Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
John Oliver explains the issue of gerrymandering.
The problem with celebrity profiles.
Did Elizabeth Anscombe do away with all moral philosophy, ancient and modern? (Not really, but interesting point of view…)
Racial attitudes and income made the largest impact on the likelihood to vote for Trump in 2016.
Can anything save us fromĀ the consequences of unknown unknowns?
The importance of being an epistemologist in the post-truth era.
The real Spartacus and the importance of a philosophy of life: the story of Andy Whitfield.
Can democracy survive the Internet? Good question. (Which I am, of course, asking on the Internet…)
The most and least educated religious groups. No surprises there, except for atheists, perhaps?
A comedian takes on scientists who think the rest of us are stupid.
Footnotes to Plato 
Re Gerrymandering, they’ve been a number of articles recently like this one in Quanta https://www.quantamagazine.org/20170404-gerrymandering-math-standard/
but none is both informative and entertaining as Oliver.
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Celebrity profiles? With a hat tip to what you said a couple of weeks ago about classical logical fallacies, Massimo, I think there’s always at least a bit of ad populum behind most such stories.
The unknown unknowns? To tie back to politics, leading Senate Dems, like Sen. MBNA Joe Biden and Sen. Hillary Clinton, pushed hard FOR the bankruptcy bill.
The education study? Would have expected atheists somewhat higher, but, now, living outside of a major metro area and knowing atheists and agnostics exist “out here,” I’m not surprised they’re not at the top, either. Gnu Atheists, though, will be crushed.
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Answer for gerrymandering? Elect at least part of Congress off a national list.
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The Internet, especially with “devices,” the Internet of Things, etc.? To riff on the Spartacus link, it’s today’s bread and circuses. Julius Caesar would drooled first, then gotten to work, with a tool like this. (Combined with the selective blocking of access that today’s dictatorial societies do, of course.)
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Interesting!
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I didn’t really suggest that Anscombe had done away with all moral philosophy, period. Rather, I wanted to head off the too-easy interpretation of Anscombe as saying, “Given that modern philosophers are not going to re-embrace divine command ethics in significant numbers, we may as well go back to the Greeks, although that will involve dropping the required/forbidden dimension of morality. (Insofar as it is dependent on a law conception of ethics.)” My claim — and I think it is Anscombe’s claim too — is that such a move is not really available to us, insofar as modern philosophers are no more inclined to re-embrace the sort of teleology necessary for virtue ethics as they are inclined to re-embrace divine command notions of requiredness/forbiddenness.
I know that some have held out hope that the increasing understanding that biological explanations have an ineliminable teleological dimension may allow us to substitute a modern teleological view of nature and thus develop a distinctively modern virtue ethics. I am not currently of the view that there is enough teleology to get out of biology for this task — it would have to be one that allows us to recover an axiologically thick conception of a “fact” — but it is something I am open to, which is why I proposed to Massimo that we do a dialogue on biology and teleology, which we will do after we first have done one discussing his new book.
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Speaking of the end of Daniel’s last comment, Massimo’s one posted link from last Friday about the environmental constraints on biological evolution, never really got comment.
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Dan,
Yes, I oversimplified your thesis in order to draw attention to the piece… But in fact I disagree with Anscombe on both counts: I don’t think one needs either a divine command to articulate a modern ethical position like Kantianism or utilitarianism, nor does one need a thick conception of teleology to defend virtue ethics.
Think of it this way: modern scientists talk about “laws” of nature, a concept they inherited from Christianity, and in particular from Newton’s metaphysics. But it’s not like a modern scientist has to believe in God in order to talk meaningfully about laws of nature.
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I’ve heard that objection before, Massimo — Shelly Kagan made it to WLC in a debate. But I don’t think the analogy is a good one. To obey the laws of logic is a hypoethetical, not a categorical imperative. Obeying them is not required and violating them is not forbidden, other than relative to certain desired outcomes.
Anscombe’s point is not that laws in general, must have law givers. Her position is that laws of a certain sort — those which require/forbid categorically — require law givers, and not just any law givers. She rejects — rightly — the idea that one could substitute a contractarian notion of law giving for the divine one, precisely for this reason.
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Dan,
I don’t want to go too far into this discussion because as you know we’ll soon tape a video chat about it. But as far as I’m concerned there are no categorical imperatives in morality, only conditional ones. But I’m not a contractarian because I do think there are objective features of the world, and in particular of human nature, that make it somewhat non arbitrary which type(s) of ethics do and don’t work for human beings.
