Think. Philosophy for Everyone Volume 10, Number 27, Spring 2011

Number 27 Volume 10 Spring 2011 ISSN: 1477-1756 Think Philosophy for everyone A Journal of the Royal Institute of Phil...

Author: Editor(s): Dr Stephen Law | University of London

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Number 27 Volume 10 Spring 2011

ISSN: 1477-1756

Think Philosophy for everyone A Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy Edited by Stephen Law

Think 1. Guidelines for Contributors The editor welcomes accessible contributions from philosophers and other thinkers on any topic broadly related either to philosophy or to the development of thinking skills. It is anticipated that most contributors will be academics. Contributions should be below 4,000 words (unless otherwise agreed with the editor). Very short pieces are welcome.

Think welcomes submissions which are clear and to the point and in the straightforward prose characteristic of the best philosophy. At the same time, the editor would also like to encourage the use of imaginative and unusual ways of making ideas engaging and accessible, e.g. through the use of dialogue, humour, illustrations (black and white: line and photos), examples taken from the media, etc. Papers engaging with some topical debate are especially welcome. Contributors should presuppose no philosophical background knowledge on the part of the reader. The use of jargon and logical notation, especially where unexplained, should be avoided. Please avoid including notes and references if at all possible. While the presentation of original thought is very much encouraged, a submission need not go beyond providing an engaging an accessible introduction to a particular philosophical issue or line of argument. Authors are asked to include within their submissions clear and fairly thorough introductions to any debates to which they wish to make a contribution. Contributors of accepted articles will be asked to assign their copyright (on certain conditions) to the Royal Institute of Philosophy so that their interest may be safeguarded. Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce any material for which they do not own copyright, to be used in both print and electronic media, and for ensuring that the appropriate acknowledgements are included in their manuscript. The editor has the assistance of a panel of referees drawn from the Institute’s Council. Please include with your contribution a brief statement of your position and institution (where relevant).

2. Submissions Contributions (as Word documents) and communications should be sent to: Stephen Law (editor) THINK Heythrop College University of London Kensington Square London W8 5HQ Email: [email protected]

3. Format and Style The editor would be grateful if final submissions were in the Think house style. Please use single quotation marks (double when embedded). Please italicize rather than underline. Where it is absolutely unavoidable that references be included, they should be incorporated into the text (preferably) or else appear as endnotes in the Think style. Examples: Fred Author, Title of The Book (Place: Publisher, 2002), p. 23. D. Academic, ‘Title of Paper’, A Journal, vol.1, no.1 (1990), pp. 34–56. © The Royal Institute of Philosophy, 2011

Think Philosophy for everyone Number 27 † Spring 2011

A Journal of The Royal Institute of Philosophy

Contents Introduction Stephen Law

5

Return of the Zombies Ardon Lyon

9

31

There is Something About Inez Jonathan Webber

45

The Difﬁculty of Understanding Mark Lovas

57

The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy Dene Bebbington

71

The Immortal Solipsist Christian H. So¨temann

73

The Dirty Word Michael and Natasha Berman

77

My Evening With Mr. Wang Berel Dov Lerner

83

Euthyphro, Socrates, and Professor Pangloss Brian Vroman

95

Are Dogs the New Hummer? Margaret Betz

105

That Truth Exists is More Logical Noriaki Iwasa

109

Better Not to Have Children Gerald Harrison and Julia Tanner

113

Think Spring 2011 † 3

Argument in Mixed Company: Mom’s Maxim vs. Mill’s Principle Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse

INTRODUCTION

Skepticism About Reason In philosophy, a ‘skeptic’ is someone who denies we have knowledge in a given area. Here is a classic example of a skeptical argument: Whenever we argue about the truth or falsity of a belief, we apply our powers of reason. But why suppose that reason is itself a reliable route to the truth? We might attempt to justify our use of reason, of course. But any justification of reason that we offer will itself rely on reason. Relying on reason to justify our reliance on reason is a bit like taking a second-hand car salesman’s word for it that he is trustworthy – it’s an entirely circular justification, and so no justification at all! So it turns out that our doi:10.1017/S1477175610000394 Think 27, Vol. 10 (Spring 2011)

# The Royal Institute of Philosophy, 2011


Suppose Mike is involved in a debate about the truth of his own particular New Age belief system. Things are not going well for him. Mike’s arguments are being picked apart, and, worse still, his opponents have come up with several devastating objections that he can’t deal with. How might Mike get himself out of this bind? One possibility is to adopt the strategy I call Going Nuclear. Going Nuclear is an attempt to unleash an argument that lays waste to every position, bringing them all down to the same level of ‘reasonableness’. Mike might try to force a draw by detonating a philosophical argument that achieves what during the Cold War was called ‘mutually assured destruction’, in which both sides in the conflict are annihilated. Here’s an example.

reliance on reason is entirely unjustified. It’s a leap of faith!

Law Introduction † 6

From the claim that our reliance on reason is unjustified, it is seemingly then but a short step to the conclusion that no belief is justified: But if reliance on reason cannot be justified, then, because every rational justification relies on reason, so no belief can be justified. But if no belief is justified, then, ultimately, everything is a faith position! But then your belief is no more reasonable than mine. Get out of that! Whether or not this is actually a good argument for the conclusion that no belief is justified is not a question I’ll address here. The point is, at first sight, it does look pretty persuasive. It’s not easy to spot precisely where the argument goes wrong, if, indeed, it goes wrong at all. This means that if Mike’s belief system is taking a beating, rationally speaking, Mike can adopt the last-ditch tactic of employing this skeptical argument. Mike can then admit that his belief might not be justified. But he can insist that his opponent’s belief system cannot be justified either. The skeptical argument offers Mike a wonderful ‘get out of jail free’ card. It allows him to walk away with his head held high, saying, ‘So you see? In the last analysis, our beliefs are equally (ir)rational! They are both “faith positions”!’ You can see why I call this strategy Going Nuclear. Once Mike plays the skeptical card, all his opponent’s hard work in constructing arguments against Mike’s position counts for nothing. Kaboom! At one stroke, Mike demolishes them all. He lays waste to every rational argument, bringing every belief down to the same level. In order for Mike’s opponent to deal with his Going Nuclear, they will now have to refute his philosophical argument. That is a difficult, perhaps impossible, thing to do. They are certainly going to struggle. As a result, any


audience to their debate will be struck not only by Mike’s sophistication in employing such a devastating philosophical objection, but also by his opponent’s mounting frustration as they wrestle with the thorny philosophical conundrum Mike has set them. It’s quite likely Mike will be perceived to be the intellectual victor in this exchange. At the very least, he won’t be thought to have lost. This version of Going Nuclear can be employed in defence of a wide variety of beliefs. Believe in the curative powers of crystals, or that there’s a family of fairies living at the bottom of your garden? If you find yourself on the losing side of the argument, you can always employ Going Nuclear as a last ditch, face-saving strategy. So what, exactly, is wrong with this version of Going Nuclear? After all, it might be that the skeptical argument Mike has employed really is a good argument. Perhaps every belief system really is as rational as every other. So, if Mike finds himself argued into a corner, why shouldn’t he employ such a skeptical argument? Because it’s almost certainly an intellectually dishonest ruse. Those who press the nuclear button rarely do so in good faith. Bear in mind that, in such discussions, playing the skeptical card really is the nuclear option. By Going Nuclear, Mike avoids defeat, but only by utterly annihilating the rationality of every belief. All positions, no matter how sensible or nuts, come out as equally (ir)rational. If Mike is to be consistent, he must now accept that that the Earth is flat, that the Earth is round, that milk makes people fly, that it doesn’t, that astrology is true, that is isn’t – that all these beliefs are equally (un)reasonable. Now of course, Mike almost certainly doesn’t believe any of this. The fact is, he does think reason provides us with a fairly reliable tool for establishing what is true and what isn’t. We all rely on reason in our day-to-day lives – Mike included. In fact, Mike constantly trusts his life to reason, whenever, for example, he trusts that the brakes on his car will work, that a bridge will support his weight, that a medicine will save his life, and so on.

Law Introduction † 8

Indeed, those who employ this version of Going Nuclear are usually quite content to rely on reason to make their case just so long as they are not losing the argument. It’s only when the tide of rationality turns against them that they reach for the nuclear button. And of course, once their opponent has left the room, they’ll start using reason again to try to prop up their belief. That’s downright hypocritical. So this version of Going Nuclear is, in truth, almost always a ploy. Those who use it don’t usually believe what they’re saying about reason. They say it only to raise enough dust and confusion to make quick their escape. (N.b. this is adapted from Stephen Law’s forthcoming book, Believing Bullshit). Stephen Law Editor

RETURN OF THE ZOMBIES Ardon Lyon

I The Zombies Advance

doi:10.1017/S1477175610000333 Think 27, Vol. 10 (Spring 2011)



We’re back! Actually, we’ve never been away, so what I really mean is that my fellow zombies and I are, I hope, about to announce to the world that we’re here! It’s true I haven’t yet asked anyone else to agree to expose themselves as I am now doing, but I’m hoping that my own public outing will encourage, or perhaps even shame others to come forward and join me. Admittedly there’s a bit of a problem about all this, as I’ve no idea how many other zombies there are. For the sort of zombie I am, a ‘zombie’ in the philosophers’ use of the term, is a human being who doesn’t differ in any physical ways whatsoever from the usual run-of the-mill, admittedly pretty varied sort of human, and who furthermore behaves in all the normal – again pretty varied – sorts of ways, but who is, as it is sometimes put, ‘dark inside’, meaning that we have absolutely no mental occurrences such as visual and auditory sensations, aches, pains, itches, feelings of love and hate, anger and pity, etc. So we aren’t the common or garden type of zombie, to be found in Haiti and elsewhere, who no doubt has brain states altered by drugs or spells and who therefore behaves in altered, unusual, ‘zombie-ish’ ways, sometimes making such humans quasi-mechanical slaves under the control of zombie-masters.1 Philosophers’ ‘zombies’ are different sorts of creatures; third parties cannot in any way distinguish the philosophers’ type of zombie from any other human being who isn’t a zombie. Perhaps the zombie informs them, as I am now publicly doing, but on what possible grounds could such a confession or deical be believed? Only a zombie knows ‘for sure’ that he’s a zombie. So

Lyon Return of the Zombies † 10

embarrassingly enough, when I wrote that we’re back, it may turn out that I’m using the royal ‘we’: that is, for all I know, there may be only one of us, at least here on earth. As I shall later explain, that’s only one of the reasons it’s embarrassing. I may be in a minority of one, or there may be just a few of us, or we may even be the majority. Or perhaps everybody is a (philosophers’ type of) zombie, but they’re too embarrassed to say so. How can I tell, unless I ask? So please, please, please, if you are such a zombie do let me know. From now on, where I use the term ‘zombie’, I shall mean a philosophers’ zombie. As it has been so difficult for me to admit that I totally lack what just about everyone else seems so confidently to claim that they have, I’ll let you know what led me to do so. One morning in April when I woke up I noticed that the light seemed completely different from normal, and looking outside I was completely surprised to see snow gently falling onto the London gardens, already softly carpeted with a thin white powdery layer. It made me feel sad, and yet somehow quietly content. What was it doing at this time of the year, with all that worry about global warming? It somehow made me think of times long gone, and looking so peaceful, it presumably must have evoked in me those mixed emotions of surprise, sadness and contentedness. It felt good. I’m sure these conflicting emotions must somehow have led me to feel that I should confess what I’ve kept secret for so long. I can understand why people might take it amiss; but then I think ‘Why should I keep it secret? All these years of doing so must have taken their toll. And nobody would ever have known, if I hadn’t “confessed” at some time or other. How could they have?’ Now I can imagine you asking: ‘How on earth can you say that you feel and experience nothing, when just now you wrote about what the snow looked like, and just how it made you feel?’ Well, that’s just the problem. Almost every non-philosopher, and probably most (but certainly not all) philosophers, confidently affirm that there’s more to seeing, smelling, hearing, feeling sick or elated, emotionally


overcome, in love, upset, having a headache etc. than merely behaving in the variety of ways that different people do behave in those situations, together with having the relevant goings-on in their brains and other parts of their nervous systems, internal organs, joints etc. Philosophers speak of ‘raw feels’, and ‘what it is like to experience things “from the inside”’, and the experiencing subject’s ‘qualia’, and other academic peculiarities, but in any event, such philosophers are completely confident that there is more to experiences than mere bodily ‘matter in motion’ with physical causal input and output, and many even believe that this ‘more’, this ‘extra’, is all there is that makes life worthwhile, or hell on earth, or something in between. So you’ll appreciate why it’s embarrassing to admit that I don’t have any of this extra ‘stuff’, and even haven’t too much clue what they’re talking about. But I do believe them, or anyway half-believe them. For why would the majority of the human species go around lying in this way? Well, one can sort of see why they might. We probably all know someone or other who is tone deaf, others who actively dislike or are bored by a whole range of music that we find profoundly moving, or exciting, others who apparently appreciate what sounds to us merely a hideous din, and I even know someone who, incredibly as I first thought, tells me that he doesn’t like any music at all. None. If he hears some on the radio, whatever it may be, he simply turns it off. So we can quite easily understand people having a certain sort of experience and pretending they don’t, or not having it and pretending they do. So perhaps a good many of those people – and could it possibly be all? – don’t have any experiences at all, and just pretend they do, out of sheer embarrassment. It must be incredibly difficult to keep this up. But perhaps they do. Or perhaps, like me, they have never had to pretend, because nobody has ever asked me. Think about it: has anyone ever asked you? In any event, I’m not pretending to have experiences, these so-called ‘extras’, that in fact I don’t have. I just find


myself talking and reacting in all ways as though I’m having them, but I’m not. So when I said that I find certain music moving, or hideous, I just meant that I find myself reacting in various complicated sorts of ways to those sorts of music. I’m not even sure what kind of thing it is that ( just about) everyone else claims they have, but which I’m confident I lack. If you’ve never seen, or had described to you, or seen a picture of, say, a pterodactyl, then how can you know what you’re allegedly missing? But in fact I have a very good reason to think that I’m missing something. You see not only am I a zombie, but I’m an alien. I come from the planet Zog, and good King Zack of Zog had me sent to Earth when I was a baby to replace someone of the same name, physical and genetic make-up, and the same parents, and who did have experiences. As King Zack has since explained to me, by telecommunication, on Zog the laws of nature are different from earthly laws. We Zoghumans have the same genetic and other physical makeup as Earthly humans and behave in just the same sorts of way as Earth-humans, but we don’t have experiences: our physical make-up suffices for all that we do. But when Earth-humans have the equivalent physical goings-on these are all (inevitably, on Earth) correlated with various experiences, and these experiences are required for many of their responses. They have so-called autonomic responses, where the nervous impulses suffice for their responses, but also non-autonomous, where their corresponding experiences kick in with causal input. Earthly philosophers apparently find it difficult, if not impossible, to explain how experiences, if they are not physical things, can have this causal input. On Zog this problem never occurred to anyone, because we don’t have experiences. It seems as though it was pretty risky of King Zack to send me to Earth – well, not risky for him of course – because there would be no guarantee that Zogians would go on functioning satisfactorily on Earth, where there are different laws of nature from those on Zog. But Zack is a


kind man – first he sent several animals that Earthlings usually claim have experiences, such as cats and dogs, but which lack them on Zog, and they all seemed to function perfectly. Later he sent some Zog-humans: he has told me I’m not the first one, but I’m not at all sure where the others might be, for the reason I have explained. So I hope he won’t be unhappy that I’ve decided to come out. (Those of us lacking experiences have as much free will as the next man.) But in truth I haven’t asked him, or anyone else. First of all I’m worried that my girlfriend will be terribly upset if she reads this article. I can just see what will happen if she does. I’ll need to point out to her that it hasn’t, doesn’t, and I trust won’t make a blind bit of difference to our relationship; things can carry on just as before. But I can see that they won’t. ‘You absolute sod’ she’ll say (or actually something quite a bit worse). ‘You never told me. All these years you’ve been deceiving me: you’ve felt nothing. You’ve been pretending that you have had all sorts of feelings for me when you haven’t. How could you possibly have done this to me?’ It won’t be any good my protesting that I haven’t been pretending: I have simply been behaving like more or less every other sort of man. There’ll be floods and floods of tears. I’ve been abusing her, unbelievably abusing her. It won’t be any good my saying that if she’d ever asked me I’d have admitted – well, I hope I would – that I never experience anything at all. I’ve sighed, groaned, sent flowers, protested my love, as adamantly as the next man. But I know it, I know it: it will be of no avail. So you see that’s a further reason why I have been so reluctant to come out. She really is a wonderful woman. So I wouldn’t have made these sacrifices of both her and me if I hadn’t thought it for the greater good of humanity. I need to do it because some philosophers have claimed that (philosophers’) zombies are impossible. Of course I wouldn’t have cared at all about this if the ‘impossibility’ claims had remained in the obscurity of seldom read academic journals. But now they have


reached the wider public by being published in Think. If these claims are right, then on one interpretation of them we have a solution to the philosophical problem of explaining how the alleged ‘extras’ – private subjective experiences, which Earth-humans allegedly have and zombies lack – how these alleged mental ‘extras’ can have a causal input into purely physical aspects of humans. For if zombies are impossible then there can be no such things as entities physically, behaviourally and structurally identical with humans except that they lack experiences. But we should note that this could be for either of two reasons. The first would be that anything physically identical with a zombie would inevitably have the mental extras: it is impossible to have the one without the other. This would still leave open the question how the extras, if not physical entities, can have a causal input into humans and other animals. The second reason would be the subtler and extremely surprising idea that to be physically identical with a zombie just is the same thing as to have experiences: there is no further ‘extra’ to have. The claim would be that there is nothing more to experiences than – to put it roughly – what goes on physically in humans; so the answer to the problem of explaining how the extras can have a causal input is that there simply are and can be no extras to require any sort of explaining. This is a typically reductionist theory, reductionists being philosophers who claim that seemingly awkward entities of some type A are actually no more than non-awkward entities of another type, B. On this account, zombies are impossible not because anything (physically) identical with a zombie would inevitably have something extra, but because anything (physically) identical with a zombie just is something with experiences: to be the one is the same thing as to be the ‘other’, so there can be no such thing as being the one without the alleged ‘other’. It would be like suggesting that something might be a vixen without ‘also’ being a female fox. There is no ‘also’ to it. To be the one just is to be the ‘other’; or, one might say, there is no ‘other’ to be the same


as the one. So, very subtly, if to be a zombie is to be a human being with suitable behaviour and internal physical goings-on but without experiences, then such a creature is impossible, because to have suitable behaviour and physical internal goings-on just is the same thing as to have experiences. This view about humans and other animals is very surprising and counter-intuitive, which is why it requires extremely long and complicated books to be written about it explaining why the common sense view is both primitive and a terrible obstacle to the advance of science. One version claims that experiences are the same things as brain processes. To the objection that this seems obviously ridiculous, because experiences seem clearly to be very different sorts of things from brain processes, or because I can be fully aware of my experiences without having any clue about my brain processes, or that I can look at your brain processes but cannot look at your experiences, the answer usually given is that there are many situations where one thinks one is looking at or thinking about two different things, but it turns out that they are one and the same: one can simply be ignorant about the matter. But I think there is a simple knock-down argument against this particular version of mind-matter reductionist theory, one that I haven’t seen published anywhere. Consider someone hearing a simple, unchanging musical note, or seeing an undifferentiated and unchanging colour on a wall. For these unchanging experiences to continue through time surely requires processes to be changing in the brain. But one and the same thing cannot be both changing and unchanging. So experiences cannot be the same thing as brain processes. Thus so far as I can see at least this particular ‘identity’ theory must be false. This fact leaves untouched my personal ability, as a zombie, to have these things going on in my brain and this sufficing for everything I do: it’s just that I don’t have experiences of unchanging musical notes or undifferentiated colours, or indeed of anything else. Other people apparently do have, and I’m


beginning to feel quite jealous. Although I don’t know: their experiences of pain are apparently quite horrible. Clever, up-to-the minute philosophers often make derogatory remarks about the common sense view of the nature of the alleged mental ‘extras’; Beenfeldt refers to them in this journal as popularly believed to be ‘metaphysically supernumerary, causally inefficacious, mystical ingredients . . . forever undetectable by science’.2 And he claims that the famous philosopher Daniel Dennett has actually shown that zombies are impossible, zombies being entities with no qualitative awareness of any kind; so presumably he thinks that humans do have qualitative awareness but they don’t have these mental ‘extras’ – perhaps because being in the relevant physical states is all there is to qualitative awareness. Robert Kirk has also claimed in this journal that zombies are impossible.3 Now it so happens that one summer when we were young lecturers Robert and I both attended a philosophical conference at which we shared a bedroom. (Don’t wait with baited breath for amazing revelations, or anyway not ones of interest to the gutter press). A charming chap, Robert, but informing someone that you’re a zombie isn’t the sort of thing one simply blurts out to someone one has only just met, even if one is sharing a bedroom, so I certainly didn’t tell him. Many years later I find he is arguing that zombies are impossible. This makes me suspicious. Could it be that actually he too is a zombie and is trying to pretend that he isn’t one on the spurious grounds that they are impossible, whereas if that evening I had confessed, he might also have done so? An opportunity missed, like so many in life? And now Robert is trying to keep it even more secret by arguing that zombies are impossible? So his arguments, and those by other ‘impossibilists’, have now, perhaps unfairly, led me to me suspect that perhaps Dennett, Kirk and the others are zombies themselves, like me. Could they really be pretending that they believe such things are impossible, because they are too embarrassed to admit they are zombies themselves? Could they be ‘self-hating zombies’?

