Tuesday 20 December 2011

Brief Hiatus

Thanks to all of you who have participated with the blog throughout the semester. We've had some very good discussions, and we plan to continue to have many more next semester. We'll be holding off on new posts until late January, but in the meantime, feel free to scroll through and comment on any of the topics posted so far. Have a great break, Adam (on behalf of QUB Philosophy staff)

Friday 16 December 2011

Divine Omnipotence

Today I’d like to open up the issue of divine omnipotence. Unreflective thinking would suggest that there is no real issue here since omnipotence simply means an ability to do anything, or that there is nothing that an omnipotent being cannot do. Whilst these understandings are somewhat correct, there is a deep fissure between defenders of divine omnipotence to the effect that whilst both accept that there is nothing that an omnipotent being cannot do, they differ as to their account of how this is the case.
On one account, attributable to Descartes, when we hold that there is nothing an omnipotent being cannot do, we hold that an omnipotent being can do anything it wants. Thus, if such a being wanted to create a universe within which 2+2=5, then such a being could have done so. On this account, possibility is located in the will of a divine being.
On the other hand there is the position attributable to Aquinas. Assuming that possibility is a necessary though not sufficient condition for actuality, Aquinas holds that whatever an omnipotent being can do must in principle be possible. Now, Thomas holds that what is possible is what does not admit of a contradiction, and what is impossible is precisely what admits of a contradiction. Thus, what is impossible is incapable of being actual, and therefore precisely nothing. So, for Aquinas when we say that there is nothing that an omnipotent being cannot do, the ‘nothing’ here is understood precisely as what is impossible. Consequently, on Aquinas’s account, omnipotence is an ability to bring about any possibility, where a possibility is understood as what does not involve a contradiction.
On Aquinas’s account then, there are imaginable states of affairs such as going back in time and changing a past that has already been, bringing about 2+2=5, and arguably creating a universe with no evil therein, which whilst imaginable are not possible and therefore not open to divine omnipotence. On the other hand, on the Cartesian account of divine omnipotence, any imaginable state of affairs is open to such power since an omnipotent being can bring about anything it wants.
What do you think?

Monday 12 December 2011

Traditional Empiricism and the Space of Reasons

John McDowell holds that empiricism as it has been traditionally conceived leads to a radical incoherency. In order to avoid this incoherency, he proposes a different though not new model for understanding the relation of experience to the empirical world and how we ground empirical judgements.
As he sees things, McDowell characterises traditional empiricism as making a strict distinction between a space of reasons and a space of facts. The space of reasons is the space wherein concepts, reasons, justifications etc are operative, whereas the space of fact is the space of scientific normativity. What is crucial about the distinction for McDowell is that the space of fact is so juxtaposed from the space of reasons that whatever is located within the space of fact is not conceptually imbued, but conceptually naked as it were; whereas what is located in the space of reasons is located in a space wherein conceptuality is present. Given this strict distinction, McDowell goes on to charge traditional empiricism with radical incoherency.
Traditional empiricism holds that our empirical judgements are justified by the empirical world, by facing the tribunal of experience as it were. On this account, the empirical world so interacts with the subject that the subject is able to justify his or her judgements about the world through an appeal to the empirical world itself. By McDowell’s lights however, this is absurd for the following reason. When we seek to justify a judgement, we seek to give reasons for why we think the content of that judgement is the case. Thus, if asked why we think that x is the case, we say 'because…'and thence give reasons for its being the case 'that x'. McDowell claims that by putting the conceptually naked given in the place where we would give reasons for why we think that our empirical judgement is the case, we are merely exculpating ourselves from blame rather than giving a reason. In other words, the given, considered precisely as lacking in conceptual content, cannot justify our empirical judgements because precisely as lacking in conceptual content, the world cannot be a justifying reason for any belief about the world. As McDowell sees things, what we are left with in traditional empiricism are two sui generis spheres, one of reasons and the other of facts, standing aloof from each other with no meaningful interaction between the two, and this is intolerable.
McDowell recognises the appeal of the given. On the one hand there is recognised the need for some spontaneity in human thought, a spontaneity without which the genius moments wherein one exclaims ‘Eureka’ would be impossible. On the other hand, such spontaneity needs to be curtailed in order that one cannot just think about the world in any way that one likes; one’s thought must be accountable to the world. As McDowell characteristically states, if we have nothing to curtail our spontaneity, we spin frictionslessly in the void. The given was intended to introduce friction and curtail our spontaneity, but, as we have seen, appeal to the given merely offers us exculpation and not a justifying reason for why we think about the world as we do.
With the issue sufficiently motivated, McDowell goes on depict his own view of the relationship between mind and world. Recognising the need for both spontaneity in thought and answerability to the world, but the incoherence of appealing to a conceptually naked given to ensure the latter, McDowell claims that the whole picture of two distinct sui generis spheres is a flawed one that will always lead to inconsistency. He recommends that in order to ensure worldly justification for empirical judgements, the world itself must be conceptual. Only if conceptuality is present in the world can the subject give a justifying reason for an empirical judgement, rather than just pointing to some conceptually naked given. On McDowell’s account then, the world is conceptual insofar as when the subject engages with the world, the subject’s conceptual capacities are brought into operation. Thus, when I experience the world, I experience the world as thus and so, and such experience is conceptual precisely because it is experienced as thus and so. The world’s being thus and so in turn brings into operation the subject’s conceptual capacities, and when asked why I have a particular belief to the effect that the world is thus and so, I can reply because the world as revealed to me in experience is revealed to me as thus and so.
McDowell’s position thus represents a definite shift away from traditional empiricism insofar as it sees the world as itself conceptual and as thus conceived the subject is able to engage with the world in a rational manner. This is not a new understanding of the mind world relationship, in fact, it can be argued that it is coloured by some very traditionalpre-modern views of the mind/world relationship. For the purposes of this discussion, I would like to know what you think about the issues involved the position outlined above.
Further Reading
John McDowell, Mind and World, Lectures 1 - 3.

Friday 9 December 2011

Friday Question: What is fiction?

We (and libraries) frequently distinguish between fiction and non-fiction.  But how do we do this? A first stab might be to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction by appealing exclusively to the notions of truth and falsity. Here's a rough first try:

(1) A work is a work of fiction iff its claims are false, non-fiction iff its claims are true.

Though this might seem right at first blush--after all, non-fiction works contain(among other works) such works as reference works, works comprised of facts--whilst works of fictions, such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, do not have "facts"--after all, Huckleberry Finn wasn't real. 

