Hobbes, and giving up your rights to the Constitution

I've been thinking about some ways to fix Hobbes's view so that you don't end up giving up all your rights to a sovereign who then has absolute power and can do awful things with impunity. Hobbes was concerned that if you don't give up all your rights to a single individual or body, your divided government will be riven by internal power struggles and you'll end up in another English Civil War. (A lot of Leviathan is a "How to not be in the English Civil War" manual.) Hobbes claimed that an absolute monarch would rule in the best interest of his subjects because his power was constituted by theirs. Historically, this consideration hasn't been especially successful in aligning the interests of absolute monarchs with their subjects.

So here's a way to start from Hobbes' basic premises about the state of nature and meet all his major desiderata while incorporating goodies like separation of powers and the structures of liberal democracy. Rather than getting out of the state of nature by giving up all your rights to a sovereign, give them all up to a form of government embodied in a clearly written Constitution, which defines the roles of various branches of government, lays out procedures for governance, and guarantees a bunch of rights to the subjects. You're also going to have to do some voting to figure out who will fill the offices at first, but Hobbes grants that you can do that in his account of how a commonwealth begins by institution.

From then on, regard the Constitution the way that Hobbes would want you to regard the sole pronouncement of an absolute monarch. If people are violating it, they're denying the sovereign's authority, putting them at a state of war with everyone else. Assuming that the Constitution is clearly written and there's an agreed-upon framework for interpreting it, I don't see why you couldn't achieve all of Hobbes' major desiderata. (There are some minor things you couldn't get -- he thinks an absolute monarchy is superior to democracy because the absolute monarch has an easier time making secret plans. But I'm sympathetic to Yglesias' argument that in some foreign policy contexts, it actually helps if everyone knows you're incapable of secrecy.)

This isn't to say that there aren't problems with this account of government. The point is just that as far as I can tell, it'd accomplish everything Hobbes really cares about, while building in some extra goodies.

Roar T!

I've been a fan of the Philosophical Lexicon since I was an undergraduate. If you've read it before, they've packaged the new 2008 entries in one place. This one had me laughing:

Roar T, n. Loud conversational alternative to Convention T; also known as "the disputational theory of truth."

I actually haven't read anything of Richard Rorty's work since freshman year, but I've heard enough to get it, and it's really a Tarski joke anyway.

Moral intuition and linguistic intuition

Here's a disanalogy between moral intuition and linguistic intuition (for example, intuitions about what a word means or whether a particular construction is grammatical). I'm sure that something like this is true, though I may not be talking about it right. And who knows, maybe it's more controversial than I think...

We can imagine a community where everybody across all times has the same moral intuitions, and they're all wrong. But we can't imagine a community where everybody across all times has the same linguistic intuitions, and they're all wrong. If the community of Spanish speakers regards it as intuitive that 'arroz' means 'rice' in Spanish, that's what 'arroz' means in Spanish. When we imagine them all using it to mean 'beef', we're just imagining a situation in which 'arroz' means beef in Spanish. However, if all Spanish speakers (or all Puritans, if we want to make this be a community of moral co-believers rather than a linguistic community) thought it was wrong to use birth control, there still might be nothing wrong with using birth control. This is because the linguistic intuitions of the community play a role in constituting the language, while the moral intuitions of the community do not constitute morality.

I'm just using intuition in the sense of 'pretheoretical judgment' here. Obviously if you say it's a presentation of necessary truth to your nous or something that'll mess up the example.

Have grant, will travel

A couple months ago, I applied for a grant to fund travel around America between May 10 and July 25 so that I could give talks on my research at a bunch of places. Today I got some news from the nice granting people here in Singapore saying that they like my application and they actually want to give me more money so I can give more talks! They haven't officially approved the grant yet, but things seem to be on track.

So I thought I'd just kind of open this up. If you want me to come over to your philosophy department and give a talk defending utilitarianism or the Humean theory of motivation, send me an email (my address is at the top of this page). The papers are yet to be written, but I'd be happy to discuss stuff in more detail or send along a draft in a month or two when I've got them ready. And if you're at a place with an undergraduate philosophy club, I'd be happy to give them a reading of "Possible Girls", which never fails to amuse the kids. I know summer isn't the best time for this sort of thing, but if it turns out that your institution can host a talk in mid-June or the teens of July, that'll be wonderful.

