Win Sharon’s Money 5: Bioethics, Sandel

So does anyone have an interpretation of this argument of Michel Sandel’s against genetic engineering *even when it’s feasible for adults to genetically modify themselves and if these opportunities are subsidized and equally available to all* which makes any sense? As usual, $5 to the first convincing answer.

“Why, after all, do the successful owe anything to the least-advantaged members of society? The best answer to this question leans heavily on the notion of giftedness. The natural talents that enable the successful to flourish are not their own doing but, rather, their good fortune—a result of the genetic lottery. If our genetic endowments are gifts, rather than achievements for which we can claim credit, it is a mistake and a conceit to assume that we are entitled to the full measure of the bounty they reap in a market economy. We therefore have an obligation to share this bounty with those who, through no fault of their own, lack comparable gifts.

A lively sense of the contingency of our gifts—a consciousness that none of us is wholly responsible for his or her success—saves a meritocratic society from sliding into the smug assumption that the rich are rich because they are more deserving than the poor. Without this, the successful would become even more likely than they are now to view themselves as self-made and self-sufficient, and hence wholly responsible for their success. Those at the bottom of society would be viewed not as disadvantaged, and thus worthy of a measure of compensation, but as simply unfit, and thus worthy of eugenic repair. The meritocracy, less chastened by chance, would become harder, less forgiving. As perfect genetic knowledge would end the simulacrum of solidarity in insurance markets, so perfect genetic control would erode the actual solidarity that arises when men and women reflect on the contingency of their talents and fortunes.”

-- from The Case Against Perfection http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200404/sandel

So far as I can tell he is intentionally ‘splitting the difference’ between two bad arguments. One argument says that the best and indeed only sufficient moral arguments for social services for the worst off depend on the fact that our talents are merely gifts. In this case if subsidized voluntary genetic engineering in facts stops peoples’ talents from being gifts of fortune then allowing it will indeed stop people from supporting social services but (by hypothesis) it will also bring an end to the moral need for social services! It is no argument against a policy that adopting that policy will prevent people from doing something they are now obligated to do, *by creating a situation in which they accurately realize that they are not longer obligated to do that thing*.

Maybe Sandel could try to work some magic with saying that having social services are always morally good, but would not be morally obligatory post genetic engineering and we want to create societies where people are morally obliged to do as many as possible of the things which would be good, but I can’t see this working. I mean, would it even be good for people to be taxed to support someone who refuses to undergo the (subsidized, freely available!) gene therapies they would need to make a living?

The other argument is that people *erroneously* feel that our moral obligations to provide social services come from the fact that talents are gifts of fortune so preventing genetic enhancement is a good propaganda move in that keeping talents a gift of chance makes people keep voting the right way for the wrong reasons. This is at least *some* argument against genetic engineering, but it’s a very poor one. It reminds me of the bioethics argument against human cloning, that if you choose to raise the clone of your dead husband as your child you might then be sexually attracted to them and find this awkward. Surely this isn’t an argument against cloning, but an argument for cloning with some kind of advisory/legal mechanism to say ‘hey, cloning your dead husband might make things awkward so don’t do it!’ Surely given the potential benefits of genetic engineering (to lifespan, human dignity in the face of senility and professional obsolescence not to mention all the environmental, medical etc advances that could come from improving human abilities) we can find another less costly way to make sure we act on our genuine, independently existing, obligations to the poor.

So, given that Sandel teachers here and whatnot (and of course given my ignorance about bioethics) I feel there must be something more going on here that I am missing. I am offering $5 to find out.

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Anti-Quinean Hoaxers?

This NYT article quotes a letter in which Quine tells his friend’s kid about an arithmetic trick. http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/05/a-little-math-puzzle-to-ponder/#more-1836

It is interesting to hear about the private life of the great man, but I think the comment section is even more interesting: rather than proving to themselves via normal elementary school math why the trick *must* work for all positive integers many posters seem to just try a bunch of cases. e.g. “The algorithm does not work for 29 x 31.” “In fact, it does not work for the number 29 at all. Why is that?” Then, sometimes they forget to take into account the first column (which causes trouble only when the first number you are trying to multiply is odd) so these cases seem to ‘falsify’ the claim, from which they conclude that the algorithm has “holes”. They even guess (apparently purely inductively) what the holes might be e.g. ‘all pairs of numbers starting with 29’. Other responders disagree by going through their observations of the particular instance in question. Then the same thing happens with another pair of numbers!

Is this just a case of decaffeinated blog posting or a bit of sly performance art which envisages what the state of mathematics would be like if we *did* form and revise mathematical beliefs in the same way as other more traditionally empirical parts of our web of belief?

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realist Pen Maddy, waffles

I just bought "Organic Vanilla Mini-Waffles 8 sets of 4 waffles". Hopefully the ur-elements are in the same box. Read more!

from L.W.'s notes on Culture and Value

"If it is true that Mahler’s music is worthless, as I believe to be the case, then the question is what he ought to have done with his talent. For obviously it took a set of very rare talents to produce this bad music. Should he, say, have written his symphonies and then burned them? Or should he have done violence to himself and not written them? Should he have written them and realized that they were worthless? But how could he have realized that?"

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incompatible complaints?

