Episode post here. Another excellent transcription from Caroline Wall—thanks!
Matt Teichman:
Hello, and welcome to Elucidations, an
unexpected philosophy podcast. I’m Matt Teichman.
Agnes Callard:
I’m Agnes Callard.
Ben Callard:
And I’m Ben Callard.
Matt Teichman:
And today is our listener Q&A episode, which means that
we’ll be answering questions that you recorded and sent to us. I guess we’re
about ready to get started. So let’s listen to the first one.
Listener #1:
The problem of property: the phrase ‘taxation is theft’ is
probably well known, because theft is only possible if someone takes another’s
property unlawfully. The principle always made me think of the question where
the right of property comes from, especially because this phrase is often paired
with the nonaggression principle, the notion that if you start from first
principles and you follow through, the conclusion should stand.
But how should one proportion the claims of property? Can the first one to reach Mars claim it all? Should you, if you can, repay or return stolen property? Think not just of common theft, but of reparations, or the land that the Romans stole from the Gauls, et cetera? Can property even make sense alone, practically as well, but even conceptually?
Agnes Callard:
So I just want to introduce two thoughts here about
property, and see where you guys want to go with this. So one of them is from
Oliver Wendell Holmes writing in
1897. He is talking about the
foundations of property law, and he is saying that it is rooted in a certain
fact about human instinct, namely that we get attached to stuff that we hang
around for a while.
So here’s the quote. ‘It is in the nature of man’s mind. A thing which you have enjoyed and used as your own for a long time, whether property or an opinion, takes root in your being and cannot be torn away without your resenting the act and trying to defend yourself, however you came by it. The law can ask no better justification than the deepest instincts of man.’
So Holmes is saying, this is why we’ve got property law. It’s just like, someone hangs around something for a while, and they become convinced that it’s part of them, or who they are.
Matt Teichman:
And if you imagine a little kid with a toy, they get so
attached to those things. It’s like this inanimate object is their best
friend. It’s nuts, right?
Agnes Callard:
Yeah. And if you think about—just one step before
getting attached to the toy would be:
Hegel thought that the first kind
of property that you have is your own
body. Right?
And it’s like, why think your body is yours? And it’s like, whenever you’ve been
around, it’s been there. You’ve gotten really attached to it, to thinking of it
as yours. And maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s all there is to the basic idea of
property: you’ve hung out with something forever, as long as you can remember.
Matt Teichman:
I feel like if we took this really far, maybe we would
start thinking of our property as an extension of our bodies, if we had that
relationship to our bodies. I don’t know. That seems like a way to take that
view to the extreme. I don’t know what you guys think.
Ben Callard:
Yeah. I guess I’m not convinced that Holmes is right about
this. It’s not exactly a cynical theory, but it’s kind of a reductive
theory. It’s saying there’s nothing more to the root idea of property than—
Agnes Callard:
A kind of bias, almost.
Ben Callard:
—familiarity or something. I’m not sure what would count
as an argument for or against that view. I’m not sure what would count against
the following view that I’m about to give. But why not think the root idea is
the idea of earning? We sometimes earn something. We all have that concept. We
all feel that we know when we’ve earned something when it’s due to us, when it’s
not due to somebody else. And of course, many of the things that we earn are
going to be things that are therefore near us, and that we’re familiar with. And
so it might even entail or explain Holmes’s intuition. But why not think that it
starts with the idea of: I earned this thing, it’s because of me that it exists,
and then that’s the basic idea of ownership?
Matt Teichman:
And just to throw a related concept into the mix, maybe
also the idea that you made the thing seems to be absent here, compared to other
accounts of where we get property rights from. It’s just like, I got attached to
it. But there isn’t this authorial ownership over it that results from having
made it. I don’t know if you’re thinking of that as the same thing, but it seems
intuitively related.
Ben Callard:
Yeah, yeah. There’s a huge argument in the history
philosophy about all this stuff. And Locke
said that property is a
matter of us mixing our labor with something. I think that maybe that’s the
right way of understanding Locke’s idea. Ultimately, he’s trying to think about
this notion of earning, and mixing our labor is one way of thinking about
that. But a lot of philosophers are cynical about property, I’ve discovered.
Matt Teichman:
Totally.
Ben Callard:
Liam
Murphy
and Thomas Nagel have that book
The Myth of
Ownership
where they’re basically saying, ah, this is a bunch of baloney. Ownership is
going to be this incredibly reduced notion, right? It’s basically the government
deigns to give you some rights to something. And maybe that’s right. I think
property rights are sort of a nightmare. But what’s wrong with just the earning
idea? What do you guys—
Agnes Callard:
The Hegel point.
Ben Callard:
What’s that?
Agnes Callard:
The Hegel point’s what’s wrong with it. If we want to
say ‘my body is my property’, I find it hard—if you’re going to think you have
any property, if you have any rights over any physical object in the entire
world, you had better have some physical rights over your body. And if that’s my
property, clearly I didn’t earn it. So that’s a problem.
Ben Callard:
First of all, we’re not talking about all rights. We’re
talking about a particular subclass of rights, namely, property rights. And I
guess for me, my body is not a paradigmatic example of things that I take to be
my property. I agree with you that I have some rights over it. But I might not
even remember to list my own body on my list of my property, right? It would be
my sofa, and my book. And if you say, oh, and what about your body? I guess I
wouldn’t tend to include that on that list, as one of the things I own.
