It will consist primarily of summarization, although if I find something exceptionally problematic and decide to grapple with it immediately… then I will post a link to my further analysis.

— 1st week of April :: robustness, universality, recognizing consciousness —

This image was attached to a spacecraft and was intended to depict its ideas in a “universal language” – can you decipher it in its entirety? What would a universal language look like?

In his book, Aesthetics: Key Concepts in Philosophy, Daniel Herwitz introduces a real conundrum: what is beauty? Indeed, it’s not a problem of his own invention… it’s a real problem that has been bugging philosophers for centuries.

“Wait”, you say, “I know what beauty is, at least for me – beauty is in the eye of the beholder – show me beauty and I will see it!” – said with a confidence only parental sources can instill. Indeed, you’re not explicitly wrong in what you’ve said – beauty sometimes feels subjective. It’s in you, its yours, but… are you so sure? For what reason then do you argue with a friend over what piece of art is better (more beautiful)? Surely we normally don’t argue about the subjective. We argue about what we think we can prove – we argue over the facts, we try to convince each other of the truth… and how might you do that with, say, a piece of art?

The fact that we can argue at all over what’s more or less beautiful seems to point to some objective conception of beauty. We try to persuade our friend by pointing to the artwork itself… “look here, THIS art is beautiful”. As though the beauty of which we speak is something we can point to, something anyone ought to be able to see (or hear, taste, etc). A part of us might want to say, beauty it “out there” – not just in us.

That’s really the gist of the aesthetic problem – is beauty subjective or objective? Why do we so strongly insist Shakespeare is better than John Grisham?, then recite our deeply held belief about beauty as a subjective experience? Herwitz spends the first part of his work fleshing out this issue, then he turns to Hume and Kant for possible clarification… we’ll go there next week.

[I'm going to rant about this, because I don't believe it is much of an issue at all.]

— 2nd week of April :: Humian arguments about aesthetics —

It will consist primarily of summarization, although if I find something exceptionally problematic and decide to grapple with it immediately… then I will post a link to my further analysis.

— 1st week of April :: different types of moral luck, empirical vs theoretical components —

Thomas Nagel, in the third chapter of his book Mortal Questions, raises a real issue – what he calls a paradox – with moral accountability in a world of uncertainty. The problem is simple enough to appreciate after only brief reflection – almost any action you take is subject to outside interference. What’s even more problematic is that your motivations behind any action at any given time may be a result of luck as well. The closer we look, the more luck we can find. Nagel explicitly identifies three types of luck:

• constitutive – your biological luck. ie. sex, temperament, dispositions, etc.
• circumstantial – the luck involved with where you happen to be (or have ever been) and what is going on while you are/were there
• resultant – the luck involved in your completion (or incompletion) of an action, and how that action is interpreted

For specific scenarios refer to the book, or simply roll your own. The interesting issue at hand is that on some level everything you do seems to hinge on some sort of luck. Your responsibility for action seems to melt away, and your agency vanish. You are left simply as a sum of happenstances. This is problematic for most people. But this result is derived through mostly unproblematic premises:

1. [intuitive] People cannot be morally assessed for actions outside of their control.
2. [result of our analysis] Everything depends on factors beyond our control.
3. [empirical] We can be morally assessed for our actions.
4. [but, 1. and 2.] We can not be morally assessed for anything.

This is the problem we are left to deal with. It’ll be interesting to see where other authors might have us go from here.

— 2nd week of April :: next —