Philosophy Talk: The Blog

Self Deception

posted by KT

Our topic this week is self-deception. 

Self-deception is rampant in human affairs.  And although too much self-deception is probably a bad thing, a little self-deception may be just what a person needs to get through the day.   One should never underestimate the power of positive illusions.  For example, psychological studies show that people who are overly optimistic about their own abilities often have enhanced motivation, which enables them to do better in the face of challenges than people with more realistic assessments of their own talents.

Of course, it may be that for every one person who benefits from self-deception, there are scads who are burned by it.  Think of the pathological gambler who goes bankrupt betting on a “sure thing” or a battered wife who keeps returning to her abuser, confident that he won’t do again. Or think of the mass self-deception that causes the American electorate to believe we can have lower taxes, more government services, and a balanced budget all at the same time.   Clearly,  people subject to this sort of self-deception run a real risk of ruin.

Still,  I’m prepared to say that self-deception always leads to ruin.   I suspect that self-deception, like many facets of human life, has both a dark side and a light side.  Perhaps key to happiness is to staying on light side and avoid the dark side.  But doing that would be no easy task.   I doubt that there could be a formula or even a set of rough principles that told you when it would be happiness making to deceive oneself and when one needed to be relentlessly honest with oneself.

Moreover, when you stop and think about it, self-deception borders on the paradoxical.   It’s easy to see how you can deceive somebody else.  Maybe you hide or distort some evidence or maybe you straight-out lie to them and, like a fool, they believe you.  There may be something morally wrong with deceiving others, but there’s nothing incoherent about it.  It can certainly be highly advantageous for me to get you to believe what I know to be false.    But in the case of self-deception the deceiving party and the deceived party are one and the same.  That’s what makes it so puzzling.

At first blush, it looks as though in order to be self-deceived you have to believe things that you know to be false.   But if you know something to be false, how can you believe it?  You can’t just self-consciously will yourself to believe things you already know to be false.  You can certainly pretend to believe things that you know to be false.  But self-deception doesn’t seem like a form of pretense, not exactly anyway.   Though some have denied it, self-deception seems to involve straight-out believing and believing something that, at some level,  you know to be false.

That suggests that when you are self-deceived you simultaneously believe and disbelieve the same thing.  At some level that gambler mentioned earlier knows he’s betting on a losing proposition.  But at another level he really believes he has chance of winning.   That sounds pretty darned irrational.   It’s not immediately obvious how such irrationality is even psychologically possible. 

That’s  one question that a good theory of self-deception needs to answer. Self-deception is pretty obviously possible,  but explaining just how it’s possible is not a simple matter.

A good theory of self-deception had also better explain how self-deception manages to be so pervasive.  Self-deception is not a rare and exceptional thing for us humans.     We humans pride ourselves on being paragons of rationality.  And there is more than a little justification for that pride.  After all, our brains have created science, art, mathematics politics and philosophy.  But the problem is that right along side all these amazing capacities sits a capacity for rampant self-deception.   Why do we have such a capacity in the first place?   Did natural selection specifically design our brains for self-deception?

And then there’s the original question that I started out with.  Can self-deception sometimes be the key to human happiness or will self-deception always lead you to misery and ruin, at least in the long run? Those are just some of the questions we’ll put to this week’s guest --   Neil van Leeuwen.  Besides being one of the world’s up and coming authorities on self-deception,  Neil has deep connections to Philosophy Talk.   When he was a graduate student at Stanford,  working on his very fine dissertation on self deception – he served as Philosophy Talk’s  Director of Research.  He’s now gone on to bigger and better things, obviously.  But we’re really pleased to welcome him home. 

Social Reality

posted by Ken Taylor

Our  topic this week is social realities.  I must admit that when I first brought the nature of social reality up as a topic for an episode of Philosophy Talk, the non-philosophers on our team all went  “huh?”   That phrase obviously doesn’t mean much to the person on the street.  But  social realities are all around us.  Think of cocktail parties, football games, bar mitzvahs, political rallies, and even nations.  These are all social realities.  

 And in connection with this sort of thing both parts of that phrase “social reality” are worth focusing on. All the things I just mentioned are things that really and truly exist.  They aren’t figments of anyone’s imagination; they’re real.  Really real.  Objectively real.   But at the same time, they're all made up entities, at least in a sense.   Cocktail parties exist only because a group of people get together and say “we're having a party now.”  People just sort of decide that these things are going to exist.  And so they do exist.  Seems kind of like magic.

It isn’t really magic,  but it is puzzling.  At bottom, social realities are just creations of the human mind.  Not individual human minds, but collections of human minds.   You can’t all by your little lonesome create a social reality.  Try it and you really will end up with something that’s just a figment of your own imagination.  But put a bunch of people together, let them exercise their imaginations together;  let them agree; and presto,  you’ve got a new social reality. 

