Author Archive for James Gray

Is Knowledge Impossible?

Published
by
James Gray
on March 26, 2011
.

Some people have thought that knowledge is impossible. It might seem implausible to think knowledge is impossible, but there are important philosophical concerns we can have about knowledge and challenges to the possibility of knowledge can be illuminating. First, I will discuss what “knowledge” means and suggest three different definitions: (a) justified true belief, (b) certainty, and (c) a deep understanding. Second, I will discuss that the belief that “knowledge is impossible” seems to be self-defeating. Third, I will discuss an argument against the possibility of knowledge known as the “Münchhausen Trilemma” and explain where it might go wrong. The argument supposedly shows how unsatisfying any proof is in order to show that none of our beliefs are proven—and knowledge is impossible. I reject the Trilemma because it is too demanding about what counts as a “justified belief.” Proof or evidence is not always necessary to have a “justified belief.”

1. What is knowledge?

We all know what knowledge means to some extent already. We use the word in everyday discourse and we can often spot when someone uses the word wrong. We ask a child if she knows she has hands and she is supposed to say, “Yes” or we worry that she doesn’t know what “know” means. We ask a child if she knows what planets in the universe contain intelligent life and the answer, “No” seems like the correct response here. At some point we have an intuitive understanding of what “knowledge” means. This intuitive understanding is based on how people actually use the word, but it is fallible. There can be mistakes made when a person uses the word.

Philosophers can give technical definitions to the word “knowledge” in an attempt to help us understand and correct our intuitive understanding of the word. The technical definitions must be based on our intuitive use of the word, or we aren’t even talking about knowledge anymore. We would be talking about something else. The intuitive use of the word should be sensitive to what ordinary practice says are examples of knowledge. If the police take me down to the station for questioning and ask me if I know that George is the killer, I’m not supposed to respond saying, “It’s impossible to know if a person is a killer.” The police will not be amused by this statement and are likely to respond, “You know what we mean. Just answer the question.”

I don’t think the word “knowledge” necessarily has only one meaning. It can be used in different ways in different contexts. I suggest the following definitions:

  1. Justified true belief.
  2. Certainty.
  3. A deep understanding.

We could say that the word “knowledge” actually stands for at least three different words that are related and sound alike. This is likely to cause some confusion and equivocations, which can help explain why we sometimes make mistakes with the word. People might have arguments using a concept of knowledge starting with one concept and ending with another. For example:

  1. I don’t know that I have two hands because I can’t disprove that I’m in a dream world.
  2. Therefore, my belief that I have two hands is unjustified.

This argument starts with the word “knowledge” as “certainty.” It is true that I am at least marginally uncertain that I have two hands because the belief could be false if I am in a dream world. Then the conclusion shifts the word “knowledge” to mean “justified true belief.” If we find out that I don’t have a justified true belief that I have two hands because there is no reason to believe I do, then we find out that I don’t have a justified belief. However, the argument didn’t prove there is no reason to think I have two hands, it only proved that I’m not absolutely certain that I have two hands.

I will discuss the three suggested different definitions of knowledge.

(a) Justified true belief

Justified true belief is a modest sort of knowledge. A belief can be justified without being proven. As long as we have more reason to have a belief given our limited information than not, the belief seems to fulfill the need of being justified. A justified belief is a belief that is reasonable to have. It seems plausible to think that beliefs can be justified even when no argument is given for them at all because a belief could be reasonable as long as it’s not unreasonable—as long as we don’t keep a belief that we have reason to reject. For example, I think we all know that “1+1=2” even though we can’t all give an argument for it. This modest use of the word “know” does not require an argument, a justification, certainty, or a deep understanding.

The word “true” is where justified true belief becomes problematic. It might be that none of our beliefs are true. It’s hard to say when a belief is true if it ever is. For this reason I am more interested in justifications than truth. That’s not to say that I’m not interested in truth. There’s a sense in which justified beliefs are more likely to be true than unreasonable ones.

The word “true” often refers to a correspondence. If a statement corresponds to reality in the appropriate way, then it’s true. We can say that true beliefs correspond to “facts,” and “facts” are the reality that beliefs could correspond to.

We might worry that none of our beliefs perfectly correspond to reality. Newtan’s theory of physics seemed very useful and accurate, but it does not correspond to reality perfectly. Einstein’s theory of physics did a better job. Perhaps Einstein’s theory is also imperfect. Both theories attempt to model or represent reality, and do so pretty well, but they might both be imperfect models. We could say that both theories might be false, but there is also a sense that both theories are true to some extent. We might say that they are both relatively accurate theories, even if they aren’t entirely true.

That the word “true” itself is ambiguous, but we should often prefer to use the word to mean something like “accurate” that allows for degrees of truth. This is one motivation behind fuzzy logic and multiple truth values, and it seems to capture how we use the word “true” in everyday discourse pretty well. A person can say that they believe that Einstein’s theory of physics is true without implying that they think it maps onto reality perfectly.

I don’t want to suggest it really is impossible to say something that turns out to be absolutely true, but that isn’t generally a requirement of our knowledge of the “justified true belief” variety. General statements seem to be strong contenders for being absolutely true. Perhaps the statement that “something exists” is so general that we can know that it is absolutely true.

I think our use of the word “knowledge” usually refers to something like “justified true belief” and this is how I usually use the word.

(b) Certainty

We often say that we don’t know something when we are speculating, even though our speculations could be justified true beliefs. We might not be certain (sufficiently know) that someone is a murderer even when we witness that person commit the crime because our mind plays tricks on us, we might worry that the person has an evil twin, and so on. At least some certainty is required before we satisfactorily know that someone is guilty of murder. What we call “reasonable doubt” is enough to find someone to be “not guilty.”

When we are certain that a belief is true, it is also a justified true belief. However, the demand for certainty is a more demanding form of knowledge.

Some people equate “certainty” with “infallibility.” However, there can be degrees of certainty. This is what many call “degrees of confidence.” If something is absolutely certain, then there is no possibility of error. This is the highest degree of justification conceivable. However, not all justification provides a high level of confidence.

(c) A deep understanding

Sometimes we think a belief isn’t justified or that we don’t know something if our understanding is too limited. Good examples can be found in what is now called the Gettier Problem. For example, I might see a cow in a meadow and believe that there’s a cow over there. However, I might be looking at a cardboard cutout of a cow while there is really a cow over there hiding behind the cardboard cutout. I have a justification to believe that there’s a cow over there and it’s true that there’s a cow over there, but there’s a sense that I don’t know that there’s a cow over there. This sense seems to be that I don’t have the deep understanding of what it means for the cow to be over there.

Some people have said that beliefs must be causally tied to reality in the right way for us to have knowledge. This is a more demanding kind of knowledge than mere justified true belief. Either that kind of justification provides us with more certainty or it provides us with a deeper understanding. Either way, I don’t find it to be a particularly impressive requirement for knowledge in everyday life because we have no way of knowing for certain when our beliefs are causally tied to reality in the right way. We would just beg the question when we say, “My belief is causally tied to reality in the right way.” Of course, some speculation involving how our belief seems to be causally tied to reality could provide us with the deeper understanding that we would like to have.

Similarly, we might prefer to have arguments and justifications for our beliefs, even though it can be perfectly reasonable to have some beliefs even when no argument or justification is attained.

Philosophers are interesting in having a deep understanding of our beliefs. We want to know how our beliefs are causally tied to reality, we want justifications for our beliefs, and we want arguments for them. However, it seems wrong to say that a deep understanding is always required. Even philosophers commonly rely on axiomatic assumptions. Such assumptions might be defensible, and they might have to be something we could reject on the basis of comparison—we might need to be able to decide one belief is better than an alternative for it to be justified.

2. What if knowledge is impossible?

Let’s say that knowledge is impossible—of the modest justified true belief variety. In that case we can’t know that knowledge is impossible. We would still be forced to have opinions and find some way to explain why some opinions are better than others. In the long run we would still say we have justified beliefs and that we know many things based on the ordinary use of the word “know.”

Can we know that knowledge is impossible? No. If knowledge is impossible, then we have no way of knowing that. We would have no way to persuade anyone that it’s true. It wouldn’t even be reasonable to try to do so. It would be strange to expect anyone to believe it or agree with it.

What if it’s impossible to have true beliefs? We can have justified beliefs, even if none of them are true. It might be that no beliefs are absolutely true, but that is not the requirement of the modest sort of knowledge that I’ve discussed. There are different degrees of truth.

What about knowledge as certainty or deep understanding? It might be possible to have knowledge in the sense of having some degree of certainty or deep understanding, but it might be impossible to have absolute certainty or absolutely deep understanding. Those extreme kinds of knowledge could be impossible.

3. The Münchhausen Trilemma

Here is what wikipedia has to say about the Münchhausen Trilemma:

If we ask of any knowledge: “How do I know that it’s true?”, we may provide proof; yet that same question can be asked of the proof, and any subsequent proof. The Münchhausen Trilemma is that we have only three options when providing proof in this situation:

  1. The circular argument, in which theory and proof support each other (i.e. we repeat ourselves at some point)
  2. The regressive argument, in which each proof requires a further proof, ad infinitum (i.e. we just keep giving proofs, presumably forever)
  3. The axiomatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts (i.e. we reach some bedrock assumption or certainty)

The first two methods of reasoning are fundamentally weak, and because the Greek skeptics advocated deep questioning of all accepted values they refused to accept proofs of the third sort. The trilemma, then, is the decision among the three equally unsatisfying options. In contemporary epistemology, advocates of coherentism are supposed to be accepting the “circular” horn of the trilemma; foundationalists are relying on the axiomatic argument. Not as popular, views that accept (perhaps reluctantly) the infinite regress are branded infinitism.

The skeptics wanted to argue that (a) all knowledge relies on argumentation; (b) all arguments are ultimately circular, regressive, or axiomatic; those sorts of arguments can’t provide us with justification; therefore (c) there is no knowledge.

Let’s assume that “knowledge” here is the modest sort—justified true belief. Why do I reject this argument? First, because the conclusion that “there is no knowledge” seems to be self-defeating. If there is no knowledge, then how can we know that there’s no knowledge?

Second, because the conclusion is so counterintuitive. Our everyday discourse requires that a modest use of the word “knowledge” refers to certain things or we just don’t think the person even knows what knowledge means. In other words, the trilemma can be taken to be a reductio ad absurdum—the conclusion is absurd to the point that we’ve proven that something is probably wrong with the argument. Either the argument is invalid or at least one premise is false. People who take the argument to be a real proof that knowledge is impossible seem to miss the point.

Third, because the argument is overly ambitious. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The conclusion is counterintuitive and the premises are not obvious. The premises could be false and need a great deal of justification, but I have never seen a satisfying justification for the premises.(In fact, the argument requires that the premises couldn’t be satisfactorily justified.) That’s not to say that I know for certain which premise is false. Any of the premises could be false and the argument gives us reason to question them.

Fourth, the premise that knowledge requires arguments seems unjustified and I think it’s probably false. (a) The belief that all justified beliefs must be justified through sound argumentation could be self-defeating if there is no argument for it, and I haven’t heard of any sound arguments for it. (b) We seem to know some things even though we don’t know how to provide sound arguments in support our knowledge. I know that “1+1=2” even though I can’t give an argument for it. This was already discussed in detail above. This implies that beliefs can be justified even when no sound argument can be given for accepting it.

When a justified belief is in need of an argument, then the trilemma will apply (assuming that these are our only options) and we will have to decide what route to go. Historically, arguments have been axiomatic and I think that’s a good way to justify our arguments in general. There are beliefs we don’t need to justify. We take them to be something like a “working hypothesis” and we keep such beliefs until we have a good reason to reject them. We find them plausible, in part, insofar as no alternative belief is more plausible. That’s not to say that justifying our axioms isn’t helpful nor is it to say that circular reasoning can’t help justify our axioms.

Perhaps the dilemma isn’t meant to disprove knowledge of the modest sort. Perhaps it can be used to disprove that we can be absolutely certain that something is true.

Conclusion

A modest definition for “knowledge” is all that seems needed in most everyday contexts and it is the most important kind of knowledge in general. It tells me if I can wake up in the morning, if I can type out an essay, and if I can think anything worth putting on paper. This modest definition is compatible with our quest for truth, certainty, and deep understanding; but not all of our knowledge is absolutely certain to be true nor is all of our knowledge a deep understanding.

Once we accept the modest definition we will find the claim that “knowledge is impossible” self-defeating and the Münchhausen Trilemma to be implausible. It’s possible that the Münchhausen Trilemma is sound, but we have no reason to think so given our limited information.


Filed under: epistemology, philosophy Tagged: justification, knowledge, rationality

Why Theistic Religion Might Go Extinct

Published
by
James Gray
on March 24, 2011
.

Successful religions have historically been appealing to both the educated and the uneducated. They have appealed to the greatest minds and “experts” (the most distinguished philosophers and scientists) and people who aren’t especially interested in fully understanding life’s greatest mysteries. First, I will argue that the success of religions partially depends on appealing to both of these groups because (a) the religion needs educated people to join and persuade others that the religion is probably true (b) sometimes only the greatest minds can convince educated people that the religion is probably true. Second, I will argue that religions have lost the support from the experts that they need. This doesn’t mean that all religion will die off forever, but it does mean that truly successful religions of the future will probably have to regain support from the experts. These will probably be either revised versions of current religions or entirely new religions.

1. Why religions need the world’s greatest minds.

Religions need the world’s greatest minds for at least two main reasons. First, they need educated people to join to convince others that the religion is probably true. Second, the world’s greatest minds are often needed to convince educated people that the religion is probably true.

(a) They need educated people to join to be persuasive.

Religions need educated people to join because educated people are good at convincing the general public that the religion is probably true. The educated know the arts of persuasion, argumentation, and evidence. The educated can be able to answer the various questions and objections given against the religion to help convince others that the religion is probably true (or at least not probably false). The educated have to be a step above the general public or the religious advocate will be unable to answer certain questions and objections. That will immediately put the religion into question.

(b) The greatest minds are often needed to persuade educated people.

