E.G.

At the Conservative Philosopher, there’s a short post by Keith Burgess-Jackson (KBJ) called "Bush-Hatin’ Paul."  (I’d link to it, but they don’t seem to have enabled permalinks at CP.)  KBJ’s post is related in an interesting way to my recent post about the demi-fallacy I’ve dubbed "begging the question against oneself."

Just so you don’t have to dig through CP’s archives, here’s KBJ’s post in its entirety:

Any philosopher will tell you that there can be more than one rationale (justification) for a given action or policy. An act of promise-keeping, for example, can be justified on both consequentialist and deontological grounds—because of the kind of act it is and because of its consequences. So why does Paul Krugman consider it morally problematic for President Bush to have—and assert—more than one rationale for Social Security reform? See here.  There are many reasons to reform Social Security. Why should President Bush pick just one of them? Don’t let Krugman hoodwink you. If there are five reasons to reform Social Security, then President Bush should emphasize all five. There is nothing whatsoever disreputable about this. Indeed, he would be a bad arguer if he ignored good arguments in support of his conclusion.

KBJ is here responding to a remark Krugman makes in the beginning of Krugman’s piece:

Social Security privatization really is like tax cuts, or the Iraq war: the administration keeps on coming up with new rationales, but the plan remains the same. President Bush’s claim that we must privatize Social Security to avert an imminent crisis has evidently fallen flat. So now he’s playing the race card.  [From here, Krugman goes on to debunk Bush’s recent claims that the present system is unfair to blacks since they die earlier and therefore are eligible to collect benefits for a shorter period of time.]

Both Krugman and KBJ seem to agree that Bush’s concern is to be a "good arguer," i.e. to convince as many people as he can that his view is the best one.  I assume both would agree that as a good arguer, Bush gives reasons he thinks others will accept without caring much whether they are the reasons he himself accepts.  As KBJ notes, this type of strategy is common among philosophers, and those with a philosophical background are likely not to see anything wrong with it.  But Krugman, an economist, apparently hasn’t done enough philosophy; he seems to take it to be intuitively obvious that there is something suspicious about this argumentative strategy.  I suspect Krugman’s intuitions on this point are widely held.  (This does not mean, of course, that those intuitions aren’t mistaken.)

I decided my armchair wasn’t getting me very far in thinking about this Turkey question I’ve been posting about, so I e-mailed a Turkey expert and asked him to suggest references.  Here’s his list: 

1.  Mustafa Aydin & Cagri Erhan ed ‘Turkish-American
Relations’ (Routledge, 2004).  This is the only book
dedicated to the subject in English

2.  F Stephen Larrabee & Ian O Lesser, ‘Turkish Foreign
Policy in An Age of Uncertainty’ (Rand, 2003).  A book
basically about Turkish foreign policy and Turkey’s
geopolitics but by American think tankers who are most
familiar with the subject.

3.  William Hale, ‘Turkish Foreign Policy, 177?-2000’
(Cass, 2002?). A historical, analytical treatment by one of
the world’s top non-Turkish scholars of Turkey.

4.  Philip Robins, ‘Suits & Uniforms: Turkish Foreign
Policy Since the Cold War’ (Univ of Washington Press,
2003).  More context and process oriented in focus, but
with four policy case studies included.

5.  George Harris, ‘Troubled Alliance: Turkish-American
Problems in Historical Perspective, 1945-71′ (Hoover,
1972).  George has lived the subject for the last 30 years,
esp as part of the INR section of the State Dept.  Good on
an earlier period.

Time permitting, I hope to work through some of these between now and summertime.  If so, I’ll post about it.

Some arguments are bad even though they’re sound and valid.  "George Bush is a loon; therefore, George Bush is a loon."  Assuming George Bush really is a loon, this argument is both sound and valid, but it’s still a bad argument; it begs the question. 

Rule: Always form your argument from premises your opponent is willing to accept. 

This rule suggests another rule: Always form your argument from premises you yourself are willing to accept.

Should the second rule be followed?

