How rationality can make your life more awesome

by Julia Galef

www.racingducks.com

Sheer intellectual curiosity was what first drew me to rationality (by which I mean, essentially, the study of how to view the world as accurately as possible). I still enjoy rationality as an end in itself, but it didn’t take me long to realize that it’s also a powerful tool for achieving pretty much anything else you care about. Below, a survey of some of the ways that rationality can make your life more awesome:

Rationality alerts you when you have a false belief that’s making you worse off.

You’ve undoubtedly got beliefs about yourself — about what kind of job would be fulfilling for you, for example, or about what kind of person would be a good match for you. You’ve also got beliefs about the world — say, about what it’s like to be rich, or about “what men want” or “what women want.” And you’ve probably internalized some fundamental maxims, such as: When it’s true love, you’ll know. You should always follow your dreams. Natural things are better. Promiscuity reduces your worth as a person.

Those beliefs shape your decisions about your career, what to do when you’re sick, what kind of people you decide to pursue romantically and how you pursue them, how much effort you should be putting into making yourself richer, or more attractive, or more skilled (and skilled in what?), more accommodating, more aggressive, and so on.

But where did these beliefs come from? The startling truth is that many of our beliefs became lodged in our psyches rather haphazardly. We’ve read them, or heard them, or picked them up from books or TV or movies, or perhaps we generalized from one or two real-life examples.

Rationality trains you to notice your beliefs, many of which you may not even be consciously aware of, and ask yourself: where did those beliefs come from, and do I have good reason to think they’re accurate? How would I know if  they’re false? Have I considered any other, alternative hypotheses?

Rationality helps you get the information you need.

Sometimes you need to figure out the answer to a question in order to make an important decision about, say, your health, or your career, or the causes that matter to you. Studying rationality reveals that some ways of investigating those questions are much more likely to yield the truth than others. Just a few examples:

“How should I run my business?” If you’re looking to launch or manage a company, you’ll have a huge leg up over your competition if you’re able to rationally determine how well your product works, or whether it meets a need, or what marketing strategies are effective.

“What career should I go into?” Before committing yourself to a career path, you’ll probably want to learn about the experiences of people working in that field. But a rationalist also knows to ask herself, “Is my sample biased?” If you’re focused on a few famous success stories from the field, that doesn’t tell you very much about what a typical job is like, or what your odds are of making it in that field.

It’s also an unfortunate truth that not every field uses reliable methods, and so not every field produces true or useful work. If that matters to you, you’ll need the tools of rationality to evaluate the fields you’re considering working in. Fields whose methods are controversial include psychotherapy, nutrition science, economics, sociology, consulting, string theory, and alternative medicine.

“How can I help the world?” Many people invest huge amounts of money, time, and effort in causes they care about. But if you want to ensure that your investment makes a difference, you need to be able to evaluate the relevant evidence. How serious of a problem is, say, climate change, or animal welfare, or globalization? How effective is lobbying, or marching, or boycotting? How far do your contributions go at charity X versus charity Y?

Rationality shows you how to evaluate advice.


Learning about rationality, and how widespread irrationality is, sparks an important realization: you can’t assume other people have good reasons for the things they believe. And that means you need to know how to evaluate other people’s opinions, not just based on how plausible their opinions seem, but based on the reliability of the methods they used to form those opinions.

So when you get business advice, you need to ask yourself: What evidence does she have for that advice, and are her circumstances relevant enough to mine? The same is true when a friend swears by some particular remedy for acne, or migraines, or cancer. Is he repeating a recommendation made by multiple doctors? Or did he try it once and get better? What kind of evidence is reliable?

In many cases, people can’t articulate exactly how they’ve arrived at a particular belief; it’s just the product of various experiences they’ve had and things they’ve heard or read. But once you’ve studied rationality, you’ll recognize the signs of people who are more likely to have accurate beliefs: People who adjust their level of confidence to the evidence for a claim; people who actually change their minds when presented with new evidence; people who seem interested in getting the right answer rather than in defending their own egos.

Rationality saves you from bad decisions.

Knowing about the heuristics your brain uses and how they can go wrong means you can escape some very common, and often very serious, decision-making traps.

For example, people often stick with their original career path or business plan for years after the evidence has made clear that it was a mistake, because they don’t want their previous investment to be wasted. That’s thanks to the sunk cost fallacy. Relatedly, people often allow cognitive dissonance to convince them that things aren’t so bad, because the prospect of changing course is too upsetting.

And in many major life decisions, such as choosing a career, people envision one way things could play out (“I’m going to run my own lab, and live in a big city…”) — but they don’t spend much time thinking about how probable that outcome is, or what the other probable outcomes are. The narrative fallacy is that situations imagined in high detail seem more plausible, regardless of how probable they actually are.  

Rationality trains you to step back from your emotions so that they don’t cloud your judgment.

Depression, anxiety, anger, envy, and other unpleasant and self-destructive emotions tend to be fueled by what cognitive therapy calls “cognitive distortions,” irrationalities in your thinking such as jumping to conclusions based on limited evidence; focusing selectively on negatives; all-or-nothing thinking; and blaming yourself, or someone else, without reason.

Rationality breaks your habit of automatically trusting your instinctive, emotional judgments, encouraging you instead to notice the beliefs underlying your emotions and ask yourself whether those beliefs are justified.

It also trains you to notice when your beliefs about the world are being colored by what you want, or don’t want, to be true. Beliefs about your own abilities, about the motives of other people, about the likely consequences of your behavior, about what happens after you die, can be emotionally fraught. But a solid training in rationality keeps you from flinching away from the truth — about your situation, or yourself — when learning the truth can help you change it.

The difference between rationality and rational self-interest

by Massimo Pigliucci

media.photobucket.com

Far too often in the course of discussions on this blog or with friends I encounter a fundamental confusion: people using the word “rational” (or “irrational”) as if there were only one clear meaning of it, from which their own position follows logically (or, alternatively, other people’s position is therefore deemed illogical). Not so.

The ancient Greeks had already made a distinction between “theoria” (theoretical reason) and “praxis” (practical reason), the first one being the sort of reasoning that is supposed to reflect a point of view from nowhere, as the phrase goes, while the second one is a type of instrumental rationality deployed in the pursuit of specific ends. (Yes, modern philosophy and cognitive science have respectively argued and shown convincingly that human beings can hardly access a view from nowhere, but it is an ideal, meaning that in some cases we want to transcend as much as possible our foibles and specific issues to look at the world as broadly as is feasible for us.)

While all systems of logic do need starting assumptions (or axioms, as they are called in math), and no interestingly complex individual system can be completely justified from within itself, the aims and assumptions of theoretical and practical reason are nonetheless clearly distinct. Theoretical reason is what we deploy when we wish to arrive at general principles of logic that apply regardless of the circumstances (e.g., the principle of non-contradiction), while the practical reason tells us what we need to do in order to maximize a specified utility function.

Of course, much of the confusion I referred to above comes in when I have discussions with libertarian-oriented people, who never fail to bring in rational self-interest, or the principle of rational egoism, as a trump card. We don’t need to get (again) into Rand-style pseudophilosophy here, as rational egoism was seriously discussed (and criticized) by Henry Sidgwick in his The Methods of Ethics already in 1907. One of the things that is often confused by libertarian/objectivists is that there is a fundamental distinction between rational egoism (a type of reasoning) and ethical egoism (an ethical position). One can readily agree that rational egoism is a particular kind of instrumental rationality (i.e., it isn’t “irrational”) without having to concede that it is ethical (I certainly don’t).

Indeed, this distinction between the (instrumental) logic and the ethics of one’s actions is one of the issues that makes economics such a fascinating field. Pace the most scientistically inclined of my readers and commenters, as this is one area where we clearly see the difference between facts and values. (Yes, I am aware of Quine’s denial of that distinction, I think that Quine is over-interpreted and over-rated in this respect. At best, he was able to argue that the difference isn’t always sharp, not that it doesn’t exist.)

