Anna Nyman - "Moral Principles: A Challenge for Deniers of Moral Luck" (2024)

The problem of moral luck has its origins, at least in its modern conception, with Thomas Nagel. 

The author notes: "A familiar understanding of the problem of moral luck has it that it consists in a contradiction to which common-sense ideas about moral responsibility seem to commit us: that moral luck exists and that it does not." (Anna Nyman, 177)

I wonder if this paradox just is the paradox of blaming the human qua person vs blaming the human qua organism? In one sense we are not blameworthy at all – in the sense of moral blame, which is the sense of whether there is anything bad we can say about the soul itself. I argue that we cannot judge souls; souls are passengers, experiencing life. Even our choices are just experiences. On a more epiphenomenal interpretation, our choices are literally just experiences; we don't cause anything. On a more common sensical interpretation, we do in fact cause things and we do make choices, but in doing so we are merely experiencing the decision making qualities that have been handed to us by nature and nurture. Either way, we merely experience our choices and cannot be blamed for them, not in the sense of judging the poor soul (or the happy soul) who gets to enjoy (or suffers from) the choices they will make, borne out of the poor qualities of nature and/or nurture surrounding the soul that the soul had no control over.

But in another sense we are totally blameworthy. You can acknowledge the goodness or badness of these qualities. And in this sense of critical blame, we can legitimately criticise people. But we aren't criticizing their souls; those we (should) feel nothing but sympathy (or envy) for. We legitimately criticize people in the sense that we legitimately evaluate the goodness or badness of the qualities that people happen to have, but cannot be identified with. You have the quality of being young, smart, attractive, kind, selfish, narcissistic, jealous, or what have you, but you are not identified with these qualities. These qualities are part of you, or associated with you, or you possess or have them, but you are not identical to them. You are identical to yourself, which is a pure subject, a self, the self which is not only right in front of you, but is the front in front of all fronts.

The classic case of moral luck that I believe is from Nagel is the two drivers who drive recklessly. Both drivers selfishly take on the chance of getting someone hurt just so they can have some fun. One driver crashes into another car, killing an innocent person. The other driver does no damage to anything. Intuitively, the driver that actually caused damage is more blameworthy than the driver that did not (they are the one who goes to jail). And yet, both drivers committed the same selfish act. So intuitively, both drivers are equal in their guilt.

Our author today gives examples of assassins. Both assassins intend to kill for money. One succeeds. The other does not because a bird flies in the way, taking the hit. Again, both perpetrators had the exact same evil intention. But because of chance events, only one evil act is actually completed, and it's this assassin that takes the greater blame. If the assassin that fails has the better moral character, it's only thanks to the luck of having a bird fly through at the right moment. Intuitively, this lucky moral character should count for nothing in terms of moral value.

Our author gives three examples of moral luck (thought experiments are mine, though I'm sure I've heard similar versions elsewhere):

Resultant moral luck: this is the assassin or the reckless driver as described above.

Circumstantial moral luck: imagine two people come across a wallet full of cash. One has a great job and is doing well financially. He returns the wallet. The other is homeless and broke. He takes the money. 

The person who returns the wallet does the right thing. But if they do the right thing purely because of the good fortune of their circumstances, where's the moral value in that?

Likewise, for the person who takes the money, if they would have returned the wallet under different circumstances, then how does their taking the money disparage their moral character when it's the circumstances, not their character, that causes the difference in action?

Constitutive moral luck: again imagine two people come across a wallet full of cash. Neither person needs the money. One takes it anyway because he enjoys the thrill of getting away with things. The other returns the wallet because he would have a guilty conscience otherwise.

Again, the person who returns the wallet does the right thing, but only because their constitution was so shaped by nature and nurture. They were raised by morally upright parents and taught that stealing is wrong, maybe they recently had their own wallet stolen giving them a sense of empathy, their brain structure is such that they have a strong sense of conscience, and so on.

The person who takes the money does the wrong thing, but only because they were unlucky enough to have their dispositions shaped by unfortunate life circumstances.

Because your constitution is a result of circumstances, I don't see why we couldn't just subsume constitutive luck under circumstantial luck? While we're at it, resultant luck could be described in terms of circumstances as well, like the circumstances of a bird flying through the air at the right moment. Even if a circumstance was purely result-based, like in radioactive decay, then you still have the circumstances of the decay happening this moment rather than another. So it seems like we could solidly fit "resultant luck" under circumstantial luck. 

 

But calling luck circumstantial seems like a redundancy, considering what it means to be lucky just is to have circumstances in your favor that are beyond your control. So it seems to me that we can simplify all the above terms (Resultant moral luck; Circumstantial moral luck; Constitutive moral luck) to just one: moral luck. How are these distinctions meant to be useful?

What it means to be "committed" to moral luck is to be committed to the idea that the person who does the right thing really is praiseworthy, despite doing the right thing only by good luck. 

(Assuming being a morally good person is a lucky thing to be. You could argue that there are circumstances where being a morally good person is very unlucky, because it will cause you to fight against evil and die a horrible death.) 

And, the person who does the wrong thing really is blameworthy, despite doing the wrong thing only by bad luck.

Contrast this commitment to a commitment to the control principle, which says that "agents are responsible for something only to the extent that it depends on factors within their control" (Anna Nyman, 179).

These are the two clashing intuitions...

