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Archives for March 2018

Life is But a Game

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There are numerous varieties of skepticism as defined by the extent of the doubt. A relatively mild case might involve doubts about metaphysical claims. A truly rabid skeptic would doubt everything—perhaps even their own existence.

While many philosophers have attempted to defeat the dragon of skepticism, these attempts seem to have failed. This is hardly surprising—skepticism seems to be unbreakable. The arguments for this have an ancient pedigree and can be distilled to two simple arguments.

The first addresses the possibility of justifying a belief and thus attacks the standard view that knowledge requires a belief that is true and justified. If a standard of justification is presented, then there is the question of what justifies the standard. The same question can be raised into infinity and beyond. If no justification is offered, then there is no reason to accept the standard.

A second stock argument for skepticism is that any reasonable argument given in support of knowledge can be countered by an equally reasonable argument against knowledge.  Some folks, such as Chisholm[i], have contended that we should assume we have knowledge and begin epistemology from that point. However, this seems to have all the merit of grabbing the first-place trophy without competing.

Like most philosophers, I tend to follow David Hume[ii] in my everyday life: my skepticism is nowhere to be seen when I am filling out my taxes, suffering through a committee meeting, or eating pizza. However, like a useless friend, skepticism shows up again when it is no longer needed. As such, it would be nice if skepticism could be defeated or a least rendered irrelevant.

John Locke[iii] took a rather interesting approach to skepticism. While, like Descartes, he seemed to want to find certainty, he settled for a practical approach to the matter. After acknowledging that our faculties cannot provide certainty, he asserted that what matters to us is the ability of our faculties to aid us in our preservation and wellbeing.

Jokingly, he challenges “the dreamer” to put his hand into a furnace—this would, he claims, wake him “to a certainty greater than he could wish.” More seriously, Locke contends that our concern is not with achieving epistemic certainty. Rather, what matters is our happiness and misery. While Locke can be accused of taking an easy out rather than engaging the skeptic in a battle of certainty or death, his approach is certainly appealing. Since I happened to think through this essay while running with an injured back, I will use that to illustrate my view on this matter.

When I set out to run, my back began hurting immediately. While I could not be certain that I had a body containing a spine and nerves, no amount of skeptical doubt could make the pain go away. In terms of the pain it did not matter whether I was a pained brain in a vat, being deceived by a demon, stuck in the matrix or really a pained brain in a runner on the road. In either scenario, I would be in pain and that is what mattered to me.

As I ran, it seemed I was covering distance in a three-dimensional world. Since I live in Florida (or what seems to be Florida) I was soon feeling quite warm and had that Florida feel. I could eventually feel my thirst and some fatigue. Once again, it did not seem to matter if this was real—whether I was really bathed in sweat or a brain bathed in some sort of nutrient fluid, the run was the same to me. As I ran, I took pains to avoid cars, trees and debris. While I did not know if they were real, I have experience what it is like to be hit by a car (or as if I was hit by a car) and experience involving falling (or the appearance of falling). In terms of navigating through my run, it did not matter at whether it was real. If I knew for sure that my run was really real for real that would not change the run. If I somehow knew it was all an illusion that I could never escape, I would still run for the sake of the experience of running. As such, while skepticism cannot be defeated, this simply does not matter to how one lives their life.

My view that skepticism does not matter might seem a bit odd. After all, when the hero (or victim) of a story or movie finds out that they are in a virtual reality what usually follows is disillusionment and despair. Intuitively, the idea is that it does matter whether the skeptic is right because if what I do is not real, it simply does not matter.

One way to support this view is to use the illustration of a dream: if I dream that I have won a gold medal in the Olympics, this means nothing—I have not really won the medal and it would be bizarre of me to brag to people about winning that medal in a dream. They would refute my prideful boasting with the obvious counter: you did not win for real.

As another illustration, imagine that I am on a run and see a baby being swept away in a flooded stream. I rush into the water and save the baby, only to find out that it is just a plastic doll. While I could be said to have acted bravely, if I claimed to have saved a child, I would be dismissed for the obvious reason that I had saved some plastic. Retrieving the plastic might make me an eco-hero, but it would not make me a hero—because the “baby” was not real.

