Hopefully it will not be seen as an abuse of posting privileges if I share some thoughts I’ve been developing over the past few years. But I’ve been prompted to share them by JLA’s assertion at Uncommon Descent that naturalism entails nihilism — an assertion that seems unquestioned in that forum. I think that that assertion collapses on closer inspection.
The problematic I’m concerned with here is about the relations between naturalism, normativity, and nihilism. Each of these terms avails itself of a straightforward articulation, but I’ll be explicit: by ‘naturalism’ I mean that all real phenomena have a spatio-temporal location and participate in causal relations with other spatio-temporally locatable particulars. By ‘normativity’ I mean that thought and action for at least some intelligent beings are governed by norms or rules of what counts as correct or incorrect, valid or invalid, good or bad. And by ‘nihilism’ I mean that there is nothing of any real, genuine value, meaning, purpose, or fact in the world.
Now, does naturalism entail nihilism? It does, I submit, if — and only if — one has an a priori commitment to the further view that normativity is non-natural. Put otherwise, if normativity is non-natural, but the natural is all that there is, then there isn’t any normativity — not really. And nihilism follows as a result.
However, if normativity is natural, then nihilism does not follow. So then the question is, how to make sense of normativity as itself an emergent, natural phenomenon? (Notice that the question as posed here simply side-steps whether there are any emergent properties at all — I’m only asking here whether, given that there are emergent properties, normativity is one of them.)
Another way of putting the problem — and I apologize in advance for being ‘cute’ about it — is in terms of “the Four Ms” and “the Four Fs”. The Four Fs — I know of the phrase from Patricia Churchland but cannot say for sure that she invented it — are, of course, fighting, fleeing, feeding, and reproduction — the basic motives of biological existence. And the Four Ms — a phrase I’ve borrowed from the philosopher Huw Price — are mind, meaning, modality, and morality. So the naturalism-and-normativity problem is, can we make sense of the Four Ms in terms of the Four Fs?
I submit that nihilism follows if, but only if, we cannot — in which case the Four Fs are “all there is,” so to speak, and the Four Ms are an illusion. On the other hand, if we can make sense of the Four Ms in terms of the Four Fs, then we can affirm the reality of mind, meaning, morality, and modality within a naturalistic view.
Hypothermia, hyperthermia, nitrogen narcosis, hallucinogenic drugs all affect judgment.
Taking off all of one’s clothes when in hypothermia, ripping off one’s oxygen mask while at 200 feet depth in water, leaping off buildings when hallucinating are all evidence that “normativity,” as you are apparently using the word, is affected by natural events.
What the brain learns to process as “normative” appears to be a result of direct and shared experience; both of which involve interactions with an external world. Complete removal of interactions with an external world leads to hallucinating.
There is, as I understand it, some speculation that hallucinating under conditions of complete stimulus deprivation is a way the nervous system will provide its own stimulation when deprived of external stimulation. This suggests that, in some sense, the nervous system is “synchronized” with reality as a result of experience with the environment.
It is also the case that stimulation and interactions with the external environment are crucial in the ongoing development of the complexity of the nervous system. Lack of stimulation results in atrophy of parts of the nervous system. Sleep deprivation and disruption of dreaming disrupts the integration of experiences imprinted on the nervous system; learning is thereby made more difficult.
The simple fact that humans are similar and exist in a context is why I am neither an existentialist nor a nihilist.
Under an evolutionary framework, there are many things that the overwhelming majority must agree on. Evolutionary Stable Strategies arise for any population.
Sure, we are not identical, and we have this unrivaled ability to challenge anything we inherit, but human-ness, not the abyss, is the de facto starting point of any discussion.
The mere fact of discussion also presumes sociality, and in most cases, empathy.
Well put, KN. This is a ubiquitous problem in debates with Christian and other theists. The immediate problem with the non-existence of God is that many have no naturalistic (or more precisely, non-supernatural) framework for “good”, “evil” or anything deontological. This is not an accident, at least in evangelical circles, I know from the experience of my younger years. The “without God there can be no morality” meme is an important part of their apologetics, not just in being trollish toward atheists, but in their internal “discipling”; that way lies moral nihilism, necessarily.
