But before I can spell out Nietzsche’s constructive attitudes about how there can be true judgments in the realm of values and how we could create moralities of any value, we must make sense of what it is he means to tell us about himself and about morality when he refers to himself as an immoralist.  So that is what I want to begin to do with in this post.

In the preface to Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, at the beginning of section 3, Nietzsche writes:

Hitherto, the subject reflected on least adequately has been good and evil: it was too dangerous a subject.  Conscience, reputation, Hell, sometimes even the police have permitted and continue to permit no impartiality; in the presence of morality, as in the face of any authority, one is not allowed to think, far less to express an opinion: here one has to–obey! As long as the world has existed no authority has yet been willing to let itself become the object of criticism. and to criticise morality itself, to regard morality as a problem, as problematic: what?  has that not been–is that not–immoral?

Nietzsche refers to morality here in the singular, as though it were simply one thing, even though he knows quite well that there are numerous moralities.  When talking thus about morality, i.e., as though it were a monolithic entity, I interpret him primarily as taking the stance of a dissident under the reign of a specific morality which wants to be, and is assumed by most to be, “morality itself”.  But Nietzsche does not think it is all that can or ought to be considered “morality”.  To this effect, he writes in Beyond Good and Evil, section 202:

Morality in Europe today is herd animal morality—in other words, as we understand it, merely one type of human morality beside which, before which, and after which many other types, above all higher moralities, are, or ought to be, possible.  But this morality resists such a “possibility,” such an “ought” with all its power: it says stubbornly and inexorably, “I am morality itself, and nothing besides is morality.”

So the idea that there is only one kind of morality or that a specific morality can be “morality itself” is actually false, according to Nietzsche.  It is also not the case that Nietzsche is against all moralities—he clearly makes the normative judgment that “higher moralities” ought to be possible.  This means that Nietzsche thinks they would be a good thing that should be brought about.  This argument about what to be can itself be taken as evidence that Nietzsche’s “immoralism” is not an abandonment of all normative or “moral” judgments.  What he is attacking is a specific kind of morality which like an authoritarian ruler insists on never being questioned but only obeyed, and insists upon being seen as “morality itself”.

So, in the original text we are considering (Daybreak 3) Nietzsche adopts the perspective of someone under this authoritarian morality’s rule and who is writing for readers who accept this morality’s rule as well, and he notes that according to the way this morality functions, all questioning and dissent are morally forbidden and, so, according to its standards genuine, critical reexamination of it is “immoral”.  So Nietzsche, in open defiance of such oppressive strictures on investigation and reevaluation, takes this label of “immoral” as a point of pride and provocation.   If questioning the dominant morality is immoral, he will be an immoralist.

In fact, Nietzsche does not think that that questioning received moral precepts is actually a “wrong” or “bad” thing.   He does not actually accept the full legitimacy of the morality which judges him “immoral” for questioning it.   So Nietzsche’s immoralism is not a call to do whatever one genuinely thinks is wrong or bad according to one’s own best reasoned moral judgments.  He is not saying, “Determine what you think is right or good and do the opposite!”  On the contrary, immoralism means being willing to be perceived as immoral for daring to challenge false, dominant moral norms and, therein, challenging the very assumption of those norms’ absolute authority.

Since people regularly conflate their particular moral judgments with morality itself, whenever one promotes an opposing value to one widely held to be moral, one risks being accused of attacking morality itself and the authority of all moral rules whatsoever.  One risks being accused of being an immoralist.  Nietzsche accepts the mantle as a challenging affront to the authoritarian character of morality which challenges its legitimacy.

Implicit in all of this, Nietzsche is targeting “morality” as a powerful institution, not merely as a conceptual ideal.  He thinks of morality as not the merely a referee in struggles for power but as a power player itself.  And specifically he thinks of morality as a tyrannical power which cowers people from challenging itself and which wrongly impresses upon people absolute prohibitions and absolute commands.

If other Enlightenment moral philosophers, like Kant, are correct and morality ideally should be based on autonomy and reason, then it is morally scandalous and the height of all hypocrisies to the extent that Nietzsche is correct and in actual practice moralities dominate individuals and cultures in ways that are heteronomous and which actively discourage vigorous moral questioning and openness to changes of values.

I think this is the core meaning of Nietzsche’s paradoxical charges that “Morality is just as ‘immoral’ as any other thing on earth” (The Will to Power 308) and that “morality is itself a form of immorality” (The Will to Power 308) and that “The victory of a moral ideal is achieved by the same ‘immoral’ means as every victory: force, lies, slander, injustice.” (The Will to Power 306).

Moralities as institutional powers can be critiqued for how they live up to moral ideals in their implementation.  Do moralities (or those actual people and institutions which enforce them) impose and leverage their authority through lies, bullying, or any other manners of coercive force?  Insofar as they do they are probably hypocritical on their own terms and they are definitely immoral on the terms of the Enlightenment autonomy-based morality which Nietzsche implicitly judges them against repeatedly throughout his writings.

There is more to say about the topics above.  In particular, I should note that in the above discussion, I realize did not actually address any of the texts where Nietzsche specifically uses the term “immoralist” or identifies himself directly as an immoralist or explicitly defines his usages of the term for himself.  Those texts will complicate the meaning of the term further and in future posts I hope to do justice to those complexities.

Your Thoughts?

And I believe that it is an abrogation of duty to the public for intellectuals to hide safely in the ivory tower and never challenge religions’ systematic efforts to inculcate bad habits of thought for the sake of social and political control. It is messy to get involved in the public domain and demand that the strict rigorous standards for pursuing knowledge and establishing just authority be consistently applied in social, ethical, spiritual, and political matters no less than in scientific and other academic matters, but it is our responsibility.  What else are philosophers here for if not this role of public education about vital philosophical issues?

But to illustrate her point that at least some issues should not be debated carelessly before an audience that cannot properly handle it, she explains the possible dangers of incautiously advocating that atheism leads to moral anti-realism. More specifically she explores what the consequences for atheism itself might be like if moral error theorists, such as Russell Blackford, with whom she is currently debating and who recently criticized Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape on error theorist grounds, were ever to become prominent cultural voices. (An introductory post to error theory by me can be read here.  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s explanation is here.)

She gives a serious warning about an issue that has certainly weighed on me and influenced my own decisions often. Both personally and philosophically I care deeply about metaethics, atheism, and the causes of rationalism and liberalism. And I also spent years writing a dissertation on that self-confessedly polemical, rhetorically reckless, self-proclaimed “immoralist” and “antichristian” Friedrich Nietzsche, who says a lot of things that can be used against a lot of things I defend.

I think that in the end, when read carefully, Nietzsche is ultimately a naturalist and realist about value (in fact, in my case studying  him helped convince me of both positions).  He just calls for massive work psychologically analyzing, contextualizing, and reassessing the values of particular moral systems according to what he takes to be a truer naturalistic value standard than is often admitted.  But, nonetheless, his skeptical and iconoclastic rhetoric both tantalizes many readers into anti-realism and gives fodder to a great many religionists who see him as a confirmation of their fears (or hopes?) that atheism inevitably leads to moral nihilism.

But before I get into my views of how to respond to these problems, I want to give Kazez’s case against indiscriminately public debates on metaethics the full vent it deserves:

A  view Russell’s been promoting lately is not science/religion incompatibility but atheism/objective morality incompatibility. He argues that atheism leads to an “error theory” of morality like that defended by J. L. Mackie and Richard Joyce.  Take the sentence below–

Torturing babies just for fun is wrong.

Most people think it’s true.  The error theory disputes this.  Mackie says all moral statements are false, while Joyce just says they’re not true.  (There’s a difference–with different logical problems whichever way you go.)

Suppose Russell gets lots of fame and acclaim, and starts promoting the error theory all over the place.  So he starts influencing people to think that atheists must believe the sentence above is false, or at least not true.  I wouldn’t hesitate to say I thought that was a bad idea.  It wouldn’t be my place to address him in the second person and tell him what to talk about, but I’d be perfectly entitled to my opinion that spreading this view is unwise.

And it would be a perfectly cogent and respectable opinion.  This sort of meta-ethics would likely increase public distrust of atheism and discourage people from accepting atheism. I’d also make another sort of argument–that meta-ethics can’t be discussed coherently in the public square.  It’s a highly technical area of philosophy, where philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and logic intersect. There is simply no way that the ordinary person, with little or no education in philosophy, can get a grip on the pertinent issues.