The educated often use poor reasoning and are ignorant of the world’s most sophisticated arguments and evidence. Educated people can often spot this poor reasoning and ignorance of others and many educated people will become smarter than the religious advocates. At that point religious advocates will no longer be persuasive. We aren’t usually going to trust someone who claims to know something incredibly ambitious about the universe that we don’t personally know about—especially when we realize that the religious advocate doesn’t actually know anything we don’t know. They often claim to know more than they really do. It’s this point that the educated will need “experts” to persuade them of the religious truths. The experts can stay one step ahead of the vast majority of educated people concerning the evidence and arguments for a religion.

Additionally, people often love to appeal to expert opinion and sophisticated arguments. Everyone values rationality including religious people. If we can trust the most informed experts among us, then many of us will trust in our religion when it is supported by the most informed experts. If the most informed experts offer the best arguments and they favor our religion, then we will have a good reason to believe in our religion. These facts help us predict when religions will be successful. The most successful religions throughout history appealed to both the uneducated and the experts. The most successful religions were endorsed by the experts of their time and they were supported by the best arguments available at the time. They were “scientific” and “rational” insofar as the most rational worldview available was based on the opinions and arguments of the experts.

2. Religions have greatly lost the support of expert opinion

The problem is that our current experts—our philosophers and scientists—have a diverse set of beliefs concerning religion. They don’t agree that any one religion is probably true. In fact, many of our experts reject all religions. That makes it too difficult for informed people to decide which religion we should agree with. If the experts aren’t sure, then we can’t hope to be sure either. It’s impossible to rationally appeal to an authority when the best authority available is in radical disagreement.

Additionally, even the greatest theistic minds of our time tend not to fully endorse popular religious beliefs. Their beliefs are greatly ignored by the religious community and the so-called “authority” found in most religions aren’t particularly qualified or scientific. Their expertise is no longer based on rigorous educational requirements and their opinions are not subject to a peer-review process.

The fact that the success of religions depends partially on having the experts endorse them is bad news for our religions right now. Religions tend to rise and fall, so this might simply be the time for them to fall and new ones to take their place. If any religion is going to be successful again, there’s going to have to be a greater connection between religious philosophers and everyone else who follows the religion. There’s going to have to be great philosophers who can show why their religion is highly plausible through argumentation and many philosophers will have to support the religion. This is likely to either require a new religion or a great deal of change in an existing one.

When Nietzsche declared that, “God is dead,” I think this is part of what he was referring to. The philosophers and scientists of his time were already starting to doubt their religions and he knew that this doubt was going to eventually spread to everyone else. The reason God is dead rather than simply non-existent is because the thousands of years of religious tradition still has a hold on people. You can say that God “died” when the religion no longer had the greatest minds any longer, but just like a death, not everyone knows about it yet.

Many people do trust the experts and they are religious. They trust the “religious authority” endorsed by their church. However, I suspect that these people tend to be ignorant about the religious opinions of the greatest minds of our time. If we trust the experts, then we should trust the best experts rather than unqualified people pretending to be experts. It’s hard to continually have faith in a religion based on your trust of religious authority figures after we realize that they aren’t particularly qualified. The most educated people tend to realize that they are more qualified than the religious authority, but not everyone knows the difference between a true expert and a pretender.

Right now none of the arguments for God are particularly convincing to atheist philosophers or even atheists in general. That isn’t a good sign for the belief in God. The best philosophical arguments should be rational to the point of being convincing to rational people. Additionally, the belief in God tends to violate a rule of reason—don’t require us to accept ambitious claims unless absolutely necessary. Supernatural claims are particularly ambitious, and the three major monotheistic religions claim God is supernatural. We could simply decide that there is only a natural world rather than a supernatural one. We already know about the natural world, so there’s nothing ambitious about believing in it. We don’t know for sure that there is a supernatural realm, so it’s existence is quite an ambitious claim.

Of course, even religious people know about this rational requirement. They often think their religion’s supernatural claims are exceptions to the rule, but they still generally reject all other supernatural entities from other “false” religions.

Atheist philosophers have been doing quite well making sense out of reality without the need for God or the supernatural. If there is no God, they can make sense of reality pretty well. It’s possible that the universe ultimately needs to be explained by God if God exists, but not if God doesn’t exist. It seems overly ambitious to require people to believe in God at this point in time given that a naturalistic worldview offers such a rich understanding of the universe while simultaneously doing such a good job at being modest rather than ambitious.

I can’t say that theism won’t become plausible through some future evidence, argumentation, and expert agreement. In fact, I think that’s what’s necessary for theistic religions to continue to be successful in the future. Something new is needed in our intellectual communities or the theistic religions might die out just like other religions have died out throughout history.

There is nothing about any religion that makes it exempt from the same rational requirements as all the rest are. Every religion must compete for plausibility and it’s not clear that any religion in particular is plausible. If you have a religion and think there are 1,000 religions that are implausible, then you should ask yourself what makes your religion so different from the rest. Can you come up with arguments to explain why you’re probably right? If not, no one has any reason to trust you and your religion is in danger.

Conclusion

The most successful religions have appealed to both the educated and uneducated, and I think I understand why. The religions with the support of the educated and experts are often needed to make the religion plausible. Without that support the religion loses its plausibility. That is what we are seeing happen now. Our current religions could die out unless things change.

I don’t think that the requirement for religions to be rational and endorsed by experts is an offensive one. I have nothing against rational religions or rational theism. Whatever religions are proven to be probably true through argumentation and endorsed by the world’s greatest minds deserves to thrive. However, that sort of religion requires a great deal of support from the experts within science and philosophy. No religion has the necessary support from experts needed at this moment in time.


Filed under: philosophy Tagged: atheism, religion, theism

A Discussion of Philosophy’s Importance

Published
by
James Gray
on March 23, 2011
.

Philosophy is the “love of wisdom”–an attempt to deliberately become more reasonable and wise. Philosophy professors know a lot about what it means to be reasonable, and we have a lot we can learn from them. I created a new section to discuss the importance of philosophy called “Why Philosophy is Important.” I list 11 reasons that philosophy is important, provide evidence that philosophy is beneficial, and defend philosophy from objections. Much of the discussion is reused from previous things I’ve written. Go here to take a look at what I have to say.


Filed under: outreach, philosophy

Theoretical Virtue Epistemology: A Common Sense Philosophy

Published
by
James Gray
on March 21, 2011
.

What makes a belief justified or reasonable? We think we know many things, but we can’t always explain how we know they are true. Some of these beliefs might be self-evident, some of them are based on experience, some are “successful assumptions,” and others are unjustified prejudice. However, we have little choice but to do philosophy in the face of uncertainty and take certain beliefs as “common sense” before we can conclusively understand how we justify those beliefs.1 This is why philosophy makes such heavy use of what’s intuitive (beliefs that do not seem to be absurd and seem compatible with our knowledge). I currently believe that the most modest form of justification is through the creation of successful assumptions similar to “working hypotheses” and that is all we usually need when we argue within the philosophical tradition. I will describe self-evidence, coherence, experience, working hypotheses, and theoretical virtues.2 I will then explain my current understanding of justification (epistemological theory)—a form of common sense philosophy that I call “theoretical virtue epistemology.”3

Self-evidence

The idea that some beliefs are justified because they are self-evident is the idea that some beliefs require no argument for them to be justified. (Self-evident beliefs have a noninferential form of justification.) What we experience (such as our pain) and our mathematical knowledge seems to many to be justified through self-evidence. We are justified to believe that “1+1=2” is true and we are justified to believe we are in pain or see green when we have certain experiences. Robert Audi argues that self-evidence often requires a certain degree of wisdom and contemplation.

Coherence

Coherence is the main alternative to self-evidence. If a belief can’t be justified through self-evidence or some relation to other self-evident beliefs, then many will argue that the belief can be justified anyway through its relation to our other beliefs, experiences, and “knowledge.”4 For example, I see my hands and I think my belief that I have two hands is justified. I might be in some deceptive dream world and actually just be a brain in a jar. At the same time I know that I have two hands if my belief is true. Knowledge doesn’t require certainty, it just requires that a belief is appropriately justified.

Why am I justified to believe I have two hands? Because I see my hands, because I think I understand that my eyes are a reliable source of information given my past experiences, and because my assumptions about my hands (they are solid and can touch things) is confirmed by my experiences of them. You could say that I have a hypothesis that I have hands, that the hypothesis is testable, the hypothesis has been confirmed many times, and the hypothesis has never been disconfirmed. My experiences and my hypothesis are coherent because they are logically compatible. My experiences and my hypothesis could both be true. The more risky predictions a hypothesis can successfully make, the more likely it is that the hypothesis is true. My hypothesis that I have hands must also be justified in terms of alternative hypotheses, but it seems to be the “best explanation” for my experiences.

Coherence theorists don’t necessarily think all of our beliefs must cohere with our experiences. I think I am justified at believing that I’m not currently in a dream world despite the fact that all my experiences would be the same in that dream world (and it’s certainly not self-evident that I’m not in a dream world). The assumption that I’m not in a dream world is at least partially based on the fact that it coheres the assumption that dreams tend not to make a lot of sense. However, it might be even more important that the assumption that I am in a dream world lacks certain theoretical virtues. (I will discuss that issue later.)

It should be noted that justification through coherence must be sophisticated, and we might even have to reject coherence from time to time. My belief that “1+1=2” could be incoherent with my observations about the world, but that would imply that my observations about the world are wrong and not the other way around. We are simply more certain that mathematics is reliable than we are certain that our observations are reliable. However, it’s always possible to be forced to accept two contradictory beliefs that are both highly justified when we have no way to reject one of them. Perhaps we might be forced to accept two incompatible mathematical truths at some point until we can resolve where the error in reasoning took place.

Experience

We take our experiences to be important because it’s an outside source of information. If we only justify a belief through its coherence with our other beliefs, then there’s a higher chance that the belief is merely prejudice. For example, people who think they are in a dream world have no way to support or correct that belief through experience. On the other hand, beliefs that are based on experience tend to be testable through risky predictions.

Working Hypotheses

A working hypotheses is a proposed explanation for a phenomena that may or may not have been tested. A working hypothesis that has been tested and confirmed (rather than refuted) becomes more and more justified based on its success. A working hypothesis should be coherent with our current knowledge, but it is often necessary to test our “common sense” assumptions.

Theoretical Virtues

Theoretical virtues are the various forms of justification. Although self-evidence, experience, and coherence are three important forms of justification, there are others. For example, logical coherence, predictability, comprehensiveness, and simplicity. Our observations are more likely accurate when they confirm risky prediction. Our “coherent” beliefs can be logically compatible with our other beliefs, but they can also be “comprehensive” in proportion to the number of beliefs they cohere with. Additionally, an explanation is justified to the extent that it makes predictions and is comprehensive by explaining many of our beliefs or experiences rather than few.5 Given two beliefs we should also prefer the simpler one—and that is one of the best reasons to reject the belief that I am in a dream world. If I am in the real world, then I exist because I have a body and my observations are reliable because I have sense organs. However, if I am in a dream world, then we are in serious need of an explanation—what is causing the dream? Am I just in bed, or is there a super computer causing the dream? In that case we must posit the existence of both a dream world and a nondream world.6 That is unnecessarily complected and more ambitious than the modest belief that I am usually in the real world.

My Current Thoughts on Justification

I don’t have any strong beliefs concerning coherence or self-evidence. The problem is that what we think we know intuitively is merely difficult to explain in words, but the actual argument for an intuitive belief could involve any of the theoretical virtues—and it’s not clear to me that self-evidence, coherence, or experience are separable from the other theoretical virtues that I mentioned. (I’m not even sure if any of our beliefs are actually self-evident.) In fact, some beliefs seem like they are highly justified despite not being self-evident or something we can prove through experience. Such beliefs are much like working hypotheses except they might not always be explanations.

For example, we are not certain that the future will be at all like the past (because the laws of nature will be the same), but we think we know that tomorrow will be much like today—the sun will rise in the morning, people will still buy things with money, bread will still be nutritious, and so on. I don’t see how we can know anything about the future through self-evidence or experience. What we experienced throughout our lives tells us nothing about what the future will be like.

How do we know that the future will be like the past? Because it’s a successful explanation both compatible with our various beliefs and able to comprehensively explain those beliefs. It’s common knowledge that the sun will rise tomorrow, and the assumption that the future tends to be like the past explains that knowledge. Additionally, a rejection of the assumption seems absurd. Assuming that the future won’t be like the past because the laws of nature will stay the same makes living our lives impossible. We can’t know to eat bread, to keep lead away from our food, or to save our money.

Our philosophical arguments need not conclusively prove anything to be true once and for all. Instead, we can compare various explanations and beliefs to decide which is the most justified. A working hypothesis tends to be justified if it’s the “best explanation,” and other beliefs tend to be justified if they are the best beliefs compared to the competition. (There might be exceptions where the best explanations are almost certainly false and we should simply admit ignorance.)

My main point is that the way we can justify our belief that the future will be like the past is both modest but perfectly good. We should even say we know the future will be like the past. We don’t always have to concern ourselves with ultimate forms of justification involving self-evidence or observation. Our philosophical beliefs can be perfectly good and reliable despite the fact that they aren’t justified through self-evidence, mathematics, or natural science. Knowledge of the future is a good example of that and science itself depends on the assumption that the ultimate laws of nature will stay the same in the future (and there will be ways to predict if certain laws of nature will change).

If we want to justify a philosophical belief through argument, then we should take a close look at the theoretical virtues and we need not discuss self-evidence. Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t discuss self-evidence when it proves to illuminate our understanding of reality. If self-evidence exists—That is merely a “deeper” and more ambitious realm of philosophy.

What about people who reject that the laws of nature will stay the same? To reject highly plausible beliefs just because they can’t be known through self-evidence, observation, or proven once and for all in some other way leads to absurdities; and I suspect that there is a common failure in reasoning where a person decides something must be false or unjustified if it can’t be explained. It took me some time to decide how to explain how we know that the laws of nature will stay the same in the future, but that doesn’t mean it was false until I came up with my explanation, and I see no reason to think we can know the laws of nature will stay the same in the future through self-evidence or experience.7 I think this failure in reasoning was committed by David Hume when he decided that there was no reason to think the laws of nature will stay the same in the future, and it is committed by philosophers who decide that the mind as we experience it is an illusion because “only the physical world exists.” The mind as we experience it could be physical.

