The Humean Problem of Induction and Peter F. Strawson

In keeping with my desire to post on this blog more frequently than I actually do, I have decided to link to a paper that I wrote for school on David Hume's problem of induction and Peter F. Strawson's response. I am not all that proud of the paper, as I have written better ones, but it does the job. Here is the link for direct access, and below follows a summary for those unfamiliar with anything I have just mentioned: http://www.freegoodnews.com/logos/humeandstrawson.htm

To put it briefly, the Humean problem of induction is essentially a philosophical observation that Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote about in the 18th century. Hume is famous for being a skeptic, and in this problem he creates for inductive reasoning he is true to that title. Basically what Hume does is ask our reason for thinking that the future will be like the past. In so doing his point is, ultimately, to show that we have no reason for believing that the future will be like the past. The way he accomplishes this task is to examine the potential arguments we could give for such a belief - a deductive one and an inductive one - and to rule both out.

Against a deductive argument that the future will resemble the past, Hume says that such a proposition as "the future will resemble the past" is not entailed by any known propositions that we have, therefore we cannot validily deduce it as true. Hence we must turn to induction to justify this belief, yet here we run into a problem. If we try to argue to the idea that the future will probably resemble the past, what shall we admit as evidence for this being true? One good candidate (and perhaps the only) is past experience. Thus, from past experience we observe a regularity of nature, therefore we can expect that it will continue on into the future. What Hume shows is that this statement, "The past has been regular" does not entail the statement we wish to arrive at, specifically, "The future will be like the past." Hence, we must find some intervening proposition that connects these two, otherwise we cannot reasonably hold the second statement to be true. Hume posits - or rather, other philosophers have taken Hume to posit - that we need something like a principle of the uniformity of nature that we can use as an intermediate premise that will take us from "the past has been regular" to "nature is uniform" and all the way to "therefore, the future will be like the past." The problem is that such a principle is not a necessary truth - i.e. it is possible that it is false - and we cannot justify it through induction - i.e. by observing what the past is like and inferring that the future will be similar.

Thus, we can see that there is a problem. To inductively conclude that the future will be like the past is ciricular because it assumes that the past gives us evidence of what the future will be like without explaining how we can know this. And, as well any attempts to deductively justify a belief in the uniformity of nature will immediately be met with shouts of illegitimacy because none of our justified beliefs entail that the future will be like the past. Hence, if we believe that the future will resemble the past, we seem to do so without having a reason for this belief.

So what can we say in response? You'll just have to read the paper...

Maintaining Appearances

When I first started this blog I was fairly ambivalent as to what its focus/title should be. I could have gone the route of purely philosophical reflection, or I could have focused entirely on apologetics (which, in reality, would simply have been a different kind of purely philosophical reflection with an emphasis on the phil. of religion), or I could have complained about my day/deep personal problems as so many bloggers seem content to do. In fact, this is the most personal blog I have posted so far, and therefore it is time to stop talking about me. Instead I will finally be posting something which actually lives up to the name that the blog has, that is, posts which are related to Christianity as Truth, and not perhaps some of the other popular conceptions which people are now and again given to mischaracterize it as. Towards this end, here is an article I wrote (for Christians) on the Kalam Cosmological Argument for the existence of God, posted at a church website where the moderators were kind enough to tolerate my verbosity (which can be quite staggering when I am not writing papers for academia): http://www.dyingtolive.org/artman/publish/article_46.shtml

In the future, however, I will continue to post as I have done. Since my goal is to learn as much from my classes as possible, I will still reflect upon the things that I read by posting short articles to this blog.

Joel Feinberg's Nature and Value of Human Rights summarized

One of the recent readings in my Philosophy of Human Rights class has been a piece written by Joel Feinberg, formerly at the University of Arizona as he passed away not long ago, entitled "The Nature and Value of Human Rights" (the reader it is from is The Philosophy of Human Rights, edited by Patrick Hayden, published in 2001). In the space provided below I will limit myself to summarizing and articulating Feinberg’s position, as any criticisms I have will be forthcoming and related to a future paper due in the class.

To begin, I will do so where Feinberg begins, and that is with a thought experiment. He begins his article by conceiving of a make-believe world called “Nowheresville.” “Nowheresville [is a] world very much like our own, except that no one, or hardly any one (the qualification is not important), has rights,” (emphasis original, pp. 174 of Hayden text). We are asked to imagine this place is in fact quite morally superfluous, that is, acts of generosity are in abundance and empathy is practically given away at the corner store. Hence, normal social interactions within Nowheresville are at an elevated level of eloquence, courtesy, and chivalry in both public and private discourse.

