Singer's "Famine, Affluence and Morality": Exposition and Appraisal: Now on YouTube

I've posted an audio version of an article of mine critiquing Peter Singer's "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc1j7IMltR0

Timothy Sprigge and the Importance of Subjectivity

Scott Ryan has a new article at Scholardarity, Timothy Sprigge and the Importance of Subjectivity. The article covers panpsychism, eternalism, Absolute Idealism, and ethics. Here is an introductory excerpt:

In this essay I shall offer a brief appreciative overview of the philosophical system of British philosopher Timothy L.S. Sprigge (14 January 1932—11 July 2007). In so doing I shall be emphasizing the importance in that system of subjectivity—of the existence of centers (he writes “centres,” but here I follow the US spelling convention) of consciousness, sentience, and experience, characterized essentially by the fact that there is ‘something that it is like’ to be them.

Sprigge had adopted this way of talking about subjectivity—as involving what it is “like” to be something—before it was made famous by Thomas Nagel in his 1974 paper “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” Subjectivity was a theme of Sprigge’s philosophical work from the very beginning, well before he had fully worked out his mature views. Indeed, “The Importance of Subjectivity” was the title of his inaugural lecture upon his appointment to the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh in 1982, and was chosen (by his friend, colleague, former student, and literary executor Leemon McHenry, at the suggestion of Pierfrancesco Basile) as the title of a posthumously published collection of his papers.

My aim is to provide, for interested readers, a short and accessible (though of course very far from complete) account of the main lines of Sprigge’s system in a way that will provide a quick and ready grasp both of the overall unity of that system and of the fundamental and far-reaching importance of subjectivity within it.

Philosophy, et cetera on Effective Giving

Philosophy, et cetera: Effective Giving:

I encourage  everyone who wants to make the world a better place to join Giving What We Can and pledge to give 10% of their pre-tax income to effective charities.  You can expect to save several lives each year (averaging over your lifetime earnings, if you're currently a student), which is pretty amazing when you think about it, and it's surprisingly easy too.  (A 10% change in income generally doesn't impose any drastic lifestyle changes!)  Some people give even more, and that's even cooler.  Some start with less, and every bit helps. ...

A Summary of Mackie’s “The Subjectivity of Values”

I've posted a summary of J.L. Mackie's article "The Subjectivity of Values" in Philosophy Notes at Scholardarity.

Here's an excerpt:

In his essay “The Subjectivity of Values”, J.L. Mackie aims to show that values are not built into the structure of the universe. He begins by clarifying his position, addressing possible reactions and trying to prevent misunderstandings. Some would reject Mackie’s thesis as being morally subversive, others would accept it as a platitude, and still others would say that the question of whether there are objective values is itself illegitimate. Mackie’s thesis applies to all purportedly objective values, not just moral ones. Also, his thesis is a second-order rather than a first-order claim: It states that our values have nothing objective corresponding to them, but one who accepts this claim is not thereby committed to adopt any particular attitude towards private conduct or public policy. One can think that values are ultimately subjective while still valuing things, practices, or states of affairs—or perhaps not valuing much of anything at all—because valuing something does not presuppose that valuing it has an ontological ground.

A Synopsis of Singer’s The Life You Can Save

In this article on Scholardarity.com I provide a synopsis of Peter Singer’s book The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, in which he tries to get his readers to consider, or reconsider, the question of what their obligations are to those who are trapped in extreme poverty. I write the synopsis in the hope that it may convince you to think about these issues for yourself, and also to go on to read Singer’s book.

How to Know What Should Be So: Ethical Guidance and Ethical Theories

If one is in a moral quandary it is wise to look for ethical guidance if one has the time to do so. Ethical theories are, among other things, intended to be one possible source of ethical guidance. If such guidance is valuable, then in ethics there is an embarrassment of riches: There are multiple, well-accepted, yet mutually inconsistent theories. These include utilitarianism, Kantianism, virtue ethics, contractarianism, libertarianism, natural law theory, some forms of moral particularism, and more. The disquieting thing is that, at present, it seems that we are not at all close to being able to determine which of them, if any, is right. How can you know what you should do when ethicists, those who devote their careers to studying such theories, cannot reach a consensus on which one we should accept? Those who look to ethical theories for ethical guidance are apt to be disappointed. This situation is problematic, for if ethical theorizing is to have relevance to real-world ethical behavior, and not just be a way of examining ethical issues out of a love of arguments or puzzles, it must be possible for us to use ethical theories to inform ourselves of what we should do.

