Common Sense and the Liar Paradox

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Ben

This is a post on the Liar Paradox.  The Liar Paradox arises from sentences such as (l).

(l): (l) is not true.

Let (~l) be the negation of (l), i.e. (~l) is supposed to contradict (l).  The paradox ensues from this kind of reasoning: Assume (l).  Then, (l) is not true.  So, (~l).  Thus, (l) and (~l).  This reduces our original assumption to absurdity.  So, we reject our assumption and conclude (~l).  But, then (l) is not true, from which (l) follows.  And, we’ve derived a contradiction.

I’ve been reviewing a fairly recent (advanced) introduction on truth by Alexis G. Burgess and John P. Burgess.  They suggest that the most common initial reaction to the paradox is to deny that (l) expresses a proposition.  This would appear to block even the initial assumption of (l); (l) would not even be a candidate for assumption.

As Burgess and Burgess suggest, this common sense reply is problematic.  Even if it succeeds in blocking the paradoxical reasoning above, there’s the “revenge of the liar.”  So consider (l*).

(l*): (l*) does not express a true proposition.

Note that this sentence is distinct from (l), which basically amounts to (l’).

(l’): (l’) expresses a not-true proposition.

Because (l) is equivalent to (l’), it seems like one can block the paradox by denying that (l) expresses a proposition.  But, the standard line is that this can’t help with (l*).  Here’s how Burgess and Burgess explain it (in square brackets):

[The would-be vindicator of the intuitive notion of truth who says of (l*) what was said of (l)/(l'), that it does not express a proposition, faces the reply, "So, a forteriori (l*) does not express a true proposition, and since that is just what it says, it is true."  The would-be vindicator may then insist, "No, (l*) does not say that; (l*) does not 'say' anything; (l*) does not express a proposition.  So, a forteriori (l*) does not express a true proposition, and contrary to what you say, (l*) is not true."  But then the would-be vindicator will be in the position of having said something (namely (l*), which is to say, "(l*) does not express a true proposition"), and also having said that it is not true.  The problem, sometimes called that of ineffability, is that the would-be vindicator's theory cannot be enunciated, at least not without saying something that, according to that theory itself, is untrue.]

I’m interested in the step of this reasoning that I’ve set in bold.  I guess I’m not sure why the person pushing the common sense line would want to make that move, i.e. go from ‘(l*) does not express a proposition’ to ‘(l*) does not express a true proposition’.  The later sentence is just (l*) itself.  Surely, if this sentence doesn’t express a proposition, then it isn’t a good candidate for the conclusion of an argument.

Of course, the move in question seems to be innocuous.  It seems to be the conclusion of a valid argument form.  But, of course, on first acquaintance (l*) seems to be a perfectly meaningful sentence that we might well expect to express a proposition.  It seems to be at least a slight departure from common sense to think that sentences that have the right form to express propositions—in the sense that meaningful constituents are properly combined into something that should be a well formed thought—sometimes don’t express propositions.  If this is the common sense position though, then I don’t see how it should be a further affront to common sense to think that there are sequences of sentences that have the right form to express valid arguments but don’t.  That just seems to be a natural consequence of taking up the position that form isn’t always a good guide to propositional content once the concept of truth and its affiliates have been introduced.

Of course, Burgess and Burgess are right that this leads to a kind of ineffability.  But, we should anticipate this.  The common sense line appears to be that, in certain cases, there is literally nothing to say even though the ordinary rules for composing propositions out of concepts would suggest otherwise.  The ineffability, then, isn’t because there’s some thought that we can’t find a way to voice; it’s because there isn’t a thought at all.  I’m not really sure whether this is plausible in the end, but it’s never been entirely obvious to me that it isn’t either.

Posted in Logic, Philosophy of Language | Leave a comment

Event: Professor Julian Savulescu, 2 May

Posted on April 29, 2013 by Ben

We have a Royal Institute of Philosophy Public Lecture this Thursday.

2nd May                      Professor Julian Savulescu

Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics, Oxford University

‘Unfit for the Future: the Need for Moral Bioenhancement’

[Royal Institute of Philosophy Public Lecture]

Note: Professor Savulescu’s lecture will take place at 4pm on Thursday in 16 University Square, G01.

