Ruth Chang on parity, agency and rational identity

What is it to be a rational agent? The orthodox answer to this question can be summarized by a slogan: Rationality is a matter of recognizing and responding to reasons. But is the orthodoxy correct? In this paper, I explore an alternative way of thinking about what it is to be a rational agent according to which a central activity of rational agency is the creation of reasons. I explain how the idea of metaphysical grounding can help make sense of the idea that as rational agents we can, quite literally, create reasons. I end by suggesting a reason to take this alternative view of rational agency seriously. The orthodoxy faces a challenge: how do rational agents make choices within ‘well-formed choice situations’? By allowing that we have the power to create reasons, we have a satisfying and attractive solution to this question.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c4d055b365f02de29e99730/t/5f57600575dd3715b178fb3f/1599561735709/whatrationalagentFINAL.pdf

When a hard choice is substantively hard, the right thing to say, I think, is that the alternatives are comparable, but related by some relation beyond ‘better than’, ‘worse than’, and ‘equally good’ – I dub this relation ‘on a par’.

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‘On a par’ and ‘equally good’ are different relations because they have different formal properties. ‘Equally good’ is reflexive – a is as equally good as a — and transitive — if a is as equally as good as b which is as equally good as c, then a is as equally as good as c. ‘On a par’ is irreflexive — a isn’t on a par with itself – a is as equally as good as itself — and nontransitive — if a is on a par with b which is on a par with c, it doesn’t follow that a is on a par with c. But they are both ways in which items can be compared.

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If someone asked me to say what it is for things to be better or equally good, I’d try to describe what those relations involve by describing features of the evaluative differences they denote. If A is better than B, then the evaluative difference between them favors A. If A and B are equally good, then there is a zero evaluative difference between them. If A and B are on a par, there is a non-zero evaluative difference between them, but that difference doesn’t favor one over the other. One reason it’s hard to wrap our minds around the idea of parity – or non-zero, non-favoring evaluative differences – is that we’re so used to understanding value on the model of the reals. Once you assume that value behaves like mass or length, you’re stuck with the view that one value has got to be more, less or equal to another since mass and length can be measured by real numbers, and real numbers must stand in one of those three relations. One of the upshots of entertaining the possibility of parity is that we begin to question at a really fundamental level understanding value in the same way we understand most nonevaluative properties in the world.

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Besides its inviting us to give up our deeply held, implicit conception of value as akin to mass or length with respect to measurability, the most important difference between ‘on a par’ and ‘equally good’ shows up in what we should do, practically speaking, when faced with such alternatives. If alternatives are equally good with respect to what matters in the choice between them, it’s always permissible to flip a coin between them. Not so when things are on a par.

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[Parity] opens up a new way of understanding rational agency that is a substitute for the usual Enlightenment conception according to which we are essentially creatures who discover and respond to reasons. On that view, our agency is essentially passive – our reasons are ones given to us and not made by us. Our freedom as rational agents consists in the discovery of and appropriate response to reasons given to us and not created by us. Parity allows us to see that our agency may have a role in determining what reasons we have in the first place.

The idea instead is that when our reasons are on a par, we have the normative power to create new, ‘will-based’ reasons in favor of one alternative as opposed to another. Take a toy example. You can have the banana split or the chocolate mousse for dessert. They are on a par with respect to deliciousness, which is what matters in the choice between them. You have the normative power to put your agency behind – to ‘will’ – the chocolateyness of the chocolate mousse to be a reason for you to have it, thereby, perhaps, giving yourself most all-things-considered reasons to choose the chocolate mousse. Your act of agency is what makes it the case that you now have most reason to choose the mousse. This is an active view of rational agency because instead of sitting back and discovering what reasons we have, we can create reasons – when our non-will-based reasons – what I call our ‘given’ reasons – are on a par. It’s in this way, I suggest, that we forge our own identities as, say, chocoholics or people who love extreme sports or care about the environment or work to alleviate poverty or any number of things that help define each of us as distinctive rational agents with particular concerns and projects. This is, I think the most interesting way in which we are– as philosophers like to say – the ‘authors of our lives’.

One way to get an intuitive handle on this alternative view of agency is by considering the way you spend your Saturday afternoons. Say you spend yours interviewing philosophers. Could it be true that you have most reason to spend your Saturdays this way, rather than, say, going for walks, learning the piano, or working in a soup kitchen? Probably not. Could it be true that you have sufficient reason to interview philosophers as well as many other things, and you just arbitrarily plump for interviewing philosophers, where this plumping isn’t an exercise of rational agency but the agential equivalent of flipping a coin? Our choices of how to spend our free time don’t always feel that deeply random. What we do instead, on the view I believe parity makes possible, is put ourselves behind one activity rather than another – we identify with it, we commit to it – for the time being perhaps – we take it on as something we’ll do. When we put our agency behind something, it feels like we have most reason to do what we’re doing. And that’s because we have conferred normativity on that activity. Putting your agency behind spending your Saturdays interviewing philosophers is how you make yourself into the distinctive rational agent that you are – someone curious about things philosophical.

