Frankly speaking, the analytic philosopher can be a bit of an insufferable asshole. Into every conversation, on any conceivable topic, he enters with a confident swagger, poised to pounce at the slightest infelicity or error on the part of his unlucky interlocutors. For any slippage or equivocation, an expression of exasperated confusion and demand for clarification at the ready. To any proposal, the impulse to counter-proposal. Talking with an analytic philosopher, one has the distinct feeling of being monitored. Every word, a potential landmine; every idea, inspected for implication and inconsistency.

And as if all that weren’t bad enough, behind all the smug self-satisfaction, some might feel, is really nothing at all! The analytic philosopher is intellectually shallow and incurious about anything beyond his narrow province. The products of his thought are, accordingly, bland, a shameful shadow of what philosophy once was. To make matters even worse, none of this he finds at all disturbing. On the contrary, the analytic philosopher takes a perverse pride in his ignorance, his simple-mindedness, his utter frivolity and irrelevance.

Assholery of this kind is not an individual pathology […] it is but the analytic style to be obnoxious in this particular way

These are the opening words in a recent book review by Lily Hu of Christoph Schuringa’s A Social History of Analytic Philosophy: How Politics Has Shaped an Apolitical Philosophy.

As a naturalistic philosopher, who frequently attacks analytic philosophy, it is a lovely change of pace to see a criticism of analytic philosophy from a very different angle. For Schuringa’s criticism of analytic philosophy comes from a Marxist perspective, lamenting its allegedly ‘a-political’ defense of the status quo.

But for the naturalist philosopher the problem with analytic philosophy is not its focus on rigour. When I describe myself as a naturalistic philosophy and not an analytic philosopher, I frequently encountered the question of whether I object to clear writing and rigorous thinking. Of course not. These are valuable traits. And so in a weak sense I am an analytic philosopher. But that is a very weak definition indeed. For spiritually I am not.

The problem with contemporary analytic philosophers is that they have taken on board the focus on rigour that characterized the logical empiricists, in their attempts to emulate the sciences, but abandoned their interest in actual science and data that may threaten commonly held intuitions. Analytic philosophy, today, is largely incurious about the developments in science, preferring to engage with each other, than with the actual world.

The vast majority of work in analytic philosophy, if one dissects the arguments in detail, eventually arrive at appeals to premises that are meant to be ‘intuitive,’ the rejection of which should count as an objection to a view. Schuringa is right to criticize that what philosophers think of as intuitive is shaped by their cultural environment. This is why much of analytic philosophy is concerned with uninteresting attempts to offer highly technical and formalized versions of ‘common sense,’ such as Rawls’s A Theory of Justice that is said to have revived political philosophy.

Ironically, even libertarians would agree with Schuringa’s Marxist criticism here. See Jason Brennan’s libertarian criticism of Rawls:

Philosophers in the analytic tradition are so focused on whether a theory (or rather its conclusions) corresponds to the common sense, that they even frequently even abandon their adherence to logical rigour and the questioning of all assumptions. Such is the inevitable consequence of fetishising one’s intuitions as guides to truth, without realizing that they are shaped by one’s cultural upbringing and social environment.

Lily Hu concludes her review with a general reflection on the trend to lament the state of philosophy:

For those of us who see or have been brought to see what Schuringa sees, A Social History offers the pleasure of recognition, of nodding along to him and the so many others in the history of philosophy who have lamented the contemporary state of philosophy. Even Bertrand Russell once wrote that he ‘cannot accept’ the ‘philosophy now in vogue’, in his foreword to Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things (1959), a predecessor to A Social History in the long line of polemics against philosophy.

Rejecting philosophy is as core to philosophy as it gets.

I could hardly agree more.

To be a good philosopher is to question philosophical methods, not to try to create ad-hoc justifications for mainstream ‘common sense’ positions. While the latter might garner a lot of popularity by defending the ‘right ideas,’ intuitions about we should already believe to be true should play little role at all in serious philosophy. Unfortunately, I think that this problem is more central to the very methodology of analytic philosophy than even Schuringa may believe. It’s as he says in the blurb for his polemic:

Over the last weeks of releasing a several blog posts, most of which were polemical against common philosophical positions that I think are deeply mistaken, I was somewhat surprised about the extent to which some people took extreme offense and responded with insults. Why would someone treat a harsh attack on a philosophical or even ethical point of view as a personal attack? Isn’t it obvious that one should decouple attacks on people from those on views? Or are polemical essays more popular, on average, because they are seen as insulting people?

I think something interesting is going on here that people haven’t really thought about.

Admittedly, terms like ‘polemic’ and ‘polemical’ have acquired a new association over the years, used more often as an insult of a writer or text than a neutral description of a style of writing. But that negative connotation is not strictly part of these terms, otherwise it would be very strange that anyone would willingly express support for polemics.

Here is a definition of ‘polemic’ from The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms:

Polemic writing was once incredibly common. And yet, the professionalization of intellectual discourse in journals and books has gradually led to the decline of polemical writing. Those engaging in it, by attacking positions too harshly, are frequently attacked for being ‘offensive’ or ‘insulting.’ But is that an essential part of a polemic?

The late Brian McClinton, once the director of the Humanist Association of Northern Ireland, offered a defense of the style, arguing that its art form was only really detested when people disagreed with it:

And yet, I don’t think this is quite right. While this may explain parts of the opposition to polemics, I don’t think it explains all of it.1 After all, why is it that some people express vehement distaste to polemics, not just when they attack their own cherished beliefs, but in general, whereas others have no issue with polemics at all, with some even celebrating it? How could people have such different attitudes to a genre?

That puzzled me until I remembered a distinction between two cognitive/communication styles, which I first heard about from one of my favourite philosophy bloggers , between high and low decouplers:

• A high decoupler evaluates a claim in virtue of its literal truth.

• A low decoupler tends to think of the subtext in which such statements might usually be made.

I think this dimension of cognitive diversity largely explains the difference between those who take no issue with polemics and those who are vehemently opposed to them.

As a philosopher working on the diversity of minds, whether that’s in animals, humans, or more recently AIs, I have long tried to push against the very common tendency of philosophers and the general population alike to assume that their own mental states and modes of thinking reflect how others see the world. One of the central goals of my first book was to explicate what I called ‘phenomenological complexity’, recognizing many dimensions and gradations of consciousness as a multi-dimensional phenomenon across the animal kingdom in order to replace the common conceptualization of consciousness as an all-or-nothing property. But even in our own species, minds vary alongside a huge number of dimensions, aka neurodiversity, which can frequently lead to misunderstandings. As I wrote in the final pages of my book:

Other future applications of the framework may also extend to the explanation of disorders and varieties of consciousness in humans. Since my being on both autism and aphantasia spectrums has informed my awareness of the phenomenological diversity of minds, I hope to expand into this area in the future.

And expand I shall. Let’s use some examples to illustrate the differences between how high and low decouplers may respond to polemical sentences.

Ironically, how one uses the word ‘polemic’ itself can be used to distinguish the high decoupler from the low decoupler. Some treat ‘polemics’ as a thick concept with an inherently negative evaluative component. Polemics are seen as always bad, perhaps because they are intrinsically insulting or too destructive in their usual subtext or more generally because violations of politeness norms are usually associated with bad people. Obviously those endorsing polemics don’t endorse a style of writing that they think of as intrinsically bad.

For the high decoupler, a statement like “utilitarianism is a ridiculous view” carries about the same connotation as the statement “utilitarianism is a really really badly mistaken view.” But for a low decoupler, the first statement amounts to little else than the statement, “You are a ridiculous person for believing in utilitarianism.” It doesn’t matter to a low decoupler that one adds clarifications that a harsh attack on a view is not meant as an attack on the people holding it. Or that one clarifies that people holding mistaken views are just as intelligent. The statement is treated as little else than a veiled insult. The clarifications are not believed to be honest. To the low decoupler, it sounds a bit like saying: “This is not meant as a personal attack and I think you’re intelligent and I respect you, but you are a ridiculous person.” That is to say it sounds even more offensive to a low decoupler.

To turn this difference into a cute neurodiversity advocacy poster:

I am very much a high decoupler, probably on the far end of that spectrum.

But I don’t think that being a high decoupler is superior or inferior. “Low” does not mean worse and “high” does not mean better. High decouplers, for instance, may fail to notice problematic political dog whistles. Each cognitive style has its advantages and downsides depending on the situation and as a society we benefit from having a neurodiverse population. But to reap those benefits, we are better off becoming aware of these differences in cognitive styles. Otherwise misunderstandings and conflict are inevitable. Given the awful history of discrimination against human differences, we should be especially careful not to declare a dominant way of thinking as ‘right’ and all others as ‘wrong’ or ‘pathological’.

As a high decoupler, I’m not insulted if someone declares one of my philosophical views to be “ridiculous,” though I’d of course prefer it when others share them and am naturally a bit saddened that they aren’t taken more seriously, e.g. animal liberation. To me, declaring a view “ridiculous” is treated more like a shorthand way of emphasizing that one disagrees with a view very very very strongly. I wouldn’t treat such a statement as a personal attack, unless the uttering person makes it clear that they think that I, as a person, am ridiculous for holding them. No doubt, this may sound strange to low decouplers, who almost automatically treat such comments as personal insults.

A low decoupler may ask what could be the point of a polemic, if not to insult the people holding a particular view?

Ironically, one’s use of the term ‘polemic’ itself may reflect whether one is a high or low decoupler. Today, it is common to use terms like ‘polemical’ or ‘polemicist’ in a pejorative sense to dismiss a criticism or to imply that they constitute personal attacks as a matter of fact. No doubt, polemics can and did historically occasionally include ad hominem attacks. But are they conceptually part of them? I don’t think so. Even if ad hominem attacks are common in politics or the common subtext in such political discussions is one of veiled insults. Again, we can decouple these subtexts. Historically, polemics referred to sharp and biting criticism that did not hold itself back to adhere to strict norms of politeness that owe all views respect, such as slavery.

To me, polemics is more like a fun literary genre that allows itself some freedom from the stale and regulated prose one might encounter in journal articles that enforce equal respect to all views, by mocking what are perceived to be deeply mistaken and harmful ideas. To illustrate the thought to a low decoupler, take a philosophy comic that pokes fun at some philosopher’s ideas:

Even as an admirer of Dennett’s naturalistic philosophy, I can’t help but find the comic hilarious. And I suspect most low decouplers would do so too. I don’t think most people would treat it as a personal attack on either Chalmers or Dennett and be offended by it. Now some extreme low decoupler might fail to disassociate comedy from personal attack. But even that is not always wrong. Some comedy, after all, is quite vicious and uses the guise of “just being humour” to launch mean-spirited attacks on individuals or minorities. But comedy is probably a good test case for checking where one falls on a high-to-low decoupler spectrum. Think of where your own boundaries lie if someone tells increasingly critical jokes about your philosophical views before you’d consider it offensive/a personal attack.

Before I thought about that distinction between high and low decouplers a bit more, I was quite surprised by some of the extreme discrepancy between those who took no issue with polemical essays and those who felt deeply insulted by them. No doubt, some who celebrate polemics may do so precisely because they think of them as veiled insults of people, not just views. They may celebrate them in the same way they might celebrate the kind of veiled backhanded compliments in the movie Mean Girls. But to be charitable, we shouldn’t just assume that others share the same cognitive styles.

I suspect that many people who enjoy polemics are high decouplers dissociating ideas from people, since people who actually celebrate personal attacks are rare.

Interestingly, speculated that we may be better off by sorting ourselves into high and low decouplers to avoid conflict:

I wonder how much better discourse would be if high and low decouplers could more easily filter each other out. (Seems rare for interactions between the two cognitive styles to be productive.)

Evidently, communication between people of these different cognitive styles can quickly turn hostile and unproductive. But rather than separate ourselves into our own echo chambers, I hope we can learn about each other’s cognitive and communication differences — and become more tolerant of and sympathetic towards each other. After all, we probably can’t change our psychological position on the high to low decoupling scale all that much. It’s a simple fact about the neurodiversity in our own species.

If high decouplers were in the majority, there might not be a communication problem, since the usual subtext of attacks on views would be attacks on views, not persons. There would be no subtext to be misunderstood if everyone just used language in a literal way. As someone on the autism spectrum I can certainly only dream of that. How nice would it be if everyone meant what they said! (I am not sure if autism necessarily comes together with a high-decoupling style of thinking, but it’s probably correlated. The vast majority of high decouplers are not autistic, however.) Living in Britain, which is infamous for its passive-aggressive subtext that, can easily create communication problems for foreigners. Who came up with the idea to use “That’s interesting.” to mean “That’s bollocks!”? Sigh.

