Philosophy and reasoning links
A World Cup soccer illustration of the difference between rules and norms.
Arguing that line length shows a hidden symbolism in Plato’s texts.
Rumsfield and Keynes on probability and prediction.
About problems with models. Arguing that we cannot know that all models are false
Reviewing four books on evil.
About former Supreme Court Justice Souter explaining that judging is hard. The text of his speech.
Oz writer and reasoning consultant Paul Monk interviewed on religion, science and history.
A philosophical debate which is the reductio of the progressivist conscience’s impoverished sense of human achievement.
About what does, or does not, make the Holocaust distinctive. Further.
Making an excellent point about the “Israel lacks basic humanity” charge.
Connecting research on the moral development of children and adolescents to political philosophy.
About methodological and normative forms of political philosophies:
One way in which social democracy differs from socialism is that social democrats at least partly accept conservative methodological claims about fast and radical changes, and liberal methodological claims about markets and constitutional structures.
About structured procrastination:
I got a reputation for being a terrific Resident Fellow, and one of the rare profs on campus who spent time with undergraduates and got to know them. What a set up: play ping pong as a way of not doing more important things, and get a reputation as Mr. Chips.
About procrastination and perfectionism:
Many procrastinators do not realize that they are perfectionists, for the simple reason that they have never done anything perfectly, or even nearly so. …
Perfectionism is a matter of fantasy, not reality.
Reviewing the last book by G.A.Cohen, the “thinking man’s Marxist”:
Cohen soon became a leader of a school of thought known as analytic Marxism. Analytic Marxism eventually rejected so much of Marx-the dialectics, the scientific pretensions, the claims of historical inevitability-that it has long been debated whether it really is a form of Marxism. Cohen thought the question was misguided. In his view, Marx began a tradition of political and economic equality, and everything else was negotiable. Cohen once noted that Galileo and Newton founded physics, but physicists are never asked whether they are a Galilean.
… Cohen’s analysis of Nozick’s self-ownership argument was more technical, but it showed that more than one arrangement regarding resources was consistent with self-ownership, which was enough to derail Nozick’s claim that once we grant self-ownership libertarianism swiftly follows. Introductory texts in political philosophy now routinely direct students to the 1995 book where Cohen’s critique of Nozick is found, Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality. If there has never been another breakout work of analytic libertarianism, Cohen’s cool and unruffled takedown of Nozick is an important reason why.
… In 2008 Cohen published a book-length critique of one of my own intellectual heroes, liberal philosopher John Rawls. Reading Rescuing Justice and Equality, one instantly has the sense that all other challenges to liberalism are secondary, and that one must grapple with Cohen’s powerful criticisms if one is to maintain any shred of intellectual honesty. …
References to the “repugnant motives” and the “moral shabbiness of market motivations” appear frequently in Cohen’s essay. Yet business books often note that the hardest product for any salesperson to sell is one he or she does not believe in, and the surest path to business failure is to think only of your own needs, not your customers’. Cohen’s one-sided rhetoric contains a strong element of prejudgement, of a kind that will be obvious to anyone who has ever worked in sales or run his or her own business. …
What explains Cohen’s dark view of market motivations? I believe it stems from his definition of greed as any desire that is self-directed rather than other-directed. This view admits no difference between self-interest and selfishness. It will be self-interested of you not to mail your next paycheque to me. But is it really selfish? You worked for it, and so surely you have a more legitimate claim to it than I do. Selfishness implies not merely acting in self-interest, but doing so to a degree that exceeds what you actually deserve. Cohen seems to think market motivations are selfish simply because they are self-interested, but that does not follow. If a group of factory workers goes on strike to protest dangerous working conditions the workers are asking for something that is in their immediate interest. Cohen’s standard would suggest their action is thereby selfish. That not only seems wrong, but it is also a view no self-respecting leftist should flirt with.
Examining the moral life of babies:
A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. Which is not to say that parents are wrong to concern themselves with moral development or that their interactions with their children are a waste of time. Socialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be.
… A vast body of research now suggests that - contrary to what was taught for decades to legions of psychology undergraduates - babies think of objects largely as adults do, as connected masses that move as units, that are solid and subject to gravity and that move in continuous paths through space and time. …
But the new studies found that babies have an actual understanding of mental life: they have some grasp of how people think and why they act as they do. The studies showed that, though babies expect inanimate objects to move as the result of push-pull interactions, they expect people to move rationally in accordance with their beliefs and desires: … The psychologists Kristine Onishi and Renée Baillargeon have found that 15-month-olds expect that if a person sees an object in one box, and then the object is moved to another box when the person isn’t looking, the person will later reach into the box where he first saw the object, not the box where it actually is. That is, toddlers have a mental model not merely of the world but of the world as understood by someone else.
