2014-2015 Lecture Series

[00:00:00] JAY WALLACE:
Okay. I, yes, I’m, I’m Jay Wallace, and, um, it’s my pleasure to welcome you to, uh, day two of this year’s, um, Berkeley Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Uh, we’re very honored to have, uh, Professor Philip and Pettit, uh, Philip Pettit in, uh, in town this week for these lectures on the birth of ethics.

Uh, those of you who were here yesterday, which is probably most of you, know that Philip has left us in great suspense at the end of yesterday’s lecture. Uh, we’ve, we’ve been hanging out in Erewhon, and we’ve got all kinds of complicated practices and activities, but ethics hasn’t yet appeared, and, uh, we’re all eager to hear how we move, um, from commitment to responsibility, which is the title of, uh, Philip’s lecture today. So, Philip.

[00:00:50] PHILIP PETTIT:
Thank you, Jay. It was a good note on which to end yesterday was sort of a high note, but it’s a terrible note on which to begin today. It c- it can only be an anticlimax.

Um, okay, so yesterday, we were talking about Erewhon. I take over that name from the nineteenth century novel. Nowhere is spelled backwards, where you’ve got a community of people who’ve got a basic competence in language.

They have conventional, overtly used, intentionally used signs. um, and they, um, but they use these beginning stages solely to communicate, to report information about their surroundings. We talked– there are two sorts of excuses with the report they could use: that they, uh, were misleading, the data were misleading, or that the data changed since they actually made the report.

And then we talked about how they can communicate, will be interested in communicating because of the commitment to, uh, the good of mutual reliance. They’ll want, uh, to be able to rely on others, and they’ll want o– to be able to get others to rely on them. And in order to, uh, to do that, they have to prove reliable themselves in making their reports.

But they can, if they give a misreport, get off the hook by either of these two excuses. However, being interested in mutual reliance, they have to communicate about their own attitudes, the beliefs they have, the desires they have. And what we saw is that they, with the basic resources I’ve talked about, would have access to the means of, as I put it, avowing their beliefs and their desires and pledging their intentions, where avowing means that you are communicating, that you have the belief or that you have the desire.

I’ll be focusing today on desire, um, in a way that forecloses one of those two excuses that a report would allow. You can’t say, having avowed a belief or a desire that, not proving then, to live up to it, uh, you can’t say, “Gosh,” I must have gotten it wrong.” If you avow it, you stand with it.

The only excuse is you may have changed your mind since you gave the avowal between then and when you actually acted. And then with the pledge, the pledging of an intention, you actually rule out the second excuse or cooperation-saving explanation as well. So you can’t even give the, uh, the changed mind, the changed data, so to speak, excuse.

And then I introduced finally the notion of co-avowal and said that that’s endemic in the notion of conversation as analyzed a la Stalnaker. So we have these, this community, uh, this report of community, Erewhon, by this series of, of adjustments, um, under the desire to achieve mutual reliance, um, this community has moved to beyond mere reporting to making these avowals and these pledges of their attitudes. And now what I want to try to argue today, uh, and I have to say it’s still an uphill struggle, we’re not going down the other side, it’s not all planes sailing from here.

Uh, what I want to argue today is that in the world that these people now can be thought of as occupying, and so far, they have no normative notions that I’ve introduced. Um, but in this world, uh, normative notions are going to very readily come to hand, come to mind, going to be used by them so that they will break into, as people sometimes say, normative space, and in particular into ethical space, with notions of right and wrong coming on stream, and notions of being responsible, uh, for acting rightly or acting wrongly and holding one another responsible. So two sides to today’s discussion, one focusing on the notion of rightness and wrongness.

I’ll just stick with rightness, and the other focusing on responsibility or holding responsible. Okay, so the analogy I gave to the, this sort of, what do you call it, a genealogical sort of emergence story, this exercise, uh, was with the economist story about money. That doesn’t tell you the actual history of money, but tells you how money could have evolved.

And when you see how it could have evolved from a barter society by individually intelligible mutual adjustments and the byproducts aggregatively of those adjustments, then you sort of see there’s something mysterious about money. If it could have emerged in that way, in a, after all, a nearby possible world, because it’s not all that different, even if it’s not historically accurate from the actual world, then that really takes the mystery out of money. The argument, the idea here is that if we can tell a similar sort of as if story, uh, provided it’s fairly plausible, i.e., the world is nearby, broadly speaking, then we’ll have demystified, uh, ethics to a certain extent.

That’s the project. I don’t for a moment think that I will bring you to your knees at the conclusion with, “Yes,

(laughter)

we’ve got there.” But I hope that this sort of project is at least interesting and that this is, this is my attempt at an initial foray in the, in the area. Okay.

With the money case, remember, in order to do that story about money, you had to have a conception of money, a sort of definition of money. And in particular, you had to see that money, what counts as money has to be a, a medium of exchange, a way of storing wealth, and also a metric of value, as in you can value things in terms of money. And when we– when I sketched to you that standard der-derivation of money, uh, the gold, for example, that was acting as the cherished and the preferred good, uh, it was actually serving as a met– a medium of exchange, a metric of value, and a means of storing wealth.

And that’s why I thought, “Yes, okay, that’s exactly that,” that, that would be close enough at least to what we me-mean by money, And that’s why we demystified it in showing how it would emerge. In order to have that similar story about ethics, we need a conception of rightness on the one hand and responsibility on the other in order to indicate, so to speak, the profile that, say, in the case of rightness, it ought to meet. If I’m going to persuade you that this community would push towards a point where a concept of the right would be a natural sort of resting place for them, we have to have some idea of what was going to count as a concept of the right.

So initially, let me just make a couple of remarks on, uh, on that. And unfortunately, on this issue, um, I realize I made a mistake. No, not a huge mistake, but I did make a mistake.

Uh, let me just say I think of it as work in progress. I hope it’s progress, not regress, but in any case, there is one mistake which I’m now going to correct. So I said, first of all, of course, the word right is used in ordinary usage in two distinct senses.

One, the sense in which it means permissible, and the other, the sense in which it means imperative or mandatory. Um, put in terms of good and bad, the permissible is good enough, so to speak. The mandatory is what you have to do, presumably the best if you think the right calibrates with the good in that way, which you are not committed to thinking, nor am I committed to thinking for the purposes of this exercise.

However, I’m going to take right in the sense of imperative, not permissible. Okay, now, two things that are certainly, I think, constraints on any concept that is going to count as a concept of the right in that sense, uh, are constraints that indeed any concept that’s going to count as a concept of the desirable will have to satisfy too. And I take it that if you think of something as being right, you have to think of it as, at least in some respects, as desirable.

Um, I don’t think this, as it were, pushes you into consequentialism or anything from there, is an issue there, but I’m gonna push it aside. Okay, so here are the constraints. And the very concept of the right, um, pushes us to think, requires us to think that consistently with thinking that this is the right thing to do, thinking that the concept applies, it’s at least possible that that is not what you desire to do.

So the first constraint is that the right, more generally the desirable, can diverge from the actually desired. And that makes, I take it, straight common sense. The other constraint on rightness that is actually a constraint on any desirability concept is that When there is a divergence, um, there’s some sort of failure on the agent’s part if the right does not prevail over the desired, if the desirable does not prevail over the desired or the attractive.

So two constraints. One is that if it’s a, uh, there’s a possibility of divergence, the other is that if there is a divergence, then it’s the right that prevails unless there’s some sort of failure yet to be identified on the part of the agent. Okay, so those are two constraints that I think we look for in any concept that’s going to count like a candidate on the part of these people for a concept of the right.

Two other constraints that I have, and the mistake has to do with one constraint. Uh, one constraint is that I think the concept of the right should not be a relative concept, uh, in the sense that, um, depending on your point of view as an assessor, uh, what you think is right may not be what somebody else acting from another– assessing from another point of view thinks is right. Um, if it’s right from one point of view, it’s right from all points of view.

Another way of putting this, the truth value of the claim something is the right thing to do should not be relative to the standpoint of assessment. Now, in this university, John MacFarlane, above all others, has really done Trojan work in explaining to us that relativism is a semantically coherent doctrine, that there’s nothing incoherent about thinking that certain predicates, um, are relativistic, as we may put it. My assumption here is that rightness is not– right is not one of those predicates.

Uh, so judgments of rightness are not, um– they’re, they’re true or false from all points of view, uh, and not just there’s no variation in truth value between the different points of view. The other constraint I’d put on rightness here, as I put it, was that it should be age-neutral and that it should be non-indexical, uh, is how I said it here. That, uh, all those sort of, what right means in the mouth of one speaker should be the same thing as what it means in another speaker’s mouth.

Like I say, mine, this is mine, my watch. Well, mine in my mouth obviously predicates one property. It predicates of this watch, a different property from what, um, say Pamela might predicate of her watch, uh, where she should say, “This is mine.”

Mine in her mouth is a different content from what it has in mine. Uh, what I had put here was that the word right should not be indexical in that way. I actually think that this was a slip, um, a slip that some of you will say is intelligible given my consequentialist leanings.

Although let me just say, um, that, um, nothing I say here decides the issue between consequentialism and non-consequentialism or any such issue in normative ethics. That’s, that’s all left open, and in fact, that’s what I’d like to happen, that it should be left open. But instead of non-indexical here, what I think I should have said is non-idiosyncratic, because by some accounts of non-consequentialism, not going to expand on this, and to some it may seem a rather obscure remark, but by many accounts of non-consequentialism, it does take the concept of right to be an agent-relative concept, to be, I should say, an, an indexical concept like mine, so that right in my mouth can mean something different from what it might mean in Pamela’s mouth or anybody else’s mouth.

And I actually think that’s okay, provided that right isn’t a sort of idiosyncratic, uh, concept, so that, uh, there’s no saying, uh, by knowing somebody’s circumstances what is likely to be right for them, that it’s idiosyncratic as between people. Like take a concept like something is appealing. Well, it may be that appealing is an idiosyncratic concept.

Just by, uh, understanding what appealing is, uh, I may have no idea what’s appealing for person A or person B or person C, ’cause it depends so much on their tastes, and tastes are variable. And I want to say that right can’t be quite like that. It has to be–

It can’t be idiosyncratic like that. So that’s the second of the two pairs of constraints. Then the constraints, the desirability constraints, the right can diverge, but it should govern, as you might say, that i-in the case of divergence, there’s a failure in the agent’s part if he or she doesn’t go the way of rightness rather than the way of what’s actually attractive when there is divergence.

And the second pair of constraints, that the concept of right should be, uh, non-relativistic but also non-idiosyncratic in its application. Okay, so now let’s start on the,

(clears throat)

the attempt to, uh, to try to show you how the normative, uh, beco– is going to become salient for people who are involved with one another as we’ve described them being so involved yesterday. Just to recall the general picture, on that picture emerging as to the people in Erewhon, uh, these counterparts of us in this, uh, less evolved society, this conceptually so far deprived society, uh, the inhabitants of Erewhon, um, they have got deeply engaged with one another because of the desire for mutual reliance. They have got into the act of avowing desires and I’m going to concentrate on desires, avowing desires, indeed pledging intentions to one another.

