Matt Teichman

• Satisfaction is whether or not that state is obtained

• Challenging scenario for this view:

  • A man is rushing to catch a important train to NYC and boards at the last second, only to realize afterward that the train is heading to the wrong destination. Was his desire satisfied?

  • No - eliminitivist

    • We reject that the than man desired to get on the train to a wrong destination, because his ‘true’ desire involved to see the doctor in NYC, which is inconsistent with being on the wrong train.

    • Problem:

      • The doctor was going to tell him if his disease was curable, so what his ‘true’ desire is the cure, not the train to NYC (this can be done ad infinitum: his true desire is not the cure but rather health -> happiness -> ‘the good’).

      • I.e. the naive eliminitivist accidentally eliminates all desires other than the desire for ‘the good’.

  • Yes - separatist

    • Introduce another desire to make sense of why the man is upset despite the desire being satisfied. The ‘catch-this-train’ desire was satisfied, but ‘get to NYC’ that was not satisfied.

    • Problem

      • This account makes the desires seem separate/atomic, but why do they seem so intimiately connected to each other?

      • If he learned just before that it was going to the wrong destination, his desire to catch the (that) train would instantly vanish.

      • Makes desires in principle unconnected from what is good for us.

• When you want anything, you want more than one thing, so it’s complicated to answer “did you get what you want”.

• The man wanted to catch the train AND wanted to get to NYC, those are both aspects of his SINGLE desire.

• There is a specific side and a general side to a desire

  • Object of desire (“catching this train”)

  • Aim - what makes the object appealing.

• Conventional wisdom holds they are both representable merely as states of the world, although they have an complementary relationship

  • We want to update our belief state to match the world, want to update the world to match our belief state.

• This picture is incomplete

  • Example: feel hungry, desire food.

    • It can’t be an accident that a bunch of seemingly related desires pop up (want a sandwich downstairs, want pasta from next door, …)

    • It doesn’t make sense that we desire things in a way that is not possible (want sandwich from Paris, from the moon)

    • Things make more sense when we break down the structure of a desire:

      • Object: sandwich from deli downstairs, sandwich

      • Aim: satisfy the hunger

• These thoughts might inspire positive change in fields like economics, where people’s desires are taken to be “given in advance”

  • Their framework involves setting up a system that optimizes utility, given desires (as the fixed input data).

  • But rather the desires are adaptive to the world / how things are achieved.

• Parents try don’t satisfy children’s desires because they don’t have the right desires. The desires are formed on the reflection of prior experience (knowing what to want, how to achieve it).

• The story of the formation of the desire is required towards understanding what it means to satsify it.

• Some problems stem from representating a human state of mind as a static object, whereas our beliefs aren’t constant w/r/t time spent in reflection.

  • Every desire can be chained iteratively until you reach “the good”, but almost never is that entire chain ‘in register’ for real human being. At instant t in time, we are cognizant of a finite number of steps along that chain (we implicitly accept some goals as final, even with more thought power we would view them as instrumental).

  • Therefore the eliminitivist is not susceptible to Collard’s criticism. Whether the man’s desire was satisfied would be dependent on his mental state while having the desire. If he did not invest enough effort into chaining the desire all the way to The Good, then it’s possible for the desire to be satisfied but the person not (and more likely the fewer links along the chain are ‘in register’).

• Collard’s “object”/“aim” structure of a desire seems to be just considering two points along the chain - this is still more nuance than a one-point approximation, but it really is referring to a pair “naive desires” as a desire with bipartite structure.

  • It is a reasonable strategy to salvage the “separatist” POV by giving an account for the relation between different desired states of the world (they are not atomic anymore)

• Clarification: “poetry” to Plato is more similar to what we call theatre (performative context).

• Plato thought he innovated the distinction between style and content:

  • Distinguishing the story from the way the poet tells the story

    • E.g. style could vary between 3rd person, 1st person narration for the same story

• The effect of being exposed to poetry: one tries to be many things, instead of one thing.

  • Background: Plato + Aristotle both believed a good human life is unified

    • A single goal, so you could say what it was about

      • (they happened to think the best goal was contemplation of eternal truths).

      • We share this intuition, though now we also praise people for having a variety of interests.

        • How can you be a mother and a working professional at once?

        • We would rather try to make the two identities compatible, rather than try to argue that people should be comfortable/adept at having multiple identities.

    • What is the distinction between unity and diversity:

      • A single person does many things (shoemaker has to cut leather, sew, negotiate, …) and these are all ways of expressing a single identity (illusory multiplicity).

      • Plato objects to the multiple identities.

  • Also note: Plato not opposed to all poetry, since he thinks it is valuable in early moral development as a form of play.

    • Rather, we should reform poetry to prevent it from encouraging multiplicity.

• When you seek to be many things, you are no particular thing at all.

  • The single identity of ‘a poet’ is not a real identity.

• We have lots of fleeting/meaningless pleasure that is not actually satisfying (we have to keep varying things to keep interested). Was Plato predicting the emptiness of contemporary society and shallowness of popular culture?

• Plato’s remedy is austere: the only goal capable of having the stability of unifying a life is pursuit of reason. (Not incompatible with modern conceptions of the good life, for theists or academic-minded people).

• Plato offers valid criticism of entertainment and high culture, but he underestimates the value of certain kinds of play. He didn’t see that we play not at things we want to become, but also things we’re afraid of or want to learn about.

