Category: Ethics

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Justin Capes – “The W-Defense Defended”

In this post, Justin Capes discusses the article he recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Justin’s article can be found here.

street sign indicating that expectations and reality go in opposite directions

A person deserves blame for what she did only if she could have avoided doing it. This principle of alternative possibilities (PAP), as it has come to be known, sounds plausible. But why think it’s true?

David Widerker (2000, 2003) suggests an answer that I find attractive. Widerker’s argument, which is known as the W-defense, goes something like this:

Premise 1: A person deserves blame for what she did only if it would have been reasonable to expect her not to do it.

Premise 2: It would have been reasonable to expect a person not to do what she did only if she could have avoided doing it.

Conclusion: A person deserves blame for what she did only if she could have avoided doing it.

This argument is significant, as it promises to advance a debate many believe has reached an impasse. But does it deliver? Does it yield a convincing argument for PAP? 

Some think not. In a past philosophical life, I complained that Premise 1 is unmotivated (Capes 2010). Others have complained that it requires us to reject intuitively plausible judgments about particular cases (Frankfurt 2003; McKenna 2005, 2008). And still others have complained that Premise 2 depends on the controversial ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ maxim (Fischer 2006).

None of these complaints, though, is legitimate. I respond to each of them in turn.

Start with complaint (lodged by my past philosophical self) that Premise 1 is unmotivated. This isn’t so. Premise 1 is supported by many of our ordinary and uncontroversial moral practices. Consider, for example, what we do when we want to persuade others that we don’t deserve blame for what we did. One of the most obvious strategies is to argue that expecting us to behave any differently would have been unreasonable – in behaving as we did, we didn’t fail to live up to any reasonable expectations. If we can establish this, either by showing that we didn’t fail to live up to others’ expectations or by showing that, if we have, the expectations in question were unreasonable, that will suffice, it seems, to demonstrate that we aren’t blameworthy for our behavior. Premise 1 thus looks pretty plausible.

Often, though, ideas that sound plausible have counterexamples. Consider the following case (modeled on a famous example from Frankfurt 1969):

Shooter: Jones shoots Smith without hesitation. But if Jones had hesitated, a nefarious neuroscientist would have taken control of Jones’s brain and forced him to shoot Smith, and there is nothing Jones could have done to stop this from happening.

Because Jones shot Smith on his own, without being caused to do so by the neuroscientist, many judge that Jones deserves some blame for shooting Smith, even though he couldn’t have avoided shooting Smith (since the neuroscientist would have forced him to shoot Smith if he hadn’t done so on his own). Thus, many philosophers think cases like Shooter are counterexamples to PAP. 

Many of those same philosophers also think cases like Shooter are counterexamples to Premise 1 of the W-defense. They grant, for the sake of argument, that it wouldn’t have been reasonable to expect Jones to avoid shooting Smith, given that he couldn’t have avoided doing so. However, they claim that Jones deserves some blame for shooting Smith, nonetheless.

So, here’s the situation. Premise 1 is plausible, but it also seems to conflict with our intuitive sense that Jones deserves some blame for what he did. What’s a W-defender to do? 

As I see it, we should have our cake and eat it too. Here’s the recipe. Note that, in the example, Jones shoots Smith on his own (i.e., without being forced to do so), and, although Jones couldn’t have avoided shooting Smith, he could have avoided shooting Smith on his own. For example, he could have thought twice about shooting Smith, hesitating enough to prompt the neuroscientist to intervene and force him to shoot Smith. Moreover, we could reasonably have expected Jones to do just that. We can therefore justly blame Jones for shooting Smith on his own (or for shooting Smith without hesitation), since we could reasonably have expected Jones to avoid doing that. What we can’t justly blame Jones for, though, is shooting Smith, as we couldn’t have reasonably expected him to avoid doing that.

So, Jones does deserve some blame for something in this case, but what he deserves blame for is something he could have avoided and that we could reasonably have expected him to avoid. In this way, we can retain PAP and Premise 1 of the W-defense without having to deny that there is indeed something in Shooter for which Jones deserves some blame.

What about Premise 2? Well, it arguably entails the controversial deontic maxim that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ (the Maxim, for short), and some see this as reason to reject it (Fischer 2006: 210). However, I argue that the case for Premise 2 is stronger than the case against the Maxim. So, if Premise 2 entails the Maxim, we should accept both claims.

To illustrate this, imagine the following:

Sandy walks by a lake with twenty children in it, all of whom are clearly drowning. She can’t rescue all twenty children; there’s not enough time and no one else around to help.

What would it be reasonable to expect Sandy to do in this situation? The obvious answer is: to save as many of the drowning children as she can. But why isn’t it reasonable to expect her to save all twenty? Here, too, the answer is obvious; it’s because she can’t save all twenty. 

I think we will be hard pressed to account for these judgments without appealing to the general idea (of which Premise 2 is an instance) that expecting something of someone is reasonable only if the person can comply with the expectation. Since the judgements in question are correct, I think we should accept the general idea (and thus Premise 2).

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/5717/.

References

  • Capes, Justin. (2010). “The W-Defense.” Philosophical Studies 150: 61-77.
  • Fischer, John Martin. (2006). My Way. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Frankfurt, Harry. (1969). “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” Journal of Philosophy 66: 829-39.
  • Frankfurt, Harry. (2003). “Some Thoughts Concerning PAP.” In Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities, eds. David Widerker and Michael McKenna, 339-348. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press.
  • McKenna, Michael. (2005). “Where Frankfurt and Strawson Meet.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29: 163-180.
  • McKenna, Michael. (2008). “Frankfurt’s Argument Against the Principle of Alternative Possibilities: Looking Beyond the Examples.” Nous 42: 770-793.
  • Widerker, David. (2000). “Frankfurt’s Attack on Alternative Possibilities: A Further Look,” Philosophical Perspectives 14: 181-201.
  • Widerker, David. (2003). “Blameworthiness, and Frankfurt’s Argument Against the Principle of Alternative Possibilities,” in Moral Responsibility and Alternative Possibilities: Essays on the Importance of Alternative Possibilities, eds. David Widerker and Michael McKenna, 53-74. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press.

About the author

Justin Capes is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Flagler College. He writes on issues in ethics and the philosophy of action, especially those that concern proper responses to wrongdoing.

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Alexander Edlich and Alfred Archer – “Tightlacing and Abusive Normative Address”

In this post, Alexander Edlich and Alfred Archer discuss their article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

“Standing woman viewed from the front, clasping her corset” (ca. 1883) Edgar Degas

When we interact with each other, we draw on assumptions about what the other is like. When I talk to someone, I assume they can understand me; when I ask them for help, I assume they are capable of helping; when I offer help, I assume it is in their interest. These assumptions are often neither explicit nor conscious, but they guide our interactions.

