Notes

Yesterday's analysis was fun, so I'm going to do another one today. I will use the second article on the Oxfam website. It concerns Oxfam's calling for urgent protection of civilians in the conflict between Israel and Palestine. In other words, the problem in this part of the world also involves another conflict causing the suffering of innocents. Except here, Oxfam is getting closer to the root cause of the matter in the way it is addressing the issues. Preventing harm to civilians in a military conflict is clearly a popular leftist issue. It is one of the focuses in Singer's The President of Good and Evil as well. I want to focus on this as a topic of research. It might even be an issue on which Singer and I actually have some common ground. If only because it does not seem to involve rampant self-sacrifice, and just might be in everyone's interests for a change. It is important to use clear and commonly shared terminology in such matters. The headline fo...

I am not convinced that Peter Singer is a particularly good philosopher. I agree with Colin McGinn, again from that wonderful New Yorker article, that he is more of a politician than a philosopher. I think that he only appeals to what is popular rather than what is truly well thought out. He does actually recommend, for example, that we should give so much of our money away to the Third World that we are very nearly as badly off as they are. (See Section 2 of the article.) This is, incidentally, also another example of his own hypocrisy, because he has never done anything to impoverish himself. The point is, however, that this view is in the mainstream of the leftist rhetoric about the evil that we have so much while others have so little. It also does not take into account what we did to earn what we have. Nor does it take into account the actual reason that the other countries in question have so little. Nothing whatsoever, for example, is mentioned of their lack of economic freedom...

I did not have the time yesterday to elaborate fully on all the claims that I made. I regard them as important, so I think that I should elaborate on some of them more fully. Today, I shall concentrate on the hypocrisy of Peter Singer with regard to his own mother. A distinction needs to be drawn between the respective facts that: Singer did not euthanise his mother; and Singer spent a lot of money on caring for his mother. It can be nearly argued that by Singer's own ethics, he should have euthanised his mother. To begin with, he holds that we do wrong by bringing about a person with impaired chances of happiness. He specifically has in mind a child who is disabled. However, his claims are not limited merely to those children who are severely disabled. For example, even if the child were merely hemophiliac, Singer claims that its parents might still be better off killing it. If they could have another child after it that was normal, say, then ceteris paribus, they should ki...

It sounds good to read Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy . I had already started it ages ago. But I reread the second chapter last night, simply so that I could refresh my memory of it. I also read a blurb about it on Amazon.com, however, and I'm not sanguine about the book's ability to help me. Williams's argument is based on the assumptions that ethics is not objective and is culturally relative. I do not agree with either of these claims. It seems that the only way that he thinks that he can protect the First World from untold self-sacrifice is by destroying morality entirely. Certainly one must destroy a Singerian approach to morality. But other moral codes, which are objective and culturally non-relative, should be enough to do this. We should not be encouraging the view that anything you think is right because your culture says so. After all, it is plausible that an entire society may in some ways be unjust. Williams recognises this, and so it is a major preoccupati...

Yesterday you said that people do not value too high a disparity between rich and poor. I thought you might like to elaborate on that. I was reflecting on this passage from Wilson. I have also thought about it in the context of when real people I know make moral judgments similar to that. I know someone, for example, who has always had conservative politics. But even he finds outrageous the salaries that some of these top business entrepreneurs make. Nobody is worth so-many-millions-of-dollars a year. But this is still consistent with the intuition that rewards should be proportionate to contributions. Specifically, the ratio of contributions to rewards should be the same for everybody. Some people seem to get rewarded according to a ratio that is higher than that for most other people. This is what seems unfair, and this why no one is worth that much money. Even then, however, the people I know do not necessarily say that those people should not take the money. They should not take...

I don't think that I can sustain my interest in a determinist theory of mind. Just because you believe in sociobiology doesn't mean you have to believe in determinism. Heredity and environment certainly have an influence over human behaviour. But this does not mean that that influence is a causal influence. This is the only way in which sociobiology needs to be mended in order to be compatible with libertarianism. That seems like a very small price to pay in order to preserve your existing intuitions. Particularly striking as an influence on human behaviour, I think, is the moral sense. I am learning some fascinating things about its cross-cultural nature 1 . Particularly enlightening so far has been Wilson's chapter on fairness. It gives me valuable ammunition against both John Rawls and Peter Singer. Their theories of justice and ethics respectively are not fair. Among other things, they do not respect the principle of rewards as proportionate to contributions. I al...