So they’ve sort of spoken for themselves. Uh, they’ve presented themselves to one another as being reliably, uh, desiring of this, that, or the other, for example. Um, and I want to say, I’m going to argue, uh, over the next little while, that it’s that sort of, um, commitment to being a certain way from the point of view of the other, that actually introduces the normative for them.

As I realize that’s, that’s obscure, so let me take it a, a, a bit more slowly. Um, we saw in the last day that if I am to avow a desire, that means that I’m going to let you believe, assume, act on the basis of the assumption that I have that desire.

(cough)

And it means in particular, that I’m going to, if I can use the word, I invite you to rely, uh, to act as if I had the desire to rely on my having that desire, uh, to the point where if I fail to display it, it may be that I can persuade you that I really changed my mind between the time of the avowal and the failure to display it, but that apart, I cannot claim, I will not say I foreclose that explanation, that excuse. I cannot say, “Look, uh, I must have got it wrong when I said, you know, ‘I really want that,’ or when I said, ‘That’s really attractive,’ when I said, you know, uh, ‘all the properties stack up on this side.’ When I said that, I must have gotten my desire wrong.

I renounced that possibility. So I expose myself, so to speak, to, to you in a, a certain way. I put myself in your hands.

I will not use that excuse. You can rely on me. And of course, I do all of this consciously.

It’s not just that I won’t have that excuse. I’m backing myself not to need, uh, not, not to fail to display the desire. I’m betting on myself, and in that sense, I’m making a sort of game theory pre-commitment as I described it.

Okay, now we said in order for me to do that, to have the confidence to do that, to stand over a desire in that way, exposing myself to your, um, well, non-cooperation as it will be in the event of my not displaying this desire. And the question is, how could I ever know I have that desire, um, with sufficient confidence to be able to stand over it, avow it in that sense? And what I suggested was, we will be able to do it if we can find in relation to desire something that played, as we saw yesterday, the role of evidence in relation to belief.

That is to say, if we can find in relation to at least the desires we’re willing to avow, attractor properties, as I call them, properties that make their bearers a-attractive to me. If I can identify in the object of desire that I avow, if I c– find properties such that I can see, I can think, believe about those properties, that provided they remain there, they’re going to keep the desire existent in me. They’re going to keep it alive.

They’re going to sustain it. They’ve got to sustain it, you might put it robustly. That’s to say, not just now as I happen to be at this time of day with this particular sort of physiology or what I’ve just eaten.

No, no, these attractors, as I see them, eliciting the desire in me, I think of them as they would keep me fastened on that desire across a whole lot of variations, uh, in my beliefs perhaps, or variations in my temperament, or variations in the time of day or whatever it might be. And it’s because of seeing those attractors, as I say, giving the Molly Bloom yes to those attractors, you know, deferring to them as eliciting your desire, but not just contingently in this robust way. That’s the basis on which you can avow a desire.

But I also mentioned we were all aware, of course, that there are some factors that will often knock us off balance, that will stop us, so to speak, acting on the desires, displaying the desires, having the desires, as you might say, uh, like the, the whim or the impulse, the malaise of spirit that overcomes us. We’re all aware that these factors can knock us off balance. We also have a way of thinking about them that allows you and me, as theorists, to describe them, those factors, as disruptors because we, now we are Waltonians, think about those factors as follows.

They’re factors as we recognize that may cause me not to display or have the desire for a given moment, but they’re not factors such that when I’m asked, “How could you, you, you said you had this desire, you communicated, you avowed it, and you didn’t act on it.” Um, we can’t say, “Oh, that was a change of mind.” Of course, we could say that if a new attractor appeared in place, right?

And we stopped having the desire we had previously avowed, and you rebuked me, I can say, “Well, a new attractor came on place. I did change my mind.” But with these factors, the whim, the impulse, the yen, the malaise, uh, with these factors, you’re not disposed.

We Erewhonians, I say, are not going to be disposed to say we changed our mind. There are not factors like that, and for that reason they can be called now by us, the theorists, disruptors, so to speak, of the attractors and of the desire. Now, we have the confidence to avow a desire insofar as we can see attractors that robustly fasten us on the object of desire, where we also, um, are resolved or can, um, foresee that we can guard against those sorts of disruptors.

We can steel ourselves against them, put, you know, protections in place or whatever. And it’s only then when we are confident of the presence of the attractors and that we have a comprehensive view of the relevant attractors, and when we are disposed to guard against any disruptors, so the Molly Bloom yes to the attractors, the deferring through those attractors enables us to say to others, “This is what I desire.” Here is how you can take me to be.”

And no excuse about getting myself wrong if I should prove not to display it. This is the desire, so to speak, I stand by in my relationship with you. Now, and um, that is a– another way of saying that is that I know I have this desire not by scanning myself introspectively.

Oh, do I desire that? Don’t I? You know, closing your eyes and thinking about it or thinking about your behavior.

Of course, you might do that with somebody else, think about their behavior and wondering, do they have such and such a desire? No. In this case, you don’t know you have the desire sufficiently confidently to avow it by scanning yourself or introspecting your on your on your own state of mind.

You know it by very by the very fact that you make up your mind in that exercise of deferring to the attractors. That forms the desire in you. And in knowing what you do in deferring to the attractors and giving them Molly Bloom, yes, you know that you now are in that state of desire.

Okay, so that’s now, in a way, that’s still repeating some themes from yesterday, but now what I want to introduce is this. Um, Anything you, for which you’d avow a desire, then is going to have to be something that is available to be thought of by you as robustly attractive. It’s not just contingently attractive.

It’s attractive to you robustly, meaning across a whole range of possibilities. The possibilities where the attractors remain in place and where the disruptors have been silenced, but other things may vary in all sorts of ways. So you have this category pattern available to you to be thought of as the pattern of the robustly attractive from the point of view of an avower of desire.

Okay, but you also now have, um, you recognize that, of course, what’s robustly attractive to you, what you deem to be robustly attractive, what you avow a desire for, uh, may actually be something because of the presence of an attractor that gets in under the radar, you know, that you actually don’t manage to protect against, may actually be something that contingently you don’t find attractive. It just may happen that you’re not really moved by this. This you have avowed a desire, let’s say, for, you know, keeping, um, for being a vegetarian, let’s say, for own– for not eating meat.

But there you are, you know, this succulent piece of steak, I’m sorry to get too vivid, uh, appears before you and, and you dive in. You know, the impulse just takes over. And, uh, that’s a case where what’s robustly attractive for you by your lights is, um, is a vegetarian or a vegan diet or whatever, and, uh, you’ve just, it…

You found the contingently attractive just broke apart from the robustly attractive. Now, remember the two constraints we had associated with desirability. One is that what counts as desirable— I made this point in relation to rightness, which is a very specific category of the desirable— but what counts as desirable has to be something such that you may not actually desire it.

Now, notice about the robustly attractive. It’s something such that you may not actually desire it. Okay, now think Erwanian.

You’re an Erwan, right? You have a notion of these things are robustly attractive, but gee, I’m not desiring them. Okay, now go to the second constraint.

Is there a failure in you if you go with the contingently attractive rather than the robustly attractive? If, for example, you go to eat meat rather than stick to the vegetarian, uh, diet. Well, obviously there is, from the point of view of you as an avower.

As an avower, you stood over a self that you spoke for in presenting it to other people. Notice the second person point of view is really important here. You’re, you’re dealing with other people.

As a narrow one, you want mutual reliance, and this is the cost you pay, and you’ve presented yourself avowedly as someone with this desire, and invited them to rely on you as someone who will act on that desire. And here you are failing to display that desire, rather being taken by what’s just contingently attractive because of the presence of a disruptor, uh, rather than what is robustly attractive. Now, what I want to say, just thinking from within the point of view of the Erewhonian, uh, creatures, or, uh, we’re, we’re imagining.

From their point of view, the robustly attractive is now assuming the dimensions of a normative category. Um, of course, this is all relative to a practice, the practice of an avowal. And, uh, what’s happening is that if they’re going to practice an avowal, which I’ve argued they are going to invariably do, if they’re going to practice an avowal, that’s going to drive a distinction between what’s robustly attractive to them and what’s contingently attractive to them.

And this means that the category of the robustly attractive is going to be an available category for them. It’ll be there for them to give a name to. And the name they could give to it, I suggest to you, is the name of individually desirable.

This is what’s desirable, meaning ought to be desired, right? Why? Because the, it, there’s a failure on my part insofar as I go with what I contingently desire rather than what I robustly desire, And of course, they may diverge.

And so that’s exactly what it is for it to be a normative category of desirable. So just by this very fact, we’ve found already, as you might put it, and one normative category. Another way of putting this is that I said that the self associated with the, with your avowed desires, the desires you avow to other people.

That self is the self, as I said, that you speak for, um, not a self that you speak about as a third person might say, \”Well, he’s got all of these. He’s this way, that way, and so on. He changes moment by\u2014\” No, no, I, I want to stem that current when I avow desires, and I present myself to you with a certain, as it were, permanence.

as I speak for myself, and it’s that, there’s an old English word which I really like, bespoke. It’s that bespoke self, right, that you are holding up when you say, “It’s a failure on my part to have eaten the meat.” It’s a failure on my part to do something other than what I avowed, found avowedly attractive, other than that which I, um, treat as, uh, “robustly attractive.”

And, and so what’s happening is you’ve a normative perspective introduced insofar as you get into the relationship of avowal, and it’s the perspective of the bespoke self. There’s the contingent self, you know, who acts and whatever, uh, disruptors may be, you know, come in place, And then there’s the bespoke self, the self that you held up to others just by virtue of the act of avowal. And that bespoke self gives you a sort of idealized perspective on the actual self.

Many of you here will be familiar with Michael Smith’s work on, um, on desirability and the moral problem, where he sets it up in terms of an idealized self. Uh, it’s a self that is, uh– has full information and is theoretically unified and rational in various ways. And as Michael puts it, when we talk about something being desirable, this is– okay, let me say no more of it.

Desirable. What you’re saying is, this is what the idealized self would desire for you, the actual self, in these circumstances. Uh, that’s what it is to say it’s desirable.

I’m using the same sort of Smithian, uh, structure here, and I’m saying that there’s a bespoke self that comes into prominence just in virtue of relating to others in the manner you assume a relationship with them when you avow your desires. Uh, the bespoke self becomes a very prominent and salient sort of entity. And identifying with the bespoke self, you do see it as a failure that you actually ate the meat rather than stick with the vegetarian diet or whatever it might be, and that is simply to think in a normative way.

So these Erewhonians, I say, in the world they occupy, insofar as they get into the act of avowal, it’s going to display a pattern for them, uh, such that a natural word to ex- to express that pattern, to articulate that pattern, is to say, “I ought to, uh, “not eat meat,” for example, in this example.” “And, \”I ought to go with\”” the bespoke self. It’s going to give a source of oughts.

You might think of the oughts in question here as those that are individually desirable for me. Uh, those things that are supported by attractors that I give the Molly Bloom yes to. Of course, in this case, these attractors will include many neutral attractors, like you might be devoted to peace on Earth or a sustainable planet.

Um, but equally, they may, of course, include, uh, agent-relative attractors, properties like this will help me advance my projects, this will help my children, this will make sure that my record is– of promise keeping is good or whatever it might be. It may be a variety of properties, but the properties that, as where you take your stand on in assuming the identity of a bespoke self, um, those properties may be both agent-relative and agent-neutral. And when you identify something as individually desirable, uh, it may be on the basis of any one or any of a mix of those.