But high decouplers are evidently in the minority and so I hope to have given some insight here into what it’s like to be one.

As a result, I’ll moderate the tone of any future polemics. While it seems like a mistake to a high decoupler like myself not to decouple attacks on beliefs from attacks on themselves, I don’t cherish making people feel insulted, especially if this is simply how low decouplers will inevitably read polemics. If this comes down to a different way of thinking and communication, we shouldn’t really think of either side as making a mistake at all.

I also don’t enjoy seeing retaliation to polemics perceived as insulting in the form of actual insults. While I love to debate philosophical views for hours, I don’t really understand people who like to spend their time insulting each other. Some polemicists may enjoy actually insulting individuals and thriving in controversy, Friedrich Nietzsche may be the most obvious example here, making statements like this:

“Is Wagner a man at all? Is he not rather a disease? Everything he touches he contaminates.”

But these kind of insults have probably given a bad reputation to the polemics genre as a whole. Indeed, with all the rage bait that algorithms push today, the subtext of polemics may have unfortunately been ruined forever.

In a world where high decouplers were the majority, harsh polemics would probably be unproblematic and cherished (as long as they only attack ideas, not people). But we don’t live in that world. In a world of high and low decouplers, polemics frequently backfire and offend, rather than convince people to change their minds, and so high decouplers may well recommend to each other to police their tone a bit more because of the subtext low decouplers will read into it. Dan Dennett was probably right after all, when he called for gentle pressure:

I’m all for keeping a very gentle pressure on, not overdoing it—because it’ll backfire.

But I hope low decouplers can also learn to show some appreciation for the fact that polemicists need not be edge lords or trolls purely in it for the sake of insulting people by attacking particular views. Milton’s attack on censorship and Thoreau’s polemic against slavery demonstrate the value of polemics nicely.

Perhaps high decouplers are even essential to challenging bad ideas that have become culturally ingrained and are considered offensive to even challenge. This may have been slavery or monarchy in the past and factory farms today. Sometimes people associate ideas so closely with their own identity that any criticism of those ideas becomes a personal attack. This is why Charles Darwin has received much hate from theists (to this day). High decouplers may be in the minority in our neurodiverse world, but humanity is better off for having them, breaking the ice on taboos about which ideas are allowed to be criticized.

Finally, whenever you attribute mental states to others based on what it would take for yourself to communicate a certain way or to have certain beliefs, pause at least for a moment and consider whether different people may have very different cognitive and communicative styles. That goes for both high and low decouplers, but also for all the other dimensions of neurodiversity in our species. We’d all get along much better.

What is my least favourite genre of philosophy writing?

Many analytic philosophers despise the obscurantist, vague, and unclear writing style of continental philosophers, but at least that writing style can often be entertaining and occasionally deeply insightful. But as a philosopher working in the Anglosphere, continental philosophy isn’t something I encounter much anyhow. Analytic philosophy is the law of the land.

And so, as a naturalist philosopher, I find a particularly common style of writing and reasoning among analytic philosophers far more off-putting, given how frequently I encounter it.

It is also a style of writing that is common in online philosophy, such as on Substack, where it’s all too common to try to debunk a position in a single comment, or dunk on a view with a single short argument, as if philosophical positions could be easily reduced to a short list of premises that can easily be dispelled.

And I say that as someone who frequently expresses a negative attitude towards a variety of philosophical views, whether that is moral realism or panpsychism, or a whole host of other views. But what you won’t hear me say or write is that I think these views are obviously logically incoherent. My polemical blog posts against particular views have made no pretense of being logical proofs against them. Rather, they attacked their meta-philosophical foundations, the theoretical virtues and philosophical methods meant to support them — but that are so rarely made explicit. This is where discussions should really take place. But philosophers, unlike scientists, have no methods sections in their publications to make their methodology explicit, and thus transparent for criticism.

My own view could not be further from one that is often attributed to Gilbert Ryle, who expressed hostility to expressed the following sentiment, but wasn’t really against meta-philosophy:

“Preoccupation with questions about methods tends to distract us from prosecuting the methods themselves. We run, as a rule, worse, not better, if we think a lot about our feet”

I rather think it’s a bad idea to start a marathon with the wrong kind of footwear. And modern runners do, in fact, pay much more attention to their technique. But to add a correction by the philosopher Michael Kremer, to my original use of Ryle’s quote:

The problem I have with much of analytic philosophy is that it reduces philosophy to logic-chopping.

It is the kind of dry and over-precisified writing style aimed at objectivity, but which misses the forest for the trees — effectively ending up straw-manning most of the views it is trying to debunk.

If all you have available in your toolkit is an evaluation of whether a philosophical position is coherent or not, I am not very interested in what you have to say, since that is not very interesting at all. A great many philosophical articulations of theories may have logical inconsistencies, falling far short of offering deductive proof. But why care about debunking an incoherent version of an idea that can be made coherent?

Even as an atheist, I have little doubt that one could offer a logically coherent worldview that includes a God. It’s not that hard to add extra variables to a model. Even as a staunch materialist, I don’t doubt that someone could give a logically coherent account of panpsychism. I just don’t care much for the straw-manning of an entire position, declaring it logically incoherent because one might succeed at showing that one version of a theory is incoherent. Not to mention that many such philosophy articles, or blog posts for that matter, create a straw-man version of a view. Like Dan Dennett, I think we went too far in turning philosophy into mere logic-chopping:

I like to think I’m drifting back to what philosophy used to be, which has been forgotten in many quarters in philosophy during the last thirty or forty years, when philosophy has become a sometimes ridiculously technical and dry, logic-chopping subject for a lot of people — applied logic, applied mathematics. There’s always a place for that, but it’s nowhere near as big a place as a lot of people think. - Daniel C. Dennett

As a naturalist, I prefer to think about philosophical theories as just another species of scientific theory. Logical analysis, of course, does have a place in the sciences. But vagueness is an inherent element of science itself. Many of the attempts to debunk Darwin’s theory of evolution through dry logic-chopping amounted to little more than providing effective proof that logic-chopping isn’t all that conducive to evaluating whether we should endorse a theory or not. Even if a particular specification of a theory has inconsistent assumptions, these can easily be fixed. Pointing out such problems is no proof that an entire theory is misguided.

The same applies to conflicts between views like materialism vs. panpsychism, or atheism vs. theism. The naturalist compares the various theoretical virtues of the best versions of these theories, which are all assumed to be capable of being made logically coherent. The geocentric model of the world was not discarded because it was logically incoherent, but because its theoretical virtues diminished compared to those of the heliocentric one. I reject panpsychism, not because it is incoherent, but because its theoretical virtues pale in comparison to a naturalistic materialism. The case for panpsychism is far too often reliant on flimsy logic-chopping ‘proofs’ for the incoherence of materialism/physicalism, rather than an independent, well-worked out theoretical account of a panpsychist alternative.

Much of analytic philosophy has become entirely dry by restricting itself to uninteresting logic-chopping alone. The same goes for much writing on Substack. While this approach may succeed in showing particular versions of views or particular authors to be mistaken, it adds little value to the grand scheme of evaluating the very best versions of theories we can and ought to articulate to make serious attempts at understanding reality.

Unfortunately, this much more important work does not easily lend itself to Substack comments, tweets, blog posts, or often enough even journal articles. The very architecture of our modern engagement with philosophy encourages logic-chopping and the straw-manning of positions, reducing philosophy to single arguments. As if one argument alone could undermine or prove a particular position… (sometimes it can, but don’t just confidently proclaim that your argument is the final nail in the coffin.)

Once we try to steel-man, rather than straw-man philosophical or scientific theories, logic chopping has little value left to add, since we already work on the assumption that the best theories are logically coherent. But for some analytic philosophers, logic-chopping has unfortunately become their only tool of the trade. All in the hope that all theories but one will eventually show themselves to be incoherent.

But that is a vain hope indeed.

If we have to choose between a vision of philosophy as applied logic versus philosophy as abstract science, we should choose the latter — vastly expanding our toolbox to answer philosophical questions.

That’s why I consider myself a naturalist philosopher. Not an analytic philosopher. (See this blog post:)

If you really want to convince someone to change their mind or if you really want to evaluate alternative philosophical views in an objective manner — you should engage in a discussion about the theoretical merits of alternative views on the table. What are the trade-offs between them? What are the methods we should use to decide between these views? Don’t quibble about the details of how the views are articulated too much. There is a time and place for that, but let’s not miss the forest for the trees. Philosophy has much more to offer.

*Since readers reqeuested an example: I think the Gettier-case industry of papers on the proper definition of ‘knowledge’ is perhaps the clearest illustration for how logic-chopping can go awry. The move towards conceptual engineering/explication, explicitly asking what a concept is meant to do and how we should design it was a very helpful introduction of meta-philosophy into the debate. See the following open-access article:

• Olsson, E.J. Gettier and the method of explication: a 60 year old solution to a 50 year old problem. Philos Stud 172, 57–72 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0383-z

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Peter Singer’s essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” is perhaps the most influential philosophy essay ever written. For it contributed to the creation of the Effective Altruism movement that raised BILLIONS to save human and animal lives.

But in another sense it is also deeply unpopular. Few people, after all, want to think of themselves as unethical/immoral for not donating to charities.

While most of us agree that it would be morally good to donate to charities, few think it is an obligation. Failing to donate is not impermissible. But Peter Singer tried to counter this common intuition with the following thought experiment (restated for the public):

On your way to work, you pass a small pond. Children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee-deep. The weather’s cool, though, and it’s early, so you are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond.

As you get closer, you see that it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond. You look for the parents or babysitter, but there is no one else around. The child is unable to keep her head above the water for more than a few seconds at a time. If you don’t wade in and pull her out, she seems likely to drown.

Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy. By the time you hand the child over to someone responsible for her, and change your clothes, you’ll be late for work. What should you do?

Most people would probably say: “Yes, in that case one should jump into the pond to save the child.” If you don’t, Singer’s argument won’t really apply to you. But if you think you should save the child, even at financial cost to you, Singer asks:

Now think about your own situation. By donating a relatively small amount of money, you could save a child’s life. Maybe it would take more than the amount needed to buy a pair of shoes, but we all spend money on things we don’t really need, whether on drinks, meals out, clothing, movies, concerts, vacations, new cars, or house renovations. Is it possible that by choosing to spend your money on such things rather than contributing to an effective charity, you are leaving a child to die, a child you could have saved?

I always found Singer’s argument quite compelling. Why should we value children’s lives less just because they are on the other side of the planet, as opposed to right in front of us? Psychologically, of course, we can understand our limited range of empathy. What would be the evolutionary benefit of unlimited compassion? But even if we don’t feel the same emotional pull to help those we can’t see, that doesn’t appear to be a good argument for thinking that their suffering doesn’t matter. The same goes for animals in factory farms, who suffer greatly but are largely hidden from sight, thus making it much harder to psychologically feel the pull to do something about it.

Now that still leaves room for who should donate and how much. Given the housing crisis today and the debt many students take on to study, it’s hard to teach Singer’s thought experiment to convince students to donate. But that’s not really who the target is anyway. Singer’s essay was about people in affluence. People in secure jobs with a high income and struggling to decide what to spend it on — other than luxury goods perhaps — should donate a portion of their income. The more one has, the greater one’s moral responsibility becomes.

Recently, I criticized tenured academics on Substack for monetizing their public writing on the grounds that they “need” that money. Personal circumstances may make that true, of course, but I think for most tenured academics, our needs pale greatly in comparison to animals in factory farms and the global poor who need that money much more. Moral philosophers, in particular, I think should set a good example by donating to good causes. And the same goes for the richest people in the world.

That doesn’t mean only the affluent among us should consider donating, however. I think it’s probably a good trait worth cultivating even in children, to consider giving some pocket money away to those in greater need. We evolved to be nice and it actually feels great helping others! Even students could occasionaly consider replacing perhaps an Uber Eats meal with something cheaper and donating the $10 difference.

The false equivalence between not donating at all and donating everything except the bare minimum one needs for a good life is not one we should take very seriously.

It’s used far too often as an excuse not to donate at all. And I think it would be immoral not to try and contribute to creating a better world by sometimes making financial sacrifices. It doesn’t require all that much from each of us to create a better world.

Consider, for instance, donating $20 to either of these charities:

• The Life You Can Save

• The Effective Altruism Animal Welfare Fund

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Richard Yetter Chappell kindly responded to my argument that tenured academics should not monetize Substack unless they donate their additional income. He disagrees. That surprised me as a fellow utilitarian since I think the social consequences of eroding the trust of academics by making us look like profit-seekers is quite serious. So let’s see what he has to say.