Posted in Events, QUB Philosophy, Royal Institute of Philosophy, Belfast Branch | Leave a comment

Time Travel and Fatalism: Part 2

Posted on April 24, 2013 by Joseph

Now consider how the FAT argument might play out in the context of backwards time travel.  According to Lewis (1976), in order for time travel to genuinely involve travel, there must be a ‘discrepancy between time and time’; that is, in order to travel back in time, the time traveler’s journey must take time.  Suppose Tim travels back to a time before his birth in order to kill his grandfather.  If Tim’s journey back to the time of his grandfather’s youth does not take time, then there is no sense in which Tim travels from the present to a time prior to his birth; rather, he simply exists at intervals that are not temporally contiguous.  In order to deal with the discrepancy between different times required by genuine time travel, and in order to do so in a way that does not require two dimensions of time, Lewis introduces the devices of ‘personal’ and ‘external’ time.  Personal time is the time measured by the time traveler’s wrist watch, while external time is time itself, the time that the time traveler is traveling back through.

So let’s assume that Tim travels back to a time during his grandfather’s youth.  Can he succeed in his murderous plot?  If so, then contradictions arise; but if not, then why not?  Can the laws of logic alone stop him?  Consider the following version of FAT, tailored to this context (where t* is the time of Tim’s birth, and t is a time before Tim’s birth):

FAT-TT

6) It was true at t* that Tim does not kill his grandfather at t.  (Assumption)

7) Necessarily, if it was true at t* that Tim does not kill his grandfather at t, then Tim does not kill his grandfather at t. (From 6 and the necessity of logical consequence)

8 ) Tim never had and never will have a choice about whether 6 is true. (From 6 and the fixity of the past)

9) Tim never had and never will have a choice about whether he kills his grandfather at t. (From 7 and 8 )

10) Therefore Tim is not free to kill his grandfather at t. (From 9)

I submit that neither of our earlier responses are going to work in this context.  The relevant analogue of the eternalist’s response here would be to claim that premise 6 of FAT-TT is a timeless truth made true by Tim’s not killing grandfather at t, and therefore that premise 8 is false.  But is the situation here really analogous to the earlier one?  Compare premise 1 with its counterpart here, premise 6.  The former is a truth that is not grounded in an event existing at t*, but one existing at t, and thus it is perfectly legitimate to say that Susan’s going to Anstruther at t makes 1 true (at all times).  Can the same be said of premise 6?  Is it’s truth grounded in the event of Tim not killing grandfather at t, or is it grounded in an event existing at t*; namely, in the event of his being born at t*?  Given that the latter event is one that Tim never had and never will have a choice about, the answer one offers to this question is crucial for an adjudication of the matter at hand.  Unfortunately, however, given the nature of closed causal loops, it is not at all clear how one should answer.

Lewis makes the following point in his discussion of the causal loops engendered by time travel.  He says that though every event in the causal loop can be causally explained by events elsewhere on the loop, the loop itself may not have any such explanation.  Similarly, we can explain Tim’s not killing grandfather at t in terms of (i.e. as being entailed by) his birth at t*, in which case the anti-fatalist response to FAT-TT is blocked; or we can explain his birth at t* in terms of (i.e. as being entailed by) his (freely) not killing grandfather at t, in which case Tim’s free agency is vindicated.  In the latter case, it would appear that Tim does, in some sense, have a choice about his birth.  But there seems to be no way of deciding which explanation is prior.  This is why Lewis expresses doubt whether we can decide if personally past but externally future events (i.e. Tim’s birth) are straightforwardly past or straightforwardly future: all events in a closed causal loop are equally past and future.  It is natural, here, to appeal to the causal order in attempting to defend Tim’s freedom; the thought being that as long as Tim’s deliberations at t are causally upstream from his birth at t*, then he is able to causally influence events that occur later than t.  But the point is that his deliberations at t are also causally downstream from his birth at t*.  And even by the lights of an eternalist, if an event e is earlier than t, then e is fixed at t, thus justifying premise 8.

As for the presentist’s response, it’s not clear that this kind of time travel is compatible with presentism (see Sider 2005).  Even granting that it is, however, if the truth of 6 is grounded in the birth of Tim (an actual event), then the presentist response is not available, since that response depended upon there being no event corresponding to the past truth about the future.

