1 / 21

Passion, reason, and the irrationality of MORAL PERFECTION

Passion, reason, and the irrationality of MORAL PERFECTION. Jeremy Seligman The University of Auckland. Reason and Passio n.

draco
Download Presentation

Passion, reason, and the irrationality of MORAL PERFECTION

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Passion, reason, and the irrationality of MORAL PERFECTION Jeremy Seligman The University of Auckland

  2. Reason and Passion “We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (David Hume, Treatise, Bk. II, Pt. Ill, Sect. III).

  3. Agenda • Reason as slave: Decision Theory • Objective Ethics and Perfect Integrity • Lewis vs Desire As Belief (DAB) • Hájek and Pettit’s Indexical DAB

  4. Reason as slave • Walter desires above all else to be Phyllis' lover and believes her husband to be the only obstacle in his path. • Phyllis desires only the large payout on her husband's accidental death. • Together they concoct an elaborate plan of murder dressed as accidental death. • They both desire the successful completion of each step of the plan.

  5. Value and Credence • Walter wants to follow the murder plan to the extent to which he believes that it will result in his happy union with Phyllis. • Degree of belief (credence C) and degree of desire (value V) are related. • V()=50 C( | murder) = 96% V()x C( | murder) = 48 C( | ¬murder)= 1% V()x C( | ¬murder) = 0.5

  6. Decision Theory Richard C Jeffrey, The Logic of Decision, University of Chicago Press, 1983

  7. Decision Theory • A1, ... , An partition • C(Ai|A) = C(Ai A)/C(A) if C(A)>0 Richard C Jeffrey, The Logic of Decision, University of Chicago Press, 1983

  8. Decision Theory “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”

  9. A wavering heart • Walter learns more of Phyllis’s past and becomes suspicious. • Does this mean that she will betray him? • Update C to CE and V to VE

  10. A wavering heart • Simple Conditionalisation • Special case of Jeffrey Conditionalisation • Only one of the ways of updating ones beliefs and desires in the light of new evidence • Claim: if <C,V> is rational so is <CE,VE >

  11. Objective Ethics • Murdering Phyllis’ husband was wrong/bad. • Objective ethics • Ao = A is good/right • A maximizes expected happiness • If things were perfect, A would be true • A follows from certain universal principles • An ideal ethical agent would desire A

  12. Perfect Integrity • Objective ethics => ethics is subject to reason • We can have ethical beliefs, to various degrees, and adjust them in the same way that we adjust other beliefs. • C(Ao ) = degree of belief that A is good • Integrity: matching one’s behaviour to one’s beliefs about how one should behave • Perfect integrity: V(A) = C(Ao )

  13. Desire As Belief • Necessarily, all agents have perfect integrity, because there is no more to desiring A than believing Ao. • Apparent lack of integrity is really a lack of sincerity. • For any agent with credences C and values V, DAB

  14. Lewis’ Argument David Lewis. Desire as Belief. Mind, 97:323–332, 1988. David Lewis. Desire as Belief II. Mind, 105:303–313, 1996.

  15. Lewis’ Argument A Ao David Lewis. Desire as Belief. Mind, 97:323–332, 1988. David Lewis. Desire as Belief II. Mind, 105:303–313, 1996.

  16. Desire As Conditional Belief • How about V(A) = C(if A then Ao ) ? • (CCCP) C(if A then B ) = C(B |A) • Lewis: also trivial Huw Price. Defending Desire-as-Belief. Mind, 98 (389):119–127, 1989. David Lewis. Probabilities of Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities. Philosophical Review 85: 297-315, 1976.

  17. Practical Integrity • DAB requires perfect match between desires and beliefs. • Only relative desires are behaviourally significant. • Preference for A over B: V(A) > V(B) • Practical Integrity: • Define h such that h(V(A))=C(Ao)

  18. Indexical Desire As Belief • Allow the meaning of Ao to depend on <C,V> • Too easy (but is that a problem?) • Are any ethical theories indexical? Alan Hájek, Philip Pettit. Desire Beyond Belief. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 82(1): 77-92, 2004

  19. Indexical Desire As Belief • Ao = A is good/right • A maximizes expected happiness • If things were perfect, A would be true • A follows from certain universal principles • An ideal ethical agent would desire A • Candidate Indexical theories: • I approve of A • In the current circumstances, A • A maximizes my expected happiness • A maximizes expected-by-me happiness

  20. Indexical Desire As Belief • Indexicality in general • I am a twin. • It is not snowing here. • We are talking about beliefs and desires. • Index and content • Semantic theory: • Proposition as set of worlds • Proposition as set of index-world pairs • E.g., Ao determines the set of <a,w> such that a approves of A in world w.

  21. Summary • Objective ethics presupposes a conception of integrity (and moral perfection) that is incompatible with evidential reasoning.

More Related