The long anticipated 2023.
Uehiro lectures in practical ethics, and we're turning out to hear Professor Tom Hurka deliver the second in this series.
Roger gave a lot of introductions, Tom, earlier on, which I won't repeat and detailed, but that's okay.
Jackman Distinguished Chair, Philosophical Studies at the University of Toronto.
And we're delighted to welcome back tonight. And the first entry in this series.
I'm seeing a new bunch of faces from the industry over here. So welcome Very briefly,
Tom gave us a fascinating new view about some of the relationships between
knowledge and achievement and how we might begin to think about their value.
Tonight, I believe we're going to hear a little more about how that can be developed to help in our thinking about ethics.
Tom, thank you so much again for joining us and excited to hear what you have to say.
Thanks again. Thanks for. Thanks for returning.
You weren't put off too much by the first lecture, so let's go on to the second.
So my first lecture discussed the intrinsic good of knowledge and achievement in general, or as such, emphasising the parallels between them.
And based on parallel accounts of their natures. I assumed the traditional view that the two are compounds of simpler elements,
so knowledge involves justified true belief and achievement involves competence, successful intention.
But I argue that each also requires a connection between these elements,
though the connections run in opposite directions to know that P Not only must you have a justified
true belief that P but the facts that make P true must help explain why your belief is justified,
for example, by being the causal origin of a significant part of your evidence.
This connection runs outside in.
To achieve p you must competently and successfully pursue P, but the features that make your pursuit competent must help explain why it succeeded.
This connection is inside out.
Requiring these connections yields the intuitive verdicts in many cases from the epistemology and achievement literatures,
and invokes Gilmore's principle of organic unities,
which says the value of a whole needn't equal the sum of the values its parts would have on their own.
Thus, the value of knowledge does not equal to some of the values of merely justified or merely true belief,
but is greater given the required connection. The value of achievement is likewise greater than the sum of those of competent and successful pursuit.
Nor are these accounts objectively gerrymandered. They rest on the comparatively simple idea that it's better when to good making properties.
Truth and justification or competence and success are connected than not on their own.
Justified belief and true belief have some value, as do competent and successful pursuit.
But it's better and makes for the full value of knowledge or achievement when one of the two helps explain the other.
But a complete account must also explain what makes for degrees of value in these goods.
Some knowledge, for example, of a fundamental scientific law is very worth having just in itself.
But some, such as about the number of blades of grass and a lawn is not.
There's significant versus trivial knowledge, and there are also significant versus trivial achievements.
Climbing Mount Everest or finding a cure for cancer, it's a significant achievement.
Whereas tying a shoelace is not some instances of each good or better than others
with the difference resting in each case on one between significance and triviality,
a full account must explain this difference or identify the features of knowledge and achievement that make for significance.
And that's the topic of my lecture today. First, though, there's a background issue.
I'm going to assume that the overall value of your knowledge or achievement, either at a time or through time,
depends on two things The number of instances of that good you have and their degrees of significance.
This general model mirrored mirrors, ones commonly used in hedonist and bizarre fulfilment views,
which consider both how many pleasures are fulfilled,
desires you have and their degrees of intensity by simply counting the number of truths You know.
The model captures the intuitive idea that if you gain a new item of knowledge without losing any old ones, you improve your cognitive state.
It also fits the more abstract idea that knowledge and achievement involve a match between your mind and the world.
Since the more matching states you're in, the more overall matching you've done.
It may be objected, however, that counting the number of these states is impossible, since it's always infinite.
If you drop, don't you also no point p, p, and so on.
But a similar objection can be made to desire fulfilment views, since the same reason to think that if you desire p, you also desire.
It's a logical equivalence. In a neither case is the difficulty insuperable, at least in principle.
We can imagine a division of truth into a large but finite set of kinds.
So p, p and so on are all in the same kind and make knowing an additional truth in a
given kind have either no value or value that diminishes rapidly towards zero.
Then what matters most for the value of your knowledge isn't the number of individual truth you know,
but the number of times in which you know truths or how diverse your knowledge is.
I mean, it's not that the required division into kinds is given by nature as some kind of non evaluative fact,
making it to the value of exercise, reflecting the evaluative thought that it's better to know a greater variety of truths.
Or perhaps that if two propositions are made true by the same facts, it isn't much or at all better to know both.
But if I can assume that a general model, but assuming that a general model that counts,
instances of knowledge and achievement can be vindicated in some such way, we can turn to its account of significance.
That's my term for what makes for greater and lesser degrees of value in knowledge and achievement.
So this account will give knowledge of a trivial truth about blades of grass, just minimal value.
So making an effort to acquire it will almost always be counterproductive, since it almost always prevents you from doing something better.
But some may deny that this kind of knowledge. Some may think that this kind of knowledge has no value.
Whatever. This is sometimes said in arguments that knowledge in general has no value.
I mean, I can I tell an anecdote? So many years ago, I was I was interviewed unsuccessfully for a folding chair at Harvard.
And Robert knows it was one of the, you know, interviewers.
And I was talking about the value of knowledge. And what is it intrinsically good to know, the number of grains of sand in Coney Island Beach?
I didn't have as good an answer as I might have anyways. So some people think that trivial knowledge has no value, whatever.
And that view could be accommodated by introducing a threshold on the scales of significance.
So only instances of knowledge or achievement above the threshold have value.
And when Bradford says something like that about significant achievements but involves a standard difficulty at all threshold use,
it implies that a large number of states just below the threshold have less value together than a single one just above it,
which to me is unintuitive.
So I'll therefore assume that all instances of knowledge or achievements that meet the models, other conditions have at least some value.
If some prefer a threshold view, they can substitute it in what follows.
So the account of significance I'm going to develop updates.
