Tag: philosophy

Must progressives be so boring?

I’m going to make a bold prediction. Hillary Clinton will win the presidential election. I think we should move beyond this fact. Clinton is very competent but no revolutionary. She might do quite well at protecting some of the gains the left made during the Obama administration, but few are expecting her to significantly push the envelope of the progressive agenda in her first term. What will Clinton be able to achieve by 2020? Probably not much. There is almost no chance that she will be able to achieve (or even make substantial steps toward achieving) some of the bolder goals that are part of the Democratic platform, especially a single-payer health system and free higher education. Of course, perhaps those on the left simply need to work hard and bide their time.

However, those who think of themselves as “progressives” should also wonder whether they even know what the “envelope” looks like. Is it represented best by the policy views of Bernie Sanders. For a very long time Americans on the left have, rather reflexively I think, attempted to make an America in the political image of Europe; there is a spoken and unspoken principle of leftist thinking that Europe is a model society, more civilized and decent. European public policy is in many ways the culmination of a post-war welfare-state program, in which the community is tasked with taking care of all.

Those on the left lament the fact that the construction of the welfare state was never as successful in America, even with its unmatched wealth. The standard story (I take it) is that America is too steeped in conflict and corporate domination to be a fertile ground for an extensive welfare state; or perhaps Europe’s cleansing in the fires of WW2 showed it the way to righteous politics. Though perhaps it has more to do with the relative homogeneity of European countries that allowed generous welfare benefits to remain popular. Americans have a long tradition of despising each other, but this is a relatively new phenomenon in European countries that have thrived on consensus politics. Europe’s current internal struggles with immigration reveals that there might be something to this.

In any case, the ideal of the European welfare state is not transformative in the way progressivism was in the early 20th century, when the sort of abject poverty and powerlessness that characterized the lives of the vast majority of humans for most of human history was all but eliminated in the United States. And in the 1960s the American cultural revolution and civil rights movement did to social relations what the early progressive movement did for physical subsistence, dramatically changing how people thought about themselves and each other.

What I find rather remarkable is how immediately comprehensible the thoughts of ‘60s artists, thinkers, and writers are to us, in ways that those from the ‘50s are not; there is a certain foreignness (for us) to American culture before this time. We don’t often think about how important it is that (many) 18 year-olds today still understand and fully appreciate Bob Dylan or The Beatles, when this music was recorded half a century ago. Even Trump’s veiled racism is little different than Goldwater Republicanism. Truly, our economic aspirations are a century old and cultural aspirations are a half century old. The gadgets of the 21st century nip at the margins of our lived experience, but they have not transformed it.

What goals would be transformative enough to be worthy of the name “progressive”? I’m not sure. But I have a few ideas, and will express some of them between now and the election. I’ll start with an idea that originates, in some ways, in the right’s vision of a radically transformed society: a society of radical personal liberty in a free market.

In many ways the political right possesses the sort of new transformative vision of society that the left lacks. The sort of vision inspired by Milton Friedman and (less cogently) Ayn Rand is one in which the coercive powers of the state have been all but eliminated, and in their place exists a system of free markets and voluntary associations. This is the libertarian ideal. It takes the very old ideas of anarchy and provides a demonstration for why social order can be maintained even absent any sort of significant coercive regime. Its power then – and it really was a powerful idea that transformed conservative political thinking in the 1980s – is in its ability to show how freedom can be made compatible with complex economies and societies.

The reaction of the left, I think, has been largely uninspiring; it is typically argued that this is an unrealistic vision, and that markets will always need substantial government regulation for them to operate efficiently and in the common interest. I think this is true, but rather boring. In particular, it doesn’t get to the heart of the issue of whether the vision offered by the right is one that should inspire us at all. Is there something wrong with the vision, or is it just something we aren’t able to attain? The problem with the latter answer is that it leaves us wondering whether we simply aren’t doing enough the attain the goal. Perhaps we just need to privatize more social programs!

I think there is something basically wrong with the vision of a society composed entirely of free markets and voluntary associations, but I also think this ideal gives us an insight into what might be a progressive ideal. It at least shows us a problem about which we must ponder. The libertarian ideal takes humans to be fully capable of deciding how to act in the market and what voluntary associations to make; in fact, some versions of this ideal take a person’s preferences and values to be identified with the structure of her choices. According to that formulation, there is really no way in which a person can choose poorly in life. If a person chooses to smoke cigarettes, shoot-up heroin, or get serial pay-day loans then she is just “revealing” her preferences for those goods.

The progressive reaction to this ideal brings out an important foundation of progressive politics, and one that stands in tension with the existence of a free society. I think it can be represented by several claims:

  1. There are better and worse ways of living.
  2. At least some of the time, we are incapable of independently making good life choices (leading to a good life). And a substantial number of us are incapable of doing this most of the time.
  3.  We have obligations to care for others.
  4.  A necessary feature of a good life is the liberty to choose how to live one’s own life (personal autonomy).

Most libertarians would deny that the first three conditions are true, and even those who do not deny their truth think that society instantiating the first two conditions (and perhaps 3 as well) is not compatible with one that instantiates the last. In short, they think that any society respecting personal autonomy must ignore (1)-(3) when determining how to design its political institutions. I don’t think the above list would surprise most progressives, but its has important implications for the possible shape of society when put into the context of the 21st century.

The modern welfare state already presumes that (1) is true to some degree; the life of a starving person is worse than that of someone with enough food to eat, and this is why we spend money assuring that everyone has enough food to eat. However, this aspect of the welfare state might be supported by Libertarians as well as those on the left – the provision of cash payments (or vouchers) to the poor is a mainstay of right-wing welfare policy. However, many on the left also promote paternalistic policies, which promote certain ways of living and not just economic goods (like food and housing) that any way of life requires. Paternalism is especially obvious in policies that promote health care and safety; providing incentives for people to get yearly checkups, talk to their doctors about their weight or blood pressure, or wear seatbelts are all perfect examples of paternalistic policies supported by the left and (often) criticized by the right.