The same would hold true in the case of skepticism in general: if my life is not real, everything I do is like that Olympic dream and all my “heroic” deeds are just like rescuing that piece of plastic. So, the skeptic must be defeated if life is to have any meaning. This, then shows that it does matter whether skepticism is right. While this objection is indeed formidable, there is a plausible reply and I now turn to it.

My view of what matters has been shaped by years of gaming—both tabletop (BattleTech, Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, etc.) and video (Zork, Doom, Starcraft, Warcraft, Destiny, Halo, etc.). When I am pretending to be a paladin, the Master Chief, or a Guardian, I know I am doing something that is not really real for real. However, the game can be pleasant and enjoyable or unpleasant and awful. This enjoyment or suffering is just as real as enjoyment or suffering caused by what is supposed to be really real for real—though I believe it is but a game. Knowing that I am just playing games does not diminish the value of the experience, although I certainly concede that what I do in a game does not make me really heroic or really a winner in the “real” world.

If I somehow knew that I was trapped in an inescapable virtual reality, then I would simply keep playing the game—that is what I do. Plus, it would get boring (and probably awful) if I stopped playing. If I somehow knew that I was in the really real world for real, I would obviously just keep doing what I am doing.

Since I might be trapped in just such a virtual reality or I might not, the rational thing to do is keep playing as if it is really real for real. After all, that is the most sensible option in either case in this dilemma. As such, the reality or lack thereof of the world I think I occupy does not matter. As such, the skeptic need not be refuted in order for life to be meaningful. After all, gaming can be quite meaningful. The play, as they say, is the thing.

 

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[i] http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/ewatkins/Phil107S13/Chisholm-Phil107.pdf

[ii] https://www.dascolihum.com/uploads/CH_12_Hume_Scepticism_in_Regard_to_the_Senses.pdf

[iii] https://www.iep.utm.edu/locke-kn/

Partisanship & Principles: Stormy Daniels & Monica Lewinsky

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When Gallup polled Americans about their views on adultery in 2013, 91% of the respondents said that it was morally wrong. While surveys are inductive generalizations and thus can always get things wrong, it is reasonable to believe that most Americans think adultery is wrong. Interestingly, this moral view shifts under the influence of partisan politics.

When Bill Clinton’s sex scandal was in the news, the overwhelming majority of Republicans regarded his behavior as immoral. While many of the surveyed Democrats also regarded Clinton’s actions as wrong, many also did not. Not surprisingly, this reversed in the case of the revelations of Trump’s adultery: Democrats overwhelmingly condemn it as immoral while the Republicans are underwhelming in their condemnation.

This is, of course, consistent with J.S. Mill’s discussion of liberty. As he noted, people tend to think that liberties should be allowed or restricted based on their likes and dislikes rather than on the basis of a consistent principle. The same applies to moral assessment along partisan lines: people tend to assess their side far more favorably than the other side, even when the moral offenses are the same. As noted above, while Americans overwhelming claim to condemn adultery, this condemnation is dampened considerably by the influence of partisanship.

From a logical standpoint, this behavior seems to be irrational. After all, if an action is wrong, then the fact that it is done by a Democrat or Republican would not change the ethics of the action. This is because party affiliation does not seem to be a morally relevant difference in determining the morality of an action, such as committing murder, theft or adultery. To illustrate, if you were told that Bill committed adultery or murder, it would be odd to need to inquire into his party affiliation before deciding whether the murder or adultery is immoral.

This sort of partisan effect on morality is not limited to moral assessment of actions and people, but also impacts people’s avowed principles. Research by Pope and Barber show that people are generally quite willing to shift their views in ways inconsistent with their professed ideology, provided that the shift is motived by party affiliation. This certainly helps account for what Mill noted, namely that most people do not have a view of liberty based on principle but based on their likes and dislikes of the moment. So, for example, most Republicans usually profess that the liberty of local rule is both correct and a conservative principle while condemning the imposition of state or federal power as an evil of the Democrats. But, they easily shift their view on local rule when the party takes a position on a specific issue, such as local gun or fracking laws. Most Democrats presumably do the same—shifting their views with the party, even when these views do not match liberal ideology.

On the one hand, some might praise this flexibility and contend that it could be the basis for compromise. After all, if party members can so easily shift between positions irrespective of ideology, then it would seem they could shift to the same position and reach an agreement.

