Ability

In the last post I mentioned the need for an analysis of ability in order to tell whether my account of the freedom required for moral responsibility is compatible with determinism. Here, I am going to take a stab at providing such an analysis.

First off, it seems obvious to me that, if I have the ability to do something, then it is possible for me to do it. Some will likely disagree with me about this, and many will likely claim that there is more to ability than the possibility of acting in a certain manner, but it is at least a reasonable starting point for our investigation. I am not committed to this being a complete analysis of ability, but it seems unlikely that any other part of an analysis would conflict with determinism if this part does not.

The puzzle which arises with an analysis of ability in terms of possibility is as to the kind of possibility. A compatibilist, of course, must deny that it is possibility in the sense of being compatible with a proposition stating how things were in the distant past together with the laws of nature (or stating whatever might be determinative of whatever happens). Jack Spencer at MIT has argued that ability needs to be understand in a manner compatible with our having the ability to do things which are logically impossible, and I find his argument compelling (Able to Do the Impossible, Mind (2017) 126: 465-96). So the possibility in question cannot be one which entails even such a weak kind of possibility as logical possibility.

Abilities are possessed by individuals. Further, such abilities can be carried around from situation to situation. I thus propose that we understand ability to phi as holding with respect to an agent when the agent, taken as she is at the time she is said to have the ability to phi, possesses the properties in virtue of which some individuals who actually phi, do so. Or, better, to decouple abilities completely from their exercise, we could better say that an agent possesses the ability to phi when that agent possesses the properties which are required for an agent to phi.

This need not be the only case where an agent can be said to have an ability. For instance, some abilities may be built up from lower-level abilities. If A has the ability to teach something in general, and B has the ability to learn it in general, then A, ceteris paribus, has the ability to teach it to B, even if no one has ever taught it to B. The ceteris paribus clause is required in this case to deal with cases where the learning style of B conflicts with the teaching style of A, such that A can teach a topic to students in general, but not to B, because A lacks the ability to teach the topic to students of the sort which B is--but this would be clear in a more fine-grained account of the abilities of A and B, which would still not require A's ability to include the ability to teach a topic to B in particular.

Jack Spencer argues that there are cases where there are necessarily unexercised abilities. That is, that it is possible for someone to have an ability in a world where no one exercises the ability. His example involves a lonely genius in a deterministic world who could, but never does, discover what things were like in the distant past and the complete description of the laws of nature. Again, however, by analyzing ability at the level of the properties required of an agent to phi, we can simply note that the lonely genius has all the required properties himself, and simply is never caused to utilize those properties.

The difficulty for my view is to say what keeps an agent from trivially having the ability to go 10 feet into the air simply because he has the properties required to do so in the event that a giant gust of wind blew him up into the air. There are a couple ways we could solve this problem. In the given case, we might require that the mode of ascent be specified. The agent lacks the power to propel himself 10 feet into the air under his own power, even if he contributes to the height he ascends with the gust of wind. Alternatively, we might specify that abilities only count under normal conditions. Thus, the agent in this example only has the ability to ascend 10 feet if gusts of wind of this kind are normal. I suspect that the latter better tracks the way we talk about abilities, while the former is more precise for metaphysics. To put it another way: when we talk about abilities, we mean abilities under normal conditions, and so it is the context of what counts as normal which specifies which ability in the more precise sense we are talking about.

Freedom

I have not posted anything about free will recently, so here I intend to sketch an account of freedom which is compatible with determinism. Before I get into that, however, let me explain the point of compatibilism with respect to free will and determinism. The point is not that I think the world is determined, though it may be, nor that I am afraid that it might be. I would be a compatibilist with respect to free will and determinism even if I were convinced that the world was indeterministic. The point is to articulate what free will depends on, what the concept of free will amounts to, or what kinds of free will are possible. A compatibilist, such as myself, holds that whether or not the universe is deterministic should not make a difference to whether or not we are free.

Free will is a vague term, and can be used in different ways. Ordinarily, I understand it as whatever choice-relevant factor is required for moral responsibility. One can also understand it to refer to the prerequisite for a being determining its own choices. I will need to do some work in a moment to clarify this second type.

Take freedom as prerequisite for moral responsibility first. If this is all freedom is, then an account of moral responsibility which makes clear whether any of its elements presuppose indeterminacy will answer the question of whether free will is compatible with determinism. My account has it that moral responsibility arises from the ability to consider other points of view on a decision. The only element here that seems likely to require indeterminacy is that it is an ability. So the next step here would be to provide an analysis of (particularly unexercised) ability which is compatible with determinism.

Now take freedom as self-determination. If freedom is self-determination, then when a being performs an action freely in this sense, the freedom of that being has the final say on whether the being performs that action. This need not mean that no other factors are involved, and clearly must be compatible with the being doing things for reasons. Hegel's account of freedom lies in this kind, where he suggests that a being is free if it does all it does from itself, not determined by anything outside itself. The notion of "outside itself" at work here is not, however, a physical one. It is a matter of appropriating or incorporating things into oneself. Thus, one can be free in this sense in a deterministic world so long as one finds oneself--sees one's own values and so on--in what determines one. To put it another way, one would be free so long as one can say "Amen" to all that determines one in its manner of determining one--if one is glad to be determined in the way one is.

Moral Subjectivism, Relativism, and Objective Expressivism

Yesterday, I brought up expressivism, the moral theory according to which terms like "good" and "bad" primarily, if not exclusively, express sentiments about actions. Since the next section of Hegel's PR is quite relevant to expressivism, that is where we are headed today.

The account which Hegel is opposing is not exactly expressivism. It is not a theory about the meanings of moral terms, but about what makes an action good or bad. The account appears to be, roughly, that what makes an action good is that it is done from a good motive or that the agent is convinced that he is doing what he should be doing.

As Hegel traces the account which he is opposing, he argues that it leads to relativism. This should be a familiar argument, whether one accepts it or not. It is basically the same development which leads from "it doesn't matter what you believe so long as you're sincere," to "what's true for you might not be true for me."

(e) Subjective opinion is at last expressly acknowledged as the criterion of right and duty when it is alleged that the ethical nature of an action is determined by the conviction which holds something to be right. The good which is willed does not yet have a content; and a principle of conviction contains the further specification that the subsumption of an action under the determination of the good is the responsibility of the subject. Under these circumstances, any semblance of ethical objectivity has completely disappeared. Such doctrines are intimately connected with that self-styled philosophy... which denies that truth...can be recognized. --PR,, remarks to §140, italics in original.

This is what I refer to in the title of this post as "moral subjectivism." It is not the stage of our present culture but the stage which our culture was in not long ago. It is what some people refer to as "postmodernism." One of my occasional discomforts with agreeing with MacIntyre's claim that we are, culturally, expressivists, is that we are no longer relativistic expressivists. We do claim that there is right and wrong, that there is true and false, albeit even as we continue to regard moral discourse as exprevissivistic.

(f) ...The only possible culmination - and this must now be discussed - of that subjectivity which regards itself as the ultimate instance is reached when it knows itself as that power of resolution and decision on [matters of] truth, right, and duty which is already implicitly [an sich] present within the preceding forms. ...in addition, its form is that of subjective emptiness [Eitelkeit], in that it knows itself as this emptiness of all content and, in this knowledge, knows itself as the absolute - The extent to which this absolute self-satisfaction does not simply remain a solitary worship of the self, but may even form a community whose bond and substance consist, for example, in mutual assurances of conscientiousness, good intentions, and enjoyment of this reciprocal purity...and certain other phenomena [Gestaltungen] are related to the stage [of sunjectivity] which we are here considering - these are questions which I have discussed in the Phenomenology of Spirit (pp. 605ff). --ibid., italics and brackets in the original. 

Turning to the Phenomenology of Sprit, then, we find:

Conscience, then, in its majestic sublimity above any specific law and every content of duty, puts whatever content it pleases into its knowledge and willing.

...When, however, consciousness finds expression, this puts the certainty of itself in the form of pure self and thereby as universal self. Others let the act hold as valid, owing to the explicit terms in which the self is thus expressed and acknowledged to be the essential reality. The spirit and substance of their community are, thus, the mutual assurance of their conscientiousness, of their good intentions, and rejoicing over this reciprocal purity of purpose, the quickening and refreshment received from the glorious privilege of knowing and of expressing, of fostering and cherishing, a state so altogether admirable. (The Phenomenology of Mind, 384-385 in the Dover edition, trans Baillie) 

 At this stage, the subject takes itself to determine what it should do by itself. To be in this stage does not require that we take ourselves to be consciously legislating morality for ourselves. Rather, I would suggest that the idea that one must follow one's heart fills the same role. In fact, Hegel seems to suggest this in the Phenomenology when he says:

Conscience, which in the first instance takes up merely a negative attitude towards duty, qua a given determinate duty, knows itself detached from it. But since conscience fills empty duty with a determinate content drawn from its own self, it is positively aware of the fact that it, qua this particular self, makes its own content. Its pure self, as it is empty knowledge, is without content and without definiteness. The content which it supplies to that knowledge is drawn from its own self, qua this determinate self, is drawn from itself as a natural individuality. (ibid., 387, italics in original)

What Hegel is saying here is simply that, though we think we are find what is good emanating from our inner "true" selves, we are actually only finding our own natural, particular, undeveloped desires. For Hegel, the true good is universal, whereas the particular, qua particular, is evil. Hegel does not completely oppose the idea of being oneself, but his idea of what that should amount to is distinct from what we mean by it. Hegel's notion of the self is one where the self is what it is only in the context of a whole which it finds itself in. The notion of the self which we use when we tell someone to be herself is a notion of the self as separable from the social context the self is in, as a self-sufficient, self-legislating almost-divinity--the notion which Hegel is critiquing in these passages.

