The UCSD Philosophy Department is pleased to announce that it is now accepting applications for the 2016 Summer Program for Women in Philosophy.  Details are available at the SPWP website (http://spwp.ucsd.edu).  Here is a flyer, which departments or individuals might consider posting.  Please encourage your talented undergraduate women philosophy majors interested in graduate study to apply.

Carla Merino-Rajme is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She works in philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Before coming to Chapel Hill, she was an assistant professor of philosophy at Arizona State University and a Bersoff Fellow at New York University. She received a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University and an MA in philosophy of science from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Experiencing time

Our everyday experiences of duration are as phenomenologically rich as they are puzzling.

Consider, for instance, the following familiar situation. You are at a fun party, having a wonderful time, when your friend comes by to tell you it’s time to go. You glance at your watch to realize that even though it feels like the party has just started, you have been there for over three hours. In situations like this, you become prey to a perceptual illusion: some feature—in this case, the party’s duration—presents itself as being in a way that it is not, i.e., as being much shorter than it really is.

Upon reflection, there is something puzzling about this type of experience. Consider a few of the words uttered as you chat with your friends during the party. While the party as a whole feels like it is going by really fast, you do not hear these words as going so quickly that you can hardly understand what is being said. Rather, you experience them as being uttered at a normal speed. Or consider seeing a glass of wine fall to the carpet. Here again you do not see the glass rushing to the floor at a super-high speed. Contrast your experiences of these short-lived events with those you would have if you were under the effects of certain drugs. In this latter case, the people around you would indeed sound like they were talking far more quickly than the usual. A lamp post approached at a normal walking pace would seem to be flying by. This is not what happens, neither during the party nor during its converse case—one in which you would experience, for instance, an especially boring movie as lasting twice as much time as it actually takes. During the movie you do not hear the characters as speaking in-cre-di-bly slow-ly. Instead, as in the party, you hear them speaking normally. Yet, you feel like the whole movie is taking twice as long as it actually takes.

Your experiences of duration in cases like the fun party (or the boring movie) are thus characterized by a part/whole incongruity: while the duration of the long-lived, composite event is experienced as lasting much less (or more) time than it is indeed lasting, the party’s (or the movie’s) short-lived events—precisely those in which you get to experience the whole, long-lived event—are experienced as having their usual durations.

One possible, though obviously bad way of accounting for this feature of your temporal phenomenology would be to claim that you passed out for most of the party’s duration. Had you become unconscious for two-thirds of the party, putting together the felt durations of the short-lived events that you did experience would yield a felt duration for the whole party of roughly a third of its actual duration. But of course this is not what normally happens during fun parties!

Another possible explanation would be to claim that even though you were not passed out for two-thirds of the party, you forgot that much. This, together with the claim that your experience of the duration of the whole party is the result of adding up the felt durations of the short-lived events that you remember, would serve to account for the part/whole incongruity of your temporal experience. This proposal, however, is also unacceptable: while you forgot some of the short-lived events you experienced, you did not forget more than you would have forgotten if the party had been less fun. But had the party been less fun, its felt duration would have been much longer!

In previous work, I have aimed at accounting for this and other puzzling features of your temporal phenomenology. The main idea is to model your mind as a subjective clock whose pulses or ‘ticks’ are the very short-lived events you experience as you undergo a long-lived event. I call these ‘ticks’ experienced quanta. Think of an experienced quantum as a short-lived chunk of the situation encountered that is experienced as forming a temporally extended but tightly unified whole. Think of hearing the ‘ding-dong’ of a doorbell. Each sound takes place, and is heard as taking place, at a distinct time; yet, the whole doorbell is heard as composing a tight unity. Contrast the unity of this auditory experience with the lack of unity in hearing an entire concert. Or contrast the feeling of unity in seeing a dancer perform a gracious leap with the lack of unity in seeing the movements of the same dancer as she performs an hour-long, solo dance. Or contrast the felt unity in experiencing a finger sliding along your arm with the lack of it in experiencing an hour-long massage. Or, contrast the feeling of unity in hearing a few words uttered during the party with the lack of unity in hearing all the words said during a forty-minute conversation. The felt unity found in the first cases is what characterizes experienced quanta. (An experienced quantum can be seen as a way of making sense of the notion of the specious present, first introduced by E. R. Clay, and made famous by William James).

Think of your mind as constantly ‘counting’ quanta, where to ‘count’ is to form an impression of numerosity. In order to ‘count’ a quantum, however, it is not enough to experience it; you also need to notice it. Your experience of the duration of a long-lived event at any given time can then be thought of as the quanta ‘counted’ during that long-lived event—that is, as the impression you form of the number of experienced quanta that you have noticed up until that time. This can explain why, despite undergoing no duration illusions in experiencing the party’s short-lived events, you feel like the fun party flew by. Since during the party much of your attention is captured by its fun events, you have less attention free to notice the feeling of unity that characterizes the quanta that you keep experiencing. As a result, you ‘undercount’ them: you form an impression of fewer quanta than the one you would have formed during a less exciting event. Conversely, as your attention drifts away from a boring movie, your quanta become more salient. As a result, you notice more of them and, hence, you form an impression of a larger count: you ‘overcount’ them. This can explain why the movie feels longer than an equally long, but less boring one.

Unlike models of time perception found within the psychological literature that appeal to subpersonal clocks—and that, for this very reason, cannot offer a full-blown characterization of what goes on at the phenomenological, experiential level—this model offers a way of characterizing the complexity of our experience of duration and of its corresponding illusions qua the experiential phenomena that they are.

Tina Rulli is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis, working in normative ethics, practical ethics, and bioethics. Her research is on moral demands and the implications of accepting moral options to do less than the best. She has defended a duty to adopt children rather than procreate, arguing that genetic-relatedness is morally insignificant. In bioethics, she writes on the duty to rescue in medical and clinical research contexts. She received her PhD from Yale University in 2011.

Conflicts Between Rescuing and Creating

Many thanks to Professor Krishnamurthy for inviting me to share my work on Philosop-her and for her contribution to the profession in running this excellent series.

I’ve argued for the claim that prospective parents have a duty to adopt children rather than procreate, given that there are children in need of adoption and that some prospective parents can afford to do so. My initial interest in the duty to adopt was from the population ethics side—the area of ethics that assesses the moral value, if any, of creating people. But the duty to adopt raises many other rich ethical questions, which became the primary focus of my past research. For instance, I’ve written a detailed exploration of the moral significance of the preference for parent-child genetic relatedness. The project was also the starting point for my research on the duty to rescue.

My initial interest in population ethics is still strong and is the focus of my present research. This refocus is especially timely, considering the refugee crisis and the impending increase in global migration. An estimated 100-300 million people will be forced to migrate from their countries of origin due to climate change induced flooding over the next several decades.[1] Indeed, in 2014, we witnessed the first climate change refugees—the Alesano family was permitted to relocate from low-lying Tuvalu to New Zealand.[2] At the same time, nearly half the world lives in nations with declining fertility rates. Many of these countries (including Russia, Japan, Singapore, Denmark) are incentivizing their citizens to have babies. One may initially think these situations have little to do with one another. But in a world where millions of people are forced to relocate in order to survive, increasing birth rates comes at the opportunity cost of providing scarce resources and land to existing people in need.

Why should we create new lives, which present new needs and demands on resources, when there are so many existing people in desperate need for those same goods? I argue for P1: we have stronger moral reason to meet the critical needs of existing people than to create new people to benefit instead.

