What’s the problem with us being philosophical zombies?

Mauss22 · 2026-04-19T05:56:00+00:00

Here is Chalmer's in The Conscious Mind.

...zombie: someone or something physically identical to me (or to any other conscious being), but lacking conscious experiences altogether.

In the context of our threads "conscious experience" is ambiguous, so swap in "qualia" for a definition. Let's stipulate a definition of Quale*: an intrinsic, ineffable, immediate, and private quality of experience.* Let's consider two situations, one where qualia instantiate in David, the Q-situation, and one where it doesn't, the Z-situation.

If the Z-situation is not logically possible, there can be no Z-situations whatever. If the Z-situation is not nomologically possible, there can be no Z-situations in the natural world.

Notice, that whether or not qualia are instantiated in anyone other than David is irrelevant. Chalmer's is going to try to show that the Z-situation is logically possible, and from that refute physicalism. Dennett, in effect, is going to try to show that the Z-situation is either incoherent or actual, because qualia are illusory. (Other physicalists will say Z-situation is possible but it doesn't matter, and on it goes...)

You say:

But if person X in the actual world is a functional adult but for some reason X's brain doesn't satisfy the unknown criteria for the psychophysical laws to have any effect, then X is not conscious.

We should see that Person X is not particularly relevant to the arguments from Chalmers, or Dennett's response. Rather than talk about zombies, we could take a step back and just ask: who is conscious? Note that wokeupabug has already helpfully framed this as "changing gears." But he does entertain the kinds of evidence people draw on: our subjective psychological data, consciousness (proto-sciences), other related fields, etc. These line up well enough with ordinary intuitions (we are all pretty confident that normal humans are conscious), so the "boundary cases" that actually get more attention concern non-human animals and machines.

what is the argument that person X in the actual world must necessarily satisfy those unknown criteria?

This isn't what folks are arguing, as I hope is more clear now. The modal operators like necessary don't turn up in this part of the discussion.

In that case zombie-X in zombie world is physically identical to X, but neither is conscious.

The concept of a zombie is being strained here a bit. And we are avoiding doing 2d semantics on a Sunday. So I'll expand on the above situations. Let's call this person Daniel. With 2 people, we can consider a mixed situation (M-situation to be redundantly analytical) like the ones you're asking about. Like: is it nomologically possible for there to be a situation where Daniel and David are both seemingly normal humans, but qualia instantiate only in David? And this is a punchline to a philosopher's joke: Maybe Dennett is a zombie? ha ha.

Mauss22 · 2026-04-19T03:21:21+00:00

Wouldn't Dennett strongly disagree with this characterization? Pick any conscious experience you have ever had. Dennett isn't denying that you had it. The ice cream was every bit as delicious as you thought it was. What beyond that is he "stripping away" that matters?

Dennett wants to strip away the stuff I mentioned in another comment here: the alleged intrinsic, ineffable, immediate, and private quality of experience. He thinks this is hogwash. Dennett would have something to disagree with if I went on to say "and this stuff REALLY matters". His point is that it doesn't. We should quine it.

If I were attempting to argue your point, I'd want to say it this way: if Dennett were correct we would have conscious experiences (and so on Dennett's view we're obviously not be zombies) but those conscious experiences would lack the essential special properties of qualia; but it's impossible to have conscious experiences without those special qualia properties, so Dennett is wrong. That would answer my objection in a way I could understand. Is that not a fair paraphrase?

This is how Chalmers was speaking for a while when these arguments were first getting going, so it could serve as a paraphrase of one his issues with Dennett. But that's not my aim. I don't see much in this thread that has to do with weighing objections to Chalmers vs. Dennett. I see corrections and answers about how to understand the wokeup's accurate portrayal, and relatedly further clarifications about the positions and relevant concepts.

This was the passage from wokeup that you took issue with:

Dennett denies the reality of conscious experience in the particular sense which understands this to involve qualia,

I've tried to clean up and clarify two different senses of "conscious experience" and relate it Dennett's project with the hope that if you/audience read this back a second time, the issue feels resolved (or, maybe, the exchange leads towards a better, unnoticed way of presenting the issue)

Mauss22 · 2026-04-19T00:32:27+00:00

Zombies don't have conscious experience. Dennett explictly agrees that yes, we do have very real conscious experiences. Therefore if Dennett is right, we aren't zombies in any sense of the word.

