Resilience to counterfactuals

One project that I have been pottering away at recently is an attempt to cash out what could be meant with something like Phillip Pettit's theory of 'freedom as non-domination' (meaning that we are free to the extent in that we can do what we go about our affairs without the arbitrary intervention of another party). To do so I develop a framework for highlighting some important modal considerations that are involved in our political deliberation. One of the dimensions on which we evaluate courses of action is on how likely they are to achieve their aims. I believe that we could provide a framework, perhaps even a semantics, of this evaluative dimension. My proposal is to discriminate amongst courses of action according to their 'resilience to counterfactuals' (as I call it), meaning the range of contingencies wherein they would succeed. One course of action is more resilient to counterfactuals than another if there are more possible worlds (within some specified degree of similarity to the actual world) where that course could successfully be pursued. The idea is that this might be a useful way to articulate how we distinguish between secure state of affairs and precarious ones – in the secure state of affairs, there are more contingencies in which we can accomplish what we might set out to do. Secure state of affairs lead to plans with greater resilience to counterfactuals.

An application of the project, a straightforward and I hope informative one, is that it would allow us to discriminate between the status of different political rights based on how secure those rights are (meaning, how resilient to counterfactuals they are). I also think, and am willing to defend, that considerations of this type is one of the reasons why political rights are such a central feature of our social lives (and would be even if there were no natural rights): legal protections of those kind cut down the range of contingencies that you need to secure yourself against, and thus gives you a greater safety margin within which to deliberate towards your chosen end.

This approach has important advantages over the decision-theoretic approach for judging among possible courses of action. Attempts to do feasibility studies in the usual decision-theoretic way -- looking at the probability that certain situations would arise, assigning outcomes to the situations and deriving their expected utilities -- run into serious problems, given that the result of such studies depends on what people intend to do, but that people very often radically change their courses of action given the circumstances. This means that you have to redo the feasibility study for each change in plan of anybody in the environment, leading to a combinatorial explosion of things to consider (if re-doing the sums is even possible at all), very quickly making the results of such a study intractable. The resilience-to-counterfactuals approach handles this feature of situations much better, since the fact that there are a number of different ways someone could try to achieve their goals is a premise of the analysis.

There is more to be said here, like how a formal semantics for such a framework might look -- a possible-worlds semantics is very suggestive here, but there are kinks to work out. I also want to see how this compares to other approaches in the literature. I have a decent idea of how it relates to Pettit's proposal, but given the influence of the 'freedom as non-domination' theory, there is a lot of different ways this gets cached out in the literature. One development in particular I want to take a closer look at is Dowding and Van Hees on 'counterfactual success', which seems similar but importantly different. There is also the question of how much we can conclude about some particular plan's resilience to counterfactuals. If A has a plan to acquire X that is relatively resilient to counterfactuals, does this have significance beyond just that particular plan? Does it tell us something about all A's possible X-involving plans? (I would hope so.) Does it tell us something about A's security in general? Or, perhaps only of A's security in his or her X-involving domains. (What is an X-involving domain, then?) These questions are so suggestive to me that I've proposed this as a possible PhD project. However it might turn out, this is something I've spent some time thinking on in the past, and I'm likely to keep coming back to this issue for the foreseeable future.

Distinguishing Moral Theory and Anti-Theory Through Intuitionistic Logic

My purpose here is to present a formal framework for the relationship between intuitions and concrete particular judgements in moral cases and the general theories which are supposed to capture them. This framework is to give that relationship a suitable interpretation in intuitionistic (or constructivist) logic, with which I hope to give an interesting way to articulate the difference between theoretical and anti-theoretical approaches to ethics. On this interpretation, the propositions to be evaluated are particular moral judgements, and they are evaluated in terms of whether they are endorsed by the general theory in question. What the particular judgements or the theory are is unimportant for my present purposes, since what I am after here is to make a general point about the way these things might relate.

