Philosophy Talk: The Blog

Caring

by John Perry

It was terrific to have Martha Nussbaum on Philosophy Talk.  Martha is one of those philosophers, like Robert Nozick, John Searle, David Lewis and a few others, who seem to produce more interesting philosophy than seems humanly possible, and not just by repeating themselves, but in virtue of a steady stream of original insights.

In the program I was skeptical about Nussbaum's rather cognitive take on the emotions, and I used some such phrase as "primitive caring." Ken mentions this in his blog, and seems not quite sure of what I meant.  Well, I'm not quite sure either, but I'll play with the idea here a bit.  There are two roots to my inchoate thoughts about this topic, one based on personal experience, the other on rather theoretical considerations.  I'll only discuss the former....

I agree with Nussbaum that how we think of future possibilities has a lot to do with our emotions.  If I think that X is going to have a root canal, I am filled with sympathy.  Well, not filled, but I have some sympathy for X.  If I realize that X is me, a whole different set of emotions rise in my breast, or brain, or heart, or wherever emotions are taken to arise these days.  Fear, based on anticipation of pain and discomfort, replaces sympathy.  The first-personal perspective is crucial.  This is true even for emotions that are not self-centered in the ordinary sense.  I may make sacrifices for the benefit of some other being, but somewhere in my conception of that other being will be some relation to  me: my wife, or my children, or my country, or the world my children and grandchildren are going to live in.  I would probably be willing to sacrifice my life to bring about peace and justice in the earth's future; it's my planet, after all.  But I doubt I would do so for peace and justice in the future of Mars, and almost certainly not for peace and justice in Vulcan or some other planet outside our own solar system, unless I thought that peace and justice there would prevent, say, a future invasion of Earth.

Still, in thinking about desires it is crucial to distinguish between the objects of the desire and the agent or possessor of the desire.  If X desires that Y have a good time, X is the possessor and Y is the object.  Even if I desire that I have a good time, we still need to make this distinction.  Egoists sometimes confuse the truth that it is only our own desires that motivate us, with the falsehood that we are the objects of all desires that motivate us.  It's theoretically possible and for all I know a noble thing to have desires whose objects have only the most attenuated relation to us, and we certainly lots of people have desires about matters that won't have any effect on the succession of experiences they are going to have between birth and death.

Conversely, it seems to me that no relation between possessor and object guarantees that the possessor will care what happens to the object.  Even identity.  It is theoretically possible, as far as I can see, that I am fully aware that if I don't move I will be run over by a bus, but I just don't care.  I don't mean that it is possible that I prefer being run over by the bus to not being run over by the bus; certainly people get themselves into a state where they want something awful to happen to them.  I mean not caring one way or the other.  The impending events involving me simply do not arouse any passions in me.  I don't care.  And so I am not motivated to do anything.  Whether this ever really happens, I don't know, but experiences of lethargy, depression, and the like seem to approximate to this condition.

I think ultimately what motivates us is sensations and anticipations of sensations.  Any organism that is in pain will try to change its situation so it is not in pain.  It cares whether or not it is in pain.  Pain is a state that is intrinsically motivating, or at least naturally motivating.  This is not quite the same as being necessarily motivating; a human can be trained or drugged in various ways so that pain doesn't bother them.  But it doesn't require training to be motivated by pain.  It's the natural way of things.  It's presumably what pain is for, what Mother Nature had in mind by giving us the capacity for pain.  As Hume points out, we would have expected a perfect God to come up with something better---maybe a more or less continual semi-erotic pleasure diffusing all of our body, which diminishes when we are injured.  If I twist my ankle, and then walk on it, the semi-erotic pleasure based in my ankle disappears and I quickly stop and limp so it comes back.  But Mother Nature does it with pain.  Mother Nature, as we know, has rather peculiar goals for Her creations:  that they stay alive long enough to procreate, so that there will be plenty of things of their own kind for other things to eat, so they can procreate.  So pain is a fine device for her to use.

As Nussbaum rightly observes, there is no one to one correlation between emotions, like despair and joy, and the feelings that are a part of having the emotions.  Still, there seems to be a collection of emotional-feelings, that are naturally motivating, the sorts of feelings one wishes not to have or wishes to have and continue having, that are involved in a complex way with our emotional life.  It seems to me that no judgment, no matter how certain, how first-personal, or how vividly focussed on, can motivate us without being tied to some of these naturally motivating feelings.  While there is not a one to one correlation, there are complex patterns.

