on philosophy of language with Hilary Putnam and developed interests in Kripke and others, but they never displaced Quine in my affections.  I developed a fondness for William James.  From Rorty I saw more value in the Continentals, although I prefer to misread them.  I flirted with the early German romantics and their rejection of philosophy, at times mediated through J.S. Mill.

Later experience with Liberty Fund interested me in "deep" readings of Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Maimonides, and some of the other "Straussian" texts.  I’ve never been a Straussian, though.  I’ve made attempts to understand Heidegger but without any success. 

Right now the philosophy journals I read are Ethics and Philosophy and Public Affairs.  When it comes to metaphysics, mind-body problems, and the like, I prefer books, usually of a semi-popular nature.  The academic debates on these topics are too rarified to interest me very much.

That is my path, in a nutshell.  I don’t pretend it is an optimal sequence for others. 

The bottom line: I have learned to focus on the philosophy which clicked with me at the time.  The rest was just so much blah blah blah.  Philosophy books are more like self-help tomes, or fun record albums, than they let on.

Any suggestions for how our reader should choose a path?

I can understand not wanting kids.  I can understand wanting kids.  What I cannot understand is not knowing whether you want kids.  Having kids and not having kids are not alike.  Not even close.  The choices are not remotely equivalent.  How do you answer the question with “Eh. You know, whichever.” How do you not know?

Here is more explanation, and here is a follow-up post, both from my current favorite theorist of rational choice.  From another direction, the newly unattached Jacqueline Passey is unsure where to live, yet she is sure about not wanting children.

I find it easier to be certain when comparing two similar items or courses of action.  I am sure that I prefer the Beatles to The Rolling Stones.  Both are British popular music groups from roughly the same period of time.  It is tougher to rank Charlie Parker relative to Dvorak.  I reluctantly opt for Parker.

Some uncertainty about children may stem from the difference between ex ante and ex post preferences.  You’re very happy having the kid when he or she comes but you did not care about that particular kid "in advance."  Some of the "uncertainty" therefore is faux; it represents a confusion about which perspective to report. 

Then there is the margin.  How many kids should you have?  I doubt if anyone is, ex ante, certain about this, although a few people may pretend to be ("Three is the number for me.").  But one extra kid is a huge, huge difference at the margin, especially if you are moving from one kid to two (or so I hear).  So it must be allowed that we can be uncertain about very drastic changes in our lives.

Most fundamentally, are indeed many people uncertain about having kids?  How might we define such uncertainty?  Surely we cannot trust our self-deceiving subjects to report their true intentions.  Medical issues and "finding a mate" issues aside, for most of us isn’t it "in the cards" whether we will have kids, no matter how much we hem and haw in advance?  (What is the function of the feigned uncertainty?  Does it make the later decision "easier to live with" if we first pretend to put up a fight?  Do we create an illusion of autonomy to feel in control?)  Would small changes in our lives lead to big changes in the outcome here?  I wonder.

What is personal uncertainty anyway?

Most of all, I am uncertain what we have reason to be uncertain about.

David Friedman writes:

Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State and Utopia, offers an interesting hypothetical; I don’t have a copy of the book ready to hand so will give you my version:

Someone invents an experience machine; get into it and you will have a fully convincing illusion of experience. Somehow, the inventor figures out about what your life is going to be like and makes you the following offer:

Get into my experience machine, spend the rest of your life there, and I will give you the illusion of a life slightly better than the one you would otherwise live. Your average income in the illusion will be a few thousand dollars higher than it would have been in reality, your wife a little prettier, your children slightly better behaved, your promotions just a little prompter. Your illusory summers won’t be quite as hot, or winters quite as cold.

As I (and Wikipedia) remember the thought experiment, your life [sic] is much better, a bit like the Hollywood movie of your choice, at the very least.

This thought question is supposed to refute utilitarianism, or at least its hedonistic version.  Pleasure isn’t everything, and authenticity counts too.

But for an economist, Friedman is oddly non-interested in the marginal questions.  At what age should you opt for the experience machine?  If it can give you eighty more years of subjectively perceived time on your deathbed, that is a no-brainer.  At what per capita income level should you prefer the machine?

Or say you don’t want the machine, but your acceptance will save five other people’s lives.  Would you proceed without guilt?  And how many lives should be needed to push you over the edge?

