Beliefs are Innocent Until Proven Guilty

Many people equate “justified” with “justification”—they think beliefs are justified if and only if we give a good justification for them. A sign of this attitude is found in statements such as, “We should only believe something if we can observe it’s true.” I will explain that not all our beliefs require justifications to be justified because (a) we have justified beliefs that we can’t give justifications for, (b) such an assumption is self-defeating, and (c) such an assumption would lead to an infinite regress or vicious circularity.

Top 10 Posts on Ethical Realism from 2011

Ethical Realism is my philosophy website where I post my philosophy notes. These notes are clarified in essay form in the hopes that other people will find them helpful. I do this to be critiqued, to help popularize philosophy, to help people learn why philosophy is important, and because I think these are topics worth discussing.

Five Tips For Better Debates

Debate can be an educational opportunity (for hopefully at least one participant), but many people find it to be a “waste of time.” This is likely due to the fact that many people have bad habits and know very little about how to debate well. Nonetheless, the Internet gives us new opportunities to debate using message boards, blogs, and so on. I want to encourage people to debate informally in everyday conversation whether face-to-face or online, and I will discuss five argumentative virtues that can help us have better debates—charity, relevance, clarity, modesty, and justification. These virtues apply to any sort of debate including philosophical essays, but I will also discuss certain flaws I’ve encountered in informal debates.

Review of The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail

Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist, wrote the essay “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail” where he introduces his “social intuitionist model” of moral judgment and discusses four reasons to doubt the causal importance of reason for moral judgments. The social intuitionist model proposes that moral judgments are created from various factors including intuition and emotion, and only rarely due to a reasoning process. “Rationalist models” supposedly claim that that moral judgments are mainly created by a reasoning process.

My Review of Lawrence Becker’s A New Stoicism

In A New Stoicism Lawrence C. Becker attempts to develop a new form of Stoicism compatible with current scientific assumptions concerning reality—without the Ancient Stoic metaphysical or psychological assumptions (such as the existence of a deity). Becker argues that his new Stoicism will agree that virtue is the greatest good and that all virtuous people are happy. Becker does not spell out his new Stoicism’s moral psychology in detail, but he does describe his new Stoicism’s understanding of virtue as “ideal agency.” I will discuss his understanding of virtue and offer my objection to it. In particular, I find this understanding of virtue to be impractical.

A Second New Kind of Stoicism: Common Sense Stoicism

This is part 2. Go here to see part 1.

I have created a new form of Stoicism that doesn’t require a god that I call “Neo-Aristonianism.” I will now present a second new form of Stoicism (that doesn’t require a god) that I call “Common Sense Stoicism.” Neo-Aristonianism is a skeptical form of Stoicism that requires as few assumptions as seem necessary for a potentially comprehensive virtue ethics. Nonetheless, many assumptions are very plausible and many of us will prefer a more ambitious virtue ethics that involves some of these assumptions. (In particular, the existence of certain intrinsic values.) That’s where Common Sense Stoicism comes in.

A New Kind of Stoicism: Neo-Aristonianism

Stoicism is one of the most neglected philosophical traditions, but I think it’s informative and helpful. I also think it’s likely that Stoicism’s been neglected in recent times because the Stoics believed in a deity, and now philosophers shy away from any philosophy involving God. For these reasons I will present a new form of Stoic ethics I call “Neo-Aristonianism” that doesn’t require us to believe in a deity.

No, We Don’t Have To Agree With You!

Do you think everyone has to agree with you about something? Do they have to agree that God exists, Christianity is true, atheism is true, Islam is evil, libertarianism is true, socialism is true, Obama is the antichrist, or Harry Potter is satanist propaganda? Many people seem so confident that they’re right and they know that you need to agree with them. The other person might think that you’re an idiot for not agreeing. This attitude of certainty and confidence often leads to intolerance and insults. Of course, few people are perfect and almost everyone suffers from over-confidence and immodesty at one point or another.

Being Risk-Averse, Hedging Our Bets, and Secularism in Philosophy

We should generally prefer beliefs and theories that are well justified and don’t require ambitious metaphysical or religious assumptions. “Metaphysical” beliefs are beliefs about reality, and “ambitious” beliefs are difficult to justify in a satisfying way that would lead to anything resembling certainty. We attain absolute certainty when we have a belief that couldn’t possibly be wrong.

The Is/Ought Gap Part II

This is part 2 of “The Is/Ought Gap.” If you don’t know anything about the is/ought gap, then you should read part 1 first.

I have already discussed how we might be able to get what morally ought to be the case from what is the case (via bridging premises). These are known as “solutions to the is/ought gap.” Even after we answer (or try to answer) how to get what morally ought to be the case from what is the case, there are more troubling questions left over. In particular:

The Is/Ought Gap: How Do We Get “Ought” from “Is?”

The is/ought gap illustrates the difficulty in understanding what it means to say that we ought to do something, and how we can know what we ought to do. What is the is/ought gap and what’s it all about? I will describe the is/ought gap, discuss its implications in meta-ethics, and discuss various solutions to the is/ought gap.