(L) people are praiseworthy / blameworthy despite moral luck. 

(The assassin that hits their target really is more blameworthy than the assassin who misses.)

(C) people are only praiseworthy / blameworthy if they are in control.

(Both assassins are equally blameworthy or blameless.)

...that form the paradox of moral luck.

And yes, I see my distinction between kinds of persons as an immediate solution to the moral luck problem. I absolutely deny L and affirm C. But I affirm L in a critical sense. I can acknowledge the badness of a hurricane without blaming any person. Likewise, I can acknowledge the badness (or goodness) of (dispositions, constitution, brain structure, sensitivity to reasons, upbringing, traumas, genetics, psychological factors... basically, nature and nurture) that a person has without blaming the person per se.

It's confusing because we use terms like "blame" and "praise" both in the sense of "attributing sourcehood" and in the sense of "regarding with awe or spite."

It's important that we separate these two senses. I call one set "moral" praise and blame and the other set "critical" praise and blame. Though, we could call moral praise and blame "praise and blame" and call critical praise and blame "love and hatred" or "awe and criticism" or "celebration and condemnation" or "beholding the goodness / badness of."

Here's a picture of things that might illuminate what I am imagining.

Imagine that souls begin in heaven. God speaks to us and says, "Do you want to go down there? Down to earth?" 

Some of us say no and stay behind in heaven. Some say yes and are let down to earth. 

"What will it be like if I go down there?", one soul asks.

God says, "Well, you will possess the body and brain of a man named John Smith. You will be a coal miner working for a company town. Your miserable and unfair working conditions will make you a terrible person, and you will become abusive to your wife and children. Alcohol becomes your only escape and you die middle-aged from liver failure."

And the soul responds, "That sounds, uh, bad. I don't want to do that."

And God says, "Too bad" and the poor soul is flung down to earth.

(God is not a good guy in this story.)

The poor soul proceeds to do all the things God said it would do. The soul is just a witness to its own choices and experiences.

Question: is anything the man does the fault of the soul? No. The soul is just the unlucky subject that happens to be attached to the poor body, poor brain, and poor circumstances of the doomed miner. (And the souls attached to his abused family members are likewise unlucky.)

(This is not to advocate for substance dualism. The point is to show that subjectivity itself is on the receiving end of the body it's attached to. If it's true that the quality of your brain is something that happens to you, and is not your fault, then the poor quality of the soul's choices, caused by the brain, are not the soul's fault either.)

Continuing with the article:

Per the author, "The most popular strategy is to abandon the particular moral responsibility judgments", that is, to accept C and reject L. (Nyman, 179)

However, abandoning moral responsibility judgments sounds like... free will skepticism! If someone abandons all moral responsibility judgments, doesn't that amount to endorsing free will skepticism? But if someone abandons only some moral responsibility judgments but not others, how do you tell which judgments are worthy of abandonment and which aren't? Where do you draw the line? Is this the problem that Nyman is pointing out?

I will quote an extended passage that gets at the heart of the issue:

I believe, however, that consistently denying moral luck is harder than previously recognized, because there seems to be little room for denying that certain factors are both beyond agents’ control and affect moral responsibility. Consider, for instance, the truth of principles about moral responsibility and the deontic status of actions. It is beyond an agent’s control that a correct moral principle condemns a certain action of hers as wrong, and yet the principle’s condemning it surely affects her moral responsibility in that it is because the principle is true that she will, given that she fulfils conditions for moral responsibility, be blameworthy for the action rather than praiseworthy. Likewise, it is beyond an agent’s control that a correct moral principle says that agents who act as she does are blameworthy for what they do rather than praiseworthy. Yet the principle’s saying so plainly affects her moral responsibility in that it is because the principle is true that she is blameworthy rather than praiseworthy. Thus, since moral principles are both beyond agents’ control and affect moral responsibility, it would seem that quite a bit of moral luck exists. (179-80)

(Emphasis mine.)

 

First, I accept the point that moral principles are indeed beyond our control. Consider a pair of individuals. One subscribes to what Nietzsche would refer to as a "slave morality," where virtue is identified with a lack of imposing oneself onto others, poverty, kindness, and non-violence. The other subscribes to a "master morality", where virtue is identified with domination, possessing material goods, and power. The person who happens to be born into peasantry is conveniently placed in the path of slave morality. The person who happens to be born into royalty is conveniently placed in the path of master morality.

I don't know if Nietzsche would make this point, but I would say that it's mighty convenient when your ethics match up with what comes easiest to you. We should be highly suspicious of such ethics. And yet, surely there are true ethical principles (assuming moral realism is true). And surely for some people those principles will line up with their circumstances such that they find it easy to be an objectively good person, whereas someone in different circumstances finds it much harder, through no fault of their own.

I don't see how this is any different from constitutive moral luck. After all, didn't we have true moral principles in mind when we were discussing the luck of ending up with a good constitution? And the luck of ending up with a good constitution is a matter of circumstance. In a footnote the author mentions that we can think of moral principle luck as circumstantial luck.

The slave/master morality scenario could be given as an example of constitutive luck: the meek peasant is constituted a decent person while the ambitious prince, say, is constituted a tyrant. Which one counts as the decent person and the other the moral failure is a matter of what the true moral principles happen to be.

