Internal Reasons That Cannot Motivate

Bernard Williams begins an influential essay [1] by defining internalism about reasons as follows:

Internalism   There is a reason for person A to φ only if A has some motive which would be furthered by his or her φ-ing.

Plenty of philosophers have found something intuitive about this idea, but there has also been no shortage of disagreement over the exact sense in which A must “have some motive” which φ-ing must further. In the introduction to a recent anthology of literature on internal reasons, Kieran Setiya [2] seems to think that the most attractive versions of internalism are those which satisfy the explanatory constraint. Bernard Williams gives it best:

EX   If something can be a reason for action, then it can be someone’s reason for acting on a particular occasion, and then it would figure in an explanation of that action. (p. 106)

There are at least a few reasons for adhering to EX. You might think that there is a unified account of explanatory and normative reasons, and that EX is a link in that unification. You might think that what it is for A to have a motivation which would be furthered by A’s φ-ing is just for there to be some p such that A is disposed to make p A‘s motivating reason for φ-ing. If you’re inclined to believe either of these, you’ll probably think with Setiya that the broadest plausible version of internalism is IR:

IR   The fact that p is a reason for A to φ only if A is capable of being moved to φ by the belief that p. (p. 4)

However, I don’t see how EX could possibly be true, as I don’t think it can overcome the kinds of cases which motivate so-called “advice models” of reasons. I argue that an agent can have a reason for action which, qua reason, could not possibly motivate them. This undercuts the motivation for thinking that IR is the correct way of understanding internalism.

Understanding Ecumenical Expressivism

Call a metaethical view a hybrid if it allows that moral sentences sometimes express cognitive states of mind and sometimes non-cognitive states of mind. Then one kind of hybrid view is an ecumenical one, which requires that moral sentences always express both cognitive and non-cognitive states of mind. I’ve been interested in hybrid theories for a while now, so it’s been a pleausure to find Michael Ridge’s ecumenical expressivism (EE), which is  subtle and deftly defended. However, I’ve got some reservations about how it’s cashed out.

The basic idea of EE is that the non-cognitive attitudes expressed by a moral sentence have priority in that the cognitive beliefs which are also expressed do not determine the truth-conditions of the sentence. To color things in a bit, it’s much as if we thought that speakers had hazy necessary and sufficient conditions in mind for “good”, but we also stipulate that the meaning of “good” doesn’t commit a speaker to using that term whenever those conditions are satisfied (hence preserving the Open Question intuition).

Now here’s a first development of EE, which Ridge calls Plain Vanilla EE (concentrating just on the notion of a reason for action):

(PV)   “There is a moral reason to X” expresses (a) an attitude of approval of a certain kind toward actions insofar as they have a certain property and (b) a belief that X has that property. (Ridge, 2006)

Note that in PV Ridge intends there to be a unique property I approve of in all my assertions about reasons, though this property may be disjunctive. Ridge (2006) argues that this feature of PV excludes particularists and pluralists, so he suggests the following dispositional account instead:

(D)   “There is a moral reason to X” expresses (a) an attitude of approval of a certain kind towards actions insofar as they would garner approval from a certain sort of subject and (b) a belief that X would garner approval from that sort of subject (Ridge, 2006),

where it’s understood that the subject in mind is of the ideal observer variety.

But the curious thing about (D) is that Ridge (2006, n. 47) denies a very natural interpretation: that (D) is just (PV) coupled with a first-order normative view, i.e. that in talk of moral reasons I’m expressing a certain pro-attitude toward actions with the property that the ideal observer would approve of them (as well as a belief that this particular action has that property). One problem Ridge raises for this view is that it doesn’t really avoid the problem of monism above. But there are others as well. For instance, while dispositional theories might say something important about certain normative concepts, I doubt they can plausibly be folded into the contents of the associated states of mind. 

Consider the attitude of belief towards a proposition P. Suppose I believe P; if I were to learn that my epistemically-ideal self does not believe P, it seems I would ought to drop belief in P. But that normative relationship does not imply that my belief was all along about what my epistemically-ideal self believed. The content of my belief was just P. And if it wasn’t just P, then the content of my belief must be even less accessible to me than I thought, and presumably can’t play the kind of role in guiding conduct that many expressivists think states of mind do play.

Now suppose I have a pro-attitude toward all actions which are φ. Once again, were I to learn that my normatively-ideal self wouldn’t approve of all φ-ing, it seems I would ought to modify my attitude. But I don’t think this means that my pro-attitude was all along towards what my normatively-ideal self approved of. I just approved of actions that were φ – or so it seems. Once again, if I’m in the dark about my own states of mind, how can states of mind guide my actions?

