What is a Cause? (Part 1) The Counterfactual Approach

Tweet

This post is part of my series on Steve Sloman's book Causal Models. For an index, see here.

Over the next two posts I will run through the concepts introduced and discussed in Chapter 3 of the book. The chapter offers a very basic counterfactual definition of causation and then mentions some problems with this definition. 

To some extent the chapter is little more than a gentle warm-up, preparing the reader for the more detailed model of causation that follows in Chapters 4 and 5. That said, it offers a reasonably succinct introduction to some classic issues in the philosophy of causation.

Part One will set out the main features of the counterfactual definition; Part Two will cover the problem cases.

1. Event-Event Causation

Sloman begins by noting that the most common vocabulary of causation is that of event-event causation. In other words, in talking about causation most people are talking about how one event or state of affairs (smoking cigarettes) leads to another event or state of affairs (addiction or cancer).

There are more exotic forms of causation discussed in the literature. Perhaps most famously there is the notion of agent-causation. The idea here is that agents (or persons or souls if you like) cause events in a unique way. This idea is popular among some in the free will debate.

My own feeling is that there is no coherent concept of agent-causation, but one would need to swim through a sea of philosophical verbiage to make the point. There is no point in doing that here.

2. Experiments: Identifying Causes

After that brief introduction, Sloman moves on to consider how we identify causation. He does by noting the first law of psychology: correlation is not causation.

A correlational study merely identifies when two variables happen to go together. In this sense, a correlational study is merely descriptive: it has no deeper explanatory significance.

For example, a correlational study might find that those possessing two X chromosomes are more likely to have long hair. Does this mean that having two X chromosomes causes long-hairedness, or vice versa? Of course not, the fact that long-hair and two X chromosomes go together is likely the result of some third factor (cultural norms).

To work out whether one event causes another we need to do more than describe events; we need to perform an experiment.

The simplest form of experiment deals with two variables: an independent variable (IV) and the dependent variable (DV). We will have some hunch that there is a causal link between the IV and the DV. The goal of the experiment is to see whether this hunch is correct.

In the experiment, the value of the IV is manipulated and the change in the value of the DV is recorded. If the manipulation of the IV consistently results in a variation of the DV, we can infer a causal link. Although we should always be cautious in making such inferences. 

To give an example, suppose we wish to know whether punishing our children (e.g. taking away pocket money and/or grounding them) changes their behaviour. To do this we need to vary the amount of punishment and record the resulting changes (if any) in the behaviour.

Of course, good experimental design is more complicated than this example suggests. As Sloman notes, a good experiment must do two things:

1. It must use a manipulation technique that is precise. In other words, it must make sure that other potential causes are not being manipulated at the same time.
2. It must use the right statistical tools to detect the effect. In particular, it must ensure that the difference in the value of the DV is not due to random chance.

3. Counterfactual Dependence

One important feature of the experimental method is its ability to compare two or more possible worlds. In one world the value of the IV and the DV are at one level, and in another world they are at a different level.

This is crucial because the most popular definition of causation is counterfactual in nature. So to infer causation, it is not enough to just say that one event follows or precedes another. You must also be able to say that, in another world, if the first event had not occurred then neither would the second. This is known as counterfactual dependence and is illustrated (poorly) below.

To sum up: a causal statement is not a mere description of the actual world; it is a statement about two (or more) possible worlds simultaneously.

That's enough for now. In the next post we will deal with one classic problem facing the counterfactual definition of causation.

Causal Models by Steve Sloman (Index)

Tweet

Some exciting work has been done in the philosophy of causation over the past 20 or so years. Most of it coming from cognitive and computer scientists. They have developed some sophisticated tools for constructing causal models.

The apotheosis of this effort is probably manifested in the work of Judea Pearl. However, Pearl's work is not for the faint-hearted. 

Steve Sloman's book Causal Models: How People think about the World and its Alternatives offers a more manageable introduction to some of the key ideas. It is also of interest to me because it covers some of the psychological research on how people reason about causality.

I've decided to go through Sloman's discussion of the basic elements of causal modeling. The discussion is found in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 of his book.

Chapter 3: What is a Cause?

• Part 1 - The Counterfactual Approach
• Part 2 - Crossing the Desert

Chapter 4: Causal Models

Chapter 5: Observation v. Action

Expanding my Repertoire

Tweet

I've decided to expand the purview of this blog somewhat. To justify taking the time out to write it, I need to include more of the material that I actually research.

