Psychoanalysis objection against free will skepticism

I have three responses to this objection: 1) this is an ad hominem attack; 2) on no free will you still must take responsibility in some sense, and 3) a reverse psychoanalysis can be given against adherents of free will.

Point 1: Ad hominem 

This is an ad hominem attack that says: “The only reason for someone to argue for the no free will view is because they want to excuse their moral failings or their general failings in life.”

The good aspect of this objection is that the objector has some data – people rejecting free will – and wants to explain that data through a psychoanalytic theory. If you think the arguments for free will skepticism are so bad that no one could take them seriously, then you might think that the arguments for free will skepticism fail to explain adherence to free will skepticism and there must be something psychological going on.

These kinds of psychoanalytic theories are common. Christians will say that atheists reject Christianity not because they have good reasons for doing so, but because atheists want to sin guilt-free. Atheists will say that Christian belief is grounded in wishful thinking.

Atheists cannot appeal to the truth of Christianity to explain Christian belief, so atheists are forced into an alternative explanation, and inevitably this will be an unflattering psychoanalysis. Neither can Christians appeal to the devastating strength of the arguments against Christianity to explain (even a single case of) rejection of Christianity, and so they too are forced into unflattering psychoanalyses of non-Christians, probably involving the noetic effects of sin (God giving them up to their sin) or free will poorly exercised (or, in William Lane Craig's middle knowledge story, some people reject Christianity in all feasible worlds). (Caveat: Some Christians and/or atheists may subscribe to doxastic permissivism which says there are multiple competing rational views on an issue. Folks who are permissivists can disagree with their opposition without relying on unflattering psychoanalyses thereof.)

Likewise, believers in free will cannot appeal to the truth of free will skepticism to explain belief in free will skepticism, and may themselves feel forced into giving an unflattering psychoanalysis to explain belief in free will skepticism. This especially applies in cases of minority views; when you see that only 11% of philosophers believe in free will skepticism, you might think there's got to be something wrong with free will skeptics.

But if we were to unpack your beliefs, we certainly would find some that have an 11% or less adherence rate by professional philosophers. Are we then to conclude that something is wrong with you?

The ad hominem immediately runs into the problem of the actual strength of the arguments for free will skepticism. If you think the arguments against free will are that bad, then you cannot just state this – you must show it. This is why ad hominems are fallacies of irrelevance – the arguments against free will are not addressed by this objection. Until the arguments against free will are addressed, you admit that for all you know it's the strength of these arguments that explains belief in free will skepticism.

Point 2: You still have to take moral responsibility in some sense

The worry is that rejecting free will gives one a license to do whatever irrational things they want because 'It's not my fault', 'I can't be blamed', or 'I was always going to do that.'

But this doesn't work even on the no free will view, because you still have critical blame – beholding the badness of what you are. Naturally, you wish to behold the goodness of what you are.

In court room settings, the fact that you committed a crime without free will is irrelevant. We don't need retributive punishment or just deserts to make sense of courts in general. The court system, in theory, punishes people based on the badness of what they are. If someone is a danger to society, then it makes sense to quarantine them. It makes sense to punish behavior to generate those inputs that will cause a future disinclination of that behavior, either in those who are punished or in those who hear about the punishment. It further makes sense to punish behavior when failing to do so would generate social unrest.

You still have to live with yourself and your choices, so it's still in your best interest to be the best you can be and to make the best choices you can.

Point 3: Psychoanalysis of those who believe in free will

The problem with any psychoanalysis is that two can play that game. Per the no free will view, everyone who wrongs me is not at fault for their wrongs. If anything, I am biased, as all humans are, to believe that those who wrong me are at fault for their wrongs. Of course, on my system, I can take a bifurcated view where I acknowledge the badness of those who wrong me while also acknowledging that their badness is not their fault.

Some folks may be biased toward free will because of other views they have. Christians may feel forced to believe in free will due to how responsible for our sin the Bible makes us out to be.

On the no free will view, you ought to forgive those who wrong you in the sense of letting go of any sense of moral protest or hatred. Some people might prefer to hold a grudge or want to rationalize their hatred. But if those who wronged you were never free, then your hatred of them never made sense. You might hate the poor quality of the person qua organism, but you should feel sorry for the person qua conscious subject who is trapped in a low quality organism against their will. On the no free will view, all blame is victim blaming. The murderer was just as much in the wrong place at the wrong time (genetics, social inputs, brain structure, etc.) in the chain of causes leading up to them becoming a murderer as their victims were. For some people, realizing that their hatred was wrong the whole time would require a humbling admission, and a general significant change of mind they may be unwilling to undergo.

