In a variant of the hoary old ‘ungrounded morality’ question, Barry Arrington has a post up at Uncommon Descent which ponders how a ‘materialist’ could in all conscience take a position as clinical ethicist, if he does not believe that there is an ultimate ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer. I think this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of clinical ethics. In contrast to daily usage, ethics here is not a synonym for morality.
I can understand how a theist who believes in the objective reality of ethical norms could apply for such a position in good faith. By definition he believes certain actions are really wrong and other actions are really right, and therefore he often has something meaningful to say.
My question is how could a materialist apply for such a position in good faith? After all, for the materialist there is really no satisfactory answer to Arthur Leff’s “grand sez who” question that we have discussed on these pages before. See here for Philip Johnson’s informative take on the issue.
After all, when pushed to the wall to ground his ethical opinions in anything other than his personal opinion, the materialist ethicist has nothing to say. Why should I pay someone $68,584 to say there is no real ultimate ethical difference between one moral response and another because they must both lead ultimately to the same place – nothingness.
I am not being facetious here. I really do want to know why someone would pay someone to give them the “right answer” when that person asserts that the word “right” is ultimately meaningless.
(The last question is an odd one. You would pay someone to give you the “right answer” so long as they believe that there is such a thing?)
Of course you don’t have to go far into medical ethics before you get to genuine ethical thickets. The interests of a mother versus those of the foetus she carries; the unfortunate fact that there aren’t the resources to give every treatment to everyone; the thorny issues of voluntary euthanasia or ‘do not resuscitate’ decisions; issues raised by fertility treatments; cases such as the recent removal from hospital of Aysha King; the role of a patient’s own beliefs. There aren’t many right answers, when you get beyond the obvious things that you don’t need to pay someone to set guidelines for.
It is a bizarre argument to regard moral relativism as a bar to this job. A moral absolutist may believe that blood transfusion is wrong, that faith in the lord is the way to get better, that embryos should never be formed outside a uterus, or some other such faith-based notion. And they have to persuade others of different, or no, faith that this decision is indeed what objective morality dictates, and whatever their own views on morality they must accept that. So I don’t agree that the ‘grounding’ of an atheist’s personal moral principles has any bearing on their candidacy.
I’m not sure what you are referring to.
I am taking his current position on moral responsibility from his review of the Waller book at naturalism.org. (Not his later paper there on Harris’s book, where I believe he concentrates on justifying compatibilism).
@ Keiths and Walto
Enough now!
From now on either comment civilly or ignore each other’s comments.
Otherwise I shall, without mercy and without compunction, apply the ultimate sanction permissible under the rules of this blog. Guano awaits!
You have been warned!!!
And it’s about time, too.
Even though I am Canadian, I must admit to being flabbergasted that someone would sometimes choose to scratch this particular itch using a Blackberry.
I already did in the last sentence of my previous comment.
I don’t think walto sees a contradiction between the manifest image and the scientific image. And I certainly don’t see a contradiction. My read is that walto takes the manifest image as a constraint on how we understand science.
Take what I recall as your example, the solid table. I still see a table as solid. Most scientists still see a table as solid. I see science as clarifying and explaining what we mean by “solid”. I don’t see it as contradicting the view that the table is solid.
That’s certainly the way I see it.
Science builds encompassing descriptions.
As a first approximation, the earth is flat. As we expand our viewpoint, the apparent flatness is included by an encompassing description that does not deny the apparent flatness.
Same could be said for the observation that things fall down. They still fall down under general relativity, but the viewpoint encompasses more extreme conditions.
I suspect that much of the conflict between the manifest and scientific images would be dissolved if we stopped thinking about either of them as sets of sentences and thought of them rather as systems of abilities or competencies, and then noticed that (a) manifest-image abilities or competencies are grounded in various sensorimotor skills, and (b) scientific-image abilities or competences are grounded in how technology is basically a huge set of sensory and motor prostheses or augmentations. Thinking about scientific theories without thinking about the technology at work in those theories is a serious error — in fact, in my view, one of the more serious errors committed by the logical positivists.