I think of economics as a type of (soft) social science, not as quackery, despite the fact that much nonsense is being sold to us all in its name by a variety of pundits and experts. I mean that there are facts about economies that we can’t (or shouldn’t, at any rate) ignore, regardless of our values about fairness, distribution of wealth, etc. But it is also obvious that what is “rational” in economics does not depend only on those facts, it greatly depends on one’s values and how the latter determine one’s priorities. So, for instance, it may very well be that laissez-faire capitalism is the best way to maximize distribution of goods (I am not conceding the point, I am assuming it for the sake of argument), but even so we could (should, really) decide that other criteria need to be counted into the equation too, and sometimes may even override the goal of maximization of distribution (or even, gulp!, of maximization of shareholders’ profits). Criteria such as fair access to resources (like education and health care), safety, environmental impact, and so forth are among those that might be considered.

So, one cannot simply assume without argument that rational self-interest is equivalent to rationality tout court. Firstly, because it is a particular type of instrumental rationality whose assumptions may (should) be questioned. Secondly, because there are other uses of instrumental rationality available (such as maximizing societal benefit, enhancement of human flourishing, etc.). Thirdly, because it isn’t the type of general rationality that seeks principles independent of particular points of view (i.e., it is a type of praxis, not theoria).

Let me take up another example, which concerns issues that have arisen during the (ongoing) preparation of a collection of essays on the philosophy of pseudoscience that Maarten Boudry and I are putting together for the University of Chicago Press. It hinges on the following question: can we reasonably (ah!) say that it is rational to align one’s beliefs with the available evidence (a la Bayes theorem and Hume’s dictum)? Most skeptics would say hell yes, and repeat the Hume-inspired Sagan mantra: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Yes, but that is true from the point of view of theoretical reason. Cognitive science has begun to show that human beings apparently need to believe, at least some of the time, in things for which there is no evidence (or which are, in fact, contradicted by the evidence). Optimists — which can be defined as people who disregard some of the negative facts about their own abilities or the state of the world — apparently live longer and happier lives than pessimists (who actually tend to be realists, i.e., they come closer to aligning their beliefs to the available evidence). So from the point of view of practical reason, it may be argued that it is actually rational for people not to behave too strictly as Bayesian estimators, theoria be damned.

The upshot is that we skeptics are perfectly justified in telling someone who believes in, say, astrology, that he is theoretically irrational, but not necessarily instrumentally so. Then again, things get complicated by the fact that if the person in question starts acting on the basis of his false beliefs in situations where his health is at risk (say, by going for homeopathic “remedies” instead of proven medical procedures) then we can justifiably say that he is behaving irrationally both from the point of view of theoria and of praxis — at least assuming that he actually values his life over his temporary psychological satisfaction.

So, the next time you are about to hurl the “that’s irrational” judgment at someone, stop and think in what sense you mean it, and consider whether it actually applies to the situation at hand. It may save you some grief and frustration, and who knows, you may even get your point of view across in a less threatening manner. Assuming that’s of concern to you, of course.

Free will roundtable

by Massimo Pigliucci

it.toonpool.com

Recently, I have hosted a roundtable discussion on the science and philosophy of free will (full video here), where the panelists were Hakwan Lau from Columbia University, Alfred Mele from Florida State University, Jesse Prinz, a colleague of mine at the City University of New York, and Adina Roskies from Dartmouth College. The idea was to have a serious discussion about the various concepts of free will, as well as what exactly neuroscience can tell us about them. (I will not address the simplistic take that has predictably been featured on the topic by the usual suspects, among whom are Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne. There are only so many times when I feel like pointing out that someone ought to read the relevant literature before pontificating ex-cathedra.) I should also point the interested reader to a recent article in the New York Times, by Eddy Nahmias who (pace Coyne) actually provides a nuanced and intelligent brief discussion of the topic. For a more in-depth look, check out Roskies’ “How does neuroscience affect our conception of volition?” published last year in the Annual Review of Neuroscience — in my opinion one of the best papers on free will of the last decade.

Perhaps surprisingly, there was quite a bit of agreement among panelists on several contentious points concerning discussions of free will. Here is a partial list:

* Neuroscience cannot actually establish the truth of determinism. At best, that’s an area of competence of physics.

* Libet’s classical experiments have done close to zero to show that we do not make conscious decisions. Indeed, good neurobiological evidence shows that conscious deliberation plays a primary role in some of our decision making processes.

* fMRI data are interesting, but they can only indirectly provide clues to discriminate among different hypotheses concerning human volition (a much better term than the hopelessly marred “free will”).

* Nobody any longer seriously defends a notion of free will that relies on dualism or, a fortiori, even more metaphysically suspect concepts like souls. (Well, okay, some theologians do, but then again, astrologers still defend the idea of cosmic influences on our personality...)

Let’s take a brief look at some of the above claims, starting with the issue of determinism. The best that neuroscience can do is to show that behavior X is neurally correlated with activity in brain structure Y. This has precisely nothing to do with determinism because non-deterministic effects could be present at much more physically fundamental levels than those dealt with by neuroscience and never show up on the neuroscientist’s radar. That’s why determinism is really an issue for physics. And let’s clear the air about oft-repeated claim (most recently by Alex Rosenberg, in an awful book that I’m currently reviewing for The Philosopher Magazine) that physics has shown determinism to be true. Au contraire, mon ami, physics has, once and probably for all, shown determinism to be wrong, via of course quantum mechanics. Before the good reader’s ire leads him straight to the comments section of this post, let me be clear that I know perfectly well that random quantum events do not rescue naive conceptions of free will (because randomness is not at all the same thing as deliberative decision making). But the fact remains that the best of modern physics shows us that determinism is not of this world — you are free (so to speak) to draw your own metaphysical conclusions from that bit of science, as long as you keep in mind that it ain’t neuro-science.

What about Libet’s experiments? You know, the one showing that people make unconscious decisions about when to push a button hundreds of milliseconds (according to more recent evidence, even several seconds) before they become aware of having made the decision? I always thought this was a strange way to attack either free will or consciousness, and my panelists readily agreed. First off, Libet-type experiments are conducted by telling subjects to push a button when “they feel the urge rising.” This is hardly the sort of deliberative reflection we associate with human volition, so it’s not testing anything like “free will.” Second, it would be truly surprising if a lot of decisions were not actually made by our unconscious. Indeed, we know this is the case, for instance for all automated tasks (driving a car, hitting a baseball), and we know why: conscious reflection would be too slow in most of those cases, sometimes potentially costing us our lives. Third, it is simply bizarre to think of my unconscious decisions as “not really mine.” Whose are they, then? “I” am not just the conscious processing of information and awareness of that processing, “I” am also my distributed cognition at all levels of my nervous system, including unconscious processing of information. If you disagree, this means that most of the times you are not actually driving your car, your inner zombie is (did he also decide where to go?).

Now to the much talked about fMRI data. Let’s set aside the well acknowledged (by neuroscientists) fact that this is still a very blunt instrument, that it doesn’t really measure brain activity (only oxygen consumption by brain cells, used as a proxy for brain activity), and that it is still next to impossible to carry out the scans in real time (those beautiful pictures of brains “doing” this or that are actually sophisticated statistical composites of various individuals) and in realistic situations. At the moment, all that an fMRI scan can establish is that there is a correlation between activity X and oxygen consumption by brain area Y. That’s it. While this is much better than we could do until a few years ago, and while Lau at the roundtable cautiously explained how this sort of information may help us discriminate among some functional hypotheses, it is a far cry from the sort of claims that are made these days on the basis of fMRI research.

To begin with, of course, just remember the old mantra: correlation is not causation. Correlations may be spurious or the result of a third, as yet unmeasured process, that is affecting both correlates. Moreover, even if we could establish causality, this would constitute only a very partial explanation for whatever it is that is going on. Take, for instance, the much talked about fMRI of people immersed in deep prayer. They do show that certain areas of the brain are preferentially involved in that activity. But then again, how could it be otherwise? Everything we think or do has to pass through some sort of neural signal after all. What the fMRI cannot tell us is whether, say, the mental state induced by deep prayer (or meditation) indicates a reduced proprioception (which would explain in entirely materialistic terms the sense of expanded consciousness and detachment from one’s own body that sometimes accompany the experience), or the fact that subjects are actually accessing a non-material realm, just as they claim they are, based on their phenomenological experience. Indeed, it isn’t even clear what sort of evidence could discriminate between the two “hypotheses” (just for the record, yes, I do think the second possibility doesn’t have a prayer — ah! — of being true).