Nietzsche means something different from ethics when using the term morality

• He presents himself as a “critic of morality”

• Although also talks about “higher moralities” as things he approves of, using the same German word.

• Leitner distinguishes these senses by introducing the term “morality in the pejorative sense”

• What characterizes the types of morality Nietzsche’s opposed to?

  1. Has particular assumptions about human nature that Nietzsche takes to be false.

     • E.g. assuming there is “free/autonomous agency” of the sort Nietzsche thinks doesn’t exist.

  2. Has certain normative content he doesn’t like (big disjunctive list)

     • Egalitarianism

     • High value on pity / altruism

     • Especially high value on happiness / low value on suffering

     • E.g. Nietzsche is a critic of utilitarianism, which might have some but not all of these features

• Leitner calls Nietzsche a naturalist thinker about morality

  • Thinking of him in line with Hume and Freud, rather than the popular view of thinking of him as a precursor to postmodernism

• “Naturalist” is a fraught term. Need to distinguish:

  • “substantive”

    • a certain ontological view (no ‘supernatural’ things exist)

  • “methodological”

    • an idea of how one does philosophy

    • There aren’t any distinctive philosophical practices, no difference in kind with other sciences (primarily psychology)

    • No reliance purely on a priori

  • Nietzsche is at least the latter. Calls himself the ‘first psychologist’

  • He is a ‘speculative methodological naturalist’ like Hume.

  • Same kind of structure of argument that is characteristic of Hume:

    • Take some class of beliefs (e.g. beliefs of morality)

    • Be skeptical that the beliefs can be rationally arrived at

    • Construct a psychological narrative for how we could have arrived at those beliefs / why they are attractive to human beings as they are.

    • E.g. in geneology of morals: how did the acetic ideal come to dominate the human mind / major religions.

• How would Nietzsche. try to convince someone who believes in morality (in the pejorative sense)?

  • Leitner believes Nietzsche’s goal is not to get everyone to give up on morality.

    • “Herd morality for the herd”

    • There are different types of people

  • But there are (potential) creative geniuses like Goethe, Napoleon, Nietzsche himself, etc., whose flourishing is hindered by morality.

  • Lots of techniques to convince those people.

  • Nietzsche acknowledges that belief isn’t an entirely (or even mostly) rational deliberative process, so his methods of convincing are unusual compared to other philosophers.

  • Writes to ‘get you in the gut’ - is crude/rude/joking/hyperbolic.

  • “We don’t even notice the slave morality because it’s been victorious” He knows his readership isn’t even skeptical of morality, so he needs to be provokative to loosen them up / open them up to critical reflection.

  • Makes arguments

    • E.g. Naturalistic picture debunks common picture of human agency (his readership is becoming more committed to science, which allows him to draw up a tension)

  • But you can’t argue someone out of their morality, so rhetoric is important.

• Nietzsche wants different moralities for different types of people, but maybe he’s implicitly arguing for a universal principle “what is good for people is good for their individual fluorishing as the type of person they are”

  • Distinguish two kinds of goodness

    1. prudential goodness, what is good for an individual (e.g. their well-being)

    2. moral goodness (all other types of goodness) (e.g. “morality in the pejorative sense ought be rejected because it prevents higher beings from flourishing”)

    • Nietzsche doesn’t believe these claims are ‘moral facts’ (he’s not a moral realist)

    • If a herd animal read Nietzsche’s book and understood it perfectly but reacted poorly (“but this criticism of herd morality isn’t good for the rest of of us”) … N would not think this person has made any error.

    • Nietzsche thinks it’s a matter of taste whether flourishing of higher beings is more important than well-being of the herd.

  • So he is not aiming for a universal principle that is in the best interest of everyone.

• Leitner: I don’t think “analytic philosophy” exists, beyond some general stylistic concerns like attempting to be clear.

• There is a current strand of moral philosophy intersecting with psychology that he would fit in with.

• Nietzsche was a speculative naturalist, it’s possible that his beliefs that had empircal content are not psychological facts, but Leitner thinks after a century of psychological research that Nietzsche was right often.

  • E.g. he centred the role of the subconscious

  • Among the three dominant paradigms of moral psychology, Aristotle/Kant/Nietzsche, Nietzsche has the most plausible underlying assumptions given what we now know about psychology.

• Personally sympathetic to anti-egalitarianism and reducing importance of agency by assigning strong roles to non-conscious factors.

  • Framing a philosophy in a non-universalizing way is

    1. intellectually honest

    2. easy to defend / hard to attack

    3. suffers memetically (lacks a priori reason to convince anyone to adopt it) … so in some sense it cannot survive ‘at steady state’

• Rejection of something that is seen as a contaminant (useful in the context of feces, etc.). These are called the primary objects of disgust

• In all societies, it gets extended in practice to groups of people seen as ‘low’/‘dirty’

  • extending the attributes of primary objects of disgust to these people, e.g. separate drinking fountains for blacks

• Lord Devlin: a society needs to be able to defend itself against intrusion/defilement.

  • Justifies making things illegal even if they cause no harm to others

  • His rival: John Stuart Mill who said only harm to others should matter

• More contemporarily, Leon Cass: disgust is a legitimate emotion which can sometimes guide us legitimately warn us of atrocity.

  • E.g. “torture” elicits disgust that rightly directs us away from it

• When disgust is potent, we cannot rely on reasoning to give us respect.

