Dittamonodo (the Book of Spells)

In the attempt to write a "critical introduction" for my first novel, Dittamonodo (The Book of Spells) I find myself in a difficult- virtually insane position. Were I to comment eruditely upon the debts I, as a writer, owe to other writers, expound upon their "influences" on the work, my critical introduction would be almost as long as the novel itself. I will simply say that, just as Celia Tripp--my funnel here for the surreal and swirling madness--admits, in Book III, I, too, have "copped" freely. I have, in point of fact, stolen stuff--or, rather, to be literary, "made allusions"--right and left. I have pranced to the literary corpses of Dante, Blake (poor schizophrenic William with those angels asquat the trees), Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Pope, Faulkner, Joyce, Baum, Carroll, Stein, and a cast, probably, of dozens more. I have rifled their mouldy purses and shaken the gold out, letting it fall to the floor of the crypt. (Shades of Poe!) This done, the only question remaining is: in that awful darkness there, do those coins roll and glitter on the granite, or merely thud? This I will not decide myself. It is the book's task--and yours--to decide the ultimate validity of the literature hinted at in the alluiii sions as it relates to death and human mortality; just as Celia must decide for herself which philosophy to embrace in Book III, so you must make a choice, too. One of the reasons I have difficulty with writing a critical introduction to my own work is that, at some level deep inside, I simply do not believe in the beast. The critical introduction has always struck me as a sport, a freakish mutant (head twisted around, a single, blinking eye trying to look back through a mass of matted fur). I do not enjoy the company of such creatures, any more than did Henry James--though I know he went back as an old, old, creaking man and added them to his novels. One might mention here as well the New Critics. Though I am not one of them, I must agree with their abhorrent distrust of the preface. The book, somehow, must speak for itself! It should stand on its own hind legs (in a New York alley, off publisher's row, preferably), whip its covers wide like a tattered raincoat. It should flash one, sizzle or fizzle completely on its own merits, because-and this is important--all the talking in the world, fore or aft, will do no good if the book is bad, if it stinks like a rat in the attic or a body in Muddy Bit. This is my third "critical introduction" to Dittamonodo (The Book of Spells). I prepared the first for inclusion with this dissertation copy of the novel and the second to be read at the defense. Although I was not requested to make any changes in the novel itself, everyone on my committee hated both introductions. I wrote the introductions with an eye toward the book itself (what it meant to me), but my commit"tee members shook their heads and said, "This is not what the book is about." In a sense, this was a rather gratifying turn of events for me, as a writer, because in the best literature I have ever read, each reader takes away from the work what is important to him. The book t~en "means" on a thousand (a million, perhaps) different levels; the reader "individualizes" the work, making it his own. So, at this point, all I can really say about Dittamonodo (The Book of Spells) is that it is a novel about what it is to be human and to be alive. This was all I ever wanted to write about; it is why I became a writer in the first place, switching over permanently eight years ago from the practice of architecture to literature. To be human! To be alive! What a magnificently complex and confusing thing this is. This is the stuff of the best literature that has ever been written. And I feel proud and delighted to be, at least, attempting to produce writing that deals, at the deepest levels of all, with this subject.Englis

Acts, Attitudes, and Rational Choice

In this paper, I argue that we have obligations not only to perform certain actions, but also to have certain attitudes (such as desires, beliefs, and intentions), and this despite the fact that we rarely, if ever, have direct voluntary control over our attitudes. Moreover, I argue that whatever obligations we have with respect to actions derive from our obligations with respect to attitudes. More specifically, I argue that an agent is obligated to perform an action if and only if it’s the action that she would perform if she were to have the attitudes that she ought to have. This view, which I call attitudism, has three important implications. First, it implies that an adequate practical theory must not be exclusively act-orientated. That is, it must require more of us than just the performance of certain voluntary acts. Second, it implies that an adequate practical theory must be attitude-dependent. That is, it must hold that what we ought to do depends on what attitudes we ought to have. Third, it implies that no adequate practical theory can require us to perform acts that we would not perform even if we were to have the attitudes that we ought to have. I then show how these implications can help us both to address certain puzzling cases of rational choice and to understand why most typical practical theories (utilitarianism, rational egoism, virtue ethics, Rossian deontology, etc.) are mistaken

Metanormative Regress: An Escape Plan

How should you decide what to do when you're uncertain about basic normative principles (e.g., Kantianism vs. utilitarianism)? A natural suggestion is to follow some "second-order" norm: e.g., "comply with the first-order norm you regard as most probable" or "maximize expected choiceworthiness". But what if you're uncertain about second-order norms too -- must you then invoke some third-order norm? If so, it seems that any norm-guided response to normative uncertainty is doomed to a vicious regress. In this paper, I aim to rescue second-order norms from this threat of regress. I first elaborate and defend the suggestion some philosophers have entertained that the regress problem forces us to accept normative externalism, the view that at least one norm is incumbent on agents regardless of their beliefs or evidence concerning that norm. But, I then argue, we need not accept externalism about first-order (e.g., moral) norms, thus closing off any question of what an agent should do in light of her normative beliefs. Rather, it is more plausible to ascribe external force to a single, second-order rational norm: the enkratic principle, correctly formulated. This modest form of externalism, I argue, is both intrinsically well-motivated and sufficient to head off the threat of regress

What Normative Terms Mean and Why It Matters for Ethical Theory.

