Welcome to the ranks of non-cognitivists. BB absolutely disagrees with you about the objectivity of morality, but I think he’s wrong and his arguments for it are poor (his essay where he lays out his case for objective morality is one of his weakest IMO). I highly recommend digging into expressivism if you’re interested in this topic. Simon Blackburn is a great author in this space.
I found myself most surprised on the BB post that nobody was asking him to elaborate further on what appeared to be a very strong foundational assumption that "pain is bad, suffering is bad, so pain is suffering". I was unable to expand past my current understandings rooted in Buddhism - suffering arises from clinging, aversion, or delusion -- *responses* to stimuli (one being pain, but another being pleasure), not the stimuli themselves. Animals are caught in the wheel of suffering just like us, but freeing them from pain is not liberation from suffering. We cannot free them, they cannot free us, and all life is uniquely responsible for its own soul's journey through suffering.
I agree with "it is frankly a little hard to tell how seriously he takes his own ideas.", he hardly addresses the comments that remark about the paradoxes implied (things like, no pain means sterilize the earth of life). So there's ultimately a disconnect in the idea that felt a tad unsatisfying - incompleteness. Nothing that I can't deepen with other authors though :)
With people such as BB, I often agree with them in my head but I rarely agree with them in my heart. For me there's an aspect of intellectual play to all of this, like "this reasonable premise leads to this counterintuitive conclusion, isn't that interesting?", but I don't feel compelled to live my life the way that BB's philosophy lays out.
There are a few different intuitions about normativity expressed in this essay:
1 - That we should do what we truly want to do
2 - That we should do what we are "designed" to do (by evolution? by some combination of personality and personal history?)
3 - That we should do whatever is compatible with fitness (in a Darwinian sense?)
Each of these intuitions represents a claim about what counts as a genuine source of normativity; what counts as a giving you a good reason for action. These kinds of principles appeal to us as axioms that may serve as foundations for the operation of practical reason. We have to build our sandcastles on something. BB builds his sandcastle on a different axiom: that it is choiceworthy to maximize wellbeing while minimizing suffering (or something like that).
Plenty of philosophers have decided that the choice of any practical axiom is an essentially arbitrary, arational choice -- perhaps not properly a "choice" at all. Maybe once you have adopted an axiom it can serve as the basis of a chain of reasoning which can then either vindicate or vitiate itself, a snake eating its own tail, but the circle drawn here is only convincing if you have already adopted the axiom, and it is rationally arbitrary whether you have adopted any axiom.
Alastair MacIntyre would categorize any such philosopher as, roughly, an expressivist. To MacIntyre, this is a slur. And not because it is not a philosophically tennable position. You can be an expressivist and coherent. But there is something kind of pathetic about expressivists. They give up too early. They decide that holding ourselves and others accountable for our practical axioms is too hard, so we might as well not even try.
I don't have a good solution to the problem of how to assess a practical axiom without question-begging. But consider this: wouldn't it seem *a priori* super fucking stupid to be a committed anti-utilitarian, devoted to cultivating as much pain for yourself and others as possible? I think it's worth trying to figure out how to show that anti-utilitarianism is irrational, whether for an eagle or a lamb or a space alien.
Expressivism is for cowards. Join the war against incommensurability.
Welcome to the ranks of non-cognitivists. BB absolutely disagrees with you about the objectivity of morality, but I think he’s wrong and his arguments for it are poor (his essay where he lays out his case for objective morality is one of his weakest IMO). I highly recommend digging into expressivism if you’re interested in this topic. Simon Blackburn is a great author in this space.
I hadn’t heard of either expressivism or Simon before! Thanks for the rec
I found myself most surprised on the BB post that nobody was asking him to elaborate further on what appeared to be a very strong foundational assumption that "pain is bad, suffering is bad, so pain is suffering". I was unable to expand past my current understandings rooted in Buddhism - suffering arises from clinging, aversion, or delusion -- *responses* to stimuli (one being pain, but another being pleasure), not the stimuli themselves. Animals are caught in the wheel of suffering just like us, but freeing them from pain is not liberation from suffering. We cannot free them, they cannot free us, and all life is uniquely responsible for its own soul's journey through suffering.
I agree with "it is frankly a little hard to tell how seriously he takes his own ideas.", he hardly addresses the comments that remark about the paradoxes implied (things like, no pain means sterilize the earth of life). So there's ultimately a disconnect in the idea that felt a tad unsatisfying - incompleteness. Nothing that I can't deepen with other authors though :)
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts! 🙏
If nothing else, BB is a good reminder for why utilitarianism is psychotic at the core.
With people such as BB, I often agree with them in my head but I rarely agree with them in my heart. For me there's an aspect of intellectual play to all of this, like "this reasonable premise leads to this counterintuitive conclusion, isn't that interesting?", but I don't feel compelled to live my life the way that BB's philosophy lays out.
There are a few different intuitions about normativity expressed in this essay:
1 - That we should do what we truly want to do
2 - That we should do what we are "designed" to do (by evolution? by some combination of personality and personal history?)
3 - That we should do whatever is compatible with fitness (in a Darwinian sense?)
Each of these intuitions represents a claim about what counts as a genuine source of normativity; what counts as a giving you a good reason for action. These kinds of principles appeal to us as axioms that may serve as foundations for the operation of practical reason. We have to build our sandcastles on something. BB builds his sandcastle on a different axiom: that it is choiceworthy to maximize wellbeing while minimizing suffering (or something like that).
Plenty of philosophers have decided that the choice of any practical axiom is an essentially arbitrary, arational choice -- perhaps not properly a "choice" at all. Maybe once you have adopted an axiom it can serve as the basis of a chain of reasoning which can then either vindicate or vitiate itself, a snake eating its own tail, but the circle drawn here is only convincing if you have already adopted the axiom, and it is rationally arbitrary whether you have adopted any axiom.
Alastair MacIntyre would categorize any such philosopher as, roughly, an expressivist. To MacIntyre, this is a slur. And not because it is not a philosophically tennable position. You can be an expressivist and coherent. But there is something kind of pathetic about expressivists. They give up too early. They decide that holding ourselves and others accountable for our practical axioms is too hard, so we might as well not even try.
I don't have a good solution to the problem of how to assess a practical axiom without question-begging. But consider this: wouldn't it seem *a priori* super fucking stupid to be a committed anti-utilitarian, devoted to cultivating as much pain for yourself and others as possible? I think it's worth trying to figure out how to show that anti-utilitarianism is irrational, whether for an eagle or a lamb or a space alien.
Expressivism is for cowards. Join the war against incommensurability.