NDPR Annette C. Baier, The Cautious Jealous Virtue: Hume on Justice

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-09-01 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Annette C. Baier, The Cautious Jealous Virtue: Hume on Justice, Harvard UP, 2010, 261pp., $45.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780674049765.

Reviewed by James A. Harris, University of St. Andrews

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No one could possibly accuse Annette Baier of being idle in her retirement from teaching at the University of Pittsburgh. In addition to a steady stream of papers on a variety of philosophical topics, she has published three books in the past two years alone: Death and Character: Further Reflections on Hume (Harvard UP, 2008); Reflections on How We Live (Oxford UP, 2010); and now The Cautious Jealous Virtue: Hume on Justice. A further, introductory book on Hume, Pursuits of Philosophy, will appear next year. The Cautious Jealous Virtue is a collection of papers on Hume's theory of justice and 'associated topics'. Five of its ten chapters have been published before: these are the chapters on questions closely related to the main theme of the book, such as Hume's treatment of promises and of chastity, what he has to say about resentment, and the differences and similarities between Book Three of the Treatise and the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals.

Because these pieces are, in the main, familiar landmarks on the crowded terrain of Hume studies, I shall not discuss them here. I shall concentrate instead upon the new chapters on justice that make up Part One of the book, and upon what I take to be the three main concerns of those chapters: (i) an elaboration and defence of Baier's view that, according to Hume, it is in terms of enlightened self-interest that the moral obligation to justice is to be explicated; (ii) an attempt to recover from Hume's texts a theory of equity as well as a theory of justice; and, following on from (ii), (iii) a charting of the way in which the strikingly narrow conception of justice operative in the Treatise is expanded in later texts, most notably in the History of England, to include more of what is normally thought of as constitutive of the concerns of justice.

In Part Two of Book Three of the Treatise, Hume raises a question about why we attach moral significance to acts such as repaying loans, respecting the property of others, and doing what we have said we will do. Hume begins with the ordinary assumption that we evaluate actions in terms of the motives that prompted them. He then argues that a concern for justice as such is not to be found in everyday motives like self-interest, regard for the public good, and benevolent concern for particular interests. Take the case of repaying a loan. It is not just insofar as doing so is in my interests that such an action is morally admirable, since we expect loans to be repaid even when it is not in the borrower's interests to do so. Nor do we praise such an action just insofar as it is done out of regard to the public interest, since the public interest may very well not be at issue in whether or not I repay this particular loan, and since, in any case, our expectations of people are not so elevated that we expect them to act from motives so elevated. Nor do we praise such an action just insofar as it is done out of benevolent concern for another, since we expect loans to enemies to be repaid just as promptly as loans to friends, and since we expect loans from the wealthy and corrupt to be paid by the poor and needy. So what kind of motive do we take to express itself in the repaying of a loan, such that we morally approve of the action?

It might be answered that the motive in question is that of a simple respect for what is right. The borrower repays the loan because she knows that that is what she must do, and we praise her on that account. The lender has a right to his money. The borrower acknowledges that right and so repays the money. It was widely held among philosophers of Hume's time -- and of course also among philosophers since -- that in fact an action is morally admirable only insofar as it is done out of a respect for the rights of another or, in other words, out of a sense of obligation or duty. Hume counters that it is logically impossible, because viciously circular, to explain the moral admirability of doing what is one's duty in terms of a respect for what is one's duty. For, on the ordinary assumption from which the argument began, to say that an action is what duty requires is merely to say that there is some morally approved motive to that action, and what we were wanting to find out, and have yet to be told, is what that morally approved motive is. The conclusion Hume draws from all of this is that actions such as the repaying of a loan are not 'naturally' morally estimable. The sense that they have moral significance, he says, 'is not deriv'd from nature, but arises artificially, tho' necessarily from education, and human conventions' (Treatise, ed. Selby-Bigge, rev. Nidditch, p. 483).

This is to say, in the first instance, that it is only when and where it is established as a general convention that loans must be repaid that it makes sense to talk of there being moral significance to giving back money to someone who has lent it to me. Hume proceeds to give a brilliant account of how conventions regarding property, and regarding its lawful transfer from one person to another, might be thought to have developed as a condition of the possibility of social life as such. This, he says, explains the 'natural' or 'interested' obligation each member of society has in such things as the repayment of loans. But it does not explain why, different and distinct from what is in my interests as social being, there is the question of the moral value of the repayment of a loan. Hume himself distinguishes the 'natural' obligation to such actions from the 'moral' obligation. The idea that repaying a loan is morally admirable, he says, derives from the operations of the faculty of sympathy, by means of which we each take upon ourselves a vivid sense of the interests of society at large, such that we are pleased by (and approve of) what is in accord with those interests and offended by (and disapprove of) what is not in accord with them.

The problem faced by the interpreter of Hume once this account of the history of 'the sense of justice and injustice' is complete is that the question Hume began by asking, concerning the motive of the person who repays a loan, the motive that explains why repaying a loan is morally admirable, appears not to have been answered. Certainly Hume himself gives no explicit answer to the question he started out with. It is as if, by the end of the section 'Of the origin of justice and property', full of satisfaction at his account of the artifice involved in the original framing of conventions regarding property, and excited by the prospect of extending his theory of sympathy to explain what Hutcheson had had to bring in a special 'moral sense' to account for, Hume has simply forgotten about the motive of the person who respects rights of property.

Unwilling to believe that this might be the case, readers of Hume have proposed a number of different candidates for the job of the motive that explains why acts in accord with conventions regarding property (and acts in accord with the convention of promises) are morally praised. In The Cautious Jealous Virtue Baier is especially concerned with two relatively recent such proposals, one developed variously by Stephen Darwall, Don Garrett, and Lorraine Besser-Jones, another made by Rachel Cohon.^[1] On both proposals, though in significantly different ways, Hume is supposed to end up weakening his opposition to the idea that a respect for duty as such might be the morally approved motive to justice. According to Darwall, Garrett, and Besser-Jones, it turns out that in the end Hume allows that the morally esteemed motive to justice is a sense of duty or, at least, a commitment to respect conventions and rules simply because they are the conventions and rules operative in the society in which one lives. According to Cohon, in time, if all goes well, the moral approval directed at others generated by sympathy becomes itself a motive to action for the agent herself.

Baier's main objection to both these proposals is that they have no solid basis in Hume's text. She also points out respects in which they are at odds with positions which do have a solid textual basis: in general, Hume 'is rather scathing about acts of inner commitment' (p. 59); and Hume 'explicitly says, in a sentence he added after the Treatise was published, that sympathy with the public interest . . . is too weak to motivate' (p. 65). It needs to be said, though, that Baier's own position -- that the morally approved motive to justice is 'a sense of common interest' (p. 66), 'a special form of prudence' (p. 67) -- itself has no direct support in the text of the Treatise.

Baier's case for her position is in essence that Hume never says anything that rules it out. That is, according to Baier, Hume never says anything that suggests that an action in accord with conventions regarding property and promises is any less morally admirable when it is done out of a sense of how it is in one's interests so to act (in circumstances of moderate material scarcity and when there is reason to think that everyone else is disposed to act likewise). This is true. But Hume does not anywhere stipulate that an action must be done out of enlightened self-interest in order to be morally praiseworthy as a just action. It seems to me, in fact, that in the Treatise Hume argues himself into a tacit rejection of the principle with which he began -- the principle that the moral worth of an action is derived from its motive. Part of what differentiates the 'artificial' virtues from the 'natural' ones, I think, is that in the case of the former, the 'virtue' lies simply in conformity with a convention, without it mattering what the motive is for that conformity. The moral worth of conformity derives from its consequences, not from its motives. I believe Hume is more in control of his own theory in the second Enquiry­, where the role of utility in the moral estimation of justice is more prominent and where the puzzle of the moral motive to just acts is not mentioned.

Baier writes persuasively of what is new in the second Enquiry in the final chapter of The Cautious Jealous Virtue, 'Incomparably the Best?'.^[2] In another chapter, 'Nature and Artifice, Equity and Justice', she laments the fact that the decade and more that separates the second Enquiry from Book Three of the Treatise was not sufficient to prompt Hume to effect a clear distinction between justice on the one hand and equity on the other. 'Equity is bracketed with justice, in EPM,' she notes, 'not given any role in criticizing the provisions of social schemes, or laws' (p. 81): there is here no break with the Treatise, where the word 'equity' is very often used as if it is a synonym for 'justice' . Earlier in the same chapter Baier asks why the approved motive to justice cannot be 'duty for equity's sake' (73). Why, in other words, could not what is morally admirable in repaying a loan be a sense, simply, that it is fair that the lender get his money back, that it would be unfair not to keep to the terms of the agreement made when the loan was issued? Intriguingly and, for Baier, frustratingly, at one point in the Treatise Hume is prepared to list 'equity' as one of the natural virtues -- along with '[m]eekness, beneficence, charity, generosity, clemency, moderation' (Treatise, ed. Selby-Bigge, rev. Nidditch, p. 578). This makes it at least conceivable that on the Humean scheme of things, in addition to justice defined strictly in terms of rules determining property ownership and the obligations of promises and contracts, there is a principle possessed of the capacity to criticize those rules and suggest ways in which they might be morally improved. Equity, or fairness, reveals itself, as Baier puts it, 'outside the sphere of artifices, say, in parents' treatment of their several children' (p. 74). It is not, like benevolence, a principle absolutely different in kind from that of justice. It might rather be thought of as a means of negotiating between the demands of justice and the recommendations of charity. Why, Baier asks, did Hume not make more of it?