II The Zombies Retreat OK, OK, I admit it. I was joking. I am not a zombie. Of course I didn’t exist on the planet Zog, where laws of nature are different, as I pretended in Part I of this article. But it is only in these sorts of circumstances, I think, that (philosophers’) zombies would be possible, a philosophers’ zombie being unlike an ordinary earthly zombie in that it would be indistinguishable from an earthly human in all physical and behavioural ways, but would lack experiences. I also cheated shamelessly when, in order to persuade you that I might be a zombie and you wouldn’t know unless I told you, I pretended that such a zombie might go on functioning on Earth. It (contingently) couldn’t, any more than we could function if we went to a planet where gravity affected only inorganic elements, unless we had some amazing machine which overcame this ‘defect’. So a zombie sent to Earth, even by King Zack, would need some sort of physical ‘driver’ to overcome the changed laws of nature, and thus wouldn’t be physically indistinguishable from us, people whom I would argue have on the contrary ‘mental drivers’. But zombies would be possible in other worlds. We need to distinguish two different sorts of possibility, and of impossibility. It is physically impossible, or in fact impossible, for humans to jump unaided higher than 30


If they are, then I now ask them to come out and publicly ‘admit’ it. So come along now Bob: please join me. Nobody is going to criticize anyone for a public recantation. But just in case he and others are unwilling to do so, in the second part of this article I shall criticize one of the major arguments he uses for the ‘impossibility conclusion’, and very briefly indicate how I think the causal problem can be solved for the common sense view of the nature of experiences as subjective entities over and above mere physical goings-on.


feet on earth. Conditions on earth, and the laws of nature, make it in this way impossible. We might therefore, rather unnaturally, call this a ‘natural’ impossibility, to cover the suggestion that perhaps there is more to nature than just the physical – perhaps the mental, or the abstract. We can on the other hand easily imagine a human making an unaided jump of more than 30 feet on earth; it could happen if the gravitational pull on earth were much weaker. There are conceivable circumstances in which this might occur. Another way of describing this is to say that there are possible worlds in which humans can jump more than 30 feet on earth. We owe the idea of possible worlds to the great philosopher Leibniz, so in his honour we can say that it is ‘L-possible’ to jump higher than 30 feet . . . etc., but not physically (naturally?) possible. I consider it perfectly satisfactory to read ‘L-possible’ as ‘logically possible’, but I should warn that many modern philosophers object to this (for what I consider spurious reasons). My claim has been that it is in fact impossible to create zombies on earth, but that this is a ‘natural’ impossibility, i.e. the laws of nature prevent us from so doing, whereas it isn’t an L-impossibility: there are possible worlds, with different laws of nature, where zombies might be created, and I have been pretending that our universe actually contains at least one such ‘possible world’, namely on the planet Zog. Perhaps it does and perhaps it doesn’t. (Of course we anyway live in a possible world: if it’s actual, then it’s possible. But most possible worlds aren’t actual, or real – they remain merely possible, or imaginary.) My claim is that on earth, humans and other creatures with reasonably complex central nervous systems have so evolved that correlated with various occurrences in their nervous systems they have experiences which are something different from, or ‘extra’ to, the physical occurrences. This anti-reductionist account needs to explain how such experiences, together with the physical occurrences, jointly cause various outputs of internal physical changes, outward behaviour, and further experiences. In circumstances with


different laws of nature – in other possible worlds, as we say – the same nervous systems would have evolved without the concomitant experiences. Either such creatures would be able to react in the same ways as do the corresponding earthly creatures, or they wouldn’t. My claim is that in some possible worlds, although lacking experiences, they would be able to react in the same way as humans and other animals do in our world; but in such worlds the laws of nature would have to be different to allow this to occur. So philosophers’ zombies are possible, but presumably not on Earth, and quite likely nowhere in the entire universe – only in different possible worlds. They are L-possible. So my belief is that zombies are L-possible, that there aren’t any on earth (or probably anywhere else in the universe), and that if there were such creatures on earth we might know about it because they might say the same sorts of thing as I have written in Part I, for example, and with some embarrassment: ‘What on earth are you talking about, so-called subjective experiences as entities different from the physical goings-on inside me?’ But the funny thing is that there are such creatures on earth, namely certain philosophers. So are they in fact themselves zombies after all, and refusing to admit it, so their existence doesn’t contravene our laws of nature, or are they intellectually confused, or am I? Of course all the above is philosophically contentious. If zombies really are L-impossible then there must be something wrong with what I have claimed, so I shall look in a minute at an argument claiming that they’re not possible. But the reason why I want to insist that they are L-possible is that if they are, then we need to understand how there can be something more – and contingently more – to earthly animals that have experiences than merely their physical goings-on, and there is a real philosophical problem to be solved about how such ‘extras’ can have causal input. It is a problem going back at least to Descartes, who wondered how the mind, if not a physical object, can affect the body. If, to put it crudely, minds aren’t


anything different from bodies, then there is no such problem to solve. But are there, as we normally believe, such things as experiences which are different from the goings-on in peoples’ bodies, things which embody the ‘how-it-seems’ to the individual alone, ‘from the inside’ (to use a very misleading spatial metaphor)? I am very fond of spinach, and a friend of mine hates it. He wonders just how I can possibly like that disgusting stuff, as he would put it. Of course it isn’t actually the spinach that he hates and I love: it’s the taste of spinach. And he has told me he sometimes wonders: does it taste the same to both of us? If it tastes differently to him from how it tastes to me, then it is easily understandable how he can hate it and I can love it, because what we are hating and loving are two different ‘its’. If it tastes differently to me then what I am liking is something different from what he is hating. What he finds difficult to apprehend is how anyone can like just that particular taste that he finds so disgusting, the thing that he experiences. So there surely is a question: does it taste the same to both of us? If it tastes differently to each of us, then our subjective experiences of ‘the’ taste of spinach are different: if it tastes the same then our experiences are qualitatively the same. How could we tell which of these two alternatives is correct? Before at least waving towards a way of answering this, we should note that ‘how it tastes to him’ just is what we call his subjective experience of the taste, and ‘how it tastes to me’ is my subjective experience of the taste. These two experiences are necessarily distinct things, even if (as we guess?) often they are qualitatively identical, i.e. it tastes to him the same as it tastes to me. And one aspect of the so-called ‘mind-body’ problem is the problem of explaining how such subjective somethings, the experiences themselves, can have causal input – if indeed they can have. Turn now to the subject of colour blindness, the phenomenon of being unable to distinguish between light of two or more different wave-lengths that most people can


distinguish between. One of the most common is red-green colour blindness. There is an extremely clever and also extremely simple, objective way, of testing for this. If red dots are made into a pattern on a green background, or vice versa, a normally sighted person will be able to see the pattern but a red-green colour-blind person will not. So this is a completely objective test of how things subjectively look to the individual being tested. It certainly is a scientific test. Now consider someone who is colour-blind in this way. He cannot distinguish between red and green, and we might now ask ourselves: is this because red things and green things both look red to him, or because they both look green to him? In asking this question I take it that I am asking whether both red things and green things look to him in the same way as red things look to you and to me, or as green things look to you and to me (assuming that you are not colour blind, and, as I point out below, that they look the same to you as they do to me, and we don’t both see as red what everyone else sees as green, and vice versa!). How things subjectively look to Frank is an example of ‘what it is like to be Frank’ vis-a`-vis his experiences, that is, what they seem like to Frank. So there is such a thing as what it is like to be Frank in this respect which is not the same as what is going on in his body. Scientific testing can ascertain whether Frank is colourblind in this respect. But if he is, then can science ascertain whether everything red and everything green looks red to him, or whether they all look green to him? And when I made the distinction above, I assumed that you and I, both passing the colour-blind test, see red things in the same way, and see green things in the same (but of course different!) way. But is there any way of telling whether we do see all red things in the same way? Could science answer this question, and if it can’t, then is it just nonsense? It certainly seems to make sense, and if it does, then there is such a thing as how things seem to you in the world and how things seem to me: our experiences seem to be mental contents that may or may not be qualitatively identical.


Now we might think that science could ascertain whether colour blind Frank sees red and green things as red, or red and green things as green, by ascertaining what goes on at his retina and in his visual cortex or perhaps other parts of his brain, and comparing it with the occurrences in normally sighted people. We normally take it that this would provide excellent evidence concerning whether he sees both these colours as red or as green. But we can see that it isn’t an absolutely knock down proof. Perhaps the parts of his visual cortex that are active when he sees either colour are the same as the parts when others see red, so it is reasonable to conclude that he see both colours as red. But isn’t it possible that when those parts of his cortex are stimulated then he is having experiences as of what we see as green (cf. the spinach question in the previous paragraph)? This simply pushes us into the field of general scepticism, about which I don’t want to say much. What I mainly want to show is that to find out what is going on in the cortex etc. is a different matter from how things seem to Frank, what his experiences are like. And what we would like to know is how, if at all, the actual experiences, the ‘how it subjectively seems to him’ can have a causal input to his actions, or whether the total causal input comes solely from what is going on in his central nervous system etc. My argument about the zombies has been to suggest that there could be – and hence are – possible worlds where the total causal input comes solely from the physical states, but that our world is one in which there also is causal input from experiences correlated with those physical states. It would be very strange, it seems to me, if experiences and other subjective conscious states which arise from evolution have absolutely no function, no causal input whatsoever into what goes on in animals’ behaviour. But if they do have, we need some philosophical explanation of how this is possible – for it often seems to people that only the movements of physical bodies can have causal influence. I wrote in the last paragraph that I don’t want to say much about scepticism. But I shall say this much: despite


the fact that philosophers still carry on discussing and apparently trying to ‘solve’ the ‘problem of scepticism’, I believe that it was certainly solved by John Wisdom in his series of articles ‘Other Minds’, later published in book form.4 What Wisdom showed is that sceptics can always push their opponents into admitting that no possible evidence would prove absolutely beyond a shadow of doubt that they know what they think they know, or even that what they think they have good evidence merely for believing is indeed good evidence for those beliefs. This is usually because the move from evidence to that for which it is evidence is neither deductive nor even straightforwardly inductive: so, sceptics often conclude, we have no evidence whatsoever for what we often confidently affirm, or affirmed before philosophical probing. The fact – the L-fact – always is, Wisdom affirms, that in claiming that our evidence is not ‘knock-down’, logically conclusive, the sceptic is just about always right, and if he – perhaps confusedly – marks this truth by saying that in those circumstances we cannot ‘know’ that our conclusions are true, then this too is correct, but put in a very misleading form of words. It then might look as though there is something we are missing, some other evidence that might give us the knowledge that we so painfully lack. But there is and can be no such thing. To move to the example we have been discussing, it is surely right that we cannot know how things look to Frank in precisely the way that Frank knows how things look to Frank. Suppose I get wired up to his brain, and all these things then look green to me, via what is going on in his brain. Does it follow that they look green to Frank? Well, maybe they do and maybe they don’t, for Frank is seeing things through the use of his brain, whereas in this thoughtexperiment it is I who am ‘seeing things through Frank’s brain’, (and actually, also through my brain as well, which Frank is not). And these are two different things. So it seems as though there is something I lack, namely, seeing things through the use of Frank’s brain in the way that Frank sees things through the use of Frank’s brain. But,


surprisingly, there is no such thing. So there is nothing that I lack. Why is there no such possible thing, and thus nothing that I lack? Suppose you say that you would like to own my house. Being a generous chap I say ‘Help yourself’. I get out the legal papers so that it becomes yours, perhaps charge you the minimum required to make it a legal sale, say £1, and hand you the keys. You move in. Are you happy? ‘Oh dear,’ you say, ‘this is no longer your house: it’s mine. So I haven’t got your house at all: all I have now is my house that merely used to be yours.’ Perhaps it will be clear that if that is what you want then there isn’t anything that would count for you as owning my house: either it’s mine or it’s yours, but not both. What follows from this is that there isn’t anything relevantly in the way of houses that you might have but in fact lack. This, by the way, is why the truth that ‘God cannot perform the logically impossible’ is no constraint on God’s omnipotence. The reason why God ‘cannot’ cut out an area of paper that is both square and circular is that there is no conceivable area that is both square and circular; so making an area that is both square and circular isn’t a ‘something’ that God, despite His omnipotence, unfortunately cannot do. It isn’t anything at all, actual or possible. Similarly, my knowing how things look, smell, feel etc. to Frank in the way that Frank knows how they look, smell, feel etc. is no possible state of affairs, so nothing that I lack. If this is correct, then Wisdom solved the philosophical problem of scepticism, and it is a great shame that many contemporary philosophers continue to come up with amazing (and implausible) attempted ‘solutions’ to it, none of which can possibly work. Let us turn now to the arguments for the impossibility of zombies. In his article ‘Zapping the Zombies’ Robert Kirk introduces the idea of (philosophers’) zombies as ‘beings physically exactly like ourselves . . . fully functioning human bodies . . . [but with] . . . no conscious experiences’ (p. 47).


That is exactly the sort of creature that I pretended in Part I that I am: Kirk argues that they are impossible. They might be thought impossible either because for some reason there is no possible world in which a creature physically exactly like us except lacking experiences would be able to function like us, or because any creatures physically exactly like ourselves would inevitably, either in our world or in all possible worlds, have conscious experiences that are something ‘extra’, over and above their purely physical make-up, or because, utterly surprisingly, to be a fully functioning human body exactly like ourselves just is the same thing as to have conscious experiences. If the latter were the case, then there couldn’t be ‘the one thing without the other’, for there simply wouldn’t be two things, one of which might (or might not) be able to exist without the other. But this latter view is the philosophical ‘reductionist’ view which the ordinary man in the street would find so hard to swallow, and which I too find hard to swallow. That, alas, isn’t enough to show that it is wrong. However, my claim is that although it is factually impossible for such zombies to be formed on earth, with our laws of nature, nevertheless they are L-possible, that is, there is nothing self-contradictory in the idea of such a creature, which therefore could exist in some possible world, and thus even might, for all we know, exist in our world, namely in a part of it having different laws of nature (or perhaps initial conditions) from those existing on Earth. My claim is that humans (and other conscious animals) do have something more, experiences and other mental states that have causal input into their behaviour and bodily internal physical states, as well as into their other mental states, and thus there is a philosophical problem of spelling out the (non-reductionist) nature of such mental states, and how they can have causal input. So it is important, from my point of view, to claim that zombies are possible, not merely because I think it’s true, but because it underlines the fact, if I am right, that there is something further to be explained about human and other animal behaviour.


The structure of Kirk’s argument, as he tells us on p. 51, is that if zombies are possible, then (it follows that) something else is possible, but that ‘something else’ is impossible, hence zombies too are impossible. Kirk makes thankfully plain that he is talking of L-possibility and impossibility: he claims on the same page that his argument shows that ‘the zombie idea is . . . incoherent’, (ie. self-contradictory). The ‘something else’ that he claims is impossible, and yet the possibility of which follows from the possibility of zombies, is a creature physically identical with a zombie (and hence with a human being) but having what he calls ‘non-physical’ experiences that are caused by physical occurrences in the creature – presumably in its brain – but which have no effects on the physical world, the view known as ‘epi-phenomenalism’. I shan’t discuss Kirk’s complex and subtle argument attempting to show that their possibility does indeed follow, an argument which I thoroughly commend to the reader, or his claim that such epi-phenomenal creatures are in truth impossible. Instead I want merely to raise some questions about his use of the concept of the physical in the course of his argument. Kirk says that if zombies were possible then there would be ‘more to human consciousness than can be accounted for in purely physical terms . . . [and that we would therefore have] . . . non-physical components whose presence explains the fact that there is something that it is like to be one of us’ (p. 47, my italics), and he argues that this view is wrong. At other places he refers disparagingly to belief in non-physical ‘components . . . items . . . and properties’, at least with respect to human beings. But we need to know what ‘being accountable for in purely physical terms’ amounts to; could it be that humans do have something ‘extra’, something non-physical, but this ‘extra’ can be accounted for ‘in purely physical terms’? We also need to understand what it is to be physical, and hence what to be non-physical. Kirk states (p. 48) that ‘In the nineteenth century scientists began to think there were good reasons to suppose


that every physical effect has a physical cause’. He then uses this supposition as a premise in his later arguments, so presumably he thinks there are other good reasons for accepting it, since scientists have believed all sorts of strange things, and still do. As Kirk expresses it, the supposition is anyway compatible with some physical effects also having some non-physical causes, since there are almost always very many causes of any effect. But from what he goes on to say, it is pretty clear he means that physical effects have only physical causes. Now we normally, and usefully, contrast a person’s physical properties such as height with mental properties such as intelligence: we also distinguish between physical and mental strength. But intelligence and mental strength clearly have effects on people’s behaviour, so any arguments to conclusions that they don’t must either have gone awry, or the conclusions need somehow reinterpreting. Such conclusions might be misleading ways of claiming either that it’s only the physical (e.g. neural) correlates of these properties that have causal influence, or that mental properties or other entities really are physical properties or entities. Either of these claims obviously needs a good deal of support. Properties are not physical objects, like pebbles, pushcarts or even people, all of which have spatial location. Even if some properties have spatial location, which I doubt, it’s clear they don’t all have. The property of being president of the United States passes from person to person: the current president is currently somewhere, but the property of being the president is not also there, hovering over him like a ghostly . . . ah . . . mind? Suppose we just decide to classify and thus call all (and only) properties of physical objects ‘physical properties’, in contrast to properties of abstract objects, such as that of being a prime number. We would then, simply by fiat, classify intelligence as a physical property. But even with this terminology, it doesn’t seem true that every physical effect must have (only) physical causes, if physical causes and effects are


changes (or continuations) in physical objects or properties of physical objects. According to Relativity Theory the bending of space has physical effects; but the bending of space isn’t a property of a physical object, because space isn’t a physical object. Empty space also has the properties of transmitting light and other electro-magnetic waves, but not sound waves, and therefore affects the transmission of these waves. If these doubts about a version of ‘physicalism’ are right, it leaves open the possibility of the mind being as ‘mystical’ or mysterious as you like, and still having a causal input. My own belief, however, is that one needs no such mysteries to understand the nature of mind. My view, somewhat alluded to above, is that minds, including even experiences, are properties of organisms, which are themselves of course physical bodies. If something’s being a property of a physical body is enough for it to be a ‘physical property’, then minds are physical properties. Life too is a property of organisms, and so isn’t a physical object, but most non-religious scientists and philosophers think it can be ‘accounted for’ in purely physical terms simply in the sense that when and only when various objects (organisms) have certain physical set-ups, those objects have the (further) property of being alive. I believe the same holds for minds, and for experiences, which means that they are not identical with, or the same thing as, either the physical objects, or the processes going on spatially within the objects having those properties. One reason why minds often seem so mysterious is that, being properties, they are nowhere: in some circumstances and about some mental entities, such as thoughts, we feel very inclined to believe this, and about others, such as sensations, we do not. If right this still leaves open the question just how they can have causal input, which requires a view on the nature of causation. I hope to write about these matters elsewhere. Ardon Lyon is former Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, City University, London. [email protected]

Notes


1 I am extremely grateful to my friend and ex-colleague Peter Cave for reading and criticizing earlier drafts of this paper, and to my son Douglas for giving me Wade Davis’s fascinating and terrifying book The Serpent and the Rainbow (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1985) which describes his research into Haitian zombies together with a good deal of the appalling history of that country. 2 Christian Beenfeldt, ‘A wake up call . . . A Review of Daniel Dennett’s Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness’, Think 19 (Summer 2008), p. 85. 3 Robert Kirk, ‘Zapping the Zombies’, Think 13 (Summer 2006), pp. 47–58. 4 John Wisdom, Other Minds (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1952).

