The epiphenomenalist wishes to preserve the integrity of physical science and the physical world, and appends those mental features that he cannot reduce. The parallelist preserves both realms intact, but denies all causal interaction between them. They run in harmony with each other, but not because their mutual influence keeps each other in line. That they should behave as if they were interacting would seem to be a bizarre coincidence. This is why parallelism has tended to be adopted only by those—like Leibniz—who believe in a pre-established harmony, set in place by God. The progression of thought can be seen as follows. Descartes believes in a more or less natural form of interaction between immaterial mind and material body. Malebranche thought that this was impossible naturally, and so required God to intervene specifically on each occasion on which interaction was required. Leibniz decided that God might as well set things up so that they always behaved as if they were interacting, without particular intervention being required. Outside such a theistic framework, the theory is incredible. Even within such a framework, one might well sympathise with Berkeley’s instinct that once genuine interaction is ruled out one is best advised to allow that God creates the physical world directly, within the mental realm itself, as a construct out of experience.
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Parallelism
The epiphenomenalist wishes to preserve the integrity of physical science and the physical world, and appends those mental features that he cannot reduce. The parallelist preserves both realms intact, but denies all causal interaction between them. They run in harmony with each other, but not because their mutual influence keeps each other in line. That they should behave as if they were interacting would seem to be a bizarre coincidence. This is why parallelism has tended to be adopted only by those—like Leibniz—who believe in a pre-established harmony, set in place by God. The progression of thought can be seen as follows. Descartes believes in a more or less natural form of interaction between immaterial mind and material body. Malebranche thought that this was impossible naturally, and so required God to intervene specifically on each occasion on which interaction was required. Leibniz decided that God might as well set things up so that they always behaved as if they were interacting, without particular intervention being required. Outside such a theistic framework, the theory is incredible. Even within such a framework, one might well sympathise with Berkeley’s instinct that once genuine interaction is ruled out one is best advised to allow that God creates the physical world directly, within the mental realm itself, as a construct out of experience.
Epiphenomenalism
If the reality of property dualism is not to be denied, but the problem of how the immaterial is to affect the material is to be avoided, then epiphenomenalism may seem to be the answer. According to this theory, mental events are caused by physical events, but have no causal influence on the physical. I have introduced this theory as if its point were to avoid the problem of how two different categories of thing might interact. In fact, it is, at best, an incomplete solution to this problem. If it is mysterious how the non-physical can have it in its nature to influence the physical, it ought to be equally mysterious how the physical can have it in its nature to produce something non-physical. But that this latter is what occurs is an essential claim of epiphenomenalism. (For development of this point, see Green (2003), 149–51). In fact, epiphenomenalism is more effective as a way of saving the autonomy of the physical (the world as ‘closed under physics’) than as a contribution to avoiding the need for the physical and non-physical to have causal commerce.
There are at least three serious problems for epiphenomenalism. First, as I indicated in section 1, it is profoundly counterintuitive. What could be more apparent than that it is the pain that I feel that makes me cry, or the visual experience of the boulder rolling towards me that makes me run away? At least one can say that epiphenomenalism is a fall-back position: it tends to be adopted because other options are held to be unacceptable.
The second problem is that, if mental states do nothing, there is no reason why they should have evolved. This objection ties in with the first: the intuition there was that conscious states clearly modify our behaviour in certain ways, such as avoiding danger, and it is plain that they are very useful from an evolutionary perspective.
Frank Jackson (1982) replies to this objection by saying that it is the brain state associated with pain that evolves for this reason: the sensation is a by-product. Evolution is full of useless or even harmful by-products. For example, polar bears have evolved thick coats to keep them warm, even though this has the damaging side effect that they are heavy to carry. Jackson’s point is true in general, but does not seem to apply very happily to the case of mind. The heaviness of the polar bear’s coat follows directly from those properties and laws which make it warm: one could not, in any simple way, have one without the other. But with mental states, dualistically conceived, the situation is quite the opposite. The laws of physical nature which, the mechanist says, make brain states cause behaviour, in no way explain why brain states should give rise to conscious ones. The laws linking mind and brain are what Feigl (1958) calls nomological danglers, that is, brute facts added onto the body of integrated physical law. Why there should have been by-products of that kind seems to have no evolutionary explanation.
The third problem concerns the rationality of belief in epiphenomenalism, via its effect on the problem of other minds. It is natural to say that I know that I have mental states because I experience them directly. But how can I justify my belief that others have them? The simple version of the ‘argument from analogy’ says that I can extrapolate from my own case. I know that certain of my mental states are correlated with certain pieces of behaviour, and so I infer that similar behaviour in others is also accompanied by similar mental states. Many hold that this is a weak argument because it is induction from one instance, namely, my own. The argument is stronger if it is not a simple induction but an ‘argument to the best explanation’. I seem to know from my own case that mental events can be the explanation of behaviour, and I know of no other candidate explanation for typical human behaviour, so I postulate the same explanation for the behaviour of others. But if epiphenomenalism is true, my mental states do not explain my behaviour and there is a physical explanation for the behaviour of others. It is explanatorily redundant to postulate such states for others. I know, by introspection, that I have them, but is it not just as likely that I alone am subject to this quirk of nature, rather than that everyone is?
For more detailed treatment and further reading on this topic, see the entry epiphenomenalism.
Interactionism
The simplest objection to interaction is that, in so far as mental properties, states or substances are of radically different kinds from each other, they lack that communality necessary for interaction. It is generally agreed that, in its most naive form, this objection to interactionism rests on a ‘billiard ball’ picture of causation: if all causation is by impact, how can the material and the immaterial impact upon each other? But if causation is either by a more ethereal force or energy or only a matter of constant conjunction, there would appear to be no problem in principle with the idea of interaction of mind and body.
Even if there is no objection in principle, there appears to be a conflict between interactionism and some basic principles of physical science. For example, if causal power was flowing in and out of the physical system, energy would not be conserved, and the conservation of energy is a fundamental scientific law. Various responses have been made to this. One suggestion is that it might be possible for mind to influence the distribution of energy, without altering its quantity. (See Averill and Keating 1981). Another response is to challenge the relevance of the conservation principle in this context. The conservation principle states that ‘in a causally isolated system the total amount of energy will remain constant’. Whereas ‘[t]he interactionist denies…that the human body is an isolated system’, so the principle is irrelevant (Larmer (1986), 282: this article presents a good brief survey of the options).
Robins Collins (2011) has claimed that the appeal to conservation by opponents of interactionism is something of a red herring because conservation principles are not ubiquitous in physics. He argues that energy is not conserved in general relativity, in quantum theory, or in the universe taken as a whole. Why then, should we insist on it in mind-brain interaction?
Most discussion of interactionism takes place in the context of the assumption that it is incompatible with the world’s being ‘closed under physics’. This is a very natural assumption, but it is not justified if causal overdetermination of behaviour is possible. There could then be a complete physical cause of behaviour, and a mental one. The strongest intuitive objection against overdetermination is clearly stated by Mills (1996: 112), who is himself a defender of overdetermination.
For X to be a cause of Y, X must contribute something to Y. The only way a purely mental event could contribute to a purely physical one would be to contribute some feature not already determined by a purely physical event. But if physical closure is true, there is no feature of the purely physical effect that is not contributed by the purely physical cause. Hence interactionism violates physical closure after all.
