Contents
Terminology and Concepts
Normative ethics, Justice, Law, and Metaethics
Consequentialism
▷ Utilitarianism and variants
▷ Minimalist axiologies
▷ Negative Utilitarianism
▷ Prioritarianism
Deontology
Threshold Deontology
Virtue Ethics
Contractarianism
Shallow pond
Golden rule
Moral psychology, inc Against empathy
Rights
Realism
Patienthood
Justice
Criminal justice
Pessimism
Population Ethics
Death
Meaning
Evangelism and Deconversion
Humanism, Rationalia, and Organised antirealism
1. Naturalism
2. Metaethics
⮕ Why be moral/just?
3. Politics
Terminology and Concepts
morals
ethics
etiquette
customs
good/bad
good/bad for an organism
right,
wrong (n),
righteous
evil
mattering
(un)just; (in)justice
fair
should
ought
normativity
imperative
categorical
hypothetical
prescriptive
descriptive
evaluative
reasons
purpose
telos
end
end-in-themselves
means
motives
rationality
value
values (final, intrinsic and extrinsic)
aims
principles
universalizable
permissible
obligations
duty (positive and negative)
expectation
honor
respect
dignity
dispositions
natural law
meaning (existential/wellbeing)
law
rights
rules
autonomy
agency
consent
exploitation
harm
interests
flourishing
wellbeing
suffering
blame
responsibility
guilt
conscience
consequentialism
teleological
deontological
virtue
contract
sentimentalism
emotivism
consequence
motivations
reasons internalism etc
conscience
intuition
desires
prudence
disgust
ocd
normative ethics
metaethics
realism
antirealism
moral nihilist
moral skeptic
error theorist
(non-)cognitivism
(non-)naturalism
psychological egoism
overdemandingness
supererogation
akrasia
selfishness
equivocation between the terms immoral (whether that be due to miscalculation or lack of willpower) and selfish.
does selfish entail harm? a violation of etiquettes and conventions in decision-maker’s favour?
universalism in religion
all human beings will ultimately be saved and restored to a right relationship with god.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/christian_universalism
meanings of “morality”
disambiguate between:
1. your own moral intuitions/feelings/conscience
2. others’ moral intuitions/feelings/conscience; popular moral intuitions
4. de facto moral behaviour/practice
3. (facts about) laws promoting social governance (for some consensus notion of a good life)
ideal law vs actual law; moral duty to obey the law?
extreme poles on meaning of ‘morality’:
• idiosyncratic preference, all arbitrary
• unseen spiritual forces
immoral, meaning of:
• selfish/mis-prioritised
• akratic/weak-willed
• miscalculated
counterfactual
difference-making
cause
expectation
participation
continuity of personal identity
nociception/pain and suffering
moral agent
moral patient(hood)
action
doing vs allowing
commission vs omission
preventing
positive and negative duties
upstream cause
downstream effects
proximate
identifiable
trolley problem
shallow pond
is-ought problem
naturalistic fallacy (appeal to nature / confusing description for prescription)
naturalistic fallacy (open question argument)
thick concepts/natural goodness
fact-value distinction
evolutionary debunking args
generalism
particularism
Normative ethics, Justice, Law, and Metaethics
http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/dog-philosophy
https://philosophics.blog/2025/08/16/good-boy-as-social-construct/
[Sorting]
Obeying morals seems to be more than conditioned awareness of any practical deterrent.
the only morality in a cruel world is chance
pluralist towards social desiderata, but nihilist towards real ethical truths
are ethical normatives queerer than we can suppose?
evolutionary debunking attack on moral knowledge via intuition
psychological egoism attack on normativity
is guilt sole mediator of morality?
Our initial impulse to behave morally becomes instinctive
Man’s oldest exercise in moral philosophy is the search for a (philosophical/intellectually superior) justification for selfishness
Are good/bad people and right/wrong actions fictions?
The ideology of altruism is one that is open to manipulation by ruling elites. The idea of living for others sounds like a noble one. But it
can be used both by totalitarian governments seeking to persuade
their subjects that the interests of the whole must come before
their own individual rights, and also by those politicians whose
objectives can only be achieved through thousands of military
personnel being prepared to give up their lives in pursuit of
them. I suppose that suicide bombers too might see their acts as
heroically altruistic. Again, the value of altruism is something to
be decided by political and moral discussion, not by an appeal
to nature.