The first stab doesn't pass even a first inspection, though. Both sides of the biconditional (A work is a work of fiction iff its claims are false) seem problematic. . First, it could be argued that the claims of fiction are not false because the proposition expressed by each fictive claim is of the form "According to work W, X" as opposed to "X." On such a view, the utterance "Huckleberry Finn was a friend of Jim" is true because the proposition it expresses,  ["In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huckleberry Finn was a friend of Jim"], is true. This aligns with our pre-theoretical thinking that "Huckleberry Finn was a friend of Jim" is correct in a way that "Huckleberry Finn was a friend of Nurse Ratched" is not. Along similar lines, the conditional (if a work is a work of fiction, its claims are false) could be rejected on the grounds that works of fictions contain claims that are not truth-apt and so not false. The idea could be that fiction, by nature, is non-representational discourse and so is capable of truth or falsity no more than commands or expressions of attitudes are. So it's false that: if a work is a work of fiction, its claims are false. The other side of the biconditional can be challenged as well: a work can be comprised of false claims and not be a work of fiction. Suppose someone wrote a very poorly researched bibliography of former U.S. President John Adams. Suppose that each sentence in the biography was nearly true (verisimilitudious) but strictly speaking false. The biography for instance says that Adams came in second to Washington in the 1789 Presidential Election vote by a margin of 69-35 votes in the electoral college. Adams actually lost the 1789 Presidential Election by a margin of 69-34 votes. So this claim is false. Suppose our biography is full of claims like this. This work is a work whose claims are false, but it doesn't seem to follow that this rubbishly researched biography of Adams counts as fiction, as a book that belongs next to novels and story books, for instance. It seems instead to be just a very bad example of non-fiction. This consideration counts equally against the suggestion in (1) that a work is non-fiction iff its claims are true. The bad Adams biography is an example of non-fiction whose claims are false. So truth and falsity seem to be a poor litmus test for distinguishing between fiction and non-fiction.

A prominent philosopher of fiction Kendall Walton has proposed that we can individuate what counts as fiction  by appealing to the concept of imagination rather than to the concepts of truth and falsity. Roughly, what individuates fictive utterances Walton thinks is that they (unlike non-fictive utterances) are a prescription to imagine. This account seems to capture something important about fiction: fiction involves a sort of make believe, and to read (in the case of written fiction) and enjoy fiction is to participate in the author's invitation to imagine. An author of non-fiction extends a different invitation: an invitation to believe, and perhaps to know (on testimony). Does Walton get things right then? Maybe. There are quite a few objections to his view. Here's one I'd like to consider. Suppose Dostoevsky had an uncle named Raskalnikov, and who seemed to Dostoevsky to be shrouded in mystery, leaving only a trunk full of documents in an attic that detailed his life. Suppose Dostoevsky wished to write a biography of Raskalnikov and so read through the documents in the attic, finding all sorts of court documents, diaries and other evidence that suggested Raskalnikov had murdered his landlady as well as a visitor Lisabetta. Dostoevsky then writes up a large biography and entitles it "Crime and Punishment*." Suppose further that Crime and Punishment is word-for-word identical with Crime and Punishment. Crime and Punishment* is not a prescription to imagine. Crime and Punishment is. So Walton's view suggests that fictionality must be a relational property; two works with all the same intrinsic properties can be such that only one is a work of fiction. Perhaps this is not problematic? I think this result is awkward and so counts against an otherwise very good account of fiction. Any thoughts? 

Monday 5 December 2011

Rorty and Boghossian on Galileo and Cardinal Bellarmine

Copernicus's De Revolutionibus made a then-revolutionary assertion: that the earth revolved around the sun. Galileo, through the use of his telescope, found evidence that stood to support Copernicus's theory and was summoned to the Vatican, where he was prosecuted for heresy by the Cardinal Bellarmine. As Boghossian (2006) put it, Cardinal Bellarmine, "when invited to look through his telescope to see for himself, is reputed to have refused, saying that he had a far better source of evidence about the make-up of the heavens, namely, the Holy Scripture itself." (Boghossian 2006: 60)

One line we can take here is to say that Galileo was right, and Cardinal Bellarmine was wrong, that Galileo's epsitemic principles and judgments were superior to Cardinal Bellarmine's. As Boghossian notes, there is some resistance to this sort of thought that is widespread throughout the humanities. The resistance is embodied by what Boghossian calls the Equal Validity view:

Equal Validity: There are many radically different, yet "equally valid" ways of knowing the world, with science being just one of them. (2006: 2)

Boghossian considers a range of positions that would count in favour of equal validity, focusing in his monograph on constructivism and relativism. Let's consider here the plausibility of what Boghossian describes as epistemic relativism.

Epistemic Relativism: 
A. (Epistemic non-absolutism) There are no absolute facts about what belief a particular item of information justifies
B.(Epistemic relationism) if a person, S's, epistemic judgments are to have any prospect of being true, we must not construe his utterances of the form
"E justifies belief B"
as expressing the claim
"E justifies belief B"
but rather as expressing the claim: According to the epistemic system C, that I, S, accept, information E justifies belief B. 
C. (Epistemic pluralism)There are many fundamentally different, genuinely alternative epistemic systems, but no facts by virtue of which one of these systems is more correct than any of the others (2006: 73)

If epistemic relativism is correct, it would seem as though there is no privileged perspective from which to claim that Galileo's epistemic principles and judgements are superior to Cardinal Bellarmine's.

Richard Rorty, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, attempts to defend something akin to Equal Validity by way of arguing in favour of just the sort of position Boghossian is calling epistemic relativism. Rorty writes:


But can we then find a way of saying that the considerations advanced against the Copernican theory by Cardinal Bellarmine—the scriptural description of the fabric of the heavens—were ‘‘illogical or unscientifc?’’. . . [Bellarmine] defended his view by saying that we had excellent independent (scriptural) evidence for believing that the heavens were roughly Ptolemaic. Was his evidence brought in from anothersphere, and was his proposed restriction of scope thus ‘‘unscientifc?’’ What determines that Scripture is not an excellent source of evidence for the way the heavens are set up? (Rorty 1981: 328-9)

Boghossian here quotes Rorty at some more length, noting that he answers his own question. Here, again, is Rorty with some provocative remarks:



So the question about whether Bellarmine . . . was bringing in extraneous ‘‘unscientific’’ considerations seems to me to be a question about whether there is some antecedent way of determining the relevance of one statement to another, some ‘‘grid’’ (to use Foucault’s term) which determines what sorts of evidence there could be for statements about the movements of planets. Obviously, the conclusion I wish to draw is that the ‘‘grid’’ which emerged in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not there to be appealed to in the early seventeenth century, at the time that Galileo was on trial. No conceivable epistemology, no study of the nature of human knowledge, could have ‘‘discovered’’ it before it was hammered out. The notion of what it was to be ‘‘scientific’’ was in the process of being formed. If one endorses the values . . . common to Galileo and Kant, then indeed Bellarmine was being ‘‘unscientific.’’ But, of course, almost all of us . . . are happy to endorse them. We are the heirs of three hundred years of rhetoric about the importance of distinguishing sharply between science and religion, science and politics, science and philosophy, and so on. This rhetoric has formed the culture of Europe. It made us what we are today.We are fortunate that no little perplexity within epistemology, or within the historiography of science, is enough to defeat it. But to proclaim our loyalty to these distinctions is not to say that there are ‘‘objective’’ and ‘‘rational’’ standards for adopting them. Galileo, so to speak, won the argument, and we all stand on the common ground of the ‘‘grid’’ of relevance and irrelevance which ‘‘modern philosophy’’ developed as a consequence of that victory. But what could show that the Bellarmine-Galileo issue ‘‘differs in kind’’ from the issue between, say, Kerensky and Lenin, or that between the Royal Academy (circa 1910) and Bloomsbury? (Op. cit. 330-1)
What exactly are we to make of this? Does Rorty here give us any reason to approach the Galileo-Bellarmine issue as the epistemic relativist does? Boghossian's answer is a resounding "no." I will not retrace his arguments against epistemic relativism here. Rather, I invite readers to assess whether Rorty's take on the issue gives us any good reason to favour any of the three components of what Boghossian is calling epistemic relativism.