So the angle of the luck of moral principles does give us another perspective through which to look at things, another level of non-control we have as moral agents. Needless to say, that fits well with free will skepticism, even if it doesn't really add any new evidence for free will skepticism, given that it's just moral luck rotated to reveal another surface.

I suppose you could take this opportunity to argue that a prince who takes on a slave morality out of their own sensitivity to reasons is demonstrating free will, given how they are "going out of their way" to adopt a certain ethical system. In this case, the prince is not adopting an ethical system out of convenience, but conviction.

However, this does nothing to give the prince any moral praiseworthiness, beyond the awe or admiration discussed earlier. The reason is because while it looks like the prince is using his free will to overcome his bias, in fact there are inputs that shape the prince's morality just like everything else, inputs beyond his control.

People who "overcome their circumstances" or "rise above their inclinations" – language pro-free-will folks use – in reality it's the intelligence and empathy, features of the brain, that cause the prince to feel the way he does to the point that it would be harder for him to take on a different ethical system. He is still very much acting within his natural inclinations.

Back to the task at hand: if moral principles are out of our control, and yet affect our moral responsibility, then there is moral luck, and a lot of it. Yes, I accept this, in one sense, and reject it in another. Whether someone has high moral qualities and is thus admirable (in the same way a beautiful vista is admirable) is a matter of luck. True moral principles determine which qualities are really "high" versus "poor." But whether someone, as a pure subject, is blameworthy in the sense of at fault or being the cause of or the source of despite having no control – that I reject wholeheartedly, and in that sense I "abandon all moral responsibility judgments." And so free will skepticism, combined with a bifurcated view of the self, solves moral luck quite nicely.

 

Now, calling them moral qualities might cause confusion, but it shouldn't. No, they are not moral qualities in the sense of indicating blameworthiness or praiseworthiness on the part of the soul. But they are moral qualities in the sense of qualities that pertain to moral contexts – rationality, sensitivity to reasons, reasonableness, kindness, level-headedness, selflessness, and so on. While these are admirable moral qualities, it is a matter of luck to what degree any person possesses any of them at any time, and so we cannot fairly attribute credit to the souls that happen to have them. That doesn't reduce the goodness (hence, the admirability) of having these qualities, as these qualities lead to flourishing for the person who has them and for those around them. (Generally this is true. As mentioned, in theory being virtuous could be hazardous to your health. You could have a tyrant who wants to crush all kind people, in which case being kind threatens your flourishing. But obviously this hazard only exists ultimately because of a lack of kindness – a lack in the tyrant.)

At this point, I don't feel the need to continue discussing the article here. At the end, the author acknowledges that free will skepticism solves the problem of relevant differences, but also notes that most deniers of moral luck will find free will skepticism an unattractive option. Free will skepticism, however, is a highly attractive option, and its ability to neatly solve the moral luck paradox, and a host of other problems, is why.

Does choosing death entail maximal suffering?

In other posts I've argued that suffering-at-capacity aka max suffering (or maxed out suffering) aka unbearable suffering is logically incompatible with a loving God. Suicide entails suffering-at-capacity. Thus, suicide entails there is no loving God.

But is it true that suicide entails unbearable suffering?

It seems like my own views say no, because I believe that some people can die happy, and can even die happy by choice. I think an example of this is Jesus, who willingly goes to his own death. But Jesus can die happy, knowing that he will survive his death and knowing that his death is for the salvation of the lucky elect (or, under universal reconciliation, for everyone).

Socrates is another example. He takes his own life, but he seems to do so with a kind of satisfaction, knowing that either he will be favorably judged by gods in the afterlife, seeing as he is a philosopher who has strived to cultivate virtue, or death is a peaceful sleep. Either way, there is nothing to worry about. Socrates dies peacefully, despite the fact he dies by suicide; no unbearable suffering in sight.

First, here is a similar puzzle: If someone sees that they will be crucified on a cross in the near future, and takes their life to prevent what would be unbearable suffering, then isn't this a case of suicide implying a lack of unbearable suffering?

My response: Dread itself can cause unbearable suffering. If you want to know whether someone is suffering unbearably, look no farther than signs that life is not worth living for them. So if someone takes their life, it must be the case that living has become unbearable by something. In the case above, it's dread that is the source of the person taking their life, and thus it is dread that is the cause of unbearable suffering.

So how do I respond to the case of Jesus, or Socrates?

One option (and these options need not be mutually exclusive) is to say that no one can really die happy; everyone wants to live. Consider what Diotima says in the Symposium:

“Now, then,” she said. “Can we simply say that people love the good?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But shouldn’t we add that, in loving it, they want the good to be theirs?”

“We should.”

“And not only that,” she said. “They want the good to be theirs forever, don’t they?”

“We should add that too.”

“In a word, then, love is wanting to possess the good forever.”

“That’s very true,” I said. (206; pg 519)

Which reminds me of something Nietzsche said:

"Oh man! Take heed of what the dark midnight says: I slept, I slept—from deep dreams I awoke: The world is deep—and more profound than day would have thought. Profound in her pain—Pleasure—more profound than pain of heart, Woe speaks; pass on. But all pleasure seeks eternity—a deep and profound eternity." (Schaeffer, Francis. How Should We Then Live? Translated by Udo Middelmann. Fleming H. Revell Company, 1976, pg 169.)

We then must speak of dying relatively happy. Some deaths are more miserable than others, and we should strive to have the least miserable death we can.

