1

MORALITY AND THE HUMAN CONDITION

A Short Book For Philosophically-Minded People

Robert Hanna
2020

“The Human Condition,” by Thomas Whitaker

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For my parents, Alan and Dianne Hanna

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter I. Introduction 5

Chapter II. The Standard Conception of Morality 7

II.1 The Moral Question and The Meaning Question 7

II.2 How Ethics Relates to Morality 8
II.3 How Morality Relates to Rationality 9
II.4 Six Famously Hard Cases, and a Hard Case from the 2020 Pandemic 10

Chapter III. Three Classical Challenges to the Standard Conception 23

III.1 Moral Relativism 23

III.2 Eight Logical Principles of Human Rationality 28
III.3 Moral Skepticism 29
III.4 Psychological and Moral Egoism 34

Chapter IV. Morality, God, and Religion 44

IV.1 God and The Divine Command Theory 44

IV.2 Does an Essentially Rational God Exist, or Not? 45
IV.3 Religion and Morality 50

Chapter V. Three Classical Moral Theories 52

V.1 Aristotelian Virtue Ethics 52

V.1.1 Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, books 1-3: A Brief Exposition 52
V.1.2 Four Worries about Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics 58
V.1.3 Contemporary Virtue Ethics 59
V.2 Millian Utilitarianism 62
V.2.1 Not-So-Happy Little Campers: Ten Big Problems for Millian Utilitarianism 65
V.3 Kant’s Morality of Persons and Principles 70
V.3.1 The Ten Basic Ideas of Kant’s Moral Theory 70
V.3.2 Three Classical Worries about Kant’s Moral Theory 82
V.4 All-Things-Considered Conclusion of This Chapter 91
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Chapter VI. Pascal’s Realistic Optimism and Schopenhauer’s Pessimism 93

VI.1 Pascal’s Realistic Optimism About The Meaning of Life 93

VI.2 Schopenhauer’s Pessimism About The Meaning of Life 100
VI.3 Pascal or Schopenhauer? Realistic Optimism or Pessimism? 110

Chapter VII. Existentialism, the Absurd, and Affirmation 112

VII.1 Two Kinds of Existentialism 112

VII.2 Nagel and the Absurd 114
VII.3 Camus and Affirmation 115

Chapter VIII. The Morality of Authenticity 117

VIII.1 Existential Morality and the Concept of Authenticity 117

VIII.1.1 What is “Authenticity” in the Classical Existentialist Sense? 117
VIII.1.2 Authenticity and Radical Freedom 118
VIII.1.3 Inauthenticity, Freedom-Refusers, and Freedom Deniers 120
VIII.2 Two Important Problems for Existential Morality 121
VIII.3 Sartre on Principled Authenticity 122

Chapter IX. The Nature of Death 125

IX.1 The Ambiguity of “Death” 125

IX.2 The Nature of Our Own Death 130
IX.2.1 Nagel On the Nature of Our Own Death 130
IX.2.2 Suits Against the “Deprivation” Account of the Badness of Death 132
IX.2.3 Some Critical Worries About What Nagel and Suits are Saying About
the Nature of Our Own Death 133

Chapter X. The (Im)Possibility of Human Immortality 135

X.1 Williams on the Tedium of Immortality 135

X.2 Fischer on How Human Immortality Could Be a Good Thing 137
X.3 Some Worries About What Williams and Fischer are Saying About Human
Immortality 138
X.4 Human Life Without Immortality 140
X.5 The Be-All and The End-All 141

NOTES 143
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Chapter I. Introduction

I.1 The image displayed on page 1 of this book digitally reproduces a painting by the
convicted murderer Thomas Whitaker:1 it’s aptly entitled “The Human Condition.”
Whitaker was on death row for 11 years; and his death sentence was commuted to life
imprisonment less than an hour before his scheduled execution on 22 February 2018.
Leaving aside for the time being some hard questions about the morality of the social
institution of crime-and-punishment, then Whitaker’s painting and his existential
predicament, alike, poignantly raise the following complex question:

Is human life worth living, and if so, then how ought we to live it?

I.2 What follows is an attempt to answer that complex question, and to grapple with
the fundamental issues raised by that question, in a way that (i) is introductory, yet also
systematically develops a unique “take” on those issues, (ii) isn’t terribly longwinded
(57,000 words), and above all (iii) is accessible to any philosophically-minded person,
including college and university students, and professional philosophers, but also and
especially self-guided fledgling philosophers, members of traditional book clubs, and
those who belong to one (or more) of the thousands of non-academic online discussion
groups that have sprung up spontaneously during the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed,
I’ve used the penultimate draft of the book for just that purpose in a weekly non-
academic online discussion group with people mostly home-based in London, but also
in North America and continental Europe.

My unique take on the pair of questions above is broadly Kantian, and also
fundamentally concerned with the fact that, like Whitaker, we struggle with these
questions, all-too-often unsuccessfully, and sometimes tragically. In short, from a broadly
Kantian moral-existential point of view, our “human, all-too-human” failures are every
bit as important as our successes. More specifically, however, here’s a brief description of
the book’s contents:

Morality is the attempt to guide human conduct by rationally formulating and

following principles or rules that reflect our basic personal and social commitments and
our leading ideals and values. But this presupposes that our “human, all-too-human”
lives actually do have some meaning that, in turn, captures our basic personal and social
commitments, and our leading ideals and values. In this introductory book, I’ll try to
answer two fundamental questions about morality and meaning: (1) “Is morality
possible, and if so, then how ought we to live?” (the moral question), and (2) “Does life
have meaning, and if so, then how can we live meaningful lives?” (the meaning
question). In pursuit of answers to these questions, after this Introduction (chapter I),
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I’ll investigate the nature of morality and the standard conception of it (chapter II),
three classical challenges to the standard conception (chapter III), morality and religion
(chapter IV), three classical moral theories: Aristotelian virtue ethics, Millian
utilitarianism, and Kant’s ethics of persons and principles (chapter V), Pascal’s
optimism and Schopenhauer’s pessimism (chapter VI), existentialism, the absurd, and
affirmation (chapter VII), the morality of authenticity (chapter VIII), the nature of death
(chapter IX), and the (im)possibility of human immortality (chapter X).

If this sounds a little like a university course description, then that’s because the first
working draft for the book was indeed based on my lecture notes for a large-ish
introductory moral-philosophy-and-existentialism course for undergraduate students
(+/- graduate-student teaching assistants) that I taught regularly—usually once a year—
at some universities in Canada and the USA, for close to 25 years, from the early 1990s
through the end of 2014. I’m especially grateful to Andrew D. Chapman, who helped
me teach the ultimate version of the repeating course.

I.3 As philosophers go, I’ve published a respectable number of books, including a

recent five-volume series (2015-2018), THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION.2 But
every time I give a copy of my latest tome to my (nowadays 89 year-old) parents, they
tell me that one day I really should write something not only suitable for college and
university students, and professional philosophers, but also “that ordinary people with
an interest in philosophy can actually read and learn from— and that we can use in our
book clubs.” And I always say that I’m still trying to, but that writing such books takes a
special kind of talent. So, whether or not I have that talent, this short book is my
wholehearted attempt to do this, and my hope is that philosophically-minded people of all
possible kinds, and from all walks of life, will find it worthwhile engaging with.3
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Chapter II. The Standard Conception of Morality4

II.1 The Moral Question and The Meaning Question

As I mentioned in the Introduction, morality is

the attempt to guide human conduct by rationally formulating and following

principles or rules that reflect our basic personal and social commitments and
our leading ideals and values.

And as I also mentioned in the Introduction, this presupposes that our “human, all-too-
human” lives actually do have some meaning. By “meaning” in this context—that is, the
special kind of “meaning” our human lives can have—I’m referring to some highest
good(s), or some ultimate purpose(s), that express our basic personal and social
commitments, and our leading ideals and values.

The phrase “human, all-too-human” is an allusion to the title of an 1878 book by

Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits. As I’m understanding it
however, what the phrase means, roughly, is that we human beings are nothing more
and nothing less than a species of animals essentially characterized by our possession of
innate or acquired capacities for (i) rationality, (ii) cognition (including sense perception,
memory, imagination, and judgment), (iii) emotions (including desires, feelings,
passions, and above all caring about oneself, others, and also chosen and desired ends of
various kinds), and (iii) free agency, who thereby possess (iv) absolute, non-denumerably
infinite, non-fungible, intrinsic value or dignity, but who also, as a species, are
characterized by (v) our exceptionally high aspirations and our exceptionally low success
rates, and (vi) our unique capability and propensity for causing and experiencing
suffering: lucky us.

Nevertheless, when our “human, all-too-human” lives actually do have meaning,

then it’s because our lives actually do incorporate the highest good(s) and ultimate
purpose(s) that express our basic personal and social commitments, and our leading
ideals and values. Moreover, our lives are then meaningful precisely to the extent that
they actually do incorporate the highest good(s) and ultimate purpose(s) that express
our basic personal and social commitments, and our leading ideals and values. And
since morality is the attempt to guide human conduct by rationally formulating and
following principles or rules that reflect our basic personal and social commitments and
our leading ideals and values, therefore it follows that to the extent that we live morally,
then we have meaningful lives. —Or so says the moralist.
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But is human life really as the moralist represents it to be? The doubter or skeptic
about morality—Nietzsche is a leading example—and the cynic or pessimist about life’s
meaning—Schopenhauer, one of Nietzsche’s immediate philosophical predecessors and
an important influence on his work, is a leading example—will outright deny the
moralist’s picture of ourselves and of our human lives. And that denial in turn, leads us
to two fundamental questions about morality and meaning:

(i) “is morality possible, and if so, then how ought we to live?” (the moral
question), and

(ii) “does life have meaning, and if so, then how can we live meaningful lives?”
(the meaning question).

I’ll start with the moral question, but before I get into that, I want to say something
about how ethics relates to morality.

II.2 How Ethics Relates to Morality

As Hegel in the 19th century and also many more recent or contemporary
philosophers—perhaps most notably, in the 1970s, Bernard Williams—have correctly
noted, it’s illuminating to distinguish between “ethics” (aka Sittlichkeit) and “morality”
(aka Moralität).5 Ethics is the larger, more encompassing domain of values, especially
including the highest good(s), and morality, the domain of rules, principles, strict normative
laws, permissions, and obligations, is only a proper part of it. On Williams’s account,
strikingly, morality is “the peculiar institution,” alluding of course to John C. Calhoun’s
notorious description of the American system of slavery prior to the Civil War. 6 By
ironically applying this morally uncomplimentary label to morality itself, Williams
means that it is nothing but a socially constructed, life-denying, normatively shallow,
inherently oppressive, inhumane, and self-perpetuating formal sub-system of rule-
mongering within our real, fully meaningful, “thick,” multi-textured, and all-
encompassing “human, all too human” ethical life.7 Similar critical, skeptical thoughts
about morality have been developed by Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and John Mackie. 8
But on my sharply different understanding of the ethics vs. morality distinction,
morality is the essence of ethics. What do I mean by that? Our ethical life is indeed a real,
fully meaningful, “thick,” multi-textured, “human, all too human,” and all-
encompassing ethical life. Indeed, our ethical life is our whole life. But morality is our
whole life’s all-enabling core, that is, its essential proper part. So in this sense, the proper
part structurally guides and pervades the whole.
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In what follows, I’ll generally use the terms “ethics” and “morality” in
accordance with the distinction I’ve just spelled out. But it’s also worth noting that
occasionally I’ll follow the usage of many other teachers and writers in this area, who’ve
somewhat sloppily either (i) used “ethics” and “morality” interchangeably, or (ii) used
“ethics” to mean the same as “moral theory” or “moral philosophy.” A good example is
the term “introductory ethics course.” —Obviously, it’s a philosophical mug’s game to
try to legislate common or even technical usage; and as always, sadly, there are simply
too few words in any natural language for the purposes of philosophy. But we’ll
muddle through.

II.3 How Morality Relates to Rationality

In the brief, cogent, and much-taught first chapter, “What is Morality?,” in The Elements
of Moral Philosophy, James Rachels very plausibly proposes what he calls a “minimum
conception of morality”:

Morality is, at the very least, the effort to guide one’s conduct by reason—that is, to do
what there are the best reasons for doing—while giving equal weight to the interests of
each individual who will be affected by what one does. This gives us, among other
things, a picture of what it means to be a conscientious moral agent. The conscientious
moral agent is someone who is concerned impartially with the interests of everyone
affected by what he or she does; who carefully sifts facts and examines their
implications; who accepts principles of conduct only after scrutinizing them to make
sure they are justified; who is willing to “listen to reason” even when it means revising
prior convictions; and who, finally, is willing to act on the results of this deliberation. 9

Rachels’s “minimum conception of morality” is essentially the same as what I’ll call the
standard conception of morality, in order to indicate that over and above its being minimal,
it’s also very widely shared.

There are three things about the standard conception of morality that I
particularly want to draw our attention to.

First, as Rachels notes, the standard conception is intended to be a minimum

conception of morality, which means that it’s a required feature of anything we’d be
reasonably prepared to call “morality.” At the same time, however, it’s also far from
being trivial, in that the picture of the “conscientious moral agent” is actually quite
thick, rich, and substantive. Thick, rich, and substantive concepts, and claims based on
such concepts, are especially likely to be open to critical challenge. In fact, we’ll see in
the next part of this book that it’s possible to challenge the standard conception in at
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least three different ways: (i) by being a relativist about morality, (ii) by being a skeptic
about morality, and (iii) by being an egoist about morality.

Second, the standard conception is grounded on our “human, all-too-human”

capacity for rationality, which, not too surprisingly, is essentially concerned with reasons,
and more specifically, with: (i) recognizing reasons as reasons, (ii) adopting reasons as
our reasons, (iii) having those reasons for at least some of our beliefs, feelings and
desires, and choices, (iv) critically analyzing those reasons, (v) justifying those reasons,
and finally (vi) acting according to policies or principles for which we have good
reasons.

Third, in being rational, we are also supposed to be impartial in the sense that we
always take into account not only our own interests but also those of all relevant others.

The standard conception of morality also includes some general moral

issues/notions that we’ll encounter constantly as we investigate the nature of morality:
(1) morally good vs. morally bad (relative to a scale of moral values running from best
to worst), (2) morally right vs. morally wrong (relative to a set of moral principles, rules,
or laws), and (3) obligation (i.e., what you ought to choose or do, or what’s required by
principles, rules, or laws of morality) vs. permissibility (i.e., what’s acceptable for you to
choose or do, or what’s consistent with principles, rules, or laws of morality) vs.
impermissibility (i.e., what you mustn’t choose or do, what you ought not to choose or
do, or what’s inconsistent with principles, rules, or laws of morality).

II.4 Six Famously Hard Cases, and a Hard Case from the COVID-19
Pandemic

So far, this has all been very abstract and non-specific; but now I want us briefly to
consider six concrete and specific cases that are also famously hard cases, together with
an equally concrete and specific but more recent case, from the COVID-19 pandemic,
and see whether we can apply some of the abstract notions I’ve been talking about in a
way that indicates the characteristic moves of moral thinking in accordance with the
standard conception.

