I know semantic externalism is a symptom, not a cause, but grrr ...

Depressing: that this post on the importance of seeing human experience in all its glorious particularity has already, by comment three, served as a pointed example of how doggedly we insist on processing all new information through a set of transparently inadequate categories.

That book sounds fascinating, though. Even if it isn't the Buffy-verse backstory I'd originally assumed.

Maximization and the supererogatory

Charles Johnson, in a thoughtful Comment to my last post, suggests that the demandingness objection to consequentialism is really about making conceptual room for the supererogatory. And I think that's probably right, but I'm still not convinced by it. I freely concede that maximization can't allow for supererogation at the fundamental level of moral ontology, but I actually see this as something of a feature, not a bug.

I think that supererogation is on a par with virtue and duty--a pervasive feature of a moral landscape that reflects, not a basic moral property, but the intersection of the unqualified (and maximizing) moral 'ought' with the limitations of the imperfect human frame. Virtues are character traits likely to reliably bring about the good; duties arise when maximization is itself a self-defeating approach to the good; and supererogation reflects a complicated mix of factors involving human sociability and fragility.

Our twin needs for self-respect and for the esteem of others--to be able to hold our heads up in public, to echo a concern of Pettit's--require us to differentiate the morally required from both the legally/institutionally required and from the morally desirable. These needs help us place sensible dividing lines between bad and forbidden, good and required; they help us translate this continuous line of valuations into something that can properly guide actions. We need to be able to see our lives as narratives with meaning, and we need to see and by seen by others as more than moral failures. But this no more goes against maximizing consequentialism than Bentham's acknowledgment that only certain bad acts merited legal sanction betrayed utilitarianism.

In short, supererogation has more to do with moral psychology than it does with moral ontology; and that is precisely why the example of Christ on the cross is misleading. As Johnson notes, supererogation makes no sense for an all-powerful, all-knowing being; but a theory like mine wouldn't expect it to.

That said, the original post was a bit of half-assed speculation about just why philosophers take the demandingness objection so seriously--and since Johnson's example suggests a Christian upbringing might encourage one to make room for the supererogatory as a foundational moral property, I suppose it tells against my suggestion.

Consequentialism and the demandingness objection

The demandingness objection against consequentialism--that, since it bases the right on maximizing the good, it demands perfection from moral agents--has never struck me as being all that problematic. Indeed, I'm rather puzzled that so many find it a reductio; what's so weird about the claim that you should always do better?

Wild speculation: perhaps there's some connection here with the prevalence of atheism among philosophers. After all, if you grow up taking Romans 3:23 seriously ("For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God"), demandingness is exactly what one ought to expect from a moral theory. Hrmmm--are ex-Catholics more likely than others to be consequentialists?

Agency, akrasia, and Velleman

I've been reading a bit about practical rationality and reasons for action, and find David Velleman's theory quite interesting (see here, esp. chapter 3). But here's something curious: apparently both Velleman and I take it to be an advantage of his theory that it provides a plausible explanation for akrasia (weakness of will)--and yet we seem to have diametrically opposed beliefs about what exactly this explanation is.

Now, this probably just means that I've misunderstood his view, but, A, I find my interpretation independently interesting, and B, this is my blog, so there.

So. Briefly, Velleman's view of agency is that it consists in being guided by a motivation towards self-understanding, a motive that is constitutive of agency and hence inescapable. He likens it, persuasively, to a particular sort of improv: improvising the role of oneself, where a bad performance, an inauthentic performance, is one that fails to make sense. (Making sense is here cashed out in either a folk-psychologic or narrative sense.)

Now, he's not claiming that this motive dominates all others, merely that it exists and is an essential aspect of agency itself, and hence guides the formation and regulation of our other motivations. It plays the functional role of selfhood, basically.

How does this explain akrasia? Well, it seems like--at least in an earlier work--he sees the virtue of his explanation to lie in demonstrating the genuine agency of the akratic actor. He seems to be saying that akratic actions are those in which either the motive of self-understanding correctly overrides mistaken beliefs about what reasons there are, or the proper weighting of them, or correctly refrains from action, despite being aware of the right thing to do, because the awareness doesn't here constitute a full grasping of how the action fits into the agent's self-narrative.

My objection to this story, put simply, is that it makes akrasia sound okay. But it's not okay; it's awful--and if there's one thing I'm intimately familiar with, it's the phenomenology of akrasia. Under this reading, it seems like what's gone wrong isn't the "will" at all, which is doing fine; it's rather that the belief subsystem hasn't quite caught up to it. And this seems to utterly miss what's so disturbing about the phenomenon.