It’s good to find a way to see our research freely shared, e.g. via open-access journals or repositories like PhilArchive, especially when it costs us nothing.¹ But we aren’t obliged to record and share our classroom lectures, conference talks, or philosophical banter over drinks. Nor is it generally considered unethical for professors to give paid talks, to write op-eds for paywalled newspapers, or to publish a book commercially. So we aren’t obliged to freely share our every academic output. Walter suggests that “using one’s paid university time to write a blog that one then asks others to pay for” amounts to double-dipping. But then why isn’t the same true of writing a trade book?²

Ethical boundaries are often blurry in reality so I have no doubt that some edge cases will be difficult to judge. Trade books, for instance, involve a huge team and publishing house. They aren’t put behind a paywall because of the academics. But perhaps this additional income as an academic should be donated nonetheless? In any case, blogs were historically seen as publicly accessible. To put them behind a paywall makes them look morally suspect in the public eye, even if there was no fundamental difference. If this would damage the reputation of academia, I’d be worried, but it’s so standard and I haven’t really seen it called out ever.

Personally, I am (like many academics) a big fan of open-access publication. I do think it’s better to make one’s writing freely available, which is why I personally paywall very few posts (and none that I consider important). I’d encourage other academic bloggers to do likewise. But since they don’t have any obligation to blog at all, I don’t see how it could be “unethical” to do something better than baseline, like writing a post and making it available only to those who consider it worth paying for.

The argument in short:

1. It’s supererogatory for professors to blog about their areas of expertise.

2. Paywalled expert blogging is better than not blogging at all.

3. If an act is optional, and charging for it is better than not doing it at all, then charging for it is permissible.

4. Conclusion: So paywalled blogging by professors is permissible.

The highlighted premise is what I object to mainly here since that is the main argument in my essay, so I am a bit surprised that Chappell doesn’t focus much on defending his actual premises that go against what I argued in my post.

To briefly challenge the first premise: Academics, while perhaps not individually, generally have some expectation nowadays to communicate their results to the public. The public already pays us for this and to try to get paid twice over is nethical double-dipping. This is not something they do over and above their jobs. If you write a book and you suddenly pass the contracted hourly mark of your week, your work doesn’t suddenly move outside the scope of academia. The same standards still apply. There is no true “off-the-clock time” for academics. I suspect most think about our academic work outside of official times.

But much more importantly, I think making academics look like profit-rather-than-truth seekers is bad for academia as a whole. That’s unlikely to be offset by the value of a blog post an academic would only put out into the world behind a paywall. Even in a world where experts didn’t blog they’d still be able to engage in other forms of public communication or so could science communicators whose job it is to do so. So it’s very unclear why we should assume paywalled blogging is better than no blogging, unless that income is donated.

So let’s look at the case Chappell envisions:

Reflect on whether there’s anything deeply problematic about failing to write articles about feminism at all. Assuming that’s permissible (I’ve never seen anyone criticized for this), next reflect on whether feminists should prefer that there be paywalled articles on feminism over nothing. If so, it seems rather incoherent to selectively criticize just the option that you regard as better!

Again, I think the presence of a paywalled blog post is worse than either alternative, as I argue in my essay. If if was just worse than the presence of a paywall, but still good, I’d have much less of an objection.

Now there are some cases with this curious structure, as seen in Horton’s “All or Nothing Problem”. It would be wrong to gratuitously save only one of two children at the cost of your arms if you could have saved both for the same cost, even though it’s permissible to refuse to sacrifice your arms at all. (It’s a nice case for showing that avoiding wrongdoing isn’t the most important thing in the world. We should prefer that the agent wrongly save one rather than permissibly save none, after all. Though it would, of course, be better still for them to permissibly save both.) But the paywall case doesn’t seem anything like this. The suboptimality is not gratuitous,³ and no one can seriously claim that they’ve been grievously wronged by their lack of access to our writing.

The harm doesn’t just lie in a person being unable to access our blog posts. It lies in the perception of hypocrisy — we give off the impression that we care about open access, but not when we stand to personally gain from it. I don’t object to your paywalls Richard because I believe you donate probably more than what you receive in subscriptions to charitable causes anyway?

Again, I do agree that it’s (even) better to make supererogatory efforts for free. But it’s a dangerous practice to criticize people for doing something that is imperfectly good, if they could instead avoid criticism by doing nothing at all. It perversely incentivizes the worse option.⁴ (Compare how billionaires are subject to more criticism if they donate to charity than if they don’t. Or how critics of “price gouging” punish entrepreneurs for turning a profit while remedying shortages.)⁵ As I explain in ‘Utopian Enemies of the Better’, removing options for supposed inadequacy while failing to guarantee better alternatives risks just making things worse. So until we have a plan for getting more philosophers writing on Substack for free, let’s not discourage what writing we can get.

When I started seriously looking into Substack as a platform earlier this year, with the aim of blogging regularly and building a community, I looked at many other academics, especially professors, to see how they ran things and managed to develop successful followings. There were plenty of commonalities, such as posting regularly, sharing things on social media, engaging with their audiences, and so forth. However, I also made two observations that I found quite strange, if not downright unethical:

1. Academics frequently ask for money in deceptive ways, suggesting that paid subscriptions are “necessary,” “supportive,” “allow them to,” “are helpful,” in order to do public philosophy, despite being in secure tenured positions.

2. Academics frequently paywall their “public writing.”

I have long pondered whether I should write this post, since criticizing other academics isn’t looked upon too kindly, but the institution of academia ultimately matters more than any individuals. To not call out unethical behaviour in our academic colleagues is going to lead to nothing but a loss of trust in the institution that we all depend on.

After several months of observing and reflecting on this platform, I have come to the conclusion that many academics are using Substack in an unethical way, or at least in a manner that violates the values they profess to hold. Such hypocrisy is dangerous for the public reputation of academia as a whole. This post should therefore be understood as coming from a place of love for academia. I only wish to preserve its reputation. So let’s look at the two cases here.

Case A: Academics frequently ask for money in deceptive ways, suggesting that paid subscriptions are “necessary,” “supportive,” “allow them to,” “are helpful,” in order to do write public philosophy, despite being in secure tenured positions.

That academics ask their readers on Substack to support their work with donations may seem innocent at first. After all, isn’t that the model Substack operates on?

I would have no problem if professors in tenured positions asking for paid subscriptions made plainly clear that they are keen to supplant their university income. At least that would be honest. Alas, many do not, couching their requests for paid subscriptions in language that suggests they’re dependent on this income to write for the public.

But professors are not like most other writers for whom that would be true. Indeed, we are quite dissimilar from freelance journalists, book authors, or the many hobby-writers that use their free time after work to share their ideas and thoughts. For we are already receiving a full-time wage in secure employment. (I am not talking in this blog post about academics in temporary positions.) And unlike employed journalists who may fear for their jobs in today’s volatile market, academic jobs are fairly secure once we get tenure. Essentially, we can write about whatever we like for the rest of our lives, with some time spent on teaching and the administrative tasks academic life brings.

And so I always found the usage of the same language of writers in much more precarious positions that actually depend on the income they earn with writing a bit distasteful. I am not implying that other academics are necessarily malicious. They may be entirely oblivious to their actions being unethical, much like an elderly person who may not even be aware that some racial slur is offensive. So I want to emphasize that I am not attributing any deliberate unethical behaviour to any of the professors.

Now to put my cynical hat on, do academics actually need the help of donations? I don’t know their personal circumstances, which may change things for particular individuals. But the annual salary of university professors is nothing to sneeze at, putting them comfortably in the 10% of highest income earners in the UK and US. But nothing stops academics or other professors from using the time they are paid for to engage the public, so why suggest otherwise?

I could understand why academics would have a greater incentive to spend more of their time on public-facing activities than on, say, writing journal articles aimed at other academics, but it remains unclear why “help” is necessary for them to expand their public work. After all, it would not remove their existing university obligations regarding teaching and administration. And so, such statements seem quite misleading.

Perhaps this is nothing serious worth calling out. But most other writers on Substack actually need help to make a living from writing at all. They cannot use the time spent in their regular jobs to write their newsletters. Using one’s paid university time to write a blog that one then asks others to pay for, therefore, seems like asking to be paid twice over.

But things become much more problematic when we move to Case B.

Case B: Academics frequently paywall their articles.

The pay-walling of academic writing aimed at the public suffers from the same ethical problems identified in Case A and more. Some academics paywall most of their pieces.

Putting everything behind a paywall is no doubt a great strategy for climbing the bestseller list, which counts only paid subscribers. Regardless of how many free subscribers you have, this has no impact on whether you appear in the rankings. To my great dismay, this creates the perverse incentive to make things less accessible to the public in order to appear in those rankings.

I do not believe paywalls for the public writing of professors are ethical. They violate many of the values that most of us academics usually stand up for.

The very point of being a public intellectual in academia, of public philosophy or popular science, is to educate and inform the public. One of the biggest debates in academia concerns the problem of paywalled journals. Almost all of us oppose the profit-driven nature of this enterprise, which prevents the widespread distribution of knowledge, especially in developing countries. Research, academics almost universally agree, should be freely available. For knowledge is a common good that humanity should share.

So why do academics suddenly change their position when they are writing for the public? If it is because they previously had to pay for journal articles or open-access fees, whereas they now stand to profit by hiding their own articles behind a paywall, that seems quite unethical, or at least hypocritical, when it is now them that stand to gain from the arrangement.

If even Ivy League professors feel the need to monetise their writing by placing it behind paywalls, our whole profession starts to look a bit hypocritical. Do we say what we do because it is true? Or could financial interests be at play? Actual intentions barely matter, because they can hardly be proven. What matters is that such behaviour can harm the collective reputation of academia as a whole.

So What Should Academics Do On Substack?

I believe that professors on Substack should neither ask for money, nor have paywalls, unless the following condition is met:

• They donate all of their subscription income

This is an easy solution to all these problems, while not disadvantaging professors by the Substack algorithm.

This is how , the most famous ethicist in the world, handles his Substack income. He puts his money where his mouth is. And I think we should all emulate him.

About Paid Subscriptions

I do not need to earn income from Substack, but I’ve decided to offer a paid subscription option in order to support The Life You Can Save. If you wish to support my efforts, consider upgrading your subscription ($70/year), giving someone else a gift subscription, or contributing to The Life You Can Save

In the past, I very much struggled with the idea of introducing paywalled content. But to appear in the philosophy rankings and receive a much larger viewership, one needs paid subscribers, so I found myself in a dilemma.

I found paywalls unethical, but hoped to make it onto the top 100 ranking at some point, which features unfortunately only few actual philosophy professors — a embarrassing state for our discipline, really, given the not too small number of professional philosophers that regularly write excellent essays. The solution I came up with for myself was to put occasionally put a new blog post behind a paywall for a few days before I made them public, and to offer free pdf copies of my books. [That offer still stands by the way:]

I also promised to donate at least half to a charity:

Since I am writing a book on shrimps at the moment, I’ll donate at least half (if not all) to shrimp welfare causes at the end of the year. :)

But I’ll now officially pledge that I will donate all of my subscription income at the end of this year. For maximum transparency, 50% will go to the Shrimp Welfare Project and the other 50% will be donated to FarmKind.

Why shrimp? I admit that it would be easier for me to convince people to become a paid subscriber if I gave all the proceeds to a charity for dogs. But almost all donations to animal welfare already go to dogs and cats. What goes to farm animals, the animals with the worst lives in modern factory farms, is only a tiny proportion. But even here we spend most of our attention to the familiar animals we all know and love (even if purely as food): cows, pigs, and chicken. Almost nothing has gone to shrimp. Indeed, their welfare wasn’t even considered by anyone until very recently. That has led to some horrific practices like eyestalk ablation, which is the removal or crushing of the eyes of females to make them grow faster:

I’m currently writing a book on the mental lives of shrimps, which I hope will turn many readers to rethink their attitudes to these animals, and perhaps even donate themselves. The UK recently announced that they’ll ban the boiling of shrimps, lobsters, and crabs alive — but much more work remains to be done. For financial transparency, the Shrimp Welfare Project has graciously funded a grant to my university that has replaced my teaching and admin tasks for a year to write the book. None of that money adds anything to my income, I should add, it only means I don’t teach for a year.

Nevertheless, if you don’t want to see your money going to shrimp, the other 50% of my subscription income this year will go to who try to improve the lives of all farm animals!