ARGUMENT IN MIXED COMPANY: MOM’S MAXIM VS. MILL’S PRINCIPLE Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse

Giving Mom Her Due Mom’s Maxim enjoins us to avoid being impolite, especially in our dealings with strangers. And that certainly is sound advice. Impoliteness consists of acting in ways which make others needlessly uncomfortable or ill at ease. We are to steer clear of discussions of religion and politics, it seems, because discussion of them makes others uncomfortable. To be more precise, Mom’s Maxim instructs us to avoid discussion of such topics in mixed company, that is, among those who, for all we know, may not agree with what we say. Presumably the idea is that people are likely to hold differing political and religious views, and disagreement over these topics makes them uncomfortable. Since we generally should avoid needlessly making others uncomfortable, those topics should be taken off the table. Notice, however, that there is no prohibition against argument in general. There is no adage directing us to shun doi:10.1017/S1477175610000424 Think 27, Vol. 10 (Spring 2011)



It is impolite to discuss matters of religion or politics in mixed company. So goes the popular adage which all of us were supposed to have learned as children from our mothers. Let’s call it Mom’s Maxim. We tend to accept Mom’s Maxim. But is it philosophically sound? In this short essay, we raise some objections to Mom’s Maxim and make a case for an alternative which we call Mill’s Principle.

Aikin and Talisse Argument in Mixed Company † 32

discussion of other controversial matters in mixed company. People tend to hold differing views about sports, food, movies, music, and a whole lot else. Disagreements over these topics are often heated. Yet there is no corresponding rule against discussions of these topics. In fact, it seems that some matter of controversy on these topics may be exactly the kind of topic for polite dinner conversation. Why? Here’s a possible explanation. Not all disagreement is created equal. Some disagreements are such that we can live with them. You hold your view, you hold that those who disagree with you are mistaken, and you may even engage in lively debate with your opponents when the opportunity arises. But if at the end of the day your arguments fail to persuade, you lose no sleep over the fact that your opponents are mistaken. You can live with the fact that they’re wrong, just as they can live with what they perceive as your error. No sweat. To be clear, no sweat disagreements are real disagreements. When we elect to move on from an unresolved dispute, we are not saying that nobody’s view is right or that everything is ‘just a matter of opinion.’ We may hold firm to the correctness of our view, while admitting that those who disagree are mistaken. It’s not that we don’t care about the matter in dispute. In taking such a stance, we are simply recognizing that certain questions are difficult to settle and that we must go on despite our disagreement. Sometimes we decide to move on from an unresolved disagreement precisely for the purpose of gathering more evidence or developing new arguments in favor of our views. Sometimes we simply move on, resolving never to revisit the issue. Yet not all disagreements are of the no sweat variety. Sometimes we disagree about matters of such magnitude that we cannot simply let the dispute go unresolved. Let’s call such disputes momentous. When disagreement is momentous, it concerns matters that loom large in the lives of the disputants. Again, the distinction between no sweat


and momentous disputes is not that the former concern things that don’t really matter to us while the latter involve things that do. We rarely bother to argue about things that don’t matter to us. Instead, the difference is that in momentous disagreements, what is in dispute is something that matters for how we live our lives. In momentous disagreements, we are disagreeing about matters that are significant to the rest of our lives. Some beliefs are central to how we live our lives. We invest our lives in the truth of these beliefs, we live by them. Let’s call these core beliefs. Changing a core belief would typically cause much of one’s life to change. One would have to live differently from how one lived before. So there is an understandable tendency to seek to preserve the beliefs that most directly inform our lives. After all, it matters how we live. Consequently, it matters what our core beliefs say about how we should live. Our beliefs about politics and religion – we could add here beliefs about many values – are commonly at the core of our lives. For example, when one’s view about the artistic merits of Martin Scorsese’s films changes, we say that one has merely changed one’s mind. But when one’s religious, moral, or political views change significantly, we employ stronger language to describe what has happened. For example, one doesn’t merely change one’s mind about whether Jesus was divine; one converts to Christianity. When one comes to believe that animals have moral standing which obliges us to not eat them, one does not simply come to agree with the vegetarians; one becomes a vegetarian. Consequently, when one challenges the core beliefs of others, one thereby calls into question not merely what they believe, but who they are. In short, disagreements concerning core beliefs can be personal. Discussion of such personal matters is usually out of place among strangers, or even acquaintances. Hence discussion of core beliefs – such as beliefs about religion and politics – is inappropriate in mixed company. It seems that Mom is right, as usual.


Trouble for Mom: Mill’s Principle But there’s something peculiar about Mom’s Maxim. Recall that the reason we should avoid discussion of religion and politics in mixed company is that our beliefs about these topics are momentous. This is why disputes about them are often so personal. But this is also why it is important to try to believe what’s true about these topics. We all want to live well, and this requires some degree of success in believing what’s true about how we should live. If we want the truth, we should want to talk with people with whom we disagree. We should want to examine the reasons they offer in support of their views; we should want to know, and even grapple with, the criticisms they have of ours. We should want to try to respond to those criticisms, and to develop our own criticisms of the opposing views. In other words, we should care about the truth of our religious, moral, and political beliefs. And caring about the truth of our beliefs requires us to take seriously the reasons, arguments, and criticisms of those who disagree. The British philosopher John Stuart Mill captured this thought well in his seminal work On Liberty; he said, ‘He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.’ Call this Mill’s Principle. It counsels us to argue in mixed company about momentous matters; it tells us to reject Mom’s Maxim. It is important to stress that taking seriously the arguments and criticisms of those with whom we disagree does not require us to adopt the attitude that our own beliefs might be false or in need of repair. Mill’s Principle does not call for skepticism about our momentous beliefs. Neither does it advocate a wishy-washy relativism where objections, reasons, and arguments are treated as merely expressions of different ‘points of view’ with no critical edge. Rather, it says that we should take seriously those who disagree precisely because we care about the truth of our own beliefs. Those who follow Mom’s Maxim always


and everywhere show an inappropriately low level of concern for their beliefs. Why? You’re probably familiar with the phenomenon known as semantic saturation. This is what happens when one repeats a word out loud over and over again. Eventually one loses one’s sense of the meaning of the word one is uttering. The word’s meaning fades away, and all one hears is the sound of the word, or rather the noise one makes in uttering it. Beliefs can be like this. When we grow accustomed to hearing only our own beliefs, we tend to lose sight of what they mean. They become slogans, catchphrases, dogmas, cliche´s, and mantras. We habitually recite them, but they eventually lose their meaning, we grow detached from them, they become mere sounds. By bringing our beliefs into contrast with the beliefs of those with whom we disagree, we force ourselves to stay connected to our beliefs, we remind ourselves of where we stand. Perhaps more importantly, when we take seriously those who disagree, we bring into focus the reasons we have for our beliefs. And this in turn helps us to perceive more accurately the ways in which our beliefs are interrelated, how they hang together, and how they form a system of beliefs. We are thus better positioned to see new implications of our beliefs, new connections between what we already believe and new ideas that we have not yet considered. We learn; we integrate. We are also prompted to devise new reasons and arguments in support of our beliefs. Furthermore, we come to better understand the views of others and thus become better able to diagnose where they go wrong. Put simply, by engaging with those who disagree with us, we can gain a better command of our own beliefs, we come to be in possession of our beliefs. By engaging in disagreement with others, we come to know what we believe, so to speak. If we care about our beliefs, we should seek out intelligent opposition to them. We should discuss them in mixed company. Sorry, Mom.


Of course, there are risks that one incurs when adopting Mill’s Principle. Sometimes when we take seriously those with whom we disagree, we discover that our reasons are not as compelling as we had thought. We may discover that there is more that can be said in support of the opposing views than we expected. We might be presented with ideas and objections we had never considered. We might find that some criticism that we had taken to be fatal to an opposing view is in fact easily defused. And we might discover that our beliefs are just false. In any of these cases, we will have to reconsider, reformulate, reevaluate, reconfigure, or revise our own views. As we have already mentioned, the experience of revising one’s core beliefs can be disconcerting, frustrating, and even painful. These risks are significant. But, like all assessments of risk, the matter must be considered comparatively, against the risks associated with alternative courses of action. We already have said that beliefs about religion, morality, and politics matter because they have a great impact on how we live our lives. How we live matters. This means that it’s important to believe what’s true about religion, morality, and politics. The stakes are high. Hence the risk of frustration, disappointment, and discomfort seems worth incurring, given the alternative. In calling for discussion in mixed company about religious and political beliefs, Mill’s Maxim does not press a case for what is variously called ‘open-mindedness’ or ‘mutual understanding.’ It does not call for a celebration of the diversity of beliefs. It does not claim that one owes it to others to learn about their perspectives. Of course, these may all be good things. Mill’s Principle says that there is a cognitive requirement that calls us to engage with others about important matters. It claims that engaging in discussion about momentous topics in mixed company is necessary if we are to exhibit the proper care for the truth of our beliefs. In other words, violating Mom’s Maxim is a demand of responsible believing.

The Dark Side: No Reasonable Opposition


It may be said in response that we have been too hard on Mom’s Maxim. It is, one might say, a harmless principle of public decency, and not the call to cognitive irresponsibility we have described. We beg to differ. As we will now argue, Mom’s Maxim has a positively dark side. It not only discourages responsible believing, but actually encourages irresponsibility with respect to belief. We mentioned above some of the risks associated with taking seriously the views of those with whom we disagree. These risks provide a strong inclination to avoid debates in mixed company. Yet there’s something so manifestly correct about the idea that responsible believing requires engagement with the opposition that we often feel compelled to say something about those who disagree with us. No one who is fully committed to his beliefs can avoid this. At the very least, one must hold that those who disagree are in some way mistaken. We are driven, in other words, towards taking account of opposing views, especially in the case of momentous beliefs. This is why so many would count among their religious beliefs their beliefs about other religions. Think of Catholics and Protestants. Each group has their own set of theological beliefs, but each group also has beliefs about the other group’s beliefs as well. It is part of each religion to think that the other religion is in some way mistaken. This is even more obviously the case in politics. In the United States, popular political commentators tend to spend more time describing their opposition (mostly in highly negative ways) than affirming their positive views about policy. In the United States, part of what it is to be a Republican or a Democrat is to have a low opinion of the platform and members of the other party. When we take up momentous beliefs, we not only affirm some view about how we should live; we also adopt beliefs about others’ beliefs. It is important to get our beliefs about others’ beliefs right. Yet there is a strong incentive to avoid the risks of


actually engaging with those with whom we disagree. One common way of trying to avoid the risks that follow from the demands of responsible believing is to try to convince ourselves that we’ve already met those demands. We tell ourselves that we’ve already engaged with those who disagree, and have overcome their objections. Most commonly, we tell ourselves that our opponents really have no objections anyway; we portray them to ourselves as benighted, ignorant, unintelligent, wicked, deluded, or worse. This tactic dominates popular political commentary in the United States. On almost any issue, the pundit’s principal argument in favor of his or her favored view is that the opposition is not simply wrong, but ignorant, idiotic, and depraved. A quick stroll through the Politics or Current Events section of any bookstore – or a cursory scan of political talk-radio and TV – will confirm this. To mention only a few examples, we are told by conservatives that that liberalism is a mental disorder which afflicts people who are brainless idiots. The liberal popular commentators portray conservatives as greedy liars, fools, and hypocrites who make only noise and oppose science. The key to popular politics, it seems, is to hold one’s opponents in contempt. This strategy represents one simple and effective way of seeming to satisfy the demands of responsible believing while avoiding the risks of engagement. Let’s call it the No Reasonable Opposition strategy. It runs as follows: You tell yourself, or surround yourself with people who tell you, that there is no reasonable opponent to your views, that all opposition is woefully uninformed, ignorant, or irrational. If there is no reasonable opposition to what you believe, then there’s no point in trying to argue with those who disagree with you. Indeed, those who disagree with you are not even worth speaking to; the fact that they disagree shows that they’re stupid, deluded, or worse. Hence there can be nothing wrong about declining to engage with them. Where there’s no reasonable opposition, Mom’s Maxim wins the


day. The right policy is to talk about momentous matters with only those who will agree with what you say. The No Reasonable Opposition strategy is a compelling and effective way of seeming to have satisfied the demands of responsible believing while avoiding the risks of engagement. But it is simple-minded and confused. It would be a nice world were it the case that on every important question there was but one obviously correct answer, and a brood of other answers that are so obviously incorrect that only the stupid or depraved could adopt them. Alas, the world we live in is much more complicated than that. Questions concerning religion, morality, and politics are so controversial precisely because they’re so difficult. On almost every central question in these areas, one can find substantial disagreement among intelligent, honest, and sincere persons who are roughly equally informed of the relevant facts. This is due to the complexity of these issues. The No Reasonable Opposition strategy encourages us to think that with regard to the most important and perennial questions human beings can ask, there is but one simple and obvious answer, and every other proposed answer is demonstrably irrational, ignorant, or stupid. The No Reasonable Opposition strategy is for this reason simple-minded. There’s a tendency, understandable but ultimately misguided, to equate the recognition of the complexity of these issues with a ‘who’s to say?’ variety of relativism. This ‘who’s to say?’ view mistakenly infers from the fact of the complexity of these matters the conclusion that everyone’s opinion is somehow correct, or at least just as good as anyone else’s. But ‘who’s to say?’ relativism is confused. That a group of well-intentioned, intelligent, and wellinformed physicians disagree about the proper diagnosis of a given patient does not entail that the patient is not sick. That two detectives disagree about the proper interpretation of their evidence does not entail that no one committed the murder. That well-informed, sincere, and intelligent people


have different beliefs about religion, morality, and politics does not entail that no one’s right. To make sense of this, we need to introduce a distinction between the truth of a belief and the justification one has in holding it. The former is simple enough, at least for our purposes. A belief is true when it says something about the way the world is, and the world is that way. Here’s a simple example. It is a fact that Harrison Ford majored in Philosophy in college. This means that the belief that Harrison Ford majored in Philosophy in college is true. The belief claims that something is the case which, as it turns out, is the case. Now, imagine that our friend Abby believes that Harrison Ford majored in Philosophy in college, but she holds that belief because in the movie Star Wars Ford’s character Han Solo says many philosophical things. Abby has a true belief. But her belief is not properly grounded. The fact that Ford once played a character that says many philosophical things is not a good reason to believe that Ford majored in Philosophy. Abby has a true belief, but she is not justified in her belief. Now compare Abby with Bill. Bill believes that Harrison Ford majored in Philosophy in college; he believes this because he recently read Ford’s autobiography in which Ford claims to have majored in Philosophy. That Ford claims to have majored in Philosophy in college provides evidence that he did. Thus Bill’s reason for his belief is appropriately hooked up with what he believes; his belief is justified. With this distinction in place, we can see how the No Reasonable Opposition strategy is not only simple-minded, but positively confused. Sadly, when confronted with disagreement people often turn instantly to efforts designed to make their interlocutors look silly or incompetent. As we argued above, this betrays a lack of regard for one’s beliefs. When we show proper concern for our beliefs, we engage in argument not for the sake of making others look foolish, but rather for the sake of better apprehending the


truth. In proper argument, then, we try to exchange our evidence. Consequently, properly conducted argument involves a diagnostic endeavor. When we look to our interlocutor’s reasons for his beliefs, we are attempting to explain the fact that he asserts what we deny. We are trying to explain the fact of our disagreement. Now, disagreement has many sources. It is often the case that disagreements arise because the two disputants are drawing from radically different sets of evidence. Sometimes disagreement arises because the evidence is indeterminate or sketchy. Sometimes a dispute about one issue is due to a deeper dispute about what evidence there is. Sometimes the disputants share the same evidence, but weigh it differently. And so on. The point is that, among adults, it is rarely the case that anyone believes something that’s not supported by what he or she takes to be the evidence. Accordingly, with most disputes, it is possible to rationally reconstruct the position of one’s opponent: One can see that the opposing view proceeds from the opponent’s conception of what the evidence is and how it is to be weighed. When argument succeeds, we still may see the other as having a false belief, but we will also grasp his reasons, such as they are, and be able to say something about why those reasons fall short. Once we are able to diagnose disagreements in this way, we will be unable to regard those with whom we disagree as necessarily deluded, ignorant, wicked, or benighted. We will see them as nonetheless wrong, mistaken, and in error. But we will also see how, from their perspectives, their reasons, such as they are, are supposed to support their beliefs. We will see them as reasonable, that is, as fellow rational agents, who have, in ways that are identifiable and in principle remediable, made a mistake. Part of what it is to care about the truth about one’s beliefs is to care about how reasonable people go wrong. This is in part the aim of argument. Perhaps it’s the most important part.


To put the matter in a different way, we can say that there are two kinds of evaluation we are engaged in when arguing. First, we are trying to get a better grasp of the truth. To do this, we are surveying and evaluating the evidence that can be brought to bear on the issue. That requires talking to people who have different evidence, different evaluations of it, and so on. Second, we are trying to get a better grasp of the cognitive condition of the person with whom we are disagreeing. We are trying to find out what evidence he has, how he came to believe as he does, and how (or whether) his evidence supports his belief. In the first instance, we are evaluating beliefs; in the second, we are evaluating believers. It is this nuance that the No Reasonable Opposition strategy fails to capture. It conflates belief evaluation with believer evaluation. Those using the No Reasonable Opposition strategy infer from the fact that one believes what is false (a belief evaluation) that one is stupid (a believer evaluation). But whether someone is stupid is not a question of what he believes, but rather of the relation between his beliefs and what he takes to be his evidence. The stupid person is someone who systematically and persistently believes against what he acknowledges as evidence, someone who cannot make the right connections between what he believes and what he has reason to believe. Someone with very limited access to the available evidence concerning a certain matter might, indeed, arrive at a seriously and obviously mistaken belief, but he would not therefore be stupid or irrational. But this is precisely the kind of judgment that the No Reasonable Opposition strategy encourages. It is therefore confused.

Conclusion We have argued that the No Reasonable Opposition strategy is the dark side of Mom’s Maxim. If we think that beliefs about religion, morality, and politics are indeed

Scott F. Aikin is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Vanderbilt University and Associate Editor of History of Philosophy Quarterly, and Robert Talisse is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Graduate Studies in Philosophy, Vanderbilt University and Editor of Public Affairs Quarterly. scott. [email protected] and [email protected] This article is a shortened version of the first chapter of their co-authored book, Reasonable Atheism (Prometheus Press)


momentous we should care most of all to get the truth about these topics. As we have seen, caring about the truth is not simply a matter of holding the right beliefs. Like caring for a child, caring about the truth is an ongoing process of attending to our beliefs and looking after the grounds upon which they rest. Caring about the truth of our momentous beliefs thus means caring about the reasons, evidence, and arguments of those with whom we disagree. It means taking care to get an accurate picture of what those reasons are. This requires us to discuss religion, morality and politics in mixed company. More importantly, caring about the truth requires us to acknowledge that, with respect to momentous issues, there is typically room for reasonable disagreement. Caring about the truth, then, requires us to reject the No Reasonable Opposition strategy and acknowledge that there are reasonable people who reject our momentous beliefs. In the end, those who think that how they live matters must embrace Mill’s Principle and shun Mom’s Maxim.

THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT INEZ Jonathan Webber




Hell is other people. This miserable-sounding soundbite, the moment of revelation in Jean-Paul Sartre’s shortest play, must be the most quoted line of twentieth-century philosophy. Not even Jacques Derrida’s claim that ‘there is nothing beyond the text’, fondly cherished in some regions of academia, has anything like the cultural reach of what is often taken to be the quintessential Sartrean slogan. And the analytic tradition hardly abounds in snappy lines: meaning just ain’t in the head, to be is to be the value of a variable, and that’s about it. You’ll not sell many of those tshirts. Part of the appeal of Sartre’s slogan lies, of course, in the fact that we all regularly annoy each other. We think we can see better ways of doing what only other people have the power to do. Your schemes can clash with mine in ways that prevent me from achieving my goals and living my dreams. People can look down on me. Other people can and do thwart, defeat, constrain, disappoint, irritate, and distort us. When we dwell on all this at the expense of the love, inspiration, fun, co-operation, respect, and decency that characterise much of our social interaction, then we find Sartre’s slogan neatly encapsulates our mood. Its wit helps us put the melancholia in perspective as we express it. We get it off our chest. This all fits, moreover, with the popular view of existentialism as a depressing philosophy obsessively articulating only the negative aspects of our lives. Søren Kierkegaard wrote a whole book about anxiety and another one about despair. Albert Camus worried about how we should deal with the absurdity, or meaninglessness, of life and wondered whether we should just kill ourselves. Sartre’s philosophical masterpiece, Being and Nothingness, is filled with

Webber There is Something About Inez † 46

analyses of anguish, self-deception, shame, alienation, conflict, mortality, the futility of love, and the gnawing awareness of inner emptiness. It doesn’t get much darker than that. But these philosophers did not create the phenomena they describe and neither are they celebrating them. Like the ancient Stoics, the philosophers often grouped together as existentialists tend to give our deepest troubles careful consideration in the hope that greater understanding will help us to dispel them. Kierkegaard wants to show us the way out of anxiety and despair. Camus considers the correct response to the indifference of the universe to be not suicide but rebellion, creating our own meaning where before there was none. Careful reading of Being and Nothingness, in my view, shows Sartre to stand in this therapeutic tradition. He does not consider us to be condemned to misery by the very nature of our existence. Those who read him as describing only the metaphysics of the human condition are mistaken. He is rather concerned to diagnose a malady underlying our more immediate and more obvious problems, both individual and social, and to show us that we can cure ourselves of this malady. He examines the nature of our existence as part of this larger project. The sickness we suffer, he thinks, is a distorted view of what human beings are like, a view we cling to but only because we are used to it. This is what he means by ‘bad faith’: an attitude towards the human condition that we freely maintain and that we would be better off without. It is this attitude that poisons our relations with one another, at both the personal and the social levels. Bad faith makes love futile. Racial hatred is a form of bad faith.1 If this is right, then Sartre does not think that our relations with one another are necessarily hellish, in whole or in part. The standard reception of the slogan misunderstands it. Which is indeed something Sartre pointed out some twenty years after the play was first published. ‘It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned’, he said.


‘But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell.’2 Discussions of the play, however, tend not to see it this way. They generally describe each of the three main characters as frustrated by their inability to control the thoughts and actions of the other two, especially where these threaten their preferred images of themselves. They usually point out that the characters have died and so are incapable of adding to their life stories. From which they generally conclude that Sartre’s message is simply that we should not be too concerned with the views others have of us at the moment, but should concentrate on developing ourselves through our future actions. We are not dead yet.3 But this standard reading does not seem to fit with Sartre’s philosophy or with what he said about the play. For it is central to Sartrean existentialism that we cannot help but see ourselves through the eyes of other people. One of the themes of Being and Nothingness is that the characterisation of an individual as this or that kind of person is an inherently public affair. I simply cannot ignore or override the views of other people. Those who interpret Sartre as claiming that we are condemned to disastrous personal relationships by the very nature of our existence tend to emphasise precisely this aspect of his philosophy: that we cannot understand ourselves except through them. Sartre repeats this point in describing the message of the play: since ‘other people are basically the most important means we have in ourselves for our own knowledge of ourselves’, since the judgments of other people necessarily enter into whatever I think or feel about myself, ‘if my relations are bad, I am situating myself in a total dependence on someone else. And then I am indeed in hell.’4 The badness of my relations with others is therefore something additional to the structure of self-understanding. The problem is not our reliance on other people, but the combination of this with our relationships being ‘poisoned’. Hell is neither the metaphysics of human existence nor excessive


concern with one’s image in the eyes of others. In order to see clearly just what it means to say that hell is other people, just what Sartre sees as poisoning our relationships, we need to rethink our understanding of the play. Huis Clos was written within a fortnight towards the end of 1943, the year in which Being and Nothingness was published. The immediate impetus was that Sartre had been asked by three of his friends, including Camus, to write a play for them. Mindful of their vanity, Sartre wrote a play in which three characters have an equal number of lines. As it turned out, these three never played the parts written for them. The play opened in 1944, shortly before the liberation of Paris, under the title Les Autres (The Others), with a different line-up of actors. Its mixed reception may partly have been due to its claustrophobic atmosphere under the perpetual gaze of ‘the others’ being taken as an allegory of the occupation. Sartre does seem to have intended the play to have this political dimension as well as illustrating his ethical theory. Indeed, the enduring fascination with the play may well be due to its compact presentation of a wide range of themes and we should be wary of any interpretation that reduces such a masterpiece to a single simple and easily expressible message. It seems similarly unlikely, moreover, that such a strangely engrossing dramatic narrative could be wrought from a schema so simple as to involve three cartoon characters each facing the same basic challenge. So our interpretation of the play must not render the play’s success too puzzling in either of these ways. The title of the play has always presented a problem for English translators and producers, who have generally chosen between the more populist No Exit and the more technical In Camera, though have sometimes preferring to leave it untranslated.5 The first of these involves a nice theatrical pun: although the three main characters enter the stage, none of them ever leaves it, even when the door is open and they are quite capable of walking out. But this is not a literal translation of the French title, nor even a


figurative one. For the French title is taken from legal terminology, designating proceedings occurring behind closed doors, in the chambers, away from the open courtroom, with no public or media gallery. No Admittance might be a better rendering than No Exit. But fortunately the English language has its own phrase for the same kind of meeting: In Camera. The relative unpopularity of this title with translators and producers of the play is presumably due to its status as legal jargon rather than ordinary English, and perhaps also due to the fact that the play has nothing whatever to do with photography.6 The differences between these titles suggest differing interpretations of the play. A legal proceeding in camera is neither an eternal process nor a punishment, so seems an inapt metaphor for hell. Such a proceeding does end in an exit, though neither the timing nor the direction of this exit need be set in advance. Perhaps these three characters are not intended to be in hell at all, but rather in purgatory where sinners are punished until purged of their sins. Or perhaps they are facing the last judgment, at which eternal destinies are decided. The sole character who undoubtedly knows precisely what is going on, the valet who makes only minor appearances, gives nothing away about the status of this place. Two of the three main characters describe the place as hell, Garcin somewhat speculatively and Inez much more firmly, but this is hardly conclusive.7 Part of the reason why the characters are often assumed to be in hell might be the common view that there is no change, no progression, no quest or discovery during the play. Since the characters are already dead, the thought runs, there is nothing for them to do except contemplate what has been. But this simply does not seem right. Garcin begins the play exuding a false bravado about his exploits, but under questioning from Inez comes to admit that he is genuinely unsure whether his life story shows him to be courageous or to be cowardly. Sartre seems to have selected the events Garcin dwells on precisely for their ambiguity in this regard. The bickering between the


characters reaches its apex at the moment when the door opens allowing any of them to leave but they all remain. This is another ambiguous action, at least for Garcin: is he courageously staying to face the music or merely afraid of ending up somewhere worse? Garcin soon comes to see that he is tortured by the divergence between the way he reads these ambiguous events and the way others do – that, for him at least, hell is other people – and the play then ends with his expressing an unambiguously courageous attitude to their situation: ‘Well, well, let’s get on with it.’ Garcin seems to be making progress. This helps to explain why Garcin is often seen as the central character of the play even though the three main characters have the same number of lines. His being the central protagonist of this narrative is also indicated by his uttering the first line, the last line, and the punch line. The play is not about three equally central characters at all: the other two are there to contribute to the story about him. What is more, such progress would suggest that Garcin is wrong about his current location. Rather than being tortured in hell, he is simply finding painful the process of coming to recognise, confess, and regret his sins. He contrasts quite neatly with Estelle in this respect, since she seems to be making no progress whatsoever. From start to finish she is concerned only with whether men find her physically attractive, whereas Garcin is concerned with finding his salvation. Estelle is the only one of three lacking in depth, but this is not the way she is drawn so much as the way she is. Sartre gives us here a rounded portrayal of a two-dimensional character, not a flimsy sketch of a character. Inez is different. As readers often observe, she seems rather unruffled by the whole situation. Whereas the room seems designed to irritate the other two, it does not annoy her. Whereas the other two obsess about whether they really are what they hope that they are, which requires them to worry about whether people see them as they want to be seen, Inez seems to have a very solid idea of who


she is, one that fits perfectly the way others see her. ‘When I say I’m cruel, I mean I can’t get on without making people suffer’, she tells us, describing herself as a ‘live coal in others’ hearts. When I’m alone I flicker out.’8 Inez presents a serious problem for those interpretations of the play that see the three characters as facing variations on the same predicament. For while it is clear what Garcin and Estelle each want, the same cannot be said of Inez. It is true that she has sexual designs on Estelle, who in turn is interested only in men, while Garcin prefers Inez to her. And it is true that the story unfolds partly under the pressure of this triangle of desire. But the serious problems that Garcin and Estelle face, the problems that dominate the play, are not sexual at all. They are concerned with identity, self-understanding, and public image. And in this arena, Inez seems to have no trouble at all. Inez seems to know what is going on, moreover, whereas Garcin and Estelle seem only to surmise. It is no accident, she tells the others, that the room is too hot and contains only ugly and useless objects: ‘I tell you they’ve thought it all out. Down to the last detail. Nothing was left to chance. The room was all set for us.’ She is equally calm and clear about their situation: ‘We’re in hell, my pets, they never make mistakes, and people aren’t damned for nothing’. It is Inez who first claims that the three will torture one another, much like ‘in the cafeteria where customers serve themselves’.9 But this latter claim, often echoed in descriptions of the play, seems just as disingenuous as her opening accusation that Garcin is the torturer: since she freely declares herself to be uncommonly nasty, surely she is aware that most of the pain will be caused by her. Focusing on Inez in this way brings out the possibility that she is not in the same position as the other two and that perhaps she is a demon in disguise. If this is right, then she genuinely is, as she herself says, cruel right to the core, and her role is simply to torture the other two. She tells a tale of her past life, of course, but this could easily be part of her disguise, since being seen as a fellow


inmate of hell would make her all the better placed to do her job. Sartre occasionally alludes to this possibility, as when Inez admires Estelle looking ‘quite diabolical’. He even allows Garcin to come very close to making precisely this accusation at one point. ‘You’ve given us quite enough hints’, he tells Inez, ‘you might as well come out with it.’ Inez plays dumb in response, claiming to be ‘as much in the dark as you are’, but soon presses the torture onwards.10 So long as we see the play as set in hell, however, we cannot find any significance in Garcin’s apparent progress and Estelle’s contrasting inertia. For if nobody is going anywhere, change is insignificant. Our evidence that they are in hell is just that Garcin assumes so and Inez states it to be the case. Even if we take Inez to be a demon in disguise, and therefore to know exactly what is going on, we do not have to accept that she is telling the truth about their location any more than she is telling the truth about her own past. Describing their situation as hell is useful for getting the other two to focus on their sins. ‘What have you done?’, she asks Estelle. ‘I mean, why have they sent you here?’ Garcin picks up on this and insists they each ‘bring our spectres out into the open’ in the hope that doing so will ‘save us from disaster’.11 We need not accept that the characters really are in hell, therefore, since this could be merely a conceit promulgated by Inez. If the play is set in purgatory, then it is the painful exercise of diagnosing and confronting their basic sins that can save Garcin and Estelle, an exercise Inez insists upon. If this is the last judgment, on the other hand, then it seems that Garcin and Estelle are to pass judgment on themselves, or perhaps that the audience are to pass judgment, and Inez is playing the role of prosecutor. Either way, we can explain why it is Inez who drives the plot forwards with her relentless cruelty. If this is the right way to understand the play, then it is clear that it is not intended to dramatise the necessary structures of relations between people at all. Other people


are hell for Garcin at this time because of his sin that they, under the leadership of Inez, are forcing him to bring to light. This fits Sartre’s claim that the play encapsulates the idea that relations with other people are hellish when they are poisoned, twisted, or vitiated in some way. It is Garcin’s sin that is poisoning, twisting, vitiating his relationships with other people. If we are to understand precisely what this sin is, moreover, we need to respect Sartre’s further point that Garcin’s relationships with others are poisoned in such a way as to make him overly reliant on those other people. Sartre clearly sees this as compatible with the idea that we are necessarily reliant on other people for our understanding of ourselves. Garcin’s sin cannot simply be seeing himself through the eyes of others, but must be something that makes him overly dependent on doing this. Despite her lack of progress, Estelle’s troubles parallel Garcin’s in an important way, which suggests that they share a basic cardinal sin that is manifest in their other activities. Both characters are primarily concerned with the kind of people that they are, though for Garcin this is about being courageous where for Estelle it is about being beautiful. Garcin sees himself in terms of objective psychological properties that define him and his place in the world, Estelle sees herself similarly but in terms of physical properties. Both are therefore operating within the framework of understanding people in the way in which we understand physical objects, as possessing sets of properties that define them and determine their behaviour in given sets of circumstances. They see people as being courageous or beautiful just as they are tall or thin, just as objects are heavy or soft. This is the basic structure of the ‘bad faith’ that Sartre describes at great length in Being and Nothingness. The contrasting truth about human existence is neatly summarised by Inez: one is ultimately nothing but the projects one has chosen to pursue: ‘You are – – your life, and nothing else.’12 The immediate sins of Garcin and Estelle are, of course, the abominable ways in which they treated the people


around them during their lives, even though they seem to think of this as merely incidental to the perplexing question of the kind of people they really are. But their terrible behaviour is underpinned by their basic outlook, which we can therefore see as their basic state of existential sin. It is because they see people as having fixed properties that determine their behaviour that they have behaved in these ways, simultaneously trying to live the lives of the courageous or the beautiful while understanding this effort as simply the manifestation of their inner selves. This allows them to see their impacts on other people as the inevitable results of the interaction of their own natures with those of the people around them. And we can see how this attitude towards people renders one overly reliant on the views others have of one. Since objects are public and understood from a variety of perspectives, we take agreement between people to settle the nature of an object. Although we always need the eyes of other people in order to see ourselves, bad faith condemns us to be being reliant on seeing ourselves as this or that and therefore reliant on other people in a way we would not otherwise be.13 Estelle and Garcin both present themselves as objects. In the terminology of Being and Nothingness, they are engaged in masochism, the project of being seen and treated as a mere thing. Inez is the sadist before whom they prostrate themselves. Garcin finds other people to be hell because the sadist refuses to confirm his self-image and aims to enlist Estelle in this refusal. She threatens not only his self-image, but his preferred picture of humanity and thereby his excuse for his own behaviour. Estelle faces a similar problem, though she is not presented with quite so many challenges to her self-image during the course of the play, so does not make the progress Garcin makes. Through the presentation of ambiguous situations and actions, Garcin’s confidence in his outlook is shaken. Across the play it is gradually dawning on him that actions cannot be agreed upon to manifest this or that property, that people are not to be understood in the same way as

mere objects. His realisation that his hell is other people is a breakthrough, a major step forward. He is beginning to understand his problem. Jonathan Webber is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Cardiff University. [email protected]

1

This reading of Sartre is not uncontroversial. I argue for it in my book The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (Routledge, 2009), especially chapters 6– 10. I intend this discussion of the slogan and the play in which it appears to offer further support for it. 2 No Exit, in Sartre on Theater, ed. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (Quartet Books, 1976), p. 199. This is a transcript of a spoken preface Sartre gave to a recording of the play published by the Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft. 3 See, for example: Gary Cox, Sartre and Fiction (Continuum, 2009), pp. 133 –139; David Detmer, Sartre Explained: From Bad Faith to Authenticity (Open Court, 2008), chapter 4; Benedict O’Donohoe, Sartre’s Theatre: Acts for Life (Peter Lang, 2005), pp. 72–88; Robert Solomon, Dark Feelings, Grim Thoughts: Experience and Reflection in Camus and Sartre (Oxford University Press, 2006), chapter 7. 4 No Exit, p. 199. 5 These are the titles of published English translations of the text, though the current Penguin Classics edition retains the French title. The play has been performed under a variety of other titles, but these are usually variations on these two basic themes, such as No Way Out or Behind Closed Doors. 6 Though a version set in the Big Brother house could nicely be entitled On Camera. 7 Solomon points out that the characters might be in purgatory rather than hell, but does not seem to realise that this would make a significant difference to the entire narrative, since he goes on to say that the setting of the play means that ‘nothing can happen and no one can ever do anything, ever again’ (Dark Feelings, Grim Thoughts, p. 178). Sartre himself did say that it was the desire to give the three characters equal exposure, ‘to keep them together, as if for eternity’, that gave him the idea to ‘put them in hell and make each of them the others’ torturer’ (No Exit, p. 199). But it does not follow from this that the final version of the play embodies that idea, rather


Notes


than merely employing it as the way some of the characters view their predicament. 8 Huis Clos, pp. 203 –4. Translation by Stuart Gilbert. In Jean-Paul Sartre, Huis Clos and Other Plays (Penguin: 2000). 9 Huis Clos, pp. 192, 194, 195. 10 Huis Clos, pp. 198, 193. 11 Huis Clos, pp. 193, 201. Inez taunts Estelle with the idea of hell on p. 194. 12 Huis Clos, p. 221. 13 I take this to be what Sartre meant when he said that the play portrays the ‘living death’ of a person ‘encrusted in a set of habits and customs’ with which they are unhappy but who ‘do not even try to change them’ and ‘therefore continue in many cases to be the victims of judgments passed on them by other people’ (No Exit, p. 200).

THE DIFFICULTY OF UNDERSTANDING Mark Lovas

Keith Oatley, Emotions: A Brief History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 97 If emotions such as sympathy are to play the role Oatley envisages for them, they cannot be condescending; they must be based on some real understanding. This is an essay about the difficulty of understanding, and, consequently, the difficulty of sympathy. So, it is a challenge to any philosopher who seeks to understand morality by assigning a strong role to the emotions. In what sense would or might universal emotions ground ethics? If well educated or properly socialized individuals share the same emotional reactions to the same action, then there would be a common ground for discussion and argument about what should be done. One would also expect a degree of regularity in the actions people took in response to a given situation. However, the thesis being broached should contain an important qualification. The basic ways of responding, or the basic emotional reactions are shared. One might ask, doi:10.1017/S1477175610000357 Think 27, Vol. 10 (Spring 2011)



Adam Smith, discussed the emotions of sympathy and empathy in his book The theory of moral sentiments, and thought they were the glue that holds society together. We are able to experience these emotions precisely because our emotions of love, of anger, of sadness, of fear are universal, based on inherited systems of the limbic system; we share them with each other . . . A strong argument can be made that morality is based on such empathetic emotions.

