The strongest arguments for and against the existence of God

It is nicer to think that you are here for some kind of reason that's written into the rules of the universe

than that it all is just a happy or unhappy accident. I think that there are very good arguments to believe that there are some kind of foundational principle of the universe

some necessarily existing being, some first cause. But I think that the Judeo-Christian tradition is an imperfect approximation of who that being is

Nihilism doesn't remove values. It yzes values and finds them to be essentially groundless

or if they do have a ground, subjective preferences of people. It's a very difficult thing to define concepts like good and bad

but we employ them all the time. Like, what is the difference between a murder just occurred

and it's wrong that that murder just occurred? If you try to isolate what the actual difference is there

I think it has to just be an attitude. It's an expression. It's the way you feel

My name's Alex O'Connor. I'm the host of the Within Reason podcast, I think I'm best described as a philosophy YouTuber and former edgy atheist

So I think probably the most powerful argument for the existence of God is the so-called

first cause argument, which is quite like naive. A lot of people are familiar with the idea that

we need a first cause for the universe. But I think people think about it wrong. There is

what you might think of as a horizontal causal argument and a hierarchical causal argument

And a lot of people just aren't familiar with the hierarchical version of the causal argument

which I think is probably best explained with a prop, like this lovely glass of water

You might ask yourself, why is this water here? And the way that people tend to think about

cause is in terms of time and what happened before what might be called the efficient cause

in the Aristotelian sense, which is, well, somebody just poured the water into the glass

And then I might ask, well, why did they pour the water into the glass? Oh, well, because you asked them to. Oh, well, why did you do that? Well, because the glass was empty

because I'm thirsty, so on and so forth back infinitely. There's just no beginning. As long

as every single step is explained by the step before, then everything gets explained back in

back in time. But there's another way that you can think about causation. I can say

why is this water here? Well, because it's being held up by the glass. If the glass wasn't there

the water would just fall out, or at least wouldn't retain its shape, even if we were in

space. The water is in the glass right now because it's being held up by the glass. In that sense

the shape and position of the water right now is being caused by the shape and position of the glass

okay, so why is the glass there? Because it's being held up by my hand. Why is my hand there

Being held up by my arm. My arm's being held up by my shoulder. My shoulder's being held up by my

body. My body is being held up by the chair. The chair is being held up by the ground. The ground

is being held up by the foundations of the building, and so on. And if you kept going, you might get

the gravity that's pulling the building down. You might get the forces of nature which are holding

the earth together. But ultimately, all of this is happening now in a time slice and hierarchically

This isn't some causation that goes back in time. It sort of goes up and down, if you can see what I

mean. So there is a reason why that kind of causation cannot go on infinitely. And that is that

in each stage of this causal chain, the causal actor doesn't have any causal power

except insofar as it borrows it from something more fundamental. I'll try and put that in simpler terms

The glass holds up the water, but it can't do it of its own accord

It's being held up by my hand to the extent that if I took away my hand, the glass would no longer have the power to hold the water here, right

So the glass's power, the causal power to cause the water to be where it is right now

is literally borrowed from my hand. but likewise if I removed my arm my hand would no longer have the power to hold the water where it

is so my hand doesn't have on its own any kind of power to hold up the glass it borrows it from my

arm and my arm borrows it from my shoulder my shoulder borrows it from my body to the extent

that if I were to remove any of those parts in the causal chain everything further up the chain

than that would instantly lose its causal power to hold the water up where it is right instantly

So what that means is that there is no actual causal power except for whatever is at the basis of this giving the whole chain causal power

So if you think about that horizontal causation, right, imagine a series of dominoes knocking each other over

This is causation in time. Domino one is knocked over by domino minus one

And domino minus one is knocked over by domino minus two, minus three, minus four, minus five

and so on back to infinity. In this kind of causation, when domino minus five knocks over domino minus four

and then the dominoes keep falling over, I could take domino minus five that caused

you know, all these other dominoes fall over. I could take that earlier cause

I could take it, I could throw it in the bin. We don't need it anymore. Those dominoes further down the chain would keep on going. It's the kind of causation where you

don't require the first causes, the earlier causes, to remain in existence in order for the causal

chain to continue. So another example of this would be like parents and children. My grandfather

caused my father to exist. Then my grandfather died. After my grandfather died, my father caused

me to exist. So you've got cause A, B, and C. A causes B. A then just disappears, gets

in the C, and B still has the causal power to bring about C. You see what I'm saying

You don't need that first cause to remain there. But that's in this so-called horizontal

causation, right? In a hierarchical series of causation, you can't get rid of the earlier cause

And when we say earlier or first or fundamental, we don't mean in time. We mean like sort of further

down the chain, as it were. So if my grandfather causes my father, then my grandfather dies

My father still has the causal power to bring me about. But if my shoulder causes the position of

my arm, then if my shoulder disappears, my arm no longer has the power to hold up my hand

The shoulder needs to stay there causing the arm in order for the arm to cause the hand. So all of

that causation happens all at once, right? Which means that there is no intrinsic causal power

My father has his own causal power to bring about me but my arm only borrows it from my shoulder It doesn have it on its own But my shoulder only borrows it from my body and my body only borrows it from the chair Without the chair none of this would

have any causal power. My hand would not be able to be here. And without the floor, none of that

would be able to do anything. So there's no causal power at all in this chair, except insofar as it

borrows it right now in this instant from the ground below it. So if this just goes back

infinitely, well, this borrows from this and this borrows from this and this borrows, and that goes

back on literally infinitely, then there is no causal power at all. Because it's not being

borrowed from anywhere. It's like everyone is just borrowing from another thing which has no causal

power. It only gets its causal power where it's borrowed it from something else, which has no

causal power. So where did it get it from? It borrowed it from something else, which has no

causal power. So where did that get it from? That can't go back forever, because then there would be

literally no causal power in this instant right now. So unlike the temporal thing, where you can

go back in time and imagine that that just sort of goes on infinitely and there's no first cause

because each individual causal actor in the chain has its own causal power to knock over the next

domino. The hierarchical causation in this time slice right now, this glass being held up right

now, has some kind of foundational cause, which is giving life to this entire causal chain

without which the whole thing would fall apart. So it's a sustaining cause. It's causing things

to exist and be as they are right now in time. Not like a billion years ago set something in motion

but right now sustaining it in existence. In the same way that the law of gravity sustains

all of the objects in this room in position. It's a fundamental cause of why everything is

being held up right now. If that just switched off, the entire thing would fall apart

right you need that now right now like at the basis of this sort of causal chain of

floors holding up chairs and chairs holding up buildings and stuff like that and so

you might say well maybe the the fundamental cause there then is something like the law of gravity

fine but you might want to ask sort of what's you know holding the law of gravity in place what's

making sure that it won't stop working tomorrow and this is the sort of great debate with something

like this argument. And there are lots of technical terms that you can throw in there. You can talk about contingency and necessity, and you can talk about per se and per accidents

causal chains. But let's just do away with that for a moment and just think about it in those

terms. What is holding up this invisible microphone that I promise our listeners is above my head

right now in place? And the depth of explanation you go to will be context dependent. If I say

what's holding up that microphone? Our audio engineer might say, well, it's the mic stand

But the physicist might say, oh, it's the floor pressing up against the mic stand. But the

philosopher will say, it's whatever is at the foundation of that causal chain giving causal

power to it all. And that is the strongest version of a first cause argument, I think

one that's insensitive to time and one which requires that first cause to exist right now

so this alone isn't strong enough to establish the existence of of capital g god right like this

just establishes that there is some kind of fundamental sustaining principle of the universe

now there are lots of debates as to the nature of what that thing could be but the thing that's

really important to note is that there's no singular argument for the existence of god

what you have is a kind of cumulative case you have different arguments that deal with different

aspects of God. So this kind of causal argument is discussed by Thomas Aquinas in his Summer

