Stephen Darwall at SUNY-Buffalo

On November 29, 2007, the philosophy department at SUNY-Buffalo is pleased to announce colloquium speaker Stephen Darwall. Currently John Dewey distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan, his newest book, The Second Person Standpoint (Harvard 2006) advances an account of practical reasoning based on our responsibilities to each other as members of the moral community. This new theory of moral obligation is surely being discussed in philosophy departments across the country, as well as inspiring new courses in normative ehtics largely dedicated to its content (as here at the University of Buffalo in the Fall of '07).

His talk on Thursday is entitled Two Kinds of Recognition Respect for Persons. The Buffalo Logic and Departmental Colloquiums are free and open to the public, for more information, please click here.

Below is a book review by Arthur Ripstein, University of Toronto:
"Stephen Darwall's The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect, and Accountability is an important contribution to moral philosophy, and its arguments are sure to be widely discussed and debated. The book brings into contemporary philosophical debates a series of ideas centering around what Darwall calls 'the second person'-- the idea that morality is fundamentally about the demands that particular people are entitled to make on each other. Obligation, understood as what people owe to each other, has been central to recent moral philosophy, but the second person standpoint gets behind the idea of obligation and explains that in terms of the standing the particular people have to make claims against each other. These ideas have been of great significance in the history of philosophy, but that have not attracted the attention of philosophers in recent decades. This is a fascinating and important book."

Individualist Constraints on Normative Ethical Theories

Here is a passage from a paper I presently working on, I think the reasoning is fairly succinct. Comments are Welcome:

In this paper, I will be arguing for a somewhat radical constraint on normative ethical theories; but it is one which, I argue, comports well with our commonsense moral reasoning. The constraint I argue for can be stated positively as follows:

(IC) In order to be morally justified in harming any individual person P, it is neccesary and sufficient that the harm under consideration, H, be such that H necessitates some good G which is required for the flourishing of P and which P would otherwise not be able to get.

Upon reflection, I think that most people will find this Individual Constraint (hereafter IC) agreeable. Appealing to their prudential self-concern, I think that most would agree that a constraint like (IC) needs to obtain if they are to be personally harmed. But I have claimed for (IC) the status of belonging to our commonsense morality, and some readers will surely object to this claim. So then, perhaps some examples will help to further coax out this intuition.

The first case that I propose we examine, then, is that of the skilled surgeon who, operating without the expressed permission of her unconscious patient, performs a thoracotomy, and then uses a rib-spreader, to get access the patient’s heart in order to perform emergency, life-saving, surgery. Even in the relatively controlled environment of a hospital emergency room, such a procedure is dangerous to say the least, some patients do not survive some thoracotomies. Furthermore, even where successful, open-heart surgery is extremely harmful to the body (as evidenced by the fact that it often takes weeks to recover from such invasive procedures). Yet few, if any, will argue that the doctor has acted immorally when she harms her patient in such a case, even if she does so without the patient’s permission. And even if the patient dies of as a direct result of the surgery. I think we refuse to impart guilt precisely because the emergency thoracotomy fulfills the conditions of (IC). In other words it is clear in this case (and others like it) that the doctor’s harming of the individual is such that it necessitates some good (e.g. increased health and lifespan) that is required for the flourishing of the patient and which the patient could not otherwise get.

The second case, then, like the first, involves an unconscious subject and an invasive medical procedure. Only in this case, the thoracotomy is not being undertaken in order to save the subjects life but, instead, alien abductors are performing the surgery in order to observe the workings of the human heart. In such a case, it appears that (IC) has been violated, and therefore my intuition is to call the aliens monsters and condemn their intrusive operations as immoral. But this intuition is far from universal. Suppose that the aliens are some species of consequentialists; suppose further that their species is dying of a heart ailment that can only be cured by means of examining human aortas; Might they not say, then, that they (the alien surgeons) are justified in harming their test subjects? Some consequentialists will be inclined to say that they are. I argue that they are not. The harm that the alien surgeons inflict on their abducted subjects (to say nothing of the abductions themselves) is not such that it necessitates some good which is required for the flourishing of the subjects and which the subjects would otherwise not be able to get.

The second case differs importantly from the first insofar as, while in the first case, I think that almost no one will object that the doctor really is morally culpable for harming her patient in order to heal them, in the second case it is not clear that everyone would agree that the alien surgeons act immorally in harming their test subjects. Some consequentialists, for example, might find justification for the alien’s acts in the good outcome achieved on behalf of their dying species. In the face of such intuitions there is little that one can do except to appeal to the preponderance of moral reasoning. If the reader fails to see the inherent immorality of such acts, they may not find the arguments on offer here at all compelling.

A Question About Eternal Life

Here is an interesting discussion on the Philosophy of Religion blog, Prosblogion.

The Good Old Days of Australian Philosophy??

Chalmer's MindPapers

David Chalmer's and David Bourget (an ANU Grad Student) have recently launched an online archive of papers in the philosophy of mind MindPapers which, with 18,000 searchable papers archived--many of which are available in downloadable formats--is now the single best online research tool for philosophers and grad students interested in the philosophy of mind. I have been grazing through it all day, it's really remarkable. Adjust your bookmarks everyone.

