1)  Our metaphysical beliefs are produced by our cognitive faculties.

2) Our faculties were formed by the ‘forces’ of contemporary evolutionary theory.

3) Contemporary evolutionary theory predicts that a trait is selected for behavioral reasons first and foremost, and may only happen to track truths.

4) If our metaphysical beliefs are behaviorally important, then we hold useful ones, not [necessarily] true ones.

5) If our metaphysical beliefs are not behaviorally important, then it is unlikely they just happen to track metaphysical truths.

6) Either way (5 or 6), we have a strong defeater for moral realism.

This argument depends on a few key assumptions. If you don’t think evolutionary forces played an interesting role in shaping how we think about specific things, then this might be a reach. If you think that the same faculties that navigates us through the world successfully (i.e. reproductive fitness) generates our metaphysical beliefs, then you might have a way out. But I take it that a serious commitment to contemporary evolutionary theory makes those two tenuous empirically.

Ok, so how does this cash out? Well, I take it that there are a few positions in logical space that one can have. On first glance, debates about composition seem shallow–I just don’t care about, nor do I think there is an interesting answer to, the question of whether an appletini is a martini (or whatever the hell that example is).  But certainly there are some objective facts here. There are glasses and chemicals and alcoholics and all sorts of real things in the vicinity. So let’s just dispense with anti-realism and just let good arguments be good arguments and ignore trivial linguistic traps.

Two anti-realist responses. First, I take it that an anti-realist could say that there really are no facts of the matter in the vicinity that cash out into metaphysically interesting claims; sure, there are glasses per linguistic community, but not really. I’ll just assume that hyper-anti-realism is boring and wrong. The next thing an anti-realist could say is that of course there is a world and there is structure and facts of the matter about spacetime smears and abstract entities, but we could never know the answers.  This is the sort of anti-realism that I think is hinted at by taking evolutionary psychology seriously. Certainly, it becomes difficult to see why should be able to answer these questions properly from a fitness-enhancing standpoint.

It’s late so I’ll continue this jumble of disjointed mind-dump later.

1)  Our psychology is explained by the mechanisms described by contemporary evolutionary theory.

2) If our psychology is explained by the mechanisms described by contemporary evolutionary theory, then our behavior in moral situations is explained by natural selection (or genetic drift, spandrels, etc).

3) If our behavior in moral situations is explained by natural selection, then we don’t need independent moral facts to explain our behavior.

4) We don’t need independent moral facts to explain our behavior.

This is weak because it’s imprecise and empirically questionable.  But, I think there is a good argument under here as long as you 1) are a strong-ish adaptationist and 2) you think something like evolutionary psychology is true.  Let’s look at the premises:

(1):  This is obviously a given. If you don’t care much for evolutionary theory, then the rest of the argument is uninteresting. But supposing you do, then you either think it explains some limited set of facts (not including our psychology) or all of the facts about us. Of course, evolutionary theory doesn’t explain why I am me and not someone else or other trivial logical truisms. But if evolutionary theory can explain anything, heritable behavior “dispositions” or traits are perfect candidates due to the immense visibility it would have for natural selection.

(2): I don’t really know what I mean by moral situations. I suppose it would be like our moral beliefs/judgments plus the other stuff going on in our heads.  When I see some particularly heinous crime reported on television, I might find myself in an emotional state which culminates in some moral judgment: “Whoever did this deserves what’s coming to him.”  Whatever relevant psychological states and factors are in such a moral moment, that’s specifically the sort of thing that would be visible to natural selection.  I throw in a bit about genetic drift and spandrels for completeness’s sake, not because I think they are real contenders. Drift might work well in small populations, but our psychology and the underlying physical substructure that forms it are extremely complex and expensive resource-wise, and this is a telltale sign of the finagling of natural selection. One things to note here:  Sharon Street, author of the paper inspiring this post, refers to “proto” traits as the heritable traits selected by evolutionary forces.  Whether they are tendencies, beliefs (in proto form), judgments or dispositions is a little unclear.  But one thing that is certain, she wisely wants to tread the line between blank-slate-ism and nativism, especially about content.  We don’t want to think that, say, beliefs are inheritable. It must be something smaller.  I would just say that they are judgment-forming faculties and leave it at that (or rather, punt to developmental psychologists).

(3): I don’t know if this is true or not. It seems true.  If our psychology governs behavior and evolution explains behavior, then we don’t need moral facts to explain what happens in the real world. Think of it this way:

You:  Why do humans protect their own children so viciously?

Me:  [Evolutionary Explanation]

You:  But also because it’s morally right?

Me:  I dunno, maybe.

Of course, moral realism is logically compatible with this view, but it seems unlikely.  Of course, this argument hinges on us actually caring that our psychology hooks up (or would hook up) with independent moral facts.  You might be a weird error theorist and just claim that moral facts exist in Platonic heaven but it is of no consequence to us because our faculties were formed by the pressures of reproductive fitness, not rightness or wrongness.

Here is Sharon Street’s paper on evolution and moral realism. Sometimes I say I’m going to read/blog about some paper/book and never do, but I have the proper motivation this time.  We will have a guest responding to the Street paper in a month-ish, so I’d like to have some constructive things at the ready. I’ve always thought there was a tight connection between evolution and expressivism, so maybe I can formulate that blobby intuition into something more articulate.

