E.G.

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Long ago, someone gave me a lifetime subscription to Typepad. I used it for a while, and then I stopped for a while, and then I started again. I like the ritual of producing a blog post every Sunday. But now Typepad is dying.

I suppose I ought to treat this as an opportunity to create a new, better-looking blog. I think I will keep the same name, E.G. And I will keep the same motto. It is a slightly modified line from Emily Dickinson, who is the only poet I particularly like.

I guess this will be fine, but I do not like having to find a new spot. I wonder if I will be able to figure out how to save all of my posts from this blog.

I'm listening to Ethel Cain's Willoughby Tucker, I'll Always Love You. I am thinking about Ethel Cain's interest, in much of her work, in the uses of Christianity by ordinary people who think of themselves as sinners. And this makes me think about Sinead O'Connor, who is among the artists I appreciate. So, here's my take on Sinead O'Connor.

***

I think she felt that she had been abused by the Catholic Church. Not just by individuals who happened to be Catholics, but by the Church itself. In her autobiography, she writes:

My intention had always been to destroy my mother’s photo of the pope. It represented lies and liars and abuse. The type of people who kept these things were devils like my mother. I never knew when or where or how I would destroy it, but destroy it I would when the right moment came.

Her mother abused her, so it was her mother's photo of the pope that she destroyed in front of everyone in her infamous appearance on Saturday Night Live. But her mother didn't act alone. She acted under the influence and guidance of the Catholic Church. I think Sinead thought the Church abused her through her mother. And this, I think, is why it was a photo of the pope, and not any other possession of her mother's, that she publicly destroyed.

***

And I think her way of responding to the abuse she suffered was not to reject the Church, but to turn it into an artwork of her own making.

She treated the Church like a piece of driftwood you'd put on your mantel. In relocating driftwood from the beach to your mantel, you make it into an artwork: what's called found art. You thereby make it yours, and assert control over it. You can do this to a piece of driftwood without making any alterations to it. My view is that Sinead O'Connor did something like this to the Church itself.

Of course, you can't put a Church on your mantel. So instead she did other things with and to the Church. For example, she made songs out of rearranged lines of scripture:

The way I worked was that I laid down on the floor huge pieces of paper, and I wrote down all of the lines that I loved that were in the Scriptures and decided to put them together and not change them but make them rhyme where I could. And there are some beautiful songs already written by God in the Scriptures.

She says in her autobiography that she wanted to be buried with a copy of that album. I don't know whether she was, though.

And she became a priest. She said: "We're all born priests." 

***

As her life and work evolved, she was drawn to religious traditions beyond Christianity. She became a Rastafarian, and then a Muslim. And she was buried as a Muslim in a Catholic cemetery.

My overall feeling about her is that she exhibits an intensifying pattern of appropriative freedom throughout her life. She admired and respected other people's traditions and experiences, but also regarded them as generally available for her own free use. She kept whatever she wanted and discarded whatever she didn't want.

This comment about Muhammed Ali (from her autobiography) seems illustrative:

I loved him, as I’m sure all child-abuse survivors did, because we had similar self-esteem issues as African-American people had. We got there in a different way, but nevertheless, we were in a form of slavery, with a small s.

Personally, I'd be very hesitant to use the experience of American slavery in order to say anything about myself. Sinead shows no such hesitation.

The case of Sinead O'Connor might present interesting issues related to the transracialism controversy. Sinead claimed a lot of identities for herself that she knew others would perceive as inauthentic, confused, or mistaken—and perhaps in fact were inauthentic, confused, or mistaken. But I for one don't think there was anything wrong with the things she did and said, and I put a high value on what she created. Then again, I've also never been entirely sure why Rachel Dolezal deserved all the trouble she got.

Basl and Coons memorably worry about inferential movements from ought to is. Such movements constitute attempts at what they call moral science. There seems to be something fishy about such inferences in general, and they want to explain why.

***

Here's an argument that Basl and Coons don't discuss:

A theistic moral science argument
(1) If there is no afterlife and no God, then there's no moral order in the world.
(2) There is a moral order in the world.
Therefore, there is an afterlife and there is a God.

I associate this sort of argument with Kant, though I'm not enough of a Kant scholar to say whether the above rendition represents a fair distillation of his thought. In any case, I suppose there are many who want to argue in this way.

I'd say that (1) and (2) are moral claims, and that the conclusion is a non-moral claim. If so, the argument is an attempt at moral science. And it's theistic moral science because it's got a theistic conclusion.

***

The moral order is just the familiar realm of objective moral facts. So, e.g., the fact that Donald Trump is a bad person is part of the moral order. The fact that we have a moral obligation to look after those who are vulnerable is part of the moral order. And so on. The second premise of the theistic moral science argument says that such a moral order exists, and I'd say we should all agree to that.

