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).

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?

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 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.

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?

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.)