The feature of intuitionistic logic which interests me here is that it gives a way to articulate how theories might only imperfectly account for the particular cases they are supposed to address. On intuitionistic logic, a theory is gradually constructed over successive stages of reasoning, where there are conclusions you can reach at later stages which would be unwarranted at earlier ones. In the paradigmatic interpretation, concerning mathematical reasoning, propositions stand for mathematical theorems are mathematical propositions, and to assert a proposition is to claim that there is a mathematical proof of it (and asserting a negation means that there is a proof that the theorem proposition can't be true). The theorems proved at stage n can then be used to prove further theorems at stage n+1 which could not be proved or disproved with the resources of stage n-1. Of particular interest here is that intuitionistic logic allows for a final stage of reasoning, where there exists either a proof or disproof for every theorem. At this final stage intuitionistic logic is equivalent to classical logic (for instance, the law of excluded middle then holds, and, more importantly, the logic becomes complete, but only at the final stage).

My claim here is that theoretical approaches to ethics are ones where, if we give a suitable a intuitionistic interpretation to the field of particular judgements and the general theory, the approach asserts that there is some (actual or possible) final stage of theory construction where every particular judgement is comprehensively captured in the theory. Anti-theoretical approaches deny this. The interpretation would be as follows: there is some theory T at stage s which validate inferences to certain moral judgements (A,B,C, etc.) – this is meant as a straightforward analogy to the mathematical case. This allows for an interesting contrast between approaches which allow for a final stage of theory construction, and ones that don't. If we were at the final stage of our theory T (let's call it T_Ω), then the content and import of every particular judgement would be accounted for by T. In contrast, if we aren't (and might never be) at T_Ω, then there remains some particular judgement on the strength of which T can be modified, and needs to be if T is to be a comprehensive guide to our moral lives. This seems to me to be equivalent to the anti-theoretical claim in ethics: that there is no systematisation of our ethical practice which can hope to capture the variety and complexity of that practice, but that there will always be a remainder which is not accounted for in the theory.

My claim is very limited – I am not proposing something like a logic in which to couch our moral reasoning. But, even in the limited role as a way to make an important distinction, my proposal here has its virtues. Casting the developing of an ethical theory as a series of constructive stages matches very well with the view, for instance, of our understanding of ethics as an expanding circle of moral concern, where as we develop our moral sensibilities we see duties to things we hadn't considered important earlier. It also is a natural ally of something like the reflective equilibrium to approach to moral reasoning, where we have a to-and-fro between general theories and particular moral judgements, each being revised on the strength of the other. But intuitionistic logic is not the same as reflective equilibrium: for one thing, the latter isn't a logic; another, more troubling point is that intuitionistic logic doesn't allow for the type of oscillation between different versions of particular claims that reflective equilibrium requires.

What I mean is that, once we reach some stage T_n where moral claims A, B and C are validated (given comprehensive and convincing support by T), then at no T after T_n will A, B and C fail to be validated. Reflective equilibrium isn't like that: up until the final equilibrium is reached, everything is up for modification. This leads to what I see as the greatest problem for my proposal: interpreting particular moral claims in the way we do theorems in mathematics might not be very convincing, especially because we are often very willing to give up particular judgements or intuitions which seemed certain to us earlier.

I have two replies to this worry, one ambitious and another more modest. The ambitious reply would try to dodge this problem by being very careful about what the scope of the particular moral claims are. Instead of having a proposition A like 'intentionally killing another human being is always wrong', which we might believe to a greater or lesser extent given variations in our background theories and our moral theory as a whole, we can see the pronouncements at earlier stages of T to be on propositions like B = 'intentionally killing of a human being without special societal sanction is always wrong' and C = 'there is some appropriate societal sanction which would allow for the intentional killing of another human being', where T₁ might validate B but not C, whereas T₂ might also validate C's negation (if our moral theory ended up being a pacifist one, for instance). Having finer-grained judgements of this type makes it far more believable that we can at some stage of the reasoning set some of them in stone (at least regarding the further development of T). The more modest reply, in contrast, would be to point out that the distinction I'm trying to make between theory and anti-theory holds even if there are just two or three stages of reasoning, where when we go to T_Ω we settle almost every moral question in one bound. This is not a fantastic state of affairs, since if we take many defenders of various theories at their word, when we carefully and conscientiously apply the theory in question, we at least have a procedure for answering any moral question (difficult to apply as it might be).

There is a further worry, about whether the claim that a theoretical approach to ethics would entail asserting that there is some final stage for the theory in question is too strong a claim – it at least seems to assert the existence of a complete decision procedure which either asserts or denies any possible particular moral judgement, which many people who see themselves as opposing moral anti-theory would also deny. But I will leave that question unanswered at the moment.

