Okay, today I want to talk about two paradoxes of choice.
I'm not sure the second one is really a paradox, but the second one is always called a paradox.
And the first one isn't usually called a paradox, but it is one.
So they're both paradoxes in some sense.
And paradoxes that connect with issues about free will, about human action, and about nature of the good.
and we'll set us up for some things that will be coming later.
Okay, the first paradox is called Newcomb's Problem.
A lot of different philosophers have talked about this problem,
although they've disagreed with each other about exactly what the moral of the paradox is supposed to be
or what, or in some sense even what the topic of it is, but I've got my line on that.
So here's the story you're supposed to imagine.
Imagine that you are confronted with two boxes.
One of them is transparent and one is opaque.
So you can see what's in the transparent one. What's in the transparent one is a thousand dollars.
You can't see what's in the opaque one, but you are assured, and just stipulate that you believe this,
that the box you can't see into contains either a million dollars or nothing.
You don't know which, and you're given the following choice, you can either take the opaque box only, just the box you can't see into, or you can take both.
Well, thus far it doesn't seem like a difficult choice. Why not take both? If you take only the opaque box, you'll get either a million dollars or nothing.
If you take both boxes, you'll get either a million plus a thousand, or you'll get a thousand.
Clearly, whatever happens, you're better off taking both boxes than just taking the opaque one.
But now you're told an additional piece of information, which we stipulate again, you also believe.
There is a reliable predictor. Some versions, it's a very, very reliable track record.
In other versions, it's actually an infallible predictor.
Let's go with the infallible predictor.
I think that sharpens the paradox more.
There's a predictor who can predict exactly what anyone will do in any choice situation.
They're a master of psychology or they are reading your brainwaves or whatever it is.
But this person knows what kind of person that you are.
This person knows what choice you would make in this situation.
And this is also the person who's in charge of deciding whether it's a million dollars or nothing that's been put into the box you can't see.
So, I've got this thing here, I might as well use it for something.
And just to, let's see, which is the spot on the top, all right, so just to, oh, I'm doing it the wrong way.
But the box you can see into with, I'll do this to show you can see into it, I don't know why that shows that.
Here's the box you can't see into, go like that to show you cannot see into it.
And so your choice is between taking both these boxes, you have the choice of taking them both, or you have the choice of just taking this one.
Okay, so the predictor, who knows what kind of person you are, knows what you will do in the situation as described, has either put a million dollars in this box or zero.
What the predictor has done is, if the predictor predicts that you will choose only the opaque box, then the predictor has put a million dollars in it.
But if the predictor predicts that you will choose both boxes, then the predictor will put nothing in the opaque box.
So there you are facing the boxes. The predictor has already made whatever prediction she's going to make, and she's already put the money in, or not.
She's already done whatever she's going to do with that. So there you are. You can't see into the box, but you know that it's either got the million in already, or it's got nothing.
And now you have to make this choice. Well, now the situation is more complicated. Should you take both boxes or one?
Well, it seems like there's a good argument for each.
Here's the argument for taking both boxes.
The money's already there or not.
Nothing you can do now can change it.
It's not as though the money's going to, you know,
magically, quantumly vanish depending on what choice you make.
Either the money's in there or it isn't.
So, given that fact, if you pick, you know,
if the money's there, then if you pick both boxes,
If you get a million plus a thousand, whereas if you only pick the one box you just get the million.
A million plus a thousand is better than a million, so if the money is there it's better to pick both boxes.
If the money isn't already there, then picking both boxes gets you a thousand and picking just the one box gets you nothing.
A thousand is definitely better than nothing.
So it seems like whether the money is there or not, either way it seems like it makes sense you're better off choosing both boxes.
So that's the argument for choosing both boxes.
However, there's also an argument for choosing one box.
The argument is this.
The predictor is an infallible predictor.
She's put the million in there only if you are going to choose just the one box.
So, any possible future in which you choose just the one box
is a future where you get the million.
Any possible future where you choose both boxes is a future where you get only a thousand.
So, if you really trust, and we're stipulating for the sake of argument, you do really trust that this predictor is utterly reliable.
Then it seems you have to say that your only chance of getting the million is to pick just the one box.
And so that's what you should do.
And, you know, the two-boxer says, well, that doesn't make sense, because, you know, you can't affect...
What you do now can't affect what the predictor puts in there because the predictor has already done it.
You can't affect the past, so you should pick both boxes.
The one-boxer says, this is actually a quote from a famous article about this,
if you're so smart, why aren't you rich?
In other words, if you're so smart to appeal to this idea that the money is already there,
well still, if this really is a reliable predictor, then it's only the people that the predictor predicted would pick the one-box,
And those are the people who do pick the one box.
It's only the people who pick the one box that get the million.
The people who reason your clever way and pick both boxes
keep getting a thousand over and over.
There's the people who follow, you know,
who ignore the fact that the money's already either there or not
and just, you know, just pick the one box, they get the million.
So, which, you know, would you rather be right or rich is the way it's sometimes put.
Well, so there's been a lot of dispute about which of these two arguments is the better argument.
Should you accept the two box argument based on the fact that money is already either there or not?
Or should you accept the one box argument on the basis that those who get the one box are always the ones who get the million and those who don't, don't.
All right, my claim is that these two arguments are equally good.
That if you accept the situation as described, if you accept that there's a predictor who is reliable in this way,
and if you accept that she's put the money in, if she predicted you'd pick the one box, and that she hasn't, if she's predicted you wouldn't.
If you accept all that, then I think that both arguments decisively follow.
It is true that the money is already either there or not.
And given that, it follows that picking both boxes can't make the money go away if it's already there.
And picking just the one box can't make the money appear if it isn't already there.
Therefore, the case for picking both boxes is decisive.
On the other hand, the one box argument is definitive.
If you accept that there is this infallible predictor and that she has done the things that are described in the story,
then it follows that whether you get the million or not co-varies with whether you pick just the one box or not.
And if there's something under your control that co-varies with something you really want,
so you get the thing you want only in those cases where you make this choice,
and you don't get the thing you want when you make the other choice,
well then clearly it's rational you have to do the thing. So I think both
arguments and once you accept the choice set up as described I think both
arguments are decisive. Of course they lead to opposite results so something must
be wrong. Well generally when you have an antinomy that is when you have arguments
both of which seem decisive but which lead to opposite conclusions generally a
A good strategy is to look to see if there's some common assumption behind both that's generating the problem.
And in this case, I think the common assumption is the possibility of this situation.
If you assume that you are in the situation as described, then you are committed to picking both boxes and you're also committed to picking just one.
So something must be wrong.
So what I suggest is what's wrong is that you cannot coherently regard yourself as being in such a situation.
You can't regard that as a possible situation for you to be in.
So what do these two arguments show?
Well the two box argument shows that you can't coherently aim to bring about something that you think is already passed and settled.
It doesn't make any sense to say...