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Massimo: Sticking strictly to Anscombe, then I don’t see how you disagree with her. You simply don’t think that any imperative, moral or otherwise, has the force of requiredness/forbiddenness, in any absolute sense. The only real disagreement with her you would have, then, is over the meaning of the word ‘moral’ as it is used in modern frameworks. Notice that she disambiguates several senses of the term, in MMP, and grants that in the Greek sense, it has no such implications whatsoever — that for Aristotle, the “moral” is distinguished by its subject matter, not its force.
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Is it just me or is anyone else feeling cheated by polls like Pew’s on “The most and least educated U.S. religious groups”? This is somehow helpful? Big shrug . . .Perhaps Robert Newman or John Oliver can weigh in on the humor of, what to me, this seeming fascination with endlessly correlating lego-labels and concluding insightful information is being conveyed. And the same goes for yet another post-mortem on Trump election.
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Dan,
“in the Greek sense, it has no such implications whatsoever — that for Aristotle, the “moral” is distinguished by its subject matter, not its force”
Yes, exactly.
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Re: internet and democracy:
One problem with the internet is effective monopolies (e.g. Google, Facebook, Twitter). One can argue that as private companies they can operate as they like, but if they are near monopolies then perhaps we should require that they operate in the public interest.
Specific example: if you want to use Facebook or Twitter to call for the execution of an apostate from Islam, as thousands actually do, then those companies will see nothing wrong with that. If, though, you’re an ex-Muslim and want to use Facebook or Twitter to call for reform of Islam, then those companies will often take down your pages and close your accounts because they “violate community standards”.
That’s simply because those companies want customers, and there are a couple of billion Muslims who might get offended and boycott you, but not that many ex-Muslim activists (since, of course being an ex-Muslim activist in most Islamic countries gets you imprisoned or killed). Thus Facebook will, for example, take down whatever “blasphemous” pages the government of Pakistan asks it to, because it fears being excluded from Pakistan more than it fears being boycotted by free-speech activists in the West.
Sadly, free-speech activists in the West are getting to be rather too few for the health of democracy, given the wholesale abandonment of free-speech principles by “the left”.
It is widely accepted in the West that governments should prevent misuse of monopoly power by companies. It might be time that governments started imposing First Amendment free-speech principles on any social media company with market share above some threshold. Ditto university campuses while we’re on.
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Re: moral philosophy. “… modern moral philosophy and its contemporary progeny suffer from two fatal problems which, when combined, leave a radically subjectivist sentimentalism as the only real option in ethics …”
Yes. Maybe at some point everyone will realise that non-cognitivism is the answer.
Massimo,
But a “law” of nature is purely descriptive, being a sufficiently accurate description of how nature is. Anything along those lines would not get you normative virtue ethics (though it could get you virtue ethics as a description of how humans think).
Do and don’t work in terms of enabling humans to prosper? That’s entirely true, and is also a purely descriptive statement.
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The Robert Newman interview was amusing, enlightening, and spot on target. Scientistic science popularizers frequently seem to be arguing that being human is some sort of disease that ‘science’ can cure (in quotes because this shouldn’t really be a function of science, and relies heavily on developments in technology rather than well-supported theory).
Is comedy the new intellectualism? Frequently seems so these days.
Meanwhile: Can democracy survive the Internet? No.
Celebrities: Since the celebrity industry no longer depends on its commodities actually achieving anything other than public notice itself, there’s nothing of interest in it except for those who have no lives of their own.
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Coel,
“But a “law” of nature is purely descriptive, being a sufficiently accurate description of how nature is. Anything along those lines would not get you normative virtue ethics (though it could get you virtue ethics as a description of how humans think).”
As I’ve explained several times, my position is intermediate between your “purely descriptive” (which I don’t think anyone, including you, actually believes, it’s just an intellectual game) and a strong sense of prescriptive (as: it’s a divine law!).
Ethics is prescriptive in the specific sense of conditional imperatives. IF you want to be a member of a flourishing human community (given that human beings have such and such characteristics) THEN certain ethical precepts apply. If you don’t want to be such a member, go live on a deserted island or risk jail if your behavior turns out to be socio- or psychopathic.
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I question whether Donald Rumsfeld has “further articulated the problem of ignorance” (to quote Vyse, the author of “Can Anything Save Us From Unintended Consequences?”), by his identification of the category of “unknown unknowns”. In other words, there is a three-fold division, and this latter category is the most
“difficult” or problematic.
