Abstract. In their article “The Extended Mind” (1998), Andy Clark and David Chalmers introduce a theory of extended cognition. In this paper I explain what extended cognition theories maintain by examining one such theory in particular- namely the Extended Mind thesis (EM), which Clark and Chalmers put forth. Following this, I consider two popular objections raised against EM- one based on concerns about what exactly constitutes a “part” of a cognitive system, and the other based on the intuition that the biological body is what marks the natural boundary between humans and their environments- and provide a defense of EM from each of these objections.

1.1. Introduction

In the past, philosophers have thought of the biological brain and body of the agent as being the sole physical substrates that make up the mind. But, over the last decade a theory of the mind has emerged which suggests that a human’s mind, in particular one’s mental states and cognitive processes, may at times “extend” into the environment that immediately surrounds their body. According to the Extended Mind thesis (EM), parts located beyond the agent’s body can serve as the material vehicles of the agent’s mind and, in such cases, these relevant parts should be viewed as constitutive parts of the mind. In this sense, contrary to what has been traditionally thought, EM claims that the mind “extends” beyond the body.

This paper has three major parts: first, I will outline the central claims of EM and the arguments put forth by Andy Clark and David Chalmers in favor of it (section 2.1.) and follow this with an example of the theory (2.2.); second, I will consider two objections to the theory, one based on concerns about what exactly constitutes a “part” of a cognitive system and the other on the intuition that the biological body is what marks the natural boundary between humans and their environments; and third, I will provide I defense of EM against both objections, in each case arguing that the theory is able to withstand the objection raised against it.

2.1. The Extended Mind thesis

Andy Clark and David Chalmers first introduced EM in an article called “The Extended Mind”. In this article the authors make two central claims- one regarding cognitive processes and the other regarding mental states. Mental states include things such as propositional thoughts, experiences, beliefs, desires, feelings, and so forth. Cognitive processes, on the other hand, are processes that take place within an agent’s mind, or cognitive system, such as “retrieval of memories, linguistic processes, and skill acquisition.”[1] The first claim EM makes is that an agent’s cognitive processes can be partially constituted by portions of the world that are not bound by their brain-and-body.
How I have phrased this claim is important since if, instead of “not bound by their brain-and-body,” I were to have said “non-biological” or “parts of their external environment, I would be begging the very question that EM is attempting to address. After all, the theory aims to redefine the very notion of what is internal or external to the agent. So, to say, for example, that an agent’s cognitive processes can be partially constituted by “parts of their external environment,” would be to assume that the relevant portions that lie beyond the agent’s body are external to the agent and a part of the agent’s environment, and thus, that they are not a part of the agent or the agent’s mind. Similarly, it would be wrong to use the phrase “non-biological” in this case since Clark and Chalmers remain open to the possibility that one agent’s mind may be partially constituted by the mind of another agent (further discussion of this in 4.3.).[2] Thus, by claiming the mind can be realized by vehicles outside of the traditional “shell” of a human (their brain and/or body), EM is arguing that what is internal to a human agent is not (always) just what is internal to its body. After all, if parts of the world beyond an agent’s body really are the physical realizers of that agent’s cognitive process then these parts should be seen as internal to the agent.

The second claim of EM is that an agent’s non-occurrent mental states, such as beliefs and desires, can be partially constituted by portions of the world that are not bound by their brain-and-body. A non-occurrent belief is one that is not currently being entertained, whereas an occurrent belief is one that you are entertaining right now. For example, if I were to ask you whether you believed the sky to be blue in color, you would surely say yes. If so, then before I had asked you this question, your belief that the sky is blue would have been non-occurrent (unless you were already entertaining the thought). But, having been asked about your belief regarding the color of the sky, you likely brought that belief into consciousness and thus, what was once your non-occurent belief has now become your occurrent belief that the sky is blue.

The distinction between occurrent and non-occurrent beliefs is important as Clark and Chalmers are clear that the EM thesis only makes claims about non-occurrent mental state extension, and not occurrent mental state extension.[3] This is likely because it is often held that our occurrent mental states have a phenomenally conscious feel to them, that is a feeling of “what it is like” to be in that occurrent mental state, but Clark and Chalmers both hold that consciousness cannot not be realized externally from the brain-and-body (although they are silent about why this is). So, in order to avoid committing themselves to the claim that consciousness extends, Clark and Chalmers limit their claims about extended mental states to non-occurrent ones. Furthermore, to avoid the same result with regards to their first claim, they must also limit the extension of cognitive processes to those that are not conscious.

Thus, for those who take the view that all cognitive processes and all mental states are conscious and occurrent, such as Galen Strawson, EM would be implausible since it only makes claims about mental states and processes that do not display consciousness. The view that all our mental states must be occurrent, however, does not seem plausible to me, and Clark and Chalmers would agree[4], because it denies the highly intuitive claim that one can have a belief, a desire, or knowledge that they are not currently entertaining. Still this is the position that Brie Gertler endorses in “Over-extending the Mind”[5] (denying premise four of the argument for EM, see section 3.1.) and also what Clark and Chalmers’ believe to be “the most consistent way to deny” EM.[6]

2.2. Otto and Inga: An illustration of EM

In The Extended Mind, Clark and Chalmers provide an example that attempts to draw a parallel between two people who want to go to the museum: one whose mind “extends” the other whose mind does not.[7] The latter individual is Inga. After deciding that she would like to go to the museum, Inga quickly recalls that the museum in located on 53rd street, so she proceeds in that direction. In this instance it is clear that Inga has successfully relied on her working memory to access the information she needs to find her way to the museum. Meanwhile, a man named Otto suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and thus can no longer rely on his memory to recall all of his standing beliefs. Otto is forced to rely on a notebook that he stores all of his important information in such as phone numbers, directions, medical information, and so forth. After deciding to go to the museum, Otto quickly reaches for his notebook, reads that the museum is located on 53rd street and promptly heads in that direction. He relies on his notebook on a regular basis, takes it with him everywhere he goes, and writes in it often so that he will not forget important information.

Clark and Chalmers argue that “in relevant respects the (two) cases are entirely analogous: the notebook plays for Otto the same role that memory plays for Inga.”[8]
In other words, if we consider the information in Otto’s notebook, then it seems that it plays the same explanatory role as the information in Inga’s memory. For example, in both cases we can explain why they headed toward 53rd street with reference to their desire to go to the museum and belief that it was located there. Inga’s belief was there before she accessed it (non-occurent) and likewise, Otto’s belief was in his notebook before he accessed it. To be sure, this is not the claim that Otto’s behavior is identical to Inga’s, but rather that “taken as a single integrated system, Otto-and-the-notebook exhibit enough of the central features and dynamics of a normal agent having… the dispositional belief (about the location of the museum) to warrant treating him as such.”[9] Thus, a proponent of EM would grant that in many trivial ways Otto’s actions do differ from Inga’s, but still would contend that what is relevant is the role that the information about the location of the museum plays in each case, and in Otto and Inga’s cases, the information plays the same functional role.

3.1. A representation of an argument for EM

In this section I will flesh out each of the premises of an argument for EM, spending the most time on what I believe are the most important premises. In doing this, I will introduce and spell out both the ‘parity principle’ and Clark and Chalmers’ conditions of a cognitive system. Gertler has extracted the following argument from Clark and Chalmers’ Otto and Inga example:[10]

1. “What makes some information count as a standing belief is the role it plays.”
2. “The information in the notebook functions just like [that is, it plays the same role as] the information constituting an ordinary non-occurrent belief.”
3. The information in Otto’s notebook counts as standing beliefs. (1,2)
4. Otto’s standing beliefs are part of his mind.
5. The information in Otto’s notebook is part of Otto’s mind. (3, 4)
6. Otto’s notebook belongs to the world external to Otto’s skin.
7. The mind extends into the world. (5, 6)

3.2. Premise one and the Parity Principle

The first premise of this argument states that what matters in labeling some thing as a part of a cognitive system is not its location or physical identity, but rather the “role that it plays.”[11] This premise follows from what Clark and Chalmers label the parity principle, which contends that if an object in the environment is playing the same role as an object that, were it located in the head, we would certainly count it as part of a cognitive system, then we should count the object in the environment as a part of the cognitive system also. So, if the information Inga’s mind (about the location of the museum) would surely count as a part of her belief (about where the museum is located) because of the role it plays in her memory, then, since the information in Otto’s notebook (about the location of the museum) plays the same role in his memory, it ought to count as a part of his standing belief as well.

If it weren’t the role that mattered but the physical identity, for instance, if the vehicles of cognition had to be biological (and within the body of the agent), then any non-biological resource, such as Otto’s notebook, would instantly be disqualified as cognitive. The parity principle is used to avoid this outcome. It maintains that regardless of how the information is physically realized, if the information in both cases plays the same functional role in driving the agent’s behavior, then it should be given the same cognitive status. After all, with no justifiable reason, it would be both ad hoc[12] and question begging to assume a priori that only a certain type of matter- biological matter -can constitute standing beliefs.

So, it follows from the parity principle that whatever turns out to be the necessary functional role for a thing to play in order to count as a part of a cognitive system it will have to be described without reference to any particular physical properties and in a sufficiently abstract way as to allow that the relevant functional role could be played by something beyond the agents body. At the same time, the cognitive system cannot be described so abstractly as to include all sorts of things as constitutive parts of the system. Otherwise too many things would be included as parts and EM would threaten to “over-extend” the mind. For example, the information in Inga’s head should count as her standing belief not because it is biological or internal to her body, but rather because of the role it plays in her successful retrieval of memory, which then causes her to head towards the museum. This presupposes that there actually exist some way of describing the relevant “functional role” that is sufficiently abstract to be realized both internally and externally to the agent’s body.

3.3. Premise Two

The second premise of the argument for EM claims that the information about the location of the museum plays the same functional role in Otto’s case as in Inga’s case. To outline this functional roll Clark and Chalmers provide three (tentative) conditions[13] to be met in order for any thing to be granted “recognition as part of the physical substrate of a cognitive system:”[14]

1. Constancy: The use of the resource must be a constant in the agent’s life.
2. Accessibility: The resource must be directly and easily available.
3. Reliability: The agent must trust and endorse the resource without hesitation; rarely doubting it’s veracity.

A fourth condition, which they are more tentative about labeling as necessary, requires that the information in the resource must be there as a consequent of having been consciously endorsed at some point in the past. It seems evident that these conditions are met by our ordinary, non-extended mental states and it is difficult to deny that Otto does not meet these conditions, since Clark and Chalmers developed the Otto and Inga example in order to support their argument for EM.[15] Thus, it seems the best way to object to the second premise would be to claim that parts of cognitive systems, like mental states and cognitive processes, meet some further condition not on this list. The two objections that I consider in the second part of this paper take this approach in rejecting EM.

So, because the information in both cases meets these conditions and we would surely call the information in Inga’s mind her non-occurrent belief, then, given the parity principle, the third premise of the argument follows: we ought to call the information in Otto’s notebook his non-occurrent belief as well (P3). And, if the information in the environment serves as the material vehicle of a part of Otto’s beliefs (P3), and his beliefs constitute a part of his mind (P4), then it follows that the information in the environment is a constitutive part of Otto’s mind (P5). Furthermore, it is clear that something like a notebook is a part of the world external to an agent’s skin and body (P6). Thus, portions of the would external to Otto’s body (the information in his notebook) serve as the physical substrates of a part of his mind (namely, his belief about the location of the museum), and in this sense Otto’s mind “extends” into the world (P7).

4.1. Problems facing EM

My discussion in this paper will be limited to a consideration of two objections, both of which I will defend EM against. Neither of these objections are to the parity principle itself, but rather, they both deny the similarity between cases of extended cognition and regular cognition that is needed for the principle to apply. In other words, both of these objections object to either the necessity or the sufficiency of the functional role, as Clark and Chalmers’ have described it, in determining whether or not some resource is a part of a cognitive system. While I recognize that there are other important and compelling objections that one could make to EM, unfortunately I will not be able to consider all of them in this paper.

4.2. Sufficient conditions for “parts of cognitive systems”

The first objection I will consider would likely arise if one were uncomfortable with the results of EM, believing that it casts too broad a definition of what is mental. In this case they could object to the joint sufficiency of the conditions proposed for a cognitive system- constancy, accessibility and reliability (as discussed in 3.3.) This would require that there is some quality unique to all parts of cognitive systems that the three conditions fail to pick out. For example, if one could find a condition that is common only to our internal mental states, of the sort Inga has, and not present in Otto’s case, then the two cases would not be analogous and so, the principle would not apply. One quality that has often been thought of as being unique to biological cognitive systems is their capacity to produce intrinsic content. It is argued that this marks a distinction between the biological substrates that traditionally compose cognitive systems and potential non-biological realizers like Otto’s notebook.

This notion of intrinsic content rests on the view that mental states are intentional states, which is to say that they “have content; they are typically about things.”[16] This is not unique to mental states, however, since certain non-biological things, such as books and road signs, also have content and so should equally be labeled intentional. So, according to this view, it therefore possible to draw a distinction between things with derived intentionality and things with intrinsic intentionality. Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa define derived content as content that is assigned by “intentional agents who already have thoughts with meaning.”[17] Non-derived content, or intrinsic content, on the other hand, does not require “the independent or prior experience of other content.”[18] If something has content, then “it is either mental or the content is derived from something that is mental.”[19] So, derived content is a product of intentional agents. It is argued that this marks an important variance between Otto’s case and Inga’s case- Otto’s notebook has derived content only and thus, it is argued that, its intentionality does not make it mental, whereas Inga’s memories are not derived, and therefore they do count as mental.