Now, I said in the last day I moved from avowal to co-avowal, and co-avowal is where I speak not just for myself. I don’t just avow, let’s stick with desire, a desire of my own, but I actually avow a desire that I think is shared by us in a particular group. Um, when I do this, uh, one way in which I might do it, which is very artificial, very special, is where you all, let’s suppose, have pre-authorized me in advance to speak for you.

Uh, so when I go and I speak to the example I gave yesterday, I may be representing you as a union or a faculty, members to the chancellor, and I say, “We want such and such,” right? If you’ve pre-authorized me, what that means is that, uh, you’re not going to say, “No, I didn’t. You know, I don’t want such and such.”

Y-you’ve authorized me to speak for what you want, right? In advance, so you’re not going to be open to saying that. Um, the other way in which, of course, uh, we can co-avow the views of, the— the views, the desires of others is by presuming that we know what they are, or by having a presumption about what they will come to be in the light of our saying what they are.

And we, um, um, as in the John Cleese example, we say, you know, uh, “The Romans have done nothing for us,” you know? And if nobody says anything, eh, you know, then nobody says, “What about the hospitals and the roads and so on?” If no one does that, then I’m taken to co-avow.

Uh, I, I’ve, I, I’ve, I’ve achieved a certain success in venturing this view as one shared, this desire as one shared across the group. Now, of course, there are two sorts of group. Well, there are two broadly two sorts of groups.

I just have to mention this quickly, um, because there are two sorts of conversation. Uh, one sort of conversation is where I speak for a particular group of maybe five people, um, and we want to get our group– our, our views together, maybe our desires together. Now, in a case like this, the membership is fixed, and as I venture an account of what we desire, uh, I’m going to have to be responsive to these, just these very five people.

And of course, I may have to say, and we may each accept, that we desire something that is much less than s- what some of us as individuals desire. And that’s one sort of group.

Another sort of group is a group where the membership isn’t fixed, but the core tenets are, core values, as you might put it, are fixed, like a religious group who– for whom A, B, and C are just non-negotiable. And now when I speak for this group, uh, I may dismiss someone as a member because they don’t go along with me, or others may dismiss him or her as a member because they don’t go along with the rest of us. Um, but we don’t allow movement on those cor-core tenets.

Both of these conversations are bounded conversations. The one is bounded by the membership, the other by the core tenets, the orthodoxy, so to speak. But there’s also unbounded conversation, which is a, a topic I think of relevance to other topics, uh, to other themes than that I’m discussing here.

And it’s the sort of conversation where neither membership nor ground is actually fixed. Neither membership nor core tenets is fixed. It’s when I, um, put forward a view, perhaps for your digestion to see if you agree, or maybe I’m writing it in a book, you know, for my readers.

Maybe I’m even writing for two hundred years’ time. Maybe I’m reading someone back there involved in a conversation with them, like Machiavelli enters his study to discourse with the ancients and enter gentle conversation with them, as he puts it. In this unbounded conversation, what you’re seeking to identify are presumably both, uh, matters of fact, matters of belief, and matters of desire, matters in particular of robust desire, that you think that anybody, um, could be led to sign off on because of the power of the attractors, for example, that support the desire.

Of course, when you avow that desire with an open-ended audience in mind, anyone can say, “Well, I disagree.” But if they’ve nothing to say, eh, you sort of put them aside as an interlocutor. If on the other hand, they say, “Well, here’s why, because you’re overlooking such and such an attractor,” or whatever, or, “The weight of these attractors against those,” well, then I’m likely to come back with a different avowal, or maybe they will avow on behalf of all of us something different to which I, which I con– with which I concur.

In e-either of these cases, what’s happening is the conversation is moving on, but it’s a conversation with an open edge. You know, it’s, it’s like what Dick Rorty used to talk about as a conversation of humanity. You know, sort of ongoing conversation, I think, in which we’re all involved in some ways.

Um, I think that also represents a sort of form of co-avowal. Now, what I want to say is just as the view from avowal is a view from within which patterns show up that have this normative character. The bespoke self, as I said.

Whenever you’re speaking for a group, be it the, um, bounded group or an unbounded group, uh, you’re obviously holding out, uh, something as attractive to us, to all of us, uh, on the basis of what you think of as co-attractors, attractor properties that are going to get a hold on everyone. Of course, this is always tentative, and it, the conversation advances, as I said yesterday, in terms of, you know, objection and revision and so on until we settle down around certain, uh, claims. But notice that with any group, be it a bounded or an unbounded group, um, when you are in that business of co-avowal, or co-accepting what others avow, because after all in the conversation, the avower identity has got to switch between members.

When you do that, uh, you– the notion of what’s robustly, well, you might say here, we-attractive. Uh, in the case of a value, simply as I was talking about earlier, we looked at what was robustly I-attractive. Attractive in terms of both the neutral and the agent-relative attractors that might, might actually operate with me.

When we’re looking at what’s we-attractive, of course, we have to put aside attractors that will only work for me. So for example, with any group, my son Rory, for example, His welfare matters a lot to me, but that attractor that it would help him out in various ways is not going to be an attractor that’s going to be relevant to any group, um, that we might form either of a bounded or an unbounded sort. So that’s not going to be relevant to the we attractive or the robustly we attractive.

But you can now see in the case of coeval, I’m going to do it very quickly, why the same structure might appear as we saw in the individual case of the robustly I attractive. With the robustly we attractive, there are going to be prospects or scenarios such that we each think, those of us who co-avow, those of us who co-accept in the group, there are going to be attractors, co-attractors, of which we think that, um, uh, they make things, um, attractive to us in such a way that we can each go along with this being an avowed desire of ours. We each recognize that, of course, we may be knocked off balance by factors that count in the way I described as disruptors, and maybe the same disruptors as before, like the malaise or the whim or the impulse, but equally disruptors of an interpersonal sort, like personal bias.

I just can’t get myself to go for this because it would hurt Rory’s career, for example, uh, I might say. That will be a case of bias, but these are going to be disruptors from the point of view that they’re robustly we-attractive. And now you can see the robustly we-attractive can come apart from the contingently we-attractive.

And from the point of view of any one of us, identifying with that group, be it the conversation of humanity or particular groups. From that point of view, I’m going to see the contingently we-attractive when it diverges as representing a path such that if I went that way, it would be a failure on my part. It would be a failure on my part qua someone who’s involved in forming a group and involved in this sort of conversation, um, this, uh, um, this adoption of a, a common standpoint with, uh, with others.

I talked about the bespoke self in the individual case, the self you stand with, but I think as members of groups, We also project a, in each case, a different sort of bespoke self. That’s the self you speak for as a member of, let’s say, a local group, the Make Barkley, Make Berkeley. Sorry, I’m Irish.

I learned to say Barkley very early on.

(laughter)

Uh, we, we might be members of the Make Berkeley Beautiful group, you know, it’s just concerned with beautifying and putting out our rubbish and, you know, keeping our houses, our gardens or wherever clear and, uh, uh, pummeling the local council to get rid of ugly spots and so on. Um, as members of that group, there are going to be things that are we attractive for us, and when any one of us as a member of that group fails because of either interpre– uh, you know, personal bias or one of these impulses, we have to see it as a failure in ourselves to live up to the identity ourself that we’ve spoken for in assuming, uh, that role within the, within the group. Um, and similarly, of course, if you think of yourself as belonging to a more impartial group, the unbounded group, um, then, uh, uh, for example, let’s say the, the good world group, you know, that looks for making the world a better place for humans and animals and, and everything.

Um, then from that point of view, uh, you’re obviously equally going to have a bespoke self with whom you identify and from whose point of view your contingent desires when they take you away from what you see from that point of view as robustly attractive are going to represent, so to speak, a downward path because it’s going to be a failure in you not to go with what you find robustly attractive. You might think of the– what we, um, as a member of the unbounded group, find we attractive, you might describe that as the commonly desirable, and you might describe for any, of course, we’ll be a member of many, many different contingent groups, um, we might think of that as the jointly desirable from within that group. But now to, to begin to wrap this up, uh, be– and to, um.

as some of you will certainly think, pull the rabbit out of the hat on the rightness front, um, let me just now point out, of course, one real problem that the Arwonians, we Arwonians, are going to meet as we find ourselves with these normative categories of the i- The individually desirable, the jointly desirable, the, um, commonly desirable, is that these are often going to be in conflict. Um, there are going to be choices where doing one thing is commonly desirable, doing another is individually desirable, doing yet another is, from the point of view of one or another particular group, jointly desirable.

And that’s going to, well, put us individually in a state of dissonance, but even worse from our point of view as people who are wanting to connect with others and establish mutual reliance, we’re going to be able to offer them no guide as to what to rely on us to do if we’ve got this plethora, as you might put it, of normative perspectives. And now what I want to say is that one obvious solution to that predicament in the Erewhonian society would be for them to have a category that is sort of the category of the hyper-robustly attractive, the category of, uh, where they think they ought to stand when these different partial normative standpoints actually clash with one another. Unless they have that, they’re going to be, I think, in a sort of quandary.

We can talk about that in greater detail perhaps in the Q&A or tomorrow, I hope. And, but to that extent, they’re going to want to introduce a category that will identify what you might call, we the theorists might call, the outright desirable. What’s desirable such that if you fail to go for it, if you disaster signal, it’s certainly, um, a failure on your part, but where you identify it not from any one point of view, like the point of view of the I or the point of view of any we, common or joint, um, it’s rather a

what’s desirable in light of all of those possible partial points of view, and it’s, as I say, what we would call outright desirable or perhaps desirable, all things considered, all standpoints taken into account. I want to say that’s going to be attractive from the point of view of each one of us in Erewhon because we now have a way of signaling to others what they can expect of us, as when we say, This is the right thing to do. That’s going to allow them, um, where there is conflict, neglect what is we attractive or we desirable from our point of view, or I desirable from our point of view, we have nailed our colors to the mast.

This is what it’s right to do. So from the point of view of each of us, it’s going to be a way of resolving an ambiguity in the expectations of others. And from the point of view of the society as a whole, it’s equally going to mean that with, with any other person, we can know where they stand, rather than finding ourselves bewildered by the different, uh, normative points of view they, uh, that we see that they occupy and that they may represent, even by using terms like this is individually desirable, this is commonly desirable, this is desirable from the point of view of the beautified Berkeley, uh, group or whatever.

We know where we stand because they can say: that this is the right thing to do in the case of this, uh, this sort of conflict. Now, that notion of rightness, if you allow me, uh, suggests that in this community it’s going to be a very natural thing to reach for. That’s obviously going to be a desirability concept.

There’ll be divergence, and there’ll be… where there is divergence, it’ll be a failure not to go with the right, else it doesn’t play its role. But, um, equally it’s going to be, if it’s gonna play its role, it’s got to be non-relativistic, and I would say it’s got to be non-idiosyncratic. It’s got to be some sort of concept such that with a given person, we can understand what they’re likely to think is the right thing to do or what any one of us is likely to think from their point of view is the right thing to do.