I suppose there are many ways to try to argue for the first premise. For example, one can say that

(i) if there's no such thing as virtue and vice, then there isn't any moral order at all,

and

(ii) if virtue isn't ultimately rewarded, and vice isn't ultimately punished, then there really isn't any such thing as virtue and vice,

and

(iii) in this life, virtue isn't ultimately rewarded, and vice isn't ultimately punished (bad people get away with murder, good people die of cancer, etc.),

so

(iv) there must be an afterlife, and a God to provide one for us, in order for there to be a moral order.

***

Basl and Coons say that moral science is generally faulty because it (always?) faces a dilemma, which they present as follows:

(I) Either [the moral scientist is] committed to treating all the moral premises as necessary or they are not.
(II) If [they are committed to treating] any moral premise [as] contingent, then the inference is circular or rests on a false assumption.
(III) If they are committed to treating all the moral premises as necessary, they are forced to deny the contingency of a claim known to be contingent.

I suspect that the person who gives the theistic moral science argument will want to say that the premises are necessary, so I suppose the Basl-Coons view implies that the argument will face the second horn of their dilemma.

***

Here's their example of an argument that faces the second horn:

(A) (Necessarily,) it is never morally wrong to do what maximizes utility.
(B) (Necessarily,) it is always morally wrong to kill an innocent child.
Therefore, (necessarily,) killing an innocent child will never maximize utility.

It does indeed seem that the conclusion of this argument is false, and false because it denies the contingency of a claim known to be contingent. So, as Basl and Coons say, the conjunction of the premises shouldn't be asserted (even if it's unclear which of the premises should be given up). This is Basl and Coons's diagnosis of the problem with this argument, and I think their diagnosis is correct.

***

But I doubt the theistic moral science argument that I presented above falters in the same way. Or at least, I'm not sure we can say so without begging any questions.

If the conclusion of the theistic moral science argument is taken to be necessary, i.e., if it is rendered as

Necessarily, there is an afterlife and there is a God,

the theist probably won't be particularly bothered by this. 

I somewhat doubt the Basl-Coons framework is very useful for diagnosing what's wrong with the sort of theistic moral science I am discussing here.

***

I do reject the conclusion of the theistic moral science argument. I accept the second premise, and deny the first premise. And I reject (i) and (ii) of the argument for the first premise.

But that's not because I don't feel the pull of that first premise. I see that there is something absurd about a world in which, on the one hand, there is a moral order—but on the other hand, wrongs go eternally unaddressed, and moral saints go to their graves without reward. A moral order that is never empirically fulfilled is hard to believe in. Such belief requires some kind of faith: the moral realist's faith.

According to a view I find appealing, when somebody does something wrong, there are three particulars involved. There's the particular agent who's done the wrong thing; there's the particular action that they've performed; and then there's the particular wrongness of the action. That particular wrongness is a trope, according to the view I'm gesturing toward.

***

In Anna-Sofia Maurin's extremely useful SEP entry on tropes, she discusses efforts that have been made to defend the existence of mental tropes on the ground that (1) mental properties are causally potent and (2) mental properties need to be tropic in order to be causally potent. Such efforts, on Maurin's account, begin with the view that the notion of a property is really two notions, as follows:

Property₁=that which imparts on an individual thing its particular nature (property as token)

Property₂=that which makes distinct things the same (property as type)

And she explains:

Once ‘property’ has been [thus] disambiguated, we can see how mental properties can be causally relevant after all. For now, if mental properties₁ are tropes, they can be identified with physical properties₁. Mental properties₂ can still be distinguished from physical properties₂, for properties considered as types are—in line with the standard view of tropes—identified with similarity classes of tropes. When Lisa removes her hand from the stove because she feels pain, therefore, she removes her hand in virtue of something that is partly characterized by a trope which is such that it belongs to a class of mentally similar tropes.

And she says:

This trope is identical with a physical trope—it is both mental and physical—because it also belongs to a (distinct) similarity class of physically similar tropes. Therefore, mental properties can be causally relevant in spite of the fact that the mental is multiply realizable by the physical, and in spite of the fact that we live in a physically closed and non-overdetermined universe.

Here Maurin is focusing on how a tropic view of mental properties can be handy if you want to say both that (a) mental properties are causally potent and (b) only physical properties are causally potent.

But here I want to point out that a tropic view of mental properties might also (or instead) be handy if you want to say both that (a) mental properties are causally potent and (c) only particulars are causally potent. 

Note that (c) doesn't require or entail (b). Somebody who likes (c) might be happy to allow all sorts of non-physical yet causally potent stuff into the world. She might have no problem with causally potent hobgoblins, for example. Her view might just be that it's only particular things, whether they are physical or non-physical, that causally make things happen. So, e.g., the number nine can't make anything happen; but hobgoblins, at least in principle, can make things happen. Someone who held such a view, and who wanted to affirm the causal potency of mental properties, might have a lot to gain from a tropic view of the mental.