Likewise, when we act, we are influenced by assumptions about what we ourselves are like. I only get into the pool because I assume that I can swim; I go to bed early because I assume that I need a certain amount of sleep; I hesitate to run for a public office because I am unsure I can handle its pressures.

Our agency is thus deeply influenced by our conception of ourselves. This also holds for our moral agency. We may feel under a duty to help others because we assume not only that they need help but also that we are able to offer the help they need at no great cost to ourselves. Conversely, we think that others should help when we assume they are able to and it is not too demanding. Whether we think we have a certain duty, then, depends in part on what kind of people we understand ourselves to be, including what we understand our capacities to be and what we think will count as unduly burdensome for us. 

This makes us vulnerable to having our self-conceptions wrongfully distorted by others in ways that control how we think we should act. We call this kind of wrong “tightlacing”.

Tightlacing occurs when someone is subjected to influences that foreseeably distort their self-conception in a way that makes them have overburdening demands on themselves. This may come about in various ways, but moral address, and the assumptions it makes about its target, are a particularly useful vehicle for it. Consider two examples:

  • Some parents want their children to suppress their emotions, especially where they are negative, and this can lead to emotional abuse. If normal episodes of, say, a child’s anger regularly elicit responses like “Keep your ridiculous anger to yourself”, “Why are you annoying us with this?”, or “Your mother/father is having such a hard time already, and now you’re being so unhelpful”, a moral demand is made that conveys an assumption about what the child is like. They are expected to be able to suppress their anger in order not to annoy their parents, and this conveys that their anger is something they should be in control of, and that managing it away has no cost to them.
  • Survivors of political atrocities like the Holocaust are sometimes expected to overcome feelings of resentment to enable a society to move forward. Where they refuse to do so, they may find themselves accused of vengefulness and egoism. Their resentment is not treated as a proper emotional reaction to the horror they experienced, but as something they, in the interest of society, should be able to get rid of. This expectation, too, conveys a view of their emotional nature.

In these examples, people are addressed with moral demands based on the assumption that they can regulate their emotions away in order to benefit others without significant cost to themselves. Given the perceived authority of moral demands and the fact that these problematic assumptions are left implicit, this risks manipulating the moral addressees into accepting the view conveyed. If successful, this strategy induces in them a distorted view of themselves: for example, that they are beings with no significant affective nature, or at least with an affective nature that can be easily disposed of. As a consequence, they will tend not to view their emotions as a natural and integral part of themselves, and they will not recognise that emotion regulation can be a difficult and costly task. In short, their view of themselves might become distorted.

This tightlaces them: if someone is made to think their affective nature carries no weight and is easily managed away, they will make moral demands on themselves that are based on this assumption. Once manipulated into thinking that one’s anger has no significance, or that emotion regulation has no costs, these agents are likely to expect themselves to regulate their anger away even when doing so is in fact inappropriate. They will apply norms to themselves that appear to be justified but, given their actual nature, are in fact decidedly overburdening. Victims of tightlacing thus find themselves wearing a normative corset which does not fit what they are like.

We are not saying that tightlacing is the only form of wrongdoing occurring in these examples. Nor do we think that tightlacing only occurs in relation to managing feelings; it occurs whenever someone’s view of themselves is changed such that they apply overburdening demands to themselves. 

Tightlacing wrongs people in many ways: it is manipulative, it makes unreasonable demands, and it is likely harmful to its victims. But, in addition to this, there are two especially significant ways in which it is wrongful. First, by pressuring the victims into applying unreasonable demands to themselves, it denies their rights, and it makes them complicit in this denial. Second, it erases who they are and, again, makes them complicit in this erasure of who they are.

To sum up, our actions and interactions depend on our conception of what we and others are like. This makes us vulnerable not only to other people’s conception of us, but also to what they may do to alter our conception of ourselves. Not abiding by a distorted conception of ourselves, and not being tightlaced into unfitting norms, matters greatly to our lives and our freedom. To break free of unfitting normative corsets, we need to let go of such distorted conceptions. 

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4644/.

About the authors

Alexander Edlich is a postdoctoral researcher at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, where he completed his PhD in 2023. He works on moral responsibility (specifically blame, protest, and apology), the philosophy of emotions, and feminist and LGBTQ ethics.

Alfred Archer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Tilburg University. He is interested in ethics, social philosophy, philosophy of sport and moral psychology. He is the co-author of Honouring and Admiring the Immoral: An Ethical Guide (Routledge 2021), Why It’s Ok to be a Sports Fan (Routledge 2024) and Extravagance and Misery: The Emotional Regime of Market Societies (Oxford University Press 2024).

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Nir Ben-Moshe – “An Adam Smithian Account of Humanity”

In this post, Nir Ben-Moshe discusses his article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Nir’s article can be found here.

photo of two people in a room without sensory reference points.
“Bridget’s Bardo” © James Turrell/Courtesy The Pace Gallery/Photo by Florian Holzherr

Some sentimentalists, inspired by Adam Smith’s moral philosophy, have tried to establish a strong normative connection between one’s own perspective and the perspectives of others, as a way of showing that one is reciprocally bound to, and ought to be engaged with, one’s fellow human beings (Debes 2012; Stueber 2017; Fleischacker 2019).

I understand the connection via Christine Korsgaard’s claim that

“valuing humanity in your own person [. . .] implies, entails, or involves valuing it in that of others” (Korsgaard 1996: 132)

Based on Smith’s moral philosophy, I offer a sentimentalist defense of a version of the Korsgaardian claim: my valuing my own humanity, my unique perspective, entails my valuing your humanity, your unique perspective.

Following Samuel Fleischacker (2019: 31), the conception of humanity that I develop builds on the notion of perspective at the heart of Smith’s account of sympathy.

Smith has an account of sympathy based on imaginative projection, according to which we use our imagination in order to place ourselves in another actor’s situation (TMS I.i.1.2).

“[Sympathy] does not arise so much from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation which excites it” (TMS I.i.1.10)

This account pays special attention to an agent’s perspective on the situation, including the causes of their passions: 

“The first question which we ask is, What has befallen you? Till this be answered, […] our fellow-feeling is not very considerable” (TMS I.i.1.9).

I associate humanity with having a unique perspective and being aware of this perspective. More specifically, a human being is the type of being that is aware, qua spectator, of its own unique perspective, qua actor.

The main argument of the paper relies on three components of Smith’s moral theory.

The first component is the impartial spectator, which Smith understands as the standpoint of a person in general, a neutral point of view. This standpoint humbles our self-love and makes us appreciate that our perspective is but one of a multitude and in no respect better than any other. From this standpoint, Smith argues, we take into account the perspectives and interests of all concerned. 