That’s all a bit fast, I know, but we’ll have a chance, hopefully, to talk about this detail, and I know my commentators will give me a good deep grilling on, on, um, on, on all of this. But that’s the basic picture as to how once the social ontology gets enriched with avowal and pledging and core avowing points of view appearing, patterns become salient for these people, and it requires that they are, in a way, committed, as you might say, to one another in the sense that they are they’ve put themselves at one another’s mercy. They’ve adopted the avow– point of view of avowal and and pledging.

And from that point of view, patterns of what is robustly attractive are going to assume a normative character for them. Uh, unfortunately, there’ll be a number of such, uh, normative characters, and the obvious solution is for them as a society is to introduce a category of what is right. Now, I take it, this is very brief, and I really have to push on.

I take it that what is, uh, there are going to be lots of salient examples of things that they will all agree are right regardless of what else are the points of view that people are occupying. As in, for example, the pattern of truth-telling. We said yesterday about how a community like this, out of just natural self-interested desires, are going to move to a pa– uh, to generate a pattern of general truth-telling.

That’s going to be so saliently important for the society, as you can see it, as at least qua type of action. It’s going to be a natural candidate for the property of being outright desirable. And there’ll be other properties like that too, because I mentioned in the discussion yesterday, just as you’d expect truth-telling to emerge as a byproduct of mutual accommodation before you ever get to the normative, uh, you’d expect non-violence and various other patterns to emerge.

So there are going to be, there are going to be candidates there to be named as the right sorts of action, and even in particular cases, the right thing to do. Of course, consistently with this, there’ll be lots of difference about what actually is right. That’s going to make a lot of sense here.

It may not be clear for a given agent with different standpoints, with different attractors supporting each of those standpoints. It may not at all be clear what is outright, uh, desirable. Uh, so you’re going to have a notion of rightness that you’d expect to have a lot of indeterminacy at the edges.

So you’re going to expect a lot of theorists of rightness in the community who are going to try to spell out in greater detail what is right or going to develop a normative ethics. Okay, so that was the, the rightness aspect of, um, of the, um, um, of the derivation of the normative, so to speak, or the emergence of ethics in the story that I’m telling. Even if this community developed a concept of the right, of the outright desirable, uh, being pushed by these forces that I’ve been trying to identify, um, they may not, in any recognizable sense, hold one another responsible for doing what is right.

For example, consistently with what I’ve said so far, it may be that they just take one another as, uh, just as they are, uh, in the sense that, uh, well, here’s someone who does the right thing, you know, a lot of the time. This other guy’s doesn’t. Um, but, you know, I just identified the right, the rightdoers and the wrongdoers, uh, and I just treat them as types of people.

I avoid the wrongdoers, and maybe I orientate towards the rightdoers, assuming we’ve got agreement now about the application of right in some cases. Uh, but I don’t say to a wrongdoer anything in the way of, “I hold you responsible for doing wrong. You ought to have done right.”

No, no, I think maybe that’s just in his nature. Some are wrongdoers, some are rightdoers. For all I’ve said, it might be like that.

Um, but what I now want to argue is that in the Erewhonian community, as we characterized it the last day, there is very good reason why a practice would develop, um, of actually holding one another responsible. Now, as with money, I’ve got to give you some account of what would count as a practice of holding responsible, and I think there are three aspects to it. This is going to be very fast, uh, but I think it’s fairly intuitive.

Um, and what I’m saying actually in the rest of this talk about responsibility draws in good part on a joint paper with, uh, Victoria McGeer that’s coming out later in the year. So I think there are three connotations, um, of holding someone responsible. Let’s focus for simplicity on the case where you hold someone responsible for having done something that you regard as wrong.

Okay, so you say to them, “You could have done otherwise.” Let’s take that as the iconic expression of blame or of holding someone responsible for having done wrong. Now, three connotations I think show up in three, as it were, messages that that remark, you could have done otherwise, uh, signals.

One is what I call the– I’m going to reverse. They’re on the handout in terms of one, two, three. I actually think it might be better to put two in place once.

So I’m gonna start with it. We’re on page three of the handout. So one connotation of holding someone responsible is that you– when you say to them, “You could have done otherwise,” there’s a sort of expression of impatience, right?

Um, it’s like you think, um, uh, well, you know, before somebody, y-y-you might be thinking like this. Before they had done it, you might say to them, “You can do it.” “You can do the right thing,” right?

But they don’t do the right thing, and after the event, you say, “You could have done otherwise.” Think of that as a sort of post hoc exhortation. When you say, “You can do it, you can do it.

You can do, you can do the right,” you know, that’s exhorting them, as we say. When you say, “You could have done otherwise,” you know, that shake of the head, uh, what you’re con-connoting, what you’re implying really is that had someone been there beforehand, they would rightly have exhorted you. You were exhortable to do it.

You were that sort of person. Um, I think that’s one message of you could have done otherwise. A second message of you could have done otherwise is a, is, is, is, is this.

It’s what I call recognition rather than exhortation, which is you’re saying about the person that you had the capacity to do otherwise. Now, what do you mean by that? You mean that the fact that they did the wrong thing was not characteristic of them.

It was sort of a fluke. You want to say about them that, look, you want to c-communicate the message that they had the capacity to do the right thing. Meaning, in lots of variations on the actual circumstances, whereas it, in fact, they did the wrong thing, but in lots of variations where the re– same reasons were in place, they would have done the right thing.

To say you could have done the, could have done otherwise, could have done the right thing, is to give expression to the fact that they really had that capacity. It’s like you might say, you know, in exasperation about a racehorse. If you had a racehorse who, uh, you know, failed to run a mile or whatever in the time he routinely did it, you say, “That horse could have run better.”

You know, you’re, you’re saying it had the capacity. It was a fluke, uh, given they were ordinary conditions. It was, they weren’t wet or whatever.

It was just a fluke that it didn’t actually run a mile. You’re saying it had the capacity. Now, equally, when you say you could have done otherwise, you’re ascribing the, the capacity.

It was just a fluke that you didn’t do it. And the third thing, of course, the third connotation of holding responsibility is you’re censuring them. You’re not just exhorting them, saying, expressing impatience, and you’re not just, um, you’re not just ascribing to them the capacity as a matter of fact, this was untypical of you.

You’re also blaming them. You’re censuring them. You’re saying you’re actually reprimanding them.

You’re imposing a penalty just by saying you could have done otherwise, and indeed suggesting that this is a deserved penalty. Now, the question is, why would Erewhonians, can we imagine why they would begin to think of one another in those ways? And I suggest we can.

I’ve got ten minutes to fifty-five. Is that okay, Jay? Ten minutes?

[00:52:37] JAY WALLACE:
Yeah.

[00:52:38] PHILIP PETTIT:
Give me a ten. Give me-

[00:52:39] JAY WALLACE:
Ten. Ten is okay. Um- No more.

[00:52:42] PHILIP PETTIT:
I’ll start bidding. Uh, so let’s think about exhortation, first of all. So the interesting thing about the Erewhonians, as I’ve described them, is that it’s a matter of common acceptance or awareness between them that they’re each really recruiting others to regulating themselves.

So when, for example, and I avow a belief, thereby putting aside a certain excuse, thereby, as we said, raising the cost for me of not actually displaying that belief or that desire, then what I’m relying on are the costs, uh, that the other person will impose by, say, not cooperating with me, ostracizing me, gossiping about me, and so on. I am really acknowledging the cost that the other person can impose on me if I fail to display this belief or desire. So I’m really recruiting that other person to energize me, as it were, into behaving in the way in which I, I’m inviting them and to rely on me to behave.

I’m acknowledging that the costs they can impose are really powerful costs, and I’m getting myself to I’m confident that I will actually stick with the desire, the belief or whatever, by virtue precisely of the costs that are going to be involved in not displaying that belief. At least it helps me over the line. And of course, I take it that you’re aware equally that this is going to make it, my belief more credible, that I have it, or my desire more predictable that I will act on it, as you see that I’m going to suffer that cost at your hands if I don’t actually display it.

Now, that’s to say that in this community, we have a community of people who are really, and you might say, capacitating one another. They’re eliciting capacities in one another by virtue of each recruiting the others to act as their police officers, you might say, to act as their regulators. Okay, now, if that’s the case, as it is under this story, consider my position as someone who sees, um, sees Zach here as having done something, done something wrong.

Um, or sorry, as facing a choice between doing one action or another. And I realize that Zach is going to be interested in my opinion of him, that when it comes to doing what’s right, obviously he’s going to want to be seen to do what– if we both agree that it’s right, seen to do what’s right, otherwise he’s going to look like he hasn’t really signed up to this category. Okay, so when we have this interaction, um, and I say to him, I’m aware now that I can influence him by the very fact that, that he’s gonna suffer the cost of my low opinion of him should he not behave that way.

And so when I sa– when I say to him, “You can do this, Zach. You can do the right thing,” I’m not just speaking as in, “By the way, I just meant to mention I noticed, you know, that you have this capacity actually to do the right thing. It wouldn’t be a fluke if you did the right thing.

You often do it, so you can do it.” No, no, I’m saying, “You can do it,” you know, “you can do the right thing.” Because being aware that I can actually influence him by virtue of signaling my presence and signaling, of course, how I will feel about his doing the right, the right or the wrong thing.

My saying, “You can do it,” is a form of encouragement. It’s not just a descriptive, a remark that you have this capacity, it’s an evocative remark. We know how a performative remark is a remark that makes itself true.

Like, “I resign,” reports the state of affairs that I make to be the case by actually uttering the words, “I resign.” Now, it’s not the case when I say, “You can do it,” to Zach, that I make it the case he can do it. But it’s neither is it the case

I’m just describing, uh, his ca-capacity. No, I’m invoking it as a sort of evocative, uh, as a speech act. It’s designed to make it more likely that the state of affairs it records, that you can do it, is actually going to obtain.

So it’s very natural that it should be exhortatory as a remark when I say, “You can do it.” But if that’s the case, and that’s the case where all of us are Erewhonians in dealing with one another, then when he does the wrong thing and I say, “You could have done it,” you know, in that tone of voice, it’s like I’m adopting the attitude that I would have adopted previously by saying, “You can do it.” I’m standing with that attitude.

I’m suggesting it was the right attitude to have had. Now, of course, I may not have been there beforehand, but when I say, “You could have done it,” uh, that is still going to have that tone insofar as I suggest that anyone prior to the act was in a position to exhort you. You are an exhortable sort of person.

So that’s the one. Now, you can– you could have done otherwise. He’s going to have that connotation, I say, among Erewhonians.

That’s the first connotation of holding responsible. The second one is that you ascribe the capacity, uh, to have done otherwise. You suggest it wasn’t a fluke that he, uh, sorry, that it was a fluke that, uh, he did something wrong.

Uh, it’d be more typical of him within his capacity that he should do what is right. Well, as an Inwagenian now, and I say this to Zach that you could have done otherwise. I…

I’ve just lost my thread, my thread for just a moment. When I say to him, uh, as an Inwagenian that you, um, and, uh, could have done otherwise, you might think, well, wait a moment. If he actually didn’t do otherwise, if he didn’t do the right thing, why shouldn’t I think that, well, this– I thought he had the capacity, but he actually didn’t have the capacity.

