I was just reading the Powerpoints for David Chalmers’ “65536 Definitions of Physicalism”:http://consc.net/papers/physicalism.ppt (warning – powerpoint) and I was struck by a couple of things. First, I wasn’t entirely sure we got 16 options for the type E at the end of the definition, but that’s just a quibble. What I really wanted to write about was this slide.

bq.. Test for when an issue involving C is just terminological:

# Give away the term ‘C’, in favor of ‘C1’, ‘C2’, etc.
# Is the issue still statable, without using ‘C’? Is there a substantive disagreement about the truth of some sentence in the new vocabulary?

p. This test seems to overgenerate. Let’s just pick one example. Manny says that executing an innocent to stop a riot is not morally good. Jack says it is (in the right circumstances) morally good. Is this dispute solely about terminological term ‘C’, i.e. goodness? Let’s apply Chalmers’s test.

It seems Manny uses ‘good’ to mean ‘in accord with the maxims we could will to be universal’, and Jack uses ‘good’ to mean ‘maximises preference satisfaction’. These are C1 and C2. Now it seems there is no dispute. Manny and Jack agree that the action (executing the innocent) is not in accord with the maxims we could will to be universal. And they agree that it does maximise preference satisfaction. So they just had a terminological dispute.

But disputes between Kantians and utilitarians are not terminological, they are among the most important disputes in philosophy. Sometimes we can’t rephrase a philosophical dispute because it really is just terminological. And sometimes we can’t rephrase it because we’ve hit philosophical bedrock, and our terms latch onto the most important philosophical concepts there are. In these cases, any reformulation would fail not because the original issue was terminological, but because the reformulation would just miss the point.

Suzy has a favourite bottle. She values it at $100.

Billy has thrown a rock at Suzy’s favourite bottle. It will soon hit and shatter the bottle.

Suzy cannot intercept Billy’s rock or save the bottle, but she can throw her own rock at the bottle so that it hits at the same time as Billy’s, and jointly causes the shattering.

The bottle fairy gives Suzy $1 for every bottle she shatters with a rock, including those she co-shatters.

What should Suzy do?

Standard versions of “causal decision theory” say that Suzy should throw the rock. She will lose the bottle either way, and this way she gets $1 from the bottle fairy.

A more purely *causal* theory, one that says you should do what has the best causal consequences, would say that she shouldn’t throw. Throwing causes a net $99 loss for Suzy – destroying her $100 bottle and getting back $1 from the bottle fairy. Not throwing has no salient causal consequences. Since nothing beats a $99 loss, she shouldn’t throw.

What are usually called causal decision theories are really counterfactual decision theories. Suzy should throw because she would be better off if she threw than if she didn’t throw. That her throwing would cause a net loss, and holding her arm would not, is irrelevant. I side with the counterfactual theories here over the purely causal theories, but the main point I want to make is that what is standardly called causal decision theory does not just say “Do whatever has the best causal consequences.”

In “Daniel Nolan’s book on David Lewis”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=caoineorg-20&camp=14573&creative=327641&link_code=am1&path=http%3A//www.amazon.com/gp/product/offer-listing/0773529306%3Fcondition%3Dall/ASIN/0773529306 he wonders why Lewis doesn’t link his ethical theory more closely to his causal decision theory. I think it is cases like this that show why we might want decision theory and ethics to come apart. What I’ve been calling a purely causal decision theory is more appropriate for ethical decision making. (Or at least it seems to be according to Lewis.) We can see this by changing my example a little.

Change the example so the bottle is Sally’s, not Suzy’s. She values it at $100. Suzy assigns no value to the bottle, but does value the $1 she will get from the bottle fairy for breaking it. It would be wrong in standard cases (i.e. when the bottle is safe) for Suzy to break Sally’s $100 bottle for the $1 from the bottle fairy. Lewis’s view, I think, is that the same is true even when Billy’s rock is bound to break the bottle anyway. The world would not be worse off if Suzy threw her rock and co-broke the bottle. But it would be vicious of Suzy to do this – even if X is going to occur anyway it is wrong to _cause_ X if X is a bad outcome.

Here is a less charitable way of putting Lewis’s position. The sunk costs fallacy is a fallacy for prudential decision making, but it is not always a fallacy for ethical decision making.

Coincidentally, as I was writing this the iPod played Bob Dylan singing “Unless you have made no mistakes in your life, be careful of the stones that you throw.”

Peter Sutton mentioned the following kind of case the other day, which I think is worthy of some consideration.