Since humans are not omniscient, the category of unknowns will always be present, and this category dwarfs everything we do know or even can know. Of course, the “known unknowns” doesn’t not exhaust the “unknown category” but I hardly find his addition of “unknown unknowns” insightful.
However that may be, in what follows, I will assume his analysis [if only for the sake of argument . . . :^) ].
In the compound expression that Rumsfeld “ruminates” on, each term has two forms: 1) the positive term “known”; 2) the negative term “unknown” (where the prefix un- functions like an alpha privative, e.g., moral, a-moral, etc.).
Rumsfeld discusses three possible combinations:
known knowns
known unknowns
unknown unknowns
If each term is binary, then combining them in a compound expression yields four possible combinations. The one that Rumsfeld omits is the following:
unknown knowns
Here I quote S. Zizek, the pyschoanalytic philosopher, with his analysis of Rumsfeld’s approach:
“What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: unknown knowns,” the things we don’t know that we know–which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say.
If Rumsfeld thinks that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the “unknown unknowns,” that is the threats from Saddam whose nature we cannot even suspect, then the Abu Ghraib scandal shows that the main dangers lie in the “unknown knowns” — the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and obscene practices we pretend not to know about, even though they form the background of our public values”: http://www.lacan.com/zizekrumsfeld.htm
Vyse does go on to talk about how “incentives” often interfere with decision-makers making good decisions. The specific example he cites has to do with abstinence-only sex education leading to higher teen pregnancy rates (as well as no decline in sexually-transmitted diseases). I live in a state (TX) where the state legislature has promoted abstinence-only sex education, and made access to contraception (including abortion) difficult. And consequently, TX has one of the higher teenage pregnancy rates among states.
Can Anything Save us From Unintended Consequences?” The answer lies not in arcane distinctions such as “known unknowns” vs. “unknown unknowns”, but in ignoring what we do know. When policy decisions are driven by rigid ideology (well-known examples: religious right dogma; neoconservative worldview, neoliberalism economics), well-known and predictable consequences will continue to happen.
But what about those genuine instances of unintended consequences (e.g., Israeli daycare example). If a consequence truly is unintended, that isn’t a problem. Policy decisions need to be subject to revision. It’s called the scientific method. In science, with advancing knowledge we are constantly revising and refining our initial hypothesis. It’s called progress. The unintended consequence that arose is now a “known.” Just learn from the new known and revise the policy. Let’s stop ignoring what we know.
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(Article on Anscombe) Historically, I think both Aristotle and Kant are misunderstood. Aristotle’s ethics are not conditional. Eudaimonia is desired BY NATURE by all men. Kant’s discussion of the foundation of morality is a priori so empirical legislation is beside the point. What is refuted is the Utilitarian interpretation of A and K.
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Hi Massimo,
In that case we’re in agreement. This is rare. š
Moral prescriptions are instrumental oughts deriving from human feelings, aims and values. (And we have those feelings because evolution has programmed us to be social and cooperative animals.) That is effectively emotivism is it not? If not, what’s the difference?
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Hi Massimo, I forgot to add, about this:
But this statement here …
“IF you want to be a member of a flourishing human community (given that human beings have such and such characteristics) THEN certain ethical precepts apply.”
… is entirely descriptive, is it not?
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On democracy and the internet: Moneyball applied to politics; cleverness/algorithms produce a successful formula, which worked very well in baseball for a few seasons, before every other team picked up on it, and then the richest ones went back to winning.
Ironic that one of the richest candidates ever won by finding the cheapest way to do it. Also that the Republicans, having found out how to win, are so divided about what they have to offer.
Democracy seems to contain a self-defeating tendency to form elites. One of the most democratic entities in existence, a jury of peers in a court case, begins by electing a foreman.
I believe firmly in democracy, but it’s hard not to be cynical about it sometimes. One way of looking at Trump is to recognize that he had the courage (or foolishness) to face the depths of his supporters ignorance and accept and ratify it. I have a personal response to this, as my maternal grandmother (1888-1976), who was very dear to me, was a quintessential Trump supporter decades before her time. She had six children, all brilliant, intellectual, and well-educated, and a husband who was quiet and wise, but she never met a rumor she didn’t believe. She mailed extreme right-wing propaganda to all her numerous grandchildren anonymously (but they all recognized the printing of her never-cleaned typewriter), and she was given to delivering opinions that made one cringe, e.g. “I can always recognize a Jew by looking at him.”