The second component is the normative status of other-oriented sympathy. When discussing sympathy early in TMS, Smith focuses on imagining being oneself in another actor’s situation (self-oriented sympathy). However, later in TMS, Smith focuses on imagining being another actor in that actor’s situation (other-oriented sympathy). I make the case that Smith thought that other-oriented sympathy is the proper form of sympathy. The key idea is that the appropriate form of sympathy to experience from a neutral point of view is a form of sympathy that is not influenced by self-love.

The third component is the desire for mutual sympathy with others: people are pleased when others sympathize with them and when they are able to sympathize with others.

In order to appreciate the importance of these three components of Smith’s thought, I make use of a distinction that Nagel (1986: 170) draws between recognizing a perspective and occupying it.

The standpoint of the impartial spectator is a standpoint from which I recognize that all perspectives have equal worth: adopting it makes me appreciate that my own perspective is no more privileged than—indeed, is equal to—other people’s perspectives; it tells me that insofar as my perspective is worthy of recognition, your perspective is worthy of recognition, too.

However, this type of recognition would merely show me that your perspective has normative force for you in the same way in which my perspective has normative force for me; it would not show, in and of itself, that your perspective has normative force for me. This is so because, while the recognition of equality necessitates consistency, this consistency can be attained by recognizing that each perspective has normative force for its author; it does not necessitate my engagement with your perspective. 

This is where other-oriented sympathy, as the proper form of sympathy, has a crucial role to play: the impartial spectator requires me to see the situation from your perspective rather than my own; it requires me, that is, to try to occupy your perspective, and not merely recognize it. 

This requirement to occupy someone else’s perspective does not come about ex nihilo, but rather builds on the aforementioned third component, namely, the desire for mutual sympathy with others. According to Smith, the desire for mutual sympathy leads to a process in which we constantly imagine being in the other person’s situation and augment our sympathy so as to match the experiences of the actor; this process, in turn, leads people to construct a rudimentary internal spectator, albeit one that is just averaged out from the perspectives of the people that we have encountered. When the impartial spectator is constructed, he reaffirms the sympathetic efforts to see the situation from others’ perspectives, giving normative authority to other-oriented sympathy.

The combination of being required to both recognize and occupy your perspective means that your perspective has normative force for me in the following way. Insofar as I value my perspective as a unique perspective, I am required to engage with your perspective and consider it from the inside—I am required to attempt to sympathize with you in your person and character in the same way in which I, qua spectator, sympathize with myself, qua actor, in my own person and character—while also recognizing that your perspective has equal standing to my own.

By doing so, your perspective, which is equal in standing to, but different in content from, mine, demands a rational response from me, thereby making your perspective normative for me. Therefore, the proposed Smithian account shows that my valuing my own humanity, my unique perspective, entails my valuing your humanity, your unique perspective.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4662/.

References

  • Debes, Remy (2012). “Adam Smith on Dignity and Equality”. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 20(1), 109–40.
  • Fleischacker, Samuel (2019). Being Me Being You: Adam Smith & Empathy. University of Chicago Press.
  • Korsgaard, Christine M. (1996). The Sources of Normativity. Onora O’Neill (Ed.). Cambridge University Press.
  • Nagel, Thomas (1986). The View from Nowhere. Oxford University Press.
  • Smith, Adam (1976). The Theory of Moral Sentiments [TMS]. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Eds.). Liberty Fund.
  • Stueber, Karsten R. (2017). “Smithian Constructivism: Elucidating the Reality of the Normative Domain”. In Remy Debes and Karsten R. Stueber (Eds.), Ethical Sentimentalism: New Perspectives (192–209). Cambridge University Press.

About the author

Nir Ben-Moshe is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Health Innovation Professor in the Carle Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research falls primarily into two areas. The first area lies at the intersection of contemporary moral philosophy and 18th-century moral philosophy. The second area is biomedical ethics. He is currently working on a book entitled Idealization and the Moral Point of View: An Adam Smithian Account of Moral Reasons.

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Craig Agule – “Defending Elective Forgiveness”

In this post, Craig Agule discusses his article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Craig’s article can be found here.

self-portrait of frada kahlo with a calm monkey, and angry black cat, and a neckless of thorns
“Self-Portrait With Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird” (1940) Frida Kahlo

Not all that long ago, I got angry at someone close to me. They had slighted me; it was not a terrible wrong, but it was enough to be angry (or, at least, I was angry, and several confidants told me that my reaction was reasonable). This person deserved my resentment, and I righteously felt it. But as time passed, and as our relationship continued, I found myself wondering what to do with my anger:  should I hold on to it, or should I forgive this person, letting my anger go? 

I kept coming back to two related puzzles. First, what sort of reasons would support or oppose my forgiving this person? For example, should I be thinking about whether they had taken responsibility? This person had acted poorly and never apologized. Or should I rather be thinking about the consequences of being angry? My anger was both unproductive and disruptive. Were those downsides of anger enough reason to forgive the unrepentant wrongdoer?

I came to see that there was good reason to forgive, but this brought me to the second puzzle:  If it was wise and prudent to forgive, then wouldn’t holding on to my anger be unwise and imprudent? The thought irked me.  Even if it would be reasonable to forgive, this person deserved my anger, and I was entitled to be angry. I was allowed to forgive, I thought, but not required to forgive.

I was irked because I suspected a tension in my thinking about forgiveness. On the one hand, I take forgiveness to be principled, in that we can forgive for reasons and we can offer others reason to forgive. On the other hand, I take forgiveness to be elective, such that, at least in many cases, it is acceptable both to forgive and to withhold forgiveness.

One way to defuse the tension is to pick between these two features of forgiveness, and so a number of philosophers defend principled forgiveness, deflating or abandoning electivity. We may identify reasons to forgive by thinking about the function of anger and blame. Perhaps we can say, with Miranda Fricker, that the point of blame is to bring the wrongdoer and the blamer into an aligned moral understanding. Or perhaps we can say, with Pamela Hieronymi, that the point of blame is to protest a past action that persists as a threat. If the point of blame is something like this, then we might have good reason to forgive in cases where blame has become pointless. If, for example, the wrongdoer has earnestly apologized, that apology might be adequate evidence that the wrongdoer has come to the right moral understanding and is therefore unlikely to repeat their wrong.

This can help us organize our thinking about whether and when to forgive. We think about the point of our anger, and we think about whether anger remains useful. Yet despite this advantage, this way of thinking also threatens the electivity of forgiveness. According to this framework, withholding forgiveness from a repentant wrongdoer might be irrational and even morally inappropriate.