P1 reflects a familiar debate in population ethics: we can increase well-being by making existing people better off, or we can create new people with lots of well-being. Much attention has been paid to the latter possibility—do we really have any moral reason to create new people for their contribution to total well-being? But very little attention has been paid to the comparative concern: if creating new people does count morally, how much should it count in a situation where we must choose between creating a new person or benefiting an existing person? P1 goes some way toward addressing that question. It says we should prioritize benefits to needy existing people over providing benefits to potentially existing people.

P1 would be easy to defend on the view that we have no reason to create happy people at all. But while many people find it highly unintuitive that we may have moral reason to create happy people, there are strong theoretical arguments for this claim. For instance, most people would agree that we have strong moral reason to not create a miserable person. To treat the issue symmetrically and non-arbitrarily, we should embrace the idea that we have strong moral reason to create happy people. I concede the point—for my interest is in defending P1. P1 is defensible even on the assumption that we can benefit people by creating them.

P1 is supported by P2: we have stronger moral reason to meet people’s critical needs than to provide people with noncritical benefits. Critical needs are those that, if unfulfilled, lead a person to come to harm. A critical benefit prevents or ameliorates a harm. A noncritical benefit is a “pure” benefit. It is an improvement in well-being that doesn’t ameliorate a harm. P2, in some form or other, is highly intuitive. It is consistent with views that emphasize the priority of basic human rights and with prioritarianism, in which gains in well-being to the worst off count for more than gains to the better-off.

P2 will help us make the right distinction in a choice between rescuing an existing person or creating a new one. Existing people in need will come to harm without a critical benefit. But potentially existing people, though they (by the above concession) can be benefited by coming to exist, are not harmed if they do not come to exist. So rescue is a critical benefit and creation is a noncritical benefit. In cases of conflict, given that we should prioritize critical benefits over noncritical benefits, we should meet the critical needs of existing people rather than create new people.

Defending P1 by appeal to P2 is a novel move in population ethics because it grounds the priority of existing needy people in their critical need for a benefit rather than on their metaphysical status as actual people. P1 doesn’t prioritize all existing people over all possible people. It is unlike the famous Slogan by Jan Narveson, who says morality is about making people happy, not making happy people.[3]

Of course, there are details to work out. P2 may have a threshold. There may be some point at which the amount of noncritical benefits can outweigh the amount of critical benefits such that we should bring about the noncritical benefits. Perhaps we should allocate medical resources to developing a headache medicine that would benefit millions of people rather than spend the same money on providing a life-saving treatment for a disease that affects only a small population. If P2 has a threshold, then P1 will inherit it. There may be some cases where the benefits to potential people greatly outweigh the critical benefits to existing people such that we should favor benefiting the former.

Additionally, the claim that potential people are not harmed (or benefited) in not coming to exist needs more support. Most people think it highly implausible that people can be harmed by not being created. But I concede that potential people can be benefited by coming to exist. Some think the logic of “better than” entails that if someone can be benefited by creation—such that existence is better than non-existence for her—then it must be the case that she can be harmed by not being created—non-existence is worse than existence for her. We can avoid this entailment by employing a non-comparative sense of benefit or harm. Alternatively, we can maintain a comparative sense of benefit and harm by understanding it in terms of the preferences of existing people. Lucy prefers existence to non-existence; so her existence is better for her given her preferences than non-existence. But if Lucy had never existed, she’d have no preferences such that it could be said that she is harmed by not coming to exist. The bigger difficulty is in articulating why potential people cannot be harmed or benefited by non-existence without committing ourselves to deeper theoretical problems. It is tempting to appeal to moral actualism to explain the absurdity of harms of non-existence. Moral actualism is the highly intuitive and popular view that only the interests of actual people are relevant to determining the moral status of an act. But moral actualism has seemingly intractable and counterintuitive commitments. Caspar Hare says it results in “deontic absurdity.”[4] I argue that—though the moral interests of potential people can be relevant to the moral status of actions (contra moral actualism)—only actual people can be harmed or benefited. I want to show that P1 is not undermined by the possibility that potential people can be harmed in not coming to exist, though it does not depend upon the truth of moral actualism.

I don’t suppose that P1 is all that matters morally to rethinking immigration policies. But it is surely one consideration that matters, and it has received little attention from philosophers working in population ethics or on human migration. Past work on population focuses on overpopulation and reducing our numbers, not on establishing a priority principle for allocating benefits between existing and potentially existing people. Moreover, P1 has broad practical relevance. It applies to our personal decision to have children and to global population and resource conservation policy. It is also a fundamental, but under-discussed principle in medical resource allocation. I think it worthy of a deeper exploration.

[1] Rick Noack, “Has the Era of the ‘Climate Change Refugee’ Begun?” Washington Post, August 7, 2014. URL: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/08/07/has-the-era-of-the-climate-change-refugee-begun/.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Jan Narveson, “Moral Problems of Population,” in M. Bayles, ed. Ethics and Population (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Co., 1976): pp. 59-80

[4] Caspar Hare. “Voices From Another World: Must We Respect the Interests of People Who Do Not, and Will Never, Exist?” Ethics 117, no. 3 (April 2007): 498-523.

Nina Emery is an assistant professor of philosophy at Brown University. She works on topics in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of physics. She is especially interested in whether and how our best scientific theories should inform our understanding of entities like chance, time, and laws of nature. Her Ph.D. is from MIT.

At Brown Nina has helped found the Summer Immersion Program in Philosophy (SIPP@Brown), a two-week residential summer program for students from traditionally underrepresented groups in philosophy. If you know any talented undergraduate students who would benefit from such a program, please encourage them to apply to SIPP@Brown!

A Middle Ground for Metaphysics

Thanks so much to Meena for running this wonderful and inspiring series and for inviting me to contribute. I’m going to use this opportunity to say a bit about a question that underlies many of my research interests. The general version question is: what is the proper relationship between philosophy and science? A more specific version of the question, and the version in which I am especially interested, is: what is the proper relationship between metaphysics and physics?

There’s a way of thinking about this specific version of the question that gives rise to something of a dilemma for metaphysicians. For reasons that I will spell out below, I think this dilemma isn’t really all that problematic. But I also think that it underlies much of the continuing skepticism about the legitimacy of metaphysics as a discipline.

The supposed dilemma is this. On the one hand, suppose that our best metaphysical theories must accord with our best scientific theories in some robust sense. Then why do we need metaphysicians at all? Can’t we just ask the scientists what the consequences of their theories are, accept those consequences, and move on? At most metaphysicians are just translators, helping the rest of us understand the increasingly technical and complex language in which scientists, especially physicists, work. On the other hand, suppose our best metaphysical theories can come apart from our best scientific theories. Then what are the rules by which we investigate, construct, and judge metaphysical theories. Insofar as we think that metaphysics has a distinctive methodology, what exactly is is that methodology? And doesn’t the lack of progress and consensus in metaphysics suggest that whatever that methodology is, it is somehow defective?

My own view is that neither horn of this supposed dilemma is all that troubling. I think that the process of reading consequences off of our best scientific theories is philosophically interesting in and of itself. And I think that pessimism stemming from the lack of consensus and progress in metaphysics is overblown. But I’m not going to defend either of those claims here. Instead I want to point out that there is some substantive middle ground between the two positions described above. In addition to paying attention to the content and consequences of our best scientific theories, metaphysicians can also pay attention to the methodology of standard scientific practice. One way of being a scientifically-respectable metaphysician, then, is to take standard scientific practice as a good guide to successful inquiry into what the world is like, but to apply the principles embodied by that practice to questions that go beyond the standard scientific purview. This gives metaphysics as distinctive domain but also allows it to inherit some of the legitimacy of scientific practice.