And here is where things become more radical, and where serious thought is necessary. Many of the social problems that we see today are due to how people choose (or are forced) to live, rather than their lack of basic necessities. And more importantly, some of the social problems on the horizon cannot be dealt with by the contemporary welfare state, even if benefits are very generous. For instance, automation has drastically reduced the market price of manual and repetitive labor. And AI threatens to reduce the price of even some complex labor. The high unemployment among non-college graduates has in part occurred because the price of manual labor in many sectors has been reduced below the minimum wage that allows workers to obtain a minimally decent lifestyle.

The ready solution to this problem has always been the retraining of these workers, thus increasing their productivity to above the minimum wage. But constraints on fluid intelligence limit the sorts of jobs workers can be retrained to do. It is entirely feasible (as Galbraith argued in the 1950s) that at some point in the future there will simply be no economic use (at a minimally decent wage) for large segments of the population. At some point it may even be more expensive to train those of average (or above average) intelligence to do complex tasks than it will be to develop and maintain a machine to do that same tasks. Of course, there might always be roles for high-level human developers and managers, but very few people are ever capable of being trained to perform those tasks. This leads us to a question that is currently facing some of the generous welfare states of the Europe today: can a life that is not economically productive be as good as one that is not?

In order to answer this question, Progressives must go beyond the 20th century goal of equalizing the consumption of the rich and the poor. It is likely that a life of pure consumption, without a meaningful contribution to society, is not a good life (though this is something that requires thought!). The government could always make positions for people to fill; this was a favorite strategy of the FDR administration. But today this would require the government to not only undertake tasks it might not otherwise undertake, but also undertake them in ways that are dramatically less efficient (utilizing more labor) than could be achieved on the free market.

It is true that the sort of public works projects that employed many during the Great Depression built much of value, but today those projects would certainly be accomplished far cheaper by finding already trained workers from the private sector. In a future in which even construction work is automated, substantial additional funds would have to be spent in order for such projects to employ significant numbers of people. In that case the government might even be able to give the unemployed higher levels consumption by using automation than if they had payed them to do work less efficiently.

This is all rather speculative, but it shows the sort of problem that progressive politics might face in the changing world, problems that I think progressives are in a position to answer. Importantly, I think the left is better able to provide answers than the right. For instance, according to the libertarian ideal if someone isn’t able to successfully compete in the market (meaning no one is willing to pay for their labor at some minimally decent price) then they must rely upon charity. But a society in which vast segments of working-age adults are charity cases baffles the mind; that is not a vision to work toward, but is rather a disaster to avoid.

I will return to this problem in a couple weeks. I admit that I don’t have many answers, but I think that the role of work in the lives of those in the rich world may be one of the defining issues of the 21st century, and progressives must have an answer.

However, in the next post I will ask another question that may be central to progressive politics in the 21st century: what is the role of surveillance and robotics in policing and security? In perhaps not more than 30 years there may exist technologies that will dramatically increase the monitoring and prevention of crimes. They could have live-changing benefits for people living in cities and neighborhoods that are not safe, but raise rather obvious questions about civil liberties. Would the use of, for instance, constant police drone patrols produce a world that was safe but unbearable? This is made more disturbing by the fact that such technologies would likely most often be deployed in minority-majority neighborhoods, increasing the risk of discrimination. Such surveillance techniques have the promise to eliminate much of the intolerable violence of American society, but at serious costs in privacy. Progressives should be conflicted about this prospect, but technological advances are not likely to give us the benefit of decades to deliberate about it.

A Psychological Interpretation of Hume’s Standard of Taste

In Hume’s “Of the Standard of Taste”1, we are presented with a sometimes confusing picture of the aesthetic world. On one hand, Hume is quite explicit in saying that aesthetic properties are dependent upon beliefs of aesthetic agents; they are parasitic on sentiment. However, Hume argues that there are nevertheless clear standards of taste, which dictate the correctness of our various aesthetic judgments. Here I wish to present a loose interpretation of Hume that takes the psychological nature of aesthetic judgments seriously. Following work by Jerrold Levinson, I claim that aesthetic standards can only be understood from the perspective of prediction; we want to have an aesthetic standard of taste so that we can predict which works will bring us the most aesthetic pleasure. Furthermore, if we consider this issue from such a perspective, the more troubling issues of Hume’s view fall away. Continue reading A Psychological Interpretation of Hume’s Standard of Taste

Social Justice and Transit Oriented Developments

As the automobile became the preferred method of travel in the United States during the 20th century, car oriented development became the dominant pattern of city design. Today it is extremely difficult or simply impossible to go about ones daily life without some reliance upon an automobile. Furthermore, in most areas of the country, the lack of one makes a person a second class citizen. For a variety of reasons, there has been a resurgence in the interest for mass-transit oriented developments (TODs). Proponents of this alternative method of city organization argue for its superiority over car oriented developments in efficiency, aesthetics, and livability (to name a few).1 Although there is something to be said for all of these reasons, here I will concentrate on an argument for TODs from the perspective of social justice. Typically arguments from social justice have been among the more controversial because they often involved some sort of redistribution of resources; in American politics it is often unclear how much the rich should be forced to give up in order to help the poor. I hope to bypass this issue by looking at a current public policy that seems to have wide-spread public approval, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and derive from it an argument for government sanctioned support of TODs. In section 1, I describe a number of public policies, including zoning, highway, and accessibility standards for the disabled and from these derive the moral basis for the government support of TODs. In section 2, I explain my argument in detail and address a number of initial concerns. Finally, in section 3, I address the most plausible objection to widespread TOD development – that gentrification could cause the poor to lose their homes. Continue reading Social Justice and Transit Oriented Developments

Activism and truth

I simply don’t trust activists. The reason for this is probably quite clear; activists have stopped searching for truth (whatever sort of thing that might be) and simply focus on how they can argue for some given view. Philosophers who deal with topics that interface directly with the world have the difficult task of straddling the line between simple neutrality and activism. Rhetorical skills are extremely important when dealing with those not familiar with a topic; too often clear, valid but dull arguments fall flat when posed to the general public, and this makes such illuminations of truth completely useless if one wants to make a difference. Some topics are simply too complicated to be comprehensible (all at once and quickly) and therefore need to be distilled down to more simplistic elements that might appeal to a general audience. I don’t want to make any big claim here about any of this, but I do want to elucidate the problem for the philosopher of practical problems.

