Positive Indeterminacy Revisited

(I meant to write this post a few months ago, when I was actually studying Merleau-Ponty. Since then, positive indeterminacy has popped up a few more times, in various guises. Hence "revisited".)

Merleau-Ponty introduces the term "positive indeterminacy" in The Phenomenology of Perception, where he uses it to describe visual illusions such as the Müller-Lyer...

 

Which line is longer?

 ...and the duck-rabbit. His point is that perception is often ambiguous, and he concludes that we must accept this ambiguity as a "positive phenomenonon". Indeterminacy, according to Merleau-Ponty, can sometimes be a feature of reality, rather than a puzzle to be explained.

Is it a duck? Is it a rabbit? Nobody knows!

Positive indeterminacy, then, is the identification of features of the world that are in some sense inherently indeterminate. Quine argues that any act of translation between languages is fundamentally indeterminate, as there will be always be a number of competing translations, each of which is equally compatible with the evidence. Of course in practice we are able to translate, at least well enough to get by, but we can never we be sure that a word actually means what we think it does. Thus Quine concludes that meaning itself is indeterminate, and that there is no fact of the matter about what a word means.

Quine: a dapper chap

Hilary Putnam comes to similar conclusions about the notion of truth. According to his doctrine of "internal realism", whether or not some statement is true can only be determined relative to a "conceptual scheme", or a frame of reference. Truth is also indeterminate, in that there is no objective fact of the matter about whether or not something is true. Putnam takes care to try and avoid what he sees as an incoherent form of relativism, and stresses that from within a conceptual scheme there is a determinate fact of the matter about truth. Nonetheless, this truth remains in an important sense subjective - it's just that Putnam thinks that this is the best we can hope for.

More recently Dennett has reiterated this kind of "Quinean indeterminacy", with specific reference to beliefs. According to his (in)famous intentional stance theory, what we believe is broadly determined by what an observer would attribute to us as rational agents. In some (perhaps most) situations, there will be no fact of the matter as to which beliefs it makes most sense to attribute. The same goes for other mental states, such as desires or emotions.

Dennett draws attention to Parfit's classic account of the self as another example of positive indeterminacy. There will be cases, such as dementia or other mental illness, where it is unclear what we should say about the continuity of the self. Rather than treating this as a puzzle that we should try and solve, Parfit argues that our concept of self is simply indeterminate, and that there is sometimes no "right" answer.

All of the above cases are much more complex than I have been able to go into here, but they give a taste of the importance of positive indeterminacy. I am most interested in how it can be applied to puzzles in the philosophy of mind, but it seems that it might well be a more fundamental part of how we should think about the world.

Basic Well-being

(by Joe)

I finished reading Reasons and Persons over the weekend - as you may have noticed, I haven't blogged about it like I threatened to at the start of the month. Its incredibly dense and technical, and whilst I got a lot out of it, I wasn't that inspired to write anything. I probably got the most out of section three, which concerns personal identity. Whilst most of Parfit's ideas weren't new to me, they've been incredibly influential in shaping my views on the self, so it was nice to read them in the original. Sections one and two, concerning self defeating theories, and rationality and time, respectively, weren't directly relevant to most of my work, but were nonetheless interesting. Once you get used to it, Parfit's writing is actually extremely enjoyable, full of dry humour and inventive examples.

The fourth and final section, concerning future generations, and our moral responsibility towards them, raised several fascinating issues. Not least of these was the question of how, morally speaking, we ought to compare different distributions of well-being¹. If we could have either 1% of the population very well off and 99% in poverty, or 100% just a fraction above poverty, which should we choose? In some cases these kinds of questions are going to be intuitively obvious, but Parfit weights them in such a way as to make them very difficult to answer. Does a slight reduction in overall well-being justify more equality? Should we be worried about the total or the average well-being? Can any amount of well-being justify any amount of suffering?

Yes, I chose those numbers intentionally.