Currently, I have 10 paid subscribers and 311 USD to donate by the end of this year, which I am already proud of since I didn’t really offer much of a benefit to paid subscribers so far. But I hope to make it to reach 1000 USD by the end of December. It’s the season of giving after all.

If you want to support my blog (and irregular podcast) in reaching the philosophy bestseller list, while also seeing your money help animals in need rather than, to put it polemically, simply filling the pockets of academics who are probably already much richer than you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or gifting a subscription to someone you think might enjoy my posts.

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Substack also offers the option of becoming a “Founding Member”, allowing you to contribute any amount above the regular subscription fee. Again, even if you’d donate a million here, I’d donate it all to charity. And so should other academics, who are estimated to earn millions, or at least a good proportion of it. I believe this is necessary in order to preserve the integrity of academia itself.

The ultimate currency of academia is and should remain scholarly reputation, not income. If you want to be rich, I’m tempted to say, choose a different career. That’s not the point of being an academic. Otherwise we all lose our credibility as intellectuals employed in institutions allegedly dedicated to the pursuit of objective truth. Tenure was designed to give us the security to do so, not to serve as the starting point for a second career.

Please like, share, and subscribe. It helps a lot to reach a wider audience to discuss these ideas, even if you do not agree. Indeed, please leave your thoughts in the comments — regardless of whether you agree or disagree. I try to respond to all.

Let me pre-emptively apologize for the anger a polemical essay of this kind will, no doubt, cause in some readers. For there is no polite way of stating my conviction that a large part of the philosophy profession have misapplied their intellect in pursuits that have tarnished the reputation of our field. But I assure you that I harbour no ill feelings of hatred for my fellow philosophers or the field that we all love. I only feel pity.

I shall thus not apologize for laying a finger in the wound of philosophy’s pitiful state.1

Two years ago, the philosopher and veteran of the blogosphere published a lovely book titled The Weirdness of the World — a book aimed at the public to show the mind-bending and strange views that have made it into current debates in philosophy, celebrating “a philosophy that opens” the horizon of our minds. Outsiders of philosophy sometimes look with bewilderment at the weird things that go on in philosophy and come to the conclusion that anything goes. Schwitzgebel wants to affirm that conclusion. We should celebrate philosophy for its wild speculations.

As a fellow philosopher, my view of philosophy could hardly be more opposed to Schwitzgebel’s vision. I think an anything-goes attitude turns philosophy into a circus in pursuit of spectacle. Not a serious academic enterprise in search of truth. With such different views on what philosophy should be, it almost seems like two entirely different creatures roam the floors of the philosophy department.

In a review of Schwitzgebel’s book that surprisingly made it into Science, fellow naturalist philosopher Edouard Machery had this to say:

There are two kinds of philosophers: swallows and moles. Swallows love to soar and to entertain philosophical hypotheses at best loosely connected with empirical knowledge. Plato and Gottfried Leibniz are paradigmatic swallows. Moles, on the contrary, rummage through mundane facts about our world and aim at better understanding it. Aristotle, William James, and Hans Reichenbach are paradigmatic moles.

Machery is well-known for his usage of psychological methods to study philosophical intuitions — that have shown armchair theorizing of philosophers to be entirely unreliable — and so it won’t be surprising that he considers himself a mole. He notes that his own writing has been aimed at curtailing “the flights of fancy with which contemporary philosophers are enamored” and accordingly was largely critical in his review. He writes that “Schwitzgebel’s arguments often rely on a commonsensical, but questionable, understanding of key ideas” from science, leading to wild speculation, such as whether the United States of America is conscious.

Machery does not hold back on this point:

Schwitzgebel prides himself on painting awe-inducing philosophical possibilities that go against common sense and that we do not have compelling reasons to believe; they are, in his terminology, “wild.” But he never asks why we should care about what common sense finds plausible or bizarre. Common sense is a poor guide to truth, and it should play little role in serious philosophizing.

Finally, Machery concludes his review with the somewhat barbed compliment that if you enjoyed reading “Philip Goff, then this book is definitely for you,” but warns the moles of the world that the book is not for them:

It is brilliant, thought-provoking, and very enjoyable. But card-carrying moles who want to see philosophy add its stone to the ever-growing edifice of knowledge might be left dissatisfied.

[I have criticized Goff’s speculative views on consciousness elsewhere:]

Even the title of Machery’s review is ambiguous. Describing Schwitzgebel as ‘audacious’ could be read as a compliment for his boldness to go to new places, but also describe a kind of recklessness and a lack of proper respect. Swallows, unfortunately, show little respect for the intellectual achievements of science and even less for its actual outputs, being largely ignorant of what science has to say on the questions they are trying to answer.

While people often think of the history of philosophy as a long series of wild speculation that had little concern for empirical knowledge, that’s not quite right. Moles have always existed.

Aristotle, whom Machery identifies as a mole, spent much of his time observing the natural world and ended up writing some of the first systematization attempts of the living world, which made him the father of biology in the eyes of many — something we have unfortunately largely forgotten.

Hans Reichenbach was an incredibly influential philosopher who published a book in 1951 titled The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, in which he argued that the scientific revolution finally allows us to leave behind the speculative philosophy of the past, which merely asks questions without ultimately answering them. Here is a lovely passage from it that nicely captures the spirit behind much of my recent criticisms of non-naturalistic philosophy:

Despite disagreements in the detail, I could hardly agree more with Reichenbach’s general vision for philosophy, which stands in stark contrast to that of Schwitzgebel.

[Ironically, Reichenbach is my academic 3rd great-grandparent (5 generations back through academic supervisors), which I learned when I dug a bit through the history of my lineage:]

Admittedly, Schwitzgebel doesn’t want to “reserve the name of philosophy” for non-naturalistic philosophy. The swallows of philosophy have increasingly given up on that goal. However, the many swallows housed in philosophy departments do want to preserve the label philosophy for all “their fallacious attempts at superscientific knowledge.”

Like Machery, I respect Schwitzgebel, and I, too, agree that his writing is makes for a mind-bending and enjoyable read. But I don’t think it is philosophy. It’s more akin to a science-fiction novel that bends the rules of reality, but shouldn’t be taken seriously as telling us anything about the actual world. Schwitzgebel, of course, is more than competent in doing actual philosophy, masterful even. He has frequently dealt in deeply naturalistic work, even conducting empirical research himself. And so he is a good foil here, since his case shows that swallows can become moles. While I think that philosophy has no need for swallows, indeed, must ‘purge’ itself of swallow-like flights of fancy to become respectable again, no one is prevented from becoming a mole and doing serious work.

Machery’s metaphor is unfortunate, of course, for a multitude of reasons. After all, animals do not metamorphose into other species. I and many other philosophers are also animal lovers. How could anyone want to get rid of swallows? Don’t we want a diverse ecosystem? Furthermore, given the choice between being a swallow soaring through the skies or a mole burrowing in the dirt, philosophers uninterested in finding themselves constrained by science will feel themselves vindicated. Swallows are free. They can explore the whole world, whereas moles can only ever explore parts of it. Worse, moles have poor vision. So it might be read as a kind of self-own of Machery to describe himself as a mole.

But there is a better way we can think of the difference between moles and swallows here, and it is ironically one provided by Schwitzgebel himself in the final paragraph of his book:

Rather than thinking about the two kinds of philosophers as swallows and moles, I believe it is more useful to think of them as placed at different stages in the maturity of philosophical development. Children and adults. Child-like and mature philosophy. Or in Reichenbach’s terminology, the ‘speculative philosophy’ of the past and the ‘scientific philosophy’ of the future.

Children engage in wild speculation entirely untethered from the knowledge humanity has accumulated. Even logic is thrown out of the window. As adults we look at their innocence and curiosity with nothing but encouragement and love. But if an adult fails to distinguish imagination from reality the only response left is pity. Child-like philosophy is but one step in one’s development as a philosopher. But eventually it is time to grow up.

Earlier in his book, Schwitzgebel writes: “It would just be too sad if the world had no space for speculation about wild hypotheticals.” Sad that may be. But no one is trying to ban wild speculations. They are just no longer viewed as philosophy and should thus be confined to the fiction sections of book stores. They can still make for an enjoyable read and even hit best-seller lists nonetheless. Mature philosophy is also not against all speculation or diversity either. Science is filled with speculations that are motivated by what we have learned. Science is filled with bizarre and unintuitive conclusions because intuitions and common sense play little to no role in the search for truth. But what would be a truly sad and pitiful state of affairs is if “wild” speculations entirely unconnected from the sciences were continued to be viewed as serious philosophy within the field. For it would justifiably lead to the continued decline in the respect philosophers once held. It would undermine the status of philosophy as a serious academic field in search of truth.

If we are keen to experience the weird, diverse, and wonderful, one has to look no further than to the actual world.

In a very short blog post this summer, fellow philosopher set out to show that David Hume’s famous doctrine that reason is the slave of the passions “makes no sense”:

The 18^th century Scottish philosopher David Hume put forward a theory of human motivation that remains highly influential to this day. On Hume’s view, motivation always bottoms out in desire. Reason is merely a tool for helping us to satisfy our desires. The desires themselves – at least our most basic desires – are not subject to rational criticism. As Hume put it, ‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.’

We all know instrumental reasons. If you want to drink water, you have an instrumental reason to move, fill yourself a glass, and drink it. But Goff wants more. He wants substantive reasons that are entirely disconnected from our desires at all. He wants to defend moral objectivism.

And so I expected him to defend a substantive view of reasons that is not just instrumental. Alas, he does not. For almost the entirety of his post, Goff rambles about how we might interpret ‘desires’ and ‘motivations’ in different ways, which does nothing for his conclusion:

One big problem I have with Hume’s view is that the word ‘desire’ is used in different ways, and philosophers sympathetic to Hume are often unclear which they mean. Here are three different meanings of ‘desire’:

Yearning – A conscious craving for something. In a strong form, being driven by hunger or lust. In a weaker form, feeling enthusiastic about a trip to the cinema.

Psychological aim – A long-term decision to do something. Perhaps I have a fixed decision to volunteer every Wednesday in my neighbourhood – it’s something I ‘want’ to do – even though I don’t feel any pleasure from it and would rather be at home watching Netflix.

Preference – The fact that one enjoys something when one does it. Often this goes along with yearning for the thing but not always. Maybe I never feel like going for a long walk but I always enjoy it when I do.

Human motivation is a mix of all three of these things.

Humeans insist there’s always a desire in the background. Yes, I am motivated by the fact that I will enjoy walking in the country, but that’s only because I desire to feel good. But in what sense of ‘desire’? It can’t be the yearning sense because I don’t always yearn to feel good. The Humean could postulate a ‘desire’ in the psychological aim sense: I have made a long-term decision to feel good. But I don’t see the need for a deeper level of explanation here. The bottom-line is: I went for the walk because I knew it’d make me feel good. If someone says, ‘But why did the fact that you would feel good motivate you?’, I wouldn’t say, ‘Because I’m psychologically aimed at feeling good.’ I’d say, ‘What are you talking about? There’s nothing more to be said.’

None of this matters for the questions at hand. Humean philosophers typically describe the whole set of psychological states that can motivate our engagement in instrumental reasoning as a ‘subjective motivational set.’ Whether that’s emotions, desires, feelings, aims, or any other way you might wish to carve up this space, they give you reasons to act upon them. It is precisely the Humean who doesn’t ask someone why they took a walk. It is Goff who wants a “deeper level of explanation” for it is he that isn’t satisfied with the basic motivational psychology we all share.

The final category of preference is especially important, as once we take on board the role this plays in motivation, the Humean dogma that motivation always bottoms out in desire collapses. This is because, in the case of preference I am essentially motivated by a fact about the world, namely that I would enjoy (for example) a long walk. But if I can be motivated by the fact that I would enjoy something, I can also be motivated by the fact that somebody else would enjoy something. If I can be motivated by the fact that something will make me suffer less, I can be motivated by the fact that something will make someone else suffer less.

Imagine arguing that you didn’t actually drink a glass of water because you desire a glass of water, but because of the fact that you desire to drink a glass of water. What force does that argument have here? None. Hume does not oppose that we can care for the suffering of others. That gives us instrumental reasons to act to help them. Goff is attacking a straw-man here, implying that a Humean can only be trying to egoistically look out for his own happiness.

If Hume were right, then we just happen to be psychologically aimed at feeling good, whereas we might have been psychologically aimed at feeling pain all the time, or psychologically aimed at counting as many blades of grass as possible (even though this brings us no pleasure). For Hume, all of these fundamental psychological aims are rationally on a par, and the job of reason is just to tell us how best to satisfy these fundamental aims.