How Philosophy Changed My Life

The popular idea of philosophy is that it’s just an academic discipline involving arguments and esoteric forms of reasoning. However, in What is Ancient Philosophy? Pierre Hadot argues that philosophy was originally meant to be a “way of life.” This isn’t shocking when you realize that one of the main fields of philosophy is ethics, and ethics is meant to be put into practice. To abstractly discuss and contemplate ethics without trying to live ethically seems very strange. If someone finds out that “killing people indiscriminately is wrong,” then we might think there’s something unphilosophical about that person killing others indiscriminately.

Do We Experience That Pain is Intrinsically Bad?

We experience that our pain (or suffering) is bad, but is everyone’s pain bad? Is it wrong to cause other people pain (at least some of the time) because their pain is bad? Many philosophers think that (at least some) pain is “intrinsically bad”—bad just for existing and worthy of being avoided for its own sake. If so, it seems reasonable to say that everyone’s pain is bad and it’s wrong to cause needless pain to others. However, this is an interpretation of our experience of pain and not everyone agrees with it. I will discuss various interpretations of what it means to experience that pain is bad:

The Search for Truth

Some people at this point might have assumed that philosophy is the quest for truth. This might be true, but philosophy requires nuance and we need to realize that philosophy might not always need to give us “the truth” to be important in our lives. Even if philosophy doesn’t give us “the truth,” it still gives us better and more justified beliefs, which are often more accurate than other beliefs that aren’t based on philosophical thought.

Notes on Business Ethics Ebook (PDF) (Updated 9/4/2011)

I have organized some of my essays (blog entries) to make a free ebook that tries to answer the question, How does morality relate to the business world? I discuss moral philosophy and how various moral principles seem to apply to business.

Proving an Argument Is Logically Valid

I have discussed the importance of understanding logical form and how to create formal counterexamples. Understanding logic well is a lot easier when we know something about logical validity, and one way to better understand logical validity is to consider an argument that proves an argument to be valid. If we can know why an argument can be valid, then we can know more about logical validity in general. I will now produce a proof of logical validity here. It can take some time to understand the proof, so you might want to take your time to read it carefully.

Examples of Valid & Invalid Logical Reasoning

I have already described formal logic, explained why it’s important for proper reasoning, and described how we can prove arguments to be logically invalid through counterexamples. I will now give examples of valid and invalid logical arguments to help illustrate the difference and help us learn how to identify the difference in everyday life. I will give 10 examples of arguments that could be either valid or invalid, but I won’t give the answers to the examples right away to give you a chance to think about the answers on your own. Then I will give the answers in another section below and justify my answer using counterexamples when possible. I will also justify why various argument forms are valid, but these justifications are a bit complicated and you can skip that part if it gives you a headache. It’s possible that the arguments below make use of poor reasoning that is unrelated to logical validity, but logical validity is my only concern here.

Logical Validity & Counterexamples

I have already described formal logic and explained why it’s important for proper reasoning. One of the best ways to learn formal logic is to take a logic class. However, we don’t have to take a class just to learn the basics and improve our intuitive grasp of formal logic. What I want to do here is explain how to use counterexamples to prove an argument to be logically invalid. This can help improve our understanding of logic and help us prove arguments to be logically invalid.

Examples of Errors in Reasoning

One common way to learn about good reasoning is to pick apart arguments by spotting errors in reasoning and applying our knowledge of epistemic principles in various contexts. In other words, we can improve our rational thinking through practice. Once we can better criticize other people’s arguments, we can learn to better criticize our own. I will describe twenty examples of poor reasoning and one example of good reasoning, but I won’t immediately explain why I think the examples use poor reasoning. Instead, my answers will be listed in a separate section. You are encouraged to think about why each of these examples are examples of poor or good reasoning before reading my answers. If two arguments are presented in an example, then consider why there are errors in the reasoning of the objection rather than the positive argument. It is possible that my answers are mistaken or incomplete, but I will defend them. It’s possible for more than one error to be made, but my focus will be on the most serious failings of each argument rather than the less serious ones. Additionally, the focus here is not on false premises or conclusions as much as poor reasoning. That’s not to say that false assumptions don’t play an important role in poor reasoning in general.

Philosophical Thought & an Illustration of a Positive Argument

It’s often a lot easier to pick a part someone else’s argument than to come up with a positive argument of your own. Additionally, it’s usually a lot harder to present a philosophical argument for a controversial position than an uncontroversial one. It’s not as hard to argue that bread is nutritious or that killing people is wrong than it is to argue that God exists or abortion is wrong. One way to learn more about how to create positive arguments of your own is to read philosophy and examine the thoughts of a philosophical thinker who develops such an argument. It’s a good idea to pay close attention to the kinds of questions and answers a philosophical thinker comes up with. I will try to do that here and present the thoughts involved with developing a positive argument. In particular, I will discuss an argument against the existence of ghosts.