Phil 1000 Words essay
Learning from Arguments An Introduction to Philosophy

By Daniel Z. Korman Fall 2019 Edition

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Table of Contents

Preface 3

Introduction 5

1. God Does Not Exist 19

2. You Should Bet on God 29

3. No Freedom 43

4. You Know Nothing 59

5. What Makes You You 76

6. Don’t Fear the Reaper 98

7. Taxation is Immoral 108

8. Abortion is Immoral 119

9. Eating Animals is Immoral 141

10. What Makes Things Right 158

Appendix A: Logic 170

Appendix B: Writing 180

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Preface I’m going to argue that you have no free will. I’m going to argue for some other surprising things

too, for instance that death isn’t bad for you, taxation is immoral, and you can’t know anything

whatsoever about the world around you. I’m also going to argue for some things you’re probably

not going to like: that abortion is immoral, you shouldn’t eat meat, and God doesn’t exist.

The arguments aren’t my own. I didn’t come up with them. I don’t even accept all of them:

there are two chapters whose conclusions I accept, three I’m undecided about, and five I’m certain

can’t be right. (I’ll let you guess which are which.) This isn’t for the sake of playing devil’s

advocate. Rather, the idea is that the best way to appreciate what’s at stake in philosophical

disagreements is to study and engage with serious arguments against the views you’d like to hold.

Each chapter offers a sustained argument for some controversial thesis, specifically written

for an audience of beginners. The aim is to introduce newcomers to the dynamics of philosophical

argumentation, using some of the standard arguments one would cover in an introductory

philosophy course, but without the additional hurdles one encounters when reading the primary

sources of the arguments: challenging writing, obscure jargon, and references to unfamiliar works

or schools of thought. Since the aim is to introduce readers to the dynamics of argumentation—as

opposed to introducing them to actual philosophers and their philosophies—I don’t always give

the most sophisticated or historically faithful versions of the arguments, opting instead for more

accessible formulations. And since the book is aimed at absolute beginners, I often ignore

objections and nuances that would only ever occur to someone already well-versed in these issues.

The different chapters aren’t all written from the same perspective. This is obvious from a

quick glance at the table of contents: the first chapter argues that you shouldn’t believe in God,

while the second argues that you should. You’ll also find that chapters 5 and 6 contain arguments

pointing to different conclusions about the relationship between people and their bodies, and

chapter 7 contains arguments against the very theory of morality that’s defended in chapter 10. So

readers will be exposed to a variety of different philosophical perspectives, and should be on the

lookout for ways in which the arguments in one chapter provide the resources for resisting

arguments in other chapters.

And while there are chapters arguing both for and against belief in God, that isn’t the case

for other topics we’ll cover. For instance, there’s a chapter arguing that you don’t have free will,

but no chapter arguing that you do have free will. That doesn’t mean that you’ll only get to hear

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one side of the argument. The views I’m defending within each chapter do always gets the last

word, but along the way you will be exposed to the standard objections to the views and arguments

I’m advancing, and you can decide for yourself whether the responses I offer to those objections

are convincing. Those who need help finding the flaws in the reasoning (or ideas for paper topics)

can look to the reflection questions at the end of each chapter for some clues.

As I said, the arguments advanced in the book are not my own, and at the end of each

chapter I acknowledge the sources of the arguments. In some chapters, the central arguments have

a long history, and the formulations I use can’t be credited to any one philosopher in particular.

Other chapters, however, are much more directly indebted to the work of specific contemporary

philosophers, reproducing the contents of their books and articles (with some modifications and

simplifications). In particular, chapter 7 closely follows the opening chapters of Michael Huemer’s

The Problem of Political Authority; chapter 8 reproduces the central arguments of Judith Jarvis

Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion” and Don Marquis’s “Why Abortion is Immoral”; and chapter

9 draws heavily from Dan Lowe’s “Common Arguments for the Moral Acceptability of Eating

Meat” and Alastair Norcross’s “Puppies, Pigs, and People”.

I’m grateful to Jeff Bagwell, Matt Davidson, Nikki Evans, Jason Fishbein, Bill Hartmann,

Clayton Littlejohn, Katherine Lowe, David Mokriski, and Neil Sinhababu for helpful suggestions,

and to the Facebook Hivemind for help identifying the further readings for the various chapters.

Special thanks are due to Chad Carmichael, Jonathan Livengood, and Daniel Story for extensive

feedback on a previous draft of the book, and to the students in my 2019 Freshman Seminar: Shreya

Acharya, Maile Buckman, Andrea Chavez, Dylan Choi, Lucas Goefft, Mino Han, PK Kottapalli,

Mollie Kraus, Mia Lombardo, Dean Mantelzak, Sam Min, Vivian Nguyen, Ariana Pacheco Lara,

Kaelen Perrochet, Rijul Singhal, Austin Tam, Jennifer Vargas, Kerry Wang, and Lilly Witonsky.

