Animal Ethics

It goes without saying (doesn't it?) that torturing animals is wrong. The resulting minor benefit of a cheap and tasty meal does not excuse it. So if the reality of factory-farms is anywhere near as bad as what I've heard about them, then they are surely immoral.

Does anyone know if there is any legislation to protect animals from severe suffering at the hands of the meat industry? There should be, in any case.

I don't think meat-eating is necessarily wrong, however. It is bad to the extent that it supports the unethical industries which inflict suffering on animals. But if that suffering could be minimised, then this objection disappears. The Ethical Werewolf outlines the practical conclusions reached by this line of reasoning:

I divide meats into 3 categories: the Normal, the Weird, and the Fallen. Unethically farmed meats that someone else would eat if I didn't eat them are Normal (Normal here isn't a normative term that attributes any positive value, it's a descriptive term that is appropriate because these meats are the most common). Weird meats are those where the animals live under non-cruel conditions. This gets its name because it includes many of the unusual things that I'm happy to still be able to eat, like squid, shrimp, and alligator, as well as most fish. Fallen meat is any kind of meat, Normal or Weird, that would go to waste if I didn't eat it. When my roommate left for two weeks and a sausage was in the fridge, it became Fallen meat. By eating only Weird and Fallen meat, I generate no economic demand pressures on factory farming. So that's what I do.

But some might argue that to kill animals painlessly is still wrong.

Would it be acceptable to humanely raise and painlessly kill humans if there were a use for their body parts, or if, all of a sudden, many humans acquired a taste for human flesh? ... Just as each human life is precious and irreplaceable, so is each animal life.

(See also his Animal Ethics blog.)

I'm not so sure that animal-friendly farming is wrong, though. There are, after all, some pretty significant differences between humans and other animals that are worth bearing in mind here. A good life for an animal will (obviously) not be the same as that for a human. Human flourishing requires freedom, opportunities for intellectual stimulation and creativity, etc. Animals, by contrast, wouldn't seem to have their quality of life in any way impaired by living in a pleasant captivity.

Notice that we have few qualms about killing a suffering animal to put it out of its misery. This suggests that it's not life itself which is intrinsically valuable, so much as the quality of life. There is no absolute 'categorical imperative' against killing animals.

Killing a person is wrong because it impedes their flourishing. We have future interests, many of which we have heavily invested in throughout our lives. Death thwarts those interests. So killing us (usually, though not always) makes us worse off than we otherwise would have been. Can the same be said of farm animals?

The animals in question simply would not exist were it not for the farms. It seems odd that someone who cares about animals' interests could wish them non-existence - thus precluding the possibility of any of those interests being realised!

Compare the following options: (a) non-existence, or (b) life on an animal-friendly farm, where during their lives animals can 'flourish' as much as possible given their nature, followed by a painless death at human hands. Isn't it clear that (b) is better for the animals in question? It seems so to me, anyway. Though one might object that evaluating non-existence is an impossible (perhaps even incoherent) task.

Even if we restrict our focus to dealing with animals already in existence, we can still defend the practice of farming as being in an animal's best interest. It seems altogether possible that the quality of life an animal would enjoy on a good farm could far exceed that it would endure in the wild. A painless death, in particular, would be a very welcome blessing.

I think the extreme anti-farming view rests on a mistaken view of morality. It requires that 'killing' be intrinsically wrong. But it is not. It is wrong to cause harm. Death is generally a harm, and so killing is generally wrong. But in the case of animals, it is not so clear that death is a harm to them. Taking a broader view of things, it actually looks like an animal-friendly farm would be in the animal's best interests. If this is so, then eating meat from such farms would be morally permissible (perhaps even praiseworthy, odd though that sounds). The opposite conclusion can only be reached by focusing on abstract rules of human conduct, to the exclusion of the animals' own interests.

Update: See also Fake Barn Country

All New Zealanders

It's good to see the government finally talking some sense on race issues:

Paranoia politics and playing on prejudice will not advance New Zealand one iota. Nor will race-based politics and race-based policy-delivery. Services must be on the basis of need and not because of a sense of race-based entitlement.

New Zealand also has to get its British imperial past behind it. Maori and Pakeha are both indigenous people to New Zealand now. (Emphasis added)

I couldn't agree more. Of course, the opposition is quick to point out that this 'one law for all' thing is precisely what they had been suggesting all along. Still, better late than never, I suppose.

An important step to overcoming our "British imperial past" would be to replace our tired old flag and national anthem. After all, the Union Jack is a pretty clear symbol of our colonial past. Better to replace it with something which reflects our identity today - a Maori design, perhaps. This flag looks rather good:

As for our national anthem: the lyrics suck, the melody is plodding and dreary, and it was written by an Australian. Also, as we're such a secular country, it seems a bit inappropriate that our anthem is so religious. I'm not sure what to replace it with (just about anything would be an improvement though) - perhaps Pokarekare ana. Apparently overseas NZers associate this song, more than any other, with home. Given that it has already entrenched itself in our national consciousness, why not make it our anthem? It would be a nice cultural gesture, and it's a pleasant-sounding song besides.

Back to Mallard's speech:

There are no people on earth who would of their own free will agree to extinguish themselves as an ethnically distinct group and totally surrender control over their communities and culture to others.

That cannot be what New Zealand’s 21st century is about. New Zealanders know that our unity as a nation can only be achieved by respecting and admitting diversity and difference.

