This Be The Verse
BY PHILIP LARKIN

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

I'm familiar with the, let's face it, abstract argument. I know the analogies.

But you want to tell typical folks considering having a child that they ought not, that to do so would be wrong. What will you say?

Won't they promise to do everything they can to protect their child from harm until they're able to protect themselves? Do they have to provide you an absolute guarantee that the child will never suffer so much as a skinned knee or an afternoon's boredom or a broken heart?

If that's your approach, I don't think you'll be taken seriously. Are you actually interested in convincing anyone not to have children?

Around the edges, I'm not sure what to say. Cruelty is dead center, certainly. And there is a sort of genuine and committed callousness that's practically cruelty -- I don't know because I don't care, doesn't matter to me if I hurt someone. And there's every degree of indifference from there down to perhaps blameless lack of knowledge. Even the judgment of whether you "should have known better" will vary a bit, maybe sometimes a lot. For instance, a lot of white folks are pretty stupid about race, but if you get out in the world or see the news much at all, you don't have much excuse for that ignorance.

So parents are somewhere in here, right?

Most people don't think having children is wrong because they don't think having a child hurts anyone. In fact, that's pretty clear from the exceptions, I'd think: if you worry that your family can't support a child, or that you may be incapable of taking care of one, you may think it would be wrong to have one, or others may think that about you, and similarly if your community or your country is poor, or in the middle of a civil war, etc., then it might be common to think that having a child is not in itself wrong, but wrong given the circumstances.

I think those sorts of judgments might even be pretty common: that wonderful couple is having a child, hurray; that awful couple is having a child, I feel sorry for that kid; and so on.

Take just an average couple, let's say decent people, and with the resources to raise a child; as far as they're concerned, and the people that know them, there is nothing in their circumstances that would make having a child wrong. No guarantees -- maybe both parents will die in a car crash and the children will be miserably orphaned. Since that's not the sort of thing anyone can foresee, no one would blame them for having children even if that's what lies in the future. That's very far out on the rim from callous indifference, and way past "you should have known". No one knows the future.

I mean, if people are going to say, "We shouldn't have kids" or "They shouldn't have kids", they're going to want something specific, something concrete to support such a claim. Poverty, illness, civil war, "you're a whore and your husband's a drunk" -- something specific.

So what do you have in a typical case like this? What do you know that they don't?

It's not about your intentions, but about consequences. — Srap Tasmaner

Maybe I shouldn't have made this sound like such a sharp dichotomy.

We can all agree on "Don't be cruel" -- don't deliberately hurt people when you know exactly what you're doing, what the results will be, and you don't have to -- but we'd probably also all agree an even better rule would be "Don't be cruel or callous": we want people to pay attention, to be aware of how their actions affect others. Even if you lack the specific intention of hurting someone, being indifferent to whether you're hurting them is also pretty bad. We have general expectations, that you will know the sorts of things most people know, that you will recognize when you're hurting someone.

That's not purely about your intentions or purely about the consequences of your actions, so there's some middle ground available, and where I'd figure a lot of us land.

This is about the parents then, right? When you say, "a violation has occurred", you mean someone has violated this principle. They hurt someone when they could have avoided hurting them; they could just choose not to be parents.

To be clear though, having a child is not generally a malicious act. The parents-to-be don't intend to hurt anyone by having a child, certainly not their offspring-to-be. There may be horrifying exceptions, but generally not, right? They may even think they're doing something good, and in particular doing something good for the future offspring.

Of course people can do evil believing they're doing good, no question. On your view, people who have children and think it's a good or at least an unobjectionable thing to do fall into this category, yes?

The principle, then, will not excuse someone for performing a harmful act they didn't have to just because they didn't intend the harm that results, right? It's not about your intentions, but about consequences. Is that right?

I'm sorry, the English there seems a little garbled.

Do you mean something like, "Don't hurt people if you don't have to" -- where "have to" is a pretty high bar to clear -- or maybe just "Don't hurt people if you can avoid it"?