The answer to this question surely lies in the extent to which Hume broke with conventional assumptions concerning the source of our moral convictions. In Principles of Equity, Henry Home of Kames could write that

a court of equity commences at the limits of common law, and enforces benevolence in certain circumstances where the law of nature makes it our duty. And thus, a court of equity, accompanying the law of nature in its gradual refinements, enforces every natural duty that is neglected by common law.^[3]

Kames retained confidence in a faculty of conscience able to tell us about the dictates of natural law. Hume did not. History and artifice are needed, on Hume's version of moral sense theory, to turn the impressions of pain and pleasure that are the raw material of the moral life into ideas of duty, obligation, and law. Hume's own version of 'natural law' is exceedingly, and pointedly, minimal; it amounts to no more than the principles 'of the stability of possession, of its transference by consent, and of the performance of promises' (Treatise, ed. Selby-Bigge, rev. Nidditch, p. 526). According to Hume, as Baier herself emphasizes, in the familial and amicable domain of the natural virtues, notions of duty and law have no application. The only duties that there are, on the Humean scheme of things, are artificial ones, and this would seem to place a drastic limitation on justice's capacity to regulate itself by means of a principle of equity. It is likely, I think, that the inclusion of equity among the natural virtues was a slip on Hume's part -- a slip that was not to be repeated in the second Enquiry.

A reason why Baier dwells on the possibility of a Humean theory of equity is that she thinks Hume himself came to reject the very narrow conception of justice on display in the Treatise and the second Enquiry. The introduction to The Cautious Jealous Virtue is entitled 'What the Historian Taught the Moralist', and in several of the chapters, as in Part One of Death and Character, Baier is concerned with ways in which the History of England sees Hume complicating, refining, and improving his moral philosophy. In his account of the rule of James I and VI, for example, Hume writes as though justice might include both a universal penalty for murder (introduced by James to replace a penalty that varied according to the rank and sex of the victim) and alter the law of property so as to provide incentives for improvement of land that one owned.

In the History, but not in the Treatise and Enquiry, Hume is perfectly clear that murder counts as an instance of injustice, and, as Baier puts it, 'Once wrongful death counts as an injustice, . . . English history becomes a long string of injustices' (p. 87). 'Hume is very clearly moved by the manifest injustice of [the Earl of] Strafford's trial and conviction [in 1641, at the hands of Parliament]', Baier observes, 'but the injustice of it has nothing whatever to do with the infringement of property rights' (p. 89). The same could be said, and is said by Baier, of many other manifest injustices described in the History (see pp. 86-99 passim). In the History Hume's conception of justice is 'enlarged' to include fair trials, fair wages, fair opportunities, a right not to have one's character besmirched -- as well as the right not to be killed just because it suits the powers that be to do away with you. Baier remarks,

It is striking how at crucial points when some change in law is being praised by Hume, it is "equity" which is the value promoted. It is almost as if justice is obedience to custom, while equity is what often demands reform of custom, just as courts of equity revised lower-court rulings (p. 98).

Baier writes of Hume's enlargement of his conception of justice as if when it came to the writing of the History, Hume discovered, or remembered, something that he did not know, or had forgotten, when he wrote the Treatise and second Enquiry. She expresses a wish that Hume had returned to moral philosophy after having completed the History. It is surely unlikely, however, that Hume was ever unaware that on any normal definition, wrongful killing counts as an instance of injustice just as much as robbery and defaulting on a loan do. There is of course a question to be asked as to why Hume restricts the scope of justice as he does in his moral philosophy, but that question is probably best answered in terms of his concern with the notion of 'sociability' (socialitas) that had been at the heart of natural jurisprudence since Grotius and his desire to bring out the artificiality of the basic conventions in which the 'laws of nature' are encoded.

A further thing that is to be found in the History but not elsewhere, according to Baier, is an understanding of how the virtues combine, in given social conditions, to make an admirable person. The second Enquiry gives us only a catalogue of virtues, not anything like (to use Baier's own example) Plato's description of how the different virtues learn to cooperate with each other, protecting each other in diverse ways from possible loss or corruption (see p. 14). There is, Baier says, more 'moral wisdom' in the History (p. 17). This remark gives a good sense of the kind of reader of Hume that Baier is. She is restless, demanding, and surprising. The chapters of The Cautious Jealous Virtue do not themselves combine into a single orderly line or argument. Indeed, taken individually, they often have something of the feel of meditations or, to use a term that Baier has herself more than once used to characterize her work, of reflections. Her deep affection for Hume is obvious everywhere, but so also is her inability to perfectly be satisfied by any of Hume's conclusions, and a sense that the questions that Hume raises are more important than the answers he himself gives them.

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^[1] See Stephen Darwall, 'Motive and Obligation in Hume's Ethics', Nous 27 (1993): 415-48; Don Garrett, 'The First Motive to Justice: Hume's Circle Squared', Hume Studies 33 (2007): 257-88; Lorraine Besser-Jones, 'The Role of Justice in Hume's Theory of Psychological Development', Hume Studies 32 (2006): 253-76; Rachel Cohon, 'Hume's Difficulty with the Virtue of Honesty', Hume Studies 23 (1997): 91-112.

^[2] Originally published in Elizabeth Radcliffe (ed.), A Companion to Hume (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 293-320.

^[3] Henry Home, Lord Kames, Principles of Equity (Edinburgh, 1760), pp. vi-vii.

NDPR Casey Perin, The Demands of Reason: An Essay on Pyrrhonian Scepticism

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-08-34 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Casey Perin, The Demands of Reason: An Essay on Pyrrhonian Scepticism, Oxford UP, 2010, 130 pp., $49.95 (hbk), ISBN 9780199557905.

Reviewed by Filip Grgić, Institute of Philosophy, Zagreb

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A comprehensive and systematic interpretation of Pyrrhonian scepticism as it is presented in the works of Sextus Empiricus is probably not possible. His treatises are collections of a vast array of arguments stemming from various sources from Pyrrhonian tradition and elsewhere, arguments that often strongly differ in their strength and aims. The best known of these treatises, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, is also not amenable to a fully coherent interpretation, as Casey Perin rightly remarks in the "Introduction" of his book (5-6). So instead of offering a comprehensive interpretation of Sextus, he discusses several central topics from the Outlines -- such as the nature of sceptical investigation, the scope and character of the suspension of judgement, and the problem of beliefs, appearances, and action -- that have been the main bones of contention among scholars in the last decades. In this short book, Perin has defended a well argued, clear, and challenging interpretation of some of the central aspects of Pyrrhonian scepticism. In this respect, The Demands of Reason is a major contribution to Sextus scholarship. At the same time, it shows that Sextus is still able to engage a contemporary reader.

Perin's main objective is to challenge the interpretation according to which the scepticism of the Outlines can be characterized as a form of anti-rationalism. Some scholars have argued that Sextus' sceptic abandons the search for truth once he has observed that his ultimate goal, tranquillity, regularly follows upon suspension of judgement. Moreover, it has been held that the sceptics' use of certain types of argument, notably Agrippa's modes, commit them to the view that the search for truth is futile. Thus Gisela Striker, one of the main proponents of such an interpretation, ascribes to the Pyrrhonists the view that "there is no need to fall back on reason and argument in everyday life because all of it can be conducted by following the appearances that come to us involuntarily, untainted by the influence of reason."^[1] Perin wants to argue that such a view of Sextan scepticism fails to capture its most important characteristics. He does not deny that reason has a restricted role for the Pyrrhonists, but insists that it does have a role, especially in that their central recommendation, that one should suspend judgement in all matters, is guided by the aim to satisfy the demands of reason.

In Chapter 1 ("The Search for Truth") Perin discusses the character and aim of sceptical investigation. Sextus insists that, while other groups of philosophers have announced that they have found the truth (positive dogmatists, like Epicureans or Stoics) or that the truth cannot be found (negative dogmatists, that is, Academics like Clitomachus and Carneades and their followers), the sceptics are "still investigating" (Outlines of Pyrrhonism [PH] 1.3). While Sextus is not explicit about what exactly it is that the sceptics are investigating, Perin argues that they are, like other philosophers, engaged in the search for truth. On the other hand, however, there seem to be some reasons to think that the search for truth is incompatible with the sceptics' position. For Sextus also says that the goal of scepticism is the achievement of tranquillity, and he defines scepticism as the ability to achieve tranquillity through suspension of judgement. So if the discovery of truth is just a means to achieving tranquillity, and, on the other hand, it appears to the sceptic that tranquillity regularly follows upon suspension of judgement, it seems that the sceptic has every reason to abandon the search for truth, for even if it is successful, it cannot achieve tranquillity. If this is so, then scepticism cannot be seen as a kind of philosophy, contrary to what Sextus insists.