Theologica. He gives five famous ways of sort of showing the existence of God to be true. And the

first three are kinds of causal arguments. You have to then do more to get the attributes of God

You have to do more to show that this thing is not material, that this thing is certainly more

to show that it's like good or loving or anything like that. But so Aquinas has an argument from

change. I mean, it's called the argument from motion, but motion just means change in some

sort of older dialects of philosophy. So he leans quite heavily on Aristotle and it gets a bit

complicated, but he'll say something like, you know, for something to change means that something

which is potential becomes actual. That's what change is. A hot cup of coffee will cool down

because when it was hot, it had the potential to become cool and that potential was actualized

Potential can only be actualized by something which is already actual. Potential can't be

actualized by potential. If the coffee cools down because it's in a fridge

the potential coldness of the coffee can't be brought into existence by the potential coldness of the fridge

the fridge has to be actually cold in order to bring about the potential coldness in the coffee

it can't just be you've got a potentially cold fridge and a potentially cold cup of coffee and the potential coldness

brings about the potential, no you have to have an actual thing actualising

the potential in the coffee and that's what he thinks change is But you have another kind of causal argument then. Any instance of change where something potential becomes actual, there has to have been something actual to actualize it. But there will have had to have been something to actualize that thing and to actualize that thing and to actualize that thing

And so Aquinas sort of follows this causal chain and says, again, at the beginning, there must be, as Aristotle might have had it, an unactualized actualizer, something which is pure act

Now this gets really kind of technical and weird, but Aquinas then tries to draw out why it would be that if something has zero potential in it, it can't be material, for example

Because if something is material, you could potentially divide it. You know, you could potentially move it

There are things that are like potential about it. It has potential qualities. And so if the first cause of the universe has to be pure act, no potentiality, pure act, then whatever is the cause of the universe can't be material

So now we've got an immaterial first cause of the universe. And then we carry on in a similar vein using different arguments to show why this thing must be outside of time, outside of space

And you end up with something like a spaceless, timeless, creative first cause of the universe, powerful enough to bring the universe into existence

And if you don't want to call that God, that's fine by me, but I think it will suffice for most people

The strongest argument against the existence of God as traditionally conceived is undoubtedly the problem of evil

I prefer to say the problem of suffering, because a lot of the time, being an ethical emotivist

especially a religious person, will say, well, how can you call anything evil if you've got no standard of goodness

Okay, let's not say evil then, let's say suffering. If you believe that there is a loving God who has the power to do all that is possible and who supervises not just the goings on of the universe but also supervised its creation and the setting up of its parameters

There are a few questions that jump out, a few mysteries. For example, life on Earth is the result of evolution by natural selection

That is the reason why we have such complexity and such variance of life

natural selection is survival of the fittest survival of the fittest is the same thing as

the destruction and death and suffering of the weakest for billions of years there's been life

on earth and for much of that it's existed in a brutal competition for survival with predation

and disease and 99.9 percent of all the species let alone the creatures but the species who've

ever existed, been wiped from existence, usually in a pretty dismal manner. And all of this is

built into the very mechanism by which God chose to bring about human life on earth

Traditional religious communities believe that humans are very special. They think that we are

the reason why this all exists, as opposed to other animals and other points in history

which means that all of this has occurred for our sake. It's built in. It's one thing to talk

about suffering as a sort of abstract object, but it is unfathomable, truly, the amount of suffering

that these animals, not just like the human species in its 200,000 year history, or I suppose

the human species would be much longer than that, a few million years, but the animals who came

before us and the animals who existed at the same time as us. It's genuinely unfathomable

the depths of despair and misery and suffering and torment, meaningless torment for those animals

who don't get to inherit eternal life. And we're told that for some reason, God chose this mechanism

to bring us into existence. It just doesn't seem to be what you would expect. Of course

this doesn't disprove the existence of God. It's not logically contradictory to say that

God did this for some reason, but it just seems a little unexpected. And I think for most people

it's very powerful. Of course, this only really does anything to argue against the existence of

a good God. Some people will then just say, well, maybe God is evil. But this will then just depend

on your view of God, because there are philosophers who, in the course of proving God's existence

have established why he must be perfectly good, for example. There are also people who belong to

religious traditions who insist upon the goodness of God. So they would at least have to give up

that if they were to accept the plausibility of an argument like this. And I think it's powerful

I think that there are very good arguments to believe that there are some kind of foundational principle of the universe, some necessarily existing being, some first cause

But I think that the Judeo-Christian tradition is an imperfect approximation of who that being is

I think it probably gets a lot right and is a sort of compilation of human theological wisdom over the past few thousand years

But it will get a lot wrong as well. I think that if you have just personally apprehended a truth about the universe, you are just convicted that there's some kind of foundational cause

I don't really know much more than that, and I don't want to subscribe to a particular tradition

I say more power to you. I think you're on the right track. In the same way that if somebody is sort of a dogmatic atheist of the new atheist variety, I have a lot of fun posing religious arguments to them and saying there might actually be more plausibility to these arguments than you would know from reading The God Delusion

But that's not enough to say that you're wrong about atheism or anything, but I much prefer

this kind of person who says either, I believe there's some kind of God of maybe of some sort

maybe not even a God, maybe just something like that, but I don't really know what it is. I'm like, yeah, me too, man. I've got no idea. Likewise, somebody who says, there's a lot of mysteries

but I just can't buy the fact that this was designed somehow intelligently. I'm like

yeah, I get that too. That's awesome. And then we can just discuss it. you know? And so I quite like that kind of person. There are also the so-called deists

who typically are described as people who believe that God kind of set the universe in motion

and then went away. So it does not involve himself. I mean, he could have died

you know, he could have gone to sleep and sort of set it all off. And that explains how it got

going, but it's not there anymore. I don't think that makes much sense. I think that this is a

a product of mechanistic thinking that comes about with the sort of scientific revolution

where we think of everything as sort of like a bit of a machine where you twist it up and let it go

But the argument that I just ran through, the reason I like it so much is because I think it gets rid of this idea of deism. You can't have a God who sets it all in motion and then goes to

sleep. He can't knock over the first domino and then go away and the dominoes keep on falling over

and he's long dead because he's not just knocked over a domino and then gone away

he's holding up the microphone above my head right now in this instant and if he were to disappear

the whole thing would just collapse i think that there's a more powerful argument for

that kind of god not to say personal not to say that he cares about human beings

right like because again you can you can distinguish between those things there's

there's there's like people say well i believe that there is a god but he has no interest in

human affairs, that's fair enough. But someone who says, well, I believe in a God, but he's just

not around anymore, like at all. I think that might be true. There might be no God. But if you think

there's a good argument for God's existence, I think the best versions of arguments for God's

existence require that he does stick around. And so I think you either kind of have to say there's

no God at all, or there's a God who's still here right now holding it all in place as we speak

I don't think this God at the beginning, but not anymore, makes much sense to me

chapter two understanding nihilism and the human condition nihilism comes in many forms and depending on the context can mean many different things but

most broadly it's probably the lack of belief in or belief that there is no such thing as

an objective purpose to life or to the actions that we commit and the behaviors that we

portray within life. Whenever anybody acts in any way, when I pick up a glass of water to have a

drink, when I walk to a bus stop or something, there will be a reason why I've done that

These kinds of behaviors don't just spring up ex nihilo. They exist for some kind of reason

And so if you ask me why it is that I'm reaching my arm over there, it might be because I'm trying

to pick up a glass of water. Why am I doing that? I don't just do that randomly. Well

because I'm thirsty. Okay, well, why am I thirsty? Well, now we're kind of into some

biological science. You might say, well, it's been a while since I've last had a drink. And then you might describe what it is about my biology that causes thirst. And you might even

give an evolutionary explanation for why it is that we've developed this sensitivity to thirst

