It’s pretty easy to side-track discussions of morality and ethical systems into one of two swamps: epistemological challenges and nihilism. They’re great conversation-killers, but it’s hard to do any thinking if your partner resorts to saying “how do you know that?” every time you say something, or adopts a position of perfect skepticism and simply attacks without ever establishing a position worth defending.
Usually, those strategies are best for skeptics when discussing religion. They work well, because religions tend to make a lot of claims of knowledge that are, frankly, suspicious. How does the believer know god’s will? How does the believer know they have a soul? Those are serious questions and they’re hard to answer, but they come with a problem – you may as well just be saying “I don’t believe you” while the believer is saying “I believe.” Yes, we get that, that’s the whole point of the discussion. How and why the believer believes is an important line of enquiry, but they’re obviously already convinced of those things and they’re going to just double down with more of whatever convinced them in the first place. Then it becomes easy for the believer to start trotting out inefabbable in response, and the whole discussion devolves into the skeptic saying “how do you know that?” over and over again.
Those of you who’ve studied your history of skepticism probably see religion since the renaissance as attempting to deflect nihilistic challenges from skeptics or, most likely, from other branches of the same religion that have unleashed skeptical tropes against their opponents in order to destroy their positions. Extreme skeptical tropes, such as those compiled by Sextus Empiricus, allow one to win an argument by demolishing all assertions at the expense of being unable to make any in return. For a believer, that’s very uncomfortable, but that did not stop pre-enlightenment catholics and protestants from deploying corrosive skepticism to obliterate each others’ claims to having any knowledge of the desires of god or what was truth. In those wars, certain ideas were left untouched because they are foundational assumptions without which christianity is shredded: god is love, the bible contains moral teachings, the bible is divinely inspired, we have souls, there is an afterlife, god cares about the actions of humans. During the wars of religion, the various sides clawed at each other but generally steered away from the doomsday arguments, so christians slaughtered each other in huge numbers over questions like “did Jesus have a navel?” while steering assiduously away from questions like “how do we know we have a soul?” Naturally, an atheist can choose to attack any of these assertions, which is why well-placed skeptical enquiries are painful to believers, when those believers stop pretending and take them seriously.
In most of the discussions I’ve had with religious believers, I have tended to adopt the basic skeptical stance, challenging them over and over again for the basis behind their claims of knowledge. It’s a lost cause, because they already believe that their claims of knowledge are justified, somehow, so they’ll just fall back on that justification. Fellow skeptics have doubtless experienced it: you ask a believer “if god is all-powerful why is there evil in the world?” and they’ll cheerfully fire back with “because of free will!” Ugh; of course that’s not an answer, but apparently it was good enough for the believer.
I would say my efforts here are doomed to failure, except that, to fail, I’d have to have an achievable objective. I’m not expecting any of this will de-convert believers; any believers capable of de-converting already have the mental tools that they need to do it themselves, and they will accomplish that in their own good time. Mostly what I am doing is exploring the consequences of accepting christian claims about god and their belief, and seeing where that leads. My feeling is that christians have gotten away with dealing great big shovel-loads of bafflegab, usually because they try to couple that with a local monopoly on violence – and that they unwittingly insulate themselves from any of the consequences of holding such a load of contradictory (and, as we shall see) outright wicked beliefs. Perhaps these ideas will serve as additional questions for further disturbing the comfortable, because christianity certainly seldom serves to comfort the disturbed.
If you’re a skeptic, you’ve probably encountered some of those “ten questions atheists cannot answer” lists, and I hope you’ve found them as irritatingly stupid as I have. Maybe these essays will boil down to be equally stupid and irritating; I don’t know, yet. I hope they’re a bit perplexing – as they have certainly perplexed me. “How could anyone believe that stuff!?” coming from a nihilist is both envy and a complaint. I suppose, then, I’ll be satisfied if I can just muddy these waters a little bit.
A note on procedure: I’m not going to capitalize “god” or “christian” because I’m lazy and I tend to get things wrong. I’ve read christian writings where things like “The Divine Will” and “Free Will” are treated as proper nouns, and it just seems silly and makes the writing look like a marketing puff piece: “New Free Will(tm) with ten times as much Epistemology from His Divine Self!” Treating these hypotheticals as proper nouns subtly implies that they are real, which is a trick I am not interested in giving over to the christians without a fight.
