Is there still an American Left?

I've just finished reading Richard Rorty's Achieving Our Country, and I must say that it is the best thing of his that I've ever read. I will probably bother the group with it more than once as I think about it more, but for now, since I'm just in the "stunned" phase, here's a choice little passage I wanted to share:

It is as if, sometime around 1980, the children of the people who made it through the Great Depression and into the suburbs had decided to pull up the drawbridge behind them. They decided that although social mobility had been appropriate for their parents, it was not to be allowed to the next generation. These suburbanites seem to see nothing wrong with belonging to a hereditary caste, and have initiated what Robert Reich (in his book The Work of Nations) calls "the secession of the successful.

Sometime in the Seventies, American middle-class idealism went into a stall. Under Presidents Carter and Clinton, the Democratic Party has survived by distancing itself from the unions and from any mention of redistribution, and moving into a sterile vacuum called the "center." The party no long has a visible, noisy left wing---a wing with which the intellectuals can identify and on which the unions can rely for support. It is as if the distribution of income and wealth has become too scary a topic for any American politician---much less any sitting president---ever to mention. Politicians fear that mentioning it would lose them votes among the only Americans who can be relied on to go to the polls: the suburbanites. So the choice between the two major parties has come down to a choice between cynical lies and terrified silence. (pp. 86-7, emphasis mine)

You're all just a bunch of robots, man.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the "determinism makes us robots" assumption that seems more or less pervasive in the popular literature on free will and moral responsibility. It popus up especially in popular articles about the impact of neuroscientific work on free will. The idea seems to be that the truth of determinism would preclude reasoned judgment, which appears to be at least a significant requirement for free and responsible action. But the robot metaphor carries with it the image of self-alienation, as if determinism would have us carrying on mechanistically in spite of some deper free self.

There was an interesting exchange about this on The Garden of Forking Paths recently over an article of Dana's. And since then contributors have been linking to (mostly popular) articles that make this assumption or seem to take it as a serious position that needs to be dispatched.

All this strikes me as interesting both sociologically and philosophically. There's ample evidence to show that lots of people think this way about determinism. What makes, not just incompatibilism, but this particular interpretation of its consequences, so attractive to undergraduates and science journalists? Is compatibilism really that unintuitive? And so what if it is? Eddy Nahmias and Joshua Knobe have pushed this for some purpose that is a bit opaque to me.

Anyhow, thoughts on the determinism to robots move, either anecdotal or otherwise?

semantic externalism comics

Here.

the medicalization of back pain

Here. An excerpt:

Now as I have said so many times before, the placebo effect is not about a sugar pill, it’s about the cultural meaning of a treatment, and our expectations: we know from research that two sugar pills are more effective than one, that a salt water injection is better for pain than a sugar pill, that colour and packaging have a beneficial effect, and so on. Interestingly, there has even been a trial on patients with arm pain specifically comparing a placebo pill against a placebo ritual involving a sham medical device, modelled on acupuncture, which found that the elaborate ritual was more effective than the simple sugar pill. “Placebo” is not a unitary phenomenon, there is not “one type of placebo”.

But the most important background information missing from the news reports wasn’t about the details of the study: it was about back pain. Because back pain isnt like epilepsy or tuberculosis. Most of the big risk factors for a niggle turning into chronic longstanding back pain are personal, psychological, and social: things like depression, job dissatisfaction, unavailability of light duty on return to work, and so on.

And the evidence on treatments tells an even more interesting psychosocial story: sure, anti-inflammatory drugs are better than placebo. But more than that, bed rest is actively harmful, specific exercises can be too, and proper trial data shows that simply giving advice to “stay active” speeds recovery, reduces chronic disability, and reduces time off work.
We don’t like stories and solutions like that for our health problems. There are huge industries telling you that your tiredness is due to some “chromium deficiency” (buy the pill); your cloudy headed foggy feeling can be fixed with vitamin pills, pills, and more pills. It is a brave doctor who dares to bring up psychosocial issues for any complaint when a patient has been consistently told it is biomedical by every newspaper, every magazine, and every quack in town.

cooked up thought experiments and the viciousness of ethics

I've been working on these thoughts for a while, but I hope they will be particularly relevant given the recent discussions of the so-called problem of ethics professors.