***

I don't have any strong attachment to (c), but I am drawn to a structurally similar view: (d) Only particulars are normatively potent. Here is an argument to consider:

The normative potency argument for a tropic view of wrongness
(1) Wrongness can be normatively potent only if wrongness can be a particular.
(2) Wrongness can be normatively potent.
Therefore, wrongness can be a particular.

One way for something to be normatively potent (as I'd like to conceive of normative potency) is for it to be reasons-providing. That is, if the fact that X is P provides a reason to promote, perform, avoid, or prevent X, then P is normatively potent. 

If being reasons-providing is all there is to normative potency, then I think (1) is plausible (because it seems to me that, in general, all of our reasons are provided by facts about particulars). But I worry about the plausibility of (2) (because many people will say that it is moral fetishism to think of wrongness as reasons-providing, as opposed to being merely correlated with, emergent from, or supervenient on reasons-providing properties).

So, I think that in order for the argument above to be maximally compelling, I might need to come up with a broader conception of normative potency.

In Mere Christianity, CS Lewis writes:

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have.

The point that Lewis makes here is psychologically deep. Paradoxically, it is possible for a claim to be excessively plausible. Of course, that doesn’t mean that implausibility always enhances believability. There’s an art to this.

***

I think there are two sorts of contexts where a claim’s high degree of plausibility can reasonably arouse suspicion. First, there are contexts where you have antecedent reason to think the speaker might be inclined to try to manipulate you by telling you just what you expect to hear. Second, there are contexts where you have antecedent reason to think that, whatever the truth of the matter is, it’s likely to be something weird. As it happens, religion exemplifies both sorts of contexts. By the way, so does philosophy.

I have previously discussed how (i) what Dennett called credal athleticism, and (ii) the incoherence of mass appeal, can both help to explain why absurdity is typically abundant in religions. To this list we should add CS Lewis’s point that (iii) implausibility can sometimes enhance believability. 

***

In her book about UFO belief, Diana Walsh Pasulka observes that in some religions, “the absurd is intentionally cultivated to an extreme degree,” as in the koans of Zen Buddhism such as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” And she asks whether the UFO phenomenon might be a kind of “mass koan.”

Broadly, Pasulka’s idea is that UFO belief is a kind of religion or at least a “spirituality.” It differs in all sorts of ways from traditional religions like Catholicism and Zen Buddhism, partly because it is emerging in a time of photography and newspapers and (now) the Internet. These forms of information technology both constrain it and liberate it in novel ways.

And Pasulka thinks that, in our modern information environment, religions of the traditional sort will not emerge anymore. We won’t see the likes of Christianity again. But Pasulka thinks that UFO belief and traditional religions are both instances of some kind of broadly human religious or spiritual tendency, which persists.

***

Russell wrote:

The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.

Some people will say that philosophers earn their absurdities, because they hold themselves to certain rules, like this one:

A Russellian rule: An absurd claim can be made only after it has been shown to be derivable by means of valid inference from highly plausible premises.

Theologians and UFO believers do not usually bother with this rule. You might say they are undisciplined in that way.

It would not be entirely fair to say that. Theologians and UFO believers have their own rules. Many forms of theology have been highly disciplined. This might also be true of UFO belief, for all I know. Also, philosophers don’t consistently abide by the rules they purport to have.

But I think it is probably fair to say that, for those who are in the business of making sense of things—a group which I’d say includes theologians, UFO believers, philosophers, and many others—something like the Russellian rule given above is a good ideal to strive for. 

***

Many of us share the optimistic feeling about philosophy that Parfit expresses at the end of Reasons and Persons:

Belief in God, or in many gods, prevented the free development of moral reasoning. Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage. We cannot yet predict whether, as in Mathematics, we will all reach agreement. Since we cannot know how Ethics will develop, it is not irrational to have high hopes.

The optimism here is about agreement. Parfit is expressing hope that, as philosophical ethics develops, we will reach a point where we converge on the same general moral outlook. I take it that Parfit thinks that such convergence would be good because it would be a sign that we’ve gotten things right, but one may also think that there would be further advantages of such convergence.

I am interested in a broader optimism, too: an optimism about convergence on all of the main questions of philosophy, including the sorts of questions about “the meaning of it all” that religion addresses and that I think UFO belief, in its own way, also tries to address. We might say the Parfitian endpoint is the worldview we’d have in that hypothetical moment of future convergence.

There is a view according to which the Parfitian endpoint will be an outlook that lacks the sorts of absurdities that have marked all religions and that mark modern forms of “spirituality,” a category which includes (on Pasulka’s account) UFO belief. And then there is a view according to which the Parfitian endpoint will embrace some small selection of judiciously-selected, well-justified absurdities. I’m a fan of the latter view. I reject CS Lewis’s Christianity, but I like the idea that, when it comes to the main questions of philosophy that we’re all worried about, whatever the truth turns out to be, it’s almost certainly going to be weird.

Bret Stephens says:

[T]here is a glaring dissonance to the charge that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. To wit: If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal—if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans—why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly? Why not, say, hundreds of thousands of deaths, as opposed to the nearly 60,000 that Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatant and civilian deaths, has cited so far in nearly two years of war?