What could, I suppose, make that sound a little like magic still is the fact that it takes at least two minds to make a social reality. If one mind can’t do it, why are two or more minds any better, you might ask.  Well the answer is that social realities are, by their very natures,  founded on agreement.   If a bunch of humans agree to create a club, then there is a club.  If a bunch of humans agree to form a nation, then there exists a nation.  And although clubs and nations are nothing but products of human agreement, they're not figments of our imagination.  To be sure they are products of our imaginations, but they’re real products, not mere figments.  Once we agree that they exist, they are  as objectively real as rocks and mountains.

Not only are things like clubs and nations real, they are  really important.  They have a huge impact on our lives.   We’re immersed in a universe of ever changing social realities.  And they play an immense role both in determining how we live and how well we live.   Our earliest forbears foraged on the savannah and huddled in caves. Civilizations have risen and fallen and with them, ways of life have come and gone.  Throughout these massive changes in the social world, the biological and physical worlds have changed too -- but not as radically, and mostly in ways that are more or less direct consequences of changes in the human social world. 

So the social world affects not only the way humans relate to one another, but also how we interact with the rest of the biological and physical world.   Science, for example, is really a complex social undertaking by which humans collectively seek to understand the physical, biological, and even the social world itself.

Now scientific understanding of the social world sounds like a good thing.  But it also sounds a bit like sociology or anthropology or maybe social psychology.  We’re philosophers.  Why should we philosophers worry about the social world?

Well for one thing, we want to understand just how the social world arises out the natural world.  

But wait a minute, you’re about to interject. You started out by saying that social realities are a creation of the human mind.  Doesn’t that suggest that the social world doesn’t arise out of the natural world at all?  In one sense yes; in one sense no.   The sense in which the social world is not part of  unaided nature is obvious.  The social world depends entirely on us humans and not on the blind and impersonal forces of nature.  But ultimately human beings are just parts of the natural world.  So the power of the human mind to create social realities must have its roots in human psychology, which must ultimately have its roots in human biology, which must ultimately have its roots in physics.

 This may sound a little reductionist.  Afterall, I  started out talking about the power of the human mind to create, almost out of nothing, all varieties of new social realities.  And now I seem to be suggesting that it all comes down to the chemical processes of the brain.   It’s definitely got to come from somewhere.   It’s not just magic.  And besides, even animals have some limited power to create social realities.  It would certainly be good to understand just what equips the human mind to build social realities of such a wide variety and just how those human capacities evolv ed from lower level capacities of social animals,

There’s obviously a lot to think about here.  Fortunately for us we had an excellent guest for this episode -- Berkeley’s own John Searle, author of Making the Social World. 

I should say that this program was recorded in front of live audience at the Marsh Theater – this time in Berkeley, California.  As a consequence, you won’t be able to join the conversation on air.   But you can join it here.   

Loyalty

posted  by Ken Taylor

Our topic this week is loyalty.  Loyalty binds people together.  Friendships, marriages, even nations are built on loyalty.  Try imagining a person who has no loyalty whatsoever to anything or anyone.   Such a person would be friendless, loveless, nationless.  She would feel no devotion to any higher cause or principle – like truth or justice.   She would not even be a fan of any sports team.   A life like that would be empty, devoid of many of the things that make us fully human.

Of course, loyalties are not all created equal though.   Loyalty to a sports team is a shallow form of loyalty.  Loyalty to a nation can sometimes demand too much.  Or think of the loyalty that some battered wives display to their abusive husbands.   There’s a misplaced loyalty if there ever was one. 

Loyalty goes hand in hand with trustworthiness.   If you can’t trust your spouse not to beat you or cheat on you, then your spouse doesn’t deserve your loyalty.  If you can’t trust your government not to send young men off to fight in fruitless, forlorn wars, then your government doesn’t deserve your loyalty.

That’s connected to something else.  Earlier I  said that loyalty unites and that’s a good thing.  But loyalty also divides. And that’s a bad thing.  For example, soldiers at war are driven to kill each other by their competing loyalties.   Or think of a parent who lavishes more toys on his/her children than they really need, out of a sense of loyalty and devotion, while entirely ignoring the needs of poor, abused, malnourished children around the world.  If he would just spend a little bit of his wealth elsewhere, he could do a tremendous amount of good.  But his loyalty has blinded him to the needs of others.

Loyalties can also divide a person from herself.   Loyalty and devotion to your family, for example, can pull in one direction, while loyalty to  an employer can pull you in an entirely different direction. Managing such conflicting loyalties is no easy task. 

You could think that you just have to decide.  You have to decide where your highest loyalty lies.  Do you most  want to be a better parent or a better philosophy professor and radio host? 

But it doesn’t seem quite right to me that choosing between conflicting loyalties is a brute decision, a matter of simply deciding for yourself to whom or what you owe the higher allegiance.   There must be some principles --  some moral principles --  that tell you who and what you owe loyalty to and to what degree you owe loyalty.  Such moral principles should  help you resolve such conflicts on an objective moral basis. 

Speaking of abstract moral principles, though,  depending on your  moral outlook, the very idea of loyalty can seem morally problematic. Take utilitarianism, for example.   Its highest principle is that you should always act so as to produce the greatest good for the greatest number.    But it’s  actually pretty hard to make sense of the very idea of loyalty if you are a utilitarian – at least if you are a crude act utilitarian. 