Mills says that this argument is invalid, because a physical event can have features not explained by the event which is its sufficient cause. For example, “the rock’s hitting the window is causally sufficient for the window’s breaking, and the window’s breaking has the feature of being the third window-breaking in the house this year; but the facts about prior window-breakings, rather than the rock’s hitting the window, are what cause this window-breaking to have this feature.”
The opponent of overdetermination could perhaps reply that his principle applies, not to every feature of events, but to a subgroup—say, intrinsic features, not merely relational or comparative ones. It is this kind of feature that the mental event would have to cause, but physical closure leaves no room for this. These matters are still controversial.
The problem with closure of physics may be radically altered if physical laws are indeterministic, as quantum theory seems to assert. If physical laws are deterministic, then any interference from outside would lead to a breach of those laws. But if they are indeterministic, might not interference produce a result that has a probability greater than zero, and so be consistent with the laws? This way, one might have interaction yet preserve a kind of nomological closure, in the sense that no laws are infringed. Because it involves assessing the significance and consequences of quantum theory, this is a difficult matter for the non-physicist to assess. Some argue that indeterminacy manifests itself only on the subatomic level, being cancelled out by the time one reaches even very tiny macroscopic objects: and human behaviour is a macroscopic phenomenon. Others argue that the structure of the brain is so finely tuned that minute variations could have macroscopic effects, rather in the way that, according to ‘chaos theory’, the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in China might affect the weather in New York. (For discussion of this, see Eccles (1980), (1987), and Popper and Eccles (1977).) Still others argue that quantum indeterminacy manifests itself directly at a high level, when acts of observation collapse the wave function, suggesting that the mind may play a direct role in affecting the state of the world (Hodgson 1988; Stapp 1993).
Substance Dualism
Substance dualism is also often dubbed ‘Cartesian dualism’, but some substance dualists are keen to distinguish their theories from Descartes’s. E. J. Lowe, for example, is a substance dualist, in the following sense. He holds that a normal human being involves two substances, one a body and the other a person. The latter is not, however, a purely mental substance that can be defined in terms of thought or consciousness alone, as Descartes claimed. But persons and their bodies have different identity conditions and are both substances, so there are two substances essentially involved in a human being, hence this is a form of substances dualism. Lowe (2006)claims that his theory is close to P. F. Strawson’s (1959), whilst admitting that Strawson would not have called it substance dualism.
Property Dualism
Whereas predicate dualism says that there are two essentially different kinds of predicates in our language, property dualism says that there are two essentially different kinds of property out in the world. Property dualism can be seen as a step stronger than predicate dualism. Although the predicate ‘hurricane’ is not equivalent to any single description using the language of physics, we believe that each individual hurricane is nothing but a collection of physical atoms behaving in a certain way: one need have no more than the physical atoms, with their normal physical properties, following normal physical laws, for there to be a hurricane. One might say that we need more than the language of physics to describe and explain the weather, but we do not need more than its ontology. There is token identity between each individual hurricane and a mass of atoms, even if there is no type identity between hurricanes as kinds and some particular structure of atoms as a kind. Genuine property dualism occurs when, even at the individual level, the ontology of physics is not sufficient to constitute what is there. The irreducible language is not just another way of describing what there is, it requires that there be something more there than was allowed for in the initial ontology. Until the early part of the twentieth century, it was common to think that biological phenomena (‘life’) required property dualism (an irreducible ‘vital force’), but nowadays the special physical sciences other than psychology are generally thought to involve only predicate dualism. In the case of mind, property dualism is defended by those who argue that the qualitative nature of consciousness is not merely another way of categorizing states of the brain or of behaviour, but a genuinely emergent phenomenon'
Predicate dualism
Predicate dualism
Predicate dualism is the theory that psychological or mentalistic predicates are (a) essential for a full description of the world and (b) are not reducible to physicalistic predicates. For a mental predicate to be reducible, there would be bridging laws connecting types of psychological states to types of physical ones in such a way that the use of the mental predicate carried no information that could not be expressed without it. An example of what we believe to be a true type reduction outside psychology is the case of water, where water is always H2O: something is water if and only if it is H2O. If one were to replace the word ‘water’ by ‘H2O’, it is plausible to say that one could convey all the same information. But the terms in many of the special sciences (that is, any science except physics itself) are not reducible in this way. Not every hurricane or every infectious disease, let alone every devaluation of the currency or every coup d’etat has the same constitutive structure. These states are defined more by what they do than by their composition or structure. Their names are classified as functional terms rather than natural kind terms. It goes with this that such kinds of state are multiply realizable; that is, they may be constituted by different kinds of physical structures under different circumstances. Because of this, unlike in the case of water and H2O, one could not replace these terms by some more basic physical description and still convey the same information. There is no particular description, using the language of physics or chemistry, that would do the work of the word ‘hurricane’, in the way that ‘H2O’ would do the work of ‘water’. It is widely agreed that many, if not all, psychological states are similarly irreducible, and so psychological predicates are not reducible to physical descriptions and one has predicate dualism. (The classic source for irreducibility in the special sciences in general is Fodor (1974), and for irreducibility in the philosophy of mind, Davidson (1971).)History of dualism
History of dualism
In dualism, ‘mind’ is contrasted with ‘body’, but at different times, different aspects of the mind have been the centre of attention. In the classical and mediaeval periods, it was the intellect that was thought to be most obviously resistant to a materialistic account: from Descartes on, the main stumbling block to materialist monism was supposed to be ‘consciousness’, of which phenomenal consciousness or sensation came to be considered as the paradigm instance.The classical emphasis originates in Plato’s Phaedo. Plato believed that the true substances are not physical bodies, which are ephemeral, but the eternal Forms of which bodies are imperfect copies. These Forms not only make the world possible, they also make it intelligible, because they perform the role of universals, or what Frege called ‘concepts’. It is their connection with intelligibility that is relevant to the philosophy of mind. Because Forms are the grounds of intelligibility, they are what the intellect must grasp in the process of understanding. In Phaedo Plato presents a variety of arguments for the immortality of the soul, but the one that is relevant for our purposes is that the intellect is immaterial because Forms are immaterial and intellect must have an affinity with the Forms it apprehends (78b4–84b8). This affinity is so strong that the soul strives to leave the body in which it is imprisoned and to dwell in the realm of Forms. It may take many reincarnations before this is achieved. Plato’s dualism is not, therefore, simply a doctrine in the philosophy of mind, but an integral part of his whole metaphysics.
One problem with Plato’s dualism was that, though he speaks of the soul as imprisoned in the body, there is no clear account of what binds a particular soul to a particular body. Their difference in nature makes the union a mystery.
Aristotle did not believe in Platonic Forms, existing independently of their instances. Aristotelian forms (the capital ‘F’ has disappeared with their standing as autonomous entities) are the natures and properties of things and exist embodied in those things. This enabled Aristotle to explain the union of body and soul by saying that the soul is the form of the body. This means that a particular person’s soul is no more than his nature as a human being. Because this seems to make the soul into a property of the body, it led many interpreters, both ancient and modern, to interpret his theory as materialistic. The interpretation of Aristotle’s philosophy of mind—and, indeed, of his whole doctrine of form—remains as live an issue today as it was immediately after his death (Robinson 1983 and 1991; Nussbaum 1984; Rorty and Nussbaum, eds, 1992). Nevertheless, the text makes it clear that Aristotle believed that the intellect, though part of the soul, differs from other faculties in not having a bodily organ. His argument for this constitutes a more tightly argued case than Plato’s for the immateriality of thought and, hence, for a kind of dualism. He argued that the intellect must be immaterial because if it were material it could not receive all forms. Just as the eye, because of its particular physical nature, is sensitive to light but not to sound, and the ear to sound and not to light, so, if the intellect were in a physical organ it could be sensitive only to a restricted range of physical things; but this is not the case, for we can think about any kind of material object (De Anima III,4; 429a10–b9). As it does not have a material organ, its activity must be essentially immaterial.
