At its philosophy website The Stone, the New York Times finally published an article that sparked my interest, though of course I don’t completely agree with it. It’s called “How to live a lie,” and it’s by William Irwin, a philosopher at King’s College in Pennsylvania.
By “living a lie,” Irwin refers to three forms of “fictionalism”: instances of people pretending to believe, or acting as if they believe, things that aren’t true. The three forms he considers are religion, free will, and morality.
Under religion, Irwin argues that many “believers” don’t really believe, but simply act as if they do because it improves their lives. He quotes philosopher Jean Kazez, whom I used to discuss on this site, as saying she’s a Jewish fictionalist:
Indeed, [philosopher Richard] Joyce speculates that some people probably take a fictionalist approach to God; they accept the existence of God but they do not really believe God exists.
. . . As an example, the philosopher Jean Kazez has written, “I am a religious fictionalist. I don’t just banish all religious sentences to the flames. I make believe some of them are true, and I think that’s all to the good.” At her family’s Seder, she wrote, “I pretended there was a deity to be praised for various things.” Kazez embraces this particular form of fictionalism for personal reasons: “I like pretending the Passover story is true because of the continuity it creates —it ties me to the other people at the table, past years that I’ve celebrated Passover (in many different ways, with different people). I like feeling tied to Jews over the centuries and across the world. I also like the themes of liberation and freedom that can be tied to the basic story.”
Well, no harm done there, although Dave Silverman—who claims that “secular Jews” damage atheism because they enable real Jews to claim nonbelieving Jews (I consider myself one) for faith—will disagree. (But I disagree with him: no rabbi has ever claimed me!). But I think that the claim that most, or even many, religious people really only pretend to believe is exaggerated. For one thing, they don’t act as if they’re pretending: they take actions, like building creation museums, trying to get creationism in schools, opposing gay rights and abortion, killing apostates and non-Muslims, and so on, that suggest that their beliefs are more than self-realized fictions.
The notion that most religious belief is actually form of fictive imagining was proposed by Neil van Leeuwen in a recent paper, and philosopher Maarten Boudry and I wrote a paper taking issue with his claims. You can see the whole discussion here, but I’ll add that our peer-reviewed paper, soon to appear in Philosophical Psychology, gives me CREDIBILITY as a philosopher. Take heed, Dr. Pigliucci!
As for free will, by and large Irwin agrees with me: he’s a determinist, and doesn’t really buy compatibilism, either:
Adopting compatibilism, I would still feel as if I have free will in the traditional sense and that I could have chosen steak and that the future is wide open concerning what I will have for dessert. There seems to be a “user illusion” that produces the feeling of free will.
Yes, and that “user illusion” may in fact be an evolved tendency. I, too, am a hardnosed free-will rejecter, but of course I still feel and act like I make choices. I know that’s an illusion, but it’s one that’s necessary for me to function. But when we realize on an intellectual level that our “choices” are really determined by our genes and environment, many of them well in advance, there is a consequence of realizing it’s a fiction—a consequence different from Kazez’s pretend-God. And that is that realizing the hegemony of determinism has real consequences for how we judge people, how we empathize with them, and how we structure our judicial system. (I know that some readers disagree here.) So there’s a value in realizing that we’re deceiving ourselves about free will.
Where I disagree with Irwin is when he comes to his main point: the “illusion” that there is are objective moral judgments. He realizes, as do I, that there isn’t any objectivity. As I see it, morality is in part an evolutionary phenomenon: a way of acting and thinking that was selected to preserve harmony in our small ancstral bands. (Those bands probably prevailed for nearly the entirety of our evolution since we split from the ancestors of the other great apes about 5 million years ago. We’ve been “civilized” for only about 20,000 years: 0.4% of that time!). On top of our evolved moral feelings and behaviors lies a veneer of “morality” arrived at by rational thought and consensus (and often said to derive from religion, but we know from the Euthyphro argument that that’s not the case).