To see why think about two people drowning.  You’re in a boat and can save only one of them.  One of them happens to be a Nobel Laureate who has discovered a cure for cancer.  The other happens to be your spouse.  Which one do you save? 

The obvious answer to me is that I’d save my wife.  But you’d have a hard time justifying that answer on utilitarian grounds.  That’s because utilitarian morality has a hard time justifying giving the kind of special weight to one’s wife that loyalty demands.  In deciding what to do, her well-being should count, to be sure, but  no more, and no less, in your calculations than the well being of any arbitrary person. 

That seems wrong to me.  But I have to admit that I have hard time putting my finger on just why.  My wife means a whole lot more to me than just any arbitrary other person.  But does my loyalty and devotion really morally obligate or entitle me to give more weight to her well-being than to the well-being other people? 

Consider a further test of just how much added moral weight loyalty endows my wife’s well being with.  Suppose it was a matter of saving my wife, while letting two other people or three or four other people drown.  Would I still be inclined to save her and let the others drown?

Here I feel something of a quandary – perhaps divided loyalties are tugging at me. On balance loyalty, and the special concern that goes with it, seem to me like very good things.  But loyalty can be taken too far and can demand too much.    And drawing the line is a tricky matter. 

Clearly,  we need some help sorting this all out.   And luckily for us, help is on the way, in the form of our guest, poet and philosopher, Troy Jollimore.  Troy has thought long and hard about loyalty, love, friendship and morality.   So it should be a fun episode.   If you’ve got the time,  give a listen.  Maybe even call in. 

What are Human Rights?

posted by Ken Taylor

Our question this week is  “What are human rights?” The American declaration of independence offers a compelling answer to that question so its the first place one might think to look of for a characterization of human rights.  It says in what I personally find stirring language that  “All men are created equal … they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights … among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

 The Declaration is rooted in the Enlightenment idea that every human being enjoys, just in virtue of being a human being, certain fundamental rights.  Of course, not every enlightenment thinker thought that rights were ‘god given,” as Jefferson seems to suggest.   That, however, raises the question that if fundamental rights are not god-given, where exactly do rights come from.  One could, I suppose think that rights are just “natural”  and intrinsic to what it is to be a human being.  Locke seems to have thought something like that.    No doubt during the episode we will explore alternative views about where rights come from and in virtue of what human enjoy various rights.  But I won’t try to get into that very much here.

 I should say  that not everything that is represented as a right, even a universal right could plausibly thought to be a “natural”  right, whatever exactly those are.   For example, the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights  says that “the right to rest and leisure,  including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay” is a universal human right.   Paid holidays are certainly a good thing.  But it is at best debatable that the right to paid holidays is in, any plausible sense,  “universal.”  And it seems plainly false to say that such a right is somehow a natural or intrinsic right. 

 I don’t mean to be suggesting that employers have the right to work their employees to the bone, until they drop from exhaustion.  I’m just saying that we need to distinguish fundamental or intrinsic rights from socially or politically created rights.  Workers don’t have an intrinsic right to paid holidays.  But where certain laws and/or collective bargaining agreements are in place, they do have the right.

It can be a little bit tricky to draw the line between intrinsic rights and socially or politically constituted rights.   One’s first thought might that  intrinsic  or basic rights are rights that we enjoy independently of any laws, agreements or conventions.   Socially or politically created rights depend entirely on laws, agreements or conventions.    

 One problem with this attempt at line drawing,  however, is that  until people get together and empower duly appointed bodies to make laws prohibiting murder or slavery, it’s not even clear what it  would  even mean to say that people have a right to life or a right to liberty.   One wants to say, of course,  that even in an imagined “state of nature”  in which there is not yet a political or social order, it would be plain wrong for anybody or anything to deprive another of liberty or life.  There doesn’t need to be a system of laws or courts or even a system of social sanctions  in order for the deprivation of liberty of life to count as wrong.   Or so one might think. 

Perhaps.  But suppose that there were no society and no force of law to back up such claims about rights.   In such a situation if  someone had the power and desire to enslave you or kill you then they might just do so.  You could scream in foot-stomping protest, but without the backing of law and society and government, your protest would amount to no more than impotent screaming.    At a bare minimum,   without the backing of the state or at least civil society,  talk of rights may be ineffectual, even if not exactly meaningless.   Of course,  that is precisely the reason why Jefferson listed not just life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as fundament rights, but also the right to institute governments to secure such rights and even the right to rebel --  to alter or abolish governments that fail to secure fundamental rights.

But let’s  come at rights from a different angle for a second.  Consider two societies with two different sets of laws.  In one society, the law grants women full autonomy over their own bodies.  In the other, the law treats women as the sexual property of men.   Many of us will have the intuition that the second society has violated the fundamental human rights of its female citizens.  And in good Jeffersonian fashion we may conclude that any government that permits such violations ought to be “altered or abolished.”

