On Living Life and Accepting Death

  photo by Lari Huttunen (cc by-nc-nd 2.0)

I don’t believe in an afterlife, which means I do believe in death. It shouldn’t be such a strange thing to believe life ends in death, but most people believe or at least hope for more. Death denial is an understandable impulse; sometimes it even extends to family pets, but less often to other animals. We want ourselves and those we care about to carry on. We won’t. They won’t.

Does the reality of death mean life doesn’t matter? No, it means life is the only thing that matters. You get once chance to exist and it’s happening now. Now is the time to love, the time to learn, the time to create, the time to enjoy yourself and choose to either bring comfort or suffering to others.

What about jerks who prosper in life and kind people who live hard lives? Doesn’t the reality of death mean the world is unjust? Yes. That may sound harsh, but how kind is it to tell people that the suffering and deaths of their loved ones is for the best? It can be disheartening to know we can’t make everything better, but what we can do matters all the more because there’s no other help on the way.

Besides, popular alternatives tend to be worse. At least suffering and injustice end along with life. Mainstream Christian and Muslim beliefs promise unending joy for a select few and unending suffering for most people. That’s solving a house fire with an atom bomb.

Why not just have as much pleasure in life as possible and forget about other people? Well, there’s nothing wrong with pleasure. Pleasure is great and it comes in many satisfying forms! As a loved one says: “No time enjoyed is entirely wasted.” As for ignoring the suffering of other people, moral philosophers have tried in vain to find a reason for completely selfish people to care about others. You have to start with caring a little. Thankfully, most of us do. We don’t have to solve whole categories of suffering on our own; we can cooperate with others, working within the limits of our imperfect empathy and our incomplete understanding to make our lives a little better.

“If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.”

— Emily Dickinson

Moral Training Wheels

"Finally, on the theistic hypothesis God holds all persons morally accountable for their actions. Evil and wrong will be punished; righteousness will be vindicated. Good ultimately triumphs over evil, and we shall finally see that we do live in a moral universe after all. Despite the inequities of this life, in the end the scales of God’s justice will be balanced. Thus, the moral choices we make in this life are infused with an eternal significance. We can with consistency make moral choices which run contrary to our self-interest and even undertake acts of extreme self-sacrifice, knowing that such decisions are not empty and ultimately meaningless gestures."

— William Lane Craig, "Can We Be Good Without God?"

A friend of mine recently scolded her cat for starting to play with an electrical cord. It wouldn't do any good to lecture the cat about how dangerous electricity can be, so an imposed association between electrical cords and punishment are needed to keep her cat safe when no one is watching. The same applies to toddlers. Adult humans avoid chewing on electrical cords because they don't want to be shocked. No stand-in motivation needed!

When it comes to moral situations, some philosophers try to show that acting morally is in our own best interest, either all the time or often enough that we tend to come out ahead in life if we cultivate moral habits. Other philosophers (and many preachers) claim that acting morally is in our own best interest because we will be punished or rewarded in an afterlife. The quote at the top of this post is such an example: William Lane Craig believes that self-sacrifice is "empty" if it doesn't eventually turn into huge rewards for the person doing the sacrificing.

In other words, there's a tendency to reduce morality to self-interest. I believe this is a mistake. While it's true that moral action often works in our own favor, the essence of morality is other-interest.

But there's a problem: some people don't have much in the way of other-interest. How do we convince them to act in the interests of others anyway? Impose an association between harming others and punishment, or an association between helping others and reward. It's another kind of stand-in motivation.

Punishment and reward are training wheels for human beings who can grow in understanding (to better achieve what they want and avoid what they don't) and who can grow in empathy (to better care about what others want). Training wheels might keep your bike from falling over, but you aren't truly riding until you no longer need them. When I read things like the quote at the top of this post, I see a desire for perfect training wheels: the appearance of moral justice without any need to act out of the interest of others.

Nicomachean Ethics (Pt. 2)

[Series introduction and table of contents here.]

Book I, Chapter 4

In my comments on Chapter 2, I described Aristotle's "grand goal" as the political art. That wasn't quite right. What he was saying back then and reiterates here in Chapter 4 is that the highest of goods is the same as whatever the political art's goal is. He sees politics as the most encompassing activity in human life, so its goal would be the most encompassing goal. And what is the goal of the political art? Happiness.

All human activities are subordinate to politics and politics is aimed at happiness. Got it. Aristotle doesn't feel the need to argue for the answer of "happiness" because he takes it as universally accepted by both "the many" and "the refined." (Yes, he's just a tad elitist.) He does note that "the many" give a variety of explanations for what constitutes happiness, e.g. health, wealth, pleasure, etc.

"Certain others, in addition, used to suppose that the good is something else, by itself, apart from these many good things, which is also the cause of their all being good."

"Certain others" being Plato and friends, obviously. It's interesting how Aristotle puts some distance between himself and this view. Before he elaborates, however, he goes off on another tangent about arguing from principles vs. arguing to principles. Why does he do this? I think it's because he wants to excuse himself from starting with Plato's principles. He actually names Plato as someone who understood these two different directions of argument. He's tip-toeing around his audience's reverence for his own former teacher. Aristotle is firmly on the side of arguing to principles, which might sound bad until you realize he's trying to be more of a scientist than an ideologue; he wants to use induction to discover what the true principles are from "things known to us" rather than "things known simply."

"Perhaps it is necessary for us, at least, to begin from the things known to us."

See, he's not being arrogant by going his own way from Plato. He's being extra humble.

Book I, Chapter 5

There are three "especially prominent" ways of life:

The life of enjoyment. This is what "the many" choose to pursue, though some rulers do as well. Aristotle calls this "the life of fattened cattle." These people think happiness and pleasure are the same.

The political life. The "refined and active" live the political life by pursuing honor...or maybe virtue. Aristotle considers the possibility that honor is more of a reaction people have when they encounter a person with virtue, which would make virtue the primary goal. He's not quite happy with this result, however, since there are many cases where the exercise of virtue and happiness seem at odds.

"For it seems to be possible for someone to possess virtue even while asleep or while being inactive throughout life and, in addition to these, while suffering badly and undergoing the greatest misfortune. But no one would deem happy somebody living in this way, unless he were defending a thesis."

Funny! But I have to wonder if Aristotle is being overly dismissive of the possibility of being fulfilled and happy despite great suffering, because a person is so overwhelmingly interested in what they're accomplishing.

The contemplative life. A footnote here says that Aristotle doesn't get around to explaining the contemplative life until Book X, Chapters 6-8. I've already seen how easily distracted he is, but this has to be some kind of record! Is "sophistication" a Greek word meaning "disorganized"?

Book I, Chapter 6

Aristotle argues that good can't be a Platonic form (see the "Certain others..." block quote above) because, roughly:

• For something to have a Platonic form, its expressions must pertain to a "common idea."
• Good can pertain to both what something is and its relations to other things.
• What something is is an essential property.
• How something relates to other things is an accidental property.
• A common idea can't be both essential and accidental.
• Therefore good can't be a Platonic form.

He goes on to list other difficulties in understanding good as a single idea. But then he admits that maybe we can divide instances of good into "things good in themselves" and things that "are advantageous" so we can consider whether the multiplicities of good might only be a problem for the latter category (what philosophers today call "instrumental good"). Perhaps there is a single idea common to all things good in themselves. For example, what if the idea of good itself is the only thing that is good in itself? Aristotle calls this "pointless."

In order to avoid pointlessness, it must be the case that all instances of things that are good in themselves outwardly manifest good in a common way, "just as the definition of whiteness is the same in the case of snow and in that of white lead." Aristotle believes that "honor, prudence, and pleasure" are good in themselves because people pursue these things for their own sake (even if they also pursue them in an instrumental sense). He doesn't see how the good of honor and the good of pleasure, for example, manifest in a common way, so good can't be a Platonic form even if we set aside instrumental goodness.

Now Aristotle has a problem. Why the heck do we call all of these disparate things "good" if they don't share a common idea?

"For they are not like things that share the same name by chance. Is it by dint of their stemming from one thing or because they all contribute to one thing? Or is it more that they are such by analogy?"

He doesn't have a ready answer. Instead, he points back at the Platonists and accuses them of having problems explaining how totally abstract forms and concrete human action interact with each other. Reminds me of physicalists in philosophy of mind who defend themselves by pointing out issues with Cartesian dualism.

