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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: Neil Sinhababu

Why evolution doesn’t explain value

02 Sunday Oct 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Aesthetics, Biology, Buddhism, Foundations of Ethics, God, Metaphysics, Morality, Self-Discipline

≈ 25 Comments

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Aristotle, Ayn Rand, Denis Dutton, Ethan Mills, G.E. Moore, game theory, Jesse (commenter), Neil Sinhababu

I’ll be the first to admit that last week’s post was insufficiently argued. But I think it may have been helpful as a springboard for further (potentially more carefully argued) reflection; I expect that next week’s post, as well as this one, will follow up on it. I argued last week that attempts to explain value judgements seem to run into trouble when they don’t ground those judgements in a deeper metaphysical reality. I looked at this problem there largely in terms of the early twentieth-century analytic tradition. But I didn’t address one of the most common non-metaphysical attempts to explain value judgements: the evolutionary explanation.

Several comments from Jesse took this approach. “Morality,” he claims, “has existed in some form or other since the first self-replicating proteins formed in the primordial ocean.” Citing game theory, he notes that organisms which helped each other out would have been far more likely to survive and thrive. Ethan Mills, while somewhat skeptical of the game-theoretic explanation, still cites James Rachels for another kind of evolutionary explanation: at the social rather than individual level, societies wouldn’t have lasted long without morality.

Now I am not and was not speaking only of “morality” in the sense of aiding (or refusing to harm) others. (There was a reason the word “morality” didn’t appear in that post.) As I noted in my comment, I was also speaking of other kinds of value – including virtues like self-discipline and patient endurance that would be valuable whether or not anyone else is around, and for that matter of aesthetic value, the value in good art or the beauty of nature.

But that’s not the big issue here, for it’s not so hard to come up with evolutionary explanations for these other kinds of value either. Self-disciplined creatures would very likely have adapted better to their environments. There are plenty of people, perhaps most notably Denis Dutton, who have even tried to find evolutionary explanations for aesthetics.

I am not going to pass judgement here on whether evolution is a correct or adequate causal explanation for the origins of human value judgements. For the sake of argument, in this post, I am going to assume that such accounts get the causal origin of value judgements basically correct. Because far more important is a deeper criticism: they miss the point. Continue reading →

Is happiness the purpose of life?

13 Sunday Feb 2011

Posted by Amod Lele in Early and Theravāda, East Asia, Epicureanism, Flourishing, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Pleasure, Serenity

≈ 21 Comments

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Aristotle, Homer, Martha Nussbaum, Neil Sinhababu, New York City, Pali suttas, Penelope Trunk, Socrates, utilitarianism

Blogger Penelope Trunk describes herself as having Asperger’s Syndrome. Her obsessive Aspergian interest seems to be in the nature of her own life – which makes her a dedicated follower of Socrates’s maxim that the unexamined life is not worth living. So while her blog is supposedly about career advice, it often winds up being highly philosophical. Recently, she’s said a fair bit about one of the most enduring philosophical questions: happiness.

Aristotle tells us everyone agrees the purpose of life is eudaimonia. It was once the standard to translate this term as “happiness.” This translation has started to fall out of favour, to be replaced by “flourishing” – and rightly so. For it’s pretty clear that whatever eudaimonia is – and I think Aristotle deliberately makes it hard to pin down – it is not what we usually understand by “happiness.”

Consider: near the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tells us that everyone agrees that eudaimonia is the ultimate purpose of human life; we just don’t agree what constitutes it. But if this eudaimonia were happiness, how would we explain someone like Trunk, who has spent a great deal of time thinking about happiness – only to reject it? “I don’t want to be happy,” she says. “I want idle time to let my mind wander because the unhappy result is so interesting.” Continue reading →

Paradoxes of hedonism

11 Sunday Apr 2010

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Christianity, Despair, External Goods, Foundations of Ethics, German Tradition, Happiness, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Pleasure, Psychology, Self, Truth

≈ 5 Comments

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blo sbyong, consequentialism, Hans Vaihinger, James Maas, Jesus, Neil Sinhababu, New Testament, Peter Railton, Śāntideva, Sigmund Freud, utilitarianism

