I’m writing this post to propose such a tag. I suggest all the twittering philosophers use “#philq” (short for philosopher’s query/question) whenever you want to crowdsource a query. I picked that because nothing came up for it when I did a search on twitter. I’m open to a different standard, but for now I’m going to use this. I hope you’ll join me!

Many scientists share the attitude that philosophers of science (or philosophers of a particular science) have little to contribute and should avoid talking about science and interfering in scientific matters. This attitude is even more prevalent among non-scientists who are strongly interested in what science has to say and keep a close eye on scientific matters. These are the kind of people that keep up to date with what Dawkins and PZ Meyers have to say, read blogs by scientists, etc. I typically refer to these people as Science Fan Boys, but I don’t intend that to be derogatory; I’m a science fan boy and I’m not at all ashamed of it. I love and am fascinated by science, and want others to be as well. I wish everyone were a science fan boy/girl. What I do not wish is for everyone to adopt the attitude regarding philosophers of science.

This isn’t because I’m a philosopher of science but because the attitude is stupid. I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes philosophers opine about empirical matters on a priori grounds when they shouldn’t, but I think this mistake happens less and less. Professional philosophers in general, and philosophers of science in particular, are very cognizant about the relationship between the empirical sciences and their work and know when the empirical facts and not a priori reasoning should be appealed to to settle a matter.

Scientists, and science fan boys, on the other hand fail to see that often times empirical matters are tightly interwoven with conceptual and philosophical ones. They instead make the mistake of thinking that since an empirical enterprise involves a set of concepts C, that the empirical enterprise settles all the conceptual issues regarding C. Often times those conceptual issues are the domain of philosophy. For example, the nature of laws, the role that considerations like parsimony should play in deciding between theories, and the nature of evidence and the statistical method that we should use are all philosophical matters. (If you think they are not, you’ll have to endorse a view about how empirical facts settle these issues which will be a philosophical view….).

I understand why the attitude might be tempting. The thought is probably something like “What does this philosopher who sits in a chair all day have to say about something that consists in doing stuff that involves anything but sitting in a chair all day? It’s like getting advice about my health issues from an accountant.” Except it isn’t like that at all. Philosophers of science often are or were scientists. At the very least they have significantly more training than science fan boys. At most, they’ve got more than enough training to comment competently on the empirical matters that they study (the same can probably not be said about most scientists regarding the philosophical matters they brush up against). To be exasperated that bloggingheads gave space to philosophers to talk about science (as some commenters were) when the philosophers they gave space to were Fodor and Sober is a perfect example of people expressing the attitude when the philosophers in question (especially, in this context, Elliott) are more than competent to comment on the subject (Fodor is at least competent to comment on issues of law-hood and the like which are those issues he leverages in his work on selection).

Scientists and science fan boys (and obviously not all of them are guilty here) need to appreciate that philosophers are competent to talk about science and that science is not solely the domain of scientists. Furthermore, before you even think about criticizing philosophers for getting involved in scientific matters, you should be sure to evaluate the philosophers for competence (especially when the philosophers in question have not only trained with top scientists in the field, but when the philosophers are acknowledged by the relevant scientists as having made great contributions in the sciences).

A quick note: since I wrote this, I’ve talked with some faculty members who have some minor opposition to the project. If I were to rewrite my little essay, I’d try to take on the worries raised.

Comments are more than welcome.

In what follows, several advantages of 3-paper dissertations are given, and several potential criticisms are discussed. It is worth noting in advance that the 3-paper dissertation should not be seen as a replacement for the traditional dissertation but as an alternative option. The traditional dissertation makes perfect sense for some projects even while it may be less suitable for others.

Advantages
1. In some areas of philosophical research, a 3-paper dissertation is more representative of the kind of work that will be expected of students in their professional career as a philosopher. In many sub-disciplines, especially the more technical ones, the standard contribution from philosophers is in the form of journal articles, with book-length projects being the exception, not the rule. In light of this, the 3-paper dissertation better prepares students for the kind of work that will be standard for at least the early parts of their career.

2. The 3-paper dissertation allows students to develop a broad expertise that (a) better suits them to contribute in their area of specialization and (b) may have advantages on the job market. With respect to (a), in many sub-disciplines, the contributions to be made by young philosophers are not broad in scope, but often involve the detailed aspects of some very small area of research. By allowing for 3-paper dissertations, the student will be able to contribute to a broader range of problems because their contributions need not be unified in the way required by a traditional dissertation. With respect to (b), a broader expertise may allow students to market themselves more broadly and demonstrate a breadth that some search committees find attractive.