In this paper, I argue that forgiveness is both principled and elective by looking closely at the nature of blame. Reactions like blame, I claim, are in the business of marking and making significance. When we blame someone, we prioritize their culpability and wrongdoing. This affects how we perceive and treat the person. When we forgive, our priorities change. The person’s wrongdoing and culpability is no longer quite as significant for our relationship.

Noticing the role of priorities at the heart of both blame and forgiveness helps to explain why forgiveness is elective. Our priorities are largely (although not entirely!) up to us, given that we have great freedom to settle for ourselves what sort of life we want to lead. Because forgiveness is largely a matter of our changing priorities, whether we should forgive has as much to do with who we are and want to be as it has to do with external facts, such as whether the wrongdoer has apologized. This is a deep sort of electivity!

At the same time, forgiveness remains principled. We might, for example, explain our forgiveness by reference to the wrongdoer’s apology. That apology might have been particularly important to us, or it might have causally prompted us to revisit our own priorities. The apology, then, provides an explanation for our coming to forgive, even if it does not compel forgiveness.

Thinking of forgiveness in terms of priorities helps us to reframe our thinking about forgiveness. For instance, it enables us to make sense of both conditional and unconditional forgiveness: sometimes we forgive because the things that we care about in the world have changed, and sometimes we forgive because our cares themselves have changed.

Thinking in terms of priorities also helps us to understand why forgiveness is not, normatively, entirely up to us. Although we have tremendous leeway to set our own priorities, there are some legitimate demands others can make on us regarding our priorities, often grounded in our relationships and interactions. Thus, there might well be some cases, albeit probably rare, where failing to forgive is blameworthy!

More generally, my defense of truly elective forgiveness pushes us to look inward in thinking about whether we should hold on to anger. Of course, we should think about the wrongdoer’s wrongs and culpability. Yet we should also keep in mind that when we hold on to our anger we prioritize, and so it is also important that we think about how our anger fits into what we care and should care about.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4647/.

About the author

Craig K. Agule is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University–Camden. He is interested in philosophy of law and moral psychology, particularly issues concerning moral and legal responsibility and the normative conditions of blame and of punishment.

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Bert Baumgaertner and Charles Lassiter –“Convergence and Shared Reflective Equilibrium”

In this post, Bert Baumgaertner and Charles Lassiter discuss the article they recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

Photo of two men looking down on the train tracks from a diverging bridge.
“Quai Saint-Bernard, Paris” (1932) Henri Cartier-Bresson

Imagine you’re convinced that you should pull the lever to divert the trolley because it’s better to save more lives. But suppose you find the thought of pushing the Fat Man off the bridge too ghoulish to consider seriously. You have a few options to resolve the tension:

  1. you might revise your principle that saving more lives is always better;
  2. you could revise your intuition about the Fat Man case;
  3. you could postpone the thought experiment until you get clearer on your principles;
  4. you could identify how the Fat Man case is different from the original one of the lone engineer on the trolley track.

These are our options when we are engaging in reflective equilibrium. We’re trying to square our principles and judgments about particular cases, adjusting each until a satisfactory equilibrium is reached.

Now imagine there’s a group of us, all trying to arrive at an equilibrium but without talking to one another. Will we all converge on the same equilibrium?

Consider, for instance, two people—Tweedledee and Tweedledum. They are both thinking about what to do in the many variations of the Trolley Problem. For each variation, Tweedledee and Tweedledum might have a hunch or they might not. They might share hunches or they might not. They might consider variations in the same order or they might not. They might start with the same initial thoughts about the problem or they might not. They might have the same disposition for relieving the tension or they might not.

Just this brief gloss suggests that there are a lot of places where Tweedledee and Tweedledum might diverge. But we didn’t just want suggestive considerations, we wanted to get more specific about the processes involved and how likely divergence or convergence would be.

To this end, we imagined an idealized version of the process. First, each agent begins with a rule of thumb, intuitions about cases, and a disposition for how to navigate any tensions that arise. Each agent considers a case at a time. “Considering a case” means comparing the case under discussion to the paradigm cases sanctioned by the rule. If the case under consideration is similar enough to the paradigm cases, the agent accepts the case, which amounts to saying, “this situation falls into the extension of my rule.” Sometimes, an agent might have an intuition that the case falls into the extension of the rule, but it’s not close enough to the paradigm cases. This is when our agents deliberate, using one of the four strategies mentioned above.

In order to get a sense of how likely it is that Tweedledee and Tweedledum would converge, we needed to systematically explore the space of the possible ways in which the process of reflective equilibrium could go. So, we built a computer model of it. As we built the model, we purposely made choices we thought would favor the success of a group of agents reaching a shared equilibrium. By doing so, we have a kind of “best case” scenario. Adding in real-world complications would make reaching a shared equilibrium only harder, not easier.

An example or story that is used for consideration, like a particular Trolley problem, is made up of a set of features. Other versions have some of the same features but differ on others. So we imagined there is a string of yes/no bits, like YYNY, where Y in positions 1, 2, and 4 means the case has that respective feature, while N in position 3 means the case does not. Of course examples used in real debates are much more complicated and nuanced, but having only four possible features should only make it easier to reach agreement. Cases have labels representing intuitions. A label of “IA” means a person has an intuition to accept the case as an instance of a principle, “IR” means to reject it, and “NI” means they have no intuition about it. Finally, a principle consists of a “center” case and a similarity threshold (how many bit values can differ?) that defines the extension of cases that fall under the principle. 

We then represented the process of reflective equilibrium as a kind of negotiation between principles and intuitions by checking whether the relevant case of the intuition is or isn’t a member of the extension of the principle. To be sure, the real world is much more complicated, but the simplicity of our model makes it easier to see what sorts of things can get in the way of reaching shared equilibrium.

What we found is that it is very hard to converge on a single interpersonal equilibrium. Even in the best case scenario, with very charitable interpretations of some “plausible” assumptions, we don’t see convergence.

Analysts of the process of reflective equilibrium are right that interpersonal convergence might not happen if people have different starting places. But they underestimate that even if Tweedledee and Tweedledum start from the same place, reaching convergence is hard. The reason is that, even if we rule out all of the implausible decision points, there are still so many plausible decision points at which Tweedledee and Tweedledum can diverge. They might both change their rule of thumb, for instance, but they might change it in slightly different ways. Small differences—particularly early in the process—lead to substantial divergence.

Why does this matter? Despite how challenging it is for our model, in the real world we find convergence all over the place—like philosophers’ intuitions about Gettier cases—supposedly from our La-Z-Boys. On our representation of reflective equilibrium, such convergence is highly unlikely, suggesting that we should look elsewhere for an explanation. One alternative explanation we suggest (and explore in other work) is the idea of “precedent”, i.e., information one has about the commitments and rules of others, and how those might serve as guides in one’s own process of deliberation.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4654/.