By far the most famous portions of Śāntideva’s work are his meditations on the equalization and exchange of self and other, found in chapter VIII of the Bodhicary?vat?ra. They appear in Western introductory readers on ethics, and are considered the foundation for an entire genre of Tibetan literature, blo sbyong or “mental purification.” Personally, these are not generally my favourite parts of Śāntideva’s work; his arguments against the existence of the self do not convince me, and the meditative exercises strike me as potentially damaging. That said, they do contain one line that sticks with me, that strikes me as extremely profound and valuable: All those in the world who are suffering are so because of a desire for their own happiness. All those in the world who are happy are so because of a desire for the happiness of others. (BCA VIII.129, my translation)

I discussed this claim once before but want to return to it. The claim is, I think, overstated for rhetorical effect. Even in Śāntideva’s eyes, merely desiring others’ happiness will not make you happy – especially if you are misguided about the causes of their happiness, so that you try only to provide them with external goods rather than addressing the inner mental causes of their suffering. And yet from my experience, I would still say the claim is more true than not. There’s something self-defeating about searching after one’s own happiness itself. If one keeps one’s eye on this goal above all, one becomes too acutely aware of failures at it, too focused on one’s lack of happiness – “I’m trying so hard to be happy and yet I’m not; something must be wrong with me” – and the goal is inhibited. (In his book Power Sleep, psychologist James Maas noted a similar problem with respect to sleep: subjects offered $20 if they fell asleep quickly would take longer to fall asleep than subjects who were not offered the money.) Continue reading →

The pleasurable life of a doll

01 Sunday Nov 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Flourishing, Happiness, Pleasure, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Self, Sex

≈ 3 Comments

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Joss Whedon, Neil Sinhababu, Robert Nozick, technology, television

The cast of <i>Dollhouse</i>I’ve recently been enjoying Joss Whedon‘s underrated science-fiction TV series Dollhouse. Whedon’s ingenious plot twists and a strong supporting cast have made the show highly enjoyable, at least since the middle of the first season; beyond that, the show’s premise is bait for philosophers, especially those who focus on the ethics of technology or enjoy “thought experiments.” It’s about a secret operation that erases people’s memories and personalities and “imprints” them with completely new ones. Given the rapid pace of advances in contemporary neuroscience, it is not entirely far-fetched to say that such a process could become feasible within my lifetime; and it raises a great deal of questions, familiar to Buddhists, about the nature of personal identity.

Last Friday’s episode, Belonging, implicitly makes a further point about the good life. (Spoiler warning, if you haven’t seen this episode.) Continue reading →

Is pleasure the only intrinsic good?

14 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by Amod Lele in Analytic Tradition, Christianity, Confucianism, Emotion, Foundations of Ethics, Happiness, Monasticism, Morality, Pleasure, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Psychology, Truth

≈ 6 Comments

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Augustine, Immanuel Kant, Jonathan Haidt, Mencius, Neil Sinhababu, phenomenology, Todd Stewart

I recently had the pleasure of reading an interesting paper by Neil Sinhababu, a friend I met while I was a visiting scholar at the University of Texas. Neil’s paper, thoughtfully posted online, is entitled The Epistemic Argument for Univesal Hedonism. In it, Neil makes an argument for a strong and controversial position that I’ve flirted with before myself: that pleasure and displeasure are the only things intrinsically good or bad in any ethical sense.

Neil’s argument proceeds roughly as follows (and this summary, qua summary, must necessarily leave out some of the detail and precision of his argument): Ethical judgement all derive from one of two sources: emotional perception and phenomenal introspection. The source of most of our commonsense judgements about morality is emotional perception: a process by which we react emotionally to states of affairs in the world, form moral judgements in connection with these emotional reactions, and thereby perceive the states of the world as having objective moral qualities. Neil draws on Jonathan Haidt’s empirical research to support this point.

Neil goes further, however, in arguing that we are wrong to make moral judgements on the basis of emotional perception, thus rejecting Mencius’s metaethics as well as those of the moral sense theorists. Emotional perception, he claims, is inherently unreliable. Continue reading →

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