On the other hand, there is the concern that such flexibility does more to show a lack of principles than a willingness to compromise. This is supported by the fact that the Democrats and Republicans are often unlikely to compromise because they tend to simply follow their own party and oppose the other party. Put crudely, while such tribal loyalty makes the Democrats and Republicans morally flexible within their parties, it also interferes with compromise on matters they would otherwise agree on. As such, even if the Republican party adopted a liberal view on, for example, tariffs, then the Democrats are likely to oppose it because it would now be a Republican position. This sort of tribalism is especially concerning since Americans tend to have considerable agreement on issues when they are considered apart from party affiliation. As noted above, the vast majority of Americans condemn adultery—except when it becomes a partisan issue. The same also seems true of such things as gun control. As such, the country is engaged in many utterly needless and senseless conflicts over tribalism when there is, in fact, considerable agreement. The challenge, then, is getting Americans to be less ruled by tribalism and able to agree on what they actually already agree on. Perhaps this can start by an agreement that adultery is bad, whether it is Bill Clinton or Donald Trump having the affair.

 

 

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Sex Workers & #MeToo

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NPR’s A1 did a show on sex workers and how their apparent exclusion from the #MeToo movement. While the show covered a variety of issues, one key topic was the attitude commonly expressed towards sex-workers, namely that they do not really matter in terms of their rights. Since this is clearly a moral issue, it is well worth considering.

One obvious problem with addressing any philosophical issue related to sex is that people tend to approach this topic irrationally. There is also, to put it mildly, considerable mental derangement in the United States on this subject. Despite these challenges, I will endeavor to address the issues in this essay in a rational and reasonable manner. To avoid people being drawn into the red herring of legal issues, I will focus on legal sex work, such as that done by porn actors.

As noted above, sex workers tend to face the attitude that because they work in the sex industry, they are thus excluded from having certain basic rights. This, as would be imagined, is primarily grounded in the view that sex workers are an inferior sort of person and thus not entitled to the same rights and treatment as the “better sort of people.” As put by Cardi B, “So what? You’re a ho. It don’t matter.” Misogyny is also obviously a factor that can come into play here as well.

The easy and obvious reply to the view that sex-workers do not matter is that the burden of proof rests on those who claim that they do not matter. After all, they are still people and are thus entitled to the same basic moral rights that people get simply by being people. To show that this is not the case, it would need to be shown that by being engaged in sex-work, they thus give up these basic rights. While there are clear biases against sex-workers, there do not seem to be any compelling logical reasons that their choice of profession strips them of their basic moral rights.

One area where sex-workers are seen as not having the same rights as others is the view that because they are sex workers, they do not have the right to complain about being sexually harassed or being expected to provide sex when they do not wish to do so. While it might seem odd for a sex-worker to have the right to complain about being sexually harassed or having to engage in unwanted sex, there are at least two reasons this is just as legitimate for them as any other worker. The first is that profession does not matter when it comes to the person’s rights. Just because a person is a sex-worker, it does not follow that they cannot be sexually harassed. To use an analogy, just because a person is a football player who engages in a violent sport for a living it does not follow that they cannot be assaulted. Likewise, for sex-workers.

The second is that the sex-worker’s work is sex, so their being sexually harassed or being pushed to engage in sex when they do not wish is compelled labor. If the director of a hospital pushed their doctors into giving her free medical services during their off hours, then that would be rightly regarded as unacceptable. Or if the manager of a fast food restaurant pressed their workers into cooking meals for them for free, then that would also be rightly regarded as wrong. The same also applies to sex workers: they have the same right as any other worker to refuse to engage in compelled labor.

Another area of concern for sex-workers is their working conditions, broadly construed. This includes the acts they are expected to engage in, how they are treated, what language is used, and so on. While some might think that a sex-worker should expect to simply work with whatever conditions they are subjected to, this same attitude is not applied to other workers—at least by people with basic moral decency. As such, sex-workers should have the right to reject the conditions they wish to reject, without fear of retaliation. Obviously, this can have legitimate career consequences, but that

The easy and obvious objection to this view is to argue that sex-workers’ work is, by definition, sex. As such, they must expect to engage in sex. To use an analogy, if a person is working as an engineer, then they must expect to engage in engineering when they are at work. If they do not want to engineer things, then they need to find another line of work. Likewise, for sex-workers. While this reply does have some intuitive appeal, it fails.