Contra Sam Harris, I don’t think that there are any objective moral rules or values. To me, morality represents a preference for ways to behave. And I don’t mean to demean morality by saying that: I think it’s a preference we’ve arrived at because we know that what we call “morality” helps us construct and preserve harmonious societies. I am a consequentialist, so although I don’t see morality as “objective”, I can say that I prefer actions and behaviors that lead to the best consequence (whatever that means) for society. That is my choice, and others feel differently. I’d prefer, in fact, to jettison the terms “morality” and “moral responsibility” entirely, since they’re freighted with religious overtones, but I know that’s not gonna happen.
And I think that, when pressed, people who say that something is objectively right or wrong would also become consequentialists. Asked to justify WHY something is right or wrong, many would speak of the effects of that judgment on society. Thus, it doesn’t really bother me much if people speak of morality as if it’s objective. But it does bother Irwin:
Following a fictionalist account of morality, would mean that we would accept moral statements like “stealing is wrong” while not believing they are true. As a result, we would act as if it were true that “stealing is wrong,” but when pushed to give our answer to the theoretical, philosophical question of whether “stealing is wrong,” we would say no. The appeal of moral fictionalism is clear. It is supposed to help us overcome weakness of will and even take away the anxiety of choice, making decisions easier.
But if you simply conceive of the word “wrong” as I do, meaning “having deleterious consequences for society,” then one can really believe provisionally such statements are true. (That’s a matter for empirical study, of course.) This doesn’t mean that I have an objective morality, but simply that I believe that acting in a certain way has certain consequences, and I don’t like those consequences. And I don’t see a real problem with this—not nearly as much as I do with free-will fictionalism, which has led to harsh judicial systems, the damning of gays and others for making the “wrong choice,” and propping up religion’s claim that we are free to choose a Saviour, and are damned if we choose wrong. Irwin:
There is, though, a practical objection to moral fictionalism. Once we become aware that moral judgments have no objective basis in metaphysical reality, how can they function effectively? We are likely to recall that morality is a fiction whenever we are in a situation in which we would prefer not to follow what morality dictates. If I am a moral fictionalist who really wants to steal your pen, the only thing that will stop me is prudence, not a fictional moral belief.
It is not clear that this practical objection can be overcome, but even if it could, moral fictionalism would still be disingenuous, encouraging us to turn a blind eye to what we really believe. It may not be the most pernicious kind of self-deception, but it is self-deception nonetheless, a fact that will bother anyone who places value on truth. Fictionalism has the understandable goal of facilitating what one wants to do — acting as a kind of commitment strategy — but it would be preferable if one could do what one wanted to do without this maneuver.
Moral fictionalism is disingenuous only if you see morality as being “objective.” I’m not sure that most people think it is, but I may be wrong.
Finally, Irwin’s last paragraph sets free-will fictionalism apart from religious and moral fictionalism, and I don’t agree:
William James famously remarked that his first act of free will would be to believe in free will. Well, I cannot believe in free will, but I can accept it. In fact, if free will fictionalism is involuntary, I have no choice but to accept free will. That makes accepting free will easy and undeniably sincere. Accepting the reality of God or morality, on the other hand, are tougher tasks, and potentially disingenuous.
First of all, “accepting free will” is not the right way to construe this; what I’d prefer is saying “acting as though we think we have free will.” That’s not the same as “accepting its existence.” But accepting the reality of God and morality don’t seem much harder to many people; such bliefs are simply natural to many folks—especiallly believers.
As for being “disingenuous,” well, all three are disingenuous, for free will and objective morality are illusions (in the sense of not being what they seem to be), and the idea of God is a delusion. I think Irwin’s piece gives us food for thought, but I don’t think he’s thought very deeply about the notion of “objective morality.”
h/t: Greg Mayer
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servient
Speaking only for yourself, of course.
😀
Naturally, who else could I possibly speak for?
At a stretch, I suppose you could have been remarking on the persona I reveal here; but honestly, I was just kidding!
(And you don’t seem very subservient either. :D)
And I too am only half not kidding (at least about the speaking for myself part)…sometimes at home I speak for my d*g. Everybody does it! Right???
