Justice and taxation

No system of taxation currently in use distributes the financial burden in a completely fair way. I think this is something that just about everyone will agree on, though where exactly the unfairness is located is a controversial question. I do not mean that the unfairness is intentional or even foreseen by the legislators, but more like this: there will either be a pair of individuals A and B such that it would be fairer if A were taxed more and B less (it's also possible, but less likely, that (a) everybody is taxed more than justice allows or that (b) everybody is taxed less than justice requires; I'll neglect (b), and leave the extension of the arguments to (a) as an exercise).

This is not something we can complain about much. No legal system can cover all cases adequately. But here is an interesting consequence: An across-the-board increase in taxes is very likely to exacerbate some instances of injustice. For if fairness requires that A be taxed more and B less, then when we raise A's and B's taxes, we will likely be overtaxing B by a greater amount than before, and hence the injustice to B will very likely be the greater. (This can be controversial. One might think that what matters are the ratios, not the absolute amounts. I am inclined to disagree.) This means that we have a prima facie consideration of justice against across-the-board tax increases.

Moreover, I think the above considerations generate a prima facie consideration of justice against government spending. For if overall spending were even slightly lowered, a slight across-the-board decrease in taxes would be made possible, and that would slightly decrease the severity of the unfairness to B.

Of course, the reasons above are only prima facie and defeasible. Double Effect can permit the increase of spending and across-the-board increase in taxations when the injustices are not intended and a sufficiently serious good—perhaps itself a good of justice—is being pursued. So while the above considerations sound like they would generate fiscally conservative conclusions, in practice the effect of the considerations could be quite small or nonexistent. Or it could be large. I don't know. But it is still interesting to me that the defeasible reasons against spending and across-the-board tax increases are reasons of justice—I didn't think of them that way before I noticed the above arguments. And I suppose it would be healthy for legislators to think of them as reasons of justice, if they are indeed such.

A weakness, however, in the above arguments is that it is not clear whether it makes sense to talk of unintentional injustice. If I am convicted of a crime I did not commit, but on excellent evidence and with solid legal procedures, have I really suffered an injustice? If the answer is negative, then we may not be able to say, strictly speaking, that B has suffered an injustice by being taxed too much. Maybe, though, the thing to say is this. My conviction of a crime I did not commit is not an injustice; but justice requires that such convictions be minimized. Likewise, the allocation of too high a tax burden to B is not an injustice; but justice requires that such misallocations be minimized.

The incorrect conviction analogy also suggests that we have a prima facie reason of justice not to increases criminal sentences across the board. For each across the board increase of sentences is likely to result in some innocent serving an even greater sentence than otherwise. (However, there is a difference with the taxation case. For while justice does not intrinsically call for taxation (though taxation may be a necessary means to ends that justice requires the pursuit of), justice does intrinsically call for the punishment of the guilty.)

Novels, art and collaboration

I am reading R. Austin Freeman's Eye of Osiris which so far is a pretty decent mystery. The quality of the writing is not bad, though not so great. It is unduly prolix at some times (I suppose one could say that that makes for some character development of the narrator, though, but that could still be done otherwise), and occasionally at the beginning there is a lack of clarity. This brought home to me the obvious fact that the skill of story-making is very different from the skill of story-telling. While there may be some correlation between the two skills, I do not know that the correlation is very strong. In any case, one would expect that there are a number of people who would be excellent at story-making but whose story-telling is subpar, and a number of people who would be great at story-telling but only if someone else made up the plot. But now the puzzling fact is that there are very few co-authored novels, and off-hand I can't think of any famous ones written by two authors working together (a number of works do draw on older texts or traditional elements, and maybe that should count co-authorship, but I don't want to count that as "working together").

There are artistic genres where collaboration is routine. Film, theater and music perforances are obvious cases. I do not know if Greek statues were carved by one person and painted by another, but it certainly would make sense to have that sort of division of labor. On the other hand, my sense is that painters, writers and contemporary sculptors tend to work alone.