Matt Teichman:
A lot of people think that you are your body. So if you
are your body, then you can’t really own your body, maybe. I don’t know. There
might be a way to make that happen conceptually.
Agnes Callard:
But Ben doesn’t think you’re your body.
Ben Callard:
No, I don’t. Yeah.
Matt Teichman:
Ah, I see.
Ben Callard:
But for the reasons I was just giving, I don’t see why we
should think that we own our bodies.
Agnes Callard:
Well, what relation do I stand to my body?
Ben Callard:
By the way, I’m not sure you do own your body legally. Do
you? Maybe you do. But this is certainly a highly non-paradigmatic,
non-canonical example, contra Hegel.
Agnes Callard:
I think Hegel’s thought is: you’re right that it isn’t
the example that people would normally use. But it is the example that reveals
the foundation of what it is for you to stake a material claim in the
world. It’s like your first material claim in the world, that in virtue of which
you have spatial location or something, is the body. And if you think you can
have a normative relation to make any other material claim, it’s got to be
parasitic on that material claim.
Ben Callard:
Uh-huh.
Matt Teichman:
So I’ll just mention another interesting problem that
was mentioned by the listener in the question, this idea that, well, is it just
first come, first served? Can I just traipse all over the globe and plant my
flag everywhere, and dominate the whole globe that way because I got there
first? There seems to be something intuitively morally problematic about that.
So maybe there’s this issue—there does seem to be this intuitive connection between being productive, making something, doing work, and earning the right to own the thing, on the one hand. But maybe if you’re super productive, and you’re a workaholic, and you’re just making things right and left, and claiming things right and left, there’s this concern that it could be a mode of unfair domination.
That’s why personally, for me, this is a true dilemma, and I don’t know the answer to whether I believe in property rights. On the one hand, it seems undeniable that we develop attachments to things, and that other people shouldn’t get to do whatever they want with our things. On the other hand, there does seem to be this concern that you could just take over the world and call it yours.
Listener #2:
Hello, Matt, Professor Agnes Callard, and Professor Ben
Callard. Greetings from China. My name is Steven Chen, alum of the
College and former intern of the
podcast. First, I just want to say thank you for doing this Q&A thing. I think
it’s an amazing idea.
My question is about how beginners should approach philosophy. Currently, my job is helping Chinese students apply to colleges in the US. And because I was a philosophy major, most of the students assigned to me are interested in philosophy or humanities in general. But when I ask them how they learned philosophy, they show two extremes. Either they are struggling to read history of philosophy textbooks, or they claim they have been trying to read the works of Kant or Heidegger, which in my opinion is quite a daunting task.
So usually, I recommend the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to them, but I really wonder how would you advise high school students to explore philosophy? It could be methodology, philosophers, books, or websites. And I’m also curious, really, how important history of philosophy is for people who are not scholars of history of philosophy. And it would be lovely if you could also share your intellectual history in high school and how you approached philosophy. Again, thank you very much, and stay healthy.
Ben Callard:
Thanks, Steven. I agree with you that Kant and Heidegger
are not the place to begin your philosophical studies.
Matt Teichman:
Whaaaaaaat.
Ben Callard:
I’m not sure they’re the right place to end them,
either. And maybe for the same reasons. But anyway, the Stanford Encyclopedia,
which you mentioned, is certainly a great resource. And poking around that can
be a wonderful place to start.
Matt Teichman:
But I feel like sometimes, it’s at least as hard as
Kant.
Ben Callard:
Fair enough. That’s true.
Agnes Callard:
Especially the entries about Kant.
Ben Callard:
Yeah. I would recommend Thomas Nagel’s book from the ‘70s,
Mortal
Questions,
as a great introduction. It covers justice and injustice, and the nature of
consciousness, and the meaning of life, and sex, and death. So roughly speaking,
if that doesn’t excite you and trouble you philosophically, then probably
nothing will. And it’s very clear and simple and stuff, so that’s a great place
to start. Agnes, do you want to jump in here?
Agnes Callard:
Did you just call on me? Yeah, so I like your formal
recommendation. But I’ll make a methodological one, which is that I think you
have to find people to talk philosophy with. So I think trying to set up a
reading group, a discussion group—it almost doesn’t matter what the book
is. The discussion group will motivate you to read it. And you’ll just find that
you have more questions to ask when there are other people there, ready to
listen to your questions. So that would be my number one suggestion: find some
kind of peer group and talk philosophy with them. Ideally, meeting in person,
but there are other formats possible, too.
Matt Teichman:
And I would say that often, that works even if there
isn’t a, quote unquote ‘expert’ in the group. You can often bootstrap yourself
into a pretty deep understanding of the material just by meeting regularly, and
hashing through it, and talking to each other about it.
Ben Callard:
To get to your question about high school personal
history, I didn’t have much acquaintance with philosophy in high school. In
fact, I think my only acquaintance was I read the Allegory of the
Cave and wrote a very
long and very unsound argument refuting
Plato. So that was my main
thing. But I guess my main encounter with it was being interested in physics,
going to physics club, and being constantly told, well, that’s not really a
physics question. And so I felt homeless for a long time. And then, as soon as I
got to college, I discovered—or fully discovered—that there’s this subject
where those questions were the questions that I was allowed to ask. So that was
definitely my—for me, it was college, not high school.
Agnes Callard:
I actually did start with Kant. I went to the—
Matt Teichman:
I was thinking about that.
