From: Jim Pryor To: X Subject: Re: Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2013 10:43:28 -0500 On Mon, Dec 9, 2013, at 11:50 AM, X wrote: > I was pretty confused about the Feldman material in class today and I had a > couple of questions. Hi X, sure, questions are good. > So Feldman accepted the Termination Thesis and Hedonist Theory of value > as well as relating value to how much it does for "you", "objectively". > > First thing i wanted to confirm was question 1. the Termination Thesis > and Hedonist Theory of Value assumes that you can only experience "value" of > pain/pleasure(bad/good) when you're biologically alive right? Yes, that's correct. > So that means you can't consider your image or legacy as an extension of your person > that remains alive vicariously after your death.So in the Julius Caesar > scenario where information of good deed is discovered later because no matter what > happens after or before his death, he wasn't there to experience it. I > think you answered this in previous classes but I just wanted to confirm. It's true that (1) he's not there to experience it. It's also true that (2) considering the situation where it happens and the situation where it doesn't, his life has exactly the same pleasures and pains in both cases. Both of those things, (1) and (2), are true in this reputation case. Feldman is arguing that even if we accept the (T) the termination thesis and (H) the hedonist theory of INTRINSIC value, we should still accept (D) the deprivation account of how TOTAL value depends on intrinsic value. He thinks this blocks the Epicurean, death-is-not-bad conclusions. I said my Julius Caesar case is "cheating" because (2) means that even on views (T)+(H)+(D), there is no difference to Caesar's life. So to the extent we do think Caesar's life may be better when he has posthumous recognition, we're not consistently holding to (T)+(H), as we promised. However, when we turn to the Epicurean, death-is-not-bad conclusions that Feldman is really attacking, (1) is still true (the dead person isn't there to experience being dead), but (2) IS NOT TRUE. Comparing the situation where he's dead then to the situation where he's not, he doesn't have the same total pains and pleasures in his life in both cases. The situation where he's not dead now may be a better total life. (It MAY be; nobody is saying it's GUARANTEED to be. We're only taking about the cases where as a matter of fact it IS a better total life when the subject lives longer.) So if we agree with Feldman that the right way to get from (H) the hedonist theory of INTRINSIC value, to a theory of TOTAL value, is to use his Deprivation account (D): then in that case, it can sometimes be the case that the person's death is bad for them, even though (1) is true: they're not there to experience their death. > Also, I was confused about the third question "When is it bad for you?" > Feldman's point of view was "always". > > I don't understand how you can judge the value of p without relation to a > certain point in time while being objective at the same time. He seems to > be assuming that every variable that comes with the time period in > relation to value is fixed. That sounds right. > I don't see how you can be objective about death or some event without > referring to what the evaluation of something's value was deemed "objective" at the time. I think what's going on here is you're hearing the word "objective" differently than it was being used in our dicussion. As I warned, this term has many, related but subtly and importantly different, meanings. Our aim wasn't to figure out anything about (a) how HUMANS SHOULD JUDGE whose life is more or less valuable. We were trying to build a theory of (b) what the facts are about value. In the same way we were in earlier classes trying to build a theory of (c) what the facts are about personal identity. That INTERACTS with questions about (a) how/when people are in a position to make reasonable judgments, or have knowledge, about the facts we're discussing. But theorizing about (b and c) isn't quite the same activity as theorizing about (a). Saying we are theorizing about the (b*) OBJECTIVE facts about a life's value (for the person whose life it is), as opposed to the subjective ones, is just our way of saying that the person may think so-and-so about her own life's value and be wrong. We're theorizing about (b) the TRUTH of how valuable certain lives are for her, not about (a) what she thinks about it. (a) may have some connection to (b), but we are not assuming they are exactly the same thing. (One plausible connection is: if you think your life is good, that's one objectively good thing about your life. But there may well be other objectively good and bad things about your life too, that all have to be considered.) But why are we INTERESTED in what the facts are about how valuable a person's life is? Our discussion got started because we were talking about whether it's REASONABLE for humans to fear death, and so on. These are issues about people's thoughts about attitudes about death. So it isn't quite fair for me to simply say, we're theorizing about (b) the FACTS about how valuable a life is, we're not looking at questions about (a*) what people