Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

  • Richter on Rationality

    Hi, Bill. I love your Maverick blog.

    I’m Reed Richter: a 71 yr old ex-academic, retired and living in Chapel Hill, NC. I was an undergrad philosophy major at UNC and did my PhD at UC Irvine. My early work was on decision theory. After teaching at UCI, UNC, and Duke, I moved to Europe. I taught a year in Salzburg, but dropped out of academics to run a family business. Nevertheless I continued to participate in academic philosophy and publish a few more papers. 
     
    BV: Small world. I'm a year younger, quit the teaching racket and a tenured position thirty years ago to write philosophy and live an eremitic life in the Sonoran desert; from Southern California, applied for graduate work at U.C. Irvine for the bad reason that a quondam girlfriend had transferred there; was luckily rejected, studied in Salzburg, Boston, and Freiburg; taught at Boston College, University of Dayton, Case Western Reserve University, and Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.  I work and publish in German philosophy, metaphysics, and the philosophy of religion. I know little about decision theory, and I don't call myself a political philosopher. So caveat lector.
     
    My son is now a philosophy major, but he’s totally into anarchism, Hegel, and continental philosophy. I have little interest in that material and can’t help him much there.  But he’s writing an honors thesis on Wolff and autonomy and, helping him I ran across your excellent commentary. A couple of comments.
     
    A comment on this point: [The following is from my November 2009 entry Notes on Anarchism II: Wolff on Authority]
     
    According to Robert Paul Wolff, "Every man who possesses both free will and reason has an obligation to take responsibility for his actions . . . ." (In Defense of Anarchism, Harper 1970, 13) Here a question arises: Is it in virtue of my possession of free will and reason that I have the aforementioned obligation? If yes, would Wolff not be inferring an 'ought' from an 'is'? That I am free, and that I possess reason are non-normative facts about me. Taken together they entail that I am capable of taking responsibility for my actions. But how does it follow that I ought to take responsibility of them, that I am morally obliged to? Let's let this query simmer on the back burner for the time being.
     
    Richter: It occurs to me that possessing reason implies being rational. And being rational is implicitly normative, implying oughts. So from the brute facts—I possess reason; I’m rational; in fact above all else, I want a cup of water; and there is a cup of perfectly potable water in front of me—it follows that therefore I ought to drink that cup of water. All things equal, rationality requires maximizing expected utility, generating oughts. Well, at the very least, if one doesn’t want to view rationality as implicitly normative, then that’s a great example of is implying ought.  But that’s a trivial point.
     
    BV:  I don't follow the above. To possess reason is to possess the capacity to act rationally.  I take it that rationality in the means-end sense is at issue.  The talk of MEU makes that clear. Suppose an agent exercises his  capacity to reason in a given situation: he chooses means conducive to the end he desires to attain.  He wants a drink of water; potable water is in front of him, and so he drinks the water. How does normativity come into this? Well, if you want water, and potable water is available, then you ought to drink it. It would be rational in the means-ends sense to drink the water, and irrational in the same sense not to drink it.
     
    But if an ought is thereby generated, it is a mere hypothetical, not  a categorical ought.  How do we get to the categorical moral obligation to take responsibility for one's actions from  the capacity to reason in the means-end sense plus free will?
    Bill Vallicella

    6 responses to “Richter on Rationality”

  • Moral Progress Report

    Between my abandonment of my vices and their abandonment of me, progress has been made. The weaker the flesh, the stronger the spirit.

    Bill Vallicella

  • On Acquiring a Large Vocabulary

    How does one acquire a large vocabulary? The first rule is to read, read widely, and read worthwhile materials, especially old books and essays.  The second rule is to look up every word the meaning of which you do not know or are not certain of: don't be lazy. The third rule is to compile vocabulary lists. The fourth rule is to review the lists periodically and put the words to use.  Use 'em or lose 'em.

    But what good is a large vocabulary in a society of semi-literates? Not only is it of little use, it can harm relations with regular guys social intercourse with whom can be useful.  Among the latter, one needs to pass oneself off as one of them. Use 'big words' and you will strike them as putting on airs, whether or not you are — not that the semi-literates would understand this old phrase.

    While alive to and appreciative of the good in people, one should not overlook the prevalence of the mean, the paltry, the envious, and the resentful. In this joyous season, and in every season.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Christmas Cards and Virtue Signalling

    The cards are coming in. While I lack the power to peer into souls to discern motivations, I suspect that many who send pictures of themselves in masks are signalling their politically correct virtue. Or maybe it's a fashion statement they are making.
     