And:

[Israel] could have bombed without prior notice, instead of routinely warning Gazans to evacuate areas it intended to strike. It could have bombed without putting its own soldiers, hundreds of whom have died in combat, at risk.

The death count in Gaza is lower than it could have been, Stephens says, because

Israel is manifestly not committing genocide, a legally specific and morally freighted term that is defined by the United Nations convention on genocide as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

***

I suppose Stephens's reasoning can be represented like this:

The effectiveness defense of Israel against the charge of genocide
(1) Israel is committing genocide only if it intends to destroy the Palestinians as such. [From the UN definition of genocide.]
(2) The most effective way to destroy the Palestinians as such would be to kill as many Palestinians as possible, as quickly as possible. And Israel knows this. [This is supposed to be obvious, and it is.]
(3) Agents Act Effectively: In general, when any given agent intends to accomplish a goal G, if that agent knows that the most effective way to accomplish G is to φ, then that agent will φ.
(4) So, if Israel intended to destroy the Palestinians as such, then it would be killing as many Palestinians as possible, as quickly as possible. (From 2 & 3.)
(5) So, Israel is committing genocide only if it is killing as many Palestinians as possible, as quickly as possible. (From 1 & 4.)
(6) But Israel isn't killing as many Palestinians as possible, as quickly as possible. [This is supposed to be obvious, and it is.]
(7) So, Israel isn't committing genocide. (From 5 & 6.)

The main problem with the argument is its third premise: Agents Act Effectively. I'll mention two of the reasons why we should reject that premise.

***

Suppose you want to murder someone, and you can see only two ways to accomplish this goal. You can sneak poison into their coffee, or you can approach them on their way to work in the morning and shoot them in broad daylight. Let's say that the poison method has a relatively low chance of working (as your target has a strong constitution) whereas the shooting method is almost certain to work. So the shooting method is more effective than the poison method. And suppose you know all of this.

But suppose that killing this person is not your only goal. Suppose you also hope to be able to get away with it. And suppose you're more likely to get away with it if you use the poison method than if you use the shooting method. In this situation, you might then be expected to choose the poison method, even though you know it is less effective.

The point: When agents have multiple goals and priorities, they may choose less effective ways of pursuing some goals in order to more effectively pursue others.

***

Suppose that S has been found bludgeoned to death in their home. You are accused of committing the crime.

At your trial, you produce evidence from your cell phone's GPS tracker. The evidence from the tracker conclusively shows that you did visit S's home on the night they were bludgeoned to death. But you took a very inefficient route from your home to theirs. Specifically, the tracker shows that, in late evening, you began walking in the direction of S's house, and you got halfway there, but then you began walking back home again. Then you abruptly turned around again, and headed toward S's house. Then you walked past S's house and walked around the block a few times. And so on. You finally did reach S's house in the end, but only after a lot of wandering.

You argue that this GPS evidence shows that you had no intention of killing S on the night in question. You say that, if you did have such an intention, you would have gone straight to S's house. You would not have taken such a long and winding route.

This argument is not likely to be very persuasive. To explain the inefficient circuitousness of your route to S's house, the prosecution might propose that you seem to have been of two (or more) minds about killing S. Such internal conflict could straightforwardly explain why you did not go directly to S's house. And such an explanation is fully consistent with the hypothesis that you did intend to kill S, and that in the end you did carry out this intention.

***

The cases I've given here illustrate that agents do not always pursue their goals with maximum effectiveness. This can happen in cases where an agent is balancing multiple goals, and can also happen when an agent is experiencing internal conflict about their goals. There are many other sorts of cases, too, where agents behave intentionally but ineffectively.

None of this shows that Israel is committing genocide, but I think it does show that Stephens's defense of Israel against the charge of genocide is not very persuasive.

It could be that Israel, as a collective agent, is either balancing multiple goals, or is experiencing internal conflict about whether or how to pursue its goals. In either case, the fact that Israel is not committing genocide with maximum effectiveness might be consistent with the charge that Israel is nevertheless committing genocide.

Let's say an Occasionalist picture is any picture where

(a) there is some agent S, and

(b) there is some object O, and

(c) S and O cannot directly interact (S cannot influence O, and O cannot influence S), and

(d) O is explained by X (e.g., O is grounded in X, or caused by X, or emanates from X, or is orchestrated by X, etc.), and

(e) X affects S in such a way as to make it the case that S has an experience E, and

(f) E is a veridical experience of O.

Classical Occasionalist views (as traditionally caricatured) fit this schema. The idea: God is the only true cause. So, we never causally interact with anything in the external world; God is the only being with whom we truly interact. God orchestrates the world, and (separately) orchestrates us, and our inner lives, including our perceptual experiences. But God sees to it that our experiences line up with how the world is, such that our experiences are (for the most part) veridical experiences of the world.