Obviously, my feelings about democracy are mixed. Everybody counts, or nobody counts; but I’m hoping that reason will prevail (though how it has managed to keep its head above water so far is a miracle).
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Jbonni,
“Aristotle’s ethics are not conditional. Eudaimonia is desired BY NATURE by all men”
Right, but human nature underdetermines specific ethical practices, and there certainly are some aberrant human beings (sociopaths) who have deviant desires. That’s why I prefer a formulation in terms of conditional imperatives constrained by a suitable notion of human nature.
Coel,
“But this statement here …
‘IF you want to be a member of a flourishing human community (given that human beings have such and such characteristics) THEN certain ethical precepts apply.’
… is entirely descriptive, is it not?”
It is what I mean by prescriptive. Since it is a conditional, it isn’t just describing something, it’s telling you that you have to do certain things, if you want to achieve a certain goal. Conditional statements are not usually understood as descriptive, but as (conditionally) prescriptive. That’s why they are referred to as (conditional) imperatives — as opposed to categorical ones.
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EJ ā Well, being human is some sort of disease, according to cynic bon mots like late-life Twain, Bierce, etc., but they didn’t propose scientism as the cure. Basically, they said there ain’t no cure.
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Hi Massimo,
In that case we may be differing merely about labeling. A statement such as: “if you want to get to Philadelphia, then you should turn left at the junction ahead” is a factual and descriptive statement about geography and road networks. It is equivalent to (and follows from) the equally descriptive statement: “at the junction ahead, the left road leads to Philadelphia, and the right road away from it”.
Anyone who sees ethics as descriptive would surely be counting such conditional statements as descriptive (absolutely no-one would deny their validity). And at that point ethics is completely naturalised.
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Dan:
If Anscombe argues that modern ethics has taken on board a lot of christian assumptions, then what can be said of non-christian cultures? How do they fit into this argument? At a folk moral level, I find that discussions with friends of mine who are Indian or Chinese rarely leads to any ethical disagreements. And if there are disagreements then it never has anything to do with culture.
Given that morals are clearly not absolutes and also just as clearly not arbitrary, do you think there is a cognitive problem in that we as humans have difficulty reasoning about such things?
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Coel,
Are you simply allergic to the word “prescriptive”? Of course ethics is naturalized. What else could it be? But there are pretty obviously uncontroversial “prescriptions” in the natural world, like laws, for instance.
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Bunsen Burner: It’s hard for me to answer you, because I have had the opposite experience with the people I know from non-Western cultures. There are profound disagreements and they almost always are revealed to be a function of differences in culture, which make possible different starting premises.
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Bunsen Burner: I also don’t know that I agree with your “clearlys.” I think I do agree with Anscombe that the distinctive sense of “moral” that is used by many people in the modern West does imply absolutes. That is, I agree with her regarding the common use of the term. The older Aristotelian sense, which does not imply that things are either required or forbidden is not the primary sense in which people use the moral ‘ought’ in modern Western culture.
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I still see the problem with ethics is that we overlook the real power of a relational ethics.
“Nature and the things in it are no longer conceived of as purposeful and the only objective characterizations of things are in terms of mathematically quantifiable magnitudes, which means that their qualitative characteristics have come to be understood as entirely subjective; as mere impressions in our minds.”
To me, this would be like arguing only atoms bouncing around are real and so properties like temperature, color, time, pressure, etc, are mere illusions. “Subjective impressions on our minds.”
As long as there are bottom up processes, there are top down consequences.
Emergence is an effect and if you have cause, you have effect.
Only if you have nothing, is there no effect. Not even mathematically platonic quantities and magnitudes. Which are abstractions, not absolutes.
A real problem with our society is that we take those abstract, mathematically quantifiable magnitudes far more seriously than the qualities that give them substance.
For example, you go to the store and get a couple bags of groceries, then hand the cashier some money. The groceries are real, tangible value, largely based on their qualities, as you wouldn’t value mush with the same caloric content as highly. While the money is an quantity of purely abstracted value.
The world is run today(rule by the banks) on the assumption that if we print enough money, the stuff we would buy with it will magically appear, but it doesn’t work like that. Abstractions are concepts derived from reality, not some foundational basis for it. They are tools of the mind, not Gods.
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