When do we think?

Last night I read through Peter Geach’s essay “What do We Think With?” from the book God and the Soul (Saint Augustine’s Press, South Bend IN 1969) and I thought I would share some thoughts on the primary argument of the essay, which goes roughly as follows:

(1) If materialism is true, then each of us thinks with some material part of the body.

The most obvious candidate for this thinking “tract” as Geach calls it, is the brain. As Geach points out, we have not got the foggiest reason to think that any other part of the human body is ever engaged in thinking. I have heard objections to similar points raised before. Someone will point out that the brain relies, for example, on nourishment from the circulatory system and thus it must also be involved in thinking. But not much follows if you disagree with Geach on this point. Either way materialism would have you conclude that you are thinking with some tract of some organ (or set of organs) or other.

So we move on:

(2) Thinking is a basic activity.
(3) The basic activities of any bodily part can be assigned a position in the physical time-series.
(4) But our thinking cannot be assigned a position in the physical time-series.
(5) Therefore [from 2 & 3] thinking is not a basic activity of any bodily part.
(6) Therefore it is not the case that each of us thinks with some material part.
(7) Therefore [from 1 & 6) materialism is false.

Geach thinks that the weakest part of the argument here is step 2. That is, he supposes that someone might object to the proposition that thought is a basic activity after all. Now, it is not, I think, entirely clear what he means by ‘basic activity’ but I will try to give it the following analysis: an activity is basic just in case that activity does not subsume as parts any other activity. This is contrasted with complex activities which do subsume other activities as parts. For example, Geach talks about the man who murders his wife with poison. First he lays the poison, then she drinks the poison, then she dies of the poison, but at what point does the murder occur? Geach replies that there is no matter of fact, philosophically speaking, about when the murder occurs. It occurs to be sure between t1 and tn but exactly when? I think this is a case where we are forced to admit to some de dicto vagueness. Murder is a complex activity, i.e. it subsumes other activities (the laying of the poison, the drinking, the dying etc). Saliently, each of the subsumed activities can be assigned a precise position in the physical time-series (i.e. the system of temporal relations in which physical events occur); the poison is laid out at 7:00, at 7:30 it is drunk, and at 8:00 the wife dies.

The question, then, as Geach sees it, is whether or not thinking is, like murder a complex activity subsuming a set of basic activities (and therefore having stages which are “clockable”), or whether it is a basic activity without parts. I am not sure that I am convinced on good grounds of the latter. However, it certainly does not seem likely to me that a thought has any “clockable” parts. Certainly, the propositions expressed by various thoughts are atemporal. And therefore it seems correct to say that when one grasps the content of a proposition one does so immediately, or synchronically, and not over a duration of time. The converse seems to be impossible. Suppose Liz tells me “the snow is white,” clearly a span of time is required for her to convey of this information; she must utter the sounds that compose the beginning if the sentence, before those that compose the middle, and both of these before she utters the last word. Now, if my understanding of her utterance were likewise smeared across a time-span, then by the time I heard the word “white” the part of me that heard the “is” would no longer be present, and the part of me that heard “the snow” would have ceased to be present long before that. I would have to be comprehending her utterance with parts I do not presently possess, this seems like an impossibility.

10th Annual Pitt/CMU Graduate Conference

Call for Papers

The graduate students of the University of Pittsburgh & Carnegie Mellon University invite submissions to The 10th Annual PITT- CMU Graduate Student Philosophy Conference To be held March 1st 2008:

Keynote Speaker
Bas van Fraassen
Princeton University

Faculty Speakers
Gordon Belot
Peter Machamer
University of Pittsburgh

All papers of high quality will be considered. Encourage submissions focused on Relativism and Rational Reflection. This topic should be construed broadly and may among other things subsume:

Idealization & formalization
Reduction
Emergence
Scientific practice & methodology
Causation
Bayesianism
Scientific & mathematical explanation
Ontological judgments
Abduction & induction
Decision & game theory
Belief revision
Voluntarist Epistemology

All papers must be submitted electronically by December 10, 2007.

For more information see: http://www.pitt.edu/~philgrad/

For the poster: http://www.pitt.edu/~philgrad/callforpapers.pdf

Soames' example of the contingent apriori

Here are my reflections regarding Scott Soames' talk on Friday. I havent gotten a clear handle on his argument yet, and dont even have his paper with me presently (actually I just found it and will quote it below) but I didnt want to delay posting any longer; lets get talking while this is still on our minds, right?