So you can expect more posts on topics in the philosophy and psychology of normative behaviour, causation and game theory. This will also include some material on the psychology of religion. If that interests you, stay tuned.

Must Goodness be Independent of God? (Part 3): Alston and the Divine Metre Stick

Tweet

This post is part of my series on Wes Morriston's discussions of theistic morality. For an index, see here.

I am currently taking a look at an article by Wes entitled "Must there be a Standard of Moral Goodness Apart from God?". This article looks at the attempts of William Lane Craig and William Alston to rescue divine command morality from the horns of the Euthyphro dilemma.

Part one introduced the whole Euthyphro debate. Part two covered Craig's solution to the dilemma. It was found to be lacking. In this part we will consider Alston's solution. It will also be found to be lacking.

1. The Supervenience Relationship

Alston's solution to the Euthyphro relies on the concept of supervenience. This is something that I have covered before on this blog. It is probably best explained here with an analogy.

Consider a painting. It has different sets of properties. Its pigmental properties are determined by the precise distribution of pigment across the canvas; its aesthetic properties depend on the pigmental properties but not necessarily in a causal or logical manner. They are said to supervene on the pigmental properties. Any change in the aesthetic properties must result in a change in the pigmental properties.

Alston envisages something like this when it comes to God and the Good. For him, God's commands are an expression of His perfect goodness.* And his perfect goodness is something that supervenes upon his attributes. 

According to Alston's picture, God's existence is not merely incidental to the existence of morality. His existence is necessary for the supervenience relationship to hold. No God, no morals.

This is illustrated below.

To this point, Alston's solution sounds suspiciously similar to Craig's. Both seem to be singling out a set of properties as the basis for morality and in doing so their positions seem to reduce to Moral Platonism. Alston tries to avoid this interpretation with an analogy.

2. The Metre Stick Analogy

Alston suggests that there are two distinct kinds of predicate: Platonistic and particularistic. The former predicates are defined in terms of a set of necessary and sufficient conditions; the latter in terms of similarity to a paradigm.

An example of Platonistic predicate would be triangle. A triangle has a precise geometrical definition. Indeed, the definition is so precise that no existing object, no matter how triangular it appears to be, is actually a triangle. 

By way of contrast, an example of a particularistic predicate would be metre. This is a unit of measurement that defined in terms of similarity to a paradigmatic object. According to popular misconception, this object is a platinum-iridium bar in Paris (Morriston points out that this is no longer true).

So now we reach the punchline: the property of goodness is to God as the property of being a metre is to the platinum-iridium bar. Consequently, to say something is good is to highlight its similarity to God.

In this way, Alston hopes to escape Platonism. But does he escape the Euthyphro dilemma?

3. An Unfortunate Analogy? 

Recall, that the other horn of the Euthyphro is represented by the Ockhamist. According to the Ockhamist, God's commands are good for no other reason than that they are God's. This is thought to make morality arbitrary.


Is Alston's position simply a disguised form of Ockhamism? It would seem so. He claims that God plays the part of moral metre-stick, but what is it about God that justifies his choice for that role?


Alston has two responses to this.


i. The Significance of Particularism
First, he argues that the objection doesn't imbibe the full importance of the Platonist/particularist distinction. If one is going to charge his account with arbitrariness, one may as well ask: what singles out the platinum-iridium bar for the special status of metre-hood? The answer is nothing. Particularist properties simply don't work that way.


But this is, of course, a bizarre answer. The metre is an arbitrarily-chosen unit of measurement. We only use it because we need some agreed-upon unit of measurement. To pick God as the moral metre-stick simply because we need some standard of morality would make a mockery of moral thought.


Alston is aware of this, so he sometimes falls back on the idea that God's "maximality" is what makes him a non-arbitrary moral metre-stick. But this seems to be a reversion to Platonism: it is now maximal love, maximal kindness etc. that are doing all the work.


ii. The Arbitrariness of Platonism
Alston's second response comes in the shape of a riposte to the Platonist. He argues that his invocation of God as the supreme moral principle is no worse than the Platonist's invocation of some abstract property. Explanations have to come to an end somewhere and for Alston that somewhere is God.


This is all well and good. It may well be that explanatory stopping points are always metaphysically arbitrary. But that leaves us with a pragmatic question: is God more useful than a Platonic standard?


It would seem unlikely that he is (these observations are largely my own, although somewhat influenced by what Morriston says).


First of all, we frequently use Platonic properties - e.g. trianglehood - for pragmatic reasons without labouring under the misapprehension that triangles actually exist in the physical world.