The one in my book, Perfectionism 30 years ago.
It's hard to believe and uses parallel measures for knowledge and that you would
have to say if anyone has just been reading Chapters nine and ten of that book,
then some of what I'm going to say will be familiar. I apologise for that.
But there will be there will be new material and corrections and I hope a better presentation of the ideas.
But the basic ideas,
many of the basic ideas are the same and I have to give them because they're needed to complete the parallels between knowledge and achievement,
which were the theme of the first lecture.
And there also will be needed to generate many of the more applied conclusions that I'm going to draw in the third third lecture anyway.
So the account of significance will use parallel measures for knowledge and
achievement and the accounts of the degree of value of an instance of either good.
But was everyone have handouts? Yes. Yes. The degree of value of an instance of either good depends on a generality in too sensitive generality.
I begin with knowledge where something close to it was defended by a W.D. Ross,
and there's a quote from him on the handout with an acknowledgement with acknowledgement to Bradley.
Ross said and this is the quote, Knowledge of general principles is intellectually more valuable than knowledge of isolated matters of fact.
And the more general the principle, the more fact it's capable of explaining, the better the knowledge.
Our ordeal in the pursuit of knowledge as system and system involves the tracing of consequence to their ultimate ground ground.
Our aim is to not only the not only the that, but the why.
Where there is a why. These remarks, however, run together to different senses of generality.
How many facts of truth is capable of explaining that's one of Ross's phrases is a feature it has on its own and can have,
even if you haven't used it to explain anything. But there can only be system or the tracing of consequence to their ultimate grounds.
Those are further phrases of Ross's If you've actually done the explaining, I'll therefore distinguish a truth intrinsic generality,
which depends just on its own internal content from its relative generality,
which is a matter of how many other truths you've used it to explain and understand.
Each will have some bearing on the degree of value of an item of knowledge,
though the second may have more to start with intrinsic generality, a truth could explain more if it concerns or applies to more things.
The laws of motion that govern all objects at all times and places can explain more and are in this sense,
more general than ones just about falling bodies on earth or the orbits of the planets.
And an extension of this idea says a truth is more intrinsically general and so more worth knowing.
If the state of affairs it affirms is more encompassing or includes more objects at more times and places.
In this sense, a truth about the blades of grass and a lawn isn't at all general, since it concerns just one lawn and one place and time.
But a law governing all objects everywhere is highly general.
Now the value of intrinsic generality is so understood, can be grounded in part in its connection with rationality.
If we humans can be in more valuable cognitive states than nonhuman animals,
it's partly because our thinking isn't confined to our immediate physical surroundings.
Now we can grasp and know truths about longer stretches of time, for example, from the distant past into the future, or that include faraway objects.
Doing so exercises rational powers that are both distinctive of us and impressive.
And this value can also be connected to the idea that knowledge involves matching your mind to the world.
Just as you do this more, the more truths you know.
So you do it more. The more of the world, the truths you know, concerned.
You mirror more of reality. If what you mirror includes, more of what there is.
Bradley. Who? I said Ross.
Got his ideas largely from suggested this last idea when he asked of an item of knowledge How much of my world is contained and involved in it?
That's a question about how valuable the knowledge is, as I think Bertrand Russell did when in the last sentence of the problems of philosophy,
he gave the following reason to study philosophy through the greatness of the universe,
which philosophy contemplates the mind is also rendered great and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.
I think the greatness of the universe is sort of its extent. And when you.
Apparently he thinks that right now we're communing with the universe and doing philosophy.
But you kind of think these abstract general thoughts which have this tremendously extended content anyways,
this form of generality can't be measured in any simple or especially linear way.
If it were knowing, a scientific law would have not just more value to knowing some particular fact, but vastly more than is credible.
The value of additions to it must therefore diminish and have an upper bound.
There may also be something like this kind of significance in knowing particular facts that are remote in time or space.
For example, about an event in ancient Rome or the chemical composition of a distant star, though not extended in its specific content.
This knowledge, too, takes your mind beyond the here and now,
and there may be more value in knowing an extended truth when you can identify and thus
have knowledge of the individuals it involves as individuals than when you know it.
Just as an abstract generalisation. If so, that's a further limit on the value of knowing a scientific law just as a law.
Though there are many further issues about this measure, the basic idea is that knowledge is intrinsically better.
The more extended and encompassing its content and a parallel measure for
achievement makes a goal more significant and therefore more more worth realising.
The greater its extent in the times, places and objects,
perhaps especially persons it involves its ground could again be in part that pursuing and realising intrinsically general
goals exercises rational powers not had by other animals who can intentionally affect only their immediate vicinity now.
It can also be in part that if achievement involves making the world match your mind, you do that more, the more of the world your goal includes.
And there can be a there can again be a related value in realising a particular goal that's remote in time or space,
such as Europe standing atop some distant mountain.
Two years from today you can't achieve any goals extended to some truths you know that you can't affect,
though you can know about objects light years away.
But a measure of intrinsic generality broadly parallel to that for knowledge can be part of what makes for degrees of value in achievement.
So among this last measures, many implications.
One says there's intrinsic value in having a goal for your life as a whole or for some long stretch of it,
and being guided in your individual actions by that temporally extended end.
I think Aristotle, for one thought this having this kind of goal was part of a good life.
Another finds value in goals that connect you to states before or after your life.
And so when you try to continue a tradition established earlier by others and to keep it available for those who will follow.
I was talking to Jeff just the other day. Do people know Samuel Schaeffer's book, Death and the Afterlife?
With a suggestion is that if we learned that the human race was going to die out 30 years from now, we'd see no point in living.
And his reason is that then we couldn't sort of see what we're doing now, as, you know,
helping other generations in the future continue an activity that we're doing now and that perhaps that was handed to us by generations before.