Interesting article. I only really disagree with one part:
It seems to me that this paragraph neglects the fact that humans aren’t entirely rational. Its true that if we were completely rational, then the self-realization that some prohibition is based on a fiction would negate the power of the fiction to prohibit my action. But we aren’t completely rational, and I’d say that empirically it appears that for whatever foible of human psychology we don’t understand, its possible for a human to (i) construct a fictional reason to do X, (ii) know its a fiction, yet (iii) still ‘sincerely and wholeheartedly’ do X.
So while it may make no logical sense, I can see that moral factionalism may have normative value for humans even if I can’t understand how it achieves that normative value.
err….fictionalism not factionalism. Though factionalism also has normative value. Which, now that I think about it, is also somewhat irrational though not entirely. 🙂
I partly agree. For simple behaviors that don’t involve much reasoning, it indeed seems true that people can be moved by what they know to be fictions. They refuse to eat feces-shaped chocolate, refuse to drink from a glass labeled “sodium cyanide” even when they know it’s water and they have put on the label themselves, etc. If we show subjects a demonstrably fake button labeled “kill a baby” (don’t know if this has been done, and I’d like to know if it has), I’d expect that they will be reluctant to press it, too.
But this may not extend to actions that require complicated reasoning, such as boycotting a food chain because of its politics — at least if the system 1/system 2 explanation for the sodium cyanide kind of case is correct and if complicated moral reasoning depends more heavily on system 2.
That’s a good subject of study. I bet we would find that moral decisions for which a lot of time is allowed would rely less on fiction-based normative rules than deep contextual reasoning, while more ‘snap’ type decisions are more likely to rely on fictional guidelines in the same way that your example decisions are really being made based on immediate perceptions or feelings of disgust (that looks like poo; that looks dangerous, etc.) rather than deep analysis.
Richard Joyce’s solution to this problem is that moral fictionalism is a commitment that you make when doing moral philosophy. You decide to act *as if* your moral judgements are true, even though you don’t really believe them. However, according to Joyce, in your day to day life you will become immersed in the fiction to the extent that you won’t really behave differently to any ordinary moral believer. So the thought that stealing the pen would be wrong will motivate you not to steal the pen, because it will seem to you, in the moment, that it is wrong. Really, you’re just deciding not to let your scepticism about objective morality interfere with your everyday life. (A bit like how people who claim not to believe in free will continue to speak and act in ways that would suggest that they do.)
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PCC,
It’s interesting that, as an incompatibilist, you think you need this illusion in order to function.
As a compatibilist, I would say that I don’t need the illusion. I can fully accept that my choices are fully determined in the same way that the moves chosen by a chess-playing computer are entirely determined. All one need do is interpret “choice” in that deterministic way; no illusion need be involved.
By the way, I agree with you entirely on morality.
“it’s one that’s necessary for me to function”
Indeed interesting.
I would say: it’s just the way it is; it’s the way we function.
I doubt we need this illusion. Other animals seem to do well without, even the social ones.
Irwin’s piece was too long and his conclusions were fragile. Summary:
“morality represents a preference for ways to behave” as PCC notes.
Behaviors are complicated, but they are a starting point and they are observable. Nothing in morality has to be objective it just needs to point roughly in the direction of minimum suffering.
When Irwin talks of that scary moment when people become aware of no foundation for their moral truths I feel like pulling out my nano-tiny-violin and playing him the world’s least sympathetic tune.
RE your last paragraph, I think I actually do have sympathy for people that feel that their must be an objective foundation for morality (for example a god) and that there must be moral truths defined by it. Seems very needy to me and sadly lacking in self confidence and or self respect. Or sadly lacking in confidence in human capabilities in general.
The problem with philosophical “truth” and anthropocentric morals are that they are overrated. People do choose to use simple effective models everywhere else, even if they are only simple approximations and not the underlying nature of things.
A physics smell test:
‘It is not clear that this practical objection can be overcome, but even if it could, gravitational newtonism would still be disingenuous, encouraging us to turn a blind eye to what we really know. It may not be the most pernicious kind of self-deception, but it is self-deception nonetheless, a fact that will bother anyone who places value on facts.’
