Topic for this section is, why should I care about anyone else but myself?
Why should I care about anyone's interests but my own?
So far, everything I've said about having an ultimate end and so forth
leaves that question entirely open.
I'd have some ultimate end which is to satisfy, you know, the maximum satisfaction of my own preferences
or however you want to define it.
but we haven't yet seen much about its content well over the next few sessions
we'll be trying to specify more of that content and ultimately the specified in
libertarian direction but just starting off now with question why should I care
about other people's interests and this connects to the issue I mentioned
yesterday of agent relative versus agent neutral value. So the question is, when
you say that something is good or right or valuable or something, is that
simply a relational claim, a claim that it's good for, let's say for me, good from
my point of view, or is it somehow an endorsement of some kind of shared or
or a Common or Commonly Accessible Value.
So you wanna think of it this way.
When I say the word I, you're referring to me.
But if, when you say the word I,
you're referring to yourself.
I just wanted to give a joke we heard at the lunch, but.
And so, it's not that the meaning of the word I
I is subjective in some odd ways.
Now, in some sense, which we all mean exactly the same thing
by the word I, but nevertheless,
the reference is all different.
When I say I, I mean me.
When you say I, I mean you.
So you might think, someone might think,
well, maybe good is like that.
When I say good, I mean good for me.
When you say good, you mean good for you.
Now, praxeology might seem to favor
this agent-relative conception,
because praxeology talks about the fact that the values you pursue are always your own values.
Classical eudaimonism also might seem to favor that view because classical eudaimonism says we each have our own eudaimonia,
we each have our own flourishing that we're pursuing.
In fact, Aristotle even suggests that good is sort of a relational concept.
He attacks Plato's form of the good as some sort of good in itself.
No good is always the perfection of something. My good is to perfect my nature, your good is to perfect your nature, and so on.
And you look at cases like the squirrel eating the acorn. You might say, well, is good or bad thing?
Well, it's good for the squirrel, bad for the acorn. It seems like there's an Asian relative conception there.
On the other hand, you know, when we think about justice and rights, it seems like it's awfully tempting, at least, to think you need something like an agent-neutral conception there.
Unless you want sort of a purely kind of egoist contractarianism or something, where you say, well, I decided it's in my interest to make this agreement with other people that we're all sort of agreeing not to violate each other's rights.
Rights, but you might think, well maybe you want something more robust than that. Maybe there's
some reason I ought to respect your rights apart from the fact that it's simply a strategy that
serves my ends. If it is, if I'm, you know, should somehow adopt respect for your rights or for your
interests or whatever, you know, some kind of inherent value, then that might seem to push you
in the direction of agent-neutral value.
So there's the question, why should we care about other people?
And then there's this other question,
is all value agent relative?
Is all value agent neutral?
How are these two kinds of value related?
So here's a question you might ask.
If you think of, Nietzsche makes this distinction
between master morality and slave morality,
where master morality, I'm going to oversimplify a bit in the long tradition of oversimplifying
Nietzsche, master morality involves values, people who go around dominating and going
after what they want and imposing their will and being aggressive and self-assertive and
slave values or servile values involve being meek and not putting yourself forward and
and being humble and gentle and doing what other people want rather than what you want
and so on.
So slave values or survive values are self-sacrificial and what you're supposed to admire, not just
what you're supposed to do for yourself but what you're supposed to admire in other people
is sort of self-abasiveness.
Of course, for master morality you're supposed to, not only what you're supposed to pursue
But you might ask, well, why shouldn't I endorse master morality for myself and for other people I care about, if any, and why shouldn't I endorse servile values for everyone else?
What I should endorse for myself and my friends is bold self-assertiveness.
What I should endorse for everybody else is meek self-abasiveness.
I want other people to be helpful to me.
So I like it when other people are really helpful and they sacrifice their interests to me.
But I don't want to do that stuff. I want to go after what I want.
So is there any reason not to adopt a double set of values?
One set of values for you and your gang and another set of values for the rest of the world.
If you think value is agent-relative, you might think that nothing would rule that out.
Now, the existing evaluative terms we actually use seem to be agent-neutral, I claim.
Well, I'm claiming that they seem to be. I'm not claiming that they are, but I'm claiming that they seem to be,
which by itself could still be a disputable claim.
But what I mean by that is that when we say
that something is good or right,
we're generally not merely endorsing it for ourselves
or expressing our own desire for it,
but generally we're also endorsing it for others,
saying that other people ought to want it
or respect it or whatever.
And the fact that our evaluative terms
actually work that way doesn't by itself prove anything.
we might have, you know, our evaluative terms might conceal some sort of confusion.
But nevertheless, I'm claiming that in fact our evaluative terms do tend to work that way.
Not only do they express our own desire or approval for things,
but they also tend to suggest that other people should feel similarly.
Now, you might think, well, this isn't true generally.
You might think, well, what about cultures that have a double standard?
Nietzsche, for example, talks about cultures that had master morality for the in-group.
You're not only supposed to behave self-assertively yourself,
you're supposed to admire self-assertion among your fellow gang
and want them to be like that too.
But you're not supposed to admire it in the rest of the world.
You're not supposed to want the rest of the world to be self-assertive.
You want the rest of the world to be meek and humble.
You're perfectly happy with the fact
that the rest of the world is meek and humble
and you're self-assertive.
And so Nietzsche thinks that,
at least in cultures like that,
evaluative terms aren't universal in that way.
That evaluative terms,
although they may involve a recommendation
for someone other than just you personally yourself,
they don't involve recommendations for everyone.
Well, I shouldn't agree that that's how things often work in many cultures, and I think that
particular way of thinking is not entirely dead in our culture for that matter.
But I'm not convinced that that is sort of the dominant, uncontested way that evaluative
terms work in any culture, even in cultures like the very chauvinistic ones that Nietzsche
is talking about these cultures still if someone from outside the privileged class starts behaving
in the way that the privileged class is supposed to admire among themselves being bold and aggressive
and self-assertive and so forth you know although that may awaken disapproval and dismay often it
And it can also awaken admiration, the Romans were, the Romans admired the Celtic leaders
they found hard to defeat, they still went and happily defeated them and dragged them
in chains to the streets of Rome, but nevertheless they'd rather fight, even though in some sense
they might rather fight a weak and wimpy foe, they felt greater respect for the cool and
admirable strong and brave and intelligent foe, and you feel more respect for that one.
And so even in chauvinistic cultures, I think there is some extent for evaluative terms to extend beyond just the end group.
But anyway, whether or not, as a matter of fact, any culture has them.
Suppose, as a matter of fact, that our evaluative terms do work like that.
Suppose, as a matter of fact, when we use an evaluative term, we commit ourselves to it being valuable not just for ourselves, but for everyone.
That doesn't mean that that's right.
You might ask, couldn't we revise our moral terms?
Sometimes we, you know, we do revise moral terms and we don't like what they imply.
Now who are we revising the mean?
Well, I don't think it could mean that we could, you know, simply take the very same moral terms
and start applying them in a way that they no longer apply universally anymore.
Because if it's part of the meaning of our terms and the way, you know, the way the terms are used
is part of what determines the meaning.
the meaning of the moral terms that they apply to everyone universally.
