Epiphenomenalism, causation and explanation

Epiphenomenalism is a view that mental events are caused by physical events yet they themselves do not play any causal role in the physical world. This view is worth considering for those philosophers who do not accept physicalism for some reason or another. However, a common objection to this view, which can be found in Richard Taylor?s work, is that it leads to an unacceptable consequence that existing mental events are not important in explaining or understanding our behaviour, given that it predicts that nothing would change even if corresponding mental events had not occurred. In this paper, a response to this objection is provided. It is argued that the objection above at best relies upon the assumption that all explanations have to be causal, which is rather implausible in the context of present debates in the philosophy of science that make room for noncausal explanations. Furthermore, by using an interpretation of the Aristotelian view of the nature of geometrical objects as analogy, a model of how noncausal (and nonphysical) phenomenal consciousness could be explanatorily powerful is provided, which renders epiphenomenalism intelligible.

Harms and objections

Intuition says that choosing to create a miserable person is wrong, but choosing not to create a happy one is not; this is ‘the Asymmetry’. There is a complete theory which agrees – the ‘Harm Minimization’ theory. A well-known objection is that this theory rejects Parfit’s principle of ‘No Difference’. But No Difference has less intuitive support than the Asymmetry, and there seems to be no complete theory which agrees with both. There is, however, a more serious problem for Harm Minimization: it says it is wrong to create happy people if we could have made some of them happier at the expense of others. The purpose of this note is to describe a complete theory which agrees with the Asymmetry and avoids this unacceptable consequence; like Harm Minimization, it rejects No Difference.

Was Darwin a Social Darwinist?

Are humans inherently selfish brutes? Skeptics and critics of evolution routinely denounce the ghastly specter of society “red in tooth and claw” as an unacceptable consequence of Darwin’s concept of natural selection. They equate Darwinism with so-called Social Darwinism, a belief in ruthless social competition and unmitigated individualism. Many evolutionists, too—even staunch defenders of Darwinism, from Thomas Henry Huxley to Michael Ruse—seem to concur that the natural history of humans leaves an ethical void. Darwin himself, by contrast, had a well-developed interpretation of the evolution of morality. Others since have deepened our biological understanding of human and cultural origins. Perhaps, then, we are ready to challenge this entrenched assumption, this sacred bovine: that belief in evolution entails forsaking any foundation for morality. Many scientists disavow any role for biology in addressing ethics. They retreat behind the shield of the fact/value distinction or invoke the threat of the fallacy of deriving values from nature. Yet morality is an observable behavior, a biological phenomenon. We might well document it in other species. For example, empathy has recently been observed in both mice and, ironically perhaps, rats. The rats will even forgo chocolate to help a cage mate escape restraint. Morality deserves a biological explanation, especially for those who wonder about the status of humans in an evolutionary context. There are important limits, of course. One does well to heed philosophers who warn that we cannot justifiably derive particular values or moral principles from mere description. Many have tried, and all have failed. “Oughts” do not arise from “ises.” Values and facts really do have different foundations. Yet why or how we can express values at all, have moral impulses, and engage in ethical arguments are all psychological or sociological realities, susceptible to analysis and interpretation. Indeed, an understanding of human evolution may well be incomplete without addressing these very important human traits. One may begin, of course, as one often does with evolutionary topics, by returning to the source: Charles Darwin. How did Darwin regard culture?

The Humean Theory of Practical Irrationality

Christine Korsgaard has argued that Humean views about action and practical rationality jointly imply the impossibility of irrational action. According to the Humean theory of action, agents do what maximizes expected desire-satisfaction. According to the Humean theory of rationality, it is rational for agents to do what maximizes expected desire-satisfaction. Thus Humeans are committed to the impossibility of practical irrationality – an unacceptable consequence. I respond by developing Humean views to explain how we can act irrationally. Humeans about action should consider the immediate motivational forces produced by an agent's desires. Humeans about rationality should consider the agent's dispositional desire strengths. When (for example) vivid sensory or imaginative experiences of desired things cause some of our desires to produce motivational force disproportional to their dispositional strength, we may act in ways that do not maximize expected desire-satisfaction, thus acting irrationally. I argue that this way of developing Humean views is true to the best reasons for holding them.

Naturalistic Descriptions and Normative-Intentional Interpretations

Naturalistic Descriptions and Normative-Intentional InterpretationsNormative pragmatists about linguistic meaning such as Sellars and Brandom have to explain how norms can be implicit in practices described in purely naturalistic terms. The explanation of implicit norms usually offered in the literature commits pragmatists to equate actions with naturalistic events. Since this is an unacceptable consequence, I propose an alternative explanation of implicit norms that avoids this identification. To do so, one has to treat the normative-intentional concepts such as "norm", "action", "sanction", "belief", "desire" as a holistic system, in the sense that one has to apply all of them to a given naturalistic practice simultaneously. This result might be taken to imply that the pragmatist strategy of explaining the content of assertions and beliefs in terms of norm-governed use is misguided because it presupposes that one can account for the concept "norm" independently of the concept "belief". I argue that this consequence does not follow.