Moral Distance

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Moral Distance

 

 

We tend to think that our moral obligations fall off with distance: the closer someone is to us the greater is his moral claim on us, and the further away the less. Morality operates like gravity—it weakens with distance. True, morality is an expanding circle, but it is also a diminishing sphere. At the outer limits it hardly gets a grip at all. It would be a mistake to interpret this notion of distance as mere spatial separation, though that seems to be one component of it. In addition to distance in space there is also distance in time: the more temporally remote some future person is the less hold she seems to have on us morally. What obligations do I have to people in the 30thcentury? If I have any, they are not so strong as the obligations I have to people now. Whether this is rational or morally justifiable is a debatable question, but as a descriptive truth about our moral attitudes it is surely correct. Further, there is the dimension of personal contact or emotional proximity: the more intimate my relationship with someone the greater the obligation I feel. This applies to family, spouse, friends, colleagues, and so on. It may be that spatiotemporal distance is really just correlated with this dimension, which is the underlying factor; relationship-distance is the main consideration. We might also add psychological similarity: we tend to regard beings similar to us psychologically as deserving more of our moral concern—humanlike, mammalian, warm-blooded, non-alien. Thus our contemporaneous close relatives have a stronger claim on us than a jellyfish-type creature living in a remote galaxy two million years from now. Moral distance is multi-factorial and complex not just a matter of physical miles. It introduces degrees of obligation into moral duty instead of just the all-or-nothing binary opposition of duty and non-duty. It also introduces uncertainty and messiness into our moral calculations.

                It is helpful to picture the diminishing moral sphere as follows. At the center lies the ever-present self: this is the being minimally distant from the moral agent (they are identical) and it has a uniquely strong influence over our decisions. Given that prudence is also moral concern for one sentient being among others—I am a valuable being just like everyone else—we can think of prudence as the basic case of moral obligation. I am obliged to be concerned about my own interests and I am extremely close to myself. I am the center of the sphere of my concerns and others radiate outwards from me. The next closest being is then a matter of individual variation: it could be my spouse or my parents or my children or my friends, depending on circumstances. Then we get to the much more extensive circle of my general acquaintance. After that we have members of my local community perhaps; then other countries; then other species; then the next generation; then more remote generations; then beings in other galaxies; finally completely alien life-forms in remote regions of space millennia hence. My own interests come first (other things being equal and given a degree of selfishness) and then the interests of others according to their place in the sphere. This is the whole sphere of my moral obligations, and it varies in degree of demandingness. Most obviously, there is variation in the strength with which I am obliged to reduce or prevent suffering.

            Imagine if someone inverted this ordering of moral priorities: she treats the more remote beings as having a stronger hold on her moral concern. Creatures in the distant future on remote planets that are psychologically dissimilar to her occupy the center of her moral universe, while family and friends have merely marginal moral interest for her (she might even regard herself as morally negligible). That would certainly strike us as bizarre, insane even, but it is not easy to see how we could persuade her that it is irrational or immoral (she might point out that they are suffering sentient beings too, equally deserving of respect and care). But by the same token it is hard to see how we could be deemed irrational for our ordering. Nor does it seem justifiable to insist that only equalconsideration is rational or moral, so that we must treat spatiotemporally remote beings as morally interchangeable with our nearest and dearest. In fact, the distribution that seems the most natural is precisely the one that we adopt—despite the fact that no obvious foundation for it can be produced. Perhaps it is just psychologically necessary for human beings or other evolved creatures, or even for all beings with emotions directed at others: no other moral psychology is feasible given the basic nature of sentient beings. Ought implies can, so there is no point in reprimanding us for favoring the more proximate beings. Not that we can or should have no concern for the remote and alien, but it must of psychological necessity be diluted and relatively undemanding. If this means that we cannot occupy an entirely impartial and objective moral perspective, then so be it; at least the perspective we have is workable and not too destructive or callous. Brain surgery that changed our moral psychology so as not to discriminate against the distant and different might totally wreck everything that makes human life worthwhile, or even possible. How could you marry someone who systematically favored the remote over the proximate? What would happen to loyalty, trust, solidarity, etc.? What would happen to family life if parents treated every child in the world as deserving the same care and attention as their own?

            It is not an easy matter deciding how robustly moral obligation extends to the distant objects of possible concern. Morality has not evolved with these quandaries in mind. For instance, we have not had to think about how our actions will affect the wellbeing of people in future generations, as in climate change; nor did our ancestors put much thought into our obligations towards animals. I don’t want to argue that our current distribution of moral concern is correct and beyond reproach, only that it is not irrational to treat distance (in the multi-factorial sense) as morally relevant (certainly we should be careful about trying to reconfigure our psychology to adopt a more impartial point of view). I would not, for example, be happy to see support for foreign aid curtailed in favor of a supposed more pressing need on the part of future generations, or the political plight of the Venusians. This is also not a point about favoring humans over non-humans: I am all for treating our own animals as having moral priority over more distant animals, because this exhibits the kind of relational closeness that confers moral priority (though I also think remote animals do deserve some moral consideration). Some sort of moral ordering seems inescapable, but whether we have it right now is another question. What we should not do is try to motivate concern for our fellow man (and other animals) by appeal to some perfectly general principle banning all forms of moral distancing, as if every sentient being in the universe had an exactly equal claim over us.  [1] Things are more nuanced than that, and more difficult to resolve.

 

  [1] People sometimes say that we should try to occupy a God’s-eye view of creation, morally speaking, treating all sentient beings equally. But God does not exist in space and time, and he has no selective emotional relations with human beings and other animals. We do, and it is folly to try to make us take up a Godlike moral perspective. We can take this perspective into account, but we shouldn’t be governed by it, on pain of possible psychological collapse. In any case, there is no demonstration that the diminishing sphere that we habitually operate with is irrational or immoral.

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Memory Illusions

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Memory Illusions

 

 

In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Fanny Price, a thoughtful and unassuming young woman, makes the following observations to a certain Miss Crawford: “If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do believe it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient—at others, so bewildered and so weak—and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control!—We are to be sure a miracle every way—but our powers of recollecting and forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.” (538) The author then reports Miss Crawford’s reaction: “Miss Crawford untouched and inattentive, had nothing to say; and Fanny perceiving it, brought back her own mind to what she thought must interest.” (539) Here we see Jane Austen at her most philosophical and, gratifyingly, mysterian. She clearly finds memory fascinating, but also “peculiarly past finding out”. She also realizes that such questions are not for the shallow of mind. The philosophical reader duly warms to Miss Price, who is already very much in our good books on account of her virtue and modesty (in her inventor we see yet another sign of genius).

            Austen is comparing memory to our other “intelligences”, presumably including perception and thought. Her observation is that memory is more arbitrary in its powers than they are. To be sure, perception and thought have their failures and breakdowns—they are subject to error—but these weaknesses are fairly regular and predictable, while the powers of memory vary for no discernible reason. Sometimes we cannot for the life of us remember what we want to, but at other times memory pursues us relentlessly, refusing to relinquish its contents no matter how we may feel about them. Perception is not subject to the will, while thought is, but memory is partially subject to the will—sometimes under our control and sometimes very much not. The reasons for this are obscure: why do we so vividly remember some things, often seemingly insignificant, while others slip too easily from memory? I cannot ever choose what to see, while I can always choose what to think about, but I have partial choice when it comes to remembering things. Thus memory seems poised somewhere between perception and thought. It is quasi-perceptual and quasi-cognitive.

            Then there is the question of its scope and limits. Perception is limited to the present moment and the impinging environment, though it handles an immense amount of information simultaneously. Memory has a broader scope, taking in large tracts of the past and being relatively independent of time of occurrence (you can often remember your childhood more vividly than last year). Perceptions rapidly come and go, while memories can linger indefinitely. Thought ranges more widely still, taking in the future as well the past and present, and including things not perceptible at all (you can think about atoms but you can’t remember what they did, not directly anyway). So memory falls between these two poles. My question is whether it is subject to illusions. There are clearly perceptual illusions, while thought is not vulnerable to illusions (though error is commonplace), but what about memory? Does memory sometimes give rise to illusions of the past? Errors, certainly, but are there also actual illusions? I don’t mean memories of past perceptual illusions, like remembering that Muller-Lyer illusion you saw yesterday; I mean specifically memory illusions, where a memory impression misrepresents a past event. If so, what are these illusions, what types do they fall into, what laws govern them? Are they analogous to perceptual illusions or are they sui generis? The question is not an easy one, despite its simplicity. On the one hand, memory has a sensory, particularly visual, dimension: we have sensory image-like impressions of the past. These can be inaccurate, as when one remembers a face with the wrong color eyes or a page with a word misplaced. It is tempting to describe this phenomenon as a visual illusion of the past not merely as a false belief. One can also have a complete hallucination of the past, as when one appears to recall a past event in full vividness that simply didn’t happen. These seem rather like mirage cases or seeing two equal lines as different in length: a sensory misrepresentation of the world, but relating to the past state of the world. The memory system has delivered up a mental representation that fails to fit the “stimulus”. False beliefs may be formed, as in the perceptual case.