But suppose that citizens of the relevant society by and large endorse the relevant laws and practices.  We can imagine that the men do so out of a crude kind of self-interest which they believe to be enhanced by the subjugation of women.  And we can imagine that the women either the lack either the power to change things or the will to change things – perhaps because of the cumulative effect of decades or centuries of  subjugation on their self conception.   What do we do when faced with what strikes us as such an obvious violation of human rights and human dignity?   Do we, as outsiders,  have the right to seek to alter or abolish the social system and/or oppressive government in the name of  protecting fundamental human rights and human dignity?   Or would an outsider’s attempt to alter the government of another society amount to cultural imperialism?

This, I think,  is a delicate question.  It’s one we intend to put to Helen Stacy, this week’s guest.  Helen is the author of Human Rights for the 21^st Century: Sovereignty, Civil Society, Culture.  No doubt, she will have a lot to say about the complicated interaction of our conception of universal or fundamental human rights, and cultural diversity.   

Psychological vs. Biological Altruism

posted by Ken Taylor

There are at least two kinds of altruism.  Psychological altruism means acting out of concern for the well-being of others, without regard to your own self-interest.  Biological altruism refers to behavior that helps the survival of a species without benefiting the particular individual who’s being altruistic.   It may not be obvious what exactly these two forms of altruism have to do with each other and why they should be discussed in the same breath. 

 You could think that the two come together in certain theories about human nature.  Some say that humans are by nature selfish.  But evolutionary biology and psychology are beginning to challenge this idea.   It turns out that evolution has actually hard-wired altruistic behavior into many animals -- including human beings.  Thus the facts of biological altruism might be thought to show the error of those who think that humans are psychologically egoistic.

 But to think that way would put you in danger of mixing “is” and “ought.”  Biological  altruism may have nothing to do with morality.  Even if some animals have evolved to be altruistic, that doesn’t automatically make it morally right.  Biological altruism isn’t a challenge to psychological egoism, but to what used to be called the selfish gene hypothesis. That’s the hypothesis that genes are solely in the business of replicating themselves and that an animal is basically the tool of its genes. Genes make animals behave so those very genes get reproduced as often as possible in subsequent generations.

 Admittedly that’s a peculiar use of the word selfish.  Genes don’t really have a self.  So they can’t really have self-interests.  And that’s  why biological altruism is different from psychological altruism and has nothing to do with morality.  Richard Dawkins coined the phrase "selfish gene", as a metaphor.  He was just trying to say that genes act as if they are totally self-centered.

Of course, that does raise the interesting question of just biological altruism happens, given that genes are so metaphorically selfish.   That’s not the same question as how psychological altruism happens,  but it’s an interesting question in its own right.  It turns out that lots of organisms behave in ways that are detrimental to their own chances of survival, but are beneficial to the reproductive chances of fellow organisms.  For example, a vervet monkey will give alarm calls to warn other monkeys of the presence of predators, even though this attracts attention to itself, increasing its own chance of being attacked and killed.

This isn’t quite the same as saying that genes are metaphorically selfless rather than metaphorically selfish.   The point is rather that selection may not operate on individual genes at all, but on whole groups or populations.  A group that contains some altruists will survive better as a group than a group that contains no altruists.   Evolution, it turns out, can work on whole groups as a unit.   That’s called group selection.  That’s a still controversial thought, but one that seems to be gaining wider acceptance.   

 But let’s get back at least briefly to psychological altruism. Maybe there is a way to tie biological and psychological altruism together, especially if we think of the human psyche as at least in part designed by natural selection, especially if we think of collective human psychology.  Think of a human collectivity like a nation.  We don’t all have to be willing to die for our country.  But maybe some of us had better be.  If some of us are,  we’d all be better off – though maybe those who are willing to die will be worse off individually.   Now I’m not suggesting that nations are directly designed by natural selection on groups.  But I am suggesting that maybe something like the process of group selection has shaped the human psyche for at least a modest degree of psychological altruism by guaranteeing that collectivities of humans contain enough psychological altruists to enhance the groups chances of reproductive success.

In hypothesizing that to some extent human psychological altruism may be a consequence of biological altruism,  I do not mean at all to suggest that  people blindly do what their genes tell them to do.  People act on their beliefs, desires, hopes and fears, on their conceptions of right and wrong.   But in the end people are just biological organisms.  The human brain is just another organ.  It’s highly likely that even our conceptions of right and wrong are a product of evolutionary forces.  So it wouldn’t

be altogether surprising to find a tendency toward altruistic thinking wired into our very neurons by something like the mechanism of group selection.  Would it?  That’s the question we put to our guest, Jeffrey Schloss, who  is an expert on both biological and psychological altruism.  

Philosophy Talk's Fifth Annual Philosophical Summer Reading List

posted by Ken Taylor

    This week, we broadcast our fifth annual summer reading list show.  Over the five years that we've done this,  we've been really impressed at how  widely and deeply read our listening audience is.   It really heartens usto know that there are still avid readers out there,  in this age when reading has been declared all but dead.

But there is reason to worry that reading as we once knew it may be dead.  Granted people do still read -- though not the printed  page, at least not nearly as much as they once did. More and more, they  read their kindles, their  ipads and even their computer screens.  You can get just about any book you want in an instant these days. One could perhaps reasonably hope that these devices may lead to a rebirth of reading that would reverse a long steady decline. 