About the authors

Bert Baumgaertner grew up in Ontario, Canada, completing his undergraduate degree at Wilfrid Laurier University. He moved to the sunny side of the continent to do his graduate studies at University of California, Davis. In 2013 he moved to Idaho to start his professional career as a philosophy professor, where he concurrently developed a passion for trail running and through-hiking in the literal Wilderness areas of the Pacific Northwest. He is now Associate Professor of Philosophy at University of Idaho. He considers himself a computational philosopher whose research draws from philosophy and the cognitive and social sciences. He uses agent-based models to address issues in social epistemology. 

Charles Lassiter was born in Washington DC and grew up in Virginia, later moving to New Jersey and New York for undergraduate and graduate studies. In 2013, he left the safety and familiarity of the East Coast to move to the comparative wilderness of the Pacific Northwest for a job at Gonzaga University, where he is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for the Applied Humanities. His research focuses on issues of enculturation and embodiment (broadly construed) for an understanding of mind and judgment (likewise broadly construed). He spends a lot of time combing through large datasets of cultural values and attitudes relevant to social epistemology.

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Igor Douven, Frank Hindriks, and Sylvia Wenmackers – “Moral Bookkeeping”

In this post, Igor Douven, Frank Hindriks, and Sylvia Wenmackers discuss their article recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

Allegorical image of Justice punishing Injustice.
“Allegory of Justice Punishing Injustice” (1737) Jean-Marc Nattier

Imagine a mayor who has to decide whether to build a bridge over a nearby river, connecting two parts of the city. He is informed that the construction project will also negatively affect the local wild­life. The mayor responds: “I don’t care about what will happen to some animals. I want to improve the flow of traffic.” So, he has the bridge built, and the populations of wild animals decline as a result of it.

This fictional mayor sounds like a proper movie villain: he knows that his actions will harm wild animals and he doesn’t even care! We expect that people reading this vignette will blame him for his actions. But how does their moral verdict change if the mayor’s project happened to realize positive side-effects for the wildlife, although he was similarly indifferent to that? Would people praise him as much as they blamed him in the first case?

According to most philosophers, someone can only be praiseworthy if they had the intention to bring about a beneficial result. Yet, many philosophers also think that someone can be blamed for the negative side-effects of their actions, even if they did not intentionally cause them. This presumed difference between the assignment of praise and blame is the Mens Rea Asymmetry. (Mens rea is Latin for ‘guilty mind’.) However, data about how people actually assign praise or blame to others does not support this hypothesis.

One source of evidence that runs counter to the hypothesis of the Mens Rea Asymmetry is Joshua Knobe’s influential paper from 2003, which can be seen as the birth of experimental philosophy. His results show, among other things, that respondents do assign praise to agents who bring about a beneficial but unintended side-effect. We used the structure of the vignette from Knobe’s study to produce similar scenarios, including the mayor deciding about a bridge in the above example.

In order to explain the observed violations of the praise/blame asymmetry, we formulated a new hypothesis. Our moral compositionality hypothesis assumes that people evaluate others by taking into account their intentions as well as the outcome of their actions to come to an overall assignment of praise (when the judgment is net positive) or blame (when net negative). In principle, the overall judgment could be a complicated function of the two separate aspects, but we focused on a very simple version of the compositionality hypothesis: people’s overall judgment of someone’s actions is equal to the sum of their judgment of the agent’s intention and of the outcome of the action. We call this the Moral Bookkeeping hypothesis.

To put our hypothesis to the test, we asked nearly 300 participants to score how blameworthy or praiseworthy the mayor was for his decision and likewise for other agents in two similar scenarios. As already mentioned, we varied whether the potential side-effect of the decision was harmful or helpful. To study the respondents’ judgements of an agent’s intentions and outcomes separately, we included cases where the agent wasn’t informed about potential side-effects and where the potential side-effects didn’t occur after all. We also considered decision makers who were aware of potential side-effects, without knowing whether they would be positive, neutral or negative.

As expected, we found further evidence against the Mens Rea Asymmetry. Our results also corroborated the Moral Bookkeeping hypothesis, including its counterintuitive prediction that respondents still assign praise or blame to decision makers who weren’t aware of potential side-effects. Moreover, participants assigned more praise than blame to decision makers who unintentionally brought about the respective positive or negative side-effect. This finding remains puzzling to us as well.

Finally, based on our data, more complicated versions of the general compositionality thesis cannot be ruled out either. We hope that this work will inspire further experiments to unravel how exactly we come to our moral verdicts about others.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4645/.

References

  • Knobe, J. (2003). “Intentional Action and Side-effects in Ordinary Language”. Analysis, 64(3): 81–87.

About the authors

Igor Douven is a CNRS Research Professor at the IHPST/Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris.

Frank Hindriks is Professor of Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

Sylvia Wenmackers is a Research Professor in Philosophy of Science at KU Leuven, Belgium.

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Gabriel De Marco and Thomas Douglas – Nudge Transparency Is Not Required for Nudge Resistibility

In this post, Gabriel De Marco and Thomas Douglas discuss the article they recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

Image of a variety of cakes on display.
“Cakes” (1963) Wayne Thiebaud © National Gallery of Art

Consider,

Food Placement. In order to encourage healthy eating, cafeteria staff place healthy food options at eye-level, whereas unhealthy options are placed lower down. Diners are more likely to pick healthy foods and less likely to pick unhealthy foods than they would have been had foods instead been distributed randomly.

Interventions like this are often called nudges. Though many agree that it is, at least sometimes, permissible to nudge people, there is a thriving debate about when, exactly, it is so.

In the now-voluminous literature on the ethics of nudging, some authors have suggested that nudging is permissible only when the nudge is easy to resist. But what does it take for a nudge to be easy to resist? Authors rarely give accounts of this, yet they often seem to assume what we call

The Awareness Condition (AC). A nudge is easy to resist only if the agent can easily become aware of it.

We think AC is false. In our paper, we mount a more developed argument for this, but in this blog post we simply advance one counterexample and consider one possible response to it.

Here’s the counterexample:

Giovanni and Liliana: Giovanni, the owner of a company, wants his workers to pay for the more expensive, unhealthy snacks in the company cafeteria, so, without informing his office workers, he instructs the cafeteria staff to place these snacks at eye level. While in line at the cafeteria, Liliana (who is on a diet) sees the unhealthy food, and is a bit tempted by it, partly as a result of the nudge. Recognizing the temptation, she performs a relatively easy self-control exercise: she reminds herself of her plan to eat healthily, and why she has it. She thinks about how following a diet is going to be difficult, and once she starts making exceptions, it’s just going to be easier to make exceptions later on. After this, she decides to take the salad and leave the chocolate pudding behind. Although she was aware that she was tempted to pick the chocolate pudding, she was not aware that she was being nudged, nor did she have the capacity to easily become aware of this, since Giovanni went to great lengths to hide his intentions.