E.g. never mind that newtonian gravity is a useful approximation that are used by rocket scientists because it is too complex to model general relativity for trajectories. It neither treats spacetime as curved nor respect that the pseudoforce of gravity is not a classic force and hence it can’t be valued for its simplicity, factfulness in most cases and overall usefulness. To Irwin and like minded it is a mora… excuse me, physics sin.
Oy vey!
Very well stated. I recall someone saying that normal day speeds we encounter like walking, cycling, driving are at least 1/10^6 determined by Newtonian dynamics. No special relativity needed. But we know Newton was incomplete and yet we still use that theory.
We have not crossed any bridge to objective morality and we may never, but that doesn’t mean all that we have discovered about morality is any worse than Newton’s theory describing a sparrow’s fall — it will get it almost right.
But the key word there is “incomplete”. Newtonian physics isn’t wrong; it’s just a hasty generalization to conclude the universe as a whole works according to the theory. The theories of relativity simply swallowed it, explaining not only what Newtonian physics couldn’t explain, but also explaining what Newtonian physics could explain.
What Irwin is intending to describe is more comparable to pretending vitalism is true and “elan vital” animates living organisms. Even if it accidentally has everyday practical applications, it is doomed as an explanatory framework, complete or incomplete.
This notion can be (perhaps) captured by the notion of partial truth, which would at least involve the judgement that general relativity is *more* true than Newtonian gravitation theory. (Cf. also Asimov on the “relativity of wrong”.)
One can believe in unicorns, they are a kind of horse with a horn. One can believe in Bigfoot and the Yeti, they are big hairy fellows. One can believe in angels, they are men with wings. But one can *not* believe in a godlike entity, because the term is empty, it has neither intension nor extension, it has no properties and can’t be described. Every believer is pretending. They use the term as a projection screen for their individual fragmented fantasies. No two believers believe in the same god.
If you take the view that ‘wrong’ means
“having deleterious consequences for society”
then it looks like you do have a somewhat objectivist moral theory, so long as we can get a roughly objective handle on what counts as a ‘deleterious consequence for society’. Although that might be viewed as just a further value judgement (or preference), I think there are good grounds for saying that which actions are deleterious to society aren’t just a matter of opinion. Stealing and murder really are deleterious to society, regardless of anyone’s opinion on the matter. Dying your hair green, not so much. Perhaps different environments or different stages of development of different societies will lead to some differences in which actions are deleterious, but that needn’t detract from the objectivism of the view. We can just assume that your moral judgement is true or false relative to your own society.
Having said that, there are, I think, good reasons for thinking that the word ‘wrong’, at least as it is usually used, doesn’t just mean something like “having deleterious consequences for society” (or “being utility reducing”) because that seems to leave out the normative force of moral terms like ‘wrong’. The word isn’t merely descriptive, but partly prescriptive. To know that an action is wrong is to know not only what the effects of the action is, but that you ought not to perform that action. That’s the problem that Richard Joyce and earlier J.L. Mackie raise about supposed moral properties. Our moral discourse seems to imply that there are moral properties that are both objective and prescriptive, but there seems to be no way to fit such properties within a naturalistic framework. Joyce is well worth reading on this stuff (he’s quite an entertaining writer too, which is a bonus).
Building on your idea (or maybe simplifying it), yes it is possible to build valid moralities in which the conclusions follow rationally from the premises and the empirical data you have to work with. In this respect, morality can be made consistent and reproducible – anyone and everyone who correctly turns this crank, gets this answer. This is one vernacular definition of ‘objective’ – that everyone can come to agreement that this system of rules working on this data will yield this result. Maybe we can call that ‘soft’ objectivity.