To be sure,  they have a long way to go to accomplish any such thing.  In 2007, for example, 1 in 4 adult Americans reported not having read a single book.  On average, Americans read about 4 books per year.  And that number keeps getting smaller year after year. 

 



If one were an optimist, who tended to look on the bright side always, one might respond that although book reading is on the decline, people spend more and more time reading all kinds of writing that didn’t even exist decades ago – the blog,the online chat, the text message.  So maybe one could say that reading lives.  But  lives in a different forms.

 


But seriously -- Blogs? Chats?? Texts???  That’s not reading, not really.  That kind of "reading"  is to  genuine reading what synthetic processed cheese food is to real cheese.  


In saying that we don't mean to be either snobs or luddites 
 But we do plead guilty to being a lover of reading, genuine reading, reading of the deepest kind.

Reading of the deepest kind is reading that deeply engages the capacities of the mind and heart.  Think of reading a novel that moves you deeply  -- not by being superficially titillating, but by taking over your moral imagination and giving it a real work out.  Think of philosophy books that challenge you to think and think again, not by beating you over the head with histrionic arguments, but by subtly leading you to new insights and new depths of thought.  Or think of non-fiction that invites you to see seemingly familiar things in a whole new light.   It’s that kind of reading, and that kind of writing, that seems to be on the decline.



We at Philosophy Talk believe that that kind of reading -- critical, reflective reading that is both  emotionally and imaginatively engaged  -- is both a fun thing and a good thing.  One could even argue that the mere act of reading, and reading deeply,  can help make you a better person.  It exercises capacities that play a huge role in real life: capacities to judge, feel, and imagine.   Don't get us wrong. We're not saying that reading is a substitute for real life and lived experience.  But reading is, we think, to real life what baseball practice is to an actual baseball game.  Reading is a way of hone the imaginative, emotional, critical, and evaluative capacities that you need to be able to deploy in real life if you are to live well.  It would be a shame if the art of deep reading were ever to disappear from our culture.  

 Certainly, there is a lot that threatens it. The makers of mass culture -- especially mass culture for the young --  specialize in promoting the cultural equivalent of synthetic processed cheese food.   If you feed people enough of that sort of thing, after awhile they begin to acquire a taste for it and to dislike the real thing.

 That would be a sad outcome. 

Because so much of what mass culture offers up for us to consume is the culture equivalent of synthetic processed cheese food,  reading of the kind we're talking will seem to many to be something of interest only for the "elite" few, who spend more  time buried in books, rather than hooked up to some screen.   But we shouldn't let reading devolve into a past time only for certain elites.   We need to empower more people in our society to become the kind of readers we’re talking about.   That’s definitely something our schools should be doing more of. 
And it’s also a reason why its important for us to do our small part, by compiling a philosophical summer reading list every year.  Every summer, we want to invite our  audience of very avid readers to help us extol the virtues and joys of reading – real reading.   
Won't you join us and  become an ambassador for the book and for deep reading that enhances our most fundamental human capacities?  Tell us what good reads are on your own summer reading list?  Tell us what have you already read  or plan to read that you would recommend to others.  

The Place of Scepticism and Sceptical Arguments

An encore post of mine on the topic of scepticism -- reissued since we are rebroadcasting that episode. --KT

posted by Ken Taylor

Today's show will be about scepticism. Our guest will be John Greco of St. Louis University. I don't really know John or his work, but I see that he has written a book called Putting Sceptics in their Place. That's sort of what I want to talk about in this warm-up to the show post.

I should start with a confession about my philosophical tastes. I tend not to find epistemology the most gripping of philosophical subjects. Roughly, epistemology has to do with the nature of knowledge. And a big part of epistemology historically has been devoted to answering the sceptic who challenges us to say whether and how we can know anything at all. Sceptical arguments, I'm sure you will see as we do the show, are pretty seductive and pretty darned hard to answer. In fact, I suspect that ultimately that sceptical arguments are not really answerable at all. At best, the sceptic can always argue the defender of knowledge to a standstill. So if the defender of knowledge is the one with the burden of proving her claims, I think she never ever succeeds in discharging that burden.

Does that mean that sceptic is right and that we really don't know anything at all?

Well, maybe. I guess that depnds what we mean by "know."

And here's precisely the thing that drives me batty about so much epistemology. So much of it is focused on analyzing and re-analyzing the concept of knowledge -- mostly in light of sceptical worries about the very possibility of knowledge. What could knowledge be such that it survives various sceptical arguments?

Don't get me wrong. Lots of really smart, creative and ambitious philosophers work on that sort of thing. And I don't doubt that they have collectively done some amazing work. But frankly, in one way I have to confess that it all seems to me so much wasted labor.

There are two reasons why I think this. First, I really do think that sceptical arguments are pretty much here to stay and are pretty much irrefutable. When we fudge around with the concept of knowledge in order to make "knowledge" seem possible even in the light of those arguments. I'm just not sure what we've accomplished, really.