When I first read Ch. 3 of his manuscript, though, I felt it invited a dramatically different interpretation, one much more attuned to its tragic aspect. On this reading, is not that what the motive of self-understanding grasps has come apart from what the agent believes to be justified, or even to make the most sense. On the contrary--the problem is that the motive of self-understanding, while active, is simply too weak to enforce a coherent narrative. The akratic action may be undertaken while under the influence of that motive while remaining out of step with its demands. As a result the agent feels torn between his self-understanding as someone whose actions are under conscious control and his self-understanding as someone who doesn't do whatever it is he just, akratically, did.

On this interpretation, akrasia is worse that mere non-agency; it's an active subversion of agency, because it engages with the agent's self-understanding while undermining the narrative whose construction is its entire aim.

(I think a similar analysis helps illuminate one aspect of what's so awful about extreme depression.)

Placeholder.

Some unfinished thoughts with respect to authority, conventionalism, or something entirely different.

(Think Elsterian precommitment.)

Thoughts on Hayekian liberty and democracy

Some scattered thoughts, while rereading The Constitution of Liberty:

I'm not very surprised by how close he is here to something like Pettit's republicanism. But I am surprised by the similarities between his view of law's generality and Rousseau's. (This is what comes of having a terrible memory, and even worse note-taking habits.)

Now, Hayek focuses on the formal (abstractness, generality) rather than procedural (mode of enactment) aspects of law ... mostly. But in his Chapter 10 discussion of law and coercion, he comes quite close to Rousseau's insistence on law's double generality. For Rousseau (Social Contract II.6), only norms that are willed by the people as a unified whole and applied to the people as a unified whole may be properly considered laws. Laws can have differentiated effects, and even establish separate groups of citizens, but only if the people wills it as a general, undifferentiated whole. This doesn't mean unanimity, but it does require an absence of faction.

So, too, with Hayek: "There may be rules that can apply only to women or to the blind," and this is inevitable, since "only a woman, for example, can be raped or got with child" (154). But what would keep laws touching on such matters from being arbitrary would be their status as "equally recognized as justified by those inside and those outside the group." As with Rousseau, this doesn't mean unanimity but rather a sort of anti-factionalism.

Hayek acknowledges this debt explicitly in a later section (194). But what I find interesting is that he doesn't do much with the procedural side of things; indeed, he's at pains to argue that liberalism has only a limited, instrumental connection to democracy (ch. 7). And in chapter 1, he insists that the "political freedom" of self-government is quite distinct from liberty proper, and represents the metaphorical extension of the latter concept to collectivities (a "free people," etc.).

But even the most expansive versions of political liberty (institutionalizing the equality of political power, let's say) are implicated in Hayek's anticoercion--this is what I take to be the moral of Rousseau's double generality. The negative argument is straightforward: if a new law is passed that only a minority recognizes as justified, each individual of the majority has reason to feel that it is thereby being made subject to another's arbitrary will, insofar as a 'minority rules' decision procedure implies some degree of differentiated status that falls afoul of the 'arbitrariness' criterion. Supermajoritarianism presents analogous, though less severe, difficulties. In the easiest case, the status quo bias implicit in supermajoritarian decision rules might be seen as benefitting a discrete set of persons and lasting only through their efforts, in which case it represents the enforcement of their arbitrary will. Even if this isn't true, however--even if opposition to the status quo takes the form of cross-cutting majoritarian coalitions--the individuals within those coalitions will have reason to feel that they are subject to the arbitrary will of the governing coalitions of the past.

Obviously no one can make a complaint on these grounds who simultaneously wishes to enact a law that would, by his own lights, count as furthering oppression. But as Jeremy Waldron insists, questions of authority go precisely to cases when we disagree about matters of justice and liberty; and the liberal who finds his anti-oppression law frustrated by supermajoritarian decision-rules has a legitimate complaint on procedure, not merely substance--a complaint his opponents should acknowledge as well-founded insofar as they too consider themselves liberals.

Best. Originalism. Article. Ever.

I'm sure you're all eager to hear my thoughts on Mitchell Berman's "Originalism Is Bunk" article. So here they are:

1. This is awesome. He gets everything right. Best. Originalism article. Ever.
2. Damn. Damn, damn, damn. So much for my writing the definitive refutation of conceptual originalism. Curse you, Mitchell Berman.

There's more to say, of course--Larry Solum has yet to concede defeat, so the fight must go on--but I really do think Berman has thoroughly refuted the extant "hard" originalist claims. To respond, originalists will need to articulate and defend an account of conceptual content sophisticated enough to deal with the fact the disagreement over the nature of constitutionalism and constitutional law extends all the way down when elaborated at any level of specificity. And this they have yet to do.

This, I think, has to be the next step. Perhaps pragmatic inferentialism will have a large part to play here; perhaps not. But, like Berman, I suspect "strong originalism" will lose its attractiveness as a interpretive theory.