Finally, from the bulleted list above, if no serious philosopher or neuroscientist defends a notion of free will that relies on dualism of any sort, what kind of notion is then being defended? As Roskies puts it in her paper linked above, we are really talking about human volition, of which there are several types, each likely to end up requiring its own neural machinery, and carrying its own philosophical implications. Her list includes (apologies for the extended quotations, but she really did put it pretty darn well):

* Volition as initiation. “The will is thought to be critical in endogenously generated or self-initiated actions, as opposed to exogenously triggered actions, like reflexes or simple stimulus-response associations.” This is the sort of thing that Libet-type experiments address, and as we have seen, this type of volition is likely to be unconscious.

* Volition as intention. “Intentions are representational states that bridge the gap between deliberation and action. Arguably, intentions can be conscious or unconscious. Moreover, there may be different types of intention involved in different levels of planning for action.”

* Volition as decision making. “In one prevalent view, the paradigmatic exercise of the will lies in our ability to choose what course of action to take, rather than to initiate or represent future action. Many philosophers have located freedom of the will in the ability to choose freely [note: this doesn’t mean “a-causally”] which intentions to form. Decision often precedes intention and initiation.”

* Volition as executive control. “The control aspect of volition is the notion that higher-order cortical regions can influence the execution of action by lower regions. This may take several forms. For example, one conception is that volition involves the conscious selection of action.”

* Volition as feeling. “The experience of willing is an aspect of a multifaceted volitional capacity. ... There are at least two phenomenological aspects of agency: the awareness of an intention or urge to act that we identify as prior to the action, and the post hoc feeling that an action taken was one’s own.” This is probably the sort of volition that the Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne and Alex Rosenbergs of the world think of when they say that free will is an illusion. Incidentally, they don’t seem to have a clue as to why nature would endow us with such an illusion.

I hope the above is enough to whet your appetite. Go check the video (reach for a beer before you start, it lasts one and a half hours), and especially some of the papers and books written by our panelists.

p.s.: Thanks to Michael De Dora for organizing the panel discussion, and to the Center for Inquiry for editing and posting the video.

Podcast Teasers: Joseph Heath on Economics Without Illusions and the debate over naturalism

by Massimo Pigliucci

Our next guest for the Rationally Speaking podcast will be Joseph Heath, author of “Economics Without Illusions: Debunking the Myths of Modern Capitalism,” which means that Julia and I are going to turn our skeptical eyes toward the treacherous dual terrain of economics and politics. You can guess where we’ll be going by perusing the book’s description:

Every day economic claims are used by the media or in conversation to support social and political positions. Those on the left tend to distrust economists, seeing them as friends of the right. There is something to this, since professional economists are almost all keen supporters of the free market. Yet while factions on the right naturally embrace economists, they also tend to overestimate the effect of their support on free-market policies. The result is widespread confusion. In fact, virtually all commonly held beliefs about economics — whether espoused by political activists, politicians, journalists or taxpayers — are just plain wrong.

Joseph Heath wants to raise our economic literacy and empower us with new ideas. In Economics Without Illusions, he draws on everyday examples to skewer the six favorite economic fallacies of the right, followed by impaling the six favorite fallacies of the left. Heath leaves no sacred cows untipped as he breaks down complex arguments and shows how the world really works.

As for our second topic, we’ll take on naturalism and his (reasonable) critics. The starting point for the discussion is a recent exchange in the New York Times between Alex Rosenberg and William Egginton. As it happens, I’m also reviewing (and, so far, not liking at all) Rosenberg’s new book, The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions. Much to talk about, I’m sure.

New Rationally Speaking podcast: philosophical counseling

Our guest Lou Marinoff joins us to discuss philosophical counseling, a recent trend to use philosophy as a type of talk therapy. Now, despite the provocative title of his best-selling book, “Plato, Not Prozac!: Applying Eternal Wisdom to Everyday Problems,” the idea is actually not to replace psychiatric medications with chats about the ancient Greeks. Rather, as he puts it in the introduction to the volume, you should take your medications if you really need them, but once your brain is back to a normal functionality you will likely still be faced with the same existential problems that plague most human beings. And that’s where philosophy might help.

Lou Marinoff is the Chair of the Department of Philosophy at The City College of New York and a founder of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association. His other books include "The Middle Way: Finding Happiness in a World of Extremes" and "Therapy for the Sane."

One more take on the role of intuition in philosophy

by Massimo Pigliucci

www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton

Julia — over at her Measure of Doubt blog — has reopened our discussion concerning the use and misuse of intuition in philosophy, which originally started in an episode of the Rationally Speaking podcast (the first two rounds of our discussion after that can be found here and here). Since I chided her for cherry picking examples in her critique, this time she relies on a (as yet unpublished, but available as an online preview) paper by J.R. and J.R.C. Kuntz, to appear in the Review of Philosophical Psychology. (Wow, a whole journal devoted to that? At any rate, here is the link to the article, since Julia provided her readers only with access to the abstract. You will need academic library access if you don't want to purchase the paper.)

I will first stake out my own view about the role of intuitions in philosophy, then briefly comment on Julia’s post, and finally go into some details in the Kuntz’s paper, which is characterized by modest results and a number of methodological flaws (but which nonetheless does manage to make a couple of good points to which philosophers should pay attention).

As the Kuntz’s make clear, intuitions can play two distinct roles in philosophy (or, for that matter, in anything else, including science): one in what philosophers of science call the context of discovery — providing the starting point from which logic (or empirical evidence, in the case of science) take off — and one in the context of justification, i.e., as data used to test hypotheses. The former is not only perfectly justified, but in fact inevitable. Galileo’s and Einstein’s thought experiments began as intuitions, and so does much valuable research in science and scholarship in philosophy. Hilary Putnam’s famous thought experiment about a twin earth can be used as a good exercise to make explicit, and if necessary to criticize, reject or modify, our thinking about language and its referents. However, intuitions cannot and should not be used as data to test hypotheses or draw conclusions, because they are not epistemically reliable — hence the silliness of David Chalmers’ zombies, which tells us precisely nothing about consciousness, as I have argued before.

There is a second important distinction that needs to be made when talking about the role of intuitions in any specialized field, since failing to acknowledge its import makes for some unnecessary confusion in both Julia’s essay and the Kuntz’s paper. I am referring to the distinction between the intuitions of professionals and those of lay “folks” (to use the Kuntz’s terminology). Pace much (again, in my opinion, hyped) clamor about experimental philosophy (an oxymoron actually referring to psychological research on concepts relevant to philosophy), it matters exactly zero what folk intuitions about free will, twin earths, Chinese rooms and the like are, just as it matters zero what folk intuitions about logic, mathematics, physics or the game of chess are to the practices in those fields. As for the intuitions of experts, there is plenty of cognitive science literature (developed from studying chess players, math teachers and nurses, among others) showing that intuitions in one’s domain of expertise become increasingly reliable the longer one has been practicing in that domain. (Interestingly, it takes several thousands of hours of practice to develop intuitive skills equivalent to those of a good chess player, and thousands more to achieve equivalency with a grand master.)

Now back to Julia’s essay. Despite my warning about cherry picking, she does it again right at the beginning, mentioning Chalmers’ zombies and a pretty risible claim by G.E. Moore about the desirability of a clean over a dirty planet even if there were nobody around to enjoy the landscape. By the same token, I could easily compile a large list of blunders by scientists and declare the whole enterprise in deep trouble (actually, someone has already done the compiling, see this delightful book about science’s greatest mistakes).

Julia then cites one of the major findings of the paper, that 51% of the philosophers sampled by the Kuntzs (see below for methodological issues) think that intuitions are useful in philosophical justification. She however waits until the very end of her essay to mention that a whopping 83% of respondents thought that intuitions are useful in discovery (not justification) and does not report at all that 70% of philosophers think that intuitions are not essential to justification. Julia, however, does acknowledge that philosophers of science seem to be particularly skeptical of the role of intuition in the context of justification. Kudos to ourselves, my dear colleagues.

