The Ethical Werewolf

21st Century Monads: Achiever!

2012-01-24T07:33:00.007-05:00

I'm on the cover of the Monads' latest single! [Update] Here's their page and the song!

The second person

2012-01-22T06:02:00.002-05:00

I have a tendency to interpret "you" in song lyrics as referring to myself. This can be unpleasant when I listen to punk rock and wonder why the singer is so mad at me, but it's fun when I listen to religious music and am told that I redeemed the world.

The ends of introductions

2012-01-09T19:48:00.001-05:00

Academic book introductions typically end by thanking the author's devoted and caring spouse. Just once I want to see "And finally, I'd like to thank Jack, Rusty, Susan, and Brett, the three boyfriends and one girlfriend I had and lost during the writing of this book. Though I didn't spend enough time with them because I was working too hard, their senses of humor, good cooking (except Rusty), and skill in bed (mmmm, Susan) won't be forgotten."

It'd make quite a conference nametag too

2011-12-27T14:50:00.002-05:00

As the APA begins, I remember how I felt going on the market 4 years ago. What if I didn't get a philosophy job and had to work in fast food, but my R&R went through and the Philosophical Review asked for my institutional affiliation? Would I list it as "Burger King"? Thanks to NUS, it didn't come to that.

51 talks, 6 months

2011-12-27T01:40:00.008-05:00

It's been an amazing six months. Thanks to the generosity of the National University of Singapore and a bunch of wonderful people at philosophy departments around the world, I've given 51 talks in six months -- 42 in the USA this semester, and 9 in Australasia during the middle of the year. (That includes workshops on my papers, an invited guest lecture for a class, and a mystery event that turned out to be a 3-hour Q&A on my defense of utilitarianism.) I'm home with the family in San Francisco right now, polishing up the papers and sending them off. I'm also trying to get lots of exercise so that my pants will fit properly again after all the delicious dinners people fed me.

I was really impressed with how welcoming people were. My advice to any junior faculty person who would like to give a talk and has their own funding is to go ahead and ask! Especially at smaller departments that don't have that active a colloquium schedule, since they'll be very appreciative and up for hanging out with their visitor. I had great conversations with philosophers at places I didn't know much about before like the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, DePauw, IUPUI, Salem State, and the University of Portland. I had a good time talking with the philosophers at Boise State, who asked me to give a public lecture on Nietzsche (50+ people came!) as well as a research talk.

Oh, and the best accommodations I had were at FSU, where they put me up in a former university president's apartment that you could get to by putting a key in a campus elevator to make it go to a secret floor. Sometimes you feel like a rock star.

I mostly did the colder parts of the country in early fall and the warmer parts of the country when winter struck. Not only did this give me better weather, it let me use one set of clothes in all climates. The smaller amount of clothing meant I could fly carry-on, which helped with scheduling because I could get out of the airport faster. The big hassle was all the logistics -- having to figure out lots of intercity transit stuff to figure out where I could go before I could even ask departments whether they wanted me to come by got pretty tricky. But everything got figured out and I didn't miss a talk (thanks in part to nice people at Wayne State and Alabama who accommodated my train delays).

Writing on the road went really well. I'm a lot better at getting stuff done the morning of the talk on an airplane wedged between two chubby businessmen than I am with no deadlines ahead of me in my office. The office makes me procrastinate; having to give a talk in a few hours makes me write. Of the 10 papers I presented on this tour, 7 are under review now (3 are R&Rs which are now back to the journals) and I should be able to finish up 2 of the remaining 3 by March. I'll be setting up a proper website to house my draft papers in the next week or two.

It looks like I'll be on the road again from late April to July when this semester ends, as well as in the spring semester of 2013. My department head is great and we've worked out a deal where I do some extra teaching in exchange for my taking spring 2013 off. I was mostly in the Midwest and East Coast this time, so I should try to visit California and the Southwest when it's colder, or Canada when it's warmer. If you'd like to have me come by, send me an email!

"The Humean Theory of Practical Irrationality" accepted by JESP

2011-11-03T00:58:00.005-04:00

I'm proud to say that "The Humean Theory of Practical Irrationality" has been accepted by the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. Here's an abstract:

Christine Korsgaard has argued that Humean views about action and practical rationality jointly imply the impossibility of irrational action. According to the Humean theory of action, agents do what maximizes expected desire-satisfaction. According to the Humean theory of rationality, it is rational for agents to do what maximizes expected desire-satisfaction. Thus Humeans are committed to the impossibility of practical irrationality – an unacceptable consequence.

I respond by developing Humean views to explain how we can act irrationally. Humeans about action should consider the immediate motivational forces produced by an agent's desires. Humeans about rationality should consider the agent's dispositional desire strengths. When (for example) vivid sensory or imaginative experiences of desired things cause some of our desires to produce motivational force disproportional to their dispositional strength, we may act in ways that do not maximize expected desire- satisfaction, thus acting irrationally. I argue that this way of developing Humean views is true to the best reasons for holding them.

I submitted to JESP before the other ethics journals in its class -- the Journal of Value Inquiry, the Journal of Ethics, the Journal of Moral Philosophy, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice -- because it's open source.

Just sent off another R&R today, and I hope I have another happy post like this to write soon...

[Update] And it's up! Online journals are fast. Time between acceptance and publication was under a month.

They cost 10 coins

2011-10-29T07:56:00.006-04:00

I'd like to carry my laptop in something that would give people justified true beliefs that a laptop was in there, but keep them from knowing. It'd be a Gettier case.

Platonic love

2011-10-18T14:21:00.002-04:00

In a Platonic relationship, you treat your partner like an abstract object.

Grueling pace and generous rations

2011-09-16T21:15:00.002-04:00

I took a long walk to the University of Portland for my talk yesterday, and near the end I came upon the Willamette River Valley. I was happy that I didn't die of dysentery on the way, and I knew that if I'd shot a bison I couldn't have carried more than 100 lbs of it back with me.

I go everywhere and give talks

2011-08-10T21:03:00.059-04:00

Thanks to the generosity of the National University of Singapore, I've got a semester of leave with which to travel the USA giving talks and a nice travel grant to pay for it. So I'm going to travel the country giving talks and meet all the philosophers I can!

Here's the schedule at present -- I'll update it as necessary. More invitations are definitely welcome, especially if I'm passing through your part of the country.

Aug 26 Boise State Public Lecture - Zarathustra's Metaethics

Aug 27 Boise State - The Gap Between Thought and Ought

Aug 29 Tennessee - Ethical Reductionism

Sep 2 Georgetown - The Desire-Belief Account of Intending Explains Everything

Sep 6 Michigan Ethics Discussion Group - The Epistemic Argument for Hedonism

Sep 8 Wayne State - The Desire-Belief Account of Intending Explains Everything

Sep 9 Michigan State - Unequal Vividness and Double Effect

Sep 12 Northern Illinois - Emotional Perception of Morality

Sep 13 Illinois at Chicago - Unequal Vividness and Double Effect

Sep 15 University of Portland - Zarathustra's Metaethics

Sep 20 Puget Sound - Ethical Reductionism

Sep 22 WUSTL - The Epistemic Argument for Hedonism

Sep 23 UMSL - The Desire-Belief Account of Intending Explains Everything

Sep 26 Illinois State - The Gap Between Thought and Ought

Sep 28 IUPUI - God, Fine-Tuning, and Psychophysical Laws

Sep 29 DePauw - Zarathustra's Metaethics

Sep 30 Cincinnati - Ethical Reductionism

Oct 3 Princeton Normative Workshop - The Desire-Belief Account of Intending Explains Everything

Oct 4 Rutgers guest lecture for Andy Egan's philosophy of food class

Oct 5 Maryland - The Desire-Belief Account of Intending Explains Everything

Oct 7 Syracuse - Fine-Tuning and Psychophysical Laws

Oct 11 Yale Moral Philosophy Group - The Epistemic Argument for Hedonism

Oct 14 Tufts - Emotional Perception of Morality

Oct 17 Salem State - Belief and Imagination: Against the Norm Theory

Oct 21 Delaware - The Desire-Belief Account of Intending Explains Everything

Oct 23 UNC Metaethics Group - Ethical Reductionism

Oct 28 Florida State - The Desire-Belief Account of Intending Explains Everything

Oct 31 Florida - Ethical Reductionism

Nov 4 South Florida - Zarathustra's Metaethics

Nov 8 Miami - Zarathustra's Metaethics

Nov 9 UAB - God, Fine-Tuning and Psychophysical Laws

Nov 10 Alabama - The Epistemic Argument for Hedonism

Nov 14 Houston - Ethical Reductionism

Nov 15 Arkansas at Little Rock - The Epistemic Argument for Hedonism

Nov 16 University of Central Arkansas - The Epistemic Argument for Hedonism

Nov 17 SMU - Ethical Reductionism

Nov 18 Texas - Ethical Reductionism

Nov 28 Kansas State - Emotional Perception of Morality

Dec 1 Kansas - Zarathustra's Metaethics

Dec 2 Oklahoma - Desire, Action, and Pleasure

Dec 4 UMKC Philosophy Squares

Dec 9 Bowling Green - The Epistemic Argument for Hedonism

Total: 42

R&Rs R us

2011-08-10T18:47:00.005-04:00

Just got my 3rd revise and resubmit of the year! That makes it R&R&R&R&R&R, I guess.

I still need to send back the first one, but it had 9 pages of very good comments and I realized I had to rewrite a lot of the paper. The second and third ones don't require quite as much revision. It's left me feeling a bit like Buridan's ass about which one to work on, but it's time to just go on ahead and gobble up one of the three bales of hay.