I wonder what Aristotle would have made of Paul Ziff's book, Semantic Analysis. It seems to me that Ziff answered the question by discovering that things are never good in themselves and it's the other category that can fold neatly into a single idea.


Quotes from: Bartlett, R.C. & Collins, S.D. (2011). Aristotle's nicomachean ethics: A new translation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Nicomachean Ethics (Pt. 1)

Time for a good old-fashioned blogmentary! In this series, I'm going all the way back to ancient Greek moral philosophy. Most of my previous readings in ethics have been more-or-less contemporary, with a side of Hume, Kant, and Mill. While I'm not a fan of confusing philosophy with history of philosophy, this Aristotle fellow keeps popping up in current, actively-defended philosophy. He's resilient! I decided it's high time to get acquainted with Aristotle's ethics beyond the popular quotes I've encountered elsewhere.

So you understand where I'm coming from, I have a very goal-oriented view of morality. Descriptively, morality arises from deeply-held human values. Normatively, moral truth arises from a fitting application of decisions or policies to the way the world works. This means I have a decidedly practical rather than mystical view of morality. In the not-so-helpful language of metaethics, "cognitivism," "success theory," "anti-realism," and "hybrid expressivism" should put you in the right neighborhood.

I will be using Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins' new (2011) translation, as pictured above. They pursued formal equivalence—as opposed to dynamic equivalence—to provide readers with a less filtered experience of Aristotle's wording. Think NASB instead of NIV or CEV, if you're familiar with Bible translations (and their acronyms!). I have no set plan on how much to write per original text or even if I'll comment on the whole thing. So long as I find the material interesting and worth discussing, I will. Finally, I encourage you to pick up a paperback copy for yourself. The Kindle edition has a typo in the first sentence and takes away from the excellent footnotes on nearly every page.

Series Links

• Pt. 1 — Introduction and Book I, Chapters 1-3.
• Pt. 2 — Book I, Chapters 4-6. 
• [On hold indefinitely. Aristotle is so very repetitive.]

Book I, Chapter 1

"Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action as well as choice, is held to aim at some good. Hence people have nobly declared that the good is that at which all things aim."

Quite an opening line. The first sentence calls out for elaboration. Given an art, inquiry, action, or choice, what is the good being targeted? The second sentence is, intriguingly, hedged. Aristotle isn't flat-out saying all things aim at "the good." He's putting a common view on the table and expressing some sympathy for the people who take that view. It's one thing to say all things aim at "some good"; another to say all things aim at the same good. Even if they do, is this common good so abstract that we can only call it "the good"?

Aristotle immediately raises a difficulty with this noble declaration: how can all things aim at the same good when there are different types of things aimed at? As he puts it, "there appears to be a certain difference among the ends." Some ends are direct. The end of shipbuilding is the production of a ship. Other ends are indirect. The end of building warships isn't just the production of a warship, but of winning a war.

When one end is pursued as a means to a more encompassing end, Aristotle calls the encompassing end "naturally better" and "more choice-worthy." I'm less sure. Take bread-making, for example. The immediate end is the production of a loaf of bread. A further end is to alleviate hunger. Does this necessarily mean the work of alleviating hunger is better than the action of baking bread? Bread isn't the only way to take care of hunger; opening a can of beans could do the job. A person might value bread-making in itself, over and above its use as a hunger banisher. In other words, bread-making might have both instrumental and final value. (Or instrumental and intrinsic value, if you're not hip to Korsgaard).

I'm wary about pushing all value for one activity into its encompassing activity because it can lead pretty quickly to single-value ethics such as Mill's grand goal of aggregate happiness or Rand's grand goal of extending one's own lifespan. While we may value such broad ends and engage in many activities that promote them, I think it's a mistake—an error in judging human psychology—to empty all other values into such pools. The error is especially clear in Ayn Rand's case: we need to live to experience life, but what makes our lives worth living is more than just the time spent.

Book I, Chapter 2

"If, therefore, there is some end of our actions that we wish for on account of itself, the rest being things we wish for on account of this end, and if we do not choose all things on account of something else—for in this way the process will go on infinitely such that the longing involved is empty and pointless—clearly this would be the good, that is, the best."

Freshmen programmers who don't understand the need for a base case in recursive functions should be ashamed of themselves. The ancient Greeks knew this stuff! (They also put your middle school Geometry skills to shame.) Anyway, I still think Aristotle is wrong to ignore the possibility of multiple ends in the "on account of itself" category. But since he thunders on past that, what is his grand goal? ...the political art. Huh? I didn't see that coming, but it does make sense of this edition's beautiful cover art.

Aristotle lists activities such as economics, warfare, and rhetoric which can all be understood as supporting politics. Today we might say that all things are done for the good of society.

"[T]he good of the individual by himself is certainly desirable enough, but that of a nation and of cities is nobler and more divine."

Why not say that the good of nations and cities is subordinate to the good it produces for individuals? It will be interesting to see how Aristotle handles situations where what's good for the state is very bad for some individuals. Or when what's good for individuals is irrelevant to what's good or bad for society.

Book I, Chapter 3

This chapter argues for approaching political science in a rough—rather than an unduly precise—manner.

"The noble things and the just things, which the political art examines, admit of much dispute and variability, such that they are held to exist by law alone and not by nature. And even the good things admit of some such variability on account of the harm that befalls many people as a result of them: it has happened that some have been destroyed on account of their wealth, other on account of their courage"

Oh what a relief! He admits there are problems when civic good or other virtues are pushed to the extremes without considering their effects. Maybe he was familiar with Greek tragedies? This should have prompted some reflection on his part. If your great all-encompassing good can have bad effects, isn't this a flashing clue that you have the wrong fundamental good...or at least not the only fundamental good?

After some snappy characterizations of mathematicians and youngsters, Aristotle praises an attitude of patience when learning. He says his teachings are pointless for people who just follow their passions unreflectively, but of great benefit to people who "fashion their longings in accord with reason and act accordingly." This makes me ask myself, "When was the last time I allowed learning to shape my actions, and not just to justify them?" Honestly, not long ago, considering I participated in the political art just this week and made a different choice than I did four years ago.

Impurity and Total Value

I don't remember much about school before high school, but I do remember my seventh grade Reading class and the city-wide furor that came out of it. I think of that class in two parts. In the first, I was surprised that something as fun as reading fiction could be a class in school. My teacher, Ms. L., had a positive attitude and was great at helping individual students find books that interested them. I hope these kind of classes are still popular beyond the standard English Lit curriculum.

Then the crisis. Sticking to the public record, let's just say my mother objected to some of the material that was read out loud in my classroom, then in other Reading classrooms, then in the school library. What followed was a typical book challenge followed by a not-so-typical political movement culminating in her election to the school board. Some challenged books were moved to the high school library and some were reviewed and remained where they were. Emotions were high on both sides, to put it mildly. The whole ordeal changed more in terms of the people involved than the availability of the books in question. I'm intentionally being vague about other people, but I was pulled out of public school.

Fast forward two decades. I'm a card carrying member of the ACLU and about one-third of the way through a Master of Library and Information Science program. One of my personal goals is to reduce the kind of antagonism I witnessed back in junior high. I'm sure there are some irresolvable points of difference, but I'm also sure there is substantial room for improvement. In this post, I want to highlight one way challengers and defenders talk past each other.

Of Cake and Hair

A frequently used metaphor in the Harry Bosch noir detective series is "hair on the cake." This refers to the way one little legal problem with a criminal case can screw the whole thing up. No matter how great 99.99% of the cake may be, the hair ruins it.

Some people take the same approach to books, movies, music, etc. One rude word and the whole work is "trash" so far as they're concerned. One depiction of sex or violence and it's "unsuitable for minors." (Well, in America, it takes violence at the level of Cormic McCarthy rather than John Wayne. Meanwhile, mentioning female sexuality at all is sufficient.)

98% Fat Free!

A very different approach is to focus on the value of a work on the whole. A person who takes this approach might not approve of every element, but still believes the book/movie/album/etc. is worthwhile for its overall message, or its social importance, or a greater proportion of good bits. For example, one of my favorite books is John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, despite some rather disgusting cultural bigotry near the beginning.

The Disconnect

When two people who take these different approaches argue about whether X is a good book, or Y is a good movie, or Z is a good album, they're going to think the other person is totally daft in the very common case where the material has a little objectionable content.