And eventually this kind of has to bottom out somewhere. But as soon as we're in this level of

biological science which seems to be kind of outside of my own volition and desire and control I suddenly realized that if the reason I reaching my arm over right now is ultimately speaking because of some

evolutionary principle that I had no control over, that's just a result of animals fighting

for survival, then my reaching my hand over there kind of feels a bit silly now. It feels like I'm

like beholden to something which is not reasonable, is not some kind of, you know

God-given purpose. There's nothing good about drinking the water or anything like that. I'm

just sort of following my evolutionary drives. And a process like that, for a lot of people

will feel quite devoid of meaning because you realize that you're just beholden to your sort

of animalistic instincts, essentially, with almost everything you do. The thing that the nihilist

recognizes is that the values he or she holds are not grounded in anything other than their

own preferences or aesthetic preferences. So to be a nihilist is not to have no desire

it's not to have no motivation to act. A lot of people think that if you lived like a nihilist

you'd sort of rot away in bed. Some nihilists may do that, and I think there is actually a

correlation, a strong correlation between philosophical nihilism and practical depression. However, nihilism is not about the actual consequences or the things that you're doing

It's about the purpose behind them. It's about the meaning behind them. And so

you know, suppose that you're feeling thirsty. I could explain to you that the only reason you're

feeling thirst is because of some animalistic drive that you had no control over. And you might

go, wow, that makes this all a bit ridiculous, doesn't it? But you're still thirsty. You still

have that desire. You still have that value of quenching your thirst. And so you'll still do that

And the same applies in all areas of life, including art and music and poetry, but also

including relationships, friendships, that kind of stuff. You're still going to want to do those

things. But the nihilist is someone who sort of takes a bird's eye view of it and realizes that

it's all a little bit meaningless. It's like, you know, Camus famously described in the myth

of Sisyphus, this person who suddenly recognizes the structure of their day, you know, waking up

having breakfast, getting in the car, going to work, taking a break, eating some food

going back home, eating some food, going to sleep, starting again. And you sort of start to notice

that you're doing this. And it's not anything about what you're doing. It's realizing, taking

a step back and realizing that there's no meaning to any of this. There's nothing more than just my

doing it. It doesn't go any deeper than that. Meaning, I think, is used synonymously with

purpose. To have meaning is to have some kind of purpose. And purpose is something like reason to

act or reason to be. So to have meaning or to have purpose, I think, is to have some kind of

reason to either act. If you're talking about the meaning in an action, it's the reason to act in

that way. If you're talking about the meaning of or in life, it's the reason to live or the reason

that we are alive, right? Now, like I said before, there always will be some kind of reason

but that reason will be contingent on something else. So the reason why I'm reaching my hand is

because I want to get the water. But the reason why I want the water is contingent on something

else, that is, that I'm thirsty. And the reason that I'm thirsty is contingent on something else

So to find an objective meaning at the root of life would mean finding a non-contingent

reason to act or to be. There would just need to be a self-justifying principle where if you ask

but why, the answer and the truthful answer would be, it just is. Or that why is an inappropriate

question to ask any further. For there to be something for this to bottom out in, it will

either have to bottom out in something completely arbitrary, which feels meaningless to people

because it could have easily been something else. Or this contingent chain of reasoning just

essentially goes back forever, which seems implausible. Or it terminates in something

which is self-justifying. And when people say that they found their meaning in life

I think a lot of the time they found that self-justifying principle. For some people

their meaning in life might be the raising of their children. And if you ask them, why are you

getting out of bed? To go to work. Why are you doing that? To make money. Why? To provide for

my family. Why? To bring up my children healthily. Why? Because I want my children to be healthy

Why? What do you mean, why? That's it. That's what it's about. And the philosopher might look

at that and say, well, you know, you should still probably ask why as a point of interest. Why do

you care about that? But in practice, that moment that you reach where that question why just seems

inappropriate, that's where you've bottomed out. And if you find some kind of self-justifying

principle that ultimately motivates most of your actions. It's what you sort of have in the back of

your mind when you're doing anything. And for most people, it probably is relational. It's probably

got to do with children or spouses or something like that. For the religious, it will be God

Everything they do, even if they don't cognize it all the time, will be for the glory of God

If you ask them to proactively yze what they're doing, well, why are you doing this? Why

are you sat here doing an interview with people? Ultimately, they would say something like, well

know it's all for the glory of God. Everybody will have that self-justifying principle somewhere at

the basis of their thinking. And if you're a secular person, if you're an atheist, it will

likely be something else. I might say that, well, I really enjoy doing this kind of thing. I think

it's a meaningful pursuit because I like discussing big questions. And if somebody says, well, why are

big questions in life important? Somebody might just say, what do you mean? Of course they are

That's almost the definition of importance. Now, you can pick a hole with that, and a nihilist will

They'll say that you can always go deeper and you will realize that ultimately it's just preference, which is why the nihilist thinks that there's no objective meaning

But most people have some kind of self-justifying principle. It's just usually a subjective one

Objective meaning would look something like a reason to act that is self-justifying and not because, not dependent on some kind of preference that you have

So if your foundational self-justifying principle is your care for your children, it seems quite clear that your care for your children is subjective, it's dependent on you. After all, you don't care about other people's children in the same way and they don't care about your children in the same way

It seems like if you died and your children with you, this kind of principle wouldn't exist out there in the ether. It seems completely dependent on your circumstances and your preferences. It seems a bit crude to describe your care for your children as a preference, but broadly speaking, it is a kind of preference. You prefer the well-being of your children over the well-being of other children

And in fact, that's a lot of the time what caring for the wellbeing of your children

is about. It's providing them with a roof over their head and a stable income, which oftentimes

is to the detriment of other people who are competing for the same job. But you have this preference. But it seems quite clear that that is person dependent, right? Like for there to be an

sensitive to preference, it would mean that even for somebody who just had different preferences

who just didn't want children, if caring for your children were the objective meaning in life

then if somebody said, well, you know what? I just don't want children. It's just not something

that appeals to me. I think I wouldn't be a good parent. Then you would say to them, you are wrong. You are literally incorrect about the meaning in your own life

And some people think this, but what they mean is something like, oh i think that if you had kids you'd actually like it right but that's just saying that you

you predict that they will subjectively prefer it too right like to say it's objective would be

even if you don't prefer it even if you have children and actually hate the whole process

and think gosh this is awful and terrible your life will still be more meaningful even if you

don't think it is it would have to be something which provides meaning completely independent

of your preferences, of how you actually feel about it is, about what it is that you're doing

if that makes sense. If meaning just means a reason to act

or a reason to be, then of course, ultimately, I do think there is some kind of

literal explanation for why we behave in the way that we do. And that will be objective in the sense

that that will be the driving force behind our behaviors, whether we like it or not

So if you are an atheist materialist, you might think that evolution by natural selection has simply favored certain traits which produce certain behaviors

And I could say, literally speaking, the reason why you are behaving in this way

the reason why you have these preferences is because of this evolutionary trait, right

For most people, that's not very fulfilling, but literally speaking, that could be something like

an objective meaning in the sense of it being an objective purpose. It is literally the purpose

why we all act. But I think people want something a little bit more than that. They want something

which feels like it's not quite just a reason to act. It's also something which feels worthwhile

that's somehow justified by some universal principle. It's almost like a moral element

that it's a good thing to be alive, that it's a good thing to live a meaningful life. And that

kind of thing I think is very difficult to ground objectively unless you posit some kind of either

supernatural design or I suppose if you have a kind of philosophy of life or a metaphysic which

says that there is some kind of teleology built into nature itself which some people believe but

I struggle to I struggle to grapple with. I think human beings naturally desire certain things and

they have values. And I think this is probably an evolutionary trait. I mean, if you had two

communities, one of which sort of just didn't care about anything, were completely apathetic

didn't care about their own children, didn't care to have children, didn't care to get out of bed

they're not going to survive for very long. So I think it is just literally the case that

having some kind of sense of motivation for doing things in life is evolutionarily selected for

