A Dog Chasing its Tail
My goal in the following paragraphs is to lay out my world view succinctly and in a way that is intelligible to someone who has not spent hundreds of hours reading philosophy. This does not mean however that this can be read without any effort, I assume you have not spent time reading, but I do assume you are intelligent, can put together different ideas and have the ability to use names for ideas or arguments.
We will start with the problem that seems to be present to anyone who does not accept their normative positions from a perfect entity, an attack on views of ethics and ethical language that claim objectivity. This will lead to a conversation on different types of non-objective views of ethical language and why the differences are not all that important in my opinion and finally where I think we can go.
We all spend our days considering what the right course of action is. Whether we should donate more to people in need, whether we should give more in our friendships or more simply how to navigate interpersonal relationships in accordance with what is right. What we are doing in these cases is evaluating our decisions. What I want to demonstrate is that there is no perspective that gives us value that is unimpeachable. I have spent the best part of a half hour trying to write out an example, but the point really is we assume a value hierarchy. In the example of whether we should tell a white lie to a friend, we could say that lying is bad. The value coming from the intrinsic badness of lying. But why would lying be intrinsically bad? We can imagine examples where lying would be good. Another example would be should I give money to a charity that helps malnourished children in the Third World. If we assume that utility and value are synonymous, then the answer is yes. I easily spend $100 a month on alcohol; that money would have a lot more utility being spent to get food to areas of the world where it is not profitable to get it otherwise. But why would value and utility be synonymous? We are looking for someone or something that can tell us what to value. I will refer to this as the problem of deciding what to value.
We will now look at common solutions to deciding what to value. These solutions come in two flavors, that there is a correct answer to the problem and that there is no answer, but this is why we think there is. Here I will present a contemporary argument that argues there is no answer and does a good job dealing with objections from the there is a correct solution crowd. I first encountered this argument when reading Sharon Street (the goat) in her 2006 article “A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value”. The term “Realist Theories of Value” refers to the crowd who argue that there is a correct solution to our problem of deciding what to value. A large part of these refinements in my thinking of the last 2-3 years is almost entirely caused by Street and David Hume. Street’s argument is let us imagine there is a correct solution to the problem of what to value, why would we think humans naturally value these things? So much of our natural values can be explained by our evolutionary history, why we value our family, why we value our friends, and why we disproportionately value ourselves. For the realist case to be correct not only does the correct answer need to exist, but the realist needs to explain why evolutionarily we would pick it.
This is a neat argument because realists like to point out that to say there is no answer to our problem of value seems to fly in the face of our experience. We feel strongly that there are rights and wrongs, and that these rights and wrongs are universal in human cultures. How could that be the case and it not be because of some force driving them that way. Street says yes, there is a force driving them that way, but it is not a moral or ethical force but an evolutionary force. The humans who did not feel a strong desire to help and protect their family died, the cultures that did not frown upon murder and promote cooperation went extinct. We can have an entirely natural world and have people who swear up and down that it is wrong to murder each other. I was already of the opinion the only defensible realist position was that you need someone to design the universe and for them to possess this sense of what to value that we should inherit. This argument also supports this dichotomy.
We will largely ignore the position that the value problem has been solved and the answers lie in the Bible, Torah, Quran or whichever book you please. To me this is a completely unfalsifiable claim, it might be true, it also might be true that I am just dreaming right now. The question to me is what beliefs can be justified, I do not think any of the evidence presented in holy books for why there conception of god is correct is adequate, therefore we do not have reason to believe that even if there is a god-like being that does value things, that we know what their values are.
Let us move on to answers that are of the flavor there is no answer to the problem of what to value. How should we think of moral statements? Two theories that are prominent are that all moral statements are false (called moral error theory) and that moral statements are not capable of being true or false (called ethical non-cognitivism). Moral error theory argues that when making moral statements we are saying something like “Hermoine is a witch”. Now if we are familiar with the Harry Potter universe then we may say that the sentence is true. The person being referred to, Hermoine, is in fact a witch, she possess magical ability. However we would not say that Hermoine or witches really exist, in that sense the statement is false. Moral statements are the same, “Murder is bad” the badness in question is like Hermoine or a Witch. If you have some imaginary object you can substitute in for bad then the sentence could be true, but badness doesn’t really exist so in that sense it is false. Ethical non-cognitivism is simply the view that all statements of value are not truth-apt. For example, we usually hold this view on questions of taste. If I say “Quinoa is bland” we do not normally consider this to be a true or false sort of statement. So that “Murder is bad” is analogous; it is not the type of statement that is true or false.
We would call both positions anti-realist positions. The name here is helpful because they are usually constructed to offer some alternate view to the realist view. I also think on theories like the above, anti-realists go quite off course; the problem is of deciding what to value. Whether moral statements are false or truth-apt does not help us to decide what to value. I think separating between moral error theory and ethical non-cognitivism is not what we are interested in.
What now? We should be anti-realists, as we should not believe that someone else can tell us what we should value, but then what to do we value? It is almost a contradictory statement, but it points at the only place where value can come from, ourselves.
These are all now ancillary thoughts that I do not know how to reconcile with the above picture but seem very important.
To throw a wrench into the engine and to truly offer you nihilism I want to add another seemingly unrelated quirk. An assumption that carried the scientific revolution until the start of the 20th century was that God does not play dice. Everywhere we looked before the advent of quantum physics, we saw a universe that was ruled by cause and effect. This led to the conception of Laplace’s Demon. This was a being that if they knew the state of every particle in the universe, using a completed laws of physics, they could calculate back to the origin of the universe and forward to the end of the universe. While this does not work for thermodynamic reasons (some reactions are not reversible) and quantum reasons (God does in fact play dice) this conception of the universe is the rule with a couple exceptions. This is known as determinism, that a preceding state causes the following state. Let us apply this to our conception of the human brain, that the human brain at any point in time is caused by the preceding moment and causes the next moment. There is no place that choice comes into the picture.
Agency, the idea that we have a choice to choose between a or b. It would seem that agency and determinism are incompatible. Then what can we say about the choices we make? I do not know what to say other than that feeling is a form of delusion. I have given a sort of logical argument, the problem is that this logical argument can be supported experientially. Try focusing on your breath, sit there until you notice that you are no longer focusing on your breath. You can repeat this endlessly and notice that even though you sit down with every intention of focusing on your breath you are the nevertheless distracted shortly after. This is just the nature of our minds to be permanently dancing all over the place in a way that is not controlled by us. All we can really say is that we are the objects that experience what appears to us.
This is the view at this point, there is a clear problem of deciding what to value. No one can tell you what to value, you must choose freely and we seem incapable of freely making choices. Yet I value things. Around in circles I go.
