LU Philosophy weekly discussion is back!

Join the Philosophy Department tomorrow,. Monday (10/17) in the Strange Lounge of Main Hall (103), 4:30-5:30pm for refreshments and informal conversation.  This Monday, October 3, we will discuss debates surrounding fetal personhood laws.

For this Strange Philosophy Thing, we’ll be discussing the recent trend of fetal personhood laws. Specifically, we’ll look at possible legal and policy implications, and discuss the ethics of those policies. Here are a few examples of the kind of thing I want to discuss:

Georgia’s state department of revenue has extended the state’s tax exemptions for dependents to include gestating fetuses.  

A Texas woman claimed the fetus she was gestating counted as a second passenger, allowed her to drive in the carpool lane.

Women are charged under child abuse or endangerment statutes, for behaviors including drug use while pregnant. (This specific example, however, does not depend on a fetal personhood law.)

Evaluating the ethics of law and policy is complicated, and doesn’t easily connect to the ethics of the behavior being regulated. Breaking promises is typically wrong, but it would be a mistake to legally require everyone keeping their promises. We only do this for special cases, such as contracts. Driving on the left side of the road is not in itself wrong, but legally prohibiting it is completely appropriate.

Sometimes the ethical status of a law or policy depends on its relation to other things in the hierarchy of laws, such as compatibility with a State’s or the federal Constitution. But if this is all there is to it, then the problem may not be the otherwise sensible subordinate law, but the but the superior law that it conflicts with. Certain gun control regulations are (arguably) an example of this.

Sometimes a law or policy is intrinsically wrong, such as those that allow partisan gerrymandering. This is wrong by its very nature, since its nature is to disenfranchise equal citizens because of their political viewpoints.

Sometimes a law or policy is instrumentally or contingently wrong. This is when there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the policy, but the effects it has in the world are unacceptable. An example of this is voter ID laws. There is nothing wrong in principle with requiring identification to vote. Voter fraud is worth preventing because each case of voter fraud functionally removes one valid vote. But in practice, these laws have several negative effects. First, they prevent more eligible voters from voting than they prevent cases of voter fraud. So when we look at the rationale for such laws (the ethically acceptable rationale, whether or not it’s the actual motivating rationale), it is inappropriate for being self-defeating. It’s worse if more valid voters are removed through ID laws than if fewer are neutralized through fraud. Second, the discouraging or preventing effects are concentrated on already marginalized groups of people (racial and ethic minorities, lower economic classes).

Sometimes a policy that would be otherwise problematic is actually fine because of the outcomes it has. One example might be the pandemic relief funds that were sent out to individuals (oversimplified to serve the example). It’s problematic (regressive economic policy) to send the same amount of money to people at all points on the economic spectrum, because a large portion of that money is not needed and so is wasted. It would be better to target the relief to those who would benefit from it the most, since this would help them more. But this targeting would be costly, difficult, and slow, so the people we want to help avoid harm will be harmed while we try to figure it out. So, it is better overall to give the economic help faster but less efficiently targeted.

Or, it might not be a single law or policy that is problematic, but a cluster of them that are together problematic. Consider: while the right to abortion was constitutionally protected, Louisiana passed a law requiring abortion providers to have admitting (patient transfer) privileges at a hospital within 30 miles. While that’s a single law (deemed unconstitutional at the time for lack of medical benefit, violating the undue burden requirement on abortion restrictions), we could imagine passing a second law that prohibited hospitals from giving admitting privileges to abortion providers. Even if we didn’t find either law objectionable in isolation, we might find the conjunction objectionable. (This isn’t the cleanest example, but it was the easiest (realistic) one for me to think of at this point.)

I want to consider implications of fetal personhood laws in this light (or, the last four lights). Or, the implications of other laws and policies in light of fetal personhood laws.

What policies might have intrinsically problematic effects?
What are the points and purposes of these laws? How do the effects of these policies (or the ones we should expect them to have) relate to those rationales?
Are there any effects that are problematic, independent of how they relate to the policy’s rationale?

