A meaning to life: Part 3 - Actualisation for everyone

At the end of last post we elaborated on an answer to Meanlife by appealing to Eudaimonia. This led to:

EudaimoniaAnswer:   the answer to Meanlife is that each human should aim for human flourishing - they should leave an enriching life where they can develop theoretical and moral virtue.

 So far our analysis has been relatively abstract, but in this week I hope to ground it more concretely by forming an initial association between Eudaimonia and self-actualisation, as well as arguing that a societies purpose is to maximise this actualisation.

Eudaimonia in practice

The Aristotelian notion of Eudaimonia is somewhat abstract, if a little vague. 'Human flourishing', 'The telos of man', 'Theoretical and moral wisdom' - these sound great but lets make it more concrete. An initial caveat is that I'm sure there are many philosophers who have analysed Aristotle far more than myself - my interest here is not in perfectly capturing Aristotle's view, but to express my own perspective as having grown (to some extent) out of my own reading of Aristotle's work.

I think a good place to start is to focus on 'theoretical and moral wisdom'. Aristotle focuses his analysis of man on their ability to reason, thus it seems plausible to think that part of Eudaimonia revolves around improving our reasoning abilities. What does that mean? More broadly I'd consider reasonining to be practice of considering different positions, their relation with one another and coming up with a conclusion. I'd associate it fairly closely with concepts of rationality. I'm personally an Accuracy First epistemologist, which means that what matters to me is that we have accurate beliefs - where a belief is accurate if it is 'close' to the truth. A rational person is one who maximises their accuracy given their evidence. So part of improving our ability to reason is to develop how we think about arguments, how we use logic and how we come to conclusions given our evidence. Let us call these skills 'meta-theoretical knowledge'. 

We can then mention broader 'theoretical knowledge' as things that help us deal with specific domains. For example, we can imagine that as an engineer, I might need to have a grasp of physics and material sciences in order to build something safe. Theoretical knowledge is still useful as it helps us respond to specific instances, where the additional knowledge allows us to establish relationships between propositions and concepts ('this material will break under this force'). It however contrasts with our meta-theoretical knowledge which touches at the purest of theoretical virtues.

On to moral wisdoms. I think that Aristotle is touching on the wisdom one gains through engaging in different moral actions and decisions. As we learn more about the world, we have a better perspective of the moral dimension - we have a better perspective on what is good and what is bad. When we're younger we might be told never to lie, however a few years later might learn of the concept of a 'white lie'. I'd also be open to thinking that emotions are some kind of indicator to moral concepts, and our ability to understand the emotions of others also improves over time. They key concept here is that we know more about people, more about the world and this gives us the knowledge of how to behave better.

Between these two concepts is a clear sense of self-improvement and self actualisation. We as humans need to develop ourselves for the better - both rationally and morally. Achieving this actualisation can take a life time - it's certainly not something one learns in specific instances, but something developed over time with deliberate practice.

Now, I would consider self actualisation as something a broader than what Aristotle is calling Eudaimonia. For example, I would see physical feats (e.g. training oneself to run a marathon) as fitting in with actualisation, even if its not directly related to moral or theoretical wisdom. Essentially, I'm less concerned by the idea that Human's telos is reason, but more focused on this broader notion of flourishing and living one's best life.

This leads me to my final analysis of Meanlife:

ActualisationAnswer:   the answer to Meanlife is that each human should aim for self-actualisation- they should develop themselves and strive to achieve their potential.

 What is the purpose of society?

 On its most basic level, we could consider a society a group of people. Generally we might expect them to have come together for some additional purpose - safety, common interest, familial all come to mind. Now an initial question comes to mind - all other things being equal, is it better for humans to be in a society or not? I'm not entirely sure if this is a philosophical question, as I imagine that it's probably better answered by athropological or biological analysis. 

Anyhow, I ask this question because we already have an analysis of the meaning of life for an individual person, so it's natural to ask whether a larger society helps, deters, changes this analysis.

If we focus for now on the normative side, we might argue that a society should be there to help improve the lives  of the people in the society. I.e. we should group together only if it helps us in some sense. And what sense is most relevant? Well I think the natural answer is to say that we should group together only if it helps us achieve the meaning of life - self actualisation.

Now, should society be helping each individual person achieve actualisation, or should it be trying to maximise (more broadly) the potential of the group of people? It's worth noting that the former may have a specific tension - if two individual people are trying to e.g. become the president of the society then it will be hard for both of them to reach actualisation. Of course, one might argue that the 'winner's' potential was higher (and they achieved it) while the loser's potential was lower (and they also achieved it) but I still feel there is some tension. For the latter, we might focus on enabling everyone as a collective - e.g. we aspire towards a society that is overall more advanced, humane and so on, even if some people may have a more stifled experience (for example, we might avoid funding research on more 'exploratory' topics such as space travel, and instead centre it on smaller and local issues). Anyhow, I won't focus on this distinction and I think the ideal society should achieve some kind of balance between the two.

What would this ideal society look like? Well one way to think about this is to consider what currently stops people in society achieving their potential. Suppose I'm an artist - I'm reasonably talented and would like to spend the rest of my life painting. Let us further suppose that while I'm good, I'm not *that* good, people probably won't be paying millions for my work and it is unlikely to be shown in any major exhibits. Still - I have a love for painting. Now in our current society it might be tricky to for me to devote my life to painting, as I normally need to spend time 'working a job'. If we assume that this takes around 35-40 hours a week, this significantly reduces the time I have to focus on my passion and achieve actualisation.

One response to this might be to say that I could instead be unemployed and just receive benefits from the government. There are a number of reasons why I think this is unconvincing. The first is that it's not really 'sustainable' in the sense that the government see benefits as a short-term solution. You're in theory expected to constantly be looking for new jobs and they might take away your benefits if you spend all your time painting, with no evidence of job hunting. The other problem is more of a social issue - some people may consider it shameful to need to take benefits. We want society to encourage us to achieve our potential - not shame us about doing so. 

I conclude from this that an ideal society should be able to provide sufficient income to it's members such that they can spend their time pursuing self actualisation. This would probably take the form of some kind of universal basic income, but I'm fairly neutral at the moment about how it would be done or funded - I'm currently just expressing a theoretical ideal.

Another thought I had was that some people might not have any explicit passions in life that they want to do. The ideal society I think would also need to have a way to help or at least encourage people to find their passions.

It's clear to me that the creation of this ideal society would be fantastic, as it would help a lot of people achieve their actualisation. Indeed, i think that the goal of achieving this ideal society would in itself be a great accomplishment and something that I myself would like to strive towards. Of course the exact properties of this ideal society are not fixed - the broader goal is to help as many as people achieve actualisation as possible.