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[Kant and Sartre] were each partly right. Some reasons – the will-based ones – have their source in the will but others – the ones that are on a par when will-based reasons can kick in – are ‘given’ to us just as the Enlightenment view says. And only some choices are a matter of agential fiat – for example, ones where our ‘given’ reasons are on a par. Crucially, the existentialists eschewed any possibility of normativity before the act of agential fiat. When we make ourselves into chocoholics or do-gooders or philosophical explorers, we do so in an already-existing normative landscape. Or so I think. So that’s another way my view differs from existentialism.

https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-existentialist-of-hard-choices/

Rational agents have the normative power to create will-based reasons to be in one choice situation rather than another. By creating a reason to be in one among many eligible choice situations, you create the justification for being in that choice situation rather than the others. And as a rational agent who responds to reasons, you can thereby get yourself into that choice situation since you have most reason to be in it. And as we’ve suggested, when you create a reason for yourself to be in one choice situation among others, you put yourself behind that reason. By putting yourself behind that reason, you make yourself into the kind of person who now has most reason to be in that choice situation rather than any others. In this way, the activity of your will allows you to become one kind of agent rather than another, namely, an agent who faces these choice situations and not those. You are the driver of which choice situations – and consequently which reasons – make up the story of your life. 20 By creating reasons for yourself, you form what I have elsewhere called your ‘rational identity’ (Chang 2009, 2013a).

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Return to you lounging on your living room couch. There are a range of eligible choice situations you could be in right now. This range is determined by agential values like autonomy, well-being, and meaning in life. In choice situation A, what matters is getting your homework done well, and your choice is between continuing to read or getting yourself a coffee. In choice situation B, what matters is the suffering of others, and your choice is between writing a check to Oxfam or hopping a plane to volunteer your aid. In choice situation C, what matters is having fun, and your choice is between going to a movie or calling up some friends for a party. All three choice situations are eligible to you right now.

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Which choice situation should you be in? The Passivist orthodoxy has only this to say: you have sufficient reasons to be in any of the three, so just choose. By hypothesis, there is no reason to be in one over the others. But the reasons that render the choice situations eligible on the Passivist View are given reasons. As far as your given reasons are concerned, there is no further justification to be had for being in one choice situation over any others. The Activist View, by contrast, allows that you might create a will-based reason to be in situation A, which then justifies your being in that choice situation. By creating a will-based reason to be in situation A, you thereby make yourself into the sort of person for whom it is true that he has most reason to be in situation A. Your friend, similarly situated, might create a will-based reason for herself to be in situation C. She thereby makes it true of herself that she has most reason to be in situation C. Iterated across a lifetime, you may create a rational identity for yourself as a nerd, and your friend, a party animal. The Activist View gives rational agents the power to craft their own identities as individuals who justifiably face certain sets of choice situations rather than others.

The path we cut through life, among the myriad choice situations rationally open to us, is justified by the will-based reasons we create. Those who champion effective altruism have cut one such path. Those who spend their hours on Wall Street, making as much money as they can in order to live the high life, have cut another. It is only by allowing that there is more to rational agency than recognizing and responding to reasons that we can make sense of how we can be justified in crafting ourselves into the distinctive rational agents we are. Central to being a rational agent is creating reasons for ourselves to be in one choice situation rather than another. By doing so, we can determine for ourselves the reasons we have.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5c4d055b365f02de29e99730/t/5f57600575dd3715b178fb3f/1599561735709/whatrationalagentFINAL.pdf

Holden Karnofsky on visualising utopia

We should believe that a glorious future for humanity is possible, and that losing it is a special kind of tragedy.

When every attempt to describe that glorious future sounds unappealing, it's tempting to write off the whole exercise and turn one's attention to nearer-term and/or less ambitious goals.

We may not be able to describe it satisfyingly now, or to agree on it now, and we may have to get there one step at a time - but it is a real possibility, and we should care a lot about things that threaten to cut off that possibility.

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Personally, I don't consider myself able to imagine a utopia very effectively. But I do feel convinced at a gut level that with time and incremental steps, we can build one. I think this particular "faith in the unseen" is ultimately rational and correct.

https://www.cold-takes.com/visualizing-utopia/

Richard Rorty on Proust and Hegel

For quite a while after I read Hegel, I thought that the two greatest achievements of the species to which I belonged were The Phenomenology of Spirit and Remembrance of Things Past (the book which took the place of the wild orchids once I left Flatbrookville for Chicago). Proust's ability to weave intellectual and social snobbery together with the hawthorns around Combray, his grandmother's selfless love, Odette's orchidaceous embraces of Swann and Jupien's of Charlus, and with everything else he encountered – to give each of these its due without feeling the need to bundle them together with the help of a religious faith or a philosophical theory - seemed to me as astonishing as Hegel's ability to throw himself successively into empiricism, Greek tragedy, Stoicism, Christianity and Newtonian physics, and to emerge from each, ready and eager for something completely different. It was the cheerful commitment to irreducible temporality which Hegel and Proust shared – the specifically anti-Platonic element in their work – that seemed so wonderful. They both seemed able to weave everything they encountered into a narrative without asking that that narrative have a moral, and without asking how that narrative would appear under the aspect of eternity.

