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Text of the page (random words):
gela merkel angela merkel however this fact about classical logic conflicts with the widely accepted principle that a logical truth is true in virtue of its logical form that is formal if a string of characters is a logical truth then every string with the same grammatical or syntactic form is also true since angela merkel angela merkel has the same grammatical or syntactic form as zeus zeus and classical logic classifies the first but not the second as a logical truth classical logic violates this widely held principle formal edit update june 1 2021 this argument might be improved by replacing every instance of logical truth with theorem and logical form with syntactic form see the 7th comment in the comment thread to this post positive free logicians can avoid this problem they make every instance of s s including zeus zeus a logical truth again where s has all the grammatical features of a name and negative and neutral free logics make no instances of s s logical truths however as nolt points out in the free logic sep entry i n negative or neutral free logic it is not the case that any substitution instance of a valid formula is itself a valid formula see the reference there for explanation posted by greg frost arnold at 11 36 am 24 comments 5 23 2021 marquis s double standard i teach bioethics most years and like many people who teach bioethics i teach don marquis s article that argues that typical cases of voluntary abortion are very morally wrong there are many objections that one can and should make to the claims in this article this semester another one came to me i have not seen it before this objection may very well already be out there google scholar says marquis s article has been cited 618 times i wrote it down mostly in order to get it clear in my own head if something like this argument is already out there somewhere among those 618 citing articles please let me know everyone agrees that in the large majority of cases murder is seriously morally wrong marquis asks the question why what makes murder seriously morally wrong marquis s answer flo if something has a future like ours with many experiences activities projects and enjoyments 189 then it is prima facie seriously morally wrong to destroy that thing marquis combines flo with the dubious claim that a typical fetus has a future like ours to derive an anti abortionist conclusion one initial critical reaction to flo are you saying it s morally permissible to kill people who are near the end of their lives since they have very little future left marquis s dialectically correct and fair reaction no if you read principle flo carefully you ll see that an entity s having a future like ours is sufficient to make it morally wrong to destroy that entity it is not a necessary condition marquis is not claiming that if a being lacks a future like ours then it is morally permissible to kill it he points out that there can be other reasons besides having a future like ours why it is wrong to kill people who have very little future remaining my ultimate conclusion in this post is that marquis does not allow one of his opponents the exactly parallel correct and fair reaction for their competing position that is marquis s defense relies on a double standard he allows himself to have multiple non competing explanations for why different killings are morally wrong but he does not allow his opponents to have multiple non competing explanations for why different killings are morally permissible let s get started one way to resist marquis s argument is to offer an alternative answer to the question what makes murder wrong one alternative answer marquis considers is the desire account desire if a being has a desire to live then it is prima facie seriously morally wrong to destroy it clearly if one accepts this as correct explanation of what makes murder wrong then the main motivation to accept flo disappears and with it a central motivation for accepting marquis s anti abortion conclusion marquis responds as follows desire does not generate a valid argument that abortion is typically morally permissible even if the anti abortionist grants that the fetus lacks a desire to live to create a valid pro choice argument from the premise that the fetus desires to live we would need the converse direction of the conditional in desire namely converse desire if a being lacks the desire to live then it is prima facie morally permissible to destroy it and converse desire is incorrect as marquis points out it is not morally permissible to kill a person who is currently asleep or who is strongly suicidal even though neither of those two types of people currently has a desire to live so much for set up now i can state my point i happily grant that converse desire is incorrect but i deny that someone who accepts the desire account even if they accept it in order to undercut marquis s argument must accept converse desire obviously logically one can accept desire without accepting converse desire so marquis s reply must be that a person who criticizes his argument by appealing to desire must dialectically be committed to converse desire if they actually hope to undercut his argument spelling this out marquis s imagined critic thinks desire better explains what makes murder wrong than flo thus this critic accepts desire in place of flo thereby removing needed evidential abductive inference to the best explanation support for one the premises of marquis s argument but marquis thinks that in order to undermine his anti abortionist argument his opponent needs converse desire why to be honest i m not 100 sure but the combination of desire plus the claim that the fetus lacks a desire to live does not entail that it s morally permissible to destroy a fetus in order for fetuses lack desires to deliver a validly derived pro choice conclusion converse desire is needed as a premise therefore marquis concludes for proponents of the desire account to have an argument for their pro choice position they must accept converse desire but this is incorrect someone can believe that the desire account s explanation of why killing adults is wrong is at least as good as marquis s flo and use some other rationale to justify their pro choice position that does not use converse desire as a premise for example following j j thomson they could claim that abortion is morally permissible because i have a prima facie right to control the degree to which other being use my body marquis s criticism would only be legitimate if the only way a proponent of the desire account could argue for the permissibility of abortion is by appealing to whether or not beings had a desire to live but that seems pretty clearly false or at least not independently motivated now one might imagine marquis responding to this by saying something like my overall account is better because the flo unlike desire gives a unified treatment of abortion cases and murder or the desire account proponent you have described has to make an ad hoc maneuver having one explanation for what makes killing adults wrong and a totally different explanation for what makes destroying fetuses morally acceptable and here at last we get to the double standard i mentioned at the beginning marquis allows himself to have one explanation for what makes killing a typical child or middle aged adult wrong and a separate distinct explanation for what makes killing a very elderly