Barry Arrington (the current owner of the blog, Uncommon Descent – the former “playground” of William Dembski, advocate of “Intelligent Design”) is a lawyer who seems to regard his finest hour when he acted for some victims families in the wake of the Columbine massacre.
Regular readers of Uncommon Descent (come on, admit it – it’s not just me) may have noted Barry’s singular style of posting “gotcha” questions and using the answers and his ability to control what appears on his blog to bolster his claim of “crickets”. (No complaint from me – ID is a lost cause as a philosophical view so whatever Barry does cannot make any difference in the real world – whether he allows discussion or limits it, the hollowness of ID shines through). The latest post, Eric Harris Was Just Paying Attention, seems to blend Barry’s contribution to Columbine with his predilection for the gotcha.
Asks Barry:
Why should our Übermensch refrain from hurting other people to achieve his selfish desires.
Commenter Mark Frank deals very eloquently with Arrington (please take the time if you can to read Mark’s comments) and RDFish/aiguy also contributes eloquently.
But I have to reproduce in full this masterly comment from Reciprocating Bill:
I’m always amused (and amazed) by the cartoonish portrayal of human experience that invariably accompanies eristic “challenges” such as this. In that cartoon, stick figures with no relationships and no histories either act upon self-interested calculations or conform themselves to objective, moral guidelines, fearful of the riding crop of eternal consequences. Those who reject God and his objective values do so because they wish to take what they want from others. To fully embrace the logic of naturalism is to become indistinguishable from that of a psychopath. (Or, it should; never mind that none of this actually occurs.)
Fortunately, the reality of human experience is different. Human beings are born into and participate in social worlds that are both cognitively and emotionally deeply interpenetrating, entering into what Andrew Whiten called “deep social mind.” Infants as young as 42 minutes imitate the facial gestures of adults – remarkable because they’ve never before seen a face and have yet to see their own. Mirror neurons encode the actions of others and the infant’s own actions identically, laying a neurobiological foundation for understanding and empathizing with others. Infants and mothers jointly attune themselves to the topography of their pre-verbal interactions, tracking “vitality affects” (per Daniel Stern) and sharing a form of joyful, mutually sustained and modulated affective attunement that in adulthood may be seen in joint activities as diverse as joint musical improvisation and good sex. In the latter months of the first year infants follow the gaze of adults to external objects, an innate skill that is quickly folded into thousands of episodes of shared joint attention that are crucial to human enculturation and language learning. Toddlers as young as 18 months understand and sympathize with the preferences of others, even when they differ from their own. Children at play enact countless simulated dramas in which fair play is argued and negotiated (can you count the number of times you heard “That’s not fair!” as a kid?). Out of all this emerges theory of mind, sensitivity to the beliefs, desires, affects and sufferings of others, skillfulness in “social chess” (the ability to negotiate and navigate social alliances and contracts), and the capacity for experiencing guilt (and being shamed) within one’s own community. These skills and capacities sculpt the human brain from birth and are among the foundations for filial love, pair bonding and community identification, altruism, and moral reasoning.
We all, theist and philosophical naturalist alike, emerge from and live within like social networks, and we all derive our capacity for pro-social behaviors and moral reasoning from those experiences, not from a coat of philosophical or religious paint applied after the fact. And, like it or not, this human sociality has a long history, specifically an evolutionary history of at least several million years duration, atop of which have accrued briefer and more varied histories of cultural invention.
Psychopaths display grave deficiencies in the deployment of this deep sociality. A large number of studies indicate that psychopaths exhibit subtle cognitive and affective abnormalities seen in language processing, cortical maturational lags, hemispheric imbalances, frontal lobe dysfunction, abnormalities of the deployment of attention, and states of chronic under-arousal. They have an attenuated experience of anxiety and fear and are abnormally physiologically unresponsive to punishment and painful stimuli, differences observable in galvanic skin response and accelerations in heart rate in experimental settings. Lack of social controls, emotional lability, restlessness and inattentiveness, impulsiveness and irritability may be identified in a subpopulation of children as early as age three years. Robert Hare observed that children who eventually become psychopaths as adults come to the attention of teachers and counselors at a very early age and continue their antisocial careers through latency and adolescence in the face of every attempt to socialize them. Something is awry in those children and adults they become. Absence of empathy for and attunement with the experiences of others is a defining characteristic, as codified in the Psychopathy Checklist (WJMs dictionary-driven misapprehension not withstanding).
“Why shouldn’t a metaphysical naturalist do exactly what he pleases even if it hurts another person?” Because it hurts other persons, Barry, and those of us who grew up in an adequate social milieu devoid of the profound deficits of the psychopath find that a good enough reason.
I’d like to chime in at Uncommon Descent but at least I’m curious as to where Barry finds his objectivity, his superior grasp of morality, his justification for some objective source for social norms. Can anyone help?
ETA
Hat-tip to Kantian Naturalist for spotting this.