All of that is fairly abstract. Here is a concrete example of this sort of middle-ground approach to metaphysics. The history of science appears to include many cases in which scientists—especially physicists—were convinced to admit the existence of entities that they previously would have thought were far too strange or too novel to countenance. Why? Because it turned out that entities of that sort were required in order to play a certain explanatory role. Think of the introduction of electromagnetic fields at the end of the 19^th-century. Or the introduction of particles that sometimes behaved like waves at the beginning of the 20^th. A contemporary example might be the widespread belief among cosmologists in the existence of dark energy—if there wasn’t such a thing then what would explain the accelerating rate of expansion of the universe?—despite their utter uncertainty about what dark energy is. In standard scientific practice, it seems, explanatory power trumps metaphysical weirdness.

But taking this methodology seriously would require many metaphysicians to reconsider, if not their favored positions, at least their understanding of the main challenges facing their favored positions. Take, for instance, the continuing popularity of Humean theories of laws and of chances. According to such theories, laws and chances can be reductively analyzed in terms of the Humean mosaic—the distribution of non-modal, non-causal, and non-dispositional properties throughout spacetime. At first glance, this sounds like a promising approach—primitive modal or causal or dispositional properties are strange sorts of things. Why not eliminate them from our metaphysics if we can?

The problem is that Humean theories of laws and chance have a notoriously difficult time showing how laws and chances, once they have been reductively analyzed in terms of the Humean mosaic, can play any robust explanatory role. How can the law of universal gravitation explain the fact that certain sorts of bodies exhibit certain sorts of behavior if the law of universal gravitation is in some sense nothing over and above the fact that those sorts of bodies exhibit that sort of behavior? How can the chance of a certain kind of radioactive decay explain the relative frequency with which that kind of decay occurs if the chance of that kind of decay is in some sense nothing over and above the relative frequency of that kind of decay?

Recently Humeans have made what I think may be real progress on this explanatory challenge. In particular, Barry Loewer has made the interesting suggestion that the challenge might be diffused if we distinguish between two kinds of explanation—scientific explanation on the one hand and metaphysical explanation on the other. (See Loewer, B. 2012. ‘Two Accounts of Laws and Time’, Philosophical Studies, 160 (1): 115-137.) It is very much an open question whether this sort of move succeeds—at the very least we need a much better understanding of metaphysical explanation before we lean too heavily on Loewer’s distinction. The relevant point for our purposes, however, is just this: insofar as we are taking seriously the fact that explanatory power trumps metaphysical weirdness, the Loewer strategy, if it works, is not just icing on the cake. It is crucial. Insofar as we take explanatory power to trump metaphysical weirdness, the explanatory challenge is the central challenge facing Humeans. If Loewer’s suggestion is the only helpful suggestion forthcoming, Humeans ought to drop whatever else they are working on in order to try to prove that it succeeds.

In fact, once we internalize the fact that in standard scientific practice explanatory power trumps metaphysical weirdness, we ought to be prepared for anything when it comes to the metaphysics of explanatorily important entities like laws and chances. Insofar as someone convinces us that Humean laws and chances cannot play a robust explanatory role, we ought not be Humeans. Insofar we become convinced that no reductive account of laws or chances—Humean or non-Humean—can meet the explanatory challenge, we ought to be primitivists about laws and chances.

Yes, on such an account laws and chances would be novel, and in virtue of being novel, would count as strange. But the very same thing could have been said about electromagnetic fields or quantum particles. The very same thing could be said about dark energy today.

Of course, even with this one example there’s plenty of work yet to be done. Surely it is a certain kind of explanatory power that is relevant in these cases. So what kind is it? And what about other relatively straightforward features of scientific practice? Scientists from Galileo to Einstein have thought it was important to eliminate what appears to be excess spacetime structure from our theories. Is there a way of understanding this move so that it has bearing on metaphysical theories more generally? And anyway, how are these methodological principles that we’re extrapolating from scientific practice to be justified?

But all of that just serves to make my point—there is interesting and well-defined philosophical work to be done here. My own view is that this sort of work is by no means the only interesting or well-defined work that there is to be done within the realm of metaphysics, but it is as good and uncontroversial a starting place as I can think of.

Julia Annas is Regents Professor in Philosophy at the University of Arizona, and previously taught at St Hugh’s College, Oxford. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, the founder editor of *Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy*, former President of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association and foreign member of the Norwegian and Finnish Academies.

I’m very grateful to Meena for asking me to contribute to Philosop-her. First off, I’m delighted and excited to see so many younger women in philosophy, and in such a range of areas. There are more women in philosophy than when I was young, and more diversity, and philosophy itself has got a lot more interesting, and the two are connected. Of course we have far to go, but the state of philosophy is a lot healthier than it was in the sixties and seventies, when I was starting out. The only caveat that I find myself registering is the pace of development that’s expected of young philosophers – not just numbers of publications, but constant, sometimes relentless progress in the area you start out. For a variety of reasons – some good, some not – less was expected of me in my early philosophical years, and I was able to make many starts and develop in different areas. My work has only had a single focus in the second part of my career. I am amazed at the energy of younger women philosophers, and I wish that you didn’t have to use so much of it to succeed.

I spent many years developing interests in many areas of ancient philosophy. There is, after all, over a thousand years of it, in which different enquiries were developed in a multitude of different ways. Early thinkers do philosophy in Homeric hexameters, Plato writes dialogues, we have Aristotle’s lecture notes, we have texts and fragments from the Stoics and Epicurus, and so on. There are many different styles of doing philosophy. By the end of antiquity philosophers who write commentaries on other philosophers in a way quite like modern academic philosophical commentators. Doing ancient philosophy is a great way of mentally loosening the constraints of the contemporary academic article and book; philosophy can be done well in plain prose examining numbered propositions, but it can be done in many other ways too. In doing ancient philosophy we have to distinguish between an analytical approach in the broad sense, which discusses the reasoned basis for philosophical claims, and a narrower sense in which context is discarded and arguments are reduced to abstract schemata. The first, broader approach is the one more likely to be fruitful, and history of philosophy is a great way to develop it.

In my experience ancient philosophy has been the place I have found attitudes that are more co-operative, and less gladiatorial, than turn up in some other areas of philosophy. I don’t know how closely this is connected to the point that, at least in my intellectual lifetime, there have been more women in it than in many other areas of philosophy. I feel fortunate in not having suffered experiences as bad as those that many other women philosophers have had to put up with. We are still far from being equally represented in ancient philosophy, but I think the area does modestly better than some areas in philosophy, especially the more technical ones.

For some years my interests in ancient philosophy have concentrated on ancient ethical theories, and their (almost) universal eudaimonist structure. The central concepts are those of happiness and virtue. Neither is well understood within the tradition of moral philosophy that we philosophers have inherited from the 19^th and earlier 20^th centuries. Because of this, the ancient theories were during that period grotesquely misunderstood by philosophers like Prichard, and it is in the last half-century that interpretations that answer to the texts have been developed in the field of ancient philosophy. At the same time (some wider Zeitgeist was at work, no doubt) contemporary moral philosophers began to rediscover eudaimonism and virtue ethics in the contemporary world. I started to find myself invited to conferences on virtue and happiness as the resident scholar to tell people what Aristotle thought, and I and others started to see how valuable cross-fertilization between ancient and contemporary ethics could be. The rediscovery (after a strange gap of nearly two centuries) of eudaimonism and virtue ethics as illuminating accounts of how we actually think ethically has been the philosophically most exciting development in my lifetime.