Did Liliana resist the nudge? We think so. We also think that the nudge was easily resistible for her, even though she did not have the capacity to easily become aware of the fact that she was being nudged. If you agree, then we have a straightforward counterexample to AC.

In response, someone might argue that, although Liliana resists something, she does not resist the nudge. Rather, she resists the effects of the nudge: the (increased) motivation to pick the chocolate pudding. Resisting the nudge, rather than its effects, requires that one intends to act contrary to the nudge. But Liliana doesn’t intend to do that. Although she intends to pick the healthy option, to pick the salad, or to not pick the chocolate pudding, she does not intend to act contrary to the nudge.

If resisting a nudge requires that one intend to act contrary to the nudge, then Liliana does not resist the nudge, and the counterexample to AC fails. Yet we do not think that resisting a nudge requires that one intend to act contrary to the nudge. While we grant that a way of resisting a nudge is to do so while intending to act contrary to it, and that resisting it in this way requires awareness of the nudge, we do not think that this is the only way to resist a nudge. Partly, we think this because we find it plausible that Liliana (and agents in other similar cases) do resist the nudge.

But further, we think that, if resisting a nudge requires intending to act contrary to the nudge, this will cast doubt on the thought that nudges ought to be easy to resist. Suppose that there are two reasonable ways of understanding “resisting a nudge.” On one understanding, resistance requires that the agent acts contrary to the nudge and intends to do so. Liliana does not resist the nudge on this understanding. On a second, broader way of understanding resistance, one need not intend to act contrary to the nudge in order to resist it; it is enough simply to act contrary to the nudge. Liliana does resist the nudge in this way.

Now consider two claims:

The strong claim: A nudge is permissible only if it is easy to act contrary to it with the intention of doing so.

The weak claim: A nudge is permissible only if it is easy to act contrary to it.

Are these claims plausible? We think that the weak claim might be, but the strong claim is not.

Consider again Food Placement. This was a case of a nudge just like Giovanni’s nudge, except that the food placement is intended to get more people to pick the healthy food option over the unhealthy one, rather than the reverse. In this version of the case, Giovanni wants to do what is in the best interests of his staff. According to the strong claim, this nudge would be impermissible insofar as his staff cannot easily become aware of the nudge. And this is so even though it would be permissible for Giovanni to put the healthy foods at eye level randomly. Moreover, it would remain so even if all the following are true:

  1. the nudge only very slightly increases the nudgee’s motivation to take the healthy food,
  2. the nudgee acts contrary to this motivation and picks the same unhealthy food she would have picked in the absence of the nudge,
  3. she finds it very easy to act contrary to the nudge in this way,
  4. her acting contrary to the nudge in this way is a reflection of her values or desires, and
  5. her acting contrary to the nudge is the result of normal deliberation which is not significantly influenced by the nudge.

We find it hard to believe that this nudge is impermissible, or even more weakly, that we have a strong or substantial reason against implementing it.

We think, then, that if nudges have to be easily resistible in order to be ethically acceptable, this will be because something like the weak claim holds. On this view, a nudge can meet this requirement if it is easy for the nudgee to resist it in our broader sense, and this is compatible with it being difficult for the nudgee to become aware of the nudge, as in our Giovanni and Liliana case.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4635/.

About the authors

Gabriel De Marco is a Research Fellow in Applied Moral Philosophy at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. His research focuses on free will, moral responsibility, and the ethics of influence.

Tom Douglas is Professor of Applied Philosophy and Director of Research at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. His research focuses especially on the ethics of using medical and neuro-scientific technologies for non-therapeutic purposes, such as cognitive enhancement, crime prevention, and infectious disease control. He is currently leading the project ‘Protecting Minds: The Right to Mental Integrity and the Ethics of Arational Influence‘, funded by the European Research Council.

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Cathy Mason – “Reconceiving Murdochian Realism”

In this post, Cathy Mason discusses the article she recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of Cathy’s article can be found here.

A picture of a vase with irises.
“Irises” (1890) Vincent van Gogh

Iris Murdoch’s ethics is filled with discussions of moral reality, moral truth and how things really stand morally. What exactly does she mean by these? Her style is certainly a non-standard philosophical style, and her ideas are remarkably wide-ranging, but it can seem appealing to think that at heart her metaethical commitments largely align with standard realists’. I suggest, however, that this reading of Murdoch is mistaken: her realism amounts to something else altogether.

I take standard realism to be roughly captured by the following definition from Sayre-McCord:

Moral realists hold that there are moral facts, that it is in light of these facts that peoples’ moral judgments are true or false, and that the facts being what they are (and so the judgments being true, when they are) is not merely a reflection of our thinking the facts are one way or another. That is, moral facts are what they are even when we see them incorrectly or not at all. (Sayre-McCord 2005: 40)

Does Murdoch subscribe to this view? It can certainly be tempting to think so. She repeatedly talks about ‘realism’ and ‘objectivity’, and remarks like the following seem well-understood in standard realist terms:

The authority of morals is the authority of truth, that is of reality. (TSG 374)

The ordinary person does not, unless corrupted by philosophy, believe that he creates values by his choices. He thinks that some things really are better than others and that he is capable of getting it wrong. (TSG 380)

Here, Murdoch clearly commits to the idea that some moral claims are true, and that what makes them true is not something to do with the valuer, but something about the world. All this sounds very much like standard realism.

However, it would be a mistake to think that these surface similarities point towards a deeper congruence between Murdoch and standard realists. For a start, realists typically take moral facts to be one kind among many. Just as there are mathematical facts and psychological facts, so too there are moral facts. Yet Murdoch repeatedly insists that all reality is moral—and thus that all facts are in some sense moral facts (e.g. IP 329, OGG 357, MGM 35). Moreover, though Murdoch insists on the truth of some moral claims, she understands the notion of truth very differently from standard realists.  Whereas realists typically regard truth as something abstract, Murdoch suggests that it can only be understood in relation to truthfulness and the search for truth. The seeming agreement between Murdoch and standard realists on the truth of some ethical claims thus belies deeper disagreements between them.