It seems that philosophers have usually tried to address the issue of how one should act by advancing arguments for or against these theories (or certain parts of them). I want to approach this issue from a different angle. The question I will address is this: Can you get ethical guidance about what you should do in certain situations without knowing, or even having good reasons to believe, that any particular ethical theory is right?

I know of at least one philosopher who thinks you can. In the following passage from his article “Hunger, Duty, and Ecology”, which was the inspiration for the ideas I express in this article, Mylan Engel Jr. rebuts an objection to the obligatoriness of donating to famine relief:

One of the most common reasons that I have heard philosophers give for rejecting the arguments of Singer and company [for contributing to famine relief] runs roughly as follows:

Singer’s preference utilitarianism is irremediably flawed, as are Kant’s ethics, Aieken’s theory of human rights, and Rawlsean contractarianism. The literature is peppered with devastating objections to these views. Because all of the aforementioned arguments are predicated on flawed ethical theories, all these arguments are also flawed. Until someone can provide me with clear moral reasons grounded in a true moral theory for sending large portions of my income to famine-relief organizations, I will continue to spend my money on what I please.

Such a self-serving reply is both disingenuous and sophistical. It is disingenuous because, as noted earlier, utilitarianism, Kantian ethics, human rights-based ethics, and contractarianism are among the most widely accepted theories in normative ethics. In other contexts, philosophers typically embrace one of these four theoretical approaches to ethics. It is sophistical because a similar reply can be used to “justify” or rationalize virtually any behavior. Because no moral theory to date is immune to objection, one could, for example, “justify” rape on the grounds that all of the arguments against rape are based on flawed ethical theories.

The speciousness of such a “justification” of rape is obvious. No one who seriously considers the brutality of rape can think that it is somehow justified / permissible simply because all current ethical theories are flawed. But such specious reasoning is often used to “justify” allowing millions of innocent children to starve to death each year. [footnote omitted] (Environmental Ethics, p. 462).

Engel goes on to justify his conclusions about donating to famine relief by appealing to what he takes to be almost universally shared commonsense beliefs about morality.

My approach will be different. My idea is that if you compare all the viable ethical theories that you know of, and find that all, or at any rate a great majority of them agree about whether an action you're considering is right, wrong, or permissible, then you know that it is at least highly probable that that action really is right, wrong, or permissible. For if all ethical theories agree about the moral status of an action, it can only fail to have that status if they are all false. And if a great majority of ethical theories agree about the moral status of an action, it can only fail to have that status if all of the theories that agree about its status are false, which becomes more and more improbable as the number of the theories that agree increases. Note that I’m not arguing that if a great majority of ethical theories agree about the moral status of an action then it automatically follows that it very probably has that status. The argument is rather that if some ethical theory or other is true, then majority agreement implies that the action very probably has the moral status that the majority of theories agree that it has. The upshot is that my approach should be a good guide as to what you should do as long as some ethical theory or other is true.  So by using my approach you can be guided by ethical theories without having to attempt the difficult task of determining which of them is right.

To clarify, my idea is not to put different ethical theories together to get a composite theory, but to help someone figure out what they should do in a fairly specific situation. By comparing different ethical theories you might find that they agree about what you should do in a situation, but they might not agree about why you should do it. If you try to “combine” the guidance you get across diverse situations the result would probably not be cohesive enough to yield an ethical theory. And if you find that a sufficient number of ethical theories don't agree even about what you should do in a given situation, I think the most you can conclude is that you don't know what you should do, and in such a case you would not have any determinate guidance. So I think that in some cases my approach will give you guidance and in other cases it won't.

Nevertheless, on my view, you would have a reason to explore as many different candidate ethical theories as you can, even though there is no need to determine which of them is right. This is because the more of them you consider, the more certain you can be that you have a representative sample of all the possible viable ethical theories, and the more representative the sample is, the more certain you can be that an action really has the moral status you think it does given that the majority of ethical theories agree that it has it.