Philosophy Down Under

2011-07-25T07:42:00.003-04:00

As you can see, I'm having an awesome time doing philosophy Down Under.

Okay, the picture at right depicts me dancing at a karaoke bar, but in my defense there are no less than three leading lights of the discipline (Daniel Nolan, a delighted Amie Thomasson, and Alan Hajek) behind me. This was a few weeks ago at the Australasian Association of Philosophy conference in Dunedin NZ.

After two great conferences in Auckland, I came down to Tasmania last week. Tomorrow I go up to Melbourne for two talks, and then to Brisbane. Then I return to Singapore, and before long the big lecture tour in the States will begin.

Berlin review of Pippin's Nietzsche

2011-06-30T05:35:00.004-04:00

Anyone who took interest in my NDPR review of Robert Pippin's Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy back in September might be interested in another review by Kristóf Fenyvesi at the Berlin Review of Books. Fenyvesi is better acquainted with Pippin's recent work than I am. I agree with many points he makes about the place of psychology in the Nietzsche secondary literature, especially as applied to Pippin's book.

Philosophy of race

2011-06-30T04:06:00.000-04:00

I wonder how many NASCAR fans have gotten interested in Critical Race Theory, only to discover that it wasn't what they expected.

Best call for papers ever

2011-06-22T06:10:00.003-04:00

Just got this email from the A-phil list:

Call for papers:
The History and Philosophy of Astrobiology

A conference on the history and philosophy of astrobiology will be held on Tycho Brahe’s island Ven, Sweden, September 27–28, 2011. The conference is arranged by the astrobiology research theme ”Astrobiology: Past, Present, and Future” at the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies, Lund University. Registration and submission of abstracts is open until July 15th, 2011.

The two-day symposium will explore:
• The history of astrobiology from antiquity to the present, concerning its theories, methods, instrumentation, organization, and its interaction with society and popular culture.
• The philosophy of astrobiology, including for instance ethics, epistemology, theory of science, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, and cognitive science.

A conference on astrobiology. On an island. In (southern) Sweden (in the early fall). And did we mention that Tycho Brahe built observatories on the island? Whose awesome idea was this?

If this is your favorite philosophy blog, you have goofy taste in philosophy blogs

2011-06-15T00:56:00.006-04:00

I'm flattered and slightly embarrassed to be included in a 'Favorite Philosophy Blogs' poll. It's against the rules to link, so I won't. While I appreciate votes for me, it's pretty obvious that lots of other blogs have content superior to my silly puns.

Probably the best thing I've put up this year is a puzzle about butts based on Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back."

Modal logic thought of the day

2011-06-06T22:29:00.001-04:00

Boxes are made of would.

Australasian Talk Schedule

2011-05-26T15:38:00.011-04:00

About a month from now, I'll be starting my travels around the world, presenting papers and having all kinds of fun with philosophers. Here's the itinerary for the Australasian phase. I'll fill it out further once I get in contact with various departments about which paper they'd like to hear:

June 27-28, Global Themes in Ethical Naturalism, Singapore - "Emotional Perception of Morality"

July 3-8, Australasian Association of Philosophy, Dunedin - "Ethical Reductionism"

July 12, Canterbury (Christchurch NZ) - "The Epistemic Argument For Hedonism"

July 14-15, Naturalisms in Ethics, Auckland - "Emotional Perception of Morality"

July 16-17, Australasian Philosophy of Religion Association, Auckland - "Fine-tuning & Psychophysical Laws"

July 20, University of Tasmania - "Zarathustra's Metaethics"

July 27, La Trobe (Melbourne) - "Zarathustra's Metaethics"

July 28, University of Melbourne - "The Epistemic Argument For Hedonism"

July 29, University of Queensland - "Zarathustra's Metaethics"

Then I'll be back to Singapore for a few days, and then off to America for the fall semester of 2011 to have more awesome months like this.

NUS has very kindly given me a semester of writing leave and a travel grant, and I'm eager to make the most of them. I'm scheduling the US part of my trip right now. If you'd like to have me come visit you, I'm ready to travel, so let me know!

It wouldn't work for his "heat is the motion of molecules" example though

2011-05-19T05:42:00.001-04:00

If Kripke wanted to refer either to the wooden lectern or to a lectern made of ice in its place, he could've used frigid designation.

Let's just call his subfield "R"

2011-05-16T08:44:00.002-04:00

It would've been unfortunate if Derek Parfit had been denied tenure on grounds that his research was not on a significant topic, because personal identity is not what matters.

Possible curls

2011-04-23T03:55:00.001-04:00

If my counterparts all had dull, dried-out hair, I would use a counterfactual conditioner.

Bad naturalist! No biscuit.

2011-04-14T11:23:00.001-04:00

I've discovered the best reason to think that emotions are necessarily electrochemical signals in the brain! It's the linguistic evidence: email is electronic mail, so emotions must be electronic motions!

Pantheism gives rise to similar issues

2011-04-11T02:56:00.005-04:00

If you're trying to fry things by rationally persuading your cookware to heat up, you might be a panpsychist.

Webcomic!

2011-04-04T02:50:00.000-04:00

I am really liking Dead Philosophers in Heaven.

Jessica Berry's letter to the UNLV Board of Regents

2011-03-16T23:56:00.004-04:00

UNLV is planning to respond to the fiscal situation in Nevada by simply eliminating the philosophy department and the women's studies department. Anything I wrote about this would be less eloquent than what Jessica Berry wrote, so let me put her letter up:

To the Members of the Board of Regents,
Shortly after being sentenced to death by a jury of his fellow citizens, Socrates observes: "It is for the sake of a short time, gentlemen of the jury, that you will acquire the reputation and the guilt, in the eyes of those who want to denigrate the city, of having killed Socrates, a wise man, for they who want to revile you will say that I am wise even if I am not." You have no doubt heard many defenses recently of the "cash value" of Philosophy as an academic research discipline, and of the claim that Philosophy is the core of the humanities, and of the many ways in which students who are able to study Philosophy as undergraduates are more "well-rounded" and demonstrably more competitive than students in many other disciplines, across and outside of the humanities. All of these things are true and well worth bearing in mind as you confront your state's current fiscal crisis. But consider also Socrates' suggestion: even if none of these things were the case, the reputation of your state, your city, and your university system is likely to suffer just the same. In a state that allows women legally to practice "the oldest profession," you will become known for having killed off a Women's Studies program during International Women's Month, and for having at the same time having focused your efforts solely on ousting your practitioners of the oldest academic profession there is.
Because those who devote their lives to the academy as a career are among the most highly-trained professionals in our country, people whose expertise is not so easily transferred to other places or fields, your administration will become known for having ruined the lives of many faculty members when doing so could certainly have been avoided. The University of Nevada will find it increasingly difficult to recruit and retain excellent faculty members, in any discipline, or to recruit students from out of state. The loss of these programs will outrage alumni, whether or not they studied Philosophy as a major or minor, thereby alienating a number of would-be future contributors to the university. Finally, and most obviously, the intellectual reputation of the university-nationally and internationally-will suffer. What may appear to you to be the loss of one department will have substantial, long-term repercussions for the entire University of Nevada.
When the University System of Georgia faced a proposed second year of $3M cuts, even Republican Governor Sonny Perdue called a halt, saying that he would not allow the Legislature to dismantle a world-class university system that it took generations to build. I can say without exaggeration that I believe the proposal currently under consideration by the Board would clearly have that effect on your institution. I would urge you to look to the solutions adopted by other university systems around the country who have weathered times just as trying as those in Nevada, but without such far-reaching and catastrophic consequences.
Respectfully,
Dr. Jessica N. Berry,
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Georgia State University

This joke will be my greatest contribution to early modern scholarship

2011-03-09T00:29:00.002-05:00

If Hume were right about the missing shade of blue, it would be a pigment of our imagination.

Looking forward to the 2011 AAP

2011-02-12T06:40:00.002-05:00

I just bought my ticket from Singapore to Christchurch for the 2011 AAP in New Zealand. The conference will be in Dunedin, at the University of Otago, from July 3-8. I've had a lot of fun with Aussie and Kiwi philosophers at past AAPs, and this year they're rolling both the Australian and the New Zealand conference into one. After that I'll make my way up to Auckland for the Naturalisms in Ethics Conference July 14-15. I'll probably be Down Under for another couple weeks after that to have a good time with more philosophers.

Jetstar was having some kind of fare sale, so I got a pretty good deal on this flight. The one-way ticket cost SGD 315 (USD 246), which is good for a journey of over 5000 miles. I'm good at sleeping on planes overnight, especially if I gulp down some melatonin, so if you meet me in Christchurch I should be awake and alert. And since New Zealand's duty free allowance is 3 liters of hard liquor, I should have some good stuff to share.

I need a friend with a video camera

2011-02-10T22:33:00.001-05:00

Someday I'll go up to Jerry Fodor and say, "Gubap-boop meelip junga whinky-whinky." And he'll say, "What?" And I'll say, "Oh! Sorry. I thought you knew the Language of Thought."

A puzzle about your butt

2011-02-05T02:00:00.003-05:00

Nineteen years ago yesterday, Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" was released. In commemoration of this significant cultural event, I've put together a little puzzle.

You are curious whether your butt is big or small. Unfortunately, you lack the ability to accurately assess the size of butts. Fortunately, there are three rappers before you. You are of their preferred gender, so they are willing to collectively entertain exactly one yes-or-no question from you, to which they will each give an answer.

One rapper likes big butts and cannot lie. One rapper likes small butts and always lies. One rapper likes all butts but shares your inability to assess butt size, and will answer yes or no at random if asked whether a butt is big or small. You do not know which rapper is which. All the rappers know all other facts relevant to the situation, including everyone's identity and butt preferences.