Hume wouldn’t say you’re trying to maximize your own happiness at all times. That’s entirely a misreading. He’d have no problem with someone going through a great amount of suffering to take care of something who they love.

And yes, a Humean believes all of our desires entire into consideration when we reason. That doesn’t mean anything goes. For most of us, we simply have desires that are stronger than that to count the blades of grass on a meadow (if we have that desire at all). But if someone really wants to do that in the moment, why give a shit? Goff wants to rule out such cases by demanding that reason disqualify any desires from consideration at all. He wants to make reason the dictator of the passions. But then please give an argument.

The only argument he ends up giving is in the final paragraph, if one can even call it an argument:

To my mind, the Humean view of motivation makes no sense when you think it through in this level of detail. Yes, sometimes we do things because of our yearnings, or because we’re just psychologically directed at a certain goal. But a lot of the time we pursue things because they are worth pursuing. One’s own happiness is a worthwhile pursuit. So is the happiness of others, or scientific advancement, or creativity. We are motivated by these things not because we happen to ‘desire’ them but because they are worth doing. In contrast, pursuing one’s own pain for its own sake, or counting blades of grass for the sake of having blades of grass counted, are pointless activities, which is why we tend to avoid doing them.

Welcome to moral objectivism.

Goff grants that “sometimes” reason does act as a slave to the passions. But he thinks the Humean view makes “no sense” because we also pursue ends because they are objectively worth pursuing. He doesn’t mean you subjectively find something worth pursuing, for that would just fall back into the Humean picture, he wants to say that we do things because they actually are objectively worth pursuing.

But, of course, that can’t be right. We don’t have some special access to a faculty telling us what really are the objectively worthwhile things to pursue, even if we think that there are facts of the matter. What ultimately motivates a person, in such cases, is what they feel is worth pursuing. That is, a moral passion which imbues some end with a kind of special glow that features in our reasoning. Even if they later change their mind, that doesn’t change their moral passions they felt at the time.

Goff doesn’t like counting blades of grass. Fair enough. But he is only revealing his own own lack of such a passion. Using this argument is a dangerous game to play. For it’s a similar move we see in the moralization of behaviours that majorities don’t find worth engaging in themselves, but cause no harms to others, such as, say homosexual activities. Goff is simply begging the question. Stating your own intuitions is no replacement for argument.

That Goff thinks the fact that most people don’t find counting blades of grass objectively worthwhile is the strongest argument for moral objectivism is more of an indictment for moral objectivism than an obvious proof that Hume’s view “makes no sense when you think it through in this level of detail.” One may be tempted to explain “Which Detail?!” in response. Even I, who is not a moral objectivist, thinks there are much better arguments one could make. Alas, Goff doesn’t offer them.

It’s like we’ve observed a criminal trial in which the prosecution (the moral objectivist) decides to rest their whole case on only one argument, which is so bad, that the defendant (the moral subjectivist) is immediately cleared of all charges, and the prosecution suddenly appears corrupt for bringing the defendant to trial at all.

In 2016, the journalist Olivia Goldhill published a short interview with the provocative clickbait title One of the most famous living philosophers says much of philosophy today is “self-indulgent”.

Read more

I must have read Alex Rosenberg’s “Atheist’s Guide” around 2014/2015 when I began my undergraduate studies. However, what led me to the book wasn’t that it was a book about atheism, but about the philosophy that makes many of us atheists: naturalism.

The book isn’t really a book defending atheism, indeed, as far as I remember Rosenberg was orginally thinking of re-using the title of Epicurus’ Great work “On Nature” — but with trade books publishers are interested in sales, and so his editors pushed for a title that would draw on the cultural Zeitgeist of New Atheism.

The book sets out to answer some of the most persistant philosophical questions that most of us have wondered about, if we actually take science seriously, in order to live a life without illusions. Now that doesn’t mean there is uniform agreement among naturalists. After all, science is continuesly changing and updating. Naturalists, unlike most other philosophers, are no slaves to their intuitions.

Early on in the book Rosenberg gives a quippy short list of these questions and the answers he is going to defend. Here, I’ll briefly quote them and offer some insight into where I agree with the so-called ‘mad dog naturalist’ himself.

Is there a God? No.

Agreed. Here, we have uniform agreement among naturalists: there is no need to invoke God in one’s metaphysics. Purely speculative metaphysics and natural theology are not even serious epistemological rivals.

Ask someone, who is trying to provide a proof for a god, about their epistemology, and one is quickly disabused of the notion that any serious attempt to understand reality is taking place.

That is not to say that the people are fools or that the arguments can’t be intellectually impressive. But their arguments are — like much of what goes on in (a priori) philosophy — largely pointless “chmess”, as Dennett called it. (An attempt to work out the higher truths about an arbitrary set of alterations to the rules of chess.) Here is a lovely quote to illustrate the idea:

What is the nature of reality? What physics says it is.

Rosenberg is a bit reductive here and I wouldn’t go as far as him. If rephrased as “What is the universal nature of reality?” one can reply with universal physics (see also Ladyman and Ross), but the special sciences, such as economics or biology, are also describing real though local patterns of reality.

What is the purpose of the universe? There is none.

An absurd question really that projects our evolved human capacity to engage in instrumental reasoning unto the world.

What is the meaning of life? Ditto.

There are Darwinian ‘purposes’ in biology, such as the heart having the evolved function to pump blood, or biological systems having the ‘purpose’ to maximize fitness, but that’s not what the question is getting at here, of course. There is no hidden secret.

Why am I here? Just dumb luck.

Indeed.

Does prayer work? Of course not.

Sorry to dissappoint.

Is there a soul? Is it immortal? Are you kidding?

Ditto.

Is there free will? Not a chance!

Now I’d disagree with Rosenberg here and assert the existence of free will, but that’s not the libertarian free will most defenders of it have in mind really. There is a difference in how ‘free’ your actions are as a child versus an adult.

What happens when we die? Everything pretty much goes on as before, except us.

Agreed.

What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad? There is nomoral difference between them.

Agreed.

Why should I be moral? Because it makes you feel better than being immoral.

People fear nihilism because people would just act selfishly. But we evolved to be nice. If you feel empathy with other animals, it will make you feel good to donate. You don’t need to try to justify that you have an obligation to do so first. Try donating 5 bucks and see how it feels.

Is abortion, euthanasia, suicide, paying taxes, foreign aid, or anything else you don’t like forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory? Anything goes.

This could be misread as Rosenberg thinking everything is permissible — which would be a moral view. Rather he’s denying that there are facts that could make a sentence like “Stealing is bread is permissible when you’re hungry!” true or false. It’s like the question: “Is the king of Germany bald?” — well there is no king of Germany

What is love, and how can I find it? Love is the solution to a strategic interaction problem. Don’t look for it; it will find you when you need it.

Or rather look at the cognitive science literature on what causes people to fall in love. The causes are manifold.

Does history have any meaning or purpose? It’s full of sound and fury, but signifies nothing.

I think this is overstated. What Rosenberg has in mind is that we often tell a narrative history, attributing mental states to people of the past to tell some grand story. To him these stories are closer to the telling of myths in what they can teach us. He is not opposed to empirical research into history. But he denies the idea of “eternal recurrence” — that historical events are doomed to repeat.

Does the human past have any lessons for our future? Fewer and fewer, if it ever had any to begin with.

I partially agree. The more complex human societies become the less predictable they are. And so looking at our past to predict our future become less and less reliable. The rise of AI emphasizes that nicely.

In any case, Rosenberg’s book is well worth a read, since it was written for the public, not just other philosophers.

*

If you have any questions or want to know more about why I believe these things, leave a comment. I’d be happy to offer some more detail there. If you’re interested in a discussion between me and Alex Rosenerg, you can watch the following video:

If you made it to the end, please consider to like, share, and subscribe. It helps a lot to reach a wider audience and create discussions, even if you strongly disagree. Please also let me know your thoughts in the comments, regardless of where you agree or disagree, I’m keen to read the feedback of my readers. I try to respond to all.

Let me apologize proactively for the provocative clickbait title and image I have chosen for this essay.

The reason I have done so is that there are actually thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of lives at stake, yet their deaths and suffering receives almost no attention at all. While this essay will do little to change that in the great scheme of things, I am naively optimistic that I can at least raise the problem here in a way that might reach and change the minds of a wider audience who otherwise only come into contact with poltical issues that make it to the top of increasingly sensationalized and polarized news.1 (Those are not the only ones we should prioritize!)

The issue I am talking about concerns children born with genetic diseases that cut their lives short and/or massively reduce their quality of life, but which could have been cured through gene editing.

This problem is entirely neglected in the current culture war between the Left and the Right, which shifts media attention and public concern almost entirely towards other topics, while issues such as this one do not make it onto the political agenda of either party. That this is problematic can easily be seen in the case of animal welfare, which, despite cross-party support for welfare improvements on factory farms, does not make it onto the agenda of either party. In the case of gene editing, of course, things are even worse, since both sides of the political aisle are united in their opposition to the gene editing of humans, which has largely thwarted research that could save hundreds of thousands of lives in the future.

The tendency in the culture wars to use terms like ‘fascist’ or ‘eugenics’ indiscriminately to describe one another has also brought ordinary scientists who are merely trying to cure diseases into the crosshairs, inundating them with similar terms and personal attacks. No doubt, to anyone who does not spend more than a few seconds thinking about genetic engineering, the practice may seem morally suspect. After all, could this be a veiled return of Nazi ideology?

It is not. No one wants that. Okay, let me rephrase that. A tiny minority of the world’s population may be interested in Nazi-style eugenics.

But opposition to giving parents the option of curing embryos of awful genetic conditions that would cut their lives short or give them an awful quality of life, merely because even a Nazi might agree with doing so, is no more rational than opposition to animal welfare laws because the Nazis also implemented them, or refusing to invest in national military defence because military ‘defence’ can, for some, mean expansionist war, as in Nazi Germany or Russia’s attack on Ukraine.

The supposed slippery slope towards a return of coercive and racist Nazi-style eugenics is entirely fearmongering.2 People are so vehemently opposed to genetic editing in humans that it is hard to see why a widespread adoption of gene editing to cure genetic disorders would suddenly cause people to become Nazis.

One of the most common distinctions made in bioethics in this debate is between curing and enhancing. Whereas the former restores health, the latter attempts to go beyond average human capacities. While the former receives broad support, ethicists and the general population are far less enthusiastic about the latter, making it incredibly unlikely that people would attempt to genetically engineer a ‘new and improved race’.

Now, as it happens, I do not think the distinction between curing and enhancing should carry much weight in ethical decisions. If someone can live a longer life because we find ways to genetically improve their immune system beyond ‘normal’ levels, I do not think that is ethically more suspect than doing so by removing a gene that is likely to cause cancer.

If many decades of genetic engineering have passed, successfully treating genetic health conditions, I do not see why we should oppose further genetic alterations likely to improve a human’s immune system, disease resistance, and perhaps even cognitive traits beyond what is statistically normal in human populations. But all these things are so far removed from the editing of deleterious genes that they require a wholy separate discussion and one that should likewise not be confused with a slippery slope towards Nazi-style eugenics.

Critics sometimes envision a dystopian world in which we create two entirely different breeds of humans, one of which controls and oppresses the other, but these are utterly absurd scenarios that can be seriously envisioned only by those who have watched too much science fiction and have little to no understanding of genetics.

At best, ‘improvement’ beyond average population health would initially be fairly minor, perhaps reducing your risk of certain types of cancer by a few percentage points. Now, that is nothing to sniff at. With millions of people on this planet, that could mean thousands of lives saved, but it is nothing like the images of Nazi eugenics that people envision when they hear about genetic engineering. It has nothing to do with declaring that some lives are worth more than others. It is simply about things on which we could universally agree, regardless of our views about the good life, such as preventing our children’s lives from being cut short by cancer.

Funding is always limited. And there is no reason to think that we would reach this stage unless we dealt with all the highest-payoff scenarios first, namely genetic conditions that lead to premature death or extremely painful conditions, of which there are many.

But even if we want to restrict ourselves to curing, we should not fear the common slippery-slope arguments, which are generally despised by philosophers as a faulty mode of reasoning. We can always choose to wear better footwear. We can implement a wide variety of precautionary measures to prevent such outcomes. These would be vastly superior to simply letting children die or suffer from awful diseases.

Even if you are religious, I do not think there is a good argument for why God would not want us to engage in gene editing to cure harmful mutations, even if God would not want us to pursue further ‘enhancements’. After all, helping those who are suffering because of an unlucky draw in the genetic lottery is presumably a restoration of ‘God’s intended design’ rather than an affront to it.

