Values end up being justified by nothing

Having finished Todd May's book, "A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe," I left an Amazon reader review titled Best "Meaning of Life" book I've ever read. 

That's high praise, since I've read a lot of them. Philosophical, spiritual, psychological, mystical, religious, scientific, political, environmental. 

May's book has resonated with me more than any other.

Maybe it is because "A Significant Life" is the most recent one I've read. But I don't think that's the reason. Rather, May delves into issues that have always fascinated me, explicating them in a fresh and appealing manner.

For example...

Whether we're speaking of meaning, values, morality, or any other concept of this sort, the age-old question is what grounds our belief that this is good or true, and that is bad or false?

Some people regard God or another transcendent cosmic being as the source of objective answers to questions of right/wrong, good/bad, true/false, and so on. Others consider that The Universe (whatever this means) speaks to us. As in, the universe is sending a message to me.

However, May correctly dismisses these attempts to ground what I'll call values, for lack of a better word, in an objective foundation.

(Sorry, religious believers, but there is no evidence that any god/divine being exists, much less the particular god/divine being that you worship.)

Turning completely in the other direction, toward subjectivity, other people feel that values are entirely in the eye, or mind, of whoever holds them. Whatever is their byword. No one can say that murdering millions of people is better or worse than finding a cure for cancer. 

Whatever. We live in a meaningless world. Any attempt to ground meaning or morality in anything other than individual whim is doomed to failure. 

May's book strikes a middle ground, which makes sense to me. Intuitively, I'm not attracted either to religious absolutism or existential nihilism. And it seems that most reasonable people I know feel the same way. 

We just find it difficult to express what that middle ground might be. Which is understandable.

May, a professional philosopher, takes an entire book to do this, and I suspect his conclusions are based on a heck of a lot of personal pondering and interpersonal discussions with friends, colleagues, and many others.

In this post, and likely a few succeeding ones, I'll share my understanding of May's view that a meaningful life is one where "subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness." It is pretty easy to grasp the subjective part; the trick is how objective attractiveness is possible without positing a god or cosmic force that grounds this.

Basically, May says that there is "a general web of beliefs that we share," and "a set of values that lend meaningfulness to a life."

The beliefs and values arise from a community of human beings. Where else could they come from, if the universe is silent and there is no god? May then asks a great question:

But here someone might ask, what justifies the web itself? If we accept or reject certain values based on the web of beliefs a community holds, how do we know the web itself is right? It may be that values aren't arbitrary because they must be justified within the network of other values and practices. But couldn't the entire thing be arbitrary? And if it is, doesn't that, by extension, make each of the values in it arbitrary?

The worry here is that our web of values, founded in our practices, is somehow floating in space. It is unmoored. Without beliefs being anchored somewhere, it could be floating anywhere: that is the arbitrariness of it. If the web is what anchors the values, but the web is unattached, then each of the values still floats free -- not from the web, but along with it.

I loved May's next sentence.

The short response to this worry is this: nothing justifies the web. 

Along with what he said after that. 

We have arrived at the point where justification comes to an end. In fact, we have arrived at the point where justification must come to an end. We cannot justify the web, the whole, itself. The reason for this is that all justification, all giving of reasons for what one believes, happens inside the web. This is true not only for values but for all of our beliefs.

...The attempt to step outside our current web of beliefs, values, and the practices in which they arise in order to justify the whole is an impossible task. After all, what would even count as a justification for an empirical claim or a value if we need to lay aside everything else we believe? In a case like that, it would be the claim or value itself that would be floating free, unanchored to anything else.

This is freaking brilliant philosophizing. Clear, logical, persuasive. Unless, I guess, one is either a dogmatic religious believer or a whatever nihilist. 

Soon after, May quotes the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: "If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: 'This is simply what I do.'"

May's next words are my favorite in the entire book. I can't resist quoting them in their entirety.

The image is a striking one, and it is famous in contemporary philosophy. My only quibble with it is that the reference to bedrock suggests that there is hard ground beneath the soil of our practices.

But there isn't, as the last line of the citation reminds us. The reason we cannot dig any deeper is that there is no more soil left. This is not because we have hit something sturdy that resists our spade. It is only because we have run out of soil. What is left is not granite or marble; it is nothing.

This is simply what we do.

The web of values and beliefs and the practices in which they arise are all we have to ground objectivity. Any one of us could be wrong, and we could all be wrong -- although we cannot say why this might be, since that would refer us back to our own practices, beliefs, and justifications.

It is perhaps possible that far in the future a generation of posthuman types will look back upon us and ask, "What were they thinking" Of course, they will do that from their own lights, as we do from ours. And, of course, we cannot imagine what it would be like to be those posthuman types, since we would have to do it from our perspective. 

All we can say is that we cannot in advance rule out the possibility of it happening.

Our web of practices, with their beliefs and values, does not rest on a ground assured by the universe. As with meaningfulness, the universe is silent on this matter. But neither do the beliefs and values in that web arise simply according to individual or collective whim.

When we seek to justify our narrative values (or anything else) to ourselves, we are in a realm which is neither arbitrary nor ultimately assured, but somewhere in between. 