A quick remark on “free will” — apologies if I’ve shared this story before.
A few years ago I was arguing about incompatibilism and compatibilism with a colleague (young, very bright epistemologist). We quickly realized that for him, libertarian free will is an obvious fact about human existence — a fact needed to be explained by some metaphysical theory. For me, libertarian free will is not a fact but is rather itself the explanation (and a bad explanation at that) for the experience of voluntary movement and basic agency — an explanation that needed to be replaced by a better, naturalistic explanation.
I’m quite happy to say something like, “our capacity for voluntary movement and emotional self-control is explained by activation patterns in the pre-frontal cortex as it regulates activity in the motor cortex and in the limbic system, and that’s all there is to it.” Some people have the intuition that that’s not really free will, or that this picture somehow deprives us something. I don’t share that intuition and I don’t understand it.
Exactly. To the extent that the advancement of science seems to contradict ordinary experience, it must explain its actual coherence. It can’t simply deny it, a la Feyerabend or the Churchlands because the confirmation of the scientific hypotheses requires the use of the manifest image. If apparently external/public stuff were actually all references to our individual personal experiences, confirming anything would be wildly complex, if possible at all. That’s the connection with phenomenalism, verificationism, internal realism, etc.
But, as I’ve mentioned numerous times, I don’t deny that any of those might be true in spite of my antipathy (and my use of “can’t simply deny it” above). They just have a ton of splaining to do–and I don’t believe they can do it.
I’m not clear on where mathematics fits into this picture.
It’s true that I need to wave my hands a lot when I talk about Hilbert spaces and QM, but I don’t think that is what you mean. And I don’t think one can visualize such things except though mathematics, so I don’t see a sensory component.
I simply don’t know what to say about mathematics. I’m slightly innumerate — I have an immense difficulty getting mathematical operations, and that’s actually what held me back in science (which is why I became a philosopher) and in logic (which is why I became a ‘Continental’ philosopher).
It’s true that there’s no obvious sensory component to mathematics, but that leaves open the possibility of embodied experience constituting mathematics in some other way. I haven’t read Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being, but that’s the kind of thing I have in mind.
One minor point: what the Churchlands deny is actually quite specific: they deny that individual brains represent their environments in terms of proposition-like or sentence-like structures. As Paul Churchland once confirmed for me when I asked him about this, “the enemy is Fodor, not Brandom.”
Cool. I just looked at a book on Churchland in which the author suggests that C’s main foil was a guy that many of his gurus (like Hanson, Sellars, and Feyerabend) were influenced by and drew upon–Wittgenstein. So it’s interesting that Fodor (whom Churchland took as “the enemy”) also considers Wittgenstein to have had a very pernicious effect on philosophy in the 20th Century.
Moral: Maybe neither the friend of our friends nor the enemy of our enemy can be depended on to be our friend?
walto,
Your comments are your responsibility. No one else’s.
walto,
We’d all prefer that you not indulge that particular appetite.
Just state your case, I’ll state mine, and readers can decide which (if either) they find persuasive.
It depends on the question one is trying to answer, I think:
1. What is a naturalistic explanation for how mathematics could have started?
2. From a socio/psychological perspective, how do specific models in formalisms like math and diagrams get invented and spread in a community of scientists?
3. Are there general conclusions crossing sciences that one can draw about the role of these formalisms in expressing scientific theories?
4. What is the relationship between scientific theories and reality, if any?
5. Assuming theories tell us something about reality, what do they tell us?
I would see sensory and motor aspects as important for 1, somewhat important for 2, and not important for the others.
I expect that it started by idealizing counting, which gives us arithmetic. Then it moved to idealizing measurement, which gives us geometry.
Some of the scientists are also mathematics. Additionally, when a scientist sees an apparently useful idea, he tries it out — this give something analogous to horizontal gene transfer.
As I see it, a scientific theory is largely an exercise in applied geometry. That is to say, it is an account of how to get data from reality. This is why data is theory-laden. And, of course, if a theory describes how to get data from reality, then it is also valuable for interpreting data in terms of reality.