That sentiment sounds admirable, but I'm a little wary of the meaning hidden behind all the warm-fuzzy rhetoric. He goes on to say that "[c]ohesion doesn’t mean assimilation of every single one of us into one mould of the identikit New Zealander". Assimilation certainly has a bad name these days, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we should be encouraging separatism in the name of "diversity" either. I'm not sure whether that's what Labour is doing here, but it's worth watching out for.

I think that separatism is the real concern New Zealanders have about race relations in our country. That's why Brash's Orewa speech and 'one law for all' policies were so popular. It's good that Labour has taken note of this, and agreed to avoid "race-based policy delivery". Still, there is more to be done. Talk of 'diversity' must be careful not to exclude the mainstream.

To be clear: I don't want a New Zealand which pretends to be exclusively British, and tramples all other cultures underfoot. But nor do I want to live in a separatist "bicultural" New Zealand where obsessions with "diversity" (and cultural 'purity') lead to exclusivity and cultural segregation. Instead, I would like New Zealand to develop its own distinct, unified culture, to which all citizens (regardless of their ethnic backgrounds) can belong. That is, I think integration - not assimilation or multiculturalism - should be the goal.

Fortunately, such integration is probably inevitable anyway. It's a natural - almost organic - development. Pakeha and Maori culture are continually influencing each other, and growing together in the process. I look forward to the day when there is no longer any distinction to be made between the two.

Removing race-based policies is a step towards unification. Incorporating Maori culture into our national symbols (i.e. flag and anthem) is perhaps the next big step. Doing so could serve to not only recognize Maori, but also reassure ordinary New Zealanders that Maori culture is not exclusive. It would no longer be 'us vs them'. It would just be 'we'.

Relevant Implications

The 'material implication' of classical logic does a fairly poor job of capturing our intuitive understanding of if-then.  It holds X -> Y [if X then Y] to be logically equivalent to ~X v Y [either not-X, or Y].  So an implication will be true whenever the antecedent is false (regardless of the consequent), or else whenever the consequent is true (regardless of the antecedent).  But it just seems wrong to say "if today is Tuesday then today is Wednesday".  We are more inclined to interpret this as a counterfactual / subjunctive conditional, i.e. "if today were Tuesday then today would be Wednesday" - and this we can see is obviously false.

Further, there are true material implications where the antecedent has nothing to do with the consequent at all.  For example, "if I click my fingers, then 2+2=4".  This is true, even if understood subjunctively (since 2+2=4 is true in all possible worlds).  So the problem isn't so much to do with counterfactual truth-values, as relevance.  Our common-sense understanding of if-then seems to involve an explanatory (perhaps even causal) notion.  To say "if A then B" often means that B depends on A, in some sense.  We might even think that if A is false, then B will be too (which is fallacious reasoning according to classical logic).

I'm not suggesting that our intuitive understanding is better than classical logic, or vice versa (though for particular purposes one might be more suitable than the other).  I just think it would be interesting to formalise the intuitive notion, though I'm not sure how this is best done.  As always, feel free to leave a comment if you know more about all this stuff.

In class today we briefly discussed some oddities about the 'Conditional Proof' natural deduction rule.  The basic idea is that you (temporarily) assume X, somehow or other derive Y, then you can cancel the assumption and conclude that X -> Y.  The oddity arises from the fact that you need not use X when deriving Y.  So if you have already proven Y, then you can use CP to prove X -> Y for any proposition X at all, no matter its truth value or relevance.

One suggestion a classmate offered was that we could modify our CP rule to require that the assumption X must be used in the derivation of Y.  The problem with this (as our lecturer pointed out) is that it is too weak.  One could always just append X using &-intro, then remove it again using &-elim.  It would then be used in the derivation, though in an utterly redundant way.

What we really want here is some way of telling that X needs to be used to derive Y.  My first thought was that we could formalize this requirement as ~(~X -> Y), but in classical logic that is equivalent to X & ~Y, which is clearly not the meaning I was after!  I was really thinking of something like "If X were false then you would not be able to derive Y any longer".  But that begs the question of how to represent counterfactuals.

The closest truth-functional approximation I could think of was ~X -> ~Y, but that's a bit too strong really.  Combined with the original CP, that would prove the biconditional X <--> Y.  Instead, I want to say that if X is false then we cannot (yet) know that Y is true.  Note that this doesn't necessarily mean that Y is false, however.  Hmm... This might work according to some sort of constructivist logic, I'm not sure (I know very little about that stuff).  Suppose "~X" means "I cannot construct a proof of X" (rather than the usual "X is false").  Then I think this formula would capture what I want: If you lack a proof of X, then you cannot construct a proof of Y. [Should this instead be done subjunctively too?  I'm hoping I can get away without it.]

Perhaps it isn't possible to formalize a relevance requirement on CP whilst remaining within classical logic.  Framing relevance in terms of what we can know turns it into an epistemic question (seemingly requiring constructivist logic?), whereas the earlier notion of what we need raises modal issues (and so we need a logic of counterfactuals, to deal with other possible worlds). Truth-functional logic is merely concerned with 'brute' truth-values.  The concept of relevance goes beyond this, so I guess it would make sense for the concept to be unanalysible in truth-functional terms.

Incidentally, a quick google turned up the Stanford encyclopedia entry for Relevance Logic.  I've only skimmed it, but it looks fairly interesting.

Retreat

I'm off to Kaikoura for the weekend, as our university is having another 'philosophy retreat' thingamajig. Should be fun - especially since I've been asked to present my paper on free will.

If you're looking for something else to read in the meantime, have a glance through this huge list of weblogs.