Before you are able to ask your question, one rapper receives a booty call (the size of the booty is unknown to you) and leaves the room. The other two rappers remain and are willing to pronounce on your question. You still do not know who any of the rappers are.

To determine the size of your butt, what question should you ask them? (You may assume that all butts can be classified as either big or small and ignore contextual factors, e.g. from the presence of Oakland booty.)

Perhaps you will enjoy hearing "Baby Got Back" while working on this puzzle.

Thanks are due to Daniel Velleman for inspiring the puzzle, Rob Helpy-Chalk for pointing out an inconsistency since corrected, and Dennis Clark and Supriya Sinhababu for playtesting.

Naturalisms in Ethics in Auckland

2011-01-21T15:08:00.005-05:00

Here's where I'll be in the middle of July 2011: Auckland NZ, for the Naturalisms in Ethics conference. People of very different views (including some theists) will be there. In fact, since it precedes a philosophy of religion conference, they might be a majority. It should be exciting!

Moral epistemology in action

2010-12-24T01:13:00.004-05:00

When we went out for drinks after I presented "The epistemic argument for hedonism" at ANU, Dan Korman and I both demonstrated our favorite ways of forming beliefs about the good.

Dan is using rational intuition to reach into Plato's heaven and grasp the Form of the Good. I'm using phenomenal introspection on my experience of pleasure to recognize its goodness.

Thanks to Jo Lau for taking the picture.

Podcast!

2010-12-12T21:04:00.002-05:00

A while ago, I recorded a philosophy podcast with Luke Muehlhauser on Possible Girls, the Humean theory of motivation, and my version of hedonic utilitarianism. He's gone to the trouble of transcribing the whole thing so anyone interested can click over there and read it or download it to listen as you please.

Luke has been doing this sort of thing for a while with lots of philosophers (including ethics people Stephen Finlay, Don Loeb, and Ruth Chang) and he asks good questions.

Down Under in December

2010-11-10T07:47:00.004-05:00

I'm going Down Under in December! The philosophical agenda looks like this:

December 2: presenting "Zarathustra's Metaethics" at UWA.

December 5-9: attending the AAP New Zealand and presenting "Why My Pants Are Not Subject To Requirements Of Rationality."

December 16: presenting something at ANU. I've been wavering on what to do.

(Then: fun exploring the Great Barrier Reef with Dan Korman, and maybe hanging out with some wonderful folks in Brisbane.)

The schedule is a bit lighter than last December, when I gave 8 talks in Australia and NZ. That's mainly because I've spent a lot of this semester polishing up old papers into talk form and sending them out.

Farewell, Philippa Foot

2010-10-04T15:28:00.004-04:00

Just as I was preparing a lecture on her "Utilitarianism and the Virtues," I heard the news that Philippa Foot passed away. She was 90 years old. I wish I could've met her. (Longtime readers of this blog will remember a cheeky song dedication to her.)

Last night I was looking over the paper and enjoying the liveliness of her writing. In reading her, there's a feeling of interacting with a complete human being that I often don't get when reading philosophy.

I really like the picture on the right, taken in the early 1940s. I imagine that she's just heard somebody present a view, and she's about to respond. I want to hear what she's going to say.

I think in acronyms

2010-10-01T05:43:00.003-04:00

When I saw the title of Brian Leiter's post, "National Association Representing Computer Scientists Denounces NRC Rankings", I wondered if that was actually the name of the organization. They would then be the NARCS.

As it turns out, the association is actually called the CRA.

I review Robert Pippin's new Nietzsche book in NDPR

2010-09-30T10:12:00.008-04:00

It's a harsh review. I'm going to step back and say some things about why it came out this way.

In retrospect, being a reviewer rather than just an ordinary reader made reading the book an especially painful experience. The book is very unclear, often with very different directions in which each bit of unclarity could be resolved. If there are 2 ways to read each unclear bit, and n unclear bits, you end up with 2ⁿ possible interpretations. (A lot of the unclear bits admit of many more than two possible interpretations, so really it's more.) Trying to live up to your obligations of charity as a reviewer and figure out which of this huge array of different interpretations is the best one is exhausting. An ordinary reader can just shrug, say it's unclear, remember the bits he liked, and forget the rest. But a reviewer has to correctly describe the view to everybody.

Usually things wouldn't be this bad. The organization of the book, perhaps, would enable one to slice down 2ⁿ to a manageable number, perhaps by isolating separate elements of the position. But the book is very disorganized. As far as I can tell, the clearest expressions of the positive view are scattered throughout middle parts of late chapters.

It wouldn't be so bad either if the differing interpretations had substantial and distinctive virtues. If you're a connoisseur of philosophical positions, which is a good thing to be in our profession, you might enjoy savoring each one. Instead, I spent hours and hours figuring out which of a large range of yucky views I had to attribute to Pippin. It was a miserable, frustrating experience.

I met Pippin at a conference a few months ago. He's a nice man, and he was nice to me and one of my graduate students. I think of him without any negative emotion, and I don't want my review to cause him anguish. (I don't expect it will -- I'm sure he's doing well enough for himself to shrug off a harsh review written by some guy on the other side of the world).

But insofar as this makes any sense, I'm angry and resentful towards his book for the misery it inflicted on me. As I wrote I wanted to avenge myself against it, and rescue readers from it, by making its faults clear so it would be avoided by all and honored by none. If there are points in the review where you're wondering what emotion drove me to write as I did -- well, that's the feeling.

PhilosophyTV with Jason Brennan

2010-09-27T13:36:00.003-04:00

I'm on PhilosophyTV with Jason Brennan of Brown University! The first half is him talking to me about his argument that the right to vote and the right to hold office aren't really valuable to the individuals who hold them. I found a surprising amount to agree with in the argument, at least once his conclusion was spelled out narrowly enough.

Unfortunately my computer isn't able to display video properly for some reason, so I haven't watched the finished product yet. For anyone who does: Assuming that the PhilosophyTV folks didn't get horrified and edit them out, I can promise you some silly visual gags in the second half of the video. I think I started them at some point after 35:21 when I start the segment focused on my work, which is the epistemic argument for hedonism.

If I can figure out how to embed the video properly, I'll post it here too.

The Desire-Belief Account Of Intention Explains Everything

2010-08-10T02:40:00.004-04:00

That's the new paper I've uploaded. I'll be submitting it somewhere by the end of the month, just in case some folks I sent it to want give me feedback before then.

I'm looking at a bunch of the things that the desire-belief view of intention supposedly can't explain -- for example, our tendency to rise in confidence that we're φing when we intentionally φ, our ability to choose which of several reasons we act on, and the stuff Michael Bratman describes in his 1987 book mostly dealing with the ability of intentions to explain deliberative phenomena. I argue that the view in fact explains all this stuff, often better than opposing views, because it can tell you why these phenomena obtain and say something about why, in some cases, they don't.

The title is kind of big and in-your-face because I got really annoyed with how casually the desire-belief view gets dismissed for supposed explanatory inadequacy. People didn't think seriously about functional properties of desire other than its motivational effects (and sometimes not even those) when dismissing it. My friend John Maier told me when I was giving a talk on something else at ANU in December that nobody accepted the view anymore. This got me really motivated and I gave talks at KCL and Tufts and Illinois and UChicago and Illinois State defending it this summer. If you're interested in intention, have a look and tell me how well I did!

The regress argument against understanding philosophers

2010-08-09T04:54:00.008-04:00

Via Brian Leiter. The argument proceeds from the premise that to understand any philosopher, you have to understand the philosophers who influenced him/her. This pushes you back down the history of philosophy until there's nothing you can write a good dissertation on after Aristotle. (People in well-funded doctoral programs might be able to make it up to Epicurus.)

Obviously things aren't that bad. The big point to be made here is that it's impossible to produce work that comes from a perfect knowledge of everything. You pick the things you're going to be really good on, and you're going to be mediocre at some other stuff. Some of us are going to know Montaigne and we'll be able to understand what Nietzsche is saying about him, and what that means about Nietzsche. Others are going to know metaethics and we'll be able to characterize Nietzsche's metaethical position in more precise terms. Maybe imperfect knowledge of the areas we're not expert in will impair our efforts. That's why we talk to each other.

Also: I admire philosophers who do interdisciplinary work that engages with the humanities and social sciences. There's lots of bad philosophy out there, and the world seriously needs philosophers who have the intellectual ability, patience, and academic social skills to help people there see that their (often very worthwhile) projects shouldn't be shaped by bad theories.

Video up soon

2010-08-06T09:58:00.002-04:00

I just did a diavlog (I think that's what we're calling it) on hedonism about value with fellow hedonist Ben Bradley of Syracuse. It went really well, and I look forward to putting it up here.

Fin

2010-07-21T00:02:00.000-04:00

It's finally done! Not just this summer's philosophical travel (8 talks, 4 conferences only one of which I was speaking at) but everything from the big grant I got in early 2009. In total, I got 25 talks out of that pot of money. Things went well, but I'm feeling pretty tired right now.

I'm going to be roving around the UK for the rest of July, writing and sightseeing. Then I return to Singapore.

Remaining summer schedule

2010-06-18T11:36:00.004-04:00

I've been remiss in not posting about where I'd be traveling. Here's the agenda ahead:

Now until June 26: Austin, TX
June 26-29: NYC
June 29-July 5: DC
July 7-9: Southampton, UK (Nietzsche's Postmoralism conference)
July 9-12: Dublin (Joint Session)
July 13: Giving a talk in St. Andrews
Until August 1: Bumming around the British Isles in some way or another until I fly from London to Singapore.