But if you are a non-cognitivist, wouldn’t you say that “knowing that it is wrong” is some kind of category error, since knowing involves justified TRUE beliefs and moral statements are not the sort of things that can be true or false.
I think a non-cognitivist would say instead that such a person has conflicting attitudes.
Elsewhere you mentioned subjectivism. I understand that vanilla relativism fails as a criticism of non-cognitivism for similar reasons: since it involves saying every person/culture has his or her/their moral truths, and since there is no such thing as truth in the metaethics of non-cognitivism, those characterizations do not apply.
So you have to to change a charge of relativism to something like everyone has his or her own attitudes; further, there is no principled way to argue that some sets of attitudes are better than others. I think that last point can be resisted but I don’t know the details of how. So yet another TODO for me.
Sure there is. Wrongness always involves harm to someone or some being capable of feeling pain or harm. Harm is the negative pole of the moral compass.
The problem is not defining north and south, but prioritizing conflicting consequences.
Why is it wrong to harm others always? Why is that always involved in wrongness? Who counts as others?
That’s the sort of question that the philosophers like Kitcher are trying to answer.
Or: why should greatest good to greatness number matter? And even if it does, who determines good and who determines how to add up what each individual affected by a moral decision thinks is good?
BruceS,
But if you are a non-cognitivist, wouldn’t you say that “knowing that it is wrong” is some kind of category error, since knowing involves justified TRUE beliefs and moral statements are not the sort of things that can be true or false.
The position you described (“I abhor X; Join me in doing so!) isn’t really non-cognitive since the first conjunct is a true/false statement. It’s subjectivist, and the whole conjunction is prescriptive, though. To make the first conjunct something that is “emotivist”–which implies that it’s neither true nor false, you should put it something like “X–yuck”!. Then it would be correct to say that believing or not believing that conjunct doesn’t really make sense.
As I said above, I think such a view (both of them, actually) requires the claim that very many of the ordinary remarks we make every day that nearly everybody takes to be true must really be false or meaningless. It is akin to phenomenalism in that regard–and that’s the best reason I know of (along with your “progress” concerns, which are connected) for not liking it. But can (and do) people still hold it? Sure. Can I prove that they’re wrong? Of course not.
Yes, that subtlety tripped me up. I agree that to say we are just describing our feelings is subjectivism, so I was wrong to imply that was also non-cogitivism.
As I now understand the non-cognitivist position, the sentence “Torture is wrong” functions just like “torture, yuck”, because there are no moral properties of things, only attitudes, so the “torture, yuck” interpretation is the only way to give the sentence meaning.
But it is one of those phil of language issues, I suspect, and they often confuse me. Thankfully, no one I’ve read has said it has anything to do with de re/de dicto. Please don’t tell me it does.
My idea of progress is just a personal preference. Asking why is a bit like asking why sugar is sweet. It’s a widely held personal.preference.
My observation — possibly flawed — is that this preference steers social evolution.
Sure, but then I think you are a philosophical relativist of the subjectivist variety.
Kitcher (and I) want a way to say that morals are not just personal preferences. And they are not what one society has constructed for itself with any societies choices being as morally valid as any other.
Some of the reasons for avoiding relativism been rehearsed here in previous threads and are repeated at the UD thread linked in the OP. No point in repeating them, I think.
That’s your preference, and you are welcome to construct a system.of morality based on it.
But for the record, I do not think all systems of morality are equally valid, any mor than I think all attempts to build airplanes are equally valid.
The preference for pleasure and health over pain and disease are objective biological traits. They do not determine what is good, but they constrain it. Just as the laws of nature describe constraints on what can fly, without determining the specific forms of birds and airplanes.
Just thinking out lod at the moment.
It strikes me that the pursuit of some objective morality makes about as much sense as the pursuit of absolute melody or absolute cuisine or absolute poetry.
Moralizing is something we do, like talking or cooking, or building houses. We construct moralities the way we construct physical objects, and for similar reasons. They nourish us or protect us. We do the best we can with what we are given.
I’m baffled by much of the philosospeak here, but the fundamental error of the UD position appears to me to be the assumption that the subjective amounts to free, unconstrained choice. It doesn’t. I am not free to pick my favourite ice cream from among the many possible flavours, nor to pick my preferred gender for ogling, nor to pick some from among them to give particular attention to. And nor am I free to kick puppies, to shoot someone in the face for kicks, or to exit a bar without paying the tab. Most people are more-or-less the same. What kind of idiot does something that makes them feel crap, even if there isn’t someone passing a ruler over them after they die, or some Natural Moral Law (laughable concept) that gives an appropriate karmic shit?
Hah. I also hope not….
I see the problem of morality not as what flavor or gender were are to prefer, but rather how do we manage people’s behavior.
That may sound a bit crass, but I prefer plain speaking.