So how do we stay neutral and yet be effective? It certainly requires good faith; we need to approach these issues with as much neutrality as possible and with truth as our goal. But I think this is often ignored. If we decide for some pre-reflective reason (or after some sort of preliminary reflection) that something is true then it is far to common for us to find cleaver ways to argue for that given view. We can simply feel that healthcare is a right or that urbanity is good without any deep understanding of why. Then it is quite easy to practice a little sophistry and make plausible arguments even though we might ignore a good deal of facts. Or we take facts that exist within some sort of complex context as simple (or straight forward) facts without qualification, even though most facts require a great deal of contextualization. I fear that most of the information you hear from activists is of this simplified sort and it seems obvious that this strategy likely leads to a great deal of deception and confusion.

But I (like most people) have social views that are not totally elucidate and vetted. Does such a high mandate for truth-seeking require me to sit on the sidelines until I am very sure that my views at least approach truth in some meaningful way? (of course I don’t require that we are absolutely sure of the truth, just reasonably so) I hope not; however, it seems as though the unthinking mode of politics (in which we never question our lower level assumptions about how to bring about good) would be in direct conflict with the truth-seeking (or modeling of regularities, if one is going to be difficult) of philosophers, scientists, and any other serious theorists.

Philosophy admissions advice – part 4 – I’ve sent off my applications; now what?

You wait. I recommend that you forget you ever applied to graduate school. If you get in somewhere, they will call you up or send you an email in late February – mid March. You don’t have to impulsively check their website or anything; if they admit you then they will let you know. If you insist on being obsessive about the entire process (like I was) then there is an entire community of like minded philosophy grad school hopefuls out there with whom you can share your misery.

The most common thing people obsess about is when there is admissions activity. In order to put this information in the public domain (schools don’t just announce to the entire world when they have contacted people) there is a admissions results page at a site called thegradcafe.com. Here people post when there are informed by schools that they have been accepted or rejected. Many people reason that if there are rejections posted, and you haven’t gotten one, then maybe the school will let you know very soon that you have been accepted. Conversely, if there are acceptances posted and you are still sitting with nothing, then you are shit out of luck. However, things are rarely so simple; often times schools send out rejections in waves, so even if you haven’t been rejected yet, yours might be coming in a few days (this happened to me at several schools). Some schools also don’t seem to inform everyone that they have been admitted in one day and at many schools being high on a waitlist gives you a very good chance of being admitted; so, one should not necessarily despair until a rejection is official. That said, I found that schools typically admitted and waitlisted people all at once and took their sweet time letting rejects know.  So, if you haven’t heard anything then you are probably out of luck.

There is also a livejournal site called whogotin, with a special section for philosophy. It seems that philosophy students use this site a lot more than all other subjects, so during the peak of admissions activity there is constant activity here. Whereas thegradcafe simply has a list of activity, whogotin is a discussion forum; so, things become a bit more interesting. It is probably best to just visit the site to get a good idea of what it is all about; you will certainly see what happens when otherwise reasonable people are stressed to the point where madness begins to set in.

On the more practical side, schools will start letting you know about your admissions status around from mid- February until about mid-March. If you haven’t heard from a school by the middle of March then this generally means you have been rejected but, of course, there are always some stragglers. You then have until April 15th to let them know if you are going to accept their admissions and funding offer; most people visit the schools they have been admitted to and many schools will help cover the costs of such a trip. However, things might get hairy if you have been admitted to a school but wait-listed at a school you would rather attend; this seems to be a common phenomenon and means that you might have to stay home sitting by your phone on the 15th in case you get a call with an offer from the more desirable school. It is also a good idea to be in contact with all the schools involved, so that everyone is aware of what is going on. And for the love of God, if you do get accepted to a school such that others you have been accepted at are no longer viable options for you, then withdraw from those other schools as soon as possible. Remember that REAL people are sitting on the waitlists at other schools biting their fingernails.

This is all I have to say about grad school admissions.  I hope it helps someone, though perhaps it won’t.  Oh well.

Philosophy admissions advice – part 3 – What makes a good application?

I don’t think my application did any miracles for me, so I’ll send you to Eric Schwitzgebel of UC Riverside who has composed a very helpful guide to philosophy graduate school applications. David Brink from UCSD has also prepared a similar (though shorter) guide. I’ll just throw in a few more suggestions, but the two above sources and your letter writers are probably a better bet…

  1. Do well on the GRE. I’m talking above a 1250 combined verbal and quantitative and ideally well above that. Bad scores will not completely doom your chances (I was just shy of 1200 and I got into a good program) but they will get you thrown out at many programs.  Also, I have heard that at many lower ranked departments, funding is only given to students who have high GRE scores. So, if you don’t do well, try again, and STUDY. That said, doing extremely well won’t help you nearly as much as putting more time into your writing sample.

  2. Make sure you make your writing sample very readable. This means that it should be well organized and clear; that is the best advice I got from my letter writers. People on admissions committees have to read a ton of these papers, so you should tell them everything you are doing o n the first page. Then divide the sample into different sections, so that they can jump to the meat of your argument before they decide to read it more carefully. Also, the paper has to be pretty much perfect; they are looking for any reason to throw your application out, so don’t give them one.

  3. Have a 2nd writing sample (probably in one of your area of interests outside of the area you wrote your main sample about) ready to send if it is requested.  I don’t think that it needs to be as good as your first sample, but certainly a revised A paper an undergrad course would be helpful.  In late February I got an email from Maryland asking me for a paper in philosophy of mind (my writing sample was in metaethics); I am lucky that I had something I could send.

  4. If your home department has a grad program, try to get into a philosophy grad course and get a letter from the instructor. I wasn’t able to do this and it probably would have helped; several people told me that this would be a very good idea.