So, at one point in Dr. Soames' presentation he guides us through the dilemma of the following three inconsistent claims:

1) there are genuine instances of the contingent apriori.
2) Epistemic Necessity- if p is false at some epistemically possible world-state, then p isn't apriori. So if p is apriori, then p is true at every epistemically possible world-state.
3) it is never apriori inconsistent to suppose, of any metaphysically possible world-state, that it is instantiated. (presentation handout, page 3)

One of these three has to go; however, any two of them are consistent. It wasnt precisely clear to me during the talk why claim 3 was included at all. However, upon doing my phil-mind reading for this week it became quiet obvious that Soames was wanting to deny 2 (while holding 3) in order to defeat Chalmers' distinction between primary and secondary intensions. More below. I really dont feel confident talking about all of that right now though, and want to concentrate on Soames' pro-example for the contingent a priori (i.e- his support of 1) and why he uses it rather than the standard examples from Kripke and Putnam (e.g.- "water is H2O"). However, what I think I have found in my meager studies is that Soames uses his novel "actually" examples specifically because of Chalmers' critique of the Kripke/Putnam examples, so this will all eventually lead back to Chalmers' The Conscious Mind chapter 2.

Soames' example of the contingent apriori:
"S iff actually S". This is apriori because, both a) it is derivable from "S iff S" and, b) "S iff S" is a priori. (Soames tends to say "knowable apriori" but given that apriori means "knowable without experience," saying "knowable" is redundant. I hate that there is no footnotes option for this word processor and beg your pardon for my parenthetical notation.) Lets grant that "S iff actually S" is apriori preliminarily and go on to evaluate Soames' argument for its contingency.

Now what is it about adding "actually" to one side of the necessary biconditional "S iff S" that renders a contingency? It is actually quiet basic:
Take S to be any contingent truth, say, that UB South campus is less than 20 miles from UB North campus. If we evaluate the proposition that "UB South campus is less 20 miles from UB North Campus if and only if UB South campus actually is less than 20 miles from UB North campus" at the actual world-state, we get a truth. However, if we evaluate this proposition at a possible world in which UB South campus is 60 miles from UB North campus, we get a falsity. For, at that possible-but-not-actualized world-state, the left side of the biconditional is false while the right side is true. Accordingly, we have a proposition that is true of some possible worlds but not true of all possible worlds. Therefore it is contingent.
Something about this seemed fishy to me from the start and still does. Maybe the following is what is bothering me, but I dont know...

What does it mean to evaluate a proposition at a possible world? Isn't this to wonder (for the sake of evaluation) what things would be like if the given possible world was actually the actual world? If so, then "S iff actually S" would be just as necessary as "S iff S", for in the counterfactual world considered above we would have a falsity on both sides of the biconditional. That is, it would be true that "South is less than 20 from North iff South is actually less than 20 from North" for both sides would be false if that world-state obtained, and we would agree that if North campus were moved 50 miles closer to South in the given counterfactual, then both sides would become true at once.

Under this alternative treatment of possible worlds, Soames' example for the contingent apriori fails (to be a legitimate example), but my alternative treatment seems dubious. Let me at least try to take a shot at defending it, however.

Lets try a reductio! Suppose Soames' approach to possible worlds is correct and we can evaluate propositions at possible worlds while continuing to index the actual world within them. For utility, we'll take Putnam's famous Twin Earth. I am on Twin Earth and say "This is water", pointing to a meandering stream. What I have said is false, because, given that water is essentially H2O and vice-versa, only H2O will count as water on any possible world. But what if I, having learned to properly distinguish XYZ and H2O, and having scouted all of Twin Earth, come to say "There is no water."? This seems true. What about if I then say "Actually, there is no water."? It seems fine to my intuitions (as long as we are doing speculative metaphysics), that this latter proposition would be true. "Actually", here is embedded to Twin-Earth, which is taken to be actual. But, because we've adopted Soames' approach and indexed 'actual' to our world, this proposition would be false.

Its getting late and this blog is getting long, so let me leave this line for now (maybe I can tidy it up after my fellow-posters examine it) and say one more thing about Soames' contingent apriori. This time I will question the aprioricity of the example.

Remember that Soames has argued in favor of giving up the second horn of the triad dilemma above, which he calls Epistemic Necessity. What he argues is that certain propositions are false when evaluated at certain epistemically possible world-states, despite being apriori. However, he wishes to hold onto the view that (3) it is never apriori inconsistent to suppose, of any metaphysically possible world-state, that it is instantiated. But if it is metaphysically possible (and I think it qualifies for this label as much as any proposed world-state), that, to use his example, Saul does not philosophize, then we cannot know apriori that Saul philosophizes. Moreover (and this is the point), we cannot know apriori that Saul actually philosophizes. This is just following lemma 3, which Soames accepts. Therefore, we are not permitted to index 'actual' from "saul philosophizes iff actually saul philosophizes" back to the possible world in which Saul does philosophize (to the world we take to be actual, the one in which I am typing right now). What I mean (I really am trying to be clear!) is that it is not apriori that the possible world in which Saul Kripke philosophizes is the actual world, and therefore if we follow Soames' approach to possible worlds (which we must do in order to get the contingent portion of his proposed contingent apriori) then we no longer have something which is apriori.
If what I have said holds, then the correct way to conceive of conceiving of possible worlds is to stipulate them as being actual; all indexing of 'actual', taken as an introductory adverbial clause and in the philosophical sense, must index to the possible world being stipulated.

I guess I wont get to the further implications (and the relevance to Chalmers' two-dimensionalism) in this post.

Please respond. I thank you all very much for your time; I thank Wes and Adam for encouraging me to join this blog.