Scenarios like lifeboats and Nazis at the door are not so much moral problems as life problems. Most people agree that betraying friends or harming them is bad, so it is not morality we are dealing with when life gives us hard choices.
The real question is how do we raise children to have moral skill. By that I mean the ability to delay gratification when the payoff is significant, to abstain from foolish behavior, to live compatibly with others.
Yes, exactly. It’s an all-or-nothing philosophy: either total unconstrained libertinage or total acceptance of the unchanging, absolute “moral law”. The vast gradations between those extremes are, from their point of view, confused and incoherent — because the extremes are the only conceptually coherent options, and why’s that? Because reasons.
It’s much like their insistence that emergentism is materialism + magic. It’s not as if they’ve studied the philosophical scholarship on the concept of emergence and reached a judicious conclusion. They already know it cannot make any sense, because reasons.
Morality, at its core, is this simple. No need for a moral code on Robinson Crusoe’s island till Friday turned up. Morals are how other people should behave. And, for most of us, that is fairly. I see the best code of morals as that which reduces claims of “that’s not fair” to a minimum.
Edward O. Wilson and I both claim an evolutionary root (and route 🙂 ) for this trait. How else could social groups function?
“The only frame of mind which can provide direct support for moral commitment is what Josiah Royce called Loyalty, and what Christians call Love (Charity). This is a commitment deeper than any commitment to abstract principle. It is this commitment to the well-being of our fellow man which stands to the justification of moral principles as the purpose of acquiring the ability to explain and predict stands to the justification of scientific theories. . . . the ability to love others for their own sake is as essential to a full life as the need to feel ourselves loved and appreciated for our own sake — unconditionally, and not as something turned on or off depending on what we do. This fact provides, for those who acknowledge it, a means-end relationship around which can be built practical reasoning which justifies a course of action designed to strengthen our ability to respond to the needs of others.” (W. Sellars, “Science and Ethics” (1960)
KN, I like LUV as a basis for morality, but in ordinary life, the burning issue is not whethwer we should torture babies or shoot up our high school.
The problem is how to raise children who will want to do the right thing. There are times when figuring out the right thing is difficult, but these are actually rather uncommon. I certainly don’t spend my day stressing out over whether the kill and eat my co-workers.
The most contentious moral problem in the political arena is abortion. I suspect it affects more elections than any other issue.
But no one wants to have an abortion, and no sane person would get pregnant in order to experience an abortion. There is a kind of rough and natural justice involved.
The problem with abortion, drugs, AIDS, obesity and the like is one of self-management. And that’s a learned skill.
I can see some sense in the theist’s claim that church supplies a ready-made curriculum for teaching children. The problem I see with Barry’s world is that he bases his morality (much of which I agree with) on false authority. He does not appeal to love or compassion or empathy. And these are the very things that, if acquired early in life, are impervious to change or degradation. There are no lies about nature or the afterlife to shed.
I’ve posted several time about Kitchers pragmatic, naturalistic approach to ethics in his book The Ethical Project. Here is a summary of how his approach answers questions about ethics raised in this thread and the linked post at UD. Many of the individual ideas have been discussed at TSZ, but he structures them in a way I have not seen here.
The Nature of Ethics
Ethical norms are rules of behaviour established as part of an ancient and ongoing process in human societies to maintain social harmony by fixing altruism failures. These rules are created though a process of engagement and consensus building involving the whole society (physically in pre-history, ideally and virtually today). Only endorsable altruism failures are to be fixed: endorsable failures are unfulfilled desires which could be satisfied for all in some environments. So shared access to food is endorsable; reproductive privileges for someone in particular is not.
The rules are implemented by education to shape emotional reaction (building on human traits provided by evolution) and so shape thinking and behaviour. They are also implemented by punishment of violators.
Ethical rules are the inventions of human society to respond to felt human problems. They are not attempts to know and implement objective truths of morality, whether religious or natural, nor are they attempts to uncover a priori moral rules through pure reasoning.
Altruism and its Biological History
Kitcher distinguishes three types of altruism:
– biological: A acts toward B in a way that decreases A’s reproductive success and increases B’s
– behavioral: A acts towards B in a way that satisfies B’s desires at the expense of A (regardless of A’s motives)
– psychological: A’s desires and motives are focussed on satisfying B’s desires
As a naturalist, Kitcher needs to explain altruism empirically and scientifically. To do so, he spends the first third of the book recounting well-known ideas related to the evolution of altruism: kin selection, maternal affection in mammals, the associated hormones and their role in facilitating more general altruistic behaviour, the possible role of mirror neurons. He recounts primate experiments showing fairness and social retribution for unfair behaviour. He uses the results of experiments with iterated prisoner’s dilemmas in groups, showing how they can lead to formation of coalitions and possibly defection (altruism failures). He discusses the frequency of altruism failures in chimpanzees, leading to time wasted to re-establish coalitions by grooming and similar acts, and so claims that it is justifiable to believe that abilities to avoid altruism failures by creating and obeying social commands were selected by evolution in our ancestors.