• Gays/Lesbians depicted as weirdos/animals

• ‘Torture’ also elicits indignation, which is a more constructive feeling towards righting the wrong of torture (concede that disgust happens to be right on this one)

  • That is wrong and it better not happen again

  • But maybe indignation may be argued to already be ‘getting too close’ - dignifying the abhorrent act with the status of “an act that is wrong” - maybe rejecting uncritically is the proper treatment?

  • “We won’t look at that at all” is evasion of moral confrontation.

  • Both have cognitive content and are falliable

  • Disgust’s validity limited to primary objects - which actually do pose a danger.

• Juries to whom a murder is described in a more gory way are more likely to be harsher, even though this doesn’t always track how bad the homicide was / whether it was premeditated

• Need to imagine the other as fully human like ourselves

• Is this sufficient? Couldn’t a homophobe fairly imagine this but still conclude the other person is wrong?

  • Nussbaum: Certainly. Empathy is not sufficient for compassion.

  • perhaps not even necessary, e.g. compassion towards actual animals we cannot empathize with.

• Should government be involved in marriage?

  • Marriage has three aspects:

    • 1. Religious: state shouldn’t be involved (obviously)

    • 1. Material: benefits given to certain relationships (civil unions sufficient)

    • 1. Stuff in between: marriage is important because it signals some sort of societal approval of the act

      • Nussbaum doubts that this is really as true as proponents claim:

        • We don’t think of the state as supporting the N’th marriage of some celebrity

        • Extremely low bar in most states for being able to officiate a marriage

  • Civil unions analogous to transracial marriage:

    • People had to fight to not give this a different term since they truly believe it is equal

• Three dimensions that get conflated:

  • Informational: the private is secret

  • Spatial: a private place, like the home

  • Decisional: what is private is yours to design

• Example: pornography is legal, but only in your home. Or a court ruling that gay sex was legal unclear about whether it was merely because it was demonstrated in private that the homosexuality should be condoned.

• Mill: self-regarding impact principle

  • What impact does this have on non-consenting strangers

  • Could recover our intuitions (the pornography has an impact on other people, acts in sex clubs that you have to voluntarily enter).

• We should avoid the word ‘privacy’ because it’s such a nest of confusions.

- W/r/t torture + disgust + indignation:
  - Agree that indignation comes off as more constructive than disgust, though is disgust an essential / primary cause for the indignation? Who is indigant about torture but not disgusted by it?
- Agree disgust is valid when it directs us away from danger
  - Though Nussbaum's opponents are claiming homosexuality is a (societal) danger (for which disgust is just one piece of 'evidence'), so it's deflecting the main argument.
- A couple examples of disgust getting it wrong not convincing.
  - Could come up with examples of indignation getting it wrong according to Nussbaum herself.
  - Hypothetical: suppose Native Americans were disgusted by European settlers and were motivated to unify and reject the invasion. Wouldn't this have saved their society? Was a (counterfactual) stronger disgust reaction the only plausible hope for this happening?
- Is not eliciting disgust in nonconsenting strangers bad by Mill's principle? Couldn't there exist a country whose population is so vicerally disgusted by homosexuality that, in that country, it truly is wrong to have gay marriage? (e.g. Islamic country)

• Empirical facts about perception may be useful, and the physical theories of perception need not be challenged

  • E.g. gestalt psychology could be important to phenomonology

  • Notion of ‘perceptual features’. Empirical question:

  • Is it that to perceive is, essentially, to perceive objects? Every perception is a perception of something?

    • alternatively, we could also perceive ‘features’, too

    • More generally, is perception uniform or is there a richness/complexity of kind in the types of perception? This could influence philosophers who need to discuss the uses of perception.

  • In some sense, this is just a boring/trivial question about the grammar of perception.

  • Interesting empirical question: what is the privileged form of perceputal sensations - how far are we (always) breaking down sense data into objects? What physical mechanism does this?

• Philosophy should disentangle confusions that arise out of the natural usage of the term.

  • An enduring example confusion:

    • Tendancy to approach problems in perception from a theory of knowledge.

      • How much do we know given our perceptions?

      • How does the knowledge from perceptions interact with other sources of knowledge?

    • This is often a confusion

      • (though may make sense in certain contexts, e.g. wondering if I’ve seen you before in the street)

    • It makes us wrongly think of the essence of perception as being in contact / direct relation with the world, as a means of getting knowledge.

    • This is a category error

    • Epistemologists are not actually dealing with perception, rather something derived from perception

• Seeing something far away might be misleading

• Two people could perceive the same phenomenon differently for various reasons

• It’s a mistake of philosophers to lift this to questioning perception in general, questioning whether we ever could be in contact with the real world.

• Raw data (waves/beams) impinge upon us, our minds make sense of this

  • Optics / biology outside domain of philosophy.

  • Then philosophy asks the trancendental question “how is it possible for us to access the outside world?”

    • From what point of view is this question being asked?

    • “Contact” is a better word than “access” because the fact that we (in the world) are in contact with the world is obvious and nullifies the philosophical question.

    • This question is a symptom of philosophy since Descartes, implies one has already gone astray from understanding what perception is.

      • Benoist would respond to a Cartesian skeptic differently; rather, would reject the question as ill-founded because the fact we are in contact with the world is presupposed before asking more abstract/higher order questions.

      • The fact that Descartes creates this artificial question leads him to the artificial separation of the physical and spiritual world. Both artificialities are related.