Pseudo-Philosophy

Wouldn't we think it odd if a science magazine had as their 'top story' a link to a creationist website? Or an article espousing the wonders of astrology? Yet the Philosophy News Service had as their previous 'Top Story' this nonsense about gay marriage, full of straw men, logical fallacies, and pseudoscience.

Consider his portrayal of the liberal argument:

Homosexuals argue they are born this way, they say. Therefore, since we can't change who we are, then we should be just as protected as minorities and females.

That's a stupid argument, and no intelligent liberal should use it. For starters, it's politically foolish to rest our case on such a flimsy premise which could well be disproved by new evidence. More importantly, the argument isn't even valid. If some people are born with a predilection for violence, that doesn't mean we should allow them to commit murders. The "it's natural!" argument is just as idiotic as the "it's unnatural!" argument; neither justifies any moral conclusion whatsoever.

Homosexuality is perfectly acceptable regardless of whether it arises from nature, nurture, or is a freely-made choice. Better arguments will reflect this. For example, one could appeal to J.S Mill's harm principle: that is, the value of liberty, and the utter lack of any decent justification for curtailing it in this case.

But the writer of this article ignores such arguments, preferring to attack the straw man. Remarkably, though, he can't even do that properly.

Why am I so sure that a gay gene "isn't there"? It's a simple matter of (surprise) Darwinism... In the case of homosexuals, same-sex couples cannot reproduce. This is the fatal flaw in the homosexual argument that homosexuality is genetic. Therefore, even if you grant that a "gay gene" did exist at one point, it couldn't have been passed along to future generations since same-sex couples can't reproduce.

There is so much wrong with this I'm not sure where to start. But I'll try anyway. (1) Genetic influences are rarely so blunt as a single "gay gene". [Note: follow the link in the update for my explanation of precisely why this is a problem for his argument.] (2) Recessive alleles can be passed on by 'carriers' who do not themselves experience its phenotypic effects. (3) Gay people can still have children the usual way. (4) Non-reproducing family members can help their relatives to pass their genes into the next generation. It's also rather telling that homosexual behaviour has been observed in other animals.

As I mentioned above, the genetic question is rather irrelevant anyway. But it's worth pointing out that this guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Just look at this fallacy:

If the presumption [in the "liberal argument"] is not true, then homosexuals do not have a right to marry.

Um, no. A false premise invalidates an argument, but it does not guarantee the falsity of the conclusion. There could always be some other argument which establishes the conclusion.

Lastly, there's the usual tripe about homosexuality being "unnatural":

[S]ame-sex sexual relations deviates from the biological standard of male-and-female sexual relations. Any other type of sexual relations (e.g., human-and-animal) is similarly deviant. Pretty black-and-white, folks... As everyone knows, male homosexual relations involves the anus. And everyone also knows that the biological function of the anus is not sexual.

It's pretty stupid to assert that just because an object has some function, it's immoral to use it for any other purpose. The biological function of the mouth is the consumption of food and drink. Does that make kissing immoral? I use my hands to play the piano. I'm pretty sure hands didn't evolve for that specific purpose though. As for the reproductive purpose of sex, I take it that the "biological standard" is fertile male-and-female couples. So does that make it "deviant" for the infertile to have sex? Should post-menopausal women not be allowed to marry either?

This article is no more philosophy than creationism is science. The Philosophy News Service should be ashamed of itself for implicitly endorsing such rubbish.

Update: For more on the first article, see the PNS forum.

Mixed Metaphysics

I really enjoyed the metaphysics course I took last semester, though it often struck me as a deeply mistaken enterprise. We would take some concept central to our common-sense understanding of the world (such as 'properties'/universals), and then treat it as though it really existed. This seems to ignore the central lesson of modern science (particularly 20th century physics): that our intuition or "common sense" is a very unreliable indicator of the actual nature of reality. See also this post by John Wilkins on the foolishness of philosophers who understand biological species' as metaphysical 'kinds'.

Our metaphysics course stood squarely in the Aristotelian tradition of examining the nature of reality, or "being qua being". An alternative approach was mentioned, however. As I understand it, the Kantian tradition instead limits itself to examining mental constructs, or the conceptual schema which underlies our understanding of the world.

Based (perhaps loosely) upon those two opposing traditions, I find myself thinking that there are two 'ideal' ways of approaching metaphysics. Both should be scientifically informed, but in different ways: the one by physics, the other, psychology.

My first ideal is modelled on the Aristotelian tradition of pursuing the fundamental nature of reality. This approach absolutely must be based upon physics if it is to have any hope of success. What it should do, I think, is take our best scientific theories (general relativity, quantum mechanics, perhaps soon String Theory), and provide us with the bare minimum of metaphysical constructs required to support the scientific theory. Baroque two-worlds ontologies, or unscientific treatments of space and time, would have no place here. What we need instead, is a presentation of the metaphysics underlying scientific materialism/physicalism. (Please let me know of anyone who has undertaken such a project - I'm sure it must have been done, but I haven't heard of it yet!)

My second ideal is essentially tied to cognitive science. It is the attempt to understand the human mind, and how we categorise/analyse reality. "Folk metaphysics", in other words. This approach would take our common-sense concepts of properties, truth, time, etc, and try to spin them together into a coherent, conceptually simple, system of understanding.

The 'folk metaphysician' would make no claims about the nature of reality. Instead, he would help us to understand ourselves. Furthermore, he would play a crucial role in the development of Artificial Intelligence. For without some coherent conceptual schema for analysing the flood of data provided by its input sensors, an AI would have little hope of understanding the world around him. In this way, metaphysics - seemingly one of the most abstract branches of philosophy - would in fact serve an important practical purpose.

