Your Argument is Bad (and Dangerous) and You Should Feel Bad

The CEU Philosophy department recently held a conference for graduate students. That is, most of the talks were by graduate students from across Europe, there were responses given by CEU students, and the keynote speeches were given by the professors involved in organising it. I wasn't at much of the conference, but one talk I heard was so appalling that I feel the need to make a public record of this.

To be clear, this was not a talk by a graduate student. This was by a professor from elsewhere who came here in order to help run the conference. The reason for my strenuous objection is not that it is merely wrong (lots of philosophical ideas and arguments are wrong) or even that it was a bad argument (although even by the low standards of academic philosophy it was). This argument is dangerous.

The conclusion of the argument is that "holding different values from a person constitutes an epistemically sound reason to regard them as unreliable in fields in which they are expert". That is to say, if you disagree with them about politics then you are justified in ignoring whatever they have to say - even in fields you know very little about.

How does one justify such a remarkable position? We begin with the question of how far one ought to defer to experts. Clearly experts are not always reliable, but we would like to be able to assess whether or not to believe them without going through the long and difficult process of gaining all the same knowledge that they have. The speaker therefore distinguished the cases where there is general agreement and where there is widespread disagreement between experts. In cases where there is general agreement, we should go with expert consensus. In cases where there is disagreement, we need some way of establishing which to trust.

This is about as far as I am willing to agree with the speaker. There is as yet no draft of the paper - this was, the speaker remarked, the first time she had discussed these thoughts publicly - so you will have to trust from this point onwards that I am presenting her views faithfully and accurately.

Before moving on, I think she might have benefited from drawing a distinction between consensus of experts and consensus of papers. If all the experts in a field conclude that X, then I'm going to be strongly inclined to believe X. If all the papers on the subject conclude that X, then while I will probably still accept X I'm going to also be heavily suspicious that there is some bias in the publication procedure. The speaker's example of consensus was global warming, and she quoted some meta-analysis which looked at more than 900 papers and found that they all pointed towards the existence of AGW. Sure, AGW is definitely a thing, but is it really plausible than in 900 studies, none of them would by chance fail to detect it? There's something fishy going on either with that meta-analysis or with the way the speaker reported it.

That said, how did the argument continue? The speaker claimed that deciding when a risk is worth taking will require a kind of judgement. Her example involved some ecological risk relating to bees. Suppose the downside of this risk has a 5% chance of occurring. Is that a big enough risk that we ought to consider action?

Ultimately, she claimed, this is a value judgement. So if one ecologist tells us we should beware of this risk and another says we don't need to, in order to decide which one to trust we need to know which shares our values where risk-taking is concerned. So if an expert has significantly different values from you, this constitutes a reason to give less weight to their testimony relative to those experts with whom you have shared values.

There are, so far as I can see, four gaping holes in her argument. The first is a simple failure to apply Bayesian epistemology. When we say "there is a 5% chance that a large comet will strike earth in the next 10,000 years", this does not mean that the universe is indeterminate and has a 5% chance of resolving into a situation where a large comet strikes the earth: rather, we mean that we lack the information necessary to establish definitively whether or not earth will be hit by a comet, but based on the information which is available we attribute a 5% probability to it happening in the next 10,000 years. Furthermore, it is fine to act based upon this kind of partial information. Indeed, it is all that we can do.

So there is no need for some "critical point" at which a risk becomes worth considering. We can simply do a standard cost-benefit analysis in which the ethical weights given to events are multiplied by our best guesses at the probability of those events.

The second is that even if there were some "critical point" of this sort, or even a Sorites-paradox-type thing where really tiny risks should be ignored and we're never quite certain when they become important to think about, and it were subjectively determined in the way our speaker took it to be - this would be a far cry from what we ordinarily refer to as "values". It would be something much more contained and precise - call it "risk tolerance". I'm sure the speaker would recognise this if pointed to it - but the fact remains that she chose to use the word "values" in a very loose and careless way.

