Gigi asked:

Hi. I don’t really know if this makes sense, but according to Deontology and the Universal Moral Imperative, are immigration raids considered moral? Meaning that if anyone was able to conduct an immigration raid at any time, would to world still be a rational place?

Answer by Gideon Smith-Jones

There was once a question on Ask a Philosopher about whether it was ethical according to the Universalizability Principle to post questions on Ask a Philosopher. The problem being that if everybody posted a question, then the service would be swamped and unable to cope.

This is absurd, of course, but it highlights the problem of applying the Universalizability Principle without sufficient thought about what exactly is the thing we are universalizing.

You have a hunch that immigration raids are not always ethical, and that this has something to do with the Universalizability Principle. But what, exactly?

Some would say, the more immigration raids the better. Get rid of all those damned illegal immigrants. Others see a problem — can you say what it is? Two words: probable cause.

In the US, to get a search warrant, or an arrest warrant, there has to be probable cause. You can’t just arrest someone and interrogate them on the off chance that they might confess to doing something illegal. You can’t just search someone’s house on the off chance that they have stolen goods stashed. There has to be something, some meaningful evidence to justify the warrant.

In the UK, the law is different, but a case still has to be made, that there is a reasonable prospect that illegality is involved. There have to be grounds for suspicion.

Well, we know which areas of town where you’re most likely to find illegal immigrants. Let’s just start at the end of the street and raid every house. But that’s not enough. The reason that it is not enough is that if the principle according to which the proposed action was accepted, then you could arrest someone for any reason you like.

Now, we’re getting close to the application of the Universalizability Principle.

Suppose it turns out that the proportion of criminals with the name ‘Smith’ is higher than the proportion of Smiths in the general population. Is that sufficient ground for arresting someone on the grounds that their name is Smith? Why, or why not?

Suppose it turns out that stolen goods are more likely to be found in houses that have a green door, than in houses with doors of any other colour. Is that sufficient ground for searching any house with a green door? Why, or why not?

When you’ve puzzled that out, you will have the answer to your question. If the law (where you happen to live) allows immigration raids without ‘reasonable suspicion’ or ‘probable cause’ then according to the Universalizability Principle the law is wrong. It cannot be ethically justified.

 

Buddy asked:

Hi there, do you have any advice in understanding Michael Dummett’s “truth” from 1959?  I’m struggling to understand it in a class I have.

Answer by Geoffrey Klempner

Dummett’s ‘Truth’ is a seminal article in analytic philosophy. There’s a revised version in his collection Truth and Other Enigmas (1978) plus lots more on his view about the realism/ anti-realism debate.

Most students come across this article in George Pitcher’s collection Truth (Prentice Hall 1964). This is from a time when the standard way of discussing truth was in terms of ‘correspondence theory of truth’ versus ‘coherence theory of truth’ versus… whatever. Back in 1959, Dummett was way ahead of the game. He saw that the traditional disputes were not the most illuminating way to approach the question of truth. The problem is that instructors still routinely use this book leaving students totally unprepared for Dummett’s contribution.

I would be prepared to lay a bet that a significant proportion of those same instructors would struggle to give a coherent synopsis of Dummett’s argument. At the time when it was written, not many professional philosophers did ‘get’ what Dummett was on about. His argument could easily be expanded into a book. (As well as Truth and Other Enigmas you can look at his Frege Philosophy of Language which appeared in 1973.)

You’re not going to be able to follow the article unless you have already looked at and have some grasp of the Strawson-Russell debate over the analysis of definite descriptions. (It wasn’t really a ‘debate’, Strawson wrote his article 50 years after Russell’s ‘On Denoting’ appeared. I’ve reviewed more than one student essay where the writer was blissfully unaware of that fact.)

It will also help if you understand what the clash between Intuitionist versus Classical mathematics was (or still is) all about. Mathematical Intuitionism is Dummett’s model for his ‘anti-realist’ account of truth and meaning. (Wrongly, in my view: see my Amazon eBook, originally my D.Phil thesis, ‘The Metaphysics of Meaning’ https://amazon.com/dp/B01JUS7G68.)

Here’s a very brief sketch:

Dummett’s ultimate purpose is to raise a question about our notion of truths that lie beyond the range of human knowledge. To do that he first has to combat the idea that truth value gaps, as proposed by P.F. Strawson in ‘On Referring’, are acceptable in semantics. It is part of the concept of truth that truth is something we aim at. Hence, he argues, reference failure should be seen — as in Bertrand Russell’s theory of descriptions — as a way of being false rather than ‘neither true nor false’.

However, there are other truth value gaps that are more problematic, e.g. ‘Either Jones (who never saw combat) was brave or not.’ Is there a  truth (maybe a truth about the structure of Jones’s brain, or a truth about other possible worlds) that we can never know? All Dummett does in the article is raise the question. He ends with a description of an alternative anti-realist way of viewing reality as ‘something that comes into existence as we probe’.

In his later writings, Dummett developed an alternative account to the realist view of truth and meaning, developed from the later Wittgenstein’s views about language. Propositions are not ‘arrows’ which we aim at reality (at a target which might be so far away that we will never know whether we actually scored a hit or not) but rather instruments that we use according to rules. One can still talk of ‘truth’ provided one doesn’t lapse into a realist (arrow and target) view. We make moves in the language game, some of which are ‘correct’ and some of which are ‘incorrect’ according to rules that we are able to apply to any given case. There’s no ‘recording angel’ up in heaven keeping the score.

— I spent years of my life pondering this question. If you want to know more read my book The Metaphysics of Meaning.