Trotsky and the Wild Orchids (1992) https://cdclv.unlv.edu/pragmatism/rorty_orchids.html

Richard Rorty on his path from Plato to Hegel to Dewey

About 20 years or so after I decided that the young Hegel's willingness to stop trying for eternity, and just be the child of his time, was the appropriate response to disillusionment with Plato, I found myself being led back to Dewey. Dewey now seemed to me a philosopher who had learned all that Hegel had to teach about how to eschew certainty and eternity, while immunizing himself against pantheism by taking Darwin seriously.

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I decided to write a book about what intellectual life might be like if one could manage to give up the Platonic attempt to hold reality and justice in a single vision. That book - Contingency, Irony and Solidarity – argues that there is no need to weave one's personal equivalent of Trotsky and one's personal equivalent of my wild orchids together. Rather, one should try to abjure the temptation to tie in one's moral responsibilities to other people with one's relation to whatever idiosyncratic things or persons one loves with all one's heart and soul and mind (or, if you like, the things or persons one is obsessed with). The two will, for some people, coincide – as they do in those lucky Christians for whom the love of God and of other human beings are inseparable, or revolutionaries who are moved by nothing save the thought of social justice. But they need not coincide, and one should not try too hard to make them do so. So for example, Jean-Paul Sartre seemed to me right when he denounced Kant's self-deceptive quest for certainty, but wrong when he denounced Proust as a useless bourgeois wimp, a man whose life and writings were equally irrelevant to the only thing that really mattered, the struggle to overthrow capitalism.

Proust's life and work were, in fact, irrelevant to that struggle. But that is a silly reason to despise Proust. It is as wrong-headed as Savonarola's contempt for the works of art he called 'vanities'. Singlemindedness of this Sartrean or Savonarolan sort is the quest for purity of heart – the attempt to will one thing – gone rancid. It is the attempt to see yourself as an incarnation of something larger than yourself (the Movement, Reason, the Good, the Holy) rather than accepting your finitude. The latter means, among other things, accepting that what matters most to you may well be something that may never matter much to most people. Your equivalent of my orchids may always seem merely weird, merely idiosyncratic, to practically everybody else. But that is no reason to be ashamed of, or downgrade, or try to slough off, your Wordsworthian moments, your lover, your family, your pet, your favourite lines of verse, or your quaint religious faith. There is nothing sacred about universality which makes the shared automatically better than the unshared. There is no automatic privilege of what you can get everybody to agree to (the universal) over what you cannot (the idiosyncratic).

This means that the fact that you have obligations to other people (not to bully them, to join them in overthrowing tyrants, to feed them when they are hungry) does not entail that what you share with other people is more important than anything else. What you share with them, when you are aware of such moral obligations, is not, I argued in Contingency, 'rationality' or 'human nature' or 'the fatherhood of God' or 'a knowledge of the Moral Law', or anything other than ability to sympathize with the pain of others. There is no particular reason to expect that your sensitivity to that pain, and your idiosyncratic loves, are going to fit within one big overall account of how everything hangs together. There is, in short, not much reason to hope for the sort of single vision that I went to college hoping to get.

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If I had not read all those books, I might never have been able to stop looking for what Derrida calls 'a full presence beyond the reach of play', for a luminous, self-justifying, self-sufficient synoptic vision.

By now I am pretty sure that looking for such a presence and such a vision is a bad idea. The main trouble is that you might succeed and your success might let you imagine that you have something more to rely on than the tolerance and decency of your fellow human beings. The democratic community of Dewey's dreams is a community in which nobody imagines that. It is a community in which everybody thinks that it is human solidarity, rather than knowledge of something not merely human, that really matters. The actually existing approximations to such a fully democratic, fully secular community now seem to me the greatest achievements of our species. In comparison, even Hegel's and Proust's books seem optional, orchidaceous extras.

Trotsky and the Wild Orchids (1992) https://cdclv.unlv.edu/pragmatism/rorty_orchids.html

Bernard Williams reviews Nagel on reason

Who, in these discussions, are “we”? Is every claim to the effect that our understandings are relative to “us” equally threatening? When we reflect on what “we” believe, particularly in cultural and ethical matters, we often have in mind (as the relativists do) ourselves as members of modern industrial societies, or of some yet more restricted group, as contrasted with other human beings at other times or places. Such a “we” is, as linguists put it, “contrastive”—it picks out “us” as opposed to others. But “we” can be understood inclusively, to embrace anyone who does, or who might, share in the business of investigating the world. Some philosophers have suggested that in our thought there is always an implied “we” of this inclusive kind; according to them, when cosmologists make claims about what the universe is like “in itself,” they are not abstracting from possible experience altogether, but are implicitly talking about the way things would seem to investigators who were at least enough like us for us to recognize them, in principle, as investigators.