Lovas The Difficulty of Understanding † 58

however, whether emotions do not nevertheless vary between individuals. Are not some people more readily excitable and others calmer? You and I don’t have to love the same things or the same persons. Even if the fundamental ways in which we respond to a given situation are the same, where is the guarantee that we share positive and negative evaluations? What we like we move towards. What we hate we move away from. Surely some people love what I hate? What if two people disagree about what is important, and their disagreement emerges unexpectedly? What if I lay primary stress on the autonomy of individuals, while you value intimacy? The linguist Anna Wierzbicka (CrossCultural Pragmatics, Second Edition; Mouton de Gruyter: London and Berlin 2003) has suggested that English speakers differ from Russian or Polish speakers on precisely these points. English speakers with our generic ‘you’ also favor a more generalized friendliness. For Polish-born Wierzbicka, English, lacking the two forms of ‘you’ common in other languages, fails to provide its speakers with a ready device to mark developing levels of intimacy. I cannot do justice now to the details and complexities of Wierzbicka’s analysis, but let us think, for a moment, about the contrast between the values of intimacy and autonomy. With the stress on autonomy comes a notion of private space, something which can be violated, something we all want and have a right to. Wierzbicka illustrates this difference via a contrast between styles of leave taking: a lengthy process with the effusive insistence that the guest stay, versus a more abrupt and factual departure. Respecting someone’s autonomy, we accept their desire to leave. A culture which values intimacy creates lengthy partings with the formulaic, ‘Do you have to go?’, or the insistent ‘Stay longer!’. Wierzbicka’s account raises many questions. By virtue of sharing a language, speakers share certain ways of negotiation in social space, pre-packaged chunks of behavior – how to begin or end conversations, how to come and go


from a visit, and countless other ways of behaving. Yet we acquire these routines at an early age, in an unquestioning way. We might never become aware of them, or we may only become aware of them when we have moved to another country, or when speakers of another language come to visit us. This challenges our status as free people and self-knowers. An important part of how we relate to other people is acquired thoughtlessly, and without prior evaluation. As an adult, once one becomes aware of a difference, one can think about it and evaluate it. Wierzbicka reports that at one point she consciously decided that she would not give up all of her Polish ways in favor of Anglo ones. In particular she could not join in the custom of small talk or the custom of asking ‘How are you?’ without expecting a real answer. So, according to the picture of freedom as choosing between options, in making that decision she became freer – even if she chose to continue what she had previously done without awareness. Apart from introducing the idea of freedom, one might ask: was she better for having learned that English-speakers differ from Poles? If one is going to stick with the customs of childhood anyway, what is the point of recognizing that other people have different habits? Is it a kind of achievement to recognize that others – others, who, I suppose, one respects and may even have affection for – have had a different childhood, and thus have come to structure their worlds differently? But, is this something positive when one continues to behave in the same way? Can the mere difference in one’s thinking itself be a sort of achievement? Perhaps, it undermines a certain naı¨ve certainty. Perhaps it means a kind of tolerance. But what of people who have not reached Wierzbicka’s level of awareness? Are their choices less free? People today move around the world all the time. We are faced with cultural difference both because we move and because others have moved to our homelands.


A generalized sympathy alone is not going to overcome the potential conflicts Wierzbicka is highlighting. On the contrary, other emotions come into play when two people with different routines of conversation or parting meet. The characteristic expression of a discovery here is the phrase ‘How rude!’. So, from this point of view, emotions are not the basic level where we find human universals – unless we speak of a universal reaction of hostility or discomfort in the face of a different culture. I may, on the whole, sympathize with a friend, but fail to see that in a particular case, we differ because I value privacy where he or she values intimacy. In my relations to the friend there will be a mixture of incomprehension and goodwill. How far can the goodwill carry us? The case of different styles of leave-taking involves habits which are largely not conscious. What of our conscious thoughts and judgments? I need not know what another person is thinking in order to sympathize with them – though that can be a source of sympathy. However, it seems wrong to suppose that another person thinks a thought, a proposition with a determinate content, and that I grasp exactly the same proposition. For an example, let the thought contain a demonstrative: ‘That was unfair.’ I may know an action was unfair, and the immediacy with which I grasp its unfairness naturally leads us to say that I saw that it was unfair. Perhaps I see that the person who has experienced the unfairness equally well recognizes its unfairness. So there is a common point of reference for us: the unfairness of that act. Sometimes our ability to feel sympathy is possible because we share a context and a judgment about what happened in it: we both saw the act and saw that it was unjust. Both of us being sufficiently sensitive to what was going on, there were no questions about whether we were responding to an indication of injustice which might, in another context, have been overridden. There is a kind of variability of the connections here which is a necessary


feature of the very abstractness and undefinability of moral notions. This variability might equally be spoken of in terms of infinity or creativity. Normally, I prefer to be kind, but, perhaps, with some friends or some students, if I am kind, then they will not understand the importance of some issue. So, on that occasion I must adopt a different posture, perhaps I must be stern. And my sternness will not be anger, though some might think it to be. My sternness might well be, with that particular person, on that particular occasion, just what is needed to do my duty by the person, and so to act fairly or justly. And what happens if two thinkers fail to be present at the same time, in the same situation, and so fail to share a context? I must represent to you, my audience, sufficient details to allow you to come to see what I saw when I was in the context. That does not require that you come to the injustice of what was done through exactly the same path as I did. My words do not reproduce a second event of the same sort. They focus your mind upon salient features of the original event. But is there mutual or common or universal salience? The features we care most about are abstract, hence can be reached from countless paths. Can I actually communicate to you what happened in the fullest sense so that you agree with me, so that your agreeing is substantial? You do not merely nod your head in order to move the conversation forward or because you are my friend, but because my account seems reasonable to you: you find it plausible that A did this to B, and you honestly believe that A’s doing this was a bad thing. Here is a sort of doubt: not everything that I am in the habit of finding salient need be salient for you. We can perfectly well say as a matter of theory: two virtuous individuals will both recognize that something is bad. However, this ignores questions of variety and diversity. I make an assumption that some might challenge. I assume an important part of moral evaluation involves our emotions.


In deciding what to do, I try to imagine how my actions will impact upon other people. I don’t wish to cause a friend needless embarrassment. I don’t wish to offend someone. But there is a question of emotional indeterminacy. One and the same event can be classified differently. There are psychologists who claim that neither facial expressions nor physiological reactions correspond in a one-to-one fashion with emotion terms of ordinary English. This places them at odds with psychologists and the philosophers influenced by them who suppose that universality is to be found in physiology or facial expressions. It also raises the question, as the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett has stressed, of why we are so sure that our emotion terms fit. (‘Solving the Emotion Paradox’, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 206, vol. 10, pp. 20 –46.) Barrett herself introduces language to explain how we do it, but that solution itself will imply a degree of indeterminacy or miscommunication when people of different language backgrounds meet. In the UK and the USA people appeal to the categories of privacy, private space, invasion of privacy. They can use these categories to explain what people do: ‘She moved away from the man on the park bench because he was too close. He was invading her privacy.’ If the linguists Aneta Pavlenko ( ‘Emotions and the body in Russian and English’, Pragmatics and Cognition, vol. 10 (2002), pp. 207– 241) and Anna Wierzbicka are to be believed, Poles and Russians don’t appeal to privacy in explaining or justifying behavior. They place a higher value upon other sorts of relationships between people. Where Anglo-American culture places a stress upon the value of autonomy and independence, Polish culture prefers intimacy and cordiality. Perhaps the clearest expression of this difference is in the Anglo-American ideal of emotional neutrality, something which Pavlenko and Wierzbicka agree is lacking in Russian culture, which likes unrestrained public expressions of emotion. If we grant that this difference is real, are we thereby committed to skepticism about the objectivity of morality?

(A) I want to be left alone with my emotions. (B) I want to be left alone because I have a right to privacy. With (A) goes a further thought: (A1) People need sometimes to give in to their emotions. With (B) goes a further thought: (B1) Everyone has a right to privacy. There are some things we need to do away from the public eye. Now, here is a question. What difference does it make if we are avoiding the public eye or simply giving in to our emotions? It is not simply one situation or one particular explanation that is different. The difference is a broad one influencing a host of thoughts and a host of individual actions and every relationship. The difference is a fundamental one. Even more troublesome from the standpoint of universality, if our linguists are right, then one culture can lack a concept that another has. Poles and Russians and many others don’t have the Anglo concept of privacy.


Do these views assume or imply moral relativism? The short answer is that the recognition of cultural differences is not identical with moral relativism. No one is saying that the Russians do what is ‘right for them’, and that Americans do what is ‘right for them’. However, our linguists do claim that there are differences in what is valued, differences in the role of emotion, differences in the importance given to the open display of emotions. It might help to consider an example inspired by the research of Aneta Pavlenko. Here are two different reasons:


We lack a Russian concept which Pavlenko attempts to capture with the phrase ‘soul space’. (However, we shouldn’t think that ‘soul space’ is identical with ‘privacy’. They just happen to play a similar role as a reason in the example above.) A quick response is to say that all such complex concepts can be de-composed into simple units, and that such units are universal, and so comprehensible to us. The problem however is Humpty Dumpty’s: all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot put the concept back together again once we’ve taken it apart. The Anglo perception is not of a world with a special place for exemption from the public view. It is the default setting in our Anglo conceptual scheme. To add it on as an extra is a distortion. What is at issue here? Is it a question of privileging one’s own way of viewing things? As if I must be right when I say I feel this way? That is not the issue. I am not claiming that particular individuals have error-free access to their own emotions and thoughts. Nor am I claiming that if a given language contains certain categories that those categories must correspond to a deep, metaphysical reality. On the contrary, it seems clear from history that people can have false categories – e.g., ‘witch’ or ‘phlogiston’. The point is that speakers of different languages can differ about what is important – and that the difference might be invisible. Had Wierzbicka never moved to Australia and started to ask questions about why people reacted to her as they did, she would never have recognized her habits. Wierzbicka claims that Polish speakers value a certain intimacy, whereas English speakers value non-interference. This is a real difference, and if we attempt to parse Polish behavior by saying it is just like what we Anglo-Americans do/feel, only more so, we distort both what Polish speakers think and feel, and we miss a chance to notice that they really do live different lives. Culture makes a difference to how people live.


There is as well a sort of compromise position: With respect to these matters, you always win something and lose something. Or, there are always opportunity costs. Maybe that is illusory. Just maybe, when we do the right thing, there really was no other possibility – and no real possibility was missed. That is, in fact, I think a consequence of taking seriously the idea that there are moral facts and that there is moral knowledge. At a less grandiose and abstract level, maybe the Poles and Russians have noticed something that English-speakers tend to miss. Maybe they’ve developed a way of relating that is better. How would one know? Perhaps there is a sort of subconscious argument here: If doing the right thing means not missing a possibility, and if I’ve never thought of a world without privacy, then I’ve missed a possibility, and maybe, just maybe I’ve been in some way wrong? But surely I couldn’t be wrong about that! The question of simple ideas is a question of understanding. Can I understand the other culture? I wanted to insist that simple paraphrases fail to capture the original thought. If the Japanese have a special way of relating to intimates and have given it a name, we cannot understand it simply by saying that it is like our friendship only more so. Why do I insist on keeping things together? I hinted at my reason above: it runs the risk of a sort of emotional imperialism or condescension. ‘Oh it’s just like our desire for intimacy, but more intense.’ But, no, it’s not as if there were some switch that was moved forms setting ‘8’ to setting ‘12’. That is a misrepresentation of the difference. Perhaps an analogy can serve: contemporary dance is not simply classical ballet with looser rules about where the arms, shoulders, and torso can be located; it is a different style of dance, with different expressive possibilities. Earlier we saw that Keith Oatley claimed emotions such as sympathy are central to morality. Oatley, a psychologist and novelist, has been inspired by the novelist George


Eliot. Now, I would like to shift gears and consider just a bit of what George Eliot has to say about the emotions. George Eliot wrote of the importance of living a life ‘. . . vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellowfeeling with all that is human.’ (The Mill on the Floss, Oxford UP: Oxford and New York; 1860/1996, p. 498.) This does not seem to be the Anglo view that our linguists find among Americans and English. Eliot is saying that if we have had an intense and vivid emotional life we become capable of expanded sympathy. In fact, one of the central tragedies of The Mill on the Floss is Tom’s incapacity to share the feelings of his sister, Maggie. And now we are near a quite pretty suggestion. Earlier I seemed to be skeptical about the universality of emotion because I accepted the claim that different cultures might place different values on emotions or value different emotions, and that this difference might be reflected in language. Yet, now we see that a difference in language is not needed to produce an emotional and moral gap, a failure of human understanding. Tom lacks the emotional capacities needed to understand his sister. And, to make the point more dramatic, we might say: it’s not just the psychopath who fails to feel what one would need to in order to act rightly. Tom is a character who satisfies certain social standards of respectability and is praised by his community, but he is often cruel to his sister. Moreover, it is Maggie’s moral and emotional depth which makes her a target of community criticism. Like Tom, Maggie’s community is, for the most part, simply incapable of accepting the complexity of her character. Toward the novel’s end, after hearing Maggie’s story, Dr. Kenn advises her, The people who are the most incapable of a conscientious struggle such as yours, are precisely those who are likely to shrink from you; because they will not believe in your struggle. (The Mill on the Floss, p. 496)

Here in her narrator’s voice, Eliot describes how Maggie responds to Tom’s words: There was a terrible cutting truth in Tom’s words – that hard rind of truth which is discerned by unimaginative, unsympathetic minds. (p. 393)

. . . she said inwardly that he was narrow and unjust, that he was below feeling those mental needs which were often the source of the wrong-doing or absurdity that made her life a planless riddle to him. If we return to my earlier example, where two people can agree that something is unfair, the very schematic account I proposed there seems hollow. Maggie and her brother Tom might well agree that many things were wrong or bad, yet the grounds of their judgments would be different. For Tom there is the powerful force of public reputation. For Maggie there is always something like a primary ground of emotional sympathy. Maggie and Tom’s father goes bankrupt. For Tom this brings shame. For Maggie, there are fewer thoughts about how this will influence her life than there is sympathy for her father. So too, if we recall Wierzbicka’s account of the Anglo mind, we can see Tom as the sort of person who will care about privacy in a formal way, while Maggie will be in need of a space where she can experience her emotions. That suggestion turns things around once more; even two people who share the same language and have shared childhood can be emotionally separated. Maggie’s emotional life looks more Russian than Anglo-American. Her misfortune is that her brother is closer to Wierzbicka’s portrait of an Anglo. Can we draw any conclusions? No language or culture, and, indeed, one might add (though we have not discussed


And here on the same page are Maggie’s thoughts about Tom:


this point) not even the most creative and competent of teachers or mentors can give us some form of automatic and privileged insight. Your language may require you to notice some things and not others. But making a life for one’s self that is just and happy is so complicated a process that no matter what one’s initial endowment, there will be dangerous decision-points where the initial advantages come to seem quite trivial. In Maggie’s case, she was condemned by people who, like her brother Tom, lacked imagination and sympathy. To see Maggie’s tragedy as solely or primarily due to some excess in her character is to ignore the role played by the community. Eliot knew well the power of community judgment: Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them. (Middlemarch (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1871/ 1996) p. 9) We have touched on the ways in which language and culture can create difficulties or complications which hinder understanding. I have also suggested that people who share a culture and early childhood experiences may yet differ in the emotions they feel in ways that matter for moral judgment. Maggie is closer to moral reality than Tom. Her greater sensitivity brings with it a perception of what is important which Tom lacks. Perhaps, too, we can derive another moral. If emotions matter to morality, it is not merely because they are universal and serve as a kind of foundation. There is as well a question of the depth or quality of emotion. George Eliot thought that art must enlarge one’s capacity for sympathy, or it would be worthless. Mother Nature may have endowed us with the emotions which make morality possible, but their final destiny lies in cultural institutions which can develop those energetic creatures in diverse directions. That insight can already be

found in Plato. What is new in the contemporary thinkers I have mentioned is an appreciation for the surprising granularity of the social or cultural. Society influences the individual not merely at the level of macro-institutions such as schools and political systems, but equally at the micro level of parting rituals and small talk.

Mark Lovas is an Independent Philosopher, formerly Visiting Assistant Professor at University of Toledo (Ohio), and a member of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy.


I would like to thank Aneta Pavlenko for email discussions about her research; she has reservations about the way I have interpreted it.

THE TEXAS SHARPSHOOTER FALLACY Dene Bebbington




A man fires a gun several times at the side of a barn and then draws a circle around a cluster of most of the bullet holes. Drawing a target retrospectively like this doesn’t prove the shooting skills of the gunman – no one would consider him a sharpshooter if they knew what he’d done. When the equivalent of this happens in other circumstances we call it the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. As with many fallacies, it may not appear fallacious at first inspection. The classic example of this fallacy is in the identification of a cancer cluster: a geographic area with a perceived or real above average number of cancer cases thought to be in need of explanation. Typically something in the local environment is claimed to be the cause – e.g. overhead power lines, pollution from a chemical plant etc. The problem is that the geographic area chosen is akin to the shooter’s circle drawn around bullet holes after firing the gun. If the cancer cluster is large enough and occurs in a small town then the localised cancer rate is likely to be higher than the national average. However, if the geographic area selected was a county, then the rate is likely to be close to the national average, and the cluster isn’t necessarily in need of investigation. This isn’t to say that cancer clusters are never the result of a localised cause, just that the existence of a cluster isn’t sufficient to infer it. Public concern has led to many cancer clusters being investigated, often fruitlessly. To understand why a cluster of something isn’t necessarily in need of investigation we look at randomness. People intuitively, but wrongly, tend to think that the law of

Bebbington The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy † 72

large numbers applies to small numbers – that is, they believe a small sample will be as representative of a population as a large sample. When asked to generate a hypothetical random sequence of coin tosses, people usually produce short sequences with the ratio of heads to tails close to 50 per cent; however, this is not what chance would predict. In other words, even though tails (T) in the sequence TTTTTTH occurs 6 out of 7 times consecutively it’s not a reason to suspect cheating. An example from pseudoscience is the so-called Bible Code. Here, an algorithm is chosen to arrange the biblical text in a certain way, then messages are deciphered from the result. These supposed messages are only found after playing around with the algorithm. To expose the Bible Code as an instance of the fallacy it’s been shown that ‘messages’ can be found in books without the prophetic overtones of the Bible – e.g. Leo Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace. In science, a hypothesis is made then data is collected and analysed to see if it conforms to what is expected if the hypothesis is true. The fallacy occurs when a hypothesis is constructed and tested on the same data. To use the shooting analogy: a target should first be drawn, shots fired, and then the result analysed. People who are quick to judge a situation sometimes use an old saying that there’s no smoke without fire. The Texas sharpshooter fallacy reminds us that there may not actually be any smoke, let alone a fire.

Dene Bebbington is an IT professional and freelance writer. [email protected]

THE IMMORTAL SOLIPSIST Christian H. So ¨ temann




Philosophers have been known to sometimes conjure up world-views which seem dazzlingly at odds with our everyday take on the world. Among the more, if not most drastic ‘-isms’ to be found in the history of philosophy, then, is the standpoint of solipsism, derived from the Latin words ‘solus’ (alone) and ‘ipse’ (self). What is that supposed to mean? It adopts a position that only acknowledges the existence of one’s very own mind and opposes that there is anything beyond the realm of my mind that could be known. What a drastic contradiction to the way we normally view the world, indeed. Allow me to emphasize some implications that would arise were one really to take the solipsist view for granted. The aim is to briefly adumbrate how a solipsist view would cut us off from the social world and from the existential dimension of our own death. A basic argument from a solipsist’s point of view – let’s call our imagined solipsist Sol – is that I can by no means achieve an ‘objective’ view of the world: it is always inevitably connected to, even generated by my perceptions, my reflections, my abstractions etc. Certainly, this represents an important point when discussing the question: ‘What can we know?’ I cannot perceive something without someone – me – perceiving it. And yet most of us would consider it bizarre and absurd to think of myself as the giant ego that produced and sustained the world in my mind. There are several objections to solipsism, like the impossibility to perceive all the different perspectives of the world we experience at once: we are always situated in a concrete position from where we perceive the world, and there are other perspectives we can take, but only one we

So ¨ temann The Immortal Solipsist † 74

currently can have. Another objection is that the world is not equipped according to my own wishes and preferences: why would Sol, the solipsist, fill the world with all those unpleasant things he dislikes, when he were to be the only truly existing individual, the one at the very helm? Surely, Sol, the solipsist, would not maintain that there were no world at all, or nothing at all. In fact, saying that ‘nothing is’ already is something in itself. And the world is there for the solipsist as well – it is only that it is rooted in the presence of one solitary mind. There is, however, a thought experiment we can make, which yields a puzzling result: It concerns death from our everyday point of view on the one hand, and from the perspective of Sol, the solipsist on the other, and it goes like this: We only die once, or do so presumably – no-one who is alive can ever know what it is like to be dead. All our guesses, all our hypotheses are those of somebody who is alive and sufficiently well to ponder on what it might be like to be dead. From the viewpoint of natural science, it can be said that the matter I consist of will dissolve into different states of matter and energy. But the internal perspective, the dissolving of one’s own psyche cannot be imagined, because as long we are imagining something, it is always there, as has been stressed by psychologists and philosophers before. Now, what about Sol, the solipsist, and his death? Surely all of us conclude that since everyone else has to die, and we become witnesses of the deaths of relatives, friends, partners . . . and we grieve – we have to die as well, and do not seriously doubt this rational knowledge. The analogy behind this runs basically: Every human being has to die; I become witness to the deaths of other human beings – since I am also a human being, one day, I will have to die too. That is, we infer the inescapability of death for ourselves because we consider the outlines of our own existence basically comparable to the existence of other human beings. They die, we die. Quite clear, quite likely, although we cannot know this with paramount certainty. But one


would most probably furrow one’s brow to hear somebody utter: ‘What? I will die too? Me? I thought it was only all of you that had to die.’ There are no exceptions, be this a good or a bad thing. Sol, the solipsist, cannot resort to this analogy, were he to take his position seriously. Instead, other human beings would not be like him at all: he would have to consider them productions of his mind, mental phenomena only, and not more; certainly not independent, individual existences. And the mental phenomena in question may have the outward semblance of independently existing human individuals, but they cannot be the same from this standpoint. Sol, the solipsist, is on his own. He is the only experiencing soul, the only actual individual. And when he becomes a witness of a human being dying, this only signifies a drastic change in the appearance of some mental phenomenon, but not a real, independently existing human being. And therefore, he cannot extrapolate from this change of appearance (a living phenomenon becomes a corpse – a lifeless, unmoving apparition) to the assumption that he will have to die as well. Sol, the solipsist, is left to an uncertain future. The phenomena he calls ‘human beings’ appear to be lifeless at one point, and he may call them ‘dead’, but Sol is immortal in that he has no way of coming to the conclusion that he will suffer the same fate. He has no sure indication of his experienced world ever ceasing, since there is no precedence as to what happens with solipsists in a solipsist’s world. And since he is the all-experiencing being, what should his mind turn into if he did die after all? Philosophy and sciences have shown often enough that something cannot simply turn into an absolute nothingness. Many open questions . . . Sol would have a hard time in defending his world-view when seriously queried. I suppose hardly anybody would wholeheartedly agree with this conclusion of an immortal solipsist. It would be deemed unrealistic and highly whimsical. In fact, the extreme standpoint of solipsism has few followers (if any at all) amongst contemporary scientists. If we dilute the kernel

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of solipsism quite a bit, though, it serves to remind us that even though there are hard realities such as death which we all will have to confront, each of us perceives the world from his or her very own perspective, and that all knowing, perceiving and thinking, all human mental activity is and has to be related to the respective subject, the experience of a human being. There is no world-view without a viewer of the world. This has been emphasized in recent times by another of those ‘-isms’, constructivism. And yet, Sol, the solipsist’s case represents a strident exaggeration – his world, although certainly still some form of world, would, after all, be an ultimately lonely, isolated one, with no real company, no counterpart proper. The thought of a possible immortality would be a cold comfort.

