Three Recent Papers I Liked
Spanning metaethics, fitting emotions, and population ethics
I often talk about how philosophy needs better discovery systems, and try to find ways to clearly communicate my own work (e.g. summarizing My Big Ideas, and my main “myth-busting” updates to our disciplinary conventional wisdom)—while inviting others to do likewise. But of course one very simple small step towards better academic “discovery” is to simply share good papers we come across. So, in that spirit, here are three recent papers that I recommend:
(1) Jesse Hambly (forthcoming in PQ), ‘The Normative Property Dualism Argument’
By drawing on related arguments in the philosophy of mind, this paper helpfully clarifies the kind of argument against metaethical naturalism that Parfit gestured towards in his later work (but, it seems, was never quite able to elucidate in a way that metaethicists found compelling). I hope Hambly’s attempt receives more uptake!
The core challenge is for metaethical naturalists to explain what attribution is being made by a false normative claim. For example, if the property of goodness just is the property of happiness (as hedonist naturalists claims), what are non-hedonists supposed to even be claiming about the world? (Surely not that happiness involves more than just happiness.) Informative identity claims involve implicitly relating distinct reference-fixing properties. As I explained it here:
The cognitive significance of ‘water’, say, may be given by a certain complex functional property: roughly, being the clear drinkable liquid found in lakes and rivers around here. This differs from the cognitive significance of ‘H2O’, which is instead given by a certain chemical property. The claim ‘water is H2O’ is informative rather than trivial because it relates these two distinct properties. This is possible because the concept water is “gappy”: it refers to whatever actually fills the associated functional role. This functional role could, for all we know a priori, be filled by all manner of chemical substances. Hence it is informative to learn that H2O is the particular chemical property of the watery stuff.
The challenge for naturalists is to explain what (purely natural) reference-fixing property could do this work for a normative concept like goodness. Hambly’s paper expands on this challenge very nicely.
(2) Vida Yao (2023, PPR), ‘The Good Fit’
D’Arms & Jacobson famously accuse other philosophers of committing “the moralistic fallacy” when they “conflate” fittingness and moral assessment. This charge assumes that emotions have purely descriptive fittingness conditions. I’ve long preferred the Aristotelian view that emotions involve implicit normative claims (not just descriptive ones); though it remains important to distinguish intrinsic fittingness assessments from instrumental evaluation.
In this new paper, Yao offers a compelling defense of (normatively ‘thick’) Aristotelian fittingness, as against the ‘thin’ descriptive view championed by D’Arms and Jacobson. As Yao explains, “to feel one’s emotions accurately is both an epistemic and moral achievement, and so, to assess an emotion as fitting is to endorse it both epistemically and morally.” I liked a lot of the examples explored in the paper, and especially the following observation about philosophical methodology:
My aim here is not to defend this view of anger [as involving the putatively false normative belief that “not getting what one is due is something bad”], but to show that this interpretation is more philosophically productive than concluding that it falls prey to the moralistic fallacy. For example, in response to this view, one could argue that some forms of anger do not involve a belief or construal about the goodness of getting one’s due, or that it is in fact good, at least sometimes and in the right contexts, to get what one is due. In the first case, we will have a substantive moral-psychological disagreement about what anger consists in; in the second, we will have a substantive moral-philosophical disagreement about what things are in fact good and worthy of concern, and what things are not. It is more productive, and crucial to understanding and engaging with robust forms of moral-philosophical thought, to locate a disagreement at either of these levels than to simply see the argument as a confused form of reasoning expressive of a moralistic mind.
As she concludes:
an insistence that “genuine” morality must be limited to the central concepts and concerns of specific views such as deontology or consequentialism, that it must be about practical rather than theoretical reason (and that these can be understood dualistically in the first place), or that it is fundamentally or exclusively concerned with questions about what to do, may reflect an over-simplification of moral philosophy and moral theory…
(3) Elliott Thornley (ms), ‘A Non-Identity Dilemma for Person-Affecting Views’
This paper offers very clever arguments for a very important conclusion. Better yet, you can read Elliott’s blog post ‘My favourite arguments against person-affecting views’, which summarizes some other neat arguments before getting to his ones (in section 5). Michael St. Jules offers some interesting critical commentary in the comments below.
Kudos to Elliott for blogging about his paper in this way (also on Twitter). I wish more academics doing interesting work would do the same: it makes knowledge-sharing much easier! (If you don’t have access to a relevant forum, and don’t want to start your own blog, consider submitting to the New Work in Philosophy substack!)
The Thornley paper is a good critique of pure person-affecting population ethics. I was wondering how it would affect the type of hybrid view that you advocate in your post, "Killing vs Failing to Create."
I've had some thoughts on that matter recently, especially after reading this post about goal vs desire-based thinking:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iWJ5kzeqvx4kvB527/goal-thinking-vs-desire-thinking
The article is about singe individual's preferences rather than about population ethics, but I think the ways of thinking about goals and desires that it explores are relevant. It basically talks about how some people sometimes have difficulty understanding the idea that people can have specific life-goals, and assume (wrongly) that everyone has some kind of underlying meta-goal like "extinguish all desires" that is indifferent about the specific content of those desires. Because of this they see replacing one of a person's life goals with a different one (through brainwashing or some other type of invasive behavior modification) as good rather than bad, providing the new goal is easier to achieve than the previous one. In some more extreme differences they may see death as desirable because it extinguishes all desires.
I think this can be analogized to Parfit's Impersonal Total Principle where personal identity does not matter, only the "total quantity of whatever makes life worth living." This principle seems similar to the "extinguish all desires" attitude in that it posits a single meta-goal and does not care exactly how it is fulfilled. This threatens to collapse the distinction between killing and failing to create, because it does not recognize the strong moral reasons to value specific existing people. There needs to be some way to recognize those reasons, the same way a proponent of "goals" based thinking recognizes that people have specific reasons to achieve specific goals they have.
Thornley’s paper is absurdly clever.