Mathew Coakley

On the Value of Political Legitimacy

(Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Nov 2011, Vol 10, No 4 )

Theories of political legitimacy normally stipulate certain conditions of legitimacy: the features a state must possess in order to be legitimate. Yet there is obviously a second question as to the value of legitimacy: the normatively desirable features a state possesses by virtue of its legitimacy. A standard conception is that legitimacy either grounds duties (such as to obey the law) or provides either a right to use, or general justification in the employment of, coercion. I discuss the problem that these duties, rights and justifications seem to only change how we should overall act or judge in situations where prima facie we would not want them to. I consider a range of potential solutions based on the importance of rights, reasonable disagreement, morally optional acts, epistemic or pre-emptive reasons, and psycho-political benefits. All face difficulties. The intuitive triviality of establishing the value of normative legitimacy may mask a serious problem.

Comments welcome. Paper available here.  (Full PDF of pre-published draft here)

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How Should Consequentialism Evaluate Agents?

What, under consequentialism, makes someone morally good (or bad)? One answer is that they do, or are expected to do, morally good (or bad) actions - that is they tend to act rightly or wrongly. Or it could be that agent evaluations are meaningless or cannot correctly be made. Or that it is not the evaluation of what agents do, but of something else, that determines their evaluation. Or perhaps the question of agent evaluations doesn't matter -  it is knowing what is right and wrong that is important.  This paper explores the difficulties of each of these options. To show these are contingent problems given consequentialism's structure, rather than endemic to moral evaluations per se, it outlines a broad structure of theory - “motivation ethics” – that can overcome them even while retaining consequentialism’s conception of the good. 

Comments welcome. (Full PDF here)

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A Solution to Goodman’s “New Riddle of Induction”

Under Goodman's famous riddle, the observation of green emeralds before some future time t would seemingly support GRUE: “All Emeralds are green before time t and blue after time t” as much as GREEN: “All Emeralds are green before time t and green after time t”, a result often taken to be devastating for approaches to induction solely focused on the logical relations between evidence and theory. I argue however that if we insist on non-contradiction and logical closure in the support relation then green emeralds before time t support GREEN but not GRUE. The key move is to insist that any logical support relation must both (i) hold between the evidence and the theory; and (ii) not hold between the evidence and the negation of any of the theory’s logical entailments.  It is this second clause that separates GRUE from GREEN, even while both do meet the first (which on its own creates the apparent riddle). The solution generalizes.

Comments welcome. (Full PDF here)

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Interpersonal Comparisons of the Good:

Epistemic not Impossible

One way to evaluate the overall effects of any policy or institutional choice is to compare the benefits and losses to those affected: to make interpersonal comparisons of the good/welfare. Yet skeptics have worried either: (1) that such comparisons are impossible as they involve an impossible introspection across individuals; (2) that they are indeterminate as individual level information is compatible with a range of welfare numbers; or (3) that they are metaphysically mysterious as they assume either the existence of a social mind or of absolute levels of welfare when no such thing empirically exists. This paper explores, however, the possibility that if we treat this as an epistemic problem – that is as a problem of forming justified beliefs about the overall good based on evidence about the good of individuals – then these critiques might be addressed. 

The Annex proves that, for any non-dogmatic well-defined credence function, accepting Arrow’s Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives entails the possibility of incoherent beliefs. If we seek justified beliefs about overall welfare or the overall good, we should not accept Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem as validly characterizing out task.

Comments welcome. (Full PDF here)

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Moral demandingness and two concepts of evaluation

  

“Bob is a good swimmer”. What determines the potential correctness of the term “good” here? Well, it could be comparativist in that by good swimmer we mean ‘better than most human swimmers’ or that Bob is a better swimmer than compared to some other implied comparator set. Alternatively however it might be non-comparativist in that it refers to some threshold – not drowning in water perhaps – that in principle almost everyone (or no-one) might meet. These represent two different ways of grounding the truth conditions for qualitative labels. This paper argues that resolving the debate over moral demandingness depends on what is the correct way to conceive of moral evaluations – whether they should be comparatively or non-comparatively determined – and that comparativism though seemingly more radical has advantages. 

Comments welcome. (Full PDF here)

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There is no Paradox of the Ravens

Under Hempel’s famous ravens’ paradox, a white shoe confirms all ravens are black, which appears paradoxical as it seems evidence concerning a shoe’s color should not tell us something about raven color. This paper points out that our general understanding of the paradox is mistaken as (i) the shoe’s color is irrelevant and (ii) every logically possible theory about raven color is confirmed by the shoe. The underlying reason is that the observation of a non-raven on its own supports the theory that “no ravens exist” and this, in standard logic, entails all ravens are black (and “all ravens are white” and many more theories too). Having often being taken to be a grave problem for logical empiricist (and logical positivist) accounts of the philosophy of science, the ravens’ paradox, on careful examination, is in fact well handled by such approaches.

Comments welcome. (Full pdf here)