I will also avoid addressing nihilist challenges to the foundation of morality as a whole. Why? Because I’ve been there and done that all my life and I describe myself as a “moral nihilist” because I have not managed to assemble a plausible system of ethics that satisfies me. Therefore, I am going to play fast and loose, and pretend that there’s some kind of “right” and “wrong” that we can usefully refer to, and I’ll go from there. Put another way, if this was a game of Monopoly I’m going to start on Park Place. That seems like a bit of a cheat, but it’s actually nowhere near as bad as what the christians do when they glibly assert something like that they learn their morals from the bible. Oh, really? Which bible? How do you know that? etc. I will try to be somewhat rigorous regarding right and wrong by framing my arguments so that I think someone reasonable would be uncomfortable in saying “no, that’s acceptable” in defending christianity. I know that’s a risky move, because apparently some christians find Lot’s giving his daughters out as rape-toys is an ethical example, but I’d be being dishonest if I pretended that I could backstop what I am about to write with a sound, objectively quantifiable, ethical system.
In other words, I am not trying to write a philosophy paper that would withstand a challenge from a pyrrhonian; that’s like fighting a land war in Asia when you’re not Genghis Khan or Stalin. I’m going to drop these arguments, try to refine and defend them, and then summarize them, perhaps, as a list entitled “ten questions that christians won’t want to answer about their morals.” Except that, christians and their god being as immoral as they are, it’d be a longer list than that.
“Those of you who’ve studied your history of skepticism” – I strongly recommend Popkin’s excellent History of Skepticism from Savanarola to Bayle which starts with the ancient Greeks and rolls forward to David Hume, making a lie of its title. [amazon] Per Popkin, pyrhonnian nihilism (extreme skepticism) has left religion and philosophy a burned-over battlefield in ruins. It’s important to understand that process and why it works that way.
Skepticism, nihilism, and epistemology in a nutshell: nihilism is a form of skepticism – it depends on challenging all positive statements (or just a selected set) generally on epistemological grounds. So, I see the three things as connected like the strands in a braid; depending where you are in your skeptical enquiry, you will almost certainly be deploying epistemological challenges or nihilist tropes such as those formulated by Sextus Empiricus. If I sometimes seem to be lumping those things together, it’s because I see them as connected – and their connection with religion is on the interface between religious claims of knowledge and skeptics’ challenges to the same.
Popkin covers the pyrrhonians at length and understanding pyrrhonism’s relationship to skepticism is critical. “Read Popkin” is the short answer. A slightly longer answer is that the pyrrhonians developed a set of skeptical modes of argument (the “tropes” or “hypotyposes”) that are a framework for destroying other claims to knowledge. These were laid out by Sextus Empiricus, but they are much older and go back to Epicurus (my opinion) and, of course, Plato’s Socrates. The Socratic method is a form of skeptical enquiry that’s less weaponized than the pyrrhonist tropes. Let me give you an example of one of the skeptical tropes; the argument from authority. It goes like this: Every claim of knowledge rests on some other claim of knowledge, which rests in turn on another claim of knowledge. Thus, all claims of knowledge exist in infinite regress and we cannot ascertain their truth, therefore it is best to entirely withhold judgement in order to avoid making an error. If you are ever debating someone and they start saying “it appears to me now that…” or “it seems as though…” you may be talking to a pyrrhonist or someone who is posturing as one. Because, of course, the pyrrhonist pose is extremely irritating since it allows them to destroy any discussion without taking a stand on any particular point. Thus, they deal only with appearances, which allows them to claim to be being as honest as possible given their ignorance of everything. One final comment on pyrrhonian skepticism and then we’re done: the scientific method is an epistemological method that tries to beat the pyrrhonians by collecting observations (e.g.: “appearances”) to establish a cause/effect relationship: “it appears to me that every time I throw a ball it describes what we might call ‘a parabola.'” Eventually you establish a sufficiency of test results that you can establish as highly likely and even predictive. Without wanting to write long awkward sentences invoking the presence of an atmosphere and a gravitational field we can eventually say “when I throw a ball its course is that of a parabola.” Cziko’s book Without Miracles [wc] is about scientific epistemology and never mentions pyrrhonians but it’s basically an extended response to radical skepticism.
