Elucidations

This month, Greg Salmieri (University of Texas at Austin) returns for his third appearance on Elucidations, this time to talk about doing right by yourself.What was the last thing you did? The last thing I did was pull a shot of espresso. I wouldn’t say I made coffee as an end in itself, even though I love the taste of the roast I just used. If I had to tell you the main reason I made a coffee, it was in order to speed along my transformation from groggy podcast host to awake podcast host. But why do that? Hmm. I guess I wanted to wake up so that I could start writing this blog post, pay a couple bills, and put together a cool new IKEA lamp? But why pay a couple bills or put together a new IKEA lamp? So that I can continue to live in my apartment, be able to see things in it, and so on, maybe? Plato and Aristotle were interested in these ‘but what are you doing XYZ in order to accomplish?’ type questions, and they had the idea that if you keep re-asking the question every time you come up with answer, eventually you’ll get to something that is the ultimate reason you’re doing everything for. Once you get there, there won’t be any further justification for anything you do.‘Ethical egoism’ is a nickname that philosophers give to the idea that being a good person means that everything you do, ultimately, at the end of the day, you do in order to benefit yourself.Note that there’s already a lot of subtlety in this idea as we’ve defined it. For example, if you’re deceived about what’s good for you, and the thing you think is good for you is actually bad for you, then if you do everything you do in order to bring that about, you don’t count as a good person. Maybe I think that fame will be great for me, because of all the money, power, and attention that comes with it. But in a few years, once I actually become world famous, I realize it’s actually pretty miserable to be hounded by paparazzi, speculated about in the tabloids, and subjected to intense scrutiny every time I make a comment about anything. Once that happens, I might decide the whole get famous plan was misbegotten, longing for the days before I was a celebrity. So one point of subtlety is that what’s good or bad for a person can be complicated to determine—there are lots of cases where you can make a mistake about what’s really good for you.A second point of subtlety is that how your everyday behavior corresponds to what you’re ultimately doing everything for can be complex. Maybe you’ve adopted a monkish lifestyle, sacrificing the day to day comforts we take for granted so that you can help as many other people as possible, volunteering, donating to charities, and so forth. An ethical egoist would say that if you’re ultimately doing all those things because of the deep, persistent, long-term satisfaction it brings you—because of how it enriches your life to the fullest possible extent, then that counts as being a good person. So it’s not like commonly-held stereotypes about what selfishness is necessarily line up with what ethical egoists recommend.Due to those two factors, there’s a lot of wiggle room in what concrete behaviors can count as acting in your self-interest, and different behaviors are going to count as self-interested for different people, because different people often have fundamentally different needs and abilities. And I would say that’s what makes it especially interesting to think about whether ethical egoists have it right.Join us this month as our esteemed guest defends the viability of ethical egoism! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This month, Long Dang and I sit down to talk to Jessica Tizzard (University of Connecticut, Storrs) about weakness of the will.You’re at a party hosted by a close friend. It’s been three hours since you got there, and the evening thus far has been chock full of scintillating conversation, a fun round of Charades followed by Assassins, first rate cocktails, and a dessert to die for. You’ve just now been invited to play one of your favorite games, which usually takes about 90 minutes to complete—when out of nowhere, the onset of a yawn yanks you back into reality. Suddenly, you remember you’d promised yourself that you weren’t going to stay out late, because you’ve got to get up early tomorrow for an important meeting. You realize that now is the time to go home and get a good night’s sleep. And yet, the allure of the game pulls you in. Against your better judgment, you play the game deep into the night, future consequences be damned.Since the time of the ancient Greeks, some of the sharpest thinkers in philosophy have tried to figure out what is happening in that scenario. Obviously, we frequently decide that X is the best course of action, and yet our willpower falters and we decide to do Y, even though we know full well that doing Y is counterproductive or self-destructive. But why? In what world does that make any logical sense? Surely, if you decided that X was the thing to do, the natural next move is to do X. Not do the thing you convinced yourself was going to be bad for you. Right?The trouble is that every obvious answer to this puzzle feels unsatisfactory. You could be like: well if I did Y, then I must have really decided Y was best. But if that’s the case, why do you feel so terrible when you do it? Why do you feel guilty staying at the party until