Thinking in Text

I see fit today to add a footnote to my counterexample to the Kantian idea of moral worth . It's a quotation that I read from Michael Moncur's Collection of (Cynical) Quotations for today: A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not be endured with patient resignation. Bertrand Russell, Conquest of Happiness (1930) ch. 10 British author, mathematician, & philosopher (1872 - 1970) It would have been inappropriate to approach the crying woman out of duty. She would have responded to the emotions of the person approaching her rather than the reasons. If you are approaching someone in that position out of duty, what would be the accompanying emotion? Most likely patient resignation. If you are approaching her out of sympathy, what would be the accompanying emotion? It is probably too strong a claim to say that you like a person that you don't even know. Yet you seem to be at least giving her the benefit of the doubt ...

I think that something else still needs to be said about moral motives. It is, at least generally, a morally acceptable reason to do something because it is right. However, if one does something because it is right, one is presumably thereby not doing it out of inclination. My moral observation compels me to believe that this girl helped this person for the right reasons. Yet at the same time, the act seems clearly to have been performed out of inclination. I would not claim that just any inclination, however, would be of moral worth. It is for this reason that it is perhaps worth exploring more deeply what consistutes a good inclination. Suppose that one were to ask this girl why she helped this person. If she said, "Because it gave me pleasure," that is not a moral reason. But note also that if she said, "Because I felt like it" or even "Because I felt sorry for her", I do not consider those moral reasons either. But if she said "Because she was up...

On Friday I decided that one treated people as ends in themselves by not harming them. Is that all that is required in order to treat people as ends in themselves? Peter Singer would surely claim that we also had duties to help people. But I do wonder whether any such duty is really consistent with treating people as ends in themselves. We are simply considering this from the point of view of the helper. But what about the helpee? If I found myself down on my luck, then would it not be selfish for me to expect that anybody else had a duty to help me? One difficulty here is that I have never been in a situation where I have felt like I actually needed anybody else's help. I don't think that I have ever asked anybody for help in my life, and I probably would feel selfish if I did anything like that. I am not the only person to have this sentiment. I think that we have all heard of people who are too proud to accept charity. I certainly do not refuse help if someone offers it to m...

I think we want to elaborate on a philosophical point from yesterday. I would examine further what it actually means to treat people as ends in themselves. It is a rather vague phrase. I actually think that it may be clearer to think of it as the negation of treating people as mere means to ends. I have much clearer intuitions about what it means to treat someone as a mere means to an end. The run-over fat man from yesterday's entry is clearly being treated as a mere means to an end. It also clarifies what I think is wrong in various other counterexamples to utilitarianism that I have heard over the years. One of them, for example, involves killing someone so that her organs can be used to save the lives of four other people. She is also being used as a mere means to an end. What do these two instances have in common with each other? Given them, I can see two different ways of interpreting what it means to treat someone as a mere means to an end. First, it could be that they are be...

Would you say that helping someone out of sympathy is not an act of self-interest? I know that I said something similar to this in my Masters' thesis. I don't know. It seems to me to be an act of self-interest, because you are technically acting out of concern for your own interests. But I still consider that it is importantly different from the kind of self-interest that is thought to negate moral worth in actions. First, it is not mere self-interest. You are clearly also acting out of concern for the interests of the other person. Unless other people have some kind of intrinsic value in your motivations, then I do not believe that those motivations could ever be called "moral". Second, those other people's interests are necessarily connected with your own self-interest. A proper motivation of empathy cannot fail to feel something of others' joys and sorrows as if they were your own. Hence, your own interests cannot contradict the interests of the other peo...

I have thought of an objection to my counterexample from yesterday. Specifically I am thinking of the claim that the girl did not approach the crying woman out of pleasure. On the one hand, I am sure that she did it out of sympathy, which is importantly different from pleasure. On the other hand, I can still see a Kantian objection to which that motive would be vulnerable. One could argue that in feeling this sympathy she felt something of the woman's pain. It does not sound like it would be of moral worth if the girl did what she did in order to relieve her own pain. If that was indeed the motive, then I seem to be forced to agree with this. It is not morally praiseworthy to do something simply because it is in one's own interests. And yet, look at how different this kind of motive is from what some egoists call "enlightened self-interest". Enlightened self-interest involves acts of reciprocity. Hence, there is a gap in the time between when the other person's in...

