John & Belle Have A Blog

Fair is foul, and foul is fair

This will be another wonky analytic philosophy post about imaginative resistance. (Here is the last such, with links to others yet further back.) Today I cranked out the first half of an essay - too hastily, although I've been taking notes for the longest time, and the first bit is recycled. It is a bit precious and scholastic, as befits its dignity as an academic paper. It lacks an ending, so don't expect one. But if there's anything fundamentally defective about these feet and torso, it would be helpful if I were informed before screwing on the head. Brian Weatherson, in particular, is instructed to leave critical comments. (And I am sorry that, in the course of the post, I have been compelled to note before god and google that the fiction he has penned of late is hardly of the first water, aesthetically. Brian is a fine fellow. But there you are. Plato dear, truth dearer, yadda, yadda, yadda.)

And I've realized I don't really understand Gendler's paper. That is, it seems to me she should conclude her paper by saying, sensibly: 'so there's really no such thing after all. Just a big misunderstanding.' But she doesn't. I really should email her and request clarification, but haven't yet.

Proceed at own risk. Geek-talk between us academic wonks.

If you build it

I see that Randy Barnett is a little annoyed at us. This is very understandable, as he has gone to the trouble of writing books, and we haven't gone to the trouble of so much as reading them. Sometimes a snark is a boojums, perhaps. So I went to the law library to check out Barnett's The Structure of Liberty. (Noticed NUS does not have a copy of his new book, Restoring the Lost Constitution. I'm official philosophy department library rep, so on my list of books to order it goes. Could do with a little more libertarianism around the place. Perhaps prof. Barnett will accept this proxy purchase as a token of our good will. We at John & Belle do like our Volokh Conspiracy with coffee every morning.)

Would you state the difficulty?

My title recalls a passage from Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno, which I quote for no particular reason except that it is vaguely relevant and terribly funny:

“Do you really find no logical difficulty in regarding Nature as a process of involution, passing from definite coherent homogeneity to indefinite incoherent heterogeneity?” . . . “No physical difficulty,” she confidently replied: “But I haven’t studied Logic much. Would you state the difficulty?” “Well,” said Arthur, “do you accept it as self-evident? Is it as obvious, for instance, as that ‘things that are greater than the same are greater than one another?” “To my mind,” she modestly replied, “it seems quite as obvious. I grasp both truths by intuition. But other minds may need some logical – I forget the technical terms.”. . . .

Brian Weatherson has taken up the topic of 'imaginative resistance' once again. I wrote some rather rambling posts (here and here) on the subject myself sometime back. Let's see if I can be brief for a change. [UPDATE: nope.]

Tamar Gendler states the problem like so: "The puzzle of imaginative resistance: the puzzle of explaining our comparative difficulty in imagining fictional worlds that we take to be morally deviant." (Confused, or you want the reference? Go click on my earlier posts above.)

Weatherson more or less takes for granted there is a difficulty. He attempts to generalize to a difficulty concerning imagining 'assymetric compound impossibilities.' Be that as it may be - and it may be everything I am about to say is consistent with what Brian says - it seems worth noting that it isn't all that hard to imagine morally deviant fictional worlds. Yet no one seems to offering example. So let's.

Mostly Harmless

Can't let Belle have all the fun. Here's a passage from the "Reason" libertarian roundtable that sort of sums it up for me. Randy Barnett:

Of course, to some extent this debate is moot. If we ever get to a libertarian world in which these are the only forms of coercion still existing beyond self-defense, etc., we will know a lot more about how liberty actually works and how to achieve it politically than we do now. We will be in a much better position to decide whether to abolish these practices along with all the other vestiges of the welfare state. I should live so long.

Why then debate them now? For the same reason Epstein has been harping on these points for decades. We debate the form of the ideal end stage as part of the debate over whether to take any further steps in its direction.

Barnett clearly wishes to duck the 'and a pony' objection. Let it be so. His explanation of why he finds these sorts of debates interesting and worthwhile is still not fully credible.

For 'tis the sport to have the enginer / Hoist with his owne petar

Kevin Drum shakes his head in wonder at Tom Smith's capacity to plumb the depths of the liberal psyche. I feel the same, for I myself have lately been the subject one of these displays of seemingly effortless insight. Mr. Smith is kind enough to deduce, on the basis of my statement that, "I myself don't subscribe to the 'conservatives are dumb' line that some favor," that I am - Mr. Smith is not completely clear about what I am, but it looks like I'm a pretty bad guy, so I'll just quote:

[UPDATE: Prof. Smith responds. I don't know why I called him Mr. Smith, rather than just Smith. Maybe, being a Matrix fan, I just like the sound. But I didn't call him prof. because I didn't realize he was one.]

Plato's heaven manufactures more metaphysical mystery than it can consume locally

Ditto for Kant's Kingdom of Ends. We'll come back to that.

Do you believe in miasma?

Matthew Yglesias doesn’t approve of Christian libertarian virtue ethics.

I heard one guy briefly discuss his "Christian libertarian" outlook in response to Amy Sullivan's Christian liberalism. Basically, he said, all this stuff liberals (and particularly religious liberals) say about the moral imperative to aid the poor, etc. is all quite true. That's why he thinks he has a duty to live his life virtuously by giving time, money, etc. to helping others. When he does this, he does a good deed personally, and provides help to a second person. If, however, he were to try and force me to give my money to help someone else, that would not be a virtuous act on his part or on mine. Christian compassion is all well and good, but using the state as a surrogate Robin Hood is not.

Matt finds this “roughly the reverse of correct”:

Cultivating personal virtue, whether in myself or in others, is irrelevant. The key is to help those in need by hook or by crook and, indeed, in the ideal set-up everyone would just act selfishly and the mechanisms of the state would ensure that our selfish behavior winds up serving the general interest.

This causes my brain to think a thought related to my old paper on moral dilemmas, which I happened to link two nights ago, so it's been on my mind. Let’s approach by vaulting from the pole of ethical heroism to its antipode, naughtiness. This will be a wonky, philosophy-type post, such as I usually do not write. Click ‘continue reading’ at own peril.

This whole conservatives in academia thing

Andrew Stuttaford writes at The Corner, regarding Duke philosophy prof. Robert Brandon's rise to notoriety, due to the late conservatives in academe kerfuffle:

What really is nonsense, however, is this claim:

“Typically, we know nothing about the candidates' politics until after they are hired.”

Oh come on, professor. In your discipline, a quick glance at a candidate’s publications, fields of interest and so on will be more than enough to reveal his or her political leanings. You don’t need to look for a bumper sticker.

I've been sort of meaning to weigh in on this issue myself. Tonight let me make a start by duly noting that the notion that you can discern a philosophy job candidate's politics from his/her CV is nonsense.

Let me soften that blow a little. I know what the man is thinking and, although it is utterly mistaken, it is not wholly mad. Thinks Stuttaford: there must be dozens of little clues - little whiffs of partisanship, wafting up from the page for the orthodoxy sniffers to delectate or disapprove. But just look at Brian Weatherson's paper blog. Or poke around via Dave Chalmer's page. Look at Kai von Fintel's semantics web page. Logic, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology and metaphysics. Here's your meat and potatoes, and it is not politicized. (It isn't like all Dems favor weak supervenience of mental events on physical events, or something.) You do history? That tells me precious little. And the analytic/continental split, such as it is, is not a partisan split. (Maybe continental philosophers are somewhat likelier to be lefties? But I'm not even confident about that.) It's even largely true of papers in political philosophy that you can't tell the politics of the author from the title - or even the abstract - because of the high degree of abstraction, and the likelihood that the author is critically examining - hypothetically taking up - a view he/she does not hold. You write "A critique of Rawls' Justice as Fairness". That tells me squat about your politics. You could be a libertarian, an Oakeshottian conservative, a Rawlsian liberal or a communist. What about papers in ethics? You're a Kantian? You're a utilitarian? You're a virtue ethicist? I cannot say who will get your vote. (I've published a fairly long paper on ethics - on moral dilemmas. I'll bet you couldn't guess my politics by reading the whole damn thing, let alone the abstract.)