Then we can't start using them in a different way without abandoning the term.
It's not the same term anymore. It's another term that sounds like it.
But it's not the same term if it doesn't have the same meaning.
So we couldn't use the terms differently.
But the question is, could we abandon our terms and substitute other ones?
Sometimes we do that. Sometimes there are terms that necessarily carry certain evaluative
commitments with them. If we decide we don't like those evaluative commitments, we just
stop using the term and racial epithets are being the obvious example. You can't use them
with their original meaning without committing yourself to certain evaluations. If you don't
want to commit yourself to those evaluations, either you have to use the term with a different
meaning or you have to stop using the term. Could we do that? Could we give up the universal
So how do we give up the universal implications of our evaluative terms?
Well, I want to argue that we can't.
Again, as is often the case this week, I don't claim to have an absolute knock-down argument against it,
but I'm going to give what I think are some reasons against it.
But first I want to talk about a different reason for thinking we can't give up the universal evaluative terms.
And I want to think of that argument that doesn't quite work.
So some have what you might call a consistency argument.
You often see this argument in moral philosophy, that you have to take universal terms,
you have to treat those applying to everyone.
Because if I regard my pursuit of my well-being as legitimate for me, I have to regard your
pursuit of your well-being as legitimate for you.
It doesn't make any sense for me to treat it as okay for me and mine, but not for you.
Unless I can point to some actual relevant real difference between us and when we're
telling whether it's a real relevant difference is you know suppose you know suppose it's
like the the snitches in Dr. Seuss where the ones with the stars on their bellies think
they're the the best and the ones without the stars aren't and so they might say well
the reason that these just apply to us is we have the stars but as soon as you take
the stars away they don't say oh well all right now we should you know we should be
in a subordinate position.
Now they've suddenly decided that not having the stars is the important feature.
So you have to find some feature that really is relevant, not one that you're just pretending
is relevant.
All right, fair enough, but I don't think this will get you everything you want.
We have to distinguish between weak and strong universalizability of values, and here's what
I mean.
Suppose that, think about the way that two sports teams that are playing against each other, regard each other.
So team A is doing everything it can to win against team B, and team B is doing everything it can to win against team A.
Well, does team A think that team B is wrong to be trying to win against team A?
No, team A thinks it's perfectly legitimate for team B to be trying to win.
But that doesn't mean that Team A thinks that it should thereby be committed to letting Team B win.
You know, the attitude you have in sports is, or in any kind of, you know, sort of competitive situation like this is,
it's perfectly appropriate for you to be trying to win, but it's perfectly appropriate for me to be trying to stop you.
Now, in that sense, you've got a kind of universalizability.
It'd be different if you said, you know, I should be trying to win and everyone else should let me win.
If you had said that, then you'd sort of have a view that makes yourself special and different from everyone else.
But if you don't have that, you would just say, well, I should be doing all I can to win, you should be doing all you can to win, and, you know, we'll see who wins.
That would be a kind of your universalizability, but it's not going to be the kind that gets you
what you want morally.
Now, of course, in the case of the sports teams,
there is a common background of shared values that licenses this conflict. Although,
Each of them wants a different situation. Team A wants Team A to win. Team B wants Team B to win.
Nevertheless, they both agree on the shared background rules of sports. It's a good thing that we allow this conflict or promote this conflict or have this conflict happen.
And so they both agree that it's a good thing that there's this institution of the sport.
and you would say both sides are better off for having this conflict the game
would be no fun if one if if both sides agreed that team a ought to win if team
B didn't do anything to stop team A from winning you know not only would team B
get no fun out of the game but team A would get no fun out of the game so there
are lots of cases where we have what looks like a departure from from strong
universality it looks like case we've got these these kinds of conflicts but
If they're licensed by something stronger in the background.
But is that always going to be the case?
You can imagine someone who thinks, well, life is like the sports teams, except there's
no shared, there are no shared norms in the background that justify this.
It's just this is how it is.
I, you know, I go after what I want, you go after what you want, and that may not be the
best situation we can imagine, but that's nevertheless what is in fact legitimate.
Hobbes seems to have in mind something like this.
Hobbes says that in the state of nature, everyone has the right to do whatever they want, but
what he means by right is simply it being okay for them to do it, but it doesn't imply
that anyone else has an obligation to let them do it, so according to Hobbes, I have
a right to kill you and you have the right to stop me.
So when Hobbes says I have a right to kill you, he doesn't mean a kind of right that
One of the arguments for rights is it seems to me they often presuppose strong universalizability when they think they're establishing it or they often presuppose it when really all they've got is weak universalizability.
For example, there's an argument in Rothbard early on in the Ethics of Liberty where he's trying to argue for property rights.
I think it's a perfectly good argument. It's an argument that works only if you already presuppose this one thing that I'm asking you how to prove, of strong universalizability.
It's an argument where Rothbard says, well look, suppose you've got, how do we prove that anybody owns anything? What are the options?
Well one option is that nobody owns anything, but he says well that means that no one would have the right to use anything, because ownership is the right to use stuff.
and so no one would have the right to use any material object including their own bodies
and so they'd all immediately have to die and that doesn't seem to make much sense.
So we should assume that there is such a thing as ownership.
So what about ownership of our own material bodies? Who owns them?
And Rothbard says there are three main options.
Could be that each person owns him or herself, which is obviously the option Rothbard wants to argue for.
Or it could be that everyone owns an equal share of everyone else, you know, so if there are 300 people, each person owns one 300th of every other person, and so on.
If there are 4 billion people, each one owns one 4 billionth of everyone else.
And Rothbard argues against that on the grounds that there's no way to implement that, because you'd have to get permission from all the other 4 billion people before you could raise your arm or inhale.
That's obviously not going to work out.
Then Rothbard leaves with the other option,
some people own other people.
He says, well, that's not going to work because it's not universalizable.
It's not a principle universally applicable.
Ethical systems should apply to everyone.
Well, I think those are good arguments as far as they go.
However, I don't think that it settles this foundational question
The computational question of whether there are any, whether there is such a thing as universalizability at all.
Because imagine what a Hobbesian would say to these examples.
A Hobbesian would say, well, my view is, there's perfectly legitimate, you know, whatever you mean by ownership,
it's perfectly legitimate for me to do whatever I want with my body.
But it's also perfectly legitimate for you to do whatever you want with my body.
And you want to cut off my arm and cook it and eat it, it's perfectly legitimate for you to do it.
This is also one of the worries I have about Hans Hoppe's argument that by engaging an argument, you're thereby committing yourself to the legitimacy of that person, using their money to do something that's not your obligation to do it.
Mind and Body in order to engage in an argument.
Because once again, is this legitimacy
in the weak universalizable or the strong universalizable sense?
Because you could say, yeah, by engaging you in an argument,
I've granted it's perfectly legitimate for you
to use your mind and body to argue,
but it's also perfectly legitimate for me to cook and eat you.
So we need the strong universalizability
in order to make these arguments work.
Can we get it?
Now, of course, you could say in one sense
we already have it because I'm claiming
that the evaluative firms we already have
are ones that already have this commitment
to strong universalizability built into them.