I saw a convincing counterexample to the Kantian idea of moral worth this morning. While we were still riding through the Inner West on the train, a woman in front of me burst into tears. She was talking to someone on her mobile phone. Her sobs were so great that I could make out almost none of what she was saying. But it seems that she had just found out that someone close to her had died. She was going to call work and then she was going to go straight back home. As the train was starting to empty at Central, a girl on the other side of the aisle took her by the shoulder and asked her if she was okay, and whether she would like a glass of water. The woman started to talk to her a little about what had happened. Again, I could make out very little of it, but the girl decided to sit with this person and unpack her things by her. Apparently she was going to say with her until she got onto a train back to the Mountains. It seemed obvious that this was an act performed out of inclination...

I was just reading this web page, an interview with Kurt Vonnegut. His books are full of dark humour. But interestingly, he does actually say in this interview that there are some subjects that he thinks it is inappropriate to joke about, such as the Holocaust. Nevertheless, Vonnegut did think that Voltaire demonstrated that the Lisbon earthquake could be made funny. The interviewer suggested that the difference was in the amount of time after the event. If it were only one year after the Lisbon earthquake it would not be funny. And if it were three hundred years after the Holocaust it might be funny. The difference, in other words, is whether the events affect any actually existing persons. And yet, look at the "Friday Night Sports Machine" from the late 1980s. They poked fun at all sorts of sporting accidents, always less than a week old. I suppose you could argue that that was in bad taste, but there was clearly an audience for it. I suppose the difference here is a matte...

Not so long ago, I had a few more thoughts about my Masters thesis. I decided to look into one of the objections raised by the external reviewer: The thesis seemed to depend on the claim that society and its practices could be specified independently of a constitutive reliance on moral terms. As such, s/he said that this claim needed to be defended, or at least more than it was in the thesis. I had not had any thoughts at all about whether society had a constitutive reliance on moral terms. Nor I did not see how it posed a problem for my arguments one way or the other either. My idea for an ethical theory revolved around a putative dependency of ethics on social functioning. How was this weakened if society was constitutively dependent on moral terms? If anything, it seemed to strengthen it if the connection between morals and society were really that strong. I decided to email my supervisor to ask him this question. He replied saying that much of the subject matter was now too far in ...

I have been reading about Ted Bundy on the Wikipedia. "Several hundred people were gathered outside the prison and cheered when they saw the signal that Bundy had been declared dead." Of all things, it makes me think of Dexter . On the one hand, you have to think that a TV series with a serial killer as its main character cannot fail to have an ambiguous morality. I mean, we're supposed to be sympathetic to him just because he only kills serial killers? All that that does is make him a missionary killer. He just rationalises his murders by believing that his victims deserved to die. It lets him feel that, instead of being the scum of society, he is actually doing society a favour by ridding it of its undesirable elements. And yet, if he only kills serial killers, then how is he any different from so many states in the United States? And if we cheer Ted Bundy's execution, how can we not cheer Dexter when he claims another victim?

I am reflecting on some assumptions behind my empirical theory of ethics. One was that a proper theory of ethics must harmonise our beliefs with our actions. Another was that a theory properly grounded in human nature would be like this. I can see now that the second assumption was definitely false. Just because something is natural does not make it harmonise with other natural things. Consider the pain — and often injury or death — that a woman endures in the process of bearing children. Genesis 3:16 claims that this was because Eve led Adam to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It is really due to two different, natural but conflicting, requirements of human evolution: A baby’s head must be large to accommodate human intelligence; and A woman’s pelvis must be narrow to accommodate successful bipedalism. What has survived so far is a compromise, with all the sorrow that accompanies it. The compromise survives because the species has survived along with it. Human hypo...

Wow! I haven't even thought about this blog in ages, and it's nice to see that it actually meant something to some people enough to actually leave me a few comments. I cannot help but be flattered, even if I do not agree with some of what has been said. Mamabeek left me an interesting comment to my Introduction post. I will not here repeat it, since you can visit the links if you're curious. I am familiar with the argument adumbrated by Mamabeek in her comment. I do not, of course, agree with it, but it does deserve some sort of reply. I can think of no better reply than the one of which I thought years ago now, when I read some of the article on Personal Identity in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy . In this article, Eric T. Olsen draws a distinction between qualitative and numeric al identity. Think of a person as consisting of various person-stages existing over time. Numerical identity occurs when those person-stages belong to one and the same person. Qual...

Porcorn is a practical movie snack. First, it stops you from having to go to the toilet during the movie (even if you've drunk half a large Coke). The salt in the popcorn absorbs the excess water in your body, as it does in potato chips. Second, unlike potato chips, popcorn is a quiet food to eat during a movie, not making any loud, obnoxious crunchy movies to obscure the dialogue.