Perin wants to argue that there is no real conflict here. The crucial question is why the sceptic is interested in finding the truth in the first place. One might get the impression that he is interested in truth merely as a means to tranquillity, that is, that the sceptic wants to know whether it is the case that p only because he wants to achieve tranquillity, i.e., eliminate the distress he feels because of the ignorance concerning p. Perin insists that this cannot be so. For the sceptic is distressed precisely because he has an interest in knowing whether p is the case, that is, because he has an interest in truth for its own sake. Thus, an interest in truth for its own sake precedes and explains the distress, and the desire to alleviate the distress is, in turn, the desire for tranquillity. Perin argues that it is precisely because he has an interest in truth for its own sake that the sceptic can take the discovery of truth as a means to achieving tranquillity. It follows, then, that the sceptic has an interest in truth both for its own sake and as a means to tranquillity. The search for truth, of course, presupposes that the truth can indeed be found, and Perin shows that the sceptics' use of Agrippan strategy does not, contrary to what is sometimes thought, commit them to the view that the truth cannot be found.

Perin's interpretation is convincing, elegant, and well argued. A possible objection might be that he uses too restricted a notion of investigation. Commenting on PH 1.1-3, he says: "In fact I doubt whether investigation can be understood as anything but the search for truth, but I am claiming here only that investigation as Sextus understands it -- the activity he claims the Sceptic is engaged in -- is the search for truth" (8). While I agree that this may be the most natural reading of PH 1.1-3, it seems to me that there is much more in Sextus' notion of investigation than the discovery of truth. For the sceptical investigation is also aimed at the avoidance of false beliefs (or, as the sceptics would put it, of precipitate assent), and includes the careful examination of dogmatic theories; moreover, they also investigate whether there are such things as truth and the true (and argue that there are no such things [PH 2.80], or, alternatively, that we should suspend judgement about them [2.94]). So perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that sceptical investigations are guided by an interest in truth in a more general sense, and not only by the interest in discovering which of p and not-p is true. That is to say, we may grant that the source of distress is the failure to know which of p and not-p is true, so that the sceptics embark upon investigation because they have an interest in truth for its own sake, but perhaps we should leave open which truth-related value is such that it can be expected to remove the distress. The desire to discover the truth may be the sceptics' original motive; but as their investigation progresses, they may become aware that there are many more truth-related values they want to satisfy for their own sake.

Perin argues that in the Outlines we can find an argument that is in tension with the view that discovery of truth is a means to achieving tranquillity. This is the value argument, as he calls it, according to which the source of distress is not ignorance, but any belief about the goodness or badness of something, from which it follows that "discovering the truth about the value of something is an obstacle, not a means, to tranquillity. For, obviously, to discover the truth about the value of something is to come to know, and hence to believe, either that it is good or that it is bad" (25). So if the source of distress is, as Sextus argues, the belief that some things are good or bad, then, if a person believes that x is good, she must, to remove the distress, eliminate this belief, and not discover the truth. I agree that the value argument can be seen as a deviation with respect to the rest of the Outlines, but it seems to me that things are perhaps more complicated. A person may believe that x is good and feel distressed because of this, but, if she has an interest in truth both for its own sake and as a means to tranquillity, she may believe that in this case, too, an investigation guided by her interest in truth will remove the distress. So she may set out to examine whether the proposition that x is good is indeed worthy of assent and discover that the criteria for the application of the term "good" are so confused that, after scrutiny, her assent to the proposition that x is good turns out to be an instance of a precipitate assent.

In Chapter 2 ("Necessity and Rationality") Perin addresses the character of the sceptics' suspension of judgement. Sextus often writes that suspension is a matter of necessity, i.e., that the fact that the conflict between candidates for belief is equipollent compels one to suspend judgement. Perin describes this kind of necessity as causal or psychological necessity: it appears to the sceptic that a psychological state of one type (the appearance of conflict and equipollence) causes a psychological state of another type (suspension). Taken in this sense, suspension is something that is entirely passive. Perin does not deny that the necessity attached to the sceptic's suspension is causal, but insists that this cannot be the whole story. For Sextus not only says that one is compelled or forced to suspend judgement but he also says that in certain situations the dogmatist will immediately concede that it is necessary to suspend judgement (PH 2.19), or that it is right to suspend judgement (2.96). This suggests that the necessity involved in suspension is not just causal. Perin describes it as a kind of hypothetical necessity: it is necessary for sceptics or dogmatist sto suspend judgement if they want to satisfy certain rational requirements. The relevant rational requirement in the case of the dogmatists is

(SJ) Rationality requires one to suspend judgement about whether p if one believes there is no reason to believe either p or its negation (40),

while the rational requirement the sceptics want to satisfy is

(SJ*) Rationality requires one to suspend judgement about whether p if it appears to one that there is no reason to believe either p or its negation (43),

where "appears" should be taken non-doxastically, which means that by saying that it appears to him that p the sceptic does not attribute to himself the belief that p. Thus both the dogmatists and the sceptics aim to satisfy the demands of reason, which is to be expected, given that they are both engaged in the rational activity of searching for truth. We might ask what (SJ*) has to do with rationality, since it is stated in terms of what (non-doxastically) appears to one to be the reason for belief. Perin's answer is that (SJ) and (SJ*) are instances of general requirements of rationality with respect to belief, and, as such, they say only that we should not have a belief "that conflicts with the attitude that controls the formation, retention, and revision of that belief" (44).

Now, there are a variety of other ways in which Sextus announces suspension as a conclusion of sceptical arguments: he not only says that one must suspend judgement or that it is right to do so but he also says that one "arrives" at suspension (1.8, 1.91) and "concludes" to it (1.35, 1.123, 3.49), that it is "introduced" (1.117), that it "follows" (1.166), etc. What should we make of these cases? Perin tackles this question very briefly (p. 47, n. 24), and says that such descriptions are neutral with regard to whether the manner in which suspension follows is a matter of causal or hypothetical necessity. It seems to me, however, that at least some of these cases give support to the hypothetical interpretation. Take, for instance, the conclusion of Aenesidemus' fourth mode, where Sextus says that "the suspension of judgement about external existing objects is introduced (eisagetai)" (1.117). Reasoning leading to this conclusion seems to me to have basically the same structure as the argument in 3.34-6, where Sextus, according to Perin, relies on (SJ) or (SJ*). Let me also note that PH 2.253 may be taken as a clear example, not discussed by Perin, of a dogmatist (Chrysippus) who must suspend judgement if he wants to satisfy (SJ).

Chapter 3 ("The Scope of Scepticism") turns to one of the most discussed topics in recent scholarship, the problem of the sceptics' beliefs. While Sextus insists that the sceptics suspend judgement about everything, which suggests that they have absolutely no beliefs, he nevertheless puts the restriction on the scope of scepticism and says that the sceptics do have some beliefs (dogmata), if belief is taken just as acquiescing in something, i.e., as an assent to the affection forced upon one in accordance with an appearance. The question is, what kind of mental state this is and whether we can call it "belief" in the standard sense. Perin's suggestion is that the beliefs the sceptics have -- or non-dogmatic beliefs, as he calls them -- are beliefs about how things appear to them, while beliefs they lack -- or dogmatic beliefs -- are beliefs about how things are. While this solution is not novel, Perin supports it by a very clear argument and persuasive interpretation of the central passage (PH 1.13). He also offers a detailed criticism of an alternative and influential view proposed by Michael Frede.

Now, if dogmata that the sceptics admit are dogmata about how things appear to them, then the question arises: does this mean that they have beliefs in the standard sense of that term? While it may be controversial what exactly is included in having a belief, it seems obvious that to believe p is to take p to be true. Some commentators have rejected this and insisted that the sceptics' beliefs, as opposed to the dogmatists' beliefs, do not include accepting a proposition as true.^[2] Others have endorsed the standard account, but claimed that, as it was the common view among the ancient philosophers that the reports about how things appear do not have a truth value, they could not think that there are beliefs about how things appear.^[3] Perin rejects both lines of interpretation: he argues both that non-dogmatic belief includes accepting a proposition as true and that it is a genuine belief. His main piece of evidence is PH 1.215, where Sextus reports that someone has identified scepticism with Cyrenaicism because they both claim that we apprehend (katalambanesthai) only our own affections (pathē), which suggests, according to him, that the sceptics have knowledge of what appears to them. He further suggests that

if, as Sextus claims, the Sceptic has knowledge of how things appear to him, and if belief is a constituent of knowledge, then he has beliefs about how things appear to him. But it is difficult to see how it is possible for the Sceptic (or anyone else) to believe p, and in doing so to know p, without accepting p as true. (69)

I am not certain, however, that the standard distinction between knowledge and belief applies in this case. The Cyrenaics take beliefs about their own pathē as infallible and incorrigible,^[4] and the same can be said about the sceptics' beliefs about how things appear: they do not admit of being false. In this respect, the sceptical dogma is more like knowledge than like belief.

One of the main functions commonly attributed to belief is to guide our actions. However, when he argues against the famous apraxia objection -- which says, roughly, that scepticism is incompatible with action -- Sextus does not appeal to sceptical dogmata. As Perin shows in Chapter 4 ("Appearances and Action"), he is right in not doing so, for beliefs about how things appear to one cannot guide one's actions. Sextus argues instead that the explanation of actions should be given in terms of appearances. In Perin's account,

The explanation of any action the Sceptic performs will have the form 'S does action A because he desires to φ and it appears to him that p' where p is, typically, a complex proposition that relates the doing of A to φ-ing and so to the satisfaction of the desire to φ. For example, the Sceptic drinks a glass of water because he is thirsty, i.e., has a desire to drink, and it appears to the Sceptic that there is a glass of water in front of him and that he can drink it. The appearance to which the explanation of the Sceptic's action appeals is not a belief, but it is an analogue to belief in the sense that it plays the role in the explanation of the Sceptic's actions that belief plays in the explanation of the non-Sceptic's actions. (96-7)

Things are, however, somewhat more complicated, as Perrin shows, primarily because Sextus does not make it clear how an appearance is different from a belief. In any case, it would be wrong to conclude that, because the sceptics are guided by appearances rather than by beliefs, they want to entirely reject reason. On the contrary, their appeal to appearances is the result of their attempt to satisfy the requirements of reason: "In this way the restriction placed on the role of reason in the Sceptic's life is a restriction reason places on itself" (117-8).