A key to dying well is to write down a bucket list, a set of things you'd like to do while you can, and to then prioritize them. Take the single most important achievement on that list and turn it into an action plan. And that there becomes your life, for the time being at least. If you do this accurately enough, and if you are lucky enough to succeed, and if you don't happen to change your mind such that the achievement in question no longer interests you, then you will achieve a pretty good sense of satisfaction with yourself and your life; you accomplished the essential task you set out to accomplish; you slayed your dragon.

So when we talk about dying happy, we are talking about something relative and not absolute. Obviously, if an old, accomplished person had the chance to live another life, or to be young again and free, they'd take that over death most of the time. But we don't get the option. So you have to psychologically adapt to what you're stuck with.

Another option is to say that Socrates did in fact suffer unbearably. 

Another option is to say that being able to die happy is exactly what causes unbearable suffering. If someone is able to die happy, then they probably have achieved some sense of existential completion; something of a self-actualization, or maybe even a psychological state beyond self-actualization. Whatever it is, it's the peak of psychological achievement; a kind of bliss or nirvana or enlightenment. But if someone has achieved such a state, then you can see how continued living could become unbearable for this kind of person. To live further would be pointless, and indeed it may be impossible to live without some kind of pursuit on which to live, a pursuit that betrays desire or need, when the person who is existentially complete has no desire or need, and thus has no pursuits, and thus has no basis on which to live. Living itself becomes unbearable for such a person. So far from the ability to die happy contradicting the idea that self-death entails unbearable suffering, it actually can entail it.

So I can have it both ways: self-death always entails unbearable suffering, and yet someone can die happy while choosing to die. But how can such deep peace be compatible with such deep suffering?

Another option is simply to say that not all suicides entail unbearable suffering, but some of them do. Even if just a single suicide entails unbearable suffering, that's enough for my argument against God.

The problem of different kinds of unbearable suffering:

Let's say someone achieves existential completion and can die happy. Because of this, they find life unbearable and so they choose their own death. Here's the problem: We now have two entirely separate kinds of unbearable suffering. The first kind is the suffering of being existentially incomplete. The second kind is living without a basis on which to live.

For the kind of person under question, the greater suffering between the two is obviously being existentially incomplete. Because, after all, why wouldn't this person just choose to die before accomplishing their great task? If they're going to choose death anyway, why not save themselves the trouble? The answer: because the thought of dying before accomplishing the great task is unbearable. And yet the thought of dying is no longer unbearable after the task has been accomplished, and indeed the thought of living becomes unbearable.

So now we have two kinds of unbearable suffering:

(1) Die before becoming existentially complete.

(2) Live while existentially complete.

Which one is worse? Surely, the first one is worse. And yet, death is not a conscious harm. And only conscious harms can be the worst harms. If suffering in general ultimately cashes out in terms of consciousness, then the worst suffering cashes out in terms of consciousness. But if we allow depriving evils to cash out in terms of consciousness via the theoretical conscious comparison between the positive goods and a lack thereof, then don't we allow depriving evils, and thus unconscious harms, to be the worst of sufferings? This would lead to a contradiction on my part.

Response: Being deprived of paradise is bad for the one deprived, but not as bad as being sent to hell. We know that being deprived of paradise is bad the same way we know being sent to hell is bad: by the test of direct awareness. We can be certain that one experience is better than another (or better than a lack) by comparing the two in our minds. If one of the experiences is not actual but probable, then we still have probabilistic justification for believing that one experience is better than another.

The person directly aware of their happiness in paradise is aware that being deprived of paradise would make them infinitely worse off. But this doesn't mean that deprivational evils are as bad as positive evils of the same magnitude. This is an asymmetry between max depriving evils and max extrinsic evils, and between max saving goods and max extrinsic goods. Being saved from hell is a max saving good. Being sent to heaven is a max extrinsic good. The latter includes the former, but then also includes infinitely more goodness. So extrinsic goods / evils are always greater than saving goods / depriving evils of the same "rank", at least when maxed, because max extrinsic goods / evils always include max saving goods / depriving evils. (Maybe unmaxed evils and goods are sometimes, or always, incommensurable and cannot be held at the same rank.)

So the worst of suffering and the best of flourishing still must be intrinsic and not merely depriving or saving. So technically the best possible good with respect to someone suffering in hell is to send them to heaven, and not merely to snuff them out of existence. But both the sending and the snuffing are in fact maximal goods, it's just that one is greater.

But how can you have two max goods with one being greater than the other? Likewise, how can max suffering be considered maxed when we can imagine a worse suffering? If (2) is an unbearable suffering, and yet (1) is worse, then (2) isn't really a max evil. This would mean that suicide doesn't entail max suffering.

Response: Think of unbearable suffering as suffering that surpasses a threshold. Different sufferings can surpass that threshold to different degrees. So if I have a bank account with $100 in it, I can overdraft it by spending $101 or by spending $1,000. If one's capacity for suffering is overdrafted, then one experiences unbearable suffering, no matter the degree of the overdraft.

This means that some max sufferings are worse than other max sufferings. This makes sense, for God could always enhance our minds so that we could suffer in deeper and more profound ways, and then torture us with our new heightened capacities for suffering. These heightened max sufferings are worse than our current max sufferings.