Monday 28 November 2011

Eavesdroppers and epistemic modals

Sometimes, we make claims of the form: "A might be F." For example, "Keller might be taking a nap," or "Zane might be guilty." Such claims are called epistemic modals. What makes them true, when they are, seems to be an epistemic matter. That is: what makes a claim of the form "A might be F" true is whether A's being F is epistemically possible relative to some body of knowledge. But whose body of knowledge? This is where things get tricky. Some contextualists claim that the relevant body of knowledge will always at least include the speaker's body of knowledge. A rather flatfooted version of contextualism (which MacFarlane 2011: 146) calls "solipsistic contextualism")) says the speaker's body of knowledge is all that matters. And so when Clint says, "Keller might be taking a nap," the proposition expressed by his utterance is true (on solipsistic contextualism) just in case Keller's taking a nap isn't ruled out by what Clint knows. This view might sound plausible at first blush. There are however several problems. Perhaps, for example, the relevant body of knowledge should be extended to include not only what Clint knows but also what others involved in the conversation know. But suppose it is. The problem I want to consider is one that appears to infect any form of contextualism about epistemic modals. I'll use John Hawthorne's (2007) example of an eavesdropper case here:

EAVESDROPPER: Someone is on the way to the grocery store. I hear her say: 'Susan might be at the store. I could run to her.' No party to the conversation that I am listening in on knows that Susan is on vacation. But I know that she is. Despite the fact that it is compatible with what the conversants know that Susan is in the store and that the speaker will run into her, I am inclined to judge the speaker's modal judgements to be incorrect. (Hawthorne 2007: 92)

For the contextualist, this is awkward. It seems that the person who utters 'Susan might be at the store" has said something true. After all, Susan's being at the store is entirely compatible with the speaker's body of knowledge (and the body of knowledge possessed by those in the conversation I'm overhearing). However, having overheard this conversation, I am inclined to judge the speaker's claim to be incorrect. 

But the picture that emerges is not a friendly one for the contextualist. It looks as though we have a case of disagreement: I reject what the speaker I overhear accepts. It also looks like neither the person I overhear nor I myself am mistaken: "Susan might be at the store" thus seems true relative to the body of knowledge operative in the conversation I overhear and false relative to what I know. But this sort of 'faultless disagreement' implies a sort of truth-relativism about epistemic modals. In order to avoid this result, the contextualist has got to explain away why the eavesdropper case only appears to be a disagreement (or at least a case where my denying what the speaker I overhear asserts is felicitious) when it's actually not, or alternatively, why the case is one that only appears to be faultless, when in fact either I or the person I overhear believes something false. 

No matter how the contextualist tries to get out of this puzzle that appears to motivate truth-relativism about epistemic modals, one thing is clear: the contextualist is going to have a hard time explaining just whose body of knowledge is supposed to be the relevant one in this context.

Reference:

Hawthorne, John (2007). "Eavesdroppers and Epistemic Modals," in Philosophical Issues, 17, The Metaphysics of Epistemology, 2007. 
MacFarlane, John (2011). "Epistemic Modals are Context Sensitive," in Epistemic Modality, eds. Egan, A. & Weatherson, B. (Oxford: OUP).

Monday 21 November 2011

Epistemology and the Ought-Can Principle

In certain contexts, it can be fairly natural to give voice to an assessment of somebody's belief by using the word 'ought'. For instance, suppose that your friend is engaged in wishful thinking: this friend believes that some guy will call her when (unfortunately) that is pretty clearly fantasy on her part. You might say to her (if you were trying to wake her up to the cruel reality), "That's not what you ought to believe. We both know that this guy rarely calls anybody the day after." She might respond, "That is what I ought to believe. My case is different because ... ."

Now, as natural as these assessments might be, there is some room for discomfort as to whether we can ultimately make sense of them. One concern revolves around the alleged entailment from 'ought' to 'can'. The idea is that in order for it to be the case that one ought to bring about a particular outcome (e.g. a belief or action), one must have the (appropriate kind of) ability to bring about that outcome. In other words, if one cannot control the outcome, then it is not possible that one ought to bring it about. Where the outcome in question is belief, it boils down to this: if it is not possible for the subject to exert control in order to have better beliefs (i.e. beliefs that fit the evidence better), then it cannot be that the subject ought to have better beliefs.

As this suggestion applies to our fictitious example, it appears that what you've said to your friend may not be strictly correct. Supposing that your friend is just incorrigibly prone to wishful thinking (as many of us are), it may be that she does not have the cognitive resources to take a position that respects her evidence. Assuming so, the suggestion is that it cannot be that she ought to believe other than how she does on this matter. Perhaps we can assess her belief as bad, but not as a belief she ought not have.

I find this result fairly unsatisfactory although the issues here are complex. One consideration that concerns me is that this way of thinking appears to let people off the hook for bad decisions merely because they are incorrigibly bad at managing their beliefs. Think about somebody who you consider to (1) have terrible beliefs about public policy or religion (whether for or against), and (2) be so entrenched in these terrible beliefs and so bad at thinking that there is no way that they could give them up. Presumably, people of this sort are a bad influence on society; they make bad decisions about, for instance, whom to vote for. It strikes me as fairly reasonable that we should hold them responsible for this bad influence, even if they sincerely take themselves to be doing what is best. However, if it really is the case that the prospects for them to improve their beliefs are hopeless, then the suggestion last paragraph appears to have the result that it cannot be that they ought to be believing differently. On what grounds, then, can we hold them responsible?

Maybe we should we give up the idea that the 'ought' in question entails 'can' of the relevant sort. What do you think?

Monday 14 November 2011

War, murder, and LeMay: is it ever excusable to intentionally kill non-combatants?