When bad things happen to people who make poor choices, we like to think “Well, that’s what you get.” Our recourse to blame and smug satisfaction at the misfortune of others is arguably a self-soothing technique in response to evils. Evil makes the world seem like a bad place. But when we reframe evils as forms of justice, like in karma, then we can make the world seem better than it really is. So belief in free will could be motivated by an existential desire to avoid the conclusion that our world is far more chaotic and unjust than we want it to be.

Then there's the matter of credit. Successful people may be biased to attribute their success to their own free will rather than luck. But if there is no free will, then it's luck all the way down. Letting go of free will means letting go of all credit, all glory, all attribution to you. But the reverse of Point 2 applies here: you still get to behold the goodness of what you are (or the luckiness of what you are), and in that sense you can still retain a sense of reasonable pride. But even with that, there is still the much deeper humility that you had nothing to do with your success, you're just the lucky duck that got to hitch a ride on an organism that was set up nicely by fortunate circumstances.

So the person who thinks we can just dismiss views via psychoanalysis will have to dismiss the free will view by these psychoanalyses. Obviously, that’s not what we should do. What we should do is analyze the arguments for and against competing views and come to a judgment.

Four Objections to Free Will Skepticism

I examine four objections against the no free will view (NF) and argue that they pose no threat to the view.

Objection 1: NF is a contradictory view.

Michael Huemer gives five arguments for the incoherence of determinism.[*1] Of the five I find three to be independent (i.e., addressing the three addresses the five), so here are my responses to those three:

First argument - There is no point in arguing for determinism.

If determinism is true, then we cannot believe other than we do.[*2] So there’s no point in arguing for determinism, because those who disagree with determinism must disagree with it, and thus cannot change their minds, and those who agree with determinism must agree to it, and thus do not need to be persuaded.

But it’s obviously false that those who agree with determinism must agree to it as if their belief in determinism is magically zapped into their brain. It may be precisely an argument for determinism that caused their agreement with determinism.

Those who argue for determinism might do so because they believe spreading truth makes the world a better place. Or they may not have persuasion in mind at all, and simply argue for determinism because they find doing so compelling. The point in arguing for determinism, in that case, is to do what you find yourself compelled to do, which is, in an oversimplified way, why anyone does anything.

Second argument - There is no point in deliberating without free will.

Huemer says:

“When we reason about free will and determinism, we are deliberating about what to believe. But deliberation presupposes the existence of alternatives that one has control over. It makes no sense to deliberate about whether to do A if you don’t think you have any choice about it.”[*3]

This is false; it makes perfect sense to deliberate even when you know that whatever choice you end up making, you couldn’t help but make that choice. You have to live with your choices, free or not. So it’s in your best interest to deliberate as well as you can so you make the best choices you can make. It would be silly to pick the first option that comes to mind before weighing the pros and cons because “I was going to do that anyway.” You know that will lead to poor choices, which is exactly why you don't adopt that way of thinking.

Because you are a rational being, you have no choice but to be sensitive to reasons. So you cannot help but reason as you do, weighing the reasons to φ or not-φ for any action φ. You inevitably choose based on how the reasons weigh up in your mind. 

So I do not see my deliberating as an expression of my free will but as an expression of my attempt (or my brain’s attempt) to make the best choice I can (or it can).

Third argument - Determinism entails a contradiction.

I’ve adapted the following argument[*4] for clarity, but the core idea remains: by assuming determinism and incompatibilism, along with some common sense premises, we can show a contradiction:

1) If S should do A, then S can do A. (Premise 1 - ‘Ought implies can’)

 

2) S should believe what’s true. (Premise 2 - from common sense)

 

3) Therefore, S can believe what’s true. (From 1,2)

 

4) S cannot believe other than how S does. (Premise 3 - assume determinism and incompatibilism)

 

5) S believes in free will. (Premise 4)

 

6) Therefore, S cannot believe what’s true. (From 4,5)

This contradiction threatens the coherence of NF. Premise 4 is guaranteed to be true with respect to some S. Premise 2 cannot, by my lights, be coherently rejected. The hard determinist (which includes the hard incompatibilist) cannot deny Premise 3. So that forces the hard incompatibilist to deny Premise 1 and to reject ‘ought implies can’, which brings us to our next objection to NF. 

