Phil,

1. What evidence or arguments can you offer to support the claim that “Much of the knowledge described in Luke’s recent post on the cognitive science of rationality would have been impossible to acquire under such a ban”? I agree that much of the knowledge described in that post was gained through testing on chimpanzees. It doesn’t follow, however, that this knowledge could not have been obtained in ways involving no experimentation on those animals.
2. I don’t quite understand your third point above. Suppose it was true that “Banning chimp testing should thus be done only in conjunction with allowing human testing.” Why are you then opposing the ban on chimp testing, rather than advocating a lift on the ban on human testing? In the absence of further elaboration, your position smacks of status quo bias.
3. Chimps are morally relevantly similar to human babies and toddlers. Since you defend experimentation on chimps, you should also, I believe, defend experimentation on human babies and toddlers. Do you?
4. More generally, I think we should be cautious of endorsing the conclusions that we reach by considering the merits of arguments for and against animal experimentation. As humans, we have a deep-seated bias against members of other species. It is likely that this bias has influenced our views on issues involving widespread use of non-human animals. Since we also have a strong tendency to rationalize the views that we find ourselves subscribing to, it seems advisable to correct for this potential source of bias by being extra skeptical of arguments that appear to show that animal experimentation is morally permissible.

[link]

Seth, I am generally in sympathy with the tenor of your article, but I do object to one argument you appear to be making towards the end of your post. You conclude that psychiatry will never succeed in curing depression because (a) depression is due to environmental factors and (b) psychiatry cannot change the environment nor supply the “cheap and abundant” things that were present in the ancestral environment but missing in contemporary society. This is a non-sequitur. Suppose your own hypothesis is correct and depression is caused by a failure to see faces in the morning. The brain would still be implicated in this chain of causality: absence of morning faces will cause certain changes in the brain which would themselves cause people to feel and act depressed. If psychiatrists uncovered the relevant neural mechanisms involved in this process, they could in principle develop agents that mimicked the effect of morning faces in the brain. So it is not true that, because depression is ultimately caused by the environment, it falls outside the scope of psychiatry.

[link]

1. It is unclear to me how exactly Carl, Nick and Henrik are suggesting moral psychology could help us figure out the way to fill in the relevant free variables. The link you provide gives us only a summary of the presentation; it would be useful to have either an audio recording of the session or a full-length paper.

2. When Dave writes that the propositional content of goals does not in itself matter, he means that it is not intrinsically valuable. This claim about the instrumental value of goals is compatible with the recognition that one may sometimes have to aim at goals devoid of value in order to maximize the states that do have value. The Greeks knew already that you are unlikely to become happy if you constantly and consciously aim at happiness. Similarly, it is possible that hypervaluable states are unattainable in a world guided by happiness as the sole optimization criterion. This constitutes no objection to the claim that only happiness is valuable.

[link]

I don’t quite understand your reply to the ‘value receptable’ objection. According to this objection, utilitarianism fails because it attaches value to the experiences* of a person rather than to the person herself; the person is, on this view, only valued as a container of her experiences. In assessing the force of this objection, it seems to me irrelevant whether utilitarian agents have just one single desire to maximize good experiences or a multiplicity of desires corresponding to each of the good experiences to be maximized. In either case, the desire is not ultimately aimed at the person, but only at her experiences, whether individually or as constitutive parts of aggregate good.

Those who are troubled by this objection should reply instead that what utilitarians value is not experiences, but people’s lives. It’s just that the value of a person’s life is, for a utilitarian, a function of the quality of her experiences. But if each of these experiences occurred in isolation from all others in such a way that none could be properly ascribed to any individual person, the experiences would lack value, since they would have no impact on people’s lives.

–

* I assume, for simplicity, a hedonistic form of utilitarianism.

[link]

It cannot be a mere definitional matter if you believe, as Robin and others seem to believe, that important things turn on whether you and the future individual who shares your memories and personality are or aren’t the same person. For these people, the decision to sign up for cryonics, say, will partly depend on whether cryopreservation is identity-preserving; and whether it is cannot be settled by simply choosing a convenient definition.

Of course, if you really thought it was a definitional matter (as I think it is), then that would be a reason to drop the view that personal identity has rational or moral significance.