While a sex-worker must expect that their work in sex involves sex, that does not entail that they must accept any conditions in their field. To use an analogy, a professional boxer must expect that they will be punched. As such, if a boxer does not want to get punched, then they need to find another line of work. However, if they agree to a normal match and when they arrive their opponent is carrying a knife and the ring has been replaced with a pool of pudding, then they have every right to refuse the fight. Also, if they enter into an agreement to fight a normal match, and then things are changed on them during the fight, they would have every right to refuse to continue. So, just as agreeing to box does not entail that a boxer must accept whatever violence might be done to them, agreeing to sex-work does not entail that the sex-worker agrees to everything that might be done to them.

Some might think that worrying about how sex-workers are treated is foolish or a waste of time, but that view is exactly the problem. To think that sex-workers somehow have their moral status as people degraded or taken away is to engage in a moral error—they are just as entitled to basic moral rights as anyone else who works for a living, even if some people find their line of work morally wrong.

 

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Can Trees Think?

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While science fiction abounds with intelligent trees and fantasy is replete with such beings as dryads, the subject of trees thinking has generally been something used to mock the absurd pretentious of philosophers. However, this is starting to change: scientists are starting to seriously consider that trees have mental states, such as feelings. This lends the discussion of thinking trees a cloak of credibility that I will now avail myself of.

From a philosophical standpoint, the key issue is whether a tree can have a mind. Unfortunately, philosophers do not agree on the nature of the mind. As such, I will consider some of the main theories of mind and whether they would allow for thinking trees.

There are a variety of philosophic theories which attempt to explain the mind. Some of the better known ones include identity theory, substance dualism, property dualism and functionalism. The implications of each will be considered in turn.

Identity theory is a materialist theory of mind—the mind is composed of matter. Identity theorists assert each mental state is identical to a state of the central nervous system. So, the mind is the central nervous system and its states. Given identity theory, trees cannot think. This is because they lack a central nervous system.

Substance dualists claim that reality contains two fundamental types of entities: material entities and immaterial entities. On this view, which was embraced by Descartes, the mind is an immaterial substance which has a causal relation with its body. This mysterious relation enables the mind to control and receive information from the body and allows the body to affect the mind. On this view, a tree could have a mind—a tree having an incorporeal mind connected to its material shell is no more mysterious that a human having an incorporeal mind. It is also no less mysterious.

A second type of dualism is property dualism: the mind and body are not distinct substances. Instead, the mind is made up of mental properties that are not identical with physical properties. For example, the property of being the feeling of sadness could not be reduced to a physical property of the brain, such as the firing of certain neurons. So, the mind and body are distinct, but not different substances.

This sort of dualism would also allow for trees to think. This is because the theory does not require the physical properties to be composed of the same properties that make up the human nervous system—all that would be needed is the right sort of mental and physical properties. Again, that trees could have this metaphysical makeup is no stranger than the belief that humans do.

The last view to be considered is functionalism. There are many varieties of functionalism, but they all have a common foundation: mental states are defined in functional terms. A functional definition of a mental state defines that mental state in terms of its role/function in a mental system of inputs and outputs. To illustrate, a mental state, such as being in pain, is defined in terms of the causal relations it has to external influences on the body, other mental states, and bodily behavior.

Functionalism is usually taken to be a materialist view of the mind because the systems are supposed to be physical systems. While identity theory and functionalism are both materialist theories, they differ in a critical way. For identity theorists, each mental state, such as being sad, is identical to a physical state, such as the state of neurons in a chunk of the brain. For two mental states to be the same, the physical states must be identical. So, if mental states are states of neurons in a certain part of the human nervous system then anything that lacks this sort of biological nervous cannot have a mind.

The functionalist has a rather different view: a mental state, such as feeling sad, is not defined in terms of a physical state. Instead, while functionalists believe each mental state is a physical state, for two mental states to be the same they need only be functionally identical.  So, if mental states are defined functionally, then anything that is capable of exhibiting these functions can have a mind. While trees obviously lack the brain and nervous system of a human, they could have physical systems that function in analogous ways. To use an obviously analogy, different computer hardware can run the same programs. For example, this essay can be read using a browser on a wide variety of hardware platforms including an Android phone, an Xbox One and an old Macintosh with a Motorola chip.