There is something that has always bothered me about the thought experiments / intuition pumps that are the ultimate data for ethics according to many people, and for even more people, the rhetorical device driving ethical writing. Consider the following typical case (drawn from a pretty much random source):

You are out in a small boat and come upon fifty people in danger of drowning. Your boat can only accommodate ten people, and there is not time to make more than one trip to shore. Furthermore, there are no other boats in the area, and no one close enough to aid in any other way. No matter what you do, at least forty of the fifty will die.

My immediate inclination in these cases is always to try to find some way out of these situations. This, of course, is cheating, the ethicist will say. If you press them, they will add further constraints that frustrate your creative solutions, until you are left with the "hard choice" that the ethicist wanted to probe your intuition about.

I suspect my annoyance at this procedure is pretty universally understood as a sign that I am not serious about ethics, that I'm being annoying, or that I am too thick-headed to see the point. I also suspect that there is a strong pressure to stop suggesting the creative solutions, and to "play along" when these kind of cases are brought up, so that the ethics discourse can continue. And certainly, taking a certain conception of what ethics is to do for granted, this would be a totally reasonable way to go.

But I've still got a nagging bit of dissatisfaction, here, that I want to probe. Why do people react this way to thought experiments in ethics in particular? No one tries to "weasel out" of thought experiments in physics (do they?). I think my worries begin with a strong feeling that ethics ought to be tied to helping people make concrete moral decisions. I know this isn't universally accepted; it isn't uncommon to make a distinction between decision procedures and standards of value, to focus ethical theory on the latter, and to ignore any impracticalities of it, because those only matter for the former. I don't buy it; I think ethics has to be strongly concerned with both, and that they probably aren't totally separable. For a criterion in ethics to be true, it seems to me that a minimal condition is that it ought to be usable in (at least some) concrete situations.

Here's how I analyze my dissatisfaction. It seems like what I, or the undergrad ethics student, or others who cause this kind of trouble are trying to do is actually a sign of a good moral sensibility. It's not that we're not serious, or annoying, or thick-headed. It's that we're trying to do what most people try to do, what one ought to do when faced with a moral problem: we're trying to find a solution that maximizes all the types of value at hand. This kind of problem-solving activity uses a variety of resources, including background knowledge from any relevant area, to try to come up with a better solution than the immediately obvious ones.

Take the example above. As I read, I have in mind a picture of what my boat looks like (smallish wooden boat with oars), and I start using my background knowledge to come up with ideas about how we could save more people. Perhaps a few people could use the oars for flotation? Perhaps we could break up the boat and everyone could have a large enough piece to stay afloat? What if, instead of just letting 10 people in the boat, I let as many people as can manage grab on to the side to stay afloat? Etc.

And I start to think about reasons to take certain people over others. I should pick women and children, and probably I could fit more. I'd pick people who look weak or like poor swimmers, and try to come back for the others. Maybe I'd pick one or two stronger looking fellas who could paddle the boat faster than I could. And so on.

None of these considerations are supposed to be allowed, of course, because the point is that we want to theoretically explore the case when we can only save 10 out of 50. We want to ask something about our obligations, or their claims, or whether there is moral remainder, or whatever. They don't want the creative solution because it prevents us from facing genuine conflicts of value, which is one of the things they are interested in exploring. So the ethicist will keep adding stipulations until you are forced to deal with the issue that interests them.

And, given enough examples with this, you're probably going to get driven out of ethics, or you're going to fall in line. This actually strikes me as quite a vicious result! One of the results of studying ethics, then, is to squash one's ability to engage in ethical deliberation! No wonder that it's said: "nothing makes a man so much of a scoundrel as a prolonged study of ethics"[1]. In this case, we should recommending to students who might hope to become more skilled at solving moral problems, or become more reflective about right-behavior, to at all costs stay away from Ethics courses!