Okay, to the meat of the matter now: the Kuntz’s paper itself. Other than the findings already mentioned, the most visible result is that philosophers seem to prefer two of the seven accounts of intuitions that were provided to them by the researchers, while they largely dislike two more. He are the Kuntz’s seven conceptions of intuitions, as presented in their survey:

1) Judgment that is not made on the basis of some kind of observable and explicit reasoning process.

2) An intellectual happening whereby it seems that something is the case without arising from reasoning, or sensorial perceiving, or remembering.

3) A propositional attitude that is held with some degree of conviction, and solely on the basis of one’s understanding of the proposition in question, not on the basis of some belief.

4) An intellectual act whereby one is thinking occurrently [sic] of the abstract proposition that p and, merely on the basis of understanding it, believes that p.

5) An intellectual state made up of (1) the consideration whether p and (2) positive phenomenological qualities that count as evidence for p; together constituting prima facie reason to believe that p.

6) The formation of a belief by unclouded mental attention to its contents, in a way that is so easy and yielding a belief that is so definite as to leave no room for doubt regarding its veracity.

7) An intellectual happening that serves as evidence for the situation at hand’s instantiation of some concept.

A majority of respondents liked (1) and (2) and dislike (6) and (7) which, despite some quibbling on the part of the Kuntz’s, actually indicates that philosophers tend to have somewhat consistent views of what intuitions are. However, the problem here is that it is not at all clear how, at a conceptually deep level, these ideas of intuition are in fact different from each other (they are certainly not identical, but several could be taken to be overlapping, and indeed even almost identical once the complex and sometimes obfuscatory language is stripped away).

So far, the results of the study aren’t that bad for philosophers: a majority, especially of philosophers of science, thinks that intuitions are useful in discovery more than justification, and there is some agreement about what intuitions actually are (though I’d be curious to see what one would find by asking scientists about the type of intuitions that inform their discovery phase). The real problems with the paper are methodological.

To begin with, this was a voluntary online survey. Bad idea. The sample (which isn’t that large to begin with, only 282 people) is very likely to be self-selected in terms of interest in the topic and other criteria (such as level of online activity, which is still relatively low in the humanities, especially among older faculty) and areas of expertise within philosophy (the Kuntz’s do address the latter problem, but claim that their sample is not likely to be biased based, unfortunately, on yet another online survey, and one conducted by a philosopher — Chalmers — not a social scientist!).

Moreover, we discover that an (unreported) number of participants had not actually finished their PhD, raising the question of the extent to which this is in fact a survey of professionals (see my comment above about how many thousands of hours are necessary to develop expert intuitions). To complicate things further, some sub-areas of Philosophy included in the analysis were barely represented at all (e.g., aesthetic, n=3; postmodernism, n=2; education, n=3; feminism, n=1; philosophy of literature, n=1; philosophy of mathematics, n=5; Philosophy of religion, n=4; law, n=3; and so on).

The descriptive statistics of the survey are not problematic (they simply report the rankings of the various options by participants, broken down by categories such as gender, geographical area, subfield of interest, etc.). But then we get to the bivariate correlations among variables (measured as Spearman’s non parametric rho), such as the relationship between the importance attributed to intuition and the preference for one or another of the seven types of intuitions from the menu described above. While all correlations discussed by the Kuntz’s are statistically significant (as much as I personally put little faith in p-value based statistics), the effect sizes seem pretty tiny. A good number of the coefficients are in the 0.15-0.20 range, indicating very weak correlations. It would have been nice to know what the percentage of explained variance of one variable by the other was, the so-called coefficient of determination, but that’s not available because the Kuntz’s didn’t do a parametric analysis, which is necessary to estimate these coefficients.

Then again, didn’t they? Toward the end of the results section they mention an analysis of variance, which is a parametric procedure. So, then, were the data approximately normally distributed, so that ANOVAs were possible? But if so, why use Spearman’s rho for the correlations, since non parametric statistics are known to be less powerful and ought not to be deployed if the data even approximately satisfy parametric assumptions? And why don’t the authors report the results of the ANOVAs in a table, instead of simply briefly summarizing their results verbally?

In the end, I don’t think we’ve learned much from the Kuntz’s paper about philosophers and intuitions, other than being reminded of the valuable conceptual point that everybody interested in either using or studying intuitions ought to make very clear the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. And the paper certainly lends very little support to Julia’s sweeping critique of "philosophers" for using an epistemically unreliable method.

Here, I am with Henri Poincaré (quoted by the Kuntz’s) when he wrote back in 1908 that “It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover.” Which is true also for formal logic and math. Substitute “empirical evidence’ for “logic” in the quote, and you get science.

Michael's Picks

by Michael De Dora

* Should we ban cigarettes? That’s what Robert Proctor argues in his forthcoming book Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition. You can read more about the case against cigarettes in this recent article by Peter Singer.

* The nonprofit research organization Public Religion Research Institute has released the 2011 American Values Survey, which gauges Americans’ beliefs on religion, values, and politics.

* The Catholic Church is now framing its fight against reproductive rights and marriage equality as a matter of “religious liberty.”

* Mississippi residents have rejected a constitutional amendment to change the legal definition of personhood to include fertilized human eggs. Yet let us not forget that there is still only one abortion clinic in the entire state.

* On a similar note, here is a comprehensive map of the world’s abortion laws, compiled by the Center for Reproductive Rights.

* Jonah Lehrer synthesizes a couple scientific studies that suggest humans are happier when wealth is more equally distributed rather than less equally distributed.

* A panel of experts commissioned by the Royal Society of Canada has concluded that assisted suicide should be legal in the country.

City University of New York to turn into a glorified high school

by Massimo Pigliucci

[Apologies to my readers for the seemingly parochial topic of this post, but in fact what you are about to read is part of a national trend toward dismantling liberal arts education, in the apparent conviction that our society doesn’t need intelligent and critically thinking citizens, but simply workers who are trained to do whatever the market and the reigning plutocracy bids them to do. Much more about the trend and its dangers can be found, among many other places, here, here, here, here, and here.]

City University of New York’s Chancellor Matthew Goldstein is about to turn the prestigious system of senior and community colleges into a glorified high school. And few people seem to even want to try to stop him. This is bizarre, as Goldstein is a CUNY graduate himself and has been credited with major accomplishments since he took the lead at CUNY in 1999 (e.g., he raised admission standards, created the William E. Macaulay Honors College, and the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism).

Goldstein has recently begun what is known as the “Pathways to Degree Completion” initiative, which is being quickly rammed down the throats of the faculty members at all CUNY Colleges, in blatant disregard of faculty governance, interfering with curricula and the structure of majors, and possibly resulting in the elimination or great reduction of entire departments, mostly in the humanities (beginning with foreign languages, arts, assorted studies programs, history, and philosophy). The science and math requirements also are being reduced to ridiculous minimum common denominator standards, all in the name of increasing the graduation rate and decreasing the time to graduation of CUNY students — apparently the only currencies understood by the inept (to say the least) State legislators up in Albany.

According to CUNY’s central administration official mantra, Pathways is “designed to create a curricular structure that will streamline transfers and enhance the quality of general education across the University.” In reality, it will do little in the way of the first goal, and achieve exactly the opposite as far as the second goal is concerned. The centerpiece of this stunning coup that Goldstein and his associates are perpetrating on a system of 23 campuses serving 480,000 students is a reduction of the General Education requirements from above 50 credits (out of 120 necessary for graduation) — which is typical across CUNY’s senior colleges — to 30. Because, you know, our students already have far too much general education.

More specifically, Pathways is about to force the Colleges to adopt a common “required core” of 7 credits in English composition, 4 in mathematical and quantitative reasoning and 4 in life and physical sciences, accompanied by a “flexible core” of 15 credits distributed among very rigidly defined areas that include “world cultures,” “US experience and its diversity,” “creative expression,” and “individual and society.” This sounds good only until you realize that the individual Colleges are already requiring all of the above and then some, and that the core structures will severely limit the flexibility of the Colleges to establish their own curricula.

One of the major positive features of CUNY is that it is a system, where a student can go from community college to 4-yr college to Masters to PhD for comparatively little money and getting a pretty darn good education. Within the system, the individual colleges operate as quasi-independent laboratories of higher education, constantly trying different things, competing for admissions, and cross-fertilizing each other through a variety of instruments, including the inter-college disciplinary councils. Goldstein’s idea is not only a solution in search of a problem, it will essentially destroy what makes CUNY such an extraordinary place for both faculty and students.