    • It’s fundamental to perception that it’s not possible to ‘take distance’ from perception

      • (yes, epistemlogically, but that is really treating the uses of perceptions).

      • It’s legitimate inquiry into the role of perception among other aspects of reasoning, but it is not about perception itself.

• How does belief in raw contact with the world explain different observers observing the same thing differently?

  • E.g. “jaundiced eye” seeing the world with yellow tint

  • Benoist: perception is clearly dependent on where you are

  • The fact it is perspectival does not take away from the fact we are in direct contact

  • However we also have different faculties which cause differences beyond geometry (diseases, enhancements).

    • The yellow of jaundiced eye is just as much a reality and fact of perception as seeing a stick broken in the water.

      • There is a temptation to think when our perspective has dramatically affected the experience of some aspect of reality (stick), that it’s no longer the stick which we are perceiving

      • (even though it is the stick, even if it looks different than how we’re used to it - it’s just the reality of optics that viewed a certain way the experience of a stick is broken)

      • JL Austin: does anyone expect a stick, if it’s actually straight, has to appear to be straight under all circumstances?

    • It is wrong of philosophers to conclude from examples like this that our subjectivity is in between us and contact with reality.

      • Our subjectivity is just us being ourselves as we are in relation to the reality.

      • Subjectivity just captures the factors of perception which are dependent on the perceiver’s location/faculties

      • Subjectivity is just one aspect of the reality of perception (direct contact with the world).

• It’s an alternative source of evidence towards philosophical theses. - It’s not always meant to undermine traditional (armchair / mathematical) philosophy.

Why do we care what laypeople think over professional philosophers? Are philosophers biased away from the truth? Aren’t we learning about what people say rather than what really is? 1. We’re supplementing traditional philosophy - we want to show philosophical conclusions are not at odds with reality (we at least need an account in light of the evidence, e.g., above) 2. Laypeople lack prior theoretical commitments to bias them. 3. A general psychological investigation into how we draw conclusions from evidence (what biases are at play when we go data -> theory) is precisely what philosophy has always done. - We can learn how to do philosophy better by understanding, e.g., that we are likely to draw certain conclusions given our human desire to punish. - Some of our theories are an expression of current cultural identity rather than universal truth

• This is in line with Nietzsche’s geneology of morality, which leads to severe relativism. Is this a natural consequence?

  • Experimental philosophy is neutral - people disagreeing about morality is evidence for our knowledge of morality rather than evidence for it being relative

  • Arguments about morality that are based on people sharing intuitions however could be invalidated/validated based on the evidence.

  • Utilitarians may have conclusions that can be demonstrably against layperson ethical intuitions, but they can have independent arguments for why they are still right and our intuitions are wrong.

• Do we have faculties that trancend experience?

• Empiricists see a continuity between what we observe and how we reason

  • Hume argues that we “think in pictures” and arrives at this conclusion by personal reflection.

  • Rationalists like Descartes says we can conceive of distinct figures of 1000 vs 999 sides, even if they are visually indistinguishable.

• This point could be resolved by traditional psychology.

Something is not acceptable because it is ‘not natural’.

• This has counterexamples in both dimensions (good things - e.g. medicine - that are unnatural)

• More sophisticated version: something that comes out of evolution is good

• Good for survival is not the same as good in the ethical sense, even if the origins of our ethical norms came out of some competitive advantage it gave early humans.

What is good is indexed to the kind of thing one naturally is - We should always ask the question “is X good for Y” (rather than simply “Is X good?”) - “What is good for a plant is not good for what is good for a human”

• We have an easy route to relieve ‘tension’ on the word “good” by adding an extra degree of freedom to it (what would otherwise a contradiction is no longer once I create multiple “kinds of goods”.

• This gives you too many degrees of freedom - everything is good for some purpose for some kind of being, and we now need to prevent this from being abused by finding a principled reason for limiting whaat kinds of good are important in ethical normative judgments (“sure, you’re ‘good’ in some sense, but I will judge you”).

• Seems like some form of “good (simpliciter)” can build in enough flexibility to account for all of the specific kinds of good (and any ‘global’ things too). When someone talks about “good for X” they are restricting our focus to a subset of the overall logic that is relevant for X, which could be useful since it’s a much simpler concept to worry about.

• To claim there is no “good simpliciter” is to say that you can partition the logic of “good simpliciter” into the relevant subclasses (then by occams razor, the global good is not conceptually necessary).

• Study of traits shaped by natural selection

• No formal distinction from evolutionary biology

• Example psychological traits/behaviors: jealousy, homicide, male promiscuity

• What was its evolutionary function of jealousy? (studied by Bus)

  • Mate-guarding behavior. If you spend lots of resources/time on offspring, you want to make sure they’re yours.

  • Observed in primates standing in front of their mates and chasing off all other suitors

• How to validate this hypothesis?

  • There are two claims to be tested empircally :

  • 1. The existance of jealous mental states caused people to leave more offspring

  • 1. Those offspring inherited the tendency to have jealous mental states

Couldn’t you just make up a narrative for any trait? - It is fair to accuse EP of making ‘just so’ plausible stories. - Though unfair to say there is anything wrong with that, even if it can be used to justify any conclusion. - Hypotheses (in general) have this feature as well. - We could’ve come up with a hypothesis for why the sky is black. - EP has been unfairly criticized for ‘just so’ stories when they are widespread in science. - However need to be careful to resist seduction of hearing a ‘just so’ story and think that the hypothesis is confirmed. - Admits that EP are more likely to succumb to this seduction over other fields - The narrative ought just the beginning of a research programme to verify it.

