In my teen years, I’ve always had a bit of an interest in philosophy, particularly metaphysics. I wanted to understand how the universe worked at a fundamental level and so physics lead to metaphysics. This interest in philosophy was mostly left undeveloped for a long time, until I took a first year seminar course tying ideas from anthropology, psychology and philosophy. I was still largely unfamiliar with the literature, but I started independently forming my views on the world and developing the ideas that I subconsciously had. For example, in the back of my head, I knew there was a conflict with free will and the determinism of physics (forget the quantum development for now) just from learning high school physics and studying physics independently but I hadn’t fully formed the idea that free will truly couldn’t exist until then. In addition, that course made me think of the philosophy of ethics.
To my friend, I declared that “I didn’t believe in morality. Morals are a social construct.” What I was trying to express was that I didn’t believe objective morals existed, namely that I believed in moral relativism. I didn’t have the right words to express myself clearly at the time, but that’s what I believed. I confess that I take pride in coming to this line of thinking independently. Of course, this pride is unwarranted as the ideas that were exposed to me by the course and throughout my life simply lead me to this thinking. This realization was made clear by reading the works of Skinner, particularly his Beyond Freedom and Dignity. A while after reading it, the ideas started to settle in and I came to a new view on morality: the view of moral nihilism.
Moral nihilism asserts that — though “assert” is too strong of a word, I feel, and we’ll discuss this soon — morality does not exist. I had previously said to my friend that I didn’t believe in morality, but that was in regards to objective morality. Now I believe that even relative morality doesn’t exist. This is a bit of an abuse of language though. It’s not that I don’t believe people do what they believe to be moral. It’s that I believe statements of morals have no truth. For example, I don’t doubt that the charitable man gives his change to the beggar because he believes it’s good. Instead, I believe that the act is neither good or evil, regardless of his moral values — or anyone’s moral values. I think that words like believe and assert are not the right words to describe this thinking though. There’s no belief or assertion being made here; the only fact is that the man gave the beggar his change. Attaching a belief of goodness or evil can only be secondary to the fact. This view is strictly weaker than any belief in morality. The only “truth-apt” statements are statements of facts, and not that of value. It’s an easy consequence of Hume’s law: that no “ought” statement can be inferred from an “is” statement. I see this view one of pure rationality. When presenting this view to a rational man, it’s hard to see what objective objections can be made. In fact, the way I described it seems almost like common sense. In saying this, I am not attacking other views. I wanted to point out that it seemed too obvious. For simplicity in the rest of this post, when I refer to “immoral acts” or attaching morality to an act, I do it in the sense of how believers of morality may perceive it and should not be viewed as an expression of my belief in morality.
What does this mean for my ethics then? When I presented this view to my friend and gave her an example that I believed kicking and beating her dog was neither moral nor immoral, she (jokingly) told me to stay away from her dog. It seems that moral nihilism should lead to immorality. After all, nothing is considered wrong (or right), so what’s stopping me from actually kicking her dog?
My answer is that I don’t know. I just know that I don’t want to kick her dog and I can speculate on perfectly coherent reasons for why that might be though. I regard the non-desire as a complex function of biological pressures and societal pressures put in place by the environment I was conditioned in. Kicking her dog could lead to ostracization by the community — a societal pressure — which would interfere with my ability to reproduce, which is undesirable — a biological pressure.
I think my ethics can be summed up succinctly by hedonism, but we must be cautious and not regard it as of the naive kind. To repurpose the thought experiment by Singer, if I see a child drowning on my way to work, would I save it? Suppose I’m the only person around and that I have little reason to believe that I would be rewarded in any way for saving the child. My clothes would get wet and I would probably arrive to the office late, so the naive hedonist answer would be to continue along because saving the child doesn’t benefit me in any way. But this viewpoint is stupidly naive. If I do not save the child, I would feel overwhelming guilt, and this guilt very reasonably wouldn’t be just some imaginary concept — you could surely measure the effects of the guilt through my following behavior and determine it to negatively affect my well-being. Therefore it is in my hedonistic interest to save the child and avoid the guilt at some minor expense. As I explained earlier, I cannot tell you the precise source of this guilt, but it surely is a complex function of biological and societal pressures. In contrast to the naive hedonistic view I presented, I’ll call the accounting of the important, hidden factors of my well-being in conjunction with standard hedonism to be mature hedonism.
Of course, judging whether an act is conducive to my overall well-being with regards to mature hedonism isn’t always perfect. After all, skipping a meal while I’m engrossed in something doesn’t improve my well-being. I can’t, and don’t, perfectly judge whether something is hedonistically correct, but I don’t claim it to be. I regard this imperfection of hedonistic judgements to be part of the mature hedonistic framework though. This framework by itself is not very powerful, but with the aid of behavioral psychology and future advancements in neuroscience to fill in the gaps of how mature hedonistic judgement works, this becomes a very practical ethical framework.