Yet, on the other hand, what we don’t find are reliable, predictable illusions generated by certain types of configurations of objects—as in the moon illusion or the Muller-Lyer illusion. It is not that whenever one remembers the moon it always seems larger than it really is, or that memories of adjacent parallel lines always present them as unequal in length. Memory “illusions” are haphazard, unsystematic, and unrelated to the properties of the stimulus; they are more like errors of belief in this respect. There are apparently no laws of memory illusion analogous to the laws of perceptual illusion (faces with brown eyes don’t always produce memories of blue eyes).  [1]  Moreover, memory errors are correctable in the light of contradictory knowledge, unlike perceptual errors, which are incorrigible in the light of true belief.  [2] Thus the moon illusion and the Muller-Lyer illusion persist even when one knows quite well that the facts are otherwise than they appear, but memory impressions are permeable by extraneous knowledge—you will not keep on remembering things a certain way once you have been enlightened (at least there is the possibility of a change of impression, unlike in the perceptual case). This makes sense, given that memory lies somewhere between the perceptual systems and the central cognitive system. Memory thus seems vulnerable to something like perceptual illusion but also unlike it. It is neither fully one thing nor the other (as Jane Austen intimates).   

            I think, then, that there is no clear answer to my question, because memory provides a counterexample to the dichotomy between perceptual and cognitive error. Perhaps we can say that it gives rise to quasi-illusions, where the qualifier simply indicates being betwixt and between. In other terminology, memory is neither an encapsulated module nor a general-purpose ratiocinator. On balance, I would say that it is not susceptible to illusion in the strict sense, but that it does give rise to sensory misrepresentation as a matter of course. In fact, it is more prone to sensory error than the senses themselves, being less governed by psychophysical laws; but these errors are not as rooted in the architecture of the system as perceptual illusions. The senses systematically act in ways that can defy our reasoned view of things, as autonomous informational agents; but memory is not so cut off from reason, not so independent of cognition in its operations. It is puzzling and counterintuitive, quite exceptional in our psychological economy; whether it is “peculiarly past finding out” is another question, but not one to dismiss. It is noteworthy how little philosophical reflection has been devoted to it in comparison with perception and thought.  [3] As Miss Price remarks, no doubt we are all “miracles”, but memory seems especially impenetrable even in its most quotidian operations.

 

  [1] The closest thing I can think of concerns memory impressions of elapsed time. We remember a busy time as passing quickly while a boring time is remembered as passing slowly, and this seems somewhat lawlike. But even here the illusion has its source in the contemporaneous perception of time in the two cases not in an inherent tendency to illusion in memory as such.

  [2] See Jerry Fodor, The Modularity of Mind.

  [3] In contrast memory has been a staple of psychology since its inception, with much experimentation and theory devoted to it. I don’t recall ever hearing the question of memory illusions discussed, though failures of memory are routinely studied. Psychologists recognize how perplexing memory is, though I have not heard of one who takes Austen’s mysterian line.

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Limits of Reality

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Limits of Reality

 

We speak of the limits of human knowledge or reason or our conceptual scheme, but we don’t tend to talk about the limits of reality. Knowledge is limited relative to reality—it is not as extensive as reality—but reality cannot fail to be as extensive as itself. But it may be less extensive than some conceivable alternative, so that there is at least a sense to the question. Is there some type of reality that is less limited than our reality? Or is our reality—actual reality—unlimited, perhaps essentially so? This seems like an interesting metaphysical question, though not one I have seen asked. People have certainly discussed the question of the infinity of the universe (Spinoza), but that is not the question I have in mind. We can agree that numbers, space and time are infinite, and therefore limitless, but a universe containing only one of these things—or all of them—would still be limited in the sense I intend, because there would be many perfectly conceivable things that would not exist in such a universe. The series of numbers has no limit, but a world of only numbers would be vastly more limited than our world. An infinite world can be a sharply limited world—an ontologically impoverished world. Intuitively, we are speaking here of how many kinds of thing there are; and the question is whether our world is maximal in this respect.

            Suppose we think that reality consists of three kinds of thing: physical, mental, and abstract. Is this a limited number of kinds of thing? Could there have been many more kinds of thing (ontological categories)? Apparently not: we can’t imagine any further basic type of entity that just contingently happens not to exist in our world. A hard-nosed materialist might contend that nothing could exist that is not material, so that a purely material world is not a limited world (relative to some conceivable world). Of course, there could be many more particular material things, but there may be no limitation in the kinds of things that exist. Similarly, there is limitation in the animal species that exist (or chemical substances), but that entails no limitation of basic categories. A world without life is more limited than a world with life, but not a world without cockroaches. If our world lacks deities, then it is limited relative to a world that has them; so it might be a fundamentally limited world (or it might not be if there are deities in it).

            Consider laws of nature and logic. They constrain what can happen, so they function as principles of limitation. In a world without such laws there would be no limitation on what can happen. That is a very different world from ours (though it may not be a genuinely possible world). Moreover, there are only a few basic laws of nature in our world; maybe there are worlds containing many more basic laws (could there be more logical laws in some possible world?). We can think of these laws as laws of limitation: they force our world to be limited in certain ways. A law tells you what can and will happen, but also what can’t and won’t happen. Or consider the speed of light: this imposes a limit on the speed of any projectile. Objects are not at liberty to move at any arbitrary speed; there is a sharp limitation. Likewise the universe is not free to reverse entropy; it is limited to increasing disorder.

            Limitation is the flipside of possibility. If something has a certain nature (and everything does), then it has a range of possibilities and a range of impossibilities. This is as true for whole universes as it is for individual objects. Limitation is thus normal, predictable, and inescapable. Part of the nature of our universe is to be infinite in various ways, but this does not negate the fact that it is a limited reality. We marvel at the richness of nature, its extent, its possibilities, but in fact it is quite sharply limited. It is more limited than our imagination (which itself is limited by our nature as cognitive beings). We might even say that reality is subject to ontological closure: it is not unlimited in what it contains. Space, say, though infinite in extension, is quite confined with respect to its dimensions—having only three (or nine if you follow certain versions of string theory). The brain is quite limited in its physical nature, consisting of only certain chemicals in certain structures and subject to certain forces. Cognitive closure is one kind of ontological closure—one kind of natural limitation. Gravity prevents bodies from moving in certain ways, and the brain’s physical construction prevents it from functioning in certain ways, including cognitively. Everything has limitation built into it, despite its impressive range of potentialities. The whole universe is accordingly an entity subject to inherent limitations. We don’t appreciate these limitations because we experience only this universe—while we experience many different kinds of individual objects—but our universe may be quite sparsely populated and inept compared to other possible universes. The universe might give rise to an illusion of richness: we are awestruck by its variety but only because we know nothing better. Maybe God kept it nice and simple so as not to overburden our limited minds; other universes might make ours look simple and dull. After all, our universe began in something quite lumpen and undifferentiated—the Big Bang—and it can only reflect that initial event. Surely the material condition of the universe at that point was sharply limited by the prevailing physics, and the subsequent history of the universe consists of iterations of what was then present. Reality is limited by the initial conditions that made it possible.

            When we contemplate the galaxies and the variety of species and our own minds we are stuck by the richness of the universe, even conceiving it as limitless, but this is an anthropocentric perspective. To a more objective point of view the world must appear as confined—as just one type of reality amid others. It may not be the least interesting of all possible worlds, but it may be far less interesting than we tend to suppose. It may be a garage sale compared to the Harrods of some other world. In pre-Socratic style we might picture the universe as the product of forces of expansion and constraint. Many new things come into existence, expanding the inventory of things the universe contains; but this happens against a background of curtailment as the universe prevents things from happening and possible things from being formed. It limits as it creates. It is as preventive as it is generative. It operates with an ontological Occams’s razor, ruthlessly paring away at reality. When God created the universe he created limitation on being as well as plenitude, denial as well as affirmation.

 

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Knowledge, Opinion, and Fantasy

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Knowledge, Opinion, and Fantasy

 

 

Plato wished to know the difference between knowledge and opinion. His idea, much elaborated over the centuries, is that something needs to be added to opinion to get knowledge. Knowledge is opinion plus something—truth, justification, reliability, etc. Certainly we can agree that knowledge is more than opinion, but could it also be less? Do we need to subtract something from opinion to get knowledge? Does opinion have properties that knowledge lacks? Might it have properties that disable it from counting as knowledge? In order to answer these questions we need to be clear what we mean by “opinion”, allowing that the word may be more inclusive than the concept we intend to single out. There are two sorts of case to consider: bad opinions and acceptable opinions. Acceptable opinions would include a scientist cautious about the data tentatively suggesting that a certain hypothesis might be true: she isn’t at all dogmatic about it, agreeing that she might well be wrong; she proportions her belief according to the available evidence. Bad opinions would include those influenced by prejudice or propaganda and reflecting animosities in the believer—for example, the belief that Mexicans are murderers and rapists. I include here opinions based on wild conspiracy theories as well as superstitions and urban legends. The question then is how these kinds of opinions differ from knowledge.