I have independent reasons for rejecting ‘ought implies can’, so my rejection of the principle here is not ad hoc.

Objection 2: NF entails that 'Ought implies can' is false.

While it’s true that NF, as I defend it, entails that ‘ought implies can’ is false, this is not the unacceptable consequence some might think.

Amy Karofsky, in her defense of necessitarianism, responds to the incoherence objection herself, and in doing so rejects ‘ought implies can’:

According to the necessitarian, terms like ought and should are used to prescribe a future course of action. The speaker uses them to encourage, influence, affect, or recommend that a person takes that course. But that does not mean that there are two, genuinely possible courses that the person might take; instead, the speaker’s encouragement is merely another factor in the situation.[*5]

I’m not advocating for necessitarianism here. But I agree that normative terms like ‘ought’ and ‘should’ need not imply alternative possibilities.

Regardless of whether we have alternative possibilities, we need language for prescribing actions, and words like ‘ought’ and ‘should’ are part of that language. When faced with mutually exclusive options we must choose one option at the expense of all other options, and therefore, if we wish to avoid arbitrary choices (and we very much do; our survival depends on it), we must have a method for non-arbitrary option selection. That method, as mentioned above, involves adding up reasons for choosing each option and selecting the option with the weightiest reasons. Reasons are often consequential in nature: what are the outcomes of each option and how do they compare?

If ‘shoulds’ play this prescribing role based on reasons, then when we think that someone should have done something, we are prescribing an action we can imagine that person taking, and we prescribe the action based on the reasons apparent to us. It’s easy to say “My dad should have invested in Microsoft,” because we see the superior outcome had he done so. We imagine placing ourselves in Dad’s shoes a few decades ago, equipped with our future knowledge of stock prices, and making choices on the basis of the reasons available to us.

If that sounds like cheating, then it should, because it is. Whenever we judge someone’s actions and say they should have done differently, we are always making that judgment on the basis of the reasons available to us and not necessarily on the basis of the reasons available to the person we are judging at the time they made their choice. Even if the reasons available to us were available to the person at the time the choice is made, our sensitivity to those reasons and the relative strength of those reasons is different for us than for the person we are judging.

Given our ability to imagine Dad investing in Microsoft, does it follow that he could have invested in Microsoft? Not at all. Dad did not have access to the reasons, or sensitivity to reasons, that would have made it possible for him to do so.

Moreover, we imagine impossible things all the time, like in the case of consuming fiction. We can imagine Harry Potter well enough to follow the story and immerse ourselves into its world. But if you pull at any threads then the logic of the world quickly unravels and plot holes emerge. Magic is physically impossible, and yet we can imagine it. We can imagine Harry Potter doing otherwise (say, casting the Killing Curse on Bellatrix instead of sparing her), but Harry Potter cannot do otherwise as he does not exist.

So reasons give us the ought, and the ease of imagining someone making choices, even when those choices are impossible, gives us the (mistaken) can.

'Ought implies can' is correct in the following sense: ought implies blameworthiness in the sense of critical blame, i.e. beholding someone’s lack of quality. If someone ought to φ, but fails to φ, then we criticize this person’s lack of understanding of the reasons we see why they should have φ'd.

Compatibilists want to say that Dad could have invested in Microsoft in the sense that had he tried to do so, he would have succeeded.[*6] But that pushes the problem back a step: Of course Dad could not have tried doing so given his ignorance.

The compatibilists are right in the following sense: given the fact that Dad could not have tried not because of constraints outside of his character, but due to constraints related to his character, Dad’s failure to try says something about his character, namely his ignorance.

Denying ‘ought implies can’ entails the following: We ought to do things we cannot do. For many people that sounds strange, even unintelligible. If I cannot do something, then I cannot be blamed for not doing it. And yet, if I ought to do something, then I can be blamed for failing to do it. So if I ought to do it, I can do it. We can show the logic in the following way:

1) If I ought to φ, then not φ-ing is a failure on my part. (Premise 1 - common sense)

 

2) I ought to φ. (Premise 2 - necessarily true in some cases if there are moral facts)

 

3) Therefore, not φ-ing is a failure on my part. (Modus ponens, from 1,2)

 

4) If I cannot φ, then not φ-ing is not a failure on my part. (Premise 3 - common sense)

 

5) Therefore, I can φ. (Modus tollens, from 3,4)

Given the common sense nature of Premises 1 and 3, it looks like the proponent of NF who denies ‘ought implies can’ is forced to deny Premise 2, which amounts to denying the existence of moral facts. This brings us to Objection 3 against NF.