It is common for modern Aristotelians, who otherwise have a high view of Aristotle’s relevance to modern philosophy, to treat this argument as being of purely historical interest, and not essential to Aristotle’s system as a whole. They emphasize that he was not a ‘Cartesian’ dualist, because the intellect is an aspect of the soul and the soul is the form of the body, not a separate substance. Kenny (1989) argues that Aristotle’s theory of mind as form gives him an account similar to Ryle (1949), for it makes the soul equivalent to the dispositions possessed by a living body. This ‘anti-Cartesian’ approach to Aristotle arguably ignores the fact that, for Aristotle, the form is the substance.
These issues might seem to be of purely historical interest. But we shall see in below, in section 4.5, that this is not so.
The identification of form and substance is a feature of Aristotle’s system that Aquinas effectively exploits in this context, identifying soul, intellect and form, and treating them as a substance. (See, for example, Aquinas (1912), Part I, questions 75 and 76.) But though the form (and, hence, the intellect with which it is identical) are the substance of the human person, they are not the person itself. Aquinas says that when one addresses prayers to a saint—other than the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is believed to retain her body in heaven and is, therefore, always a complete person—one should say, not, for example, ‘Saint Peter pray for us’, but ‘soul of Saint Peter pray for us’. The soul, though an immaterial substance, is the person only when united with its body. Without the body, those aspects of its personal memory that depend on images (which are held to be corporeal) will be lost.(See Aquinas (1912), Part I, question 89.)
The more modern versions of dualism have their origin in Descartes’ Meditations, and in the debate that was consequent upon Descartes’ theory. Descartes was asubstance dualist. He believed that there were two kinds of substance: matter, of which the essential property is that it is spatially extended; and mind, of which the essential property is that it thinks. Descartes’ conception of the relation between mind and body was quite different from that held in the Aristotelian tradition. For Aristotle, there is no exact science of matter. How matter behaves is essentially affected by the form that is in it. You cannot combine just any matter with any form—you cannot make a knife out of butter, nor a human being out of paper—so the nature of the matter is a necessary condition for the nature of the substance. But the nature of the substance does not follow from the nature of its matter alone: there is no ‘bottom up’ account of substances. Matter is a determinable made determinate by form. This was how Aristotle thought that he was able to explain the connection of soul to body: a particular soul exists as the organizing principle in a particular parcel of matter.
The belief in the relative indeterminacy of matter is one reason for Aristotle’s rejection of atomism. If matter is atomic, then it is already a collection of determinate objects in its own right, and it becomes natural to regard the properties of macroscopic substances as mere summations of the natures of the atoms.
Although, unlike most of his fashionable contemporaries and immediate successors, Descartes was not an atomist, he was, like the others, a mechanist about the properties of matter. Bodies are machines that work according to their own laws. Except where there are minds interfering with it, matter proceeds deterministically, in its own right. Where there are minds requiring to influence bodies, they must work by ‘pulling levers’ in a piece of machinery that already has its own laws of operation. This raises the question of where those ‘levers’ are in the body. Descartes opted for the pineal gland, mainly because it is not duplicated on both sides of the brain, so it is a candidate for having a unique, unifying function.
The main uncertainty that faced Descartes and his contemporaries, however, was not where interaction took place, but how two things so different as thought and extension could interact at all. This would be particularly mysterious if one had an impact view of causal interaction, as would anyone influenced by atomism, for whom the paradigm of causation is like two billiard balls cannoning off one another.
Various of Descartes’ disciples, such as Arnold Geulincx and Nicholas Malebranche, concluded that all mind-body interactions required the direct intervention of God. The appropriate states of mind and body were only the occasions for such intervention, not real causes. Now it would be convenient to think that occasionalists held that all causation was natural except for that between mind and body. In fact they generalized their conclusion and treated all causation as directly dependent on God. Why this was so, we cannot discuss here.
Descartes’ conception of a dualism of substances came under attack from the more radical empiricists, who found it difficult to attach sense to the concept of substance at all. Locke, as a moderate empiricist, accepted that there were both material and immaterial substances. Berkeley famously rejected material substance, because he rejected all existence outside the mind. In his early Notebooks, he toyed with the idea of rejecting immaterial substance, because we could have no idea of it, and reducing the self to a collection of the ‘ideas’ that constituted its contents. Finally, he decided that the self, conceived as something over and above the ideas of which it was aware, was essential for an adequate understanding of the human person. Although the self and its acts are not presented to consciousness asobjects of awareness, we are obliquely aware of them simply by dint of being active subjects. Hume rejected such claims, and proclaimed the self to be nothing more than a concatenation of its ephemeral contents.
In fact, Hume criticised the whole conception of substance for lacking in empirical content: when you search for the owner of the properties that make up a substance, you find nothing but further properties. Consequently, the mind is, he claimed, nothing but a ‘bundle’ or ‘heap’ of impressions and ideas—that is, of particular mental states or events, without an owner. This position has been labelled bundle dualism, and it is a special case of a general bundle theory of substance, according to which objects in general are just organised collections of properties. The problem for the Humean is to explain what binds the elements in the bundle together. This is an issue for any kind of substance, but for material bodies the solution seems fairly straightforward: the unity of a physical bundle is constituted by some form of causal interaction between the elements in the bundle. For the mind, mere causal connection is not enough; some further relation of co-consciousness is required. We shall see in 5.2.1 that it is problematic whether one can treat such a relation as more primitive than the notion of belonging to a subject.
One should note the following about Hume’s theory. His bundle theory is a theory about the nature of the unity of the mind. As a theory about this unity, it is not necessarily dualist. Parfit (1970, 1984) and Shoemaker (1984, ch. 2), for example, accept it as physicalists. In general, physicalists will accept it unless they wish to ascribe the unity to the brain or the organism as a whole. Before the bundle theory can be dualist one must accept property dualism, for more about which, see the next section.
A crisis in the history of dualism came, however, with the growing popularity of mechanism in science in the nineteenth century. According to the mechanist, the world is, as it would now be expressed, ‘closed under physics’. This means that everything that happens follows from and is in accord with the laws of physics. There is, therefore, no scope for interference in the physical world by the mind in the way that interactionism seems to require. According to the mechanist, the conscious mind is an epiphenomenon (a notion given general currency by T. H. Huxley 1893): that is, it is a by-product of the physical system which has no influence back on it. In this way, the facts of consciousness are acknowledged but the integrity of physical science is preserved. However, many philosophers found it implausible to claim such things as the following; the pain that I have when you hit me, the visual sensations I have when I see the ferocious lion bearing down on me or the conscious sense of understanding I have when I hear your argument—all have nothing directly to do with the way I respond. It is very largely due to the need to avoid this counterintuitiveness that we owe the concern of twentieth century philosophy to devise a plausible form of materialist monism. But, although dualism has been out of fashion in psychology since the advent of behaviourism (Watson 1913) and in philosophy since Ryle (1949), the argument is by no means over. Some distinguished neurologists, such as Sherrington (1940) and Eccles (Popper and Eccles 1977) have continued to defend dualism as the only theory that can preserve the data of consciousness. Amongst mainstream philosophers, discontent with physicalism led to a modest revival of property dualism in the last decade of the twentieth century. At least some of the reasons for this should become clear below.