So far I've given 6 talks: at KCL, Tufts, Illinois-Urbana, UChicago, Illinois State, and Northern Illinois. I also attended SLACRR, which was great.

Habermas interview

2010-06-13T12:23:00.002-04:00

I don't know a lot about Jurgen Habermas' philosophical views, but I'm impressed with the thoughtful and sensible answers he gives when asked about contemporary political issues.

Things you learn while grading exams

2010-05-07T12:37:00.004-04:00

From a delightfully digression-packed essay on John Mackie's argument from relativity:

Anyway, back to monogamy, at some point humans become monogamous. It may have been brought about by natural selection processes that favour our species (a human is likelier to shoot you for sleeping with someone else, perhaps? than an animal would kill its mate → not just because animals have no firearms & excluding the likes of black widows that devour their male companion for nutrition after creation. More sensibly, the formulation of settlements and organized living would decrease the pool of mates met.)

Paraphernalia

2010-05-06T03:18:00.001-04:00

I was looking up the spelling of paraphernalia, and I discovered the historical meaning. Old views of gender and property rights are really strange.

No open question argument here

2010-05-05T12:08:00.003-04:00

From political reporter Glenn Thrush:

Generally, hiring one’s relative is illegal. Among the 27 relative designations listed in the federal law regarding nepotism and hiring, however, "grandson" is not mentioned.

So Moore, who makes a six-figure salary working for his grandmother, is just fine, ethics-wise, according to an ethics lawyer contacted by POLITICO.

Legal text from the House of Representatives ethics manual follows.

I guess people in politics needed a term for obeying laws that prohibit certain self-serving abuses of power, and "ethics" was closest to hand. But I hope that they're still aware that one can obey these laws and still do grossly unethical things, in the sense of what's really right and wrong.

Bloggingheads and hedonism

2010-04-26T14:33:00.002-04:00

I was on Bloggingheads recently with Jesse Bering, a psychologist. They've got the whole thing divided up into nice bite-sized pieces on the Bloggingheads site. Or you can watch it below.

A lot of the first part of the video deals with this paper I'm writing that defends universal hedonism. After doing the diavlog (that's what they call them), I suddenly realized that it would get people wanting to download the paper, and now I've spent a couple days frantically revising it. So if you're wondering how the heck the arguments I offer little pieces of in the video can possibly work, here's the paper! I'm probably going to do a couple more little revisions soon, but the big stuff is in there.

This is my first time doing this sort of thing on video, and I'm still learning how to do it. One thing I'll keep in mind in the future is to keep my eyes on the camera rather than in my lap when I'm talking. Another issue is that I'm good at talking about my research with philosophers, and I've gotten reasonably good at talking with ordinary people, but I don't really know how to pitch things to psychologists. Especially when I'm talking to a psychologist on video in front of an educated lay audience.

Jesse is writing a book on religion from an evolutionary psychology point of view. The biologists I've known in academia have been fairly skeptical of the whole thing and it's rubbed off on me, so we had a bit of a methodological dispute about how much you can get out of evolutionary psychology. That's a lot of the end part of the video.

Big thanks to David Killoren, who's a Wisconsin philosophy grad student and Bloggingheads associate editor, for setting this up.

Color analogies in metaethics

2010-04-22T04:17:00.002-04:00

I'm trying to put together a list of people who have analogized morality to color in defense of one metaethical view or another. The best example I know about is John McDowell in "Values and Secondary Qualities." Geoffrey Sayre-McCord briefly uses the analogy in a defense of nonreductive realism in "Moral Theory And Explanatory Impotence." And in old times, there's Hume, who wrote, "Vice and virtue, therefore, may be compar'd to sounds, colours, heat and cold, which according to modern philosophy, are not qualities in objects, but perceptions in the mind."

Does anybody else spring to mind?

My Humean reason-choosing post at PEA Soup

2010-03-31T09:07:00.002-04:00

The nice folks at PEA Soup invited me to their blog more than a year ago, and I hadn't put up any posts yet. So I've done a big one over there on how Humean views of motivation can explain the choosing of reasons. Feel free to comment here if you're afraid of going up against the Reason-Fu of terrifyingly skilled top ethicists in comments over there. Or for any other reason.

Norms of democratic representation

2010-03-20T07:40:00.002-04:00

I've been reading political scientist Jonathan Bernstein's blog lately, partly because he's been an excellent predictor of what was going to happen with health care reform. He was able to keep the political actors' incentives in mind a lot better than most people and especially news-of-the-day-obsessed pundits.

Anyway, he has an interesting view about how norms of representation work in democracy, and I wrote a big post on it at the other blog.

Matt's top ten

2010-03-19T11:39:00.004-04:00

I've been reading Matthew Yglesias since 2003, and he's been a huge influence on my political views. He studied philosophy at Harvard, and he just put up a list of the ten books that had the most influence on him. Reasons and Persons is at the top. Lots of other interesting things there too. As somebody who teaches philosophy, it made me happy.

Your intention is _____

2010-02-24T22:32:00.004-05:00

When p is the case and you believe that p, we say that your belief is true. When p is the case and you desire that p, we say that your desire is satisfied. When p is the case and you intend that p, what do we say about your intention?

"Your intention is true" sounds bad. "Your intention is satisfied" sounds a lot better, though I think I'd say "Your intention is achieved."

I don't know how much weight this should have in getting us to prefer accounts on which intentions are desires to accounts on which intentions are beliefs. But it seems to me that it has a little bit of weight.

Supervenience, Australian and American

2010-02-22T10:31:00.002-05:00

Do Australians and Americans tend to use the term "supervenience" in different ways? The way I've heard Aussies (and honorary Aussie David Lewis) use the term fits the characterization in the Stanford Encyclopedia: "there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference". But I've heard some Americans use the term to mean something that adds a conjunct to make supervenience something much stronger: "there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference, and A's aren't reducible to B's." Were these Americans just being weird?

Back from India

2010-02-21T08:34:00.004-05:00

It was good! If you haven't been to rural India and are curious, I have a big post here with lots of photos and it might interest you.

In India

2010-02-12T22:57:00.003-05:00

I'm flying out to India tomorrow. Most of next week is going to be spent in rural West Bengal, where there will be many cows but probably no internet. I'll be back around February 21st or so.

We're not really sure where Mom's village, Bikrampur, is on Google Maps. But our guess is that it's somewhere here. Dad's village, Kadakuli, is about two miles northwest. If you happen to be in town, come by and say hi!

Not the best way to criticize Kant

2010-02-10T14:32:00.009-05:00

I like my Kant-bashing as much as the next utilitarian who defends the Humean theory of motivation and works on Nietzsche. But this really isn't the best line of attack:

In his latest title, Lévy launches a scathing attack on the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, calling him “raving mad” and a “fake”.

The book, De la guerre en philosophie (On War in Philosophy) , has been greeted with the customary rapture, and its ubiquitous author has been a fixture on television and in the press all week.

In framing his case, Lévy – BHL to the Parisian cognoscenti – drew on the writings of the little-known 20th century thinker Jean-Baptiste Botul – author of The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant , and a man Lévy has cited in lectures.

The problem? Botul never existed. He was invented by a journalist from the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné 10 years ago as an elaborate joke. And since the hoax was revealed, BHL has become a laughing stock.

“As it turns out, it was a hoax,” admitted the author in a blog post after the blunder was spotted by a journalist from Le Nouvel Observateur .

Claire Danes on Jonathan Dancy's leather pants on Craig Ferguson

2010-02-06T14:52:00.004-05:00

Claire Danes spent several minutes discussing her father-in-law, Jonathan Dancy (of particularism fame), on Craig Ferguson's show!

Dancy was on my dissertation committee. He read my dissertation and let me know that it was done. That was very helpful, especially coming from an opponent of my view.

Korsgaard, Yawgmoth, and personal identity

2010-02-05T11:02:00.001-05:00

In “Personal Identity and the Unity of Agency: A Kantian Response to Parfit,” Christine Korsgaard writes:

It is, I think, significant that writers on personal identity often tell stories about mad surgeons who make changes in our memories or characters. These writers usually emphasize the fact that after the surgical intervention we are altered, we have changed. But surely part of what creates the sense of lost identity is that the person is changed by intervention, from outside. The stories might affect us differently if we imagined the changes initiated by the person herself, as a result of her own choice. You are not a different person just because you are very different. Authorial psychological connectedness is consistent with drastic changes, provided those changes are the result of actions by the person herself or reactions for which she is responsible.

She then states the broader thesis that these reflections serve: “the sort of continuity needed for what matters to me in my own personal identity essentially involves my agency” (123).

However, drastic changes that are fully intended consequences of one's own agency can similarly disrupt one's personal identity. Consider the following story:

Yawgmoth was the cruelest of demons, and he liked tormenting the damned. But his greatest wish was to leave Hell and wreak horrible misery upon the happy people living above. He knew why no demon had ever done such a thing – the gates of Hell were enchanted so that only a creature of pure benevolence could exit. So he learned how to make a potion that would wipe all the malevolence from his mind and replace it with benevolence just for one minute, allowing him to leave and then become cruel again. He poured it into a goblet, strode to the gates, and drank.

But what happened then? Having become a creature of pure benevolence, he recoiled at the horrors that the living would endure if the cruelest demon of Hell was among them. Instead of passing through the gates, he ran back into Hell. And wishing to spare even the damned from the torments of a furious and frustrated Yawgmoth, he bravely pulled a cleaver from the hands of another demon, struck off his own head, and perished.

Intuitively, Yawgmoth becomes a different person after drinking the potion, no less than Dr. Jekyll or any victim of a mad surgeon. That he intends this change and is responsible for it does not make him the same person before and after.