Now I don't mean to say that Nussbaum's theory can't account for this, and I certainly don't mean to ascribe to her the conflation of self as possessor and self as object that I see in some egoists.  But if I had a theory of the emotions, I would put the primitive phenomenon of caring about which future possibilities are actualized, in the sense of having different pleasant and unpleasant feelings, ultimately related to anticipations and memories of naturally motivating pains and pleasures, at the heart of it.  But then, maybe its just as well I don't have a theory of the emotions.

Descartes

John Perry

Tuesday we discuss René Descartes, who lived from 1596 until 1650 ---- not very long, by my standards.  Descartes was a French philosopher, scientist and mathematician who is the father of analytic geometry in mathematics and modern rationalism in philosophy.  Pretty good for someone who died at 54....

For almost forty years I have taught Descartes' Meditations in my Introduction to Philosophy Class.  The skeptical problem which he poses bring up a host of interesting problems which occupy us for the rest of the course: the external world, the self, God, and the relation between mind and body.  For about half of that time I have been using Ron Rubin's translation of the Meditations, which is by far the best translation for those who wish to use Descartes' work to introduce students to philosophy.  It's not a translation designed for scholarly purposes; Rubin rather tries to find the English sentences that Descartes might have used had he written the book in 20th century English.  The introduction provides a good explanation of some of the weirder terms and ideas that occur in the Meditations, especially in the argument for the existence of God.

It's become fashionable to dump on Descartes.  Recently there have been books with titles like Descartes' Error and Goodbye, Descartes.  Still, there seems to me to be a number of things in Descartes' philosophy that were essentially right.  He thought the mind interacted causally with the body, and our knowledge of the external world was due the information carried by states of mind about their external causes.  That seems right to me; all I would change is to say that the minds interacts causally with the rest of the body.  Descartes thought that without the backing of some large metaphysical picture, we couldn't be sure that the states of our minds really contained information about their causes, rather than mis-information.  That seems right to me.  Descartes thought the big metaphysical picture was a dualistic world created and sustained by a perfect God, and he thought he could prove it a priori.  My big metaphysical picture is a physical world where the way things happen is constrained by laws --- whatever exactly they are --- so that effects, including our brain states, carry information about their causes.  The argument for this is not deductive, like Descartes', but "transcendental,"; if the world isn't like that, we're screwed, knowledge-wise.

Descartes' works lead to lively discussions in the classroom about all sorts of interesting issues, from the issue of how I know, if I do , that I am not dreaming, or am not simply a brain in a vat in the basement of Jordan Hall (Stanford's Psychology Department's headquarters, where I like to locate the fictional events of the macabre thought-experiments that are part of doing philosophy), to the existence of God, to the relation between mind and body.  We are lucky to have Ron Rubin to help us in this conversation.

Emotions, Judgments, and Mattering.

posted by Ken Taylor

Thanks to Martha Nussbaum for being a fine guest.   We've been trying to get her on the program for two years.  And we're please that she was finally able to do it.    It was certainly a lively and entertaining conversation that probed some philosophically interesting issues.   I haven’t yet had a chance yet to read her two big recent books on the emotions,Upheavals of Thought and Hiding from Humanity : Disgust, Shame, and the Law,  but both sound fascinating.   They are  definitely on my list.

I am still not fully convinced that emotions are nothing but  judgments.  Certainly emotions are tied up with judgments, sometimes quite closely.   But it just seems wrong to say that an emotion is nothing but a judgment.   Judgments can be true or false.  Any given judgment, even a judgment concerning my own flourishing, can be made with  or without an accompanying emotion.  Emotions, on the other hand,  are sometimes appropriate and sometimes inappropriate, but they don’t seem the sorts of things that can be true or false.   Also emotions, at least conscious emotions, seem to have a felt qualitative character, but judgments, even conscious judgments, don’t.   It’s like something to be (consciously) angry.  But what’s it like to judge that you have been wronged?  Such a judgment might cause  an episode of anger.  But could such a judgment  really just be an episode of anger?