But still, and the question we have to ask is,
what do we say about someone who thinks we should give it up?
Can we coherently give it up?
And I'd like to be able to show that we can't
coherently give up the strong universalizability
that's built into our evaluative terms.
Okay, why not?
Well, a number of philosophers have stressed,
as part of their argument for why we should care
about other people, a lot of them have stressed
that we have a need to admire oneself.
You find this in Socrates and Aristotle
and David Hume and Adam Smith.
Hume talks about being able to bear our own survey.
And part of what they mean is that
When you step back and look at yourself, you want to be able to find in yourself the same
traits that you admire in others. But you could ask why that's the case. You can imagine
someone saying, look, what I want to see in other people is slave values. What I want
to see in myself is master values. When I step back and look at myself, I have very
There are very different standards from what I want when I step back and look at other people.
Now what human smiths do is they try to base strong universalizability on certain innate psychological tendencies we have.
It's just a fact about human beings that we have these natural sympathies, that we just have this natural tendency to put ourselves in other people's shoes,
to see ourselves from other people's point of view and or ultimately to see
ourselves from a kind of objective or neutral point of view and that therefore
they think there's a reason that we want me to harmonize the kinds of traits we
want to see in other people with the kinds of traits we want to see in
ourselves. I think there's something to that and I wouldn't agree with all the
details, but I do think that they're on the right track there. The problem is, if
you make this purely a psychological claim, it's just a psychological claim
that we have this tendency. You know, it's, I have the same kind of worry about it
that you might have about, you know, in Austrian economics you might
have about basing an economic principle on empirical data rather than trying to
defend it conceptually. You know, because it may be true that we have a natural
natural tendency to step outside of ourselves and view ourselves objectively and try to bring into harmony the traits we see in ourselves or the traits we treat in others.
We have a lot of natural tendencies. We have a tendency towards interpersonal objectivity, but also we have tendencies toward bias and toward ignoring other people's viewpoints and just doing whatever we want to do.
Clearly human beings have both those tendencies. You see both those tendencies around all the time.
So, why should we pursue one of those rather than the other? If they're just sort of psychological facts, it's not clear where does their normative punch come from.
So it would be nice to have something more like a conceptual argument.
Well, here's at least part of the move I want to make as to why I think we can't get rid of this strong universalizability in our evaluative terms.
So first I want to claim that rational agency requires language, that you couldn't have rational agents without language.
Now, you might doubt that. You might say, well, we need language to communicate our thoughts, but we could think perfectly well without language, or even thought perfectly well, we could think well enough to count as rational agents without language.
I'm not convinced of that. Part of the reason I'm not convinced of that is what I was talking about this morning, where you don't count as a mental state unless you're capable of expressing it in certain ways.
And I have trouble seeing how you could have thoughts that you didn't have any means of expressing in language.
So I tend to think of language not just as a means of communication, but actually as a vehicle of thought.
Now that's a philosophically controversial claim, but anyway, it's the one I do sign on to.
All right, although I don't think that language is merely a means of communicating thought you already have,
I think that it is, that language is, it's also a vehicle thought,
I do think that the communicative dimension is essential in the following sense,
that speaking language involves acquiescing in essentially shareable norms.
Now this touches on what's in this called Wittgenstein's private language argument,
and there are a lot of different interpretations of exactly what it means.
I think he's right, but let me say a bit about what I think that means.
By a private language, I don't mean a language that only one person knows.
When Tolkien created Elvish, or actually two strains of Elvish,
before he published any of that, he was the only person on earth who knew Elvish.
The original speakers of it, having died out many ago.
Whoever it was who developed Klingon, I don't know if that was one person or group, but let's say it was one person.
The first person who came up with Klingon was, at one time, the only person on earth who spoke Klingon.
So there's a sense of private language, which those are private languages.
That's not the sense I mean, because although they were languages that no one else actually spoke,
they were languages the rules of which were generally applicable.
In other words, the rules are such that anyone saying,
Saying Ay Elbreth Gilthaniel means the same thing as anyone else saying Ay Elbreth Gilthaniel even if there was a time when Tolkien was the only person on earth who had ever said Ay Elbreth Gilthaniel and I forget what it means you know something like oh Elbreth you're really cool but or something like that but there was it you know to say that the language was not private is not to say that you know it couldn't have been the case that only one person might ever have spoken it. Tolkien could have died before and his notebooks could have been burned before anyone ever else
The rules were essentially shareable. The norms of language were essentially shareable.
You could say, could you construct a language where the rules of it are such that only you can mean, only you can understand the meaning of it.
So that when I say grobsik, that means table for me.
But not only will it not mean table if you say it, but it won't even mean table to you when you hear it.
You can't, you know, you can't understand it as meaning table. It's only something in my own little little world.
It's a language you in principle could not learn. It's only my language. Well, I don't think that makes sense. I think that
language by its very nature involves a shareable norm.
Now what follows from that?
Well, some thinkers have thought that something about morality follows fairly directly from norms governing language.
You can find this in Habermas, you can find it in Hans Hoppe.
Take norms governing language or governing interpersonal linguistic communication
and try and build ethical or political norms directly out of that.
That's not what I'm going to recommend, but what I am recommending is something in common with the spirit of that.
Here's why I don't want to recommend that approach. First of all, I don't think it's a promising approach. I don't think it's going to get you what you want in the way of content.
Because the norms governing linguistic communication are much more permissive than the norms governing ethics.
I think that I can succeed in having a conversation with you while I'm torturing you to death.
The conversation wouldn't be that fun for you, but it would be a conversation.
I could follow all the norms necessary to succeed in having a conversation with you,
without obviously doing anything particularly moral.
I don't think that this is going to get you something ethical, but also I don't think it's necessary.
I don't think you need to get ethics out of the norms of language per se, the particular content of linguistic norms,
but rather I want to get something of the fact that they are, in some sense, agent-neutral.
If part of what it is to speak a language is they have norms that are in some sense agent-neutral,
and if any rational agent has to be a language speaker, then any rational agent has some agent-neutral norms.
Now, the norms might just be, you know, stuff about governing language use. They're not moral norms yet.
But there is an agent-neutral dimension to their value.
Now, you needn't necessarily think of this agent neutral as being in conflict with or opposed to or contradistinguished from agent relative value.
You could see it as something that's already built into agent relative value or wherever you want to put it, but there it is.
Which means that once you've got such a thing as agent neutral value, even if thus far it only applies to things about language,
Then you've got a perspective you otherwise wouldn't have.
You've got an agent-neutral perspective from which you could raise questions about the evaluation of action from an agent-neutral perspective,
even though you haven't as yet gotten that far. So far you're just talking about language.
But now there's sort of a standpoint from which to raise those questions, and otherwise there wouldn't be.
Because I think the real worry a lot of people have is there's just no such thing as an agent-neutral standpoint.
We can't find any basis for thinking there could be such a thing.
And what I'm suggesting is, well, for any being that speaks language, there is such a standpoint.
We already have agent neutrality on the table.
Well, why should we care about that ethically? Why should we think that that would get us anything?
Well, here I am inspired by a point that Socrates often seems to be making.