A commonplace view of World War II is that the Allies were right to go to war and acted justly in their fight against the Axis powers. After all, it was the Axis powers who had been the aggressors – Nazi Germany invading Poland, Imperial Japan attacking Pearl Harbor – and who proved themselves frequently merciless in their treatment of enemy soldiers and civilians. But while it may be uncontroversial to claim the Allies were right to go to war, it certainly is controversial to claim the Allies acted justly in their prosecution of the war. This is because a significant part of the Allied war effort was focused not against combatants but instead against non-combatants. In Europe this took the form of a deliberate policy of carpet bombing German population centres so as to break the will of the German people and consequently undermine the Nazi regime from within. The near total destruction of major German cities such as Cologne, Dresden, and Hamburg was the result. In the Pacific theatre the policy led to the devastation of most Japanese cities and, eventually, the deployment of two atomic weapons, with an estimated combined death toll of half a million civilians. Curtis E. LeMay, US Air Force general and architect of the strategic bombing campaign of Japan, freely admitted that if the Axis powers had won the war, he and other Allied commanders would have been tried as war criminals. He nonetheless believed that he was right to fire bomb Japanese cities and kill vast numbers of innocent men, women, and children, since that was the only way, in his view, to bring the war to a swift and successful conclusion, thus sparing the lives of an even greater number of Americans and Japanese.

One way to assess the actions of LeMay is to rely upon the venerable tradition of just war theory. There are two main parts of just war theory. The first, jus ad bellum (‘justice of war’), sets out the principles that determine when it is right to go to war, the most important being ‘just cause’. A prime example of just cause is the right of violent resistance against illegitimate aggression. Many would argue that LeMay acted in accordance with this basic jus ad bellum idea. The second part of the just war doctrine, however, is jus in bello (‘justice in war’), a key principle of which is ‘discrimination’. This is the demand that only combatants can be legitimately killed, a demand endorsed by many religions and enshrined in international law. Clearly, LeMay and others, including Britain’s ‘Bomber’ Harris, were guilty of deliberately and grossly contravening this principle.

If we believe in accordance with jus in bello that it is always wrong to intentionally kill non-combatant men, women, and children, are we not compelled to regard LeMay and Harris, as well as their political bosses who approved the policy of strategic bombing (Churchill, Roosevelt, and Truman), as murderers who deserve nothing but opprobrium for committing some of the greatest atrocities in world history? This seems the only conclusion you can arrive at if you adhere to the just war doctrine. And yet many refuse to condemn these figures as murderers. Instead, they believe these men acted as they did out of necessity, that their actions may not have been wholly right, since they involved undeniable horrors, but that they certainly were permissible or, at the very least, ‘excusable’, given the gravity of the threat faced by the Allies and the obstinate refusal of the Axis powers to capitulate. But if we endorse this view, should we not then be honest in our assessment of the phenomenon of war and concede that all talk of justice in war is mistaken, that war, as LeMay seemed to presume, is always and unalterably ‘hellish’? Or should we insist that talk of justice in war is appropriate, but take a consequentialist stance and understand our basic moral principles as prima facie principles that may in certain circumstances be overridden, admitting that sometimes worthy ends really do justify horrific means? And if we take this latter stance, are we not saying that what is ordinarily thought of as murder – the wilful violent destruction of innocent human life – is sometimes morally demanded? Is this a defensible conclusion, or is it one which makes a nonsense of our basic moral principles in justifying that which is always unjustifiable?

Friday 11 November 2011

Friday Question: Philosophy, whither now?

This week's Friday question takes up a theme explored a few weeks back viz. the nature and role of philosophy. Whereas previously I raised the issue of the nature and role of philosophy in relation to the wider society, I now wish to focus on the nature and role of philosophy in academia.
One of the core strengths of philosophy is that it is quite a malleable subject, meaning that for any other academic discipline there is usually a ‘philosophy of’ that discipline. This phenomenon is so apparent that it hardly needs defending, one need only point to such branches of philosophy as philosophy of religion, philosophy of science, political philosophy etc to see its presence. I call this a strength because in disciplines such as science, theology, politics etc there is often widespread disagreement resulting from presupposed philosophical principles. Philosophy thus can provide a playing field within which such disagreement can be resolved.
One reason often offered for the pervasiveness of philosophy amongst other strictly non-philosophical disciplines is that the other disciplines often employ philosophical presuppositions which are left undefended by the discipline itself and require a defence by the philosopher. This would then suggest that there is a core area or set of areas that is (are) purely philosophical and not simply a ‘philosophy of’ something. A case can be made for the view that the core philosophical areas are metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, logic and their particular branches, with the ‘philosophy of’ disciplines being an application of these core areas to the discipline on which the ‘philosophy of’ focuses.
Given that philosophy can be diversified into (i) core areas and (ii) ‘philosophy of’ areas, the question of the role of philosophy in academia becomes an interesting one. If we accept that philosophy is an important subject worthy of study (a theme discussed in the Friday question a few weeks back), then we must ask ourselves what position it should take in the contemporary academy. There is a lot to be said for having ‘philosophy of’ disciplines, since the disciplines about which they are a ‘philosophy of’, e.g. science, psychology, theology, politics, all have a place within the contemporary academy. However, the ‘philosophy of’ disciplines are only such because they recognise that there are philosophical issues at work in the discipline on which they focus and drawing upon the core areas of philosophy, which are not ‘philosophy of’ disciplines, they seek to clear up the philosophical issues at work in the disciplines about which they are a ‘philosophy of’. The argument can thus be made that if the contemporary academy only retains the ‘philosophy of’ disciplines and neglects the core areas of philosophy, the ‘philosophy of’ disciplines will become rootless, they will lose their philosophical integrity, and philosophy will ultimately become a kind of fanciful reflection with no systematic manner of conducting its own affairs. If we recognise that philosophy is a noble pursuit and a subject that ought to be preserved in the contemporary academy, then perhaps the core areas of philosophy ought to be nourished, to be given their own space to pursue their own problems independently of their application to various other disciplines.
This is a real dilemma, not only for the pragmatic issues that a contemporary academy must face but also for the very identity of philosophy and its independence or otherwise from other strictly non-philosophical disciplines. I thus welcome your thoughts on the matter.

Tuesday 8 November 2011

Morality and Strict Liability

Most legal systems recognise offences of ‘strict liability’. These are offences which are defined in such a way that they can be committed regardless of whether the perpetrator shows any ‘faulty’ intentions or character traits. A case in point is that of plagiarism – or, to give it its proper legal name, breach of copyright: a person breaches copyright if they pass off the words of another as their own regardless of whether they do so intentionally or knowingly.

Although it is primarily a legal term, it is interesting to speculate on whether there is anything akin to strict liability in the moral realm. Nagel, in his classic article on moral luck, is sceptical, remarking that strict liability ‘may have its legal uses’ but seems ‘irrational as a moral position’. Presumably what he means by this is that a person (such as the unwitting plagiariser) cannot be subject to moral criticism on the basis of their ‘external’ conduct alone – what always matters are their intentions, motives and traits of character.