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What is really disturbing [...] about the relativists and subjectivists is [...] their insistence on understanding “us” in such a very local and parochial way. [...] They suggest that there are no shared standards on the basis of which we as human beings can understand each other—that there is no inclusive, but only a contrastive, “we.”

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Nagel’s basic idea is that whatever kind of claim is said to be only locally valid and to be the product of particular social forces—whether it is morality that is being criticized in this way, or history, or science—the relativist or subjectivist who offers this critique will have to make some other claim, which itself has to be understood as not merely local but objectively valid. Moreover, in all the cases that matter, this further claim will have to be of the same type as those that are being criticized: the relativists’ critique of morality must commit them to claims of objective morality, their attempts to show that science consists of local prejudice must appeal to objective science, and so on.

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The basic idea that we see things as we do because of our historical situation has become [...] so deeply embedded in our outlook that it is rather Nagel’s universalistic assumption which may look strange, the idea that, self-evidently, moral judgment must take everyone everywhere as equally its object.

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We should not forget that the style of philosophy to which Kant self-consciously opposed his critique he called dogmatic philosophy, meaning that it took the supposed deliverances of reason at their face value, without asking how they were grounded in the structure of human thought and experience. [...] In the spirit of Kant’s distinction, [Nagel's approach] is dogmatic, because it is not interested enough in explanations. It draws, as it seems to me, arbitrary limits to the reflective questions that philosophy is allowed to ask.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1998/11/19/the-end-of-explanation/

Thomas Nagel on reason

Reason, if there is such a thing, can serve as a court of appeal not only against the received opinions and habits of our community but also against the peculiarities of our personal perspective. It is something each individual can find within himself, but at the same time it has universal authority. Reason provides, mysteriously, a way of distancing oneself from common opinion and received practices that is not a mere elevation of individuality—not a determination to express one's idiosyncratic self rather than go along with everyone else. Whoever appeals to reason purports to discover a source of authority within himself that is not merely personal, or societal, but universal—and that should also persuade others who are willing to listen to it.

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The essential characteristic of reasoning is its generality. If I have reasons to conclude or to believe or to want or to do something, they cannot be reasons just for me—they would have to justify anyone else doing the same in my place.

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How is it possible that creatures like ourselves, supplied with the contingent capacities of a biological species whose very existence appears to be radically accidental, should have access to universally valid methods of objective thought?

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Descartes reveals that there are some thoughts which we cannot get outside of. [...] To get outside of ourselves at all, in the way that permits some judgments to be reclassified as mere appearances, there must be others that we think straight. [...] And once the existence of a single thought that we cannot get outside of is recognized, it becomes clear that the number and variety of such thoughts may be considerable.

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What kind of self-understanding would make our capacity to think comprehensible?

I believe there is no informative general answer to this question, because the authority of the most fundamental kinds of thought reveals itself only from inside each of them and cannot be underwritten by a theory of the thinker. The primacy of self-understanding is precisely what has to be resisted.

The Last Word, Chapters 1 & 2

Joe Carlsmith on secular love and loyalty

The problem of evil is about more than metaphysics. Indeed, Lewis dismisses materialism as confidently as ever; Hart sets the question of God’s “existence,” whatever that means, swiftly to the side; Ivan still expects the end of days. The problem of evil shakes them on a different axis — and plausibly, a more important one. It shakes, I think, their love of God, whatever He is. And love, perhaps, is the main thing.

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To see a man suffering in the hospital is one thing; to see, in this suffering, the sickness of our society and our history as a whole, another; and to see in it the poison of being itself, the rot of consciousness, the horrific helplessness of any contingent thing, another yet.

We might call this last one “existential negative”; and we might call Ginsberg’s attitude, above, “existential positive.” Ginsberg looks at skin, nose, cock, and sees not just particular “holy” things, contrasted with “profane” things (part of the point, indeed, is that cocks read as profane), but holiness itself — something everywhere at once, infusing saint and sinner alike, shit and sand and saxophone, skyscrapers and insane asylums, pavement and railroads, the sea, the eyeball, the river of tears.

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“Father love,” for many, is easy to understand. Love, one might think, is an evaluative attitude that one directs towards things with certain properties (namely, lovable ones) and not others. Thus, to warrant love, the child needs to be a particular way. So too with the Real, for the secularist. If the Real, or some part of it, is pretty and nice, great: the secularist will affirm it. But if the Real is something else, the thing to be done is to reshape it until it’s better. In this sense, the Real is approached centrally as raw material (here I think of Rob Wiblin’s recent tweet: “I’m a spiritual person in that I want to convert all the stars into machines that produce the greatest possible amount of moral value”).

But mother love seems, on its face, more mysterious. What sort of evaluative attitude is unconditional in this way? Indeed, more broadly, relationships of “unconditional love” raise some of the same issues that Ginsberg’s holiness does: that is, they risk negating the sense in which meaningfully positive evaluative attitude should be responsive to the properties of their object (reflecting, for example, when those properties are bad). And one wonders (as the devil wondered about Job) whether the attitude in question is really so unconditional after all.