4.3. Responses to Intrinsic Content

In this section, I will argue that the objection based on the inclusion of intrinsic content as a necessary condition to be met by all parts of a cognitive system is actually no threat to EM. As Clark points out in “Intrinsic content, active memory and the extended mind”, the argument for intrinsic content is flawed for several reasons. First of all, the notion of “intrinsic content” is not uncontroversial and is surely not universally accepted.[20] Secondly, Adams and Aizawa give no reason to believe that external, non-biological structures are (logically or contingently) incapable of having intrinsic content. We should not assume that this is the case and as Clark points out in the future we can imagine there might be technology that has advanced enough to change this reality. For instance, imagine that we identified some internal part as a vehicle of intrinsic content. Now imagine that part is replaced with a “functionally equivalent silicon part.”[21] If the agent could still experience mental states with intrinsic content, then this should defeat concerns about intrinsic content as a criterion for mentality.[22]

Furthermore, even if we grant the claim that intrinsic content is a necessary condition for being considered a part of the mind, EM would still be true in cases where one agent’s standing beliefs are realized by biological structures outside its body, for example, in the mind of another agent (who is capable of intrinsic content). After all, according to this objection it is only the fact that non-biological structures are incapable of intrinsic content that would prevents Otto’s notebook being recognized as a part of his cognitive system. Thus, there is no reason why the biological realizers of an agent’s cognitive system must be located within their own brain or body. For example, Clark and Chalmers suggest that “(i)n an unusually interdependent couple, it is entirely possible that one partner’s beliefs will play the role for the other as the notebook plays for Otto.”[23] All that is necessary for the resource to count as a part of the cognitive system in this case is that it is capable of intrinsic content and meets the other three conditions laid out by Clark and Chalmers.

Finally, Clark’s third response is that even if intrinsic content is accepted as a valid notion and if non-biological structures were incapable of displaying it, this would not compromise EM. This is because in a system not every constitutive part of that system will necessarily have the qualities that the entire system, as a whole, has. According to Clark, all that is necessary for a given part to count as a vehicle of a mental state “is that it be appropriately linked… to representations whose content is (as Adams and Aizawa insist) intrinsic.”[24] Adams and Aizawa make this very same point about the relationship between systems and their components themselves, only in a different discussion, when they attempt to clarify Clark and Chalmers’ positions in EM.[25] Still, although they demonstrate that they are well aware of this relationship suggested by Clark, they do not seem to consider it when raising their objection to EM based on intrinsic content.

To spell out Clark’s claim I will use the example that Adams and Aizawa give of an air-conditioning system. In such a system only a portion of the components are responsible for actually cooling the air. The other parts play different roles- some “duct the air about the building, compress the refrigerant, directs the flow of refrigerant, monitors the room temperature, and so forth.”[26] Thus, for an air-conditioning system to be labeled as such it has to cool air. Cooling air, then, is a necessary feature of an air-conditioning system, and yet, not every part of an air-conditioning system actually cools air. I would contend that, in the same way, original content may be a necessary condition for cognitive systems, but this does not entail that every material vehicle responsible for a given mental state must display original content. Furthermore, I do not see how even a defender of intrinsic content could deny this, since one would have to hold the same view with regard to brain-and-body bound mental states as well.

Surely no one would argue that every neuron and atom of grey matter displays intrinsic content just because the whole mental state that arises from a system composed of neurons and grey matter does. In fact Adams and Aizawa as much as concede this point themselves: “Having argued that, in general, there must be non-derived content in cognitive processes, it must be admitted that it is unclear to what extent every cognitive state of each cognitive process must involve non-derived content.”[27] And, because we must remain neutral on where parts are located, as not to the beg question, we should apply the same standard to extended mental states. Thus, if EM is correct and mental states can extend into their environment, there should be requirement that external portions of the mental state be capable of intrinsic content in order to be recognized as constitutive parts.

5.1. Appeal to the dual boundaries of perception and action

Another objection to EM is based on the intuition that the natural boundaries that separate the mind from the external environment are the dual interfaces of perception and action and that these boundaries align with the boundaries of the body. In other words, the first claim is that our minds affect the world through our actions and likewise, our minds are affected by the world through our perceptions. If this is the case, then it follows that perception and action are the interfaces through which contact is made between our environment and us. The second claim of this objection is that these interfaces align with our body such that we perceive through bodily senses and we act through bodily motions. And, given these two claims, it follows that the mind must be body-bound.

For example, it is argued that because Otto must perceive the information in his notebook, this means that they will lie beyond his perception, and thus beyond the natural boundary that separates him from the world. Inga, however, does not need to engage in bodily perception to access her belief in the way that Otto does. In her case, her belief is realized by physical substrates located on the “inner” side of the perception and action boundary. So, because Otto must engage in this crucial act of bodily perception (and action) to access his beliefs, he would be taking in an extra step(s) that is not necessary in “ordinary” cases, such as Inga’s. What is more, because of this extra step that Otto takes, he would have a completely different phenomenological experience than Inga. If this is the case, then Otto and Inga’s cases are not entirely analogous and so the parity principle may not be applicable.

5.2. Response to the appeal to perception and action

There are a number of possible responses that a defender of EM could give to this objection. The first that Clark and Chalmers make is to point out that the objection begs the question.[28] This is true, after all, it is the legitimacy of this very boundary- between an agent and her environment- that is in question and that EM is trying to define (as discussed in section 2.1.). So, a defender of EM might agree with the first claim of this objection- that perception and action are the dual interfaces that separate the mind from the world- but reject the second premise- that we perceive and act only through our bodies. After all, it is the second claim where the question begging is really taking place. By rejecting the second claim we could allow that the mind lies strictly on one “side” of our perceptions and actions, and remain uncommitted as to where perception and action occur.

Consider Walid, for instance, who is blind and relies heavily on his white walking stick to aid his mobility. Since the stick is his only reliable way to detect objects in his path, Walid uses it constantly and must keep it with him at all times.[29] For Walid, this stick is more than just a helpful mobility tool- he uses it fluently and feels as though he were touching the pavement at the end of his stick. That is, he perceives the world at the end of the stick, not just his hand gripping the stick.[30] I believe that in this case we can accept that Walid’s perception is not limited to his bodily senses, and thus, we can reject the second premise and conclude that (under the right conditions) cognitive processes can extend to include non-biological structures. As long as the process remains explanatorily similar in every relevant way to how a person with regular vision might function, then as the parity principle contends, we ought to label both instances as cognitive processes.

I believe this response to be compelling, since as Clark and Chalmers argue, it would be incorrect to allow which “side” of the body-boundary the process falls on to bias us. Thus, the example of Walid seems to help in the defense of EM, however, it does not work so effectively in defending the example of Otto and Inga. It doesn’t seem reasonable to say that Otto’s perception is not limited to his bodily senses because he perceives what is inside the notebook. In seems more likely that in Otto’s case, unlike Walid’s, the interfaces of perception and action do align with his body. Furthermore, the Walid example does not overcome the objection over Otto and Inga’s different phenomenological experiences either. After all, Walid would surely be having a different phenomenological experience of walking down a busy sidewalk than a person with 20/20 vision.
Clark and Chalmers’ second move is to downplay the difference between the phenomenological experiences of Otto and Inga. They do this by arguing that in both cases the agent will still have some phenomenological experience and, though the experiences may be different, this should not affect their equal status as non-occurrent beliefs.[31] Chalmers expands on this idea by making an appeal to the notions of ‘introspection’ and ‘mental action’.[32] According to him, if these notions can be taken as parallel to (‘real’) perception and (‘real’) action, respectively, in the traditional sense, then the parity principle will apply.

This response will work only if there are no substantial differences between the notions of introspection and perception, or between mental action and action. I take this parallel to be a little far-fetched myself and Chalmers recognizes that not everyone will be sold on this parallel, so he correctly predicts the possible replies that will follow. For example, one who opposes EM could insist that introspection does not seem to involve bodily sensory perception in the way that “real” perception does. And likewise, mental actions do not involve any physical action.[33] Furthermore, one could insist that the differences in phenomenological experiences are too essential to be downplayed. Otto has a particular “perceptual and agentive experience” that Inga would not have, and so the cases are not analogous.[34]

6.1. Conclusion

In this paper I have attempted to give a thorough exposition of the central thesis of EM- that the material vehicles that realize certain mental states and cognitive processes of a human’s cognitive system are at times located beyond the body of that agent. I have laid out the arguments put forth by Clark and Chalmers in defense of EM and explained the rationale behind them. In the second part of this paper I discussed two popular objections to the second premise of the argument for EM (as laid out in section 3.1.) and in each case I have argued that EM is able to overcome these criticisms. While I believe that I have successfully defended EM from these objections, I understand that, other serious objections still face the theory. But, unfortunately, I could not address them all on this occasion.

Bibliography

Adams, Frederick and Kenneth Aizawa. “The Bounds of Cognition.” Philosophical Psychology, 14 (2001) 43-64.

Adams, Frederick and Kenneth Aizawa. “Defending non-derived content.” Philosophical Psychology. (2004).

Aizawa, Kenneth. “Clark’s conditions on Extended Cognition Are Too Strong.” (2005).

Chalmers, David. “Foreword to Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind.” Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension. (Oxford, 2008) ix-xvi.

Chalmers, David. February 6, 2009. “Fodor on the extended mind.”

Clark, Andy. “Intrinsic Content, Active Memory, and the Extended Mind.” Analysis, 65 (2005): 1-11.

Clark, Andy. “Coupling, Constitution, and the Cognitive Kind: A Reply to Adams and Aizawa.”

Clark, Andy. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension. (Oxford, 2008).

Clark, Andy and David Chalmers. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis, 58 (1998): 7-19.

Fodor, Jerry. “Where is My Mind?” London Review of Books. February 2009. Review of Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension by Andy Clark.

Gertler, Brie. “Overextending the Mind?” Arguing about the Mind. Brie Gertler and Lawrence Shapiro, eds. Routledge, 2007.

Notes

1. Andy Clark and David Chalmers. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis, 58 (1998): 4.
2. Ibid, 10. It should also be noted that it is preferable to use the term “agent” in this case instead of “human” in order to allow for the possibility that human minds may include other non-biological realizers (as when a blind man relies on a seeing-eye dog), or even that animal minds themselves may extend (if they can be shown to adequately engage in tool use, for instance).
3. Clark and Chalmers, 6.
4. Clark and Chalmers agree. Ibid, 4.
5. Brie Gertler, “Overextending the Mind?” Arguing about the Mind. Brie Gertler and Lawrence Shapiro, eds. Routledge, 2007, 11.
6. Clark and Chalmers, 9.
7. Ibid, 6.
8. Clark and Chalmers, 6.
9. Andy Clark, “Intrinsic Content, Active Memory, and the Extended Mind.” Analysis, 65 (2005): 7.
10. Gertler quotes the first two premises from Clark and Chalmers, The Extended Mind. Gertler, 2.
11. Clark and Chalmers, 7. This is also what Gertler labels as premise one of the EM argument, 2.
12. Gertler agrees, 7.
13. Clark and Chalmers, 9.
14. Andy Clark. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension. (Oxford, 2008), 88.
15. Gertler, 8.
16. Jerry Fodor. “Where is My Mind?” London Review of Books. February 2009. Review of Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension by Andy Clark, 5.
17. Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa. “Defending non-derived content.” Philosophical Psychology. (2004), 1.
18. Ibid 1.
19. Fodor, 5.
20. Clark, “Intrinsic Content, Active Memory, and the Extended Mind”, 4.
21. Ibid, 4.
22. Here we see an example of how functionalist reasoning is applied to support the EM argument.
23. Clark and Chalmers, 10.
24. Clark, “Intrinsic content, Active Memory, and the Extended Mind”, 4.
25. Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa. “The Bounds of Cognition.” Philosophical Psychology, 14 (2001), 50.
26. Aizawa, 2.
27. Adams and Aizawa, “The bounds of cognition,” 50.
28. Clark and Chalmers, 9.
29. The stick fulfills all of Clark and Chalmers’ three conditions- consistency, accessibility and reliability (see section 4.3.).
30. Clark gives a similar example of a blind man, Supersizing the Mind, 31.
31. Clark and Chalmers, 9.
32. Chalmers, “Foreword to Andy Clark’s Supersizing the Mind,” xii.
33. Ibid, xii.
34. Ibid, xii.

Abstract: In this paper, I examine David Lewisʼ treatment of vagueness as a problem of “semantic indecision” and conclude that this position on vagueness is inconsistent with the metaphysics of his theory of modal realism, with specific regard for counterparthood and the counterpart relation. To reach this conclusion, I employ a thought experiment in which an exact counterpart of Lewis is subjected to a series of possible worlds treatments designed to satisfy Lewisʼ criteria for counterparthood, as well as to test the limits of semantic treatments of higher-order vagueness. In doing this, I find that Lewisʼ suggestions for dealing with vagueness fails to pick out counterparts at several points in this series, even when given a satisfactorily precisified set of criteria for the qua relation. Rather than a clear candidate for counterparthood, one encounters instead a problem of infinite regression that could destabilize the whole project of Lewisian de re modal realism. I conclude by noting that accepting metaphysical vagueness into the Lewisian theory of modal realism changes nothing in the overall theory, and may in fact be the only way to save the theory from its problem of infinite regression.