Furthermore, there’s just no point in the public worrying about meta-ethics.  All sane people are committed to not torturing babies just for fun and will do the very same things to stop would-be baby torturers.  For all intents and purposes, we may as well say the sentence above is true.   Everyone in philosophy converges on the idea that roughly speaking, anyway, it’s at least kind of like true. Nothing whatever is gained by associating atheism with an anti-realist view of morality.

Now, that doesn’t mean the error theory should never be discussed. Of course it should.   In philosophy books and philosophy seminar rooms, and by anyone who’s willing to spend a couple of years gaining the expertise required to discuss these things proficiently.  If you get yourself into that milieu, you’ll find out there are big problems with the error theory, and there are many, many impressive competitors in logical space.  In fact, there’s a very close competitor that [on some versions...] makes the sentence above true (moral fictionalism, which compares it to “Harry Potter is a wizard”).  There is no reason at all to foist the error theory on the public (at the price of atheists seeming bizarre), and not one of these competitors, given the total lack of consensus even among meta-ethics experts.

In any event–the point is that there’s nothing remotely scandalous about saying that the public square is the wrong place to promote atheism/objective morality incompatibility*.

My response:

Even as a (somewhat unconventional) moral realist and (Aristotelian/Nietzschean/existentialist) moral naturalist, I do not fear the metaethics debate being brought into the public eye because I think that error theory (and fictionalism, which improves little on error theory as far as I am concerned) is false and can be shown to be false.  But I also admit that proving that point takes serious work.

And we live in a culture that tends to think simplistically and dualistically.  A good many people assume that our only options in ethics are the extremes of total absolutism on the one hand or total subjectivist relativism on the other.  The same problem occurs in popular epistemology too as people constantly talk as if anything short of absolutely incontrovertible certitude in knowledge is formally no different than the wildest, most religiously baseless, leap of faith.

So, in this context, there is a prejudice towards anti-realism as soon as one starts dismantling absolutism.  And even if there are better arguments in favor of both moral naturalism and an objective moral pluralism that can rationally and systematically account for the real relativities and subjectivities in ethics without descending into moral nihilism, a good many people would be seduced by the extreme of absolute moral anti-realism and a good many others would be scared back into the comforting arms of the opposite, equally familiar extreme, moral absolutism.

In fact, a previous great public wave of ascendant atheistic philosophy, namely atheistic existentialism, already influenced a pervasive ethos of nihilism among many atheists and gave ample stories for theologians and pastors to tell their flocks at the bedtime of their reason to make sure they would never want to wake up to a secular reality.

The New Atheists though, as far as I have seen, have had little interest in repeating the existentialists’ sabotage of atheism in the public mind.  By contrast they have tended to give full-throated endorsements of Enlightenment values.  They are more likely to brush aside questions about an atheist metaethics either (a) as easily and quickly solved, (b) as irrelevant, (c) as just a chance to rightly point out secularism’s vindicating record in practice of creating values progress, or (d)  as a personal, prejudicial assumption about the depravity of actual atheists and, as such, a cause for offense rather than refutation.  Of the New Atheists only Sam Harris has made a serious book length attempt (yet a somewhat wrong-footed one if I understand his argument in his reply to critics properly, though I have not read the actual book) to treat metaethics head on.

My view on this is simply that the man on the street will not be scandalized by becoming acquainted with the views of moral anti-realists.  They already share them. Even those who cling to moral absolutism by faith cite epistemological relativism when it suits them as a justification for faith, saying some variation of “no one can be certain so we all hold an absolute by faith, so I am entitled to my dogmatic belief which at least makes coherent sense of ethics so I have something to teach my kids, gives me meaning, and promises me eternal life”.

When being philosophical and weighing options metaethically, they see an abyss of moral nihilism outside of their bald faith assertions.  They do not want to dive into that abyss and so instead they stick with beliefs that a good many of them will frankly admit are rationally unjustified.

When Sarah Palin insidiously assumes that the godless liberals would judge her Down’s Syndrome afflicted son or the “useless elderly” unworthy to live, she is logically inferring that unless God imputes value to such a life, it has little by the objective standards of full human power and excellence.  She and many other religious people are absolutely convinced that but for the fiat of God, Social Darwinism and brutal amoral selfishness would be the only options for humanity.

So this fear keeps many people penned up in false institutions out of sheer will to believe there can be meaning in the teeth of their cynical, hardheaded philosophical realism (which in metaethical terms is moral anti-realism).  And some (though definitely not all) of those who simply cannot believe the necessary religious fictions become truly metaethically disoriented, nihilistic atheists (as I did for a long time before I could painstakingly prove a realist position to myself through studying primarily Nietzsche and teaching numerous ethics classes while in graduate school).

Metaethics is not some irrelevant puzzle only of purely academic interest and of such interest only to philosophers.  Though the ordinary person has never heard the word, to many of them believing in the truth of moral statements is essential to believing in their authority at all.  They are not naive about what hangs in the balance on questions of moral foundations. To many people this is what keeps them within the irrationalism of faith.  And to many, like me 12 years ago, it is a personal and existential crisis to leave their faith and feel the need to build their own moral compasses for themselves since few prominent people or institutions, if any, seem to offer ones that seem to be truthful.

I think making the metaethics debate public can only make objective, context-sensitive moral realism get a voice in the discussion, to make arguments against the prevailing presumption to extremism—whether it be relativistic or absolutistic.  And from the activist atheists I see, I think many have a serious hunger to prove morality can have an objective footing without religion.  Many atheists want nothing to do with Sartrean nihilism.  They want to prove that their worldview has a place for moral truth so that religion can no longer hold morality hostage with the threat of meaninglessness and anarchy for all who become atheists.

I say, let’s have some confidence that the truth will win out.  I say let’s put our money where our mouths are as supposed believers in the educability of the average person and his or her fitness for self-rule in an open society and a participatory democracy.  I am a moral realist predominantly because our visceral opposition to torture is rooted in true things.  There are really good reasons that we are passionate about Western liberalism, about mutual cooperation, and about feats of moral heroism.

There are of course, some legitimate Nietzschean challenges to these things that honesty requires tackling head on.  But, in general, these values are pragmatically borne out in facts about human flourishing and where they may not be they deserve to be interrogated.  There are reasons we believe in these things and we should not shy away from a public fight for their respectability.

Publicly avoiding these most difficult questions for fear of what the masses would think if they heard question marks put behind moral statements is to signal to those very masses that we have nothing to say on behalf of moral truth that we think could stand up to public scrutiny.  This confirms their existing suspicions and prejudices.

If we believe in our values for good reasons (and I sure think we do), then we should be able to prove that our value judgments are rational beliefs and we should find ways to do it that require no special technical ability to sift out every detail of a complicated proof.  If we cannot do even this much then philosophers will continue to prove by our silence the irrelevance that the public assumes of us.

And meanwhile those looking for a positive, constructive account of how they can find meaning and values and moral truth in the world will continue to see those signs only in the windows of religious houses of worship.  And there they will be radicalized politically in favor of regressive, authoritarian, nativist politics and social values, while liberals will offer strong assertions of progressive political values that are unmoored from any philosophical grounding and never adequately stated in coherent moral terms as part of coherent moral worldviews that advocate anything more than tolerance as an ideal.

If the truly qualified authorities on philosophy do not frankly address the public, we leave them to the pretenders to authority.  And that, to me, is a dereliction of duty.

In the West (at least), the gods are dying.  This is an unstoppable process.  We cannot tell the people coming out of the houses of worship just go back in unless they are ready to become philosophy majors and we should not by our silence abandon to nihilism all those serious, thoughtful people who cannot bring themselves to go back to faith and yet have internalized recent Christianity’s false dichotomy that moral confidence can only be found within the faith and only moral arbitrariness or crude selfishness can be found outside of it.

If I am Kantian in any way at all it is in my view that true, valuable morality must be autonomous.  People must be able to understand the true justifications for their duties and act only on these and reject all claims upon them that cannot prove themselves to reason. Kant takes the risk of allowing people to think for themselves in confidence that reason will lead them to the right answers.  Kant’s moral courage is to trust so radically in reason and to eschew all that relativism, paternalism, and authoritarianism that fears the average man would just botch things up if allowed to think for himself.

I am with Kant and against claiming there are esoteric philosophical truths about the real foundations of morality which are inaccessible to the ordinary person.

Finally, the ordinary person can understand hypothetical philosophical reasoning that considers outlandish or immoral scenarios for the sake of philosophical clarity without finding the exercise itself immediately threatening, corrupting, or bizarre, as proved by this NSFW South Park clip:

Your Thoughts?

