June 2009 – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

The Strange Case of U. G. Krishnamurti

Some people are gullible and credulous, without a skeptical bone in their bodies. Others are skepticism incarnate, unable to believe anything or admire anything. A strange case of the latter is U. G. Krishnamurti, the anti-guru and 'anti-charlatan.' Please don't confuse him with the much better known J. Krishnamurti.

An obsessive doubter and debunker, U. G. Krishnamurti is a bit like the atheist who can't leave God alone, but must constantly be disproving him. U.G. can't leave the enlightenment quest and 'spirituality' alone. It's all bunk, he thinks, but he can't be done with it. Buddha, Jesus, and the rest were all just kidding themselves and misleading others. But U. G. can't just arrive at this conclusion and move on to something he deems worthwhile. For he is an 'anti-quester' tied to what he opposes by his self-defining opposition to it. Curiously perverse, but fascinating. He is a little like the later Wittgenstein who, though convinced that the problems of philosophy arose from linguistic bewitchment, couldn't move on to something worth doing, but instead obsessively scribbled on in any attempt to show a nonexistent fly the way out of a nonexistent fly-bottle.

Consciousness, Free Will, and Illusion

This just over the transom:

I'm an occasional reader of your wonderful blog, "Maverick Philosopher". I was wondering if I could probe you a bit regarding an argument you make in your post, "Could Freedom of the Will be an Illusion?"

You make the statement, "An illusion is an illusion to consciousness, so that if there is no consciousness there are no illusions either." I know this logic is not unique to you, as Descartes used similar reasoning to conclude that he exists. I firmly believe that free will is not an illusion, but I'm having trouble convincing myself of this particular argument.

As a computer programmer, I can write a program that tries to comprehend things in its environment (identifies animals from images, for example). It might come across a particularly tricky image, and get the wrong answer. I could then say that the program was tricked by an illusion. But, the program does not have consciousness.

Is there something wrong with this example?

Continue reading “Consciousness, Free Will, and Illusion”

The Irrationality of Playing the Lottery

I have posted several times over the years on the irrationality of playing the lottery and on the immorality of state sponsorship and promotion (via deceptive advertising) of lotteries. The following e-mail, however, raises an interesting question that gives me pause:

As I was reading this story of an impoverished young rancher who won $88 million net with a Powerball ticket, I was wondering whether you'd allow that a case could be made for the rationality of his gamble. The young man and his whole family were in desperate financial circumstances with no way to cover back taxes, livestock loans, etc. They faced foreclosures, eviction, etc. The young man bought one ticket. He was not a chronic heavy lotto-gambler. The one ticket did not make his situation worse. Arguably, the lottery gamble was his only hope of salvaging his situation. If you have only ONE way to save yourself, the odds don't really matter.

Actually, according to the account linked to above, the cowboy bought $15 worth of tickets. So he bought more than one ticket. But no matter. Let us assume that this $15 was the only money he ever spent on the lottery. And let's also assume that the cowpoke was at the end of his rope — pun intended — facing foreclosure and imminent residency on Skid Row. We may also safely assume that the young man will never again play the lottery. (For he seems resolved not to fritter away his winnings on loose women and fast cars.) The question is whether it was rational for him in his precise circumstances to spend $15 on lottery tickets.

Now one question to ask is whether the rationality of a decision can be judged ex post facto. I would say not. A rational agent agent is one who chooses means that he has good reason to believe are conducive to the ends he has in view. A rational decision is one made calmly and deliberately and with 'due diligence' on the basis of the best information the agent has available to him within the limited time he has at his disposal for acquiring information. A rational decision cannot be rendered irrational by a bad outcome, and an irrational decision cannot be rendered rational by a good outcome.

So I am inclined to say that our cowboy made an irrational decison when he decide to spend $15 on a chance to win millions. The fact that, against all odds, he won is irrelevant to the rationality of his decision. The decision was irrational because the chances of winning anything significant were astronomically small, whereas the value of $15 to someone who is down to his last $15 is substantial.