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I. Background

The sentence “All bachelors are unmarried.” and the sentence “The author of this paper is typing on a computer.” are both true. However, these two sentences are not true in the same way. To understand how they are different, let us examine how each sentence can be considered true. In the first example, truth appears to be a function of the meaning of the word “bachelor” in relation to the rest of the sentence. This is because the first example states a specific and important property of the concept of being a bachelor. It is almost a kind of definition, and its truth is derived from the relationship between its form (what kind of sentence it is) and its semantic content (what the sentence means). The first example sentence demonstrates that the relationship between the form and the content of a sentence is one way to measure the truth of a sentence. The second example presents an exception to this rule. The form of the second example sentence does not follow the pattern of the first, yet (much to the authorʼs chagrin as I watch the clock) it is still true.

So what does it mean to say that the two sentences are true in different ways? In this case, it means that they arrive at being true by taking two different routes. The first example must always be true; the word “bachelor” carries somewhere in its meaning the idea of being unmarried, and the property of being unmarried is a definitive property of the word “bachelor”. The second example need not be, but by all respects still is, true. Truths that must be true, like the first example, are called necessary truths. This means that there is some quality of the words of the sentence or the things being discussed by the words in that sentence which requires the sentence to be true. The second example illustrates what is called a contingent truth. Contingent truths are not true in virtue of structure or meaning per se, but rather are true with regard to a given situation. Another way to put this is to say that there is no quality about me that would require, as a matter of necessity, that I be sitting at my desk writing this paper. I could just as easily be sleeping, or going for a walk, or touring the country with my world famous band instead.

Hypothetical statements like the one above, which gives some examples of ways in which my life might have been different, are called “counterfactuals”. Counterfactuals are just what they sound like: statements that consider cases in which the facts are contrary to the way things actually are. Often stated in the form of conditionals (“If X then Y”), counterfactuals are aimed at examining the ways in which the world could (and could not) be different by positing alternate situations for conceptual analyses. Take the statement “If I werenʼt writing this paper, I would be asleep right now” as an example. The purpose is to assert that under specific circumstances that are contrary to the actual ones (“If I werenʼt writing this paper,”), a different set of statements about the world would turn out to be true, and I would be in bed.

What counterfactuals illustrate is called “modality”, or the measure of necessary or contingency. It would seem that in order to be able to evaluate modality correctly, and in doing so evaluate the truth-value of the sentence in question, there must be some properties, or kinds of properties, of the thing being discussed that remain true about that thing across all counterfactual statements. Here, I must bring up another distinction, one concerning interpretations of things about which the modalilty is in question. With regard to modality, there are two ways to gloss a given sentence. One such way is called a de re reading (from the Latin for ʻof the thingʼ). The other reading is a de dicto reading (meaning ʻof the wordʼ). De re readings of sentences are concerned with the modality of the actual physical thing(s) referred to by the terms of a sentence. De dicto readings are concerned with the modality of the words of the examined sentence itself. This differentiation is relevant to the ways by which the truth-value of a given sentence can be evaluated as necessary or contingent. To illustrate the difference between a de re and a de dicto reading, examine the sentence “The President of the United States could be a woman.” Under a de dicto reading, this sentence means that it is possible for a woman to become the President of the United States. Under a de re reading, this sentence means that the legal status of Barack Obamaʼs marriage is in serious jeopardy under current law.

In contemporary analytic philosophy, the truth-values regarding the modal properties of a sentence are often evaluated in terms of “possible worlds”. Though there is significant disagreement about the nature of these worlds, such as when it is appropriate to assign de re or de dicto readings to statements made about them, it must be the case that possible worlds are at minimum conceptual spaces in which one can run thought experiments to determine the necessity of a truth-value of a sentence. The classic examples used to illustrate this are “Aristotle is Aristotle” and “Aristotle is the teacher of Alexander”. Under a de re reading, it is simple to see that the first statement must always be true, because if there is an “Aristotle” about whom this statement can be made, then that Aristotle must be self-identical. However, there is no quality about such an Aristotle that necessitates that he be “the teacher of Alexander”. Rather, this is something that happened to be the case only as a matter of course and not as a matter
of the things involved those circumstances.

Note the inherent import here of a robust idea of identity. When employing possible worlds as a measure of modal properties, especially under a de re reading, identity is assumed as a most basic property. Generally, identity can be understood with the following two premises: (1) All things are self-identical and (2) no two things are identical to each other in all ways. Identity is a philosophical issue unto itself, however due to the limited scope of this paper it must suffice to say that identity is the metaphysical property of self-sameness. As such, an issue like metaphysical vagueness would appear to be an important area to explore when discussing de re modality, if only because in any dialogue that takes as its subject the modal properties of things must start first with an understanding of the thing about which modal properties are to be discussed. If one is to understand how a thing could have been different, as well as how it could not have been different, then one must first encounter that thingʼs identity. In this paper, I will contrast David Lewisʼ treatment of de re modality (Lewisian modal realism) against that of another philosopher, Saul Kripke. I argue that modal realism necessarily admits of metaphysical vagueness, and until that theory is modified to accept this fact, modal realism is not a feasible theory of modality.

II. De Re and Vagueness

Saul Kripke explores de re interpretations in his work Naming and Necessity. In this lecture series, Kripke abandons the skepticism of his predecessors such as Quine about de re readings. He argues that rigid designators, which are terms that pick out the same thing across all possible worlds (where that thing exists), are the appropriate means of evaluating claims de re. Examples of rigid designators are names, numbers, and natural kind terms such as “water” or “gold”. Under this treatment, possible worlds need be nothing more than hypothetical scenarios run in oneʼs mind. For Kripke, to exist is to be the extension of a term.

The Kripkean treatment of de re modality is what is called “ersatz” modality (ersatz meaning substitution) and is semantic in nature. This is to say that Kripkean possible worlds are constructs of meaning located in the mind, and are intended to exemplify counterfactual possibilities about actually extant things. Kripke does not assert that using possible worlds to evaluate modal claims has any ontological implications. As such, a Kripkean treatment de re allows for the existence of “transworld identity” which means that the singular identity of a thing being discussed can be distributed over all possible worlds. Another way to put this is to say that for Kripke, the “Aristotle” in any of the worlds in which Aristotle was not the teacher of Alexander is self-identical to the Aristotle in this world.

David Lewis accepted the premise of possible worlds re-introduced to analytic philosophy by Kripke. The function of possible worlds for Lewis is almost exactly the same as for Kripke; they measure the necessity of a claim. However, according to Lewis, possible worlds are real physical places—as real as our own world—in which real things exist. This is Lewisian modal realism. As Lewis discusses at great length in On The Plurality of Worlds, there are innumerable such real worlds, and the inhabitants of these worlds are the subjects of the counterfactual conditionals that possible world scenarios evaluate. Among other things, Lewis asserts that counterfactuals are evaluated by means of a relation of counterparts in possible worlds to things in the actual world. This means that when we say something could have been different in any way from the way it actually is (for example, to say that I might have been a concert violinist instead of a philosopher) is to say that there is some possible world in which the counterpart of that thing actually is that way (my counterpart is a concert violinist in some possible world).

In §4 of his book, Lewis argues that possible worlds are spatiotemporally isolated from each other. He also argues that spatiotemporal location is a necessary property of identity, and that the criteria of identity can only be sufficiently met by sharing exactly all the same qualities, including spatiotemporal location. From these two premises arise the need for the counterpart relation to take the place of transworld identity, because identity can only be granted to objects that are at least spatiotemporally identical, and also because in Lewisʼ theory individuals in different possible worlds are separated and thus anything in one world is spatiotemporally isolated from anything in another. What will eventually run Lewis aground here remains unproblematic for Kripke because Kripkeʼs specific theory of possible worlds has no ontological implications and all he needs to grant identity is that a termʼs extension be the same across all possible worlds. However, for Lewis it is clear that it is not possible to grant identities across possible worlds because their referents differ in spatiotemporal location, so he must create some new theory to take its place.

The counterpart relation is the theory that Lewis proposes for this purpose. It is the basis for being able to assess counterfactuals in Lewisʼ account. The counterpart relation is one of “relevant similarity”, or comparative similarity of desired properties between token-specific candidates for counterparts across possible worlds. That which makes an individual in another world a counterpart of an individual in the actual world is an overall comparison of similarity among all possible candidates in any given possible world. Counterparts are only counterparts to each other in virtue of a given “qua relation.” For example, if a counterfactual involving having a certain number of hairs on oneʼs head is being discussed, the proper way to assign counterparthood would be to say that person X in World 1 (W1) is a counterpart of person Y in W2 qua Xʼs and Yʼs number of head-hairs. Thus, one person can be a viable candidate for the counterpart of another person if and only if those two people, as Lewis states, “closely resemble [each other] in important aspects.”

There is no room in Kripkeʼs ersatz treatment of possible worlds for vagueness to arise as an issue. In virtue of the fact that there are no ontological assertions made by ersatz possible worlds, there can be no ontological vagueness. Furthermore, because rigid designators grant identity across possible worlds and the fact that to have an extension, as far as Kripke is concerned, is to exist, there can only be semantic vagueness in the evaluations of modal claims.

This is not the case for Lewisʼ theory of modal realism, though. Modal realism is a large and complex theory that leaves much room in which the problems of vagueness might take hold. Notably, however, Lewis famously decries the whole project of metaphysical vagueness:

The only intelligible account of vagueness locates it in our thought and language. The reason it’s vague where the outback begins is not that there’s this thing, the outback, with imprecise borders; rather there are many things, with different borders, and nobody has been fool enough to try to enforce a choice of one of them as the official referent of the word `outback.’ Vagueness is semantic indecision. (Lewis 1986, 212)

Many such quotes fill the pages of On The Plurality of Worlds. The idea is always the same: the world is not vague, but rather it is our representations of the world, our words, that are. That David Lewis, the famous metaphysician, is so vehemently opposed to metaphysical vagueness is a bit shocking at first. Why should someone so deeply involved in metaphysics, especially someone whose project is specifically a refutation of a larger semantic theory, seek the solution to the problem of vagueness in a semantictheory? If nothing else, this is strikingly counterintuitive.

Much like others who found vagueness to be a problem of language and not of the world, Lewis seeks to eliminate vagueness by precisifying problematic language:

If a sentence is true over an entire range, true no matter how we draw the line, surely we are entitled to treat it as simply true. But also we treat a sentence more or less as simply true, if it is true over a large enough part of the range of delineations of its vagueness. (For short: if it is true enough). (Lewis 1983, 244)

Here Lewisʼ position on how to deal with problems of vagueness is clear. Because vagueness is “semantic indecision,” the proper manner by which it should be dealt with is to look at the way sentences admit of vagueness and re-evaluate how they are interpreted. Vague sentences are “true enough” to be considered true when they are true over some sufficient range (the “large enough part of the range”) of precisifications. Lewis avoids dealing with the question of what counts as “true enough” by calling this itself a vague matter. This is for Lewis, however, not an important enough issue to pursue, as is evidenced in the next paragraph of the text:

When is a sentence “true enough”? Which are the large parts of the delineations of its vagueness? This itself is a vague matter. More important for our purposes, it is something that depends on context. What is true enough on one occasion is not true enough on another. The standards of precisions in force are different from one conversation to another. (Lewis 1983, 244-245)

One should assume, at risk of otherwise creating a straw man argument, that Lewis expects his own semantic prescription for handling vagueness should be sufficient to explain away the vagueness he himself admits is inherent in how he tells us to handle such problems. However, in at least one case, Lewisʼ account is not a sufficient method of explaining away vagueness as semantic indecision.

Consider the following scenario: there is a series of possible worlds in which at one end there is one and only one possible counterpart of Lewis, and he is a spitting image of Lewis in every single possible relevant manner. At the other end of the series, there is a world populated entirely by just one single rooster. This set-up is consistent with how Lewis assumes possible worlds work. Now, assign to this series, in the search for counterparts, the highly precisified set of criteria for counterparthood that is exactly and only the breadth of wingspan and the volume of caw. Lewis would acknowledge that his spitting image meets all the relevant criteria to be his counterpart. He would agree as well that he is not a counterpart of the rooster at the far end of this sequence, being that he meets no relevant criteria for being its counterpart and thus is not, in any way, a viable candidate of counterparthood.

If one observes the series of worlds that starts in the world of the lonely rooster and ends in the world in which there is an exact duplicate of Lewis illustrates a possible worlds sequence of a Lewis/rooster chimera that runs in reverse. Actual-world Lewis would admit that there is one world in this series in which the counterpart relation ceases to be sufficient enough under the relevant criteria for the thing in that world to count as a counterpart of the rooster. By extension, in virtue of the nature of the relevant criteria of this sequence, it is logically true (assuming that counterparthood is cardinal) that there is also some point in this sequence at which the Lewis/rooster chimera ceases to meet any relevant criteria for Lewis-counterparthood.

