I am a Moral Nihilist

Ethics
521

You would have to exclude from this great philosophical tradition all of the accounts which belong to the affective turn in philosophy and the social sciences, including Pragmatism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, poststructuralism and embodied, enactive approaches in cognitive neuroscience. These approaches flip your script on its head without simply returning to Hume’s emotivism.

Affectivity is the cradle within which cognition rests. It orients and provides salience and relevance to thought. Cognitive and affective processes are closely interdependent, with affect, emotion and sensation functioning in multiple ways and at multiple levels to situate or attune the context of our conceptual dealings with the world.

While more traditional approaches in philosophy and psychology treated affective phenomena as at best peripheral to, and typically disruptive of, rational processes, embodied cognitive theories take pains to present emotion and thought as an indissociable interaction. According to the newer thinking, affective tonality is never absent from cognition. As Matthew Ratcliffe puts it,

“moods are no longer a subjective window-dressing on privileged theoretical perspectives but a background that constitutes the sense of all intentionalities, whether theoretical or practical”

The absence of emotion comprises a state of cognitive and behavioural paralysis rather than fully functional cognition, stripped of ‘mere’ affect. A phenomenology without affect is a phenomenology that guts the world of all its significance. The experienced world is ordinarily enriched by the feelings that we sew into it, that imbue it with value and light it up as an arena of cognitive and behavioural possibilities.

So cognition without affect is not, according to William James, in any sense complete. It is an extreme phenomenological privation that strips the world of all meaning, a state of depression or ‘melancholia’.

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues:

“…emotions play a role in constraining and structuring the realm of explicit deliberation, restricting deliberation to a small number of options and structuring patterns of reasoning, so that we remain focused and relevant in our activities, able to act towards goals without becoming distracted by trivia. Thus emotions and feelings serve to constrain and focus our attention, so that we only consider from a pre-structured set of options.

1 Like
522

That’s an interesting question. I would have thought that hedonism appeals to some emotionally while others are repelled by it. Just as I find Goya appealing and Warhol repelling. (But let’s not get into aesthetics.)

523

Thanks for this, it does seem to match my intuition.

When you get to know someone well (as much as one can), it often seems to me that who they are seems almost entirely shaped by their affective relationship to the world. This then informs how they make sense of things, preferences, patterns, approaches, beliefs and values. I certainly see this in myself.

524

You would have to exclude from this great philosophical tradition all of the accounts which belong to the affective turn in philosophy and the social sciences, including Pragmatism, existentialism, hermeneutics, phenomenology, poststructuralism and embodied, enactive approaches in cognitive neuroscience. These approaches flip your script on its head without simply returning to Hume’s emotivism.

Affectivity is the cradle within which cognition rests. It orients and provides salience and relevance to thought. Cognitive and affective processes are closely interdependent, with affect, emotion and sensation functioning in multiple ways and at multiple levels to situate or attune the context of our conceptual dealings with the world.

While more traditional approaches in philosophy and psychology treated affective phenomena as at best peripheral to, and typically disruptive of, rational processes, embodied cognitive theories take pains to present emotion and thought as an indissociable interaction. According to the newer thinking, affective tonality is never absent from cognition. As Matthew Ratcliffe puts it,

“moods are no longer a subjective window-dressing on privileged theoretical perspectives but a background that constitutes the sense of all intentionalities, whether theoretical or practical”

The absence of emotion comprises a state of cognitive and behavioural paralysis rather than fully functional cognition, stripped of ‘mere’ affect. A phenomenology without affect is a phenomenology that guts the world of all its significance. The experienced world is ordinarily enriched by the feelings that we sew into it, that imbue it with value and light it up as an arena of cognitive and behavioural possibilities.

So cognition without affect is not, according to William James, in any sense complete. It is an extreme phenomenological privation that strips the world of all meaning, a state of depression or ‘melancholia’.

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio argues:

“…emotions play a role in constraining and structuring the realm of explicit deliberation, restricting deliberation to a small number of options and structuring patterns of reasoning, so that we remain focused and relevant in our activities, able to act towards goals without becoming distracted by trivia. Thus emotions and feelings serve to constrain and focus our attention, so that we only consider from a pre-structured set of options.

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525

This is very interesting too. Particularly Aquinas’ idea about modification over time.

