Ethical Brain in a Vat
Matjaž Potrč

Brain in a vat (BIV) skeptical scenario affirms the equivalence of yours and your BIV duplicate experiential worlds. Dasein in a vat (DIV) presents BIV with a human face: it has a rich multi-dimensional experiential world, although it lacks the external world, and it also has all the rich normative experiential world. DIV's two dimensions involve practical intentionality and normativity. Advantages of BIV approach to ethics and moral philosophy are in that externalist moves lose their impact. Narrow BIV approach methodologically excludes external factors as unimportant for an inquiry into normativity and morals. Methodological solipsism does not deny the existence of the language/thought independently existing World. The World is just put under parentheses so that one can concentrate upon the normative, phenomenologically constituted, experiential world. The background to externalism is in expelling the judgment in profit of truth-conditions, of function-argument structure and sentences. The move had its impact upon the overall approach in philosophy. It is especially questionable for ethics, given that moral judgment is in its basis. The moral BIV approach compatibility with the construal of truth as indirect correspondence can restitute phenomenologically constituted moral judgment. The proposal is to straightforwardly apply BIV scenario to ethics. The objection is that you cannot introduce BIV scenario straightforwardly to an approach concerning ethics, as there are several dimensions to ethical inquiry: semantic, metaphysical, psychological, epistemic, phenomenological. Normativity is yet another dimension, at a different level. A reply to this is that there is a requirement that an approach to ethics consistently encompasses all of these dimensions.

Brain in a vat
Brain in a vat (BIV) skeptical scenario affirms equivalence of yours and your BIV duplicate experiential worlds.
Brain in a vat (BIV) is an up to date rendition of the Cartesian skeptical scenario. Descartes was in the business of securing the basis for human knowledge. He imagined an all powerful cheating daemon (le malin génie) that fools your everyday perceptions. You perceive yourself to be seated in the front of fireplace, enjoying your evening while reading a book. But nothing of that is true. These are just illusions that are produced for you by the cheating daemon. Descartes is in search for a solid point of departure in this treacherous environment, so that he ends up with a punctual and disappearing (punctuel et évanouissant) moment of cogito. If I think so I am, i.e. I am not under illusion: the foundation basis gives possibility for reconstructing the whole world. BIV is a modern version of the Cartesian story. It has a beneficial or again a malign narrative background to it. Here is a piece of thought experiment directed fiction. Suppose that unfortunately you get involved into a car accident so that just your brain stays unharmed. Your luck in the overall unlucky condition is that your personal friend, super-neurosurgeon happens to be on the scene. He asks himself how he can help you to avoid the forthcoming and ensuing grave mental shock that you risk to encounter, even if he would not be capable to restore all of your bodily functions. He does the following: he takes your brain and puts it into a vat with a nutrient solution. Then he connects all your brain's afferent and efferent endings to a very powerful computer and by these means he goes on to play to your sensual and perceptual system a private movie, presenting to you right at this time the perception as if you would be reading this text, the chirping of birds in the background, the feeling that the room where you sit has a certain determinate temperature. But unhappily, nothing of this is true, as you are a brain in a vat, sorrily bathing in the nutrient solution, in the medical experimental center. What is then a more cruel turn of the same story? According to this version the super-neurosurgeon is not your friend, but a crazy Frankenstein-like freak who comes to you at night, surgically removes your brain and feeds to you the private movie according to which you read this text right now, the birds are chirping in the background, and all the rest. The point of this BIV thought-experiment scenario is that you cannot prove that you are not in the BIV position right now. A reaction may be: “I'll teach you, I'll knock your chin, and so yo will realize.” But a moment's thought will show that this cannot really prove that you are not in a BIV position. What is the upshot of this story? It is that your experiential world – supposing that you are not in a BIV position – is equivalent to your BIV duplicate's experiential world. Notice that under the just stated presupposition you have a real world, whereas your BIV experiential duplicate has just a movie-like experiential world, and nothing besides to that. But still, yours and your BIV's duplicate experiential worlds happen to be equivalent. You cannot really tell that your are not in the BIV situation right now. One thing that you share with your BIV's experiential duplicate is the what-it's-like feeling to be in this situation, your phenomenology.