deep into the night, if you’ve supposedly decided that staying at the party is for the best? Taking that stance is effectively saying: no one ever has a crisis of willpower. Whenever you do anything, that is definitive proof that you believed it was the best possible thing to do. But insisting that everyone always has the willpower to do everything they think they should just seems to fly in the face of what we know about the human experience.Another option might be to say: well, ok, I did decide that X was the best thing to do, but when the moment to suck it up and actually do X came, I was overcome with desire. The feeling of pleasure at the prospect of partying hard swept over me and signal jammed my rational faculty, blocking me from doing what I knew I should. So I stayed, and had to suffer the consequences the next morning. But then that feels unsatisfactory as well, because if I really was overcome by the pleasure instinct, blocked from doing what I thought I should do, then what I did was really involuntary. Like a muscle spasm. Or a brain tumor that made me do it. That just seems wrong: clearly, in these types of situations, I actively chose to e.g. stay at the party and suffer the consequences. Staying at the party didn’t just happen to me, like a headache.Jessica Tizzard thinks that the 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant offered an interesting and novel way to understand what’s going on in these moments when you’re weak-willed. Step one in his approach is to take cases like the one described above and assimilate them all to what is often thought of as a different situation: the moral dilemma. A moral dilemma, as standardly construed, is a situation where you really can’t decide which of several options is the best to take. The idea here is that what look like situations where you knew you should do X but instead did Y are often, upon closer examination, really situations where you genuinely couldn’t tell which of those two things you should do. Sometimes, perhaps, when I thought I was having a crisis of willpower, I was in fact just torn and couldn’t decide.Number two in Immanuel Kant’s bag of tricks is to accept a version of the ‘I wanted to go home, but the desire to stay swept over me and made me stay at the party’ explanation, with one key difference: namely, he has a different take on what a desire is. Maybe a desire isn’t some physical pleasure sensation seizing control of your body like a puppet and forcing you to do something other than what you really want to do. Maybe a desire is really more like another set of factors to consider in your reasoning—it may come with a feeling, and present itself to you with a certain urgency, but really what it is is a set of reasons that you’re weighing up like any other. Understanding desire on those lines puts Kant in a nice position to say that lacking the willpower to do what you think is right is actually just a case of being racked by indecision.Tune in to hear Jessica Tizzard lay out the Kantian story about what happens when we act against our better judgment!Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This month, Ben Andrew and I are joined by Nethanel Lipshitz (Tel Aviv University, Bar-Ilan University) to talk about discrimination.If someone treats me unequally--that is, if they give other people a relative advantage but not me--am I the victim of discrimination? Our guest says yes. That is enough for me to count as having been discriminated against, and that is enough for it to be morally wrong.All fine and dandy. But then what's the big deal? The big deal is that the standard view in political philosophy tells us that discrimination requires more. If a shopkeeper kicks me out of their store merely because they don't like my hat, then according to the definition, I haven't been discriminated against. Why? Because in order for this behavior to count as discrimination, I have to be treated unequally based on my membership in a salient social group. It's maybe a bit tricky to define exactly what a 'salient social group' is, but some familiar examples might include e.g. LGBTQ people, people with a disability, or black people. 'People with a funny looking hat' aren't a salient social group--that's just a random category that popped up in this moment. So although I may have been treated badly, I haven't been discriminated against.Nethanel Lipshitz doesn't see a good reason for including 'you have to be a member of a salient social group' in the definition of discrimination. Note that this is compatible with saying that being discriminated against qua member of a particular social group is worse than being discriminated against as an individual, maybe as part of a one-off. The idea is just that it still counts as discrimination, and that it's still bad, even if it isn't as bad. Lipshitz' main reason for thinking this is that the 'I got discriminated against because of my hat' situation and the 'I got discriminated against because I'm gay' have a key factor in common: in both situations, the victim is being singled out as someone not worthy of the same moral respect/consideration as everyone else. It's a fascinating discussion, and I hope you enjoy it. I think Nethanel Lipshitz provides lots of good reasons to rethink some of our contemporary assumptions about what discrimination is and why it's bad. Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