Let me point out, too, that these passages speak of a community composed of people assuring one another that they are okay--"I'm ok, you're ok." This is a phenomenon one can find easily in certain circles, and it helps to strengthen bubbles because this assurance keeps us from second-guessing ourselves. One often hears such a community's opponents suggesting that the assurances are required because the members are afraid that they are wrong, but notice that there are some groups of this kind which oppose each other. Perhaps both are wrong, and I suspect both are correct about the other, that they are afraid they are wrong, because no one has a firm basis on which to make their moral claims, and thus no one has any valid certainty (incidentally, his analysis of hypocrisy, which follows shortly after the above passage, appears to apply very well to virtue signaling).

I owe an explanation of how this developed form of expressivism is not relativistic. A large part of this is that the phenomenon which Hegel is articulating is not self-consciously relativistic. It is inherently open to relativism, but claims to be objective. When someone claims to be following his own heart, he is not claiming to be inventing his own morality, but to be following true morality as revealed by his heart. Our natural dispositions sway us to clump toward similar positions, and so we can maintain the illusion that we are all tracking moral reality even when none of us are, since there is consensus. Because there is no verifiable basis for moral claims, however, expressivism comes to be how moral discourse works, even thought morality is not, itself, expressivistic. If our hearts are our only guides, then the only way to convince someone of a moral claim is to sway her heart, the only way to disagree with someone's moral claim is to view him as being untrue to himself.

Any relativism which exists, then, is buried under claims to objectivity. The expression of moral claims may be made in such a way that is reminiscent of relativism, with the same kinds of empty objections to opposing views, but the individuals making the claims no longer think the opposing views are right for anyone.

I should note that there are genuine arguments offered for some positions in some circles. Often these arguments are not very well thought out, however, and occasionally they are more rhetoric than genuine argument. The semblance of argument, however, remains. It likely never left, and it forms the seed from which we may hope to regain a morality based, to some extent, on rational disputation.

Alienation and Retreat

the tendency to look inwards into the self and to know and determine from within the self what is right and good appears in epochs when what is recognized as right and good in actuality and custom is unable to satisfy the better will. --Hegel PR, Remarks to §138

In the context of the rest of Hegel's Philosophy of Right up to this point, I take this to mean that the retreat into the self for guidance as to what to do occurs when the guidance provide from outside oneself breaks down, whether by the guidance being obviously wrong, or by the authoritative guides losing standing (e.g., by being found hypocritical). I have also heard it suggested that this kind of retreat occurs where the general public finds that it lacks social efficacy, that is, where people find themselves in a position where it appears that they can have no influence in the culture or state. Both of these situations are situations where the self fails to find itself represented outside itself, that is, where it is alienated from the outside world.

If these ideas are right, then the modern ideas of "finding oneself," "being true to oneself," and "not caring what others think" are a result of alienation. All three of these adages are forms of retreat, wherein we are advised to see ourselves as authorities on how to live. There is truth to these adages, but when they are absolutized they become corrosive to social cohesion. We become atomic individuals without interaction, and we deny the permissibility of exchanging moral views. What Hegel is suggesting, however, is that the social cohesion was corroded first. We take charge of our fates and souls because we are at a loss as to who else to grant authority over them.

As someone who is generally critical of the above mentioned modern ideas, this framing of the problem presents the challenge of navigating a way forward which respects the common and in many ways justified distrust of authority and lack of hope for social efficacy. In the latter vein, the rise of locally focused social movements benefits us. By focusing on smaller, low-level issues, we prove that we can change something, and can work our way up from there. With respect to our distrust of authority, however, I have not noticed any promising developments. As much as we follow leaders, we seem to trust only those leaders who are within our own groups. This is better than nothing, but is not promising for an exchange of moral views.

The challenge is compounded by the way in which our distrust of moral authority expresses itself. As MacIntyre has argued, we tend to operate with an implicitly expressivist view of moral discourse: we think of claims about good and bad as merely expressing cheers and boos for different actions. This lies behind the difficulty people have distinguishing between condemning an action and condemning an agent who acts in that manner. Because condemning the action is heard as booing, any agent who performs it seems to be booed along with it. Claims about good and bad become inherently charged with blaming and praising and cannot be heard dispassionately any more than swear words can. Because we hear moral claims in this way, we hear disagreements about moral claims as power struggles, and thus the resolution of moral disagreement is viewed, not as a rational processes, but as a processes of rhetorical, particularly emotional, persuasion. We are as suspicious of attempts to persuade us regarding moral claims as we are of advertisements, because we view both as the same kind of thing.

Futurology

When we think of the world's  future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going in now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing direction. --Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value p.3e

Futurology is the attempt to predict how the future will turn out. As opposed to less respected forms of fortune telling, it generally attempts to predict sociological and scientific changes, rather than particular events, although it occasionally makes stabs at predicting world wars and similar globe spanning events.

My subsumption of futurology under the category of fortune telling may suggest that I am opposed to it. I am not. We all predict the future all the time. Implicit in undertaking any action is the prediction that one will have time to do it, or at least make headway on it. There is also the prediction that if I do this, then something I want will result at a reasonable cost. If futurology based its guesses on events which had no natural connection with how things will turn out, then there would be a problem, but it instead attempts to extrapolate from current trends.

The task of extrapolating is often done poorly, however. That is the point of the opening quote: we tend to extrapolate linearly. We tend to think in terms of either progress or decline, and see these as both opposed and lacking internal resources for any reversal. It is hard, even when one notices this fact, to resist this tendency. If one looks back at my posts about current culture, one will likely see me falling into this error.

The twists in history come from the fact that not everyone is going the direction of the masses, and not all the masses are unequivocally going the direction of the herd. The herd is an abstraction. Each individual in the herd feels dislocated from the herd. Most people dissent in some way with respect to some view of their group. Some twists occur because there comes to be enough of a certain kind of dissent to crystallize into a new movement. Other twists occur because people change their minds, often because they see their views as conflicting in irresolvable ways.

What should give us hope in the present time, when it seems as though both the left and the right are providing only predictions of decline, is that these twists and turns occur, and are likely to occur. Neither political party is as unified as it seems, and both seem to contain views which conflict with each other. These two elements provide resources for both parties to change direction. In the culture at large and in various sub-groups the same holds, although it is less clear--because the groups are less well defined--where the fault lines may appear.

A responsible futurology must provide an account of the forces which are presently driving the culture, what the forces which are operating at a level that is not efficacious are, what new forces may be produced, what produces and demolishes such forces, and how all these forces and force effecting processes interact. The lazy futurologies which merely continue a trend linearly or expect history to repeat itself the same way every time must be done away with. Cultural and scientific trends are unstable, and history rarely repeats itself the same way twice.

Externalization, Internalization, and Formation

There is a view that how we keep our surroundings reflects how we are within. It shows up in Thoreau and Hegel, as well as motivational speakers. The view, to use Hegel's language, is that we externalize ourselves or press our minds into stuff. We work things by imposing ourselves on them.

This view is usually introduced as a one way street: when I form stuff in the world, how I am influences how it comes out. But it can also be run backwards: if you would be a particular way, then you must conform the world around you to express that. The relation of expression is not unidirectional, as Merleau-Ponty points out. There is experimental evidence to back this up, particularly in the realm of the emotions, but it is also the whole reason that practice works. When we express ourselves, we also form ourselves. Thus, how we are is a product of what we do, and what we do is a product of who we are. It is a reciprocal relationship.

It is therefore possible to express our way into being as we want to be. The more one acts a particular way, the more one will become the kind of person who acts like that. If thinkers like Hegel and Merleau-Ponty are right, then this works much more generally than habits narrowly construed. The more you speak in a certain way, the more you will act like those who speak in that way, and vice-versa. By identifying with a group in little ways, one sets oneself on the path to identify with them in bigger ways.

Imposter Syndrome can be described as a conflict between how one expresses oneself (usually successfully) and how one sees oneself. In hegelian terms, it is a conflict between the self in-itself and the self for-itself. This conflict is sustained by a belief that if one were really what one looks like, then the expression would just flow out of one. Instead, in all areas of life, to succeed we must set ourselves against our natural inclinations and develop ourselves by expressing and incorporating better ways of being.