And that's what you're doing. If you pick just the one box, you're picking it in order to get the million.
But since the million is in there only if you pick it, according to the assumption,
then in effect, you are picking the one box in order to make it the case that the predictor put the money in there.
So you're doing something now in order to make it the case that the predictor did something in the past.
And the reason that seems to lead to a paradox is that what you do now can't change the past.
If the predictor already put the money in, nothing you do now can prevent that.
And if the predictor didn't put the money in, nothing you do can make that happen.
So what the two-box argument shows is it doesn't make sense to think of yourself as aiming backward,
as trying to bring something about that already is in the past.
However, what the one box argument shows is that if there is something we can aim at, and it necessarily co-varies with something else we want, then we can aim at A in order to get that first thing or to get the other thing.
If I get the million only if I pick the one box, and I can control whether I pick the one box, so I can aim at picking one box, it seems like I can aim at getting the million.
So, I think that the moral of this is, is that you can't coherently aim at or regard yourself as aiming at something if you think that that something either is already passed and settled or co-varies necessarily with something already passed and settled.
So that's why I think you can't aim at the predictors having done something, because that's already passed and settled.
And therefore, you can't really, it doesn't really make sense to think of yourself as aiming at picking one box in order to get the million,
because whether you get the million or not co-varies with whether the predictor already put it in there, which is already passed and settled.
Now people have often said, well sure, you can't aim at something you think is already settled, or you can't choose or deliberate about something you think is already settled, if you think you know which way it's settled.
You know, I can't decide between A and B if I think it's already settled that I'm going to do A.
That's fairly uncontroversial. If I think that A is already settled and B isn't now ruled out as impossible, then I can't deliberate and choose between them.
But people sometimes think that's only because we know which way it's settled.
A lot of people think that if you think it's already settled which one's going to happen, but you don't know which, then you can still deliberate and choose.
But I think what the Newcomb's problem suggests is, I think the moral of it is, you can't coherently aim at something,
or you can't coherently try to make choices about something you think is already fast and settled, even if you don't know which way it is.
As in this case, you don't know which way, it's either a million or zero, we don't know which way it is.
You might have thought that you could therefore aim at one or the other, or choose between them,
but I think the paradox you run into in Newcomb's problem, I want to suggest, means that you can't go ahead and do that.
Alright, what does that moral get us? Assume that that's right.
Assume that this shows, what I'm claiming is it shows, that you can't coherently aim at something that's either already passed and settled or else that it covariates necessarily with something already passed and settled.
Where does that show us?
Okay, first thing I think it shows us is it shows us a problem with certain views of motivation.
There are some views of motivation, according to which, whenever we do something, what we're motivated by is one of our own subjective mental states, in the sense that our goal is to bring about some subjective mental state.
This is true, for example, of psychological hedonism, where if you think that the goal of everything you do is to think you feel some kind of pleasure.
A lot of people have thought that, thought that whatever you do, the ultimate end is to produce some feeling of pleasure or satisfaction in your mind.
Not just that that's sometimes the goal, but that's always the goal, the only goal.
John Stuart Mill, for example, seems to have thought something like that,
although there are passages where maybe he's heading in a different direction,
but at least that's on the surface, that's the most natural way to read him.
Certainly that's the most natural way to read someone like Jerry Bentham, I think.
Some people have thought that Mises holds this view, too. I think it's hard to tell whether he does.
Mises often says that the point of acting is to relieve felt dissatisfaction and you could take that to mean that you've got a felt uneasiness and you could take that to mean that you've currently got some feeling of uneasiness or dissatisfaction and you want to get rid of it and so you go looking for something that will make that feeling go away and so the relief from that feeling would be the goal of our action. Sometimes Mises sounds like that's what he means and if so
Mises talks more as though he means something purely formal, he just means that you're dissatisfied with some situation, you want to make the situation different, but not necessarily that you're trying to relieve some feeling in your mind.
but anyway whatever Mises thought at least it's a possible view I think that the
fact that we can't aim at something past and settled causes a problem for this
view because think of some of the things we can aim at for example suppose that I
buy life insurance or write a will that's an action I'm doing now what's the end
What is my goal in buying life insurance or writing a will?
Well, presumably it's my action as a means to my loved ones doing well after my death.
Seems like that's the most natural way of thinking about it.
You've got, let's take, I write my will now and it seems like that's a means to my loved ones doing well after my death.
Seems like that's, this is the means, this is the end.
But, is that in and of itself, or is it a means to something further?
Well, whatever it means to it, it seems like it couldn't be a means to pleasure.
Because we're assuming that, you know, this is after my death, I'm not around to experience the pleasure.
Now, if you believe in an afterlife, you still don't necessarily believe that you're going to be hanging around watching your loved ones
and getting, feeling a pleasure from seeing them do well, you know, might be off busy elsewhere.
Anyway, people who don't believe in an afterlife also buy life insurance and write wills and so forth.
They certainly don't think that they're going to be feeling pleasure from this in the future.
So, writing a will can't be a means to, you know, this cannot be a means,
My loved one's doing well after my death can't be a means to some pleasure in the future.
Now, someone could say, well, yes, sure, but when you write the will or buy the life insurance, you get pleasure now.
You take pleasure now in your loved one's doing well in the future.
Well, what does that mean?
It could mean that your loved one's doing well after your death causes you to feel pleasure now.
And so then you'd be, but that would be a kind of backwards aiming.
And if there's no backwards aiming, if we can't aim it at, you know, if,
I think what Lucas's problem shows is that a means can't be later than the end.
And so it doesn't make any sense to think of this as a means to that.
You could say, all right, well, this drops out then.
Well, just writing the will now causes the thought that your loved ones will do after your death, and that thought causes pleasure now.
Well, that's true enough, but the question is, is it only the thought of your loved ones doing well after your death that you care about,
or is it your loved ones actually doing well after your death that you care about?
Here's a reason for thinking that it must be your loved ones actually doing well after your death and not just the thought that they will.
Suppose that I give you a choice.
You can either buy this life insurance policy for $100 or you can buy this magical pill for $50.
The magical pill will make you believe that you have bought life insurance.
So you have life insurance for $100 or the belief that you've bought life insurance for $50.
Now, if your only reason for buying life insurance is to have the thought that your loved ones will do well after your death,
that seems as though you'd have reason to prefer the pill to the life insurance.
And therefore, we wouldn't be able to make sense of people if we're buying life insurance when they could buy the pill.
You might say, well, there's a brief moment between your deciding to take the pill and your taking the pill,
where you feel really awful, and that is, but you know, all right, you can imagine,
you know, if that's all it is, though, you can imagine doing things to compensate for that,
like, well, this pill not only gives you the thought, but also gives you, you know,
five hours of intense pleasure or something.
That'll make up for those five minutes of a guilty conscience.
It seems as though that's not the way we think.
So we do care about things we're not gonna experience.