Agnes Callard:
—Barnes and Noble, and I bought every book that was in
the little philosophy section, and I read through them in chronological
order. And when I got to Kant—I mean, I did keep going, because I read
Rawls and
Nozick and stuff. But when I got to Kant, I
just thought, this is true. And I was actually confused why they continued
philosophy after that, because I thought he’d gotten all the answers
correct. And I went around quoting Kant and preaching Kant for a number of years
until I got to college, and I learned that I was not the first person to really
discover him, which was disappointing. But I was doing high school debate, and
so I had people to talk about it with, and people to spout Kant at. That was
crucial. I think I wouldn’t have gotten so engaged with it if I hadn’t had that.
As for the history of philosophy, yeah, I think it’s really important. And one way to think about it is: these are the philosophical texts that have stood the test of time. So they tend to be pretty good. If we’ve preserved them for a couple thousand years, there’s probably something in them. They’re a good bet. But some of them are obscure and opaque, and so at least for your first thing, you might want to choose something like a Platonic dialogue. Or Ben’s suggestion about Nagel is great, too.
Matt Teichman:
I would also mention—I feel like people don’t say this
too much—that the exact same advice we’re giving about getting into a reading
group and working your way through a text, I would say that applies to the
formal ‘mathy’ areas of philosophy as well. Get together with some friends, find
a paper you think is interesting. Maybe you don’t even understand why it’s
interesting, you just think the symbols look cool or something. Get out a
whiteboard and try to figure out what’s going on. I think the same thing applies
there.
In terms of my autobiography, it’s extremely weird, so I won’t go into it that much. So I got interested in philosophy in the course of doing a PhD in cinema studies. And I found that whenever I got stuck on a difficult problem in cinema studies, I had to turn to philosophers for help. So that’s probably not going to be replicated by that many people.
Listener #3:
Hi Agnes, Ben, and Matt. I’m a big fan of the show. I’m a
long-time listener, first-time caller. My question is about who gets to call
themselves a philosopher. In my life, most of the people I’ve met that call
themselves philosophers are just dudes who like to talk a lot. But in academic
philosophy, there’s a lot more gatekeeping. Did you get a PhD? Are you employed
as a professional philosopher in a philosophy department? And so I am curious
about your thoughts about who gets to use that term. Is it everybody?
Everybody who likes to think? Or is it only certain people? Curious to hear your
thoughts.
Agnes Callard:
When I was an undergrad here at the University of
Chicago, one of my teachers said, don’t call yourself a philosopher. Plato,
Aristotle, and those people are philosophers. You’re someone who studies
philosophy. That’s who you are. And for a long time, I used that. I was like, I
study philosophy. I teach philosophy. And—
Matt Teichman:
It’s like it’s a spectator sport or something.
Agnes Callard:
Yeah. And then, at a certain point, I was like,
wait. Can’t you just be a philosopher and not be that good at it? I’m not saying
I’m a good philosopher. But it is what I’m doing. Yeah, I’m doing the same
thing Kant was doing, and Aristotle, and Plato. I’m playing that game. And I
think it’s important—for me, it’s important to be like, that’s the game I’m
in. I’m not in the game of Plato commentary. If I’m doing Plato commentary, it’s
because I think that’s part of the game that Plato was in. So I think it is
important to be able to access that title and say, this is what I’m doing. I’m
trying to answer the deepest questions about the human experience. I’m trying to
give my own answers to those questions. I think that’s what makes me a
philosopher.
Matt Teichman:
I’m curious to hear if you would agree with this, and I
think this is sort of in the spirit of what you just said, but I take the
general position that if somebody identifies as an X, that’s good enough. You
can start treating them as an X, for any X. So that applies to
‘philosopher’. That applies to ‘musician’. Even if they can’t really play
anything yet, if they’ve got a guitar and they’re trying, that’s fine. They’re a
musician. So anyway, I don’t know if you agree or disagree with that, but I’d be
curious to hear your perspective.
Ben Callard:
I’m a little worried about the self-identification
criterion, at least—we could cut thinner or thicker there—but somebody might
think that philosopher meant philologist, or philatelist, or something. And so
they might say, ‘I’m a philosopher’, but have a misapprehension of what the word
meant.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah. If they completely had no clue as to what it was,
if they thought it was being a surgeon, maybe we wouldn’t want to say that that
was sufficient. So I think it’s going to have to be something like defeasibly
sufficient, or maybe sufficient only if the person has some level of
understanding about what it means. But then, we get into this gatekeepy
issue. So it gets tricky once we fold that in.
Ben Callard:
On the gatekeepy issue, I suspect that Agnes and Matt will
both agree that having a PhD in philosophy is not a necessary condition on being
a philosopher, nor is it a sufficient condition, and being a professor of
philosophy is not a necessary condition, nor is it a sufficient condition. So
that’s speaking to the gatekeepy question. There’s another question—I’d be
actually curious to hear in particular what Agnes had to say about
this—whether, if those are not necessary or sufficient conditions, is it that
everybody’s a philosopher?
I suspect that Agnes is inclined to answer that question ‘yes’. And I’m inclined to answer that question ‘no’. I don’t think everybody’s a philosopher. There’s an inclination side to that story, and there’s an aptitude side to that story. And I’ve had students who had a great amount of philosophical aptitude, but the subject just left them cold, and they stopped doing it and went off and did something else. And I’ve had students who were strongly drawn to it, but who didn’t have any talent for it. I haven’t yet said for what. We have to say what the ‘something’ is. But I’m inclined to say that not everybody is a philosopher. But you certainly shouldn’t look only in philosophy departments to find philosophers. Anyway, that would be my answer to that question about the domain or the scope of who is a philosopher.
