Why It’s OK that Nothing “Really” Matters, and Why You Should Be Yourself

An Addendum to Sharon Street

(Originally submitted to Prof. Jason Marsh in an undergraduate philosophy class on May 9, 2015, my senior year. The body of the paper is roughly 4,500 words.)

In Sharon Street’s “Darwinian Dilemma,” she argues that an evolutionary basis for moral values undermines those values, but only on a mind-independent metaethical view. In a popular version of this article entitled, “Does Anything Really Matter or Have We Just Evolved to Think So?” Street answers the titular question by saying, yes and no: “Nothing ‘really’ matters in the sense of mattering independently of the attitudes of living beings who take things to matter,” she states, “but the nice fact is that living beings evolved, began taking things to matter, and thereby made things matter” (Street, 2015, pg. 685–692). What Street calls a “nice fact” might appear to others as a “bomb nicely dropped” because mind-dependent ethics seems to threaten moral agency. In crude form, to say “nothing really matters” seems to entail “everything is permissible,” or, in the words of Derek Parfit, “nothing matters [full stop]” (Parfit, 2008, pg 29). Despite this apparent threat, I argue that Street’s view, which Selim Berker calls Humean constructivism (Berker, 2014, pg. 1), actually enhances moral agency and moral understanding by relegating important tasks of creation, protection, and promulgation of value to each individual. Finally, I offer an account of constructivism as a means to moral progress even in its most subjectivist forms.

Before I begin, I will explain Street’s view. On the constructivist metaethical view, the truth or falsity of a normative claim depends on whether it follows from the practical point of view. The practical point of view is, in Street’s words, that state of mind in which one “takes at least some things in the world to be good or bad” and believes “that some things call for, demand, or provide reasons for others” (Street, 2010). In short, it is a state of valuing certain things and seeing those valuings as reasons for action or for other valuings. (I say “valuings” to emphasize the agency of the subject.) Normative truth, Street explains, is whatever the practical point of view entails. Rawls and Kant, respectively, demonstrate constructivism in their definition of the ethical as that set of principles which free agents would choose in the original position and that set of principles which is universalizable. According to both of these views, normative truth could literally be anything so long as it follows from the specified practical point of view.

In the context of this discussion, constructivism deserves further qualification, for there are many different variations of constructivism. Street’s constructivism is Humean constructivism. In her analysis, Street distinguishes metaethical constructivism from restrictive constructivism. According to the former, the practical point of view is described formally, i.e., one gives an account of what it means to value something and does not presuppose any values in doing so. Restrictive constructivism, by contrast, presupposes values inherent to the practical point of view, from which normative truths follow. (Recall Rawls.) Humean constructivism is metaethical, as is Kantian constructivism, but Street distinguishes the two. According to Kantian constructivism, everyone has reason to be moral no matter what evaluative judgments serve as the basis of their practical point of view. For Humean constructivists, it is possible that one’s practical point of view is coherent and yet fails to provide a reason to be moral. This is because the Humean’s practical point of view lacks any evaluative presuppositions of its own before the agent puts them in. The agent provides all of the evaluative content from which a normative truth could follow.

So, Street’s view is this: according to Humean constructivism, normative truth is whatever is entailed from the practical point of view, which presupposes no values other than those of the agent herself. As Street puts it, substance in, substance out (Street, 2010, p. 11); Humean constructivism only gives you substantive normative truths if you first put in substantive evaluative judgments.

This is the view that, Street claims, saves us from global moral skepticism in the face of an evolutionary explanation of morals. I do not intend to defend this claim and so will not be entering the debate that has ensued about Street’s Darwinian dilemma toward realism. Rather, I intend to analyze the consequences of a Humean constructivism for moral agency and moral understanding. Thus for the purpose of this paper, I am assuming that Humean constructivism is coherent and plausible.

Humean constructivism enhances moral understanding and agency.

