1 Introduction.

Cockatoos are really fantastic birds; but few people realise how they can contribute to philosophy. In view of this, I have decided to compile this page of notes on this topic. It is designed to be read in conjunction with Henry Fitzgerald's similar notes on the philosophical merits of dogs, and Cathy Legg's on cats.

2 Ethics.

Cockatoos have a lot to contribute to ethics. They are clearly hedonists, though there has been much debate over whether egoistic or utilitarian hedonists. Clearly, the greatest good for cockatoos is fun; it remains to be seen whether the appropriate receptacle of fun is the individual cockatoo, or all moral agents, broadly conceived.

2.1 Egoism considered

The primary egoist argument is that cockatoos are often seen to act in ways that we regard as having an ethical disvalue: it would seem that a cockatoo is acting in such a way that it,ceteris paribus gains fun, while other moral agents seem to loose it. For example, screeching loudly outside a student's window at 6am on a Sunday morning. The prima facie explanation for this would be that the primary value for this cockatoo is its own happiness, while that of other agents is not to be considered.

2.2 Egoism refuted

It would be unfair however, to suggest that this case resists utilitarian redescription. Many redescriptions suggest themselves: it may be the case, that in the sunday morning scenario, it so happens that the net utility loss incurred in the world as the result of the student being woken up was balanced by the utility of the cockatoo's screeching (as we shall see, loud noises play a central role in cockatoo hedonism). Or it may be the case that the screeching itself had a large, necessarily concomitant, gain in net utility, which together with it, exceeded the net loss in utility incurred by the student. These are of course, merely counterfactual situations, so the simple implausibility of these options cannot defeat the utilitarian framework, though it might defeat individual utilitarian explanations. And in individual cases, we cannot rule out that there might be an available utilitarian explanation, and were we not such limited creatures, we might discern it.

2.3 Cockatoo Utilitarianism

These grounds thus leave us where we began, with no grounds for choosing either theory of cockatoo ethics. Fortunately, there are empirical grounds on which the utilitarian view may be preferred. We begin with the ``necessary concomitant'' gain approach suggested above. What might this gain be? A good contender is the enjoyment of other cockatoos. We might add the enjoyment of nearby cockatoo-loving non-cockatoos. Call the utility gain of each cockatoo Cn, where C is a coefficient expressing the cockatoo's capacity for noise-enjoyment, and n is the objective noise value of the screeching. Non-cockatoo screech-enjoyer utility gain will be given by Dn, where D is the non-cockatoo screech-enjoyer coefficient. Contrast this with the student's utility loss on being awoken by the cockatoo's screech, E. This gives us the following expression for net utility in this situation:

Now, the question is, do cockatoos act so as to maximise delta-U? Clearly, yes. For, while, coefficents C and D are parameterised by n, E is not. Furthermore, E is negative, while C is always positive, and D is unknown. The rational cockatoo acts to increase n, so that the sigma expression in terms of C will greater exceed E in absolute magnitude. No matter how great E is, the C expression can always be made to outweigh it, in circumstances C* (to be defined), on the idealising assumption that m is greater than 0.

This gives us the general equation of the cockatoo felicific calculus:

Or, in ordinary language, ``More noise can't go wrong''.

3 Ontology

The ontic status of the world is a central concern in the dog/cat debate. There seem to be two issues involved. Firstly, does the phenomenal world exist at all? Secondly, is whatever exists composed primarily of repeatable or non-repeatable entities, of universals or of things? These difficult metaphysical issues have resisted solution for a long time, and the debate might be thought to have degenerated into an ideological battle. Cockatoo thought offers a synthesis of these opposing viewpoints. Clearly, the only way in which we can come to knowledge of the world is through interacting with it in some way or another; so the question should not be ``What exists?'' or ``What is true?'', but ``What is useful from the point of view of interacting with the world?'' In short, cockatoos are pragmatists.

3.1 A ``Thick'' Pragmatism

Cockatoo Pragmatism offers a thick account of pragmatic value. As I have already hinted, the key to pragmatic value is the idea of interaction. It is the interaction of agents with their surroundings that holds the key to the usefulness of various metaphysical beliefs. In every interaction with its environment, a cockatoo can be seen to be having fun. Hence, there can be no barrier to the supposition that fun is the primary pragmatic value. (See accompanying picture of a cockatoo having fun.)

So, we should judge metaphysical claims by their ability to license fun in our interactions with the environment. We should not judge the claims by the amount of fun to be found in doing the metaphysics. Since metaphysics is a very quiet activity, in the limit case, more fun can be had, say, swinging upside-down from gum trees, as the fun in involved in this latter activity can be increased proportionally with the amount of noise made. By comparison, metaphysical debate produces the same basic value no matter how noisily it is done.

We should thus believe that gum trees exist, to continue the example, as interaction with them in this way is clearly the source of a great deal of fun

Notes:

1: Circumstances C* are that either l is 0 or D greater than or equal to zero. Since an important consideration of cockatoo utilitarianism is that D is always greater than 0, C* is trivially the case.

2: Agents are defined as those who enjoy hearing cockatoo screeches. This is no danger of this excluding anyone, since, as we have shown, in the limit case of screech loudness, every expression for net utility gain (including gains of agents) comes out positive.