Finally, thanks to Renée Bolinger for permission to use her portrait of the great 20th century

philosopher and logician Ruth Barcan Marcus on the cover. You can see some more of her portraits

of philosophers here: https://www.reneebolinger.com/portraits.html

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Introduction

1. Detailed Contents

As I said in the preface, each chapter is written “in character”, representing a specific

perspective (not necessarily my own!) on the issue in question. But they are not all written from

the same perspective, and you should not expect the separate chapters to form a coherent whole.

In Chapter 1, “God Does Not Exist”, I advance an argument that God could not allow all

the suffering we find in the world, and therefore must not exist. I address a number of attempts to

explain why God might allow suffering, for instance that it’s necessary for appreciating good

things, for building character, or for having free will. I also address the response that God has

hidden reasons that we cannot expect to understand.

In Chapter 2, “You Should Bet on God”, I advance an argument that you should believe in

God because it is in your best interest: you’re putting yourself in the running for an eternity in

heaven without risking losing anything of comparable value. I defend the argument against a

variety of objections, for instance that it is incredibly unlikely that God exists, that merely believing

in God isn’t enough to gain entry into heaven, and that it’s impossible to change one’s beliefs at

will.

In Chapter 3, “No Freedom”, I advance two arguments that no one ever acts freely. The

first turns on the idea that all of our actions are determined by something that lies outside our

control, namely what we most strongly desire. The second turns on the idea that our actions are all

consequences of exceptionless, “deterministic” laws of nature. I address the concern that the laws

may not be deterministic by arguing that undetermined, random actions wouldn’t be free either,

and I address attempts to show that there can be free will even in a deterministic universe.

In Chapter 4, “You Know Nothing”, I argue for two skeptical conclusions. First, I advance

an argument that we cannot know anything about the future. That’s so, I argue, because all of our

reasoning about the future relies on an assumption that we have no good reason to accept, namely

that the future will resemble the past. Second, I advance an argument that we cannot know anything

about how things presently are in the world around us, since we cannot rule out the possibility that

we are currently dreaming.

In Chapter 5, “What Makes You You”, I criticize a number of attempts to answer the

question of personal identity: under what conditions are a person at one time and a person at

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another time one and the same person? I reject the suggestion that personal identity is a matter of

having the same body, on the basis of an argument from conjoined twins and an argument from

the possibility of two people swapping bodies. I reject the suggestion that personal identity can be

defined in terms of psychological factors on the strength of “fission” cases in which one person’s

mental life is transferred into two separate bodies.

In Chapter 6, “Don’t Fear Death”, I advance an argument that death cannot be bad for you,

since you don’t experience any painful sensations while dead. I argue that you don’t experience

any painful sensations while dead by arguing that physical organisms cease to be conscious when

they die and that you are a physical organism. I also address the suggestion that what makes death

bad for you is that it deprives you of pleasures you would otherwise have had.

In Chapter 7, “Taxation is Immoral”, I argue that it is wrong for governments to tax or

imprison their citizens, on the grounds that these practices are not relevantly different from a

vigilante locking vandals in her basement and robbing her neighbors to pay for her makeshift

prison. I address a variety of potential differences, with special attention to the suggestion that we

have tacitly consented to following the law and paying taxes and thereby entered into a “social

contract” with the government.

In Chapter 8, “Abortion is Immoral”, I examine a number of arguments both for and against

the immorality of abortion. I argue that the question cannot be settled by pointing to the fact that

the embryo isn’t self-sufficient or conscious or rational, nor by pointing to the fact that it has

human DNA, that it is a potential person, or that life begins at conception. I then examine the

argument that abortion is immoral because the embryo has a right to life, and I argue that having

a right to life doesn’t entail having a right to continued use of the mother’s womb. Finally, I

advance an alternative argument for the immorality of abortion, according to which this killing,

like other killings, is wrong because it deprives its victim of a valuable future.

In Chapter 9, “Eating Animals is Immoral”, I defend the view that it is immoral to eat meat

that comes from so-called “factory farms”. I begin by criticizing three common reasons for

thinking that eating meat is morally acceptable: because people have always eaten meat, because

eating meat is necessary, and because eating meat is natural. I then argue that eating factory-farmed

meat is immoral, on the grounds that it would be immoral to raise and slaughter puppies in similar

ways and for similar reasons.

