It's okay to be a bully bully bully bully

The paradox of intolerance goes like this: Do not tolerate the intolerant, only judge those who are judgmental, only kill killers, only bully bullies, and only war with warmongers. It's a superficial paradox; a contradiction only arises if you are using a strict rule: Intolerance of all kinds is wrong, judgment of all kinds is wrong, killing of all kinds is wrong, bullying of all kinds is wrong, and war of all kinds is wrong. But this strict rule is clearly false; defensive intolerance is fine, defensive judgment is fine, killing in defense is fine, bullying in defense is fine, and defensive war is just war. So it's perfectly consistent to be intolerant of intolerance, judgmental of judging, to kill killers, to bully bullies, to war with warmongers, and to hate hatred. If everyone followed the rule of "only bully bullies", then no bullying would be needed, as no bullying would get started. Same with all the other defensive rules. As long as you are not the aggressor, you are in the clear, because the alternative is to fail to stand up for yourself, to fail to stand up for others, to allow victimization to go unchecked, and to allow tyranny to trample over the innocent. A complication arises when escalation is involved. Is the escalator the bully, or the bully bully? If escalation bounces back and forth, you could argue that both sides are bullies, and so a third party that bullies either side would be a bully bully, which is fine. But, because of the muddiness of the situation, a fourth party might mistake the bully bully for a bully and proceed to bully the bully bully, making them a bully bully bully, which is not fine. If you understand who is who you might try to correct things as a fifth party by bullying the bully bully bully. In short, if you are an odd-numbered aggressor, you are in the wrong, but if you are an even-numbered aggressor, you're fine. Odd is evil, even is okay. But what if you are mistaken about where you are in the chain, or where you would be if you intervened and began to withdraw toleration, to judge, kill, bully, war, or hate? Our inability to ever know whether we are odd or even is exactly why we can do none of those things ever, and must take on a position of absolute pacifism. If aggressors walk all over us and crush us, so be it. We can guarantee we are even in the chain of aggression by being aggressor zero.

Pedagogy and AI

I remember the first day of my first, and only, public speaking class, a class I was taking only because it was a general ed. requirement. (I doubt I would have signed up for a public speaking class on my own initiative – too anxious for that at that stage in life.) I remember going through the school cafe on the way to the class, stopping to use the restroom, and feeling this wave of dread and anxiety. I steeled myself and told myself that I just have to do it. Rip it off like a band-aid. I knew it was healthy, but I hated it all the same.

 

It was awkward and awful, and it was good and necessary, and I improved a lot through the course. I came away thinking that college should require more than just one public speaking class. The skills are too important.

 

After becoming a tutor I discovered how powerful explaining things out loud was for increasing my own understanding. Before I would have felt too weird talking to myself out loud, but after tutoring it felt natural; speaking out loud is a kind of information processing, and explaining things out loud is, I think, an essential component of learning.

 

While I only had the one class that fell under the subject of 'Speech', technically I had a number of classes after that I would consider public speaking classes in a broad sense. These were management and business classes that required public presentations. Again, these assignments were agonizing, but I tackled them head-on and felt that they were healthy and necessary. I came away thinking that every class ever should have a public speaking component. The more you do it, the better you get, and the better you get, the more manageable the anxiety becomes.

 

For the first time ever I had oral exams for one of my philosophy classes in Spring 2025 and Fall 2024. They were intense, and I prepared hard for them. Despite my preparations, I still made errors; I could have prepared better. (I did well overall and received As for both oral exams I took.) Again, healthy and challenging.

 

Oral exams teach the value and necessity of preparation and they force you to explain things in your own words on the spot. There's no relying on search engines or AI; you either know it or you don't in the moment. It's like an interview. You can easily bullsh*t written assignments (generally – depends on how they are designed), but there's really no way to bullsh*t an oral exam.

 

With AI tools like ChatGPT calling into question the legitimacy of student written work, and thereby calling into question the student's understanding of class material, oral exams are quickly becoming an essential tool to assessing a student's understanding. (I have no idea whether High Schools or Universities have started moving in this direction or not. It's not like you can use AI during a proctored test, so I imagine written tests aren't going away. It's written assignments that are losing relevance, though even in that case, you can generally tell whether something is legit or AI, as AI work, especially in philosophy, is poor in quality, milquetoast, uninspired, shallow, and often just straight up incorrect or misleading – for now.)

 

But given the massive pedagogical value of explaining ideas out loud, and the sheer importance of public speaking skills, oral exams are already highly valuable and underused. (I certainly wish I had more of them. They force a higher standard of preparation and understanding.)

 

Putting this all together, my thought is this: Schools K-12, and college, should focus on building the speaking skills of students. Students despise public speaking. That's understandable; they have no confidence in their speaking skills, and humiliation is just about the most painful thing there is. An example of a speaking assignment would be to record yourself on video explaining an idea, such as how to solve systems of equations. This process reveals gaps in understanding when you go silent and realize there's something you don't understand, can't explain, or have a question about. Students could be encouraged to leave in those silences in the recording and to write down then and there what their hangup is. These recordings are then sent to the teacher who watches them and makes notes on what students are either explaining incorrectly or what they struggle to explain. By sending the recordings to the teacher, the student doesn't have to worry about presenting in front of a group of people. But recording yourself is still a performance, one that can be critiqued by your teacher. It's much easier when the risk of embarrassment is limited to one person rather than a group. The teacher gives 1) Feedback on speaking skills and 2) as mentioned, prepares teaching notes based on recordings.

