Monthly Archives: October 2007

John Barrow and Frank Tipler

[O]nce space travel begins, there are, in principle, no further physical barriers to prevent Homo sapiens (or our descendants) from eventually expanding to colonize a substantial portion, if not all, of the visible Cosmos. Once this has occurred, it becomes quite reasonable to speculate that the operations of all these intelligent beings could begin to affect the large scale evolution of the Universe. If this is true, it would be in this era—in the far future near the Final State of the Universe—that the true significance of life and intelligence would manifest itself. Present-day life would then have cosmic significance because of what future life may someday accomplish.

John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford, 1986, p. 614

William Shepard Walsh

Professor [Benjamin] Jowett […] is one of the lions of Oxford. That town is subjected to constant inroads of tourists, all of whom crave a sight of the famous professor. It so happened, while he was engaged on his translation of Plato, that a guide discovered the professor’s study-window looked into the Broad Street. Coming with his menagerie, the guide would begin: ‘This, ladies and gentlemen, is Balliol College, one of the very holdest in the huniversity, and famous for the herudition of its scholars. The ‘head of Balliol College is called the Master. The present Master of Balliol is the celebrated Professor Benjamin Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek. Those are Professor Jowett’s study-windows, and there’ (here the ruffian would stoop down, take up a handful of gravel and throw it against the pain, bringing poor Jowett, livid with fury, to the window) ‘ladies and gentlemen, is Professor Benjamin Jowett himself.’

William Shepard Walsh, A Handy-book of Literary Curiosities, Philadelphia, 1893, pp. 640-641

David Benatar

That suicide harms those who are thereby bereaved is part of the tragedy of coming into existence. We find ourselves in a kind of trap. We have already come into existence. To end our existence causes immense pain to those we love and for whom we care. Potential procreators would do well to consider this trap they lay when they produce offspring.

David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, Oxford, 2006, p. 220

Alan Carter

Consequentialism may be able to provide reasons for why their theory does not, in fact, entail some counter-intuitive outcome in the world in which we happen to live. But in relying on some contingent feature of the world, their theory, when it rules our such counter-intuitive outcomes, does so for the wrong reason.

Alan Carter, ‘Inegalitarian Biocentric Consequentialism, the Minimax Implication and Multidimensional Value Theory: A Brief Proposal for a New Direction in Environmental Ethics’, Utilitas, vol. 17, no. 1 (March, 2005), p. 71

Thomas Schelling

Many of us have little tricks we play on ourselves to make us do the things we ought to do or to keep us from the things we ought to foreswear. Sometimes we put things out of reach for the moment of temptation, sometimes we promise ourselves small rewards, and sometimes we surrender authority to a trustworthy friend who will police our calories or our cigarettes. We place the alarm clock across the room so we cannot turn it off without getting out of bed. People who are chronically late set their watches a few minutes ahead to deceive themselves. I have heard of a corporate dining room in which lunch orders are placed by telephone at 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning; no food or liquor is then served to anyone except what was ordered at that time, not long after breakfast, when food was least tempting and resolve was at its highest. A grimmer example of a decision that can’t be rescinded is the people who have had their jaws wired shut. Less drastically, some smokers carry no cigarettes of their own, so they pay the “higher” price of bumming free cigarettes.

In these examples, everybody behaves like two people, one who wants clean lungs and long life and another who adores tobacco, or one who wants a lean body and another who wants dessert. The two are in a continual contest for control: the “straight” one often in command most of the time, but the wayward one needing only to get occasional control to spoil the other’s best laid plan.

Thomas Schelling, ‘Egonomics, or the Art of Self-Management’, The American Economic Review, vol. 68, no. 2 (May, 1978), p. 290

Samuel Johnson

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent; deliberation, which those who begin it by prudence, and continue it with subtilty, must, after long expence of thought, conclude by chance. To prefer one future mode of life to another, upon just reasons, requires faculties which it has not pleased our Creator to give us.

Samuel Johnson, in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, London, 1791, vol. 1, p. 282

Bernard Williams

[O]ne good testimony to one’s existence having a point is that the question of its point does not arise, and the propelling concerns may be of a relatively everyday kind such as certainly provide the grounds of many sorts of happiness.

Bernard Williams, ‘Persons, Character and Morality’, in Moral Luck, Cambridge, 1981, p. 12

Jon Elster

Once a scholar has identified a suitable mathematical function or a suitable set of dependent or independent variables, she can begin to look for a causal story to provide an intuition to back the findings. When she writes up the results for publication, the sequence is often reversed. She will state that she started with a causal theory; then looked for the most plausible way of transforming it into a formal hypothesis; and then found it confirmed the data. This is bogus science. In the natural sciences there is no need for the “logic of justification” to match or reflect “the logic of discovery.” Once a hypothesis is stated in its final form, its genesis is irrelevant. What matters are its downstream consequences, not its upstream origins. This is so because the hypothesis can be tested on an indefinite number of observations over and above those that inspired the scholar to think of it in the first place. In the social sciences (and in the humanities), most explanations use a finite data set. Because procedures of data collection often are nonstandardized, scholars may not be able to test their hypotheses against new data. [Footnote:] One could get around or at least mitigate this problem by exercising self-restraint. If one has a sufficiently large data set, one can first concentrate on a representative sample and ignore the rest. Once one has done one’s best to explain the subset of observations, one can take the explanation to the full data set and see whether it holds up. If it does, it is less likely to be spurious. Another way of keeping scholars honest would be if journals refused to consider articles submitted for publication unless the hypotheses to be tested together with the procedures for testing them had been deposited with the editor (say) two years in advance.