-vsi science and religion indoc
morality is the herd-instinct in the individual
egoism belongs to the essence of a noble soul…and has its basis in the primary law of things
‘who else should we wish to serve, if not ourselves?’
is altruism the fear of desire, the denial of pleasure, anti-life, self-hating and not saying yes to life?
‘nobody willingly does wrong’? moral intellectualism
Is ethical disagreement a mere clash of tastes?
life involves negotiating the tricky balance between conflict and cooperation
is morality enlightened self interest? Pleasure principle
overdemandingness
supererogation
If we can always do more, how far do we go?
What do we care about and why?
“The world is cruel. And the only morality in a cruel world is chance. Unbiased. Unprejudiced. Fair.”
Why is it if some people realise they cant follow a deontological prescription at all, they give up even partial adherence which they had hitherto followed? Eg falling off the vegetarian/vegan wagon
Is morality anything more than a gut feeling with the discomfort that one should create some kind of reason?
Nietzsche debunking of Christian altruism and meekness
‘[Philosophers] pose as if they had discovered and reached their real opinions through the self-development of a cold, pure, divinely unconcerned dialectic…while at bottom it is an assumption, a hunch, indeed a kind of “inspiration” — most often a desire of the heart that has been filtered and made abstract — that they defend with reasons they have sought after the fact’
-Nietzsche
Philosophers give complicated analyses which appear to involve impersonal logical reasoning but which always end up by demonstrating that their pre-existing prejudices were correct’ says Warburton
in gustatory taste, principles cant alter one’s initial evaluations like they can in morality
Are there experts on moral living?
If morality is taste, who decides the moral curriculum?
Should others’ expected actions and the space of what’s possible affect one’s ethical aims?
Morality is a mix of culturally conditioned intuition and diplomacy of power.
Teleological ethics sees the good as separate from the right, but deontic doesn’t.
action (deontic) or outcome (telic) oriented ethics.
or impulsive/unconscious/uncalculating (virtue ethics)
outcomes
actions
people (character traits)
maybe wise, lawful, kind, and moral actions can all potentially be different.
How do motivation, reasons and morals relate?
What is it for something to matter?
-If you want to find the worst-behaved people in town, then go to the university ask for the philosophy department, go to the philosophy department and ask for the ethicists
What is the good life?
One optimising wellbeing while consistent with all legitimate normative principles of the universe. The solution is trivial and left as an exercise for the reader…
Is Everyone good but with different knowledge?
Can we knowingly do bad?
Railton characteristics of moral realism f1-f5
cognitive form, objective purport, supervenience, categoricalness, practical import
selfishness is violation of etiquettes and conventions in decision-maker’s favour.
Modern moral theory is autism in practice
Modern moral theory in practice glorifies an autistic fetish for rule-following
modern morality is the result of autism in kant and bentham?
what should I decide?
how should i act/behave?
Is The good life measured hedonically or ethically?
To be thoroughly evil one should have a good conscience
“how do you deal when confronted with a disagreement…?”
that societies respond to disagreement with various degrees of force, game-theoretic participatory consent/compromise, propaganda, and civil unrest.
Id be tempted to add the evaluation that civil war/social collapse would be ‘bad’ for the ‘general good’, but how to justify that?
Force, persuasion or compromise/trade.
I guess my morals are some mix of enculturated intuition and pointless deliberation on consequences.
we obey due to punishment and self-interest
Our initial impulse to behave morally becomes instinctive
Cant ignore the questions — what should society do — presumably as some unified corpus — about, say, abortion, horseracing etc?
pluralist towards social desiderata, but nihilist towards real ethical truths
ethical realism can still be context sensitive, just not in some sense agent-relative
It’s not uncommon for people to seek out belief systems, whether political or spiritual, that make them feel good about how they already live their lives.
is guilt the sole mediator of morality?