Objection 3: NF entails there are no moral facts.

On the contrary, moral facts fit nicely on NF. Denying moral facts wreaks havoc on morality, so the objection goes. If there is no truth to the statement “murder is wrong”, then someone can be perfectly within their epistemic rights and yet commit murder. And yet, as I myself would argue, one cannot commit murder while being perfectly within their epistemic rights.

Given what I’ve said about reasons, it’s no surprise that I accept rationalism about moral facts, which says that moral facts are a species of epistemic fact. Moral facts are facts about what we should do. Epistemic facts are facts about what we should believe, or about what’s rational to believe. We can apply epistemic facts to moral contexts when behaviors are grounded in beliefs. If an action depends on an objectively irrational belief, then that action is objectively irrational.

Therefore I must deny one of the ‘common sense’ premises, and I deny Premise 1, that oughts entail blameworthiness, which leads to our last Consequence. In short, I accept critical blameworthiness but I reject moral blameworthiness.

Objection 4: NF cannot make sense of praise and blame.

On the contrary, NF can make perfect sense of our common sense attitudes of praise and blame. If we can think of praise as in ‘singing the praises of’ something, then we can think of blame as in beholding a lack of quality in something, and this kind of bemoaning the badness of something is what I mean by critical blame.

Saying that I ought to φ is to say that the reasons for φ-ing outweigh the reasons for not φ-ing. So failing to φ is to fail to have access to, grasp, understand, or have the proper sensitivity to the reasons for φ-ing. But whether one succeeds or fails to have access to, grasp, understand, or have the proper sensitivity to reasons is not up to us, and so we cannot be credited or blamed for this success or failure. We can acknowledge the quality, or lack thereof, of a person in some respect while simultaneously acknowledging that such quality is not chosen by the person.

So on one kind of blame – critical blame – we can appropriately praise or criticize the qualities of persons, such as the quality of being rational or irrational. I suggest that our common attitudes of praise and blame often manifest exactly as this kind of critical blame. But on the blame we care about in this context – moral blame – we cannot appropriately praise or blame persons for succeeding or failing to be rational, as such success or failure is not up to the person.

---

*1 - Michael Huemer, Knowledge, Reality, and Value (Self-published, 2021), 192-193.

*2 - I accept hard incompatibilism, which says free will is impossible on either determinism or indeterminism. If we take free will to require a kind of self-determination, then both determinism and indeterminism preclude self-determination, so the hard incompatibilist argues, and so we can refer to both as ‘determinism.’

*3 - Huemer, Knowledge, 192.

*4 - Huemer, Knowledge, 193.

*5 - Amy Karofsky, A Case for Necessitarianism (New York: Routledge, 2022), 152-153.

*6 - Robert Kane, Four Views on Free Will (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 12.

*7 - For an example of this kind of defense of moral facts from epistemic facts, see Terence Cuneo, The Normative Web (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 224.

Stream of consciousness - The martyr and the animal

"I wanna die happy"

-Sufjan, song 'Die Happy'

Part 1: Metatheory of truth

My meta-theory of truth says that truth concerns correspondence to reality, and then theories of truth address that correspondence relation.

A power theory of truth says you correspond to reality in the relevant way when something works, helps you survive, or gives you power. The power theory of truth is motivated by three things: 

1) The (alleged) failure of analytic philosophy to provide an undeniable method for adjudicating analytic truth; 

2) The absolute undeniability of experience; and

3) Survival as the necessary precondition for the relevance of truth.

We cannot be certain of things like the existence of God or free will. Philosophers waffle and waver and grope about endlessly with no progress in sight when it comes to these kinds of debates. But what we can be absolutely certain of is our lived, authentic experience. Descartes would agree: We can have phenomenal certainty. Maybe my experiences are an illusion or dreamed up or misinterpreted. Doesn't matter. I still have phenomenal certainty of my experiences. Even if my interpretation of my experiences is false, I can still be certain of my experience of myself interpreting my experience in the way I do. My experience of myself interpreting my experience is part of my phenomenal certainty.

There are many cases where truth doesn't matter. If I'm arrested and convicted for a crime I did not commit, the truth that I am innocent has no intrinsic power in that situation. I am forced to endure horrible experiences in prison and propositional truth is worthless in preventing my false incarceration. If raiders descend upon my village and murder the men and take the women, the moral facts that murder and rape are wrong are utterly impotent in stopping the aggressors. Truth has no intrinsic power. There is no karmic system that shoots lightning bolts at those who violate moral facts. Reality doesn't work that way. Ironically, reality doesn't care about reality; truth doesn't care about truth.