The first two famously hard cases are fictional cases, that jointly comprise what’s
called The Trolley Problem.10
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Case 1—The Bystander at the Switch

There’s a driverless runaway trolley that’s heading straight towards five

innocent people trapped ahead on the tracks, and an intervening spur occupied
by one innocent person who’s also trapped on that spur. You are standing beside
a switch at the spur, which you know how to operate, and you see the runaway
trolley, so you decide to turn the trolley onto the spur and thus onto the one,
thereby saving the five.

Case 2—The Really Fat Man

You are standing on a footbridge over the trolley track. Beside you is a really fat man.
You see the runaway trolley below you heading towards the five, and realize that if you
push the fat man down onto the tracks he will stop the trolley. So you decide to push
the fat man off the bridge and save the five.11

Bystander at the Switch

The Really Fat Man

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It’s a truth generally acknowledged—not only by philosophers who teach

introductory ethics courses but also by cognitive psychologists and social scientists
who’ve relentlessly empirically tested these things—that most people who consider
those two cases, judge that your action in The Bystander at the Switch is morally
permissible or even morally obligatory, but that your action in The Really Fat Man is
morally impermissible. Nevertheless, it must also be generally acknowledged as a truth,
that a minority of other people do also in fact judge either that both cases are morally
permissible (or even morally obligatory) or that both cases are morally impermissible.
So The Trolley Problem is just this: what (if anything) is the moral difference between
the two cases?

The next three cases are famously hard real-world cases.

Case 3—Baby Theresa12

Real-World Facts: Baby Theresa was a human baby born with no cerebrum or
cerebellum, but also possessing a functioning brain stem and some autonomic
functions.

Specific moral issue: Is it morally permissible (or even obligatory) to remove Baby
Theresa’s organs, thus killing her, in order to harvest them for several organ
transplants that could save as many as (say) five people?

Case 4–Jodie and Mary13

Real-World Facts: Jodie and Mary were conjoined twins with fused spines and one
heart plus one set of lungs between them. Jodie was stronger and provided blood
for Mary. Doctors said that without medical intervention they would both die
within six months. It was expected by the doctors that if the twins were
surgically separated, then Jodie would live, but Mary would die.

Specific moral issue: Is it morally permissible (or even obligatory) to separate the
twins, thereby killing Mary to save Jodie?

Case 5–Tracy Latimer14

Real-World Facts: Tracy Latimer was a 12 year old with cerebral palsy, functioning
at the mental level of a 3 month-old baby, who had undergone major surgery,
and was frequently in pain. Her father, Robert Latimer, killed her by means of
carbon monoxide poisoning, without her consent (because she was incapable of
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consent), in order to prevent, as he said, “mutilation and torture for Tracy,”

hence as a non-consensual mercy killing, aka “involuntary euthanasia.”

Specific moral issue: Is it permissible (or even obligatory) for Robert Latimer to
mercy-kill Tracy?

The sixth case is slightly less famous, at least in North America; nevertheless, it
was quite famous in the UK, and it also involves a Kantian philosopher I studied with in
graduate school at Yale in the 1980s and therefore knew with no degrees of
separation—so this case is especially poignant for me.

Case 6—Stephan15 and Edith Körner16

The story was brief, tragic and haunting. A brilliant philosophy professor, Stephan
Körner, had been found dead with his wife Edith, an NHS pioneer who had just been
diagnosed as having terminal cancer. Instead of being divided by disease the couple
chose to be united in death, taking a lethal overdose and breathing their last in each
other's arms at their Bristol home.17

Real-World Facts: In 2000, the 86 year-old Kantian philosopher Stephan Körner

and his 79 year-old wife Edith, who was a National Health Service expert in the
UK, committed double-suicide by taking a lethal overdose, then tying plastic
bags around their heads and putting pillows on top of them. She was suffering
from terminal cancer, and they died together in each other’s arms.

Specific moral issue: is it morally permissible (or even morally obligatory) for
Stephan and Edith Körner to commit double suicide?

The seventh hard case is also a real-world case, famous at least in the USA, and it
also has special resonance for anyone directly or indirectly adversely affected by the
COVID-19 pandemic—i.e., almost everyone in the world.

Case 7—Donald Trump, COVID-19, and Schadenfreude

What Moral Philosophy Tells Us About Our Reactions to Trump’s Illness

The other day, my 7-year-old, having gotten wind of President Trump’s Covid-19
diagnosis, asked me point blank, “Mommy, are you glad that Trump got the
coronavirus?”
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I am a moral philosopher, and yet I had a hard time coming up with an answer. The
question demands we grapple not only with the moral meaning of the president’s
illness but also with our complex and contested reactions to it. To be clear, I am not
debating whether it is morally wrong to wish for the president’s death. It is wrong. Full
stop. Nevertheless, now that Mr. Trump has been declared healthy enough to return to
work, I think it is important that we assess the moral significance of the positive
reactions his run-in with Covid-19 has produced.

Mr. Trump’s diagnosis generated an immediate torrent of glee, gloating and

schadenfreude on social media. It was followed by an equally quick and ferocious
attempt to tamp it down. Joe Biden and Barack Obama, among other Democratic
politicians, offered well wishes for the president and his wife, while left-leaning
columnists rushed to wish them a speedy recovery. Many went on to admonish those
rejoicing in the president’s misfortune, suggesting that such apparent meanspiritedness
is but one more symptom of the moral rot that has come to consume our political
culture.

While I agree that the gloating over Mr. Trump’s illness is morally concerning, I also
find it fair to ask whether certain less celebratory but still positive reactions to his
disease are entirely blameworthy and without moral merit.

It is generally accepted that Mr. Trump’s mendacious and reckless attitude toward the
coronavirus, including his contempt for his government’s own public health guidelines,
has helped lead indirectly but predictably to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of
Americans. This is not to mention the individuals he directly and perhaps knowingly
endangered once he had learned of his own diagnosis. In light of these catastrophic
misdeeds, was it morally wrong to want Mr. Trump to suffer the consequences of his
own callous incaution?

Ambivalent reactions to President Trump’s medical condition become more

understandable when we appreciate that valid moral principles are often in tension
with one another and can pull us in different directions. Condemning the pleasure that
his misfortune has produced is certainly correct from one moral perspective, but there
are also valid moral reasons to regard his illness as a potentially positive thing. Judging
the moral meaning of Mr. Trump’s bout with Covid-19—and our reactions to it—is no
easy task.

The same bedrock moral principles—that life is sacred, that all people deserve to be
treated with dignity and respect—make it wrong both to wantonly endanger others and
to wish suffering and death upon any individual. We appeal to these principles in
objecting to the glee and schadenfreude that engulfed Twitter in the wake of Mr.
Trump’s diagnosis. From this perspective, it does not matter how morally corrupt he
may be, nor the harms he has inflicted on others, wittingly or unwittingly, directly or
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indirectly. This is all beside the point when we consider that the president is a person
with dignity or, as columnists more often put it, “a man with a family.” According to
this line of thought, we should not wish to see Mr. Trump fighting for his life on a
ventilator, no matter what he has done, and we are right to be concerned by attitudes
that seem to contravene this principle.

But while it is true that life is sacred, and we must honor the dignity of all persons,
including Mr. Trump, society also has a legitimate moral interest in seeing wrongdoers
face consequences for their actions. The sense that justice requires punishment for
wrongs runs deep and is not the same as a mere thirst for revenge or a desire to get
even.

On the contrary, punishment plays an important role in any healthy moral ecosystem.
When the moral order has been ruptured, punishment for wrongs helps to repair tears
to the social fabric and to reinforce the validity of the moral expectations that were
violated. Imagining Mr. Trump’s illness as a metaphorical punishment for his misdeeds
helps to satisfy at the level of fantasy a legitimate need to see justice done. Because Mr.
Trump contributed to the illness and death of so many Americans, it is understandable
that many feel satisfied in seeing him forced to contend with a harm to which he has
exposed so many others.

The moral complexity becomes greater still when we consider that from a purely
consequentialist point of view, there are reasons to view Mr. Trump’s potential
incapacity as the best moral outcome. Most famously associated with the utilitarianism
of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, consequentialism is the philosophical position
that affirms that what is morally right is whatever makes the world best in the future. If
one believes that Mr. Trump has unleashed a tremendous amount of suffering and
death through his mismanagement of the coronavirus pandemic and that he is likely to
continue causing harm on this scale, a consequentialist argument can be made that his
speedy recovery from Covid-19 would not be the best moral outcome.

The consequentialist argument, while repugnant from the perspective of human

dignity, tells us that a world in which Mr. Trump is unable to commit harm would be
morally better than a world in which he continues to harm freely. This philosophical
approach to weighing moral outcomes conflicts with the principle of individual human
dignity and offers no easy guideline for reconciling these powerful yet opposing ways
of thinking about what is best.

So where does this leave us?

Can those who rejoice in Mr. Trump’s misfortune claim the moral high ground? Not so
fast. Those who regard Mr. Trump as the enemy may simply wish to see him suffer.
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Such a wish may be entirely untethered from concerns about justice or the
consequentialist moral appeal of a world where he is too ill to campaign effectively. For
these reasons we are right to be skeptical of their reaction. Moreover, the principle of
human dignity tells us that even the president, for all the wrong he has done, deserves
our good will.

Here’s how I explained the moral quandary to my 7-year-old: I am sad that Mr. Trump
got sick because in general suffering is bad, and I don’t want anyone to suffer, but on
the other hand I think he should suffer consequences for the harm he has done. This
answer seemed satisfying enough at the time, but it left out an important distinction.

What I did not try to explain is that the punishment that Mr. Trump’s bout of Covid-19
represents is merely symbolic, a stand-in for the real punishment he deserves, which is
necessarily social in character. Mr. Trump deserves to be punished at the ballot box and
to be held accountable for any possible criminal wrongdoing in a court of law.

I hope that after experiencing firsthand the illness that has killed so many people and
devastated the lives of so many others, the president will think better of his cavalier
attitude. It seems, so far, that he hasn’t. Nevertheless, I hope Mr. Trump returns to good
health. I hope this both because Donald Trump is a human being with dignity, and also
because the world needs this president to get his real just deserts.18

Here are six general issues to notice especially in thinking and talking with
others about the seven cases, that we’ll also encounter constantly as we investigate the
nature of morality and the human condition: (i) benefits-based moral reasoning vs.
intrinsic value-based moral reasoning, (ii) human personhood and the differential moral
status of human or non-human persons vs. human or non-human non-persons, (iii)
legality vs. morality, (iv) moral judgments about responsibility for acts and/or their
consequences vs. moral judgments about responsibility for choices or intentions vs. moral
judgments about people’s characters, (v) caring about people with sufficient respect for their
dignity as persons vs. treating people with sufficient respect for their dignity as persons,
and (vi) moral goodness and badness (relative to a scale of moral values running from best
to worst) vs. moral rightness and wrongness (relative to a set of moral principles, rules, or
laws specifying what’s permissible, obligatory, or impermissible). Correspondingly, I’ll
now unpack those notions a bit.

According to benefits-based moral reasoning, historically well-represented by

Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Utilitarianism more generally—everyone always
ought to choose and act in such a way as to maximize good consequences, aka positive
utility—usually cashed out psychologically in terms of pleasurable experiences,
avoidance or reduction of painful experiences, or satisfaction of preferences—for as
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many people as possible. By sharp contrast, according to intrinsic-value-based moral

reasoning, historically well-represented by Immanuel Kant and Kantian so-called
“deontology” (i.e., the theory of duty), (i) human persons are human animals that
possess capacities for rationality, emotions (including desires, feelings, passions, and
above all caring about oneself, others, and also chosen and desired ends of various
kinds), and free agency, (ii) by virtue of their possession of those capacities, all human
persons thereby possess non-denumerable, non-fungible intrinsic value or dignity, and
(iii) everyone always ought to choose and act in such a way as to sufficiently respect
one’s own and everyone else’s human dignity, but (iv) not all human or non-human
animals have the moral status of being human or non-human persons, and our moral
obligations towards human or non-human persons are stronger, more stringent, and
more generally override, any moral obligations we might also have towards human or
non-human non-persons.

Morality, as we’ve seen, is

the attempt to guide human conduct by rationally formulating and following

principles or rules that reflect our basic personal and social commitments and
our leading ideals and values.

But by contrast, legality concerns what’s deemed right or wrong by social institutions (for
example, governments, or judicial systems) that enforce their judgments, policies, rules,
and laws by means of coercion. Moreover, just because a social institution commands
that something is legally right or wrong, it doesn’t thereby follow that it is morally right
(good, virtuous, etc.) or wrong (bad, vicious, etc.). For example, in the 1940s, the
government of Germany, the Nazis, commanded that it was legally right to kill millions
of innocent people belonging to certain ethnic or racial groups, but this was obviously
morally wrong. As another example, and closer to home, from the standpoints of
intrinsic-value-based moral reasoning and benefits-based moral reasoning alike, it is
plausibly arguable that the social institution of crime-and-punishment in the
contemporary USA, especially including the police and prisons, not only provides a
morally scandalous example of rationally unjustifiable “structural racism” and/or “mass
incarceration” directed against Black people, but also is inherently and systematically
authoritarian, coercive, and in violation of human dignity, for anyone who is deemed to
be in violation of the laws of the system: hence, while obviously as a system it’s legally
right, nevertheless equally obviously as a system it’s morally wrong.19 Conversely,
something can be morally right—say, treating all people with sufficient respect for their
human dignity—but also legally wrong: for example, and again using an example from
the USA, under the system of slavery in the USA prior to The Emancipation
 18

Proclamation20 issued by Lincoln in 1863, treating black people who were slaves as equal
human persons was in fact illegal.

Corresponding to the crucial distinction between morality and legality, is the

equally crucial distinction between moral responsibility and legal accountability. For the
purposes of this book, I’ll say (i) that moral responsibility belongs primarily to persons
(as opposed to groups of persons or social institutions, say, business corporations or
governments) by virtue of their choices and/or actions, and (ii) that a person is morally
responsible for any choice or intention and/or action that flows from the person herself,
and (iii) by virtue of the fact that a given choice or intention and/or action flows from
the person herself/himself/themselves, then the moral value of that choice and/or action,
especially including the moral value of some or all of the consequences of that choice
and/or action, also attaches to the agent herself/himself/themselves. By sharp contrast, legal
accountability concerns what people can be deemed and held liable for (accused of, blamed
for, punished for, etc.) by social institutions (for example, governments, or judiciaries)
that enforce their judgments, policies, rules, and laws by means of coercion. Obviously,
then, you can be morally responsible for something without also being legally
accountable for it, and also legally accountable for something without also being
morally responsible for it.

With respect to moral responsibility, it’s crucial to notice that because choices or
intentions are one thing, and acts or consequences are another, it follows that moral
judgments we make about them typically differ as well. Indeed, we typically judge evil
acts or bad consequences much more harshly than we judge evil choices or intentions,
and this fact is directly reflected in our legal judgments. For example, someone’s
making a choice with malign intent towards another person, or attempted murder, is
one thing, morally speaking, and that same person’s actually murdering that other
person is a sharply different thing, morally speaking.