Agnes Callard:
So first of all, I think you’ve conflated two questions,
Ben, which is, is someone a philosopher, and can they do philosophy, or do they
have philosophical ability? Because someone might have both the inclination and
the talent, but just not do philosophy, right? So let me answer the question, is
everyone a philosopher? I think no. Can everyone do philosophy? Yes. Should
everyone do philosophy? Yes. So I think anyone who’s not a philosopher is making
a mistake, because I think philosophy is the examination of life, and the
unexamined life is not worth living. So everyone should do philosophy.
Ben Callard:
I agree with you about that. Everybody should be doing it.
Agnes Callard:
Right. And I independently think that everyone can do
it. But that’s yet another view.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah. So I feel like this is compatible with what you
both just said, but let me know if it isn’t. So my view on this is: philosophy
is an unavoidable component of any human life. And one thing you could mean by
‘I’m a philosopher’ vs. ‘I’m not a philosopher’ is that you focus on that. So
walking is a part of most human lives. Eating, digesting, is a part of most
human lives. But you wouldn’t be like: I’m a digester, or I’m a walker, or I’m a
breather—unless, somehow, you wanted to make that the focus of your
self-conception. So the way I hear it when somebody says, ‘I’m a philosopher’ or
‘I’m not a philosopher’, is that they’ve chosen to focus on this thing that
every person does, to some extent, as part of their self-conception.
Ben Callard:
That sounds right to me.
Agnes Callard:
Yeah, that sounds right to me, too. I think everyone
should focus on that, but that’s a separate point.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah. Excellent.
Listener #4:
Is it possible to prove, rather than merely argue for, the
ought statement? If so, what’s a provable example of an ought statement?
Ben Callard:
I think it’s definitely possible to prove an ought
statement. Let me give you an example. I’m going to prove the following ought
statement. Someone ought to play less online pool. To have a proof, you need two
things. You need to have it logically entailed by something else, and that
something else has to be something that you know. So here’s something that I
know. I ought to play less online pool. By existential
generalization, that
entails that someone ought to play less online pool.
So that’s an example. I suspect that that does not get at what you really meant. But I just wanted to—there’s a further question. Can we prove all ought statements? And the answer to that question, I think, is definitely no. But that’s true, also, for all non-ought statements. So we have to start somewhere. We have to start with insight, rather than proof. But that’s true for every domain, whether it’s normative or non-normative.
Agnes Callard:
And also, it might be worth distinguishing between
proving an ought statement and discovering the truth of an ought
statement—that is, the order of proof and the order of discovery are not the
same. I suspect what you’re thinking of is the case where we move from an ‘is’
to an ‘ought’. Can we start with a bunch of ‘is’ claims and derive from them an
‘ought’ claim? I actually just don’t know the answer to that question. Ben’s
example wasn’t an example of that. But I definitely think you can start with a
bunch of ‘is’ claims and go from that and learn the truth of an ‘ought’ claim,
not through proof, but through discovery.
Matt Teichman:
So I like both of the answers you’ve given. I don’t have
that much to add. One thing I’ll mention is, there’s a little bit of wiggle room
in what we mean by ‘proof’. So one thing people sometimes mean by ‘a proof’ is
‘a formal math derivation’. And I think what Ben gave was close to that. It was
in English, but it resembled the form of a formal derivation you would give in a
modal logic framework. So was that what a proof is? Or is it just, I don’t know,
a convincing piece of evidence offered forth in a conversation? Is that proof?
So I guess the only thing I have to add to this is whether you can prove an ought statement may depend somewhat on what we’re counting as evidence or proof. If the bar for what counts as evidence is low, then I think it’s pretty easy to find examples of proving ought statements. If you basically just support the ought statement, that could be enough. But if you want to rigorously prove that it absolutely must be the case, that could be harder. But then, it seems like that’s just true of any statement. It’s true of evidence in general that depending on what your standards for the evidence are, you may or may not be able to provide sufficient evidence.
Agnes Callard:
Yeah. Let me add one last thing, which is: I don’t know
if you can derive an ‘is’ from an ‘ought’, either, unless it would be an ‘is’
about ‘oughts’. So it kinda seems like ‘ought’-s and ‘is’-es are pretty
parallel, in terms of proof.
Listener #5:
This is a question about social injustice and moral
obligations. So let’s assume the following two premises. One is a moral claim
that the current social order is immensely unjust. And second is an empirical
claim (but I think a reasonable one) that as a member of one of the more
privileged groups in society, worldwide or so, I’m a beneficiary of this
injustice. So should I conclude that just being a generally decent person, but
at the same time devoting most of my time to personal goals such as a fulfilling
career, raising a family, or nurturing friendships—that is not enough for
being a morally good person?
And I’m vacillating between two answers. On the one hand, I think that social justice activism is good, but it can be over-demanding. You shouldn’t feel guilty about pursuing ordinary personal goals. On the other hand, sometimes I think that even asking the question is illegitimate. It’s hiding a desire to rationalize complacency, and finding a way to avoid guilt. Thank you.