Socrates thinks that once you recognize a category of value, you're committed to wanting to integrate it in with your other values.
I don't have a full-fledged argument for that. I hope to have, but I find the view plausible and attractive.
An example that Socrates gives is a bit different from this one. The example Socrates gives is, in Plato's Gorgias, for example, he's arguing with this guy, Polis, about which is better, justice or injustice, and Polis in effect says, well, justice is morally better than injustice. It's more admirable, sure, but injustice is more advantageous, so injustice is more
of Having, even though justice is more worth admiring.
But the point Socrates pushes him on is, can you really
regard something as more worth admiring,
and yet regard it as not worth having?
Can you really recognize a certain kind of value,
and yet still regard your life as worth having
without that kind of value in it?
Well, this is a somewhat different kind of case,
but this is the kind of case where
I want to push something analogous.
Say that once you recognize that there is such a thing
is agent-neutral value, even if you see it simply as an aspect of agent-relative value
rather than something as a sink. Once you've got that, then you've got a standpoint from
which questions can always be asked about the justification of this from other people's
standpoints. Now, agent-neutral value, I don't mean some sort of platonic good floating off
independent from what anyone wants, if that's what Plato meant. You could think of it as
There's maybe sort of a more of an intersubjective value rather than simply a value that leaves
agents behind altogether.
That's a shared value or a shareable value.
But it seems to me once you've got this shared value perspective, once there is such a thing
as this way of viewing the world, then you can't logically be indifferent to questions
about the evaluation of your actions from a shared perspective.
So take, for example, the standard line that people often use when they're, let's say,
raising children and teaching them to be moral.
They don't do that.
You wouldn't like that if someone did it to you.
You can imagine why a Hobbesian might say, well, why on earth is that relevant unless
Unless you just mean, you know, they better watch out that, you know, they don't come back with, you know, with stronger friends.
Why should I, you know, you might say, well, of course I sure wouldn't like it if they did it to me.
I'm sure I'm glad it's me doing it to them instead.
So why is there any force to this question?
You know, you wouldn't like it if they, how would you like it if they did it to you?
It seems as though that question has some kind of force.
It seems as though it makes sense.
It doesn't mean it's always effective, and saying it to someone doesn't necessarily make them recognize or change, but it does seem as though it makes sense to ask that question.
And what I want to say is that any being that speaks language is open to that question.
Because there's a foothold for stepping outside of this sort of solipsistic perspective.
Again, none of that adds up to a knockdown argument for anything.
If I can work any of that into a knockdown argument, I certainly will, but I haven't yet.
But that is what I'm tempted by.
Now, there was a time when I thought I didn't need any of that stuff at all.
There was a time when I wanted to go purely agent-relative and then try and build concern for others out of some purely agent-relative thing.
But again, that was all pretty Wittgenstein, and Wittgenstein affected me in various ways.
For better or for worse, I can't judge, but since I am within the perspective that that created.
but certainly this sort of private language thing has influenced me in thinking well maybe there's
something to this agent neutrality after all. Well so what I want to claim is that once you recognize
as Agent Neutral Value, then that enables you to take an agent neutral perspective on your own actions and on your own character and then you're going to want to integrate what can be agent neutrally endorsed into your conception of your own edimonia.
You know, so that if you can't find fully satisfying a life that can't be endorsed from the agent neutral standpoint, then you're going to regard agent neutral endorsement as something to, you know, want to make part of your audimonia.
I suppose this, you know, I suppose it's not just Wittgenstein that influenced me on this, it was on, I guess I'm reading Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments.
where I kept resisting the psychologicalism of it, trying to boil everything down to these innate psychological impulses, natural sympathies we have, and I didn't like that, but it kept striking me there was something right about this idea of stepping outside of our own solipsistic perspective and seeing something from another person's point of view, and someone who started off as a quasi-Randy and I figured well how do I reconcile that with
sort of my Udiministic sympathies and so I'm trying to cram all these different
things together into a single theory. My theory is rich but you know it seems to
me there's something right about Smith there's also something right about the
about the Udiminist view and it's you know it's your own you know it's sort of
about your own flourishing that you are promoting and I want to make sense of how I can have it all.
Alright, so suppose I want to integrate this agent neutral perspective into my own conception of my own good.
So somehow, concern for others' interests has to be integrated into my own good.
Well, how do I do it? Well, you can imagine different ways it could go. I might just hold fixed because I'm trying to construct my conception of my own good by building other people's interests into it.
But remember, I'm also trying to construct my conception of what other people's interests are, the fact that they're sort of in reciprocal determination with my own.
I'm trying to come up with a conception of self-interest, both of mine and of other people's,
that will allow them all sorts of being integrated into each other.
Now I could just start off with sort of a prima facie account of self-interest, and
And then just say, well, then we'll just integrate that and say that what everyone ought to do is, you know, some sort of master morality without any slaves.
It would be where everyone goes around being self-serve and aggressive because I want that for myself.
And so I then from the agent perspective, I'm committed to wanting that for everyone else.
So everyone goes around, you know, pushing and shoving. It's like New York.
And, you know, that could be what you do. You hold fixed, the initial prima facie conception of self-addressed and then you go from there and everywhere else.
You could go the other way, you know. Think about the way I like other people to treat me and think, well, I should be more like that.
And so I start off with, you know, some prima facie account of the way I want other people to treat me, which is just, you know, their, you know, being really, really helpful to me and putting what I want first.
I think I should be like that too and I try to build that into my conception of happiness.
So then you get a situation where everyone is sort of deferring to everyone else and everyone is being really nice
and no one ever pushes for anything but everyone is constantly deferring to everyone else.
It's sort of like what Herbert Spencer thought would be the ultimate pinnacle of civilization.
Nietzsche read that and reacted with horror.
But it seems to me that neither of those is going to be quite the right story
story because each of them involves, you know, holding one conception fixed and sort of adapting
everything else to fit it. So in one case I hold my conception of self-interest fixed and then, you
know, how people are supposed to treat other people gets completely adapted to fit that. In the other
case I hold my prima facie conception of how you ought to treat other people, how other people ought
to treat me fixed and then I adapt my own conception of self-interest to fit that. But it's even more likely
I think that it would be a matter of mutual adjustment that if I'm trying to bring my conception of my self-interest in line with concern for others' interests,
I'm also trying to bring my conception of their self-interest in line with my thinking that they also should be concerned for mine,
it's not going to be all one way. It's going to mean some kind of reciprocal determination where it's not going to be all pushing and shoving,
It's loving, but it's also not going to be complete self-abnegation.
Now, the fact that I'm trying to give a conceptual defense, or praxeological defense, or a priori defense, or something like that,
of this concern for others by trying to do it along the same lines that Hume and Smith did except that they did it by appealing to these natural sympathies and I'm trying to say no we don't need that we can go a priori you might think well that's odd because well it might be odd for more than one reason but the main reason you might think it's odd is it suggests that our natural sympathies are irrelevant you know Hume said and Smith said look look at these natural sympathies we have look at the fact that you you naturally wince if you see someone hit in the face with a shovel just your natural reactions to
We just have this natural tendency to put ourselves in other people's shoes, and that explains where this comes from.
