Maarten van Doorn
Sep 9, 2018 · 4 min read

Thanks, Brian.

I’ve added your article to my reading list!

I like your real-life angle on this. It’s what I’ve been thinking about a lot too, especially lately for some reason.

The problem is this: the search or need for some objectivity in judgments about value arises from its importance. “I don’t want to be making a mistake about how to live! I’d better get my values right!” That’s the set up. And then you start reading moral philosophy and whatnot, and there is this gap between facts and values, which seems to imply that our beliefs about values cannot be said to match the actual world (like our beliefs about rocks or animals or planets or whatever).

But on the other hand, there surely is something objectively wrong with someone who adopts suffering as a value? But where does things wrongness ‘come from’? After all, it’s not like we can look at the world with a superdeduper microscope and then discover that events of suffering do not have the property of ‘goodness’ like we can discover that a rock has a certain mass.

So now philosophers who have struggled with this problem come along and propose all kinds of ‘criteria’ as it were by which we can say that certain value judgments are objectively wrong (like the external point of view thing here). But still … whatever one proposes there, it seems a bit feeble. Robert Nozick, a philosopher, has a good line on this:

“Though philosophy is carried on as a coercive activity, the penalty philosophers wield is, after all, rather weak. If the other person is willing to bear the label of “irrational” or “having the worse arguments”, he can skip away happily maintaining his previous belief. He will be trailed, of course, by the philosopher furiously hurling philosophical imprecations: “What do you mean, you’re willing to be irrational? You shouldn’t be irrational because …” And although the philosopher is embarrassed by his inability to complete his sentence in a noncircular fashion — he can only produce reasons for accepting reasons — still, he is unwilling to let his adversary go.

Wouldn’t it be better if philosophical arguments left the person no possible answer at all, reducing him to impotent silence? Even then, he might still sit there silently, smiling, Buddhalike. Perhaps philosophes need arguments so powerful they set up reverberations in the brain: if the person refuses to accept the conclusion, he dies. How’s that for a powerful argument? Yet, as with other physical threats (“your money or your life”), he can choose defiance. A “perfect” philosophical argument would leave no choice.”

So if we would accept such a philosophical argument about what we should care about in life and what not, then at most we can condemn people for being irrational, for not accepting reasons that we believe he should accept. But when the area of investigation is your own life, what does that really matter? It’s my life, goddamnit, and I’m going to decide how I’m going to spend and if you apparently have a solid argument for why I should spend my time on self-improvement to be able to make more difference in the world, or on work and not on drinking, then good for you but I’m fine with being labeled “irrational”. And how do you mean I’m making a mistake? In virtue of what for Christ’s sake could I be mistaken in adopting values?

Reasons and values are not things with causal powers. That means, again, that the penalty for being mistaken about them — if there is such a thing — would be rather low. Objects in one’s manifest surroundings, by contrast, do have causal powers — thing such as trees, boulders, and lakes. Because of their causal powers, these are things you don’t want to be wrong about: you can run into a tree, be crushed by a boulder, or drown in a lake. Values are not like that.

“But claims about values are not claims about how the world works, they are purely normative claims”. OK, that seems right, but think deeply about what this means when the ‘cost’ of being ‘wrong’ with respect to this purely normative claim is so low. It means that, if according to these purely normative claims I should spend my time working, but I don’t agree, I can very well “shrug it off” and Buddhalike continue my life like I want to (think of the philosopher running after the rational egoist: “You shouldn’t be irrational because .. ?!?!”) .

So then what really is the importance of moral philosophy? If independent normative truths exist, then, in some sense, they seem to be beside the point when we’re trying to figure out how to lead our lives and spend our time. If they do not exist, then what are we doing when we think about how to live?

Maarten van Doorn

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PhD candidate in philosophy. Reconsidering the obvious. Chasing interestingness. Get good ideas that make you think: maartenvandoorn.com

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