This dissertation investigates how philosophy of language, ethics, and metaethics can mutually inform one another. Chapter 1 develops what I call condition semantics for normative language. I argue that, just as ordinary factual sentences distinguish among possible worlds (or test whether a possible world meets a certain condition), so do normative sentences distinguish among normative standards (or test whether a normative standard meets a certain condition). Normative sentences place conditions on normative standards, conditions those standards must satisfy in order for them to be characterized by those sentences. The framework of condition semantics offers a perspicuous way of posing classic ethical and metaethical questions — e.g., concerning expressivism, cognitivism, relativism, realism, and judgment internalism. This can encourage clearer, better motivated answers and suggest new ways the dialectic may proceed. Chapter 2 develops an account of the distinction between weak necessity modals (‘ought’, ‘should’) and strong necessity modals (‘must’, ‘have to’). I argue that what makes weak necessity modals “weak” is that they express a kind of conditional necessity, necessity on the supposition that the “applicability conditions” of certain premises are satisfied. The resulting analysis generalizes across readings of modals, elucidates a special role that ‘ought’ claims play in conversation, and captures a wide range of seemingly disparate linguistic phenomena. Greater sensitivity to differences among necessity modals can also improve theorizing on broader philosophical issues. I consider three: moral dilemmas, supererogation, and judgment internalism. It is common in ethics to distinguish what we objectively ought to do from what we subjectively ought to do — i.e., what we ought to do given all the facts about the world, known and unknown, from what we ought to do given our evidence, limited as it invariably is. But at first glance it appears that the standard analysis for modals from Angelika Kratzer implicitly assumes that we always ought to do what we objectively ought to do. I argue in Chapter 3 that, contrary to the standard semantics, relative deontic value between possibilities sometimes depends on which possibilities are live. I then develop an ordering semantics for modals and conditionals that captures this point.PHDPhilosophyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97949/1/asilk_1.pd

Environmental Rights

In this thesis I address the claim that theories of moral rights are incompatible with environmental concerns. This claim is often made on the grounds that rights are too individualistic and human-centred. I attempt to answer this, not on the grounds that it misrepresents all theories of rights or that these concerns are not important, but rather by demonstrating that concepts of environmental rights can be developed that will do this work. I argue that rights are dynamic concepts which have altered over their history to accommodate new challenges and problems (a fact frequently disguised by the often rigid and legalistic frameworks of twentieth-century rights theories) and that their associations with individualism and agency should not be seen as central to the ‘core’ concept of a right. I examine various cases that might be regarded as difficult for ‘traditional’ theories, including the rights of future people, groups and animals. I show that certain theories are unable to account for moral rights in these cases (especially, but not only, ‘choice theories’ of the kind espoused by H. L. A. Hart). I develop an account of what an adequate theory of environmental rights must involve. This includes the suggestion that there are ‘essentially’ environmental rights which are not derivable from any of the traditional basic rights. I base this claim on the role that environment plays in identity on a number of interlinked levels. I argue that the ways in which we are involved in and dependent upon our environments are just as fundamental to who and what we are as the ways in which we are autonomous and independent. A theory of rights that places liberty and independence alone at the heart of the self will then rely on an impoverished and unbalanced view of how we relate to the world

Practical Language: Its Meaning and Use

I demonstrate that a "speech act" theory of meaning for imperatives is—contra a dominant position in philosophy and linguistics—theoretically desirable. A speech act-theoretic account of the meaning of an imperative !φ is characterized, broadly, by the following claims. LINGUISTIC MEANING AS USE !φ’s meaning is a matter of the speech act an utterance of it conventionally functions to express—what a speaker conventionally uses it to do (its conventional discourse function, CDF). IMPERATIVE USE AS PRACTICAL !φ's CDF is to express a practical (non-representational) state of mind—one concerning an agent's preferences and plans, rather than her beliefs. Opposed to speech act accounts is a preponderance of views which deny that a sentence's linguistic meaning is a matter of what speech act it is used to perform, or its CDF. On such accounts, meaning is, instead, a matter of "static" properties of the sentence—e.g., how it depicts the world as being (or, more neutrally, the properties of a model-theoretic object with which the semantic value of the sentence co-varies). On one version of a static account, an imperative 'shut the window!' might, for instance, depict the world as being such that the window must be shut. Static accounts are traditionally motivated against speech act-theoretic accounts by appeal to supposedly irremediable explanatory deficiencies in the latter. Whatever a static account loses in saying (prima facie counterintuitively) that an imperative conventionally represents, or expresses a picture of the world, is said to be offset by its ability to explain a variety of phenomena for which speech act-theoretic accounts are said to lack good explanations (even, in many cases, the bare ability to offer something that might meet basic criteria on what a good explanation should be like). I aim to turn the tables on static accounts. I do this by showing that speech act accounts are capable of giving explanations of phenomena which fans of static accounts have alleged them unable to give. Indeed, for a variety of absolutely fundamental phenomena having to do with the conventional meaning of imperatives (and other types of practical language), speech act accounts provide natural and theoretically satisfying explanations, where a representational account provides none

