Modesty is a Contagious Blindspot

Canadian Journal of Philosophy · 2025-12-29

Abstract I am modest about my spelling accuracy. Oops, I cannot consistently believe that! Modesty about my spelling entails I underestimate my spelling. If I indeed underestimate my spelling accuracy, then my ignorance about spelling accuracy is contagious. For if I believe you and I are equals at spelling, then my modesty commits me to underestimating your spelling. In addition to my ignorance of my merit spreading to my ignorance of your merit, my ignorance can make you ignorant. After all, how do you know that I am modest rather than accurate? In general, any modesty I possess robs my peers.

Time traveler confirms five minute hypothesis!

Synthese · 2024-07-31

Abstract Conclusion: What matters for any norm is personal time rather than time. Personal time is a time-like relation (roughly, the time measured by your wristwatch) that knits together scattered temporal parts so that they conform to familiar patterns. David Lewis introduced personal time as an interpretive fiction that allows readers to consistently read fictions about time travelers. Inadvertently, Lewis thereby introduced a metric for all value (including prudence, morality, and aesthetics). Premise: The application of any norm requires personal time rather than time. This principle of reasoning is illustrated by recent debate about Bertrand Russell’s 5 minute hypothesis. This skeptical hypothesis would be undercut if one needs more than 5 minutes to reason about it. But what reasoners actually require is personal time. Once its priority over time is established for the norms governing reasoning, all remaining norms synchronize to personal time. Re-writing diachronic epistemology in Lewis’ atemporal vocabulary salvages much of what is literally true – and exposes the primacy of causation.

The Fatalist Is the Most Extreme Extremist

2024-02-07 · 1 citations

A moral extremist hollows out a spectrum of options. An extreme extremist leaves a single ‘choice’. The most extreme extremist is the logical fatalist. He maintains there is exactly one possible world. There are no alternatives to what actually happens. The Stoics concluded there is no room for regret, anger, or fear of death. After the Stoics, fatalists continued to deduce other extreme consequences. But fatalists have yet to be extreme enough. To drive fatalism to its logical conclusion for ethics, I show how ‘There is only possible world’ triggers deontic logic into delivering a consistent and complete morality. Despite the absence of any moral premise, fatalism manages to be the most demanding morality. It is also the most practical of moralities. For fatalism ensures that you will meet all your obligations.

Fichte’s world of wordless lies

Inquiry · 2024-06-19

Catholics condemn Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) as a fanatic; he fails to cushion ‘Never lie' with a distinction between venial and mortal sin. But Kant has secular substitutes: lie/mislead, candor/honesty, commission/omission, deception/illusion, discursive/pictorial. Kant weaves these distinctions into a safety net for polite society, business, politics, and religion. Kant's break-away disciple, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) removes this safety net. Any intentional propagation of error suffices for lying. Ditto for refraining to correct a remedial error. Why? Because we all have a duty to perfect each other. This moral development requires rational informed choice. Being misinformed subverts freedom. The medium of misinformation is irrelevant: utterances, silences, pictures, music, dance, private thoughts, telepathy. To Fichte's relief, Kant overcame the temptation to save an innocent man from murder by lying. But Fichte still thought Kant manifested a corrupt mind by merely considering lying!

Nonspecific perjury

Jurisprudence · 2024-03-04

Since 1970, a United States prosecutor can prove perjury without specifying which statement is perjurious. A bold prosecutor could concede ignorance of which statement is false. A bolder prosecutor could further concede that the witness himself does not know. The boldest prosecutor could concede there is no specific lie. Instead of there being a statement that is intrinsically perjurious, the perjury is relational. Just as two statements can be inconsistent without either being inconsistent, two statements can be perjurious without either being perjurious. These consequences are reconciled with the generalisation that all perjury involves lying. Corollaries about culpability are drawn from the phenomenon of nonspecific perjury. The reasoning is generalised to other forms of illegal lying.

