Random bits of philosophy
Left versus right in ethos
We would all be immensely disgusted by a child selfishly killing a parent. We would all be immensely disgusted by a parent selfishly killing a child. This is right and proper. However, almost unanimously, I think, we would be more disgusted by the killer parent than the killer child(*). Throughout most of history, it would have been the other way round. The fact that almost everyone feels this way now- almost regardless of their background- is because fundamentally the left, as an ethos, has defeated the right, as an ethos.
Left and right are totally unsatisfactory terms here, but I can’t think of better, so they’re what we’ll use.
Both a parent killing their child and a child killing their parent are disgusting for their lovelessness- but, each has a special fearsomeness. In the case of the parent killing the child, it is a horror at the disregard for authority. Frankly, this scarcely bothers us anymore. I am bothered by the lovelessness of killing one’s parent, but not by any inherent disregard for authority. Nevertheless, historically, it was considered a major horror. In the case of a parent killing a child, we have the horror of the exploitation of the weak by the strong, particularly those whom the strong owe care to. Almost everyone in the contemporary world finds that worse. We are typically much more horrified by exploitation than by disobedience. Even if our own instincts happen to be authoritarian, we feel compelled to argue in the idiom of horror at exploitation rather than horror at disobedience. Consider:
>The nationalist doesn’t argue that his nation should dominate as he might have in the past; instead, he argues that his nation must be strengthened merely for its protection.
>Patriarchy is defended not as the natural rule of the superior sex, but as ultimately good for women.
>Inequality is defended not as a natural state of affairs where the strong are better off than the weak, but as fairness and non-exploitation of those who work hard, and as ultimately good for the worst off.
Certainly, at the level of public debate, the fear of the misuse of authority is far in excess of the fear of disrespect for authority.
Abelard considers the case of a slave who is to be killed by his master. Abelard takes it for granted both that this is wrong and that the slave has no right of self-defence. It’s not just that we disagree with Abelard here- in a profound sense, I think we don’t even get what he’s going on about. As soon as that perspective became incomprehensible to us, the right was defeated and the left won. Assuming civilization doesn’t collapse, some permanent authoritarian regime isn’t set up, and this ethos I have described isn’t reversed, the left ethos has won, and the political left will eventually crush the right.
(*)- A small exception exists. Infanticide is often partially excused when an infant is very young. Officially, this is because we tend to assume mental illness played a role; unofficially, I think it might be at least in part because, although we’d be reluctant to say it out loud, many of us don’t see newborns as fully human persons.
The culpability of those in the past
A common idea is that we should judge the past by its own standards. This is insane. I don’t have to acquiesce to the claim that slavery was okay when the ancient Romans did it. It’s lazy moral relativism (specifically, actor rather than speaker relativism).
A much more moderate version of this claim is that the wrongfulness of an ancient Roman practicing slavery is typically less than the wrongfulness of a modern person doing it. I think this is true, although it’s important not to emphasise how mitigating a factor it is.
One interesting route to arguing would be in terms of constitutive and circumstantial moral luck. However, I won’t be taking that approach here.
My two arguments are:
The (dis)unity of virtues: If you found out your neighbor was practicing slavery, you would learn a lot about them. You would learn that they are likely in a generalized way, cruel, unjust, megalomaniacal, and so on, in a fully general way. On the other hand, if you learn that an ancient Roman owned slaves, you only learn that they had these traits in relation to their slaves because the society-wide rationalization made it possible to have one set of virtues in relation to non-slaves, and one set of vices in relation to one’s slaves. Slave owners in ancient Rome, due to the social-psychological features of their society, could be excellent in all other spheres, just not that one. Now, admittedly, keeping slaves or even defending keeping slaves is a huge sphere to fail in, and so slave owning was still extremely wrong in the past, but it is slightly less alarming vis-à-vis someone’s character than slave keeping would be today.
The correctability of vice: If we learn that someone’s vices are easily correctable, we tend to sympathise more with them. Certain vices from the past are likely more correctable than similar failings from the present would be. Consider St Augustine, who considered slavery permissible in many cases. It is quite plausible, I think, that if one took him out of the past and put him into the present for a few days, let him see the effects of abolishing slavery, let him talk to scholars who had seen the topic from a different point of view, that he would turn against slavery. By contrast, a modern defender of slavery is likely deeply entrenched in that view, in a way that no comparatively gentle intervention would be likely to correct.
Note that both above points are less exculpating in cases intermediate between ancient slavery and slave-holding in the contemporary West. For example, antebellum slavery is less excused than Roman slavery precisely because by that point, many people had worked out that slavery was wrong. Hence, the vice is less correctable, and the idea of an impermeable society-wide rationalisation without challenge- shielding other virtues- doesn’t hold.
Intuitions are truthmakers, not truthtrackers
People are arguing about intuitions on Substack. On the one hand, they seem terribly mysterious, “I just know it”. Philosophers often make fun of new-age bullshit, but how much better a footing is intuition on? On the other hand, you’ve got to start somewhere. On yet another hand, even if we have to accept that some minimal intuitions are indispensable, maybe they are used far too plentitudinously in philosophy.
I have a good theory that makes the evidential value of a large class of intuitions wholly non-mysterious.