For an idea of my approach to substantive, naturalistic, realistic metaethics and ethics, my rejection of Noble Lies in politics, or overviews of the interpretations of Nietzsche I developed in my dissertation, see any (or all!) of the following posts:

A Brief Overview Of My Dissertation

A Video Of Me Rambling About Nietzsche

Goodness Is A Factual Matter (Goodness=Effectiveness)

Grounding Objective Value Independent Of Human Interests And Moralities

Non-Reductionistic Analysis Of Values Into Facts

Effectiveness Is The Primary Goal In Itself, Not Merely A Means

What Is Happiness And Why Is It Good?

On The Intrinsic Connection Between Being And Goodness

Deriving An Atheistic, Naturalistic, Realist Account Of Morality

How Our Morality Realizes Our Humanity

Subjective Valuing And Objective Values

My Perspectivist, Teleological Account Of The Relative Values Of Pleasure And Pain

Pleasure And Pain As Intrinsic Instrumental Goods

What Does It Mean For Pleasure And Pain To Be “Intrinsically Instrumental” Goods?

Against Moral Intuitionism

Moral vs. Non-Moral Values

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

On Good And Evil For Non-Existent People

My Perfectionistic, Egoistic AND Universalistic, Indirect Consequentialism (And Contrasts With Other Kinds)

Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation

Further Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation

On The Incoherence Of Divine Command Theory And Why Even If God DID Make Things Good And Bad, Faith-Based Religions Would Still Be Irrelevant

Rightful Pride: Identification With One’s Own Admirable Powers And Effects

The Harmony Of Humility And Pride

Moral Mutability, Not Subjective Morality.  Moral Pluralism, Not Moral Relativism.

How Morality Can Change Through Objective Processes And In Objectively Defensible Ways

The Religious Conservative’s False Choice: “Big Brother” Or “Heavenly Father”

Your Thoughts?

Thanks to Lucy.

Your Thoughts?

Moral Status and Human Life: The Case for Children’s Superiority,

I pose to you, my most insightful readers, the relevant questions he raises: How should we conceptualize moral status? What gives a being moral status at all? Are there actually different degrees of moral status and if so how can we fairly determine what they are in different cases? What bearing would various psychological facts have on determining the truth about moral status and what other factors besides psychological facts might matter?

And, most importantly, I pose all these questions to you as part of asking you today’s open philosophical question, “Do Children Have Higher Moral Status Than Adults?”

And beyond questions of the rightfulness or wrongfulness of religious indoctrination as part of formal schooling–which I encourage you to discuss instead in reply to this already hotly debated post rather than redundantly in reply to the present question–what would be other concrete practical issues in which your views on the moral status of children would have ethical and/or legal implications?

Thanks to Richard Collins of the website End Hereditary Religion for the video.

Your Thoughts?

But many people can be and have been persuaded that goodness is not a property of things but rather of people’s attitudes towards them. The very existence of anti-realists about the existence of good means that moral realists cannot just appeal to a “highly intuitive” notion that goodness is a simple property.

The notion that goodness is irreducible is what is at issue. The belief that goodness is reducible is a very strange idea to me. I have discussed why. In particular, I don’t know how someone could ever know that “Goodness is X” rather than the more modest claim: “When there is X, there is goodness.”

Here our disagreement is clearest.  In my view, you are confusedly reifying goodness. It is a genus term, that is why we use it related to multiple kinds of things—not because it is a distinct kind of entity, distinguishable from instances of effectiveness, usefulness, pleasantness, etc.  The reason that not all instances of pleasure or usefulness are properly instances of the genus is because they do not have the essential component that marks all members of the genus.  I think I have specifically and defensibly identified that marker as effectiveness.

If we can, as I argue, analyze the other rightful cases of goodness attribution to cases of effectivenesses according to beings’ characteristic functionalities, then we can properly demystify and disambiguate the word “good”, understand it in factual terms, and eliminate the confusion which leads to anti-realisms.  And we can do this without having to posit any mysterious “non-natural property” of goodness itself and without dubiously equating our biological or cultural preferences with goodness itself.

James’s next remark is again a reply to something I said.  He quotes me again:

The existence of real goodness is a fact which must be demonstrated to be believed, just as much as the existence of God would need to be demonstrated if it is to be believed. The vast majority of humans claim an “intuition” of God, but it is not enough to make it even probably true. We can and must do much better with respect to good, for goodness’s sake.

We experience that pleasure is good. We all agree on that. We don’t all agree that we experience God.

I would wager that at least as many (if not more) people who doubt the real existence of God doubt the real existence of good.  Many people think pleasure is just something we like and that’s all that good means.  And besides such emotivist views, there are error theorists who need to be taken seriously when they claim that it is possible that we think in terms of goodness but that it refers to no true or objective thing in reality.

This is very persuasive to a lot of well informed, rational people.  Just insisting without demonstration that our minds are indeed reliably engaging an independent reality when they think in terms of “goodness” and that the concept refers to something real and distinguishable from our preferences, is unhelpful dogmatism.  That is why objective goodness must either be grounded in facts or defined the way error theorists or emotivists do.

James continues, then quotes me, and replies again to me:

Whether or not pleasure is experienced as an irreducible “intrinsic” good is certainly something you can question and I’ve already argued in detail why I think such a thing. In fact, I can’t imagine it being otherwise. My argument is here:http://ethicalrealism.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/an-argument-for-moral-realism/

If goodness cannot, given its concept, be an objectively observable natural property or a natural relationship among properties (which is my view), then they are likely to wind up emotivists or error theorists or some other form of subjectivists or anti-realist relativists. (And MacIntrye in After Virtue makes a strong case that this is precisely what happened in the 20th Century, Moore’s moral intuitionism led dialectically straight to emotivism).

You are confusing empiricism with the view that we can’t experience our own thoughts and mental content. Yes, we can observe that pleasure is good. That’s why I said we can experience it.

If people don’t know how to deal with simple experiences, that’s their problem. I think it’s easy to understand. I experience that I have thoughts. I think that’s a pretty “simple experience” and it doesn’t mean that my thoughts are hallucinations or delusional.

No it is not just “their problem”, you have to come up with an actual argument beyond “I understand the intuition better than you do”.  And, no, you are not hallucinating or deluded, no one is claiming that.  Those are loaded words.  The issue is that just because humans are wired to think with certain moral categories does not mean that they necessarily exist in fact any more than mere conventions do.

Many other species clearly have totally different sets of characteristic and highly valued behaviors.  To say that moralities are something beyond our own species’ evolved sets of norms, which exist merely for their usefulness for survival but with no further sanction as having “true value”, requires serious argument.  It is question-begging to just appeal to our accepted conventions or the intuitions that stem from participating in them as a basis for believing they have any justification outside themselves.

James quotes me again:

To say that good is self-evident goodness is just empty tautology.

I disagree. I don’t think 1+1=2 is an empty tautology, but seems like it could be self evident (if anything is). Self-evidence could have to do with conceptual analysis and so forth.

Additionally, what is self-evident isn’t necessarily unprovable or incompatible with empirical observation.

To say it is philosophically (and not merely practically) “self-evident” that pleasure is good is more emptiness without a definition of goodness.

We can define goodness in circular ways, but morality (or “value”) isn’t necessarily reducible to the non-moral (or non-evaluative).

I do not equate the non-moral with the non-evaluative.  There are many value judgments that have nothing to do with morality.  These value judgments track real relationships of human-independent value.  Value is a constitutive feature of reality (in the form of inherent relationships of effectiveness), whereas moralities are biologically and culturally evolved sets of specific value attitudes with certain varying degrees of objectively determinable objective worths.

We can define “goodness” in indexical ways. I can point to the “how it feels” of pleasure. In particular, the positive feeling. There might be a similarity here in that it’s good for pleasure to exist just like that it’s good for human life to exist.

Positive is just a synonym for goodness.  To say pleasure is a positive feeling is to say it is a good feeling but then the word good needs further definition if it is to add any more information than we already know from saying “pleasure is enjoyable”.  When people say pleasure is a positive or a good feeling I just think they really mean that they like it and it is something they approve of and think others like them would approve of too if they experienced it.

If they are challenged to really defend pleasure’s objective merits for a human life or a given context in a given human life, then out come the necessary appeals to pleasure’s effective contributions towards goods that go beyond itself, i.e. the goods of humanly functioning in its intrinsically valuable, characteristically effective ways.