Ben Callard:
So there’s a part of your question, which is just a
question about how demanding morality is. And that’s the well-known question in
philosophy. Peter Singer famously said that it’s very, very, very demanding, and
that we have to give to marginal
utility. That I take to be a
very, very difficult question. I don’t have anything particularly illuminating
to say. I think it’s just a hard question.
But I wanted to focus on one part of what you said, which is somewhat separable from that larger question. You seem to imply that if we benefit from an injustice, that we have a special obligation with respect to remedying that injustice. And I don’t think that’s true. So just to give a dumb example, if my neighbor has a big awning and it casts shade on my garden, and then somebody steals his awning, I’ve now benefited from an injustice. That was unjust, and I benefited from it. But I don’t think I have any special obligations to catch the thief, just because I benefited from the injustice.
Matt Teichman:
Ben, you’re complicit in this theft!
Ben Callard:
[ LAUGHTER ] So it may be that I am morally obligated to
help catch the guy. But I’m not obligated because I benefited. That doesn’t add
anything to it. It may be that I have obligations just by being a human being.
Matt Teichman:
Right. So you’re just as obligated as anyone else would
be. But you’re not more obligated because this happened.
Ben Callard:
Right.
Agnes Callard:
So I think you are more obligated, but not necessarily
because other people are being treated unjustly so much as because you’re
privileged. Suppose what we mean by ‘privilege’ is that you have a lot of
opportunities that other people wouldn’t have. I think you have an obligation to
make use of those opportunities, in the mode of: you have an obligation to
develop your talents and make use of your talents. Right? And you could think of
privilege as: you just get a bunch of those things.
Now, the turn in the question that surprised me was when the social justice activism came in. Because I think that you’re obligated to take whatever talents you have, and whatever benefits you’ve been given, and whatever luck you have—you’re obligated to take that and make the most of yourself, and do something great with your life to whatever extent you can. I think sometimes that might mean social justice activism. But for a lot of us, that would be a misuse of our talents. And I think a lot of what you might call personal growth, like career—you shouldn’t pick a career, except if you think that career is going to do some good in the world, and make a good use of your talents.
So I think you do have very strong moral obligations to do the very best things with your life that you possibly can. And those are probably stronger if you’re more privileged. But I don’t know that I would focus those obligations necessarily in the area of social justice activism.
Matt Teichman:
I may be misinterpreting the question somewhat, but I
thought I picked up on the idea that raising a family wasn’t making the best use
of your talents. And that’s a very complicated question—what good does it do
in the world if you put a lot of time into raising your family? But I think it’s
at least a very interesting question worth pursuing. And there’s a good case to
be made that it is an intrinsically valuable activity, both for you and for your
community at large, to do those kinds of things, which it seems were being
talked about as selfish.
Agnes Callard:
If nobody did it, there would be no more people.
Matt Teichman:
That’s one reason it’s valuable.
Ben Callard:
I agree with you, Agnes, and with Kant, that we have an
obligation to try to make the most of the things that we’re given, with our
privileges and our talents. But I think that, as it were, factoring off too much
from Noam’s question. Noam was interested not in what we should do with the
things we’ve been given, but what we should do with the things we’ve been
unjustly given, or unjust benefits. I was making a case that you don’t have any
added obligations because the benefits that you’ve gotten are from an injustice.
Agnes Callard:
Good. I guess maybe we interpreted the question slightly
differently. My thought was that he was saying that some people are unjustly
deprived of these things, but not necessarily that it was unjust for you to have
them.
Matt Teichman:
Hmm. Yeah, that makes sense. So I don’t know if this is
necessarily the most popular opinion in the world, but I just thought I’d throw
it out there: I’m very much not in favor of guilt. I think that guilt is an
emotion that interferes with our ability to make the correct moral
decisions. And I also think it often interferes with our ability to come up with
effective political policies. Now, of course, whether that’s ultimately true is
a big discussion. But I just thought I’d throw that out there, since in certain
circles, it’s assumed that being guilty is the way you get yourself to do the
right thing.
Agnes Callard:
Gil Harman has a
paper saying that nobody
should be guilty. A good person is not made better by the capacity to feel
guilt.
Matt Teichman:
Right on.
Agnes Callard:
I don’t think that’s right, though.
[LAUGHTER]
I think guilt is a kind of pain you have at your own wrongdoing, and it’s important for your soul to be sensitive to that in the same reasons that it’s important for your soul to be sensitive to sad things that happen to you, or to bad things other people do to you. I agree with you—it often has very bad effects. Martha Nussbaum notices this about anger and she’s like: let’s get rid of anger. Right? And Gil Harman is like: let’s get rid of guilt. Rüdiger Bittner has a paper—let’s get rid of regret. Don’t let anyone ever regret anything. Right? Which is close to the guilt case.
Matt Teichman:
Right.
Agnes Callard:
Arnold Isenberg has a
paper—let’s get rid of
shame. And I get why people want to get rid of these things—because they’re
negative emotions, and they are all counterproductive when they show up in one’s
life. And when they show up at a political level, they’re
counterproductive. But I think that our emotions are our moral sensibility, and
there’s something really there that we’re sensing, at least some of the
time. And I wouldn’t want to lose my sense faculty for that.
Matt Teichman:
Maybe if I can just refine the previous thing I said,
because this is a response that I’m sympathetic to, I think maybe my worry is
about guilt misfires—so about inaccurate guilt, which I think can be very
dangerous. But maybe what you’re bringing out here is that there’s an important
place for guilt when it’s correct. When the thing you did really was wrong, and
you are really responsible for it.