• Can’t do tests on humans (ethical reasons, lifespan too long to measure reproductive success)

• Mental states do not leave fossils

• Need to make claims about proto-humans.

• There is tendancy of (moral/political/mind) philosphers to bring in evolution as a skyhook for their theories

• It’s not usually a core argument, but it’s used as support

• They usually not good support because EP is almost never empirical

• Furthermore, lots of evidence of evolutionary selected features that are selected for ‘arbitrary’ reasons, unrelated to flourishing

  • E.g. female preferring mate to have a particular spot pattern/chirp just due to ‘how they’re wired’ / randomness

  • So evolutionary fitness of a moral trait is not a good supporting argument by itself

• What are examples of metaphor?

  • Need to be careful to not use

    • ‘dead metaphors’

    • idioms

      • “bit the dust” / “went west” / “bought the farm” -> die

  • Metaphors are devices for saying something and using something else

• There are two lines of questions:

  • Technical ones in the philosophy of language (e.g. Joseph Stern)

  • Aesthetic questions (this is what Ted is interested in)

    • Metaphors are small-scale works of art

      • you need imaginative capacity to make/understand one

      • Art: the thing we do that we don’t need to do

        • it’s the place human’s exhibit their freedom

• Once you understand a statement as ironic, it’s not hard to figure out what it means.

• Could recognize something as a not-literal metaphor but then be puzzled about what it means

  • Try reading Wallace Stevens poetry as an example

  • Song of Solomon in the bible actually about sex, though you could read it without realizing that.

Is it possible to say what a metaphor says literally? Is this committing the ‘heresy of paraphrase’?

• The question was confused. Metaphors aren’t reducible to similes which have a straightforward content. (“juliet is the sun” is not “juliet is like the sun”)

  • The simile is not true, there’s no relevant property shared by juliet and the sun that romeo means.

• Inverse: “My love is like a red, red rose” why not “My life is a red, red rose”?

• These questions are addressed by Joseph Stern, from analysis of the context.

• In using a metaphor you will do something you couldn’t do otherwise, harder to say if you will say something you couldn’t do otherwise

  • Poetry is often the desire to compress a language and squeeze out all you can get

• Can you translate poetry?

  • Of course.

  • Czech poet, Anschel, makes his name easier one day as Ansel, then much later writes under anagram “Selam”. Has a poem “Death Fugue” which begins “Der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deustchland”

    • Should be translated “Death is a Meister from Germany” because no subtitutee would work for Meister.

• Romans made very few advances in mathematics, possibly because their notation was so bad.

  • Representation makes a big difference in our ability to imagine

  • This may be analogous to poetry which represents concepts in a way that prose may not be able to.

• We must be free, but if we’re free then there’s chaos and we end up not free, so the solution is a self-imposed constraint.

• Related vaguely.

• Interpreting metaphors in the same way seen as a means of connecting with other people (meaningful because it is falliable)

  • Wittgenstein in PI: “Sometimes people we cannot find our feet with them”

    • If you tell a joke that someone laughs at, you find youself in that person. Gratifying.

    • If you tell a joke that someone doesn’t laugh at, we react poorly, like something has gone wrong.

• Irony/metaphors/jokes. All ways we live within but break rules. They help us get in touch with our freedom.

• Are inappropriate/offensive jokes similar in how they work to normal jokes? Or has something gone wrong?

  • Cohen: they’re the same. Learning to not say telling offensive jokes is akin to learning to not pinch a stranger or roughhouse with someone who doesn’t want to.

    • Double infliction: they don’t like it, then you say they don’t have a sense of humor (it’s their fault for not finding it funny)

    • They don’t need a justification to not find it funny.

    • No moral theories could account for why it’s not ok for a stranger to say “I don’t like it when you cross your legs” but ok to say “Your music is too loud”. It’s something to be negotiated - you won’t learn it studying moral philosophy. The layperson is equally or more qualified than the philosopher at these practical questions.

  • No bearing on the functioning of the joke among people who find it funny.

    • Would need some account of it being harmful, that it perpetuates or creates harmful stereotypes has not been convincingly shown

    • The fact that a stereotype isn’t true is not a mark against the joke (a joke is always a small fiction)

  • “Not everything you don’t like is immoral”

• Distinction: good (absolutely) vs good for something vs good

  • E.g. It’s good to be kind, it’s good for me to study math, that’s a good car

• British 20th centurary moral philosophers like GE Moore don’t like “good for X” wanting a morality that is not egoistic, instead trying to frame in terms of absolute good.

  • These theories overlooked possible justifications which use “good for” but are not egoistic.

  • Absolute good is a much more abstract / questionable concept, so it would be nice to frame ethics without it if possible.

• These may be different (absolute good is incoherent, but not absolute bad) but Kraut needs neither.

• It’s coherent to say “pain is bad”, but we also say “it’s bad for me to feel pain”. What more is gained by using absolute language?

• What about cruelty/cowardice?

  • Again we can show that these things are bad because they are bad for people.

• Does this point of view lead to egoism, e.g. good/bad being instrumental to what we want?

  • Mistake to conflate “good for me” as “what I want” or “good for some end I want”.

  • There are objective truths of what is good for certain types of beings, even if we’re ignorant.