I'm going to leave it there for this post. In my next post I'm going to discuss in a bit more detail my thoughts around creating this ideal society and helping people achieve self actualisation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A meaning to life: Part 2 - Eudaimonia, enrichment and flourishing

Last post we refined our question on the meaning of life to the following:  

Meanlife: What is a / the purpose o f an individual's existence?

We then ended last post with the HappyAnswer to MeanLife: "The answer to Meanlife is that each human should aim to be happy. The reference to 'purpose' is because it is good for a human to be happy.

Now, I mentioned that there were various kinds of metaphysical concerns around this answer. My interest however is to look at the more practical issues around what happiness means. My aim is to get to a satisfactory analysis to this answer that I can then practically apply in my own life.

Let me first revisit the two readings of happiness that I previously mentioned. The first is around happiness in a hedonistic sense - seeking pleasure. The second is happiness in a flourishing sense - enrichment and eudaimonia. I argued for the latter, but let's take a quick look at the former.

 Hedonism

There are different ways people might get pleasure, but the hedonistic kind if quite specific. It's about the maximising of the 'good feelings' of pleasure beyond all else. We aren't talking here about the pleasure we might get from reading a book in the morning. We're talking about the exact dopomine we're getting from taking drugs or having an orgasm. Hedonism is focussed on that feeling of pleasure regardless of where it comes from. The causation does not matter, and even the epistemology does not matter. 

What's wrong with this? Well in some sense nothing, and in another sense a lot. There's a sense in which its hard to argue against the good feelings. After all, most would say that being happy requires one to feel good - is it a problem to reverse this and say that if one feels good then one is happy? 

Let's consider some objections to happiness = hedonism. The first is an epistemic objection and I'll explain it via a pop culture reference! In the film 'The Matrix' a character discusses how they are satisfied for their brain to be fed false memories and experience, as long as those false memories are experiences are ones in which they are doing well. In essence, they would be happy to be in a situation where their life was a lie, but they were experiencing a lot of pleasure. In my view, this captures some of the essence of hedonism - it's about pleasure above all, which also means pleasure above truth. The hedonist would rather live a false life of pleasure than a real life of pain. Is that a problem? Not obviously, but I do feel like something is going wrong if the answer to 'What is the meaning of life' somehow resolves into a solution where a false life of pleasure becomes the model answer.

I think the epistemic issue expands a bit further when we consider hedonistic committment to things like drugs. The feeling of the high when on drugs may be incredible, but there's a sense of falsity that seems to mimic the Matrix situation. When a drug addict is in a constant sense of craving for their next high, surely they are not in a happy situation - even if their experience of the drug provides this hedonism. 

The other issue worth considering it the causation aspect. It's about considering 'Why am I happy, or why have I derived pleasure? Not to fully go down a naturalistic argument, but I would argue that the pleasure we experience from activities such as sex is because the body wants to encourage certain things that are 'good for you'. In this sense, the pleasure is meant to be some kind of bodily reward mechanism and not something to aspired for in itself. I think this is more relevant when we consider certain drugs which provide chemical highs - there's a sense in which we want to be rewarded the 'natural way' - just hitting the chemicals almost feel cheating as we are getting the reward without doing anything. We should be getting pleasure as a reward for doing good things, not as a prize for a competitition that we've cheated.

I don't think this is a real take down of hedonism, but I wanted to share some intuitions as to why I didn't go down this route. 

Eudaimonia

The Philosopher Aristole describes eudaimonia as the highest human good - and the only good that is desirable in its own sake. Eudaimonia refers the condition of human flourishing and living well, and is sometimes translated as happiness. According to Aristole, every entity has some kind of characteristic function that distinguishes it (also known as its Telos or purpose), with the highest good of a thing being its performance against its Telos. Thus the virtue of a knife is that which enables it to cut well, the virtue of an eye is that which enables good seeing. To Aristotle a person's telos is eudaimonia, and thus eudaimonia defines what human excellence and virtue is meant to mean.

Now Aristotle believes that the telos of man is their ability to reason, and thus achieving eudaimonia is in some sense about being a rational individual. Aristotle connects virtue and rationality together, where he places great praise on gaining intellectual virtues such as theoretical wisdom and rationality, but also places emphasis on moral virtues such as justice and courage. Furthermore, these virtues are not innate talents or specific pieces of knowledge - they are traits that are developed with practice, and reflection throughout ones life. This discussion of course feeds into the theory of 'Virtue Ethics', a form of normative ethics that proposes that encourage us to live virtuously.

That's a lot of exposition, but I think the central point here is that achieving this kind of virtue or flourishing is essential to doing good as a human. It is challenging and requires experience and practice, but is something we should strive for. Note that this assessment of Eudaimonia shares some parallels with what we might call self actualisation which I would see as being achieved through enriching one's life. The goal to achieve these virtues is a goal of self enrichment, where we develop ourself and become better people.

I am therefore proposing that by happiness, I actually mean the striving to achieve Eudaimonia.

A few short objections or concerns to consider before I talk about what this all practically means. I guess the first thought is a simple one - what if Aristotle is wrong. Sure we can broadly understand the idea that the purpose of a knife is to cut, but I might not share the exact intuition that the purpose of a human is to become a moral intellectual. I think the idea that we should develop moral virtues (such as kindness, justice etc) seems plausible if we want to associate goodness and purpose. However it isn't quite clear why theoretical virtues. In a sentence - what does reason have to do with all this? I guess if we are to consider eudaimonia as more about 'reaching my potential' and 'human flourishing' I can see buy that developing my virtues across the board has some value.

The second thought to consider is along the lines of 'what does this have to do with happiness'? Aristotle himself mentions that eudaimonia takes time and that 'a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy'. This is interesting, as I think he's attempting to draw a contrast with hedonistic views of happiness. One does not achieve eudaimonia simply by having short bursts of happiness - it requires time. I think there are two ways to justify the eudaimonia view of happiness. The first is to consider an association between flourishing and happiness, which does seem plausible. Another way is to look at our objections to Hedonism and see if Eudaimonia can address them. 

Let's look at the epistemic objection first, which argues that a hedonistic analysis of happiness would prefer a pleasurable life of lies than a struggling life of truth. Eudaimonist would not need to committ to the same conclusion - as they are open to the idea that happiness may require struggle - after all eudaimonia is something achieved after a life of experience. Furthermore, the eudaimonia places some emphasis on achieving theoretical wisdom and epistemic virtue. It seems plausible that they could avoid the pleasurable life of lies.

Second, we get to the causation based objection. Again, I don't think this is necessarily the best objection, but I do think that the Eudaimonist can respond very effectively. If the Eudaimonist is right, then eudaimonia is what one gets once one has succeeded in achieving a life of virtue, suceeded in self flourishing and enrichment. In this sense, one deserves the satisfaction they get - if they are happy its because they got it through a hard battle through life.