But I can understand how intuitions might differ. Suppose we alter the example by supposing that the man will die and knows that he will die if he does not win today's lottery. Suppose he has exactly $15 to spend and he spends it on lottery tickets. He now has nothing to lose by spending the money. It is perhaps arguable that, in these precise circumstances, it is prudentially if not theoretically rational for the cowpoke to blow his last $15 on lotto tickets.

Just what is rationality anyway?

Good Societies and Good Lives: On State-Run Lotteries

Good societies are those that make it easy to live good lives. A society that erects numerous obstacles to good living, however, cannot count as a good society. By this criterion, present day American society cannot be considered good. It has too many institutionalized features that impede human flourishing. Here I discuss just one such feature, state lotteries.

Any government that promotes lotteries is promoting behavior that is harmful to many and positively good for none, not even the few winners who are morally if not economically undermined by them. Sufficiently disciplined people can of course gamble without harming themselves economically. They gamble for diversion and they know when to stop. They have no illusions about it and they appreciate that in the long run it is a losing proposition. But even these people are not doing themselves much good by gambling: they are wasting time that could otherwise be used in some productive way. The undisciplined, however, positively harm themselves, and not only by going into debt. They wallow in irrationality and ‘innumeracy’ (the mathematical analog of illiteracy). How many gamblers could explain the Gambler’s Fallacy? They associate with people who are likely to have a bad influence on them. Since the virtues and vices tend to come in clusters, the gambler is likely to become a drinker, a glutton, and so on. In the words of an old Mose Allison tune: "Drinkin’ and gamblin’, stayin’ out all night; . . . livin’ in a fool’s paradise."

I am not saying that gambling should be illegal; nor am I saying that it is immoral. Some gamble for relaxation, and no ill comes of it. I am saying that gambling ought not be state-sponsored. Government should cause no harm. Some will respond by pointing to the supplemental revenue that state lotteries generate, revenue that can be put to good uses. The tacit assumption seems to be that, if X is a source of supplemental revenue, then X is a good thing.

This assumption is false. State-sponsored prostitution would be an excellent source of revenue — there would be no lack of eager customers — but prostituion is not something a state should sponsor. If it is wrong for the government to promote prostitution, the use of tobacco products, the drinking of alcohol, and the taking of drugs, then it is wrong for the government to support gambling in the form of lotteries.

One can argue with some show of plausibility that governments should permit the aforementioned activities; but I cannot see how any rational person could argue that governments should support or promote them.

Not a Joiner

Paul Brunton, Notebooks, vol. II, p. 117:

He is not a joiner because of several reasons: one of them is that joiners are too often too one-sided in approach, too limited in outlook, too exclusive to let truth in when it happens to appear in a sect different from his own. Another reason is that too frequently there is a tyranny from above, imitated by followers, which forbids any independent thought and does not tolerate any real search.

On the other hand, going it alone does not guarantee safe or speedy arrival in the harbor of truth. It can just as easily leave one rudderless in the samsaric storm.

Life's a predicament.

Avoidance Always Possible

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, VI, 20, Loeb Classical Library no. 58, p. 141, tr. Haines:

Suppose that a competitor in the ring has gashed us with his nails and butted us violently with his head, we do not protest or take it amiss or suspect our opponent in future of foul play. Still we do keep an eye on him, not indeed as an enemy, or from suspicion of him, but with good-humoured avoidance. Act much the same way in all the other parts of life. Let us make many allowances for our fellow-athletes as it were. Avoidance is always possible, as I have said, without suspicion or hatred.

This is indeed Sage Advice. Avoidance is always possible and sometimes necessary if one would live well. Marcus bids us avoid, if not our "fellow-athletes," then their rude antics. But I would add to the list certain thoughts, words, and deeds.

‘Could Have Done Otherwise’ Disambiguated

Here again is how Harry Frankfurt formulates the principle of alternate possibilities in his 1969 J. Phil. article:

PAP. A person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise.

