20 Minutes of Writing
Setting a 20 minute timer and seeing if I write anything interesting in the 20 minute period.
1 My Dispute With Russ Shaeffer-Landau
As part of a philosophy book club that I’m part of, I recently had a chat with Russ Shaeffer Landau. It was a fairly short chat — I just asked him a question as part of a Q and A period. Landau was talking about the argument from disagreement.
I asked him if he thought that, if people converged increasingly over time in their moral views, that would serve as evidence for moral realism. After all, if there was a fact of the matter you’d expect that, as we reason more, we’d be more inclined to believe the factually correct view — rather than other incorrect views.
RSL had an interesting reply, though one that is, I believe, unsuccessful. His primary objection was pointing out that there are lots of philosophical disputes that still rage on, even though they’ve been going on for thousands of years. For example, there’s clearly a fact of the matter in the determinism vs indeterminism debate, yet that is far from settled.
However, I think these cases are outliers. The only reason that many of these philosophical topics are still disputed is because there’s controversy. Nobody argues about whether square circles actually exist — after all, there’s no one who believes that they do.
The only philosophical issues that we ever discuss are the ones that cause controversy. But the one’s that cause controversy are precisely the ones that causes, when people consider the evidence on both sides, significant disagreement to remain, and divergence not to happen.
On top of this, I think that studying philosophy does cause people to move more in various directions. People who study philosophy almost certainly become less likely to be various types of subjectivists and cultural relativists — likewise, we know that studying decision theory makes people more likely to 2-box in Newcombe’s problem — the phil papers survey shows that.
Thus, while interesting, I do not think that RSL’s response succeeds.
2 Implausible Bullets Some Pro-Lifers Bit
I quite like arguing. As a result of this, when I saw that the pro-life club at my university was having conversations with people about abortion, I decided to join in (I might publish my thoughts about abortion at some point, but I definitely disagree with the radical ‘life begins at conception’ view — I think that people get very confused by being deontologists on the subject; but that’s a topic for another article). Over the course of the argument, several rather amusing things happened.
First, when I described that abortion is impermissible if the fetus is sentient, they asked me if I thought that there are certain higher animals like chimpanzees that have more moral significance than some humans, assuming that they can experience more well-being. I bit the bullet instantly, of course!
Second, they thought that a being matters if and only if it’s a biological human being. I gave them the following case. It’s a spinoff of the IVF clinic case — there’s a burning building and you can either save a full on baby or ten fetuses. Here’s the kicker — we know with total certainty that the fetuses will never become conscious — they won’t develop into conscious beings at any point. However, if what matters is being a biological human being, well, fetuses meet that criterion, even if they’ll never become viable. They bit the bullet, which seemed pretty insane.
One might try Thto get around this by saying that a being only matters if it is a biological human being and will be conscious in the future. However, this fails to prohibit abortion pre-consciousness, because if the baby is aborted, it will have no future. This also has some other weird axiological implications. I’m not sure if there’s a way to get around these problems. Any suggestions?
Third, given that they said that being a biological human being is what mattered, I presented them with the following case. You take a DNA test and it turns out you’re not human. You had some weird genetic mutation which means you’re otherwise like humans, but you’re not technically human. Would you stop mattering? They bit the bullet on this too!
This seems easy to get around. Just say that very conscious, intelligent beings matter. And when, deontically, we should care about their interests begins when they begin to be a biological human being.
This does have an implausible implication though. It implies an odd form of hypersensitivity. It seems odd that the moment before conception the fetus’ future interests don’t matter at all, but the moment after, the fetus does begin to matter a lot. One second and qualitatively meagre change shouldn’t make that much of a difference.
Also, as I argued in my article about longtermism, it’s very implausible that we don’t have interests to future beings — one’s that won’t exist for a while. To see more of that, look at my article longtermism is correct part 1.
3 A Worry About The Partners in Crime Argument
I’m starting to worry about the dialectical force of the partners in crime argument. I think that, while the premises are true, it has limited ability to convince an anti-realist. For those who don’t know, the partners in crime argument gives an analogy between epistemic realism — the notion that there are things that we ought to or are rational to believe — and moral realism — the notion that there are moral facts that are true independently of what people believe about them.
The big problem is this — I think moral realism is a lot more obvious than epistemic realism. Talk of epistemic norms can sound weird — ‘you ought to believe X, you oughtn’t believe Y.’ While I accept epistemic anti-realism, a lot of moral anti-realists don’t, and I think that moral realism is the much more obvious of the two.
The moral universe is made up of existing conscious beings and “reasonably certain to exist” conscious beings, like unborn fetuses. I don’t find the threshold issue in abortion that counterintuitive. Otherwise, beings would have a sliding scale of moral worth (based on what exactly?). There is a point where a bunch of grains of sand become a pile and there is a point where a bunch of neural connections become a conscious mind (or is reasonably certain to become one) that gives that being moral standing.