This is fairly effective in at least bogging down the debate. Most of us here have heard, and more than once: “that’s not morality, that’s just man’s opinions and judgments”. Their concepts are calibrated to “supernatural”, and if it’s not transcendent in some cosmic sense, then ya got nothin’, end of story.
*blink*
Here’s the thing, though. The way you’ve framed it, which I agree with, tends to play toward this problem, not away from it, if only because of the language used. Does “normativity” exist in natural terms? Well, not as such, not as an abstraction. The evolved psychology of humans manifestly establishes core values we share (empathy, self-preservation, pride, desire for love/affection, etc.), but just by virtue of being natural features of natural humans, these are frequently dismissed out of hand by believers/questioners because they integrated into human psychology.
“Normativity” doesn’t exist as some “material abstraction” [sic] or as some separate “natural substance”, and this is problematic for many. It’s not reasonable to bring this expectation to the table, but I run into this all the time.
I often hear, from Christians offended and horrified at the idea of death as oblivion, without any afterlife or after-death consciousness, that if death is the end, “then my life has no meaning at all”. I can (and have) join this person for a walk through the woods on a beautiful fall day, or point out how important their roles as parents are for the kids they love and are raising, or how just the relationships they maintain and grow with those kids and the rest of their family not only provide meaning and purpose, they provide meaning and purpose that make “God’s purpose” and “heaven” empty, crass and superficial by comparison.
Doesn’t matter, at least at the start of the conversation. They have oriented their concept of “meaning” totally around “what happens after I die”.
I don’t have any easy answers on this, it’s dealing with thoroughly conditioned people holding fast to prejudicial semantics. But I kind of cringe at this phrasing: “Does normativity exist?”. That articulation seems to affirm the prejudices that are at the core of the problem here, casting “normativity” as some kind of abstraction or “metaphysical something”, that is hard to break down and reify in naturalistic terms and easy to deny for those who see such concepts as being in the supernatural domain, inherently non-natural.
The obvious question back is: OK, well, how would you put it? From my experience, I steer away from “normativity”, “deontology” and morality in ethereal, abstract terms, and focus on humans as concrete agents, with a natural physiology that compels them toward beliefs, emotions, reactions and thought processes that we describe as “moral thinking” or “moral behavior”. Sam Harris’ analogy to morality as a natural aspect of human physiology in a somewhat analogous fashion to human health as a nature feature of human physiology — what characteristics are intrinsic to human psychology and what beliefs, norms and actions promote human flourishing (and analogously, which habits, practices and methods promote healthy humans).
It’s not a coincidence that the West’s great political thinkers (Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, Marx) began their political treatises with words to the effect that “because human nature is THUS, the political structure must be as follows.”
Human values overlap almost entirely across societies and histories, because human nature IS something consistent, and not arbitrary.
I’m not sure why in all these treatises nihilism “follows” some particular worldview. For the few nihilists I’ve known, their nihilism seemed to be a primary personality trait, not a result of some philosophical position.
It’s for the same reason that, as a child, if you did not have the right “worldview” about keeping your room tidy, you had to fear that the boogeyman would get you.
Hmm, in my experience, specifically with my family, nihilism followed directly after refusing to remain iCatholic. I saw it in relatives by marriage, of differing personal temperaments; I’m not sure it was a result of some philosophical position but it does seem like it to me. I believe in my different relatives’ cases that they grieved over the loss of their faith and studied (that is, at a casual layman’s level) a philosophy that would allow them to name and understand – perhaps magically have some “control” over – their new worldview with its new freedom for them to go to hell if they wanted rather than because god sent them. Sad, I think, but then again, I didn’t have to struggle to escape that rapacious corrupt racket of Catholicism. Nihilism didn’t seem like a positive blessing to me.
I hope this doesn’t overstep Lizzie’s boundary of peanut-galleryism, but I did notice that JLA identified as Catholic in the UD thread which Lizzie already linked to. Just one more bit of anecdata. Now-agnostic-maybe-soon-to-be-ex Catholic who sees Nihilism as the only “logical” alternative to remaining in untenable faith.
Well, I’m probably reading too much into a few coincidences. I often do.
Absolutely not! Thanks!