One of the foundational ideas behind philosophical logic is that when you say something, that has further implications beyond the single thing you said. Like, if I think ‘every single frog is green’ and ‘Fran is a frog’, then I am committed to thinking that Fran is green. I don't have to have actually thought to myself or said out loud that Fran is green—I'm just required to believe that Fran is green, given that I thought the first two things, and if I fail to believe that, I've made some kind of mistake. Like I haven't thought through all the consequences of my beliefs.Modal logic studies how we reason about obligation and permission. For example, f I think that Bob is obligated to visit his parents for the holidays, it follows from that that he isn't permitted not to visit his parents for the holidays. (The term for this in philosophical logic is that obligation and permission are duals.) There are lots of inference patterns that pop up, some of them familiar and some of them surprising, the moment you start thinking about how the notions of ‘obligated to’ or ‘permitted to’ interact with notions like ‘if/then’ or ‘and’.Free choice permission is a funny case where it feels like out in the wild, you would have to draw a certain conclusion from something you said, but our best formal, mathematical theory of obligation and permission tells us that you aren't allowed to draw that conclusion. So although the theory gets most other things impressively right, it seems to get this one thing wrong.Here's the example. Imagine you're a customer at a cafe and a waiter says to you, ‘Since you ordered our prix fixe lunch menu option, you may have coffee or tea’. Translated into the terminology of obligation and permission, we could think of what the waiter said as ‘it is permissible for you to have either coffee or tea’. And there seems to be no way the waiter could think that and not thereby also be committed to thinking it is permissible for you to have coffee. If you're allowed to have either coffee or tea, then surely you're thereby allowed to have coffee. Right?The problem is that the best available formal mathematization of how reasoning about obligation and permission works (believe it or not, this is given the humorous-sounding name normal modal logic) predicts that you are not allowed to draw that conclusion. So since it seems obvious that any rational person would draw that conclusion, but our theory predicts that you aren't allowed to draw it, that means the theory has a problem. The trouble is that revising the theory so as to correctly make that prediction is quite technically difficult, because most of the obvious things you might do to have it make that prediction have the side effect of breaking other aspects of it that work well.In this episode, Melissa Fusco sketches out a highly original and ambitious approach to the puzzle, using a more sophisticated framework called two-dimensional modal logic. Two-dimensional modal logic is based on a subtle but interesting distinction between a statement that's automatically true the moment you start thinking about it, and a statement that is necessarily true, no matter what. It may sound a bit counterintuitive, but just wait till you hear the examples that Fusco gives! Trust me—her idea about how you can use that distinction to explain what's happening in the waiter example is super cool. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Nic Koziolek (Washington University in St. Louis) returns to talk to me and Nora Bradford about self-consciousness.Self-consciousness, as philosophers use the term, is a word for when you know something about one of your own mental states. Like when I really enjoy some pizza and note that I'm enjoying it. Someone else might ask me: ‘Hey Matt, do you like that pizza?’ And I'm typically the best person to ask about that, which is a sign that I typically know whether I like the pizza. Or when I have an itch, and I notice the itch before going to scratch it. If I noticed it, then I know that I have an itch. Self-consciousness, in the philosophical setting, is a name for me being able to tell what's happening in my own mind, when it happens.Now, you might wonder how I know about my own mind, when something new happens with it. Our guest argues that there has to be an answer to that question, because whenever you know something, there's an answer to the question how you know it. And so, he argues that the way you know you're in a mental state is by being in that mental state. So to apply the idea to the two examples we started with, you know you having an itch by having an itch. And you know you like the pizza by liking the pizza. Being in the state is what allows you to know that you're in it.If you think that idea sounds wacky, you're not alone. But our guest provides some pretty interesting arguments in favor of it. And he also makes the case that understanding what's going on when you fail to know something about your own mind can lead us to a clearer understanding of what's going on when you fail to know that you know something—which is an age-old puzzle in philosophy.It's a fun discussion. I hope you enjoy it.Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Three philosophers. Eight head-scratchers. 