3. 3-paper dissertations are better suited to help students meet tenure requirements. Most dissertations are unlikely to be published as a whole in the form of a book (at least at those publishing houses most useful in securing tenure). Many new professors spend a fair amount of time cutting out chunks of their dissertation into journal-sized articles to send off for publication. The 3-paper dissertation allows students to generate items that are suitable for publication in a shorter span of time and, since the aim is to generate 3 articles, each part of the 3-paper dissertation could potentially be used towards tenure.

4. The 3-paper dissertation may be useful for job applications and for interviews. The format of the dissertation may lend itself to providing both a polished, self-contained writing sample and a polished, self-contained job talk. Furthermore, it may increase the probability that search committees find candidate’s work interesting and that the candidate is seen as a good fit for the department. This will be especially true in cases where the applicant is willing and able to adopt a variety of research programs. A traditional dissertation may not provide the opportunity for a student to genuinely report their capabilities and interests.

Perceived Disadvantages
1. There are no clear standards for writing and/or evaluating the 3-paper dissertation.
Since the 3-paper dissertation is not standard in the field (though this may be changing), there are worries about how such dissertations should be written and evaluated. These worries are worthwhile and discussion about the content of a 3-paper dissertation and the standard for evaluating these dissertations should be discussed. However, here are some preliminary thoughts on content and evaluation that might alleviate some of the initial worries.

With respect to evaluation, it seems that the standard might be similar to that of a traditional dissertation. While the standards of the traditional dissertation are not officially articulated in any detail, it seems that the standard ought to be that the dissertation demonstrates that the author of the dissertation is capable of entering into the profession and of making the relevant contributions to the profession. This standard can easily be adopted to evaluate 3-paper dissertations and in some cases may make evaluation easier since the work is more representative of what will be expected of students (see above).

With respect to the content of the 3-paper dissertation, there might be worries that allowing students to write a 3-paper dissertation doesn’t require enough of them. After all, if a student wrote three, article length papers, they will have produced far less written work than a student who wrote a traditional dissertation. This worry might be addressed in several ways. If page-count is the main worry, the 3-paper dissertation could be made into a 4-paper dissertation. Alternatively, the requirement could be that the 3 papers be of greater length (though this does some work to undermine the first advantage, but still maintains the benefit of breadth and perhaps adds a benefit of depth-within-breadth). If, on the other hand, the page-count is not intrinsically worrying but rather the issue is of fairness with respect to students writing traditional dissertations, it seems that allowing 3-paper dissertations is not unfair. While traditional dissertations would be longer than 3-paper dissertations (in the case where the papers are of article-length), this does not mean that the traditional dissertation involves more work overall. Writing three distinct papers will require students to deal with a literature that is broader and so will sometimes involve more research than would a traditional dissertation. As long as the average amount of work required to write both dissertations is about equal, there does not seem to be a fairness worry.

2. The 3-paper dissertation fails to determine whether the student has a deep understanding of her area of specialization.
The 3-paper dissertation will typically aim at dealing with a broader range of issues than the traditional dissertation and so there may be a worry that students will not come to appreciate the depth of any problems in their area of specialization. Another worry is that there is something of value gained by thinking through a single issue in great depth and this is sacrificed with the 3-paper dissertation.

One response to this worry is to grant that a certain level of depth is sacrificed, but to point out that breadth and not depth is better for students and young members of the profession for a variety of reasons (including those discussed above).

Another response is that the 3-paper dissertation develops a deep understanding of several areas even though this depth is not demonstrated in the written work (for example, by a lit review). This response will apply where a deep understanding of some area is needed to write a short article even if that depth is not demonstrated in the written work (though it will potentially be demonstrated by the contribution itself).

A final response would be to question whether the value of the additional depth of knowledge gained by the traditional dissertation should serve as a constraint on the content of student’s dissertation. While this level of depth may be necessary to demonstrate proficiency in some areas of philosophy, it may be less valuable in others. If the value to be had by writing a traditional dissertation will be of less use to students in their academic and professional career, it seems wrong to appeal to this value to constrain the kind of dissertation project the student should be allowed to pursue so long as the 3-paper dissertation can be used to evaluate the ability of the student to be a member of the profession. This is not to say that there is no value in the traditional dissertation, but only to ask why that value should serve as a constraint when another option would be more valuable in other respects.