There are additional thoughts as to whether there is a third alternative to happiness, but I won't go into detail here. 

I will end today's post with a new conclusion, another refined answer to Meanlife.

EudaimoniaAnswer:   the answer to Meanlife is that each human should aim for human flourishing - they should leave an enriching life where they can develop theoretical and moral virtue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A meaning to life: Part 1 - laying the foundations

As noted by many a pop-philosopher, there's this constant question around what might constitute the meaning of life. Today I'd like to start a series where I outline my view on this question on a abstract level but also (perhaps surprisingly!) on a practical level. I want to outline what I think one should be doing in their life, and why this is the case.

We begin first by disecting the question of interest, making transparent various nuances and articulating what aspects I'd like to focus on.

To ease reference, let me denote MeanLife1:

MeanLife1: What is the meaning of life?

- Philosophy of Language

So much to discuss but let us begin with philosophy of language. 

What is meant here by 'meaning'? Perhaps it is about semantics - for example we might ask a question like 'what is the meaning of this sentence', to which the answer might be 'a specific proposition'. Under one analysis the response might simply to provide a definition of 'life'. Intuitively, this doesn't seem right - a response to MeanLife1 that provides some kind of biological definition just seems inadequate. The semantics point however does seem to be getting somewhere, especially if we view 'life' as eliptical for a deeper construct such as 'human / personal existence'. I'd also argue that when people ask about 'meaning' they are not making a semantic comment - they are instead saying something more akin to purpose.

The first three words 'What' 'is' and 'the' are also interesting and potentially imply some kind of reference or denotation. It seems to invite the sort of response to MeanLife1 in the form of that - that is the meaning of life. We'll discuss what sort of thing that can be (if anything) when we move onto metaphysics. The use of the definite article 'The' is also rather interesting. Traditional Russelian analysis of definite articles is that it implies a unique reference. I.e. that there is a unique answer to this question. Let's keep things open for now.

Note that issues of uniqueness become slightly more complicated if we take our above eliptical construct 'human / personal existence' as context dependant. Indeed, this leads to the possibility that each human / person has its own unique reference.

Let's offer a rephrasing of our question:

MeanLife: What is a / the purpose of an individual's existence?

- Metaphysics

 Now onto some metaphysics. First we observe that MeanLife does seem to be a referencial statement, and we can be interested in what is referenced by 'purpose'. We can ask now whether this reference is mind dependant or mind independant. If it is mind dependant then we might think that there is effectively a sort of prophesy written in reality for each person, which denotes what their purpose it. It does seem a bit strange to imagine how this kind of prophesy could exist. One way to justify this might be through religion. For example, one might think that 'God has a plan for everyone'. God of course would be supernatural, and thus it would not be strange to think that these 'prophesy' entities could also exist in a supernatural way. 

Now, I've often used the 'God' example to articulate how a moral realism could work. God would either make things moral or would simply be pointing to things that are moral. If it is the latter, then you could take away God and you could still have an objective morality. Let's attempt an analogous argument - God is either creating these 'purposes' or God is only pointing to them. Is it plausible to think that these prophecies could exist and be pointed to? 

Intuitively, it does seem rather strange to think that reality somehow writes prophesies for individual people. Aside from large issues around time (reality can tell the future?) there's also a question about how it indexes these objects against individuals that are born (or maybe even those that are not). One way to respond to this latter point is to consider that these prophecies might not be unique for each person. For example, there might be a universal prophecy for all humans - especially if is a prophesy that can reached in different ways.

Taking this view seems somewhat plausible, but we still have to deal with another question. What kind of 'reference' are we dealing with? Are we actually talking about concrete 'prophecy objects' or might we be talking about something something much weaker? One analysis that comes to mind would be a view like the following:

BioAnswer: "The answer to MeanLife is that each human being just needs to reproduce. The reference to 'purpose' is simply the existence of reproductive organs and biological history'"

I'd argue that this a somewhat plausible argument. It is indeed true that we only exist right now because of reproduction. Furthermore that many of our biological faculties are specifically deisgned to aim for reproduction (e.g. sex) It's similar in some sense to saying that moral properties could be reducible or at least superveniant on physical properties such as happiness or pain. Still, this kind of answer does seem to have a few odd flaws.

Firstly, what about people who a) Don't want to have kids, b) Are unable to have kids, c) would be immoral to have kids. How does this kind of universal purpose respond to this? Consider also d) people already with kids. Has their purpose been complete? I guess there's a natural thought of 'once I've met my purpose then my life can end'. Is this what we should be thinking about the above 4 cases? 

The above cases I think showcase some problems with BioAnswer but I also think there's another problem in that it just doesn't seem to be a satisfying response to MeanLife. When people ask MeanLife they are often asking with the underlying view that somehow they are meant to do something 'meaningful'. It is plausible to consider that for some people, reproduction may provide this meaning - but it seems odd to think that this would apply to everyone! Still, to be unsatisfying does not mean that BioAnswer is incorrect.

Are there any other answers? Well how about the following:

HappyAnswer: "The answer to MeanLife is that each human should aim to be happy. The reference to 'purpose' is because it is good for a human to be happy'.

A lot of comments on this one!

 First, what does happy mean? There are at least two readings. The first reading is of happiness in a hedonistic sense - to just seek pleasure. A second reading might be to read happiness in a flourishing sense - to achieve enrichment and eudaimonia. I think the second reading has a lot more credence, but I won't argue this point right now. 

The second comment is about the reference. 'good' seem to have a moral dimension. It is worth noting that if 'good' is somehow mind dependant then we have a large problem as we are currently evaluating analyses which are (at least to some extent) mind independant. If we are moral realists (as I am) then we avoid the metaphysics issues but we do still face some problems around whether it is actually good for a human to be happy. One way to fix that is by taking a very naturalist view of realism - maybe ethical properties are reducible from things like happiness. In that case, this statement would be almost tautological!

 There's still the issues that happiness seems to be a state of being, and arguably a mental state or experience. How do we avoid subjectivism here? We can try the following clarification: that it is mind independant in so far that there is a proposition that is satisfied when someone is genuinely happy, where being happy is a mental experience that only manifests where certain other conditions are met. The analogue here would be to say that 'pain genuinely exists even if it is a mental experience, as you are experiencing it (here in particular) because of physical conditions.' I'm not certain that this line of argument works though!

In fact still, I do take a stance a bit like this, and I'm sort of happy to endorse HappyAnswer. I would however say that there are huge metaphysical problems that I would need to deal with for this position to actually seem convincing. Whilst I'm fairly convinced by realism, there's still significant work around whether I am naturalist (and what kind), as well as whether what sort of happiness should we be looking (and what it involves).