Second, and more importantly, it seems to me that the real question of philosophical interest isn't what to say about the slippery concept of "knowledge" but what to say about rational inquiry and rational belief fixation. Questions about rational inquiry remain of interest, it seems to me, both before and after we give the sceptic his due. What do we reason to believe -- whether or not our beliefs count as full-blown knowledge? If knowledge is supposed to be that kind of belief, with that kind of warrant, whatever it is, that withstands sceptical arguments, then maybe we simply don't have any "knowledge." So be it. Still, we have lots of beliefs and some of those beliefs are more or less warranted by argument and/or evidence. Certainly, some of our beliefs are "warranted enough" for the multitudinious purposes of life, even if the sceptic is right that none of them deserve the honorific label "knowledge." Why shouldn't that be good enough for us?

Someone might respond that the sceptic can do the same trick on rational belief that she does on knowledge. That is, just as she can convince us that we can never know anything, she can also convince us that we never have any grounds whatsoever for believing anything. But I think as soon as the target shifts to grounds for believing and away from knowledge, the sceptic is much less compelling a figure and his arguments much less powerful. THe main reason is this: we can believe and be reasonable in believing even when we haven't ruled out certain alternative ways the world might be. Believing is, in a way, inherently more risky than knowledge purports to be. When I merely believe, even if my belief is warranted by the evidence and is backed by arguments, I don't need to rule out the very possibility that my belief could ultimately be wrong. But knowledge is supposed to be firmer than that. One can't know that p, unless p is the case.

I just looked up at the clock. I really gotta go. Too bad, because there is really a lot more to say and I'm just getting warmed up.

If I get time, I'll come back to this post after the show.

Talk to you soon.

A dialogue on Biracial Identity

posted by Ken Taylor

Tomorrow show is about biracial identity.   And I thought as a way of getting the juices flowing,  I'd write a little dialogue about some of the issues to be covered.  So here goes:

 A Black Guy (BG)  and a White Guy  (WG)  are in a bar, having drinks.  You may be tempted to think that they are John Perry and Ken Taylor -- but since I'm putting words in both people's mouths,  don't hold John responsible for any of this. 

BG:      I've been thinking a lot about biracial identities,  lately because I see that my favorite radio show,  Philosophy Talk  is about to do an episode on it.     

WG:   I wonder what they'll talk about.  I mean  thanks to Obama,  biracial is the new cool, BG.   But  I don't really see that there are  deep philosophical questions connected with the  topic of bi-racial identities raise.  Do you? 

BG:  Yeah ,  I do.   Biracial identities challenge our old understanding of race.   I think  biracial people and their struggles to constitute their identities  are beginning to push our old concepts of race to the breaking point.

WG:    This is America, dude.  Race is a reality and race isn't going anywhere anytime soon.  As a black guy, you should know that. 

BG:   Whatever do you mean by that remark?   

WG:  I mean black people experience the reality of race everyday.   White guys, like me,  tend to think of ourselves as non-racialized, as if we don't have a race.   That's a form of white privilege that you black guys don't enjoy in our racialized society.    Of course,  I'm not saying that white people are right to think of themselves as non-racialized.   It's, in fact,  part of our racial consciousness to think of ourselves as non-racialized, if that makes any sense.  

BG:  It makes lots of sense.   In America,   white is racially "unmarked."  Black is racially "marked."    if you are a member of the unmarked race, you entitle yourself to think of yourself as somehow free of race and you entitle yourself to think of  the other as the racialized other.  On other hand,  if you are part of racially marked group, you aren't so free to deny race.    And if you are one of the racially marked "others"  you are sort of confronted with your racial difference, your racial markedness at every turn.   And that gives you a distinctive form of racial consciousness.   

WG:  Er, well, something like that  -- I think.    But back to biracial people.   You said that they somehow  challenge  our old understanding of race.   But I don't see it.  Think of animal and plant species.    You can cross breed animal and plant species to produce hybrids -- sometimes stable and fertile hybrids.  But that doesn't challenge our ideas about species, does it?   In the same vein,  you  can cross breed races to produce people of biracial ancestry.   Where’s the challenge to our understanding of race in that?  I don't get it.  

BG:  But you're thinking of race as if it were analogous to biological species.   But it just isn't.   Once upon a time, people did believe that there were such things as biologically grounded racial essences.   And racial essences were supposed to distinguish people from each other in socially and morally relevant ways.  But modern biology will have none of that.

WG:  Dude,  are you really suggesting that there are no races?   Let's follow the logic of that out a little.   If there are no races, then you are not a black man, I am  not a white man, and Obama is not a man of bi-racial ancestry.  But that’s absurd isn't it?    Let me put the question to you directly.  Dude, are you now, or have you ever been,  a black man?

BG:     Of course,  I am a black man.   And you are a white man, and Barack Obama  is – well, he’s something more complicated.    Everybody thinks of him as our first black president.  But isn't he  really as much and no more a white man than he is a black man?  Why isn't he thought of as our first biracial president or even just another in a long line of white presidents?   What really makes Obama black, anyway? 

