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.
quote joshua greene moral psychology consequentialism hedonism
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.
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.