What’s more, standard realism is hard to square with some wider views Murdoch holds. First, she suggests that some moral concepts can be genuinely private: fully virtuous agents may have different moral concepts without either of their conceptual schemas being inaccurate or incomplete. Second, she suggests that there can be private moral reasons: moral reasons need not be universal. It is hard to see how there could be room for private moral concepts and reasons within standard realism: either there are facts corresponding to a moral belief, or there are not. If there are, then it is a kind of moral ignorance to ignore such facts. If not, then the belief is simply false. Finally, Murdoch rejects the idea common in standard realism that the moral supervenes on the non-moral, since she suggests that there simply is no non-moral reality.

What, then, does Murdoch have in mind when she discusses realism? In most cases where Murdoch introduces ideas such as realism or objectivity, she is discussing the moral perceiver’s relation to the thing perceived, rather than only talking about the thing perceived. Her realism is a claim about the reality of the moral where reality is understood as that which is discerned by the virtuous perceiver.

Take, for example, the following passages:

[T]he realism (ability to perceive reality) required for goodness is a kind of intellectual ability to perceive what is true, which is automatically at the same time a suppression of self. (OGG 353)

[A]nything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue. (TSG 369)

In both of these quotes, Murdoch discusses the relation between a moral perceiver and the thing perceived. Realism or objectivity is talked of not as a metaphysical feature of objects, properties or facts, but as a feature of moral agents who are epistemically engaged with the world.

Of course, the standard realist might allow that there is such a thing as realism as a feature of a moral perceiver, and understand this in terms of accessing facts or properties which independently exist. Yet this ordering of explanations is ruled out by Murdoch’s insistence that reality itself is a normative (moral) concept. What is objectively real, for Murdoch, cannot be understood apart from ethics, apart from the essentially human activity of seeking to understand the world which is subject to moral evaluation. This is not to suggest that reality is a solely moral concept: it is also linked to truth, to how the world is. But it is to suggest that a conception of how the world is, of reality, must be essentially ethical.

What kind of relation, then, must the realistic observer stand into the thing observed? Murdoch suggests that no non-moral answer can be given here, no description that demarcates the realistic stance in an ethically neutral way. However, a description can be given in rich ethical terms. To be realistic is best understood as doing justice to the thing one is confronted with, being faithful to the reality of it, being truthful about it, and so on. All of these terms capture the idea that perception can be genuinely cognitive, whilst at the same time being a fundamentally ethical task.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4653/.

References

  • Murdoch, Iris (1999). “The Idea of Perfection”. In Peter Conradi (Ed.), Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (299–337). Penguin. [IP]
  • Murdoch, Iris (1999). “On God and Good”. In Peter Conradi (Ed.), Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (337–63). Penguin. [OGG]
  • Murdoch, Iris (1999). “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts”. In Peter Conradi (Ed.), Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (363–86). Penguin. [TSG]
  • Murdoch, Iris (2012). “Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals”. Vintage Digital. [MGM]
  • Sayre-McCord, Geoffrey (2005). “Moral Realism”. In David Copp (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory (39–62). Oxford University Press.

About the author

Cathy Mason is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the Central European University (Vienna). She is currently working on a book on Iris Murdoch’s ‘metaethics’, as well as some ideas concerning the ethics of friendship.

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Victor Lange and Thor Grünbaum – “Measurement Scepticism, Construct Validation, and Methodology of Well-Being Theorising”

A young pregnant woman is holding a small balance for weighing gold. In front of her is a jewelry box and a mirror; on her right, a painting of the last judgment.
“Woman Holding a Balance” (c. 1664) Johannes Vermeer

In this post, Victor Lange and Thor Grünbaum discuss the article they recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of their article can be found here.

Many of us think that decisions and actions are justified, at least partially, in relation to how they affect the well-being of the involved individuals. Consider how politicians and lawmakers often justify, implicitly or explicitly, their policy decisions and acts by reference to the well-being of citizens. In more radical terms, one might be an ethical consequentialist and claim that well-being is the ultimate justification of any decision or action.

It would therefore be wonderful if we could precisely measure the well-being of individuals. Contemporary psychology and social science contain a wide variety of scales for this purpose. Most often, these scales measure well-being by self-reports. For examples, subjects rate the degree to which they judge or feel satisfied with their own lives or they report the ratio of positive to negative emotions. Yet, even though such scales have been widely adopted, many researchers express scepticism about whether they actually measure well-being at all. In our paper, we label this view measurement scepticism about well-being. 

Our aim is not to develop or motivate measurement scepticism. Instead, we consider a recent and interesting reply to such scepticism, put forward by Anna Alexandrova (2017; see also Alexandrova and Haybron, 2016). According to Alexandrova, we can build an argument against measurement scepticism by employing a standard procedure of scientific psychology called construct validation. 

Construct validation is a psychometric procedure. Researchers use the procedure to assess the degree to which a scale actually measures its intended target phenomenon. If psychologists and social scientists have a reliable procedure to assess the degree to which a scale really measures what it is intended to measure, it seems obvious that we should use it to test well-being measurements. For the present purpose, let us highlight two key aspects of the procedure. 

First, construct validation utilises convergent and discriminant correlational patterns between the scores of various scales as a source of evidence. Convergent correlations concern the relation between scores on the target scale (intended to measure well-being) and scores on other scales (assumed to measure either well-being or some closely related phenomenon, such as wealth or physical health). Discriminant correlations concern non-significant relations between scores on the target scale and scores on scales that we expect to measure phenomena unrelated to well-being (e.g., scales measuring perceptual acuity). When assessing the construct validity of a scale, researchers evaluate a scale by considering whether it exhibits attractive convergent correlations (whether subjects with high scores on the target well-being scale also score high on physical health, for example) and discriminant correlations (e.g., whether subjects’ scores on the target well-being scale have significant correlations with perceptual acuity).

Second, the examination of correlational patterns depends on theory. Initially, we need a theory to build our scale (for instance, a theory of how well-being is expressed in the target population). Moreover, we need a theory to tell us what correlations we should expect (i.e. how answers on our scale should correlate with other scales). This means that, when engaging in construct validation, researchers test a scale and its underlying theory holistically. That is, the construct validation of the target scale involves testing both the scale and the theory of well-being that underlies it. Consequently, the procedure of construct validation requires that researchers remain open to revising their underlying theory if they persistently observe the wrong correlational patterns. Given this holistic nature of the procedure, correlational patterns might lead to revisions of one’s theory of well-being, perhaps even to abandoning it. 

The question now is this: Does the procedure of construct validation provide a good answer to measurement scepticism about well-being? While we acknowledge that for many psychological phenomena (e.g., intelligence) the procedures of construct validation might provide a satisfying reply to various forms of measurement scepticism, things are complicated with well-being. Here the normative nature of well-being rears its philosophical head. We argue that an acceptable answer to the question depends on the basic assumptions about the methodology of well-being theorising. Let us clarify by distinguishing between two methodological approaches.

