Video up soon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 _____

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.