My (perhaps) worthless advice for applying to philosphy PhD programs – part 1

I’m going to attempt to summarize the knowledge I have extracted from my PhD admissions experience. Just so you know my perspective, I was admitted to the University of Maryland – College Park with full funding for 5 years. That said, this was my only offer (not counting another wait-list that I withdrew from just before the deadline) and it only came after I had been on the wait-list for almost a month. Keep in mind that I consider myself rather lucky; I applied to a large group of schools and was only accepted at one, but many people were rejected by every school. From what I can gather, complete shutouts of applicants is quite common. So as you think about whether you want to apply to philosophy PhD programs, remember that the application process will probably be one of the largest undertakings you have completed so far in your life.

In the next few entries I’ll cover some topics that I had questions about when I started applying; I assume that these questions are pretty universal. I am by no means an authority (on anything), but the application process has certainly had an effect on me, and I think there is something I can add to the general knowledge base.  I’ll start out, in this entry, with the question of whether you should go to philosophy grad school at all.

Should I go – Is it really so bad?

It is common for professors of philosophy to tell those inquiring about grad school that if they could see themselves doing anything else other than philosophy then they should do that instead.  In fact, when I asked one of my professors for a letter of recommendation he attempted to convince me NOT to go into philosophy; I also had some interests in psychology and he thought that the prospects in that field were far better (after I had convinced him that I really did want to do philosophy he explained that he gave this “public service announcement” to every student who wanted a recommendation). I think that much of the pessimism about pursuing a career in philosophy is well grounded; the baseline job market for philosophers (not counting any momentary depressions due to the economy) is quite dismal (though the statistics on this are apparently a bit ambiguous) and most philosophy PhDs have to be ready to move to pretty much any location if they hope to secure a job as a professor. On top of this, fewer universities have serious research philosophy departments (those in which professors do more research than teaching) than those that have a great deal of science research, and therefore, most obtaining a PhD in philosophy should expect to teach far more than their counterparts in the sciences. But do these issues mean that students should only treat philosophy as a last resort – a profession they should only consider if nothing else could be fulfilling?

I think that this ‘last resort’ standard makes the prospective philosophy grad feel unwarranted desperation. Philosophers should have a wide variety of interests and abilities; how else are they supposed to write intelligently about the many topics with which philosophy interfaces? So, it seems odd that good philosophy students would have such narrow interests so that any other career would be totally unfulfilling. These sorts of thoughts came especially clear for me when I sat with no offers pretty late in the admissions season. I had to start thinking about ‘plan-b’, otherwise I would have no idea what to do if I was rejected from every place; I came up with several careers that might be interesting to do outside of philosophy. Of course, I might have hated these possible careers, but that is exactly the problem; it is extremely difficult to know your suitability for a career before starting it. So, why should one give up a potential career that seems interesting simply because they might like doing something else as well? If one can come out of the grad school experience without seriously harming other life goals (this is probably the key) then this doesn’t seem to be such a bad option.  Of course, given the job market, you should probably be able to accept grad school as having some sort of intrinsic goods.  Even if upon graduation you had to find a job outside of philosophy, you should be able to look at grad school itself as being a fulfilling experience.  If you can’t do this, then perhaps it would be best to find some other career.  And, if your goals are mostly monetary in nature then philosophy graduate school is almost certainly not for you.

I also recommend talking to philosophy grad students about their experiences in order to gauge whether professional philosophy is all it is cracked up to be. Do they seem happy with their lives? Do they end up with jobs? This will vary greatly based on the school; it seems that at some places students are extremely stressed and might do something else with their lives if given the chance, but at other places the students seem to be well rounded and happy individuals. This also seems to be the case of philosophy professors themselves; I’m not sure how the proportion of happy/unhappy people in philosophy compares with other professions but it doesn’t seem to be too different. I think that expectations probably play a large role as well; don’t expect to be a philosophical superstar making lots of money at a flashy institution, because you almost certainly won’t be.  However, take all this with a grain of salt, because I havn’t actually experienced grad school yet.  Talking to some grad students who have been there for a few years is probably a far better way of figuring whether you should go into philosophy.

Update about my real life

The last few months have been quite hectic, so I haven’t really updated this much.  There are a few coffee shop reviews that I have yet to write up, but those should be coming soon.  Also, I’m moving to the Washington D.C area by the end of summer where I’ll be starting in the philosophy PhD program at the University of Maryland.  So, the entire admissions process is over for me and I’m quite happy with how it turned out in the end.  However, the waiting process was probably the most stressful period in my life and I’m very glad for it to be over with!  I’ll probably post more about my experiences later; I did learn a few things as I went through this admissions cycle and perhaps it may be of some (limited) help to others.  And maybe I’ll have some thoughts about philosophy eventually…who knows.

Moral Seriousness and Ethical Contextualism – The writing sample

This is the writing sample I sent graduate schools; it is full of philosophy jargon that may make it a difficult read for many.  But I just put it out there, because it is something I wrote.

1. Introduction

One way to evaluate a metaethical view is to determine how it accommodates beliefs we have about the world. On the one hand we want our moral theory to be compatible with the extremely successful naturalistic ontology that is the dominant view of the objective world; however, it is also hard to deny that we have moral experiences of a certain sort that oftentimes seem to contradict naturalism. Mark Timmons in Morality without Foundations and Timmons with Terry Horgan in a number of later articles have proposed a metaethical theory that aims to satisfy both of these pressures. This view has changed names several times through the years but I will call it ‘ethical contextualism’, as this is how Timmons refers to it in Morality without Foundations, which most of this analysis is based upon. In this paper, I will not contest whether ethical contextualism is satisfactorily compatible with naturalism; as an irrealist view, it easily accommodates this. I also will not deny that the view properly accommodates moral experience as Timmons and Horgan have characterized it. However, in section 3, I contend that Timmons and Horgan do not properly address one important aspect of our moral experience; they fail to address our experience of taking morality seriously. This makes their view vulnerable to a plausibility argument that I present. Then, in section 4, I show that their explanation of moral seriousness does not coincide with our common conception of it. In section 5, I further demonstrate that Timmons and Horgan cannot simply jettison moral seriousness from their view without also conflicting with the prevalent notion that we can change our moral context in a reasoned manner. Finally, in section 6, I assert that ethical contextualism can only be made plausible if its proponents provide a detailed description of moral seriousness that is consistent with irrealism and also show how this affects the role of morality in our lives.