The Chancellor and his hand-picked, faculty governance independent “task force” are moving at great speed, for instance allowing only two weeks to the Colleges to respond to the Pathways proposal (and, rumors have it, being prepared to reject pretty much any substantive counterproposal they may receive). By comparison, Harvard took two years to develop its GenEd curriculum...

Of course, there has been some resistance to this egregious abuse of power. The cross-CUNY Councils of a number of disciplines have met and asked the administration to reconsider. The Philosophy Council, on which I serve, for instance, has passed a resolution where it “urges the Board of Trustees to defer action on the current proposed framework and undertake to address the problems of degree completion and course transfer through a careful and consultative process that is better suited to the complexity of the issues, and in keeping with the principles of faculty governance.” We received no answer at all.

Hunter College, one of the most prestigious institutions within CUNY passed the following resolution, back in October:

“We, the undersigned Chairs and Program Directors of the Hunter College School of Arts and Sciences, oppose the process and implications of the Pathways Project proposal. While we all recognize the need to address the issue of student transfer policies, this proposal as it is being implemented will reduce the overall quality of a CUNY education and will erase the unique identity of its individual colleges. It lowers the standards of science and mathematics programs at a time when the U.S. is falling behind in these areas. It dilutes the rich liberal arts offerings of our college. Furthermore, in an increasingly globalized world, we do not see how CUNY can justify eliminating foreign language requirements and imposing curriculum changes that would undermine the value of pluralism and diversity. By undermining the expertise of CUNY faculty and our right to determine curricula, the Pathways Project will erode the national reputation of the university. Our goal is to offer the highest quality education to all of our students, not just the fastest and easiest path to a degree.”

As far as I know, this also was met with stone silence. Various bodies at the College of Staten Island have also issued anti-Pathways resolutions. Here is the one passed by the College’s General Education Committee (approved with no dissenting votes):

“The breakneck pace of the deadline Pathways imposes on CUNY Colleges and the Colleges' governance committees makes it impossible for such a radical change of our general education program to be given proper analysis and evaluation. Despite its best efforts, the General Education Committee has not been able to give due consideration to even this first stage of the Pathways master plan under this kind of pressure. The timetable would oblige the General Education Committee to overstep its bounds of authority by having it make major curricular decisions without guidance from the Departments, Curriculum Committees, and the Faculty Senate. We have been made aware that the student government and a growing majority of departments have made known their opposition to Pathways on pedagogical, social, legal, and ethical grounds in formal resolutions. For these reasons, the General Education Committee of the College of Staten Island believes the Pathways Proposal should not be implemented unless it is ratified by all of the CUNY Colleges in accordance with their governance procedures on curricular change.”

Again, nothing happened in response. The latest to act has been Queens College, whose Senate passed the following strongly worded resolution (just before releasing this I found out that Lehman College's Senate also approved a very similar document):

“Whereas the problem of improved student transfer facilitation, for which we recognize a need, can be addressed without the imposition of a standardized new curriculum on the colleges of the City University and

Whereas the Pathways initiative has shown a disregard for the legally defined and traditional rights of faculty governance over curriculum and

Whereas the imposition of a curriculum by a board of trustees, contrary to the national best practices of curricular reform, will make CUNY an outlier in the educational community, and so will erode the national reputation of the university and

Whereas Pathways would substantially cut the general education curriculum and devalue our students' education and the reputation of Queens College and the City University of New York and

Whereas Pathways undermines the College's stated goal in the strategic plan of ;advancing the schools academic programs; and

Whereas Pathways threatens to make the College less able to recruit and retain outstanding scholars due to its devaluing of the curriculum and undermining of shared governance and

Whereas the disregard shown to the faculty in the Pathways planning process undermines the College's stated goal of; building a culture of community;

Therefore the Academic Senate of Queens College concludes that the Pathways to Degree Completion Initiative cannot be redeemed by minor changes to its individual components and rejects Pathways on pedagogical, intellectual, and legal grounds.”

Despite these and other voices of dissent (including Brooklyn College), what is stunning is the inaction or complete silence by two other outlets that should obviously be deeply involved or interested: the faculty union and the local press.

PSC-CUNY (the Professional Staff Congress) has vaguely motioned toward the idea that what Goldstein & co. are doing (and the Board of Trustees has recklessly and hastily approved) may be in violation of faculty governance (you think?) and that the union will consider the possibility of legal action (consider? Why didn’t they file a suit immediately to stop the darn thing in its ill conceived tracks?).

What about the press? Ah, there too the silence is almost complete, and thereby all the more infuriating. WNYC, the local NPR affiliate, has a single entry on the matter, penned by education reporter Beth Fertig back in May (!!). It’s a good piece, but there has been no follow up since. As for the New York Times, I seem to remember something appearing during the spring, but I’ll be darned if I can find it on their web site, regardless of which combination of “CUNY,” “controversy,” “curriculum,” “transfer students” and “Pathways” I put in. Now, how is it possible that the leading newspaper and the leading radio news station in the city have been almost completely ignoring a huge controversy that is about to wreck New York’s largest institution of higher education, and which is going to impact, as I said, almost half a million New Yorkers and their families? If I were a bit paranoid I’d suspect political collusion, but it is as likely to be sheer indifference or incompetence.

So, dear readers, since few seem to want to do something about this mess, perhaps you can help stopping this train wreck of a reform by forwarding this post, or better yet by writing a brief note, directly to the people who ought to be interested and pay attention:

* Chancellor Goldstein.
* CUNY’s Board of Trustees.
* The University Faculty Senate.
* CUNY’s Union.
* The New York Times “news tips.”
* WNYC education reporter, Beth Fertig.

And whoever else you may think appropriate. Thank you.

Massimo's Picks

by Massimo Pigliucci

* "If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you're likely to go to prison. If born to a rich family, you're likely to go to business school."

* Three types of libertarianism, and the objections that can be raised against them.

* Could it be that Americans are smarter and more fair minded than the GOP assumes? Oh my spaghetti monster!

* The sort of movie about Wall Street you really don't want to miss.

* The perfect example of what is wrong with mixing financial interests and political power...

* Post hoc ergo propter hoc, Tim Minchin style.

* Quote of the Day: "Those who believe in telekinesis, raise my hand." -Kurt Vonnegut

* Conservative politics and authoritarian personality.

* Thank evolution for giving us birds...

* New paper in Philosophy & Theory in Biology: Lamarckism ascending!

* The vacuity and ignorance of Alvin Plantinga.

* Jon Stewart takes on the idiotic "In God We Trust" vote in Congress.

* Insanity, defined: parents infecting their children on purpose, to develop natural immunities.

The Templeton Foundation

by Massimo Pigliucci

A few weeks ago I got an email from my book agent. She had been approached by an editor at a well known academic publishing house with a project she thought I would be interested in. Sometime later I met with the editor in question, a genial person with whom I clearly had quite a few interests in common. Nonetheless, a few days later I decided to turn down the offer and pursue other projects. The reason: the book, which would have been part of a series, was going to be produced as a joint venture by the academic press in question and the John Templeton Foundation.

A few nights later I was having dinner after an event in New York where I moderated a panel discussion with four colleagues. Over drinks someone asked me about my Templeton-related decision and I explained my motivations. Turns out three of my four colleagues (two philosophers and a scientist) were funded by Templeton, which frankly has only strengthened my resolve to buck the trend and remain unassociated with that outlet.

The JTF was established by Sir John Templeton to “support science, invest in the big questions,” which sounds great unless you know who Templeton was and what he was up to. Sir John was born in Winchester, Tennessee (he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1987 because of his philanthropy), was a Yale graduate, a Rhodes Scholar, and made his money by investing in the stock market beginning in 1938, and eventually by managing other people’s money through mutual funds, starting in 1958. The Templeton Prize, which is financially heftier than the Nobel, was established in 1972 to further scientific and other advances “in the spiritual domain,” whatever that means.