We care about things that will happen after we're dead
to our loved ones.
So therefore, our feelings, our emotions,
our mental states of mind can't be our only goals.
There's some of the things we care about.
We want to feel good, but feeling good
can't be the only thing we care about.
And, you know, I think that's a plausible argument in its own right, but I think it's helped by consideration of this, of this nucleus problem issue.
Because I think what nucleus problem suggests is that it doesn't make sense to think of a means being later than the end,
which is what it would have to be if you thought that the loved one's actually doing well after death, it causes a pleasure.
Well, maybe it's not that the loved one's doing well in the future causes my pleasure now,
because that would be backwards causation and that would be weird,
but can I not take pleasure now, not just in the thought that my loved ones will do well,
but can I take pleasure now in when my loved one's actually doing well?
Sure, I think you can, but in that case, I mean, I think that's a perfectly good way of talking,
but in that case, it's not a means-and relationship. I think if I take pleasure
If we're now in something happening in the future, it's not a means end.
The thing happening in the future is not a means to my pleasure.
Okay, here's another upshot, I think, of Newcomb's problem.
I think it shows that there couldn't be...
We can't coherently regard ourselves as being causally determined.
We can't coherently think that everything we do is the necessary result of prior causes.
Why not? Well, suppose determinism is true. Then what's the case?
Then it's the case that my present actions necessarily co-vary with past states of the universe.
If causal determinism is true, then there can't be any difference in the present except as a result of some difference in the past.
I can't do something different now from what I'm doing unless the causes acting on me are different.
And those causes couldn't be different unless the causes acting on them were different, and so on back indefinitely.
So if determinism is true, then if I raise my hand now, that must mean that the past causal history of the universe was one way.
And if I hadn't raised my hand just then, then the past causal history of the universe would have had to have been the other way.
And so, raising my hand or not raising my hand necessarily covariates, if the termism is true, with things that are already passed and settled.
Well, could we have preferences about things that are already passed and settled?
Sure, you could say we wish things were this way rather than that.
Well, what the one box argument shows is if you have preferences about things that are already passed and settled and those things co-vary with things that are under your control now, then you can thereby aim at making things one way or another in the past.
So, for example, suppose that I would like it to be the case that the past causal history of the universe is one of a certain kind that would lead up to my clapping my hands right now.
That's what I would like. Well, then by clapping my hands right now, I can make that the case seems paradoxical.
paradoxical, but it seems as though if I want it to be the case that that's the causal chain that existed,
well, if I clap my hands now, then that will be the causal chain that existed. And if I don't
clap my hands now, then that won't be. So I have a preference between these two things, and which of
them happens, necessarily covariates with that I clap my hands now, well then by clapping my hands now,
I could aim at bringing about a certain past causal chain. But, according to the two box argument,
I mean that doesn't make sense, so we can form preferences about past causal chains.
If past causal chains co-varied with our present choices, then we both could and couldn't aim at changing those past things.
We couldn't aim at changing the past things because of the past and settled.
But we could aim at changing those past things because they necessarily co-variate with something we can choose.
So, once again, we have an antinomy, and I'm claiming that the common assumption behind the antinomy is the assumption that our present choices necessarily co-vary with something past and settled.
I think we cannot coherently regard our present choices as necessarily co-varying with something that's already past and settled.
And so, I claim that means we cannot regard ourselves as causally determined.
Okay, so there's a, that's the first paradox I wanted to talk about and the ways in which I think that that has an upshot for free will.
What's the second paradox? Well, the second paradox is the so-called Socratic paradox. Remember I said that I thought one of these was a paradox and one wasn't.
wasn't. In the strict sense, a paradox is in a case where it looks like you've got equally good
arguments for mutually contradictory conclusions, and that's why I think Newcomb's problem is a
paradox in that sense. Socratic paradox does not obviously seem like a case of that, but there's
just this long, long tradition of calling it the Socratic paradox, and a much broader sense of
paradox, where paradox is just, in any case, we've got an argument not necessarily for something
Contradictory, but for something weird, or surprising, or implausible.
Paradox literally means contrary to opinion.
So any time you've got something contrary to seeming, so any time you've got some argument
whose upshot is contrary to what seems to be the case, or contrary to
what most people would have thought, that's a paradox in this much broader, looser sense of paradox.
Paradox. You know, the first kind of paradox can never be true. It can never really be, you know, both sound arguments for a contradictory conclusion. So whenever you've got a paradox in that strict philosophical sense, you know, something must be wrong. However, when you have a paradox where the upshot is just, you know, something surprising, that doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong. It might be. It's certainly a reason to look at it closely. But a paradox in that sense
between something counter-intuitive, something contrary to what you expected.
Well, lots of paradoxes are true in that sense.
Okay, what's the Socratic paradox, which, as you might guess,
is named because it's found in the teachings of Socrates?
Well, choosing something expresses a preference for that thing.
If you choose something, if it's a real choice,
not just some sort of random twitch or something,
but if it's really a purposeful action,
Choosing something, your choice expresses a preference for that thing.
Having a preference for something expresses the judgment that it's worth choosing.
Now, that's not uncontroversial.
You might think, well, some of your preferences are just sort of urges that don't really express any kind of judgment.
I talked a little bit yesterday about this idea of when you're deciding what to do,
What to do, there's a sense of what you should do that just is what you're deciding then.
Deciding what to do is deciding what you should do in a certain sense of shit.
So I want to claim that when you choose something, there is something like a judgment that's
expressed there.
If it really is an action and not just a blind urge and if it's an action of a rational
So I think all of that is right. So the famous upshot of it is that you can't choose something you think is not worth choosing, because to choose something expresses a preference, and expressing a preference expresses a judgment that the thing is worth choosing.
But then that seems to have the upshot that no one can knowingly or voluntarily do wrong.
And Socrates seems to say both those things.
And that seems hard to accept.
So first of all, I think there's a difference between the knowingly and the voluntarily.
And to explain the difference, let me just say what I think Plato later changes the view from the one he got from Socrates.
Plato thinks that you can be overcome by some sort of emotion or passion, which can then make you do something contrary to your judgment of what is the best thing to do.
And so Plato abandons the view that you can never knowingly do what's wrong.
But Plato still thinks that you can never voluntarily do what's wrong.
At least that's the way I interpret Plato.
So Socrates thinks you can never knowingly or voluntarily do wrong.
Plato thinks that you can do wrong knowingly, because you can be dragged by your passions
and your judgment is saying, stop, stop, help, but your passion just drags you on anyway.
Then, since you're acting contrary to your best judgment, you're not acting voluntarily, but you are acting knowingly.
Socrates, when he strongly thinks it doesn't make sense to think that you can even knowingly do wrong.
If Socrates had known how Plato was going to develop his ideas after his death, I think Socrates would have said,
wait, Plato, this notion of being dragged away by passion doesn't make sense.