“a plausible system of ethics that satisfies me” – Pace Crowley, who almost got it right with “Do as thou will’t shall be the whole of the law.” But it comes out more like “whatever you can, you do.” That neatly allows us to side-step free will and the question of establishing an ethical system in a universe in which our will is constrained.
“with a sound, objectively quantifiable, ethical system” – I had to throw “quantifiable” in there because of all the irritating virtue ethicists, objectivists, and utilitarians who like to act as though they can fall back on some sort of “moral calculus” and – when you ask how it works – it’s just handwaving that boils down to “well that’s just my opinion, dude.” I don’t want to fight christian dishonesty with utilitarian dishonesty. (and, by the way, when did being vague become a virtue?)
When I’m getting into ethical discussions, I prefer the terms “pro-social” and “anti-social” to refer to belief systems, rather than “right” and “wrong” or “good” and “evil.” As you well know, you can’t have any kind of debate when you have fundamental disagreement on what terms mean. When the actions some theists define as “good” include, say, kicking homosexual children out of their homes, or condoning slavery and colonialism, or segregating neighborhoods, or slaughtering non-believers, or flying airplanes into buildings, it’s pretty clear that the terms have lost any usable meaning. As you mention above, we have centuries of history of theists killing each other over disagreements on what is “good.” Coming up with a mutually agreeable definition for “pro-social” seems more achievable — something like “belief systems that tend to promote and sustain diverse groups inhabiting the same are with mutual tolerance.”
BTW, as I suggested in my comments on your last post, I like going after Christians for the morality of their beliefs from a purely tactical level. If you go after them from an epistemological standpoint, they’re totally prepared for that — they’ve all had decades of training on why believing things with no evidence to back them up — which they call “faith” — is wonderful and beautiful and entirely reasonable. In the area of morality, though, they’ve been taught to assume that atheists have none, so that’s an area where they think they can safely go on the offensive — they have no preparation whatsoever for playing defense on that field.
So, what happens if a genuine believer joins in the convo?
(I set myself on notice to behave nicely, saving you the trouble)
Re
It’s not complicated, God is the proper noun, god is the regular noun.
Personally, I play around with it all the time, thus uses such as “the Christian god”.
Sufficiently subtle that people mostly don’t even get what I’m doing ;)
(Less subtly, I’ve taken to calling theists by the literal English translation: goddists)
John Morales@#2:
So, what happens if a genuine believer joins in the convo?
Then we’ll probably get another 66+ comment thread, unless I’m a meanie and try to rein it in.
If a christian shows up and starts doling out bafflegab, they’ll probably not do it on the threads where I am arguing that dealing in bafflegab is (at the very least) a character flaw.
brucegee1962@#1:
When I’m getting into ethical discussions, I prefer the terms “pro-social” and “anti-social” to refer to belief systems, rather than “right” and “wrong” or “good” and “evil.” As you well know, you can’t have any kind of debate when you have fundamental disagreement on what terms mean.
I used to try to avoid using moral language entirely (since it’s something we do not agree upon) but blogging here has made me more comfortable with it – I’ve realized that it’s just another way of communicating a problem diagnosis or an opinion. But, in this situation, a big piece of the point I’m trying to make is that disagreement and the importance of that disagreement, so using language intended to overcome disagreement would be self-defeating.
Christians have cheerfully gone to the bank for a very long time on the assumption that their belief somehow makes them moral (and they often seem to think that atheists are therefore immoral) – that’s one of the windmills I am trying to attack. I know it won’t change anything, but, forward, Rocinante!
Another main reason I like the moral argument is that I’ve found one of the best debating strategies is to force your opponent to confront their own cognitive dissonance. At least, that helped along the process of my own deconversion!
brucegee1962@#6:
Another main reason I like the moral argument is that I’ve found one of the best debating strategies is to force your opponent to confront their own cognitive dissonance.
Exactly. “You keep claiming that christians get their morals from god; but if you do, did you get the ‘collective punishment’ part, or the ‘inheritable guilt’ bit?”
If you want to see funny expressions, you should watch my face when a christian tries to tell me that atheists have no morals because we don’t believe in god and god is what conveys morals. Uh, if that’s the case, wouldn’t god still convey morals anyway? Christians keep saying “it doesn’t matter if you believe in god, because god believes in you” (etc.) does god’s morality suddenly stop working when you don’t believe in him? They can’t even make sense.