Take the suggestion that driving pregnant makes you eligible for carpool lanes. The point of these laws is to reduce traffic congestion and auto emissions by encouraging people going to and from the same or close places to travel in fewer vehicles. They do this by giving access to a special lane that is (supposed to be) less crowded, allowing you to get where you’re going faster. And so they specify “high occupancy” thresholds, and (from my quick research) these typically specify the number of seats filled rather than the number of persons in the vehicle.

This excludes fetal persons from counting towards HOV requirements for carpool lanes. Is there something intrinsically problematic for excluding this class of person? It’s hard to see what that would be. Is there something contingently problematic about excluding them? By looking at the point of carpool lanes, it seems like there would instead be something problematic about including them. Pregnant people cannot travel separately from the fetuses they gestate, and so having them travel together does not reduce the numbers of cars on the road (congestion, emissions). This adds a car to the carpool lane (slowing it down), without removing an extra car from the other lanes. So counting them towards HOV eligibility would work against the purpose of the law.

We also have to think about similar cases. What about family or friends who would be driving together even without carpool incentives? It makes sense to allow these passengers because if we did not, sorting out the good cases from the bad cases would be unduly invasive for the purposes of the law. Similarly, if we did count fetuses as passengers for HOV purposes, having HOV levels about two might be problematic because sorting out which people have single pregnancies and which have twins (or more!) would be unduly invasive. (I think this further counts against considering fetuses as separate passengers, rather than counting in favor of capping HOV requirements at two.)

So, I want to talk about policies like the dependent tax exemption and gestational child abuse examples above, but also “safe surrender” (“infant relinquishment”) allowances, and adoption and surrogate pregnancy. The article on the Georgia law also raises questions about child support policies. We might also discuss in vitro fertilization and unused zygotes.

If there are any policies that you think might have interesting (problematic or just unexpected) implications given a fetal personhood law, we can talk about that as well.

“Is a Fetus a Person? The Next Big Abortion Fight Centers on Fetal Rights,” Kelsey Butler and Patricia Hurtado, Bloomberg (linked at Washington Post)

“Georgia says ‘unborn child’ counts as dependent on taxes after 6 weeks,” María Luisa Paúl, Washington Post

“Pregnant woman given HOV ticket argues fetus is passenger, post-Roe,” Timothy Bella, Washington Post

“Pregnant women were jailed over drug use to protect fetuses, county says,” Marisa Iati, Washington Post

‘Safe Surrender’ or ‘Infant Abandonment’ Legislation,” ACLU

The philosophy department will be taking a break from the Strange Thing next week in honor of LU’s Indigenous People’s Day! Please join the celebration at Warch Campus Center 324 (Somerset Room) between 5-7 p.m. on Monday, October 10th. The event will include song, dance, food, and local Native American guest speakers and leaders. It’s open to the entire Fox Valley community, so bring your friends!

Homer’s Illiad dramatically opens with Achilles’ anger and its destructive wake:  Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. Many a brave soul did it send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures…

In light of its destructive outcomes, Stoic philosophers, such as Seneca, urge us to mitigate and avoid anger.  Seneca emphasizes the harm to oneself and others, comparing an angry person to a “falling rock which breaks itself to pieces upon the very thing which it crushes” (On Anger, Part 1).  Martha Nussbaum emphasizes the relative superiority of other emotions (generosity and love) as responses to injustice and wrongdoing, warning of the moral pitfalls that anger might lead us to.  In further considering the moral implications of anger, philosopher Agnes Callard observes that “there are two problems with anger: it is morally corrupting, and it is completely correct” (here).  Myisha Cherry offers some suggestions about how to categorize and understand different kinds of anger and rage, and recommends instances where rage is not only appropriate, but also instructive and important.  Please listen to this episode of Philosophy Bites where Cherry highlights some of the different internal and external implications of anger and rage (if you would prefer an alternative to listening, here is a New Yorker piece by Cherry). 

As you listen, here are some questions to consider:

• What kinds of mental states are emotions, and what are they for?

Some philosophers treat emotions as ways to understand and relate to the world and our evidence about it, and further as a means to instigate actions that further our interests.  In this framework emotions can be understood as appropriate and fitting (and not just predictable and inevitable given certain conditions).  How does that cohere with your own experiences of emotions and the emotions of others?