Mind Body Problem.
The Mind-Body Problem
The mind-body problem is the problem: what is the relationship between mind and body? Or alternatively: what is the relationship between mental properties and physical properties?Humans have (or seem to have) both physical properties and mental properties. People have (or seem to have)the sort of properties attributed in the physical sciences. These physical properties include size, weight, shape, colour, motion through space and time, etc. But they also have (or seem to have) mental properties, which we do not attribute to typical physical objects These properties involve consciousness (including perceptual experience, emotional experience, and much else), intentionality (including beliefs, desires, and much else), and they are possessed by a subject or a self.
Physical properties are public, in the sense that they are, in principle, equally observable by anyone. Some physical properties—like those of an electron—are not directly observable at all, but they are equally available to all, to the same degree, with scientific equipment and techniques. The same is not true of mental properties. I may be able to tell that you are in pain by your behaviour, but only you can feel it directly. Similarly, you just know how something looks to you, and I can only surmise. Conscious mental events are private to the subject, who has a privileged access to them of a kind no-one has to the physical.
The mind-body problem concerns the relationship between these two sets of properties. The mind-body problem breaks down into a number of components.
- The ontological question: what are mental states and what are physical states? Is one class a subclass of the other, so that all mental states are physical, or vice versa? Or are mental states and physical states entirely distinct?
- The causal question: do physical states influence mental states? Do mental states influence physical states? If so, how?
- The problem of consciousness: what is consciousness? How is it related to the brain and the body?
- The problem of intentionality: what is intentionality? How is it related to the brain and the body?
- The problem of the self: what is the self? How is it related to the brain and the body?
- The problem of embodiment: what is it for the mind to be housed in a body? What is it for a body to belong to a particular subject?
Materialist views say that, despite appearances to the contrary, mental states are just physical states. Behaviourism, functionalism, mind-brain identity theory and the computational theory of mind are examples of how materialists attempt to explain how this can be so. The most common factor in such theories is the attempt to explicate the nature of mind and consciousness in terms of their ability to directly or indirectly modify behaviour, but there are versions of materialism that try to tie the mental to the physical without explicitly explaining the mental in terms of its behaviour-modifying role. The latter are often grouped together under the label ‘non-reductive physicalism’, though this label is itself rendered elusive because of the controversial nature of the term ‘reduction’.
Idealist views say that physical states are really mental. This is because the physical world is an empirical world and, as such, it is the intersubjective product of our collective experience.
Dualist views (the subject of this entry) say that the mental and the physical are both real and neither can be assimilated to the other. For the various forms that dualism can take and the associated problems, see below.
In sum, we can say that there is a mind-body problem because both consciousness and thought, broadly construed, seem very different from anything physical and there is no convincing consensus on how to build a satisfactorily unified picture of creatures possessed of both a mind and a body.
Other entries which concern aspects of the mind-body problem include (among many others): behaviorism, consciousness, eliminative materialism,epiphenomenalism, functionalism, identity theory, intentionality, mental causation, neutral monism, and physicalism.
Contractualism/Kantian Ethics
Kantian Ethics and Contractualism
Kantian ethics is one tradition of ethical theory within the broader contractualist tradition, although for much of the past several hundred years it has been the main representative of contractualism. Kantian ethics is sometimes classified as a deontological, or duty based, theory of ethics, which is usually contrasted with teleogical theories of ethics, like utilitarianism. Teleological thoeries proceed by defining the right action in terms of some particular end (teleos) whereas deontological theory proceed in their ethical reasoning by defining the right action in terms of a duty or set of duties (deon). There are many ways in which the theories we are covering can be classified however for our purposes we will think of Kantian ethics as a contractualist theory of ethics. It is deontogical but the duties are derived in a contractual way which, I believe, makes it more appropriate to classify it as a contractualist theory.
Nice Summaries of Kantian Ethics by Allen Wood and John Rawls
“Kant’s moral philosophy is grounded on several related values. Its primary idea is that of the rational agent as a self-governing being. This is closely related to the equal dignity of all rational beings as ends in themselves, deserving of respect in all rational actions. These two values are combined in the conception of an ideal community, or “realm of ends,” in which all the ends of rational beings are to be combined in a single harmonious system as an object of striving by all of them. These basic values, and their philosophical grounding, are articulated in Kant’s two principle foundational works in ethics: Groundwork for the metaphysics of Morals (1785) and the Analytic of the Critque of Practical Reason (1788).” (Wood, 129)
“Kantian ethics is not a morality of austere command but an ethic of mutual respect.” John Rawls
Intuitions that support Kantian or Contractualist view
- Certain thought experiments (Organ stealing doctors)
- Inviolability of Individuals (Rights)
- Our intuition that peoples motivations are important, not just the consequences
- Kantian ethics is the main traditional is what has come to be called Deontological ethics
- Deotonological = duty based
- Duty plays a very important role in Kantian ethics
- Whatever the moral law commands
- Duties to ourselves and to other
- Only actions done out of respect for the moral law have moral worth
- It is not enough to act merely in accord with the moral law for an action to have moral worth
- Shopkeeper who doesn’t cheat is customer because he knows it will be bad for business is acting in accord with the moral law but his action does not have moral worth because he is not acting exclusively out of respect for the moral law
- The same is true of a mother who cares for her children because she loves them, her action is in accord with the moral law but does not have moral worth
- The commands of morality
- Imperative = Command
- Hypothetical Imperative vs. Categorical Imperative (moral vs. prudential ought)
- Hypothetical Imperative
- Applies only conditionally
- If you want x do y.
- If you don’t want x then you have no obligation to do y.
- Categorical Imperative
- Applies to all rational beings
- Not contingent on personal desire
- Do y.
- It does not matter what you want, you are still obligated to do y.
Kant uses this first formulation of the categorical imperative to derive a system of perfect and imperfect duties and this has traditionally come to define Kantian Ethics as well as drive much of the criticism Kantian ethics has received. Following the lead of Allen Wood in his book Kantian Ethics we are going to focus our attention on passage where Kant describes what he is trying to get at with this formulation of the categorical imperative.
Kant says:
”
Formula of Humanity – “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.”
Formula Realm of Ends – “act in accordance with the maxims of a universally legislative member of a merely possible realm of ends” (Groundwork 4:439)
Realm of Ends – “union of different rational beings in a system by common laws.”
The realm of ends is not a state of affairs but a system of purposive activity shared by different rational beings who stand in social relationships to one another – they respect one another as ends in themselves and choose to live according to a common set of objective moral laws expressing this mutual respect. This is why they choose to to share a common set of ends that brings the happiness of each into harmony with the happiness of all others, and why each one chooses to limit the pursuit of her own happiness in such a way that it can belong to such a shared, purposive system.” (Wood, 266)
“The realm of ends is a way of representing maxims to which each member is bound in belonging to the end.” (Wood, 267)
“Kantian ethics differs from ethical theories whose style of practical reasoning is oriented to producing the best states of affairs by making the primary thing the relationships between rational beings, and the terms on which rational beings relate to one another. The basic thing is that rational beings should follow a common set of laws or principles expressing their self-respect and their respect for one another as ends in themselves and the idea that they are legislators in a common of the laws to which they are subject.”(Wood, 268)
The moral community
This will become an important feature of kantian/contractualist ethical theory as we turn our attention to abortion and animal rights in the next section of the book.