Agnes Callard:
Yeah. And there was something else you said that strikes me as very right, which is that feeling guilty is not doing anything in terms of penance. Sometimes, people seem to think that just by feeling guilty, you’ve accomplished some kind of moral achievement.
Matt Teichman:
It’s all better, now. The wrong is undone.
Agnes Callard:
Right. So I agree with you on that one.
Listener #6:
What’s the point of saying that extraordinary claims
require extraordinary evidence if no one is ever willing to look at the evidence
for extraordinary claims?
Ben Callard:
I think you’re asking an excellent question
here. Yesterday, in my Phil. Perspectives class, we were reading Hume on
miracles. And
Hume gives this argument that you can’t ever have any reason to think that a
miracle report is true. And his argument is, roughly speaking: miracles are by
definition things that have never happened before. And we’re supposed to go on
our experiences. And so by definition, all the evidence is on the other
side. And so by definition, you’re irrational in believing a miracle claim.
And my students were very suspicious of this argument. And I am, too. They detected a real problem here: the problem of dogmatism. You’re holding fixed your current evidence set, and you’re saying: well, given that I’ve never seen X happen before, I ought not to take in new evidence. It’s related to Kripke’s dogmatism paradox, though it’s not quite the same. And I just think you’re right here.
Take an actual case. Think about how you’d actually react. Suppose you meet somebody on the bus and they start telling you some extraordinary claim: that aliens have landed, and some of them have assumed human form. And you might be tempted to say something like, well, that requires extraordinary evidence. But then, what we all actually do is ignore the guy. We say, he’s a crackpot, or he’s a crank or something. And so we stop listening to him. And maybe it’s okay to do that, though we would need an argument for why it’s okay to do that.
But in any event, we should stop saying extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence if we don’t listen to the extraordinary evidence. That is, suppose the guy says, oh, I have some evidence that this thing with the aliens is happening. We’re not going to listen to him. So I think you’re right. You’re putting your finger on a phenomenon that’s very, very common, and I agree with you it’s problematic.
Matt Teichman:
So one question I have about this is: it seems to me
that sometimes, we do listen to extraordinary evidence for extraordinary
claims. So for example, in Episode 113 of
Elucidations, where
we talked to Tom Pashby about quantum mechanics, I really can’t think of any
claim more extraordinary than basically any claim made in quantum
mechanics. It’s absolutely mind-bending, doesn’t even seem to make any logical
sense, and yet it’s the best available description of empirical facts about the
physical world that we have. And in that case, because it seems to fit the facts
so well, I was more inclined to try and understand what the evidence for it is.
And it had only happened in audio form, but Tom took these polarization filters out, and performed one of the experiments that you do with polarization filters. And without going into the details of that, he did it before my eyes. And I was like, what? How did that even happen? How did the light get through when you turned the middle filter around? That’s crazy. So I would submit that, maybe, as an example of how sometimes, we are willing to listen to evidence for extraordinary claims.
Agnes Callard:
But maybe, actually, there’s a lesson there, which is
that extraordinary claims require not only extraordinary evidence, but a kind of
extraordinary presentation. Because the thing is, first of all, you didn’t
listen to just anyone. You listened to Tom, who knows stuff, right?
Matt Teichman:
He does know a lot of stuff. That’s true.
Agnes Callard:
And we have defenses, I think, built up against taking
in the evidence. But those defenses can be worn down. They can be worn down by
an authority figure, or they can be worn down by people presenting us with a
little bit of the evidence and being like, you’re probably thinking this. And
then, they can finesse it. And so it may be that when you’re making an
extraordinary claim, you have to apply some finesse in how you present the
evidence in order to overcome people’s defenses. That might not be a bad thing,
that that high bar is required.
Matt Teichman:
So extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
plus really well-executed rhetoric.
Ben Callard:
But if I can speak to that very last thing that you said,
Agnes, you might take what you just said as true at least descriptively. People,
as you say, do have their guard up.
Agnes Callard:
Yeah.
Ben Callard:
And then, certain kinds of finesse might get people to
lower their guard. But then, at the end, you said that that might not be a bad
thing. But why isn’t it a bad thing that we have our guard up? Why not take the
principle, well, if the claim is extraordinary, the evidence needs to be
extraordinary, and have that be our principle? Why do we need this? If we were
fully rational, wouldn’t we just say, okay, you’ve said this strange thing. Now,
you’re going to need to give me some extraordinary evidence.
Agnes Callard:
I think because there’s a economics of attention
allocation problem, which is that it just might take a fair bit of time to get
through the extraordinary evidence, and you have to decide whether to allocate
attention to it or not. And so you need to be meta-persuaded to even pay
attention.
Ben Callard:
Okay. Good.
Listener #7:
Hello. This is Mark Cohen with my listener question. When
I was a kid, I was fascinated with driving. Whenever my parents drove me
somewhere, it was just nonstop questions. One day, I remember asking my mom
about the speed limit sign. I must have been about six years old at the
time. And she explained it signifies a law that says that you have to drive this
many miles per hour or else you’re breaking the law, and you might get pulled
over by a police officer and given a ticket.