However, I wonder whether this is an oversimplification. To be sure, in the vast majority of cases, what matters are intentions, motives and traits of character, but couldn’t there be some exceptions where external conduct alone is sufficient to warrant moral blame?

To focus attention on this possibility, imagine that I have promised to be present at your daughter’s christening. Knowing how important this is to you, I have given a cast-iron guarantee that I will attend. Unfortunately, on the day itself, my car breaks down en route to the ceremony, meaning that I don’t make it in time. This isn’t due to negligence or bad planning on my part; it’s just that sometimes the best laid schemes of mice and men go awry.

To my mind, it isn’t outlandish to suggest that I am morally blameworthy in this case. Of course, I haven’t disclosed a character flaw or bad intention, nor have I been negligent in my planning. Nonetheless, I have failed to keep a promise and, by implication, I have failed to fulfil a moral obligation, and normally the non-fulfilment of obligations is taken to be good grounds for moral criticism.

It therefore seems plausible to me to suppose that there is at least one form of strict liability in morality – namely, the strict liability that is associated with promise-keeping.

I wonder what readers think. Do you share my response to the promising example, and, if so, do you think that this yields any insights into broader topics in philosophy, such as the nature of moral appraisal and the problem of free will and moral responsibility?

Saturday 5 November 2011

Friday Question: Should You Take the Pill?

For the Friday question this week, I'm going to share with you a strange ethical dilemma I constructed (out of boredom, I imagine) on a 20-hour-car ride from Missouri to El Paso, Texas in 2005. I'll do my best to be concise (as the original case wasn't).

Suppose a highly-advanced (perhaps supernaturally gifted) doctor takes you to a room and places 10 pills in front of you. Each of the 10 pills looks identical, and there is no way you have to tell any of them apart. The doctor says: "Nine of these pills are Jesus Pills. If you take one of the Jesus Pills, here's what will happen: you will 'black out' for one week, and during that week's time, you will save 10 lives, and these 10 lives are lives of innocent people who would have otherwise died. After the week's time, the effects of the pill will wear off and you will return to normal, having no memory of this." The doctor then adds, "Now, like I said, nine of these 10 pills on the table are Jesus Pills, but one of them is what we like to call the 'Dahmer pill.' If you take one of these 10 pills and it turns out to be the Dahmer pill, here is what will happen: You will black out for one week, and during that week, you will kill three innocent people. After the week's time, the effects of the pill will wear off and you will return to normal, having no memory of this."

The doctor then gestures to the 10 pills on the table and gives you two options. One option is to take one of the 10 indistinguishable pills in front of you (nine of which you know are Jesus Pills, one of which you know is a Dahmer Pill). The other option is to walk away.

What should you do, and why?

(And yes, it was a very long drive to El Paso, Texas.)

Monday 31 October 2011

Christian philosophy

From its earliest days, Christianity has openly embraced philosophical inquiry, making full use of it in order to elucidate key elements of its theological system. Philosophy played a significant role in the thought of the Fathers and their elucidation of the key Christian doctrinal elements; and this role was somewhat ratified at the council of Nicaea when it was decided to make use of a philosophical and non-scriptural term (consubtantia/homoousios) in describing the nature of Christ. The relationship remained steady with philosophy being seen as a good and honourable field of study, and this persisted through the middle ages and into contemporary Christianity, with Pope John Paul II, not only himself being a philosopher in the continental tradition, but also defending the role of and need for philosophy in Fides et Ratio.

Such a relationship is not peculiar to Christianity. Judaism and Islam are both religions whose followers took up philosophy, and there was a lot of interpenetration of philosophical thought amongst these three major religions, especially in the middle ages. Furthermore, not only historically have there been religious philosophers, but also in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries there are/have been a significant number of major philosophers who subscribe to one of the world religions noted above. One can list such names as: Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Geach, Frederick Coplestone, Michael Dummett, John Haldane, Eleonore Stump, Bas Van Frassen, Nicholas Rescher, Hilary Putnam, Alisdair MacIntyre etc.

Given the interpenetration of philosophy and religion, the question of how a philosopher who has adopted a particular religious creed should comport himself or herself to philosophical inquiry is an interesting one. The issue I wish to open here is whether or not there can be a philosophy that is specifically religious in the required sense, that is, can there be a Christian, Jewish, or Islamic philosophy?

In the Thomistic tradition in which I specialise, this question was a pressing one. In the early days of the Neo-Thomistic movement of the early twentieth century, Thomists had to consider how a follower of the thought of Thomas Aquinas should address the relationship of Christianity to philosophy. Two particular camps emerged. One group, principally inspired by Etienne Gilson and his followers, held that a Christian philosopher can find room for Christianity in his or her philosophy insofar as Christianity functions as a kind of Bildung or world picture within which the philosophical discussion takes place. By conducting the philosophical inquiry within such a world picture, it is argued that interesting discussions begin emerge, and historically speaking many interesting philosophical discussions on the nature of the person, substance, accidents, relations, etc were developed within theological contexts. On this account then, there could definitely be a Christian philosophy insofar as it is a philosophy that takes its central issues and concerns from within a Christian paradigm. On the other hand, there were those who held that the Christian philosopher ought not to try to find a place for his or her Christianity within philosophy, but that philosophy ought to find its place in Christianity. On this account, one’s Christianity should not have a positive influence on one’s philosophy, and should remain somewhat distinct from the discussion, though one’s philosophy should of course influence one’s Christianity and have a role to play therein. Thinkers in this camp usually held that there can be Christian philosophers but no Christian philosophy; their main representative, and opponent of Gilson, was Fernand Van Steenberghen.

Recently a third opinion has emerged, led by John Wippel, that attempts to accommodate both groups. On this view, when a philosopher comes to deal with a problem there must be distinguished two elements: (i) the moment of discovery of a solution and (ii) the formal statement of the solution. According to this group, the moment of discovery of a solution to a problem can come from anywhere and have any inspiration; one often finds that philosophers, when working on a problem, will take a walk, read the paper, listen to some music, and come back to the problem with some inspiration. Thus, when considering the moment of discovery of a solution, Christianity can play a role insofar as its doctrines contain answers to philosophical questions, though they are stated in a non-philosophical manner. However, when it comes to the formal statement of the answer to a philosophical question, the inspiration that played a role in the moment of discovery drops out and only the formal elements remain. Thus, when one provides an answer to a particular philosophical problem, that answer must be based on reasons and not appeal to the original inspiration that led to the answer in the first place. Thus, in the formal statement of the solution, one’s Christianity drops out. Overall then, on this account, Gilson’s view is accommodated insofar as the doctrinal elements of Christianity can provide the context within which the inspiration occurs for a solution to a philosophical problem. On the other hand, Van Steenberghen’s view is accommodated insofar as the doctrinal elements of Christianity must drop out of the the formal statement of the solution to philosophical problems.