While the issue of whether trees do think or not remains, this essay has addressed the issue of whether they could have minds within the context of modern philosophy of mind. If dualism, property dualism or functionalism is correct, then trees could have minds and think. However, if identity theory is correct, then trees cannot think.

 

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Executing Drug Dealers

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As America struggles with a massive opioid addiction crisis, President Trump has proposed executing certain types of drug dealers as a possible solution. While his proposal drew applauses, it seems unlikely that this will become a legal reality. However, it does raise interesting philosophical and practical questions.

From a purely practical standpoint, the key question is whether executing drug dealers would have an impact on the opioid epidemic. It will, of course, be assumed that the people running the pharmaceutical companies manufacturing and distributing opioids will not be executed as part of this plan.

From an intuitive standpoint, it does seem that execution could have an impact on the epidemic. As a great philosopher once said, “if you kill someone for doing something, they won’t do that again.” As such, killing drug dealers would reduce the number of dealers and thus could reduce the extent of the opioid epidemic. This would obviously require killing new dealers as they stepped in to replace the old, but this would presumably be a problem in the logistics of killing.

There is also the deterrence factor. On the face of it, it seems sensible to believe that the threat of execution would deter people from dealing opioids. This assumes that drug dealers are rational actors and their calculation of the risks and benefits will guide them to stop dealing. Or that they would be so scared of being executed that they would stop (or never start). It seems reasonable to think that people fear death and would thus try to avoid it. As such, executing drug dealers could prove to be effective.

However, it is not without cause that some are critical of philosophers for relying on reason and not considering the empirical data. In the case of the death penalty, there is extensive data on its effectiveness. The evidence is fairly solid that it is not an effective deterrence, which runs contrary to what intuitions about death and threats of death would suggest. Naturally, it could be argued that it would deter drug dealers, but international data suggests otherwise. As such, it seems unlikely that this is a problem that we can kill our way out of. I now turn to the moral issue.

On the face of it, the moral issue has already been settled by the practical issue: if the death penalty would not deter drug dealers, then the deterrence argument could not be used to morally justify executing them. However, there is still the classic retribution argument: killing drug dealers would be morally justified as retribution for their crimes.

On the one hand, this does have some appeal. The opioid epidemic has resulted in a significant increase in accidental deaths, so it is reasonable to lay some of the blame for some those deaths on the drug dealers. After all, if a business (in this case a drug business) knowingly provides a dangerous product to customers, then they are morally accountable for at least some of the harms. This is true in the case of legal products, such as tobacco and prescription opioids, and clearly true in the case of products that are illegal because they are harmful, such as illegally trafficked opioids.

While the drug dealers certainly do deserve to be punished for distributing such a harmful product, the punishment must still be subject to the principle of proportionality. That is, the punishment must be warranted by the severity of the harm done in the crime.

A drug dealer that intentionally sold contaminated products that killed users would be rather directly responsible for those deaths. The same would apply to a company that knowingly sold fatally flawed legal products that killed people, such as defective cars. Obviously, the criminal would compound their misdeed legally by engaging in a criminal activity, but from the moral perspective, the legality would not be the primary concern. Rather, it would be causing of death that mattered. It would be these sorts of cases that would most plausibly merit execution, on the principle that the punishment (death) should match the crime (causing death). However, selling someone a fatally defective product is still distinct from killing them—there is not as direct a causal link in the death. As such, executing those who knowingly sell defective products that will cause death would still seem morally problematic.

In most cases drug dealers do not intentionally sell defective products they know will kill their customers. They do, after all, want repeat business. But, drugs are almost always harmful to some degree and, as such, this puts them into the moral category of harmful things. The harms are quite numerous, ranging from health issues to death by overdose. This category is, of course, also occupied by many legal products, such as alcohol and tobacco. As such, the question is whether it is morally acceptable to execute someone for providing a harmful product that can potentially kill the user. Once again, the legal issue is distinct from the moral—after all, all opioids could be made completely legal tomorrow, but this would not change the basic moral issue. The easy and obvious answer is that while knowingly peddling harmful products is morally wrong, the level of wrongness does not merit execution. As such, killing drug dealers simply for dealing drugs would be no righter than killing the owners of Heineken or R.J. Reynolds for distributing legal products that cause significant health issues and contribute to the ruin of many lives.

