Natural Disasters and Opportunities for Action

This week, doctoral researcher Lauren Traczykowski, discusses the ethics of intervention for natural disasters and opportunities for action.

My work focuses on the ethics and appropriateness of intervention in the aftermath of natural disasters. Intervention is necessary because sometimes a national government doesn’t respond by themselves – either because they are unable or unwilling - which leads to unnecessary suffering and death. We can blame response failure on poor planning, lack of situational awareness, and more bad weather or natural disaster that compounds the problem. We even know that extreme poverty exacerbates the effects of natural disasters.

The part of natural disaster response and intervention I am interested in, though, is the ethics that drive our decision-making. I focus on two political issues which have ethical components. First, sovereignty. Governments assert that sovereignty must be observed, and thus consent to intervention must be granted, in all natural disaster scenarios and in order for an intervention to take place. But ethically, sovereignty shouldn’t be a barrier. In fact, sometimes intervention on behalf of the people affected can be seen as intervention in support of the individual’s sovereignty. Second, the human right to welfare – food, shelter, emergency medical attention, and basic security. However, governments upholding this right and assume the associated duty inconsistently. There is also very often an inherent bias as to who governments will deliver the right to welfare. I argue that we need to look beyond sovereignty and accepted norms of welfare desert. We must consider what our ethical responsibility to intervene is when people are suffering from the effects of a natural disaster.

My research obviously keeps me entrenched in atrocity and surrounded by disaster, disease and death. And of course many of you, like me, often feels helpless. Henry Dunant, the founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross, wrote “the feeling one has of one's own utter inadequacy in such extraordinary and solemn circumstances is unspeakable” (Dunant, 1959, p. 72). Despite our feelings of inadequacy in saving those affected by natural disasters, though, we are ethically responsible for those affected by a natural disaster. With that, we need to do our best to make effective, appropriate and ethical policies before disaster strikes.

I will not dwell on the horrific nature of natural disasters and the unethical policies that prevent us from intervening. Instead, I want to use this week to show you that we as individuals are not powerless to make important contributions to those affected by disaster. If you feel like addressing the needs of those millions affected by natural disasters is too big to tackle on your own, you are not alone. But small actions can make a big difference. If you don’t care about this because you don’t care about helping – fine. I am not going to convince you. But you should care and you should be aware of the effects of natural disasters, the duties your governments usually fail to fulfil and what the international community is doing, if for no other reason than that you could be next. Natural disasters, unlike politics and economics, do not care about borders, race or religion. They don’t care who you are - but I would guess you do care about your own life. And so keep reading… tomorrow.

References:
Dunant, H (1959) A Memory of Solferino, International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva.

Desiring to Believe and Self-Deception

This week, postgraduate student Martin Smith considers the relationship between self-deception, the desire to believe and rationality. 

Nicole swears that her husband is faithful. She’s adamant about it. Her friends, though, aren’t convinced. That weekly poker game of his? He spends it with Rachel, they say. They see his car at her place every week. And these friends of Nicole’s are good friends. They wouldn’t say this lightly. But Nicole’s firm; “I just don’t believe any of it”, she says.

She speaks with conviction but her words aren’t the whole story. She won’t drive by Rachel’s place when her friends say he’ll be there. A few times she’s needed to get somewhere and it would have been convenient to just go past Rachel’s. But if it’s ‘poker night’, she’ll avoid that route. It piles minutes on to her journey but she just won’t go near that house.

Nicole is a bit of a puzzle. She says she believes her husband to be faithful. She’s not trying to deceive her friends by saying that. Best as she can tell in that moment, that’s an honest report of her perspective. But still, she doesn’t behave like someone who really believes that.

She seems to have some awareness that things are off. That’s why she avoids Rachel’s house. Part of her, somewhere, we might think, senses her friends have a point. But she’s keeping that sense – that awareness – at bay somehow. She’s blocking it out. She’s self-deceived.[1]

No doubt this self-deception is irrational. Hopefully, if we look at her case more deeply, we should be able to draw from it certain lessons. Namely, lessons about what not to do if we want to remain rational! And what’s interesting about this case, I think, is that the lessons we can draw from it might challenge common assumptions about desire, belief and rationality.