 

2. An overview of ethical contextualism

The version of ethical contextualism that Timmons and Horgan propose is entirely irrealist; it asserts that there are no moral properties and therefore moral statements are not descriptive. This can be contrasted with moral realism, which views moral statements as descriptions of properties in the objective world. Under moral realism, matters-of-fact in the world somehow set the truth-value of a moral statement. However, under moral irrealism the source of moral truth is not so easily explained because there are no direct ‘truth makers’ in the world. Some irrealists attempt to overcome this by reducing moral statements to non-normative descriptive ones. For instance, a statement such as “Abortion is wrong” may be reduced to something about the psychological state of the speaker (“I believe abortion is wrong”). However, along with this reduction comes an elimination of many of the features of moral experience that we take for granted. For example, moral statements have certain surface features that allow us to reason logically with them. If I say “Abortion is permissible” and my friend says “Abortion is impermissible,” typically we think of these as being two answers to the same question. We also think that they are contradictory because they are translated into the logical form of ‘A’ and ‘~A’ respectively. Under a reductive account, this is not the case; the statements are translated into “P1 thinks A” and “P2 thinks ~A,” and these two statements are not contradictory. At least on face value, this seems to change the standard way we experience our moral language. Timmons’s solution is non-descriptive and non-reductive, so moral statements are not transformed at all. Instead, the truth-value of a moral statement is set by its correct assertibility within a moral context. Notice that this is a rather radical solution, as it means that no aspect of a moral statement’s truth-value is set by the world. However, this has the potential to accommodate both our moral experience and naturalism. This gives ethical contextualism an advantage over standard realist and irrealist views that tend to only accommodate one or the other.

Under Timmons’s view, described in Morality without Foundations, the basic element of the moral world is the context. A moral context is the set of moral beliefs that we hold, some of which are more important in our moral reasoning than others. Timmons asserts that much of our moral reasoning is done from a morally ‘engaged’ perspective. This means that we are thinking and acting morally using the context as our basis and justification for moral truth. This process need not even be conscious for us; this is demonstrated by the direct nature that many of our moral perceptions and acts possess. For example, if you see a person being beaten in the street, it seems as if you see the wrongness of that situation directly; you do not need to contemplate the physical properties of the event in order to conclude that the action is wrong. Given your moral context, the normative properties of the act come automatically from the physical properties.

Furthermore, we are least aware of those moral beliefs that form the basic structure of our moral world. In a coherent moral network, all the other moral principles will be based upon these base principles. For example, there may be an individual who reasons morally from within context ‘A’ and another who does so in context ‘B’; imagine that ‘A’ has a hedonistic basic moral principle whereas ‘B’ has a basic principle that centers around the sanctity of human life. According to Timmons, all other moral principles need to be justified by these basic moral principles. So, in A it would likely be justified to kill an infant with a degenerative illness if his/her life will be one filled with constant pain, whereas this probably would not be justified in context B. Moral justification within a context works in this fashion: less basic moral principles receive their justification from the basic principles that characterize a moral context, though those basic moral principles do not require any sort of objective justification from facts outside of the context. Timmons contends that it is through this method of moral justification that moral statements within a context can have truth-values. This means that for moral statements reflecting derived (non-basic) principles, moral experience and practice can function just as if there were objective moral facts.

 

3. The argument from moral seriousness

The first part of my argument relies on what Timmons proposes is an advantage of ethical contextualism; to use his words, it “comport(s) with deeply embedded presumptions of ordinary moral discourse and practice” (Timmons 1999, 12). He further describes what he has in mind by giving several categories of discourse and practice. In summarized form, they are as follows (p. 159):

 

  1. There is a general form of our moral language. For instance, we oftentimes use logical constructions in moral language, refer to moral properties, and assert moral statements as if they are genuine.

  2. There is a certain moral phenomenology, so that we seem to experience moral facts as if they are in the world itself.

  3. There are ‘critical practices’ in morality; some moral statements seem genuinely true, and we feel as though moral progress is possible. Furthermore, there also seem to be genuine moral disagreements between moral agents.

  4. Moral discourse is oftentimes reason guided.

 

Timmons spends a great deal of time showing that a contextual irrealist view can accommodate all of these aspects of moral experience. I will not contest that he succeeds on this point. However, I wish to propose another aspect that I think Timmons has missed:

5.    When we carefully analyze our moral beliefs, we do not consider an (epistemologically) arbitrary basis for those beliefs to be acceptable.

This is another way of saying that we take our ethical views seriously. Note that this new feature is quite different from ones already mentioned by Timmons1, but it only becomes apparent when we do a more stringent analysis of our ethical beliefs. Features 1- 4 occur from a morally engaged perspective, which means that they are experienced when one reasons and acts morally from within a moral context. Even #4 is only possible from within a moral context; moral beliefs can only be justified by their agreement with base principles of the moral context. Because we do not normally concern ourselves with these principles, this sort of justification is typically adequate. This is obviously true when we make moral assessments in real time, such as when we see someone being beaten; the situation simply does not allow for a more time-consuming analysis. However, even when we are not confronted with an immediate moral situation, we still reason from within a certain context. When one asks whether abortion is wrong, typically the dialectic involves the competing moral prohibitions on killing and restrictions on autonomy. We rarely ask whether killing or autonomy are important morally themselves; the contexts in which we all morally reason already assume that they are. Timmons himself gives a good example of how moral reasoning is typically restricted to within the context (pp. 220-221). He describes a committee he was once a member of that was tasked with formulating an honor code for the university. The committee members needed to come to a consensus in a reasonable amount of time and produce a code that would be consistent with the general sensibilities of the university. Timmons argues that in order to accomplish this they needed to operate within the same (or at least a similar) moral context. Therefore, if a skeptic should appear in such a situation declaring that we have no good reasons to think that plagiarism is wrong, his sentiments are seen as a waste of time. He is questioning the context in which the discussion takes place and, according to Timmons’ irrealism, this means that nothing can be said to contradict him.

