Hey! Stumbled on your blog b/c of the great essay on liberalism. But I'm also puzzled reading this because I'm it's not obvious to me how these views cohere.
I know some philosophers think you can be agnostic about meta-ethics while still holding convicted first-order ethical views (e.g. about moral desert, animal welfare, egalitarianism, etc.), but it's never been clear to me why they think that. Seems pretty straightforward that you've got to reject anti-realism if you want to make sense of normativity. In a similar vein, it's puzzling how one could be a convicted physicalist while being agnostic about moral realism. Insofar as physicalism is a reductive view, I'm not aware of any successful attempt to reduce normative properties to natural ones — most philosophers I knew came to regard this as a category mistake.
The possibility that philosophy might just be riddled with category mistakes is a prior that I see a a lot of my EA friends discounting. Many of them arrive at their special distinctive views because they can start with apparently innocent premises and arrive at radically unintuitive conclusions, "because inference, bro." And fine, philosophers have done that as long as there's been philosophy.
But this ignores the possibility that Wittgenstein and the ordinary language philosophers introduced last century which fundamentally changed how we should think about the role of the philosopher's apparently-innocent premises in their conjuring tricks. If it's possible that well-formed english sentences purporting to make some sort of important philosophical claim might actually be meaningless or trivially true when pressed (language gone on holiday), then we should spend considerable amount of time investigating whether those premises actually make sense before we start seeing where they lead. We should be especially suspicious if we find that they lead to strange or unintuitive places.
Yeah my best answer is that I'm knowingly inconsistent. I do think you can have normativity without realism, like ethical constructivism could be true. Can circle back on this later!
Thank you for writing this post Andy, I've been thinking about views on personal identity recently, and agree with what you've written here on it here. I just bought the audiobook of Reasons and Persons, which I've been meaning to read but kept putting off, thanks to this post. I actually do find myself emotionally affected by my skepticism about personal identity though, I think that it has made me less fearful of death.
Overall I agree with a large proportion of the items on this list. The item I most disagree with is your confidence in physicalism, where I am much more agnostic. Shouldn't substantial uncertainty about qualia be at least enough to downgrade confidence in physicalism from fundamental to pretty sure?
Thanks Tim! And yeah I think uncertainty about qualia should by definition make me much more uncertain about physicalism so I should probably revise that
This Saturday, before I saw your post, I was trying to remember a story about a person who uses a teleporter, only to find that it has malfunctioned, and although a copy of him was sent to Mars, he will soon die. I tried searching for it and asking Claude, but to no avail. So imagine my surprise when this afternoon I started Reasons and Persons section 3, only to be immediately met with the story I had been trying to find! From what I've listened to so far I'm finding Parfit very convincing on personal identity and an enjoyable read.
I also took a brief look at Appendix I since you mentioned that as well, and thought it made good arguments against preference utilitarianism, but the only part there I saw dedicated to hedonistic utilitarianism was this bit:
> Narrow Hedonists assume, falsely, that pleasure and pain are two distinctive kinds of experience. Compare the pleasures of satisfying an intense thirst or lust, listening to music, solving an intellectual problem, reading a tragedy, and knowing that one's child is happy. These various experiences do not contain any distinctive common quality.
But these experiences all share the common quality of being pleasurable! And if it is possible to choose whether listening to music or solving an intellectual problem today will make one's life go best, then it seems to me that there must be a single-axis way to represent which is better. I'd like to be convinced otherwise though, since hedonistic utilitarianism seems kind of boring. Anyway sorry for the long rambling comment, reading Parfit is making me have a lot of thoughts.
Hey! Stumbled on your blog b/c of the great essay on liberalism. But I'm also puzzled reading this because I'm it's not obvious to me how these views cohere.
I know some philosophers think you can be agnostic about meta-ethics while still holding convicted first-order ethical views (e.g. about moral desert, animal welfare, egalitarianism, etc.), but it's never been clear to me why they think that. Seems pretty straightforward that you've got to reject anti-realism if you want to make sense of normativity. In a similar vein, it's puzzling how one could be a convicted physicalist while being agnostic about moral realism. Insofar as physicalism is a reductive view, I'm not aware of any successful attempt to reduce normative properties to natural ones — most philosophers I knew came to regard this as a category mistake.
The possibility that philosophy might just be riddled with category mistakes is a prior that I see a a lot of my EA friends discounting. Many of them arrive at their special distinctive views because they can start with apparently innocent premises and arrive at radically unintuitive conclusions, "because inference, bro." And fine, philosophers have done that as long as there's been philosophy.
But this ignores the possibility that Wittgenstein and the ordinary language philosophers introduced last century which fundamentally changed how we should think about the role of the philosopher's apparently-innocent premises in their conjuring tricks. If it's possible that well-formed english sentences purporting to make some sort of important philosophical claim might actually be meaningless or trivially true when pressed (language gone on holiday), then we should spend considerable amount of time investigating whether those premises actually make sense before we start seeing where they lead. We should be especially suspicious if we find that they lead to strange or unintuitive places.
Yeah my best answer is that I'm knowingly inconsistent. I do think you can have normativity without realism, like ethical constructivism could be true. Can circle back on this later!
Thank you for writing this post Andy, I've been thinking about views on personal identity recently, and agree with what you've written here on it here. I just bought the audiobook of Reasons and Persons, which I've been meaning to read but kept putting off, thanks to this post. I actually do find myself emotionally affected by my skepticism about personal identity though, I think that it has made me less fearful of death.
Overall I agree with a large proportion of the items on this list. The item I most disagree with is your confidence in physicalism, where I am much more agnostic. Shouldn't substantial uncertainty about qualia be at least enough to downgrade confidence in physicalism from fundamental to pretty sure?
Thanks Tim! And yeah I think uncertainty about qualia should by definition make me much more uncertain about physicalism so I should probably revise that
This Saturday, before I saw your post, I was trying to remember a story about a person who uses a teleporter, only to find that it has malfunctioned, and although a copy of him was sent to Mars, he will soon die. I tried searching for it and asking Claude, but to no avail. So imagine my surprise when this afternoon I started Reasons and Persons section 3, only to be immediately met with the story I had been trying to find! From what I've listened to so far I'm finding Parfit very convincing on personal identity and an enjoyable read.
I also took a brief look at Appendix I since you mentioned that as well, and thought it made good arguments against preference utilitarianism, but the only part there I saw dedicated to hedonistic utilitarianism was this bit:
> Narrow Hedonists assume, falsely, that pleasure and pain are two distinctive kinds of experience. Compare the pleasures of satisfying an intense thirst or lust, listening to music, solving an intellectual problem, reading a tragedy, and knowing that one's child is happy. These various experiences do not contain any distinctive common quality.
But these experiences all share the common quality of being pleasurable! And if it is possible to choose whether listening to music or solving an intellectual problem today will make one's life go best, then it seems to me that there must be a single-axis way to represent which is better. I'd like to be convinced otherwise though, since hedonistic utilitarianism seems kind of boring. Anyway sorry for the long rambling comment, reading Parfit is making me have a lot of thoughts.
Thanks for sharing!