            It would be wrong to claim that such opinions can be converted into knowledge by the mere addition of certain conditions. Suppose one of these bad opinions turns out to be true, and suppose also that the believer has evidence for his belief: does that entail that he has knowledge? No, because the way he arrived at his belief deprives it of the ability to count as knowledge—at any rate, there is something defective about the belief that casts doubt on its claim to knowledge. In the Meno Plato suggested that opinion differs from knowledge in that it is transitory (“untethered”) while knowledge is fixed and stable. That fails to allow for rigidly held prejudicial beliefs or deep-seated errors of judgment. But the suggestion is interesting because it finds in opinion a feature that distinguishes it intrinsically from knowledge—a feature that prevents opinion from qualifying as knowledge. That is, it identifies in opinion a positive disqualification, not merely a remediable lack. And this corresponds to an intuition that pervades the philosophical literature on the analysis of knowledge, namely that knowledge cannot be defined as true justified opinion. It is not an accident that the first condition in the analysis of knowledge is stated using the concept of belief, because that concept is neutral on the question of knowledge; but no one finds it natural to start out stipulating that x knows that p only if x is of the opinion that p. That would quickly lead to counterexamples in the light of the kind of case I mentioned earlier: a prejudicial belief that happened to be true and justified would not count as knowledge (it would be a type of Gettier case). Bad opinions cannot be magically converted into knowledge by the addition of truth and justification. Such opinions differ intrinsically from knowledge. Plato conjectures that they are essentially unstable, flighty, and malleable—and one can appreciate his point. But even if that were correct, we would still need to ask why they are thus mutable. So we have the question: in virtue of what do opinions of this type differ from knowledge (or rational belief)?

            The answer I propose is that they are governed by fantasy. There is a class of beliefs that are controlled by fantasy, and that is the mark that distinguishes them from knowledge. I won’t be able to say much about fantasy here; I will take it for granted that fantasy plays a significant role in the human psyche, affecting almost every aspect of our psychological lives. Clearly the mind of the human child is riddled with fantasy, and this fantasy life affects the child deeply: a great many of a child’s convictions stem from fantasy—indeed there no clear line at this stage between fantasy and belief. As we mature the control of fantasy lessens, as the “reality principle” sets in (Freud wasn’t wrong about everything); but it never entirely disappears, and it is more powerful in some people than others. It can still shape belief even as the years accumulate. We can imagine beings that lose all vestiges of fantasy at puberty, becoming fantasy-free zones, never having their views shaped by what their imagination presents to them: but human beings are not like this, being prone to fantasy throughout their lives. Thus we are open to the fantasies promoted by conspiracy theorists, as well as to our own self-manufactured fabrications and fancies. The suggestion, then, is that opinion (in the intended sense) is the result of fantasy while knowledge is not. Knowledge is the rejection of fantasy; opinion is its embrace. Thus opinion can never count as knowledge, because fantasy-based belief can never be knowledge. There is a class of human beliefs (if that is the right word) that are disqualified from counting as knowledge by their genesis, no matter whether they may be true or justified. Thus we don’t analyze knowledge as true justified opinion just as we don’t analyze it as true justified fancy or feeling: we don’t say that x knows that p only if x fancies that p or feels that p (or fantasizes that p), because that suggests the wrong sort of psychological state to count as a case of knowledge. If a view (position, attitude, stance) results from fantasy it is disqualified from being knowledge; it is “mere opinion”.

            But why is that? Why is fantasy so disqualifying? Because it roots belief in the self: it makes belief dependent on personality, emotion, idiosyncrasy, and waywardness. Fantasy reflects the urgings of the psyche–its preoccupations, insecurities, and aggressions. But knowledge must be rooted in the world beyond the self not inthe self—in the reality principle not the fantasy principle. Fantasy drags the mind away from the world and into its own dark labyrinth, but knowledge must face the bright objective common world. Opinion therefore tracks what lies within not what prevails without. Opinion is the expression of the self not its negation or transcendence. Thus opinion differs fundamentally from knowledge: you can’t just add to it and hope that its dubious origins will magically remove themselves. The OED defines “opinion” as “a view or judgment not necessarily based on fact or knowledge”. One supposes that this definition took some crafting: notice that it avoids the word “belief” and uses “necessarily” to expand opinion beyond rational inquiry; also it opposes opinion to knowledge, as if these are two very different kinds of thing. But what it doesn’t do is provide any positive definition of the word; it simply says what opinion is not based on. Then what is it based on? It is based on something in the psychological subject evidently—and “fantasy” is its name. It is what the mind comes up with when facts and knowledge are lacking—conviction without evidence, without the control of the reality principle. Freud might call it the pleasure principle, and that is not wide of the mark, but fantasy is not always about pleasure. Fantasy is about disconnection from the world, possible (and impossible) worlds, madness, deception, self-deception, fiction, the absurd, the undisciplined, the puerile, and the paranoid. Fantasy is the antithesis of knowledge, not a precursor to it. Knowledge cannot have fantasy as a component. Opinion controlled by fantasy is not a suitable basis for knowledge. It needs to be thrown out not supplemented. People whose minds are stocked with such opinions are not on the road to knowledge; they have disqualified themselves from the start. They are going about the cognitive life in the wrong way.

            Two distinctive Platonic doctrines fall into place under the present theory. The first is Plato’s attitude to the arts, particularly drama: he famously opposed them, regarding them as disruptive to the search for true knowledge (suitable only for watching on cave walls perhaps). We can now see that if opinion is based on fantasy it is based on what the arts are all about—the fabricated, the imagined, the unreal. If the mind confuses fantasy with reality, then mere opinion is the upshot, and true knowledge is precluded. Second, Plato’s hostility to the Sophists acquires a theoretical foundation: they trade in human fantasy, using it to sway opinion (note the word), exploiting the fragilities of the self. Plato seeks to banish fantasy from rational discourse, and discourage its role in human cognition—in the formation of our “views”. We can envisage different degrees of prohibition in the ideal Platonic society: completely excise fantasy from the mind (surgically or by indoctrination); suppress it as far as possible while tolerating its existence; or assign it to its proper place—dreams, romantic love, the arts. What we cannot accept is its intrusion into the serious business of acquiring knowledge—not if we take Plato’s strictures to heart. Practically, we must train our young to form their beliefs without any reliance on the promptings of fantasy—no conspiracy theories, no wishful thinking, no succumbing to the temptations of the compelling narrative (as if the world has to fit your favorite plotlines). The Sophists among us will always seek to inflame our imaginations in an effort to warp our beliefs, but we must train our young to resist their incursions. Let “That’s just a fantasy!” be our mantra. (Not that any of this will be easy: some catchy songs might help.)

            Presumably fantasy is more powerful in some areas of thought than others. People tend not to fantasize about numbers (there are exceptions) or elementary particles, but when it comes to the biological world fantasy is strong—notably with respect to humans. Obviously animals have proved a rich source of fantasy and many weird beliefs have been held about them (mainly to their detriment), but humans are clearly the most fertile ground for the flowering of fantasy. We look at each other through a blinding haze of fantasy, not just people from other places, but also our own kith and kin. Marriage is a rich source of fantasy thinking, and so a hotbed of non-knowledge (the problem of other minds providing the slack needed to allow fantasy to flourish). I think of Othello and other Shakespeare plays (isn’t Iago the ultimate fantasy-monger?). So we need to be more alert to the depredations of fantasy in some areas than others; we need to beware of “opinion” in the areas in which it is most likely to take root. Marriage counselors should take a “fantasy studies” course, specializing in “spousal fantasy disorder”. At any rate, the recognition of the possibility of fantasy should inform all our personal interactions, from the most casual to the most intimate.

            We must acknowledge our dual nature. On the one hand, we have the rational faculty, whose object is knowledge; on the other, we have the imaginative faculty, whose work product is fantasy. The latter has a tendency to leak into the former, to deform and distort it. There could be beings without the imaginative faculty (they would be pleasing to Plato) as there could be beings without the rational faculty (maybe pleasing to some Romantics). The beings without imagination would be all knowledge and no opinion; the beings without reason would be all opinion and no knowledge. We have both faculties and the problem is leakage: too many people have their views shaped by the operations of fantasy. And they don’t realize it; or rather, they can’t think in these terms, as children can’t. They stand at rallies shouting and shrieking, their heads full of fantasies, brimming with “opinions”, and with no actual knowledge in sight: if only their fantasies could be abolished! History is largely the history of fantasy, of “opinions”, of the antithesis of knowledge. When a person tells you he is “entitled to his opinion” he really means he is entitled to his fantasies; maybe he is, but he is not entitled to confuse his fantasies with reality.