Cultural Evolution and The Ethical Project
With psychological altruism and the ability to obey social norms in place, Kitcher claims the ethical project could start. He tells a story of how it could have progressed from pre-history until today, not to claim this as what actually happened, but rather to give credibility to the concept of the ethical project by providing a reasonable story of what could have happened.
Start with a small groups sitting around the camp-fire, solving problems like shortages of food by deciding to share (exercising psychological altruism) and gaining acceptance by showing the shortage is what (he would now call) an endorsable desire. Such practices would spread between groups by a Darwinian competition (between the individual practices, not the whole groups). One of these practices was the invention of an unseen enforcer to help avoid misbehaviour when no one was watching; Kitcher claims this idea as a source of religion.
Further practices to reduce shortage and increase goods would spread similarly: for example, specialization of tasks to those with the most skills and consequently the start of trade between groups. These more complex changes also have potential costs: for example, inequality due to extra rewards for the results of rarer skills. Real human ethical change involves trade-offs. This means that different social groups could make different trade-offs in their execution of the ethical project and so end up with a different set of social norms.
Kitcher ends his history by trying to show that how the ethical project could have produced several modern changes: freeing the slaves, the emancipation of women, and growth of personal freedom to live one’s life as one wishes, as long as no one else is harmed.
Moral Progress
Kitcher wants to avoid seeing the ethical project merely as a series of changes. He claims that progress, not mere change, is possible.
But he refuses to appeal to satisfaction of external constraints as a way of measuring progress. Examples of external constraints are objective moral truths and the results of a priori, fixed reasoning processes about rules or social contracts. He argues such appeals fail both due unsound arguments for them and due to a failure to correspond to actual change as documented in written history we have available for modern changes.
Instead, he takes the pragmatic approach of judging progress by improvement in functions. In general, a function provides a solution to a need; in the context of the ethical project, the needs are endorsable desires of of a group of people regarding altruism failures. Improvements can be implemented by satisfying the need more reliably, more completely, or in ways that avoid problematic side effects.
So one means of progress is to introduce new functions which meet this criteria for ascertaining improvement.
Another way to progress is to improve the implementation of current functions: more effective eduction and punishment, enhancing psychological altruism (and so improving reliability), and expanding the scope of people or situations to which the functions apply (an example of the last is the ongoing incorporation of the LGBT community into all social functionality).
Kitcher will use the concept of progress to avoid relativism; I’ll describe this later. He also uses it to explain why people need not always obey the norms of their society; if someone can demonstrate that a changed norm would constitute progress, then he or she is morally justified in proposing a change.
Processes for Functional Improvement
Kitcher provides an idealization of the process he says is followed to discover new functions or improve functions.
The process must always preserve the notions of equality and altruism present from the start of the ethical project. The process itself must allow for equal input and consideration of all, and the participants must use psychological altruism to incorporate the endorsable needs of others in proposed new functions. (For this process, Kitcher extends altruism to “extended mirroring” which allows for A to try to account for B’s desires in the light of B accounting for C’s desires, etc).
The process must incorporate relevant factual knowledge and the existing moral standards.
To this base, Kitcher adds two techniques. The first is process of “reflective equilibrium”, a standard philosophical technique of considering all relevant moral and factual elements, and looking for ways to ensure they cohere and reinforce each other. This will sometimes suggest incremental improvements, and so is suited for discovering and evaluating smaller changes.
For larger changes, Kitcher proposed “dynamic consequentialism”. A consequentialist approach judges proposed changes by their consequences, seeking to maximize the net good consequences. By “dynamic”, Kitcher indicates the process does not rely on a fixed definition of good (eg greatest pleasure for greatest number), but rather allows the process itself to select the appropriate metric and the people and time frame it applies to.
Kitcher relies on the proper execution of this process to answer scepticism about norms (why should I obey them?), relativism (how can one society have better norms than another?), and to respond to charges of committing the naturalistic fallacy. I’ll post about those topics later.
Pragmatic naturalism?
BruceS,
Might make for a useful OP?
Yes, that is what he calls his approach to ethics.
I debated doing a OP due to the length, but this thread seems to have quieted down to very few participants (but of the highest quality, of course!). Hence I did not think a long post would interrupt ongoing exchanges.
It’s simpler and easier for me just to reply and I think it is on topic for OP (well, it is probably on topic for many of the conversations at TSZ!).
BTW, Sean C has posted his promised update to discuss where the probabilities come from in the MWI interpretation of QM. As an extra, added bonus, Sean references the approach OlegT linked to on decoherence (but in an MWI context, of course).