We could do something similar in morality by appealing to an ideal observer and using him/her when making moral calculations. This observer is somewhat analogous to God, but no one thinks he/she actually exists. In fact, many secular theories of morality already do this.

Second, we may actually end up in a worse position if we appeal to God. After all, to make the appeal worthwhile, we would need epistemic access to unambiguous divine commands. Such access is sorely lacking.



4. Divine Sovereignty
I'm skipping a large part of Morriston's discussion on the truth conditions of particularistic predicates. I feel that it is too technical for a blog entry. Instead, I will close out this series by summarising what he has to say about divine sovereignty.


One reason that theist's cling to divine command theory is that they want morality to be "up to God"; to preserve divine sovereignty. That is what Alston and Craig's solutions to the Euthyphro were designed to do.


Morriston thinks that even if Alston and Craig's theories were successful, they would not preserve the notion of divine sovereignty.


Think about it: if God's nature is responsible for the existence of moral properties (in a particularist or Platonic way), then he would still not be able to exercise control over what those moral properties are.


Craig and Alston admit as much: their answer to the Ockhamist horn of the Euthyphro is that God's commands are not arbitrary because they are constrained by his nature.


This is similar to someone who might argue that logical and mathematical truths owe their existence to God's existence. Even if they are right, it would seem odd to say that God literally wills the validity of the modus ponens.


If this is right, then a divine command theory of morality would always be superfluous.

* It should be noted that Alston does not defend a divine command theory. He offers his solution to those who might wish to defend such a theory.

Must Goodness be Independent of God? (Part 2): Craig on God's Nature

Tweet

This post is part of my series on Wes Morriston's discussions of theistic morality. For an index, see here.

I am currently taking a look at an article by Wes entitled "Must there be a Standard of Moral Goodness Apart from God?". This article looks at the attempts of William Lane Craig and William Alston to rescue divine command morality from the horns of the Euthyphro dilemma.

Part One covered some background material: it looked at what most people want from a moral theory; what theists want from a moral theory; and the dilemma facing theistic morality. As we saw, any theistic theory of morality has to sidestep two unwelcome interpretations.

According to the Ockhamist interpretation, God creates morality through his commands and we must obey them. Why we should obey them is unclear.

According to the Platonist interpretation, God is simply a moral expert who has perfect knowledge of an independent existing realm of moral truths. This interpretation would make God metaphysically unnecessary for morality.

In this Part we will look at Craig's attempt to avoid those unwelcome interpretations. This post is short because Craig's attempt blends into Alston's attempt after a careful reading (at least, that seems to be Wes's take on it).


1. The Divine Nature
Craig's answer to the Euthyphro is disarming in its simplicity. God's commands, he tells us,* flow directly from his moral nature. Morality is expressed to us in the form of commands, but it is wrong to say that these commands are whimsical or capricious: they necessarily reflect the divine moral nature. This nature consists in lovingness, generosity, justice, kindness and so on.

I suspect that there may be theological inconsistencies within this account: how can God be free and omnipotent if his commands are necessarily dictated by his moral nature? I have heard lawyers advance similar claims about criminals. But these theological difficulties are irrelevant to this discussion.

The real question is why is it that the properties of love, generosity, justice and kindness are good? How does Craig avoid moral platonism? Morriston says:

Craig's answer would appear to be that these qualities are good because they are united in God's nature. There is no standard of goodness apart from God. God's moral nature -- his character as we might say -- plays the role of the "Good" in Plato's Republic. It, and nothing else is the true Ultimate."

2. What is a Divine Nature?
The cogency of Craig's solution starts to unravel as soon as we consider what it means to have a "nature". A person's nature is a set of properties that they are imbued with and possess in every possible world. So to say that God has a moral nature is to say that he possesses a set of properties in every possible world.

This leads to what we might call Craig's Dilemma. If Craig is simply identifying the Good with a set of properties that God happens to possess, then God is not the source of morality. It is the properties he possesses that perform this function. And anyone who had these properties would be good, irregardless of God's existence.

This lands us back in the Platonic waters Craig was trying to rescue us from.

One potential solution to Craig's dilemma is the doctrine of divine simplicity. Adhering to the tenets of this doctrine, we would have to say that God's nature is singular and indivisible and thus not distinct from his being. On this doctrine, it is wrong to say that the property of goodness stands over-and-above God.

However, it is not clear that divine simplicity can provide a source of morality. After all, the moral properties beloved by Craig (love, generosity, kindness, and justice) are not simple. They would seem to require a God with part-whole distinctions.