 

This has the additional advantage of making lessons highly relevant to each student. Often students feel disconnected from lessons, making it harder to care, harder to pay attention to, and harder to be motivated to show up at all. But when the lessons cover the mistakes students made in their explanation videos, and answer questions students have, each student suddenly has a clear personal stake: if I don't show up to class, I may never fill those gaps of understanding that I am aware of. That's a painful thought.

 

Students could then be required to make a follow-up video re-explaining the same topic to show their improvement from before and after. By the time the student is required to speak in front of the class, they are well-prepared, having gone several rounds on speaking, explaining, clarifying, and re-explaining a topic (students could be required to pick a unique presentation topic for their class presentation, one they must prepare for on their own using what they've learned from the class-based speaking assignments).

 

Students would be far more confident going into these class presentations because 1) They have prepared well for them and 2) Because of teacher feedback, they have an idea of where they fall in terms of speaking skills. They know what to expect in terms of how others will react to their speaking.

Lance Bush on justification, truth, and intuitions

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tEPgTNV4Mc

 

27:15–29:15

 

"I don't believe in analytic accounts of justification either, I just completely reject them. I think what philosophers tend to be talking about is nonsense; I don't need justification for beliefs. I build a system on pragmatic grounds; I act based on what I expect to yield consequences that are conducive to my goals. I don't need any sort of extraneous permission. So I can give a pragmatic account of justification . . . but I'm talking about something that probably functionally and very much so philosophically is quite different from their accounts of justification. . . . It looks to me like a lot of analytic philosophers want some sort of permission to hold a view. I don't need reality's permission to hold a view. Let's say I'm a complete instrumentalist about my beliefs and I just go around believing things that are useful to me, and someone comes along and says, 'Yeah, but that belief isn't justified.' Okay. Well, what happens if I ignore it? Nothing. If you act like a pragmatist and ignore non-pragmatic conceptions of justification, there are no consequences to this. There's none! There aren't consequences. So I don't care, because I care about the consequences of my actions. So these non-pragmatic conceptions of justification are practically irrelevant and I don't care about them. Someone could say, 'Ah, but they're true!', okay well your truths don't matter to me. And if someone says 'Yeah but it doesn't matter if it doesn't matter because our quest is to figure out what's true', great, you're operating on a non-pragmatic conception of truth. I reject that as well, so I don't care about that either. . . . I don't believe in correspondence theory . . . So the whole thing is this system that they're operating within where I reject the whole system."

 

Continuing (29:38–30:29): 

 

"But for philosophers that take non-pragmatic approaches, I'm not obligated to abide by their metaphilosophy anymore than they're obligated to abide by mine. What you won't see me doing, at least I don't think so, is going around insisting that if you're not a pragmatist, like you're doing it wrong and you could only do things correctly if you're doing them the way I do. Now, there may be a sense in which I think that that's true, again pragmatically true—I mean it's almost trivially pragmatically true—but I try to be self-aware enough to realize when people are approaching philosophy from a different metaphilosophical perspective and be mindful of that fact and pivot to a discussion about metaphilosophy when it becomes appropriate. But a lot of people that work within conventional mainstream metaphilosophies, they don't see it as metaphilosophy, they're just doing philosophy and if you're not doing what they're doing, you're doing it wrong, you're not doing it at all."

 

I'm on board with the consequentialist aspects of what Lance is saying. And maybe a hard consequentialist position like the one I take leads to a pragmatic theory of truth and justification. I'm aware of Shamik Dasgupta's defense of a pragmatic theory of truth in this paper "Undoing the Truth Fetish." I have yet to analyze his arguments in that paper. So I don't know where I will land on the issue of truth and justification ultimately (or would land given enough time, research, thought, etc.).

 

Where I am at the moment though is that saying "My beliefs aren't justified and I don't care" is exactly as crazy as it sounds. I'm sure Lance can appreciate how it sounds to say "I don't need justification for my beliefs." It sounds, well, crazy. Saying "I don't need justification for beliefs" sounds like saying "I cannot be wrong" or "I don't need reasons to think that something is true to be convinced that it is true or is probably true." Again, that sounds crazy. But if I learned more about Lance’s views then maybe what he's saying wouldn't sound crazy at all.

 

It seems to me that at the heart of justification is this worry of arbitrariness: Imagine philosophers saying "I believe in a..." 

 

Philosopher 1: "...Correspondence theory of truth."

 

Philosopher 2: "...Pragmatic theory of truth." 

 

Philosopher 3: "...Deflationary theory of truth."

 

Philosopher 4: "...Primitive theory of truth." 

 

Philosopher 5: "...Semantic theory of truth."

 

Philosopher 6: "...Coherence theory of truth."

 

Philosopher 7: "...Performative theory of truth." 

 

Philosopher 8: "...Constructivist theory of truth."

 

Philosopher 9: "...Pluralist theory of truth." 

