So This Caught my Eye...

So what is the point of advice? Why do we give advice, when it only really acts as guidance for those who already have the knowledge of the situation for which we are advising them on? Is it, perhaps, more of a knotted handkerchief to remind us of what we already know?

So there I was surfing the Twitter, when this popped up on my feed.

 Reading between the swearing (which I find hard because dyslexic) and finding I agree with almost all of it I started to wonder if it is contradictory. Can one follow such advice while believing in oneself? I looked a bit closer and took the swears out, and reformatted it for a giggle:

Now looking again some surprising things lurk in here. I wondered if this was anonymous, or if it had some pedigree. After a quick search I found where the original was from, Turns out, rockstar designer Jonathan Ive, chief design officer for apple. Inc. had this on his wall as a motivational poster. Jony Ives was originally a designer for a company called Tangerine, but left due to a disagreement about customer expectations.

But did Jony design it? It seems not. I found an enlightening blog about the posters history here. Seems it was from the makers of the GFDA website/promotion's  and I recommend you look it up. The whole point if of course that the swearing denotes the passion, so perhaps I have been hasty in removing it - but I still worry about conflicts in the rules.

And conflicts in ought statements is moral philosophy, right!? 

Here are the 25 rules:

1. Believe in yourself.
2. Stay up all night.
3. Work outside your habits.
4. Know when to speak up.
5. Collaborate.
6. Don't procrastinate.
7. Get over yourself.
8. Keep Learning.
9. Form follows function.
10. A computer is a Lite-Bite for bad ideas.
11. Find inspiration everywhere.
12. Network.
13. Educate your client.
14. Trust your gut.
15. Ask for help.
16. Make it sustainable.
17. Question everything.
18. Have a concept.
19. Learn to take criticism.
20. Make me care.
21. Use spellcheck.
22. Do your research.
23. Sketch more ideas.
24. The problem contains the solution.
25. Think about all the possibilities.

The fist and most obvious problem is the apparent paradox is believing in yourself because someone told you to, but perhaps thats too easy? I mean, it is still what I would call good advice - metaphysically good even if not truly functional. I am more concerned with if any of these rules contradict each-other.

Take "Trust your gut" and "get over yourself "; it seems hard to follow both pieces of advice? Following your gut is the core of self-belief, but getting over yourself is humility. Does self belief somehow work contrary to humility? On the face of it it seems to. If I were programming a computer - an apple even -  I might find this step hard.

I suppose I would make the programme lookup the situation in a database and draw its answers from their. The database would be a list of "experiences" or "pass happenings" which the programme could use to tell if now was the time to trust "its gut" (I know I know) or else listen to advice! So the computer needs experience to follow the instructions.

Some are common sense rules, from the bottom: 25, 23, 22, 21, 15, all seem pretty straight forward. But perhaps this is just me as an adult seeing the wisdom in stuff I already know? 

This all brings to mind the idea of temperance. Temperance is an idea I have learned through Aristotle which I believe helps here. Because we are all experienced to some degree in acting in the world, we have knowledge of the results of our actions. I know that there is a time and place to get over myself, though I may forget in any given circumstance. I also know there is a time and place to trust my gut. Though I am historically bad at this! But I do realise, as an experienced moral agent that these things are true, I know they are a matter for judgement, for applying my set of experience to, for temperance.

Pride has no Side, so be Kind

Pride comes before a fall, they say, though I’m not sure who 'they' are or when they conducted a fact-checked double blind trial about falls and their preceding emotional or dispositional states. Neither-the-less there does seem to be some anecdotal evidence in the adage, so let’s roll worth it for the moment; It seems we are so proud we have decided we do not need to be part of a larger union, and so the UK has decided it can do better without Europe.

Were we proud? Pride seemed like a blip in the moral path behind us somewhere. Some (less than half it seems) having moved past pride were furious that others couldn't see how amazing this country is! Except for those who didn’t agree of course, they are part of the problem (of course). This too was also a cause for some irritation: How dare almost half of this great country be so wrong!

Were we all proud? The other half, well almost half, were in turn furious that anyone could be so stupid to disagree with them! Indignant that they couldn’t tell the lies from fact, or navigate the complex set of that which contains all Europe, and boil this down into a single word, either stay or leave. How dare people be uneducated!