And yet, knowledge is power. If I know ahead of time that raiders are coming and I get my family to safety, then my survival and experiences are protected. Then I am connected to reality in the relevant way, and that power connection or survival connection – that's the correspondence relation.

The only thing undeniable is our experience. Phenomenal certainty is our only undeniable guide in life. Everything else is suspect. But phenomenal certainty includes certainty in the goodness of good experiences and the badness of bad experiences. Therefore, what matters most is maximizing good experiences and minimizing bad ones. How do we do that? Through freedom. How do we get freedom? Through power. The only thing that's true, in any relevant sense, is power. Power is what gives us control over our experiences so we can have good ones and avoid bad ones. If I connect to reality in a way that increases my power, then I connect to reality in the only relevant and undeniable way.

Besides, if the name of the game were to believe what's true in some analytical sense, then that presupposes your survival, because you can't believe what's true when you're dead. Survival is a necessary precondition for the relevance of truth. Thus, correspondence to reality is only relevant when such correspondence keeps you alive. We see this in phrases like "Money talks" or "Money validates." If something makes money, then it's true. That is, if something makes money, then it's connected to reality in the only way that matters. If something fails to make money, then it's false in the only way that matters.

The power theory of truth comes full circle: analytic theories of truth don't work. They don't give us power. Therefore, they don't connect us to reality in the relevant way.

But there are three obvious problems with the power theory. The first is that it's false that analysis doesn't work. Mathematics is analytical and absolutely works (though, only when it confers a survival advantage through a successful job or product). Data analysis is analytical and works. But if these forms of analysis work even according to the power theory of truth, then the power theory must admit that there's something about analysis that allows us to connect to reality. But then an analytic theory of truth is true.

The core difference between the power theory of truth and the analytic theory is optimism about a priori knowledge and human reasoning. The analytic theory says yea to a priori reasoning; the power theory says nay. The power theory says human reasoning is clearly deficient, because look at how well it has worked thus far. The analytic theory says we can see for ourselves, using the power of reason, that certain a priori truths are true.

The second problem is that a power theory of truth creates a kind of short-sightedness. What if the survival is short-lived? Then is the truth short-lived? Take Nazi Germany for example. They survived quite well as they rose to power, until they lost the war. So was Nazism true for a bit and then lost its truth?

The third obvious problem is that falsity often confers a survival advantage. Nazism and slavery were never true despite connecting to reality in such a way that conferred power to Nazis and slavers for the time they did.

Perhaps a fourth problem is that truth as a linguistic, propositional notion is necessarily analytic, and humans have no choice but to be linguistic, rational creatures, and thus we have no choice but to adopt an analytic notion of truth.

Because of these problems, we have no choice but to incorporate the power theory of truth into a broader analytic theory of truth. It's clearly true that some truths are more important than others, and it's true that in urgent situations prudential wisdom is far more important than analytic wisdom. All your knowledge of arguments about God's existence does you little good if you keep your door unlocked and are killed in the night by a thief.

(This assumes the importance of survival which we will address in a bit.)

Because we cannot avoid an analytic theory of truth, our lack of an undeniable method for truth is irrelevant; we simply have to strive to discover and establish such a method to the best of our abilities.

The analytic theory of truth comes full circle: the power theory of truth is analytically self-refuting, as its analysis of methodology and the undeniability of experience is itself an analysis. But if analysis is unreliable, then this analysis is unreliable. For the power theory of truth to work, it would have to be totally non-propositional, which is impossible.

There is yet another problem with the power theory of truth: it forces one into the archetype of the animal, while some of us fall into the archetype of the martyr.

Part 2: The martyr and the animal

The most fundamental belief of all living things is the 'going concern' – I must survive. Survival is the most basic value. When given the choice between survival and truth, most humans most of the time will follow the most basic value and choose survival. And yet this is how you get tribalism, genocide, Nazis, and all of the worst things. One of the deepest flaws of humanity is utterly unchangeable – and this is the flaw of choosing survival over truth.

Normalcy is a deep value because normalcy confers social success, and social success confers survival. But if survival is a misplaced value, then social success is a misplaced value, and so normalcy is a misplaced value. If there is a different value structure – the value of truth – then according to this structure that which gets in the way of truth is that which is bad. If the most normal thing to do is to choose survival over truth, then normalcy is bad according to the truth-oriented value structure.