Here is a hypothesis: The artistic vision tends to be hard or impossible to communicate except by means of the genre of art in which it is to be embodied. But collaboration would require communication of the artistic vision. And that artistic vision cannot be communicated except by the work being produced, which presents a vicious circularity in the case of collaborative works.

This argument can't apply always, because there are collaborative works. But maybe we can say something about these exceptional cases. I don't know if the painting and the sculpting were separate in Greece. But if they were, we might say that the sculpting was to some degree an independent work of art, which communicated its vision by itself. After all, most of the Greek statues we see in museums have lost their paint, and yet the sculptures appear to us to be complete works of art—so much so, that in times past people didn't seem to know they were originally polychrome.

The case of directors and conductors is a bit different. But there we can take the director or conductor as in some important sense the author of the performance as a whole. There is a communication between the director and conductor and collaborators, but in an important sense this communication is itself essentially a part of the genre (cases of films written, directed and starred in by one person are defective cases of the cinematographic art), in a way in which communication between authors is accidental to the novel. Moreover, note that the director and conductor only communicates to each individual collaborator a part of the artistic vision.

So this might explain why a superlative novel is unlikely to be produced by two or more authors. But still, a decent novel could be, and sometimes is.

Common descent

Is common descent a part of contemporary evolutionary theory? It sure seems to be. But here is an argument to the contrary that puzzles me. Start with this thought experiment:

1. Organisms not based on DNA are found by a deep-sea vent or in some other hard to access isolated location on earth. Subsequent study reveals that they do not have a common ancestor with any of the DNA-based organisms that we know of but derive from a different abiogenesis.

Here is a surmise:

2. Most biologists are very sure of evolution, but either not sure or not as sure that (1) won't happen.

It follows from (2) that:

3. Either evolution is compatible with (1) or most biologists have inconsistent probabilities in this area.

If we deny the second disjunct, we get that evolution is compatible with (1). But (1) does not seem to be compatible with common descent. Hence we have an argument that evolution does not entail common descent.

I could be wrong about (2). But it does seem plausible. Here is one reason to think (2). Biologists are very sure of evolution. But (maybe) it would be unreasonable to be very sure (1) won't happen. So either biologists aren't very sure (1) won't happen or they are unreasonable in matters relevant to biology. Supposing they are not unreasonable in matters relevant to biology, we conclude that (2) is true.

Here are two ways out of the argument:

4. Common descent is not the thesis that all earthly organisms have common ancestry. Rather, it is the thesis that all the presently known earthly organisms (Daphnia magna, Quercus alba, Homo sapiens, Cantharellus cibarius, ...) have common ancestry. Problem: Does that mean that whenever a new species is discovered, the content of evolution changes?
5. "Evolution" is ambiguous between "the central aspects of the general picture that evolutionary theory gives" and "the currently best models of evolution". The former is what biologists are quite sure of. The latter is what entails common descent. Problem: If we asked biologists what the central aspects of the general picture that evolutionary theory gives are, common descent would likely be listed.

I am not happy with any of the ways out of the argument. Maybe (4) is the way to go? Or maybe we just need to suppose biologists are not entirely reasonable in their discipline (who is, after all?)? Or maybe my surmise (2) is false.

Are naturalists Pelagians?

Yes, they are: For they think that the central goals of human life are of a sort that can be achieved by natural powers alone.

No, they aren't: For they think that intimate union with God cannot be achieved by natural powers alone.

OK, so what's the right answer? In a sense, both yes and no. If we define Pelagianism by the natural achievability of the central goals of human life, then yes. If we defined it by the natural achievability of intimate union with God, then no. On Christian doctrine, the two definitions will come to the same thing. But on naturalism, they don't.

This might, however, yield a question-begging (but perhaps still useful) argument against naturalism. According to naturalism, the central goals of human life can be achieved by natural powers alone. But union with God cannot be. And union of God is a central goal of human life.

Is Leibniz an idealist?