If there were a market in organs, we would be obligated to trade on it

I'm participating in a debate on the goodness of markets for the trade of organs on the Practical Ethics blog hosted by the University of Oxford. Nicholas Shackel has made a case that such a market would only be a benefit. Simon Rippon has objected that such a market would give rise to social obligations to make use of the market even when doing so would harm you. Shackel has responded that talking about such social obligations is unwarranted, because at most there would be an expectation to trade on the market, but never an obligation. I've chimed in and made use of David Lewis's work in Convention to show that expectations do sometimes lead to obligations, and it would in the case of a trade in organs (and, in fact, in any legitimate market).


Shackel believes that a market in organs would be a good thing, even for the poor people who are most likely to be the ones selling organs, because it allows the buyer to gain a kidney, greatly extending their life, and the seller to make a lot of financial headway. He describes this as a win-win situation. But believing that this is a fair trade is exactly which leads to there being obligations to trade on the market, as Lewis's framework shows.


A quick, simplified gloss on Lewisian conventions: there is a convention to do C (and we should do C rather than not) when almost everybody expects people in the relevant circumstances to do C (and expects people to expect doing C), prefer doing C given this expectation, and would prefer some other action C* if almost everybody expected to do C* instead. This gives rise to straight-forward obligations because when I act against these expectations, I frustrate everybody's ability to co-ordinate towards mutually preferred ends. This is all pure game theory to this point, so I don't expect you have much to object to here. So, for the organ market case, it would go: for any legitimate market, I expect that trading occurs on that market and I prefer there being trade on a market over no trade (otherwise there wouldn't really be a market), which covers the 1st and 2nd conditions. If there were no market, or if it were banned, I prefer no trade on it, like I do for the market for hard drugs or illicit weapons (the 3rd condition). Because the three conditions are met, there is a convention to trade on the organ market. Thus, if I am in the relevant circumstances -- needing money and having something to trade on the market -- there is a convention to make use of the market, and an obligation to do so, otherwise I am arbitrarily frustrating people's attempts to reach the type of scenario Shackel describes as win-win. But this means that a market in organs leads to at least some obligations.

Shackel is committed to this result exactly because he describes someone improving their economic condition through organ trade as a win-win situation. To deny that somebody would prefer trade to non-trade (denying the 2nd condition I outlined above, and the only plausible response) would mean denying that such an exchange, even at full market value, would be fair, and that would be to deny the good of the organ market. Shackel makes the claim that we have second-order norms on the fairness of expectations which would stop exploitation, and such norms are certainly present and in effect. But for there to be such norms describing even trade at full market value as an unfair expectation would mean that there are constraints on the fairness of trade which goes beyond what determines fair market value. Those of us who are more skeptical of the goodness of such a market have that option available to us, but Shackel does not.

Formal Methods in Political Philosophy

On the off-chance that there is somebody reading this who doesn't already know about it: the political philosopher Robert Wolff is running a very detailed serialised introduction to game theory and related fields here. Wolff is very much a skeptic about most of the uses that people try to make of formal methods in political philosophy, especially about the simplifying assumptions that are made without due comment, and applying theorems and models outside of their proper scope.

The moral life of babies?

In the New York Times magazine a psychology researcher, Paul Bloom, has published a report of research into some signs that very young children show some inklings of a moral sense, distinguishing between mean and nice actions and preferring the latter to the former.

I'm afraid I can't agree with Bloom's conclusions. The article gestures at psychological research which shows that babies sometimes predictably and spontaneously behave in ways we'd expect moral beings to. There are two large problems it doesn't address: which responses are supposed to count as moral and why; and, how the sentiments which underlie the babies' actions are supposed to relate to morality as a whole.

