PEA Soup

G. E. Moore and his young godson

There’s a story that I heard from my father many years ago, which I’m tempted to share with PEA Soupers. G. E. Moore was a Cambridge friend and contemporary of my great-grandfather Ralph L. Wedgwood (1874-1956), and so when my grandfather John H. Wedgwood (1907-1989) was born, Moore agreed to be his godfather.

According to the story, my grandfather, then a small boy, had the following conversation with Moore, while Moore was visiting my great-grandparents’ house for a couple of days.

Small boy: What are you doing, Mr Moore?

Moore (earnestly): I’m writing a book, about the meaning of the word ‘good’.

Small boy: You mean, like when we say that something’s “gone for good”?

Moore (taken aback): Oh! I hadn’t thought of that!

The trouble with this story is that I really doubt that it’s true.

Should graduate students be encouraged not to publish?

Many senior American philosophers strongly advise their graduate students that publishing while in graduate school is a bad idea, and hurts the students' chances on the academic job market. The argument, so far as I understand it, is this.

1. If the sample of written work that you send in with your job application is drawn from a thesis that is still a work in progress, it will be judged by more lenient standards than a published work, which will be taken as the candidate's final word on the topic.
2. Your published work will be so salient in the minds of the philosophers who are assessing your application that they will find it hard to forgive you for any flaws that they think they see in the published work.
3. Indeed, to be ready to write something that is truly worthy of publication, one must have a depth of learning and insight that one can only achieve by first completing one's doctoral dissertation. (It might even be thought somewhat vulgar to rush one's ideas into print -- such people might even stoop to -- blogging ...!)

This argument does not seem even remotely persuasive to me. But I'd like to know what PEA Soupers think!

My Problem with Torture

I don’t think about issues in applied ethics as much as many other people. But when I do, it sometimes turns out that I have a problem: I often have definite intuitions about clearly imaginable but improbable cases that don’t in any straightforward way support the position that I want to take for political reasons.

One of these problems that I have concerns torture. I fervently support the absolute prohibition on torture (at least when instigated by public officials) in international law. I have been horrified by the kinds of torture that have been carried out by US military personnel, with the clear authorization (as a bipartisan Senate committee has recently confirmed) of the Bush White House. Yet I also have the intuition that torture, in certain improbable but clearly imaginable cases, is permissible.

Does Mill believe in discontinuities?

As we all know, J. S. Mill claims that pleasures differ from each other, not only in quantity, but also in quality. Many commentators have read Mill as making the following two claims: 

1. Pleasures fall into two disjoint categories -- the "higher" pleasures and the "lower" pleasures.
2. There is a radical discontinuity between these two categories -- there is no amount (however large) of the lower-quality pleasures that can be more valuable than any amount (however small) of the higher-quality pleasures.

I believe that such discontinuity claims are intrinsically implausible. But that is not what I want to argue here. What I shall argue here is that there is no evidence that Mill made this second claim (2).

A Puzzle: The Groundwork and the Golden Rule

Ever since I first read Kant’s Groundwork, I have been struck by a puzzle that I have never seen adequately explained.

In a footnote in Section 2 (G 430n), Kant makes some rather dismissive remarks about the Golden Rule (he calls it “the trivial quod tibi non vis fieri etc.”). At best, he argues, this “trivial” Rule is a consequence of the Categorical Imperative, and it holds only “with various qualifications”. It cannot be a “universal law”, for three reasons: it obviously cannot ground our duties towards ourselves; it cannot ground our imperfect duties towards others (since a fortunate person might well prefer not to be helped by others, in exchange for his not being obliged to help them); and it also cannot ground our perfect (or “owed”) duties to others (since if the judge were in the criminal’s shoes, he would prefer not to be punished as he deserves).

But surely Kant knew that this “trivial” Golden Rule comes from the Sermon on the Mount: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets” (Matthew 7:12). How can Kant have been so dismissive of such a central part of Christ’s ethical teaching?

The Recognitional View of Instrumental Rationality

The "recognitional view" of practical rationality - as I shall use the term - is the view that all requirements of practical rationality are justified by the fact that it is reasonable to expect one's conforming to these requirements to lead to one's practical reasoning's getting things right to a higher degree than one's violating these requirements. If R is a requirement of practical rationality, then it must be reasonable to expect the results of one's conforming to R to be better - specifically, to involve one's practical reasoning's "getting things right" to a higher degree - than the results of one's violating R.

Can this recognitional view explain what justify the requirements of instrumental rationality (i.e., roughly, the requirement that we should take appropriate means to our ends)?  As I shall argue, it can.  Once we have a plausible view of what it is for one to "get things right" in one's practical reasoning, this recognitional view will have no difficulty explaining the requirements of instrumental rationality.

A Puzzle about 'Right' and 'Wrong'

Intuitively, it's clear that 'wrong' entails 'ought not'; and the term 'right' seems simply to be the contradictory of 'wrong' (after all, 'It's not right' seems at first glance to entail 'It's wrong', and obviously nothing can be both right and wrong). But then it follows that 'right' cannot entail anything stronger than 'it is not the case that ... ought not...'. I.e., 'right' cannot mean anything stronger than 'permissible'.

Intuitively, however, 'right' seems stronger than 'permissible'. If I say, "You're quite right to F", I seem to be expressing a much stronger sort of approval of your F-ing than if I merely said "It is quite permissible for you to F".  It's natural to talk about "the right thing to do", but decidedly odd to talk about "a right thing to do" (whereas it's perfectly natural to talk about "a permissible thing to do"). So, what does 'right' mean -- does it just mean 'permissible' or does it mean something stronger?

Setiya’s “Reasons”: The Diagnosis

Why is Setiya’s principle vulnerable to the problems that I listed in my previous post? What exactly is the diagnosis?

I suggest that the diagnosis is that there are in fact two sorts of reasons. These two sorts of reasons do not always coincide; and Setiya is implicitly conflating these two sorts of reasons here.

Problems for Setiya’s “Reasons”

I’m supposed to be writing a review of Kieran Setiya’s  book, Reasons without Rationalism (Harvard UP, 2007). Even though I disagreed with a lot of what he says (well, I'm an opinionated philosopher, so I would, wouldn't I?), I found it a wonderful and fascinating book.

In this post, I want to raise some problems for a central principle that lies behind much of Setiya’s argument. (I’m sure that PEA Soupers’ comments will help me with my review.) This is the principle that he calls Reasons (p. 12):

Reasons: The fact that p is a reason for A to φ just in case A has a collection of psychological states, C, such that the disposition to be moved to φ by C-and-the-belief-that-p is a good disposition of practical thought, and C contains no false beliefs.

I think this principle has the following problems:

Beliefs are not necessary for motivation

Many philosophers think that whenever we are motivated to act, our motivation always involves a belief. E.g. according to the version of the Humean Theory of Motivation that is defended by Michael Smith, your motivation for action always consists of a desire and a "means-end belief" (see The Moral Problem, p. 92).

I think this is false. There are cases in which for no further reason, you simply form an intention to perform a certain basic action right now. Then I think that this intention can motivate you to act, without the need for any "means-end belief" at all.