It is now time to put 'could have done otherwise' under our logico-linguistic microscopes. The phrase is ambiguous. On one reading, 'could' is the past indicative of 'can' where 'can' signifies ability: If I can do X, then I am able to do X. Accordingly, if I could have done otherwise, then I was able to do otherwise. Suppose I failed to lock the door last night. Then to say that I could have done otherwise is to say that I was able to lock the door last night. So, on the first reading, 'could have done otherwise' means 'was able to do otherwise.'

Continue reading “‘Could Have Done Otherwise’ Disambiguated”

If You Are Finding Things a Bit Dry Around Here . . .

. . . head over to What's Wrong With the World. Feser on Leiter on Feser. Feser et al. on Tiller.

Some bloggers warn their readers that 'blogging will be light.' I should warn my readers that 'blogging will be dry and technical for the foreseeable future' as I work my way through the recent free will literature.

I've never met a philosophical problem that didn't turn my crank. How could anyone be bored in a world so riddled with philosophical difficulties? There are no boring topics; there are only bored people.

On Tipping

Here, in no particular order, are my maxims concerning the practice of tipping.

1. He who is too cheap to leave a tip in a restaurant should cook for himself. That being said, there is no legal obligation to tip, nor should there be. Is there a moral obligation? Perhaps. Rather than argue that there is I will just state that tipping is the morally decent thing to do, ceteris paribus. And it doesn't matter whether you will be returning to the restaurant. No doubt a good part of the motivation for tipping is prudential: if one plans on coming back then it is prudent to establish good relations with the people one is likely to encounter again. But given a social arrangement in which waiters and waitresses depend on tips to earn a decent wage, one ought always tip for good service.

Continue reading “On Tipping”

Incompatibilism and Frankfurt Counterexamples

I am an incompatibilist about moral responsibility. That is, I maintain that causal determinism and moral responsibility are logically incompatible. (Two propositions p, q are logically incompatible just in case they cannot both be true. Hence, logically incompatible propositions are logical contraries, not contradictories.) Here is an argument for incompatibilism:

P1. Causal determinism rules out alternative possibilities. For in a causally deterministic world W there is exactly one nomologically possible future at any time t given the laws of nature and the events that have transpired prior to t in W.

P2. Moral responsibility requires alternative possibilities (e.g., the ability to decide, choose, intend otherwise.)

Therefore

C. Causal determinism rules out (is incompatible with) moral responsibility.

Continue reading “Incompatibilism and Frankfurt Counterexamples”

PhilPapers

I have begun using PhilPapers. "PhilPapers is a comprehensive directory of online philosophy articles and books by academic philosophers." It is proving to be quite useful. I see that they have scrounged up a few of my papers all the way back to 1976. Ah, the wonders of the Web!

If only the proliferation of research tools, the multiplication of lines of inquiry, the ever-increasing specialization and technicality were sufficient to put philosophy on what Kant called den sicheren Gang einer Wissenschaft, "the secure path of science."

Taxation and Liberty

On 17 April I wrote:

Taxation, then, is a liberty issue before it is a 'green eyeshade' issue: the more the government takes, the less concrete liberty you have. Without money you can't get your kids out of a shitty public school system that liberals have destroyed with their tolerate-anything mentality; without money you cannot live in a decent and secure neighborhood.

But I just now found something over at Jim Ryan's Philosoblog that gives me reason to think that I blundered. Ryan writes:

As Isaiah Berlin said, echoing the Bishop Butler, "Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice…." Unjustly high taxation is unfairness, injustice, and theft. It is not a violation of liberty rights. The price for ignoring this fact is that we let the verbal trap stand and you lose the basis for dismissing out of hand the leftist's argument for redistribution of wealth. There is plenty of reason to indict unjustly high taxation. There is no need to resort to verbal trickery. Leave the verbal trickery to the leftist, isolate it, and expose it.