Timmons describes how the committee in his example did not take the skeptic seriously and the conversation was quickly moved away from the skeptic’s worries. I think this is a common reaction to such a moral detachment; there is very little one can say to someone who simply denies basic premises of one’s moral outlook. For example, even something as basic as, “it is good for a human to prosper (if nothing else will be harmed” can be denied by a stubborn skeptic. We will probably stop taking them seriously, but still the skepticism stands. Timmons can explain this fact quite sensibly; we cannot justify the moral context itself because outside it there simply are no moral truths. Under his view, moral language does not even make sense without a context. Thus, the statement “My moral context is true and moral context B is not true” is simply improperly asserted. His moral irrealism posits that there are no moral truth makers in the objective world, and his contextualism states that outside of a context we can’t even make moral claims. Therefore, there is nothing else to say about these extra-contextual moral assertions.

Regardless of Timmons’ difficulty in accommodating it, #5 seems like a very compelling statement. Any successful moral theory should be able to supply the skeptic with an answer to the question of why we hold certain beliefs. It seems that when we look at our moral context from a detached perspective, we seek to make our beliefs non-arbitrary in an epistemic sense because it is not enough that our context is merely internally consistent. This is why we typically take moral truth seriously, just as we take truth about the world seriously. I will argue that because #5 is a compelling feature of moral experience, then any view that can accommodate it is more compelling than one that cannot if all other aspects of the views are equal. Furthermore, a realist version of contextualism could be this competing view; as Timmons describes it, realist contextualism does not differ from the irrealist version in how it explains the surface features of our within-context moral discourse (Timmons 1999, 124-125). However, it posits that our moral semantic norms conspire with the facts in the world to yield correct assertibility of moral statements. This means that, unlike irrealism, basic moral principles have objective justification outside of a given context; they are justified by the fact that they describe moral properties in the world. In this way, contextual realism is able to accommodate #5. With this dichotomy in mind, what I call ‘The argument from moral seriousness’ follows:

 

P1) If metaethical view V1 does not accommodate an aspect M of our moral experience that view V2 does, then (all other things being equal)2 V2 is more plausible than V1.

 

P2) Irrealist contextualism does not accommodate #5.

 

P3) Realist contextualism does accommodate #5.

 

P4) #5 is an aspect of our moral experience.

 

C) Realist contextualism (all other things being equal) is more plausible than irrealist contextualism.

 

P1 seems apparent; if we do not have to make any sacrifices, then accommodating an aspect of our moral experience is desirable. P2, P3, and P4 simply follow from my treatment of these topics above; at least on the face of it, they seem true. Timmons characterizes his contextualist view as one that can accommodate our moral experience even while being irrealist; however, if this argument succeeds then irrealist contextualism does not seem to be the optimum solution that Timmons takes it to be. In the next section I present a response to this sort of argument that Horgan and Timmons have already suggested.

 

4. An irrealist response to the argument from moral seriousness:

In a recent article, Horgan and Timmons preempt the issue of moral seriousness. They give the following suggestion (emphasis is theirs):

 

…we think that the sort of challenge being posed is best construed as a moral challenge: why ought people to take their moral views seriously? And the appropriate response is to give moral reasons – reasons that, for instance, will likely appeal to the important role that morality plays in people’s lives. Such moral reasons are not hard to find. And here again, our understanding of the challenge is to take it as appropriately dealt with from within an engaged moral outlook. (Horgan and Timmons 2006a, 287)

 

They see the problem of moral seriousness as just another moral question that can be treated from within the moral context. For instance, if we have a base principle under which psychological well-being is valued, it would be considered good to take morality seriously if it has psychological benefits. Thus, they assert that psychologically pragmatic reasons are sufficient to fulfill the requirement for moral seriousness if those types of goals are valued within the moral context. This directly attacks P2 of my argument from moral seriousness. However, Horgan and Timmons can only claim this because they interpret ‘arbitrary’ from #5 (in section 3) to include both epistemic and pragmatic arbitrariness.

I do not believe that the need for moral seriousness expressed in #5 can be satisfied by an appeal to pragmatic reasons to take morality seriously. I contend that the natural interpretation of ‘arbitrary’ in this case should be epistemic and not pragmatic. To clarify how the ambiguity of ‘arbitrary’ can cause us to have different interpretations of #5, let us consider the following question:

Why should I believe that I will survive my illness?

I take this sentence to be similar to the question we ask about moral seriousness, and there are at least two interpretations3. The first is a pragmatic interpretation:

P: In what way is it helpful to my health for me to believe that I will survive my illness?

There may be good psychological and physical effects from my belief that I will survive, even though my actual survival may be unlikely. This is how Horgan and Timmons interpret moral seriousness; regardless of the lack of epistemic reasons for me to take my moral beliefs seriously, it is advantageous for me to do so because of the important role morality plays in my life. The other interpretation is an epistemic one:

E: What good evidence is there for me to believe that I will survive my illness?

This is entirely based on the likelihood that ‘I will survive’ is true. We may look at medical tests and then use past outcomes to make a prediction of survival. In the medical situation either P or E seems acceptable. However, I do not see the same ambiguity in our intuitions about moral seriousness. It seems rather clear that an interpretation like E is closer to what we ask when we question whether we should take morality seriously. Intuitively, the pragmatic effects of not taking morality seriously may be a concern, but our primary concern is epistemic in nature.

Although the preference for the epistemic view of moral seriousness is based upon one’s intuition, an example of a contextual system that exhibits pragmatic seriousness without epistemic seriousness should bolster this. The fact that in the United States we drive on the right side of the road is a perfect example of mere convention with a great deal of practical seriousness. It is extremely beneficial for someone to obey this convention when in the United States; in fact, it is so serious that disobeying this rule could lead to a very early death. If we had never known about the way motorists drive in England, we might even be tempted to think that we somehow have epistemologically objective reasons to drive on the right side. However, even though we have very good practical reasons to obey the applicable traffic laws when we are in a certain country, we realize that there is not reason to think that one side of the road is more appropriate for driving than the other. ‘Side of driving’ is in some way a base principle because other aspects of our driving context (which side the steering wheel is on or the way the signs are facing) are based upon it. It seems implausible that morality works in this pragmatic way. In fact, this example suggests that if moral seriousness is merely a practical matter then moral contexts are not very different from conventions. It is unlikely Timmons and Horgan want to claim this4; therefore, their argument against P2 fails.

