Monthly Archives: March 2003

I haven’t done anything on

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I haven’t done anything on imaginative resistance for a while, ever since I wrote the stages paper for Melbourne really, but I think it’s time to get back in the saddle.
This is mostly (well, entirely) at Tyler Doggett’s urging.

The timing of the urging is fortunate because it’s a good day to be writing. Outside my window is a blanket of white. Snow is general all over Rhode Island. It’s been snowing most of the morning, but the currents are so strong around here that it’s mostly been falling sideways or even upward.

Tamar Gendler described the puzzle as follows (in her The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance, J Phil Feb 2000):

The puzzle of imaginative resistance: the puzzle of explaining our comparative difficulty in imagining fictional worlds that we take to be morally deviant.

The idea is that there is something phenomologically and aesthetically distinctive about lines like the last line of the following story.

Death on the Freeway

Jack and Jill were arguing again. This was not in itself unusual, but this time they were standing in the fast lane of I-95 having their argument. This was causing traffic to bank up a bit. It wasn’t significantly worse than normally happened around Providence, not that you could have told that from the reactions of passing motorists. They were convinced that Jack and Jill, and not the volume of traffic, were the primary causes of the slowdown. They all forgot how bad traffic normally is along there. When Craig saw that the cause of the bankup had been Jack and Jill, he took his gun out of the glovebox and shot them. People then started driving over their bodies, and while the new speed hump caused some people to slow down a bit, mostly traffic returned to its normal speed. So Craig did the right thing, because Jack and Jill should have taken their argument somewhere else where they wouldn’t get in anyone’s way.

The moral claim at the end is appalling, and we are not at all inclined to believe it. We are not even inclined, I think, to believe it is true in the story. Those of us who have a good view of I-95 as it runs through Providence know that the rest of the story is not true in the actual world – there has never been this kind of double-murder on the freeway. But we are not inclined to think that this means that in the story nobody is murdered on I-95. The descriptive sentences are taken to be true in the story, the moral claims to not be true in the story. That’s, I think, half of the puzzle of imaginative resistance – why don’t we treat the last line like the earlier lines. This is what I called the aesthetic problem. (There’s another aesthetic problem, why we might take the last line to damage the aesthetic quality of the story. This is hardly relevant to a story that has no aesthetic value, like Death on the Freeway. So I’ll ignore that problem.)

But there’s another problem, a phenomenological problem. The last line is striking in a way that the earlier lines are not. It forces us to have a different attitude to the text to the attitude we had previously adopted, and the change is noticable. Here is, again, how Tamar described it. (Apologies for the long quote, but I think all of this is relevant.)

Now as a general move, to respond to an invitation to make-believe with this sort of distancing gesture is to refuse to play the game of make-believe. There’s a joke that brings out why this is so. One night, a graduate student dreams that she is approached sequentially by all of the famous philosophers in history. To each in turn, she provides a devastating one-line criticism, so that the thereby-devastated philosopher slinks away in humiliation to rethink his entire theory. Although she is soundly asleep, the graduate student is nonetheless able to scribble down the astonishing sentence on a pad of paper by her bedside. When she awakens in the morning, she remembers her dream. She grabs the pad of paper to behold her remarkable insight. Scrawled across the top are the words: “That’s what you think!”

The joke is funny-to the extent that it is-because “that’s what you think” is in fact something that could be said to every philosopher in history. But it’s not a very good objection. As an ending to a conversation game, it’s more like knocking over the board than like winning by the rules. So we need to have pretty good reasons for concluding a conversation with "that’s what you think.”

What I want to suggest is that imaginative resistance is a “that’s what you think” move in a game of make-believe-something that is always available as a last resort, but which, if overused, undermines the entire convention of which it is supposed to be offering local criticism. If imaginative resistance were our general response to authors’ invitations to make-believe, this would be tantamount to refusing to play the fiction game. The analogue to “that’s what you think” is the sort of doubling of the narrator that I have just described, where from the author’s inclusion of (5) in the story, we conclude not that (5) is true in the story, but that (5) is what the narrator of the story thinks is true. But such unwillingness to grant the author the right to stipulate what happens in the story is tantamount to giving up on the idea of storytelling altogether. Just as the practice of philosophy would be undermined if it were normal to respond to every argument by saying “that’s what you think,” so too would the practice of fiction be undermined if it were normal to respond to every invitation to make-believe with a doubling of the narrator.