I revised my view. You know, the capacity failed. It’s not the case that he had the capacity, and he acted in the presence of the capacity to do otherwise.

Sorry, to do the right thing, but actually in the presence of that capacity to do the right thing, he still did the wrong thing. Why shouldn’t I sort of think, well, you know, I thought he had the capacity. I was wrong.

Now, when I hold him responsible, of course, I’m not taking that view. I’m suggesting, no, he really had the capacity. It wasn’t that the capacity was, was, was, was absent.

Um, and I mean by saying he had really had the capacity, not just that he generally has the capacity to do the right thing, but equally that there was no excuse or no unforeclosed excuse present for why he might not, not have done the, uh, the right thing. In the absence of any such excuses, he still did the wrong thing, but I say he could have done otherwise, meaning he had the capacity. I don’t say, um, “Oh, well, he must– I must have been wrong about his having the capacity.”

It must have been the case of the absence of the capacity rather than the failure to exercise it.” I don’t say that. Now, why would the Erewhonians follow that pattern?

Why would they insist on ascribing the capacity even in the– under a failure to display it? Well, here’s one reason. If we are involved in this mutual capacitation, you know, involved in this mutual encouragement and exhortation that I’ve talked about, then we’re involved in expecting things of one another, enjoining one another to act in the way we manifestly, uh, expect one another to, to act

And if I think that about Zach, then to say, “Well,” he didn’t have the capacity after all,” is really to give up on the whole practice of treating him as someone I can enjoin to do those things. It’s sort of to opt out of a practice that we’re naturally involved in as members of this mutually capacitating society. Um, it’s a sort of, i-it’s a sort of premature surrender, as it might be said.

Uh, with the case of failure, if we think other people really are responsible in this way to us and to the injunctions we implicitly give them when we encourage them and exhort them, as I said, we do naturally, uh, then, um, we have to think of them as indeed having a capacity to do the right thing. So when we say you could have done otherwise, perfectly intelligible that this is understood as saying you really had the capacity. Second connotation of holding responsible.

Third connotation is that you actually, I actually censure, um, Zach, when I say you could have done otherwise. Well, of course, this actually goes through quite quickly now because, um, the form of censure that is most salient in this context is that I have a bad opinion of you. Um, you agreed something was right.

We took this for granted as something that was right. You subscribed to the right, and here you failed to display it. When I say you could have done otherwise, I mean that implies, of course, you didn’t do as you, um, had implicitly, let’s say, pledged to do.

I haven’t quite put that bit, that premise in place, but allow it to me for the moment. When I say that you could have done otherwise, I signal that you fail. Of course, I also express a bad opinion of you because you failed to act as I implicitly, manifestly expected you, implicitly enjoined you to act.

Uh, so that itself is a reprimand. It’s actually punishing him. It’s a penalty that I am expressing, uh, this bad opinion of his performance.

Um, there’s an issue that comes up here as to, well, wait a moment, uh, there’s maybe an explanation for why he performed badly in this case, and maybe it was a neural glitch or whatever, uh, that got in the way. Maybe it was a freak accident. Like, would I still blame him?

Well, actually, under this practice, it’s perfectly intelligible that I would. Because after all, the idea of enjoining people and expecting them to behave in a certain way, and of their giving the message that they will indeed be led to behave in that way, as when they avow and expose themselves to costs that they treat as effective. In that case, uh, and put aside various excuses, that whole practice will only work if in the presence, in the absence of excuses, there really is a penalty.

If you are, uh, prepared to exonerate them, as it were, not to impose the penalty, just whenever there’s an explanation, but not an explanation in terms of an excuse for why they behave badly, then the whole practice of injunction is going to make no sense at all. So even though I accept that he– the neural glitch occurred, accounted for this, I still say you could have done otherwise in terms of the practice. You’ve accepted that In the absence of excuses, you will do the right thing, um, and you failed to do the right thing, so there was some explanation for it, fine.

But the whole regulative point of injunction means that it was, it’s still appropriate for me to hold a bad opinion of you. Okay, so now this brings it to an end, and had to do it very quickly. Lots, lots of jumps.

I’m well aware of that. We’ll have lots of time, hopefully, to discuss it. Um, I’m going to hold up my end as well as possible, but I’ll be learning all the time, I’m sure, from the discussion and from these commentaries.

Uh, but just to remind you, what I’ve argued is, uh, if we start from something like the report of community, you can see these practices developing in terms of those normative patterns are going to be accessible, normative categories are going to be expected to come on stream, and the practice of holding one another responsible to those categories is going to make a certain sense. It’s not our world, the world I’ve described, but I think it’s a nearby world. It’s not an implausible world.

It’s quite like ours in many respects. So I hope that that’s the project, that if I can show the emergibility of ethics along these lines, that’s enough to naturalize it, to demystify it, to show the, that there’s nothing very special or mysterious about ethics, albeit there is something wonderful because it involves us putting ourselves in one another’s hands, as it were. So thank you.

(applause)

[01:04:47] JAY WALLACE:
Thank you very much, Philip. Um, you will have discovered that these chairs are carefully designed to excru– to inflict excruciating pain after about fifty minutes. So, uh, we suggest that people should take maybe three minutes or so to stretch.

Some of you may need to leave, and then we’ll, uh, resume proceedings with the commentaries. Okay, um, so our first commentator on today’s, um, Tanner Lecture is another very distinguished, uh, scholar whom we’re delighted to be able to welcome to Berkeley. Uh, this– that’s, uh, Dick Moran.

Dick is Brian D. Young Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. He works in the general area of, uh, philosophy of mind. But to characterize him in the compartmentalized terms of professionalized contemp– the contempor– professionalized contemporary, uh, academy is to do a severe injustice to the nature of his interests and to the manner in which he pursues them in his philosophical work.

A typical paper by, um, by Dick is likely to start with a puzzle, perhaps one latent in a work of fiction, uh, and then tease out its layers and strands, drawing freely on whatever philosophical resources might be useful for the purposes at hand. Uh, the result could be characterized equally as a contribution to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, to the theory of agency, to aesthetics, or to moral psychology, and the truth is that it’s probably all of these things and more. Dick did his graduate work at Cornell University, receiving the PhD degree in, um, there in, uh, t– nineteen eighty-nine.

He taught for several years at Princeton University before moving to Harvard in nineteen ninety-five, where he has taught ever since. He’s the recipient of prestigious fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Princeton University Center for Human Values, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Dick’s scholarly work includes important publications on a wide range of philosophical topics and figures.

Uh, one abiding concern in his work is to explore the disanalogies between our relations to our own attitudes as agents and as thinkers, and our relations to the attitudes of other people. Drawing on an insight from Sartre, one whose significance he has virtually single-handedly rehabilitated for contemporary analytic philosophy, uh, Dick argues that it can lead to estrangement and alienation to adopt toward oneself the kinds of attitudes that are perfectly in order when we are thinking about the states of mind of other people. This is a central theme in his influential, uh, book, Authority and Estrangement, which was published by Princeton University Press in 2001.

Dick’s work explores the ramifications of this basic insight for many different philosophical issues, including the nature of belief and the ideal of objectivity and ethics. A characteristic moment is his application of these ideas to an understanding, uh, to understanding an amusing passage from Kingsley Amis’s novel, That Uncertain Feeling, in which the narrator reports on, quote, “Feeling a tremendous rakehell, and not liking him– uh, myself much for it, and feeling rather a good chap for not liking myself much for it, and not liking myself at all for feeling rather a good chap.” It may well be, Dick suggests, that the narrator’s shame at his rakehell tendencies, his not liking himself much for them, reflects well on him in a certain way.

But it’s a profound and puzzling fact that that true thought is not available to the rakehell at the moment when he’s in the grip of his shame. Entertaining the thought would undermine the very attitude that is its basis, which is why the rakehell spirals into feeling bad about himself again after having momentarily felt himself to be rather a good chap. This is just a small taste of the way in which Dick proceeds in his philosophical work, teasing out deep insights from often surprising sources.

Other topics he’s addressed with similar, um, insight and imagination include testimony, metaphor, intention, imagination, and the aesthetic attitude in Kant and Proust. We’re delighted that he’s able to join us in Berkeley for these Tanner Lectures, and we’re, uh, eager to hear his reflections on The Birth of Ethics.

[01:08:46] SPEAKER 1:
I’ll have to leave before making my comments.

[01:08:50] PHILIP PETTIT:
Quick exit there. If we’d only known that was-

[01:08:54] SPEAKER 1:
No, no. Yeah.

[01:08:55] PHILIP PETTIT:
Thank you. Thank you, Jay, for that very generous introduction. Um, it’s a great pleasure to be here.

And thanks to the Tanner Committee for, uh, um, Um, not just inviting me here, for p-putting this whole group together. Uh, it’s, it’s a, it’s a real pleasure to engage with Philip’s, uh, work, and especially in the company of people like Michael Tomasello and Pamela Hieronymi.

[01:09:17] KRISTA LAWLOR:
Um, I’m gonna try and keep my remarks today, uh, on time. Um, and so I’m really jumping t-uh, kind of to the middle of the remarks that I, uh, prepared, uh, for this occasion. Um, and, uh, I’ll, I’ll get to…

I have s-I have more general remarks about the shape and structure of Philip’s project, uh, that I’m going to leave for tomorrow. Um, today, I just wanna raise some questions about, uh, the use to which he puts the notion of a vow, a vow of belief and a vow of desire, um, in his, uh, in his reconstitution of ethics from the, the situation of a reportive, uh, speech community. So these people need to rely on each other in various ways, and it’s to the advantage of each of them to have a reputation for reliability, both for the potential power that this may give such a person to influence the behavior of others, uh, and to avoid the dangers of isolation or retaliation should a reputation for unreliability become widespread.

So this sets the terms for a problem of not only preserving, but enhancing the apparent believability of one’s own reports. And the solution proposed will be one that’s available to everyone in the speech community, and hence can be expected to establish itself and take root throughout the community. It’s here that Philip makes an observation about the different speech acts of reporting and what he calls avowing and pledging, and their different relations to certain social costs that they overtly and voluntarily expose themselves to.

Um, I’m responding, uh, to the written text which does not differ in its essentials, but, but some of my quotations here won’t be quotations that you heard, uh, today or yesterday. Um, so let me just cut to the chase. So you’ve, you’ve, you’ve heard this before.

Reports have room for two sal– this is Philip’s words. Uh, reports have room for two salient sorts of excuses. Avowals leave room for just one, and pledges leave room for neither.

So increasing risk, uh, with each move here. The point is to show, and I’m no longer quoting, uh, the natural emergence of speech acts such as avowal and pledging, and that once established and enforced throughout the speech community, uh, we’re th- within reach of specifically, uh, moral or more specifically moral relations. An excuse enables one to avoid a sanction of some kind in the event of failure of correspondence between what one says and the facts in question.

A straight report, uh, normally allows for two kinds of epistemic excuse. Either I misperceived or misinterpreted the evidence, or the facts themselves changed after I made my report. Um, I think it should be noted, uh, uh, however, that although such excuses may enable the speaker to avoid the sanctions that go with, say, having lied or having been careless, uh, it’s still true that regularly availing oneself of such excuses will nonetheless, uh, lead to a reputation for unreliability.

