Empowerment Ethics: A criticism.

'Empowerment Ethics' is philosopher Dan Fincke's attempt at an objective naturalistic ethics. I offer a criticism here.

If it could be shown that ethics could be grounded within a naturalistic framework in such a way as to supply objective principles of moral conduct, what would follow? One thing is that we would have a way to counter potentially socially corrosive views of morality such as moral relativism, whilst retaining naturalism. 

For example, suppose an atheist who also rejects the concept of the 'supernatural', wants to assert that torture for fun is wrong. What account can they give of 'wrong'? Can they offer a counter to challenges like: 'that's just your subjective opinion', or 'that's just what your culture at this time has led you to think, other cultures at different times have had different moral standards that were valid for them'.

I think Finke's Empowerment Ethics (EE) does well in drawing distinctions between concepts that can get muddled, for example 'subjective' and 'relative'. It also goes a long way in explaining how there can be objective aspects to value judgements and hence to morality.

In terms of the relatively modest goals of elucidating rational objective components to morality and pointing out formal constraints such as consistency and conditions for fairness, I think Empowerment Ethics succeeds. Fincke seems to pursue a more ambitious goal however, which is to show that given his naturalistic definition of 'good' an agent would be rationally compelled to behave morally. I think this is where EE over-reaches.

According to EE, 'good' is defined as a kind of effectiveness which is an objective relation in the world, so to say that 'x is good at bringing about y' is to say that x is effective in the bringing about of y. The next important premise is that a human agent not only has powers, such as social, technological, creative and many other powers, but that the human agent is these powers. An agent acting in such a way as to diminish their own effectiveness in instantiating their powers is therefore not being 'good' at being human. The move EE then makes is to say that the way for anyone to make the most of their powers is to empower others. Hence moral good is equated with a kind of instrumental good, in which agents behave optimally to be themselves, and realise their own potential via facilitating other agents to realise their own powers.

Although some of the obvious objections are dealt with, such as the impossibility of reconciling competing powers, I do not think the attempt to bridge the is/ought gap is successful. The premise that the way to flourish is to empower others is either circular or supported by cherry-picked evidence. You might want to argue that the stereotype of a powerful individual, say a dictator, isn't really flourishing despite all the power and lavish lifestyle, but then again how can the charge of sour grapes be met without circular reasoning?

On a more fundamental level, equating moral good with an instrumental good that preserves bundles of powers (humans) by the happy by-product of empowering other humans fails in much the same way as any of the categorical imperatives yet devised have: it fails to track our use of 'good' in the moral sense. Consider what is of value in the bundle of powers that comprises a human within the EE paradigm. If it is the set of powers for it's own sake, and maximising these is taken to be 'good', then EE seems to have the following counter-intuitive result. If a posthuman entity came about that could maximise its powers and those of its progeny by eliminating humans, and these sets of powers were greater than those of humans, it is difficult to see how EE could do other than endorse this.

Determinism and Predictability

Determinism doesn't entail predictability, even in principle, unless you are going to help yourself to some principles so outlandish that you might as well invoke the supernatural.

To a first approximation, a system is deterministic if every event necessarily follows as a result of prior events. Or, to put it another way, every future state of the system is completely determined by the initial conditions of that system. 

It would seem to follow that every future state of such a system could be predicted, albeit perhaps only in principle. For example, imagine a snooker table at the beginning of a game and suppose the precise location, mass and other physical variables of all the balls are known. Then, given the laws of physics and the momentum and path of the cue ball after cueing off, we might think that some supercomputer could show us a picture of where every ball would be on the table at any future time.

So if the natural world as a whole is considered to be a deterministic system, we might conclude that the future is completely predictable. But there seem to be limits on predictability by any known methods of computation yet devised. 

First, we'd need precise measurements of all of the physical variables, or the error in our predictions would grow so fast as to make them uselessly inaccurate. Suppose that one such measurement had a value that turned out to be a non-computable irrational number? If it is truncated anywhere, that introduces error. But if it is not truncated, we have an infinite amount of information.

Second, even if the supercomputer is as computationally powerful as we like, it is still part of the natural world, so the information state of the computer is manifest physically, which itself would perturb the system leading to an infinite regress. Supposing the computer to be outside the natural world doesn't help either, as we then have the classic dualist problem of how it could interact with the world to take measurements whilst remaining completely separate. 