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^[1] G. Striker, "Scepticism as a Kind of Philosophy", Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 83 (2001), p. 122.

^[2] M. Frede, "The Sceptic's Two Kinds of Assent and the Question of the Possibility of Knowledge", in M. Burnyeat and M. Frede (eds.), The Original Sceptics: A Controversy, Indianapolis/Cambridge, 1997, pp. 133-8.

^[3] See M. Burnyeat, "Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed", The Philosophical Review 91 (1982), pp. 25-27.

^[4] See on this in V. Tsouna, The Epistemology of the Cyrenaic School, Cambridge, 1998, esp. pp. 3-4.

NDPR Manuel Bremer, Universality in Set Theories: A Study in Formal Ontology

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-08-33 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Manuel Bremer, Universality in Set Theories: A Study in Formal Ontology, Ontos, 2010, 125pp., $93.00 (hbk), ISBN 9783868380712.

Reviewed by M. Randall Holmes, Boise State University

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I am very interested in books and articles like this one which lie at the border of philosophy and set theory. There is an unfortunate difficulty with such studies: they are usually written by philosophers rather than set theorists, and it is vitally important in such a study to get the technical details right. The technical details bear strongly on the philosophical issues. This book, very interesting to me in conception, labors under this difficulty. The philosophical issues related to the issue of the existence of a universal set are laid out, but the discussion of central mathematical issues and of particular theories is marred by technical errors and confusions which are sometimes distracting and sometimes seem to call Bremer 's philosophical conclusions into question. I am not saying that philosophers cannot write technically correct books about the philosophy of set theory. Very impressive books have been written by David Lewis ([4]), Mary Tiles ([7]), and A. W. Moore ([6]), for example, which ably deal with both philosophical and technical mathematical issues.

The brief introduction (pp. 7-11) correctly (in my opinion) lays out certain issues and strategies central to what follows. Bremer states that set theories are ontologies: this seems entirely sensible both from a philosophical standpoint and from a mathematician's standpoint as to what set theory is for. Set theories are theories of collections of objects, themselves reified as objects. In connection with a particular set theory, we might have occasion to consider (informally) the collection of objects of that theory and the domain(s) over which quantified variables range in that theory. It is reasonable to ask whether these collections (informally speaking) are among the collections actually considered as objects of the theory. Is there a universal set? Are the ranges of quantifiers in the theory sets? This is the problem of "universality".

Bremer discusses issues of epistemology in mathematics and the issue of the "real existence" of mathematical objects (Platonism) only to say that he does not address these issues here. He briefly discusses how a Platonist on the one hand and an anti-realist on the other might read the text, and suggests that it might be useful to either of them, but would be read in different ways by each. The issue for Bremer is whether the universal set should be taken to exist in set theory in its own internal terms, leaving aside the issue of how mathematical existence in general is to be understood. This seems to be a reasonable approach.

Bremer singles out the state of affairs in ZF, where certain collections (such as the universe) are ruled not to be "sets" in the sense of the internal theory. He states that this ontological position will be evaluated in what follows.

A recurring defect of this book is first manifest on p. 13. Bremer says:

The antinomies (like Russell's Paradox) are often taken as showing that Naive Comprehension

(NC₁)(∃y)(∀x)(x ∈ y ≡ φ(x))

(NC₂)(∀F)(∃y)(∀x)(x ∈ y ≡ F(x))

is wrong.

For either the first-order or second-order formulation given, there are simply no grounds for the qualification "are often taken as", unless one postulates major modifications to logic. Bremer keeps returning to remarks that Naive Comprehension is justified in some limited contexts: these are in all cases either errors or confusions, before the later excursion into "paraconsistency", on which I have different comments.

An example of what I take to be a confused discussion of the merits of Naive Comprehension is found on p. 15:

Comprehension is fine as long as we restrict the domain of objects to be comprehended. If we assume that there is no universal set or domain even Naive Comprehension need not lead to the antinomies, as one cannot take for granted that R (or a similar cause of trouble) belongs to the objects (sets) to be comprehended.

There is no way to make sense of this. The first sentence might be taken as talking about Zermelo's Axiom of Separation (just briefly introduced and discussed in the text at this point). But the remainder is incoherent. Naive Comprehension includes as an instance (∃x)(∀y)(y ∈ x ≡ ¬y ∈ y). This asserts the existence of an object R, necessarily in our domain of discourse on any reasonable understanding of the existential quantifier, such that (∀y)(y ∈ R ≡ ¬y ∈ y) is true, and in particular R ∈ R ≡ ¬R ∈ R is true. This conclusion cannot be avoided, or regarded as acceptable, without major adjustments to logic, which Bremer is not yet proposing. Now I am willing to charitably suppose that he is equivocating between Naive Comprehension in the sense formally stated above and naive comprehension as found in mathematics which says that any collection of mathematical objects of some sort (say numbers) can be regarded as a mathematical object, but of a different sort, say "sets of numbers"; this is an essential feature of the naive mathematical construction, and overlooking it may be taken to be the error in Frege's proposal of the capitalized Naive Comprehension. We look forward and see Bremer claiming (p. 16) that Russell's paradox demonstrates not that not all properties have extensions, but that there is no universal set. On the face of it, this is absurd: Russell's paradox shows precisely that the property of non-self-membership has no extension. But in the preceding paragraph Bremer qualifies the notion of a property having an extension as relative to a base set. On this understanding, saying that all properties have extensions (relative to any base set) expresses Zermelo's axiom of separation, not Naive Comprehension, and of course the axiom of separation implies that there is no universal set by a version of the Russell argument. This involves unfortunate use of terminology (Bremer cannot properly equivocate between Separation and Naive Comprehension in this way, because he elsewhere explicitly contrasts them) but it could be argued that no mathematical error is involved.

Another confusing statement about Naive Comprehension is made on p. 22 and reiterated on p. 99: on p. 99 he flatly says that "Naive Comprehension is consistent on the finite sets" (he clearly means hereditarily finite sets here). It is not possible to make sense of this assertion in either context. On p. 22 he says correctly that the set of all hereditarily finite sets which are not members of themselves fails to cause a problem for us because it is infinite (and so not a hereditarily finite set) but it does not thereby cease to be an explicit example of the failure of Naive Comprehension relativized to the domain of hereditarily finite sets (or merely finite) sets.

A philosophical issue which comes out in the axiomatization of ZFC and is correctly identified by Bremer as important is the fact that the quantifiers in ZFC range over all sets, which conflicts with what he calls the Domain Principle (and ascribes to Cantor): this is the assertion that quantification over a domain presupposes the existence of that domain as a completed totality. I point out that this could mean two different things: the completeness of the domain might mean that each of the objects in the domain exists (if read this way, the principle would reduce to Quine's dictum that to be is to be the value of a bound variable) or it might mean (and this is how Bremer reads it) that the domain itself must be reified as an object. However, a philosophical discussion of ZFC requires a critical attitude toward the Domain Principle (hereinafter taken as Bremer reads it). One must be open to the view that this "principle" is wrong (this is, by the way, my considered opinion). If one takes the axioms of ZFC seriously, one is tacitly taking the position that this principle is wrong (the mathematically equivalent NBG (which has proper classes) is arguably compliant with the Domain Principle). Bremer seems to think that the set theoretical Reflection Principle allows one to avoid the truly universal quantification implicit in ZFC; I do not agree.

The Domain Principle can motivate an alternative development of set theory not discussed by Bremer, but which I will briefly outline to cast some light on the issue here. If one starts with Zermelo set theory and restricts one's language to disallow quantification over all sets, requiring every quantifier to be restricted to a set, one obtains a version of the set theory called "bounded Zermelo set theory" or "Mac Lane set theory". (Strictly speaking it is not the same theory because in Mac Lane set theory one is allowed to write sentences with unbounded universal quantifiers, but not to use them in instances of separation. The theory considered here has more limited means of expression, though it has the same theorems expressible in this limited format). One also needs to rephrase certain axioms which are unavoidably general in character in schematic form (using term constructions to avoid existential quantifiers): for example the axiom of Power Set takes the form

x ∈ P(y) ≡ (∀z ∈ x.z ∈ y).

Bremer attempts (pp. 110-13) to criticize the use of schematic assertions to avoid explicit universal quantification (and any presupposition of a domain of discourse as a reified object); I am unconvinced that this is problematic. Mac Lane set theory is strong enough to do almost all mathematics outside of set theory, though it is a bit weaker than Zermelo set theory and much weaker than ZFC. It is exactly as strong as the impredicative theory of types, to which it is conceptually closely related. I observe that it appears that the Domain Principle can be satisfied in a quite standard set theory, though I also maintain that the Domain Principle is itself quite open to question. For an extended study of Mac Lane set theory, see [5].