A great deal of my intellectual life has been spent interpreting the ancients, probing to find what they thought. There has been a great widening of interest and collapsing of barriers in this field, which is far more lively and rewarding than it was when I began. I also find that in the latter years of my career I am in the middle of a new, fermenting movement which is developing on fronts unimaginable when I was beginning in my career. What more could a philosophers want? I often reflect on how fortunate I am. I’ve lived through a period when virtue ethics has gone from being a joke (among conservative ethical philosophers) to having gained respect (sometimes grudging) in the mainstream of ethics. It does not color within the lines set by conservative ethical traditions which start from duty, obligation and the ‘right-makers’ of right actions, and so is still sometimes dismissed as rudely disruptive of business as usual; this attitude can still be found among meta-ethicists who work within a tradition formed in a period when virtue had sunk to a sub-theoretical level. But this is an advantage for eudaimonism and virtue ethics; we constantly have to refine and defend our basic positions against objections and misunderstandings, and so our debates stay lively; we are not in danger of falling into academic disagreement on minor matters within an agreed framework.

There have been so many ways that virtue ethics and eudaimonism have developed at dizzying speed in the last thirty years that it has taken me some time to work out what I find the most attractive and defensible version. I spent some years working up a book on virtue ethics, only to find myself stalled, until I ditched it and started again on a book on virtue, which emerged in 2011 as Intelligent Virtue. I had slowly realized that anyone needs to work out and defend a particular conception of virtue before being able to develop a virtue ethics. The conception I developed is on the lines of Aristotle’s conception of virtue as a disposition to be active in acting, reasoning and feeling in accordance with the virtues. Every aspect of that claim needs to be spelled out and developed, of course. This is independent of Aristotle’s own theory about the ‘mean’, and of other aspects of his ethics, such as his version of naturalism. I developed this conception of virtue in several ways and sketched out the relations in which it can stand to happiness or flourishing (which, is an issue in itself).

Since then I have been slowly working on various issues in virtue ethics, hoping eventually to be in a position to develop a book. I have been working on the role of virtue in virtue ethics in relation to topics such as learning virtue in terms of ‘thick concepts’; action required by virtue and its relation to duty; the nature of vice and its relation to virtue; how virtue ethics accounts for heroism; and more. There are so many exciting and under-explored areas that I feel really lucky. At the same time I am finishing up a book on virtue and law in Plato’s late work the Laws. Having two such different projects keeps me going, as each is attractive when the other palls, but it’s also true that working on each means that I often feel that neither will get finished.

I’d like to end by pointing out how the modern revival of interest in virtue and virtue ethics has been largely driven by the original contributions of women. Anyone talking about virtue has to mention Elizabeth Anscombe’s pathbreaking article in the 50s pointing out the deficiencies of then modern ethics. Nor can anyone pass over the work of Philippa Foot, or Rosalind Hursthouse. Different, non-Aristotelian versions of virtue and virtue ethics have been developed by Christine Swanton, Linda Zagzebski and Julia Driver. And, although they are not virtue ethicists, I should mention the work that virtue ethicists engage with in Humean studies with Rachel Cohon and Kate Abramson, and in Kantian studies with Christine Korsgaard and Barbara Herman. I am deeply grateful to all of these for their original work which has enabled progress to be made by people like me. Despite all the real bad news about women in philosophy, I am modestly optimistic for the future of women philosophers in the fields I work in, which is another thing to be grateful for.

Helen Beebee is Samuel Hall Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. She has published on topics in metaphysics, primarily on causation, laws and free will; in epistemology; and has a monograph on Hume (Hume on Causation, 2006). She has also written some undergraduate texts: An Introduction to Free Will (2013), Metaphysics: The Key Concepts (2010) with Nikk Effingham and Philip Goff, and Reading Metaphysics (2007) with Julian Dodd. She co-chairs, with Jenny Saul, the British Philosophical Association/Society for Women in Philosophy (UK)’s joint committee for women in philosophy. In their co-chairing role, they co-authored a 2011 report, Women in Philosophy in the UK, and in 2014 launched the BPA/SWIP ‘Good Practice Scheme’, aimed at getting departments, learned societies and journal editors to improve their practices in ways that may encourage more women to stay in the profession. She is one of four Patrons of the Athena Swan Charter in the UK, a national government-sponsored scheme that encourages gender equality in academia.

Many thanks to Meena for inviting me to contribute to, and more importantly for running, this blog. My post is high on sweeping assertions and low on rigour. But, in my defence, I wanted to write about something that really matters to me as someone who self-identifies as a metaphysician. So that’s what I’ve done.

Here’s a feature of the contemporary free will debate that I find deeply puzzling. (This post is mostly going to be about metaphysics more generally, but bear with me.) Libertarianism – the view that (a) we actual human beings act freely at least some of the time but (b) doing so requires that free actions are suitably related to (or just are) events that are not deterministically caused – is a pretty popular view. And yet very few libertarians seem to be interested in actually arguing that the world is, in fact, indeterministic in the required way. (There are exceptions – Helen Steward, in her book A Metaphysics for Freedom, is one – but not many.) Instead, the debate almost entirely revolves around whether libertarianism is a coherent position – or, to put it another way, whether there are possible worlds in which libertarian free will exists.

This is a curious state of affairs, but I think it connects with a broader, and equally curious, state of affairs within metaphysics as a whole, namely the increasingly popular view that metaphysics is (to quote E. J. Lowe) ‘the science of the possible’. The task of metaphysics, Lowe says, is that of ‘charting the domain of objective or real possibility’ (2011, 100). On this view, ‘[a]ll metaphysics is implicitly modal, because it is primarily concerned with kinds of things are possible or compossible, and only subsequently with what kinds of things are actual’ (2011, 106).

We might think of much of the contemporary free will debate as fitting this general mould: what we are primarily interested in, so the thought goes, is figuring out what any possible world has to be like in order for there to be free agents at that world. It is of only secondary interest whether the actual world happens to be such a world. Thus conceived, the debate strikes me as one that has become at least partially unhinged from what is surely the most important question about freedom of the will, namely whether – and in what kinds of circumstance that stand a fighting chance of being actual – it’s something that we are capable of exercising. After all, assuming that freedom of the will underpins moral responsibility, surely it’s much more important to figure out whether and when we exercise it than it is to worry about whether merely possible agents who inhabit possible worlds that might well be very different to our own exercise it.

That point doesn’t generalise in an obvious way to metaphysics more generally. It’s clear (to me anyway) why questions about actual moral responsibility are much more important than questions about merely possible moral responsibility; it’s less clear why we should care more about the metaphysics of the actual than about the ‘science of the possible’. But there are independent reasons, I think, to be sceptical about conceiving metaphysics as the ‘science of the possible’, one of which is the fact that the data on which such a ‘science’ is built consists primarily in modal intuitions: intuitions, for example, about what is and is not part of an object’s essence. David Lewis cautioned us long ago about supposing that questions about essence have determinate answers:

Could Hubert Humphrey have been an angel? A human born to different parents? A human born to different parents in ancient Egypt? A robot? A clever donkey that talks? An ordinary donkey? A poached egg? Given some contextual guidance these questions should have sensible answers. There are ways of representing whereby some worlds represent him as an angel, there are ways of representing where none do. Your problem is that the right way of representing him is determined, or perhaps underdetermined, by context – and I supplied no context. (1986, 251)

If Lewis is right about what he calls ‘modal inconstancy’ – and I think he is – then the ‘science of the possible’ cannot get off the ground.

