According to me: for an action to be a wronging of a person is for it to be an action worthy of victim resentment. And similarly: for an action (at least usually a wronging of a person) to be morally wrong is for it to be an action worthy of observer indignation. So I take wronging and moral wrongness to be (non-obviously) fitting-attitude-type evaluative properties, similar to events being scary, jokes being funny, people being admirable.

Here is a potential problem for this idea: excuses can render wrong actions non-blameworthy (and so, it would seem, non-indignation-worthy) without their ceasing to be wrong. Boom. So much for my pretty little idea!

Continue reading →

In a previous post, I provided an account of society S being required to be some way (or do some particular thing) W entirely in terms of more familiar requirements that participants (individuals, but perhaps also collectives that count as agents) do enough or do their part to help S realize W. In the comments, I noted that David Estlund provides something of a different account, in terms of: (a) participants being required to do their part to help S realize W, but only if everyone else does their part and (b) it being the case that S ought to be W (this being the evaluative use of ‘ought’, distinct from S being required to be W). I voiced some general sympathy with the need to include something like [b], while preferring my imperfect but unconditional agential requirements (that might well entail Estlund’s perfect but conditional agential requirements).

Here is a sketch of what I think is a better analysis: for S to be required to be W = (i) S failing to be W being indignation-worthy and because of this (ii) all participants being required to do something (or enough or their part) to help S be W.

Continue reading →

What does it mean to say that a certain institutional arrangement P in some society S ought (or is morally required) to be? Maybe that comes to this: S is required to come up with and implement a plan to achieve S. And perhaps that, in turn, comes to something like this: each individual and collective agent in society is required to make reasonable efforts, relative to role or position, to promote S (all of us collectively) coming up with and implementing a plan to achieve P. Different agents in different roles would have different more-specific requirements.

Is this kind of analysis standard? What are the alternatives?

If this analysis, or something very much like it, is right, there would seem to be some important results that I don’t think are always acknowledged in discussions of justice with regard to the basic structure of a society.

Continue reading →

~AI Facilitating Mind-Reading

This could become a way for paralyzed people to communicate. It might become a way for the government to get information from people (and obviate attempts to get information by torture). At present the system requires not only our general knowledge of where things are typically thought in the brain, but knowledge of the brain operations of the specific individual, and this latter requires about 16 hours of investigation of the subject individual before successful mind reading.

If this system could overcome that arduous preliminary learning and if the system could be shrunken down to the size of a skull cap, perhaps hats would come back into fashion. A dating service might offer the hats to be worn for users of the dating service. It might be a sport to go on dates with these hats in which you get the low-down of what your date is really thinking about.

When x-rays were first discovered, the newspapers entertained the possible future in which people could walk down the street wearing glasses through which you could see the bodies underneath the clothes. But that was a very long time ago, and nothing like peeping glasses has eventuated so far as I know.

I can only muster one thought in response to the Ralph Yarl shooting: legalities aside, and taking press reports at face value, it seems to me that having a doorbell constitutes implicit consent to peoples’ ringing it. If you consent to having people ring your doorbell, you’re not entitled to regard someone’s ringing it as indicating a threat that justifies the use of lethal force. If you do, then absent some very clear evidence of a threat, you’ve committed an unforgivable injustice.

And old age will only go so far as an excuse here. A person who invokes old age as an excuse in this context is invoking a kind of admitted debility for accidentally having shot someone who shouldn’t have been shot. But to invoke such an excuse is to know that you have the debility. And knowing it is a reason to refrain from shooting in the first place. So the old age excuse is self-cancelling: to the extent that it functions as an excuse, it also functions as self-incrimination.

Something similar applies, mutatis mutandis, to shootings on long driveways.

I’ve always been skeptical of the idea that a more heavily-armed society is a safer one. Am getting more so.

This post contains spoilers about the 1985 Andrei Konchalovsky film, “Runaway Train.”

My late wife Alison had a weirdly idiosyncratic conception of politics that fit no clear, known template. She called herself “a Democrat abandoned by the Party,” but that didn’t necessarily tell you what you wanted to know about her politics, assuming that you did. “What, in general, did she believe?” you might ask. Well, phrased that way, nothing. “So she literally had no beliefs?” you might rejoin. No, she believed a lot of things. Continue reading →

I can’t seem to paste screenshots into the comments. The wall is hard to see in Longman’s shot, but here it is in blue below.

Readers had trouble seeing what I was referring to in my last post, Invisible Land. Here are some snips. 

Here is Longman’s shot. I’ve circled where the wall is located. His shot was taken in the evening on a somewhat cloudy day, so the circled location is relatively dark, rendering the wall hard to see in a photo. It’s not hard to see by the naked eye. Continue reading →