A violation of what?

You're not going to answer the question?

Before I was born, did I have a right not to be born?

FWIW, it's a pattern than anti-natalism passes right by.

Of course. I wasn't suggesting absolute rules -- there are all sorts of things to take into account in a specific situation. Still, there's a pattern to at least part of what makes an action praiseworthy or blameworthy. Not claiming anything more than that.

Oh sure, neither of us is saying anything out of the ordinary. I'm just struck by how specifically the terms match up. There's a scale on each side (self and other): doing good for another at no cost to yourself is good, but even better at great cost to yourself, and vice versa, and the more good or harm on each side, the stronger our judgment of the morality of the act. Not a big deal, but interesting.

Okay, cool.

Curiously, we find the reverse of your scenarios particularly praiseworthy: that is, risking harm to yourself or knowingly sacrificing your own well-being in order to benefit someone else.

What do we make of all this?

All the examples I gave are actually nearby: delayed gratification is precisely a case of present-time you accepting something negative to benefit future you.

We must not have the same things in mind because examples are infinite. I didn't enjoy being a young-ish hyper-stressed broke father and husband, but the joy my kids bring me more than makes up for it. Most adults who enjoy playing the piano didn't enjoy practicing scales. I hear BUD/S sucks big-time but many find being a Navy SEAL rewarding.

What are you talking about?

I find that we never use joys to trump considerations of suffering irl — khaled

?!

I find that we do this all the time. Dunno what you're talking about here.

Everything you say is obviously true.

However, @khaled (before his conversion) argued specifically from this uncertainty: not knowing means you are taking a risk with another person and you have no right to; @schopenhauer1 seems to hold a position that, even if we knew for a fact that life is always and only pure bliss, it is a violation of that person's dignity (or perhaps "autonomy") to force them to lead such a blissful existence without so much as a "by your leave".

I'm with you: this whole "summing up" of a life is a bizarre and pointless approach. But even granting that, anti-natalism claims to be, as it were, defending someone's rights, albeit in the strangest way imaginable. That's a whole different confusion.

However, not bringing a new person into the world is preventing wholesale all suffering for that person. — schopenhauer1

Can you present this argument in different terms somehow? When you put it like this, it makes it sound like this person benefits by not existing, but of course that's not the case and I know you don't think that.

On the other hand, you've made a point in this thread of rejecting approaches that aggregate "happiness" or "fulfillment", so I'm not sure how you could phrase this to avoid attributing something to a non-existent referent, while at the same time avoiding aggregation (something like, "not adding to the net suffering of the world's sentient beings").

Expressing your position in terms of tenseless indicatives is not only misleading, it's unnatural: there should be a future tense in here somewhere, or a subjunctive. ("If you have a child, they will suffer." "If I hadn't been born, I wouldn't be suffering." "If you were to bring a new a person into the world, they would suffer.")

But of course then you would have to describe a possible future world that includes the hypothetical person, and they would then hypothetically have exactly the same standing as everyone else, the same rights and duties, the same potential for good to their fellows or evil, the same potential to be helped or harmed. In describing that world, it's not clear why one person is singled out for special consideration above all others.

As Witt says, "back to the rough ground!" — Luke

It's a funny thing that LW's other really salient metaphor for what he's up to is seeking a "bird's eye view" -- that puts you not only not on the rough ground but not on the ground at all! Perhaps this is his "stereoscopic vision", I don't know. It's odd though.

A couple months ago I had an exchange with @Andrew M in which I made a somewhat fanciful use of the rough ground vs. ice thing, suggesting that one way of doing philosophy is to make glass-soled boots that will glide all the way across a frozen pond with one push. Of course you can't actually use them for anything, but you can pretend you've demonstrated the perfect boot.

I have felt very strongly the pull of formal systems (as LW did), of logic and game theory and the rest. I have admired the perfection of many a glass-soled boot. But I have come to suspect that the desire to formalize philosophy is a desire not to think, but instead to build a machine that simply spits out the answers.

