"KFC is obviously inferior chicken. It's plausible that some people would actually like KFC more... but I can't imagine it."
I don't like chicken except for processed chicken tenders/strips/nuggets. That being said, my experience with KFC is mixed.

Well have you ever had real southern fried chicken? It's so unbelievable compared to KFC etc. I actually never had Popeye's until I was 20 and living in New York for a bit. The yankees kept yammering on about how it was "sooooo good." I had it and told them it was only a notch above KFC and not in the same league as the real stuff.

NOTE: I’m writing this out quickly while trying to be thorough, so it might be more technical than my normal writing and may not be totally clear. Just ask about the parts you don’t get and I’ll elaborate.

Phlogiston, the humanist moral perspective is incompatible with the claim that “I should do whatever is best for me” to the extent that the “best for me” is meant in the self-regarding sense – it is built on the idea that there can be legitimate claims against self-regarding benefit-maximizing behavior. Does that help at all, or does it make things more confusing?

I’m not sure why you say that I didn’t address the benefits of being a humanistic moralist…most of the final section was spent doing just that. You are correct that I didn’t address the possibility that there are better moral systems than humanism for my purposes, but I don’t know of any that would be. If you can think of one, I’ll be glad to consider it!

I wish I knew what the Dumbo’s magic feather argument was…


TEM, the reason that it’s more effective to adopt the perspective than to try to determine the outputs of the system through reflection is that when you adopt it, it works without you needing to think much about it. You just think about a child being beaten and you know how you feel about it. Your attitude will match your intuitions and feelings. If you adopt a different map – anti-humanism, for example – you’ll be constantly facing cognitive dissonance; you’ll feel that something is horribly wrong and ought to be stopped, but you’ll force yourself to accept that it’s just your weak “all too human” constitution, and that there’s really nothing wrong with it.

On the issue of friendships, I think this example from Schmidtz’s discussion of utilitarianism in Elements might be useful (171):

Quote:

Unconstrained maximizers, by definition, optimally use any resources to which they have access, including their neighbors’ organs. To get good results in the real world, though, we need to be surrounded not by unconstrained maximizers but by people who respect rights, thereby enabling us to have a system of expectations and trust, which allows us together to transform our world into a world with greater potential (a world where delivery companies are willing to serve the hospital [because they don’t fear that their delivery men will be killed in order to harvest their organs for needy patients]). When we cannot count on others to treat us as rights-bearers with separate lives, we are living in a world of lesser potential.

He continues (173):

Quote:

When doctors embrace a prohibition against harvesting organs of healthy patients without consent, doctors give up opportunities to optimize – to hit the ceiling [of possible utility outcomes] – but patients gain opportunities to visit doctors safely. They gain a world with a higher ceiling. Such utility comes from doctors refusing even to ask whether murdering a patient would be optimal.

Since Gauthier’s highly visible failure in Morals by Agreement, I think it’s been pretty clear that there’s no non-moralistic way to ground defection avoidance in game theoretic situations where the benefits of defection in the individual circumstance really does appear to outweigh the potential costs, even with all things considered. You can therefore seek an enforceable contract, or you can find someone whose attitude suggests that they will either not consider defecting or be predisposed to value cooperating for the sake of upholding some valued commitment. Since an enforceable contract seems out of the question here, and since it would be naïve to think that people wouldn’t consider defecting, it seems to me that commitment is the only thing that will work. But without morals, I don’t see how you can get that kind of commitment; it’s simply irrational.

As for moral philosophy, I study morality for the purpose of doing political philosophy, not for its own sake. It’s important for me to understand the nature of my premises, the kinds of sensitivities that adopting those premises will produce for my work in political philosophy. But I certainly won’t try to argue that you are morally obligated to pursue moral philosophy; do whatever you want. I found writing that post rewarding.


Vichy, moral theorizing can be good when the moral theory is a tool. If it’s a claim about the true metaphysical nature of morals, then…well…that’s dumb.

I was talking about how you didn't address how it and NO other moral philosophies addressed it. You had made the point that only if your philosophy and NOT others could perform the functions you pointed out, would it be "wise" to adopt it. I pointed to how "Born Again" performs that function as well. Its not a refutation but a point that must be addressed.
Very good moral skeptic form - the question of epistemilogical access to consequentialist when engaging in fictionalism, and contrast with alternative propositions - almost unanswerable, I think, since it relies on complex empirical information that basically nobody knows.

Yet not proven or thought unknowable.

Until I read and not skim your blog, I forego any more talk. If you prove or find the above knowable it will be worth reading your blog. I will probably find it worth while anyway.

Vichy, I know you said that you were diagnosed as having Asperger's Syndrome. That does not seem right to me, though. What I have found in your exchange with Danny seems finely and subtly attuned socially to him as a dialoguist and as a psychological entity as well as a philosopher .
Perhaps, but Danny and I share similar interests as well as some background. Since Danny does expect anything (in particular) from me, it's pretty easy to get along with him.

I've read some stuff about Asperger's, but I've also known some Asperger's children--and I just don't see it. Are you sure you fit into this-- admittedly broad-- category?
Yes, I think it's one of the best explanations for certain psychological and historical trends in my life. Another part, somewhat related if Brain Science has done it's job, is that I'm on the right side of the bell-curve. So I don't get caught up in minutia about lights, and tend to direct my attention towards things that are interesting to normal people with a philosophical background (just usually not as interesting as they are to me). I also show many of the physical and linguistic cues of Aspeger's syndrome.

I score over 40 on the AQ test, which tends to correlate with Aspeger's (80% of people who score over 32 are diagnosed when tested). The average is 16-17.

Why not just use no map at all. You simply do what you want to do regardless of whether it would fit better with someone's classification of “humanism,” or of “anti-humanism.”
"Whether what I think and do is Christian, what do I care? Whether it is human, liberal, humane, or inhuman, unliberal, inhumane, I don't ask about that. If it only aims at what I want, if I satisfy only myself in it, then call it whatever you like: it's all the same to me ." Just thought I'd throw in some daily Stirner.

I was talking more about how following one fiction over another will or won't yeild the same results.
Yes, this is different from my topic. Your point is a good epistemilogical skepticism towards moral fictionalism - one that Richard Joyce raises in his book the Myth of Morality. First of all, violating doxastic consistency (consistency of ideas) can lead to either constant war with the fictional values or to cause one to believe irrational, tangentially related things in order to continue the fiction. Example, you can't believe in Plato's 'noble lie' unless you have some pretty wacky ideas about biology.
There is another point though that, even if we were to concede that fiction has potentially beneficent results how can one reasonably judge which fiction will actually conform to goals and psychology better without violating the fiction? And if they're all fictions in the first place, based on essentially erroneous principles, what do you even use to compare them.

Science has mundane fictions such as spin because of the benefits of thinking in those terms.
I don't think most scientific principles are fictionalist - rather they lack some accuracy (which is normal - we don't have infinite mental powers). Moreover, things like spin are Model components. And no one but confused science enthusiasts thinks, for example, that quantum physics or even relativity is a strong description of ontology - it is, rather, a mathematical set which allows some prediction and explanation of ontological phenomena.