The objector will point at this rude word or that sexual passage as if they're hairs on a cake; since it has these elements at all, the work in question is therefore bad. Meanwhile, the defender will ask, "Did you read the whole thing?" Since the answer is usually "no," the defender is baffled; how could the objector possibly have a valid opinion about the goodness or badness of the work as a whole? And so it goes.

For a relatively recent example, check out this letter to the editor. Scroggins, the objector, writes of the novel Speak:

"As the main character in the book is alone with a boy who is touching her female parts, she makes the statement that this is what high school is supposed to feel like. The boy then rapes her on the next page. Actually, the book and movie both contain two rape scenes."

Scroggins is complaining about the inclusion of any sexual elements in a book about dealing with rape. He doesn't seem to care about the book's impact on helping young people avoid dangerous situations and, especially, helping them deal with life after rape. It mentions sexuality in relation to *gasp* high schoolers, so it has to go. (The author's response is worth a read.)

A Tactic For Reconnecting

Now I do think it's appropriate to respond to objections by listing a work's virtues and weigh them against whatever content people find objectionable, but if it's clear that the objector is of the "hair on the cake" variety, this difference in philosophy needs to be directly addressed. No matter how many virtues a defender lists, the objector can still wave around the "bad bits" as if they settle the matter. By explicitly and repeatedly refocusing the question on whether — in general principle — the presence of bad bits makes a work bad, one of three things might happen:

• The objector refuses to acknowledge the question, which will cause the objector to lose credibility with onlookers who understand the question.
• The objector affirms that the presence of bad bits makes any work bad. The defender can then highlight respected works with bad bits to, again, cause the objector to lose credibility with many onlookers.
• The objector affirms that the presence of bad bits doesn't necessarily make a work bad. Now the objector is publicly committed to weighing the various elements of any given work. Differences in judgment may still occur, but at least a conversation about overall value has become possible.

I hope that greater awareness of these two approaches of "It's impure!" vs. "It has positive total value!" can help everyone in such disputes understand each other better and pin down any essential points of disagreement more quickly. Disagreements happen, but misdiagnosing the disagreement makes resolution unnecessarily difficult.

I'll leave you with a quote from the 1950's that could have been written this year:

"The major characteristic which makes for the all-important difference seems to me to be this: that the selector's approach is positive, while that of the censor is negative. This is more than a verbal quibble; it transforms the entire act and the steps included in it. For to the selector, the important thing is to find reasons to keep the book. Given such a guiding principle, the selector looks for values, for strengths, for virtues which will over shadow minor objections. For the censor, on the other hand, the important thing is to find reasons to reject the book; his guiding principle leads him to seek out the objectionable features, the weaknesses, the possibilities for misinterpretation. The positive selector asks what the reaction of a rational intelligent adult would be to the content of the work; the censor fears for the results on the weak, the warped, and the irrational. The selector says, if there is anything good in this book let us try to keep it; the censor says, if there is anything bad in this book, let us reject it. And since there is seldom a flawless work in any form, the censor's approach can destroy much that is worth saving." — Lester Asheim, Not Censorship But Selection

Reasons of Love & Living a Meaningful Life

Creative Commons (cclark395).

What does it mean to live a meaningful life? Googling for "meaningful life" does turn up material written from the perspective of academic philosophy, but the first hit has to do with "psycho-spiritual lessons" from Jewish mysticism. There are also a variety of pages giving advice on how to get involved with advocacy or how to change personal habits in a goal-oriented way. This may be the area of popular philosophy most neglected by English-speaking philosophers, but it's not neglected by all of them.

A few years ago, Susan Wolf gave a pair of lectures titled: Meaning in Life and Why It Matters. These have recently been put into book form along with some responses. Since the book is overdue locally, I read through a slightly less polished PDF version (and will be quoting from that). Anyway, I warmed up to Wolf's approach pretty fast when I read this bit:

"In offering a conception of meaningfulness, I do not wish to insist that the term is always used in the same way, or that what I have to offer as an analysis of meaningfulness can be substituted for that term in every context. On the other hand, I do believe that much talk of meaning is aimed at capturing the same abstract idea, and that my proposal of what that idea is fits well with many of the uses to which the word is put."

This is a bit like Paul Ziff's treatment of the meaning of "good" — at its most general — as answering to certain interests implied by context. Seemingly different usages of "good" can be understood in this more abstract fashion. Wolf wants give an abstract explanation of meaning-in-life talk that works for specific instances. How does her "conception of meaningfulness" shake out? Before getting into details, it's important to understand what she means by the phrase "reasons of love."

Reasons of Love

Kant sought for moral principles in a kind of rational willpower that didn't depend one bit on consequences or, especially, human desires:

"That an action done from duty derives its moral worth, not from the purpose which is to be attained by it, but from the maxim by which it is determined, and therefore does not depend on the realization of the object of the action, but merely on the principle of volition by which the action has taken place, without regard to any object of desire."
— Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

Philippa Foot challenged this idea by suggesting that the pursuit of some human desires could be what morality is really all about:

"It will surely be allowed that quite apart from thoughts of duty a man may care about the suffering of others, having a sense of identification with them, and wanting to help if he can. Of course he must want not the reputation of charity, nor even a gratifying role helping others, but, quite simply, their good. If this is what he does care about, then he will be attached to the end proper to the virtue of charity and a comparison with someone acting from an ulterior motive (even a respectable ulterior motive) is out of place."
— Philippa Foot, Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives

Just because I'm following my own desire to help another person doesn't make my action selfish. Our desires can be self-oriented or other-oriented. It's not a stretch to say that a person acting out of other-oriented desires is acting out of love, i.e. acting for reasons of love. This might explain why we don't worry about people (or robots) with poor reasoning as much as we worry about those with excellent reasoning but who lack other-oriented desires.

Does this mean that acting for moral reasons and acting for reasons of love are equivalent? Susan Wolf says no. We can have and pursue desires which aren't particularly self-oriented, but they aren't particularly moral either. These desires might be oriented toward other people (e.g. helping a friend move) or they might be oriented toward impersonal interests (e.g. keeping a garden free of weeds). Wolf's categories look something like this:

My Desires

• Self-oriented (selfish reasons)
• Impersonal interest oriented (reasons of love)
• Other-oriented Non-moral (reasons of love)
• Other-oriented Moral (moral reasons)

No One's Desires

• Kant's notion of moral duty (dualistic moral reason)

Wolf admits she is lumping together two categories under the "reasons of love" label, but this is because she wants to emphasize that there are desires (and therefore reasons) which fall outside of the other categories:

"My claim then is that reasons of love – whether of people, ideals or other sorts of objects - have a distinctive and important role in our lives, not to be assimilated to reasons of self-interest or to reasons of morality. Insofar as we fail to recognize and appreciate the legitimacy and value of these reasons, we misunderstand ourselves and our values and distort our concerns."

Maybe you're skeptical. If you have an expansive view of morality, you might want to put both categories of other-oriented desires together. This would imply that, for example, a desire to help a kid learn to read would be both a reason of love and a moral reason. Environmentally minded folks might even want to make impersonal projects like preserving biodiversity a moral issue. Most fundamentally, isn't love itself a moral positive? This is all fine. I understand Wolf to be talking about strong moral imperatives when she talks about morality. We don't expect everyone to personally go out of their way to combat illiteracy or preserve an obscure plant species the way we might expect them to go out of their way to combat hunger or injustice.

The important thing about reasons of love is that they're personal and passionately held. Yours and mine can be quite different, and that's ok. I don't have to love your spouse the way you love your spouse. I don't need to feel the same thrill participating in cosplay culture that you do.

As you may have guessed by now, these personal and passionately held reasons of love are a central figure in Wolf's views on what it means for a life to be meaningful.

Engaging With What We Love

"Essentially, the idea is that a person’s life can be meaningful only if she cares fairly deeply about some things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged, or as I earlier put it, if she loves something– as opposed to being bored by or alienated from most or all that she does."

This is the first of the two parts of Wolf's "conception of meaningfulness." She's trying to capture the idea of finding your passion and actively pursuing it. This is subjective and can vary a lot from person to person, especially since she's talking about passions which aren't self-oriented desires or universal moral duties. Maybe I have a passion for dance, or writing about philosophy, or competitive video gaming. I don't think Wolf mentions it, but we might put charity causes here which are clearly moral but the particular cause isn't something we expect everyone to be involved with. So organizing and then participating in a breast cancer walk could count as a personal passion for an individual.