First, I argue that Humean constructivism enhances moral understanding and moral agency precisely because it precludes the grounding of moral claims on anything beyond the evaluative judgments of the individual. Imagine two children charged with the task of configuring a new video-game console. Suppose both children are equal with respect to intelligence and other factors that would aid in completing the task. The difference: one child is allowed to consult her mother, who holds the instruction manual, for help, and the other child is allowed no such assistance. The one child consults her mother throughout the process and succeeds in configuring the console; the other child succeeds despite the lack of assistance. Despite an identical result, the child who received help from her mother is less responsible for the configuration of her console than the child who received no help. The latter, we would agree, should receive more credit. Although referencing a trusted source — mommy and the instruction manual — adds credibility to the process, it diminishes the extent to which one can say, “yes, this child configured the console.” More importantly, it diminishes the extent to which one can say of the first child, “yes, this child understands how to set up the console.”

Why can one child be said to have less technological understanding? Because that child relies on technological testimony in the form of the instruction manual or her mother. Allison Hills (2009) would probably agree that configuring the game console with such assistance demonstrates less technological understanding, for she argues that relying on moral testimony undermines a person’s moral understanding and that a person achieves greater moral understanding when she can evaluate a moral situation without the help of said testimony. In Hills’s words, “Moral understanding involves a grasp of the relation between a moral proposition and the reasons why it is true” (Hills, 2009, pg. 101). In the context of the two children, the child who follows instructions does not necessarily know why she is following each instruction; she is merely doing as she is told. Granted, the child who has no instruction manual does not necessarily understand the inner workings of the game console. (That is, she is no electrical engineer.) However, she does gain a deeper understanding by experimenting with the thing, by trying out solutions one by one, and, finally, by achieving the desired result (See footnote 1).

Introducing Hills’s concept of moral understanding raises the side issue of whether, on Humean constructivism, one’s normative truth actually has a truth value. After all, Hills defines moral understanding as “factive,” which means, in brief, that one cannot understand why p unless it is true that p. (E.g., I can never understand why the ocean is red, because it isn’t.) If evolution, a non-truth-tracking process, influences one’s values, and if one’s values determine one’s normative truth from the practical point of view, then it follows that a non-truth-tracking process is responsible for our normative truths. On the surface this seems sticky (read: problematic), but I maintain that the difficulty here results from a failure to distinguish between objective and subjective truths. On Humean constructivism, there is no objective truth. Therefore, on Humean constructivism, there is no question of whether evolution is an objective-truth-tracking process; the only “truth” it could track is subjective truth. And even so, it is odd to think of evolution as tracking subjective truth, for evolution itself is not a subject that can hold things to be true. As to the question of whether one’s subjective normative truth itself has truth value, the Humean constructivist can, similarly, only ask whether it has subjective truth value. And it is obvious, I think, that is does. Therefore, understanding one’s normative truth does count as a form of moral understanding.

Humean constructivism enhances moral agency.

Now to my second point: Humean constructivism enhances moral agency. It does this mainly because it decreases self-alienation (See footnote 2). Alienation, as Peter Railton defines it, is a “kind of estrangement, distancing, or separateness (not consciously attended to) resulting in some loss (not necessarily consciously noticed)” (Railton, 1984, pg. 134). Moral agents become alienated from themselves and others when their motivations for moral action lie beyond the here and now, the you and me. For example, imagine John is married to Jack, and one day Jack is sick at home. John makes Jack pea soup, which Jack loves, and when Jack thanks him for the soup, John replies, “Oh, I had to. I knew that making you pea soup would bring about the best possible world.” Jack is understandably disappointed, but why? It is because John has alienated Jack from his will. He has separated his motivation for action from Jack’s specific good. Although Jack would prefer that he himself be the reason for John’s good deed, instead it is the best possible world (whatever that means) that motivates the deed. This results in a loss of genuineness, and, potentially, a perceived lack of love.