The problem that Lewis is forced to acknowledge, by his own justification of the counterpart relation, is that there remain penumbral cases of counterparthood in this series. Specifically, there are at least some worlds in which it is indeterminate whether or not the most Lewis-like thing in that world can be rightly called a counterpart of Lewis qua the relevant criteria, but are still, definitely, the counterparts of other non-Lewis counterparts in the series qua those same criteria. Every case in this series in which the chimera is more like a non- counterpart of Lewis, but is still a Lewis/rooster chimera, yields an indeterminate counterpart relation for Lewis. Each further attempt to create more precise semantic boundaries for vague predicates such as “is a counterpart of Lewis” serves only to shift the problem up by one degree of order; there is no way in Lewisʼ treatment of vagueness for there to be enough precisification to eliminate vagueness as a problem of semantics alone.

III. Saving Modal Realism

The basic premises Lewis works from are as follows:

1. The world is made of material things
2. Modal realism is true
3. All possible worlds are spatiotemporally and causally isolated
4. Spatiotemporal location is a necessary quality of identity
5. Counterpart theory is the means of measuring counterfactuals across spatiotemporally isolated worlds
6. Vagueness is semantic in nature

My thought-experiment shows that modal realism is philosophically unsound if Lewis accepts a theory that uses counterpart theory and eschews metaphysical vagueness, because his prescribed semantic treatment of vagueness results in an infinite regression. However, the counterpart relation is essential to Lewisʼ modal realism, and thus cannot be given up without losing the larger theory. It is the only way he can account for being able to assess counterfactuals. In the above example, I have shown that even under Lewisʼ strict semantic treatment of vagueness, there no precise cut off point at which a thing in the example series is still be enough like Lewis that, were there no other Lewis-like things in its world, it could be determined whether or not that thing would still be Lewisʼ counterpart.

Meeting all of Lewisʼ criteria for hyper-precisification of the relevant criteria fails to eliminate vagueness of the counterpart relation in the above example. I submit that this is the case because the notion of counterparthood and the counterpart relation are based in comparative overall similarity. The problem with such evaluations is that the terms of these evaluations are themselves vague predicates. Thus, we enter an infinitely reiterating argument that fails to address the issue at hand (that being the location of vagueness as being in language or the world). It is a necessary consequence of precisely this is that Lewisʼ system does not function to evaluate modal properties with any hope of being other than accidentally correct. As such, Lewisʼ theory of modal realism with vagueness as a semantic problem is less than a sufficient account of de re modality.

However, I propose that if Lewis were to add to Premise 6 that vagueness can be semantic and metaphysical, he would no longer face an issue of infinite regression. Lewis argues against metaphysical vagueness because he conceives of identity as a most basic property, which he effectively argues to be unique self-sameness, and his argument against vague objects is based on the fact that he assumes there is a finite answer to the question “how many objects are in the world?” Lewis is correct to state that if vagueness is metaphysical, then it would be a fact of the world that there is no finite number of objects in the world. However, why should it be assumed that there is a finite number of objects in the world? I can think of no compelling reason to assume this to be the case, and Lewis certainly fails to give a sufficient account supporting his personal predilection for there being a finite number of things in the world. At every opportunity, he fails to address the issue as he turns questions of metaphysical vagueness into questions of semantic vagueness.

For Lewis to accept vague objects, he is not required to give up any other part of modal realism. Revising Premise 6 as I have prescribed has no impact on the previous five premises. However, the real issue at hand here is that extending Premise 6 to acknowledge the existence of vague objects might be the only way for Lewisʼ modal realism to survive. Rather than supporting modal realism, his position on vagueness as a problem only of semantics actually undermines his project of modal realism. There is no sufficient argument provided as of yet that can semantically explain away problems of vagueness. The problem of infinite regression that Lewisʼ solution entails makes it unjustified and therefore philosophically unsatisfactory. The existence of vague objects is not only simply the more logical solution, but may possibly be the only way he can salvage modal realism from its problem of infinite regression.

Works Cited

1. Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1972, 1980
2. Lewis, David. On The Plurality of Worlds. Malden MA: Blackwell Publishing. 1986.
3. Lewis, David. “Counterparts of Persons and Their Bodies.” The Journal of Philosophy Vol. 68 (1971). 203-221.

Jaime Harrell (’10) is a Philosophy major at University of Maryland College Park.

Art courtesy of gromyko.

Introduction

As secularized accounts of morality’s social origins, the theories of Italian Renaissance political thinker Niccolo Machiavelli and the 19^th century German continental philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche call for a transvaluation of morality. If we analyze their systems of thought through the distorting, reductive lens of conventional modern connotations, we see the repugnancy of Nietzsche’s sexism or anti-Semitism or the cold, calculating, seemingly self-interested tactics of Machiavelli; as a consequence, we fail to delve deeper into the complexity of these works. This dismissive approach needs to be unlearned and replaced with a more detailed examination of how these figures redefine the notions of good and evil as the foundations of their philosophy and political theory, respectively. Over the course of describing their ethical theories and the ways in which they transvalue the moral standards of their times and attempt to show that vice can legitimately constitute virtue, I would like to explore the question: to what degree can Nietzsche and Machiavelli be defined as consequentialists? Finally, I will touch on the relationship between transvaluation and consequentialism.

Transvaluation Defined

One of the reasons that Nietzsche and Machiavelli have been studied for so long is the sense of theoretical novelty and innovation stemming from their transvaluations; both thinkers seem particularly sensitive to the importance of re-evaluating standards and social mores which facilitates philosophical progress. The concept of “transvaluation” is usually attributed to Nietzsche, rather than Machiavelli; however, the term aptly applies to both. In On the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche explicitly states the project of such a genealogy, or history of morals, and writes about the “need” for a transvaluation, which he defines as a “critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must first be called in question... (20) Nietzsche’s project involves seeing value from the perspective of a meta-cultural stance. The process of transvaluation is essentially a re-assessment of concepts; one takes a step back from the internal, socially constructed systems of value to look at the larger picture, even if this means tearing down their foundation. There is also a shift from a view of morality as something that has objective, intrinsic worth to a view of it as having a subjective, socially and extrinsically determined worth.

Transvaluation: What is being “Transvalued”?

Nietzsche and Machiavelli, in their renunciation of traditional “popular morality”, criticize the Christian ethics which permeated their respective time periods in order to make way for new secular modes of thinking (On the Genealogy of Morals 45). Christian values are precisely what the two aim to attack and transvalue. Machiavelli draws on his own transvaluation of values for the purposes of providing a blueprint for the success of the state. Just as Nietzsche describes a moral dichotomy (slave morality and noble morality), Machiavelli explores two sets of morality: traditional Christian ethics and a political morality. He rejects the former in lieu of acceptance of the latter. Bernard Crick acknowledges that there are two seemingly incompatible spheres of morality, which he divides into the Christian and the Pagan worlds. There exists a conflict between Christian ethics, or “morality of the soul”, and political Pagan morality, or “morality of the city”, and one is forced to operate within one sphere or the other (Crick 67). Machiavelli points out the often mutually exclusive natures of both spheres and is emphatically anti-Christian. A political thinker more than a systematic philosopher, he never undertakes the task of attempting to reconcile the two spheres. This negative view of Christianity is further promoted in The Discourses, in particular sections 11-15. In these sections, Machiavelli makes an important distinction: he is not anti-religion, although he is opposed to Christian dogma. What makes Christianity so distasteful to him is the underlying element of passivity. Such a biblical command as “Turn the other cheek” is completely at odds with Machiavellian principles. Machiavelli’s play La Mandragola delineates the importance of action with the protagonist Callimaco, who says, “I’ve got to try something, be it great, dangerous, harmful, scandalous” (17). It is of further interest that Machiavelli’s works are grounded in unflinching secular realism. Focusing on the present world, he rejects the Christian view that life on earth functions as a spiritual test for soul-making and developing morally significant characters in order to ultimately gain entry to Paradise in the afterlife. As Mansfield states, Machiavelli is interested in establishing prosperity in the world of the here and now (Machiavelli’s Virtue 48). Let us act, he seems to be saying, as if there is no “next world”, and do our best to work with the present conditions. However, on a more general level, Machiavelli recognizes the social utility of religion; it inspires the armies, gives them courage, and unites the people under a common ideological bond. Religion for Machiavelli is a positive thing if it acts a catalyst for the people to political action, but deleterious if it leads to stasis (as Christianity does, according to Machiavelli’s interpretation).

Nietzsche’s obsession with the flaws of Christianity is concisely and elegantly formulated in the “In Attempt at a Self-Criticism” in The Birth of Tragedy:

Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life’s nausea and disgust with life… Hatred of ‘the world,’ condemnation of the passions, fear of beauty and sensuality… For, confronted with morality (especially Christian, or unconditional, morality), life must continually and inevitable be in the wrong, because life is something essentially amoral. (23)

For Nietzsche, Christianity is so destructive to the interests of man because it is rooted in a denial of life, and, moreover, constitutes a kind of perversion in that it restrains the instincts of human nature. The Christian religion teaches that natural sexual impulses and human evil are things of which we should be ashamed, and as such, it is necessarily life-negating; life, Nietzsche points out, encapsulates more than simply what human moral constructs deem “good.” To truly be considered life-affirming, we have to recognize that life is intrinsically supramoral, and we must embrace both halves of the whole, the light and the dark. Nietzsche attempts to critique morality; if the so-called purpose of morality is to label and prescribe what is beneficial as good, he advises that we critique the value of values to determine if the good is actually beneficial. Nietzsche tries to tear down the Christian traditional ethical concepts of self-sacrificing, self-denying moral goodness. Nevertheless, there are positive ethical assertions being posited.

Transvaluation: The Ethical Theories of Nietzsche and Machiavelli Explained

The Genealogy of Morals is a historical, psychological, etymological account of the origins of the meaning of morality. Nietzsche’s approach leads him to a documentation of control conflicts between socio-economic classes, a power-fueled process of assertion and retaliation, or competitive desires for supremacy. Moral valuation, according to Nietzsche, actually splits into a dichotomy relative to two social groups: the aristocracy, or the highest order in the social hierarchy, and the lowest rank, which is that of the slave. The aristocratic sense of the good is synonymous with power and centralized in self-affirmation. Using language as an instrument or expression of power, the aristocracy proves their supremacy by identifying and labeling as good the very actions the ruling class takes, notably making no distinction between the action and the executor of the action. From the noble’s self-justifying perspective, he is inherently good, and thus his behavior is but a perceptible manifestation of his good nature, rendered good by the mere fact that it originates from him, the source of goodness. In master “Roman” morality, power equates to goodness. Occupying the opposite end of aristocratic ethical values is “badness”, which is more or less all that is not the aristocracy, namely the lowest social class. The plebian is deemed bad automatically on the grounds that he is by definition deprived of power, and therefore indisputably separate from the aristocracy and their concept of goodness. The noble regards the commoner with indifference, seeing him as being of no consequence. He is actually incapable of feeling enmity towards the lower class, as he is not considered worthy of his attentions.

Slave morality consists of the polarities of “good and evil”, rather than the aristocratic valuations of “good and bad.” Under this reactionary ethical system, the slave despises the aristocrat, who in his eyes possesses the ability to choose weakness, yet remains in power. The weak, resenting the powerful, delude themselves into believing that their weakness is virtue, while the seemingly unattainable power is renamed vice, and thus gain superiority in the only sense they are capable: the transvalution of the pre-existing aristocratic morality. By redefining the aristocratic good as “evil”, the slave himself secures a degree of control over the nobles, the self-validating social tyrants. He linguistically transforms his impotence and subjection into his very sense of worth (On the Genealogy of Morals 56). This moral value generates from hatred, and the slave’s joy consists in the suffering of the nobles. Slave morality is, in contrast with self-affirming aristocratic morality, spiteful, vindictive, and actively negating. Furthermore, the slave’s good is in fact his evil; it is rooted in hate and malicious delight in diminishing the authority of and even inflicting pain upon the oppressive nobles, exemplifying our traditional concept of vice. In Nietzsche’s phrase “beyond good and evil” we see his desire for philosophy to move beyond a slave conception of morality (Ibid., 55).

While Nietzsche criticizes conventional morality and even morality in general by boldly claiming that “every morality is, as opposed to laisser aller, a bit of tyranny against ‘nature’ also against ‘reason’”, he never successfully escapes from the very oppositional thinking which he so adamantly detests (Beyond Good and Evil 100). Nietzsche, although he claims to despise morality, is clearly making a positive moral assertion of his own. The “life-affirming versus life-negating” opposition that is so salient in his writing forms a kind of new morality in its own right. Leila Haaparanta, in her article A Note on Nietzsche’s Argument, attempts to reconstruct Nietzsche’s critique of moral philosophy in strictly logical terms and also offers insight on his positive ethical theory and supports the interpretation that Nietzsche is asserting a life-affirming morality (494). Nietzsche observes that the polytheistic religions of antiquity are superior to Christian monotheism because in that epoch “There was only one norm, man” (The Gay Science 191). Nietzche’s morality, then, may be reduced to a simple and noble calculation: a true morality justifies man as perhaps an intrinsically moral being. It is his very natural instincts which Nietzsche labels as morally good, and the conscious repression of them as amoral. His moral prescription is essentially that vitality and natural impulses are the only ethical standards by which we should live. We have to accept the chaos and the dissonance, i.e. not only what is deemed by Christian values to be “good”, but also the “evil”.