Nussbaum is of course well aware of these kinds of criticisms of theories that try to reduce emotions to judgments.   As far as I can tell, she thinks that she can get around the typical criticisms of cognitive theories of emotions by tinkering with the contents of the relevant judgments.   That’s why she says that emotions are judgments with what she calls  a self-referential “eudaimonistic” component.  Emotions, she says,  “are appraisals or value judgments, which ascribe to things and persons outside the person’s own control great importance for that person’s own flourishing.”  The thought here must be that if emotions are evaluations that have intrinsic reference to the subject’s own flourishing, they will be intrinsically but defeasibly motivating in the way that emotions seem to be.   Emotions have a strong tendency to move us to act – sometimes, of course, against our better judgment.    And perhaps evaluations of the sort with which Nussbaum wants to identify emotions might have something like the same strong tendency to move us to act.

In the end,   I doubt that  it works.   The approach may address worries about whether judgments are even  the sorts of things that can move us in the same ways  that emotions apparently do.   It was the thought that “reason” is powerless to move us on its own,  in the absence of  passion,  that led Hume to his famous slogan that reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions.   If you think that emotions are intrinsically motivating and  that judgments are not,  that would give you a reason to deny that emotions are judgments.    But showing that certain kinds of judgments – evaluative judgments that have reference to one’s own flourishing – are motivating would not suffice to show that emotions just are such  judgments.   Would it?   Don't  all the rest of the worries about the difference between  emotions and judgments would still stand.  Conscious emotions feel like something.  Judgments don't.   Judgments are true or false.  Emotions aren't.   They are appropriate or inappropriate to a situation, perhaps when based on a bad judgments.    Emotions conflict with judgments in different ways from the way judgments conflict with each other.  Two judgments may be inconsistent, but held at the same time.  But when judgment is overcome by emotion, it doesn't really seem like just more judging happening.   Does it?

Plus, there’s John’s quasi-Humean  point about “primitive caring.”   I’m not sure what John meant by that exactly.  I take it the that the primitive part had something to do with it being a form of caring that can’t be analyzed as something else – as say a judgment.    And I take it that the caring part had to do with  it being something like intrinsically and “fundamentally”  motivational.  Probably most people do primitively care, about  their  own well being.   But it seems possible that someone could fail to primitively care even  about his or her own  flourishing and so fail to be moved by Nussbaumian type evaluative judgments, but nonetheless still be moved by various emotions in various ways.

I don’t take any of these to be absolutely knock-down  arguments against Nussbaum.  Besides, even if she gets the metaphysical nature of the emotions wrong, she gets a lot about them absolutely right -- including their deep and perhaps intrinsic connection to our cognition and representation of the world as mattering to us in various ways. And she is certainly right to insist that emotions are not just blind, distracting  intrusions upon rational thought, as some philosophers and macho-cultural formations, once had it.   

That, of course, is just the beginning of the story, not the end.  Clearly, negotiating our emotions in ways that adjust them to our considered judgments about what matters is a tricky thing.   Sometimes,  one feels too much or too little anger, sympathy or love for those we judge to  deserve our anger, sympathy or love.  It seems to me that in a well-lived life, emotion and judgment work together like sort of hand and glove. with judgment helping one to track the true, and emotions helping to move one in ways that honor the good.

Self-Deception and Moral Dilemmas

posted by Neil Van Leeuwen

      

One thing I do for Philosophy Talk as a member of the Crack Research Team is pre-interview each guest. The point is to give the guest an idea of the structure of the upcoming show—the “story arc”—and to make notes on what the guest thinks to pass on to John and Ken. Last week I spoke with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong about moral dilemmas. At the end of our conversation he said something that dovetails with thoughts I’ve had concerning the area I specialize in: philosophy of mind on self-deception.

Sinnott-Armstrong said that the person who faces a moral dilemma has an obligation to compensate, or minimize damage, on whichever side of the dilemma she ultimately breaks the moral requirement. In other words, if you have a moral dilemma, you’ll necessarily break one requirement or another, but since it’s a moral requirement you’re breaking, you should try to do as little damage as possible. The Ethiopian mother who must leave one child behind on the trip to the aid station, lacking strength to carry both, should tell the child she leaves that she loves him and is sorry. And Sartre’s student, if he joins the French resistance, should ensure that his mother is as well cared for as possible. This is Sinnott-Armstrong’s point; I’ll take it as given in what follows.

Self-deception is a state of believing that humans enter into as a result of desiring. It’s motivated irrationality. The abused wife in denial, for example, wants it to be true that her husband won’t beat her again, and this desire engenders the belief that he won’t. She’s not unintelligent; she’s self-deceived. Likewise, the college dropout clings fiercely to the belief that finishing his education isn’t necessary for having good employment prospects. He wants that to be true; that wanting causes a self-deceptive breakdown of his better standards of judgment.