These intuitions are not-truthtrackers; they are truthmakers. For example, that I feel that the Gettier cases are not cases of knowledge isn’t a glimpse into a mysterious realm of ideas; rather, it is a kind of stipulation about what I mean by “knowledge”. It is a picking out from among the plentitude of possible properties in the knowledge-like space which one we are deploying in our language. The same could be said of many other philosophical concepts.
By embracing moral subjectivism, we can use this framework to make sense of moral intuitions as well. That I think, say, pushing the fat man is not equivalent to pulling the lever (or don’t think this, as the case may be) is not a guess at some external moral reality- it is rather a declaration of principles. My moral intuition becomes a moral truthmaker- or at least tightly conceptually connected to one.
Of course, this approach implies that the undergraduate take that philosophy is often or typically merely verbal is close to right—caveat lector.
EDT superstition
It is widely believed that being fed breastmilk offers advantages to a child. However, some believe that the best available evidence tends to suggest that breastmilk has minimal advantages over formula, and any correlations are spurious. Because of the belief that breastmilk is better for children, the best parents are statistically more likely to provide it. This creates the expected correlation between breastfeeding and life outcomes. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that this theory is true and the correlations are spurious. Let us further suppose, though, that the relationship is not entirely clear, even from the point of view of an outside observer.
Now, suppose an evidential decision theorist is considering whether to breastfeed her children. She does not want to do so if she can avoid it, and she is 95% convinced the effect is purely correlational. Given these odds, she thinks, it is best not to breastfeed. However, she considers that even if the effect is correlational, finding out that she has not breastfed might be bad news. Maybe- given the uncertainty about whether or not the effect is correlational- it says something about her commitment to her child, even though she is *pretty sure* there is no causal relationship. Maybe the best parents would be more paranoid than relying on a 95% chance because maybe the best parents are worried about their child’s safety even when it is at its face irrational. Hence, maybe finding out she isn’t going to breastfeed would still be bad news because it shows she is not a maximally doting, paranoid parent, and that is associated with problems in other areas; hence, perhaps she should breastfeed.
But it seems like, using this method and using EDT, it might be possible to create an indefinite number of ‘rational superstitions’ that EDT agents are effectively stuck with. Once a somewhat plausible ‘superstition’ about something is embedded and it cannot be definitively disproved, it indicates something about you, whether or not you will tend to follow it. It is my impression that parenting is especially filled with such superstitions. This might make it rational, on an EDT account, to conform to many superstitions.
[I appreciate there’s a lot more that would have to be spelled out here- the actual argument would have to be made with much more detail and include premises such as ‘we have limited grasp of our own character, thus decisions like this can be a major basis for updating and ‘plausiably parents who are more paranoid than might appear warranted on a decision by decision basis create better outcomes’.]
Qualia and personal perspective
Two mysterious facts about the mind that I think are often run into each other, even though they are conceptually distinct.
The qualia problem. The redness of red- the highness of the high note- none of this seems easily explicable in terms of functional or computational properties. Consider, e.g., inverted spectrum arguments- what if I saw the colours in reverse all my life? It’s not clear what difference this would make functionally or computationally, but it would clearly make a difference to my experience.
My experiences, it seems, are mine. They are private, yes, but more importantly, they belong to a very specific consciousness, mine. One way to put this is that there might be facts about the world that are only understandable from a first-person point of view. This is a bit mysterious because most of our systems of thought and narratives about the structure of the world are third-personal.
You can believe in Qualia without believing in this mysterious property of my-ness. You can believe in my-ness without believing in qualia. I can imagine a world in which there are numerous, interrelated qualia in spiralling networks without any irreducible mine-ness or your-ness. I can imagine thinking about my-ness or your-ness without ever being troubled by qualia.
While this point has been made before, I wanted to point it out again because it is often forgotten.
Interestingly, I have a somewhat more conservative view on children killing parents. In the case of a child killing their good, loving, non-abusive parent, it honestly does seem just as bad if not worse than a parent killing their *adult* child (so leaving aside the issue of the abuse of vulnerable minors).
For me, it isn't a matter of authority at all, but one of *gratitude*. Good parents sacrifice so much for their children that it seems peculiarly monstrous to repay this love and sacrifice with murder.
And, while authority obviously played a major role in pre-modern disproportionate horror at parricide, I do think gratitude was a major factor as well. Note that some ethical systems, like Buddhist morality, explicitly classified murdering one's *mother* as even worse than murdering one's father. In a patriarchal context, killing a father would be an even greater offense against authority--but killing one's mother would be an even greater sin against gratitude, given the even greater sacrifices mothers make.
Re: moral relativism when judging people of past eras, I think I would phrase it rather that it is _understandable_ why people did bad things (like hold others in slavery) given the context they were living in, and what their society was telling them was right / wrong, or acceptable / unacceptable, or normal / deviant. The people who were abolitionists in the context of the late 18th / early 19th century were doing something heroic. Obviously the world would be better if more of us had that kind of courage, but most of us just don't.
Contrariwise, people who will come out and speak _in favor_ of putting other supposedly-inferior classes of people in slavery, or argue that the South was doing people a favor by enslaving them (because at some statistical level, descendants of enslaved Africans are likely to be wealthier at this point than relatives who weren't enslaved), are engaging in a kind of moral anti-heroism. Bucking the consensus of your society in order to try to drag that consensus towards something _worse_ is a non-banal way to be evil.