In my future posts I'm going to step away from the metaphysics side, and focus on the latter questions around happiness. That is, I'm going to assume for the time being that HappyAnswer is a somewhat satisfying response to MeanLife, and I'm going to try and disect what HappyAnswer is actually about.

 

 

 

 

 

Existence without witness

In this blog post I'm going to talk about existential statements, the witnesses for these statements and whether there is value in existential statements without witnesses. 

PART 1: How can we have existence without witness

An existential statement is of the form 'There exists X with property Y in domain Z ' which means that there is an (at least 1!) entity (call it X) that has a property (call it Y) in whatever domain or area that we're interested (call in Z). For example, 'there exists a bottle that is blue in the fridge'. The entity is the bottle, the property is blueness and the domain is the fridge.

Now, in practice people will make existential statements without explicitly following the format above. Consider statements like:

1A: 'There's a soulmate out there for you'

2A: 'Someone lives here'

One can consider these as elliptical constructions which means that the statement ommits certain words but are nonetheless understood in the context of the remaining elements. In other words, they can be considered short hand for a more expansive sentence. The equivalent expanded sentence might be:

1B: 'There exists a person who has the property of being your soulmate and is in the current world'

2B: 'There exists a person who has the property of living (in this building) and is in the current world'

A witness for an existential statement is an entity that satisfies the existential statement.

For example, a witness to 1A would be the persons actual soulmate. This person would validate the existential statement - it provides a proof that the statement is true.A witness to 1B would be the specific person who lives in the building. 

Now ideally our existential statements all come alongside witnesses. I.e. whenever we say something exists, we can actually identify that specific thing that exists. As long as I have an entity, I can construct a existential statement in which the entity acts as the witness. The inverse is not however true - the fact that I can construct existential statements, even prove existential statements says nothing about whether I can identify the relevant witness.

Consider the following mathematical statement:

< 3 >: There exists irrational numbers A and B such that A^B is rational

Now consider the following argument (I will write R(X) to indicate the square root of an integer X):

R(2)^R(2) is either rational or irrational.

If is rational, then we have a witness to the existential statement, A = R(2) and B = R(2).

If it is irrational then let A = R(2)^R(2) and B = R(2).

Note that A^B = (R(2)^R(2))^R(2) = R(2)^2 = 2, which is rational. Therefore one of the above is a solution.

The point is that we know for sure that the existential statement is true - we have just proved it. However we are unable to determine with certainty a witness for the solution.

Now a keen observer might notice that the problem seems to be the first line of our proof - a claim that a number is either rational or irrational. This is an instance of the law excluded middle which states that it is always the case that (P OR not P). Whilst this law is true logically, is has the annoying habit of allowing us to provide existence without witness. In the example above we showed that the P case leads to a solution and the not P case leads to a solution, without identifying which one is the case. This lack of witness can be rather frustrating and has lead to an interesting area of mathematics known as constructivist mathematics, where one is unable to prove an existential statement without providing a witness. One way this is done is by restricting the use of the law of excluded middle.

PART 2: What value is there in existence without witness?

Our example with the irrational numbers showed that we can have existence without witness. In a lot of pure mathematics we probably don't care about picking out a specific witness that validates our proof. We will however construct a name for a witness (that we know exists) and allow the name to point to said witness. Let us call this a denoting witness.

This might seem a bit confusing, so let's consider an example. Suppose it is true that 'there exists a richest person in the world'. Now off the top of my head I might not know who this person is. However I might still make claims such as 'the richest person in the world should donate some of their money to help world hunger'. Essentially I'm using 'the richest person in the world' as a name that refers or denotes its witness and then making claims about this entity. The same is frequently done in mathematics where we might let X denote our witness to an existential claim. The reason this is useful is because we want to later use X (and it's proven properties) for further proof claims without going through laborious effort of actual identification.

 It's clear that denoting witnesses have significant uses in mathematics, but I think this has arguably more important ramifications for metaphysics. In mathematics, we act within a supposedly objective world (there's contention here, but most people would argue that mathematics is mind-independant). In contrast it is often more difficult for us to determine to what extent our reality is objective.

Consider for example the following claim:

 < 4 >:  'There is an objective morality'

 This is an existential statement and a standard analysis is that it is elliptical for the following claims:

4i - Moral claims purport to facts and are true if they get those facts right

4ii - Some moral claims are true

4iii - The truth value of moral claims is determined mind independently.

Now, I think there are some very good arguments to think that other moral theories are weak and I've already argued about this in previous posts. So we have some reason to believe that < 4 > is true.

One can note however that < 4  > is to some extent uninformative - it tells us about the nature of morality without telling us what things are actually moral. It doesn't tell us whether murder is wrong, whether it is okay to lie or whether we should be helping the poor. Essentially, the next step to the existential claim is to ask for a witness - please give us some kind of thing that satisfies the conditions addressed above.

It might be considered that the lack of witness is a big problem for moral statements. Moral statements are strange and while most people have basic moral intuitions, this doesn't seem to be the most robust of epistemologies. Even as a moral objectivist, I would probably cede that it is difficult to produce a witness for our moral existential statement. Furthermore, some people believe that moral theories should be to some extent action guiding. To say that there is an objective morality but provide no way to identify what that morality is, is unhelpful as it doesn't say how we should behave.

In fact the question then becomes - does it provide any value at all? We haven't even proven the moral objectivst position and are already doubting what the point of doing so would be. 

I argue that whilst having a witness would be fantastic, it is still very useful even if we don't.

Suppose we think < 4 > is true and let W be a denoting witness. What do we know about W? Well only that it exists and satisfies properties (4i, 4ii and 4iii), which actually amounts to quite a lot.

 For example, if moral M satisfies 4i then that means that when people are talking about morality, they are actually referring to facts about the world. This is also means that if two people disagree about a moral claim, at least one of them is wrong. Suppose I make a moral claim, C and you make the opposite claim Not C. Now, C is true if gets the relevant facts about the world correct. However that means that Not C must be wrong as it would get the relevant facts about the world wrong.

Another interesting observation of W being true (even without a witness) is that it seems people can do things that are morally wrong without knowing it. One can act in a certain way, that goes against the moral facts of the world. In this sense, we could argue that the person is morally wrong even if they had no idea about it. This can have some interesting after effects - it means that people in the past could be morally wrong as they go against the moral standards of the world. 

I might be wrong when judging the people of the past (or the people of different cultures) for being immoral, but the moral facts of the world don't care. You're either moral or not, depending on how your map to those facts. This therefore puts quite a lot of pressure on things like cultural relativism.  

We might also consider what value 4ii has. As we lack a witness, I can't tell what moral claims are true. However, since I know that some moral claims are true, I know that it isn't the case that 'anything goes'. Things I do could be morally wrong. Knowing that I could be doing something bad is quite interesting as it enforces some restrictions on our behavior. A final comment on 4iii is that it doesn't matter as much what one thinks - it is the facts about reality that judge. 

