Reddit reviews On What Matters (2 Volume Set)

Wish I had time to engage properly today but I don't. Here's some well regarded arguments for realism you can look into if you haven't already.

Enoch's Taking Morality Seriously Shafer-Landau's [Moral Realism: a Defense] (https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Realism-Defence-Russ-Shafer-Landau/dp/0199280207/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=CNVDTNHGJW3FHXNR8821), Oddie's Value, Reality and Desire, Huemer's Ethical Intuitionism, Parfit's On What Matters Wedgwood's The Nature of Normativity, Cuneo's The Normative Web: An Argument for Moral Realism.



And here's some free papers you can read (too lazy to name them all, sorry):
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard_Boyd5/publication/240034001_How_to_Be_a_Moral_Realist/links/556f6f4308aec226830aab09/How-to-Be-a-Moral-Realist.pdf


http://www.academia.edu/4116101/Why_Im_an_Objectivist_about_Ethics_And_Why_You_Are_Too_


https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=433000088031098030104101075089022124028072042008084011092124087113084016108098084005098003032035018116033080110110127020085084106080012039033080068103113067015099089032030091083096096084064089109093065079071016028099008078093021125125068072101086002&EXT=pdf


https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=207103102008006126082026003080087077015002001000090086121025066112086090029103080091030096049125038001052020081100031102121000046002046043009065006112075102115099049080048111067091106094117103109111097113120126103124079110093018090122114122112110007&EXT=pdf


http://www-personal.umich.edu/~umer/teaching/intro181/readings/shafer-Landau2005EthicsAsPhilosophyADefenseOfEthicalNonnaturalism.pdf


http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1007/s11245-016-9443-7?author_access_token=R2EN7zieClp6VWWEo8DyZPe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY6_LyD8T3yNLLNQUBcKQRpfV5lbirZE36eSIc6PLipzIUjIvQrTe9aO4meFw0oJ_Dp784B0R9TnA9qTFaNLe9oWPQUaroxf3o-BsITKWjp_6Q%3D%3D


http://www.owl232.net/5.htm

>However, I still don't see why this or any moral theory posed on atheism for that matter would be objective in any way. To me, morality and meaning in a Godless universe both seem arbitrary sans a foundation to rest on.

Consider an example: utilitarianism. To be good, an action must increase overall utility (pleasure and the absence of pain). Whether overall utility goes up is objective--if we had the technology, we could just measure it. It doesn't depend on what anyone thinks about it. Thus, the moral property of goodness is objective too. The same result holds on most interpretations of Kant and of Aristotle.

>What do you think is the objectively right way to live?

I'm more convinced that there is one than of any particular option, but my favorite theory is in Derek Parfit's new book.

>I think you would need a stronger reason for saying Christianity or religion in general is false.

Absolutely. I didn't focus on that in the video. And I think there's a lot more to be said here.

It is more or less provided in the table of contents found here.

> I admit these positions seem odd to me because whether one be a compatibalist, hard determinist or fatalist it seems as if each is committed to the thesis that mental states are determined by the initial conditions of the universe such that in your fatalist example the fatalist was determined to be a fatalist, and thus determined to believe his actions had no causal influence over the future, whereas the determinist was determined to believe differently- all regardless of the truth or falsity of the respective positions (given determinism, obviously).

This is all correct.

>I guess a follow up question would be whether those that adhere to these positions think that "reasons" have any influence over a persons beliefs. Can people believe anything "because it's true"? Do people who hold these positions think our beliefs can track truth? It seems as if the determinst wants to say that the beliefs they have they have been fated to have since the beginning of the universe- it could not be otherwise, and the beliefs others have which contradict their beliefs, too, those people could not have had otherwise, such that there is no room for truth or reasoning.

These are really good questions, and the answers depend a lot on how you interpret what exactly it is to say that reasons might "have an influence" or that we might have beliefs "because" they're true. I'd say that most philosophers (determinist or otherwise) think that beliefs can track truth--that is, that it's possible to have a belief that is true or false--at least to the extent that they think we have beliefs at all. Someone who was both a determinist and an extreme eliminativist about mental states (think Paul Churchland, maybe) would reject claims like "reasons can influence our beliefs" and "our beliefs can be true" in virtue of the fact that he rejects the existence of things like beliefs and (psychological) reasons in the first place. For people without that kind of eliminativist view, determinism doesn't usually imply anything in particular about the truth-functionality of beliefs, and I'd say that most determinists think we can have true beliefs, though the explanation for how that's the case is more controversial and messier. The basic correspondence theory of truth gives a nice (if somewhat overly simple) account of how this might work, though there are others. In the context of this discussion, "reasons" probably means something like "justification." That is, you're asking whether or not justification plays any role in belief formation. A justification, though, is really just a different kind of belief, what philosophers call a "second-order" belief--it's a belief about a belief. This sort of question, then, can get subsumed into the question of how determinists deal with the connection between beliefs and actions more generally, I think.

