Substance dualists are fond of pushing possibility arguments for the conclusion that we’re not essentially material. And if not, then there must be some other element that is essential to us, ergo, substance dualism. Swinburne has a popular version of the argument, Plantinga offers one in Nature of Necessity, and he makes a substantially similar argument in a 2006 issue of Faith and Philosophy. My question: if we put aside Kripke-esque complaints about modal intuitions of identity, why can’t the materialist push his own possibility argument? I rehearse one below the fold.
Archive for July, 2007
From Abortion’s Wrongness to Its Illegality
Thursday, July 19th, 2007Take the following argument:
(1) If abortion kills an innocent human person, then it ought to be made illegal.
(2) Abortion kills an innocent human person.
(3) Therefore, it ought to be made illegal.
Let’s grant (2) and focus on (1). It is prima facie plausible in that killing innocent human persons violates a person’s rights and so ought to be illegal. But what about this sort of reasoning against it? If we instantiate a law against abortion, then many women will try to have abortions illegally and will die (or be severely harmed) as a result. This will then cause a degree of disutility which will outweigh the disutility which would’ve occurred if there had been no such law. So we ought not to make such a law. Could such an argument work?
Must we be causally connected to what we perceive?
Friday, July 13th, 2007There are various constraints offered on accounts of perception. For example, most philosophers adopt what we might call a factive constraint. If a subject S perceives that X is F, then X is F. We can’t perceive things that aren’t there just like we can’t know what’s not true.
Another popular constraint has something to do with causal connection. For example, if a subject S perceives X, then X must be have appropriately caused S’s perceptual state (or something like this). Are there counterexamples to the causal condition? I entertain a few possibilities below the fold. If anyone can think of others (or would like to dispute mine), that would be helpful. Also, has anyone explored this in the literature? I can’t find anything on it…
Ginet on the Epistemic Condition for Moral Responsibility
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007Carl Ginet writes the following:
Melanie shoots her gun and thereby causes the death of her enemy, fully intending to do so. Her belief as she pulled the trigger that by firing the gun she would cause her enemy’s death was correct and justified, for she is an expert marksman and just an hour ago she checked the operation of her gun and loaded it. But what happened was this: the bullet she fired was deflected by a flying bird; nevertheless the firing gun caused the death of her enemy because the sound of the shot startled a passing driver and caused him to lose control of his car which struck and killed her enemy. Here I am disinclined to regard Melanie as blameworthy for the death of her enemy (though she is, of course, to be blamed for acting with the intent of killing him). She seems no more culpable for that consequence than she would have been had she aimed her shot harmlessly into the sky and unintentionally caused her enmy’s death in a similar way. (Philosophical Perspectives 14, 2000, p. 270)
Do others feel this same inclination? In response, you can just write ‘yes’ or ‘no’, no need for comment unless you want to.
What is patriotism, and why does it have such a bad rap?
Thursday, July 5th, 2007Here’s a 4th of July post for the Show-Me bloggers. It seems to me that professional philosophers and most of the other profs that I know in the humanities are dismissive of patriotism. They seem to think that it’s something for the masses, the uneducated, etc. With regard to current events, they seem to think that patriots are the ones carrying out Bush’s agenda or the ones blindly supporting any move the US government makes.
In this post, I’d like to explore two things. First, what, more precisely, is patriotism? Is it having a certain affective state? Is it meeting certain social or moral duties? Is it a virtue? Once we’re clear on the first issue, the second question can be addressed: is being a patriot a good thing, all things considered?