We might be tempted to describe Nicole’s problem like this: she wants too much to believe that her husband is faithful. Or she is too committed to believing that her husband is faithful. This desire/commitment, sadly, we might think, is competing against and trumping the rational demands upon her. Demands, for instance, to be fully attentive to evidence against her husband’s faithfulness. If only she could be less ‘invested’ and more ‘neutral’ regarding her belief that her husband is faithful, she would be more able to be rational.

There is something right in this. I think Nicole’s desire to believe that her husband is faithful is involved, in some way, in her irrationality – her self-deception.[2] But I don’t think the problem is that this desire is too strong. Rather the desire (or commitment) is too weak. Let me explain.

Nicole’s belief that her husband is faithful can’t withstand serious levels of opposing evidence. If she were to find her husband’s car at Rachel’s place, it might not be psychologically possible (it would at least be very hard) for her to continue believing in her husband’s faithfulness. So if Nicole desires to believe that her husband is faithful, evidence that he isn’t will make her uncomfortable. She’ll feel the threat that this evidence poses to her desire. It will be distressing for her.  

What can you do to get out of a distressing situation? One option is to face up to it. When you’re, say, anxious about making a phone call to a friend you’ve upset, you can choose to respond by gritting your teeth and picking up that phone. The distress might temporarily increase as you do so but you’re actually tackling the problem. Once it’s resolved, the distress will disappear.

The other way out of a distressing situation is to avoid it. You put off the phone call. Put it out of your mind. Distract yourself whenever the thought of it arises. Avoidance, no doubt, is easier than facing up to a problem. In avoidance you can experience immediate relief from distress rather than the temporary increase that taking action brings about. But there can be other price tags attached to avoidance, as I hope to show.

Obviously Nicole, rather than facing up to the evidence against her husband’s faithfulness, avoids that evidence. She keeps away from Rachel’s house. Brushes aside memories of suspicious activity. She has some level of awareness of this evidence alright but she keeps it from the centre of conscious attention. It’s always pushed to the peripheries. That’s how she deals with the distress that threats against her desire to believe bring.

Well okay, that’s a little cowardly but she’s getting what she wants, isn’t she? Hasn’t she has kept her belief that her husband is faithful intact? It sure seems like her desire to believe is winning out against the demands of rationality. It seems her desire is being gratified.

Consider, though, that her avoidance of threatening evidence against her husband’s faithfulness seems to call into question whether she does in fact believe him to be faithful. After all, she’s not willing to put that belief to the test. She’s not willing to ‘put her money where her mouth is’. Really, her avoidance of the evidence just seems like distrust that the world really is as she professes to believe it to be. That is, she seems to distrust her judgment that her husband is faithful. But if she distrusts that judgment, does she really believe it? Intuitively, to me, it seems she doesn’t. Or at least, she doesn’t fully believe it.[3]

It seems to me that in avoiding evidence against her belief, Nicole gradually loses that belief by systematically distrusting it. Self-deception may gratify her temporary desire for relief from distress but it sabotages her desire to believe that her husband is faithful. Her desire to believe loses out against her desire for comfort. Self-deception isn’t quite as attractive regarding belief-preservation as it may have seemed.

So what could she have done differently? Could she have better served her desire to believe? Yes, she could have, by facing up to the evidence. Enough avoidance guarantees loss of belief through mistrust. But while facing up to threats to a belief may also lead to loss of that belief, it also opens up the possibility of preserving it.

Confronting the situation allows one to potentially find out that the ‘evidence’ is not what one feared. Perhaps Nicole, if she drove up to Rachel’s house, would find a satisfactory and innocent explanation of it all (Rachel’s help was needed for a surprise for Nicole). Even if the chances of this are slim, they beat the zero-chance of belief-preservation offered by avoidance.

If all this is correct, then Nicole’s desire to believe would have been best served by complying with the demands of rationality. She would have maximised her chances of gratifying that desire by being attentive to the evidence. Really, her failure to be attentive to the evidence is a failure to be properly committed to her desire (and her belief). So rather than her desire competing against the demands of rationality, taking her desire seriously requires meeting those demands.