3. The 3-paper dissertation fails to cultivate a skill necessary for success on the job market.
It might be argued that in order to have a sustained research program that will allow students to flourish in the profession, they must have a certain skill that is best cultivated by a traditional dissertation. This worry is related to the above worry insofar the necessary skill involves having a deep understanding of a research area.

This worry is significant to the extent that (a) having a sustained research program is necessary for students to flourish in the profession, (b) the 3-paper dissertation is unlikely, or less likely, to cultivate this skill,  (c) there are no other ways to cultivate this skill, and (d) there is reason to suspect that a given student lacks this skill.

(a) seems plausible with respect to research positions but less plausible with respect to teaching jobs.

It seems difficult to assess the plausibility of (b) except in the context of a particular project. Some 3-paper dissertations may well require a deep understanding of several areas that may serve as the basis for a sustained research program (see above).

(c) seems implausible; it is entirely plausible that there are alternative ways to cultivate the relevant skill. In fact, the new prelim system seems to be one such way.

(d) is probably a worry for some students, but this worry will be alleviated to the extent that a student’s advisors are willing to inform that student that it would be best for them to write a traditional dissertation. This alleviates the worry without constraining grad students for which it makes sense to allow a 3-paper dissertation.

4. The 3-paper dissertation will hurt the student on the market.
It is possible that writing a 3-paper dissertation will put students in a worse position in a market where the traditional dissertation is the standard. If the 3-paper dissertation will be viewed in a negative light, this provides a strong reason for students not to opt for the 3-paper dissertation.

It would be useful to see how 3-paper dissertations are viewed by search committees. While more and more graduate programs are allowing for this kind of dissertation, they are typically the very top programs (NYU, MIT, Princeton, Michigan, Stanford, Pitt, Rutgers, Arizona, and CUNY), students of which generally tend to do well on the market. In light of this, the relevant empirical data is hard to come by.

This is a significant worry, but perhaps should not serve to justify a ban on 3-paper dissertations so long as students and their advisors are cognizant of the risk and have fully considered what it might mean on the market.

1. Rethinking Multi-level Realism: Problems for the Trait-Group Framework of Group Selection
I assume multi-level realism about the levels of selection – the view that natural selection really operates at levels of organization higher than the individual and/or gene – but argue that the trait-group framework offered by Sober and Wilson is not fully adequate as a framework for multi-level realism. The trait-group framework consists of a definition of ‘group’ and a set of definitions for selection at a level. I construct a set of cases that serve to undermine the trait-group framework and suggest a new set of definitions for selection at a level that avoids the problems I raise.

2. Moral Status Enhancement and Non-human Research Subjects.
I explore whether it is possible to enhance the moral status of non-human animals by enhancing their cognitive capacities in the context of research of cognitive enhancement technologies. I explore the various potential bases of the moral status of non-human animals, argue that it is possible to enhance the moral status of research subjects, discuss the ethical issues that arise from this possibility, and develop some research guidelines to avoid ethical infractions in the relevant research contexts.

3. The Extensionist Strategy and The Moral Considerability of Non-individuals
One of the most productive strategies for grounding claims of the direct moral status of individuals has been the extensionist strategy of arguing that there is no morally relevant difference between individuals of kind A and of kind B, that individuals of kind A have direct moral status, and so consistency requires that we extend direct moral status to individuals of kind B. This strategy has been applied with varying degrees of success in attempts to extend moral considerability from humans to sentient non-humans and from sentient beings to non-sentient individuals such as plants. However, many people have objected that the strategy cannot be employed to extend moral considerability to non-sentient non-individuals such as communities or ecosystems. The basis of these objections is that the relevant interests of non-sentient individuals are ultimately grounded their functions which are in turn grounded, at least in part, in selection-etiologies. The objection continues that since selection does not operate at levels higher than the individual, non-individuals cannot have interests in the same way that individuals may. Thus, there is no basis for extension. I argue that these objections are grounded in an implausible view about the levels of selection, develop a version of multi-level selection theory and appeal to a set of empirical results to show that community-selection is possible. This shows that current objections to the use of the extensionist strategy in the case of non-sentient non-individuals fail.