            I want to emphasize that what Plato dubbed “correct opinion” is not to be confused with knowledge. An opinion is not saved from criticism by being correct (true, justified) given that it arises in a certain kind of way—by fantasy, according to the present hypothesis. Correct opinion might not lead us astray practically (because it’s correct) but that doesn’t mean it reduces to knowledge: it just happens to be correct, because it arose by a means that is inimical to correctness, viz. fantasy. Knowledge is more valuable than correct opinion because of its origin not because of its effects (to answer Plato’s question in the Meno)—because of its freedom from fantasy and fantasy’s dependence on the self. Knowledge is not self-directed, unlike opinion. This is why it would be wrong to define knowledge as correct opinion, as if opinion could redeem itself by being (accidentally) correct.  [1]

            Since we are in Plato territory let me propose an allegory of knowledge and opinion. There is a war going on between two factions: the adherents of fantasy and the adherents of reality (call this the Allegory of the War). We are the ground on which this war is being fought. The fantasy side wishes to acquire as much ground as possible, seizing as much doxastic real estate as it can; the reality side is defending its territory against the marauding forces. The battle ebbs and flows, with bits of land exchanging hands. The forces of fantasy are winning the war in certain areas (politics, ethics, the law) while the forces of reality hang on to their strongholds in science, mathematics, and philosophy. Some ground is hotly contested—history, economics, parts of psychology. The fantasy side is fuelled by rage and self-regard, not to mention insecurity, while the reality side is stoical and stone-faced, dispassionate to a fault. The war has been going on for millennia, ever since man acquired his dual nature (back there in old Africa). Sometimes fantasy holds most of the territory, sometimes reality manages to capture a chunk of land previously held by fantasy. The tide has been shifting in the reality direction in recent centuries, but nothing is ever securely held; for the fantasy side is wily and determined, and full of brute energy. There are setbacks, reversals of fortune, and humiliating defeats. Who will win in the end (this a zero sum game)? It’s hard to say, but there seems to be no end in sight.

 

  [1] I have not recurred to the category of tentative belief as a species of opinion, as with the cautious scientist. I don’t think this is the kind of case Plato had in mind, and anyway my main interest is in the category I called bad opinion. In the former kind of case we don’t need the concept of opinion because we can speak simply of knowledge without fear of solecism: the scientist knows that the probability of the hypothesis is n where nrepresents her degree of belief. There is nothing untoward about that belief and fantasy played no part in its formation. It is proportional to the evidence and is not resistant to new evidence, unlike the bad kind of opinion. The kind of opinion I have been concerned with corresponds to the groundless psychologically motivated opinions we observe all around us.

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Jane Austen’s Moral Universe

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Jane Austen’s Moral Universe

 

 

Jane Austen is the most moral of writers, but what is her morality? What values does she espouse and promote? That is not an easy question, given the elusiveness of the authorial mind and the gap between life and art, but I propose to deal with an easier subject: what I have derived from reading her in the way of moral ideas. I shall describe how her books strike me, hoping (but not claiming) that this corresponds to her intentions and attitudes.  [1] It seems to me an interesting and distinctive set of values, worth making explicit and pondering. I will not labor to demonstrate my interpretation by reference to the texts; I will simply set out the view that I find in them with minimal reference to character and story.

            The most significant feature of her moral world-view is that it is a two-tier view—she believes in two sorts of value only loosely connected. It is often said that Austen is a worldly writer, aware of reality (especially social reality) and its demands; she is not high-minded. This is true, but only partially true. She certainly accepts the value of worldly things: money, houses, good looks, clothes, rank, manners, charm, carriages, horses, balls, comfort, food, warmth, furniture, and money (always money). A handsome man with a large fortune is not something to be sneezed at, still less a pretty girl who can play the harp and make witty conversation.  Austen properly values these worldly things and is happy to be guided by them: not for her the life of self-abnegation and the ascetic nunnery. Marriage to a handsome charming man with a considerable fortune in a fine country mansion is her idea of the good life. That is the first tier of value: what might loosely be called bourgeois values, except that “aristocratic values” is closer to the mark. In this pantheon I would say that to her good looks and money are paramount: a poor plain worthy man is not regarded as desirable. It is, for Austen, simply unrealistic to believe otherwise.

            What is the second tier? One might think it is moral virtue—a desirable person must be virtuous. This is not wrong, but it misses what is distinctive in Austen’s view. It is not virtue as such that Austen admires—good motives, right actions, and beneficial consequences—but moral discernment. It is correct moral judgment, moral intelligence, that she particularly values—seeing what is right. Often her heroines progress from moral blindness to moral vision, without ever doing anything particularly moral. Often, too, they start out with superior moral perception to those around them and are not admired for it. It is this perceptiveness contrasted with the moral crassness of others that Austen singles out for praise (Fanny Price in Mansfield Park is a good example; also Anne Eliot in Persuasion). So it is an intellectual virtue that Austen particularly approves. In addition to this there are two other traits that excite her admiration, not usually presented as on the list of virtues: humor and eloquence of expression. She is herself famously funny, especially when satirizing the foibles of her characters (there are many examples but Mrs. Norris and Lady Bertram in Mansfield Park spring immediately to my mind). Her humor is of a rarified and morally complex kind, so it is not far removed from the first virtue I identified, moral discernment. It is also partly aesthetic and observational, not practical. It characterizes a certain kind of sensibility: a way of seeing things. Her most despicable characters are notably lacking in it, and some worthy characters are simply dull. And third there is how a person talks—as well as moves and smiles. The speech of her characters is calibrated to their expressive powers: some characters can be meretricious in their eloquence, but generally speech gives a clear indication of the inner quality of the person. He who speaks well is spiritually well. She who chatters and babbles is of no account. This is Austen’s harshest demand on people, because it cannot be detached from intelligence and education. The finest people are the finest in their speech. Here we might feel that she incurs the charge of snobbery, and that would not be a wrong opinion. She is saved from it—or it is mitigated—by the fact that some of her wealthiest and most consequential figures are dull of speech and hence unlovable (Sir Thomas Bertram being a good example). In Jane Austen’s moral universe this is a non-negotiable fact: verbal skill is among the highest of values. And it goes with the other two values, since it is connected to humor and also to the intellectual faculty of moral discernment. It is also strongly aesthetic—more so really than houses and horses. Distinction of speech is regarded as beautiful and desirable. Of course, Austen herself has this power to an almost preposterous degree: she can’t utter a sentence without betraying her genius and distinction. Some of her most misogynistic impulses (and there are plenty) stem from her expressive requirements: the poorly spoken pedestrian woman is a figure of contempt. The ideal woman (and man) is morally perceptive, humorous, and eloquent. These qualities coexist with the other more worldly values, which also have their place; but they exist in a class of their own. They mark out the superior from the inferior.

            This is not traditional Christian morality: far from it. It has an almost Nietzschean character. The Austen heroine is not out there helping the poor but entertaining her friends and family with her cutting wit, verbal prowess, and moral intelligence (we don’t hear much about the servants and their trials). In addition she dances and dresses well, and is pretty, spirited, and gifted. Thus she combines two sorts of virtue, which are not always (or often) found together: higher virtues and lower ones. Both are essential to being a person of true value. In Austen’s social world people tend to find the first set of values of exclusive merit; her radical alternative is that there is another set of values of higher importance. But this set is hardly what Christian morality would propose. Even the moral component is skewed towards the personal and inward, not being much concerned with actual good deeds (though these are not disregarded). Most shockingly perhaps superior virtue is held to reside in the aesthetic qualities of humor and eloquence. This is what we thrill to in Jane Austen: the unabashed celebration of the most civilized of virtues. It is all very well to be a good person in Austen’s moral universe (indeed it is essential) but it is also important to be a civilized person in the sense captured by the three virtues she highlights. Indeed, we should not really think of the former concept independently of the latter. So Austen is unchristian in two respects: she accepts the value of worldly goods without question, and is unconcerned with questions of fair distribution; and she also celebrates virtues not recognized in traditional Christian morality, which have a distinctly aesthetic cast (she is Wildean as well as Nietzschean—though before those two men ever came along). Certainly there is no shortage of unethical charmless parsons in her novels, and God doesn’t come into the picture much. She doesn’t find virtue to be incompatible with wealth, and she most approves of qualities of mind.  [2]

            Two ancillary themes stand out. There is some tendency in the novels for heroines to possess the second set of virtues but to be somewhat lacking in the first set, which makes it difficult for them to achieve worldly success, typically in the form of an advantageous marriage; yet they often prevail in that sphere. This may be Austen giving in to fantasy—escaping the iron laws of her time and place. I don’t at all deplore this: such fantasies are part of urging a superior morality on one’s reader. We certainly applaud the marital success of her disadvantaged heroines, which reinforce the power of the virtues she esteems, particularly the moral ones. The coarsely advantaged should not be allowed to succeed at every turn. Second, I sense that Austen is alert to the perils of pride in the kind of person she favors—hence in herself. Just as her more worldly characters often exhibit pride in their possessions and titles, so the intelligent and witty may feel pride in their superiority, whether earned or not. There is a strong strain of moral elitism running through Austen’s work, which excites the reader’s own sense of self-pride, and like all pride it must not overreach itself. Some degree of pride is acceptable, but it must not inflate itself out of all proportion. I think Austen is troubled by this danger and works to prevent her good characters from falling prey to it; and she is prey to it herself, and well aware of that fact. The difficult question is how to prevent it. The subtext of her novels is the problem of humility, which she never completely resolves. Nor do we wish her to. We like her the way she is.