Opposing genetic engineering research is a little like allowing homeless people to starve to death or opposing aid to starving children because one thinks that providing such aid might slightly reduce the chances of a communist revolution in the distant future, leading to a utopia in which starvation no longer exists.

Unfortunately, gene editing of human embryos remains illegal or restricted from receiving public funding in many countries. I am not talking about actually bringing gene-edited babies into existence. I am talking only about research. Pointing out unforeseen genetic risks should be a call to conduct more research, not a veiled political attempt to stop it in its tracks.

If we really care about the lives of hundreds of thousands of children, research into curing terrible diseases through gene-editing should become a political priority. This has nothing to do with being left, right, or anything else. Saving the lives of children should be something on which any rational and compassionate human can agree, regardless of their political views. Both sides of the political aisle have blood on their hands for preventing research that could already have saved thousands of lives. Not to mention the suffering of parents whose happiness is frequently destroyed by having to watch their children suffer and die. But I hope we can admit our mistake.

Future generations would thank us.

If you made it to the end, please consider to like, share, and subscribe. It helps a lot to reach a wider audience and create discussions, even if you strongly disagree. Please also let me know your thoughts in the comments, regardless of whether you agree or disagree, I’m keen to read the feedback of my readers. I try to respond to all.

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In this essay, I’ll try to briefly explain why I believe that the most despised theories in ethics and meta-ethics, respectively, can resolve all of ethics when combined.

I have been a utilitarian since my undergraduate days... or at least since my twelfth year of school, when we had a philosophy elective for a year. What a wonderful opportunity that was, by the way, for I may never even have considered studying philosophy otherwise.

But I’ve also been a moral nihilist. I see no reason to believe that there are moral facts. Indeed, I’ve also become a moral abolitionist — a nihilist twice over. I think that we should abandon much of moral language for it is deeply confused and would make most of us better off in the process. Yet I also think that we should organise society in broadly utilitarian ways.

This may seem paradoxical. One cannot both defend a particular view of what is morally right and good while denying that there are moral facts. So how can we square this strange combination, which I believe even Jeremy Bentham himself endorsed?

In ethics classes, I largely found utilitarian answers vastly more compelling than deontological ones, or whatever other alternatives were being discussed. Whereas utilitarianism was naturalistic, grounded in the mental states of particular individuals and what makes their lives better from their own point of view, other ethical theories have always been awfully paternalistic, telling people what they should really value, and building metaphysical castles in the sky unconnected to reality in order to justify these intrusions into people’s own visions of the good life.1

And yet, when utilitarians made the move from the fact that positive mental states or the satisfaction of preferences, the subjective values of people, to what is objectively valuable, from the point of the universe one might say, I always found myself puzzled — hesitating for the same reason that I’ve become a moral nihilist. There are no moral facts. There are no objective values.

However, I didn’t really feel any internal tension. Of all the ethical theories one might endorse, utilitarianism still offered the metaphysically least objectionable move, simply identifying the subjective values of creatures to the objective values of the universe.

Other moral theories cast their long and cumbersome ways of generating moral facts from those subjective values, or sometimes ignoring them altogether, trying instead to justify whatever their authors find valuable for what is valuable once and for all. But the end result is the same: non-utilitarian ethics sacrifices people’s real subjective values on the altar of whatever values are declared to be ‘objective’ but are, in truth, merely fictional.

From the nihilist’s point of view these attempts can be seen as a dictatorship of allegedly objective values, not as the self-proclaimed liberation from evils and injustices that the moralist promises.

Yet, I never saw a tension here because I didn’t endorse utilitarianism as a reflection of the one true morality, but rather as a pragmatically useful answer to the inevitable problem of how to organize social life. See also my earlier essay:

The moral error theory, the philosopher’s term for a set of meta-ethical theories according to which there are no moral facts (there are many reasons that would make their existence problematic rather than just one, just like for arguments against God), has been steadily gaining more attention among philosophers. But the literature has in recent years shifted away from a defense of this kind of nihilism and towards the question of what we should do once we embrace a world without (objective) values.

Philosopher’s call this the Now What? Problem of the moral error theory.

Most philosophers and the public itself hesitate to even consider moral nihilism due to the fear of a world in which everyone just does as they please without regard for each other, entirely unrestricted by the moral law. Much like atheism was long not considered because of the fear that people would rob and kill indiscriminately once they lost their fear of God. And, of course, because atheists would be killed. Moral nihilists are also unlikely to reveal themselves, because of the negative social consequences this may have.

“You don’t believe murder is wrong?!” the indignant neighbor shouts. Americans won’t vote an atheist into office. What hope does a self-avowed nihilist have?

Alas, despite the high proportion of people who do not believe in moral facts, we are all locked into a ludicrous and unhelpful game, throwing around moralized language, all in the vain hope that we may arrive at a society we find more desirable. Often, of course, this game has the opposite result. Raging culture wars have probably not made the vast majority of lives better off in the long run. But if you were to stop coating your arguments in the magical gloss of alleged moral objectivity what hope could you have in a debate with those who do? It’s a bit of a prisoner’s dilemma really, where it might benefit one in the moment to use that language, or so most think, but makes everyone worse off.

But the amoral society does not need moral language. It only needs the pragmatic tools of conflict resolution, social coordination, and cost-benefit analysis.

I saw utilitarianism not as a theory of what is the one true theory of morality, but simply as the pragmatically best framework to have a functioning society. I never ended up writing these ideas down, and later found to both my dismay and delight, that someone else had done so first — the Harvard psychologist and philosopher Joshua Greene.

In his book Moral Tribes, he came incredibly close to the views I tried to develop in the back of my mind:

A more apt name for utilitarianism is deep pragmatism. Utilitarianism is pragmatic in the good and familiar sense: flexible, realistic, and open to compromise. But it’s also a deep philosophy, not just about expediency. Deep pragmatism is about making principled compromises. It’s about resolving our differences by appeal to shared values-common currency

Earlier, in his PhD thesis, Greene wrote:

Utilitarianism is not true, nor is it an adequate systematization of anyone’s values. No one is a utilitarian at heart. But at the same time, everyone is a utilitarian in part. As realists, relying on our moral intuitions as guides to moral truth, we have every reason to reject utilitarianism. But as people who know the truth about morality in search of practical moral guidelines that people with different moral outlooks can share, utilitarianism is, I think, our best hope.

Utilitarianism is unattractive to many because it involves trade-offs and compromises. The real ethical truths could not possibly be so cruel. But there are no moral facts. There is only the harsh real world of millions of beings, many more if we include animals, who all have their own subjective values, which will inevitably come into conflict with one another.

To deal with these situations, there is no better tool than utilitarianism, for it makes those trade-offs explicit and transparent, whereas other ethical theories offer little more than the dictatorship of allegedly objective values, with a propaganda minister who declares any criticism or mention of trade-offs immoral.

And, of course, yes. Yes, of course…

The answers offered by a utilitarian approach to social problems will be unsatisfying in the same way that planning a holiday among a group of friends with very different visions of the ideal holiday will be. One wants to go skiing. One wants to be at the beach. One wants to rest a lot. Another wants to party. Imagine if one of these friends came up with an objective theory of holidaying, defending the one true way by which different holidays could be assessed, one that just so happens to coincide with their own preferred destination.

That is how moral discourse looks to the moral nihilist.

I hate to break it to you, but scaling these problems up to millions of individuals makes them even harder. None of the objections to utilitarianism as the one true and final theory of ethics carries much weight against utilitarianism as an inevitable pragmatic tool. Nothing else can do better. Any deviation reduces the amount of (subjective) value in the world.

J. L. Mackie, the father of moral error theory, advocated a kind of moral revisionism that cleansed ethics of its problematic parts and left it with a kind of pragmatic remainder that came pretty close to utilitarianism. In his own words:

No doubt my approach could be called, in a very broad sense, a rule utilitarian one

And Bentham and Mill, the founders of utilitarianism, might have seen the need to combine moral nihilism with utilitarianism as well. They were ultimately social reformers, engaged in law and governance, as much as they were part-time philosophers. The 18th and 19th century was no time to advocate for moral nihilism to promote social coordination and welfare. A utilitarian, after all, might well lie about their views on meta-ethics if they believe that this would make more people into utilitarians.

Bentham once wrote in his An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation:

When thus interpreted [in light of the principle of utility], the words ought, and right and wrong, and others of that stamp, have a meaning: when otherwise, they have none.

He does not believe that these moral terms are even intelligible, unless they are translated in terms of utility. I read this as an endorsement of moral nihilism, with an appeal to rewrite our moral terms, by casting all previous thinking, so harmful to human and animal flourishing, into the flames.2

Moral nihilism, in the end, is the liberation of values. The only real values there are: subjective ones. Even a traditional objectivist utilitarian could instrumentally endorse moral nihilism, for it would free us from the many harms that moral zealotry causes today. But I ultimately endorse utilitarianism as the best pragmatic tool for all of us, including other animals, to realise our values in a world where they will inevitably clash with one another. That this would be an amoral society is no objection. For we would all be better off if we cast off the yoke of tyranny that is morality:

But now it seems that there is no work left to be done for moral philosophers. Meta-ethics is abolished once we adopt moral nihilism and normative ethics is fully replaced to the empirical study of how we can optimally resolve our conflicts. If so, that would be wonderful. A sign of a mature field that has actually made progress in offering us guidance for how to act.

Of course, this is the very reason so many moral philosophers despise nihilism and utilitarianism. Not because these views are false. But because they rightly believe that this would mean that their job here is done and that they’ve wasted much of their lifetime defending theories that aren’t even close to truth. And so they desperatedly cling to their alternatives, much like the vast majority of religious leaders are never seriously going to question their religious beliefs — incentivized to keep believing in a myth.

But just like philosophers of science aren’t obsolete in modern science, moral philosophers are given a new role to play — that is, as philosophers of ‘moral’ science. A role that is admittedly quite different from much of what goes on in the offices of moral philosophers.

I haven’t written a blog post in a while. My apologies, I’ve been quite busy working on a book. But since several of you have taken out paid subscriptions to support the newsletter, I feel compelled to remedy the lack of a new post now. Not because I think there is a moral fact, a duty, or anything of the sort, but simply because I subjectively value the support of my readers.

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Abstract

Fleming and Michel propose that conscious vision evolved as a result of the water-to-land transition of animal life, enabling what they call “reality monitoring.” Here, we challenge their account by drawing on evolutionary arguments and the sensory capacities of aquatic life. Consciousness, we suggest, may have deeper evolutionary roots with significant roles for “slow” decision-making.

Originally published here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X25102926 [Download]

The target article by Fleming and Michel offers a novel evolutionary account of conscious vision, arguing that it emerged during the transition from water to land due to the broader sensory horizons. From the role of conscious vision in model-based learning and action selection, they develop a theory of consciousness facilitating the higher order process of “reality monitoring”: “the capacity to determine whether internal signals reflect external reality or endogenous activity uncoupled from sensory input”.

While we find their arguments for the role of consciousness in reality monitoring compelling, we worry about the limitations that come from an excessive focus on vision. While F&M acknowledge that they are really just offering an account of visual consciousness, the inferences and theorising at times suggest otherwise. While they recognise that there is more to consciousness, including other types of perceptual processing and affective states, they are addressed only incidentally.

In this commentary, we’ll examine how these factors may challenge their evolutionary proposal, requiring one to think about the range of activities and perceptual experiences available to many animals. In particular, we’d like to highlight two limitations of the account presented. The first is the claim that visual consciousness is too slow for immediate action selection. The second is the possibility for reality monitoring across a far wider range of perceptual modalities, which may undermine the significance of the transition from water to land.

In arguing that conscious visual processing is too slow to guide immediate action selection, F&M have assembled a rich and convincing collection of empirical evidence about the speed of visual consciousness. As they note, Dennett & Kinsbourne (1992) have argued in their influential “Time and the observer” that there is a difference between the time a mental state occurs and the time of an event represented by the mental state. From an evolutionary perspective, F&M’s insistence that conscious vision is too slow for rapid actions, such as fleeing from an ambush predator, or responding to fast-moving prey is almost certainly correct. However, we think they over-emphasise the importance of these specific rapid actions within an animal’s entire behavioural repertoire. Part of the problem here is the very nature of experiments on vision, which are almost always highly restrictive, limiting options, time, and conflicting variables for human and animal subjects (Veit 2023). Many decisions made by animals occur at slower speeds: e.g. moving between foraging patches, finding shelter, interacting with conspecifics. These behaviours could be guided by visual input without the need for a rapid response. It is therefore unclear why visual consciousness needs to explain something beyond traditional action selection of this type. Indeed, there is already a lot of evidence that conscious vision can help animals to survey environments and build mental models of the location of key resources, and use this to guide behaviour over longer timescales.

