Previously in this series: Frankfurt Declaration on the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness. Not another declaration. Looking back, I feel bad about how I wrote the Frankfurt declaration. It's not very well-argued; I'm not sure I managed to convey that I am against
As you’re not being entirely serious, I Kant tell if you’re confusing Heidegger (Being and Time) and Sartre (Being and Nothingness) or if that’s just part of the joke.
For a graduate-school philosopher, the prefaces to math books will look like "undergraduate philosophy", and a biologist at an MA level will see metaphors for his favorite basic theories everywhere as well. One thing that scientists typically don't see is how a concept is invented; they are already born into the world where the concept is a part of a language and thus doesn't seem to be like much of an invention. You can think of the philosophers as inventors of "words" (concepts), who end up having to give a million of examples of how to use them in a sentence, so that at the end of the book the word feels familiar. If their words (or rather, schemes of thought) get really stuck in the language, then they will feel too familiar in the original books to care; if they get stuck in a way that is different from what the philosopher aimed at, the book will feel weird and wrong.
E.g. It's only easy for you to talk about moral utility as something quantified because this view was developed (by theologicians) and then secularized (by the philosophers around 17-18th centuries). But it's a big deal, and the reason why it's worth to study it is because some of such concepts end up holding the weight of their origins.
E.g. one of the schemes of reasoning that was a product of secularization of concepts is when we reason on the basis of "society" being somehow an active force, which a scheme that was quite purposely taken from the theology during the French revolution (for a very precise reason, by the way) and then very carefully and far from completely critically peeled by the generations of sociologist. "Of course we don't actually think that it's a real active force", you'll want to argue, but in what precise way and how and why thinking as-if it was is so potent and useful and yet so wrong – that's a problem that is quite easier to see and understand if you look at it diachronically, noticing the changes and thus recognising both the trends and the limitations the concept encountered.
I think the 2nd section is actually pretty relevant. I think the thing LM multiplyers doesn't capture is that the constraints are over actions rather than over states of the world, and the thing that a Kantian cares amount is the intention behind the action. I think there probably are ways to formalise it though.
I'm also not sure that VNM utility is doing anything work here. The key claims of utilitarianism are that individuals can aggregate things they value into preferences (other way round to VNM) and that this aggregation can be extended across people. But VNM doesn't give us any of that - it doesn't even give us a formalisation of it because it only cares about ordinal preferences. (this is why I think welfare economics is dumb, fuck pareto improvements, all my homies hate pareto improvements as a baisis for comparing states.)
Maybe the best application of maths to ethics is social choice theory to formalise contractarianism? Key argument behind contractarianism is that induviduals are the relvent units of anylsis rather than states of the world and socail choice theory maintains this property.
haha, love how you fooled me with THE link. hope every click makes you laugh.
As you’re not being entirely serious, I Kant tell if you’re confusing Heidegger (Being and Time) and Sartre (Being and Nothingness) or if that’s just part of the joke.
For a graduate-school philosopher, the prefaces to math books will look like "undergraduate philosophy", and a biologist at an MA level will see metaphors for his favorite basic theories everywhere as well. One thing that scientists typically don't see is how a concept is invented; they are already born into the world where the concept is a part of a language and thus doesn't seem to be like much of an invention. You can think of the philosophers as inventors of "words" (concepts), who end up having to give a million of examples of how to use them in a sentence, so that at the end of the book the word feels familiar. If their words (or rather, schemes of thought) get really stuck in the language, then they will feel too familiar in the original books to care; if they get stuck in a way that is different from what the philosopher aimed at, the book will feel weird and wrong.
E.g. It's only easy for you to talk about moral utility as something quantified because this view was developed (by theologicians) and then secularized (by the philosophers around 17-18th centuries). But it's a big deal, and the reason why it's worth to study it is because some of such concepts end up holding the weight of their origins.
E.g. one of the schemes of reasoning that was a product of secularization of concepts is when we reason on the basis of "society" being somehow an active force, which a scheme that was quite purposely taken from the theology during the French revolution (for a very precise reason, by the way) and then very carefully and far from completely critically peeled by the generations of sociologist. "Of course we don't actually think that it's a real active force", you'll want to argue, but in what precise way and how and why thinking as-if it was is so potent and useful and yet so wrong – that's a problem that is quite easier to see and understand if you look at it diachronically, noticing the changes and thus recognising both the trends and the limitations the concept encountered.
I think the 2nd section is actually pretty relevant. I think the thing LM multiplyers doesn't capture is that the constraints are over actions rather than over states of the world, and the thing that a Kantian cares amount is the intention behind the action. I think there probably are ways to formalise it though.
I'm also not sure that VNM utility is doing anything work here. The key claims of utilitarianism are that individuals can aggregate things they value into preferences (other way round to VNM) and that this aggregation can be extended across people. But VNM doesn't give us any of that - it doesn't even give us a formalisation of it because it only cares about ordinal preferences. (this is why I think welfare economics is dumb, fuck pareto improvements, all my homies hate pareto improvements as a baisis for comparing states.)
Maybe the best application of maths to ethics is social choice theory to formalise contractarianism? Key argument behind contractarianism is that induviduals are the relvent units of anylsis rather than states of the world and socail choice theory maintains this property.