All of these things bring us "feelings of fulfillment" that living a merely selfish life or living only for an abstract moral code doesn't seem to provide. What's especially interesting about fulfillment so construed is that what fulfills me may not be the same as what's healthy or comfortable for me, or what makes me happy, or what morality demands. Our reasons of love can be in competition with these other human goods.

Loving What's Worthwhile

The other part of Wolf's "conception of meaningfulness" has to do with a worry that might have come up when you read the last couple of paragraphs: doesn't it matter which passions we pursue? Would a person's life be meaningful if she pursues passions that are pointless? What about passions that are wickedly dangerous to others?

Wolf uses Richard Taylor's thought experiment of Sisyphus fulfilled. Instead of feeling bad about rolling a boulder up a hill forever, this Sisyphus loves rolling the boulder uphill all day every day. Since he is subjectively fulfilled by following his passion, shouldn't we characterize him as living a meaningful life? Wolf writes:

"Something desirable seems missing from his life despite his experience of fulfillment. Since what is missing is not a subjective matter – from the inside, we may assume that Sisyphus’s life is as good as can be – we must look for an objective feature that characterizes what is lacking."

For this objective feature, Wolf appeals to another common way of talking about meaning in life: being involved with something "larger than oneself." Of course this is figurative; it doesn't mean that caring for a physically larger person counts while caring for a physically smaller person would not (otherwise, sorry babies!). Wolf takes it to mean that a person with a meaningful life must be engaged with something that has value beyond or outside the value she herself places on it. If Sisyphus is the only one who esteems boulder rolling, then his love for boulder rolling may make him feel fulfilled but it doesn't give his life meaning in the bigger picture outside of his mind.

This might not sound objective enough to you. Wolf wrestles with this problem too. On the one hand, she wants to be "minimally exclusive" when it comes to defining the kind of objectivity required. On the other hand, she wonders how we could maintain, e.g. that adding an observer who feels fulfilled by watching Sisyphus merrily roll his bounder would suddenly make Sisyphus' life meaningful. How could multiplying subjective valuers create objective value? After a few pages, Wolf concludes:

"Though I believe we have good reason to reject a radically subjective account of value, it is far from clear what a reasonably complete and defensible nonsubjective account will look like. The absence of such an account gives us all the more reason to be tentative in our judgments about what sorts of project deserve inclusion in the class of activities that can contribute to the meaningfulness of a life."

She's inclined to call some activities objectively worthwhile (even if no one else appreciates them) and others not worthwhile (even if lots of people value them), yet she tries hard to avoid the charge of snobbery by admitting it's hard to be sure which is which, or to even apply any certain methods of making such determinations.

Fitting Fulfillment

Putting these two parts together, Wolf sums up her "fitting fulfillment" view like this:

"[M]eaning arises when subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness, and one is able to do something good or positive about it."

or

"[M]eaning arises from loving objects worthy of love and engaging with them in a positive way."

Or is that three parts? It's multi-part at any rate. But why would a single concept — meaningfulness — have distinct parts like this? Wolf argues that these parts are intertwined even when we talk in ways that make them seem like separate concerns. In subjectivity, an element of objectivity:

"When someone recommends that you find your passion and go for it, it seems, there is a hope, if not an expectation, lurking in the background, too. The hope is that the passion you find will be an intelligible one, within a certain range. You will not be passionate – at least not for too long – about stone-rolling, or Sudokus, or caring for your goldfish, or making handwritten copies of War and Peace."

And in objectivity, an element of subjectivity:

"[W]hen the recommendation to get involved with something larger than oneself is offered, it is typically offered in the hope, if not the expectation that if one does get so involved, it will make one feel good. The thought is that if one tries it, one will like it, and one will like it in part because of one’s recognition that one is doing something independently valuable."

I'm surprised she didn't include a Yin Yang diagram. While I was reading Wolf's paper, I wanted to say that fulfillment (subjective) and meaning (objective) could simply be treated as separate, peer ideas. Now I'm not so sure. She makes an interesting point about background assumptions when we talk about one idea or the other. Plus, it's a fact that we casually use "meaning" to refer to both aspects. Perhaps we do operate on a two-fold conception of meaning in life.

Human Nature & The Nature of Value

I'm one of those people who gets uncomfortable when the term "objective value" comes up. Means-end value, I understand. Subjective valuing, I understand. But I come up empty when I try to grasp value that is neither means-end nor subjective. I want to collapse Wolf's objective element into one or both of the kinds of value that make sense to me.

So how about this: because intellectually mature humans are social beings by nature, a significant portion of our subjective fulfillment is held hostage by the valuing of others. We crave appreciation, if not for ourselves then at least for our projects or for the results of our projects. I may love tapping piano keys randomly, but if I realize that no one else appreciates or even would appreciate this form of music, my social desires are frustrated. Wolf touches on this idea when she writes about "our need (or wish) not to be alone" and to "see (or try to see) oneself from an external point of view."

What about joyful Sisyphus? If he is fully satisfied because he loves boulder rolling and isn't frustrated even knowing that no one else could share his appreciation for boulder rolling, then — in a sense — he isn't human. He may share my DNA, but his psychology is alien to me. On this view, only subjective value is needed. The constraint on activities we call "meaningful" comes from typical human nature, not from an impersonal source of value.

Now what would be really interesting would be another society (with human DNA or not) that so differs in their valuings that our projects are meaningless to them, and their projects are meaningless to us. This implies neither our lives nor their lives would be meaningful in a sense that transcends all valuers, but I don't understand what it would mean for life to be meaningful in that sense anyway.

On "The Ethics of Belief"

In his 1877 essay, The Ethics of Belief, William Clifford claims: "it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." The bulk of the essay is concerned with what counts as sufficient evidence, but I'm not going to get into that here. Let's just assume it's clear when a belief is based on sufficient vs. insufficient evidence.

A Sea Tale

What's so ethically wrong about believing something upon insufficient evidence? Clifford begins by telling a story about a shipowner who doubted his ship was safe, but stifled his doubts until he came to sincerely believe it was safe. The ship sank and he received his insurance money. What a jerk! Intuitively, he's guilty of something. But what, exactly? Clifford writes:

"He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts. And although in the end he may have felt so sure about it that he could not think otherwise, yet inasmuch as he had knowingly and willingly worked himself into that frame of mind, he must be held responsible for it."

There's a problem here. Clifford's goal in this essay is to convince us of the wrongness of merely holding a belief without sufficient evidence. A more appropriate story would start with the shipowner believing the ship is seaworthy and then neglect to confirm his belief to some appropriate degree. He would not have "knowingly and willing worked himself into that frame of mind." We could consistently condemn someone for doubt-stifling yet not condemn someone for whom the doubt never arose.

Clifford goes on to say that the shipowner's guilt would not be reduced "one jot" if he stifled his doubts and the ship was — in fact — completely seaworthy. I agree that the shipowner would still be failing to carry out due diligence, but he can't be "guilty of the death of those men" as Clifford had claimed about the original case. This is a terrible story for making Clifford's point because it mixes in guilt for manslaughter, guilt for doubt-stifling, and the whole controversial idea that a person can choose what to believe.

Catch-22

What if the shipowner were convinced that the ship is fine, but checks it anyway to fulfill his professional obligations? Clifford would condemn him for believing the ship is fine before checking it. And even if the confident shipowner checks the ship and finds no problems, Clifford would still(!) condemn him for continuing to believe his ship is fine.

"No man holding a strong belief on one side of a question, or even wishing to hold a belief on one side, can investigate it with such fairness and completeness as if he were really in doubt and unbiased; so that the existence of a belief not founded on fair inquiry unfits a man for the performance of this necessary duty."

Why is being "really in doubt" unbiased, yet it's biased to believe something? Are doubters somehow immune to confirmation bias while believers are not? Can someone loan me a time machine so I can show Clifford the modern denialist movements?

Infection

I have to admit this bit is rather poetic:

"No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may someday explode into overt action, and leave its stamp upon our character for ever."

So not only are we in a permanent failure state if we already believe something important without sufficient evidence, any "trifling" misheld belief is just as bad. As anti-religious as Clifford is, I feel like he's introducing his own system of everyone's-a-sinner. He actually does use the word "sinful" later on.

Virtue and Vice

We finally see more explicit ethical theory two paragraphs before his oft-quoted conclusion. First, he rejects act consequentialism:

"And, as in other such cases, it is not the risk only which has to be considered; for a bad action is always bad at the time when it is done, no matter what happens afterwards."

He does dabble with justification for his maxim from rule consequentialism.

