Showing papers in "Philosophical Books in 2007"

Rational capacity as a condition on blame

Abstract: Suppose that a particular woman intentionally takes a drink. To provide an evaluative context, suppose she ought not to have another because she will then be unfit to fulfill some of her obligations. Preanalytically, most of us would insist on the possibility and significance of the following three descriptions of the case: (1) the reckless or self-indulgent case; (2) the weak case; and (3) the compulsive case. In (1), the woman knows what she is doing but accepts the consequences. Her choice is to get drunk or risk getting drunk. She acts in accordance with her judgment. In (2) the woman knowingly takes the drink contrary to her (conscious) better judgment; the explanation for this lack of self-control is that she is weak-willed. In (3), she knowingly takes the drink contrary to her better judgment, but she is the victim of a compulsive (irresistible) desire to drink. (41–42) Distinguishing these three categories is important, because they are thought to license different responses to the drinker. While we blame both the reckless drinker and the weak-willed drinker, we do so in different ways, or for different things; the compulsive drinker, on the other hand, is excused in virtue of her compulsion. Although matters of moral importance thus hang on distinguishing these cases, providing a way to distinguish them proves difficult. Watson believes that both the weak-willed and the compulsive drinker act contrary to their better judgment. This distinguishes them from the reckless drinker. Distinguishing them from one another proves more difficult. In a natural first attempt, one might claim that the weak-willed drinker could have resisted the temptation while the compelled drinker could not have—she was compelled. This is a preprint. The final version can be found in Philosophical Books 48, no. 2 (April 2007): 109–123.

Low-grade two-dimensionalism

Abstract: 1. Two-dimensionalists often rely on the assumption that “a posteriori information only tells us about our world” (Chalmers (1996), 137). This assumption backs their rejection of what Chalmers calls “strong metaphysical necessities”, since such necessities would be forever beyond our epistemic reach. But I see no reason to accept this epistemological constraint, and much reason to reject it. Not only are there, as Soames notes1, cases in which non-modal a posteriori knowledge combines with conditional a priori modal knowledge to yield, a posteriori, previously-unavailable categorical modal knowledge, but it seems to me that there are numerous cases in which ordinary epistemic procedures straightforwardly deliver modal information. Examining a table can reveal nonmodal properties such as its shape and material composition, modally-inflected dispositional properties, and fully modal properties such as the facts that it could be taken through that doorway, that it wouldn’t break if a book were placed on it, or that it could have been painted red. I find plausible the stronger view that in many cases, this modal information is part of the content of perceptual states – an essential aspect of a perceptual space seems to me to be the presentation of the possibility of acts and events at locations – but the weaker claim that some stage of the epistemic process yields novel modal information suffices to reject this aspect of two-dimensionalism.

Rationality, coherence, convergence: a critical comment on michael smith's ethics and the a priori

Abstract: For many years now, Michael Smith has been developing his version of the dispositional theory of values, according to which, somewhat roughly, believing that an act is desirable is believing that one’s ideally rational (fully informed and coherent) self would desire that one (imperfect as one actually is) perform it. This view, so says Smith, comfortably accommodates the objectivity, normativity, and practicality of evaluative discourse, an achievement that is not shared by any of its rivals. In the papers collected in Ethics and the A Priori, Smith further develops this view (previously most systematically developed in his well-known The Moral Problem), clarifies some of the argumentative moves, responds to objections, and proceeds to flesh out some of the implications of this view to such topics as the Free Will debate and the appropriate understanding of weakness of will.Because I remain unconvinced about the dispositional theory itself, and because of the length-constraints for a reasonably-sized comment, I will have to postpone some important issues for another occasion (chief among them, perhaps, are a defence of Platonism against Smith’s critiques, and the question whether a meta-ethical theory — however strong in itself — can do all Smith wants it to do). In what follows, then, I focus on three major themes in Smith’s argumentation — rationality, coherence, and convergence — arguing that in each of these Smith faces serious difficulties.

Impartiality in weighing lives

Abstract: Weighing Lives examines the problems of choice that we face when the options available to us not only have consequences for different people at different times but also for what people there are at each point in time, for who is alive and when. The principal conclusion of the book is that the goodness of a distribution of wellbeing across a population over some period of time is measured by the sum of the standardized wellbeings of the individuals belonging to it (over that time period), where the standardized wellbeing of an individual is the difference between their wellbeing and a constant that measures the ‘critical level’ of wellbeing above which someone’s existence is a good thing. Broome is not the first to make this claim it is, for instance, the heart of what Blackorby, Bossert and Donaldson ([1],[2]) call Critical-level Utilitarianism but his book surely provides the most careful and systematic examination of both its foundations and its consequences. The idea of a critical or neutral level of wellbeing, of a level at which it is better that someone exists than that they do not, is in apparent contradiction with intuitions that many people have about what they or policy makers should do when considering options that affect the number of living people. Consider the following two examples: