Tag: value theory

TAing Intro Philosophy Pt. 3

Previous Posts: Week 1, Week 2.
In week 3, the class turned to argumentation. This again left me a fair bit of freedom, since the skill is broad and will be useful for the whole quarter (and in general). On the other hand, I had to run this section six times (instead of my usual three) since two people were out of town, so I made it something fairly repeatable, and by the sixth time through it was pretty good.
The first half of the section was spent reviewing Deductive Arguments. Students were instructed to on a sheet of paper, write down a true, simple sentence, such as”40 million people live in California.” Then they constructed  sound arguments for them. E.g.
  1.     If the census data is reliable, then 40 million people live in California.
  2.     The census data is reliable.
  3.     So, 40 million peple live in California.
They wrote them, paired up and shared with each other, and then a few people shared with the whole group. In each section some people seemed to have trouble, so after a few minutes, I revealed the general form
  1. If X then Y.
  2. X.
  3. So, Y.

Then, I explain, the task is just to put in an appropriate X and Y. Understanding seemed nearly universal at this point, so I moved on to constructing valid arguments for false conclusions. I had them each write a false, simple sentence, such as “Skittles are made of chocolate.” Then I had them each construct a valid argument for it. E.g.

  1.     If all round candies are made of chocolate, then Skittles are made of chocolate
  2.     All round candies are made of chocolate.
  3.     So, Skittles are made of chocolate.

They notice that 2 is false, but the argument itself is valid. Because 2 is false, the argument is unsound. They repeat the pairing and sharing exercise, this time a bit faster since the routine is established, and then we moved on since understanding seemed solid.

One of the readings was Linda Zagzebski’s “Caring and Epistemic Demands”. Of the several they had to read, it was short, simple, yet interesting and applicable. Here I made fuller use of my ability to put in quotes from the texts. For instance:
Caring about many things is not only natural, but is part of any life we would care to live. But if we care about anything, we must care about having true beliefs in the domains we care about. (69)
I ask, what does this mean? Is this true? Then I have them each write down something they care about, followed by the beliefs they must care about being true as a result. For instance, I offer,  I care about my students understanding this material. As a result, I care about truly believing what LZ’s argument is, where and when section meets, etc.
I’ll call a belief that is governed by a concern for truth a conscientiously held belief. (69)
I asked what two demands does conscientious belief places on us. Admittedly, I overestimated how intuitive the argument is, and nobody quite figured out what I was going for. By section three or four I had learned to quickly move on to the next quote:
First, there is a demand to be conscientious in whatever beliefs we have in that domain, and second, there is a demand to acquire conscientious beliefs in the domain. (69)
Here I asked them to add to their papers what actions they have to take as a result about caring about certain beliefs of their being true. For instance, since I care about my belief in the time/location of class being true, I checked the university’s online portal for class information. It’s rather obvious stuff, but it forces students to get into the mindset of breaking things down into simpler parts.
Around this point I had still half the time left, but the next part of the argument turned to a generality, and used harder grammar in the process. That is, LZ argues that we all, in virtue of caring about things, care about being good informants to others. And to argue for this, she uses language difficult enough to put a paragraph on the wall and ask students to spend ten to fifteen minutes working together to break it down into an argument (in the style of the first half of the section) . This proved to be a very fruitful exercise. The quote:
Among the things we care about is caring that others care about what we care about, which means that we care about their having true beliefs about what we care about, and we also care to some extent about what they care about. So we care about being good informants to others. We want the ability to convey true beliefs and not false beliefs to others. (71)
I broke it down, in color:
  1. We care that others care about what we care about.
  2. If we care that others care about what we care about, then we care about their having true beliefs about what we care about, and we also care to some extent about what they care about.
  3. If we care about their having true beliefs about what we care about, and we also care to some extent about what they care about, then we care about being good informants to others.
  4. So, we care about being good informants to others.

Download slides.

How sure you need to be depends on what you’re doing (Or: As usual I think social media discussions are missing a more fundamental disagreement, this time about a SCOTUS nominee)

Brett Kavanaugh is being considered for a position on the Supreme Court of the United States. He’s also been accused of sexual assault. This information has been all over social media lately, and there seems to be, as there often is, a fundamental disagreement behind the arguments. On the surface, we see basic support versus opposition of the man. There are some straightforward statements of believe in Kavanaugh or else the women who have accused him, mostly prominently including Dr. Christine Ford. There is also quite the range of more general claims. For instance, some people are saying that you should always believe someone accusing someone of sexual assault. Others are taking the opportunity to speak up about what they take to be a worrying trend of false accusations. But these generalities are harder to grasp, so let’s look at the particular case at hand.

In this particular case, besides the basic disagreement about facts, there’s a prior disagreement about how sure either way you need to be to claim to believe in one side or the other. Or, more straightforwardly, to take one side or the other. What actions or consequences are at stake on a belief one way or the other change how easily we’ll take a side or make a belief claim.

A common way philosophers model sure-ness is by using what are called “credence levels,” numbers between zero and one that represent how confident one is in the truth of a statement.  I’m probably 99% sure it’s not going to snow in Phoenix tomorrow morning. Maybe even more sure than that. So I have a credence level of .99 for that. I think I have three decks of cards in my closet, but I’m not super sure. I wouldn’t even bet on even odds. My credence level is maybe .3.

These credence levels are also nifty for expressing how sure of something to be to act a certain way. For instance, in the US, a guilty verdict requires “proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” This is often expressed as requiring a credence level for the guilt of .99 or higher. But in a civil case, the standard is just believing the verdict is more likely than not. That is, .51 or higher. You can pick all kinds of cases. If you really hate rain, then maybe you only need a .1 credence level that it’ll rain tomorrow to bring an umbrella.

But before you can pick a requisite credence level in a given belief for a given action, some sort of goal is required. Or multiple goals. We have competing values that push us in either direction. I don’t want to get all wet walking to work, but I also don’t want to needlessly carry around an umbrella. I don’t care that much about staying dry, but carrying an extra umbrella annoys me a fair bit. So I need probably a .9 credence level that it’s going to rain. We want to have a functioning justice system, but we really don’t want to punish the innocent. Better a hundred guilty people go free than one innocent person get locked up. So we need that credence level of .99.

The difference in rhetoric of Kavanaugh’s supporters and detractors is revealing of entirely different focuses. The opposition is generally mostly focused on keeping a rapist out of the Supreme Court. For that end, you don’t seem to need to be all that sure. You might even, as I do, flip the proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt around to proof of innocence beyond a reasonable doubt. The cost of being wrong is much higher if he’s guilty. Meanwhile even if he’s innocent, a replacement can easily be found. Given the plethora of options and importance of the position, we should be really, really sure that we get someone really, really good. If there’s any reason at all to suspect a Supreme court nominee is a rapist, then we should just move on to the next option. So my opposition to Kavanaugh in this regard only requires a credence level higher than .01 for his guilt. (It is in fact higher than that, though I haven’t spent a lot of time fine-tuning my position. The credence level is far enough above .01 that not much farther thought is needed.)

On the other side, Kavanaugh’s supporters focus on a few things. Shouting “innocent until proven guilty” is one route, suggesting a demand for a .99 credence level for his guilt being needed to deny him the job. But digging a bit into it, there’s more of a focus on some notion of justice. The actual consequences are secondary to the importance of doing the right thing. This would move the bar probably at least to .51. Either Kavanaugh is deserving of the position or he is undeserving, but that fact has nothing to do with the actual results of him getting it. The question comes more down to “Is he a good guy?” as a quasi-factual question about his character.

Some do appeal to some notion of “ruining his life” being a bad thing, to which the standard response is that not being on the Supreme Court does not constitute one’s life being ruined. The standard response to that is that his reputation is being destroyed. I’d be really surprised if anyone hinged their judgement of him on how the Senate votes. The damage, deserved or not, is done. But this does bring up the presence of various actions to take or beliefs to have based on the credence level of a single statement. For example, while I only need a .01 credence level that someone is a rapist to say that they shouldn’t be a major government official, I do still think .99 is morally required to incarcerate someone. Given the former is the context usually at hand, .01 is the bar used to determine what to say I believe. In most of our lives, we have other contexts. If a friend shared a story about having been assaulted, my role would be to comfort, be confided in, or something along those lines. So the bar is pretty low for me to believe. Even if the evidence I have would seem a little suspicious, I don’t need to be very sure at all. On the other hand, if someone I don’t know accused a close friend, I’d probably need more convincing. (It’s a bit harder to pin this case down, though. I have plenty of evidence already built up leading me to believe that my friend wouldn’t do such a thing. So maybe I wouldn’t need that high a credence level in my friend’s guilt, but I would need a lot of evidence to get the credence level even to a medium level.)

These middle cases suggest to me that there’s some reasonable room for needing different amounts of convincing given different conditions. Whether you’re seeking to find someone good enough for a Supreme Court position, send someone to prison, support a friend, or achieve some notion of justice will determine how sure you need to be to take one position rather than the other. And how sure you need to be can vary from one extreme to the other. Given this fact, perhaps the prior questions need a bit more attention. We have the facts as they’ve been presented. Throwing them back and forth appears to be rather unconvincing. But maybe the sureness levels can be moved. If I think about it, I’m not super sure that .01 is the right bar to deny someone a spot on the Supreme Court. I could probably be convinced that I need to be more or less sure. Some people may also be able to be convinced on what the important values at hand are. This is often the route I take. I don’t think that I can convince people to believe Ford if they don’t already. I do think that I can convince a few people that the bar for being on the Supreme Court ought to be really high and so even if you think that Kavanaugh is probably innocent, you should still support moving on to someone who isn’t even accused.

There’s some back and forth from there. Usually the first defense is that a really corrupt political group might just get people to block everyone Trump appoints. I have responses to it, mostly appealing to the growing incredulity and subsequent increased scrutiny. But the point is that the badness of a rapist on the Court is much harder to deny, the badness is much harder to counterbalance, and even rather strong supporters of Kavanaugh are likely to have some non-zero level of suspicion. So this is the argument to have. It has another nice feature, too: The open acknowledgement of different contexts and aims requiring different levels of credence allows us to be more clearly supportive of people who have been assaulted and are in the current discussion being made afraid of coming forward for fear of widespread disbelief. It also satisfies some of the worries about the potency of false accusations. Sexual assault, among other crimes against others, is unfortunately often very difficult to be super sure either way what happened. But, we do at least have a fair bit of middle ground to work with. You need to be pretty damn sure someone did something wrong to lock them up. You don’t need to be so sure to just not give them a bunch of power. And you don’t need to be so sure to give someone some support when they’ve been hurt.

A better-or-worse ethical space

Often when I see ethical categories they fall into a rather neat binary of good and evil, right and wrong, moral and immoral, or some other duo. (I’ll just use “good” and “bad” from here on out for simplicity.) Sometimes the binary will be complicated by expanding into obligatory, permissible, forbidden, and superogatory. (That is, stuff you must do, stuff you can do, stuff you must not do, and stuff that’s really nice if you do but you don’t have to.)

You can also combine these two for eight total options (or, more likely seven actual options—I doubt there’s sense to be made of bad superogatory actions). The good obligatory actions and bad forbidden options are obvious. But then we also have necessary evils, that is, actions that are bad, but because every other option is worse, they are nonetheless the only acceptable option. And we have some actions that may be considered good at least in some significant aspects but because of some overriding factor are forbidden. For instance, one might believe that stealing to serve the needy is good but the law overrides the goodness. (One may argue that the overriding factor just makes it bad, but there is at least the conceptual space for the argument to be had.)

We also often see some understanding of things being more or less good or evil. While one might condemn both jaywalking and murder, murder is worse.  This is already apparent in the above description of a necessary evil being the least bad option.

An element I don’t see played with as often is the location or even presence of the middle line, so to speak. Some theories even look bad because the dividing line between good and bad. For instance, if one takes a consequentialist theory to say that the only good action is that which maximizes whatever the good consequences are and every other action is bad, then the theory seems pretty ridiculous. There are plenty of good choices that could have been better. That particular ridiculousness is found only in the misplaced middle line. Perhaps the line is somewhere else, with a multitude of good and bad choices to make.

Or, more radically, maybe there is no middle line. Maybe for any two choices one can be better or worse (or of the same valence) as the other. This seems particularly intuitive to me because the goodness and badness of choices, outcomes, and everything else does seem to be relative to some sort of standpoint. Any neutral line seems like little more than arbitrary, especially if inaction is properly recognized as itself a choice.

The other aspect of value space I think we need to question more is its boundedness. I’ve encountered some people who think that there is a cap on how good things can be and everything short of that is badness. The opposite can exist as well, and I’m somewhat inclined to it: there’s an absolute value minimum, and everything is building goodness on top of that. Of course, there’s also space for having both maximum and minimum value as well as value being unbounded on either side. What domain is being modeled will make a difference. For finite choices, obviously there are bounds. For total states of affairs, the bounds are much less obvious, if they exist at all.

Freedom of speech does not end at the First Amendment

Someone said or did something controversial. Then, private companies decided not to let the person use their platforms anymore. (Or they deleted a few posts or whatever.) Not too long after, the person (or their followers) make an appeal to freedom of speech. Something like “[Company] is violating [person]’s free speech!” with “and that’s bad” implicit at the end. In response, people who don’t like what was said come around with the revelation that the First Amendment to the US Constitution only applies to the US government. Private companies (and other countries) have the legal right to silence people or disallow them from using their platform.

Yes, that is true. The First Amendment, for example, does not say anything about the legal status of me deleting your comments on my blog, for example. Or WordPress deleting my blog posts on their website. Yet, in either case, freedom of speech is being violated. This is possible because free speech (or “speech that is neither restricted nor silenced”) is something we can understanding independently of the First Amendment. That the First Amendment makes reference to freedom of speech should make this rather apparent.

There are of course several positions one could hold regarding free speech:

  1. Free speech is good without exception: This is often the value touted by people trying to defend the right to say anything, anytime, anywhere. An equivalent phrasing is “All restrictions on speech are bad.” If we want to be less extreme, there are two ways to make exceptions:
  2. Everyone’s having access to free speech is good without exception: This makes room for private entities and such to restrict speech so long as the option to speak freely exists somewhere. Often this value is working in the background when people who are silenced or restricted are told they can go speak freely in their own space, or in a publicly owned space.
  3. Free speech is good with some content exception: That is, it’s bad to restrict speech based on location, time, speaker, etc., but there are some things that ought not be said, and silencing speech of that kind is fine or even good. Of course, with this value we get the further question of what speech is bad enough to restrict.

Unfortunately often, people talk past each other because they don’t agree on this initial question. Or, someone will disingenuously take up one of these for the sake of not having to defend her side in a later question.

I take it most people, at least in the US, have a position that is a combination of 2 and 3. But, if you endorse position 3, then you have to make material distinctions. You cannot just say “Well, everyone has the right (in the sense of “should be allowed”—not necessarily legal right) to say anything,” but rather “In general, everyone has the right to say anything, and this instance is not exception because….” But if the instance is particularly appalling, then what comes after “because” can be rather unpleasant. For instance, to defend someone spouting white supremacist nonsense, you have to defend that nonsense in particular against the reasons why it ought to be silenced. That’s usually going to look like you think the nonsense is not egregious and harmful falsehoods. So, appealing to position 1 instead is very tempting.

One caveat worth noting is that a good does not have to be completely overriding. For example, someone might actually hold position 1  but also believe that the good of free speech can be easily overcome. Maybe it is good to let anyone say anything, but keeping the peace is a greater good, so when the two clash, keeping the peace wins. Thus, positions 2 and 3 are not just position 1 plus recognizing sometimes there are greater goods. Rather, someone who holds position 2 actually does not think it’s particularly good to have setting-unrestricted speech. And someone who holds position 3 thinks that there are some things that are not at all good to allow people to say. (Again, the allowing can be done by a government or someone else. And if allowing it is bad, one might believe that everyone has a duty to silence it.)

I, for instance, hold position 3. In general, people being able to speak without restriction is good. But, there are some things that are bad enough that they aren’t worth allowing their expression. Perhaps it’s not the role of the state to make the restrictions, but the speech should somehow be disallowed. Yet, I also think there are some goods that can outweigh unrestricted speech. Sometimes privacy, for example, demands some speech restrictions. I shouldn’t be allowed to barge into your personal space to speak, and I shouldn’t be allowed to reveal all of your personal information to the world.

The other caveat worth mentioning is that these three positions are not exhaustive. The most obvious omissions are positions that don’t hold freedom of speech as a value at all. To address these positions requires stepping further back to investigate whether freedom of speech, in general, is good. But, in the original context I described, both sides agree that freedom of speech has some positive value.

We can pose a series of questions, then, to isolate disagreement and allow for more fruitful conversation:

  1. Is freedom of speech, at least in general, good? (If yes, go to 2)
  2. Are there exceptions to its goodness that include the situation at hand? (If no, go to 3)
  3. Is there some other good that outweighs the goodness of freedom of speech in te situation at hand?

 

Another attempt to bring out the two most critical points in the abortion debate

A month or two ago Ireland made a stride towards legal abortion, and the US made a stride in the opposite direction. Abortion is always on the political table though. I imagine a perfect pregnancy-prevention mechanism would cool the flames quite a bit, but even then, people can change their minds, and the question will emerge of whether that should be allowed. But as usual, this most recent flare-up of abortion debates involved a lot of people talking past each other other. I think, though, there is ultimately one argument for the prohibition of abortion that is good if it works. There are plenty of reasons one might want to prohibit abortion, such as controlling women, liking the appearance of pregnancy, and any other number of bad reasons, but they’re all pretty bad. So, here’s the one possibly good argument:

  1. Killing people ought to be illegal.
  2. Unborn humans are people.
  3. So, killing unborn humans ought to be illegal.

This seems to be the most intuitive and defensible argument for making abortion illegal. A lot of people seem to endorse it, sometimes implicitly. There’s a need in the popular discourse, though, to be more explicit about the two premises in play, because oftentimes people will defend 2 against an attack on 1, or vice-versa.

Getting a little more clear on the premises

Neither premise is super clear, as is the cost of making them short. The first, the killing people ought to be illegal, has plenty of exceptions. Asking why killing people ought to be illegal seems a little strange. Being wrong to kill seems like it might just be a feature of being a person rather than some other kind of thing. So wrong, in fact, that any code of law that doesn’t forbid killing people seems fundamentally broken. So, to spare us a lengthy dive into a theory of moral personhood, I will assume that there’s an agreement that in general people’s lives should be protected by law.

The generality rather than universality of the statement is important, though. There are exceptional cases in which we defend the legal killing of persons. Self-defense is the most obvious. If someone is threatening your life, you’re allowed to kill the person threatening your life. There are perhaps other crimes that might make killing someone defensible. If someone is threatening the lives of others, if someone is severely assaulting you, and so on. War and law enforcement create further situations. Sometimes there is no choice but to kill some set of people, and the choice is merely which set. Accidents that aren’t the result of negligence also usually land on the legal side. My point here is just that we ought to have many legal exceptions for killing people. This is of course an opening that someone defending the legality of abortion against this argument can and often does use.

In the phrasing of the second premise I use “people” in a possibly technical way. While we might have been able to dodge questions of moral personhood for the first premise, they are the heart of the second premise. By “person” (and derivatively, “people”), I just mean a being with moral personhood. That still sounds a bit circular, but getting a technical definition down is a whole subsubfield of philosophy on its own. Examples can give us a good enough idea, though! Normal adult humans are the archetype of people. If a theory of personhood excludes them, it’s probably defective. Inanimate objects are not people. You can violate the autonomy of a rock all you want, and nothing wrong is being done. Then there are edge cases. Is C-3PO from Star Wars a person? Maybe. Are higher apes, or maybe dolphins people? Again, maybe. Within the realm of humanity, we can ask the same of fetuses and maybe infants, too. Once we pin down what gives adult humans their moral worth as people, we can turn to the unborn and ask if they are people.

Arguments pointing to the human DNA and beating heart of the unborn are usually along these lines. They are implicitly placing the bar for personhood at humanity. Nobody defending abortion thinks that the unborn humans are not living beings, and nobody denies that they are human beings. They very obviously are. What one might deny is whether they are persons. Often someone backing this sort of argument against abortion takes for free that all humans are morally relevant persons and then goes in to prove the much easier point that unborn humans are human. But this is just the root of much misunderstanding.

The common arguments against each premise and setting up the right questions

With the first premise, that killing people ought to be illegal, usually the premise is not denied outright so much as the line pushed. Almost nobody thinks every case of killing a person ought to be illegal, so the argument here is on where to draw the line. So, let us take up the case of whether the line ought to be before or after abortion. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that personhood begins at conception. Given this, can someone kill a person inside them?

A well-treaded argument asks us to consider waking up in the hospital attached to a famous violinist. He brings a lot of happiness to the world with his playing, but is sick in such a way that he requires using your body for life support for awhile. Let’s say he’ll be hindering you for about nine months. If you pull the plug, he dies. The defender of abortion here draws on the intuition that you ought to have the legal right to pull the plug anyway.

The argument can be strengthened or weakened. Someone not yet convinced might think that the state should totally use someone as life support if they aren’t doing much with their lives but the person in need of support is. This person might also think mandatory blood donations are a good idea. In that case, we can reduce the status of the violinist until he contributes as much to society as the unborn do: nothing.

On the other hand, someone arguing against abortion might not be satisfied yet. Usually the first next objection is that the aborter usually has something to do with the creation of the unborn person, so while normally you have a right to not let someone use you as life support, you do if you willingly engaged in an act with the potential to create that situation. (We might note that this makes the argument against the legality of abortion no longer work against cases of rape.) So let’s alter the example to fit this. How far we want to push it is another question. Perhaps the right analog is someone who you accidentally hit with your car. You weren’t trying to, but a danger of getting behind the wheel is hitting someone. If they require the surrender of your bodily autonomy, ought the law demand it? (Ideally, this case uses you as life support for nine months. If you don’t have enough imagination, maybe ask what the law should demand if they need blood. Or a kidney.) Alternatively, perhaps the right analog is someone who you aimed your car at and hit. You knew the likely consequences of your actions. But the fun of smashing someone with your car seemed worth it. Are you bound to use your body to aid the person you hit?

I’m not sure yet where to move from there, but those seem to be the two questions at hand, in addition to the question of which one pregnancy is more like. For the argument presented for the prohibition of abortion to work, whichever one abortion turns out to be like has to also be answered that, yes, the government should step in and force you to surrender your bodily autonomy. You cannot pull the plug on/deny an organ donation to someone you hit with your car.

Onto the second premise, then. Are unborn humans people? If they’re not, then the door is open to killing them. They might still have some rights. Dogs aren’t people, but you can’t torture them. Nonetheless, their being people is pretty significant to this argument.

Now, we don’t need perfectly refined necessary and sufficient conditions of personhood to answer this question. All we need is something sufficient that unborn humans have or something necessary that they do not. So, someone making the argument against abortion will try to put forward a condition that anything that fulfills the conditions is a person. And someone defending abortion will put forward a condition that is required to qualify as a person.

On the arguing against the legality of abortion side, being alive tends to come up far more than it should. Lots of things are alive. The fly I just swatted was alive, but it was not a person. Next up is human. From here we see all sorts of conditions thrown around, like a beating heart or looking like a human in ultrasounds, or just being alive while having human DNA. Being alive while having human DNA isn’t enough since removed limbs are not people. Okay, so being alive, having human DNA, and either being able to survive independently or on a path of development toward independent survival. That seems to be the stable position, but then the question emerges: Why is that the line for moral personhood? What about having human DNA and either being biologically independent or on the path to such makes someone morally relevant as a person? This is what the person arguing against abortion needs to be more clear about.

Cue the defender of legal abortion. There are some conditions thrown out that turn out to be rather silly. “It’s just a clump of cells” is common, but it doesn’t work. As noted in the previous paragraph, the clump of cells is special in that it can develop. Given the right resources, it will develop into a human. Now if you want to push for the absurdity of allowing speculation into the future with some resources just assumed, you might argue that an egg or sperm will develop into a person given the right resources. But clearly eggs and sperm are not people, so that line cannot work. There’s room to go back and forth on this, but I think looking for a biological answer to personhood is a mistake.

Remember when giving examples of possible persons, beings like C-3PO came up. When we ask why someone is morally relevant as a person, the features that really matter are not a certain biology, but certain capacities or abilities. The ability to enter into interpersonal relationships, intelligence, language or concept use, moral understanding. These are all possible criteria. Unborn humans seem to fail all of them. Of course, each of these also has some dangers. If an adult human is incapable of being in an interpersonal relationship, is she not a person? Is sufficiently low intelligence grounds for denying personhood? Is someone completely amoral not a person? Perhaps. Is any of these things are the things that really matter to personhood and some humans fail to meet the condition(s), then maybe some exceptional humans are not persons.

The other side to this is the developmental disjunct. Maybe an unborn human is unable to enter a relationship, well below whatever an intelligence criterion might be, and amoral. But, the likelihood of developing into such a being is high, given adequate resources. And we can assume some level of resources because if you starve anyone, they will degrade and likely lose these conditions. There might be something question-begging about saying only the present individual counts, unless some further reason is given. One might look to people who are comatose or asleep. They fail the conditions, except maybe being in relationships. Yet going to sleep doesn’t make you not a person. But the defender of abortion can appeal to someone sleeping having a personal history. Though maybe going into a permanent coma does deprive one of personhood. Or dying. Are dead people still people? If they are, then being alive isn’t even a requirement. It doesn’t seem entirely absurd, though, to say that dead people are people. In which case maybe the personal history requirement is just the crucial requirement for personhood that captures all the cases we would otherwise want but excludes the unborn.

The problem here is just that now we’re stuck asking what a personal history is. My working hypothesis for a condition for personhood is something like personal history, and I take the lines to be drawn not by strict logical requirements, but rather by a general understanding of what a story of someone’s life looks like. Now, maybe “I know it when I see it” isn’t all that helpful in figuring out whether unborn humans are people. It may just leave us right where we started. But, as I said, just finding a necessary condition for personhood is enough, even if it’s not the most restrictive true necessary condition. That is, maybe the real bar is higher, but if we find a bar that’s not too high but the unborn still cannot meet, then the case against the second premise is made. So maybe a condition like this: someone is a person only if she is able to engage in interpersonal relationships or can use language or can use concepts or is intelligent or has moral understanding. Surely that’s too low a bar for personhood, but it doesn’t seem too high in any important regard, and unborn humans don’t clear it.

To summarize:

  • The best argument to make abortion illegal has two premises, each of which must be argued separately.
  • The first question  is whether, even if unborn humans are people, abortion is one of the exceptions in which we think killing people ought to be legal. The argument against the legality of abortion demands that abortion is not justifiable.
  • The second question  is whether unborn humans are people. While a complete definition of personhood is not needed, the argument against the legality of abortion demands that unborn humans do fall within the boundaries of personhood.

Some media is better than other media

This article is excellent. I don’t agree with everything in it, but I think it has two very good and important points:
 
1. If you give up on things like value judgements and expertise, you lose almost all ground you have to say much with oomph. Some things are better than some other things. Aesthetically as well as politically. Media created with nuance and skill is better than kitsch and propaganda. People who spend a lot of time studying a thing do tend to know better than most about that thing. “Elitism” has become such a bad word that we’ve forgotten that it is better to be better.
 
2. Texts (and other works, but usually texts) that are difficult and slow, but rewarding, to work through have benefits over fast and easy media. Simple messages are easy to use as rallying cries. For good or bad causes. If something takes no thought to consume, then it usually won’t get much thought in its consumption. This isn’t to say that writing in such a way that is needlessly difficult to understand is a good thing, but works that reward reading slowly and rereading and analysizing are better.
 
 

What does it say that people have no idea how to argue for caring about other people?

Certain debates prompt a certain article from the Huffington Post to make the rounds again. Sometimes it’s gun control; sometimes it’s health care. At this point people have mostly given up on linking to the article, preferring to state the headline and move on:

See the source image

Usually this comes from liberal spheres. On the occasion a leftist voice can be heard, sometimes a leftist will deal with the bad taste of Huffington Post long enough to repeat the line. That both of these types tend to respect expertise (or at least pay lip service to it) makes their lack of turning to the relevant experts rather odd. There are, after all, plenty of people who do know how to explain why you should care about other people. (Or, at least they claim to. I don’t think they succeed. But I’d certainly turn to at least a few moral philosophers before declaring the project impossible.)

Perhaps there’s really two problems one of these people might be having. The first is a lack of understanding why they should care about other people themselves. They find it basically aesthetically pleasing when people show care for other people, but their taste is fundamental. They cannot explain it to someone else because they have no explanation besides claiming it as a brute fact.

The second is a pedagogical problem. Even if Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals does successfully explain why you should care about other people, whipping a copy of it at a nearby person who doesn’t care about other people is unlikely to persuade them. If any moral philosophy is right, it’s probably right in a way that’s difficult to understand. Most people are not well-equipped to impart the arguments to others. But then, that’s usually the result of not having much of an argument for it for themselves. So the problem is probably the first in most cases.

But if there’s no reason to care, then demanding anyone else abide by your arbitrary maxim is absurd. “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about the rights of grass” sounds silly. Vegans often do know how to explain to you that you should care about animals. Perhaps this is just an accident of their coming to veganism from a position of non-veganism. The arguments don’t always persuade, but they are at least better than throwing their arms up and saying “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about animals.”