• Do you think of anger and rage as something to be managed, mitigated, and avoided?  What kinds of things do you think it is appropriate to be angry about? Or angry at?  When has anger served you poorly?  When has it served you well?  How does anger help or harm humans more generally?

• Third, Myisha Cherry makes the case for importance of Lordean rage, a response to oppression that spurs productive and effective action and is rooted in community solidarity.   In outlining this type of rage, she focuses on four important aspects of emotion: the target, action tendency, aims and perspectives informing the emotion. How can using this framework help us understand rage (specifically), or other emotions more generally?

Please join us Monday, September 26, at 4:30 p.m. in the Strange Lounge of Main Hall for the second installment of the Strange Philosophy Thing of the 22-23 academic year.

The author of this article considers a couple of reasons one might think that linguistics and/or universal grammar isn’t a science. One concerns falsifiability. Karl Popper famously argued that a necessary condition for a hypothesis to be scientific is that it is falsifiable, i.e., it must generate predictions that can be refuted by observation. The challenge for linguistics concerning falsifiability is particularly acute for Noam Chomsky’s universal grammar, according to which human beings have a common innate linguistic capacity which guarantees that all human languages will share certain traits, most notably, recursion, i.e., the ability to form arbitrarily long expressions by repeatedly applying one or more rules of grammar.

Chomsky’s view faces a challenge due to the existence of languages like Pirahã, which do not appear to feature recursion. The author notes that, in response to being questioned about the falsifiability of universal grammar, Chomsky himself has claimed that universal grammar shouldn’t be understood as a scientific hypothesis but instead as a field of study, like physics, with the claim of innate universality being a guiding assumption, akin perhaps to the presumption in physics that physical objects exist. So, if asked about the implications a language like Pirahã has for universal grammar, rather than trying to argue that it does in fact contain recursion, or to explain it away as irrelevant data, Chomsky would presumably reject the assumption implicit in the question that universal grammar is a scientific hypothesis.

The author of the article points out another reason one might think that linguistics isn’t a science: the peculiarity of the data from which linguists draw many of their conclusions. In particular, the sorts of sentences linguists use to draw certain conclusions are heavily contrived. In many cases, neither the grammatically incorrect nor grammatically correct sentences relied upon are sentences one would hear in normal discourse. The author makes connections between the contrivance of these sentences and idealization in other scientific domains we might be familiar with, e.g., in the formulation of various laws, like v = 9.8m/s² × d, in which we abstract away from friction produced by air resistance.

The author’s discussion of these issues raises a few clusters of questions:

1. Must a science be falsifiable? Is universal grammar falsifiable, given the approach notable adherents use to deal with Pirahã? Is linguistics in general falsifiable?

2. Should universal grammar be understood as a field of study rather than a scientific hypothesis? Should it be taken as a methodological assumption or does it need to be confirmed empirically? If the former, then what should one make of the existence of Pirahã?

3. What is the role of idealization in science? Does the respect in which idealization figures into linguistic data, as the author describes, the same (or at least relevantly similar to the) way in which it figures in elsewhere, e.g., in the abstraction away from friction in, for example, v = 9.8m/s² × d?

See you on Monday for discussion of these questions and refreshments!

Please join us Monday, September 19, at 4:30 p.m. in the newly renovated Strange Lounge of Main Hall for the return of the Strange Philosophy Thing. 

Language models are computational systems designed to generate text by, in effect, predicting the next word in a sentence. Think of the text-completion function on your cell phone. Large language models (LLMs) are language models of staggering complexity and capacity. Consider, for example, OpenAI’s GPT-3, which Tamkin and Ganguli note, “has 175 billion parameters and was trained on 570 gigabytes of text”. This computational might allows GPT-3 an as yet unknown number of capabilities—unknown, because they are uncovered when users type requests for it to do things. Among its known capabilities are summarizing lengthy blocks of text, designing an advertisement based on a description of the product, writing code to accomplish a desired program effect, participating in a text chat, and writing a term paper or a horror story. Early users report that GPT-3’s results are passably human. And LLM’s are only destined to improve. Indeed, artificial intelligence researchers expect LLMs to serve a central role in attempts to create artificial general intelligence. Our discussion on Monday (9/19) will focus on two aspects of this research:

• Are LLMs genuinely intelligent?