 

Coli

  [1] Actually I feel pretty confident that these ideas are hers, but that is not something I intend to establish; nor is there any great need for me to do so. Officially, then, I am merely describing how her writings strike me (which doesn’t mean I agree with what I extract from her). 

  [2] Or she most disapproves of bad qualities of mind: dull witless foolish people are treated with the utmost contempt. Their moral failings are invariably connected to their intellectual limitations.

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Is Psychology a Science?

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Is Psychology a Science?

 

 

The question is only as precise as the word “science”, which isn’t very precise. But I don’t propose to quibble about that word (I incline to a wide application of it); instead I will compare psychology to some established sciences and note various gaps in what psychology has accomplished compared to these sciences. We might express the upshot of these reflections as denying that psychology is a mature science, or that it is a real science, or that it is an explanatory science; what matters is the reality of the distinctions I identify. Psychology is not as other sciences are, dramatically so. It is signally lacking in the chief characteristics of the sciences, as they now exists. It is weak science, proto science, science in name but not in substance.

            First consider the physical sciences—physics (pure and applied), cosmology, astronomy, and chemistry. What has physical science achieved? I would say that it has achieved success in three (interconnected) areas: origin, structure, and dynamics. To summarize: it explains the origin of the physical universe (big bang cosmology); it has uncovered the hidden composition of physical things (atoms, molecules, fields); and it has developed a dynamic theory of how the physical world evolves over time (specifying the basic forces and the laws that govern them). I shall say that it has achieved OSD success: it has established theories of how matter came to exist in its present form, how it is composed, and how it changes its properties with time. This is what we would expect of an adequate empirical scientific theory of some aspect of reality: an account of its origins, its underlying structure, and its behavior over time. Not to have answered these questions would make physics into a merely embryonic science, hardly worthy of the name (think physics in the age of Aristotle or earlier). Now turn to biology—anatomy, physiology, evolution, and genetics. It too can boast real achievements in the three areas identified: how life originated, the structure of living things, change of biological forms over time. We now know that life on earth began with bacteria some four billion years ago (though we don’t have a clear idea of how bacteria came to exist), and it has been evolving by means of mutation and natural selection ever since. We also know about the fine cellular structure of organisms, as well as the molecular structure of the genetic material. And we have a well-established theory of how organisms change over time (the aforementioned evolution by natural selection), as well as how individual organisms function biologically (blood flow, enzymes, digestion, photosynthesis, etc.) Granted, we don’t know everything about life–as we don’t know what preceded the big bang or how to integrate quantum physics and gravity—but we have made serious progress in understanding these three aspects of the biological world. Biology is well advanced in OSD studies. It is not that a student of the subject would have fundamental questions in these three areas about which biology has established nothing. What we expect of a reputable science is that it can tell us where its proprietary entities came from, how they are internally structured down to the microscopic level, and what explains change in them over time. Biology and physics satisfy these criteria.

            But what about psychology–can it boast comparable achievements? The short answer is no. What theory in psychology plays the role of big bang cosmology in physics and Darwinian evolution in biology? None: psychology has no theory of how minds as they currently exist came to be. The best it can do is piggyback on biology, but there is no explanatory theory of how minds with their characteristic properties came to be—subjectivity, consciousness, intentionality, reason, introspection, and more. How did these develop from more primitive traits? How did the whole process begin? If a mind is like a galaxy, how did the mental galaxy form? Psychology just accepts minds as they are, animal and human, but it doesn’t explain how they came to be, what triggered them, what shaped them. There is no origin story in psychology. What about structure? We can say what the parts of the mind are—the analogues of bodily organs—but we have nothing to say about the ultimate constituents of the mind, especially its hidden structure. People mumble about “bits” of information, as if these were the atoms of mentation, but really this is hand waving, not solid science. There are no microscopes of the mind, no diffraction chambers, no spectral analyses, no supercolliders. Psychology makes do with commonsense divisions into belief and desire, memory and perception, emotions and sensations; but there is no elaborated theory of fundamental constituents analogous to atoms and molecules, cells and DNA. We don’t know how our mental life is built up. And what about dynamics? How does psychology explain the flow of conscious thoughts or the changing behavior of the organism? What laws are cited to predict how one thought will follow another, or how emotions influence overall mental state, or how a subject will act in a novel situation? Psychologists like to talk about various “effects” (e.g. the Zeigarnik effect), but where is the analogue to Newton’s three laws of motion? We just don’t have a theory of how a psychological system changes over time; at best we have rough hints about what might lead to what (as in “laws of association”). Where is the unified theory of psychological dynamics? Where are the equations of thought and action? A physicist or biologist encountering psychology for the first time might wonder how the subject accounts for origin, structure, and dynamic change—the basic facts she is familiar with in her own discipline—but her psychology professor will have little to say about these questions. He will report some experiments, maybe some established “effects”, but he won’t have comprehensive theories to offer in these three areas. He won’t say, “I’m glad you asked that question because we have great theories of how minds originated, what composes them, and how they change with time”. If he is honest, he will mutter in a low voice, “Good question, we’re working in it”, perhaps followed by some boilerplate about psychology being a young science and all that (but is it really any younger than physics and biology?).

            Compare linguistics. Chomsky has long pointed out areas of ignorance in that field, mainly relating to the evolutionary origins of language and in the free use of language in speech (“performance”). The evolution of language is largely a mystery, especially the origins of the lexicon, and the stimulus-freedom of speech makes language use hard to subsume under predictive laws. Some progress has been made with linguistic structure, but even here it is reasonable to wonder whether we have reached linguistic bedrock. So linguistics has not achieved what the established sciences have. Linguistics is really a branch of psychology, and it looks as if psychology in general has the limitations Chomsky finds in this branch of it. There is some grasp of structure, basically extrapolated from commonsense psychology (including commonsense linguistics), though it has nothing like the depth we find in physics and biology. But the origins of the language faculty in evolutionary history, and how that faculty is manifested in action, are shrouded in mystery. Whether the mystery is temporary or permanent, contingent or necessary, is another question; what is clear is that psychology and linguistics do not have the kinds of explanatory success found in the established sciences. And what holds for linguistics and psychology also holds for sociology and anthropology (and maybe economics): how social structures and cultures came about is unexplained except in the most rudimentary terms, and there is no generally accepted dynamic theory of how they change over time (Hegel and Marx anyone?). Human history is not like the history of the physical universe or of the biological world. Freud made some heroic efforts to do for psychology and human history what physics and biology have achieved in their domains, but his efforts are not generally lauded. The simple fact is that the psychological “sciences” are nowhere near as advanced as the physical and biological sciences. They suffer from OSD deficiency. This is not, of course, the fault of psychologists, who are just too lazy or incompetent to bring the subject to maturity; it is inherent in the subject itself. It is very difficult to explain how minds originated, what their compositional structure is, and how they change over time.  [1] I intend no aspersions on the field or its practitioners; I merely point out certain significant asymmetries. Presumably the mind has some sort of intelligible origin (it didn’t just spring into existence from nothing), and some sort of internal structure (the “cells of thought”), and some dynamic principles (not just stochastic chaos): but we are far from understanding what any of these might be. Nor do I see any relief on the horizon. It is pretty amazing that we have achieved the kind of insight in physics and biology that we have, and it didn’t happen overnight; there is really no guarantee that psychology will ever repeat these successes. Psychology might always remain a semi-science.  [2]

 

  [1] Note the contrast with the brain as an organ of the body. There is no more difficulty explaining its origin than other organs of the body; it is composed of cells that are composed of molecules; and its dynamic mode of operation is the nerve impulse that changes the brain’s state over time. We have a science of the brain, much as we have a science of matter and life, though of course it still has a long way to go. But that doesn’t provide us with the right level of explanation to account for the mind. Perhaps this is (partly) why people tend to favor neural reductionism: it enables psychology to mirror the theoretical successes of the other sciences.

  [2] That is not to say that it can’t be useful or illuminating, just that it may never mimic the OSD successes of physics and biology.

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Is Moral Responsibility Logically Possible?

