An open letter to my philosophy teacher.
A Note: I wrote this email to Profesor Bonevac, who teaches Ideas of the Twentieth Century. I found the lecture on normativity lacking in its defense of humanism and in pointing out the horrors of its alternatives. I furthermore found the moral implications of the discoveries of evolution and other naturalistic explanations of the world and ourselves needlessly confused. I now know that not only is Profesor Bonevac cognizant of my concerns but probably agrees with me. I am publishing this simply because I don't want to admit that I may have wasted a Saturday convincing someone of something they already agreed with me on. I have skipped the introduction for brevity and privacy's sake.
When I lift weights, I can take measured and reasonable increases, like putting on five pounds on my squat every week to get months of steady strength growth, or I can give myself one big boost between workouts, like say ten pounds on a lift between Monday and Wednesday, and be stuck on that weight for a month or more. I think Hume advanced moral philosophy in the latter way, where a faulty and overreaching push led to centuries of ethical confusion and bad philosophy.
The divide between facts and values not only aligns closely with our intuitions but perseveres as the dominant moral paradigm in academia, and scientists and those in the second culture alike have fallen into this pitfall. Any freshman who has taken Philosophy 101 can ask his friends “but why” barely more cogently than a nagging toddler does and appear to his friends a genius who has proven that rape and torture are not unethical. But this view is clearly wrong, and those who have been taken in by it are intellectuals of such high order and influence that we cannot afford to prolong their confusion.
There are facts to be known about human and animal wellbeing. Is it false to say that a rape victim suffers or that not being raped is more conducive to wellbeing? Those who say we cannot know for sure, or that wellbeing doesn’t really mean anything, are making this harder than it has to be. Isn’t health just as vacuous a term, with just as much potential to change over time as new facts in medicine are revealed? A strength coach may ardently argue that a 200 pound male at 18 percent body fat is healthy and could even stand to make it to 230 but a dietician may suggest a caloric restriction. As new research in medicine comes out, our understanding of health changes. So it is with wellbeing. Just as there is an entire science of medicine devoted to improving health, there can be a science of morality that pools in facts from psychology, biology, economics, sociology, and virtually every other domain of knowledge known to man relevant to wellbeing. As our knowledge increases, we make moral progress by better understanding what is conducive to wellbeing and moving civilization in the direction of these moral peaks.
I want to make sure the word wellbeing is not confused with happiness and that the standard charges against hedonism aren’t leveled against me. Perhaps suffering and hard work can create better people capable of deeper forms of wellbeing. Maybe stoicism is the way to be. We will learn if this is the case as more about the brain (which is the source of our conscious experience) and how it interacts with the world is revealed, and if this is the case, so much the worse for tears and cheat days. But you have not disproven the importance of wellbeing by doing this; you have simply proven the value of stoicism through wellbeing.
Lest you argue that wellbeing is not the centerpiece of morality, or even that morality doesn't exist, I ask you what else is there possibly to value? I need not spend any time on why religion cannot be the answer to morality, for two millennia of terrible ideas, atrocious practices, and brutal wars should be enough to understand why letting iron age cults dictate our morality is a bad idea. I also urge you to contemplate a scenario where every conscious being is tortured in the worst way possible for the longest time, with no silver lining. This is bad, and if one doesn’t agree, I don’t know how to proceed in a conversation with such an individual. You may level a “why?” against me here. But this proposition needs no defense, for it is one amongst many that are necessary but cannot be defended. Try defending reason without giving reasons for valuing it or logic without using logic. Such values, without which science would be nothing more than the beliefs of the tribe with the biggest stick, are necessary to build the pillars of knowledge that we have out of them. Similarly, to move toward moral progress, the value of wellbeing is a valid and necessary piece of luggage.
Hume’s alternative is such a proven disaster. Do I really need to list out the terrible things that happen if we let our own sense of “approbation and disapprobation” (I’m saying it in a Scottish accent in my head) dictate our moral compass instead of facts about wellbeing? Hundreds of studied and established cognitive biases have been embarrassingly revealed that make this an unworkable solution. We feel empathy for the dying dog in the movie while billions of conscious creatures are locked in gestation crates, deprived of the necessary social and behavioral outlets they have evolved to psychologically demand the same way we demand ours, and ripped apart from their children to allow for another impregnation. We justify moral atrocities when our tribal identities are at stake. We are capable of great cruelty, and no man’s moral sense is “developed” perfectly, as we are not a blank slate. Evolution did not make us perfectly moral creatures; it made us as moral (and in many cases immoral) as we needed to be to pass on our genes. And if anyone had developed their moral sense fully, it would simply mean she knew how to maximize wellbeing.
I know that you are aware of all these arguments in favor of humanism, and I hope that you agree. If not, I would love to learn why not. Please let me know if there is something I am missing in my reasoning here. I would genuinely like to know because I do not want to be wrong for a second longer than I have to be. But assuming you agree, I was disappointed that in class you never explained what the problem is with making religion or your own feelings the link between is and ought, or for that matter, what the problem is with having no link, where you tell yourself you are in no position to say things like slavery is wrong or that forcing girls on a scale of millions into cloth bags and performing genital mutilation on them is wrong. Such moral confusion is never more than an opportunistic politician or overeducated academic away from ethical disaster. The same goes for the idea you broached at the end of class - that science is proving we are not free agents with souls, but rather particles arranged by natural selection in an indifferent universe. I wonder why you didn’t reveal what doesn’t follow so that we don’t raise a generation of social Darwinists and nihilists. If you are looking for morality within evolution, you’re looking in the wrong place. We know we are conscious. In fact, our own consciousness is the only thing we know for sure. We assume by analogy that others are also capable of a similar scope of suffering and wellbeing, and that we can offer no reason to deny them wellbeing while demanding our own. Wellbeing does exist in a scientific universe, and it still matters. I am of course not even close to the first person to say anything I’ve said here. In my view, centuries of philosophers have been combatting the idiocy that has come crashing in as false conclusions are drawn from irrelevant premises. Must we really keep these students in the dark on their work?