So I think really mere excusability, uh, will not take one terribly far in the game of seeking to enhance the reliability of one’s speech, uh, but let’s leave that to one side for now. Um, avowals now are defined in this, in this paper as first-person expressions of belief or other attitudes, which, unlike reports, are not based on observation of oneself or observation about the thing that one’s, um, reporting on. Now, whether what a person says about her own belief from the first-person point of view is genuinely not based on observation of any kind is a matter of some controversy in the philosophy of mind.

Uh, but let’s just take this as a working definition at this point, and one which I think does fit much of what we say about first-person utterances, as contrasted with how we talk about the beliefs and other attitudes of other people. There’s a difference here to be marked. If this is so, then Philip makes the interesting observation that avowals in this sense then cannot avail themselves of one of the excuses that may apply to reports in the case of failure of correspondence with the facts.

They cannot appeal to the excuse of misperception or misinterpretation of the evidence, for they’re not based on observation or evidence in the first place. In the case of discrepancy, then, an avowal can only appeal to the excuse of what he calls change of matter, that is, the facts about what I believe changed in the meantime. Thus, he argues, with respect to the availability of excuses, in the case of discrepancy, I’m more exposed to risk with regard to my avowals than I am with regard to my reports.

And pledges are riskier still, for with respect to pledging to someone to do something, if I fail to do the thing in question, I can neither appeal to the excuse of misperception of my own pledge, nor the excuse that the facts, that is, here, my intentions, changed in the meantime. So you’re really on the hook, uh, for a pledge. So he then raises the question, why would there emerge in a reportative community certain forms of speech that seem constructed to expose the speaker to greater risk in the case of discrepancy than would other alternatives?

Would not speakers have every reason to avoid such verbal forms? It’s here that Philip makes an intriguing connection between these thoughts and certain ideas from the application of game theory to the evolution of communication in the human and non-human worlds. In contrasting the avowal of one’s belief with the report of one’s belief, he says the following: “The very fact that the pragmatic or expressive mode of communication allows of only one excuse for error provides a motive for why any of us should positively cherish it.

By communicating a belief in this manner, I manifestly take on a greater risk than if I had reported it. I expose myself to the cost of not being able to explain a miscommunication about that belief by recourse to misleading evidence. And by manifestly taking on such a risk, I make my words more expensive and give you and others firmer ground for expecting them to be true.

So here, as I read it anyway, we, we have an allusion to what’s called the handicap principle or, or the theory of costly singling– signaling in game-theoretic explanations of the evolution of forms of communication. It’s a contested hypothesis, uh, but, uh, also a widely accepted one. Um, a well-cited example being the case of the peacock’s display of his elaborate but dysfunctional tail.

Uh, the display of something so costly to maintain and otherwise useless to the o-organism is interpreted by the theory as a way of displaying to potential mates that it can afford such apparently wasteful extravagance, and thus signals the animal’s reproductive fitness. The very dysfunctionality of the signal for, uh, for the organism itself, like the great elk’s enormous antlers that make it impossible to move around,

(clears throat)

um, serves to enhance its apparent reliability as a signal of fitness, either because the signal will be perceived as one that’s difficult to fake or because its costliness to the organism functions as a sign that the organism can bear that cost and thus must have fitness traits to spare. In the current context of particular forms of speech then, the thought is that by overtly renouncing appeal to a particular form of excuse, the misperception excuse, the speaker signals to her audience that she’s confident that she will not have to bear the cost of a discrepancy between her words and what they express. She makes her words, quote, “more expensive,” in Phillips’ phrase, by exposing herself to an additional risk that a different verbal form would not expose her to.

And in doing so, she thereby makes her words a more reliable signal of her belief or her intent. So we’re to imagine an audience of this signal as thinking along the following lines. She wouldn’t voluntarily put her credibility at additional risk if she did not feel sure that she will not have to pay the cost of misleading or misinforming me.

So I conclude she must in fact be more reliable. So this is a strategic move on the part of the speaker seeking to enhance the greater apparent reliability of her speech acts. And when we look at things from the point of view of the speaker, we can also see a connection with the theory of side bets that was mentioned earlier.

Um, so like someone trying to quit smoking, she here is enlisting another person in helping to make her reliable in her speech acts. And such a reputation for reliability is advantageous to her, and she does this by overtly renouncing appeal to a set of excusing conditions in the events that she, say, lapses from her resolve. For this report of community, the reliability in question will be a matter of the reliability of speakers as informants about the world around them.

We want reliable informants about the berries ripening on the hillside, and we want to maintain reputations as reliable informants about such matters. It’s for this reason that I’m a little unclear as to why the question of avowals and the way in which their independence of observation makes a certain form of excuse unavailable to them, how this is really relevant to the dynamics of signaling reliability that’s central to the account on offer here. Now, the notion of an avowal has no very fixed meaning in philosophy, and there are differences as well as similarities between how I have used the term and how it’s being used in these lectures, uh, or in the work of Dorit Bar-On.

But for purposes of argument, we can agree on this much. When a speaker reports that the berries are ripening on the hillside, lo, those berries, she thereby also conveys or expresses that she believes that the berries are ripening on the hillside. Philip argues that because in asserting P, those berries, I also thereby express or conveyed something about another topic, na-namely my belief, we may see this other expression as my avowal of my belief that P. Unlike my report about the berries, my avowal of my– what I believe is not based on observation of the topic myself or evidence of any kind.

In this way, a form of excuse that’s available with respect to my report about the berries is not available to me with respect to my avowal of my belief. And the application to the dy-dynamics of signaling reliability is made in the following terms, uh, quoting now again, “To choose the pragmatic or expressive communication of a belief, seeking to reduce the excuses available to the cha– now just to the change of mind excuse. To do that is to avow that belief.

But it is to adopt for that mode of communication over the salient alternative of just reporting it. And so presumably it is to opt for that form of conveying my belief, at least in part, because it represents a more expensive and more credible form of communication. It provides me with a potentially more effective means of getting you to believe what I say.

Now here, it becomes harder for me to see how this fact about avowals can really serve to enhance a speaker’s reputation for reliability. Basically, I don’t see why the peculiarities of the first-person expression of belief are being introduced at all. Insofar as the other speakers in my report of community are concerned about my reliability as a reporter, they’re concerned about my reliability about things like the location of the ripening berries on the hillside.

Except in special circumstances or at some later stage of cultural development, uh, their concern is not with my beliefs as such or the question of my knowledge of them. And because the value I place on my own reliability is based on the value that I take that to have for others, the reliability that I’m concerned to project then in my signaling will be my reliability as a reporter about things like the location of the berries or the stags. For ordinary straightforward reports like these, a speaker will have open to her both the excuse of misperception of the evidence and the excuse of change of matter, as when the facts about, say, the location of the stag change, you know, after I made my report.

They moved, they went away. In this sense, my report about the stag then is less expensive than an avowal of my belief would be because there, I retain the option of these two forms of excuse. So in this sense, it may be less reliable than all things, other things being equal.

But other things really are not equal here, since what matters to the value of my speech for my audience is what I’m taking to be reliable about. If we’re making a comparative judgment about the relative exposure to risk of an avowal of belief as a c– as compared to a report about the berries or the stag, that will not be relevant to the overall dynamics of projecting reliability if the topic of concern for my audience is something like the location of the berries rather than the question of my belief. Now so far, this is just to raise a question about why the first-person expression of belief is being introduced into the discussion.

That is, I’m not suggesting that Philip means to be describing a strategic choice to avow one’s belief about the berries rather than simply report where the berries are. That can’t be the picture here for the reason that, as he rightly says, any report about the berries will by that very fact also count as the avowal of my belief about the location of the berries. So there’s really no choosing, strategic or otherwise, between reporting some fact about the berries and avowing or expressing one b– one’s belief in that fact.

To do the one just is to do the other. Rather, in the passage I just quoted, the strategic choice is described as a choice between reporting my own belief and avowing that same belief. To use a neutral term then, my communication of my belief will be more exposed and therefore more expensive and therefore more reliable than my report of my own belief, because in the mere report, I would still keep available to myself the excuse of misperception.

As he puts it, quote, “I opt for that mode of communication, avowal, over the salient alternative of just reporting it, because it represents a more expensive and more credible form of communication.” ” Okay, but if I purchased greater credibility in this way, this seems to be at the cost of restricting the topic of my discourse to my beliefs as such, rather than the location of the berries. Whereas the credibility that matters to my interlocutors concerns the events in the world where my reports will necessarily have opened to them the two forms of excuse.

If we do hold the topic fixed and think about this as a strategic choice between two ways of communicating my belief, reporting it versus avowing it, then it’s difficult, I think, in another way to understand how this makes sense for the speaker. For we’ve already said that the speaker necessarily will express or avow her belief that P, just in virtue of making the straight report that P. So if there’s an advantage in avowing rather than reporting one’s own belief, this will be taken care of by the simple act of assertion, assuming that the pointed interest really was the conveyance of one’s beliefs as such.

To the extent that the option to merely report rather than avow my belief is really open to me, you know, if it, if it’s really the question of communicating my belief, and I want to report rather than avow, so I won’t do that by expressing… by affirming the statement that P, I want to report rather than avow. It seems to me that choice to report rather than avow will be only under circumstances in which I divorce what I say about my belief concerning the location of the berries from what would be conveyed by the simple assertion about the berries, because then I would be avowing. I would thus report on my belief as I might describe the belief of another person.

And when I do that, I can leave open the question of my endorsement of that belief as true. Those are two separate questions when I’m talking about someone else. Uh, I keep those separate since that would– that’s what would be conveyed by simple assertion, and then I would be avowing.

Instead, I would report the belief as perhaps the best explanation of some otherwise puzzling behavior of mine, and in this way, I would both make available to myself the excuse of misperception or misinterpretation of the behavioral evidence, and at the same time convey that in offering this explanation, I’m holding quite open the question of whether I would endorse as true the belief that I’m now ascribing to myself. So in special circumstances, I think a person can be said to choose between reporting her belief and avowing her belief. But the relative value of the avowal over the report to the speaker’s audience does not come from the speaker’s renunciation of appeal to the excuse of misperception, but rather, you know, the, the, the relative value of the avowal over the report, that comes from the fact that the avowal, ex– when I avow the belief that the berries are on the hillside, that expresses conviction about the facts in question in a way that the mere report does not.

(throat clearing)

And it’s the facts about the berries or the stag that are of value to the audience and are what ultimately matters to the speaker’s value as an informant. And in fact, it’s the independence– Uh, sorry. The independence of evidence for avowals, which is the reason why the excuse of misperception does not apply, is explained by the fact that avowals, rather than mere reports or attributions of belief, that avowals express conviction about the facts in question.

That’s what distinguishes the first person avowal of belief from the report about the beliefs of some other person, uh, or the attribution of belief to myself on some purely explanatory basis. And in addition, there’s no other way, it seems to me, we could talk about this. Uh, there’s no other way to avow my belief that P than to make the corresponding assertion that P.

So again, whatever advantage or increase in cost there may be between report of my belief and avowal of my belief, this stems not from the fact that I renounce appeal to a certain range of excuses, but rather from the fact that my avowal of the belief that P is a consequence of my assertion of the fact of P itself. It’s m– in my assertion about the berries themselves, I’m more committed than in my mere attributing or reporting of my belief. And that’s just the enhanced degree of commitment that my audience will normally be interested in when thinking of me as a potential informant.