Is the experience machine example so compelling as a refutation of hedonism?  I think it puts pleasure squarely on the map as one value which matters and which is even undervalued in many circumstances.  Many of us are too reluctant to step into the machine rather than too ready.  Isn’t our general tendency to overvalue the illusion of control? 

1. For reasons of practicality and cost, nations should in many cases devote more resources to their own citizens than to foreigners.

2. Once the costs mentioned in #1 are taken into account, foreigners are still "worth less" than citizens.

#2 does not follow from #1, that is a mistake in moral arithmetic.  #2 is false.

If you could change one thing about NYC/Russia, what would it be?

New York: End the mall-ification of the city. Throw out many rich
people and replace with adorable starving artists. Make Manhattan much
poorer.

Petersburg: Start the mall-ification of the city. Throw out the
nationalist punks and replace with normal middle class folks. Make the
city much more prosperous.

That is Gary Shteyngart, via Bookslut.

Here is the video link.

Seriously.  That is tomorrow, for Frank Buckley’s Law and Economics Program.  Fortunately, no one will be running a tape recorder.  And yes, it is that Heidegger.  But is "theory" the right word?

Ten percent of Greg disapproves of gambling.  More than anything I am baffled by gambling; to me it would be as fun as paying to count pennies.  I genuinely cannot understand the adrenalin rush but I don’t enjoy driving really fast either.  If I let out my moralist (who is more than ten percent, I might add), I would disapprove of people who are usually late, people who smoke cigars in restaurants, people who play loud music late at night, and people who are not curious.  Call me a prude if you want, but might these people be, in some fundamental sense, partly evil?  Seriously. 

That is for the last 25 to 30 years; here is the collective wisdom of CrookedTimber commentators.  The picks are good ones, but I’ll predict the lasting work for (if not in) political philosophy will come from some other direction entirely.  How about neuroscience, experiments, or evolutionary psychology?

I’ll run a similar query soon about economics, with open comments of course.  Get your thoughts ready.  If you leave a comment today, restrict yourself to political philosophy.

Here is yours truly again, from his latest book.  I tried to condense the limits of welfare economics into a few simple sentences; here is what I came up with:

On the negative side, the economic approach considers only a limited range of values, namely those embodied in individual preferences and expressed in terms of willingness to pay. This postulate is self-evident to many economists, but it fails to command wider assent. It wishes to erect “satisfying a preference” as an independent ethical value, but is unwilling to consider any possible competing values, apart from preferences. It is hard to see why non-preference values should not be admitted to a broader decision calculus.

Typically economists retreat to their intuition that satisfying preferences is somehow "real," and that pursuing non-preference values is religious, mystical, or paternalistic. The rest of the world, however, has not found this distinction persuasive. They do not see why satisfying preferences should be a value of special and sole importance, especially when those same preferences may be ill-informed, inconsistent, malicious, or spiteful. The decisions to count all preferences, to use money as the measuring rod, and to weight all market demands equally must themselves rely on external ethical judgments. For that reason, the economist has no a priori means of dismissing non-preference values from the overall policy evaluation.

This is from his correspondence:

The large open market including all of Europe is aim of the large banks and the capitalist business class whose main goal is simply larger profit. The idea of economic growth, with no specific end in sight, fits this class perfectly.  If they speak about distribution, it is most always in terms of trickle down.  The long-term result of this – which we already have in the United States – is a civil society awash in a meaningless consumerism of some kind. I can’t believe that is what you want.

So you see that I am not happy about globalization as the banks and business class are pushing it.  I accept Mill‘s idea of the stationary state as described by him in Bk. IV, Ch. 6 of his Principles of Political Economy (1848). (I am adding a footnote in §15 to say this, in case the reader hadn‘t noticed it). I am under no illusion that its time will ever come – certainly not soon – but it is possible, and hence it has a place in what I call the idea of realistic utopia.

For more see CrookedTimber.  The real question is how much this should cause us to downgrade his moral philosophy.  I say "a lot."  I used to think there was some deep argument of consilience behind "maximin," but now I am ready to classify it as a simple mistake, akin to a person who doesn’t understand what drove the flow of traffic across the Berlin Wall in one direction and not the other.