Considerations of space in this review limit my discussion of the next chapters on Limitation of Size and Virtual Sets and Constructivism. I do note on p. 33 a frank error: NBG is not a stronger theory than ZFC (its consistency strength is the same and it proves no assertion about sets that ZFC cannot prove) and NBG does not allow the definition of a model of ZFC. This is related to an omission: in the discussion of "virtual" theories of sets and classes one should mention NBG, which is in some sense almost a theory of this type: it extends a virtual theory of classes over ZFC only in having more powerful means of expression, namely the ability to quantify over all classes, though not having the ability to use these more powerful means of expression to prove more theorems about sets. Bremer does in these sections discuss issues surrounding the set/class distinction and the distinction between first- and second-order logic which involve introducing more than one basic sort of object: these are issues which must be raised in a philosophical treatment along these lines.

An idea which Bremer expresses (not very clearly) on p. 28 and at some other points in the discussion is the idea that V (the universe of ZFC) should be taken to be a unique object (not one of many proper classes) in order to satisfy the Domain Principle. It would have been a good idea to actually give a formal presentation of a theory of this kind to make it clear what is meant; it is then clear what is meant and how it bears on the Domain Principle. I had quite a bit of trouble figuring out what Bremer was talking about on p. 28, which an explicit description of a theory with such a unique V would have cleared up. I do this here, presenting a theory equivalent to ZFC in mathematical power (a cosmetic modification of NBG) which appears to avoid objections based on the Domain Principle. This theory has a unique proper superclass U rather than a unique proper class V, but the fundamental idea is the same. Objects of this theory are called superclasses. The only proper superclass is a distinguished object called U, with the property that all superclasses (including U itself) belong to U. Superclasses with the same elements are asserted to be equal (extensionality). A class is defined as a superclass not equal to U. A set is defined as a superclass which is an element of a class (here we regard sets as special classes and classes as special superclasses; in his treatment Bremer is reluctant to identify classes that are not proper with the sets with the same extension: it is convenient and harmless to do so). The comprehension axiom scheme for classes states that for any formula φ(x) in which each quantifier is restricted to a class and all parameters are classes, the class of all sets x such that φ(x) exists (just as in NBG). We further provide the axioms of Pairing, Power Set, Union, and Infinity for sets, and the axiom of Limitation of Size: a class C is not a set iff there is a class bijection between C and the class V of all sets (notice that V is not the same as U: V contains all and only the sets as elements, whereas U contains all the proper classes (and itself!) as elements as well). It is obvious that this theory has a model iff NBG has a model (this is just a matter of adding or removing a single object with the properties of the proper superclass U). It is well-known that NBG has a model iff ZFC has a model. It is clear that the universe of all objects of the theory is an object of the theory (U) and that the domains of all quantifiers are objects of the theory (since U will always work as a bound). Further, the predicative class comprehension axiom is well known to be equivalent to a finite collection of its instances, so there is no danger of misinterpreting the comprehension scheme as involving some kind of quantification over all properties. This theory is impeccable from the standpoint of the Domain Principle and the way in which this is achieved is trivial, which casts doubt on the real effectiveness of the Principle. Notice that the proper superclass U is mathematically entirely useless: no set or class construction of the theory can be applied to U in any interesting way; in particular, we have no ability to use properties to determine subcollections of U. The subcollections of U which are reified are U itself and all the subcollections of the smaller class V definable using bounded formulas.

In the next section, Bremer discusses set theories with a universal set. I pass over the discussion of the set theory or family of set theories proposed by Church to consider Bremer's discussion of New Foundations and related systems. This discussion is marred by serious errors, though he does point out some of the important issues which would have to appear in a philosophical analysis of NF and NFU. The first failing of this treatment is that Bremer does not succeed in giving a coherent definition of the notion of stratification (p. 51). He emphasizes a point which would need to be central to a philosophical analysis of NF(U): Cantor's Theorem in its naive form fails in NF (or NFU) because it can be proved that the set of singleton sets (which must, by a stratified version of Cantor's argument, be strictly smaller than the power set of the universe, that is the collection of all sets) is smaller in cardinality than the universe, from which it follows that the singleton "map" is not a set (as if it were it would witness the set of singletons being the same size as the universe and strictly smaller than the collection of all sets, which would be a contradiction). The version NFU of New Foundations in which urelements are allowed was defined and shown to be consistent by R. B. Jensen in 1969 (in [3]; it was not developed by me in my 2005 (sic, actually 1998) book [2] as Bremer seems to assert on p. 51). The system of my book which he calls NFU is a strict extension of the theory properly called NFU. Bremer makes confused statements about the primitive ordered pair in the extension of NFU in my book (ordered pairs are not a special kind of object in this theory). He notes the important fact that the membership relation is not a set relation in NFU, so though the domain V of a model of NFU is an object in that model, the model itself (the structure (V, ∈)) is not an object in that model (otherwise the theorems of Gödel would show us that NFU is inconsistent). NF disproves Choice; NFU is consistent with Choice, and the argument for the failure of Choice in NF shows in NFU that most objects in the universe are urelements, and that the collection of all sets is (much) smaller than the collection of all objects. Another disconcerting fact in NF or NFU which a philosophical treatment would need to make sense of is that the natural well-ordering on the ordinals in a set model of NF or NFU is not a well-ordering from an external standpoint, though of course it is one in internal terms. Bremer asserts in closing that while NF or NFU provides support for ordinary mathematics, the nonexistence of the graph of the membership relation and the curious consequences of Specker's theorem cancel these gains. I agree that certain counterintuitive features of NF or NFU make them harder to use as one's working set theory than ZFC and related theories, but disagree with Bremer (on the basis of experience) as to which features they are, and I think that a philosophical analysis based on a better understanding of the theories might have cast some light on these pragmatic difficulties.

Bremer next turns to something with which he is obviously deeply concerned, which I am less familiar with, and against which I will turn one of his own arguments. It is true that there are systems of "paraconsistent logic" under which something like the axiom of Naive Comprehension can be "consistently" postulated (whatever this means in a theory where contradictions or failures of Excluded Middle are allowed). On pp. 63-64 Bremer criticizes a system of Brady's for messing with generally accepted fundamentals of our understanding of the concept of negation; he says the burden of proof lies with Brady to justify meddling with the usual understanding of negation in order to recover Naive Comprehension. I note that the same argument applies with considerable force to any attempt to meddle with non-contradiction or excluded middle (generally accepted fundamental properties of the concept of negation!) in order to recover an axiom that looks like Naive Comprehension. Further, this is a misguided enterprise in my opinion because Naive Comprehension was posed incorrectly to begin with: in actual mathematics, we allow properties to determine arbitrary collections of objects of a given sort, which we reify as objects of a different sort, which motivates not Naive Comprehension but the Separation Axiom of Zermelo or the Comprehension Axiom of type theory (depending on whether we regard sorts as sets or not).

A further point about such systems is that they are generally so mathematically weak as to be useless. Bremer himself notes that these theories at least threaten to collapse the hierarchy of infinities to a single infinite magnitude (which implies that the very standard mathematical reasoning in Cantor's diagonal argument is impossible to implement). A study of set theories as formal ontology must have as one of its desiderata the preservation of the ability of set theory to serve its intended purpose as an ontological basis for classical mathematics. I am not familiar with the specific theories Bremer describes in this section, so cannot make informed statements about their mathematical power, other than to quote what he said, which seems to support what I say above. But I am quite familiar with systems studied by Libert, Esser, Forti and others, alluded to by Bremer only in a footnote, which are paraconsistent set theories (though presented in a classical framework) and definitely have the property of being quite weak unless additional assumptions are made (whose power appears to depend strongly on working in a classical ambience). Further, these systems of paraconsistent set theory are closely related to systems of positive set theory (with entirely classical logic) developed by the same group of researchers which are a major line of development in set theory with a universal set and are not mentioned in this monograph at all (I regard this as a significant deficiency). Olivier Esser's [1] is a good paper to read as an entry point to these positive set theories.

I emphatically do not reject the study of paraconsistent logic as a branch of logic. The logical systems described seem interesting and a system in which some consequences can be deduced from unrestricted Naive Comprehension without incoherence would have technical interest. What I do believe is that no motive Bremer suggests justifies regarding such developments as anything but peripheral to the issue of what the best approach to set theory as a formal ontology should be. I note that he has not chosen to investigate systems of set theory in which constructive (intuitionistic) rather than paraconsistent logic is used to replace classical logic: there has been considerable work done on such systems and they are very interesting.

The final section on broader ontological reflections is to my mind seriously reduced in value by Bremer's determination to promote paraconsistent approaches, which I regard as poorly motivated. A discussion of the ontology of the usual set theory ZFC (about which quite a lot can be said), contrasted with the ontologies of the set/class theories and the classical theories with universal set which were briefly introduced earlier would have been more useful. Bremer's uncritical attitude toward the Domain Principle mars the philosophical discussions in the book in general, and in this section in particular. A more careful exposition of the idea to which he returns repeatedly that the universe of ZFC is in some sense "incomplete" would also be useful (this is an interesting and important idea which does need attention). There is some discussion of this on pp. 110-3, but Bremer cannot get away from the idea that quantification is tied to a domain of definition; I do not find it difficult to see approaches to untying this knot. On pp. 114-6 there is a quite unsatisfactory discussion of Bremer's notion of V as a unique limit object, of which I give a sample implementation in a concrete theory above. A specific unsatisfactory feature of his discussion is that, contrary to what he says, a unique V of the kind he discusses is not any kind of limit obtainable by simply iterating the construction of the hierarchy of set theory: it is an exceptional object added by fiat to an essentially arbitrarily chosen "stopping point" in the cumulative hierarchy (as explicitly seen above in the model construction I give). The merit of Bremer's concept, which he does not see himself, is that it completely dispels the problem of the Domain Principle by revealing that it has no mathematical content, as it can be satisfied by an essentially trivial maneuver.