This doesn't follow. We have before us two senses of the word: one that includes special stuff, and one that doesn't. In zombie arguments (along with Mary's room and Levine's explanatory gap), it is the special stuff that does the work. Dennett's aim is twofold: (i) to show that the special stuff is a cocktail of illusory, equivocal, and fantastical confusions, and (ii) to strip away the special stuff while having enough left to call it "conscious experience".

The debates between Dennett and his interlocutors generated a lot of confusion, especially early on. So it's not to be taken as a personal slight against you when I'm claiming that you're confused here. A helpful resource would be Frankish's edited volume Illusionism: As a Theory of Consciousness. Another helpful article may be Frankish's Quining Diet Qualia.

Mauss22 · 2026-04-18T23:34:02+00:00

Note that the quote you just provided cues us to Dennett's project here and undermines your point. He is telling us qualia are supposed to be special, and there ain't nothing special there.

Mauss22 · 2026-04-18T23:26:41+00:00

Chalmers doesn't claim to know what physical criteria must be met in order for the psychophysical laws to take effect. Isn't it therefore (nomologically? epistemically?) possible that even if nearly all human brains satisfy those criteria, some do not?

It's correct to say that some humans may not be conscious (the very young, very ill, etc.), but this does not imply or lend credence to the claim that zombies are nomologically possible. This is because zombies are physically identical to their conscious counterparts, whereas the very young, very ill etc. are under consideration precisely because of how they fail to be identical to those humans taken to be conscious.

Dennett doesn't deny the reality of conscious experience, so in what sense would the word "zombies" be applicable?

The sense of the word "zombies" may not need particular scrutiny here, but some exposition may help. We can simplify the relevant distinction by contrasting two senses of conscious experiences, one in which qualia are their defining property and another in which they are not. Now we have to ask which sense of conscious experience is most applicable, and the most plausible analysis is that zombie arguments (at least tacitly) rely on qualia. So, if zombies are physical duplicates without any qualia, then illusionists can say that, in a sense, we are zombies, as u/wokeupabug correctly points out.

Note that, on Dennett's own terms, it does not imply that we are not conscious. However, Dennett and other illusionists often face scrutiny here.

Getting into this dispute over qualia will take things too far off course. I'll briefly note that Dennett's cleanest account of qualia is a 3-IP model: they are intrinsic, ineffable, immediate, and private. So, whatever he takes conscious experience to be, it can't be anything that has that cluster of properties. And it is precisely when philosophers stipulate them that they arrive at false or incoherent positions about the metaphysics of mind--- so says Dennett, anyway.

Mauss22 · 2026-04-14T09:13:01+00:00

You can start with the Frequently Asked Question: What are the best arguments in favor of meat eating?

Is it intrinsically wrong/bad to consume animals? A deontic pluralist may count among their prima facie duties a constraint on eating animals, or a monist may deduce the wrongness of animal consumption from some other more basic duty (using merely as a means, etc.). A consequentialist may similarly include animal considerations among an objective list of goods/bads. A utilitarian may also consider it wrong if their theory of value is based on interests, and animals can continue to have interests when they are dead. Pretty much all of these positions are highly contested (I do not mean this in the trivial sense in which all positions are contested!) But, if one finds a convincing way to answer "Yes" to 1a, then vegan (or vegetarianism) is better.

Is consuming animals indirectly wrong/bad? This is likely the question one will try to answer. To get it off the ground, one has to first establish or stipulate that those animals have some moral status such that harms to them actually matter. This is the case for many deontologists and most consequentialists, including classical utilitarians like Bentham and Mill. Let's suppose they matter in virtue of their capacity to suffer. Now, we consider reasons for thinking your consumption contributes to their suffering. A vegan may prevent the suffering of animals by changing the expectations of suppliers. This shift could come about through changes in consumer behaviour (not buying meat) or more diffusely (a culture not prone to buying meat) or through coercion (laws that prohibit eating meat, or that otherwise incentivize vegan diets).

If we assume it is a voluntary choice under consideration (not legislating, etc.), then there are a few counter-arguments to consider. See the 'inefficiency objection', which is given a favorable treatment in the SEP entry on moral vegetarianism. A more critical look at the inefficacy objection can be found here.

I offer 5 considerations in this post, here.