In Book I of The Discourses, Machiavelli promotes his own view of the origins of morality. Like Nietzsche, he identifies the establishment of moral terms with power conflicts and social classes. In the earliest days of human history, people lived in primitive independence of social structure, organization, and law (106). As populations began to increase, so did interactions between people, until eventually more or less isolated individuals or small groups of individuals banded together in the name of the utility-steeped purpose of increasing the chances of survival. They chose a leader, a man of mental and physical distinction, to augment a sense of social cohesiveness and guide them as an early stages executive figure. This figure, not doubt, was a paradigm of the Machiavellian idea of virtu¹; he exemplifies the political role in Machiavellian thought which Pitkin identifies as the Founder, “a male figure of superhuman or mythical proportions, who introduces among men something new, good, and sufficiently powerful so that it continues beyond his lifetime on the course he has set” (The Founder 52). As such, the people felt a sense of obligation and indebtedness to their leader, or Founder, for the prosperity of the collective. After the establishment of governments, Machiavelli explains, people formed a notion of justice based on the way their leader was treated. Thus original concepts of good and evil were rooted in other individuals’ exhibitions of gratitude or ingratitude towards the Founder; when instances of ingratitude arose, men were filled with resentment for the ungrateful, and came to associate ingratitude with evilness and vice, while instances of gratitude shown to their leader induced valuations of goodness and virtue (The Discourses 107). Laws were created to accommodate these vicarious feelings, i.e. to punish the ungrateful and reward the grateful. Justice for Machiavelli is a purely subjective term revolving around the well-being of the leaders of the state. Moral judgments were formulated by the appropriation of gratitude towards the Founder, who had made social success possible, not because of inherent goodness or badness, and it is these relativist foundations of traditional morality which Machiavelli seeks to expose but also manipulate to the advantage of the whole.

Machiavelli’s transvaluation of values is most apparent in the infamous work The Prince. Espousing the ideals of civic duty and the common good, Machiavelli’s notion of virtue is inextricably bound up with classical republicanism. Good and evil are transvalued according to ends, i.e. the noble republican goal of liberty, preservation and expansion of the state, and the overall well-being of the people within the state are re-defined as the good. What society traditionally deems to be “evil” is even, at times, a necessary means to achieve the good. Evil in Machiavellian terms constitutes what is harmful to the republic.

…[A] ruler, and especially a new ruler, cannot always act in ways that are considered good because, in order to maintain his power, he is often forced to act treacherously, ruthlessly or inhumanely, and disregard the precepts of religion. Hence he must be… capable of entering upon the path of wrongdoing when this becomes necessary. ( The Prince 62)

Machiavelli’s concept of good actions and moral behavior is tied to social and political action and a sense of necessity. “Wrongdoing” for Machiavelli should be a term in quotations, since it so-called evil actions are justified and made good by the positive outcomes his actions produce. Bernard Crick articulates this sentiment rather bluntly, but accurately, with his recognition in the introduction to The Discourses that the impetus behind the action of Machiavellian figures is the understanding that “[s]omeone has to take up the dirty work” (64). For example, the people may despise a ruler for raising taxes and call him miserly, but when the state later needs these funds, the stability of the country which his prudence and foresight maintained will outweigh the initial financial inconveniences. Machiavellian virtue utilizes acts that would be classified as Christian evil as instruments to achieving higher goals. Methods of cultivating the collective good vary with one’s position in society; the task of redefining morality falls upon the ruler of a principality or republic. He must exercise virtu and the willingness to take part in such ethical transvaluations as the circumstances demand, while the citizen must demonstrate civic virtue and carry out the deeds which his government requires of him for the betterment of the state. It could even be argued that if there are two spheres are morality, the political and the Christian, the former requires evil and transvaluation, while the latter is concerned solely with goodness in the deontological sense.

Transvaluation of the Concept of Violence: Ethical Behavior Made Compatible with Violence

Machiavelli and Nietzsche’s views on violence clearly stem from their ethical transvaluations, in which they both recognize the need for “evil”. To recapitulate, in Nietzsche’s case, evil is to be embraced simply on the basis that it composes only part of a unity, that is, extramoral life. In Machiavelli’s case, this “evil” is necessary at times to achieve the greater good of the well-being of the republic, and thus “evil” and cruelty become in a sense vindicated, and made good, by the attainment of the ends. Violence is most often viewed as a form of moral evil because it involves humans choosing a wrong action from a set of morally significant actions, and hence it functions as an effective paradigm of Nietzschean and Machiavellian ethical transvaluation theory in application. An expansionist, Machiavelli acknowledges the inevitability of inter-nation conflict, as well as the need for conflict within the state. The former is highlighted in the form of military virtue in The Art of War, in which Machiavelli labels expertise in battle as a necessary evil, but one which even the generals, the executors of that evil, must only resort to it with the utmost reluctance. Furthermore, good generals and soldiers must be first and foremost good citizens. Machiavelli underscores the significance of patriotic necessity-driven motives in warfare. The art of war is not a craft which truly good soldiers will want to pursue in times of peace, and violence is not something which they will actively seek out (The Art of War 18). Additionally, Machiavelli discusses the positive influence of institutionalized conflict on the state’s overall prosperity in The Discourses. He posits that the violence which erupts between the two social groups of the plebian and the Senate actually facilitates legislative progress, and thus leads to the betterment of the republic (113).

Nietzsche views violence as an essential facet of human nature, which is inclined towards cruelty and schadenfreude. In the Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, he describes the origins of guilt. This state arises from a financial relationship: the debtor-creditor relationship. Guilt is, in a modern context, largely associated with the failure to meet a responsibility, but initially it simply meant that the debtor needed to pay off his debt. If the debtor failed to make his payment, the creditor would be allowed to torture him as payment. Punishment functions as sharp and vivid memory aid to fulfill our promises (On the Genealogy of Morals 61). However, morality causes us to brand these creditor instincts as wrong. No longer having the ability to take our aggression out on others causes us to turn our cruel tendencies inward, replacing sadism with masochism. This internalization of cruelty is what breeds bad conscience. Nietzsche departs from Machiavelli in the sense that for Machiavelli, violence is a rather unpleasant undertaking, the only means available of attaining a higher, nobler goal. For Nietzsche, suffering takes on another dimension: it is an end in itself and is to be promoted for its own sake (On the Genealogy of Morals 67). It is in this essay that he explores the idea of a cheerful suffering. His concept of an ideal society would be one devoid of traditional morality, where cruel instincts are allowed free reign, under the sole confines of the debtor-creditor contract. Nietzsche calls for us to do away with moral oppositional thinking, implying that it is preferable to live in such a natural state of ritualized physical violence and torture rather than to cope with the bad conscience of the moral era which traditional morality imposes upon us.

Machiavelli and Nietzsche’s recognition of the essential nature of violence is a direct result of their ethics, and has caused many to accuse them of simply being immoralists. While it may appear that both Nietzsche and Machiavelli are not actually positively asserting a moral code of their own, Nietzsche’s is a kind of life-affirming, humanity-affirming morality, and Machiavelli’s is a classical republican morality. While he operates according to reason of state, the concept that different standards of morality apply to the political arena, Machiavelli is clearly not devoid of idealistic motivations, as frequent charges of realpolitik would suggest, and like Nietzsche, who, despite explicitly voiced aversions to moral constructs, he is not calling for a complete abolishment of morality. Machiavelli’s agreement with such extreme instances of violence, particularly the sons of Brutus case, in which he praises the conduct of a man who killed his two sons because they were acting against the state, strikes the modern Western reader as radical (The Discourses 393). To refute immoralist charges, we must take into consideration Machiavelli’s admonition against the employment of excessive violence, or cruelty that does not serve a noble end (The Discourses 132). Machiavelli emphasizes the importance of the ends, and condemns action for the sake of action, or violence merely for the sake of violence. In Machiavelli’s world, everything that is noble serves a greater political purpose, and every action should be justifiable to be considered worthy and good. In the process of maintaining any state, violence is a fundamental component, and Machiavelli does not attempt to sugarcoat its undeniable necessity. The Machiavellian leader maneuvers around the problematic rigidity of traditional morality to live according to the exigencies of the moment (The Discourses 430). Republicanism becomes an epistemological matter; the populace often do not know what is best for them, and it takes a leader equipped with virtu, a preternatural understanding of actions which will bring about the best consequences, to know when to transvalue and resort to violence.

The Problem of Determinism: Evidence against the Formulation of Positive Ethical Theory?

The concept of free will plays an important role in any ethical theory, and has been an object of contention in the philosophical traditions of both modernity and antiquity. The crux of the problem appears to be: if a philosophy relegates the concept of free will to a mere fiction and takes a deterministic approach, then it logically follows that, since we have no control over our actions, we cannot be held morally responsible for them. If this is the case in Machiavelli and Nietzsche’s theories, then what role can any kind of moral code play? I would argue that determinism does not provide an impediment to the formulation of their ethics.

Nietzsche’s views of free will are extremely complex; for the most part, he claims that free will is an empty idea, but other aspects of his work would suggest otherwise. On the one hand, we see Nietzsche’s professed disbelief in free will in On the Genealogy of Morals: “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything” (45). It is a human prejudice to distinguish an action from the subject, Nietzsche says. However, in reality, there is no causal chain involving two separate entities: a performer of an action and the action itself. There is no free will that enables the subject to choose to act or to refrain from acting in such a way, as with action, there is always necessity. Contrastively, in Aphorism 341 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche presents the idea of eternal recurrence, the concept that life repeats itself over and over again into eternity. Instead of lamenting this “greatest weight” to no end, Nietzsche suggests that we revel in this escape from the unbearable weightlessness of nihilism. The fact that every event and thought inevitably occurs again and again regardless of human actions or attempts to evade it is not in fact a source of anxiety or depression. There seems to be an element of choice here, beyond the overwhelming determinism. Through amor fati, love of fate, we can in a sense choose to transcend the conditions beyond our control, as Nietzsche declares, “I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth!” (The Gay Science 223).We may not be able to ward off eternal recurrence, but we can freely control our psychological attitudes towards it. In other words, we can choose to fatalistically despair, resigned to Hamlet-like nausea at the futility of human action, or we can laugh like the ubermensch in the face of the eternal recurrence (Beyond Good and Evil 68). Similarly, free will in Machiavelli emerges with restraints, but still intact. Prevalent throughout his works is the figure of Fortuna, a female personification of fortune. Departing from the medieval view of a Fortuna who turns a single wheel that determines the Fate of men, he constructs a worldview marked by a plurality of options. According to Pitkin’s view of Machiavelli, there are multiple wheels “so that it may be possible for men to choose among them, or to jump from one to another… the stress on activism and human choice in Machiavelli’s vision is really new” (Fortune 146 Pitkin). With Machiavelli too, then, there is some wiggle room for free will. Furthermore, in Chapter XXV of The Prince, Fortuna is described as not only a fickle and cruel woman, but also a viciously raging flood. Executing virtu and foresight, as well as carefully preparing for the future, can eliminate some of the woe brought about by Fortuna. Of course, there is always a degree of unpredictability, as there are clearly many variables working against any given person, no matter how much virtu he practices, but Machiavelli stresses in his constant exhortation to action that we can and must do our best to conquer the half of human behavior which is within our power to control (85). We can conclude, then, that in both Machiavelli and Nietzsche’s thought, free will is given some degree of validity, and this enables the development of their particular moral codes.

Nietzsche and Machiavelli’s Consequentialism as Ethical Egoism and Ethical Altruism

Despite the shared basis of transvaluation in their ethical theories, Machiavelli looks beyond the self for the moral justification which he assigns to human behavior, while Nietzsche is primarily concerned with the self. These views of the value of the individual versus the collective lend themselves to a self-oriented form of consequentialism, or ethical egoism, and a common good-oriented consequentialism, or ethical altruism. Consequentialism is a broad category of normative ethics which is based on the idea that the value of an action derives not from any intrinsic value to the action, but from the consequences that arise from it. The value of an action, then, is extrinsic and not intrinsic. Machiavelli’s political ethics would be best characterized as ethical altruism.² The clearest formulation of his consequentialist orientation is in The Discourses: “ It is a sound maxim that reprehensible actions may be justified by their effects, and that when the effect is good… it always justifies the action” (132). This work in particular highlights Machiavelli’s other-regarding love and altruism. In Section 9 of Book I, he presents his concept of the ideal leader: one whose sense of self-interest drops out completely for the attainment of the common good (Discourses 132). This leader must eliminate his sense of self and his own desires, as he exists for the service of the republic.

While Machiavelli’s works are steeped in the classical republican value of the greater good, a kind of ethical altruism, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche presents his ideal of the lonely intellectual immersed in the vita contemplativa, the contemplative life. Furthermore, in On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche rejects the judgment that the herd, the majority, should be considered above the interests of the nobles, the minority (56). Placing this kind of noble individual above the relatively ignorant, intellectually unremarkable masses, he values the process of self-development, or self-becoming. Nietzsche refuses to equate the “good” with the “useful” or “expedient”; nevertheless, he certainly is concerned with the consequences of behavior at the level of the individual. How we choose to behave determines whether or not we will, in his terms, become who we really are, that is, come closer to the ideal of a true self. Failing to act on our own impulses and learning the habit of obeying the interests of others above our own results in the breeding of bad conscience. Nietzsche’s morality is one defined by ethical egoism, the view that it is right to always act in our own best interests. We should always say “yes” to ourselves, as to deny our own desires is unnatural, or un-vitalistic, and hence unethical. Whether an action is right or wrong depends on whether or not it is good for the self.