This is not to reject Korsgaard's broader thesis that personal identity has some interesting esential relation to agency. Nor is it to say that intentionally causing the changes in oneself is wholly irrelevant to personal identity – just that it is one among many more or less significant sorts of psychological connectedness.

What are they doing to KCL Philosophy?

2010-02-03T04:29:00.005-05:00

I presented my defense of universal hedonism at King's College London during June of last year. Question and answer period there was one of the most lively, stimulating, and productive sessions I've ever had. A couple of the faculty came out for coffee afterwards, and my only wish was that I could've talked with them longer.

That's part of why it's astonishing to hear about the people losing their jobs there. You don't usually hear about this kind of thing happening at top departments. Shalom Lappin and Charles Travis, in particular, are big people who have continued to be very productive researchers.

Update: Here's a letter and petition for friends of KCL to sign.

Violating duties to yourself is hard

2010-01-29T05:43:00.005-05:00

I'm not big on duty, but I think that people who are would consider this a generally plausible principle:

Conditional Release: If A has a duty to B, B can conditionally release A from that duty by choosing that A act otherwise, rather than fulfill the duty. Then if A acts otherwise and does not fulfill the duty, A has not violated the duty.

Now what happens in the case of a self-regarding duty, where you are both A and B? Then you can choose to act otherwise rather than fulfilling the duty, and when you do it, you haven't violated any duties. So it's pretty hard to violate duties to yourself.

Maybe there are some duties for which Conditional Release doesn't hold. Maybe I have a duty not to kill you, and you can't release me from it. Then you could still get a duty not to commit suicide. And if you can violate duties without making any choices, perhaps by falling asleep at an unfortunate time or forgetting about them, this won't get you off the hook for those duties.

Frege-Geach whiteboard

2010-01-27T03:48:00.004-05:00

I have a whiteboard in my office. I've used it three times over the 18 months or so that I've been here. Each time was to draw up the Frege-Geach problem for students.

Do a whale's hip bones have a function?

2010-01-18T14:27:00.010-05:00

I think the right answer is 'no'. (So says this evolution website: "These bones resemble those of other mammals, but are only weakly developed in the whale and have no apparent function.") They had a function for whales' ancestors who walked on land in the distant past and needed hip bones for their leg bones to attach to. But lacking legs, whales have no use for hip bones, rendering these structures without function in the present.

This is a problem for evolutionary accounts of function. On these accounts, the function of the whale's hip bones is something like connecting up with the whale's leg bones. That's because evolutionary accounts of function are historical. On such accounts, the selection pressures that caused a particular part to exist are what gives it its function. I'm fine with saying that whale hip bones had the function of connecting with legs in the past, when they were in whale ancestors who had legs. They just don't have it now.

Maybe we could build a better account of function by looking at the way that some part relates to an animal's present interests. This gives many of the same intuitive answers as to what the function of a particular part is, but it deals better with vestigial structures that have lost their function. I don't see any reason why the function of some part needs to connect to the process that produced it -- natural objects that we find can be put to some purpose, and thus acquire a function. If I find a bunch of rocks and use them as ballast in my submarine, their function is to add weight so that the sub will go down, even though that has nothing to do with the process that produced them.

Dolphins Are Smart!

2010-01-09T01:36:00.001-05:00

Being a longtime cetacean fan, I'm excited to see these scientists (and a philosopher) saying dolphins are smart enough to have some of the rights we accord to persons. All popular science article warnings apply, but there's a pretty good roundup of their cognitive abilities at the linked article.

Assuming that humans don't screw things up by killing ourselves or the dolphins, I think there'll be a time when humans can engage in much fuller communication with dolphins than currently possible. We'll probably need some really crazy neurotechnology to make this work out, but I think humans will eventually put that together given enough time. When it happens, it'll be one of the coolest things our species has ever done.

Werewolf blogging

2009-12-30T20:15:00.002-05:00

People who are following this blog for werewolf-related reasons might be interested to see my brief review of New Moon, which I saw last evening with a group of people including several philosophers.

Secret identity

2009-12-26T10:57:00.003-05:00

Dana McCourt and James Chartrand are like Hesperus and Phosphorus. In a world where astronomical facts could reveal a pretty horrendous level of sexism in society.

Reference magnets are as bad as primitive intentionality. Psychologize!

2009-12-22T00:32:00.007-05:00

On Ted Sider's suggestion, I read Rob Williams' Phil Review paper "Eligibility and Inscrutability" with hopes that it would lead to my being less creeped out by reference magnets. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. I got more worried that we'd have to appeal to the darned things in building theories of reference, but I dislike them just as much as before. Depressing.

I take it that this is how the reference magnet strategy is supposed to work: Say we're trying to reduce intentional relations to something nonintentional. We do the whole Ramseyfication thing, and... uh-oh, we either have too many equally good candidates for what our terms refer to and many of them are counterintuitive, or as Williams' paper suggests, something counterintuitive ends up being the winner. So on the reference magnet strategy we say that the intuitive things have a certain kind of primitive naturalness to them, and that's why they get selected. Now we've reduced the intentional successfully to something nonintentional!

But it's hard for me to see any real theoretical gain here. We've avoided using primitive intentionality by introducing another primitive -- naturalness -- that's just as ontologically extravagant. If naturalness did some other interesting kind of theoretical work so we needed to appeal to it, there would be something to be said for it. But it's hard for me to see what kind of work it's going to do. A notion of natural kinds, which we might maybe be able to get out of the sciences, isn't going to do enough work for us, because we're going to need lots of primitive naturalnesses that go beyond what scientists use in explanation and prediction. We don't just need primitives like 'electron' and 'orangutan', we need 'corset' and 'film noir' and 'Optimus Prime.' We don't have primitive intentionality, but we have a bunch of primitives that are shadows of the intentional relations we were wanting to reduce. So in the end our overall theorizing ends up just as complicated, and the reduction of intentionality is a hollow victory.

I'm quite attracted to the idea of somehow psychologizing the naturalness out of the picture, so that instead of having primitive naturalness in the world, we have some kind of psychological state that does the work of selecting what ends up being the most intuitive referent for a term. There's good explanatory reason to posit something like this -- it explains people's behavior, namely, their yes- and no-saying behavior when you ask them whether this or that thing is the referent of their term (or in complicated cases that support semantic externalism, whether this thing or that thing would be the referent of their term if the world turned out to be a certain way). What's explaining their behavior when you ask them these questions has to be something in their heads, and it's there for us to appeal to.

Teaching Early Modern

2009-12-03T03:56:00.003-05:00

I don't think they're going to make me teach a survey course on early modern metaphysics and epistemology anytime soon. But I thought this post by Dana at Edge of the American West on how to do it had all kinds of good stuff.

Travel observations

2009-12-01T18:39:00.002-05:00

When you're at 30,000 feet wearing the clothes in which you're going to present a paper and you're opening a container of airplane-provided yogurt packed on the ground, it's best to open it away from you.

I looked down when the plane went over the Australian Outback, and it looked like I was flying over Mars.

Werewolf to meet koalas, kiwis

2009-11-27T05:10:00.008-05:00

In three days, I'll be flying out to Australia to give a bunch of talks! There are two full-length papers I'm presenting, both of which have annoying rhymes in their titles. There's also a short paper I'll be presenting at the New Zealand AAP conference, which has its own absurd title. If you're interested in knowing where I'll be, here's the schedule:

December 1 - Australian National University - The Gap Between Thought and Ought
December 3 - University of Waikato - The Trouble With Double Effect
December 7-10 - New Zealand AAP - How Jenny and the cannibal desire Orlando Bloom
December 14 - University of Sydney - The Gap Between Thought and Ought
December 15 - Macquarie University - The Trouble With Double Effect
December 16 - University of New South Wales - The Trouble With Double Effect
December 17 - University of Western Australia - The Trouble With Double Effect
(Update: there was a Jan. 4 talk in NZ, but that probably won't happen.)

I'll be spending Christmas with colleague Ben Blumson in Brisbane. Apart from that, late December and early January are open, and I'll probably be wandering around New Zealand.

If you're curious what all these talks are about, here are some abstracts.

The Gap Between Thought and Ought
According to Nishi Shah and David Velleman, it is a conceptual truth about belief that it is governed by a norm of truth. They claim that their view helps to explain the difference between imagination and belief, and explains why the deliberative question "whether to believe that p?" inevitably gives way to "whether p?" They call this phenomenon "transparency." I argue that it is merely a synthetic truth about belief that it is correct if and only if true. First, their view does little to help us distinguish believing from imagining. Second, when people reject the norm of truth for belief, we regard them as substantively mistaken rather than incoherent. Third, we can give better explanations of transparency without regarding the concept of belief as having any normative content.

The Trouble With Double Effect
According to the Doctrine of Double Effect, it is worse to intend something harmful as a means to a good end than to intend the good end while foreseeing that it will cause harm. For example, it is worse to kill one person as a means to save five lives than it is to save the five in a way that then kills the one. I will argue that belief in Double Effect is produced by systematically misleading psychological processes. Intended harms seem worse because we imagine them more vividly than merely foreseen harms, resulting in more intense emotional responses. This is not a reliable way of forming true beliefs about which option is better. I will discuss recent experimental results from psychology and neuroscience that support this explanation and this criticism of Double Effect.

How Jenny and the cannibal desire Orlando Bloom
Michelle Montague argues that propositionalism, the view that all of our intentional attitudes are propositional attitudes, fails in the case of liking. I first discuss two advantages of propositionalism in the case of desire. Propositionalism correctly identifies the cases in which we regard two agents as desiring the same thing, and it also allows desire to do the explanatory work that it is supposed to. I then extend these arguments to propositionalism about liking. I conclude by considering ways for objectualists to defend their view in light of these arguments.