To survive is to survive as a self, as the self is the recipient of experiences, and you cannot survive without experience. This is why there is no such thing as 'ego death' in this life. I imagine folks who've used psychedelics would disagree with me here, maybe even with certainty. And yet these folks aren't tripping 24/7. Eventually they get back to their lives and have experiences of going to work and doing the basic things of life. But who is it that is having these experiences? Especially if you go on to have painful experiences, the realness of pain asserts the realness of the self. Something without an ego cannot assert the going concern, but someone who chooses survival when aware they could choose death asserts the going concern.

The closest thing to ego death in this life is accepting the fact that when you die you will cease to exist forever, and thus to internalize the truth that reality does not need you or depend on you in any way. This is not to devalue the self completely, but to devalue it massively compared to what the ego wants to assert. Because there is a small amount of value of the self, choosing to live, and thus asserting that value, is not irrational.

Christians are only pseudo-martyrs. Christians are willing to die for what they believe in this life, but only because they believe such a death leads to life. Same for Muslims who die in Jihad. While the Christian appears to be choosing truth over life, the Christian is really just choosing life as they understand it. Only a non-Christian can be a true martyr – someone who disregards survival in any form for truth.

Literal martyrs are people who die for a cause or for their religion. Archetypal martyrs are people who have a non-normal value structure that says the following: When given a choice between survival and non-trivial truth, choose non-trivial truth at the expense of survival.

This demands the question: how can we tell whether a truth is trivial vs non-trivial? What are those truths that are worth dying for?

Choosing survival over non-trivial truth is terrible because of its terrible consequences. So we look to the plausible consequences to see whether the truth is worth dying for. We can give extreme examples where the answer is obvious. Is it worth dying for the truth of how many blades of grass are on my lawn? No. Is it worth dying for the truth that Nazism is wrong? Yes.

Here is a less obvious example: You work for a company that holds false beliefs about social justice or something. You are put on the spot to give your opinion on something. You can either lie and say what they want to hear or tell the truth. If you tell the truth there might be an HR report against you and you could even lose your job.

On one hand, it doesn't seem like standing up for the truth will have any meaningful consequence other than potentially getting you fired or at least turning your co-workers against you.

On the other hand, you might potentially sow the seeds that result in your co-workers changing their minds, which would be very good. Moreover, you might discover other people at your job who agree with you and through strength in numbers you might be able to change the culture within your job so that your beliefs needn't hide in the closet. Failing to integrate the shadow can cause internal turmoil, because you feel like an imposter, withholding your true self for the sake of social success. If you can share your beliefs and thereby integrate your shadow, you can lessen that burden, lower social stress, and increase your happiness.

Most creatures most of the time act as if their survival is the single most important thing in the universe. Ego death, at least the closest to it, is the giving up of this belief. And we should give up this belief because it's false. But what does it look like when someone gives up the most basic belief, and swaps out the most fundamental value with a new, enlightened value? It looks like archetypal martyrdom – a general disregard for survival in favor of believing, discovering, and spreading the truth, and doing what's right.

Am I being a hypocrite? I'm choosing to survive now aren't I?

There is something true when it comes to the value of survival. What's false is that my survival is the most important thing. It's not wrong to choose survival. It's wrong to choose survival at the expense of non-trivial truth. I'm speaking in terms of both analytic truth and truth as in what's right, as in what's truly consequentially best.

Some people define the survival value as the basis of rationality. To be rational just is to hold onto an absolute survival value or to hold to the survival belief. On this view, any kind of disregard for one's survival is irrational.

I disagree with this definition of rationality. Instead, rationality is one's ability to engage in formal and informal reasoning.

Survival is a success term: one can succeed or fail to survive. The martyr is potentially someone who cannot succeed in survival, and so they change their value structure so that survival no longer matters, protecting their ego. In this case, we can give a Nietzschean critique of the archetypal martyr as a dishonest person who, coping with their failure to survive, lies about their true feelings of what's important (really, they do believe that their survival is the most important thing, as all creatures are forced to believe) as a way to protect their ego. In this case, the martyr, far from achieving ego death by disregarding the self in favor of a higher purpose, upholds their ego by shifting their failure to survive to a success in the proper valuation of their survival. ("All those lowly normal people choose survival over truth. Pah! Not me. I choose truth over survival, because I am so enlightened!")

