Rationality

I’ve been working through a few different books that are more or less related to my current projects and I’ve decided to start tossing some thoughts at the ole interwebs to help keep my gears spinning now that I’ve begun to see some important patterns emerge.

Thought #1: Morality should not have a theory of truth modeled on that of science.  This comes straight from Dworkin’s book Justice for Hedgehogs and I have to admit I’m only about a quarter of the way in, so I don’t yet know what his positive views are, but he absolutely destroys the theory of moral realism that incorporates a (more or less platonic) correspondence theory of truth.

Here I should backtrack a bit.  To give it all a brief gloss – people generally don’t like the idea of moral relativism, the view that moral truth is dependent on human beings, since one might naturally take this to imply that any moral view is just as good as any other.  But we all have moral convictions – we believe our moral judgments are True, and not just true relative to us or our culture.  Moral realism is the obvious alternative view, according to which moral truths exist objectively, that is, independently of what humans do or think.  On this picture morality has a foundation in the world itself, somehow or other, and so when I get a moral judgment right I’m getting in touch with the way the world really is.  But what is this ‘getting in touch’ and how are we to understand what it is in the world that makes moral statements true (or false)?

One solution is to explain moral truths the way we explain scientific truths.  The truth of a scientific statement is explained in terms of correspondence to reality.  ”This molecule is H2O” is true just in case the molecule we are looking at is made of hydrogen and oxygen.  Another way to put it is that true scientific statements require truth-makers, that is, things in the world that make the statement true.  In our example, the truth-makers are certain protons, neutrons, electrons, etc, that form a water molecule.  The fundamental constituents of the physical world are the truth-makers for scientific claims.

What about the statement “Killing innocent people is wrong.”  It’s hardly informative to say that the statement is true because killing innocent people really is wrong.  What makes it really wrong?  If we are moral realists, then there is something about the world, independent of us and our disparate points of view, that makes the statement true.  But what could possibly count as moral truth-makers?  There are no basic constituents of moral reality (what Dworkin calls ‘morons’) to which that statement corresponds.  If only we could get out our trusty moral microscopes and look for evidence of morons, then we would have a foundation for moral realism.  It should be obvious, though, that this is a hopeless pursuit – even discounting Dworkin’s sardonic neologism.  Dworkin gives some nice arguments for why it looks to be an impossible pursuit, but perhaps I’ll save that for next time.

The Is-Ought/Naturalistic fallacy has come up a number of times in my intro classes this semester.  First, it’s worth pointing out that I have had trouble finding clear definitions of these things – even the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy goes so far as to mention that the definitions are not agreed upon amongst professional philosophers.  The problem I have in mind, though, is basically this: It is a mistake to think that something is morally permissible just because it is natural and it is a mistake to think that something is morally wrong because it is unnatural.

So stated it seems clear to me that those are mistakes and should be avoided.  One reason is that ‘natural’ is not a well-defined term or, at least, it is certainly not used consistently by the ‘folk’.  The go to example would be homosexuality – some conservatives think it’s unnatural and might thereby conclude that it is immoral; some liberals think it’s natural and might thereby conclude that it is moral.  The uses of ‘natural’ are different in each case.  The former might be not much more than a synonym for disgust (i.e., it’s gross, so it’s unnatural), while the latter might be an appeal to the observations of homosexuality in non-human animals.  I don’t think either interpretation of ‘natural’ warrants the conclusions drawn.

The second reason against such arguments is the fact that counter-examples abound.  I might find the sight of a needle puncturing one’s skin (e.g., to administer a flu vaccine) to be gross and unnatural, but I wouldn’t thereby consider it immoral.  I might notice that in their natural habitats chimpanzees throw their feces at one another, but I wouldn’t thereby consider such acts morally permissible in human beings.  Thankfully these kinds of examples suffice to curtail the use of similar arguments among my students (e.g., we naturally eat meat, so it is morally permissible).

However, there is a deeper problem that is not so easily resolved.  The “is-ought fallacy” is not quite the same as the “natural, ergo moral” arguments above.  In short, the claim is that it is a mistake to derive an ‘ought’ statement from an ‘is’ statement, that ethical conclusions cannot be drawn from factual statements.  It is not as clear to me that this is really a fallacy – perhaps a topic for my next post.

I’ve had lucid dreams before and they are always interesting experiences, but a couple of days ago I had one that was especially noteworthy.  I can’t recall much of the detail, but it doesn’t much matter.  I remember peeling what seemed like a hard-boiled egg but which turned out to have some kind of an embryo in it – upon seeing what it was I think the bizarreness shocked me into going lucid (the realization that something one is experiencing cannot possibly be real will sometimes throw one into lucidity).  As is often the case when I go lucid things started to take on a kind of glimmering fuzziness that made it hard to focus.  I imagine this sensation might occur in the real world when one’s pupils have been dilated and everything looks too bright, or if you have bad vision like me, when bright objects or lights take on an a luminous aura when you aren’t wearing glasses or contacts.  The first thing I tried to do in the dream was to bring the world into focus – I was trying to open my eyes wide and, alternatively, to squint in order to see things clearly.  This, of course, was folly.  I had the sudden realization while still dreaming that I was trying to use my eyes to see, but that my eyes were closed and the objects of my perception were all in my head – that I was seeing things without using my eyes!   I then found that by relaxing my dream-eye (is this my mind’s eye?) things would begin to focus.  At this point, as is often the case, the stress of being consciously aware of my dream led me to awaken.

I’m not a huge fan of using the Matrix to explain metaphysical notions, but soon after I woke up I recalled a pertinent scene from the movie.  There is a point where Neo and Morpheus are training in the matrix and Neo is exhausted and sweating profusely.  Seeing his struggle, Morpheus says something like, “you think that’s air your breathing?”  in an effort to get Neo to realize that he wasn’t and shouldn’t be trying to overcome the seeming ‘physical’ obstacles since the things he was experiencing were non-physical.  This was exactly my experience in this particular dream – I couldn’t cope or take control of the dream world until I realized that I wasn’t seeing ‘things’ at all and I wasn’t using my eyes to see them.  It was quite extraordinary.

I’ve gone semi-lucid a number of times before, but on the occasions where I am completely lucid I find it very difficult to stay asleep.  Lucid dreaming, though, is a skill, believe it or not.  Practice can enable one to go lucid more frequently and learn to control one’s dream world.  I’m still a novice, but it sure would be a fun skill to master – opening endless possibilities, like seeing without seeing.

At the bridal shower, one of the games was “how well does the bride know the groom?”  And Nicole had to answer a bunch of questions about my favorite things (she passed with flying colors!).  Anyway, I randomly remembered Blake’s poem, which is easily my historical if not all time favorite:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

I probably first liked this poem just because it’s about tigers, but it really is something special.  There is, of course, also another version of it, which I believe was created by Sam: “Tiger, tiger burning bright / Burning forests down at night”.  Less artful, yes, but vastly superior in comedic value.  I picture this particular tiger as Smokey the Bear’s sworn arch-enemy.  But Smokey was kind of overweight, if I recall correctly, so he’d better just let the tiger keep on burning.

We get so used to the English language that it becomes easy to overlook the many oddities and exceptions that a non-native speaker would find baffling.  I used not to care much about such things, but over time my attention to the nuances and mysteries of language has become second nature.  Of course, we have all competently used the rules of grammar, but we do so mostly out of habit.  Case in point, think about the phrase “used to”.  What does the word “used” mean?  How does that meaning fit into the phrase “used to”?  Look at how the words are used in the first three sentences of this paragraph – does it mean the same thing in each case?  Isn’t it weird?