And right as she explained that, we blew past a couple of cars in the left lane. And I turned to her and said, ‘Mom, why were we going so much faster than those cars? Were we going the speed limit and they were going really slowly?’ And she said, ‘Oh, no, I’m going, like, 75 miles per hour’. And this was a 65 miles per hour zone, as we had just learned from the sign that I asked her about. And I immediately lost my mind, because my mother, who I had heretofore loved and admired, was suddenly a criminal. And I just couldn’t wrap my little six-year-old brain around that. She calmed me down and explained, oh, if you’re going within 10 miles per hour of the speed limit, you probably won’t get pulled over, and even if you do, you’ll just pay a fine and maybe get a point on your license.
But what has stuck with me since I was a kid is this conflict over what the speed limit means, and how weird it is that speeding by a little bit—obviously not reckless driving, but speeding by, say, 5 miles per hour—is this totally benign thing that nobody cares about, but nonetheless is breaking the law. And so I would love to hear a proper philosophical discussion around what this implicit contract means, how we’re to make sense of this unspoken interpretation of the law, and what it means to us as governed citizens. So yeah, I hope this makes it onto the podcast. I would love to hear it discussed. Thanks.
Matt Teichman:
So I think a good starting point for attacking this
question is to advert to the immortal wisdom of one of the 21st century’s great
philosophers, Brad Pitt. Now, in this context, Brad Pitt is talking
about the fact
that people online—I think it’s probably mostly men—but anyway, people
online in their online dating profiles typically lie about how much they make in
order to seem more impressive. So that’s the context. And here’s the quote:
‘Everyone lies online. In fact, readers expect you to lie. If you don’t, they’ll
think you make less than you actually do. So the only way to tell the truth is
to lie’.
I think Brad Pitt is onto something important here. And there’s a little terminology that I’m just going to introduce, because I think it’s fun, from the literature in dynamic epistemic logic. And they draw this distinction between what they call honesty and what they call sincerity. And these are special meanings they just coined for the purpose of their discussion. So the idea is that being sincere is saying what you believe to be true, but being honest is being as truthful as your interlocutor expects you to be. So what Brad Pitt is saying here is that because everyone expects you to be misleading—everyone expects you to exaggerate about how much you make—the only way to actually convey the correct information to them is to play into that expectation that you’re going to exaggerate a bit, and do it. So it’s an example of insincere honesty.
I think something like that might be happening with the speed limit. The expectation is that we exaggerate a bit on how low the speed limit is. In fact, the speed limit’s 75, but the posted speed limit is 65. And as long as everybody understands that we’re going to agree to lie a little bit about what the speed limit is, that’s the convention. What do you guys think about that?
Agnes Callard:
Can I just offer a totally different framework?
Matt Teichman:
Please.
Agnes Callard:
So I think that there’s a distinction between a price
and a sanction. So a price means you pay a certain amount of money to be
allowed to do something, and a sanction means there’s some kind of penalty
that’s imposed on you for doing what’s forbidden. So when you want to park
somewhere, you pay a fee there, right? That’s the price. But a sanction would
be: you get a parking ticket because you didn’t park where you were supposed to.
And now, you could just view the parking ticket as a price, and just be like, it’s okay. I’m okay with the ticket. I’m going to park here, and then I’ll take the ticket. And I think that there’s a fuzzy borderline between prices and sanctions at the level of small sanctions. So I think it’s probably okay to view a parking ticket as just a price you’re going to pay for parking somewhere if you really wanted to park there. And I think similarly with speeding, technically, it’s a sanction. You’ve broken the law if you speed a bit. But as this person said, their mom’s like, yeah, you pay a little bit of a fine, whatever. She’s viewing that as a price, I think. And so I think the reason why she thinks it’s okay is exactly because she’s viewing it as a price, rather than a sanction. And so she’s not seeing herself as breaking the rule and getting punished for it. She’s just seeing herself as paying, with a risk or whatever, in order to do something she wants to do.
And I’ll just cite, there was this interesting—I think it was an Israeli study—where they instituted a payment system if you showed up late to pick up your kid. And a lot more people would show up late. And I think that’s because that turned it into a price, rather than a sanction. Nobody wanted to violate the sanction, but they were okay paying the price.
Ben Callard:
I think there are circumstances that can turn it back into
a sanction, though. So suppose that you were driving, as his mother was, over
the speed limit. And suppose that a child runs out into the road. And she slams
on the brakes, but there isn’t enough time, and the kid gets hit and killed. And
suppose it emerges that, had she been driving at the speed limit, the kid
wouldn’t have been killed.
We have three options at that point. So we can say there’s moral luck—that is to say, we can say that she’s guilty, though had a child not run out into the road, she wouldn’t have been guilty, but it wasn’t up to her whether or not a child ran out in the road. The second is, what that reveals is that she ought not to have been riding over the speed limit, and so to speak, it’s not a matter of luck. What it reveals is that she was doing something wrong all along, whether a child ran out or not. And the third option is to say, no, this is misplaced guilt—we were talking about guilt with respect to an earlier question—that, so to speak, she shouldn’t feel any more or less guilty than a person who was driving at the speed limit would if they had hit the child. In any event, I think it’s not clear to me that the first or second answers aren’t right.
Matt Teichman:
Hmm.
Listener #8:
Hi, I’m Mike. When I write stuff, or when I say stuff, I’m
always fixated on saying true things. I think a lot of people are like
that. However, I think increasingly that fixating only on iron-clad, verifiably
true things can be a limitation that reproduces orthodoxy. For example, I grew
up thinking that Emily Dickinson and Isaac Newton were asexual at best and
failures in love at worst. But now, I’m aware of letters that they wrote that
demonstrate that they may very well have been gay. It’s not like we can ask
them, so we can’t—big air quotes—‘prove’ it. And so, that conclusion may
be—big air quotes—‘wrong’. But I also think it’s a valuable and likely
enough alternative that I think I can believe it, as far as it goes. Do you
think objective truth about historical events is intrinsically valuable and is
something that should be sought out, even when shifting the truth doesn’t change
the lives that we’re living? Thanks.