  • There are differences and similarities for what is good for different people/species.

    • Cannot apply same formula to each case.

• What problems does thinking about morality in terms of absolute good have?

  • It’s not necessarily bad. But it could be used to justify something that is bad for everybody.

• Argument against euthansisa: life itself is good (would not be sufficient if Kraut’s thesis is accepted)

• E.g. good for A to be loud, good for B to be in quiet environment

• We should organize political institutions to avoid needless conflict.

• The concept of justice is needed to resolve these cases.

  • “Absolute Good” not needed

• We can frame some instances of absolute good/bad in terms of good for, but the interesting question is can this be done for all uses?

  • if absolute bad exists, then it does seem possible that an institituion/relationship is good for everyone involved but still is bad (or vice versa). E.g. euthansia.

  • Kraut’s grammar of moral terms should not alter this fact.

• Wittgenstein opens PI Augustine’s picture:

  • Common sense description: words name objects, sentences are combinations of such names

  • Every word has a correlated meaning which is the object for which the word stands.

    • Problem: what object does the word ‘and’ stand for?

• Standard thought is this picture is the main object of criticism of PI

  • Gustafsson thinks this is making too much philosophy out of the Augustinian picture.

    • (in fact, Augstine himself doesn’t subscribe to the philosophical implications commonly attributed to the passage)

• This simple picture is attractive and can be applied in good ways or bad ways.

  • Pictures for Wittgenstein operate on a primative level, can’t say they’re right or wrong.

    • Wittgenstein in Foundations of Mathematics: “We don’t judge the picture but we judge by means of the picture.”

  • They are prototheories / paradigms that are bad if cut from their useful applications.

    • e.g. Start looking for the correlate of the word red, postulate Platonic forms and get philosophical confusion

  • Cannot be argued against because counterexamples can be absorbed by a picture, which can be elaborated upon

    • The closer the picture is to a fully fleshed out theory, the harder (more artificial-seeming) this becomes.

• If Wittgenstein is not strictly criticizing Augustine, is he at least criticizing Plato?

  • Wittgenstein quotes Theatetus picture of language: Socrates is presenting something he has heard and he concludes we don’t really understand it.

  • Wittgenstein considers himself in a common struggle with Plato and Augustine. He is attracted by these pictures but is trying to overcome them, just like Plato and Augustine.

    • If Wittgenstein is documenting his personal struggles, then what philosophical value is there? Is it just of autobiographical interest?

      • There are many levels of PI - he provides arguments and uncovers paradoxes.

      • Is he merely providing more details to the pictures in order to try to avoid the counterexamples/paradoxes? Is he trying to get rid of pictures altogether? Experts are divided.

        • Some say ‘meaning as use’ is a picture, one he thinks is less harmful than augustinian view

      • He doesn’t really want to construct theories, but rather wants philosophical peace / quietism.

• thinking as something that goes on inside your head

• regarding infinity as merely something very large

• Mary wins $1 million in lottery

  • Deedee says that Mary is rich now

  • Naomi (who is wealthier) says “No, Mary is not rich.”

• We want to say Deedee and Naomi are both speaking “truth” and need an account.

  • Relevant contextual parameter: the standard of wealth according to the speaker.

  • Contextualist says: because the conversational standards for deploying “rich” vary among Deedee’s community and Naomi’s community, the truth conditions of their utterances should also vary.

• The bank case:

  • On Friday, a man and his wife go to the bank and see a long line. The man says “Oh well we can go tomorrow” and asked how he knows, he says “I was here last Saturday and they were open.”

  • Alternate scenario, it’s really impt that they deposit their check. He is asked “how do you really know? Maybe they changed their hours.” and he updates “You know, you’re right, I don’t know.”

  • Contextualist wants to say “I know X” and “I don’t know X” were both truthful utterances with no change in world state (but rather, what changed was the context-dependent truth conditions)

• Epistemological contextualists claim that the standard for knowing X is dependent on what doubts have been raised in a conversation (the doubts become ‘live’). Skepticism is addressed because we can hand the skeptic a victory in their ivory tower (you are right that we don’t know anything) while denying the skeptic the right to challenge an ordinary person living their life claiming to know many things.

  • Counterpoint: why were hyperbolic doubts even raised? Actually, the skeptics were concerned with ordinary claims of knowing.

  • Contextualists could be said to be using some motivated reasoning to insulate ordinary belief from what goes on in the phil seminar room.

A more radical example is Pia and the maple tree.

• The principle: that there is a kind of content of an utterance which is tied to the point of the utterance (which is tied to motivations/expectations of conversational participants).

• This is an underlying assumption of many contextualist arguments.

  • The point of Naomi’s utterance is different (to relate Mary’s wealth to the standards of wealth in her world).

  • Unfounded: context principle justifies tying the truth conditions to points/interest/conversational standards.

    • Counterexample: wealthy people who say they themselves aren’t wealthy - it is in their interests to not seem wealthy (to avoid legislation, to seem like a salt-of-earth person). Perhaps their use of the word is serving those desires.

    • The truth conditions ought to float free of the ‘local discourse’ if the argument actually concerns disputed territory. If Deedee/Naomi agree that the rich ought pay a special tax, then it is crucial to have a notion of ‘rich’ that is dictated by a larger discourse which includes both participants (the larger community agrees with Deedee in this case, so Naomi’s claim can be called false even if it matches her local community’s use of the word).