LW, like Derrida, offers a sort of internal critique of the project: Derrida repeatedly shows that every self-described "complete" system has swept something under the rug, something it needs to work but pretends isn't there; Wittgenstein talks about things like "following a rule", which you can't formalize in rules on pain of regress, and then he asks how it is possible that we clearly can follow a rule or fail to despite the lack of definitive criteria. To answer that question, you need the bird's eye view, but therein lies temptation: it is from such heights that we perceive structure, human civilization laid out before us like a circuit board in all its logical perfection, the territory reduced to a map.

But a map is also a tool. There are good maps and bad, useful and misleading, and how you use the map, how you modify it, update it and improve it -- none of that is on the map. A map is such an extraordinary thing! It would be a mistake to regret their invention. But it would also be a mistake to think that exploration is not required for making good maps, or to think that having drawn the map you've actually been everywhere you want to go.

I consider this a particular kind of structuralism. — Joshs

I think that's largely right.

One thing I'd emphasize is how one of the quintessential moves of OLP works: if X were true then it would make sense to say Y. This is a particular way of showing how no concept stands alone, and thus cannot be analyzed on its own, but is always part of a constellation. That constellation consists not just of other concepts, but of what we say, what we do, what we think, and what we feel. You can see this sort of thing clearly in Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment" -- we talk about an action having been done freely or not in particular ways, and we have particular emotional responses that are intimately related to that somewhat abstract characterization, the "moral sentiments". "Did she do that of her own free will?" is a concrete question, addressed by ordinary people everyday with considerable subtlety, and with real stakes.

It is very nearly philosophy as, at least in large part, a sort of anthropology. (Austin dreamed of having teams of researchers doing field-work.)

But what of the normative claims of philosophy -- that this is the right way to think, not that, or that this is the right way to act, or organize a society, or evaluate a work of art? LW famously claimed that philosophy leaves everything as it is, that it has nothing special to contribute. By and large, I think that stands as a reasonable rebuke to the absurd hubris of philosophers, as if no one knew anything until they finally came along to tell everyone what they really think, as opposed to what they think they think, and what they should think. Never listen to anyone who wants to tell you about your metaphysical presuppositions.

But I think we can say this much: philosophy doesn't come along to add a normative dimension to our lives -- it's already there, and available for philosophy to participate in just as people do ordinarily. Philosophy doesn't stand outside or above life in judgment, but by the same token philosophy can make just the same sort of normative claims as non-philosophers do everyday.

One could say that the terms of ordinariness are whatever allows for an alignment of moving parts that creates agreement, shared practice , normativiity. — Joshs

I think that's close -- but I'd resist seeing this as some sort of frozen structure. Normativity is not a feature that emerges from the existence of a complete and closed system describable in terms of rules and criteria and so on. Normativity is in play. People act and judge each other's actions, react to them emotionally, dispute not only whether an action was just but what justice is. Examining and modifying the rules as you go is part of the game, so philosophy cannot be in the business of figuring out what The Rules are. If structuralism has pretensions to explain people's behavior by reference to some fixed "underlying" system (economic, cultural, psychological, what have you), that's obviously not what you'll get from any of these folks.

It used to be in first person, now it's in third person. — fdrake

I have the same thing with dreams, and it's my impression that during the dream, I flip between first and third person often.

I have had the thought that you can almost see the construction of self in this phenomenon, as if something is inferring there "needs to be" a subject for the experience and then making one.

what John Locke later in the 1800s explained in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding — Mapping the Medium

?

Things like “P(X | Y)” are often phrased as “the probability of X given Y”, but that means the same thing as “the probability that X is true if Y is true” or “the probability that if Y is true then X is true” or “the probability that Y implies X”. “X given Y” = “X if Y” = “if Y then X” = “X implies Y”. It’s all the same thing. Just wrap a “the probability that” around any of those and you have what “P(X | Y)” means. — Pfhorrest

We shall see that there is no way to interpret a conditional connective so that, with sufficient generality, the probabilities of conditionals will equal the appropriate conditional probabilities. — David Lewis

The bar in ‘pr(H | D)’ is not a connective that turns pairs H, D of propositions into new, conditional propositions, H if D. — Richard Jeffrey

Maybe you're right, @Pfhorrest; but maybe Lewis and Jeffrey are right. Don't care.