Some beliefs are so intuitive that denying their truth seems absurd. This is a good reason not to reject the belief. Although some people might claim to deny such highly plausible beliefs, just like Hume denied that we can know that the laws of nature will be the same in the future, we have reason to doubt them. Even a person who explicitly rejects a highly plausible belief might still have other beliefs and behavior that would indicate that the belief is still there, and we can know something is true without being aware of our own knowledge. For example, Hume didn’t know how to explain how we could know that the laws of nature will be the same in the future, so he intellectually decided that he didn’t have such knowledge after all. I think Hume did know the laws of nature would stay the same in the future despite his argument to the contrary.

The reason that I believe in common sense philosophy—what I call “theoretical virtue epistemology” is because I have little understanding about self-evidence and I believe in “common sense justification”—I think we can justify beliefs with theoretical virtues other than observation and self-evidence.8

What are common sense beliefs? I often refer to “common sense beliefs” and I think I use the term quite similar to how other people use it despite my technical understanding—that a belief is common sense insofar as it is intuitive but difficult to justify through argument. Common sense beliefs need not be justified through argument, self-evidence, or observation; but they often can be. Common sense beliefs should be justifiable through some theoretical virtues. Common sense beliefs are often the starting point of philosophy and can be assumed to be true until we have a reason to reject them.

The terms “common knowledge” or “uncontroversial” are not a good way to describe how I view “common sense beliefs” because common sense beliefs need not have a high degree of certainty and need not be something easily understood by people. That’s not to say that common sense beliefs are never common knowledge or uncontroversial.

What is common sense justification? Common sense justification is justification that is neither based on self-evidence nor observation. Instead, it’s a justification based on other theoretical virtues. Such beliefs can be called “assumptions” because they can’t be proven to be true once and for all and they must be compared to alternative beliefs. These are the beliefs that are like “working hypotheses” because they are justified for being the best belief compared to known alternatives, but it’s always possible for even better alternatives to be discovered in the future. For example, I have no reason to believe I am in a dream world at this moment, but new experiences or arguments might change my mind.

What is common sense philosophy? Common sense philosophy includes what I describe as “common sense justification” but need not limit itself to that form of justification. (In fact, I think common sense philosophy must also accept observation as a strong form of evidence.) Self-evidence is compatible with common sense philosophy.

Conclusion

I don’t have a strong opinion about self-evidence, but I endorse common sense philosophy insofar as I accept what I call “common sense justification” and such a modest kind of evidence is often the starting point of philosophy, even though common sense beliefs must occasionally be rejected as “prejudice.”

Modest philosophical arguments need not be justified through self-evidence, experience, mathematics, or natural science. Those forms of justification can be helpful, but modest common sense arguments are often good enough, such as my argument that the future will have the same laws of nature as the past.

Notes

1 I discuss common sense in greater detail in “Self-Evidence vs. Common Sense Assumptions.”

2 I have also heard “theoretical virtues” be called “cognitive values” and “epistemic merits.” For more information, see “Knowledge, Justification, and Theoretical Virtues.”

3 “Theoretical virtue epistemology” should not be confused with “virtue epistemology,” which discusses intellectual virtues—characteristics of people that make them better at attaining knowledge. My hypothesis mainly concerns positive characteristics of theories, hypotheses, and beliefs rather than people.

4 Here “knowledge” might be better described as “justified beliefs” or “what we believe to be highly plausible beliefs.”

5 A fully comprehensive explanation is “complete” if it can explain all phenomena that it should be able to explain. For example, normative moral theories purport to identify right and wrong behavior, so a complete normative moral theory can identify all right and wrong actions.

6 If I am in a dream world now, then my actual dreams must still be explained as well. The dream-world hypothesis seems like it would have to state that there is a real world, dream world, and dreams within the dream world.

7 The problem of natural laws and predicting the future is known as the “problem of induction” and the solution to the problem is a contentious issue in philosophy despite the fact that we know the laws of nature wills stay the same. We can know something is true before we can agree about how we know it.

8 My understanding of knowledge is neither a form of foundationalism nor empiricism., but it could be considered to be a form of a coherence theory of justification. (Unlike many coherence theorists, I am not against self-evidence, and I am not convinced that coherence is always relevant to our justifications, so I don’t know if it’s appropriate to say that I endorse a coherence theory.)


Filed under: epistemology, philosophy Tagged: common sense, david hume, theoretical virtues

A Study Finds That Formal Logic Can Help High School Students

Published
by
James Gray
on March 17, 2011
.

A study provides strong evidence that an applied logic class significantly helped improve high school students’ critical thinking skills. The study was conducted by Dan Bouhnik and Yahel Giat from the Jerusalem College of Technology (in Jerusalem, Israel) and information about the study was published online in a PDF file entitled, “Teaching High School Students Applied Logical Reasoning.” (You can download it for free here.1) This study is of the utmost importance because high school students in the United States are not taught about good reasoning in high school, and logic in particular is highly relevant to good reasoning. A better understanding of good reasoning can help us achieve our goals, become more ethical, avoid deception, and think for ourselves. Nonetheless, I don’t think a single news organization has published information about this study.2

The study tested an applied logic class’s effectiveness on high school students—how helpful would this kind of class be for high school students? Would students’ reasoning skills improve? The class was given to juniors and seniors. Students were tested at the beginning of the course and at the end of the course to find how much their reasoning skills could be improved, if at all. The students were also given a “questionnaire about the course and its effect on them” (1).

The study used a years worth of a “college level” applied logic class that was originally meant to be a two-year college course.3 Only the first year’s worth of instruction was taught in detail. The class taught logical reasoning and deductions, and Boolean Algebra in detail.4 It then proceeded to introduce students to what would be taught in the second year, “digital systems, inductions, paradoxes, and computation” (2).5

The class is meant to do the following:

a) Improve critical reasoning skills.

b) Improve ability to apply logical reasoning in speech and writing.

c) Improve ability to search, retrieve, analyze, and evaluate information.

d) Improve ability in other applied logic fields, such as computation and digital systems. (4)

The ability to understand logic wasn’t only meant to be abstract or mathematical. Instead, “[t]he students were given many assignments in which they had to analyze newspaper articles, political statements, judiciary rulings, and day-to-day life situations” (11).

According to the researchers, “[t]he results suggest that the students significantly improved their critical reasoning” (8) and “[a]ll student groups found this course important” (9). Many of the students reported that “they use these tools to critique and evaluate information” (10). Additionally, there were deficiencies found in students’ reasoning skills before taking the class, which “stresses the need for reasoning to be taught, as much improvement can be gained by such instruction” (11).

The results of this study doesn’t prove that formal logic is the most effective way to teach high school students to be more reasonable. Perhaps a philosophy course without formal logic would be even more effective. However, I personally find formal logic extremely helpful for thinking philosophically and I explain why here. In particular, it’s very difficult to understand formal validity or how to appropriately object to an argument without studying formal logic. We already intuitively understand formal logic, but our intuition often fails us and knowing more about logic can help us avoid making logical mistakes.

Free information regarding formal logic can be found here.

Update (3/19/2011): I rephrased the introduction.

Notes

1 Originally published in the Journal of Information Technology Education, Volume 8, 2009. <http://jite.org/documents/Vol8/JITEv8IIP001-016Bouhnik681.pdf>.

2 A search in Google’s news archives for ‘Dan Bouhnik and Yahel Giat’ on 3/16/2011 gave me 0 results. Go here to check the current results. A web search gives almost no results as well.

3 The class was taught in “approximately 90 class hours” (5).

4 The class taught argumentation and “propositional calculus” (a symbolic version of formal logic) in addition to Boolean Algebra (the mathematical application of propositional calculus) (5).

5 The class can be compared to other logic courses. In particular, a similar course is taught at the Critical Thinking Community website (4). “The main difference between our course and these courses is that we provide a broader skill set of applied and theoretical logical tools.” (ibid).


Filed under: philosophy Tagged: education, logic

Does Morality, Meaning, or Knowledge Require God?

Published
by
James Gray
on March 14, 2011
.

I was a guest contributor at Camels With Hammers by posting “Philosophy can Debunk Myths about Atheism.” In particular, many theists argue that atheists must reject morality, meaning, and knowledge because these things can only exist if God exists. Or of course, the atheist must convert to theism precisely because we know morality, meaning, and knowledge exist–and God is required for these things to exist.

Rather than prove that atheism is compatible with morality, meaning, and knowledge I merely discuss my personal understanding about why the natural world seems sufficient to explain the existence of these things. The theist will have to prove my personal understanding to be false or we have no reason to think God is required for such “facts” after all.

Go here to find out what I have to say on these issues.


Filed under: philosophy Tagged: atheism, god

Six Uncontroversial Moral Beliefs

Published
by
James Gray
on March 10, 2011
.

There are highly plausible uncontroversial moral beliefs, such as the belief that slavery and racism are wrong. These beliefs are important to philosophy because they help justify our theories and arguments. Arguments that are compatible with such beliefs are more plausible than those that conflict with them. I will define “highly plausible uncontroversial beliefs,” briefly discuss why such beliefs are important in philosophy, and explain why I think the following six beliefs fit this description:

  1. It can be appropriate to love someone to the point of self-sacrifice.
  2. It’s appropriate to have empathy for all people.
  3. Morality is overriding.
  4. It’s rational to be moral.
  5. Morality isn’t up to us.
  6. Some actions are right and some are wrong.

I ultimately think these beliefs are part of our “moral knowledge” and that the existence of intrinsic values is necessary to explain our moral knowledge.1 This is a very contentious issue and I will not prove it here, but I have already discussed how intrinsic values help explain these beliefs in “Intrinsic Values are Common Sense.”

What are “highly plausible uncontroversial beliefs?”

Highly plausible uncontroversial beliefs are beliefs we think we know are true, but we can’t necessarily explain how we know they are true. There are varying degrees that beliefs can be “plausible” and “uncontroversial.” “1+1=2” is maximally plausible and uncontroversial, and “it’s wrong to kill people in at least some situations” is also extremely plausible but it’s at least somewhat less plausible.

Highly plausible uncontroversial beliefs are not always irrefutable or known for certain, but we think we know they are true. It’s normal to say, “I know I have a hand” or “I know killing people just because they have a certain hair color is wrong” because these beliefs are so plausible and uncontroversial.

“Uncontroversial beliefs” as I use the term are not necessarily agreed upon by everyone, but such beliefs are not irrational and we find the denial of these beliefs to be “counterintuitive” or “absurd.” They can be justified through argumentation or they can be justified intuitively.2

Highly plausible uncontroversial beliefs are not merely common beliefs. The belief that the Earth is flat was a common belief for thousands of years, but the realization that the world is actually round does not seem absurd or counterintuitive once we realize that the Earth is so large that it only looks flat from close up.

I will henceforth call highly plausible uncontroversial beliefs “uncontroversial beliefs” for short.

Why are uncontroversial beliefs important?

Uncontroversial beliefs are important in philosophy. All things equal, theories and arguments that require us to reject uncontroversial beliefs are “revisionary” and are less plausible than theories and arguments that don’t. Many good arguments are justified precisely because the conclusion follows from uncontroversial highly plausible premises. For example:

  1. Killing people just because they have a certain hair color is wrong.
  2. If killing people just because they have a certain hair color is wrong, then killing people just because they red hair is wrong.
  3. Therefore, killing people just because they have red hair is wrong.

Both premises are uncontroversial and highly plausible, which makes the conclusion highly plausible and justified.

Six uncontroversial moral beliefs

1. It can be appropriate to love someone to the point of self-sacrifice.

When I say that something is “appropriate,” that means that it’s not inappropriate—it’s sufficiently justified. When I say something is inappropriate, that means we shouldn’t do it and there might be something “irrational” about doing it. First, I will explain how some emotions could be “appropriate.” Second, I will explain why self-sacrificial love seems to be appropriate.

(a) Emotions can be appropriate when they are based on justified beliefs.3 A rational person can have more appropriate emotions. All things equal, a person whose child dies should feel grief as opposed to joy.4 The loss of a child is usually bad. If a person feels joy because something bad happens, then that person is either insane or they mistakenly think something good has happened. One rule of thumb is “it’s appropriate to feel good in proportion the fact that something good has happened, and it’s appropriate to feel bad in proportion to the fact that something bad has happened.”

Examples of inappropriate emotions include the following:

  1. To hate someone for giving you a slice of cake tends to be inappropriate. That action does not usually warrant hatred because hatred only seems warranted by extremely horrific acts and giving someone a slice of cake tends not to be such a horrific act.
  2. To love money to the point of murdering people to take their money is inappropriate.
  3. To get so angry about a car tailgating you to the point of deciding you should murder that person is inappropriately extreme even though some anger could be warranted by the act.

Examples of appropriate emotions include the following:

  1. Being joyous that your friend had a child.
  2. Being angry that someone tortured a child.
  3. Feeling grief when a loved one dies.

(b) It is appropriate to love someone to the point of self-sacrifice—to the point that no reciprocal benefit can be attained. We often have a loved one and we are willing to provide that person food, shelter, an education, a kidney, or even protect that person though violent resistance to threats. A lot of our loving relationships are reciprocal and we expect to be rewarded from our sacrifices, but not all of them. Sometimes we know that no reward can be expected, but we still make sacrifices for the ones we love. Such love can be inappropriate if the person we love isn’t worthy of the love or is only using us, but it seems wrong to say that self-sacrificial love is always inappropriate. There are people we know will die soon who might be unable to reciprocate, but that doesn’t mean we should leave them out on the street to starve to death. The elderly who get Alzheimer’s disease are one example of a group of people who need to be cared for and can’t always reciprocate or appreciate our sacrifices, but they still deserve the care of their loved ones.

If emotions are never appropriate, then we couldn’t say that it’s ever appropriate to help loved ones with Alzheimer’s disease who can’t reciprocate our sacrifices. In fact, helping loved ones without any expectation for reciprocation would seem irrational because it wouldn’t help fulfill our personal desires. That result seems absurd.

2. It’s appropriate to have empathy for all people.

Just like love, empathy often motivates self-sacrifice with no expectation for reciprocal benefit. Whistleblowers, freedom fighters, and activists are often killed for trying to make the world a better place and fight corruption. Socrates, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. are three examples of activists who were murdered for speaking out. These people don’t just try to protect their families, they care about strangers and are willing to put their lives at risk to help strangers. That doesn’t mean these people are fanatics, fools, or irrational. Having empathy for all people (including strangers) is praiseworthy rather than inappropriate.