My goal is to believe what’s true about truth. Given that goal, which view of these should I take? Or should I take none of them? 

Here’s an idea: I will assign a number 1–9 to these views and use a random number generator to select a view randomly and I will believe whichever view is selected. You might complain that such a view would not be justified, but I don’t care. My beliefs can be totally arbitrary and that’s fine by me.

Not only would it be crazy to do this, it would be impossible. I can’t believe a philosophical view unless it makes sense to me. The "making sense" part is why reasons are needed. Reasons explain someone’s belief in x rather than y. Again, reasons are answers to 'why' questions, which makes them a kind of explanation. (So in cases where internal explanations aren't needed, like in non-propositional beliefs, reasons aren't needed. But those beliefs still have explanations, say in evolutionary terms.)

I think the problem of evil shows that a perfect being does not exist. Imagine if my true answer to someone asking why I think that is "I don’t care." That would be a bad answer. It would be so bad in fact that it would call into question whether I really believe what I claimed to believe, because, really, it’s not possible to have the answer "I don’t care" if I have reasons to believe my claim; the reasons are the answer! That's why, and how, I believe.

 

Being a bit tongue-in-cheek, imagine I said: I am converting to Nazism. Why? Well, haven't you heard? Justification is not needed! I don't need an answer. 

 

This would just be nonsense, because this is not how belief works. You can't convert to an intellectual position (like a philosophical or political position) without having an answer to the question of why you are convinced that that position is better than alternatives. (I’m not talking about social conversion, but doxastic conversion.) Whether the answer is justifying depends on whether the answer is any good. Does Lance think the answers moral realists give to challenges to moral realism are any good? I would guess not. So doesn't he accept the notion of good answers?

P.S. Before the above discussion, Lance talks about and denies the reality of intuitions, or as Huemer defines calls them, "intellectual seemings."

 

Curiously, within the quote at top Lance uses the phrase "it looks to me", which looks to me like an intuition marker. So it seems to me that an intuition is a seeming ("intellectual seeming" is redundant), which is something you are inclined to believe, agree with, or act as if you believe, but if asked why you believe that thing you wouldn't be able to articulate a clear answer, at least not without doing some serious work first.

 

In this episode, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVFuRH--n2o,  roughly around the 1h:30m mark, Alex Malpass says that intuitions are unreliable and count very little, with seemings acting as something of a practical tool for moving on from intractable problems of skepticism. I'm inclined to agree with that, though I think Huemer would accuse Malpass of self-defeat because Malpass is relying on his seemings when downplaying seemings.

 

In any case, if intuitions are beliefs you believe but can't quite articulate why, then they are in a sense unjustified beliefs (using a reasons-based sense of justification). But if you hold the belief only very lightly, then you're not making the mistake of believing in a way that's disproportionate to the evidence or reasons to believe.

 

It can be worth holding onto beliefs you can't articulate reasons for because 1) you can't help but hold the belief, even if only very lightly, and 2) there may be reasons within the vicinity that do justify that belief, reasons that explain why it was that the belief seemed true to you to begin with.

 

So with intuitions there's this idea of subconscious belief or subconscious understanding involved; to have an intuition is to be subconsciously aware of certain reasons to believe something, but those reasons are not explicit in your mind. (Haven't you had the experience of reading a philosopher who articulates something you already agreed with, but couldn't articulate?) 

 

Back in school sometimes I would answer a math question intuitively. If you were to ask me "Why is that your answer?", I would have said "I don't know, but it feels right", and often I would get math questions right when operating by this feeling. Similarly we hear of "intuition-based" chess players who don't calculate captures or board-states but instead play moves that feel strong and avoid moves that feel weak. It's possible to be subconsciously attuned to a truth without being able to consciously explain it, which is why intuitions are worth exploring to bring out the understanding (or misunderstanding) that was lying underneath.

 

But I'd agree with Malpass (or what I take he'd agree with) that until that exploration has been done, and the reasons for the belief are uncovered, the intuition by itself is not worth anything other than as a jumping off point.

The Absurdity of Life Without God (June 2025)

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/S7n1PXVg9X0

 

1) Is Craig saying that all humans prior to Christianity should have thrown themselves off cliffs in despair over the meaninglessness of their lives? Because that would be a clearly false thing to say.

 

2) In response, Craig might say something to the effect of "Humans prior to the revelation to the Jews or prior to the Gospels could have believed in God as revealed by creation."

But this would be a bad response for the following reasons:

A) Craig himself says that you need God and an afterlife for reality to be ultimately meaningful.[*1] But Orthodox Judaism doesn't teach an afterlife, and no clear teaching of the afterlife can be found in the Old Testament. So really, even belief in the God of the Old Testament, the true God, is not enough on Craig's view for life to be meaningful. I'll say that again: Even believing in the true God is not enough to live a meaningful life on Craig's view! So all the figures of the Old Testament were living meaningless lives, including Joseph, Abraham, and Moses? Really?

 

B) The God revealed by creation is, like Hume points out, not clearly good nor evil, as life is rife with both good and evil. But if the God of creation is not clearly good nor evil, and is apparently indifferent to both our suffering and our joy, then there's no reason to think there will be an afterlife for our sakes.