I get that you are developing a real and recognizable intuition that we think of goodness distinctly as its own evaluation category distinguishable from related particular goods and categories of judgment.  In other words, it is definitely true that when our minds make the judgment of “good” this is a distinct judgment from “pleasant”, “useful”, “desired”, and, even, “effective”.  It is a more general category of judgment which means, as far as I can tell, “something to embrace and/or pursue”.   And “bad” refers to the more general category of judgment “something to be rid of and/or to avoid”.

The mind is inclined to think in these broadly pro/con categories, distinguishable from the various kinds of experiences which properly stimulate pro and con attitudes in us.  So, G.E. Moore’s famous “Open Question” argument is on to something when he says with every pleasure or usefulness, or desire, etc. we have to ask ourselves “but is it good?” insofar as for every pleasure, usefulness, or desire we can ask ourselves “is it something truly to embrace?”

That is certainly how our minds make the judgment “goodness” or “badness”. But what I want to argue is that this mechanism of judgment in simple categories of “that which should be embraced” (goodness) and “that which should be avoided” (bad) tracks no truth if there are not objective, mind-independent facts about what should be embraced and why and what should be avoided and why.  And these facts may explain what makes for objective value and what makes the genuinely good things worth embracing may be strange sounding within our automatic mental associations.  In our minds, while experiencing them, we intuitively experience pleasure as intrinsically, immediately, and obviously something to embrace and pain as intrinsically, immediately, and obviously something to avoid, for example, and so be inclined to call pleasure intrinsically good and pain intrinsically bad.

But I want to argue that the objective value truth about when, where, and how to embrace pleasure and to avoid pain is much more complicated than our subjective responses to them.  This counterintuitively (but quite logically) qualifies in objective terms, our best, most reliable subjective valuing tendency to think pleasure intrinsically good and pain intrinsically bad.  While it is objectively good that we subjectively respond with distress at pain and feel it as intrinsically bad so it can do what it does properly, we can from an objective, external standpoint also realize that it is indispensably good for our overall functioning—when it occurs at the best and most effective times and ways for enhancing that functioning.

Of course excessive quantities or intensities of pain which thwart our functioning well are evils—but so are such pleasures which have that effect.  The litmus test of the worth of pleasures and pains, both in general and in specific, are not our subjective inclinations to embrace or avoid them but, rather, more objectively, the ways they effectively, ineffectively, or counter-productively help us function well as human beings, in our most essential powers.

On a practical level, speaking and thinking in shorthand, of course w can say “pleasure is obviously good”. But to explain what makes it good and in what ways it is good—especially when, again practically, there are clear cases in which it is not good in a shorthand way—requires a clear account of what goodness is (one much better than a “simple property” which tells us nothing) and what pleasure’s goodness is (which goes beyond inferring from the fact we like it so much that this makes it “self-evidently” good by itself in a decisive objective sense).

I don’t know that basic properties tell us nothing, but if that’s your definition, then goodness isn’t basic.

I think you have an overly narrow view of self-evidence and what it means for something to be basic. Self-evidence is something that can potentially be explained and understood, even if it’s difficult to do so. Same with being basic.

We all must rely on some self-evident intuitions if thinking is to occur.  And, yes, we can give accounts of these where we disagree about them and they sometimes do produce agreements.  My point is that we need to go deeper into uncontested territory to find self-evident truths that can form a basis for agreement here.  I think that everyone grasps a hypothetical imperative, everyone self-evidently accepts the use of the word good which means nothing more than “x is effective at making y happen” or “if x did not do activity y it simply would not, conceptually speaking be x at all”.

I think these intuitions I employ are much more self-evident than that goodness is a simple, irreducible, non-natural or natural property in reality which is completely distinguishable from all the species of good things (and not just a general category for encompassing all of them when they are indeed objectively effective to our purposes).  I think I am taking intuitions that even the anti-realist can accept (and often implicitly does accept as part of traditional denials of objective goodness) and am extrapolating from them their logical implications.  I think that the one definition of value which even those who do not  believe in categorical imperatives accept can be used to explain in a non-reductionistic way how categorical imperatives derive some real and binding value (even if it is not actually a categorical kind).

Your Thoughts?

You are defining pleasure as intrinsic instrumental good. This is obviously not intrinsic goodness as I define it at all. Instrumental goodness is not intrinsic goodness.

A successful pleasure instance is an intrinsically good instance of pleasure in-itself and for-itself, just for being a good instance of pleasure.  Just the way I think a river is a good river in-itself, by-itself, and for-itself whether or not any other being ever finds it important for its own purposes that that river be a good river or that there be good rivers at all, so also pleasure’s intrinsic good in-itself, for-itself, by-itself, is just a fact of its sheer effective existence as a pleasure.  For a pleasure to be a good instance of what it is, i.e., successful at being pleasant, it does conceptually require that it actually causes a being to have an experience the being likes.  Pleasure only effectively exists insofar as it does this, so in doing this it realizes its intrinsic good for-itself.

But this is irrelevant to whether or not the pleasure happens to be overall a good thing either intrinsically or instrumentally for the being for whom it causes pleasure.  When I have been analyzing whether pleasure is an intrinsic or instrumental good (or, as I have actually decided pleasure is, an “intrinsic instrumental” good), I have been writing in shorthand.  What I have meant is how or in what ways is pleasure intrinsically and instrumentally good for us humans. The intrinsic or instrumental contribution of pleasure to the human being is a separable issue from whether the instance of pleasure is a successful/good/effective instance of pleasure.

Now, there are complicated ways that pleasure can be intrinsically, instrumentally, or intrinsically instrumentally good for us.  So, let me make these distinctions clearer:

Pleasure is instrumentally good for us insofar as it is an internal tool for attracting us towards other things which contribute to our functioning.  From a purely third-person, empirical perspective we can see that pleasure evolves because of its efficiency in helping us to function in the ways necessary for us to exist and thrive in the very functions in which our being consists.  Our only completely intrinsic good is our own characteristic functioning, through which we ourselves are instantiated as beings at all.  In other words, only through functioning through characteristically human activities (from the cellular to the complex power levels) can this organism we are be at all and thrive in its kind of being at all.  These functionalities are what we are and so they are the only completely intrinsic values we have which do not derive their value from consideration of any further more basic goods.

Beings emerges as a function of effective relationships between entities which serve as their subcomponents.  A being’s intrinsic goodness is just this effectiveness of its characteristic functioning.  Without this functioning, the being does not exist, it is inherently of ultimate and indispensable value to the being that it function in the ways that make it emerge in being at all.

Now, pleasure does not itself constitute any of our essential functions themselves.  Rather it is a component of numerous of our functions.  It is a piece, a component, of numerous intrinsic functions and of our total functional power.  It plays only an instrumental role in the working of those most essential, most intrinsic functions working.  In this way it is an instrumental good.  But, since it plays an indispensable instrumental role, it is in this mediated way integral enough to our being that it is intrinsic to us in the sense of being essential and not merely accidental or dispensable.

So pleasure, while on one level instrumental and not itself an intrinsic functioning of our being, is not instrumental in the way that, say, a ladder or a particular kind of food is.  Such instrumental goods are ones humans could live and thrive without.  Pleasure is a good which is absolutely vital to integral functions and for its role as not only instrumental but also indispensably and naturally instrumental, I think it is intrinsic.  It is not intrinsic in the sense that our functions themselves are—which is as the very conditions and expressions of our being itself.  If we had only pleasure but no characteristic human functions (say, we were kept in a permanent state of morphine induced pleasant delirium), we would not live intrinsically good lives.

James writes:

Yes, pain is instrumentally good. Does that mean I should torture people? Does it mean I shouldn’t give a stranger an aspirin who has a headache? No! Pain is bad in some sense. What sense is it bad? I say it’s bad in the intrinsic sense.

You might want to read this for more information:http://ethicalrealism.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/mischaracterizations-of-intrinsic-value/

You are lacking in examples. I have my explanations for why killing and torturing is right. I have my explanations for why giving an aspirin to the stranger is right. I think my explanation is extremely simple and matches ordinary everyday ways of thinking. How do you explain these things?

No, I am not lacking in examples, I explained already how pain plays an indispensable role in (a) regulating our awareness of harm, (b) preconditioning various virtues which involve endurance with respect to pain, and (c) preconditioning and intensifying various pleasures, including both the most delightful and the most objectively valuable ones.  These are all vital contributions it makes to being human and thriving as a human.  It is intrinsically and not merely incidentally good for these roles.  We would not have recognizably human lives and human virtues of the kinds we have without pain.  We could of course in that case still be some other sort of being which just has different functional excellences. But human goodness involves functions which essentially employ pain both as a warning sign and as a dialectical contributor to their strongest realization.