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In Chapter 10, “What Makes Things Right”, I advance a “utilitarian” theory of morality,

according to which the rightness or wrongness of an action is always entirely a matter of the extent

to which it increases or decreases overall levels of happiness in the world. I defend the theory

against the objection that it wrongly permits killing one person to save five. Along the way, I

consider the ways in which morality is and isn’t subjective and variable across cultures, and what

to say about the notorious “trolley cases”.

In Appendix A, “Logic”, I examine one of the features that makes an argument a good

argument, namely validity. I explain what it means for an argument to be valid, and I illustrate the

notion of validity by presenting four examples of valid forms of argument.

In Appendix B, “Writing”, I present a model for writing papers for philosophy courses:

introduce the view or argument you plan to criticize (section 1), advance your objections (section

2), and address likely responses to your objections (section 3). Along the way, I explain the

importance of clear and unpretentious writing that is charitable towards opposing viewpoints; I

offer advice for editing rough drafts; I identify some criteria that philosophy instructors commonly

use when evaluating papers; and I explain the difference between consulting online sources and

plagiarizing them.

2. The Elements of Arguments

Throughout the book, you’ll hear a lot about arguments and premises and conclusions

following from premises. So let’s begin by having a look at what an argument is, and examining

some common argumentative strategies.

An argument is a sequence of claims, consisting of premises, a conclusion, and in some

cases one or more subconclusions. The conclusion is what the argument is ultimately trying to

establish, or what’s ultimately being argued for. The premises are the assumptions that, taken

together, are meant to serve as reasons for accepting the conclusion. A subconclusion is a claim

that is meant to be established by some subset of the premises but that isn’t itself the ultimate

conclusion of the argument.

As an illustration, consider the following argument:

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Against Fearing Death (FD1) You cease to be conscious when you die (FD2) If you cease to be conscious when you die, then being dead isn’t bad for you (FD3) So, being dead isn’t bad for you (FD4) If being dead isn’t bad for you, then you shouldn’t fear death (FD5) So, you shouldn’t fear death

The argument has three premises: FD1, FD2, and FD4. FD5 is the conclusion of the argument,

since that’s what the argument is ultimately trying to establish. FD3 is a subconclusion. It isn’t the

conclusion, since the ultimate goal of the argument is to establish that you shouldn’t fear death,

not that being dead isn’t bad for you (which is just a step along the way). Nor is it a premise, since

it isn’t merely being assumed. Rather, it’s been argued for: it is meant to be established by FD1

and FD2.

In this book, you can always tell which claims in the labeled and indented arguments are

premises, conclusions, and subconclusions. The conclusion is always the final claim in the

sequence. The subconclusions are anything other than the final claim that begins with a “So”. Any

claim that doesn’t begin with “So” is a premise. (Those that begin with “If so” are premises. More

on these in a bit.)

However, when it comes to unlabeled arguments—arguments appearing in paragraph

form—all bets are off. For instance, I might say:

Death isn’t bad for you. After all, you cease to be conscious when you die, and something can’t be bad for you if you’re not even aware of it. And if that’s right, then you shouldn’t fear death, since it would be irrational to fear something that isn’t bad for you.

The paragraph begins with a subconclusion, the conclusion shows up right in the middle of the

paragraph, and neither of them is preceded by a “So”. Here, you have to use some brain-power

and clues from the context to figure out which bits are the basic assumptions (the premises), which

bit is the conclusion, and which bits are mere subconclusions.

All of the labeled arguments in the book are constructed in such a way that the conclusion

is a logical consequence of the premises—or, as I sometimes put it, the conclusion “follows from”

the premises. You may or may not agree with FD1, and you may or may not agree with FD2. But

what you can’t deny is that FD1 and FD2 together entail FD3. If FD3 is false, then it must be that

either FD1 or FD2 (or both) is false. What that means is that you cannot reject the conclusion of

any of the labeled arguments in the book while agreeing with all of the premises. You must find

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some premise to deny if you do not want to accept the conclusion. (See Appendix A, “Logic”, for

more on how to tell when a conclusion follows from some premises.)

3. Conditionals

Arguments frequently contain premises of the form “if… then…”, like FD2 and FD4. We

call such claims conditionals, and we also have terms for the different parts of a conditional. The

bit that comes between the ‘if’ and the ‘then’ is the antecedent of the conditional, and the bit that

comes after the ‘then’ is the consequent of the conditional. Using FD2 as an illustration, the

antecedent is you cease to be conscious when you die, the consequent is being dead is not bad for

you, and the conditional is the whole claim: if you cease to be conscious when you die then being

dead is not bad for you.