One can classify human thinking into four basic types. Imagine a grid of four squares. The left column is the theory column and the right column is the practice column. The top row is the theory row and the bottom row is the practice row. Now number the four squares from one to four, from left to right and from top to bottom. This gives you the four different types of thinking. Type one thinking is theory-to-theory. This type is exemplified by pure mathematics and, in some forms, philosophy. It begins with pure theoretical principles, and derive further principles from them. Type two thinking is theory-to-practice. This type is exemplified by engineering and applied mathematics. It starts with pure theoretical principles, and uses them to derive practical aims. Type three thinking is practice-to-theory. This type is exemplified by empirical science. Empirical science starts with observations of the world, from which hypotheses, and eventually theories, are formed. Type four...

I think that there should be open source philosophy. A person can have a particular view presented on a web page. There can be a form on the bottom of the page that allows you to post an objection. A list of approved objections can be listed at the bottom of the page, and you can click on a button on any of those objections to post a reply. You can also post a neutral comment, and there could be a different message format for that as well. Essentially, it would enable me to have an essay posted to a website that people could link to. That is the only way to get the page listed in Google in a lasting way.

We should consider our introduction to the paper. It does not seem enough simply to say, "We are going to consider what makes a person the same person over time. But the problem with this question is that it is ambiguous." This formulation does not indicate to the lay reader why this question is interesting in the first place. Tip 4 states: Do not expect the reader to fill in gaps in your reasoning, even if you know they have read the same things you have. Write as if you were trying to explain things to one of your friends who is not taking the class. You might even test this by having a friend read the first draft. What makes this question interesting to me is that it is essentially a matter of life and death. Right now, people assume in various cyberpunk novels that people can be copied. They think that it is okay for their current bodies to die if they have backed themselves up. I need to tell them that it is not okay. I would never consent to being killed even if I ...

I have now written nine entries on the metaphysics of personal identity. I had a brainstorm last night that gave me enough information to write a proper paper on the subject now. When I am finished, I shall supply a link to it from this blog. I have written an outline for the paper. I wanted to get a concept of what word length people would expect from a work of this nature. I would imagine that there would be a maximum of ten thousand words for the paper, but a thousand words seems a little short. That's as much space as I would devote to a single blog entry. I did a Google search on "philosophical paper word length". The top-ranked page belonged to the University of South Carolina College of Liberal Arts Department of Philosophy. It was a list of tips for writing a short philosophy paper, and it merely said that: Length should not be a problem if you choose a good (and tractable) issue that interests you and compels you to explore what it involves. Well, this ...

Re-reading yesterday's section, I think you do well up to the point where you ask what is mind. I don't really think that mind is brain viewed from the inside. Little pieces of your brain can get replaced over time, but we would not say that little pieces of your mind ever get replaced. You touch on this subject in your penultimate paragraph. I therefore think that mind supervenes over the brain. No computer backup is something over which the same token of the mind could supervene. What if you slowly split the consciousness in two over the two different mediums? Half your consciousness could supervene over brain processes. Half could supervene over computer processes. We can assume that phenomenologically, you could not tell the difference between this condition of consciousness and the way it normally is. We could imagine this process continuing until your consciousness was fully supervening over the computer. I think that that would be a legitimate transference. The wa...

You have had quite a philosophical journey in the last few days. I'm still not sure that it all hangs together properly, so I will recapitulate it here. You directed your attention to the question of what makes a person the same person over time. You identified what you took to be a source of confusion with this question. It is type/token ambiguity in what is considered to be the same thing. You can definitely say that a backed-up and restored person are the same type of person. But they are two different tokens of the same type. The question of what makes a person the same person over time is therefore not really one question, but two. What makes a type of person the same type of person over time, and what makes a token of person the same token over time. The former question is the easier one to answer. Continuity is what makes any type of thing the same type over time. In this case, the basic argument made in the Altered Carbon series is that continuity of consciousnes...

There is a difficulty in the previous section. You said that it is a logical impossibility for two different token-stages to coexist at the same time. But what if you move one of the token-stages back in time? It's the basic science-fictional scenario where you go back in time and meet yourself. What I would argue is that in this instance, you have to conclude that both token-stages belong to the same token. After all, you already believe that you are you over the whole period of time if you don't go back in time. So how can you conclude that you cease to be you over the whole period of time just because you go back in time to meet yourself? Surely the difference of going back in time is not metaphysically relevant. And if you decide that two different token-stages can exist at the same time, then you go down a slippery slope. What is to stop the backed-up and restored token-stages from existing at the same time as well? You have already decided that the differences of content ...