Just because pain is instrumentally good for the ways it contributes to our necessary functions and just because it is an intrinsic instrumental good since its contributions are necessary and not merely accidental and avoidable, it does not follow at all that therefore torture is okay.  I have already explained this too. If torture damages intrinsic functions more than it helps them (as it manifestly does), it does more harm than good.  Neither pain nor pleasure are good if they are not calibrated to contribute to our maximal effectiveness and both are bad when they outright harm it.

The mere fact that not all pains serve as instrumentally valuable does not make pain itself intrinsically something to avoid.  Excesses of food, excesses of pleasure, excesses of any instrumentally and intrinsically good thing can be harmful.  Good things at the wrong times and in the wrong ways can all kill us.  Pain is no different.  The only difference with pain is that its intrinsic way of contributing to our healthy functioning is (rightly) psychologically experienced in such a way that motivates us to remove it.  This is fine.  There can be a good thing that’s goodness is precisely in the ways it pushes us and upsets us. As long as pain’s ultimate results are to increase ultimate functioning, it is estimable.  If it is put to the purpose of harming us then it is turned against its valuable evolved function of insistently warning us against harms and becomes a harm itself.  And the same can be done with pleasure, of course.

The fact that both pleasure and pain can be used in instrumentally tortuous and effectively harmful ways makes both of them context-dependent for when and in what ways they serve as good for us (where good means effective for contributing to our flourishing in our characteristic functions), it does not mean that either one or the other is not intrinsically valuable.  It only means that the intrinsic value of each is instrumental and dependent on contexts in which it fulfills its proper instrumental role.  Neither’s intrinsically good character entails that it is always unqualifiedly good in all possible respects and contexts.  The kind of intrinsic value they have is just that they are eventually crucially necessary in certain inevitable and vital contexts for our flourishing.

James quotes me again before replying:

My position is that pleasure is in one sense truly “intrinsically good”, in that its goodness is not merely accidental to human beings but it plays an integral and indispensable role in our excellent functioning.

Again, intrinsic goodness is what is good just for existing — an end in itself. It’s not good because it’s functional or helpful or instrumental.

No it’s both.  Pleasure is so indispensably instrumental that in certain necessary roles that it is intrinsically good.  But pleasure is not intrinsically good just because we like it and are inclined to embrace it.  It is instrumentally good because we like it in that this leads it to have its indispensable (intrinsically necessary) contributions to our characteristic functions through which alone we exist and thrive.

Nonetheless, however much we like it and desire it, in objective terms we can understand that its value is distinguishable from these enticing feelings by which it functions. Its objective value is in its instrumental role in guiding us towards functioning both minimally and maximally well.

Yes, that’s right — except you are saying The value of pleasure is only found in its instrumental value when it also has intrinsic value.

I am saying its intrinsic value is that it is indispensably instrumental, not that it would have intrinsic value if it were not also instrumental.  In such a case, we would subjectively value it (and there might be nothing wrong with that if it were not counterproductive), but it would have no objective worth, since it would be irrelevant to our powerful functioning through which our being itself is constituted.

The problem with defining the “good” of pleasure as “the ‘how it feels’ of pleasure” is that pleasure only is the “how it feels” of pleasure. Pleasure just is feeling pleasure.

I think the feeling of pleasure is connected to our sense of what it means for something to be an end in itself/an intrinsic value. I think Aristotle understood this and that Aristotle found that happiness was something everyone agrees is worthy of desire precisely because of how we experience happiness.

Consider how Aristotle discussed pleasure. The point wasn’t that pleasure isn’t an end in itself — the point is that pleasure isn’t the ultimate “most final” end.

I think Aristotle is wrong on this.  I know I am radical on this point, but I am just trying to carry out the logic of the situation. The only basis for truth about morality is going to have to be in facts.  The goodness of effectiveness is factual.  To understand the objective, truthful, factual value of usefulness, of pleasure, of preference attitudes, of morality, and all the other things called good, we must analyze them in terms of fact relationships of effectiveness and the intrinsic goods of beings themselves which are bound up in their functional effectivenesses as the beings they are.

Pleasure is not an end-in-itself for us (though of course it is an end-in-itself for itself).  We just quite necessarily love it and have evolved to think of it that way because that usually helps it fulfill its indispensably instrumental role in helping us thrive in our characteristic functions.   We had might as well have as much of what we love that we can, consistent with our maximal intrinsic functioning in our characteristic powers.  But the only things that are non-instrumentally, intrinsically good for us are our intrinsic powers themselves.

Your Thoughts?

Below are major statements of my metaethical positions and posts which explore issues in ethics in ways informed by these positions.  The list of posts is, for the most part, in logical, rather than chronological order:

Goodness Is A Factual Matter (Goodness=Effectiveness)

Grounding Objective Value Independent Of Human Interests And Moralities

Non-Reductionistic Analysis Of Values Into Facts

Effectiveness Is The Primary Goal In Itself, Not Merely A Means

What Is Happiness And Why Is It Good?

On The Intrinsic Connection Between Being And Goodness

Deriving An Atheistic, Naturalistic, Realist Account Of Morality

How Our Morality Realizes Our Humanity

Subjective Valuing And Objective Values

My Perspectivist, Teleological Account Of The Relative Values Of Pleasure And Pain

Pleasure And Pain As Intrinsic Instrumental Goods

Against Moral Intuitionism

Moral vs. Non-Moral Values

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

On Good And Evil For Non-Existent People

My Perfectionistic, Egoistic AND Universalistic, Indirect Consequentialism (And Contrasts With Other Kinds)

Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation

Further Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation

On The Incoherence Of Divine Command Theory And Why Even If God DID Make Things Good And Bad, Faith-Based Religions Would Still Be Irrelevant

Rightful Pride: Identification With One’s Own Admirable Powers And Effects

The Harmony Of Humility And Pride

Moral Mutability, Not Subjective Morality.  Moral Pluralism, Not Moral Relativism.

How Morality Can Change Through Objective Processes And In Objectively Defensible Ways

First, I don’t know that it matters to call something a “moral value.” Of course, there are instrumental values concerning morally neutral goals. Are you saying that intrinsic values are moral but instrumental ones aren’t?

My point is whether we can understand intrinsic value in non-”intrinsic value” terms.

Second, you said “Such analyses are not reductionistic and they do not try to assess the good in “non-good” terms. They do purport to assess moral values in non-moral terms.” I don’t know what any of this means, perhaps because it’s not clear to me how moral values differ from nonmoral values. Some examples might help.

What I am saying is that both intrinsic and instrumental values exist all throughout nature without making any reference to human moral interests to derive either their intrinsic or their instrumental value.  Intrinsic value simply means intrinsic effectiveness.  This means whatever is a thing’s characteristic effective activity that either makes it, or contributes to it being, the kind of thing it is.

On the level of humans we have both moral and non-moral intrinsic values and both moral and non-moral instrumental values.  Non-moral intrinsic goods for humans include aesthetic goods, goods of physical power, goods of artistic and technological creative powers, goods of sexual power, goods of intellectual power, etc.  All our functional powerful excellences which are intrinsically good to being human but which can be at times be exercised independently of advancing narrowly moral concerns, is a “non-moral” intrinsic value.

Largely influenced by Jonathan Haidt but with my own additions, I take distinctively morally intrinsic values to be our interests in fairness and equality, our interests in harm avoidance and mutual care for each other, our interests in purity and sanctity, our interests in in-group loyalty, our interest in respect for hierarchicalism, our interests in actions which are highly formally consistent/universalizable, our interests in deferring dutifully to order and principle even at the cost to our own immediate personal well-being or interests when required.

These sorts of interests are subjectively experienced as highly valuable to us to some degree or another.  And to one degree or another each of these value priorities is objectively defensible in at least some contexts and in at least some concrete forms.  These are what I mean by characteristically “moral” values, which are contrastable with all other interest priorities.

Intimately connected to these moral priorities are a slew of distinctively moral virtues, which I identify as such by their general or (expectedly general) contribution to the realization of these moral priorities. Insofar as overall human flourishing is maximized when we thrive functioning in all our potential excellences, fulfilling these moral potentials contributes to our intrinsic flourishing as excellent humans.

This flourishing is not only intrinsically good as exercise of characteristic human excellences, but it is also instrumentally good insofar as it serves moral value priorities which genuinely advance the material, social, economic, political, spiritual, intellectual, and other cultural conditions of our well-being and thriving.