[link]

Robin, common sense draws a fundamental distinction between prolonging the lives of those already alive and bringing new people into existence. This view may be mistaken–and I believe it is–but is at the basis of people’s decisions about health and reproduction. There is, accordingly, no tension between spending lots of money on end-of-life medicine and showing no preference for female children. In one case you are extending lives which existed already, whereas in the other case you are causing new lives to exist.

[link]

But why are you focusing on only men in this regard? Is this not a “problem” for both genders?

Actually, life satisfaction and physical attractiveness are positively correlated in women, whereas there is no such correlation in men. (I can’t find the study and am relying on memory; I welcome corrections.) To the extent that we care about disadvantaged groups because disadvantage negatively impacts happiness, we should care about unattractive women, not men.

Then again, levels of attractiveness are more easily raised in females than in males. On my estimates, breast augmentation adds on average about 1.5 points, on a ten-point scale, to a woman’s level of physical attractiveness. There is, to my knowledge, no intervention that can comparably raise the attractiveness of men.

[link]

if a creature wakes up in a few minutes remembering everything that I remember, and having the same feelings and habits of thought that I do, well that guy is me. Doesn’t matter if there are a hundred of them spread across the galaxy, made out of a hundred exotic materials. They are all me, because they all remember being exactly me now and they haven’t changed much.

Robin, I’m baffled by what you write here. Let’s say there are as many distinct individuals psychologically continuous with you as there are letters in the alphabet. Are you really saying that A, B,…, and Z are each identical to you? If so, by the transitivity of identity it would follow that A = B = … = Z. But that cannot be so, because by the indiscernibility of identicals it would further follow that whatever is true of A is true of B, C, etc. Suppose A is now thinking of eating broccoli. It would then follow that B, C, etc are thinking of eating broccoli. Or suppose that B is now lifting his left arm. It would follow that C, D, etc are now lifting their left arm. Of course, nothing of the sort follows.

Rather than insisting that these people must be you because their existence would preserve what you most deeply care about, you should drop the assumption that someone must be identical to you in order for you to have towards him the sort of intimate concern that people typically have only for themselves. If you believe psychological continuity is the relation that matters, what you should say is that you care about the survival of whomever is psychologically connected to you, regardless of whether you would be the person or people so connected.

[link]

While we await the arrival of prediction markets to resolve these and other disagreements, we can at least rely on how people react to the idea of such markets to identify those whose opinions should be trusted. There are very few other beliefs that tell you more about a person’s concern for the truth than his or her beliefs about prediction markets.

[link]

It is quite striking that a movement built around the rejection of all forms of supernaturalism should insist in defining itself by according humans a unique place in the natural world. Theism seems the only plausible justification for human exceptionalism; once the idea of God is rejected, there ceases to be any convincing reason for thinking that the members of our species deserve, as such, special moral consideration. William Lane Craig is absolutely right in stressing the essential tension between naturalism and speciesism. (Where he goes wrong is in construing this as an argument for theism. It is, instead, an argument for vegetarianism.)

[link]

Dom, you write:

But there is a separate question about whether there is benefit in a general rule that prohibits discrimination on the basis of age (which in many instances is not morally relevant). A simple rule that prohibits age discrimination might have better overall consequences than a complex rule that allows exceptions in certain cases etc.

It is, I believe, incorrect to characterize the QALY approach as discriminating, justly or unjustly, on the basis of age. Using QALYs to allocate scarce resources just happens, as a matter of contingent fact, to favor the young over the old. Under different circumstances, deciding on the basis of QALYs might have the opposite implication. This would be so, for example, if life expectancy for people of a given age was more than one year greater than life expectancy for people one year younger, provided that health remained constant over time. Indeed, this is actually the case (I believe) for babies and young infants, so in practice allocating resources on the basis of QALYs would favour older people, provided they are young enough.

More generally, in deciding whether a policy is discriminatory, it is insufficient to look at the distribution across the relevant variable (sex, age, race): it is also necessary to look at the process that generated that distribution. If more women than men are, say, admitted to writing school, this may simply be the result of gender differences in ability or personality; if the differences were reversed, the same process would result in more men than women being admitted. (Of course, in practice many policies and decisions do discriminate on the basis of sex, and often unjustly so. But establishing this requires more work than merely observing a correlation.)