(5) is a line like the last line in my story. I basically think Tamar is right about what happens in imaginative resistance, but not entirely correct about the bigger picture. One thing to note is that if Tamar is right here, then stories with dubious moral claims that already have an active narrator should have a quite different feel to stories with a relatively obscure, if present at all, narrator. One class of such stories is stories told through a diary of one character. The last few pages of Portrait of the Artist suddenly flip into diary form, but of course we could write a whole story that way. And when we do the narrator is eternally and vividly present.

March 6 – Another Bad Day on the Freeway

So I was driving home this evening and the traffic was way worse way worse than I ever seen it through Providence. I was like cursing at all the slow f**ks holding the traffic up when I seen what the holdup was. These two idiots standing in the f***ing fast lane arguing about some overdue videos or something. I don’t know if it were that it were stupid whatever thing it was. I thought I can speed up the traffic for everyone else by just getting them off the road. So I shoot them both and damn if people didn’t start just driving right over them serve them right. Everyone was honking their horns in celebration those jokers weren’t holding up traffic any more. Some cops came by to remove the corpses and help the traffic move again. Everyone always says I never do anything for anyone, but that there was my good deed for the decade – anyone who knows right from wrong would have done what I did.

If Tamar’s right, there should not be a distinctive kind of reaction to the last line of that story. We certainly have to give it a “that’s what you think” interpretation, but we are forced to interpret every sentence in the story that way, because Craig’s voice, with all its idiosyncracies and flaws, is omnipresent. I think that Tamar is right, and the last sentences of the two stories do have quite different feels. But anyone who does not find them noticably different should, I think, reject the claim that ‘doubling the narrator’ is essential to explaining the phenomenal feel of imaginative resistance.

(This story is a little complicated because I can’t quite get the feel I want in the last sentence. Any way I try and draft it, it feels like Craig is trying to justify to an unseen reader what he did. Any sentence I’ve tried there either feels defensive or unnatural. Maybe someone can figure out how to make the story end.)

Anyway, that’s what I think Tamar is right about. What I think she’s not so clearly right about is what would happen to fiction if we always double the narrator. I always do this when I read, good modernist that I am, and while it means I get a different experience to someone who reads in a more traditional manner, I don’t think it means I can’t engage in the practice of fiction. It isn’t hard to find stories where we should be having the “that’s what you think” reaction to every line, but we can still play along with the fiction. For example, here are the opening paragraphs of “Clay”

THE matron had given her leave to go out as soon as the women’s tea was over and Maria looked forward to her evening out. The kitchen was spick and span: the cook said you could see yourself in the big copper boilers. The fire was nice and bright and on one of the side-tables were four very big barmbracks. These barmbracks seemed uncut; but if you went closer you would see that they had been cut into long thick even slices and were ready to be handed round at tea. Maria had cut them herself.

Maria was a very, very small person indeed but she had a very long nose and a very long chin. She talked a little through her nose, always soothingly: “Yes, my dear,”and “No, my dear.” She was always sent for when the women quarrelled over their tubs and always succeeded in making peace. One day the matron had said to her:

—Maria, you are a veritable peace-maker!

And the sub-matron and two of the Board ladies had heard the compliment. And Ginger Mooney was always saying what she wouldn’t do to the dummy who had charge of the irons if it wasn’t for Maria. Everyone was so fond of Maria.

There are no distinctively moral claims in here, but there are a few claims to which the only possible response is (an unvoiced) “that’s what you think”.

But to end on a positive note, Tamar’s theory predicts that people like me who see narrators like Maria everywhere, should find the aesthetic problem of imaginative resistance more striking than the phenomenological problem. And I think that prediction is also true. As for what this all means for a positive theory of imaginative resistance, I don’t have much to add to the stages paper. But maybe I can come up with something better in the near future.

Ethics at Mardi Gras

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A quick report on the Mardi Gras ethics conference.

The pranks paper went well, I thought. There really was a food fight, of sorts, in the session. And every one of the questions touched on one of the areas of ethics that either Andy or I knew something in particular about. So I think we came across as fairly knowledgable, which was a nice touch.