It’s often thought that desire for a belief, emotional investment in a belief, or commitment to a belief compromises rationality. But the lesson we can draw from cases of self-deception like Nicole’s might be that the problem is not in these attitudes themselves but in the deficient methods we use to (attempt to) uphold them. Deficient methods like choosing avoidance over action (‘facing up’), for instance.  

Bibliography

Funkhouser, E., 2005. Do the self-deceived get what they want? Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 86(3), pp.295-312.

Lynch, K., 2012. On the “tension” inherent in self-deception. Philosophical Psychology. 25(3), pp.433-450.

  

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[1] This is an adaptation of a case of self-deception discussed by Funkhouser (2005, p.302).

[2] Of course, she may desire that her husband actually is faithful too. But it’s plausible to think that she also desires to believe that. Even if it were false that her husband were faithful, sincerely believing him to be would surely provides a level of comfort she could easily cherish. Ignorance is bliss after all. For considerations in favour of viewing desire for belief rather than for some state of affairs out there in the world as more significant in self-deception see Funkhouser (2005).

[3] I find plausible something in the spirit of Lynch’s claim that “the extent to which S really believes that p can be gauged by observing the risks he/she is willing to take on that assumption (2012, p.444).”

Philosophy of Mind and Psychology Reading Group -- The Predictive Mind chapter 4

Zoe Jenkin

Welcome to the fourth post of the online reading group in the Philosophy of Mind and Psychology hosted by the Philosophy@Birmingham blog. This month, Zoe Jenkin (Harvard) presents chapter 4 of The Predictive Mind by Jakob Hohwy (OUP 2013).


Chapter 4 - Action and Expected Experience
Presented by Zoe Jenkin

The first three chapters of The Predictive Mind sketch how prediction error minimization underlies all perceptual processing, explaining various features of the mind using one unified framework. Chapter four addresses the question of how action fits into the PEM framework, arguing not only that PEM can adequately accommodate action, but also that action plays a crucial role in minimizing prediction error. We end up with a picture on which in any given case of a prediction error (a discrepancy between the prediction of the system and the sensory input), this error can in principle be minimized in one of two ways—by revising one’s priors and generating a new hypothesis, or by acting so as to selectively sample the world in a way that makes the input data match the selected hypothesis. An example of such selective sampling might be, if the system predicts that there will be a face before it, it will fixate its eyes toward the region where the prediction dictates a nose will be, and scan for a surface with a characteristically nose-like slope. Hohwy notes that this active, selective sampling method will be more efficient than random sampling, because it will target regions of space where the hypothesis makes a particular or unique prediction and so can easily be confirmed or disconfirmed. On this view, “perceiving and acting are but two different ways of doing the same thing” (71), where that “thing” is minimizing prediction error.

Making Philosophers Employable - Reflections on Philosophy and Employability (Part 2)

In the final post of a 2-part series on philosophy and employability, Ruth Oswald Wareham asks if the prospects of philosophy graduates could be improved by encouraging them to philosophise about employability.

In my last post I considered the common assumption that the study of philosophy produces graduates who are less employable than those with degrees in other subjects. Although there is strong evidence to suggest that this assumption is incorrect, with philosophy graduates outstripping those with degrees in a range of more obviously vocational subjects in terms of graduate employment, I wondered if the best way to enhance the employability of philosophers (and their own perceptions of this employability) was not merely to encourage them to identify the ‘transferable skills’[1] which they are likely to have developed over the course of their studies. Owing to the fact there is a sense in which such a justificatory move represents an endorsement of the useful/useless discourse which pervades popular discussion about the purpose of Higher Education, I suggested that there may be another way to make philosophers employable.

Philosophising About Employability

In 2011/12 I began working as a (student) project assistant with the Careers Network at the University of Birmingham. As a doctoral research student in philosophy, I was asked to look for ways in which we could start to embed employability into my own discipline. Of course, in spite of the obvious concerns about some of the overall assumptions underpinning the employability agenda, it seemed clear that we would not be able to abandon the traditional approach (involving skills auditing & personal development planning) completely. We may acknowledge that the vision of the university as a tool to produce workers is problematic, whilst simultaneously realising that we have an educational duty to equip students with the requisite knowledge to be able to ‘play the employability game’. This duty arises from the fact that, like it or not, such knowledge will determine the extent to which graduates are able to live flourishing lives after graduation. This said, the traditional approach needn’t be old-fashioned in terms of how it is delivered and, in order to support the personal development process, our Careers Network developed an innovative online employability tool, Progress, which is now being integrated into personal tutorials, induction and transition across the University of Birmingham.