"Every time we let ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evidence. We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to, and the evil born when one such belief is entertained is great and wide."

But rule consequentialism might not cover all cases of believing for insufficient reasons. I suspect believing that one's own prescriptions are effective drugs is helpful as a rule, even though doctors sometimes prescribe placebos. Also, stifling doubts about doing something dangerous-but-necessary may increase one's chance of success.

Clifford turns to a form of virtue ethics as his primary justifications for saying it's wrong to hold any belief without sufficient evidence.

"If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done from the mere transfer of possession; he may not feel the loss, or it may prevent him from using the money badly. But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself dishonest. What hurts society is not that it should lose its property, but that it should become a den of thieves, for then it must cease to be society."

So it's not about immediate or far off consequences associated with the loss of money; it's about acting contrary to the kind of beings we are. We're social beings and social beings respect property. Likewise, beliefs held on insufficient evidence may have this or that consequence, but what's really wrong with such beliefs is that they turn us into credulous savages.

Beliefs and Ethical Goals

For Clifford, not falling into intellectual savagery is an ultimate and overriding ethical end. Holding beliefs without sufficient reason is detrimental to that end, so it's always wrong to do so. I don't think most of us would agree because we have other values that are (at least) on the same level as doing our epistemic duty.

I would connect evidence to ethics in a way that's quite significant, even if it isn't as absolute as Clifford's connection. Informally:

• Beliefs held with sufficient evidence are more likely to be true than beliefs held without sufficient evidence. 
• Goals are more likely to be achieved when holding relevant true beliefs than relevant false beliefs.
• Goals are more likely to be achieved when relevant beliefs are held with sufficient evidence.
• Ethical rightness involves maximizing the likelihood of achieving certain goals.
• Ethical rightness involves holding relevant beliefs with sufficient evidence.

At any rate, "The Ethics of Belief" is a provocative and fun read...or maybe an infuriating read. I appreciate the way he criticizes Christianity by only criticizing other religions directly. He's sure not a boring writer.

Conference Notes Day 2

[Day 1 notes here.]

Saturday's notes...

9:30

Peter Railton led off with the questions: Why did Kant write a third Critique? He had already written about pure reason and practical reason, wouldn't that cover everything? Why address judgment separately?

Answer: in order to be responsive to reasons we need some capacity that doesn't reduce to reason and isn't required by reason. The discussion of aesthetics in the Critique of Judgment is meant as an area which highlights the psychological sensibilities that drive what we do with our reasoning.

Railton went on to characterize even ordinary belief as a combination of representation and attitude. (I suppose this is what's meant by "propositional attitude" but I hadn't thought so explicitly about it before.) Adjustments to the strength of our beliefs are then characterized as adjustments to our attitude toward some proposition. Railton put up a diagram of a Bayes-like "tuning circuit" to illustrate this point. When things are working properly, our belief-attitudes should adjust each time we're faced with a confirmation or a discrepancy. I thought about entrenched political and religious divides as being cases where this "circuit" has gone into a runaway cycle of attitude reinforcement, even for what we usually think of as purely descriptive beliefs.

I really liked Railton's presentation of intrinsic value. Using the aesthetics metaphor, we don't need to believe in an ontologically mysterious value in artistic works to make sense of most "intrinsic value" talk. Instead, we can understand it as taking a broader perspective. I can't remember his example, so I'll use troll dolls. Let's say I love troll dolls. As far as I'm concerned, these things are tops when it comes to aesthetic value. But if we take a wider survey of tastes around the world and through time, troll dolls aren't going to make any Top Ten lists. Broad human sensibility isn't strongly attuned to troll dolls, even if my personal sensibility is. Meanwhile, van Gogh paintings do very very well on the broadness test.

If I could sign up for lectures with any of this conference's presenters, Railton would be my immediate choice. He's so casually thoughtful and interacts well in dialogue.

11:15 

Mark Schroeder presented his paper "Tempered Expressivism" which is more specifically about relational expressivism. I particularly like his concise definition of expressivism in this paper:

"The basic idea of expressivism is that for some sentences ‘P’, believing that P is not just a matter of having an ordinary descriptive belief. This is a way of capturing the idea that the meaning of some sentences either exceeds their factual/descriptive content or doesn’t consist in any particular factual/descriptive content at all, even in context."

Schroeder then introduces three labels for expressivist theories. Unrestrained expressivist theories allow any state of mind to be expressed by P. Restrained theories place some kind of limit, e.g. it might have to be a state of mind with which it's possible to disagree. Tempered theories have a special kind of restraint: the state of mind must be "belief involving"; there has to be a descriptive belief in there somewhere. This restriction on tempered expressivist theories helps them deal with traditional challenges to expressivism, such as how to make sense of compositions like, "If lying is wrong, then getting your little brother to lie is wrong." (See "What is the Frege-Geach Problem?").

Next, Schroeder highlights two ways descriptive beliefs can be "involved" which, in turn, leads to two forms tempered expressivism might take: hybrid expressivism and relational expressivism. The primary example Schroeder gives of hybrid expressivism is essentially Daniel Boisvert's Expressive-Assertivism, which I've written about before. There are other forms of hybrid expressivism in the literature. Relational expressivism, by contrast, hasn't really been explored. What's the difference?

hybrid expressivism — "moral sentences express states of mind that consist in both an ordinary descriptive belief and a desire-like attitude"

relational expressivism — "moral beliefs consist in a certain relation holding between one’s ordinary descriptive belief state and some kind of desire-like attitudinal state"

I'm still having a hard time fully grasping the distinction Schroeder is making here. At first, I took relational expressivism to be a more restricted form of hybrid expressivism, but this was wrong. Schroeder writes, "The key insight we’ll need is that hybrid expressivism is really just a special case of relational expressivism." From what I now understand, hybrid expressivist theories are more specific about which belief and which attitude a person must hold in order to accept a given moral sentence. Meanwhile, relational expressivist theories can get away with being less substantive about the identity of beliefs and attitudes in moral statements so long as a certain class of relationship holds between them.

Schroeder does give a rough example of relational expressivism, but then he says it's not a good example (because adding detail to the belief component shouldn't be able to flip the judgment in proper relational expressivist theories) and instead directs readers to Teemu Toppinen's paper "Belief in Expressivism" which will appear along with Schroeder's paper in Oxford Studies in Metaethics vol. 8.

2:15

Steve Finlay and Justin Snedegar presented their paper "One Ought Too Many" which defends the claim that the word 'ought' itself has a more-or-less uniform meaning, as opposed to having significantly different meanings in different kinds of sentences.

For example, suppose there's a party with the door prize of kissing Mary. Bill is holding the lucky ticket.

(1) It ought to be the case that Bill kisses Mary.
  vs.
(2) Bill ought to kiss Mary.

Finlay and Snedegar (F&S) don't insist these two sentences have identical meaning as a whole (we communicate something different when we choose one form over the other). Rather, they argue that this difference can be explained without resorting to 'ought' itself meaning one thing in the first sentence and something else in the second sentence.

What's the difference between (1) and (2)? Well, sentences like (1) are more like an impersonal evaluation of the situation while sentences like (2) are much more directly concerned with an agent's deliberative choice of what to do. These are called evaluative readings vs. deliberative readings respectively. So why do "It ought to be..." forms (tend to) generate evaluative readings and "[Agent] ought to..." forms (tend to) generate deliberative readings? If 'ought' always has the same meaning, shouldn't both readings be equally available for both sentence forms?

F&S suggest that the social and linguistic context of 'ought' can imply different contrast classes for 'ought' to operate on. Certain kinds of contrast classes result in deliberative readings. So sentences like (1) tend to generate contrast classes which yield evaluative readings. Sentences like (2) tend to generate contrast classes which yield deliberative readings. For example:

It ought to be the case that [Bill | Tom | Lucy] kisses Mary.
  vs.
Bill ought to [kiss Mary | ignore Mary | kiss Lucy].

If context suggests these as the alternatives on the table, notice how the second sentence — unlike the first — yields a set of options for a particular agent to deliberate about and choose.

It might seem like F&S are just trading one kind of complexity (multiple semantics) for another kind of complexity (adding the contrast class step), but not if the contrast class step is used in 'ought' semantics anyway, which it arguably is.