person wrong if he didn t allow himself two distinct explanations then the first prima facie unfair criticism we saw of his view would work his explanation of what makes murder wrong would have to be rejected on the grounds that it does not entail that a nursing home massacre is a moral atrocity of course it doesn t entail that it isn t an atrocity either and eliminating the double standard would seriously undermine marquis s position for what happens if we apply a uniform standard to both the future like ours account of what makes killing wrong and the desire account of what makes killing wrong then we would either i allow the desire account proponent to have a second separate explanation for what makes killing a suicidal person wrong so that the desire account is saved from marquis s criticism or ii marquis s future like ours account is undermined by the fact that it does not entail that killing very elderly people is extremely morally wrong i think that if a pregnant person has decided to get an abortion then that fetus no longer has a future like ours for a fetus to have a future at all it needs the continued support of the pregnant person s body the existence of the fetus s future depends on this physiological support continuing remove that support for whatever reason e g the biological physiological conditions that create a spontaneous abortion and the fetus no longer has a future the pregnant person s decision to get an abortion is one way to end that physiological support so while i grant that a fetus in the uterus of a pregnant person who plans to take the pregnancy to term will usually have a future like ours a fetus in a pregnant person who plans to get an abortion does not have a future like ours any more than a fetus that has some sort of purely biological condition or genetic trait that would prevent it from coming to term and or living beyond a few years now one might argue that there is a difference between a genetic atypicality that prevents a fetus from coming to term e g chromosomal aneuploidy and a decision made by the pregnant person to terminate the pregnancy the former is not under anyone s voluntary control whereas the second one is under the pregnant person s control i think this difference does not make a moral difference at least in the present dialectical situation imagine i m an employee at a small to medium sized company where the entire upper management is extremely anti republican further imagine that the upper management find out that i am a very active member of the republican party i think most people would agree with the claim that i don t have much of a future at that company they ll fire me at their first opportunity and certainly won t ever promote me this indicates that resolute decisions can make it so that people don t have futures added later it looks like this basic line of reasoning in this footnote already appears in sinnott armstrong walter 1999 you can t lose what you ain t never had a reply to marquis on abortion philosophical studies posted by greg frost arnold at 11 04 am no comments 11 08 2020 causal attribution election results many people on my timeline are sharing this excellent interview with rep alexandria ocasio cortez https www nytimes com 2020 11 07 us politics aoc biden progressives html here s a representative quote from her if the party believes after 94 percent of detroit went to biden after black organizers just doubled and tripled turnout down in georgia after so many people organized philadelphia the signal from the democratic party is the john kasichs won us this election i mean i can t even describe how dangerous that is after reading that the philosopher part of my brain started wondering about how we should think through causal questions in the neighborhood did 94 of detroit going to biden win him the election or did winning over the john kasichs right leaning centrists of the swing state electorate do it let s suppose for the sake of argument that there were a non trivial number of john kasichs in swing states who either voted for biden or chose not to vote for trump in the 2020 election i am completely open to that latter being factually false the scenario i describe below is highly idealized and may be massively disanalgous to what actually happened in the 2020 electorate but the idealized scenario brings out something that might be going on in this causal debate about the 2020 results suppose 9 people are voting on a proposal further imagine that the proposal passes by a 5 4 vote in a strict sense all five of those yea votes were necessary to bring about the effect of the proposal passing and we can even imagine that each of the 5 votes yea for a different reason but we often speak of one or more of those 5 as the cause or at least the decisive cause of the proposal passing relatedly maybe one of those 5 voters is seen as especially responsible for the proposal s passage i recognize that responsibility and causation are not identical but they are related often this one is called the swing vote but all 5 of those votes was necessary to bring about the effect so how can we pick out one as privileged over the 4 others if we hold all votes but one of the 5 yea s constant and wiggle intervene on that one yea then the effect flips from passage to failure and that is equally true for all 5 of the yea votes now one reasonable reaction to this is to simply reject the idea that one of the 5 yea votes is in any way specical or privileged people may think one of them is special but they are wrong although this is a reasonable response i am curious whether there might be anything salvageable or reasonable in ever causally privileging one yea over the other yea s i am very much not an expert on the causal attribution literature so i strongly suspect that someone has already said this i couldn t find anyone saying it after a little googling but if any readers know of someone who has already published this point please let me know in the comments anyway here s my probably not new hypothesis out of a set of partial causes each of which was necessary to bring about an actual effect we privilege the cause that fails to hold in the closest possible world to our own this is why the swing voter is considered especially responsible for the proposal s passage out of all 5 yea votes the actual world would have to undergo the smallest change to flip a swing voter from yea to nay and this matches other causal attributions we make as well we say that the match lit because it was struck not because there is oxygen in the air even though both those conditions are necessary for sustained burning to occur on the hypothesis above this is because the world in which i don t strike the match is closer to our actual world than the world in which i am in a very low oxygen environment so on this view questions about whether biden s victory is caused by the john kasichs of the electorate or increasing turnout in georgia come down to the following question which is closer to the actual world a the kasichs of the electorate voting for trump at roughly the same rate as in 2016 or b black turnout in georgia remaining at roughly 2016 levels i genuinely have no idea as i think about it the causal question seems actually not to matter for the political question of what the party should do to win in the future unless distance between possible worlds can be measured by money and other resources the question in terms of promoting future success is not what caused the biden vi...