The problem with the metaphysics we studied, is that it mixed these two ideals. It was based on the common-sense, rather than scientific, structures. Yet it still made claims to objectivity, to representing the fundamental nature of reality. I found that mix to be rather implausible. It would be better, I believe, to pick one of the two 'ideals' outlined above, and stick to that. You can have reality, or common sense, but not both.

Logic Translations

An issue about translations came up in our Logic lecture earlier this week.  Consider the sentence S = "Either Fred will eat out and Martha will eat with him, or Fred will go home and eat alone".  How should this be translated into truth-functional logic?
 
The obvious approach is to simply go for (O & M) v (H & A), where O = Fred will eat out, M = Martha will eat with Fred, H = Fred will eat at home, A = Fred will eat alone.  Or something along those lines.
 
However, as another student pointed out, this seems incomplete, failing to capture the meaningful connections between elements of the sentence.  For example, it seems clear to us that A and M are mutually exclusive, as are O and H, yet the syntax of the simple translation offers no hint of this.
 
I think, then, a better translation may be:
[(O & M) v (H & A)] & (O → ~H) & (M → ~A) 
 
It might be objected that this unnecessarily complicates things.  Perhaps our basic translation should be kept as simple as possible, and any "extra information" or inferences between its parts, ought to be introduced as new premises if necessary.  Though if this principle were taken to extremes, we might be tempted to just offer the entire sentence S with no internal analysis whatsoever.  That would obviously not be helpful.
 
I would have thought that a translation should try to capture as much of the analytic/syntactical information provided in the sentence as possible.  That is, our translation should try to spell out the appropriate inferences between the words and phrases used.  However, we should avoid cramming in 'synthetic' or contextual information, for these might include unwarranted assumptions - far better to introduce them as new premises. 
 
In this case, however, I think the information added is best understood as analytic.  If Fred eats alone, then it is not the case that he eats with someone else (e.g. Martha).  This is a simple analytic truth that we can know from the words themselves, without having to reference contingent real-world facts.
 
To re-inforce this point, consider how we would translate the sentence into first-order logic.
We can do this with the single predicate - Wxyz: x will eat at (location) y with (person) z; 
We will also need the constants f = Fred; m = Martha; h = (Fred's) home.
Using 'E' as the existential quantifier ("there exists"), and 'V' for universal quantification (i.e. "for all..."), our translation of S could now be as follows:
 
Ex(Wfxm & x ≠ h ) v (Wfhf & VxVy(Wfyx → x = f))
 
This literally says "Either Fred will eat at somewhere that is not home, with Martha, OR Fred will eat at home (with himself), and he will eat with nobody but himself."
I think that captures the meaning of S reasonably well.  Notice that it includes the analytic implication that if Fred eats alone then there is no-one else he eats with - not even Martha.
 
However, this particular translation doesn't rule out the possibility of eating at several places, i.e. both at home and not and home.  This could be introduced easily enough with some more quantification, but it's starting to get a bit messy.  Also, the 3-place predicate might not be entirely faithful to the original syntax of S, which appeared to treat locations and companions quite separately.  This too is easily solved, this time by replacing it with two 2-place predicates, but that will make things messier yet. 
 
I think a better approach - solving both problems - might be to introduce a function, to map from a person to the place where that person "will eat" (at whatever particular time we're implicitly talking about). So here's a stronger translation...
 
Let px = the place where x will eat; f = Fred; m = Martha; h = (Fred's) home;
Wxy: x will eat with y.
(Wfm & pf ≠ h) v (pf = h & Vx(Wfx → x = f))
 
i.e. "Either Fred will eat with Martha, at a place which is not home, OR Fred will eat at home with nobody else".
 
Alternatively, we could lose the predicates altogether, and just use the function...
(pf = pm & pf ≠ h) v (pf = h & Vx (px = pf → x = f))
i.e. "Either Fred and Martha will eat at the same place, which is not home, OR the place where Fred will eat is home, and there is no-one but him at that place".
 
I quite like that last translation actually, though one might complain that there is a conceptual distinction to be made between eating with someone, and merely eating at the same place as them.
 
Anyway, my enthusiam about various translating strategies aside, the point is that these first-order logical translations seem to capture the meaning of S, better than the basic truth-functional one did.  These analytic implications can be captured truth-functionally, however, we just need to append them manually to the end of the basic translation.
 
The big question, then, is "should we?".  I think so, but I'm not entirely sure.  One could object that I've just assumed the sentence is talking about a single temporal period, and that this may not be so - perhaps the pairs are not mutually exclusive after all.  Fair enough.  But suppose I picked a better example to illustrate this point, one with no ambiguities here (e.g. reword the sentence to be entirely in the present tense).  The general question remains: How much detail should we seek to include in a logical translation?  Just the basic elements?  Or also the analytic implications we can draw between them?
 
As always, comments are most welcome.

Israeli Spies

International spies, here in li'l ole New Zealand! How exciting ;)
Details available from NBR, NZ Herald and The Press. Some excerpts:

Prime Minister Helen Clark launched a blistering verbal attack and slapped diplomatic sanctions on Israel last night after two suspected Mossad agents were imprisoned for six months for illegally trying to obtain a New Zealand passport.

"The Israeli agents attempted to demean the integrity of the New Zealand passport system. The Israeli government was asked for an explanation and an apology three months ago. Neither was received."

"This type of behaviour is unacceptable internationally by any country. It is a sorry indictment of Israel that it has again taken such actions against a country with which it has friendly relations."