    In a restaurant a while back I espied a couple of classy gals, mask-less, engaged in a heavy-duty tête-à-tête, leaning in close while eating and talking. Lunch over, they donned their designer masks and strolled out into the open air.
     
    It makes sense to a leftist!
    Bill Vallicella

  • Sometimes the Truth is not Reasonably Believed

    If a proposition is true, does it follow that it is rational to accept it? (Of course, if a proposition is known to be true, then it is eminently rational to accept it; but that's not the question.)

    Playboy Jan 1981Hugh Hefner's death (27 September 2017) reminds me of a true story from around 1981.  This was before I was married. Emptying my trash into a dumpster behind my apartment building one day, I 'spied a big stack of mint-condition Playboy magazines at the bottom of the container. Of course, I rescued them as any right-thinking man would: they have re-sale value and they contain excellent articles, stories, and interviews.

    I stacked the mags on an end table. When my quondam girlfriend dropped by, the magazines elicited a raised eyebrow.

    I quickly explained that I had found them in the dumpster and that they contain excellent articles, stories, interviews, arguments for analysis in my logic classes, etc.  She of course did not believe that I had found them.

    What I told her was true, but not credible. She was fully within her epistemic rights in believing that I was lying to save face. In fact, had she believed the truth that I told her, I would have been justified in thinking her gullible and naive.

    This shows that truth and rational acceptability are not the same property. A proposition can be true but not rationally acceptable. It is also easily shown that a proposition can be rationally acceptable but not true.  Truth is absolute; rational acceptability is relative to various indices.  Rational acceptability varies with time and place; truth does not.

    "But what about rational acceptability at the Peircean ideal limit of inquiry?" 

    Well, that's a horse of a different color. Should I mount it, I would trangress the bounds of this entry.

    As for Hugh Hefner, may the Lord have mercy on him. And on the rest of us too. 

    _________________

    *I am assuming that credibility and rational acceptability are the same property, where 'credibility' is defined as the property, not of being believable by someone, but of being rationally believable by someone. We should also distinguish between the credibility of persons and the credibility of propositions.  My quondam girlfriend did not question my credibility but the credibility of what I asserted.  Finding what I said incredible, she concluded that I was lying on that occasion; an occasional lie, however, does not a liar make.  A liar is one who habitually lies just as a drunkard is one who habitually gets drunk. Same with philanderers and gluttons. (But what about murderers?  It sounds distinctly odd to say, "Mack is no murderer; he murdered only one man.")

    Bill Vallicella

  • Free Speech and the First Amendment

    The free speech clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the citizen's right to free expression from infringement by the government, not from infringement by any old entity.  My home is my castle; you have no First Amendment rights here, or at my cyber-castle, my weblog. So it is no violation of your First Amendment rights if I order you off of my property because of your offensive speech or block you from leaving stupid or vile comments at my website. It is impossible in principle for me to violate your First Amendment rights: I am not the government or an agent thereof.  And the same holds at your (private) place of work: you have no First Amendment rights there.

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Right to an Opinion

    The right to express an opinion does not absolve one of the obligation to do one's level best to form correct opinions.  Note however that the legal (and moral) right to free speech guaranteed  to the American citizen by the First Amendment of the U. S. Constitution remains even if one shirks one's moral (but not legal) obligation to do one's best to form correct opinions.  

    Bill Vallicella

  • Walter Morris: Bourgeois Bohemian

    Walter Morris may count as an early bourgeois bohemian, a 'BoBo' to adopt and adapt a coinage of David Brooks.  Morris is an exceedingly obscure diarist, known only to a few, but a kindred spirit. An e-mail from a distant relative of his caused me to dip again into the stimulating waters of his journal.

    I have already presented his thoughts on solitude.  That post also provided some information on the man and his writings. What follows is part of an entry from 8 February 1947. (Notebook 2: Black River, limited edition, mimeographed, Englewood NJ, 1949. It contains journal entries from 25 June 1942 to 3 August 1947.)