  • Contextualists acknowledge that interests/focus of attention vary among people but do not pay special attention to what those interests are - harsh charge but evidence by the fact that most contextualists are not methadological contextualists

    • (Wittgenstein was a methodological contextualist).

  • The ‘freighted terms’ which philosophers are most often interested in seem to more likely be the cases like ‘wealth’ where we do not want to let people’s biases dictate the correctness of their word usage.

• A formal theory characterizing various ways to combine individual beliefs into collective beliefs

• What could it mean for a group to have beliefs over and above the beliefs of the individuals?

• We ascribe beliefs in order to interpret actions/decisions based on reasons

  • Groups act and make decisions based on reasons, so it seems reasonable to think that we can ascribe beliefs to groups

• The group beliefs are uniquely determined by the individuals’ beliefs, but it may not be identical to any of the individuals.

  • Example: condo asssociation where 50% believe \(A\) and 50% not \(A\). Maybe it’s reasonable to ascribe an indeterminate belief towards \(A\), but none of the individuals is indeterminate.

What if we say the ‘group believes’ what the majority of the group believes? - Problem: majorities are not consistent over multiple beliefs IF the beliefs are logically connected. - 51% of people believe \(P\), 51% believe \(Q\), 1% believe \(P\land Q\). - Under this proposal, the majority has inconsistent beliefs (and therefore believes everything) - Real example: - German politicians voted on the the three propositions: - Should Berlin or Bohn be the capital? - Should the parliament be in Berlin or Bohn? - Should the capital be where parliament is?

• Supermajority:

  • If you construct threshold carefully enough, you can guarantee consistency

    • With \(P\land Q\) example, you need 2/3.

• Determine ahead of time, determine what are most important (logically independent) propositions, use inference to determine the rest of propositions.

• Research in the field isn’t really about finding specific alternatives:

  • Actual goal: formalize the desiderata and find out which sets of constraints are compatible with each other.

• Mathematically provable that we can’t satisfy a bunch of desiderata simultaneously.

• However, one particular constraint both causes a lot of problems and really isn’t that justified: the independence constraint

• The collective belief on a particular proposition is uniquely determined by opinions of the members of the group on that belief alone.

  • Our intuitive sense of collective belief is sensitive to the reasons for belief.

    • Example:

      • Two panels: all believe that government and parliament should be in same city, also all believe it should be in Berlin. Other is split on which city things should be on, but all believe it should be in same city.

      • Independence would say that both panels agree ‘equally’ on whether government+parliament should be in same city.

      • Intuitively we know that the second group has undermining/inconsistent reasons for their agreed-upon belief, so their aggregate belief should be strictly weaker than first panel.

  • Independence is usually involved in the unsatisfiable subsets of constraints.

• Example: I know there is a table in front of me (both sides agree: if I know anything, I at least know that)

• Skeptic rejects that, and therefore rejects that you know anything

• Many different skeptical arguments, often of the form “There exists a scenario in which you are having the same phenomenological experience yet there is no table, so how can you know whether you are in that scenario vs the genuine experience scenario?”

  • Examples: dreaming, evil genius, brain in vat (Putnam)

• This is not a general anti-skeptic argument, but other skeptical tactics might be addressable by similar reasoning.

• Thus, Edward is proposing bottom up anti-skepticism, rather than some top-down “reason for knowing that the table is there”

• Stanley Cavell has written well about how skeptical lines of thought arise naturally (i.e. they are not purely the product of academic philosophy).

• Skepticism shows up in lots of fields/subfields of philosophy, and it’s important to prevent the confusion that arises here from spreading. (e.g. brain scanner is relevant in legal topics)

(written in 2018) - 1A: Logical priority of conventional methods of determining thoughts over brain scanner - Is this related to the fact that the brain scanner is purely correlation, rather than based on some fundamental theory? - If we had a more fundamental theory that the brain scanner’s workings fit in with (e.g. quantum mechanics), then we would be more likely to embrace the absurd scenario of the subject being insane (and/or we failed to identify his environment) rather than saying quantum mechanics is wrong. - Surely there are historical examples where X is a ground for some technique Y, but for various reasons eventually Y becomes ground for X? - Logically-prior = closer to the ‘center’ of the web-of-beliefs. - Furthermore, this example only works if it is possible that there is a conflict (in the world where there is perfect correlation, then we can identify brain activity with thoughts) - 1B: “To be a brain state is one kind of thing, to have a thought is a different kind of thing” - This is a good point towards saying they are not ‘literally’ identical, in the sense of “My dad’s wife” and “My mom” being literally ‘different’ (they have different truth conditions) but may be equivalent given some state of affairs. - This is perhaps sufficient to say “no reason to think brains in vats can think” … but at least it’s sufficient for “there is a reason to think brains in vats cannot think”. - What this argument does not show (which maybe Ed is advocating) is that it is incoherent to identify brain states with mental states. If we can identify them, then they both are both kinds of things and there are no - There may be an isomorphism between the “logical space of reasons” and the space of brain states related by physical causality. - If brain states (and their relations) were in bijective corrspondance to thoughts, then we can refer to a brain state by its thought and vice versa. Whether or not this is the case is precisely the debate at hand, but bringing this point up does not advance the argument one way or another. - How to decide whether to believe such an isomorphism likely exists is complicated. - 2: - The belief that there is a table in front of me (even in brain-in-vat scenario) IS answerable to reality (and the the belief is false). Likewise for intentions (the intention will be unfulfilled, unless one is desiring to be a brain in a vat) - How does this bear on the legality of killing comatose people (they are in an analogous situation)

• Why protect religious conscience, over and above other forms of moral conscience?

