"Once It's Been Done, One Can See It Was Always Inevitable." A movie about a ghost dog who plans a wedding. http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2017/11/21/the_first_ghost_dog_wedding_planning_movie_is_here_at_last.html
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On the 16th and 17th of November I posted here discussions of the "error theory" in meta-ethics [hereafter ET in ME]. This is nihilism by a somewhat fancier name. It is the view that our statements about right and wrong mean what they sound like they mean to untutored ears, they mean that we are making claims of knowledge about actions, situations, duties, etc. -- but they are always wrong, because we never really have such knowledge. I put off the matter of my own evaluation of error theory. But here we go. Note that a key argument is simply how ":queer" a sort of thing a moral fact is if it exists. Why does the error theorist think moral judgments are inherently "queer"? Mackie put it this way, to say that they are knowable facts is also to say that they are "intrinsically action guiding," independent of the "desires or purposes" of the one who is guided. Of course it is open to the opponent of ET/ME to say "it doesn't ...
How old was Bertrand Russell in 1922? Not ALL that old, surely, because he had a lot of life left in him. The reason I ask (no reason to rush and look it up yourself, dear reader, I will do that for you shortly) is that Russell delivered a lecture in March 1922 that began with a rather supercilious reference to his age. The lecture, with the title, "Is there an Absolute Good?," answers the title question with a resounding "no." Furthermore, the "no" is true even if one interprets "absolute" so that it means something rather less demanding that it sounds. Russell meant to say that there is no objective good. Important subject, but not why I'm writing this post. It is inspired by the opening of the lecture, which is this: When the generation to which I belong were young, Moore persuaded us all that there is an absolute good. Most of us drew the inference that we were absolutely good, but this is not an essential part of Moore...
I believe I've discussed this before in this blog but, hey, I'm old enough so that you have to expect that I've repeated myself now and then. According to one theory -- one with a certain level of plausibility to it at least -- the societies of the world fall into three classes as defined by water: the dry, the temperate, and the wet. With the dry, large-scale irrigation is essential to any agriculture at all. With the wet, dikes and flood control measures are an imperative. In temperate parts of the world, neither of those needs is quite so urgent, and they can be handled at smaller, localized, scales. Projects that require great scale require great states, powerful imperial centers. On this logic, small states, and individual liberty, has only been possible in the lucky goldilocks parts of the world, neither wet enough nor dry enough to create those unquestionable imperial centers.
William James delivered his now-notorious essay on "The Will to Believe" first as a guest lecturer, a guest of the combined "Philosophical Clubs" of Yale and Brown University in 1896. That's important to remember because it gives one a sense of who is the "we" is when James talks about what "we" believe. Ivy League students almost all (possibly all) white men from well-off families. I will contend in what follows that there was an esoteric message in this essay, a message that was likely very clear to many if not most of those in the hall, but the salience of which faded with the passage of time. The pertinence of a key contemporary reference came to seem quaint. So the esoteric meaning has become utterly inaccessible until recovered by -- well, by me. Just now. In the passage below, James is making the point that we take a wide range of our beliefs on authority - we believe a lot on no evidence or personal consideration of our own. T...
This is an important day in the history of the Middle East. It is the anniversary of the final day of the four day Battle of al-Qadisiyyah, in Iraq, in 636. The Sasanian Empire, centered in what we now call Iran, first came into existence in the middle of the third century AD, and became at once the great eastern rival of the Roman Empire. The fatal blows to the Sasanians in the 7th century came not from the west, from what by then was known as Byzantium, but from the growth of new Moslem Arab powers. Qadisiyyah was the decisive five-day battle that led to the defeat of the Sasanians, the loss immediately of Iraq and ultimately Persia/Iran itself, Sasanian homeland, to the new militantly Islamic wave in the region. The battle was a ferocious enough struggle and story tellers began embellishing upon it immediately. In recent times, it is invoked within the Arab/Moslem world as a great victory over a people who were not "of the book." Saddam Hussein of Iraq...
It appears that the life or death of Marion Wilson Jr., pictured here,may turn on a dry-seeming point of appellate procedure, and an even more obscure seeming question in the interpretation of a precedent. First: should a federal appellate court look through a "summary decision" to review the last REASONED judicial decision in the hierarchical chain? Second, did the Supreme Court decision in HARRINGTON v. RICHTER implicitly answer that question "no," silently abrogating an earlier look-through rule? Here's a link to a brief discussion of where the case of WILSON v. SELLERS now stands. https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-6855 Wilson's appellate attorney petitioned for a new trial on the basis of the alleged incompetence of his original trial attorney. There were other arguments too, which I'll ignore for the moment. The superior court denied that petition, and the attorney then appealed to the state Supreme Court. The state high court issued a...
Relying on yesterday's prelude, let's dive right in. If I understand it correctly, the error theory holds that (1) cognitivism is right about what ethical statements try to do but, (2) cognitivism is wrong in that ethical statements ALWAYS fail to do it, to convey knowledge. Error theorists rather boldly refuse to re-interpret such errors in non-cognitivist fashion to turn them into anything that could be non-erroneous. An ethical statement in the pertinent sense says that some normative predicate is true of some subject. The classic text for error theory is J.L. Mackie, ETHICS: INVENTING RIGHT AND WRONG (1977). It contends that there are no true statements with normative predicates -- that is, of the form "X is just" or "X is a breach of trust." In arguing for this view, Mackie coined the phrase, "the argument from queerness." He contended that ethical statements could possibly be right only if ethical facts somehow "supervene...