Neil,
petrushka:
Here’s how I put it earlier in the thread:
We modify the manifest image’s intuitive concept of solidity to make it consistent with the scientific image’s, which is better supported.
Here’s a passage I found earlier from Dennett’s newest Intuition Pumps:
The scientists have typically been making a rookie mistake: confusing the manifest image with what we might call the folk ideology of the manifest image. The folk ideology of color is, let’s face it, bonkers; color just isn’t what most people think it is, but that doesn’t mean that the manifest world doesn’t really have any colors; it means that colors — real colors — are quite different from what most folks think they are. The folk ideology of consciousness is also bonkers — resolutely dualistic and mysterian; if that were what consciousness had to be, then Wright would be right (see p. 313): we’d have to say that consciousness doesn’t exist. But we don’t have to treat consciousness as “real magic” the kind that doesn’t exist, made of wonder tissue; we can recognize the reality of consciousness as a phenomenon by acknowledging that folks don’t yet have a sound ideology about it. Similarly, free will isn’t what some of the folk ideology of the manifest image proclaims it to be, a sort of magical isolation from causation. I’ve compared free will in this sense to levitation, and one of the philosophical defenders of this bonkers vision has frankly announced that a free choice is a “little miracle.” I wholeheartedly agree with the scientific chorus that that sort of free will is an illusion, but that doesn’t mean that free will is an illusion in any morally important sense. It is as real as colors, as real as dollars.
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I find this distinction between “the manifest image” and “the folk ideology of the manifest image” fascinating and hopefully also immensely productive, but I also wonder Dennett would account for it.
The manifest image has no concepts. People have concepts.
Concepts and meanings are subjective anyway. We cannot compare them between different people. My concepts and meanings depend on my experience. And learning about science is part of that experience.
Your idea, of the form that we modify X to make it consistent with Y seems too rigid. There is a lot of fluidity to concepts and meanings.
KN,
I think there’s an instinctive dualism at the heart of that intuition. When told that their behavior depends on “activation patterns in the prefrontal cortex” (or any other part of their brains), many people think “if so, that means that I don’t control it, which means my will is not free.” In other words, they see themselves as separate from the activity in their own brains, which implies dualism — even if they don’t recognize the implication.
The compatibilist solution is to recognize that the activity of our PFCs, or any other part of our brains, is part of us. To argue that such activity deprives us of control is to miss the fact that it originates in us.
keiths,
That’s surely right, but for a whole host of factors at work in my biography, I was never inculcated with the instinctive dualism and I have correspondingly little patience for those who have it. And even less patience for those who stubbornly cling to it because they prefer scriptural doctrine over scientific explanation.
As I use the term “manifest image,” I don’t think it has changed much since Fred Flintstone’s time. Austin talked about “trailing clouds of etymology”–but I don’t think that actually has much effect on how we experience the world. I highly doubt that anybody here literally SAW things (or sat down) differently after taking their first physics class.
FWIW, there’s a paper by van Frassen, which I think is available on line, in which he dismisses the whole idea that there are two “images” as a bunch of nonsense. I think he takes the whole picture of there being scientific and commonsense “pictures” as completely confused. I don’t agree with him, but it’s an interesting paper.
I think this is where the libertarian types (like van Inwagen) point out that those activities don’t actually originate in us either: on his view they must be caused by earlier events back in the mists of time.
walto,
Were you thinking of “The Manifest Image and the Scientific Image“?
Neil,
That’s silly. The manifest and scientific images are chock full of concepts.
Also silly. We compare concepts and meanings all the time. Walto and I did it with ‘verificationism’, after all.
If X is inconsistent with Y, then the only way they can be made consistent is if X changes, or Y changes, or both X and Y change.
keiths:
walto:
Yes, and I think they’re right to do so. However, I would argue that this doesn’t deprive us of free will.
Suppose a kid chooses to load his MP3 player with one kind of music versus another. His choice of genre might ultimately have been determined by events beyond his control, like the fact that he was born in Chicago rather than Ouagadougou, but this doesn’t mean (I would argue) that he is not freely choosing what to load onto his music player.
