In the case of non-epistemic goods, it’s an obvious feature of life that someone there is a choice to be made by an individual between their own first-order good and the first-order good of the community—each requires the sacrifice of the other. In the case of epistemic goods, this is less obvious.
In the pragmatic case, the typical reason for such competition between goods is due to limited resources. This, of course, also happens in the epistemic sphere. Suppose Alice is much more intellectually talented than Bob, but only Bob has the money to go to university. If Bob spends the money on himself, he will gain private epistemic goods, but will contribute little epistemically to society as a whole. But if he gives the money to Alice, she may become a brilliant scholar or scientist, significantly contributing to society’s knowledge.
More interesting than these, however, are cases of competition between private and communal epistemic goods that are not due to epistemic resources. I find it interesting that some cases of self-locating evidence appear to be such.
Suppose there are ten billion people in the world, currently isolated from one another. A device produced by a mad scientist has a 99.9% chance at noon today of triggering a death ray that randomly kills 99.9999% of the world population. Noon has just passed. You are still alive. Should you think the device worked? Sleeping Beauty style arguments say “No”. This time I want to think about this in terms of individual epistemic goods. In N runs of the device, 0.001N runs will have you survive because the device doesn’t trigger and 0.999 ⋅ 0.000001N runs will have you survive despite the device triggering. Thus, the vast majority of the runs where you survive are runs where the device didn’t trigger. Hence, it’s best for you individually to adopt the epistemic policy of thinking the device didn’t trigger.
But on the other hand, suppose we all adopt the epistemic policy of thinking the device didn’t trigger. Then 99.9% of the time, we are unanimously collectively wrong. And if we all adopt the epistemic policy of thinking the device did trigger, then 99.9% of the time, we are unanimously collectively right. It seems thus that if we look at the epistemic goods of society, then a policy of thinking the device did trigger is best.
If this is right, it points to a potential diagnosis of why the problems about self-locating evidence (doomsday, multiverses, Sleeping Beauty, etc.) are so difficult. For there may be different bearers of epistemic goods at play—say, society vs. the individual—and it could be that different answers are appropriate depending on whose goods we are pursuing. Maybe.
4 comments:
I apologise right away that this question is not related to the topic.
I was thinking about Graham Oppy's method in his book, The Best Argument Against God (p.g. 26 to 27) against the contingency arguments. He says, "As Naturalist supposes that the global causal order just is the natural causal order, Naturalist can say: if the global causal order is wholly contingent, then it cannot have – and so does not need – a cause (whence the natural causal order cannot have – and so does not need – a cause, and the first premise (that, All wholly contingent structures have causes) in the argument is plainly
false)..."
He is also on record in recent times to accept the principle of sufficient reason of the strong but probabilistic sense.
So, I think that the argument that follows (given below), shows that Graham cannot hold both the principle of sufficient reason, i.e., that for any contingent concrete entity, there is an explanation of the fact that it exists; and that the natural causal order can be wholly contingent and yet have no need for explanation.
Premise 1: If the natural causal order is the global causal order, then, if the natural causal order is contingent, it cannot have a cause.
Premise 2: If the Principle of Sufficient Reason is true, then, if the natural causal order is contingent, it must have a cause.
Conclusion: Therefore, if the Principle of Sufficient Reason is true, then a contingent natural causal order cannot be the global causal order.
Do you think that this is a potent objection to his methodology in the book, and if so, how should it be presented against him?
But if the PSR is merely probabilistic, then I don't think you get premise 2.
I think there may be an ambiguity in “probabilistic PSR” that matters here. One reading is epistemic: probably every contingent thing has an explanation. On that reading, I agree it does not support the modal force in my premise, since the probability modifies our expectation. But the reading I had in mind is ontological: every contingent thing must have some explanation, though that explanation may itself be irreducibly probabilistic. In an indeterministic ontology, probability is not merely epistemic but part of the causal structure of reality itself. So the necessity lies not in the outcome, but in the existence of explanatory dependence. That seems closer to the kind of PSR Oppy would need if he accepts a necessary initial singularity from which contingent worlds branch by objective chance. If so, my thought was that the natural causal order, if contingent, would still require explanatory grounding, even if probabilistic, and thus could not be the global causal order.
That sounds right, but I doubt Oppy would endorse this strong claim.
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