WG: Wait a minute.  Wait a minute.  You're going too fast for me.   I'm confused.    You seem to want to claim that races aren’t really real.   But you defiantly – or was it reluctantly    -- admitted  to being a black man.    What gives?  You can't have it both ways.  Either there are no races,  and you are not a black man.  Or there are races and you are a black man.  

BG:  I didn't say races aren't real.  I said they aren't biologically real.   The fact that races aren’t biologically real, doesn’t mean there’s nothing to the concept of race.  National identities aren’t biologically real, either.    But national identities can matter quite a lot in human affairs.

WG:    So you think that  race is a social reality, even if it isn't a biological reality.  I can buy that.    But then I don’t see how biracial identities push our concepts of race to the breaking point, as you claim.    Think about ethnic identities.  Does the fact of people of multiple ethnicities  push our old concepts of ethnicity to the breaking point? 

BG: Well,  I'm not sure.  But race and ethnicity are different in some ways and similar in others.    I think we need a distinction.   Let's  distinguish between race and racial identifications.  I'd like to  reserve concept of race for something that pretends to be  biologically grounded and  reserve racial identifications for something socially and culturally grounded. When I acknowledged  being a black man – and I was doing that proudly, by the way --  I wasn’t  making any claim about my biology.  I was making a claim about my social and cultural heritage. 

WG:    NOw it just sounds like racial identifications, as you are construing them,  are very much akin to ethnic identifications or national identifications.   You seem to think we've got two things going on without being very clear about them.  We've got a set of ethnicity like racial identifications and a set of would be biological racial categories.    Is there a problem with that? 

BG:    I think there is.  I think you're finally starting to get my point.     Go back to what I was saying earlier about biology and race.  Even though we now know that racial categories are biologically empty, we still have this deeply ingrained, cultural habit of identifying ourselves in racial terms.  But it turns out that our racial identifications are anchored in, well, nothing really.  Or at least they aren't anchored in the kind of thing we once thought they were.    And I think our struggle to make sense of biracial identities helps us to see that. 

WG:  I'm not sure  I'm following this.   But let me try something out to see if I catch your drift here.  Take Barack Obama, again.    What race does he belong to?   And why exactly does he belong to that race?  Is he black?  White?  Or is he something else entirely?  In the old days,   the one-drop rule told us the answer.   If you had one drop of “black blood,” then you were ipso facto black.   But that's clearly non-sensical,  especially if we're thinking of racial categories as biologically grounded.   But suppose we let culture and stuff like that be our guide.    Given Obama's quite distinctive upbringing,  you  wouldn't be wrong to think that from a social/cultural perspective he's much more of a white dude than a black dude.  

BG:  Of course,  neither blacks as a whole nor whites as a whole are cultural monoliths.   But if Obama's life story represent some strand of some typical American subculture, it's certainly not a paradigmatically black strand of the plethora of American subcultures.   I don't think anybody would deny that. 

WG:  SO what makes this guy a black dude?

BG:   He's decided that he's black and his decision counts as authentic,  I think, because he's got one black parent.   

WG:  That seems right, as far as it goes.  But it doesn't go far enough.  Ask yourself,  could Obama just decide that he is a white man, rather than a black man or a biracial man?

BG:    I think you're onto something important here.  It seems to me that   Obama’s got two, and only two socially acceptable options for his racial self-identification.    Like a rare but growing number of people who think of themselves as  a sort of multi-racial vanguard, he could  permissibly identify himself as a biracial person – full stop.   Or he could permissibly  do the more standard and  less culturally threatening thing and self-identify as black – full stop.  But we’re not yet at the point where Barack Obama is socially allowed to self-identify as white, rather than black.

WG:    What do you mean by "permissibly"  here?    He’s the goddamn  President of the United States.  He’s free to self- identify as whatever he chooses.  Remember George Bush I and his refusal to eat broccoli? 

BG:    You and I both know that Obama isn't free to self-identify as white and deny the black part of himself. First it would so radically change his political narrative that it  would be political suicide.   But politics aside, there's a much, much broader point here that gets us right to the heart of things.   Old fashioned  white people and old fahisoned black people  have a perhaps not fully conscious,  but deeply ingrained  cultural investment in  maintaining the racial status quo.  They, in effect,  try to  force biracial people into the  old comfortable and familiar  racial categories.    For some reason -- I'm not sure why -- we pigeon-hole biracial people into the socially “marked” race – in the case of black and white in America that's  the black race  --  rather than allow them into the socially unmarked race –  the white race (at least in America from its beginning until now).   

WG:   Now I finally see why you think the struggles of biracial people to constitute their identities -- racialized and non-racialized -- is a threat to our old ways of thinking.   They just don't fit.   And our attempts to make them fit distorts many things.   

BG:  That's one reason I referred to old-fashioned white people and black people.   I think maybe some younger people are beginning to see things differently.    They are willing to allow racial identifications to be as fluid and multiple as ethnic identifications. 