THINK and what attitudes they have towards the alleged disvalue of death. I just admitted we got interested in (b) because ultimately we want that to feed into some questions about (a*). Still, the key word here is "ultimately." Arguably, it can make sense for us to postpone thinking about (a* and a) for a while, until we get perfectly clear about (b). That is Feldman's attitude. It can be reasonable to disagree with that. Your comments suggest that that's part of what's bothering you. You are thinking it's not possible to build a good or correct theory of (b) without paying attention to (a*). > I believe the term objective, is itself a subjective term. It depends > upon what society deems to be the logical or rational with the information or > societal values they had at the time. So in a way, objective is heavily > related to conventionalist principles. I think what you have in mind here might be expressed like this: "What counts as a reasonable way to make judgments about objective matters, that is, about what is really the case as opposed to what people think is the case? (Perhaps we could focus on objective matters of VALUE, or perhaps what I'm saying now is true about ALL objective matters.) I propose that what counts as the quote-reasonable-unquote way to do this is a matter of convention, like what counts as humorous or fashionable." That's what I understand you to be saying. That is a bold, extreme, radical and surprising view. It does have some proponents. It may be correct, or it may not be. I'm not going to try to critically decide that. I'm just acknowledging that this is one view a theorist can have. However, there is a useful distinction we might introduce. When we are asking what it takes to make reasonable judgments about some subject-matter, like value, we could be asking: (i) what does it take for the man-in-the-street to be reasonable in believing that this particular thing, say taking a job at Google, or having a household slave, is valuable or not? (ii) what does it take for a philosophical theorist to be reasonable in choosing/rejecting some very general theory of value? I understand you to at least be saying that some kind of conventionalist story is right about (i). (As I indicated in the parenthesis above, perhaps you intend not just a conventionalist story about (i), but also about the analogues of (i) for other subject-matters too, not just about value. Also about physics and math and mental claims?) The question I want to raise is whether, even if you're right about (i), you must also be right about (ii). It might be that it's a non-conventional matter what the GENERAL FACTS are about value, even if the particular questions of whether X is or isn't valuable has a conventionalist element. For example, Hedonism is a non-conventionalist proposal about the general facts about value. It says that pain and pleasure are the only intrinsic values/disvalues, period. No matter what a society says. I don't know whether Hedonism could be coherently combined with a conventionalist story about (i). (Perhaps you could do so if you said it was a conventional matter whether what you're feeling right now counts as pleasure.) Another example: Conventionalism is another non-conventional proposal about the general facts about value. They're saying that it depends on a society what Xs are valuable. Even if the society says it DOESN'T depend on them: that is, Conventionalism says it's true even about societies that reject Conventionalism. So we should at least pay attention to the difference between when we're considering (i) and when we're considering (ii). Maybe accepting Conventionalism about (i), as you're inclined to, is compatible with us philosophers still theorizing in a reasonable way about the general facts about value? > So, in my opinion, objectivity varies over time. What was considered good > at a certain period(ex.World War II) may be bad at another > period(current). > For example, if you are a German during World War II, discriminating > against and killing jews would be intrinsically good "for you" because it > was socially acceptable and led to higher standard of life(pleasure) as > the > social/economic/financial conditions improve for you at the expense of > others(jews) making it intrinsically good according to Hedonist Theory of > Value. If you discriminated and killed jews now, you'd be condemned, > imprisoned, or even executed. So that clearly would not be intrinsically > good. > > Going even further, if you extend the timeline, killing jews as a German > in > WWII would possibly be intrinsically good for you at the time, but after > the war, would be intrinsically bad for you due to Nuremberg trials, > etc... > So, whether something's intrinsically good or bad in relation to how much > pleasure or pain it can bring you also depends on the time period you are > calculating the sum of values. > > Since value is an everchanging term based on the societal principles, > morals, etc... of the times, I don't understand what Feldman is saying > when > something is "always" bad for you, objectively. Even death was considered > a > good thing in certain societies, religions, cults, etc... at different > points in history because it brought more meaning to