Because if you just mean that your limbs are taking over and suddenly it's like some sort of epileptic fit or something,
that your arms and legs are suddenly doing something you don't want, well that's not an action.
That's something happening in your body, but that's not an actual choice of yours.
It's only a choice of yours if it expresses a judgment.
So I think Socrates would want to cling to the stronger form of the claim.
Now, I think that, on the one hand, I think Socrates has good reasons for these things, but on the other hand, this conclusion seems to clash with some things.
First, it seems to clash with some obvious facts. We all know from experience, not only that we've done things that we knew we shouldn't be doing, or at least that we thought we shouldn't be doing,
but that at the time we didn't feel as though it was just some passion completely overtaking us
it seems as though we were choosing to do it
so it seems as though it's a familiar feature of human experience
that we do things that we don't really think are the best thing to do
and yet somehow we do them
but also the Socratic paradox seems to clash with free will
it seems to imply causal determinism
And I've just argued that that would not make sense.
So, for example, it seems as though if you can never do anything
contrary to your judgment of what's most worth doing well,
then that means that I can't clap my hands right now
unless I think that clapping my hands right now is the best thing to do.
Neither I think that or I don't.
And if I think it, then I'll do it.
And if I think it's not, then I won't.
And so it seems as though whatever my current beliefs and judgments are, already settles what actions I'm going to take.
And so then it seems as though I don't have any free choice.
So, what's the solution?
Well, on the handout I start right off with Aristotle's solution,
But I want to back up a bit and say a little bit about Xenophon's solution first, because Xenophon has a sort of a shorter solution.
I'm not going to mention him. I should have his name.
Xenophon was another pupil of Socrates, less famous than Plato.
And here's his solution to the Socratic paradox.
He thinks, yes, passion can overcome us and make us do something contrary to our judgment,
but it's not as though when we act we're then doing something different from what we judge to be best.
Zenithen thinks that what happens is that our passions confuse our judgment.
So initially we have a clear judgment of what we ought to do.
Then the passion comes and confuses us so that we no longer clearly see what to do.
to do. And instead, the passion gets us to believe something else temporarily. And so temporarily, we go off and do this other thing on the basis of a different judgment. Then once the passion goes away, our judgment comes back and we say, oh, you know, I shouldn't have done that. So you have kind of a temporary amnesia or temporary confusion where you believe something different as a result of passion. Now, Xenophon's solution has certain advantages. It avoids what might seem
It sounds like an excessive intellectualism on Socrates' part.
A lot of people have objected that Socrates believed you always necessarily do whatever you think best.
It makes us sound purely intellectual.
It ignores the fact that we have emotions and passions and impulses that can influence us.
And Xenophon's solutions solves that.
Xenophon's solution says, no, no, you can have the Socratic paradox even if you grant that we can be influenced by our emotions.
I think that's fine as far as it goes, but it's not good enough, I think, because although
it may cover the fact, it may cover the cases where you're blinded by passion and just can
no longer see what you ought to be doing.
It does cover the cases when, as you're doing the right thing, your wrong thing, you're
If you're saying to yourself, I know I shouldn't be doing this,
because then it seems as though the judgment hasn't been obscured, it's still there.
Well, I think Aristotle, although I think he's probably influenced by Xenophon's solution,
if it is a Xenophon's solution, I mean, Xenophon may have just gotten that from Socrates, we don't know.
But anyway, I think Aristotle builds on Xenophon's solution and then has something better.
Aristotle distinguishes between possessing a judgment and exercising a judgment.
First of all, this allows for the fact that you might have more than one judgment.
I might have a judgment that I should do something and also have another judgment that I shouldn't do it.
They could both be floating around in my mind, but which one am I acting on?
I think this is analogous to the distinction in Austrian economics between praxeology and themology.
This is the distinction that Mises makes.
Praxeology has to do with the analysis of action
and themology has to do with, more broadly, psychological causes underlying or influencing action and so forth.
And part of Mises' point is that you can have conflicting preferences in the themological sense.
That is to say, you know, I can have some desire for one thing and also some desire for something else incompatibly.
You can't have conflicting desires in the praxeological sense.
Praxeological desires are desires realized in action.
They're the desires you're actually acting on.
And, you know, so I might, you know, maybe I have some reason to take a drink now.
I'm thirsty.
I also have some reason not to take a drink now.
It would interrupt my lecture.
I may have a slight worry that
someone just put poison in there,
whatever.
So I've got some reason to take a drink and some reason not to.
So you could say, well, I've got some desire to
and some desire not to.
But when I'm actually
drinking, you know, I can't
enact both those desires at the same time.
When I'm actually drinking,
There's a preference I have that's built into the desire.
And those are the preferences that economics deals with,
the preferences that you actually are acting on.
You may have, in another sense of preferences,
various sorts of desires floating around
that you're not acting on.
Now, it's an interesting question whether there is some sense
in which you can actually simultaneously act in some way
on opposite preferences.
And I've gone back and forth a bit on this
and written about this, but I don't think it matters right now.
So, Aristotle's point is that what Aristotle thinks is happening is that when you do something you know is wrong,
what happens is you've got your better, wiser judgment that's saying don't do that.
But you've also got another judgment that says do it.
And he says, you know, maybe your reason is telling you don't do it and appetite is telling you do it.
But the appetite is the judgment too. Appetite is not just some blind urge. Appetite presents,
the thirst presents the water as choice worthy. Thirst doesn't just, you know, start moving my
hand to the glass robotically. My thirst presents the water to me under the aspect of choice worthy.
You know, try me, drink me, drink me. Whereas my reason says, you know, I know these people are
So I've got both judgments, but then whichever one I act on, that's the judgment that I'm exercising, the judgment that's actually operative.
But the judgment that I'm not acting on could still be around. I could comment on it, I could give utterance to it.
So when you say, I shouldn't be doing this, as you go and do it,
in fact,
well, when you do something, saying at the same time,
I know I shouldn't be doing this, then that shows that the
judgment that you shouldn't be doing it is around, it's along for the ride.
You can notice it, you can give voice to it,
but it's not the one that you are putting into motion.
Now, this helps somewhat with the Socratic paradox, because the reason the Socratic paradox sounds so weird is that it gives the impression, and Socrates may have thought this, I don't know whether he did or not, but certainly the way that it's often put, it gives the impression that when you act, you're always acting on this one judgment you have. You've got one judgment whether the thing is good or bad, and you act on that judgment.
Judgment. But I think a sort of a milder way of putting it is that whenever you're acting, your
action is expressing a judgment that's worth doing. But it doesn't mean you don't have a contrary
judgment. The contrary judgment might be better grounded, the contrary judgment might be the one
that you more usually have or whatever, but they could both be present. And so therefore this doesn't
can imply that whenever you act it's somehow necessarily the result of your judgment
because you might have contrary judgments you can pick which one to act on.
A second point is that some people thought that praxeology itself implies determinism.
