Just the Booze Talking

I still think,contra many agency theorists, that when you act and feel that it’s not really you acting, as happens when you think “it’s the anger talking, not me”, when you feel passive with regard to your action, “possessed” by some alien motivation – that feeling, however disturbing, doesn’t mean that your action is in any way not yours. Or less yours. Or less deeply yours. Or not a full-blooded action. It offers no deep insight into agency. It’s just…a feeling.

Does everyone experience this feeling, sometimes called “alienation”, salient to eminent philosophers from Harry Frankfurt on? No, some people assure me they don’t, and

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Raw Reflections on Rationality and Intelligence + Two Cat Pictures

So I have two cats. One is a British Shorthair named after the very English Philippa Foot. The other is an Ocicat named Catullus, after Gaius Valerius Catullus, an ancient Roman poet some of whose stuff is decisively Not Safe For Work. I often refer to the two as “the irrational animals” – as in “the irrational animals are hungry” or “thank you for taking care of the irrational animals” – but I suspect this is just an Aristotelian slur. They are probably more rational than I am, though I am surely smarter.

Can you be smarter but less rational? I hear epistemologists talk as if you can’t. But you can, easily. Consider a mentally healthy child of 11. Imagine the same child at 14. She has gotten smarter, but probably less rational.

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Motivation Without Charm

O Duty,
Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie?

 That’s Ogden Nash. Now Kant:

Duty! Sublime and mighty name that embraces nothing charming or insinuating but requires submission, and yet does not seek to move the will by threatening anything that would arouse natural aversion or terror in the mind but only holds forth a law that of itself finds entry into the mind and yet gains reluctant reverence (though not always obedience), a law before which all inclinations are dumb, even though they secretly work against it; what origin is there worthy of you, and where is to be found the root of your noble descent which proudly rejects all kinship with the inclinations, descent from which is the indispensable condition of that worth which human beings alone can give themselves?

 (Exhale)

Kant appeals powerfully to the sense that doing the right thing often feels different from doing something you want to do. The Neo-Humean – as in one who thinks moral motivation, like other important motivation, is based on desire – is often asked: if, as a good person, you do right because you want to do right– (de dicto or de re, doesn’t matter for the moment) – why doesn’t doing right because you want to do right feel like going to the beach because you want to go to the beach?

Fair question. Let me have a go.

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The Problem with Imagining

The problem with human imagination is really two problems. One is that our imagination is very limited. Thus, for example, I can’t properly imagine the life, or even the schedule, of someone who has two children. The second problem is that we trust our puny imagination a huge deal, enough that we accept its testimony despite perfectly good evidence to the contrary. Thus, for example, an academic with a young child might say things like “they told me that I won’t get any research done the first few months but…. I guess I didn’t take them seriously!”. In other words, he received reliable information but ignored it because his imagination told him he could just get work done when the baby is asleep.

My favorite cases involve not believing a person when she talks about her inner life. Far be it from me to think that people are never wrong about their inner lives, but when a person tells you she thinks or feels or wants something, the simple fact that you can’t imagine thinking or feeling or wanting it is not in itself a reason to doubt her. I once told a relative stranger that though I grew up in a certain country, I do not feel identified with it. The man said “that’s highly unlikely”. I am still a little angry at the person telling me what I feel, but I don’t have the right to feel superior to him. After all, for decades, I believed that any person who claims to be “full” after a salad – a mere salad! –  is either lying to me or lying to herself. To my defense, there exist some people who confess that they have kidded themselves on this particular topic, but I admit that the main reason I failed to believe people who claim to be full after a salad is that I can’t properly imagine being full from eating (only) a salad. That’s a bad reason.

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