Ben Callard:
So I think you should stay fixated on the truth. And I
take the case that you’re describing to be a success case, rather than a failure
case. Your thought is that in this case, being fixated on the truth—I think
you said it would be a limitation that would perpetuate orthodoxy, or something
like that. But it seems to me what happened was: we used to have a certain base
of evidence, and on that evidence, it was reasonable to assume that they were
asexual or whatever. And then, what happened is we got some more evidence. And
now, it seems to me what you ought to think is, as you just said: they may very
well have been gay.
Why not leave it there? Why not leave it where you yourself seem to go? You seem to want to say, let me go beyond what the evidence is telling me, which is that I now have reason to think that it’s very possible they were gay, and I should actually believe they were gay. Why do that? In any event, why is it that not doing that is somehow perpetuating orthodoxy? This just seems to me a good case of revising how you’re thinking in the light of the evidence.
Matt Teichman:
I would draw a similar moral, and I would say, imagine
more and more evidence of that sort keeps pouring in. At a certain point, I
think you are going to conclude they were gay. If you just uncover tons of
written testimony from all sorts of independent sources of whatever, Emily
Dickinson living with a same-sex partner, if you encounter many different types
of historical evidence, at a certain point, you’re probably going to have to
conclude that that was the case.
And as you rightly point out, this is true of any historical fact. We would like to have a time machine to go back and actually just observe what happened. But barring that, we have to make use of other kinds of evidence.
Agnes Callard:
So let me play devil’s advocate here, and just ask—
Matt Teichman:
Yes, please do. Play Michael Dummett, who didn’t believe in facts about the past.
Agnes Callard:
—I believe in facts about the past. I’m not that much
of a devil. But you guys keep talking about this evidence. And what I wonder is,
where is this fountain of evidence coming from, that’s rushing in your face? Ah,
I’ve got to move. I’ve got to respond to the evidence. Yeah, but the real
question is, what kind of evidence are we running into? And I think that people
acquire new evidence by opening an inquiry into something, and by entertaining a
new possibility and probably entertaining it beyond the level that they already
have evidence for, to ground the truth of the claim, and be like, wait, what if
they were gay?
And that obsesses them, and they hunt for that—they’re not hunting for evidence either way. They’re really hunting for evidence that they were gay. It probably occurred to someone: wait, these people were supposedly asexual, but that is how gay people would have looked back then. So let me look into this, right? And they’re looking into the truth of something. And they’re searching for it. And their search might come up empty. But our ability to sit back and respond to the evidence might be parasitic on the ability of these people who are, in fact, I think, questioning established norms and orthodoxy. And they’re even, in some sense, putting their own rationality on the line, in a certain way, by jumping in at the deep end of a claim, and then seeing if they’re able to swim.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah. that’s a really good point, right? Evidence
doesn’t just walk in front of you while you’re sitting there with your popcorn
in the movie seat waiting for it to come along. You have to go out and find
it. And often, what are you going out and looking for evidence on the basis of?
Maybe often, it’s just a hunch. There are very interesting questions here about
when should we versus when shouldn’t we listen to our hunches. But I think
that’s a really nice point, right? It’s an active process of gathering evidence.
Ben Callard:
I think it’s certainly an active process. But it seems to
me that the motives behind that search—there are various sorts of motives. And
not all of those motives have to do with dumping your fixation on the
truth. They could be, for example, that you hope that they were gay. It could be
a desire, rather than a belief. That could explain why you’re doing it.
Matt Teichman:
‘Wouldn’t it be cool if they turned out gay?’
Ben Callard:
Right, wouldn’t it be cool? Exactly. But the point is,
that doesn’t involve us relaxing our commitment to the truth. It simply is a
desire that we have. In terms of truth, it’s no worse for that.
Matt Teichman:
Yeah. We really need a devil’s advocate here, because I
think we’re a room full of
realists. Yeah. But I mean,
to me, the fact that we’re even interested in this presupposes that we think
there’s a fact to be discovered.
Agnes Callard:
I guess I think that there’s a difference between being
interested in the truth and being interested in avoiding the false. And it could
be: if there’s some truth about their sexuality, you want to have it. And if you
want to have that, you’re best off believing something about their
sexuality. You have no chance at getting the truth unless you believe something,
right? And so I think what the person who’s jumping in at the deep end is doing
is they’re on the side of the truth rather than avoiding the false. They’re
being a little less careful than the rest of us. And that is what can lead them
to being a fount of evidence for us.
Matt Teichman:
I think that concludes our Listener Q&A episode. I want
to thank everybody for all the questions. I was absolutely blown away by how
knock-your-socks-off awesome all the questions were. I found them incredibly
stimulating and fun. So thank you, listeners. And maybe we’ll do this again
sometime. And if so, I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks very much as
well to the Callards for providing complementary philosophical awesomeness.
Ben Callard:
Thank you, Matt.
Agnes Callard:
Thanks.
Elucidations isn't set up for blog comments currently, but if you have any thoughts or questions, please feel free to reach out on Twitter!