And so I think that most people are not actually fundamentally apathetic. Even people who seem apathetic actually have certain values. They value their own comfort, for example. Like if you sort of wake up and you just want to go back to sleep, that's not apathy. That's having a different value to the kind of value that would get you out of bed. You value your comfort. You value sleeping. And so most people have these kinds of values

nihilism doesn't remove values it yzes values and finds them to be essentially

groundless or if they do have a ground the ground is within the subjective preferences of people

and so like i understand why i mean nihilism might make you act in a way that would be viewed

as apathetic it might make you a bit depressed for example and it might mean that you lay around

a bit more and you have less motivation for doing the things you formerly enjoyed, all of those

things that come along with depression. But you'll still have literal values. You will not enjoy your

own pain. If hungry, you will feel that hunger, whether or not you choose to satisfy it. You will

have experiences that you want when experienced and experiences that you don't want when experienced

which I think is a good definition of pleasure and pain. And so what does dialyism do then

It just removes the meaning in those values. And so I sort of like to imagine that the person who

is suffering, it's helpful to think of a person who's suffering, but is not a nihilist. You could

have the worst life in the world. You could be depressed. You could be upset every single day

You could think your life is going terribly, but you could believe that there's some kind of reason

You could believe that there's a meaning behind it. Maybe you're religious. Maybe you believe in

reincarnation, whatever, such that you're suffering, but you're not a nihilist. To be a nihilist is to

suffer and suffer all the more from the recognition that the suffering is meaningless. So in principle

you could also be really happy. You could be having the best time in the world and be a nihilist

so long as you recognize that that happiness you're feeling is completely meaningless. There's no reason for it. You're just feeling it. You just exist and you're feeling a certain thing

and that's it. In practice, nihilism tends to make people more sad than happy. But as a philosophy

let's say, a philosophy of life, there's no inconsistency with being a very motivated

very happy, very content person who yet realizes that there's no meaning behind any of it

There is the fact that most people, literally speaking, do feel meaning in life. And it does

seem a little bit bold to say that everybody who reports that is essentially either lying or

deluding themselves. That seems bold. It seems a little arrogant and too confident. Not to say

that that makes it false, but I think you should be aware of how radical the claim that is, of

course. But also there does seem to be this universal compulsion towards meaning. It's like

obviously there is there is this universal compulsion to think that there is some reason

why we're all here now like i said before that could be explained through evolutionary self-selecting pressures but in a way you might just say that that's kind of enough

because the only thing that matters is that i feel as though there is objective meaning you know

like that that might just be enough for people in the sense that nihilism as a lived philosophy

that like informs the way that you behave you might just sort of you might just sort of accept

the fact that everybody universally has this drive and treat it as if it were objective in

the same way that like if you're trying to work out what color to paint a house and like color is

completely subjective but if it just so happened that everybody for some evolutionary reason

preferred the color blue, like absolutely everybody just in fact preferred the color blue

you might treat it as an objective fact that blue is the best color to paint the house. And in that

context that might become a meaningful statement even though you recognize it not technically objective it just universally subjectively true But in practice that sort of works the same as an objective truth if you know what I mean

So you would paint the house blue, and if anybody said you should paint it another color

you might be able to say to them, you're kind of wrong, even though you're just dealing with preferences

So the universality of felt meaning, or desire for meaning, or assumption that there is meaning

might be enough to raise a few eyebrows when it comes to nihilism

Nihilism is often seen as a kind of response to the decline of religion, you know, and you get

thinkers like Nietzsche, you get thinkers like Emile Turan, and then a bit later on you get your

existentialists and your absurdists, you get your Sartres and your Camus, right? But this goes way

further back. Nihilism is not a new philosophy in response to the decline of religion. I think

that religions emerge as a response to nihilism. I think it's the other way around. One of the still

greatest expositions of nihilism that can be found in the printed word is the book of Ecclesiastes

in the Old Testament. Just this nihilistic outpouring, meaningless. Everything is meaningless

says the teacher. But Ecclesiastes takes us through the reflections of this man, this anonymous

author. Some have tried to identify him, but it doesn't really matter who it is. We know that he

was a great man, a king. He lived an illustrious life, but he saw no meaning in it. And he keeps

coming back to this word, hevel, which means literally something like wind. And so it's

translated as vanity by the King James. Vanity of vanities. Everything is vanity. I've heard some

exegetes think that the best modern translation of that word hevel in Hebrew is actually absurd

in alignment with Camus rubbing up of our expectations against the great iconoclast

of reality, which just shatters all of our expectations. But meaningless, meaningless

everything is meaningless is one translation. Absurd, absurd. Everything is absurd is my

favorite. Because he's describing these things. He's like, I denied my eyes no pleasure that they

saw. If I wanted something, I took it. I drank wine. I partied. I lived life. But in the end

I saw that it was all Hevel. It was all just wind. It's just nothing. It just happens. And

then it's gone. And it doesn't mean anything. And clearly, whoever penned this text is struggling

deeply with the exact same nihilistic themes that we talk about today. And for him, this is a piece

of religious scripture. So there's this undertone. He keeps saying that under the sun, there is

nothing, there's no meaning, there's no purpose to any of this. It's where we get the phrase, nothing new under the sun. Under the sun is this phrase that keeps showing up in Ecclesiastes

And some have suggested that this is supposed to indicate that on earth, separate from the

heavenly realm. There's no ultimate purpose to this. But interestingly, at the very end of

Ecclesiastes, there's this passage where someone is, I mean, we've heard the teacher speak

Kohelet. We've heard this teacher speak and talk about how meaningless everything is. And then at

the end, there's a commentary on this teacher's sort of treaties. And it says that everything he

said was upright and true. Everything he said was correct, essentially. But the solution is this

fear God and keep his commandments. And there's no explanation as to why that would solve the

problem. There's no mechanism as to what that would change. But the most interesting thing is

that it seems to suggest that everything that this guy was saying was true, that it is all just wind

but that somehow by just fearing God and keeping his commandments, you have somehow solved the

problem. I don't think that that's a very satisfying solution. But then I think that

that is the great theme of nihilistic literature. People try for a kind of solution

but ultimately, for me at least, they seem relatively unsatisfying. Fast forward thousands

of years and you get Albert Camus' myth of Sisyphus, which famously ends with this idea of

imagining Sisyphus happy. Maybe that does it for you. I don't know what it does for me

But yeah, Nietzsche is often associated with nihilism, not a nihilist himself, of course

but discusses a lot of nihilistic themes. And then the existentialists are the sort of go-to

figures for discussions of modern nihilism. In fact, Camus is celebrated for the starkness of

the opening line of the myth of Sisyphus, that there is one serious philosophical question

and that is suicide. Because everything else, how many dimensions there are to space

whether abstract numbers exist, all of that is secondary. The most foundational question is

whether or not you're going to, as he once put it, have a cup of coffee or kill yourself today

Those are kind of your options. So nihilistic literature, so to speak, is a broad span

Literally, I think it begins with, I think that the term is popularized by Turgenev's novel

Fathers and Sons. Although I think that's a more restricted use of the word nihilism. It's more

culturally relevant to the Russia that he was living in. But that's sort of where we get the

term from. And it's in novelistic form. Interestingly, this often shows up in narrative

even in the book of Ecclesiastes. It's sort of telling a story. I mean, broadly speaking

most people will know there's this distinction between the so-called ytic philosophy

the if P then Q and logical fallacy and modus ponens. And on the other side, you've got the

so-called continental philosophy, which is more narrative. It's more poetry. It's more grasping

at ideas but not directly so this is where you have your your existentialists but also your

novelists you have your your dostoevskys and your and your tolstois um and you have your your poets

and that's all sort of on that side and the nihilistic literature at least the stuff that

people care about is almost exclusively on the on the continental side because it does seem to be

something that resists discussion in abstract terms. It's very personal. It's very narrative