The problem is how is there a conscious experience at all? We have detectors that can discriminate light and sound, yet they're not conscious. When we examine our brains, no consciousness is found there. It's not like some neural pattern is colored red. — Marchesk

Surely you didn't expect my eyes to be conscious, or my brain for that matter; I'm the one who's conscious, at least much of the time. What is it you're not seeing that you expected to? Do none of my parts look like they're part of a sometimes conscious creature? Why not? What do they look like?

if that perspective is is coloring in the world, adding sound, taste, smell and various feels, then we're still left with something that needs to be explained — Marchesk

But what are we supposed to be adding color to? A little paint-by-number picture in our minds? Even if we did such a thing, how would we see it? The "mind's eye" is a metaphor, not an organ.

Maybe it's no help, but I would rather start by saying that we see a world of colored things because that's how we see, and other animals must see quite differently because they have very different organs of sight. Since color is admittedly relational, what can it mean to say that the world lacks color until we daub it on? Is the intent just to say that other animals, or people with atypical eyes our brains, see differently? Color is neither out there nor not out there; color is an aspect of how you see or it isn't.

I find this slightly puzzling to think about, but I don't care, because I know that my brain always only presents objects to my awareness colored, and there's no way for me to see around my own corner. This simply is what seeing is for me. For me to have an experience of seeing-things-colored, I'd have to have something to compare it to, and I can't. That's why it makes sense to me to deny that I'm experiencing color sensations or whatever -- I don't see how I could do that, but I do know that I can see and when I do there's always color.

I don't doubt I've once again phrased some of this poorly; it is genuinely awkward to talk about, but I'm not convinced there's philosophical hay to make of that awkwardness.

If your use of "probable" isn't formal, you're not going to be "calculating" anything.

Bayes' rule allows for your confidence, or your subjective degree of belief, to increase given new evidence. You allow change only in the sense that some alternatives are no longer viable, but the surviving theory still has exactly the same status it had before. If that's a Bayesian view of evidence, it's one I'm not familiar with.

Anyway, look into or don't. It's your project, not mine.

I said exactly that in the OP, and have referred back to or requoted it many times since. — Pfhorrest

You really didn't, and if you had said it you'd be wrong. Conditional probability is a whole different animal from material implication, and no adding of "probably" changes that, as David Lewis showed, like, forty years ago.

That's why I keep saying you have to choose between the logico-deductive model and the Bayesian model. You don't think you have to choose, but you're wrong.

Point being that we increase our faith in the model the more it fails to be falsified, without it ever being proven true. And this is not because we have falsified particular known competitors, and certainly not because we've falsified ~Higgs, but because we have narrowed down what a competitor theory can predict that is different to the Higgs model. One doesn't actually have to formulate the competitor theory to falsify it: it is sufficient to know that, as each data point is collected that is consistent with Higgs theory, so long as no data point is collected that rules it out, whatever potential competitor theories might be formulated are either falsified or equally consistent with the data do far, i.e. are *like* the Higgs theory to an increasing extent. — Kenosha Kid

I already tried exactly this line of argument (beginning here and here). It won't work.

As far as I can tell, nothing will budge @Pfhorrest from his position. Nor should anything, in a sense, since the principles in play are not themselves falsifiable. That's irony or necessity, as you like, I suppose.

Personally, I think classical logic is just too primitive a tool here: material implication is not a good model for causation or for the relation between a theory and a prediction of that theory. Conditional probability is a better fit for both, and if you take a Bayesian approach you still get falsification as a special case, while picking up a reasonable treatment of confirmation.