So, on classical Occasionalist views (as traditionally caricatured): S=any one of us; O=any perceivable object in the external world; X=God; and E=our perceptual experiences under normal circumstances.

I'm no fan of classical Occasionalism but I care about Occasionalist pictures in general, because I believe that metaethical non-naturalists need to paint Occasionalist pictures in order to make sense of how we can secure epistemic access to moral reality without being able to influence or be influenced by moral reality.

In the kind of Moral Occasionalism that I think metaethical non-naturalists should be in the business of defending, S=any one of us; O=any part of moral reality that we are able to intuitively grasp; X=the natural phenomena in which intuitively-graspable moral reality is grounded; and E=our intuitive grasp of (this or that part of) moral reality.

There are lots of interesting questions to ask about Occasionalist pictures. Some of these are about perception. The core perception question about Occasionalism is whether there is any way to flesh out the details of the picture so that it is the case that

(g) S perceives O.

That is: Is Occasionalism capable of being an account of an agent's perception of an object?

Another question is whether you can get (g) in the case where O is a moral reality (e.g., the wrongness of something someone does).

I'm not sure what the answers to these questions are, but I'll say a bit about how I think we may address them.

I don't remember whether I've ever publicly articulated the following thoughts about Occasionalist perception, but I feel inclined to put these thoughts into the form of a blog post today. So, that is what I will do.

***

It is said that, in humans, there are five perceptual senses: vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. Sometimes other items are added to the list, e.g., proprioception. And it is sometimes said that non-humans have further senses that humans do not have. Bats echolocate, some insects are able to detect magnetic waves, etc.

These various senses furnish ways of perceiving objects. That is, seeing O is a way of perceiving O; hearing O is a way of perceiving O; etc.

Here is a generalization that might be true:

Actual-world perception always involves object-to-subject influence: In every case in the actual world, whenever S perceives O, O causally influences S.

Say you look out the window and see a bird. You see the bird because the bird reflects light, which strikes your retina, which causes electrical signals to be passed along your optic nerve to your brain, etc. In this way, there is a causal sequence extending from the bird to you, such that the bird (the object of your visual perception) causally influences you (the subject of your visual perception).

We could construct similar examples involving each of the other five senses, and any further senses there may be. Such examples may be presented to support the generalization above.

Someone might say that our apprehension of moral reality provides a counterexample to the above generalization. And that would indeed be true if (i) Moral Occasionalism is true and (ii) Moral Occasionalism is an account of moral perception. But given that (i) and (ii) are both contentious (and are, for me, most at issue in the present discussion) we should just bracket the matter of apprehension of moral reality here. If we want a relevant counterexample to Actual-world perception always involves object-to-subject influence, we should look at cases of actual-world perception of natural, non-moral objects, such as birds.

If we end up being unable to find any relevant counterexample to Actual-world perception always involves object-to-subject influence, then we might conclude that it is true. This might lead us to the further conclusion that perception involves object-to-subject influence as a matter of conceptual necessity, such that it is not even conceptually possible for someone to perceive an object without being causally influenced by that object. This should, in turn, mean that (ii) above is false, i.e., Moral Occasionalism is not an account of moral perception.

But there is at least one way to push back against this reasoning.

***

Here's a thought experiment:

Classical Occasionalism was true all along: All of the best scientific evidence seems to overwhelmingly support the conclusion that perceptual systems of humans and all other living things involve causal interaction between perceiver and perceptual object. But all of that scientific evidence is in fact profoundly misleading, or has been profoundly misinterpreted. What's in fact true is classical Occasionalism (as summarized above).

What should we say about the hypothetical scenario where Classical Occasionalism was true all along? For example, what should we say about the case where you (seem to) look out the window and (seem to) see a bird?

Well, we could say either of two things. We could say that, in this hypothetical scenario, when you (seem to) look out the window and (seem to) see a bird, you are subject to a (mere) veridical hallucination of a bird. Or we could say that, in this hypothetical scenario, you genuinely perceive the bird.

At least one philosopher, namely Michael Dummett, has considered this hypothetical scenario. Dummett's intuition was that, in this hypothetical scenario, your experiences of birds and other ordinary objects in your external environment would be genuine perceptions, not (mere) veridical hallucinations.

Dummett's view, I think, was that if it were the case that Classical Occasionalism was true all along, and if we were somehow to discover that this is so, then the discovery of this fact would be a discovery about how perception in fact works. So, it would not be a discovery that all of the sorts of experiences that we have always taken to be perceptual experiences are in fact veridical hallucinations.

If that is right (and I think it is) then it might seem to show that it is conceptually possible for someone to perceive an object without being causally influenced by that object. This might pave the way for an argument that Moral Occasionalism is in fact an account of moral perception. But there is a complication.

***

An ostensionally fixed natural kind is a natural kind that we pick out by pointing. Water, I think, is an example of an ostensionally fixed natural kind. At some point in the past, I imagine, we pointed at water and named it 'water.' In that event, we made it the case that what we refer to when we use 'water' is that sort of stuff to which we were, at that time, pointing.