Sarah McGrath did a paper arguing that existing arguments in favour of the ban on the sale of non-vital organs are, to put it bluntly, awful. The audience didn’t do a much better job of convincing one that there is a decent argument here. The overall impression I had was that the only way one could find something interesting to discuss in pro-ban arguments was by spotting one or two premises that were clearly false, and arguing about the premises that were only probably false. This is fun and all, but it hardly encourages the thought that there might be a cogent argument behind the ban. I’m probably just mean, but I don’t think Some things shouldn’t be for sale is really an argument. And it certainly isn’t an argument that grounds an infringement on personal liberty.

Just in case anyone reading this wants to argue for a ban on organ sales, here’s a quick hint, one that if followed will improve your argument immensely. (From hearing Sarah’s paper, I’d imagine that any argument that merely acknowledged the following distinction would be the best available argument for a ban.) There are two kinds of arguments for banning a course of action that people might have wanted to take. First, there is the flatly paternalistic argument that the ban prevents individuals doing things that they want to do, but which are really not in their interests. This is the Government as the ropes around Ulysses model, and it only works if you assume you know more about what is in individual’s interest than they do. Secondly, there is the game-theoretic argument that taking some options out of play will mean that the decisions made by all players lead to an outcome that is preferable for all. Here the role of government is to rule out, by fiat, defections in Prisoners Dilemmas.

Now it is possible that one or other kind of argument could work here. But it is hardly plausible that both could work at once. For the first kind of argument rests crucially on the irrationality of the citizenry, and the second kind on their rationality. So when someone tries to make an argument for the ban by sliding back and forth between the first kind of argument and the second, it is a strong sign that they are looking for any argument they can find for the ban. And that in turn is a sign that they don’t really take the argument seriously – they have already decided on the conclusion and are now looking to justify it.

Patrick Hopkins argued that technology could help solve the abortion controversies. The idea, which didn’t seem particularly novel, was that if we could move the time at which foetuses were viable back earlier and earlier, then we could just remove the foetus from any woman who didn’t want to be pregnant and grow it artificially up to a time it could be adopted out. This apparently will make all sides happy, because no foetuses get destroyed (making the pro-lifers happy) and no woman is forced by law to remain pregnant (making, allegedly, the pro-choicers happy). As became clear in the discussion period, this only works if one assumes that the only motivation for pro-choicers is that women should be able to determine whether they remain pregnant or not. If the idea is that women should be able to determine whether they become parents or not without interference by the state, then this will look like a complete capitulation to the pro-life side. And, as Leslie Cannold has suggested in her research on women’s attitudes towards abortion, that idea is what motivates many, perhaps most, pro-choice women.

Patrick’s argument also rested an unfortunate amount of weight on the actions of pro-life terrorists. He seemed to argue, and I could be unfairly paraphrasing here, that one reason we should look for a ‘compromise’ solution to the abortion controversies was the damage the very existence of the controversy was doing to the polity. But this damage seemed to consist largely in the existence of pro-lifers who are prepared to bomb clinics and murder doctors in support of their moral views. Whatever the merits of the moral case, I’m certainly not inclined to give more weight to a side because some of its adherents are prepared to murder in support of it. In this debate, like many others, count me in as preferring the option of treating criminals as criminals before we get to addressing ‘root causes’.

The most philosophically interesting (to me at least!) paper was Liz Harman’s paper on the potentiality problem. Liz wanted to reconcile the following two intuitions:

  • How harmful a certain action is might depend, in part, on the potential for flourishing of the thing that is harmed.
  • Killing an embryo is not a morally significant harm.

(I don’t have my notes for the talk – so I’m paraphrasing a bit here. These summaries feel a little sloppy, but I hope you get the idea.) The worry is that since embryos have quite a bit of potential, destroying them counts as a very significant harm, if potential matters to harm. But then it seems like the question of whether embryos may be destroyed becomes very morally significant.

(Note that the discussion here is, for now, all about early embryos. We’ll see in a bit how this carried across to foetuses.)