Some philosophical views are supported by reasons which, when made explicit, can be strung into a valid argument, of finite length, from premises which are comprehensible to people with no prior philosophical training.  (In fact, I think these are the most interesting kinds of philosophical views.)  The intro course I’m imagining would be devoted to analyzing the argument supporting just one such view.  The view would be sincerely held by the instructor, and the argument would be composed of the reasons the instructor herself would give for holding that view.

The premises of the argument would, ideally, be drawn from most or all of the major sub-areas of philosophy.  So, for instance, you might have some epistemic claims in there, some moral claims in there, some metaphysical claims in there, etc.  The reason you want this sort of diversity is because it’s supposed to be an intro course, so you want to acquaint students with the sorts of claims made in answer to a lot of different philosophical questions.  You might think this diversity of premises would be hard to come by, but I’m not sure that’s the case.  When you finally get down to the most "fundamental" reasons for holding a given view, I think much of the time those reasons are drawn from across philosophy.  I’m not sure of this point, though.

Also, the argument would need to be of a certain length.  That is, it would need to be long enough that a detailed analysis of it would take exactly one semester.

A class like this would serve a few purposes.  First, it would give the instructor a chance to really spell out for herself, and in detail, the reasons she has for holding her view.  I think that, despite the amount of time philosophers spend thinking about their views, many philosophers never really do this.  So planning and teaching a class like this would be a real philosophical exercise; unlike most intro courses, a class like this would be directly relevant to the philosopher’s "real work."  Second, it would give students a chance to see what philosophy is really like by going deeply into the thinking of just one philosopher, i.e. the instructor.  So many intro courses just dip into classic texts at random spots, making a few comments on each selected passage before moving on.  That kind of class acquaints students with the "big philosophical questions," but it leaves students without a clear idea of why those questions are asked or what those questions have in common. 

Obviously, there are cons as well as pros to a class like this.  Probably, a class like this would be unsuitable for most undergrads at most institutions, but it might be a good experiment somewhere.  For all I know, somebody’s already done something like this.

This post from Noam Chomsky is old, but perhaps worth revisiting.  Chomsky says:

The US interest in having Turkey join the EU goes well beyond issues of its resources, etc. Turkey has been a close ally of the US since World War II, serving both as part of the encirclement of the official Cold War enemy — for example, a launching pad for nuclear missiles until they were replaced by more lethal Polaris submarines — but also as part of the ring of peripheral states that protects US interests in the crucial energy-producing regions of the Middle East, along with Iran (under the Shah), Israel (since 1967), Pakistan (intermittently). Israeli-Turkish relations trace back to 1958, but became much closer in later years.  …  [I]t’s assumed [by American policy-makers] that Turkey will be a loyal client, and its entry into the EU, it is expected, will dilute the influence of Germany and France, the economic powerhouses of Europe. It’s been a major concern of US policymakers since World War II that they might lead Europe towards a more independent stance in world affairs. US support for admission of the former Soviet satellites in part traces to similar considerations: they are expected to obey Washington’s orders in a more disciplined way.

Chomsky is here assuming that after joining the E.U., Turkey will continue to be a "loyal client" of the U.S.  Turkey has long acted in American interests — for the narrowly rational reason that it has long been in Turkey’s interests to do so.  If Turkey joins the E.U., it should be expected that its interests will change.  Its situation, and therefore its interests, will more closely resemble those of countries like Germany and France, so I suppose it should be expected that its behavior will more closely resemble that of countries like Germany and France, as well.  Moreover, in joining the E.U., countries like Germany and France will gain more influence over Turkey than Turkey will gain over them.  So if Turkey joins the E.U., America is more likely to lose Turkey to Europe, than Turkey is to win Germany and France for America.

I think Chomsky’s rather quick assessment of this situation reflects a larger tendency in his thinking.  It has seemed to me that Chomsky’s first instinct is to think in terms of slaves and non-slaves, masters and non-masters, client states and superpowers.  There’s nothing wrong with these classifications, as far as they go; there certainly are such things as "American client states," for instance, and Turkey may well be one of them.  But a client state is a client state in virtue of its highly contingent circumstances, not by its nature.  Client states are subservient to superpowers for reasons of their own, and those reasons change when circumstances change, as they must.