Man’s oldest exercise in moral philosophy is the search for a (philosophical/intellectually superior) justification for selfishness
good/bad people and right/wrong actions are fictions
altruism is open to manipulation by ruling elites. The idea of living for others sounds noble But it can be used both by totalitarian governments seeking to persuade
their subjects that the interests of the whole must come before
their own individual rights, or by politicians whose
objectives can only be achieved through thousands of military
personnel being prepared to sacrifice their lives
morality is the herd-instinct in the individual
at the risk of displeasing innocent ears, I submit that egoism belongs to the essence of a noble soul…and has its basis in the primary law of things
in non-egotistical instincts — compassion, denial, self-sacrifice, the will has turned against life
Slave Ethics: priests’ new system — Inversion of noble values of their rulers (the strong and
powerful) into vices boldness health pride etc. Slave Ethics meekness, the value of suffering, humility etc. and invent the idea of evil
Contractarianism:
“We had a deal, we had paper work!” -Rocco Pelosi, GTAV
Criminology and psychology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techniques_of_neutralization
is altruism the fear of desire, the denial of pleasure, anti-life, self-hating and not saying yes to life?
‘nobody willingly does wrong’
Christianity is a rebellion against natural law (survival of the fittest), a protest against nature
life involves negotiating the tricky balance between conflict and cooperation
(How) Should Society Be Organised?
men would be unjust if it profited them to be so
-paraphrasing Glaucon
Cardinal virtues
Seven deadly sins
‘There’s no justice in the world — not unless we make it’
Nonsense upon stilts
‘So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.’
-Benjamin Franklin
“Adam Smith famously wrote of ‘a man of humanity in Europe’ who would not ‘sleep tonight’ if ‘he was to lose his little finger tomorrow’ but would ‘snore with the most profound security’ if a hundred million of his Chinese brethren were ‘suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake
[Williams’ work in moral philosophy] “consisted largely of reminding moral philosophers of truths about human life which are very well known to virtually all adult human beings except moral philosophers.”
Why is it if some realise they cant follow a deontological prescription at all, they give up even partial adherence that they could before manage?
eg meat, wine, shylac, palm oil
//cc vegan
learning the impossibility of a moral goal weakens motivation to pursue it/makes some people give it up. why?
It changes the guilt delta
What is normativity?
What gives putative morals normative force?
In what sense is there force?
What is a valid grounding for ethical normativity?
If objective moral ‘shoulds’ exists, how do we verify them? Where is the evidence?
morality is arbitrary “pacts among wolves”
If there is no God, everything is permitted
[Actually the Brothers Karamazov book said “If there is no immortality, there is no virtue”]
Is morality nothing more than a gut feeling with the uneasy aftertaste that one should create some kind of quasi-logical post-hoc justification.
Are all legal laws deontic/consequentialistic? Are any character/virtue based?
Should others’ expected actions and the space of what’s possible affect one’s ethical aims?
Are there Ethical experts?
causes may take a Rube Goldberg path to effects
Williams argues that the orthodox conception of morality (as represented most vividly by Kant) amounts to a kind of obsession that threatens to consume all of life and alienate us from the individual projects that give meaning to human life
Reason can show errors, inconsistencies or consequences of decisions
politics are the complexities of the actual world that make morals irrelevant(?)
to find the worst-behaved people in town go to the university and ask for the philosophy department; go to the philosophy department and ask for the ethicists
Candidate example of a non-harmful wrong:
secretly putting someone in experience machine against their will
conscience and shame are the shackles of slaves
Disgust alone motivates moral action? Not so simple
Can one preach [sentiocentric] normative ethics without accounts of:
• metaethics and value theory?
• theory of responsibility/free will/determinism?
• a position on the wrongness of death?
• [theory of wellbeing, DALYs etc]?
• [explanation of hard problem]?
There’s only one ethical question:
Do you focus on shrimp?
Consequentialism
Optimise across possible options
Acts/omissions/allowing/commissions/preventings are morally equivalent
##
Problems:
Incalculability
cognitive overload
Cluelessness — ignorance of downstream effects
When? At what future time to evaluate?
Act/rule
“One thought too many”
Actualism/possibilism
Possibility/ defining realisticness
Independence of counterfactuals
Utilitarianism and variants
Maximise impartially aggregated wellbeing
##
Problems:
Aggregation problems (intra-subjective, inter- subjective and intertemporal).
Separateness of Persons — non-aggregability/fungibility/Replaceability argument / Narvesum’s dictim
An ontological/moral-status claim: individuals are distinct loci of value and cannot be straightforwardly aggregated.