I believe that there is a niche for a philosophical treatment of set theory with a universal set based both on a firm technical grasp of the systems of set theory involved (necessarily involving some mathematically correct technical exposition at a basic level) and a correct understanding of the philosophical issues. This book does not fill this niche, though it suggests what ought to go there. A further criticism of the book which I am not sure how to place is that the book has not been effectively proofread for correct English. There are some very awkward and occasionally incomprehensible sentences to be found; "NF is Quine's set theory with a universal set that is not just virtual is NFU" (p. 51) is a particularly bad example.

References

[1]Esser, Olivier, "On the consistency of a positive theory," Mathematical Logic Quarterly, vol. 45 (1999), no. 1, pp. 105-116.

[2]Holmes, M. R., Elementary set theory with a universal set, volume 10 of the Cahiers du Centre de logique, Academia, Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium), 1998, 241 pages, ISBN 2-87209-488-1. There is an errata slip on the author's web page. By permission of the publishers, a corrected text is published online on the author's web page; an official second edition will appear online eventually.

[3]Jensen, R.B., "On the consistency of a slight(?) modification of Quine's NF," Synthese 19 (1969), pp. 250-263.

[4]David Lewis, Parts of Classes (with an appendix by John P. Burgess, A. P. Hazen, and David Lewis), Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1991. 165 pages.

[5]Mathias, Adrian, "The Strength of Mac Lane Set Theory," Annals of Pure and Applied Logic, 110 (2001) 107-234.

[6]Moore, A. W., The Infinite. (London: Routledge, 1990) A revised second edition, with a new preface, was published in 2001.

[7]Tiles, Mary, The Philosophy of Set Theory: An Historical Introduction to Cantor's Paradise, Blackwell, Oxford 1989 (reprinted by Dover 2004).

NDPR Allen Buchanan, Justice and Health Care: Selected Essays

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-08-31 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Allen Buchanan, Justice and Health Care: Selected Essays, Oxford UP, 2009, 259pp., $65.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780195394061.

Reviewed by Jennifer Prah Ruger, Yale University

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This volume comprises a collection of ten essays by Allen Buchanan, and in some cases Buchanan and co-authors as well, on various topics under the general rubric of justice and health care. The essays were originally published over the span of some twenty-four years in various publication venues including edited books and journals in bioethics, public affairs, and law and policy. As Buchanan notes, the selected essays do not comprise an overall theory of justice and health care or justice and health, and indeed a major motivation of this effort is to project a deep skepticism about the very task of attempting to put forth such a theory, which Buchanan eschews as too ambitious. He offers instead a more "modest" "thought-journey" to gain "a deeper appreciation of the complexities of thinking systematically, self-critically, and realistically about justice in health care".

While the essays are not arranged in chronological order, there is a rhythm to the sequence, commencing with a 1984 article on the right to a decent minimum of health care and moving through a series of discussions about the respective responsibilities of the private and public sectors in health care, issues raised and responses to questions of rationing more broadly and specifically in the context of managed care organizations and for-profit entities, along with some deep reflection on the idea of trust and what we can and should expect from the medical profession in these and other settings. The selection ends with a return to questions about the right to health, what we can and cannot say about its content and specification and which institutions are relevant for its realization. The volume concludes with a wide ranging discussion of responsibility for global health with a particular emphasis on the notion of unprincipled "duty dumping" in our expectations about who owes what to whom on a global scale. I shall return to these essays in turn below.

In the first chapter, "The Right to a Decent Minimum of Health Care", Buchanan offers one of the most incisive and effective criticisms of attempts over the years to apply a utilitarian and especially a Rawlsian perspective (through use of the difference principle, and greatest equal liberty and equality of opportunity arguments) to the questions of justice in health care and in health. After reading the essay, one might reflect that Rawls's reluctance to take on this task himself may have, or should have, offered a harbinger of critiques to come, which Buchanan encompasses well within the pages of this chapter. Buchanan is utterly unconvinced by efforts to ground a right to health care in Rawls's principle of equality of opportunity and carefully and diligently sheds light on the circularity, ambiguity, lack of universality, and insensitivity to resource constraints that hinder the view's ability to provide a foundation, grounding, or "basis" "for an account of just health care." Despite the force of Buchanan's criticism, and the time with which it has had to sink into the modern architecture in bioethics, it's a bit surprising that it isn't taken up more often in efforts to recognize the lack of traction of the Rawlsian approach for health and health care. This essay should be both the start and end point of any understanding of the Rawlsian line of thinking applied to health and health care.

Efforts to cobble together a "pluralistic" justification for health care and public health rights -- through, for example, principles of rectification, compensation, exceptional sacrifice, harm, equal protection, productivity, fitness, prudence, coordination, and enforced beneficence -- discussed in this chapter, however, are unpersuasive and fail to get us to a coherent story of how we might justify health rights in a universal capacity. Just to take two concepts, public goods and coordination, public goods are brought up as a possible justification and coordination is held up as important. No one would argue that these two ideas are key elements to an overarching framework of justice and health care. The coordination argument alone, however, appears particularly vacuous given a lack of justification or discussion of what the coordination is for; coordination, of course, requires an objective, an end goal, to which activities are aimed. Moreover, if we rely on public goods arguments, we must have some reason to believe that public goods are worthy of public and individual investment, for example, in terms of a moral theory of a right to health or some other such notion. On this score, the chapter finds affinity with the libertarian persuasion arguing for no plausible justification for a right to health care or public health and certainly no right to health more broadly.

The bulk of chapter two, "Health-Care Delivery and Resource Allocation" rehearses the same themes as chapter one, particularly focusing on critiques of various approaches to justifying a right to health care, predominately a decent minimum, but in greater detail than done in the first essay. An interesting elaboration on this set of arguments is a discussion in this chapter on the view adopted by the President's Commission in 1983, which espoused a "social obligation to provide an adequate level (or decent minimum) of care for all". However, the notion that some ethical theory of a moral right to health care would justify this perspective fails to emerge, leaving one wanting for decisiveness regarding a balance among rival theories of justice. The remainder of chapter two and chapter six, "Managed Care: Rationing Without Justice, But Not Unjustly" then move on to take up the issues of rationing and resource allocation. The main point of chapter two is to argue for the need to ration and the need for systematic theorizing about allocating resources, which Buchanan argues is seriously lacking. A tour of two dichotomous approaches to resource allocation -- ethical and efficiency -- are presented in somewhat rudimentary form. What's clear in the review is a call for more systematic thinking about how to combine these approaches in efforts to come up with an alternative approach. Moreover, emphasis is placed on how little work has been done in the sub-domain of ethical theorizing about distributive justice and what is needed is the hard work of moving from abstract principles to practical policy solutions. A clarion call for such theoretical and policy analysis comes through loud and clear throughout this chapter.

Chapter six can be clumped with chapter two in terms of its focus on this general class of rationing issues, but the former takes a much more narrow approach by focusing specifically on managed care organizations and their respective roles in the rationing of health care. An important distinction is made in this chapter. That is the difference between, on the one hand, the justness or unjustness of rationing by managed care organizations within the broader scope of the health care system at large (for which Buchanan answers that managed care organizations are justified in acting competitively even if they deny some access to care) and, on the other hand, the justness or unjustness of rationing by managed care organizations in terms of the populations with which they are in contractual relationships to serve (for which Buchanan answers that managed care organizations need to be put to the test primarily of contractual or procedural justice in order to know whether or not they act unjustly). The criterion of substantive justice could plausibly apply to assessing the actions of managed care organizations, but because throughout history a broader standard on substantive justice has failed to exist in the U.S., this criterion rests on shifting ground.

A common theme in chapters three, "Public and Private Responsibilities in the U.S. Health-Care System", four, "Privatization and Just Health Care", and five, "Ethical Issues in For-Profit Health Care" centers around the question of the morality of actions by private and for-profit institutions in the health care system and what criteria one might draw on to evaluate moral and immoral behavior by these institutions. An important point is made about "duty dumping" (although this term is not used until the last chapter in the book), which involves allocating obligations to institutions and individuals without offering an adequate justification for doing so. While this concept is employed later in the book in chapter ten, the underlying notion is relevant in the analysis of the role of private entities in health care. Buchanan is particularly concerned with the unintended consequences of "duty dumping", which involve false and unrealistic expectations on certain actors (e.g., private for-profit hospitals) at the expense of failing to hold others (e.g., all citizens or the government) responsible for addressing morally urgent issues (e.g., lack of access to health care). Rather, for-profit institutions are no more responsible than are we all for major problems in health care, such as lack of access to the system by some individuals and populations. Such actors are simply pursuing their own interests in the absence of an ethical assignment and accountability enforcement mechanism about health care in the United States. On the flipside, those who advocate more privatization in the health care system put forth incomplete reasoning, Buchanan argues, because privatization must be assessed in the context of multiple factors. These factors could include the fair and effective distribution of costs, resource allocation, and financing, not just whether or not private institutions can produce or do more at lower cost or offer more options and choice for consumers.