  • Historically, lots of religious intolerance have led to atrocities.

• What’s distinctive of religious belief (not merely theistic religions)? Two characteristics:

  1. There are certain beliefs that are insulated from ordinary standards of reasons and evidence.

  • This is trying to cache out “faith”

  1. There are certain obligations that are demanded of a believer.

  • This is why religion comes in conflict with the law, so the need for practices

  • Potential counterexamples:

    • Not let in enough: Christian apologists willing to argue/defend Christiantity based on normal standards of evidence.

      • It’s true there exist intellectualist traditions within religious thought.

      • 1. Most believers want their beliefs insulated

      • 1. These are beliefs that are post-hoc rationalizations

      • Could say these are not religious hypotheses, although they deployed to support religion.

    • Let in too much: secular people have opinions about the meaning of life that are not subject to reason/evidence. E.g. John Lennon thinks we should give peace a chance, I’m commanded to not go to war.

      • Whether you think moral views are insulated from reasons/evidence depends on deeper metaphysical views.

        • Naturalistic moral realist: morality is just like science, so it is answerable to reasons and evidence

        • Noncognitivist: moral beliefs are actually expressing emotions, so not applicable to rule 1.

• Neither of the distinctive characteristics are related to the standard arguments for tolerating religion.

  • Utilitarian and Rawlsian arguments justify protecting liberty of conscience but would not single out religion.

• Nussbaum - doesn’t religion deserve more than toleration, e.g. respect:

  • Mere toleration: you disapprove but you have to put up with them.

  • Respect is ambiguous:

    • 1. recognition respect: “you ought to respect his feelings”

      • respect for people in virtue of them being people

    • 1. appraisal respect: “I respect her intellect”

      • admiration

  • People conflate 1 (which is uncontroversially owed to strangers), but bait-and-switch with meaning 2.

    • Nussbaum’s example: Roger Williams founded Rhode Island and discovered the native americans were more similar than he expected.

      • This still doesn’t justify appraisal respect.

• Extend the practice of appealing for an exemption from a law to all matters of conscience.

• Worrisome that courts will now have to judge whether matters truly are of conscience.

  • It’s easier to figure out if 1.) someone is a member of a religion, 2.) if a religion demands a certain behavior rather than to figure out if a person is being genuine.

• Maybe pragmatic reasons for status quo, but not moral reasons.

• “Completing” the contract theory of justice started by Hobbes, developed by Locke / Rousseau / Kant.

• Most influential modern political philosopher.

Most theories are contractural but not Sen’s.

• Don’t think pursuit of justice involves looking for the perfectly just world.

  • Issues of injustice:

    • people who need medicine that can be cheaply produced

    • children not being educaiton

    • tons of other ways. Addressing these individually won’t create a perfectly just world

• We can aspire to a perfectly just institution without guaranteeing a perfectly just world

  • The latter also depends on people’s behavior/natures.

    • E.g. if people are incorruptable, then more socially trusting institutions become feasible.

• Seeking a perfect world will not help us rank all of the imperfect worlds we have as more promixate options.

  • Neither necessary nor sufficient to have a particular target.

    • Do we have no basis for saying something is unjust?

      • Example: you’re in a sauna and the temperature keeps going up. Once you feel in danger, you try to leave but the door is locked. Someone outside sees but can’t open the door either. But he does have access to the temperature control. You ask him to lower and he says “what is the ideal temperature you want” which you don’t know. He could object that without a principled goal, all there is arbitrary gut reaction (the point: gut reaction is important)

There are many kinds of justice, not a single scale:

• Liberty, fairness, reducing inequality, removing poverty

• For Rawls, these all matter but he strictly orders them in importance like above

  • More natural to trade off, like a small concession in liberty could be worth a huge reduction in poverty

Concern of advocating societal change without a goal: - E.g. “reduce inequality”, but if there is no stopping point, then this could head towards a situation worse than the current one (even if the current one has too much inequality).

• Action at a distance

  • E.g. Gravity/EM, something in one place can affect something far away without anything passing in between

• Fear: if we allow action at a distance, then anything is permitted anywhere

  • Billiard ball motion could be determined by huge (far away) bodies of motion rather than anything local.

• in 17th century, “mechanistic philosophy” (e.g. Boyle)

  • All explanations should be given by just matter and motion

  • Magnets thought to emit something similar to levitator particles

• in 19th century, get the development of a field.

  • Newton’s gravity is action at a distance is already well-established

    • action at a distance now tolerated widely

  • Faraday/Maxwell are able to reform E&M that doesn’t require action at a distance, have nothing to say about gravity.

  • Einstein then gets rid of it for gravity

• Einstein has methodological complaint. Science is impossible if objects aren’t independent of each other.

• Leibniz Principle of Sufficient Reason: for everything that happens, there is a reason why it (in particular) happened.

• Paramenides: nothing comes from nothing (apple comes from the tree, apple’s redness came from the seed (DNA))

  • Change is impossible follows from this

  • In some sense, something coming from nothing would violate the principle of sufficient reason.

• Many arguments for and against.

• Philosophically, one must have a framework to do science.

• P.S.R. is really hard to do without.

• There were never historically people who lamented loss of action at a distance when an equally predictive theory becomes available.