It is important to note that ethical theories properly so called need not be the only kind of ethical view that one might have to take into account on my approach. Timothy Chappell has introduced the different yet related notion of an ethical outlook, which he characterizes as follows:

Anybody who is going to live a genuinely worthwhile and a fully human life will have to live out a set of views and commitments about the central questions concerning value: what is worth living for and what is worth dying for, what is really admirable and what is really contemptible, what we must do at all costs and what we must not do no matter what; and so on. This set of views and commitments need not be very explicit; but it must run deep—must be sincerely and indeed passionately held. And it need not be very systematic; but it must be as considered, rationally defensible, and coherent as possible. Any such set of views about value is what I will call an ethical outlook.[1]

The notion of an ethical outlook is, in principle, broader than the notion of an ethical theory, for it can include ethical theories as well as ethical views that are less systematic. In Chappell’s opinion, mainstream ethical theories[2] are not credible ethical outlooks, because he thinks they are ill-suited for any of the four roles that he regards as important ones important for ethical outlooks to play.[3] I am not convinced by his arguments, but I don’t have the space to address them here, so I will proceed on the assumption that mainstream ethical theories are credible ethical outlooks and leave the analysis of Chappell’s arguments for another occasion

Related to this is the important question of whether ethical outlooks that are not ethical theories are eligible to be included among the views that my approach takes into account.  For now I will simply say that, though I cannot see a priori any reason why not, I think their eligibility must be determined on a case by case basis, and in order to make such determinations I would need a more fully developed account than I now possess of the criteria of viability that I will present next. The development of such an account is something that I must also leave for another occasion.

Given that there may be ethical theories that have not yet been thought of by anyone, it is not certain how many of them there are. But it is certain that not all of them are created equal. Thus, in order to carry out a project like mine, it will be necessary to develop criteria of viability that one can use to eliminate theories that are inadequate and thus narrow down the range of theories one will have to consider.  In this section I will list some of these criteria.

One criterion is cohesiveness. Ethical theories cannot contain contradictions, but more than that, their components must be mutually supporting and fit together well. That is, an ethical theory can’t just be some arbitrary set of statements about what one should do that happens to be logically consistent. Some parts of the theory must provide a rationale as to why such-and-such is right, wrong, or permissible. Furthermore, these parts and their rationales must be subsumed under some common principles, or be such that relevantly similar actions receive relevantly similar evaluations, and for relevantly similar reasons.

Another criterion is comprehensiveness: An ethical theory cannot merely tell one what one should do in just a few cases. It should give one guidance that applies to a large number of cases of various kinds.

 

An ethical theory also has to have verifiable implications for one’s behavior. That is, one’s obligations must be such that it is in principle possible for one to discover what they are if one makes the effort to do so. If an ethical theory says, for instance, that in cases having feature F one should do x and in cases having feature G one should not do x, there must be a way for one to  recognize that one is in a case which has feature F or a case which has feature G. If this were not so, one could only do x or fail to do x in the appropriate kind of case through a lucky guess. Even if one assumes that one really would have obligations in such a skeptical scenario, it would be pointless for one to try to find out what they were.

Yet another criterion derives from the old but venerable principle that “‘ought’ implies ‘can’”. Ethical theories must be psychologically plausible: One cannot be obligated to do something if it is psychologically impossible for one to do it. And if doing something is possible but difficult, an ethical theory which prescribes doing it is less viable the more difficult it is to do it.

As with any kind of theory, ethical theories should not contain any statements that have been shown empirically to be false. They should, in other words, be empirically adequate. This seems obvious enough, but if one takes one’s theorizing seriously it requires that one should make the effort to see if the ethical theories that one is considering are consistent with any relevant scientific theories or bodies of knowledge.

The guidance that an ethical theory provides must also be appropriately specific, that is, it should not be so vague that it doesn’t really recommend anything in particular.

Finally, however specific an ethical theory’s guidance may be, when considering it one needs to ask oneself, “Do those who know this theory best agree about what it recommends and what it doesn’t?” The more difficult it is for the relevant experts to agree on how to interpret the theory, the more it lacks interpretational stability and the less viable it is.

I will make no claim that the above list of criteria is complete, but one has to start somewhere. However, I will claim that these criteria are both necessary and useful for my project.

To read the full article, please go to Scholardarity.com, How to Know What Should Be So: Ethical Guidance and Ethical Theories.

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[1] “Ethics Beyond Moral Theory,” p. 7.

[2] Chappell actually uses the expression “moral theory,” which I take to be equivalent to the expression “ethical theory” as I use it.

[3] Here is Chappell’s characterization of these roles:

We want our ethical outlook to be something which, in real time, can be the source of our reasons to act (motivation), and which can structure our thinking and deciding about how to act as it actually happens (deliberation). We also want our ethical outlook to be something which, offline, can articulate and deepen our understanding of what counts as good or bad and right or wrong action, and why (explanation); and we want it to be something which can explain what will or would be good or bad and right or wrong action, in future or hypothetical situations that we ourselves have not actually met, but which we or others might conceivably meet (prediction) (“Ethics Beyond Moral Theory,” pp. 12-3).