That said, philosophy departments tend to skew left - I dunno, maybe 80/20 on average? (I just made that number up.) Given the manifest difficulty of hiring in philosophy in a partisan fashion; and given - I honestly believe this - the implausibility of the notion that many hiring committees really are diverting power to long-range sensors to pick up whatever faint hints there may be; well, I'd guess that the left-right ratio in philosophy departments gives you a pretty good baseline for how humanities departments look, politically, when there is damn near zero political bias in hiring.

So what's the explanation for the leftward skew? I myself don't subscribe to the 'conservatives are dumb' line that some favor. I think there are powerful cultural determinants, and ... things related to what Kieran said; and, well, that would be a very long post if I wrote it up. I actually believe that conservatives are often discriminated against in humanities departments, and that this is a bad thing - though it is not high on my personal list of wrongs that need righting. But these numbers that some find truly shocking need the following frame around them. In a truly politically-blind hiring procedure (if that is even an intelligible notion) I think lefties would still be pushing 80%. So 90%+ lefty dominance does not suggest to me the sort of vicious, total exclusion that some are alleging, or are on the verge of alleging, or are convincingly pretending to allege even though they may really know better.

UPDATE: I need to respond to some of these comments. No time just right now, but real quick ...

The violent and the voluntary

Brian Weatherson links to this brilliant Guardian piece: the 'never trust anyone over ten' set rate classic rock tunes. It's amazing, you know, the range of bizarrely precise, non-musical associations music can evoke. From, "It’s making me think about doing bad things like putting snowballs down my sister’s back," to "It's too pointy" to "It sounds like when your wee goes back up." And the intensity of it. Why, just this morning I was playing The Eels, "Daisies of the Galaxy", and Zoë spontaneously burst into tears, "It's tooooo saaaaad"; so I had to click quickly over to The Fifth Dimension, "Carpet Man", which perked her right up. (Zoë is heavy into the Fifth Dimension.)

Shift into University of Chicago mode:

All of which puts me in mind of a passage from Plato's "Republic", with which I trust you are all intimately familiar, but I'll just quote it anyway:

I don’t know the musical modes, I said, but leave me the one that would best evoke the tone of voice of a brave man in the heat of battle or violent action – also, of one whose strength fails, who is soon to suffer wounds, death or terrible misfortune but remains steadfast and stalwart in the face of fate. Leave me as well another mode, evoking a man engaged in peaceful, harmonious, voluntary action. Let the man be engaged in persuasion, asking a favor of a god through prayer or a mortal through teaching and exhortation; or, on the other hand, let him be attending to the teachings and persuasive urgings of one who would change his mind. And in all this let him act as he should, not arrogantly but reasonably and moderately, accepting of all consequences. Leave me these two modes, the violent and the voluntary, which best imitate the tone of voice of brave and moderate men, in success or misfortune. (399b)

I taught this once and parodied it in some such terms as these: leave me the musical mode that best evokes the feeling of having left your car keys somewhere unusual and forgettable, yet convinced that you have left them in this precise spot before; and also the mode that best evokes the feeling that you have written a philosophy paper in which there is an error you have papered over with a passage from John McDowell's Mind and World. In which McDowell simply makes the same error.

The comment box is open: what classic rock tunes meet Socrates' specifications? The violent and the voluntary.

One or two things

Brian Weatherson muses:

More generally, "three or four" is an interesting phrase. It would be decidedly odd to say "Three or five jobs interest me", although one could imagine circumstances under which that is true. It's not that "three or four" is an idiom, but there is something odd about the construction.

By extremely odd coincidence, just a few days ago I descended into this very pit of perplexity whilst reading page 1 of chapter 1 of Patrick O'Brian's H.M.S. Surprise. (Which you can see here.) Please consider the oddity of the sentence: "Some of the civilians had a stuffed and noncommital air, and one or two of the sailors remained staring at the sheets of blotting-paper laid out before them." O'Brian is quite a good writer, but this is just plain sloppy. We humans can count up to five sailors at a glance last time I studied cognitive science. (Then again, where is it written that the narrator is using a human eye and brain to gather data, rather than some other organ of limited omniscience?) The coffin nail, surely, is that iron laws of anaphora would seem to demand that the sentence conclude: 'laid out before him or them.'

One or two points Brian makes have a certain twiddly intriguingness. But I've had two or three beers. Click on one or two of these links, if you like.