Regarding peanut gallerism: I think I need to clarify my ideas on this. For the time-being I shall sit on my hands.
KN
Very interesting OP thanks
“then there isn’t any normativity — not really. And nihilism follows as a result.”
Like you I am sure that naturalism is perfectly compatible with accepting norms or rules of behaviour. But I am not even convinced that without accepting norms nihilism follows. I can imagine finding real value in aesthetic experiences and emotional relationships without accepting any norms of behaviour. It is hard to prove it because in practice almost everyone does recognise norms of some kind. – but logically it seems possible.
To be bathetically practical for a moment:
Whether or not it is sensible to say that an “objective” morality exists somewhere Out There, if we have no objective way of discovering what it entails, it isn’t much use.
I suspect that at least some of the times it means “real afterlife consequences for getting it wrong”.
Explicitly in some cases, implicitly in others.
Someone once said all of god’s law is contained in the phrase thou shalt love…
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
—Matthew 22:35-40
Doesn’t seem like a hook on which to hang all that the Christian Taliban insist upon. I don’t see any connection between what Jesus said and telling your gay neighbor that he’s an abomination who should kill himself for shame. Nor in forcing a pregnant woman to die of infection while refusing to allow doctors to remove the doomed fetus even though that would certainly save her life. Nor in USA fundamentalists thwarting NGO efforts to stop the spread of disease.
I see it as hook on which to hang a rich social program, including nutritious food guaranteed for every single child; home health visits for any elder or invalid who is housebound; stringent regulations against the pollution of our water and air …
What use is the concept of the Lord Almighty and pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die if it can’t motivate christians to feed their neighbors’ children in this lifetime?
This is how I think of the objective morality problem.
As I understand it a theist believes
a) there must be a set of criteria/norms/rules to judge when something is morally good (or bad)
b) God provides these criteria
c) This is what makes morality objective
Now if A is an atheist and T is a theist.
Either they mean the same thing by “morally good” or they don’t.
If they don’t then it is a matter of semantics to be solved by referring to a good dictionary or defining their terms
If they do mean the same thing then
A clearly doesn’t mean “according to God’s law” as he doesn’t believe in God
Therefore T doesn’t mean “according to God’s law” because he means the same thing as A
Therefore when T says it is morally good to act according to God’s law he is not saying something that follows from the meaning of “good”
Therefore T must have judged that it is morally good to act according to God’s law.
But by (a) above this requires a further set of criteria to judge God’s law. This is an infinite regress. The only way out of it is to make a subjective decision that some of set of criteria is absolute – even if the process of judging whether something meets them is objective.
What KN refers to as “normative” has changed over time, even within Western culture. How rewards and punishments for behavior were meted out in the Middle Ages is far different from how justice is practiced since the Enlightenment.
The practices of “morality” and justice in the US colonies were superseded by Constitutional law and an enormous set of court rulings over a couple of centuries. In fact, law and court rulings have been evolving over several centuries of wrangling in courts and the changing circumstances and perspectives we gain as we learn more about human behavior and the universe in which we live. Science has had an enormous effect on how we practice law.
Sectarians have had to adapt their “laws” and “judgments” of behavior to align with secular law. Killing for “heresy” is no longer permitted.
So, the historical development of our laws, and the legal systems we have put in place for adjudicating our interactions among ourselves, suggests pretty strongly that what we call “good” or “bad” comes from experience. Our interactions among each other and with our environment are our teachers.
The Hawaiian myna bird has an interesting set of behaviors, referred to in Hawaii as the “myna bird court.” I was skeptical about this when I was first told about it; but then I witnessed it for myself.
I was walking along a street in the area of Waikiki one morning when I noticed that a person mowing his lawn suddenly stopped his mowing and stood quietly focused on a ring of mynas that had just landed on his lawn. In the center of the ring was a single bird cowering in a submissive position with wings drooping. After a minute or two of loud chattering among themselves, the mynas in the ring proceeded to beat up and peck the bird in the middle and then finally chase it away.
Apparently even birds have notions about what is “normative;” and that is not the same among all species of bird.
Other animals apparently understand the notions of “fairness” and learn how to negotiate among themselves what constitutes “proper behavior.”
Yes.
