Thursday, February 18, 2016

Basing Actions on Knowledge at the Supreme Court

People sometimes complain about philosophy for its reliance on esoteric thought experiments. "Suppose someone wants to kill someone else, but falsely believes that she's allergic to a certain medicine that will actually help her, but he was ignoring certain defeaters his belief, but he wouldn't have been doing so if he had been raised by better epistemic role models, etc." No doubt there is a grain of truth behind the stereotype, and the criticism of it. But weird cases do matter—both because we're sometimes after necessary truths which should cover all cases, and because the world is a big and weird case, and sometimes weird cases are actual.

If you don't know it already, I am pleased to present to you the absolutely bizarre case of Heffernan v. City of Paterson, currently before the Supreme Court of the United States. If an undergrad had made it up as a counterexample to some principle in a philosophy course, I'd've raised my eyebrows and chuckled quietly at its cleverness.