your life. Like > Spartans wanting to die a glorious death in battle. He's not saying that death is objectively always bad. He's saying it's possible for death to sometimes be objectively bad. His opponents are saying that death always fails to be objectively bad. > Even other variables such as place or culture is huge in determining > objectivity. In case of martyrdom, even a suicide bomber can be > considered > a hero in extremist Muslim communities or Japan during WWII. To them, > this > could be a totally objective point of view because it makes those suicide > bombers heroes in the eyes of their respective societies. Whenever you find yourself saying (x) "To them, this could be objective point of view..." I recommend rephrasing it as (y) "They consider this to be reasonable..." and then taking it as a live question whether, just because (y) they consider it reasonable, (z) it really is reasonable. Perhaps (y) implies (z) or perhaps it doesn't. Or perhaps there are no facts about (z), but only about (y). Many of us think there are facts about what's reasonable, but some philosophers don't. Anyway, the reason I recommend rephrasing (x) as (y) is this: some other people will be using "objective" talk in a way that interacts differently with (y). The way Feldman was using it, and I was using it in class, was an example. In Feldman and my sense of "objective", call it objective-1, what's objectively-1 true is what's true, rather than what people think is true. In your sense of "objective", call it objective-2, what's objective-2 are not facts or truths, but rather beliefs or judgments. And a judgment is objective-2 when it's reasonable and unbiased and so on. If you say, "To these people, so-and-so is objective-1," that means "To these people, so-and-so is true," or in other words, "They think that so-and-so." Which is the same as saying so-and-so is at least subjectively-1 true, for those people; but it leaves unsettled how things stand, objectively-1. If you say, "To these people, so-and-so beliefs are objective-2," that means "These people think that those beliefs are reasonable." Then there's a hard philosophical question whether people's thoughts about what's reasonable can come apart from what really is reasonable. Depending on how we answer that question, it may be that it follows that the beliefs really are reasonable. Or it may not. > So considering all of this into account, the early death and late birth > argument seems to depend on the times as well. Like being born in 1920 in > the US can make your life difficult due to the coming Great Depression > than > if you were born in let's say 1980s. > At the same time, you can say being born male in 1920 in the US was good > for you because of the plethora of economic opportunities available > during > and after wartime, which can lead to pleasure(material: money and large > woman population in relation to male). So the value of life, death, > pleasure, pain has so much to do with the time period and the duration of > the time period you're taking into account. > > How does Feldman answer these questions? Feldman is not saying that every shifted life is equally valuable to every original life. Some time-shifts may make some lives better and other lives worse. He is assuming in his discussion that we can think about some average sort of life and average sort of time-shift, where the life would be about as valuable either way, whether it occurred a bit earlier or a bit later, so long as it had the same duration. Since he'd agree that not every time-shift is of this sort, he'd agree that time is relevant in some ways. But suppose you've fixated on a particular life and a particular time-shift. Say that we consider some ancient Roman, Marcus, and consider his actual life of 50 years. And we're comparing that to a life shifted 10 years, but still lasting 50 years long, and suppose we agree that in that particular case we think the net difference of pains and pleasures would be about the same. And we also compare a third case, where he instead lives 60 years, and we agree that in that particular case the net difference would be more positive, so that life seems to be better by Hedonist lights. Just in these cases. Now Feldman's opponent is asking: When are these lives equally good, or better, than each other? And Feldman's answer is: it's always true that they equally good or better. I think he might have done better to say: it's not a temporal question. Just as if I say, when is it true that 1+2=3? You might answer, that's always true. Or you might say: that's not a temporal question. So I think Feldman agrees with the point you're trying to make, and is objecting to something different. > And how can you look at the early death, late birth in a time period as > simply shifting the timeline when each time period comes with different > values or environmental factors Yes, as I said, he'd accept this. He's arguing that some shifts can be value-neutral. > resulting in different evaluations or > numerical sum of good or bad? This gets back to the issues about Conventionalism. You're asking good questions. I hope these comments are of some help in thinking about them, but by no means do I think we've gotten to the bottom of the issues.