Just had a catch-up on the UD thread. KF (if I understand him correctly; he is a master of murky prose) has managed to set up another challenge, in which the ‘objectivist’ position is held to be refutable by showing the manner in which mind emerges from simpler replicative systems, and by an explanation how appeal to personal moral restraints avoids the dangers of manipulation … the latter is pretty easy, but I’d offer the converse challenge, if we’re in a challenging mood. Show how mind is connected to ‘meat’ in the theist world, with the same rigour that is expected of the materialist, and (forgive me while I snigger into my wine-glass) show how manipulation and appeal to ‘might’ is likewise avoided.
As a contrasting exercise in clarity, I’d invite onlookers to view RDFish’s #116, one of the nost amusing comments I’ve seen on this never-settled arena and the meta over the way these debates invariably rumble.
Here is the second and final post summarizing the ideas in Kitcher’s Ethical Project. I outline how he deals with skeptics, relativism, and the naturalistic fallacy. Kitcher does not claim to provide knock-down arguments for these concerns; rather, he wants to show that the pragmatic naturalism can provide at least as powerful a defense as other approaches to ethics. And he notes that philosophical arguments are not meant to be used against criminals and psychopaths.
Dealing with Skeptics
The skeptic says: “Why should I heed any of the rules resulting from the ethical project?”. Technically, he or she is asking why the rules it develops should have normative force.
Kitcher argues that any skeptic is free to raise continual objections to any counter-argument, so the best any approach to ethics can do is show limitations in the skeptics logic. For pragmatic naturalists, this amounts to pointing out the centrality of the ethical project to human life, how its results have made possible the society in which the skeptic would like make amoral choices, and reviewing the logic of the project in addressing social problems in an equitable way.
For any particular rules he or she questions, the skeptic can be walked through the details of the process to review its logic in that case. Should the skeptic reject the process in total, he cor she can be challenged to provide a superior replacement, recognizing the humanity is a social animal and so the means for living together are an essential.
The Naturalistic Fallacy
“One cannot deduce an ought from an is” according to Hume. So how can a naturalistic approach be the source of ought-statements, since it seems to consist only of a set of is-statements describing human biology and human history.
To answer this concern, Kitcher starts by noting the concern is often applied to ethical approaches which postulate truths to be known by reasoning, starting from a position with no known ethical truths and only facts. But this is not the case with pragmatic naturalism.
For it starts with some oughts built in, those which form part of the human condition leading to the ethical project. Inferences can re-use those oughts without committing the fallacy.
For subsequent, novel oughts added during the project, Kitcher’s argument starts by noting that deduction is not the only valid form of inference. Since naturalistic pragmatism aims for progress, not truth, it is enough show that in specific cases involving the processes described in my previous note (eg dynamic consequentialism) such progress is achieved. This can be don by arguments showing net gain in meeting altruism failures. This possibility is how he completes his argument on avoiding the fallacy.
Relativism and the Limits of Toleration
What about the standard problems of TSZ discussions — Nazis and baby torturers — how can pragmatic naturalism claim societies which embrace these will achieve progress if they reject them? Could they not have arrived at such rules by some sequence of progressive changes in the ethical project conducted by that society?
Here Kitcher argues that equality and avoiding the inflicting of unjustified pain have been at the core of the ethical project and its focus on altruism from the start. Further, these norms re-appear throughout human societies, reinforcing a claim that they have achieved a status of a permanence. So any any society which has moved away from these rules can have more progressive norms by re-establishing them.
But more complex cases are not so easy to deal with. Recall that the process allows for tradeoffs when establishing new functions, meaning that some societies may end up with sets of rules which still honor the basic norms of equality and non-violence but which have others which seem regressive to us.
For example, Kitcher raises the situation of a society with norms which provide for limitations on womens roles. Further, the women in such societies often agree that these norms are best for them. Is there a principled way for Kitcher to use pragmatic naturalism to say such norms are regressive?
His attempt to do so starts by claiming that ethical projects will converge on a generic principal that everyone is entitled to an equal opportunity to freely determine and try to achieve his or her life project. Then he can say that women in such societies are being deprived of this opportunity; further, a claim to agree with a limited role in the society is in fact a unfree choice made due to unfair education practices in the society.
Of course, here one may start to wonder whether or not Kitcher is just justifying his existing western, individualistic values. There are further possible instances of this as the book ends, for example a discussion of global income inequality and a plea for population control to limit resource usage and so permit better opportunity for equal sharing. But I’m not trying to critique, only give an very high-level outline of what he says in the book, so I’ll stop here.
How to be good.
A New Yorker article by philosopher Derek Parfit. New Yorker is free for the rest of the summer.
I was commenting on the Sellars quote the other day and put my thought about it this way:
I can see the value of Kitcher’s project in terms of giving a plausibly ‘naturalistic’ account of the origins of caritas or fellow-feeling. (It might be pointed out that Kitcher here is borrowing a good deal from Dewey, whom Kitcher has called ‘the most important philosopher of the 20th century’.) Where I become much more reticent is where Kitcher attempts to justify the moral basis of political liberalism on those grounds. We liberals like to cry “bullshit!” when theological reactionaries (like our frenemies at Uncommon Descent) ground their politics in a vision of how the universe really works. But that just means we shouldn’t do the same thing.