Finally, I know I often talk about morality so I do want to mention some other examples. One useful example to consider is physical reality. Many people think there is sufficient justification for a claim of scientific realism which is the view that the universe described by science is real regardless of how it may be interpreted. At the moment science provides an incomplete picture, but I think many scientific realists might endorse a stronger version - a claim that there is a 'true physics' that would fully describe the world. Note that this puts us an interesting situation - we might endorse the idea of a true physics, yet we obviously lack the witness to it. However by endorsing existence even if we lack witness, we can make some useful statements. For example we can reasonably conclude that people are crazy or hallucinating when they don't believe the same physical statements ('there is a chair') to others around them. We can consider some people irrational if they refuse to take a vaccine, especially if they believe in alternative methods that lack evidence. 

I think I've written enough but I found this quite useful to jot some thoughts. People often argue with me about the importance of epistemic access about certain metaphysical claims I have made. What they are really asking for is a witness. Of course I'd love a witness - but I don't think they realise that existence if often enough.

Skepticism, moral realism and applied ethics (2)

 It has been a while since I have last posted. Today I want to do a bit of a follow up on my previous post. I am going to focus specifically on providing details of why I am a moral realist. 

In some sense, the moral realist position is highly intuitive - afterall we very much behave as if moral sentences have genuine force. In other senses the position is highly controversial - it is not exactly how we can access this morality. Before we begin, it is worth first outlining what I take to be the moral realist position and the intended structure of my argument.

 Moral realism:= the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective (mind independant) aspects of reality. The position that ethical sentences can be genuinely true.

 It's worth adding a few clarifications.

Ethical sentences are sentences that involve things like 'ethical goodness', 'moral badness' and so on. One way to frame this is to think that there might be 'ethical properties' and that an ethical sentence is one that involves these ethical properties (with no committment yet as to whether these ethical properties refer to genuine parts of reality). I'll also be using ethical and moral as semantically interchangeable.

Sentences are lexical expressions - they are the things people directly say or write. The content of a sentence is the proposition that it expresses. (We actually rely on a subclass of sentences known as declarative sentences) The same sentence can express different propositions at different contexts (e.g. 'I am here' means a different thing depending on where I am). The same proposition can also be expressed by the same sentence (think about saying the same thing in two different languages). Propositions have truth values (true / false - let's assume a binary system) and the truth values are determined by a satisfaction of certain truth conditions. 

To say that ethical sentences can be genuinely true means that I think ethical sentences express propositions that have truth conditions that could be true. For it to be true means that the ethical properties or other such things involved in an ethical sentence have truth conditions that can be satisfied by objective reality. 

To refine 'can' - I am not saying that all ethical sentences are true. This would be an extreme position (think 'Murder is always ethically right') but also vulnerable to contradictions (Think 'Abortion is right' and 'it is not the case that Abortion is right').

Structure of my argument

My argument is reasonably sophistcated and will be split into two primary parts (this may require multiple posts). The first part will involve an exploration of the alternatives to Moral realism and explaining why I find them unconvincing or undesirable.

The second part will address some of the common reasons why we might be sceptical about moral realism and argue that there are epistemic challenges in many similar and analogous areas that we are less sceptical about. I'm not planning to provide a full defense of moral realism - my goal is to argue that the alternatives are all problematic and that the problems of moral realism are not as bad as people might think.

Part 1: 

Moral realism can be considered the conjoinment of the following separate claims:

i) Cognitive - moral sentences express propositions. Propositions can be true or false and have truth conditions. These truth conditions refer to some aspect of reality and are satisfied if they reflect this aspect of reality.

ii) Possibly true - there exist true moral sentences.

It is worth adding an aside that moral subjectivism is actually a branch of moral realism that claims that that the truth values of moral sentences is necessarily dependant on the attitudes of people. I want to express a stronger claim and talk about an objectivist brand of moral realism. I am therefore going to add a third point

iii)  Objectivist - moral propositions are not subjective. The truth value of moral propositions is determined mind independantly.

 Non cognitivism (deny i))

 I'm now going to outline a few views that are variations of this. I'm going to start first with the denial that moral sentences express propositions. This is known as a non cognitivist position. Claims ii) and iii) are both cognitivist positions and thus are inconsistent with non cognitivism. Non cognitivism basically says that we aren't actually expressing propositional content when we talk about morality. Instead we are doing something else - for example we are expressing some kind of attitude towards something.

To a non cognitivist, a sentence like 'Murder is wrong' is simply an expression of disapproval (Boo murder!) towards murder, but is not purporting to express anything more than that. Wrong is not some kind of moral property - there is no propositional content or semantic meaning involved. Instead the focus is on the function of the sentence - what it is doing, as opposed to what it is actually saying.

I think this is the view I have analysed the least but also the view that I have heard defended the least. It is worth noting that most objections against moral realism involve the denial of ii) or iii). Denying i) goes against both of these. I personally find this position unconvincing because of the embedding problem.

Consider a sentence such as 'Adam doesn't realise that murder is wrong'. A non cognitivist would have to assess this along the lines of: 'Adam does not realise 'Boo murder!' which seems like a very strange analysis.

I'm going to move on because as I've mentioned I've never actually heard anyone defend this position, but I would be open to someone who could convince me that this view is plausible.

 Moral nihilism (denying ii))

 Also known as moral scepticism or error theory. This is usually framed as the claim that there are no true moral sentences, i.e. all moral sentences are false. Technically there are different versions of scepticism that differ in why they think we are not justified in believing any moral sentence. The epistemic sceptic might go down a route of lack of access to ethical properties. I'm going to focus on the error theorist for now and respond to the epistemic sceptic later.

Note it is worth clarifying the specific sense of false. They are false because (it is claimed) moral properties fail to purport to any aspect of reality. It is like if I invented a property and I went around talking about people that satisfy or do not satisfy the property. These sentences can not be true because for them to be true would require that they truth conditions about reality when in practice there are no such truth conditions in the first place.

 A standard argument in favour of error theory is that if ethical properties were to exist then they would have to have some sort of mystical properties that are very much distinct from physical properties in our universe. 

I think the moral error theorist is wrong, but I think it is a very tall order to directly refute them. Instead I will argue that there are some very uncomfortable conclusions that an error theorist must commit to. I will also later argue that the motivations for the error theorist (i.e. problems they see in realism) can be explained. Therefore, whilst the error theorist position is in theory plausible, it is very much undesirable and is not more explanatory than a realist position.

 In term of being undesireable, the moral error theorist is saying that when we express ethical sentences ('Murder is wrong', 'Rape is wrong', 'Kindness is good') we are wrong. We are wrong in the sentence that our language involving ethical properties like 'good' or 'bad' fail to refer to any aspect of reality. We are essentially talking semantic nonsense, discussing properties that don't have real meaning. 