Helen Clark said it was not the first time Israel had sought fraudulently to obtain passports from another country.

"Israeli agents caught in an unsuccessful assassination attempt in Jordan in 1997 were found to be carrying fraudulent Canadian passports," she said. "While we regret the need for it, New Zealand has no option but to take the actions that it has in response to a deliberate breach of its sovereignty."

The response of our government has been to:

Suspend high-level visits to and from Israel.

Decline permission for Israel's President to visit later this year.

Implement visa restrictions on all Israeli government officials visiting New Zealand.

Suspend Foreign Ministry consultations with Israel.

Delay indefinitely the appointment of a new Israeli ambassador.

Ha, this even makes me feel patriotic - I imagine it'll do wonders for Clark and the Labour party in the polls...

Questions or Pretensions?

One of the great things about my Semantics class is the high level of student participation (i.e. questions and comments) in the lectures. Though some see it differently. A linguistics student I know complained to a mutual friend about the "pretentious philosophy prats" in the double-coded course. That got me thinking.

I sometimes find other students' questions/comments annoying. But only if they are bad questions. There are, after all, some people who make utterly random or irrelevant comments, and that can be quite frustrating. Fortunately, our lecturer (Kate Kearns) is very skilled at handling them, managing to treat the student respectfully yet quickly steering the lecture back on track.

Other times, however, student participation can really add a lot to a lecture. For example, in our last lecture Kearns suggested that the 'sense' of a word limits the appropriate uses of it - we can't just use words however we please - to which one girl pointed out the dynamic aspects of language, especially in slang and idioms. After all, if a particular 'inappropriate' use of a word becomes widespread, then the meaning of the word is expanded, and such use becomes 'appropriate' after all. This helpful interjection led the lecturer to discuss the issue in a bit more detail, clarifying matters and treating the rest of us to a very interesting discussion. I, for one, greatly appreciated it.

I'm interested in the difference between good and bad questions because I often ask questions in lectures myself. Of course, I always think they're fairly interesting and relevant, or I wouldn't ask them. But I'm not sure how they come across to others. I get particularly worried when I find myself inwardly cringing at someone else's pointless interjection, since I'm faced with the niggling doubt, what if others react similarly to mine?

I think student comments can be categorised as belonging to one of three broad groups. These are, in increasing order of intelligence displayed:

Missing the point entirely - These are always annoying, though the severity of idiocy displayed varies. It's worst when the stubborn speaker is unable to realise that he's barking up the wrong tree.

Requests for clarification - Though mildly tedious for those who understood it all the first time through, these are probably good questions to ask. Chances are others will benefit from having a tricky concept clarified.

Making a point/suggestion/objection - Here I intend to exclude those who aim for this group, but instead fall under group one.

That last one is the group I'm interested in - and, I assume, the target of the "pretentious prats" remark. I guess when someone raises a technical issue, it may seem rather pedantic, appearing to serve no point but to say 'look how smart I am!'. Being a question-asker myself, I'm generally more sympathetic here, but even I sometimes reach this uncharitable conclusion about a speaker.

Sometimes it may be justified. But I think it is far too easy for people to conflate intellectual curiosity with arrogance. If I ask a question, it's because I'm interested in what the answer is. Seemingly 'pedantic' technicalities can decide the viability of a theory or explanation. If it has some potential flaw in it, this is worth exploring. Delving into such details requires a narrower focus than the broad sweep of generalisations we undergrads are used to. But it would be a mistake to think that breadth is always preferable to depth, or to conclude from this that such questions are not worth asking. And it would certainly be a mistake to think that the only motivation for asking them is egotism.

P.S. On a semi-related topic, Leiter has a couple of great posts on scientists being called "arrogant" for having specialized knowledge.

New blog

Check out the a new Philosophy of Biology blog. They already have a couple of interesting posts on Game Theory, and the teleological nature of biology.

Blogging Survey

Via Pharyngula, I noticed a blog survey some graduate students are carrying out. It's quick (took me five minutes), easy, and even fairly interesting (as far as surveys go). If you have a blog of your own, go do it!

Though I actually think finding out the personality traits of bloggers would be far more interesting. But by the meagre response so far, it seems not many others agree with me here. A pity.

Template Changes

I've been playing around with my blog template a bit recently, you might have noticed. My sidebar in particular now looks much better (it was a bit of an eyesore before!).

Changes include:

Cooler bullet points

Cooler blockquotes

A list of links to 'previous posts' on the sidebar, which should make travelling around the site quicker and easier.

New fonts

Aligned post text (now 'justified' on both margins, not only the left)

Slightly wider margins, for easier reading

Google search (of site or web) available at the bottom of the page.

Blogrolls displayed on main page only

Archives condensed down to just links, rather than entire posts.

Leave a comment if you have further suggestions - any feedback is much appreciated.

Truth and Relativism

I share Maverick Philosopher's distaste for the predicate "true for". Phrases like "that's true for you but not for me" are borderline nonsensical. Truth doesn't bend itself to match our beliefs, and it doesn't show different faces to different people. Truth just is. If you want to talk about what different people believe, then damn well use the word "believes", instead of trying to pass it off as a plurality of truths.

Extreme relativism is self-defeating of course. Take the thesis 'All truths are relative' - is this claim absolutely true, or only relatively true?

But not all relativism is nonsense. So long as you have genuine (non-relative) truth at the core, it is possible - perhaps even necessary - to build some (limited) relativism up around this. The key here, though, is not to relativise truth itself, but rather, the framework against which the truth is being judged.