More importantly, if there is no report of an afterlife revealed by God in a credible way, then there is no reason to think there is an afterlife. It would be pure speculation. So...

 

3) ...would Craig say it's okay to live a life that might be meaningful on speculation? Does life have to be absolutely certainly known to be meaningful (i.e. does God’s existence and an afterlife have to be known with certainty) for a person to rationally live it?

Surely Craig would not set the standard that high. Indeed Craig is infamous for saying that when it comes to pragmatic reasoning, the standard can be extremely low.[*2] As long as there is some chance that there is a god out there and an afterlife out there, then it's reasonable to live according to that chance. So as long as atheists aren't absolutely certain that there is no god and no universalist afterlife, as long as they believe there is a non-zero chance of these things, then they can live on the same kind of leap of faith that Craig champions when he says Christianity is worth believing in even if there were only a one in a million chance of it being true. And many atheists would admit that there is some chance of such a universal salvation, however small.

4) Is a naturalistic worldview unlivable? No! And shouldn't Craig know better, having debated however many naturalists at this point, who all clearly do not find naturalism to be unlivable? Is Graham Oppy, a “scary smart” atheist scholar, somehow irrational for living as a naturalist?

Craig claims that naturalists live as if their lives have meaning, but have no basis for this meaning. But that's not only mistaken, but I'd claim certainly mistaken. The basis for meaning that naturalists have is the same basis that all humans prior to Christianity had, and it’s the same basis that, ironically, even Christians have for meaning.

 

Why do Christians live their lives? Do Christians receive a letter from God in the mail that details their purpose on earth? Or do Christians receive a vision or a dream, or an auditory message from God that details their purpose on earth? Nope. Christians are left to figure things out on their own, the same as everyone else.

 

And so inevitably Christians end up living for: their jobs, hobbies, entertainment, family, friends, exploring the world, because their biology generates an internal pressure to survive, and so on, exactly the same reasons humans have always had for living.

 

You might say that Christians have uniquely Christian jobs like pastor, missionary, and Christian philosopher, but that's only very few Christians. Most Christians are like everyone else: Working some miscellaneous job that puts food on the table for the family. (Why is God so okay with his followers working mundane jobs for decades and decades, knowing what that does to the soul, I have no idea.)

 

We are told in Revelation that in heaven there will be no more death or suffering. We are told that hell is a place of torment. This is a strikingly hedonistic system of value. If Christianity were anti-hedonism, then we could imagine heaven being filled with pain and hell being filled with happiness. After all, if it's things other than pain and happiness that form the basis of value, then heaven could be filled with those intrinsically good things (whatever they are) along with pain, and hell could be filled with those intrinsically bad things (whatever they are) along with happiness.  

 

As it stands, we don't find that description of heaven and hell in the Bible or in Christian tradition. So we're left with a hedonistic picture of Christian value. But if hedonism is true, then happiness forms the basis of meaning. That which is meaningful is that which makes life worth living, and vice versa (this is the meaning in life sense of meaning). Happiness makes life worth living. So that which imparts happiness imparts meaning. And this is exactly what we find in the world: all human motivation can be understood in terms of pursuing certain kinds of happiness and avoiding certain kinds of pain.

 

The reason why I say that it's certainly the case that life is meaningful is because not only is it certain that we experience happiness, but because it is certainly the case that our actions make a difference (this is the difference-making sense of meaning). Craig claims that our lives make no ultimate difference if death is the permanent end. But there is a difference, and a certain one at that, between happiness and pain. The real moments of real flourishing that real people really have—that's the difference-maker, and it's a difference that we have direct access to via immediate experience.[*3]

5) So a naturalistic worldview is certainly livable for the same reasons that life in general is livable, including Christian life. But is a Christian worldview livable? A person can find Christian worldviews to be unlivable for the following reasons:

A) To be a Christian you must select a denomination but it can seem like there are no good reasons to select one over the others.

 

B) When you try to do theology to discover which denomination is best, you discover that there are severe challenges to the coherence of all Christian doctrines, including the doctrines of God, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, Salvation, Sin, Eschatology, Heaven, Hell, Creation, Faith, Ecclesiology, etc. 

 

B) There are moral horrors in the Old Testament, horrors that Craig happily defends.[*4]

 

C) Jesus says things that are arguably straight up false, including His teachings on divorce (Mt. 19:9), that the "meek shall inherit the earth" (Mt. 5:5), that "whoever is not with me is against me" (Luke 11:23), "how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him" (Mt. 7:7), and "the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father." (John 14:12).

 

On that last one you might try to wriggle out of it by saying that it refers to only the disciples, but a) it specifies "the one who believes in me", not just the disciples, and b) the disciples did not go on to perform greater works than that of Jesus.

 

You might respond by saying "works" refers to spreading the gospel, and "greater works" refers to how greater numbers of people will be reached by the gospel than what Jesus reached during His earthly ministry. But the term for works, τὰ ἔργα, found in John 14:11, refers to miracles. 

 

D) If someone is committed to a pragmatic theory of truth, and if being a Christian is pragmatically false, then Christianity is false for that person. Some people have found being a Christian to be detrimental to their mental health (religious trauma, hell anxiety, etc.) and success in life. (Why would God give us this heuristic of looking to what works for guidance on what to believe and what to do with one’s life and then allow for Christianity to not work for so many people, I have no idea.)