I think we should be broadly Kripkean externalists about ostensionally fixed natural kinds. For example, if it is the case that 

(a) all of the sort of stuff we point to when we use the word 'water' is H2O,

and 

(b) it is a matter of lawful regularity (as against mere coincidence) that all of that sort of stuff is H2O,

then, I think, we should say that, as a matter of conceptual necessity, water=H2O. And I think we should say this even if we had no idea that water=H2O at the time that we named water 'water.'

***

Let's say the XYZ Hypothesis is the hypothesis that the slippery stuff we call 'water' is XYZ, not H2O. Consider this scenario:

The XYZ Hypothesis was true all along: All of the best scientific evidence seems to overwhelmingly support the conclusion that the slippery stuff we call 'water' is H2O. But all of that scientific evidence is in fact profoundly misleading, or has been profoundly misinterpreted. What's in fact true is that the slippery stuff is XYZ.

If the proposals I discussed above about water being an ostensionally fixed natural kind are correct, then we should not say that, in the above thought experiment, all of the stuff in our lakes and oceans and ice cube trays that we've always called 'water' is in fact not water and is some other sort of stuff yet to be named. We should instead simply say that all of that stuff is water, but we've been mistaken about what water is.

In this way, the proposal that water is an ostensionally fixed natural kind allows us to render coherent two plausible proposals. On the one hand:

(I) Given that, in the actual world, (a) the sort of stuff we point to when we use the word 'water' is H2O, and (b) it is a matter of lawful regularity that all of that sort of stuff is H2O, water=H2O as a matter of conceptual necessity.

But on the other hand:

(II) In the hypothetical scenario where The XYZ Hypothesis was true all along, water=H2O would be false, and water=XYZ would be true.

***

In a similar manner, if perception is an ostensionally fixed natural kind, then we could coherently say both that

(III) if, as a matter of lawful regularity, perception in the actual world always involves object-to-subject influence, then it is conceptually necessary that perception always involves object-to-subject influence,

and

(IV) in the hypothetical scenario where Classical Occasionalism was true all along, it would not be conceptually necessary, and in fact would be false, that perception always involves object-to-subject influence.

***

To my mind, then, a key question is whether perception is an ostensionally fixed natural kind. Suppose it is. Suppose there was some time in the past when we pointed to various ways of apprehending objects through the senses and we named those ways 'perception.' If that is so, and if it is the case that, as a matter of lawful regularity, these ways of apprehending objects always involve object-to-subject influence, then I think we should say that it is conceptually necessary that perception always involves object-to-subject influence. And in that case I think we should deny that Moral Occasionalism is an account of moral perception.

My opinion is that we should be faithful vegans: We should consistently and constantly follow veganism's rules.

On an alternative view, we should be economic half-vegans. An economic half-vegan is someone who follows this rule:

The economic rule: Avoid decisions that send the sorts of economic signals that cause producers to do bad things to animals. Feel free to make decisions that do not send such signals, even when such decisions violate veganism's rules.

The economic rule, I grant, gets some things right. For example, purchasing chicken sandwiches from McDonald's sends economic signals that cause farmers to do horrible things to chickens. So, the economic rule forbids purchasing chicken sandwiches from McDonald's.

But this rule permits many choices that faithful vegans won't make. Consider bivalves. Buying oysters sends economic signals to oyster farmers that cause them to raise oysters in order kill and sell them. But if (i) oysters aren't conscious, and therefore (ii) it isn't bad for farmers to raise oysters in order to kill and sell them—then it seems that the economic rule permits us to buy oysters.

My view, by contrast, is that even if (i) and (ii) are both true and known to be true, we still should not buy oysters—because buying oysters is inconsistent with being a faithful vegan.

In what follows I will discuss one of main deficiencies of the economic rule. My discussion here won't get us all the way to a case for fully faithful veganism. But it will, I think, provide good reason to reject economic half-veganism.

***

Imagine: Company X owns a large factory where thousands of people are employed. There is an open shop union that has been founded to represent the employees of the factory. From time to time, the union calls a strike, or threatens to do so, in the course of negotiations over matters like wage increases, working conditions, etc.

The union's ability to call strikes might give it some power in negotiations with Company X, but the magnitude of this power depends on two factors.

First, the union's power depends on the number of members of the union. If only a tiny fraction of factory employees are members, then factory operations might not be much affected by a strike. And in that case, any strike threat would be unlikely to compel Company X to agree to the union's demands.

Second, the union's power depends on the faithfulness of the members. Suppose that the members have little loyalty to the union, and therefore are willing to cross the picket lines whenever they think doing so is in their self-interest. In that case, even if every last employee of the factory were an official member of the union, strike threats might have little effect on Company X's decisions.