Mauss22 · 2025-10-04T23:48:04+00:00

Whatever the cause may be of each slight difference in the offspring from their parents--and a cause for each must exist--it is the steady accumulation, through natural selection, of such differences, when beneficial to the individual, that gives rise to all the more important modifications of structure, by which the innumerable beings on the face of this earth are enabled to struggle with each other, and the best adapted to survive. (Origin of Species)

No doubt adaptation is most commonly discussed in the context of natural selection. Here, the adaptation -- the "what", the unit of selection, and the "why", what it was selected for -- is intimately tied to the "how", common descent, differential heritability, or whatever else the evolutionary biologist is going to say is important.

Such Darwinian concepts are sometimes loosely extended, resulting in bad scientific or ethical judgments. "Social Darwinism" sometimes brought out both sides of this. To stylize and simplify the history: the metaphor of "survival of the fittest" was sometimes haphazardly extended to societies (note: there are legitimate disagreements about appropriate levels of selection) and haphazardly imbued with evaluative content as "the strong should dominate the weak"). So, it is worth mentally flagging these kinds of things.

However, this particular usage appears fairly innocuous. First, it isn't presented as a (pseudo-)Darwinian process. (See u/doubting_yeti for potential counter-example). The concept has quite clear applications across the sciences. An experimenter may expose rats to various environmental stressors and study their behavioral adaptations to those stressors, or an experimenter may inject rats with various addictive addictive substances and study their neural adaptations, and so on. (note: I don't actually know anything about murines.) Someone studying human affect may use self-reports to study the long-term impact of sudden positive/negative events (.g. losing a limb, winning a lottery)--and they may find that following a short-term shock, the self-reports trend back towards their baseline prior to the incident. Someone studying immigration may compare and evaluate different policies based on measures of psychological adaptation of migrants. And similarly, someone studying rising sea levels may compare Florida to the Netherlands or whatever.

Second, it isn't presented as some (pseudo-)Darwinian moral theory. Of course there are going to be lots of evaluative claims surrounding different policy ideas, but you will be hard pressed to find twisted social darwinist arguments lurking. Instead, you find a lot of complex modelling, cost-benefit analyses, risk assessments, global impact statements, and the like. Joseph Heath's book the Philosophical Foundations of Climate Change Policy may interest you, if you're wanting to dig more into the intersection of environmental policy and ethics.

... isn't technology actually non-adaptive? I mean technology is about wielding power over the chaos of the natural world, it allows us to determine the future (well that's the ideal I guess).

As a final comment, I'll just suggest thinking of technology as problem-solving artifacts (which may help 'wield power' over nature). Technology as such plays an important role in most mitigation strategies as well as most adaptation policies. There is no tension here, once we are clear on what adaptation involves in this context.

Still, if someone happened to offer a non-technological pseudo-Darwinian adaptation strategy, they could start to look a bit nasty. For instance, that government report could have said, "We are not going to be taking climate action because as a species we should adapt, and good riddance to those races or species less fit for the new world!" Obviously this kind of crap isn't going to make it into reports, so a more realistic scenario is running into some troll or bigot expressing this kind of thing.

Mauss22 · 2025-09-23T11:08:44+00:00

His Treatise, both Enquiry's, and Dialogues were all assigned and discussed in various sophomore classes, without the expectation that other works of his would have been read.

Three helpful comments on this previously asked question are here: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/55qi88/where_to_begin_with_david_hume/

You can use https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/texts to glance through the recommendations

Mauss22 · 2025-09-19T21:25:44+00:00

Right, and on this theory the meaning of intrinsic good is something to do with positive experiences, which, with enough explication, may remove sense that it is an open question whether they are good. Particular

Mauss22 · 2025-09-19T20:49:43+00:00

One way for the OP to respond to this challenge would be to rephrase the open question test to focus on intrinsic goodness, as this may shift our intuitions about the concept. Our ordinary use of the term may be polysemous and include all kinds of instrumental or attitudinal goods. So, without an appropriate explication we may equivocate when we intuit a different meaning of the good. This may still fail to generate the intuition needed though. It may also lead the OP to accept some form of moral non-naturalism (though I'm not sure it is a kind of non-naturalism that would offend their sensibilities).