Firstly, note that you can have objective truths about relational properties. It is absolutely true that Jupiter is larger than Pluto. But 'larger than' is a relational property. Moreover, the very notion of 'largeness' (for example) is context-dependent. Is an elephant large? The question is incoherent without a basis for comparison (though in reality we can ask it sensibly, because context should make the implicit basis clear). Elephants are large relative to mice, but not if we're comparing them to whales.

So you can see that we're admitting an element of relativity here. But it's not relativity about truth itself. Instead, it's recognising that the claim being considered is, by itself, incomplete. We need an extra parameter to plug up the gap and clarify exactly what proposition we are refering to. The truth of the claim will vary depending on what parameter is chosen, but this is because the choice of parameter affects the meaning of the sentence. An ambiguous sentence could refer to any number of distinct propositions. But each proposition has a definite, objective truth-value.

Truth is not, ultimately, relative. But it sometimes appears that way because a sentence may be ambiguous or incomplete until 'filled in' by a parameter.

A good example of this is value-judgements. Some people think that value judgements are purely subjective, and simply refer to the individual's own subjective assessments, rather than any objective facts. I am convinced that this is the wrong way to understand it. (I've previously wrestled with some sorts of truths which seem to be inherently subjective, but value-judgements aren't one of them!)

A better way to understand the relativity of value is to say that value-judgements are made relative to some framework of standards. The claim "Beethoven is better than Britney" is, by itself, incomplete. However, once we clarify that the missing parameter is the set of standards shared by classical music lovers, then we have ourselves a proposition which is objectively true. If a teeny-bopper disagrees, claiming that Britney is better, then - according to the above standards - she is wrong. However, if we were to choose an alternative parameter - say, the aesthetic standards of pop music (such as they are), the tables would be turned: the teeny-bopper would speak truth, and the old fogeys falsehoods.

I hope it's clear enough what I'm getting at here. Value judgements, understood as assessing something against some particular standards, are objective. What's relative is the choice of standards. (I made a similar suggestion in the comments thread of a recent FBC post on aesthetic relativism.)

In my old post on Semantic Contextualism, I argued for what appears to be a very broad form of relativism. It is fully consistent with what I've been saying here, however. In effect, I was arguing that there are many truths which are only indirectly related to the objective world (e.g. truth in fiction). When assessing a truth-claim then, we need to consider what world [the parameter] it applies to. Ultimately, however, all truths can be understood as objective descriptions of reality. It's just that they might require some clarifications in order to get to that stage.

Minimum Wage

Slate has an interesting article by Steven Landsburg about the minimum wage. The first half debunks the common argument that it causes unemployment. He goes on to argue that the minimum wage places an unfair burden on a small minority, and we would do better to instead focus on welfare funded by all taxpayers (apparently the US has something called 'EITC' to this effect).

For some disagreement over that second point, see Majikthise and Brad DeLong.

Update: Crooked Timber has a good overview of the matter.

Brash on Crime

It seems like all the other NZ bloggers are talking about crime and Don Brash's latest speech (skip to the summary/conclusion if you can't be bothered reading it all), so I might as well chip in with a few thoughts of my own.

Most of the details I don't really know enough about to comment. For example, targeting organised crime and "well-known criminal families" certainly sounds like a good idea, but I haven't a clue whether National's policies there are likely to improve things or not. Though the move to make greater use of DNA fingerprinting is surely a good one. Helen Clark even said she was open to the idea (I can't remember where I saw that - The Press, perhaps?).

But looking at the big picture, Brash's main focus seems to be on putting more people in prison, for longer. So let's look at that:

To operate the prison service now costs around $600 million annually. If the prison population increased by 50% as a result of the abolition of parole (which is possible if offending rates do not reduce), the increase in annual operating cost could rise by around $300 million after about five years. Additional prisons will also involve significant one-off capital costs, possibly of up to $1 billion, though to keep taxpayer costs as low as possible we would contract the running of these to the private sector. [Footnote:] The country's only privately managed prison, the Auckland Central Remand Prison, beats the state operated prisons on almost every measure, including cost, education and health programmes.

I heard a while ago that even the Greens concede that private prisons are run much better, but they nevertheless are opposed to all privatisation as a matter of principle. In other words, they're opposed to what's best for the country if it clashes with their ideology. Disgraceful. (Assuming my information there is accurate. Let me know if you have evidence to the contrary - a link would be good!)

But back to Brash, one must ask whether those massive costs are really worth it. As far as I'm concerned, the only people who should be imprisoned are those who pose a significant threat to society. If there is good evidence to suggest that a crime was a one-off event (a crime of passion, say), and the offender poses little future risk to society, then he should not go to jail. There simply isn't any point. Of course, a serious crime will require a proportionally serious punishment for the sake of deterrence, but we can surely come up with alternatives to prison which would benefit, rather than cost, society at large. Perhaps a huge (and I mean huge) fine and several years (hell, decades!) of community service, for a start. [Update: Perhaps corporal punishment is worth considering too.]

'Rehabilitation' seems to be a dirty word these days. The major parties are both emphasising how 'tough on crime' they are, but seem more interested in punishing offenders than protecting the rest of us. Imprisoning now-harmless people does nothing to protect the rest of us, it just wastes our money. A prisoner should be released the moment we have sufficient evidence (if ever we do) that he is successfully rehabilitated and no longer poses a significant risk.