In other words, explaining the origins of caritas or agape from earlier forms of primate social bonding is all well and good — and explaining its neurological underpinnings is as well — but does that help resolve any of the ethical or political debates that characterize 21st-century Western capitalist societies in their various crises?
In order for Kitcher to give us more to go on, I would like to know how he might respond to Rorty’s review of Hauser’s Moral Minds. In particular:
Yes, and he does acknlowledge that many times thorughout the book. It seems clear he views this work as just carrying on what Dewey started.
The Rorty quote talks a lot about biology, but that is only a starting point for Kitcher: his book is much more about people engaging for principled discussion.
Kitcher also does spend a large part of the final chapters talking about dealing with the inequalities of the world and how to renew the ethical project, but returning to some its roots of equality and altruism and moving away from accepting inequality because of what he considers the doubtful logic of allowing some people to get very rich means everyone will be better off.
But by then the book is 400 pages and I think he is running out of gas. Plus it is probably moving away from the book’s central purpose.
I must mention one thing I find curious. Part of this section on renewing the ethical project talks to the role of philosophers: not leaders, since all are equal in the ethical project, but possibly as facilitators or sources of suggestions for discussion.
But he never deals seriously with the real way moral change happens today: power and politics.
(I had a similar problem with his recent book on science and democracy and ended up giving up on it for that reason).
A long time ago, I was a grad student in Kitcher’s seminar in which we read the first draft of Science, Truth, and Democracy. In my seminar paper I argued that he needed to take critical theory seriously. At the time he seemed genuinely impressed and pleased with my criticism. And certainly Dewey took power and politics seriously, even if he was somewhat naive and optimistic about the prospects of democratization. I haven’t read Kitcher’s latest works but I suspect that he doesn’t take power and politics seriously enough.
Playing devil’s advocate, I don’t see that worrying about power and politics has much effect on the world. It’s a bit like asking about the effect of music on the world.
I do see that philosophy appears to have had the large scale effect of favoring democracy over monarchy, but it has also served totalitarians. And there are quite a few benign monarchies left in the world.
KN:
I think this is related to my endo/exo metaphor. I see trying to find a rationale for ethics and morality as an exo project.
This is what legislators and rulers do. It’s not really worthwhile opposing this kind of activity, because it’s a thoroughly ingrained cultural trait. Opposing the way people organize themselves is a bit like commanding the tides to stop.
But I observe (and I could be wrong in my observation) that social systems change organically from the inside and resist imposed change. They change for reasons that are inscrutable and uncontrollable and undesignable.
There’s a mini-debate going on over at Panda’s thumb, with Joe Felsenstein in the lead, over whether the term evolution should be construed as broad enough to include human inventions. I’m afraid I’m on the side of using the term broadly. I think social change is non-rational and not designable.
I don’t oppose people trying to design changes. I just think of plans and designs as variations that get tossed into the political sausage grinder and subjected to selection processes that are too complex to analyze in detail.
I think that when leaders have attempted to manage these selection factors, they have tended to build totalitarian governments. the reason is fairly simple. Half measures get co-opted. Regulations get captured by the regulated. The attempt to prevent this results in a spiritual of clamping down, until everything that is not forbidden is mandatory, and everything that is not mandatory is forbidden.
Just some random thoughts…
OK, I’ll bite.
Over the last 40 years, surely the person who had the most influence globally on changing the way people live and on what they say is good is the politician and power broker Deng Xiaoping.
Or if want to stay in the Western world, it would be Thatcher/Reagan.
Sure, these politicians may not have thought of the ideas they pushed. But they were the leaders in changing the world to conform to the ideas.
Or if you want to not restrict to recent times, then the person who had the most influence on Western civilization would be the politically-savvy Paul (the apostle).
Having good ideas about morality and how societies should work is helpful, but making them happen is what politicians do.
I hope he did not do much lecturing.
If some YouTube videos of him that I tried to watch are any guide, his lecturing approach is to read from a prepared text. That’s sin #1. Sin #2 would be that he uses his dry, densely argued papers as the lecture text he reads.
In any event, it seems my reply to your note means I am now two degrees of separation from Kitcher, one of the Big Names. A nice bonus of participating in TSZ!
Politicians occasionally find a lever strategically positioned with which to move the world, You could also mention Hitler and Stalin. I would call all of those examples transient phenomena. I would guess not one ordinary person in ten could provide more than a sound bite description of any of these people or what they did. They are rapidly being forgotten.
There’s a cliched question: do men make the times, or do the times make the men. Perhaps is says something about the times that the question jumps out immediately as sexist.