Zombie Brian is someone just like me who has no inner life. Some debate has ensued about whether Zombie Brian is a real possibility or not, much of that debate starting with the assumption that Zombie Brian can be clearly and distinctly conceived.

Pain Brian is someone just like me whose inner life consists of perpetual excruciating pain, on top of my normal feelings. If property dualism is correct, Pain Brian is a real, if immensely tragic, possibility.

But I don’t conceive of Pain Brian as easily as I conceive of Zombie Brian. I’m really not sure what it would be to be constantly in pain and acting just the way I act. I strongly suspect Pain Brian is a metaphysical impossibility.

Some I’m sure will have the intuition that Pain Brian is possible. Others will argue (not without reason) that even though Pain Brian is a real possibility, there are reasons to do with his ‘distance’ from real possibility that we could not conceive him. I just wanted to note that it is interesting that arguments from intuition like this don’t _always_ point in the direction of dualism – sometimes they can point just as well towards physicalism.

What looks to me like the biggest annual philosophy grad conference, the Berkeley-Stanford-Davis conference, is on this Saturday and the schedule of papers includes links to the nearly 30 papers being presented.

The Melbourne Philosopher Blogger is proposing to hold an Essay Competition for bloggers. It’s just in the planning/brainstorming stage right now, but if you’re interested in the idea pop over there and offer suggestions.

The point of this post is to float an argument for contextualism about ethics. I don’t want to _endorse_ the argument. Indeed my main interest is in seeing how it compares to arguments for contextualism about other domains, especially epistemology. The argument takes as its starting point some experiments performed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky summarised “here”:http://www.workingpsychology.com/lossaver.html.
Continue reading →

The “Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy”:http://www.jesp.org/ is a new (or at least new to me) online journal being edited by Andrei Marmor, James Dreier, Julia Driver and David Esltund. Here are the theee papers currently on the site.

# “The Myth of Instrumental Rationality”:http://www.jesp.org/articles/download.php?id=13 by Joseph Raz
The paper distinguishes between instrumental reasons and instrumental rationality. It argues that instrumental reasons are not reasons to take the…
# “The Government Beguiled Me: The Entrapment Defense and the Problem of Private Entrapment”:http://www.jesp.org/articles/download.php?id=14 by Gideon Yaffe
Defendants who are being tried for accepting a temptation issued by the government sometimes employ the entrapment defense. Acquittal of some of…
# “Two Approaches to Instrumental Rationality and Belief Consistency”:http://www.jesp.org/articles/download.php?id=15 by John Brunero
R. Jay Wallace argues that the normativity of instrumental rationality can be traced to the independent rational requirement to hold consistent…

We’ve already had a (very interesting) talk by Peter Ludlow this week, and there are two more to come.

First on Thursday, Mark Johnson (Linguistics and Cog Sci, Brown) is talking on Features of Statistical Parsers. Here’s the abstract.

bq. Statistical models of syntactic structure are now the dominant approach to natural language parsing. This talk begins with a survey of these statistical models, explaining the trade-offs in the various ways that non-local context can be accounted for in probabilistic models of syntactic structure. The talk ends with a description of a reranking parser, and the kinds of features of syntactic structure that it uses to achieve good performance.

And on Friday Chris Taylor (Philosophy, Oxford) is talking on Courage in the Protagoras and Nicomachean Ethics.

Both talks are at 4.30, Johnson’s in Morill Hall 111 and Taylor’s in Goldwin Smith 142.

Roger White, Explanation as a Guide to Induction.

bq. It is notoriously difficult to spell out the norms of inductive reasoning in a neat set of rules. I explore the idea that explanatory considerations are the key to sorting out the good inductive inferences from the bad. After defending the crucial explanatory virtue of stability, I apply this approach to a range of inductive inferences, puzzles, and principles such as the Raven and Grue problems, and the significance of varied data and random sampling.

“Richard Zach writes”:http://www.ucalgary.ca/~rzach/logblog/2005/04/logic-instruction-and-philosophy.html

bq. I’ve put up materials from the panel discussion on Logic in Philosophy Graduate Training at the ASL Spring Meeting, which featured Michael Glanzberg, Ted Sider, and Brian Weatherson, and which Andy Arana and I organized. The materials include slides for Michael’s and my talks, notes for Ted’s talk, and Andy’s paper, as well as MP3’s of the talks. I didn’t record Andy’s, since he read his paper and it’s available online, and I cut out the discussion since most of it was inaudible.

I’ve closed off comments here so people who want to leave comments can do so over at Richard’s.