Now if I come along and say, well, no, it's got nothing to do with those natural sympathies.
It's really this a priori argument that any rational agent is committed to taking up an agent-neutral perspective.
Then, you get the odd result that here, in fact, we obviously have these natural sympathies.
I mean, if you read the things that the human smith say, it certainly seems right to say that we do have these
sentences they talk about, and it does seem as though beings with tendencies like those would tend to develop something like
moral norms, or humanly looks at least kind of like moral norms as a similar shape.
And then I come along and say, well those natural sympathies are irrelevant.
You know, I can get these moral norms purely out of the a priori.
The reason that might seem odd is you might say,
well here we have all these natural sympathies that tend toward what you're talking about.
And you want to say it's just a coincidence.
The content of morality would be exactly the same if we didn't have these natural sympathies.
Isn't that suspicious? Isn't that unlikely?
Well, I think what I would prefer to say is that I don't think it's irrelevant,
but what I think is that it might be that only beings that had those natural sympathies would be capable of rationality.
Any rational agent has to be able to take up an agent-neutral perspective,
But maybe only beings that have capacities for sympathy could take up the agent-neutral perspective
so that maybe there couldn't be a species of Hobbesian language users,
a purely Hobbesian attitude toward other people.
And again, that's simplifying Hobbes. Hobbes doesn't actually advocate what we call a purely Hobbesian attitude toward other people.
there's more complicated but the so it might be that the right thing to say is
that only beings that are capable of putting themselves inside of the shoes
could get the kind of degree of impersonal perspective could enable them
even to grasp language you couldn't grasp language unless you were capable
of stepping outside of yourself and that only if you have certain kinds of
Okay, so I've said that we're committed to taking up some sort of Asian neutral perspective on ourselves and not endorsing anything unless it can be endorsed from an Asian neutral perspective.
Well, you might think this would generate utilitarianism. You might say, all right, well, then we have to treat our old people's interests equally.
We all have to count equally. If we all count equally, then you just do whatever maximizes most of them, since you can't satisfy all of them, and therefore you get utilitarianism.
Why isn't that the upshot of this? Well, more than one reason, but one reason at least is this.
I've said a bit about this before, but I'll say it again. I think that utilitarianism is praxeologically unstable.
And here's why.
I've got, you know, this is the standard distinction.
Whenever I make a distinction that's not on the handout, I try and offer some.
There's a distinction that's often drawn between rule utilitarianism and act utilitarianism.
The way this distinction works is sometimes the best way to get what you want is not to aim at it directly.
not to aim at it directly. For example, here I have a digital watch. Suppose I went back
in time to the 17th century and handed someone this digital watch, assuming they didn't burn
me at the stake, I need to choose my company carefully. They might be really impressed
and say, oh, well, we want to do scientific and technological research. We want digital
watches too. We want to pursue some line of research which would bring that about. Well,
What line of research would they pursue and what line of research should they pursue?
Well if you wanted this line of scientific research that is going to end up with little
watches like this, with this liquid crystal display and so on, what you really need is
an understanding of electronics and to get that you need an understanding of electromagnetism
and to get that you need to be studying lightning and stuff like that, you need to be doing
Whatever it was Benjamin Franklin was doing with lightning, apparently the traditional story that he was running around with a kite and a key is dubious.
The best evidence against it is that he survived that period of his life, but I don't know whether that's what he did or not.
Anyway, that sort of thing, whatever it was he was doing, is the sort of thing you need to do in order to end up with stuff like this.
But in the 17th century, no one looking at this watch would guess that studying lightning would be a useful way of getting this watch.
Instead they thought of something to do with, you know, clock making.
And there was a lot of study of clock making and gears and so forth, and they would have studied clock making more, and that would have been a dead end.
That wouldn't lead to this at all.
So, there's a famous point made by Francis Bacon.
Now, Francis Bacon was one of the first philosophers of science to think that the point of science is the technological goodies it brings us.
Before him, the dominant view was the Aristotelian view that the point of science is just knowledge for its own sake.
Bacon said, no, no, who cares about knowledge for its own sake, the benefit of science is technological goodies.
Given that, you might have thought that Bacon would have said that we should change the way we do research,
and that we should direct our research more toward practical ends.
But he didn't. He thought that you should do scientific research as though you cared about knowledge for its own sake.
And the way he put it is you should look for experiments of light, not experiments of fruit.
By which he meant not a preference for optics over horticulture, but do experiments that will shed light on general principles,
as opposed to experiments that are designed to yield some specific practical result.
and his argument for this was it's difficult to know ahead of time
exactly, since you don't know the principles involved, it's difficult to know ahead of time
exactly which experiments will lead to which practical results
but in the insight in general principles it's more likely in the long run to lead to more
useful applications even if you don't know ahead of time exactly what they are
and so although he thought that the point of science was technological goodies
he thought you shouldn't do science aiming at technological goodies
You should do science as though you cared about the research for its own sake.
Well, applying this issue to utilitarianism, a lot of people have suggested that even if the element of good,
even if you think the point of morality is to promote the common welfare,
doesn't necessarily mean that you should be trying to promote that directly.
Suppose you're a referee in a game, and you're a philosophical referee,
and you start reflecting on your role in the game, and you think,
well, what's my point here? My point is to facilitate the game.
Well, what's the point of the game? Suppose you decide that the point of the game
is to provide pleasure to the spectators.
I don't know whether that's quite the right story. It's probably oversimplification.
But let's say that's it. I decide the point of this game is to provide pleasure to the spectators.
So I might then conclude, all right, when I make my calls, I decide if someone is safe or out or whatever,
I should be guided not by the rules of the game, but by whatever ruling will give the most pleasure to the spectators.
And so when I'm trying to decide something, I don't look in the rule book and say, I think, well, is this a home game or a way game?
It's a home game, all right, so most of the people, most of the spectators are favoring Team A, so I should make a rule that favors Team A.
Well, that may maximize the pleasure of the spectators in the short run.
But in the long run, the spectators will pretty quickly realize that whether a team wins or loses has nothing to do with actually how it plays.
And then you'll easily predict who's going to win just by counting how many people in the stands are for a particular team.
and then you have not maximized the pleasure of spectators quite the
contrary or take another famous example suppose that you know suppose that you're
a doctor and you've got five patients and each one needs a different organ
transplant one needs a lung and one needs a liver and one needs a heart and
so on and they're all in desperate need you don't have any donors and then a
perfectly healthy patient walks into your clinic for routine checkup and it
If you kill him, you can redistribute his organs to the other five, and you save five lives at the cost of one.
You might think utilitarianism recommends this, because you try and maximize as many people's interests as possible.
But, many utilitarians will point out, in fact, utilitarianism doesn't recommend this,
because in general, if you adopt a general policy that the few can always be sacrificed to the many,
well, although everyone's a member of the many, everyone's also a member of some few or other,
So everyone is a potential object of sacrifice.
And so if there's a general rule in society that any individual can be sacrificed to the group,
the whole group is going to be less happy. They're going to be much more nervous thinking that any one of them could be next.
And so therefore the whole group will be more happy if you adopt a general rule saying that no one can be sacrificed.