[link]

Pleasure and pain are intrinsically normative to minds that have a pleasure/pain reward system.

You seem to be equating normative force with motivating force. This is not, however, an equation that many moral realists would accept. States of pleasure are pain are intrinsically normative, not in the sense that they necessarily motivate, but in the sense that they count for or against their own existence. The phenomenology of pain is such that, by undergoing a painful experience, we thereby know that the experience ought not to exist. There is something it’s like to be in pain that carries with it the imperative to get rid of it. Since this is an intrinsic property of the phenomenal experience rather than an extrinsic motivational role played by that experience, it is arguable that any conscious being in possession of the relevant concepts will come to know, after experiencing pleasure or pain for the first time, that pleasure ought to be promoted and pain ought to be prevented.

And even then, there is a difference between my pain and your pain; your pain is not intrinsically motivating to me.

Other people’s pains, it is true, do not directly motivate us. But, as indicated above, this fact about motivation is not an objection to the realist position.

[link]

If lives with farm pain are still better than not existing, it is still good to create farm animals even if they suffer more than wild animals.

The emphasis on whether animals in the wild or in factory farms have lives that are worth living on the whole seems to me misplaced. What matters from a welfarist perspective is not whether existing is better for the creature than not existing, but whether bringing the creature into existence is better than not bringing her. The answer to the last question involves comparing the welfare the life of the animal is expected to contain if brought into existence with the welfare we are likely to create otherwise. Even if the life of the animal is not worth living, it might be obligatory to bring her into existence if we are expected to create even more suffering instead; and conversely, we may be prohibited from creating a new life even if the life is worth living, because by failing to create such a life we are likely to produce more welfare still.

[link]

there must be a problem with the Kalam cosmological argument somewhere, and I don’t need to bother understanding Craig’s responses to every objection that has been offered.

I agree that this characterizes adequately the modus operandi of many atheists who debate William Lane Craig. But I don’t think there is anything inherently objectionable in such a move. It all depends on whether one’s inability to spot a flaw in Craig’s argument is more likely due to the fact that the argument has no flaw rather than to one’s imperfect ability to spot flaws in arguments. When it comes to the Kalam cosmological argument, it does seem to me that the atheists are wrong in dismissing it out of hand; but this is because I believe the antecedent evidence for atheism is not so strong as to warrant that dismissal. But concerning the historical argument for the resurrection, a prior dismissal is, I believe, perfectly justified. Suppose you took the argument seriously and still failed to find a problem with it. Now ask yourself, which is more likely, that God did in fact raise Jesus from the dead, or that there is a problem with the argument which you just failed to find? The question answers itself.

[link]

In principle, there may be tradeoffs between extending maximal life spans and increasing aggregate happiness. In practice, however, prolonging lives will very likely promote welfare as well. At least two considerations support this claim.

First, death causes vast amounts of suffering to those close to the person deceased. If people live longer, there will be, ceteris paribus, fewer deaths, and hence less suffering. Secondly, and more importantly, increases in maximal life spans will extend the scope of self-regarding concern, thereby expanding the time horizon of projects for which human wills may be mobilized. This is critical in relation to the risk of human extinction. In light of the best estimates available, achieving even modest results in life-extension would mean that the risk of extinction becomes a greater threat to individual lives than the risk of stroke. Under such circumstances, the general population is likely to take existential risks much more seriously, and as a result active measures will be taken to reduce those risks. Given the astronomical instrumental value that attaches to the survival of our species, prolonging the lives of its individual members may well turn out to be one of the most effective strategies available for maximizing the sum total of happiness in the Universe.

[link]

I agree with the overall point of your post. Here I would simply like to comment on the relation you draw to the “value receptacle” objection to utilitarianism and the claim that persons are morally separate. It seems to me that, contrary to what you appear to assume, there is a difference between affirming that people are mere receptacles of value and denying that their separateness has moral significance.

