Interesting discussion over at Errol Lord’s blog. Some related stuff in an earlier post of mine, here.

A useful perspective from Gary Becker here, via a friend’s shared items feed.

Congress passed a law in the early 1990s that made it illegal for colleges to force faculty members to retire unless the schools clearly demonstrated that a professor could not teach or do research at a modestly high level. Prior to that law, colleges forced their faculties to retire at a given age, usually 65, and made exceptions for those members they considered special in their teaching, research, or other contributions. Two former colleagues of mine, the Nobel Prize-winning economists George Stigler and T. W. Schultz, were kept on for this reason- in Stigler’s case until he died at age 81, while Schultz did not fully retire until he was in his mid-eighties.

This is a bad law because colleges now cannot force less competent or less energetic older faculty to retire while keeping the more productive faculty members since they are required by law to offer the same retirement terms to their entire faculty. The older system allowed schools to undo some of the harmful effects of the faculty tenure system by eventually retiring faculty that they should never have appointed.

As Becker notes, this is a particularly salient issue for disciplines (like philosophy) with bottlenecks at the junior ranks.

It is more difficult to understand the consequences than the causes of the aging of academic faculties, although one obvious effect is that opportunities for young PhDs have deteriorated. The slowdown in the expansion of institutions of higher learning in the past couple of decades has increased the scarcity of academic positions for younger PhDs. As a result, young academics have to concentrate more on doing good enough teaching and producing enough research to merit tenure in this tougher environment. Adding to this job pressure for American academics is that the market for faculty, along with that of many other services, has gone global since students from all over the world come in large numbers to get their graduate education at American universities, especially in the sciences, economics, and a few of the more humanistic fields. Many of the best of the foreign students stay on to teach and do research. They compete against Americans looking for academic positions, and hence narrow the market for Americans. Indeed, their competition partly explains why in many fields fewer Americans are getting their PhDs, and instead are taking MBAs, law degrees, and other advanced degrees where competition from foreigners has so far been less severe.

Minor note: this last part is not, I think, true of philosophy. My sense — and I would be interested to see if numbers actually substantiate this — is that applications to philosophy PhD programs (from American undergraduates in particular) continue to swell. I really have no idea why this is the case (though the phenomenon satirized here probably plays a real and increasingly significant role), but it does seem that a lot of applicants are wasting a lot of time, effort, and money trying to make a livelihood out of their philosophy degrees.

Getting back to the main thread, it’s not hard to see why this regime might have a deleterious effect on the quality of research getting done in philosophical academia. Becker again:

Important new ideas in different fields come disproportionately from younger persons, and academic research is no exception. Significant advances not only in mathematics, but also in biology (such as Crick and Watson), in economics, and even in the humanities have typically been made by younger rather than older persons. This means that while the aging of faculties at American universities adds greater experience, faculties have lost some freshness of approach that comes from having younger faculty. Of course, it is possible, and perhaps even probable, that growing life expectancy and healthiness of older persons will shift ages of peak creativity toward older ages as well.

This strikes me as being true of philosophy, as well.

I really don’t know whether Becker’s favored remedy — “to abolish the federal law that prevents colleges from having compulsory retirement ages for most faculty members” — is the right way to address these problems. The trick is to give American universities enough flexibility with respect to older faculty to alleviate some of these problems, while avoiding certain undesirable aspects of the British system’s punitive treatment of older faculty. Presumably there’s some sort of balance to be struck here, but smarter people than me will have to find it.

Better Gmail 2 doesn’t work with Firefox 3 in OS X. Any way around this?

UPDATE: problem fixed with version 0.5.2. Yay!

Once upon a time, Castaneda attacked Hare’s proposal for imperatives* for licensing the following inference: (’!’ just represents a natural language device for making an indicative into an imperative)

If p, !q

!p

Therefore: !q

Castaneda had in mind examples like the following:

1a. If you finish your work, come have a drink.

2a. Finish your work.

3a. Come have a drink.

In uttering (1a) and (2a), it seems that a speaker in no way commits herself to (3), and an addressee to whom (1a) and (2a) are uttered would be awfully mistaken in thinking that (1a) and (2a) together allow her to infer (3a). The problem is that understanding ‘!’ as a species of commitment-describing necessity modal (call it ’should’) pretty much commits you to endorsing the inference.

Actually, this strikes me as a feature, not a bug of the view.

The following argument doesn’t, at first pass, look so hot.

1b. If you finish your work, you should come have a drink. (if p, should q)

2b. You should finish your work. (should p)

3b. You should come have a drink. (should q)

But really it’s not too bad. Say that (1b)’s uttered at a context c. Let O(c) be the set of worlds in the common ground that are most desirable, according to the c-relevant ranking. Updating c with (1b) lands us in a new context c’ where O(c’)∩p⊆q. Updating c’ with (2b) lands us in c”, where O(c”)∩p⊆q and O(c”)⊆p. So O(c”)∩p=O(c”), so O(c”)⊆q. Once (1b) and (2b) are assimilated by the context, the best worlds are p-and-q-worlds. So the best worlds are q-worlds. So, you should come have a drink (but not without finishing your work). Detaching doesn’t seem so bad after all. (I should note that this seems a lot like an argument that I’ve read somewhere, though I can’t for the life of me remember where.)