These are all important questions, ones that we struggle to answer to this day, but I think that there's a crucial point that Parfit, and others, have missed. Economists and (utilitarian) ethicists tend to view well-being as a pseudo-numerical quantity - even if we can't count it precisely, we can at least make general statements about whether a certain policy will result in "more or less" well-being. Often this isn't a problem; when we discuss famine relief, or NHS funding, an analysis of the well-being that different options are likely to produce is essential. However, when we start to talk about higher levels of well-being (what Parfit terms "quality"), the numerical metaphors begin to break down. What does it mean to say that somebody is a million times better off than somebody else, or even just a hundred times better off? I genuinely don't know - I just don't have any conception of the kind of happiness or fulfilment that somebody this well off would be experiencing. When I'm asked to consider whether ten people suffering is worth one of these "super-lives", I just don't have any meaningful way of answering.

Parfit is at least partly aware of this difficulty, writing that Nozick's appeal to a "utility monster" as a refutation of utilitarianism is weakened due to the "deep impossibility" of such a creature. Nozick imagines a being who, unlike ourselves, has no limit to the pleasure it can get from the consumption of basic resources. Such a monster has a potential quality of life millions of times better than our own, thus requiring that we sacrifice everything to it in the name of greater utility. As "we cannot imagine, even in the dimmest way", what it would be like to be such a creature, we can deny that Nozick's argument has any intuitive force to us (Parfit 1984: 389). Parfit still thinks that such considerations can shed light on what we ought to do, but as a direct refutation of utilitarianism, Nozick's argument fails.

Nozick's utility monster was capable of consuming a limitless amount, and deriving equal pleasure from every bite. What about those who consume 100 times what the average person does? In terms of raw monetary resources, such people are relatively common. Do they really have a quality of life that far above my own? I don't think they do, and I think that this highlights a general flaw common to economic and utilitarian reasoning.

The internet seems to think that it might look like this.

I can , of course, imagine being fabulously wealthy, but I'm very sceptical of how much more well-being this wealth might bring me. Basic economic security, enough for me to enjoy the things that I enjoy, is all that I ask for. Maybe I'm just unusually ascetic (although this doesn't seem to be true, as I enjoy good coffee, expensive books, and nice food), but it strikes me that a basic level of well-being, not that far above what I currently enjoy, should be enough for anyone. I don't mean that they'll necessarily be happy, but rather that above this baseline physical resources aren't going to do most people a great deal of good. Being happy seems far more reliant on personal outlook and lifestyle choices than any degree of wealth or privilege. Parfit introduces the notion of a life being "worth living", but then goes on to include lives that are much better than this in his calculations. I'm not sure that this makes any sense in the real world - once a life is worth living, there's only so much that external factors can do to improve it. So when we're calculating how to allocate resources, we should bear in mind that "super-lives" may simply be an a posteriori impossibility - something that in practice does not, and cannot, exist.

This is pretty contentious, to say the least. It obviously undermines mainstream economics, and the whole acquisitive structure of the modern world. However, the important thing to note is that even if we set this baseline at my own level, or slightly above, it is still an extremely privileged position. Most of the world's population have not yet reached it. Parfit's moral conundrums remain, albeit in a slightly reduced form. We no longer need to worry about the moral worth of extremely good lives, because such lives simply don't exist. Instead we need to look at maximising the number of lives that reach the level of basic well-being. For argument's sake, we might define such a level as (currently) £10,000/year, ignoring tax. It's obviously going to depend on local prices, as well as extraneous issues such as childcare and differences in taste. What's essentially is that our level of basic well-being involves a relatively comfortable life, but nothing particularly fancy. How we go about maximising those at this level is obviously an even more contentious issue, and one that I don't plan to discuss here any time soon - this blog's meant to be about minds, not politics.

(This video has been doing the rounds today, and the basic point at 3:00, that rich people can't actually spend all their money, is similar to what I've been trying to say. TED apparently refused to publish it, although I'm sure things are a bit more complicated than that.)