The divide between facts and values not only aligns closely with our intuitions but perseveres as the dominant moral paradigm in academia, and scientists and those in the second culture alike have fallen into this pitfall. Any freshman who has taken Philosophy 101 can ask his friends “but why” barely more cogently than a nagging toddler does and appear to his friends a genius who has proven that rape and torture are not unethical. But this view is clearly wrong, and those who have been taken in by it are intellectuals of such high order and influence that we cannot afford to prolong their confusion.
There are facts to be known about human and animal wellbeing. Is it false to say that a rape victim suffers or that not being raped is more conducive to wellbeing? Those who say we cannot know for sure, or that wellbeing doesn’t really mean anything, are making this harder than it has to be. Isn’t health just as vacuous a term, with just as much potential to change over time as new facts in medicine are revealed? A strength coach may ardently argue that a 200 pound male at 18 percent body fat is healthy and could even stand to make it to 230 but a dietician may suggest a caloric restriction. As new research in medicine comes out, our understanding of health changes. So it is with wellbeing. Just as there is an entire science of medicine devoted to improving health, there can be a science of morality that pools in facts from psychology, biology, economics, sociology, and virtually every other domain of knowledge known to man relevant to wellbeing. As our knowledge increases, we make moral progress by better understanding what is conducive to wellbeing and moving civilization in the direction of these moral peaks.
I want to make sure the word wellbeing is not confused with happiness and that the standard charges against hedonism aren’t leveled against me. Perhaps suffering and hard work can create better people capable of deeper forms of wellbeing. Maybe stoicism is the way to be. We will learn if this is the case as more about the brain (which is the source of our conscious experience) and how it interacts with the world is revealed, and if this is the case, so much the worse for tears and cheat days. But you have not disproven the importance of wellbeing by doing this; you have simply proven the value of stoicism through wellbeing.
Lest you argue that wellbeing is not the centerpiece of morality, or even that morality doesn't exist, I ask you what else is there possibly to value? I need not spend any time on why religion cannot be the answer to morality, for two millennia of terrible ideas, atrocious practices, and brutal wars should be enough to understand why letting iron age cults dictate our morality is a bad idea. I also urge you to contemplate a scenario where every conscious being is tortured in the worst way possible for the longest time, with no silver lining. This is bad, and if one doesn’t agree, I don’t know how to proceed in a conversation with such an individual. You may level a “why?” against me here. But this proposition needs no defense, for it is one amongst many that are necessary but cannot be defended. Try defending reason without giving reasons for valuing it or logic without using logic. Such values, without which science would be nothing more than the beliefs of the tribe with the biggest stick, are necessary to build the pillars of knowledge that we have out of them. Similarly, to move toward moral progress, the value of wellbeing is a valid and necessary piece of luggage.
Hume’s alternative is such a proven disaster. Do I really need to list out the terrible things that happen if we let our own sense of “approbation and disapprobation” (I’m saying it in a Scottish accent in my head) dictate our moral compass instead of facts about wellbeing? Hundreds of studied and established cognitive biases have been embarrassingly revealed that make this an unworkable solution. We feel empathy for the dying dog in the movie while billions of conscious creatures are locked in gestation crates, deprived of the necessary social and behavioral outlets they have evolved to psychologically demand the same way we demand ours, and ripped apart from their children to allow for another impregnation. We justify moral atrocities when our tribal identities are at stake. We are capable of great cruelty, and no man’s moral sense is “developed” perfectly, as we are not a blank slate. Evolution did not make us perfectly moral creatures; it made us as moral (and in many cases immoral) as we needed to be to pass on our genes. And if anyone had developed their moral sense fully, it would simply mean she knew how to maximize wellbeing.
I know that you are aware of all these arguments in favor of humanism, and I hope that you agree. If not, I would love to learn why not. Please let me know if there is something I am missing in my reasoning here. I would genuinely like to know because I do not want to be wrong for a second longer than I have to be. But assuming you agree, I was disappointed that in class you never explained what the problem is with making religion or your own feelings the link between is and ought, or for that matter, what the problem is with having no link, where you tell yourself you are in no position to say things like slavery is wrong or that forcing girls on a scale of millions into cloth bags and performing genital mutilation on them is wrong. Such moral confusion is never more than an opportunistic politician or overeducated academic away from ethical disaster. The same goes for the idea you broached at the end of class - that science is proving we are not free agents with souls, but rather particles arranged by natural selection in an indifferent universe. I wonder why you didn’t reveal what doesn’t follow so that we don’t raise a generation of social Darwinists and nihilists. If you are looking for morality within evolution, you’re looking in the wrong place. We know we are conscious. In fact, our own consciousness is the only thing we know for sure. We assume by analogy that others are also capable of a similar scope of suffering and wellbeing, and that we can offer no reason to deny them wellbeing while demanding our own. Wellbeing does exist in a scientific universe, and it still matters. I am of course not even close to the first person to say anything I’ve said here. In my view, centuries of philosophers have been combatting the idiocy that has come crashing in as false conclusions are drawn from irrelevant premises. Must we really keep these students in the dark on their work?
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