My supervisor did not think you could reason without having free will. He did not present his view very convincingly, but I could dissuade him no more effectively. But sociobiology does firmly hold a deterministic thesis. And I can't well say that I don't reason just because I happen to believe in sociobiology. So I am going to have to reconcile reason with determinism somehow. I have just conducted a web search for "reason determinism". The top-ranked article is " Dominos, Determinism, and Naturalism " by Gregory Koukl. Its central argument is that if determinism is true, then we could never know it. To know something is to choose to believe in it based on the evidence. But if determinism is true, then we cannot choose to believe anything, we simply believe because of prior physical conditions. What a weak article! Even if libertarianism is true, nobody "chooses" to believe anything, because beliefs are not subject to voluntary control. I c...

I read Chapter 1 of James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense 1 last night. It has stimulated further thoughts from me this morning. Can you have morals without free will? According to sociobiology you can, just because your moral sense is a part of you that is determined. It rather begs the question of what morality actually is, however. James Q. Wilson sheds some light on this. He notes the argument from G. E. Moore that goodness is a basic property, which cannot be subdivided into further basic properties. Yet every time we discuss what is good, we instinctively know what is meant. Likewise when we discuss what "ought" to be the case. The presence of an innate moral sense explains this fact. It is rather like talking of the thrill that a man experiences when he reads a copy of Playboy . This "thrill" might be incomprehensible to a child, but it will not be for an adult. An adult has acquired the feeling to be able to know it in someone else when she sees it. ...

I finished the whole book The Moral Animal last night. I have been stimulated by Robert Wright's discussion of (the lack of) free will. Sociobiology is (or aims at being) a completely deterministic science. Under the sociobiological paradigm, therefore, free will, to the extent that we appear to have it, is indeed an illusion. For a long time during my philosophical studies, this was my opinion as well. I was simply impressed by the success of the deterministic sciences, on the one hand. But on the other hand, I did not see that indeterminism would give you free will either. Suppose that you ask someone whom to explain an action that she has just performed. If she simply said, "I just happened to do it", then that would not indicate a free action. Exactly what, then, was this mysterious third quantity that gave you free will? It seemed to me that the only two logical choices were either causation or randomness. I mentioned this to two educated people. Both simply ...

Yesterday's entry gives me an idea of where you are moving metaethically. But it does not explain what kind of normative ethics you expect to obtain from evolution. First things first. At this time, I do not think I have anything wonderful to contribute to normative ethics in the first place, just because I do not consider myself to be a moral revolutionary. I am happy with the norms of my society pretty much as they already stand. But I feel enough annoyance about the claims of moral realists that I want to shut them up with evolutionary anti-realism. But I also feel enough annoyance about the claims of cultural relativists to shut them up as well. My kind of evolutionary anti-realism also requires a moral consensus, so it eliminates relativism as well. Yes, I think that a synthesis between realism and anti-realism is indeed in order. And what would you call your book? Evolutionary Metaethics . What work has already been done in this field? A good question, whic...

So the biological purpose of morality is to make us look good. It seems to me that you could write a whole book on evolutionary meta-ethics, and perhaps you should. In any case, I think I am finally starting to get intrigued by evolutionary ethics. Why were you not intrigued before? Mainly, I was influenced by Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals by Robert M. Pirsig. Pirsig was skeptical about attempts to justify morality in terms of biology. His example in the book was between the Victorians and the modern permissive society. He argued that Victorians were more moral because they were less permissive. Raised in an environment of that discipline encouraged self-control. Simply allowing people to do whatever they wanted let their biological nature predominate over their social nature. Their biological nature was more primitive and it resulted in greater immorality. Hence, the increase in violent crime, degeneracy, and so on. He thought that we would be better off with firm social sanct...

Yesterday you said that the hypocrites' behaviour was peculiar and hard to explain. This morning I have just read a section of The Moral Animal that would seem to explain it perfectly adequately. It is not in people's genetic interests actually to be moral per se. It is only in their interests to appear moral, for the sake of raising their own status 1 . Sometimes this means that their behaviour actually will be coextensive with morality. (Sometimes they will even actually believe that they are being moral, and are taking ethics seriously.) But it also means that they will pay lip-service to a belief that they will not necessarily themselves practise. The club members did not care that they would not sacrifice themselves, because "we are not here discussing what people would do, but what they should do!" Writing that again now, it really does sound like a dodge. Why is it what people should do when it is not what they would do? What is the point of ethics if y...