But max suffering is relative to the individual's capacity. And saving goods are relative to the suffering. So no matter how simple the creature, their suffering-at-capacity produces a good of being saved from that suffering, and it's hard to imagine what goods God has in mind that are supposedly greater than these saving goods.

To die happy then is to die without a specific kind of suffering – the suffering of feeling unfinished in one's life, and to die with a specific kind of happiness – the happiness of feeling that one's life is complete. But it's entirely compatible to have one kind of happiness amid outweighing pains such that one dies with one kind of happiness, peace, and yet also with unbearable suffering. The mistake is in thinking that necessarily happiness and pain eliminate each other and cannot co-exist, or in thinking that specifically contentment cannot survive along with suffering, as suffering implies discontent. But one can be content in certain respects while discontent in others, just as one can be happy with some things while unhappy with others. No one is truly happy, because to be truly happy would be to plainly ignore the failings of this world and the plights of others.

The peace that surpasses all understanding is perfectly understandable

Christians, like Paul, have been in situations where they suffer horribly. These are situations of imprisonment, martyrdom, or suffering under the pains of life. And yet, Christians report a sense of peace, calm, and even joy in these situations. In Philippians 4 (NRSVUE) we read:

Rejoice[b] in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.[c] 5 Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. 6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. 7 And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

8 Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about[d] these things. 9 As for the things that you have learned and received and heard and noticed in me, do them, and the God of peace will be with you.

There is an obvious psychoanalysis of this peace: by believing that death is not the end, and that death is the worst this world can do to you, you are in an existentially complete state. Put another way, you feel fundamentally safe. Caveat: this requires that you don't have any anxiety over whether you are living out God's plans for you – basically, as long as you don't feel like Jonah running away from your Nineveh.

Is it possible to learn this peace? "Not from a non-Christian", the Christian says.

But I disagree. While I've already written about this, I'll duplicate thoughts for this topic. I wrote the following in response to a prompt from class, about Socrates discussing how pleasures and pains, matters of the body, distract us from what matters most, which are matters of the mind and virtue:

Is it true that the body distracts us from what matters most?

In Christianity, God incarnates as Jesus, taking on a human body. From a Christian point of view, the human body is elevated and esteemed, validated by the God who designed and created the human body and the environment in which it lives. Even when Jesus rose from the dead, he did not turn into a bodiless spirit, but retained a physical body that somehow ascended to heaven.

Christians consider it a Gnostic heresy to say that the body is wretched and the soul pure, and that the physical is imperfect and evil while the immaterial is perfect and good. Indeed, the Christian would say that our souls are as corrupt as our bodies, both being corrupted by sin. It is only through faith in Jesus, and baptism, that the soul can be purified. So on one view, both the body and the soul are corrupt, and yet both are glorified and validated.

On a very different view, it is matters of the mind that distract us from what matters most, which are bodily affairs. For many folks, life just is a matter of family, sex, drugs, food, relationships, social experiences, traveling, and so forth—matters of the body. Matters of the mind are irrelevant, or even distracting us from living life. Philosophy, on this view, causes “analysis paralysis,” leading to a paralyzed life. While some people, like me, love to stay inside and read and write, many others would consider this an impoverished way of living, and a failure to live life to the fullest, which requires one to go out and do things in an embodied way.

On a third view, what matters most is transcendence. I’m reminded of a lyric I wrote long ago:

Aim for pleasure

And you won’t survive the pain

Aim for transcendence

And death will transcend your aim

I’ve heard it said that we shouldn’t aim for a life free of suffering, as that sets you up to be most vulnerable to suffering. Instead, we should engage in work we find so important that it’s worth suffering for. Transcendence refers to this ability to overcome suffering, even transform it into something good. Transcendence also refers to achieving a level of consciousness and existence that is higher than what you’ve had previously.

Death threatens transcendence, because you cannot exist on a higher level when you don’t exist at all. So, as the lyric suggests, we have a dilemma: If we focus on an embodied way of being, and ignore matters of the mind and soul, then we make ourselves too vulnerable to pain and won’t have a way to surpass our pain. And yet, if we aim for transcendence as a way to overcome pain, death threatens our transcendence. This dilemma lies at the core of the “human predicament.”

So how do we solve this dilemma? This is why Christianity is so powerful: it solves the problem of death through the promises of eternal life that Jesus makes to His followers.

But for those who find the challenges to Christian belief too challenging, this is not an option. If you find the idea of heaven too good to be true, you must admit that on some level death wins and we lose.

However, there is a way to transcend even death, not by defeating death, but by sharing in death’s victory. If you allow death to motivate you to work as hard as possible while you still have time, then, if you’re lucky, you will have the resources needed to create that thing or achieve that achievement that allows you to die happy. (Something even Christians may feel pulled by.)

If you can achieve something so great, at least of such great personal importance, that you enter into a state of bliss such that you can genuinely die happy, then, by enabling this possibility, both in terms of the urgency and of the magnitude of the achievement – of such magnitude that you can die happy – death itself becomes the mechanism by which you transcend. Death glorifies you indirectly through this achievement at the same time it humiliates you through your destruction.