50 minutes. In this episode, Agnes Callard, Ben Callard and I respond to the world's most awesome listener-recorded questions.A lot of people have the impression that philosophy is, first and foremost, an enterprise in which college professor types read books that no one can understand, then issue a response in the form of more books that no one can understand. It's not. Don't get me wrong—I love books. I'm constantly trying to talk friends and acquaintances who don't like reading books into giving them another shot, if only for the simple reason that reading is basically guaranteed to improve your life. It's just that the existence of philosophy books doesn't make philosophy the art of book writing any more than the existence of bodybuilding books makes bodybuilding the art of book writing.Philosophy is about fearlessly posing questions. Our everyday lives are interwoven with foundational mysteries, some of which turn out to be trivial, others of which prove challenging to resolve. While we can't confront all of them, simultaneously, 100% of the time, philosophy is what happens when you formally give yourself permission to confront some of them head on, at least some of the time. Which is a superior alternative to sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending they aren't there. Or so I would allege.The point of departure for this episode is what the show's listeners are wondering about. Not journal citations. Not name-dropping over miniature bagels at a conference. Not some incomprehensible jargon that cleverly avoids ever getting defined over hundreds of pages. The real stuff. Why is blahbityblah the case? That's quite surprising, because of such and such. What the heck is going on? Etc. There's nothing I enjoy more than working through conceptual difficulties in the form of a conversation.In this episode, we end up talking about property rights, the best gateway drugs for getting into philosophy, how to prove ‘ought’ statements, whether the past is real, looseness in how we interpret speed limit regulations, who counts as a philosopher, whether those of us in the first world are shirking our moral responsibilities towards everyone else, and why we never seem to listen to extraordinary claims, even when they are backed by extraordinary evidence. Join us as you, listeners, supply us with things to be surprised about, and Agnes Callard, Ben Callard, and I set out in search of strategies for coping with those surprises.Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode link here.In this episode, James Koppel (MIT, James Koppel Coaching) joins me and Dominick Reo to talk about how we can write software to help identify the causes of disasters.These days, there's often a tendency to think of software primarily as a venue for frivolous pleasures. Maybe there's a new app that's really good at hooking me up with videos of alpacas on skateboards, or making my mom look like a hot dog when she's video chatting with me, or helping me decide what flavor of cupcake I want delivered to my home—because gosh, I just am just way too stressed right now to be able to figure that out. Have you seen how few Retweets I'm getting? If we followed the lead of a lot of the popular rhetoric about the software industry, we might very well come away with the impression that tech exists solely to facilitate precious, self-involved time wasting. And if that's right, then if it doesn't work from time to time, who really cares?But in fact, software correctness is frequently a life or death matter. Computer software controls our medical life support systems, it manages our health care records, it navigates our airplanes, and it keeps track of our bank account balances. If the author of the software used in any of those systems messed something up, it can and often will lead to planes crashing into mountains, or life support systems malfunctioning for no particular reason, or some other tragedy.James Koppel is here to tell us that software can do better. It can be designed ‘preventatively’ to avoid large classes of bugs in advance, and there are diagnostic techniques that can help pinpoint those bugs that cannot be ruled out in advance. In this episode, Koppel discusses some work he started in 2015 as a follow-up to Stanford's Cooperative Bug Isolation project, which provided a way to gather detailed diagnostics about the conditions under which programs fail or crash. But the problem he kept running into was that the diagnostic information was too much correlation and not enough causation. If the analysis you did tells you that your app crashes whenever it tries to load a large image, that's ok, but it doesn't tell you what about the large image causes the crash, or what other kinds of large images would also cause a crash, or whether the crash even is a result of largeness or something more specific. Correlation information is a great start, but ultimately, it's of limited use when it comes to directly fixing the problem.To deal with this, in his more recent work, Koppel and his colleagues have turned to the analysis of counterfactuals and causation, which is an interesting point of collaboration between philosophers and computer scientists. Using a recent paradigm called probabilistic programming, they have identified a way to have a computer program run the clock back and simulate what would have happened, had some condition been different, to determine whether that condition is the