Well, fury won the vote, and it seems the most furious side has carried the day. Democracy is all its glory has spoken. Good. The fall - the stock market fall - has occurred. The rationale (border controls, market controls, law controls, democratic controls) have begun to be reneged by those who promised them. As with all referendums, we "have spoken", but what we have said is uncertain.

I mean, we only said “Yes” really, but I still have follow-up questions. I’m sure a few people do.

These questions will be answered loudly by politicians, who generally jump to tell us what we said. Also the media is quite keen to say, be it The Sun, Sky, Mirror or Guardian, or whatever. Wouldn’t it be better for us to honestly, critically look at ourselves, and at what occurs now? ‘They’ have now got what they said they wanted. We will ask later, did they really get it, and did they want it? Was it partly our mode of discussion that led to the obvious divide of opinion? And hardest of all, in the end, will it be for the best or not?

Did those who wanted border controls, and voted for those controls, get them? Will they? Time will tell of course, but I believe not. So that’s a good thing perhaps. Ironic perhaps.

Will those who wanted less interference in UK law get less interference? It seems not, though time will tell of course. In which case, those who sought power will get less, which is a good, perhaps.

Did those who wanted more democracy get it? Was it a good thing in itself, or did it lead to good things? Only time will tell of course, but I suppose we can all dream of a world where the answers are yes, yes and yes. Is this something else we need to learn: That democracy is not a single thing, or identical to the good.

So with less money, power and border controls the newly empowered will go forth, and clearly demonstrate to us all exactly what kind of a choice this was. Perhaps it will work, but if it doesn’t, perhaps blame will lie where it should lie, and for once we will all see. Hopefully we will watch listen and learn this time, and experience exactly why what we did was right, or wrong. Perhaps we will learn lessons, mistrust the newspapers, press, media feeds and rose tinted glasses that led us here. And that, if it would happen, would seem to be a good.

Mistakes learned from are not wasted.

Pride has long lain inside us, on all sides of this debate. We have pride in the ghost of an empire that moved this very process closer. Globalisation would be hard without the trade, linguistic, cultural and administrative norms introduced by the British Empire. That empire is dead, but its effects live on. It is these effects that mean we cannot be separate, and we cannot be in charge, and we cannot have this pride any longer.

Those that voted against do not deserve scorn, they need to be reassured. It is fear that has led them to this choice, and you cannot beat or ridicule the fear out of someone. It’s like trying to plug the holes in your bucket with bullets, or teaching a child to be polite by telling them to “fucking stop swearing”. We need to talk frankly and honestly, and learn as a country to discuss anything without breaking the laws of logic or debate… and perhaps we are on the path to that future still.

By giving this 52% their way through disengagement and mistrust, we give a practical demonstration or these methods on both sides. Pride comes before a fall, let us hope we are resilient enough to get up again having learned better from where we've been.

Why This Blog

Why?

Originally this blog was a place for me to write down some abstract thoughts about a (then) confusing and seemingly insurmountable set of related problems I was facing - namely my dissertation in Meta-Ethics, specifically about questioning the nature and reality of Moral Principles. I have moved away from this now, but what I do is still influenced by this work.

In the end I managed to submit a lengthy academic work which gained me a decent qualification, and all was well; but I do not feel I truly finished. For a few reasons.

Firstly I had not satisfied myself as to the correctness of my answer, or even my question. Secondly I had an urge to rewrite, rewrite-some-more, edit and then bind my finished thesis. I have not yet done this (but I will!!)

My worry about the question has not gone away, and I have been secretly planning a way of answering my question, or perhaps thinking of a better question. In the end I chose this:

What is the best conception of the relation between natural properties and moral properties?

I looked at many alternatives, and drew heavily on Shaffer-Landu's work, especially Moral Reasons (1997) in forming a taxonomy of what I still see as a kind of scale of views. My answer really came down to a response to Jonathan Dancy's arguments: he points out (Ethics without Principles, 2004 and may other places) that absolute rules are doomed, because they are destroyed by exceptions. There are always so many exceptions to a "Moral Law", that the very concept is ultimately impossible do defend.