WG:  You're talking about the harbingers of a post-racial age.  I think I think that's a fantasy and isn't coming anytime soon.   But  this is tough stuff and my head is beginning to spin.   I think I need to listen to the upcoming episode of Philosophy Talk to get this all straightened out.  

The First Annual Dionysus Awards

Philosophy Talk is initiating a new movie award.   

I know;  I know.  Do we really need yet another movie award?  We've got the Oscars; the Golden Globe; the National Society of Film Critics, the People's Choice Awards ....  So what's the point of another, you ask?

Well,  it's fun to talk about movies -- at least the good ones.  But more importantly,  nobody really explicitly applauds movies for their philosophical merits -- though filmmaking can sometimes be a highly philosophical art form.   So why not an award that does just that?  Finally,  what could be cooler than winning a Dionysus Award?  Sounds much cooler than an Oscar or a Golden Globe -- at least to me. 

So on February 8th, we're going to inaugurate our Annual  Dionysus Awards for the most philosophically interesting movies of the year.    Our main guest will be noted film critic David Thomson.   But we'll also be joined briefly by some of our favorite philosopher-cinemaphile who will give their takes on the philosophically most interesting movies of the year.   

We'd love to have you join in the fun.  Submit your own  nomination for a Dionysus Award to comments@philosophhytalk.org.   Tell us which movies of 2008 you found most philosophically gripping and why.  If we find your nomination compelling,  we just may include you as a special guest  on our on-air broadcast on the 8th.

Legal Ethics

UPDATE: John Perry originally posted this when our episode on legal ethics first aired. Since, we are repeating that episode this week, we are moving this entry to the top.

Are Lawyers all that bad?
by John Perry

Our blurb for this show says,

Lawyers are often thought to be hardly better than hired guns, who, in the words of Plato, are paid to "make the weaker argument the stronger" -- like the sophists of old.  .

My father, grandfather and uncle were lawyers, in the small firm then called "Perry & Perry" in Lincoln, Nebraska, and my cousin and his son continue in that firm, now known as "Perry, Guthery, Haase & Gessford".  If the Danforth Foundation hadn't kindly offered me a fellowship to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy at Cornell, I would have followed the family tradition.  It never occurred to me, as I was growing up, the law was anything but the most honorable of professions. 

Lawyers, it seemed to me, had the very honorable calling of helping ordinary citizens cope with the law, with contracts, with lawsuits, when they were accused of crimes, when they wanted to petition the government for redress of grievances, and so forth.  And, I must say, lawyers have helped me in most of those ways, and the lawyers who have helped me have all seemed like honorable, hard-working  people, who earned the fees they charged.  We are proud to live in a nation of laws rather than men, and how could we do that without lawyers?  So when and why did lawyers get the bad reputation reflected in our quote, and expressed every day in lawyer jokes?

And, come to think of it, if lawyers are such jerks, how come the law school has a higher pay scale than the philosophy department ---- but I digress.

There are presumably many reasons that lawyers have acquired, in the eyes of many of the non-lawyers in our society, a bad reputation.  For every television show that represents them in a positive light, like Perry Mason or Matlock, there must be a dozen that cast them in a less favorable light, like one of my current favorites, Boston Legal.  And a lot of lawyers work for big corporations, helping them to avoid taxes, avoid just punishment for peddling defective products, and the like.

But one reason, and the one we are most likely to explore on the program, is that lawyers are often obliged, or seen to be obliged, because of legal ethics, the code of conduct to which lawyers subscribe, to do things that  conflict with  the more common sense dictates of morality. O.J. Simpson is widely, perhaps unfairly, seen to have gotten away with murder because his zealous lawyers flim-flammed the jury.  And Robert Blake.  Not to mention Michael Jackson, who wasn't accused of murdering anyone, but whose luck in the courtroom seemed also to exemplify the principle that people with enough money to hire lawyers who are good at making the true appear the false and the false appear the true  can get away with anything.  Especially in Southern California.

Lawyers have an obligation to pursue the interests of  their clients, whether they defending  tobacco companies that have conspired to keep the truth about the danger of their product from the public, or rapists or other depraved individuals who will commit more crimes if released, or helping stupid people who spill hot coffee on themselves with frivolous lawsuits that mean that the rest of us get tepid coffee from the local drive-in, or conniving so that big companies don't have to pay taxes and can continue to spoil the environment. 

Not to mention prosecutors, who, if my sources of information, mostly television shows, are to be believed, regularly browbeat people into copping pleas for crimes they didn't commit.

But our system is an adversarial system.  Justice is served by vigorous prosecution and defense.  Does this imply that lawyers are obliged to behave in ways that don't always serve justice, and don't always benefit society, and aren't always very fair to everyone involved --- particularly to the people who don't have enough money to hire the top guns?  Does the nature of our legal system put lawyers in a moral dilemma, where the obligations of their profession require them to act in ways that can have terrible consequences?  Is there a better way to do all of this?

Well, these are some of the issues we will explore with noted  philosopher of law David Luban, of Georgetown University, We had a great program with him once before, on war crimes, and this should be a good one too.  Join us as we discuss the  ethical obligations of lawyers to their clients, to the court, and to society at large.