This makes sense and suggests that working out what a virtue and vice might be is quite complex.

The obvious question flowing from this is whether you believe the average person can tell what is right and wrong most of the time, or whether it is instead an intellectual exercise that requires some form of expertise? (I am aware of Aristotle’s notion of needing develop the habits of virtue over time.)

This thread is throwing out many ideas and it’s hard to keep track.

Can I ask you to show me something of this in action? I was wondering how you would use your understanding of morality in assessing a case of a person wanting to commit suicide. The situation might be that they are upset and depressed and believe they don’t fit in. There is no terminal illness or calamity before them. Is their suicidal ideation a moral question, and if so, maybe just in a brief paragraph, how would you approach it and why?

The reason I ask is that rather than endless picking over definitions and theoretical positions, and points of reason, I like to see things in action.

526

The “script” was that the great traditions do not go the way of emotivism (and neither does Hume, by the way). You give me no reason to believe that you disagree. You’ve offered no counterexample of a great tradition based in emotivism. You’ve even admitted that none of your examples are examples of emotivism.

527

My argument is a bit like the idea that emotivism is a doctrine which would counsel something like this. When going fishing, bait the hook, let out a great deal of line, set the fishing rod in the boat, grab the slack line with your hand, and fish by pulling up and down on the fishing line that you are holding in your hand.

The great religious and philosophical traditions would say something different. They would say that one should use the rod to deftly manipulate the fishing line instead of interacting with the line directly.

Similarly, once scientists learned that atoms consist of things like neutrons, protons, and electrons, they ceased explaining things in terms of atoms and started explaining things in terms of neutrons, protons, and electrons. If Z is explained by Y then in order to understand the consequences of Z one needs to consider Y; they can’t limit themselves to Z.

(Obviously emotivism is meant to be metaethical even to the exclusion of the ethical, but its “flatness” remains a liability in both spheres.)

Sure, and it is in some ways. The trouble is that like ‘ought’, ‘emotion’ can mean many different things in different hands. There are different terms, such as emotion, passion, and affect, but then there are also different theories that interpret these words differently.

For example, Aristotle and Aquinas both have a robust theory of the passions, they understand the centrality of pleasure and enjoyment when it comes to goal-directed behavior, but they are not emotivists. They canvass and study Z, but certainly not without reference to Y, X, W…

Yes, I think so. If I think all behavior is grounded in emotion qua emotion, then I have no reason to control my emotions. Similarly, if I think every human act is necessarily selfish, then I have no reason to try to be unselfish. If I think that everything that exists is material, then I will never search or wonder about immaterial things. This is why I made an argument about parenting earlier, because parenting requires weaning children away from purely emotional behavior and reactions.

All of the speculative theories of TPF have practical effects. It’s not as though our ideas have no effect on us. That’s why, from a Platonic point of view, the notion that all humans are the same is absurd (i.e. the emotivist says all human beings are emotion-driven, the egoist says all human beings are selfish). It seems to me that some human beings are emotion-driven, some are selfish, some are altruistic, some are virtuous, some are dutiful, etc. What they are depends in part on what they believe.

On my view that’s exactly the problem. It tells us nothing at all about emotion, because it tells us nothing at all about the causes of emotion (i.e. Y, X, W, V…). Of course if there were nothing more to be known beyond Z then this would be no problem at all. That’s how it is for the lower animals (or the “dumb” [unspeaking/non-linguistic] animals). Something akin to emotion or instinct drives them, and they have no access to the causal priors of Y, X, W…

It’s also worth mentioning that professional philosophers do not separate the “moral” sphere and the “practical” sphere as some in this thread are wont to do. They are interested in human action itself, and this includes the practical. Stevenson, for example, is a classic emotivist who is concerned with the “moral” in the large sense rather than the small or undefinable or eristic sense.

When I use the word “moral” that’s what I mean, and maybe you also meant it in that broad way.

The first sentence may be true, but nevertheless the point is that the social scientists are in part focused on shaping the behavior of large groups of people. They are interested in moral beliefs just as they are interested in emotion, for both drive behavior.

My last sentence of that post meant to indicate that if one wishes to shape behavior they would do well to learn how to shape emotions. They would do well to move to a higher level in the puppet/puppeteer spectrum. This is true on the individual level as much as it is true on the societal level.

