Practical Reasons and Rationality Research Papers (original) (raw)

Back in my twenties, when I wrote this paper, I was consumed by philosophy, jumping from topic to topic in an effort to answer an implausibly wide range of questions. Unfortunately, my writing wasn't always "polished"; it was intuitive, dense, rough, difficult to read, not nearly as discursive and diffuse as that of most academics. So it was rarely publishable. The excerpts below from a long paper on values are an example. They're in the anti-"objectivist" spirit of these simpler thoughts. I hadn't read J. L. Mackie's classic Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, but, in retrospect, my arguments were broadly in agreement with his. There are no "objective truths" about values, about which values are right and which wrong, which good and which bad. People can have whatever values they want: they can believe Hitler and Stalin were good, and they aren't "wrong"-except in relation to other values, such as being compassionate, not killing millions of people, etc. There is no such thing as (literal) "evil," a remnant of theology: objectively bad is as meaningless as objectively good. We're dealing with subjective reactions here, subjective orientations toward a given object; the universal mode of experience according to which the value we assign to something actually inheres objectively in it is mistaken. Beauty, ugliness, goodness, magnificence, badness, and all other values are things we subjectively project into something; they aren't there independently, even though it may seem when you look at a beautiful face or painting that its beauty is objectively given, so to speak, just as objective as the measurements between features or the various colors that strike the eye. We think of the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer as somehow bad in his essence; but in reality he was just someone who had a taste for killing and eating people, as others have a taste for gardening or growing their own vegetables or playing tennis or whatever. It is we who assign the negative value to Dahmer's activities, as we assign a positive value to, say, a medical doctor's activities. There would be nothing incoherent or objectively wrong about reversing the value-judgments: we're free to value whatever we want. It so happens, fortunately, that the vast majority of people share common intuitions about what is good and what is bad, so we all agree Dahmer was bad. But the only genuine content of our judgment is that we don't like his behavior. Our judgment has an "objective" form ("He was..."), but really we're only saying something about ourselves, not him.