Assuming the grant money comes through as expected, I'll be able to pay my own way. If you want to feed me something interesting, though, I won't turn it down!

Future selves and procrastination

I'm wondering if I'd manage my time more efficiently and procrastinate less if I saw my future selves the way I see other people.

Failing to do some task today so that it ends up having to be done by somebody else strikes me as more shameful than failing to do some task today so that I have to do it tomorrow. So I'm much more likely to slack off if I'm going to pay the price in the future than if somebody else will. Maybe if I felt similar obligations towards Neil_tomorrow as I do to, say, my colleagues, I'd get more things done today.

Silence and John Kulvicki's stable property view of sounds

In "The Nature of Noise", John Kulvicki defends a 'stable property' view of sounds, on which sounds are "dispositions of objects to vibrate in response to being stimulated." They aren't the compression waves that pass through the air -- they're the dispositional properties of objects that make them vibrate and produce those waves in response to thwacking. (I give him points for using the word 'thwacking' liberally in the paper.) As Kulvicki says, this would make sounds a lot like colors, at least on some fairly intuitive views of color.

Two things. The minor point is that we're going to have to have a really complex view of thwacking in order to make this all work out. Intuitively, the sound of Roy Sorenson is the sound he makes when he talks, not the sound that he makes when you thwack him, unless you interpret his speech as some kind of internal self-thwacking. Kulvicki's distinction between having sounds and making sounds, which he uses to deal with cases like audio equipment, doesn't seem to do the necessary work here. While I suppose I could get into saying that my stereo makes sounds it doesn't really have, it sounds weirder to say that Sorenson is making sounds he doesn't really have when he talks.

But my bigger objection has to do with silence. It seems pretty straightforward that when it is silent, there are no sounds. This goes along perfectly well with the view that sounds are compression waves. But it's big trouble for the view that sound is a stable dispositional property of objects. On the stable property view, silence is compatible with there being lots and lots of sounds! Objects retain their dispositions even if those dispositions aren't being activated, and the presence of lots of drums or other objects with wave-making dispositions will make it the case that there are lots of sounds, even if nobody is beating the drums and all is totally silent.

Ending the paper JFPs / Proceedings And Addresses

If you're an APA member, they mail you 4 paper copies of Jobs for Philosophers and three book-shaped copies of the Proceedings and Addresses of the APA (one for each division's annual meeting) each year. I imagine that a big chunk of the APA membership fee goes towards funding the creation and distribution of all this paper.

In our internet-enabled times, I don't see good reason for mailing out all this stuff. The electronic versions of the Proceedings and Addresses are just plain easier to use -- you can instantly keyword search them with Ctrl-F and remind yourself when the session you want to heckle is meeting. If there's some way to push the APA to move to an online-only format, I'd be happy to do my part in the pushing. I'm guessing that the money we save by doing this could be put to better use creating public goods of some kind or another. Or you could just cut the membership fees.

Possible reasons that we're sticking with paper:
-There are some ads in the Proceedings and Addresses that may not translate very well to internet form (the JFP is all classified ads which should translate just fine to the internet with no revenue loss.) But I can't imagine that the revenue stream here is big enough to justify huge amounts of paper.

-Old-timers may not like the internet. But is that really such a big constituency these days? And if they don't like looking at screens, will they really be so unhappy to use their printers and print stuff?

-Paper copies of the Proceedings and Addresses are also used as programs at the conferences, and then economies of scale make it not such a bad deal to print out additional copies and mail them to everyone. I'd be surprised if the economics worked out this way, but I guess it's possible. Then I'd be interested in seeing if there's some way to get more streamlined programs.