Posted in Metaphysics | 1 Comment

Time Travel and Fatalism: Part 1

Posted on April 22, 2013 by Joseph

Consider the following argument for fatalism (let t* = a time 1000 years ago, and t =  tomorrow):

FAT

1) It was true at t* that Susan goes to Anstruther at t. (Assumption)

2) Necessarily, if it was true at t* that Susan goes to Anstruther at t, then Susan goes to Anstruther at t. (From 1 and the necessity of logical consequence)

3) Susan never had and never will have a choice about whether 1 is true. (From 1 and the fixity of the past)

4) Susan never had and never will have a choice about whether she goes to Anstruther at t. (From 2 and 3)

5) Therefore Susan is not free to refrain from going to Anstruther at t. (From 4)

The idea behind premise 3 is that the past if fixed, over and done with, and so whatever was true about the past will always be true, regardless of our choices.  So we construe the fixity of the past in terms of an agent’s choices, and it is fairly uncontroversial to affirm the thesis that an agent has no choices about matters 1000 years past.  It is somewhat more controversial to assume, as the argument clearly does, that there is truth about the future.  Rejecting this assumption, however, involves rejecting classical logic for a limited domain of propositions (those about the future), solely in order to avoid fatalism; and this just seems ad hoc.  So I will assume that there is truth about the future.

The inference pattern relied on in moving from premises 2 and 3 to 4 looks something like this (where Np = ‘p and the agent never had and never will have a choice about p’):

Necessarily (if p then q)

Np

Therefore Nq.

I assume that this is a valid inference pattern.  It is difficult to see how there could be a plausible counter-example to it.  Furthermore, an objection to FAT which relied solely upon a questioning of this inference pattern would not be very philosophically satisfying.

So how should we respond to FAT?  Consider how the argument might call for a divergence of responses depending upon one’s temporal ontology.  The standard anti-fatalist metaphysical explanation that is brought to bear against such arguments is that future truth does not necessitate or fix future or present actions; rather, future and present actions make propositions about those actions true.  According to Rea (2006), the anti-fatalist explanation is a valid response to FAT, but only on an eternalist ontology according to which past, present, and future are all equally real.  His argument for this claim is that premise 1 is best interpreted as a tenseless truth that is eternally made true by Susan’s going to Anstruther at t.  Thus, on the basis of this claim, the eternalist can reject premise 3: Susan does have a choice about whether 1 is true.  But, Rea argues, this response is not open to the presentist (i.e. someone who thinks that only present objects and events exist), since, for her, Susan’s going to Anstruther does not exist until it occurs, and so is not available to make premise 1 true.  So, regardless of whether 1 is true at t* or eternally true, since Susan’s going to Anstruther neither exists at t* nor exists eternally, she has no choice about its truth, and the fatalist conclusion follows.

I think that Rea is correct in arguing that the eternalist can resist FAT in this manner, but I disagree that it’s curtains for the presentist.  What is it about the past that makes us think that it is fixed, or that we (now) have no choice about it?  What is it that grounds the intuitive notion of the fixity of the past?  Plausibly, for the presentist, fixity is grounded in the occurrence of concrete events, and there is no concrete event that corresponds to ‘Susan goes to Anstruther in 1000 years’.  There is at most the abstract state of affairs, it’s being the case that Susan goes to Anstruther in 1000 years; and whatever this state of affairs amounts to, it certainly is not something that occurs at t*.  After all, it is not as though when t* is present, it’s being the case that Susan goes to Anstruter in 1000 years happens.  Thus, intuitively, this state of affairs is not fixed, and therefore neither is its corresponding proposition.  What ultimately grounds the truth of ‘Susan goes to Anstruther in 1000 years’ is the concrete event of  Susan’s going to Anstruther at t* + 1000, and this event is not fixed until it occurs.  Granted, there is an issue here of whether the presentist can ground the truth of premise 1, when it’s corresponding event does not yet exist; but there are a range of solutions that the presentist might offer to this ‘grounding’ problem.  As long as these solutions do not beg the question against the fatalist (and I see no reason why they should), then the grounding problem can legitimately be deemed independent of worries about fatalism.