Function of Intensity / Integral of intensity wrt time?
Temporal discounting
Hard problem (scope of sentience in species)
• p-zombies,
• super-spartans
• pain asymbolia
• vulcan trolley problem / is valence consciousness merely consciousness?
• blindsight
• Autonoetic (“self-knowing??? Self-aware)
Killing, including BWE (Benevolent world explosion)
The Meat Eater problem (shallow pond)
Rights violations
eg putting someone into the experience machine against their will/without consent
Utility monster.
Overdemandingness: functionally unbounded obligations; no supererogation nor tolerance for akrasia
Obligations to create Hedonium shockwaves / tile the world with Utilitronium / perform Paradise Engineering
Overdemandingness: Impartiality
• Special obligations
Agent-Relativity Problem/ agent-centred prerogative / allow agents to give special weight to their own projects and relationships
• Disintegrity (Williams)
Hedonic or preference-satisfaction oriented wellbeing?
some quirks:
• delayed gratification
• akrasia
• satisfaction of ideally-informed preferences that we can remember
• inadequate explanation if you dont know it’s been satisfied
• putting into the experience machine against their will/without consent
Problems of EUT: Pascal’s mugging, St Petersberg paradox; Ellsberg, Allais, etc
##
Principle of equal consideration of interests
the needs of the many outweigh the LIKE needs of the few or the one.
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commission/omission and action/inaction and doing/allowing.
in some contexts (e.g., a doctor withholding a terminal diagnosis), the omission can seem morally equivalent to active deception.
doing/allowing cares about the originating agent of a harm
Logic of the logger (farm animal maxxing to reduce WAS via habitat destruction)
Hunting > wild death otherwise
Is formal sentiocentrism just unconscious post-hoc rationalistation of empathy?
Contentedness/undisturbedness as hedonic ceiling / tranquilism/antifrustrationism
Neutral point location
must we operationalise in DALYs and WELLBYs or similar?
Commensurability of positive and negative states?
Scalar overall wellbeing measure?
Can one be happy and suffer at the same time — equivalent to a pure state?
Minimalist axiologies
Drafting
Negative Utilitarianism
Variants: Absolute NU, Weak NU, Pragmatic (It’s just more impactful to focus on suffering-reduction)
Criticisms of NU:
Ord’s NU criticism:
Lexical because Indifference arg
Threshold because Pinprick arg. auschwitz
(Dis)Continuity arg (Sorites)
Incoherence Arg against WNU (Wellbeing and suffering)
WFE (The worse-for-everyone argument — imprudence) against all NU
prospect
they temporal overall
trade-off end of film hungry
failed healthcare system
2-level synth lies act rule
“Presentism or Critical Level Utilitarianism, which deny that adding a happy life is good, while agreeing that adding happiness to existing people is good and even that preserving the life of existing people is good.”
Indifference
Pinprick
Continuity (sorites discontinuity arg)
Incoherence
Worse for everyone (imprudence)
Prioritarianism
Drafting
Deontology
Some acts are bad independent of other outcomes
More Action-guiding than conseq;
deontology is the only action guiding ethics because of cluelessness?
But what is an action?!
Is the etymology (duty) helpful?
The problem of Enormity for responsibility
Responsibility seems related to causal agency.
determining causal agents in the enormity of a causal nexus is open-ended, and we often — perhaps unjustifiably — end up wielding sharp deontic rules for attributing responsibility.
A consequentialist will treat action and inaction morally the same, so in a sense every stranger’s actions and inactions 10 years ago are causally responsible for me being sat in this chair right now. butterfly effect etc
the “problem of enormousness” is how we select a single trigger from an infinite chain of background conditions to label as a “cause”.
“when I say that the glass of juice quenched my thirst, I am not talking about the Jupiter, the Andromeda galaxy, and all the other heavenly bodies exerting forces on the glass, the balance of which was part of the story of the glass raising to my lips. I am talking about a glass of juice.” https://iep.utm.edu/causation/#SSH4bi
Butchering Kant:
Categorical imperatives require understanding (i.e by rational agent; moral principles can be derived from first principles even?)
Impossibility of simultaneous universalisability would violate “ought implies can”, so cat imperatives must be simultaneously universalizable.