But imagine that Lewis was just wrong about modal inconstancy. Would that vindicate the use of modal intuitions as data for the science of the possible? Only if we could tell a convincing story about their epistemic credentials. Back in the heyday (or dark days, depending on your point of view) of late-ish 20^th Century Lewisian analytic metaphysics, intuitions generally were normally conceived – and certainly conceived by Lewis himself – as mere elements of our commonsense theory of the world, and their importance derived from the idea that consonance with our commonsense theory constitutes a methodological constraint on metaphysical theorising. (That’s not an unproblematic view, of course.) But times have changed, and intuitions are generally not seen in this light. And so, if consonance with intuitions is to remain a desideratum of an adequate metaphysical theory, we need an account of why they are to be trusted. Thus we have debates about whether intuitions are a priori, or self-justifying, or quasi-perceptual states, and so on. But to think of intuitions in these kinds of ways is to return to just the kind of metaphysics that Hume wanted to see committed to the flames.

Lowe himself advocates just such a return: the ‘dark days’ of metaphysics, he thinks, ‘began with Hume and Kant and lasted until the second half of the twentieth century’ (2011, 108). Well, I myself don’t find those days so unrelentingly dark. Of course, if one conceives metaphysics as Lowe does – as ‘an enquiry into the ultimate nature of mind-independent reality’ (2011, 99), then those days – many of them – were dark. In particular, neither Hume nor Kant thought there was very much that could justifiably – or indeed intelligibly – be said about the ultimate nature of mind-independent reality. So by Lowe’s lights, neither of them was really doing metaphysics at all.

I’d like to think that metaphysics will remain inclusive enough to embrace those of us who have empiricist sympathies, and those of us who are inclined to think – as Lewis thinks in the case of essences – that a great deal of what we are doing in the metaphysics room is not, in fact, penetrating into the ‘ultimate nature of mind-independent reality’ at all. (Metaphysical realism is, after all, a metaphysical thesis, and hence subscription to that view cannot coherently be viewed as a necessary condition for doing metaphysics at all. To deny metaphysical realism, or realism about some specific area of enquiry, is to make a metaphysical claim, and not to stop doing metaphysics all together.) The current direction of travel suggests otherwise.

References

Lewis, D. K. 1986. On the Plurality of Worlds. Blackwell: Oxford

Lowe, E. J. 2011. ‘The rationality of metaphysics’, Synthese, 178: 99-109

Sheridan Hough (Ph.D., Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley) is Professor of Philosophy at the College of Charleston; she has also taught in the Honors College at the University of Houston and served as NEH Professor of the Humanities at Colgate University. Her forthcoming book on Kierkegaard’s existential ontology (Kierkegaard’s Dancing Tax Collector: Faith, Finitude, and Silence), will be published by Oxford University Press in September 2015; she has recently published the novel Mirror’s Fathom, a work that explores the ‘Kierkegaardian self.’ Hough is also the author of Nietzsche’s Noontide Friend: the Self as Metaphoric Double (Pennsylvania State Press, 1997). Her philosophical work has appeared in International Studies in Philosophy, Contemporary Buddhism, The Journal of Social Philosophy, Hypatia, and in several other edited collections, including Feminist Interpretations of David Hume (Penn State Press, 2000).

The Exhausted (First) World: a Plea for 21st-Century Existential Philosophy

Sheridan Hough

Consider: a lecture hall of undergraduates, bored and fidgety (and techne-deprived, since I’ve banned computers and devices in class) in distinctive too-cool-for-school Philosophy 101 style.—Ah, but today will be different: the current offering is not Aristotle on causation, or Cartesian dualism, or Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception—no. Today the reading is from Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and surely these students are eager to talk about the significance (or lack thereof) of our own fragile, brief lives.

With some anticipatory relish, I give them Kierkegaard’s ontology in broad strokes. ‘Kierkegaard,’ I announce, ‘is concerned about one thing: meaningfulness, the meaning of life, your life, materially realized.’ (No sign of interest yet, but I press on.) I remind them that Kierkegaard wants each person to have a substantial commitment, one that gives her or his life purpose and significance; human beings, when they achieve this kind of significance, become selves: a ‘self’ is thus made, not given. And how does this happen? A self is established when a person ‘takes a stand’ (ooh, looking forward to glossing that dead metaphor) on the contradictory dimensions (the ‘finite and the infinite, the temporal, the eternal, possibility and necessity’) that constitute a human being. A person, in order to become a self, must define these factors by way of what Kierkegaard calls an ‘infinite passion’; once this commitment is established, each set of factors is defined by X, by whatever the object of commitment is.

Now the lecture space needs a boost—if I could open a window (there aren’t any, in this auditorium) or wall, I would. But no, so on I go.—How does a commitment like this establish a self? By providing a focus for a person’s material and intellectual/spiritual needs and desires.

Let’s say—for the sake of argument—that my infinite commitment is being a philosopher. So what? Well: instantly my world has contours. My vocation has absolute significance, and I’m no longer free just to do any old thing: when I wake up in the morning I know who I am and what I’m doing. Each choice—what to eat, wear; what activities to pursue, whom to love and how to conduct that love-relationship, where to live, when to travel—each choice is shaped and delimited by my commitment. Now my life makes sense, yes? I am a whole and stable self, and my entire existence is suffused with meaning. Of course—as you’ve surely already anticipated—not every attempt at becoming a self succeeds, and Kierkegaard’s corpus is an account of several such ventures. So: where would you begin?

(At last! Geez. The ‘Kierkegaard basics’ always take longer than I think they will, but here comes the fun, the dessert! The student honey-trap, and I’ll be on hand to help them evaluate their responses) Now for the question: what is it that a human being might initially move towards in an effort to bring her or his existential birthright into harmony? Why, pleasure, yes?

Yes?

Strangely, no one bites. I try again: ‘Think about what it would be like to commit yourself to a life of pleasure—not as an occasional relief, but as a vocation? What would you do? Where would you start? Be specific. If, right now, you made pleasure your infinite passion, what would you do, where would you go, right now?’—Aha! Hands in the air.

Dear Reader: what do you think I hear? Sex, you say? Drugs? Sex and drugs on the beach?

No. Here are the first two responses I got:

‘Lunch.’

‘A Barcalounger and a TV.’

Seriously.

I press them: what kind of lunch? (I wondered if they would approach the fabulous heights of Kierkegaard’s own champagne-soaked aesthetes.) ‘Grilled cheese,’ the student shrugged, ‘you know, comfort food.’

That’s it? And our Barcalounger? ‘Just ready to zone out.’

Indeed. And, lest you think my 101 darlings are somehow more dispirited than the usual hormonally wracked/existentially pumped student (undergraduate and graduate alike), let me tell you that this is a phenomenon I’ve observed over the years, on a number of North American campuses, and it continues to astonish me.

They are exhausted. These children of first world everything, every material good and privilege that humans have wrought, fashioned and fought for over millennia, are simply tired of the whole thing.

What does this mean?

It means, in part, that Kierkegaard’s diagnosis of our age (originally of his ‘early 19^th-Century backwater of Europe’ age, but plus ça change…) is correct: we are failing to think in the right way about the demands of subjectivity, and indeed what it is to be a subject.

Trained as we are to occupy the objective mode, to quantify, analyze and measure—how much bandwidth? Number of gigabytes? Points scored in the debate? Jelly beans in the jar, or dollars in the bank account?—we forget that all of these facts, the torrent of Googled information ever exponentially increasing, are meant to mean, or to be, something for us. More to the point: something for you, or for me.

Evidently, we need some help in knowing ourselves (to crib a line), or with coming to terms with what it is to be a self. One of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms,

Anti-Climacus, describes a person who ‘lives fairly well’, has a family and a good job, is in all respects honored and esteemed—and yet no one detects that he lacks a ‘self’.