Beginning here, Feinberg then takes us on a journey of examining what the consequences would be if slight changes were made to the nature of Nowheresville. He first says, “Let us…introduce duties into Nowheresville, but only in the sense of actions that are, or believed to be, morally mandatory, but not in the older sense of actions that are due others and can be claimed by others as their right,” (pp. 176). The distinction is that we now have the kinds of “duties” that are “required” by the law, “under pain of penalty,” but that we do not have the kind of duties to others that entail their rights. By “duties” is meant the idea of something due to someone, and thus paying our dues becomes paying that which we owe others and they can make a claim to. Keep in mind that this does not have to be any kind of monetary debt, but something that naturally arises either from (a) the inherent worth of an individual such that the realization of his needs are someone’s debt, or (b) the establishing of a contract which binds two or more people together as to what each owes the other, given the obtaining of certain circumstances.

Hence, because Nowheresville lacks such duties, when someone else is at fault for hurting us, such as breaking our window by playing baseball in our backyard, we can complain and say that they were wrong and should fix our window, but because we have no right and they no duty, we have no moral justification for making the claim that it is their duty. In fact, the thought does not even cross our mind – according to Feinberg – to make such a claim because the other person has no moral duty to us, therefore they have no responsibility to fix the window – and we certainly have no right to claim that they do. Surely we can state a moral ought, but this does not equal a right or the assertion of a duty – according to Feinberg.

Feinberg then goes on to make other changes to Nowheresville that I will not explore. The important conclusion yielded from his thought experiment – or what he is claiming as important – is that no matter what else Nowheresville has, if it does not have the idea of rights then something “morally important” is missing. So what does Feinberg have to say about the nature of rights that is so morally significant? On this matter his statements are – I believe – somewhat imprecise, mainly because he thinks that a philosophically rigorous definition of rights is impossible, and as such he is likely entirely correct. Thus, his approach is to characterize not necessarily rights themselves, nor duties, nor claims, but instead he gives a statement of the relationship of rights to claims and also morality. First, I should begin by giving a bit more insight into the nature of rights from Feinberg’s perspective with this quote: “Even if there are conceivable circumstances in which one would admit rights diffidently, there is no doubt that their characteristic use and that for which they are distinctively well suited, is to be claimed, demanded, affirmed, and insisted upon…Having rights, of course, makes claiming possible; but it is claiming that gives rights their special moral significance.” This quote comes after he has attempted to sort out the difficulty in distinguishing the difference between a right and a claim, because the existence of one seems to first necessitate the other and the effect is a very circular juggling of terms. As Feinberg sees it, rights and claims cannot exist separately, almost like relational properties (Two examples of relational properties are “taller than” and “shorter than.” If Tree A has the property of being “taller than” Tree B, then we necessarily infer that Tree B is “shorter than” Tree A. Thus one property cannot exist without the other necessarily existing.”). He thinks that to make sense of one you must have the other, like to understand “up” you must have “down,” but he notes that claims and rights are distinct, just like up and down are distinct (though one requires the other).

All this having been said, here is part of Feinberg’s concluding paragraph: “To have a right is to have a claim against someone whose recognition as valid is called for by some set of governing rules or moral principles.” (text, pp. 185). In this sentence we see as close as Feinberg comes to giving a definition of a right, though by shorthand he says that a right is a “valid claim” (c.f. text pp. 182-183).

To summarize one might say that Feinberg has attempted to give an account of the interrelated nature of rights, duties, and their moral justification. A moral imperative directed at someone (e.g. “you ought to fix my window because you broke it”) that does not inherently carry with it a morally justified (meaning, that I can appeal to morality to justify it) duty, is not the assertion of a “right” in Feinberg’s sense. Rather, a duty that is to someone, and which is morally justified, naturally creates a “right” for that person to that which the duty specifies (i.e. mowing the law, paying your taxes, etc.)

As I said earlier, I will not in this piece be criticizing what Feinberg appears to be saying (if my analysis is correct), therefore I will avoid going into what I believe are the problematic areas of his article. Instead I will simply comment that it seems as though a complete theory (or a reasonable one, we might say) of morality and moral justification seem necessary to properly understand when a person has a duty to another, as this understanding is appropriate so that we are not arbitrarily assigning rights and duties. Hence, I believe that much work must be done before Feinberg’s case can be made, and the purpose of this article by itself was not to facilitate this broad of a point.

A critique of Talbott's "Moral Philosopher"

In the Philosophy of Human Rights class that I am taking the professor (William J. Talbott) has recently written a book entitled Which Rights Should Be Universal? Parts of the book are required reading for the class (which he fortunately provides to us free of charge), and as such I decided to buy it in order to have a more comprehensive perspective on my professor’s thoughts. After having read a portion the book, I made an observation which I thought required the sorting out of my own thoughts on the issue, and hence I have chosen to do that here. Since my space is short I will not use any more of it on introductory issues.