I’m not much of a one for the philosophy of ethics as it is conducted by philosophers of ethics. Indeed, when I put my History of Ideas hat on I tend to put aside notions of whether any of this stuff is actually true. Perhaps that’s a limitation of my preferred approach – I’m interested in what cultural, economic and societal influences make people come up with these sorts of ideas. If you pressed me on why I hold the moral intuitions I do, I’d probably tell you it’s all a result of a whole tapestry of such influences, and leave it at that. It’s rather like taste in food, about which it does not do to argue.
But the truth claims of christians are another matter. There I tend to find that most of the confusion comes from a lack of understanding of where all these ideas came from in the first place. I did my doctoral dissertation on medieval reception of ancient thought on the soul, so I have some familiarity with the wellsprings of christian versions of physics and metaphysics. It is a constant source of disappointment for me to discover christians who quite genuinely think that the warmed-over mess of Plato, Aristotle and Augustine that forms much of their constructed world view is anything more than an emergent synthesis of several no longer tenable or justified ancient intellectual traditions. It’s like encountering physicians who still cite the theories of Galen, Hippocrates and the Vedas, but are unaware that the science moved on centuries ago. The questions that ancient and medieval thinkers asked are often still entirely relevant, but their supposed answers have been entirely superceded by modern understandings that have a weight of evidence behind them. “What is the soul?” was the ancients’ way of asking “what is it that makes a living person alive and a dead person behave quite differently?” Not a silly question at all.
Know?
No I don’t.
Suspect, think, imagine, gather, grok, believe, understand perhaps mistaken so? Maybe?
Epistemology~wise, I,like Socrates “answer” I know that I don’t know an awful lot. Paraphasing.
Hang a sec. Are you admitting to nihilism or want to argue against nihilism ? If it’s the latter, that’s not a difficult task. If it’s the former, oh boy…
“Your comment is awaiting moderation.”
What for ?
daverytier@#11:
“Your comment is awaiting moderation.”
What for ?
I whitelist all of the posters on this blog. That way spammers are more or less unseen here.
Hang a sec. Are you admitting to nihilism or want to argue against nihilism ? If it’s the latter, that’s not a difficult task. If it’s the former, oh boy…
I am not trying to argue against nihilism. You seem to think that’s an easy task? Well, as the default position, unconvinced, it takes some convincing to budge a nihilist. Nietzsche’s nihilist was a poorly-formed straw man, not an extreme skeptic but rather a believer in destruction. That was a christian view that may have worked in the late 19th century, but if you jerk the clock back to Epicurus or Sextus Empiricus it’s a tougher row to hoe. For the record: I disagree with Nietzsche’s characterization of the nihilist as one who wants to destroy everything for no reason. There are nihilisms and then there are nihilisms – the extreme form reject what appears to be a universe around them, and the less extreme ones have problems with the concept of shared morals, or shared language. I am somewhere between the latter two. Unlike Sextus Empiricus, since appearing to be right all the time does not concern me so much, I am comfortable making assertions about the world as it appears to exist around me. The other stuff, I withhold judgement about.
I have long wanted to post a defense of nihilism, similar in intent (but less skilled) than Robert Paul Wolff’s defense of anarchism. Like Wolff, I would argue that the understanding most people have of nihilism is shallow and inaccurate. Nihilism no more means “dude let’s blow up the world!” than anarchism means “let’s have chaos in the streets, and Hobbes’ playground for all man!” There are anarchisms and other anarchisms, and there are nihilisms and other nihilisms. Since it’s unfounded and, for all intents and purposes a calumny, I reject Nietzsche’s version. He was a fascinating thinker but ultimately less of a nihilist than Hume (for one example)
I’m a “pro forma nihilist.” As my friend who was a “pro forma masochist” explained it once, “Even I cry when I stub my toe.”
No, I was not talking about Nietzsche, nor Big Lebowski “nihilists”. I am talking specifically about the philosophical kind.
A few years back I had a run-in with someone trying presuppositional apologetics on me. So, I had to stand my ground.
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Presuppositional is essentially a two step process. The first step is using exactly the insincere nihilism you describe. Not making any claims, just gunning down any opponent’s truth claims by demanding further justification ad infinitum until nothing remains.
