A Fair Dialogue on Sterling's Six Philosophical Commitments

 

A Fair Dialogue on Sterling's Six Philosophical Commitments

What follows is a dialogue between two voices — Advocate and Critic — moving through each of Sterling's six philosophical commitments in turn. The Critic raises the strongest objections available. The Advocate responds on behalf of the framework. Neither voice is a straw man.

Substance Dualism

Advocate: The five-step method requires a real self capable of standing over against an impression and withholding assent. If the self is simply a physical process, the pause has nowhere to occur. Substance dualism is not a theological commitment — it is what the practice demands.

Critic: Neuroscience shows that what we experience as deliberation is a physical process in the brain. The feeling of standing over against an impression is itself a brain state. You are postulating an immaterial substance to explain something that physical processes already explain adequately.

Advocate: If assent is a brain state governed by physical law, it is determined by prior physical causes. The pause disappears — there is only a longer causal pathway to a fixed result. You have explained the feeling of deliberation while eliminating deliberation itself.

Critic: Property dualism gives you a genuine self with genuine mental properties without requiring an immaterial substance. Mental properties are real and causally efficacious without being properties of a separate non-physical thing.

Advocate: Mental properties without a mental substance leave the agent without genuine causal power independent of physical law. The properties belong to the brain and are ultimately governed by physical causation. The agent is still inside the causal chain rather than capable of interrupting it.

Libertarian Free Will

Advocate: Virtue and vice require authorship. The act must originate in the agent — not in prior causes operating through the agent. Compatibilism preserves the language of freedom while surrendering its substance.

Critic: Libertarian free will requires an uncaused cause at the level of the person. But quantum indeterminacy — the only genuine indeterminacy we know of — is random, not free. A random swerve in the brain is not a rational act of will. Randomness does not produce responsibility.

Advocate: The alternative to determination is not randomness. Agent causation is a third option — the agent as a genuine originating cause that is neither determined by prior conditions nor random. The act originates in the agent's own rational nature without being necessitated by antecedent states.

Critic: Agent causation is mysterious. What exactly is the mechanism by which the agent initiates a causal sequence without that initiation itself being caused? You seem to be postulating a miracle at the moment of every free act.

Advocate: The mystery cuts both ways. Compatibilism purchases clarity about mechanism at the cost of genuine responsibility. If the Stoic student cannot genuinely choose otherwise, training is pointless — the trained student was always going to respond correctly and the untrained student was always going to fail. The mystery of agent causation is preferable to the incoherence of a practice built on an illusion.

Moral Realism

Advocate: The examination tests the impression against a standard. That standard must be objective — a real feature of moral reality — for the test to be genuine. If virtue is the only good is merely a Stoic preference, the examination confirms nothing except Stoic taste.

Critic: Mackie's queerness argument stands. Objective prescriptive properties would be unlike anything else in the natural world. They would need to be perceived by a special faculty that has no evolutionary explanation. The simpler explanation is that moral judgments express attitudes rather than report facts.

Advocate: The queerness argument assumes physicalism. Once substance dualism is accepted — as this framework requires — a non-physical rational faculty standing in relation to non-physical moral facts is no more mysterious than a physical eye standing in relation to physical light. The argument loses its force once the physicalist assumption is dropped.

Critic: Even granting dualism, moral realism requires that virtue really is the only good — a substantive claim that most people reject. The framework simply assumes what needs to be argued.

Advocate: Sterling argues for it through the theorems. The argument is that desiring externals necessarily generates vulnerability to unhappiness, that only virtue is fully within our control, and that happiness requires complete control over its conditions. The realist claim is the conclusion of an argument, not an assumption.

The Correspondence Theory of Truth

Advocate: The examination asks whether the impression matches reality. That question only makes sense if truth means correspondence. Coherentism, pragmatism, and consensus theory each dissolve the test into something else — internal fit, usefulness, or agreement. None of them preserves the examination as a genuine test of anything.

Critic: Correspondence theory faces the problem of access. To know whether a belief corresponds to reality, you need independent access to reality — access that is not itself mediated by beliefs. But all our access to reality is belief-mediated. The correspondence relation cannot be verified from inside the belief system.

Advocate: This objection proves too much. It would eliminate science as well as ethics. We operate with correspondence as the regulative ideal even when verification is difficult. The examination does not require perfect access to reality — it requires the foundational beliefs to be correct. Moral realism provides their correctness. Correspondence theory specifies what correctness means.

Critic: Deflationism is simpler. Truth talk adds nothing substantive. To say the impression is true is just to endorse it. You do not need a correspondence relation — you just need criteria for endorsement.

Advocate: Deflationism cannot ground the distinction between correct and incorrect assent. If truth is merely endorsement, the examination has no criterion — it simply is the endorsing or refusing. The practice requires a standard that the endorsement either meets or fails. Deflationism eliminates that standard.

Foundationalism

Advocate: The examination must draw on beliefs that are already settled. If every belief is revisable in the presence of a sufficiently vivid impression, nothing stable remains to test impressions against. The dogmata function as axioms — the ruler, not what is measured.

Critic: Classical foundationalism has been largely abandoned in contemporary epistemology precisely because no beliefs are immune to revision. Even apparently basic beliefs have been revised in the history of thought. The coherentist alternative — a web of mutually supporting beliefs with no fixed foundation — is more epistemically honest.

Advocate: A web of mutually supporting beliefs can be coherently wrong. An agent whose entire belief system coheres around the false premise that externals are genuine goods has a coherent system — and every value judgment is false. Coherentism cannot identify this as error. The examination requires a fixed standard outside the belief system.

Critic: Your foundational beliefs — virtue is the only good, externals are indifferent — are not self-evident in the way classical foundationalism requires. They are conclusions of a philosophical argument. They need justification themselves.

Advocate: They are foundational within the domain of practice, not within epistemology generally. They terminate the regress of practical justification — not because they are indubitable but because the practice cannot function without a fixed starting point. Tremblay's account of digestion confirms this: beliefs that must be derived under pressure will not be available when the vivid impression arrives.

Ethical Intuitionism

Advocate: The verdict of the examination must be delivered immediately. The impression arrives with force and does not wait for a syllogism to be constructed. The trained rational faculty perceives directly whether the impression corresponds to moral reality — just as the eye perceives color without argument.

Critic: Moral intuitions are notoriously unreliable and culturally variable. History is full of cases where confident moral intuitions turned out to be badly wrong — about slavery, about the treatment of outsiders, about the status of women. Intuitionism gives no method for correcting mistaken intuitions.

Advocate: The intuitions at stake here are not culturally variable moral intuitions about particular cases. They are the trained perception of category membership — virtue, vice, or indifferent — by a rational faculty that has digested the foundational beliefs. The training is precisely the method for correcting mistaken perceptions. The untrained intuition is unreliable. The trained perception is what the practice produces.

Critic: Calling it trained perception rather than inference does not resolve the problem. What looks like immediate perception may simply be fast inference — reasoning so habitual it is no longer noticed. Intuitionism may be a description of psychological speed rather than a distinct epistemic faculty.

Advocate: That objection assumes physicalism. If the rational faculty is a physical mechanism, then all its operations are ultimately mechanical — and fast inference is the only available explanation for rapid judgment. But the framework does not accept that assumption. The rational faculty is a distinct substance whose operations are not governed by physical law. It perceives moral category membership directly — not because the inference has been automated but because perception is what a non-physical rational faculty does. The distinction between genuine perception and habituated inference is not psychological but ontological. Substance dualism is what makes the distinction coherent. The Critic's objection dissolves once its physicalist premise is removed.