Posted in Metaphysics | 1 Comment

Devolution & The McKay Commission

Posted on April 8, 2013 by ugphilosophyblogczar

A VOICE, NOT A VETO SAYS THE MCKAY COMMISSION

The McKay Commission, appointed to consider the consequences of devolution for the House of Commons, reported on Monday. We concluded that decisions taken by UK MPs with a separate and distinct effect for England should normally be taken only with the consent of a majority of MPs for England.

To some, this suggests that MPs from Northern Ireland (as well as Scotland and Wales) might have to forego their right to decide on legislation for England that comes before the House of Commons. But this is not the case.

Under our proposals, no MP from Northern Ireland would have their rights reduced. Instead of considering how to limit the rights of MPs from constituencies outside England to vote on English issues, we explored new ways of listening to the collective voice of MPs representing England or England-and-Wales when shaping laws that relate to their territory. In essence, we want all MPs to retain the right of final say, while allowing for the voice of England to be heard.

As an independent 5-person Commission we based our findings on the principle that informs the devolution settlement here, as in Scotland and Wales. This is the principle that the UK Parliament will ‘not normally’ legislate with regard to devolved matters except with the agreement of the devolved legislature. In other words, issues over which the Northern Ireland Assembly has jurisdiction are decided by MLAs, unless they give Westminster explicit consent to legislate on those issues. A recent example is the Assembly’s agreement to reforms of estate agency business in Northern Ireland as part of a UK-wide bill.

We suggest that a similar principle be adopted for England. The devolution arrangements are already marking out some legislation as being of relevance to England only. Yet, this is not sufficiently recognised in existing arrangements. Tuition fees, for example, were applied to England in 2004 with the help of MPs from Scotland voting in support of the Labour government’s plan, even though the measure was opposed by a majority of MPs from England.

We found a growing discontent among the public in England for such scenarios. Independent research shows four in every five people in England believe that Scottish MPs should not vote on laws relating to England. And, over half believe that Scotland gets more than its fair share of public money, compared with one-quarter of English people who think that Northern Ireland gets more than it should from taxpayers. Politically, too, more than half of the English want some form of England-specific procedure for making laws for England.

This sense of English grievance was supported by oral and written evidence to us from a wide range of individuals and organisations across the UK. The stabilising of devolved arrangements in Northern Ireland and strengthening of the devolution settlement in Scotland and Wales has sharpened this sense of unfairness among the public in England. It became clear to us that there was a need for transparent, accountable procedures whereby legislation of particular relevance to England could be identified, and the views from England expressed.

If our recommendations are adopted, MPs from England will have the opportunity to make their own views known on legislation relating to England during the passage of a bill. All MPs would have a final say, with the views of MPs from England known. This preserves the right of Parliament to make the final decision.

MPs from Northern Ireland, then, together with all other MPs, will retain their right to have the final say on issues affecting England, and will be able to inform their voting decisions with knowledge of what MPs from England think about these matters. At the same time, MPs representing English constituencies will be given a stronger voice when concerns directly affecting the interests of England come before Parliament.

Previous suggestions for solving the West Lothian Question have ranged from a stand-alone English Parliament to special procedures in the House of Commons known as ‘English votes for English laws’. These, and other, solutions would have the effect of making MPs from Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales redundant. At best, they would become second-class MPs. Our recommendations avoid this consequence by guaranteeing that all MPs retain the final say. MPs from England are given a voice, but not a veto.

 

Professor Yvonne Galligan, Queen’s University Belfast

Member of the McKay Commission

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Moral Subjectivism

Posted on March 22, 2013 by ugphilosophyblogczar

This week’s Friday Question comes from final year undergraduate student Dean Presho.

 

My basic moral position is subjectivist, so I want to make the following claims:

1. Everyone has their own unique personal moral code which they follow

2. There is no standard objective right/wrong

3. Morality consists in one following one’s own moral code.

4. No-one ever commits an act which they believe to be immoral.

5. It is, in fact, not possible to ever act immorally.

 

The first and second claims just seem obvious to me. Were these not true, there would be no moral disagreements in practice. That they are true means moral disagreement is futile. The aim of moral discussions or disagreements is convergence- we try to get other people to share some of our moral feelings. In any case: that we differ on what we think is right or wrong in a particular scenario means we have different moral codes in some sense. There are of course things which purport to be universal moral codes which we all ought to abide by; a “10 commandments” kind of thing, let’s say, or the law maybe. But, I would suggest that these things necessarily exclude morality, because morality consists in following one’s own convictions without being told what to do by a rule set.