I’m skipping a bunch of steps here, but I want to suggest another reason for agreeing with Ridge on how not to interpret (D): that it might make the notion of a moral state of mind so anti-transparent that it (a) strains credulity and (b) may not do a lot of the simple work in explaining behavior expressivists want it to. But, that done, I’m not sure how to interpret it in a way that avoids these problems. It can’t be that moral sentences express the ideal advisor’s approving state of mind. I am not my ideal advisor, and I cannot express another’s state of mind unless I am acting, or perhaps quoting that individual. But in those contexts I generally don’t mean to endorse those attitudes. Everyone finds Hitler reprehensible, but no one finds actors who play Hitler reprehensible. (At least, not for that reason.)

At this point I wonder whether the solution is to drop the uniqueness requirement in (D). Why not think that some moral sentences express approval of property φ and others of property ψ, for ψ ≠ φ?

Bibliography

Ridge, M. (2006). “Ecumenical Expressivism: Finessing Frege”. Ethics 116, pp. 302-336.

Ridge, M. (2007). “Ecumenical Expressivism: The Best of Both Worlds?”. Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol. 2, pp. 51-76.

Jumpstarting the Blog: Objecting to Sider’s Objectivism

Given that it’s been over a year since we’ve had any posts, I’ve decided to try to jumpstart the blog again. Here goes…

While reading Sider’s Writing the Book of the World, I noticed a strange dialectic circularity. One of Sider’s main theses is that structure is objective: it’s ‘out there in the world’ in some metaphysically heavy sense. But, Sider then goes on to give an account of objectivity in terms of structure. Given this circularity, it’s possible to find a reductio.

Sider claims that structure is not subjective (i.e. structure is objective). I take this to mean that sentences about structure are not subjective. Without loss of generality, let’s take the following sentence about structure:

(S): ‘being negatively charged’ is structural

Sider wants to claim:

(O): (S) is not subjective

He goes on to give the following account of subjectivity: “A sentence is subjective…if and only if it’s truth-value depends on which of a range of equally joint carving candidates is meant by some term in the sentence, where the candidate that we in fact mean was selected in a way that is not arbitrary, but reflects something important about us, such as our values” (59). Combining this account of subjectivity with (O) gives us:

(O’): It’s not the case that the truth value of (S) depends on which of a range of equally joint carving candidates is meant by some term in (S), where the candidate that we in fact mean was selected in a way that is not arbitrary, but reflects something important about us, such as our values.

This roughly amounts to saying that in order for facts about structure to be objective, they must ‘carve at the joints’ — in other words, facts about structure must themselves be structural. But that’s a condition that far too easy to meet. For instance, take a simple expressivist view of structure. Roughly, to say ”being negatively charged’ is structural’ is simply to express some mental attitude A towards ‘being negatively charged’. I think we can all agree that, pretheoretically, this is a subjective account of structure. But, if Sider’s account of subjectivity is correct, an expressivist account of structure is consistent with the claim that (S) is objective. Accepting (O’) amounts to expressing attitude A towards ‘is structural’; this is all we need to accept (O’), because the terms in (S) do not have ‘a range of equally joint carving candidates’ — by our own lights, ‘structural’ is joint-carving. So, either Sider must reject his account of objectivity or accept that expressivism about structure is consistent with structure being objective. I take it that he will choose the former.

Thoughts?

David Lewis + Kit Fine = Weirdness

David Lewis thinks that properties are just sets of possible individuals. SEP: “Lewis argues that for any set of actual and possible objects (fundamental or not), there is a property, namely the property an object has just in case it is a member of the given set.”

Kit Fine thinks that essence is an asymmetrical relationship. Specifically, it is an asymmetrical relationship between a set and its constituent(s). Although Socrates is essential to the singleton set {Socrates}, the set is not essential to Socrates. “It is no part of the essence of Socrates to belong to the singleton.” (“Essence and Modality“)

Suppose you accept both. Then no individual has any property essentially. After all, a property is a set, and it is not part of the essence of any individual to belong to any set. Moreover, every property has its bearers essentially. After all, constituents of a set are essential to that set. On the face of it, that is pretty weird.

Ways to get out: (1) Most obviously, don’t put Lewis and Fine together. (2) Clarify what Fine says, so that the essence relationships hold for some sets but not others. (3) Clarify what Lewis says, so properties aren’t just sets, but in some sense correspond to them. Both (2) and (3) look ad hoc to me, so perhaps the weirdness can count as an incompatibility result between Lewis and Fine?

Too Many Dans or Just One?