A further worry goes to the heart of the enterprise. I think the most sensible way to understand the point of intuition-pumping must be that it is supposed to make explicit the wisdom implicit in our practices of ethical choice-making, or, a bit more opaquely, to find out our core commitments or basic beliefs at the level of particular judgments. There is a worry, though, that since, in the course of intuition-pumping, we actually end up pretty far away from normal practices of ethical problem-solving, that whatever the thought experiments produces is going to be loosely if at all related to any actual implicit wisdom we have or practical judgments that we would make.

[1] It is quite difficult to find the original source of this saying. I've seen it alternatively attributed to C.S. Peirce and G.K. Chesterton.

Teaching Philosophy?

Howdy philosophers!

Well, in response to Matt's plea for posts, I thought I'd weigh in on a topic that I've
been thinking about recently, since I'm teaching existentialism (again) this summer.
Since I'm pretty certain that teaching will be the largest part of my academic life
after I leave here, I'd like to be able to articulate a coherent theory about how one
should teach philosophy (or maybe, how one should teach at the university level more
generally).  It's easy to fall into cynicism and apathy about teaching after a few bad
experiences, and I'm just as guilty of this as anyone else.  But given that most of our
students only get a single (or, if we can get them hooked, a couple years of) exposure
to philosophy, it seems like we should be thinking about how to make the most of that
opportunity (or those opportunities, if we're talking about majors).

I know that there are articles about this type of thing floating around; one author whose
work on pedagogy that I really like is Parker Palmer, and I could do a lot more reading to get
ideas.  But I'm sure some of you have thought about this as well.  Does anyone have
particular recommendations, or thoughts on the matter?

Common Sense and Scientific Inquiry, OR why I'm always tripping over my feet

Almost every day I trip over my feet: I catch my toe on a curb, shuffle over some uneven piece of pavement, mis-step down a stair, or trip over a shoelace. I've never met someone who stumbles as much as I do. But I almost never actually fall over. I'm a master in terms of using my momentum, flailing my arms, and other strategies that doubtlessly make me look ridiculous, but pretty much do a great job of keeping myself upright. And I was walking to LSE this morning, after such a close save, thinking about all this. And thinking about whether there might be something about the way I walk that causes the problem (doubtless this is the case).

Then it occurred to me that this was the perfect analogy for something I've been thinking about recently. John Dewey, perhaps notoriously, maintains that scientific and common sense inquiries are of fundamentally the same type, operating the same sort of way. This is extremely dubious to most people, given the obvious dissimilarities (how is Loop Quantum Gravity or Evolutionary Genetics anything like fixing a bike?). Dewey maintains that the only difference is that scientific inquiries are more systematic, more concerned with general relations and long-term consequences that immediate circumstances, but they have the same basic pattern, and they serve the same basic type of goal (solving a concrete problem rather an abstract one like "discovering the true structure of reality" or "saving the phenomena"). How to understand this?

Well, here's an analogy. Clearly, something like problem-solving has gone on as I attempt to compensate for my clumsiness. I have developed a set of solutions to help me recover from a fall (this has actually proved useful this year as I've pursued the quixotic venture of trying to learn how to skateboard, with only a few tumbles and even fewer serious ones, though many ungraceful recoveries). These solutions are more or less particular solutions to immediate problems. But when I begin to think more systematically about the way I walk, I begin an inquiry that is more scientific in nature. I'm concerned now not so much with an immediate problem, but a generic set of consequences and a systematic cause for them. To follow the inquiry out might take me through areas of physics and physiology, and perhaps ending in a general theory of walking that could be used to correct particularly clumsy gaits.

The advantages to this approach are the same advantages that Dewey names for science. Solutions developed here are potentially applicable to any person, if done well enough, and they cut to the problem right at the source, rather than develop more fragile and immediate solutions. It could be used to inform more immediate inquiries in a way that helps develop more permanent and robust solutions, though of course any application will itself require some degree of inquiry, rather than being totally automatic.

Anyhow, I thought that was a pretty neat illustration.