If the achievement lasts beyond the grave, then you will have achieved the closest thing to immortality that we can. Though, it’s not the immortality that matters, but the state of being able to die happy. It just so happens that achieving such a state requires achieving something of great personal significance, and often such achievements will be the kind that leave a mark on the world. But you could have a person who does some great work behind the scenes that doesn’t last beyond their lifetime, but who is nevertheless connected to the work in such a way that they can die happy having done it. I think parenthood can be like this, a great work (when done right) that involves giving up yourself to build up someone else. When people say "Some people should never be parents," part of what they are getting at is the fact that some people are not connected to the work of parenthood in the right way; they see parenthood as a burden and not as a core part of their life's work.

Matters of the body can distract us from transcending death in this way: if someone ignores death and strives not to achieve that which will enable one to die happy, but instead lives in the moment and pursues entertainment, then death will creep up on them and they will have little, in their own eyes, to show for their life. They may find themselves regretful in the end, suffering at the thought of dying, because they cannot die happy. Those who do not account for death in the way they live run the risk of suffering in this way. Though, it's possible for someone to not know what it would take for them to die happy until after they have already achieved it, perhaps even ironically thanks to their ignoring death, living in the moment, and pursuing entertainment.

A disadvantage for the non-Christian is that achievements are not a reliable method of transcendence. It requires a great deal of luck to be able to achieve one's essential personal goal. Some folks will find it impossible not to desire something too ambitious, and will thus be stuck in unfulfilled desires. The Christian, on the other hand, need only believe, and from their beliefs come hope.

Paradoxically, as in the case of the Christian martyr, both horrendous suffering and existential completeness can be found in a person at the same time. Hope, from believing the best is yet to come, allows one to endure suffering, so of course a hope-based existential completeness is compatible with horrendous suffering. But does this mean that only a hope-based existential completion can withstand horrendous suffering?

I don't think so. "Die happy" needn't be taken so literally. Even Jesus, a paradigm of existential completion, didn't die happy in a strict sense. What matters is whether, in addition to your suffering, there is the added suffering of feeling incomplete, like you didn't do what you set out to do. As long as you feel complete, the most important pain is avoided. Achievement-based existential completion is just as compatible with a painful death as a hope-based one. Death is the worst the world can do to you, and for those who can die happy, not even the worst can impede their happiness. Feeling fundamentally safe in this way generates a profound inner peace, even in the face of death and suffering, even for the one without hope in a life to come.

What is virtue? What does it mean to be wise?

To answer this question, here is a similar question: What is intelligence? What does it mean to have intelligence versus not having it?

We associate intelligence with many things: the ability to recognize patterns, grasp concepts, process information, memorize and recall, to solve puzzles, solve problems, invent things, to be creative, to think outside the box, to avoid making mistakes, and so on. We also associate intelligence with knowledge—an awareness of a collection of important or complex truths, which leads to an understanding of how things work in life. Intelligence is associated with success, and stupidity with failure.

Intelligence then is something like: your mental capacity, or mental powers. The more mental powers you have, the smarter you are, and the fewer mental powers you have, the less smart you are.

Wisdom could be just a synonym for intelligence: To be wise is to be smart. Or we could say wisdom is something more specific than intelligence—wisdom is a subcategory of mental powers. On this view, to be wise is to be smart (that is, to have a specific mental capacity is to have mental capacity in general), but to be smart is not necessarily to be wise. (Compare: Having a strong imagination is smart, but being smart does not entail having a strong imagination.)

One way to think of wisdom on this view is that wisdom is the specific mental power of figuring out the golden mean for any given virtue. This ‘figuring out’ means 1) the ability to identify and understand the golden mean between two vices, and 2) being able to choose the golden mean, to have an understanding strong enough that it instills within you a confidence such that you cannot help but will yourself to live out the golden mean. So (1) and (2) are two parts of one category: the category of understanding.

Virtue then is the disposition to choose the golden mean. Bravery is the disposition to be brave, to choose the golden mean between cowardice and recklessness. Patience is the disposition to be patient, to choose the golden mean between impatience and indecision.

Wisdom and virtue are nearly the same thing. Wisdom is a mental power—the power to figure out and/or comprehend the golden mean. Virtue is the disposition to choose the golden mean, which comes from having wisdom.

If someone is wise (if they have the understanding), then they will be virtuous (possessing a disposition to choose the golden mean), and if someone is virtuous, then they will be wise, as one cannot have a disposition to choose the golden mean without having an ability to recognize and understand the golden mean. For some people, this is not an overly conscious effort; some people understand what the golden mean is for a given virtue on instinct or intuition. Mental activity occurs subconsciously, like when a mathematician figures out the solution to a problem suddenly and seemingly out of nowhere, because the brain does work that the mind doesn’t see. So the understanding of wisdom needn't be explicitly conscious or reflective.

Just as wisdom is a specific kind of mental capacity, and is thus an instance of intelligence, a virtue, such as bravery, is a specific kind of virtue, and is thus an instance of wisdom (and is thus an instance of intelligence).

This view is compatible with Socrates’ view that virtue is a kind of knowledge (Protagoras 345 - 360). Many people might think that virtue is doing what’s right even when it’s difficult to do so. But I think Socrates would say that everyone is always choosing what’s least difficult. For the brave person, it would actually be more difficult for them to choose to be cowardly. It is exactly the difficulty of one choice outweighing another that explains why that person made that choice. The virtue does not lie in the ability to do what’s hard, but rather the virtue lies in what comes easy for the person. The fact that being cowardly is so difficult for a person that they’d rather face pain or death, that tells us something about the bravery of this person.