Because they thought, well look everything we do is motivated.
We don't do any random actions. If they're random they're not actions.
Everything we do is the result of our desires.
You do it because you desire that more than you desire anything else.
Our actions express our strongest preference.
You might think that just straightforwardly implies some sort of psychological determinism.
But this very point that both Aristotle and Mises stress in different contexts
is that the desires we're talking about are desires that are built into the action.
They're not some prior cause of the action.
It's not as though at time one, I've got a desire,
and then at time two, my limbs start moving.
And the reason that counts as being motivated by that desire
is the desire somehow kicked it off, the way that you knock over one domino.
And if a domino, 10 dominoes down, knocks it, falls over,
it's because it was caused by this earlier one.
Now, when you're acting, the desire is present right then.
The desire is built into the action.
Desire is an aspect of the action. Desire acting on is an aspect of the action.
Now, of course, it ordinarily isn't going to make much sense for you to act on some desire now
unless you had that desire earlier. So you probably have to have the desire earlier,
at least in most cases. You have to have the desire earlier in order to be able to act on it now.
But still, what makes my action of drinking be motivated by thirst
It's not that I had thirst earlier than I drank. That's not the decisive thing.
What makes it is that in drinking, I'm choosing it as a thirst quencher rather than as something else.
I'm thinking of the following example. Suppose that you're out in the middle of the Sahara Desert
and you've been lost for days, you had no water, you're desperate.
Suddenly someone comes along and offers you some water and says,
I'll pay you $50 to drink this water.
Well, now, you've got two reasons to drink it.
One is you're dying of thirst, and the other reason is it's kind of nice to have $50.
But at that moment, probably, unless you're very cool-headed,
probably the $50 is not even something you're going to pay attention to at that moment.
You're just going to grab the water.
You're going to choose it as a thirst quencher, not as a money-bringer.
And you could, if you had more cool-headed, you might choose it as both, but probably not.
But anyway, which one you do it for is a matter of something that's built into the action.
It's not as though first you have a desire over here and then some mechanical motion of limbs follows later.
That's not what action is like. The desire is actually simultaneous with the action.
And that means that although it may be true that you always act on your strongest motive,
It doesn't mean that I'm always act now on whatever my strongest motive was a second ago.
I might not have decided. We might sort of decide what our strongest motive is going to be.
I might have a lot of different motives. And whatever one I'm acting on at the moment
is the dominant one. But it's not clear that it's being the dominant one.
It's just a separate fact from the fact that it's the one I'm acting on.
Now, while this isn't in the notes, another thing that might be worth mentioning is, Mises seems to have thought that praxeology implies determinism for a different reason, not just because you might think that our actions are caused by our desires.
But Mises said that, one way he put it, is that the concepts of cause and effect are implied in action.
Because whenever I choose something as a means to an end, I must assume that the means is causally related to the end.
It wouldn't make any sense for me to choose raising this glass to my lips as a way of quenching my thirst,
unless I thought that raising the glass to my lips would cause the quenching of thirst.
If I thought there was a purely random relationship between raising the glass to my lips and quenching my thirst,
Well, I think that's true enough, but the question is whether cause and effect is the same thing as cause of determinism.
And I don't think so. I think that we can have cases of cause and effect that aren't deterministic.
And let me borrow an example from Elizabeth Anscombe, I believe it was Anscombe I saw this in.
Suppose that, you know, grant for the sake of argument that quantum physics is really indeterministic.
It's not just a matter of our knowledge, but it really is.
Alright, so let's say I've got a chunk of radioactive material.
If physics is indeterministic at the quantum level, then what that means is that this chunk of radioactive material
is emitting radioactive particles at a rate that's in principle unpredictable.
You know, just radioactive particles zap out every once in a while.
Now, you know, we have a pretty good idea of what the probabilities are.
We have a pretty good basis for saying, you know, within the next second,
you know, it'll spew out, you know, approximately 10 particles in the next second or something like that.
But we cannot predict in principle. It's not settled in principle exactly how many or exactly what points during the second will happen.
Alright, so here's Anscombe's example. I take this piece of radioactive material and I hook it up to a Geiger counter, which will then click.
Every time that the radioactive material sends out a radioactive particle, the Geiger counter will click, registering that it's received that particle.
And therefore the clicking of this will be random. We know that it's likely that there will be about 10 clicks a second, but we can't predict exactly when the click will come.
Now I take this Geiger counter with the radioactive material attached to it and hook the whole thing up to a bomb.
The bomb. And I rigged the bomb so that the bomb will go off if a click comes between, you know, one-fifteenth and one-sixteenth of the way into the second.
If between one-fifteenth of a second and one-sixteenth of a second, the Geiger counter clicks once or more, then the bomb will go off, otherwise not.
Then I stick this whole thing under your bed.
And it just so happens that the radioactive material does send out a particle at the right time, it hits the Geiger counter, the Geiger counter clicks, the bomb goes off, and you are blown to bits.
And so, you know, I'm taken to court and accused of killing you, and I say, wait a second.
I didn't cause this person's death because the causal chain leading from me to the person's death had some randomness in it.
There was this random thing where I couldn't guarantee whether the Gregor Conner were quick at the crucial moment or not.
That was purely random. And so you can't accuse me of causing the death.
Maybe there was a good probability that it would cause your death.
You know, maybe there was, you know, you can, you know, you can make it if it was one chance in ten,
or you can make it if it was nine chances in ten, you know, spin the story however you want,
just as long as it's a fairly decent probability that this would kill you.
I mean, if it's one in a million, then you might think, all right, I'm off the hook.
But it's like, if it's one in ten, you're inclined to think that, you know, I'm guilty of killing you.
And, you know, they might say, no, I haven't caused your death.
Well, what Asuka wants to say is, it's plausible to say that I have caused your death.
And so she wants to say that, therefore, the fact that there is some indeterminism in the course of the causality doesn't change the fact that it is causality.
X causes Y, you know, if I increase the probability of something, and then the upshot is that it happens,
it seems as if I've made a causal contribution to it, even if ultimately nothing necessitated it.
So, I think Mises is right that we can't view the world in terms of means and ends unless we view it in terms of there being causal regularities.
If it's just sort of random what will happen after I raise the glass to my lips, just sort of completely unpredictable,
then I couldn't coherently regard raising the glass to my lips as a means to quenching my thirst.
But if I think that it's overwhelmingly probable that raising the glass tinted lips will quench my thirst,
and if therefore by raising the glass tinted lips I can render it overwhelmingly probable that my thirst will be quenched,
then I can aim at it, since, after all, our actions generally don't guarantee that the result is going to happen anyway.
Okay, I think what's a further upshot of all this?
Well, one thing I think it shows is that our patterns of preference cannot be innate.
Why is that?
Well, let's first talk about the preferences in the praxeological sense.
That is, the preferences that are embodied in action.
The preferences in some sense only exist insofar as we're acting on them at that moment.