Self-sacrifice does not require that we actually die, it merely refers to altruistic acts that cost us something to benefit another. The empathy that our heroes have for strangers might seem unusual, but I think self-sacrificial empathy is normal. If a stranger wants an aspirin to get rid of a headache, then it seems appropriate to give her one. No expectation for reciprocation is required.

If it’s not appropriate to have empathy for all people to the point of motivating self-sacrifice, then it’s not appropriate to give an aspirin to a stranger and the heroic lives of Socrates, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. would not be praiseworthy. Instead, all of these actions would seem irrational based on the fact that they cost them something without an expected personal benefit. That result seems absurd.

3. Morality is overriding.

What morality demands and what we desire often conflict. I might want money and I might be able to get it by killing people, but it’s wrong to kill people to take their money. Desires don’t justify immoral behavior. What matters most is what is moral, not what we desire. Fulfilling desires can be perfectly rational, but we shouldn’t fulfill our desires in a way that conflicts with moral demands.

If morality isn’t overriding, then there is no reason to say that I shouldn’t kill people when it helps fulfilling my desires as long as I could get away with it. That result seems absurd.

4. It’s rational to be moral.

To say that something is “rational” is to say that it’s not “irrational” and it’s sufficiently justified. We say beliefs are rational when we have sufficient reason to believe them and we say that an action is rational when it is based on sufficiently justified beliefs. It’s rational for people to disagree about whether or not intrinsic values exist, but it’s not rational for people to disagree about whether “1+1=2.” We know it does and it’s irrational to think otherwise.

To think that morality is rational means that there are true moral beliefs and an action is rational as long as it is a result of those beliefs. For example, it’s rational to believe that “killing people just because they have red hair is wrong,” and it’s rational to refuse to kill redheads based on that belief.

In fact, morality often conflicts with our desires, and we think it’s usually rational to fulfill our desires. It’s rational for me to try to make money to buy food. However, it’s not rational for me to kill strangers to take their money. Morality requires me to restrain my own happiness because it can conflict with the happiness of others—and those people count too.

If morality isn’t rational, then it would seem irrational to allow morality to interfere with fulfilling my desires. It seems strange to say that helping the poor, giving strangers aspirins, or refusing to hurt people to satisfy my desires is irrational. Such a result seems absurd.

5. Morality isn’t up to us.

Morality isn’t whatever I want it to be. Morality restricts our behavior and requires us balance our own happiness against the happiness of others. Morality isn’t what a culture wants it to be. Some cultures have wrong moral customs, such as racism; and some cultures undergo moral progress, such as when we abolished slavery. Moral beliefs aren’t true just because we believe they are true. Sometimes people have false moral beliefs.

If morality is up to us, then we could say that slavery isn’t wrong—just like people did for thousands of years—and we would be right. If morality is up to us, then we could say racism isn’t wrong—just like people did for thousands of years—and we would be right. However, slavery and racism are wrong. The thought that we could make slavery or racism right seems absurd.

6. Some actions are right and some are wrong.

Perhaps the most intuitive core of morality is the belief that some actions are right and some are wrong. Being a whistleblower, being a freedom fighter, and being an activist are at least sometimes the right thing to be. Killing people just because they have red hair is wrong. Slavery and racism are wrong.

If some actions are never right or wrong, then our heroes (Socrates, Gandhi, and King Jr.) never did anything right; slavery was never wrong; and racism was never wrong. These results seem absurd.

Conclusion

I have explained why certain highly plausible uncontroversial beliefs are the sorts of beliefs we think are true. These beliefs are intuitive and might even be part of our moral knowledge. These beliefs could be false, but that would require a huge shocking revelation. We shouldn’t reject these beliefs without a very good reason for doing so.

Notes

1 Something is intrinsically good if it is good just for existing. It seems plausible to think happiness and human existence are intrinsically good.

2 What is known intuitively is merely known but difficult to justify in words. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to justify in words. For example, I find it difficult to prove that “1+1=2” in words, but I think my belief is justified and I think I know that “1+1=2.”

3 The Stoic philosophers were some of the first people to analyze emotions in terms of reasonable beliefs, and now philosophers discuss how emotions have a “cognitive component.” Go here for more information about the Stoics. Go here for more information about cognitivist theories of emotions.

4 There might be unusual circumstances when a person could appropriately be (somewhat) glad when their child dies, but that is not usually the case.


Filed under: ethics, philosophy Tagged: morality, right and wrong

Should Philosophy be a Requirement In High School & College?

Published
by
James Gray
on March 2, 2011
.

I added a new piece to the Philosophy Campaign section of this site called, “Philosophy Should Be An Educational Requirement in High School & College.” I argue that philosophy is of the utmost importance because it helps us be reasonable and moral. We should help everyone become more reasonable and moral through philosophy.

I would like people to spread the word. I think this is important.


Filed under: outreach, philosophy Tagged: education

Why Intrinsic Values Are Common Sense

Published
by
James Gray
on February 25, 2011
.

I will argue that the belief in intrinsic value—that at least one thing is good or bad just for existing—is common sense.1 It’s not only intuitive and compatible with our moral beliefs and emotions, but the denial of intrinsic value seems to be highly counterintuitive and lead to absurdities. (I don’t know how an alternative hypothesis could avoid being counterintuitive, but it might be possible.)

I recently said in “Intrinsic Values and Beliefs About Reality” that “intrinsic values are necessary to make sense out of our uncontroversial and highly plausible moral beliefs, and these beliefs shouldn’t be rejected without a good reason to do so.” I will now explain why I think intrinsic values are so important to our “uncontroversial and highly plausible moral beliefs” but I cannot prove that there are no possible equally intuitive alternative hypotheses.2 It is sometimes necessary to reject common sense and embrace “revisionistic” (counterintuitive) beliefs and theories. We know that the world is not always as it seems. The Earth is not flat and the Sun doesn’t revolve around the Earth. At the same time common sense is worth something and we shouldn’t reject common sense unless we have a good reason to do so. Perhaps the best reason to believe in intrinsic value is the fact that it’s common sense (and denying the existence of intrinsic values seems to be counterintuitive). In particular:

  1. Intrinsic values make sense of certain emotions.
  2. Intrinsic values make sense of our experiences and understanding of pleasure and pain.
  3. Intrinsic values tell us why morality is overriding.
  4. Intrinsic values tell us why it’s rational to be moral.
  5. Intrinsic values tell us why “morality isn’t up to us.”
  6. Intrinsic values make sense of right and wrong.

1. Intrinsic values make sense of certain emotions.

Certain emotions—such as love, joy, and grief—seem to imply assumptions about intrinsic value and we don’t think these emotions are always “inappropriate.”

Love – When we love someone we are often willing to harm ourselves to protect that person. We think the person we love has value beyond our own desires. We don’t just hope that the person we love gives us various benefits. We want the person we love to live a good life even at our own expense. If people or their experiences can be intrinsically good, then it makes sense that we love them. It makes sense to be willing to make sacrifices when we know those who will benefit from our sacrifices have value and are worthy of our love.

Joy – Having a child is a cause for joy precisely because we assume the child (or that child’s experiences) are good just for existing. Having a child is not a cause for joy just because we hope the child gives us benefits in the future. Having a child is a lot of work and is not always a good way to achieve happiness. The whole point to having a child should be to create someone good for its sake, not our own.

Grief – When someone dies it can make us quite sad, even if we didn’t have a strong personal relationship with that person. This makes sense if that person’s existence is taken to be good just for existing, and the death of the person is a loss of something “good in itself.”

If intrinsic values don’t exist, then is isn’t clear whether or not love, joy, and grief are “appropriate” emotions; and it would be even less clear whether they could be coherent with the rejection of intrinsic values. Love in particular is a problematic emotion if intrinsic values don’t exist. If you love someone, but think that person has no real value, then it’s not clear we are even talking about love.

2. Intrinsic values make sense of our experiences and understanding of pleasure and pain.

We experience that pleasure is good and pain is bad. It certainly seems rational to want to attain pleasure and avoid pain. This doesn’t seem to require any beliefs concerning intrinsic value, but I think pleasure is intrinsically good and pain is intrinsically bad. One reason I think that is because our knowledge of other people’s pleasure and pain is important to us. We think their pleasure is good and their pain is bad, just like our own. It not only seems rational for me to seek pleasure, but also to give pleasure to other people. It not only seems rational for me to avoid pain, but to help other people avoid pain.

We often take pleasure in the thought of other people taking pleasure. We think their pleasure is good, and that thought is a source for joy. We might like to show them our favorite movies and make them laugh. We often feel pain in the thought of other people’s pain. We think their pain is bad and that is a source of our own misery. We might want to give a stranger an aspirin in the hope that it helps that person avoid pain.

Empathy for all people and animals (that have minds) itself seems to be rational only given the existence of intrinsic values. If other people’s pain is really bad, then it’s appropriate that we are distressed by their pain. We probably evolved empathy for genetic reasons involving pro-social behavior within one’s family or tribe. Empathy probably did not evolve to be applied to strangers, competing tribes, enemies, or other animals; yet we think we should feel empathy for all people and animals. This thought makes perfect sense if we find out that we can have empathy for any being that has intrinsic value rather than merely towards those involving expected reciprocity. If I only want empathy for my own benefit, then there seems to be no reason to extend empathy to all people or animals, but it seems appropriate to “care” for any being that has intrinsic value even when no reciprocal benefit is possible. If others have intrinsic value, then the good we do for others counts because the other is an important part of the universe.

If intrinsic values don’t exist, then it’s not clear that we can rationally care about the pain or pleasure of strangers because such care seems to imply that we find them (and their experiences) to have value beyond our self-interest. If intrinsic values don’t exist, then it’s not clear that empathy for all people and animals is rational. I not only find it implausible that it’s instinctual to care about all people and animals, but I think we can indirectly control our empathy. We can nurture our empathetic nature and learn to empathize more, with greater intensity, and with a wider circle of beings; or we can neglect our empathetic nature to empathize less, with less intensity, and with a smaller circle of beings. We can attain more empathy by having close friends and fulfilling relationships with others if we realize that strangers are quite like ourselves. Those who were once strangers eventually became friends who have thoughts and feelings similar to our own. The loss of empathy is common when we demonize “the enemy,” when we dehumanize others different from ourselves, when we keep ourselves isolated from the outside world, and so on.

3. Intrinsic values tell us why morality is overriding.

We think morality is overriding—moral goals take priority over nonmoral goals. Morality is more important than everything else and we shouldn’t accomplish any goal if it conflicts with morality. Intrinsic values can tell us why morality is overriding. If intrinsic value exists, then intrinsic value is the most important thing in the universe. In fact, it’s the only thing that “really matters.” If one thing is “good in itself,” like human life, and another thing isn’t, like money—then helping people survive is more important than attaining money. If I have a goal to attain money at the cost of human lives, then it’s not worth it because our survival is more important than money. Of course, these aren’t always mutually exclusive goals. Money often helps us survive. Our goals involving money are perfectly moral as long as they don’t conflict with moral requirements.

Our personal interests often conflict with moral requirements. The motivation to do the wrong thing tends to be based on expected personal gain. A CEO might want their company to make millions of dollars of profits by dumping toxic waste in a third world country. This might be a good way to get a lot of money in bonuses and keep one’s job. Of course, one’s personal interest is only one small factor when making a moral decision. Everyone’s interest counts. If people have intrinsic value, then it makes sense that morality could conflict with one’s rational self-interest because (a) one is not the only person that matters and (b) it’s theoretically possible to help oneself at the expense of others (and it’s theoretically possible to make personal sacrifices to benefit others).3

Additionally, being morally praiseworthy often comes at a tremendous personal cost. Consider advocates like Martin Luthor King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi who spoke out against injustice despite the fact that it put their lives at risk. These people seem perfectly rational despite getting themselves killed.

If intrinsic values don’t exist, then its not clear why morality is overriding. Morality wouldn’t have greater importance in any ultimate sense than anything else. In that case something like “rational self-interest” should probably replace morality. Although it’s theoretically possible that one’s own self-interest is always compatible with morality, that is highly implausible and self-interest is the motivation of a great deal of immoral behavior.

4. Intrinsic values tell us why it’s rational to be moral.

If intrinsic values exist, then there is something “truly important” we can try to promote. It seems rational to want to do something that “really matters” and “make the world a better place”—and we can do exactly that if intrinsic values exist. Saving lives, helping people find happiness, and helping people attain knowledge all seem like they are important and “worthy goals” beyond one’s personal desires or self-interest. These are the kinds of goals that are “worthy of desire” and that we ought to learn to desire (perhaps through nurturing empathy).

On the other hand if intrinsic values don’t exist and nothing is truly important, then it doesn’t seem rational to make personal sacrifices for the good of others (and it doesn’t seem rational to refuse to harm others to benefit oneself). We have no choice but to care about our own pain because of how it feels, but we certainly don’t have to care about everyone else. If everyone has intrinsic value, then it seems to make sense to care about them. If they don’t, then it’s unclear why we should care about everyone. In fact, empathy motivates us to make sacrifices and it can be a cause of emotional distress, so the nonexistence of intrinsic value would seem to make it rational to want to minimize our empathy rather than expand it.4

The fact that it only seems rational to be committed to morality if moral realism is true was discussed by Marcel S. Lieberman in his book Commitment, Value, and Moral Realism. Lieberman also stresses the personal sacrifices required by morality and argues that commitments would be irrational if moral realism is false to the point that anti-realist moral commitments would be incoherent—a person has to assume desire-independent values to exist to have moral commitments.

5. Intrinsic values tell us why “morality isn’t up to us.”

We believe that certain actions are right and others are wrong, and intrinsic values are one way to justify such beliefs. We don’t think all of these moral beliefs are merely a matter of opinion or a matter of taste. We think “killing people willie nilly” is always wrong, and it’s not in any way “up to you” to make it true. If morality isn’t completely up to us, that implies that there can be something like a “moral reality” or “moral element of reality.” I suggest that this element is intrinsic value. We know that “killing people willy nilly” is wrong because human life (or the experiences of people) can have intrinsic value—it’s good for a person to exist (and/or for their positive experiences to exist). It’s better for a person to exist than not. When a person dies, something of value is lost. Assuming that human life is intrinsically good, the death of a person is always a loss of value.