KN,
Paul Bloom argues persuasively that we’re all born dualists, and I agree, which is why I chose the phrase “instinctive dualism”.
If he’s right, then it isn’t just that you were never inculcated with dualism — it’s that someone or something “exculcated” it from you!
I’m hesitant to endorse this outright, because there’s a Big Question here: is “the manifest image” the most basic (or most general?) conceptual structures in terms of which we’re practically engaged with our social and physical environments — or is “the manifest image” our understanding of those structures?
Sellars exploits an ambiguity here — which is why he can say such things as “Aristotle is the philosopher of the Manifest Image” but also say that Kant and Hegel discovered objective truths about the manifest image that weren’t appreciated by previous philosophers — such as the intimate links between the concepts of authority, freedom, responsibility, community, normativity, judgment, and experience.
For the more-than-idly curious, Humana Menta had a whole special issue devoted to “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man“. Highly recommended.
Yes, that’s it. Thanks.
Those five questions I posted were attempts to see how one could interpret KN’s post in which he suggested we consider that “scientific-image abilities or competences are grounded in how technology is basically a huge set of sensory and motor prostheses or augmentations.”
If scientific-image abilities are the abilities to deal with the formalisms of science, then what would make a specific instance of a formalism spread while others died out? Why Liebniz’s notation for derivatives and not Newton’s? Why do certain diagramming standards become common and not others? Maybe it has something to do with what best augments our perceptions in a way that could be studied with socio-psychologically.
That was what I meant by the second question.
I admit it was a bit of a flyer.
Seeing scientific theories as accounts for getting data (meaning observables, I take it) seems a way of stating a form of scientific instrumentalism, which is a concept I understand.
But I don’t know how to take “geometry”. In what way is a scientist doing geometry when he or she does regression analysis or solves differential equations or developing taxonomies of species? Maybe with a suitably abstract definition of geometry. But I don’t think many scientists using those formalisms would know about that abstraction.
And anyway, if one decides to go the abstract route, why not go all the way to set theory?
I agree with you, but if the libertarians are right to deny that these events actually originate in us, we can’t base our response to them on this:
can we?
My own sense is that the two images are complementary–they don’t, indeed can’t really conflict on the most basic level. Sellars agreed that it was ok that ladders have parts (like molecules) that don’t have the same sorts of properties that the whole ladder has. The differences in part-properties and whole-propeties are explained by the relationships of the parts to each other (in conjunction with various physical laws). He would even agree, I believe, that to think otherwise is just to commit the fallacy of division.
But he drew the line at pink ice cubes: he believed that such objects are homogeneously pink in a way that can’t be similarly explained. That’s where he went wrong, I think.
keiths:
Bruce:
I haven’t read the review yet, or the Waller book, though I will — thanks for mentioning them — but based on a talk of Dennett’s that I attended at Stanford a few years ago, I take his view to be that people truly deserve rewards or retributive punishments for their actions, despite the fact that the ultimate causes of those actions lie outside them.
I accept the need for rewards and punishments as a practical means of motivating or discouraging certain behaviors, and of incarceration as a way of protecting society, but I don’t think that rewards and punishments are truly deserved, though the intuition that they are deserved is a very strong one.
Yeah, almost no one who admires Sellars thinks that we should accept “sensa” in the ontology of the scientific image. I mean, I’ve heard that he really thought that physicists and biologists had gone badly wrong by not looking for sensa. I worry that something has gone badly wrong when a philosopher starts telling a scientist what to look for. The question is, where did Sellars go wrong?
For Rorty, Dennett, Brandom, and McDowell, Sellars went wrong by retaining non-conceptual content in the first place. On this reading, Sellars should have recognized that conceptual content is all the content we need. (Teed Rockwell says that Dennett is “more royalist than the king,” which is nice — and the same holds for the others in this camp, too.) Then there’s a minority, more orthodox view — Jay Rosenberg, Jim O’Shea, and Willem deVries — that thinks that there’s a deep insight in non-conceptual content, but they most of them prefer to cash it out in terms of pre-linguistic representational systems a la Churchland or Millikan.