If you understand “!” as some sort of desirability-describing modal that updates a contextually relevant ordering source O (as Magdalena Schwager roughly does), the same sort of argument shows that going from (1a) and (2a) to (3a) is good. But I don’t see what’s so bad about that. Suppose that q hasn’t been commanded in the starting context d. The imperative !q is not inferrable at d (since it’s false that O(d)⊆q). But it is inferrable at d’ (where d’ = the result of updating d with (1a) and (2a)). At d’, it is impossible to comply with all of the speaker’s commands without both finishing your work and coming to have a drink. So, the fact that !q is inferrable at d’ doesn’t mean that you may come have a drink without having finished your work. You’ve been commanded to finish your work!

This is a pretty simple-minded response to Castaneda’s worry. Still, I’m having trouble seeing what’s wrong with it.

* Actually he presented it as an objection to Geach, but it works equally well as an objection to Hare.

Even Celtics fans should be hoping for a game 7, so that Garnett has a chance to reprise this performance.

I’ve got the Pistons winning in 7 in my bracket, but alas I don’t think that’s going to happen. Billups just isn’t holding up his end. Rasheed looks scared of getting another technical, and has been totally ineffective on the post. Tayshaun doesn’t really have an answer for Pierce (and keeps passing up wide-open looks), and no one has an answer for Garnett. Stuckey and Dyess have been fun to watch, but that’s just not going to be enough.

I think the Lakers are going to dismantle the Celtics, though I certainly hope that doesn’t happen.

Alastair Norcross has a cool (but ultimately, I think, wrongheaded) response to the causal impotence objection (see here) in a 2004 Philosophical Perspectives paper (pdf here). (Edit — Mike Almeida writes to tell me that he and Mark Bernstein published a version of this argument in 2000 in the Journal of Applied Philosophy. See here.) The presentation here is slightly more general than Norcross’s, in that avoids some inessential empirical assumptions.

Let n = the number of individuals such that omni > veggie, where omni = the number of animals killed if n individuals do not go vegetarian after t, veggie = the number of animals killed if n individuals do go vegetarian after t. Let saved = omni - veggie. Your subjective probability for the truth of “if I go vegetarian, I will be the n-th person to do so after t” should plausibly be set at 1/n. As long as saved > n (as it surely is) the expected value of you going vegetarian (in terms of number of animal lives saved) is greater than 1.

It’s important to note that this is not an argument that your going vegetarian is causally efficacious: n-1 times out of n, it isn’t. Norcross’s idea is that it is wrong to ignore the chance that your going vegetarian will be causally efficacious, as “We commonly accept that even small risks of great harms are unacceptable.”

But something’s amiss. Let E be the event such that n individuals go vegetarian after t in E, and suppose that your going vegetarian will bring E about. Even if you don’t go vegetarian, E will still occur, and really in very little time at all — all it takes is one more person (call this person “Steve”) to go vegetarian. So it’s false that the expected value of you going vegetarian (in terms of number of animal lives saved that otherwise would not be) is greater than 1. (It is true that the expected value of you going vegetarian — in terms of number of animal lives saved that otherwise would not be saved by you, but rather by someone else — is greater than 1, but, morally, that’s neither here nor there.) Continuing to suppose that if you go vegetarian, you will bring about E, the relevant issue here is how many surplus deaths there will be if you don’t go vegetarian, and it’s Steve that brings about E. It’s hard to say with any confidence, but this number is probably comparatively quite small — surely several orders of magnitude smaller than saved. And this affects the expected value (disvalue) of you going vegetarian (staying omnivore) proportionally.

You can (and Norcross, in a way, does) try arguing, whether or not your going vegetarian brings E about, your not going vegetarian is practically certain to delay E (and therefore practically certain to result in excess animal suffering). This is a strong argument, but it’s distinct from the one we’ve been considering here.

One interesting thing about the causal impotence objection to ethical vegetarianism is that, so far as I can tell, almost no ordinary person subscribes to it. (Roughly, the causal impotence objection notes that while the meat industry is sensitive to large fluctuations in demand, it’s not sensitive to the sort of fluctuation in demand that results from a single individual going vegetarian.) That is to say, almost everyone agrees that if it is wrong to needlessly kill animals for food, then it is wrong for them to eat the flesh of animals that have been needlessly killed for food. I suppose this must be because most people don’t think about such issues with a consequentialist vocabulary, and you’ll only really be inclined to find this conditional worrisome if you do. I’m personally satisfied that the conditional is true, as it seems sufficiently analogous to conditionals like “if it’s wrong to needlessly kill dogs for their hides, it’s wrong to wear dog-hide shoes”, but we might want a stronger justification than an analogy.

Here’s a slightly suspicious way of getting around causal impotence. Let φ = animals are needlessly killed for food, ψ = you eat the flesh of animals that have been needlessly killed for food.