The error theorist will usually try and offer an explanation of our behaviour. The error theorist could bite the bullet and offer no explanation but this is a serious charge. There is surely an explanation for why all of humanity would talk and take seriously these imaginary properties despite all talking about nonsense. Thus the error theorist will offer an explanation for this behaviour, which is usually framed in terms of 'usefulness'. It is useful for us humans to talk about morality because it embeds certain principles that are in some sense useful to a functional society. By selling the lie that 'Murder is wrong', society becomes more functional and things can happen. Note we have to use the word functional because we can't say that society is ethically better (as ethical doesn't exist). If people lived in constant fear of death then very little could get done.

I think this is reasonable but has some issues. The first is the rather blunt comment and acceptance that claims like 'Murder is wrong' is not actually true and is fundamentally nonsense. It is just there because it is useful for a society to impose these kinds of rules. So people either believe in these imaginary properties because they are brainwashed by society to genuinely think so (everyone is simultaneously wrong!) or they act as if these properties are real as some kind of social agreement (or a mix). The latter / mix is also problematic - as it suggests that to some extent people are consciously aware that there is some kind of lie going down. There's also the second issue that if believe this due to some kind of social agreement, it is not clear why they would choose to obey these moral principles when they had no chance of getting caught or if there were minimal impact to society. Is it worth you going out of your way to save a kid drowning a river, or to donate to a charity to help the poor in Africa? If no one knows about your actions at all, your thinking would presumably be based on how it is helping you, and here that is really not clear.

There's a sense in which it is hard to demonstrate what these moral properties really look like. However there is also a sense in which it just seems absurd to deny that certain moral claims are true.

Moral subjectivism (denying iii))

In contrast to the error theorist position, i think subjectivism is a terrible position. I think there are two versions of subjectivism that people might be interested.

1) Person dependant subjectivism

2) Culture / Society dependant subjectivism (i.e. cultural relativism) 

Refuting Person dependant subjectivism

Person dependant subjectivism would ammount to claiming that the truth conditions of moral claims are somehow dependant on the person, and can shift between persons. Note that moral subjectivism is a realist position - we are very much committing to morality being real but also allowing that it has some very flexible properties.

I think there are two variants of this person dependant subjectivism. The first is the 'self-identification' position, where the truth value of a moral sentence is just dependant on what a person thinks. This position seems genuinely absurd. We're basically saying that morality is real and that the content of our sentences genuinely refers to reality. What's more, that reality is prone to change at the flick of a switch depending on what I'm thinking.

So I can go around saying 'Murder is right' (and be correct) and then change my mind whenever and say 'Murder is wrong' and still be right! 

This is incredible unintuive and also fails to explain aspects of reality. Even if in practice we might accept some kind of subjectivism, the subjectivism is not so strong that it works just by flicking a switch. We don't allow people to be able to go from 'Abortion is right' to 'Abortion is wrong' and back by simply thinking it, without changing their argument somehow.

The second variant is that there are the personal subjective truth conditions are not based on self identification, but based on some kind of property about the person. The truth value of moral sentences is still fine to flick from person to person, but that's because of some facts about the person that they might not have full control of. Such facts may for example be the background of a person, e.g. their upbringing. I think this variant is slightly more plausible but also faces basically the same issues.

A murderer may have a messed up context, but does this really mean that 'Murder is right' when expressed by them? 

One response is to say that moral sentences depend on the context. Someone might say that 'stealing is justified' in the context of a parent who has to steal to feed their kids, but is not justified in other kinds of contexts.

I think this is actually a fairly good argument, but also not sufficiently convincing. The problem with this is that (I argue) that moral sentences like 'stealing is unjustified' are actual unrefined expressions of a general moral law. The way we talk about 'stealing is unjustified' is similar to the way we talk about 'things fall down to the ground'. They express a general law of how things work but reality is actually slightly more complicated. Think about how a plane doesn't fall to the ground - gravity is still operating but it is able to overcome it. Similar for claims about stealing. In general stealing is wrong, but when we evaluate actual situations we express a different proposition. When I talk about the parent stealing for their child I might express the proposition 'It is justified for THIS parent to steal bread in THIS context', which could be true. The key here is that the proposition I express is fully generated by the sentence I express and fully captures the relevant details. This is still an objectivist position as long as I claim that once the proposition is fixed, the truth value remains static. It would follow that whenever the exact same proposition is expressed it still has the same truth value. The nature of moral justification is sophisticated.

Refuting cultural relativism

Let's move onto cultuarl relativism which can be understood as the view that the moralities are dependant on the culture. This is meant to express some sort of claim that different societies have different moralities. What we think is good in our country might be different to what is good for another country. Murder might be wrong for us, but in some cultures murder could be a positive thing. This helps us explain disagreement (one of the main challenges to realism)

This version of subjectivism is also quite intuitive and explanatory. It seems to explain things like cultural disagreement, whilst also allowing us to engage in a degree of epistemic modesty. We're saying that we somehow have access to our morality, but we don't profess to have understanding of someone elses. I will argue however that this position also encounters some very serious problems.

Remember that this position is a realist position. 

We are allowing for claims like:

'In culture X, doing A is wrong'

'In culture Y, doing A is not wrong'

There are many questions to answer. The first, is how might this work in practice for a given individual - where is the culture applied. For example, suppose in the UK it is wrong to steal, and that in some tribe in the amazon, murder is permissible. Is it the location of the action that is relevant? If I go to the Amazon tribe is it now alright for me to muder people? What if the amazon tribe person comes to the UK, should they now follow UK rules?

Perhaps there is a rule along the lines of 'When in Rome, do as Romans do'. This is plausible and interesting, but also flawed. Consider the normative force - why is this claim saying we should do it. There's two possibilities relevant to us, either the normative force is ethical (there is an ethical reason for us to do as Romans do) or it is non ethical (e.g. it is practically beneficial for us to do this). If it is non ethical then we can ignore this statement entirely for the purpose of our argument. So let's assume that it is an ethical sentence. Where does this sentence apply? Well the claim is really a variable sentence - feel free to replace Rome with any location. For this to therefore apply across all these locations, it must be some kind of universal ethical sentence.

Now because there is an example of a universal ethical sentence does not itself undermine cultural relativism, but it does present it with serious issues. If we accept there is a universal ethical sentence, then suddenly we have to accept some kind of metaphysics of morality that applies universally. What happens if someone disagrees with 'When in Rome do as Roman's do'? Are they simply wrong - presumably they are (as we're moral realists).