Then, in the nothingness left, establishing its own claim of absolute truth simply by fiat. Of course never subjecting them to the same treatment, deflecting any criticisms by tu quoque accusation instead –
“hey, all the stuff you believe is equally unjustified, so you can’t object. More over, unlike me, your belief system purports to be non-arbitrary … yet, you fail by your own standards. So, shut up. Resistance is futile.”
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Which is not going to persuade anyone because down below all people know things like “the sky is blue” or “2+2=4” are not arbitrary. But, because even now, most people think, but the majority of them don’t have a clue about how they do it,
it is amazingly effective at confusing them, making them shut up, or making them appear no better than the adversary. And that is more than a satisfactory outcome for the apologist as dragging the truth down to become equivalent with the lie is at the end of the day just as a victory for the lie.
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However that specimen had the misfortune of running into someone with sufficient knowledge of machine learning and all things related. So he failed at the first step.
I just shrugged and reduced all empirical knowledge to the results of the scientific method. Then (superficially) algorithmized the scientific method as a machine learning algorithm.
( the dude was at high school math level so a very simplistic bayessian inference/ uninformative priors as an example was more than enough )
He of course started relativizing mathematics, so I pointed out that all mathematics can be reformulated as definitions of terms. I.e. not “we have a group,
let’s arbitrarily impose those axioms on it” but “a group is defined as an entity that obeys those rules”
defining everything from only a handful of truly basic concepts like “a thing”, or establishing relation with “is”. At this point his stratagem just broke down and in confusion he just started repeating his previous claims in a loop like a broken bot, which I gleefully pointed out.
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But if he were more consistent he could go into complete cognitive nihilism, of course, and attack those basic concepts/words too in the same manner. At that point, however, I would use my finishing move –
I would declare that those don’t have to be defined. They are the basic elements thought is based on and thus innate and implicit in all of it.
One cannot in fact reject or even question them without self-refuting in the process. For example if you declare “the meaning of ‘is’ is arbitrary/udefined” then if true, the sentence itself would lose its meaning too “the meaning of ‘$#_aq-__@’ $#_aq-__@ arbitrary/undefined” and you would not be able to assert the claim.
Or “what is ‘what’ ?” – well, dude, if you don’t know that either then your question becomes “fdfr4f6e3w $#_aq-__@ ‘fdfr4f6e3w’ ?“. So, to even ask the question you already have to have the answer.
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Complete cognitive nihilism, unlike its lesser cousin epistemic nihilism, has not even the option of not being stated explicitly and just taking hypocritical pot-shots at all claims of knowledge.
Any expression of it is automatically self-refuting in the same manner screaming on top of your lungs “SOUND DOESN’T EXIST” is.
Actually, any even formulating it in your own mind is automatically a refutation of it. It’s not just “cogito ergo sum”, if you think then both you, your thoughts and concepts therein must exist.
Consistent cognitive nihilists can be found only among ICU ward patients in vegetative state.
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You say you are a “language nihilist”, well, that’s slightly less extreme. But still, it is instantaneously refuted by the very act of communicating it and you did just that.
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Ethical/moral nihilism, while technically not self-refuting, is still a pushover. One can just declare all systems of ethics/morality to be strategies of the evolutionary game theory ( they fulfill the definition ),
therefore making the entire field of ethics a sub-field of population population biology and moral nihilism equivalent to fluid dynamics or electro-magnetic field nihilism.
[daverytier, if you’re using those full stops to “create” paragraph breaks, be aware the preview feature here doesn’t display them, but the posted comment does]
daverytier@#13:
A few years back I had a run-in with someone trying presuppositional apologetics on me.
Presuppositional arguments are just circular reasoning: you assume some of the points that you base the rest of your argument on, are factual. Of course, getting them to admit that can be really tedious. Usually you can just start questioning (in detail) the supporting facts for their claims of knowledge. But I prefer to go meta- and just explain that presuppositional apologetics has been a failure for hundreds of years and ask if they think they’re bringing anything new to the battle. Most presuppositionalists I’ve met are working from a playbook someone smarter than them wrote and they don’t work very effectively once you pull them off the beaten track.
I would declare that those don’t have to be defined. They are the basic elements thought is based on and thus innate and implicit in all of it.