The first recipient of the Templeton was Mother Theresa, the most recent one Martin J. Rees, the Astronomer Royal. For some time I have been disturbed by JTF’s activities because they smack of ideological interference with research and scholarship, essentially buying credibility for the Foundation by giving large amounts of money to scientists, philosophers, and other scholars in an environment in which funding for research is increasingly scarce and competitive. Of course, the idea of wealthy and not exactly pure-minded patrons supporting the sciences and the humanities isn’t new at all, going back to the very beginning of civilization, both eastern and western. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it.

In thinking over my agent’s proposal I went to the JTF web site and poked around their “testimonials.” What I found was disturbing to say the least. There are five sections of short videos with various people telling us why JTF efforts are so important. The first one, on “Science and the Big Questions” is pretty plain and I found little to object to, except for the occasional popping up of strange words when it comes to a scientific vocabulary, like mentions of research on “virtue.” It also features Martin Nowak of Harvard regretting that most biologists find it “distasteful” to talk to theologians (they should). And then we find Charles Townes (UC-Berkeley) making the tired distinction between sciences dealing with facts (true) and religions dealing with meaning (on what basis, one might ask?), from which he comes pretty close to suggesting some sort of intelligent design at work. Okay, I guess I did have some problem with that section after all.

The second video concerns “character development,” which early on features David Myers (Hope College) talking about Templeton’s desire that science could eventually study and validate the “laws of life” (uh?) underlying good living, which led JTF to fund research on “forgiveness” (clearly a heavily Christian-influenced concept seldom found in the scientific vocabulary, until Templeton started giving out grants to study it). Following that, we have an appearance by David Blankenhorn, of the Institute for American Values, a neo-conservative think tank, naturally advocating rather vague “changes in public policies” stemming from JTF’s funded research.

It is only natural, then, that the third introductory video displayed on the Foundation’s entry page concerns “freedom and free enterprise,” and just from the title the savvy reader can tell where this is going. It opens with — and mostly features throughout — Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute (another conservative think tank), who delivers some bullshit about the morality of the free enterprise system, and who manages to belittle international aid to reduce poverty.

The fourth video is about genius, targeting young people with exceptional talents. I have no objection to that, though it seems to me that the problem the world has is not that geniuses don’t get a chance, it’s that too many people are functionally illiterate and incapable of critical thinking. Putting emphasis on the first rather than the latter problem will push society into an even greater divide between the elite few on one side and the large masses on the other — not a good trend for democracies and open societies.

The last video is not ready yet. It’s supposed to be about genetics, and the site says only that “the Foundation takes a particular interest in how major advances in genetics might serve to empower individuals, leading to spiritually beneficial social and cultural changes.” Sounds a bit Brave New Worldish to me, but at this point I may have developed Templeton-induced paranoia.

In short, my reason for declining the book project is that I simply don’t like having my name associated with right wing and/or libertarian organizations like the JTF, the American Enterprise Institute or the Institute for American Values. But the dinner conversation with my colleagues gave me also an informal opportunity to find out why others don’t seem to be as bothered by the idea of getting money from the JTF. Broadly speaking, and based of course on my extremely limited sample (augmented, however, by similar conversations I’ve had over the past several years), there seem to be three reasons (or rationalizations, depending on how you look at it) for why scholars take JTF money:

* “I’m independent anyway.” The first response is that there is a distinction between the agenda of the funding source and what one does as an independent scholar. This is certainly true, and I was assured (and have no reason to doubt) that Templeton would have had no editorial say whatsoever in what I would have written in my book. Then again, research into the practice of science does show that the source of one’s money makes a difference (often unconsciously) on the outcome. The case in point is that of medical research that is much more likely to find a given drug effective if the researchers received funding from the pharmaceutical industry rather than from government agencies. At the very least one ought to be aware of the danger and not just dismiss the possibility out of hand. (This, of course, is a separate point from the one I made above concerning one’s name lending credibility to an institution whose ideological positions one may not share.)

* “It’s the same with the federal government.” NIH, NSF and other governmental agencies also have agendas, the argument goes, because the federal government has an agenda, and these days that agenda is significantly tilted toward an anti-science, pro-religion trajectory, largely because of the influence of Congressional Republicans. I find this argument rather specious. I am not aware of any evidence of this sort of influence in the pattern of NSF funding (with which I am most familiar), and that’s probably because there are many layers between Congressional Republicans and, say NSF or NIH officers, and because the funding process is entirely handled by professional scientists. Of course, one could very reasonably question funding amounts and priorities at the level of the entire federal research budget, and that discussion would indeed be political and ideological. But at the very least we are talking about a government of elected officials, not a private outlet that is free to push whatever agenda it wishes to push. There is also, of course, the question of whether a scientist should accept money from specific federal agencies whose goals may be ethically questionable, such as the Department of Defense. And indeed I am sympathetic toward scientists who do reject such funding, and somewhat critical of those who accept it.

* “Someone else would do it anyway.” This is the ethically most naive response I have encountered. First, this may not be true, as Templeton has gained influence and credibility precisely because a good number of legitimate scientists and other scholars have accepted their money. The Discovery Institute (the Intelligent Design “think” tank based in Seattle), on the contrary, has not succeeded in part because legitimate scientists have ostracized them. Second, one’s integrity is not helped, nor is one’s ethical responsibility diminished, by the thought that someone else would have stepped in and gotten the money, so we might as well. If we adopted that sort of standard, all kinds of unethical behavior would become acceptable on pragmatic grounds, the academic version of realpolitik.

There was one more thing I was curious about concerning Templeton and how it manages to get the attention of prominent scientists and other academic outlets, so I asked the editor at the press that will produce the new book series: why exactly do you guys need the JTF, particularly as you have an excellent reputation and the JTF people will have no editorial input into the series? Answer: because Templeton has money, and money buys publicity, and publicity sells books. There is capitalism at work, my friends.

Ethical Pluralism: the ugly theory that could

by Ian Pollock

socialmediaworld.com

Warning: this post is long, and assumes basic knowledge of ethical philosophy 101 — you need to know and care what deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics are, and have a basic grasp of the arguments for & against all three. In other words, this is a post for ethics geeks.

“In practice, virtually everyone seems to judge a large matter of principle to be more important than a small one of pragmatics, and vice versa — everyone except philosophers, that is.”
(Gary Drescher, Good and Real)

We like systems of thought, and we like them elegant and simple. This applies as much to ethics as to any other topic, and leads us to prefer simple ethical theories to complex ones. However, it may be that ethics (bound up in messy, evolved human preferences) is one place to expect complications in abundance. It may be that no simple principle can capture the whole of our ethical lives.

Let me see if I can make this more plausible. I will be talking in terms of the “big three” ethical theories — consequentialism, virtue ethics and deontology, because most ethical statements humans make seem to be grounded in thinking that comes from one of those three broad areas, though only a minority are aware of the vocabulary itself. (As an aside, I am also studiously ignoring a large portion of what some consider morality — what Jonathan Haidt labels “purity” concerns.)

First, I wish to establish a “bare minimum” — that consequences, virtues and justice do matter, at least whenever all other things are equal. In other words, for example, a consequentialist is also a deontologist in the sense that, given identical consequences, they’ll usually choose the same thing a deontologist would. Consider the following scenarios:

Scenario #1: You are considering donating with a limited budget to various charitable causes. Eventually the field is narrowed to two charities. According to an independent organization evaluating charities’ effectiveness, one saves approximately one life per $600, the other, one life per $2,000 dollars.

Solution: Choose the more effective charity.

Lesson: At least ceteris paribus, numbers matter in making moral decisions.

Scenario #2: A front-end car collision has occurred, and the two drivers involved are both bleeding profusely. You witnessed the accident and are the only one on the scene. The first driver caused the accident and appears to be drunk; the second was not at fault. You know you need to apply pressure to the wounds to stem the bleeding, but can only do this for one person at a time.

Solution: Prioritize the person who does not appear to have caused the accident due to their own negligence.

Lesson: At least ceteris paribus, an agent should consider questions of virtue and character in making moral decisions.

Scenario #3: Suppose (counterfactually!) that after decades of debate about capital punishment, it was finally determined by statisticians that, in terms of lives saved, the practice is a wash. In other words, without capital punishment, N innocent people per year per capita die (killed due to the lack of strong deterrent for murderers); while with capital punishment, N innocent people per year per capita die (killed due to wrongful convictions). It is in your power to either continue or abolish the practice. Knock-on effects on society are otherwise negligible.