- According to Kant only beings that are rational and autonomous are members of the moral community
- Autonomous: “Autonomous literally means being a self-legislator.” (FoE 170)
- Kant did not believe that animals were members of the moral community
- Kantian ethics vs Kant’s ethics
- Some contemporary Kantians believe that animals are members of the moral community
- Moral patients vs moral agents (Tom Reagan)
Kantian Ethics vs Consequentialism
- Fundamental value – pleasure vs humanity (rational nature)
- normative principle – maximize utility vs. respect humanity
| Utilitiarianism | Kantian Ethics | |
| Fundamental Value | Utitlity | Humanity |
| Normative Principle | Maximize Utility | Respect Humanity |
Final Words from Allen Wood on Kantian Ethics
“Our task is to respect the rights of persons (and the right more generally) and to set as ends those instances of goods falling under the rubrics of our own perfection and the happiness of other toward which we are capable of making a meaningful contribution with our limited powers in our limited life. The larger practical context for our action is not the highest good (regarded as “the greatest good overall”) but the realm of ends. That is to say, it is not an encompassing consequence to be brought about but a web of relationships between rational beings in which all their particular ends can be shared and all are respected as ends in themselves.” (268-9)
Comparing Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant
Hobbes and Rousseau
- emphasis on state of nature and transition to social state from state of nature
- By entering the social contract we give up our right to everything to gain a more limited but more secure set of rights
- Rousseau doesn’t explicitly claim to derive all moral obligations from self-interest
- At times Rousseau sounds more like Kant in talking about the role of reason in determining the content of our moral duties, and reason seems to encompass something more than prudence (self-interest)
- Individual Will is constrained by Duty/reason
◦ “No doubt there is a universal justice emanating from reason alone.” (77)
◦ Real freedom is obedience to a law one has prescribed to oneself
“So long as subjects are subjected only to conventions such as these, they obey no one, but only their own will (74) “one need no longer ask . . . how one is both free and subject to laws, since they are merely records of our wills.” (78)
“the people subject to laws ought to be their own author” (78)
Morality as a system of free individuals with equal rights
“Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.” (55)
“This common freedom is a consequence of man’s nature. (56)
“To renounce one’s freedom is to renounce one’s quality as man . . .” (59)
Differences with Kant
- Rousseau very clearly uses the social contract as the metaethical foundation of his system, whereas Kant skips over the social contract and uses reason as the metaethical foundation of moral duties
Jean-Jaques Rousseau: The Social Contact
Opening question and statement:
“I want to inquire whether in the civil order there can be some legitimate and sure rule of administration, taking men as they are, and the laws as they can be: In this inquiry I shall try always to combine what right permits with what interest prescribes, so that justice and utility may not be disjoined.” (Rouseau 55)
Most famous quote:
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” (55)
This is perfect example of how we don’t want you to write, but it is great writing nonetheless.
Does humankind belong to the rulers (one-hundred men) or do the rulers belong to humankind? (56)
Are some naturally superior and born to lead/rule and some meant to follow? (57)
“Aristotle was right, but he mistook the effect for the cause. Any man born in slavery is born for slavery, nothing could be more certain. Slaves lose everuthing in their chains, even the desire to be rid of them, they love their servitude, as the companions of Ulysses loved their brutishness. Hence if there are slaves by nature, it is because there were slaves contrary to nature. Force made the first slaves, their cowardice perpetuated them.” (57)
The right of the stronger
“The stronger is never stong enough to be forever master, unless he transforms his force into right, and obedience into duty.” (57)
Do monarchs have a right (divine right) to rule?
“all power comes from God, I admit it; but so does all illness. Does this mean it is forbidden to call the doctor?” (58)
“Let us agree, then, that force does not make right, and that one is only obliged to obey legitimate powers.” (58)
The key question is what makes a power/ruler legitimate, and Rousseau has a slightly more different concept of this than hobbes.
What would make someone alienate themselves i.e. give their freedom to a ruler?
“To renounce one’s freedom is to renounce one’s quality as man.” (59)
It can be merely tranquility: “Life is also tranquil in dungeons; is that enough to feel well in them?”
Rousseau’s discussion of slavery (58-61)
His main point is that there can never be a right/justified convention of slavery, slavery is the mere exercise force
A convention must be mutually beneficial and recognizes both parties rights, slavery does not do this:
“ These words slavery and right; they are contradictory; they are mutually exclusive. Either between one man and another, or between a man and a people, the following speech will always be equally absurd. I make a convention with you which is entirely at your expense and entirely to my profit, which I shall observe as long as I please, and which you shall observe as long as I please” (61)
A multitude vs A society (61)
Before a people can give themselves to a king they must be a unified group
- Even a majority vote is a convention
- “Before examing the act by which a people elects a king, it would be well to examine the act by which a people is a people. For this act, being necessarily prior to the other, is the true foundation of society.” (62)
The terms of the contract are the same everywhere
- “The clauses of this contract are so completely determined by the nature of the act that the slightest modification would render them null and void; so that although they may never have been formally stated, they are everywhere tacitly admitted and recognized; until, the social compact having been violated, everyone is thereupon restored to his original freedom for which he remounced it.” (63)
- “Each of us puts his person and his full power in common under the supreme direction of the general will; and in a body we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.” (63)
- Why are we obligated to act according to the general will when our individual will contradicts the general wil
- “Indeed each individual may, as a man, have a particular will contrary to or different from the general will he has as a Citizen. His particular interest may speak to him quite differently from the common interest; his absolute and naturally independent existence may lead him to look upon what he owes to the common cause as a gratuitous contribution, the loss of which will harm others less than its payment burdens him and, by considering the moral person that constitutes the state as being of reason because it is not a man, he would enjoy the rights of a citizen without being willing to fulfill the duties of a subject; an injustice, the progress of which would cause the ruin of the body politic” (65)
- “Hence for the social compact not to be an empty formula, it tacitly includes the following engagement which alone can give force to the rest, that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the entire body: which means nothing other than that he shall be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each Citizen to the Fatherland, guarantees him against all personal dependence; the condition which is the device and makes for the operation of the political machine, and alone renders legitimate civil engagements which would otherwise be absurd, tyrannical, and liable to the most enormous abuses.” (65-6)
“This transition from the state of nature to the civil state produces a most remarkable change in man by substituting justice for instinct in his conduct, and endowing his actions with the morality they previously lacked. Only then, when the voice of duty succeeds physical impulsion and right succeeds appetite, does man, who until then had looked only to himself, see himself forced to act on other principles, and to consult his reason before listening to his inclinations.”
“Let us reduce this entire balance to terms easy to compare. What man loses by the social contract is his natural freedom and unlimited right to everything that tempts him and he can reach; what he gains is civil freedom and property in everything he possesses.” (66)
Real Freedom
“Obedience to the law one has prescribed to himself is freedom.” (66)
Equality (Summary and Conclusion of Book I)
“I shall close this chapter of this book with a comment that should serve as the basis of the entire social system; it is that the fundamental pact, rather than destroying natural equality, on the contrary substitutes a moral and legitimate equality for whatever physical inequality nature may have placed between men, and that while they may be unequal in force or genius, they all become equal by convention and by right*” (68-9)
Good and bad Government
“*Under bad governments the equality is only apparent and illusory; it serves only to maintain the poor in misery and the rich in usurpation. In fact the laws are always useful to hose who possess something and harmful to those who have nothing: Whence it follows that the social state is advantageous for men only insofar as all have something and none has too much of anything.” (69 Footnote)
The general Will
- “The general will alone can direct the forces of the State according to the end of its institution, which is the common good” (69)
- The king can never legitimately against the general will and direct the forces of state according to his will or the will of any particular individuals
They will never agree perfectly because “the particular will tends, by its nature, to partiality, and the general will to equality” (69)
Just for fun
“Truth does not lead to fortune, and the people confers no ambassadorships, professorships or pensions” (71)
General Will vs The Will of All
“From the preceding it follows that the general will is always upright and always tends to the public utility: but it does not follow from it that the people’s deliberations are always equally upright. One always want one’s good, but one does not always see it: one can never corrupt the people, but one can often cause it to be mistaken, and only when it is, doe it appear to want what is bad.”
