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?).

The Eutyphro Problem I

I was involved in a most interesting e-mail exchange for the better part of November and December of last year. It all started with a claim about the notorious Eutyphro problem for so-called 'divine command theory'. The claim, poffered by Chris Morris, was that the traditional Eutyphro dilemma is not a dilemma if one makes a distinction between what is 'right' and what is 'good'.

Let me explain. Divine command theory (aka 'theological voluntarism') is the view that one ought to do something if and only if God commands it. More precise, an action is right if and only if God commands it. There is an old dialogue written by Plato entitled Eutyphro in which that old scoundrel Socrates has a discussion with young Eutyphro on the street. Eutyphro is on his way to the courts to denounce his father. In the course of the 'discussion' (for it really is a monologue where Eutyphro's contributions are restricted to utterances such as "Indeed!", "Pray go on...", "I see....", etc.) Socrates asks Eutyphro "Are acts pious because the Gods command them, or do the Gods command these actions because they are pious?" The dialogue does not really give an answer, but later philosophers have taken this question to be the kiss of death for divine command theory (DCT).

The reason is that this question can be reformulated as an inescapable dilemma for DCT-ers: "Is an action right because God commands it, or does God command it because it is right". If it is the case that an action is right simply because God commands it, it seems that God could have commanded just about everything and it would be 'right'. Thus, if God had said 'go and kill all Canaans, rape their women and butcher their children' this would be right. But how could this be right? Murder, rape and infanticide are wrong and it seems, they are wrong necessarily. DCT cannot explain why these are wrong necessarily. Alternatively, if God commands us not to commit murder etc., because these actions are wrong it seems that God is irrelevant for the determination of what is wrong. Murder is wrong and God's commands do not add anything. In short, it seemed DCT is not a plausible theory of what is 'right'.

However, this is too fast. A DCT-er could argue that one ought to distinguish between the 'right' and the 'good', between 'duty' and 'value'. Then DCT can be salvaged from this dilemma. For God is such that he 'tracks' the good, what is valuable, and bases his commands on that. So God commands us not to commit murder and his command makes it our duty not to commit murder. However, the reason that God issues this command -- and issues it necessarily -- is that there is a connection between this command and what is good or valuable. (I am trying to avoid saying that the connection between the command and what is good is a consequentialist one. That is, it need not be the case that God commands us not to commit murder because such actions have the best feasible consequences. As long as there is some relation which makes it the case that God could not command us murder, rape, plunder and what have you...).

This seems correct -- at least to me, but I took a lot of flak trying to defend this view to others.

However, thus stated and defended, the Eutyphro problem (for it no longer is a dilemma) does point to a different problem for the DCT-er. A DCT-er has to have some story as to how God's commands can make and action right. What is it about God's commands (as opposed to mine for example) that make murder wrong? In other words, DCT can be defended against the Eutyphro problem, if it can be shown that God has moral authority. What could this authority be and how can you show that God (were he to exist) has it.

One final remark: this discussion is germane, not just for the assessment of a rather arcane view in moral philosophy that only a bunch of crazed, uncritical fundamentalist believers endorse. Similar problems arise for any alleged authority. For example, why ought one to do as the government commands? Why are the decisions of democratic bodies (e.g., a well-functioning parliament) legitimate? Why ought one to accept what experts (e.g., teachers) tell us to accept? Finally, note that there is a similar problem for you: why should you do what you decided to do?

I will come back to this later I hope...

In the mean time, check out the stuff here...

Evolution continued

I rarely if ever get reactions to the crap I post here, but this time I did in response to my previous post on religion and evolution. I left a small promisory note announcing some examples of what I think is ill-advised use of evolutionary theory.

One of the best and most wide-spread examples is the idea of meme selection. Though widely discussed and refined by serious scientists, it has been (ab)used to "explain" (and I use the phrase in its most liberal sense) all kinds of things, including the spread of religion. What do I have against it? Nothing in principle, but from what I have seen there are several serious problems with it.

First, what exactly is a 'meme'? Dawkins, who coined the phrase defined it as imitable behavior. Elsewhere, he calls them 'viruses of the mind'. Obviously, this is too vague and too metaphorical. If we stick to the behavior bit: this is a functional description of the unit of selection. Dawkins is consistent as his definition of a gene is functional as well. So basically, a meme, just like a gene, for Dawkins is 'that which gets selected'. Now with genes at least we have a decent idea what it is that gets selected. In other words, we know in what stuff the functional traits of genes reside. DNA (but also other things).

And this brings me to number two. For evolution to have any bite as an explanation at all, you have to be sure that there is a causal feedback loop from the function displayed to the selection of the unit that displays this function (i.e., a gene, a phenotype, a group, or what have you). However, we don't have such a causal feedback loop for most if not all proposed memes. How exactly do bits of behavior get copied and propagated? Through 'imitation' or 'learning' the protagonists of meme-selection say. But that is just a label, until we have more grasp of how exactly human beings (or animals for that matter) 'imitate' or 'learn'. And apart from some theories of the learning of movement through some forms of 'trial and error', we don't know what happens when people learn, for instance, Pythagoras theorem.

I am not saying that therefore meme-selection is a mistake. Far from it! What I am claiming is that just because you observe a change in the composition of a population (of individuals, of ideas, or what have you) which does not seem to be the result of some intentional process, that does not imply that the process of propagation must be evolutionary. In chapter 2 of my 2002 book (here is a blur) I give some examples of this type of quick jump in economics and perhaps one day, when I am a big boy, I will write a paper about it...

Evolution and Religion

Several books have been published lately taking an evolutionary look at religion. Dan Dennett and Richard Dawkins, each in their own way, have argued that religion merits scientific study. Their basic question seems to be the following. Human societies are characterised by religious beliefs and practices which often cost an awful lot in terms of energy (e.g., all those cathedrals that took several generations and lots of mortar, stone and lives to construct) and survival (think of the various religious wars, saints sacrificing themselves, etc.). What is it that motivates people to do these things? Both authors are atheists -- as am I, incidentally -- and are keen defenders of a naturalism that has its roots in evolutionary theory. Both authors favor a meme-selection theory of cultural change and consequently are looking for the gene that makes possible the meme of religion. So far so good, I would say. But both authors also take a dim view of religion. Dennett considers it a parasite that does more damage than good to mankind. Dawkins is not friendlier.

This attitude annoys me. Both Dennett and Dawkins have no interest in finding out what adherents see in religion. What is it that attracts otherwise intelligent people to religion? D & D argue quickly, much too quickly, that religion is irrational and stupid. While that may be true in the end, proper philosophical method requires that you first seek to understand the point of view of the opponent with an open mind as to what is attractive and plausible about it. D & D don't -- a missed opportunity.

Is evolution dangerous for religion? I am not sure, but I am sure about this: too much, far too much is attributed to evolution. Too much, far too much is labelled as 'evoution'. Perhaps I will give some examples of this in the coming days...