But is mother love unconditionally positive? Maybe in a sense. But a better word might be: “unconditionally committed” or “unconditionally loyal”. [...] Where the archetypal father might, let us suppose, give up on the child, if some standard is not met, the mother will not. That is, the mother is always, in some sense, loyal to the child; on the child’s team; always, in some sense, caring; paying attention.

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Chesterton, in Orthodoxy (chapter 5) talks about loyalty as well, and about loving things before they are lovable:

“My acceptance of the universe is not optimism, it is more like patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty. The world is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to leave behind because it is miserable. It is the fortress of our family, with the flag flying on the turret, and the more miserable it is the less we should leave it. The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more … What we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent.”

https://handsandcities.com/2021/04/19/problems-of-evil/

Maxwell Tabarrok on growth as condition for cooperation

In an environment where total wealth does not grow the only way to get ahead is to take from someone else. Therefore, in an environment with a fixed supply of resources, respecting the rights of others is a strictly worse strategy than taking what you can when you can. It is only in a growing economy where two people can interact cooperatively and both come out ahead. We see this truth in comparisons between human society and the societies of other mammals. Male lions brawl with one another; whoever wins devours any children that don’t carry his genetic material. The animal world has no morals. In the zero-sum savannah this is perfectly rational. Any food and territory going to them is food and territory that isn’t going to your bloodline.

Since at least a few centuries ago things have been different in human society. Growth of what were once rival clans becomes mutually beneficial because it creates more vectors for trade, a bigger market for specialized goods and services, and more chances at transformative innovation. The possibility of positive sum interactions is the foundation for all moral behavior. We have not had this possibility for long and we do not yet fully appreciate its importance. If our society ever stops growing, it is only a matter of time before we return to our deep and brutal evolutionary roots. So, even if you still adhere to Rawls’ principles of justice, only a dynamic and growing economy will produce the incentives necessary to uphold them.

https://virginica.substack.com/p/stubborn-attachments-from-behind

Robin Hanson: one of our main choices is between competition and governance

I do tend to think natural selection, or selection, will just be a continuing force for a long time. And the main alternative is governance. I actually think one of the main choices that we will have, and the future will have, is the choice between allowing competition and then replacing with governance.

https://mindsalmostmeeting.com/episodes/future-generations

When I try to do future analysis one of the biggest contrary assumptions or scenarios that I focus on is: what if we end up creating a strong world government that strongly regulates investments, reproduction and other sorts of things, and thereby prevents the evolutionary environment in which the evolutionary analysis applies. And I'm very concerned about that scenario. That is my best judgement of our biggest long term risk [...] the creation of a strong civilisation-wide government that is going to be wary of competition and wary of allowing independent choices and probably wary of allowing interstellar colonisation. That is, this vast expansion into the universe could well be prevented by that.

Brian Leiter on naturalism and normativity

This brings us to what, I take it, has to be the real objection to the naturalist about normativity: namely, that he has not explained real normativity—that is, the bindingness of standards independent of our attitudes—and that explaining the real normativity of reasons is indispensable for creatures like us when we are trying to figure out what to do (or believe).

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The claim that it is “irrational for one to do a” means, for the naturalist, nothing more than some people or even all people might feel that you should not do a.

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The NeoHumean naturalist has not explained real normativity, as Scanlon complains, because real normativity does not exist: that is the entire upshot of the naturalist view. There are no reasons whose existence and character is independent of human attitudes; there are only human attitudes which lead us to “talk the talk” of reasons, to feel that we should act one way rather than another. And if real normativity does not exist, if only feelings of inclination and aversion, compulsion and avoidance, actually exist, then that means that all purportedly normative disputes bottom out not in reasons but in the clash of will or affect.

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If we have no real reason to believe the same or act the same, and thus we may not believe the same or act the same, given that our underlying psychological states (our attitudes) vary, what follows? What follows is basically what Ayer and Stevenson correctly diagnosed not quite a century ago: where people share attitudes, reasoning about what one ought to do and what one ought to believe is possible; where people do not share attitudes, reasoning is not possible and only force prevails in a dispute, whether that is the rhetorical force of producing a change in attitudes by whatever means are effective or the physical or lawful force of suppressing contrary attitudes. An agent deciding what to do or what to believe is in the grips of particular normative attitudes, some practical and some theoretical, and has no reason to discount them since after all they are her attitudes—although, as Nietzsche noticed, she might discount them if she were in the grips of a non-naturalistic view of what had to be true of her attitudes for them to move her, that is, if she thought they had to be something more than her attitudes.

Nietzsche's Moral Psychology, Ch. 4

Agnes Callard on philosophy

Philosophers are trying to make the story that humanity tells about itself better.