So this is the idea of rule utilitarianism, which is that you don't simply choose your actions on a case-by-case basis.
You try to figure out which general policies are the most, you know, are the most beneficial and you stick to those general policies as though you thought that they were valuable for their own sake.
Now in fact I think praxeology shows, because Austrian economics shows, that you produce more total prosperity for society if you stick to certain general principles like voluntary exchange and so on.
So, act utilitarianism is praxeologically incoherent, I think, because praxeological analysis itself shows that if you act on act utilitarianism, you end up making everyone worse off, which is the opposite of what you wanted.
So, rule utilitarianism seems the only defensible version of utilitarianism, but I claim that rule utilitarianism is also praxeologically incoherent. Why is that?
Well, because in effect, what real utilitarianism is advocating is that there are certain things that, in order to gain some good or other, you should treat certain means as though they were ends in themselves.
But my question is, what does it mean to treat something as though it's an end in itself?
I mean, either you treat it as an end in itself or you don't.
Either you adopt it as an end or you treat it as a mere means.
If you treat it as a mere means, then you're always going to be open to arguments for departing from the rule.
Because here you have a patient who walks into your clinic and your first thought is,
hey, I can kill this patient and redistribute his organs.
And your next thought is, oh no, a general policy of doing that would be bad for society.
But your third thought could be, well, I'm not enacting a general policy here.
I'm just doing my one little action.
As long as I can do it and I can make it look like an accident and no one knows about it,
I'm not undermining the general respect.
So I might as well do it.
Of course, if all the real utilitarians reason that way, then they're just going to act exactly like act utilitarians and the bad results won't sue.
So this seems like a case for saying that you should commit yourself to treating these things as though they really aren't in themselves.
Well, fine. But once you do that, I claim you're not a utilitarian anymore.
Because if you've really committed yourself and you really do care about these means for their own sake now,
now maybe your reason for carrying your reason for getting yourself to care about them with a
utilitarian one but that was sort of a ladder and you picked it away I mean some of the ancient
Epicureans had this argument about friendship people said to them oh well you Epicureans are
egoists you only you know you only regard your friends as means to your own happiness which I
think to some extent might be right because the Epicureans didn't really have the same kind of
I don't really include the Epicureans in my gang of Platonists and Aristotelians and
Stoics and Scholastics, although they had some of the demonist aspects.
Anyway, some of the Epicureans responded by saying, no, it's true that we ought to care
I don't care about the friend for the friend's own sake, but here's why.
You'll get much greater pleasure out of the friendship if you value the friend for the friend's own sake.
So therefore you have a perfectly good egoistic reason to get yourself to care about the friend for the friend's own sake.
And I would say, all right, fine.
You've got an instrumentalist reason for trying to get yourself into a certain frame of mind.
Once you've got yourself into that frame of mind, it seems to me that your attitude toward your friend is no longer instrumental.
You had instrumental reason for adopting non-instrumental concern, but once you've got a non-instrumental concern for your friend, you're not an egoist in the narrow epicurean sense anymore.
So likewise, I want to say, yeah, there are good utilitarian reasons to get yourself to be committed to certain principles of justice for their own sake.
Once you've committed yourself to those principles of justice for their own sake, then you've waved bye-bye to utilitarianism.
Now, as I mentioned before, and as I will go into more detail again, that doesn't mean that I think consequentialist reasons are irrelevant or unimportant in ethics.
On the contrary, I think that there's once again something to integrate into a larger picture.
that consequentialist considerations can play a role in specifying the content of
some of our moral duties. But it goes the other way around too. What counts as a
good consequence should be influenced by some of our views about moral duties.
Now there was a time when I thought that consequences were largely irrelevant for
the content of libertarian rights held regardless of the consequences and the
reason I came to change my mind about that it's not the reason you might think
you might think you know so you might think well here's someone who used to
think that you could defend you could or should defend libertarian rights on
sort of purely non consequentialist grounds and now they start bringing
I'm not bringing consequentialist considerations in, that must mean that they think that the non-consequentialist arguments aren't so good and so they need help from the consequentialist ones.
But actually it wasn't that, it wasn't that I became less impressed by the non-consequentialist arguments, it's that I became more impressed by the consequentialist ones.
In the sense that I thought these consequentialist arguments for libertarian rights are really, really good.
And it would be really weird if the fact that they're so good were totally irrelevant to why libertarian rights are correct.
It would just be sort of an amazing coincidence that although the fact that they bring about peace and prosperity and progress in society is just a happy, useful fact,
it's got nothing to do with why libertarianism is right.
The same kind of worry that I said someone might have about natural sympathies, where, you know, we've got all these natural sympathies and they support a certain viewpoint, but in fact the viewpoint is right for a reason that has nothing to do with the natural sympathies. I wanted to avoid saying that, so likewise, you know, if the, you know, it would be really weird if, you know, here you have the fixed volumes of human action and man economy and state and they give all these reasons why you get much, much better consequences, much more, you know, much more better social cooperation and prosperity and so forth if you have a libertarian
in the libertarian system, but if it turned out that all that is irrelevant to why libertarianism
is right, it's just a happy coincidence, but that human action and man economy and state
have nothing to tell us about why libertarianism is a good idea, I think that would just be
odd. So it's not that I loved deontology less, but that I loved consequentialism more. Not
Not more than deontology, but more than I had before.
So it seems to me that it would be odd if consequentialist considerations weren't part
of the story of why libertarian rights are correct.
Of course, I also don't think that they are the main story.
I think that they're just concern for consequences is part of our moral point of view, but not
the whole thing.
and I'll have more to say about that tomorrow.
Okay, questions?
Yes.
On the thought that thought requires language,
what would you say about a cake such as
your dog goes over to the door to indicate that he wants out,
you get to let him out and then he hops in
his favorite chair which you had been sitting in?
I mean, it seems like there's some level of thought
going on there.
Yeah, no, certainly, I mean, again, it's gonna depend exactly what you mean by thought.
What I said was, you know, specifically rationality, but of course, you can then say, what do you mean by rationality?
There's a sense of rationality where if you do X because you want Y and X is the most efficient way of getting to Y,
then there's a sense in which the dog is acting rationally. There's some sense of rationality.
Actually, I think animals are a tricky thing in general for philosophy.
Philosophy would be much easier if there were no animals other than humans.
Because when we try to figure out what to say about animals,
there's two temptations it's always easy to fall into.
One is sort of the Cartesian temptation,
where if anything that falls short of the human conceptual status
can't really have any mentality at all.
So they're just like robots, and that clearly is wrong.
And the other temptation is to go the opposite direction and think, well they must be like little people, they must have reasoning like ours.
Now I think that, yet another thing I've been convinced of by, partly by Wittgenstein, partly by things sort of related to Wittgenstein.
And part of becoming more Wittgensteinian is that I'm more friendly to Kant than I was back when I was more Randian.
But I'm still more Randian than Kant, but I'm more Kantian than Rand.
But I've been convinced by this.