There's also big issues in terms of how we establish the morality in a given culture. If we are saying morality is cultural relative, then our standards are placed at the society level. Therefore, we are essentially being moral objectivist within our society. Suppose this is true, then there's the question of whether our individuals are able to successfully access or understand the objectivism of their society. Presumably this must be possible to some extent, as we appear to operate as if other cultures at least understand their own moral principles. There is therefore the question about whether one can have moral disagreement in one's own culture. Note I am talking about genuine moral disagreement - cases where both sides express contradictory positions but no side is at fault (for example not doing enough research). If we accept cultural relativism in this way then it is vulnerable to the argument that is no non genuine disagreement. The moral rules of the society is listed and accessible and only disagreement would occur if people are not up to date with the rules (allowing that they can change with time).

Note that this version of the disagreement objection is actually just a smaller version of the objection that is faced by moral realism. Here we apply it on a societal level as opposed to on a universal level, but the argument still applies. I actually don't think this argument is particularly devastating (I think it is fine to simply say that some people are wrong and that genuine disagreement is not possible). The point is that the purported benefit of cultural relativism is that is successfully explains things like disagreement. We have argued here that it faces the same issues as moral realism!

Okay I think that's enough reasons to reject moral subjectivism. I've written so much and I haven't even got to the reasons for supporting moral realism. It is worth noting that I have previously addressed both some of the issues with realism and ways to defend in my previous posts. I've actually also addressed in this post a few of the arguments.

I'll do a brief summary here:

Objections / issues for moral realism:

1) How to access what is morally good?

2) How to deal with moral disagreement? (Response discussed above - people are just wrong)

3) Do moral properties have weird properties?

4) How can we justify our moral claims?

These are good questions to consider. They aren't decisive objections (I think the positions discussed in this post are far worse) but one should probably have some kind of view on them to be able to successfully defend their position.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ontology of God's game

 In this post I want to discuss a sort of view that I am sympathetic about and I think helps us understand concepts such as truth, objectivity, properties and realness. I call this analogy "God's game" and I hope that this analogy will help us better understand various issues. I also want to discuss some issues I think there are with this analogy in particular with social concepts.

 Before I formally describe God's game, I want to discuss some important claims that I believe in that I hope to explain using the analogy.

1) Truth as some kind of correspondence to a mind independant reality.

2) The ability to characterise 'real' and 'unreal' properties, in particular things like Gender, Race.

3) To understand what it means to have objects and properties.

4) To understand what it means for a property to be formally reductive or supervenient on other properties.

5) To understand how we can have abstract properties that cannot be directly experienced by any existing agent.

6) The concept of meta-agents

7) The concept of property extentionality and extenional oracles.

 I think these are very much non trivial ideas to express and spread across various areas of epistemology, metaphysics, logic, truth and so on.  

As in various religions, God is often thought to be some omniscient and omnipotent entity. The nature of God is very much distinct from not only us as humans but also other entities such as animals or trees. It is first useful to consider the possibility that such a God genuinely exists, that such a God has full power to create various entities and also that such a God has full knowledge over everything in God's universe. 

Now take that exact possibility and imagine instead that we exist in some kind of video game and that 'God' is instead the almighty game designer that has full view of the entire game.

Let us now take a minor aside to a basic concept in objective orientated programming. A programmer can write constructors that are basically a formulaic way for constructing objects with various properties. The programmer can create an object and has the full view of the properties that the object has. For example, we can imagine the game designer writing a 'human' constructor to create a 'Jesus' object with a height property of say 175cm. The programmer can view the property by doing something like Print(Jesus.height).

We can therefore imagine that our game designer is such a programmer who can freely construct different objects. These objects will be the various entities of our game and will include things like people, animals, chairs and so on. Each entity will be its own object and will contain various properties. The game designer can pick out any object and see its various properties.

Now we can think about truth as a how we correspond our game state to truth. In programming speak we can think of this as a unit test. We write something like "assert Jesus.height == 175". What this does is it queries the 'height' property of the 'Jesus' object and checks if it is equal to 175cm. If it equal, then our assertion will come out as true. If not it will come out as false.

We can think about facts as these kinds of assertion statements. A fact makes a claim about reality, which is then queried against the game state to see if it is true or false.

It is important to note that I have said nothing so far about what objects exist and what properties exist. The game designer will of course know because they are a meta-agent, they exist outside the game and they are not an object of the game. With our concepts so far we can now discuss what it means for an object to be real and for a property to be real.

An object is real if it corresponds to an object in the game. Properties are things that are had by an object. However there will often be common property types that are shared by many objects. For example, we might expect all human objects to possess the property type of 'height' but potentially possess different values. We can query whether a property is a real if there exists an object that has the property. This is particularly important for the more controversial properties such as gender. We're saying that 'male' and 'female' are 'real' if and only if there exists an object that has one of these properties assigned to it. Note that the property assignment is done by the game designer only. It's 'real' because the game agrees that it is.

Truth and realness all correspond to the game state. Furthermore, truth and reality are very much mind independant concepts. They are theoretically verified by querying the game state using some kind of assert statement. Note however that this does not require any sort of 'thinking' on behalf of any of the agents in the game. The agents in the game can all think one thing, but the truth is exactly what the game state says. 

OBJECTS WITH FREE WILL

Let us extend God's game further where the game designer allows the objects in their game the freedom to do various things. The objects always live within the confines of the game but can choose to do whatever they wish within the game, as long as they follow the programmatically defined rules. For example, the game designer may create concepts such as gravity. Human objects will need to follow the game rules and thus will be unable to fly unless they develop new things.

Humans (and other objects) can manipulate various objects that exist within God's game. They can take trees to create chairs, kill animals to make food and so on. This a good point to note an objection - how does this object conversion work? Does a cow object somehow become a meat object upon death? 

Now Human's are also able - to some extent - view the properties of other objects. For example, they can broadly detect rocks from trees, short from tall, water from salt. Human's can also build upon existing properties to create new properties. For example we might say that an object that contains the property of 'male', 'adult' and 'unmarried' will also have the property of 'bachelor'. This bachelor property we might say is a 'reductively real' property. The game designer might never have thought of it but it is full understood in terms of properties that the game designer has understood.

Let us consider now one of the more controversial properties. E.g. let's consider now 'race'. We know that the property type 'race' is real if and only if there exists an object that actually has a property with the 'race' property type. This can be directly queried against the game state. Suppose however that there is no 'race' property type in the game. We can now consider whether 'race' is 'reductively real' which means it can be reduced to properties that we do understand in our game state.

Peaceful dialectic

It's been a while since I've last written in this blog, but today I want to talk a bit about the current situation involving #BlackLivesMatter and some of my thoughts and concerns. Primarily, I am worried that in our zeal to 'do the correct thing', we end up confusing a social cause with the justification for it. We end up silencing those who oppose us not based on the counter arguments they raise, but based on a (perceived) judgment on their character and upbringing. I will argue that not only is this practice immoral, it is also irrational and unhelpful. I will describe a concept of 'peaceful dialectic', where individuals make arguments in order to determine the truth of an issue. I will then draw an analogy between peaceful dialectic and peaceful protest and that our reasons to favour the latter also apply to the former. Finally I will argue that if one's position is correct, then it is both epistemically and ethically better to establish it via peaceful dialectic.