So what I would like to open for discussion is how you think one’s religious (or indeed non-religious) convictions should play a role in how we approach philosophical problems. Can non-philosophical influences have a positive role to play in our philosophical inquiries, and if so, what role should that be and how does it affect the inquiry?

Further Reading:
Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy.
____________, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages.
Fernand Van Steenberghen, La philosophie au XIIIe siècle.
John Wippel, Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas, Chapter 1.

Friday 28 October 2011

Friday Question: A Dilemma in Medical Ethics



I want to offer here a case that I take to be an excellent example of a moral dilemma that arises in the field of Medical Ethics. This case is one I remember vividly still from a graduate course in Medical Ethics at the University of Missouri with Professor Bill Bondeson, from whom I am quoting the following case.


Going to Australia...
A 69-year-old male, estranged from his children and with no other living relatives, underwent a routine physical examination in preparation for a brief and much anticipated trip to Australia. The physician suspected a serious problem and ordered more extensive testing, including further blood analysis (detailing an acid phosphatase), a bone scan, and a prostate biopsy. The results were quite conclusive: The man had an inoperable, incurable carcinoma--a small prostrate nodule commonly referred to as cancer of the prostate. The carcinoma was not yet advanced and was relatively slow growing. Later, after the disease had progressed, it would be possible to provide good palliative treatment. Blood tests and X-rays showed the patient's renal function to be normal. (The physician consulted with the urologist who had performed the prostate biopsy in order to confirm the diagnosis.)
The physician had treated this patient for many years and knew he was fragile in several respects. The man was quite neurotic and had an established history of psychiatric disease, although he functioned well in society and was clearly capable of rational policy and decision making. He had recently suffered a severe depressive reaction, during which he behaved irrationally and attempted suicide. This episode immediately followed the death of his wife, who had died after a difficult and protracted battle with cancer. It was clear that he had not been equipped to deal with his wife's death, and he had been hospitalized for a short period before the suicide attempt. Just as he was getting back on his feet, the opportunity to go to Australia materialized, and it was the first excitement he had experienced in several years.
This patient also had a history of suffering prolonged and serious depression whenever informed of serious health problems. He worried excessively and often could not exercise rational control over his deliberations and decisions. His physician therefore thought that disclosure of the carcinoma under his present fragile state would almost certainly cause further irrational behavior and render the patient incapable of thinking clearly about his medical situation.
When the testing had been completed and the results were known, the patient returned to his physician. He asked nervously, "Am I OK?" Without waiting for a response, he asked, "I don't have cancer, do I?" Believing his patient would not suffer from or even be aware of this problem while in Australia, the physician replied, "You're as good as you were ten years ago." He was worried about telling such a bald lie but firmly believed that it was justified. http://web.missouri.edu/~bondesonw/MedicalEthicsSyllabus.html

What do you make of the doctor's decision here? Did he do the right thing? If so, why? If not, why not?

Monday 24 October 2011

Future Contingents

Frequently, we make claims about the future, claims that we think could either be true or false, depending on how the future unfolds. For example:

(1) "There will be a sea battle tomorrow."

As John MacFarlane (2002) has noted, a certain puzzle unfolds when we consider what truth value to assign (1). The puzzle is motivated by two competing intuitions. One intuition we'll call the indeterminstic intuition, according to which (at the time of uttering (1)) we think the future is open, and multiple possible histories can unfold. The indeterministic intuition aligns with the way we speak of sentences like (1) at the time of utterance, which is to say it's neither true nor false; there neither has nor has not been a sea battle tomorrow (at the time of utterance). A conflicting intuition is that, (as MacFarlane notes) we can be tempted to reason as follows:

Jake asserted yesterday that there would be a sea battle today.
There is a sea battle today.
So Jake's assertion was true. (MacFarlane 2002: 325)
The sort of reasoning suggest that, when we take the retrospective view we are inclined to think that the utterance 'There will be a sea battle tomorrow' was true (rather than undetermined) at the time of utterance.
But this is directly at odds with the view that utterances of future contingents are neither true nor false at the time of utterance.

Against this background, it seems we have two different strategies of response. Firstly, we can assume what MacFarlane calls the absoluteness of utterance-truth: this assumption is that the truth of a given proposition is not relativised to a context of assessment. This is a widely held position. With the absoluteness of utterance truth in the background, we must argue that EITHER Jake's utterance has an indeterminate truth value OR that it has a truth value (the same truth value it had at the time of utterance). An alternative strategy is to reject the absoluteness of utterance truth and allow that the truth of utterances to be relativised to the context in which they are assessed. This would be a version of truth relativism. The idea would be, roughly, that when the context of assessment of the utterance 'there will be a sea battle tomorrow' was the time of utterance, the utterance is neither true nor false. But if the context of assessment of the utterance is the following day (in the middle of a sea battle, say) then the utterance counts as true. Which strategy do you think is the best?

References:

MacFarlane, John (2002). "Future Contingents and Relative Truth," in The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 212.




Friday 21 October 2011

Friday Question

This week's Friday question engages with the issue of the role and value of philosophy.

We have just witnessed the elections to the Students' Union council. A lot of students canvassed on a number of issues. One particular issue was that of free education, and I believe that some philosophy students canvassed under this issue. This raises the interesting question of the relationship of philosophy to politics and practical matters more generally. In particular, the question often arises as to what contribution philosophers have to make to society.

Marx famously stated that philosophers merely interpret the world, whereas the point is to change it. Now it is arguable that Marx was reacting to a form of speculative Hegelianism that did not put Hegelian philosophy to any practical use, whereas Marx saw a need for a practical kind of Hegelianism. Be that as it may, his position raises a serious question for the role of philosophy (and other speculative disciplines) within society.

There is no doubt that there are branches of philosophy that are highly speculative and of very little practical advantage. Tell a single parent struggling to make ends meet that the world is made up of discrete substances as the basic constituents of reality or that mind and world exist in two heterogeneous spaces and you will, if fortunate, be asked to leave their presence. On the other hand, tell such a person that it is the duty of the state to tax the rich and help the poor, provide free education, school dinners etc, he or she will soon become interested. The distinction is palatable: in some areas philosophy has a very practical use whereas in others it is seen to be abstract, stuffy, mere speculative reasoning with no connection to the matters of living.

On the other hand, speculative philosophers will claim that the unexamined life is not worth living, that once the necessities of life are taken care of, human beings do not curl up and go to sleep; rather they start to think about the starry heavens above and the moral law within, and seek to understand the world around them. There seems to be a drive in human beings to gain some kind of understanding of the world in which they live, in which case even when all the practical questions of life have been answered, there remains a longing to find out more. Speculative philosophy, just like any other speculative subject, answers to an innate desire to know, and just like the fulfilment of the desires for warmth, shelter, food etc, the fulfilment of the desire to know is its own reward, and thus ought to be prized as a goal in itself and not evaluated on the basis of its instrumentality to the state.