    The Bohemian way of living has its points, but I am unable to appreciate Bohemia at full tilt. I have never had it that way and, except for a very youthful period, I have never much wanted it that way. I like cleanliness of body and living quarters, not a fanatical 100% cleanliness, not a sterile and perfect order, but such cleanliness as is compatible with normal comfortable living. I dislike messy emotional relationships and all kinds of exhibitionism. I dislike vomiting drunks, people with the monkey on their backs, flaunting homosexuality, financial dishonesty, irresponsibility, and puerile minds posing as advanced and liberated. This is the measure of my Respectability and middle-classness. Otherwise — in being devoted to my own pattern, in quietly ignoring some White Cows instead of ostentatiously mounting a rebellion — I don't mind at all being called Bohemian. Our family dish, as a matter of [f]act, could stand a dash of that kind of sauce. (p. 206)

    I recall a quotation from Gustave Flaubert along similar lines: "Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

    Bill Vallicella

  • You Want Anti-Government? I’ll Give You Anti-Government!

    Contrary to the willful  misrepresentations of contemporary liberals, leftists to be precise, conservatives are not anti-government.  To oppose big government is not to oppose government.  The following passage from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851),  conveys a genuine anti-government point of view, one that I share, and one that is the opposite of the one contemporary Democrats are aiming to impose upon us.  The following passage is surprisingly prescient now that Sino-surveillance is upon us and will only get worse.  Needless to say, I do not hold that government must of necessity fit Proudhon's description: there is such a thing as limited government.

    To be governed is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so…. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

    ProudhonOf course, I don't accept that property is theft. On the contrary! Private property is the foundation of individual liberty.  The problem with private property is not that it is private, but that too few own too little and in a way that is protected from criminal and governmental seizure.  That is why firearms are the most important private property. You can't eat, wear (though you can bear), or live in a gun, but guns are the means for the maintenance of  ownership of the aforementioned.

    Bill Vallicella

  • F. H. Bradley on the Non-Intentionality of Pleasure and Pain

    This is a re-do of a post from 13 April 2009. The addenda are new.

    ……………………………………

    I have argued at length for the non-intentionality of some conscious states.  Here is an entry that features an uncommonly good comment thread. None of the opposing comments made on the various posts inclined me to modify my view.   I was especially pleased recently to stumble upon a passage by the great F. H. Bradley in support of the non-intentionality of some experiences.  Please note that the intentionality of  my being PLEASED to find the supporting Bradley passage has no tendency to show that PLEASURE is an intentional state, as 'pleasure' is used below by Bradley.  No doubt one can be pleased by such-and-such or pained at this-or-that, but these facts are consistent with there being non-intentional pleasures and pains.  The passage infra is from Bradley's magisterial "Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake" (Ethical Studies (Selected Essays), LLA, 1951, p. 37, bolding added):

    Pleasure and pain are feelings and they are nothing but feelings. It would perhaps be right to call them the two simple modes of self-feeling; but we are not here concerned with psychological accuracy. The point which we wish to emphasize and which we think is not doubtful is that, considered psychically, they are nothing whatever but states of the feeling self. This means that they exist in me only as long as I feel them, and only as I feel them, that beyond this they have no reference to anything else, no validity and no meaning whatsoever. They are 'subjective' because they neither have, nor pretend to, reality beyond this or that subject. They are as they are felt to be, but they tell us nothing. In one word, they have no content; they are as states of us, but they have nothing for us.

    How do I know that Bradley is right?  By doing a little phenomenology.  Right now I am stretching my back in consequence of which I am experiencing a pleasant kinaesthetic sensation.  At the same time I am gazing out my window at a blooming palo verde tree.  Both the kinaesthetic sensation and the gazing are 'states of me' to adapt a Bradleyan phrase, but only the second 'has anything for me,' i.e., presents an object, pretends to a reality beyond the subject, intends or means something, takes an accusative, has an intentional object, possesses a content, refers beyond itself — pick your favorite phraseology.  The second 'state of me' is object-directed; the first is not. Either you 'see' (with the mind's eye) the distinction between the seeing of the tree (using the eyes in your head) and the feeling of the sensation, or you do not.  No amount of argument or dialectic can make you 'see.'  At most, argument and dialectic can remove impediments to 'seeing.'  And if there were no 'seeing,' how could there be arguments?  Arguments need premises, and not all premises can be the conclusions of arguments.