So, I’m gonna wrap up. Um, the commitment expressed in my, an assertion about the facts is the source of the greater potential value of the speaker’s words. So for these reasons, I hope that wasn’t rattling through too fast.

Uh, the appeal to a greater cost stemming from the unavailable, unavailability of a certain set of excuses, the excuse of misperception. That appeal seems misapp- applied here in the, uh, enhancement of one’s reliability as a, as a reporter. And in conclusion, I just want to note, there are, are after all more familiar ways of adding to the cost of one’s declarations, where we stay on the level of plain reports about the facts.

If she was in con– if, if our speaker was concerned to enhance the believability of her report by making herself more vulnerable, Um, in the case of error, she c– she may not only say, “The stag,” you know, “This, there’s a stag on the hill over there that would be an easy target.” She could also add to that, “And I solemnly swear this is true, and may I be struck by lightning if it’s not.” That’s another way in which a speaker can overtly and voluntarily, uh, increase, uh, the value of her words by, uh, by opening up her, uh, her vulnerability to, uh, a new form of censure that she wouldn’t have been.

And in a related context, and this is where I’m going to conclude, we can see a closely related appeal to the idea of augmenting the believability of what one says by overtly staking one’s reputation in a new way, in an enhanced way, in, uh, J.L. Austin’s, uh, famous discussion of the difference between the simple statement that S is P and what he calls the further plunge that is taken in declaring that one knows that S is P. Uh, the invocation of knowledge can also be a way for the speaker to enhance the, uh, to make her words more expensive and, uh, and but at the same time to incur her, to open herself up to greater, um, risks. Uh, he compares pro– uh, saying, “I promise” as compared with just saying, “I’ll do such and such,” with the difference between saying, “I” know,” versus simply saying, “Such and such is so.” When I say, “I promise,” this is Austin now, a new plunge is taken.

I’ve not merely announced my intention, but by using this formula, I’ve bound myself to others and staked my reputation in a new way. Similarly, in saying, “I know,” I also take a new plunge. Um, when I have said only that I’m sure and proved and been mistaken, and this seems very reminiscent with the situation, um, that Philip is describing, Austin says, “When I, when I only say that I’m sure, and I prove to be mistaken,” Austin says, “I’m not liable to be rounded on by others in the same way as when I say I know.”

Um, so, uh, since I’m cutting things off today, I might have to end rather abruptly. Um, this, this fact about, um, uh, statements of knowledge has, you know, recently been explored to great depth by Krista Lawlor, uh, in her book, uh, on assurance. Um, but I will just leave things there, uh, for now.

Thank you very much.

(applause)

[01:33:08] JAY WALLACE:
Yeah, it’s a great pleasure to, uh, to introduce now our second, uh, commentator on today’s lecture, who is Pamela Hieronymi. Pamela is Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. She works in the, in the broad area of ethics and value theory with interests that extend relentlessly into such related areas as the the philosophy of mind, uh, the philosophy of action, and the theory of freedom and responsibility.

She’s written influentially on a wide range of topics in these areas, including forgiveness, blame, the nature of our control over our attitudes, and the possibility of believing at will. It’s characteristic of her work on these topics that she zeroes in on foundational questions, uh, that tend to get glossed over in other treatments, but that turn out to be absolutely central to the resolution of the disputes. Thus, um, an examination of the issue of whether responsibility requires control quickly morphs in Pamela’s treatment of it, um, into a defense of the basic idea that our propositional attitudes represent our answers to questions that we have implicitly posed.

Similarly, an investigation of the suggestion that there can be reasons of the wrong kind for certain attitudes. Suppose someone offers you a ton of money to, uh, to believe that Philip Pettit is a replicant. Um, you know, that, that– it’s a standard topic in, um, in, uh, philosophy.

Not, not–

(laughter)

Philip’s status, but, um, the status of, um, the financial inducement as in relation to believing that Philip is a replicant. Um, h-her treatment of that opens up into the much more basic question of what reasons are in the first place. Pamela was an undergraduate at Princeton University, graduating summa cum laude in nineteen ninety-two with a BA in philosophy.

At the risk of embarrassing her, I can report that a famous member of the faculty of Princeton once commented to me in conversation that she was the most brilliant undergraduate, uh, he had encountered in his entire scholarly career. Uh, after two years in the nonprofit sector, she moved to Harvard to take up graduate study in th-that university’s storied Department of Philosophy, where she was awarded the PhD degree in two thousand. She’s taught at UCLA since two thousand, advancing to the rank of associate professor in two thousand seven, uh, and to professor in two thousand eleven.

Her academic distinctions, uh, include, um, two prestigious fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Mellon Fellowship for Junior Faculty, and the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for recently tenured scholars. She’s a– She was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, uh, in two thousand eleven to twelve.

I– though she spent a year at Stanford, I noticed that she put on her website that she was coming to, um, comment on Philip Pettit’s Tanner Lectures at Stanford University this fall, this, this, this spring. But I thought she figured out evidently where we’re, where they’re actually taking place, which we’re all deeply grateful for.

(laughter)

Um, her first publication was an exceptionally penetrating, uh, and original, uh, treatment of forgiveness, which appeared in 2011, uh, it’s Articulating an Un-uncompromising Forgiveness. Subsequent writings include The Force and Fairness of Blame, uh, The Wrong Kind of Reason, Responsibility for Believing and Believing at Will. Other topics addressed in her work include Trust and Its Reasons, The Nature of the Will, The Nature and Un-unimportance of Control, and Responsibility for Attitudes.

More recently, she’s made a foray into writing for a general audience on incredibly important issues of educational policy, setting herself against the widespread tendency to treat earning potential as the point of a college education. Um, she also argues forcefully against the equally common assumption that there must be some technical shortcut to imparting the skills at critical reflection that make people free and effective citizens.

(clears throat)

Um, we’re delighted to have Pamela in Berkeley for these events, and look forward, uh, eagerly to her remar-marks on The Birth of Ethics.

(applause)

[01:37:08] PAMELA HIERONYMI:
Thank you very much, uh, for having me. Um, it’s a pleasure and an honor. Uh, in my remarks today, I’m gonna focus on the big picture.

Uh, and in my remarks tomorrow, I’m gonna raise some more specific questions about avowal and co-avowal. So to the big picture, Philip is wanting to show, uh, that the ethical would naturally emerge from what he calls a reportive society. That is, he’s wanting to start with certain non-mysterious material and draw ethics out of it.

Now, that’s a familiar sort of project. It’s sometimes been pursued in the spirit of skepticism, other times in the spirit of naturalism. The skeptical form shows up early in Plato’s Republic, where Thrasymachus famously suggests that justice is the advantage of the stronger.

There’s nothing mis- mysterious about the stronger propagating rules for their own advantage. Socrates argues against Thrasymachus, but his argument didn’t satisfy Glaucon, who saw a skeptical threat from a different possibility. That justice is not the advantage of the stronger, but rather, as we might put it, the strategy of the equally weak.

There’s nothing mysterious about a bunch of people, none of whom is able to dominate the others, but each of whom is strong enough to do some damage, striking certain agreements, and in doing so, securing, uh, avoiding the worst of injustice while securing the benefits of cooperation. Glaucon was worried, deeply worried, that that might be all there is to justice, a mere modus vivendi. And so he looked to Socrates to say it ain’t so.

Socrates did. He appealed to ideals of health and harmony. Time moved on.

Justice became more metaphysical, more mysterious, tied up with the church and with the divine right of kings, and there were wars. By the late 17th century, disagreement on matters metaphysical, doctrinal, and practical, combined with a rough equality of power, made for intractable and exhausting wars throughout Europe. Wars that made Glaucon’s modus vivendi look pretty good.

Then came developments at Westphalia. Stunning developments looked at from what we now might call a meta-ethical point of view. Each party exhausted, none able to dominate, this collection of rough equals found a way to simply set aside divine right, true religion, and other central convictions, and simply agree to disagree.

They first hit upon the idea and then created the reality of sovereign states, really of autonomous states. And by doing so, they created a new order, a new set not only of expectations, but even importantly, of rights. Forged from that pragmatic human agreement.

And by that point, Hobbes was already at work thinking about citizens rather than states. The social contract tradition began to provide the secular modi vivendi with a needed underlying theoretical justification, so that they were no longer mere modi vivendi. Rather than a version of the skepticism that Glaucon feared, what emerged was Western political liberalism.

And what started centuries ago as a political theory has recently found expression as a moral theory in the likes of Gauthier’s and then Scanlon’s contractualism. But I take it that Philip, like Glaucon, is unsatisfied with the strategy of the equally weak. It lacks what Philip calls, quote, impersonal merits of a moral kind.

And I take it that Philip finds the resources appealed to by the contractualist moral theories either unsatisfying or mysterious. But I feel I could be much helped in thinking through General Phillips’– Philip’s account by better understanding two things.

First, I’d like to better understand what exactly Philip has in mind when he talks about ethics or morality. Philip may find this first question puzzling, since the first line on his handout states that ethics is thinking and acting in terms of rightness and responsibility. But I’d like to better understand what those terms mean in his mouth.

To put the question another way, what exactly does the material from lecture two add to the material from lecture one, such that we’re meant to feel at the end of one that we have not yet been launched into ethical space, but by the end of two that we– the recognizably ethical has been restored, that we have, so to speech, speak, scratched Glaucon’s itch. Secondly, and relatedly, I’d be helped if I could better understand what exactly Philip is finding mysterious about ethics or morality, or perhaps what he finds unsatisfying about the accounts given by others. Such that on the one hand, we need a story like Philip’s to dispel the mystery, and on the other, that the story he tells is suited for the job.

I find it hard to assess the success of Philip’s myth without knowing which mystery it was meant to demystify. I’ll note that these two questions pose a familiar sort of problem, almost a dilemma. On the one hand, to the extent that you avoid mystery, you run the risk of disappointing someone like Glaucon, who might think you’ve fallen short of providing, quote, genuinely ethical content.

On the other, to the extent that you provide content that will seem genuinely ethical, or in the jargon of the day, normative, others might find it mysterious. Now, I don’t think this is a genuine dilemma, but it highlights the importance of specifying both what’s required to qualify as ethical and what’s required to avoid mystery, s– to ensure that we’ve given ourselves a real but achievable task. So let me start by tracing, uh, the broad outlines of Phillips’ thought.

He begins with the society engaged in conversation and in mu- in relations of mutual reliance. His starting point, thus already contains a great deal of what I might have already thought of as ethical. There are social norms of truth-telling, non-violence, and even fair dealing.

Each person has an incentive to comply with these norms rooted in the need to establish good relations and a secure reputation.

(breath)

In addition, there are what he calls excuses, ways of showing that a failure on your part should not damage your reputation,

(breath)

that it should not be taken to be show– sh-could– should not be taken to show that you are unreliable or uncooperative.

(breath)

But as Philip says in the text of his first lecture, these social norms are,

(breath)

quote, “likely to be pursued without” a sense of their moral or ethical appeal.”

(breath)

We each support them out of a desire, now in this case, now in that, to prove reliable to others.