I have to say, I mean, to me, Schaeffer is conclusion is kind of wildly exaggerated.
There's lots of valuable things we could do, even if we knew the human race was going to die out in 30 years.
I wouldn't stop playing golf, for example. And I also wouldn't stop doing philosophy.
I don't love the idea that my work will be affecting thinkers 200 years from now.
But that aside, I mean, I think there is something, you know, what Scheffler is talking about is is a value.
There's a value in being able to aim at goals that don't involve just what you're just your own condition now,
but maybe connect your activities to the activities of people in the past,
let's say philosophers in the past, and enable an activity to be continued in the future by future generations.
And that can be seen as one aspect of what I'm calling intrinsic generality,
where your goal is extended in time, and also here in the number of people that you thinking of affecting.
So it's not just not just Samuel Scheffler.
You know, nature seem to care about extending time because he especially value nature, especially value temporally extended goals.
He lauded someone who can, quote, extend his will, of course,
across great stretches of his life or a cast that quote would be able to cast its goals millennia hence.
Anyways, many such goals involve states of other people, which the measure likewise sees as valuable.
This. This may explain why for many classical philosophers such as Aristotle,
the prime exemplar of an act of a practical life was more specifically a political life.
That makes sense if there's additional value in realising goals that include many people as political leaders distinctively do.
Intrinsic generality is also found in cooperative activities where you intend
what you do in part is contributing to a more extended goal where a large,
larger group that includes you works jointly towards a common end.
There again, you aim at something beyond yourself in parallel with a claim about knowledge.
There may be more value in as part of a cooperative venture. You try to and do affect how the others act than when acting on your own.
You just aim just to add your activities to theirs.
But any time you pursue and help realise a goal that involves other people, there's some added value in your goals greater extent.
Well, though, I'm reasonably confident that intrinsic generality is one factor affecting the degrees of value in knowledge and achievement.
I'm less certain what its best specification is,
nor am I certain how much weight it has or how much in the significance of these goods turns on this matter of extent.
So let me turn to the possibly more important value of relative generality and start again with knowledge.
In this circumstance, a truth generality is a matter of its relation to other things,
you know, or its place in Ross's explanatory system of knowledge in such a system.
You use some truths, you know, to explain and understand others,
and a truth relative generality depends on the extent to which it plays this role or the number of other truths it's helped you to understand.
You may know one truth. Also know that explain several others and thereby understand those others.
This makes your knowledge of the first truth relatively general with a generality greater the more other truths you've used it to explain.
So in this sense to a truth about blades of grass isn't general, since it can't be used to explain anything in Ross's language.
It's an isolated matter of fact. But a law or other abstract principle can be general if you use it to explain and understand many things.
To play this role, a truth must have some intrinsic generality or some extended content.
But the two forms of significance don't always go together.
You can use a law with a restricted subject matter, such as the geology of the Earth, to explain more things than you use.
A more extended one to explain than your knowledge of. The first is more relatively general.
I was once hiking in a park north of Toronto and there was a pond.
With turtles in it, for example. And it was clear that there were biologists at one of the Ontario universities were just studying that pond
and they would come up and they would know all about how changes in the temperature of the water affected.
The population of this species and that species, you know, they would have been kind of doing the ecology, the part.
And on the one hand their subject matter is quite narrow.
But on the other hand, they would have had a lot of explanatory integration of facts about that pond.
And that's just a case where not that much intrinsic generality, but a lot of relative generality.
On the other side, some intrinsically particular facts can have great relative generality as when a historian understands
how a particular battle or judicial decision led to it explains a great many later events.
Although they often overlap, the two forms of generality are distinct.
The value of relative generality can again be grounded in the idea that connecting items of knowledge
in the way that makes for understanding exercises rational powers not held by other animals,
and that if explanatory connections are part of reality, it's important to match your mind to them.
Now, what other writings that we have now, you have to start looking at the handout where the diagrams are.
I mean, in other writings, I've illustrated this measure with diagrams where each node represents a truth, you know,
and a line running from one node down to another means, you know, how the first truth explains the second.
Compare Figure one, which represents seven unconnected items of knowledge with FIG. two,
where you've used the truth at the top to explain and understand the six below.
Figure two contains more relative generality and a simple, I'm sure way to simple model can explain how.
Imagine that each item of knowledge has one unit of value in itself,
just as an item of knowledge plus one via relative generality for every other item of knowledge you've used it to explain that figure.
One contains seven units of value one for each node, whereas figure two contains six in the bottom row,
plus seven in the top road row in the top node one for itself, plus one value relative generality for each other.
Truth. It explains for a total of 13 or almost twice as much.
And there's even more value in the more complex structure of figure three where you use the chart
the truth at the top to explain the two in the middle and each of them to explain the two below it.
Here there are four units of value in the bottom row, three in each node in the middle row,
and seven in the top node for a total of 17 in the structure as a whole,
the more integrated understanding and figure three or its greater degree of what
Ross called system makes via relative generality for more significance and value.
And again, I don't attach any significance in that particular way of assigning numbers.
That's supposed to be the most simple minded way of doing it.
So relative generality is so understood, involves another organic unity,
since it can make the value of a body of knowledge greater than the sum of the values its parts would have on their own.
I've located the added value in the higher items in the structure, for example,
in the top and second rows of figure three, but it could equally well be assigned to lower ones so they have more value.
The more items there are Above them are following more to the body of knowledge as a whole,
which means, in effect to the explanatory relations it involves.
Though all three options can find the same total values. For example, the same 17 units.
In figure three, I find it most intuitive to locate the added value of explanatory relations, as Ross did in the knowledge that does the explaining.