I continue to be surprised why Leibniz gets described as an idealist. If Leibniz is an idealist, Dretske is committed to idealism, too, and that seems mistaken. Leibniz thinks everything has soul, and every soul has perceptions, but not all the perceptions are conscious, and some souls have no conscious perceptions. As far as I can tell, the claim that x has a soul with perceptions comes down to two things: (a) x has a substantial form, and (b) x has representations. Claim (a) holding for all x does not imply idealism: Aristotle surely does not count as an idealist. Claim (b) holding for all objects x is something that Dretske is committed to, assuming that we, reasonably, take having information to entail having representations (information surely represents; and on a Dretskean view it seems pretty easy to argue that everything that can be affected by something else carries information). We could take this to be an argument that Dretske is an idealist, but it is better to take it to be an argument that Leibniz is not.

Deep Thoughts XXVII

Only the eternal is forever.

[Actually, this is only a necessary truth on some readings of "forever" and "eternal". We need to read "eternal" as compatible with merely futureward eternity, but not pastward eternity. We need to read "forever" as implying infinite futureward temporal extent, so that existing at every time not count as sufficient for existing forever (imagine a world where the timeline has only a finite extent from beginning to end—we don't want to count a being that exists from the beginning to the end of time as existing forever in that world). It's worth noting that the converse of the above Deep Thought might not be a necessary truth. For a timeless being can be eternal, but I am not sure a timeless being counts as existing "forever", except of course in an analogical sense.]

Crime and punishment

Justice demands a punishment proportionate to the gravity of the crimes. In particular, a greater punishment is called for for committing eleven instance of some type of crime than for committing ten of them. But we do not have much reason to think that the person who committed the eleven is a worse person than the one who committed the ten. Hence, pace Hume, punishment is not based solely on the character as evidenced by the crime.

Is all immoral action a violation of a duty to someone?

Each of the following propositions is controversial:

1. It is possible to act wrongly without wronging any person.
2. It is possible to wrong oneself.
3. There is a necessarily existing person.

I think (2) and (3) are true. I deny (1), because I think that every wrongdoing wrongs oneself and God.

I shall argue that at least one of (1)-(3) is true. I think the disjunction of (1)-(3) is also controversial, so this result has some interest, I suppose.

The argument for the disjunction of (1)-(3) is based on the following premises:

4. If there are no necessarily existing persons, then it is possible that there is only one person in existence and she acts wrongly.
5. It is not possible to wrong a non-existent person.

Given (4) and (5), the argument is easy. For a reductio, assume that none of (1), (2) and (3) are true. Since (3) is false, it follows from (4) that there is a world w at which is there is only one person in existence and she acts wrongly. By (5) she does not wrong anyone except perhaps herself. But by (1) and (2), she wrongs someone other than herself in w.

I think (5) is very plausible, but (4) needs argument. The argument depends on a simple case. If there are no necessarily existing persons, it is possible that there be only one person in existence and that she be imperfect. (One might think that necessarily if there are imperfect persons, there is a perfect person, but that is only plausible if necessarily there is a perfect person.) Suppose Sally is the one person in existence and she knows that torture of the innocent is wrong and justifiably but falsely believes that by pressing a button she would be torturing an innocent other. She presses the button in order to torture that innocent other for fun. In so doing, she acts against her conscious and clearly does wrong.

Suppose one bites the bullet and says that Sally doesn't do anything wrong. Then by the same token, if I shoot at a distant shape falsely believing it to be the present king of France, but in fact it's just a rosebush, I do not wrong. And that's absurd.

Perhaps, though, (5) can be denied, and it can be insisted that a merely possible person is wronged by Sally. But, still, which possible person is wronged in the Sally scenario? The only at all plausible answer I can think of is: every possible person who could possibly satisfy the description under which Sally intends to torture is wronged. But suppose that Sally also justifiably but falsely believes that humans are reptiles, and she intends to torture an innocent human reptile. Then there is no possible person who fits her description. And the idea that one can wrong impossible persons seems really weird. Certainly it seems more problematic than the disjunction of (1)-(3).

