I’m going to be brief because I just typed up my post and lost it. Grrrr.
(1) I won’t be connecting up rationalizing causes, free will, and functional or goal-oriented systems. False advertising there, sorry.
Author Archives: Michael Young
free will, part two
In the first part, I argued that non-determined events need not be random (where ‘random’ means that there is no causal explanation of why this rather than that alternative possibility is or would be realized given the fully-specified initial conditions). I conceded, for the sake of argument at least, that if intentional action (choice, decision) were
free will, part one
Calling all philosophers! [Cue Rodin’s The Thinker searchlight-figure cutting through the Gotham night.]
Suppose that C, as a brutely probabilistic matter, has a 50% chance of causing/producing E1 and an equal chance of causing/producing E2. Now suppose that condition K causes the E1-as-against-E2 probability to shift, say, to 80/20. And suppose that, with condition K holding, E1 happens. Continue reading
normative judgment internalism & motivational functionalism (redux)
David and I seem to agree that, for at least certain sorts of normative beliefs or judgments, a kind of moderate internalism is true. For example, Bri’s judgment that she ought to tie her shoe (her belief that this is what she has most reason to do presently or what she has compelling reason to do presently) tends, as a non-accidental matter, to produce in her the intention to tie her shoe. Continue reading
‘WRONG’: MOTIVATIONAL FUNCTIONALISM OVER HYBRID EXPRESSIVISM
Thoughts such as ‘It would be wrong for me to PHI’ and ‘You would be wrong in PHI-ing’ seem to be special in that, in addition to having an essential cognitive function as ordinary beliefs do, they seem to have an essential motivating function as well. (And we might say similar things about other bits of moral thought or moral thought in general, but I’ll focus on ‘wrong’ here.) So, in this sort of way, the concept ‘wrong’ appears to be essentially motivating as well as essentially descriptive or cognitive.
Is Knowledge metaphysically (or conceptually) prior to belief?
Coming out soon, J. Adam Carter, Emma C. Gordon and Benjamin Jarvis have an anthology on the “knowledge first” approach to epistemology and mind (based on the work of Timothy Williamson in his Knowledge and Its Limits). (Maybe the volume is already is out, but I could not find it on the interwebs.) Their introductory essay contains some clear and insightful explanatory summary of various knowledge-first theses (including what they take to be the central one) and discusses a central motivation for the knowledge-first approach (and what they take to be its central thesis). Here is that essay:
https://www.academia.edu/23517268/Knowledge-First_An_Introduction
And here are some excerpts/summary from this text and some commentary from me (in bold).
(If there is a theme to my recent philosophical commentary here at PoT, it is the importance, in many cases, of understanding how things function (or what their function is) in order to understand better what they are.)
Home on the range (Free Range Philosophers)
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of reading Derek Bowman’s interview with Benjamin Jarvis, a Brown philosophy PhD who worked for a bit in a pretty good academic position and then quit academia, got his MBA and now works in business analytics. Here it is:
https://freerangephilosophers.com/2016/09/05/benjamin-jarvis/
Some thoughts on coercion and the moral requirement not to coerce others
[The following is loosely inspired by a compare-and-contrast re-reading of Scanlon’s material on coercion in his Moral Dimensions (p. 74, 78, 108-111) and Michael Huemer’s initial discussion of coercion – in his stipulative sense that simply means exercising or threatening to exercise physical violence or control over another person – in his The Problem of Political Authority (pp. 9-10).]
1. One might coerce someone by doing things that impact or interfere with their exercise of their agency in a ways that are never permissible. One might also coerce someone by doing things that impact or interfere with their exercise of their agency in ways that are permissible if the patient consents – but they have not consented (and in the right circumstances like having full information and with the conditions of consent or non-consent not themselves being coercive). Both sorts of coercion presuppose antecedent moral requirements, moral requirements not to do specific things that negatively impact the ability of others to exercise their agency. So the requirement not to coerce would seem to be a generalization over particular ways of interfering with the agency of others that are of these two types (absolutely forbidden, forbidden unless the patient consents).
Haidt, TRM, chs. 9 & 10
In chs. 9 and 10, Haidt begins his defense of his third principle of empirical moral psychology:
(III) Morality binds and blinds.
The other two (with my interpolations), already defended in the book, are:
(I) Intuitions come first [in moral thinking] strategic reasoning [to moral conclusions] second
(II) There’s more to morality [moral thinking] than harm and fairness.
Admirability (etc.): reasons and getting fitting attitudes right (PEA Soup discussion of Gert’s recent article)
It is fitting or appropriate to admire the admirable (and similarly, it is fitting to value the valuable). According the the fitting attitudes account (FA) of an action or person being admirable, admirability is nothing more than fittingness to be admired. And according to the reasons account of an attitude being fitting (RFA), an attitude being fitting is nothing more than the balance of reasons (of the right sort) favoring having the attitude toward the object. This gives rise the the “wrong kind of reason” problem: we need to say which reasons are the right reasons for admiring to make for admirability because a person or action is not rendered admirable by, say, my threatening her (or God threatening everyone) should she (or any given person) fail to admire, say, children torturing cats. Nor are these sorts of reasons relevant to it being admirable to help someone in need at some significant expense to oneself (e.g.).
Policy of Truth 