On the first point: why should we take those baby responses to be moral ones? For instance, the studies record the babies' interests by tracking their eye movement. But by that measure, babies prefer human faces (and other objects) with symmetrical features, or anthropomorphic figures to non, in just the same way they prefer 'nice' to 'mean' actions. You and I know that the first group are aesthetic rather than moral preferences, but we have reason to believe the babies don't (and no reason to believe otherwise). Making these types of distinctions is crucial to moral action (though we need not conclude from that, as many have, that moral preferences have no links to non-moral ones). Secondly, whatever morality is, it is not just the expression of sentiments. There are sentimentalist moral theories which are serious candidates (Michael Slote's comes to mind), but even in them there is a lot of ground to cover between having a sentiment which is broadly compatible with moral action, and having a moral life. For one thing, there must be some way to seperate the appropriate sentiments from the inappropriate ones. And we have no reason to believe that children, even well past infancy, are able to do so.

The conclusion that there is some, if even a rather impoverished, moral life at work with babies is likely to be a case of the over-analysis of results. The quickest way to point this out is to gesture at a confusion and its converse. It is a mistake to believe that if babies (or anyone else) doesn't have a moral life, properly construed (whatever that turns out to be), that no action they take would be moral. This is like believing that because dice themselves can't know or care how they land, they will never roll the numbers we like. The article goes the other way: because babies act in ways we see as moral, they actually are moral, at least in some way. But it is quite likely that babies would occasionally do things we would look upon as moral, even do so reliably and spontaneously, for reasons of their own. That is, for non-moral reasons. And that possibility is never discussed in the article.

Racial tensions on the rise in South Africa

Keep an eye on South Africa for the near future, because racial tensions are on the rise. Today saw the murder of Eugéne Terre'blance, the leader of the AWB (Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging - Afrikaner Resistance Movement), the largest political and paramilitary organisation of the far-right, white-supramecist fringe of SA politics (recently re-activated). I won't be shedding any tears for him – even under apartheid SA, he became a figure of ridicule in the mainstream, his movement clashed even with apartheid-era police and in the late 90s was jailed for assault and attempted murder on two blacks – but this bears watching. He was apparently beaten to death in his sleep by two blacks, on his farm. This touches a few sensitive issues for Afrikaners: firstly, for years there has been an endemic phenomenon of white farmers, still a heartland consituency of Afrikanerdom, being murdered on their farms, sometimes including torture and the murder of very young children; secondly, the leader of the ANC's youth wing, Julius Malema, has recently though well of it to resurrect violent chants like 'kill the Boer [white farmer]' and accordingly as been found guilty of hate-speech, causing huge public controversy. Malema is a major public figure, and considered by many to be a possible future leader of South Africa, and his vitriol towards non-blacks (predominantly, but by no means exclusively, whites) is a major sticking point in current SA politics. Terre'blanche's support is more vocal than widespread, though it must be mentioned that it has mobilised violently before, once to spectular effect, and once in bloody farce. But the major danger of this episode is as a bellwether, or as something which causes the lines of racial conflict to again be drawn across my homeland.

Thomas Hobbes on climate change

Which is the cause, that the doctrine of Right and Wrong, is perpetually disputed, both by the Pen and the Sword: whereas the doctrine of Lines, and Figures, is not so; because men care not, in that subject what be truth, as a thing that crosses no mans ambition, profit, or lust. For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any mans right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, That The Three Angles Of A Triangle Should Be Equall To Two Angles Of A Square; that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of Geometry, suppressed, as farre as he whom it concerned was able.

Leviathan, Chapter XI

This incidentally, is also Thomas Hobbes's view on the debate surrounding evolution.

I'm no climate scientist, and I have no special reason to believe that the orthodox view in that field, that our planet is experiencing anthropogenic climate change, is correct. But I do note that the interests of the skeptics in climate science are pretty narrowly focussed, and incidentally, focussed on exactly those parts of it which interferes with the interests of people outside of the science.

What is suspicious about this is that the results in favour of anthropogenic climate change is part of a normal science: they have been spit out as part of the business as usual of a research programme, and fits in place with the other aspects and results of that normal science. For instance, pronouncements on anthropogenic climate change depends on tracking the greenhouse effect, of  measuring the role of carbon in said effect, of tracking climate change over time, etc. None of these things have been questioned by the climate change skeptics, except to the degree necessary to deny anthropogenic climate change. And that's strange, from a scientific point of view. It isn't quite that all these things stand and fall together, but they definitely are interlinked. But public interest in the field extends exactly as far as its results impact business as usual outside of climate science. And that arch-cynic Thomas Hobbes gives an indication of what to expect in such situations.