Moreover, we also morally judge people’s characters in a sharply different moral

way than we judge their choices or intentions, and actions and/or consequences. For
example, we not infrequently judge of someone that a certain evil choice or intention for
which that person is morally responsible, or a certain wrong choice or act for which that
person is morally responsible, is nevertheless “out of character” or “done in all good
faith.” Indeed, that kind of moral judgment is often directly reflected in moral or legal
judgments about punishment, as a mitigating factor.

Finally, and relatedly, while it’s obviously the case that morally right choice or
action is also itself morally good, and also that morally wrong choice or action is also
itself morally bad, nevertheless the evaluation of moral goodness and badness operates
 19

relatively to a scale of values that runs from best to worst, whereas the evaluation of
moral rightness and wrongness operates relatively to moral principles, rules, or laws.
Hence some person’s choice or act can be strictly speaking morally right according to
moral principles, even though that person’s character or feelings at the same time are
fairly or even very morally bad (as when a generally nasty person, “for once in their
life,” chooses and acts rightly); and some person’s choice or act can be strictly speaking
morally wrong according to moral principles even though that person’s character or
feelings can at the same time be fairly or even very good (as when a generally good
person chooses or acts wrongly “out of character” or “in all good faith”).

Now let’s briefly apply these notions to our seven hard cases.

As regards The Trolley Problem, benefits-based moral reasoning would seem to

dictate that there’s no moral difference whatsoever between The Bystander at the
Switch and The Really Fat Man, and that it should be morally permissible or even
morally obligatory to kill one in order to save five in both cases. Yet most people’s
judgments about the moral difference between the two cases seem to reflect intrinsic-
value-based moral reasoning that constrains the moral permissibility of choices and
actions according to benefits-based moral reasoning, by judging the case of The Really
Fat Man to be morally impermissible, which of course implies that there really is a
moral difference between the two cases.

In the Baby Theresa, Jodie and Mary, and Tracy Latimer cases, the contrast or
even clash between benefits-based moral reasoning and intrinsic-value-based moral
reasoning is also heavily inflected by the distinction between human persons and
human non-persons. For example, it’s arguable that because Baby Theresa is a human
non-person by virtue of lacking capacities for consciousness or sentience, caring,
rationality, and free agency, then she can be morally permissibly killed and her organs
harvested in order to bring about life-saving benefits for (say) five human persons; and
it’s also arguable that Mary can be killed in order to save Jodie, because although Jodie
is clearly a human person, there’s some reason to think that Mary is a human non-person.
But even if Jodie and Mary are both human persons, nevertheless most people’s
judgments about The Bystander at the Switch case would seem to generalize to the
case of Jodie and Mary, by permitting (or even obligating) us to kill one (Mary) in order
to save one (Jodie), in cases in which both will die if no intervention happens.

In the Tracy Latimer case, like the Baby Theresa case, whether Tracy is a human
person possessing a rational capacity that would enable her to consent toor dissent from
her treatment by her father, or instead a human non-person with no such rational
capacity, is of fundamental importance to our moral judgments about the case; and it’s
 20

also directly relevant to the issue of Robert Latimer’s moral responsibility for Tracy’s
death, in view of his claim that mercy-killing her without her consent, in order to
prevent “mutilation and torture for Tracy,” which would seem to reflect benefits-based
moral reasoning on his part, was not merely morally permissible but indeed morally
obligatory. Moreover, Robert Latimer’s claim, if true—as it seems to have been—
importantly inflects our moral judgments about his choices or intentions, namely that
they were rationally justified and morally acceptable, and also about his character. In
terms of legality and legal accountability, Robert Latimer was in fact held legally
accountable and blameworthy for her death and sentenced to life imprisonment for
second-degree murder in the mid-1990s, with no chance of parole for ten years, but was
then later released from prison with a permanent parole in 2010. And in summer 2018,
Robert Latimer applied for a full pardon for his conviction, with strong support from
some professional ethicists21 and many other Canadians. Whatever we may think about
the morality of this famously hard case, at the very least its legal history clearly reflects
changes over time in Canadians’ moral judgments about Latimer’s moral responsibility
for his choices or intentions, and also about his moral responsibility for his act and its
consequences. And if Tracy was indeed a human non-person, then we might well think
that Robert Latimer was no more morally responsible for mercy-killing her than if he’d
euthanized an ailing horse or dog for the same reason, and therefore that his being held
legally accountable for her mercy-killing was rationally unjustified and morally wrong
from the get-go.

As regards the case of Stephan and Edith Körner, benefits-based moral

reasoning seems clearly to entail, at the very least, the moral permissibility of their
double-suicide, whereas intrinsic-value-based moral reasoning might, at least on the
face of it, make suicide under any circumstances morally impermissible. At the same
time, however, it’s also arguable on intrinsic-value based grounds that it’s at least
morally permissible or even morally obligatory to respect people’s reasonable, free choices
about how and when they should die, which is why this phenomenon is commonly called
“dying with dignity.” Strikingly and significantly, however, the Körners’ daughter Ann
implicitly sharply disagreed with that line of thinking. From the available evidence,
Ann judged that it was morally impermissible both for her father Stephan to have
performed what was in effect a mercy-killing with the full consent of Edith and also to
have committed suicide too:

[Their daughter,] Dr Ann Altman, says she was “disappointed” at her father’s actions
and would be horrified if her parents’ final act became lauded as the ultimate symbol of
devotion. “I would want to leave my own children a different legacy,” she says
simply.22
 21

And anyone can certainly empathize with Ann Körner-Altman’s point of view—
what if Stephan and Edith had been your own parents: how would you feel? Moreover,
what would be the precise rational bearing of that feeling on your (supposed) moral
impartiality; and more generally, how can the rational obligation to moral impartiality
that’s built into the standard conception of morality be reconciled with the special moral
commitments we have to our family, loved ones, and close friends? These are
amazingly hard questions. So I’ll leave it as “a task for the reader,” to think and talk
with others more about this poignant case, and try to answer those hard questions.

Finally, as regards the case of Donald Trump, COVID-19, and Schadenfreude,

it’s arguable that from the standpoint of intrinsic-value-based moral reasoning, it’s a
morally bad thing to feel pleasure about his COVID-19 infection or to wish for his
death, whereas, from the standpoint of benefits-based moral reasoning, had he been
significantly incapacitated or had he died, a great many people would have been better
off: hence it’s morally permissible or even obligatory. At the same time, however, it’s
also arguable from the standpoint of intrinsic-value-based reasoning, that on the one
hand, it’s one kind of morally bad thing to feel pleasure in someone’s illness, or to wish that
they will die from that illness, but on the other hand, it’s altogether a categorically
different kind of morally bad thing to cause someone to be sick by infecting them, or actually
to kill them. Indeed, how many of us have at least occasionally and/or temporarily, and
quite spontaneously, felt schadenfreude about someone else’s misfortune or wished for
someone else’s death, but never did anything about it? And of course, after the fact, we
might well have felt guilty or ashamed about having those feelings and wishes, no
matter how spontaneously they arose. But it seems morally excessively strenuous to
condemn those feelings and wishes as strictly morally wrong and impermissible, even if
we also fully agree that we fell far short of being as good as we can be, as far as the moral
value of those feelings and wishes is concerned. Hence it’s arguable that although it’s
certainly a morally bad thing to feel pleasure about Trump’s illness or to wish for his
death, nevertheless it’s not strictly morally wrong and impermissible, provided that one
never acts on that feeling or that wish. This point also nicely illustrates the important
difference between moral goodness and badness on the one hand, and moral rightness and
wrongness on the other. Moreover, and relatedly, if it’s actually true that the social
institution of crime-and-punishment in the USA, as a system, is morally wrong, in view
of intrinsic-value based reasons and benefits-based reasons alike, even though it’s
obviously legally right, then wouldn’t it also be morally bad (even if not strictly morally
wrong and impermissible) to hope that Donald Trump “be held accountable for any
possible criminal wrongdoing in a court of law”?

To be sure, I’ve only scratched the outermost surface of the moral complexity,
difficulty, and richness of these seven cases. But that should also be enough, for now, to
 22

indicate what morality is all about and how rationality bears directly on it, according to
the standard conception of morality.
 23

Chapter III. Three Classical Challenges to the Standard

Conception

In the Bible’s Book of Revelation, there were said to be Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse23—Death, Famine, War, and Conquest—and not dissimilarly in their impact
on the standard conception of morality, although one less quantitatively, there are three
classical challenges to the standard conception: (i) moral relativism, (ii) moral skepticism,
and (iii) psychological and moral egoism: The Three Horsemen of the Moral Apocalypse.
Let’s now look critically at each of these in turn.

III.1 Moral Relativism

The basic idea behind moral relativism was crisply expressed by the most famous of the
ancient Greek Sophists,24 Protagoras, who asserted in a treatise (no doubt ironically)
entitled “Truth,” that

[the human being] is the measure of all things, of the things that are that they are and of
the things that are not that they are not.

Moral relativism, in turn, divides into two basic kinds: (i) individual relativism, and
(ii) cultural, aka communitarian, relativism.

As to (i), the thesis of individual relativism says that there is no such thing as
universal objective moral truth and that whatever an individual believes is morally
right or wrong, truly is morally right or wrong. But now a question naturally arises.
Following in the not-so-glorious footsteps of Pontius Pilate, but also in the better
footsteps of a great many others, What is truth?, you ask. For the purposes of this short
book, by “truth” I mean the following:

A statement (judgment, belief, proposition, meaningful sentence, etc.) is true if

and only if what it states (means, says, etc.) is actually the case.

So, for example, the statement,

Sweetpea the cat was looking at Bob the human from her cat-cave in Los Angeles
in late December 2018.
 24

is true if and only if it’s actually the case that Sweetpea the cat was looking at me from
her cat-cave, in Los Angeles CA on 27 December 2018, as per the (we’ll assume, non-
doctored) smart-phone-camera-generated digital image directly below—

Sweatpea the cat and Bob the human: An objective truth.

(Los Angeles CA, 27 December 2018)

Moreover, notice that universality and objectivity are distinct—although still

mutually consistent—notions. Universality means that a fact, truth, or value holds in all
relevant sets of circumstances. And objectivity means that a fact, truth, or value can be
known by any rational thinker whatsoever, and does not depend on any particular
individuals or what they believe or feel. For example, it’s also objectively true, as per
the digital image above, that Sweetpea the cat was looking at me from her cat-cave, in
Los Angeles CA on 27 December 2018. Correspondingly, universality and objectivity
are mutually logically independent notions. On the one hand, a perfectly objective truth
might nevertheless still be dependent on highly contextual factors—for example, the
statement about Sweetpea and me—and so not be universal. And on the other hand, an
 25

absolutely universal truth might nevertheless still depend on particular individuals and
what they’re believing or feeling, and thus not be objective—for example, the statement,

It’s absolutely true of everyone and of everything they believe, feel, or say—
including Donald Trump right now—that whatever they believe, feel, or say is
not always both true and false.

In any case, by contrast to individual relativism, the thesis of (ii) cultural/

communitarian relativism says (i) that there are no such things as absolutely universal
objective moral principles, (ii) that none of the many different culturally-/community-
specific moral codes (including ours) has any special moral status because all of them
are morally equivalent, (iii) that each culture’s/community’s moral codes are
incommensurable with all the others and can be inconsistent with any of the others, and
(iv) that the moral beliefs of each culture/community strictly determine what is morally
right for that culture/community, and/or morally wrong for that culture or community.

Correspondingly, the primary argument for the truth of moral relativism,

whether individual relativism or cultural/communitarian relativism, runs as follows:

(1) As a matter of empirical fact, different people have different and often
conflicting moral beliefs about moral principles, and different
cultures/communities have different and sometimes conflicting moral beliefs
about moral principles.

(2) Therefore, there are no absolutely universal and objective moral principles.

(3) Therefore, there are and can be only either individually relative or culturally-
/community-relative moral principles, each of which is morally equivalent with
all of the others, incommensurable with all of the others, possibly inconsistent
with any of the others, and true or false just because that individual or
culture/community believes that it is true or false.

(4) Therefore, moral relativism is true.

Now let’s critically evaluate that argument. Step (1) is of course true. But
obviously, step (2) does not follow as a logical consequence from step (1). It’s quite true
that from the fact that two or more different beliefs about X are mutually logically
inconsistent, it does indeed follow that at least one of the beliefs must be false, because
they cannot all be true. Nevertheless, from the fact of two or more different beliefs
about X, some of which are mutually logically inconsistent, precisely nothing follows
 26

about the nature of X. Belief in proposition P does not itself entail the truth of P: the fact
that P is not entailed by the mere fact of someone’s belief that P, nor is it entailed by the
mere fact that a great many people believe that P. Correspondingly, a belief in the
denial of proposition P does not itself entail the falsity of P: the fact that not-P is not
entailed by the mere fact of someone’s belief that not-P, nor is it entailed by the mere
fact that a great many people believe that not-P. So even given the truth of step (1),
there could still be absolutely universal objective moral principles.

Moreover, even if there were no absolutely universal objective moral principles,

still it would not follow that there are only individually relative or culturally-
/community- relative moral principles. That is because even if there were no absolutely
universal objective moral principles, there could still be objective moral principles (i) that
held for a great many contexts, individuals, and cultures/communities, even if not strictly
speaking holding for absolutely all contexts, individuals, and cultures or communities,
and (ii) that in addition could hold for any context, individual, or culture/community
whatsoever, provided that certain favorable background conditions obtain, and hence
they would hold “other things being equal,” aka ceteris paribus. Here we can think, for
example, of the two moral principles “It’s impermissible to kill innocent people” and
“It’s impermissible to tell lies constantly.” There are obviously contexts in which these
principles might not hold. For example, “It’s impermissible to kill innocent people”
would fail when it’s morally permissible to kill one innocent person in order to save five
innocent others, as in the case of The Bystander at the Switch, i.e., case 1 of The Trolley
Problem. And “It’s impermissible to tell lies constantly” would fail for someone’s lying
constantly when they’re operating as an undercover agent in a morally warranted war
against an evil enemy. But on the whole, and other things being equal, these moral
principles certainly do seem to be objectively valid: that is, they certainly do seem to
hold for a great many contexts, individuals, and cultures/communities. I’ll call such
non-absolutely universal, yet still objectively valid, and genuinely although restrictedly
universal—other things being equal, aka ceteris paribus—moral principles, fairly universal
and objective moral principles. Given the possibility of fairly universal and objective moral
principles, the truth of moral relativism obviously doesn’t follow from steps (1) and (2).