And it involves, you need to sort of involve yourself in the story of life in order to even

understand what the problem is. I mean, you can imagine speaking to an alien. If you sort of

try to describe to an alien or an AI what nihilism is, and you say like, well, the problem is

you know, I get up and I go to work and I just don't know why I do it. And the alien might be

like, well, yeah, you do. You do it to get money and to get a job. Yeah, but like, why do I do that

Well, because otherwise you'd be on the street and you'd be suffering. But why? Well, you just

you know, it's just built into it. You don't like suffering. That's like a definition of suffering. You just don't like suffering and you're trying to avoid it. Yeah, you're right. But it's just

sort of, there's something, gosh, I just wish there was more, you know? And the alien's like

what do you mean? More what? Like more pleasure? No, not more pleasure. Just like

I wish there were like a reason It be actually quite difficult to just explain in plain terms It almost like it a problem that can only be understood by someone who lives it Whereas you could easily explain to that alien the concept of modus ponens The alien probably wouldn have a problem with that as long as it got a rational mind But nihilism is something that we need to experience ourselves and explore

through narrative. I am brutally agnostic about almost everything. And in fact, if somebody ever

asks me how I might console myself in the face of these existential woes, genuinely, at least

personally, it is in agnosticism. It's in the fact that I do not know the first thing about

why any of this exists. Of course I don't. And sometimes people ask me in a context on a podcast

or on a stage or something, implicitly as if I'm going to have some answer, as if I've worked it

out and I'm going to be able to communicate that to people. There's just no way. This is obviously

a deeply personal story that everybody has to live individually. And I'm like doing the same

thing, right? And I'm interested in philosophy. So I might've read something that helps to elucidate

a concept, or I might be able to put a word on something that you've been thinking, but didn't

know was also thought by other people. But we're doing the same thing here. And ultimately, I have

absolutely no idea what the ultimate answers are. And so that kind of consoles me. Because if you're

a more certain nihilist, I can understand why that would be very upsetting. If you really just

believe that there's no meaning to any of this, then I can see why that would cause you some

trouble. But personally, that's just not something that I strongly believe. I think it's plausible

I think there's a lot of... It's quite an attractive view in many respects. You look at the

level of suffering of animals in the history of the world. When you look at the seeming

arbitrariness of the world around us, the way that the environment and the organisms within it

seem to just sort of almost randomly evolve according to literal just battles for survival

it all just seems a little bit like this is all just accidental and meaningless

But then on a more fundamental level It just seems strange to suggest that it's all just happening

For literally no reason That seems implausible to me too So I don't really know how to fully make sense of that

And that consoles me It's the same on the religious question It's much easier to be consoled

If you believe in God, you might be terrified Because you're constantly worried about going to hell

If you're an atheist, you might be terrified Because you think that this is the only life you have

And that it's ultimately meaningless If you're somewhere in the middle, you kind of just feel like you'll cross that bridge when you come to it

Nihilism is an upsetting thing to think about. It would be a sad reality

And so if you're certain of it, if you really are convinced that that's the case, I can see why that would be quite upsetting

Agnosticism literally does just... It's not like I'm choosing to be an agnostic in order to console myself

I just genuinely don't know what the truth of the matter is. and that just doesn't allow me to get really upset it's almost like it's almost like you know

i i don't know if it's going to rain on my wedding day it's like so long as i have no

real conviction that it is going to rain it's going to be very difficult for me to get like

upset about the the rain spoiling my wedding day right like i i literally just can't be upset about

that unless i've got some reason to think that it's going to happen of course there's literal

reason to think it's plausible that it will rain on my wedding day. But that's not quite enough

You have to actually be convicted of it in order to be upset by it. And I suppose I'm just not

convicted of nihilism. But that's not to say that I think it's false. It's just to say that

there's a lot of room for doubt there. A lot of people don't realize the extent to which their

emotions are influencing their thinking. Everybody likes to think that they are thinking objectively

and rationally and with a sober mind, but our minds are never sober from emotion. And so when

you sort of develop a philosophical view, it's always going to be informed by the way that you

feel. So a lot of people think, you know, I'm depressed because I'm a nihilist. But I think

without realizing it, a lot of the time is actually the case that people are nihilists

because they're depressed. It goes the other way around. Nobody is ever convinced, like

out of nowhere of a philosophical position, right? Like, you read a philosopher and they will put

something in such a way that makes you go, huh, yeah, you know what, I think that makes sense

And that's usually because they are kind of putting something into words or systematizing

something which you already kind of knew. In fact, if you open Wittgenstein's Tractus

the very first line of the introduction, it says something like, this book will be completely useless to anybody who doesn't already agree with its contents

He just admits that the reason he's really writing this is to elucidate something

that hopefully his readers had already kind of independently come to. I think that happens all the time, which is also why, by the way

if you've ever tried to get into philosophy, you might look up like

the 50 greatest philosophers of all time. I'm really interested. I want to see what I can learn. And it will say, okay, well, one great

philosopher is Jean-Paul Sartre. And so you're like, okay, I'll give that a go. And you pick it

up and you read it and you're just like, I don't get it. I don't understand. Not only do I not

understand the context, like even when I looked up the spark notes and I got what he was talking

about, it just doesn't make sense to me. I'm not impressed. Like why is this so famous? And it's

because you've just plucked it out of nowhere. Whereas if you've had like a million conversations

with people and Jean-Paul Sartre is a name that has come up every now and again, such that you've

heard of him and such that just because it so happens that you're in like conversations and

you're in situations that suit his name coming up from people who know who he is, chances are that

if you then go and read him, you're actually going to enjoy what he's saying because there's

some reason he keeps coming up. So when people ask me for a recommendation of what to read

philosophically. I literally tell them to just read what they've heard of, because there's a

reason why you've heard of those philosophers, because they're the people who've come up in the

kind of context that you're obviously already interested in. And I think it's important to

recognize that you're not going to be convinced out of nowhere of a philosophy that you don't

already have sort of one foot in. And so for that reason, I think that our predisposition

towards the world will influence the kind of philosophies which are attracted to us

I mean, like all of the nihilistic literature, all of the famous existential nihilistic literature, if you handed that to a confident Christian, they're not going to be convinced by it. If you hand it to somebody who hasn't really thought about the issue, but maybe has some sort of nihilistic undertones to their life, they might read that and go, yeah, he's got a point, right

it's going to be more attractive if you're already kind of attracted to it before you've

interacted with the text. I do think it's not just that. I mean, I just think it's worth pointing out

that any kind of radical abandonment of philosophical consolation and principle is going to bring with it distress But it not just that because nihilism is also just quite an upsetting thing for a lot of people I mean

it is nicer to think that you are here for some kind of reason that's written into the rules of

the universe than that it all is just a happy or unhappy accident. I think it's just a nicer

a nicer kind of philosophy. But I think we ought to be more suspicious of philosophies

which are more attractive to us. Not because they're less likely to be true, but because we

are more likely to accept them on less evidence because we want them to be true. And so I think

we need to recognize that bias and be careful of it. But it does also seem completely bewildering

that we would just exist for absolutely no reason. I mean, the nihilist ultimately has to posit that

there is either no reason for our existence, which seems completely ludicrous, there needs to

literally be a reason why things exist, or that there is some kind of reason, but it's completely

arbitrary, which also just seems a bit bewildering. I mean, whatever is the answer to the grand

mystery of why anything exists at all, it seems a little unsatisfying philosophically to say that

it just could have gone the other way and there could have just been nothing

It seems a little, well, on the surface, it seems a little implausible

And so there is an inherent implausibility to nihilism too that people will wrestle with

And whether you are more convinced by the implausibility of meaning in life

or the implausibility of it all just happening for no reason, I think will ultimately depend on your emotional state