“There is often considerable difference between the will of all and the general will: the latter looks only to the common interest, the former looks to the private interest, and is nothing but a sum of particular wills; but if, from these same wills, one takes away the pluses and the minuses which cancel each other out, what is left as the sum of the differences is the general will.” (71)
Can we make sense of this idea?
Factions and the General will
- “Finally, when one of these associations is so large that it prevails over all the rest, the result you have is no longer a sum of small differences, but one single difference; then there is no longer a general will, and the opinion that prevails is nothing but a private opinion.”
- “It is important, then, that in order to have the general will expressed well, there be no partial society in the State, and every citizen state only his own opinion” (71)
“. . . to ask how far the respective rights of the Sovereign and Citizens extend is to ask how far the Citizens can commit themselves to one another, each to all, and all to each.
From this it is apparent that the Sovereign power, absolute, sacred, and inviolable though it is, doe not and cannot exceed the limits of the general conventions, and that every may fully dispose of such of his goods and freedom as are left him by these conventions: so that it is never right for the Sovereign to burden one subject more than another, because it then turns into a particular affair, and its power is no longer competent”
“These distinctions once admitted, it is so [evidently] false that the social contract involves any renunciation on the part of individuals, that [rather] as a result of the contract their situation really proves to be preferable to what it had been before, and that instead of an alienation they have only made an advantageous exchange of an uncertain and precarious way of being in favor of a more secure and better one, of natural independence in favor of freedom, of the power to harm others in favor of their own security, and of their force which others could overwhelm in favor of right made invincible by the social union.” (74-75)
My summary: you are not sacrificing any rights in the social situation, it is really only through a social contract that you have any enforceable rights. In theory, pre-contract, you have a right to everything, but practically this amount to very little because no one can enforce their right to everything against everyone else’s right to everything.
However there is still the question of why it is that one cannot be made to give up one’s rights for the common good.
Although his answer rests on the claim that “there is no general will about a particular object. . . when I say that the object of the laws is always general, I mean that the law considers the subjects in a body and their actions in the abstract, never any man as an individual or particular action” (77)
So, it seems like Rousseau thinks the general will only determines rules/rights/etc that when followed by everyone lead to the common good for all. He seems to think of it in a similar way to a rule utilitarian.
Leviathan
Thommas Hobbes – Leviathan
Everyone is roughly equal
◦ Everyman is enemy to everyman
◦ There is no security
◦ No industry because the fruit of industry is uncertain, No navigation or trade by sea, no commodious building, no large moving equipment, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, not arts, no letters, no society
◦ Continual fear and danger of violent death
◦ “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”
Nothing is unjust in a state of war
“The passions that incline men to peace are: fear of death; desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain them. And reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace upon which men my be drawn to agreement. These articles are they which otherwise are called laws of nature”
Natural law (jus natural)
“as long as this natural right of every man to everything endureth, there can be no security to any man, how strong or wise soever he may be, of living out the time which nature ordinarily alloweth men to live. And consequently it is a precept, or general rule of reason: that every man ought to endeavor peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.
The Second Law
“the mutual transferring of right is that which men call contract.”
The third law
The Fool
◦ Second – If you break your covenants you are removing yourself from society and putting yourself back into the state of nature, which is a bad thing. You will not be able to be received by any society. You might happen to fool some group of people but it is not wise (rational and prudential to assume that you will be able to do so).
◦ A more formal reconstruction
1.A rational person always prefers a state of peace than a state of war.
Premise 4 is the crucial missing premise that seems somewhat implausible. Although 1 also seems somewhat suspect as well.
Everyone is roughly equal
- This is not some philosophical statement about the absolute dignity of all persons, this is a crude statement of the facts
- “The weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest”
- and competition and fighting (diffidence)
- which leads to misery for all (prisoner’s dilemma)
- a state of war of everyman against everyman (bellum omnium contra omnes)
- the state of war is a the disposition to fighting i.e a fight can happen anytime
◦ Everyman is enemy to everyman
◦ There is no security
◦ No industry because the fruit of industry is uncertain, No navigation or trade by sea, no commodious building, no large moving equipment, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, not arts, no letters, no society
◦ Continual fear and danger of violent death
◦ “the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”
Nothing is unjust in a state of war
- in a state of war everyone has a right to everything
- “The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are the two cardinal virtues.”
“The passions that incline men to peace are: fear of death; desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a hope by their industry to obtain them. And reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace upon which men my be drawn to agreement. These articles are they which otherwise are called laws of nature”
Natural law (jus natural)
- Hobbes asserts that natural is really nothing other than the right to one’s own self preservation
- “By liberty is understood, according to the proper signification of the word, the absence of external impediments”
- Hobbes uses a negative definition of liberty
- Positive liberty includes rights to be given certain things (education, healthcare, basic standard of living, etc)
“as long as this natural right of every man to everything endureth, there can be no security to any man, how strong or wise soever he may be, of living out the time which nature ordinarily alloweth men to live. And consequently it is a precept, or general rule of reason: that every man ought to endeavor peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it; and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.
The Second Law
- “From this fundamental law of nature, by which men are commanded to endeavor peace, is derived this second law: that a man be willing, when others are so too, as far forth as for peace and defence of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself.”
- In the state of nature everyone has a right to everything, we get out of the state of nature by agreeing to renounce our right to everything if others are also willing to do so
“the mutual transferring of right is that which men call contract.”
The third law
- “that men perform their convenants made”
- The commonwealth ensures that the punishment for breaking contracts is sufficiently great and reliable such that it is not in anyone’s interest to break a contract or more generally act unjustly in any way
- “Therefore before the names of jusgt and unjust can have place, there must be some coercive power to comple mean equally to the performance of their convenants, by the terror of some punishment greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of their convenant, and to make good that propriety which by mutual contract men acquire in recompense of the universal right they abandon: and such power there is none before the erection of a Commonwealth.”
- The Leviathan refers to an absolute monarch
The Fool
- Is it against reason (one’s interest) to follow through with contracts made?
- Hobbes says “No”.
◦ Second – If you break your covenants you are removing yourself from society and putting yourself back into the state of nature, which is a bad thing. You will not be able to be received by any society. You might happen to fool some group of people but it is not wise (rational and prudential to assume that you will be able to do so).
◦ A more formal reconstruction
1.A rational person always prefers a state of peace than a state of war.
- If you break contracts (act like a fool) then you are removing yourself from a state of peace and putting yourself in a state of war.
- No breaking of a contract is ever guaranteed to go undetected.
- The odds of one’s being detected, no matter how small, and punishments that might result from that breach of contract always make it irrational to break a contract.
Premise 4 is the crucial missing premise that seems somewhat implausible. Although 1 also seems somewhat suspect as well.