Furthermore, there’s a classical and obvious problem with both individual and
also cultural/communitarian moral relativism, having to do with truth and logical
consistency. If relativism were true, then if person A or culture/community C1 believes
that principle P is true, then P is true. But if person B or culture/community C2 also
believes that principle P is false, then P is false. So according to individual or
cultural/communitarian relativism, principle P could be both true and false. Indeed,
according to individual or cultural/communitarian relativism, every moral principle
 27

could be both true and false. But that’s absurd and unintelligible, precisely because it
violates the logical Principle of Non-Contradiction in its logically thinnest and at the
same time absolutely unrevisable version, Minimal Non-Contradiction:

Accept as truths in any language or logical system only those statements which
do not entail that it and all other statements in any or all languages or logical
systems are both true and false.25

So moral relativism is false.

Nowadays, it’s a standard response of the relativist to claim that for them, the
words ‘true’ and ‘false’ mean true for them and false for them, and not anything objective.
But it wouldn’t even be correct for the individual relativist or cultural/communitarian
relativist to hold that a given moral principle is true or false for them, just in virtue of the
fact that they believe it. This is because belief does not, in and of itself, itself entail truth,
whether truth about the larger world, truth about oneself, or truth about one’s own
culture/community. All that can be validly concluded from the fact that a given
individual or culture/community believes a certain principle, is that this individual or
this culture/community indeed believes this principle. It doesn’t follow that the principle
itself is true, whether for them or anyone else. So the thesis,

Subject S believes that P, but since the proposition P is other than just the claim “S
believes that P,” then P can be false

is a logically or conceptually necessary truth about the notions of belief and truth.

Now the next move in the contemporary debate about moral relativism is for the
relativist to try to define the meaning of the word ‘truth’ in terms of individual or
cultural/communitarian belief—say, as warranted assertibility, or whatever. But any such
move, although it may suffice for playing interesting dialectical games in professional
academic philosophy, runs directly into the self-evident contrary fact that any version of
the argument

(1) X believes that P and P is not just the claim “X believes that P.”

(2) Therefore, P is true.

is a fallacious argument. Or in other words, on no even remotely plausible construal of

the meanings of ‘believes’ and ‘true’, does believes logically or conceptually entail true.
 28

OK: so far I’ve argued that moral relativism—whether individual relativism or

cultural/communitarian relativism—is false. But cultural/communitarian relativism also
has three unacceptably bad consequences. First, if cultural/communitarian relativism
were true, then we could never legitimately assert that the customs of other cultures are
morally inferior to our own. Second, if cultural/communitarian relativism were true,
then we could always decide whether actions or intentions are right or wrong just by
consulting the moral standards of our own culture. And third, if cultural/
communitarian relativism were true, then the highly plausible thesis that there’s at least
some moral progress over human history could not be correct.

At the same time, however, there are still two things we can learn from
cultural/communitarian relativism, even if it’s false and also has some unacceptably bad
consequences. First, we shouldn’t be dogmatic about our society’s moral beliefs. That is, we
shouldn’t assume that all of our society’s moral beliefs are based on some absolute
rational standard: some of them might be—in fact, some of them very probably are—
mere moral prejudices. And second, we shouldn’t be dogmatic about our own personal
moral beliefs. That is, we should not assume that any of our personal moral beliefs is
correct just because it is based on our society’s moral beliefs: some of them might be—in fact
some of them very probably are—the result of sociocultural conditioning imposed by
groups of people with important vested interests in the effectiveness of that
conditioning, who also possess coercive power sufficient to impose that sociocultural
conditioning, aka hegemonic ideology, and therefore reflect mere, or even tragically
wrongheaded, moral prejudices.

III.2 Eight Logical Principles of Human Rationality

At this point, it’s helpful to formulate, explicitly, eight absolutely universal and
objective logical principles of human rationality that I’ve been implicitly using so far,
and that we’ll continue to use throughout this book.

(P1) An argument in the logical sense is a set of statements or sentences such that one of
the statements or sentences (the conclusion) is held to follow logically from the others (the
premises).

(P2) A conclusion follows logically from a set of premises if and only if there is no
possible set of circumstances such that all the premises are true and the conclusion is
false.
 29

(P3) An argument is valid if and only if its conclusion follows logically from its premises;
otherwise the argument is invalid, because there is at least one possible set of
circumstances in which all the premises are true and the conclusion is false.

(P4) An argument that is taken to be valid, or put forward as valid, when in fact it is
invalid, is a fallacy.

(P5) If a conclusion follows logically from its premises, and the premises are all true,
then then the conclusion must also be true.

(P6) An argument is sound if and only if it is valid and all its premises are true.

(P7) Contradictions are statements or sentences of the form, “Both S and not-S,”
contradictions are necessarily false (i.e., false in every possible set of circumstances), and
it is self-contradictory for any statement or sentence to be both true and false at the same
time and in the same respect.

(P8) Any two statements or sentences are mutually consistent if and only if they are not
contradictory and it is logically possible for both to be true, and a statement or sentence
is self-consistent if and only if it is not self-contradictory.

Now we’re logically well-equipped to gird up our philosophical loins and take
on the second of the three challenges to the standard conception of morality: moral
skepticism.

III.3 Moral Skepticism

Moral skepticism challenges the very idea of absolutely universal and objective moral
principles and values. One way of being a moral skeptic would be to deny that there are
any absolutely universal moral principles or values. Another way of being a moral skeptic
would be to deny that there are any objective moral principles or values. And a third way of
being a moral skeptic would be simply to claim that morality according to the standard
conception is utterly bad and bogus.

Nietzsche, especially in his exceptionally influential 1886 book, Beyond Good and
Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future,26 is a moral skeptic of the third kind. The
exceptional influence of that book and of Nietzsche’s writings more generally, largely
flows from the fact that he was a brilliant literary philosopher who wrote polemical
essays, brief striking remarks, and poetry rather than logically-organized essays or
 30

treatises, and therefore his work was being read by all kinds of philosophers and non-
philosophers alike, not just by professional academic philosophers. He’s not only brilliant,
he’s also highly controversial—definitely a philosophical bad-ass—and as a
consequence he’s often regarded as intellectually and morally “highly dangerous”;
hence it’s also not entirely irrelevant that he went mad and died from the effects of
syphilis.

Nietzsche’s version of moral skepticism says (i) that morality according to the
standard conception is utterly bad and bogus because it is life-denying or nihilistic,
psychologically unhealthy, uncreative, and weak (or otherwise put: it’s slavish), and
(ii) that whatever the life-affirming or vital, psychologically healthy, creative, and
powerful person says is right, is right (or otherwise put: it’s masterly). And here’s
Nietzsche’s basic argument for these two “highly dangerous” theses.

(1) God does not exist, and physical nature is universally driven and governed by
“the will to power,” which, in human animals, is the purely natural urge to
satisfy basic desires, experience lots of pleasure, survive and be healthy,
reproduce, be creative by expressing oneself as fully as possible, and above all, be
powerful.

(Notice the parallels between Nietzsche’s view and 19th century Romanticism,
Darwinian evolutionary theory—especially social Darwinism, and Freudian
psychology.)

(2) Morality according to the standard conception—as represented historically

by, for example, Socrates, Christianity, or Kant—says that we ought to repress or
suppress the will to power in us (whether by having a virtuous character, or by
obeying God’s divine commands, or just by thinking, choosing, and acting
according to our “human, all-too-human” capacty for rationality), and choose or
do the right thing instead.

(3) So morality according to the standard conception is life-denying or nihilistic,

psychologically unhealthy, uncreative, and weak: or otherwise put, acceptance of
it is slavish.

(4) Hence morality according to the standard conception is utterly bad and
bogus.
 31

(5) In order for us to be life-affirming, psychologically healthy, creative, and

powerful human animals, we should reject morality according to the standard
conception: or otherwise put, we should be masters, not slaves.

(6) Therefore, not only is morality according to the standard conception bad and
bogus, but also whatever the life-affirming or vital, psychologically healthy,
creative, and powerful (or: masterly) person says is right, is right.

But is Nietzsche right about morality?

In at least one respect, his version of moral skepticism is quite difficult to argue
rationally against, since it rejects logical and moral rationality itself. Or in other words,
Nietzsche “isn’t playing the rationality game.” (Actually, from the standpoint of the
standard conception of morality, rationality isn’t a game at all, in the sense of being an
optional activity: it’s a necessary component of all lives like ours—which is why I scare-
quoted that phrase.) But one line of argument that a defender of the standard
conception of morality can pursue, for the purposes of a reductio ad absurdum argument,
is to grant to Nietzsche, as a supposition, his own starting-point, namely his naturalism
and the Will-to-Power, and then point out that physical nature is driven and governed
every bit as much as or even more than by forces of chaos, destruction, organismic
death, and entropy or heat-death (as it were, Dark Side nihilistic forces), as it is by life-
affirming or vital, psychologically healthy, creative, and powerful forces. And in fact
Schopenhauer, who originally developed the idea of a Wille zum Leben, or Will-to-Live,
on which Nietzsche based his own notion of the Will-to-Power, and whose work I’ll
discuss later in this book, thought of nature as essentially chaotic, destructive, and
deadly. So by Nietzsche’s own Schopenhauer-inspired line of reasoning, then, it’s the
master morality that’s doomed to self-destruction and failure, and the slave morality that’s
vastly more likely to survive and be successful in the long run. Therefore, Nietzsche’s
view is self-stultifyingly (aka “pragmatically”) inconsistent, and false by a sort of
existential reductio.

I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, that according to the first two kinds
of moral skepticism, one can either deny that there are any absolutely universal moral
principles or values, or else deny that there are any objective moral principles or values.
It’s this specifically anti-objectivist tack that John Mackie takes in his influential 1977
book, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong.27 Of course, it also follows from the rejection of
all objective moral principles or values, that there are no absolutely universal and
objective moral principles or values. But notice that it would not follow from the
assertion that there are no absolutely universal and objective moral principles or values, that
there are no objective moral principles or values. As we saw above, there could still be some
 32

fairly universal and objective moral principles, and of course, correspondingly, there could
also still be some fairly universal and objective moral values. I’ll come back to that crucial
point a little later.

In any case, Mackie offers three basic reasons for denying the objectivity of all
moral beliefs, claims, or judgments.

First, he appeals to the fact of individual and cultural/communitarian differences

in moral beliefs/claims/judgments, and how they contradict one another. This of course
is similar to the first two steps of the classical argument for moral relativism.

Second, he says that if there really were objective moral truths or values, then
they would have to be metaphysically and epistemologically “queer” because they
would not be natural facts, hence they would be neither knowable in ordinary ways
through sense perception or the sciences, nor explicable in the ways we normally do in
the sciences.

And third, he says that the commonsense belief in objective moral truths or
values can be explained away by appealing to an “error theory” of how such a belief
came to be. An error theory of the belief in some supposed fact X says not only (i) that X
is actually bogus and a myth, but also (ii) that we can offer a scientifically acceptable
explanation—via, for example, evolutionary psychology—of how a belief in the bogus
and mythical X came to be widely held. The basic idea here is that we can use the
psychological fact of “unconscious projection” together with, for example, a theory
about evolutionary mechanisms, in order to explain how our own desires, needs, and
wishes to have objective moral truths and values, have unconsciously led us to project
them onto the world, even though they do not actually exist there.

Is Mackie’s version of moral skepticism correct? On the one hand, he has

formulated his claims and arguments very carefully, so (although for diametrically
different reasons than the ones that made refuting Nietzsche somewhat difficult, i.e.,
Nietzsche’s rejection of logical and moral rationality) it is not at all easy to find decisive,
simple objections to Mackie’s basic reasons for skepticism. For example, refuting the
“queerness” argument would require an all-out critique of scientific naturalism; and
refuting the “error theory” argument would require an all-out critique of philosophical
debunking strategies. To be sure, there’s no a priori reason whatsoever to think that both
critiques could not be successfully carried out,28 but they would of necessity be fairly
long-winded and rationally strenuous, and “too much like hard work” for a short book
like this one. On the other hand, however, one way of decisively and simply
demonstrating that Mackie is incorrect would be to provide a crisp, compelling, positive
 33

argument for the existence of at least some absolutely universal and objective moral
principles and values. So here’s my best shot at that—

(1) There are at least some moral rules that every individual and every culture or
community whatsoever must believe and hold in common, at least implicitly,
hence even if not self-consciously. I’ll call such rules strictly common moral rules.
One such strictly common moral rule is this one, which (with ironic allusion to
the so-called Golden Rule) I’ll call The Platinum Rule:

“It’s impermissible to kill any or all arbitrarily-chosen innocent people for

no good reason whatsoever.”

Another such strictly common moral rule is this one, which I’ll call The Platinum-
Plus Rule:

“It’s impermissible to treat any or all arbitrarily-chosen innocent people

either as mere means to others’ ends or as mere things, like garbage or
offal, for no good reason whatsoever.”

(2) That these moral rules—namely, The Platinum Rule and The Platinum-Plus
Rule— are indeed strictly common is shown by the following. Any individual
who, or any culture/community that, attempted to disbelieve or disobey one of
these moral rules would also have to believe that it is morally permissible to kill
herself or anyone or everyone else in their own culture, even though they are
innocent, as the result of an arbitrary choice, for no good reason at all, and also
that it’s morally permissible to treat herself or anyone or everyone else in their
own culture/community, even though they are innocent, either as mere means or
as mere things, like garbage or offal, as the result of an arbitrary choice, for no
good reason at all. But, clearly and distinctly, the very idea of the innocence of a
person entails, at the very least, that she doesn’t morally deserve in any way to
be killed or treated either as a mere means or as a mere thing, like garbage or
offal, as the result of an arbitrary choice, for no good reason whatsoever. So
violating The Platinum Rule and The Platinum-Plus Rule would imply that it is
morally permissible to treat oneself or anyone or everyone else, insofar as they
are innocent people, in ways that are not morally deserved in any way, or on the
basis of any good reasons whatsoever, as the result of an arbitrary choice. But
that is absurd and the moral equivalent of “1=0.” Therefore, The Platinum Rule
and The Platinum-Plus Rule must be believed or obeyed, at least implicitly and
even if not self-consciously, by every individual and every culture whatsoever.
So they are strictly common moral rules. Moreover, the moral and rational force
 34

of these strictly common moral rules should be directly compared to the logical
force of Minimal Non-Contradiction.

(3) The best overall explanation for these strictly common moral rules is that they
express absolutely universal and objective moral principles and values.

(4) Therefore, there are at least some absolutely universal and objective moral
principles and values.

Correspondingly, Mackie’s version of moral skepticism must be incorrect.

III.4 Psychological and Moral Egoism

The thesis of egoism, in general, says that all our actual psychological motivations and
all our moral principles are fundamentally self-centered and based on self-interest. But
under this general rubric there are are two importantly distinct types of egoism:
(i) psychological egoism, and (ii) moral egoism. Psychological egoism is a factual thesis,
which is to say that it’s about what actually is, and not either about what must be (as a
matter of logical or metaphysical necessity) or about what ought to be (as a matter of
morality), which says that every human desire, intention, choice, and action is
fundamentally motivated by self-interest. Directly opposed to psychological egoism is
the factual thesis of psychological altruism, which says

that some human desires, intentions, choices, and/or actions are not
fundamentally motivated by self-interest, but instead are fundamentally
motivated by concern for the interests of others.