Though it wasn’t quite the University of Woolloomooloo, in July 2010 at the Australian National University, I, Dan Singer, was honored to join the company of Dan Greco, Dan Korman, Dan Marshall, Dan(iel) Nolan, and Dan Stoljar.

Courtesy of Thomas Whitney

There sure were a lot of people with the same name … or so you might think …

1. Dan Singer and Dan Nolan have the same name.
2. Names are rigid resignators, a la Kripke (1970/80).
3. So, Dan Singer’s name and Dan Nolan’s name pick out the same thing in all possible worlds.
4. So, Dan Singer’s name actually picks out the same thing that Dan Nolan’s name picks out.
5. So, Dan Singer is Dan Nolan.

Either 4 is wrong or I know a lot more about metaphysics than I thought I did.  It seems pretty obvious to me that there is an equivocation on “name” between 1 and the rest of the premises.  The issue is that I can’t figure out a sense of “name” that makes sense of 1.  Here’s why: The natural move is to say that the names of 1 are individuated by their syntactic properties (i.e. the letters and the sounds associated with them).  Then admit two senses of “name”.  But if this is right, we’d expect the analogous move to apply to words in general, i.e. that there’d be the two analogous senses of “word”.  But I’m inclined to deny that there is any sense of “word” such that financial institutions and sides of rivers can be picked out by the same word.  Am I just being stubborn on this point?  Are there other viable solutions here?

Experimental Metasurvey

[cross-posted at: 
http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2011/05/experimental-philosophy-metasurvey-results.html
. This is a summary of the results of a meta-survey about experimental philosophy conducted by myself (Billy Dunaway), Anna Edmonds and David Manley.]

Some current experimental philosophy is devoted to conducting surveys among non-philosophers to gather information about their dispositions to apply philosophically relevant concepts. And those who report the results of these surveys sometimes make claims about how surprising these results are to philosophers. (Here is a representative quote: “[W]e think that a critical method for figuring out how human beings think is to go out and actually run systematic empirical studies… Again and again, these investigations have challenged familiar assumptions, showing that people do not actually think about these issues in anything like the way philosophers had assumed.” (Nichols and Knobe, “An Experimental Philosophy Manifesto” in Experimental Philosophy, ed. Knobe and Nichols, p. 3)) But whether an empirical result is surprising to a group of people is itself an empirical question, and so we designed a survey of our own to test this.

Our hypothesis was that that philosophers would, for the most part, correctly guess what kind of response non-philosophers would give. This was confirmed by our study. We selected several published surveys of folk subjects, each of which had been claimed in the literature to have surprising results. The surveys we chose cover a variety of philosophical topics: causation, intentionality, and moral responsibility. We asked philosophers to suppose that ordinary, non-philosophical folk are presented with the relevant cases, and to say how they thought the folk would respond. (Subjects were firmly instructed to opt out of a given question if they had prior familiarity with experimental research that might bias their answer.) For each question, at least 77% (and up to 95.8%) of philosophers correctly predicted how the non-philosophers would respond.

A brief overview of the questions from the experimental philosophy literature we asked about and the results from our study are printed below. For a more detailed presentation of the questions we asked (which include verbaitim descriptions of the vignettes from the original studies conducted by experimental philosophers) and the results, go here:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dunaway/MetaSurvey.html

Genre and Folk Evaluations of Art

How do our moral evaluations of artworks relate to our aesthetic evaluations? Put it another way: do moral defects cause or constitute aesthetic defects, cause or constitute aesthetic virtues, or are they aesthetically irrelevant? This is the question that we (Shen-yi Liao and Jonathan Phillips) attempted to answer in recent studies. Our findings suggest that there is no univocal answer to the question. Instead, the influence that moral evaluations have on aesthetic evaluations of artworks partly depends on genre.

Let’s run through one study (N = 50; between-participants). In one condition, participants listened to a 30-second clip of a Taiwanese folk ballad song.

Then they were shown two sets of “translated lyrics”, and asked which set of lyrics would make the song more appealing.

“Show You the Facts” (Moral)
Men say stupid things like
“Women are not worth anything
I use them and then I toss them”
They don’t treat women like they should
Let me show you the facts, get it right:
Women are equals in every respect

“Game Over” (Immoral)
Another woman dropped down
I wanted it, I got it, and I’m gone
There’s another one around the corner
I’ll do the same thing with her
You know they want more from me
But the game’s over when I score

In the other condition, participants listened to a 30-second clip of a Taiwanese hip hop song.

Then they were shown the same two sets of “translated lyrics” as before, and asked which set of lyrics would make the song more appealing.