04 June 2025 - Thoughts

• Today I'm working on my post "Intellectual Virtue #1 - Joe Schmid on Intellectual Virtue", part of a series on intellectual virtue.
• Intellectual virtue is part of a broader topic – critical thinking, and informal reasoning. It's part of the preliminaries to truthseeking, the foundations of truthseeking, and the universal truths that will not be denied by any rational person whose goal is to believe what's true. It's a good place to start for doing philosophy, since everything else depends on it.
• Critical thinking can be defined very simply: Critical thinking is asking 'why' questions. By asking why questions, one is trying to understand the fundamental principles behind the truth of something. Critical thinking involves principles surrounding problem solving, which itself relates to goals.
• This topic transitions nicely into the topic of mistakes. Mistakes are related to goals. So if you have a goal of maximizing your true philosophical beliefs, then anything that makes it less likely for you to get rid of false philosophical beliefs or to adopt true philosophical beliefs is a mistake relative to that goal.
• This also transitions into the broader topic of reasoning, critical thinking, methodology,  justification, and knowledge.
• As part of the topic of mistakes and intellectual virtue, the "threat" of normativity presents itself. You should be passionate about truth, you should be intellectually brave, you should be intellectually disciplined, etc. This is what intellectual virtue reveals. But then are we committed to true 'should' statements? If yes, then doesn't that mean there is an irreducible epistemic normative property? If yes, then doesn't that mean there is normativity? If yes, then doesn't that mean that epistemic normativity can be applied to ethical contexts to arrive at moral normativity? If yes, then doesn't that mean moral realism is true?
• Actually, if we can analyze 'should' as not a basic, essence fact, and thus as an irreducible normative property, but instead can analyze 'should' as involving mistakes and goals, then there is no need to posit an irreducible normative property. 'Should' statements are true relative to goals.
• This solves the is-ought gap by analyzing 'oughts' in terms of 'is'. Everything is descriptive. This is because 'oughts' are analyzed in terms of mistakes and mistakes are descriptive. There is no irreducible 'ought', at least not necessarily, not yet.
• While I totally get the idea that there are judgment-independent value facts that are phenomenally grounded, I don't get Sharon Rawlette's idea that there are judgment-independent moral facts that are phenomenally grounded. In other words, I don't see how intrinsic goods ought to be. Intrinsic goods ought to be relative to the goal of being happy, but you still have relativism there. Intrinsic goods don't have a "built-in" ought-to-be-ness, it seems to me, because some intrinsic goods are not worth it, and thus you shouldn't pursue those intrinsic goods given the goal of being happy. [Here Rawlette would distinguish between pro tanto ought-to-be-ness and pro toto ought-to-be-ness. But if 'oughts' are analyzed in terms of mistakes and goals, then there is no such thing as pro tanto ought-to-be-ness. Though if you admit there are value facts, which I do, then you have to admit that some things are better than others in terms of producing value. So that still leaves us with some kind of moral realism, even if there technically is no irreducible normative property.]
• Why prefer the analysis of 'should' in terms of goals and mistakes over the analysis of essence? First, maybe I'm wrong and the latter analysis is preferable. I'd need to study the Shafer / Cuneo paper.
• Second, the reason is because we can analyze 'should' in terms of goals and mistakes, and so it's worth pursuing.
• Third, you might think such an analysis couldn't be possible were it the case that there were an irreducible normative property. So the fact that we can analyze 'should' in terms of goals is evidence in favor of that analysis.
• Fourth, if there is an irreducible normative property, it's hard to see how we could ever come to learn it. There's a problem of moral knowledge. You'd have to go for some kind of moral intuitionism. That view clashes with moral disagreement. People have wildly different moral intuitions. So I find intuitionism to be a very unattractive view. I also don't like the idea of anything being "magically" right or wrong, meaning the rightness or wrongness of something is just a brute fact. Example: Why is it wrong to torture babies for fun? If the intuitionist can only say that this is an invalid question because it's an autonomous fact that torturing babies for fun is wrong, then I'm not sure that this doesn't face the problem of a failure to explain moral data. It seems like the intuitionist is forced to say that it's simply an analytic truth; someone who grasps the concepts of 'torture' and 'for fun', 'baby', etc., will, purely by virtue of grasping, come to see that the statement is true. But 1) this doesn't remotely work for controversial moral debates, hence the problem of moral disagreement, and 2) it just seems obvious to me that we can explain why it's wrong to torture a baby for fun; it's simply not an analytic truth. And so it's not an autonomous fact and so the question "why is it wrong to torture babies for fun" is a perfectly legitimate question with an answer. That answer is something like: it's a value fact that torturing babies for fun fails to maximize value (i.e., fails to avoid causing pointless pain, fails to cultivate virtues which are necessary to maximize value, fails to generate extrinsically valuable happiness, etc.), and thus it's a fact that relative to the goal of maximizing value, you should not torture babies for fun. Maybe the question "Should you have such and such goal" is a nonsensical question given that the concept of 'should' depends on there being a goal. So the question could only make sense if you are asking about a subgoal in service to a larger goal. Given a larger (more fundamental) goal it makes perfect sense to ask whether one should or should not have a certain sub-goal. Arguably, goals terminate into a final, ultimate goal, and the reason for having that goal is because you cannot not have it.