Or maybe instead of wronging possible persons, one can wrong fictional persons. But then writers are in grave moral danger! It seems, for instance, much preferable to suppose one can wrong oneself than to suppose that one can wrong a fictional person.

Della Rocca on PSR

Here's a a nice article (thanks, David, for the heads-up).

A dilemma for the deflationary theory of truth

Is the claim that truth is completely characterized by the deflationary theory itself a part of the deflationary theory of truth?

If yes, then the deflationary theory of truth has a problematic kind of self-referentiality: it contains the statement:

1. The theory which includes (1) and statements X-Z completely characterizes truth.

But it is not clear that the content of (1) is sufficiently determinate. It seems that (1) suffers from a similar semantic underdetermination to that suffered by the truthteller sentence:

2. Statement (2) is true.

Suppose now that the claim that truth is completely characterized by the deflationary theory of truth is not a part of the deflationary theory of truth. There are now two options. Either the completeness claim is or is not known to be a consequence of the deflationary theory of truth. If it is not a known consequence of the deflationary theory of truth, then we have a problem for deflationary theorists who assert that the deflationary theory of truth is complete. For if they do not know their assertion to be a consequence of the deflationary theory of truth. But if it is not a consequence of it, then the theory is not complete. So it seems unlikely that they know the theory to be complete, and they are asserting something something they do not know.

Suppose that the completeness claim is known to be a consequence of the deflationary theory of truth. But the deflationary theory of truth without the completeness claim consists merely in a claim as to what the truth-bearers are and all the instances of the T-schema. But the completeness claim simply does not follow from these. For there are multiple predicates, with "is true" being only one of them, that satisfy the deflationary theory of truth: any predicate extensionally equivalent to "is true" satisfies the deflationary theory of truth just as well. And such predicates are myriad. For instance: "is true and is not false", "is believed by God", "is true if 2+2=4", etc.

Perhaps if we add to the deflationary theory that "is true" expresses a very natural property, then we can rule out some of the alternate predicates. But "is believed by God" appears very natural as well. So at least the theist can't take this way out.

Two kinds of choices

We should distinguish between two kinds of choices. Intrinsically free choices are free solely in virtue of the internal features of how the choice is made (if externalism about the mind is true, we may need to allow mental facts to count as "internal" for the purposes of distinguishing between chocies). Any exact duplicate of an intrinsically free choice will also be free. Extrinsically free choices are free in part in virtue of something occurring or not occurring outside the choice itself, typically facts about the history of the agent.

Paradigm libertarian-free choices are intrinsically free. If Curley is choosing whether to take a bribe or not, and he is causally and psychologically able to take it and causally and psychologically able not to take it, and he has non-overwhelming motivations in favor of taking the bribe (he desires money) and non-overwhelming motivations in favor of not taking the bribe (he desires to avoid moral degradation and he desires to avoid jail), then it does not matter whether he was brainwashed into having a desire for money and a desire to avoid moral degradation. His choice is intrinsically free. Note that, interestingly, Frankfurt examples trade on our intuition that at least some of our choices are intrinsically free—that's why the neurosurgeon's standing by does not affect the choice's freedom.

Libertarians can, of course, admit that there are extrinsically free choices. Thus, if my earlier free decisions have formed, through the right kinds of causal chains, a character that is unable to give my son a scorpion when he asks for bread, I may still act freely when I refrain from giving my son a scorpion when he asks for bread. However, this is an extrinsic freedom. For if I were brainwashed into having this sort of character, I would not be acting freely.

Compatibilists are committed, I think, to the claim that it is possible for all of one's free choices to be merely extrinsically free.

We can then argue for incompatibilism by arguing that the freedom of an extrinsically free choice always depends on one's being antecedently (to the choice) responsible for something outside the choice itself, and that anything one is responsible for depends on a free (intrinsically or extrinsically so) choice or on something else one is responsible for. For then, if all choices are extrinsically free, an infinite regress will be generated.