The trouble with the traditional approach however, is that it does not provide us with the tools to establish the particularity of philosophy; its uniqueness as a discipline. In order to attempt to address this challenge I introduced the idea of philosophy & employability workshops dealing with the philosophy of employability.

Through problematising the employability agenda itself; by thinking philosophically about employability and asking what it means as a concept, I reasoned that participants would begin to grasp how the discipline of philosophy informs their thinking and give them a richer perspective on their own employability. Indeed, the feedback from the students who participated in the workshop that we held implied that this was, in fact, the case. Of course, far more empirical and theoretical work needs to be done in order to validate this theory but, if I’m correct, the position may point to the conclusion that good employability practice ought to arise out of in-depth critical engagement with the most significant features of a discipline; that it should help students to answer the question “what makes you employable?” with direct reference to the unique attributes of their subject.

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[1] It is worth noting that the concept of ‘transferable skills’ is more controversial than mainstream discussions of employability acknowledge.  For an illuminating discussion of some of the key disagreements see Bridges, D. (1993) ‘Transferable skills: A philosophical perspective’, Studies in Higher Education, 18:1, 43-51.

Making Philosophers Employable - Reflections on Philosophy and Employability

In the following two blog posts, Ruth Oswald Wareham (Doctoral Researcher and Student Engagement Facilitator in The School of Philosophy, Theology and Religion) considers what can be done to enhance the employability of philosophy graduates and wonders whether the answer might involve philosophising about employability.

In recent years, the employability agenda has become one of the most prevalent in framing discussions about the efficacy of universities. Traditionally, academics have been loath to accept this shift towards what they regard as crude instrumentalism and which implies that the function of university is to produce work-ready individuals who will “meet the needs of business.” (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, 2012).

While David Willets has claimed that: “Our universities are centres of critical inquiry and free-thinking; they instil civic values in their students; and they extend understanding through teaching and research,” (BIS, 2012, p.3),  there is concern that the value of learning ‘for its own sake’ is being gradually eroded in favour of narrowly conceived market values.

The literary critic and academic Stefan Collini calls this pattern of debate “the conflict between the ‘useful’ and the ‘useless’”(Collini, 2012, p.39); a conflict which has, in one way, shape or form, existed in debates about the purpose of university since the early nineteenth century. Collini recommends that we recast the difference between academic inquiry and the more utilitarian thinking exhibited in current political discourse about the purpose of the university as one which arises out of a disparity between the idea that learning should be for a specific (pre-determined) purpose and the academic “drive towards understanding [which] can never accept an arbitrary stopping point, and [through which] critique may always in principle reveal that any currently accepted stopping-point is ultimately arbitrary.” (Collini, 2012, p.55)

With this in mind, perhaps it is time to withdraw from the useful/useless debate in terms of employability and begin to examine new ways in which to engage with the subject. In these blog posts, I intend to discuss what I envisage could be the way forward in terms of education for employability with particular relation to the study of  philosophy.

Philosophy & Employability – What Are You Going to Do With That?

When you study philosophy, you get used to derisory comments. The response to telling someone you are studying philosophy is usually something akin to: “What are you going to do with that then?” (although it is worth noting that I was once asked if this meant that I could read minds!). Philosophy graduates have a reputation for being less employable than graduates of STEM subjects. Indeed, even the students themselves have a fairly negative perception of their employability; only 42.5 per cent of students holding degrees in history & philosophical studies agreed with the statement 'The undergraduate subject I studied has been an advantage in looking for employment.' (Telegraph, 2012a). It is peculiar then, that according to recent data from HESA, graduates with degrees in history & philosophical studies actually do better than graduates of business, physics, architecture and computer science in terms of graduate employment. (Telegraph, 2012b)

Of course, the negative perception of philosophy is nothing new, in a discussion with Socrates, Adeimantus voices the concern that “the effect of [the] pursuit… even on those of its practitioners who are supposed to be particularly good is that they become incapable of performing any service to their communities.” (Plato, 1998, p.208) Socrates responds that the problem is not the uselessness of philosophers but “others’ failure to make use of them.” (ibid. p.209) Failing the complete overhaul of society in a manner reflective of Republic, what can be done to enhance (and improve perceptions of) the employability of philosophy graduates?