Dasein in a vat
Dasein in a vat (DIV) presents BIV with a human face: it has a rich multi-dimensional experiential world, although it lacks the external world.
1.	Notice now that in your BIV situation you posses the entire world, a whole experiential world. So your experience is not different from the usual human experience. Indeed, BIV sounds kind of spooky, due to its floating brain condition. So instead of BIV (brain in a vat), we may use Dasein, i.e. Dasein in a vat (DIV). What is Dasein? It seems fair to say that it is human. It is a creature, an organism, say, possessing the capability for establishing relation towards awareness about existence, say that the world exists. Other animals may not care about this. But humans are exemplars of here (Da) through which the being (Sein), whatever exists, gets in the world. Actually, Dasein ex-sists in the world, which means that the being (or the World, say) comes along with the Dasein. It is a bet that Dasein's world is constitutively an experiential world. We will say some more about the German origins of the word in one subsequent section. Let us presume now that you are Dasein. But certainly you are human. So it is more appropriate perhaps that your possible experiential duplicate would be called DIV rather than BIV.
	Just take a look at your experiential world right now. It is rich. You perceive yourself sitting behind a desk and reading this paper, trying to understand something of it. As this goes on, you hear a very slight buzzing of computer in the background, and chirping of birds in the garden. You may not consciously clearly experience all this information, certainly you did not think about it before we made you attentive at the matter. The reason was that you were involved into trying to understand the text which you read. Other things that are involved into your situation right now is that you sense a certain temperature: if it would be colder or hotter in the room you would strive for a change. But you were not explicitly aware about the room temperature before I pointed it out to you. Besides to other things, you feel the touch of the shirt upon your skin, although you don't posses an explicit thought in respect to this either. All these experiences of yours, in addition to the others still to be pointed out, form a rich experiential world of yours. You are a Dasein, you live in the world and you co-constitute it. Your possible experiential duplicate Dasein in a vat (DIV) shares with you the same rich experiential world. DIV lacks the external world, since he resides in a vat. But Dasein's being-in-the-world is equivalent to that Dasein's duplicate DIV, at least in as far as the experiential world is concerned. Dasein inhabits a rich multi-dimensional world. And so does DIV that inhabits an equivalent rich experiential world. It does not matter that DIV lacks the external world which the supposed non-DIV Dasein inhabits. Their rich phenomenological experiences are equivalent.

DIV's normative experiential world
DIV also has all the rich normative experiential world.
2.	We have presented DIV's rich experiential world, singling out its perceptual and sensory experiences. But this is not all. Dasein also inhabits a very rich normative multidimensional world, intertwined with the formerly mentioned perceptual world, coming with awareness and also without it. As you read the text, you do this because you feel the obligation that you imposed upon yourself: you promised to read it. You also know that you have commitments to the members of your family, to your co-workers, and these come in many directions. You have all these multiple commitments, and again mostly you are not aware of them at this very moment. You were certainly not clearly aware of them before I pointed them out for you. You have short-term and long-term goals that you set to yourself, which are lurking there in your cognitive background, directing your deeds in such a manner that you are mostly not aware of this fact. As Dasein you experience a rich normative world. You are in this world, co-constituting it. Now realize that the possible DIV experiential duplicate of yours also has the entire rich normative world, interwoven with obligations and commitments: your brain in a vat (BIV) experiential duplicate has a whole, entire rich moral /ethical experiential world. It is often not appreciated that Dasein has a rich experiential world, where the two mentioned dimensions are interwoven. Still less it seems to be acknowledged that DIV, and your DIV experiential duplicate, also possesses that world. This is the world that she inhabits and that she co-constitutes by inhabiting it. Such is the ex-sistence of DIV in her world.