Well, if we necessarily have to regard our actions as free, and I claim we do, because
otherwise we have to regard things we can choose as co-varying with things that are
settled, and I'm claiming that that's incoherent, if we regard our actions as free, you know,
we're free, you know, so I'm free either to, you know, to drink the water or not, well,
And drinking the water embodies, if I drank the water it would embody a preference for clenching my thirst.
If I didn't drink the water it would embody a preference for not being poisoned by all you guys.
Well then I can control which of those preferences exist in the praxeological sense,
where the preference exists only so long as it's in the action.
I can determine which of those preferences I have just by choosing whether to drink or not.
So, in that sense, it can't already be settled what my preferences are going to be.
So, if I've got free will, then I can control those preferences.
But what are preferences in the themological sense?
In the sense that we're not talking about preferences embodied in action,
but just the various desires and impulses that you happen to have.
Well, those preferences exist when you're not acting on them but I want to claim that even though the preferences you have that you don't act on don't depend on any specific actions.
I think they do depend on patterns of action generally. Here's why.
I think part of what it means for you to have a certain psychological state has to have something to do with how you actually apply it.
And here I want to borrow a message from an example from Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein gives this example of this guy who is allegedly planning something and you're wondering what he's planning.
I'm planning. You say, well, no one can know what he's planning because you can't look into his head and see his plans.
So Wittgenstein asks, all right, suppose he wrote his plans down. Then would you know his plans?
Well, suppose he writes all his plans down but he doesn't act on them.
He writes down, you know, I'm planning to do this, I'm planning to do that, I'm planning the next thing,
and he just sits there, doesn't do any of those things.
It's not just occasionally, you know, when you plan something, it doesn't do it, but it's sort of systematically.
He never does any of these things on this list.
Well, it seems like we'd have a hard time saying that these really are his plans.
They might look like plans, maybe they have the word plans written in big red letters at the top,
but who knows what they are, but maybe there are things he's fantasizing about,
If he's advertising about, maybe he's writing some sort of fiction or something, whatever it is,
it seems like they're not his plans if he never acts on them.
If he only just sometimes doesn't act on them, you think, oh well, we know how that is.
But if he just never acts on any of them, or hardly ever, you just think, oh, it's not plans going on.
All right, so Wittgenstein says, all right, now suppose you could peer into his head,
and there you see the plans written in his mind.
Also, big red letters saying plans at the top, but once again he doesn't act on them.
How does peering into his mind, how does that help?
I think part of Wittgenstein's moral there is that a mental state doesn't count as a plan unless you actually act on it.
Now again, you don't have to act on it all the time.
You don't have to act on it consistently.
But if you just never act on it, it just doesn't count as a plan.
And more broadly, you have some sort of desire.
There are lots of desires that we're not acting on all the time,
but if you have some sort of desire and you never act on it,
then it's doubtful that you really have that desire.
Now, of course, what acting on a desire means can be tricky.
There are cases where you desire to do some particular action,
and you don't ever do that action,
but nevertheless you might do something else that somehow shows that you have that desire.
So, probably would be too strong to say that, you know, so, you know, maybe I want to kill my father and I never actually kill my father, but nevertheless the fact that, you know, other things I do show that I would like to kill my father or something like that.
So we can allow for there being desires you never act on, but nevertheless some will have to express themselves in their actions, just as you might have plans you never acted on, but you see either you're trying to act on them or you're doing somehow or other it has to express itself in action in order even to count as a desire in the themological sense.
So even tendencies or impulses are various things we have. If we have free will, we don't have to act on them, but you could say, well, you've always got them, even if you don't act on them.
But if you have enough control of your actions, you can avoid ever acting on those tendencies. And if you consistently don't act on the tendencies, then it seems to weaken the case for saying that you've got them anymore.
All right, a couple of morals of those.
First moral, you might think that certain facts about your preferences are genetically determined.
People thought, for example, that someone's degree of time preference or their degree of risk aversion or something like that could be innate.
I'm going to argue that we can't consistently think that those are innate
because those are preferences that are embodied in action and if we have free will, we can control our actions.
If we can control the specific actions, then ultimately we can control the overall pattern of actions.
Someone might say, well, maybe not.
Maybe not. Maybe, you know, suppose that any, you know, suppose for example that, you know, let's say that being an alcoholic means that, well I'll simplify it a bit.
Being alcoholic means that you, you know, that you usually don't turn down a drink. That's not really what being alcoholic means, but let's simplify it.
Being an alcoholic, part of what it means I'll say is you usually will not turn down a drink.
You might say, well you can turn down any particular drink. You have free will to turn down any particular drink.
But you can't consistently turn them all down, because you're just stuck with this preference that you will accept most drinks.
So although you have control of your individual actions, you don't have control over the overall pattern.
But it seems to me that if you have control of your individual actions, you do have control over the overall pattern.
You know, because, you know, suppose that, you know, suppose that you're going to be offered ten drinks today,
and suppose that you've turned down the first four, exercising your free will.
Well, you still have free choice about the next one. You can deliberate whether to accept it or not, and your deliberation is going to be, you have to regard the choice as not already settled in order to deliberate about it, so you have to regard yourself as free to make that choice.
You're free to make that choice, and you're free to turn down the fifth drink, you're free to turn down the sixth drink, and so on, and so you could, in principle, turn them all down.
In which case, what happens to this alleged pattern that you're stuck with?
So I think that if you're free to choose individual actions, then you also have freedom to choose your overall pattern of actions.
And if you're free to do that, then if you do that consistently enough, then you don't really count as being stuck with a particular pattern of preferences.
at Time Preference, Risk Aversion, Alcoholism, or anything else.
Second moral is that one crucial feature of Aristotelian ethics, the notion of habituation,
is, I'm going to argue, a priori.
Here's why.
Aristotle thinks that it becomes easier and easier to be virtuous because the more often
When you do virtuous things, the easier it becomes to do it next time.
You get, you know, your impulses to do the virtuous thing get stronger, your impulses
to do the under-virtuous thing gets weaker.
Of course, you also thought it's true the other way, in the case of bad habits.
The more often you do the wrong thing, you can start strengthening your impulses to do
the wrong thing and weakening your impulses to do the right thing.
And so, that situation is a crucial part of versatility in ethics.
You might think it's a sort of crucial part of ordinary common sense.
But you might think, well, that just happens to be a psychological fact about us.
You might think, well, we might have turned out to be different.
We might have turned out to be the sorts of beings for whom habituation just doesn't apply,
where no matter how often you do something, your impulses to the opposite are never any weaker.
But I think that these free will considerations suggest that it's not just a happenstance.
It's not just an accidental psychological fact of us.
I think that any rational agent would have to be a rational agent to whom habituation applies.
Or to put it another way, only beings capable of habituation could be rational agents.