These points highlight an important general point about unions. A union is in the business of making two sorts of demands: Upward demands which are directed at the employer (e.g., a demand to increase wages) and downward demands which are directed at employees who are union members (e.g., a demand to stay home when a strike is called). And these two categories of demands are interlinked. The union cannot effectively make demands of the employer unless it can show the employer that it can effectively make demands of the employees.

The upshot is straightforward. Every time the union calls a strike and then you cross the picket line, you contribute to the erosion of the union's negotiating power. And every time the union calls a strike and then you dutifully stay home, you make the union stronger. So, if you have reason to strengthen rather than weaken the union, then you have reason to (a) join the union and (b) faithfully do what the union tells you to do.

Notice that this reason for compliance with the union's demands may exist even if, in a given instance, you correctly believe that calling a strike was the wrong choice. Even when the strike shouldn't have been called in the first place, it remains true that faithful compliance with the call strengthens the union, and crossing the picket line undermines the union's power.

This means that if the union is broadly good, such that you have reason to make the union more powerful rather than less so, then you have reason to stay home when a strike is called, even when the strike shouldn't have been called.

***

Veganism is like a labor union. The differences are:

(1) Veganism is an organization that represents (a certain class of) consumers, whereas a union is an organization that represents employees.

(2) Veganism makes upward demands of producers who sell products to consumers, whereas a union makes upward demands of an employer who buys work from employees.

(3) The demands that veganism makes of producers are concerned with the interests and rights of animals, who are not among the consumers that veganism represents. By contrast, the demands that a union makes of the employer are concerned with the employees represented by the union. Veganism is thus other-directed in a way that labor unions aren't.

(4) Veganism has less structure than a typical union. A typical union has committees, and elections, and so on; and when a decision is made (e.g., a decision to strike) this is usually the result of some sort of formal decision-making process. By contrast, there are no elected leaders of veganism. And there is no committee that determines what the rules of veganism are. (Despite the lack of formal process, however, there is a perhaps surprising degree of consensus among vegans about what veganism permits and what it forbids.)

Despite these differences, the similarities between veganism and labor unions are significant.

Veganism says to producers: We will not buy your products, unless you produce them in accordance with our rules. A union says to an employer: We will not sell our work to you, unless you meet our demands (for improved wages, better working conditions, what-have-you).

Vegans are, in a certain way, on strike against producers who exploit animals in their production processes. And just as an employer will (in ideal circumstances) know what they need to do in order to get the strike to end, so producers will (again, in ideal circumstances) know what they need to do in order to get vegans to be willing to buy their products.

The power of veganism to influence producers is affected by the same two factors that affect the power of a union to influence an employer. First, numbers: The more vegans there are, the more motivated producers will be to meet vegans' demands. And second, faithfulness: The more faithfully vegans abide by veganism's downward demands (i.e., the rules of veganism), the more power the vegan movement will have to influence producer behavior.

To briefly expand on the second of those two points: Imagine a world where 99% of consumers identify as vegan but 99% of those who identify as vegan routinely purchase animal products. Then producers would have little reason to alter their behavior in order to meet veganism's demands. This is like the case where most employees are union members but most union members are strike-breakers. 

***

Just as you may have reason to comply with your union's call to strike even in some cases where you know that the union's decision to strike was a mistake, so you may have reason to comply with veganism's rules even in some cases where you know that this or that rule is a mistake.

To make this point, return to the case of bivalves that I discussed at the outset of this post. Suppose (i) and (ii) above are both true, and suppose that, consequently, veganism ought to permit the purchase and consumption of oyster-containing products. That is, an ideal veganism (e.g., a veganism whose rules were written by a committee of maximally wise philosophers) would make an explicit exception for oysters.

Even supposing all that, it remains the case that, as a matter of fact, in the actual world, veganism doesn't permit the purchase and consumption of oyster-containing products. (Oysters are animals and veganism forbids the purchase and consumption of animal products.) And in general, when you show producers that you are willing to buy their products even when their products aren't vegan, you undermine rather than strengthen the power of veganism to make demands of producers. So, there's reason to avoid oyster-containing products even in the case where an ideal veganism would allow oyster-containing products.

And here we come to the problem, as I see it, with economic half-veganism. Economic half-veganism misses the fact that flouting veganism's rules undermines veganism's power to make demands of producers. And it does this even when flouting veganism's rules in a given instance doesn't send the sorts of economic signals that cause producers to do bad things to animals (as may well be the case with oysters).

Economic half-veganism is insufficiently attentive to the importance of contributing to rather than undermining veganism's bargaining power with producers, and should be rejected for that reason.

This, however, doesn't yet mean that we should be fully faithful vegans. Consider the matter of secretly eating leftover turkey sandwiches that would otherwise be thrown away. A fully faithful vegan wouldn't do that. But there's no reason to think that secretly eating those sandwiches would have any chance of undermining veganism's bargaining power with producers. (Eating those sandwiches would be analogous with crossing a picket line in a way that would somehow be undetectable to your employer.) So, the present point about collective bargaining, on its own, doesn't quite show that we should be fully faithful vegans. But it does, I think, show that we should be more faithful than economic half-veganism would have us be.