So so far I've taken the nodes in the diagrams to represent items of knowledge,
but there can also be some relative generality and therefore some value in the absence of knowledge.
Imagine that first that while you know all the truths in the bottom two rows in figure three,
you have an unjustified false belief that p at the top as well as unjustified false belief that P explains the truths below it.
Since your beliefs about P don't meet any of the conditions for intrinsic value, they don't meet any of the conditions for knowledge.
The top node adds no value to the diagram, but this leaves the generality and value in the nodes below it unchanged.
Those in the middle row still have the three units and those below it have their one.
So value at the bottom of one of these structures is safe from failings at the top.
Now imagine that your belief that P at the top of figure three the false is justified by your evidence, as are your beliefs.
That explains the truth below it. They too are false.
The false are justified, but the but the bottom two rows are still knowledge.
I've said that merely true and merely justified beliefs have some though lesser value,
and their degrees of value can again depend on their generality.
If merely justified belief has, say, half the value of knowledge, then you're justified false belief that P has 0.5 units of value in itself.
Half of one.
As merely justified rather than a full unit plus half time six equals three units in virtue of your justified false beliefs about what it explains,
that gives it a total of point five plus three equals 3.5 units of value or half the seven it would have if all your beliefs about it were knowledge.
And again, the numbers don't matter.
The point is that you can have relations like those that hold between items of knowledge when you have not understanding that it involves knowledge.
The same relations can hold between between beliefs that fall short of knowledge, let's say, because they're justified but false.
And there will be less value, but there will still be some value there.
And if the beliefs below this top one are likewise justified but false,
the value of using it to explain any one of them is now a half times a half equals a quarter rather than a half times one equals five.
Again, replacing knowledge with merely justified belief reduces the generality value by half.
So states that fall short of knowledge can then still have value, including some general generality value, but it's reduced value more generally.
On The View, I'm proposing the ideal for cognition is a composite where the best beliefs both meet
all the conditions for knowledge and in addition have a high degree of significance.
But just as there can be some value in knowledge without significance as in knowledge of some trivial truth,
so there can be some value in significance without all the elements of knowledge now.
So like I said, the measure what the measure of relative generality values is understanding,
which like many views in the literature, it equates with seeing the connections between items of information.
But where it takes this in its best form to involve knowledge.
Some philosophers argue that understanding is a distinct state from knowledge and more valuable than knowledge,
so it not knowledge should be our primary cognitive goal.
But that argument may rest on the adamant assumption that the value of a body of
knowledge must equal to some of the values its constituents would have on their own.
And so can't involve a relational state like understanding. But this again ignores the possibility of an organic unity.
There's no reason why the value of a collection of items of knowledge can't depend on the relations between them,
especially when those involve knowing how some explain others or no reason why understanding can't be an especially valuable form of knowledge.
Some others say understanding is distinct from knowledge because it doesn't require knowledge you can understand.
Q By relating it to explanatory proposition.
P Even though that your belief is that P is true only because of some Getty your style, luck, or even if it's false.
And I think in the discussion on Monday,
somebody raised this possibility that if if you know something because you picked I mean there's eight books in
the library and seven of them have false information and you accidentally pick the one with true information,
the claim is that you don't know what you read in the book,
but the claim was that if you use it to explain something, you nonetheless have understanding.
So that's the idea that you can have understanding without knowledge.
But I've just said the relations that make for understanding when they hold between
items of knowledge can also hold between items that fall short of knowledge,
say because they're justified but false or justified and true, but get ered.
It's to me it's then it's just a verbal question whether what result deserves the name understanding.
I mean, the view I just described calls it understanding. Other people say you can't have understanding in the absence of knowledge.
You can't say, I understand why P but I don't know why. P That that's absurd.
I don't have any view about that question.
It seems to me entirely terminal logical.
The relation that makes for understanding when it holds between items of knowledge can also hold between items that are not knowledge.
And it could have similar, though in my view, lesser value. And I just don't think it matters whether we call it understanding.
I mean, in particular, nothing prevents the same relations from making for the best kind of knowledge.
So that involves understanding for themselves, being at their best when the items they hold between are knowledge.
So. People are.
With me anyways. The measure of relative generality for knowledge can be elaborated in two ways.
One finds more value in the explanation and understanding of more varied or diverse truths.
Many think the greatest intellectual advances come when a new principle unifies realms that had previously been thought distinct,
as when, for example, Newton gave a single explanation of the motions of bodies on Earth and of planets around the sun.
This is more illuminating than giving yet more explanations of essentially similar facts.
Well, that idea can be captured if we extend the division of truths into kinds.
So truths on a similar topic count as in the same kind,
and then make a truth relative generality greater when it's used to explain more different kinds of truth, or, I wondered,
has more varied kinds below it in an explanatory structure,
then a unified understanding of diverse truths will be better than an equally unified understanding of similar ones.
A second elaboration value is knowledge more when it's more precise.
I mean, you might know vaguely that falling objects on Earth accelerated a rate somewhere between eight and 12 metres per second squared,
or more precisely that the rate is 9.8 metres per second squared.
In the second case, you you might be said to know a greater number of truths since you know.
No, no. Not only that, the rate is between eight and ten, so eight and 12,
but also that it's between eight and a half and 11 and a half, nine and 11 and so on.
Those are those are very similar truths, but there can still be some more value in knowing them.
You can also explain more precise and again, arguably more numerous truths about the velocities of particular fault falling objects.
Whether or not that particular derivations of, you know, the value of precision succeeds.
I don't hang my hat on that. It's plausible that more precise knowledge is intrinsically better.
So the best understanding uses extended and precise general truths to explain many precise and varied particular truths.
So that's relative generality for knowledge. A similar measure can help determine the degrees of value in achievements.