Since the purpose of prisons is to protect society from threats, they should aim to neutralise that threat while they can. That is, they should try to rehabilitate prisoners so that they no longer pose a threat to society. If this can be done (and I don't know enough to say whether it can - realistically - or not), then it is surely preferable to releasing a criminal just as dangerous as when he went in.

On the other hand, if we have good reason to think that a dangerous criminal is beyond all hope, then he should probably never be released. I guess the difficulty is in accurately judging whether an individual is 'safe' or not. I don't know whether there is any reliable (or even semi-reliable) way of doing this.

Brash suggested careful monitoring of released criminals to prevent re-offending. This sounds like a very sensible idea. What makes less sense is suggesting this as a replacement for parole. We should be aiming to keep our prisons as empty as possible, and releasing offenders as soon as it is safe to do so. Post-release monitoring is a method which (presumably) increases our margin of safety here. As such, its implementation would give us reason to consider releasing offenders earlier, rather than later. (Admittedly, this reasoning assumes current practices to be tolerably safe, a premise Brash et al might not accept.)

Prison should be a last resort, only to be utilized when it is necessary for the safety of society. I imagine various lobby groups for victims of crime would disagree with this, due to their desire for retribution. However, despite being natural and understandable, this drive for revenge is not one which ought to influence policy. I would hope that our political leaders base their position on more rational grounds, seeking what is truly best for our society. Although there were some good points in Brash's speech, I'm concerned by his apparent focus on filling up prisons. He is appealing to the worst in people, and I can't help but wonder whether the effects of this will spill over, preventing us from realising what is best for society.

Damn Bugs

Blogger seems a bit screwed up - it refuses to update my main page. Until this is fixed, you might need to instead check my index page to see any new posts. Also, I'll keep this post updated with links to any 'missing' posts.

[Note: If the main page freezes again, it will not display updated versions of this post. You will need to check the individual permalink instead.]

Sorry for any inconvenience - I'm hoping the Blogger support crew will sort out what's wrong soon!

Details of the problem:
I think the main page is supposed to load the index file automatically, but it is clearly failing to do so (instead it is loading an old, outdated version - pressing 'refresh' doesn't do any good, so it doesn't seem to just be my computer's cache.)

A similar problem has just cropped up with the archive file. The usual archive link loads an older page, even though the actual archive file is newly updated and works fine if directly loaded.

If anyone reading this has any idea what's going on or how to fix it, please email me! (Or leave a comment)

Update: A friend checked the site and said the main page loads fine for him. Perhaps it's just my computer after all? If you can spare a moment, please leave a comment and let me know whether the main & index pages appear the same to you.

2nd Update: Looks like the main page has caught up to my Brash post for me too now, so that's good. I'm hoping these 12-hour delays will stop altogether, but I'll keep up the 'technical difficulties' message until I'm sure (i.e. if it can last 24 hours without any more freeze-ups). A good test will be to see whether this update appears on my main page or not...

Collective Intelligence & Rousseau

An interesting article on the wisdom of crowds:

[Surowiecki] rejects the widespread view that groups of ordinary people are usually wrong--and that we do better to ignore them and follow experts instead. Even when individuals blunder, he believes, groups can excel: "Under the right circumstances, groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them." This is so even when "most of the people within the group are not especially well-informed or rational." What is wonderful, and surprising, is that "when our imperfect judgments are aggregated in the right way, our collective intelligence is often excellent." Instead of chasing experts, we should consult that collective intelligence.

...Surowiecki also invokes an astonishing finding by the British scientist Francis Galton, who tried to draw lessons about collective intelligence by examining a competition in which contestants guessed the weight of a fat ox at a regional fair in England. The ox weighed 1,198 pounds; the average guess, from the 787 contestants, was 1,197 pounds.

...Surowiecki does not make the implausible suggestion that all crowds are wise. To qualify as such, a crowd needs to satisfy three conditions. It must be diverse; its members must be independent; and it must have a "particular kind of decentralization." Each of these conditions is designed to ensure what most interests Surowiecki, which is the emergence and the aggregation of information that group members have.

This reminds me of Rousseau's Social Contract, written centuries earlier. Rousseau advocated a form of direct democracy, whereby each citizen votes for what they believe to be in the common interest. He thought individual mistakes in either direction would tend to cancel each other out (like with the contestants guessing the weight of the ox), so the average result would accurately represent the "general will".

What especially caught my attention here was how similar Surowiecki's "conditions" are to Rousseau's own. Rousseau explicitly denounced political factions because they encourage clusters of people to all vote the same way - that is, it reduces diversity. He also wished to ensure the independence of all voters, recommending (bizarrely) that they not be allowed to communicate or discuss the issues with each other. I'm not sure about decentralization: that one at least sounds like a more modern idea.

Anyway, I just thought I'd point out those parallels. There's also some intriguing speculation about the viability of "prediction markets". Sunstein's balanced critique of Surowiecki's ideas in the latter half of the article is especially worth reading, and pre-empts most of the complaints that sprang to mind as I read the first half.

Update: Blogger has a spin-off: The Wisdom of Blogs

Computer Art

Chaoscopia is a very cool site. It features artworks generated from mathematical (fractal-based?) algorithms - though I wouldn't have guessed it just by looking.

Here's a sample:

Check out the galleries for more.

Speaking generally, I tend to find computer-generated drawings and animations more aesthetically appealing than hand-drawn stuff. I'm not exactly sure why. Perhaps they can achieve extra clarity, or vibrancy of colour? I don't know much about art, so it'd be great to hear from someone more informed as to just what the differences are. I guess as far as movies go, CG animations look a lot more realistic than cartoons, and can have more fluid movement, etc.