Anti-Climacus trenchantly concludes, ‘The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed.’

We might observe that the students in the existential ‘check-out’ line are in a different condition from this redoubtable, yet empty, human being: they aren’t even aroused by the prospect of taking up the gleaming mantles of propriety and esteem—those letters after the name! The corner office and the elaborate business card! Oh, they will do all of it, of course, but the point of their activity, any of it, except for indolent repose, has gone missing: their subjective condition is not fully functioning. (And, lest you think this is a particularly undergraduate malaise, I’ve met many graduate students, grinding out journal-fodder with an eye to publication and advancement, who are just as disconnected from the meaning of the work they do).

Hence Kierkegaard’s often misunderstood, generally misquoted notion of ‘truth is subjectivity’—which does not mean, as someone once said to me at a faculty party, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s just saying that if you think it’s true then it’s true for you, right?’ Not right. (As if the clause ‘true for you’ had any epistemic purchase at all.) In fact, Kierkegaard is merely amplifying the ancient Socratic dictum that there is an absolute, incontrovertible difference between orthê doxa, correct opinion, and epistêmê, knowledge. Two persons holding the same belief can’t be distinguished on the basis of, say, an utterance; both will claim ‘X.’ The difference between the two is how the belief is held. A merely true belief is unreliable, not located in a network of relevant justified true beliefs. Rote memorization and the mastery of abstruse technical jargon can offer up a series of truths, but the person giving the recitation doesn’t necessarily understand what it is that she or he is saying. Knowledge, of course, is a true belief that is held in the right way, standing in the proper relation to other pieces of knowledge; it can be accounted for, and recognized when approached from multiple epistemic perspectives.

Now the issue is clear: merely holding, and espousing, a true belief is not necessarily to be in the right relation to that truth. Our students utter all manner of truths, but they often seem delivered as materiel stolen from a construction site: here’s a couple of worthy boards, there’s a bag of nails, and what’s it all about, anyway? Another of Kierkegaard’s voices, Johannes Climacus, provides a trenchant example of a just such a subjectively-deficient truth claimant: he imagines a madman who has escaped from an asylum. Of course, the madman doesn’t want to be captured and taken back: what to do? He must convince everyone around him that he is in fact sane, and how better to do this than to speak the objective truth? He finds a ‘skittle ball’ on the ground, and he secures it in the hem of his coat, vowing to utter a true sentence every time it bumps his bottom. What does he choose? ‘Boom! The world is round.’ He visits friends in order to convince them of his renewed sanity and paces the floor, uttering this sentence at each posterior prompt.

But surely the earth is round?

Of course it is: the fault of the madman’s recitation doesn’t lie in the truth of the utterance, but in his relation to it. His objectively true remark is subjectively empty, an incantation to ward off the asylum supervisor, not a meaningful remark about the world through which he moves.

‘Truth is subjectivity’ is thus, in part, a meditation on the way in which a truth is held. And indeed, those who teach—any subject at all, but particularly philosophy—have an intersubjective obligation to underscore not only why the lesson at hand is important to understand, but how each student should consider what that text, or argument, or historical account, might mean particularly for them. The task of education is not (again, borrowing from Socrates) to pour external facts and claims down their willing (or un) gullets, but to set a challenge, that of developing what Kierkegaard calls ‘interiority,’ the aduton or sanctuary that is an established self, one committed to a task in the world.

Or: getting a life, you might say.

This commentary is not a plea for the wider teaching of existential and/or phenomenological texts (although of course that can’t hurt), nor am I privileging the so-called ‘Continental’ texts and methods over those used by my sister (and brother) philosophers. The Kierkegaardian question of subjectivity should lie at the heart of —dare I say it?—every philosophical project. From social justice to Bayesian epistemology, it does matter how the student (and the instructor) relate to, and inhabit, the arguments and explanations that they explore: not simply a matter of ‘what does it mean? But ‘what does it mean for me?’—And, in case this sounds hopelessly ‘subjective,’ please note that the point of locating oneself in a project, and in a view of the world, is to go forth and do something with it, and about it—to write essays, organize protests, demand economic reforms, to join a struggle (intellectual or physical), to be present in one’s own life: in fact, to own up to, and to own, that existence.

Back to the lecture hall: I try once more to peddle the life of pleasure—that first and ultimately hopeless attempt in the Kierkegaardian quest for selfhood—and ask the question again. One of them sits forward to ask: ‘what do you mean by “defined by”? You mean that would be my identity?’

Right on. Seeing that human beings have, and are responsible for, an identity—ethical, sexual, religious, racial, political—is a good place to start the subjective conversation.

Helen Daly is an assistant professor of philosophy at Colorado College. She works in the philosophy of language and metaphysics, largely in the analytic tradition, but has broad research interests including the philosophy of religion, artificial intelligence, and feminism. That breadth is a consequence of her interest in applied philosophy generally. You can find her recent essay, “Sex, Vagueness, and the Olympics” at Hypatia, and an interview about her sex/gender model (from RoME, 2015) here. She completed her PhD at the University of Arizona in 2011.

A Model for Sex/Gender

Helen Daly

Thanks, Meena, for the invitation to write about my current research.

I have been thinking lately about the ways people talk about sex and gender. There is an interesting problem here because the ways we categorize ourselves and others by sex/gender[1] seem invariably to exclude or offend some people. For example, there seems to be no good way to define ‘trans women’ (or ‘women’ simpliciter, including trans women) without at the same time endorsing some kind of essentialism about sex/gender categories.[2] The result is that the available definitions are offensive either to trans women or to some gender atypical cis women.

Let me give a more concrete example. If I am challenged to justify my belief that I am a woman, I will try to give reasons for my belief. But if I mention any particular feature as evidence, I thereby imply that that feature is a central or definitive part of what it is to be a woman. Trans women are routinely challenged in just this way. If their answer seems to define womanhood (which can’t help but exclude some women), then it is offensive and mistaken. If a trans woman doesn’t answer, though, her identity is likely to be denied by others. It is an impossible position.

One sort of solution is to deny that sex/gender categories have any significance at all. Maybe they are misguided notions that we would all be better off without. But I think we cannot even work to remedy the different ways that sexism hinders women and men, or the special challenges that face trans people, if we reject those categories entirely and refuse to use the words that stand for them. You cannot even refer to an injustice against women, much less organize a response to it, if you lack the words to describe which people are discriminated against. So I want to keep words like ‘man’ and ‘woman’ until these problems are solved, which could be a while.[3]

The challenge, then, is to find meanings of those words and extensions of those categories that do the work we need them to do.[4]

What work is that? It depends. Sometimes, we categorize people by sex/gender for no good reason. We could stop doing that without any loss. Other times, we categorize people by sex/gender because we want to better understand our world or because we want to advance the interests of an oppressed group. For instance, public service announcements about heart attacks should describe common symptoms for all people, rather than just common symptoms for men. That requires research on different categories of people, divided according to some sex/gender characteristics. We also categorize by sex/gender in deciding who may have access to something intended just for women or just for men, such as a women’s college or a boy’s high school. In each case, there is some specific work that sex/gender words and categories need to do.

I think the best answer to the challenge is to sidestep the semantic and metaphysical questions (What does ‘woman’ mean? What is a woman?). I propose instead that we use a flexible “model” of sex/gender to give our sex/gender terms specific, useful meanings that vary appropriately from one context to the next.[5] There are a few different ways people ordinarily conceptualize sex/gender, that is, a few standard models already in use. But I’m working on a new one that I think is quite a lot better. I’ll briefly describe the most common models I’ve noticed in ordinary use, and then my own “many strands” model.