Nietzsche's Postmoralism is in Southampton

2009-11-23T14:15:00.003-05:00

Or at least, that's where the conference is on July 7-9 of 2010. I think it's 2010, though the website says 2009 in some places. I hope they know that the eternal recurrence doesn't work that way.

This could be a nice stop on the trip back to Singapore after the summer 2010 run of talks.

NIP Journal

2009-11-21T03:23:00.005-05:00

The Northern Institute of Philosophy is thinking of starting up another Analysis-like philosophy journal that specializes in shorter papers. Philosophers can vote in their poll about whether they should do it. I think this is great! Sometimes I've been told that articles I've submitted were too short, and larded them up with not-as-important stuff to make them properly lengthy. That's a bad situation for everybody. Having another short-paper journal would really help.

I hope they make the journal open-access and free like Philosophers' Imprint! From what I've heard, librarians are eager to help out with that sort of thing.

It's possible that MP3 pirates exist...

2009-11-12T23:57:00.005-05:00

Me and Ben Blumson before a Halloween shindig in the NUS philosophy grad room. We're discussing the Barcan formula. I was an MP3 pirate for Halloween -- you can see the headphone wires running down my shirt.

Oxford's Neda Agha Soltan philosophy scholarship

2009-11-12T03:24:00.002-05:00

Oxford, being awesome. Iran, denouncing the awesomeness.

Great deeds

2009-11-08T13:17:00.005-05:00

I'm trying to keep politics on the other blog, but occasionally big awesome things happen. And I am just in awe of this woman. She beat Social Security privatization in 2005 by refusing to concede anything to Bush.

She used the John Murtha resolution to turn the Democrats into a wholeheartedly anti-Iraq-War party in 2006, over the objections of Rahm Emanuel and Steny Hoyer.

This year she's gotten the climate change bill through the House by a 219-212 vote.

And now we've won a 220-215 vote for health care reform. We've still got to pass it through the Senate, strip the Stupak amendment in conference committee, and get the conference report through both chambers. Conference reports are not amendable, so passing those ends up being easier. But this is a tremendous step, and we're further along than anyone has ever gone. In terms of getting good things done, Nancy Pelosi and her longtime ally Henry Waxman (who will spend the rest of his career taking us from this bill towards single-payer) are the best people in American politics.

Paper titles

2009-11-06T13:14:00.003-05:00

Has anyone yet written a paper on demonstratives titled "What is the meaning of 'this'?" ? It needs to happen, but I don't know anything about demonstratives so somebody else will have to do it.

My contribution to linguistics

2009-10-30T12:55:00.002-04:00

Longtime readers may recall my dance floor linguistics research from two years ago. I'm happy to let you know that that research has been cited in a conference presentation titled "An Eleméntàry Linguistic Definition of Upstate New York," by Aaron Dinkin and Keelan Evanini (pdf).

Xenophobia, partisanship, and epistemic peer disagreement

2009-10-11T16:12:00.003-04:00

[Cross-posted from my political blog, Donkeylicious]

A lot of smart people in America are uncomfortable with the idea that they should treat similarly educated folks from other advanced democracies as generally ignorant, deluded, or crazy on global political issues. Instead, we should treat them as 'epistemic peers' -- people just as intelligent as us, working from the same body of evidence, who are roughly our equals in ability to know the truth. In the case at hand, the bodies of evidence differ somewhat, since we have different news sources. But we can mostly solve this problem by sharing our evidence in discussion. If the evidence conflicts and we try to argue that their news sources are unreliable, all we usually have to go on is our news sources, and they can argue the same against us.

Similarly, a lot of smart Democrats are uncomfortable with the idea that they should regard Republicans as generally ignorant, deluded or crazy on global political issues. Many of the same considerations apply here. If we argue that their news sources are unreliable, they can argue that ours are, they're in possession of a basically isomorphic argument. Ordinarily, treating Republicans as epistemic peers would be a reasonable position, just as treating foreigners that way is. But the trouble at our historical moment is that we're no longer able to treat Republicans and educated people throughout the world as epistemic peers at the same time.

I think the following is a fair characterization of the reasoning that resulted in Obama's recent honor: The Republican Party has gone mad and become so destructive of world peace that you get a Nobel Peace Prize for removing them from power. That's an incredibly strong way to to put the point, and I don't know if the consensus of educated people outside America is willing to go quite that far. But if it stops short, it doesn't stop too far short. The 2008-2009 jump in favorable views of America, especially in Western Europe but including many other nations, is a sign of how differently people see Obama-era America from what preceded it. Foreigners will have many different views of what exactly is going on, but they're generally going to include the idea that Republican views on foreign policy are so tainted by the xenophobia, bloodthirst, and misinformation of influential people in the party that they can't be regarded as epistemic peers.

Republicans regard world opinion as badly as it regards them. You can see it even in their relationship with mainstream American opinion, where they've constructed an alternative news infrastructure in Fox News and talk radio that they regard as free from the distortions of the mainstream media. While Democrats have their own preferred blogs and websites, they haven't built full-fledged Fox-News-style alternative versions of mainstream news institutions. Globally, this becomes even stronger. Republicans' relation to respected international institutions like the UN (on the political side) and the BBC (on the news side) has long been hostile. When international weapons inspectors claimed that Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction, Republicans ridiculed them. Thinking the Wikipedia editors of the world are biased against them, Republicans created Conservapedia. If you don't regard educated people throughout the rest of the world as your epistemic peers, this is what you do, and maybe you start ordering freedom fries. Of course, this leaves you in a situation where the rest of the world isn't going to think you're an epistemic peer of theirs.

So where does this leave Americans who aren't Republicans? I don't think it's possible for us to treat both Republicans and educated people throughout the world as epistemic peers. This would involve having some level of trust each group's deeply held belief that the opposite group has gone totally off the rails. This leaves you suspecting that two different groups of people are deluded on the say-so of people who you suspect are deluded about issues like who is deluded. That's a pretty bad position, and not one we can stay in very long. We could also just regard global affairs as a huge area of general confusion where nobody knows what is going on, and withdraw from politics. If we're going to continue doing politics, however, we need to decide which group we're going to treat as epistemic peers and whose opinions we're going to regard as tainted by bias and misinformation.

There's plenty to be said about how exactly we should make that decision. But I'm going to conclude this post by observing that the noble intentions of Democrats and independents to treat both Republicans and educated foreigners as epistemic peers about global affairs can't be satisfied in our unhappy world. If we're going to engage in politics, we have to be either xenophobes or partisans. There are no other options.

SLACRR

2009-10-10T05:15:00.003-04:00

The St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons & Rationality looks neat. I'm probably going to be in the States from May 23-25, so if I can get my stuff together in time, I'll go.

Reverse Polish sausage

2009-10-05T07:23:00.002-04:00

I'm not enough of a logician to laugh at the latest xkcd, though I did manage to figure out the joke without looking anything up.

Hedonism FTW

2009-09-28T01:26:00.002-04:00

I've just uploaded a new paper (and submitted it to a journal): The Epistemic Argument for Universal Hedonism. This one is pretty action-packed. First I give an account of moral judgment. Then I present an argument that pushes us towards global skepticism about morality. Then I save us from global moral skepticism by arguing that despite the big skeptical argument, we can know about the goodness of pleasure through phenomenal introspection. Then there's a part at the end where I clean up some stuff about how to go from the epistemic stuff to the metaphysical and moral conclusions. This is supposed to be the first and biggest step in the big argument for hedonic utilitarianism.

I gave this paper at a bunch of places this summer -- Arizona, Tennessee, Illinois State, and King's College London -- and people gave me great feedback everywhere. Thanks, folks!

Pulau Ubin

2009-09-21T10:17:00.005-04:00

I went to Ubin yesterday! It's an island a ten minute boat ride from Singapore. Attractions included a wild boar and a mangrove swamp.

Depicted with me are super philosophy undergraduates Zi Wei and Ming De, as well as super philosophy colleague Ben Blumson. I'll be visiting Ben's native Australia in December, as well as New Zealand. I've heard that there is plenty of awesome nature down there, and I look forward to seeing it.

By the way, if you'd like me to give a talk at your department in Australia, let me know! NUS has given me a big grant that I'm supposed to use for exactly that purpose, and I'm told that I put on a good show.

Kanye West bum-rushes the history of philosophy

2009-09-15T17:41:00.001-04:00

Via.

My chocolate dream

2009-08-31T08:14:00.003-04:00

I had a dream some years ago. I was in a candy store with a couple dollars in my pocket, deciding whether to buy another piece of chocolate. I decided to buy it, and ate it. It was yummy!

Then I woke up. As I thought about my dream, I felt happy about making the right decision, insofar as I made a decision at all. Sometimes dream decisions are real decisions, and sometimes they're not. Dream pleasure, however, is always real pleasure. Dream money is never real money.

Double-Humean paper up!

2009-08-02T11:11:00.011-04:00

One of the papers I've been presenting this summer on the Moral Naturalism World Tour, "How Double-Humeans Can Make Room for Error", is now available for download. I'm going to send it off to a journal in about a week, so if you want to read it and correspond with me before I do that, now's your chance! Here's the introduction of the paper:

A concise way of spelling out the Humean theory of motivation is that an agent will do whatever maximizes expected desire satisfaction. And a concise way of spelling out instrumentalism is that it is rational for an agent to do whatever maximizes expected desire satisfaction. Instrumentalism is sometimes called the Humean theory of practical rationality, so one could call the conjunction of the Humean theory of motivation and instrumentalism the double-Humean view.