I would call this a false dichotomy. Individuals invent things, including ideas. But ideas are, in my opinion, are just variants, which thrive or not. The analogy to biological evolution is tenuous, but the dynamics are the same.
OK.
I was not really trying to push a “Great Man” version of history, just the rather banal thought that it takes thinkers and doers, and when it comes to moral change, politicians and politics are the doers.
Nice bit of lateral thinking on the sexism comment; that made me smile.
Good grief! A quick catch-up with another 100 comments at UD. I can only skim, but … beauty is objective because the thing perceived exists outside the beholder. Taste isn’t because … well, you have to stick it in your gob. StephenB. Stunning. And the UD denizens are right behind him.
I know, it’s completely ridiculous. This is what happens when one has only the two categories to play with — complete and utter ‘subjectivity’ (private, individual, knowable by introspection alone. etc/) and complete and utter ‘objectivity’ (transcendent, eternal, unchanging, absolute, knowable by reason alone, etc.). You end having no choice but to say that vision and taste are radically different sensory systems. It’s an absurd claim that’s forced on all on them by dint of starting off with too few basic categories with which to comprehend the world. And any attempt to introduce a different category is immediately assimilated into one of the other two.
StephenB comes across as very intelligent, well-educated (probably self-taught) and has a decent grasp of philosophy from Plato to Aquinas (though none of them show any knowledge of philosophy after Hume), but he also comes across as an idiot, because he can’t see the need for any basic categories besides the ones he’s already got and he can’t see that his categories are forcing him into making absurd assertions.
Are these people so wedded to dogma that their own physical reality teaches them nothing?
Are there any aspects of our sensed world which are strictly dichotomous?
Get out of your dumb binary logic, people, and pay attention to the real world of spectra and gradients. Ring species. Bisexuality and pansexuality. Agnostic atheists and agnostic theists. Probability.
They’re the ones who supposedly value inference. (They’re proud of their “accomplishment” of inferring a Designer of complex life when we witness human-design of complex objects.) Why are they such abject failures at inference? Why can’t they infer, correctly, that binary categories are too reductive when we witness the magnificently-colored universe? It’s not black and white, IDiots.
Actually, if you take a look at Arrington’s newest post, “Denying the Obvious,” you’ll see a radical shift in the ID movement — a much greater shift than anyone there realizes. The “theory” of intelligent design used to be that we inferred design from complex specified information. This led to much wrangling about how to operationalize and calculate CSI, etc.
But now Arrington is saying, there is no design inference. We just perceive that there is design — that’s what it means to say that it is obvious. I don’t think that Arrington or any one else still participating in UD realizes that, with this move, they’ve rejected the entire project of Dembski and Behe.
The old ID approach was, “based on calculated complex specified information and some probability theory, we infer it is more likely that X was designed than it is that X is the result of chance and necessity”. The new ID approach seems to be, “based on the observation that X is designed, it must have a designer.”
In fact, with a bit of historical context, Arrington’s approach isn’t so much new as it is a regression to Paley’s view. This is interesting, because Dembski’s entire project was to rescue intelligent design from Paley; Dembski is bright enough to realize that Paley’s view is decisively undermined by Darwinism. One wonders what Dembski would make of Arrington’s neo-Paleyianism.
He seems to be arguing that there is no need to prove it, since everyone acknowledges it. After all, Dawkins has admitted (the appearance of) design.
After that bit of equivocation, the post becomes a grand gathering of gaps arguments: gaps in evolution in explaining the cell, gaps in explaining consciousness, gaps in explaining intentionality, gaps in a (presumed need for) a reductive explanation of everything to physics, and so on.
This leads, I suppose, to a sort of anti-consilience argument against materialism: with so many independent, destructive arguments against materialism, surely it must be false?
Of course, just like the plural of anecdotes is not data, a list of bad arguments taken together does not together constitute a good argument.
BruceS,
Interesting point about how it functions as an anti-consilience argument, and why that doesn’t succeed. It indicates a compulsion to turn a whole bunch of different theories into a “world-view.” I don’t know what a “world-view” is or why I’m supposed to have one.
As is fairly typical of UD, Arrington’s post presumes a certain position — “materialism” — and then trots out a whole bunch of different arguments about what “materialism” cannot explain x, y, or z. Arrington — and UD generally — indicates no awareness that there are lots of different naturalistic explanations for these different phenomena, and some of them are quite promising and others seem more problematic.
I’m fairly confident that complexity theory gives a us a highly promising theoretical framework for solving the problem of abiogenesis. And I’m fairly confident that some version of naturalistic pragmatism, suitably elaborated by neuroscience, can explain intentionality. (That’s what Okrent tries to do in his Rational Animals, and I think it’s mostly correct. If the mood strikes me at some point I’ll write up something about why Okrent’s theory is better than Millikan’s for refuting the EAAN.)
I don’t know what to say about consciousness, though. That’s obviously just magic!