(Strictly speaking, conditionals don’t have to be of the form “if… then…”. They can also

be of the form “… only if…”, as in “You should fear death only if being dead is bad for you”, or

of the form “… if …”, as in “You shouldn’t fear death if being dead isn’t bad for you”.)

Conditionals affirm a link between two claims, and you can agree that the claims are linked

in the way the conditional says they are, even if you don’t agree with the claims themselves. To

see this, consider the following conditional, CD:

(CD) If Corrine is under 21, then it she is not allowed to drink alcohol

You might think that Corrine is 22 and that she is allowed to drink alcohol. Still, you should agree

with CD: you should agree that being under 21 and being allowed to drink are linked in the way

CD says they are. To deny CD, you’d have to think, for instance, that the drinking age was 18. But

you don’t reject a conditional just because you disagree with its antecedent or its consequent (or

both). Likewise, you can agree with FD4 even if you think that being dead is bad for you. To

disagree with FD4, you’d have to think that it’s sometimes rational to fear things that aren’t bad

for you.

4. Common Argumentative Strategies

Arguments can play a variety of different roles in philosophical discussion. Let’s have a

look as some common argumentative strategies that you’ll encounter throughout the book.

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First, one might use one argument to defend a premise in another argument. For instance,

premise FD1 of the Against Fearing Death argument—that you cease to be conscious when you

die—is hardly obvious. So someone who likes the Against Fearing Death argument might try to

produce a further argument in defense of that premise, like the following:

The Brain Death Argument (BC1) Your brain stops working after you die (BC2) If your brain stops working after you die, then you cease to be conscious when you

die (FD1) So, you cease to be conscious when you die

Notice that FD1 is the conclusion of this argument, whereas it is merely a premise of the Against

Fearing Death argument. And whenever one wants to deny a claim that’s a conclusion of an

argument, one must identify some flaw in that argument. That means that anyone who planned to

resist the Against Fearing Death argument by denying FD1 now has to reckon with this Brain

Death Argument.

Second, one might use an argument to challenge another argument. There are two ways of

doing so. One would be to produce an argument for the opposite conclusion. For instance, one

might advance the following argument against FD5:

The Uncertain Fate Argument (UF1) You don’t know what will happen to you after you die (UF2) If you don’t know what will happen to you after to die, then you should fear death

(UF3) So, you should fear death

Notice that UF3 is a denial of the conclusion of the Against Fearing Death argument. Thus, if the

Uncertain Fate Argument is successful, then something must go wrong in the Against Fearing

Death argument, though it would still be an open question where exactly it goes wrong.

Another way to challenge an argument is to produce a second argument against a premise

of the first argument. Here, for instance, is an argument against FD1 of the Against Fearing Death

argument:

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The Afterlife Argument (AF1) You immediately go to heaven or hell after you die (AF2) If you immediately go to heaven or hell after you die, then you don’t cease to be

conscious after you die (AF3) So, you don’t cease to be conscious after you die

Unlike the Uncertain Fate argument, The Afterlife Argument challenges a premise of the Against

Fearing Death argument, and does indicate where that argument is supposed to go wrong.

I don’t mean to suggest that these are especially good arguments. Not all arguments are

created equal! People who believe in the afterlife aren’t likely to be convinced by the Brain Death

Argument and people who don’t believe in the afterlife aren’t likely to be convinced by the

Afterlife Argument. As you read on, you’ll discover that a lot of the work in philosophy involves

trying to find arguments that will be convincing even to those who are initially inclined to reject

their conclusions.

5. Necessary Conditions, Sufficient Conditions, and Counterexamples

Let’s continue our discussion of common argumentative strategies by looking at some

specific strategies for constructing arguments. One involves identifying necessary and sufficient

conditions. A sufficient condition for something is something that guarantees that it’s true. A

necessary condition for something is something that’s required in order for it to be true.

To make the idea more concrete, let’s think about some specific examples from the ethics

of abortion. Is it wrong to kill a six-week-old embryo? One way of tackling that question is to think

more generally about when it is and isn’t wrong to kill something.

Some might suggest that it’s wrong to kill something if it has a beating heart. In other

words, when something has a beating heart, that by itself guarantees that it’s wrong to kill it. If

that’s right, then we’ve identified a sufficient condition for a killing to be wrong. And the proposed

sufficient condition can then be put to work in an argument against abortion:

The Beating Heart Argument (BH1) A six-week-old embryo has a beating heart (BH2) It’s always immoral to kill something if it has a beating heart (BH3) So, it’s immoral to kill a six-week-old embryo

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Others might suggest that the only time it’s wrong to kill something is when that thing is

conscious. In other words, a requirement for a killing to be wrong is that the thing being killed is

conscious. If that’s right, then we’ve identified a necessary condition for a killing to be wrong.