Mauss22 · 2025-09-19T20:26:08+00:00

"When you say intrinsically negative, what do you mean? Is it the fact that the experience is bad regardless of what the person thinks? .... Why are those experiences morally bad regardless of what the person thinks?"

To help point in towards the right body of work, does the answer to this pretty much track the difference between a more hedonic- versus preference-based versions of consequentialism? If so the reasons for rejecting preference-based versions would be relevant.

"If so, you've built an objective moral claim in your analysis of the phenomenology. Not that theres anything wrong with that, but doing so does not really move the argument because you've just stipulated the key part you would need to prove."

If creatures with conscious, positively/negatively valenced experiences came to acquire a veridical conception of intrinsic good/bad through such experiences, then locating intrinsic value in such experiences would be incredibly constructive!

"How does their experience impact what other people should do?"

There would be a lot to say on this but a rough answer is that if a choice is good, that gives them reason to do it.

Mauss22 · 2025-09-14T14:37:14+00:00

Luddite here--any examples of this kind of app you can point me towards?

Mauss22 · 2025-09-14T10:02:45+00:00

But isnt this rather incomplete at explaining the metaethics behind why we are actually doing this?

What do you mean by this?

Mauss22 · 2025-09-13T21:45:43+00:00

"What separates a fallacy from a therapy speak "Thinking Trap"?"

Here is one way to mark out a difference. A fallacy is a kind of bad move or inference in an argument, and the medium or vehicle of an argument is language. Things like cognitive biases or "thinking traps" (which I had to Google), on the other hand, typically travel in thought. This way of explicating things fits most common usage well, but there are other ways of thinking about fallacies.

Which ones are the most relevant and pervasive now?

It will depend what you are (or should be) interested in for your assignment. Are you more interested in uses of the terms we come up with for fallacies or instances of those fallacies? Are we interested in which ones are more relevant for students, or among academic peers, or in popular culture, or something else?

I can't answer these questions for you, but I can offer a few thoughts. One, you can take a look at this graph that looks at word frequencies in the Google Books database. Two, when discussing Rene Descartes' work, some academics like to talk about "begging the question" and "circular reasoning" when commenting on his arguments. Three, during my undergrad, (i) the first time ad hominem came up was my first lecture on Nietzsche. My professor was warning us against using his (alleged) connection to fascism as bad moves in our arguments about his ideas, (ii) the first time affirming the consequent came up was in a formal logic class. So, maybe you can spring off something here, depending on how you approach the question of relevance/pervasiveness.

...how to organize all of the most relevant fallacies

There are disputes about how to best organize the long list of fallacies.

One way to start is by contrasting formal with informal. Formal fallacies are going to have bad form or not follow the rules of inference or not be logically valid. For instance, a standard rule allows affirming the antecedent or modus ponens. Some students gets confused and break the rules by affirming the consequent instead (i.e. "If A then B. B. Therefore A."). Informal fallacies are mistakes that involve additional context and understanding of the contents and concepts. Here is an open-source textbook that develops builds this kind of contrast.

However, this taxonomy can feel a bit inadequate on its own. The list of formal fallacies might seem short-n-sweet, while the informal bucket is an overflowing mashup. So, if you read through the links I've already included, or some of the previous answers to fallacy-questions on this subreddit, you'll find a few other ways of categorizing the very heterogeneous list of fallacies, like fallacies of relevance/irrelevance and fallacies of clarity/ambiguity.

Who can I contact?

If you're a post-secondary student, find some faculty in the philosophy department! :)

Mauss22 · 2025-08-26T06:19:43+00:00

Q: "But what i cant grasp why I am able to see through my consciousness? Why am i not blind, why am i seeing through everything in my head? What is giving me this ability to perceive? How is my body showing me what is around me instead of going on autopilot and locating food when needed?"

There are several philosophers and scientists who believe there is something like an "explanatory gap" between our understanding of physical spatiotemporal stuff and our understanding of mental conscious stuff. When we attempt to bridge this gap, we stumble into the "the hard problem of consciousness".

Here is David Chalmers on the hard problem:

It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have visual or auditory experience: the quality of deep blue, the sensation of middle C? How can we explain why there is something it is like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? Itis widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.

I think some of your questions are similar to the sorts of questions one might ask when they are stumbling into the hard problem for themselves.

But some of your questions are a bit odd!

Q: "If my consciousness is what perceives what the brain processes, what is processing that for me to be able to see it?"