Moral egoism, as its name of course indicates, by sharp contrast to psychological

egoism, is a moral thesis, not a factual thesis, hence it’s about what ought to be, not about
what actually is, which says that everyone ought always to pursue their own self-interest
exclusively. And directly opposed to moral egoism is the moral thesis of moral altruism,
which says that everyone ought at least sometimes to desire, intend, choose, and/or act
in a way that’s not fundamentally self-interested, but instead fundamentally motivated
by the interests of others.

Now before I go on to a critical examination of either psychological egoism or

moral egoism, with an eye to determining their truth or falsity, I’ll need to make some
some important conceptual distinctions.
 35

First, self-interest is not the same as selfishness. Selfishness is manifested by

choices or actions or attitudes undertaken for my own sake exclusively, usually with a
short-term payoff, that significantly or even wantonly ignore the interests of others. It’s
possible to act for self-interested reasons without being selfish: for example, brushing
my teeth, eating healthy food, and exercising, etc., is self-interested but not selfish. It’s
also possible to act for selfish reasons without being self-interested: for example,
stealing expensive electronic gear during a natural disaster, riot, or wartime, when you
might easily be arrested or even shot for looting, would be selfish, but not self-
interested.

Second, self-interest is not the same as hedonism, or acting for the sake of
pleasure alone. It’s possible to be hedonistic without being self-interested: for example,
smoking—especially “vaping” marijuana—when you know it’s bad for you, is
hedonistic, but not in your self-interest. Conversely, it’s possible to act for self-interested
reasons without being hedonistic: for example, brushing my teeth and flossing twice a
day, going regularly to the dentist, going to the doctor for regular check-ups, etc., are all
self-interested, but not hedonistic.

Third, self-interest is not the same as having no concern for others. It’s possible to
be self-interested and still have concern for others: for example, doing good things for
one’s own immediate or extended family is often acting in one’s own self-interest and
also acting from concern for others. It’s also possible to have no concern for others and
not be self-interested: for example, in a society that has Good Samaritan laws (like
France and other European countries), wantonly ignoring a small child who’s drowning
in a shallow pond when there’s also a CCTV surveillance camera nearby watching you,
would not be self-interested.

And fourth, establishing the truth (if it is indeed true) of psychological egoism is
not the same as establishing the truth (if it is indeed true) of moral egoism, nor is
establishing the truth of moral egoism the same as establishing the truth of
psychological egoism. For this would be to infer directly from an actual fact to a
categorically normative claim, that is, to infer directly from an is to an ought. Indeed,
this inference is generally fallacious, and also known as the naturalistic fallacy. For
example, let’s suppose it’s an actual fact that every human being craves sweet things:
even then, it wouldn’t follow that we ought to eat (lots of) sweet things, for eating (lots
of) sweet things might well be morally neutral or even impermissible. Conversely,
suppose it’s morally obligatory to be self-interested: then if you ever act in an altruistic
way, you’re thereby violating moral principles.
 36

At times, Nietzsche at least appears to be asserting something like this. But the
philosophical badass and (in effect) neo-Nietzschean 20th century McCarthyite,
neoliberal, and Libertarian novelist and philosopher, Ayn Rand29—never much one for
philosophical, moral, or political caution or modesty—actually did assert it:

If a man accepts the ethics of altruism… his first concern is not how to live his life, but
how to sacrifice it…. Parasites, moochers, looters, brutes and thugs can be of no value to
a human being—nor can he gain any benefit from living in a society geared to their
needs, demands, and protections, a society that treats him as a sacrificial animal and
penalizes him for his virtues in order to reward them for their vices, which means: a
society based on the ethics of altruism.30

Now let’s try to imagine that you actually are motivated to desire, intend, choose,
and/or act altruistically, at least sometimes. But if moral egoism were true, then you’d be
evil.

So here are three $64,000.00 questions: (i) is psychological egoism true?, (ii) is
moral egoism true?, or, on the contrary, (iii) are psychological altruism and/or moral
altruism true?

As a matter of empirical fact, as Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2016 book, Strangers

Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help, clearly demonstrates,
psychological egoism is false: some people really are altruistic, even highly altruistic.31
Moreover, here’s an argument for the truth of psychological altruism and thus also for
the falsity of psychological egoism, now generalized over most people. Suppose that a
pro-nudist, philanthropist multi-billionaire approached you on the street in a big city on
a warm sunny day and offered, in a completely legitimate and legally-attested way, to
give 1 billion USD to legitimate charities if (and only if) you walked completely naked
(except for shoes, sunglasses, and sunscreen) through the middle of the city, on
condition that you weren’t allowed to tell anyone who saw you why you were doing
this, although the pro-nudist philanthropist would later explain it all to the authorities.
I call this thought-experiment The Pro-Nudist Philanthropist, and the relevant
question is: would you do it? My prediction is that many people would do this,
including quite a few people with funny-looking naked bodies who would otherwise
find it extremely embarrassing to do it (like me), and who certainly would not enjoy
being arrested for public indecency, etc. Moreover, I’ve asked hundreds of
undergraduates this question over the years, and they confirm my prediction at rates of
75% or better. So The Pro-Nudist Philanthropist proves that psychological egoism is
false, and that even generalized psychological altruism has some strong support. And
here are three more follow-up comments on that argument, before moving on.
 37

First, notice that in order to refute psychological egoism, all that has to be shown
is that there is at least one really possible or actual case in which someone rationally chooses
to do something X even though their self-interest, on the whole, would otherwise
necessitate that they not do X or even that they do something else that’s not-X. Again, it
doesn’t have to be true that they have no self-interest in doing X: it’s just that their self-
interest alone wouldn’t allow them to do X. So your desiring, intending, choosing,
and/or acting altruistically is perfectly consistent with doing something that satisfies
your self-interest: it’s just that you’re not doing X only for the sake of your self-interest.
Indeed, had your self-interest demanded that you not do X, yet you still did X for the
sake of concern for the interests of others—as would be true in the case of The Pro-
Nudist Philanthropist—then we can be absolutely sure that you did it altruistically.

Second, the truth of psychological egoism is not established just by virtue of the
fact that every one of my experiences, including every one of my choices and actions,
necessarily is one of my experiences. That’s just the subjective character of all human
experience. Even wholly altruistic desires, intentions, choices, and acts have a subjective
character. Hence, the necessary fact of the subjective character of all human experience
does not entail the truth of psychological egoism. Therefore, anyone who argues for
psychological egoism by repeating these depressingly shopworn phrases,

“Yes!, you’re acting in a way that seems altruistic, but since you enjoy doing it, or
at the very least, since you’re motivated to do it, then it’s egoistic!,”

is simply committing a “common, all-too-common” fallacy. Human subjectivity and

egoism are different things: everything that is egoistic has subjective character, but not
everything that has subjective character is egoistic.

And third, as Rutger Bregman brilliantly shows in his 2020 book, Humankind: A
Hopeful History, psychological egoism is a nothing but a false ideology rooted in Thomas
Hobbes’s political theory, classical liberalism, and scientific opportunism,32 which
persists as a belief even after people have been presented with fully sufficient evidence
against it. In short, psychological egoism needs to be diagnosed and debunked, not merely
philosophically criticized and refuted.

Now I’ll present an argument for against moral egoism and for moral altruism
that I’m borrowing from a very famous 1972 essay by the Australian moral philosopher
Peter Singer, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.”33 In that essay, Singer argues
 38

that it’s morally obligatory for comparatively well-off people like us always to do
whatever we can to save the lives of innocent people who are in great danger,

and in particular,

that it’s morally obligatory for comparatively well-off people like us always to do
whatever we can to prevent the suffering and deaths of innocent people from
famine anywhere in the world.

More specifically, I’ll present my rational reconstruction of Singer’s famine relief

argument, as follows:

(1) Suffering and death from famine are very bad.

(2) Here’s a candidate moral principle for adoption as a duty:

The Super-Strong Saving Others Principle: If it is in our power to prevent

something bad from happening to other people, without sacrificing
anything of comparable moral value (e.g., our own life), then we ought,
morally, always to do it.

(3) Suppose that you do not agree with The Super-Strong Saving Others
Principle. Then consider instead the following weaker moral principle:

The Pretty Strong Saving Others Principle: If it is in our power to prevent

something very bad from happening to other people, without thereby
sacrificing anything morally significant (far less of comparable moral
value), then we ought, morally, always to do it.

(4) Both of the moral principles stated in (2) and (3) hold even if I am not the
closest one to the endangered person, and even if I am not the only one who can
save that person. In other words, neither the factors of proximity and distance, nor
the factor of uniquely effective aid, has any moral relevance.

(5) Consider now the following imaginary case, The Pond:

If I’m walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, and as
it happens I’m the closest one to the child and also I’m the only who can
save the child, then I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will
mean getting my nice clothes muddy (and possibly ruining them), but this
 39

is morally insignificant, whereas by sharp contrast the death of the child

would be a very bad thing, hence I’m morally obligated to wade in and
save the child.

(6) Our commonsense moral intuitions about The Pond confirm both The Super-
Strong Saving Others Principle and The Pretty Strong Saving Others Principle.

(7) The case of famine relief is precisely morally analogous to the shallow pond
case in The Pond, and further confirms both The Super-Strong Saving Others
Principle and The Pretty Strong Saving Others Principle.

(8) This in turn entails that we accept the following moral principle as our duty:

The Pretty Strong Famine Relief Principle: It’s morally obligatory for
relatively well-off people like us always to do whatever we can, short of
sacrificing anything morally significant (far less of comparable moral
value), to prevent the suffering and deaths of innocent people from famine
anywhere in the world.

As famous and compelling as Singer’s famine relief argument is, does it

nevertheless have some critical flaws in it?

I think that everyone who carefully considers it will agree that steps (1) and (5)
are both true: suffering and death from famine are very bad, and I ought to save the
child from drowning in the shallow pond. So that leaves steps (2), (3), (4), (6), (7), and
(8) as possible targets for criticism. I’ll come back to criticism of those steps a little later,
but first I want us also to consider the following pair of cases, due to another
professional philosopher named “Peter,” namely, Peter Unger, and formulated in his
words:34

The Vintage Sedan. Not truly rich, your one luxury in life is a vintage Mercedes sedan
that, with much time, attention, and money, you’ve restored to mint condition. In
particular, you’re pleased by the auto’s fine leather seating. One day, you stop at the
intersection of two small country roads, both lightly travelled. Hearing a voice
screaming for help, you get out and see a man who’s wounded and covered with a lot
of his blood. Assuring yourself that his wound’s confined to one of his legs, the man
also informs you that he was a medical student for two full years. And despite his
expulsion for cheating on his second year exams, which explains his indigent status
since, he’s knowledgeably tied his shirt near the wound so as to stop the flow. So,
there’s no urgent danger of losing his life, you’re informed, but there’s great danger of
losing his limb. This can be prevented, however, if you drive him to a rural hospital
 40

fifty miles away. “How did the wound occur?” you ask. An avid bird watcher, he
admits that he trespassed on a nearby field and, in carelessly leaving, cut himself on
rusty barbed wire. Now, if you’d aid this trespasser, you must lay him across your fine
back seat. But, then, your fine upholstery will be soaked through with blood, and
restoring the car will cost over five thousand dollars. So, you drive away. Picked up the
next day by another driver, he survives but loses the wounded leg.

The Envelope. In your mailbox, there’s something from (the US Committee for) UNICEF.
After reading it through, you correctly believe that, unless you soon send in a check for
$100, then, instead of living many more years, over thirty more children will die soon.
But, you throw the material in your trash basket, including the convenient return
envelope provided, you send nothing, and, instead of living many years, over thirty
more children soon die than would have had you sent in the requested $100. 35

Almost everyone who rationally considers these cases regards your action in Vintage
Sedan as obviously morally impermissible and also your action in Envelope as obviously
morally permissible. And this set of verdicts holds even despite the highly disturbing
and cognitively dissonant fact that not only is the loss of a leg in Vintage Sedan far less
serious than the loss of thirty children’s lives in Envelope, but also the cost of repairing
your vintage sedan’s upholstery ($5000) in Vintage Sedan is far greater than than the
cost of donating to UNICEF ($100) in Envelope. What Unger argues is that our initial
moral judgments in Vintage Sedan and Envelope are deeply erroneous and need to be
revised. This in turn is what Unger calls a Liberationist solution to The Famine Relief
Problem of Saving Lives, as opposed to a Preservationist solution that explains and
justifies our initial moral judgments. In fact, he says, the injured leg emergency situation
in Vintage Sedan is precisely morally analogous to the drowning emergency situation in
The Pond; and so too the famine relief emergency situation in Envelope is precisely
morally analogous to the drowning emergency situation in The Pond. Therefore,
according to Unger, relatively well-off people like us ought always to give (e.g.) $100 to
UNICEF (or OXFAM, CARE, etc.) whenever we can, and arguably we should also
always be prepared to sacrifice a leg (whether our own, or someone else’s) or to kill
some other innocent person (as per The Trolley Problem) in order to save many
faraway starving children whenever we can. And this of course is in perfect conformity
with Singer’s famine relief argument.

I do completely agree with the two Peters that by means of their arguments, if
they’re sound, then not only is The Pretty Strong Saving Others Principle validated, but
also another principle I’ll call The Surprisingly Strong Saving Others Principle:
 41

In certain types of cases, if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from
happening to many other people, even when we will thereby have to sacrifice
something morally significant (e.g., our own or someone else’s leg, or killing one
innocent person as per The Trolley Problem), although without sacrificing
anything of comparable moral value (e.g., our own life), then we ought, morally,
always to do it.

Indeed, in another slightly less famous essay, Singer also provides an argument for The
Surprisingly Strong Saving Others Principle by means of the story of Bob (for some reason,
in professional philosophers’ thought-experiments, it’s always a Bob who takes the hit),
the foreign sportscar enthusiast, who must choose between, on the one hand, saving an
innocent child from being run over by a train, and on the other, saving his beloved
Bugatti which is parked on the tracks, in which he has invested most of his life savings:

When Bob first grasped the dilemma that faced him as he stood by that railway switch,
he must have thought how extraordinarily unlucky he was to be placed in a situation in
which he must choose between the life of an innocent child and the sacrifice of most of
his savings. But he was not unlucky at all. We are all in that situation.36

What The Surprisingly Strong Saving Others Principle means in relation to The Pond and
all other Pond-type cases, like Bob’s Bugatti, is this:

If I’m walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning in it, and as it
happens I’m the closest one to the child and also I’m the only who can save the
child, then I ought to wade in and pull the child out. Even if I were wearing, e.g.,
a fabulously rare and valuable gold-plated Rolex watch, in which I had invested
most of my life savings, but which would be completely ruined by my saving the
drowning child, so that I thereby lost most of my life-savings and became an
indigent person, then I’d still be morally obligated to save that child in that actual
context. Tough luck for Bob.