So we are left with an intriguing question, should speculative philosophy be a subject that is preserved in our university curricula and wider social framework, or should it be relegated to the private sphere and taken up only by those who have the time, money, and inclination to pursue it?

Sunday 16 October 2011

Belief

It seems plausible enough that to have a belief is to be in a particular state of mind. But what kind of state of mind? What is the essential nature of belief? What sort of conditions must be met to qualify some state as a belief? What sort of conditions, when met, would suffice for qualifying some state as a belief? These questions are very hard, but it is not impossible to sketch some alternatives.

One suggestion is that beliefs might be like the "states of emergency" that governments declare. A state of emergency is a state that is supposed to play a particular kind of role in the activities of the institutions and citizens of a nation. In particular it is supposed to be a state in which institutions and citizens of the nation prepare themselves to adequately face real impending difficulties like natural disasters or wars. Of course, states of emergencies need not play this kind of role. Sometimes corrupt politicians create them artificially merely as opportunities to seize power, in which case there are no real impending difficulties for institutions and citizens of the nation to prepare themselves to adequately face (unless it is the corrupt politicians themselves, in which case, the state of emergency is undermining its own purpose).

Perhaps beliefs are also states that are supposed to do something as well. For instance, beliefs might be states that are supposed to be true. True beliefs might adequately prepare us to act so as to get what we want. Of course, some beliefs are not true, in which case, it would follow that some beliefs are not "doing their job" in this respect. In certain cases, this mishap might be due to bad luck, but in other cases the lack of truth might come as no surprise because the beliefs were not "fitting the evidence."

It can be interesting to think about what consequences this theory of belief has for religious belief. Occasionally, one hears the suggestion that religious belief should be belief that is insensitive to the evidence, so that it persists even when the evidence may not positively support it. Can we make sense of this suggestion if beliefs are, by their very nature, states of mind that are supposed to be true?

Friday 14 October 2011

Friday Question: A Puzzle about Free Will

For this week's Friday question, let's consider (in a basic, straightforward way) a problem that arises for those wishing to endorse an 'incompatibilist' approach the problem of free will. The problem of free will is an age-old problem in philosophy that is framed around two independently plausible but apparently conflicting positions. On the one hand, it appears that determinism is true: every event (E) is caused by some antecedent cause (or causes) which make it such that that E couldn't not have occurred. Determinism stands in an obvious tension with the doctrine of free will, which maintains that--any time we act--we could have acted otherwise. There are two prominent approaches to the tension between these two doctrines. One approach, incompatibilism, supposes that the two doctrines are mutually incompatible, which means that at least one of the two independently plausible positions must be abandoned. The other approach to the problem is called compatibilism: the view that these two doctrines only appear incompatible with each other.

These descriptions of the two positions are rather rough, but they will do for the purposes of bringing to attention a curious puzzle that arises for proponents of an incompatibilist approach to the problem. The problem is that, as one might be inclined to see it, the way to vindicate free will on an incompatibilist program is to argue that (despite the apparent plausibility of determinism) determinism is actually false. Suppose for the sake of argument that one has successfully defended such an argument, and then reasons as follows:

1. Incompatibilism is true.
2. Determinism is false (ex hypothesi)
3. Therefore, the doctrine of free will is true.

A problem with this sort of argument is that the falsity of determinism doesn't vouchsafe free will. The falsity of determinism only gets you the following: that indeterminism is true. So in order to secure the doctrine of free will by arguing for the falsity of determinism, one would have to defend the following inference:

I: Indeterminism is true, therefore the doctrine of free will is true.

Problematically, though, a presupposition of acting with free will is that one controls one's own actions. One hardly acts freely if one's actions are, say, 'random' or 'spontaneously generated' as would be the case if indeterminism were true. So, it seems that (despite what might have been initially supposed), if indeterminism is true, we don't have free will.

However, this result implies an awkward position for the incompatibilist.

1. Incompatibilism is true.
2. Either determinism or indeterminism is true.
3. If determinism is true, the doctrine of free will is false (from 1)
4. If indeterminism is true, the doctrine of free will is false (given that we lack free will without control over our actions).
5. Therefore, the doctrine of free will is false.

Against this dilemma, is there any way to defend an incompatibilist approach to the problem of free will and nonetheless avoid the conclusion that we don't have free will?

Monday 10 October 2011

Transcendental Arguments

There are many and various arguments for the existence of God, some of which are easily classifiable, some of which are not so. Usually in order to facilitate performance under exam situations, introductions to the philosophy of religion group such argumentation into easily recognisable groups; but the problem with this is that the arguments lose their individuality, and readers often gloss over important argumentative steps, associating say one cosmological argument with another, and offering criticisms which are really not to the point.

One type of argumentation for the existence of God that I have recently defended (‘Aquinas’s Argument for the Existence of God in De Ente et Essentia, Cap. IV: An Interpretation and Defence’), is what could be called a transcendental argument. This argument performs a metaphysical analysis of entities and holds that such entities display certain characteristics that place them within a nexus of causal dependency. The argument goes on to hold that this nexus of dependency is not self-existing, though it is itself existing, and thus requires some foundational existential principle, which we call God.

It is not the details of this argument on which I want to focus (though if the posts take that trend, then so be it); what I want to focus on is the argument's originality. It argues from the presence of some particular thing to outlining the conditions for the possibility of that thing. Thus, given that x exists, what are the conditions for the possibility of x? In other words, what are those conditions without which a thing could not be? As a type of argumentation for God’s existence, this argument cannot be reduced to the traditional three: cosmological, ontological, and design; and thus I have dubbed it the transcendental argument, taking the term ‘transcendental’ from Kant’s use thereof.

For the purposes of this discussion, I have two questions that may serve to open up the debate: (i) is transcendental argumentation (given that x exists, what are the conditions for the possibility of x?) a valid argumentative procedure?; (ii) if we can discern the conditions for the possibility of a thing's existing, can we thence say that there are certain things or states of affairs that cannot exist?

Friday 7 October 2011

Friday Question: What should you do when you disagree?

Suppose you have just gone out to dinner with a good friend. Afterwards, the bill is presented and you and your friend (call him 'Chuck') both try to calculate 15% of the bill to leave as a tip. You finish calculating first and arrive at the belief that the tip should be £8.35. Chuck, shortly afterwards, tells you the tip should be £8.65. Suppose further that, prior to this disagreement, you and Chuck recognize each other to be of equal (and very good) mathematical ability and of all the same evidence on the issue at hand. You are, as philosophers in the epistemology of disagreement refer to it, epistemic peers on this particular matter.


What is the rational response to this fact of disagreement (with an epistemic peer?)


Consider two very different options:


(1) Hold your guns. The fact of disagreement with an epistemic peer does not rationally require you to revise your belief. You are epistemically justified in continuing to believe the tip should be £8.35 despite the fact that Chuck, your epistemic peer, disagrees with you.