 

Given the personal nature of morality, we each act in accordance with our own moral codes. If we try to follow a deontology, then we are doing something like complying or obeying with someone else’s code. This is not morality; morality is following one’s own code. This personal moral code is of course entirely arbitrary. It is a combination of what we decide after thought, what we are taught, what our society just takes to be “good”, etc. But everyone’s will be different in some way. If you do “the good thing” because a law or some code tells you to, you have not done a good thing at all, you have not acted on what is right for your personal code, you have just done what you are told, or what is expected of you.

 

As for claim 3 above, Plato has Socrates say that no-one willingly does bad things. Now, Socrates was not advocating moral subjectivism, so I have taken his view out of context a little, but the idea seems to me to be true regardless of their original context. Given that we all have deep moral beliefs, we cannot act against these. If you think “X’ing is wrong” yet you “X” anyway, you did not really think it was wrong. You simply misunderstood your moral code. Maybe you think it is USUALLY wrong, but in this case you do it for some reason because you feel it necessary, or because you think it is acceptable in that situation. So, this is just an addendum to your moral code. If you held that “X’ing” was wrong in that particular case you would not have done it. Now, I appreciate that it is possible to think “what I am doing is wrong”. But I wish to consider exactly what is here meant by “wrong”. It seems that maybe you mean “is illegal”, “will be frowned upon by others”, “is generally held to be immoral by most members of my community”, or some such explanation. But it is not “wrong” according to your moral code. You must have some reason for doing it; you must think it is a worthy course of action for some reason.

 

So, I may decide that I am impoverished and hungry and I need to steal an apple from a market stall. Well, my doing this action presupposes my thinking that this action is acceptable to me, because we just do not do what we hold to be bad. The action must at least be good for me in that particular case. That I steal the apple means that I hold that it is ok (for some reason) to do so. Or if I kill Bloggs in revenge, I may hold that it is acceptable for me to do so because of what he did to me or someone I know. Now, we just take this to more extreme mentalities, where I kill Bloggs without what we’d consider to be a good justification. Maybe I am “insane” or sadistic. But, within my insane or sadistic mentality, killing Boggs seems to me to be good at the moment I do it.

This to me all seems perfectly obvious, but I would like to see what others make of it.

Posted in Ethics | Leave a comment

What, then, is time?

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Joseph

‘For what is time? Who can easily and briefly explain it? Who even in thought can comprehend it, even to the pronouncing of a word concerning it? But what in speaking do we refer to more familiarly and knowingly than time? And certainly we understand when we speak of it; we understand also when we hear it spoken of by another. What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.’—Augustine, Confessions 11.14.17

How should we respond to Augustine’s perennial question?  Rather than considering Augustine’s own response, I would like to consider an influential response due to the early 20th century idealist philosopher, J.M.E. McTaggart.  I say that his response was influential, but that is not strictly accurate: his answer was to claim that time is unreal, and that has not proved a popular position in the contemporary philosophy of time.  His discussion of what time must be like if it were real, however, has been very influential indeed, and has shaped the contemporary debate ever since.

McTaggart claimed, like many others before him, that time must, of necessity, involve change; but he also delineated two different ways of specifying, or determining, positions in time, and claimed that both of these ways are also essential to time.  These delineations  are widely regarded as an original contribution to the philosophy of time, and discussion of them has dominated the literature since McTaggart introduced them in 1908.

According to McTaggart, positions in time are determined either by—what he called—the A series or the B series.  The A series is simply the ordering of events according to past, present, and future.  So, the event of my typing this blog post is present, while the event of my having breakfast this morning is past, and the event of my having my dinner this evening is future.  But when I was having my breakfast, that event was present and my typing this blog post was future.  Soon that event will be past, and my breakfast will be a little more past, and my dinner will be a little less future (until it eventually becomes present).  Obviously, the point here is that the A series is constantly changing with respect to which determinations apply to which events.  And so, according to McTaggart, the A series gives us the change that is essential to time.