Given that it seems to be common wisdom that publications are helpful, two anecdotes I heard in the past week or so scare me a little bit. Both anecdotes are about departments that were searching or are planning a search. Both departments see their department as mainly a teaching department but they do have research requirements (I think 3/3 or 3/2 loads). Also, according to both anecdotes, these departments consider publications in top journals as counting against a candidate!

I can think of a couple reasons a department might see publications as counting against a candidate. One might be that a publication (or publications) in good journals indicate a level of ambition to do philosophical research and so indicate that a candidate will not be happy with the amount of teaching they will be expected to do. Along these lines, schools might be worried that an unhappy candidate is more likely to leave, and if you are worried that the administration is not likely to replace the hire, you might aim to get someone you are confident will stay. Or, the department might take the candidates research ambition as a reason for thinking that candidate won’t be the kind of colleague that will be fun to have around (all work and no play) or that the students will suffer because of it.

Another reason might be that the departments in question think that applicant’s with publications are likely to get “better” offers from more research oriented schools. Given this, the department thinks it better to aim for “more realistic” candidates.

With respect to these reasons, I think the second is a really bad reason to count publications against a candidate. Given the state of the job market, it seems unlikely to me that candidates with a publication are out of the reach of any department. This may be different with respect to candidates from NYU with four publications in J. Phil., but, at least with respect to the general population of applicants with publications, it seems true.

The first set of reasons might be good, if the inference from publications to strong research ambitions were a good one. Of course, we have good reason to think this inference isn’t good. While research ambitions would explain the publications on an applicant’s CV, so does the fact that the common wisdom with respect to publication is that publications help you get jobs!

I’m not sure if the anecdotes I mention generalize (someone get the experimental philosophers on it…ZING!). If discounting publications isn’t widespread, that is all to the good. If it is widespread, someone needs to tell us graduate students what we can do to alleviate the worries of the relevant departments. I, at least, would not count myself unlucky (in fact, quite the opposite) to get a job in a department like those I described. I did my undergrad work in a department with a heavy emphasis on teaching and was extremely pleased that there were extremely qualified philosophers there to guide me.

The fact, if it is a fact, that I have publications does not mean that I’ll neglect my teaching duties, or that I won’t go out to lunch or the pub with my colleagues. It just means that I had something (maybe) interesting to say and thought that putting it out there might improve my chances of landing a job in philosophy. Many of my colleagues, I’m sure, feel exactly the same.

Today, I was reading up on some of the factors that influence teacher evaluations, and was rethinking some of the discussions I’ve had with colleagues about whether taking advantage the psychological factors that influence student’s evaluations of teachers has any advantage beyond making the teacher look good.

When I first came to grad school, a professor in the department gave us an informal chat about the kinds of factors that can influence student evaluations. For example:

Williams and Ceci conducted a related experiment. Professor Ceci, a veteran teacher of the Developmental Psychology course at Cornell, gave the course consecutively in both fall and spring semesters one year. In between the two semesters, he visited a media consultant for lessons on improving presentation style. Specifically, Professor Ceci was trained to modulate his tone of voice more and to use more hand gestures while speaking. He then proceeded, in the spring semester, to give almost the identical course (verified by checking recordings of his lectures from the fall), with the sole significant difference being the addition of hand gestures and variations in tone of voice (grading policy, textbook, office hours, tests, and even the basic demographic profile of the class remained the same). The result: student ratings for the spring semester were far higher, usually by more than one standard deviation, on all aspects of the course and the instructor. Even the textbook was rated higher by almost a full point on a scale from 1 to 5. Students in the spring semester believed they had learned far more (this rating increased from 2.93 to 4.05), even though, according to Ceci, they had not in fact learned any more, as measured by their test scores. Again, the conclusion seems to be that student ratings are heavily influenced by cosmetic factors that have no effect on student learning (Huemer, M. here).

As it turns out (see here), how a teacher looks, dresses, and how much a teacher moves their hands and changes their tone, can all have an impact on student’s evaluations of a teacher (and on the course, and the texts!). Of course, we all wanted to get better teaching evals (after all our teaching profile will make a difference in our job prospects), so we wanted to take advantage of these psychological factors.