One frequent concern with using potential as a measure of harm is that it seems to lead to some odd conclusions. It suggests that whether or not someone else is primed to kill you affects how much I might harm you by killing you. This I think is true on Liz’s theory, but not so counterintuitive. What would be bad is if the harm becomes vanishingly small the more likely, and the more quickly, the other guy is to kill you if I do not. If lost potential is the only measure of harm, then that would follow. But I think on the view where lost potential is only one factor that goes into judging harm, it need not be. And I don’t think Liz is committed to anything like that – it is consistent with the first intuition that other factors determine how harmful a harm is.

The solution is to agree that destroying an embryo harms it, and in fact harms it quite severely, but this does not matter, because only harms to creatures that have moral status are morally significant. And the only creatures that have moral status are those that (a) are ever conscious, and (b) are now alive. This means many foetuses have moral status, but embryos that are destroyed do not, since they never become conscious. This is a very clever solution, and I think that at least in broad outlines it is probably right. If so the details matter, so I want to look at one of the details.

One alternative that came up in discussion is that we add to the conditions on moral status a condition that the thing in question ever have an independent existence, which means, in practice, that it is ever born. (The commentator suggested that Liz’s arguments suggested this move, and this was a reductio of Liz’s position. I certainly disagree with the second part.) Liz said she didn’t like that move because whether or not someone is born is an extrinsic property of them, and moral status should rest as much as possible on intrinsic properties.

So I, naturally, turned this into a debate about intrinsic properties. (You knew this would all come back to me, didn’t you.) I said that we had to focus on extrinsic properties some of the time because we didn’t want to say that proper parts of a person, like their torso, or their brain, have moral status. If you punch me in the head you harm my brain, and my upper body, and me, but only the third of those harms counts morally. Counting the others would be double, or triple, counting. Moreover, if I had my legs amputated, my upper body would have moral status, because it would be me, so whether or not it has moral status is very much dependent on whether it has the extrinsic property being attached to two legs.

The interest here isn’t really in what we say about the moral status of the upper body. It could be that some special extrinsic properties matter for moral status, but not many do. I think it will be hard work to delineate those ones that do matter, but if smart people work on it I trust it can be solved. The real interest is in whether we can use this case directly to tell us something about the moral status of foetuses. If (a) undetached proper parts of a thing with moral status do not have moral status, which is what the above cases suggest, and (b) a foetus is an undetached proper part of a thing with moral status, then a foetus does not have moral status. Both (a) and (b) here are questionable, but neither is obviously wrong, and there might be a quite strong pro-choice argument to be made by pushing along these lines. At this stage, however, I’m prepared to turn it over to the experts. (If you do write up a paper using that argument, please send me a copy – preferably with a credit to this blog!)

Overall, I thought the conference was a great success. The organisers, especially James Stacey Taylor, did a fantastic job. Now all I need is another ethical thought to turn into a paper for next year’s conference…

One last nugget from actually reading the print version of the Times last week. I meant to write this earlier, but I forgot. This is from an article about gay adoption.

Gay people are the only group categorically restricted from adopting children in Florida. Even people who have abused drugs and alcohol or people who have a history of domestic violence may adopt under some circumstances.

State courts have upheld the law, with a state appeals court ruling in 1993 that the ban could be justified because homosexual parents are unlikely to be able to give heterosexual children sound dating advice.

I’m almost speechless. What about the dating advice that gay children might want? And what about the fact that a rather substantial number of people in the world have absolutely no ‘sound dating advice’ to offer anyone? Well, at least no positive advice. Advice like When I did this it was a complete disaster doesn’t really count. Anecdotal evidence, or perhaps just induction on a small sample size, suggests this group is well represented in the blogoworld. Should they be barred from adoption too? And does this mean heterosexual no-longer-children should never turn to gays for dating advice?

One of the surprising things about the conference was how the non-philosophers would use Courts have ruled that p as a reason to believe p. This is never a step philosophers would take, and you know I think we’re right about this one.

Ethics at Mardi Gras

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A quick report on the Mardi Gras ethics conference.

The pranks paper went well, I thought. There really was a food fight, of sorts, in the session. And every one of the questions touched on one of the areas of ethics that either Andy or I knew something in particular about. So I think we came across as fairly knowledgable, which was a nice touch.