Ultimately, specific instances of morally driven priorities are either justified or proven mistakenly applied or overemphasized by consideration of whether or to what extent they lead to our overall flourishing. This overall flourishing is the ultimate ethical priority, which I distinguish from narrower, more characteristically “moral” priorities.

In this way moral goals are ultimately instrumental goods which must be defined and justified by their overall contribution to overall flourishing, more well-rounded, ethical human lives.   But insofar as pursuing a moral goal itself gives opportunity to fulfill a fundamental human excellence and contribute to our overall maximization of our powerful functioning, it is an occasion for us to be intrinsically good (i.e.,characteristically effective) humans through such exercise of our powers. In this way our morality helps us realize our humanity.

Now, with all of this context, when I say that we should assess moral values by non-moral values, I mean we should assess whether or to what extent moral priorities (or particular interpretations of them) and cultivation of specifically moral excellences ultimately contributes to or hinders in specific cases the development of general human flourishing in intellect, aesthetics, artistic creation, technological creation, social order, knowledge, cultural vibrancy, sexual fulfillment, etc., etc.  These goods are not necessary identical with moral priorities and I think their maximization trumps the pursuit of morality taken as an end in itself.

Ultimately, though our minds tempt us quite naturally and understandably to take the moral priorities as ends in themselves, and even though it is usually better to treat them as such for maximum effectiveness, nonetheless our ultimate good is not morality itself but overall human flourishing.  And so in cases where moralities (or particular concrete interpretations of it) conflict with that goal on net, it is just so much the worse for moral priorities.

This also goes for cases where we can have net growth in overall flourishing by growing more in non-moral excellences but only at the trade off of some specifically moral interest priorities or specifically moral excellences.  Ultimately overall human flourishing has greater intrinsic value than either morality or specifically moral virtues for their own sakes.

Finally, as to your question of whether we can understand intrinsic value in “non-intrinsic” value terms, I would say that ultimately the most basic value, effectiveness, is a form of intrinsic value and larger intrinsic values are of this basic sort, so there is not an intrinsic value coming from what is merely of instrumental value.

The posts where I previously worked the moral vs. non-moral values questions out most extensively were Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation and Further Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation.

Your Thoughts?

The considerations spelled out in the above post should offer a greater context and justification for the ideas in the following, roughly logically ordered, posts.  Several posts below have been written in response to this one and others were written earlier:

Goodness Is A Factual Matter (Goodness=Effectiveness)

Grounding Objective Value Independent Of Human Interests And Moralities

Non-Reductionistic Analysis Of Values Into Facts

Effectiveness Is The Primary Goal In Itself, Not Merely A Means

What Is Happiness And Why Is It Good?

On The Intrinsic Connection Between Being And Goodness

Deriving An Atheistic, Naturalistic, Realist Account Of Morality

How Our Morality Realizes Our Humanity

Subjective Valuing And Objective Values

My Perspectivist, Teleological Account Of The Relative Values Of Pleasure And Pain

Pleasure And Pain As Intrinsic Instrumental Goods

What Does It Mean For Pleasure And Pain To Be “Intrinsically Instrumental” Goods?

Against Moral Intuitionism

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

On Good And Evil For Non-Existent People

My Perfectionistic, Egoistic AND Universalistic, Indirect Consequentialism (And Contrasts With Other Kinds)

On The Incoherence Of Divine Command Theory And Why Even If God DID Make Things Good And Bad, Faith-Based Religions Would Still Be Irrelevant

Rightful Pride: Identification With One’s Own Admirable Powers And Effects

The Harmony Of Humility And Pride

Moral Mutability, Not Subjective Morality.  Moral Pluralism, Not Moral Relativism.

How Morality Can Change Through Objective Processes And In Objectively Defensible Ways

So, in this post, I will briefly reply to his clearest statement of his moral intuitionist bases for disagreeing with me.  The reasons he articulates here are the real root cause of his symptomatic complaints I have already dealt with (in order) here, here, here, and here.  He articulates his essential intuitionist counter in reply to my insistence that “goodness” is not a “basic” term but one which must be defined in simpler terms if it is to have any claim to objective truth:

The view that goodness can be a simple property is highly intuitive

Not to me, it’s not.  There are some intuitions (like those of mathematics, logic or fundamental categories like possibility or causation, etc.) which one can appeal to as basic and a priori.  But goodness is not one of them.  No rational being can very long seriously doubt mathematics or logic or causation, etc.  But many people can be and have been persuaded that goodness is not a property of things but rather of people’s attitudes towards them.  The very existence of anti-realists about the existence of good means that moral realists cannot just appeal to a “highly intuitive” notion that goodness is a simple property.

The existence of real goodness is a fact which must be demonstrated to be believed, just as much as the existence of God would need to be demonstrated if it is to be believed.  The vast majority of humans claim an “intuition” of God, but it is not enough to make it even probably true.  We can and must do much better with respect to good, for goodness’s sake.

We unavoidably think in terms of goodness and badness.  No anti-realist is able to consistently live according to his judgment that the terms good and bad refer to no real facts about the world (unless said anti-realist has a genuine break with reason altogether).  We inevitably think in value terms.  But this does not mean these values are not explicable in terms of other properties of things.

And encouraging people to look for “goodness” is a simple property (rather than as a distinguishable, unique, and in some ways simple “experience”) is only encouraging them if they do not share that strange intuition of it which you have to instead draw the conclusion that there is just no objective truth to goodness.  If goodness cannot, given its concept, be an objectively observable natural property or a natural relationship among properties (which is my view), then they are likely to wind up emotivists or error theorists or some other form of subjectivists or anti-realist relativists.  (And MacIntrye in After Virtue makes a strong case that this is precisely what happened in the 20th Century, Moore’s moral intuitionism led dialectically straight to emotivism).

I do think there is a specific experience and category in our minds for the genus “goodness” which we naturally separate from the specific species of goodness.  I think in every day language we intelligibly talk about goodness as a more general category from pleasure, usefulness, preferential attitudes, effectiveness, etc.  And for practical purposes this is not usually problematic as long as we do not confuse goodness for something which can exist apart from the specific species of goodness.  As I wrote on page 318 of my dissertation (On Deriving and Defending an Axiology of the Will to Power):

“Goodness” is no more capable of independent existence from particular species of good things than “primate” can exist without lemurs, monkeys, apes, humans, and other particular species that comprise the group.

And, further, I would say that since effectiveness is the necessary and sufficient component of all the other species of good, I would say it is not just a specific species of goodness but what the genus itself ultimately is translatable to being.  Backing up, let’s start over reading James’s paragraph, which I had to interrupt midway through its first sentence, so we can now get its full sense:

The view that goodness can be a simple property is highly intuitive and supports the view that esoteric Aristotelian teleology is not necessary for everyone to understand morality. They understand morality prior to Aristotelianism. I suppose that Aristotelian ethics could be implied by our moral beliefs, but I am not yet convinced of that.

I am not arguing the absurd notion that unless people have a clear, adequate, and explicit philosophical account of what goodness really is, that they cannot effectively use the word or understand its meaning in practical contexts.  Most people would find both our accounts of goodness esoteric, simply because they involve problematizing something people use rather than understand abstractly.  Philosophy is inherently esoteric sounding to people.  So are the rules of grammar and syntax.  Yet, functionally people use participles and gerunds and conjugate verbs fluently.  And they use the word “good” fluently too.

But clarifying investigations into truths about our implicit grammatical structures by linguistics, and about our true semantic and axiological structures by metaphysicians and ethicists is still highly valuable.  In the case of ethicists, we need far clearer and more systematic understandings of genuine value if we are to give truthful advice about difficult moral dilemmas and if we are to improve the moral misunderstandings and prejudices which come most naturally to our own particular culture and period in history.  We need more than just the layman’s working practical understanding of goodness, we need a truthful, rationally grounded, clarifying, objective theory.

Three, what do you mean by being “basic?” If you mean self-evident, yes it might be. That is what Robert Audi argues. If pleasure is good because of the concept of pleasure that the word refers to, then it is a conceptual truth. We might be able to then prove that it is “good” in the sense of having intrinsic value.

Four, natural laws make happiness (or pleasure at least) good because natural laws make pleasure and the conceptual meaning of pleasure entails that it is experienced as good. As a moral realist I take that experience also entailing pleasure to be “intrinsically good.”