Additionally, we believe that moral progress is possible precisely because morality isn’t up to us. For example, slavery was wrong and we improved our culture when we outlawed it. Slavery did not properly respect the importance all people have. People who thought that slavery was compatible with morality had false moral beliefs.

If intrinsic values exist, then they are a moral element of reality that isn’t up to us. However, if they don’t exist, then morality is up to us after all. In that case morality is based on our personal and collective preferences, or a social contract. A social contract could explain why some moral beliefs are “false” (within a cultural context), but it’s not clear that moral progress would be possible. We can’t say that one social contract is better than another if social contracts are the source of morality in the first place.

6. Intrinsic values make sense of right and wrong.

I suggest, roughly, that an action is “right” when an action produces the minimum good that we can expect of a person who has limited knowledge and ability, and an action is “wrong” when an action produces less good than the minimum we can expect of a person who has limited knowledge and ability. Our expectations should be based on the fact that we can only demand people to behave in ways that aren’t too difficult for them. A person who can easily cure cancer has a moral obligation to do so, but most of us can’t easily cure cancer. However, most of us can easily choose not to kill others throughout most of the day, so it is wrong for us to do so.

Intrinsic values help stress the importance of the words “right” and “wrong.” It’s horrific for people to be tortured and killed, and that’s why it’s usually wrong to do these things. We don’t usually use these words unless a significant amount of intrinsic value is at risk. We don’t say it’s “wrong” to pinch people because the pain is minimal, but we say it’s wrong to drink and drive because people’s lives are at stake.

Of course, intrinsic values alone don’t tell us right from wrong by themselves. First, we need to realize that morality is overriding precisely because intrinsic values are involved. Second, we need to have rational goals of promoting things that are intrinsically good. These goals should be something we could commit ourselves to. Third, we need to understand how to best promote intrinsic values. I already discussed why intrinsic values can explain why morality is overriding and why it’s rational to be moral.

How should we promote intrinsic values? That is a contentious issue in philosophy. If something is intrinsically good just for existing, then (all things equal) it’s right to bring it into existence and (all things equal) it’s wrong to destroy it. For example, it’s right to help give people pleasure through entertaining storytelling when we have no overriding reason not to, and it’s wrong to kill a person when we have no overriding reason to do so. The problem is that intrinsic values often conflict and it’s not entirely clear how we should decide right from wrong in such a case. For example, we might have to decide whether we should kill someone to save two or more other lives.

We have little choice but to do philosophy to try to answer controversial moral questions and determine right from wrong in difficult situations. I discuss philosophical approaches in more detail in “Moral Theories” and “Moral Reasoning Without Moral Theories.”

If intrinsic values don’t exist, we can still define “right” and “wrong” though arbitrary uses of language or a social contract, but the words will lose the importance attached to them and there will no longer be moral elements of reality beyond ourselves that determine right and wrong. Instead, morality will be “up to us.”

Conclusion

Intrinsic values are common sense because certain uncontroversial and highly plausible beliefs are compatible with intrinsic values and might not be compatible with the absence of intrinsic values. If intrinsic values exist, then we can understand why certain emotions are appropriate, other people’s pain is relevant to morality, morality is overriding, morality is rational, morality isn’t up to us, and certain actions are right or wrong. Without intrinsic values it isn’t clear that any of these uncontroversial and plausible beliefs are true. I have argued above that intrinsic values are intuitive, but I have not argued above that intrinsic values actually exist. I provided an argument that intrinsic values exist in “An Argument for Moral Realism.”

I have not here proven that intrinsic values are the only common sense explanation for our moral experiences and uncontroversial moral beliefs possible. My point here is that intrinsic values are common sense insofar as they seem like a good explanation for such things, but it is possible for competing theories to offer equally good explanations. I have explained why it’s not clear to me that there are any other hypotheses that could explain our moral experiences and uncontroversial beliefs, but that doesn’t prove that no such explanations are possible. My statement that “intrinsic values are necessary to make sense out of our uncontroversial and highly plausible moral beliefs” is my personal belief based on the information I have, but I might have missed something.

Update (2/26/11): First, I explained my use of the term “common sense” with a footnote to clarify the fact that I don’t use the term to mean “common belief.” I think this fact should have already been fairly clear because I already said quite a bit in the introduction about the purpose of this essay, but the term can throw a person off because it’s a bit ambiguous. Second, I added a clarification in the introduction and conclusion that alternative hypotheses might be able to explain our moral experiences and uncontroversial moral beliefs just as well as intrinsic values.

Notes

1 The word “common sense” is being used in a fairly technical way here. It doesn’t mean “common belief.” It means something more like “intuitive” and “plausible given our current understanding of reality”—but not conclusively proven. I discuss this use of common sense in more detail in “Common Sense Assumptions vs Self-Evidence.” It is possible for two perspectives, theories, or hypotheses to be equally “common sense” insofar as they are both intuitive and plausible. Intrinsic values are a hypothesis to explain our moral experiences and beliefs. It is common sense insofar as it helps explain other intuitive, plausible, and uncontroversial beliefs.

2 Much of what I say here was already discussed in “Denying the Meaning of Life” where I explain why meta-ethics (and the possible existence of intrinsic values in particular) are important questions that we need to explore.

3 It is true that the threat of punishment (and expectation for reciprocity) might usually make it rational to behave morally, but that certainly doesn’t mean it’s always within one’s self-interest to be moral. In fact, whistle blowers, freedom fighters, and peace advocates are often more likely to be harmed than benefited from their behavior despite the fact that they are trying to help others.

4 Empathy can make you feel distress at another person’s distress. I would rather not feel bad just because someone else does.


Filed under: ethics, metaethics, philosophy Tagged: intrinsic values, morality

Intrinsic Values & Beliefs About Reality

Published
by
James Gray
on February 18, 2011
.

The belief in intrinsic values (and moral realism in general) is incompatible with certain beliefs about reality. Something has intrinsic value if it is good just for existing (perhaps happiness or human life). Moral realism is the view that there are moral facts beyond our personal interests and beliefs. If something has real value just for existing, then there are facts about what actions are better than others because some actions can promote intrinsic value better than others. For example, killing people destroys something with intrinsic value assuming human life has intrinsic value.

The rejection of intrinsic values tends to be based on a person’s worldview. The most popular worldviews of philosophers tend to be materialistic—the view that everything that exists is physical (rather than spiritual, divine, or anything else nonphysical).1 I personally endorse a sort of materialism, but some forms of materialism could be the root cause of moral anti-realism. In particular, intrinsic value is incompatible with the worldview of Democritus (eliminative materialism) and it could be incompatible with versions of Heraclitus‘s worldview (the impermanence and change of all things). I already discussed these two worldviews in “Worldviews of Reality,” but I would like to discuss these worldviews further and contrast them with the emergentist worldview to make it clear how these worldviews relate to morality.2 I certainly don’t want to say that emergence is the only worldview compatible with the existence of intrinsic values, but emergence and how it relates to morality is compatible with various theological worldviews.3

I will briefly discuss how intrinsic values seem to relate to these three worldviews and the philosophy of David Hume in particular. I will provide some objections to David Hume’s view of morality and Hume is a good example of a philosopher whose worldview is incompatible with intrinsic values. Finally, I will discuss other assumptions incompatible with intrinsic values.

Intrinsic Values and Democritus

Some philosophers today endorse the worldview of Democritus—eliminative materialism—and Thomas Hobbes and David Hume are two modern philosophers with this worldview. Democritus thought that everything is impermanent and nothing stays the same except atoms. Atoms are unchanging and eternal. The ultimate reality—the most real stuff—are atoms and everything else is a sort of illusion (and are less real). Ultimately mathematics, human identity, and morality must be illusions because all that “really exists” is atoms. You don’t really exist, mathematical facts don’t really exist, and so on. This is obviously not a view compatible with intrinsic values because they aren’t atoms.

Intrinsic Values and Heraclitus

Philosophers today tend to endorse something closer to the worldview of Heraclitus. Heraclitus thought that nothing stays the same. Nothing is eternal. Everything is impermanent. We now know that even atoms were created and can be destroyed. A person cannot step in the same river twice because she won’t be the same person one second in the future. The problem is that even mathematical and moral facts must change. “1+1=2” and “murder is wrong” don’t seem to be the kind of truths that change, but Heraclitus seems to say that they must change because nothing can ever stay the same. Of course, things don’t seem to change that much from second to second—but any sameness would imply a sort of permanence. This view does not seem compatible with intrinsic values because intrinsic values represent something permanent.

Philosophers often want to endorse the worldviews of Democritus and Heraclitus without committing themselves to the absurdities implied by them. They want to say that “1+1=2” is always true, but they often suspect that moral facts aren’t always true.

Intrinsic Values and Emergence

Although materialism offers a very appealing and modest worldview, we don’t want to be committed to the absurdities of eliminative materialism or the total impermanence of all things. Some facts seem to stay the same. I seem to be the same person as I was two seconds ago (in some sense), “1+1=2” seems to always be true, and “pain is intrinsically bad” seems to always be true. We could just accept all this at face value or we could hypothesize about what reality is really like. After all, if it’s impossible for any nonatomistic permanence to exist in a physical universe and we know that some nonatomistic permanence exists, then it would seem rational to endorse a nonmaterialistic worldview. (Additionally, if we know that the universe is entirely physical and intrinsic values is incompatible with an entirely physical universe, then it would seem rational to reject intrinsic values.) One worldview of the physical universe that is compatible with nonatomistic permanence is emergentism—the view that nonatomistic facts can exist due to material conditions. For example, the right combination of physical stuff gives us a brain, and a brain gives us a mind. The mind is real and is not merely our brain. The mind has a sort of permanence to it despite the fact that the brain is constantly changing. The mind doesn’t last forever and it doesn’t stay entirely the same, but there is still something permanent about it.

Emergence is one explanation for the existence of intrinsic values. Whenever I feel pain, I experience that something “bad” is happening and I know that other people have this experience. I have no reason to think that the “badness” found in my pain is deceptive and it makes sense to think everyone’s pain is intrinsically bad. It makes sense for me to try to avoid pain, but it also makes sense for me to try to help other people avoid pain. The “badness” of pain exists because of the nature of pain and pain exists because of how our minds work. The “badness” of pain is real, pain is real, and our minds are real; but all of these things require a living brain.

I find emergence to be a plausible worldview even though it is speculative. I don’t think emergence is necessarily true and the facts that emergence would explain are not controversial. They are more certain than emergence. I think that I know that I am the same person as I was two seconds ago, that pain is intrinsically bad, and that “1+1=2.” These facts are the starting point of philosophy and should not be rejected (unless we know something is true for certain and these facts are less certain than that other truth).

The worldviews of Democritus and Heraclitus are revisionist insofar as they require us to reject things we seem to know are true. We could call them “counterintuitive” because of the absurdities they lead to. Revisionism is important when very strong evidence requires us to reject our intuitive beliefs, but we don’t have strong evidence in support of the worldviews of Democritus or Heraclitus. Those are highly speculative hypotheses about the universe, just like emergentism. One important difference is how emergentism is much more intuitive and less revisionistic insofar as it is compatible with our highly justified and highly plausible beliefs.

The belief that we experience that pain is intrinsically bad is highly justified and highly plausible and we shouldn’t reject that belief unless we have very good reason to do so. It explains why it makes sense to help other people and refuse to hurt them. I attempt to justify the fact that pain is intrinsically bad—and the absurdities in denying it—in more detail in “An Argument for Moral Realism.”

Intrinsic Values and David Hume

I suspect that David Hume is both a powerful influence on the beliefs of philosophers and a product of a similar worldview that other philosophers share. The worldview is a version of Democritus’s worldview, but his conclusions could be the same as that reached by someone who shares Heralcitus’s worldview.

David Hume is an empiricist, and as as an empiricist he thinks we can only know about the world though observation. (Mathematics might not be part of the world, so it might be known by carefully defining mathematical concepts.) This is why Hume will reject the possibility of intuition, self-evidence, or revelation from God.

One problem here is that we neither observe that “observation is a reliable method of attaining knowledge” nor that “observation is the only reliable method of attaining knowledge.” I discuss this issue in more detail in “Common Sense Assumptions Vs. Self-Evidence.”

Hume realized that moral judgments might not be “factual” when he considered that they might be merely emotional. Consider the following passage:

Reason is the discovery of truth or falshood. Truth or falshood consists in an agreement or disagreement either to the real relations of ideas, or to the real existence and matter of fact. Whatever, therefore, is not susceptible of this agreement or disagreement, is incapable of being true or false, and can never be an object of our reason. Now ‘tis evident our passions, volitions, and actions, are not susceptible of any such agreement or disagreement; being original facts and realities, compleat in themselves, and implying no reference to other passions, volitions, and actions. ‘Tis impossible, therefore, they can be pronounc’d either true or false, and be either contrary or conformable to reason” (Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature III.I.I.9)

Hume is saying two things here. First, that reason’s function is the discovery of truth and falsehood. (Either that or reason is the discovery of truth and falsity by definition. Of course, Hume thinks observation is the method of attaining knowledge, but I don’t think observation is reason.) Two, that there must be potential contradictions for something to be true or false. “1+1=2” and “1+1=3” are contradictory, so they can’t both be true—and one of them might be true. However, my desire for chocolate isn’t true or false. It doesn’t even attempt to describe reality. The fact that I desire chocolate and you don’t doesn’t mean one of us has a “false desire.” In other words passions and feelings aren’t “cognitive”—they are neither true nor false.

It is here that we might start to worry that there are no moral facts. Could “Murder is wrong” merely be my interest in people not murdering? In fact, Hume seems to be implying such when he says,

Thus the distinct boundaries and offices of reason and of taste are easily ascertained. The former conveys the knowledge of truth and falsehood: The latter gives the sentiment of beauty and deformity, vice and virtue. (Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. App. I.V.21)

Hume is saying two things here. One, that our emotions aren’t cognitive, so we can’t reason about them because reason’s function is to tell us the difference between truth and falsity, but there are no true or false emotions. Two, that moral judgments aren’t cognitive, so we can’t reason about them for the same reason.