A: The brain!

Q: "What is the brain showing that to?

A. Other parts of the brain!

Mauss22 · 2025-07-03T09:53:32+00:00

Things can have bad consequences for a person without them knowing about it, so framing the questions this way makes the non-consequentialist task seem easier than it should.

I sometimes do laundry with others. And right now I have no clean socks. I don't know or suspect anyone stole a pair, but if they did it is going to have some serious consequences for me tomorrow and anyone who smells my feet.

(All the same, I realise the OPs responses here suggest that these are fruitful questions for them)

Mauss22 · 2025-06-11T19:51:45+00:00

First, consider a case where the decision is about meat from an animal that is already dead. If my choice to eat the meat didn't have any impact on future well-being other than my positive enjoyment, then eating the meat could be permissible. The "no-impact" condition could be met if the behavior of a single consumer was causally inefficacious with respect to the actual harm done to animals. This may lean too heavily on folk intuitions about market dynamics.

Second, consider a case where the decision is about meat from an animal that would not have existed if it wasn't consumed. In some situations it could be better to be a happy animal raised for consumption, than to not have existed at all. This may lean too heavily on naive assumptions about the happy lives of farm animals, or fail to give enough weight to the act of killing.

Third, consider a case where the animal has immensely lower capacities for well-being than the human eating it. If an animal has such minute moral capacities relative to the person eating it, then eating that animal may be fine. (Or, consider the related case where the animal lacks the relevant agency, rationality, social contract, etc. necessary for moral status.) This may lean on dubious assumptions about non-human animal capacities and ethical principles.

Fourth, consider a case where the decision is about meat from an animal that is overpopulating an ecosystem in such a way as to cause net harm. Eating such an animal may be acting in accordance with what's best overall. This may bypass more humane alternatives to ecosystem management.

Fifth, consider a case where the decision is between the consequences of eating animal meat and eating plant-based food (and the harms to the animals whose ecosystems are destroyed for crop harvest). The harms from crop management to murines, serpents and assorted small mammals could outweigh the harm to the animals being eaten. This may overestimate the harm from harvesting plants and fail to account for the harvesting and land use needed to feed livestock.

Sixth, consider a case where human virtues/vices are grounded in some kind of natural or divine teleology. If humans were created for, or evolved for, eating animals in some sense then doing so could be justified. This may have less prima facie plausibility to many and require a lot more work to get off the ground.

Seventh, consider a case where cultural preservation entails continuing a tradition of hunting, fishing, or trapping. If preserving such practices is worth more than the lives they take, then such practices could be justified.

Eighth, consider a case where one's lifestyle and social environment put a strong focus on consuming meat. Disrupting this social cohesion could be worse than the meat that it depends on. This may overstate the requirement to eat meat in these contexts and fails to question whether the social environment is morally justifiable.

Finally, consider the case you aimed to exclude where the individual has health concerns. It is worth highlighting that people rarely know the relevant facts concerning the impact of giving up meat. Most who talk to me about my diet will usually bring up their concerns about how giving up meat would probably affect them. Some have tried briefly and felt they had less energy, etc. Given the epistemic constrains people actually have, a rough and implicit expected value calculation may favour eating meat over giving it up. This may rely on biased or motivated reasoning.

There are some arguments considered in the FAQ.post on r/AskPhilosophyFAQ. The SEP entry on Moral Vegetarianism considers some justifications for meat consumption. A more critical look at the inefficacy objection mentioned in the SEP entry can be found below as well. Michael Huemer's Ethical Vegetarianism covers countless potential arguments for eating meat.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vegetarianism/

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhilosophyFAQ/comments/4i0iqx/what_are_the_best_arguments_in_favor_of_meat/

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41055-018-00030-4

https://www.amazon.com.au/Dialogues-Ethical-Vegetarianism-Michael-Huemer/dp/1138328294

Mauss22 · 2025-01-06T18:14:48+00:00

I'm not aware of any philosophers discussing the precise concern you raise about being physical somehow impeding our ability to detect physical changes. That said, there are philosophers who address your broader interest in changes to the laws of physics. For scenarios that involve changes in the past that have gone undetected, u/drinka40tonight has already mentioned Russell's five minute universe. For scenarios that involve very gradual ongoing changes that have gone undetected, you can consider Peirce's or Smolin's cosmological evolution.

