Recent Media Appearances

On EA, longtermism, and synthetic a priori knowledge

Three bits of public philosophy I’ve done elsewhere that might be of interest to some:

(1) A fun and in-depth discussion of Effective Altruism (and its critics) with Walter Veit:

(2) “Commonsense Clues: A Defense of Longtermism” (against Schwitzgebel’s washout arguments) at The Latecomer magazine.

(3) A fun discussion with Dustin Crummett (hosted by Matthew Adelstein) of (i) psychophysical harmony and (ii) moral (and other synthetic a priori) knowledge, and whether we can explain both without appeal to supernatural forces. Matthew subsequently posted some interesting reflections here (more sympathetic to Dustin’s side of the debate), and I followed up a bit in the comments on why I don’t see that appeal to supernatural forces would really help much with the epistemic challenge.

The core problem is that we know that people in general aren’t reliable at discerning philosophical truths (since they disagree so much), so positing supernatural forces can’t secure general reliability. So whether you believe in supernatural forces or not, you kind of have to think of yourself as unusually well-placed to end up believing philosophical truths—that is, you have to consider yourself lucky, broadly speaking. But once you’re willing to do that, you don’t really gain anything by adding supernatural forces into the picture. You can simply think that you’re unusually reliable because—unlike all those fools who disagree with you—you happened to start inquiry from roughly the right place (closer to the truth than to competing ideally-coherent falsehoods), and so the coherence-increasing methods of philosophy are reliably conducive to truth for you (even if not for others).

Dustin and Matthew both place a lot of weight on the causal debunking principle that you cannot rationally believe that P whilst simultaneously believing that the truth of P played no causal role in your coming to have that belief. I just think that’s a bad principle, a flimsy overgeneralization of the correct basis debunking principle that when your belief is based on the presumption that it is causally sensitive to the truth (as in, e.g., perceptual beliefs) then the belief is undermined by the loss of this basis. But the causal debunking principle would only follow if every belief had to have a causal basis, and I think that’s just silly. Obviously philosophical truths aren’t, in general, causally efficacious. So if we’re going to have philosophical beliefs at all, we should already have “priced in” that they weren’t caused by their truthmakers. As a result, I don’t find it undermining when someone points out that my philosophical beliefs aren’t causally sensitive to the truth of the matter, because I never supposed that they were.

When the critic moves to give examples of cases in which it seems an agent is believing unreasonably when they lack a causally-sensitive basis—such as Crummett’s goblins and their belief in the Absolute—this just shows that agents ought to assign low a priori credence to the claim in question, not that a priori beliefs in general are undermined by the lack of a causally-sensitive basis. Obviously if you start with an a priori implausible claim, one can’t be justified in believing it without some a posteriori—causally-sensitive—basis. But that doesn’t really move the needle on the debate at all. It’s just begging the question against my position, which is that some views are a priori more credible than others, and it’s rationally ideal for an agent to (i) start with the a priori correct credences, (ii) update in light of a posteriori evidence, and (iii) not view it as the slightest bit undermining that there is a causal explanation of how their mind came to be this way that is independent of the truth of their beliefs.

After all, even on accounts that add supernatural causes, those causes presumably apply equally (weakly) to everyone, and so cannot be what explains why you have true beliefs when everyone else around you doesn’t. What distinguishes you from the philosophically misguided, on any view, is going to have to be something truth-irrelevant: weird contingencies of your upbringing, personality, and intellectual influences, that happen to lead you (but not all others) to the right place (or not) for philosophical methods of coherence-seeking to be truth-conducive. This conclusion just seems entirely inescapable. So the choice is to either make your peace with it (i.e., reject causal debunking as a form of genetic fallacy) or fall into the abyss of radical skepticism. Or so it seems to me.