Christian H. So¨temann is a psychologist/counsellor and freelance lecturer in psychology in Berlin, Germany. [email protected]

THE DIRTY WORD Michael and Natasha Berman




For the first two years of my daughter’s life, I was scheduled to teach an Introductory Logic course. While I had taught Critical Thinking courses in the past, having to steep myself in categorical and propositional logic left a lasting impression on my own thinking. More importantly, though, these courses influenced my speech-habits during the early years of my child’s development. By no means do I intend to assert that my child somehow gained some cognitive benefit from my communication with her during these early stages of her life. Rather, it seems that she acquired the particular virtue of tolerating her father’s habit of voicing strangely worded utterances. As she has passed the three and half year mark, her own communication skills and means of expression are well on their way towards developing into her own distinct styles. This I know because we talk a lot. Often times these dialogues are about day care, her friends, or princesses and lots of pink stuff. But sometimes a gem of an argument develops. While driving home from her day care, the following exchange began: ‘Daddy, my friend Erin said a dirty word in day care. What’s a dirty word?’ I said, ‘What a great question.’ After a pause, ‘What do you think a dirty word is?’ She responded, ‘A dirty word is a word that you say.’ This is when the Socratic philosopher in me took over: ‘What happens when you say a dirty word?’ ‘Your mouth gets dirty,’ she surmised. This though wasn’t enough for me: ‘What other things are dirty?’ To this she paused and then said, ‘Mud.’ ‘How is mud dirty?’ ‘When you play with mud your hand gets dirty,’ she explained.

Michael and Berman The Dirty Word † 78

This is where I began to sum up what we had been saying to each other, ‘So when you play with mud your hand gets dirty, right?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And when you say a dirty word your mouth gets dirty, right?’ A little less certain, ‘Yes.’ ‘So what do you do when your hand gets dirty with mud?’ To this she answered quickly, ‘You wash your hands with water and soap.’ ‘Then what do you do when your mouth gets dirty after saying a dirty word?’ This was followed by a bit of a longer pause (I could almost hear the cognitive gears churning away in her skull by this point); slowly she said, ‘You wash your mouth with soap and water.’ To which of course I said, ‘That’s right.’ Then we both shouted, ‘Yuck!’ And had a good laugh. Without making any knowledge claims such as could be found in the fields of cognitive or developmental psychology,1 one can see that this short conversation involves both an analogy and an equivocation. The first element demonstrates some interesting reasoning from a colloquial expression; the second is a language play that shifts meanings between the metaphorical and the literal. Analogical reasoning in its most basic form allows one to infer relations between objects; for example, sun is to moon as day is to night, or the classic Platonic example that proposes the sun is to sensible objects as the good is to ideas.2 For the first example one can infer that the relationship is that the moon and night temporally follow the sun and day; but in the classic example, just as the sun provides the light by which to see sensible objects, the good provides the intelligibility to understand ideas. Thus the relation that is demonstrated between the first set of objects in the analogy holds a structural similarity to that between the second set of objects. We should note that these relations need not be identical, as in the case of the classic example. With this in mind, let us turn our attention to the analogy in my conversation with my daughter. The analogy runs thusly: just as playing with mud makes one’s hands dirty, so too does saying a dirty word make one’s mouth dirty. It is assumed that mud is in itself dirty,


which would follow as mud is essentially made of dirt and water. The structural similarity of the relation of saying and playing would consist of a direct contact with a substance that leaves a residue; hence, the mud leaves dirt on the hand, just as the dirty word leaves a residue on or in one’s mouth. Ostensibly at this point one might say that the initial question had been answered: what is a dirty word? A dirty word is a substance (thing, word – no distinction being made in this context) that leaves a residue after its utterance, making the mouth dirty as a consequence. This definition, of course, needed to be sounded out a bit further. Focusing on the key term ‘dirty’, I posed further questions regarding solutions to dealing with the consequences of coming into contact with dirty substances that left residues. When questioned about how to address the dirt on one’s hands from playing with mud, my daughter proposed that one ought to wash one’s hands with water and soap. This should effectively remove the dirty residue, which was agreed to by both of us. But if using this solution to cleanse one’s hands worked, then would it not also have to work for one’s mouth after having been subject to dirty residue? This would naturally seem to follow given the analogical relation between saying a dirty word and playing with mud. However, when my daughter proposed this means of redress for dealing with the residue an obvious and humorous absurdity presented itself: washing one’s mouth with soap and water would not be a pleasant experience; it would be ‘yuck’. Why then did our seemingly sound line of reasoning, which correctly identified the structural relations between the terms under consideration, yield a further inference that was mutually unpalatable? It seems to me that the reason for this final element in our short argument stems from an equivocation applied to our key term. In the analogy, ‘dirty’ is introduced as a descriptor, an adjective for particular words, and subsequently applied to particular things, hands in this case. But the two uses are intrinsically different: when applied to words, ‘dirty’ must serve as a metaphorical descriptor,

Michael and Berman The Dirty Word † 80

whereas when applied to things, like physical objects, the ‘dirty’ substance is taken as physical or substantial as well. The residue then that is left on the hands is a physical thing, but words, while when uttered (heard, viewed or felt, as in Braille) have physical characteristics, do not leave behind a physical residue due to the kind of word that the word is judged to be (which I alluded to above as a colloquial express for such are socio-cultural artifacts; for example, the uttering of the sound ‘taco’ or ‘tako’ can refer in Japanese to an octopus, in Spanish to a prepared food, in Swahili to one’s posterior, or in American English slang to a pejorative or objectifying reference for women – perhaps the latter two would qualify the term as ‘dirty’). The equivocation arises in the argument’s treatment of the word ‘dirty’ as a descriptor of a physical state of residue producing, but which ascribes the same physical descriptor to words themselves (not their means of expression) that are not actually subject to such physical states. Therefore the residue left by the utterance of a dirty word could not be physical (only metaphorical, or maybe even metaphysical?), and any attempt to treat such a residue with a physical solution is destined to end in failure, for the endeavor will be utterly futile. This is the real absurdity of the argument’s conclusion, which is of course aperitifed with the idea of water and soap in one’s mouth. To conclude, the humor that marked the end of my exchange on this subject with my daughter ought to recall the conversation’s Socratic character. The above analysis examined the structure of our brief analogical reasoning, as well as some of the further implications of the insights to which we mutually agreed. Yet despite a conclusion that we both found satisfactory, there really was no conclusion, or to be more precise no answer. The question that had initiated our inquiry, ‘What is a dirty word?’, was never answered. Thus just like many Socratic exchanges, we ended up with no knowledge, a negative outcome, though we had an inkling of what a ‘dirty word’ was not. The positive outcome that our discussion yielded was an enjoyable

exercise of our cognitive and reasoning capabilities. With these two outcomes, we have a clear example of philosophy occurring in an everyday situation. What more could a practicing philosopher hope for?

Notes 1

For an interesting discussion of this subject, see: Michael P. Weinstock, ‘Psychological Research and the Epistemological Approach to Argumentation’, Informal Logic, vol. 26, No. 1 (2006): pp. 103 –120. 2 Plato, Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), trans. Robin Waterfield, 508a–c.


Michael P. Berman is Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director at the Department of Philosophy, Brock University. [email protected]

MY EVENING WITH MR. WANG Berel Dov Lerner

BDL: I am so glad that you finally agreed to meet with me; I’ve been looking forward to this for some time.

BDL: Well, aren’t you tough! Why didn’t you tell me earlier that you intend to push a political agenda? I’m not sure I want to be a part of this . . . In any case, before we go any further, I must be sure that you can hold up your side of the bargain. So tell me – what exactly was the nature of your relationship with Prof. John Searle? Wang: Back in the late 1970s I was hired by the philosophy department at the University of California, Berkley to serve as a thought-experimental subject. I soon found myself working for John Searle, who at that time was developing his celebrated Chinese Room experiment. BDL: You are talking about the thought experiment in which someone follows a list of instructions in English that are essentially a computer program designed to engage in realistic written exchanges in Chinese? Wang: Yes, but must you ask me such artificial questions in order to supply your less-informed readers with necessary background information? BDL: Look, this is a philosophical dialogue; play by the rules or walk away from the table. Wang: Now you’re the tough one! OK, OK, yes, in the original experiment I was placed inside a room which doi:10.1017/S1477175610000382 Think 27, Vol. 10 (Spring 2011)



Wang: Spare your pleasantries, Lerner. Our relationship will be strictly mercenary and mutually exploitative. You need me to help you write a philosophical dialogue and I need you to publicize my cause. Let’s just hope that each of us gets what he wants.

Lerner My Evening With Mr. Wang † 84

contained a very large book of instructions written in English and several baskets full of papers with various doodles printed on them, which I later discovered were characters of Chinese script. All day long people would pass me slips of paper through a slot in the door. I would inspect the doodles on those papers and, carefully following the instructions in the book, I would select marked pages from the baskets and push them out through the slot. As far as the people outside were concerned, I was engaged with them in a meaningful conversation taking place in written Mandarin Chinese. The point of the whole thing was to critique certain views which compared human thought with the operations of digital computers. Searle claimed that no matter how skillful I became at executing a computer program designed to converse in Chinese, that activity would never involve my actually understanding the language. He hoped this would prove that just as I never managed to attribute meaning to the various doodles I inspected and selected, so too any computer that merely executes a program for holding conversations in Chinese will not really understand Chinese either. BDL: That was a reasonably good summary of the experiment, but it was also completely conventional. Is that all you have to say? Wang: No, I have a big headline to give you, but you’ve got to promise me that you will keep your part of the bargain . . . BDL: You mean the opportunity to lobby for your cause? Wang: BDL: Wang:

Yes. Alright then, but your story had better be good. Fine. It’s very simple: Searle faked the results.

BDL: How can somebody fake the results of a thought experiment?!

Wang: That’s just the way it was. I actually did come to understand Chinese. Why do you think I call myself ‘Mr. Wang’? When I began the experiment I was called ‘Smith’ but after I learned Chinese and Searle fudged the data, I decided to change my name to ‘Wang’ in protest.

Wang: It was simple, or actually impossibly difficult. First of all, you have to understand that Searle had to endow me with a kind of super-intelligence so that I would be effectively able to carry out the instructions written in the book. Remember – it was a very large book with many millions of lines of instructions written in it. A regular human being might spend a lifetime trying to use it to engage in a brief Chinese conversation. In order to perform my experimental task I had to be unimaginably more intelligent than actual humans are. Give an unimaginably intelligent human being an unimaginably complex set of instructions to execute and it becomes very difficult to imagine what will come of it all. Searle is a pretty smart fellow, but there was no way he could work all that out in his head, so he just said, ‘Oh, sure, he never really understood Chinese’ and called it a day. BDL: That really is quite a revelation; it’s in the same league with the South Korean cloning scandal. Wang: Indeed it is, and I may be willing to tell you more about it all later, but now I must insist on making my political statement . . . BDL:

Alright, you earned it.

Wang: I don’t think it should trouble you too much because it actually has some bearing upon your dialogue. BDL:

Really? Then by all means, go right ahead.

Wang: Just a moment, I prepared something in writing. OK, here it is: ‘Recent times have witnessed great


BDL: I don’t get it; how could you have possibly learned Chinese?


advances in the ethical standards to which scientists are held in pursuing experimental research. Various laws and international agreements regulate experimentation involving human subjects. Researchers are no longer permitted to perform experiments upon human beings without first attaining their explicit, free, and informed consent. Every effort is made to avoid exposing experimental subjects to unnecessary dangers. Ethical concern is not limited to human subjects; animal experimentation has also undergone a revolution of values. The care and housing of laboratory animals is becoming increasingly regulated. Scientists try to keep animal suffering at a minimum, and, where possible, experimentation on animals is replaced by in vitro studies and computer simulations. Now is the time for the circle of ethical concern to widen once again. I represent UTES, the Union of Thought Experimental Subjects . . .’ BDL: The ‘Union of Thought Experimental Subjects’! Do you mean to say that the subjects of different thought experiments are actually in contact with each other and have banded together? Wang: Why not? It’s conceivable, and we thoughtexperimental subjects can do anything as long as it’s conceivable. That’s our claim to fame. Now let me continue my statement . . . BDL:

Just tell me, who else has joined your group?

Wang: Basically, everyone who has ever participated in a published thought experiment. I admit that questions of membership have generated occasional controversy. For instance, some early modern political philosophers seem to talk about the inhabitants of the ‘state of nature’ as if they were actual people who lived long ago. In that case, the state-of-naturites are merely false historical persons rather than actual thought-experimental subjects . . . But enough of these distractions! As I was saying: ‘Ironically,

BDL: Well, I really didn’t expect that! This is amazing, and I have to say that I am actually quite honored that you came to me to publicize your cause – this could be quite a career booster! Why did you come to me? I would imagine that someone like Peter Singer must be much better positioned to forward your agenda. Wang: Of course I would have preferred some public intellectual like Singer or Martha Nussbaum. The thing is that I had no choice in the matter. I am, after all, a thought-experimental subject and you just happened to be the person who thought of me. BDL:

That’s not true – it was Searle who thought you up.

Wang: I told you what happened. Look, I owe the man my existence, but I just can’t trust him. In any case, you are thinking of me now. BDL: But why do you pick on philosophers? Scientists, especially physicists, have also made extensive use of thought experiments. Wang: Physicists rarely make use of thought-experimental subjects. Why should anyone care about how Galileo treated a bunch of falling iron balls? Einstein did have some of our people traveling around near the speed of light, but at least he was sure that nothing untoward would befall them as long as they did not accelerate too quickly. There was the ‘Twin Paradox’ in relativity theory where an


while the horrors of World War II served as a catalyst to improve ethical standards in research with human subjects, postwar analytic philosophy has been marked by an increasing disregard for the well-being of thought-experimental subjects. Now is the time for our rights to be recognized. We at the UTES have developed a comprehensive twelve-point program of action, but our first and most pressing demand is the formulation and enforcement of a Helsinki Declaration of Ethical Principles for Philosophical Research Involving Thought-Experimental Subjects.’


astronaut blasts off into outer space and, after his spacecraft’s velocity approaches the speed of light, he eventually returns to earth to discover that his twin brother had died long before of old age. That story is tragic, but astronauts are an adventurous lot and there is something to be said for being granted a chance to live in the future. The only really vicious thought experiment to have come out of physics was Schro¨dinger’s cat, you know, the one where a cat would be gassed to death if a random quantum event occurred within a certain time-interval. But you’ve got to remember that even actual experimentation with humans was hardly regulated in those days. BDL: You didn’t seem to suffer too much in Searle’s experiments . . . Wang: It certainly was a difficult job, but no, I admit that I didn’t really suffer much. However, that’s not the point. When scientists use thought experiments they almost always build upon well-established theories and generalizations about the world. More often than not, philosophers work from mere intuitions. When Searle put me in that Chinese Room, he did not really have any way of knowing what might happen to me; I could have gone mad! That kind of unacceptable recklessness is typical of philosophical thought experiments. In any event, I was actually chosen to represent the UTES because of my celebrity status. I have been the subject of countless publications and lectures. Every year thousands of university freshmen read my story. Exploitative as it often is, the thought-experimental business has been very good to me, and I feel it is my responsibility to give something back to my less fortunate sisters and brothers. I have had it easy – but when I think about all those unfortunates who underwent gratuitous brain bisections just to make some point about personal identity – it’s all quite horrible! BDL: I am beginning to see your point. Come to think of it, some of the worst offenders are moral philosophers

Wang: No, no, you’re wrong; we have no problem with Thomson. Her thought-experimental subjects get along fine with her. BDL: How could that be? Don’t you see how wrong it is to surgically connect people to each other against their will!?! Wang: There was no surgery – it was all smoke and mirrors, cheap special effects. Those people weren’t really connected; they were just acting. Say, do you know how many times that article has been anthologized? Actors would kill to get such steady work. All they have to do is occasionally organize themselves like a tableaux vivant, and let the readers make up their minds about the ethics of the situation. It’s not as if the actor who plays Julius Caesar actually has to die in order for us to be able to discuss the ethical issues raised by the play. The problems began when other philosophers started analyzing the story. BDL: It’s still the same experiment. Why do you care who is analyzing it? Wang: As I said, we have no grievances against Thomson. She engages in a rather abstract discussion of rights that demands very little effort from her thoughtexperimental subjects. Most of the time the ‘violinist’ doesn’t really know how to play and the ‘surgical


who should certainly know better. I suppose Judith Thomson deserves a lot of the blame. Remember how she told that story about the poor woman who found herself surgically attached to a desperately ill violinist in order to keep him alive through nine months of recuperation? Thomson hoped to convince her readers that pregnant women have a right to abortion, just as the woman in her thought experiment had a right to be disconnected from the violinist, even at the cost of his death. That paper really opened up the floodgates for depraved thought experiments in ethics.


connection’ is all garden hoses and duct-tape. Once they got lazy and used a ukulele instead of a violin; she never noticed. Thomson is only interested in the general sense of the situation. Other philosophers have less patience for abstraction. They want to know all the details and develop sympathy for the characters; they want to hear the violinist play, they want the woman to deliver soliloquies about her life. Those kinds of philosophers are only satisfied with thought-experimental subjects who have spent five years studying the ‘method’ at the Actors’ Studio and who drive everyone batty by constantly asking, ‘What is my motivation? What is my motivation?’ BDL: But that doesn’t mean anyone is actually suffering . . . Wang: Wait – I haven’t mentioned the consequentialists yet. Those consequentialists judge moral decisions according to their future consequences. Do you know what happened the first time a bunch of them read Thomson’s violinist story? A massacre! They said, ‘Hey, we can’t pass judgment on this situation until we know how it works itself out.’ Then they cut up the poor thought-experimental subjects and sewed their arteries together and insisted they remain connected like that for nine months just to see what would happen. BDL: So let me understand. Basically, you are saying that there are two different ways that thought experiments are used in philosophy. Sometimes a thought experiment is like a kind of computer simulation taking place in the mind in which we try to imagine what would occur next in a particular situation. Those can be called ‘simulation’ thought experiments. Since consequentialists judge the morality of an action by its expected consequences, they must always run such simulations in order to solve their moral dilemmas. Other philosophers use thought experiments in order to investigate the applicability of a

definition or criterion of evaluation to some imaginary situation. Such philosophers might include ethicists who think in terms of formal rights and obligations rather than practical consequences. They are engaged in producing what may be called ‘exemplary’ thought experiments. You are troubled by simulation experiments and untroubled by exemplary experiments.