1. O(~φ)
2. ~φ → ~ψ
3. O(~ψ)

(3) follows from (1) and (2) in SDL. Consequentialists who care about the suffering of sentient creatures should accept (1), and everyone should accept (2). So such consequentialists who also deny (3) are committed to rejecting the move from (1) and (2) to (3). This means rejecting either modus ponens, or one of the following axioms of SDL:

A1. If p, then O(p)

A2. If O(p → q), then O(p) → O(q)

This is slightly interesting. Take it for granted that going vegetarian is causally impotent. Then lots of consequentialist normative theories will say that going vegetarian is not obligatory, though they will say that it is obligatory that animals not be needlessly killed for food. The normative theory and SDL appear to conflict. (If I had to guess, someone who denies (3) would probably want to reject (A2), since it seems to be doing the most work in generating the controversial missing premise.)

That’s kind of embarrassing, but I don’t think it’s the only (or the correct) way to respond to the argument. Rather, I think you ought to say that accepting (3) doesn’t commit you to accepting that there’s an obligation to go vegetarian. It just commits you to accepting some sort of obligation to falsify ψ. As it turns out, there are a number of ways to falsify ψ. One is going vegetarian. Another is making it the case that animals are not needlessly killed for food. When there are two ways of satisfying an obligation, you should choose the one that your normative theory sanctions — from a consequentialist point of view, the one that is causally efficacious in promoting value and minimizing disvalue. That’s not going vegetarian, if going vegetarian is in fact causally impotent.

Has anyone else tried Piñon Coffee? It’s a flavored coffee, like chicory, but in this case the flavoring is… pine nuts! Really delicious, and inexpensive ($6.50/12 oz. at Trader Joe’s). I’m always looking for home-brew coffee that plays nicely with soy, and this is so far my favorite.

Why were there anti-Israel protestors picketing Beth Israel Synagogue during Sabbath services yesterday? Seriously, wtf? (Apparently this has been going on for a while.)

Only tenuously related, but last week, I was having a friendly, spontaneous, non-political (so I thought) conversation over lunch at Earthen Jar with one of people who protests in front of our local post office, and, out of the blue, she asked me what I think of Walt and Mearshimer. Really now, wtf?

Not much to report. I’ve been back in Ann Arbor for a while now, devoting most of my time to finding housing next year. For those who don’t know, the rental market in Ann Arbor sports an absolutely obnoxious price to quality ratio. (I still haven’t heard a satisfactory explanation for why Chicagoans pay comparable rents for nicer places, which happen to be located… in Chicago!) This makes the process of looking for a reasonable lease time-consuming, frustrating, and usually unrewarding. But I made out okay this time around — cute, family-owned studio with a really nice kitchen, close to downtown (and about a mile from the department), cat-friendly, very affordable, small security deposit! Yes we can! Yes we can!

Well, maybe. The best way to beat the market in a place like Ann Arbor is, of course, to eschew internet searching (Craigslist, etc.) and to just scour a neighborhood where you’d like to live for “For Rent” signs (I say “of course”, but really I had to have this drilled into me by someone who knew better). But this, alas, is still a total crapshoot. I’d still be searching if I hadn’t happened on the place I ended up leasing.

On a related note, I’ve somehow only just discovered Ann Arbor is Overrated. Having lived previously in such cosmopolitan paradises as Lincoln, Nebraska, and Omaha, ibid., I actually do like Ann Arbor, overall. But the author is such a NIMBY-skewering mensch.

I won’t be blogging for two weeks or so. Morrissey will keep you company.

I take it almost as a datum that, for each pair of questions below, your intra-pair answers should be the same. (‘!p’ should be read as ‘make it that p’, and ‘must’ is some sort of generic deontic modal, ‘may’ is its dual.)

Pair 1.

Q1. Does !(p and q) entail !p?

Q2. Does must(p and q) entail must(p)?

Pair 2.

Q3. Does !(p or q) entail may(p)?

Q4. Does must(p or q) entail may(p)?

One nice feature of views (like Magdalena Schwager’s) that treat imperatives as a species of necessity modal is that intra-pair consistency is automatic.

Somewhat oddly, however, many other views I’ve looked at require giving different answers for at least one of the pairs. Krister Segerberg’s logic of imperatives, for example, says ‘no’ to Q1 and ‘yes’ to Q2; his ‘no’ to Q1 follows directly from his favored resolution of Ross’s Paradox. Maria Aloni’s solution to the Free Choice Permission problem involves saying ‘yes’ to Q3 and ‘no’ to Q4. (Aloni treats ‘!’ as a modal, but as something much stronger than an ordinary necessity modal — very roughly, ∇.)

This seems to me like a rather large problem for such views. Am I wrong about that?

Addendum: there’s an immediate problem with letting your answers to Q3 and Q4 come apart, if, like Aloni, you go in for a semantic solution to the Free Choice Permission problem, i.e., you hold that may(p or q) entails may(p). Suppose, safely enough, that must(p or q) entails may(p or q) (actually, Aloni can’t allow this, but this seems like a strike against her view). Then must(p or q) will entail may(p). Contradiction.

I don’t know why, but this is one of the strangest things I’ve seen on the net.