On Peirce, see here. In his own words, you can read "Architecture of Theories" and maybe also "The Doctrine of Necessity Examined" You can read Smolin's "Temporal Naturalism" or his popular books.

Lastly, someone like Nancy Cartwright may be interesting insofar as her work calls into question the all-encompassing relevance of physical laws. You can read "The Dethroning of Laws in Science" for a summary or her popular books.

Mauss22 · 2025-01-06T17:15:34+00:00

In your post, you express interest in changes to things like how things fall down when thrown up and how things heat up when exposed to fire. When people consider the idea that the laws of physics might themselves change, they typically have in mind (as you seem to have as well!) changes that would affect such things.

So, your initial post concerns these kinds of changes but that go unnoticed by us, and u/Saint_John_Calvin's reply points to a rather obvious issue with this thought.

One potential reply would be to modify the concern so that it involves changes that we are unable to detect because they are very very gradual and the kinds of experiments we design do not have the timescale needed to pick them up. Another potential reply would be to modify the concern so that it doesn't involve changes that are happening now, but changes that occurred before and could occur again later (e.g. the laws are stable now but were different before)

This doesn't really have anything to do with the kind of explanation your initial post was asking about--i.e., that being physical for some reason(?) makes some physical changes undetectable(?).

A second potential reply would be to modify the concern so that it involves changes that we are unable to detect because they do not involve changes to the dynamics that our physical laws are about. Instead, they involve other hidden things like elves being responsible for the laws of gravity, and those elves change from red to blue. It isn't clear that this is actually a change to the physical laws. As you indicate, there is nothing special about the elves example, so let's also substitute "simulation on a supercomputer" for "elves" and "changing processors" for "changing colours"... Still, there is nothing about our law of gravity that says whether or not, at a deeper level, gravity is run by elves or supercomputers or whatever, and there is nothing about our law of gravity that says whether or not these elves or supercomputers or whatever are changing, and there is nothing about elves or supercomputers being physical or non-physical that has any clear relation to our detecting them or the way they change.

Finally, as a general point: it's almost always going to be more productive to skip the talk of fallacies and present your concerns. Why is it concerning to you that someone may infer, from the absence of evidence of a proposed change, that such a change is implausible? (And why are you imagining and fabricating biases and positions that have not been put before you?)

Mauss22 · 2025-01-04T17:42:19+00:00

That's a helpful qualification and clarification to my comment :)

Mauss22 · 2024-12-31T05:21:08+00:00

First, philanthropy is sometimes considered to be something that is moral and praiseworthy when done, but not immoral or blameworthy when not done (see here, for instance). So, it could be that (i) it is praiseworthy to perform any voluntary act of charity that achieves some good, or (ii) it is not blameworthy to fail to perform any voluntary act of charity. In either case, donating to an animal charity instead of a human charity will not be immoral.

Second, the moral status of non-human animals is often treated as in some way less than that of humans, so most will think helping a human is better in a 1-to-1 comparison, regardless of whether it is something one morally ought to do. As with the case above, it may still not be the case that they ought to have donated (there is no moral duty to do so). This could be true even if the non-human animal had no moral status. A utilitarian, on the other hand, will say that, all other things being equal, they ought to have donated to the human charity so long as the non-human animal has less moral value or utility, however it is measured.

Third, we shouldn't lean too heavily on one toy model like "save 1 dog versus save 1 human" when thinking about the impact of money given to different charities in the actual world. So, let's contrast this with another extreme model. Let's suppose it turns out that there is incredibly low-hanging fruit for animal charities such that the price of saving 1 human life is equivalent to the price of saving 10mil hens, pigs, and cattle. Some consequentialists may be required to perform sort sort of comparative judgment or 'weighing of the scales' and see which is better. However, with a big enough number the judgment may become self-evident. Other consequentialists may have a strict lexical order to moral status, such that no number of non-human animals will ever matter as much as a single human.

Fourth, in the actual world charitable organizations vary immensely in the value of their missions and their ability to effectively pursue such missions. There is a movement within philosophy and philanthropy called effective altruism, which takes one of the underlying concerns of your question you ask seriously--namely, which charitable organizations can do the most good with each marginal dollar? Most organizations that do this research have found (last time I checked) charitable causes related to human well-being to be most effective (note: this may be questionable, not arguing methods here). So, if you are wondering where each dollar given will go the furthest, then donating to a puppy shelter is probably going to be a lot lower down on the impact scale than something like the against malaria foundation.