Sarah McGrath did a paper arguing that existing arguments in favour of the ban on the sale of non-vital organs are, to put it bluntly, awful. The audience didn’t do a much better job of convincing one that there is a decent argument here. The overall impression I had was that the only way one could find something interesting to discuss in pro-ban arguments was by spotting one or two premises that were clearly false, and arguing about the premises that were only probably false. This is fun and all, but it hardly encourages the thought that there might be a cogent argument behind the ban. I’m probably just mean, but I don’t think Some things shouldn’t be for sale is really an argument. And it certainly isn’t an argument that grounds an infringement on personal liberty.

Just in case anyone reading this wants to argue for a ban on organ sales, here’s a quick hint, one that if followed will improve your argument immensely. (From hearing Sarah’s paper, I’d imagine that any argument that merely acknowledged the following distinction would be the best available argument for a ban.) There are two kinds of arguments for banning a course of action that people might have wanted to take. First, there is the flatly paternalistic argument that the ban prevents individuals doing things that they want to do, but which are really not in their interests. This is the Government as the ropes around Ulysses model, and it only works if you assume you know more about what is in individual’s interest than they do. Secondly, there is the game-theoretic argument that taking some options out of play will mean that the decisions made by all players lead to an outcome that is preferable for all. Here the role of government is to rule out, by fiat, defections in Prisoners Dilemmas.

Now it is possible that one or other kind of argument could work here. But it is hardly plausible that both could work at once. For the first kind of argument rests crucially on the irrationality of the citizenry, and the second kind on their rationality. So when someone tries to make an argument for the ban by sliding back and forth between the first kind of argument and the second, it is a strong sign that they are looking for any argument they can find for the ban. And that in turn is a sign that they don’t really take the argument seriously – they have already decided on the conclusion and are now looking to justify it.

Patrick Hopkins argued that technology could help solve the abortion controversies. The idea, which didn’t seem particularly novel, was that if we could move the time at which foetuses were viable back earlier and earlier, then we could just remove the foetus from any woman who didn’t want to be pregnant and grow it artificially up to a time it could be adopted out. This apparently will make all sides happy, because no foetuses get destroyed (making the pro-lifers happy) and no woman is forced by law to remain pregnant (making, allegedly, the pro-choicers happy). As became clear in the discussion period, this only works if one assumes that the only motivation for pro-choicers is that women should be able to determine whether they remain pregnant or not. If the idea is that women should be able to determine whether they become parents or not without interference by the state, then this will look like a complete capitulation to the pro-life side. And, as Leslie Cannold has suggested in her research on women’s attitudes towards abortion, that idea is what motivates many, perhaps most, pro-choice women.

Patrick’s argument also rested an unfortunate amount of weight on the actions of pro-life terrorists. He seemed to argue, and I could be unfairly paraphrasing here, that one reason we should look for a ‘compromise’ solution to the abortion controversies was the damage the very existence of the controversy was doing to the polity. But this damage seemed to consist largely in the existence of pro-lifers who are prepared to bomb clinics and murder doctors in support of their moral views. Whatever the merits of the moral case, I’m certainly not inclined to give more weight to a side because some of its adherents are prepared to murder in support of it. In this debate, like many others, count me in as preferring the option of treating criminals as criminals before we get to addressing ‘root causes’.

The most philosophically interesting (to me at least!) paper was Liz Harman’s paper on the potentiality problem. Liz wanted to reconcile the following two intuitions:

  • How harmful a certain action is might depend, in part, on the potential for flourishing of the thing that is harmed.
  • Killing an embryo is not a morally significant harm.

(I don’t have my notes for the talk – so I’m paraphrasing a bit here. These summaries feel a little sloppy, but I hope you get the idea.) The worry is that since embryos have quite a bit of potential, destroying them counts as a very significant harm, if potential matters to harm. But then it seems like the question of whether embryos may be destroyed becomes very morally significant.

(Note that the discussion here is, for now, all about early embryos. We’ll see in a bit how this carried across to foetuses.)

