New paper completed: “A Genealogical Defense of Normative Nihilism” ; feedback welcome

“One ought not torture for fun.” Few would challenge this norm. But why? A common answer is that norms are “prescriptive”, telling us how we should act. Moreover, such norms are regarded as “authoritative”, possessed with a “binding force” that “governs” rational beings. What is the nature of this “normative force” and its “binding power”? Philosophers sometimes talk about different strengths of normative force, invoking the traditional distinction between hypothetical and categorical norms.

Hypothetical norms are “weakly” binding and exemplified by social conventions e.g. “One ought to use the small fork for salads.” Few people would consider it wrong to use the big fork because this norm only “binds us”if we want to impress high society. The force of hypothetical normativity is thus tied to our individual desires; if my desire to rebel against high society is stronger than my desire to fit in, I am hypothetically bound to not use the small fork.

In contrast, categorical norms such as “One ought not torture for fun” are “strongly” binding in the sense of not being conditional on anyone’s actual or ideal desires. If a psychopath desires to torture others for fun, they are nevertheless obligated to not torture for fun. Unlike their hypothetical cousins, categorical norms are considered “objectively prescriptive” (Mackie, 1977), enjoying what Aquinas calls “the binding force which is proper to a law”.

Suppose categorical force is merely a dressed up version of hypothetical force. How could we tell otherwise? The existence of a “binding” categorical force is not an obvious or trivial truth, nor detectable by any scientific instrument (that I know of). On these grounds alone, a skeptic might propose the “bindingness” of categorical force is merely hypothetical force masquerading as something stronger,a remnant of an old brain disposed for religiosity and magical thinking.

The normative realist claims categoricity is felt as forceful because it really is forceful in virtue of the binding power of “irreducible” normative facts. In contrast, the normative nihilist claims the bindingness of normativity derives its “force”merely from biological and cultural values, but there is no ultimate fact about which values are “better” than any other because, from the physicalist point of view, the universe is cold, uncaring, and ultimately valueless. Nietzsche’s statement of the worldview driving normative nihilism is definitive: “Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature—nature is always value-less, but has been given value at some time” (Nietzsche, 1974, p. 242, emphasis added). Nietzsche offers a “physiological” explanation of the source of normativity by tracing the concrete human origins of the concept of categoricity, explaining away the phenomenology of “binding” normative authority as a figment of an over-active brain.

Critics accuse normative nihilists of being either incoherent or hypocritical because in defending the view they “help themselves” to normative concepts, and thus undermine their own attempts at making a meaningful, rational, or intelligible claim. Thus, normativists are doubtful genealogical stories have any revisionary implications for our normative concepts. And even if they did, normativists pull out their trump card tu quoque argument: even if an evolutionary critique of moral norms were successful, it would thereby “prove too much” by casting doubt on all norms, including the epistemic norms that rationally “bind” nihilists to avoid saying “This genealogy both happened and did not happen.” Skeptics have dealt with this “global” challenge creatively, but few have opted to bite the bullet on epistemic nihilism for fear of committing “intellectual suicide” (Sorensen, 2013).Philosophers are by professional reputation defenders of epistemic authority and—not surprisingly—tend to dismiss the prospect of Global Normative Nihilism(GNN)as absurd or self-defeating.

My central thesis is once we distinguish between hypothetical and categorical strengths of epistemic authority the charge of self-defeat rings hollows, for the following reason. If epistemic norms only “bind” us hypothetically with respect to our contingently held desires and/or values, pointing out epistemic nihilists have “binding” hypothetical reasons to avoid holding contradictory beliefs is consistent with the nihilistic claim that acting in accord with epistemic norms is not good in-itself, because nature is valueless. The psychological inevitability of normal humans to feel “bound”by epistemic norms does not entail we are categorically bound to follow them. Naturalists have no beef with hypothetical forms of “binding force” because this locution is understood as a conceptual metaphor. The naturalistic worldview driving normative nihilism predicts that organisms project hypothetically binding values on a valueless world.

Read the full paper HERE: Williams – Genealogy QP 2 version 1.7 8-16-2013

Current WIP, feedback appreciated: A Genealogical Defense of Normative Nihilism

Williams – Genealogy QP 2 version 1.4 7-25-2013

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Nihilism

Value Nihilism holds a curious position in the philosophical landscape. It is simultaneously respected as a position to take seriously yet most contemporary philosophers consider it a “last resort” option at best, a bleak alternative if all other attempts at “saving” morality are unsuccessful (an incentive to never stop hoping moral theories will eventually converge into a consensus). Often it is held up as a philosophical boogey-man to be avoided at all costs. Some would even claim that if your moral theorizing ends up with nihilism you have a good reason to reject that view because it’s too at odds with our common sense ways of thinking.

