I was Reading about Meghan Sullivan “principle of non-arbitrariness,” and it reminded me Parfit’s argument against subjectivist reasoning in On What Matters… but why are philosophers (well, and people in general) against arbitrariness? I mean, I do agree it’s a tempting intuition, but I’ve never seen (a) a formal enunciation of what counts as arbitrary (is “arbitrary” arbitrary?), and (b) an a priori argument against. Of course, if someone’s preference ordering varies totally randomly, we can’t represent them with a utility function, and perhaps we could accuse them of being inconsistent. But that’s not what philosophers’ examples usually chastise: if one has a predictable preference for eating shrimps only on Friday, or disregards pain only on Thursday, there’s no instability here – you can represent it with a utility function (having time as a dimension).
There isn’t even any a priori feature allowing us to say that is evolutionarily unstable, since this could only be assessed when we look at whom our agent will interact with. Which makes me think that arbitrariness is not a priori at all, of course – it depends on social practices such as “giving reasons” for actions and decisions (i don’t think Parfit would deny that; idk about Sullivan). There might be a thriving community of people who only love shrimp on Friday, for no reason at all; but, if you don’t share this abnormal preference, it might be hard to model their behavior, to cooperate with them—at least, in this example, when it comes gastronomic enterprises. On the other hand, if you can just have a story (even if kinda unbelievable: “it’s a psychosomatic allergy”) to explain this preference, it’s ok: you’re just another peculiar human. I can understand you now; your explanation works as a salience that allows me to better predict your behavior.
I suspect many philosophical (a priori-like) intuitions depend on things like Schelling points (i.e., the problem of finding salient solutions for social practices people can converge to) than most philosophers would admit. Of course, late Wittgenstein scholars are OK with that, since for them everything is about forms of life, language games, etc. But I think relativistic / conventionalist philosophers unduly trivialize this feature, and so neglect an important point: whatever counts as arbitrary is not, well, arbitrary – and we can often demonstrate that what we call “arbitrary” is suboptimal, inconsistent with other preferences or intuitions, or hard to communicate (and so a poor candidate for a social norm / convention / intuition).
I was Reading about Meghan Sullivan “principle of non-arbitrariness,” and it reminded me Parfit’s argument against subjectivist reasoning in On What Matters… but why are philosophers (well, and people in general) against arbitrariness? I mean, I do agree it’s a tempting intuition, but I’ve never seen (a) a formal enunciation of what counts as arbitrary (is “arbitrary” arbitrary?), and (b) an a priori argument against. Of course, if someone’s preference ordering varies totally randomly, we can’t represent them with a utility function, and perhaps we could accuse them of being inconsistent. But that’s not what philosophers’ examples usually chastise: if one has a predictable preference for eating shrimps only on Friday, or disregards pain only on Thursday, there’s no instability here – you can represent it with a utility function (having time as a dimension).
There isn’t even any a priori feature allowing us to say that is evolutionarily unstable, since this could only be assessed when we look at whom our agent will interact with. Which makes me think that arbitrariness is not a priori at all, of course – it depends on social practices such as “giving reasons” for actions and decisions (i don’t think Parfit would deny that; idk about Sullivan). There might be a thriving community of people who only love shrimp on Friday, for no reason at all; but, if you don’t share this abnormal preference, it might be hard to model their behavior, to cooperate with them—at least, in this example, when it comes gastronomic enterprises. On the other hand, if you can just have a story (even if kinda unbelievable: “it’s a psychosomatic allergy”) to explain this preference, it’s ok: you’re just another peculiar human. I can understand you now; your explanation works as a salience that allows me to better predict your behavior.
I suspect many philosophical (a priori-like) intuitions depend on things like Schelling points (i.e., the problem of finding salient solutions for social practices people can converge to) than most philosophers would admit. Of course, late Wittgenstein scholars are OK with that, since for them everything is about forms of life, language games, etc. But I think relativistic / conventionalist philosophers unduly trivialize this feature, and so neglect an important point: whatever counts as arbitrary is not, well, arbitrary – and we can often demonstrate that what we call “arbitrary” is suboptimal, inconsistent with other preferences or intuitions, or hard to communicate (and so a poor candidate for a social norm / convention / intuition).