But there's a certain Kantian tradition that emphasizes that you can't really make sense of perception or of our perception without concepts.
and also Rand obviously would have disagreed with content in fairly strong form which I wouldn't quite want to endorse but it seems to me that when you try to make sense of perception as we have it without concepts it's hard to make sense of it but then it's hard to say about animals because clearly animals have perception there's some sense of concepts in which I don't want to say they have concepts and so it's very hard to know what to say about this and but
And whatever is the right thing to say about animals, it seems that there's some kind of conceptual capacity or rationality or some sort of ability to, you know, not just to move from one thing to another, but to see it as a move from one thing to another, to see, you know, not just that the dog can, you know, can go to the door and use your example, which I forgot to repeat the question, but your example was, isn't an example of rationality when the dog goes to the door to get you to open it so the dog can really run back and jump on your chair.
It's one thing for the dog to go to the door as a means of, it's one thing for getting into the chair to be the reason the dog goes to the door, it's another thing for the dog to sort of be able to see that connection and to grasp it.
It seems like that, it's hard to say that's what the dog does, although it's in general hard to say, it's hard to, you know, we can't really put our minds into the dog's minds very easily.
Again, it's not clear that telepathy would help.
This is a typical Vic and Shane example.
You peer in and it's not clear what it is you want to see that would answer your question.
And there is this question more broadly in Austrian economics about exactly who praxeology applies to.
The title of Mises' book is Human Action, not Animal Action.
Well, what do we say about animal action?
There's some sense in which the category of means and ends clearly applies to animals, to non-human animals, not just to us.
Nevertheless, it seems right that there's something about us that Mises is talking about that we don't find with the animals.
So what's the difference between sort of the much more limited version of praxeology that applies to animals and the kind that applies to rational agents?
There are various things here and there I can say, but I don't have a full story.
Libertarian, the kind of stuff that Hoppe wants to get out of that, you know, you can't get libertarian rights, that sort of thing, just from what it takes to count as communicating the candidate.
But I mean, you know, Habermas and Hoppe are both, aren't they both going to be saying something that, you know, the norms they're interested in are going to be something a bit more restrictive than that, right?
It's not just what it takes to count as speaking in a language with someone, but to the norms that govern specific parts of language,
like norms that govern argumentation or deliberative rationality or standing in a dialectical relationship with someone or something like that.
And, you know, it's basically a case, at least, to say that, you know, a lot of, you know, there are a lot of cases in which you're kind of communicating with someone, but not in which you're kind of, you know, trying to convince them of something and trying to argue with them about something in some sense.
If you're torturing someone on the rack and saying, retent your sins, retent your sins, you may get them to say, I retent my sins, but insofar as that's because of the torturer, and not because of the free choice of their will, that's not a matter of convincing them to do so.
Okay, so the question is, I said about thinkers like Habermas and Hoppe and so forth, that they're trying to construct moral or political norms directly out of the norms governing language, and the question is, well, isn't it not just language per se, but more specific applications of language?
say but more specific applications of language like argumentation in the case of Hoppe or
deliberative rationality or dealing with people in a face-to-face relationship in the case
of Hoppe and of us.
And then the example is given that if you're torturing someone you can be talking to them
but not necessarily engaging in argumentation or convincing them since just torturing them
and saying we can't, we can't isn't a way of convincing them.
Okay, a couple of things.
First, it's true that you can't,
it's true that just, you know,
just torturing someone saying we can't, we can't
isn't engaging in an argument with them.
But I think you can torture someone
while engaging in genuine argument with them.
In fact, you can, you know, you can,
well, not even go into the details.
But anyway, you could, I mean, you could genuinely, you know, as you're torching them, you can genuinely say,
here are my premises and conclusion, which, you know, if you don't like conclusion, which premise do you reject?
And they can tell you, and you can say, all right, why?
And as you're torching them, then you go back and you change your argument to fit what they're saying and so forth.
It seems like it's in principle possible.
I don't think that, you know, that doesn't cut one way or the other.
I don't think that is, you know, a direct objection to anything, but just a point.
It's true that Habermas and Hoppe both have something narrower in mind than just language,
but I'll take the case of Hoppe because I don't know Hoppe and Mises as well.
Still, Hoppe is fairly broad because the idea seems to be that you can't rationally believe something or assert something
Unless you could justify it in an argument or defend it in an argument.
It seems as though you can say things without arguing.
It's not that you can't justifiably say things without arguing,
but you can't justifiably say things without being the kind of thing you could defend in an argument.
And there again, I do want to say that's still going to be too permissive because you can, you know, while you're torturing someone you can defend them, so I guess that argument, that point I said was relevant after all.
Yeah, so the question or comment is, the term agent neutral can be ambiguous, it can mean independent of any agent whatsoever, something that's just valuable and independent of anyone who does or would value it.
People often think Plato's form of the good is supposed to be like that, I don't know if it is or not. It wasn't the last time I glimpsed it.
There's another sense of agent neutral where it just means it's, you know, it's not tied to any one particular agent, it's, you know, sort of inter-subjective or shared or something like that.
And so the suggestion was that maybe there should really be, you know, two, three terms rather than two.
In addition to just, you know, agent relative and agent neutral, the agent neutral should be split into two terms and the suggestion was we could keep agent neutral for the one that's shared or shareable
and then the agent independent could be the one that doesn't apply to, you know,
that is completely apart from any agent at all and that the suggestion was that's more like what RAND meant by intrinsic
is something that is
a value that's apart from any value.
yes, well you would have read the wrong, yeah it was the wrong one, well all right the question
One of the background readings was an article by Christine Korsgaard called The Reasons We Can Share and then the source that was listed on the website ended up being the wrong source for it.
So the question is, what does that article say or how is it relevant?
Well she was arguing in that and I think I would say the way she uses the term
agent neutral is the way that Jeff was just suggesting that we should that it's
it's not independent of any agent at all it's more shareable but she was saying
and to some extent now what she says in that article blurs together for me with
what she says in some other places but anyway she thinks she also thinks
although she's not trying to embed it in a Udiametis framework the way I am but
She also thinks, and she's sort of a, she's a kind of a Kantian, but a kind of a, watered down doesn't sound too pejorative, she's a, I don't know, kind of just a Kantian, a more expansive Kantian.
But she thinks that the, that we can't make sense of a purely agent-relative value, that we can't, you know, that in evaluating something we're necessarily,
that we're necessarily treating it as a reason that's open to, that's accessible to others.
Whatever reason we offer for what we're doing is something in principle where we're inviting other people to see it that way too.
She has this one famous weird example, which is not in that article, it's elsewhere.
In fact, it might have been in the book you actually got, but it's...
She says, think of the yellow spot on the wall, and then she points out that you all did.
Maybe one of you didn't, but duh.
And then she shows, she thinks that shows that what we say binds other people in a certain way.
And she thinks that likewise when you say, you know, think how you'd like it if it happened to you, that somehow makes you think of it.
I was never able to quite figure out how that argument worked, so I don't want to endorse the yellow spot on the wall.
I mean, it's an interesting example, but I don't know what to do with it.
Yeah.
If you understand the situation correctly, given the conventions, then I've just placed an obligation on you to respond, say, hey, Charles, and either hang around or else do something to explain that you've got to move on before you move on.