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You are pretty much constantly thinking thoughts that, in one way or another, you inherited from philosophers. You don’t see it, because philosophical exports are the kinds of thing that, once you internalize them, just seem like the way things are. So the reason to read Aristotle isn’t (just) that he’s a great philosopher, but that he’s colonized large parts of your mind. Not everyone is interested in learning about the history of philosophy. But if you are the kind of person who is not happy about having delegated some of your most fundamental thinking to other people; if you want to go back and retrace those steps to make sure you are on board; if you want to take full ownership of your own mind, well, in that case the history of philosophy might be for you.

https://dailynous.com/2018/05/27/how-philosophy-makes-progress-agnes-callard/

Chrisopher Janaway on Nietzsche's Genealogy

Nietzsche persuades us that morality’s various tenets and constitutive attitudes are historical constructions, to which there have been (and may still be) genuine alternatives. Placing high value upon compassion, guilt, and the suppression of our more aggressively expansive instincts, believing everyone’s well-being to be of equal kind and importance, expecting everyone to be a subject of rational free choice capable of acting similarly and blameable for failure to do so—these are not absolute, eternal, or compulsory attitudes for human beings to hold, but attitudes invented and perpetuated to fulfil a host of functions and needs.

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The moral attitudes that we now take for granted as the values, as the ‘values in themselves’, were brought into existence and sustained through enormous cultural ingenuity by specific types of human beings, standing in specific power-relations to others, and governed by specific internal drives both innate and learned.

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The fact that moral values are not the values überhaupt does not exclude their being the best ones for us to have. That they are a historical construct does not show that their construction was in any way a bad thing, nor does the manner of their construction, whatever its details, decide whether it is good for us to continue having them as ours.

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The creation and elaboration of Judaeo-Christian values, centred around the promotion of selflessness, brought about the development of man as an ‘interesting’ animal with a proper history, gave rise to an inner life, expressed an unparalleled form-creating will on the part of humanity, brought forth cultural products of the highest order, and enabled us to value truthfulness, the very instrument Nietzsche uses in his project of revaluation. However, none of this negates his central charge that morality has caused us to be ill, self-conflicted, self-hating, and deluded in ways that are ugly and unnecessary for us. Morality has fostered weak and reactive tendencies in humans, elevated self-punishment to a supreme good, taught us to loathe and fear large parts of the psyche, inclined us to conform to the lowest common denominator, discouraged creativity and fullness of life, systematically deceived us about the true nature of ourselves, and subordinated the human to spurious ‘absolutes’ and ‘beyonds’ posited primarily for the gratification of blaming ourselves over our constitutional inability to live up to them. If there is such a thing as progress in values, in Nietzsche’s eyes we have not come nearly as far as we might, and only if morality withers away is there hope of our going further.

[...]

Nietzsche has a radical message for philosophers and ‘scientific’ investigators: your conception of your own activity is at fault because you picture yourselves falsely. There is no primary drive towards knowledge and truth. We philosophers are composed of many affects and drives, and the notion of a rational self or knowing subject engaged in a self-validating exercise of pure dialectical truth-seeking is as much an insidious illusion as the notion of a realm of timeless objects waiting to be discovered. Disinterested, detached knowing is a fiction, but a persistently tempting one that we must struggle to guard ourselves against.

[...]

That philosophers pursue the truth for its own sake, that they succeed in speaking with a universal voice freed from the influence of non-rational drives and prejudices, that pure impersonal dialectic will reliably reach an answer to the question how best to live—these are self-serving distortions. The metaphors of universality, impersonality, and purity with which they have liked to portray themselves also arise out of the valuations peculiar to morality, and philosophy in turn can function as a source of rationalizations with which morality defends itself. Along with the values of morality, philosophers need to put themselves in question. If they understood how enquiry is beholden to valuations, and valuations to affects and drives, if they enquired more into themselves and made their many affects ‘useful for knowledge’ instead of trying to evade them, they might be less estranged from themselves and not detach knowledge from ‘life’.

Nietzsche on metaphysics as symptom

In some, it is their weaknesses that philosophize; in others, their riches and strengths. The former need their philosophy, be it as a prop, a sedative, medicine, redemption, elevation, or self-alienation; for the latter, it is only a beautiful luxury, in the best case the voluptuousness of a triumphant gratitude that eventually has to inscribe itself in cosmic capital letters on the heaven of concepts.

[…]

All those bold lunacies of metaphysics, especially answers to the question about the value of existence, may always be considered first of all as symptoms of certain bodies; and if such world affirmations or world negations lack altogether any grain of significance when measured scientifically, they give the historian and psychologist all the more valuable hints as symptoms of the body, of its success or failure, its fullness, power and highhandedness in history, or of its frustrations, fatigues, impoverishments, its premonitions of the end, its will to an end.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Preface to the Second Edition

We take care not to say that the world is worth less […] the whole attitude of man […] as judge of the world who finally places existence itself on his scales and finds it too light—the monstrous stupidity of this attitude has finally dawned on us and we are sick of it. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book V, §346

The realism we're looking for

Sharon Hewitt-Rawlette writes:

The realism we’re looking for is not a realism that affirms the existence of empirical, judgment-independent intrinsic value but then allows intuition or mere personal preference to take over the task of determining how this intrinsic value ought ultimately to influence one’s decisions.

What is the realism we are looking for? And why?

People look for different things. For example, some people want to put the word "mere" before "personal preference", while others do not. I'm not sure why.