The Online Consciousness Conference has put up its papers

The Phenomenal Qualities Podcast

Cheers

I. Between Revenue and Protection………………………………………………………………………… 1
1.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………… 1
1.3 Borrowing from Economics………………………………………………………………………… 31
1.4 Research Hypotheses …………………………………………………………………………………. 36
II. The Tariff as a Constitutional Problem……………………………………………………………… 41
2.1 Tariffs and Federalism……………………………………………………………………………….. 41
2.2 The Problem of the Faction…………………………………………………………………………. 44
2.3 Between “Imposts” and “Duties”…………………………………………………………………. 50
2.4 The Tariff before 1787……………………………………………………………………………….. 52
2.5 The Tariff at the Constitutional Convention………………………………………………….. 62
2.6 The Tariff during Ratification……………………………………………………………………… 83
III. The Constitution in Practice……………………………………………………………………………. 90
3.1 The Origins of American Protectionism……………………………………………………….. 90
3.2 A Constitutional Counterargument ………………………………………………………………. 98
3.3 The Tariff in Constitutional Crisis……………………………………………………………… 116
3.4 The Tariff and the Laffer Relationship ……………………………………………………….. 144
IV. High Revenue, High Tariff Protectionism………………………………………………………. 153
4.1 The Tariff in the Gilded Age …………………………………………………………………….. 153
4.2 Tariffs, Income Taxes, and Left-Progressivism?………………………………………….. 168
4.3 Testing the Capitations Clause…………………………………………………………………… 179
4.4 A Faulty Design ………………………………………………………………………………………. 193
v
V. The “Progressive” Income Tax………………………………………………………………………. 203
5.1 The Great Income Tax Debate of 1909……………………………………………………….. 203
5.2 A Club to Beat Down the Tariff ………………………………………………………………… 239
5.3 What Hath We Wrought?………………………………………………………………………….. 265
5.4 One Last Hurrah………………………………………………………………………………………. 279
VI. EVIDENCE ……………………………………………………………………………………………….. 287
6.1 Protection and Revenue: Descriptive Tariff Measures ………………………………….. 287
6.2 Breakeven Revenue and “Scientific” Tariff Adjustment……………………………….. 303
6.3 Tariffs, Revenue, and the Laffer Relationship……………………………………………… 319
6.4 The Income Tax: A Rational Mistake?……………………………………………………….. 333
VII. CONCLUSIONS & POLICY IMPLICATIONS ……………………………………………. 352
7.1 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 352
VIII. Appendixes………………………………………………………………………………………………. 365
Appendix I – Selected Historical Ad Valorem Equivalent Rates …………………………. 365
Appendix II – Revenue Effects of the “Horizontal Tariff” Reduction ………………….. 375

Voltaire, Traité sur la Tolérance, Tome I, Ch. 23.

Please read Chris Hallquist’s essay. I don’t always agree with him, but he’s always fun. Plus, he’s a fellow cheesehead.

“There are an odd number of planets” (oddness used for posterity)

to imply this:

“There are numbers”

Fregeans might say that the quantifier represented in English by “there are” is actually about planets, so there is no implication for the existence of numbers. But I think we can convey truths about numbers in different ways that probably commits us to their existence. Say, for example:

“2 is prime”

Seems true enough, and I can follow a rudimentary argument from reference that bullies the constituents of any proposition with truth value into existence. But perhaps this doesn’t settle the question that metaphysicians are interested in, namely, what makes up the world.  Following Jonathan Schaffer, we’ll call views that treat all existence questions as metaphysical questions Quinean or “flat”. I don’t know that there is a good definition or creed that these flat philosophers would universally hold to, but I think it’s safe to say that they are interested in the existential quantifier. This is what does the heavy lifting in your ontology, and if you polish up your quantifier then you will have a good look under the skirt of the universe.

But perhaps you don’t like this view. Something fishy is going on when we move from facts about planets and slide to making numbers a real constituent of the world. So maybe things can exist without being a part of the world. Or, to put it differently, maybe some things can exist without being among the set of fundamentals like particles or propositions or strings or simples or whatever you think is fundamental (really real, not just kind of real).

I’m mostly interested in indispensability and how those kinds of arguments work; what are the Quinean gears pushing our intuitions around, elevating numbers and sets into the Platonic heaven? Following in the off the cuff attitude of this post thus far, I won’t produce any interesting insight into what numbers are. I don’t even think I could provide an historically accurate presentation of Quine’s own position. But it does make a difference if you ditch a flat ontology for a richer hierarchical vision like Schaffer or Heidegger. So maybe if you find arguments like I presented at the top not just wrong but misguided, then you might have a hierarchical view of existence. I’m counting fictionalism as a brand of this view, but that might be inaccurate. Suppose a Platonist asks a fictionalist how mathematical statements can be true without the existence of the referents. I suppose he could answer that he is just piggybacking on the Platonist and qualifying it with “They are true in language P”.  I take it that a hierarchicalist would say that of course numbers exist; they just aren’t constituents of reality. They exist in the linguistic traditions of Platonists. So the above argument:

“2 is a prime number”

Therefore

“2 exists”

Goes through, but it does not enrich our ontology. But back to indispensability. Suppose you think things quantified over in our best scientific theories exist. Well what then? Ditching a flat view of existence, there is still more work to be done. But what would convince these hierarchicalists that numbers are actually constituents of reality? I’m not so sure. Right now I’d have to say that there is no one-size-fits-all method that just ushers in a clean and neat ontology. For numbers, perhaps something like Neil Tennant’s arguments go through, and this would show that numbers are real abstracta existing across all possible worlds. For propositions, there are interesting ersatzean arguments for the necessity of propositions that, if they went through, would probably convince me of their ontological gusto. And so on and so forth.

Anyway, this is probably a topic I’ll be revisiting as I dive headfirst into metametaphysics literature.