Individuals also experience alienation when their moral principles prevent them from pursuing a personal goal. To be brief, imagine John and Jack before they got married. Imagine that John is a conservative evangelical, and he believes that God does not approve of gay marriage. Nevertheless, John loves Jack and would do anything to be able to spend the rest of his life with him. Ultimately, if he acts to please God, he alienates himself from his own heartfelt love. On the Humean constructivist view, it is impossible to be alienated from oneself or from others due to moral constraints. What alienates Jack from John in the first example and John from himself in the second example (and the probably the first as well) is motivation by a principle with which one personally does not identify. By this I don’t mean that one does not agree with or act in accordance with the principle; rather I mean that the principle, in concept, is not internal to the moral agent. The moral agent conceives of the motivating moral principle at a distance, observes it, and marks his course accordingly. The Humean constructivist view does not allow this to happen, for all of the values in the practical point of view, from which normative truths follow, originate from within the individual. The individual cannot help but be motivated (and this wording is itself misleading) by internal factors — i.e., his values. After all, to the Humean constructivist there are no values other than those that follow from the practical point of view and those that the individual puts into the practical point of view. All moral motivation originates in the individual. For this reason, Humean constructivism eliminates alienation and enhances moral agency.

In case the above explanation of why alienation is impossible was unclear, I will explain it again in a different way. Suppose a person — Hannah — has values that, when plugged into her practical point of view, entail a normative ethics of service to the poor. One might argue that after Hannah arrives at this set of normative truths, she could become alienated from it. Perhaps one day she becomes bitter, feels that her energy is being sucked away by “all of these lowlifes,” and wants to take some time off from the Peace Corps so she and her wife can have a nice, sexy vacation in the Bahamas. Won’t she then become alienated from herself on account of the fact that the normative truth she constructed dictates that she prioritize her service to the poor and put her personal life on hold? Well, no. Remember that the starting point of any normative system under the Humean constructivist view is the practical point of view. One’s internal values (see footnote 4) dictate one’s normative truth. Anyone who has lived knows that values are fluid; the values one has at age 13 are different from the values one has at 23 (and 40, and 60, I assume). Conflicting motivations only signal a new development in one’s values. Ultimately, Hannah’s normative truth depends on what Hannah values, and if eventually she really feels a strong aversion to helping the poor, her normative truth is going to change according to those values. So long as she subjects her normative truth to careful revision, the normative truth shouldn’t feel “unnatural” or “wrong” or prevent her from doing what she believes is the right thing to do — whether it’s more Peace Corps heroism or a mimosa on the beach with smoopsypoo.

At this point in my analysis, a compassionate individual might object to this picture of Humean constructivism on the grounds that Humean constructivism entails ethical egoism, which is fundamentally self-centered; she might say further that although a person cannot be alienated from her own desires, she may alienate all other people by conceiving of their good solely in terms of her own good. In fact, this objector might say that the Humean constructivist is forced to evaluate the good of the other solely in terms of her own good, for, as I said, all of the values in the practical point of view are based on the values of the individual. To this objector, I concede that ethical egoism is one possible consequence of Humean constructivism, but it is not a necessary consequence. It is conceivable that a Humean constructivist may judge another person’s flourishing to be valuable full stop on the grounds that she feels for the other person. Furthermore, the values that a Humean constructivist brings to the practical point of view need not be self-centered, as the objector claims.

“But still,” the objector might persist, “you have no reason to value the other’s good in any particular way. Whether you derive their good from your own good or see it as a good in itself — it doesn’t really matter.” By this the objector means that there is no standard of evaluation by which to judge the foundations of one’s normative truth; therefore, one cannot know whether one has any reason to value love over murder, or truth over falsehood. On this objection, Humean constructivism entails moral nihilism, according to which there are no moral facts. I reply: what does it mean to have a reason to do something? From where does this reason to do something originate? Where is the reason located in metaphysical space? Is a reason something that motivates from without or from within? Surely one can conceive of reasons having either locus. A person can have a reason to convert her suburban lawn into a farm, according to the persuasive speech of a band of environmentalists. She may also have reason not to do so according to her husband, who happens to own the property. In both senses she may be said to have a “reason” to do or not to do something. The Humean constructivist has no problem valuing reasons as deliberative tools or as a formal demonstration of the roots of action; and in this way the Humean constructivist may value her own reasons or those of other people as factors to consider in the practical point of view. In brief, there may be zero reasons or a thousand, but the subject ultimately decides which is most important, and that rather arbitrarily.