In the very beginning of the book Professor Talbott makes an observation regarding the nature of what he calls “moral philosophy” that will later play a crucial role in the “Moral Discovery Paradigm,” the advocacy of which appears to be the theme from chapter two onward. “Moral philosophers” are defined within a particular context that gives succinct designation to their role within Talbott’s moral discovery theory. The context is religious societies or religions, and moral philosophers are essential those people whose moral judgments have not been derived from understanding someone or some text within their respective religions to be infallible. Having said this much, I will now quote a section from the book because it both does the explaining for me and provides the material which I was intending to critique. Here is what Talbott has to say about moral philosophers:

“Suppose we take the defining feature of a religion to be its identification of a moral authority, a person or a text, typically regarded as infallible. On this definition, all of the major religions qualify as religions, but some movements not usually thought of as religions–for example, various twentieth-century Marxist movements–also qualify. In this book, I will use the term religion in the broader sense that includes Marxist movements, because I believe their commonalities are more important than their differences.
At least initially, religions typically admonish their adherents to follow the directives of the relevant moral authority unquestioningly, and not to exercise their own moral judgment. Nonetheless, these religious traditions tend to produce at least some people with a capacity for independent moral judgment. People who exercise this capacity will not regard any other person or text as a source of unquestionable moral truth. They can regard people or texts as sources of moral wisdom, to be seriously considered in deciding what to do. However, the ultimate decision about what to do will always depend on their own moral judgment. I will refer to people who develop and exercise their own moral judgment as moral philosophers.” (Emphases original, Talbott 2005, Pp. 4).

To begin, any conclusions that I draw will depend most significantly upon the correct understanding of what Talbott is here saying, so I will start by elucidating how I have read this quotation and the surrounding material. First, when Talbott says that religious authorities do not encourage their adherents to exercise “their own moral judgment,” this statement seems clear in a very generalized way of understanding it. That is, it is unlikely to be debated as a matter of historical fact that religious authorities have not appreciated nor desired any person who made moral decisions that went against the accepted infallible text or person. However, it is not at all clear that accepting a text or person as infallible automatically makes one incapable of rendering his “own moral judgment.” In the sense in which a religious adherent makes his “own” decisions because it is his mind which has done the cognitive evaluating, then certainly it is a moot point that his judgments are going to be “his own.” They are his because he has made them, and it would seem difficult to read Talbott as saying that decisions which individuals make in a religious community are collective property because of the religion, regardless of the fact that each individual is making the decisions. Instead, we could perhaps propose that it is more likely to read him as saying that members of religious communities do not in fact make judgments when they appeal to infallible sources of moral revelation. This, as well, raises difficulties, as the following judgment will perhaps demonstrate:

P1) The Holy Koran is an infallible source of moral knowledge.
P2) The Holy Koran says that “X” is bad.
C) Therefore “X” is bad.

However limited, naive, or perhaps epistemically unwarranted we might consider the first premise to be, it seems to nonetheless yield a judgment when combined with the second premise and the resulting conclusion. On this view, it is also difficult to read Talbott as saying that members of religions do not make judgments, as this appears to be a case of simple reasoning no less adequate than the following, which is a classic example of logic used in logic classrooms nationwide:

P1) All men are mortal.
P2) Socrates is a man.
C) Therefore Socrates is mortal.

Hence, given the above illustrations, it seems most reasonable to conclude that Talbott is creating a very specific sense in which “moral philosophers” render their “own judgments.” But what, specifically, could he be intending to say?

We seem to find an answer in the next two lines where he says, “Nonetheless, these religious traditions tend to produce at least some people with a capacity for independent moral judgment. People who exercise this capacity will not regard any other person or text as a source of unquestionable moral truth.”

It now appears clear that when Talbott has said that religious do not allow members to make their “own” judgments, a belief on the part of the individual in an infallible authority has been the intervening factor. What is necessary for us to make our own judgments is a lack of such a belief. With this particular belief absent, judgments can be reached which are truly our own. Indeed, this is why a requisite of being a moral philosopher is to not regard any source of moral information as infallible.

Now what remains unclear, and what Talbott has left unexplored, is why belief in an infallible authority makes it impossible for an individual to render his own judgments. I have already shown that in the normal usage of these terms a religious adherent can both make decisions and that they will in fact be his own, i.e. not someone else’s. Furthermore, if we are indeed capable of making judgments while holding beliefs in infallible authorities, then Talbott has not yet justified the need for the particular kind of moral decision makers which he designates – that is, those who do not adhere to any infallible source of moral knowledge. Unless he is presupposing the non-existence of such texts or persons (which would render religious beliefs untrue and therefore inferior), or the superiority of non-belief in them, then there seems little to recommend being a “moral philosopher” over not being one.

Lastly, I am slightly confused as to how one should read these few lines on the following page:

“Since you are reading this book, I assume that you are a moral philosopher, in the sense in which I use the term – that is, you have developed and exercise your own moral judgment. Does this mean you are areligious? No, but it does imply that if you are religious, you are not blindly submissive to a moral authority.” (Talbott, 2005, Pp. 5)

In the first quotation we saw that Talbott defines “religious” belief as that which holds a text or a person to be infallible. We also saw that Talbott defines a moral philosopher as a person who does not hold to such a belief. Hence, it seems reasonable to conclude that to be a moral philosopher one can be a member of a religion, but that they cannot actually believe the claims of their text or authorities. This seems to demonstrate that, of necessity, one must not be religious in the sense that Talbott intends if they are going to be a moral philosopher in the sense which Talbott intends.