I agree with The Pond, Bob’s Bugatti, and with what I’ll call Bob’s Gold-Plated
Rolex Watch. But now it’s time for some synoptic criticism of Singer’s and Unger’s
arguments. It seems to me that the two Peters, Singer and Unger, have both over-
generalized from The Pond, Bob’s Bugatti, and structurally similar cases like Bob’s
Gold-Plated Rolex Watch. Special features of all such cases include: (1) proximity (both
the life-saver near the pond and Bob are the closest people capable of giving life-saving
aid), and (2) uniquely effective aid (both the life-saver near the pond and Bob are uniquely
capable of saving the child—no one else can do it). Nevertheless, very, very few cases in
which we’re called upon to act altruistically, are also cases in which the features of
 42

proximity and uniquely effective aid both hold. In fact, massively most cases in which we’re
called upon to act altruistically, are cases in which we’re neither the closest people
capable of giving life-saving aid nor uniquely capable of giving life-saving aid.
Therefore, it seems to me that what holds for cases in which proximity and uniquely
effective aid both do obtain, like The Pond, Bob’s Bugatti, and Bob’s Gold-Plated Rolex
Watch, will not necessarily hold for cases in which either proximity or uniquely effective
aid, or both, do not obtain, like most cases in which we’re called upon to act altruistically.

In other words, by virtue of their over-generalizing from cases like The Pond and
Bob’s Bugatti, I think that Singer’s famine relief argument fails at steps (3), (4), (6), (7),
and (8), and also that Unger’s argument fails for the same reason. But at the same time, I
also think it’s highly plausible to argue that it’s a moral scandal for comparatively well-
off people like never to do anything at all to prevent the suffering and death of innocent
people even when they’re far away and I’m not the only one who can save them. Otherwise,
we’re both regarding them and treating them like they’re mere things, i.e., like dirt, offal,
or trash, worth even less than the cost of my clothing, or the cost of my dry cleaning, not
to mention my Bugatti or my gold-plated Rolex watch. And that’s morally
impermissible: we should always regard and treat other persons like persons, not mere
things. So it seems to me that the following weaker moral principle is arguably true:

Bob’s Moderate Saving Others Principle. If it is in our power to prevent something

very bad from happening to other people, without thereby sacrificing anything
morally significant, then we ought, morally, sometimes to do it, even if we are
neither the closest ones to the endangered people nor the only ones who can save
them.

This principle in turn would directly entail, by specification, the following principle:

Bob’s Moderate Famine Relief Principle. It is morally obligatory for comparatively

well-off people like us sometimes to do whatever we can, short of sacrificing
anything morally significant, to prevent the suffering and deaths of innocent
people from famine anywhere in the world, even if we are neither the closest ones
to the endangered people nor the only ones who can save them.

Now let’s suppose that The Pond, Bob’s Bugatti, Bob’s Gold-Plated Rolex
Watch, Bob’s Moderate Saving Others Principle, and also Bob’s Moderate Famine Relief
Principle are all true: then, clearly and distinctly, moral altruism is true and moral egoism is
false.
 43

***

Where are we now? As we’ve seen, the three classical challenges to the standard
conception of morality all fail, thereby vindicating the standard conception to that
important extent. So until further notice—or at the very least, until the end of this little
book—we’re rationally justified in holding onto the standard conception.
 44

Chapter IV. Morality, God, and Religion37

IV.1 God and The Divine Command Theory

We’ll remember that for the purposes of this book, morality is

the attempt to guide human conduct by rationally formulating and following

principles or rules that reflect our basic personal and social commitments and
our leading ideals and values,

and also that we’ve (at least provisionally, in order to move forward with my overall
argument) rationally vindicated the standard conception of morality in the face of three
classical challenges to it—moral relativism, moral skepticism, and egoism, both
psychological and moral. Now holding the standard conception of morality fixed, I
want to consider the following important real-world dual fact, (i) that it has very often
been believed in the past, and also (ii) that a great many people nowadays still believe,
that there’s a fundamental connection between the standard conception of morality and the
notion of the divine or holy, aka God, as per Moses and the Ten Commandments, for
example. In fact, my very nice neighbors right across the street most certainly believe
something very much like this. But we needn’t restrict this fundamental connection to
Christianity, or even to the larger Judaeo-Christian tradition, and can extend its scope to
any moral tradition that’s also theistic. So, granting that broader scope, what precisely is
the connection between the standard conception of morality and the notion of God? Or
otherwise put, is God (or the complete collection of gods)38 the answer to the moral question?

One possible connection is that God exists, and created the world (including us,
of course), and is all-powerful (omnipotent), all-knowing (omniscient), and all-good
(omnibenevolent). Sometimes, philosophers call the classical idea that God is
omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, the idea of a 3-O God. So let’s call the
thesis that a 3-O God exists, The 3-O God Thesis. If The 3-O God Thesis is true, then God
is causally and explanatorily responsible for the the first principles of morality, just as
God is causally and explanatorily responsible for everything else. And the thesis that
the first principles of morality are true just because a 3-0 God commanded them to be
true is called The Divine Command Theory.

As has often been pointed out, starting at least 2400 years ago with Socrates in
Plato’s dialogue, the Euthyphro, against the backdrop of a polytheistic tradition—hence
appealing to “the complete collection of gods,” as opposed to a single deity—there’s a
fundamental problem with The Divine Command Theory. We assume that the first
 45

principles of morality must also be rational principles, and that therefore they can be
justified with good reasons that any rational person would accept. On the one hand, then,
if the first principles of morality are true just because God commands them to be true
and makes them true, then the first principles of morality cannot be justified
independently of God’s will, so they are not rational principles, and must be null and
void. In other words, the problem is the possible arbitrariness or irrationality of anyone’s
will, including God’s will, and in this sense The Divine Command Theory would also be
a challenge to the standard conception of morality. But on the other hand, if God
commands the first principles of morality to be true and makes them true because they
are also objectively true in themselves, then those first principles must have a rational
justification that’s also independent of God’s will, and so they would be true just the same
even if God didn’t exist.

Nevertheless, if God does exist and makes the principles of morality true just
insofar as they are also objectively true in themselves and flow from the rational character of
God’s own nature, not (merely) from God’s will, or in other words if the rational character
of God and the rational character of the first principles of morality are one and the same,
then in that sense morality according to the standard conception of morality could also
be causally and explanatorily grounded on God. So it’s this third possibility, the
possibility of an essentially rational God, that makes the question of God’s existence or
non-existence an extremely important one for morality according to the standard
conception, and, for a great many people, also an extremely urgent and indeed burning
one.

IV.2 Does an Essentially Rational God Exist, or Not?

Let’s assume that we’ve sufficiently criticized—even if not decisively refuted—The

Divine Command Theory. What I want to consider critically now is the extremely
urgent and burning question,

Does the God who makes the first principles of morality be true just insofar as
they are also objectively true in themselves and flow from the rational character
of God’s own nature, not merely from God’s will, exist or not?

Or in other words, I want to consider critically the extremely urgent and burning
question, does an essentially rational God exist, or not? This brings us back to The 3-O God
thesis I described in section IV.1.
 46

Let’s assume, for the purposes of critical analysis and argument, that a 3-O God
is an essentially rational God. Then there are at least two different basic ways of
believing The 3-O God Thesis. One is called theism, which holds that a 3-O God is
directly causally involved in every aspect of His/Her natural creation at all times. An
intriguing and highly controversial variant on theism, called pantheism—defended, for
example, by the radical 17th century Dutch Rationalist philosopher Baruch Spinoza39—
holds that a 3-O God is also, somehow, identical with nature. And the other way of
believing The 3-O God Thesis is called deism, which holds that a 3-O God, who is
essentially separate from nature, acts causally and creatively only once, at the beginning
of time, in order to create nature, and then doesn’t intervene thereafter. Deism is closely
connected with the rise of modern science in the 17th century, and the Newtonian
doctrine of universal natural mechanism, hence it’s also closely connected with the
famous analogy according to which nature is essentially a kind of clock, or clockwork
puppet, that’s created, wound up, and activated by God. And of course, it’s also
possible to believe that a 3-O God doesn’t exist, which is the doctrine of atheism.

There’s also a third position that’s neither theism/deism (a 3-O God exists) nor
atheism (a 3-O God doesn’t exist), and that’s agnosticism, which remains neutral, or in
belief-suspension, as between the belief that a 3-O God exists or doesn’t exist, and
leaves open both possibilities. It’s also useful to distinguish between two versions of
agnosticism. One is what I’ll call ordinary agnosticism, which says that we should remain
at least provisionally neutral, or in belief-suspension, as between the belief that a 3-O
God exists and the belief that a 3-O God does not exist, because the evidence we
currently have, as it so happens, is such that we do not know and cannot prove whether
a 3-O God exists or does not exist. But at least in principle, we could find decisive
evidence that would move us rationally all the way to belief, one way or the other. The
other version of agnosticism, by contrast, is what I call radical agnosticism, which says
that it’s rationally impossible for me to be other than consistently neutral, or permanently in
belief-suspension, as between the belief that a 3-O God exists and the belief that a 3-O
God does not exist, because we can and indeed do know (a priori and with certainty) that it’s
rationally impossible for anyone to know or prove whether a 3-O God exists or does not exist.40

So radical agnosticism is rationally super-charged agnosticism. But it’s also, as I’ll

argue later in chapter VI, an existentially super-charged agnosticism, since we must
consider what it’s like to live in a permanent state of belief-suspension between the belief
that a 3-O God exists and the belief that a 3-O God does not exist. Or to put it another
way: how would you live if you had fully internalized the a priori knowledge that the real
possibility of a 3-O God’s existence is every bit as open as the real possibility a 3-O God’s
non-existence? This, I think, is the true meaning of Blaise Pascal’s 17th century so-called
“Wager”; and I further think that the same Pascalian idea also carries over substantially
 47

into Søren Kiekegaard’s 19th century Existentialism. But as I say, that’s all coming up
later in chapter VI.

In order to resolve the provisional neutrality of ordinary agnostics and to answer

the doubts of God-skeptics and outright atheists, various proofs for a 3-O God’s
existence have been offered. Classically, the proofs have been of three different kinds:
(i) The Ontological Argument, (ii) The Cosmological Argument, and (iii) The
Teleological Argument (aka The Argument from Intelligent Design, aka The Design
Argument). There are many subtly different versions of these arguments, but here are
the basic proof-strategies for each kind of argument. The Ontological Argument says:

(1) The concept of God is the concept of an absolutely perfect being. (Premise:
God’s 3-O-ness).

(2) An absolutely perfect being must contain all perfections. (From 1.)

(3) Existence is a perfection, because to fail to exist when it is possible to exist, is an

imperfection. (Premise.)

(4) Therefore, a 3-O God necessarily exists. (From 1, 2, and 3.)

The Cosmological Argument says:

(1) Everything has a sufficient cause and explanation. (Premise: Principle of

Sufficient Reason.)

(2) So the world as a whole must have a sufficient cause and explanation. (From
1.)

(3) The world as a whole is contingent (i.e., neither logically or metaphysically

necessary in the sense that, logically or metaphysically speaking, it might not
have existed, nor logically or metaphysically sufficient for itself), so the world
cannot be the cause and explanation of itself. (From 2.)

(4) Only a 3-O God, who is the cause and explanation of Her/Himself (aka causa
sui), is great enough to be the sufficient cause and explanation of the whole
world. (From 3 and God’s 3-O-ness.)

(5) Therefore, a 3-O God exists. (From 1, 2, 3, and 4.)

 48

And The Teleological Argument says:

(1) Some types of natural structure are so amazingly intricate that they imply
intelligent design or purpose. (Premise.)

(2) Intelligent design or purpose implies the existence of an intelligent designer.

(Premise.)

(3) The natural world as a whole is amazingly intricately structured. (Premise.)

(4) So the natural world as a whole must be intelligently designed, and have an
intelligent designer. (From 1, 2, and 3.)

(5) Only a 3-O God is great enough to have intelligently designed the whole
natural world. (Premise: God’s 3-O-ness.)

(6) Therefore, a 3-O God exists. (From 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.)

There are various classical objections to these arguments, and various classical
replies to those objections. But for our purposes here, the most important objection is
The Argument for Atheism from the Fact of Evil. Here’s one version of it, sometimes
called The Metaphysical Argument for Atheism from the Fact of Evil:

(1) Assume that a 3-O God exists, and (as per God’s 3-O-ness) is all-powerful, all-
knowing, and all-good. (Premise.)

(2) Assume that evil exists in the world—both natural evil (e.g., disasters and
disease) and also moral evil (wicked choices or intentions and acts, or simply bad
things that happen to people). (Premise.)

(3) Then either God is responsible for the existence of evil, in which case God is
Her/Himself evil and not all-good, which is a contradiction with God’s assumed
3-O-ness. (From 1 and 2.)

(4) Or God is not responsible for the existence of evil and yet knew that it was
going to happen and couldn’t prevent it—so God is not all-powerful (Woody
Allen in Love and Death (1975): “If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think
that he’s evil. But the worse you can say is that basically he’s an underachiever”),
which is also a contradiction with assumed God’s 3-O-ness. (From 1 and 2.)
 49

(5) Or God would have prevented evil but didn’t know it was going to happen,
and is to that extent ignorant and not all-knowing, which is another contradiction
with God’s assumed 3-O-ness. (From 1 and 2.)

(6) Therefore, given the existence of evil, God necessarily does not exist. (From 1,
2, 3, 4, and 5.)

The classical responses to the Metaphysical Argument for Atheism from the
Fact of Evil are: (1) theodicy—which says that there’s a possible or at least minimally
plausible explanation of how and why the existence of both natural evil and moral evil
are really consistent with a 3-O God’s nature, and (2) the free will defense—which is
consistent with theodicy, but with narrower scope, and says that the existence of at least
moral evil flows from our free will, a capacity created by a 3-O God for our benefit and
betterment, and more specifically that free will makes possible our moral improvement
and moral progress.

The leading classical example of theodicy was worked out in 1710 by the
Rationalist philosopher G.W. Leibniz,41 who defended the thesis that even despite all the
apparent natural and moral evil, this actual world is the best of all possible worlds—a thesis
also much derided by Voltaire in Candide, Or Optimism in 1759, in the wake of the Seven
Years’ War and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Leaving aside Voltairean derision, a basic
response to theodicy is that neither a possible nor even a minimally plausible explanation
is rationally good enough: what’s needed is a rationally compelling explanation that
overrides the conclusion of The Metaphysical Argument for Atheism from the Fact of
Evil.

Correspondingly, a basic response to the free will defense (famously expressed,

for example, by Ivan Karamazov in The Grand Inquisitor section of Fyodor
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov) is that any God who would permit things as
horrendous as the rape, torture, and/or murder of children and other innocents (or any
other terrible evil done to innocent people), as the price we pay for the wonders of
personal free will, and who would promulgate the claim that these unfortunate victims
are actually heroes and martyrs in the great cause of metaphysical freedom, is completely
morally unacceptable: therefore, he refuses to believe in the existence of such a God, no
matter how wonderful metaphysical free will is.