Nihilism as I see it is the denial of purpose and meaning, but I think it goes further than that, and also denies, even if implicitly, the reality of such concepts as choices, decisions, and the admittedly clumsily expressed term ‘Free will’. And hence a denial of morality, on the basis that denial of choice implies denial of morality.
Nihilism to my mind is a domain of the ultra-reductionist, though I suppose it might also be a domain of the depressed.
I see at as an important point, because I am a fairly militant atheist, and I further believe that it is fear of the abyss of nihilism that leads many of the more thinking theists to maintain their theism.
The reasoning, at varying degrees of consciousness of the reasoning, going something like.
1) No god implies no morality (and/or some combination of value, purpose, choice…)
2) There is morality, self evidently (and/or some combination of value etc)
Hence God.
If, on the other hand, one regards all those concepts like purpose, meaning, freedom etc as non-magical emergent and still emerging, evolved and still evolving qualities, better looked at from a POV that is not ultra-reductionistic, then one can easily make sense of all these concepts without having to invoke a god.
David
I think you stumbled over a problem of descriptions that’s been keeping philosophers busy since at least Frege and Russell. One person refers to Evening Star, another refers to Morning Star. Both of them think that these are different celestial objects. By your logic, since they intend different things (if they met and agreed on definitions, as you propose, they would agree that they mean different things when they say Morning Star and Evening Star, respectively), they cannot possibly refer to the same object: the planet Venus. How can this be?
David B,
Good thing that you mentioned reductionism. To expand on that, I think the implicit assumption that is made by many theists and naturalists alike goes something like this: In the naturalist framework all phenomena reduce to a fundamental physical reality described by some putative Theory of Everything. There can be intermediate descriptions provided by various sciences and folk notions, such as celestial mechanics or psychology. But only the fundamental level of description refers to what is real; anything else is a useful fiction, at best. Thus, according to this view, planets and clouds, thoughts and feelings are not real. The real is what’s at the bottom of the presumed reductionist hierarchy: particles, fields and what have you.
Now, it is difficult to see where a value theory can fit into this picture, other than as another useful (?) fiction. Hence the deprecating expressions, such as “mere chemistry”. Chemistry (particles, fields…) is what is real, values are fictional.
Worse than that: it is difficult even to see how values could reduce to any physical description of the world. We may be able to explain where our ideas about value come from – in terms of psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary theory, or individual history – but equating those descriptions with a value theory is said to be as a naturalistic fallacy, or an is-ought confusion (in the somewhat narrower domain of ethics).
I recall this one fundamentalist Christian I used to have discussions with who stated that he knew God existed because if God did not exist, it followed that certain people would get away with doing bad things without ever having to face any kind of consequences. He just could not accept – even as a concept – the idea that some people might not ever have face any kind of punishment for doing something he deemed “evil”. Such would just be too unfair and it made him really physically angry to even ponder such.
I could not help but wonder what his belief in God prevented him from doing…
A couple of points.
One being that a view of reductionism that claims that everything must be consistent with deep physics looks to me to be fine, but that a view of reductionism that claims that everything can be derived from deep physics is to overstate the case.
Another being that back in the days when I did a little academic philosophy I was told that two aphorisms were that you cannot get mind from matter, and that you cannot get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.
And true enough, I can’t – but the mindless algorithmic processes of evolution coupled with deep time on the other hand seem to me to have accomplished the first, which further seems to me to be a sine qua non of the second.
David
I have a similar view of reductionism, but in this context I wanted to bring to light an implicit assumption about naturalism that is often made on both sides of the debate: that deep physics is what is real, while everything else is not (or less so).
As for is/ought, I don’t think this gulf can be bridged, simply because these are two different categories.
And mind and matter are not two different categories?
My view is that if mind can emerge from matter, then ‘oughts’ can emerge from ‘isses’.
David
David B,
Well, I am not sure what “matter” means here, exactly, so I can’t say for sure. In a broad sense – for example, everything that supervenes upon physics – sure, I can see how phenomenal mind could and should emerge from “matter.”
But values are in a category of their own, I think. They no more emerge from matter than pronouns or logarithms. I could (hypothetically) give a scientific account of how certain values emerged, but doing that doesn’t automatically make those values my own.