Conclusion: The Relation between Consequentialism and Transvaluation

Having analyzed the ethical theories of Nietzsche and Machiavelli, including their views of the self, free will, and violence, and the anti-Christian sentiments featured therein, as well as Machiavelli and Nietzsche’s ethical transvaluation and versions of consequentialism, I think we can see that there is a relation between transvaluation and consequentialism: consequentialism itself is a form of transvaluation. In Nietzsche and Machiavelli a transvaluation involves the redefinition of moral valuation away from the “intrinsic”, deontological notion of an action’s value. Instead of looking at the actions themselves, they look at whatever causally follows it to determine whether an action is right or wrong. Nietzsche evaluates good in terms of consequences for the self in his ethical egoist picture, while the ethical altruist Machiavelli evaluates good in terms of consequences for others.

Works Cited

Gilbert, Felix. “Machiavellianism.” Machiavelli. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998.

Haaparanta, Leila. “A Note on Nietzsche’s Argument.” The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 38, No. 153. (Oct., 1988), pp. 490-495.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Discourses. Trans. Leslie J. Walker, S.J. Ed. Bernard Crick. New York: Penguin Classics, 1984.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. Ed./Trans. Quentin Skinner. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Art of War. Trans. Christopher Lynch. Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. La Mandragola. Trans. Mera J. Flaumenhaft. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1981.

Mansfield, Harvey C., Machiavelli’s Virtue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kaufmann and RJ Hollingdale. New York: Random House, Inc., 1967.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, Inc. 1966.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, Inc., 1967.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, Inc., 1974.

Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. “Fortune.” Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. “The Founder.” Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. “The Passion of Liberty.” Fortune is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

2 The term “Machiavellianism” is predicated on a portrayal of Machiavelli as indulging in pure self-interest; however, Felix Gilbert looks into the etymological history of the word, just as Nietzsche researches the history of the concepts of “good and evil.” He illuminates the fact that the negative connotations of the word are based on a misreading of Machiavelli and comments that it simply came to mean “evil” in the twentieth-century (Machiavelli 174). In common usage, we tend to attribute Machiavelli with the term “utilitarianism” and a rational-to-the-point-of-inhuman utilitarian calculus. To say that Machiavelli is a utilitarian is really a misuse of the word; people intend to use it to mean the selfishness of the fox’s wiles and the lion’s machismo as methods to attain personal success in a monarchy. Any act which maximizes utility, i.e. increases total happiness, is moral. To think of the republican consequentialist end of the “public good” as interchangeable with “utility” might be a step in the wrong direction. Firstly, utilitarianism has aims of a universal scope, but the utility of all people everywhere, independent of spatial political boundaries, is not Machiavelli’s concern. Machiavelli’s patriotism, his specifically Florentine nationalist sympathies, highlights this concept; Pitkin acknowledges Machiavelli’s sentiment that we should value our own political state above others, and the domestic above the foreign (The Passion of Liberty 153). According to Machiavelli, your state is your moral obligation, not the happiness of mankind. Secondly, Machiavelli is entirely silent on human happiness, and his political theory is not concerned with achieving it. Civic duty and the practice of virtu do not necessarily increase overall happiness, but they will contribute to long-lasting institutions and a flourishing state. The goal of classical republicanism seems to be the satisfaction of the abstract “good” of the people; not their psychological well-being, but solid socio-political structures and greatness of an Empire. There is the overriding notion in Machiavelli’s works that what is “best” for the republic, the attainment of things like economic prosperity and state longevity, does not always coincide with the happiness of its citizens.

Helen Ciacciarelli (’09) is a Philosophy and English Literature major at Rutgers University.

What is a Good Life?

When asked, ‘What do you want from life?’, or ‘What is a good life?’, many respond with the slogan, ‘All that really matters is that you’re happy’. Does this slogan capture all that is relevant to a good life?

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Imagine that in the future, scientists and engineers develop an ‘experience machine’. People can program into the machine whatever experiences they want to undergo, and hook themselves up to this machine such that once inside, the experiences are indistinguishable from reality. Subjects can choose to live out their entire lives in the machine, experiencing whatever joys and achievements their hearts desire just like it were really happening.  Once in the machine the person is ignorant of the fact that they are really just lying in a vat or on a table having their brains manipulated according to the plan they had previously invented.

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A machine like this seems sufficient to ensure a person’s happiness, but would a life in the experience machine be a good life?  Assuming that the machine is without flaws, would you agree to be hooked up to the machine and live out your dreams? Why or why not?

Prometheus welcomes the opportunity to publish Garrett’s essay in this issue’s online journal. Enjoy.

By Garrett Lasnier

In this paper I will first and foremost answer the question as it is stated: given the opportunity, would I allow myself to be hooked up to a machine that makes me feel as though I am authentically living out my wildest dreams? If it were actually the case that I were given this choice, considering that I would be basing my decision on personal and psychological factors (essentially telling them that this life was not good enough, how would my family and friends feel if I entered the experience machine? Even if they would be brainwashed after I did it, I could not bring myself to do this in the first place), I would not go into the machine. I am too attached to this life to follow through with this decision, even if I were to coldly reason out that it was in my best interest, even with the knowledge that my decision would be irrelevant once in the machine. However, while my philosophical reasoning would be largely irrelevant in my actual decision-making process, I will argue that, philosophically, based on my conception of the ‘good life’, I would still not enter the machine.

From a solely hedonistic position, it is highly unlikely that one would even be happier in this experience machine. The psychological research overwhelmingly shows, as is the thesis of Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness, that human beings are largely ignorant of what will make them happy in the future. As a 19-year old, the “wildest dreams” that I program into the machine are vastly different from what will make me happy when I am 40, 50, or even 75. I may program the machine so that I find the cure for Aids, I become President, and am the first person to travel to Mars but, as hard as it might be for me to imagine now, perhaps my values will change. Perhaps after the first great achievement I may be more inclined to live a life outside of the spotlight, perhaps I would rather live a simple life with my family. I have no idea what will make me happy in the future; I can only extrapolate from the present state of my 19-year old existence. While in this life I will not be able to control other variables so that I can live out all of my wildest dreams (although I do have a high level of self-efficacy), at least I will be able to make choices that are relevant to my constantly changing attitudes and values. Thus, making me happier in the long-run.

Moreover, happiness is a completely subjective state. Assume that our current relative life satisfaction rating, on a 1-10 scale, is a 7. We are fairly happy. Now, if we were to lose the ability to use our hands and feet, we would assume that our life satisfaction rating would go down to a 2-we imagine that our lives would be miserable by comparison. But, if a quadriplegic claims that his life satisfaction is a 7 out of 10, who are we to claim that what he is experiencing is actually a 2 out of 10? We have this dogma that happiness is directly related to the circumstances of our life. “If I could just accomplish this or do that I would be happy.” The truth is, a person’s relative happiness scale is generally stable over time. If one person were to win the lottery and another person were to lose a loved one, the common knowledge is that the lottery winner would be significantly more happy while the other would be significantly less happy. And while this common knowledge may be true in the short term, the psychological evidence suggests that as early as 2 years after both events, both individuals would revert, with almost no discrepancy, back to their base life satisfaction rating. Therefore, as it relates to the experience machine, there is evidence that living out my wildest dreams would not even make me significantly happier. So, if I were to consider a virtual experience machine from a solely hedonistic perspective, it would be more appropriate to have a machine that would make me a person who would feel happy in any situation in the simulator.

While hedonistic calculations certainly are a factor in deciding whether to enter the experience machine, there are more factors that need to be considered-the good life consists of far more than pleasure and pain. I think that the good life is strongly tied to making authentic choices. I do not understand how I could possibly have a sense of free will in the experience machine if all my life was predetermined beforehand. But, more interestingly, I do not know how I have this sense of free will right now. Neurologically, or even philosophically, there may be no way to prove that we are free agents. After all, can you point to the neuron that constitutes the you that is choosing to do x or not to do x? We are just a compilation of independently acting cells, which are just a bunch of atoms, which are just a bunch of subatomic particles. That we are free agents is an absurd notion. Still, I feel that I have free will and I would not give that up for all the pleasure in the world. So what if there is no way to prove (considering it is ‘indistinguishable from reality’) that I am not in this machine right now? Even if I only think I have free will, I would rather hold on to this sense of authenticity than go into another machine, even if in that machine I would feel the same authenticity. So, considering that this sense of authenticity is at the core of my being, I would be unwilling to part with it, even if it were to be restored once in the machine.

So, if I am currently in an experience machine that is indistinguishable from reality, I have a few things to say to my former self. First and foremost, you must be a heartless jerk for abandoning your previous family and friends. Even if they were to be brainwashed of your existence, how could you ever follow through with such a decision and not feel too much guilt? Second, you must have had a really lame life if you consider this to be your wildest dreams. I am very happy with my life, fortunately enough, but so far the evidence shows that you are a very uncreative person. Thirdly, you must have quite the naïve conception of how human beings account for pleasure; pleasure is a relative phenomenon and is largely irrelevant to life circumstances. And finally, I am utterly disappointed that you gave up your fundamental sense of agency, perhaps you did not deserve it in the first place.

Garrett Lasnier (’12) is a Philosophy and Psychology major at Johns Hopkins University.

In this paper, I discuss Kant’s main argument for free will from morality. The aim of this paper is to reconstruct his argument as found mainly in the Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals and the Critique of Practical Reason. Concisely put, he argues that we can and even must admit free will in order for morality, which we intuitively accept, to be meaningful at all. As preliminaries to the main argument, I begin with a brief introduction to Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology, as well as his conception of free will. Following this, I explore his main argument for free will, which relies on the thesis that morality reciprocally implies free will. I break this argument into two steps. First, I discuss how Kant shows that morality implies rationality. Second, I discuss how Kant shows that rationality, in turn, implies free will. Before concluding, I review Kant’s position on the apparent incompatibility between free will and determinism.

I start with a brief introduction to Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology to establish the kind of knowledge about free will Kant thinks we can maintain. He details this-what we can know and how we can know it-in the Critique of Pure Reason. His metaphysics details what we can know by distinguishing between two worlds, the phenomenal world and the noumenal world. While the phenomenal world is the empirical world in which we experience objects as they appear to us, the noumenal world is the rational world in which we conceive of things-in-themselves. In other words, the phenomenal world is concerned with appearances, while the noumenal world is concerned with things as they actually are. Although Kant does not explicitly state how we are to conceive of these worlds, we can conceive of them as either two ontologically distinct worlds (two world interpretation) or two aspects of the same world (two aspect interpretation). As far as this discussion is concerned, I do not adopt one interpretation or another, as each has its merits. Notwithstanding this, an important consequence of Kant’s metaphysics is that whatever knowledge we can claim about the noumenal world is different not only in degree but in kind to whatever knowledge we can claim about the phenomenal world.

In turn, Kant’s epistemology explains how we can know what we know. For the present purpose, the most relevant way we can acquire knowledge is through reason, which can be either pure or practical. While pure reason is primarily concerned with theoretical or speculative claims, practical reason is primarily concerned with moral claims. However, pure reason and practical reason are not, strictly speaking, different kinds of reason, as they “are differentiated solely in their application” (391). Broadly construed, Kant grounds metaphysics on epistemology: that is, he limits what we can consider real to what we can know about what is real. It follows that although we can claim knowledge of the phenomenal world, any claim to knowledge of the noumenal world oversteps the bounds of pure reason. So as a matter of pure reason, we can neither prove nor disprove claims about the noumenal world. Perhaps in a most restrictive manner, pure reason alone forbids us from resolving the three most pressing issues of free will, the existence of God, and the immortality of the soul. So if we are to claim any knowledge of free will at all, it must be as a matter of practical reason. Indeed, Kant suggests that we posit free will as a postulate of pure practical reason, which is simply practical reason that is concerned with the noumenal world. Specifically, we postulate the idea of freedom as a transcendental idea, a “concept of pure reason” that is representative of, but not ultimately grounded in the phenomenal world. As a transcendental idea, the postulate of free will makes a claim about the noumenal world, but is not itself noumenally known or even knowable as a matter of pure reason.

Having briefly introduced Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology, I now outline his conception of freedom and its relation to the will. In the most general sense, freedom is a property of the will. The will is a causality that is characteristic of, and therefore presupposed, of any rational being. In particular, the will is the capacity to act in accordance with reason alone, independently of external causes from the phenomenal world. Further, the will acts by acting on the basis of maxims, which have the form “Perform action A in circumstance C for the end E.” In contrast then, a non-rational being, which does not have such a will, is only determined by external causes. On this reading of Kant, a rational being is a rational being insofar as it has a will, which is precisely the capacity to act in accordance with reason alone. Since freedom is a property of the will and a rational being is the only kind of being that has a will, it follows that a rational being is the only kind of being that can have freedom. Of course, Kant allows for the will to be unfree. But the will’s lack of freedom is meaningful insofar as it has the capacity to be free and yet is not actually free.