However, there is another way to order events in time, which is also essential to our concept of time, even if it is not as fundamental as the A series (we will see why shortly).  This other way is the B series, and this series orders events according to the relations of earlier than and later than.  So my breakfast is earlier than this blog post, and my dinner is later than this blog post.  Notice, though, that these determinations never change.  It is always the case that World War II is earlier than the first mission to the moon.  This was true a million years ago and will be true a million years from now.  Similarly, if the first manned mission to Mars is later than World War II, then this relation never changes.  So the B determinations are fixed and static, and this is why McTaggart thinks they are not as fundamental to time as the A series, since they cannot allow for change (and the latter is required for time).

So the picture of time the A and B series offer us together is one of a fixed ordering of events along a timeline (the B series), with the ever changing ‘spotlight’ of the present moving along the timeline in the direction of the future (giving us the A series).  This picture certainly is evocative of our concept of time, but there is a problem.  The problem, according to McTaggart, is that the A series is inherently self contradictory, and therefore cannot be real (since reality cannot tolerate contradiction); and if the A series is not real, then there can be no time (since the B series alone cannot account for change).

Why think that the A series is self contradictory?  Well, consider that past, present and future are incompatible determinations: ‘e is past’ implies that ‘e is neither present nor future’, and so on.  But every event admits of all three incompatible determinations.  What is past, has been present and future.  What is present, will be past and has been future.  What is future will be present and past.

No doubt you’ll be smirking at this apparent sophism, and thinking, ‘Well, obviously, events are past, present and future at different times.  E is never past, present and future.’  And this does seem right, since, as we just noted, when e is present, it will be past and has been future, or when it is past, it has been present and has been future, or when it is future, it will be present and will be past.

Naturally, of course, McTaggart anticipates this response.  He counters by claiming that ‘will be past’ means ‘is past in the future’, and ‘has been future’ means ‘is future in the past’, and ‘has been present’ means ‘is present in the past’, and ‘has been future’ means ‘is future in the past’, and ‘will be present’ means ‘is present in the future’, and ‘will be past’ means ‘is past in the future.’  So what we are, in effect, doing here is compounding the three tenses in order to avoid the contradiction.  (The three basic tenses will be compounded as ‘is past in the present’, ‘is present in the present’, and ‘is future in the present’.)

So, now we have nine complex tenses rather than three basic tenses, but is the problem solved?  NO, according to McTaggart, because all events will admit of all nine tenses, and some are incompatible: ‘is past in the future’, for example, is incompatible with ‘is present in the past.’  If we now try to avoid the contradiction by compounding the tenses again, (i.e. ‘no event is past in the future and present in the past, rather an event which is present in the past, will be past in the future’), we end up with 27 tenses, and of course all events admit of these tenses, and some are incompatible!  So, McTaggart claims, we are faced with a regress that is vicious, because every time we try to avoid the contradiction by compounding the tenses, the contradiction simply reappears at the next level of compounding.

Thus the A series is contradictory and therefore unreal, and so, then, is time.

Well, that’s McTaggart’s argument for the unreality of time.  Almost no one working in the contemporary  philosophy of time thinks that McTaggart’s conclusion is correct, but most think he was on to something important—although they disagree vehemently about what that was.  So where do you think his argument goes wrong (assuming that you do think that)?

 

Posted in Metaphysics | 2 Comments

Event: Dr. Cathal Ó Madagáin, 21 March

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Ben

We have a Royal Institute of Philosophy Public Lecture this Thursday.

21st March                  Dr. Cathal Ó Madagáin

Teaching and Research Fellow in Philosophy, University College Dublin

Title: ‘Can Groups Have Concepts?’