Here's why. If it's really true that by changing our actions we change our tendencies,
because you don't count as having a tendency unless you act on it often enough, in some sense of act on it,
And that suggests that it must be true that by changing our actions, we can change our tendencies.
Okay, that's all about that. Yes.
I agree that we can't change the past, but it seems to me that it doesn't fall from that, that we can't affect the past.
Suppose that the predictor works through direct pre-submissions, and let's say that the predictor
either puts the money in the box or left it empty 24 hours ago, then it seems to me that by your choice now,
you can either bring it about that the predictor puts the money in there 24 hours ago, or bring it about that you left it empty.
And so it seems to me then that the two boxers claim that in the relevant sense the money either there or it's not isn't true.
You said that it's passed and settled, and I agree that it's passed, but it's not clear to me that it's settled.
The predictor putting the money in there or not is temporally first, chronologically first,
but it seems to me that your choice is logically first.
Now, given that the predictor putting it in there or not is temporally first,
obviously there's some sense in which the money is either there or it's not.
So let's suppose that the million dollars have been there, but it seems to me that you're
still free to take only the second box, and if you do, it's not that the money will vanish,
rather if you do, the money will never have been there, that you might say, well, given
So the question is this, suppose that the predictor rather than predicting on the basis of an analysis of my mental state at the time of the prediction actually has precognitive powers and peers into the future.
So that in some sense the predictor's decision is caused by my future choice.
My choice in the future is seen by the predictor and that causes the predictor to think a certain way and to make a choice.
So you actually have a kind of backward causation or something like that.
So the question is whether the money is already there.
Well, the money being there is temporarily prior to my choice, but the suggestion would be that my choice is somehow logically or causally or something prior to the money being there, because if I make a different choice, that will make it the case that the predictor all along made a different choice.
Now this very issue got debated by the late scholastics.
There was a big dispute about whether God could change the past,
or whether God is looking into the future and seeing things and so forth.
And this whole dispute about, you know, Occam said something like this in order to water down the doctrine of predestination
nation by saying, well, you can, you know, God predestines only those that he sees really are predestined to heaven, only those who sees really are going to merit salvation and predestined to hell, only those who are, who foresees are really going to merit damnation.
Now, I don't think that the notion of backward causation makes sense.
I don't think that the notion of literal precognition of the way the Medievalists put it was knowing
the future in itself as opposed to knowing the future in its causes, that is, not inferring
the future from its causes for someone directly seeing some future thing that is undetermined
at the time of the event.
I don't think that makes sense, because if, well think for a moment about the attitude of the predictor.
The predictor is looking into the future to see, to decide what choice he wants to make.
But, you know, so the predictor is saying, I'm going to stick the million in there only if I look and see you choosing just the one box.
But of course, if I'm the predictor and I look into the future and I see you choosing just one box, presumably I see you getting the million or I see you not getting the million.
Because it seems like I don't have any choice to make there either. It seems as though that's already settled too.
But what are we supposed to picture?
We say, all right, so here's the sequence of events.
Suppose that I were to make the opposite choice.
So the money is already there.
I decide to choose both boxes.
You want to say that doesn't make the money go away.
It just makes it the case that the money was never there.
So you've got the sequence of events.
The money is there, I choose both boxes, and now the money not only is no longer there, but was never there.
It seems like it's an inconsistent sequence of events.
It says that it has the money being there at time t, and then it has the money also not having been there at time t.
And you can say, well, the first one goes away, but is the first one going away something that happens?
It seems like the first one going away never happened.
I agree that that's incoherent, but if the million dollars is in the second box, that shows that you won't make the choice of choosing only the second box, but not that you can't.
So there is no possible world in which the million dollars is there and you take the second box.
and there's no possible world in which the second box is empty and there's no possible world in which the second box is empty and you take only the second box.
But your choice determines which of these two possible worlds is actual.
Here's my problem with that, though, is that one of them is already actual.
Temporarily.
Yeah, I don't know what the non-temporal sense of actual is. I guess that's the way.
One of them is already actual. And once it's actual, it can't change from being actual to being non-actual.
We agree on that. So one of them is already actual.
But nevertheless, I'm supposed to think of myself as having the power to make the other one have been actual.
But it seems as though that implies that there's a possible route from the actual world to the other one.
But it seems like there isn't. Because if I'm in this one, if I'm already in this one, I guess I think that one way of putting it is that I think that once something happens, it is settled.
And you want to say, well, there's some sense of settled in which it's not settled yet.
This is a very old dispute. It goes back to Aristotle and the Stoics and Diodorus Cronus and all these guys.
But yeah, certainly there are moves for your side to make. I don't think I've blown you out of the water.
But I think I've got more moves to do. David.
Okay, so the question is this, why isn't this the case, that the fact that the money is already there or not means that it's not rational for us to rely on, or we can't coherently rely on or something like that.
This fact that there's this, you know, un-varying connection between whether you get the money and whether the predictor made the prediction of the past,
why isn't it just so that we can't rely on that information?
And therefore, rather than saying that both arguments are right given the assumptions, and therefore beating up on the assumptions,
why not just say, no, the assumptions are all right, but what this shows is that you have to reject the argument for taking just the one box.
Well, I guess because if it still seems to me, it seems to me a sort of a
praxeological principle, that if I can choose between A and B and A and B
co-vary with these other things C or D, so that I get A, you know, so any situation
where I get A, I get C, and any situation where I get B, I get D, and I have some
If I can choose between these two things and they co-variate these other two things I care about, then how can I not treat these as means to those?
So it does seem to me as though they're both praxeologically irresistible, given the setup.
Well, the question is, we need to have an argument against someone who says,
well, if you're going through a deliberative process, trying to think about which one of these to get,
and if the deliberative process then issues and you're getting this one, they're going to say, why isn't that a choice?
And I think, you know, this is an argument for saying, you know, an argument against that view, but I think, you know, you do need an argument, because otherwise someone could just say, well you shouldn't, you know, you can't just define choice in such a way that causal, determined choice doesn't count as choice, because after all, there could be a case where there are two things you want, and you think about, you know, I'll avoid using words like deliberate and choice, you think about which one you want most,
After thinking about it, it seems to you that this is the one that would most satisfy your preferences.
And then you, on the basis of that, you then do that.
You can see why a determinist is going to say, why not call that choice? What's wrong with that?
And so I think that you need some kind of argument to show that there's something wrong with that.
Because otherwise, they'll just say, well, you're cheating by defining choice in such a way that
you're just defining the determinist choice out of existence.
You may know something about this.
I mean, it seems like you can have, well, I guess there's two things, you can have this position, but you can never manifest it, right?
Putting in standard cases of fragile things that are safely packed away so they never kind of risk being broken, that sort of thing.
But, I mean, I'm not sure I understand the inference from the fact that you can make it a case that you can never manifest a disposition to act in such and such a way, to the claim that therefore you can make it a case that you don't have a disposition to act in such and such a way.