The Economy of Values: Community

Once upon a time, before the internet was how we bought everything, the terror of the small business world was the big box stores. Now, it is Amazon. The small businesses have difficulty competing with both for the same reason: economies of scale. In other words, because the logistical costs grow slower the sales do--it costs less to ship 50 boxes at once than 1 box 50 times--the massive scale of Amazon allows it to spread out the logistical costs, across more products, thus leading to a smaller price for the customer per unit. A book at Barnes and Noble has to pay for its own shipping, the warehouse staff, the lights in the building, rent for both the sales building and the warehouse, and so on. The same book at Amazon doesn't need to pay for a building it can be displayed and sold in (generally--excepting Amazon's bookstores). Big Box stores cannot compete with Amazon, because they are both playing the same game, by the same rules, and Amazon has a massive advantage in virtue of its scale.

None of that is news, of course. Neither is it news that small businesses have to play a different game if they want to win. Small businesses have to rely on people who value community. This is the key value for advertising in recent years, as evidenced by how much is sold by appealing to connection, community, family, neighborhood, and other similar notions (The most obvious cases of this that I have noticed are Weber and Coca-Cola, but I live under a rock as far as advertisements go). Small businesses rely on these values by inherently embodying them: they are communal entities. They invest in their communities, know customers by name, and have to care about customer retention.

Let me say a little bit more about how huge community is as an advertising value. What I mean by an advertising value is a value which a product is associated with in advertising to make people want the product because it is associated with the value. When I was growing up and learning to read advertisements so as to be resistant to them, the main advertising values were sex, money, and excitement, the last mostly when watching shows for younger people, the former when watching, say, the news. Now, however, community is bigger than both, although money still shows up now and then. Community does most of what sex used to, but draws a wider audience. Perhaps this observation is subject to a selection effect, but notice that social media draws on this same value, and that our lack of connection is perhaps the lament expressed most loudly and adamantly by the media.

So, you are being sold to via your need for connection. You are not necessarily being sold anything which will satisfy that need, however. Buying a Weber won't make nice big friendly lawn parties happen, and buying a Coke won't help you connect with strangers. Facebook is not actually there to help you connect with friends. Even small businesses only enable connection because that is how they survive. What should we do? Should we avoid all of these things because they will not satisfy our need for connection? In some cases, that may be appropriate. Certainly, don't buy a Coke because you are lonely (granted, no one is actually thinking this, but they may be buying because of it).

There is another option, however. Some of these products actually can serve connection. Social media is a tool that, when used carefully, can enable communication. Small local businesses, when done well, provide the feeling of community by providing genuine community, welcoming and connecting people. It is not hard to imagine that, if I frequented a bookstore long enough, and there was anyone else buying similar books, the salesperson might notice and connect us. Spend enough time around people, and permit it, and all sorts of discussions can take place.

Of course, the business is still a business. The clerk is not being paid to be a friend, but to be friendly. It is still not genuine connection because I meet them as a customer, and they meet me as a salesperson. Neither of us meets the other as a person. The possibility of such a business serving to enable connection between the customers is, then, an important possibility. This shifts the small business into territory competing, albeit indirectly, with social media, in that their product becomes, in part, people. Then the question becomes how to make money by connecting people, but that might be as simple to solve as relying on connection to bring people in, and then expecting that most people, once in, will buy something.

The other challenge is how to ensure that the, presumably diverse, customer base genuinely connects. We are not merely trying to sate the need, but satisfy it. We want create genuine connection, not merely a marketable semblance of it. The challenge is to bridge gaps between people with very different views, who tend to speak in very different idioms, and who the media portrays as implacable enemies. Of course, they are not implacable enemies, and most at least think that they are exceptions to the rule that says the two sides do not understand each other. Part of the challenge, then, is to get people to recognize that they do not understand each other, that they nevertheless would benefit from the hard work of doing so, and that they cannot connect without doing so. The challenge here is to ensure that views are heard whether they are thought of as legitimate or not, and in their peculiar deviations from their popular portrayals. Part of this is managing to keep people from sticking each other in boxes, assuming that, because they "know what liberals/conservatives think" they also know what this liberal/conservative thinks.

Equality and Difference

It is a common critique that equality as an end tends to self destruct. Alexis de Tocqueville offers an argument for this idea in Democracy in America, and Hegel makes the same claim in his work. In both cases the argument goes relatively simply.

When held out as an end, equality requires all differences, all hierarchy, and all dissent to be flattened. Equality as an end by itself thus requires the imposition of equality and the destruction of any who would raise up differences. Equality cannot tolerate authority or institutions. It thus raises an in-group over an out-group, removing both equality and liberty. From "all humans are equal" we move quite quickly to "but those who recognize that are more equal than others."

We may seem to be safe from an equality which would level out all difference. We, after all, value differences. We honor each individual's right to express him or herself in a unique manner. Nevertheless, we refuse to let these differences exist as differences. We refuse the idea that differences might make a difference. Differences are permitted so long as they do not matter. This is not merely the opposition to differences in value, but an opposition to practical differences. We are uncomfortable, not only with the idea that it may be better to be smarter and not everyone is equally smart, but also with the idea that those with particular talents might be better off doing some things than others. We want to say that anyone can do anything just as well, but to say this we must turn a blind eye to practical differences.

Neither de Tocqueville nor Hegel are opposed to equality per se, but only to equality as an end in itself. Instead, both see equality as a means to liberty, albeit a means which may seek the role of end, and must be kept in its place. This was one of de Tocqueville's cautions for us in America: he saw that equality could be a tempting end, and thus lead to our downfall.

To preserve liberty, we must aim for enough equality that all have a degree of power, yet permit enough difference that not all have the same power. To preserve equality, we must recognize equal honor of those in different roles which require different actions. Different individuals have different powers, and thus find themselves in different practical situations which thus call for different responses. We can acknowledge this without claiming that some sets of powers or situations make an individual worth more or worth hearing more.

Culture, Environment, and Institutions

As promised, in this post I will discuss the way that cultural and environmental factors should affect the justification of institutions. Hegel will provide our starting point, rather than our end point today:

With regard to the historical element in positive right (first referred to in §3 above), Montesquieu stated the true historical view, the genuinely philosophical viewpoint, that legislation in general and its particular determinations should not be considered in isolation and in the abstract, but rather as a dependent moment within one totality, in the context of all the other determinations which constitute the character of a nation and age; within this context they gain their genuine significance, and hence also their justification.

 ... This distinction, which is very important and should be firmly borne in mind, is at the same time a very obvious one; a determination of right may be shown to be entirely grounded in and consistent with the prevailing circumstances and existing legal institutions, yet it may be contrary to right [unrechtlich] and irrational in and for itself, like numerous determinations of Roman civil law [Privatrecht] which followed quite consistently from such institutions as Roman paternal authority and Roman matrimony. (Elements of The Philosophy of Right, same copy as last time, p.29, all italics and brackets in original--henceforth in the near future I shall abbreviate the unchanging part of this citation as "PR")

The distinction is between development historically and from the concept. There are two things in the above quoted which may seem in tension: Hegel's endorsement of Montesquieu's view and Hegel's apparent aversion to the historical view.

The aversion is to seeing the historical genesis as justification, and to seeing the totality in which a law exists as that law's (vindicating) justification. He may be using "justification" in the first paragraph in the sense of our proposed justification, in which case the point is simply that the law has a sense only in the context of an environment and culture, and thus can only be evaluated as a legal determination as applied in its particular context.

Right, as Hegel is trying to explicate it, is not a contingent concept, subject to the vicissitudes of history, but it does appear in history as developing. It develops in history without being developed by history. We can thus see the development of the concept in history, but must distinguish between what was subject to vicissitudes of history, and hence is not part of the concept of Right, and what was an internal development of the concept, required by the nature of Right.

Having sorted this out, we can say that Right appears in history and, insofar as the historical appearance of Right is full, the laws of a nation are justified. The point from Montesquieu is that the same Right will appear differently in different cultures, and the current stage in the development of Right can only be understood by examining the totality in which it appears. We can generalize this to say that the legal situation in a nation can only be understood along with the cultural and environmental situation in the nation.

This becomes clear when we recognize the way that cultural values, economic factors, and political life impinge upon one another. Alexis de Tocqueville spends a great deal of Democracy in America examining how these three elements interact, mutually supporting, and occasionally threatening, each other. If today we have a culture less well-suited to democracy, we can legislate ourselves out of the problem by finding a form of government which does suit us. On the other hand, we might prefer to alter our culture or modes of production to better support a democracy. Along with this more contentious example, there are examples which are easier to swallow. Legislation regarding carbon emissions presumes a relation to the environment. Legislation regarding what to do on hills presumes the existence of hills. Legislation regarding how individuals may claim unclaimed land are otiose when there is no land to be claimed, but necessary when the west is wide open to be claimed.

Present puzzles regarding work and automation or the role of the household and community are of this form. Our mode of economic life has changed, and has brought our culture with it. We are now faced with the puzzle of how to adjust institutions and laws, as well as economic activity and cultural products, to maintain cultural homeostasis. This is the puzzle which came to the fore, in part, a couple years ago when we noticed the massive effect of social media helping create echo chambers. The manner in which social media makes money is corrosive to current political and cultural practices, and thus something--although we do not know what--must change. The left gives its recommendations, and the right gives its recommendations, but the very problem they seek to solve hinders them from reaching a viable solution which can be agreed upon.

