Why is there something rather than nothing?

Having some time to do nothing, I watched the following worthwhile lecture by Lawrence Krauss:



Here, Krauss, a physicist, attempts to teach non-physicists something about the nature of the universe. About the physics, I am even less qualified than usual to pronounce; but I assume Krauss is competent. Krauss, however, moves from the physics to something else--metaphysics--about which I'm confident Krauss has got things partially wrong.

In the talk, Krauss partially takes up a classic philosophical question: why is there something rather than nothing? Krauss thinks he can answer that question by talking about particles existing or coming to exist in a vacuum, such that "empty space" has mass.

The accuracy of all of this as physics can be granted (as, being ignorant, I must), but, even so, it doesn't actually answer the question "why is there something rather than nothing?". To borrow a phrase from Michael Ruse, frankly, Krauss isn't even in the same ballpark with the question. The reason: Krauss doesn't actually mean (absolute) nothing by empty space-- he means a pre-existing thing out of which other things can come to exist. Here, the "nothing" of Krauss itself has physical properties. Krauss thus already assumes the existence of something, even if he has labeled it, with a certain kind of sense, as "nothing." In effect, Krauss explains only that somethings can come from something, although in surprising ways.

Incidentally, talk of a "multiverse" wouldn't really answer the question, either. You may have a picure of this universe as one among many, but as long as you keep in mind a background out of which the universe(s) appear and in which they hang together, then you too have in mind a something from which other somethings come. In which case, the question still remains as to why there should be anything at all- including the (physical) background itself.

A Very Short Post-

I got ill over xmas but am back now and hope to be posting some more serious stuff soon. In the meantime, in the vein of a prior post, find the cost of non-benign forms of religion exemplified here (discovered via Stephen Law).

Song of the Week - Crazy Dance

This week's offering was randomly selected from my files-- I haven't listened to it in preparation for posting here, and so it may or may not be worthwhile. I think it is something electronic. It's called "Crazy Dance."

Download here.

How to have both causal explanation and moral responsibility

I have noticed lately that where people act badly, there is a marked reluctance to discuss the causes of that bad acting. Thus, we abhor any scientific result suggesting that men might have a (in some sense) "natural" tendency of some kind to sexual violence; we dislike the thought that a murderers's actions might be explained via reference to an underlying social circumstance, as in the case of the Ft. Hood shooter or Matthew Murray. In other words, we sometimes act as if there were something deeply objectionable in explaining or attempting to explain the actions of those we would like to morally blame. The refrain, if there actually was one, would be: "These people had a choice!" and "By explaining their behavior, you are just denying their moral responsibility!" Let's imagine there is a group of people (a lot of us, some of the time) with this refain, and let's call them the Anti-Explainers.

Now I propose to explain how the Anti-Explainers are making a thinking mistake, and why they should be less opposed to the explanation of morally objectionable behavior.

The outrage of the Anti-Explainers in the above cases depends on their thinking that: 1) generally, there is something about causally explaining a person's behavior (in social or psychological terms) that requires denying their blameworthiness; and 2) moral blame is sometimes important (as in the case of the Ft. Hood shooter, or Matthew Murray, or sexually violent men). Thus, where someone comes along and attempts to causally explain the behavior of a person we are inclined to blame, we take that explanation --- really, the possibility of any such explanation -- as a direct challenge to our judgment of moral blame. And, as in most cases, we deeply resent this challenge to our basic moral judgment. (There is an entirely separate question as to whether or not we ought to be (more) open to revising our moral judgments. For now, I am content to assume the propriety of these moral judgments of blame.)

The mistake, I think, is in 1. Here is the question ("The Question"): Why must we think that causally explaining a person's behavior requires denying their moral status, i.e., the sensibility of blaming them? I don't see that any such thought is necessary. And if not, then the Anti-Explainers have nothing to fear by the social / psychological explanations being offered: they can have their morality, their moral judgments, their blaming (and let's be honest, we all want these things), and they can have the science, the explanation, the empirical insight as well. (You're welcome.)

In answer to The Question, however, I can construct the line a philosopher (or any of you) might take. He might say-- "Well, judgments of blame requires a notion of free will; we only sensibly blame people we take to have some free will. And, unless you are some implausible kind of compatibilist about free will, you will see that causation is the death of free will; to the extent that a person is caused, he is not free. And so there it is: a causal explanation about a person's blameworthy action amounts to a denial of blameworthiness because it is a denial of a condition of blame -- to wit, of free will."

I think Kant had an answer to this argument, though, or at least to its motivation, in his second edition preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, at about B xxiv-xxx (for those playing along at home). Kant's answer is not to adopt any kind of compatibilism about free will, but rather to point out that a person can be viewed in two senses: as an empirically conditioned object, and as a moral agent. (This critically depends on the possibility of sensibly distinguishing between "things as objects of experience and those same things as things in themselves"; with this distinction in mind, Kant would say that our objecting philosopher makes a mistake when supposing that a person must be viewed as not free if viewed, in any sense, as causally determined.)

Critically, when we think of a person as a moral agent, we are not thinking of that person as under any sort of empirical constraints or conditions; thus, there is nothing in the thought of a person as a moral agent that could informs us, in any way, about the empirical constraints on that person when viewed in another light (some light in which empirical constraints would make sense, that is). This realization does not shut out the possibility of empirical constraints on persons; it leaves open that possibility, pace our objecting philosopher. As Kant said (apologies for my ham-handed editorial additions):

Morality [ed.- including judgments of praise and blame] does not, indeed, require that freedom should be understood [ed.--i.e., morality as such doesn't require an empirical theory of free will], but only that it should not contradict itself, and so should allow of being thought, [ed.--i.e., there is nothing in having a scientific view of the world that somehow requires us to abandon morality or shows it to be a self-refuting idea] and that as thus thought it should place no obstacle in the way of a free act (viewed in another relation) likewise conforming to the mechanism of nature. The doctrine of morality and the doctrine of nature may each, therefore, make good its position.