“An autonomous being… makes laws for herself” (derive what is right and wrong from first principles and then live by those principles understood to be correct?)
Wtf precisely are a good will, rationality, or an end-in-themself?!
“An EIT is able to reason about moral principles”
“good will is the only unconditionally good thing, and the condition of the value of all ends”
Specific view about what counts as a moral act, and it has to be motivated by proper understanding of the moral law as laid down by the categorical imperative.
Tldr Nothing to see here, exegetes!
Threshold Deontology
threshold deontology — larry alexander:
term coined by michael moore
why isnt it called
critical level deontology
threshold consequentialism
manipulating people and situations
diachonicity of the situation and needs
probability
arbitrariness level N
sorites/the worth of 1
responsibility
continuum of transition from rightness to wrongness
discontinuity
intuitively inherently disintegral to say theyre commensurable
ratio problem
[assuming im unable to directly kill him] For if I can kill X to save N, then I should be able to threaten X with harm if he does not attempt to save N, even at a high risk to himself
2 conceptualisations of thresholds
differences eg sacrifice 1 to save 10, 2 to save 11 etc
or ratios?
difference method allows aggregating two sub-threshold scenarios to push over the threshold! which doesnt seem right
the threshold might be lower if the negative right we override is not the right not to be killed but, say, the right not to have a pint of blood taken
without consent, or the right not to be touched without consent.
Virtue Ethics
Habits build dispositions of character, like a muscle trained for a skill.
Ask “What would a person of good character do?” Completely clear :S
Contractarianism
drafting
Shallow pond
confront our reputation and egoism?
Historical approaches eg Fair share
Suppose you are transported to some unholy evil place. You see millions of ponds. And somebody is drowning in each of these ponds — kids, adults, all kinds of animals, insects. What the f@ck will you do? Will you start saving randomly? Will you concentrate on human beings? Will you concentrate on kids? Will you continue saving them until you die of exhaustion, or will you take a break after some period of time? Will you become absolutely numb and stop saving anybody altogether?
surgeon opera analogy in singer
limits-only something of equal moral consideration
sorites problem
Moral psychology, inc Against empathy
Bloom’s arguments against empathy as a guide to altruism.
A Single Death is a Tragedy; a Million Deaths is a Statistic. -Stalin?
Scope insensitivity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_neglect
If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will. -Mother teresa?
identifiable victim effect
Diffusion of responsibility
Availability bias estimating scale of problem
Rights
Rights: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights/
claim
power
liability
x?
active-passive
positive-negative
interests/will?
2.1.1 Privileges (or Liberties)
2.1.2 Claims
2.1.3 Powers
2.1.4 Immunities
2.1.5 Opposites and Correlatives
2.1.6 Molecular Rights
2.1.7 Active and Passive Rights
2.1.8 Negative and Positive Rights
5.1 Rights as Trumps
5.2 Conflicts of Rights?
claim rights and liabilities
Hohfeld proposes separating claim-rights, privileges, powers, and immunities, all of which he considers to be separate legal interests.
human rights around the world actually amount to a form of neocolonialism?
“The only balancing is balancing of interests. Rights are not balanced, but are defined, or redefined, in the light of the balance of interests and of empirical facts about how these interests can best be protected.”
Realism
should we trust antirealists any less than realists?
“I wouldnt cheat on you even if I could get away with it — because that’s my personal preference” feels like it offers no reassurance.
Though does the realist really offer more?
Realist’s wager
Why any particular morality?
Axiomatising morality is fraught.
What notions of good should we aim for?
How do we trade off between them?
What should guide our actions when faced with multiple conflicting and contested principles and moral uncertainty?
analogy with epistemic normative realism
parfit’s non-naturalist normative realism
https://benthams.substack.com/p/why-i-believe-in-objective-morality
does accepting ethical antirealism limit one’s hopes of persuading people and render advocacy more like a vanity project?
“you aren’t a car price realist in a negotiation, so why be one for morality?”
~’Lance Independence’
If you as an antirealist were to raise kids, would you raise them to use the ring of Gyges?
when people disagree on moral issues, is there always hope of persuasion by appeal to more fundamental principles? or are morals ultimately inscrutable matters of taste?
reasons and principles for gustatory taste are posthoc because it seems implausible to persuade a taster that they do or do not like a particular food in virtue of their adherence to a broader gustatory principle (“I like sweet things”).
yet in ethical persuasion, Id say we typically think principles do have the ability to change a person’s moral evaluation of a particular case.