… One lesson from the study of artificial intelligence (and from cognitive science more generally) is that an empty head learns nothing: a system that is capable of rapidly absorbing information needs to have some prewired understanding of what to pay attention to and what generalizations to make. Babies might start off smart, then, because it enables them to get smarter. …
In the journal Science a couple of months ago, the psychologist Joseph Henrich and several of his colleagues reported a cross-cultural study of 15 diverse populations and found that people’s propensities to behave kindly to strangers and to punish unfairness are strongest in large-scale communities with market economies, where such norms are essential to the smooth functioning of trade. Henrich and his colleagues concluded that much of the morality that humans possess is a consequence of the culture in which they are raised, not their innate capacities.
… (Some other primates behave similarly: the primatologist Frans de Waal reports that chimpanzees “will approach a victim of attack, put an arm around her and gently pat her back or groom her.” Monkeys, on the other hand, tend to shun victims of aggression.)
… Moral ideas seem to involve much more than mere compassion. Morality, for instance, is closely related to notions of praise and blame: we want to reward what we see as good and punish what we see as bad. Morality is also closely connected to the ideal of impartiality - if it’s immoral for you to do something to me, then, all else being equal, it is immoral for me to do the same thing to you. In addition, moral principles are different from other types of rules or laws: they cannot, for instance, be overruled solely by virtue of authority. … And we tend to associate morality with the possibility of free and rational choice; people choose to do good or evil. To hold someone responsible for an act means that we believe that he could have chosen to act otherwise.
… To have a genuinely moral system, in other words, some things first have to matter, and what we see in babies is the development of mattering.
… All that we can safely infer from what the babies reached for is that babies prefer the good guy and show an aversion to the bad guy. But what’s exciting here is that these preferences are based on how one individual treated another, on whether one individual was helping another individual achieve its goals or hindering it. This is preference of a very special sort; babies were responding to behaviors that adults would describe as nice or mean.
… In fact, one discovery of contemporary research in social psychology and social neuroscience is the powerful emotional underpinning of what we once thought of as cool, untroubled, mature moral deliberation.
… If this higher morality or higher altruism were found in babies, the case for divine creation would get just a bit stronger.
But it is not present in babies. In fact, our initial moral sense appears to be biased toward our own kind. …
The aspect of morality that we truly marvel at - its generality and universality - is the product of culture, not of biology. …
Morality, then, is a synthesis of the biological and the cultural, of the unlearned, the discovered and the invented. Babies possess certain moral foundations - the capacity and willingness to judge the actions of others, some sense of justice, gut responses to altruism and nastiness. Regardless of how smart we are, if we didn’t start with this basic apparatus, we would be nothing more than amoral agents, ruthlessly driven to pursue our self-interest.
Arguing that line length shows a hidden symbolism in Plato’s texts.
Rumsfield and Keynes on probability and prediction.
About problems with models. Arguing that we cannot know that all models are false
Reviewing four books on evil.
About former Supreme Court Justice Souter explaining that judging is hard. The text of his speech.
Oz writer and reasoning consultant Paul Monk interviewed on religion, science and history.
A philosophical debate which is the reductio of the progressivist conscience’s impoverished sense of human achievement.
About what does, or does not, make the Holocaust distinctive. Further.
Making an excellent point about the “Israel lacks basic humanity” charge.
Connecting research on the moral development of children and adolescents to political philosophy.
About methodological and normative forms of political philosophies:
One way in which social democracy differs from socialism is that social democrats at least partly accept conservative methodological claims about fast and radical changes, and liberal methodological claims about markets and constitutional structures.
About structured procrastination:
I got a reputation for being a terrific Resident Fellow, and one of the rare profs on campus who spent time with undergraduates and got to know them. What a set up: play ping pong as a way of not doing more important things, and get a reputation as Mr. Chips.
About procrastination and perfectionism:
Many procrastinators do not realize that they are perfectionists, for the simple reason that they have never done anything perfectly, or even nearly so. …
Perfectionism is a matter of fantasy, not reality.
Reviewing the last book by G.A.Cohen, the “thinking man’s Marxist”:
Cohen soon became a leader of a school of thought known as analytic Marxism. Analytic Marxism eventually rejected so much of Marx-the dialectics, the scientific pretensions, the claims of historical inevitability-that it has long been debated whether it really is a form of Marxism. Cohen thought the question was misguided. In his view, Marx began a tradition of political and economic equality, and everything else was negotiable. Cohen once noted that Galileo and Newton founded physics, but physicists are never asked whether they are a Galilean.
… Cohen’s analysis of Nozick’s self-ownership argument was more technical, but it showed that more than one arrangement regarding resources was consistent with self-ownership, which was enough to derail Nozick’s claim that once we grant self-ownership libertarianism swiftly follows. Introductory texts in political philosophy now routinely direct students to the 1995 book where Cohen’s critique of Nozick is found, Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality. If there has never been another breakout work of analytic libertarianism, Cohen’s cool and unruffled takedown of Nozick is an important reason why.