This answers the philosophical objection, and leaves the Anti-Explainers in a bad position. Although, now that the Anti-Explainers realize that they may have their moral judgments (as full-blooded as they like) and possibly have their empirical/causal/social/psychological explanations, too, perhaps there really is nothing lost here, from the Anti-Explainer point of view.

Niceness, Diviseness, Truth, and Action

If you're local and were listening to the local public radio station a couple weeks ago, you may have heard this insipid little commentary. The commentator called for niceness through an end to "questions that divide." In his own words:

For example; prior to the last election, at one of the city council forums, this question was raised:

"Do you think global warming is a man made phenomenon?"

On the surface this seems like a totally valid question [ed.: Yes, it rather does.]; one that might even have a clear yes or no answer. [ed.: What "might"? Of course the question has a yes or no answer; only a mush-head would think otherwise.] Give a "yes" or a "no" and you are guaranteed to put yourself on one side or the other of the global warming debate. The reward is that you are now in the exclusive group of people willing to answer that question the same way as yourself. [ed.: O please! As if there's nothing at stake here except feeling yourself to be a member of a group.] Just maybe that group will clinch the votes you need to be elected.

Unfortunately, through the process of grouping ourselves - creating us's and them's - we build barriers to actually accomplishing anything...

And on and on in the same vein: the piece ends with the commentator congratulating himself for following his heart, giving up on all the divisiveness, and just determining to get along with other people in projects aimed at producing good. It's pablum of a very average, conventional, soft-headed kind--the sort of dreck which particularly appeals to those who have never had a real thought in their life, but can only think through stale aphorism and weak metaphor. In other words, it stinks as thinking.

And I actually understand part of the commentator's motivation here: he's concerned, I think, about our American habit of discussing our disagreements badly and non-constructively. And he thinks, rightly, that something ought to be done about this unfortunate state of affairs. But the answer is not in giving up on the discussion of controversial issues where, yes, there are truths and answers to be had, or where, anyway, something might be learned by honest engagement. And there is another problem: just how are we all supposed to act together for the greater good if we don't know what we (variously?) think about the identity of that "greater good," and how will we know what we think unless we are willing to engage in some questioning and discussion with each other? And just what are we to do when we find ourselves with important disagreements?

So, I sent off a missive to the radio station expressing these ideas, and it was read on air soon thereafter. The station didn't, unfortunately, take me up on my offer of providing a special rebuttal commentary.

The letter was this:

Dear Sirs,

I heard a local commentary this morning on your station about the supposed virtue of not asking "divisive questions" (such as "is global warming man-made?") at the expense of focusing on productive collective action.

I think there is something funny about the desire for productive joint action among people who disagree on the need for that action, who disagree, that is, on the premise for acting. "Divisive questions" are sometimes necessary because truth matters, and it matters that people believe the truth. It matters for its own sake, but it matters also because any really effective collective action requires that the collective actors have *some* critical shared premises. If we can't ask potentially "divisive questions," how then to identify those who share our premises and with whom we can join in collective action? If "divisive questioning" is also sometimes uncomfortable or unpleasant, that is as much an argument for better skills of discourse as it is for abandoning all conversations with those likely to disagree with us--which is what, I think, the commentator's recommendation comes down to.

The Influence of This Blogger on the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court has now heard arguments over the federal honest services mail fraud statute. A review of the arguments in the case shows, I think, that my own skeptical analysis is widely shared (not as such, of course; I doubt anyone on the Court reads this blog) among members of the Court; the justices generally struggled to find some principled way to constrain the vague and overreaching language of the statute, and mostly seemed to think the project hopeless.

What particularly interested me, however, was an exchange between Justice Scalia and the government's lawyer in the Conrad Black case. From the transcript at page 46 (in Adobe Reader):

MR. DREEBEN: I think that Petitioner and I agree that Congress wrote this statute with the use of the phrase "right of honest services" as a term of art, in order to refer to a body of law that it understood had a consistent core, and that core --

JUSTICE SCALIA: Maybe it was wrong. Just because it understood it had a consistent core, it has a consistent -- consistent core?

Faithful readers of this blog will hear here echoes of an argument I raised against Scalia's brand of originalism a few weeks ago in a brief conversation with the Justice when he visited Moritz. I had asked Scalia why an originalist judge couldn't suppose that the Framers mis-applied or mis-judged their own concepts; my particular example concept was "cruel," as it happened. My point there was that the enacters of legal language might misunderstand their own concepts (or the application of those concepts). At the time, Scalia said the idea was "interesting" but then mocked it, suggesting it was ridiculous to think that anyone would not understand their own concepts, or the application thereof. It is somewhat heartening to see that, on reflection, Scalia has reformed his view to accord with mine. And now that Scalia does recognize that enacters can get their own concepts wrong, what will happen when he extends this insight to Constitutional language? Perhaps he'll then come fully around to my brand of originalism, a brand which leaves judges to apply original Constitutional concepts according to the best lights of their particular judgement.

The Nature of Pain-

My hastily-formed thoughts on this topic can be found here (view the comments thread).