Chapter 3. How emotivism shapes ethics. Emotivism is an ethical theory. It's also a theory of language, really, but it belongs in

this discussion around what is good and what is bad. Broadly speaking, people might be familiar

that when it comes to morals, what's good and what's bad, there are kind of two schools. You

have the objectivists who think that there are things which are good and bad, whether you like

it or not. And there are the subjectivists who say it's kind of just all your opinion, you know

So it's your preference. Some people like murder, some people don't, in the way that some people like cake and some people don't, right

Emotivism is more on this subjective side, but emotivism is something a little bit different

It suggests that when people make ethical statements, what they're doing is expressing an emotion

When you say that murder is wrong, you are literally expressing an emotional state towards murder

That sounds very similar to subjectivism, In the subjectivist framework, the phrase murder is wrong translates to something like

I don't like murder. A phrase like I don't like murder is a claim about my psychology

I could be lying. I could say I don't like murder, but actually I do secretly like murder

It could be something that I'm lying about. It could be true. It could be false that I don't like murder. It seems to be a claim about my brain, about my psychology, about my attitude

towards murder. Emotivism is not that. It's not the reporting of an emotional state or an attitude

It is literally the expression of that attitude. It's the difference between telling you

I don't like murder, and literally going like, ugh, murder, or just like pulling a nasty face

or as A.J. Ayer famously had it, going, boo, boo murder, right? The emotivist thinks that that is

what's going on when we say the murder is wrong, meaning that these ethical claims are literally

not the kind of thing that can be true or false. There are some kinds of expressions and statements

that have what's called truth value. Truth value means that it can be true or false

So a statement like the sky is red has truth value. It's just that the truth value is false

Whereas some statements like commands, for example, go over there, doesn't have truth value. It's not

the kind of thing that can be true or false. A phrase like, I don't like murder, could be true

A phrase like the objectivist theory that murder is wrong might be true. But for the emotivist

it's literally like going, boo, murder, which isn't true. It isn't false. It's just an expression

It's the same as me kicking my foot and going, ow, is that true? Is it false? Am I lying

Like, that kind of doesn't apply here. You're just expressing something. That's what the

emotivist believes anyway. That's the broad position of emotivism. It belongs in this

category of non-cognitivism about ethics, which means that these statements don't have truth

value. There are cognitivists who think that ethical statements have truth value

and non-cognitivists who think that they don't. And emotivism is a form of non-cognitivism

So, for example, another non-cognitivist school is prescriptivism, which thinks that ethical

statements are essentially commands. When I say murder is wrong, what I mean is something like

don't murder. That's like the kind of statement that I'm saying. So it's not

exactly expressing an emotion, it's giving a command, but it's also non-cognitivist because

it doesn't have truth value. You're just sort of saying something that isn't true or false

Reasoning can be connected to ethical statements on an emotivist framework. There is this idea

that if we're emotivists, then suddenly the possibility for all disagreement on moral issues

vanishes, because how can you have a debate if there's no truth value? And that's true to a

degree, and I understand the criticism. It's not so much a criticism as an observation. It might

just be true that we can't do that. But a lot of people aren't satisfied with that. But it's way

more restricted than people realize. A.J. Ayer pointed out in Language, Truth, and Logic, he sort

of is the founder of this emotivist school, he points out that the vast majority of moral

debate is not moral debate at all. It's debate about descriptive facts that we then apply our sort of moral intuitions to

So, for example, if you imagine a debate about guns in America and people are having a back

and forth and one person says, well, did you know that if we criminalize guns, it would

reduce the number of gun related deaths by 10,000 a year? And another person says, ah, yeah, but did you know that you haven't taken into account this statistic that if you get rid of good people with guns, then less people will be saved

And then someone says, oh, but did you know that swimming pools kill more children than guns

This is the kind of debate that we're having back and forth. But none of those claims are moral claims

They're just descriptive, factual claims. They're statistics. You can go and test them

It's either true or false, right? a lot of what we think is moral debate is actually just debate about descriptive facts

which once those are settled, we then apply our moral intuitions to. So for example, in the gun

debate, one person has one moral view and another person has another moral view and they're battling

it out. But actually they might have the same moral view, so to speak. For the emotivist

it's some kind of emotional expression. And so what might be the emotional expression

Well, suppose one person says, if we allow guns in society, in a

people are going to die. And another person says, but like, if we don't allow guns in society

then only the bad guys are going to have guns and they're going to kill innocent people and

there's going to be no one to protect them. So innocent people will die. Both of them agree

Innocent people dying, boo. And what they're debating is a descriptive, like truth of the

matter as to whether literally speaking, more guns, less guns, more deaths, less deaths. Right

And so the idea that instantly comes to mind that we can't have any kind of reasonable discussion about moral issues, like it's true, but I just want to point out that it's way more restricted. It's not like you can't have this kind of gun discussion. You can't have a discussion about, I don't know, about abortion and health care. And you can't talk about, I don't know, pick another pet moral issue, speed limits. You know, like how can we have a moral discussion about speed limits

Well, we can talk about how many people will die, the statistics about increasing by 10 miles an hour and all this kind of, that's all just facts. And then we'll apply our moral intuitions. And I think that when we actually break down and isolate the moral element alone, we'll find that there is actually a lot more agreement than there is disagreement

that doesn't do away with the problem. The challenge is what if there really is disagreement

on the moral stuff? What if two people genuinely just have conflicting boos and yays

And in that case, there are sort of two strategies. You either say, well, if you really broke those

down further, you'd realize that everybody ultimately has the same emotional expression

on fundamental ethical issues. Because we're all human, we all have a shared evolutionary heritage

that will have placed within us certain emotional predispositions that ultimately will be the same

if we just break them down far enough. The other strategy is to say, no, people do just have

fundamental value conflicts and that's just true. And that's just the way it is. And there's nothing

we can do about it. Whichever of those you find plausible is up to you. But obviously the former

is a bit more of an optimistic idea, I think people will be more attracted to that because

it allows us to sort of say, well, everybody agrees that boo innocent people dying. And so

you know, we can just act in accordance with that. But it seems more likely the case that

that's not true. I mean, on that point, it's quite clear that there are people who do not have an

adverse emotional reaction to innocent people dying. And so that can't be the most foundational

ethical principle that we all agree on. But it might go deeper than that. You know, it might be

That's not foundational. Innocent people dying cannot be a foundational ethical expression because it contains too many concepts. The concept of innocent, the concept of death, you know, the reason why you might think, the reason why you might have that emotional reaction to innocent people dying, it can be broken down much, much further

if somebody thinks that their fundamental ethical principle is innocent people dying, boo

I can think of 10 situations off the top of my head in which you would be perfectly fine with an innocent person dying

It can't be that. It must go deeper than that. And it might genuinely be that if you actually go deep enough into people's moral emotions

they will ultimately, at root, be identical across the human species. And that at a higher level, when someone has an emotional reaction to something

That emotional reaction, you can't say it's wrong because there's no truth value, but you could say that it betrays a mistake that somebody has made

This is really interesting. Like suppose you were really upset because it was raining on your wedding day, but it turned out it wasn't actually raining

You'd been accidentally watching a tape recording of the news forecast, right

And you believed it was raining and you're really upset about it. And I come over to you and I say, hey, you know, it's not actually raining, right? And suddenly you're happy again. Those emotional states, the sadness at the rain and the happiness that it's not raining, they're just emotional states, right? They're not true. They're not false. They're literally just expressions of emotion. But I can still come in and give you information that will change your emotional state and literally convince you to sort of feel the opposite way, just based on the information that I've just given you

So in the same way, it might be that people have, so to speak, mistakes in their emotional expressions at a higher level. In the same way that you might be sad that it's raining, even though it's not really raining, somebody might have an emotional reaction to a surface-level moral issue