(breath)

But that’s not because proving reliable promises to have impersonal merits of a moral kind. It’s only because any failure to prove reliable will make us uncongenial to others and cost us severely. It will mean we’re unable to rely on them or get them to rely on us.

We may recognize that we ought to tell the truth, but, uh, if we are to be prudent about our prospects, but on this developmental story, we will not be in a position to think that any characteristically moral considerations require us to do so. We won’t yet have concepts of that kind. So again, my first question is, what are concepts of that kind?

What is lacking? I can begin to reverse en- engineer an answer from Philip’s argument. For Philip, these concepts are or could be developed through the avowal and co- co-avowal of belief, intention, desire, and other attitudes, along with pledging and co-pledging.

To avow an attitude is to express or convey it in such a way that if things go wrong, you cannot save your reputation by saying you were innocently subject to misleading evidence about your own mind. Uh, we know what to pledge an intention is. But according to Philip, avowal and pledging are not yet ethical.

It’s still about reliability, reputation, self-interest, and the sorts of relationships that those may engender. So what more is needed? One thing Philip seems to think we need for the ethical is deserved reprimand and penalty.

Securing deserved penalty was the job of co-pledging, but I’m going to set that aside. Here’s another thing, a more subtle thing you might think we need to lift ourselves from mere self-interest into ethics. We need access to something like an intersubjective or shared point of view.

Something like what Kant had in mind in his discussion of the kingdom of ends, and what the contractualists are often after in specifying their original position. Perhaps something in the neighborhood is to be secured by conversation and by co-avowal. It seems that Philip means for co-avowal to provide us with an idealized governing, so-called normative point of view that’s common rather than individual.

So again, I’m gonna raise some detailed concerns about aval– uh, co-avowal tomorrow, but here I’ll just sketch what I think is the skeleton of Philip’s story. According to Philip, I avow an attitude when I express or convey the fact that I have that attitude in such a way that it forecloses a certain excuse. Philip points out that there’s a benefit to foreclosing that excuse.

It makes the expression of the attitude more risky and so makes others more likely to rely on it. And so Philip thinks that in his society, the default assumption will be that all, uh, intentionally expressed attitudes are avowed. Absent some s– tricky signaling to the contrary, we’ll not be able to avail ourselves of the misleading evidence excuse.

Philip points out, if we’re going to play this game, if we’re going to treat it as the default that we always lack the misleading evidence excuse, then we must be able to be confident that we know what our attitudes are. We must have ways of being confident that we’re not, in fact, being misled by the evidence. And Philip thinks we can be confident, so long as we carefully attend to the evidence on the one hand and the attractors for our desires on the other.

And in addition, importantly, so long as we’re on the lookout for what he calls disruptors, things that would tempt us away from the support, uh, from the desires supported by the attractors. Now, surprisingly to me, it’s this need to guard against disruptors that provides for Philip the possibility of a quote, normative or idealized point of view. In recognizing that I must guard against being seduced away from the generally– genuinely desirable, I come to see that I need to submit my current attitudes to guidance from a more idealized point of view, and I arrive at what Philip calls an idealized or normative perspective upon myself.

But that’s still not ethics. For that, we need three more steps, steps that seem as though they might be meant to provide the intersubjective point of view that many would identify with the ethical. The first is to establish the commonly or the jointly desirable.

These are those things that some group of us recognizes will be desirable for some sort of common or joint point of view. Importantly though, the commonly and jointly desirable can conflict with the individually desirable. As when I find that my survival or flourishing, or the flourishing of my children, more attractive than the survival or the flourishing of a member of the group as such.

The possible conflict creates a problem. Though at one point, Philip says that the problem is a conflict within the individual, he seems to take the big problem to be that we won’t be able to make representations to others about what we will do, nor will we be able to make reliable predictions. So somehow, in light of this conflict, we’ll be u-unable to say what we or others will do, and the relations of mutual reliance will break down.

Now, while I see that the possible conflict between the common and the individual will create a problem, I’m surprised it should create this problem, a problem about prediction or reliability. After all, there are even now some people who act more self-interestedly than others, and others who can be counted on to be more group-minded. And I don’t feel I need to appeal to a master category in order to know what to expect of each.

And I can often tell you with great confidence what I plan to do, even if it’s not in the overall interests of the group or even if it’s not, for the matter– that matter, the right thing. In any case, this conflict between the commonly or the jointly desirable and the individually desirable provides what I’m calling the second step on the way to the right. The third and crucial step is somehow arriving at the master category of the outright desirable.

And once we’ve arrived at that solution, and so specified the outright desirable, Philip claims we will have arrived at the right, or at least as he puts it on the handout, something close to our familiar concept of the right. And that concept’s to enable us to represent ourselves to others as reliable and to rely on them in return. But, and this will now pose my third question, Philip says distressingly little about how that actually happens, how we in fact solve this problem and arrive at the outright desirable.

He does rehearse constraints that he thinks the solution must satisfy, and he spends time pointing out that those, uh, constraints are conditions that would have to be met if the master category is to be suited to take on the role of the right. That is, they’re necessary, though I don’t think sufficient, conditions on the concept of the right. But while I see clearly the n– uh, the need that the solution, sorry.

While I see clearly that the solution would have to satisfy these constraints for Philip’s project to succeed, I need help understanding how these constraints are imposed by the problem faced by the members of the reported society. I need help to see why their problem imposes those constraints on a solution. Why, so to speak, their problem would form itself into an invisible hand that appoints here.

Why couldn’t they, for example, solve the problem about coordination, prediction, and reliability by each always doing what’s individually desirable, or by each always doing what’s commonly desirable, or by having a special hand signal to point out which one you’re going to do on a given occasion? Or more worryingly, by expecting certainly easily identified groups of people, the males perhaps, or the dominant, to do what’s individually desirable, while expecting the others to do what’s commonly desirable. Perhaps so long as we all expect the same pattern, uh, any pattern would be for Philip a version of the concept of the right.

Perhaps that would count for him as ethical. I’m not sure. I feel in the dark about what seems to me the crucial theoretical step.

So my third question is: How does the problem faced by the members of the reportive community, uh, impose constraints on its solution such that the solution will count as the concept of the right? And I’m also, uh, given this darkness, still at sea in about my first and second questions, uh, which I don’t think I’ll rehearse given the time. Thank you.

(applause)

[01:53:02] JAY WALLACE:
Five minutes of comments, 10 minutes of response?

[01:53:05] PHILIP PETTIT:
Well, maybe better go to Q&A. What do you think? I mean, I’m happy, happy to make some quick responses, but, you know. Okay. We’re really out of time, right?

[01:53:14] JAY WALLACE:
Okay. We, we have, uh, Philip has graciously, um, waived his right to respond to the commentators temporarily. Um, we’re hoping that as many of you as possible will rejoin us tomorrow, where the commentators will have another go, and Philip will have a more capacious opportunity to respond to questions that have come up.

And I hope we’ll have opportunity for general discussion. Uh, but I think we can take five minutes now for one or two, uh, questions from the audience just to, um, just to loosen things up a bit if, if there are any. Does anyone like to pose a question?

It’s a lot to, uh…

[01:53:58] PHILIP PETTIT:
Oh, yeah.

[01:53:59] AUDIENCE MEMBER 1:
I, I just have a question, uh, asking for clarification. When you spoke about individually desirable, commonly desirable, and jointly desirable, and then outright desirable, Commonly desirable sounds to me like something that many individuals desire, but not necessarily desired by the community. Is that what– which is different than jointly desirable.

Is that what you meant, or did you mean something different?

[01:54:28] PHILIP PETTIT:
I, I meant something different, um. So by the commonly desirable, I meant, um, you imagine i-it’s basically what’s desirable from the point of view of an individual who is as we are putting himself or herself under the constraint of only going with attractors that they think are– can– that others in general can be expected to endorse. Uh, I mentioned actually in the handout, I didn’t talk about it in the presentation, I was running out of time, that there are two sorts of attractors that might fill that role.

One I called unconditional attractors. So for example, um, I might think that the, um, um, you know, justice on Earth, you know, the survival of our species, biodiversity, the sustainability of the planet, uh, and of course, lower grade things too, are attractors, properties that, um, I expect to weigh with just about anyone. And insofar as I think that’s the case, I avow something, um, I co-avow in the name of an open community, um, a desire for the things that those properties would support.

Um, of course, people may disagree with me. It’s all just presumptive. The second sort of c-attractor that, uh, that obviously might play a role in your venturing a thought as to what is commonly attractive and therefore commonly desirable, I mean, we attractive and commonly desirable, Are what I call conditional attractors.

And they are, if you take, suppose that we’ve got a community where you’ve got people of different religions. So, um, in religion A, people want their religion. This is obviously an agent-relative attractor property.

They want that property to be satisfied, that their religion should thrive, and others that their religion, and a third group that their religion, and so on. You might expect that insofar as each recognizes that they’re going to have to live with people of such conflicting desires, right? That conditionally on having to live with people of such conflicting agent-relative desires, it’s conditionally attractive for all of them, therefore we attractive in that conditional way, that each group should be allowed to practice its own religion.

So the attractor, say, like freedom of religion, to pick that example, I might take to be an attractor that can elicit desire from just about anybody, regardless of their particular religion or non-religious affiliation. And I might put it forward as an attractor in that way. So I might co-avow something as attractive in the common manner, therefore as commonly desirable on the basis of those attractors.

But of course, the things that I see as commonly desirable in that sense may not include various things that I find individually desirable, which includes scenarios that are based on attractors that are relative to me, that are agent-relative. It’s actually at that point, of course, that you get the conflict between consequentialist and other points of view. At the consequentialist point of view is that when it comes to determining the outright desirable and, um, then it’s simply the commonly desirable that actually determines it.

Whereas non-consequentialist views, which of course there are many and very various, they’re going to argue that that that’s not the case. That, for example, in some cases, you should allow the individual desirable from the point of view of the relative person to actually help to determine what’s right for that person to do, even though that may not be what is commonly desirable. I don’t know whether that helps.

[01:58:26] AUDIENCE MEMBER 2:
Yes, thank you.

[01:58:27] PHILIP PETTIT:
The idea is there are these different normative perspectives that emerge. I’m terribly tempted to respond to these two people, but tomorrow morning I, uh, I’ll, I’ll give it a go. I mean, I don’t think that I’ll hold myself up probably in all fronts, but I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll give it a go.

Anyhow, I won’t say any more to you.

[01:58:43] AUDIENCE MEMBER 3:
Please.

[01:58:44] JAY WALLACE:
I, I’m pleased that you’re going to do this tomorrow morning, Philip, but I hope you also re-repeat the performance tomorrow afternoon.

(laughter)

[01:58:51] PHILIP PETTIT:
Tomorrow morning.

[01:58:53] JAY WALLACE:
Uh, we… No, no. But- Oh, yeah.

Preferably in this, this room, uh, at 4:10 PM, and I hope as many of you as possible will, will come back tomorrow for some more remarks by our commentators and discussion by Philip and opportunity for general discussion. So please join me in thanking everyone for, um, remarkably stimulating remarks.

(applause)

[01:59:16] SPEAKER 2:
Thank you very much.

(applause)

[01:59:19] SPEAKER 1:
Actually, could you give me the