My approach is to say that Sellars was right in seeing the need for non-conceptual content as such, but wrong in thinking that the concept of NCC has the epistemic status of being a theoretical posit. Instead we can get a handle on the concept of NCC as part of phenomenological description of embodied perception, where what counts as “non-conceptual content” is, very roughly, sensorimotor habits and skills.
To elaborate a bit more, showing that sensorimotor skills count as both mental content and as non-conceptual is the hard part. I’m confident that I showed why it counts as content; I’m not confident that I showed why it’s non-conceptual, though I made the best argument I could make at the time. I also spend some time showing how sensorimotor habits and skills can play the role of “sheer receptivity” that Sellars correctly recognizes the need for but which he assigns to sense-impressions as theoretical entities once he recognizes that sense-impressions as Given, a la C. I. Lewis’s qualia, cannot carry out the required task.
This is also why I put the emphasis on technology as augmenting our sensorimotor skills and habits in the development of scientific theories. Still don’t know what to say about mathematics, though. There’s only so much I can worry about at a time!
keiths,
I’m curious. Say we remove stuff about protecting society, motivating behaviors, etc. Do you think the notion of punishment for purposes of retribution makes sense If there are no objective values in the first place?
Keith:
I read him as having the pragmatic viewpoint as in your first sentence. I think he would add something about the people needing to believe that transgressions have consequences, if that is not already covered by what you say. I think the justification for supporting that need is also pragmatic.
I am not really sure what you mean by “truly deserved”. “Deserved” I take to mean blameworthy in a moral sense, but what sense of “truth” are you using?
I’m a little hesitant to ask that knowing what-has-gone-before on a related topic, but, what the heck. What’s the worst that can happen?
BTW,I have not read Waller’s book, although he does reply to Dennett on the site.
I usually prefer reading to listening to talks, but I do find web recordings a great way to pass the time while doing household chores. You can find lots of YouTube stuff and podcasts of Dennett talking about free will and moral responsibility, usually with the same examples.
But I did come across something on rarer topic of his: recordings of a recent conference held on his ideas of the personal and subpersonal, which you can find here. I enjoyed Crane’s talk (which I subsequently found a version of on YouTube), Frith’s, Mushholt’s and of course Dennett’s. I have not tried the others.
But dust and soap scum will accumulate, so I am sure I will be able to work them in.
Kantian Naturalist,
Interesting, KN. I take a more hand-waving, Tractarian (non-informative) approach myself. If pushed I’ll say that there is non-conceptual content, but I don’t think anything at all can be known or said about it. So it’s entirely non-epistemic, I guess. Not even a thing-in-itself.
Not to give you unnecessary worry, but does “technology” here refer to the technology used to express theories (eg math, algorithms, diagrams), technology used to build experiments to test theories, or technology built by applying scientific theories.
The last might motivate us to give money to scientists, but I am not sure what else is has to do with doing science.
Yes, that’s the more C. I. Lewis-style view that I wanted to distance myself from, while still acknowledging a certain insight in his distinction between conceptual interpretation and the given.
I had in mind the latter two — the technology used to build experiments that test theories, and the technology built by applying theories.
Churchland makes basically the same point in his response to Plantinga (“Is Evolutionary Naturalism Epistemologically Self-Defeating?”, 2009):
Furthermore, such supra-individual and methodologically sophisticated techniques of rational evaluation are steered by a vast armory of enhanced (artificial) sensory modalities, modalities that reach far beyond the narrow domains revealed by our native sensory equipment. Science employs telescopes (radio, infrared, visible-light, X-ray, and gamma-ray telescopes) to reveal to us the structure and activities of the very large; it uses microscopes (visible light, electron microscopes), and electrochemical techniques such as nucleic-acid sequencers, microelectrodes, and activity-sensitive fluorescent dyes, to reveal to us the structure and activities of the very small; it uses newly sensitive devices such as voltmeters, ammeters, and spectrometers to reveal to us phenomena to which we are congenitally blind for reasons that have nothing to do with spatial scale; and it uses techniques such as radioactive dating, ice-core analysis, and geological stratigraphy for determining structures and activities over deep time.