John Stuart Mill – Utilitarianism
In this reading Mill attempts to address the following three criticisms:
- Utilitarianism doesn’t actually provide a reason for acting morally i.e. for acting in a utilitarian way to maximize utility.
- Utilitarianism doesn’t account for the higher values of life, things like virtue and knowledge that are more important than pleasure. It is a doctrine “fit for swine” because it claims that the only thing that is valuable is crude physical pleasure.
Two main arguments in the reading
- Mill’s Argument for Higher and lower Pleasures
- Mill’s Argument for the greatest happiness principle.
Mill’s Argument for Higher and Lower Pleasures
Mill’s Claim: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool or the pig are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides”
Bentham vs. Mill – Higher and and lower pleasures?
Bentham “pushpin is as good as poetry”
“The utility of all these arts and sciences, –I speak of those of amusement and curiosity, –the value which they possess, is exactly in proportion to the pleasure they yield. Every other species of preeminence which may be attempted to be established among them is altogether fanciful. Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnished more pleasure, it is more valuable than either. Everybody can play push-pin: poetry and music are relished only by a few.”
– Jeremy Bentham
Objections to Utilitarianism
The epistemological problem:
There is an epistemological problem regarding the fact that utilitarianism tells us we can never really know what the right action is, but that isn’t such a big deal because we can evaluate a person’s intentions based on expected consequences.
The Deeper Problem: How do we compare preferences? If we accept a non-hedonistic view then it becomes much much harder to compare and utilitarianism loses much of its attractiveness due to simplicity.
Utilitarianism is too demanding
Three areas:
- deliberation
- motivation
- action
- utitlitarianism seems to be too demanding in requiring an excessive or impossible amount of deliberation in order to determine the right action as the right action is the one with the best consequences, overall and until the end of time considered as to how it affects every sentient organism on the planet
- on a utilitarian account the right motivations are the ones that produce the most happiness
- utilitarianism seems to suggest that one needs to have the motivations of a saint, to always be motivated to maximize utility
- utilitarianism implies that we are always doing the wrong thing because its standard of right action is so high
- utilitarianism seems to imply that the right life is a life of extreme and constant self sacrifice
- in our ordinary way of thinking about actions we tend to think of some actions as superogatory, admirable and praiseworthy but not required, but according to utilitarianism all right actions are required
- Utilitarianism seems to violate a principle that is generally accepted in moral reasoning, that “ought is implies can.”
- Utilitarianism seems to require one to be completely impartial, however many people feel they have special duties to certain people (children, parents, spouses, countrymen, humans, etc).
- One way around this is to argue that caring for one’s family is generally optifimic if we consider all the consequences and therefore according to utilitarianism caring for one’s family is generally the right thing to do
- Nothing is absolutely and always wrong, including rape, torture, murder, genocide, slavery, etc.
Here is a simple argument that might capture one’s intuitions regarding the role integrity in ethics:
- If utilitarianism is correct then acting with integrity is not morally relevant to the morality of an action.
- Acting with integrity is morally relevant to the morality of an action.
- So, Utilitarianism is not correct.
1) A man is told by an evil dictator that if executes one innocent people then the lives of nine others will be spared and if he refuses all ten will be executed.
2) A poor scientist who is having trouble supporting himself and his family is offered a lucrative job to make chemical weapons, and the weapons will be made with or without his participation.
In both cases utitlitarianism tells us it is wrong to act with integrity and refuse to kill an innocent person/make chemical weapons.
The Injustice Objection
Examples1 – The Lonesome Stranger: Framing a lonesome stranger for a crime to prevent some harm:
Example2 – The Organ Harvesting Doctor: Imagine a doctor goes around harvesting the organs of homeless people to save the lives of well-loved important people in society.
This objection has a lot to do with rights. Utilitarianism has no real way to account for rights. This is largely by design, Bentham said that rights were non-sense on stilts.
Shaffer Landau’s injustice argument against Utilitarianism:
- The correct moral theory will never require us to commit serious injustices.
- Utilitarianism sometimes requires us to commit serious injustices.
- Therefore, utilitarianism is not the correct moral theory.
Since the argument is valid so there are really only two options, the utilitarian must either deny that the first premise is true or deny that the second premise is true.
Deny Premise 2
A utilitarian can try to argue that injustice is never optimific. This will usually involve some long-term consequences.
Does this seem plausible?
For this to it must be true not only that there never has been a case where injustice was optimific but that it is not even logically conceivable that injustice could ever be optimific.
This is pretty implausible.
Deny Premise 1
This is what we call “biting the bullet” in philosophy jargon.
The diehard utilitarian will have to bite the bullet on this one and admit that sometimes it is not only permissible but morally required to infringe on someone’s or a group of individual’s rights and perform and injustice upon them.
They can however extol the importance of rights as being generally and almost always optimific.
Mill was an important proponent of certain rights that laid the foundation of the liberal democracy in England and America. (Read Mill’s On Liberty for more on this.)
A note about Utilitarianism and Political Philosophy
Because utilitarianism does not countenance individual rights it is impossible to form a stable society based on utilitarian principles.
Individual rights are the most basic foundation of society. Until you have rights you don’t really have a society.
No political philosopher has ever accepted utilitarianism. This includes but John Rawls and Robert Nozick, the two most famous political philosophers of the 20th century, despite their widely diverging approaches to political philosophy. Both Rawls and Nozick drew inspiration from Kant and the social contract tradition.
Utilitarianism
Consequentialism – the goodness of an action is determined exclusively by its consequences.Utilitarianism is one type of consequentialist ethical theory.
- Classical utilitarians and founders of the tradition include Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill
- Utility is only thing that is fundamentally good
- Act Utilitarianism– an action is morally required if and only if it maximizes utility, generally when some uses the term “utilitarianism” they are referring to act utilitarianism
- “Optimific” is used to describe actions that maximize utility
- Utility:
- “greatest good for the greatest number”
- or more precisely the greatest net balance of happiness over unhappiness
- not
- happiness for the most
- or the most happiness, without considering the suffering involved
- “pushpin (video games) is as good as poetry” Bentham
- Mill thought there were higher and lower pleasures such than a strict utility calculus was not possible in the way Bentham imagined
- The utilitarian calculus includes ALL the consequences of our actions to the end of time and every single sentient being that will be affected by them
1) Identify what is intrinsically good.
2) Identify what is intrinsically bad.
3) Determine all of your options.
4) For each option, determine the value of its results.
5) Perform the action that yields the highest ratio of good to bad results.
Attractions of Utilitarianism
Impartiality:
Everyone’s interests count equally.
Justifies conventional moral wisdom:
Slavery, rape, and killing are wrong because they make people (very) unhappy.
Conflict resolution:
Utilitarianism gives us a method for making difficult moral decisions.
Moral flexibility:
Explains why moral prohibitions (against lying, stealing, etc.) may sometimes be broken.
In summary utilitarianism explains many of our most basic intuitions regarding what actions are right and wrong.
The Moral Community
- The moral community consists of those whose interests we are morally obligated to consider for their own sake.
- For utilitarians, the moral community consists of all beings capable of suffering.
- Bentham “the question is not Can they reason?, Nor can they talk?, but Can they suffer?”
- Utilitarians were way ahead of their time on women’s rights and animal rights
Consequentialism is agent neutral in that it does not give any preference to the agents desire, preferences, happiness, or life. An agent may be obligated to sacrifice any or all of the above.