First, methodological naturalism about well-being theorising claims that we should theorise about well-being in the same way we investigate any other natural phenomenon, namely, by ordinary inductive procedures of scientific investigation. Consequently, our theory of well-being should be open to revision on empirical grounds. Second, methodological non-naturalism claims that theorising about well-being should be limited to the methods known from traditional (moral) philosophy. The question of well-being is a question about what essentially and non-derivatively makes a person’s life go best. Well-being has an ineliminative normative or moral nature. Hence, the question of what well-being is, is a question only for philosophical analysis.  

The reader might see the problem now. Since construct validation requires openness to theory revision by correlational considerations, it is a procedure that only a methodological naturalist can accept. Consequently, if measurement scepticism is motivated by a form of non-naturalism, we cannot reject it by using construct validation. Non-naturalists will not accept that theorising about well-being can be a scientific and empirical project. This result is all the more important because many proponents of measurement scepticism seem to be methodological non-naturalists.  

In conclusion, if justifying an action or a social policy over another often requires assessing consequences for well-being, then scepticism about measurement of well-being becomes an important obstacle. We cannot address this scepticism head-on with the procedures of construct validation. Such procedures assume something the sceptic might not accept, namely, that our theory of well-being should be open to empirical revisions. Instead, we need to start by making our methodological commitments explicit. 

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4663/.

References

  • Alexandrova, Anna (2017). A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being. Oxford University Press. 
  • Alexandrova, Anna and Daniel M. Haybron (2016). “Is Construct Validation Valid?” Philosophy of Science, 83(5), 1098–109. 

About the authors

Victor Lange is a PhD-fellow at the Section for Philosophy and a member of the CoInAct group at the Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen. His research focuses upon attention, meditation, psychotherapy, action control, mental action, and psychedelic assisted therapy. He is a part of the platform Regnfang that publishes podcasts about the sciences of the mind.

Thor Grünbaum is an associate professor at the Section for Philosophy and the Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen. He is head of the CoInAct research group. His research interests are in philosophy of action (planning, control, and knowledge), philosophy of psychology (explanation, underdetermination, methodology), and cognitive science (sense of agency, prospective memory, action control).

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Russ Colton – “To Have A Need”

A man is hanging from the hand of a clock fixed on the exterior wall of a six-story building, risking his life.
Harold Lloyd in the 1923 movie “Safety Last!”

In this post, Russ Colton discusses the article he recently published in Ergo. The full-length version of his article can be found here.

Every day we notice the needs of ourselves or others and are moved to address them. We often feel obliged to do so, even for strangers. Whatever is needed seems important in a way that perks and luxuries do not. Some philosophers take such observations quite seriously and give need a key role in their moral and political theories. Yet they characterize the concept of need differently, and sometimes not very fully. To help us understand and assess their ideas—but also just for the sake of improving our understanding of a common concept that enters into everyone’s practical and moral thinking—I want to try to say as clearly as possible what it means to have a need. My paper is focused on this task of conceptual clarification.

Throughout, I am concerned with a certain kind of need—welfare need, as I call it, which is the need for whatever promotes a certain minimum level of life quality, like the need for air, education, or self-confidence. This differs from a goal need (aka “instrumental need”), which is a need for whatever is required to achieve some goal—whether that goal is good for you or not—like the need for a bottle opener or a bank loan.

It is well-known that sometimes we say a person needs something when they have neither a welfare need nor a goal need for it: for example, “The employee needs to be fired.” In such cases, however, we can readily deny that the person has the need—the employee does not have a need to be fired. By contrast, in cases of welfare or goal need, the person has the need. Thus, insofar as we are interested in need because of its connection to human welfare, the specific concept of having a need may be more important than needing, which is why I focus on the former. In considering examples that test my analysis, it is best to think in terms of having a need.

Among philosophers, perhaps the most popular gloss on welfare need is this: to need something is to require it in order to avoid harm. This idea is approximately correct, but it needs improvement. The relevant notions of requirement and harm must be pinned down, and the idea must be broadened, since people also need what is required to reduce danger, like vaccines and seatbelts. To make these improvements, I offer two analyses of having a need—one that captures the original intuition about harm avoidance, and a broader one that captures the concept in full by covering both harms and dangers.

David Wiggins (Needs, Values, Truth) is the only theorist who has tried to clarify with precision the requirement aspect of the harm-avoidance idea. In broad strokes, his view is this: I need to have X if and only if, under the present circumstances, necessarily, if I avoid harm, then I have X, where necessity here is constrained by what is “realistically conceivable.”

This idea has a number of problems. One of the most serious arises when we have a need for some future X that will be unmet. If a non-actual X can count as realistically conceivable, there seems to be nothing preventing the non-actual possibility that, even without it, whatever harmful process was headed toward us is eventually thwarted by other means, leaving us unharmed. But that means I can have a need for X even though I could avoid harm without it.

Another problem is that often, when we’re in a pinch in a given circumstance, we view multiple things that could save us as needed. If I were short of money to pay rent at the end of the month, then each of the following assertions would be reasonable: I need more money in my bank account; I need a friend to lend me money; I need the landlord to give me more time. But on Wiggins’s necessity approach, given the circumstances, I can need only one X, which will have to be the disjunction of all potential rent solutions.

I argue that these (and other) problems are readily avoided with a counterfactual-conditional approach, along these lines: I have a need for something when, without it, my life would be (in some sense) harmed.

Understanding the relevant notion of harm requires attending to how we balance positive and negative effects on welfare over time. I explore this in the paper and conclude that when you have a need for something, your life from then on would be better on the whole, and less unsatisfactory for some period, with it than without it.

There will be different intuitions about what counts as unsatisfactory. My analysis is neutral, but I do make a case for the claim that for our most ordinary conception of need, the relevant sense of “unsatisfactory” is not good. With this idea in hand, my analysis implies a very natural idea: if you lack what you need, your life for a time will not be good and will be worse than it would otherwise be, and this loss will not be outweighed by any benefit.

Finally, I extend the analysis to our needs for what makes us safer, things without which we would be in more danger independently of whether we would be harmed. This is challenging because many present needs are for future benefits, and the risks relevant to our future welfare can change during the interval. Fortunately, there are easy ways to address the relevant issues so that the analysis remains quite simple. Roughly put: I now have a need for X if and only if it is now highly probable that, at the time of X, the expected value (quality) of my life from now on would, for some period, be less unsatisfactory with X than without, and would on the whole be higher.

Want more?

Read the full article at https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/ergo/article/id/4643/.

About the author

Russ Colton received his PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His current research interests are primarily in ethics.