It could be objected that (a) we can reason about the “appropriateness” of emotions and (b) that moral judgments aren’t reducible to emotions.

Why does Hume think that moral judgments can’t be true or false? Hume rejects intrinsic values for at least the following three reasons:

  1. We can’t know what “ought to be the case” from “what is the case.”
  2. We can’t reason about moral goals.
  3. Moral judgments can motivate us, but reason can’t.

1. We can’t know what “ought to be the case” from “what is the case.”

Hume argues that you can’t get what “ought to be the case” from “what is the case” in the following passage:

In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark’d that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs, when of a sudden I am surpriz’d to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, ‘tis necessary that it shou’d be observ’d and explain’d; and at the same time that a reason shou’d be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. (Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature III.I.I.27).

The main argument is basically that (a) no one has ever explained how we can get what ought to be the case from what is the case and (b) what “ought to be the case” seems totally different from “what is the case.” After all, what “is the case” actually exists right now but what “ought to be the case” might not exist right now.

My objection: If you want to accomplish a goal, then you “ought” to do whatever helps you do so. This has nothing to do with morality. Hume will probably then respond, “I was talking about how to get a moral judgment, not advice.” In that case we don’t have to talk about what “ought to be the case” at all. We can just talk about what has intrinsic value or intrinsic disvalue. We know that pleasure is intrinsically good, so it makes sense to have a goal of promoting pleasure. We can agree that we morally ought to promote intrinsic values and we can figure out how to best accomplish such a goal.

2. We can’t reason about moral goals.

Hume argues that we can’t reason about moral goals (ultimate ends) in the following passage:

It appears evident, that the ultimate ends of human actions can never, in any case, be accounted for by reason, but recommend themselves entirely to the sentiments and affections of mankind, without any dependance on the intellectual faculties. Ask a man, why he uses exercise; he will answer, because he desires to keep his health. If you then enquire, why he desires health, he will reply, because sickness is painful. If you push your enquiries farther, and desire a reason, why he hates pain, it is impossible he can give any. (Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. App.I.V.)

Hume argues that we like pleasure and dislike pain period. We can’t explain why, so morality is probably based on emotions rather than “facts.” However, this argument has various flaws.

My objections: We like pleasure because of how it feels and we dislike pain because of how it feels. We observe what pleasure and pain are and decide that they have certain moral properties based on our observations. It might be true that we don’t necessarily reason about the value of pleasure and pain just like we don’t reason about what green looks like. Observation is a method of attaining knowledge without a requirement for reasoning.

Hume said earlier that reason is a method of attaining knowledge, but here he seems to be assuming that reason is the only method of attaining knowledge. That is a direct contradiction of his empiricism. Obviously we can observe things without reasoning about it.

Perhaps Hume at some point thinks he proves that we can’t observe that pleasure is intrinsically good or pain is intrinsically bad, but I think we do observe such things. I would certainly be interested in knowing why we couldn’t observe such a thing.

3. Moral judgments can motivate us, but reason can’t.

Hume argues that reason can’t motivate us, but emotions can in the following passage:

Reason, being cool and disengaged, is no motive to action, and directs only the impulse received from appetite or inclination, by showing us the means of attaining happiness or avoiding misery: Taste, as it gives pleasure or pain, and thereby constitutes happiness or misery, becomes a motive to action, and is the first spring or impose to desire and volition. (Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. App. I.V.21)

Since reason can’t motivate us, but emotions can, Hume finds it plausible that moral judgments are based on emotions because they can motivate us.

My objections: It isn’t obvious to me that (a) moral judgments motivate us, (b) reason can’t motivate us, or (c) knowledge of intrinsic values can’t motivate us. Even if moral knowledge doesn’t provide us with knowledge, perhaps reason or knowledge can be used to increase or decrease our interests. The fact is that I think pain is intrinsically bad and it’s not hard to understand why I would want to avoid it based on my knowledge about it (how it feels). It might be a little mysterious to some people why my knowledge of pain can motivate me to help other people avoid pain. We tend to expect people to be egoistic and are surprised by altruistic behavior. We think altruistic behavior needs to be explained. I’m not sure that altruistic behavior is really as mysterious as we tend to think it is, but perhaps it is. Even if it is, I think I could cultivate my tendency to have empathy for others based on my knowledge that pain is intrinsically bad (or I could neglect my tendency to have empathy for others based on my belief that pain isn’t intrinsically bad).

Hume is famously revisionistic. He starts out with certain popular assumptions, such as empiricism and materialism, and will proudly commit himself to any absurd conclusions that it leads him. Never mind that empiricism or materialism are highly speculative—he uses these assumptions to reject induction (the belief that we can know anything through generalization and past experience) and moral facts. According to Hume, raping and torturing children are things we don’t like, but they aren’t “really wrong.” The fact that we know how horrible it is to feel pain is supposedly irrelevant to the importance of the pain others feel.

Assumptions Incompatible With Intrinsic Value

It’s not entirely clear what all of Hume’s assumptions are that lead him to his conclusions nor what all the assumptions are of people who agree with them. However, I will discuss what I suspect such assumptions could be. I see these assumptions as “unwarranted” and highly contentious rather than as plausible or obvious. I will discuss three of these assumptions:

We can’t observe mental content.

Hume thinks that we can attain knowledge from observation and he admits that we can know about pain and pleasure from experiencing it. In that case, why can’t we know anything about pleasure and pain, such as whether it’s intrinsically bad or not? Hume doesn’t seem to consider the possibility that we can observe our own experiences through introspection. I think this view of introspection is very plausible. To think I can know that a chair exists by observation but can’t know I have thoughts or emotions through introspection seems absurd.

It is true that our introspective observations can occasionally be deceptive. We know that many people who experience God are wrong—and perhaps all such experiences are deceptive. However, most of our experiences are deceptive that refer to other things. Our experience that pain feels bad seems indisputable. Whether or not the fact that pain feels bad is cause to think it is intrinsically bad is controversial, but I find it plausible.

Emotions are nonfactual.

People talk about “facts and values” as though there were no moral facts (intrinsic values). The view that values are nonfactual could be ultimately based on the idea that emotions are nonfactual. The idea that emotions are nonfactual could be based on the idea that emotions can’t be true or false. However, that doesn’t mean emotions are entirely nonfactual insofar as that seems to imply that they don’t exist or are somehow illusory. (People who think values are nonfactual tend to think values are unreal and illusory.) I think emotions exist like tables and chairs even though they are quite different from tables and chairs. Additionally, emotions tend to be based on beliefs. The belief that your family member dies can make you sad. The belief that the family member had intrinsic value also seems to have an effect on how much grief we will experience.

It is quite easy to see that Hume could have got things the wrong way around. He thinks moral beliefs are based on emotions rather than that emotions are based on moral beliefs. Our beliefs can have a very strong impact on our emotions and it differentiates them. Delight is based on the belief something good happens (such as when we have a child who is born) and grief is based on the belief that something bad has happened.

There is certainly a non-intellectual component to having emotions and desires. However, many desires seem pretty meaningless until we attach a belief to it. A pain in the stomach means nothing by itself, but it can become a desire for food when we decide that we can soothe the pain by eating. Some of our desires could be given meaning by us rather than the other way around. We could say that such desires have a “fill in the blank” component. Our social desires, for example, don’t tell us to do anything in particular. How to use the “motivation” from such desires seems to be up to us. Sure, we might need desire to have motivation, but some desires might have little to no actual content until we decide what content to give them. We might be able to use our social desires to promote intrinsic value.

Mental content is less real than atoms.

I already briefly mentioned this assumption above. A lot of people don’t seem to think mental content is factual (see above) or they think psychological existence itself is “less real” than atoms and such. I don’t see why anyone would agree with this. Why would I think my mind is less real than atoms?

Some people have suggested that morality can’t be based on the “psychological” intrinsic values of pleasure and pain because “they’re subjective.” It’s unclear why being subjective—existing in the mind—is irrelevant to morality. Intrinsic value can be a property of psychological phenomena even though they aren’t “solid objects.” The idea that something must be a “solid object” to have intrinsic value seems strange.

I think there is prejudice against psychological existence because we are recovering from Cartesian dualism—the view that minds and bodies are two totally different kinds of reality that can’t interact. One way to avoid dualism is to decide that the mind doesn’t exist or it’s “less real” than solid objects. I think a more plausible solution is the view that minds are physical like solid objects even though there are obviously differences between rocks and minds.

Conclusion

I have discussed the implausible overly ambitious philosophical commitments about reality that are incompatible with intrinsic values, but whether or not intrinsic values also require overly ambitious philosophical commitments is a good question. I think intrinsic values are necessary to make sense out of our uncontroversial and highly plausible moral beliefs, and these beliefs shouldn’t be rejected without a good reason to do so. To reject such highly plausible beliefs without a good reason to do so would be to favor controversial beliefs over uncontroversial ones. Of course, it is possible that intrinsic values are not required to understand our uncontroversial moral beliefs or that intrinsic values require highly absurd philosophical beliefs that must be rejected. However, the most absurd philosophical commitment intrinsic values might require is something like the existence of emergence. I don’t find that particularly offensive. I discuss this in more detail in “Objections Against Moral Realism Part 3: Argument from Queerness.”

Notes

1 Of course, some materialist philosophers could believe that spirits or gods are physical after all. The Stoics are a good example of this.

2 I have discussed the emergentist worldview in “Emergence: A New Worldview of Reality.”

3 I have discussed a theological worldview in “The Theological Worldview of Reality.”


Filed under: ethics, metaphysics, philosophy Tagged: intrinsic value, morality, ontology, worldview

Philosophical Lobbying & Improved Ethics Requirements in Accounting

Published
by
James Gray
on February 11, 2011
.

I discussed the need for philosophical lobbying (philobbying), and we recently found some success in California. If you want to be a CPA (Certified Public Accountant) in California, then you might have to take 10 units of ethics classes thanks to lobbying by the Center for Public Interest Law (CPIL) who hopes that such classes will help reduce the unethical behavior committed by accountants.1 I will discuss the new ethics requirement and why I think it’s a good idea.

What exactly is the ethics requirement?

Starting January 1, 2014, accountants will be required to take 10 units (3 or 4 classes) in ethics.2 The ethics classes are described in the following terms:

[A] program of learning that provides students with a framework of ethical reasoning, professional values, and attitudes for exercising professional skepticism and other behavior that is in the best interest of the investing and consuming public and the profession. At minimum, it includes academic work or independent study and shall include a foundation for ethical reasoning and the core values of integrity, objectivity, and independence consistent with the International Education Standards. (§5094.6(e)(2))

Why is this an example of philosophical lobbying?

Not only it it a philosophical answer to a social problem, but it presents philosophy instructors with new opportunities. There are tons of business schools, such as National University, that educates CPAs, but don’t teach the required number of “ethics” classes. Now it looks like they will have no choice. Either accountants will have to teach accounting ethics classes or accounting students will have to take ethics classes from philosophers.

Some people think the ethics requirement should be repealed because schools don’t offer the ethics classes, but obviously it’s not impossible to offer such classes. There are plenty of philosophy instructors out of work who would be happy to get a job teaching at a business school.

Some people might think it’s impossible to take 10 units of ethics classes. It might be mind-boggling, but it is certainly possible to take 10 units of ethics classes. That can include various accounting ethics classes and/or other philosophical ethics classes. In particular, ethical theories, applied ethics, meta-ethics, business ethics, philosophy of law, and political philosophy.

What are unethical forms of accounting?

The violations can be found in the IRS laws (Circular 230) and Professional Standards for CPAs. An examples of a famous scandal involving egregiously fraudulent accounting includes the Enron scandal.

There are some esoteric rules accountants might not even know about. For example, the IRS Disclosure and Use Rules states that a “tax preparer is prohibited from offering auxiliary services to a tax preparation client unless a consent form is received before offering the service (§301.7216-1(b)(2)(iii))”3 In other words, an accountant that wants to give you two minutes of free minor tax advice would need you to sign paperwork first. A video that describes this requirement can be found here.

Why is the ethics requirement a solution?

Ethics classes will not automatically make accountants more ethical, but they can offer the following:

  1. It can provide information about what counts as ethical and unethical behavior (in accounting). People who want to be ethical might make mistakes if they don’t actually know what counts as ethical.
  2. An ethics class can help us understand why there are certain laws and rules. We are more likely to remember and follow rules if we know why they exist.
  3. An ethics class can help people learn to think rationally for themselves about what they ought to do given their unique situation.

Additionally, some studies were cited as giving evidence that ethics courses could help reduce the amount of unethical accounting. For example, one study had data that “indicated that those students who had already taken a general ethics course and who also took the ethics and professionalism course scored significantly higher” in ethical sensitivity.4

Is 10 units too many? Perhaps the ethics requirement might be a little extreme. I don’t know that 10 units is the right amount to demand of students, but I would like everyone in college to have to take at least one philosophical ethics class whether it’s focused on their career or not. Moreover, it’s not totally preposterous to think that accounting students could take 3 classes in ethics because they could take (a) business ethics, (b) a class on professional standards in accounting and (c) a class on the Circular 230. All three of these classes could have a philosophical and ethical element.

Should business and accounting students take ethics classes?

Yes, everyone should be learning ethics. Ethics (and philosophy in general) is part of a well-rounded education that helps people think rationally, behave morally, and communicate well with others. I discuss the importance of learning philosophy in more detail in “Should I Take a Philosophy Class?”

One extensive study by Richard Arum found that of the people attending college few have been attaining the basic skills of reading, writing, and critical thinking. “Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the least gains in learning… [but students] who majored in the traditional liberal arts—including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics—showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills.”5 It is clear that philosophy is a good way to improve our “critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills” and offers a lot to a society that is increasingly declining in these skills.

Conclusion

I don’t know if the ethics classes taken by accountants can be the same ethics classes that philosophy professors generally teach or if they will only be accounting-specific ethics classes. Either way, I support an increased ethics requirement and I hope some philosophical thinking will be applied to the classes. I’ve heard that some business ethics classes have been “legalistic” rather than philosophical, but we need these classes to help people think for themselves rather than just memorize rules.

Finally, I hope some philosophy instructors teach some of these ethics classes, even if they must be specific to accounting. San Jose State University’s philosophy department teaches their business ethics course and I think philosophy instructors tend to be the most qualified people to help teach students the skills of rational and ethical thinking.