A true ego death involves no concern over success or failure. This is why there is no such thing as ego death in life, because in life one must be concerned with success and failure. The most obvious and basic kind of success is success in survival, and all other kinds of success can be reduced to a success in survival. The martyr survives death by being remembered for dying for the cause, and the cause itself survives the martyr, imparting immortality.

Moreover, if the martyr believes that their work will outlast them, then this is still a kind of reach for immortality, which is an assertion of one's continued existence, or at least continued effect on the living world.

To solve this worry, the martyr should come clean and say of course there is no ego death in this life. The martyr is not rejecting the most fundamental belief, only shifting it. Archetypal martyrdom is just a variation of the fundamental value, and not a true subversion of it.

Instead of pursuing the self-satisfaction of survival, the martyr pursues self-satisfaction through higher purpose, legacy, and virtue. What do you find more compelling: aimless survival, or fulfilling a higher purpose, legacy, and virtue?

There is a simplicity and obviousness to survival, and as such it comes across as animalistic and cowardly. There is bravery in facing death.

If someone truly has the option between survival and truth, then choosing truth is meaningful. But if survival is not an option due to failure, then choosing truth is a way to save face.

Ironically, this call to honesty is exactly the kind of focus on truth the martyr is striving for. Only a martyr would care about the true intentions of the martyr. The non-martyr only cares about whether the person survives; if the person does not survive, then the person has failed full stop.

The archetypal martyr and the archetypal animal talk past one another. Both accuse each other of failure, and both deny each other's accusation. The animal's failure to rise above its genetic impulse is grounded in its success of survival.

The animal is guaranteed to fail by its own value, as its failure to survive is guaranteed. But the martyr can succeed in its task of achieving acceptance of death. I can die happy not because I do not exist, but because my existence has achieved a status that I can be happy with, a status that I take to be in some sense surpassing death.

And here we see the even more fundamental value of both the martyr and the animal: the value of happiness, or good conscious experiences. You cannot have good conscious experiences when you are dead, hence the value of survival. But for the martyr, survival per se is boring. Survival does not and cannot by itself grant happiness. Survival is necessary for a time, to achieve some kind of status that allows the self to die happy.

For the martyr, success cannot be something that depends on being alive, such as hedonistic experiences. That sets the self up for failure, as you set death up to be this invincible enemy guaranteed to defeat you for all time. To have any chance of not meeting total failure, death must be defeated in some sense.

Paradoxically, embracing death is necessary to defeat it, because death cannot be defeated any other way. This is not so much a defeat of death, but rather a making of death's victory your own.

The martyr has zero respect for the animal and vice versa. The martyr is a loser, a failure, poor, weak, etc. The animal is a simpleton, a puppet, a cliche, a lemming, a sheep, an NPC, living an unexamined life, going through the motions, and so on.

Both the martyr and the animal want to be happy, but because they face different problems, they adopt different strategies to achieve happiness. For the martyr, coming to terms with life and death is the most important thing. So for the martyr to be happy, they must achieve a status where they can die happy. The animal can never die happy and rejects death absolutely to the bitter end. The animal sets itself up for guaranteed failure.

The martyr really is an animal, just a variation of it. You cannot defeat death. But you can share in death's victory. By using death as a guide to your life, you prioritize your achievements and work urgently to achieve them. Death, causing you to achieve something so great that you can die happy, gives you a glory you couldn't have achieved alone. Of course, you have to be lucky enough to not die too soon. This is why we shouldn't fear death, only dying before we accomplish that thing that makes us able to die happy.

The martyr's advantage is this: if I can die happy, then I didn't throw away my life pursuing shallow hedonistic pleasures but actually thought about what is it that I could accomplish that would be the most meaningful thing – so meaningful that it allows me to die happy. The animal, in contrast, lives aimlessly in life, trying desperately to hoard as much good experience and pleasure as possible until the end. But the martyr has a cause, a purpose they are striving for. The martyr paradoxically uses his fear of death to overcome his fear of death.

There are risks to being a martyr. What if you die before you achieve what you must achieve to die happy? What if you achieve it and don't feel satisfied like you thought you would? What if you can't achieve it and fall into despair?

There are risks to being an animal. The animal, trying to be happy by chasing good experiences, ironically becomes miserable because they never achieved that thing that could allow them to die happy. Instead, they only achieved shallow hedonistic pursuits.

However, in theory there are people who are so shallow in their character that at the end the thing that would allow them to die happy would be the very thing they did – to live life to the fullest in terms of pursuing good experiences. So not all animals die unhappy.

