Reflections on practical reasoning

Before one can talk clearly about moral relativism, one must first address relativism at a more general level, a level that includes statements that have nothing to do with practical or moral matters.  Suppose you are talking to a man about whether the sun is a gaseous star possessing a gravitational pull on the earth that keeps our planet in orbit around it.  He denies that this is true.  You cannot tell whether he is sincere or just being silly, and you don't know how to argue scientifically about matters that we tend take for granted as true.  You simply object, therefore, that science seems to show that he is wrong in his denial.  He replies, "That is true for you, but not for me." You may not at this moment have the resources to be able to present a cogent (convincing) argument about the sun and gravity, but you can point out that his last comment is incoherent.  By "incoherent" I mean that, regardless of what one thinks of astronomy, that last sente...

Epicurus argues that we should not fear death because we won't be there to feel pain.  This is an excellent argument against concern for eternal life--if the only thing we desire is pleasure and the only thing we want to avoid is pain.  But it might not be such a great argument if humans naturally desire more than that. And we do. We desire not just to feel a certain way, but to act a certain way.   And the objects of those actions are valued by us not just because of how they affect us, but because of how they relate us to the rest of the world. Consider the desire to know the truth.  Based on my very limited reading of Epicurus, he never seems to talk about the desire for the truth.  If he did, then he might quickly see how his philosophy fails to make sense of human life.  We desire to know the truth: that much is uncontroversial.  But if pleasure is the first and primary measure of what is good, then we desire the truth only instrumental...

“A woman has a right to choose what to do with her own body.” This claim might clinch the argument if the fetus were part of the woman's body.  But there are plenty of good biological reasons to deny that.  Usually, when a part of your body is removed from you, you are regarded as an injured person: you are not able to function well.  Typically, when a once pregnant woman has given birth to a child, she has a complete body, and if the delivery has gone normally, she is able to function well.  The child that is now outside of her has its own blood type, its own DNA, its own set of internal organs, including pumping heart and brain that generates brain waves.  It had all of these characteristics at some time  it was  in utero .  It is presently a different organism than the mother.  More precisely, it is an organism that previously lived within the mother.  There is no reason to say that the mother and zygote/fetus/embryo we...

When you love a friend, you love, among other things, what you do together.  The "together" is something not in your mind, not in your friend's mind.  Nor is it in your or your friend's will.  Nor is it the sum of your will plus the other's will.  It is, in a sense, between the two of you.  It is something both of you possess.  You both engage, for example, in conversation: the quintessential activity of friends.  Both of you experience and share in one and the same conversation, just as you share one and the same friendship.  In fact, conversation and friendship can exist only by being shared in common.  To regard friendship as good is to regard as a public thing that which cannot be reduced to one individual's will or another's, nor to the summation of their two wills. There is no room for such public goods as conversation, friendship in Kant's conception of a pure will.  Two friends have two wills.  According to Kant, they can ...

The best way to think about Nozik's Experience Machine thought experiment is to see it,  as not just clarifying what it is that we really desire (i.e., we desire to engage reality through our actions) but rather as teaching us how we ought to look at our present situation.  Or rather, since "ought" has deontological resonances that I wish to avoid, I would say that the Experience Machine teaches us what sort of attitude toward reality and toward the imaginary we will have if we are to flourish as human beings.  We are better off preferring reality to the Experience Machine than we would be if we preferred the Experience Machine to reality. If you wish that you could be in the experience machine having a positive experience rather than in the real world, which sometimes gives you situations that are undesirable, then you are looking at everything around you in an instrumentalizing way.  When the EM lover (that is, the person who would prefer a positive experience in...

Both Plato (in the Gorgias ) and Epicurus talk about higher and lower pleasures and about how the higher need less maintenance than the lower.  But they have a different focal point.  For Epicurus, the standard is twofold: attainment of pleasure and avoidance of pain and distress.  Higher pleasures are higher because they are easier, more natural to attain and their loss brings less pain or disturbance.  For Plato, on the other hand, we judge between pleasures on the basis of how they contribute to health of the soul, and we do so in a manner analogous to how we might determine which pleasures are best for the health of the body.  So for Epicurus, pleasure is an end in itself, whereas for Plato pleasure is judged according to a standard that, while including pleasure, is ultimately directed toward something like the health of the body. And the health of the soul is more than just the ability to enjoy pleasure. The following thought experiment might help...