Updated (2/11/22): I added some clarifications including the possibility that the requirement might be “too extreme.” Someone also notified me that the increased requirement might have been meant to be 10 hours rather than 10 units. If that is true, I would like a source that could confirm it.

Update (2/11/22): If the ethics requirement is repealed and reduced to 10 hours, then the legislation isn’t as philosophical as I hoped and much more work will need to be done. I think we should demand that at least a single business ethics class is required for CPAs, and we should encourage the idea of multiple ethics classes. Any classes meant to cover “professional codes of ethics” or the IRS laws could be ethics classes, and we should seriously consider whether or not they ought to be.

Notes

1 More information about the role the CPIL played in the ethics requirement can be found here (PDF). In particular Ed Howard’s response (attachment 2) was informative.

2 See section 5094 of the California Business and Professions code.

3 Gray, Michael. “IRS Disclosure & Use Rules — A Threat To Your Practice and Our Profession?” Tax Trimmers. February 10, 2011. <http://www.taxtrimmers.com/irs-disclosure.pdf>.

4 Bean, David F. & Richard A. Bernardi. “Accounting Ethics Courses: Do They Work?” The CPA Journal. February 10, 2011. <http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2007/107/essentials/p64.htm>. (Originally published January 2007.)

5 Rimer, Sara. “Study: Many college students not learning to think critically.” McClatchy. February 10, 2011. <http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/01/18/106949/study-many-college-students-not.html.> (Originally posted January 18, 2011.)


Filed under: ethics, outreach, philosophy Tagged: accounting, education, lobbying

I Created A FAQ on Intrinsic Value

Published
by
James Gray
on February 1, 2011
.

I created a FAQ on Intrinsic Value, which is now a permanent page on this site and a free ebook. Is there a meaning of life? Is there any reason for us to be moral? If intrinsic values exist, then yes. Human life, pleasure, and happiness all seem like they are good–they all seem worthy of promoting because of how important they are. This FAQ explains my beliefs and arguments concerning intrinsic value.

Much of what I say in the FAQ could be taken as a defense of Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape. There are philosophers who agree with a lot of what Sam Harris has to say.

Go here to see the FAQ.


Filed under: ethics, philosophy Tagged: importance, intrinsic value, meaning of life, morality, sam harris

Luke Nix’s Concerns About Atheistic Moral Absolutism

Published
by
James Gray
on January 29, 2011
.

Luke Nix thinks that a satisfying sort of morality requires God. Without God, morality would be a matter of opinion, mere consensus, or cultural customs. Such an unsatisfying sort of morality is “relativism” or a form of “moral anti-realism.” He thinks a satisfying morality should be in some sense “absolute” (of a moral realist variety).1 We both mainly agree what a satisfying morality should look like. It shouldn’t be relativistic or a form of anti-realism. However, I don’t agree that God is required for moral realism. I have already responded to his argument in “An Argument Against Atheistic Moral Realism.” However, my response doesn’t answer all his concerns. I had a discussion with him on his blog and I found out many of his concerns. I wasn’t able to post my reply on his website (perhaps because of my use of html), so I will post it here.

1. How is moral realism relevant?

Nix says,

I want to point out that the debate is not whether morality (regardless of type) is real. It can be real that someone has the opinion that murder is wrong, and that opinion be based on something else real, like pain. The fact that it is real does not change the fact that it is an opinion.

…The debate is not about whether morality is real, but what kind of morality is real. The distinction between objective, relative, and subjective morality is extremely important in this debate. If such a distinction is not made, then those on the different sides will be talking past one another, and fruitful debate will be impossible.

Moral realism is not the position that morality is merely an opinion. It is the position that there is something like “moral reality” and there are moral facts. A moral “opinion” is true if it corresponds to the facts. Moral realism is exactly the right understanding of morality that could be described as “absolute” rather than “relativistic.” Moral realism doesn’t say that morality is “real” if it is a “matter of opinion,” a “matter of personal preference,” consensus, or cultural customs.

The words “objective” and “subjective” are ambiguous words and need to be carefully defined. What we call “subjective” or “relative” morality is generally taken to be a form of “moral anti-realism”—but these words must be defined before we can decide.

For example, “objective” can mean “a reliable method to find truth.” In that case a relativist believes in “objective morality” because we can easily study the beliefs of a culture to determine what is “right and wrong.”

“Subjective” can mean “exists in the mind, or is mind-dependent.” In that case thoughts are subjective—including mathematical thoughts. That certainly doesn’t mean mathematics is unreliable, illusory, or a matter of opinion.

2. Pain is subjective, so how can it be relevant to absolute morality?

Nix says,

Keep in mind that pain is subjective. People have differing thresholds of pain tolerance. Any moral propositions that are determined based on pain is ultimately subjective.

Define “subjective.” It’s a fact that pain is intrinsically bad. That’s not merely an “opinion.”

One definition of subjective is “it exists in your mind.” Thoughts exist in my mind, but they are real. Pain exists in my mind, but it is real. I can experience that pain is “bad.” The fact that pain is intrinsically bad isn’t just an “opinion” just because pain is in my mind.

There is another sense of “subjective” that means “there is no reliable method to determine the truth.” It could be argued that it’s merely my opinion that pain is bad because there is no reliable way to know that pain is bad. However, I know that everyone agrees with me that pain is bad. They don’t want me to torture them (in part) because their pain is experienced as bad as well.

Nix continues this concern when he says,

If you wish to say that we know based on pain, we’re right back to it being subjective at best (explained above), and circular at worst (morality is based on pain, but pain is based on morality).

If you wish to cite agreement on the level of pain and the resulting moral proposition, that is fine, but that only allows morality to go past the individual to the cultural level. All cultures would have to agree that a proposition was morally “right” or “wrong” (see above with the problem here).

First, I don’t care about agreement, but the words “right” and “wrong” are less significant than “intrinsically good” and “intrinsically bad.”

Second, morality might not be definable in non-moral terms. That would be a form of reductionism that says morality is “nothing but” something else. We might have no choice but have “circular” definitions for moral terms insofar as we can’t give reductionistic definitions.

Third, I never said morality is “based on pain.” Morality is based on intrinsic value. Morality is based on “whatever is truly important.” For example, if human life has intrinsic value, then (all things equal), it’s wrong to kill people.

3. Pain exists only because of people, but doesn’t “absolute” morality exist even if people don’t?

Nix says,

[Pain is subjective.] Which means that it [pain] does not transcend humanity. It cannot even transcend the individual into a culture (relative morality), much less all humanity, or even the entire world. The real morality that you speak of is a subjective morality. It is dependent upon our opinions, not independent of them.

Wrong. Someone could falsely say that pain isn’t intrinsically bad. Pain is bad. That’s exactly why I should give someone an aspirin if they have a headache. It’s common sense.

If you are going to get hung up on the fact that pain exists in the mind (which is irrelevant), then you should know that it’s possible that human beings could also have intrinsic value. I don’t think moral realism requires that human beings have intrinsic value, but it is a common assumption.

Of course, without minds there are no people. Are people therefore “subjective?” Do people only exist because of our “opinions?”

Finally, there are conceptual truths about morality that transcend human existence. For example, “All things equal, it’s wrong to torture people” is true even before people exist. It just doesn’t apply to anyone before people exist. I discuss such “timeless” conceptual moral truths in more detail in “Questions for Atheistic Moral Realists Answered.”

4. If morality depends on people, then it wouldn’t exist before people exist.

Nix says,

If consciousness originated with the brain, value originated with consciousness, and morality is based on value, then morality had an origination sometime after the origination of the brain. This means that any morality would not be real prior to that point in time, so it cannot be applied to any creature living prior to that time, or even any creature living at the same time that does not possess a minimum of a brain

Is that a problem? If any people exist, then morality is relevant to them. Why would we want morality to be relevant when people aren’t around?

Also, there are conceptual moral truths that don’t need anything to exist, as I mentioned above.

5. If morality is absolute, then it must exist before people.

Nix says,

If morality transcends our opinions (thus the individual, culture, and species) then it would have to (at the minimum) begin with the universe.

You are confusing “objective truth” with something else. It is true that dinosaurs are animals before dinosaurs existed, but that “conceptual truth” would be irrelevant before they existed. This fact is not up for debate and does not rely on “human opinion.”

That gravity exists wouldn’t be true before the universe exists either, but it’s still true and has nothing to do with our “opinions.”

6. What does “right” or “wrong” mean for an atheist?

Nix says,

Keep in mind that determining in a proposition is morally right or wrong assumes that we have a unit of measure to compare to. How do we know what “right” or “wrong” even mean on naturalism?

First, there is no consensus with what those words mean to anyone—naturalist or not. Second, atheists don’t have to be naturalists. It’s possible to be a Platonist, intuitionist, etc. Third, I would suggest that “right” means something like “a course of action that promotes intrinsic goods and avoids intrinsic evils.” “Wrong” means something like “does not promote intrinsic goods or avoiding intrinsic evils.” We say that something is wrong, such as torture, because it is so horrific and brings about something significantly intrinsically bad (suffering). I don’t know of a definition that can make it much more clear how important it is that we do the right thing.

How do I know what “right” and “wrong” mean? First, I hear people use the word and learn the language. Second, I can decide what people “should” mean by the words. What would be the best use of the words? I think the best use of the words would capture how important moral actions are because “so much is at stake.”

7. Doesn’t God explain moral realism best?

Nix says,

Theism solves all the problems. Theism grounds morality in the nature of God.

First, I don’t deny that it is possible that theism can explain moral realism. Second, I’m not convinced that “theistic moral realism” is the best understanding or explanation for morality.

I personally don’t find theistic moral realism to be plausible for the following reasons:

One, I don’t find the existence of God to be plausible.

Two, it’s more modest and preferable for our theories to make no reference to such questionable entities as God. Even theists prefer our current scientific explanations for lightning over the belief that God directly causes lightning—and Christian biologists agree that “atheistic evolution” is more plausible than the view that God is intervening in evolution.

Three, I am more convinced that moral realism is true than that God exists.

Four, I think it’s quite easy to understand why morality is “absolute” and why moral realism is true without referring to God. My own form of moral realism is much more satisfying to me than the alternatives.

Five, I don’t think theistic moral realism explains morality very well. In particular, it leaves a lot of questions unanswered (or the answers are not satisfying to me):

  1. How can we know God’s nature? If we found out God is cruel would that prove cruelty is good or that God isn’t good after all?
  2. If God is good, how does that tell me how a human being can be good? Obviously being an “absentee” father is not a good idea for humans.
  3. If God’s nature is the basis for morality, then that “theory” should help “explain” real world moral problems. Let’s start with something simple. Why is “pain is bad” true because of God’s existence? (Or: Why is it true that I should give a stranger an aspirin who has a headache?)
  4. Very few people have actually used God’s mere existence to justify moral claims. Even Christians tend not to think that way. It sounds quite esoteric. In fact, most people know right from wrong through experience. They can experience that pleasure is good and pain is bad. They can experience that happiness is good, but suffering is bad. I think they can even experience their own life as having value. What gives people pain, pleasure, happiness, suffering, (and survival) is quite similar so I can know a lot about morality just by treating others how we want to be treated. A greater understanding of other people’s unique situation and unique needs can also help. (If I was homeless, might need food, etc.)

Note

1 Some people talk about “moral absolutism” in an extreme sense that “the situation is not relevant to morality.” That is not what is at issue here. I argue against the extremist sort of “moral absolutism” here. I defend a modest sort of “moral absolutism” here.


Filed under: epistemology, ethics, metaethics, metaphysics, philosophy Tagged: atheism, god, moral absolutism, moral realism, objective morality, relativism

An Argument Against Atheistic Moral Realism

Published
by
James Gray
on January 25, 2011
.

Luke Nix argues that atheistic moral realism (the view that there are moral facts) is impossible because atheistic evolution wouldn’t make it possible to know the truth about anything other than the empirical (observable) world. I will defend atheistic moral realism and object to his argument by saying that (a) atheism does not necessarily require empiricism and (b) empirical moral realism can be consistent.

Note that “atheistic moral realism” is compatible with God—it merely means that God doesn’t directly intervene in the world to bring about moral reality. That means the argument that moral realism requires God might be false, even if God exists. When I defend “atheistic moral realism,” I am defending what I see as the most plausible form of moral realism, even if God exists. I am not merely trying to make sense of moral realism as an atheist.

Luke Nix’s Argument

Luke Nix says, “I would like to point out that atheists are required to give up either absolute, objective morality or consistency in order to maintain their atheistic belief.” He basically argues that atheistic evolution would make it impossible for us to know moral facts:

[A]theists cannot explain their drive for finding consistency between what they know to be true intuitively and what they find to be true by their observations. Not only that, since natural selection operates based on survivability (vs. truth) they cannot establish that what they know to be true intuitively or what they observe to be true, are even true, themselves. Theists can explain all this without stretching their worldview one iota.

What exactly does this mean? He admits that atheists can provide consistency concerning “the physical world (the world of empirical observation)” Apparently Nix thinks that evolution can provide us truths concerning the physical world because it gave us the five senses to observe the physical world, but he doesn’t think we can know anything about morality—because morality isn’t part of the physical world. The nonphysical parts of reality can’t be known through evolution alone because we would only evolve the ability to do what is necessary to survive, and the ability to know moral facts wouldn’t be necessary to survive. (Morality requires us to be altruistic sometimes, after all).

We can formulate Nix’s argument as the following:

  1. Atheistic evolution requires empiricism.
  2. Empiricism can’t account for moral realism.
  3. Therefore, either (a) atheistic evolution is false or (b) moral realism is false.

This argument is logically valid, but we don’t know the premises are true. I find both of the premises to be unjustified assumptions.

Luke Nix actually does not use the word “moral realism” but I think it’s a better word to use than “objective morality” because the word “objective” is too ambiguous. The word “absolute” is also ambiguous, but there is a sense that moral realism always supports “absolute moral facts” insofar as these facts aren’t “a matter of opinion” and there are true conceptual moral facts that are “always true.” It’s always true that “all things equal, you shouldn’t torture children.”

My Objections

1. Atheistic evolution doesn’t necessarily require empiricism.

Nix argues that evolution alone wouldn’t enable us to know anything nonphysical (or abstract). We know about logic, mathematics, and morality—and I agree that we don’t know these things from empiricism alone. However, I disagree that conceptual knowledge would be impossible given atheistic evolution.