Most people right now think of sex/gender as “binary.” That is, the words ‘men’ and ‘women’ are thought to refer to two exclusive and exhaustive categories. Some people object that there are more than two categories, for example: ‘men’, ‘women’ and ‘nonbinary gender queer’. Call that the “discrete categories” model. Others conceive of sex/gender as a sort of continuous “spectrum” between maleness and femaleness. I think each model gets something right, but they each also get something importantly wrong.

My “Many Strands” model represents sex/gender as a collection of spectra, one for each (contextually) relevant feature, such as: how you dress, how you think of yourself, how others think of you, your gender socialization, or what physical sex characteristics you have. None of those aspects of a person is necessarily relevant to a person’s sex/gender, but each of them may be relevant in some context. And people can vary continuously along each spectrum, sometimes independently of how they vary along the others. This captures how people can be very masculine in one way and very feminine in another, and how a trait sometimes matters for sex/gender categorization and sometimes doesn’t.

So the Many Strands model, like the “spectrum” model, represents sex/gender as varying continuously, but it has more nuance than the spectrum model manages. It also allows for the division of people into categories when needed, like the “discrete categories” model, but the Many Strands model requires different categories in different contexts. In these ways, it provides an outline for organizing our ideas about sex/gender, but requires that we work out the detail by reflecting on what aspects of sex/gender are relevant to the question at hand.

I want to be clear that I am not abandoning the possibility that there really are men and women, or that someone may work out the correct metaphysical theory about them. (Excellent research on this issue, for example, by Ásta Sveinsdóttir and Charlotte Witt, gives us reason to be optimistic.) But we don’t have a widely accepted metaphysics of sex/gender yet, and even when we do, it may be that our practical decisions are best addressed through a flexible model of sex/gender rather than the context-invariant categories metaphysics demands.

We need not definitively answer “What is a woman?” in order to make principled decisions about who should be included or excluded from something meant for women (a school, a restroom, an athletic competition, etc.) or who should be included in a particular medical experiment. What we do need is a way of thinking about sex/gender that will help us make wise choices about the sex/gender conflicts of our day, and that will help us justify and explain those choices to others. That’s the work I hope my model will do.

[1] The expression ‘sex/gender’ refers to everything that ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ do, but without implying that there is a clear, unproblematic distinction between the two.

[2] See here and here for popular essays that express this difficulty, and see here and here for thought-provoking criticisms of those essays.

[3] A comparable problem arises for the elimination of racial categorization. Without research that explicitly includes racial categorization, it would be very hard to demonstrate the prevalence of racial discrimination, or to build effective responses to it. This, I take it, is one problem with the strategy of those who “just don’t see race.”

[4] This challenge might be classified as an instance of what Sally Haslanger calls “ameliorative conceptual analysis” in her essay “What are we talking about? The semantics and politics of social kinds” (Hypatia 2005).

[5] Why “models” rather than just “concepts”? Conceptual analysis typically demands context-invariant results, but here we particularly want context-sensitivity to inform our analysis. Just as a scientific model represents only the details that are relevant to the project at hand, a sex/gender model can organize our thinking without dictating that any features are essential to women or men across all contexts.

Lisa Herzog is a postdoc at the Cluster “Normative Order” and the Institut für Sozialforschung, Goethe University, Frankfurt. She has published Inventing the Market. Smith, Hegel, and Political Theory (Oxford University Press 2013) and edited Hegel’s Thought in Europe. Currents, Crosscurrents, Undercurrents (Palgrave, 2013). She works on questions of economic justice, writing both in German and English. Her current focus is on ethics in finance and ethics in organizations. 

Ethics for “cogs in the wheel” – theorizing organizations

Lisa Herzog

Thanks, Meena, for maintaining this blog and for inviting me to be part of it. In an age of fragmented knowledge, it is a wonderful place for exchanging ideas and building solidarity – this is a topic to which I’ll come back below.

I’m an economist and philosopher by training, and I’ve spent the first years of my academic career exploring questions about economic justice and markets. While doing so, I realized that many moral ills that are imputed to markets have to do at least as much with the fact that in markets, but also in many parts of the public sphere, individuals act not as private citizens, but as members of large organizations – as the infamous “cog in the wheel”. Philosophers have long neglected questions about organizations, probably because they fall in between moral and political philosophy. But there are many fascinating and important questions to be asked about moral agency in organizations: for example, what should one do if organizational rules do injustice to individual cases? What responsibility for the organizational culture do individuals have, and how does it matter for morality? How can individuals make a positive difference in preventing organizational evil, as “transformational agents” who insist on basic moral norms in contexts in which organizational imperatives threaten to override them?

The book project in which I address these and other questions is provisionally entitled “Reclaiming the systems. Moral agency in organizations”, and it attempts to analyze various mechanisms that turn groups of human beings who work together into “systems” that seem to follow a logic of their own, lacking any responsiveness to moral questions. Habermas famously warned against the “colonization of the lifeworld by the system”, and in a sense, I ask what it would take to re-colonialize the system, by reinserting basic moral standards from the lifeworld into it.

When I started working on this project, I read a lot of social psychology and organizational theory. But this literature did not quite give me what I wanted: a real understanding, from the inside, of what it means to work in an organization. So I started doing a series of qualitative interviews with practitioners. Many of them turned into long and deep conversations: about the moral questions my interviewees encountered in their job, about power and powerlessness, about the joys of work and structural inequities. In my book, I draw on some of these stories to illustrate the various dimensions of organizational life that I discuss.

Let me give you an example. Several of my interviewees told me about cases in which they faced moral questions that had to do with the distribution of knowledge in organizations. Should they reveal a piece of information although it might hurt them to do so? Did they have a duty to go the extra mile if a colleague was sloppy in handling information, but something morally important – for example the successful treatment of a patient in a hospital – was at stake? I started to systematically analyze the ways in which knowledge is handled in organizations, and the moral questions it raises. Organizations are spaces of divided labor, which means that gaps in the transmission of knowledge can have grave moral consequences. But their structures militate against the disinterestedness and open-mindedness that we need in order to process knowledge well: they are marred by conflicts of interests that invite secrecy, and by hierarchical power structures that distort the transmission of knowledge: “the boss only gets the good news”. The imperative to prevent morally relevant knowledge gaps mostly holds for those who are in positions of power: they need to make sure that everyone can speak up and is heard, no matter where they stand in the hierarchy.

These issues relate to the topic of epistemic injustices that Miranda Fricker has recently analyzed. It can be deeply insulting for individuals not to be taken seriously as bearers of knowledge. In organizations, one can often find epistemic discriminations along lines of gender or race, as Fricker has described them. But in addition, the very structures of organizations create new forms of epistemic inequality, at least in society that lack perfectly just background structures: some people have the power to refuse to listen to others or to believe them, whereas others have to remain silent. One interviewee, let’s call him Henry, told me how upset he was when his boss asked him to analyze the technical feasibility of a new production process. Time was scarce, so he volunteered to do it overnight. He reported back to his boss the next morning, explaining that the process would not work. His boss, however, did not believe him, without any good reason: he wanted the process to work, and he suspected Henry of exaggerating the problems in order not to have to take on a new project. Henry felt deeply insulted; so much that he still remembered that conversation years later! But his boss did not do himself a favor either: with insufficient knowledge about the technical details, he ran the risk of making wrong decisions. Henry and his boss depended on one another for making the right decision, and both probably also depended on many other individuals in the organization who could contribute other pieces of information to the decision-making process.