For some, this might not be enough. And to them, as I have said, I have nothing to offer by way of consolation. But for the rest of us, although this may not be all the objectivity we would like, perhaps it is all the objectivity we need.

Comments

[x]

Our web of practices, with their beliefs and values, does not rest on a ground assured by the universe. As with meaningfulness, the universe is silent on this matter. But neither do the beliefs and values in that web arise simply according to individual or collective whim.

Sounds like May has replaced God with The Web.

[George Poergie puddin 'n pie]

So in one sentence what is May's meaning of life?

That would be really brilliant and we could cut through all the pondering and speculating and buzzwords and crap.

[Brian Hines]

George, May considers meaning to be a "how" not a "what." It is a process, not a thing. Meaning arises from living our narrative values, such as steadfastness, adventurousness, intensity, etc.

There is no set list of narrative values, nor is it necessary for a meaningful life to know that we are living by certain values. So there is no Meaning of Life, no objective entity like gravity or electromagnetism.

What May tries to do in his book is elucidate what people mean by "meaning." Often words are used without much thought being given to them, which confuses discussion of them.

[David R]

"life is a process, not a thing" you said.

Well, your body itself is both a process and a thing. So you appear to be wrong.

[Yale Landsberg]

Your post begins with the words, Values end up being..."

As you are a much admired and followed keen observer and beautiful articulator of much good sense found here on your outstanding blog, perhaps you can come up (not down :-) with a logical answer to this hopefully reasonable question which I have been contemplating for many decades...

How is that processes and actions once concluded can be said to "end up", even when they end up down?

Warmest regards

[Richard van Pelt]

I have been reading Ronald Dworkin”s “Justice for Hedgehogs,” which presents his theory of justice in much the same terms as your post discusses. I have been working off and on on a way for citizens to protest on and comment on public policy by presenting their position in terms of their values. When arguing whether something is right or wrong, be it abortion or HB 2666, I want to get to the underlying issue and present it in terms of whether or not it is compatible with my values and the implicit purpose of the state and the role of the state vis a vis the citizen.

Dworkin asks what causes us to have the opinions we do about right and wrong? Do the best answers validate or impeach your opinions?

He argues that the best explanation of why we hold most of our opinions is also a sufficient justification for those opinions. The best explanations of belief validate belief.

He asks where do these opinions come from (Or, are moral beliefs accidents)? He identifies faith upbringing,.relationships with others, community, the law, social norms, education,family bonds, and your sense of responsibility.

Asking whether moral beliefs be objectively true he suggests that moral responsibility emerges from opinions drawn from a reasonably well-integrated and authentic system of conviction.

We cannot vary moral attributes except by varying the ordinary facts that make up the case for claiming those attributes. We cannot make sense of the cruel counterfactual question: Would you think X unfair even if it wasn’t unfair?

There is no causal interrelation between moral truth and moral opinion. Moral facts can cause people to form moral convictions that match the moral facts.

People can have no sound reason to think any of their moral judgements is a correct report of moral truth.

I am particularly taken by his observation that “The argument ends when it meets itself if it ever does.” (Dworkin, 117). If you organized all your moral convictions into an ideally effective filter encapsulating your will, they would form a large interconnected and interdependent system of principles and ideas. You could defend any part of that network only by citing some other part, until you somehow managed to justify all parts in terms of the rest.”

The truth of any true moral judgment consists in the truth of an indefinite number of other moral judgments. And its truth provides part of what constitutes the truth of any of those others. There is no hierarchy of moral principles built on axiomatic foundations. . .”

If this sounds like circular reasoning, Dworkin argues that, yes it is, just as the scientific method itself is circular.

Some of his other observations include:

“We develop our moral personalities through interpretations of what it is to be honest or reasonable or cruel, or what actions of government are legitimate, or when the rule of law has been violated.” (Dworkin, 158)

[Brian Hines]

Yale, you ask some excellent questions. In general, I think the answer is that mental cognition is strongly connected with the body. George Lakoff describes this in great detail in his fascinating book, Philosophy in the Flesh, which I've mostly read.

This article about Lakoff and embodied cognition contains a quote right along your line.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/11/04/a-brief-guide-to-embodied-cognition-why-you-are-not-your-brain/
-----------------------
We understand control as being UP and being subject to control as being DOWN: We say, “I have control over him,” “I am on top of the situation,” “He’s at the height of his power,” and, “He ranks above me in strength,” “He is under my control,” and “His power is on the decline.”

Similarly, we describe love as being a physical force: “I could feel the electricity between us,” “There were sparks,” and “They gravitated to each other immediately.” Some of their examples reflected embodied experience. For example, Happy is Up and Sad is Down, as in “I’m feeling up today,” and “I’m feel down in the dumps.”

These metaphors are based on the physiology of emotions, which researchers such as Paul Eckman have discovered. It’s no surprise, then, that around the world, people who are happy tend to smile and perk up while people who are sad tend to droop.

Metaphors We Live By was a game changer. Not only did it illustrate how prevalent metaphors are in everyday language, it also suggested that a lot of the major tenets of western thought, including the idea that reason is conscious and passionless and that language is separate from the body aside from the organs of speech and hearing, were incorrect.

In brief, it demonstrated that “our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”