How to lie to God: Kant's Thomistic turn

European Journal of Philosophy · 2024-05-08

Abstract For most of his career, Kant accepts Augustine's requirement that lying requires an intention to deceive. However, he eventually converts to Aquinas, following him in rejecting this requirement in favor of Aristotle's teleological conception of lying. This change of view amounts to an improvement, for it makes room for the possibility of lying to an omniscient being—and such lies, we argue, are indeed possible. We accompany these historical and philosophical theses with a biographical thesis taking the form of the following story. Kant believed that in his youth he had lied to God, largely because of his religious training. He adopted policies designed to help him resist the habit of lying to God. However, this program conflicted with his desire to lead a well‐rounded life as a public intellectual. This worldly ambition led him to forego the Quaker solution to the problem of lying to God: refuse to swear any oath to God, avoid set prayers and hymns, decline offers of intercession by clergy. Kant's worldly compromise served him well, but as he entered his twilight years, he came to worry that his only surviving argument for theism—the moral argument—might constitute a relapse into the vice of lying to God.

Overbooking: Permissible when and only when scaled up

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research · 2023-06-18 · 2 citations

Abstract Bumped from a flight? Relax with this defense of the big business practice of deliberately promising more services than one will provide. On a small scale, over‐promising yields a toxic moral dilemma and a lie. At a large scale, the dilemma becomes dilute, and the lie completely disappears. Overbooking is honest because there is a sufficiently high probability of fulfilling each promise. Overbooking is socially beneficial because the promised resources are used more efficiently. There are fewer wasted seats on jumbo jets and hence cheaper tickets with less pollution. Widespread disapproval of overbooking is a fallacious scaling error. Instead of there being too much overbooking, there is too little.

CAGE16-7 Cruise Report: Deployment of observatories and water column survey in the Barents Sea and offshore Svalbard

CAGE – Centre for Arctic Gas Hydrate Environment and Climate Report Series · 2023-01-24

The cruise was conducted from October 16th to 25th 2016 as part of the Centre of Excellence for Arctic Gas Hydrate, Environment and Climate (CAGE) at UiT – The Arctic University of Norway. The main goal of the cruise was to deploy two observatories in the pingo-crater area (“Yin Yang”) in the Barents Sea, and offshore Svalbard at the same location where OS2 was deployed in June 2015 and recovered in May 2016. The exact targeted location was determined according to multibeam analysis in order to deploy in the vicinity of bubble streams. The previously K-Landers called OS1 (black) and OS2 (grey) are now called K-Lander 1 and K-Lander 2. They contain a CH4 sensor, a CO2 sensor, a CTD, a pH meter, and a hydrophone. K-Lander 1 contains in addition a DVS (Doppler volume sampler) as the broken ADCP did not arrive on time for the deployment. K-Lander 2 contains in addition an ADCP, a transmissometer (for turbidity measurement) and an M3 (Multibeam echosounder). The present cruise also aimed at investigating an area of extensive flares western Svalbard, particularly the shallow shelf and shelf edge. The addressed scientific topics include quantification of methane concentration in the water column, temperature and salinity (via CTD casts), echosounder and multibeam signals and current (amplitude and direction) The cruise may be known as: CAGE16_7

Destigmatizing the Exegetical Attribution of Lies: The Case of Kant

Pacific philosophical quarterly · 2023 · 3 citations

• Political Science
• Philosophy
• Epistemology

Abstract Charitable interpreters of David Hume set aside his sprinkles of piety. Better to read him as lying than as clumsily inconsistent. We argue that the attribution of lies can pay dividends in historical scholarship no matter how strongly the theorist condemns lying. Accordingly, we show that our approach works even with one of the strongest condemners of lying: Immanuel Kant. We argue that Kant lied in his scholarly work and even in the first Critique . And we defend the claim that this lie attribution, strange as it may sound, amounts to a kind of scholarly charity.

Kant and the king: Lying promises, conventional implicature, and hypocrisy

Ratio · 2023-08-21 · 2 citations

Abstract Immanuel Kant promised, ‘as Your Majesty's loyal subject’, to abstain from all public lectures about religion. All past commentators agree this phrase permitted Kant to return to the topic after the King died. But it is not part of the ‘at‐issue content’. Consequently, ‘as Your Majesty's loyal subject’ is no more an escape clause than the corresponding phrase in ‘I guarantee, as your devoted fan, that these guitar strings will not break’. Just as the guarantee stands regardless of whether the guarantor ceases to be your devoted fan, the compliance conditions of Kant's promise are not affected by Kant's ceasing to be the king's loyal subject. For good or ill, Kant made a lying promise to King Friedrich Wilhelm II in 1794.