4:15

Finally, Connie Rosati gave a talk on what it means for one's life to have meaning. She spent of a lot of time criticizing Susan Wolf's views on the matter, which caused some audience consternation in the Q&A. Rosati's own views are a bit nebulous. She focused on the idea of communicating something through one's life, but didn't want to require that anyone actually receive this communication, nor did she want to allow just any sort of powerfully communicating life to count (someone had dragged out Hitler).

Provocatively, she said her own life isn't meaningful and that other accounts of meaning apply the label far too liberally to average lives. When asked whether this means average lives are meaningless, she also said 'no.' I was baffled. The closest analogy I can draw to this pattern of thinking is the way many religious people reserve "holy" for a few highly revered people or activities, but don't characterize mundane things as "unholy."

Wrap-up

I missed the party Saturday night due to sudden illness and also missed Michael Smith's talk on Sunday morning because I had library class in Omaha (semester complete, yay!). Happily, his talk was loosely based on a paper available online: "The Rational Foundations of Morality."

Overall, I really appreciated the opportunity to hear from writers I already knew a little about (Dreier, Railton, Schroeder, Finlay, and Smith) and become acquainted with some new folks. From a sociological angle, I enjoyed observing the mix of personalities, clothing styles, gender and age demographics, and ratio of bearded vs. unbearded men.

I'll leave you with a quick practical reasoning anecdote from Jamie Dreier's talk. When he bought his coffee on Friday morning, the Starbucks employee insisted on putting the cup on the counter rather than hand it directly to him. He asked why. It's policy, she explained, Starbucks doesn't want to risk liability from burning customers on a bad direct handoff. Jamie held up his coffee and shook it for the audience. It was iced coffee.

Conference Notes Day 1

Today I attended the Practical Reason and Metaethics Conference in Lincoln, Nebraska. I learned that I can identify people surprisingly well after seeing just one photo from a faculty website or book jacket months ago. I also learned that if you want an easy Q&A segment after presenting a paper, avoid having Michael Smith in the audience (who, incidentally, is quite the iPad sketch artist).

9:30

Events kicked off with a presentation by Jamie Dreier titled "Quasi-Realism and the Problem of Unexplained Coincidence." The Problem of Unexplained Coincidence (PUC) is about explaining why we have reliable moral beliefs. For some kinds of anti-realists, this presents no problem because our moral beliefs only need to track our own attitudes, or or own conventions, etc. Moral realists supposedly have the most trouble because there's no obvious — or at least no non-controversial — story about how our beliefs track moral properties that aren't so closely tied up with human psychology or human society.

Dreier's talk, however, was focused on how quasi-realists might handle this problem. He did so by presenting an interesting thought experiment. Imagine a society that speaks a special form of English: one that lacks any evaluative terms. They still have feelings and attitudes similar to our own, but they have to describe (or report) their feelings rather than express them in any other linguistic ways. Presumably, these people wouldn't be faced with the PUC. Dreier went on to advance their linguistic toolkit step-by-step in a quasi-realist fashion until their communicative practices looked pretty much like our own. Since the PUC didn't seem to appear at any of these steps, and it wasn't present on the first step, it would follow that the final stage  — which looks like us — would remain free and clear of the PUC. So actual quasi-realists can, arguably, dodge the PUC.

This thought experiment can be attacked at a number of stages, which Dreier admitted and the audience took as an invitation to do so. And even if the argument itself were totally convincing, Dreier worried we would still be short a satisfying explanation of why the argument works. I would love to read a fleshed-out story of the thought experiment itself. Think The Invention of Lying except with the invention of moral predicates!

11:15

Jonathan Way presented his paper "Reasons as Premises of Good Reasoning." His talk took the form of explaining a promising understanding of what constitutes a reason for action, pointing out a difficulty, then taking his own shot at overcoming that difficulty. I'm not sure I understood him correctly, but I'll give an example anyway.

A promising understanding:

Suppose it's raining. For this fact to count as a reason for me to take an umbrella with me, it must be good reasoning to combine some set of my psychological states with the belief that it's raining and therefore take an umbrella with me.

A difficulty:

Suppose the only available umbrella belongs to the queen and she'll have my head if I take it. I have stronger reason to leave the umbrella alone. So it would seem like my psych states plus a belief that it's raining would not be good reasoning which concludes with me taking the umbrella. But it would be weird to conclude that the fact of rain is not a reason at all for me to take an umbrella.

A proposed solution:

For the fact that's raining to count as a reason for me to take an umbrella with me, it only has to be defeasibly good reasoning to combine some set of my psychological states with the belief that it's raining and therefore take an umbrella with me. It's a kind of reasoning that can lead to bad results (like taking the queen's umbrella).

2:15

Next up, Nomy Arpaly gave a talk that didn't have a title so far as I noticed. The main idea seemed to be that "bad reasoning" can be a matter of something going wrong with beliefs, not necessarily the reasoning itself. Her primary example involved two instrumental beliefs and how they combine with the same desire:

Instrumental belief #1: Putting coins in this Coke machine will produce a Coke.
Instrumental belief #2: Putting coins in this pencil sharpener will produce a Coke.

Desire: a Coke.

A person holding the first belief along with the desire might reason her way to putting a coin in a Coke machine. A person holding the second belief along with the desire might reason her way to putting a coin in a pencil sharpener. Is the first case good reasoning and the second case bad reasoning? Maybe not! Instead, there may just be some problem with the story behind instrumental belief #2 that's messing things up; putting coins in pencil sharpeners doesn't have the right kind of relationship with Coke production.The precise nature of what relationship is needed was, ah, vigorously discussed during the Q&A.

4:15

Finally, Michael Bratman took a read-the-paper-aloud approach to "Why be Means-End Coherent?" As much as I struggled with Way and Arpaly's talks on practical reason, I had a much worse time getting into Bratman's paper. His topic may have simply been too abstract for me to grasp. And it might have helped if I had stayed through the Q&A, but I had to duck out early to see my chiropractor. 

Tomorrow's lineup is: Peter Railton, Mark Schroeder, Stephen Finlay/Justin Snedegar, and Connie Rosati.

Metaethics Conference

I will be attending a conference on "Practical Reason and Metaethics" on the 20th through 22nd. Just wanted to let readers know in case anyone is sufficiently close to Lincoln, NE and sufficiently interested in showing up. Can't say I didn't mention it now!

Details here.

Expect some notes during/after the conference.

Moral Anti-realism and Apathy

Philosophers have some weird stock phrases. If you're in a coffee shop and hear "Scott is the author of Waverley" or "torturing infants for fun is wrong," you can be confident someone has been reading philosophy. Walk up and ask if they believe "existence precedes essence" and you'll have new coffee shop pals!

What's with the phrase about torturing infants for fun? A tad morbid, don't you think? Well, it's supposed to be an indisputable moral truth. If a system of morality doesn't condemn torturing infants for fun, we can safely discard it. Of course it's hard to find someone who claims infant torture is a morally good or even a morally permissible pastime. So why bring it up? Because it can be modified slightly for use in real-world disputes:

Torturing infants for fun is objectively wrong.

or

"[M]oral truths are objective, in the sense that they are in a certain way independent of human beliefs and desires. It is wrong to torture people for the fun of it, and would remain wrong even if most or all of the world's population came to believe that this behavior is perfectly acceptable, and indeed came to desire that it be much more widely practiced."¹

The problem with this thought experiment is that we read it with our own "human beliefs and desires" intact. Maybe no one in the imaginary world has a problem with torture-for-fun, but we do. It's like taking our own microbes into a sterile environment, running a microbe detector, and *surprise* there are microbes present!

When arguing that moral truths exist independently of human emotions — as Plantinga tries to do in the quote above — it's important not to use emotionally-charged examples. Suppose some form of moral anti-realism is true, i.e. moral truths are at least partly dependent on our "human beliefs and desires." We would expect emotionally-charged scenarios to produce especially strong moral judgments, not apathy! This is why I roll my eyes at claims that people can't "live out" skepticism of moral realism because we still care about things.

We can even turn this around on moral realism. Truths which hold completely independently of how we feel about things are not necessarily going to excite our emotions. Why would moral certainty and strong emotions tend to show up together? Anti-realism has a simple answer: morality is (at least partly) based on emotions. Realism needs a more elaborate story.


1. Plantinga, A. (2010). Naturalism, theism, obligation and supervenience. Faith and Philosophy, 27(3).

Two Kinds of Intrinsic Value

There are at least two major, distinguishable meanings for “intrinsic value.” Unfortunately, these meanings often go unspecified, which results in a lot of unnecessary confusion. Christine Korsgaard covered this in her 1983 paper, “Two Distinctions in Goodness" from which I'll be borrowing.