cause of a bug. The project is still in its initial stages, but if it works, it promises to deliver major dividends in making the technology we rely on more reliable.Tune in to hear more about this exciting new area of research!Matt Teichman Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode link here:https://elucidations.now.sh/posts/episode-124/In this episode, Graham Priest returns to discuss Buddhist political philosophy with me and Henry Curtis. (Last month, we talked with him about Buddhist metaphysics.) Last month, we discussed the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism: that suffering happens, that this suffering is (partially) caused by emotional attachment, that you can deal with it by changing your headspace, and that you can change your headspace by understanding the world, understanding your mind and body, and treating other people well. In this episode, our guest adds something to that list, which he calls the '0-th noble truth'. This is the idea that suffering is bad. That idea appears as a foundational premise across many different Buddhist philosophical traditions, and he suspects that it can be used as the basis for political philosophy.You might remember last month's episode when we talked about 'anatman', which is the Sanskrit word for the Buddhist principle that there is no self. Priest makes the interesting proposal that the 0-th Noble Truth plus 'anatman' gives us the view that we should care about suffering equally no matter who is suffering. We should just try to reduce the global amount of suffering anywhere in the world.Graham Priest then argues that industrial capitalism is the cause of a lot of the suffering in today's world. Countless numbers of people are compelled by circumstance to work in exploitative jobs that overwork and underpay them, while others reap the profit from their work. If that further claim is correct, then it would seem to lead to the conclusion that a political philosophy based on Buddhist ethics would have to propose some alternative to industrial capitalism.Would a political system based Buddhist principles then have to look like socialism, or communism, or anarchism? Maybe, but the question turns out to be a bit complicated. Tune in to find out!Would a political system based Buddhist principles then have to look like socialism, or communism, or anarchism? Maybe, but it's a bit complicated. Tune in to find out! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Matt Teichman and Henry Curtis talk to Graham Priest (CUNY Graduate Center) about the philosophical foundations of Buddhism.Buddhism isn't just a religion--it's an entire family of philosophical traditions that took root all over the Asian continent for thousands of years. The historical Buddha articulated views in what we consider to be many different areas of philosophy, including metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy. For this episode, we're focusing on the metaphysics.Metaphysics means different things to different people, but our guest thinks of it as a broad inquiry into the structure of reality at a fundamental level, space and time, what substance is, cause and effect, what makes any given thing the thing it is. And one of many things he finds interesting about Buddhism is that over the years, Buddhists have floated metaphysical views that don't arise in the Western traditions.One cool example he gives is a view associated with Madhyamaka Buddhism that nothing has a nature that makes it independent of its relation to anything else in the world. So take me, Matt. I am what I am not just because of properties that I have in and of myself, but because of the relation I stand in to certain other things. (Though not all other things, as he hastens to point out.) Like for example, I have a special relation to New Jersey: I was born and grew up there. So facts about what Matt is and what he's like is are tangled up with facts about what New Jersey is and what it's like.Graham Priest further observes that this general view leads to skepticism about whether anything is maximally explanatorily basic, which is a view that hasn't been explored by many contemporary philosophers. Like, most contemporary philosophers who work on metaphysics would say that a flagpole is more basic than the shadow it casts, because you could have the flagpole without the shadow, but not the other way around. There wouldn't be anything for the shadow to be a shadow of! Priest thinks that the Madhyamaka view that everything is dependent on something else leads to the further view that no one thing or set of things can be most basic.Join us as our guest walks us through the core metaphysical tenets of Buddhism! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Frithjof Bergmann and David Helmbold make the case for a different approach to working in the modern world. A lot of us experience our day to day work as a 'mild disease'--not terrible, not excruciating, but also not our #1 choice about how to spend weekdays. Instead, they argue, a person's work should be the best part of their life. But making that a possibility for everyone requires not just our social structures to transform--it requires a kind of personal psychological transformation.Check out our blog for more info!https://elucidations.now.sh/posts/episode-122/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.