My Dad was pretty choosy when it came to ideas. If you wanted to persuade him of anything that he didn't already believe, you'd usually have your work cut out for you. But when he did find an idea he liked, he'd tightly embrace it. And his loyalty to the ideas he chose to embrace was unbreakable. Nowadays, he is no longer able to talk about these ideas that he loved, but I still remember the things he said to me.

***

Goldbugism was one of my Dad's ideas. This is the view that fiat currency is bad. Currency should be backed by gold or other tangible stuff of value. My Dad would have liked every dollar to be a certificate entitling the bearer to something of value. In his ideal world, if you had a bunch of dollars, you could show up to Fort Knox or someplace like that, and they'd give you gold, or silver, or something like that, in exchange for your dollars.

I believe that the person who first transmitted this idea to my Dad was a friend of his named Lou Bosso, but it might have been someone else. The idea was circulating long before Lou was born, and long before my Dad was born, and will continue to circulate long after all of us are gone.

My Dad got his goldbugism from somebody else but it makes sense to think of it as something that belonged to him. It did belong to him. He felt that way, and he wasn't wrong. He knew his personal goldbugism intimately. He knew it better than he knew any human person, I think.

***

I don't like goldbugism, myself. My Dad had other ideas that were good, but this one, I think, is bad.

But I think that reflection on goldbugism might be productive. I suspect there's a cool paper to be written about goldbugism, and its errors, and what those errors reveal about value, and free exchange, and consent, and honesty, and theft, and virtue, and what a good and just economic order would need to be like, and so on. Maybe that paper already exists.

***

My Dad would say that, in a fiat money system, every purchase that anyone ever makes is an act of theft. Say you give a five-dollar bill to a baker and they give you some bread. The baker gave you something of value (namely, bread), but all you gave them in exchange was a worthless piece of paper. That's theft, my Dad would say.

You might reply: By this logic, accepting a gift is theft, too. After all, gift-givers don't get anything of value in exchange for what they give. That's the whole point of gift-giving. But my Dad would say that accepting freely offered gifts is fine, because the gift-giver knows and intends that they aren't getting anything of value in exchange.

The problem with trades that occur in a fiat currency system, he'd say, is that the person who receives the money confusedly thinks they are getting something of value, but they are not. Buying bread with fiat currency is like buying bread with counterfeit currency.

In fact, he'd say that in a fiat currency system, all of the money is counterfeit, although no one knows it. And buying goods and services with counterfeit money is theft, if the seller doesn't know that what they're receiving is counterfeit money.

***

You might say: Even if all of the money in a fiat currency system is counterfeit, as my Dad maintained, it remains the case that no one (apart from goldbugs) knows it. And if you mistakenly think a counterfeit dollar is genuine, and then you spend it, then you haven't committed theft. So, the exchanges that occur in a fiat currency system aren't theft.

But my Dad would say that in the case where you unknowingly spend counterfeit money, you're still committing theft; you're just unknowingly committing theft. It's like if you take someone else's book home with you, mistakenly thinking it's yours. That's a kind of theft, he'd say. Maybe you shouldn't be blamed for it, but you still did the wrong thing.

So our fiat currency system has all of us unknowingly committing theft all the time, whenever we buy anything. That's what's wrong with the system, he'd say.

***

You might say: This line of argument assumes that fiat dollars are worthless, but that assumption is false. They're clearly worth quite a lot. After all, if you have a lot of dollars, you can use them buy valuable things, like cars and food and houses and so on. That gives them value. And that's why people work so hard to earn money. 

Whenever I made that objection to him, my Dad would usually concede that fiat currency has a kind of value. So, he'd retract, or refine, his initial claim that fiat dollars are "worthless."

He'd say that fiat dollars have the same kind of value that counterfeit dollars have. Counterfeit dollars are valuable, in a way. They're valuable to thieves. But they're not valuable to honest people. After all, an honest person would be unwilling to use counterfeit money to steal from people, so wouldn't have any use for counterfeit dollars, and therefore wouldn't value counterfeit dollars.

And he'd say that, in just the same way, fiat dollars do have a certain kind of value, because you can get goods and services in exchange for them. But it's not the kind of value that we honest folk should recognize, and certainly isn't the kind of value that we should have to spend all our working days pursuing.

He himself treated money in just the same way as everyone else. He thought dollars were worthless, but he still worked hard to earn them. And that is precisely the core of the problem as he saw it. A system of fiat currency forces all of us to assess value from a thief's perspective, rather than from the perspective of an honest person. So we all become thieves. We have no other choice. This is what I think he thought.

***

The argument bears some resemblance to Marxian arguments for and about the labor theory of value. Both arguments exhibit certain kinds of circularities. And reflection on the labor theory of value is fruitful, I think, even though the labor theory of value is in fact mistaken. I suspect that reflection on goldbugism may be similarly fruitful.