Now jumping forward to the contemporary USA, let’s compare with Ivan
Karamazov’s response to the free will defense, the following precisely analogous
imaginary moral dialogue—
 50

Carolyn D. Meadows, President of the National Rifle Association: Yes, the latest mass-
shooting is just the price we pay for the wonders of personal liberty as enshrined
in The Second Amendment; and these unfortunate victims—our thoughts and
prayers are with their families—are actually heroes and martyrs in the great
cause of American freedom.

Johnny Karamazov: But any political constitution that encodes a basic law
permitting things as horrendous as the latest mass shooting (or any other gun
violence), as the price we pay for the wonders of personal liberty—for example,
my “freedom of choice” to buy either a handgun or an assault rifle—is completely
morally unacceptable: therefore, I refuse to believe in the rational justifiability of
such a political constitution, no matter how wonderful personal liberty is.

In any case, I think it’s reasonable to conclude from our critical analysis of these
arguments that the existence or non-existence of a 3-O God, i.e., of an essentially
rational God, is at the very least an open question. Now let’s turn to the connection
between religion and morality.

IV.3 Religion and Morality

By “religion,” I mean any set of human feelings, beliefs, social practices, and
social institutions directly concerned with God (or gods, or the divine or holy more
generally) and faith in God (or gods, or the divine or holy more generally). We can
distinguish here between (i) organized religion, and (ii) personal religion (sometimes also
called “spirituality”), which can occur either inside or outside organized religion. Either
organized religion or personal religion/spirituality will count as bona fide religion for
the purposes of our discussion. The critical question I then want to raise is:

Should morality obtain independently of religion, or not?

To make that question more precise, let’s call the cluster of claims which say
either (i) that morality should be kept entirely distinct from religion and fully protected from the
influence of religion, or (ii) that religion should eradicated altogether in order to make morality
really possible, or, at the very least, (ii) that morality should fully control and restrict the scope
of religion, because otherwise, religion is actually or potentially highly harmful to
morality, Hard Secularism. Let’s call the directly opposing and contrary claim to Hard
Secularism, which says that religion should fully control and determine morality,
Fundamentalism. By a double contrast, let’s call the intermediate claim between Hard
Secularism and Fundamentalism, which says that although morality and religion are
 51

distinct sorts of enterprises, nevertheless not only are they mutually compatible, but
they’re also necessarily complementary and mutually supportive, Moderate Secularism. And
by another—now triple—contrast to Hard Secularism, Fundamentalism, and Moderate
Secularism alike, let’s call the weakest claim of all in this connection, which says that
morality and religion are distinct sorts of enterprises, and they’re mutually compatible
only in the sense that they can co-exist in their separate spheres, Soft Secularism. So the
precisified version of the question I want to raise is,

Which, if any, is correct: Hard Secularism, Fundamentalism, Moderate

Secularism, or Soft Secularism?

This is another amazingly hard question. In the interests of full philosophical

disclosure, however, I should say that I did recently write and publish a book42 in which
I argued (i) for radical agnosticism about the question of a 3-O God’s existence or non-
existence, (ii) for a Kantian-morality-inspired and existentialism-inflected version of
personal religion or spirituality as against organized religion, and (iii) for a corresponding
version of Moderate Secularism. So I do have some prior commitments here. Hence aside
from simply referring you to that book, I’ll again turn it over to you as “a task for the
reader,” to think and talk with others more about these issues and try to answer this
amazingly hard question.
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Chapter V. Three Classical Moral Theories

V.1 Aristotelian Virtue Ethics43

It seems self-evidently true that at least some people, at least some of the time, are
morally virtuous and have moral virtues. Consider, for example, of all the people you
know, those you think most highly of. So moral virtue exists. Moral virtue in this sense is
when a person is habitually disposed, by the internal state of her character, to have
good feelings, think good thoughts, and do good actions. Therefore, to be morally
virtuous is to have a good character, and to have a particular moral virtue is to have a
certain type of good character. Now virtue ethics in general says that the highest human
good is a morally good character, and therefore we ought to be morally virtuous. And
Aristotle’s virtue ethics in particular says (i) that the highest human good is happiness
(eudaimonia) and (ii) that moral virtue is the essence of happiness (it both constitutes and
controls or determines happiness), therefore (iii) we ought to be morally virtuous.

Strictly speaking, Aristotle’s thesis (i), or the thesis of eudaimonism, is logically

independent of virtue ethics: it’s possible to hold that the highest human good is
happiness and also that happiness consists in something other than virtue. So it’s
possible to be a eudaimonist without being a virtue ethicist. For example, Utilitarians
hold that the highest human good is happiness, but that happiness basically consists in
pleasurable states of mind and the absence or reduction of pain (utility), and therefore
we ought always to choose and act in such a way as to maximize utility. It is also
possible to be virtue ethicist but not a eudaimonist. For example, Stoic ethics holds that
the highest human good is a morally good character but that happiness just isn’t
possible in this vale of tears, so the morally best kind of life is that which also maintains
an attitude of ataraxia or resolute detachment from anxiety, distress, and emotional
upheaval.

V.1.1 Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, books 1-3: A Brief Exposition

Now let’s get into some nitty-gritty philosophical details. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,
books 1-3, has the following profile—

book 1: The highest human good,

book 2: The nature of moral virtue, and

book 3: The internal conditions of moral virtue.

 53

Correspondingly, I’ll provide a brief exposition of the contents of each book.

Book 1: The highest human good

Aristotle has a teleological theory of nature in general and of human nature in

particular. Teleology is end-directedness, goal-directedness, or purposiveness, and
therefore to say that something, some process, or some act is teleological is just to say
that it has some end, goal, or purpose. The cause of, or causal route to, a given end is
the means to that end. So all teleological reasoning concerns ends and means. According
to Aristotle, all things, processes, and acts aim toward some good or another as ends,
some of which are merely means to other ends, and some of which are good for their
own sake, and the total series of means and ends cannot be without a termination.
Therefore, there is always some highest good for the sake of which everything else is
done.

The common opinion, according to Aristotle, is that the highest human good is
eudaimonia or happiness (sometimes also translated as “flourishing”), because human
happiness is the end for the sake of which everything else is done, and therefore all
human beings by nature seek to be happy. But what is happiness? Happiness isn’t the
same as pleasure, since it is possible to experience pleasure but also be unhappy (for
example, hollow pleasures), and therefore pleasure isn’t sufficient for happiness. And
happiness isn’t the same as being honored by others, since one could be honored by
others but also be unhappy (for example, being famous and unhappy), and therefore
being honored isn’t sufficient for happiness. Happiness also isn’t the same as having
health, good looks, or wealth, since one can be healthy, good looking, or wealthy but
also be unhappy, and therefore being healthy, good looking, or rich isn’t sufficient for
happiness. So too happiness isn’t merely momentary, but on the contrary must be
spread out over time, that is to say, durational. Correspondingly, happiness isn’t merely
potential or passive, but on the contrary must consist in actuality and activity. Nor is
happiness dependent on anything outside itself: on the contrary, it must be self-
sufficient.

Now, says Aristotle, the earlier arguments showed that we could not identify
happiness with pleasure, honor, health, good looks, etc. But it doesn’t follow from this
that these aren’t parts of happiness. Or otherwise put, merely because they aren’t
individually sufficient for happiness, it doesn’t follow that they aren’t individually
necessary for happiness. In fact, then, pleasure seems to be a necessary part of
happiness—namely, its internal or psychological component. Being honored also seems to
be a necessary part of happiness—its external or social dimension. So too, having enough
money and property seems also to be required for happiness—happiness needs the right
 54

equipment. And being healthy and reasonably attractive to others seem also to be
required for happiness—its physiological or physical component.

Moreover, as we already saw, happiness must be actualized and active rather

than merely potential or passive. Also happiness must occur over a whole life, not
merely a part of a life. Not only that, it might even be the case that bad things can
happen after death that saliently affect or qualify one’s happiness (for example,
misfortunes that befall one’s family or nation, or distressing revelations about one’s
private or public life)—although it seems unlikely that one could convert a happy life
into an unhappy life by bad things happening after one’s death. But in any case, since
our happiness has to be complete and self-sufficient in this inherently luck-pervaded
world, hence our happiness is inherently fragile,44 then it equally inherently requires
good luck.

So far we’ve been investigating the necessary conditions of happiness, but we

haven’t yet encountered a necessary and sufficient condition of happiness, or the essence of
happiness. Now for Aristotle, the essence of something is also its intrinsic constitution
and its global structure. The essence of X can then be distinguished from the matter or
stuff out of which X is made, and also from the particular parts out of which it is made.
Moreover, since Aristotle is a teleologist, he holds that the natural world is
fundamentally dynamic. Nature, including human nature, is fundamentally active,
forceful, in process, and purposive. So to know the essence of X is also to be able to
control and determine the activity of X. According to Aristotle, everything that exists has
an essence of the sort described just above, which is the thesis of “Aristotelian essentialism.”
So happiness must also have an essence of that sort.

But what is the essence of happiness? Aristotle starts from the idea that
everything has a proper function and a corresponding kind of active excellence: this is
its “virtue” or aretê. Human beings as a species or natural kind have a proper function
and an active excellence, namely moral virtue. So happiness according to Aristotle is
morally virtuous activity, or activity in accordance with moral virtue. And since happiness is
the highest human good, then it follows that we all ought to choose and act in a morally
virtuous way.

Book 2: the nature of moral virtue

Virtue is neither a faculty nor a passion. Our faculties are pre-given, pre-formatted, and
fixed mental capacities (apparently from birth, in which case they’re innate), whereas a
virtue must be acquired and learned. And passions are passive or externally-caused
reactions to things, whereas virtue is necessarily connected with intentional action. Thus
 55

a virtue is a state of character, a dominant personality trait, and a disposition to act in a

certain way or style. More precisely, to be morally virtuous is to be an all-around morally
good human person, and a morally exemplary human person, as opposed to the mere ability
to do good or right acts. Obviously, however one could not be an all-around good and
morally exemplary human person unless one acted well. But it’s possible to do good or
right things for the wrong reasons, hence in a sense to do those good or right things
accidentally. So acting well in a moral sense—that is, acting virtuously in a moral sense—
is doing good or right things for the right reasons, that is, non-accidentally and for the
sake of those good and right things.

There are many different types of moral virtue: benevolence, courage, generosity,
leadership, truthfulness, etc. Nevertheless, Aristotle also seems committed to the idea
that there is a relatively small, finite number of virtues, and that they can be
determinately described and analyzed.

One becomes virtuous by doing virtuous things, for the right reasons. Virtue is
therefore a certain sort of good moral track record together with the various dispositions to
which this good track record gives rise. This requires a long period of training, so people
with a bad upbringing will have a hard time becoming or being virtuous.

Virtues are closely bound up with pleasures and pains, although as we saw
above, neither identical to pleasures (or pains for that matter) nor reducible to them.
This inherent connection between pleasure and moral virtue has three aspects. First,
virtuous activity typically brings pleasure to the agent. Second, pleasure and pain are
fairly good indicators of good and bad choices, acts, and things, respectively. And third,
vicious or bad acts are often brought about through excessive attraction to pleasure
and/or the avoidance of pain.

Here’s Aristotle’s all-things-considered definition (i.e., essential description) of

moral virtue:

Moral virtue is (1) a state of character, (2) concerned with choice, (3) lying in a
mean (the mean relative to us), (4) this being determined by a rational principle
or a reason, and (5) by that principle which the person of practical wisdom
(phronesis) would determine it.

The relevant sort of rationality here is good or sound practical judgment, rather than
merely a logical thinking capacity or a calculative capacity. Good or sound practical
judgment cannot be reduced to a formula, but is instead necessarily bound up with
hitting the mean between excess and defect, relative to a context of choice and action.
 56

Good or sound practical judgment also is necessarily bound up with being able to
follow the lead of either (i) exemplary cases of morally virtuous choices and acts in the history
of one’s own moral community, or (ii) the public acts of contemporary legitimate moral
authorities or experts in one’s own moral community, by means of non-slavish imitation,
rather than being bound up with merely individualistic, private reasoning. Indeed, non-
slavish, imitative appeals to exemplary historical cases of moral virtue, and/or to
contemporary legitimate moral authority or expertise, function as an adequate rational
justifications for choosing or acting in a certain way, that is: I rationally justifiably choose
or act in a certain way because it’s just the sort of thing that historically famous virtuous
persons in my community actually did or that contemporary legitimate moral authorities
or experts would do.

Book 3: the internal conditions of moral virtue

The internal conditions of moral virtue are the conditions of morally good choice and
action, and also the conditions of moral responsibility. Moral responsibility entails that a
choice or act is voluntary. In turn, my choice or act X is voluntary if and only if (i) X has
an internal source in my own psychology, (ii) I have the ability to choose or do X, and
(iii) I have knowledge of the relevant particular facts about X. If any of these conditions
fails, then my choice or act is involuntary, and therefore not something for which I am
responsible. More precisely, my choice or act X is involuntary if and only if either (i) I
choose or do X only because of some inner or outer irresistible force that overrides my
ability to stop myself from choosing or doing it, or (ii) I choose or do X only through my
ignorance or the relevant particular facts about X.

Aristotle connects the notion of responsible choice and action directly with the
notions of moral praise and blame. Moral praise and blame can attach only to choices
and/or acts for which the agent is responsible, and therefore are voluntary. If the choice
or act is involuntary, and the results are bad, then it can be the target of either pardon or
pity, or both. Some choices or acts with bad results may be voluntarily done, but still
carry reduced moral responsibility, simply because they are in some non-compulsive
way forced or done under duress. For example, you are forced to kill someone by an
evil tyrant; or the captain of a ship is forced to throw his cargo overboard in a storm to
prevent the ship from sinking. Nevertheless, some choices or acts, even if not strictly
compelled, are so awful that even if chosen or done by means of force or duress still
seem to carry full moral responsibility: for example, killing your own parents, siblings,
partner, or children.
 57

We’ve already seen that ignorance of particular facts about a choice or act entails
non-responsibility, and therefore counts as a good excuse. But not every kind of
ignorance will count as a good excuse. Indeed, there are general rules of good choice
and conduct that every rational human agent ought to know (for example, that
arbitrarily killing innocent people is wrong), and if you violate one or more of these
rules you’re still responsible and can’t legitimately claim ignorance as a good excuse for
choosing or doing these things. This thesis, in turn, solves a puzzle case, namely, the
case of someone who gets very drunk and then destroys some property or hurts
someone, then claims ignorance of the particular facts as an excuse. Here there’s a
violation of a general rule that every rational human agent should know: if you get
drunk, and especially if you get very drunk, you may easily destroy something or hurt
someone.

Aristotle’s theory of responsibility for choices and acts is strongly oriented

towards evaluating the person, as opposed to evaluating the choice or act per se.
Therefore, even though you may be judged to be not morally responsible for some
choice or act because it’s involuntary, nevertheless, you might still be judged to be a
good or bad person. Correspondingly, even though you may be judged to be morally
responsible for some choice or act, nevertheless, if it’s deemed to be “out of character,”
then you might not be judged to be good or bad as a person. Consider, for example, the
chariot driver (or, to update it for us, the truck driver) who accidentally and
involuntarily (hence without moral responsibility) kills a child, yet feels no distress
whatsoever. In this sort of case, says Aristotle, the chariot (truck) driver is pardoned but
not pitied, and that driver is thought to be a worse person than a similar chariot (truck)
driver who feels great distress for what they’ve done, even though they’re also not
responsible.