But, apart from these selfish reasons we also debated whether taking advantage of these psychological factors had any other benefits. My initial thought upon hearing about the impact of cosmetic factors on teaching evals was annoyance. I thought it was annoying that evaluations weren’t solely a measure of my effectiveness as a teacher, and that any good evals I would get might be merely a product of the fact that I bought some new shirts and had a tendency to wave my arms about like a mad man when talking philosophy. But, a colleague pointed out that doing those things might actually contribute to my effectiveness as a teacher. There is a correlation between, for example, moving one’s arms and higher scores, but this could be because people are paying more attention and therefore learning more. After reflecting on this for awhile, I came to agree that evaluations shouldn’t just be a function of the content and how clearly it is presented, but also of the teacher’s ability to get people to pay attention to that content. If that meant taking advantage of certain psychological tendencies, so be it. Insofar as I chose to take advantage of those tendencies to get my students to learn more, I was a more effective teacher.

As it turns out (see above), taking advantage of those psychological factors might not actually result in better content uptake. While students might perceive themselves to have learned more when a teacher does a little jig, if their grades are the same when the content is presented in a less exciting manner (and the grades are really just a function of the students grasp of the material), it seems that dancing the jig makes little real difference in whether the students learn. So much for taking advantage of psychology to increase student learning.

Still, there might be another reason to dance a little jig. I take it that if students perceive a class to be enjoyable, and take themselves to have learned a lot, they are more likely to take other classes with that teacher, in that teacher’s department, and, ultimately, more likely to major in the department of which that teacher is a part. I don’t have anything but anecdotal evidence for those claims, but I’ll settle for that for now.

I take it that having a thriving philosophy department (or other departments for that matter) is a good thing both for the department and for the student body. If training teachers to take advantage of these psychological factors can increase the number of majors and thereby increase the quality of the philosophy department, this seems like a prima facie reason to train teachers to take advantage of these factors in the same way that a teacher’s being good is a reason to have them teach intro courses.

I’m not sure if it is ethical to take advantage of these psychological factors in order to promote department health (something tells me maybe not…), but for those wondering about how to increase the number of majors, it may be worth some investigation. It would be good to know whether there is any correlation between people majors and the evaluations of teachers in a given department. If anyone has this data, I’d be glad to have it and post some links.

Re Michael Vick: if you eat factory farmed chicken, eggs, pork or veal, you’re in no position to be outraged by the Eagles signing him.

I think the spirit of this comment is largely correct, but some comments on twitter made me want to defend this claim in a little more detail than can be done in 140 characters (even by someone as eloquent and compelling as Singer). In fact, it seems that, if anything, we should be more outraged at those that support factory farming than at the Eagles for signing Vick. I’ll defend that below.

First, it is an empirical fact that both dog-fighting and factory farming subject non-human animals to incredible cruelty. I suspect people will grant this in the case of dog-fighting, but will, if my students are any indication, be reluctant to admit this about animals in factory farms. I’m not going to try to defend the empirical facts. Some quick research will support these facts.

Even granting the empirical facts, some people might object that while both institutions result in harm to non-human animals, dog-fighting is an institution that exists merely for pleasure, while factory farming is an institution that exists to generate food.

This objection might be compelling if factory farming were necessary for our continued and healthful survival. But, as it stands, both factory farming and dog-fighting are institutions that exist, mostly, merely for our pleasure. It is true that the kinds of pleasures generated are different. Factory farming generates pleasure for consumers in the form of the taste of food and in the money saved on cheap food that can be spent on other things; dog-fighting, I guess, generates pleasure for spectators from the thrill of the fight and from money made gambling on the dogs which, in some cases, yields money that can be spent on other things. But, despite the forms of pleasure being different, they are both institutions that exist mainly for our pleasure.

One response might be that factory farming, at least for some people, generates cheap food that is necessary for some people to live healthful lives. Due to structure of farm subsidies, meat in the U.S. is pretty cheap and some of the most impoverished make use of this in order to eat and conserve money for other important commodities.

This response works as far as it goes. Insofar as people need to cheap meat to live healthful lives, and insofar as this is only a possibility when meat is factory farmed, perhaps factory farming generates one good that may help to compensate for the harms caused to the non-human animals in the farms. But, this response doesn’t go very far. A bit of research will show that a vegetarian diet can be had cheaply as well and it will furnish the nutrients required to live a healthful life at about the same cost as a diet that contains factory farmed meat. Neither will it work to claim that eating meat is necessary for a healthful diet since a) meat can be had from sources that are not factory farms, and b) it is empirically false that you need meat to be healthful. It also won’t work to insist that, at least for the poor, getting all the nutrients necessary for a healthful diet is prohibitively expensive without factory farmed meat; the poorest of people are malnourished and this is partly because of the amount of factory farmed meat available (again, you are welcome to check the empirical facts).

