The new Dutch government

Nobody took me up on my bet on the new Dutch government. Turns out that I was incredibly wrong. I am eating my humble pie. I really thought it would be impossible to form a new stable coalition, but it looks like they pulled it off anyway. One of my MA students who also pursues an MA in political science told me that he would have predicted this right after the election, as the 'ideological distance' between the new coalition partners was the least of all possible coallitions. I thought that even the smallest 'ideological distance' (and, no, I am not going to explain what that is -- I am not even sure myself) would be too big to bridge. But no; the Netherworld remains a governable state... Incidentally, the new coalition will be formed by the social-democrates, the Christian-democrats and a small orthodox Christian party. Can you blame me for my initial incredulity? Oh, and I refrain from offering any wagers on how long it will exist...

The Virgins in Paradise

Steve Martin has published this hilarious comment on the thought that the pious believer will be rewarded by Allah in Paradise with -- among other things - 72 virgins.

The MSWV - or what I have learned today

I am not sure about whether to post the following observations or not. The direct motivation for it is a heated exchange between two colleagues at my department in Leiden. Part of the exchange was philosophical, part of it was of a deep personal nature, so I run the danger of meddling. I don't mean to. I just want to comment on the philosophical disagreement, to the extent that I understood what it was all about.

My two colleagues both work in a broadly phenomenological tradition. I don't, so I may very well completely misrepresent their views.

With this caveat, I can now move to what seemed to be the common ground between them. Both seemed to believe that the Modern Scientific World View (MSWV) is a threat to philosophy. Colleague A seems to think that MSWV, with its emphasis on reduction renders philosophy obsolete, meaningless and experiences this as a loss. Colleague B agree that MSWV is antithetical to doing philosophy, but seems to think that nobody can entirely ambrace MSWV for it is impossible to live that way.

The exchange is interesting, but I don't really understand the root of the problem in the first place. The idea that MSWV is the enemy of 'real' philosophy is very hard to grasp. Why would you think that MSWV makes philosophy impossible? Perhaps it has something to do with the idea that MSWV is in essence reductive. A good scientific theory is reductive apparently. So, for example, we have learned that behind matter, as we experience it in our daily lives, lie atoms, protons and quarks. Love, we are told, is nothing but an evolutionary instilled drive to procreate and as some cognitive neurologists recently tried to convince us, free will does not exist, because we start acting before we intend to do so. This reduction should somehow affect how we perceive ourselves and our place in the world.

It already starts there. I fail to see why this necessarily should do so. The physicist tells me that this keyboard is nothing but a collection of elemental particles with lots of space between them. So should that tell me that this keyboard does not exist? The biologist might tell me that my love for my son is nothing but a paternal instinct the existence of which can be explained by reference to ultimate evolutionary pressures on the evolution of mankind. Does that reduce my love for him or make me doubt my motives for doing so? The neurologist just told me that free will does not exist. So does that mean that I do not have to make up my mind and decide what to do? Finally, the philosopher, in the grip of MSWV and quite dazzled by it all, confronts me with the grim truth: there is no such thing as duty. Goodness is nothing but a self-deluded projection of my own interests on stuff that contributes to my relative fitness as a biological being. The meaning of my life is nonsense: like witches and magic, there is no such thing.

The first three folks are easily answered: of course there are tables! In fact, he just told me so: a table consists of clumps of elemental particles -- so there are tables. Of course I love my son and I won't do this any less (or more) just because neurons are firing in my brain and hormones subtly influence my behavior! So the threat of the MSWV -- if there is any -- does not come here.

Instead, it is the philosopher who responds in this skeptical manner to the MSWV who is most seriously deluded. Of course duty 'exists': you ought not to commit willful murder, you ought not to rape your daughter, you ought not to cheat on your exam, etc. If my conviction in these things is the inevitable causal result of evolutionary history, than that could not diminish my belief that it is wrong to murder, rape and what have you. Just like the physicist who wanted to convince me that table don't exist, this philosopher fails.

But that is not the worry. For notice that the philosopher has told me nothing about duty, he has only told me the cause of my belief. The suggestion is that the belief is false. And the realization that I have systematically false beliefs like this will affect these beliefs. Again, that seems an exaggeration to me. First, people have many false beliefs. That fact does not change my own beliefs, even though I am human and therefore I am bound to have many false beliefs. Secondly, the skeptical reaction is exaggerated because there are various alternative theories of the nature of duty. Non-cognitivists, for example, don't think that our moral convictions are beliefs in the first place. They are neither true nor false because they are not truth-apt. Or take naturalists who argue that the property of being right or wrong, of being one's duty, etc., are complex composites of all kinds of mental and world states. In fact, the only thing that seems hard to square with the MSWV is a kind of platonic intuitionism where values, obligations, duties and what have you hover around in hyperspace, but even here some very clever folks have found ways of making ethics and philosophy compatible with MSWV.