Socrates argues that virtue cannot be taught, and yet paradoxically argues that it’s a kind of knowledge, and knowledge can be taught. Here’s one suggestion to resolve the paradox: Virtue can be taught to a degree, but because virtue is grounded in wisdom, and wisdom in intelligence, at some point virtue is simply a matter of capacity, and capacities cannot be taught. Compare a student in a math class. We certainly need math teachers to teach us math. But at some point you either can do it or you can’t, and teachers cannot teach talent or a passion for math. They can inspire some students, and encourage them to pursue math, but ultimately those things fall on the student.

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.

The misery argument against pro-theism

Should we want God to exist? If God would make the world better overall, then yes we should want God to exist. And I have reason to think God would make the world infinitely better.

There is only one good argument against pro-theism that I know of, which is a practical argument: Wanting impossible things will make you miserable, and wanting God is to want an impossible thing. So wanting God will make you miserable.

My response to this argument is that we find ourselves wanting impossible things all the time, and doing so is not only natural but can even show our virtue. When a loved one dies, we wish the loved one was not dead. It's impossible for the loved one to not be dead, but we have that desire anyway, and not only can we not be faulted for having such a desire, but if anything it would be callous for us to be indifferent.

When we experience loss, we naturally grieve that loss and wish against it. We must grieve to 1) express our emotion and not let it bottle up (the psychological / physiological demand), and 2) to demonstrate our good character (we appropriately recognize the value of what has been lost). Consider a mother who loses a child, but does not grieve. This would be very disturbing, and we would want to know why the mother isn't grieving. 

Obviously, one cannot force grief; it must come naturally, and we only grieve when we lose something precious to us.

And yet, while we must grieve, we cannot grieve forever. One can feel guilty for "moving on" too quickly; one can feel as though the greater the grief, the greater the love, and thus if I am to prove my love I must grieve for a great while. But this isn't the case. The badness of death is tricky, because it depends on what the dead have been deprived of. Depending on the circumstances of the dead, when they were alive, they might not have been deprived of much. A sickly child who has only a life of illness and pain to look forward to doesn't lose much by dying. An elderly parent who has only a cold hospital room to look forward to doesn't lose much by dying. And one might reasonably feel that given that our world is not a good world, or at least not a fundamentally good world, for existential reasons it's always the case that the dead aren't being deprived of a whole lot. By being dead, all existential problems (and all other problems besides, with the only conditional exception of deprivation) have been solved. Given the potential goodness of death for these reasons, one's grief might be cut short, and depending on one's own depression, might even turn into envy.

But in ordinary circumstances, grief is what follows loss, and the problem of how to grieve and for how long emerges. This leads to the paradox of grieving: I must grieve forever to recognize the permanence of the loss, and yet I must not grieve forever so I can live my life. Overstaying in grief fails to maximize flourishing, and no loved one would want that of you. But how does one stop grieving and move on without callously pushing aside the loved one as if they never existed?

The answer, like with any paradox, is balance. You don't grieve so much that your grief gets in the way of your ability to live. But you don't bury your feelings or pretend like the loved one never existed either. You grieve for a time, and that's the time to let out your feelings, and then when it feels right you let go. There is some compartmentalization here: in you, at all times, is your love, hidden away. Then, after some time has passed, you can bring that hidden love back to the surface and grieve again. And again, you move on.

I suggest that the death of God should be treated like the death of a loved one. You grieve, you move on, and you grieve, and you move on, and this cycle repeats until the end. You do this by ear, not by ritual. If you don't feel like grieving, then you don't. But when you do feel like grieving, you do, and you do not suppress it. Grief is human, and humans have a way of finding the balance of things, and the right balance for one person is different for another.

You might want to say God is too different. When someone "loses" God they really gain the truth that there was no God in the first place. But this fails to appreciate just how real God is for those who believe, and just how deeply emotional that relationship is. If you ask those who had such a relationship with God and lost faith, I think you’ll find losing God very much analogous to losing a best friend, a fiance, a spouse, or, if I may, a heavenly father. (I note there are those who feel silly for ever believing in God in the first place. But did they have the kind of perceived deep connection with God and deep belief in God that I have in mind?)

It's true that strictly speaking God isn't lost, as God was never really there. Instead, it's more like losing your optimism in the world. The world was fundamentally good, and now it's not; the world is infinitely worse than I thought it was. You can reasonably ask: How on earth does one "grieve" infinite disappointment such as this? This isn't a normal kind of loss.

You can rejoice in the discovery of truth and the shedding of false beliefs. You can be infinitely grateful that the world is infinitely better than a fundamentally bad world. The world is fundamentally neutral, and that feels, yes, overwhelmingly disappointing, but, weirdly, it feels fair. It kind of feels right. From day one, how did life treat you? How does life treat anyone? Peasants wish they were kings, and kings, paranoid of the Sword of Damocles hanging over their bed, wish they were peasants. If something is too good to be true, it always is. That's why life has taught you since day one, hasn't it? To discover that the world isn't fundamentally bad is an incredible sigh of relief, and given how bad things can get, it can almost feel too good to be true that the world isn't fundamentally bad!