DIV's dimensions
3.	DIV's two dimensions involve practical intentionality and normativity.
It is about time now to say something more about the term Dasein as it is used here. The Dasein talk originates from Heidegger's work Being and Time (1927), which he starts by distinguishing two main dimensions constituting it.
2.	       1. First, there is practical intentionality into which Dasein is involved. Being in the world, it has first of all to act in it, thereby answering to the requirements of Being in the here of which she resides. Therefore, the involvement of Dasein in the world is practical, so that its directedness – intentionality – foremost encompasses skills. Practical intentionality aims at knowing-how and not at knowing-that. It is important to know how to ride the bicycle, which is a practical activity. And this cannot be mastered just by somebody explaining to you the accumulated knowledge that people gathered by riding bicycles. Explaining to you the representations and rules abstracted from the dealing with the skill will not do. You will repeatedly bruise your knees despite this information, and finally by trial and error you will eventually master the skill. The Dasein's account of practical intentionality may be read as criticism of rules/representations computational model of mind, such as proposed by Heidegger's teacher Husserl (Dreyfus 1990). An example of practical directedness of Dasein may be a carpenter's activity by which she produces, carefully construes a table.
1.	        2. The second dimension of Dasein is that of normativity: Carpenter is recognized by community of carpenters, which means that she is involved into a rich normatively suffused world. The rich normative dimension is one basic Dasein's constitutive aspect of her being-in-the-world. She realizes that she has an obligation to her peers to deliver a viable product. The normative dimension is implied into the carpenter's practical intentionality. She cares while exercising her practical skills.
	Both practical intentionality and normativity (Haugeland 1989) are constitutive for Dasein, and for its being in the world. The attention to DIV just sorts out their experiential phenomenological dimensions. These are important for normative aspect of her engagement, not just for the perceptual and similar modes through which she inhabits the world.

BIV encounters externalist worries
2.	Advantages of BIV approach to ethics and moral philosophy are in that externalist moves lose their impact.
1.	We have seen that DIV inhabits the world which she co-constitutes by being in the world not just by the skills of her practical intentionality but also by inhabiting a rich normative experiential world, intertwined with the intentional one. DIV inhabits a rich normative world abundant with commitments, obligations and the similar stuff. This certainly may give her the motivation to act in certain directions, thereby underscoring and enabling her practical intentionality engagements.
1.	 	This self-sufficient holistic state of DIV's engagements is strangely obscured by the currently usual approaches to moral realm. People take as one main question the relation between non-moral basis, say the arrangements in the physical or material world, and between the realm of moral properties. That relation may be then interpreted as emergence or again as supervenience, where the subvenient basis of the moral is accorded a founding position. The overall idea is that somehow, the external world has to be the basis of the moral realm. This then determines the methodology such as it is being used. What else as the external world, after all, may be the basis of ethics? The relation may not be straightforward, and so one may decide to use counterfactual generalizations over possible worlds, in order to distinguish supervenient from the emergentist relation between non-moral basis and the moral realm.
3.		There are several choices that one may take. Let us mention cognitivism and non-cognitivism as a start. Cognitivism takes it that moral judgments are beliefs with descriptive force. So they need external world in order that their claim to truth may be evaluated. Non-cognitivists take moral judgments to be emotive reactions to situations in the external world which is there again, figuring as the reference point. Emotivists and expressivists deny the descriptive impact of the world upon moral judgment. So they are related to the external world concerns in a negative manner.
 	Some people think that moral realm may be externally justified by adopting natural kind equivalents for moral terms. This has been put under question though by Moral Twin Earth arguments, which distinguish themselves from the Twin Earth arguments. The behavior of moral terms, it turns out, does not follow the referential semantic behavior of natural kind terms such as H2O and XYZ, as reference points in the actual and Twin Earth environments. This means that Moral Twin Earth is a different environment from the Twin Earth, and that moral terms need to be accorded kind of specificity that does not follow externalist measurements.
 	Now generalize upon this insight and realize that all the worries related to the externalist underpinning of moral or ethical discourse loose their impact once as the DIV strategy is taken as the starting point of inquiry. The descriptive basis that is to be found in the external world is not the center of the moral inquiry anymore, as it goes for cognitivism, and neither is its denial that underlies noncognitivism. Similarly it goes for the worries how to determine the relation between subvenient non-moral basis and the supervenient moral properties, and their likes. If DIV is the approach, then the externalism based upon the approach to ethics looses its impact.