Instead of fearing and cowering before MSWV, philosophers should welcome it and see it as a challenge. There is nothing to fear from the MSWV: sometimes it is completely irrelevant (like for the assessment of my belief that I am typing these words), sometimes is helps us finding our way among difficult discussions in philosophy (like the discussion between intuitionists and others), but most of the times, the MSWV seems compatible with just about anything a clear-headed common sensical approach to philosophy.

I wish my colleagues shared this view: it would avoid so much personal aggrevation.

Executive Salaries

I am actually quite skeptical of the idea that CEOs of large companies -- large multinational companies -- 'deserve' their larger salaries or that these salaries reflect their 'value'. Look at the usual arguments that are given to defend high salaries (the same arguments are used to defend the idea that some earn 'too much')

1. 'We need to pay high salaries because our CEO has performed really well.'

• This does not explain why you'd need to pay the CEO more than an office clerk who has performed really well.
  

2. 'Our CEO has changed the course of our company such that it performed really well'.

• Assuming that what is meant that without any change in policy the company would have performed worse, it still is a fallacy (to be precise, the fallacy of composition) to argue that it is due to the activities of the CEO. Market forces, other individual, new opportunities all contribute, and while it may be true that without the activities of the CEO no additional revenue would have been realized, it is mistaken to say that these revenues are all up to his activities. (It is like saying that since without ploughing and sowing and weeding your land would not bear any fruit, therefore, all the increase in value is due to the ploughing, sowing and weeding -- as if the fertility of the ground and climatic circumstances were irrelevant).
• But perhaps all that is meant that the base of comparison is how another CEO would have performed under these circumstances. I submit that one will never know how I or others would have managed Microsoft and that therefore Bill Gates' exorbitant salary cannot be justified by reference how I (or others) would have done.

3. 'Our CEO is worth his salary, because if he would get less, he would leave.' of more general 'The salaries of our CEO reflects the scarcity of managerial talent at t his level'.

• This is more interesting as an argument. The idea is that the scarcity determines the 'worth' or 'value' of the CEO, where this scarcity is expressed by the price the CEO can demand for his services. However, again it does not follow. One could argue that this holds under ideal market condition, where there are no insider/outsider effects or friction costs when a firm wants to hire a cheaper CEO of sufficient quality. However, in the real world the 'market' for managerial talent is not ideal. As a result, the price a potential CEO can demand reflects also things other than his or her scarce talent as a manager. Furthermore, it is unclear if there really is a 'market' for these positions as this professor from Harvard Business School whose name I keep forgetting argues.

In short, there are no good moral arguments as to why corporate top brass is entitled to the high salaries they receive. From a moral point of view, differences in reward for labor seem arbitrary. Does this mean that the socialists are right and that, therefore, there is nothing wrong with taxing CEOs heavily in order to 'correct' the income distribution? No, because that would require that there is an uncontroversial criterion that determines what and how much each person is entitled to. If these arguments don't work to justify high incomes, they also don't work to justify lower incomes. Furthermore, people have a prima facie claim to the salary that they receive: you need arguments to take some away from them.

That leaves only two sort of arguments for those who want to do something about these absurdly high incomes:

1. 'If we leave this money in the hands of private individuals they will not do as much good as we, the State, will do with it. Therefore, we should tax the (very) rich.

• Given recent discussions on the efficiency of state sponsored goods and services, it will be tough to convince people of this.

2. People who earn so much money should be praised if they contribute to the common good (e.g., fund a university or a chair in philosophy -- I know of one worthy candidate...) and be ashamed if they don't. In other words, we should encourage Bill Gates to give away chunks of his arbitrarily received wealth and praise him in exchange for his magnanimity. And if he were not, we should speak badly of him as somebody who does not realize that it is all a fluke and that it is the result of social circumstances that he was able to create this fortune. He would be vicious and (what is the opposite of magnanimity).

• Better, although you still have the inequity that the Bill Gates' of this world receiving lavish praise and the hard working hoi polloi will never be able to demonstrate their magnanimity. Virtue -- or at least the opportunity for virtue -- is distributed unequally (and perhaps because of that, unfairly?).