These reasons suggest that, although we might intuit that with enough information, time and computing power, every subsequent state of a deterministic system can be precisely specified within a given margin of error, this is not the case. Even given a classical deterministic physics model of the world, a precise prediction of the future state of the system is not possible, even in principle. 

This thought experiment predates modern computing by a long way. As far back as 1814 Pierre-Simon LaPlace, in his introduction to Essai philosophique sur les probabilités, postulated what would later be known as LaPlace's Demon: an intellect with enough calculating ability and knowledge to predict the future. 

Perhaps a demon is more apt a characterization than a supercomputer. Given the arguments considered above, any such entity looks like it would have to be a supernatural agent, able to flout the physical laws which both limit how much information it can store and prevent measurement without interaction. There is an irony here given this is one thought experiment that some hard determinists use to deny free will.


Their argument is that free will is incompatible with a predictable future, unless it is somehow supernatural and able to escape the constraints of a deterministic universe. Since the supernatural is anathema to them, these hard determinists conclude that free will does not exist. Yet in order to establish predictability they have invoked the very thing they deny, something supernatural.  

End of the World

Suppose you knew that you'd live to a reasonable old age, but that 30 days after your death, the earth was going to be destroyed with no escape possible for its inhabitants. Would you live any differently? If so, how?

Can you sing in your head?

I was reading a book about the psychology of music by Victoria Williamson called 'You Are The Music'.

I enjoyed the book, it was interesting and informative. I was puzzled by one comment the author made though. She said that when she used to work in a gift shop she would sing along to Eva Cassidy songs during quiet periods. But she did this, in her head. Does that strike anyone else as odd?

I had a go at singing along in my head to Tom Waits. I don't think I can do it. In general I mean, not just to Tom Waits. If you think you can do this, what is it like? If you can't or think, like me, that there's something odd about the idea, can you articulate what that is?

Sentiment vs Semantics

A friend recently commented on Facebook that he'd realized that love is nothing to do with gender. I interpreted the sentiment to be one I agree with: support for treating loving relationships as equal regardless of the gender of the participants.

What about trying to ascribe a literal meaning to the comment? In my experience, most individuals use gender as a primary filter for candidates for romantic relationships.  People also use age, intelligence, status and many other filters, albeit perhaps unconsciously, when they judge people as attractive or not. So on that level, gender does have something to do with erotic love for most people in contrast with other forms of loving companionship or friendship. Perhaps it would be good if we returned to using words like 'agape' to distinguish different kinds of love.

Dan Fincke's Civility Pledge

I broadly agree with the sentiment that civility should prevail during debate and disagreement. Dan's Pledge is here.

The Knack of Faith

There are some activities that seem to require a 'knack', it isn't enough to just follow a set of instructions or to have somebody demonstrate the procedure in order to get it. Nor is there necessarily a gradual improvement via practice until mastery is achieved. More often, we will be hopelessly bad at something like this until it suddenly seems to 'click'. Think of patting your head whilst rubbing your tummy. Practice is still required if you haven't learned how to do it yet, but I don't think progress is usually linear.

I wonder if perhaps faith is a knack. If so, it is one I lack even though I can see that to have faith in some circumstances can be very useful. This seems similar to the realisation that accuracy in appraising our abilities can be inversely correlated with a sense of well-being. In this context the phrase 'ignorance is bliss' is fitting, since those who are unskilled at self evaluation but unaware of it, are also less likely to be responsive to evidence that contradicts the basis of their high self esteem: namely that they think they are good at stuff.

Turning back to faith, the ability to take the Kirkegaardian leap in response to our absurd existence might be good for keeping our spirits up when life is difficult. But if the thought occurs that faith in this sense is a bit like the knack of being able to put your fingers in your ears and sing 'la la la' every time somebody is about to tell you bad news, then you might think it better not to have it.

Positive Discrimination

I think some people are against positive discrimination because they think it is incompatible with hiring people on merit. I'm not convinced that it is necessarily incompatible in a way that matters though.

Of course it is easy to think of ways in which positive discrimination would preclude a meritocratic outcome. I'm just sceptical that such thought experiments really reflect best practice in the real world.

There has been some debate recently regarding a popular uk television comedy programme called Mock the Week which has been criticised for mostly hiring all male panels. In their defense they argued that the percentage of  professional female comedians is low, so in demographic terms the percentage of women they hire is more than representative. They also said they were against positive discrimination because they believed in hiring on merit.