Julia Loo on Virtue, Knowledge, and the Craft, Art, and Science of Healing

Julia Loo examines the “'quality of care' crisis in modern Western medicine," relating it to virtue ethics and virtue epistemology, in a new Scholardarity article: Virtue, Knowledge, and the Craft, Art, and Science of Healing: Can Virtue Epistemology Create Better Physicians?

 Also available as a (PDF)

A new article on Singer’s “Famine, Affluence and Morality" at Scholardarity.com

I've published a new article at Scholardarity.com, Singer’s “Famine, Affluence and Morality”: Exposition and Appraisal.

Quote of the Day: The Real Source of Moral Motivation

Nobody sane generally or standardly acts so as to realise utility, or “on the motive of Duty” (Kant’s own phrase), or “for the sake of virtue itself” (Aristotle’s own phrase). Even people who only act occasionally in these ways can be in danger of looking priggish, and out of touch with what really matters in life, to the rest of us.

            As I hinted in the last section, what really motivates most of us, most of the time, at least if we are moderately good people or better and are not being distracted by false motives like concern about “what others will think”, is love: love for spouses, love for children and parents, love for friends, love for God, love for ideals, love for valued places or artworks or possessions, love for pet projects, love for pets. The centrality of love is a striking feature of any typical credible ethical outlook. The marginality of love in typical moral theories, and more broadly in contemporary philosophical research, is equally striking. Love is at the heart of our ethical outlooks; it is love, and not concern with what is right and wrong, that mostly drives us into action. In that sense love puts us “beyond good and evil”, and beyond morality; while morality is a constraint on what motivates us (and a constraint: there are others), love is the very engine of motivation. 

[footnote omitted]--Timothy Chappell “Ethics beyond moral theory” Philosophical Investigations 32 (3):206-243.

A Critique of Alison M. Jaggar on Abortion -- A new Scholardarity Article

I've just posted a new article at Scholardarity.com, A Critique of Alison M. Jaggar on Abortion  .

A follow up on "An uncontroversial instance of moral knowledge?"

In this post I’m going to refine the position I advanced in my previous post, “An uncontroversial instance of moral knowledge?”. In that post I said,

No matter what else one may think about which actions—or types of action—are wrong, one must hold that if someone performs any action which they believe to be wrong they have acted wrongly. And if we know that anything is wrong, we know that doing something which one believes to be wrong is wrong.

This passage is ambiguous: It could be read as saying that if one believes some (particular) action A to be wrong but does A anyway, then A itself is a wrong action. But it could also be read as saying that if one believes some (particular) action A to be wrong but does A anyway then one has acted wrongly, even if A itself is not wrong. Since I wrote this passage a while ago I can’t be sure what exactly I had in mind, although I suspect I wasn’t thinking carefully enough to notice the difference. However, I now think that the second reading is more plausible, because of cases like the following.

Suppose Jones has been raised by parents who are ethical egoists, and has been taught that one should never act to help others unless it is one’s own interest to do so, except in a situation where helping someone else and not helping them would have precisely the same consequences for one’s own well being, in which case it is permissible to help that person and also permissible not to do so. Suppose that one day Jones spies a beggar on the street, and that Jones, moved by pity, gives the beggar some money that he would otherwise have used to buy his lunch. Nevertheless, in spite of his feelings, Jones still believed while he was acting that he shouldn’t help the beggar because in doing so he made himself (mildly) worse off by skipping lunch. 

In a case such as this, I find it intuitive to think that Jones’ action of helping the beggar was not wrong, but permissible or perhaps even obligatory. In spite of that, I think it is still at least plausible to hold that Jones did something wrong. For even if an action A is not wrong, it does not follow that in doing A one has not acted wrongly. For instance, by moving one’s finger in a certain way one may thereby also flip a switch and thereby turn the lights on. Similarly,  by doing A  one may also perform another action—call it ‘e’—namely violating one’s conscience, and it might be that e is wrong because it is always wrong to violate one’s conscience. However good it may have been for Jones to give his lunch money to the beggar, it would have been better still if Jones had thought that by giving away his money he was doing the right thing, or a least a permissible thing.

An uncontroversial instance of moral knowledge?