1. Parfit uses a variety of different terms for the general idea of 'living a better life'. It's a very contentious topic, and one that I'm going to be ignoring today.

Parfit, D. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: OUP. (All references from the revised 1987 edition, which I've noticed has several indexical errors - so watch out!)

Reasons and Persons: Moral Immorality

(by Joe)

First off, a quick bit of background. I've decided to try and read Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons (1984) over the summer. It's a thick book, and densely written, so it's going to take me a while. To keep me going I thought I'd blog about each chapter here, at least when I think that there's something the interesting to say. The book isn't really about the mind, or at least not its biological aspects, but I still think it's relevant to this blog. Parfit investigates ethics, rationality, and personal identity, all of which I consider to be closely related to cognition and the philosophy of mind. In fact, I think a lot of what Parfit's saying could maybe benefit from a closer interaction with the scientific study of the mind-brain-body(-environment?), which is part of what I'm going to try and discuss here.

Derek Parfit

Anyway, on with the show. I've just finished reading the first chapter, "Theories That Are Indirectly Self Defeating". One thing that particularly caught my attention was Parfit's notion of "moral immorality, or blameless wrongdoing" (1984: 32). I'm not entirely convinced that the notion is coherent, but he argues that one possible outcome of consequentialism could be that we are morally obliged to make ourselves disposed to act in an immoral manner. He gives the example of Clare, who faced with the choice of saving her child's life or the life of several strangers, will choose to save her child. Under most consequentialist frameworks, she will have acted wrongly - instead of one person dying, several have died - but she only acts this way because she loves her child, and in coming to love her child she may well have acted rightly. Thus we get a situation where she has done wrong, but not in any way that we would blame her for.

The reason that I'm not sure whether this is coherent is that whilst consequentialism might say that, broadly speaking, it is better to save several lives than save one life, it might also say that in this particular situation it is better to act in a way that preserves the possibility of love than to act in a way that does not. So perhaps Clare hasn't acted wrongly? However, coming back to something that I mentioned in my last post, I suspect that it might be more accurate to say that Clare has committed the action that is least wrong. Practical ethics isn't as simple as a binary choice between right and wrong, and often we will have to make extremely difficult moral decisions. In a sense it is this difficulty that characterises truly moral decisions, rather than simply doing what is obviously right. So whilst I wouldn't necessarily choose to use the precise terminology that he does, I think Parfit is on to something quite meaningful when he talks about moral immorality.

He goes on to make a distinction between what we ought morally to believe and what we ought intellectually to believe (Parfit 1984: 43). So whilst Clare ought morally to believe that her love for her child comes before preserving life (as will in fact result in the best possible world), she ought intellectually to believe that what is best is to save the most number of lives. This is a very similar distinction to that made by Joyce (2001), between moral truth and moral fiction. The distinction is that whilst Parfit retains a consequentialist moral realism on both sides, Joyce's dichotomy is between the apparent truth of moral irrealism, which means we should be error theorists about morality, and our pragmatically assenting to some kind of moral fictionalism in order gain some social advantage for ourselves. Joyce characterised the latter as assent rather than belief, but I suggested here that we might be better off viewing it as a separate system of belief, one which we only come to question under certain special circumstances. This would make Joyce's position even more similar to that of Parfit: we ought to convince ourselves to hold certain moral beliefs, even though we consider them intellectually flawed. The only difference is that whilst Parfit thinks we should do this in order to bring about the best possible world (whatever that is), Joyce thinks we should do it to benefit ourselves. In fact, earlier in the chapter Parfit makes precisely this claim, in discussing whether rational egoism might be indirectly self-defeating; he concludes that it is, because it tells us to act irrationally, but that this is not necessarily an argument against it. So Joyce's moral fictionalism is well supported by Parfit's account of rational egoism, even if Parfit doesn't think that, morally speaking, that is the position that we ought to hold.

Joyce, R. 2001. The Myth of Morality. Cambridge: Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge.

 

Parfit, D. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: OUP. (All references from the revised 1987 edition.)