The first kind of intrinsic value is contrasted with instrumental value. Instrumental value is the value something has because it's helpful or supportive of something else which has value; think “derivative value.” For example, an important point in how we treat (other) animals is whether there is any reason to consider factors beyond the value of animals to human well-being.

The second kind of intrinsic value is value that is located inside as opposed to outside the thing that is valuable. As Korsgaard put it, “It refers, one might say, to the location or source of the goodness rather than the way we value the thing.”¹ This kind of intrinsic value might be, for example, a property of the valuable thing itself which does not depend on anyone in the world valuing it.

So if I claim old trees have intrinsic value, it's not clear whether I'm saying that old trees have non-derivative value or whether I'm saying old trees have value regardless of anyone valuing them. Suppose I personally and directly value old trees. Also suppose that old trees need someone to value them in order to have value. In this situation, old trees have the first kind of intrinsic value but lack the second kind of intrinsic value.

Korsgaard considers the first kind of intrinsic value to be something of a misnomer, since only the second kind of intrinsic value contrasts with extrinsic value. Whether value is derived or not is simply another issue.


1. Korsgaard, C.M. (1983). Two distinctions in goodness. The Philosophical Review. 92(2). [search link]

Expressive-Assertivism

Expressivism is a type of moral theory which says that moral judgments are expressions of desire-like attitudes, rather than true/false assertions of fact. This straightforwardly explains why it would be odd for a person to judge something to be morally right or wrong and then be indifferent towards it.

For simple moral utterances like "Slapping children is wrong" or "You ought to watch out for pedestrians," it can make sense to understand these as expressions of attitudes. The big problem for expressivism is explaining what's going on in other sorts of moral utterances like:

• Is it wrong to slap children?
• If it's wrong to slap children, then it's wrong for my neighbor to slap her son.
• Either it's wrong to slap children, or I've been misinformed.

These sure seem to involve true/false logic! While some expressivists have tried to show that appearances are deceiving and these sentences don't — after all — involve true/false logic, others have embraced a hybrid view which includes both the expression of attitudes and some true/false logic in the meaning of moral language.

Daniel Boisvert's Expressive-Assertivism is one of these hybrid forms of expressivism.¹ It was inspired, of all things, by the way ethnic slurs work (which I'll explain as I go over the three core features of Expressive-Assertivism).

First Core Feature: Dual-Use Principle

In normal circumstances, a person who speaks a simple moral sentence like "Slapping children is wrong" is performing two distinct speech acts (two "direct illocutionary acts"). One speech act is expressive and the other is assertive.

Likewise, the simple use of an ethnic slur "John is chink" simultaneously asserts something about John (that he's of Chinese descent) and expresses contempt for people of Chinese descent.

Second Core Feature: Extensionality Principle

In normal circumstances, a person who uses moral terms in any so-called extensional context still performs the same kind of expressive speech act as in simple moral sentences. The three "problem" sentences above are examples of extensional contexts, but "wrong" in "Lisa thinks that slapping children is wrong" is in an intensional context which falls outside the scope of this core feature.

The hateful attitude expression is still present when people use slurs in sentences like "Is John a chink?" and "Either John is a chink, or I've been misinformed." And notice how it's the same sort of contempt for people of Chinese descent we saw in the simple case.

Third Core Feature: Generality Principle

In normal circumstances, the expressive speech act is not aimed directly at the object of moral judgment, but at everything in a broader category.

Using the word "chink" normally expresses a contempt for all people of Chinese descent. This is why the negative attitude expression is still at full force when John's membership in the hated category is uncertain.

Solving 'The Moral Problem'

Michael Smith famously characterizes the central problem of metaethics as finding a way to show that the following two propositions "are both consistent and true" with regard to each other and with a Humean theory of motivation:

1. Moral judgments of the form 'It is right that I φ' express a subject's beliefs about an objective matter of fact, a fact about what it is right for her to do.

2. If someone judges that it is right that she φs, then ceteris paribus, she is motivated to φ.²

Expressive-Assertivism provides an account for both elements. The assertive speech act concerns the "objective matter of fact" of whether the judged action, practice, etc. has a certain property. The expressive speech act directed at all things which have that property explains an individual's motivation.

It also helps that the way Expressive-Assertivism goes about solving the moral problem is so similar to the way another kind of value judgement — the ethnic slur — plausibly works.

Answering the Objection from Missing Expressives

These next three sections break what is commonly known as the Frege-Geach problem (aka the embedding problem) into three more specific objections.

The 'missing expressives' objection concerns sentences like:

If it's wrong to slap children, then it's wrong for my neighbor to slap her son.

where it may seem like the speaker can't be expressing his own attitude at that moment. At least not like someone who says "Slapping children is wrong." But Expressive-Assertivism explains both cases as expressions of attitude toward things that are wrong in general (whatever 'wrong' means). This is the Generality Principle at work. Just because a speaker isn't sure whether an action or a person belongs to a despised category, doesn't mean his use of moral language (or the language of ethnic slurs) is expressive free.

In short, the expressives are there. They're just aimed more broadly.

Answering the Objection from Incomplete Semantics

Simple versions of expressivism run into trouble when they claim sentences like "Slapping children is wrong" only expresses an attitude, because this leaves at least some of the meaning of "slapping children is wrong" unexplained in sentences that start "If slapping children is wrong, then ...."

Compare:

[expression of attitude].

with

If [expression of attitude], then ....

What the heck is the second kind of sentence supposed to mean? Happily, this isn't such a problem for Expressive-Assertivism since the true/false 'assertive' component makes normal sense in an 'if..then' context. A full reading with a reduction of 'wrong' might go something like this:

If slapping children is harmful on balance [expression of negative attitude toward things that are harmful on balance], then ...

I should be clear that Expressive-Assertivism as a theory doesn't have anything to say about whether wrongness is a property that can be reduced like this. A philosopher who agrees with G.E. Moore about moral properties being indefinable can adopt Expressive-Assertivism. She would just have the usual issue of explaining why we have strong attitudes toward such properties.

Answering the Objection from the Ambiguity of Attitude-Attribution Verbs

Consider these two sentences:

Sarah believes that her brother pickpockets.
Sarah believes that pickpocketing is wrong.

The first sentence attributes a true/false belief to Sarah. Under simple expressivism, the second sentence could only attribute an attitude to Sarah. But it would be odd if the phrase "believes that" is associated with true/false belief unless it's followed by ethical vocabulary.

As a hybrid theory, Expressive-Assertivism's account of the two sentences isn't quite so disparate, but the objection could still be pressed by saying it would be odd for "believes that" to only attribute a true/false belief, unless followed by ethical vocabulary in which case an attitude attribution is suddenly tacked on.

Boisvert responds by saying "believes that" attributes a psychological state potentially composed of both true/false belief and attitude to the subject. The same psychological state, in fact, that a person normally possesses when they utter just the clause after "believes that."

For example, when Sarah says "Pickpocketing is wrong" she would normally hold an attitude toward things that are wrong and also hold a true/false belief that pickpocketing fits in that category. If Jack says "Sarah believes that pickpocketing is wrong" then he would be attributing both the belief and the attitude to Sarah as part of her overall psychological state (try removing either element and Jack's claim is weaker than we normally understand it). Here's the key point: if Jack says "Sarah believes that her brother pickpockets" then Jack is still attributing a psychological state to Sarah, even if the state happens to lack an attitude component.

In programming terms, Boisvert would be saying "believes that" is like a single function which takes a structure rather than a simple variable as an argument. It wouldn't be like multiple, overloaded functions as the objection alleges. (I hope at least one person finds this analogy helpful!)

Wrapping Up

Expressive-Assertivism has two more attractive features covered in Boisvert's paper which I won't elaborate on: "it holds that the descriptive content of moral sentences is non speaker-relative" and "it is consistent with, but is not forced to accept, minimalism about truth."

Overall, I think Expressive-Assertivism is on the right track. Not surprising since I intentionally set out looking for something like it because I've held a rough kind of hybrid expressivist view for a while and knew someone had to be advocating a theory in the neighborhood. Boisvert isn't the only one working on hybrid theories, so you can expect to see more comparing and contrasting from me in the near future.

Added: "Near" turned out not to be so near. I still plan on getting back to this topic eventually.