Whether or not a determinist thinks that reasons, beliefs, desires, or anything like that can play anything like a causal role in our actions depends a lot on how he understands the relationship between mental and physical states more broadly. For someone like me--that is, a non-reductive naturalist who thinks that psychological states are real, not reducible to particular physical states, and causally efficacious (in a sense)--the fact that our mental states are determined by past states doesn't imply that they're irrelevant. They're just as relevant and important as any other facts about the natural world, and (for some purposes) matter more to us, since they're facts that are very "close to home," so to speak. They play the same sort of role in our actions that other kinds of natural processes do. I don't like the language of "causation" for these discussions, so I prefer to talk about "constraints." I think it's right to say that psychological patterns (or laws) constrain our behavior just like any other natural laws do, though the argument for that assertion is quite long and would take us rather far afield from this discussion.

>It seems as if the determinst wants to say that the beliefs they have they have been fated to have since the beginning of the universe- it could not be otherwise, and the beliefs others have which contradict their beliefs, too, those people could not have had otherwise, such that there is no room for truth or reasoning.

This is the basic intuition behind hard determinism: if you don't even have any freedom over your beliefs and desires, then that's the ballgame, and there's no room for anything like free will. Still, there seems to be a meaningful distinction between an action that's in alignment with your own mental states and an action that's the result of coercion by some other agent. It might be true that all of our beliefs are the result of deterministic natural laws playing out, but it still seems odd to say that there's no real difference between a case when I take your wallet because I felt like it, and a case where I take your wallet because someone has a gun to my head and says "take that guy's wallet or I'll blow your brains out." It's quite common for compatibilists to endorse a version of "free will" on which the criterion for acting freely is something like "acting in accord with your own beliefs, desires, and reasons, rather than because of external coercion."

Many of us (i.e. people with determinist leanings who reject hard determinism) think that the only reason to really care about free will in the first place is for attributions of moral responsibility, since it's hard (though, again, not strictly impossible) to see how we might hold someone praiseworthy or blameworthy for actions that aren't freely taken. John Martin Fischer has a position he calls "semi-compatibilism" that's explicitly designed to address this sort of issue, and I think he does it pretty well. These sorts of accounts broadly are called "reasons-responsive compatibilism", and tie attributions of freedom (or, less strongly, moral responsibility) to facts about the explanation for some action or another. A "free" action on this view is one that's explanatorily related to an agent's reasons in the right ways.

Again, though, this sort of starts to brush up against some questions in the metaphysics of mind and the philosophy of science. If you don't think that reasons (or other mental states) are the kinds of things that can play a robust explanatory role in events, you'll reject this whole line of argument from the get-go. This is (at least in part) why I'm personally interested in giving a strong account of inter-level causation and emergence--it opens the door to these sorts of things in lots of areas.

>It seems like if determinism is true we have no means to determine the truth of anything, as our beliefs/reasoning do not aim at truth but are simply the inevitable result of the universe playing itself out.

Well, even if you're a hard determinist you might think that there's an evolutionary reason to think that our beliefs aim at truth--you'd just think that the thing doing the aiming is natural selection, not any kind of personal will. If our sensory apparatuses weren't at least somewhat reliable (and if they didn't tend to produce beliefs that were at least approximately true in many cases), we'd have a very hard time getting along in the world. We might think that being able to generate and maintain roughly accurate internal models of the world is one of the necessary preconditions on the evolution of organisms as complex as we are in an environment that's as complex as the one we find ourselves it. Things that can't do that tend to get hit by falling panes of glass, fall off cliffs, eaten by tigers, or otherwise fail to reproduce. None of that changes in the face of determinism.

I could say a lot more about the philosophy of science facet of stuff here, but if you're interested in digging into this (i.e. the connection between reasons, rationality, moral responsibility, and freedom) from the ethical side of things, that's not really my area of expertise. However, I can recommend a few great books on the subject. The first is Tim Scanlon's Being Realistic About Reasons, and the second is Derek Parfit's On What Matters (which is a two-volume set that also includes his Reasons and Persons). Both of these are classics in this literature, and go into these topics in great detail.