There are, in particular, several distinct but related types of freedom. Transcendental freedom, for one, corresponds well to our intuitive conception of freedom as the will’s capacity to be a “first” cause. As a “first” or “absolutely spontaneous” cause, the will is transcendentally free insofar as it is free to be a first cause in the noumenal world, the effect of which takes place in the phenomenal world. Crucially, such a cause must be itself uncaused and undetermined by any external cause in the phenomenal world. It is as such transcendentally ideal, not transcendentally real, since it is in principle unverifiable in the phenomenal world. Transcendental freedom means that I act in a certain way because I myself want to. To use a more concrete example, it means that I do my logic homework because I want to, rather than because I act merely in response to an external cause. This relates transcendental freedom with practical freedom in both the negative sense and the positive sense. While negative freedom is the will’s freedom from any external cause such as desire and inclination, positive freedom is the will’s freedom to both determine and obey its own laws. Indeed, positive freedom implies negative freedom, since the will is free to determine and obey its own laws only if it is free from any external cause. In fact, so important is practical freedom that Kant identifies the autonomous will as the will that is determined by reason alone in this way. In contrast then, the heteronomous will is the will that is not determined by reason as such. To sum, the free and autonomous will is transcendentally free in that it is itself an effective cause, and practically free in that it determines and obeys its own laws. I return to this conception of freedom later in the discussion to explore them in more detail.

Now that we have at least a general understanding of Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology, as well as his conception of free will, we are ready to tackle Kant’s main argument for free will from morality. To do so, I adopt what Henry Allison calls the Reciprocity Thesis, the thesis that morality reciprocally implies free will. In particular, I adopt the proposition that (1) morality reciprocally implies rationality, and also that (2) rationality reciprocally implies free will. It is this second proposition that I will examine in greater detail. Given these propositions, my reconstruction of Kant’s main argument is as follows:

• (Ax. 1) We accept morality on intuitive grounds.
• (P1) Morality implies rationality.
• (P2) Rationality implies free will.
• (C) From (Ax. 1), (P1), and (P2), we conclude free will.

As this reconstruction of the main argument suggests, the main motivation is to ground morality on a solid foundation. But morality depends on rationality, which in turn depends on free will. So in order to maintain morality, we must maintain free will.

The main argument begins with the axiom of morality, an assumption Kant takes us to intuitively accept as a “fact of… reason” (136). This acceptance of the axiom of morality (Ax. 1) affirms the antecedent of (P1). According to our intuitive conception of morality, morality has several characteristics. First, morality involves a law-a moral law-that commands me to act in a certain way. Second, this moral law is universal in that we conceive of it as binding on everyone without exception. Since the moral law binds everyone, I cannot, or at least ought not to, excuse myself or a friend for any crime. Evidently then, morality as a moral law, and indeed, the moral law, is an imperative in that it demands something of every person, and in particular, each person’s will. But what kind of imperative is the moral law? Based on our reflections on morality, Kant argues that the moral law is a categorical imperative, rather than a hypothetical imperative (106-107). Crucially, our reflections suggest that morality binds the will independently of the will’s desire or inclination. I cannot exempt myself from moral requirements simply because I feel like they do not apply to me. So the moral law cannot be a hypothetical imperative of the form “Do X if Y” (where X is an action and Y is an end that X can help bring about), since such an imperative is dependent upon subjective desire or inclination. Instead, the moral law must be a categorical imperative of the form “Do X” (where X is an action) in that it is absolutely and unconditionally binding on every will, regardless of subjective desire or inclination. But the moral law can only bind the will in such a way because it consists in reason, and the will is precisely the capacity to act in accordance with reason. It is clear then that morality, which consists in the universal moral law expressed as a categorical imperative, and in fact the categorical imperative, depends on reason alone (Preface). This first step of the argument establishes (P1), that morality implies rationality.

Now that Kant has shown that morality implies rationality, he moves onto the second major step of the argument to show that rationality, in turn, implies freedom. In terms of the argument as I have stated it, Kant now turns to (P2), the antecedent of which is affirmed by the consequent of (P1). Rationality, according to Kant, is normative in that it prescribes rules of both reason and morality. That is, thinking reasonably and living morally are the same kind of thing in that they are both prescriptions of rationality. At first, the idea that rationality prescribes morality may be a strange thought. Indeed, some philosophers, such as Hume, argue that morality is based on desire or inclination alone and thus has nothing to do with rationality. Yet let us first consider the relatively uncontroversial claim that rationality prescribes rules of logic as the rules of correct reasoning. Given “P” and “P implies Q,” the logical rule modus ponens persuades me to accept “Q.” Although I may for one reason or another reject the inference of “Q” from the given premises, I would do so in a way that is clearly contrary to rationality. Kant suggests that this violation of rationality means that the will is determined by external causes, whereas reason determines the will internally. Kant’s claim then is that just as rationality prescribes rules of reasoning, it prescribes rules of morality too. So the will that rejects the universal moral law is, in this sense, just as irrational as the will that rejects a valid inference from given premises. For the argument to work, Kant invokes the principle of “ought” implies “can.” He takes it that since the will ought to be rational, the will can be rational. This principle precludes the possibility of having any standard of rationality or morality so high that it is unattainable. In any case, the normative prescriptions of rationality, on both thought and morality, bind the will, which is by definition the capacity to act according to reason and assumed of every rational being.

As I noted earlier, the categorical imperative as an imperative of rationality gives us a command to act in a certain way. More precisely, we can use a priori reason to derive necessary actions or duties, the basis on which we are to act, from one of several formulations of the categorical imperative. Of these formulations, the one that accords best with the conception of freedom is the formula of autonomy. According to this formula, the categorical imperative commands the will to act in a way such that it both legislates laws for itself and at the same time subjects itself to those same laws. But to be sure, not just any law. The laws must conform to reason, which is universal to every rational being. When the will acts according to this formula of autonomy, it is the autonomous will. But the autonomous will is, as I mentioned even before I discussed the main argument, also the free will, in that it is practically free and (presumably) transcendentally free as well. As such, Kant’s conception of free will differs from competing conceptions in that far from being “free” from any constraints, it legislates and subjects itself to certain laws. This then establishes the connection between rationality, and through autonomy, freedom of the will. In any case, the derivation of free will from rationality and rationality from morality is now fairly clear. The good will acts according to reason as expressed in the categorical imperative. In turn, the rational will acts under normative prescriptions of rationality. Since rationality prescribes autonomy of the will, and the autonomous will is identical to the free will, the good will is at the same time both rational and free. Perhaps the only catch here is that strictly speaking, it seems that we can only derive practical freedom from morality, and not quite transcendental freedom. But if we also accept, as Kant insists we should, the postulate of free will as a transcendental idea, then we establish transcendental freedom as well. Accepting free will on this basis means that we have successfully completed the argument. Kant has shown (P2), and so we can validly infer from (Ax. 1), (P1), and (P2) that (C). This concludes Kant’s argument for free will from morality.

As a final word, there is one difficulty I want to mention before concluding. A source of tension lies in that while we are causally determined, we are also a first or spontaneous cause. It is not obvious how we can at once be determined by natural laws, just as rocks and trees are, and at the same time be a first cause whose effect takes place in the phenomenal world. So there seems to a sense in which causal determinism is compatible with freedom, yet Kant explicitly denies this possibility. Kant is an incompatibilist in that he thinks free will and determinism cannot both hold of the same world. Calvin Normore suggests that we can plausibly resolve this tension by postulating free will and determinism as holding at different moments in time in the same world (2008). For example, we can conceivably maintain that free will but not determinism holds from time t₁ to t₅, and also that determinism but not free will holds from time t₆ to t₁₀. Nonetheless, Kant seems to argue for a stronger conclusion that relies crucially on his distinction between the phenomenal world and the noumenal world. Simply put, he argues for a dualistic conception of us as being simultaneously present in both worlds. This way, we can maintain that while we are causally determined in the phenomenal world and subject to the laws of nature, we are also at the same time free in the noumenal world and subject to the laws of reason. Accordingly, the recognition of this dual presence in both worlds solves the tension between free will and causal determinism.

To conclude, I have shown Kant’s argument for free will from morality by appealing to the reciprocity thesis. Specifically, I reconstructed Kant’s argument as showing how the intuitive acceptance of morality implies rationality, and how rationality in turn implies free will. Following this, I mentioned the difficulty in conceiving ourselves as being both an effect of external causes and yet ourselves a first cause. Kant holds that while free will and determinism cannot both be true in the same world, the solution is to understand ourselves as being dually present in both the phenomenal world and the noumenal world.

Works Cited

Allison, Henry E. Kant’s Theory of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Experience of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Johnson, Robert. “Kant’s Moral Philosophy.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/ (accessed November 23, 2008).

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

-. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. 3. Translated by James W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1993.

-. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Third Edition. Translated by James W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., 1993.

-. Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics. 5. Translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898.

Normore, Calvin. “PHIL 301.” Montreal: McGill University, Fall 2008.

Pistorius, Hermann Andreas. “Rezension der Kritik der praktischen Vernunft.” In Materialien zu Kants “Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, by Rüdiger Bittner and Konrad Cramer, 175. 1974.

Endnotes

Kant outlines the tension between free will and determinism in the Third Antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason (484-489).

It is helpful to conceive of the postulate of free will as one analogous to the postulate of causality or the postulate of teleology in natural science. Just as the scientist examines the natural world as though causality and teleology were true, rational beings live as though free will were true. In both cases, the rejection of a postulate results in a kind of practical inconceivability: that is, the project in mind (of science or of ethical living) is impossible without first postulating the validity of some law, even if such a law is unknown and even unknowable.

However, the precise nature of this relationship is not entirely clear. Henry Allison takes a closer look at this relationship in chapter 3 of Kant’s Theory of Freedom (54-70).

Kant assumes that we do in fact accept morality on an intuitive basis. So he does not attempt to convince the moral skeptic. He only wants to ground our intuitions.

Kant’s conception of free will is thus similar to the modern conception of freedom in political philosophy. A free state is often conceived of as one that is free from some influences but not others. Most importantly, it is free from external causes, but at the same time free to legislate and subject itself to laws in accordance with its constitution.

One critic notes: “I readily confess that this double character of man, these two I’s in the single subject, are for me, in spite of all the explanations which Kant himself and his students have given it, particularly with the well known antinomy of freedom, the most obscure and incomprehensible in the entire critical philosophy” (Pistorius 1974).

Andy Yu (’11) is a Philosophy and Economics major at McGill University

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Cover image: “Be Free” by Celsojunior

By ERIK HINTON

Elizabeth Anscombe’s notorious claim in The First Person, that “I” is not a referential term, has suffered an unfair history of discredit. Although, I will ultimately conclude that Anscombe’s position is untenable when argued to apply for all uses of “I”, to deny the irreferentiality of “I” in many common uses is equally wrong-minded. The assumption which undermines both Anscombe’s argument and criticisms thereof is that “I” must always be either referential or not. While this claim seems to be intuitively true, our clinging to the fixity of “I” is purely a result of a fear that to sacrifice the fixity of “I” would be to sacrifice the fixity of self. I will show in what follows that we latently accept an “I” that is, at times, referential, and, at others, not. In doing so, we shall salvage Anscombe’s argument in part.

First, we must dispel a possible misunderstanding of Anscombe’s argument: that its putative failure arises from an unclear notion of “I-reference.” Perhaps, objectors to Anscombe’s argument merely afford “I-reference” a greater latitude of meaning than Anscombe, and this is to account for the fact that what Anscombe finds to be true runs absolutely counter to the common-sense conceptions of the matters. However, Anscombe defines, quite clearly, what she has in mind by saying that “I” is irreferential.

Reference simply is the indicating of some object by some word or expression. The general logical formulation of “reference”-a position Anscombe is not satisfied with-is that for a word or expression to refer to something, it must be exchangeable salva veritate with another name for that thing, when that thing is the subject of some assertion. To this definition of “reference” Anscombe wishes to add that referring terms are in some way intentioned to their objects, although the reference may be incorrect. When she says that the “I” does not refer, she is denying that “I” is a true subject of a sentence in that it does not signal something in the world. There is nothing which “I” “gets hold of” and, furthermore, the “I” is not intended to get a hold of any such object.

Anscombe begins her argument against “I” as a referring term by asking to what “I” would refer were it to indeed refer. She eliminates any other possibilities other than the Cartesian Ego by illustrating with her “man in a tank” example that even if we were completely unaware of our bodies we could still use “I.” If we were blinded and anesthetized in a tepid tank, we would presumably be unaware of our bodies but we would still have “I” thoughts such as “I will never let myself get in this situation again.” Therefore, our bodies cannot be the referent of “I”. The only option left for which to the “I” to refer is some immaterial soul or mind or ego.

At this point, Anscombe recognizes her argument as something of reductio ad absurdum in that if “I” does refer, Descartes must have been right, a position she sees as impossible. If “I” always refers to one’s Cartesian Ego, there is required some identification of the referent across “I” thoughts. This consistency of self-identification is an improper one that requires the positing of some continuous “self” which only leads to confusion. Take the amnesiac. Is his “self” then changed by his loss of memory because it presents itself to him as a discontinuity? The amnesiac uses “I” fine even though his earlier identity is not accessible to him. Many such difficulties arise when we try to posit identification as a continuous self required by the Cartesian Ego. Such an idea leads to a dispute that is, “…self-perpetuating, endless, irresolvable…” (Anscombe 58).