Second, there is no reason to think that reality monitoring is necessarily or uniquely visual. F&M briefly note at the end of the paper that the same abilities could indeed arise for other sensory modalities, which could be the subject of other similar projects. While we appreciate that they deliberately focused on vision alone, we think some of the conclusions are weakened when this possibility is explored seriously. Animals, particularly aquatic animals, have a wide range of perceptual capacities beyond vision. These include hearing, lateral line vibration sensing, electroreception, and chemoreception. These modalities give the animals a far broader underwater sensory horizon than vision does, and therefore, if the sensory horizon is as important as the authors argue, they are highly likely to contribute to model-based learning and behavioural control leading to reality monitoring capacities and, presumably, consciousness.

Both of these give reasons to think the transition to land may not be as significant as the authors seem to imply. Slower-scale visual processing could play a role in much of the behaviour of aquatic animals, who could also be surveying their environments to gather information to feed into decision-making. As they note, “the cluttered terrestrial-like environments of coral reefs and tide pools may be unusually rich environments for the evolution of model-based visual cognition”. Additionally, some fish rely on visual processing for complex decisions: cleaner fish will visually detect parasites and even recognize marks on their own body with a mirror (Kohda et al., 2022). Pelagic fish who rely on stalking and ambush tactics rather than pursuit, such as many sharks (Munroe, Meyer and Heithaus2022), could reasonably use conscious visual input to guide their decision-making while hunting. Widening the scope of perceptual modalities also means that even pelagic fishes, who may not often rely on vision, could still have complex mental models that require real-time reality monitoring across other senses. Even if it were true that these types of aquatic animals specifically lack conscious vision, the likelihood of them having conscious processing across the other modalities decreases the significance of this difference. While the Cartesian theatre will always remain a tempting model, it is one we need to continue to resist (Dennett and Kinsbourne1992), and this includes its emphasis on vision (Veit2022a). While vision may be central to human conscious experience, the evolutionary history of consciousness is likely to be much older (Veit2022b).

Financial support

No funding to report.

Competing interests

None.

References

Dennett, D. C., & Kinsbourne, M. (1992). Time and the observer: The where and when of consciousness in the brain. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15(2).

Kohda, M., Sogawa, S., Jordan, A. L., Kubo, N., Awata, S., Satoh, S., Kobayashi, T., Fujita, A., & Bshary, R. (2022). Further evidence for the capacity of mirror self-recognition in cleaner fish and the significance of ecologically relevant marks. PLoS Biol, 20(2), e3001529.10.1371/journal.pbio.3001529

Munroe, S., Meyer, L., & Heithaus, M. R. (2022). Elasmobranch foraging strategies and tactics. In Biology of sharks and their relatives (pp. 323–355). CRC Press.10.1201/9781003262190-11

Veit, W. (2022a). The origins of consciousness or the war of the five dimensions. Biological Theory, 17, 276–291. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-022-00408-y

Veit, W. (2022b). Complexity and the evolution of consciousness. Biological Theory, 18, 175–190. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-022-00407-z

Veit, W. (2023). A philosophy for the science of animal consciousness. Routledge.

In shifting my research gradually from that of a magpie, picking up on all things interesting, to that of a mole, focused on a single subject to maximize how much good I can do in the world, I have now opened a donation page to support my animal welfare research at the University of Reading:

https://research.reading.ac.uk/engagement-and-impact/animal-welfare-research-walter-veit/

Funds will support anything research-related to animal welfare, potentially making my Animals and Philosophy conference this Friday a more regular thing.

Here is the announcement:

Animal Welfare Research – Dr Walter Veit

With over 800 hectares of farmland, the University of Reading is a world-leading centre for agricultural research. Housed in the Reading’s philosophy department, Dr Veit is an award-winning researcher, author, and lecturer with a passion for other animals. He has travelled all over the world to speak about his research, meeting the Dalai Lama in India, bomb-sniffing Rats in Tanzania, mischievous corvids in Cambridge, and self-aware cleaner fish in Japan. You can learn more about his research here.

Support Dr Walter Veit’s animal welfare research at the University of Reading.

The funds will be used directly to support Dr Veit’s animal welfare research, including dedicated research time buyouts, as well as animal welfare workshops, open access publication costs, and other related research expenses.

The University of Reading is an independent corporation with charitable status (reference X 8145), so if you would like to make a gift and are a UK taxpayer, your generosity can be boosted further thanks to Gift Aid.

Thank you for your support

Given my work on evolution and naturalistic philosophy, it may not be surprising that I went to Sydney precisely because it was and still is the best place to do Darwinian philosophy. While the standard academic advice about the job market is to go for the highest possibly ranked university, I just wasn’t interested in jumping through the hoops of traditional analytic philosophy if I could study with the very best researchers at the forefront of the philosophy of evolution.

The University of Sydney was not just the best place for Darwinian philosophy (or so the philosophy of biology ranking of the PGR tells us) because of Paul Griffiths and Peter Godfrey-Smith. Nowhere else could one find that many philosophers who adhere so closely to Darwin’s dictum, that we can learn more about the nature of reality and our place within it, by studying evolution than engaging in traditional metaphysics. Paul Griffiths ran a large philosophy of biology group together with Pierrick Bourrat. Philosophers of biology have flourished in Australia and can be found at all major universities, e.g. Kim Sterelny at ANU, leading to frequent get-togethers such as the famous annual Philosophy of Biology at Dolphin Beach workshop.

Unfortunately, the importance of Darwin for philosophy has still not seeped into the rest of philosophy, despite Dennett’s wonderful book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, which I organized a reading group on during my undergraduate days.

Dan might well be described as something of a step-dad or rather family friend that parents may lovingly call uncle, for he was an incredibly generous man. He offered me advice on the arguments of my PhD thesis and even wrote recommendation letters for me when I entered the job market.

I was surprised to be able to trace my intellectual lineage back to Reichenbach, who wrote a great book titled The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, published in 1951, in which he argued that the scientific revolution finally allows us to leave the speculative philosophy of the past behind that merely asks questions without ultimately answering them.

Here is a beautiful quote from it that nicely captures the spirit behind much of my recent criticisms of non-naturalistic philosophy:

75 years later naturalistic philosophers continue to fight the same battles. At least there are more of us now. Indeed, the vast majority of us don’t hold PhDs from philosophy departments. They are scientists working across physics and the special sciences, but not afraid to think about the philosophical implications of their work.

Looking at the tree it is interesting to see how academics are influenced by their ancestral forefathers rather than just their immediate supervisors. While Reichenbach started out as a logical empiricist, his later work brought him closer to a naturalist pragmatism. This philosophical stance can also be found in Putnam, Kitcher, and later Godfrey-Smith. So perhaps it isn’t too surprising that my own outlook has become increasingly pragmatist over the years. A key naturalist insight by the pragmatists was to recognize that philosophy and science are theoretical aids to humans — real but cognitively limited agents that are themselves a product of a natural process: evolution. Theories do not stand independent in some platonic realm. They are ultimately tools. And so it is important to make use of the cognitive sciences to improve the standards of our theoretical tools, rather than to purely evaluate them from the perspective of a stance-independent logic.

Ladyman and Ross, whose book Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized I have repeatedly praised in my recent essays on naturalism and what philosophy should look like, also offer a pragmatic justification for the naturalization of metaphysics:

We require some proper principle which distinguishes what we regard as useful from useless metaphysics. Note that in stating this as our aim, we immediately distance ourselves from the positivists and align our attitude more closely with that of Peirce and pragmatism. As Putnam (1995) reminds us, both the positivists and the pragmatists sought to demarcate the scientific from the unscientific by use of verificationist principles. However, Putnam emphasizes that ‘for the positivists, the whole idea was that the verification principle should exclude metaphysics ... while for the pragmatists the idea was that it should apply to metaphysics, so that metaphysics might become a responsible and significant enterprise’ (293, his emphasis).

Turning to the Griffiths’ lineage, I was surprised to find J.L. Austin as an academic ancestor. He has been incredibly influential and especially so in my own department, where almost a third could be considered Austin scholars. The influences of ordinary language philosophy on philosophy have unfortunatelty been a mixed bag. Contemporary philosophers today draw too often on their methods for purposes that they were not designed to solve, such as to analyze the meaning of terms, to understand the reality of the phenomena they are meant to refer to. But ordinary language philosophy itself is actually much more compatible with the kind of naturalist philosophy I defend than one might imagine.

For once we turn to how people use language, philosophy inevitably merges with the science of linguistics as well as psychology, to create a wholy naturalistic enterprise. Paul Griffiths was ironically one of the pioneers in experimental philosophy, the application of psychological methods to understand how we use concepts — applying it to the gene concept in biology. His supervisor, Kim Sterelny, began as a philosopher of language but was more and more sucked into the naturalistic enterprise of merging insights from the various subfields of science to offer us a better understanding of reality. Recently, he even returned to his earlier work and published a co-authored book on the evolutionary origins of language. But what brought his attention to the philosophy of biology originally was Godfrey-Smith, who as an undergraduate at Sydney, gave Sterelny a copy of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. While PhD supervisors do influence their students, of course, these academic trees also simplify what is in truth a much more complex picture. Philosophers can be influenced by their teachers during their undergraduate days, their post-doc supervisors, and naturally anyone they read and exchange discussions with.

Dennett has obviously played such as role for me, but I would be amiss not to mention the philosopher of biology Samir Okasha, who was my thesis supervisor for my MA degree in the Philosophy of Biological and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Bristol (a unique program in the world that offered me exactly the kind of preparation for the kind of research I wanted to do), and later again as a post-doctoral supervisor when I returned to Bristol for a year before I landed my tenure-track job at the University of Reading. I was saddened to leave my post-doc, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity — since Reading was only a short train ride away from the University of Southampton where Heather got her position, thus luckily solving the academic two body problem for us.

Okasha’s academic lineage is also full of surprises:

I could say more about Brentano and others, but I think this is a good point to stop. Once we become more permissive these kinds of academic ancestry models become utterly bloated and less meaningful. But they are fun to create, reveal some interesting influences and hidden connections, and that’s probably all the justification one needs.

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Recently, I have written a series of blog posts highly critical of the methods of analytic philosophy and its odd flurry of wild speculation untethered to what goes on in the science and combined with appeals to intuion and common sense:

But with the exception of panpsychism, I haven’t really discussed any examples in depth to demonstrate how the methods of traditional analytic philosophy are flawed and ought to be abandoned in favour of naturalistic philosophy.

Enter Eric Schwitzgebel, one of the most-well known bloggers in philosophy, who has written many wonderful essays that I’ve thoroughly enjoyed. Yet, in his latest blog post he tries to argue that diversity is intrinsically valuable. Not instrumentally for some other end. But in itself. Immediately, this raises the question of how we can determine whether anything is intrinsically valuable. One might expect philosophers, the experts on such matters, to have come up with some ingenius methods for doing so. Unfortunately not.

Schwitzgebel writes:

How does one argumentatively establish the intrinsic value of diversity? The only way I know is to reveal, through thought experiment, that you already implicitly accept it -- and then to ward off objections.

Really? Naturalistic philosophers have long been critical of the excessive reliance by philosophers on thought experiments. Whereas we discard scientific experiments when they are biased to favour a particular conclusion, philosophical thought experiments can often be pernicious (not always) in that they are designed to favour a particular conclusion, without that being obvious from the outset. So let’s look at Schwitzgebel’s thought experiment:

My favorite approach to thinking about intrinsic value is the Distant Planet Thought Experiment. Imagine a planet on the far side of the galaxy, blocked from view by the galactic core, a planet we’ll never see or interact with. What would we hope for on this planet, for its own sake, independent of any potential value for us?

Would you hope that it’s a sterile rock, completely devoid of life? I think not. If you do think a lifeless rock would be best, I have no argument against you. For me this is a starting place, a bedrock judgment, which I expect most readers will share.

Sigh. I for on would favour a planet on which life thrives, where aliens get to enjoy some advanced form of society and technological progress that we can only dream of. But so what? At most that reveals that I have some preference for such a state of affair. Not that I think it’s intrinsically valuable. Yet, this thought experiment is a common method in axiology - the philosophical study of value.

Suppose, then, that you agree a planet with life would be intrinsically better than one without. Would you hope that its life consists entirely of microbes? Or would you hope that it teems with diverse life: reefs and rainforests, beetles and bats, squid and bees and ferns and foxes -- or rather, not to duplicate Earth too closely, their alien analogues, translated into a different key? I think you’ll hope that the planet teems with diverse life.