A traditional objection to empiricism is that you couldn’t learn math empirically because math doesn’t make empirically testable predictions. On the other hand a traditional objection to formalism is that it would be surprising if a mere formal game had the scientific applications which math does. So prima facie it seems like on the one hand we are saying that the problem with empiricism is that math *doesn’t* make empirically testable predictions while on the other hand the problem with formalism is that math *does* seem to make such predictions and these predictions turn out right. So it seems like these traditional objections can’t both work.

One natural/obvious thing to say here would be that the applications problem for formalism is not that math itself makes empirical predictions (as the empiricist would like) but that it can be combined with a lot of empirical stuff to make predictions. But if the “applicability of math” just consists in the fact that mathematical statements can be usefully combined with a lot of empirically discovered stuff to make correct predictions this doesn’t seem like much of a problem for the formalist. Given two complex systems like the game of producing mathematical proofs on the one hand and the physical world on the other hand it would be more surprising if we *didn’t* find some parallels between the two. Newton et al just noticed the bits of math that seem to match certain transactions in the physical world. For all we know you *could* do just the same with any sufficiently complex formal game.

Specifically, the feature of math which (immediately seem to) pose a problem for the formalist are the *direct* applications – the claim that when there are 2Fs and 2Gs there are 4 F-or-Gs and predictions about what a computer will do so long as its electricity behaves in a certain way, or whether you will literally be able to tile a certain floor with certain physical features and certain tiles or whether a someone doing a certain kind of formal manipulations will get a certain string. It’s not surprising that some connection can be found between a complex formal game and what goes on in the external world, but here the ‘arbitrary formal manipulations’ of mathematical practice seem to call the shots and directly make predictions –and then these predictions turn out to be correct. If one allows that the formalism of math has direct predictive applications then it does indeed seem miraculous that the particular mathematical game which we ended up with makes the right predictions.

But if math does have these *direct* predictive applications (if this program halts you should expect to find a mouse in the wiring, no one will ever manage to cover a flat floor with tiles in those shapes) which turn out to be correct when tested then how can we make the other traditional objection that ‘you can’t learn math empirically because math doesn’t make empirical predictions’?

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umm...free will

this really speaks for itself, i think
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18684016/ Read more!

Win Sharon’s Money #4

Quine, Backsliding

It’s been a while since I have come to a philosophical question such that knowing the answer to it was worth $5 to me but here we have the latest Win Sharon’s Money with a prize of $5 to the first answer that convinces me (I will send out an email saying so) or what I think is the best one if none of them convince me. This one is about defending a very famous position of Quine's, so it should be on the easy side…

If you are feeling public feel free to post your answers as comments here on the blog, otherwise email me:

So, as happens with alarming frequency whenever I think about stuff in the neighborhood, my grasp of Classic Quine has gotten unstuck. What did it this time was reading a bit of Davidson, in case that helps you see where this is question is coming from (not to imply that Davidson would agree with this point, as I understand it he wouldn’t, which is what got me thinking)…

The question:

Why can’t you take into account facts about whether a person says S in situations where it would be appropriate/normal to say that P as well as those about whether they assent to S in situations where P in deciding whether or not to attribute someone the belief that P? (If you did it, seems like this would cut down on a lot, though probably not all, indeterminacy)

Specifically, what if our ideas about when it is appropriate/normal to say P are sometimes not just some kind of empirical/sociological knowledge about what 21^st century western humans like to say but are part of our very conception of what it is to mean that P.

Consider the example –from W I think, though I don’t remember where - of a person who is trained to say the words ‘I think that…’ before every assertion. A person who was taught language in this way wouldn’t be a person who refused to make claims about anything which extended beyond their own epistemic state (wouldn’t you agree?). Rather, using the words ‘I think that’ in this uniform way would deprive them of their usual meaning. So this person’s sentence ‘I think it is raining’ would be much closer in meaning to my sentence ‘It is raining’ than to my homophonic sentence ‘I think it is raining’.

I think this example shows us (among other things) that the evidence relevant to whether a given person’s sentence S means ‘I think that it is raining’ goes beyond their *assenting* to S in the right circumstances. For, the conditions under which one should *assent* to ‘I think it is raining’ and ‘It is raining’ are the same. However the conditions under which one should *assert* ‘It is raining’ and ‘I think it is raining’ are quite different (we use the latter to signal respect and the existence of disagreement or hint that there is a certain kind of relevant justification which one doesn’t have). Now I claim that there is a difference between meaning ‘It is raining’ by your sentence and meaning ‘I think it is raining’ and we are rationally required to attribute the former state and not the latter one to the person described in the paragraph above.

If one allows that these notions of appropriate assertion (as opposed to merely assent) as being part of what is necessary for a person to mean P by their sentence S then it seems like a lot of traditional indeterminacy disappears. So, for example, there are definite (though relatively limited) conditions under which it is appropriate to assert ‘here is an undetached rabbit part’ or ‘the spatial complement of a rabbit is presently avoiding this spot’ which differ from those under which it is appropriate to assert ‘here is a rabbit’. Thus one might think that more detailed consideration of the way that a person’s linguistic behavior constrains their meaning (it’s not just a matter of assenting to what’s true but of asserting what’s appropriate) removes a lot of apparent indeterminacy of reference.

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