Furthermore, Anscombe notes that “I” might even refer to more than one subject, were it to refer at all. There is certainly a possibility that “I” could have collective reference, a position which Anscombe reinforces by reference to religious life.

From these two objections with “I” as reference, Anscombe concludes that “I” is not a referring term. As she has just demonstrated, “I” does not always “get hold” of the right object because either, in her Cartesian Ego objection, the “self” is not properly an object, or, in her several referent objection, the “I” may refer to sometimes one thing, sometimes more. However, the “I” can also never get hold of the wrong object because the thought or use of “I” demands that there be something which speaks or uses “I”. Even though cases are imaginable where what one says of themselves with “I”, this only shows that one can be wrong about what they self-attribute and not about the (alleged) reference of I. Therefore, the only resolution is to accept that “I” does not get hold of any object whatsoever; “I” is not referential.

This conclusion, as often argued, is patently incorrect. Anscombe’s argument is largely compromised by her insistence that when someone makes an I-statement they must possess and assert a full sense of self. Although her tank argument is convincing, in that I-statements can refer to the speaker in a way that does not require bodily reference, it does not entail that some self must be posited and grasped by the speaker. Gareth Evans writes:

“…it does not follow that in order to elucidate the intention of satisfying ‘x refers to x’, we need a grasp of the self-conscious Idea-type that we have of ourselves. Indeed, it seems plausible that the explanatory direction goes the other way: the fully self-conscious use of ‘I’ can be partly explained, precisely, as a use in which the subject knowingly and intentionally refers to himself (satisfies lx (x refers to x))” (Evans 258-9).

While Anscombe’s argument seems convincing for statements such as “I am John Smith”, statement such as “I am six feet tall” do little to uphold Anscombe. Truthfully, though, even the former sentence may avoid any apprehending of the self. Imagine the actor who is playing John Smith or someone who has assumed the anonymous identity of “John Smith.” In such cases, “I am Jon Smith” may be as simple as “My name is John Smith” and does not require Anscombe’s grasping hold on the “self.” Clearly, Anscombe is incorrect in resolving that if ‘I’ refers it must refer to a Cartesian Ego, her reductio conclusion. [Could be more clearly worded. Something like "Clearly, Anscombe is wrong to conclude that if 'I' refers it must refer to a Cartesian Ego." MH]

However, it is from this failure in Anscombe’s argument that many conclude the opposite of Anscombe, that ‘I’ is referential. To do so is to make the unfortunate mistake of throwing the baby out with the bath water and neglecting the value of Anscombe argument, namely her demonstration of how I-statements could be meaningful and understood without being referential. What is necessary to reconcile Anscombe with her objectors is to adopt a model of I-statements in which “I” may be referential in some cases and non-referential in others.

If the notion that “I” may be sometimes referential and sometimes not seems to run against linguistic sensibility, this is only because one has not separated words themselves from their uses. Strawson writes, “We are apt to fancy we are talking about sentences and expressions when we are talking about the uses of sentences and expressions…Meaning…is a function of the sentence or expression; mentioning and referring and truth and falsity, are functions of the use of the sentence or expression” (Strawson 7). With this model we will demonstrate that the problems we have with “I” result from conflating the word with its use. It should prove uncontroversial that a word (or in Strawson’s terminology, an expression) can be used to sometimes refers, sometimes not.

Consider, for reference, the word “it”. As Anscombe writes in a parenthetical, “…no one thinks that “it is raining” contains a referring expression, “it”…” (Anscombe 55). [Interestingly, Shakespeare did: "The rain it raineth every day"] Clearly, there is a use of “it” and, indeed, many uses of “it” in which the expression “it” does not refer. “It is cold today”, “It is five o’clock”, “It is ten miles to the store”. All such “impersonal expressions” as they are commonly called, feature an “it” that is not used to refer to anything. “It” is merely a grammatical construction to indicate a state of affairs in a certain way, much like “I” does in Anscombe’s proposed model of self-attribution.

However, in other cases, the far more common uses of “it”, the expression is certainly used referentially. “What color is the ball?” “It is blue.” In this exchange, “it” is used to clearly refer to the ball. We naturally countenance such a dual use of “it”, why, then, should “I” not enjoy a similar double use character?

Most of the cases presented when “I” is discussed feature some abstract existentiality such as “I am John Smith.” From these statements, all kinds of elaborate thought experiments are concocted in which the speaker is confused about his identity, unaware what his name is, joking about his name, etc. This led Anscombe to posit that were “I” to be referential it would have to indicate some “self” which is untenable when pushed to these extremes, these odd cases of language. This is an apt reaction and indeed these “John Smith” examples do seem to run counter to an “I” which refers to a Cartesian Ego. There seems to be no problem in denying that “I” is referential in these cases. Anscombe’s assertion that these sentences have no subject and are merely construction of self-attribution seems correct.

However, from this conclusion, we cannot infer that “I” must always be irreferential. The preceding cases were merely instances of “I” used without reference. Consider the sentence “I am six feet tall.” No “self” needs to be posited to assert the height of the subject. “I am six feet tall” seems to be no different from “The body of the speaker of this sentence is six feet tall” or (to use Anscombe A-users example) from “A is six feet tall”. In fact, were it possible for a body to speak this sentence without having a mind, we would not find it strange. If a machine reported “I am six feet tall,” we would likely happily countenance the usage. However, a machine saying “I am John” would be met with greater apprehension and would likely be translated in the listener’s receptivity into “My name is John” or “I have been called John.” Thus, Anscombe’s reductio falls apart.

This is simply because “I” is being used in a different way. We must not assume that referentiality is stored within a word. Rather it is a product of referential use. If we adopt such a model of “I” we will quickly see the problems with its grammar vanish. Like most problems that arise when we prod our language past the conventional usage which does not trouble us, the problem of “I” proves to be a specter born out of muddied conception of word and use.

Works Cited

Anscombe, G.E. M. “The First Person.” Mind and Language. Ed. Samuel Guttenplan. Oxford:

Clarion P, 1975.

Evans, Gareth. The Varieties of Reference. Ed. John McDowell. New York: Oxford UP, 1982.

Strawson, P. F. Logico-Linguistic Papers. Grand Rapids: Ashgate, Limited, 2004.

Erik Hinton (’10) is a Philosophy & Film Studies double major at University of Pittsburgh.

Cover art courtesy of winstoncamille.

The recent election of Barack Obama was certainly an historic moment for the United States, but for those who carry an affinity for the concept of freedom, its symbolism is rather disheartening. While the majority of libertarians (even at more traditionally mainstream outlets such as Reason Magazine) rightly preferred Obama to that neocon sycophant, John McCain, this election witnessed the triumph of a man who campaigned on the promise of a benevolent activist government. From the libertarian perspective, there are scant words in the English language more frightening to emanate from a politician’s mouth.

Yes, Obama’s political character of spirited statism poses some major problems for the cause of liberty. The state is, by definition, a coercive entity that operates through the use of force; its supposed benevolence is undermined by its history of cruelty and disruption of the natural social order. To place one’s trust in the state is to the ignore the context by which it maintains and asserts its full authority. Furthermore, the use of compulsion is in clear violation of one of the foundational principles of natural-rights libertarianism, the non-aggression axiom. Murray Rothbard, the standard-bearer of 20^th century market anarchism, went as far as to cast the it as the sine qua non of libertarian theory. To summarize the spirit of it briefly, the non-aggression principle dictates that initiatory force enacted against another is fundamentally wrong, and should be opposed by any libertarian worth his salt.

While any action by the U.S. government rests on the use of coercive authority drawn from the collection of taxes (or similar means), it stands to reason that there are different degrees of force, with the act of warfare being one of the most grotesque expressions of the state’s violent nature. Obama’s willingness to use this initiatory force abroad to “secure our freedoms” violates any interpretation of non-aggression principle. His foreign policy is that of the vulgar authoritarian, marked by interventionism and maintenance of American hegemony abroad. Aside from his calls for increasing military presence in Afghanistan, Obama has made veiled threats toward Pakistan and Russia, with explicit ones directed at Iran (“Afghanistan Urgent”; Holland, “Tough Talk”; Dreyfuss, “Rise and Mcfaul”; Newbart “Iran Threatens”). Exacerbating this potential for the immiseration of millions under America’s iron fist, youth support is more feverish for the incoming president than any time since the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The frightening implications that follow from this are numerous: chief among them is that many Americans will be far more receptive to proposals toward the doctrine of war under an Obama administration, acting as willing sheep for the American empire.

Of course, the use of coercive initiatory force is a far cry from the principles upon which liberalism stands, but this fact doesn’t deter Obama, who manages to get everything backwards in the following:

The Founders recognized that there were seeds of anarchy in the idea of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality, for if everyone is truly free, without the constraints of birth or rank or an inherited social order – if my notion of faith is no better or worse than yours, and my notions of truth and goodness and beauty are as true and good and beautiful as yours – then how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres? (86-87)

There certainly is anarchy in the notion of individual freedom, since liberty taken to its logical conclusion can only result in the rejection of all rulers, but the wording in the above passage clearly intends to display lawlessness as the inevitable result of “too much” freedom. Why is this so? Without the power structure that enables the consistent exploitation of others, alternative orders would necessarily and spontaneously develop, springing from the innate nature of mankind. Yet if this nature is savage and inclined toward brutality as described by Thomas Hobbes, why would it be any more logical to support a system that feeds into it by further empowering the strong through political means? Fortunately, I do not believe that the only thing that prevents you from killing your neighbor is the threat of retaliatory force, but the anarchists have always maintained society has the right to protect the greater community, if necessary.

Regardless, Obama’s negative view of humanity’s unfettered potential is further evidenced by his abject rejection of social equality, or the idea that people should be treated without deference to societal status. In fact, Obama’s writing (see above) and recent repudiation of his supposed left-wing sympathies indicate that his so-called progressivism is merely concealed communitarianism (1). His acceptance or indifference toward a concrete, hierarchical social order combined with the stated willingness to use force stands in dark contrast to Lockean-based liberalism or any of its derivatives.

His economic proposals are similarly opposed to the libertarian preference for decentralization. While it is true that his short-term plans were superior to those of McCain in that it certainly isn’t any less “laissez-faire” to remedy the accumulated ills of massive state intervention via progressive taxation than to maintain the status quo, Obama continues to fill his staff with Wall Street insiders in a desperate attempt to maintain corporate capitalism through increased state power at the expense of the American citizenry (Pryzbyla “Obama Embrace”). As such, his repeated appeals to the wisdom of the free market (undoubtedly to court the distinct American individualist character) are exposed as nothing more than a sham. Rather, his policy of maintaining Keynesian principles fails to recognize that the system was very nearly designed to collapse at some indeterminable point in the future (hint: the solution to over-accumulation is not more accumulation) due to its neglect to take into account long-term effects. After all, according to the famed economist John Maynard Keynes himself, “In the long-run we’re all dead.” Well, we’re fast approaching the long run, and the living seem to prove an exception to Keynes’ rule.

Whether its his apparent willingness to use force so as to violate the non-aggression principle, his acceptance of the justice of an inherited social inequality, or his clinging to eroding state-supported economic theories, there exists is a clear separation between the notion of liberty and the plans of Barack Obama. While we may celebrate this election as a representation of America overcoming the obstacle of lingering bigotry, there is nothing about an Obama administration to get libertarians optimistic for the scaled reduction of the hypertrophic state. That change will have to arise from external sources acting in opposition to the government’s desires.

Works Cited

Dreyfuss, Robert. “The Rise and McFaul of Obama’s Russia Policy.” The Nation. 2 Jul. 2008 23 Nov. 2008 <http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/334120>.

Holland, Steve. “Tough Talk on Pakistan from Obama,” Reuters. 1 Aug. 2008 23 Nov. 2008 <http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0132206420070801>.

Obama, Barack. The Audacity of Hope. Crown, 2006.

“Obama Calls Situation in Afghanistan Urgent.” CNN. 21 Jul. 2008 23 Nov. 2008 <http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/07/20/obama.afghanistan/>.

Newbart, Dave. “Obama: Iran Threatens All of Us.” Chicago Sun-Times. 3 Mar. 2007 23 Nov. 2008 <http://www.suntimes.com/news/politics/281249,CST-NWS-OBAMA03.article>.

Pryzbyla, Heidi. “Obama Embrace of Wall Street Insiders Points to Politic Reform.” Yahoo News. 19 Nov. 2008 23 Nov. 2008 <http://news.yahoo.com/s/bloomberg/20081119/ pl_bloomberg/awsz2kuxdtiu>.

“Who’s Getting your Vote?” Reason Online. 29 Oct. 2008. 19 Nov. 2008 <http://www.reason.com/news/show/129640.html>.

Footnotes

(1) While nearly every presidential candidate over the last century has supposedly “moved to the center” in order appeal to the undecided moderates, the majority of Obama’s shift has been in the general class of executive power. This is an area where authority figures are unlikely to retract their campaign themes.

Matthew Ignal (’11) is a History major at University of Connecticut.

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Note: Homepage thumbnail taken from ~iloveguns’s deviantART.