Would you hope that no life on this planet has humanlike behavioral sophistication -- language, long-term planning, complex social coordination? Would you hope that nothing there could contemplate the meaning of life, the origin of the stars, or its own ancient history? Would you hope that nothing there could create art, or engage in athletic competition, or invent complex games and tricks and jokes? I invite you to join me in thinking otherwise. The planet would be better if it included some beings with that richness of thought and activity.

Would you hope for uniformity of intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical opinion -- that everyone shares the same values and ideas? Or would you hope for diversity? I think you’ll join me in thinking that the world would be better, better for its own sake, if it were diverse rather than uniform. Different entities would have different skills, preferences, passions, and ideas. They’ll fight and disagree (not genocidally, I hope), sometimes value their differences, sometimes dismiss others as completely wrongheaded, sometimes cluster into shared projects, sometimes collaborate across deep disagreement, sometimes be drawn to opposites, sometimes feel kinship with the like-minded, play within and across divides, pursue an enormous variety of projects, explore a vast space of possible forms of life.

That is what I hope for on this distant planet -- not for instrumental reasons (not, for example, because it will maximize happiness), and not merely because it would strike a hypothetical spectator as beautiful and awesome (though it should). Rather, just because it would be valuable for its own sake. An empty void has little or no value; a rich plurality of forms of existence has immense value, no further justification required.

Yeah that’s just entirely question-begging line of argument… Indeed, it’s not clear we need to postulate ‘intrinsic values’ to make sense of such psychological reactions. Think of a Nazi who feels revulsion at the idea of a planet on which there are only non-Aryan people. If you took a Nazi into a philosophy classroom they might say that it would be intrinsically better for this planet not to exist - for all life on it to be annihilated by a comet even. But so what?

Again, at most this kind of thought experiment tells us what a person values. But even the move from your own values, what matters intrisically to you perhaps, in no way justifies the move to declare things intrinsically valuable in themselves. And that’s the kind of intrisic value Schwitzgebel is interested in. Otherwise he couldn’t say that hypothetical oservers should value diversity on a planet we could never learn about. Even if we did a survey of Earth’s population and most would judge a more diverse planet to be better, this does not tell us anything about intrinsic values.

The philosopher David Hume early on recognized that the “mind has a great propensity to spread itself on external objects” - it’s so easy for us to just take the things we value and declare them to reflect the right kind of intrinsic values. And that anyone who doesn’t recognize them should be seen flawed in some way.

While moral nihilism, the denial of any intrinsic values, has an admittedly unsavoury flavour to it, I suspect that the hostily towards nihilism largely stems from people’s recognition that there is nothing to be said to a nihilist that would make them share your particular values that you think should be recognized by everyone as intrinsically valuable. Humanity is a highly conformist and tribal species. Declarations of intrinsic value are often tied to control of others, e.g. the intrinsic value/sanctity of life leading to control over women’s choices. If Schwitzgebel really values diversity, he should become a moral nihilist, which places the least constraints on the diversity of life projects people may chose to value for themselves. That’s an instrumental justification, but it’s better than the thought experiments philosophers have come up with to support the misguided idea of intrinsic values.

For a more in-depth argument for moral nihilism please take a look at the following essay:

Finally, I am entirely open to be convinced of intrinsic values, but I have not seen any good arguments in their favour yet. If you believe in intrinsic values, whether of diversity or anything else for that matter, I’m curious to read your arguments for them in the comments.

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While many of my readers are philosophers, or have at least studied philosophy for a while at university, many are not. So I was reluctant to get into metaphysical debates within philosophy, fearing that they might get too high-brow, instead focusing on meta-philosophy which I believe is fairly easy to communicate.

But my discussions here with non-naturalist skeptics about consciousness science, such as with Philip Goff or Nino Kadic, inevitable get down to metaphysical arguments about intrinsic or categorical properties. Perhaps not surprising given that they are engaged in analytic metaphysics - a sub-discipline of philosophy that I’ve argued in a series of essays is a counter-Englightenment project not at all conducive to the central philosophical goal of understanding the world:

But while I may be able to show that their philosophical method is entirely misguided, panpsychists are not entirely unjustified by asking for a response to their central argument, even if the way by which they’ve arrived at should make us question whether it’s a good argument to begin with.

So due to repeated demand let me respond to one of the only two main arguments for panpsychism listed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on panpsychism.

The so-called:

The Intrinsic Nature Argument

(The other argument is the alleged inability for science to fully reduce conscious states to brain processes, which, as I’ve argued in yesterday’s post, reflects a mistaken radical reductionism among panpsychists that isn’t met by any other special science or for that matter folk ontology either. But as we’ll see this problem will come up again shortly.)

I’ve tried to make sure that it’s accessible to anyone without any knowledge of analytic metaphysics.

To set the scene, let’s first look at a kind reply by Philip to my recent rebuttal of his arguments against the very idea that science could explain consciousness. Here a link to the essay:

Thanks Walter. There are two aspects to my argument. One concerns what we know about consciousness “from the inside”. The other concerns the nature of physical science explanation. You put the two together to get my argument that we can’t completely explain consciousness via physical science explanation (although of course physical science has a crucial role to play).

Let’s just focus on the first bit. You are ascribing to me two things I don’t think: (i) that are introspective beliefs about consciousness are infallible, (ii) we know from the inside the nature of consciousness in all creatures. I’m happy with with you to reject these two things.

Granted, the beliefs formed by introspection about consciousness can be mistaken. Otherwise panpsychists and analytic metaphysicians could not possibly disagree or at least such disagreement would ultimately reflect very different types of experiences. But there it is still a widely shared view among philosophers that rigorous philosophical reflection on our experiences is a reliable guide to the nature of consciousness itself. Even if untrained philosophers fail at this task. To be fair I think that this is a bit of an arrogant view about the superior introspective abilities of philosophers. If you learn about the categories analytical metaphysicians come up with to carve up this space, of course, one will start to think of one’s experiences in that way. But the same goes for say someone training to become a Buddhist monk. This is not at all unbiased introspective philosophical discovery. It’s much more like a scientists looking for evidence in nature to support their pre-existing theory.

For naturalistic philosophers phenomenological experiences form part of the dataset that helps us to explain the nature of consciousnesss. It is not put on a pedastal so high that any evidence from the sciences is irrelevant to discussions of this nature. Yet, panpsychists and opponents to naturalistic explanations of consciousness more generally often give off the impressions that the science of consciousness ignores subjective experience, which is plain false.

But Goff also offered a version of the old thought experiment of Mary’s room, that a neuroscientist raised in a black-and-white room would learn something new when stepping out of it and seeing the colour red, no matter how advanced her scientific knowledge of consciousness might be:

But what about my claim that a blind from birth neuroscience will never know what it’s like to see red. Isn’t this something about the nature of that specific experience that cannot be discerned from third-person science?

This is where we get to the argument for intrinsic properties. The philosopher Tom Yates also left a useful and related comment under my essay arguing that consciousness has already been explained in the sense that we can answer why questions about why animals like ourselves feel states like pain:

That gives an explanation in terms of historical origins, not in terms of the intrinsic nature of the experience itself (a property which is presupposed by your evolutionary explanation). So you haven’t explained what really needs explaining.

Panpsychists are very confident in this argument reminding me of thesists who keep citing the cosmological argument for the existence of God. It’s probably no accident that Goff uses a version of the cosmological argument to argue for an inherent purpose to the universe, but that’s not my focus for this essay.

My goal here is to show that the intrinsic property argument for panpsychism faces a dilemma and that it hardly supports the radical conclusions consciousness science deniers like to defend.

The Argument Simplified

Premise 1: Consciousness has fundamental/intrinsic/categorical/essential qualitatative properties

Premise 2: Science only explains extrinsic relational properties of nature

Conclusion: Science cannot explain the fundamental intrisic properties of consciousness

Sounds plausible enough on a first impression. Even one of my favourite philosophy YouTubers has unfortunately turned into a panpsychist by it. Perhaps I’ll try to dissuade him of it one day in person. For this argument leads to a dilemma.

Firstly, we could accept the idea that science does not capture the thing-in-itself (what famously Kant called the “Ding an sich”). However, in that case we don’t know the intrisic properties of anything in nature, from trees to other animals to atoms and chemical elements. If panpsychists want to maintain the view that science cannot explain consciousness, they must consequently argue that science cannot truly explain anything else either.

Unsurprisingly, this is not a common view among philosophers of science, except those of an anti-realist bent. Many philosophers of science question whether the notion of thing in itself is even useful. As one of my PhD advisors, Peter Godfrey-Smith, put it:

This move is often tempting, but the resulting views are unhelpful. Understanding our access to reality is difficult, but adding an extra layer called “the phenomenal world” in between us and the real world achieves nothing.

The rejection by many philosophers of the metaphysical bubble of things-in-themselves also helps to explain why so many philosophers reject qualia, for they are often defined as an instance of this larger problematic category of intrinsic properties.

As James Ladyman and Don Ross put it:

things in themselves and qualia are idle wheels in metaphysics and [we impose] a moratorium on such purely speculative philosophical toys […]

we take it that such a gap between epistemology and metaphysics is unacceptable. Given that there is no a priori way of demonstrating that the world must be composed of individuals with intrinsic natures, and given that our best physics puts severe pressure on such a view, […] we reject the idea altogether.

Unless panpsychists want to endorse radical anti-realism about science they must admit that their arguments about consciousness are not really arguments against the science of consciousness at all, but about the inability of science to explain the nature of anything. Yet, panpschysists hide this unsavoury implication of their view, which would undermine their call for a radically different way of thinking.

Secondly, we could accept that science does, indeed, at least sometimes reveal the ‘real’ nature of things. In that case, panpsychism is also undermined since there no longer is a reason to think a science of consciousness is a “category mistake.” At least if talk of ‘intrinsicness’ isn’t meant to become a meaningless object of metaphysical fancy that not even introspection into direct phenomenal experience could meet.

Peter Godfrey-Smith makes this point in an interview with Alex O’Connor.

He asks us to imagine the question of what the intrinsic nature of a chair is. Rather than answer in terms of fundamental physics, it is entirely justifiable to say that it’s made out of wood. That’s not a structural answer, but one about what the chair is really made out of. We can, of course, continue to ask what in turn about the nature of wood. Godfrey-Smith responds that we can answer with lignin and cellulose, which are the primary components of wood. We can further talk about the molecular structure of these, carbon in the case of lignin and a sugar in the case of cellulose, that give wood its properties. But as Godfrey-Smith emphasizes we are not talking here about functions or relations. We are fundamentally talking about the intrinsic nature of the chair. The same is true even at the level of atoms, electrons, neutrons, and the like. And it is only when we try to press further that more ‘fundamental’ forms of physics are suggestive that such a fundamental level is entirely structural, rather than intrinsic. Furthermore, what may appear as intrinsic properties in one scientific domain may well by analyzable in terms of relational extrinsic properties at another. So too for our own cherished subjective experience. Panpsychists are simply begging the question here.

When I earlier said that panpsychists suffer from an old scientistic reductionist view according to which nothing but the fundamental level of physics matters, it’s because they fail to recognize that sciences on other levels do not purely come in a structuralist form as it may do in the case of ‘fundamental’ physics. Ironically enough, panpsychists are much more guilty of the most central charge of ‘scientism’ (as an insult) than any of the scientists studying consciousness. They fail to recognize the reality of these levels, of the special sciences, as if nothing between first-person experience and fundamental physics had any claim to reality to it. But if sciences like neuroscience can discover the nature of their target phenomena under investigation then the central case for panpsychism appears once again undermined.

Thus, even if we buy into controversial thought experiments like Mary’s room, purporting to proof intrinsic qualia properties, panpsychists have simply failed to engage with the philosophy of science literature on how we should understand reality and the connection between the special sciences. Indeed, Philip Goff also highlights his ignorance about the philosophy of science in his recent theology-light writing about teleological (purposeful) laws that govern the universe. As his colleague at the University of Durham Nancy Cartwright made clear more than half a century ago in 1983 (her book was titled How the Laws of Physics Lie) nature is not governed by laws at all. Reading panpsychists is a bit like taking a time-machine to over a century ago to read the same embarassing arguments again that have long been debunked. An embarrassing mix of old-fasioned reductionist physicalism and scholastic metaphysics. Sigh.

No matter what attitude we take about intrinsic properties, The Intrinsic Nature Argument rests on deeply problematic assumptions and even worse implications that render panpsychism a reductio ad absurdum. It’s not the gotcha! argument panpsychists think it is when they bring it up in debates.

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