Genesis, Justification, and Conservatism

Yesterday, I discussed interpretive charity as it relates to arguments. Today, I want to discuss an expansion of that thought which underlies--at least elements of--conservatism.

We interpret social structures, institutions, and human biology as well as arguments. Each of these have some degree of justification in their genesis. However one thinks human beings came to be, every theory presumes some degree of adaption to our environment, in terms of which we may speak of our biological constitution as justified. Likewise, social structures and institutions are justified by their role in a society, and are instituted because they serve a purpose.

When interpreting any of these things, then, interpretive charity calls on us to recognize that there was some degree of justification for how things are at some time. The justification which was accepted might not be a good one, but it was there. Conservatism is thus the instinct to understand the justification well enough to see how someone might once have thought it a good justification, before dismantling it. This is called Chesterton's Fence (HT: Mere Orthodoxy). If you do not know why it was justified, or at least considered justified, then you do not know that it is no longer justified--although it may be, and it may never have truly been justified.

Perhaps it is best to distinguish between justification in the sense that we give justifications, and justification in the sense that things are justified. Call the first "proposed justification" and the second "vindicating justification." The kind of justification which social structures, institutions, and biology must have is proposed justification, which need not mean that anyone has ever articulated the proposed justification, simply that there is a justification in virtue of which the phenomenon has been brought forth and preserved. The kind of justification which may or may not ever have existed is vindicating justification.

We may recognize bad proposed justifications in our past, but we must in these cases as much as with our contemporaries seek to find what the good and true thing is which led them down the wrong road. If we can find no good or truth, then we cannot be confident that we have understood the institution well enough to change it.

I hope it is clear that I do not think we should do things simply because we have always done them that way. I am, after all, articulating conditions under which one may be justified in altering social structures and institutions. We have made mistakes in our constitution of society, and we have made improvements. Just as the liberal does not see all change as good, the conservative does not see all change as bad. Change is bad when it removes a good, but good when it sustains a good. The principle of interpretive charity with respect to the past, Chesterton's Fence, simply urges us to change things with care and understanding, recognizing why the past was, and giving reason for it to be in the past. We should adapt to new situations when the justification proposed no longer vindicates and is not replaced by a new vindicating justification.

Hegel, in Elements of The Philosophy of Right §3 may be taken to be minimizing the need to understand the justification of a social structure or institution in its origin when he says:

If it can be shown that the origin of an institution was entirely expedient and necessary under the specific circumstances of the time, the requirements of the historical viewpoint are fulfilled. But if this is supposed to amount to a general justification of the thing itself, the result is precisely the opposite; for since the original circumstances are no longer present, the institution has thereby lost its meaning and its right [to exist]. (Wood, ed Nisbet, trans. Cambridge University Press p.30, brackets in original)

But he is rather making a point which I agree with: that institutions play a role and are justified in the context of a whole society, so that as the society changes the institutions must, as well. This does not mean that we can be blind to the historical justifications of our institutions when altering them, and that is not Hegel's point. Hegel wants to make clear that the particular contingent institutions are contingent and not an essential part of what Right is, so that, while the institutions should fit the culture and environment, they need not be the same in all cultures and environments. There is a great deal more in Hegel's Elements of The Philosophy of Right about the relation of genesis and justification, which I suspect I will discuss later, but currently I have only read so far in the book, and it is not all on topic. Tomorrow, however, I will discuss the need for social structures and institutions to fit with the culture and environment.

Interpretive Charity

One of the striking things about reading both liberal philosophers and conservative Christian thinkers, is that one finds them arguing past each other. Each presents arguments against the other's positions, rebuttals of the other's arguments, which are not actually engaging the views and arguments which the other would present. Perhaps this is due to reading people who are more academic--perhaps each is responding to what the masses on the other side would argue. Nevertheless, it seems to lack interpretive charity.

Interpretive charity is evidenced where one seeks to understand a position, particularly a position one disagrees with, well enough to see how someone might find it compelling. If one cannot see why someone might believe P, then it is hard to see how one could have any confidence arguing against P.

In an era with greater evidence than ever before of how human beings reason fallaciously, we can be tempted to simply locate one of these fallacies which fits the case. This removes the hard work of understanding a position from the inside. The individuals who hold such views do not, themselves, think they are reasoning fallaciously, and at least some of them have examined their views carefully. They are as sure that you are reasoning fallaciously as you are that they are reasoning fallaciously.

Besides, if we seek to convince someone--if we seek to actually discuss things and increase consensus regarding what true and good--we cannot simply claim that they are reasoning fallaciously. Pointing out a fallacy may be part of the story, but it must be done in such a way that they can recognize the reasoning as fallacious. Instead of focusing on fallacies and psychological biases, we must focus on unearthing the logic of each others' views, understanding the paradigms within which the views we find so wrong may seem so right. We must find what is right in the opposing view such that it is attractive to others. We will then be in a position to articulate our own views in a way that makes sense to these others, and we will be in a position to show how our views draw on some of the same values and truths as theirs. The goal will be, on the one hand, to learn from those with whom we disagree what kinds of passions must be provided for in our own position. We must, that is, include in our own account an understanding of where the false turns are and what makes them at once attractive and wrong. This may require us to change our views, since we must account for a rational attraction to the wrong turn. Having learned from the other view, we must then articulate our own view so as to show how it encompasses and moves beyond the truths and values of the false views, and how it makes clear both the basis of that view and how it goes wrong.

This model of interpretive charity does not permit us to oppose arguments with psychoanalysis of our opponents. Such a tack may have a role elsewhere, but not when trying to argue for a position against another position. If we are arguing, we are not pathologizing our opponents. If we do pathologize our opponents, we can no longer make sense of arguing with them.

Reflexive Awareness and Other Awareness

Reflexive awareness enables us to be aware of ourselves. We are also aware of others as subjects of consciousness, that is, beings who are aware. The question of this post is how the two capacities are related.

Object-awareness suffices for being aware of others as beings. It may, however, present others as mere objects. Something further, or a special kind of object-awareness, is needed to be aware of the fact that someone has a mental life of some sort.

There are five ways in which these two capacities might be related. Reflexive awareness might depend on other awareness, other awareness might depend on reflexive awareness, both might depend on a third thing, the two capacities might be interdependent, or they might be independent. In addition, in the first three cases, the dependence may also be such that what is depended on is also sufficient for what is dependent on it, and, since it seems quite implausible that one might find one of these two capacities without the other, these are the varieties of the first three hypotheses which I will be interested in. For the same reason, I reject the final possibility.

Let us take these possibilities in order, then. If reflexive awareness only depends on other awareness, then reflexive awareness should be able to be explained in terms of other awareness. There are at least two varieties of this idea. One is the idea that we are aware of our own awareness by the same means as we are aware of others' awareness. The idea is that we turn our capacity to understand others on ourselves. Another is the idea that we first recognize awareness as distinct from the contents of awareness in virtue of recognizing that others also possess awareness. The idea here is that, in order to recognize our own awareness, we must recognize it as one instance among others.

If the dependency is switched, so that other awareness depends on reflexive awareness, then the idea is that we generalize from our own case of awareness to others' cases of awareness. This need not be the claim that we actually go through an argument for other minds by analogy. It may be that we directly recognize others as like us, and presume that they are like us in their experiences as well as their behaviors.

Next, there may be third capacity, or other feature, on which both capacities depend and which is sufficient for both. Clearly, both capacities need a perceiving subject if there is to be awareness at all, but the idea here is that something more in the subject would produce both reflexive awareness and other awareness. This, it seems to me, is roughly Merleau-Ponty's view, since he holds that the distinction between self and other arises out of an original undifferentiated subjectivity from which we abstract ourselves and others. On his account, as I understand it, we understand our own and others' bodies, originally, simply as bodies, and gradually learn to distinguish ourselves from others. This is, incidentally, compatible with the next option, and Merleau-Ponty's articulation of it involves the next option.

Finally, the two capacities may be interdependent. The question here is whether we wind up with the best of both worlds or the worst of both worlds. We can easily see that the distinction between self and other requires both terms if it is to make sense. I am a self only as distinct from some other, and others are other only to me. This is an idea taken from the idea that reflexive awareness might be dependent on other awareness. We can also take the idea that we use roughly the same capacity to recognize our own and others' awareness. We can also recognize the fact that my own experience of the world through my body affects how I interpret others. We tend to project ourselves onto others, and this makes some sense if we use ourselves as models of subjectivity (this idea comes from Alvin Goldman, Simulating Minds). This may be understood as a neutral process, however: it is not as though I am solid and project my solid self on others, rather, I and others are fluid, and pass into and understand one another via projecting ourselves onto others and accepting others into ourselves. I hope that metaphor makes some kind of sense. It is roughly how I understand Merleau-Ponty's view. The idea is that we learn to be selves by using ourselves to model others' selfhood, and at the same time learn about others through how we have learned to be selves. The same body both models others and mimics others via the same mechanism. It becomes less porous over time, as one learns to be a self more, but it retains some degree of porosity.