But I even find some CG landscapes to look more beautiful than reality. Others can look quite disturbing, though in an exciting sort of a way. CG art often strikes me as having a feeling of magic or perfection/precision to it. Does this make it better at portraying extremes of utopian/dystopian imagery, perhaps?

No Regrets

This is interesting:

Regret, then, emerges from the feeling of disappointment when we contrast the actual outcome of our actions to some possible (more favorable) outcome that our counterfactual thinking allows us to imagine (the question of whether such counterfactual scenarios are themselves reasonable or not is an entirely different matter). That is why Camille et al. studied regret in people with damage to the orbitofrontal cortex: the hypothesis was that these individuals, unlike normal human beings, would be able to experience regret, because their cognitive and emotional pathways were uncoupled by the brain injury...

The results were as clear as one could have hoped for: disappointment (learning one had lost the gamble) turned into the stronger emotion of regret (when one acquires knowledge of what would have happened if one had chosen the alternative action) in normal individuals. Patients with orbitofrontal damage, however, experienced disappointment, but no regret whatsoever, in accordance with the hypothesis that -- while still interested in the outcome of their gamble -- they were incapable of emotionally processing counterfactual thinking.

As the article goes on to say, this raises some intriguing possibilities regarding the remorselessness of some criminals. If their lack of regret is due to a similar brain injury, is it really fair of us to hold that against them? Such questions will need to be answered as cognitive science progresses, and our actions, thoughts, and feelings become ever more explicible in naturalistic terms.

Personality Tests

There are a lot of online personality tests out there, many of which are probably quite crap. So I want to recommend an "official" one which is remarkably good (and originally brought to my attention by a psychology lecturer at uni) - the IPIP-NEO test.

You've probably done the Myers-Briggs ones before (I'm apparently an INTJ), which are good fun but don't really tell you very much beyond a few overly-broad generalisations. This test, by contrast, not only measures your personality against the "Big Five" character traits (Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism, and Openness to Experience), but also subdivides each domain, which allows for a lot more detail. It's also interesting to see when you have large variations within a single domain - in which case the averaged number alone might not be very meaningful.

My own interest in these things is purely recreational, but they apparently have some practical use too. Agreeableness and Conscientiousness both correlate with good job performance. Personally, I think the "Openness to Experience" domain (which really means "intellectual curiosity") is the most interesting one. As a general rule, I would suspect that people relate best to those who have similar scores to them in this particular domain. I'd be curious to hear if others agree or disagree with me on this point though.

A full explanation of each category & sub-category is provided on the results page, if you try the test yourself. It's probably important to read that, as some of the names are a bit misleading on their own. Each number is a comparative percentile rating, e.g. a "5" for Extraversion means 95% of people are more extroverted than I am.

Update 16/7/04: I've retaken the test, and bracketed my old results if different (I originally took the test late last year). It's nice to see that I'm even less "neurotic" than I used to be.

Extraversion: 4 (5)
Friendliness 3 (2)
Gregariousness 3 (6)
Assertiveness 64 (59)
Activity Level 27 (46)
Excitement-Seeking 0
Cheerfulness 6

Agreeableness: 78 (79)
Trust 82 (86)
Morality 85 (88) [note: this subcategory really means something like "sincerity"/"frankness"]
Altruism 58 (52)
Co-operation 48 (54)
Modesty 39 (29)
Sympathy 94 (96)

Conscientiousness: 95 (90)
Self-Efficacy 83 (78)
Orderliness 52 (38)
Dutifulness 87 (91)
Achievement-Striving 83 (79)
Self-Discipline 88 (82)
Cautiousness 99

Neuroticism: 23 (34)
Anxiety 80
Anger 42
Depression 17 (26)
Self-Consciousness 43 (71)
Immoderation 1
Vulnerability 27 (32)

Openness to Experience: 90 (87)
Imagination 81 (88)
Artistic Interests 81 (68)
Emotionality 59
Adventurousness 24 (11)
Intellect 93
Liberalism 99

So that's that. I'd be curious to hear other bloggers' results, to see if there are any noticable trends, etc. So if you're reading this and have a blog of your own, consider taking the test yourself and posting the results on your site (and leave a link here so I can go see!).

Update:
Responses are now being tracked via the meme (and its GUID) explained here.

Successful Politics: facts or values?

Empty Doorway has an excellent post on Lakoff's Moral Politics. I remember reading a similar article (probably by Lakoff) not long ago, about how conservatives are winning the popular vote in the US because of their "framing" skills. They frame an issue in such a way that it appeals to certain moral values of the people, who then ignore the fact that Bush et al are a bunch of rich pricks out to exploit them. The suggestion is that Democrats need to start playing the values game themselves - make more of an effort to show how liberal policies are grounded in shared moral values.

That is all well and good, but one shouldn't overlook the power of blunt facts. There are many polls showing how uninformed most Americans are on important (especially economic) issues. So it's surely worthwhile to bring the real statistics (condensed into easily digestable chunks) to the public's attention. It's just absurd that so many people are voting against their own interests, without even realising it.

What's going on here? [Really, I'm curious, I'm not in the US so I don't know the details.] Are the Democrats not bringing these facts to people's attention? Or are the people just not listening? If the latter, then perhaps Lakoff's moral propaganda approach really is all that can be done. But when the truth is on our side, surely something more could be done to make use of it!?

Update: The Enlightenment Project is more pessimistic: "in American "values" doesn't mean moral convictions--it means constraint, promoted through coercion and backed by punitive policies."