Redesign almost finished / Turn Into

This blog has been redesigned! Since I've got a stable political blog now, I'll be able to turn this place into a proper philosophy blog. New features include the snazzy dynamic blogroll on the right (still incomplete, I have to add back all the people who were on the old one). That should make it easier for me to figure out when people are posting so that I can read/comment/respond here. Also, I've got my currently-published-or-accepted papers up there if anyone wants to download them. Any further design suggestions will be appreciated.

Apropos of nothing really, here's the song that's been obsessing me for the last couple weeks -- the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Turn Into". There's so much cool stuff going on in this song that I've been playing it over and over again to get my fill of the acoustic part and the electric part and all the different melodies. This is sort of the 'Y Control' of the second album, which is a bit more lush and melodic than the first. (Some would say the 'Maps', and I dig on "they don't love you like I love you" as much as the next soft-indie-rock wuss, but Y Control was always my favorite.)

Cass <3 Samantha

Add this to the list of things I didn't know: new OIRA head and legal academia heavyweight Cass Sunstein is married to Samantha Power! Apparently they met through the Obama campaign and got married this past July 4 in Power's native County Cork. I also didn't know that Sunstein had previously been in a relationship with Martha Nussbaum.

See, this is why we publish.

This blog doesn't look right!

That's because Blogger tricked me into updating the way it's designed. This may be for the best, though I'll have to more work to take it there. I'll be putting links back in pretty soon, probably after I get back from drinking with former Cogitamus blogmate Sir Charles.

Save Us, Government! Set The Journals Free!

(I'm crossposting this from my political blog, donkeylicious, because it deals with academic stuff)

Ezra Klein, the rare and wonderful non-academic who reads academic papers, asks:

why is so much content locked up in pricey journals? Much of this research is being conducted on the public dime, but is utterly inaccessible to the public. The journals might have made sense when you needed some sort of archiving and distribution model to store, categorize, and spread research, but with the advent of the internet, their existence serves to foil those efficient dissemination of relevant research. Do they simply survive because the prestige they confer as gatekeepers plays an important role in rankings and advancement? Or is there some crucial purpose I'm missing entirely?

Here's my understanding of the story: All these journals were originally things more or less like magazines. In fact, they still are. The library at your university (because of course you're an academic at a university, or you wouldn't be interested in this stuff) pays a subscription fee and gets mailed a booky-looking object four times a year with the latest research. Journals are pricey and have copyrighting because that's the business model that works for low-circulation high-interest publications being sold to rich institutional libraries.

But now, there's the internet! Instead of the expensive printing, binding, and mailing of booky-looking objects, you can transmit information for free through the magic tubes. Since the editors and reviewers are professors who do this without getting paid by the journal (they regard this as part of the job the university pays them for) the entire process could be done for free. There's sometimes a grad student making a little money as an editorial assistant, but that's about it. We academics would be happy enough to just put our content on the web for free. In fact, a cool new journal in my discipline, Philosophers' Imprint, does that.

But Philosophers' Imprint is a very new journal. The existing journals aren't doing this. The trouble is that a lot of these journals are now owned by big publishing companies that don't make any profit by giving away their stuff for free. So they're clinging to the magazine business model.

I'd love it if the government could buy the journals out of the publishers' hands and open them to the public. I hear that some of that has happened in the sciences. The money taxpayers pay out in doing that would soon be recouped, at least in part, by public university academic libraries not having to pay subscription fees. Bonus: Ezra and other ordinary folk get to read my stuff without paying.

But I'm going to keep sending most of my papers to old-line journals that Ezra can't read and hoping they get accepted. After I got a paper accepted in Philosophical Review two months ago (it's the top journal in the discipline), one of my colleagues told me that at some places, people can get tenure just for that! I'd love to have more people read my stuff, but if I just put it on the web for free hardly anybody would even know it was there, or that it was worth reading. Get it into Philosophical Review, and I'm assured that my colleagues will see it, my adversaries will respond to it, and people hiring or promoting me will be impressed. But Ezra won't be able to read it. 

Changing the past

Something I've been wondering about lately -- what modality applies to the impossibility of changing the past? Is changing the past logically impossible, metaphysically impossible, or physically impossible? (If there's some weird physics thing that makes it possible to change the past, please tell me, but I'm not sure how that would work.)