But it’s an elementary point in other areas of inquiry that evidence of all humans believing in X is not in itself evidence for the existence of X. If almost everyone on the planet believes in fairies, that all by itself does not provide a good reason to the fairy-skeptic that fairies do in fact exist because it’s possible everybody else is mistaken (perhaps the fairy-skeptic could provide an evolutionary or psychological explanation for why fairy belief stabilized in the population thousands of years ago in our ancient superstitious past). Whether or not everyone else thinks the fairy-skeptic is too conceptually “revisionary” in their suggestion to overhaul belief in fairies is irrelevant to the truth of the matter.

Similarly, if it turns out that humans are psychologically incapable of giving up on the idea that some actions are “intrinsically good/evil” because it’s just too psychologically intuitive or too useful to think otherwise, that would provide no reason all by itself to think there really are such things as intrinsic values “out there” independently of contingent preferences. I think it’s strange that so many philosophers want at all costs to hold onto moral discourse including phrases like “Hitler was just downright evil“, “Torturing for fun is just intrinsically bad and you really ought not to do it” and have actually convinced themselves that this makes for a good “explanation” of why evil people do what they do. But this appeal to moral “facts” to explain the situation pales in explanatory power compared to the fully naturalistic explanation that falls out of the scientific worldview. Ontological seriousness is just not compatible with the view that there really are values independently of contingent desires.

And that in essence is my sense of what Value Nihilism is all about. It’s the view that there are no objective values that hold independently of contingent desires. Value Nihilism is fully compatible with Value Subjectivism whereby we can form objective standards relative to the standards of evalulation of contingent, desiring beings like human animals. From an ontological point of view, all modern forms of expressivism, constructivism, or subjectivism are compatible with Value Nihilism. If we say that morality can be constructed out of the basic desires/preferences of Earthly creatures, the Nihilist wants to know: Why is it good to promote basic desires? Is the satisfaction of contingent desires inherently valuable? If so, where do these values come from? What gives it value? Is relative to a stance-independent standard? How does this standard exist independently of us? The scientific worldview has no room in it for wiggles in space-time to be “intrinsically valuable”, “worth pursuing”, or “intrinsically good/evil”, etc. Crudely put, all wiggles in space-time are ontologically on the same “level” as all other wiggles of space-time.

Nowhere in science will it ever make sense to say that there are some specially moral “facts” that provide binding normative reasons for acting or thinking in a certain way. Any binding normative force will only be loosely bound by the hypothetical nature of reason. If you are sincerely committed to playing a legitimate game of chess, then you really ought to follow the rules and do en passant properly and obey touch-rules, etc. But this is only if you have the desire to play a legal game. If you really need the tournament money to pay for your dying child’s medicine and you see that you can cheat and get away with it then you really ought to not follow the rules of chess. The rules of chess don’t “bind you”, because you are always free to say to these rules “Who cares? Nobody is forcing me to follow you.” Of course, it is still objectively true that you made a mistake from the perspective of the chess community.

My sense is that all norms have the same “binding” force as the rules of chess. That is, the binding is only hypothetical relative to contingent preferences. But there is no sense in which any wiggle of space-time is “necessarily obligated” to obey some prescription. Norms do not and cannot bind, authorize, guide, regulate, control, enforce, obligate, or compel any physical entity. They just do not have that power because they don’t exist except as stance-dependent properties. But as John Heil as argued, only substances can bear properties. And the most plausible candidates for substances are things like fundamental particles or space-time fields. Relative properties as such are thus quasi-properties that arise from configurations of more fundamental substances, whose “modes” include complex phenomena such as human societies and biospheres. Norms only have force if there is a preference that has an incentive to follow the norm. No incentive, no authority.

This is just a quicky and dirty rendition of some of the motivations underlying Moral Nihilism or Value Nihilism. My own views are leanings towards the view that if you are going to be a Moral Nihilist then you should also be a Global Normative Nihilist, because it seems to me that the arguments for why moral norms must be merely hypothetical are also good argument for while any other type of norm must also have a merely hypothetical nature. Some philosophers might think this is an unsurprising finding, and it’s exactly what they’d expect. But that’s because they’re philosophers! But I think that the implications of this way of looking at the world stands in stark contrast to the onto-theological worldview that has been prevalent for pretty much the entirety of human history. I don’t think an intellectual understanding of Normative Nihilism changes one’s underlying motivational structure, but I do think it enables a subtle shift in how we understand ourselves relative to the Cosmos at large. Conceptualizing ourselves from the perspectives of the universe at large is humbling when we consider that our values are just that: ours. And we should cherish them and promote them the best we know how. But we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking these values are imbued with a special intrinsic “goodness” that holds for all rational agents. That’s a philosophical pipedream.