1.	Methodology used by BIV while encountering externalism
Narrow BIV approach methodologically excludes external factors as unimportant for an inquiry into normativity and morals.  
One can say that DIV invites a new kind of methodology to enter the stage. Once as one takes the equivalence of yours and your DIV duplicate experiential world, one does not need to care about the foundation of moral and normative realms in the independently existing external world.
	Why should one care about non-moral basis of moral properties? DIV narrow perspective dismisses that basis relevance. DIV's moral concerns all happen in the experiential world, without regard to that world's physical or material external basis.
	One may pose two questions here. Does not one thereby, by wholeheartedly appropriating the DIV perspective, deny the existence of the external world? And, even if this would not be the case, would not one thereby lose any relevant direction that could guide a moral inquiry? Our answer to the first question is that the move that we propose by wholeheartedly embracing DIV perspective on her moral world need not deny the existence of the external world at all. The move is just methodological. One concentrates upon what is relevant for the moral or normative realm, and not upon the independently existing external World that seems to be orthogonal to that questioning. And this gives a possible answer to the second question. By methodologically concentrating upon the narrow DIV moral world, one touches what is relevant in the moral discourse, its quality and its phenomenological dimension. At least this seems to become clear once as one embraces DIV perspective and denies the methodological advantage of the external world as foundation of ethical inquiry.
	Narrow DIV approach methodologically excludes external factors as relevant for an inquiry into normative and moral realms. Subvenient and supervenient properties may thereby still be recognized, just that now they do not anymore matter for ethical investigation, in the way that externalist methodological approach proposed them to matter.

Putting under parentheses: methodological solipsism's lesson
2.	Methodological solipsism does not deny the existence of the language/thought independently existing World. The World is just put under parentheses so that one can concentrate upon the normative, phenomenologically constituted, experiential world.
In order to get the grip over what we are up to by promoting the DIV scenarios as the basis for moral inquiry, we may help ourselves by lately not really extensively discussed position of methodological solipsism. Here is some history. Fodor (1981) proposed methodological solipsism as a research strategy in cognitive psychology. Externalists claimed that meanings just ain't in the head (Putnam 1975), and so the real stuff in the external world should matter for a semantic account: natural terms for H2O on Earth and XYZ for a similarly looking and similar stereotypes involving stuff upon the Twin Earth are different and so the reference and meanings are different. But according to the methodological solipsism we deny the importance of the external stuff: we abstract from natural kinds H2O and XYZ impact and we concentrate upon what is relevant to our inquiry. Notice that the area we deal with for Fodor is cognitive science, which is mainly concerned with psychology and thereby with such matters as representations. In cognitive science we should thus concentrate upon the representation of the cat, in whatever shape it comes, and we should leave besides the question about which DNA exactly has the cat exemplar in the external world. Even if it is a robot Martian cat, the representation, available through experiential means, will be the same. Fodor says that we have enough to do if we concentrate upon matters such as representations in cognitive science, leaving the constitution of the external world besides, in a methodological manner. Biologists, physicists and chemical engineers should tackle those questions. A cognitive scientist will have enough to do if he will propose some theory about how our representations work. Methodological solipsism is thus a methodological venue. It does not deny the existence of the external World, it just denies its relevance for the research in the area of cognitive science. So one may adapt a stance of solipsism, which means that just herself is there in the world – but one only appropriates that stance in a methodological way, in the manner that the research in an area such as cognitive science will not be burdened with the non-relevant external stuff. There is a sufficient number of empirical sciences that will tackle that.
	The lesson of methodological solipsism may be also explained by putting matters under the parentheses, which is a procedure known from Husserlian phenomenology. There are several layers of this procedure. No one of them denies the existence of the external world; it just concentrates upon what seems to be important from a certain perspective, be it an ideal or experiential, phenomenological perspective.
3.		Take a quick look again at the externalist tradition in moral philosophy. One asks about the non-moral basis of moral properties. Supervenience inquiry aims at the relation between subvenient and supervenient properties. The basis of this externalism guided approach is non-moral and materialist. It may be extended by counterfactual worlds involving thought experiments, where the subvenient basis again is supposed to be external, material or physical. By embracing DIV and its experiential world you put under parentheses all this externalist stuff.