You can ask how we know the world isn't fundamentally bad. It's true that I guess I can't have absolute certainty that my soul won't survive my death and attach to some nearby rock and remain there in silent agony for billions of years. But if testimonies of near death experience mean anything (and I don't really think they do), there is no risk of this. More importantly, consciousness, by all accounts, is an incredibly expensive thing. You need very particular organs, brains, in a very particular state to maintain consciousness. Even with brains and even with the right state, we lose consciousness very easily, like in sleep or anesthesia. This nearly guarantees that death is the end of consciousness, which means a fundamentally bad life – a life of eternal conscious torment – is impossible.

So there is something oddly beautiful, I think, in the infinite fairness or neutrality of this arrangement. But for those of us who once upon a time truly believed in heaven, we will have to, occasionally, grieve our loss of faith. We have no choice. We simply recognize the infinite loss.

We grieve, and we move on.

Stream of consciousness: The psychology of the philosopher

I was raised in a Christian environment where the most important thing is going to heaven when you die, and to get to heaven you must believe rightly.

Romans 10:9 - "If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved."

If I can trade 80 years of misery for an infinite number of years of happiness, that's a good deal. That's an infinitely good deal. So for the Christian, happiness in this life doesn't matter at all. And if death means I go to heaven, then why would I care about my survival? So for the Christian, survival and happiness do not matter. The only thing that matters is your salvation and your relationship with God. You live to maintain your salvation (suicide entails damnation for most Christians) and to live for God's purpose for you and to fulfill God's commands. Basically, you want to look as good as possible come judgment day.

Practically speaking, living as if a perfect being is judging your actions is a pretty good heuristic for living a life you can be proud of. Prayer as a form of 'moral introspection' is incredibly powerful and helpful as a tool of personal growth. Problems arise though when this introspection leads to self-deception (God wants me to do the thing that I happen to also want to do) or moral arrogance (pro-choice folks are pro-baby-murder because my tradition says so and I'm committed to my tradition).

While Christians try to separate themselves from the ways of the world, finding value in the virtue of being different, Christians ironically fall into all the same psychological traps of tribalism as everyone else. As biological creatures, of course Christians have an innate interest in survival. Survival requires integration into a power structure, which almost always involves integration into a social structure. As such, social success means survival for Christians. Christianity itself becomes a matter of social success. (This is clearly true of pastors who make their money from working at a church.)

So Christians rightly believe that happiness, survival, and social success can come apart from truth, and so they distance themselves from "the world" and the happiness, survival, and social success they may get from being "in the world." But ironically they just end up creating their own world. If "the world" is wrong, they are stuck in their wrong beliefs, because they depend on those beliefs for their survival. But if Christianity is wrong, Christians are stuck in their wrong beliefs for the same reason.

Being epistemically stuck is a severe intellectual vice. You can tell whether you are epistemically stuck by asking the question: If you were wrong, how would you discover this? If you say, "I cannot discover this," then you are stuck. You are not stuck (or less likely to be stuck) if your answer is: If I were wrong, I would discover this by 1) Being intellectually virtuous (especially, being willing to be wrong), 2) Reading opposing viewpoints and honestly and seriously engaging in them, 3) Talking to people who think differently than I do and keeping an open mind to what they have to say.

This is why someone's material reality can have a massive impact on their worldview. In fact, I would consider material independence to be an intellectual virtue. Anything that reduces bias is an intellectual virtue, and material independence reduces bias. If your survival doesn't depend on a particular worldview, then you won't be biased to hold onto that worldview. (If giving up a worldview entails that someone would die, then don't be surprised when they never give up that worldview even when it's false.)

Christians do not engage in opposing viewpoints. They assume they are right and carry on.

While I lost the Christianity, I kept the feeling that figuring out what I believe and why is what matters most. It's true that what happens after I die is of infinite importance, because it lasts forever. So I agree with the Christian that my happiness, success, and survival for 80 years is nothing compared to my happiness, success, and survival for an infinite number of years. So the question of whether Christianity is true is of infinite importance to me. And if Christianity is not true, then it's infinitely important to me to have certainty, or as close to certainty as possible, that this is the case. Basically, I should either do everything in my power to get into heaven when I die or to prove that heaven isn't real (or to prove that a fully rational person will, in the end, not believe in heaven). This covers my existential bases, as either I get into heaven, which is infinitely good, or I prove that there was never an infinite good in the first place (and thus, if I miss out on anything, I only miss out on finite goods).

Philosophy involves reading on your own, writing on your own, thinking on your own, and generally separating yourself from those systems that threaten your intellectual virtue. The Christian separates themselves from "the world," and the philosopher separates themselves from everything. (As mentioned though, philosophy at its best is collaborative, and it's this collaboration that's essential to preventing us from becoming epistemically stuck. However, while reading involves engaging in someone else's ideas, and is in that sense socially interactive, it's still a private practice free from the tribalistic mechanisms that emerge from social groups.)

Philosophy is a strange activity, one that most humans do not engage in on any serious level. This makes perfect sense, as humans engage in those activities that do impart survival and social success, and survival and social success have little to no connection (and even a reversed connection) to the practice of philosophy. 

Again, if I consider what matters to not be the things of this life, but rather what comes next, then it makes sense that I would disregard the things of this life. It's exactly this disregard for survival and social success in pursuit of truth that makes philosophers strange, even inhuman. And yet, as I noted in a previous post, Aristotle said that our rationality is what makes us so distinctly human. And it's this inhuman-human paradox that makes philosophy a superhuman activity.