Thus, what is at stake is, in a sense, the very question of what it means to be a moral agent when we “act” in contexts in which we only have fragmented knowledge. Individuals and organizations need to cooperate to overcome this problem. They have to put in place structures in which knowledge gaps are prevented. But formal structures are likely to be insufficient: controllers can be bought off, IT systems can be manipulated, and books can be cooked – as I gathered from the stories some interviewees told me, human creativity is without limits when it comes to these things. If what is at stake is your own job, it can be quite tempting to use such strategies, failing to take into account the wider repercussions they might have. Therefore, organizations also need to build an atmosphere of trust in which relevant knowledge – and especially morally relevant knowledge – can be shared and the dignity of individuals as bearers of knowledge is honored. Various pieces of empirical evidence suggest that a good “epistemic culture” is very much a question of reciprocity: if individuals are treated with fairness and respect, and relevant information is shared with them, they are in turn willing to share knowledge with others. Disrespect or unfairness, in contrast, lead to distrust, and probably also to self-reinforcing processes of decline with regard to the epistemic culture of an organization.

Arguably, the problems of knowledge I analyzed in the context of organizations are not limited to them. We live in a world in which huge amounts of knowledge are available, but they are fragmented, and often they are intertwined with economic and political interests. The danger of falling into epistemic “silos”, communicating only with those who share the same premises, is real. But we cannot solve the social problems that mar our societies if we stop talking to another, in open, honest conversations across disciplinary, professional, and class-based boundaries.

We need an ethos of knowledge that resists corruption by narrow-minded interests and that acknowledges the limitations of each particular perspective. And we need forums for open-minded dialogue, across the various lines that divide us. I sometimes have the hope that philosophy could, among other things, be such a forum. The changes in recent years – towards more diversity, towards more interdisciplinarity, towards real-life questions – have certainly brought it closer to that ideal.

Blogs like philosop-her help to spread the word about the fascinating research people do, and build an awareness of the contribution philosophy, at its best, can make. This awareness can be the basis for solidarity in the fight not only against our own pessimism and anxieties (which I know all too well), but also against apathy, ignorance, and injustice. So let me close by thanking Meena again for making this possible!

Kimberley Brownlee is an Associate Professor of Moral and Legal Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Previously, she was a Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester.  Her current work focuses on the ethics of sociability, social human rights, and freedom of association. This work includes a monograph (under contract with OUP) and a series of articles (including in Utilitas; Oxford Journal of Legal Studies; and Philosophical Quarterly). She also has written on conscience, conviction, and civil disobedience; punishment; ideals and virtue; and human rights. She is the author of Conscience and Conviction: The Case for Civil Disobedience (OUP 2012).

The Ethics of Sociability

Kimberley Brownlee

Aristotle said that ‘…without friends, no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods…’ (Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII).

Aristotle was talking not just about close friendships as we understand them now, but also about all of our stable, non-antagonistic connections with people. A growing body of evidence in psychology and neuroscience now backs him up by showing that we are deeply social creatures for whom living in close proximity with other people is an ineluctable part of a decent human life (Baumeister et al 1995; Seligman 2011).

Studies indicate that social isolation and loneliness are highly detrimental to our health since they trigger the same ‘fight of flight’ response that we experience when we feel pain, thirst, hunger, or fear. Chronic acute loneliness is linked to a range of health risks such as obesity, disrupted sleep, diminished immunity, depression, reduced capacity for independent living, alcoholism, suicide, and mortality in older people (Harris et al 2013; Ladd et al 2013; Cacioppo et al 2008; Decety et al 2011; Qualter et al 2013).

Yet, surprisingly, our fundamental social needs are not much discussed in contemporary analytic philosophy. In debates about human rights, social needs tend to be subsumed under economic-welfare needs for shelter, water, food, health, and education. In debates about flourishing, social interests tend to be subsumed under broader notions of wellbeing.

By contrast, in public debates, our social needs are gaining traction as we come to grips with the fact that our populations are aging and we have individualistic policy frameworks that distance us from each other. Many governments are acutely aware of the growing numbers of socially isolated elderly people, who have been described by one politician as the ‘forgotten million’ (Hunt 2013).

My current project focuses on what our deeply social nature means for morality and politics. I am interested in understanding what value we should place on each person being socially included (or having genuine opportunities to be socially included). I am also interested in what social rights we have (Brownlee 2013). Additionally, I’m interested in the limits that our social rights put on our widely accepted freedom to associate or not with whom we please (Brownlee 2015a, 2015b). Finally, I’m interested in the distinctive virtues in being sociable.

As these issues suggest, the ethics of sociability has implications for human rights theory, political theory, policy-making, legal philosophy, practical ethics, and personal morality. In particular, it raises questions about:

1. whether we can ever permissibly use isolated confinement in prisons, immigration facilities, or hospitals;
2. whether we have duties to remove the barriers to democratic participation generated by social isolation;
3. whether theories of justice are inadequate if they don’t recognise that equality of opportunity depends on certain social pre-conditions.

One of my main claims to this point is that we have a fundamental human right against social deprivation (Brownlee 2013). By this, I mean we have a right not to be denied minimally adequate access to decent human contact. We have rights not to be severely neglected when we cannot access social contact without help; rights not to be coercively denied all social contact; and rights not to endure horrific social conditions. The person who is locked up in solitary confinement is abjectly dependent and radically socially deprived. The person who is chronically acutely lonely, unable to seek social contact without help, and left unassisted is also socially deprived. The person who is grossly mistreated by her primary associates and cannot leave her environment (which is the case in many ordinary prison settings) is socially deprived since she lacks minimally adequate access to decent human contact (Brownlee 2012). All of these cases involve breaches of social human rights.

I’ve discovered by presenting this material to different audiences that it generates vastly different responses from people. Many people accept that our social needs are important and that philosophers should analyse the concepts and normative implications of sociability. But, some people are disconcerted by these themes, with one or two going so far as to call the project ‘creepy’. Some people worry that caring about social needs means we all have to be friends with everyone. The short answer is ‘no’, but the longer project aims to show that our social needs are as fundamentally important as our personal freedoms and, indeed, are pre-conditions for us to exercise personal freedom.

References 

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (various editions).

Baumeister, R. et al (1995), ‘The Need to Belong’, Psychological Bulletin, 117, 497-529.

Brownlee, K. (2015a), ‘Ethical Dilemmas of Sociability’, Utilitas, doi:10.1017/S0953820815000175.

Brownlee, K. (2015b), ‘Freedom of Association: It’s Not What You Think’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 35: 2, 267-282.

Brownlee, K. (2013), ‘A Human Right against Social Deprivation’, Philosophical Quarterly, 63: 251, 199-222.

Brownlee, K., (2012), ‘Social Deprivation and Criminal Justice’ in Canadian Perspectives on the Philosophy of Criminal Law. François Tanguay-Renaud and James Stribopoulos (eds.) Oxford: Hart.

Cacioppo, J. T. et al (2008), Loneliness. W. W. Norton & Company.

Decety, J. et al (2011), Handbook of Social Neuroscience. Oxford.

Gawande, A. (2009), ‘Hellhole’, New Yorker, 30 March 2009.

Hunt, J. (2013), ‘The Forgotten Million’, Speech at the NCAS Conference, 18 October 2013: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-forgotten-million

Ladd, G.W. et al (2013), ‘Peer-related loneliness across early to late adolescence: Normative trends, intra-individual trajectories, and links with depressive symptoms’, Journal of Adolescence, 36, 1269–1282.

Qualter, P. et al (2013), ‘Trajectories of Loneliness during Childhood and Adolescence: Predictors and health outcomes’, The Journal of Adolescence: Special Issue on Loneliness, 36, 1283-1293.

Seligman, M. (2011) Flourish. Random House.