1 Like
528

You made the following points:

1)Emotions are malleable and manipulable.

2)Emotions are a fairly superficial level of the human being.

3)Emotions are more effect than cause.

4)Reason, habits, dispositions, temperament, viewpoints, self-control, values, etc.are the puppet strings which control the emotions.

All of these claims are, to a greater or lesser extent, put into question by the approaches I mentioned. Many of them have been directly influenced by Heidegger, who writes:

Psychology, after all, has always distinguished between thinking, willing, and feeling. It is not by chance that it will always name feeling in the third, subordinate position. Feelings are the third class of lived experience. For naturally man is in the first place the rational living being. Initially, and in the first instance, this rational living being thinks and wills. Feelings are certainly also at hand. Yet are they not merely, as it were, the adornment of our thinking and willing, or something that obfuscates and inhibits these? After all, feelings and attunements constantly change. They have no fixed subsistence, they are that which is most inconstant.

Contrary to this thinking, affective attunements are the ‘presupposition’ for, and ‘medium’ of thinking and acting. That means as much as to say that they reach more primordially back into our essence, that in them we first meet ourselves-as being-there, as a Da-sein. Precisely because the essence of attunement consists in its being no mere side-effect, precisely because it leads us back into the grounds of our Dasein, the essence of attunement remains concealed or hidden from us; for this reason we initially grasp the essence of attunement in terms of what confronts us at first, namely the extreme tendencies of attunement, those which irrupt then disappear.

Because we take attunements in terms of their extreme manifestations, they seem to be one set of events among others, and we overlook this peculiar being attuned, the primordial, pervasive attunement of our whole Dasein as such.

1 Like
529

You made the following points:

1)Emotions are malleable and manipulable.

2)Emotions are a fairly superficial level of the human being.

3)Emotions are more effect than cause.

4)Reason, habits, dispositions, temperament, viewpoints, self-control, values, etc.are the puppet strings which control the emotions.

All of these claims are, to a greater or lesser extent, put into question by the approaches I mentioned. Many of them have been directly influenced by Heidegger, who writes:

Psychology, after all, has always distinguished between thinking, willing, and feeling. It is not by chance that it will always name feeling in the third, subordinate position. Feelings are the third class of lived experience. For naturally man is in the first place the rational living being. Initially, and in the first instance, this rational living being thinks and wills. Feelings are certainly also at hand. Yet are they not merely, as it were, the adornment of our thinking and willing, or something that obfuscates and inhibits these? After all, feelings and attunements constantly change. They have no fixed subsistence, they are that which is most inconstant.

Contrary to this thinking, affective attunements are the ‘presupposition’ for, and ‘medium’ of thinking and acting. That means as much as to say that they reach more primordially back into our essence, that in them we first meet ourselves-as being-there, as a Da-sein. Precisely because the essence of attunement consists in its being no mere side-effect, precisely because it leads us back into the grounds of our Dasein, the essence of attunement remains concealed or hidden from us; for this reason we initially grasp the essence of attunement in terms of what confronts us at first, namely the extreme tendencies of attunement, those which irrupt then disappear.

Because we take attunements in terms of their extreme manifestations, they seem to be one set of events among others, and we overlook this peculiar being attuned, the primordial, pervasive attunement of our whole Dasein as such.

530

From that I’d guess you’ve never read Augustine, or Dietrich von Hildebrand, or Teresa of Avila. We both know that Heidegger was no emotivist, and the translator does not have Heidegger refer to “emotion” even in the quote you provide.

You keep double-posting, probably because you are working from a phone.

531

I’m not sure I understand your point. Arent you saying that there really are such things as emotions , which you characterized in the points I summarized, and you are contrasting these entities with their causes? I am agreeing that Heidegger and most other participants in the affective turn are not emotivists. But neither ate they arguing that emotions are ‘caused’ by rational processes. The fleeting feelings Heidegger cites, whether you want to call them emotions or not, are not caused by a reasoning different from the emotions.

532

Luckily, no one at all has argued this. :+1:

533

What has one been arguing then? That emotion and reason are inseparably implicated as reciprocally causal elements of intentionality, such that it makes no sense to argue that our emotions have a privileged susceptibility to manipulation in comparison to other mental processes?