• This idea of a fundamental goal relates to autonomous facts. If you want to arrive at true philosophical beliefs, or least maximize your chances of having arrived at true philosophical beliefs, then you want your beliefs to be justified. But what does it mean to have justified beliefs?
• One answer is to have good reasons for why you believe what you do.
• What are reasons? One answer: reasons are answers to why questions.
• But what is a good reason for believing in something? One answer: a good reason is an answer to a why question that is 1) your answer and not someone else's, and thus is something you actually believe; 2) true; 3) justified (the truth of the answer cannot be accidental); 4) relevant to the question; the answer actually answers the why question.
• So a good reason is a relevant bit of knowledge. But hang on, doesn't this lead to a regress? To justify my belief, I need a good reason. But to have a good reason, I need justified belief, which means I need a further good reason. So good reasons require good reasons all the way down. 
• Analogy: Let's say I want to transport some furniture using a truck. I'll need to strap the furniture down or else it will fall off the truck when I drive off. Imagine I strap the furniture to another piece of furniture, but the second piece is itself not strapped down to the truck. Is the first piece of furniture secure? No. It, along with the second piece, will fly off as soon as I start driving. What if I attached both pieces of furniture to a third unsecured piece of furniture. Now is my first piece of furniture secure? Nope. All three pieces will just fly off. If I had an infinite number of pieces of furniture, would that do the trick? After all, if you ask "What's securing this piece of furniture?", you always have an answer: the next piece of furniture. Since this is a feature of every single piece of furniture, doesn't it follow that every piece of furniture is secure? Put another way, going back to the three pieces of furniture, the lack of security of the third piece transfers to the second, which transfers to the first, which is why the first piece is unsecured. But in the infinite chain, there's never a piece of furniture that lacks security; each is secured by a subsequent piece. So there's never a transfer of a lack of security to ascending pieces of furniture. No piece of furniture in the infinite chain gets a chance to lack security.
• Maybe there's a way to argue against this, to say that deferred security doesn't count, or that the entire chain is left insecure such that driving away would result in an infinite number of pieces of furniture flying off given the fact that the infinite chain itself is not tied down.
• I'm open to that idea, but another idea is to grant the logic as a peculiar consequence when chains of dependent items become infinite (infinity tends to have strange consequences). The problem is more basic and more obvious: you can't have an infinite number of pieces of furniture. (This move is inspired by what Amy Karofsky says on page 60 of The Case for Necessitarianism.)
• This generalizes across both epistemology and metaphysics. If you were to have an infinite chain of reasons, then each member of that chain would in fact be justified. But it's impossible to have an infinite chain of reasons. So inevitably you must either arrive at a belief that itself does not require justification, or arrive at a reason that is a good reason without requiring a further reason. So either there must be beliefs that do not require justification, or a second kind of justification for basic beliefs, or a second kind of good reason.
• This applies to metaphysics: The 'why' question for why something exists must terminate in something whose existence is not apt for explanation.
• This applies to value theory: The 'why' question for why something is wanted must terminate in something that is wanted for its own sake. Or, why something is perceived as good must terminate in something that is good in and of itself – something that is good in a non-derivative way – something whose goodness is not derived from the goodness of something more basic.
• This also relates to explanation, understanding, and grounding. While explanations are answers to why questions pertaining to why something exists, or has the properties it does, reasons are answers to why questions pertaining to why someone believes or behaves the way they do. So reasons are a kind of explanation. (Or, reason and explanation are basically synonyms; hence, the Principle of Sufficient Reason.) [Given the fact that reasons and explanations are both answers to why questions, perhaps there is a way to synthesize the reason view of justification with explanationism; explanationism says that you are justified in your belief when the truth of the belief is what explains your belief.]
• So basic beliefs, basic facts, and basic goods—these are key to understanding the foundations of epistemology, metaphysics, and value theory.