I don't think it's intended as sort of a decisive argument that here are these reasons that I've just proven we can place on each other, but it looks like the content reading situation is that we can sort of fire actions, we can enter into the reasons that others don't have.
Because the act is not responding to my reading at all, it's just walking by without acknowledging it.
That would be the normal course of affairs that I hadn't read to you, but it would be specifically disregarding the claim that I just put on you, for whatever reason.
Charles offers a different example from Korsgaard, a less weird one, where I'm walking down the street and he comes along and says,
Hey Roderick, and by saying that he has given the ordinary norms of our society and our understanding of those norms and so forth,
He has placed some claim on me, not necessarily a decisive claim, but some claim on me to respond in kind.
If I could just walk on and ignore him, and there might be some justifiable reason for me to do that if I find out he's just become a neocon or something.
I always fear that for you. But if I did that, I would necessarily be ignoring or disregarding a claim that I somehow,
given my understanding of what the norms are in our society, I can't help but recognize that he's placed a claim on me by doing that.
suggestion is well this isn't sort of decisive or anything but it's a way of
of seeing how how hard it would be to give up that perspective maybe I'm sort
of going now from from his paraphrase to do what I'm saying maybe but it's a way
of showing how how difficult would be to really rid ourselves of of any kind of
Agent Neutral Value. I think that's what that reminded me of is there's an argument in in
Cavell about aesthetic value where someone one person says oh I really love that song wasn't
it beautiful the other one says oh it was very you know it was very monotonous and it was sung
without any expression, and the tune was very simplistic, and the whole delivery was wooden.
You say, yeah, I know all that, but wasn't it great?
You could say that, but somehow your grasp of the relevant concepts involved, somehow
once this objection has been made, you can't just grant the objection and then go ahead
and say it's good.
Maybe there's some countervailing consideration you have to make, but it just doesn't make
any sense for you to, you know, there's something at least often puzzling about
sticking with your previous evaluation despite the fact that a claim has been
put on you now to, you know, at least to revise it.
It would be this weird sort of phaser of you, to me, actually, to say, hey, what's up, etc., because, you know, it's not something that I'd like to claim on you for, it's just something you're gratuitously deciding to do because it would be nice.
And that seems like the wrong sort of reading about reciprocal social interactions like that word. It's not just you being nice, it's that if you didn't do that, you'd be treading on, maybe justifiably, maybe not.
I'm just going to ignore that question. The point is that if he says, if we try to imagine a situation in which he's saying, hey, Roderick doesn't place any sort of prima facie claim on me, you have to be a case where my responding in kind would be some sort of favor shown. And now I forget what happened after that.
and now I forget what happened after that.
Yeah, yeah, it doesn't seem like the right description situation.
I'm just wondering if you can go back and give your arguments for that claim, and also maybe answer, because it seems to me, whatever commitment we do get out of recognizing the value from the sort of language argument, our commitment would be sort of the same, however, our commitment is a certain linguistic convention, right? And so that doesn't seem as robust as the sort of commitment that we want for ethical, you know, our ethical considerations, so.
Okay, so two questions. One is, what was my argument for saying that once we
recognize the existence of agent-neutral value, we're thereby committed to
integrating it into the rest of our values? And the other question is, and
even if so, given that the civil rights on the basis of language isn't going to
be of the category of our commitment to linguistic conventions, it seems that's
Well, the answer to the first question is I did not give an argument. I said this seems plausible to me and I tried to say some things to make it seem attractive, but I don't have a fully worked argument there, that's the point where I'm just waving my hands about.
When I have sort of an analogy, it's not a perfect analogy, I had this example in mind of Socrates saying that once you recognize that something is worth admiring, you can't be fully satisfied unless you integrate it into your life, you can't be fully satisfied regarding your life as lacking this kind of value, but that's not an exact analogy, it's just sort of what inspired the thought,
But although I don't have a precise argument for that, the idea that I was waving around on was
there's a certain kind of question that to a being that had no access to agent-neutral value at all,
it's a question that just wouldn't make sense.
The question like, how would you like that if it happened, if they did it to you?
And if you're just sort of completely blind to any sort of agent-neutral value,
you wouldn't even see why that's a relevant question.
No, I sure wouldn't like it if it happened to me.
Thank God it's me doing it to them instead.
And there'd be no standpoint from which to ask that question.
And once you accept the existence of any sort of h-neutral value,
even if it's only about language, my suggestion, and again,
it's only a suggestion.
I don't have the argument.
I just, this is sort of what seems to be an attractive way
of doing research to try and work out an argument here.
So the suggestion is that you've now got a foothold from which considerations about how you'd like it of someone else that it can now be raised, that there's now a perspective, a lens, you know, I haven't got an argument yet that you're somehow forced to look through the lens, but there's now a lens through which you can look at your actions from an agent-neutral perspective.
On the other question of whether this is just a commitment to certain linguistic conventions,
well, I think it's stronger than that, because it's the nature of the commitment to having any linguistic conventions at all.
Any particular linguistic convention you got, you could change.
But that wouldn't change your commitment to having some linguistic convention or other.
And of course you could give up language entirely. You could stop talking, you could stop thinking in language, you could just go about grunting.
I suppose that's a possible option, but that would be the cost.
So I think that our commitment to agent neutral language, I mean to agent neutral value, I think that is pretty robust.
But the question is, well, do I have a decisive argument for saying that once you've got it, you have to look at your other values through it? No.
But it seems to me that now that there's a standpoint from which this question can be asked, it's going to be hard to see how you can really find your life satisfactory when there's that sort of that nagging gap.
gap. There's always this position that you just don't dare ask yourself a
question from.
So the question is, does agent neutrality imply that any value you've got, you know,
No, even things you might think are matters of taste, like music, and I think music is a matter of objective taste, but oh, it's a, I don't know, succotash or something, maybe something like succotash, and are they thereby committed to universalizing that for everyone?
No, but remember the out I gave myself, which is, there are cases where conflict is licensed, but only if the conflict is endorseable or justifiable from each and every point of view.
So, if I'm on team A and you're on team B in a game, it's perfectly alright for me to prefer team A's winning and you're to prefer team B's winning, but there is a background that licenses that.
From an agent-neutral perspective, we can endorse people having those divergent values.
So, likewise, from an agent-neutral perspective, there are all sorts of reasons we could endorse some people eating Succotash and some people not, and there's no sort of drive to say that everyone has to do that.
So we can have differing values and even conflicting and competing values.
One thing that I thought about is, no matter how attractive you might be to notions of
sort of harmony of interests, if two people are in love with the same person, there's
no way you can apply sort of a pure rigid harmony of interest to that.
But you could say, nevertheless, from an agent perspective, even though you can't endorse
You can endorse someone else marrying the person you love, but you can endorse generally people having different people they love and you can endorse a situation where there is the risk that two people love the same person and you endorse a person being able to marry the one they want even if it's not you and so forth.
So there can be plenty of diverging and even conflicting, but not all diverging values are conflicting, but both diverging and conflicting values can be okay, but there has to be an agent of a standpoint from which it's okay, it can't just be sort of ground level Hobbesian.
Time for maybe one more.
Thank you very much, Robert.