Given the pervasive moral disagreements there are (or seem to be) between different people and different societies, one might question the notion that there are any uncontroversial instances of moral knowledge. In opposition to this, I propose that there is at least one instance of moral knowledge that I think most will find uncontroversial. Suppose, as I believe to be the case, that skipping pebbles across a pond is a morally neutral action: it is neither right nor wrong, but merely permissible. Nevertheless, suppose that Sam, for whatever reason, forms the belief that skipping pebbles across a pond is wrong. (Perhaps Sam’s brain has been hit by one too many cosmic rays.) If, in spite of this, Sam skips a pebble across a pond, he has acted wrongly, even though actions of that type are not normally wrong. No matter what else one may think about which actions—or types of action—are wrong, one must hold that if someone performs any action which they believe to be wrong they have acted wrongly. And if we know that anything is wrong, we know that doing something which one believes to be wrong is wrong.

Or so I think. But you may disagree; and if you do, I’m interested to hear where you think I’ve gone wrong.

A problem for consequentialism

I think one of the main problems with utilitarian theories is that they do not attribute any value to moral agents or moral patients as such. Their experiences might be valuable, as might the satisfaction of their desires, but moral agents and moral patients themselves are of no value at all. (From this point on, I will use the term “moral subjects” to refer to both moral agents and moral patients.) So if, for example, I kill Smith and somehow create a new individual whose well being is the same as Smith’s was, this state of affairs is, intrinsically, neither better nor worse than how things would be if I had left Smith alone. But this seems wrong. To borrow a term from W.D. Ross, it is our prima facie duty not to kill people, and this is so even if killing someone has no impact on the total amount of utility in the universe as a whole. Because utilitarian theories cannot discriminate between actions which result in the same overall amount of utility in the world, they are blind to the fact that one such action can be permissible while another such action is prohibited.

Consequentialists, more generally, could try to remedy this problem by assigning intrinsic value to moral subjects in themselves, apart from any value their experiences might have, and take this into account in their moral deliberations. After all, consequentialism in general requires that we try to maximize the good, but is silent on which things are good. But I doubt that consequentialists can acknowledge the intrinsic value of moral subjects without giving up on consequentialism or else failing to do justice to what we normally mean when we say that moral subjects are intrinsically valuable. In order to have a genuinely consequentialist theory, consequentialists would have to treat the value of a moral subject as being comparable with other sorts of value, such as happiness, or well being in general. But then we are faced with essentially the same problem we encountered above: Suppose Smith himself is worth 11 units of goodness (utiles), while his well being is worth 10 utiles, so that the total value of Smith’s life is 21 utiles. Why can I not kill Smith, provided that I also create 21 utiles through some other means to make up for the loss? If I do this by creating a new person, they would presumably be worth just as much as Smith was; so as long as their well being is also worth 10 utiles we have a life which is worth exactly the same as Smith’s. All the same, it is still wrong to kill Smith, even if I create a new person to “make up for it”. So a consequentialist theory has again given us the wrong result, even though we augmented it so that it assigns intrinsic value to Smith himself and takes this value into account in determining one’s permissible courses of action. What has gone wrong?

The problem is not that we have assigned Smith too little value—all persons are equally valuable, and so just as valuable as Smith is, and given this we can always concoct a new scenario in which we create enough utiles to make up for murdering Smith. This is so even if one thinks that moral subjects are of infinite value. And that view is problematic on its own: If moral subjects are infinitely valuable, one moral subject is worth just as much as a million. But if forced to chose, one surely ought to save a million rather than one.

If there is any hope for the idea that moral subjects are intrinsically valuable, I think it must lie in something like Kant’s Categorical Imperative, which says that moral subjects ought always to be treated as ends in themselves, and never merely as a means. One of the problems with the above lines of reasoning is that we have taken the term “intrinsic value” at face value and have falsely assimilated the value of persons to the value of sub-personal things like happiness or well being. Moral subjects are not merely valuable, but unique and irreplaceable. Instead of saying that moral subjects are intrinsically valuable, it would be better to say that moral subjects have moral dignity, and that this is something which cannot be measured in the same way that the value of happiness or well being can. Perhaps it cannot be measured at all. What is certain is that we cannot hold that moral subjects may be replaced by other beings whose lives have “equal value”, for a being which has moral dignity is by that very fact one which ought not to be disposed of, even if they are replaced by another being who also has moral dignity. Neither may we use moral subjects as a mere means to improve the general welfare. It might still be true, in general, that we may save the many rather than the few, but it will only be permissible for us to do so if the circumstances which force this choice on us are not of our own making.