One of the Big Ideas I’ve been working on is the difference between the rationalistic a priori (‘RAP’) and the pragmatic a priori (‘PAP’). PAP is implicit in Peirce, James, Dewey, and Royce, and it becomes explicit in C. I. Lewis and Sellars (and also in the late Wittgenstein’s notion of ‘hinge propositions’ in On Certainty).
RAP and PAP both acknowledge that there are commitments and assumptions that we bring with us in the course of making sense of what we experience. But RAP takes these a priori truths to be universal, necessary, fixed, and discoverable by reason alone. Whereas PAP takes these a priori truths to be plural, contingent, alterable, and discoverable by reflection on experience. One of the best insights of the pragmatist tradition is that the a priori is revisable in light of experience.
This does not undermine the a priori/a posteriori distinction itself, because we can still distinguish between the commitments we bring to bear on experience and what experience reveals to us in light of those commitments. But it does mean that experience can show us that our existing commitments are insufficient to do justice to reality-as-experienced, and that we need more basic categories in order to carve nature at its joints.
Careful. I say that one should let sleeping HPSS profs lie.
That seems to be a bit of a different position from your last post on intentionality and norms, unless the naturalistic pragmatism is the way to the norms which I read you as saying were not subject to scientific explanation.
Right now I’m reading Bechtel’s Mental Mechanisms which has a version of emergent causation that makes sense to me, as someone who who is troubled by what Kim’s causal exclusion argument says about the limits of emergent causation.
But I’ll will give Orkent’s book at try at some point. Seems not to be out of print in Canada, however, although U of T has a copy I think I can peruse in the library.
Life doesn’t have the appearance of design. I’ve never seen a designed organism. Deep fat fryers, paper clips and zip fasteners yes, organisms no. I don”t believe it can even be done. If designed organisms with a known designer were ten-a-penny, the inference would be justifiable. But we don’t even have one.
Yes, I would say, if living things can be designed, let’s see an example. Not just a shuffle of existing pieces. Let’s see a completely novel design from scratch. Demonstrate that it can be done.
ETA:
I’d accept a simpler example of design.
Just design a completely new protein from scratch. No copying or using parts of existing code. Just demonstrate that a protein can be designed from first principles without any trial and error.
Exactly. The “organisms appear to be designed” trope functions to conflate organisms and artifacts, and this is the argument from analogy upon which design theory rests.
As Hume correctly pointed out, the argument from analogy collapses under its own weight, since it turns out be mean nothing more than, “organisms and artifacts are exactly the same, except for all the ways in which they are completely different.”
Dembski’s concept of ‘complex specified information’ was intended to get design theory out from under the dependence of the argument from analogy. If design theorists toss that aside, the entire position is once again vulnerable to Hume’s criticisms.
The argument from analogy would be more convincing if it were a good analogy.
The argument from artificial selection to natural selection is an example of a convincing analogy.
Indeed it is — though what makes it a good analogy isn’t immediately obvious. I take it that part of what makes it a good analogy is that Darwin gives it a commentary that instructs us to see what aspects of the process of breeding are relevant to the process of speciation and what aspects are not — namely, that selection can be directional and not merely conservative.
I’d always understood “appearance of design” to refer to living mechanisms which can be described as having components working together to implement some function. For example, hearts or digestive systems.
Of course, that usage is a convenient shortform. The false analogy or the equivocation is to assume that use of “design” is the same is as design that involves intellectual forethought for analysis and planning.
BTW, in that sense I’d still see bad design as a type of design, whether the bad design is the blind spot in the human eye or the internal structure of a lot of the software which runs our banks.
BruceS,
I don’t think the fact that living systems have interacting complexities is sufficient to infer, even informally, the ‘appearance of design’. It’s the wrong way round – our more complex products are ‘like’ living systems, excepting the general absence of an iterative reproductive contest, and the existence of a functional reason for their form and action, beyond mere retention in the world. It’s a bit semantic, perhaps, but use of the D word is conventionally applied to the world of intent and purpose. You can’t infer intent and purpose from complexity alone.
One could analogize human artifacts with viruses. They have no internal means of reproduction, but hijack the host to do the reproduction.
One side effect of this is that in the process of making copies, the objects undergo modification. The variants undergo selection.
For the purposes of the analogy, it makes no difference how the specifications are stored or how they are modified. You can find examples of speciation, extinction, drift, purifying selection, convergent evolution, and so forth. I would point out that the element of foresight is irrelevant at this level of analysis. One can plan and design and so forth, but large scale change over long periods of time is steered by a selection process that cannot be anticipated or designed.
Also, the concept of horizontal transfer is irrelevant, because the unit that is being reproduced is the patentable meme. An invention is an invention, whether it appears in an automobile or a toaster,
I have no idea whether this is a “useful” analogy in terms of suggesting lines of research or of suggesting useful activities. I find it amusing and entertaining, and that’s sufficient to keep me thinking about it.