The "error" theory is a special case in the old debate between "cognitive" and 'non-cognitive" meta-ethical views. Cognitivism holds that there are moral properties or moral facts, and that the aim of normative ethical discourse is to describe them, and preferably to be right about them, in something like the same way that there are bodies and events we call "astronomical," (stars, planets, collisions, the collapse of a star into a black hole) and the aim of discussing "astronomy" is to describe them, and preferably to be right about them. For example, the wrongness of murder may be a fact in the world. If it is then the goal of the sentence "murder is wrong" is to name that fact. Non-cognitivists claim that there aren't any moral properties or facts, so they can't be described, rightly or wrongly. But it also generally adds that this doesn't mean normative ethical statements are wrong. It just means that su...
"By running up all the different virtues to this one species of propriety, Epicurus indulged a propensity, which is natural to all men, but which philosophers in particular are apt to cultivate with a peculiar fondness, as the great means of displaying their ingenuity, the propensity to account for all appearances from as few principles as possible. And he, no doubt, indulged the propensity still further, when he referred all the primary objects of natural desire and aversion to the pleasures and pains of the body." This is from THE THEORY OF MORAL SENTIMENTS. The one "species of propriety" of Epicurus is temperance, the ability to refrain from the pursuit of particular pleasures out of a reasonable concern that they will cause harm later. For example, temperance is the ability to refrain from drinking so as to avoid a hangover. That, to Epicurus, WAS virtue. Smith is here criticizing the drive toward monism. After all, his book's title says "sentim...
Some politics, some finance, and yes some philosophy here. Would you buy a bond for your portfolio that had been issued by the Spanish province of Catalonia? Would you do so in the expectation that the local government, which issued the bond and which now considers itself to be the leadership of a sovereign state, would be ready, willing, and able to continue to make payments? Or, in the expectation that Spain, which has now asserted direct control of the province, would be making the payments? The worry, of course, is that neither will happen -- that the situation will continue to be unsettled, that the government in Madrid won't make these payments as a way of undermining the legitimacy of the folks who issued these bonds, that those folks won't be able to make payments either, and thus that the buyers will be left holding the bag. The website CREDIT SLIPS has noticed something odd about these bonds: http://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2017/10/catalan-bonds-anyon...
I simply want this to be expounded once in this blog. I've alluded to the double slit experiment in some of my recent remarks on quantum theory and its philosophical overlay, and I even pasted an image of one hypothetical result of the experiment onto my most recent such discussion. But for this once I'll be explicit. Imagine that electrons, or photons, are little tiny particles, as Democritus might have imagined. Imagine shooting them (in Chicago-movie machine-gun fashion) at a wall that had two parallel slits in it, and that there is a screen behind the wall, such that each particle that gets through the slit leaves a mark on the screen. What would you expect to see on the other side of that wall? You'd likely expect to see marks directly behind each slit, corresponding top the shape and size of the split. Some portion of the screen that lay between the two slits would presumably be left unmarked. That's not what happens. Consider light first. Thomas Young d...
An essay on the fundamentals of ethics. Long enough for a short book, perhaps. Pulling together things I've written on this blog and elsewhere on the subject, but not an anthology of stuff I've already written. Drawing on the history of philosophy, but not historical in focus. Organize like this? I. Is morality beyond the reach of knowledge? a) non-cognitive understandings of ethics b) a special case: the error theory c) the central case for a cognitivist understanding d) related but perhaps less central considerations here II. Is too much knowledge a threat to morality? a) stating the problem carefully b) dismissing the "faculty" of the will c) randomness and the understanding of time III. So we can know moral truths: how? a) what might serve as the foundation for ethical knowledge? Intuition! b) what we mean if we answer "intuition" c) what we don't mean, but may wrongly be th...
This is alarming: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/oct/24/universities-mccarthyism-mp-demands-list-brexit-chris-heaton-harris The government of the UK is committed to the exit from a broader entity, the EU. I believe on the basis of my own limited study of the matter, that that is a rational decision. Also, it is the decision mandated by a referendum. Well and good. But ... The Guardian reports that a high ranking MP in the ruling party has sent letters to honchos in the country's universities asking them what they are teaching about the subject of Brexit and asking for a list of lecturers' names. THERE IS NO LEGITIMATE REASON FOR A GOVERNMENT TO ASK. Bryan Leiter discussed this on his blog, and drew an intriguing email from a well known political philosopher, Thom Brooks, dean of Durham Law School. Brooks wrote: Lists of courses can be readily found online and most department websites carry information about individual staff interests. The MP, Chr...
Hopeful news in recent days about an old and dear desideratum: a cure for cancer. Or at least for a cancer, and a nasty one at that. The news comes about because investors in GlaxoSmithKline are greedy for profits, and has already inspired a bit of deregulation to boot. The FDA has paved the road for a speedy review of a new BCMA drug for multiple myeloma, essentially cancer of the bone marrow. This means that the US govt has removed some of the hurdles that would otherwise (by decision of the same govt) face a company trying to proceed with these trials expeditiously. This has been done because the Phase I clinical trial results have been very promising. The report I've seen indicates that details of these results will be shared with the world on Dec. 11 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology. The European Medicines Agency has also given priority treatment to the drug in question. GSK's website identifies the drug at issue as "GS...