Solution: Abolish capital punishment.

Lesson: At least ceteris paribus, an agent should personally respect the autonomy and rights of individuals in making moral decisions. It is better to allow an injustice (a murder by someone else) than to perpetrate one (a wrongful execution).

What I hope these scenarios establish is that, no matter how we may differ in which principles (utility, virtue, justice) we take to be overriding, the other principles have (and should have) some prima facie sway in our moral considerations if all other things are equal. If we can get ethical discourse to the point where we are talking not about whether, but about to what extent numbers should trump matters of principle and of character, and vice versa, we shall have made some strides toward a more plausible moral theory — plausible, that is, to people who don’t want to push fat people in front of buses, or tell an axe-murderer exactly where to find (and kill) their friend for fear of lying, or rubber-stamp whatever their society tells them the good life consists in.

Of course, if I am (for example) a consequentialist who uses virtue as a mere tie-breaker in unusual situations, that is not much of a rapprochement. However, let me see if I can carry the stronger claim that no matter which of the three approaches you consider most important, the other two have to have more than only a tie-breaker status. To carry this claim, I have to show that for each of the three approaches, the other two can sometimes override it in principle. This means I will need six counterexamples.

Let us start by undermining the exclusively consequentialist approach.

Counterexample #1 (utility vs character): Julia has mentioned, in a previous post that is one of my favorite on Rationally Speaking, the appalling phenomenon of “crush” videos — in which people derive sexual pleasure from videos of nonhuman animals being stomped to death by scantily clad women. Suppose that the practice of making these videos were now outlawed, but the videos themselves remained. Would it be ethical to watch them if one enjoyed it enough? At first glance, utilitarianism would seem to say it was mandatory — a straightforward net positive with no drawbacks. But most people would say no, it’s not ethical. You can call your enjoyment of such material “utility” if you like, but that enjoyment seems simply unworthy of being valued as a moral end. Damn you and damn your utility — you’re a nasty, twisted person.

Counterexample #2 (utility vs justice): Suppose you are the sheriff of a small town, in which a murder has been committed by a member of a hated minority. You have absolutely no leads, and if somebody is not punished, the townspeople might riot and do violence to random members of the minority. If you jail an innocent person, they will probably be placated. Should you do so? Utilitarianism again returns a straightforward answer of “Yes” here, at least if the risk of violence is high enough. Now in truth, situations like this are very difficult, but most of us feel that there is something appropriate and noble about a law enforcer having an absolute (or close to absolute) prohibition on committing injustice in the service of some good consequence — “fiat justitia ruat caelum.” Maybe the sheriff should scapegoat somebody if the situation is extreme enough and the numbers stack up disproportionately enough — but not at the drop of the hat, as soon as the consequentialist calculus returns even slightly higher utility for scapegoating. This holds even if we caveat that nobody will ever know what the sheriff did.

So much for utility as the sole principle. What about virtue? Counterexamples here are of a somewhat different sort owing to the rather different question virtue ethicists answer: not “what shall I do?” but “what kind of person shall I be?” However, it is worth noting that even a virtue ethicist will eventually have to make particular decisions, and we can still judge them on those decisions.

Counterexample #3 (character vs utility): Sally is a highly intelligent person with a college education in law, who displays gentleness and wisdom in her dealings with others. When she was a young person her father died of an extremely rare disease; she now spends much of her time at a non-profit, attempting to secure funding for the study of that disease by canvassing door to door. Her friends and family love her and find her optimism infectious.

Now, there is much to admire in Sally. She is a thoroughly decent person who is committed to philanthropy, in a world where most are not. However, it is a sad fact that her philanthropic efforts are mostly wasted. She is too concerned about a disease which does not affect many people — much better to focus on common causes of death and suffering. She is also ignoring the law of comparative advantage — her time is replaceable by people with less marketable skills, so it would be much more effective for her to land a well-paying law job and fund other people to perform charitable work. The sad thing is that a person of average income who gives maybe 0.1% of their disposable income to an effective charity and uses the other 99.9% to, I don’t know, buy caviar or something, may do more good in the world than someone who is totally committed to altruism as a way of life, but hasn’t bothered with the numbers.

So, the point here is that a person can be off the charts in all or most of Aristotle’s virtues, and yet still be outdone in improving the world by a grumpy rationalist willing to give a few highly leveraged bucks here and there. Stated more generally, good character is no guarantee that one’s life will have an especially good impact. Or if we wish to reverse it, a very consequentially bad life may not be traceable to bad character.

Counterexample #4 (character vs justice): Here counterexamples spring to mind so readily as to be practically truisms. Thomas Jefferson, an admirable man in so many ways, used slavery to support himself and his family. Most of the great people of bygone times, despite their high personal virtue, were out-and-out racists, homophobes and misogynists. The point is similar to the above counterexample #3 — good character is no guarantee of just conduct, for although the case for (say) women’s rights in terms of justice is a slam dunk, few of even the very best people of bygone times endorsed such a notion. People of otherwise good character seem only to be just to the extent that they have been taught to be, and rarely otherwise. In practice, thinking of morality solely in terms of a virtuous character ends up fetishizing personality, and even a good personality can countenance barbarous things.

What of deontology, then? What of justice?

Counterexample #5 (justice vs utility): All-out nuclear war threatens between Examplestan and the Gedanken Republic. The Republic demands amnesty for three terrorists who blew up an Examplestani post office several years ago. They say that this must occur as a gesture of good faith before they will come to the negotiating table at all. Should Examplestan consider this possibility? The answer seems to be yes — justice is extremely important, but we really don’t want the heavens to fall in that particular way. Sometimes you have to just set aside a matter of principle and take out your goddam calculator.

Counterexample #6 (justice vs character): Meet Fred. Fred has the nearly irresistible urge to torture people, but because he knows that this urge is not universalizable and that he is therefore duty-bound not to do so, he refrains with great difficulty from torturing people. Meanwhile, the idea of torturing people has never even occurred to Penelope, and it wouldn’t tempt her in the slightest if it did. Kant famously argued that the first case shows moral virtue, while the second shows a “mere” disposition. But this seems clearly wrong. For one thing, because a disposition does seem to be morally laudable — it’s just better not to want to torture people than to studiously refrain.

Now, these counterexamples are full of holes, complications and potential objections, but before you make an objection, please ask yourself seriously whether you’re rationalizing. For example, if I recall correctly, Kant was against cruelty to nonhuman animals (despite their not being “rational”) — but only because he bought into the empirical claim that cruelty to animals would eventually lead to violence against humans. Frankly, Immanuel, I call shenanigans. It’s true that violence against animals may lead to later human-on-human cruelty, but that is not what is wrong with torturing a rattlesnake. So when you come up with a clever objection to my counterexample to your-favored-approach, ask yourself if the objection really works in the least convenient possible world.

Now let me see if I can be more constructive.

I used to be a flat-out consequentialist, and in many ways I still consider myself one. I think an ethical theory that fails to relate to what, y’know, actually happens in the world, is essentially meaningless or worse. That said, I now consider consequentialism to be correct in principle, but also an incomplete practical methodology for dealing with ethical questions.

In this respect, it is a similar idea to reductionism. Yes, reductionism is entirely correct; yes, the basic units of physical reality (quarks and leptons?) are probably the only ontologically fundamental constituents of our universe; but no, particle physics is not good research methodology for studying the mating habits of penguins.

Likewise, there are some decisions (like not eating factory-farmed meat and eggs) that are slam-dunks on purely consequentialist grounds. But many others, such as how to train oneself to stand up to human evil instead of sliding into apathy, are much better conceived in terms of the conceptually higher-level ideas one finds in virtue ethics. Moreover, if consequentialist reasoning fails to take into account the undeniable... utility of certain close-to-absolute prohibitions, promises, commitments and concepts of honor and justice, what we end up with is a world where people make decisions that are locally consequentially optimal but globally hideous — consider the tragedy of the commons (I shall have much more to say about this particular issue in future posts).