*

But, hey, you do you, @Pfhorrest. It looks more and more like you're not getting the kind of feedback you wanted, and endlessly defending your fundamental principles has become tiresome for you, which is certainly understandable. (Some people are here precisely in order to have the same argument over and over again and prefer saying exactly the same thing over and over again, so we had no way of knowing you weren't one of those.) Is there an earlier post that makes it clearer what sort of feedback would be more useful to you?

Absolutely, and I want to say your use of "shiny" is not coincidental.

Let's call a concept (method, habit, algorithm, whatever) robust if it is improved by use, and a concept (etc.) brittle if it breaks when you try to use it. In between would be concepts that are "okay", adequate within a quite limited domain perhaps, but not leading past themselves much.

Considering the material to use a tool on, or its field of application, I find myself reminded of Wittgenstein's remark about ice: because conditions are, in one sense, "perfect", no progress is possible -- back to the rough ground!

Now imagine a hiking boot with a glass sole: you can "demonstrate" how remarkable it is by sending the unoccupied boot all the way across the frozen pond with one push. This is one way of doing philosophy.

That's a demonstration of something, but not of something anyone really needs. Back to the rough ground, and to tools that will improve with use on rough ground, and that means no glass-soled boots.

Where's the concept of "redness" in all of that? It's nowhere to be found because it's not necessary in order to do all of those things. It's not even necessary in order to explain all of those things. — creativesoul

Yes it is. A crow cannot be trained to collect red things without some crow equivalent of a concept of redness. There is a phenomenological similarity that the crow must grasp in order to do this. For two phenomena to be similar, they must share properties. — Kenosha Kid

Not to derail the discussion, but I think what you're discussing here is Sellars' distinction between "pattern governed behavior" and "rule obeying behavior"; see "Some Reflections on Language Games". Roughly, the former is a matter of conditioning, standard learning processes, etc., while the latter relies on a meta-level recognition of something having the status of a rule that authorizes inference.

(This is not the same as but next-door to Ryle's observation in The Concept of Mind, also taking chess as the prime example: he imagines a researcher observing a game of chess and afterward commiserating with the players about how their every move was "determined" by the rules, and Ryle explains the difference between "determined by" and "in accordance with".)

(Btw, I'm not offering to defend Sellars here, as any Sellars I read more than an hour ago tends to be less clear to me than I'd like, but it's an extraordinary paper and worth reading.)

It's asking whether the red ball is red in the way it looks red to us. — Marchesk

Paul Grice tells a story about a college at Oxford offering a position to a young man who unfortunately owned a dog, and dogs were forbidden, so the fellowship committee "deemed" the dog a cat.

It's a question of framework: within one framework, the animal is "really" a dog, and within another it is "really" a cat.

If you ask whether a ball is really red outside all frameworks, then you ensure that the question cannot be answered.

Or do you expect an answer within a framework that includes "red" but nothing about how things look to human beings? What framework would that be?

As someone with nominalist inclinations, I still find this charming, right down to the note of pragmatism:

My taste is for keeping open house for all sorts of conditions of entities, just so long as when they come in they help with the housework. Provided that I can see them work, and provided that they are not detected in illicit logical behaviour (within which I do not include a certain degree of indeterminacy, not even of numerical indeterminacy), I do not find them queer or mysterious at all…. To fangle a new ontological Marxism, they work therefore they exist, even though only some, perhaps those who come on the recommendation of some form of transcendental argument, may qualify for the specially favoured status of entia realissima. To exclude honest working entities seems to me like metaphysical snobbery, a reluctance to be seen in the company of any but the best objects. — Paul Grice

Not everyone who reads this site posts, or even if they do, they don't participate in every conversation. Thus one of the points of posting is to explain to lurkers the alternative you offer. An excellent model for this is @Andrew M, who has been patiently, succinctly, and graciously explaining his worldview to the rest of us for years. Search up any of his posts explaining hylomorphism and you'll find a model for how to be on this forum among people who either disagree with you or, more often, don't even know about or understand the alternative on offer.