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Is Moral Responsibility Logically Possible?

 

 

There is a well-known argument purporting to show that human beings are not morally responsible, i.e. appropriate recipients of praise and blame, which goes as follows.  [1] What you do results from the way you are—your psychology. But the way you are is fixed by heredity and environment—nature and nurture. You act as you do because of the influences on your psychology. But you had, and have, no control over those influences: you are not responsible for your genes and upbringing. These are given to you independently of your will. But if that is so, how can you be held responsible for what you do, since it results from factors beyond your control? Your criminal tendencies are determined by what you were born with and the environmental influences brought to bear on you; they are not the upshot of your will (decision, intention). But they are what incline you to criminal acts—others may not be so inclined. It is just your bad luck that you are the way you are. You can’t be blamed for it, any more than a falling tree can be blamed for crushing you. You can’t help being the way you are. Thus you are not morally responsible for what you do.

            There is much to be said about this argument, but I want to focus on a specific question: Does it show that human beings are not morally responsible or that no being could be morally responsible? Our desires are fixed by heredity and environment, and hence are not our responsibility, but is that a logical truth? Let me first note that the question generalizes to prudential responsibility: we also take ourselves to be proper objects of praise and blame according as we behave prudently or imprudently, but isn’t this determined by factors outside our control, namely our genes and upbringing. So how can we be held responsible for whether we behave prudently? Do we think animals are proper objects of prudential praise and blame? Do we say to the cat, “It was foolish of you to climb that tree—you have only your self to blame”? But why are humans different given that they too have their psychological nature fixed by causal factors beyond their control? It may be said that humans can resist the desires they are given, but how do they resist except by the psychological capacities also given to them by nature or nurture? Whether you have a strong will or a weak will is a matter of the constitution you are given by nature and nurture and is not “up to you”: it comes from having the right genes or the right upbringing. Some people are more prone to addiction than others, but this is not something they have chosen; it is just part of their given nature, and not subject to praise and blame. So we are not prudentially responsible and also not morally responsible. Responsibility presupposes the causa sui (self-causation, self-determination), but humans are not self-caused; they are caused by factors outside themselves. Even if we are partly self-created, we are not wholly so, and thus anything about us that is not self-created (most of it) is not a candidate for assessment of responsibility, moral or prudential.

            This argument seems powerful in the case of human beings and other animals, but does it show that all possible beings lack responsibility? One might wonder about God: can God not be praised or blamed because he doesn’t choose his own nature (assuming that he doesn’t)? If God is just made the way he is, actions resulting from his nature are not up to him; they simply flow from his given nature (e.g. being all good). But this seems like a suspect result: is the notion of responsibility so flawed that not even God can count as responsible? If God performs a virtuous act and we want to praise him, should we refrain from doing so on the ground that God’s nature is not the result of his will? And how could God cause his own nature except by already having some sort of nature, in which case he is not responsible for that? Isn’t the argument proving too much? Consider a species of being with the following property: they decide what desire set to possess. They are like beings in the Original Position in that the desires they will have in life are not fixed by factors outside their control but by their own decisions: no heredity, no environment, just their own acts of will. Suppose some choose a virtuous set of desires, being attracted by the idea of sainthood and dazzled by the Form of the Good; while others choose less elevated desires, feeling the appeal of a life of wine, women and song, which they think will be a lot more fun than a life of bloodless virtue. They then set out on their lives and act according to the desires they have chosen: saints and sinners, respectively. Now when the question of praise and blame arises they can hardly reply by asserting that their desires were not up to them, since they were. They chose them: their desires were self-determined. These beings choose the personality type they possess. So they can’t dodge the question of responsibility by claiming non-self-determination of desires. So on the face of it moral responsibility is logically possible.

            This doesn’t help humans, of course, since their desires are not self-determined (except perhaps marginally), but at least it shows that the concept of responsibility is not hopelessly confused and contradictory. We have discovered empirically that human desire has certain sorts of cause, which disqualify humans from responsibility for their actions, but the concept itself is viable and applicable to possible beings (maybe God, my imaginary species). But it may be objected that this is wrong because a decision about what desires to have must issue from other desires over which the agent has no control. I said that one group chooses virtuous desires while another group chooses more worldly desires that might well lead them into temptation: but on what basis did they so decide? Mustn’t they have had certain second-order desires to go for one set of first-order desires rather than another? Here is where things get messy and murky, philosophically speaking. Is it really logically necessary that such second-order desires must exist in order for a decision about first-order desires to be possible? Couldn’t my beings simply opt for one set of desires and not the other at random or on a whim or because of a considered judgment about what sort of life they deemed more valuable? A philosophical theory of motivation is now driving the argument not the empirical facts of human nature. So my point is to make a firm distinction between thisargument and the argument that applies to human beings: that latter argument seems solid given the facts of human nature, but the other argument begs many conceptual questions about the nature of motivation. It threatens to turn into this argument: Every psychological being must have a nature that is not determined by the decisions of that being, since all decisions rest on prior psychological facts; so no psychological being can ever be responsible for its actions. Whether that argument is sound or not—or well-formulated enough to be debated—it is not the same as the argument that moral responsibility is not possible in a being whose (first-order) desires do not result from its will. Intuitively, the possible beings I described are responsible for their actions in a way that we are not, and it takes a fancy philosophical argument to undermine that conviction—the idea that it is an a prioriconceptual truth that all decisions rest on antecedent desires (in some sense of “desire”). The important point is that the possible beings can’t excuse themselves from blame for bad actions by insisting that their desires have causes beyond their control, since they chose them. Suppose they can at any moment revise their desire set simply by choosing to do so, but they refuse to make that choice—they choose to keep on having desires that lead them to bad acts. How can they defend themselves by claiming that they can’t alter their desires? They can; they just choose not to. They keep succumbing to an addictive desire that is causing havoc in their life while they could simply wish the desire away (as we cannot): they can’t plead that the desire is beyond their control. They are the exact opposite of us so far as will and desire are concerned; so it can’t be that we are on a par when it comes to responsibility. Intuitively, they are responsible for their addictive behavior, while a human baby born with a stubborn addiction to heroin is not. In the sense in which humans are not responsible, they are responsible; so the concept has possible application. This explains why we have the concept, given that it doesn’t apply to us: we simply had mistaken ideas about the etiology of human desire (as opposed to a confused concept), and now we realize that human desire originates in facts outside of human will—we can’t in fact choose to revise our desires (or our proneness to give in to them). We have discovered the empirical psychological fact that human psychology is (largely) the result of heredity and environment, and not decision in vacuo.

            What undermines responsibility is the recognition that our ability to refrain from acting on desire is not something that results from choice but from factors we don’t and can’t control (genes, upbringing), but this doesn’t apply in cases stipulated to involve freely chosen desires—here the existence and force of desire is subject to the agent’s will. So we can describe coherent cases in which agents are responsible for their actions, pending some proof that even in such cases there is an ultimate lack of responsibility. In other words, it takes an abstract and rather obscure philosophical argument to undermine responsibility even in these kinds of cases. Maybe that argument could be produced, but it would require premises that exceed what is necessary to undermine human moral responsibility.  [2]   

 

  [1] In recent years Galen Strawson has defended this argument, but many others have too, including Nietzsche.

  [2] This essay was prompted by a remark I heard from a woman commenting on the Bill Cosby case: she said that he clearly had a psychological problem that led to his sexual assaults but that he should have sought help to get over that problem, thus implying that he may not have been responsible for the assaults but he was responsible for not seeking help to remove the desires that led to them. The same might be said of someone with a drug addiction, especially if removing the desires in question is not that difficult.

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Is Descriptive Metaphysics Possible?

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                                    Is Descriptive Metaphysics Possible?

 

 

 

Strawson draws his famous distinction between two types of metaphysics in these words: “Descriptive metaphysics is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world, revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure”. This formulation raises puzzling questions. One might have thought that descriptive metaphysics (hereafter DM) aims to describe the actual structure of the world, since that is generally the aim of metaphysics (or ontology); but Strawson inserts the words “our thought about”—so that DM is describing the “structure of our thought”. Thought is an attribute of persons, a psychological attribute. So DM is concerned to describe an aspect of human psychology, not the world outside of human psychology. Our thought is about the world (what else could it be about?), but DM focuses on thought itself, not the world it purports to be about.