Okay. So the question is, a thing can have a disposition that it never manifests. A glass can be fragile and it never breaks.
In fact, you could have thousands and thousands of glasses all lined up and none of them ever breaks, but they're all fragile.
They're being fragile doesn't mean that they break from time to time or they break frequently or anything.
It just means that they would break if struck with some defined force, or sugar is soluble in water.
That doesn't mean that any given bit of sugar ever will dissolve in water.
It could spend its entire career never encountering any water.
It just means it would dissolve in water if confronted with it.
So why do I want to say that we can't have desires or tendencies or impulses or, you know, middle stuff
without it being somehow manifested in action, you know, often enough?
And I don't want to make sort of a strong claim that, you know, you never have a desire
without actually enacting that desire. I want to say something fuzzier than that.
The question is, why treat desires as different from things like fragility?
Well, I think the reason is I've sort of been convinced by Wittgenstein
that there's a kind of intimate connection between thought and action
The disposition of a kind that is different from these physical cases, the disposition to act isn't just a disposition to engage in certain mechanical motions, if it were, you could have a robot that would be disposed, you could have a robot that was disposed to, you could have a robot that was disposed to engage in a certain kind of behavior in certain kinds of situations, but it's never placed in any of those situations,
Program such that if you were to, then the actions would flow forth, and so it makes
perfect sense to say that that robot is disposed to exhibit this behavior even if it never
actually exhibits it. But an action isn't just a behavior, the action implies, the action
Action implies the desire, so you can't have an action isn't just sort of the behavioral side of things, the action actually includes the desire.
Likewise on the other side, the desire includes the action.
In the case of a robot that's programmed to do certain things, you can point into its circuitry and identify where the programming is somewhat apart from the actual acting.
But the example I was giving with the plans is supposed to show that nothing is going to count as the plans unless they're acted on.
You could say, well, look, here's the thing in the brain.
What is the thing in the brain?
I think the thing in the brain might show that you maybe have some sort of predisposition to some sort of mechanical behavior.
But I don't think the brain, just pointing to the brain, can show you have a predisposition to the action.
Because, you know, the brain is just a physical thing and anything you can infer from it is just going to be sort of more kickings around, but it doesn't really show sort of the meaning side of it.
So I want to say that in some sense the desire and the expression of it are sort of internally related
in a way that the things in the brain and subsequent muscular motions are externally related to each other.
You can grasp one without conceptually grasping the other, unless the other two are twisted together.
You have to have any particular number of actual manifestations of what a business is for.
You can't have business that develops a business that doesn't manifest in any business at all.
People have plans, they don't actually carry out. They abandon the plan for whatever.
or whatever, but for the calendar plan, there has to be some kind of difference between having it as a plan and merely tripling down out of work.
But then I guess what I wonder is, if you're sort of making it a matter of just not having felt this position,
and not having unmanifested individualism, then one of the questions you can ask, whether it's the case that one of the differences that could be relevant is the difference is not actually a physical fault.
It seems like some of the things that we cite, that we cite as positions of interest to them, like fear or pain, or things like that, maybe things that are manifested in involuntary characteristics, right?
So if someone has a theory that you have to emanate tendency towards calories and things like that, there's plenty of things that you could do to, there's plenty of things that could indicate, you know,
The continuing presence of fear, even if the person isn't acting in such a way as to act on the disposition in front of them.
And so, you know, there's just, you know, a few things like that.
Arguing is all good action, but then there's the struggle.
The thing is, that would undermine the claim that they're actually a catalyst, right?
Because they're not acting on just the things we've spoken on.
But it wouldn't undermine the claim
Question for the audience.
Okay, so the question is, I've allowed this fuzziness, as I called it, that it's not the
It's not the case that every desire or every mental state you have, you have to actually act on, it's just that you can't have any that aren't somehow, you know, expressible.
And so then the question is, well then, what if some of these ways that they're expressed are things that you don't have control over?
So, for example, if I have extreme fear, you know, that might be expressed in chosen actions like running away,
but it might just be expressed by, you know, shaking and trembling and blinching and things that are not under my control,
and therefore there's no guarantee that habituation would be able to get rid of those.
Yeah, I think I agree. I didn't want to say that we have sovereign control over all the contents of our minds so that we can get rid of any psychological state through habituation.
But by habituation, we can, any states that we act on, because what Aristotle is concerned with primarily for virtue is the states that we act on, the states we express through our actions.
I want to say that the states we express through our actions, to the extent that they are expressible through actions, to that extent they are controllable.
But so that to the extent that my extreme fear makes me run away, that aspect of it is controllable.
I can get myself to be sort of less likely to run away.
But it might not be the case that I can get rid of the trembling and the flinching.
Maybe I can, maybe I can't, but I'm not claiming that there's sort of an a priori argument that can get rid of that.
You're saying that rational agents must be habituated to a priori?
Yeah, the question is, am I saying that any rational agent must a priori be one of whom habituation is true?
I have this habit of making bold claims and I can't get rid of it.
And the only point I can give you is because these kind of reviews have been going back on to the initial plan and so it's hard to actually try to figure out something in the multiple questions.
But this story has many other greater implications, like for example, the paradox that I'm not saying, and I'll say it's more cultural, but I've always heard the story of the death of Harvard,
______
Okay so this is a question about one of the, you know, one of the suggested
readings I had. So one of the suggested readings in the background was this
This dialogue, platonic dialogue, or probably platonic dialogue with Hipparchus, which I
didn't say anything about, but it's about the Socratic paradox in effect, but the question
is about this long digression in the middle about the historic character Hipparchus, who
was a ruler of Athens, who was assassinated, and so the question is twofold.
One, does the long digression in the dialogue shed any light on the rest of the dialogue?
And second, most accounts of the death of Prakas present it as the glorious assassination
of an evil tyrant, and this dialogue presents it as the tragic assassination of a benevolent
ruler.
For the first question, I've got nothing to say.
I have never been able to figure out what that digression is doing there, and I haven't
I spent a lot of time thinking about it, and maybe if I did I would come up with something wise to say about it, but I got nothing on that at the moment.
On the other question, well, whether a particular assassination was a glorious deed or a wicked one depends on the political perspective of the author.
Plato was politically rather on the conservative side. He identified more with the aristocratic
side, and so he was more sympathetic to Hipparchus. A lot of the anti-Hipparchus things were written
by people who were more sympathetic to the democratic factions. What the right story
is about Hipparchus I couldn't say. My guess would be that Hipparchus was no saint and
And the people who killed him were no saints either, but exactly the details that they disagree on, I don't know.
Are there other representatives who talked to you about what I'm saying?
Probably. I can't think of any offhand, but I can't remember whether Aristotle talks about the Constitution of Athens or if so what he says.
But I can imagine him saying something negative about it, but less negative than Plato. I wouldn't be surprised if it went like that.
Okay, I think we are out of time. See you this afternoon.