This proposed necessary condition can then be put to work in an argument in defense of abortion:

The Consciousness Argument (CN1) A six-week-old embryo isn’t conscious (CN2) It’s only wrong to kill something if it’s conscious (CN3) So, it isn’t wrong to kill a six-week-old embryo

When someone proposes some necessary or sufficient conditions, they’re making a very

strong claim: they’re saying that things are always a certain way, or that they’re never a certain

way. BH2 says that killing things with beating hearts is always wrong; CN2 says that killing

nonconscious things is never wrong. Accordingly, one can try to challenge such proposals by

coming up with counterexamples, examples in which things aren’t the way that the premise says

things always are, or things that are the way that the premise says things never are.

For instance, you might challenge BH2 by pointing out that worms have hearts, and it isn’t

wrong to kill them. And you might challenge CN2 by pointing out that it’s wrong to kill someone

who’s temporarily anaesthetized, even though they’re unconscious. In other words, worms are a

counterexample to BH2 and anaesthetized people are a counterexample to CN2.

These counterexamples can then be put to work in arguments of their own, for instance:

The Worm Argument (WA1) Worms have beating hearts (WA2) If worms have beating hearts, then: if BH2 is true, it’s wrong to kill worms (WA3) It isn’t wrong to kill worms (WA4) So, BH2 is false

Argument by counterexample is a very common argumentative strategy, and we’ll see numerous

examples in the different chapters of the book.

One last thing. You’ll sometimes see claims that include the phrase “if and only if”. These

claims aim to specify both necessary and sufficient condition, simultaneously. Take the question

of when something is bad for you. Breaking your leg is bad for you, and relaxing in the hot tub

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isn’t bad for you. But those are just some examples; suppose we wanted to give a perfectly general

account of which things are and aren’t bad for you. Here’s a first stab at doing so, which we’ll

encounter in chapter 6:

(HD) Something is bad for you if and only if it’s painful

This account gives the right results in the cases we just considered: it says that breaking your leg

is bad for you, since that’s painful, and that relaxing in the hot tub isn’t bad for you, since that’s

not painful.

HD can be seen as two claims packed into one. First, it’s saying that something is bad for

you if it’s painful. In other words, if something is painful, that’s sufficient for it to be bad for you.

Second, it’s saying that something is bad for you only if it’s painful. In other words, something’s

being painful is necessary for it to be bad for you. So, HD is saying that being painful is a necessary

and sufficient condition for something’s being bad for you.

And because HD is making such a strong claim—specifying both necessary and sufficient

conditions—it can be challenged in multiple ways. First, you might try to show that being painful

isn’t a sufficient condition, by producing examples of things that are painful but aren’t bad for you.

Second, you might ty to show that being painful isn’t a sufficient condition, by producing examples

of things are aren’t painful but that are bad for you. An example of either sort would count as a

counterexample to HD. Can you think of one?

6. Argument by Analogy

Another common argumentative strategy is argument by analogy. We’ll encounter such

arguments repeatedly in this book. Here is a case from Chapter 7, which is meant to show that it’s

wrong for the government to tax and imprison its citizens:

VIGILANTE. Jasmine discovers that Luke and Leo have set up a fake charity and are conning some people in her neighborhood. She shows up at their door, leads them at gunpoint to her basement, and plans to keep them there for a year as punishment. Quickly realizing how expensive it is to take care of them, Jasmine goes to her neighbors and demands $50 from each of them, at gunpoint. She explains that half the money will go towards taking care of her prisoners and that the rest will go towards a gym she is building to help keep troubled kids off the street. Those who do not comply are locked up in her basement with her other prisoners.

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Thinking about this scenario is meant to elicit the intuition that Jasmine is doing something wrong.

But what Jasmine is doing seems entirely analogous to what the government does when it taxes

and imprisons its citizens. If that’s right, then we should think that taxation and imprisonment by

the government are wrong as well.

What really drives an argument by analogy isn’t so much the presence of similarities

between the two cases being compared, but rather the absence of a certain kind of difference. In

VIGILANTE, the idea is that there’s no morally significant difference between what Jasmine does

and what the government does, that is, no difference between the cases that could explain why the

one is wrong while the other is okay. The argument can be framed as follows:

Against Taxation and Imprisonment

(TX1) If there is no morally significant difference between two actions A and B, then: if A is wrong, then B is wrong

(TX2) It is wrong for Jasmine to extort and kidnap …

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