‘Hard’ objectivity would then be analogous to soundness – i.e. that you know beyond reasonable question that your premises are objectively, factually true, and thus that your moral rules would hold for all entities, in all times, and all places. ‘Hard’ objectivity implies one could build a goodometer like you might a spectrometer, and point it at things, and measure the objective moral worth of some action, and that yes even aliens with fundamentally different biologies could build the same instrument and get the same result. This seems to me practically impossible given that many of our moral premises are themselves cultural or social valuations of things; we are not measuring an externally objective property of actions analogous to momentum or other physical properties (and lest I be accused of strawmanning, I think practically nobody claims morality is objective in this way. Maybe some religious fundamentalists, but I’d bet practically no philosophers).
Actually, I would think that most philosophers have thought that morality is objective in the hard sense you describe.
A utilitarian thinks that actions are right to the extent that they increase happiness, wrong to the extent that they increase misery. Actually working out all the consequences of an action is going to be difficult, but the act of working it out is trying to discover an objective fact.
A Kantian thinks that actions are right if and only if they accord with the categorical imperative. But the categorical imperative is not perceived as merely a product of a particular culture, but as a principle of reasoning that is mandatory for any rational being.
Others think that moral facts are known to us by intuition, analagous to how we know basic mathematical facts. I.e moral facts are self-evident.
And there are several other ‘hard objectivist’ theories.
There are many dissenters to this ‘hard objectivist’ view, but when I was studying this stuff a few years ago, my sense was that the ‘hard objectivist’ view (which they’d just call ‘realism’) was the dominant one.
AFAIK utilitarian recognize that utility can be personal/social and thus is not universal or constant. That would (IMO) be like my ‘soft’ objectivity because you must first determine what personal premises on utility a specific utilitarian holds.
Kantian categorical imperatives are at least partially a function of biology. If we were evolved spiders, for instance, we’d have no moral qualms about eating our infants and it would work in terms of “if everyone did it…” because they are r-type species for whom infants are cheap and plentiful and not expected to survive. Mantis society works just fine with the rule that every female can decapitate the male during coitus. And so on. So again, this moral reasoning does not lead to a universal morality because its not based on universally true premises.
But I will defer to you on your last two paragraphs; I could certainly be underestimating the popularity of this position amongst philosophers and theologians.
Not quite sure of your point regarding utilitarianism, but it is viewed as a realist position by philosophers. Subjective preferences and values may need to be included in the calculation of utility, but I don’t think that makes the theory itself subjectivist.
With regard to spiders and mantises, they aren’t rational creatures. However, I understand the general point you’re making — that what the question of what is the rational thing to do may depend on the sort of thing you are. That may be a good criticism of Kantianism. My point was just that Kantianism is generally seen as a realist moral theory.
‘Hard’ objectivity would then be analogous to soundness – i.e. that you know beyond reasonable question that your premises are objectively, factually true, and thus that your moral rules would hold for all entities, in all times, and all places.
Hold on a second. Objectivism is not the same thing as absolutism. Lilac flames objectively exist, but that doesn’t mean it must hold that all fires, in all times, and all places must be lilac or else we give up on objectivity. Conditionals are – indeed, would in nearly all cases HAVE to be – part of any objective field, including moral objectivism. If lilac fires are caused solely by a sudden application of heat in an oxygen-rich atmosphere to atoms of potassium, then we simply include it as another fact.
My ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ notions do have a middle gray area or overlap. You can imagine a situation in which given perfect information about some context, everyone would arrive at the exact same conclusion regarding morality. But in this same imaginary world, if perfect information about context is absolutely necessary to render a moral judgment, then it would be impossible or useless to try and articulate general rules such as “murder is wrong.” When is murder wrong? Well we all agree that in this culture for this species when this happens etc etc etc. its wrong. Is that hard or soft objective? Its kind of both/on the border.
So I think the important distinction is whether moral generalizations are objectively true or not. I don’t think this is the case and I don’t think many people outside of religious fundies think this is necessarily the case, but I could easily be wrong about the last.
Morality is both objective and subjective. It is objective in the sense that everyone’s morality is based on the same evolved sense of “what actions will best insure the survival and flourishing of my tribe (society) and therefore me.” And it is subjective in the sense that everyone has their own perception of what will best insure survival and flourishing of their tribe, and therefore themselves.