I think it is the last point there where a false dichotomy has crept in. In the real world it is just not the case that merit is the only criterion used and nor is it the case that assessment of merit is free from cultural bias. Instead I think it would be more useful to consider merit as a threshold criterion. That way, you can look at the pool of candidates you have who meet the threshhold and decide what other criteria to apply. If there are still sufficient numbers in your pool to choose from after all criteria have been met then it is not the case that merit has been trumped by other considerations.

Wave Machine

Wave Machine

Just getting to grips with soundcloud...

Free Will: don't let false dichotomies lead you astray

A recent Horizon programme on the BBC in the uk considered the nature of the unconscious mind. As of the date of this post, it is still available on iPlayer. This was a very interesting account of recent evidence on our unconscious, but I found one aspect problematic. The narrator posed the question: "Are you in control of your unconscious, or is it in control of you?"

I think this is a false dichotomy. My subconscious is part of me, so if a lot of my cognition is handled by systems in my brain that are not accessible to conscious awareness that does not mean I am not in control. It is just that the majority of my control is not conscious, and that is probably just as well. The speed and efficiency of our unconsious mind is essential for our functioning in real time in a complex environment. If we had to consciously deliberate about every aspect of our behaviour, we would be overwhelmed by information, and the burden of decision making would preclude all but the simplest tasks.

I think the role of conscious control in our lives is small but important. We should not be unnerved too much if science reveals that our conscious rationalisations of our thought processes in the solution of real world problems are often inaccurate. We might just be bad at guessing the insides of our unconsious strategies, but they are still ours. I think the best way to defend our cherished notion of free will is to avoid overstating its importance in our daily lives. If we think of a small rider on a large stubborn elephant then that might help to get our measure of control in perspective, but I think it would be a mistake to identify with the rider alone rather than the elephant-rider pairing.

Perhaps some people found this programme disconcerting because they drew the inference that free will is a kind of user-illusion, that our experience of controlling what we do is just a fabrication in the service of another illusion- that of self. I think the science has been forcing a reassessment of the nature of self and free will for a while. It is now almost 30 years since Benjamin Libet did his famous experiment after all. However, even if some of our common sense ideas about consciousness and free will seem to be mistaken, I don't think science has rendered these concepts redundant so far.

The same god?

I was talking to a friend the other day who teaches young children, and she told me that one of her pupils had said that there were lots of gods. My friend corrected her, saying that we all worship the same god, but in different ways. As an atheist, I can see a sense in which this is true from my point of view, since all nothings are the same. On the other hand, if there is a god, does it make sense to say that Ganesh is the same as Allah? Perhaps this is a case of "Hesperus is Phosphorus", the sentence used to illustrate the distinction between 'sense' and 'reference' due to Frege.

I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free

Here's a very short version of this Billy Taylor tune played by me on a Heritage semi solid guitar through a Rivera valve combo amp.

Musical Semantics

I used to think that music had only elaborate and emotionally evocative syntax but unlike language, no denotive semantics. Looking into recent work however, it looks like the picture is a bit more complicated. The American musicologist L. B. Meyer made the distinction between designative meaning and embodied meaning. The former involves a reference to things outside the musical domain and the latter is about the significance that a passage of music can have for a listener in virtue of its own dynamic unfolding structure and its relation to the listener's musical knowledge and expectations. This is meaning in relation to parts of musical structure referring to other parts of itself or the whole. Expectations (implications) can be created and their fulfilment can be delivered, delayed or thwarted.

I had thought the designative component to be totally parasitic on the natural language and culture of the community of listeners. Certain motifs in music come to be associated with objects or events, for example a few notes of the 'Jaws' theme and we think of a menacing shark. This is a long way from the full blown semantics of natural language, since you cannot convey novel concepts and meanings via musical syntax without a direct association first. However, recent work by Stefan Koelsh suggests that music transfers much more semantic information than was previously thought: "Our results indicate that both music and language can prime the meaning of a word, and that music can, as language, determine physiological indices of semantic processing." from Nature Neuroscience 7(3), 2004: Music, Language and Meaning: Brain Signatures of Semantic Processing.