Are You Aware of Your Awareness?

When one is aware of something, say, your mug on a table, are you automatically aware that you are aware of it? That is the question I will ponder in this post.

There are multiple levels of awareness, and this plurality of levels complicates the question. When I am aware of my mug on the table, surely I am aware that I am aware of the mug on the table, but I might not be aware of the color of the mug, or the angle of the mug. I might be aware of the angle of the mug in a practical way, but not in such a way that I am also aware that I am aware of the angle of the mug. Let me unpack some of these distinctions here.

First, conscious awareness is the kind of awareness required for discourse. When I see the mug and can talk about whether it has coffee or tea in it, I am utilizing this form of awareness. In this case, the ordinary case of awareness, we might say, when I am aware of something, I am aware of the contents of that awareness in such a manner that the contents are accessible for reflective thought and speech.

Second, there is a form of unconscious action-awareness. At least with sight, we process perceptual information along two streams, so that one stream is not conscious but guides action, while the other is conscious, yet does not hook up to actions (at least in the smooth way that the first does). When this second kind of consciousness is in play, we are not aware of what we are aware of. One might pick out obstacles visually in this manner without noticing what one is doing or even being able to direct one's attention to it. Here, one is aware of the contents of awareness only practically, that is, in such a way that the contents are accessible for action-guidance, in particular, for fine-tuning actions directed toward the object in some way (adjusting angle of approach of one's hand to the coffee mug, for instance).

Conscious awareness can also be more finely distinguished into different levels. At the object-level, I am aware of objects, such as my mug and the table it sits on. At a more fine-grained level, call it the property-level, I may pick out the properties of these objects: I may notice the color of the mug or the texture of the table. At a less fine-grained level, the event-level, I do not notice individual things, but arrangements, such as something passing through my visual field, some odd noise, or a mass of objects. One may be consciously aware at any of these levels or none of them, and this awareness may or may not co-exist with the unconscious action-awareness. Each level is conscious, and hence transparent, but the transparency of one level does not entail any awareness of other levels. One cannot decompose higher levels in finer ones, nor assemble finer ones into higher ones, except by directing one's attention in particular ways. When one attempts to decompose an image from memory, one often finds that some of the lower-level facts are not available.

Ordinarily, one's conscious awareness is a certain combination of levels of conscious awareness, with action-awareness seeming to come along free. I am now aware of my computer, the way the text forms paragraph blocks, and the background's whiteness. Nevertheless, I am not particularly aware of what all the words say, until I direct my attention to them. Most of what I am aware of is a background, which is only fleshed out when I direct my attention to it.

Thus far, I have not endorsed transparency about conscious perception. There is a third level of awareness, however, which I will call reflexive awareness. This is the kind of awareness which allows me to be aware of my awareness as an instance of awareness. With conscious awareness, I can be aware of the contents of my awareness. With reflexive awareness, I can be aware of the fact that those contents are contents of awareness. This form of awareness enables us to think about thinking, talk about how we see, and recognize that we are aware of something fallibly.

It is in virtue of our capacity for reflexive awareness, I would claim, that we feel as though it suffices for being aware of being aware of something that we be aware of that thing. That is, it feels as though it suffices for my being aware of being aware of a mug that I be aware of the mug, but in fact that is an illusion produced by the fact that it takes no effort for us to make ourselves aware of that awareness because we are capable of reflexive awareness.

Formal Unity and Triviality

There is an objection common to approaches to ethics of the sort I have been presenting. The objection goes as follows: you have given merely a formal criteria for ethics, which can be achieved trivially in a manner which we would not think was good. In terms of my account, one might say that unity can be accomplished by restricting oneself to very few beliefs, social groups and roles, and taking extreme care of one's health. An obsessive health nut, it seems, is an ideal according to my account. Well, I certainly do not want this consequence, and I agree that if my account has this consequence, then that is a reductio against my account.

How, then, do I answer this objection? First, I think MacIntyre, in Dependent Rational Animals, already offers a way to work from our actual embodied situation to at least a sketchy yet substantive ethics. A similar tactic is available to me: I, too, can note the way that rationality requires training, how we develop from dependency to independence through being raised in a culture, and how we are always already situated in a social world which provides roles and background beliefs from which we must begin our task of self-unification. Much of what follows is my way of putting what MacIntyre has already said.

Thus, we can point to the way that an obsessive health nut is dependent on health researchers, gym owners, and trainers, or to the fact that he must have been introduced to this kind of life by someone, and likely continues in it as a member of a group of people interested in health. He is thus required to cultivate beliefs, desires, and ways of acting which will contribute to his ability to take advantage of these resources for his goal of health. There will be an etiquette to the use of exercise materials, the need to gain help from others, and a duty to provide help to others. There will be pressure to learn about health and thus cultivate a moderate understanding of human biology.

One of the points I want to make here is that obsessive interests tend to metastasize into a field of interests. The athlete wants to understand how to be a good athlete, will tend to gain an interest in a particular form of athleticism, will want to understand the history of her activity, if only to glean tips from long-dead masters. To gain access to these fields, she will need an introduction, or at least an introduction to teaching oneself. If the athlete does not gain these interests, she will need to rely on others who do have these interests. In either case, she is now a member of a community of mutual helpers.

She will thus tend to be drawn into the lives of others, simply because she is interested in them as fellows in the project she herself is engaged in. This interest is due to our need to learn how to live from others. We learn how to live by watching others live. It is to our detriment to be self-obsessed, because then we will have no resources to draw from in navigating new problems in life. Supposing the athlete treats fellow athletes merely as resources, then she will be, not only a worse human for it, but a worse athlete. She will be spurned as not helpful. Others will cease to care about how she is as a whole person. Yet the whole person is relevant to athleticism. One's health is affected by things beyond pure athleticism. How her work affects what she can eat, how she can get exercise into her day, how her recovery from a sprain is affecting her emotional health, all are avenues which tend to lead to a concern for others as people, rather than merely as athletic machines. By spurning others, she loses out on learning of how to incorporate athletic practices into her particular day, because she loses the ability to see how others do it.

By hooking my ethics into our actual human constitution, I am able to overcome the objection to formal ethical systems. Further, by framing my ethics at a general level, I enable it to act as a framework for thinking about our particular constitution, and avoid the appearance of ethics being completely relative to a kind of constitution. Rather, the formal level provides substance when applied to a concrete constitution.

Unity of the Self

It is a relatively uncontentious thesis that consciousness is, at least experienced as, a simple and unified thing. I want to argue that the embodied self has a unity, as well. This unity is not a factual unity but an ideal unity, that is, to be more fully a self one must be more fully a union.

The self is composed of a variety of aspects. The physical, the mental, and the social are the three we have been focusing on. These three aspects should each form a unity in themselves, and should be united with each other to form a self. We do better or worse as each of these and all of these together form a more unified whole.

For the physical aspect to be unified requires merely maintenance of bodily order. The bodily processes which maintain our physical life need to continue to work together and thereby succeed in maintaining our bodily presence. When the body breaks down, our ability to be as we have otherwise constituted ourselves breaks down. We can no longer fulfill the roles which we have taken on, because our bodies no longer enable us to perform the necessary tasks.

For the mental aspect of our lives to be unified requires that our beliefs hold together. I understand this broadly to require not only our explicit claims, but also those claims which we implicitly show ourselves to believe by how we act. Some beliefs we will state, other beliefs we will act on the basis of, and to be a unified self, these two sorts of beliefs need to avoid conflict. Our emotions and our beliefs also need to fit together. Now, just as we are rarely perfectly healthy, I doubt any mere mortal has ever attained perfect unity of mental life, either. Nevertheless, at the other extreme, that of breakdown, we would lose the ability to make sense of our own actions. The better we unify our mental lives, the more we will be able to regulate our own behavior, the more we will do what we say we want to do. Mental unity is not the only constrain on what we should claim, of course, or, to the extent that it is, we must notice that our perceptions and beliefs about rationality are among the constraints. Sometimes, it will be clear that we should not drop a claim simply because we have not found ourselves acting by it, but should seek means of altering our behavior, of training our desires and habits to track what we claim is true.

For the social aspect of our lives to be unified involves the roles we take up, the groups we find ourselves in, the responsibilities we accept, and the images we project of ourselves fitting together. We should not have roles which must conflict, or different groups we are in which pit us against ourselves, or sets of responsibilities which exclude their mutual fulfillment. The images we give of ourselves should not conflict, although they may provide quite different pictures of ourselves. Further, our images of ourselves should not conflict with the roles and responsibilities we have accepted. The groups we are part of should aid, rather than hinder, the roles and responsibilities we are to fulfill.

For all three of these to be unified with each other requires that our beliefs, desires, and actions should fit our roles, images, and group memberships, and that both of these should fit with what our bodies enable us to do and to be. Our group memberships and roles are constrained by what our bodies can do and the beliefs we hold. The beliefs we can hold are constrained by our bodily context and social milieu, our bodily capacities are affected by the groups we participate in, the roles we perform, and our beliefs and desires. Even where different aspects of ourselves are compatible, differences may nuance the manner in which we fulfill a role or think about a topic or care for our bodies.