That seems to me to be a bold assumption. It appears that all people do not think the same way. It also appears to me that some animals think, and that their thought processes are quite different from ours, yet they are manifestly engaging in problem-solving.
By the way, nihilism does not necessarily assert “all X is untrue” or “all X does not exist” – it may simply be what I characterize as an extreme form of skepticism: “you have failed to convince me that X is true.” It’s the high school nihilists who play the “I don’t think you exist” card, thereby asking for a punch in the stomach (“the fist of illusion”) but it’s an entirely different matter to maintain a healthy skepticism about whether or not we can understand what the other person is saying or thinking. We can recognize that another person exists, without being convinced that they’re not a really good illusion. Naturally, most people appear to be what they appear to be, but perhaps you’ve even experienced a situation in which you have held a conversation with someone and later discovered that they do not exist. It’s often called “dreaming.” [That, by the way is a very fun question to ask christians, if they start talking about a “sensus dei” or something like that. “Have you ever been wrong about something? How do you know you’re not being wrong now?”
Complete cognitive nihilism, unlike its lesser cousin epistemic nihilism, has not even the option of not being stated explicitly and just taking hypocritical pot-shots at all claims of knowledge.
There are a lot of nihilisms that, in my opinion, are mostly caricatures. As you imply, it’s hard to take them seriously and it’s hard to take seriously the idea that the person saying them takes them seriously.
Any expression of it is automatically self-refuting in the same manner screaming on top of your lungs “SOUND DOESN’T EXIST” is.
I don’t think a proper nihilist or extreme skeptic of any sort would make a dogmatic assertion like “X does not exist” for any X.
Screaming “SOUND DOESN’T EXIST” is perfectly reasonable if you’re in a vacuum. This is one of the problems I have with language – it’s a very crude tool, and to be completely clear about something requires a huge amount of backfill to achieve agreement. We might be able to decide on definitions that worked for us that made a statement like “SOUND DOESN’T EXIST” not obviously wrong, but then someone else would walk along and join the conversation, and we’d have to start all over again. We have actually had variations of that happen on this very blog, in the past. I can think of a number of times where consciousness razor has had to very carefully define things, just so that I finally go, “OH! That’s NOT what I thought we were talking about!” But, yeah, what does “sound” mean and what does “exist” mean and then we can go from there.
Put another way, depending on what you mean by “sound” and “is” it’s plausible that a tree might fall in the forest and not make anything we agree upon as sound. Language is a crude tool, and you can try to define some word and, often, the definition may turn out to be circular. If we assume that language is the primary way that people exchange thoughts – either verbally or in written form, it sure would be nice if there were something more reliable. If you’re a linguistic nihilist and you are unconvinced that language is reliable, then you’re probably going to also find problems believing in a system of shared ethics that was communicated via unreliable language. Did you say ‘blessed are the cheese-makers”?
You say you are a “language nihilist”, well, that’s slightly less extreme. But still, it is instantaneously refuted by the very act of communicating it and you did just that.
By misunderstanding what I was talking about, leaping to conclusions, and then making an apparently unfounded assertion, you’re doing a great job of illustrating my particular skepticism about language. It seems profoundly difficult, to me, to really know what another person is saying. In practice, we get by, by inferring a lot of things from situation and so forth, but – as we often see – misunderstandings appear to increase as the problem becomes more abstract. It seems to me as though that ought to be relevant to our ability to agree on an ethical system, or to understand the situations in which the system is being applied. I don’t make this as a debater’s argument; it’s my way of understanding why it is that people can’t seem to agree about important things that ought to be obvious. (also: dishonesty)
One can just declare all systems of ethics/morality to be strategies of the evolutionary game theory ( they fulfill the definition ),
You sure appear to have all the simple answers; so excuse my skepticism. First off, it would problematic since there are ethical systems that are contradictory to eachother – therefore they cannot all be correct, unless you want to say that anything that someone wants to call an ethical system is correct. That seems problematic. But also, you tried to slide past another rather obvious objection, which is that by your selecting which ethical systems you declare to be evolutionary strategies, you are merely reifying the ones that you prefer.