The two examples I just gave suggest that self-deception is to be avoided. There are many, however, who would resist this conclusion. One prominent ethicist, whose name I won’t mention, speculated once in conversation, “Maybe it’s a good thing we deceive ourselves.”

Here I want to push the view that self-deception has morally negative consequences. I’m going against a line of reasoning to the contrary that relates specifically to moral dilemmas. One might say: “Well, in a moral dilemma you’re bound to do at least one bad thing, since you can’t meet both moral requirements. Since that’s inescapable, maybe it’s good to be self-deceived about the moral obligation you’re breaking. That would alleviate the psychological pain associated with breaking that moral requirement.” I think people are tempted by this kind of thinking often; that’s one reason why we’re less on guard against self-deception than we might be.

But that line of reasoning is dead wrong; Sinnott-Armstrong’s point shows us why. Let’s put aside the question of whether self-deception actually does minimize psychological pain. (I think it doesn’t, since it prolongs the healing process.) The problem with being self-deceived in the context of a moral dilemma is that you’ll be blind to your obligation to compensate and minimize damage. If you’re blind to it, you probably won’t do it. That’s bad.

Here’s the rub. There’s growing support in the philosophical community for the view that self-deception is not intentional—at least not most of the time. We slide into it, as opposed to deciding consciously to do it. But that means we can’t simply decide not to do it either. At best we can make good faith efforts to be the kind of reflective people who rethink the evidence and try to avoid bias of any form. In short, we can’t turn self-deception on and off like a switch. We have to make a higher-order decision about what kind of cognizers to be in general: ones who let self-deception pass or ones who guard against it.

You could argue that there are specific cases where self-deception turns out to be a good thing. I’m skeptical. But just remember that you have to make a choice about whether to have the kind of mind that’s prone to self-deception or the kind of mind that isn’t. Given the obligation to compensate in the context of moral dilemmas, I think it’s better to have the kind of mind that isn’t. That will take epistemic courage. But that's no surprise; being moral usually requires courage.

Greetings from Down Under!

posted by Ken Taylor

You may have noticed that neither John nor I  nor our on-air guests have been blogging much recently.   But we're all about to get back in the saddle.   I've been travelling for the past few  weeks.   I'm in Australia, even as I write.   I gave a paper a couple of weeks ago at the University of Sydney at the annual meeting of the Australasian Associaton for Philosophy.   After eight fun-filled days in Sydney, it was off to Canberra, where I am a visiting fellow at the Australian National University until August 15.  Before heading home,  it's off to New Zealand to give a couple of talks, one in Wellington, the other in Auckland.   

We've done a series of repeat episodes but we are about to go live again, with episodes on Moral Dilemmas, the Emotions, and Descartes in that order.    I promise  we'll all be back to blogging again beginning, well, now.    So do  keep coming back, despite our recent blogging hiatus.   John has, I gather, been buried in work but he promises to get back in the saddle again on the issue of moral dilemmas.

If you yourself have been confronted with a compelling moral dilemma, do think about calling in during our upcoming episode.  We have a great guest booked.  He is Walter Sinnott-Armstrong.  Walter's not only a fine philosopher, who wrote Moral Dilemmas (Philosophical Theory), but he  has also done a fair bit of radio himself.  Unfortunately, the book is currently out of print. But you can hear the truth about moral dilemmas from the man himself by tuning in on Tuesday. It should be fun.

By the way,  I'll actually be doing the next three episodes from a studio in Canberra.   I have to arrive at the studio at 4am.  Now THAT is dedication to philosophy.

Speaking of philosophy,  let me tell you that  the philosophical scene in Australia is really terrific.   The AAP meeting at which I gave a talk was one of  the best philosophical meetings I have ever attended.  And the ANU scene is just incredible.   There are many visitors, many talks,  conferences, an intensely philosophical but also highly social atmosphere.    At the same time, there is time to sit alone in one's office  write.

Australians do seem to have more stamina than Americans, though.  For example, after talks,  a very large group "goes to bar"  as Australians say, for drinks and more philosophical conversation.  After bar,  a slightly smaller group will go to dinner for food, more drink, and more philosophy.  And after dinner,  the truly hardy, and only the truly hardy,  do another bar round for still more philosophy and still more drink.  It's hard to keep up.

More to come soon.