Dogma versus Defeasible Belief

I think this is a distinction which avoids some of the debates between atheists and believers in which the participants just talk past each other. You know how they go, the believer wants to portray the atheist as occupying a faith position. The motivation seems to be a perception that atheists are trying to argue from some kind of rational high ground. Keen to resist the portrayal, atheists sometimes attempt a distinction between a lack of belief in god and a belief that there is no god. I don't think that really works, but if instead the atheist concedes that they can't be certain that there is no god, then sometimes they are characterised as agnostic, which causes confusion. So consider the analogy with your drinking water. Assuming you live in a country where it is safe to drink, it is still the case that you can't be sure that the water supply hasn't been contaminated or poisoned without your knowledge. This doesn't mean you are agnostic about whether the water is safe, at least not according to the normal usage of the term. If you were, you wouldn't drink it. Nor are you dogmatic in your view that the water is safe, if evidence becomes available that suggests otherwise, you'll stop drinking it. So what you have is a defeasible belief that your drinking water is safe. Similarly, the atheist can argue that given a specified god, they have a defeasible belief that this god does not exist.

'Sure and certain hope'

Which is it? Cetainty or hope? Does this phrase arise from Hebrews 11:1? The New International Version translates as: 'Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.' That makes more sense to me. So perhaps the sense of 'sure and certain hope' is an affirmation of faith, a declaration of assurance that things hoped for will come to pass. Does that sound right?

Spiritual Beard

In the lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender community, a 'beard' was slang for acting heterosexual, it was a cover that allowed people to pass as normal. I'm wondering whether there is an analogy here for atheists who talk of being 'spiritual'. Some atheists who are friendly to religion (sometimes called accommodationists) use spirituality talk but seek to reject supernatural connotations. Is this a tenable position? Are they trying to pass as fully rounded human beings in some way, as if a 'spiritual' dimension is required not to be considered somehow shallow? If so, would a better strategy be to challenge that notion of what it is to be human and contend that there is no such thing as a spirit, and that the baggage-laden metaphor is no longer useful?

Thin Slicing

'Blink' is the title of a book by Malcolm Gladwell in which he explains how sometimes initial intuitions or 'gut feelings' can be a better way of dealing with information than careful analysis in some situations. 'Thin slicing' refers to our ability to find patterns based on very narrow slices of experience without being consciously aware of how we have done it.

One example given was that of the purchase of a statue (a kouros) by the J. Paul Getty museum. Despite it being subjected to careful analysis and testing and being declared genuine, it turned out to be a fake. Several experts spotted that something was amiss using thin slicing. One had the word 'fresh' pop into their head, another immediately found themselves looking at the fingernails and thinking that they didn't look right but not able to articulate quite why. One expert reported an 'intuitive repulsion' when he first saw it.

I think many people are aware that sometimes hunches give better results than careful analysis, particularly under time pressure, or when deluged with information, or when information is limited. I wonder whether religious believers who have a hunch that the universe is a 'put up job' have the feeling that they are like the intuitive experts who spotted what was going on, whereas atheists have carried out a careful, but flawed, analysis.

The Modal Scope Fallacy

Does divine foreknowledge threaten libertarian free will? Or, to put it another way, is an omniscient agent incompatible with The Garden Of Forking Paths model of free will, the one in which we could have done otherwise?

I think not. But what if somebody says, the fact that god is omniscient means that god infallibly knows that I will eat cornflakes for breakfast tomorrow. God can't fail to know this, being omniscient. The idea then, is that necessarily god knows I will eat cornflakes for breakfast tomorrow. Hence, necessarily, I will eat cornflakes tomorrow and that means it is not possible that I won't eat cornflakes for breakfast tomorrow, and this implies that I can't do otherwise, which refutes libertarian free will.

However, I think this argument fails. What do you think?

Is/ought revisited

Here is a reputedly defensible version of the famous principle that you can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is', taken from a paper in defense of the principle that 'ought' implies 'can' (Peter B. M. Vranas, 2005) (this was linked by ephphatha in a previous post), although the link is now broken:

(I/O) No valid argument has a conclusion that is a singular* moral claim and premises that form a consistent set of nonmoral claims.

My question is, does the following example serve as a counter-example to I/O? (Also, if so, why? If not, why not?):

1) Jones believes that Smith ought to concede that we can derive an 'ought' from an 'is'.
2) Everything that Jones believes is true.
3) Smith ought to concede that we can derive an 'ought' from an 'is'. (from 1 and 2)

*singular moral claims are understood as moral claims expressed by asserting or denying that a specific agent S has (or does not have) a moral obligation to @.

Belief

What does it mean to say that somebody believes something?

I think that a belief is a mental state, representational in character, taking as its content something that could in principle be stated as a proposition. To believe p is to hold that p is true.

How can we distinguish between believing that we hold that p is true and actually holding it to be true? Beliefs predispose us to certain behaviours. If we consider what people actually do, we can sometimes discern a difference between what they profess, and what they actually believe.