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.'

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

From an Old Journal: On the Meaning of Life

The germs of these thoughts came to me while climbing the Allan Blackman trail to Circlestone Ruins in the Eastern Superstition Wilderness in May of 1998.

Does it matter whether life has an ultimate meaning or not? Someone might be satisfied if he has a good chance of attaining middle-sized happiness: peaceful days, restful nights, an adequate supply of health and wealth, satisfying employment, a loving spouse, friends, progeny, long life, and the like. Why not rest our hopes in what is known to be possible rather than in what is not known to be possible, such as immortality, the resurrection of the body, the visio beata, entry into Nirvana? Why hanker for what is beyond our mortal scale? Why not accept the finite? Are we not just a particularly clever species of land mammal?

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An Objection Against Frankfurt-Style Examples (Peter Lupu)

 (Comments in blue by BV.)

1) Frankfurt-style examples are intended to be counterexamples to PAP.

PAP: A person S is morally responsible for intentionally doing X at t only if S can intentionally refrain from doing X at t.

BV: The following formulation better captures what Frankfurt actually says in his 1969 J. Phil. article, namely, "a person is morally responsible for what he has done only if he could have done otherwise."

PAP*:  A person S is morally responsible for intentionally doing X at t only if (i) S intentionally does X at time t, and (ii) S could have intentionally refrained from doing X at t.

Assumption: I assume that intentionally refraining from doing X is identical to intentionally doing some Y, where Y is not identical to X.

BV: Do you need this assumption? The assumption appears false.   If I refrain from doing one thing, it doesn't follow that I do some other thing:  I could do nothing at all.  If I refrain from smoking a cigarette during the next ten minutes, it does not follow that I do something else during that period.  I take it that not-doing-X is not an action.  It is an action-omission.  If 'X' and 'Y' range over action-types, then not-doing-X is not identical to doing-some-Y.

2) A Frankfurt-style example is going to be a genuine counterexample to PAP just in case it entails the antecedent of PAP as well as the negation of its consequent: i.e.,

(I) S is morally responsible for doing X at t;
(II) It is not the case that S can intentionally refrain from doing X at t.

BV: Note that (II') corresponding to PAP* is

(II') Either it is not the case that S intentionally does X at t, or it is not the case that S could have intentionally refrained from doing X at t.

3) The following are two claims I shall prove:

Claim 1: Any Frankfurt-style example that is interpreted to entail (I) and (II) is inconsistent: i.e., it also entails the negation of either (I) or (II).

Claim 2: Any Frankfurt-style example that is interpreted as entailing (II*) instead of (II) is consistent but is not a counterexample to PAP.

(II*) It is not the case that S can behave in a manner other than X at t.

But, (II*) is not the negation of the consequent of PAP. Hence, (I) and (II*) do not refute PAP. Therefore, standard Frankfurt-style examples are either inconsistent or they are not genuine counterexamples to PAP.

4) Suppose a Frankfurt-style example (choose your favorite example) entails (I) and (II).
4.1) Then such an example includes a backup mechanism that is capable of directly causing S to do X at t in the event S intentionally refrains from doing X at t. But the very existence of such a backup mechanism entails

(III) S can intentionally refrain from doing X at t.

Because if (III) were false and S could not intentionally refrain from doing X at t, then there would be no need for a backup mechanism.
4.2) (II) and (III) are contradictories.
4.3) Therefore, the assumption stated in (4) must be false.
4.4) This proves Claim 1 above.

BV:  I agree that (II) and (III) are contradictories.  But (II') and (III) are not contradictories.  So even if you succeed in refuting your PAP, you haven't refuted Frankfurt's PAP*.  If I haven't blundered, it seems that the debate now shifts to what exactly the Principle of Alternate Possibilities is.

5) Suppose that a Frankfurt-style example entails (I) and (II*).
5.1) As before, such an example entails (III) as well. But, now, notice that as long as we maintain a sharp distinction between behavior and action, (II*) and (III) are perfectly consistent.
5.3) Therefore, the supposition stated in (5) does not lead to a contradiction. Frankfurt-style examples that entail (I), (II*), and (III) are perfectly consistent.
5.4) But notice that none of these propositions; i.e., (I), (II*), and (III) contradict the consequent of PAP. Therefore, consistent Frankfurt-style examples are not counterexamples to PAP. This proves Claim 2.