 

E) Christianity commits one to unbelievable supernatural elements, including:

 

E.1 - Figures in the Old Testament living to hundreds of years;

E.2 - The Nephilim;

E.3 - The Divine Council;

E.4 - Angels;

E.5 - Demons;

E.6 - Satan as a demonic ruler of the world;

E.7 - Hell as a literal, physical place;

E.8 - Heaven as a literal, physical place;

E.9 - The bread and wine of the Eucharist being the literal body and blood of Jesus, if the Catholics are right about transubstantiation;

E.10 - Various miracle stories like talking animals, the flood, the plagues, Jonah and the Fish, pillars of fire, the miracles of Jesus, John's Revelation, etc.

 

F) Many folks who are LGBT report experiencing Christianity to be unlivable, and even non-LGBT folks find Christian ethics to be impractical and naive.

 

G) Infernalistic versions of Christianity are seen as unlivable because a) it's impossible to socialize with people you believe are going to hell; b) it's impossible to believe that the large majority of humanity is going to hell, including close family and friends; c) it's impossible to envision one being happy in heaven knowing so many people, or even a single person, is in hell.

 

6) Speaking of hell, life in hell is, if the accounts of the Bible and tradition accurate, not worth living. A life not worth living is a meaningless life. So life in hell is a never-ending meaningless life! So Infernalistic Christianity is far more guilty—infinitely more guilty—than naturalism of producing years of meaningless existence. If God as a perfect being entails that all existence is meaningful, and if life in hell is not meaningful, then God's existence entails that infernalism is false and there is no hell, an indictment of orthodox Christianity.

 

7) Not only does naturalism not entail a meaningless life, but Christianity does not entail a meaningful life. Christian belief can cause the believer to develop a sense that this life is pointless, because life doesn't truly begin until the end of the world and the new heaven and new earth come. This can cause the Christian to develop a lifestyle of passivity, of waiting for the end of the world. This is exacerbated by the pain of effort and risk of injury. Ambition and achievement go out the window, and the Christian lives an empty life waiting for God to do something or waiting for the Rapture – for life to really start. How tragic!

 

If Christianity ends up false, then these Christians will have wasted their one chance to fight for meaningful experiences in this life. Even if Christianity ends up true, it's still the case that these Christians failed to live well in this life. God, sensitive to these things, should encourage Christians to live for this world, say, by granting special protections to the Christian, allowing them to live more fearlessly. Instead, God allows Christians to be persecuted, martyred, and ridiculed for their beliefs.

8) Craig worries about atheists living an inauthentic life. Surely Craig can appreciate the fact that there are Christians and even pastors who live inauthentically? There are testimonies of pastors and seminary teachers who lose faith but keep the Christian mask on to keep their employment. That’s an inauthentic life, not because it’s inwardly atheistic, but because it’s inwardly atheistic in combination with being outwardly Christian!

 

If the concern is strictly with authentic living, then you would demand many people to leave Christianity, because their Christian life is not authentic. It is exactly because of problems of authenticity that many people stop going to church and leave religion altogether. How many of us have experienced the inauthenticity of Christians, who preach one thing but practice another? It is exactly because of the above problems of the livability of Christianity that results in these hypocrisies. The falsity of Christianity causes a clash between reality and the Christian's beliefs, and these clashes often manifest in contradictions in the Christian's attitudes and behaviors.

 

Living authentically includes living according to what you believe to be true, and not according to what you want to be true or according to what people around you pressure you into believing. The echo chambers of church life can produce intellectual dishonesty. The desire to be with God, for heaven to be real, for there to be ultimate justice, and the desire for one's devotion to a religion to have not been a waste, can each produce bias that encourages someone to dishonestly stay in their worldview. If Christians were honest, they would realize that 1) They want Christianity to be true more than anything, and 2) This produces a deep bias that seriously compromises the intellectual honesty of the Christian. Do you truly actually believe that Christianity is true, or are you just in it out of fear of death, or desire to see a loved one again?

 

---

 

*1 - See Reasonable Faith, Third Edition, pg. 74: "So it's not just immortality man needs if life is to be ultimately significant; he needs God and immortality. And if God does not exist, then he has neither."

 

*2 - See: Reasonable Faith Question of the Week #800. https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/raising-and-lowering-the-epistemic-bar 

 

*3 - You might think of flourishing and suffering as more sophisticated and involved notions of happiness and pain, and it's really flourishing, not happiness per se, that we should maximize, and it's really suffering, not pain per se, that we should minimize. A very rough approximation of flourishing might be like the following:

 

A human is flourishing when:

 

1) Their basic needs are met, such as food, clothing, shelter, and medical care.

 

2) Their more advanced psychological needs are met, including feeling accepted by and well-integrated into a community.

 

3) They experience happiness on a regular basis.

 

4) They do not experience pain on a regular basis.

 

5) The pains they do experience are instrumentally good, such as the natural pains that accompany self-improvement and the establishing and maintaining of a eudaimonic system. The instrumental goodness easily outweighs the intrinsic badness of these pains. In other words, they do not experience higher-order pain, only lower-order pain.