The issues we will discuss this week are alluded to in John Symon’s recent article in the Return. To frame our discussion about the general intelligence of LLMs, we might consider the following thought experiment, as discussed by Symons:

Alan Turing had originally conceived of a text-based imitation game as a way of thinking about our criteria for assigning intelligence to candidate machines. If something can pass what we now call the Turing Test; if it can consistently and sustainably convince us that we are texting with an intelligent being, then we have no good reason to deny that it counts as intelligent. It shouldn’t matter that it doesn’t have a body like ours or that it wasn’t born of a human mother.  If it passes, it is entitled to the kind of value and moral consideration that we would assign to any other intelligent being.

LLMs either already do (or, it is plausible to suppose, they will soon) pass the Turing Test. Are we comfortable with the conclusions Symons derives from this fact—that LLMs “count as intelligent” and are “entitled to…moral consideration”? Perhaps we should rather reappraise the Turing Test itself, as a recent computer science paper suggests we should do. If LLMs can pass the test by merely reflecting the intelligence of the tester, then perhaps the true test is to have LLMs converse with one another and see if we judge them as intelligent from outside of the conversation. 

• Are LLMs making us less intelligent?

A second—and the more important—theme in Symons article is the role that LLMs might play in making us less intelligent. Symons’ claims here are built on his own observations about LLMs. As he writes:

I tried giving some of these systems standard topics that one might assign in an introductory ethics course and the results were similar to the kind of work that I would expect from first-year college students. Written in grammatical English, with (mostly) appropriate word-choice and some convincing development of arguments. Generally, the system accurately represented the philosophical positions under consideration. What it said about Kant’s categorical imperative or Mill’s utilitarianism, for example, was accurate. And a discussion of weaknesses in Rawlsian liberalism generated by GPT-3 was stunningly good. Running a small sample of the outputs through plagiarism detection software produced no red flags for me.

Symons notes—rightly it seems—that as the technology progresses students will be tempted to use LLMs to turn in assignments without any effort. Instructors, including college professors, will be unable to detect that LLMs, rather than students, generated fraudulent assignments. But, while this might seem a convenient way to acquire a degree, Symons argues that it would undermine the worth of the education that the degree is meant to convey. For—or at least as Symons maintains—learning to write is learning to think, and deep thought is possible only when scaffolded by organized prose. Students completing writing assignments, then, are learning to think, and when they rely on LLMs (or other means) to avoid writting assignments, they are cheating themselves of future competent thought. Focusing on the discipline of philosophy in particular, Symons writes:

…most contemporary philosophers aim to help their students to learn the craft of producing thoughtful and rationally persuasive essays. In some sense, the ultimate goal of the creators of LLMs is to imitate someone who has mastered this craft. Like most of my colleagues who teach in the humanities, philosophers are generally convinced that writing and thinking are connected. In some sense, the creators of GPT-3 share that view. However, the first difference is that most teachers would not regard the student in their classroom as a very large weighted network whose nodes are pieces of text. Instead, the student is regarded as using the text as a vehicle for articulating and testing their ideas. Students are not being trained to produce passable text as an output. Instead, the process of writing is intended to be an aid to thinking. We teach students to write because unaided thinking is limited and writing is a way of educating a student in the inner conversation that is the heart of thoughtful reflection. 

These passages might constitute a jumping off point for our second topic of discussion. Ancillary questions here might include :1) What is the purpose of writing assignments in college? 2) To what extent is complex thought possible without language? 3) How can we design education in such a way as to produce the best possible thinkers and writers?

I look forward to seeing you all on Monday at 4:30 for a fun, informal discussion, open to everyone! Philosophy professors and snacks provided.

Please join us for the final installment of the Strange Thing this Wednesday March 9th at 4:30 in the Strange Lounge of Main Hall.

In Season 4 Episode 12 “Patty” the gang finally arrives in the Good Place.  However, there is a problem.  Everyone’s eternal happiness makes them complacent, bored, happiness zombies.  Eleanor has a suggestion though, give people an exit from the Good Place, and let them decide to leave.  I picked this episode because I wanted to think more about what the good place would be like if carefully designed.   Do you think that eternal happiness is a problem for humans?  What do you think of Eleanor’s fix?  With the new set-up, deceased humans can test into the Good Place—why is it important to be morally good before you get into the Good Place?  What’s the value of eternal reward if not to motivate good behavior?

