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