We can seek to approximate a perfect unity of the self, but approximation is as good as we can hope for in this life. Further, in light of eternity, some elements of self may become less important, able to wait for the perfection to come. It is useful to keep in mind that much of these efforts at unification depend on contingent factors: sickness, intellectual acumen, social intelligence, not to mention the contingencies of the physical, intellectual, and social world one finds oneself in, can all hinder or help one in forming a unity of oneself. Thus, the ethics which this presents is not that one ought to be unified, but that one ought to be working in that direction in a manner appropriate to it.

The Language of Worlds

The idea that there might be worlds besides our own shows up in at least three fields. In physics the idea is used as an interpretation of quantum mechanics or as an explanation for the existence of a life-conducive world. In the philosophy of logic, the same language is used to talk about possible worlds which may or may not be thought of as actually existing. In fiction, the idea refers to the possibility of different cosmoi possessing subtly different laws of nature or existing organisms and where at least one cosmos is accessible from at least one another.

In only one of these cases, the fiction case, could we encounter the contents of the other worlds in the same way that we encounter the contents of this world. In both the physics case and the philosophy case, the worlds are supposed to be self-contained. If we can access them at all, it is not in the same way that we access our own world.

It has been argued by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity that since Sherlock Holmes was made up by Arthur Conan Doyle, he is necessarily made up by Arthur Conan Doyle. This is a direct consequence of the necessity of origins. Thus, there would be no logically possible world where what we call Sherlock Holmes exists except as such a fiction. The same would be true of other fictions, such as unicorns.

This has some odd consequences. For one, if we found that we lived in the fictional kind of multiple worlds scenario, where different worlds are interaccessible, then we might find ourselves visiting a world where, we would usually say, "unicorns exist." Suppose in our fictional scenario that we had just invented a very difficult device allowing us to transfer between worlds and had good evidence that such a device had never existed in our world. If we agree with Kripke's argument, then, since we were thinking that our myth of the unicorn could not have came from this world, we would be wrong. In our world, unicorns are mythical, whereas in this other world they are not.

Supposing we found that one of these other worlds came into being differently from our own, so that everything in it originated differently from everything in our world. In that case, we would have to say that anything we met in other worlds would be different from anything we encountered in our own world in virtue of originating in a different manner. Thus, if we found a world where the Norse deities were real and the Norse creation story was real, then we would have to claim that what we called dirt in our world and what they called dirt in the Norse world would be different in virtue of having different origins. In fact, it is at least likely that the same would go for matter and energy as well. None of this requires the laws of physics to be radically different. I am not pointing out that water might be XYZ instead of H2O in the Norse world, but that hydrogen atoms, as a class, might have originated differently in the Norse world. The humans of the Norse world would likely have originated differently from the humans of our world, and thus would not both be what we call "humans."

In the physics case, this problem is largely avoided. Subatomic particles will generally originate in the same manner in each world. The various worlds only vary within certain bounds. Each world would, itself, originate in a similar manner. Likewise, in the philosophical case, the logical worlds, by definition, only represent possible states of affairs. Some included horses with a single horn, but also the proposition that these are not unicorns in our sense of the term. Even if logically possible worlds exist independently of thinkers, which I doubt, this does not case the kind of trouble which interaccessible worlds would cause.

Now, one may be wondering whether I am interpreting the necessity of origins too stringently. I have applied it to kinds, and one might think that, while it is necessary for a thing to be the kind of thing it is, and it is necessary for a thing to have the origins it has, it is not necessary for a kind to have the origins it has. In that case, while any Sherlock Holmes look- and act-a-like we might meet would still not be our Sherlock Holmes, the unicorns might still be unicorns in our sense of the term, and H2O in the Norse world might still be what we call water in our world. This is a dispute about how names work. I do not think that Kripke's argument allows for this nuance, although I do not have it in front of me at the moment.

Hylian and Aristotelian Virtue

 In Aristotle's philosophy of the virtues, the highest virtue is often phronesis, or practical wisdom. In The Legend of Zelda games, there is a triforce composed of three triangles. One represents courage, one wisdom, and one power. I understand these to represent the three core virtues of the Hylian world. If one were an Aristotelian, it would make sense to make wisdom the central virtue. The Legend of Zelda, however, presents courage as the key virtue.

When one plays a Zelda game, one plays Link, a youth dressed in green. Usually, one finds oneself with a glowing triangle on one's hand early on: the first part of the triforce. This first part is the triforce of courage. Over the course of the game, one usually collects the other two: the triforces of wisdom and power. The usual progression is courage, then wisdom, and finally power. The game presents this as a natural progression. It thus suggests that wisdom cannot be gained virtuously without courage, and power cannot be gained virtuously without both.

Interestingly, there are two other characters in the game which possess the same kind of glowing marks on their hands. The princess Zelda possesses the triforce of wisdom, and the big bad Ganondorf possesses the triforce of power. The only one of the three who can be the hero is Link, however. Zelda may be wise, but for some reason, the game suggests, one cannot work from wisdom to reach the courage necessary to face Ganondorf. Power without the other two, the game suggests, will be misused.

The account of the virtues presented in The Legend of Zelda may be compatible with that of Aristotle. Aristotle's primacy of phronesis requires one to attain it be attain other virtues, in such a way that to possess phronesis is, constitutively, to possess the other virtues. But for Aristotle courage is but one among many virtues. For The Legend of Zelda, courage is the key to growing in wisdom and power without becoming a mere guide or a bully.

I think the view that courage is central to developing virtue is common in our day. The idea that what is required to be good is to have the courage to be oneself, to face the challenges one is set, to speak up, and so on, is a popular idea. The notion that wisdom is a necessary waypoint on the way to power, however, may be endorsed less often. Our notions of success have one jumping straight from a kind of courage to power, but what The Legend of Zelda suggests is that this is not the way of courage. It thus suggests that courage requires a certain kind of direction to be courage. Indeed, Link is often presented, not only as brave, but as eager to help, concerned with the needs of others. This, I think the game suggests, is part of what Hylian courage is, the courage to aid others without fear of how they will respond, whether they will appreciate it. Yet, wisdom then takes its place as understanding what others need or want, what will enable others to develop. Power then takes its place, in the same place as in Aristotle's magnanimus man, as the power to provide for and protect others.

Emergence and Grounding

I want to develop a concept I have been using without definition for a little while now: emergence or grounding. As I use these terms, they are reciprocals of each other. If A grounds B, then B emerges from A.

Let us begin with emergence. When B emerges from A, A serves as a ground for B. B begins to exist on account of how A is structured. Ordinarily the claim that B emerges from A mean that A is the main locus of activity making B be instantiated in the context of other events which are also required for B's instantiation. Thus, when I say that our bodies ground our selves, I am leaving space for the idea that other factors are also required for us to be selves beyond our bodies, such as a cultural milieu. The body nevertheless is the ground for our selves.

Let us now turn to grounding. If A grounds B, then A provides a basis from which B can emerge. This need not mean that B requires A, but it (ordinarily, at least) means that B requires something to ground it. Perhaps C can also ground B independently of A. A ground provides the resources for what it grounds. It need not necessitate what it grounds. Further, if A grounds B, B need not occupy the same space as A. B can go beyond what A requires. It may be odd to speak of B occupying a space at all. Nevertheless, A will continue to be required for B to be maintained. This is what distinguishes a ground from other conditions required for something to emerge. A ground provides the relatively stable point amidst a flux of other enabling conditions. The instantiation of an emergent entity thus tracks its ground.

There are two questions which this raises. First, if A emerges from B, could A have failed to emerge from B? Second, if A emerges from B, could A have emerged from C instead? We will address these in order.

First, it is not hard to see that, if emergence involves not only a ground but also a particular kind of context, then a ground would fail to cause the emergence of something if it failed to be in the proper context. Thus, if selves require a culture in order to emerge from bodies, then a body could fail to ground a self in virtue of failing to find itself in a culture.

Second, by necessity of origins it seems that, if A emerges from B, then A must emerge from B if it is to be A. I want to push back against this, however, in order to dodge an argument of Kripke's, which has been expanded on by Eli Hirsch, against materialism. Note that we cannot use necessity of identity here, because A is not B, but only emerges from B. Further, A might not have emerged from B even if B had been identical. However--and this is the point where Hirsch would push--if the entire universe had been the same, then A could not have but emerged from B. This is also what David Chalmers puts pressure on in his similar argument. The way all of these arguments go is that, if the mental is necessitated by the physical, then we cannot rule out knowing a priori that the mental comes from the physical, but we can, so the mental does not come from the physical. The argument works equal well for any theory on which the mental is necessitated by a particular substrate.

The way I want to dodge this is, on the one hand, by noting that it is not clear to me that any given instantiation of a self could be the same self if brought about through a different body. Here we are all in agreement: the necessity of origins usually results in the view that I would not have existed had I not come from my parents (and, more particularly, the particular egg and sperm which I came from). This is relatively uncontroversial.