Although Ryan was not responding to me when he wrote this, he could say to me, Your talk of 'concrete liberty' being lessened by high taxation smacks of the very sort of thinking that you presumably oppose in leftists. Liberty is liberty. There is no such thing as concrete liberty. As opposed to what? Abstract liberty? You would agree that justice is justice and that there is no such thing as social justice or economic justice. Similarly with liberty. It is what it is and not some other thing. The argument against high taxation is not that it violates or lessens your liberty. It doesn't. The problem with it is that it is unjust. High taxes don't violate yout liberty; at most they impede the exercise of your liberty, which is something different.

I need to think further about this.

Closer to the Grave, Further from Birth

With every passing day we are closer to becoming grave meat and worm fodder. Or dust and ashes. That’s the bad news. The good news is that, with every passing day, one more day has been taken up into the ersatz eternity of the Past & Unalterable.

The medievals spoke of a modality they dubbed necessitas per accidens. Socrates drank the hemlock, but he might* not have: He might* have allowed his friends to arrange his escape from prison. So the drinking was logically contingent. But he did drink the poison, and once the drinking occurred, that fact became forevermore unalterable, and in this sense accidentally necessary.

There is a certain consolation in the unalterability of the past. The old look back upon a sizeable quantity of past and see that nothing and no one can take away what has happened to them and what they have made happen. All of it is preserved forever, whether remembered or not. The terrain of the present may shift and buckle underfoot as one looks to a future for which there is no guarantee. But the past and its accomplishments are in one's sure possession, proof against every threat. It is curious that the mere passage of time should transmute the base coinage of temporal flux into the gold of an ersatz eternity.

Unfortunately, the treasures of the past are preserved in a region both inaccessible and nonexistent — or should I say next to nonenexistent? You will thus be forgiven for valuing the gold in question no higher than iron pyrite.

And herein, in this hesitation, lies the riddle of the reality of the past. On the one hand, the present alone is real, and what is no longer is not. On the other hand, the past is not nothing. Surely it has some sort of reality, and a reality ‘greater’ than that of the merely possible. Kierkegaard existed and so did Regine Olsen. Their engagement existed and so did its breaking off. But their marriage did not exist: it remains a mere possiblity, unactualized and indeed forever unactualizable. Now what is the difference in ontological status between the mere possibility of their marriage and the past actuality of their break-up? The latter is more real than the former, though both, in another sense, are modes of unreality.

_______________

*These are nonepistemic uses of 'might.'

The Indeterministic World Objection to Frankfurt Counterexamples

We got bogged down in an earlier thread, so let's try a different tack. The following discussion draws upon Robert Kane, A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will, Oxford 2005, pp. 87-88.

In his seminal 1969 J. Phil. article, "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility," Harry Frankfurt enunciates what he calls "the principle of alternate possibilities," (PAP) namely, "a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise." Frankfurt goes on to argue that PAP is false because there are conceivable scenarios in which an agent is morally responsible despite his inability to do otherwise.

Continue reading “The Indeterministic World Objection to Frankfurt Counterexamples”

Vigilantism? The Jerome Ersland Case

When decent citizens fail to receive adequate protection from governmental agencies, and when they have no reasonable expectation that the scum of society will be properly punished for their crimes, they will be tempted to take the law into their own hands. Liberals need to think about this. The American Thinker offers commentary on the Jerome Ersland case.

My thought: Ersland was fully justified in shooting the ski-masked punk who was attempting armed robbery. But after he had felled the thug, and he was lying unconscious on the floor, Ersland was not justified morally in 'finishing him off.' But that is very easy for me to say, sitting here in comfort and safety in my philosopher's retreat, having no need to face an increasingingly violent public as a pharmacy worker or convenience store attendant. If had been in Ersland's position I would have been tempted to do what he did. Why let a malefactor live who will most likely come gunning for you later? Why let the worthless piece of human detritus live to commit further crimes, especially when the likelihood of his being properly segregated from the rest of us is low? Why not send a signal to the criminal element that there is no percentage in armed robbery? And for that matter, why not send a signal to the contemptible liberals who will excuse and defend any miscreant while showing no concern for the decent citizens who pay the bills?