 Employability – Towards a Philosophical Perspective

Employability is about far more than securing a ‘graduate job’ after leaving university and is more properly defined as:

A set of achievements – skills, understandings and personal attributes – that makes graduates more likely to gain employment and be successful in their chosen occupations, which benefits themselves, the workforce, the community and the economy. (ESECT based on Yorke 2006)

On this definition, it seems plausible to argue that the best way to make philosophers employable is to encourage them to articulate the skills they've developed. According to an employability guide for students and graduates:

There are plenty of career opportunities for philosophy graduates, but often in roles that bear no obvious relation to the study of philosophy, so you need to be able to demonstrate sound personal transferable skills, which employers value…think about the general skills you are developing, like the ability to think logically, analyse critically, and communicate articulately and accurately, both orally and in writing. You’re also learning reasoning skills and the ability to formulate and address problems creatively. (HEAPRS, 2009)

However,  we need to be wary of adopting the overly narrow perspective of ‘transferrable skills’ because it carries the implication that certain skills can be picked up through the study of any discipline and entails the devaluation of particularity. Surely what we really want to know is: ‘What is special about philosophy?’

One answer may come from work on philosophy for children (P4C). From the point of view of skills development in children, participation in philosophical enquiry has been found to significantly enhance cognitive ability, reasoning skills and social skills (Trickey,2007; Trickey & Topping, 2004). However, it is not so much the subject matter of philosophy which appears to produce these educational gains, rather, it is the manner in which the subject matter is approached; through participation in a community of inquiry (Lipmann, 2003; Fisher 2003).

But while research on P4C serves the philosopher’s aim in terms of illustrating the benefits of studying the subject (at least when it is studied in a particular manner), this simply seems to buy into the useful/useless debate and thus amounts to an endorsement of the instrumentalist conception of a university education. Is there another way? In my 2nd post, I will examine one such possibility.

References

BIS (2012) Following Up the Wilson Review of Business-University Engagement

Collini, S (2012) What Are Universities For? London; Penguin

Fisher, R (2003) Teaching Thinking: Philosophical Enquiry in the Classroom (Second Edition), London; Continuum

Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Philosophical & Religious Studies(HEAPRS) (2009) http://prs.heacademy.ac.uk/publications/emp_guide_for_web.pdf

Lipman, M (2003) Thinking in Education (Second Edition), Cambridge; Cambridge University Press

Plato (1993) Republic Translated by Waterfield, R, Oxford; Oxford University Press

Trickey, S (2007) Promoting Social and Cognitive Development in Schools: An Evaluation of ‘Thinking Through Philosophy’ http://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/021/vol1/026/?ecp2107026.pdf

S. Trickey & K. J. Topping (2004): ‘Philosophy for children’: a systematic review, Research Papers in Education, 19:3, 365-380

The Daily Telegraph (2012a)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationpicturegalleries/9661015/How-useful-was-your-degree-subject-in-finding-a-job.html

The Daily Telegraph (2012b) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/9415613/Graduate-jobs-Top-10-degree-subjects-for-getting-a-job.html#?frame=2282929

Yorke, M (2006) cited in Pegg, A, Waldock, J, Hendy-Isaac, S & Lawton, R (2012) Pedagogy for Employability, York; HEA

Delusion: doxasticity, rationality and normativity

This week, doctoral researcher Rachel Gunn examines the nature of delusions. 

If a subject says they believe something then I am inclined to take this at face value.  The subject usually has other mundane unexamined beliefs (e.g.: I believe that when I turn a tap on water comes out) as well as examined beliefs or opinions (e.g.: I believe that liberal democracy is the best political system).  Against this background of other beliefs it does not seem appropriate to ‘second guess’ the subject about his own experience.  Not everyone would agree with this and some would argue that delusions do not meet the criteria for beliefs as they are irrational, do not necessarily affect behaviour and do not cohere with other beliefs.