I’d also opine that those might be ethical systems but they’re not morals; they are not concerned with what is right or wrong, merely systematizing what is. It’s perilously close to “might makes right” or “survival of the fittest” – perhaps you mean to say something about evolutionary psychology being a moral system? Which of us is the nihilist, again?
First things first.
My argument doesn’t need all thinking to be exactly the same. Just to have preexisting understanding of a handful of basic concepts like “a discrete entity, a ‘thing'”, “same/different”, forming associations, and so on. And as far as I know, those animals do that too ( good luck problem solving if your brain doesn’t do relations between things or lacks the concept of (in)equality ) Anything else is not relevant. Under the hood it can be ants scurrying around with beads that encode the thoughts for I know, doesn’t matter.
Second.
While you bemoan the inadequacy of human language, you seem to exacerbate the problem by yourself. For example your idiosyncratic definition of “nihilism”
at odds with all the established meaning
Even the root of the word, nihil “nothing” implies complete rejection.
Also, what I meant by “sound doesn’t exist”, was obviously “sound in general doesn’t exist”, yet, you chose ( perhaps to demonstrate your point about language ) to misinterpret it. ( technically, even then, you still can not scream in a vacuum, just make a vain attempt ) Yes, one of the “shortcomings” of human languages is that it is context-dependent and thus both sides need to be willing to actually use the context to resolve what would otherwise be intractable ambiguities. One can not force the other to understand his/her words. Yet, if the other won’t, the language itself is not at fault.
And in the opposite direction, if one gets all humpty-dumpty and assigns different meanings to even the most basic words, then his/her speech becomes unintelligible gibberish and again, the language is not at fault here. Language would prove to be a failure only if it would not work even if both sides are sincerely trying. Which is not the case. Yes, it is a crude tool for certain tasks, but “unreliable” is still far from “unusable” as even a crude tool can get the job done, it just takes far more effort.
Third.
Yes, there certainly are different evolutionary-game-theoretic strategies. However, it is more accurate to describe them in terms of “better/worse” than “correct/incorrect” (though calling an unsustainable strategy “incorrect” is not that inaccurate).
I did not select anything. All of them are. Just some are better than the others.
They are prescriptive. They tell the critter what it should and should not do. Thus they define right/wrong.
That’s one of the strategies too, of course. One of the weakest.
More like “survival of strategies that don’t get the critters following them killed off” ;-)
@Marcus Ranum
On a meta-level, I think your comment is missing a close italic tag, or a paragraph break, or both.
If you mean something more like “skepticism” or “Pyrrhonism”, then maybe you should reconsider the term you should be using about yourself?
I think it’s particularly confusing because I’m pretty sure you’ve used “moral nihilist” as a term of opprobrium against the corporationsts, politicians, and war hawks who use the current economic and socio-political system to enrich themselves while harming others.
Owlmirror@#17:
Thank you, good catch.
I think it’s particularly confusing because I’m pretty sure you’ve used “moral nihilist” as a term of opprobrium against the corporationsts, politicians, and war hawks who use the current economic and socio-political system to enrich themselves while harming others.
Yes, what I mean when I say that is that they are bereft of any moral system, and simply do whatever they want. They’re also moral nihilists – unless we wanted to say that greed is their morality (but I wouldn’t say that because reifying greed doesn’t give us a moral system – it gives us a sort of random grabbing based on perception of opportunity.) I sometimes call someone a moral nihilist to remind myself and others that the things they say they believe are almost certainly not what they actually believe (if we want to assume that there is a connection between what people do and what they believe) (some days, I am not so sure!)
I’m not a pyhrronian – I like to think that they are more irritating than I can ever be. In fact they are systematically required to be irritating. Well, not really, since being required would be dogmatism and they want to avoid that. But, basically, they’re going to refuse to take a position on anything.
I want to be able to take a position, even a moral position, while still being skeptical of every moral system that I’ve encountered so far, to the point where I think the idea is bunk but I continue to seek ways to justify my actions or others’ actions as anything more than just my arbitrary (or their) opinion.
It seems to me that the crux of the matter is that Nietzschean nihilism (as he asserts) wants to tear down beliefs and morals – to aggressively destroy, which is a lot more effort than an extreme skeptic is going to go to (unless they are bored?) because it’s something they probably don’t believe, anyway. Nietzsche’s nihilist also lacked purpose, which is contradictory of the idea that they want to destroy (why destroy if you lack purpose?) but Nietzsche liked to deal in contradictions. I don’t think he was really trying to establish a philosophical basis of a “nihilist” so much as a straw-man.