So the value of an achieved goal depends in part on its relation to other goals, and in particular on its importance in a structured system of goals.
But the relation is here. It's different than for knowledge, since achievement is a different good and the chief goal is relatively general.
If you use if you've used your achieving of many other goals as a means to achieving it.
So it generates and unifies those other goals.
So rather than explanatory the relation here, it's instrumental or means end and it runs up up a diagram rather than down.
So in an achievement version of figure three,
you might want to look at back at that the goals in the bottom row are achieved as means to the ones in the middle row,
which in turn are achieved as means to the one of the top, which is the ultimate aim, guiding them all in a model.
Parallel to that for knowledge says each achieved goal has one unit of value in itself just as an achieved goal
plus one further unit via relative generality for every other goal that's achieved as a means to achieving it.
So the four at the bottom in figure three have one unit each,
the two in the middle three each and the top one seven for again a total of 17, which again contrasts with the 13 units.
If you achieve one goal via six, as in figure two or the seven A units in seven unconnected goals, or at least there are 13 units,
if all the goals in figure three are fully achieved since there can still be some generality and value.
If that's not so, if you pursue two, the top goal is neither competent nor successful.
It adds no value to the diagram, but that leaves the value in the lower rows intact that the middle goals still have the three units.
And if your pursuit of the top goal, the one successful is competent, it may have a half unit of value in itself, plus a half times six.
Six equals three units via a relative generality for the other goals pursued as a means to it,
assuming that each of them is fully achieved if one or more of them isn't fully achieved, say because your pursuit of it two is merely competent.
There are further reductions, say two a half times a half equals a quarter of for each such means.
So this idea, you know, the relative generality is making for significance in achievement that can again be grounded in the thought that
connecting goals in a multilevel means and structure exercises rational powers that other animals don't have,
and again, overlaps often, but not always with intrinsic generality.
Often a more extended goal requires more other goals to be realised as a means to it,
but sometimes a very localised goal such as that you stand atop a specific mountain on a specific day can require many others as means to it.
And sometimes you can realise a highly extended goal,
such as one involving your whole society for decades to come by just casting a vote in Parliament or making a judicial decision.
Now, if what relative generality values on the cognitive side is understanding here what it values is achievement.
There are complex and in that way difficult. Obviously, figure three is more complex than figure two, which is more complex than figure one.
There are several ways this complexity can make for difficulty what it means and structure contains more goals.
First, there are more places where you can fail at something crucial, and so fail in your main pursuit.
Thus, in FIG. three, you need to achieve seven distinct goals and also use six of them to achieve one or two others.
There are therefore multiple points where a local failure can lead to failure overall.
In addition, more complex structures demand more in the way of self-monitoring and executive control.
You need to have an overall plan for your activity. Keep track of where you are in the plan and sequence your acts correctly to carry it out.
That, too, is more difficult when the activity is more complex and there are further sources of difficulty.
If the measure of relative generality is elaborated in ways parallel to the ones for knowledge.
So one elaboration finds more generality and thus more value in achievement that involve varied rather than similar or repetitive means.
An assembly line worker may make many individual movements as a means to earning his day's pay,
but his activity doesn't intuitively have great intrinsic worth.
This is surely in large part because his movements are all essentially the same,
and this will give his activity only limited value if relative generality counts.
Not just not just are mainly the number of individual means to a goal, but the number of means of different kinds.
So more varied means instructors are better and repetitive ones lack worth, but varied structures also make for more difficulty.
Since the more kinds of goal you have to realise the more different skills and therefore training
you need to achieve them and the more complex the planning and self-monitoring they require.
Another elaboration makes it better to achieve more precise goals, both as your ultimate goal and as means to it.
This is a common feature of value in achievement.
So a skilled poet chooses a specific word that completes her line best.
Musician plays a note at the precise moment that will have the greatest aesthetic impact.
And a professional golfer hits his approach, shot not just somewhere near the green, but within, say, ten feet of the hole.
As with knowledge, it might be possible to see more precise achievements is realising more numerous goals.
So the professional golfer hits his ball not just into a large circle around the green, but also into progressively smaller ones, down to ten feet.
And that might give him a greater number of achieve goals and in consequence more relative generality and what he does for significant value.
However, these goals must be competently achieved.
An amateur golfer like me always hits his ball to a precise spot, sometimes even close to the hole.
But he doesn't do that intentionally, or especially with competence.
Given his limited skill, he can't knowingly select a swing with a higher probability of putting the ball near the hole.
If that's sometimes result, it's not something he controlled or was responsible for.
But precise achievements, when competent are again more difficult, the more narrowly defined your goal,
the more ways you can fail to realise it and the more skill and training it requires.
Many achievements also involve a form of intrinsic generality where you grasp a
complex array of items as a single unit and then try to and do realise it as a unit.
So hearing a melody for the first time, a skilled musician can immediately take it in as an ordered sequence and play it back correctly.
Someone who is less musical may follow the melodies individual transitions,
but not grasp it as a whole, and so be unable to reproduce it without further listenings.
A chess master sees a position on the board as a connected pattern of forces and vulnerabilities, and when choosing them,
a move seeks mainly to alter that sort of global pattern rather than just change the location of one piece.
Henry Moore was said to be able to see a complex form from all around itself.
So the ability to represent and realise these complex holes as units often has instrumental value,
instrumental value leading to better musical performances,
chess strategies and sculptures, but can also be good intrinsically as an exercise of innate or developed rationality.
Achievements that require it are in that way again, more difficult requiring more talent or training and being easier to fail at.
So the difficulty, the generality measures value and that I've been talking about is objective since it turns
on properties of your goals apart from any specific relation to you or your abilities.
This contrasts with Glenn Bradford's view, which is more subjective.