Some propose that a delusional subject fails to monitor an imagining as being self-generated (the subject is in some sense not the agent of the imagining).  This mental activity is then mislabelled (representationally) as a belief and somehow ‘given’ as true.  So the delusional person has a thought with content P.  He does not believe P.  He imagines P.  And he believes that he believes P.  In this case some delusions are imaginings with a strong feeling of subjective conviction (Currie and Jureidini, 2001).  This is an intriguing way of describing some delusions and might help us explain why some subjects do not seek to integrate their delusions into their lives or to act on them (we do not routinely act on our imaginings).  However, there are problems here – the most obvious being that there are many examples of people acting on their delusions and integrating them into elaborate belief networks that pervade the rest of their lives - for example, the person who believes he is a millionaire, a general and a senior psychiatrist who regularly phones the bank to check on his millions, attempts to arrange to inspect local military bases and applies for a job as a chief executive of a hospital (Bentall, 2004, pp.295–6). 

The other problem arises from establishing how this characterisation of delusion differs from non-delusional subjects who are ‘believers’.  Our normal propositional attitudes can be manifest as beliefs, which we may not act on, which may not be integrated into the rest of our beliefs and which may also be irrational.  For example I might say that I believe smoking kills people and I do not want to die sooner than necessary yet I continue to smoke.  This series of un-integrated beliefs might include an unexamined belief (or sub-clinical delusion) that I am special and the detrimental effect of smoking will somehow not have an impact on me.  If questioned about it I would probably concede that the (weakly held) belief that I am special is not true, yet I am unlikely to change my behaviour.  Further, one could successfully argue that my behaviour and my thinking in this case is irrational but it is unlikely that one would question the belief status of my statement about smoking.  Some say that delusions are non-doxastic acceptances that do not meet relevant rationality standards (Frankish, 2012) – and here I would have to question what is meant by ‘relevant rationality standards.’  Ideal (normative) rationality is not consistent in human beings and therefore one cannot deny the doxastic nature of delusions simply because they are sometimes irrational (for supporters of this position see Bayne and Pacherie, 2005; Bortolotti, 2010). 

Whilst it might be true that some delusions are not beliefs this does not alter the fact that our ordinary conceptualisation of beliefs sometimes seem to have the same external characteristics as the phenomenon that Currie and Jureidini describe as imaginings mistaken as beliefs and that Frankish describes as non-doxastic acceptances.  Of course, as we are unable to consistently and accurately define or describe beliefs or imaginings, I cannot say more about it here - perhaps beliefs, acceptances and imaginings are complex overlapping forms of mental activity.  For more on delusion see the imperfect cognitions blog.

Other (non-electronic) references:

Bentall, R.P. (2004) Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature. London: Penguin

Bortolotti, L. (2010) Delusions and other irrational beliefs. International perspectives in philosophy and psychiatry. Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press

Philosophy of Mind and Psychology Reading Group -- Hohwy Replies to Siegel

I am posting this on behalf of Jakob Hohwy, author the book we are currently discussing, The Predictive Mind (OUP 2013). It is a reply to Susanna Siegel's post on chapter 3.

Jakob Hohwy

Thanks to Susanna for this set of really nice, and challenging, questions. I’ll try to address them here. I do hope others might have insights to share on some of these issues!

First question: What are proper grounds for low confidence in a signal?

The signal can buck the trend in different ways. Importantly, a signal can change such that even if it has the same mean, it loses precision (e.g., a sound becomes blurry). This bucks a precision trend. This is sufficient for decreasing the trust in the signal. This is a reasonable response (and is seen in the ventriloquist effect). We build up expectations that deal with such state-dependent changes in uncertainty. Sometimes we will appeal to higher-level, slower regularities that interact with the low level expectations in question (my headphones are running out of battery, that’s why the sound has become blurry). This will often help in a particular case, but might not (I might rather learn I have developed otosclerosis, or I might need to adjust to new levels of irreducible noise). But if I do rely on the battery hypothesis then I down-grade the trust in the current signal. A similar story can be told for a change in mean, as when the location of the sound-source seems to change. Here I might appeal to an expectation about interfering causes that push the sound-source around. But if I assume the sound shifts due to some kind of echo chamber, then I’d be justified in trusting the signal less. The underlying story here is that the brain in the long run will end up apportioning noise to the right sources, and thus being able to make the right decision about any given signal.