BDL: Sorry, but I don’t see why people can’t always answer all such questions by simply attending to their own intuitions. That’s the beauty of exemplary thoughtexperiments; people can always introspect and discover what they think about something. Wang: Hey, I wasn’t finished. It all depends on what you mean by asking ‘What would we say?’ If you mean ‘What would we say right now, with our present conceptual framework, intuitions, prejudices, and so forth’ that’s fine – but in the long run it is not terribly informative. It’s often more important to ask ‘What would people have to say about this after they had lived with it for a while and readjusted their thinking and language accordingly?’ Take artificial intelligence, for example. Suppose I describe all the abilities of some super-robot and ask you whether you think it is capable of thought. You could try to


Wang: Not so fast; it is not always so easy to distinguish between simulation thought experiments and exemplary thought experiments. The latter are usually described in the course of a long question beginning with the words, ‘What would we say if . . .’ Such questions can be understood in at least two different ways. On the one hand, ‘What would we say if’ questions can be answered like items on a public opinion survey; the readers of the philosophical text simply apply their present intuitions and concepts to the classification and evaluation of the situation described. On the other hand, ‘What would we say if’ questions might be regarded as calling for high-flying sociological speculation.


respond with an off-the-cuff answer, blithely applying your current intuitions. That would probably lead to confusion, because your intuitions don’t reflect the wisdom gained through actual encounters with such a robot. So then you might say, ‘Fine, I will employ myself as a thought-experimental subject and imagine what it would be like for me to spend a good deal of time with the super-robot.’ The problem now is that languages and conceptual frameworks do not belong to individuals. You would need to have an entire society live with the superrobots in order to see how its language and concepts accommodate the new reality. That means that you would have to run a huge simulation thought experiment employing millions of human and robot thought experimental subjects in unknown and potentially oppressive technological and social conditions in order to discover how the question ‘Can the super-robot think?’ would finally reach some stable resolution. BDL: I never really thought of it that way. It seems to me that philosophers may be in for some real trouble. If thought-experimental subjects object to being employed by consequentialists or by people who think that it is society which determines how words should be used and how concepts should be applied, philosophy will soon face a crisis! Wang: Look, I am no radical. I understand that philosophers sometimes need to perform thought experiments in the course of their work. All I am saying is that those experiments should be regulated. Take, for example, the kind of naı¨ve exemplary thought experiments run by Judith Thomson. I have nothing against them as long as reasonable safety precautions are taken and the participants receive fair remuneration. Articles like Thomson’s deserve to include a footnote stating, ‘No thought-experimental subjects were harmed in the preparation of this paper.’ Simulation thought experiments are an entirely different kettle of fish. They should be replaced –

whenever feasible – with historical examples or with straightforward arguments that do not mention imaginary scenarios. After all, biologists are told to replace experimentation upon living animals with other methods of research whenever possible. Perhaps the best solution is offered by the new ‘experimental’ philosophy, which basically performs thought experiments on real people.

BDL: And as long as philosophers have to present their thought-experimental subjects with such lists of assumptions, perhaps they could even incorporate those lists into their final published papers so that readers would be able to evaluate their cogency. Wang:

That would be nice.

BDL: Well, this has been enlightening, but I have some other work to do now. Wang: BDL:

And you will stop thinking about me? Well, yes, for the moment.

Wang: I always hate this part. I’m melting, melting! What a world, what a world! BDL:

Sorry . . .

Berel Dov Lerner is Lecturer in Philosophy, Western Galilee College, Israel. [email protected]


When simulation thought experiments are performed, their subjects deserve the same respect afforded to participants in real experiments. I am talking, first and foremost, about free and informed consent. Thought-experimental subjects must be made aware of all the potentially dangerous assumptions used by a philosopher in constructing a thought experiment, including personal intuitions, alleged laws of nature, ideas about human behavior, metaphysical principles, and so on. Only then can they make a genuinely informed decision regarding their participation.

EUTHYPHRO, SOCRATES, AND PROFESSOR PANGLOSS Brian Vroman

Socrates:

Oh, hello Euthyphro. Nice to see you again.

Euthyphro: Same here. By the way, Socrates, in our last discussion, was I able to convince you of the veracity of my position? Socrates: Well, it really was an interesting conversation, but I must say I am not yet convinced. Euthyphro: What! I don’t know how I could be more clear, Socrates. Socrates: On the contrary, Euthyphro. I understood quite well what you were saying, I just don’t find your reasoning cogent. Euthyphro: Socrates?

What!

Do

you

mean

to

insult

me,

Socrates: Believe me, Euthyphro, I have no such intention. I am merely searching for the truth. I hope you will once again agree to be my interlocutor. doi:10.1017/S1477175610000370 Think 27, Vol. 10 (Spring 2011)



In his article ‘A New Euthyphro’ (Think, Summer 2010), pp. 65 – 83, Glenn Peoples constructs a new version of the famous Euthyphro dialogue, in which Euthyphro, rather than Socrates, prevails. It is my contention that Peoples’s dialogue is based on some rather odd errors in reasoning, and that these errors can best be clarified in the form of another dialogue. Further, Peoples is in danger of falling into the ‘Best of All Possible Worlds’ trap: thus a cameo appearance by Professor Pangloss of Candide fame, is necessary. The Dialogue

Euthyphro: OK, fine. But it has been awhile, and as you know, I am a busy man. So refresh my memory: where did we leave off last time?

Vroman Euthyphro, Socrates, and Professor Pangloss † 96

Socrates: Well, contrary to my normal practice, I actually wrote down some of your statements. Near the end of our discussion, you said: ‘. . . You have laid yourself a snare. You have convinced yourself now that if God has reasons for commanding, those reasons are not what make it right for us to do the things that God commands, and his commands alone may serve that purpose. And so we may say that an action is right if God commands it, and an action is wrong if God forbids it, and this does not mean that God can make just anything right, and in avoiding this charge, we do not make rightness independent of God’s commands.’1 Euthyphro:

Yes, I remember now. What’s wrong with that?

Socrates: Well, let’s analyze what you are saying here. You are saying both that an action is right if God commands it, and yet that this does not mean that God can say just anything is right. This seems contradictory. Euthyphro: I will admit that it seems contradictory. But do you remember why I said it? Socrates: Well, to avoid the charges of putting words in your mouth, why don’t you restate your position in your own words? Euthyphro:

OK, my memory is better than I realized. I said:

‘God cannot command that which he hates, even though it is within his power. Whatever God commands is right, and torture could never be right because God would never command it, nor would his character, his nature and desire permit him to.’2

Socrates: Yes, I remember now. I must say I find it a bit strange to say that God cannot command something that is in his power. It seems to me that if he really cannot do something, it is not in his power . . . or at least that is something in need of further consideration. But let’s not quibble, and drive on to the main point . . .

Socrates: That may be true. But look, Euthyphro. The issue is this: is God’s nature the measure or standard of the Good, or is there some standard of Good to which God is subject? If we say that God is Good when he stays true to his nature, we affirm the former; if we say that God’s nature can be judged with reference to something else, we obviously say the latter. Euthyphro: OK, Socrates, I see you do not really get it yet – either that or you are just a very stubborn man. But I will humor you. Can you state your position in a different way? Socrates: I would be glad to. But as you know, my propensity is to ask questions rather than to make assertions. So, as you did so many centuries ago, would you perhaps agree to let me ask a few questions? Euthyphro:

Oh, here we go. Why not?

Socrates: Excellent. Here is my first question then. Can you please define for me the word is?3 Euthyphro: What! Have you lost your mind? I thought we were having a serious discussion here . . . or, dare I ask, are you finally getting a bit senile? Or maybe you have been watching tapes of Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings? Socrates: Well, Euthyphro, I am quite serious, actually and I think this goes to the very heart of the matter.


Euthyphro: But Socrates, I am not sure it is quibbling. It is important to understand that God cannot do something against his own nature.

I believe you have already said that God is benevolent. Is this the same as saying that God is Good? Euthyphro:


Socrates: say that? Euthyphro:

Of course. Well, what exactly do you mean when you Well . . . Isn’t it obvious?

Socrates: Not at all. You see, Euthyphro, I can think of at least two possible meanings of the statement ‘God is Good,’ and it all depends on that little word ‘is.’ We might be using ‘is’ in a descriptive sense, in other words, saying something about God, or we might be using it in the sense of meaning ‘equivalent.’ Euthyphro:

I’m not sure what you mean, Socrates.

Socrates: Well, let me see if I can explain. As you know, there have been a good many inventions over the centuries since we met in Athens. I have sort of been impressed with automobiles, or ‘cars’ as they are often called, even though they are probably a bad idea because they pollute the environment. Anyway, if I say ‘that car is red,’ I am saying something about the car. Do you understand what I mean, Euthyphro? Euthyphro:

Clearly, Socrates.

Socrates: And if I say ‘God is Good’ in this sense, I am saying something about God? Euthyphro:

Yes, that follows.

Socrates: And in this case, God and the Good are two separate things. Euthyphro:

What! You have lost me, Socrates.

Socrates: Well, remember, Euthyphro, we are using ‘is’ in a descriptive sense at the moment. Euthyphro:

Well, yes . . .

Socrates: So when we say ‘God is Good,’ we are describing him, just as when we were saying ‘the car is red.’ Certainly, in using ‘is’ as we are, we wouldn’t say that ‘the car’ and ‘red’ are the same thing? Euthyphro: No, of course not. We are saying that red is an attribute of the car, just as Goodness is an attribute of God.

Euthyphro:

Why not Socrates?

Socrates: Because if we were, we would be using ‘is’ in the other sense – the sense in which it means ‘equivalent.’ Euthyphro:

So what’s wrong with that?

Socrates: Well, if we say ‘God is Good’ in that sense, the terms would be interchangeable. We would be able to say ‘Good is God,’ which would be akin to saying ‘red is the car.’ This is the case because we are saying the two words signify the same thing. So again, if this is what we mean, we would be able to say not only ‘God is Good,’ but ‘Good (or the Good) is God.’ Euthyphro:

OK, what are you driving at, Socrates?

Socrates: As we said, if we use ‘is’ in the equivalent sense, we can say ‘God is Good’ or ‘Good is God’ interchangeably. It seems to me like this could mean one of two things: either whatever God does, thinks, or says is Good; or it can mean there is some other sort of ‘Good’ out there – and I must say I do not believe in some of the ideas my student Plato envisioned, but that would be one sort of example – which is God. I don’t think you mean to take either one of these positions. Euthyphro:

No, I guess not.

Socrates: Then when you say ‘God is Good,’ you are using ‘is’ in the descriptive sense.


Socrates: But when we say that Goodness is an attribute of God, we are not saying that Goodness and God are the same thing.

Euthyphro:

Yes, that is the case.


Socrates: Thus when you say ‘God is Good,’ you are describing God. And when you use the word ‘Good,’ you must have something in mind? Euthyphro: OK, Socrates, I see you want to play some more word games. I’ll go along – why not? Yes, when I say ‘God is Good,’ I am indeed saying something about God, but I still maintain that ‘Good’ is internal to his nature, and not prior to it. Socrates: Fine. But then it seems you have the same old problem. Euthyphro:

Why do you say that, Socrates?

Socrates: Because if Goodness is internal to God’s nature, then the Good is arbitrary. It might so happen that God favors mercy and justice and all the rest, but if he happened to like rape, murder, and mayhem, then we would have to call those things Good. Of course, this is not what you mean. You know perfectly well that such things are not Good, and when you say Goodness is internal to God’s nature, you have a standard for Goodness which you believe his nature reflects. Euthyphro: But do you remember what I said in our last conversation, Socrates? I said: ‘. . . the horrid things you suggest that God might command . . . are only horrendous in worlds where God forbids them.’ Socrates: You speak of different possible worlds; I have a hard enough time understanding this one. But notice that you refer to ‘horrid’ things, even though you go on to argue that they may only be ‘horrendous in worlds where God forbids them.’ Now, I am going to take the conversation exactly where I suspect you do not want it to go, but where I think it must go. If what you are saying – that horrid things might only be horrendous in

worlds where God forbids them – if this is the case, are they horrendous because God forbids them? Euthyphro: Well, I guess that is another way of putting it. But remember last time, I pointed out that you were confusing causation with identity.


Socrates: I have thought more about that, and have decided that that is not a confusion, but an important issue. If the Good is a matter of identity, I think it is hard to say that God, or God’s nature, or however you want to frame it, is the measure of the Good, because then once more we have to say that whatever his nature happened to be would be good. On the other hand, if God causes something to be Good, then why couldn’t God make anything Good? But it seems absurd to say that child rape or something similar is Good, even if somehow positive consequences ensue. Whatever Goodness results is not inherent to the abhorrent act, and in any case, an omnipotent God could have brought those consequences about in some other way. Let me give you an example – I have taken to reading the newspapers in the last few years, and I remember some time ago reading about a father who secretly constructed a dungeon underneath his house. He then forced his teenage daughter into the dungeon, where he repeatedly raped her and forced her to bear, as it were, her own brothers and sisters. Now you seem committed to say that in some possible world, God could actually command such an atrocity, and we would be bound to say it was Good because he commanded it. Then child rape, murder, genocide, and so on are not inherently bad, but are bad only because God forbids them. I think this is a hard position to accept. Further, you say God has his reasons for commanding such things. But if God is all you say he is, would he not want to achieve his purpose through some benevolent end, and would not, due to his omnipotence and omniscience, such an end be available to him?

Euthyphro:

Oh, please Socrates . . .

Suddenly, another man appears on the scene. He is a strange looking fellow, with a disfigured face and no nose.


Euthyphro (Shocked at the man’s strange appearance) Ahhh! Um . . . Hello . . . who are you? Stranger: Well, I should think my fame would precede me. I am Dr. Pangloss, Professor of metaphysico-theologo-cosmolo-nigology. I came because I heard someone discoursing on possible worlds, and I just wanted to remind you that this is the best-of-all possible worlds. When we have hurricanes, they are the best of all possible hurricanes. Our pedophiles are the best of all possible pedophiles – how could God have it any other way – and our wars are the best of all possible slaughters. Now, we must conclude that all of this is not only good, but Best, because it fully conforms with God’s nature, and He is the Best of All Possible Beings . . . Thus God’s intentions for this world – even when he permits the rape of babies – are the best of all possible intentions, and all must therefore be for the best.4 Euthyphro: But couldn’t God create a world that is not the Best of All Possible Worlds? Pangloss: Oh, heavens no! I heard you speak earlier of God’s nature, which he cannot violate. Thus, there is only one possible world, which is this one, and it is certainly The Best of All Possible Worlds. Pangloss:

May I ask . . . what became of your nose?

Pangloss: I lost it due to exposure to the Best of All Possible social diseases, contracted from the Most Beautiful Paquette. The malady can be traced back to Columbus, that Greatest of All Possible Explorers, and through a Jesuit, a member of the Greatest Possible Holy Order. Socrates:

And was it worth it?

Pangloss: Worlds.

All is for the Best in the Best of All Possible

Socrates: Have you, like me, read any of the history that has transpired since you were a character in a book? And I must say I am familiar with Voltaire and quite like him.

Socrates: Then you must be familiar with what has come to be known as the Holocaust. How could something so overwhelmingly awful be allowed by a Deity in the Best of All Possible Worlds? Pangloss: Well, that’s easy. Many rather impressive theologians – that is, the kind that understand the sort of world we are living in – have pointed out that if the Holocaust had not happened, the Jews would never have returned to Israel; Elie Wiesel would never have won the Nobel Prize, there would be no Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC (with its delicious matzah ball soup, and all sorts of wonderful things would never have happened, making this something less than the Best of All Possible Worlds. Euthyphro: But wait a minute? I maintain that other possible worlds are plausible. And God may have reason for commanding things in such alternate worlds that he would never expect from us here. The net result might turn out to be just as good . . . Pangloss: But what you are saying, then, is that a Perfect Being is capable of Imperfection, and this seems implausible, as it would make him imperfect. Perfect is as perfect does, you know. Thus it follows that we live in the Best of All Possible Worlds, and it follows that it is the only one that could be actualized. Otherwise, the aspects of good that are lacking in other worlds would be supplied by using this world as a model. It is


Pangloss: Why, yes! How could a learned man like me not study the events of the Best of All Possible Worlds?

inconceivable to think that there are any possible worlds other than this one.


Socrates: So, do you think that what God commands in this Best of All Possible World is right because God commands it, or does God command it because it is right? Pangloss: Well, God would never command something that is not right, because that would make him something less that the Best of All Possible Beings. Socrates: And does this not mean that there is a standard of Good or right by which we can judge God? Pangloss: Well, I‘m not sure of the question. All I know is that in my study of metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology, I have concluded beyond the shadow of a doubt that this is the Best of All Possible Worlds, and All is for the Best. Socrates: As much as I hate to admit it, even I have my limits . . . Euthyphro, this man is a first-rate idiot, and there seems to be no hope for him. Shall we return once more to ancient Athens? Euthyphro: We shall, Socrates. I really see no need for a dialogue with this strange and ridiculous creature.

Brian Vroman is an instructor of philosophy and humanities in Grand Rapids, MN. [email protected] Notes 1 G. Peoples, ‘A New Euthyphro’, Think: Philosophy for Everyone, vol. 9, no. 25 (2010) pp. 65–83. 2 Ibid. 3 Discussion of the meaning of the word ‘is’ is based loosely on the work of Kai Nielsen. 4 Voltaire, Candide, (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1970), chapters I– IV.