“Even so,” says the objector, “the Humean constructivist has no reason to value those reasons.” This is where the pedantry of the objection reveals a hidden meaning: where the objector says “no reason” she means “no objective reason” — no reason, that is, that can stand independently of a subject’s evaluative judgments. It was clear from the above definition of Humean constructivism that normative truth is based solely on values that the subject brings to the practical point of view. This is not a problem for moral agency because a lack of objective reasons does not entail a lack of subjective reasons, and these subjective reasons may serve to motivate the individual just as strongly as would “objective” reasons. They may take the form of normative claims, and it is not even a problem that these normative claims are based on an individual’s values. On the Humean view, values are inherently motivational; therefore, a person will have moral motivation insofar as she has moral values, even if such moral values are subjective. Apathy, what I believe to be the objector’s true fear, is the result of perceiving oneself to have no values. I concede that apathy is bleak, but it is not a necessary consequence of Humean constructivism (see footnote 5).

One might also criticize Humean constructivism on the grounds that it precludes moral agency altogether. After all, Street’s original claim that the evaluative judgments that produce normative truth are determined by evolution smacks of, well, determinism. If some individual, by some chance mutation, ends up valuing murder as a fun and exhilarating pastime, who can blame her? “Evolution did it. Blame evolution.” However, I maintain that an individual can have moral agency despite her intuitions being the result of evolution. For, if we take a compatibilist view like that described by Ned Markosian (2012), which asserts that an action is morally free if and only if that action is caused by the agent (and no other qualification), it follows that even if one’s key moral values are the result of evolution, and one’s actions are the result of one’s values, the action is still free. Therefore, even if evolution is the ultimate cause of one’s actions, one’s free will may still be an intermediate cause.

Another objection: Parfit (2008) objects that a mind-dependent metaethics cannot give a person reasons to do things. For instance, mind-dependent metaethics (which he calls “subjectivism”), gives us no reason not to value murder (or agony, or random maiming) above all else. By extension, on a subjectivist view like Humean constructivism, people have no “reason” to value their own lives above those of a heartless murderer who has drawn a knife; therefore, they have no “reason” to defend themselves. In Parfit’s words, the subjectivist is forced to admit that “nothing matters” (Parfit, 2008, p. 29). But this is missing the point of Humean constructivism, as well as of Street’s advocacy of mind-dependent metaethics as a more plausible alternative to mind-independent metaethics and global moral skepticism. First of all, Parfit assumes that feelings are not reasons to do X. I say that they are reasons to do X, at least functionally, because feelings do in fact motivate moral action. In fact, feelings can be said to motivate action much more reliably than reasons. E.g., I have plenty of reasons to go to law school, but I simply do not want to study law; in this case, the feelings outweigh the reasons. With regard to defending oneself against a lethal opposing moral view, I argue that the claim that normative truth is grounded in the mental states of the individual does not entail anything about how to settle moral disagreements, let alone disagreements that may manifest themselves in lethal harm. If an eccentric moral agent is motivated by a love for murder and the majority of human beings by a love for their own lives, any thought of justification for one’s actions does not even enter the picture until blood has been shed, lives vigorously defended, and the eccentric forestalled. The desire to live (as well as countless other basic desires) precedes reason itself, and so it must suffice as a motivation for action. Even if subjectivism failed to provide us with reasons per se to do X, we would not need them: our emotions propel us strongly enough!