In summary, both the archetypal martyr and the archetypal animal are the same – someone who wants to be happy. For some of us that means achieving that thing that allows us to die happy and to thereby share in death's victory. For the archetypal martyr, it's wrong to avoid death at all costs if that cost includes reaching that state where one can share in death's victory, as there is no point in making a great effort to survive when you can die happy.

Definition of religion

The following definition is from Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust, 2003, pg 4:

"Roughly, religion is (1) a community's costly and hard-to-fake commitment (2) to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents (3) who master people's existential anxieties, such as death and deception."

Graham Oppy gives the following definition of religion, following Atran's, and psychologist Ara Norenzayan's, lead (Four Views on Christianity and Philosophy, pg 22):

". . . in almost all human societies we find

1. widespread belief in gods, ancestor spirits, and other nonnatural agents;

2. hard-to-fake public expressions of costly material commitments to those nonnatural agents in the form of offerings or sacrifices of goods, property, time, and perhaps even life;

3. mastering of people's existential anxieties concerning death, deception, disease, catastrophe, pain, loneliness, injustice, want, and loss, by these costly commitments to nonnatural agents;

4. ritualized, rhythmic, sensory coordinations of items 1, 2, and 3 in communion, congregation, and intimate fellowship; and

5. evolutionary canalization and convergence of items 1, 2, 3, and 4 that tend toward passionate, communal displays of costly commitments to supernatural agents."

Keith Yandell provides two compatible definitions (Philosophy of Religion, 2nd ed., pg 10 & 11):

". . . a religion is a conceptual system that provides an interpretation of the world and the place of human beings in it, bases an account of how life should be lived given that interpretation, and expresses this interpretation and lifestyle in a set of rituals, rites, institutions, and practices."

"A religion proposes a diagnosis (an account of what it takes to be the basic problem facing human beings) and a cure (a way of permanently and desirably solving that problem) . . ."

Ben Clements, approaching the issue from a legal perspective, defines religion in the following way ("Defining Religion in the First Amendment: A Functional Approach", Cornell Law Review, Volume 74, Issue 3, 1989):

" . . . religion can be defined as a comprehensive belief system that addresses the fundamental questions of human existence, such as the meaning of life and death, man's role in the universe, and the nature of good and evil, and that gives rise to duties of conscience."

Clements responds to objections from underinclusiveness, overinclusiveness, risk of fraudulent religious claims, and risk of undue interference with government activity.

Notably, he clarifies that 'comprehensive' needn't mean addressing every question known to man, but rather that the belief system is wide-ranging (perhaps 'broad' would be the better word).

The privation theory of evil is false

The privation theory of evil says evil reduces to a lack of good, much like how darkness reduces to a lack of light or cold reduces to a lack of heat. I accept the standard objection to the privation theory of evil, which says pain is certainly evil (=bad) and yet pain cannot be a lack of something. (Yes, pain is instrumentally good for survival, but intrinsically bad, and its intrinsic badness is directly accessible to us.) To lack a lack is to have something. If I lack a lack of money, then I have money. So if pain were a lack of something, then lacking pain would be to have something (pleasure? contentment?). But when someone is dead (=no longer existing), they certainly lack pain, and yet they certainly do not have anything. So the presence of pain cannot be an absence.

This means the presence of the pain of being cold cannot be an absence of feeling heat. In that sense, cold is not a lack of heat. Likewise, our experience of being frustrated by darkness is not the same as the lack of the experience of being blinded by light.

It's true that darkness (=a lack of photons) is a lack of light. And cold (=a lack of the excitation of atoms) is a lack of heat. But those are non-mental, physical descriptions of darkness and cold. Evil is not non-mental; in fact evil is realized in conscious experience (according to my preferred theory of evil). Again, pain is evil and mental.

So the analogy between evil and darkness / cold fails. Darkness and cold are only lacks when interpreted in a non-mental sense. While extrinsic and depriving evils can be non-mental, intrinsic evils must be mental, and it's with respect to intrinsic evils the privation theory fails. The ontological problem of intrinsic evils remains.

As the SEP article points out (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-evil/#DuaPriTheEvi), even if the privation theory succeeded, it would still be mysterious as to why God allows privation evils.

There is the question of justification: How can God justify privation evils?

And there is still an ontological question: To allow privation evils is to allow a lack of perfection, but it's intuitive that a perfect being would only (and even could only) beget perfection.