To say that good is self-evident goodness is just empty tautology.  To say it is philosophically (and not merely practically) “self-evident” that pleasure is good is more emptiness without a definition of goodness.  On a practical level, speaking and thinking in shorthand, of course w can say “pleasure is obviously good”.  But to explain what makes it good and in what ways it is good—especially when, again practically, there are clear cases in which it is not good in a shorthand way—requires a clear account of what goodness is (one much better than a “simple property” which tells us nothing) and what pleasure’s goodness is (which goes beyond inferring from the fact we like it so much that this makes it “self-evidently” good by itself in a decisive objective sense).

Your Thoughts?

The considerations spelled out in the above post should offer a greater context and justification for the ideas in the following, roughly logically ordered, posts.  Several posts below have been written in response to this one and others were written earlier:

Goodness Is A Factual Matter (Goodness=Effectiveness)

Grounding Objective Value Independent Of Human Interests And Moralities

Non-Reductionistic Analysis Of Values Into Facts

Effectiveness Is The Primary Goal In Itself, Not Merely A Means

What Is Happiness And Why Is It Good?

On The Intrinsic Connection Between Being And Goodness

Deriving An Atheistic, Naturalistic, Realist Account Of Morality

How Our Morality Realizes Our Humanity

Subjective Valuing And Objective Values

My Perspectivist, Teleological Account Of The Relative Values Of Pleasure And Pain

Pleasure And Pain As Intrinsic Instrumental Goods

What Does It Mean For Pleasure And Pain To Be “Intrinsically Instrumental” Goods?

Against Moral Intuitionism

Moral vs. Non-Moral Values

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

On Good And Evil For Non-Existent People

My Perfectionistic, Egoistic AND Universalistic, Indirect Consequentialism (And Contrasts With Other Kinds)

Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation

Further Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation

On The Incoherence Of Divine Command Theory And Why Even If God DID Make Things Good And Bad, Faith-Based Religions Would Still Be Irrelevant

Rightful Pride: Identification With One’s Own Admirable Powers And Effects

The Harmony Of Humility And Pride

Moral Mutability, Not Subjective Morality.  Moral Pluralism, Not Moral Relativism.

How Morality Can Change Through Objective Processes And In Objectively Defensible Ways

James Gray argues this is mistaken and I take his counter-position to be that pleasure is irreducibly intrinsically good (and that pain is irreducibly intrinsically bad).  I will answer his objections after addressing my idea of intrinsic goodness as not so irreducible.

My position is that pleasure is in one sense truly “intrinsically good”, in that its goodness is not merely accidental to human beings but it plays an integral and indispensable role in our excellent functioning.  Nonetheless, however much we like it and desire it, in objective terms we can understand that its value is distinguishable from these enticing feelings by which it functions.  Its objective value is in its instrumental role in guiding us towards functioning both minimally and maximally well.

Of course we should not only like and desire pleasure but maximize it and, even, positively relish our experiences of it—as much as this is consistent with maximizing our overall flourishing and does not hinder or distract from it.  Recognizing pleasure’s objective value is instrumental, does not make it any less subjectively wonderful.  It does mean that we should adjust some of our subjective longings for it which conflict with its objective worth.  And all humans can think of countless examples of cases wherein we need to train ourselves not to be swayed by the enticements of pleasures because more important goods would be threatened.

So, I take pleasure to be an intrinsic instrumental good for us.  Our maximal functioning according to our inherent excellences in their most powerful combination is our highest intrinsic, non-instrumental good.  Given the structure of our nature, pleasure is indispensable to this project and so its instrumentality does not make it merely an extrinsic good for us.  But the reason it is objectively good is separable from the subjective feelings which we most immediately like about it.  These delighted feelings are fine and praiseworthy because, and only insofar as, they track the truth that the things giving us pleasure are objectively good for us.  And these pleasures should only give us an amount of pleasure which either tracks the truth of a thing’s real value for us or at least does not distract or hinder us from finding more objectively valuable things which should more properly entice us with pleasure.

As evolved creatures, our pleasures only imperfectly guide us to objective good and so our subjective preferences for pleasure must be constantly assessed on objective grounds.

And pain is similarly an intrinsic instrumental good for us.  I disagree with James where he characterizes it as intrinsically of disvalue.  It is just as vitally helpful to us as pleasure is in helping us in our functioning.  Our pains help us avoid what is harmful to our functioning.  We should feel as much pain as is necessary to warn us of harms and motivate us to adequately avoid them.  Any more pain than is necessary threatens to be a distracting, counter-productive hindrance to our excellent functioning in our characteristic activities and so should be avoided.

The value of pain in these objective ways is assessable separably from the ways we rightly immediately subjectively disvalue it from a 1st-order perspective.  Our proper response to pain in most contexts should be to want to remove it and the harm causing it.  Its being good and valuable does not mean it is a desirable subjective condition beyond its role as a warning.  It functions as an objectively valuable desirable warning precisely in making us subjectively want to rid ourselves of it.

But, of course, if removing the pain will only mask a harm that will get objectively worse if pain is not prodding us to fix it, then avoiding the subjective pain could become an obstacle to removing an objective harm and be a bad thing.  If we can minimize pain and still get its warning functions this is desirable since this will help us improve objective functioning all around.

Pain is also hard to dismiss as of fundamental disvalue because of the dialectical relationship it shares with pleasure and with various virtues.

Many objectively and/or subjectively valuable pleasure experiences are clearly created or intensified through the ways that they emerge either as following pain or oscillating with it.  As Nietzsche noted, intense pleasures, particularly the sexual, often are integrally admixed with certain kinds of pains.  And, of course, the pleasures of victory and all other forms of accomplishment are intensified in contrast with the preceding pains that led up to them.  I agree with Nietzsche (in Antichrist 2) that our highest feeling worth calling “happiness” (in the feeling sense of the term) is “the feeling that resistance is overcome”, i.e., the feeling of struggle culminating and hard-earned, deeply psychologically satisfying success.  This satisfaction in some significant part is constituted dialectically by the pains that precede it.

And many virtues, such as endurance, patience, resolve, dutifulness, commitment,  etc., rely to some extent on pain as a precondition of their realization.  Without the pain there is less requirement or possibility for strengthening of a character trait into an admirable virtue.

And, again to side with Nietzsche, I think our highest possible virtue is will to power, where this is defined not as it is imagined in the popular imagination, but rather as the perpetual embrace of the resistances through which one can be challenged to grow and the strength of character to perpetually succeed in order to effectively overcome those challenges and grow before moving on eagerly to the next obstacle.  (My view of the will to power itself and of Nietzsche’s view of it as well, are both deeply indebted to Bernard Reginster’s account of it in his book The Affirmation of Life.)

So, our highest, most functional excellent activity intrinsically requires pain as a dialectically constitutive feature of its exercise.  And our highest, most objectively, and subjective valuable pleasures come from this highest functional activity and their subjective intensity is partially created and incredibly increased by reference to pains. And those subjectively intense and highly subjectively valued pleasures are in turn intrinsically objectively valued for the ways they motivate renewed engagement in will to power.

My account says much more than James’s counter-account does where he writes that:

“good” of pleasure means something like the “how it feels” of pleasure. Other people “feel” pleasure as good as well. Pleasure isn’t good because we desire it — we desire it because we know how it feels.

The problem with defining the “good” of pleasure as “the ‘how it feels’ of pleasure” is that pleasure only is the “how it feels” of pleasure.  Pleasure just is feeling pleasure.  Now, I agree that pleasure is “good” pleasure if it functions to feel pleasant. A brain experience is a “good” instance of pleasure to the extent it is something that feels strongly satisfying.  In this way it pleasure is understandable as a sort of characteristic effectiveness and has inherent goodness therein  (since goodness iseffectiveness).

But pleasure’s effective contribution to our good, our effectiveness as humans, is instrumental and not intrinsic, for the reasons and in the ways laid out above.

Same goes for the badness of pain. We understand that we ought to give strangers aspirin because their “pain matters.” The underlying health problem that causes the pain is certainly important — but we should cover up the “symptoms” of that health problem because of how pain feels.

We cover up the symptoms as long as it does not interfere with removing harms because pain has either adequately served its instrumental function of warning us of the problem or because it has malfunctioned where there is no serious problem to properly warn us about or because it has overstressed a minor problem.  Pain which remains after it has served its warning and motivational functions is just a distraction from our other effective functionality and objectively should be removed as such.  We also subjectively do not like it and there is no reason to tolerate something we do not like if no greater objective value is at stake in putting up with it.

All of these are reasons to remove the headache which need not misleadingly refer to pain as intrinsically disvaluable.