 

5. Context switching:

I also foresee an argument against P4. Horgan and Timmons may make the claim that moral feature #5 (moral seriousness) from above, unlike like features #1-4, is not a vital aspect of our moral experience. This is, of course, a matter of intuition. However, in order to overcome this assertion I will offer a concrete example of a moral activity that only seems possible if there is moral seriousness as I have described it. If Horgan and Timmons want to jettison #5 from the list of moral experience types, then they will also have to claim that reasoned moral context switching never occurs; this will make their objection implausible to most.

It seems apparent that there are cases in which one switches moral contexts. This means that the base principles that guide moral reasoning and action are changed and, consequently, the set of moral statements that are correctly assertible also changes. Within pragmatic contexts, such as the traffic example I use above, swapping contexts is a rather simple matter. Of course, it may actually be difficult to ‘learn’ a new context (we can imagine the difficulty that the typical American driver experiences when in the UK for the first time), but the goal of switching contexts is easily chosen. We see that, for the sake of some other valued goal, it is advantageous for us to switch from our current context to another and this is reason enough to do so.

I do not think this is what happens when we think about switching our moral context. When we switch our moral context, it is most natural for us to do so because we have reason to think that our current context is wrong in an epistemic sense. There may be pragmatic reasons for changing the outward behavior associated with morality; we, for example, may find ourselves isolated in a conservative atmosphere by our declarations that there is nothing wrong with promiscuous behavior. However, this is merely a change of a behavioral context. It is far rarer for us to take pragmatic reasons into consideration when we switch our moral context itself. We are more likely to hide our moral feelings in order to conform to our societal context without making any change to our moral context. I find it uncontroversial that people sometimes take themselves to change their moral context for epistemologically non-arbitrary reasons. This is only possible if there are epistemologically non-arbitrary bases to our moral contexts in the first place, and this is exactly what #5 states. Therefore, the irrealist will have to attack context switching in order to show that #5 is not an aspect of our moral experience.

I only see one option open to Horgan and Timmons at this point; they must simply bite the bullet and continue to deny P4. However, because the possibility of context switching follows from moral seriousness, they must deny that context switching (as we normally conceive of it) exists as well. This amounts to a reduction of reasons for context switching to non-epistemic ones. If we are willing to put aside the immediate intuitions we may have against such a reduction, this view does have some appeal. It may be the case that most of the shifts in moral belief can be accounted for by evoking our ability, under the contextualist view, of changing higher-order beliefs while maintaining base beliefs. When someone makes a radical, and supposedly well reasoned, change of many moral beliefs (such as through religious conversion) it is not apparent that the person’s base beliefs, that define the context, have changed. For example, one may have ascribed to the base moral principle, “It is good to do whatever God wills” before the conversion; thus, even a radical conversion may only represent the formation of new higher-level moral beliefs based upon changing beliefs about the world (mainly God’s will). Given that most of our base beliefs are non-salient in everyday ethical thinking, it is quite conceivable that we could mistake a higher-order belief for a base belief. Consequently, many of the cases that we think represent true context switching may only represent dramatic changes in higher-order beliefs. If most dramatic moral change is like this, then context switching may be only a minor problem for the irrealist. Furthermore, true context switching may not be guided by reason. People may switch contexts because of emotional or psychological pressures and not because of the sort of justifiable reasons used when within the context. This would be a reduction of our seemingly epistemic reasons for context switching to objective ones.

 

6. Conclusion

If Horgan and Timmons reduce moral seriousness and context switching, as I believe they must in order to make their view plausible, then this would have a dramatic effect on one’s attitude toward morality. For example, we are typically committed to our moral principles, and this is derived from the fact that we take morality epistemologically seriously. When we are involved in a serious disagreement, we believe that we are arguing for what is true and that our opponent is arguing for something that is false. When this epistemic justification is not present (if, for instance, I am arguing that the American driving context is superior to that of the British) the seriousness with which one takes the argument decreases dramatically. Horgan and Timmons do not think that this must be the case; they claim that the usefulness of moral commitment and seriousness gives us enough reason to think that we should take morality seriously just as if we had epistemic justification. I clarified the prominent intuition about this enough in section 4 to show that epistemic moral seriousness is a prerequisite for us to have an attitude of seriousness toward our moral beliefs. Therefore, I do not see how one could naturally take moral commitments seriously as Horgan and Timmons desire; we may wish to take morality seriously, but we simply will not if the proper epistemic justification is absent. This means that, under their view, there is no reason to have more commitment to our moral context than to our country’s context of traffic rules. Whether it is desirable or not to take moral claims seriously, it follows from irrealist contextualism that we have no adequate reasons to treat them so.

Although the loss of moral seriousness may seem to make irrealist contextualism automatically implausible, I do not think that this is the case. Rather, it is important to weigh this loss against the advantage that an irrealist view has of easily accommodating naturalism. It may be helpful to look toward philosophy of mind where this strategy has been implemented with some success. For example, it is commonplace for mental properties to be reduced to natural properties in order to maintain compatibility with naturalism. Oftentimes this results in the falsification of common sense notions about the mind; however, such a reductionist theory is typically thought of as plausible. I don’t see any reason why this basic idea cannot apply to metaethics as well. If naturalism is important enough to accommodate, and realist metaethical theories do not accomplish this5 then, rather than giving up naturalism, it may be worth reconsidering some of our common sense ideas about moral experience. With this in mind, it is rather simple to re-characterize the act of moral context switching and the attitude of moral seriousness in ways compatible with irrealism. Horgan and Timmons could say that people change contexts and take contexts seriously because of psychological and sociological matters-of -fact. This means that moral facts in the world do not inform us about the moral context we should adopt, but rather natural properties explain which ones we do adopt. Notice that the latter claim is causal and not normative. For example, for someone living in a puritanical society, the properties of the society and the individual’s relation to them are both natural properties that explain the persons view towards an act labeled ‘immoral’ by that society. This does not mean that a society alone sets moral contexts (a person may, in fact, react against the wishes of a society), but only that the natural matters-of-fact in the world do so.