We say "Do not kill", and think this is a law, but we have exceptions like "Unless in self defence, unless for survival, unless to serve justice, unless to prevent killing, unless to ease suffering, unless unknowingly, unless through meaning to do well, unless forced to choose between killing or causing death through not killing, and so on and so on forever. His point was this; add these additions, and the original rule is no longer itself.

I think this is sensible. I think replies to this are also sensible: moral rules (not laws, "laws" is... problematic)are not simple things, we instead use the words "Do Not Kill" as a kind of signpost for something more.

But what more?

I thought long and hard, and sweated into may nights, and strained and formatted, and redrafted and took notes. Eventually I had a breakthrough. The solution seemed clear, and still does, the rules must be algorithms.

As the reader will know, an algorithm is just a set of operations one performs upon an input. It seems plain that a "Moral Law" is like this: the input is the situation, the right thing to do is the output of a set of interpretations, predictions, summations of histories, calculations, extrapolations, and speculations about this situation. It may be useful to think of moral theories in this vein; as a set of algorithms.

The funny thing about this is that I feel this is wrong. Intuition is hugely important in moral theory, and ultimately this is how we judge rightness of course (indeed, any deeply unintuitive theory would be deemed wrong anyway!). Still, I don't think these intuitions drop from the sky.

Perhaps intuitions are indeed these very algorithms? That would be one way of looking at it for sure.

I will complete my work, and finish my book, and I will hopefully find time to do justice to the many other things that I want to in this life. I have been working on a career in IT and network design for some years, and it is not unrelated: algorithms are everywhere in the world of Cisco, Linux, C++, SQL, PHP and their kind. I hope to keep going until I get back to the thinking, the writing, and the necessary growing which is why I studied philosophy in the first place, and why I still think that everyone should have done so.

Economic Thoughts

Economics is a big thing these days. Economic models seem outdated, growth just doesnt seem to be happening and, even if it is, it seems prety obvious it cant go on forever. Marx seemingly got communism badly wrong (something about selfishness) and capitalism had the oposite problem (it seems to make us worse).

So what to do? Bear with me while I pen a few experiments and their drawbacks:

Idea 1: immediately adjust pay to the average of all current wages, pay everyone per the hours they work.

Advantages: more are paid more evenly, helps the majority. Imediate end of working poor. Savings for big companies with many managers.

Disadvantages: small business go bust due to higher wages than they can afford. What should a rockstar do with their earnings?

It may be that after we calculate the difference, the rockstar ends with a fair share; but let us assume he doesnt for now!

2: An equal Pay Plus: pay everyone a living wage plus company performance bonus.

Advantage:could avoid small company problem amd rockstar problem,

Disadvantage: may cause company segregation and thus, inequality.

Company segregation: where managers,  cleaners, designers, shop-fitters etc. Each made into a separate company with SLAs to "group". Managets paid hugly outstrips others leaving us is tge same situation we are in now.

A Thought: would you pay the managers at all? Would this actually be a good system?

Any thoughts?

(*disclaimer: I dont think Marxism has ever occured, but susspect it may not work because it is too good for us. These thoughts triggered by Russell Brands recent exploits and a recurring philosophical thoughts. There will be typos, I typed this on my phone. Also I have not gone into much detail (same reason))

Right-making features: Do they speak?

I have been reading and submitting ideas, gaining feedback in the last few weeks. This has led me to decide that I am going to focus upon a metaphysical idea of what a principle is, and how it makes actions right or wrong. This idea is a big part of Dancy, but it is something which has also been discussed by a little by Shafer-Landau in his paper moral-rules. I am going to explore an aspect of this idea which I find both interesting and slippery.

If actions are made right by their non-moral features, or the non-moral features of the situation they occur within, then these features are right-making. It seems easy to point to cases where a non-moral feature of an action makes that action right: the generosity of the action of buying a hot drink for a homeless person in the wintertime makes the action good. It is harder to point to a non-moral feature of situations which are right-making more generally. Generously giving out the stolen goods you have acquired rather than returning them to their owners is not a better act because it is generous.