Are we deluded about that? Im tempted to think yes we are.
If morality is taste, who decides the moral curriculum?
tit for tat in iterated prisoner’s dilemma.
Axelrod’s experiments
“Do unto others before they do unto you.”
This is a political and #moral #philosophy sometimes best expressed as: “Dick Cheney before he dicks you.”
Realism-idealism debates in IR
Nietzche moral language as a mask for self-interest
Mackie 4 types of queerness
Patienthood
Patienthood requires cognitive faculty of rationality to recognise categorical moral normatives?
Types of agency: intentional, reflective, rational.
can non-sentient beings be exploited and wronged?
grey’s argument
Justice
Callecles
Thrasymachus
Criminal justice
quarantine/protect public
rehabilitation
deterrence
punishment/retribution
Qisas — “retaliation in kind” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qisas
Pessimism
Disambiguate between:
• believing suffering is v important and prevalent
• sad and hopeless (personally)
I tend to think of pessimism as expecting bad things or focussing mental attention on the actual present bad things.
Also can mean a hopeless, defeatist attitude of demotivation (to even try changing things).
how does optimist-philia practically cohere with any person’s common desires for accurate setting of expectations / disappointment prevention?
it’s harder for some people to control mental attention on suffering and WAS;
how to give attention without empathy?
Perform Compassion, not Empathy?
How to separate the motivating effect of empathy from causing sadness?
Population Ethics
Nip
narvesum’s dictim replaceability argument
Death
re is death a harm? just ceasing to exist or slaughter?
-it’s hard to eliminate second order effects that surviving persons will miss the deceased
Wrongness of death:
theres lucretius’s mirror: being dead doesnt seem bad to us because we were effectively dead for billions of years before our consciousness began (prenatal and posthumous nonexistence)
as long as death is instant and no unwelcome foreknowledge/suffering, then the transition between states doesnt seem a harm at first blush
from a hedonic perspective, one could say premature ending of life deprives a person of positive experience. this is similar to one strand of vegan slaughterhouse arguments.
but determining counterfactuals seems open-ended.
is killing a hermit instantly and depriving them of 10 years of life really the same as not funding a drug that will extend a hermit’s life by 10 years (in the latter, without their knowledge and assuming they still die instantly)?
despite some consequentialist leanings, i cant bring myself to equate the two (by saying acts/omissions/allowing/commissions/preventings are morally equivalent)
but maybe im not abstracting sufficiently from the typical acts
in an incredibly idealised thought experiment where a person (say a cow) is instantly killed along with all its friends and with zero foreknowledge for any of them, after having lived a happy life up to its species’ typical span of healthy years (healthspan), then i struggle to harshly condemn it.
in fact, this scenario is basically what lots of vegans aspire to for a companion animal (if they are ok with euthanising them at some point). the only difference is not wasting potential food afterwards :S
this ideal scenario does not exist of course. but in every way the non-ideal scenario diverges from the ideal and is morally worse for it, I am tempted to say that’s because of the presence of suffering.
Nagel — Death
https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil150/Nagel.pdf
Meaning
christianity, the cruelty-free consumption, socialism, the virtue of human civilisation…theyre all just a cope.
meaningful activities tend to be morally-associated because they bestow virtue / social status
humanists believe we can act to make our own lives meaningful.
seems harder without myth of ultimate meaning
things giving us meaning eg passion projects, are discovered passively, not chosen.
you cant actively assign meaningfulness to your pursuits; it’s involuntary.
Do we need mythology?
Veganism has mythologised guilt-free; humanism has mythologised caricatures of science and empricism
Evangelism and Deconversion
Life is hard and we need belief and meaning in things
I wouldn’t go out of my way to attack for example the Christianity of some people as it’s taking away/attacking their MH crutch. And there are parallel issues in criticising anyone’s beliefs.
hard to switch off from seeing animal suffering everywhere.
Being in nature no longer gives the same mental peace.
desert landscapes are allegedly beautiful!