    ADDENDA (11 December 2020)

    1) The issue is whether Franz Brentano was right to maintain that intentionality is the mark of the mental, and that therefore  every mental state is object-directed.  I have long held, probably under the influence of Edmund Husserl (Logical Investigations, vol. II, tr. J. N. Findlay, Humanities Press, 1970, 572 ff.) that this is not right, that there are mental states that are not object-directed. From the entry referenced above:

    Bill Vallicella

    3 responses to “F. H. Bradley on the Non-Intentionality of Pleasure and Pain”

  • Inter faeces et urinam nascimur

    Recalling our miserably indigent origin in the the wombs of our mothers and the subsequent helplessness of infancy, how did we get to be so arrogant and self-important? We criticize and condemn one another hurling epithets and anathemas. How did we get to be so harsh and judgmental?

    In a line often (mis)attributed to Augustine, but apparently from Bernard of Clairvaux, Inter faeces et urinam nascimur: "We are born between feces and urine." 

    So inauspicious a beginning for so proud a strut upon life's stage.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

    "The sky is the daily bread of the eyes," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson magnificently and truly. And this from a man who lived in New England where there is no sky to speak of. What would he have written had he been able to bathe his thoughts in the lambent light of the desert Southwest?

    Bill Vallicella

  • Compensations of Old Age

    Philosophers in dialogueYou now have money enough and you now have time. The time left is shrinking, but it is your own. There is little left to prove. What needed proving has been proven by now or will forever remain unproved. And now it doesn't much matter one way or the other.

    You are free to be yourself and live beyond comparisons with others. You can enjoy the social without being oppressed by it. You understand the child's fathership of the man, and in some measure are able to undo it. You have survived those who would define you, and now you define yourself. And all of this without rancor or resentment. Defiant self-assertion gives way to benign indifference, Angst to Gelassenheit:

         Brief light's made briefer
         'Neath the leaden vault of care
         Better to accept the sinecure
         Of untroubled Being-there.

    You now enjoy the benefits of a thick skin or else it was never in the cards that you should develop one. You have been inoculated by experience against the illusions of life. You know that the Rousseauan transports induced by a chance encounter with a charming member of the opposite sex do not presage the presence of the Absolute in human form. Less likely to be made a fool of in love, you are more likely to see sisters and brothers in sexual others.

    Grim ReaperThe Grim Reaper is gaining on you but you now realize that he is Janus-faced: he is also a Benign Releaser. Your life is mostly over, but what the past lacks in presentness it gains in length and necessity. What you had, though logically contingent, now glistens in the light of that medieval modality necessitas per accidens: it is all there, accessible to memory as long as memory holds out, and no one can take it from you.

     

    JanusWhat is over is over, but it has been. The country of the past is a realm of being inacccessible except to memory but in compensation unalterable.  Kierkegaard's fiftieth year never was, yours was. Better has-been than never-was. Not much by way of compensation, perhaps, but one takes what one can get.

    You know your own character by now and can take satisfaction in possessing a good one if that is what experienced has disclosed.

    Bill Vallicella

  • Hospitals and Torture Chambers

    We are strangely, insanely, conflicted.  We care lovingly, or at least dutifully, for the sick, the injured, and the dying. But we also torture people to death in ways that inspire envy in demons. The belief that humans are inherently good is one of the deepest of human delusions. Paradoxically, those who succumb to it excel in the theory and practice of hell, to borrow a title from Eugen Kogon's unforgettable book.

    Limited government and checks and balances across the board help keep power dispersed, the power that goes to the head and makes of the half-way decent moral monsters. Prospects for limited government, however, are themselves  limited in a high-tech surveillance society in which soft totalitarianism can be expected to give way to the good old-fashioned hard variety.

    Freezing torture

    Bill Vallicella

  • The Source of the Normativity of the Ought-to-Be

    I was working on this four years ago. It might never get finished. So here it is.

    …………………………………

    Is there any justification for talk of the ought-to-be in cases where they are not cases of the ought-to-do?  If so, what is the source of their normativity?  I am led to pose this question by my current study of Philippa Foot's meta-ethical treatise, Natural Goodness (Oxford UP, 2001).  If I understand her scheme, all normativity has its source in life, in living things, which would imply that in a lifeless world there are no states of affairs that ought to be or ought not to be.   

    The Ought-to-Do and the Ought-to-Be

    Let's begin by noting that if I ought to do X (pay my debts, feed my kids, honor my commitments, keep my hands off my neighbor's wife, etc.) then my doing X ought to be. For example, given that I ought to pay my debts, then my paying a certain debt on a certain date is a state of affairs that ought to be, ought to exist, ought to obtain. So it is not as if the ought-to-do and the ought-to-be form disjoint classes. For every act X that an agent A ought to do, there is a state of affairs, A's doing X, that ought to be, and a state of affairs, A's failing to do X, that ought not be. The ought-to-do, therefore, is a  special case of the  ought-to-be.