534

Well, in the first place I gave seven different alternatives to the emotivist sense of “emotion.” It wasn’t, “Emotion is more causally superficial therefore everything revolves around rational processes,” as you have implied. The whole emotion vs. reason dichotomy was your idea, not mine.

That’s enough for me on this.

535

There is a sense in which it is better to work in the opposite direction. Given the existence of moral claims, could nothing be claimed to be good or bad?

In the past when I have had a good-faith interlocutor who really wanted to gain some insight into moral realism I might start with something like this:

  1. One ought not randomly stab a knife deep into their thigh
  2. Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you
  3. Therefore, one ought not randomly stab a knife deep into another’s thigh

This seems basic, but I would also say it is persuasive and even true. Most everyone accepts this argument.

What are some of the tacit premises in play? Here are some which justify (1):

    1. One ought not randomly harm themselves
    1. Randomly stabbing a knife deep into one’s thigh is randomly harming oneself
  • C1. Therefore, one ought not randomly stab a knife deep into their thigh

Another tacit premise connects (2) to (4):

  1. Harm is bad (ceteris paribus)
  2. Therefore, random harm is always bad
  3. Therefore, one never wishes to be randomly harmed
  4. Therefore, one would not have others randomly harm them
  5. Therefore, one should not randomly harm others {from 2 & 9}

(4) also follows, from (8).

That may be overly analytic for your taste, but I want to drum up some syllogisms given the lacuna of rational inference occurring in the puppy-case. Argument 1-3 is pretty basic. We all probably accept it (even though (2) has not yet received any explicit justification). But note how that argument requires tacit premises about what is good and bad, such as (6). Argument 1-3 only functions in light of premises like (6).*

This is part of @Count_Timothy_von_Icarus’ point about the relation between the fact/value distinction and the is/ought distinction. If (6) is simultaneously a fact and a value, and if it counts as an ‘is’, it is nevertheless true that we are able to reach ‘oughts’ like (3).

* Note too that (2) and its opposite function as bridges between self-treatment and other-treatment. Such are important because most everyone knows how to “treat themselves,” so to speak. They have a good basic sense of what is good and bad for them, and therefore how they wish to be treated.

On taking a shit
536

I should probably add, in anticipation, that I have never offered an argument like this on TPF because TPF contains a lot of eristic (i.e. people who argue for the sake of arguing). It contains a lot of people who fully accept arguments like 1-3, but who will nevertheless spend many hours arguing against such things with all their might. I try not to spend too much time with such people, but my advice to them would be to disagree with things you disagree with and to not disagree with things you don’t disagree with.

537

I went through the past 9 days of posts from you and didn’t find these seven different alternatives. I did find this:

Were you endorsing this passage or attempting to critique it? If the former, maybe you could explain to me how one might read it otherwise than as a subordination of emotion to reason?

538

@Joshs

I think the discrete “emotions” of Enlightenment psychology tend to be downstream of its metaphysics. The world is mechanistic, purposeless, and valueless, and so appetites and passions must be a subjective overlay projected onto facts. This is also why reason is inert for Hume. Being wholly discursive, and lacking its own appetites, it can only be a tool of the “passions” (roughly corresponding to the “emotions” and appetites).

I agree that this sort of of psychology has major deficits. It’s also very hard to argue against at this point though because it’s been formalized into logical systems within analytic thought (just as the fact/value dichotomy shows up as a logical distinction in some textbooks), and the field’s typologies are based on it (e.g., cognitivism versus non-cognitivism in ethics), so that the very language of debate tends to reinforce for the distinctions. I believe this to be true even for the terms “value” (which has something of the marketplace in it) and “evaluative,” but if I didn’t use them I’d fear no one would have any idea what I was talking about.

To @Leontiskos original point though, I don’t think this is what many traditions speak to re the primacy of the rational soul. Aquinas, for instance, allocates joy to the intellect (and this is said to be the greatest sort of “pleasure” when realized, a point going back to Aristotle’s prioritization of contemplation in Ethics X and description of the Prime Mover in Metaphysics 12). As noted above, understanding what something is brings along with it an understanding of its perfection and what is good for it, and its beauty, so that one cannot divorce the affective from the “rational.” Beauty, for instance, is generally taken to be the object of the rational soul.