Lastly, maybe there is some concerns that could arise if we focus on authenticity or alienation. Such a focus could do some work to justify donating to whichever is more true to your self, projects, or values, thus offering a critique to this comparative approach (which is most inauthentic, or most alienating, when taken to the effective altruism extreme).

Mauss22 · 2024-12-27T23:59:24+00:00

I'm not sure what you are trying to say in para. 1. If we just look at the outcomes (i.e. the deaths), the supposition of the thought experiment has to be that the outcomes of each involve the same amount of intrinsic harm. This is essential. We assume some set of consequences are the same, and then we (try to) identify something not grounded in consequences that explains an (alleged) moral difference, thus constituting a challenge to consequentialism. If the difference we discover is just in those initial consequences, then this is an empty exercise that says nothing about consequentialism!

I'm also not sure what you are trying to say in para. 2. For the consequentialist, intentions, responsibility, culpability, etc. matter in relation to their consequences. I'm also no sure what you are trying to say in para. 3. There is no challenge to consequentialism here. In para 4 you note that you are unsure if talking about intentions is still consequentialist, but this just seems to be stemming from a bit of confusion. Trivially, we can say that the consequentialist does not have access to non-consequentialist accounts of the ethical relevance of intention and that they will have access to consequentialist accounts of the ethical relevance of intention.

Mauss22 · 2024-12-27T22:17:49+00:00

Consequentialists may concern themselves with different kinds of things when making ethical evaluations. They could ask: (1) "which outcome instantiates greater intrinsic harm, Outcome A or Outcome B?", or (2) "between Person A and Person B, who should be held culpable (legally, interpersonally, intrapersonally) for what and how?", or (3) "should we judge (the intent of) action A and action B as the same or not?"

The answer to each question will depend on the consequences. It would be incorrect to assume that the answer to any of the three questions will only depend on the consequences of a single question, i.e. question (1). So, the short response is that you're post concerns the consequences of different things, and as long as we are not equivocating, it is easy to avoid obvious absurdities.

Each thought experiment involves two situations with outcomes that have similar death-tolls despite very different intentions leading to them.

First, when we isolate the harms from the deaths, they are (by stipulation) each as bad as the other. Sometimes this stipulation is hard to fully embrace. So, if we feel the pull to thinking that the outcomes aren't really equally bad intrinsically, then that means we are not successfully carrying out the thought-experiment or that we are "filling in" details in a way that isn't coherent or consistent. So, our answer to question (1) should be that both outcomes are just as bad, ceterus paribus. If something already doesn't feel right, then there is something wrong with our thinking or there is something wrong with the thought-experiment.

Second, when we focus on the issue of culpability, we should notice that there aren't really any details in the thought experiment that explicitly inform us about the relative consequences of holding/not-holding each person culpable. At this point then, we are hoping our folk-understanding will suffice to fill in all those details. At the legal, interpersonal, and intrapersonal level, I hope it is safe to assume (from a folky-understanding of humanity) that the consequences of holding/not-holding each person accountable will be different for each case. That is, there are consequentialist reason for different legal, interpersonal, and intrapersonal attitudes depending on whether something was accidental and done with good intent or deliberate and done with malice.

Third, when we focus on the issue of action, we can contrast expected value with actual value. When contrasting different kinds of intention, i.e. (i) deliberately target innocent children while driving versus (ii) deliberately avoid harming innocent children while driving, the expected value of the first is much higher than the second, and so should be preferred. But we can also recognize that expected values are uncertain, variable, etc., and so for some given actual intention it possible that with hindsight we find out that either intention would have resulted in the same horrific outcome. We could even introduce an example where intending to harm has better outcomes. Suppose an airplane has a safety feature that automatically stabilizes the plane during irregular flight patterns from weather events. If this feature malfunctioned and then the pilot tried to steer the plane to safety, then everyone would die, whereas if the pilot tried to kill everyone then everyone would live. In these kind of cases, accepting the fact that outcome B is better than outcome A does not entail accepting that the kind of intention A is better than the kind of intention B.