I'm working on a paper that discusses how norms apply to impossible actions, so I'd like to get a better handle on what sort of impossibility would apply to preventing the Civil War or other past-changing actions.

itinerary

San Francisco: Now until December 26
DC: December 26 until January 5
Singapore: January 9-whenever

You who wish to hang out are encouraged to contact me!

Students write things

It's exam grading time! My favorite sentences from this batch included the Mount Everest theory of laws, which isn't much better when you take out the typo:

Law of nature is something that guides how the world or things will be in their upmost natural state.

This student had a talent for accurately translating the philosophers' views (Hume in this case) into ungrammatical mess:

Great evil or noble man (extraordinary) are but "freaks" which is similar to extraordinary weather phenomenas observed also in nature which is governed by laws.

I liked the question this student had for Kant:

Are all rational beings autonomous? Then, what about human beings who have been brought up with animals and have never interacted with humans -- do they then have this intrinsic quality of autonomy?

Introducing Donkeylicious

Nicholas Beaudrot and I have started our own political blog, Donkeylicious. I hereby refer you there for all your werewolfish political commentary needs. As of today, War or Car is complete. It will stay up as long as the internet permits, a monument to three trillion dollars wasted on killing people for no good reason.

I only met Nicholas this summer, but he and I were blogging together during the weekends on Ezra Klein's site for two years, and then for the last year on Cogitamus after Ezra got fully absorbed into the American Prospect. He's excellent with numbers, and he was putting up some awesome county-by-county maps during the primaries to understand what was happening. This was the secret to his super powers. Here he is on February 11, 2008 -- almost four months before Hillary Clinton ended her campaign:

It's over. I'm calling it. When all is said and done, Barack Obama will have a Florida-and-Michigan-proof lead among pledged delegates (68 or more) to convince enough superdelegates to earn the nomination.

Even if Clinton manages a narrow loss, tie, or narrow win in Virginia, Barack Obama should win Maryland and DC handily. Combined with a likely big win in one of his home states (Hawaii), he'll have roughly a 100 delegate lead going into the Wisconsin primary. Let's be pessimistic and assume Obama loses by 15%. With 75 pledged delegates, that means his lead will drop to the high 80s.

We're now all the way to the Ohio and Texas primaries, with a total of 334 pledged delegates at stake. To claw back to a draw, Hillary Clinton will have to win a whopping 61% of them. There's no way that can happen; the only state where Clinton has managed a margin that large is Oklahoma. And remember, this is the pessimistic scenario; if Obama wins Virginia by 15% as polls indicate, and can play two out of three between Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to virtual draws, he'll have lead large enough that Clinton will have to pack it in.

So, yeah, he's good! As for me, I'm basically going to be doing the kind of political blogging there that you might remember from the halcyon days of this blog. With the election behind us, I'll be free to spend more time on more technical philosophy-blogging here.

The Humean Theory of Motivation Reformulated and Defended

...has just been accepted by the Philosophical Review!  

This is just awesome.  Thanks to all y'all who believed in me.  

Holding the world together

There probably aren't going to be any new posts here for the next two months or so until the election, while I'm working on War or Car.  But please go over there -- I'll be putting up a new post daily to dramatize the cost of the Iraq War.  And if there's a post that you find particularly amusing, infuriating, or astonishing, I'd be honored if you were to email a link to whoever you think might be amused, or spread it around in some such way.  

In the meantime, I'm also buying up a bunch of Google Adwords ads to help Obama and the Democrats win elections.  

War or Car?

I've started an exciting new project: War or Car?  Have a look!

What I did on Saturday night

Eating Singaporean Tex-Mex with John Holbo.

Thailand

I traveled from Bangkok to Ko Samet and back with the two intrepid explorers below. Sadly, the 44m long Buddha declined to accompany us on our journey.  

While in Bangkok I was tempted to eat a plate of roasted insects.  When my camera saw what was going on, it responded in an unusual manner.  

This is how the natives of Ko Samet have traditionally consumed their coconut milkshakes.