Simon Blackburn on people who think that anti-realism entails nihilism

Such people have a defect elsewhere in their sensibilities—one that has taught them that things do not matter unless they matter to God, or throughout infinity, or to a world conceived apart from any particular set of concerns or desires, or whatever.

Blackburn, “Errors and the Phenomenology of Value” https://philpapers.org/rec/BLAEAT-3

Joshua Greeen on utiltiarianism as "deep pragmatism"

With a little perspective, we can use manual-mode thinking to reach agreements with our "heads" despite the irreconcilable differences in our "hearts." This is the essence of deep pragmatism: to seek common ground not where we think it ought to be, but where it actually is.

[...]

We all want to be happy. None of us wants to suffer. And our concern for happiness and suffering lies behind nearly everything else that we value, though to see this requires some reflection. We can take this kernel of personal value and turn it into a moral value by valuing it impartially, thus injecting the essence of the Golden Rule: your happiness and your suffering matter no more, and no less, than anyone else's. Finally, we can turn this moral value into a moral system by running it through the outcome-optimizing apparatus of the human prefromal cortex. This yields a moral philosophy that no one loves but that everyone "gets" -a second moral language that members of all tribes can speak.

[...]

If we acknowledge that our tribal feelings can't all be right, and yet aspire to resolve our differences in a principled way, then we need some kind of "ism," an explicit moral standard to guide us when our emotional compasses fail.

Joe Carlsmith on the importance of how you weigh it

Moral philosophers spend most of their time trying to identify what factors matter to at least some degree, and trying to explain why.

Surprisingly little time is spent writing on how we should weigh different factors.

In practice, the weighting is the crucial thing. And when you bear that in mind, the differences between consequentialist and non-consequentialist theories become less significant. All plausible non-consequentialist theories care about consequences to a significant degree. So they still have a weighing problem, perhaps just a harder one than the consequentialists since it has more variables.

https://handsandcities.com/2021/03/28/the-importance-of-how-you-weigh-it/

Elijah Millgram on metaphysics as intellectual ergonomics

[The turf of metaphysics] is the design and implementation of intellectual devices that facilitate effective reasoning.

[...]

Philosophical problems almost always turn out to be about what the right way to think is, and a creature’s cognition should match its form of life.  If we’ve come to have a different form of life (a form of life that consists in having many thoroughly different forms of life, side by side but temporarily), we should expect to find, when we take another look, that we’ve got a different pile of philosophical problems to deal with.

[...]

Necessity is a metaphysicians’ staple, and it plausibly has a cognitive function also: it tells you to ignore, anyway for the purposes of theoretical reasoning, anything outside a given range of alternatives.  So it’s an attention management device.

https://dailynous.com/2015/06/25/metaphysics-as-intellectual-ergonomics-guest-post-by-elijah-millgram/

Although philosophers tend to argue about distinctions as though they were arguing about matters of truth and falsity, a distinction is neither true nor false.

[...]

The point of arguing that a distinction is hard or even impossible to draw is that it is, as a practical matter, badly chosen. If a distinction is well or badly chosen, it can be so for a variety of other reasons as well. The real question is normally not whether the distinction is, metaphysically, there, but how much attention it should get.

The Great Endarkenment "D’où venons-nous . . . Que sommes nous . . . Où allons-nous?"

It’s not a new idea that intuitions are views, or perhaps intellectual habits, that were arrived at for some reason or other, only we’ve all forgotten what it was. We mostly still don’t realize what our technical term for this is, the one we use to mark simultaneously having forgotten how we came to think something, along with our dogged insistence on the something we nonetheless continue to think. That term is “a priori”.

[...]

[Old-school metaphysics] analyses are our version of “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”: there is this thing, say, metaphysical necessity, it is just that way, and we’re sure because our intuitions say so—which again is what we say when we’ve gotten used to doing it one way, and can’t remember why. The subtext is that there’s no need to reconsider how we do do things.

https://dailynous.com/2015/06/17/metaphysics-by-forgetting-guest-post-by-elijah-millgram/

Metaphysicians and moral philosophers don’t actually write journal articles and books reconstructing the metaphysics and moral theory of which side of the street to drive on. But as far as I can see, that’s mostly because it’s obvious that the rules of the road are policies we’ve adopted, and that the sense of indelible rightness and wrongness [of driving on a particular side of the road] comes from having gotten so very used to those policies. When you look around at the monographs and papers we philosophers do write, it often is just this, only in cases where it’s less obvious what the policies are. Somehow the policies have become hard to notice; somehow we’ve forgotten that there were any such policies.

I don’t think that metaphysics has to amount to turning memory loss into invisible objects, but a lot of it does. I don’t think that moral theory has to be the pretense that habits are ghostly imperatives, but a lot of it is. We have an interest in reconsidering the policies we’ve forgotten; you know, maybe they were bad choices even back then, and maybe circumstances have changed in the meantime.

https://www.elijahmillgram.net/whatismetaphysics.html

Maximising whims

A wise man on Twitter once wrote:

I think a place [Effective Altruism] sometimes goes awry is in its emphasis on search for optimality. I strongly doubt that any strategy is sufficiently likely to be "best" that we should label it as such.