They might be like, oh, I think it's wrong that, you know, that gun law passed. But if you actually just explained the facts to them, they might be like, actually, yeah, fair enough. No, I think it's good that that gun law passed

so you're sort of having this what looks like rational discussion about moral issues but all

you're actually doing is discussing the facts and it might be the case that if we actually made every

human being on earth consistent internally emotionally with all of their foundational

emotional motivations that there would be a lot more unity than disunity but we don't know because

of course that experiment has not and probably cannot ever be done i'm not sure there is a

distinction between emotions and attitudes. I think these are essentially synonyms. Simon

Blackburn disagrees with me about this. He's an important metaethicist. He founded a metaethical

position which he calls quasi-realism, which is a kind of non-cognitivism about ethics. But

he thinks that, for example, you can have an attitude towards something without having an

emotional state, like being in an emotional state with relation to that thing. So you might have an

attitude that, you know, that thing is bad or that you shouldn't do that or something like that

But it doesn't mean that you're like emotionally invested. I'm just not sure that that's possible

I think that to have an attitude towards something is kind of literally speaking to

have a way that you prefer it to be. And I think that that belongs in the category of emotion. But

this is essentially semantics. Like if you want to draw out a distinction, you could probably do it

and say that an attitude towards something is something like your desire for the way that you

want it to be whereas your emotional state is the reaction you have to it not being the way you want it to be Yeah you could draw out some distinction like that but I think that in practice we kind of talking about the same thing One thing that important to point out is a mistake that people make Emotivists don think

that wrongness or badness or something like that, like maps on to a pre-existing emotion

like disgust or like anger or upset. It just belongs in that category, but it's its own unique

emotion in the same way that anger is a little bit like sadness, but they're not the same thing

They just belong in the same category. They're just two unique kinds of emotions. Wrong is its

own kind of emotion. It's unique, but it's still an emotion. It just belongs in that category

So, well, why might we think that? Well, how do people talk about ethics

Okay, we talk about things being wrong, but when someone does something absolutely awful

like really, really bad. What do we say? Disgusting. You know, you say that was

that's just disgusting. It's despicable. I just, and the sort of emotional reaction just comes up

on your face. Now, some people will say that that emotional reaction is your reaction to the

wrongness, right? There is this objective wrongness and you're having this reaction of disgust

to the wrongness. I'm more inclined to say that the wrongness in its totality is the feeling of

disgust. A great example for emotivism is the incest taboo. It's the most universal taboo that

exists in human societies. Everywhere we look, there is a prohibition against any kind of marital

or sexual relation with your immediate family. Some tribes, I think we found, have some interesting

variants whereby like you can marry your older sister but not your younger sister you know stuff

like that but across the board there is some kind of incest taboo it's quite easy to explain

evolutionarily why this is the case like clearly there are all kinds of problems with with inbreeding

that will be evolutionarily deselected for right but evolutionary explanations aren't a justification

right like i can also evolutionarily explain why people tend to be a bit racist i can i can explain

that in terms of your evolutionary biology, but that wouldn't be a justification for racism. That

would just be an explanation for it, right? So I can explain why there is this incest taboo

but most people want to say that incest is wrong. Why? It's a famously difficult thing for any

at least secular ethicist, to do, especially if you're some kind of utilitarian who thinks that

the only thing that matters is the minimization of suffering. Oh, well, you know, it's because

you can have disabled children? Few questions jump out of that for me. Firstly, what's wrong

with having disabled children? Secondly, obviously you can control for these factors. Okay, so you

make sure that it's two women or it's two men who've been sterilized or something like that

or a man and a woman who've been sterilized or two men. Okay, well then it's about the power

imbalances in a family. Okay, well just control for that. So often we waste so much time on these

on these irrelevant factors. You can literally just control for these factors. What's wrong with

it? When it comes down to it, most people, if they search their inner experience, the sort of

enlightened rationalists will go, well, then I don't think it is wrong. And okay, maybe they're

right in being consistent there. But even such people tend to still feel uncomfortable with it

Somebody actually once put me through my paces on this because I used to be a bit of a utilitarian

And I used to talk about this and say, well, I suppose I can't see anything that's subjectively wrong with that. And someone I know pretended that his new girlfriend, he introduced her to me as his cousin or something. And then later on, it became clear that they were an item. And he was just toying with me to see how I'd actually react. Because it's easy to say, oh, yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. But you're still going to be like, what? Because it's so universal. So what's going on there? We just think it's disgusting

we're just like gosh no i mean that's you know that's your that's your brother that's your sister

that's your that's your mother it's like that's all you've got ultimately when you when you break

it down there will be people who say no you know like i believe in god and god has enshrined into

the moral law of the universe that this is wrong interestingly still doesn't tell you why it's

wrong just gives you confidence that it's wrong but fine shelving that at least for the time being

like for at least the secular ethicists among us like even secular ethicists will say no emotivism

is wrong okay well then try to try to account for what's going on here maybe you will just say that

in this case people are just having an emotional reaction and for that reason it's not wrong but i

think that's just what's going on across the board think about the worst most homophobic person you've

ever met what do they say about gay people they don't just say abstractly like completely

dispassionately, I think that is immoral. I'd say it's disgusting. It's disgusting

No, no, no son of mine will be getting it for gay. No, no. It's got this emotional component

that everybody knows. Everybody knows about this emotional component that these things have

but I think there is just the emotional component. I think that's what this ethics is

That is the difference between a father saying, my son is gay, as a matter of fact, and saying, it's wrong that my son is gay

I think if you isolate what the difference is between those two statements, is that in one case, he's feeling something in relation to that fact about the world

And it's not like another fact that he's adding on. There's only one fact there, which is that his son is gay

And the only thing that's being added on in saying that it's wrong that his son is gay is how he feels about it

You might remember that I said that emotivism is a theory about ethics, but really it's a theory about language

It's more about what people mean when they say particular words. And so to say that when someone says, like, you know, the world ought to be this way, what they're doing is they're expressing an emotional state about the world

They're expressing their emotional reaction to the world that they don't like it, you know, and you can still make sense of what's like going on there

It kind of like if we were looking for some food and I said let go to Wetherspoons I don know if you know what a Wetherspoons is but it a glorious pub chain in the United Kingdom And you looked on your phone

and said, oh, they're all shut. And I went, oh, God's sake, you know, like I'm expressing a

preference about how I wish the world were, you know, and crucially, I'm not just reporting this

I'm not just saying, you know, I wish we lived in a world where weatherspoons were open all night

You know, that would just be a fact about my psychological state. It's the expression itself

And I think that if I said something like, it's just so wrong that they shut early or something like that

I use these moralizing terms that what I'd be doing is expressing an emotion

So you can still say something like, you know, the world really ought not be that way

But the emotivist just translates that language into the language of ethical expression

In the same way that, I don't know, you might translate when..