She too values achievements in terms of their difficulty, but she understands difficulty in terms of effort.
So it's when realising a goal involves more effort that for her it has more worth.
Since how much effort a goal requires can differ for different people.
The difficulty she values is in that way subjective now kind of subject of an object, of understandings, of difficulty.
Overlap often, but not always. Tying your shoelaces objectively simple and for most people requires a little effort.
But for someone with a disability, it can require a great effort.
It's therefore not much of an achievement on a complexity of view, but can be won on Bradford.
Conversely, realising a complex, complex set of goals with little effort is valuable on a generality based view, but not on hers.
Now. So my defence, my claim here isn't that there's no value in simple but effortful success as in a disabled persons tying a shoelace.
It's just that whatever value there is in that form of achievement, there's also value in one that's like knowledge.
And turning more objectively on the two kinds of generality.
In particular, there's a value in this form that's ignored.
If achievement is understood only in terms of effort.
In her in her book, Bradford describes a virtue virtuoso violinist who effortlessly tosses off a flawless performance of a complex piece.
Few other violinists can play. She calls what he does difficult because it would require effort from anyone else.
But since it doesn't require effort from him, it isn't difficult for him and so isn't on her view,
an achievement or anything of value when done by him.
But surely his performance is a valuable achievement. Now her view can find considerable value in the process by which he acquired his virtuoso skill,
since there was great effort in the years of training.
But once he has the skill, her view sees little point in his exercising it by playing complex pieces.
He would do better on her view to give up the violin and expand effort in acquiring some new skill.
He can then he can then again set aside once he has it more generally.
Views like Bradford's make it hard to see the point of ever improving your skill.
Skill has two effects. It allows you to do the same things with less effort and to do more complex ones with the same effort.
Since on a curfew, neither of these makes for any increase in the value of what you do.
There's no reason. Not reason, not no reason not to rest content with your current limited skill set.
But surely serious musicians, chess players and golfers all want to improve their skill so they can do objectively more difficult things.
Bradford argues against a complexity view that carry on a conversation in English is highly complex, yet not an achievement.
But I have no difficulty in saying it is an achievement, even a significant one.
I've often noted when some human capacity isn't shared by other animals, not because I think its being distinctive of US matters as such,
but because if our lives can have value that animals don't,
it must be because the properties we have and they lack and the ability to learn and use the language is absolutely one of these.
Having conversations as such isn't as a good that differentiates human lives from each other.
You can't say his life is better because he can have conversations and he can't.
But I don't see why that prevents it from being good at all.
If all our lives contained some minimum amount of pleasure with the pleasures being shared mean it wasn't good.
And there can be absolutely be some differences with respect to the good of conversing.
Some languages are more complex than others with more recursive structure, so speaking them is more of an achievement.
Or compare the conversations of people who clumsily talk past each other with those of the characters in a
Henry James novel who convey precise information in subtly indirect ways that kindly avoid rudeness or hurt.
What they do is, to me, absolutely a valuable achievement.
As well as valuing individual difficult activities.
The measure of relative generality joins the one of intrinsic generality in valuing a life with a long term goal,
say, to live a life with a certain overall character.
Not only does this goal include all the days or years in your life, that's intrinsic generality.
It also has a great many other goals as means to it, namely all those you choose in part as contributing to it.
Just as our distinctive human rationality is exercised in forming and pursuing a goal with that temporal extent,
so it's exercised in organising and pursuing all our other goal,
all the other goals this realisation requires, nor must this type of goal be for your whole life.
You can have a similarly unifying in for a year or month or for a specific aspect of your life,
such as your career or personal life, and the goal needed at least initially, be overly specific.
You can, for instance, intend to be and remain active in politics, but leave it to later to decide what specific form that activity will take.
Whatever its form it will contribute to realising what was always a temporally extended and organising end.
And it's not that no life without this kind of end can be good.
Achievement is just one good among others, and can sometimes be outweighed by others.
If pursuing a unified life deprives you of significant pleasure or knowledge, it may not be on balance best.
That can also be competing aspects of achievement, in particular,
a life that's lived chaotically or just from day to day can be high in achievement value if it contains many individual,
complex and difficult activities. The relative generality at a time compensating for the lack of generality through time.
There may even be trade-offs between these two aspects of relative generality.
The more global and the more local,
with more focus on lifetime goals inhibiting the greatest momentary achievement and full commitment to those achievements.
Limiting the attention you can give to organising plans, maybe running.
I'm tempted to, you know, to make an analogy with artistic careers, you know,
other artists who kind of work in the same style throughout their career, refining it slightly, but there's kind of a unity to all the work they do.
I can't give a highbrow example like from painting, but I think of B.B. King as a musician who kind of played the blues in the same way.
And then there are other musicians you just have to keep on changing styles who keep changing styles,
perhaps because they need a new project to throw their energy into.
To do the best works they can at a time. Maybe Bob Dylan and Picasso or people like that.
Anyways, there are artists who change styles and there might not be tremendous unity in their artistic output through time.
But. The lack of unity enabled them to do produce individual outstanding works.
Anyways, that's the idea. There can be a conflict between relative generality at the local level and at a more global level.
In both aspects though,
my conclusions assume what it can be called an all times rather than a present time reading of relative generality on a present time reading of goals.
Relative generality at a time depends only on the number of other goals pursued as a means to it at that time.
On an all times view, it depends on the number that are means to it at all the times it's pursued.
So Figure four is a version of figure three in which the nodes are extended horizontally to represent the length of time for which they're pursued.
So at each time you are pursuing the top goal one from the middle and one from the bottom on a present time view,
this makes the top goals value at a time. Always three, the middle ones two and the bottom one's one for a total of six.
Right. You get this. You only count what's happening at an individual time.