It has always seemed to me – perhaps I am deranged – that most people don’t actually believe much of what they say they do, or they would act very differently. So I tend to be skeptical of others’ stated motives as well as moral arguments, because a moral argument based on some person’s flippy-floppy beliefs is hardly worth the attention required to reject it. “That’s, just, like your opinion, man.” As Saint Lebowski would say.
So how do I resolve all of this to my own satisfaction so that I can get up in the morning and make my coffee? It’s as Lebowski says: it’s just my opinion. I try to be aware of what of the things I do are based on fact, and what are based on opinion and I find that’s good enough for me. I actually feel I have a great deal of clarity especially because I suspect that others generally are reifying their opinions into what they believe are moral systems, and are in error to a minor degree about their motivations. That may seem a bit sociopathic but I generally find that people often don’t do what they say, and that means I either have to distrust everyone, or stumble along by assuming that most of the people I talk to just don’t really think about what they believe, and couldn’t explain it if they did, and I wouldn’t probably understand them if they tried.
Once again “I don’t know yet” is not nihilism. On the contrary. That’s by necessity the starting point of all inquiry. Nihilism would be “there is nothing to be known“.
( Also, as a side note, taking a position by necessity entails rejecting other contradictory positions. No need to worry about it :-) )
daverytier@#19:
Once again “I don’t know yet” is not nihilism. On the contrary. That’s by necessity the starting point of all inquiry. Nihilism would be “there is nothing to be known“.
I don’t think so. But I see your dogmatic assertion.
At this point, I suppose we both start trotting out dictionary definitions. But the dictionary definitions I see don’t even match Nietzsche’s idea of nihilism, so they appear to be wrong to some degree. I do see some definitions that describe it as an extreme form of skepticism, which seems to be what I’m talking about.
I’m not a big fan of the dictionary definitions game because I don’t think vocabulary is a very effective tool. Everything appears to be defined in terms of other things, which – if you look them up – are often defined in terms of the first thing. I’m not asserting that language doesn’t work, but it does appear to be a really difficult tool for achieving understanding with. But it’s the only game in town.
Wikipedia seems to have it about right, i.e.:
I’m unconvinced that “nihilists assert” anything, because that would be self-contradictory and I don’t think we’re that stupid. Also, “reality does not actually exist” is an assertion, too. I would say a better way to phrase that would be “it may be impossible to know reality, including that reality may not be anything like what it appears to be.” That would be a more typical nihilist position, which aligns with the pyrrhonian skeptics and some of David Hume’s thinking. Making assertions about reality, or its existence or nonexistence is a fail-move for skeptics and I would leave the unfounded assertions to Nietzsche who, as I said, was creating a straw-man. (As, apparently, are you)
I was happy to see whoever wrote the wikipedia blurb used a pyrhhonian formulation of skepticism, “is the point of view that suspends belief” – noting it is “a point of view” and not a dogma about reality, and that it “suspends belief” i.e.: not convinced by assertions. That’s not saying “assertions aren’t true” just, “I dunno.” Not saying “reality is unknowable” just “I dunno, that reality stuff, it’s pretty confusing isn’t it?”
You really might enjoy giving Popkin a read.
Well, we both seem to refer to the Wikipedia definition, but we both agree that it is far from mathematically exact. We also both agree that asserting (epistemic or ontological) nihilism is self-contradictory.
However, you seem to think that lack of beliefs/knowledge and/or not passing any judgment, or even having doubts is nihilism.
Well, newborns got no knowledge yet. But I don’t think anyone would call them nihilists. Neither would people call a rock ( or a patient in vegetative state ) a nihilist even though no one can withhold judgment more consistently. I would thus conclude the (in case of epistemic nihilism self-contradictory) active and complete rejection is necessary. It’s still nihil-ism, literal translation, nothing-ism. Not just-very-little-ism.
… then there is of course the hypocritical nihilist who, as witnessed by his/her actions certainly judges claims true and false and obviously acts on them, just like anybody else,but refuses to call them such and claims her/his decisions were just random, based on subjective whim, etc… ;-)
dang … forgot to close the i tag…