A lot of the time in relationships with people, you kind of have to translate what they're saying

If your wife says to you, like, oh, you're back 10 minutes later than you said you'd be

What she's actually saying is, you know, stop taking me for a fool

Like, you're lying to me, and you're never on time, and you're lazy

But it's sort of this, there's something more going on under the surface

It might even be a kind of expression of emotion When she says, oh, well, oh no, it's just that I thought we could maybe, you know, get dinner together tonight

On the surface, she's making a descriptive claim about her psychology I'm just reporting to you

I thought I had a belief that we were going to get dinner That's just a fact about the world

But clearly what she's actually doing there Is expressing an emotional state to you

She's expressing her upset But she's sort of disguising it In the language of truth claims

About her psychology And the same thing is going on with ethics When someone says I think that's wrong

What they're doing is having an emotional reaction to something And putting it into descriptive clothing

I was always already just deeply suspicious of the idea that ethics is this. It's a very difficult

thing to define famously, like concepts like good and bad, but we employ them all the time

Like outside of this kind of conversation, you know, if I'm a bit late to this interview and

somebody says, oh, I just think that's really bad. That's really immoral that you were late

Like without doing any metaethics, we all kind of get what's being said there

Right. Technically speaking, if I asked everybody in this room, well, what's your definition of wrongness? What does that literally mean? Do you mean that it causes suffering? Do you mean that it's like people might have different views and whatnot, but like on the surface level, we all sort of use these terms and we kind of get along using these terms and we know what they mean

So I was just interested in the fact that it's a kind of lexicon that I was already frequently employing, but also deeply suspicious of the idea that there is this thing in the universe called like goodness. It's just like, where does it exist? How does it exist? Does it exist like in people, in actions? Like can something even exist within an act? Like where is it? What is it

you know? It's like, okay, well then let's start paying attention. I mean, this is not an uncommon

thought for people to realize that this good and bad stuff is essentially just people saying stuff

you know? It's just like viewpoints and subjective preferences, all right? But let's get more

specific. What exactly am I saying? Because I use these terms. It's not like I'm using a term

without knowing what it means, you know? It's not like I've just used the word obnoxious

but not known the definition of obnoxious. I know what I mean when I say these terms

right? But when I reflect on it, but what is this good, this bad? I must mean something. So what do

I mean? And that's when I sort of do this exercise of really trying to isolate the moral element

What is the difference between it's raining and it's bad that it's raining? What is the difference

between a murder just occurred and it's wrong that that murder just occurred? If you try to

isolate what the actual difference is there. I think it has to just be an attitude. It's an

expression. It's the way you feel about that particular situation. And so the only thing

that can be added by saying that something is wrong is the expression of that attitude

That's sort of the way of thinking about it. That led me to emotivism, I think. It's hard

to remember literally how I sort of first started becoming convinced by this, but I suppose

I was convinced that there is no objective good or bad. I couldn't even make sense of such a concept

And once that's gone, it's not even like you're really doing ethics anymore. Now you're just

trying to work out, okay, then what do those words mean? What is the referent for the word good? It

can't be literally meaningless. It must have some kind of referent. That's what led A.J. Ayer to it

in the first place. He had this whole philosophy about meaning in language. He thought that like

statements could only be meaningful if they were either something you could verify

so prove or disprove through empirical observation, or if they were just ytically true

just true by definition, things like 2 plus 2 is 4, something like that. Or ytically false

2 plus 2 is 5. It's a meaningful statement, it's just meaningfully false

This philosophy, by the way, has completely fallen out of favor, this logical positivism

as it's called. This idea that statements are only meaningful if they are verifiable or

ytically true or false, which means that any kind of statement which does not belong in that

category, it's not just that it's wrong or false. Aya thought it was literally meaningless. It was

the same as just going blah, blah, blah or something. It just literally had no meaning

And so the big problem in chapter seven of language, truth, and logic is what about ethical statements. When I say murder is wrong, it doesn't seem like it's something I can empirically

verify. I can't go out and test with scientific experiments whether murder is wrong. But it also

doesn't seem ytically true. It doesn't seem true by definition. It seems like I can meaningfully

ask, is murder really wrong? And so Ayer's philosophy led him to this position where

he either had to say that ethical statements were therefore literally meaningless Again like saying murder is wrong would be the same as just saying murder is blah blah blah just a meaningless statement

But A was like, no, it definitely means something. So if it's not ytically true and it's not

empirically verifiable, then what do these ethical statements mean? Oh, well, they're expressions of emotions. They're not the kind of things that are true and false that we can

test like scientifically or might be ytically true. It's not in the realm of truth value at all

It's literally just an emotional expression. So it's meaningful in that sense, in a slightly

different sense that the literal meaning of the expression is just that, an expression

The biggest problem for emotivism is this so-called Frege-Geech problem, named after two philosophers. It's also known as the embedding problem. The reason for that is

because it deals with this problem that when you take the meaning of a word or a statement

and you embed it in the English language into a larger sentence, the meaning needs to stay the

same. So if I say, it's raining outside, and then I say something like, I wonder if it's raining

outside. So I've embedded that phrase, it's raining outside, that atomic phrase inside a

larger sentence, that isolated element of it's raining outside has to mean the same thing. I'm

now saying, I wonder if it's raining outside, and then it's raining outside, or I think that

it's raining outside, or if it's raining outside, then I will bring an umbrella

Those statements, I will bring an umbrella and it's raining outside, have meaning of their own

and they retain that meaning when you embed them into a statement like, if it's raining outside

then I'll bring an umbrella. The problem for Frager and Geach is that with emotivism

if ethical statements are just expressions of emotion, that is when I say murder is wrong

I literally mean something like boo murder, then how can I make sense of a statement like

I wonder if murder is wrong? What does that statement mean when someone says that? Because

if murder is wrong just means boo murder that would mean someone saying i wonder if boo murder

but that doesn't make very much sense because you're expressing an emotion and then saying i

wonder it's it's it's almost like you stub your toe and you go i wonder if ah man it doesn't make

sense that's not the kind of it's the only way you could make sense of someone saying i wonder

if murder is wrong is if in that context in the embedded context murder is wrong means something

different. In that context, it's not an expression of emotion. Oh, it's a discussion about their

mental attitude or something like that. But meaning doesn't just change like that for sentences

And so the embedding problem says, well, if you look at a statement like, I wonder if murder is

wrong, or if murder is wrong, then murdering James is wrong, which seems to be a sensible

statement that I can make sense of, then given that in that embedded context, those statements

can't just be expressions of emotion, means that outside of those embedded contexts, they also

can't just be expressions of emotions. It's a bit of a technical problem. I hope that kind of makes

sense. It's a little bit difficult to explain, actually, but I think hopefully that comes across

and people can do further reading on this. But I mean, if you think about an argument like

if murder is wrong, then murdering James is wrong. Premise two, murder is wrong

Conclusion, therefore, murdering James is wrong. That conclusion follows from those premises

We don't know if the premises are true, but we can say that if the premises are true

the conclusion follows. It's a valid argument. But logical validity relies on the truth value of the premises

To say that an argument is valid is to say that if the premises are true, the conclusion is true. That's what it means to say an argument

is valid. That's like the definition of a valid argument. So if we take that argument

if murder is wrong, then murdering James is wrong. Premise two, murder is wrong. It follows

that murdering James is wrong. That seems valid, but that would require us being able to conceive

of premise two, murder is wrong, as being something which is true or false

If we're an emotivist and we say, no, no, no, that's an expression of emotion. It can't be true or false. Then we'd have to say that that argument that I just laid out is not valid. That doesn't seem right. Seems perfectly valid. I mean, it has to be valid, surely. If you see it written down, it's like that's obviously, the conclusion obviously follows from the premises

so it's as though when you take these ethical expressions and you embed them into bigger

contexts like syllogisms or i wonder if or whatever if then statements that suddenly they're what like

just not emotional expressions anymore suddenly they have truth value and we talk about them

differently that doesn't seem to make any sense so that's the freger geach problem if you're

interested in emotivism the place to start might be ajay ayah's language truth and logic which is

where this all kind of comes from. It's chapter seven, in which he talks about what it means to

use moral terms. The book as a whole explains his logical positivism as a philosophy, which

like I say, no one really believes in anymore. It was kind of popular for a while in the 20th

century and then just completely fell out of favor. But that chapter seven is still the origin

of this emotivist framework. But a more modern philosopher to read on this stuff would be

Simon Blackburn, I think. Blackburn is famous for his introductions to philosophy. He's written a

few sort of popular introductions for just getting into philosophy, but he's also done some important

work in metaethics. He's not himself an emotivist, but he's written compellingly about emotivism and

non-cognitivism more broadly. He's also compiled or constructed quite an influential response to the

best objection to emotivism. Those would be the two names that jump out at me to begin exploring emotivism