First, conceptual knowledge can give us a reproductive advantage. (a) It seems like a really bad idea to have contradictory beliefs, so logic is important. (b) It seems like a good idea to know how numbers apply to the physical world. A longer distance means more resources will be required to make the trip. Although moral knowledge might not give me a reproductive advantage, conceptual knowledge certainly does.

How does conceptual knowledge apply to morality? I know that pain is intrinsically bad (bad just for existing) and I know it’s wrong to make someone have intrinsically bad experiences (without a very good reason to do so). These are all “conceptual truths” because they abstract away from concrete reality and various situations we can encounter. In fact, it’s a conceptual truth that (all things equal) it’s wrong to drown someone in a deep pit of spaghetti even though such a deep pit of spaghetti might never exist.

Conceptual knowledge is something everyone wants to account for—including empiricists. However, some people think that something like Platonism is necessary to fully account for conceptual knowledge. Even if this is true, it’s not entirely clear that Platonism is incompatible with atheistic evolution (or atheism in general).

Second, not everything we evolve is a reproductive advantage. Evolution doesn’t only produce what is advantageous to survival and nothing else. For example, our minds might not be “necessary” to have a reproductive advantage. We have minds and the fact that we could evolve minds could be a fortuitous fact involving the brains that were eventually evolved. The laws of nature seem to be what gives us minds based on the fact that we have brains, but it’s theoretically possible to evolve advantageous behavior without a mind. We could have merely evolved seemingly intelligent mindless behavior similar to how we can program computers to do seemingly intelligent mindless behavior.

Why did we evolve minds? One, because the first brain-like nervous systems that evolved were already advantageous before they (probably) gave anything a mind. Two, the fact that certain brains produce minds is explained because of natural laws. Three, it might be more “efficient” to evolve a mind rather than a mindless computer program. Four, it might be a free byproduct of complex nervous systems that isn’t actually advantageous to survival.

In other words conceptual knowledge might be something we evolved because it is (a) “efficient,” (b) advantageous to survival, and/or (c) a free byproduct of another advantageous trait.

Three, no one has all the answers. Even if atheistic evolution doesn’t currently have the tools to explain why we have moral knowledge, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for atheistic evolution to ever attain an explanation. It’s an argument from ignorance fallacy to claim “you don’t know why something happens, so your belief is false.” If Nix wants to argue that atheistic evolution and moral realism couldn’t possibly be true, then he would have to prove that all possible forms of moral realism are incompatible with all forms of atheistic evolution—but he didn’t provide that argument.

Imagine if we had to answer every question before knowing that our “theory” might be considered to be plausible. In that case almost no theory would be plausible. Even scientific theories face “anomalies” that have yet to be explained. (There mere existence of anomalies does not disprove scientific theories because many anomalies can be explained away at some point.)

Four, atheistic evolution isn’t up for debate. Even theists should believe in “atheistic evolution.” Evolution is the only plausible theory in biology to explain our existence at this point in time, and God’s intervention in evolution would have dire consequences that are not currently accepted by biologists. “Atheistic evolution” is probably true given our current information, even if atheism is false. (Calling it “atheistic evolution” only means that God is not directly interfering with evolution.)

2. Empiricism and “physicalism” might be able to account for moral realism.

First, empiricists think they can account for conceptual knowledge. Empiricism is considered to be a sufficiently plausible epistemic theory in contemporary philosophy and no one has ever sufficiently discredited it—and empiricsts are very interested in conceptual knowledge. Empiricists think that conceptual knowledge is something like “generalizations.” It’s true that “pain is intrinsically bad” because whenever pain exists, it has the property “intrinsically bad.” We might wonder how an empiricist could know this of all pain—and one possible answer is that all the pain anyone ever experiences confirms the hypothesis “all pain is intrinsically bad” and no experience ever disproves it.1 Perhaps not all pain is intrinsically bad, but certainly most of the pain I have experienced seems like it. For more information, I argued that “pain is intrinsically bad” in my essay “An Argument for Moral Realism.”

Second, intrinsic values might be physical. Intrinsic values attach themselves to other things—such as experiences or consciousness. If nothing exists, then nothing is intrinsically good or bad. If pain exists, then something intrinsically bad exists. Pain exists as part of the “physical world” insofar as our minds are part of the physical world.

One might wonder if our minds are part of the physical world, and it’s quite possible that they are. If so, that merely means that the physical world is more than atoms and energy.

How can we know about thoughts, pain, and minds? We experience them. When I have a thought, I at least sometimes know it. When I experience pain, I at least sometimes experience the pain. When I experience pain, I at least sometimes experience it as being “intrinsically bad.” Other people seem to have thoughts, pain, and minds much like I do for much the same reasons. Having a living brain gives you mind and touching fire gives you pain.

Third, no one has all the answers. Again, we don’t know everything. Empiricists might not know how to fully explain conceptual knowledge yet, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible for them to do so.

3. Nix didn’t prove that theistic moral realism is plausible.

Nix is right that there contemporary theories of knowledge, such as empiricism, face difficulties, but he didn’t prove that these theories of knowledge require God. Nix is right that contemporary theories of knowledge haven’t been fully related to evolution, but he didn’t prove that these theories of knowledge would be impossible given atheism or “atheistic evolution.” Nix argues that it’s possible that theism and moral realism to be true at the same time, and I agree.

The question is: Is theism compatible with our “knowledge?” Is theism plausible? So far, I am unconvinced. In order to know that “theistic moral realism is true,” we would have to prove that this theory has a greater justification than the alternatives, and Nix did not prove that. Nix may have proved that there are weaknesses in “atheistic moral realism,” but he didn’t prove that “theistic moral realism has no weaknesses. If theistic moral realism is probably true, then it must have a greater justification than atheistic moral realism.

The question is: Is theism compatible with our “knowledge?” Is theism plausible? So far, I am unconvinced. In order to know that “theistic moral realism is true,” we would have to prove that this theory has a greater justification than the alternatives, and Nix did not prove that. Nix may have proved that there are weaknesses in “atheistic moral realism,” but he didn’t prove that “theistic moral realism has no weaknesses.” If theistic moral realism is probably true, then it must have a greater justification than atheistic moral realism.

Theistic moral realism is not considered to be plausible in contemporary philosophy. Why not? Because we should prefer our theories and explanations to be as modest as possible. To require all the atheists, Buddhists, and Taoists around the world to reject moral realism or believe God exists is not modest by any means. We have reason to believe in moral realism, and it is from evidence other than a belief in God.

Consider that we know that pain is bad, which is why “(all things equal) we ought to give strangers an aspirin when they have headaches.” We know this because we know what it’s like to have a headache, not because we know God hates headaches. If God was used as evidence for moral realism, then we would have to know something like (a) the nature of God and (b) that the nature of God is perfection.

It is immodest to require anyone to believe in God insofar as God’s existence is controversial. Perhaps the main problem is the belief that God is supernatural. Whenever we talk about the supernatural, we are talking about something we can’t examine or test—and something that almost by definition defies our experiences of reality. The “intuitions” people have concerning God have also been proved inconsistent. Many Christians think God must be omnipotent and supernatural, but not everyone agrees with those beliefs.

Conclusion

No one has all the answers, but it certainly hasn’t been proven that atheistic evolution and moral realism are inconsistent. To do so would require us to prove that atheistic evolution and moral realism couldn’t possibly be true at the same time—but to do that would require us to prove every version of moral realism to be incompatible with every epistemological theory compatible with atheism.

I am not saying that “it’s my way or the highway.” It’s not that I have all the answers and everyone has to agree with me. There are serious meta-ethical theories in philosophy all competing right now. However, atheism is compatible with all of the competing contemporary moral realist theories that I know of—including Platonism and intuitionism. (That’s not to say that theism isn’t also compatible with such theories.)

How should we decide what theory to believe in? It’s not an all or nothing decision to make. You don’t have to prove that all theories are impossible except the one you accept. Instead, I suggest that a careful analysis of pros and cons must be assessed. There are multiple positive epistemic traits a theory can have that make it more plausible, and some theories have a better combination of positive traits than another. For more information, see my essay on “Knowledge, Justification, and Theoretical Virtues.” Such theoretical virtues are themselves up for debate and are “contentious.” For example, empiricists will reject self-evidence. However, the alternative of doing philosophy (and trying to decide what theory is “most justified”) isn’t looking good.

The best way to argue for a moral realist theory is not to try to prove that all the alternatives are impossible. That is too ambitious for the reasons given above. Instead, a careful analysis of theoretical virtues in an attempt to prove one theory to be “more justified” than the rest would be much more modest and much more likely to be convincing as a consequence. (For example, theistic moral realism seems to violate Occam’s razor.)

Update (1/26/11): I added a clarification to the introduction, and I clarified the objection, “Is theistic moral realism plausible?”

Note

1 What about masochists and the fact that pain can help us? You might want to read my essay, “What does ‘meaning of life’ mean?” for one answer to these concerns.


Filed under: epistemology, ethics, metaethics, philosophy, review Tagged: atheism, god, morality

Questions For Atheistic Moral Realists Answered

Published
by
James Gray
on January 18, 2011
.

The Thinking Christian, Tom Gilson, thinks moral realism requires God, and says that the following questions are somehow a problem for atheistic moral realists (mainly concerning a potential eternal moral reality.) I will respond to the questions using my own perspective, but atheists and theists alike will disagree about how to best answer them:

1. What is a moral value or duty; specifically, to whom or what is it a value, and to whom or what is the duty directed, owed, or pointed?

Moral duty is an ambiguous term that can have different meanings. My preferred definition is “what should be done due to the great importance (intrinsic value) involved when it’s not too difficult to do it.” Duties are owed to people and other sentient beings either because they or their conscious states have intrinsic value. For example, you have a duty not to kill people because their life has intrinsic value.

Moral realism doesn’t require that duties exist as abstract entities. We can agree to have duties by understanding the importance intrinsic values. You ought to do certain things because it is intrinsically good to do so, even if there are no “duties” of the abstract highly demanding variety.

Imagine if Christianity is true. In that case you would still exist after you die, so it would be mysterious why killing people is such a big deal. Some Christians admit that death is not such a big deal. Some religious people have become suicide bombers for that reason.

2. To whom or what was it directed, owed, or pointed when there was no person in the universe toward whom it could have been so pointed?

Intrinsic values determine what we ought to do. If there are no people and nothing of intrinsic value, then there is nothing one ought to do. However, it is conceptually true that a person named John ought not punch his brother Charlie in the face for absolutely no reason while they are watching television together. This situation might never happen, but it is still true.

This question is like asking, “Was tyrannosaurus rex a dinosaur before dinosaurs existed?” There was no such thing yet, but the fact that tyrannosaurus rex is a dinosaur is conceptually true—and that conceptual truth is timeless.

Would a Christian think that an essence of tyrannosaurus rex must exist for all eternity? Could such an essense be used to prove that God must exist—because such an essence couldn’t exist without God? I think not.

3. Who or what held any responsibility for these moral values or duties before there was any intelligent life?

No one. Moral responsibility requires a mind with a certain level of rationality. You can’t have moral responsibility without intelligent life.

If Christianity is true, then God would qualify as “intelligent life” and this question would be nonsense.

4. In what did these values or duties inhere, or in other words, where did they exist?

The word “exist” is a strange word concerning properties. Where does the solidity of my hand exist? Does it exist in my hand? Intrinsic values are properties of consciousness (minds) or states of consciousness. If conscious life has intrinsic value, then conscious life has the property of intrinsic goodness. I suppose the property exists within consciousness, if anywhere.

5. Was there such a thing as evil while the stars and planets were forming? What was it?

Moral realism doesn’t require the concept of “evil,” but the main idea of evil seems to be that someone is malicious and enjoys harming others. The definition of evil can be true even before life exists, but evil does not exist without actual evil people. This question is similar to question #2 above—and the answer is similar to the fact that tyrannosaurus rex would conceptually count as a dinosaur before it actually exists.

6. Was killing immoral for the first 3 billion or so years of evolution, before humans arrived? Jordan says yes; but animals killing animals certainly wasn’t immoral then, nor is it now. There was no immoral killing until humans came, as far as I know.

It is immoral for morally responsible people to kill as a conceptual truth, but there were no such morally responsible people during that time. Again, see #2 above.

When humans arrived, what was it about us that made it (frequently) immoral for us to kill? Note that we take it that it’s not just about killing each other; we often consider it immoral to kill animals, too.

We have the rationality required to find out that something has value and the ability to control ourselves and act according to our moral beliefs.

8. Moral standards have changed over time, and in fact have oscillated back and forth on some issues (abortion, infanticide, homosexual relationships, for example). Jordan seems to take it that this moment in history represents the “right” moment on abortion, I think; he definitely takes it that this is the “right” moment on homosexuality. So where we’re heading as a culture on homosexual rights is in the direction of what has been eternally morally true. How can he be sure of this? What is the measuring stick? Is this not possibly chronological/cultural chauvinism?

We have no good reason to think homosexuality is wrong. The fact that a so-called holy book says its wrong is not a good argument and means no more than a holy book that says eating shellfish is wrong—or the countless other examples of strange things put in holy books.

It might be possible that homosexuality is wrong just like it might be possible that standing on one’s head is wrong. Sure, it’s possible in some far-fetched sense, but it’s implausible. We simply need to reject that things are immoral unless we have a good reason to say that they are. To say something is immoral can harm people, and we shouldn’t be causing harm without a good reason for doing so.

9. And to tie together two of the previous bullets, does Jordan think that seven billion years ago it was morally that same-sex couples should have the right to unite and call it marriage?

If consenting homosexual people want to marry each other, then they should have that right. That’s true conceptually even though there were no such consenting homosexual adults during a long period of time. (Again, see #2 above.)


Filed under: ethics, philosophy Tagged: atheism, god, theism

Ethical Realism is Now on Twitter and Facebook

Published
by
James Gray
on January 17, 2011
.

You can find Ethical Realism at twitter using the following URL: http://twitter.com/#!/ethicalrealism

You can find Ethical Realism on Facebook by using the following URL: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ethical-Realism/108132484137


Filed under: philosophy Tagged: facebook, twitter