Here it may be helpful to clarify the role of normative truth for the Humean constructivist. According to Street, the constructivist believes that “the state of mind of valuing, or normative judgment, is intrinsically motivational in the following sense: someone who judges something to be good, valuable, or something she has reason to do is thereby at least somewhat motivated to do or pursue that thing” (Street 2010, p. 21). Assuming we’re all Humean constructivists, if we have values — and we all do — then those values will be plugged in to our practical point of view; then, normative truth will follow. And this normative truth is motivational, i.e., it motivates action. Therefore, so long as we have values, we will be motivated to act on those values. To return to my previous statement, the eccentric — if she loves murder — will be motivated to murder; but everyone else — if they love living — will be motivated to live, and defend themselves. These motivations persist despite their being grounded in the mental states of individuals. To answer my previous question: who can blame the eccentric who loves murder? Provided you don’t value murder, you can!

Humean constructivism places a unique responsibility on the individual — to create moral value.

Yes, thanks to Humean constructivism, the individual literally becomes the creator of her own right and wrong. According to her own normative schemes, she may blame others for what she perceives to be their wrongdoing and praise them for what appears to her to be praiseworthy action on their part. If evolution has impacted human moral development as much as Street proposes, then it follows that the moral traits, as it were, that humans tend to have are in fact those that promote human survival on the whole. If genetics have any effect on the evaluative tendencies from which normative truth follow (and Street argues they do), then an individual’s valuing her own survival and reproduction serves a double purpose: on the surface, it motivates the individual to survive and reproduce; on a deeper level, it propagates all of the other values of that individual. In this way the individual is not only the creator of her own right and wrong but their protector and promulgator (read: distributor/promoter) as well.

These three moral roles — creator, protector, promulgator — infinitely enhance the moral agency of the individual. In the case of the murderous eccentric, it is true on the Humean constructivist view that there is no reason, apart from the normative truths that follows from the subjectively constituted practical points of view of individuals, for the peaceable majority’s values to take precedence over those of the violent eccentric. It is, in a sense, a fair fight. Moreover, neither contender may invoke a “universal” value — justice or compassion, for instance — to bolster her position. For the same reason that a child who configures her own game console would be said to be more responsible for it than a child who configured her game console with help from mommy, so the individual who acts on the basis of subjective values is more responsible for her actions than an individual who acts on values beyond herself.

One caveat: when I say that an individual creates her own values, I do not mean that she is born with a sort of evaluative tabula rasa and that she doesn’t value anything until she decides to do so. I agree with Street that people largely inherit their values from external sources and from genetics. In this way, I would not say that people create their values ex nihilo or “carve out their moral paths on a whim.” (See footnote 6.) In fact, people often go many years or their entire lives without questioning the values that they happen to hold. Surely these individuals do not see themselves as “creators” of value but merely observers and followers of value. By calling people “creators of value” I merely intend to highlight the effect of Humean constructivism on one’s own perception of values.

As we near the end of this analysis, I will move to an interesting consequence of Humean constructivism: moral progress can only happen when individuals affirm their own divergence from the moral majority. Even though evolution makes certain normative claims plausible to the majority of human beings, it is plausible to say that random mutation — a cause of evolution — has made the same normative claims implausible to others humans. Therefore, evolution can be said to have made the same normative claims plausible to some and implausible to others. As a consequence, the fact that evolution makes certain claims plausible or implausible to human beings does not obviously mean that any of those claims will best promote survival and reproduction. After all, highly advantageous traits (such as lactose tolerance) arise in a minority and then, by the mere fact of being advantageous, become widespread in populations. It is possible, then, that any metaethical view is worth believing insofar as it has a chance of increasing the individual’s likelihood of survival and reproduction.