As an initial disclaimer, I believe in objective truth (i.e. things are true independant of whether we believe them to be) but I also recognise that it can be difficult to convey truth as I will see things from my own perspective. Still, I will try to provide the context to this all in a neutral manner, as the purpose of this post is less on who is correct, but on how we should approach things.

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a social movement that campaigns against racism and system violence against black people. It has recently seen a resurgence after the death of a black man - George Floyd - at the hands of a white police officer. Protests began soon after the death, some of which have over time become violent riots. American police have been ordered to control the protests and have faced criticism for using heavy handded tactics. Around the world there has been a call for solidarity with Black Lives Matter, and many organisations and individuals have made public statements. At the same time there has been backlash against the movement itself and against violent protests.

There are three main phenomena that I think will be useful to help illustrate some ideas:

1) All lives matter and the backlash towards this
2) Silence indicating compliance towards racist structures
3) Backlash towards the violent protests

1) In response to BLM there appears to be a counter movement that take issue with the slogan #BlackLivesMatter. Some reasons provided by proponents of the counter movement is that #BlackLivesMatter places overemphasis on race - in particular blackness - as opposed to the fact that death has occurred. They might agree with the #BlackLivesMatter but only as an implication from their claim that #AllLivesMatter.

There has been a common counter response against the #AllLivesMatter movement that proponents are missing the point. It is argued that the emphasis on black lives is specifically because black people are more likely to lose their life or experience violence at the hands of the state. The slogan #AllLivesMatter implies that all lives are equally at stake, when they are not.

2) I've seen a number of posts on social media that argue this point. The point is that if one is being silent in this situation, then they are being compliant with racism. Instead individuals should feel compelled to make a statement - presumably in this case - in solidarity with BLM. In particular here, and also with the first example there has been a demand for individuals to educate themselves on the matter.

3) There are two parts to this - backlash towards the protestors and backlash towards the police. Let's start with the protestors. There's an interesting tension here as I think most people are against violent protests, but they can also sympathise with the reasoning behind the protest. They can understand why it is done, without necessarily agreeing with it. The police case appears to be different and there currently appears to be a lot of anger towards the police and how they have responded to the protests. The suggestion to potentially bring in the Army may not have helped here.

The examples above illustrate a few interesting observations. The first observation is that many people appear to see these issues as (forgive the pun) black and white. There is the right side and the wrong side. And if you're not on the right side, then you're on the wrong side (particularly evident in the second example).

The second observation is that it seems if one is on the 'wrong' side, then their opposition can be framed as racist, a term which can imply moral corruptness. The prevalence of the term 'educate yourself' I think escalates this a bit further. Not only are you immoral, you are also uneducated or are epistemically sinful. If I claim that my position is correct and tell you to educate yourself if you disagree, then there's a strong implication that my position is factual.


The third observation is that there cases where we might not normally condone of an action, but because the actions are committed by those that we favour, we might see it as permissible and justified. We might for example see violent protests as generally problematic but can sympathise with those who do it in certain cases. The question here is whether are sympathy extends further - do we actually feel like it is justified?

A brief comment - this post is primarily targetted at those who believe the 'right' side is in favour of BLM. In fact, I agree with them - but I still think there are a large number of issues with how the proponents are behaving. I am also open to the possibility that I myself am wrong. Also as I'll argue later, this 'sides' thinking is problematic as well.

Peaceful dialectic

First, some quick definitions. Let us say that a position on a topic (such as BLM) is one's overall set of views about the topic can be considered as a collection of statements that they agree with. As a result, positions can be extremely specific. Sides on the other hand can be considered factions of an issue where rival factions disagree on a core set of statements

I see the practice of vilifying those that we disagree with as really problematic and I worry that we are focusing too heavily on which 'side' individuals are on, and not enough on what justifies it. For if our side is truly justified, we should not need to denounce others are villainous for disagreeing, or denounce others as silently complicit for not shouting about it. The truth should come out by itself. To simply brand those who disagree with you as racist / stupid can be seen as an ad hominem. Given how precise positions are there is likely considerable disagreement even with those on your 'side'. Some of this disagreement can be incredibly helpful and help us refine our views without undermining them.

I can appreciate that some sides may have more riding on their position, both emotionally and physically. However whilst I can sympathise with this, I think one should also be wary. The truth is independant. For the truth is that which reality actually is like, and it is the truth that our own behaviours and beliefs should conform towards.It is also plausible that one's opposition does not engage in these practices, but this does not justify oneself in not doing so. We should lead the way.

I propose we engage in what I call peaceful dialectic. Peaceful dialectic is a manner of discussion where agents are truth seeking. Both sides propose their arguments to one another (without engaging in fallacious practices such as villifying / ad hominem). The aim for each side is not necessarily to win, but to come to a shared agreement. Remember that if your position is correct, we expect the result of this to show that your position is correct. If your position is wrong, then you should admit your position is wrong. One useful way to engage in peaceful dialectic is to consider what your 'opponent' would need to establish to convince you of their side. This has two major benefits - first it humbles us into remembering that we are not always correct, second it helps to refine and allow for abstractions of our position.

Not doing so, I argue, is both ethically and epistemically wrong. Ethically, because you are treating someone (presumably negatively) without being justified. You're accusing someone of wrongdoing without understanding what they have done or where they come from. Epistemically because your practice does not maximise truth - you are outright cutting yourself from further evidence that may expand your view point.

I see this as similar to peaceful protests more generally. If one's protest is justified we should expect for people to be convinced by it without needing for one to engage in physical violence. In fact, engaging in violence can often deter others from supporting one's position.

Rarely is one proposed position completely right and one proposed position completely wrong. Likely there are aspects of each position that make sense, and thus why not take that middle ground and accept that one's own views can have issue? For example, it might be reasonable to agree broadly with a social movement whilst denouncing certain practices as problematic. Similarly we might recognise that a broader structure such as the police force has many problems, without villifying them all or calling for their own suffering. It is because of this observation that I think 'sides' is a problematic concept, because it tends to turn to require uniform judgement on all statements within it. We're unable to admit we made a mistake because it risks undermining the entire position.

(Interesting note - my argument shares some minor parallels to what is known as 'conciliatory' views of disagreement. These views face what is known as self undermining argument, that one cannot be conciliatory about the conciliatory view itself. It might appear that I experience the same problem here where I frame actions or dialectic behaviours as being ethically wrong. There are examples in the literature that defend conciliatory views, which I think could potentially also apply here.)