    My question, however, is whether there are states of affairs that ought to be even in situations in which there are no finite moral agents with power sufficient to bring them about, and states of affairs that ought not be even in situations in which there are no finite moral agents with power sufficient to prevent them. In other words, are there non-agential oughts-to-be? 

    It may not be possible to prove definitively that there are non-agential oughts, but their postulation is in line with ordinary ways of thinking and talking and there seem to be no decisive arguments against their postulation.

    Consider a possible world W in which there are no moral agents, but there are sentient beings who are in a constant state of pain from which they cannot free themselves. It seems both meaningful and reasonable to say that W ought not exist, that its nonexistence is an axiological requirement. And this quite apart from the power of any agent to actualize or prevent such a world. One simply intuits the disvalue of such a world. One might express the intuition in the words, ‘Such a world ought not be.’ Non-agential oughts are axiologically required, while non-agential oughts-not are axiologically prohibited.

    Or consider our world, the actual world, with its nature red in tooth and claw, a world in which life lives at the expense of life. It is filled with vast quantities of natural and moral evil. Assume that naturalism is true, that there is no God or afterlife, and that the evils of this world will forever go unredeemed. If may be false, but it is meaningful to say that it would be better if this world did not exist, that it ought never to have existed. The metaphysical pessimist may be wrong, but he is not talking nonsense when he exclaims, "Better some other world or even nothing at all rather than this sorry state of things!" On the other hand, there are those who are struck by the sheer existence of things and are moved to exclaim, "It is good that there is something rather than nothing!" Such optimists are not talking nonsense when they say that things are as they ought to be even in the absence of any agent or agents who are responsible for things being as they are.

    The sense of these exclamations does not seem to depend on the existence of moral agents with power sufficient to bring about or prevent the mentioned states of affairs. That something rather than nothing exists could be good even if it is no one's duty to bring it about and no one's responsibility if it obtains. That a world of uncompensated and unalleviated misery is bad does not depend on some free agent's moral failure. 

    Does it make sense, and is it true, to say things like 'There ought to be no natural disasters' or 'There ought to be morally perfect people'?

    Perhaps the following examples are clearer.  Imagine a pessimist who makes the following two-fold declaration: "In a possible world in which there are no sentient beings, things are as they ought to be, and in the actual world in which there are sentient beings, things are not as they ought to be."  He might also say, "A lifeless world is better than one containing living things."  The pessimist Schopenhauer declares that "Human life must be some sort of mistake."  That implies that a world without human beings is better than one with them.

    On the optimist side, there are those who exclaim that it is good to be alive, that living as such is a good thing, or even that existence as such, whether living or nonliving, is good.  (For Thomas Aquinas, 'a being' and 'a good thing' are necessarily equivalent or 'convertible' terms: ens et bonum convertuntur.)

    Suppose it it good that things exist. It would seem to follow  that the existence of thing is as it ought to be.  What makes this state of affairs good or such that it ought to be.  That things exist is a fact.  That things ought exist goes beyond the fact.

    Bill Vallicella

Latest Comments

  1. Very well put: “phenomenologists of suburban hanky-panky, auto dealerships, and such.” In my student years reading Updike and Cheever was…

  2. Bill, I have been looking further into Matt 5: 38-42 and particularly how best to understand the verb antistēnai [to…

  3. Bill and Steven, I profited from what each of you has to say about Matt 5: 38-42, but I think…

  5. Hi Bill Addis’ Nietzsche’s Ontology is readily available on Amazon, Ebay and Abebooks for about US$50-60 https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=addis&ch_sort=t&cm_sp=sort-_-SRP-_-Results&ds=30&dym=on&rollup=on&sortby=17&tn=Nietzsche%27s%20Ontology

  6. It’s unbelievable that people who work with the law are among the ranks of the most sophists, demagogues, and irrational…

  7. https://www.thefp.com/p/charles-fain-lehman-dont-tolerate-disorder-charlie-kirk-iryna-zarutska?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

  9. Hey Bill, Got it now, thanks for clarifying. I hope you have a nice Sunday. May God bless you!

  10. Vini, Good comments. Your command of the English language is impressive. In my penultimate paragraph I wrote, “Hence their hatred…

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