Yesterday you ended the entry with a pretty big claim. You said that there were no dilemmas between deontology and consequentialism. But if this is true, then what was that ridiculous argument about that you had with those hypocrites on that eventful day? I guess that this is where it gets controversial. It seemed like the morally compelling thing to do in each case was to sacrifice yourself so that a society could survive. This is something about which I thought that the people in the group were quite cynical. All agreed that the moral thing entailed untold self-sacrifice, yet: Nobody was prepared to do it; Nobody thought that most other people would do it; and Even more upsettingly, nobody would even punish anybody else for not doing it. In other words, the moral argument had no practical force whatsoever. Nevertheless, the argument did still seem to have rhetorical force. These bastards were defending with ferocity a code that they had no intention of practising. They r...

I conducted a Google search for the exact phrase "a moral dilemma". I got a web page called Radium: Narrative of a Moral Dilemma . I need something to make ethics more relevant to me personally, and this page looks like just what the doctor ordered. It is an assignment "about becoming a character in an ethical real life dilemma". First, "[w]hat are the chemical properties of the element radium?" Well, I just performed a search using that question as the search phrase. The answer to it does not seem at all enlightening to a lay person. But Pierre Curie showed that radium could damage tissue. Second, "[w]here did the name of this element come from?" The Latin word for 'ray', 'radius', because it emits energy rays. "Briefly describe the life of Marie Curie. Was she always a scientist or did she have other occupations? Be sure to include when and how she discovered Radium. What are the theories about how she died...

I think it's time to move on to another blog today. The fourth-ranked page on the search for "philosophy blog" is about existentialism, in which I'm not interested. The fifth-ranked page is the same as the fourth. The sixth-ranked page's latest entry was on May 14, 2002. The seventh-ranked page is mainly quotations from something somebody else wrote! The eighth-ranked page is more readable, but also has no comments, despite its large number of backlinks. The ninth-ranked page, Opiniatrety, seems equally unremarkable. The tenth-ranked page is a blog about law and philosophy, and seems only of peripheral interest. I think that the problem is that "philosophy blog" is too wide a search. You need to be more specific, like "ethics blog", or "evolution blog". What can I get from "evolution blog"? The top-ranked page here is about bloody Ximian Evolution! I have just conducted a search for "blog evolution biology...

I have just conducted a web search for "philosophy blog". The top-ranked site has actually not been used since October 14, 2003! It is the blog of Tom Stoneham at the University of York, and it has been comatose all this time due to his Berkeley module, which is taking most of his attention this term. The second-ranked site, however, seems more promising, called Online Papers in Philosophy. It "[r]eports on changes to webpages hosting philosophical papers." But the only problem with this is that I have to actually write a philosophical paper first before it can link to me. The third-ranked site looks better still. It is actually a personal blog by a philosophy enthusiast, called Brian Weatherson. He started out studying philosophy at Monash University before coming to America, where he currently works in the Department of Philosophy at Brown University. His weblog is "where I keep track of my rolling thoughts on things philosophical." It seems to me...

I could challenge the notion that common experience never changes. Surely the "common experience" of a medieval person was much different from that of someone from antiquity. Surely both were different again from someone in the Enlightenment. Surely that is what (partly) characterises the differences in those three families of philosophy, that the common experience on which they are based is just so different. Different in some ways, and the same in others... but where does that leave my humble project? Are you still interested in pursuing your theory of ethics? I've forgotten now how the project started. Well, I like to think of my work as progressing in peaks and troughs. The troughs represent where I ask a basic question, and then work out its ramifications from the ground up. The peaks constitute the highest point that I reach before I go back down to another trough. The trough behind my basic project in this blog, in my opinion, came on 10 March, when ...

We examined commensurability in the previous section as necessary for progress. To answer the present question, however, I examine some other marks of progress as well. Another mark is that new schools of thought come about and old schools become obsolete. The obsolete schools are the ones that are "worse" than the new schools. Are there any obsolete schools of philosophy? Well, you won't find anyone talking about "obsolete schools of philosophy". But I don't think that philosophical progress is as straightforward as scientific progress. Science progresses first by accumulation, and second by revolution. But philosophy is far more fluid than that. There may still be Aristotelians around today, but their views will have still progressed from what Aristotle himself claimed. Also, logical positivism may not be the dominant philosophy of science anymore. But its influence still persists, "especially in the way of doing philosophy, in the great attention ...