6) The happiness experienced is instrumentally good and not instrumentally bad. In other words, they experience higher-order happiness, not just lower-order happiness.

 

Ditto, mutatis mutandis, for suffering. Note: I'd claim that we have direct access to whether we are happy or in pain, but we don't necessarily have direct access to whether we are flourishing or suffering.

 

*4 - See "W.L. Craig Defends the Slaughter of Canaanite Children" on the @CosmicSkeptic YouTube channel.   

Knowledge is justified true belief – blameless beliefs vs justified beliefs

Dad puts on the coffee. Mom puts laundry in the dryer. By coincidence, the timing is such that the dryer beeps to let us know it's done at the same time the coffee machine would normally beep to let us know that the coffee is done. But this time, the coffee machine fails to make a sound to signify that coffee is ready – the machine has worn down. By coincidence again, the laundry machine beep and the coffee machine beep sound very similar. So dad, sitting in his living room chair, hearing the laundry machine go off, understandably concludes that the coffee is done. And he's right – it is done. But if you were to ask dad, "Why do you think the coffee is done?", he would say "Because I heard the deal go off." But that's not true. What he heard was the laundry machine. So he gives a false reason for his belief. False reasons (answers to why questions) can never be good reasons to believe. Sure, it's understandable that dad would conclude what he did. But it's not, as it turns out, reasonable. Understandable belief and justified belief are not the same.

In the classic example of the broken clock, when you ask the person, "Why did you believe the time is 1 p.m.?", their answer is "Because the clock said 1 p.m." But that's not true. The clock doesn't say that the time today is 1 p.m. It says that the time yesterday was 1 p.m. at the moment the clock stopped working. Typically, clocks tell you the time of the day, which is why it's understandable to conclude that the clock is speaking of today. But when clocks stop working, they tell you the time of whatever day they stopped working. (See Bogardus & Perrin, "Knowledge is Believing Something Because It’s True". The clock reads 1 p.m. because the time was 1 p.m., not because it is 1 p.m.)

There are false understandable beliefs, which we can call false blameless beliefs, or understandably false beliefs or blamelessly false beliefs or innocently false beliefs, something to that effect. But being blameless in your believing doesn't make you justified in your believing. Humans may have been, at one point or another, blameless in their beliefs in gods, aether, miasma, phlogiston, geocentrism, or what have you, but these beliefs were never justified. Having an understandable or blameless belief is to have a justified belief in the internalist sense, which is why you can have internally "justified" false beliefs. But internalism is false when it comes to the kind of justification needed for knowledge.

We can think of the two kinds of justification (internalism vs externalism) as answers to different questions: is this person's reason for believing a good (i.e. true) reason? If yes, then their belief is justified (external). Is this person's believing an indication that there is something wrong with them, such as being intellectually vicious or stupid? If not, then their belief is justified (internal). So the two senses of justification are compatible.

Luck dissolves knowledge because luck dissolves justification. Justification cannot be arbitrary, and lucky beliefs are only true arbitrarily. What we want is to have the least arbitrary possible beliefs.

To illustrate this you can think of Christian denominations. Why be Episcopalian when you could be Methodist? Why be Roman Catholic when you could be Anglican? From the outside looking in, it can seem painfully arbitrary as to which denomination you should join. We know intuitively that arbitrariness destroys justification, which destroys any chance of you having arrived at the truth in any secured way. There is no reason to think that one denomination is true above the others. What you're saying, essentially, is either that you 1) Have yet to see any arguments for any denomination, in which case it would be arbitrary for you to pick one over the others; or 2) You have seen arguments on behalf of various denominations but you don't think any of them are any good. Good arguments supply good reasons, and good reasons form the exact chain or link you are looking for to remove arbitrariness. This is a link between truth and your belief. This is exactly what justification is meant to be: the link between what's true and what you believe, the link that explains how you came to believe in the truth rather than a falsehood. (And this is why psychoanalysis is essential to explaining opposing beliefs. You can't explain opposing beliefs in terms of their truth, so instead you explain them in terms of their psychological appeal or something like that. Note that explaining opposing beliefs in terms of psychology need not be belittling; wrong beliefs can, again, be blameless and not reflect poorly on the believer in any meaningful way. The point is the simple fact that you cannot explain opposing beliefs in terms of their truth [unless you're prepared to accept a dialetheia in that situation].)

For those folks with strong internalist intuitions, eliminating arbitrariness requires knowing that you know. After all, if you don't know that there is such a link between the truth and your belief, how can you know whether your belief is arbitrary or not, and, therefore, whether your belief is justified or not?

But there are reasons to think that you can eliminate arbitrariness without being aware of the elimination. This is a standard objection to internalism: animal knowledge. The lion knows the outline of his territory. How does the lion know this? Because the truth of the lion's (non-propositional) belief explains the lion's belief. The lion has a properly functioning brain which gives the lion access to highly reliable faculties of perception and memory. The connection between the truth and the lion's belief is non-arbitrary because it is mediated by a properly functioning brain capable of allowing the lion to grasp, understand, and remember its environment.