Two questions now arise: (a) why is DM construed to be about human psychology? and (b) what is meant by the “structure of thought”? With respect to (a), the natural objection will be that DM, so characterized, is not a type of metaphysics (a general philosophical theory of reality) but a type of psychology (a description of human thought). DM would therefore be wrongly so called: it is not a general description of the world (a metaphysics) but a general description of the human mind. Maybe answering question (b) can help with this objection, depending on what is meant by the “structure” of thought. It is hard to know what Strawson intends by this word, given that “structure” is usually opposed to “content”. Presumably he does not mean the logical form or grammatical structure of thoughts, since that will not bear on what the subject matter of thought is. Nor can he mean some sort of psychological theory of thought—such as an imagistic theory, or a language of thought theory, or a division into conscious and unconscious thought. If he had written “language” and not “thought” into his definition of DM, we might have naturally taken his talk of “structure” that way—as grammatical or logical structure—but that is hardly the right basis for metaphysics. No, Strawson must mean by “structure” content—what it is that we think. He uses “structure” to mean something like “general” or “basic”, not “local” or “particular”. DM is not about our thoughts concerning weasels and warblers but about our thoughts concerning material bodies in general, as well as space, time, persons, events, causation, and such other typical metaphysical topics. So his idea is that DM describes what we think—the content of it—in very general or basic terms. It will tell us, for example, that people think there are material bodies in space and time, and also persons, with events occurring, and causal relations between the events. It will not tell us that there are such things, just that people think there are. As Strawson modestly says, DM is “content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world”—content to say what we in fact think, without trying to discover what is objectively the case (he could have written “content merely to describe the actual structure of our thought”).    

            But that project is not, properly speaking, metaphysics, which should endeavor to tell us what is the case, not merely what we habitually take to be the case. What Strawson calls “descriptive metaphysics” is simply not a type of metaphysics—it is a type of psychology or anthropology. It might be pursued using standard psychological or anthropological methods: surveys, experiments, even brain science. It would try to discover what it is that people universally think about reality at a basic level. That task has no logical bearing on what is really the case—it is just the attempt to find out what humans in fact believe. Psychologists do investigate this kind of question: they seek the genetically fixed basic concepts and beliefs that humans share; and they find that concepts like material body, person, space, time, causation, and animal show up everywhere. But they don’t take themselves to be doing metaphysics (that’s a job for philosophers), just empirical psychology. To be doing metaphysics one would need to claim (at least) that such beliefs are true: but that is to go beyond merely describing what beliefs people have, and hence beyond what DM, as defined by Strawson, is intended to achieve. His aim, as he clearly states, is the modest one of merely describing human thought.

The problem with this formulation can be brought out by considering other areas in which the Strawsonian distinction might be applied: what about the idea of descriptive ethics, or descriptive philosophy of mind, or descriptive logic? In those cases the project would be to describe the “actual structure of our thought” about value, mind, and logical validity: what do we in fact think about these various areas? No doubt such a subject could be pursued, and it might turn up something of value, but it would not be a type of ethics, or philosophy of mind, or logic. It would tell us what people think in these areas, but not what is true in them; and surely, as philosophers, we want to know what is true about value, mind, and logic—not merely what people think is true. For they might be quite wrong, and anyway that is not our proper subject matter—we are interested in the thing itself not in people’s beliefs about it. What would we think if someone proposed a new type of physics called “descriptive physics”, the job of which is to describe what people think about the physical world? We might regard this as an interesting venture in anthropology, but we would not suppose that they had identified a new type of physics—which concerns what is true of the physical world, not what people think is true. What they think is often false or incomplete, and anyway physical belief is not our proper subject matter—the physical world is.

The upshot is that the concept of “descriptive metaphysics”, as defined by Strawson, is a confused and misbegotten concept: it seems to denote a type of metaphysics, but it does not, being really a misleading label for a type of psychology or anthropology. Maybe this type of psychology would be of interest to philosophers if it engaged in some substantial conceptual analysis, but it would still be psychology unless it claimed that our conceptual scheme (another phrase of Strawson’s) actually reflects the way reality objectively is. Only then would we ascend to the level of metaphysics: but then we would be doing much more than modestly and contentedly describing “the structure of our thought”. And some reason would have to be given for supposing that what we think is true, as opposed to other metaphysical views that might be proposed. Actively endorsing our conceptual scheme carries much greater intellectual commitment than merely describing what it contains. After all, people often believe a load of rubbish.

            This brings us to “revisionary metaphysics”: does that concept fare any better upon close examination? Of course, all metaphysical systems are revisionary in one sense—they are rivals of each other and aim to supplant the opposing system. But Strawson obviously means revisionary with respect to the metaphysics of common sense—that system of belief that he thinks will be revealed by “descriptive metaphysics”. That is, he supposes that some metaphysical systems contradict the metaphysical beliefs held, explicitly or implicitly, by ordinary people; and if so, these systems are to be called “revisionary metaphysics”. Strawson cites Aristotle and Kant as examples of non-revisionary metaphysicians, and Leibniz and Berkeley as revisionary metaphysicians. So some philosophers endorse the metaphysics of the ordinary person and some reject it, according to Strawson.

All this is highly problematic. First, it is exceedingly unclear whether a given philosopher’s metaphysical system really contradicts common sense: Berkeley notoriously insists that he is at one with common sense, merely differing from its materialist interpreters; and Leibniz might say the same of his system—that nothing in what we actually believe in common sense is really inconsistent with the Monadology. Where does Plato fall? Didn’t he think he was in conformity with common sense, since the existence of universals is taken to be implicit in our ordinary language and thought? Universals are not taken to be alien imports from outside, but to be woven into our ordinary practices. What about David Lewis’s modal realism? What about Hume’s view of causation and the self? Is Descartes’ dualism inconsistent with common sense? I can’t think of a single clear case of a metaphysical system that flatly contradicts ordinary belief, and is taken by its proponents so to do. Indeed, such systems often derive their support from evidence drawn from within our ordinary beliefs and commitments: they are offered as interpretations of common sense, and hence are sensitive to how we spontaneously speak and think. Surely metaphysicians characteristically oppose other metaphysicians, while hoping not to violate basic assumptions of common sense. If they preserve nothing of ordinary belief, they have no leg to stand on, and hence have no claim on our credence. They might jettison a part of common sense, but they cannot realistically reject the whole thing—and in practice they never do. So it is difficult to see who might count as a hard-core revisionary metaphysician in Strawson’s sense.

            Strawson makes a fundamental error in the way he sets up the contrast he is aiming to capture: he supposes that our ordinary thought actually contains substantial metaphysical commitments or theories. But it doesn’t: it merely commits us to various kinds of entities, properties, and relations. Thus, as he says, we believe in bodies, space, time, persons, events, causal relations, colors, shapes, and so on. But those are not metaphysicalcommitments; they are merely the commonsense things that metaphysics tries to provide theories of. We ordinarily believe in tables, chairs, and other bodies, but the metaphysician tries to tell us what the nature of these things is, which is clearly a further question. Are they mind-independent entities or are they possibilities of perception? Are they reducible to their atomic components? What is their precise relation to space and to events? We ordinarily believe in persons, but what exactly is a person—a body, a brain, a soul, a connected sequence of mental states, or an ontological primitive? We ordinarily believe in space and time, but are space and time absolute or relative, finite or infinite, continuous or granular? We ordinarily believe in events, but are they a separate ontological category or can they be reduced to objects, properties, and times? We ordinarily believe in causation, but how is causation to be analyzed–by means of necessity, counterfactuals, or constant conjunction? We ordinarily believe that objects have colors and shapes, but are these qualities objective or subjective? In all these cases the metaphysician is discussing something accepted by common sense; he is not arguing with common sense—not usually anyway. He is explaining common sense not seeking to revise it.

The mistake is to suppose that our ordinary thought contains actual metaphysical theses—as that everything is mental, or everything is material, or abstract objects exist, or causation can be defined counterfactually, or objects are mind-independently colored. Then a metaphysical system could be genuinely revisionary of what we ordinarily believe about the world. But what we have are ordinary beliefs about ordinary things that are up for metaphysical interpretation and theory. Strawson appears to suppose that a commitment to ordinary things is already a type of metaphysics, but it isn’t—it is just the subject matter of metaphysics. That is precisely why metaphysicians can plausibly claim to be in conformity with common sense, because common sense is not committed with respect to the usual range of metaphysical positions (say, materialism versus idealism). Common sense underdetermines metaphysics, in the sense that it is not committed to any specific metaphysical system—merely to the entities such systems seek to explain or analyze.  Strawson may well be right that bodies, persons, space, time, and so on, are indispensable commitments of our conceptual scheme: but such things are the topics of metaphysics not the results of metaphysics. If someone were to assert outright that there are no bodies, persons, space or time, etc, but only lumps of floating ectoplasm, then he would certainly be revising common sense. But no actual metaphysical system in the history of philosophy ever maintains such crazy things—for what conceivable ground could one have for asserting such a proposition? Such systems claim, rather, to say what these generally acknowledged things are (what their nature is), without trying to deny their existence or replace them with a brand new set of objects and properties.