We can also discuss the two-episode finale—if you decide to watch it. Please spread the word to and invite fans of either The Good Place or philosophy! 

Join us Wednesday, February 16th at 4:30pm in the Strange Lounge in Main hall for the next installment of the Strange Thing!

In this episode, Michael and Janet visit Doug Forcett, played by Michael McKean. Doug is described in the series as the first and only human being to discover the point system for getting into the Good Place. They are visiting him to determine how our main protagonists should act in order to get into the Good Place. I’d like to explore a couple of general directions of inquiry, though I would be interested to hear about any other issues that stuck out to you as well.

One question I had is: Does Doug know that the system to get into the Good Place is what it is? He is described as having been the only human begin to have ‘discovered’ it. But he formed the belief while high in the 70s, seemingly out of thin air. And they don’t mention that he ever got corroboration. But without such corroboration, it is not clear to me where his motivation comes from to abide by the system as exactly as he does. Indeed, knowing that one has ingested a mind-altering drug is a classic sort of circumstance often used to provide us with reason to doubt the beliefs we form during that time, however true they may seem to us at that time. So not only might Doug not know about the system, he may actually have reason to doubt that the system is the way he thinks it is.

Putting issues concerning Doug’s epistemic position aside, Doug is described as a happiness (or utility) pump, since, in an effort to maximize his chances of getting into the Good Place, he does everything he can to make others happy to accrue as many points as possible. This involves him living in such a way that he leaves as small a carbon footprint as possible, and participates in the morally repugnant supply chains of modern society as little as possible. It also involves him doing whatever the local teen sociopath (or anyone) tells him to do. The idea of a happiness pump has been raised as a criticism of utilitarianism, the view that what is right is what maximizes overall happiness. I thought it would be worth discussing why a happiness pump poses a problem for utilitarianism, and whether it is an effective criticism of the view. Of course I’d also like to discuss “story-internal” questions like, “Is Doug’s way of life enough to get him into the Good Place, especially given that his motivations might be corrupted due to his potential knowledge of the system for getting in?”.

Join us Wednesday, February 9 at 4:30 p.m. in the Strange Lounge of Main Hall for the return of the Strange Thing. This week, we have a pair of episodes about relationships to loved ones–especially, parental relationships–and an extended philosophical discussion between Eleanor and Michael about determinism and freedom of the will. I think we should start with E7 and the discussion of freedom of the will. But, I’ll say a word about E5-6 after that, as they imply interesting issue about humanity’s natural goodness.

Episode Seven spins off of Episode Six, in which Eleanor reconnects with her mother. The emotional reunion shakes Eleanor. She ends Episode Six blaming her mom for the fact that she was never really able to experience human love. But, then, Michael says that, “In one of the reboots, you and Chidi fell in love…deeply, and you told him that you loved him, and he told you that he loved you back.” Episode Seven opens with Michael and Eleanor having wandered into a public library, because they need somewhere quiet for the Earthly Eleanor to experience memories of her afterlife (and, as Michael says, “there’s no place more deserted than a public library in Arizona.”) Eleanor views her afterlife memories. There are some side-effects.

Eleanor’s reaction to these afterlife memories is to believe all of her actions are deteremined. This leads to a long debate between Eleanor and Michael, which focuses on determinism and freedom of the will, but also touches on divine foreknowledge. Eleanor helpfully finds a philosophy book on the shelves and reads the definition of determinism, as “the theory that we have no control over our own actions. Everything we do happens because of some external force beyond our control.” We might–perhaps equivalently (perhaps not)–define determinism instead as the thesis that the entirety of the facts that are true of the universe at T1 fully determine the entirety of facts that are true of the universe at T2. Given T1, T2 could not have been otherwise. Eleanor has become enamored of this view and Michael–a divine, eternal being–attempts to argue her out of it. A few philosophical thesis other than determinism come up during their debate.

Incompatibalism: Incompatibalism is the position that determinism and human freedom are incompatible. It holds that if determinism is true, we are not free. Eleanor, at least, seems to be assuming incompatibilism. But are determinism and free will really incompatible?