Dancy makes much of this kind of distinction. In Ethics Without Principles He discusses the difference between two interpretations of holism: the thesis in the theory of reasons that a feature that is a reason in one case may be no reason at all, or an opposite reason, in another. The first interpretation might be of the kind he calls a 'Brandom-style approach. Robert Brandom gives a holistic outline of reasons which Dancy calls 'non-monotonic. Brandom gives these conditions:

1. If I strike this dry, well-made match, then it will light. (p -> q)
2. If p and the match is in a very strong electromagnetic field, then it will not light. ((p&r)->¬q)
3. If p and r and the match is in a Faraday cage, then it will light. ((p&q&r)->q)
4. If p and r and s and the room is evacuated of oxygen, then it will not light. ((p&q&r&s&t)->¬q)

This set of conditionals offers a different approach to how reasons might operate together than Dancy sees himself as advocating. Dancy believes this to be a different kind of holism than his, because each combination of features (p, p&r, p&r&s, p&r&s&t) speaks in favour of the match lighting or not lighting. Dancy wants to say that a single feature may in one situation be a reason in favour of one outcome in one situation, and in another situation be a reason against the same thing occurring. In one case it is right to do X because of feature Y, and another case it is wrong to do X because of Y. When the features add up they retain their identity, but they might change their weight and force.

Interesting distinction. My first impression is that it might not quite add up, but I am taking Dancy with a pinch of salt at the moment.

Guides and Standards

Continuing the search for principles of moral philosophy and what these things might be I have (as mentioned in the last post) recently been reading the excellent Principled Ethics. I have previously looked at McKeever and Ridge's first description of what principles might be; standards (I wrote about them here). They have more distinctions to add, and I will now move on to their second and third suggestion of what a principle might be: guides, and action guiding standards.

Where standards are the exceptionless rules we might follow if we had a godlike perspective, rules like the principle of utility or the categorical imperative which apply always, perhaps even necessarily, guides are more like rules of thumb. If we were explaining to someone how to win at the stock market we might either pass on the obvious but vacuous standard "buy low and sell high", or give the practical advice of spreading their investments and knowing what the average price is for each share bought. Ethics in practice are performed in a limited time frame, by imperfect agents acting in non-ideal situations. Because the bigger picture is hard to even know, and harder to predict, it is useful perhaps to see principles as less like standards and more like guides. Like rules of thumb.

The authors begin to talk about how one might construe Ross and his system of prima facie duties as a system of guides. I suppose their intent was to highlight the way in which his system allows rules to override each-other, leading one to occasionally break one principle because of consideration of another. They put a disclaimer in, to highlight that Ross may not have intended his ideas in this way, and I feel this was wise. Ross did not have this kind of idea in mind at all. There is a huge gulf between 'useful rules of thumb' and the fundamental set of principles he described. His method was to 'boil down' certain principles we think of as part of morality until only those which could not be split further remained. He certainly did not think of these as the kinds of rules which allowed exception, in the way a rule of thumb might when the standard was consulted.

McKeever and Ridge continue with an interesting combination of their first two ideas, and this gives us action guiding standards (p9).  They consider two ways this might take shape, one 'uninteresting' version in which the only standards accepted are practical, and one which makes use of an ideal virtuous agent. The virtuous agent would be able to ascent to the higher level of critical awareness of a standard to assess the rightness of the guide they use. The authors this ability is necessary for situation in which the agent is able to forsake their virtue in-order to (for example) achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number.

I wonder if the uninteresting version is as uninteresting, and I wonder if the virtuous agent view is actually much to do with virtue. The 'uninteresting' view is interesting because I like the idea that some guides for action may also be exceptionless standards. I suppose the authors see that this kind of crossover would be rare due to the complexity of putting standards into practice, and in this I certainly see their point. It struck me that a principle like 'do not lie' if it were understood as complicated and involving clauses which specified action may be exceptionless. If it were sufficiently complicated, it would be both a standard and a guide... but of course as finite beings, perhaps we would not be able to grasp such complexity.

In my mind I am currently thinking of this as the complexity problem. A related problem for principles seems to be the non-translatability problem. Perhaps the two are linked: principles do not seem to be the kinds of things we can express with a simple rule (though we try to anyway). When we do express them so, they have hidden, unmentioned clauses which we take to be 'obvious' if one understands the principle properly. It strikes me that this 'understanding properly' is highly complex, and so I don't think it is inconceivable that principles are complex. I need to respond to Dancy on this point however, and am not ready yet.