The best example I can think of for this is that, in the Republic Plato’s speaks to the philosopher’s (the lover of wisdom’s) desire to “couple” with the Good, a phrase I am told is every bit as erotic in the original Greek. Or, when Dante goes to the Heaven of the Sun in the Paradiso and meets Aquinas, Bonaventure, Boethius, Solomon, etc., he has this lovely line about knowledge:

Then, as the tower-clock calls us to come
at the hour when God’s Bride is roused from bed
to woo with matin song her Bridegroom’s love,

with one part pulling thrusting in the other,
chiming, ting-ting, music so sweet the soul,
ready for love, swells with anticipation
Paradiso, Canto X, lines 139-142

I would think though that Heidegger’s quote there is likely targeting the later faculty psychology of Wolfe and Kant, and the like, but that’s just a guess.

Maybe not. There is certainly a more sterile rationalism that creeps into some later scholasticism, or rather, the rational gets divorced from the other-worldly, but I don’t think this is ever so acute. I am more familiar with the earlier Greeks/Byzantines, and they tend to hold more closely to Plato’s tripartite organization of the appetites/passions (bodily, social, rational), where all three are thoroughly affective, but the lower are easily pushed around. Which is not to say the rational soul isn’t easily manipulated (else sophistry wouldn’t be such a threat), but rather that it’s natural inclination towards the Good and True gives it the orientation needed to rule and reorient the lower appetites well, while the converse is not true.

Basically, the rational soul is prioritized because it alone is capable of understanding if a passion is good or bad, properly ordered or not, ordinant or inordinate. The strength of our hunger really tells us nothing about the appropriateness of our jealousy for instance. A strong desire for vengeance or wrath tells us nothing about whether acting on this is good or just, nor can it inform us as to the the appropriateness of our lust, hunger, or the desire for recognition. The lower appetites are lower because they have limited formal objects (nutrition, reproduction, regard), which is why they cannot inform other passions, while the formal objects of the will and intellect are said to encompass the whole on being, just through particular aspects (Goodness, Beauty, and Truth).

Anyhow, I figured I’d chime in because I do think the shift in psychology during the Enlightenment sheds a good deal of light on the evolution of ethics, and is a good example of how upstream metaphysical assumptions shape anthropology.

539

Yes and no. I’d say, as with theoretical knowledge, that it is easy to know quite a bit without knowing everything, and we often know what we need to. Maybe a good parallel here is that the ancients, who knew nothing of DNA, were able to breed wolves into cheetah-like greyhounds just off the principle of “like father (and mother) like son,” a feat modern genetic engineering could hardly replicate without having to resort to selective breeding as well.

There are some interesting comparison studies about the virtues across world cultures and they tend to be quite similar. I would say debates are more about the goodness of particular practices than the virtues themselves the overwhelming share of the time. Even today, in a climate that sees appeals to chastity as utterly old fashioned, no one thinks a totally unrestrained and overpowering sexual appetite is a good thing (the rapist, the person who cannot stop themselves from adultery, etc.). When people claim that fornication, visiting prostitutes, etc. are not “immoral” or in any way deficient, the point is normally more about fornication, even in exchange for money, not being bad, rather than the idea that an unrestrainable sexual appetite isn’t problematic.

Today, we tend to have it that desire is never culpable, so that a desire itself cannot be bad (even extremely taboo ones, like the desire to have sex with prepubescent children). I would disagree with this. I don’t see how it can be good, or even neutral, to be saddled with a desire that almost everyone agrees ought never be satisfied. Desire alone is not culpable, but acts that feed the desire and make it stronger, in understood as such, surely are.

Every case is different, but I would think it’s clear that extreme depression is a privation, an ill. People can obviously be culpable in their own misery to various degrees, but the degree to which a hypothetical person would be culpable is impossible to say.

The case with murder is perhaps analogous. Murder is an evil, but the degree to which different murderers are culpable varies tremendously. And murder can sometimes be the least bad option, in which case we rarely call it murder, but self-defense, or something like that. The same is true for suicide. If someone does something that will obviously kill them in pursuit of certain ends, or under coercion, we don’t tend to call it suicide. Socrates drinks the hemlock, but isn’t considered a suicide. Dante has a place in Hell for suicides, but puts Cato in Purgatory because his death was a refusal to be used by Caesar, based on political principles he thought more worthy than life.