Divine Foreknowledge: An important component of Michael’s argument that Eleanor has free will rests on the idea that she surprised him, a divine being, who (I think we are to presume) has special foreknowledge. For example, Eleanor surprised Michael by admitting she belonged in the bad place, back in Season 1. But is divine foreknowledge incompatible with freedom of the will? Our could God create us, know everything we are going to do in our entire life before creating us, and yet us still be free? Does divine foreknowledge entail determinism or are the two independent?

Freedom of the Will: Most generally, Michael and Eleanor’s discussion might prompt us to ask what is it to act freely? If we are incompatibilists, then we hold that we are not free if we are determined. Some incompatibilists–called hard determinists–hold that determinism is true, and so we lack free will. Other incompatibilists–called libertarians–hold that determinism is false; we have free will. But some philosophers, such as David Hume, are soft-determinists who hold the compatibilist position that determinism is true and yet we are free. Which of these positions seems most plausible to you? What arguments might you deploy to defend it?

In addition to this discussion of determinism, I was struck by the three vignettes involving family that comprise the bulk of episodes 5 and 6. Parents weigh heavily in these episodes: Jason reconnects with Donkey Doug, who has been in prison many times, once for selling “counterfeit truck nuts”. Tahani and Kamilah bond over their shared psychological trauma, wrought by their parents. And Eleanor confronts Donna Shellstrop, the mother she believed dead, but who had simply faked her own death and started a new life in Nevada. Both Tahani and Eleanor express, at some point, the sentiment that at least some of their own moral short-comings in life are due to their parents. This resonates with the foregoing considerations about determinism and free will. But, it also raises questions about the natural goodness of human beings. To what extent is our morality natural to us and to what extent is it the result of up-bringing? *Could* children, who were never instructed about morality nor were the subjects of moral reprimand by parents (or society in general) grow into moral adults? Or, is moral training in childhood required to get moral adults? What sorts of arguments might lead us to one conclusion or the other? Here’s a possibility: If morality is dependent on cultural influence, then we might expect to see different moral codes in different cultures. Do we? Here’s another: If our morality is, at least in part, natural to us, then we might expect to see strong repulsive reactions to immoral acts. Do we?

Finally, there are some really great digs on Arizona in E7. Every establishment is used to shoot pornography after closing. The sex education section of the public library contains only the Bible. The poetry section is all Jeff Foxworthy.

Hey, folks, once again we’re cancelling the Strange Thing this week for a faculty meeting that was just announced. We’ll resume with our viewing of The Good Place on Wednesday, 2/9. See you then!

Please join us this Wednesday, January 19^th  from 4:30-5:30pm, for our discussion of The Good Place (available to watch on Netflix). We are meeting virtually, please email chloe.armstrong@lawrence.edu for the Zoom link and to be added to our email list.

Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, and Jason learn that they are headed to the Bad Place after their time on Earth.  As they come to grips with this information, Chidi embraces nihilism, lecturing to his ethics students that nothing matters, not even how horrible it is to put marshmallow Peeps in your chili while doing just that.  Here’s a summary:

As you watch this episode, consider:   

• Would it change your approach to earthly life if you learned you were headed to the Bad Place and there’s nothing you could do about it?  If so, how?  What if you learned that there is no afterlife at all?

• Have you ever wanted to know more about nihilism?  Chidi says nihilism is the view that there is no point to anything. To learn more about Nietzsche on nihilism, listen to the first 12 minutes of this podcast: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p00546yh

• Friedrich Nietzche thought that nihilism is a natural response to grappling with questions about objective moral truths and their relation to the afterlife.  However, he also claimed that nihilism is a sickness that must be overcome.
  • Is Chidi’s nihilism a sickness?  Does he overcome it?  

There are lots of other great moments in and leading up to this episode, including Australia’s most American restaurant, illustrations of many of the moral values we’ve encountered so far: virtues and vices, harms and benefits, and acts of duty, and finally, the shape of time in the Bad Place: “Jeremy Bearimy.”

Join us as we discuss how the pursuit of moral truths and good-standing in the afterlife could lead to nihilism, and whether any of that matters.