Inbox: - [[=John Vervaeke]] --- A better account of the self, in turn, might help us make sense of free will. Callard asks: > If the self is just a bundle of desires, and then later you have a different bundle, what connects those two things? #todo explain http://bostonreview.net/philosophy-religion/agnes-callard-against-persuasion It’s one thing to say, “I don’t know anything.” That thought comes cheap. One can wonder, “Who really and truly knows anything?” in a way that is dismissive, uninquisitive, detached. It can be a way of saying, “Knowledge is unattainable, so why even try?” Socratic humility is more expensive and more committal than that. He sought to map the terrain of his ignorance, to plot its mountains and its rivers, to learn to navigate it. That, I think, is why he speaks of knowledge of his own ignorance. He’s not just someone who acknowledges or admits to his ignorance, but someone who has learned to dwell within it. It’s one thing to be missing your wallet—you will know it once you’ve found it. **But suppose you’re missing not only your wallet, but also the knowledge that you ever had a wallet, and the understanding of what a wallet is.** One of Socrates’s interlocutors, Meno, doubts whether it’s possible to come to know anything if you know so little to begin with. **If someone doesn’t know where she’s going, it doesn’t seem as though she can even take a first step in the right direction.** Can you map in total darkness? Socrates’s answer was no. Or at least: you can’t do it alone. The right response to noticing one’s own ignorance is to try to escape it by acquiring someone else’s knowledge. But the only way to do that is to explain to them why you aren’t yet able to accept this or that claim of theirs as knowledge—and that is what mapping one’s ignorance amounts to. Socrates stages an exhibition of this method for Meno by demonstrating how much geometrical progress he can make with a young slave boy by doing nothing but asking questions that expose the boy’s false assumptions. It is when he refutes others’ claims to knowledge that Socrates’s own ignorance takes shape, for him, as something he can know. What appears as a sea of darkness when approached introspectively turns out to be navigable when brought into contact with the knowledge claims of another. ... Most people steer conversations into areas where they have expertise; they struggle to admit error; they have a background confidence that they have a firm grip on the basics. They are happy to think of other people—people who have different political or religious views, or got a different kind of education, or live in a different part of the world—as ignorant and clueless. They are eager to claim the status of knowledge for everything they themselves think. But Socrates did not take this difference as grounds to despise or dismiss this group, aka Most People (hoi polloi). He saw, instead, that he and Most People were a match made in heaven. Most People put forward claims, and Socrates refutes them. Most People see the need to possess truths. Socrates saw the danger of acquiring falsehoods. Most People feel full of rich insights and brilliant thoughts. Socrates saw himself as bereft of all of that. Without the help of Most People, Socrates wouldn’t have anything to think about. Socrates’s neediness did not escape his own notice. In the Theaetetus, he describes himself as a kind of midwife—barren of knowledge himself, but engaged in “delivering” the wisdom-babies of Most People. Socrates saw the pursuit of knowledge as a collaborative project involving two very different roles. There’s you or I or some other representative of Most People, who comes forward and makes a bold claim. Then there’s Socrates, or one of his contemporary descendants, who questions and interrogates and distinguishes and calls for clarification. This is something we’re often still doing—as philosophers, as scientists, as interviewers, as friends, on Twitter and Facebook and in many casual personal conversations. We’re constantly probing one another, asking, “How can you say that, given X, Y, Z?” We’re still trying to understand one another by way of objection, clarification, and the simple fact of inability to take what someone has said as knowledge. It comes so naturally to us to organize ourselves into the knower/objector pairing that we don’t even notice we are living in the world that Socrates made. The scope of his influence is remarkable. But equally remarkable is the means by which it was achieved: he did so much by knowing, writing, and accomplishing—nothing at all. If, like Socrates, you view knowledge as an essentially collaborative project, you don’t go into a conversation expecting to persuade any more than you expect to be persuaded. By contrast, if you do assume you know, you embrace the role of persuader in advance, and stand ready to argue people into agreement. If argument fails, you might tolerate a state of disagreement—but if the matter is serious enough, you’ll resort to enforcing your view through incentives or punishments. Socrates’s method eschewed the pressure to persuade. At the same time, he did not tolerate tolerance. His politics of humility involved genuinely opening up the question under dispute, in such a way that neither party would be permitted to close it, to settle on an answer, unless the other answered the same. By contrast, our politics—of persuasion, tolerance, incentives, and punishment—is deeply uninquisitive. ## Ezra Klein interview https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/14/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-agnes-callard.html?showTranscript=1 What is status? It’s how much value other people accord you. Status games: 1. Basic game: find common ground, do we at least care about some of the same things. 