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.”
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.
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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.
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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’.
quote nietzsche christopher janaway metaphilosophy pragmatism metaethics