Despair, in a theological context, is a defect of hope, but there are variations of culpability there too.

This is yet another reason why I think the collapse of ought (the deontic) and good, is very problematic. No doubt, suicides of despair are bad, and to the extent people agree they are based on clouded judgement (an error) they will agree they ought not be done, but a focus on prescription and proscription collapses the badness of despair, and poor responses to it, and culpability.

I will say that there is a tension here, which I have never seen resolved fully. To be culpable would seem to require freedom. But virtue is a pre-requisite for self-determining freedom. So to the extent one’s capacity for freedom is frustrated by vice, one would appear to be less culpable.

But this problem isn’t fatal because we are never absolutely self-determining nor absolutely inert, and so culpability is a matter of degree, and to the extent that we can shape our own habits and environments, and what we allow to inform our minds, we can be culpable in that respect.

540

This was the topic of this thread.

By way of a summary of what I’ve been arguing here.

Part one: there are evaluative truths

What the line of argument I presented to @Existism showed is that if one has preferences, then one holds certain evaluative statements to be true. That the t-sentence ‘If p, then “p” is true’ applies to all statements, including evaluative ones. It then pointed out that we do have preferences, and that therefor some evaluative statements are true.

This was done without making use of “subjective”, bypassing the subject/object quagmire.

We have preferences; so some preferential antecedents are true; so some evaluative statements are true. What we have is that there are true statements of preferences. If nose picking is objectionable, then it is true that nose picking is objectionable. And yes, here it remains open that nose picking be acceptable. The point is one of the logic of such statements.

This counts against the nihilist who supposes that there are no true preferences. It’s quite a small point, but one that seems pretty solid.

Part two: we have preferences involving the behaviour of others

Some of our preferences involve the behaviour of other folk. We have, one way or another, expectations and approvals as to what other people do.

From what was said above, it follows that there are truths sentences evaluating the behaviour of others. If kicking puppies is unacceptable, then it is true that kicking puppies is unacceptable.

Here again, it remains open that kicking puppies is acceptable, in which case it would not be true that kicking puppies is unacceptable.

Broadly, I’ve been calling the area involving the evaluation of the behaviour of others Ethics, although strictly it might be better called metaethics. I’m using this term to keep it distinct from morality, considered as the setting out of which statements concerning behaviour are true, especially general rules concerning what one ought to do.

Part three: charitable agreement

If we agree on some truth concerning behaviour, then as a community we can and do institutionalise the expectation it embodies. If we agree that kicking puppies is objectionable, we can and do censure those who kick puppies.

We do agree on some - many - truths concerning behaviour.

It is important to note that nothing here so far addresses the “Why do you think it objectionable?”. It’s set aside, so that we can get on with stopping puppies getting kicked. That is a singular advantage of this approach.

It is also important to note that this is not an argumentum ad populum. It is not being argued that something is wrong because we agree that it is wrong. The direction is not from popularity to truth, but from truth to action. We agree that some action is the right thing to do, and institutionalise that action.

The argument against moral nihilism is one of practicality: we do have preferences concerning our communal life, and we institutionalise these. What is shown is that even if, as @Existism claims, one doesn’t “believe there are any objective rights or wrongs”, we can and indeed must construct communal behavioural expectations.

Reply to Michael

So, Michael, what I’ve set out doesn’t address your question — it defers it, so we can get on.

This is an application of a Wittgensteinian approach; at some point our spade is turned, further enquiry gets us nowhere, and yet we have to act. It becomes what we do. We do not need agreement as to why the antecedent is true, we only need agreement as to it’s being true. the demand for grounding of the connection between preferences and oughts is a picture that can hold us captive. Once we see that “ought” gets its meaning only within practices of mutual expectation and accountability, that there is no “ought” standing behind practice waiting to be discovered, the question “but where does the real ought come from?” dissolves rather than gets answered. The dissolution is the answer.

In ethical issues, there is no fact of the matter that is distinct from the practice.

This account will not satisfy those with a need for determinate and universal moral codes. Indeed, it denies that there are such things.

And yet we move on.