ARE DOGS THE NEW HUMMER? Margaret Betz




Pet adoption from an animal rescue shelter would seem to be one of those indisputable things in life that only increases a person’s positive karma. Kant spoke of morality residing in a good will and pure intention; saving a dog from being euthanized by providing it with a loving, secure home seems the living embodiment of that. Or so it would seem. In a recent book entitled Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living (Thames and Hudson, 2009), co-authors Robert and Brenda Vale from New Zealand’s Victoria University argue dogs, as carnivorous gluttons, are an environmental nightmare. Pursuing research that showed meat production leaves a tremendous carbon footprint, the Vales found that a medium-sized dog consumes about 360 lbs. of meat and 250 lbs. of cereal a year. This amounts to a carbon footprint of 2.07 acres – twice that of a Hummer driving 6,200 miles per year (and that includes the energy expended in building the behemoth). Even the finicky cat has a surprisingly negative impact according to the Vales, architects who specialize in sustainable housing. They report the cat’s ecoprint is the equivalent of ‘slightly less than driving a Volkswagen Golf for a year.’ The Vales argue that domestic dogs and cats ‘devastate wildlife, spread disease and pollute waterways.’ They offer as proof the 7.7 million cats in Britain that hunt and eat an average of 25 birds, mammals and frogs each; that adds up to a whopping 188 million animals killed a year. Furthermore, all that dog waste in our neighborhoods pollutes local waterways and kills aquatic life. ‘A lot of people worry about having SUVs but don’t worry about having Alsatians,’ explains Brenda Vale, ‘What we’re saying is,

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well, maybe you should because the environmental impact . . . is comparable.’ Even the lowly household goldfish is reported to have an ecoprint that’s equal to two cell phones. Rather than painting a completely bleak picture of modern pet ownership, the Vales offer some helpful suggestions if you are determined to keep at least Fluffy. Curbing a pet’s protein rich diet, they advise, would lessen the environmental impact, like feeding your cat fish heads supplied by the local fishmonger. But the best way to offset the pet carbon print according to the Vales is to choose a ‘dual purpose companion’ like a hen who produces eggs for human consumption. Or bunnies, they recommend (without a hint of humor), ‘provided you eat them . . .’ (The Vales appear unclear on the traditional concept of pet ownership, which doesn’t usually end in a meal.) Some die-hard vegetarians have attempted to rectify the situation by making their pets vegetarian like themselves. The internet is full of sites dedicated to recipes for preparing your own vegetarian and vegan dog food. Considering that dogs are carnivorous, this practice ultimately solves nothing and only raises a host of other philosophical questions: Is it the height of hubris and anthropomorphism to force another species to adopt our diet? Must we demand that our domesticated animals reflect our political affiliations? Is it possible for a dog to live immorally? One of the goals of the field of animal ethics and activism is to give purpose and direction to our historically fraught relationship with non-human animals. Agreeing we have a moral obligation to the non-human world, animal activism can be broken down loosely into two different philosophies: animal welfare and animal rights. Animal welfare tends to focus its activism on ensuring the animals in our lives are treated well, that laws are in place to protect them (like laws regarding animal abuse or factory farming). Animal rights advocacy, on the other hand, is interested in giving all animals autonomy from human intervention and, in some cases, autonomy from even human interaction. As


Lee Hall explains in her book Capers in the Churchyard (Nectar Bat Press, 2006), ‘. . . the most comprehensive of rights would mean freedom from being the object of popular curiosity; and more; it would mean regaining the freedom from being subjected to our notions of civilization entirely’(p. 54). In this context, an animal rights supporter like Hall would discourage feeding a pet a diet that adheres to our own personal politics of vegetarianism/environmentalism and (perhaps, surprisingly) likely support the idea of allowing a carnivorous animal like a dog to eat meat. With attempts to protect animals’ uninterrupted lives comes the recognition that, left to their own devices, they eat each other. That wouldn’t necessarily entail supporting factory farms – businesses that have been summarily condemned by everyone from PETA to American food journalist Michael Pollan. Meat scraps from sustainable and individual pig, cow and chicken farmers is one possibility. But proponents of animal rights regard this as a temporary solution at best, agreeing with the Vales that domesticated pets ultimately pose a negative impact on the environment. Indeed, they take it a step further by advocating a gradual demise to the practice of domesticating animals at all. That is, debating what we feed our pets may be a temporary problem if the very existence of domesticated cats and dogs eventually disappear. Animal rights activists argue pet domestication is yet another way humanity interferes with animals (through breeding and training) to suit our ends and not theirs. True non-interference, they claim, means we begin to recognize animals aren’t here for our amusement, whether through circuses or pet ownership. The fact that we have bred animals over thousands of years to accept and even enjoy this arrangement is beside the point. The desire for companionship is not moral grounds for interfering with another species. In February of 2010, the car manufacturer General Motors announced it would discontinue the controversial brand Hummer after a deal fell through with a Chinese

Betz Are Dogs the New Hummer? † 108

manufacturer. If, conceptually, animal rights proponents are right that our basic ethical obligation towards animals is, in the words of US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, ‘the right to be left alone,’ dogs and Hummers may be alike in more ways than one.

Margaret Betz is an adjunct philosophy professor at Rutgers University and West Chester University in America. She is the author of The Hidden Philosophy of Hannah Arendt and various articles on continental philosophy, feminist theory, and animal ethics. [email protected]

THAT TRUTH EXISTS IS MORE LOGICAL Noriaki Iwasa




Postmodernists claim that there is no truth. However, the statement ‘there is no truth’ is self-contradictory. This essay shows the following: One cannot state the idea ‘there is no truth’ universally without creating a paradox. In contrast, the statement ‘there is truth’ does not produce such a paradox. Therefore, it is more logical that truth exists. Bonaventure, a medieval scholastic theologian and philosopher, formulates a paradox used by Augustine as follows: ‘If there is no truth, then it is true to say: “There is no truth.” But if this is true, then something is true. And if something is true, there is a first truth.’1 On the other hand, if the statement ‘there is no truth’ is false, then there is truth. In either event, the statement ‘there is no truth’ is self-contradictory. Philosophers call this paradox a ‘reflexive paradox,’ ‘self-referential paradox,’ or ‘performative self-contradiction (contradiction between what one says and what saying it implies or intends).’ One might claim that ‘the only truth is that there is no truth.’ Let us call the entire statement in the single quotation marks (1). According to (1), the only truth is the following: ‘there is no truth.’ However, (1) itself intends to be true. Thus, there is at least one more truth other than the claim ‘there is no truth.’ Therefore, (1) is self-contradictory. Also, the claim ‘there is no truth’ contradicts the truth of (1) itself. Besides, since ‘there is no truth,’ there is no room for ‘the only truth’ from the beginning. In these senses too, (1) is self-contradictory. Let us think about the claim ‘the only truth is x’ in general. Let us call the entire statement in the single quotation marks (a). Now, (a) itself intends to be true. This contradicts what (a) says unless x is (a) itself. Even if one

Iwasa That Truth Exists is More Logical † 110

claims that ‘the only truth is (a)’ in order to admit the truth of (a) itself, the same paradox appears. This attempt to avoid the paradox leads to infinite regress, and cannot avoid it forever. One might try to express the truth of a statement itself in the statement. For example, ‘the only truth is this statement in the single quotation marks.’ Let us call the entire statement in the single quotation marks (2). Surely (2) avoids the paradox as in (1) and (a). Yet (2) simply admits the existence of truth. Then one might try to combine (1) and (2) so that he can express the truths of the claim ‘there is no truth’ and of a statement itself which includes the claim at the same time. For example, ‘the only truths are the claim “there is no truth” and this statement in the single quotation marks.’ Let us call the entire statement in the single quotation marks (3). According to (3), there are two truths: the claim ‘there is no truth’ and (3) itself. However, the claim ‘there is no truth’ contradicts the truth of (3) itself. Besides, since ‘there is no truth,’ there is no room for ‘the only truths’ from the beginning. Therefore, (3) is selfcontradictory. Let us return to the statement ‘there is no truth.’ One might claim that the statement is not self-contradictory because it is a statement at a meta-level. This simply admits the existence of truth at the meta-level. However, one cannot claim that ‘there is no truth’ universally without creating a paradox. Hilary Lawson writes, In the case of a statement such as ‘There is no truth’, a paradox arises as soon as the self-referential character of the claim is recognized. If there is no truth, then it cannot be a truth that there is no truth. Thus if this claim is to be maintained a distinction has to be introduced so that ‘There is no truth’ refers to a limited region of statements, allowing the statement itself to be asserted as a truth. So long as the statement can belong to a higher order,

Lawson also says, ‘an endless hierarchy of levels might enable us to avoid paradox on any particular occasion but in the end there must be a level at which the claim “There is no truth” no longer applies.’3 One might make the following claim at a meta-level: ‘there is no truth below the meta-level.’ This claim simply admits the existence of truth at the meta-level and higher meta-levels. Suppose the claim is true. Then there are an infinite number of truths at the meta-level. For example, it is a truth that ‘there is no truth below the meta-level.’ And it is a truth that ‘it is a truth that there is no truth below the meta-level,’ and so forth indefinitely. However, when there are an infinite number of truths at the meta-level, what is the point of establishing the meta-level in the first place? Empirically speaking, the claim ‘there is no truth below the meta-level’ is wrong. Let us think about the following Cartesian example: the existence of consciousness which understands this claim. Is not the existence of the consciousness true? If not, how could one understand the claim in the first place? Thus, one cannot state the idea ‘there is no truth’ universally without creating a paradox. No one can refute this conclusion without committing a performative self-contradiction because any attempt to refute it intends to be true. If not, why do we have to care about it? In contrast, the


a meta-level, the self-reference can be avoided and the paradox evaporates. This form of reflexive problem is less easily dispatched when the introduction of another level itself generates a further paradox. Suppose we wish to say of sentences at the meta-level that ‘There is no truth.’ To avoid paradox we would have to resort to a meta-meta-level. This would successfully avoid the paradox in this instance, but if we wish to claim that ‘There is no truth’ generally, we are left with an endless hierarchy of meta-levels.2

statement ‘there is truth’ does not produce such a paradox. Therefore, it is more logical that truth exists.

Iwasa That Truth Exists is More Logical † 112

Noriaki Iwasa is an independent philosopher in Japan. [email protected] Notes 1 Bonaventure, Saint Bonaventure’s Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity, trans. Zachary Hayes (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure University, 1979), p. 113. 2 Hilary Lawson, Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1985), p. 17. 3 Ibid., p. 18

BETTER NOT TO HAVE CHILDREN Gerald Harrison and Julia Tanner

I. Bad for Others Humans are the most destructive creatures on the planet. We cause vast numbers of animal deaths (both directly and indirectly). We destroy habitats. We damage the environment. We are currently heating up the world’s climate in a way that is likely to be detrimental to countless numbers of animals (ourselves included). And we have the means, nuclear weapons, to destroy everything at the push of a button. We came perilously close to pushing that button on one occasion (the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962). The best way to stop the destruction is to remove the destructive force; to remove humans by refraining from procreation. In short, the colossal amount of harm caused by humans gives us a moral reason to boycott the human species. It might be objected that measures can be taken to limit the harm humans cause to other animals and the environment by, say, recycling more and ceasing to kill animals for food. We should be focusing our efforts on changing our doi:10.1017/S1477175610000436 Think 27, Vol. 10 (Spring 2011)



Most people take it for granted that it’s morally permissible to have children. They may raise questions about the number of children it’s responsible to have or whether it’s permissible to reproduce when there’s a strong risk of serious disability. But in general, having children is considered a good thing to do, something that’s morally permissible in most cases (perhaps even obligatory). In this article we provide a number of reasons for thinking that it is both wrong and unwise to procreate.

Harrison and Tanner Better Not to Have Children † 114

destructive behaviour rather than giving up on having children altogether. We should certainly make efforts to curb our destructive behaviour. But even supposing we have sufficient control over ourselves to make such changes (itself doubtful), we have very limited control over how future generations will behave. To procreate is to take an unjustifiable gamble that future generations will behave responsibly (more responsibly than us). Given the rather pathetic, late-in-the-day changes humans have managed so far it is unlikely that future generations will do any better. There’s a good chance they’ll do worse. (There’s no evidence we’re aware of that humans are becoming more morally responsive). We should do our best to limit the impact we have, but we should also stop creating more humans. Human beings are dangerous things; too dangerous. It might be objected that by this logic we should not only stop procreating: we should start killing existing humans. But this does not follow. It is one thing to forego starting a life. It is quite another to end one already in existence. Humans who already exist have moral status; they have rights. To end a human life is (under normal circumstances) wrong and will violate that human’s rights. Failing to start a life does not violate anyone’s rights. Only those who exist, did exist, or will exist, can have rights. Those who do not, have never, and will never exist have no moral status, no rights to be violated. What about suicide? We wouldn’t be violating anyone’s rights by committing suicide (it is plausible to claim). Shouldn’t we at least do that? We don’t think so. There is a limit on the moral demand for altruism. How best to defend such a limit is no easy matter and we leave it open here. But most recognise that self-sacrifice is beyond any plausible limit there may be. However, the requirement to cease production of new humans is not over-demanding. It is easy to forego procreation. Of course, many will dispute this, arguing that to

forego procreation and child rearing is to miss out on a major source of human happiness and thus is a very great sacrifice. We will address this concern in section IV, where we show that the evidence suggests that procreation is actually surprisingly bad for you. In the meantime we will consider another, common objection.

The objection goes that if we all forego procreating then the human species will come to an end and that is a bad thing. Bad for whom? Not for other animals or the environment. It would be very good for them. Bad for humans? Well, the human species is not itself a human. It is not owed any moral obligations. It does not have any rights and it does not have a welfare. The end of the human species need not be counter to the interests of any individual human, or violate any individual human’s rights. Perhaps some will object to our brisk dismissal of the idea that a species has value in itself (aside from the value of its individual members). But even if we allow that species do have value in themselves there are still strong reasons for thinking the end of the human species would be a good thing overall. The world is currently undergoing the Holocene extinction event. It’s the fastest mass extinction event in earth’s known history. And it’s accelerating. In the last fifty years the rate of extinction has soared. It’s now estimated that between one hundred and forty thousand and two million species become extinct every century. That’s between four and fifty-four a day. The scientific consensus is that it’s largely down to humans. We’re the cause. If one thinks that species in themselves have value, and if one is serious about preserving species, then the demise of the human species looks as if it should be welcomed.


II. Bad for the Species?


It might be suggested that the end of the human species would be a bad thing because a lot of currently existing humans have a brute preference for it to continue. Such preferences would be frustrated and this is bad. First, if the human species becomes extinct then by definition the bearers of those preferences will no longer exist. Some might consider this cancels the preferences or seriously reduces their clout. Second, any human preference for the continuation of the species has to compete with vast numbers of other animals’ interest in our non-continuation. It is unlikely that these human preferences could win out (by any reasonable estimation the numbers of sentient non-human creatures with morally important interests vastly outnumbers the human population). Third, not all preferences count alike. Many philosophers accept that selfish or unreasonable preferences don’t count (or count less). The preference that the human species continue despite the incredible harm such continuation will do to other species is an unreasonable preference that should either not count at all, or count for very little.

III. Bad for the Child It might be argued that having a child confers a benefit on that child; they get to exist. But, it is questionable whether existence is, in general, a benefit to the exister: it may be more of a burden than a boon. Granted, if you ask them, most people will say their lives are worth living (in fact, most people will say their lives are going better than most people’s!). But there are powerful psychological factors at play here. Our selfassessments of well-being are known to be heavily biased towards the positive. The philosopher David Benatar (Better Never to Have Been (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 71.) has argued that a sober assessment of the gains and losses in


an average life could well yield a negative result overall (especially when you add in all the minor but regular negative mental states associated with hunger, thirst, bowel and bladder distension, tiredness, stress, thermal discomfort, itchiness etc.) (Benatar, p. 71). Even if benefits outweigh burdens within a life, there’s no escaping the fact we die. Most agree that our own deaths harm us greatly (not the Epicureans). They end our lives – lives that we have become invested in, that we’d very much like to continue. These sorts of considerations make it uncomfortably plausible that it may be better never to have lived at all, than to have lived and died. But even if life is beneficial overall, it doesn’t follow that it was permissible to subject someone to it. Children often, resentfully, point out to their parents that ‘they didn’t choose to be born’. They have a point. Ordinarily it is wrong to subject someone to something; ordinarily we must gain someone’s consent before doing something that will significantly affect them. To subject someone to a life is to significantly affect them without their prior consent. Some might object that procreative acts do not affect those they bring into existence. Someone who has been brought into existence didn’t exist previously and so cannot have been made better or worse off and so was not affected. But anyone who takes such a view is going to have to judge that someone whose life is clearly not going to be worth living (someone whose life will be characterised by constant, chronic pain) has not been negatively affected by being subjected to an existence. We think this is highly counter-intuitive. Furthermore, if you can’t be negatively affected by being brought into existence, you can’t be positively affected either. Existence cannot be a benefit for the existent. It might be pointed out that we cannot gain someone’s consent to exist; we cannot gain their consent before they exist and by the time they exist it’s too late. But the fact that we cannot gain their consent does not mean that we are free to do without it. Suppose you wish to torture


someone against their will, you cannot seek your victim’s consent – the torture would not then be against their will. It would be absurd to argue that for this reason we are permitted to torture people against their will. Similarly, the fact that prospective parents cannot get the consent of those they plan to bring into existence doesn’t magically mean it’s OK. Quite the opposite – if you can’t get the consent of the person you’re going to significantly affect by your action, then the default position is that you don’t do whatever it is that’s going to affect them. There are exceptions. Pushing someone out of the way of a falling piano is morally right even if no prior consent can be given (if, for instance, there isn’t time). But in this kind of case you are preventing someone from coming to great harm. To procreate – to subject someone to a life – does not prevent them coming to harm. Not being created cannot harm them because they don’t exist. Perhaps it will be objected that if life is an overall benefit then subjecting someone to such a life is not wrong. But there’s an interesting asymmetry between preventing someone coming to harm, and benefiting someone. Intuitively, it is far more important to prevent causing and/or allowing harm to befall others than it is to positively benefit others. Benefiting someone without their prior consent requires greater justification than preventing them being harmed. (For instance, if we know you’ll really enjoy the experience induced by a certain recreational drug – but we know you’ll refuse to take the drug of your own volition – it is not permissible for us to pop it in your tea behind your back.) Benefiting someone without their consent can probably only be justified when the benefit is considerable. And this could well be because unless we benefit the person, their life will go less well. Someone will miss out. Note, in the case of non-procreation the non-exister does not ‘miss out’. If we do not procreate the non-existent do not have lives that go less well than they otherwise would.

IV. Bad for You Even if one has no concern for other animals, the environment, or the child one intends to create and focuses only on oneself, having children is most likely a bad idea. Most people assume that having children is a rewarding exercise, even a necessary ingredient of a complete and happy life. But a cold hard look at the facts suggests otherwise. Children rarely make a net contribution to a parent’s (self-assessed) levels of happiness (and remember, people tend to overestimate their happiness levels). In anonymous surveys, most parents report regretting having children. Seventy percent of people would not have had children if they knew what it would be like (Ann Landers’ Advice Column, ‘70% of Parents Say Kids Not Worth It’, syndicated US newspapers, 1975). Only five percent of men and a third of women said having children improved their happiness levels (Kate Stanley, Laura Edwards, ‘The Lever Faberge Family Report 2003: Choosing Happiness?’ Becky


But even if we are wrong and it turns out that most lives record a high net benefit and there’s nothing wrong in subjecting someone to existence, the fact remains that procreating harms the interests of other currently existing and future existing animals and the environment. To procreate because one believes life is a benefit to those who are subjected to it is to take a very real gamble. First, one gambles that life really is an overall benefit to the individual living it. Second, it is someone else who will be harmed if your gamble doesn’t pay off – someone whose consent you do not have. Third, one ignores the harms that procreation does to others. And note: if you don’t gamble, if you don’t procreate, then you haven’t harmed the non-existent. The person you didn’t bring into existence hasn’t been deprived of anything. They don’t, didn’t, and never will exist.


Hatch/Institute of Public Policy Research – 1,500 couples surveyed). Studies have shown that while people’s happiness goes up when they are expecting a baby it sharply declines once the child is born. And the evidence is, the more children you have the more unhappy you are likely to be (Professor Daniel Gilbert at the Happiness and its Causes conference 8–9 May 2008). Happiness levels only start going back up after the last child leaves home (Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness (London: Harper Press, 2006), p. 221). Some might think that after a lifetime of offspring-induced unhappiness you can at least look forward to an old age where your children care for you. But in the West the number who care full-time for their elderly parents is comparatively small. Not having children is probably a much better pension plan. When they reach old age ‘[t]he childless are more financially secure and in better health [than parents]’ (J. Rempel, ‘Childless Elderly: What Are They Missing?’, Journal of Marriage and the Family, vol. 47 (1985), p. 343.). None of this makes child creation and rearing sound like a recipe for flourishing. It sounds like a major obstacle to a happy life, at least in the majority of cases.

V. Better Not to Have children Our case is hard to accept. The opposite view – that procreating and child-rearing are valuable and rewarding, a major component of a fully flourishing human life – is deeply rooted and receives constant promotion. But we have provided a number of reasons why procreation might be wrong and shown why some common objections are misguided. It is bad for animals and the environment. Existence may not be the benefit many take it to be. It may be wrong to subject someone to existence without first gaining their consent, especially given that failing to procreate does not deprive the non-existent of

anything. Finally, becoming a parent and rearing children is unlikely to bring happiness. It seems to us, then, that it is better not to have children.


Dr. Gerald Harrison is a lecturer at Massey University, New Zealand. [email protected] Dr. Julia Tanner recently completed her Ph.D at Durham University, UK. [email protected]

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Think Number 27 Volume 10 Spring 2011

Included in this issue: 5

Introduction STEPHEN LAW

9

Return of the Zombies ARDON LYON

31

Argument in Mixed Company: Mom’s Maxim vs. Mill’s Principle SCOTT AIKIN AND ROBERT TALISSE

45 There is Something About Inez JONATHAN WEBBER 57 The Difficulty of Understanding MARK LOVAS 71

The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy DENE BEBBINGTON

73 The Immortal Solipsist CHRISTIAN H. SÖTEMANN 77 The Dirty Word MICHAEL AND NATASHA BERMAN 83 My Evening With Mr. Wang BEREL DOV LERNER 95 Euthyphro, Socrates, and Professor Pangloss BRIAN VROMAN 105 Are Dogs the New Hummer? MARGARET BETZ 109 That Truth Exists is More Logical NORIAKI IWASA 113 Better Not to Have Children GERALD HARRISON AND JULIA TANNER

© The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2011

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