Laurence BonJour says the following about the objection from animal belief against internalism (Epistemology, Second Edition, pgs. 206–7):

"I once owned a German shepherd dog named Emma. . . . She understood a wide range of commands, seemed to exhibit an excellent memory for people and places . . . and could be amazingly subtle and persistent in communicating her desires . . . Anyone who observed her very closely would, I think, have found it impossible to deny that Emma had conscious beliefs and desires, together with other conscious mental states such as excitement or fear. But did Emma have any reasons or justification for her beliefs? Did she have knowledge? . . . despite her intelligence, it is hard to believe that Emma engaged in very much or indeed any reasoning, and still harder to believe that she was capable of understanding complicated arguments. Indeed, it is doubtful whether Emma could have even understood the basic idea of having a reason for a belief, an understanding that seems to be required for her to have had fully explicit access to any reasons at all. Thus it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Emma had no justified beliefs and hence no knowledge, a result that is alleged . . . to be highly implausible. Surely, it is argued, Emma was justified in believing and . . . even . . . knew such things as that there was a squirrel on the other side of the quad . . . or that the person at the front door was her good friend Marc . . ."

That applies to perceptual, non-propositional beliefs (the kind animals have). What about metaphysical, propositional beliefs? Something similar applies. Knowledge of truths about meaning requires "perceptions" of meaning – faculties for understanding, logic, language, and truth. Just as a properly functioning brain eliminates arbitrariness in perception beliefs, so too does it eliminate arbitrariness in metaphysical beliefs. This is where reasons and arguments come into play. Reasons and arguments are part of that "perceptual" chain, analogous to how light and the function of the eye are part of the perceptual chain that gives rise to our true perception beliefs. 

And as Bogardus / Perrin say at the end of the paper cited above, you don't need to know that you have knowledge in order to have knowledge, because, as they say, knowing is believing because it's true; i.e., the truth of your belief plays a central role in explaining why you believe it.

So I see two options here: explanation-first and reason-first. 

Explanation-first justification says 1) knowing A is believing A because A is true, and 2) when you believe A because A is true you will have a true (and relevant) answer to the why question ("Why do you believe A?"), and that(those) true answer(s) constitute the good reason(s) for why you believe. Explanation-by-truth entails good reasons (for propositional beliefs).

(This assumes the item of knowledge is propositional; non-propositional beliefs don't have and don't need reasons [non-propositional beliefs do have explanations, which, like reasons, are answers to why questions; reasons are internal, agential / personal explanations])

Reason-first justification says that 1) knowledge is justified true belief, with justification entailing having a true answer to the why question, and 2) for the truth of that answer to play a central role in explaining why you cite it as your answer to the why question. Good reasons entail explanation-by-truth (for propositional beliefs). 

(BonJour also notes that internalism and externalism may be compatible, addressing separate issues: pgs. 215–16.)

Questions to ponder:

a) Are there non-propositional beliefs?

b) Do non-propositional beliefs have reasons? Can they?

c) Do animals have reasons for why they believe (if they have beliefs)? Or do animals have non-propositional beliefs, which do not require, and cannot have, reasons?

d) Justification is the link between the truth and your belief such that your belief is non-arbitrary. To truly eliminate arbitrariness, must you be aware of that link? That is, must you know that such a link has been established to eliminate arbitrariness? If yes, then what is this "knowing"? How can you know such a link has been established? And does this apply to all kinds of beliefs, or only propositional beliefs? After all, it doesn't seem like animals are aware of such links, and yet surely animals have knowledge of whether a predator is chasing them, what's good to eat, of which member of their tribe is their mother, etc.

e) Do propositional beliefs require internal justification (i.e., good reasons)? If yes, is it because they are propositional, and propositional beliefs, to be non-arbitrary, require a connection to the truth that only reasons can provide?

f) Or is internal justification purely related to the blameworthiness of someone's beliefs? (i.e. If one of your beliefs is not justified in the internalist sense, then does that mean that that belief says something bad about you as a truthseeker, by, for example, indicating a lack of intellectual virtue on your part?)

g) Does explanation-by-truth entail having good reasons for propositional beliefs? Or does having good reasons for one's propositional beliefs entail explanation-by-truth? (i.e. Are good answers good because they are true and because their truth explains why they are given as answers?) Or is justification just explanation-by-truth all the way down, or just having good reasons all the way down? Or none of the above? 

Free Will: Still Not Real (reacting to Emerson Green)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBl0I7kTXo8 

"Dennett of course doesn't mean that one can be the author of their thoughts or desires in the maximalist sense, but so what?"

So what is that your actions don't say anything about you in that case, only about what you have. You can describe someone in terms of their non-essential properties, whether they are virtuous or vicious in this or that way. That's obviously important as it lets you know what to expect of their behavior, whether to stay away from them or whether they are safe (or whether they would make for a good interlocutor in a conversation or just resort to name-calling).

But descriptions of non-essential properties are not descriptions of essential properties... obviously. If my essential property is my subjectivity, then everything else about me is non-essential, something I have but not am. (And this is why trying to solve free will without first solving personal identity will never work, I think. How can I make sense of what it means for me to be blamed if I don't know what 'me' is?)