Truth as an evaluative, semantic property: a defence of the linguistic priority thesis

Thinking and using a language are two different but similar activities. Thinking about thinking and thinking about language use have been two major strands in the history of philosophy. One of the principal similarities is that they are both rational activities. As a result, the ability to think and the ability to use a language require being able to recognise and respond to reasons. However, there is a further feature of these activities: we humans are able to have explicit knowledge of how those activities work and what is done by performances in those activities. Thus, theorists face at least two constraints: 1. An account of a rational activity must be compatible with the possibility of agents engaging in that activity. 2. Having described an activity, it must be possible to have knowledge of an activity which is correctly described like that. There are a variety of accounts of how thinking works and how using a language works, and further variation in accounts of what is involved in explicit understanding of particular performances. These accounts can be distinguished by their views of the nature of the reasons that govern performances in that activity and by their views of the way a description of the activity relates to the way the activity proceeds. I argue that any description of thinking or language use requires showing how the truth conditions of thoughts/sentences are determined, and how the truth values of thoughts/sentences affects the way the activity proceeds. I then argue that in order to have explicit knowledge of what we do, truth has to be a substantial evaluative property of uses of language, and furthermore a truth conditional theory of meaning has to be taken as the description of the rationality of using a language. The big result is that, because in understanding language we understand truth, the philosophy of language is first philosophy

A Justice-Oriented Account of Moral Responsibility for Implicit Bias.

I defend an account of moral responsibility for implicit bias that is sensitive to both normative and pragmatic constraints: an acceptable theory of moral responsibility must not only do justice to our moral experience and agency, but also issue directives that are psychologically effective in bringing about positive changes in judgment and behavior. I begin by offering a conceptual genealogy of two different concepts of moral responsibility that arise from two distinct sources of philosophical concerns. We are morally responsible for our actions in first sense only when those actions reflect our identities as moral agents—that is, when they are attributable to us as manifestations of our character, attitudes, ends, commitments, or values. On the other hand, we are responsible in the second sense when it is appropriate for others to enforce certain demands and expectations on those actions—in other words, to hold us accountable for them. I argue that we may sometimes lack attributability for actions caused by implicit bias, but that even then we are still accountable for them. Next, I expand beyond individual actions at a particular time to patterns of action across time, to consider what we can reasonably be expected to do when it comes to avoiding and eliminating implicit bias in our selves. By thinking of these expectations as grounded in imperfect duties, I show, we can expand our moral repertoire to include non-appraising critical moral responses, in addition to appraisal-based responses such as blame and punishment (which are often counterproductive). Finally, I move beyond the actions of individuals to address the question of responsibility for eliminating the social conditions that breed implicit biases in the first place. I argue that accountability requires us not only to conform to a system of demands and expectations, but also to collectively organize to reform the system itself. By elaborating these multiple dimensions of moral responsibility—attributability versus accountability, particular versus patterns of action, individual versus collective—I demonstrate that the project of developing better practices of moral responsibility is continuous with, and thus contributes to, larger struggles for social equality and justice.PhDPhilosophyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113449/1/zhengr_1.pd

Rationality and Success

Standard theories of rational decision making and rational preference embrace the idea that there is something special about the present. Standard decision theory, for example, demands that agents privilege the perspective of the present (i.e., the time of decision) in evaluating what to do. When forming preferences, most philosophers believe that a similar focus on the present is justified, at least in the sense that rationality requires or permits future experiences to be given more weight than past ones. In this dissertation, I examine such theories in light of the expected success of the agents who follow them. In Chapters 2 and 3, I show that this bias toward the present is a liability: it tends to make agents less successful than they might otherwise be. I also show how these problems can be avoided: In the case of rational decision making, we must privilege the beginning rather than the present (what I call “inceptive maximization”). In the case of rational preferences, we must be completely temporally neutral. In chapters 4 and 5 I introduce a larger framework in which to interpret these results. My core thesis is that practical rationality is a form of conditional reliability. Practically rational decisions, preferences, intentions, or other relevant factors reliably produce whatever we take to be of value, conditional on an agent’s beliefs. This focus on value-conduciveness is thus the analog of the focus on truth-conduciveness in reliability theories of epistemic norms. Like reliabilism in epistemology, I show that practical reliabilism is supported by a methodologically naturalistic approach to normativity. In this way and others, I argue that epistemic and practical reliabilism interconnect to create an overarching theory of normativity