Jon Elster, Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 48-49

Sam Harris

We cannot live by reason alone. This is why no quantity of reason, applied as antiseptic, can compete with the balm of faith, once the terrors of this world begin to intrude upon our lives. Your child has died, or your wife has acquired a horrible illness that no doctor can cure, or your own body has suddenly begun striding toward the grave—and reason, no matter how broad its compass, will begin to smell distinctly of formaldehyde. This has led many of us to conclude, wrongly, that human beings have needs that only faith in certain fantastical ideas can fulfil. It is nowhere written, however, that human beings must be irrational, or live in a perpetual state of siege, to enjoy an abiding sense of the sacred. On the contrary, I hope to show that spirituality can be—indeed, must be—deeply rational, even as it elucidates the limits of reason. Seeing this, we can begin to divest ourselves of many of the reasons we currently have to kill one another.

Science will not remain mute on spiritual and ethical questions for long. Even now, we can see the first stirrings among psychologists and neuroscientists of what may one day become a genuinely rational approach to these matters—one that will bring even the most rarefied mystical experience within the purview of open, scientific inquiry. It is time we realized that we need not be unreasonable to suffuse our lives with love, compassion, ecstasy, and awe; nor must we renounce all forms of spirituality or mysticism to be on good terms with reason.

Sam Harris, The End of Fair: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, London, 2005, p. 43

John Cassavetes

The family went back to Greece when I was young and we returned to America when I was eight. I’m told that at school at the time I couldn’t speak English, only Greek. But the language barrier means nothing to me. Language is just a bunch of symbols. People’s emotions are fundamentally the same everywhere.

John Cassavetes, in Ray Carney (ed.), Cassavetes on Cassavetes, London, 2001, p. 4

Derren Brown

There was a real irony to the NLPers I knew who prided themselves on their communication skills yet because of their need to let everyone know how engaging they were, they were among the least engaging people I have ever known. In one extreme, we see this in the Christian fanatics who stand on the street and preach the word of their Lord, unaware that for every one rare, impressionable soul who might respond positively to their shouting and intrusion there are many hundreds of others in whom they have merely confirmed a belief that all Christians must be nutters. People are too often terrible advertisements for their own beliefs.

Derren Brown, Tricks of the Mind, London, 2007, p. 357

Derek Parfit

Why shouldn’t I eat toothpaste? It’s a free world. Why shouldn’t I chew my toenails? I happen to have trodden in some honey. Why shouldn’t I prance across central park with delicate sideways leaps? I know what your answer will be: “it isn’t done”. But it’s no earthly use just saying it isn’t done. If there’s a reason why it isn’t done, give the reason—if there’s no reason, don’t attempt to stop me doing it. All other things being equal, the mere fact that something “isn’t done” is in itself an excellent reason for doing it.

Derek Parfit, ‘The Eaton College Chronicle’, in Anthony Cheetham and Derek Parfit (eds.), Eton Microcosm, London, 1964, p.101

Peter Richerson & Robert Boyd

We thus have an interesting historical paradox: Darwin’s theory was a better starting point for humans than any other species, and required a major pruning to adjust to the rise of genetics. Nevertheless, the Descent had no lasting influence on the social sciences that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. Darwin was pigeonholed as a biologist, and sociology, economics, and history all eventually wrote biology out of their disciplines. Anthropology relegated his theory to a subdiscipline, biological anthropology, behind the superorganic firewall. Since the midtwentieth century, many social scientists have treated Darwinian initiatives as politically tainted threats. If anything, the gulf between the social and natural sciences continues to widen as some anthropologists, sociologists, and historians adopt methods and philosophical commitments that seem to natural scientists to abandon the basic norms of science entirely.

Peter Richerson & Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, Chicago, 2005, p. 17

Peter Railton

I doubt […] that any fundamental ethical dispute between consequentialists and deontologists can be resolved by appeal to the idea of respect for persons. The deontologist has his notion of respect—e.g., that we not use people in certain ways—and the consequentialist has his—e.g., that the good of every person has an equal claim upon us, a claim unmediated by any notion of right or contract, so that we should do the most possible to bring about outcomes that actually advance the good of persons. For every consequentially justified act of manipulation to which the deontologist can point with alarm there is a deontologically justified act that fails to promote the well-being of some person(s) as fully as possible to which the consequentialist can point, appalled.

Peter Railton, ‘Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality’, Philosophy & Public Affairs, vol. 13, no. 2. (Spring, 1984), p. 163, n. 32

Leonard Katz

Nature, as we know, regards ultimately only fitness and not our happiness, and does not scruple to use hate, fear, punishment and even war alongside affection in ordering social groups and selecting among them, just as she uses pain as well as pleasure to get us to feed, water and protect our bodies and also in forging our social bonds.

Leonard Katz, ‘Toward Good and Evil’, in Evolutionary Origins of Morality: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives, Thorverton, 2000, p. xv