If what I’ve said so far is true, then dog-fighting and factory farming are institutions that cause unnecessary harms. I’m just going to assert without argument that institutions which cause unnecessary harms like these are morally wrong (defending this claim probably requires a defense of a view of moral status on which animals have direct moral status. Such arguments abound and I think succeed. See DeGrazia for an introduction to these discussions).

So far what I’ve said doesn’t entail anything about which of these institutions is morally worse. People are certainly more likely to think that dog-fighting is worse than factory farming. I tend to think this results from a) our fondness of dogs and b) ignorance about factory farming. In any case, saying which is worse is actually pretty difficult. There are, I think, relevant facts about the kinds of attitudes embodied by those who engage in dog-fighting and those that engage factory-farming that might impact the moral wrongness of these institutions. Maybe the attitudes that dog-fighting participants (not the animals, the people) have are inherently more vicious than those of participants in factory farming. But, it is also relevant that the suffering in factory farms is of a greater magnitude than that suffered by dogs in dog-fighting institutions (I don’t have any hard data on this, largely because it is hard to determine the number of dogs killed in dog-fighting…they tend to keep that info quiet. But, the number of animals killed in factory farming is enormous. Conservative estimates put the number of pigs killed in the U.S. for food is around 128 million per year. That is from all farms, but the vast majority come from factory farms).

I don’t know of a simple way to take the facts about attitudes and magnitude of suffering into account, but it seems to me that even if the wrongs committed by the institution of factory farming are not as bad as the wrongs committed by the institution of dog-fighting (and I tend to think the opposite is the case), that the wrongs committed by the former are sufficiently bad, given that the harms are unnecessary and the magnitude of the suffering is huge, that we should strongly condemn the institution. This suggests to me that Singer is right to point out the inconsistency of being enraged by the Eagles support Vick while being complacent about factory farming practices.

In fact, I think we should be more outraged about factory farming than at the Eagles. It is true that as consumers of factory farmed meat, we only indirectly contribute to the institution, but this at best is also true of the Eagles. They aren’t engaged in dog-fighting, at best they are supporting someone who engages in dog-fighting. But, it isn’t even that; they are supporting someone who previously engaged in something morally atrocious. Meanwhile, many people are still participating in practices that contribute to factory farming. If anything, we should be more outraged by current participation than by past participation.

Anyway, that is my quick take and defense on Singer’s claim. An adequate defense would have to be much longer, so I’ll spare you.

Of course, you probably think my view, re: artifacts, is absurd, everyone in the environmental ethics literature (and probably elsewhere) seems to agree with you. But, as I said above, I think this comes from a misuse of intuitions in reflective equilibrium, the practice of weighting arguments against reflective intuitions to decide whether we ought except a particular view. I’m not against reflective equilibrium. Unfortunately, intuitions have to play a role in our theorizing about anything, including ethics. But what role those intuitions play and what kinds of intuitions should be given weight, are a matter of debate. With respect to my view on artifacts, I think that philosophers have appealed to the intuition that artifacts aren’t morally considerable and given this intuition so much weight that they are willing to reject as absurd any view that entails that artifacts are morally considerable.

With respect to my view, I hold three propositions to be true that entail that artifacts are morally considerable:

Functional Interests (FI): An entity’s having a function (of a certain kind) or having a part or sub-system with a function is sufficient for it to have an interest.

Moral Considerability (MC): Some entities (e.g. plants) are morally considerable in virtue of having interests derived from having functions (or functional parts).

No Morally Relevant Differences (NMRD): There is no morally relevant difference between artifacts and other entities that have interests in the same sense (e.g. plants).

The structure of the argument against my view is as follows:

1. Functional Interests + Moral Considerability + No Morally Relevant Differences entail that artifacts are morally considerable

2. Artifacts are not morally considerable

3. So, one of Functional Interests, Moral Considerability, and No Morally Relevant Differences is false.

In the debate over whether all living things have interests (a view called biocentrism), this argument is typically leveled against biocentrists of a certain type (e.g. Gary Varner). The idea is that the biocentrist is committed to MC + FI + NMRD. The biocentrist typically replies by denying NMRD. This is all to say that it is taken, by most parties, as a reductio of the conjunction of FI, MC, and NMRD that it entails that artifacts are morally considerable.