Expelling judgment from philosophical inquiry as the root of metaethical conundrums
The background to externalism is in expelling the judgment in profit of truth-conditions, of function-argument structure and sentences. The move had its impact upon the overall approach in philosophy. It is especially questionable for ethics, given that moral judgment is in its basis.
4.	One may ask now why at all externalism would be appealing to the research in ethics and metaethics. An answer may be searched in the standard philosophical approach in the last century or so, which started with Frege. Establishing his conceptual writing (Begriffsschrift) approach in logic, Frege opposed the then prevailing subject-predicate approach, with the aim to establish a wholly transparent procedure of reasoning. The effect of this was the elimination of judgment as the basis of logic, judgment understood in the cognitivist and phenomenology enhancing manner, in the what-it's-like quality formed sense. Truth and falsity as two independently existing objects were important for Frege, and his inquiry lead into the direction of analysis of sentences, of statements. This had an impact upon all areas of philosophy for quite a while. Philosophy of language flourished in the last century, and even psychological inquiries were mostly centered at linguistic departures. Ethics and metaethics could not run away from this trend. The mentioned cognitivism with its descriptive presupposition together with its non-cognitivist opposition both took externalist approach on board, in a positive or again in a negative manner. Evading to take judgment as a starting point, as phenomenologically qualitatively constituted, seems to be a questionable move for the area of ethics, first of all, for this area seems to be constituted upon judgments. The metaethical conundrums have their roots here; the opposition between cognitivism and non-cognitivism, realism and expressivism, non-moral basis of moral terms. One could go on.

Truth as indirect correspondence helps reestablishing judgment
1.	The moral BIV approach compatibility with the construal of truth as indirect correspondence can restitute phenomenologically constituted moral judgment.
As Frege took Truth and Falsity to be two independently (externally) existing objects under which all sentences ultimately fall, one may take his approach to favor the construal of truth as direct correspondence. The sentence “The cat is on the mat” is true, according to this approach, just in case there exists a cat and a mat in the world, which are arranged in the just indicated relation: cat being upon the mat and not the other way round. This seems to presuppose the existence of atomistic entities and relations in the world.
	The overall DIV approach, putting the existence of the external World into parentheses, does not need to presuppose the existence of cats and mats as external objects. As it is a methodological approach, it does not need to deny the existence of the World either. Once as one accepts the existence of the World in a monistic manner, one does not need to accept the existence of atomistic entities such as cat and mat as well. One may present the situation adjectively, claiming that the one material, language and thought independent World is such that it behaves cat-ishly region-ishly, without committing oneself to the existence of a separately existing entity cat.
	Asserting something about cat or mat is not externally supported through this adjectivist approach. Truth is then construed as indirect correspondence between the sentence and the World in its region-ish cat-ish manner to present itself. Judgment in its qualitative nature, phenomenologically grounded, then acquires its importance. Truth as indirect correspondence helps to reestablish the importance of judgment. The moral DIV approach compatibility with the construal of truth as indirect correspondence is able to restitute phenomenologically constituted moral judgment.