1. Boisvert, D.R. (2008). Expressive-assertivism. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. 89(2). p. 169-203. [direct link]
2. Smith, M. (1994). The moral problem. Oxford: Blackwell. p. 184.

Metaethics Summary

I've added a My Metaethics link to the sidebar. Hopefully this will serve as a quick introduction to my views on the nature of moral judgments. Might footnote it up a bunch later.

And if you haven't noticed it yet, farther down the sidebar there is a new external link to the Directory of Open Access Journals' category on philosophy.

Objective Moral Facts vs. Objectively Moral Facts

Having a rule capable of kicking out "right" or "wrong" for any particular act (cross-culturally, across time, no matter who is appraising the situation, etc.) is not sufficient to demonstrate the sort of objective morality that skeptics are skeptical about.

It's one thing to say, "Here's an objective fact; this sort of fact is what morality is about; so here's an objective moral fact." It's quite another to uniquely justify the middle step of saying what morality is about. Some examples...

Objective fact: Action X increases overall suffering in the world.
Middle step: Moral wrongness consists in increasing overall suffering in the world.
Conclusion: Action X is objectively morally wrong.

Objective fact: Action X would not be effective if everyone acted similarly.
Middle step: Moral wrongness consists in doing what would be ineffective if everyone acted similarly.
Conclusion: Action X is objectively morally wrong.

Objective fact: Action X is forbidden by God.
Middle step: Moral wrongness consists in doing what is forbidden by God.
Conclusion: Action X is objectively morally wrong.

Objective fact: Action X is out of line with God's nature.
Middle step: Moral wrongness consists in doing what is out of line with God's nature.
Conclusion: Action X is objectively morally wrong.

Objective fact: Action X goes against the overall desires of the person performing it.
Middle step: Moral wrongness consists in going against one's own overall desires.
Conclusion: Action X is objectively morally wrong.

Objective fact: Action X shortens the life expectancy of the person performing it.
Middle step: Moral wrongness consists in shortening one's own life expectancy.
Conclusion: Action X is objectively morally wrong.

Objective fact: Action X is done out of ill will.
Middle step: Moral wrongness consists in acting out of ill will.
Conclusion: Active X is objectively morally wrong.

Moral skeptics don't typically question the facts in the first lines above (except maybe the God ones). Instead, we question whether there is an additional objective fact that makes one "middle step" true and the others false.

P.S. — I wrote this post after reading the Sep/Oct 2011 Philosophy Now article "Our Morality: A Defense of Moral Objectivism." It's a defense of objectivism which doesn't seem to do much more than affirm metaethical relativism. But if you do get a chance to read it and disagree, let me know.

P.P.S. — Some of the above uses of 'objective' are questionable, but they're questionable in the direction of being too inclusive for objectivity so it's not a rounding error in my favor.

On 'Moral Facts Naturally Exist (And Science Could Find Them)' (Pt. 2)

In my last post, I sketched Richard Carrier's moral philosophy. Today I will explain my primary reservation, but first I want to point out several areas of agreement. Like Carrier, I...

• believe morality is concerned with hypothetical imperatives.
• accept a Humean theory of reasons, i.e. what a person has reason to do is dependent on that person's psychology.
• accept the theory of action that a rational person will always try to fulfill her highest-priority desires, according to the information she has.
• agree that science — broadly construed — is vital in finding out the rightness or wrongness of an action.

This definitely puts us in the same neighborhood of metaethics-ville. Carrier characterizes moral facts as objective and his view as realist (by denying the contraries); I quibble with that, but only because I would label the same things differently. Not a big deal.

'Ought' and Internalism

When Carrier defends his view that moral imperatives are a class of hypothetical imperatives, he admits this is an unpopular view among philosophers. "But," he says, "none have ever presented any other identifiable logical relation that can ever be meant by 'ought' (or any other term or phrase semantically equivalent to it) that produces any actual claim to our obedience."¹

This close association of morality, the meaning of 'ought,' and motivational internalism rests at the very beginning of Carrier's chain of deductive logic in the appendix following the chapter. Here are the first three lines, with variables expanded:

1.1 If there is <a moral system>, then <a moral system> is <a system of imperatives that supersede all other imperatives>.
1.2 If <a moral system> is <a system of imperatives that supersede all other imperatives>, then <a moral system> is <what we ought to obey over all other imperative systems (whether they are labeled moral or not)>.
1.3 <what we ought to obey over all other imperative systems (whether they are labeled moral or not)> is <that which we have a sufficiently motivating reason to obey over all other imperative systems>.²

Throughout the chapter, Carrier uses the phrases "what we in actual fact ought to do" and "what we as a matter of actual fact ought most to do" as synonyms, and contrasts this with "other things that carry no sufficient motivating reason for us to do them instead".³ You may recognize this as a strong form of motivational internalism, i.e. recognized moral facts necessarily provide some motivation or — in strong form — overriding motivation.

I think Carrier has a good point that if we start by insisting on internalism, then it's hard to see how moral facts could originate from anywhere but a person's own desires; and if we insist on strong internalism, how they could originate from anywhere but what a person desires most. Or consider a reasons-based version of internalism: a person always has some reason or overriding reason to act morally. If having a reason requires having some appropriate desire — which I affirm — then we're back to the same spot.

'Ought' Externalism

Contrary to Carrier, I hold that sentences like "Michael ought to contribute to UNICEF" or "Josephine ought not fire her pistol into the air when she celebrates" can represent true propositions even if Michael and Josephine happen to lack appropriate desires.

This means I deny (1.3). I'll make this denial punchier: it can be true that we have no reason to do what we ought to do.

How can I get away with saying this? Because I believe the word 'ought' requires an end (or goal) to complete its meaning and make it eligible for being true or false. At the same time, it doesn't require that anyone's desires be a certain way. The logical relation signified by 'ought' works something like this:

Michael ought_{[some end]} to contribute to UNICEF.

or more specifically:

In order that [some end], it ought to be the case that Michael contributes to UNICEF.

The claim being made is that — among the relevant actions open to Michael — the one most likely to precede [some end] is that he contributes to UNICEF. (The 'ought' in the more specific parsing is a non-normative probability 'ought,' like "It ought to rain before midnight." I'm following Stephen Finlay's reductive analysis of normative 'oughts' into non-normative 'oughts' plus ends, which is motivated by making sense of normative language in general.)⁴

Really, though, I just want to drive home the point that 'ought' claims have a gap if you listen for it.

We're normally very adept at filling the gap from context and so we don't notice there ever was a gap. For example, "You ought to eat two cups of green vegetables per week" in typical contexts would suggest a health-related end. In a conversation about minimizing risk for liver cancer, we would fill in the more specific end of minimizing risk of liver cancer. At that point, we have a quite specific claim which is open to empirical investigation.

You ought_{that you minimize your risk of liver cancer} to eat two cups of green vegetables per day.

or

In order that [you minimize your risk of liver cancer], it ought to be the case that you eat two cups of green vegetables per day.

Notice something else: the truth or falsity of this 'ought' claim does not depend on having actual or ideal desires about minimizing the risk of liver cancer.

Laying Claim to Our Obedience

What I'm saying is that true 'ought' statements don't necessarily lay claim to a person's obedience. Some do, because they connect with a person's desires, and this makes them the only imperatives important to that person, in a relevant sense.

I understand the phrases "there is a reason" and "Josephine has a reason" to reflect this distinction. There may be a reason for Josephine to not fire her pistol in the air when she celebrates (it might cause far more suffering than the joy she gains), but if she lacks certain desires she might not have a reason to refrain from pulling the trigger.

Carrier could grant all of the above, adjust his argument a bit, and still identify moral imperatives as imperatives which are both (1) true and (2) matter to a person by virtue of that person's desires. What I'm challenging in this post is the assertion that what a person "in actual fact ought to do" necessarily corresponds with what that person has motivating reason to do.

In other words, Carrier can't simply rule out other (i.e. externalist) uses of 'ought' as invalid. He needs to show that his moral theory is a better solution to metaethics in some way other than winning by default.

...

I may eventually follow up this post with my take on other parts of his overall moral theory, but this will do for now.

ADDED:  A followup on the same topic is here.


1. Carrier, R. (2011). Moral facts naturally exist (and science could find them). In Loftus, J.W. (Ed.), The end of christianity (pp. 333-358). Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. p. 342
2. Ibid. p. 359
3. Ibid. p. 348
4. Finlay, S. (2009). Oughts and ends. In Philosophical studies, 143(3). pp 315-340. See my post on it.