Place: Meredith Room, 23 University Square

Time: 4pm

Posted in Events, QUB Philosophy, Royal Institute of Philosophy, Belfast Branch | Leave a comment

Event: Dr. Joseph Diekemper, 14 March

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Ben

14th March           Dr. Joseph Diekemper

Lecturer in Philosophy, Queen’s University Belfast

Title: ‘Spatial and Temporal Reduction’

Place: Meredith Room, 23 University Square

Time: 4pm

Posted in Events, QUB Philosophy | Leave a comment

Confidentiality

Posted on March 11, 2013 by twalker

In many areas of life there appears to be room for the idea of a duty of confidentiality. One such area is medicine. Within discussions of medicine problems for ideas about the extent of the duty of confidentiality have primarily been raised in relation to what we might think of as special cases – such as genetic information that reveals facts about more than one person. However, there seem to be problems with what exactly the duty of confidentiality requires in more straightforward cases as well.

In discussions of the duty of confidentiality that duty is often taken to be something along the lines: A has a duty of confidentiality where B has told A something, and A has agreed (explicitly of tacitly) to keep it secret – this is basically the account adopted by the General Medical Council in its guidelines for doctors. In practice this will be extended to say that the duty of confidentiality covers not just the information B tells A but also information from which it could be inferred what B told A. There are thus two elements that are taken to be needed for a duty of confidentiality to exist.

The first is that a duty of confidentiality covers what A tells B. But this is going to be inadequate as an account. Suppose I go to my doctor and tell her that I have a pain in my chest and am short of breath. She takes some tests and comes back with a diagnosis of my illness – suppose that it is that I have cancer. The diagnosis here is not something I tell my doctor. I don’t know what is wrong with me – that’s why I went to the doctor. My doctor tells me what I have, and this is not something I already knew. However the information ‘TW has cancer’ is surely something that is covered by the doctor’s duty of confidentiality (and it is not that it is confidential because someone could infer from this diagnosis that I told my doctor I was short of breath). This suggests that the account of the duty of confidentiality given above is inadequate.

What might be needed to improve it? One thought might be that the duty of confidentiality covers whatever information is passed between me and my doctor in a professional setting. But this isn’t going to cover enough. If my doctor has test results revealing my illness but I will not be in to get them for a week, the information about what I have seems is covered by a duty of confidentiality in that intervening week – even though this has never been passed between myself and my doctor. The duty of confidentiality will also, it seems, cover any staff involved in the testing if they know whose sample they are testing – even though I have never met them.

A potentially better option would be to say that when I talk to my doctor in a professional capacity it is not just what I say that is confidential, but also any information that the doctor can work out from what I say (and from any samples I provide) that is confidential. This however covers too much. If my doctor knows of 100 people in the town who have cancer and my results show that I have cancer, she can work out that more than 100 people in the town have cancer. But this information doesn’t seem to be covered by a duty of confidentiality.

One might try to avoid this by saying that the duty of confidentiality covers what I tell my doctor and anything that she can work out from that about me (or from which someone could infer something about me). This looks better but still has a couple of potential problems. The first concerns what it is for information to be about me (is it information that is in fact about me though my identity is not revealed by the information, or is it information that is about me and which reveals my identity). The second is that it is unclear what it means to say that someone could infer the information about me from what the doctor says – does this mean that it is logically possible to infer it (perhaps if one has other information that is already in the public domain), or that it is reasonable to think that someone would be able to infer in practice?

The second part of the account of a duty of confidentiality in the original definition given above – that B has agreed (tacitly or explicitly) not to pass on that information – also looks as if it may be problematic. In the medical context it is usually taken that there is a standing tacit agreement not to reveal information on behalf of the doctor – though why we should think there is such an agreement is unclear. It is also unclear why any agreement is needed. Suppose a friend tells me that they have a new job and I am unsure about whether or not this is confidential. In this case I may have to ask whether it is permissible for me to tell other people the information or not. It does not seem to be the case here that I am unsure about whether or not I have agreed not to pass on the information. What I am unsure about is something more like the status of the information, or the basis on which I was told it. That is, the duty of confidentiality in this case seems not so much to depend on some (perhaps tacit) agreement I have given but on my friend’s intentions in giving it to me. If this is right then it seems that we can dispense with the idea of a tacit agreement in thinking about whether a duty of confidentiality exists.

One response to these kinds of concerns might be that it is a mistake to try to define when a duty of confidentiality exists or what it involves. This looks appealing theoretically. But it seems that we need some account in  practice, and the one that is currently provided looks problematic. The question is whether we can come up with something better.

 

 

 

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