            The idea of revisionary metaphysics, as Strawson understands the concept, is therefore entirely toothless and quite irrelevant to the metaphysical disputes that have occupied the history of philosophy. It is simply not a useful or well-defined notion. Nor, as we have seen, is the notion of descriptive metaphysics useful or well defined. So what is the right conception of metaphysics? The answer is easy: it is the attempt to describe the general structure of the world. This is not the same as the attempt to describe the general structure of our thought about the world; nor is it committed to supposing that metaphysics, so conceived, might contradict common sense. It might, wisely, be completely neutral as to whether it is consistent with common sense, holding that common sense is simply not metaphysically opinionated; or it might strive to demonstrate consonance with common sense. But what it actually aims to do is just to discover what is true of reality, without particularly caring one way or the other about its relation to common sense belief. It certainly will not see itself as being “content to describe the actual structure of our thought”, but will seek instead to assert truths about reality outside of thought—claiming, say, that the world is completely material. We might call this, just to have a label, “veridical metaphysics”—truth-seeking metaphysics. It fits neither of Strawson’s categories, and is really the only kind of metaphysics there is. This subject is the analogue of ethics or epistemology or philosophy of mind or physics or geography. None of these disciplines could call themselves “descriptive X” or “revisionary X” in Strawson’s sense: they are neither descriptive of what people think nor intentionally revisionary of what people think—they simply seek to discover the truth about their domain of interest. Whether that truth contradicts common sense, or supports it, is of no interest to them, since their aim is simply to describe (and possibly explain) reality as it is.

            None of this is to deny that the metaphysician may (or must) appeal to common sense in coming up with his theories: that is a question of methodology or evidence. What it does deny is that we can define metaphysics as describing what people think (or “the structure of our thought”). That’s not what it is about—its subject matter, its domain of interest. Typically, a metaphysician will develop a theory of reality by appealing to the way we naturally think or talk about it–for example, theories about modality; but he does not suppose that his topic is human thought—his topic is the nature of necessity itself. If Strawson had said that the descriptive metaphysician aims to describe the general structure of the world by appeal to the structure of our thoughts about it, then he would have defined an intelligible and useful concept; his mistake was expressly to limit DM to what humans think, i.e. a psychological matter, without regard to the truth about the world. Perhaps at some level that is what he really meant, but it is certainly not what he said. And the point is not trivial, because the project I just defined is precisely the one that would draw the fire of positivists and other skeptics about metaphysics: for how, they would ask, can we ever verify such speculative claims about the general structure of reality, and how can common sense belief ever be evidence for what is true of the objective mind-independent world? Strawson’s project, by contrast, has the look of something not open to such objections, since it limits itself to verifiable matters concerning what humans believe: it is perfectly empirical, verifiable, and even scientific. We just have to find out what people in fact believe—we don’t have to engage in unverifiable abstract speculations about reality.

The trouble is that this innocuous project is simply not a kind of metaphysics; so Strawson has done nothingto rehabilitate traditional (or even non-traditional) metaphysics. He is talking about something else entirely. He is talking, in effect, about folk psychology, not about the fundamental nature of reality. It is ironic that he is often celebrated for bringing metaphysics back into philosophy, after its banishment by the positivists and ordinary language philosophers. If he did have such an influence, it was contrary to his official doctrines and words. It might be thought that he smuggled metaphysics (the veridical kind) back in under the guise of something else entirely: he described it as merely reporting what people think, but in fact he was talking about the genuine article—thus allowing philosophers to go back to what they enjoyed with a clear conscience. The idea of descriptive metaphysics made real metaphysics seem acceptable to people, but they misunderstood what Strawson actually said, and then proceeded to carry on where they had left off. Real metaphysics came back, but only by disguising itself as Strawson’s modest and empirically verifiable “descriptive metaphysics”.

            Strawson makes two basic mistakes, which lead him into the misconceived distinction I have criticized. The first is to suppose that common sense (“our conceptual scheme,” “the structure of our thought”) contains a determinate metaphysics that might compete with standard metaphysical systems—such as the view that bodies are possibilities of sensation (phenomenalism), or that persons are a primitive ontological category (Strawson’s own metaphysical position), or that space and time are absolute and mind-independent, or that causation is a matter of constant conjunction, or that events are logical constructions from objects, properties, and times. If it did contain such a determinate metaphysics, it would be obviously inconsistent with a variety of metaphysical theories: but that appears not to be so. Common sense is just not that specific and metaphysically sophisticated. It accepts the existence of various things, but it ventures no opinion on their ultimate nature. The second mistake is to conflate describing our conceptual scheme with endorsing it; or rather, not to keep these as separate as they need to be kept. It is one thing to say what we think; it is quite another to declare what we think to be true. So even if common sense contained a determinate metaphysics, capable of clashing with typical metaphysical systems, that would not show that its metaphysics was correct. To reach the latter conclusion one would need substantial further argument, going well beyond the official business of DM. These assumptions are what would be needed to show that so-called descriptive metaphysics was really a kind of metaphysics (when supplemented with the veridicality claim), and to show that revisionary metaphysics had something to get its teeth into in attempting to revise common sense metaphysics. As it is, neither assumption holds up under examination. The conclusion, then, is that DM is not possible (as a type of metaphysics) and that RM is ill defined. All we have are different (veridical-type) metaphysical systems, proposed by theoretical philosophers, clashing with each other—just as things were before Strawson introduced his influential but misconceived distinction.

            The right thing to say is that all metaphysics is descriptive (of reality) and revisionary (of other metaphysics). No metaphysics is merely descriptive of our thought, that being part of psychology, anthropology, or possibly philosophy of mind. How much metaphysics can plausibly be read into common sense is at best moot. We are committed to various kinds of entities and properties, to be sure, but whether these commitments reach the level of metaphysics proper is dubious at best—substantial theory construction and interpretation is required before we can move from common sense commitments to real metaphysics. It is highly implausible to claim that common sense selects one metaphysical system over other competing metaphysical systems. What Strawson calls “the structure of our thought” (whatever exactly that might be) does not yield a unique and recognizable metaphysical system. Nor is it credible to suppose that common sense is fixed and impermeable to outside supplementation or even revision. Clearly, science has entered common sense at various points, changing it quite fundamentally: the theory of evolution, the extent of the universe, the nature of motion, gravity, electricity, etc. These additions have altered our common sense views of force and causation, of the nature of matter, of how animals came to exist, and so on. Our common sense views of animals and material bodies have changed substantially as a result of biology and physics. Our conceptual scheme is not as conservative and static as Strawson sometimes suggests, though at a very abstract level it has been stable for many thousands of years. His picture appears to be that our ordinary thoughts provide the last word on general questions about reality, but that is far too sanguine a view of what ordinary thought comprises. Also, defending such a view would require doing something quite different from the job Strawson assigns to descriptive metaphysics. It would require a systematic evaluation of ordinary thought, not merely recording what we do in point of fact think. I have said nothing about how such an evaluation might proceed or where it might lead; my point has been just to distinguish it sharply from the project Strawson labels “descriptive metaphysics”.  That project is entirely descriptive, not evaluative.

             Let me make a final point about epistemology. If we try to generalize Strawson’ distinction to epistemology, the picture changes because of the role of skepticism. Skepticism can quite legitimately be described as “revisionary epistemology” because it clearly contradicts many of our ordinary beliefs about knowledge and justification: we think we know and can justify a great many things that the skeptic says we cannot know and justify. Our common sense epistemology is quite firmly committed, and so skepticism can easily be seen to fly in its face. So we should have no objection to calling skepticism “revisionary epistemology”. What about “descriptive epistemology”? It is a perfectly feasible enterprise: find out what we ordinarily believe about questions of knowledge and justification. This may be worthwhile and interesting, but again it would be a non sequitur to move from such information to claims about what really is known or justified—and the skeptic would obviously contest such a move. All this is quite above board and sensible; in particular, we can read a clear epistemology into our ordinary beliefs, so that skepticism can be seen to clash with common sense. It isn’t that common sense is indeterminate with respect to whether we know ordinary facts about the external environment.

I suspect this model was influencing Strawson and his followers, with revisionary metaphysics playing the role of skepticism. That would explain why he set the issues up as he did. But the analogy is imperfect, because the alleged clash between common sense and specific metaphysical views is either unclear or non-existent. Metaphysical theories are offered as theories of the world that may or may not fit with common sense, and which are sometimes justified by appeal to common sense belief (or possibly by science, or direct metaphysical insight); but skepticism is offered expressly as a criticism of common sense, and hence as explicitly revisionary. If you are a philosopher who has little time for skepticism, you will be inclined to go with the epistemological opinions of common sense—as in fact Strawson was himself. This may then color your views about metaphysical theories, which you will see as skeptical with regard to common sense metaphysics. But the cases are crucially dissimilar, and the conceptual apparatus used to deal with one (epistemology) will not carry over smoothly to the other (metaphysics). If so, Strawson’s distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics owes its origin to a misplaced obsession with skepticism.  [1]

 

C

  [1] For the record, Peter Strawson was my teacher and friend, and I had (and have) great admiration for him as a philosopher. Individuals is a brilliant book.

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