I agree.

I think of 80,000 Hours as trying to help people see more of the best opportunities available to them, and then draw a rough circle around some 2-20% of the most promising.

Most of the value comes from drawing that circle. It is hard to draw a great circle, but if you've not thought about it much, you can probably draw a better circle (e.g. by thinking about scale, leverage, neglectedness).

How to choose between the opportunities within your circle? We can offer some rules of thumb, but none that turn the decision into a straightforward expected value calculation.

You can try some Fermi estimates, but at a certain point these are just Tarot cards.

Fundamentally, you must summon the resolve to act despite the uncertainty. Keynes:

It is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance.

I think of it as a three step process. Generate ideas, filter as best you can, then... pick on a whim.

80,000 Hours is saying: we can help you generate ideas and filter.

Some wish they could avoid the whim part. But I don't think that's an option.

Another wise man:

Many extremely valuable things will never seem credibly optimal. [...] [Effective altruism] seems to want to know what people are doing, and why they're doing it. But those people mostly didn't understand what or why until after the fact. Darwin thought he was on the Beagle to do geology, Turing working on an esoteric problem in mathematical logic...

"Smart person follows their curiosity and/or tries to solve some problem they've bumped into, happens upon a valuable breakthrough" might be a common pattern. If it is, 80,000 Hours can submit this kind of activity as an option to consider in your circle. We can say it might be one of your best options, but I don't think we can say it is your best option.

It seems like EA sometimes comes accross as offering an unrealistic degree of precision, probably due to the use of maximising language. "Find a much better option"—the realistic aim—might be a clearer slogan than "find the best option"—the regulative ideal.

What is philosophy? Some answers.

Marilyn Adams: Philosophy is thinking really hard about the most important questions and trying to bring analytic clarity both to the questions and the answers.

Peter Adamson: I guess I think philosophy is the study of the costs and benefits that accrue when you take up a certain position.

Simon Blackburn: Well, it’s a process of reflection on the deepest concepts, that is structures of thought, that make up the way in which we think about the world.

Wendy Brown: Philosophy asks about life’s meanings. Philosophy asks about who we are, what we might be, how we conceive ourselves, and how we can even think these questions.

Claire Carlyle: Philosophy is about making sense of that situation that we find ourselves in.

Tony Coady: Philosophy has always been something of a science of presuppositions; but it shouldn’t just expose them and say ‘there they are’. It should say something further about them that can help people. As I get older and older I’m more and more concerned that there should be more imagination in philosophy than there is.

Tim Crane: To quote Wilfrid Sellars, philosophy is the attempt to understand how things in the most general sense of that word hang together in the most general sense of those words.

Sebastian Gardner: Philosophy is the attempt to unify theoretical and practical reason.

Raymond Geuss: I’m afraid I have a very unhelpful answer to that, because it’s only a negative answer. It’s the answer that Friedrich Schlegel gave in his Athenaeum Fragments: philosophy is a way of trying to be a systematic spirit without having a system.

Thomas Hurka: Philosophy is abstract thought guided by principles of logic and ideals of precision in thought and argumentation about the most general issues concerning human beings and the world and our place in the world.

Brian Leiter: A philosopher for Nietzsche was an honorific. It refers to the person who creates or legislates value. It’s the person who, to borrow an image from one of my colleagues at the University of Chicago, Judge Richard Posner, is a [[Moral entrepreneur]]. It’s a nice image. It’s somebody who creates new ways of evaluating things—what’s important, what’s worthwhile— that changes how an entire culture or an entire people understand those things.

Alexander Nehamas: I can’t answer that directly. I will tell you why I became a philosopher. I became a philosopher because I wanted to be able to talk about many, many things, ideally with knowledge, but sometimes not quite the amount of knowledge that I would need if I were to be a specialist in them. It allows you to be many different things. And plurality and complexity are very, very important to me.

Alex Neill: Philosophy is thinking that is obsessed with clarity.

Thomas Pogge: Philosophy in the classical sense is the love of wisdom. So the question then is ‘What is wisdom?’ And I think wisdom is understanding what really matters in the world.

Janet Radcliffe Richards: I regard philosophy as a mode of enquiry rather than a particular set of subjects. I regard it as involving the kind of questions where you’re not trying to find out how your ideas latch on to the world, whether your ideas are true or not, in the way that science is doing, but more about how your ideas hang together.

Michael Sandel: Philosophy is reflecting critically on the way things are. That includes reflecting critically on social and political and economic arrangements. It always intimates the possibility that things could be other than they are. And better.

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong: Philosophy is the search for a coherent and justified overall world-view. Philosophers should stop looking at little issues in the corner of our lives and try to see how things fit together; how psychology fits with philosophy, how the mind fits with the body, how aesthetic value relates to economic value and justice. Those are the big issues: how do we fit together the different aspects of our lives? And that’s what philosophy ought to be addressing.

https://philosophybites.com/2010/11/what-is-philosophy.html