Consequentialists have long argued that objections to their view end up confirming it — for example, the fact that you wouldn’t want to live in a world in which sheriffs were willing to scapegoat people, shows that that world has lower utility, so that the theory is saved. I think this is half-true, and rather hand-wavy. It shows that we have reasons for endorsing some deontological and virtue-ethical ideas on broadly consequentialist grounds, but it does not show that the consequentialist theory as stated really works as a guide to practice, unless we want to install a thousand ugly caveats into the theory. Sure, humans are made of quarks, but don’t throw out your psychology textbook in favour of physics alone!

So I think that in order to actually make your way in this world as an agent who is sincerely attempting to do the right thing, you’re going to have to use the vocabulary and concepts of consequentialism, deontology and virtue ethics, or your understanding will be impoverished. Exactly how they need to be traded off against each other is a subject for much further thought, assuming these ideas have merit.

In the comments to Julia’s article mentioned above, jcm christened this view as “Ethical Heterodoxy” or “Ethical Pluralism.” Let the critique begin!

New Rationally Speaking podcast: SETI

Is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, solid science, pseudoscience, or something else, as Massimo argues in his book "Nonsense on Stilts"?

What are the theoretical foundations and empirical evidence that justify a multi-decade research program, and what are its chances of succeeding? Have we learned anything thanks to SETI?

Also, if the universe is infinite, what problems does this pose for utilitarian ethics?

Michael's Picks

by Michael De Dora

* Do whales deserve rights? That’s what People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) charges in its latest lawsuit.

* Deborah Nelson just finished a one-year investigation into Ringling Bros.’ treatment of its animals, and the resulting article paints an ugly picture.

* Some research apparently suggests that moral philosophers are not morally better than socially comparable non-ethicists.

* Neuroscientists who gave rats a marijuana-like compound, put them in a maze and measured their brain waves, found unusually chaotic communication between brain regions linked to memory formation and complex behaviors.

* The White House has provided a disappointing response to the recent petitions to remove “In God We Trust” from U.S. currency and take “Under God” out the Pledge of Allegiance.

* A private university in Georgia is forcing its roughly 278 employees to sign a statement that rejects pre-marital sex, homosexuality, and drinking in public — or risk termination.

* Andrew Cohen discusses what George Washington believed about the Constitution in The Atlantic.

* Laura Bassett details the forces behind the current campaign against reproductive rights.

Some of Massimo's all time favs

by Massimo Pigliucci

techliberation.com

I was recently in Oslo, visiting the Center for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis and giving a public talk before the local Skeptics in the Pub. One of the colleagues I talked to while I was there asked me for a short list of unusual papers I thought would be a good idea to read. So I went home and generated three such lists, reflecting my main interests these days: Skepticism, Philosophy, and Science.

The entries are below, with links whenever possible (sometimes to the full article, often to abstracts). The lists are very obviously neither a complete (far from it, focusing mostly on the past few years) nor a balanced survey. Rather, they are entries that I "flagged" as worth remembering in my personal database. Still, they may be of interest, and I'd like to hear from our readers their thoughts about my suggestions, as well as suggestions of their own. So, here we go (within each group, entries are arranged from the most recent to the oldest paper, they do not include books, and some are articles instead of technical papers):

Skepticism:

• 2007. H.H. Ehrsson. The experimental induction of out of body experiences. Science 317:1048.
• 2005. J.P.A. Ioannidis. Why most published research findings are false. PLoS Medicine 2:e124.
• 2002. A. Caso. Three skeptics' debate tools examined. Skeptical Inquirer, Jan/Feb:37-41. (This is the only one I couldn't find online, even on SI's own web site!)

Philosophy:

• 2011. I. Douven. Abduction (Inference to the Best Explanation). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• 2011. C. Chatam. 10 Important Differences Between Brains and Computers. ScienceBlogs.
• 2010. A.L. Roskies. How does neuroscience affect our conception of volition? Annual Review of Neuroscience 33:109-130.
• 2009. J. Kaplan. The paradox of stasis and the nature of explanations in evolutionary biology. Philosophy of Science 76:797-808.
• 2008. D.J. Glass & N. Hall. A brief history of the hypothesis. Cell 134:378-381.
• 2005. N. Shackel. The vacuity of postmodernist methodology. Metaphilosophy 36:295-320.
• 2005. Judge Jones. Tammy Kitzmiller et al. v. Dover Area School District. United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania.
• 2004. H. Chang. Complementary Science: History and Philosophy of Science as a Continuation of Science by Other Means. Pp. 235-250 in: Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress. Oxford University Press. (Link is to a magazine article that summarizes the chapter.)
• 2002. J. Kaplan. Historical evidence and human adaptations. Philosophy of Science 69:S294-S304.
• 2002. C. Cleland. Methodological and Epistemic Differences between Historical Science and Experimental Science. Philosophy of Science 69:474-496.
• 2001. S. Okasha. Hume and induction. The Philosophical Quarterly 51:307-327.
• 2000. M. Gill. Hume and human nature. Hume Studies 26:87-108.
• 2000. B. Forrest. Methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism: clarifying the connection. Philo 3:7-29.
• 1997. S. Haack. Vulgar Rortyism. New Criterion.
• 1996. A. Sokal. A physicist experiments with cultural studies. Lingua Franca, May/Jun.
• 1992. R. Thom. Leaving Mathematics for Philosophy. Symposium on the Current State and Prospect of Mathematics, Barcelona, June 1991.
• 1987. J.H. Sobel. On the evidence of testimony for miracles: a bayesian interpretation of David Hume's analysis. The Philosophical Quarterly 37:166-187.
• 1984. R. Ariew. The Duhem Thesis. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 35:313-325.
• 1964. R. Hofstadter. The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Harper's Magazine, Nov:77-86.
• 1890. T.C. Chamberlin. The method of multiple working hypotheses. Science 15:92-96.

Science:

• 2011. R. Woods et al. Second order selection for evolvability in a large Escherichia coli population. Science 331:1433-1436.
• 2011. N. Shea et al. Three epigenetic information channels and their different roles in evolution. Journal of Evolutionary Biology, doi: 10.1111/j.1420-9101.2011.02235.x.
• 2011. D.G. Blanchflower & A.J. Oswald. International happiness. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 16668.
• 2010. L. Damisch et al. Keep your fingers crossed! How superstition improves performance. Psychological Science.
• 2009. I. Pyysiainen & M. Hauser. The origins of religion: evolved adaptation or by-product? Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
• 2009. J. Couzin. Friendship as a health factor. Science 323:454-457.
• 2008. J.A. Whitson & A.D. Galinsky. Lacking control increases illusory pattern perception. Science 322:115-117.
• 2008. D. Jablonski. Species selection: Theory and data. Annual Review of Ecology Evolution and Systematics 39:501-524.
• 2008. E. Jablonka & G. Raz. Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance: Prevalence, mechanisms, and implications for the study of heredity. Quarterly Review of Biology 84:131-176.
• 2007. K. Sand-Jensen. How to write consistently boring scientific literature. Oikos, doi: 10.1111/j.2007.0030-1299.15674.x
• 2007. R. Bukowski et al. Predictions of the properties of water from first principles. Science 315:1249-1252.
• 2005. M.J. West-Eberhard. Phenotypic accommodation adaptive innovation due to developmental plasticity. Journal of Experimental Zoology 304B:610-618.
• 1996. G.P. Wagner & L. Altenberg. Complex Adaptations and the Evolution of Evolvability. Evolution 50:967-976.
• 1995. C. Wedekind et al. Mhc dependent mate preferences in humans. Proceedings of the Royal Society Biological Sciences 260:245-249.
• 1994. J. Cohen. The earth is round (p<.05). American Psychologist 49:997-1003.
• 1992. S.A. Frank & M. Slatkin. Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 7:92-95.
• 1991. P. Alberch. From genes to phenotype dynamical systems and evolvability. Genetica 84:5-11.
• 1987. L.V. Hedges. How hard is hard science, how soft is soft science? American Psychologist 42:443-455.
• 1979. S.J. Gould & R.C. Lewontin. The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B205:581-598.
• 1974. R.C. Lewontin. The analysis of variance and the analysis of causes. American Journal of Human Genetics 26:400-411.
• 1958. R.M. Cooper & J.P. Zubek. Effects of enriched and restricted early environments on the learning ability of bright and dull rats. Canadian Journal of Psychology 12:159-164.