This contrasts with the 17 at a time. I found by counting all the means to a goal whenever they're pursued.
Only that all times calculation gives the top girl seven units at a time.
It also means that on a present time view,
there's no more value in figure four than if at each of the four times you had a different top goal, as in figure five.
Then your total value through the four times would still be four times six equals 24 rather than four times 17 equals 68.
Do you see that if all that matters is what goal you're pursuing at a time,
there wouldn't be any more value in having the same organising goal through a time
period rather than a different sort of goal at the top of the structure at each time.
So a present time view therefore finds no more value in the greater complexity,
difficulty and unity When your bottom goals of the four times are directed to the same top goal,
then when they're not in no more value in figure four than in figure five.
Since I do want to value this complexity in unity, either in your life as a whole or in particular activities,
I've understood the generality of achievement in the more inclusive all times way that may, though,
make for a dis analogy with the case of knowledge there at all times of you says the value at a time of your
knowing a truth depends not only on the number of other truths you use it to explain and understand then,
but also in the number you used it to explain in the past, even though you can't now remember them and those you will use it to explain.
In the future, though you have no idea now what they will be. Though that's a possible view,
it may be more plausible to make the generality of an item of knowledge at a time depend only on what it helps you understand.
Then that would be a present time understanding of relative generality for knowledge.
If so, that's a difference from the case of achievement. Where to me at all times version of relative generality seems preferable.
Preferable to just just to bring something out given at all times view of achievement.
What you do at one time can affect the value of what you do at other times.
So in figure four, realising the far right bottom goal late in your activity increases the top goals generality at earlier times to for example,
at the left of the diagram. This all times view therefore extends the organic unity at the core of relative generality,
making more relations among your goals relevant to it than there would be with a present time view.
But that fact about one time can affect values in another was always part of the count.
The account count, whether a belief about the past or future counts as knowledge depends on what was or will be the case then.
And if you pursue a goal like preserving Venice, that's an example People will know from reasons and persons.
And after your death, it's realised in a way that depends on your efforts, that makes your activity while you were alive, successful.
And so an achievement. And that's true.
Moreover, even on a present time view, even if a goal is relative, generality at a time depends only on the means used to it,
then whether your pursuit of it while alive counts as an achievement can depend on whether it's realised later.
So that's perfect example. You know, you work while you're alive for the preservation of Venice and after you're dead,
it turns out that Venice is preserved in a way that depends on your effort.
So that means that your activity, while your life was successful and an achievement and that makes a difference in value,
even if the value of your working for the preservation of Venice at a time depends only on the
number of other things you're doing to preserve Venice at that time and not at other times.
Okay. So though relative generality, values, activities that are complex and difficult, some may argue that there's an imposed value of simplicity,
elegance or efficiently efficiency when you take not more, but fewer means to an end.
Isn't it often a mark of skill and achievement to do things in a less rather than more complicated way?
Isn't the resulting simplicity also a value in a contrary one?
It is indeed intuitively a value, but it seems again to involve relations between your goals, albeit different ones.
It may therefore be possible to incorporate it in something like a generality view.
Often a choice is elegant or efficient because it achieves several goals at once or using just one means.
Thus, the Henry James conversationalists find words that both convey precise information and at the same time avoid the hurt of more direct speech.
What they do may therefore be represented in figure six, with the goal at the bottom simultaneously realising the two higher up in the value.
This may this involves may be captured.
If we say a goal has more value than more other goals, it helps to realise or there more there are immediately above it in a structure of goals.
I'm not certain exactly how best to combine this view with one that values complexity,
but there should be a way and the result can again be seen as valuing rationality since rational powers are needed to select a goal because it will,
as others, won't realise several other goals at once because it the value two birds with one stone that would be near the idea.
Okay. However, exactly they are understood and as applied to both knowledge and achievement.
The generality measures are formal. They make the value of a truth.
Their goal depend only on formal properties, such as its extent and its relation to other truths or goals, and not on its substantive content.
Intrinsic generality does favour knowledge of, say, physics over geology, because the greater because of the greater extent of its principles.
But relative generality doesn't do the same or not to the same degree as I've said.
You can have more understanding or knowledge with more relative generality in geology than in physics, and the same holds more generally.
Thus you can have valuable understanding. You know, something fairly restricted,
like your friend's personality or car engines or 1960s popular music and a similar variety of fields is possible for relatively general achievements.
But one thing formal measures don't consider is the value of an object, whether of belief or pursuit.
Aristotle, at least at one point, thought that the best knowledge must be of the best things in the universe, namely the unchanging divine substances.
But that's not a critical, credible view about secular knowledge.
It's not intrinsically better to understand the nature and causes of pleasure than of pain or of virtue, than advice.
And Aristotle's view doesn't follow. It's excluded.
If the test for significant knowledge are purely formal with something similar holding given parallel test for achievement,
then it's not as James Griffin, for one, held a necessary condition for the value of an achievement that would be of an independently good goal.
That doesn't mean there's no value in pursuing good goals. There is, but it's the distinct value of moral virtue.
If that's taken to involve loving what's good, for example, desiring and pursuing what's good and hating what's evil.
Then if you pursue and realise a good goal, your activity can have two values.
One of achievement which is independent of the goal is value. And one of virtue which depends on it.
Consider as an illustration scientific research. Its goal is new knowledge, which is intrinsically good and even better, as well as more extended.
If it's knowledge not just for you, but for many people. But realising this goal can also be complex and challenging.
Think of the immensely involved process needed to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson.
Successful research can therefore be multiple valuable.
It can result in new knowledge, which is one good if it's motivated by the desire for knowledge, it involves the further good of virtue.
But it also involves and can derive much of its value from the achievement of reaching by very precise and therefore difficult means that goal.