(2) Split the difference. The fact of disagreement with an epistemic peer does rationally require you to revise your belief. In this case, given that you take it that you and Chuck are both equally likely to be right on the matter, you should give up your belief and withhold judgment about the amount of the tip.






Monday 3 October 2011

The Euthyphro Dilemma (Part 2)


Last week, our focus was on Divine Command Theory, which claims:
Divine Command Theory (DCT): an action is right if God commands it, wrong if God forbids it.
     We considered further a critical question Socrates (in Plato's Euthyphro dialogue) raised toward this sort of view. Call this critical question the Euthyphro Dilemma:
Euthyphro Dilemma: Is conduct right because God commands it, or does God command it because it is right?
     I alluded to the fact that this question frames a dilemma for proponents of DCT. Let's explore now the substance of the dilemma. It is, to stress, a 'dilemma' for the DCT proponent because--as we'll see--accepting either of the two options appears to make an endorsement of DCT problematic (for different reasons).
     Suppose a defender of DCT takes the first 'horn' of the dilemma and claims that conduct is right because God commands it. The problem with taking this horn is that it commits one to what appears to be an absurdity, the absurdity of recognizing that anything would be right, so long as God commanded it. As Peter Singer has put the point in his Practical Ethics, "if the gods had happened to approve of torture and disapprove of helping our neighbours, torture would be good and helping our neighbours bad" (Singer 1993: 3) But, as the argument goes, surely torture would not be right, whether God commanded it or otherwise.
     Given that, strictly speaking, the first horn of the dilemma allows for any conduct to be right so long as God commanded it, endorsing the first horn of the dilemma would have the problematic effect of making God's commandments morally arbitrary: anything he happened to command would be right, no matter what it was. Can proponents of DCT fare any better by taking the second horn and saying of right conduct that God commands it because it is right? This move dodges the arbitrariness objection that faces an endorsement of the first horn, but at a cost. The cost is that DCT, in taking the second horn, is at the same time admitting that what makes right conduct right is something other than God's will, a concession endorsers of DCT are typically unwilling to make. Peter Singer puts the two horns of the dilemma together nicely: 
     Some theists say that ethics cannot do without religion because the very meaning of “good” is nothing other than “what God approves”. Plato refuted a similar view more than two thousand years ago by arguing that if the gods approve of some actions it must be because those actions are good, in which case it cannot be the gods’ approval that makes them good. The alternative view makes God’s approval entirely arbitrary: if the gods had happened to approve of torture and disapprove of helping our neighbours, torture would be good and helping our neighbours bad. (Ibid., 3)
     Question: What is the best way for DCT to respond to the objections posed by the Euthyphro dilemma? Should DCT, on the basis of the Euthyphro dilemma, be rejected? If so, why? If not, why not? Another question for discussion: if the Euthyphro dilemma shows DCT to be untenable, how might a different sort of attempt to base morality on divine dictates avoid the problems the Euthyphro dilemma poses to endorsers of DCT?



Friday 30 September 2011

Friday Question: Is knowledge more valuable than mere true opinion?


Each Friday we will be posting a question e-mailed to us (northernirelandphilblog at gmail.com), and today's question has its roots in Plato's Meno. While much is explored in the Meno, one particularly interesting topic concerns the value of knowledge. In the Meno dialogue, Plato's progatonist Socrates makes an observation with some important implications: he tells Meno that while you can get to Larissa by knowing the way, you will get there no less by a mere guess that (luckily) turns out to be correct. This case is suggestive of a more general idea, which is that, from a purely practical point of view, it seems that lucky guesses are just as valuable as knowledge.

But is knowledge any more valuable for our practical purposes than mere true opinion? That's one question. If yes, then we must explain why (in light of the fact that the Larissa example suggests a negative answer to this question). If, persuaded by the Larissa example, we deny that knowledge has any practical value exceeding that of mere true belief, then how can this be reconciled with the widely-held view that knowledge is (in virtue of something) to be preferred to mere true opinion? Here a related question is germane: might knowledge be superior to mere true opinion in virtue of something other than what makes it something practically good to have?

Monday 26 September 2011

The Euthyphro Dilemma (Part One)

One aim of moral theories is to provide an account of right action. Such an account will specify the conditions under which a given action counts as morally prohibited, permissible or obligatory. One such moral theory that enjoys a rich historical precedent as well as a central place within the three great monotheistic religions--Judaism, Christianity and Islam--is called Divine Command Theory (DCT). According to Divine Command Theory, God is viewed as the creator of not only the material world and the humans that inhabit it, but equally as the creator of  the moral laws against which human conduct is morally evaluable. Accordingly, on the Divine Command Theory, an action is right if God commands it, wrong if God forbids it.

DCT has been considered an attractive view by (among others) those who want to ground the objectivity of morality in the face of contentions that what makes conduct right (or wrong) depends merely on sentiment or custom. The aim of this post however is to explore a particular objection to DCT, an objection that is among the oldest and most striking. The objection was raised famously by Plato in his dialogue The Euthyphro. In this dialogue, the protagonist Socrates critically reflects on DCT's core contention that an action's rightness (or wrongness) can be accounted for simply by appeal to what God commands. Socrates asks:

Is conduct right because God commands it, or does God command it because it is right?

This question takes the form of a dilemma: Either conduct is right because God commands it, or God commands it because it is right. Part of appreciating the force of Socrates' point is realizing that one cannot have it both ways.

Once the dilemma is recognized as a genuine one, though, philosophers have argued that taking either "horn" of the dilemma is problematic for a defender of Divine Command Theory. Thus, Euthyphro's Dilemma has often been discussed as motivating an objection to Divine Command Theory, and naturally, defenders of DCT have tried to maintain that DCT is compatible with an endorsement of either of the two horns of the dilemma.

At this point, we invite readers to weigh in with responses to Socrates' question, and to consider whether or why Divine Command Theory stands threatened by an endorsement of either horn of Socrates' dilemma. In Part Two of this post, we will outline some of the standard philosophical problems associated with endorsing DCT alongside either horn of Socrates' dilemma. But for now, we invite readers to engage directly with Socrates' famous question.


Sunday 25 September 2011

Welcome!

Welcome to Northern Ireland's community philosophy blog, administered by philosophers at Queen's University Belfast on behalf of the Belfast Branch of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. Our aim is to provide a forum for philosophical discussion and to promote philosophical dialogue in a way that is both casual and inclusive.  We will be posting here regularly and on a variety of philosophical topics which we aim to make accessible to a general readership. Though all are welcome to contribute to the blog, we encourage posters to strive to be clear, open-minded and respectful. We invite you to engage in discussion with us as well as to submit your own questions and/or blog discussion topics to northernirelandphilblog@gmail.com. Along with our regular posts, we will include each week one post that addresses a question received via e-mail. Thanks for visiting!