Is the cat really black, or is it reddish? — Marchesk

I'm no expert on color, but I think there are ways of asking this question that make sense. For instance, I heard an explanation once of the difference between the reds we observe in nature and the blues and greens: the reds are produced by actual pigments, whereas the blues and greens are not, they are a sort of a side effect of the molecular structure, more like a filter than a pigment. (Not inserting wikipedia links. We all know how to google.) You might say the same sort of thing about the purplish sheen of a blackbird's wing or, I think, of the various colors that play across the carapace of some beetles, where the effect is produced by translucence or refraction and so on. Thus you might say that green leaves are not green in the same way that the red berries next to them are red. And that's interesting. It's next door to finding out that giant pandas are not bears in the now standard sense of the word "bear", because there's a clear sense in which that bear isn't really a bear.

But there's a general, philosophical way of asking, is that red ball really red? You might as well also ask, is that red ball really a ball? I don't see much hope for sense there.

Suppose Steve and I are watching a high-stakes poker tournament, and Steve tells me that one of the players has a tell, but it takes a stopwatch to "see" it: whenever they raise after thinking less time than the last player to bet, they're bluffing. I'm doubtful, so we test his theory as we watch, and it works just the way he said: always bluffing when raising and quicker, never bluffing when not raising or slower.

That's certainly a falsifiable theory. Shouldn't I have greater confidence in it now? Steve thinks so: "We watched twelve hands and I was right every single time." What theory was Steve's competing with? There were no other theories. The null hypothesis? That's just another way of saying that observations can be confirmatory.

I think of that passage more often than almost anything else I've ever read.

Another Austin gem:

One might almost say that oversimplification is the occupational hazard of a philosophy, if it were not the occupation.

I think the word "appears" is one of those potential traps. It takes on a life of its own in philosophy! — Andrew M

Sellars went through all this in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" too: "looks" talk, as in "the apple looks red to Andrew", is logically posterior to "is" talk. There's no way even to make sense of it otherwise. What does it mean to say that an apple looks red except that it looks like it is red?

Cases where it looks like confirmationism is working, like you keep giving, are cases where it’s falsification doing all the heavy lifting. — Pfhorrest

To do what though?

Again, what about quantum mechanics and evolution? Neither body of theory is entirely satisfactory to much of anyone, but the fundamentals are the most confirmed scientific theories we have ever had, and that seems to matter to scientists an awful lot.

Should it?

at the cost of sticking our necks out and make assumptions without adequate justification, which could therefore be wrong — Pfhorrest

Hmm. But for you, beliefs can't have and don't need justification. You describe things here as if relying on a theory incurs a risk because we overstep what we actually know, we project beyond what we have adequate justification for.

But isn't that all belief? Isn't all our knowledge only probable? Or are there beliefs you will countenance treating as certain? Is relying on theory truly different? Or is it the same because we are always relying on some theory without adequate justification?

So to you the only value of GR was in making a prediction that, if observed, would allow us to rule out Newtonian mechanics, and that observation did nothing to confirm GR, or nothing we should care about, nothing we should allow to increase our confidence in GR. In particular, the explanatory framework that comes along with GR, responsible for the prediction, that's of no interest.

So assigning a theory the status of "falsified" or "not-yet-falsified" is not the only way to make progress.

good guess Einstein! — Pfhorrest

You're being cute -- "guess" is wildly inappropriate and if your approach steadfastly refuses to see the difference between a guess and a real theory, what's the point of any of this?

Every observation we make will constrain our future theorizing, whether the observation was predicted or not, whether it falsified any existing theory or not. If progress is only a matter of constraining the range of theories that might be true, all we really need are the observations and no theories at all. But no one does research that way and it is doubtful anyone could. Why is that? One reason to bother with theory is to know what kinds of observations there are, which should count as the same kind of thing -- so not really adding constraints, or not much -- and which are genuinely different, and especially which would be surprising.