The next two chapters -- chapter seven, "Trust in Managed Care Organizations" and chapter eight, "Is There a Medical Profession in the House?" -- concentrate on the issue of trust. While the well-trodden territory of legitimacy in managed care organizations (e.g., criteria such as nondiscrimination, impartiality, publicity of rules, publicity of justification for rules, and denial procedures) and conflicts of interest are rehearsed here, a more refreshing distinction is presented in the difference between "status trust" and "merit trust". Physicians, for example, benefit from "status trust" just by virtue of being part of a profession of physicians, a profession about which Buchanan is highly critical. He is especially concerned about the medical profession's failure to present convincing evidence justifying its special status. He offers much discussion about this special status, arguing that the medical profession is privileged by a norm enabling a nearly completely hands-off culture when it comes to oversight of physicians and their practices in American medicine. Buchanan notes that in America the medical profession and physicians specifically enjoy circumstances of virtually no external regulation and that medical professionals and their associates benefit significantly from substantial financial compensation. By contrast "individually merited trust" is based not on membership in a club but on evidence of high quality conduct or performance. Buchanan urges us to critically examine the difference between "status trust" and "merit trust" in our evaluation of the medical profession. He warns also against using unimportant criteria (e.g., whether a physician is nice or has a good bedside manner) for assessing standards in "trust". The significant criticism pitched at the medical profession in this book is worth considering in reevaluating whether the social benefits outweigh the social costs of this socially constructed and highly unequal relationship between the medical profession and the rest of society.

Chapter nine returns to the issues brought up in chapter one on the right to health and health care, but chapter ten, "Responsibility for Global Health" (again written in conjunction with a co-author), really tackles the issue of "duty dumping" referred to earlier. The chapter urges caution against "duty dumping" and calls this practice unprincipled and politically expedient. "Duty dumping" also reveals a publicly popular trend, which involves blaming certain entities in entirety or for all global health problems. Good reasons for assigning such responsibility are lacking in these efforts. Moreover, we should be wary of expeditious attempts to too hastily adopt the "can implies ought" principle in assigning and assessing responsibility. As in earlier chapters, a helpful example is brought to the fore; employing a grocery store owner or merchant as the actor to illustrate the point. The example is one in which "duty dumping" is applied to the grocer or, by extension, to food suppliers more broadly. The argument is made that grocers or food corporations (e.g., Kraft Foods, Inc.) have no greater moral duty to feed people who are hungry than do we all. An entity may very well be in the business of producing or selling a certain product or service that people need. This characteristic does not, however, offer a justification for attaching to that entity a moral responsibility for providing said product or service to people free of charge or at a cost that customers can afford. This practice could significantly affect the "bottom line' of these businesses and might even threaten their very existence. Profits or returns to shareholders aside, moral reasoning of this persuasion is faulty, this chapter argues.

Another example that is brought up to illuminate "duty dumping" is the blaming and finger pointing that is typically directed toward pharmaceutical companies that make medicines that people need (e.g., drugs for AIDS). Again, the chapter argues that these companies are not responsible for providing such drugs to people who need them at a price that people can afford. Again, this constitutes "duty dumping". Responsibility assignment is not only misplaced in these cases, but the practice of "duty dumping" diverts attention from responsibility assignment to the real duty bearer -- all of us -- to do what we can to form and hold accountable institutions to address these concerns. The strong attack on "duty dumping" presented in this chapter is quite useful in disputing such lines of reasoning. As with other aspects of the book, however, this chapter fails then to provide a coherent theorized moral vision for the allocation of moral responsibility to global and national state and non-state actors. Moreover, it is thin on acknowledging other efforts to take on this endeavor, such as the idea of "provincial globalism," which presents a moral vision for global health and substantive and procedural aspects of moral allocation of responsibility for addressing global health externalities and inequalities.

Overall, Justice and Health Care provides an interesting discussion of a wide array of issues pertaining to justice and health care. The book is unapologetic about the absence of an overall theory or coherent framework for addressing justice and health care or justice in health. Nor does it include analysis of other major endeavors to do so, such as those found, for example, in The Ends of Human Life,^[1] Just Health,^[2] Health and Social Justice,^[3] and Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Policy.^[4] Still, the book takes on a number of important issues and offers some useful and helpful work, especially cautioning against uncritically accepting certain faulty and misguided assumptions, criteria, and lines of reasoning found in thinking about justice and health care.

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^[1] Ezekiel J. Emanuel, The Ends of Human Life: Medical Ethics in a Liberal Polity (Harvard UP, 1998).

^[2] Norman Daniels, Just Health: Meeting Health Needs Fairly (Cambridge UP, 2007).

^[3] Jennifer Prah Ruger, Health and Social Justice (Oxford UP, 2010).

^[4] Madison Powers and Ruth Faden, Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Health Care and Health Policy (Oxford UP, 2008).

NDPR Sarah Borden Sharkey, Thine Own Self: Individuality in Edith Stein's Later Writings

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2010-08-32 : View this Review Online : View Other NDPR Reviews

Sarah Borden Sharkey, Thine Own Self: Individuality in Edith Stein's Later Writings, Catholic University of America Press, 2010, 254pp., $39.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780813216829.

Reviewed by Dermot Moran, University College Dublin

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This is a clearly written, detailed, fine scholarly study of Edith Stein's attempt in her later work, especially Finite and Eternal Being, to develop a consistent metaphysics of individuality, offering a modern version of what the medieval scholastic Duns Scotus had tried to do with his notion of haecceitas (literally: 'thisness'). Edith Stein maintains that human beings not only participate in the universal form of humanness but also that each possesses an individual form which has its own distinct intelligibility. The two forms (universal and individual) are not co-present as independent parts but seamlessly unite to produce the single substantial form with its unique essence. Each person (e.g. Socrates) has an essence (what it is to be Socrates) and this is what Stein calls 'individual form' (individuelles Wesen).

Furthermore, Stein believes, the individual as such must be recognized as intelligible precisely as an individual and not just as a member of the species 'human'. This intelligibility of the individual goes against traditional views (from Plato and Aristotle through Aquinas) according to which what is intelligible for humans is the universal. To defend her view a radical modification of the traditional Thomistic account (that places intelligibility in the formal and universal and individuation in the material) is required, and this is what Stein sets out to do in her magnum opus Finite and Eternal Being (completed in 1936 but published posthumously in 1950).^[1] Indeed, Finite and Eternal Being is Stein's most ambitious and difficult work, a sprawling ontological meditation on existence, essence and being, which was a reworking of her earlier Potency and Act,^[2] a work that she had proposed in 1930 for her Habilitationsschrift in her second unsuccessful attempt to gain that German university teaching qualification.

Borden Sharkey's new study is primarily expository of Stein's ontological discussions and succeeds very well in clarifying Stein's notions of individual form, essential being, and whatness (quiddity), in relation to the more familiar accounts in Aristotle, Aquinas, Scotus and others. This is careful exegesis. For example, Borden Sharkey is alert to the terminological ambiguities and inconsistencies in Stein's writing and even provides a helpful glossary of Stein's technical terms. Stein -- in part following Husserl and Heidegger -- uses several variants of 'essence' (Wesen), including Wesenwas, Wesenheit, Einzelwesen, individuelles Wesen, as well as speaking of 'whatness' (Washeit), and other terms (e.g. Selbstand, subsistence) to distinguish different dimensions of essentiality and quiddity. Stein, for instance, recognizes that to be an individual is itself a form. There is an essence of individuality -- a common character individual things must necessarily have in order to be individuals. But aside from this formal essence, as it were, there is also the unique individual character of the individual -- what makes it this particular and not just a particular. She struggles to articulate this insight especially in Finite and Eternal Being Chapter Eight, entitled 'The Meaning and Foundation of Individual Being'.

Borden Sharkey critically engages with Stein's attempts to articulate the form of the individual. In the end she finds Stein's account of human individuality to be closer to Aquinas' account of angelic individuality (whereby each angel instantiates its own type and there are different types of angels, as expressed in the angelic hierarchy) rather than to the Thomist position on human individuality. For Aristotle and Aquinas, form is the principle of commonality (and intelligibility -- since understanding is of the common or universal) and matter the principle of individuality. Humans are identical in terms of their humanness but differ in terms of their accidental qualities. This does not seem to safeguard the true individual identity of humans. Stein criticizes Aristotle and the medievals for making matter to be the principle of individuation. Matter does not have this power. Form is what individualizes. Humanity is a universal essence, which all humans share by virtue of being human (FEB, p. 470) but there must also be an individual essence, what makes me the unique person I am, what gives me enduring identity.