… In 2008 Cohen published a book-length critique of one of my own intellectual heroes, liberal philosopher John Rawls. Reading Rescuing Justice and Equality, one instantly has the sense that all other challenges to liberalism are secondary, and that one must grapple with Cohen’s powerful criticisms if one is to maintain any shred of intellectual honesty. …
References to the “repugnant motives” and the “moral shabbiness of market motivations” appear frequently in Cohen’s essay. Yet business books often note that the hardest product for any salesperson to sell is one he or she does not believe in, and the surest path to business failure is to think only of your own needs, not your customers’. Cohen’s one-sided rhetoric contains a strong element of prejudgement, of a kind that will be obvious to anyone who has ever worked in sales or run his or her own business. …
What explains Cohen’s dark view of market motivations? I believe it stems from his definition of greed as any desire that is self-directed rather than other-directed. This view admits no difference between self-interest and selfishness. It will be self-interested of you not to mail your next paycheque to me. But is it really selfish? You worked for it, and so surely you have a more legitimate claim to it than I do. Selfishness implies not merely acting in self-interest, but doing so to a degree that exceeds what you actually deserve. Cohen seems to think market motivations are selfish simply because they are self-interested, but that does not follow. If a group of factory workers goes on strike to protest dangerous working conditions the workers are asking for something that is in their immediate interest. Cohen’s standard would suggest their action is thereby selfish. That not only seems wrong, but it is also a view no self-respecting leftist should flirt with.
Examining the moral life of babies:
A growing body of evidence, though, suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life. With the help of well-designed experiments, you can see glimmers of moral thought, moral judgment and moral feeling even in the first year of life. Some sense of good and evil seems to be bred in the bone. Which is not to say that parents are wrong to concern themselves with moral development or that their interactions with their children are a waste of time. Socialization is critically important. But this is not because babies and young children lack a sense of right and wrong; it’s because the sense of right and wrong that they naturally possess diverges in important ways from what we adults would want it to be.
… A vast body of research now suggests that - contrary to what was taught for decades to legions of psychology undergraduates - babies think of objects largely as adults do, as connected masses that move as units, that are solid and subject to gravity and that move in continuous paths through space and time. …
But the new studies found that babies have an actual understanding of mental life: they have some grasp of how people think and why they act as they do. The studies showed that, though babies expect inanimate objects to move as the result of push-pull interactions, they expect people to move rationally in accordance with their beliefs and desires: … The psychologists Kristine Onishi and Renée Baillargeon have found that 15-month-olds expect that if a person sees an object in one box, and then the object is moved to another box when the person isn’t looking, the person will later reach into the box where he first saw the object, not the box where it actually is. That is, toddlers have a mental model not merely of the world but of the world as understood by someone else.
… One lesson from the study of artificial intelligence (and from cognitive science more generally) is that an empty head learns nothing: a system that is capable of rapidly absorbing information needs to have some prewired understanding of what to pay attention to and what generalizations to make. Babies might start off smart, then, because it enables them to get smarter. …
In the journal Science a couple of months ago, the psychologist Joseph Henrich and several of his colleagues reported a cross-cultural study of 15 diverse populations and found that people’s propensities to behave kindly to strangers and to punish unfairness are strongest in large-scale communities with market economies, where such norms are essential to the smooth functioning of trade. Henrich and his colleagues concluded that much of the morality that humans possess is a consequence of the culture in which they are raised, not their innate capacities.
… (Some other primates behave similarly: the primatologist Frans de Waal reports that chimpanzees “will approach a victim of attack, put an arm around her and gently pat her back or groom her.” Monkeys, on the other hand, tend to shun victims of aggression.)
… Moral ideas seem to involve much more than mere compassion. Morality, for instance, is closely related to notions of praise and blame: we want to reward what we see as good and punish what we see as bad. Morality is also closely connected to the ideal of impartiality - if it’s immoral for you to do something to me, then, all else being equal, it is immoral for me to do the same thing to you. In addition, moral principles are different from other types of rules or laws: they cannot, for instance, be overruled solely by virtue of authority. … And we tend to associate morality with the possibility of free and rational choice; people choose to do good or evil. To hold someone responsible for an act means that we believe that he could have chosen to act otherwise.
… To have a genuinely moral system, in other words, some things first have to matter, and what we see in babies is the development of mattering.
… All that we can safely infer from what the babies reached for is that babies prefer the good guy and show an aversion to the bad guy. But what’s exciting here is that these preferences are based on how one individual treated another, on whether one individual was helping another individual achieve its goals or hindering it. This is preference of a very special sort; babies were responding to behaviors that adults would describe as nice or mean.
… In fact, one discovery of contemporary research in social psychology and social neuroscience is the powerful emotional underpinning of what we once thought of as cool, untroubled, mature moral deliberation.
… If this higher morality or higher altruism were found in babies, the case for divine creation would get just a bit stronger.
But it is not present in babies. In fact, our initial moral sense appears to be biased toward our own kind. …
The aspect of morality that we truly marvel at - its generality and universality - is the product of culture, not of biology. …
Morality, then, is a synthesis of the biological and the cultural, of the unlearned, the discovered and the invented. Babies possess certain moral foundations - the capacity and willingness to judge the actions of others, some sense of justice, gut responses to altruism and nastiness. Regardless of how smart we are, if we didn’t start with this basic apparatus, we would be nothing more than amoral agents, ruthlessly driven to pursue our self-interest.