In “The Normativity of Instrumental Reason,” Christine Korsgaard argues that the double-Humean view makes practical irrationality impossible:
The problem is coming from the fact that Hume identifies a person’s end as what he wants most, and the criterion of what the person wants most appears to be what he actually does. The person’s ends are taken to be revealed in his conduct. If we don’t make a distinction between what a person’s end is and what he actually pursues, it will be impossible to find a case in which he violates the instrumental principle. (230)
If maximizing expected desire satisfaction is what it is rational to do (as instrumentalism says) and also what one will do (as the Humean theory of motivation says) it is hard to see how one can act irrationally. According to Korsgaard, Hume not only says that “people don’t in fact ever violate the instrumental principle. He is actually committed to the view that people cannot violate it” (228). If the instrumental principle is the sole principle of practical rationality, this will mean that practical irrationality is impossible. This would be a strange and surprising consequence, and to avoid having to accept it, we might be moved to reject either the Humean theory of motivation or instrumentalism.
First, I will explain why exactly it would be a problem for a double-Humean view if it left no room for practical irrationality. I will focus particularly on Douglas Lavin's logical interpretation of the error constraint, and Korsgaard's argument that the double-Humean view will have bad consequences for our ability to regard agents as capable of action. Unlike many recent commentators, I hold that an agent can be subject to a principle even if there is no logically possible action she could do to violate it, and I will present examples of such agents. Nevertheless, Korsgaard and Lavin are right that double-Humeans must account for practical irrationality. This is not because of any formal constraints on normativity, but because practical irrationality exists, and our theories need to reflect this fact.
Then I will lay out the two components of the double-Humean view in a more precise fashion and consider the best reasons for accepting them. The Humean theory of motivation should be accepted because it gives the best explanation of how we deliberate and act. While some philosophers have been moved to accept instrumentalism because the considerations it presents as normative have a role in explaining action, this is not a good reason to accept it. We should accept it because it correctly accounts for an important group of our normative judgments.
Finally, I will respond to Korsgaard by showing how the double-Humean view can account for just as much practical irrationality as there is. The Humean theory of motivation and instrumentalism should be filled out in ways that measure the agent’s actual desires differently. When determining how agents will be motivated, we should look at the balance of motivational forces that desire produces in them at the moment of action. When determining what it is rational to do, we should look at dispositional desires. As I will argue, this way of setting up the double-Humean view leaves exactly the right amount of space for practical irrationality, while achieving the desiderata that motivate both sides of the position.

Seattle!

2009-07-26T20:00:00.003-04:00

I fly to Seattle tomorrow! I'll be there from July 27-31, hanging out with Donkeylicious co-blogger Nick and grad school friends Justin and Ariela. Probably I'll be in Tacoma for the latter half of that. Then it'll be back to SF for a couple more days before I go back to Singapore.

Econostarstrucklunch

2009-07-24T21:34:00.002-04:00

I just had lunch with Brad DeLong!

The counterfactual in his post came up in conversation when I was explaining Possible Girls to him. Discussing that paper with famous people in academia will, I suspect, be a recurring source of joy in my life.

What is the answer to a riddle?

2009-07-17T01:26:00.002-04:00

Julian Sanchez writes:

“In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the one word you must under no circumstances use?” The question comes from Borges’ short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in which the narrator’s ancestor (we’re told) aspired to create an infinite labyrinth. He ultimately constructed his labyrinth not in space but through time and narrative, writing a great sprawling novel in which many possible—and contradictory—futures coexist, converge, and splay off into variegated chaos again. The forbidden word, of course, is “chess”—making that opening question a riddle in violation of its own rule.

I was thinking that the use/mention distinction would save the riddle from self-violation. We should regard the word "chess" as being mentioned and not used by Borges in stating the riddle. (For the time being, let's set aside the issue of whether the question actually counts as a riddle.)

Might we instead say that the locution "A riddle whose answer is X" involves the use of X, rather than the mere mention of X? Well, I would've thought that answers were linguistic entities, so when you talk about the answer to any riddle you're talking about a linguistic entity, and thus mentioning the term rather than using it.

Also, it would be a surprise if questions and answers had different ontological status. While there's a theoretical option of considering answers to be nonlinguistic entities, since they refer to things, I don't see a similar option with questions. A question has to be a series of words, or some abstract entity expressible in words. Unlike an answer, there's no object it can be taken to refer to. If there's good reason to regard answers as the same things as questions, we should regard both as linguistic entities.

Inter-philosophical sloth

2009-07-15T21:18:00.004-04:00

After giving nine talks this summer, I'm now back in San Francisco visiting Mom and Dad. I've been sleeping and blogging about politics and generally being unproductive. Maybe later this evening after dinner I'll get to revising my paper on the double-Humean view. Or maybe tomorrow. Anyway, it's going to be revised and sent off to a journal before I go back to Singapore. Mark my words.

Today it turned out that conversations about my research (in particular, stuff on dispositional desires and rationality that's in my paper about the double-Humean view) informed other people's political blogging! They were talking about requirements that restaurants print calorie information on their menus. How is this relevant? Well, I wrote a big post at Donkeylicious explaining it so you can go there and see.

England and Scotland

2009-06-13T05:56:00.006-04:00

I'm in Edinburgh now, and I've got to pay my respects at Hume's tomb. And when I get back to London, I'll make sure to see Jeremy Bentham at UCL.

Mostly, I'll be hanging out with people at Oxford after I get back. If you're in the London or Oxford or Edinburgh area and want to hang out, I'd be happy to meet up! Send me an email or comment or something and I'll see if we can get in touch.

The talk at KCL went really well. I was happy to meet M.M. McCabe, the dissertation advisor of my senior thesis advisor, Raphael Woolf. It was also a nice feeling to give a big defense of hedonism not far from where Jeremy Bentham's body is displayed.

If I'd been to London earlier, I would've asked Bentham to be the external reviewer on my dissertation committee. We have similar views on a variety of issues, and I'm sure he wouldn't have said no. Getting him to provide comments on my work or write a good letter of recommendation would've been difficult, but that's always a risk when you have famous people as your outside committee members.

(Update: I couldn't find Hume's tomb, though I did find his statue and get my picture taken with him.)

Holbo/Waring Plato Volume

2009-06-03T20:11:00.002-04:00

NUS Philosophy colleague John Holbo and classics master Belle Waring have a Plato book online. It's intended for introductory audiences, and contains the Meno, the Euthyphro, and Book I of the Republic, along with lovely illustrations.

Song for Philippa Foot

2009-05-21T19:53:00.006-04:00

This is Kate Nash covering the Arctic Monkeys' "Fluorescent Adolescent." I first heard it around the time I was teaching Philippa Foot's "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives." Foot would give up the bold morality/reasons externalist thesis in that paper twenty years after writing it, having abandoned the Humean theory of practical rationality. But I'm still totally into the young wild Philippa Foot who thought that all our reasons come from our desires.

You used to get it in your fishnets
Now you only get it in your nightdress
Discarded all the naughty nights for niceness
Landed in a very common crisis
Everything's in order in a black hole
Nothing seems as pretty as the past though
Bloody Mary's lacking in Tabasco
Remember when you used to be a rascal?

Aseel al-Awadhi goes to Parliament

2009-05-17T11:36:00.006-04:00

Congratulations to Texas philosophy Ph.D Aseel al-Awadhi, who is among the first four women to win election to the Kuwaiti Parliament. I overlapped with her in grad school, and we once had a fun multiethnic Super Bowl party together. Kuwaiti women only got the right to vote and run for office in 2005, so things are moving fast. In other good news, Sunni fundamentalists lost a lot of seats.

Now when your students ask you what you can do with a philosophy education, you can tell them: become a member of Parliament in Kuwait!

Moral Naturalism World Tour

2009-05-09T21:38:00.002-04:00

Today I arrived in San Francisco. I'm going to be hanging out with Mom and Dad for a view days before starting what I called the "Moral Naturalism Project" in the big grant application that's paying for all my travel. So far I have two papers written -- "The Epistemic Argument for Universal Hedonism" (EA) and "How Double-Humeans Can Make Room for Error" (DH). Here's the places I'm going and the talks I'm giving, as far as I've planned:

May 9 - Fly from Singapore to San Francisco
May 12 - Fly from San Francisco to LA for USC talk on 12th (DH)
May 13 - Fly from LA to Tucson for University of Arizona talk on 13th (EA)
May 14 - Fly from Tuscon to Miami for University of Miami talk on 15th (DH)
May 17 - Fly from Miami to Knoxville for University of Tennessee talk on the 18th (EA)
May 19 - Fly from Knoxville to Austin
June 1 - Fly from Austin to Chicago. Illinois State talk on the 4th (EA) and Illinois talk on the 5th. (DH)
[Now things get a little hazy. I have some free time between talks and I'll probably go somewhere on the Eastern seaboard for a few days but I don't know where.]
June 9 - Fly to London for King's College London talk on June 10. Chill at Oxford for a while, maybe Edinburgh. Return on June 19 or so.
[More haziness. Hopefully somehow involving girls.]
June 20something - Fly to Grand Rapids for Calvin College talk and subsequent Michigan talk.
Early July - Visit DC
Rest of July - Hang out with family in SF, or wherever they might be at the time.
Late July / Early August - Fly to Seattle for Puget Sound talk
August 5 - Fly from San Francisco back to Singapore

Byron York needs black people to have non-actual modal parts

2009-04-30T04:34:00.003-04:00

This Byron York post is being linked everywhere because it contains one of the most fascinating comments I've ever heard on race. It's not a throwaway line -- it's standing right there in thesis-statement position at the end of the first paragraph:

On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.