Consider two forms of utilitarianism, one extreme, the other slightly less so. The proponent of the extreme form does not assign importance to the packaging of experiences into lives at all. For the slightly less extremist utilitarian, instead, it matters that experiences are had by people, though not which people have which experiences. Both views fail to take seriously the distinction between persons, since they do not attach importance to the boundaries between lives. But only the first treats people as value receptacles, since it is alone in denying that goods located in people are good because they are good for these people.

So this illustrates that people may be replaceable without being (mere) receptacles.

[link]

Darren writes:

I personally feel that the philosophy behind the proposal is completely wrong for many reasons.

Let’s briefly consider these reasons one by one.

It imposes sentimental ideas and human moral judgment on other species;

The moral views underlying Dave’s proposal are not accurately described as “sentimental ideas”. A sentimentalist would be concerned with the suffering of only those species with whose plight we can most easily empathize. By contrast, the abolitionist project advocates the elimination of all pain, regardless of how emotionally close we may feel to the various creatures who suffer.

it (if carried through to eventuality) would mean an end to a great deal of natural selection;

It is not clear why this would be a bad thing. As the great T. H. Huxley remarked, “the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, still less in running away from it, but in combating it.”

it is fundamentally contrary to the history of life and would result in the ultimate bastardisation of the natural world;

As others have already pointed out, innumerable human interventions are contrary to the history of life, yet no sane person would think of opposing, say, modern medicine on the grounds that disease has existed as long as there have been living organisms.

and, perhaps most offensive of all, it PROMOTES the extinction and biological modification of thousands (or tens of thousands or more) of species.

Again, it is unclear why intentional extinction of a species is morally objectionable. If the species had never evolved in the first place, would we have a moral obligation to create it? If not, why do we have an obligation not to destroy it once it exists?

[link]

I certainly don’t mean to suggest that the mere existence of non-hedonic desires suffices to refute normative hedonism. But it can form the basis of a persuasive argument directed at the person who endorses their own desires, as most of us surely do by default.

I agree, but am skeptical about the value of arguments of this kind. I conceive philosophical discussion as an attempt to discover the truth about questions worth asking, not as an exercise in rational persuasion. (I grant that this conception is not widely shared, though.)

Hedonism implies that our ordinary preferences are in an important sense mistaken or unwarranted. It would be inconsistent (or at least in serious rational tension) to hold hedonistic beliefs in conjunction with the ordinary desires I’ve identified. I doubt most people are inclined to give up the latter (absent some incredibly compelling argument). So it looks like they’ll need to reject hedonism.

Again, the fact that most people are inclined to give up hedonism does not have in itself philosophical interest. It is the reasons that these people could give in support of their inclination that I regard as philosophically significant.

[link]

Hi Richard. You write:

When we reflect on the things that really matter to us in life, most of us find that we care about much more than just the quality of our subjective experiences. We also want, among other things, to form meaningful connections with other people, and to make actual progress towards accomplishing our goals.

Claims of this sort, often made in the literature (e.g., by Nozick), merely assume, without argument, a connection between what is good for us and what matters to us. Maybe such a connection exists, but if so it has to be made and argued for explicitly. When this is done, the argument often becomes transparently question-begging. Thus, it is sometimes said that what we care about is good for us because we desire the objects of our concern. But without further argument, this is simply a restatement of the desire-fulfilment view. Since that view is a rival of hedonism in the debate about what makes people’s lives go best, it clearly cannot be presupposed in the context of that debate. (Your use of the term ‘want’ in the second sentence quoted above seems to involve a move along these lines.)

[link]

Todavía tengo fresco el recuerdo de su memorable performance en la Valedictory Lecture del año pasado. La capacidad de Cohen para imitar filósofos ilustres era verdaderamente extraordinaria. Aquí unas fotos de Chris Bertram del evento; en esta se lo ve personificando a Isaiah Berlin.

Me acuerdo también de la clase que nos dio a los estudiantes de BPhil, en donde expuso parte del material que luego terminó integrando Rescuing Justice and Equality. De este libro Cohen solía decir, con su característico sentido del humor, que trataba de la igualdad y la justicia, en ese orden, pero que en el título las palabras se invirtieron “porque suena mejor así”.

[link]