If we want to find some way to yoke God's existence to the existence of morality we would be better off considering Alston's argument.

Funnily enough, that's exactly what we'll be doing in part 3.




* Morriston's discussion of Craig's views is based on the following paper:
"The Indispensability of Theological Meta-Ethical Foundations for Morality"

Must Goodness be Independent of God? (Part 1): Solving the Euthyphro

Tweet

This post is part of my series on Wes Morriston's discussions of theistic morality. For an index, see here.

Over the next few entries I will be taking a look at that the following article:

"Must There be a Standard of Moral Goodness Apart from God? (2001) 3 Philosophia Christi 127-138.

In this article, Wes sets his sights on the attempts of William Lane Craig and William Alston to rescue theistic morality from the horns of the Euthyphro dilemma. As we shall see, Alston's attempt is more worthy of consideration than Craig's, but neither is quite successful.

In this introductory post, I will sketch the playing field in which this discussion takes place. The playing field consists of three basic questions.


1. What do we want from a Moral Theory?
Moral prescriptions are ubiquitous. I suspect that no one gets through life without being told that some actions are morally obligatory, some are morally permissible, and some are morally impermissible. And I suspect, further, that no one gets through life without passing on this message to others.

But what are these moral prescriptions really? Are they the inane effusions of people who like to control others? Are they projections of our own predilections and biases? Do they have any deeper ontological grounding?

Most people would like it if morality had some deep ontological grounding. Indeed, if one examines most moral debates, one will usually discover that two things are demanded of moral prescriptions:

1. Objectivity: they should be independent of our subjective biases and whims. All rational observers should be able to agree on the content of these moral prescriptions, just like all rational observers must agree that the earth is round.
2. Practical Motivation: our awareness of their existence should be enough to motivate us to follow them. After all, what good is a morality that no one obeys?

The question is whether any theory of morality can actually give us what we want? Theists think they have the answer.

2. What do Theists want from a Moral Theory?

Theists argue that God - the all-powerful, immaterial, personal creator of the universe - can provide our moral prescriptions with the deep ontological grounding we desire.

In particular, they argue that God's commands, which form the basis of our moral prescriptions, can pass the objective and motivational tests outlined above. After all, God's commands are clearly independent of our subjective whims and we should also be motivated to follow these commands. (Why? Well let's leave that to the side for now.)

Some theists would like to go a bit further with this. They would like to be able to say that morality is, in some sense, impossible without God and that God is sovereign over the domain of morality. Why would they like to do this? Simple: so they can use this as the basis for an argument for the existence of God.

These arguments will usually work from the "undeniable", "incontrovertible" existence of moral values, to the existence of God. A good example is William Lane Craig's moral argument. It runs as follows:

• (1) If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
• (2) Objective moral values and duties do exist.
• (3) Therefore, God exists.

Could arguments like Craig's actually succeed? Well, that brings us to the third question.

3. Can Theists get what they want from a Moral Theory?

There is an infamous dilemma facing all divine command theories of morality. It is the Euthyphro dilemma, from the eponymously-titled Platonic dialogue.

Simply put, this dilemma asks the following questions: why are God's commands the source of morality? Is because they reflect some standard of moral goodness independent of God, or do they become good because they are God's commands? 

There are two standard answers to this dilemma. We can call them the Ockhamist and the Platonist answers, respectively.

According to the Ockhamist, God's commands are good simply in virtue of the fact that he commands them. This is troubling because God is supposed to be omnipotent and could command anything: murder, rape, genocide, you name it.

And if he did issue such commands we would seem to have no reason to obey them. In other words, the Ockhamist answer fails the practical motivation test outlined above. Prudential reasons for following God's commands could be advanced -- eternal life anyone? -- but in advancing them we would be abandoning the idea that there are moral reasons to follow God's commands.

According to the Platonist, God's commands are good because they reflect some standard of goodness that is independent of his will. This is troubling for the theist because it sets up the possibility of having a morality that does not depend on God.

To see this possibility, we need to realise that for the Platonist the realm of moral goodness is wholly distinct from God. God, thanks to his omniscience, might have perfect knowledge of this realm and so might be able to communicate moral truths to his creation. But this would mean, at best, that God is pragmatically necessary for morality, not that he is metaphysically necessary.

These two positions are illustrated below.

4. Alston and Craig to the Rescue

The Euthyphro raises a significant problem for the defender of theistic morality. Either they accept the arbitrariness and lack of motivational mojo that is implied by the Ockhamist, or they accept the divine irrelevance that is implied by the Platonist.