On the other hand, I want to claim that had the entire universe been identical to this one, it is not at all clear that it could be so without being the same subjectively. That is, I see no reason to think that a suitably smart being could not know a priori that certain arrangements of matter through space and time would give rise to selves (that is, I reject the possibility of "p-zombies"). I doubt that one could take a snapshot of the universe and derive consciousness. Rather, I suspect that consciousness, and selves in particular, require events over time. This is compatible with consciousness being simple and non-localized, because it is not identical to, but emerges from, a physical thing in a suitable environment.

Chalmers, David. The Conscious Mind: In search of a fundamental theory Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Hirsch, Eli. "Kripke's Argument Against Materialism" in The Waning of Materialism Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2010, pp.115-136.

Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. 1980.

Expansive Concern: Environmentalism and The Good Life

In this post I want to articulate how it is that human beings, uniquely among animals, cares for and should care for creation as a whole and without direct regard for our own well being. To do this, I want to argue that we posses what I call "expansive concern." Thus, in this post, I hope to articulate my concept of expansive concern and argue that we possess it.

Expansive concern is concern which is able to regard any subject, as well as elements of the natural world, as possessing value in itself. Notice that this is similar to what I have already claimed for humans as selves, that we are able to recognize other selves as selves, and thus are able to recognize that others have their own value by recognizing that arguments we make for our own value applies to others as correlates of worlds just as well as to ourselves. Thus, in this post, I need to show how our concern expands beyond other selves.

To do this, I need to return to the concept of culture. Just as selves emerge from living bodies, so culture emerges from a natural world. The natural world is something of an abstraction, just as our living bodies are. We never encounter either one by itself, apart from their respective subjective phenomena. That is, we never encounter living human bodies except as selves or latent selves. We never encounter nature except as it has come to be entangled with culture.

Culture is a very broad term here. It includes phenomena which one might not think of as cultural, such as our natural appreciation for exercise. Culture covers the whole terrain of how we as societies value the world around us. The imagery which we have drawn from and laid over nature is a key part of culture. The ways in which weather evokes emotions and associations in us is a cultural phenomenon, whether or not it varies from culture to culture.

As I write this, it is snowing outside. Winter has a variety of connotations, whether of hardship and desolation, of curling up by a fire with a good book, or of an adventure in a transfigured world. Snow, by itself, has further connotations of purity or, in a blizzard, of isolation and stranding. These are cultural connotations. However, these are also based in how winter is and what snow is like. Winter is cold, it freezes the ground, it keeps one inside. Snow is opaque and among the whitest things in nature. We do not merely impose ideas and values on nature, but engage nature in such a way that it has values for us.

All of this is to make the point that culture stands on material and natural conditions. To alter the environment is to alter that upon which culture stands. To fail to care about what happens to nature is like failing to care about what happens to one's body. It is a mistake which relies on a kind of Gnostic or Platonic aversion to the body in favor of an immaterial soul. The value of sociality thus grounds a concern for the environment because to act sustainably with respect to culture requires one to act sustainably with respect to the environment.

The Value of Sociality

The third area of fundamental value for us as human beings which I will discuss is that of what I will refer to as sociality. Sociality is the way we are related to other selves as selves. It involves culture and communication. I have already noted that I believe we develop as selves through sociality, but I will not presuppose that here. Instead, I hope that this post helps motivate my earlier stated view.

To begin with, notice that all of our arguments thus far could be run from any point of view and remain valid. This means that we must recognize others acceptance of those arguments as valid. This does not yet get us the claim that we should all value each others' lives.

Language is an essential part of sociality. It is a manifestation of culture and a means of communication. In language, all that we can refer to are shared realities. That is, any term we can learn a word for is a term which multiple of us can understand the use of. Thus, when any of us claim to be aware, awareness must be understood as something which both hearer and speaker are aware of if the term is to have meaning. This eliminates the possibility of a consistent solipsism, or at least of arguing consistently for solipsism.

Now, the value which attaches to my life for me attaches to it in virtue of its being, not just my having a world, but there being a world. The methodological solipsism through which that argument works is such that it operates as if each life correlates with a world, so that the value of a life is the value of the world it correlates with. Such worlds are worlds centered on perspectives and interlock with one another in a real, shared world. Thus, the methodological solipsism does not give way to either an epistemological or a metaphysical solipsism.

Because the value of my life is the value of a world, not the value of my having such a world, to be consistent I must also value others' worlds, not merely their valuing their possession of them. I must, then, value others. A brake is placed on this, however, by the fact that it is not as basic a value as my own valuing of my world. The value I place on my own world is the basis on which I build other values. Those further values are then able to compete and interact. Thus, I am not required to treat the lives of others identically to my own, although I am supposed to treat others' lives as equal in value to my own. Each self is in a privileged position with respect to their own lives, such that it is proper for them to act with respect to nearer values more than farther values. Elsewhere I may go into this in more detail, but the basic idea is that, while the values are the same, our proper response to the value of a phenomenon depends on to what extent we ought to notice the phenomenon. Two phenomena can be of equal value and yet one may require greater attention from me in virtue of being "in my face," as it were.

At this point we can say that we ought to value others, and we ought to respond to the values of those close to us in certain, albeit as yet undefined, ways. We can also say that we must presume that terms we share have a shared meaning. One big question remains: must we value interaction with others, which is what both culture and language presuppose?

First, notice that we cannot but interact with others. We are born, and if we are to become anything like what we are supposed to become, we must be raised by other humans. As soon as we are born, we begin to learn language, and are thus inextricably entangled in a culture.

Some children are literally raised by wolves and survive, albeit not in a manner most of us would recognize as flourishing. Such humans still have the same human nature which we might say should have given rise to sociality. Furthermore, such humans still utilize aspects of their social capacity to learn from the creatures around them by mimicking them. Thus, even in cases where the capacity is starved, it is naturally utilized as much as possible.

This brings me to another point: sociality includes learning. To learn any skill requires one of two things: either another who can teach or the ability to engage in a subject with an experimental attitude. In the first case, we take what the teacher offers and incorporate it into how we live. In the second case, however, we still operate through a latent sociality. This is because the experimental attitude through which we discern what actions will produce what effects involves an abstraction from ourselves. Skills are not merely abilities, nor are they merely learned abilities. Rather, a skill is distinct from a conditioned behavior by opening on a world of values and reasons. To learn a skill is to have the world articulated in a new manner, one which provides a new way of thinking about a subject. To find a new way of thinking requires the ability to entertain hypotheses and imagine what would make one wrong. To learn a new way of thinking, likewise, involves learning what those who have the skill consider when they utilize their skill.

Skills, then, involve acquiring others as interlocutors within oneself. To learn a skill from a teacher involves gaining from the teacher that teacher's manner of thinking, mediated through language and bodily action, and thus involves acquiring a way of talking and acting which belongs in the first place to the teacher but now also to oneself.

None of this is to say that we should be with others all the time. However, since sociality includes learning, and insofar as language use is a skill (and, in some ways it is, along with walking, the prototypical skill, although it is in other ways sui generis), we all carry others along with us wherever we are. We are never purely alone by ourselves, but ourselves always include others who have taught us and whose way of thinking is carried with us.

The Value of Rational Agency

In this post, I will argue for the value of rational agency. We have already touched on the value of agency in discussing embodiment, so the emphasis here will be on why we should seek to act rationally and what it is to act rationally.

We are stuck acting. We are agents, and thus we must act. Even failing to act is, so long as we are conscious and able to do something, an action in the relevant sense. Actions are behaviors which we permit or cause in ourselves for reasons. In other words, all action is action for some reason. Actions are done in response to perceived goods, in order to preserve or attain those goods. To value oneself as living requires one to value oneself as an agent, and to value oneself as an agent requires one to value oneself as one who acts for the sake of what is valuable.

We must be careful here. It is easy to think of actions and the values for the sake of which one performs the actions as distinct and separable. However, since an action is not an action apart from an end, and since one cannot have an end except as an end for potential actions, the two concepts cannot come apart. The actions we perform express our values. Actions are symptomatic of values, but values can likewise be altered via actions. By acting, we put in concrete form what we value. We thus specify our values to a greater extent. Moreover, in acting, we discover what it is like to so act. We acclimate ourselves to acting in this manner, for these reasons, in this role. Thus, if we seek a particular end, the proper action to take is not merely the most efficient way to achieve that end, but involves us in seeking actions which will express our values as we would have them be, actions which do not speak contrary to the end they are to attain. We cannot murder in order to save lives, we cannot lie in order to preserve the truth, and, in sum, we cannot make exceptions to values we would strengthen our grasp on.

This presume that our bodily actions have meanings which cannot be reduced to the agent's own intentions. This requires that the body have a kind of value-expressive structure independent of what we might value. The body must, then, have some kind of authority over us to direct us to stand with dignity and treat others with respect and care. Because we are embodied, and because we ought to value that embodiment, we ought to regard with respect the restrictions which the body places on how we can act. We should not seek to treat the sense of bodily actions as merely cultural. Even culturally defined actions are not merely cultural--culture is strong and produces real meanings for our actions. What is culturally conditioned has a meaning which permits the bodily behaviors to speak to and alter our values.

