Category — Philosophy

That which we find words for is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Nowadays, one cannot write like Shakespeare. There is no reason why one cannot write as well as Shakespeare (with immense luck and super-Herculean effort), but to write in a style remotely comparable to Shakespeare’s would be considered hopelessly old-fashioned. In itself, there is nothing odd in this, for the least we expect of artists is that they create something new. [Read more →]

The difficulty of arguing for an objective morality is not necessarily an argument against the validity of such a pursuit, since moral anti-realism, in its different forms, is also difficult to argue for. Furthermore, there is a sense in which we feel quite strongly, more so than we do for our taste in music, say, that morality is objective, and that one can be wrong about it. This feeling is almost as strong as the conviction that the chair exists, despite there being no inarguable philosophical argument in its favour.

But it must be confessed that the nature of moral objectivity, if it is not just an illusion, is very different from the fact of Newton’s laws or of 2 and 2 equalling 4. I would instead argue for what I call an evolutionary moral pragmatism, which aims to render the metaethical question of objectivity and subjectivity irrelevant, and strives rather to find the objectively best morality under certain conditions and based on certain premisses which are taken to be reasonable and easily agreed upon, in the same way that the objectively best medical operation is one which most effectively cures the given ailment, regardless of one’s eccentric taste for a different kind of success.  There is nothing in medicine that can impel a doctor to undertake an operation correctly other than the possibility of losing his job, an outcome which medicine itself cannot render undesirable. [Read more →]

If the place of indiscriminate killing in the evolutionary realm was comparatively clear, and the place of theft was a little more muddied, then the place of rape is considerably more complicated. Once again, since we are trying to understand it in evolutionary terms, we must try to work out the nature of the motivation in the first place, and only then try to work out whether this amounts to a benefit or otherwise for the species.

There is much controversy in the psychological and legal communities regarding the extent to which rape is sexually motivated and the extent to which it is power-driven. We can surely say without reams of evidence that neither in isolation is anything like a satisfactory solution. Sexual desire exists in virtually everyone, and hardly ever manifests itself as rape; the desire for power exists in many people and doesn’t usually result in such extreme harm. There is also the question, in the latter case, of exactly what sort of power rape confers on the rapist. If it does confer power, it is only of the most worthless kind (as opposed to, say, owning a multinational company or being the President of France), and we therefore must conclude that the person who desires this sort of power is suffering some kind of mental imbalance. But neither are the two in combination quite a satisfactory solution, for the problems that attend them individually exist in combination, too. [Read more →]

Or, at least, a guess at what it might consist of.

There’s an interesting debate going on between Jerry Coyne and P. Z. Myers on the provability of God’s existence. The standard atheist position on this matter seems to be disbelief for lack of evidence to the contrary, but that in principle it might be possible to conjure some piece of evidence that might prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that “God” exists. Coyne offers, as an example, a series of highly unlikely events, all perpetrated by a being calling himself Jesus. Myers rightly insists he still would not believe in God or Jesus if these happened. [Read more →]

Is theft really so bad? Perhaps, but only if ownership is so good.

In the last discussion, it did not appear to take too long, or require too much marshalling of evidence, to conclude that no moral system can sustain the instinct to murder: either the species dies out, or the instinct does. However, it turns out that this instinct may be the only one that can be dealt with so summarily, since it is the only one that deals directly with survival. When dealing with theft, we are instantly confronted with a problem of definition. The connotations of the word “theft” are too strong to use without question. It would perhaps be more accurate to think of theft as one kind of taking, and specifically one which implies the existence of, and tacit social agreement to, the idea of ownership. [Read more →]