2.	Dimensions of ethical inquiry
The proposal is to straightforwardly apply BIV scenario to ethics. The objection is that you cannot introduce BIV scenario straightforwardly to an approach concerning ethics, as there are several dimensions to ethical inquiry: semantic, metaphysical, psychological, epistemic, phenomenological. Normativity is yet another dimension, at a different level. A reply to this is that there is a requirement that an approach to ethics consistently encompasses all of these dimensions.
1.	But how can DIV moral world and reestablishing of the importance of judgment for an inquiry into ethical and metaethical questions apply to this area? A concern is that DIV approach introducing rich moral experiential world tackles just some dimensions of ethical inquiry, say the phenomenological one. But there are other dimensions of that inquiry, such as semantic and epistemological ones. Here are some tentative replies to this concern.
	Once as one starts with DIV scenario, one certainly does justice to normativity. This is so for the simple reason that normativity is not externally supported, that its nature is that of language/thought. We believe that there exists a World, which is language/thought independent. But normativity, although it resides in the World, does not introduce any Entities besides to that World. Also, normativity is unique identity based and phenomenology based.
     Phenomenology dimension is well covered by the DIV scenario. DIV scenario centers its investigation upon the narrow experiential world. This is in opposition to the externalist moral approaches, say those trying to establish something like moral natural kind terms. DIV also does not find an important concern in such questions as that of supervenience, i.e. how moral properties (higher-order properties) fit upon physical/material properties basis.
    Metaphysical dimension is well served by DIV scenario for moral world, i.e. the experiential moral world. If DIV scenario is a departure point, then one is invited to some form of irrealism, expressivism, say: moral Properties do not exist, in the ultimate ontology, they are just normative products of language/mind, which ex-sist upon the World, following unique identity.
    Semantic dimension under the DIV scenario moral inquiry departure can go as follows. One may still allow for truth, but truth is not understood to be that or direct correspondence, rather it is that of indirect correspondence, in agreement with the irrealist metaphysical departure. The narrow semantics should be compatible with judgment, not with Fregean externalist (Platonist) approach to semantics.
    Epistemology dimension of DIV founded moral inquiry is as follows. We first ask what is the justification of moral judgment. We would be inclined to go into transglobal evidentialist direction (following in this sense transglobal evidentialism, epistemological spectrum low a priori approach). Local, global, transglobal environments appear here. The transglobal environment is that which is proper to the DIV scenario for moral terms. There is compatibility of such epistemological justification for moral judgment approach with semantic, phenomenological and other DIV scenario moral inquiry dimensions.
     Psychology dimension of DIV scenario based moral inquiry may be all way down compatible with moral judgment psychology experimental data, and it can stay undecided between moral judgment rationalism, intuitionism, being compatible with both and as well with other interpretations.
	Wrapping it up: The experiential world of your DIV experiential duplicate is compatible with your experiential world, supposing that you are not a DIV, say. It is a rich world, suffused with normative obligations, forces, things like that: it is a rich experiential world. You feel that you have your shirt on, although you do not expressly reflexively cognize it. In the same sense, you have moral forces, obligations that guide you, which are present in the experiential world that you inhabit. DIV scenario encompasses all of that. And it does away with the externalist presuppositions, not just with moral terms natural kinds externalism, but also with all the stuff involving physical to normative inquiry, say supervenience. DIV scenario puts all of this under parentheses. It does not deny the existence of the World, it just centers upon the experiential world. The quality of the experiential world is what the phenomenology of morals consists in. The
1.	DIV approach is moral dimensions friendly (cf. moral judgment): normativity, phenomenology, epistemology, psychology, metaphysics (irrealism, expressivism).

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