As for the virtuous agent view, I find it misunderstands virtue. I realise the authors are talking about a virtuous agent in the sense that a utilitarian might call her virtuous who acts in ways which generally promote the greatest happiness. Given this meaning of 'virtuous agent' it does make sense to say that one might forsake their 'virtue' in order to promote the greatest good. However this is to take the idea of virtue as merely the internalisation of acts which generally promote the greatest happiness. Virtue on this view of it is the rule of thumb, and not something which is good in itself.

What I have against this view is perhaps just pre-critical thought. I like to think that virtue is intrinsically good, and that an agent who exemplifies the virtues (perhaps not Aristotle, but similar) would thereby be good in some sense which transcends utility. I need to consider this a bit further to develop it into a criticism.

A Better Grip of the Principle

I have finally managed to get my hands on McKeever and Ridge's book Principled Ethics, and am both quite excited and a bit worried by their approach. The reason I am quite excited is that it mirrors what I am already trying to do. The reason I am a bit worried is because I fear they may have already done what I was trying to do, and made my line of thought redundant. I suppose I will simply have to study in depth and see if I can pick up on anything they have missed!

The sensibly begin their work by separating out terms in the way I had previously intended to, and in particular getting straight (to them!) what is meant by a moral principle. They initially have 6 divisions into the term which they use for analysis (p8-14). Additionally they want to talk about the scope of operation for moral principles. They discuss hedged and un-hedged principles (p21) and he way in which a principle can be moral, non-moral or intra moral. I wanted to here discuss the distinctions they makes regarding principles, though I will later return to the interesting topic of scope. I seems both must be important if we want to talk about principles.

They begin by saying that one might simply see principles as standards. The authors characterise this sense of 'principle' as being something which provides sufficient condition for the application of a moral concept (p7). These are supposed to be necessary truths which might found any contingent principles, and are exemplified by notions such as the categorical imperative or the principle of utility.

Part of their discussion of this particular characterisation is to do with an argument about supervenience. Even particularists might generally agree that moral facts about a case supervene upon the non-moral facts. If there is a physical difference in the facts of the case then this difference may make a moral difference to the case as well. According to McKeever and Ridge this alone means that we might generally describe moral concepts in physical terms, and so that a comprehensive physical description of the possible world in which that case occurs (including all the facts) would give a sufficient condition for the application of a moral concept. Of course if this were true, principles as standards would be physically true.

They mention this only to flesh out what they mean by 'generalisation'. They do not mean a comprehensive physical description of the physical world, as this would be a very very long description indeed. Also many things in such a 'supervenience function' are irrelevant to moral thought, just as many physical facts seem irrelevant in any case.

So a standard is less that a supervenience function (it is shorter) and must be useful if it is to qualify as a principle. This interesting distinction is useful, and one I intend to make use of.

The idea of discounting supervenience function's as candidates for moral principles seems a bit strange to me. An example of a principle, like the principle of maximum utility, seems like a physical law. It is a generalised proposition which can be applied in a uniform way (if we could know the consequences, of course!) and would arguable give us an idea of what course of action would be correct. The idea that a comprehensive description of the physical world might qualify as the same kind of thing seems bizarre, and obviously quite different from this. For a start it is much longer, and far more complicated, and may come as a string of data capturing the position and momentum of fundamental particles.

If we are to consider both the short, and the nearly infinite as candidates for principles, then why simply rule out a complete description of the given possible world? Why not just use a complete physical description of a given case?

I notice that the authors make use of the notion of a 'moral concept' which is separate from a moral principle. This term is used throughout the chapter, and I am not certain what it means. As I understand particularism, it is largely a negative thesis, and I am not sure that the sort of morality it might promote requires anything so clear as a concept. At present I struggle to see what could be a moral concept, other than something like a principle like "do not lie" or "do not kill". Perhaps further reflection will shed some light upon this, but it is a possible problem with the discussion.

I will add to this tomorrow with some thoughts about their next distinction,; principles as guides.