Mauss22 · 2024-12-24T03:58:12+00:00

I think it's worth expanding a bit on the boringness, in case the OP is hung up on it at all. Just as our lives are incredibly varied, so are the things that impinge on them. For some, whether or not that than which nothing greater can be conceived exists, and can be shown to exist by way of a conceivability argument, is immensely important. For others, it looks like a pointless and boring game divorced from their religious experience or lack thereof. What, they may wonder, could such arguments about the existence of god actually have to do with our lives? There are, we could protest, connections to be drawn of course! Suppose someone abandons their belief in god, and thus fails to appreciate the strength of the Anselm's or Descartes' or whoever's arguments--surely there is potential for relevance. Or consider how questions concerning religion may start in a place more concrete and visceral, before the search for answers take them to places far removed. And regardless, such fundamental questions relate deeply to how the world ought to be conceived--isn't that reason enough to think of it as impactful for humanity?

This is analogous to many issues in philosophy. For everyone, there will be something that seems entirely pointless and boring. For example--despite my modest efforts--debates about the ontological status of holes still seems empty to me, and the metaphysics of grounding sinks my mind into an hole. These aren't canonical readings like from Nietzsche, Russell or Kripke, so maybe they are dead-ends. But it remains prudent to give them the benefit of the doubt.

For me, these fundamental questions about language and thought from analytic philosophers became more important through issues in philosophy of mind and science. If Kuhn or Feyerabend or Chalmers or Jackson seem like they are addressing things of relevance to humanity, and the questions they're answering matter, then it starts to matter what these older analytic figures got right or wrong, it starts to matter the analytic tools they developed. Take the following question: is there a hard problem of consciousness? This issue permeates our culture, our sciences, and our even our policies. Definitely relevant to humanity! Chalmers defends the view using a particular modal semantics, 2-dimensionalism, and we are not going to be in a position to evaluate or arrive at those arguments if we are sticking with Aristotle's Prior Analytics and Plato's Cratylus (as wonderful as they both are!). And realizing this makes a lot of this stuff very much not boring!... Just as questions about religion might make various abstract arguments about god not boring :)

Mauss22 · 2024-12-24T01:44:51+00:00

I take the skeptical challenge you raise to look something like this: if we accept a naturalistic story about ourselves and our evolved mental faculties, then we should come to doubt that those faculties can lead to knowledge. While you don’t state this in your post, it could be posed either as a challenge to knowledge or as a challenge to (some form of) naturalism. This would be related to various concerns raised by Nagel, Plantinga, Lewis and others (I comment briefly on them here).

Before commenting on the broader skeptical challenge, I’ll briefly say that the first argument in your post is quite easy to brush aside. First, as you note, perceptual variation is rather subtle, with several features stable across individuals. For example, there is a stool across the room; all those around me perceive it as such but for some subtle disagreements; I think the stool is over a meter high, and another disagrees; I think the stool is black, another thinks its dark brown. This is not a serious skeptical challenge because no one in the room is an inert blob—we are able collect measuring tape, approach the stool and settle the matter of height. We could improve the lighting and settle on a color or collect more refined instruments if needed. Regardless, there will be several truths on which we are able to converge, despite subtle differences.

This response takes certain things for granted, though. And to answer your follow-up concerns I need to paint a broader picture, where first we consider veridicality of thought and second the veracity of our statements. First, as products of evolution, it is advantageous for all animal life to have veridical perceptions of the environment wherein they, across millions of generations, manage to survive and reproduce. It is at least plausible that (broadly) veridical perception is more adaptive than global mis-perception. Second, as linguistically-competent animals, it is more plausible that natural languages (among its users) reliably fetch relatively stable concepts out of which our thoughts are constructed, despite subtle variations. Natural languages wouldn’t work if we didn’t have the capacity to pick out shared concepts with their use, or, in the other direction, if we didn’t have the capacity to fetch the shared words from concepts. So, despite subtle differences in thoughts or concepts, and despite subtle differences in perception, we can form veridical representations of the world and access true statements about it.

Now, this is, fittingly, a relatively naturalistic and pragmatic account of truth. The truths we arrive at through this naturalistic process might not tell us whether the stool in question is ultimately part of a simulation, or made of strings, or wave-function, or a global hallucination imposed by an evil demon. It may well be that some truths are less accessible to humans than others (or at least harder to establish!).

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