2. Importance game: jockeying for status, try to get your inteterlocuter to grant you the maximum importance level you can. So you try to give them hard to fake facts and signals that demonstrate your importance. 3. Levelling game: finding common ground in feeling unimportant. So you find a way to talk to someone in such a way that you can both share an experience of powerlessness or struggle. And in a way, it’s a way of deflecting from the importance game. ## Econtalk on Anger Aspiration is a social process. Morality too. ## Callard on Stubborn Attachments https://www.cato-unbound.org/2019/01/14/agnes-callard/strange-argument-commonplace Arguments tend to begin from plausible premises and end in novel or counter-intuitive conclusions. They leverage what is palatable to force feed you what you find harder to swallow. Tyler Cowen’s _Stubborn Attachments_ may be the first work of philosophy to travel the opposite road: it moves from the radically counter-intuitive to the status quo. It follows that the effects of, e.g., a particular trade policy on the lives and fates of everyone in China and the United States is a trivial consideration compared to its effects on _all the human beings who are to come._ Cowen wants us to dispense with the blinders of spatio-temporal contingency: just as we should overcome the prejudice that leads us to give preference to those physically proximate, we should stop assuming that human lives decline in value as they recede into the future. But those blinders form a big part of how action, and preference, and decision are possible for us. Benefiting future humans poses a much worse version of the kind of problem we face when we want to buy a gift for a teenager we last encountered as a toddler: in order to help someone, you need to understand how they live. In a thousand years, are we all computer programs? It is counterintuitive in the extreme to think of myself as acting with reference to a future so distant I cannot even envision it. What happens here and now is what I can control—it is, as Aristotle said, “up to me”—the downstream thousand-year effects are so far outside my ken that they do not seem “mine.” Nonetheless, according to Cowen, those effects really matter. It is as though I am operating a puppet who is operating a puppet who is…leading to some (hopefully) large forms of happiness, somewhere down the line. The most important good I do is one I will never see or know, and perhaps comes in a form where I cannot even envision it as good. So much for premises. Now let us look at Cowen’s conclusions. What does he think we ought to do, given that the most important practical considerations are profoundly inaccessible to us? The answer is to follow common sense morality, be loyal to your friends and family, stay healthy, guard against nuclear war, work to preserve currently existing social and political institutions, respect human rights, protect the environment, be a productive member of society, use leisure time to enjoy cultural pursuits or intellectual endeavors or sports or travel—he is a pluralist about value. So, roughly speaking: as you were! https://www.cato-unbound.org/2019/01/23/agnes-callard/radicalism-replaceability-bounded-obligations My claim was that the programme offered in _Stubborn Attachments_ is inherently conservative, due to the combination of (a) zero discounting and (b) our ignorance about the distant future. I see the message of the book as: we cannot know how to do the good we ought to do, so the best we can do is keep things (roughly) as they are. Tyler wants to say that one human life does not replace another, but our public policy should act (more) as though it did. When we start talking like this, we know it’s time to summon up the ghost of philosophy. I do not find myself stymied by the demand to make intelligent, well-grounded decisions about how much educational care to provide, even given my refusal to make invidious comparisons about the comparative value of my students’ minds. ## Callard giving [[=Tyler Cowen]] a hard time about commensurability https://www.cato-unbound.org/2019/01/30/agnes-callard/human-lives-have-intrinsic-worth One way out of this tangle would be for Tyler and Eli to come out as Government House Utilitarians.(See [this post](https://protect-us.mimecast.com/s/AEbgCkRXQrFx59rsQxycJ?domain=cato-unbound.org)) Perhaps when Tyler refers, throughout the book, to “common sense morality,” he classifies that among the useful beliefs (religion, faith etc.) that might give rise to more utility than direct attempts to maximize utility. If he is not prepared to use such beliefs to guide social policy, then what he thinks is that they are useful _fictions;_ they are not just advertising or PR but _false_ advertising or _propaganda_ by which utilitarians cover their own tracks. One problem with esotericism of this kind, or any other, is that its proponents are unwilling to come clean about what they believe. (That is, of course, the whole point.) Which is a shame, because if they would come clean, I could refute them. Easily, since I have the truth on my side: human lives do have intrinsic, incomparable worth.