Third, we already have an approximation of this "critical point". It's called statistical significance.

Finally, she leaves aside the extent to which our values are determined by other things, which may be the very things whose truth we aim to question. There are experts on the philosophy of religion who believe in God, and there are those who do not. If we privilege the testimony of those with whom we share values, then when considering the existence of deities Christians will have a good reason to privilege the testimony of fellow Christians, Hindus to privilege the testimony of fellow Hindus, and atheists to privilege the testimony of fellow neckbeards. But this is blatantly bad epistemic practice!

The thesis of this talk, if accepted by mainstream society, would destroy the ability to have sensible political and scientific discourse. Being dangerous does not automatically that philosophy is bad or wrong - if democracy is the only way to avoid either feudal warlords or tyrannical dictators then Jason Brennan's work is dangerous, but that doesn't mean his work is low quality. But when you are pushing a potentially dangerous thesis, you have not only prudential reasons but also a moral requirement to make the best argument you can. This speaker flagrantly failed to do so.

My philosophical views

Having an hour to spare and nothing better to do, I've decided to write down my current answers to the questions on the PhilPapers survey of philosophers' views. First, a couple of notes and caveats:

• At first, I wasn't going to look at any (potentially new-to-me) arguments for the positions while doing this. However, upon reflection it seems strange to reject a chance to be motivated to learn.
• One of the options on the original survey was "insufficiently familiar with the area." This really ought to be my default answer - I am, after all, a mere undergraduate student - but where would be the fun in that. Instead, for any given issue you should assume that I am probably not as familiar with the issue as I ought to be.

A Priori knowledge: yes or no?

Umm... lean no, maybe? I lean towards the view that logic, maths etc are constructed rather than discovered, and given that they are supposed to be the paradigm cases of a priori knowledge, I guess that places me in the No category.

Abstract objects: Platonism or nominalism?

Is this asking whether I believe that there are no abstract objects, or which of these positions I lean towards on a greater number of subjects? I'm not willing to completely rule out abstract objects (fictional objects in particular strike me as things which might exist but be abstract) but I don't believe in the existence of numbers, of propositions, or of many of the other abstract objects which have been postulated to exist. Put me down as leaning towards nominalism.

Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?

I have actually put serious effort into trying to work out why anyone might think that aesthetic value is objective, and the closest I've seen to an argument is SEP's mention of the fact that "people tend to agree about which things are beautiful." Sigh. Accept subjective.

Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?

I don't believe in it, the only question is whether I go down as Lean No or Accept No. Quine was very convincing... go on, put me down as Accept No.

Epistemic justification: Internalism or Externalism?

I can never remember which is which. Assuming I correctly understand the issue, one of them is the view that knowledge-seeking has intrinsic value, the other is that we should seek knowledge because it is useful to us. Yudkowsky put this very nicely in the Sequences, saying that seeking knowledge out of curiosity has a certain purity to it, but the advantage of seeking knowledge because it is useful is that it creates an external criterion by which to measure our success. Accept whichever one it is which says we should seek knowledge because it is useful.

External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-sceptical realism?

Accept non-sceptical realism. You can't achieve absolute certainty that you aren't being deceived by a demon, but (a) there is no reason to believe you are either and (b) in any case, suppose you were. You don't know anything about what the demon wants, so there's no particular reason to change the way you act.

Free-will: compatabilism, libertarianism, or no free will?

I'm fairly well convinced that if determinism is true, then (a) people cannot act differently than they do but (b) they are still morally responsible for their actions. I believe this makes me a compatibilist, although it strikes me as a bit weird that this is counted as believing in free will rather than denying that free will is necessary for moral responsibility.

God: theism or atheism?

Damn, no option for deism. Lean deism if that's acceptable, otherwise I place higher probability mass in atheism than in any of the "revealed religions".

Knowledge: empiricism or rationalism?

Given that I deny a priori knowledge, it would be rather odd if I were to say rationalism. (At least, it appears that way; perhaps this is one of the many things on which I shall come to be corrected.) Accept empiricism.

Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?

No familiarity with the subject area.

Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean?

Accept Humean.

Logic: classical or non-classical?

This is an interesting one. As said above, I lean towards the view that logics are constructed rather than discovered, and that different logics may be appropriate for different purposes. The philosophical justification for intuitionistic logic is something I find very appealing, so let's say Lean non-classical.

Mental content: internalism or externalism?

No familiarity with the subject area.

Meta-ethics: moral realism or moral anti-realism?

I lean towards constructivism. I believe this makes me a moral realist, although that's a bit weird since I started working out my metaethics by explicitly assuming there were no genuine moral facts floating around.

Metaphilosophy: naturalism or non-naturalism?

Is the question "Which is it more fruitful for us to assume as a default?" or "Which do I beliee is actually true?" Accept naturalism on the first, lean non-naturalism on the second.

Mind: physicalism or non-physicalism?

Next to no familiarity with the subject area.

Moral judgement: cognitivism or non-cognitivism?

I looked at this at some point, but I can't remember much of what it was about.

Moral motivation: internalism or externalism?

Is this related to the amoralist's challenge? I've been thinking about that for ages, and still don't have a satisfactory answer despite reformulating my metaethics at least partially in an attempt to produce an answer to this question.

Newcomb's problem: one box or two boxes?

Accept one box. Although even if I were the type of person who would two-box, would I go around telling people that?

Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?

Virtue ethics, subject to deontological constraints, and with the choice of virtues justified on pluralist-consequentialist grounds. Yes, really.

Perceptual experience: disjunctivism, qualia theory, representationalism, or sense-datum theory?

When I studied this in first year, it seemed like a slam-dunk for sense-datum theory. However, given that (a) that was before I had read The Sequences, (b) I can't even remember what the first two of these were or if they were even mentioned, and (c) I have rejected almost every other view I picked up on that course (belief in the a priori, epistemological foundationalism, free-will libertarianism, near-universal scepticism... I must just about hold to a sensitivity condition regarding knowledge, so not quite everything), I'm inclined to take that past belief with rather a lot of salt.

Personal identity: biological view, psychological view, or further-fact view?

I don't hold to a biological view, but I' not greatly satisfied by the leading psychological accounts (though if I had to choose one, I would go with Schechtman's). I don't even know what the further-fact view is, and looking at the relevant SEP and Wikipedia articles suggests that either I'm misunderstanding the question, or that there is something odd about it. I was reading section 3 of Reasons and Persons, but my Kindle has gone missing.

Politics: communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism?

Accept libertarianism. Have you read my blog?

Proper names: Fregean, or Millian?

I prefer the Millian view, and I believe that Nathan Salmon's discussion of "guises" solves most of the problems for it; that said, I need to do more reading, so put me down as merely leaning Millian.

Science: scientific realism or scientific anti-realism?

Scientific realism. Because, you know. Duh.

Teletransporter (new material): survival or death?

Can I suggest the answer is somewhat subjective? Personally I would regard it as survival, but I'm very open towards difference of intuitions and I think that the disagreement is more to do with people having different values than to do with some (or all) people being wrong about an actual fact in the world.

Time: A-theory or B-theory?

B-theory is the one which holds all times to be equally real, and suggests that we move through time rather than time itself moving, right? Accept that one.

Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?) 

switch or don't switch?

I would lean towards switching. I'm not entirely comfortable with it, but David Friedman's variation on Fat Man (in which both the Fat Man and yourself are required to does a fair job of convincing me that we should probably be willing not only to turn the trolley, but to push the fat man in its way.

Truth: correspondence, deflationary, or epistemic?

I read The Simple Truth and it sounded sensible. Then again, I haven't done a great deal of engagement with the views other than correspondence - certainly I could not explain what they are - so I'll have to just say I have insufficient engagement with the subject area.

Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?

Again, especially insufficiently familiar, but leaning towards one of the not-metaphysically-possible positions.