Assessing Actions and Intentions with a Utilitarian Framework
- Morally praiseworthy actions are not necessarily the right actions according to utitlitarianism
- Actions are evaluated on actual consequences
- Intentions are evaluated on expected consequences not actual consequences
- The right action is the action that maximizes actual utility
- The right intention is the intention maximizes expected utility
- This is a little strange in that you could have an action that would be the wrong action but still be morally praiseworthy
Example: you decide to steal someone’s car a morally blameworthy action that turns out to be the right action as that person was going to hit and kill someone while driving home drunk
“On this view there is no essential connection between the morality of an action and the morality of the intentions behind it” (FoE, 124).
Summary:
“Consequentialists say that our fundamental moral duty is to make the world the best place it can be. Utilitarians in particular understand this to mean that we msut contribute as much to the improvement of well-being as we possibly can. Though theorists differ, most claim that whether an action is optimific depends only on its actual (not expected) results. All results count, not just that occur in the short term. When we fail to maximize good results, we act wrongly, even if we had the best intentions. Though good intentions may earn us praise, they are irrelevant to an action’s morality. When we pass up a chance to do an action that would have had better results, we are doing something wrong. Always” (FoE 124).
Areas of Modern Philosophy
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Epistemology
Epistemology is concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge, such as the relationships between truth, belief, perception and theories of justification.
Skepticism is the position which questions the possibility of completely justifying any truth. The regress argument, a fundamental problem in epistemology, occurs when, in order to completely prove any statement, its justification itself needs to be supported by another justification. This chain can do three possible options, all of which are unsatisfactory according to the Münchhausen trilemma. One option is infinitism, where this chain of justification can go on forever. Another option is foundationalism, where the chain of justifications eventually relies on basic beliefs or axioms that are left unproven. The last option, such as in coherentism, is making the chain circular so that a statement is included in its own chain of justification.
Rationalism is the emphasis on reasoning as a source of knowledge. Empiricism is the emphasis on observational evidence via sensory experience over other evidence as the source of knowledge. Rationalism claims that every possible object of knowledge can be deduced from coherent premises without observation. Empiricism claims that at least some knowledge is only a matter of observation. For this, Empiricism often cites the concept of tabula rasa, where individuals are not born with mental content and that knowledge builds from experience or perception. Epistemological solipsism is the idea that the existence of the world outside the mind is an unresolvable question.
René Descartes
Parmenides (fl. 500 BC) argued that it is impossible to doubt that thinking actually occurs. But thinking must have an object, therefore something beyond thinking really exists. Parmenides deduced that what really exists must have certain properties—for example, that it cannot come into existence or cease to exist, that it is a coherent whole, that it remains the same eternally (in fact, exists altogether outside time). This is known as the third man argument. Plato (427–347 BC) combined rationalism with a form of realism. The philosopher's work is to consider being, and the essence (ousia) of things. But the characteristic of essences is that they are universal. The nature of a man, a triangle, a tree, applies to all men, all triangles, all trees. Plato argued that these essences are mind-independent "forms", that humans (but particularly philosophers) can come to know by reason, and by ignoring the distractions of sense-perception.
Modern rationalism begins with Descartes. Reflection on the nature of perceptual experience, as well as scientific discoveries in physiology and optics, led Descartes (and also Locke) to the view that we are directly aware of ideas, rather than objects. This view gave rise to three questions:
Is an idea a true copy of the real thing that it represents? Sensation is not a direct interaction between bodily objects and our sense, but is a physiological process involving representation (for example, an image on the retina). Locke thought that a "secondary quality" such as a sensation of green could in no way resemble the arrangement of particles in matter that go to produce this sensation, although he thought that "primary qualities" such as shape, size, number, were really in objects.
How can physical objects such as chairs and tables, or even physiological processes in the brain, give rise to mental items such as ideas? This is part of what became known as the mind-body problem.
If all the contents of awareness are ideas, how can we know that anything exists apart from ideas?
Descartes tried to address the last problem by reason. He began, echoing Parmenides, with a principle that he thought could not coherently be denied: I think, therefore I am (often given in his original Latin: Cogito ergo sum). From this principle, Descartes went on to construct a complete system of knowledge (which involves proving the existence of God, using, among other means, a version of the ontological argument).[17] His view that reason alone could yield substantial truths about reality strongly influenced those philosophers usually considered modern rationalists (such as Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Christian Wolff), while provoking criticism from other philosophers who have retrospectively come to be grouped together as empiricists.
Skepticism is the position which questions the possibility of completely justifying any truth. The regress argument, a fundamental problem in epistemology, occurs when, in order to completely prove any statement, its justification itself needs to be supported by another justification. This chain can do three possible options, all of which are unsatisfactory according to the Münchhausen trilemma. One option is infinitism, where this chain of justification can go on forever. Another option is foundationalism, where the chain of justifications eventually relies on basic beliefs or axioms that are left unproven. The last option, such as in coherentism, is making the chain circular so that a statement is included in its own chain of justification.
Rationalism is the emphasis on reasoning as a source of knowledge. Empiricism is the emphasis on observational evidence via sensory experience over other evidence as the source of knowledge. Rationalism claims that every possible object of knowledge can be deduced from coherent premises without observation. Empiricism claims that at least some knowledge is only a matter of observation. For this, Empiricism often cites the concept of tabula rasa, where individuals are not born with mental content and that knowledge builds from experience or perception. Epistemological solipsism is the idea that the existence of the world outside the mind is an unresolvable question.
René Descartes
Parmenides (fl. 500 BC) argued that it is impossible to doubt that thinking actually occurs. But thinking must have an object, therefore something beyond thinking really exists. Parmenides deduced that what really exists must have certain properties—for example, that it cannot come into existence or cease to exist, that it is a coherent whole, that it remains the same eternally (in fact, exists altogether outside time). This is known as the third man argument. Plato (427–347 BC) combined rationalism with a form of realism. The philosopher's work is to consider being, and the essence (ousia) of things. But the characteristic of essences is that they are universal. The nature of a man, a triangle, a tree, applies to all men, all triangles, all trees. Plato argued that these essences are mind-independent "forms", that humans (but particularly philosophers) can come to know by reason, and by ignoring the distractions of sense-perception.
Modern rationalism begins with Descartes. Reflection on the nature of perceptual experience, as well as scientific discoveries in physiology and optics, led Descartes (and also Locke) to the view that we are directly aware of ideas, rather than objects. This view gave rise to three questions:
Is an idea a true copy of the real thing that it represents? Sensation is not a direct interaction between bodily objects and our sense, but is a physiological process involving representation (for example, an image on the retina). Locke thought that a "secondary quality" such as a sensation of green could in no way resemble the arrangement of particles in matter that go to produce this sensation, although he thought that "primary qualities" such as shape, size, number, were really in objects.
How can physical objects such as chairs and tables, or even physiological processes in the brain, give rise to mental items such as ideas? This is part of what became known as the mind-body problem.
If all the contents of awareness are ideas, how can we know that anything exists apart from ideas?
Descartes tried to address the last problem by reason. He began, echoing Parmenides, with a principle that he thought could not coherently be denied: I think, therefore I am (often given in his original Latin: Cogito ergo sum). From this principle, Descartes went on to construct a complete system of knowledge (which involves proving the existence of God, using, among other means, a version of the ontological argument).[17] His view that reason alone could yield substantial truths about reality strongly influenced those philosophers usually considered modern rationalists (such as Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Christian Wolff), while provoking criticism from other philosophers who have retrospectively come to be grouped together as empiricists.
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