Either/or options like this are always philosophically circumspect. It could easily be the case that the Euthyphro is setting up a false dichotomy. Is there be a third option that does not impale itself on either horn of the dilemma?

Some theistic philosophers think there is and it is these philosophers that are addressed in Morriston's article. In particular, he takes a look at the arguments of Craig and Alston. 

Both men try to collapse the two horns of the Euthyphro dilemma back into the being of God. They maintain that God's commands are good because (a) his attributes/nature is essentially good and (b) his existence is necessary for those attributes to come into existence.

We will look at Craig's argument in part 2 and Alston's in part 3.

Hume on Morality (Part 2): Hume's Moral Psychology

Tweet

This post is part of my series on Hume's moral philosophy. The series works from the article "The Foundations of Morality in Hume's Treatise" by David Fate Norton in the Cambridge Companion to Hume. For an index, see here.

In part 1, we took a quick look at some of the contemporary views on moral philosophy that would have influenced Hume. We concluded by looking at the views of Francis Hutcheson. Hutcheson claimed that all humans have an innate moral sense that allows them to identify and distinguish between virtue and vice. He clarified this by saying that the properties of virtue and vice were not produced by the moral sense; rather, they were real observer-independent properties.

Hume diverges from Hutcheson on this point. He argues that moral properties are entirely the creation of the moral sense. The remainder of this series will explore how Hume reaches this conclusion and what this entails.

In this part we will follow Hume as he takes the first steps towards his completed moral theory. These first steps signal Hume's break with the tradition that preceded him.


1. The Cartography of the Mind
Like all things Humean, we must begin with a excessively brief summary of Hume's psychological theory. Although Hume was an empiricist, and so thought that knowledge came from experience, his empiricism was undergirded with a theory describing the mechanics of thought.

Very roughly, Hume felt that all mental events could ultimately be made to fit into two categories: ideas and impressions. The impressions are the immediate and vivid products of sensory experience (although they can also arise spontaneously through reflection), they include the passions and the emotions.

The ideas are the feeble copies of these original impressions. They encompass the abstract, theoretical and conceptual categories that haunt the annals of philosophy. They were the playthings of the rationalist philosophers that Hume abjured.

This mental cartography forms the bedrock of Hume's philosophical programme.

2. Contra Rationalism
For the rationalists, moral distinctions came from the relations of ideas (Reason). For example, Clarke and Shaftesbury (whose views were covered in part 1) constructed elaborate theoretical frameworks for understanding the natural world. According to such theories, each organism had a natural place in the world, and it was from these natural places that they derived their moral worth.

Hume offered three objections to the rationalist position:

1. Reason cannot motivate action; passion and emotion can. Reason can tell us how things work or how to obtain something we desire, but it cannot tell us what to desire. Morality is primarily a matter of motivation, so morality cannot be based on reason. It would be difficult to understate the importance of this argument to moral philosophy.
2. Reason usually divides the world up into mutually exclusive, but jointly exhaustive categories. This implies that good and bad are wholly separate. But moral judgments frequently admit of degrees. This suggests that they are a product of the passions, which can come in different strengths without being all-or-none.
3. If the rationalists were right, virtue and vice would supervene upon the abstract relations of concepts. This would detach morality from many of the messy details and distinctions of the real world. For example, rationalists might hold that "killing is wrong", thereby equating an abstract state of affairs (killing) with certain moral properties. But reality shows that this abstract description admits of numerous exceptions and equivocations.

3. Moral Sentiments
Implicit in Hume's rejection of rationalism is his endorsement of the idea that moral judgment is a product of the sentiments. In making this endorsement, Hume introduces considerable nuance into our account of the moral sentiments.

Working from his own mental cartography, Hume argues that moral judgment must arise from impressions. More precisely, they arise not from immediate sensation but from feeling. Actions that we call virtuous produce an agreeable feeling (or pleasure) in those who see them; actions that we call vicious produce a disagreeable feeling (or pain).

Hume is quick to point out that not all pleasures and pains are morally relevant, only a unique subset form the basis of our moral judgments. This unique subset consists of approbation and disapprobation, and they are only provoked when we consider the actions of human agents.

More interestingly, Hume argues that the moral sentiments are only felt when we abstract away from our personal circumstances and take a disinterested perspective on human action. For example, the valor and courage of our enemies may cause us pain, but those qualities can still be thought morally virtuous.

Okay, that's it for now. In the next part we will take a more detailed look at Hume's taxonomy of the virtues.