Now, an obvious difficulty for a formal view of achievement is posed by evil goals.
If you successfully carry out a complex plan aimed at torturing thousands of people, is that intrinsically good Hedonist and desire?
Fulfilment views face a similar difficulty about pleasure in other people's pain or the fulfilment of a desire to cause them pain.
And all three views can respond in either of two ways. What is to say?
These cases involve both a positive, good of achievement, pleasure or fulfilment, and alongside it an evil of moral vice.
The evil should one hopes outweigh the good.
So the achievement, pleasure or fulfilment is on balance bad, though this may be harder to guarantee for achievement than for the other two goods.
The other response says that given an evil goal or object, any potential is good.
Any potential good is cancelled and the pursuit, pleasure or fulfilment is only in purely evil.
Now, if that second response partly abandons a formal view of achievement since it finds no value in achieving an evil goal.
But it needn't abandon formality entirely. It needn't say that of a two achievements of good goals.
The one with a better goal is therefore better as an achievement.
Their values as achievements can still depend just on the goals generality, nor needed say that a good achievement must be of a good goal.
It can also be of an intrinsically neutral one. In fact, the distinctive value of achievement is most clearly present when it's of a neutral goal.
As it is in games and sports, as analysed in my favourite book, The Grasshopper by Bernard Suits.
So just his analysis. In playing a game, you aim at a goal that's intrinsically trivial that a ball go into a hole in the ground,
that you stand on top of a mountain, that the pieces on a chessboard finish in a certain pattern.
But the game's rules forbid you to take the most efficient means to this goal.
You may not pick the ball up, walk down the fairway and drop it in the hole by hand.
Normally you take a helicopter up the mountain. You have to pursue the goal by means that are more indirect and therefore challenging,
either because they involve more effort or because they're more complex with more numerous, varied and precise parts.
Despite the triviality of your ultimate goal, success in a game isn't something we regard as valueless.
We don't think people who devote their lives to mastering golf, climbing or chess have waste of their time.
They're admired for what is a substantial achievement. If this admiration is warranted,
the value of what they do can't derive from the value of its ultimate end must must instead depend on features of the process of realising it.
Such are the formal ones of intrinsic and relative generality.
To borrow the current clichés, it must be a value of process, not product journey, not destination.
The same value can be found in other activities.
For example, in business where you may found a company and then make and keep it profitable.
This can have instrumental value if you give customers a new benefit, but often there's no such benefit.
Your product product being no better than some competitors.
The world is arguably no better if more people drink Coke and Pepsi or use iPhones than Androids.
But realising a business goal can be highly complex, requiring integrated and intricate decisions about production, marketing, distribution and more.
Doing so can therefore be an achievement in the same way as success in a game.
A matter more of how you realise a goal then of what that goal intrinsically is.
Hmm. Look it. In my first lecture, I said achievement has been a less commonly recognised intrinsic good than knowledge.
One reason is that philosophers like Aristotle have distinguished theoretical from practical
rationality and assumed that just as knowledge is the one intrinsic good of theory.
So moral virtue is the one intrinsic good of practice.
Raising the right and the good makes a similar assumption, he says. There are human faculties of sensation, cognition and cognition.
And he thinks each of them has got one good pleasure. Knowledge and virtue.
One and only one for each. But there's no reason why there can't be two goods of connection, one of virtue, and the other more closely.
Paralleling knowledge of achievement and failing to recognise achievement can fail to mean failing to recognise some more specific good.
It underlies, having said at the start of the night,
common in ethics that an activity with a goal external to itself can't have more value than that goal.
Aristotle then argues that since possessing money has no value in itself,
the activity of pursuing it as a moneymaking or business life likewise has no value.
But that ignores the value the process of pursuing a goal can have just as a process.
And apart from any value in its goal, it dismisses the value of what, for many is a major life life activity.
Business activity. Cantor Repeat be instrumentally good if it provides customers with new benefits.
It can also be instrumentally evil if it increases inequality or causes environmental harm.
And it can involve vice if it's motivated only by a selfish desire for your own good and indifference to anyone else's.
But alongside there are these other values. There can be the intrinsic value of pursuing and realising through complex and difficult means a goal.
Regardless of that goals value, there can, in other words, be the distinctive value of achievement.
So just to wrap up,
I've given a brief sketch of an account of degrees of value in knowledge and achievement using parallel measures of intrinsic and relative generality.
The sketch has left many questions unanswered.
How exactly is intrinsic generality measured and how much weight does it have compared to relative generality?
How exactly does relative generality value the structuring of truths and goals?
You know, the model I gave of those diagrams was super simple. How, if at all, can the measure value both complexity and simplicity or elegance?
Despite its incompleteness, the sketch should give some idea of what, more specifically,
the knowledge and achievement most worth pursuing and promoting are.
And it should all sorts of extend the idea in the first lecture that you should
think of knowledge and achievement as parallel goods involving parallel elements,
though, with internal relations that run in opposite directions.
So that the extension here is that, you know,
in both cases the measure of degree of value is something about either intrinsic generality or relative generality.
Even the relative generality involves different relationships.
One. You know, explanation, understanding in the one case sort of means end achievement in the other.
There was that this talk in the final lecture on Friday. I'll discuss how these goods may be aims of social and government policy.
So if you think that knowledge and achievement have intrinsic value and you think that social policy should aim to make people's lives better.
What specific policies or conclusions might follow from that?
So everybody cares. I'll talk about what do I talk about? Of government support of the arts education policy.
Meaningful work. I think there's one or two more anyways.
But it'll be perfectionist social policy because the two are perfectionist goods.
The focus, though, will be a specific aspect of social policy aimed at those specific intrinsic goods.
Thank you.