"more popular overall than they actually are"? Usually, racism doesn't push people to say things that are flatly contradictory. Though we might be able to make it consistent if we take a racialized version of Brian Weatherson's view and assume that black people have non-actual modal parts while white people are wholly actual. It'll be hard to reliably poll people's non-actual modal parts, but that's never stopped Zogby before.

The real issue here is that York doesn't regard black people's input in the political process as having the same legitimacy as white people's. That's the only way you end up saying crazy stuff like that.

Fuck

2009-04-29T12:33:00.003-04:00

My friend Ezra Klein has been surfing the archives of the Social Science Research Network, and he found "Fuck", a paper by Ohio State law professor Chris Fairman:

This Article is as simple and provocative as its title suggests: it explores the legal implications of the word fuck. The intersection of the word fuck and the law is examined in four major areas: First Amendment, broadcast regulation, sexual harassment, and education. The legal implications from the use of fuck vary greatly with the context. To fully understand the legal power of fuck, the nonlegal sources of its power are tapped. Drawing upon the research of etymologists, linguists, lexicographers, psychoanalysts, and other social scientists, the visceral reaction to fuck can be explained by cultural taboo. Fuck is a taboo word. The taboo is so strong that it compels many to engage in self-censorship. This process of silence then enables small segments of the population to manipulate our rights under the guise of reflecting a greater community. Taboo is then institutionalized through law, yet at the same time is in tension with other identifiable legal rights. Understanding this relationship between law and taboo ultimately yields fuck jurisprudence.

If I'm on a hiring committee for some kind of legal philosophy search and I see a CV that lists "Fuck Jurisprudence" as an Area of Competence, you can bet that I'll read the rest of the applicant's file with great interest.

Don't blame me...

2009-04-28T07:25:00.001-04:00

...I voted for Hume.

Budget Reconciliation: The New Sensation That's Sweeping The Nation

2009-04-25T02:04:00.003-04:00

I've mostly stopped using this blog for political posts, but a thrilling political development is taking place that nobody will otherwise notice because it sounds like the most boring thing in the world. Jon Cohn reports that House and Senate conference committee negotiators have agreed to let health care reform go through the budget reconciliation process if a plan doesn't pass by October 15. Time for debate on budget reconciliation is limited, so Republicans can't filibuster and 50 votes will get legislation through. Since breaking a filibuster requires 60, this development is basically worth 10 votes in the Senate.

To put it simply, the odds that Obama signs universal health care into law this year just got a lot better. As Ezra Klein says, "This could be the day that health care reform went from being unlikely to inevitable."

Taking political philosophy back from the economists

2009-04-16T03:01:00.003-04:00

Former Harvard philosophy undergrad and current superstar political blogger Matthew Yglesias had a nice response to the post below:

I think that the questions that political philosophers have taken to debating professionally in recent decades have a limited relevance to contemporary politics. But I think a number of fairly abstract misguided ideas in ethics, political philosophy, and economics have come to have extraordinary cultural and political power in the United States and to a lesser extent elsewhere in the English speaking world, all to incredibly pernicious effect. What’s more, though most of these ideas are propounded, originally, by people whose degrees are in economics most of them are really ideas of a philosophical character.
Which ideas?
Well I’d say one important set of ideas is the perverse notion that it’s wrong or inappropriate to subject people to moral criticism for making selfish decisions as long as the decisions don’t involve breaking the law...

...Another example is that, as Brad DeLong pointed out yesterday, economists’ protestations that they’re doing value-free social science actually embeds an implicit idea that “that shifts in distribution are of no account–which can be true only if the social welfare function gives everybody a weight inversely proportional to their marginal utility of wealth.” In other words, under guise of eschewing values, economics has adopted a philosophical value system which says that the well-being of rich people is more important than the well-being of poor people. Nobody ever says “social welfare function” when engaging in practical political debate, but the idea that not caring about distribution constitutes some kind of neutral middle ground is an important underlying premise of much practical political debate, and its viability stems from the fact that everyone remembers being taught that this is true in their Economics 101 courses.

The take-home message for you and me is that economists have managed to convince people of indefensible views on normative topics such as what it's rational for individuals to do, what's an appropriate object of moral criticism, and what would be a good distribution of resources. I don't know how many of them would, when pressed, defend these sorts of claims -- their discipline isn't supposed to be one that makes normative claims.

Saying you're not making any normative claims is, of course, a good way of getting people to accept the normative claims you make. A lot more in this sort of thing depends on the sorts of emotions that get communicated as people talk about stuff and the loaded words you use. Pareto optimality, for example, has 'optimality' built into it, and who doesn't like optimality? Of course, as Rawls tells us, a distribution where one person owns all tradable goods and services while nobody else has anything is Pareto optimal.

In any event, this is the kind of thing we ought to be concerned about, both as citizens and as philosophers. While ideas from other parts of academia can't get out to the public, economists are convincing people of ridiculous theses in moral and political philosophy that their research doesn't even support. (It probably helps that widespread social acceptance of these theses is favorable to the interests of very wealthy people.) I'm not really sure what we can do about the spread of bad political philosophy through economics 101, but there's got to be something.

Epiphenomenalism about Rawls and my CV items

2009-04-13T08:49:00.003-04:00

[I posted this over at Donkeylicious, my generally nonphilosophical political blog, with a less geeky title. That's why I kind of rush through the political philosophy stuff below. Feel free to tell me why my objections to Rawls don't work or whatever, though.]

Asks Ezra: "If John Rawls had never existed, it's very clear that American political philosophy would look very different. But is it actually clear that American politics would look even a little bit changed?" Probably not, I think. The lesser reason is that his political philosophy actually didn't have very distinctive consequences relative to the American political environment. The greater reason is that we're in a political climate where intellectuals don't have much influence.

I was teaching two weeks of Rawls in my political philosophy seminar this semester, and on rereading it struck me how similar the practical consequences of his views are to the utilitarian views he displaced on the American political philosophy scene. Rawls' difference principle, which basically says that social distributions of goods are better insofar as the people on the bottom are better off, isn't a theory about how happiness should be distributed. It's a view about how social primary goods, like wealth and opportunity, should be distributed. Given the diminishing marginal utility of such goods, a utilitarian will be most concerned with helping the people with the least. There are still going to be differences between the distribution I want and the distribution Rawls wants. But given the existing distribution of goods in American society, Rawls and I are going to be pulling for basically the same political proposals.

Of course, the deeper you get into the theory, the bigger my differences with Rawls get. I think his justifications for why people in the original position would choose the difference principle aren't very good, and he'd do better to just appeal to diminishing marginal utility. His point about the separateness of persons and how you can't make up for harming one person by benefitting another -- his key objection to utilitarianism -- isn't respected by his own theory, which allows you to trade off harms and benefits as long as you do it within classes of people. At least as it's written, the methodology of reflective equilibrium doesn't allow for the sorts of debunking moves that my defense of utilitarianism depends on. But inside baseball stuff like that isn't going to have a popular impact.

(A relevant boast: we utilitarians may be almost as dead as the logical positivists on the US philosophy scene, but which philosopher does Nicholas Kristof sympathetically cover in a very nice column? Peter Singer, taking the side of animals against the meat industry. This is what happens when you have distinctive and striking commitments that touch diverse and sensitive aspects of human life. Which isn't an objection to Rawls -- it's just an explanation for why he wasn't as splashy.)

But the bigger reason why Rawls didn't make a big splash is just that the forces governing American politics at present don't put any premium on intellectual opinion, or show any interest in mainstreaming intellectual debate. The same circumstances that make it possible for George W. Bush to beat Al Gore in 2000 and Sarah Palin to be chosen as a vice-presidential candidate in 2008 prevent any current political philosopher from making an impact. If I saw a bunch of American TV pundits eagerly speculating about which candidate would win the intellectual vote, I'd make sure not to drive or operate heavy machinery in the next twelve hours. Rawls may have a nifty argument that you're not entitled to the things you get in the free market, since those things are really just products of other things that you didn't earn any more than a prince earned his hereditary title. But even though that argument was able to keep the young Texans in my Business Ethics section in their seats, trying to figure a way out, several minutes after the bell rang, it's not the sort of thing that you're going to see on cable TV anytime soon.

Being a philosophy professor who's interested in politics, you might expect me to be rather unhappy about this state of affairs. And, yeah! I'd really like it to change. The funny thing is that I've grown up so fully within this political environment that I've come to accept its constraints. My plans for having political impact generally stand apart from my research. It's kind of a weird thing to say now, just as I'm finally starting to write up my big argument for utilitarianism, the theory that stands at the foundation of my political views. But as awesome as I think the argument is, and as dramatic as its consequences are for how the world should be, I don't really think about it affecting the way anybody outside philosophy thinks about anything.

My teaching might inspire a few kids to do good things or turn their energies in socially beneficial directions, though I'm not under any illusions about my ability in that regard. I can give away a big chunk of my salary to people and causes that will make the world a better place. I can do the sort of thing that all of us bloggers do (thanks to all you for reading!) And hey, maybe the American political environment will emerge from the anti-intellectual shadow of whatever it was that made this happen. But until I see that happening, I'm not expecting to write any journal articles that change the world.

NDPR Review: Luchte Zarathustra Volume

2009-04-08T06:10:00.003-04:00

My review of a collection of essays on Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra is up at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Zarathustra is one of my favorite books ever, so I was excited to review some secondary literature on it.

Unfortunately, some of the essays in the volume were pretty bad, and I got kind of angry at one of them. More often I was just highlighting the best parts of their papers, though, or gently making fun of them if they were really screwing up. The competitive friendship with animals paper, which I mentioned here a while ago, is the last one in the review.