Rational agency, then, is not merely a matter of efficient action, but also of accurately connecting the meanings of actions to each other and to our values. To put it another way: the ends to which we must coordinate our means are not merely external, but internal to ourselves: virtue is an end, and we must seek it, along with whatever else we value.

Further, virtue is not an end we may escape. Because we are agents, we seek what seems good to us, and we implicitly presume that there is a right answer to questions of what to do. Merely be acting, we are bound up in wondering what to do, how to live. By acting, we express answers to this question. By deliberating, we presuppose that it is possible to go wrong, as well as right, in answering this question. The question we are seeking an answer to can be put many ways: What is valuable? What kind of life is worth living? What is it I must value to be consistent with valuing my life and seeking, therefore, to make it a good life?

The Value of Embodiment

Having laid the groundwork for values, we can progress to some particulars. In this post, I want to argue that our embodiment is something we ought to value. From there, we can examine how to regard particular modes of embodiment, and what our relationship to them should be.

Our bodies are our means of interacting with the world. We perceive through our bodies and alter our surroundings via our bodies. To live is to have a body. The world we find ourselves in correlates with the body we find ourselves to be. Thus, in presuming the goodness of our lives and of the world, we are forced to value our embodiment as a means to having lives and a world.

Because our bodies are how we have and alter a world, we can say that the purpose of a body is to provide us with perceptual and active access to the world. Thus, one way a body can be good is by enabling us to perceive the world well and enabling us to affect the world well. The next question, then, must be: what counts as perceiving or affecting the world well?

To perceive the world well is to perceive the world in such a way that we can act in a way that fits how the world is. This does not require complete accuracy and specificity of perception, but the degree of accuracy and specificity required for our projects. Thus, perceiving well is relative to our other projects. Augmenting human vision, then, is not a good in and of itself, but only insofar as it enables us to achieve other goods.

To affect the world well is to alter the world in a sustainable manner. To affect the world sustainably is to affect the world in such a way that the effect preserves and enhances the way in which the world hangs together. It thus includes economic sustainability as preserving and enhancing how the physical environment hangs together, but also includes social sustainability as preserving and enhancing how society hangs together, bodily sustainability as preserving and enhancing how our own bodies hang together, and rational sustainability as preserving and enhancing how our thoughts hang together.

Because our bodies are how we live, the goodness of a body serves the goodness of a life. Thus, part of the purpose of a body is to enable us to live well. What we are as bodies is part of what determines what counts as living well, but it is not all. There are two other fundamental values that we will argue for--rational agency and sociality--which also impact what a good life for beings like us is. The goodness of a life is thus served, at least generally, by affecting the world well. In each case of sustainably affecting the world, the aim is the same: to preserve and enhance the way the parts come together to form a unified, synergistic whole.

The Value of Life

It is somewhat depressing to try to argue for the irrationality of suicide, but it is the only way I know of to achieve lift off in thinking about what we should value. If we must value our own lives, then we must, to be rational, value what is conducive to that life.

We will start with a thought experiment. To compare the value of one's own life to one's own lack of life, we need two states of affairs. One, where one is alive, and another, where one is not. We are considering the value to oneself of one's own life, however, so both cases must be from one's own point of view. Let us, for the purpose of this thought experiment, suppose a view I think is false: that when you die, you no longer exist. So when we are considering these two cases, one exists versus one does not exist, how do we compare the value of the two cases to oneself? Well, we might try to imagine both from one's own point of view. What happens when one does that, however, is that one has nowhere to look out from in the case where one does not exist.

There are two ways to try to solve this problem. One is a solipsistic method, the other is a value-expansionist approach. In order, then:

If we approach the case solipsistically, then one is a case where there is a world, and the other is a case where there is no world. So, is the world better than the cessation of the world? To put it another way, is the value of the world, for oneself, greater than zero? To show the irrationality of suicide from this point of view, one merely needs to show that the value of the world can never be less than or equal to none at all. Having argued for the presumption of goodness already, we can say that we should always presume that the world is at least somewhat good.

If one approaches from the value-expansionist approach, then, instead of losing the world standing in for one's loss of existence, one utilizes the perspectives of others who remain. Thus, the question is whether the value of one's existence to those around one is greater than the value of the loss of one's existence. I want to make two points about this. First, to prove that suicide must be irrational on this approach, one must show that everyone is valued more than disvalued. Second, people who are actually thinking about suicide generally either do not have this option because they have ceased caring much about what others think or they are not in an epistemic position to be able to tell what others think about their value because they project their own feelings onto others. So this approach is useful only for the use I am trying to put it to, that is, establishing the value of life for the sake of grounding value.

Now, in order for someone to disvalue another, they must have some basis for such disvaluing, which will have to be some further value. If there is no ultimate basis for value, then the value of things will be relative to the observer. In that case, the value of one's own life will be modifiable, in principle, by altering what one cares about and thus whose values one takes into consideration. In fact, if one ceases to value anything, then one will no longer have any basis on which to select others' perspectives from which to evaluate the world, but if one does not exist, then one does not value anything. If, on the other hand, there is some ultimate basis, then we can work from whatever one's present valuations are, as well as derive what others valuation of one should be, and further, if we permit a Kantian move, then to disvalue another person completely, as a human person, requires the disvaluation of oneself as such also. If one has to regard oneself as valuable qua human (or qua rational being, etc.,) then one has to regard oneself as valuable at a basic level, however disvaluable one may be under less basic descriptions.

These are arguments against the cessation of any conscious being's existence being more valuable than the continuation of such a being's existence. From thence, one can provide arguments for and against the value of other things. Thus, I can now support the claims I made last time about three fundamental ways in which we must value ourselves. They are all based on the value of one's continued existence, although each also allows an argument for one's continued existence as well.

Embodiment: one cannot be aware of a world without a body.

Rational Agency: one cannot act without regard to reasons so long as one lives.

Sociality: one cannot begin apart from a society which brings one forth.

More on each of these three to follow.

Teleological Ethics

In this post, I take up the task of arguing for a teleological ethics, that is, an ethics in terms of ends. I will be stealing an immense amount from Korsgaard, but I am not exactly sure which works, and some of it is likely second-hand.

A teleological ethics need not presume that things have ends given them by some external agent. It must, however, assume that ends of things can be posited in some manner. It is generally connected to a view of good in general that holds that "being good" is a predicate with application relative to the ends of the bearer.

Let us begin by elaborating this notion of good with a case where the end is provided by an agent: chairs. A chair has a purpose: to hold someone up who sits in it. Most chairs are supposed to do so in a manner comfortable for--and even better, good for--the individual sitting in the chair. Thus, a sturdy, ergonomic chair is a better chair, as a chair, than one which can only hold 100lbs, and is uncomfortable. These goods are all relative to the purpose the chair is to be put to, however. A children's chair makes a bad chair for a grownup. A good chair may make a bad prop. Furniture is often intended to be aesthetically pleasing, that is, they should look nice. So a futuristic-looking chair would be a bad chair for a cozy log-cabin-style den.

A teleological ethics claims that human beings have an end, and that to be a good human being is to fulfill that end. Some teleological ethics utilize revelation to determine what this end is. Others examine how humans operate in social life to try to figure it out. Both, however, assume that pursuing this end will result in a life we will be glad to have lived.

We all have a view about what our ends are. We all have views about what kind of life we will be able to look back on with pride versus shame. Further, I would claim, we all live in an effort to fulfill the ends we take to be ours. Insofar as we identify as being certain ways, we try to be those ways well. We try to be good versions of what we take ourselves to be. When we do not, it is because we do not value being those things. If you want to be x, then you will try to be a good x, whatever you take that to be, just as, if you want a chair, you will want a good chair, whatever that means in the given context.

If I understand her right, Korsgaard holds that we should base our ethics on those descriptions under which we cannot help but value ourselves. There is something to this, and it results in ethics being inherently motivated (albeit other motives can keep us from being ethical). However, as usual with Kantian moves of this sort, it is hard to see how we can get much of an ethical system out of this. What I think is right here is that whatever ethical system is right should hook up to how we are motivated in just this way: the truth-maker for a moral ought claim "one should phi" should, if we know and accept and value it, motivate us to phi.

Instead of relying on what we cannot help but value in this manner, I would suggest we examine the kinds of beings we find ourselves to be and what traits we find we cannot do without. We should then value those traits. We may avoid valuing ourselves as embodied, rational, social beings. Nevertheless, these are characteristics which human beings ought to possess. Things go poorly for us and others around us when they are lacking. Whatever one's values, one should value being embodied, rationally agential, and social, because we cannot do without them.

In closing, I want to distinguish between three ways in which one might be said to value something one is. First, one might explicitly value it, that is, one may claim and believe that one values it. Second, one may actually value it, that is, treat it as valuable. Third, one may find one's behaviors which exhibit disvaluing it to have results which one disvalues. The third is that in virtue of which we should do the second, ceteris paribus. The first has little to do with the above. Up to this paragraph, all my uses of the term "value" are meant in the second sense. The other two are derivative meanings which I include here to disambiguate what I mean by the verb "to value."