This is also why torture is wrong. Because it feels so horrible. We might be able to function perfectly as human beings after being tortured, but functioning well is irrelevant because torture would still be wrong even if it didn’t hinder functionality.

Torture is not wrong just because it feels so horrible.  Dental work feels so horrible but it is not wrong.  Torture is wrong because it uses pain to destroy another person’s ability to function autonomously and this is one of the most integral and highest functions of being human.  Torture is wrong because it does lead to long term physical and emotional dysfunction.  The pain is not itself decisive. Obviously these other impairments and violations of each other’s functioning capitalizes on the subjective unbearableness and horribleness of intense pain. But the pains themselves are not intrinsically evil or disvaluable, they are just being evoked in evil, objectively disvaluable ways that undermine more valuable functions.

Your Thoughts?

The considerations spelled out in the above post should offer a greater context and justification for the ideas in the following, roughly logically ordered, posts.  Several posts below have been written in response to this one and others were written earlier:

Goodness Is A Factual Matter (Goodness=Effectiveness)

Grounding Objective Value Independent Of Human Interests And Moralities

Non-Reductionistic Analysis Of Values Into Facts

Effectiveness Is The Primary Goal In Itself, Not Merely A Means

What Is Happiness And Why Is It Good?

On The Intrinsic Connection Between Being And Goodness

Deriving An Atheistic, Naturalistic, Realist Account Of Morality

How Our Morality Realizes Our Humanity

Subjective Valuing And Objective Values

My Perspectivist, Teleological Account Of The Relative Values Of Pleasure And Pain

Pleasure And Pain As Intrinsic Instrumental Goods

What Does It Mean For Pleasure And Pain To Be “Intrinsically Instrumental” Goods?

Against Moral Intuitionism

Moral vs. Non-Moral Values

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

On Good And Evil For Non-Existent People

My Perfectionistic, Egoistic AND Universalistic, Indirect Consequentialism (And Contrasts With Other Kinds)

Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation

Further Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation

On The Incoherence Of Divine Command Theory And Why Even If God DID Make Things Good And Bad, Faith-Based Religions Would Still Be Irrelevant

Rightful Pride: Identification With One’s Own Admirable Powers And Effects

The Harmony Of Humility And Pride

Moral Mutability, Not Subjective Morality.  Moral Pluralism, Not Moral Relativism.

How Morality Can Change Through Objective Processes And In Objectively Defensible Ways

must be cashed out in fact terms lest it just be a projection of our preferences and nothing more.  [And] if it means anything objective, it means effectiveness.

In reply, James Gray accuses me of reductionism:

One, “good” does not have be defined in non-good terms. I don’t know that moral realism should be reductionistic and entirely understandable in non-moral terms.

I am not guilty of reductionism.  Reductionism as an intellectual error reasons that as soon as one understands a thing’s subcomponents which make it work in the way that it does one has revealed it not to be the thing it appears to be.  So, for example, reductionists think that if the mind is made up of neural interactions then in some way the mind is “just” a bunch of neurons and that this means that our mental activities are “fake” or an “illusion”.  Such a view does not give any credit to the real differences and unique orders of being which arise when entities interact.  It is as though they do not see the difference between a car going 60 miles an hour and “just a bunch of metals, plastics, and fabrics”.

A non-reductionistic attitude feels no threat from understanding mental activity as neuron interactions.  Thoughts and emotions, tastes and touches, are no less real just because they arise from and are constituted by the interactions of neurons.  They are distinct emergent realities which the neurons generate in their activities but which would not occur if the neurons were isolated or insufficiently arranged or behaving.   Thoughts, emotions, tastes, touches, etc. still refer to facts about the world and are still pleasant and can still convey objective values to us just as they always have since the days when we knew nothing of neurons.

In fact, all our references to facts, all our pleasurable conscious awareness of our mental states and our mental nature itself, all our discovery of value, etc. has all along been the result of neuron interactions.  These things are no less real just because they are made up of sub-components that strike us as alien and foreign from a scientific and uncommon sense point of view.  They are only real in the first place because of these now scientifically describable processes.

Things are similar in this case.  I am not denying the actual value of moralities or any other intrinsically good things by tracing them back to the factual interactions in which and from which they emerge.  I am analyzing the ways that value functions through facts, not reductionistically ridding all the value fr0m values by describing them in terms of facts.

Value is in certain fact relationships, inherently and necessarily.  It is a kind of fact relationship.  It inheres in reality itself in this way.  Increasingly complex value relationships emerge as increasingly complex beings emerge.  The true value of morality is situated in this much broader context of reality-wide occurrences of value.  The true value of morality in general arises relative to the human mind to which it is objectively valuable.  The true worths of particular general moral frameworks and more specific moral judgments are determined relative to our factual relationships to the world.

James’s mistake is in reading me as defining “good” in “non-good terms”.  My thesis, as expressly boiled down to a simple equation, has been that goodness is effectiveness itself. It is not explained by any further “non-good” parts of reality as effectiveness is a basic feature of reality, without which we could not understand realities at all.

To say that a being functions well as the being it is when it does the characteristic function that makes it the being it is, is not to read the good in “non-good” terms but to read good as a factual function among parts of reality.  The subcomponents which are in interactions are not “non-good” things.  They only exist as beings themselves insofar as they emerge as good functions of their own further subcomponents’ interactions, which means they themselves are intrinsically good.  And their functional interactions which create higher, more complex goods are intrinsically good relationships for them which oftentimes even contribute to their staying in being themselves.

I am not prejudicing the “non-good” over the good but, rather, opposing the common prejudice that facts are inherently value neutral and “non-good”.  My argument is that reality is shot through with facts which are composed of value relationships all the way down to the most basic rudiments of existence, whatever they may be and which compose increasingly complex value relationships insofar as they compose increasingly complex beings and relationships among beings.

In this way I am a naturalist, to be sure, but far from a reductionist.

James does rightly characterize my view as one which wants to understand moral realism in non-moral terms.  This is what is most distinctively Nietzschean about my account.  There is more to value than just moral value.  Differing moral value judgments arise from differing biological and social conditions in which they served different people’s interests in survival, flourishing, and dominance.  When thinking normatively, we should carefully assess how particular value judgments of all stripes, including all sorts of conflicting moral ones, (a) successfully or not track true value and (b) contribute to successful survival and flourishing for individuals and for humanity in general.

This means assessing moral values without circularly deferring to the moral prejudices received by our biology or our cultural conditions.  This is important for two reasons.  1.  The objective truth about values, including moral values, is an objective good for its own sake.  2.  We can improve our moral values if we have objective, non-question-begging, value standards by which to assess their actual worth and the worths of their possible replacements where they are faulty.  Such analyses are not reductionistic and they do not try to assess the good in “non-good” terms.  They do purport to assess moral values in non-moral terms, but not all value terms are moral terms–however much the automatic prejudices of morality (usually helpfully but occasionally harmfully) mislead us into strongly feeling like they are.

James had three other objections, which I will attend to shortly.  But this strikes me as a self-contained topic so I will stop here for now.

Your Thoughts?

The considerations spelled out in the above post should offer a greater context and justification for the ideas in the following, roughly logically ordered, posts.  Several posts below have been written in response to this one and others were written earlier:

Goodness Is A Factual Matter (Goodness=Effectiveness)

Grounding Objective Value Independent Of Human Interests And Moralities

Effectiveness Is The Primary Goal In Itself, Not Merely A Means

What Is Happiness And Why Is It Good?

On The Intrinsic Connection Between Being And Goodness

Deriving An Atheistic, Naturalistic, Realist Account Of Morality

How Our Morality Realizes Our Humanity

Subjective Valuing And Objective Values

My Perspectivist, Teleological Account Of The Relative Values Of Pleasure And Pain

Pleasure And Pain As Intrinsic Instrumental Goods

What Does It Mean For Pleasure And Pain To Be “Intrinsically Instrumental” Goods?

Against Moral Intuitionism

Moral vs. Non-Moral Values

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

On Good And Evil For Non-Existent People

My Perfectionistic, Egoistic AND Universalistic, Indirect Consequentialism (And Contrasts With Other Kinds)

Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation

Further Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation

On The Incoherence Of Divine Command Theory And Why Even If God DID Make Things Good And Bad, Faith-Based Religions Would Still Be Irrelevant

Rightful Pride: Identification With One’s Own Admirable Powers And Effects

The Harmony Of Humility And Pride

Moral Mutability, Not Subjective Morality.  Moral Pluralism, Not Moral Relativism.

How Morality Can Change Through Objective Processes And In Objectively Defensible Ways