 

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Aristotle & Assessment

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While assessment has become embedded deeply into the body of education, when it first appeared I suspected it would be yet another fading fad of the academy. I recall, through the haze of the years, thinking of a modification of the old saying and coming up with “those who can do; those who can’t teach; those who can’t teach assess.” Back in those days, many professors regarded assessment as something of a scam: clever assessment “experts” getting well-paying positions or consulting gigs and then foisting the grunt work onto professors. The wilier (or lazy) professors responded by simply making up assessment data and noted that the effectiveness of their fictional data was identical to that of the real data. That is, not effective at all. I, like many professors, found myself in brave new world of assessment.

I eventually got dragged deep into the system of assessment. At the start, it fell on me to complete the assessment work for Philosophy & Religion. In 2004 I was given an eternal assignment to the General Education Assessment Committee (GEAC) and then made a co-chair. This resulted in me being on all the assessment committees. As such, I now have some experience with assessment.

On the one hand, I do retain much of my early skepticism of assessment. Much of it still seems to be at worst a scam and at best a waste of time. There is clearly a lot of money to be made in this area, money that is bleed away from other areas. Assessment also eats into the time of the faculty, time that could be used for teaching or research. There are also good questions about the effectiveness of assessment—even assessment that is done properly and sincerely.

On the other hand, my reading of Aristotle and experience as a teacher has led me to accept that there is merit in assessment that is properly done. The good and proper purpose of assessment is to evaluate the effectiveness of education in classes and in the institution as a whole. This is entirely reasonable—as Aristotle noted in his Nicomachean Ethics, if one aims to become a morally good person, then one needs an index of progress. In the case of virtue, Aristotle used pain and pleasure as his measure: if you feel increasing pleasure at doing good and increasing pain at doing wrong, then you are making progress. Using this indirect measure (to use an assessment term) enables one to assess their progress (or lack thereof). In the case of education, there must also be assessment. Otherwise one does not know how well they are doing at the task of educating the students.

One mantra among the assessment elite is “grades are not assessment.” While this has been challenged, I heard this being repeated as an article of faith by experts as recently as this month (March, 2018). To be fair, there is some truth to this mantra. One obvious concern is that grades often include factors irrelevant to properly assessing the quality of work. Professors often grant extra credit that is not based on merit and such things as attendance and participation can go into grades. For example, my students can get +5 points added on to a paper grade if they turn the paper in by the +5 bonus deadline. If these grades were blindly used for assessment, they would be off. This, I agree, is a factor than can make some grades less useful or even useless for assessment. However, it is easy enough to adjust for many of these situations. For example, knowing that the +5 bonus papers have a +5 bonus would allow them to be easily assessed using the grades. What I do, of course, is assess the papers using the proper assessment rubrics—to avoid getting another lecture on why grades are not assessment.

Another obvious concern is that professors tend to be inconsistent in their grading. For example, the way I grade a paper is different from that of a colleague so that a paper I grade as an 84 might be graded as a 79 or a 90 by a colleague. Part of this can be due to a professor being a harder or easier grader; part of it can also be due to using different standards. While this is a concern, the same problem can obviously apply to assessment. Different assessors will be harder or easier in their assessment. While having a standard rubric can help offset this, the subjectivity remains whether it is a grade or assessment. Another approach is to have multiple faculty assess the same artifacts. While a good idea, schools are rarely willing to compensate faculty for this extra work—and assessing entire classes of work takes long hours.

There are also the concerns that some faculty are bad at properly grading work and hence their grades are not legitimate assessments. While it is true that some faculty are bad at grading, this is not a problem with grading but a problem with the faculty. Addressing the shortcoming would fix two problems: bad grades and assessment. There is also the fact that people can be just as bad at assessment, especially when people are assigned to assess work outside of their field. For example, an English professor might be asked to assess philosophy papers for critical thinking or an engineering professor might be asked to review biology lab reports for written communication.

In closing, much of assessment is (to be honest) ineffective and a waste of resources. But, it is beloved by many state legislatures and is part of the business model that now rules higher education. As such, it is not a fading fad. The challenge, then, is to turn assessment into something effective and useful—something I have been endeavoring to do.

 

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