6) Since this holds for any arbitrary Frankfurt-style example, we can state the following:

(*) Every Frankfurt-style example is either inconsistent or it is not a counterexamples to PAP.

7) The only potentially vulnerable move that I can see in this argument is the claim that the existence of a backup mechanism entails (III): S can intentionally refrain from doing X at t.
7.1) But, how can the proponents of Frankfurt-style examples deny such an entailment? The very point of Frankfurt-style examples is that the existence of such a backup mechanism (however it is described) is feasible and that its sole purpose is to insure that in the event S intentionally refrains from doing X at t, then the backup mechanism induces S to do X at t. Thus, the rationale of such a backup mechanism presupposes that S can intentionally refrain from doing X at t; but this just is (III). Hence, any Frankfurt-style example entails (III).

Questions: Their Raising and Their Begging

To raise a question is not to beg a question. 'Raise a question' and 'beg a question' ought not be used interchangeably on pain of occluding a distinction essential to clear thought. To raise a question is just to pose it, to bring it before one's mind or before one's audience for consideration. To beg a question, however, is not to pose a question but to reason in a way that presupposes what one needs to prove.

 Suppose A poses the question, Does Allah exist? B responds by saying that Allah does exist because his existence is attested in the Koran which Allah revealed to Muhammad. In this example, A raises a question, while B begs the question raised by A. The question is whether or not Allah exists; B's response begs the question by presupposing that Allah does exist. For Allah could not reveal anything to Muhammad unless Allah exists.

The phrase 'beg the question' is not as transparent as might be hoped. The Latin, petitio principii, is better: begging of the principle. Perhaps the simplest way to express the fallacy in English is by calling it circular reasoning. If I argue that The Los Angeles Times displays liberal bias because its reportage and editorializing show a left-of-center slant, then I reason in a circle, or beg the question. Fans of Greek may prefer hysteron proteron, literally, the later earlier. That is, what is logically posterior, namely, the conclusion, is taken to be logically prior, a premise.

Punchline: Never use 'beg the question' unless you are referring to an informal fallacy in reasoning. If you are raising, asking, posing a question, then say that. Do your bit to preserve our alma mater, the English language. Honor thy mother! Matrix of our thoughts, she is deeper and higher than our thoughts, their sacred Enabler.

Of course, I am but a vox clamantis in deserto.  The battle has already been lost.  So why do I write things like the above?  Because I am a natural-born scribbler who takes pleasure in these largely pointless exercises.

Call it What it Is!

In the swimming pool the other morning, conversation drifted onto the topic of recipes.  One lady who hails from Texas proceeded to give me her recipe for what she referred to as cornbread 'dressing.'  In my preferred patois, 'stuffing' is the word, not 'dressing.'  And so in our little conversation I kept using the 's' word.  In mock irritation she finally replied, "It's dressing; call it what it is."  She was not really irritated, but she was serious that things should be called what they are.

Thereon hinges a philosophical point, one which of course I did not pursue with the matron.  The point is that people often succumb to what Rudolf Carnap at the beginning of Chapter 12 of An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science calls "a magical view of language":

Many people hold a magical view of language, the view that there is a mysterious natural connection of some sort between certain words (only, of course, the words with which they are familiar!) and their meanings.  The truth is that it is only by historical accident, in the evolution of our culture, that the word 'blue' has come to mean a certain color. (116)

As between 'stuffing' and 'dressing' there is nothing to choose; neither captures the nature of their common referent.  The incantation of neither has the power to conjure up the edible reality.  Both words stand in a merely conventional relation to their common referent.

The confusion of words and things is a mistake to avoid.  A cognate mistake is the notion that there are such things as true definitions.  Definitions merely register our free decisions as to how words will be used.  Questions of true and false arise only after we have fixed our terms.

So is religious language based on elementary confusion? "Our Father Who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name." "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain." "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." Or is the Carnap point superficial like so much in Carnap?