If evolution has made certain normative claims plausible, then it follows that any contradictory normative claim that also seems plausible to the person who holds it shares that potential to promote survival and reproduction. In modern society, it is considered immoral to deviate from the moral values of the majority. But if an individual possesses an “immoral” trait that increases his likelihood of survival, could not that trait become as widespread among human beings as our current “moral” givens? Could not a few persons’ immorality, provided it is allowed to propagate itself, follow the same path as those moral normative claims that natural selection has carved so deeply into the human conscience? Could not morality — evolve? If this is true, then it seems that the only way to see whether one’s own normative truths win in the end is to allow oneself to embody whichever normative truths happen to follow from one’s practical point of view. Metaphorically, one’s normative truth is the hypothesis, and one’s life is the experiment. In theory, it is conducive to moral progress to be yourself.

Then again, it may seem to the reader that I have just contradicted myself. For, first I advocated for Humean constructivism, and then I said that every person should advocate her own views regardless of what is the norm. In other words, if the reader does not already espouse Humean constructivism, what should this paper convince her to do? If she is not a Humean constructivist, it follows that she should remain so (for I have just implored the reader to be herself); but this is only the case if she first accepts the truth of Humean constructivism. On the one hand, I concede that, as it appears, this is a flagrant contradiction; but, on the other hand, I merely argue for Humean constructivism as a way to interpret morality when one is outside of moral situations — from afar, as it were. In actual moral situations, people generally have strong enough intuitions and a tight enough timeline that moral theories do not enter into consciousness at all until after a decision has been made. The present discussion is still important, though, because it may help a moral agent to understand her actions — their justifications, their functions, and their causes — more clearly.

In this paper I have attempted to dismantle Sharon Street’s ambiguous “nothing ‘really’ matters” bomb and demonstrate the potential of Humean constructivism to enhance moral agency as well as moral understanding. When we apply Humean constructivism to moral situations, it seems that individuals who act on internal values have greater understanding of their actions than those who act on external values; moreover, individuals who act on internal values experience more moral agency than those individuals who act on external values. In this way, Humean constructivism can be said to have an advantage over moral realist positions (at least if one assumes having more agency is better). Whatever values one assumes, the principles of natural selection inform Humean constructivism such that it is probably always worthwhile to affirm and embody those values. Therefore, with respect to moral traits, as with genetic traits, the oddballs of today could be the champions of tomorrow.

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References

Berker, S. (2014). Does Evolutionary Psychology Show That Normativity Is Mind-Dependent? Moral Psychology and Human Agency: Philosophical Essays on the Science of Ethics. J. D’Arms and D. Jacobson, Oxford University Press: 215–252.

Hills, A. (2009). Moral Testimony and Moral Epistemology. Ethics, 120(1), 94–127. doi: 10.1086/648610

Markosian, N. (2012). Agent causation as the solution to all the compatibilist’s problems. Philosophical Studies, 157(3), 383–398. doi: 10.1007/s11098–010–9654–5

Parfit, D. (2008). On What Matters. Unpublished manuscript.

Railton, P. (1984). Alienation, consequentialism, and the demands of morality. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 13(2), 134–171.

Street, S. (2010). “What is Constructivism in Ethics and Metaethics?” Philosophy Compass, 5: 363–384.

Street, S. (2015). Does Anything Really Matter or Did We Just Evolve to Think So? In The Norton Introduction to Philosophy, eds. G. Rosen, A. Byrne, J. Cohen, S. V. Shriffin. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.

Footnotes

1: I also admit that (if I may continue to draw a parallel between technological understanding and Hills’s moral understanding) neither child has full technological understanding of the game console. Hills says that moral understanding, due to its numerous criteria, comes in degrees. It is plausible, however, to say that one child has more.

2: Thanks to Emma Ritter for sparking this idea. If it’s implausible, it’s not her fault.

3: Not a real quote.

4: I say internal because Hume is an internalist when it comes to values.

5: Despite the failure of this objection, it reveals an interesting feature of Humean constructivism: the process by which a person creates values is probably not a rational process. After all, if a person has no reason to value anything, one must simply choose on instinct. This is not a problem, for according to Street, evolution removes much of the distance between our instincts and our moral sense.

6: Referring to Marsh’s comment.