Good point.

What would something with "infinite value" be like?  Pekka’s comments to my recent post on theism got me thinking about this question.  I don’t have an informed answer, but I do have an uninformed one.  I’m putting this one below the fold.

(more…)

A while back, the thesis called "Dreier’s Conjecture" was discussed at length in a series of posts by Doug Portmore from PEA Soup.  (If you haven’t already, I suggest you read Doug’s posts, which are located here, here and here, before and/or instead of reading this one.)

In the first post, Doug offers the following formulation of Dreier’s Conjecture (which I’ll call "DC" from here on):

For any moral theory M, there is some conceivable ["counterpart"] theory of the good that, when combined with the consequentialist principle “φ-ing is morally permissible iff φ-ing would produce the best available state of affairs,” yields moral verdicts that are, in every instance, identical to those of M.

I think DC is true, and will assume it’s true for the purpose of this post.  Some have claimed that DC makes the consequentialism/non-consequentialism distinction "empty."  On this view, given DC, that distinction is unimportant and uninteresting, and its central place in traditional taxonomies of moral theories is unjustified.  As Doug ably demonstrates in part III of his series, DC is clearly not strong enough to have this uncomfortable result.  DC concerns the "output" of moral theories, i.e. the verdicts moral theories yield in specific instances.  But there are other important features of moral theories.  For instance, moral theories function to explain verdicts as well as to yield them.  If it turns out that non-consequentialist moral theories are able to offer different explanations of their verdicts than consequentialist ones do, then that alone, it seems, should be enough to provide some "content" to the consequentialism/non-consequentialism distinction, even if DC turns out to be true.

However, let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that the only distinctive or salient feature of a moral theory is the set of verdicts which it yields in specific instances.  In that case, would DC make the consequentialism/non-consequentialism distinction "empty" in the present sense? 

DC implies that for every non-consequentialist theory, there exists a "counterpart" consequentialist theory which offers the same verdicts in the same instances.  To put the point more plainly: Given DC, there’s nothing special about being a non-consequentialist; there aren’t any verdicts you, as a non-consequentialist, can offer which a consequentialist could not also offer.  But DC does not imply that for every consequentialist theory, there exists a "counterpart" non-consequentialist theory.  So DC might still be true even if there are some consequentialist theories which are "special," i.e., which offer verdicts in some instances which no non-consequentialist theory is able to offer in the same instances.  And in that case, it seems to me, there would still be some "content" to the consequentialism/non-consequentialism distinction.

So, I think, we can assume that DC is true, and assume (contrary to fact) that the only distinctive/salient/etc. feature of a moral theory is the set of verdicts which it offers in specific instances — and still have some room to argue that the consequentialism/non-consequentialism distinction is not "empty."  To make that argument, we would need to find a consequentialist theory for which no "counterpart" non-consequentialist theory, with the same verdicts rendered in the same circumstances, exists or is conceivable.  And DC, on its own, does not rule out the possibility of such a consequentialist theory.

To show that the consequentialism/non-consequentialism distinction is "empty", therefore, one needs not only DC, but also a thesis which I call "Reverse DC," which is the claim that for every consequentialist theory, there is some conceivable non-consequentialist theory with verdicts which are identical in every instance.  Unfortunately, for reasons I won’t go into here, I think Reverse DC is true; at any rate, Reverse DC appears to me to be at least as defensible as DC.

However, the above considerations do, I think, provide a possible way forward.  I think we can grant DC, and grant that the only salient feature of a moral theory is the set of verdicts which it offers in specific instances, and grant Reverse DC — and still, despite all this, find a way to show that the consequentialism/non-consequentialism distinction is not "empty" in the relevant sense.  Perhaps in a future post I’ll describe the way I have in mind.

If the dramatic stories about the election in Ukraine have been interesting to you, you might like to look at the photos and commentary posted to this blog.

Here’s another Nina Hagen song.  Please leave a comment if the link doesn’t work for you.