Intuitions
What makes us give any credence to human feelings and intuitions about our universe? This seems exceedingly strange in light of our actual position within all the time and space of the universe. We are a very small, and very recent, part of it all. And we came to be a part of it not as the result of some divine mind lying behind all reality, but as one of the countless results of meaningless, swarming self-replication. Ours are simply the genes that helped our ancestors to out-compete and out-fuck their neighbors—resulting in a species adequately successful at self-replication in its particular niche. So that’s what we’re built for; that’s what our minds are good at: being primates of our size and lifespan and habitats, and making more of the same.
Part of that is being social animals, and getting along, and feeling moral intuitions. Part of that is feeling that life is meaningful—at least inasmuch as the issue crosses one’s mind. (Evolution doesn’t necessitate being reflective or philosophical, just eschewing suicide, at least for a while.)
So yes, of course you feel what you feel, and you feel some of it very strongly. Same here. But what does that have to do with reality?
There’s a priori no answer to your question, since you’re basically asking whether it’s true that our truth-forming-faculty is accurate – whether it is or it isn’t, we can’t be expected to know. Following on from that, believing that our intuitions present a guide to behaviour is an act of faith, but I’d argue not a very strong one.
Think about it this way: our only other option is to accept that none of our intuitions have any bearing on reality. However, if you think that’s bad – or entails despair – then you’re making an intuitive judgement that we’ve just seen may be totally inaccurate! Therefore if we don’t accept that our intuitions have some accuracy, we’re forced into a kind of floating nothingness, where we neither affirm nor deny the value of any proposition at all.
I wasn’t aiming at our rationality or our sensory perception, but rather at our intuitions, emotions, hunches. As for whether the former are reliable or truthful, sure, we can’t really know. But it seems to me that to survive and to communicate, we all at least make the practical assumption that they are.
I do accept that our moral intuitions have no ultimate bearing on reality, but I don’t think that that’s bad, or entails despair. Sure, for now I often feel that that’s bad, and feel despair. But I don’t think that’s necessary, and I’m working and hoping to change it.
I would accept the description of floating nothingness. And indeed, I neither affirm nor deny the value, i.e. moral or otherwise normative value, of any proposition at all. But contra Dr. Fincke, I don’t think there’s any necessary link between affirming truth and affirming moral value. One can still deal in categories of truth and falsity without thinking that there’s any moral import or obligation involved.
Categories of truth and falsity follow norms of reasoning which make you feel obliged to believe in one way rather than another. Asserting something’s truth or falsehood on rational grounds is a claim that you have met your obligations with respect to belief. If you deny there is anything real about norms then it seems that there is no reality to the norms you use in discriminating true from false and, so, nothing “better” about some beliefs such that they merit being called “true” or “worse” about other beliefs such that they merit being called “false”. There are just beliefs, none truer or falser as there are no norms for distinguishing true or false.
That is one way to view truth and falsity. Both you and I learned under Christianity that truth is a moral matter. And feelings stemming from that view still reverberate in my gut from time to time. But intellectually, I no longer believe that—and this is a perfectly coherent position. One needn’t view truth in moral terms. To the contrary, I believe that I am in no way “obliged to believe in one way rather than another.” And by “asserting something’s truth or falsehood on rational grounds,” I do not claim to be meeting obligations, or to be referring to obligations of others. I do not think that true beliefs are morally or normatively better, or that false beliefs are morally or normatively worse.
Now for your charge that “the norms [I] use in discriminating true from false” are repudiated by my moral nihilism and its denial that “there is anything real about norms.” I’m operating with the correspondence theory of truth, so in calling beliefs true or false, I’m speaking to their relation to the world. Sure, one can pose challenges of radical skepticism, but I don’t see how those challenges would be any more worrisome or problematic for my position than for any other. So let’s bracket that, and assume that we do, in fact, have a decent picture of the world, and we can often discover whether beliefs correspond to the world and are therefore true, or fail to correspond to the world and are therefore false.
There lie truth and falsehood, without any moral component. If a belief about the world matches the actual state of the world, it is true. If it doesn’t, then it is false. And that’s it.
Because part of the actual state of the world is, I believe, that there is no ultimate morality. And this extends to reasoning and believing, just as to helping or killing.
My problem is that when saying you are going to employ a correspondence theory, you are appealing to norms for what to believe—only that which corresponds to reality. Why are those beliefs that correspond “better”? Or why should one believe them? I don’t think you can efface the participation in norms when you say something like “beliefs correspond to the world and are therefore true”. That’s allegiance to a certain truth discourse out of the observation that it is better.
I’m unclear on why those norms are so easy to justify to you when norms against killing aren’t.
I’m also unclear on what “part of the actual state of the world” is limited to. One of the states of the world is that social species have only survived and only presently exist at all because of their participation in certain cooperative activities of certain structures. For humans this has integrally meant not sociopathically murdering in arbitrary ways. While some percentages of humans do get away with this, if universalized it would destroy us. That’s it’s wrongness. This is a real state of relations in the world. Psychologically it would be irrational to treat this as a matter of indifference since our own intrinsic functioning and flourishing and our long term effects on future generations are threatened by the shredding of this social fabric.
I’m not appealing to any norms for what to believe. I’m not saying that beliefs that correspond to the world are better. And I’m certainly not saying that one should hold beliefs that correspond to the world.
I’m simply saying that by calling beliefs true, I mean that they correspond to the world. That is an exhaustive definition of what I mean. If need be, I could drop the word true and always substitute an appropriate phrase for correspondence to the world.
By saying that “part of the actual state of the world is, I believe, that there is no ultimate morality,” I meant that this lack of ultimate morality obtains, is true, is actual. I included part of so that it wouldn’t sound like I was trying to make a comprehensive or exhaustive statement about the actual state of the world. If this was unnecessary and ended up creating ambiguity, my bad.
I recognize the things you wrote relating to self-interest and universalizability. But I don’t see those things as being at issue. Anyone, including us nihilists, can consider the impacts of actions on survival or wellbeing or happiness, and can consider the impacts of universalizing behaviors or maxims. Religious folks can do the same.
But religious folks can also invoke entirely new moral concepts like ultimacy and obligation. Believers can build certain structures on their world views that we cannot build on ours. Now, obviously building on the straw of false supernatural beliefs isn’t worth much! But it does, nonetheless, give rise to very substantial conceptual differences.
Those religious moral concepts have profoundly shaped our language and culture. And I would argue that they also more closely match, or more thoroughly justify, our evolved feelings and intuitions.
At this point, we may simply have different preferences for the use of language. But I see it as I’ve written before: “We already have well-established vocabularies for discussing things like psychology, and self-interest, and social dynamics. Meanwhile, the vocabulary of morality is well-established in connection to considerations like ultimacy and obligation, which we naturalists cannot affirm. So if the things we might want to say about ‘morality’ wholly reduce to other discourses (e.g. what helps society function), why in the world would we steal moral language we cannot believe in, and create fruitless confusion?”