I don’t think that Sam Harris believes in objective moral rules. What he is saying is that there are many paths to objective “moral goodness” and many paths to objective hell. While not everyone agrees on all things good and bad, there are cases where everyone agrees that certain things are objectively good and other things are objectively bad.
So for example, imagine two people. Both of them objectively agree that good = what will best insure the survival and flourishing of the tribe. But they do not agree on what specific actions are going to achieve that survival and flourishing of the tribe. So their morality is objectively the same but their perception of what will achieve that objective good is different due to perception of reality.
In nature/nurture terms, the nature of our morality is objective, whereas our individual nurture situation creates different perceptions on how to achieve that objective good. IMO.
And it is subjective in the sense that everyone has their own perception of what will best insure survival and flourishing of their tribe, and therefore themselves.
This seems a curiously contradictory position to take. What else is that perception going to be but merely a sorely limited attempt at an objective assessment? It’s like saying everyone’s idea of how humans evolved is different, so human evolution is thus a subjective topic.
Evolution is not a good analogy because evolution is not an instinct, whereas morality is an instinct. I’m saying that our moral instinct is objectively the same. But our upbringing and knowledge and therefore our perception of reality differ so two identical moral instincts can act differently in pursuit of the same moral goal.
The point of the analogy has nothing to do with instinctive thinking. Your point is that, if people come to learn different ideas about morality, therefore it is to that extent not an objective study. But exactly the same thing can be said about human evolution – different people learn different things and come to different explanations – and no one takes that as a sign that the study of human evolution is therefore not objective. More broadly, people have different ideas over how humans arose in the first place, but we don’t have difficult seeing that this is the result of wrong ideas and parochial thinking.
I repeat my earlier question: What else is that perception going to be but merely a sorely limited attempt at an objective assessment?
“Your point is that, if people come to learn different ideas about morality, therefore it is to that extent not an objective study.”
No that is not my point. Sorry if I gave that impression. I’m saying that people come to learn different things about REALITY through their upbringing and so their PERCEPTION of reality is subjective. Thus two people with the same objective moral instinct, but different perceptions of reality can take two different paths of action to meet the same moral objective.
“Contra Sam Harris, I don’t think that there are any objective moral rules or values.”
I’m unconvinced that Sam believes that to be the case in the sense you might mean. He means it in the sense that we might say aspirin is the best way to treat a headache. That’s objectively true ONLY if your goal is to make the headache go away.
By that logic, if you don’t want a headache to go away, then aspirin therefore cannot cure headaches.
But even if a person’s goals altered the drug’s effects placebo-like, how is that a point against moral objectivism? Brain states are just as much causes as gamma rays.
Since it’s most likely that the designation “good, better, best” is deemed outside of objectivity, on what grounds can it be deemed to exist at all? There isn’t a facet of the mind sciences – a science tackling a supposedly subjective field – that isn’t sooner or later amenable to objective study. If goodness can’t even be rooted in some way to the large-scale effects of sentient organisms (and especially ourselves), then in the absence of some form of dualism, it is as non-existent as a god and moral nihilism is the correct position. You can’t turn around and invoke “preferences” or “consequences to society”, because neither of these are outside objectivity.
I don’t understand how someone living in an age of mind sciences and with no dualist leanings nevertheless concludes moral objectivism is false. There’s nothing sacred about “preferences” and “effects on society” that suddenly makes them radically different from animal ethology, particle physics, and neurophysiology. There’s certainly nothing sacred about “goals” or “desires”, and passing the buck to them is little more than arbitrary whim. Passing the buck to “society” is arbitrary mob rule.
What authority does someone’s preference have in ethics? I want to scoff tasty chocolate; I want not to die of diabetes in twenty years. When the two clash, is it simply the happen-stance of causality which one dominates? Does that suddenly make the victor “right”? And if this system doesn’t work for one individual, why is it any more appropriate for a society of them?