The difficult task for Horgan and Timmons is to address how their view alters the basic way we view moral reality. The fact that moral contexts are held and adopted for epistemologically arbitrary reasons may make some fear that irrealism will lead to moral nihilism. Timmons and Horgan briefly address this fear (Horgan & Timmons, 2006b) but their response is merely an echo of the quote in section 4; they think that moral seriousness can be addressed from within the moral context. I think that this reply misses the essence of the fear; the lack of epistemological moral seriousness is a problem because it puts into question the role of morality in our lives. Typically, we relate to moral values as we do to natural facts; we ask what is right and wrong just as we ask what is true or false. Irrealism invalidates this way of relating to morality, but proponents of irrealist contextualism have not made a substantial enough effort to replace this common sense notion with something more compatible with their view. It is true that irrealist contextualism explains our moral life when we reason from within a moral context, but this is not enough. There needs to be a more complete explanation of what happens when we reason from a detached perspective. Although I remain hopeful that such an analysis can be completed in the future, irrealist contextualism does not currently offer this explanation and therefore remains inadequate.

 

 

References

Gibbard, Allan. 1992. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Horgan, Terry, and Mark Timmons. 2006a. Cognitivist Expressivism. In Metaethics After Moore, ed. Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons, 255-298. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

—- —- 2006b. Expressivism, Yes! Relativism, No! In Oxford Studies in Metaethics, ed. Russ Shafer-Landau, 73-98. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Timmons, Mark. 1999. Morality without Foundations: A Defense of Ethical Contextualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Notes

1Timmons does mention moral seriousness in Morality without Foundations (170) but the scope of what this means is different for him than for myself. He is only concerned with how moral beliefs appear to be important to us; he states that because of this importance, we are unlikely to accept the moral views of others even if they also have internally consistent moral systems. I think that #5, as I describe it above, also leads to us taking morality seriously in the manner Timmons mentions. However, my version gives a reason for why morality is important to us and therefore it seems more basic than Timmons’ view.

2Given that many arguments for irrealism concentrate on the implausibility of realism, the irrealist will certainly not think that all things are equal between realism and irrealism. However, I want to determine whether irrealist contextualism is more plausible than the realist variety assuming that both views are equal on other fronts. It is far less satisfying to declare irrealist contextualism plausible simply because its major competitor fails for other reasons.

3Allan Gibbard (1992, 37) addresses a similar dichotomy between the rationality and desirability of a belief.

4I quickly dismiss the option of viewing moral contexts as mere conventions because I take it to be a view most metaethicists wish to avoid. Regardless, it seems as though Horgan and Timmons’ epistemologically unjustified moral contexts are quite similar to systems of conventions. Although it is true that moral contexts likely arise organically from environmental and social causes (at least according to an irrealist) whereas conventions (such as traffic laws) seem to be developed more intentionally, it is unclear whether this represents an essential difference. After all, conventions are not typically formed in a vacuum; for example, there are cultural and environmental pressures influencing which traffic conventions will be formed. Also, it is conceivable that some elements of moral systems are the result of intentional actions; the importance of marriage, for instance, may be the result of people intending to control how property is inherited. If we find that the moral context/convention distinction is not essential then we must consider how one should relate to morality as a convention. I am not sure how one would do this, but I don’t see any prima facie reason to avoid this line of reasoning altogether. However, this would not overcome my argument from moral seriousness because a conventionalist view of morality by definition precludes epistemological seriousness. This effectively rejects P4 of my argument because it rejects the importance of moral seriousness in our moral experience; I deal with this sort of objection in section 5.

5It is, of course, not clear that realism fails to accommodate naturalism. However, for the purposes of my analysis I have assumed that this is the case.

Architecture is a social science

I have been reading quite a bit lately about how we could design our world to better suit the needs of people. One major debate I have come across is whether Architecture is a form of art. It seems that many architects think of themselves as artists; some of the best are known for the artistry and the revolutionary nature of the structures they design. For example, Frank Lloyd Wright is well respected mainly because of the aesthetic qualities of his structures in and of themselves. People look at the pictures of Wright’s buildings (most of them homes) and see them as works of art; however, we don’t often consider whether they are pleasant places in which to live. It is also interesting to look at the sort of projects that are deemed noteworthy by the architectural community at large, and more importantly how they speak about them. Perusing most publications will reveal that artistically bold designs are the most respected, and much of the debate about their merits happens on this artistic level; there is comparatively little interest given to how these buildings are used or how they affect the people who rely on them.

I think that we should not look at architecture as an art; rather we should consider it to be a science. First, I should probably say that this is not a new idea (J. H. Crawford has said similar things), and also that I’m not making any statement about what architecture currently is (I’m not an architect, so I think it would be odd for me to define the field). However, it seems that the clients of architects (the people who actually live and work in the buildings) would be far better served if the purpose of the profession was to design buildings and living areas that were both useful and psychologically advantageous to the users. If we concern ourselves with these sorts of issues, and leave the more contestable debates about artistic merit behind, then architecture becomes empirical. We can then decide with reasonable conclusiveness which sort of buildings and environments make people happier and allow them to go about their lives most efficiently. Of course, we need to first decide what sort of effects we want buildings to have on people and also the relative weights we should give to the concerns of those who occupy them as apposed to those people for which the building is simply part of the environment. But it seems to me that these are both solvable issues, and once we answered these sorts of questions a systematic description of the properties of ‘good’ buildings is possible. This process, of discovering which sorts of buildings produce positive outcomes for people and then designing these buildings, should be the purpose of architecture.

I don’t find the above process to be all that insurmountable; after all, most of us can discern places we enjoy being around and living in from those that we don’t like. All that architects need to do is take these feelings and systematize their study. Of course, these feelings are culturally relativistic (people in Wisconsin might not be made happy by the sort of architecture that someone in Iran will prefer), however, I would be very surprised if those within cultures had drastically different reactions to many architectural types. If such commonalities can be found, the quality of a great many lives might be drastically increased.