"If I'm not the source of my actions because I didn't self-generate my own nature ex nihilo, then the hose isn't a source of water . . . I think to say that it's false that the hose is a true source of water has some pretty absurd implications if you follow it through . . ."

I'm happy to say that the hose is a source of water, because it's not a source in any sense that gives me reason to be dissuaded from my free will skepticism.

In tort & criminal law you have the "but-for" test to determine factual causation. Ex. But for the fact that I acted (or failed to act) as I did, the injury would not have happened. So my action (or failure to act) is the factual cause of injury. (That's not enough to determine legal responsibility, as my conduct has to be a proximate cause, or I have to have a duty to act, etc. But I digress.)

So the hose is a source of water in the sense that it "passes" the but-for test; but for the hose, I would not have access to water (or, I would have one fewer access points to water).

Likewise, our conduct can pass the but-for test. But that doesn't mean we're free; it doesn't mean that my actions say anything about me even if my actions say something about what I have. And what I have is perfectly morally relevant when it comes to blame, praise, responsibility, punishment, and so on. Like Robert Sapolsky says, if a car has no brakes, you don't let it out onto the roads and risk hurting someone. Likewise, it makes perfect sense to lock up people for the safety of others (and, hopefully, for improving the quality of the incarcerated person so that they can re-integrate into society. But we know that the US prison system couldn't care less about that part). We "praise" (recognize the quality of) cars that function well and "blame" (recognize the poor quality of) them when they don't. We can explain our recourse to praise and blame this way, as a recognition of quality rather than as an accusation of ultimate sourcehood. Indeed, it is by someone's proximate sourcehood that we come to recognize the quality of their kindness, moral reasoning, emotional stability, etc.—qualities they inherited from circumstances.

I'm convinced (any reason why I shouldn't be?) that free will skepticism can make perfect sense of common sense notions of responsibility, blame, praise, punishment, everything, whether in law or moral dilemmas. (Obviously, with the exception of retributive punishment specifically. That doesn't make any sense.)

What explains these dispositions? Where do they come from? Do we choose our dispositions, or are they products of factors beyond our control? It seems to me that compatibilism always kicks the can down the road. Whichever criterion of freedom they cite as the Real Freedom, whether that be acting on desire, or acting on your second-order desires, or acting on self-endorsed values, or acting according to your own sensitivity to reasons, or acting on your own dispositions—for any freedom criterion N, the further question can be asked of what caused N, and we can imagine Pereboom-style scenarios where someone has N and yet intuitively does not have free will, because N was caused by circumstances beyond their control, and the most core intuition we have (certainly, that I have) when it comes to free will is that it's not fair to blame someone for something beyond their control. Put another way, it's not fair to attribute non-essential properties to someone as if they are essential properties.

"We've got the free will we think we have . . ."

I don't think I have any free will. I hear this kind of talk – "We all act as if we're free..." Speak for yourself, I don't! "Given the illusion of free will, we have no choice but to act as if we are free." What illusion? I have no such illusion. My intuitions point me completely and totally toward free will skepticism. I'm happy to admit that I have freedom, which is probably what folks are referring to. Freedom in this sense refers to having options to choose from and the sense of choice that accompanies selecting one option over others. Sure, absolutely, I have that. But while freedom concerns the choices you have available to you, free will concerns the nature of the choice made—does your choice reveal something about you per se or merely about what you have, about your circumstances?

Quotes on pain – John Green and Jordan Peterson

John Green: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTEhBL7CetU

Jordan Peterson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4DgBQ9N5qk 

"When people hear that their pain isn't real, they immediately disbelieve you because they know that their pain is real; it's the realist thing in the world." –John Green

YouTube: Mythical Kitchen, "John Green Eats His Last Meal", 10 June 2025, timestamp 29:27.

". . . actually, things do have meaning. The proof of that, the most direct proof, is pain. No one disbelieves in their pain. Descartes said "I think, therefore I am", but it's more of a religious statement, and you can derive this from many religions, that the fundamental truth is "I suffer, therefore I am." And I think the reason for that is because, I don't care what you don't have faith in. The one thing you believe in is your own pain. And pain is a form of meaning, and what alleviates pain therefore, and suffering, is also a form of meaning. And I would say that the primary religious injunction, along with telling the truth, is to do what you can to alleviate suffering. And I think the truth is actually a corollary of that, because untruth produces more suffering than truth." –Jordan Peterson

Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast, February 2017, reposted on YouTube by hihosilver, 06 Jul 2022, timestamp 1:22:28.

"That's why so many religions, like the Buddhist religion, insists that existence is suffering. The reason for that, it's a claim about what's irreducibly real. Everyone acts as if their pain is real. It doesn't matter what they say, it doesn't matter what kind of materialist they are or what they think about the human soul, or anything like that. When it comes right down to it, there's nothing more real than pain." –Jordan Peterson (Emphasis in bold is mine.) 

Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast, February 2017, reposted on YouTube by hihosilver, 06 Jul 2022, timestamp 1:45:50.

Bonus:

"One thing I've learned as a clinical psychologist is that you do not hit a target you don't aim for." –Jordan Peterson

Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast, February 2017, reposted on YouTube by hihosilver, 06 Jul 2022, timestamp 1:34:15.