The above argument is a typical reductio generated by reflective equilibrium. Presumably there are some arguments for FI, MC, and NMRD, but there is a widespread, strongly held intuition that artifacts aren’t morally considerable. It is a consequence of FI, MC, and NMRD that artifacts have this property that we intuitively think they don’t have and so we are moved to reject one (or more of the that set of propositions).

I think this strategy is problematic for several reasons. The first is that it is an abuse of reflective equilibrium to give intuitions enough weight to underwrite premise 2 of the argument. Reflective equilibrium is a model for taking intuitions into account, not for using them as a sledgehammer against any theoretical considerations whatsoever. Sometimes well justified theoretical considerations should result in us rejecting an intuition as misguided and that may be the case here. At best the intuition about artifacts tells us that we should look a bit more carefully at the arguments for FI, MC, and NMRD. But, what if we do and those arguments hold up to scrutiny? It seems to me that if they do, the intuition, and not the conjunction, is then on the chopping block, and I have reason to think that the conjuncts are well justified, so…

Another problem I have with the justification for premise 2 is that I don’t think the intuitions I have are strong enough to justify this premise. Consider the following claims:

A. Nobody has ever actually done anything morally wrong to a knife.

B. Nobody in any conceivable circumstance can do anything morally wrong to a knife.

C. Knives aren’t morally considerable.

It is possible to have intuitions about all three of these claims. In fact, I have intuitions about all three of these claims. My intuition is that all of these claims are true. But, my intuitions come in different degrees of strength. I hold A pretty strongly. I consider all the things people do with knives and I think that none of those things morally wrongs the knife. I’m a bit less sure of B mainly because I recognize that I’m not very imaginative. Maybe you hold B just as strongly as A. It doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that neither A nor B entails C. Why not?

To claim that a thing is morally considerable is to claim that its interests are to be considered in moral deliberations, but it is not a claim about heavily those interests get weighted. It could be that knives are morally considerable but their interests are outweighed in every possible circumstance where something is done to knives or that there are only very, very rare circumstances where something morally wrong is done to a knife. Now, I’m not sure that I hold that view, but it is possible. And so, having the intuition that A or B is true doesn’t justify C.

What about my intuition that C is true? If I hold that C is true, and don’t hold some weird view about knives, as opposed to other artifacts, wouldn’t justify the claim that artifacts (or at least a large class of them) aren’t morally considerable? I don’t think so and that is because I don’t think we should feel as strongly about our intuition that C as we do about A or B. Why not? My intuitions about A and B derived directly from ethical experience, my experience of the ethical components of the world. I go through life, I see things that I take to be morally right and morally wrong. I reflect on these and the theoretical reasons in favor of those judgments and over time I come to a set of reflective judgments about acts being morally right and wrong or of some thing having moral value or not. This process, it seems to me, is the best I’ve got when it comes to generating intuitions. I get a lot of input for reflection on these intuitions and so the resulting intuitions are pretty stable.

Moral considerability, on the other hand, is not a part of my ethical experience. It is a theoretical construct employed to help capture some of the intuitions derived from our ethical experiences. As such, there isn’t a constant stream of experiences of considerability that, when reflected on, would generate stable intuitions in the way described above. As such, I don’t put much stock in my intuitions about theoretical constructs. Since my intuition that C is true is an intuition about such a construct, I think I should be very cautious in how strongly I believe, cautious enough that I don’t think I should take that intuition as a justification for the second premise of the reductio argument.

These responses are the result of my particular view about the role intuitions should play in reflective equilibrium and what intuitions should really be weighted heavily. As an undergrad, I gave almost no role to intuitions. Eventually, I was turned around, but I still try not to rely to heavily on intuitions. Instead, I view intuitions as markers that tell us where we need to tread carefully and scrutinize arguments a bit more. And, I’m very conservative about how strongly I’m willing to weight intuitions that I think are bound to be unreflective. That being said, I’m not a methodologists and so I could be wrong about how I’m using reflective equilibrium (if so, please convince me). In any case, it seems to me that the reductio is too quick and results in an immediate debate about reflective equilibrium. This debate is important, interesting, and once we acknowledge this, the reductio objection isn’t looking quite so strong as it seemed at first.