Humanism, Rationalia, and Organised antirealism
Why I am not a Humanist
Summary:
• triviality of epistemology and descriptive ethical membership
• infinitely inclusive
• unjustifiability of prescriptions
• identity labels: vapid semantic meaning; involuntariness of existential purpose
Longer:
While knowing that God is dead yet still dancing with his corpse, Humanism virtue signals worship of an emperor of morality that has no clothes.
Problems:
1. Naturalism
▷sharply defined sci method, caricatures of naturalism and ‘demarcation problem’ solutions, vaguely scientistic in face of legitimate non-scientific knowledge,
▷compatible with deism?
2. Metaethics
▷ “Good w/o god” confuses prescriptivity-descriptivity,
vague reason and rationality do not alone prescribe, eg Rationalia
Sure, one can be good without god beliefs but that self-selection bias doesn’t mean ex ante one can reliably produce good people without god-beliefs.
Making ethical decisions “based on reason [and] empathy” is indeterminately vague.
Whose ‘rationality’?
Can it exclude/censure anything?! eg Naziism
vague or conflicting prescriptions require a tradition to interpret them.
Moral development is psycho-socially complicated!
Maybe being raised to believe moral realism provides society with a moral capital that would be depleted following several generations of antirealists?
Some Humanists declare that they feel awe and wonder at nature, but thats idiosyncracy and humanistic beliefs alone cant prescribe feeling this.
Atheism can feel uncomfortably nihilistic for some.
Some find meaning but theyre the lucky ones; some people don’t — and it cant be prescribed.
Feeling meaningfulness from things is involuntary.
See also:
Meaning
The language of moral philosophy might be reason, but the language of morality is emotion.
When people seek meaning, most don’t turn to philosophy, they turn to music, art, poetry or religious scripture.
And ultimately maybe we obey morals due to indoctrinated shame and a self-interested fear of punishment :S
In childrearing, we warn children of possible consequences of wrongdoing — such as harm or betrayal. but they dont comprehend or care for this at the level of longterm group performance.
Do we engage in moral fictionalism (or even lying) when we tell a child “because it’s wrong”? If so, when are fictions permissible?
In which case it may be as morally contentious as encouraging them to believe in witches or phlogiston.
Or is expressing belief in the moral wrongdoing of an individual through the Interpersonal Stance (Strawson’s term) merely an elliptical expression for “I want you to do your part for the aggregate”?
▷ Superficial treatment of normativity, rights etc;
Often mere wishful thinking that moral realism exists.
“w/o god anything is permissible”?
Is humanism compatible with (moral) non-natural realisms, antirealisms including sentimentalism and nihilism, and ethical egoism?
humanists seem to make ethical prescriptions.
Euthyphro, ring of Gyges,
Does Humanism need a moral realism that its naturalism cant justify?
A problem of pluralism is disintegrity of intuitions — intuitions conflict and it becomes a ‘Choose your own adventure’!
Humanists struggle to justify particular, binding practicable morals that would be independent of human whim.
something humans make they can decide to unmake. It isnt binding.
In rejecting theism but keeping moral realism, some seem to be trying to have their cake and eat it.
Adultery in the UK is legal but immoral. From a ‘population stance’, would we really be justified to tell someone “Don’t do it” tout court?
⮕ Why be moral/just?
One reason is: Longrun cost-benefit. in the long run, in a just, stable society it’s a more stable life — free of fear and retribution. But a single-interaction situation still poses a problem as an ‘opportunity to defect’.
Is humanism denial and status signalling in the face of discomfort with this moral nihilism?
(If there are no moral truths in terms of abstract principles), is the morally antirealist preacher’s project really just (an exercise of) vanity? an exercise in therapeutic post-hoc rationalisation for the things that please or disgust them in the world?
▷ de facto anthropocentrism bias in spite of evolutionary continuity,
3. Politics
▷ de facto aversion to system change/support of status quo, democracy, freedoms, compassion, equal rights, indeterminately vague Forer effect identity
▷ In its most well-defined, it’s just inflated single-issue pro-secularist politics:
Anti-faith schools, bishops in lords.
▷ Some people’s Humanisms are bourgeois scientism Atheism++-- culture wars-heavy caricatures of science and empiricism
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But I like that
• it emphasises the finitude of our one life
• it takes a zoological approach. Though it could be more anti-speciesist/less anthropocentric.