Such artificial sensory modalities (and these examples merely head a very long list) give us a dramatically enhanced sensory grip on objective reality, and thus a comparably enhanced environment for both the creation and the critical evaluation of new theories.
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Thanks. I had thought you meant the first, based on the contrast to “sets of sentences” in your original post (which I took to be natural language sentences).
I think that producing “correct” theories is the objective of doing science, with doing experiments as a mandatory tool in achieving that objective. Based on that, I’d say the technology used to create and express theories, which is not natural language in many cases, is most important.
For example, I suspect theoreticians, especially in physics, would see themselves being steered more by math than by the details of the technology to build a particular experiment to test a theory.
I don’t actually care too much for Lewis or his “given” (or his qualia, for that matter). He has us as being certain of what he takes to be “given in experience”: givenness is the basis for his entire epistemology.
I don’t think we can be any more certain of the sensuous aspects of experience than we can be of anything else we can have knowledge about. And I also think that what we can have knowledge about has been categorized. So, as I said, while I take experience to have non-conceptual content, I don’t think it can be used as the basis for any kind of knowledge, introspective or otherwise–so if it’s “given” it’s not much of a gift. I’m no fan of incorrigibility. (I’m OK with ineffability, but so many philosophers keep effing the stuff, in spite of their promises.)
That’s my (fairly ignorant) take on phenomenology generally.
I’m more inclined to see science in terms of the abilities to deal with a world. And it is those abilities that I see idealized in mathematics. The abilities that spread are the ones that turn out to be most useful.
The word “geometry” literally stands for “measuring the world”. I’m using it in that sense. Traditional Euclidean geometry really is just an idealization of using a standard measuring rod.
If idealized measurement leads to differential equations, then the differential equations should work for the data obtained by the kind of measurement that is idealized. The geometry part of science is in devising ways of measuring. And the mathematics that results from a way of measuring should be applicable to the data obtained by measuring in that way.
walto,
I’m not sure what you’re getting at in your first sentence. The consequentialist stuff doesn’t factor into my rejection of retributive punishment, so its removal doesn’t change anything for me.
I reject retributive punishment because I don’t think we are ultimately responsible for our actions, since they trace back to causes that are completely outside of us and beyond our control — and that remains true whether or not objective values exist
keiths:
Bruce:
That’s the position I would have expected him to take, but I got a different impression from the talk he gave at Stanford. Also, he writes this in the Waller review you pointed me to:
It sure sounds like he’s endorsing the idea that criminals deserve their punishment, and not merely that punishment serves a pragmatic purpose, doesn’t it?
I’m distinguishing the conventional idea of blameworthiness (as found in criminal law, say) from what I would consider to be true blameworthiness, which would depend on the truth of libertarian free will. In other words, you are truly blameworthy only if you are truly the ultimate author of your actions. Because I think libertarian free will is incoherent, I also reject the idea of true blameworthiness.
That’s a good idea. I do something similar, listening to Teaching Company lectures while I’m on the elliptical trainer. The lure of the lectures keeps me exercising on days when I’m tempted to slough it off.
walto,
Surely the manifest image conflicts with the scientific image when a kid learns that geocentrism isn’t true. No?
walto,
I think we can, because compatibilist free will only requires that our decisions originate within us, not that their ultimate causes lie within us.
Libertarians won’t accept that, of course, because they insist that free will is real only if we are the ultimate authors of our actions. I don’t think we can be, which is why I think libertarian free will is an incoherent idea.
Not as I use that term, no. I think I’d say that geocentrism is itself a relic of the (an older, discarded) scientific image.
I think we can, because compatibilist free will only requires that our decisions originate within us, not that their ultimate causes lie within us.
I guess I don’t know what you mean by “originate.” Maybe we could just say that the decisions being within us is enough? Or maybe ENOUGH of the causes of our actions being within us?–because sometimes the causes are both in and out and we have to divvy up to decide whether an act is voluntary?