It’s certainly a lie to claim that most religious people are religious fictionalists, but certainly a modest few are, and I think there are more institutions openly accepting of this in the Jewish community than other places.
The founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, Mordecai Kaplan, in his book “The Meaning of God in Modern Jewish Religion” is effectively a fictionalist.
(I like Don Cupitt’s phrase “non-realist Christianity”, except he needs to clarify that the “Christian” part is a very modernized Anglicanism. Even the “Christian” part isn’t anything evangelicals would recognize.)
Others are “apophatic” believers for whom most of the Bible is symbolic metaphor, but God is a Ground of Being. Reza Aslan and Karen Armstrong falsely claim this to be the majority of believers, though I suspect there are a substantial number of them in liberal denominations. (I also think Aslan is more obviously disingenuous; Armstrong is just confused.)
Then you get folks who might concede Jonah and the Whale are a fiction but the virgin birth and resurrection are non-negotiables. Lots of Catholics in this group.
Then you get full-blown literalists.
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Say, if there’s a “King’s College” in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, why is the Christian college that recently forced Dinesh D’Souza to resign from the presidency called “THE King’s College”?
I agree, religious fictionalists probably have a significant overlap with sophisticated theologians. I do think the theologians actually believe the bunk they put forth, but it seems the people who appreciate their views are largely touting belief in belief
For most other people, including myself, I’m more interested in what is actually true. If religious claims fail to satisfy any questions about the nature of the Universe we live in, then I cannot pretend to go along with the charade. This is not to say that I can’t see other people happily living with this sort of cognitive dissonance though.
Jerry,
Just out of curiosity, what actual evidence do you have that we don’t have any “free-will” at all? Sure looks like an article of faith to me.
While I’ll readily concede that the issue is a little obscure at best, I expect that that is partly because it’s based on a false dichotomy: far better, I think, to consider that what we have is some limited degrees of freedom, a rather sound, ubiqutious, and venerable scientific concept and principle. While another principle, that of emergence particularly as it relates to consciousness, is maybe somewhat obscure and problematic, I think that it, as typified by phonons, could possibly underwrite a limited degree of free-will, something that justifies arguing that, to some limited degree, we are our own “first causes” – so to speak.
You have used two pseduonyms and two email addresses, so you will be posting here no more. Sorry, but that’s a Roolz violation. At any rate, if you want to see my views on free will, you can find them on this site or the internet, so don’t ask me to regurgitate for your benefit what I’ve said many time before. See, for instance, this talk I gave at the Imagine No Religion meeting last summer.
Jeremiah,
Here is a simple choice I made yesterday. I chose to have a cup of coffee. I opened the cupboard door looked inside, there was tea or coffee. I fancied a coffee, had no reason not to do what I fancied and so chose coffee..Could I have chosen tea? Yes. What do I mean? In this case I mean I would have chosen tea if I’d fancied a cup (some mornings I do).
The thing is it doesn’t seem like I chose my fancy for coffee I just had it. So firstly it doesn’t seem like I had free will. Belief in free will doesn’t fit with the experience.
Another way of putting I would have drank tea if I’d fancied one, is I would have drank tea if circumstances not chosen by me (in this case my fancy) had been appropriately different.
The point is in order to have done otherwise circumstances not chosen by me would have had to have been different.
There is no way out of this.The problem isn’t physics, it’s the nature of selection. We must select one option over the others somehow. And what this means is to make a different choice we’d have to weigh up the options differently somehow..Choice is the process, we don’t choose the process.
So free will doesn’t fit the experience of choice making and is seemingly impossible.
We’re highly unlikely to have it under such circumstances. So no, it’s not a matter of faith to disbelieve in it. We can rule it out with almost complete certainty.
The reason this matters is if we accept there is a sense in which choice we get to make is sheer luck, how we think and feel about moral responsibility rightly changes, since the denial of this luck influences us. When we think a person could have done otherwise and blame him for not doing so, our feelings change when we realise that means would have if circumstances not chosen by him had been appropriately different, because we realise he was just unlucky unchosen parts of the universe weren’t different so that he would have made a different choice.