As is well known, Stein, following a night reading St Theresa of Avila in the home of Hedwig Conrad-Martius, converted to Catholicism in January, 1922, and thereafter (to leave aside completely her personal journey into the convent) began to read herself into Thomistic philosophy, even translating Aquinas' De Veritate. Thus, for the Festschrift commemorating Husserl's seventieth birthday in 1929, she submitted an essay which was essentially a dialogue between Husserl and Aquinas: 'An Attempt to Contrast Husserl's Phenomenology and the Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas'. The original draft had been written in the form of a dialogue between these two thinkers: 'What is Philosophy? A Conversation between Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas'.^[3] Here she presents the common link as Brentano. Husserl and Aquinas both sought philosophy as rigorous science, 'the serious, sober inquiry of reason'. Aquinas recognizes the limits of human reason (natural reason) but also recognizes the domain of what is absolutely true independent of human subjectivity, a domain Husserl's transcendental phenomenology (which remains fixed in the domain of a world constituted by subjectivity) cannot reach. Both Aquinas and Husserl were interested in the 'analysis of essences' (Wesensanalyse). But Thomas' distinction between existence and essence allows for him to think of the world as created.

Most commentators on Stein over the years have sided either with Stein's Husserlian or with her Thomist meditations, and few like her attempts to develop a dialogue -- even a synthesis -- between these two figures. Moreover, Stein was not a Thomist in the usual sense. She was not a participant in the then burgeoning Neo-Thomist movement in Europe, although she was deeply influenced by her contemporary, the German Jesuit theologian and Augustine scholar Erich Przywara (1889-1972), who was a personal friend of Husserl's and with whom Stein was in correspondence between 1925 and 1931. Przywara's Analogia Entis^[4] (1932) was deeply influential for her Finite and Eternal Being (hereafter 'FEB'; see especially, pp. xxix-xxxi, where she records her debt to Przywara). As Borden Sharkey notes, Stein was trained in phenomenology (and was Husserl's assistant from 1916 to 1918) and was particularly interested in the justification of the human sciences, especially psychology in its relation to the unique human individual.

Stein never leaves behind her phenomenology; indeed, she continues to discuss the manner in which it can relate to metaphysics or ontology in Finite and Eternal Being. Stein, following Husserl and Scheler, wanted to develop both a phenomenology and an ontology of the person as a unique individual and as a substance. In a certain sense, she was an existentialist who valued the unique and original in human existence, but she moved more in the direction of ontology influenced both by her close association with the Munich realist school of phenomenologists, especially Hedwig Conrad-Martius (and Jean Hering who wrote an influential article on essence)^[5], as well as with Martin Heidegger, whom she knew quite well from her time in Freiburg. In her Author's Preface (written in September 1936) to Finite and Eternal Being, she acknowledges the importance of Heidegger's philosophy of existence as she found it in Being and Time, as well as Hedwig Conrad-Martius' ontology. Indeed, Stein acknowledges certain 'reminiscences' of Heidegger in her own study. Stein commends Heidegger's move to study Being itself and not just beings as such but disagrees with Heidegger's location of the understanding of Being solely in relation to human projection. 'Metaphysics is concerned with beings as such and not with human being alone', she writes (FEB, p. 551). Heidegger, for her, has made the mistake of placing all his emphasis on the finite human Seinsverständnis whereas the understanding of Being cannot be a 'property of finitude'. The finite needs to be measured against an infinite understanding. Stein herself follows Conrad-Martius in thinking that finite being implies infinite being.

Furthermore, Stein, in returning to Thomas, is not being an antiquarian. Under the influence of Husserl and Przywara, she wanted to develop an ontology that is sensitive to the complexity of human consciousness as, to put it in Heideggerean terms which she does not use, the site where being is revealed. In fact, Stein begins from the more Husserlian point of view, beginning with Descartes' discovery of the ego cogito as a recognition of the fact of one's own existence as a conscious subject. In other words, all inquiry must begin from the 'life of ego' (Ichleben, FEB, p. 36). As Stein puts it, my certitude about my own existence is the most primordial, intimate and immediate self-experience I can have (FEB, p. 36).

For Stein this is consistent with Aristotle, since, following Aristotle, she thinks of the living organism as the model for understanding substance. For her, the living human has a form which itself is living and progressive: 'the being of the form is life' (FEB, p. 268). There is no end to personal formation: 'the living being is never finished' (FEB, p. 270). Form or essence, then, has to be conceived of as living, evolving, developing, dynamic -- act in the genuine sense of agency -- rather than as a static constitutive principle, conceived of as a Platonic form or some kind of unfinished structure or blueprint that simply needs to be completed by matter.

Stein, then, proposes to think of individual essence in an original and challenging manner. Stein distinguishes, for instance, between the universal essence of soul (what anything must have in order to qualify as being a soul) and the specific nature or 'personal particularity' of a soul (also called the soul's essence, see FEB, p. 432). Personal essence can be changed radically (as in the case of genuine remorse) and yet there must be a deep continuing identity. There is -- and here the influence of St Theresa of Avila is evident -- something like an interior 'castle of the soul' (FEB, p. 435). Stein recognises that most individuals never reach this depth of soul nor do they live 'collected lives' (inspired here by Heidegger). Yet, all spiritual teachings recognise the need to enter into this inner life and to recognise its depth. Stein's meditations on individual being and personhood weave around these themes. Given this complex background, as well as the tragic manner in which Stein's work was disrupted due to her persecution and death at the hands of the Nazis, it is difficult to form an overall sense of Stein's project.

Borden Sharkey does an excellent job of articulating Stein's basic intent to develop an account of human existence that recognized its common form (animal rationale) and also the uniqueness of each individual, situated, historical existence as a person. The person, moreover, is not just a mereological sum of parts but has a distinct individuality, identity and wholeness (as well as a capacity to develop). Matter alone cannot account for this individuality. Borden Sharkey sees Stein's account of the relation between individual and universal as influenced by Husserl's accounts in Logical Investigations and in Ideas I. Individuals instantiate universals. Chapter Six gives a particularly clear account of Husserl's understanding of wholes, dependent parts and independent parts, and how this is taken up by Stein. Human nature as such is a form, but too empty and incomplete to ever come into existence on its own. It needs the determinacy given by individual human beings. Borden Sharkey's book situates Stein's discussion of individuality in relation to the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and Scotus with some reference to Husserl's ontology. She finds Stein's account of individuals attractive but in the end opts for a modified Thomist position. Borden Sharkey's critique of Stein is based on the view that the Thomistic account of angelic individuality requires that angels occupy different ranks in a hierarchy. This goes against Stein's claim for the radical equality of all human beings. Stein herself contrasts humans and angels by saying that humans have hidden depths to their natures whereas angelic natures are transparent to themselves. Furthermore, for Aquinas, strictly speaking, it is designated matter -- not prime matter -- that is the principle of individuation.

Borden Sharkey's monograph is a valuable contribution to the research literature of the later Stein. She shows great familiarity with Stein's work and great affinity with her project to develop an ontology of individual personhood. Furthermore Borden Sharkey, admirably, does not attempt to draw a sharp contrast between the earlier phenomenological Stein and the mature Catholic metaphysician. Stein was an intensely sincere and deep thinker who sought to explore the uniqueness of the individual person and the depth of personal being drawing on diverse resources. She sought to do so, in particular, by rethinking (unencumbered by the need to accurately reflect the history of philosophy) the categories of essence, form, matter, act and potency inherited from the Neo-Aristotelian Scholastics but informed by the ontological considerations of Husserl, Conrad-Martius, Heidegger and others.

Borden Sharkey's essay is a first step in a very complex terrain, but one which can yield much insight. The whole subject of the interrelation between Husserl's (and the early Munich school phenomenologists, including Conrad-Martius, Hering and others) interest in ontology (including formal ontology), Heidegger's fundamental ontology, and Scheler's and Stein's personalism is most complex and fascinating. Even more challenging is to bring these ontological discourses into relation with the historical context in Aristotle and Aquinas. Stein's work is extremely rich in insight, even if its overall systematic ambition remains unconvincing. More will need to be done to articulate the understanding of essence in Husserl and Stein (especially given the revival of interest in formal ontology and analytic metaphysics), but Borden Sharkey has made a significant contribution to this challenging field and has admirably demonstrated Edith Stein's importance as an original philosopher of depth.

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^[1] Edith Stein, Endliches und Ewiges Sein: Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins,, Edith Stein Werke Band II (Freiburg: Herder, 1949), trans. Kurt F. Reinhart as Finite and Eternal Being (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2002). Hereafter 'FEB' followed by the page number of the English translation. Borden Sharkey uses her own translation in citing passages from this work but maintains references to the page numbers of the published English translation.

^[2] Edith Stein, Potenz und Akt. Studien zu einer Philosophie des Seins, ed. Hans-Rainer Sepp, Edith Stein Gersamtausgabe 10 (Freiburg: Herder, 2005). English translation: Potency and Act: Studies Toward a Philosophy of Being, ed. L. Gelber and Romaeus Leuven, O.C.D, trans. Walter Redmond, The Collected Works of Edith Stein, Vol. 11 (Washington, DC: ICS Publications. 2009).

^[3] Both versions have now been published as a parallel text as 'Husserl and Aquinas: A Comparison', in Edith Stein, Knowledge and Faith, trans. Walter Redmond, The Collected Works of Edith Stein VIII (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 2000), pp. 1-63.

^[4] Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis (Munich, 1932), a translation by John Betz and David Bentley Hart is in preparation for Eerdmans.

^[5] See Jean Hering, 'Bemerkungen über das Wesen, die Wesenheit und die Idee', Jahrbuch für Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie vol. 4 (1921), pp. 495-543.