One frequent concern with using potential as a measure of harm is that it seems to lead to some odd conclusions. It suggests that whether or not someone else is primed to kill you affects how much I might harm you by killing you. This I think is true on Liz’s theory, but not so counterintuitive. What would be bad is if the harm becomes vanishingly small the more likely, and the more quickly, the other guy is to kill you if I do not. If lost potential is the only measure of harm, then that would follow. But I think on the view where lost potential is only one factor that goes into judging harm, it need not be. And I don’t think Liz is committed to anything like that – it is consistent with the first intuition that other factors determine how harmful a harm is.

The solution is to agree that destroying an embryo harms it, and in fact harms it quite severely, but this does not matter, because only harms to creatures that have moral status are morally significant. And the only creatures that have moral status are those that (a) are ever conscious, and (b) are now alive. This means many foetuses have moral status, but embryos that are destroyed do not, since they never become conscious. This is a very clever solution, and I think that at least in broad outlines it is probably right. If so the details matter, so I want to look at one of the details.

One alternative that came up in discussion is that we add to the conditions on moral status a condition that the thing in question ever have an independent existence, which means, in practice, that it is ever born. (The commentator suggested that Liz’s arguments suggested this move, and this was a reductio of Liz’s position. I certainly disagree with the second part.) Liz said she didn’t like that move because whether or not someone is born is an extrinsic property of them, and moral status should rest as much as possible on intrinsic properties.

So I, naturally, turned this into a debate about intrinsic properties. (You knew this would all come back to me, didn’t you.) I said that we had to focus on extrinsic properties some of the time because we didn’t want to say that proper parts of a person, like their torso, or their brain, have moral status. If you punch me in the head you harm my brain, and my upper body, and me, but only the third of those harms counts morally. Counting the others would be double, or triple, counting. Moreover, if I had my legs amputated, my upper body would have moral status, because it would be me, so whether or not it has moral status is very much dependent on whether it has the extrinsic property being attached to two legs.

The interest here isn’t really in what we say about the moral status of the upper body. It could be that some special extrinsic properties matter for moral status, but not many do. I think it will be hard work to delineate those ones that do matter, but if smart people work on it I trust it can be solved. The real interest is in whether we can use this case directly to tell us something about the moral status of foetuses. If (a) undetached proper parts of a thing with moral status do not have moral status, which is what the above cases suggest, and (b) a foetus is an undetached proper part of a thing with moral status, then a foetus does not have moral status. Both (a) and (b) here are questionable, but neither is obviously wrong, and there might be a quite strong pro-choice argument to be made by pushing along these lines. At this stage, however, I’m prepared to turn it over to the experts. (If you do write up a paper using that argument, please send me a copy – preferably with a credit to this blog!)

Overall, I thought the conference was a great success. The organisers, especially James Stacey Taylor, did a fantastic job. Now all I need is another ethical thought to turn into a paper for next year’s conference…

One last nugget from actually reading the print version of the Times last week. I meant to write this earlier, but I forgot. This is from an article about gay adoption.

Gay people are the only group categorically restricted from adopting children in Florida. Even people who have abused drugs and alcohol or people who have a history of domestic violence may adopt under some circumstances.

State courts have upheld the law, with a state appeals court ruling in 1993 that the ban could be justified because homosexual parents are unlikely to be able to give heterosexual children sound dating advice.

I’m almost speechless. What about the dating advice that gay children might want? And what about the fact that a rather substantial number of people in the world have absolutely no ‘sound dating advice’ to offer anyone? Well, at least no positive advice. Advice like When I did this it was a complete disaster doesn’t really count. Anecdotal evidence, or perhaps just induction on a small sample size, suggests this group is well represented in the blogoworld. Should they be barred from adoption too? And does this mean heterosexual no-longer-children should never turn to gays for dating advice?

One of the surprising things about the conference was how the non-philosophers would use Courts have ruled that p as a reason to believe p. This is never a step philosophers would take, and you know I think we’re right about this one.

Kai von Fintel has been

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Kai von Fintel has been noting lots of updates to linguistics papers on his blog. I don’t have a very good coverage of linguistics papers yet. Partially that’s by choice – I think the philosophy papers blog is more valuable if I stick to areas that at least some people recognise as philosophy. But partially it’s because my tracking systems aren’t as efficient as Kai’s. So if the philosophy papers blog is not providing you with enough resources, semantics etc is the place to be.