“Yes, and that “user illusion” may in fact be an evolved tendency. I, too, am a hardnosed free-will rejecter, but of course I still feel and act like I make choices. I know that’s an illusion, but it’s one that’s necessary for me to function.”
I think it’s important to make the distinction between “choice” (i.e. free will, which is an illusion) and “decision-making” in the simple sense of computation. Our brains do compute, of course. When faced with a moral “choice”, our brains calculate – processing the information to produce an output, even if that output was always a foregone conclusion.
So, once I realized that I had no free will, I think it actually reduced my angst level! My brain is what it is. Fortunately, it appears most of the time to generate morally acceptable outputs; it is agreeably inquisitive about the world, and it even appears to want to improve its information processing algorithms at the ripe old age of 51. So, now that I realize that there is no homunculus inside that’s free to ponder every “choice” to the nth degree, I just let my brain get on with the calculations, and hope for the best.
I suppose if I were a psychopath I might be much more inclined to reject free-will fictionalism, especially if I got caught eating somebody’s liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
I had to look that up. … OK, Passover storytelling.
I guess that’s another sign of the differences between religious expression in Britain and the US. It is possible that I have friends who are Jewish, but why on earth would the question ever come up?
I don’t recall the term ever being used when we were taught about Judaism at school. Certainly Franz (the only Jew I’ve known and known of) never mentioned it.
File under : “rosary etc”.
I always took the “The Stone” to be a rather more fossilized form of “The Onion.”
Differnce being The Onion is intentionally funny.
That, and The Onion is more rigorous philosophically.
😀
Morality is all about our emotions, but we all think our version is objectively the right one. Liberals tend just to have fewer of these strong moral emotions than conservatives and SJW’s.
In absence of objectively true moral norms, liberals try to keep everyone happy and to fight totalitarian views because they make only totalitarians happy.
I think the closest thing to “objective moral norms” we can find here:
http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
I do think (sometimes) that ethics is objective in the sense that if one wants to discover if an action is wrong, one consults the world generally, rather than one’s own preferences.
However, it does not follow that there is a useful notion of moral responsibility. I am ambivalent about this.
I am also, sometimes, ambivalent on whether or not ethics should be construed propositionally or not. (Cf. Kitcher, _The Ethical Project_.)
Actually I’m very happy about the the comment made by Jeremiah, Jerry, as it led to your reply and posting of the link to your talk at the Imagine No Religion meeting last summer, a talk I’d not seen before. An incisive and thorough exposition of the issue and a pleasure to listen to. Although I’m already an incompatibilist, it was great to watch it all summed up so well. I’ve sent the link on to my wife, my children and some other family members.
Richard
I wouldn’t say I’m an incompatibilist because I think that’s just a matter of semantics.
But I agree with Jerry about the reason this subject matters which is moral responsibility. We most certainly aren’t morally responsible in the sense people ordinarily suppose because that’s based on us being able to have done otherwise without unchosen circumstances having been different. And so we don’t have the type of free will people ordinarily think we have.
Compatibilists aren’t wrong to define free will differently. It’s just they tend to breeze past the significance of not having the free will people suppose we have. How could I have done otherwise? I would have if unchosen circumstances had been appropriately different. Is that how people see moral responsibility? Not a chance.
I am trying to live my life amorally.
It is difficult but by and large succeeding.
I enjoyed this but I am not sure I agree with you about wanting what is best for society. It seems to me that I am only out for what is best for me. Is that not a more hard-nosed evolutionary argument? Every one of us goes for what is best for themselves: survival of the fittest. I don’t grab all of the cookies off the plate when there are other people there because of the consequences if I do. You can work out the boundaries between freedom and licence without bothering with all the moralistic hogwash as A.S. Neill showed at Summerhill School.
But everything is part of a natural process, isn’t it? So, the fact that people group together and engage in strange behaviours like cheering the Royal Family or getting potty about football matches is part of the parcel. And the fact that I don’t like any of that tosh doesn’t make me superior. I’m just wired differently.