One might make a similar distinction about responsibility, and then try to argue that intrinsically free choices are the only thing one can be intrinsically responsible for. If one could do that, and then argue that anything one is extrinsically responsible for one is responsible for in part because one is responsible for something else, again a regress results if there is nothing that we are intrinsically responsible for.

Temporally pure properties

A temporally pure property of an object is an object whose possession by the object at a time is only a matter of how the object is at that time.

I don't know if there are any temporally pure monadic properties. Two kinds of candidates seems initially plausible: conscious mental properties like being in pain and geometrical properties like being round.

But neither kind of candidate seems to stand up to scrutiny. The shorter the amount of time a pain lasts, for a fixed intensity, the proportionately less one notices it. Therefore, if a pain were to last just for instant, one would not notice it at all—it would have zero temporal length. If this is right, then having a pain, and by extension having any other conscious state, cannot just be a matter of what happens at a particular time—it must be a matter of what happens at neighboring times. There is a supporting argument for this on naturalism: surely what mental states we have depends not just on the static properties of our parts, but also on dynamic ones, like the velocities of parts; but velocities are not a matter of what happens at any one time.

Geometrical properties, on the other hand, are surely relational. Being round seems to be a matter of the relations in which one stands to points in spacetime (on absolutist views of spacetime) or to other objects (on relational views). Moreover, three-dimensional shape is clearly relative to the reference frame.

Deliberation and determinism

1. If (a) were I to do A, p would be the case but were I not to do A, p would not be the case, and (b) I can rationally deliberate over whether to do A, then I could rationally deliberate over whether to act so that p would hold.
2. For no proposition p about the past could I rationally deliberate over whether to act so that p would hold.
3. If determinism is true, then for any action A I can rationally deliberate over, there is some proposition p about the past such that were I to do A, p would be the case and were I not to do A, p would not be the case.
4. There is an action that I can rationally deliberate over which I will not actually do.
5. Therefore: Determinism is not true. (By 1-4)

Lewis denies 3. He thinks that if determinism holds and A is an action I won't do, then were I to do A, the past would have been the same (except maybe very close to the doing of A), but the laws of nature would have been different. This is implausible. The laws of nature govern events and one should not choose a counternomic interpretation of an ordinary counterfactual. But if Lewis is right, then we can modify the argument by replacing (2) with:

6. If determinism is true, I couldn't rationally deliberate over a proposition solely about laws of nature.

and replacing (3) with:

7. If determinism is true, then for any action A I can rationally deliberate over, there is some proposition p solely about the laws of nature such that were I to do A, p would be the case and were I not to do A, p would not be the case.

One problem with the above argument is that one can deliberate about the past or about the laws of nature when one does not know that one is so doing (for instance, one might speculate whether to make it be the case that E happens at t without knowing that t is in fact in the past). I suppose it is a stipulation about how I use "rational" that I won't count that as rational. Perhaps a different word than "rationally" should be used, like "properly": I cannot properly deliberate over the past.

Essentiality of origins, determinism and free will

If determinism is true, then any possible world in which at t₀ I act differently from how I actually act at t₀ is a world where either (a) the laws are different from the actual world's laws or (b) the laws are the same but the past is different at every time prior to t₀. In case (b), it follows that my own causal history will be different in that world. But if essentiality of origins is true, my own causal history could not have been different. Therefore, if essentiality of origins and determinism are both true, then any possible world in which at t₀ I act differently from how I actually act at t₀ is a world where the laws are different from how they are.

On the plausible assumption that I cannot do something the doing of which entails that the laws are other than they are at @ (where "@" names the actual world), it follows that if determinism and essentiality of origins are true, then I cannot act otherwise than I do.

Or, to put it differently, if essentiality of origins holds, the compatibilist's "Had I wanted to, I would have acted differently" conditionals are counter-nomic. But it is most implausible that a counter-nomic conditional would suffice to capture our "could have done otherwise" conditionals.

Therefore, if essentiality of origins is true, either determinism is false or we are not free.

Deep Thoughts XXVI

You can't be wrong if you have no opinions.