One very tricky issue for any theory of moral responsibility is how to deal with
about choices or acts done out of passion or under other abnormal psychological
conditions. Aristotle is open to the idea that insanity is a good excuse, because it
involves internal compulsion, but he also stresses that strong feelings on their own will
not get you off the hook. —They might, however, in certain contexts, lead to “out-of-
character” judgments that treat the person who chose or acted badly or wrongly, in a
saliently different way from that in which the bad or wrong choice or act itself is treated.

Thus far, it may have seemed that for Aristotle, the voluntary is necessary and
sufficient for a choice or act’s being a morally responsible one. But he stresses that the
voluntary on its own isn’t sufficient, since non-human animals and small children alike
can desire and will things, and act voluntarily, but aren’t held morally responsible. So
what needs to be added to the voluntary is choice. Choice, according to Aristotle, is a
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deliberated or reasoned desire aimed at some end. Ends themselves aren’t chosen, but in fact
are simply given by our desires—instead, we deliberate and reason only about the
means to our ends.

Are we morally responsible for our own characters, that is, for our own
personalities? Aristotle says that answering this question is difficult, because it seems
that our characters determine which desires we will have and therefore which ends we
will select. But we don’t choose ends, so it seems that we can’t be held responsible for
our good or bad desires. And yet that seems absurd and false. Aristotle’s solution to this
puzzle is to hold us responsible for our characters only to the extent that our character is the
result of things we’ve chosen and for which we are therefore responsible. So we can morally
judge good or bad choices, acts, and also characters or personalities formed through
choices and chosen acts.

V.1.2 Four Worries about Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics

Here are four critical worries about Aristotle’s virtue ethics.

First, there’s a worry about the crucial role of luck in the constitution of
happiness that amounts to challenging the very idea that happiness is the highest good:
how could the highest good be so open to contingency?

Second, there’s a worry about the real possibility of very shallow or even
extremely wicked happiness: can’t there be happy slave-owners, happy murderers, and
happy Nazis? If this is true, then happiness can come apart from moral goodness and
rightness.

Third, there’s a worry about the rational-choice-based dimension of moral virtue,

as opposed to its character-based dimension: as the Stoics pointed out, and as Kant later
points out, it seems easily and really possible to choose and/or do the good and right
thing, even if either you’re generally unhappy or that particular choice or act makes you
unhappy. Moreover, considering the extent to which choosing and/or doing the good
and right thing typically involves resisting temptation and overcoming egoism or self-
interest, it’s also arguable that choosing and/or doing the right thing typically makes you
unhappy.

And fourth, there’s a worry about Aristotle’s analysis of moral responsibility:

there are really possible cases in which someone literally cannot do otherwise—hence
they’re involuntary actions—and yet they’re still morally responsible.
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For example, suppose that, unbeknownst to you, in a slight variant on the case of The
Really Fat Man that we looked at section II.3 above, even though you’ve already
decided to push the really fat man off the bridge, there’s also a fanatical Utilitarian
behind you who really, really wants the really fat man pushed off the bridge in order to
kill one and save five, so that if he sees the slightest hesitation on your part, then he’s
going to push you so that you do push the really fat man off the bridge, no matter what.
Then in that case—let’s call it The Fanatical Utilitarian—you literally cannot do otherwise
than push the really fat man off the bridge, hence you lack the ability to do otherwise here,
and yet you’re still morally responsible.45 So it appears, as against Aristotle, that the
voluntary is not a necessary condition of moral responsibility.

V.1.3 Contemporary Virtue Ethics

According to contemporary virtue ethics, a virtue is a trait of character, manifested in

habitual action, that it’s good for a person to have. This is, on the whole, the same as
Aristotle’s virtue ethics. But there are two non-trivial differences between Aristotle’s
virtue ethics and contemporary virtue ethics that are worth pointing up.

First, Aristotle’s virtue ethics is explicitly a version of eudaimonism, i.e., the

morality of happiness; but contemporary virtue ethics is not necessarily a morality of
happiness. Contemporary virtue ethics focuses primarily on morally good character or
morally good personality, not on happiness. Happiness may quite commonly or even
naturally flow from a morally good character or personality, but it need not necessarily
do so.

Second, Aristotle’s virtue ethics is somewhat unclear about the role of rational
principles in choice, whereas contemporary virtue ethics is explicitly committed to what
is sometimes called moral particularism, which is the rejection of both the need for and
also the intelligibility of general moral principles, a view that is sometimes called moral
generalism.46 More specifically, according to moral particularism, there are only good or
bad moral judgments in particular historical contexts and particular social communities,
not good or bad general moral principles abstracted from contexts or communities. So if
contemporary virtue ethics is true, then moral generalism is false.

It’s important to note in this connection that contemporary virtue ethics, via its
moral particularism, heavily relies on the idea that moral communities, and their
commonly-held or standing moral beliefs, are the ultimate sources of the justification of the
good and bad moral judgments we make in particular historical contexts. So
contemporary virtue ethics is also a version of moral communitarianism.
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It’s also important to note that any version of moral generalism that also asserts
the existence of absolutely universal objective moral principles—so that it’s, as it were,
moral generalism with an attitude—is an absolutist moral generalism. Kant’s ethics and
contemporary Kantian ethics, for example, are both committed to absolutist moral
generalism. So if contemporary virtue ethics is true, then Kant’s ethics and Kantian
ethics are both false.

Contemporary virtue ethics thus provides a moral framework or moral theory

based on these three basic ideas: (i) that the highest human good is a morally good
character or personality, (ii) that therefore we ought to be morally virtuous, and (iii) that
moral virtue is expressed or shown by a person’s making good moral judgments
against the necessary backdrop of a particular social community in a particular
historical context. Correspondingly, here are three prima facie philosophical advantages
of contemporary virtue ethics, in comparison with other contemporary ethical
frameworks or theories.

First, contemporary virtue ethics provides a prima facie plausible account of

moral motivation, by appealing to historically context-sensitive, social community-
grounded moral reasons.

Second, contemporary virtue ethics captures commonplace prima facie doubts

about the very idea of ahistorical, impartial, impersonal, and unsocialized moral
frameworks or theories, and (absolutely) general moral principles.

Third, contemporary virtue ethics is prima facie fully compatible with, and
indeed supports, feminist ethics, especially if it is formulated as an ethics of care.47

Contrariwise, there are at least four critical worries about contemporary virtue
ethics.

First, there’s what James Rachels aptly calls “the problem of incompleteness.”48
This problem emerges when we ask: why are virtuous choices and actions morally good
and right? If you answer, “because that’s just what virtuous people do,” then you’ve
begged the question. So there must be a theory of good/bad and right/wrong that’s
rationally justified independently of the fact of moral virtue itself. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine
any non-question-begging answer to the question of why virtuous choices and actions
are morally good and right, that’s not ultimately an appeal to either (e.g., Utilitarian)
consequentialism and its benefits-based reasoning or (e.g., Kantian) non-consequentialism and
its intrinsic-value based reasoning. Therefore, moral virtue is at best a derivative and
secondary moral fact, not a primitive and primary moral fact.
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Second, there’s what I’ll call the too few virtues problem. This problem emerges
when we notice that there are many more particular historical contexts in which the
morality of choices or intentions and acts is a burning issue, than there are specific
moral virtues to deal with them. Aristotle and some contemporary virtue ethicists
finesse this problem by appealing to practical wisdom, which can project beyond moral
virtues somewhat. But if practical wisdom is doing all the basic moral work, then virtue
ethics is primarily a rationality-based moral theory, not primarily a virtue-based theory.

Third, there’s what I’ll call the unity of the virtues problem. This problem emerges
when we ask: “is it possible to have one moral virtue without having all of them?”
Virtue ethics is committed to a holistic thesis of the unity of the virtues: to have one moral
virtue is to have all of them, that is, it is to have the entire package of moral virtues. But
on the contrary, it seems really possible for someone to be morally virtuous in some
respects, but not in others, and thus not be all-around morally virtuous. So, for example,
it seems really possible that a generous or tolerant person might also be a coward. If this
is so, then even having lots of moral virtues doesn’t entail that you’re an all-around
morally virtuous person, and something other than merely possessing some virtues—for
example, practical wisdom—must account for the unity of the virtues. But again, if
practical wisdom is doing all the basic moral work, then again virtue ethics is primarily
a rationality-based moral theory, not primarily a virtue-based theory.

Fourth, finally, and most problematically of all, there’s what I’ll call the problem of
bad and immoral virtues. This problem emerges when we notice that Aristotelian virtues
are supposed to be shared across all rational human animals. But according to
contemporary virtue ethics, every moral virtue must include an essential reference to a
particular social community in a particular historical context. But because this is true, it
seems really possible that a particular social community can be generally wicked—for
example, a slave-owning culture, like Plato’s and Aristotle’s Athens, or 17th century
America—and yet individual people in that particular social community in that
particular historical context would still count as morally virtuous internally and relatively
to that community and that context. Consider, for example, Plato and Aristotle; or
Washington and Jefferson. More specifically, is it really possible to be a morally virtuous
slave owner, internally and relatively to that person’s particular social community in that
particular historical context? Or even more forcefully put, is there any rational doubt
whatsoever that Washington and Jefferson were indeed both morally virtuous slave-
owners in 17th century America? If so, then moral virtue doesn’t entail moral goodness
or rightness, and therefore the fact of moral virtue cannot be the foundation of morality.
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V.2 Millian Utilitarianism49

I’m jumping backwards in time now, TARDIS50-wise, from contemporary virtue ethics
to the work of John Stuart Mill, a 19th century British moral sage and political activist.
J.S. Mill is the most famous and influential proponent of utilitarianism, although both
James Mill (J.S. Mill’s tyrannical father) and Jeremy Bentham (whose body still exists in
a wooden closet in University College London in stuffed form, although nowadays with
his original head replaced by a nicer one, although the fairly grotesque original head is
still in the closet, and brought out every year to preside over the UCL Board of
Governors Meeting—seriously!, I’m not making this up51) had already developed
versions of utilitarianism prior to that.

We’ve already implicitly encountered utilitarianism in the guise of benefits-based

moral reasoning, and more specifically, in the guise of Peter Singer’s (and Peter Unger’s)
argument for famine relief. So utilitarianism is the moral theory that expresses and
attempts to justify the basic moral principles lying behind benefits-based moral
reasoning. According to utilitarianism, the highest human good is happiness. In tuen,
happiness, according to the utilitarian, consists in either (i) pleasurable states of mind or
an increase in their intensity, or (ii) the promotion or multiplication of pleasurable states
of mind, or (iii) the prevention or the reduction of painful states of mind, or (iv) the
satisfaction of individual preferences and/or desires, or (v) the individual consumption
of preferred and/or desired goods. Correspondingly, unhappiness according to the
utilitarisn, consists in either (i) painful states of mind or an increase in their intensity, or
(ii) the promotion or the multiplication of painful states of mind, or (iii) the frustration
of individual preferences and/or desires, or (iv) the lack of preferred and/or desired
goods. The overall positive balance of happiness over unhappiness is utility, and the
overall negative balance of unhappiness over happiness is disutility. But there are two
significantly different types of utility: (i) private aka egoistic utility, that is, my or your
individual happiness, and (ii) public aka non-egoistic utility, that is, the happiness of
many people, as a sum of private utilities.

Utilitarianism is a form of consequentialism. In turn, consequentialism says that

what is right or wrong consists exclusively (or at least essentially) in the bringing about
of good or bad effects of our actions, and does not consist in either (i) virtuous or vicious
characters of persons (because it’s really possible to be virtuous but accidentally bring
about bad consequences, and also really possible to be vicious but accidentally bring
about good consequences) or (ii) the intrinsic rightness or wrongness of our choices or
intentions to act, or of our actions (because it’s really possible to make the right choices
or have the right intentions but accidentally bring about bad consequences, and also
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really possible to make the wrong choices or have the wrong intentions but accidentally
bring about good consequences).

Given utilitarianism’s conception of the highest good, together with

consequentialism, the general moral doctrine of act utilitarianism says:

What I (or anyone) ought to do is always to act in such a way as to bring about as
much happiness as possible for as many people (or: animals capable of being
vessels of happiness) as possible.

But there are two significantly different forms of act utilitarianism, namely (i) private,
aka egoistic act utilitarianism:

What I (or anyone) ought to do is always to act in such a way as to bring

about as much happiness as possible for me (or for himself/herself/
themselves) individually, aka maximizing private utility,

and (ii) public, aka non-egoistic act utilitarianism:

What I (or anyone) ought to do is always to act in such a way as to bring

about as much happiness as possible for as many people (or: sentient
animals) as possible, aka maximizing public utility.

Correspondingly, Millian utilitarianism is based on what Mill calls The Greatest

Happiness Principle:

What I (or anyone) ought to do is always to act in such a way as to produce the
greatest balance of happiness over unhappiness (= the greatest utility) for as
many people (or: sentient animals) as possible, where, for the purposes of
summing private utilities, each person (or: sentient animal) counts as one and no
person counts as more than one

It’s important to note that The Greatest Happiness Principle is supposed to apply only
to actions relativized to particular act-contexts and also to particular populations of
people who can be affected by my actions. So at least in principle, it’s not too morally
strenuous.

Obviously, The Greatest Happiness Principle expresses a morality of public or

non-egoistic, act utilitarianism, and not a morality of private, aka egoistic, act
utilitarianism. Thus Millian utilitiarianism is generally opposed to moral egoism.
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Nevertheless, according to Mill, it’s also perfectly morally permissible for me to

maximize private, aka egoistic, utility, as long as I don’t, in that particular historical
context, actually have a genuine opportunity to maximize public utility. It’s only when
public utility can, in that particular historical context, be maximized by my choices and
actions, that I’m morally obligated to maximize public utility. In this sense, for the
Millian utilitarian, moral egoism, like prosperity during The Great Depression, is always
just around the corner, by which I mean that according to the Millian utilitarian, there’s
nothing intrinsically morally wrong with egoism. Still, whenever you can maximize
public utility, then not only is it morally OK (i.e., permissible) for you to maximize
public utility, but also you morally must maximize public utility.

Correspondingly, even if you’re not an egoist, this might still seem to be too
morally strenuous: are you never permitted to take an hour (much less a day) off from
your utilitarian duty to maximize public utility (even if it’s only in a context-sensitive
way)?, and are you never morally permitted to favor your own interests or needs, or
your family’s and other loved ones’ interests or needs, over the urgent interests and
problems of all those hundreds, thousands, millions, and billions of anonymous,
faceless, needy strangers?52 We’ll come back to this worry a little later.

Mill distinguishes explicitly between higher pleasures and lower pleasures: (i) higher
pleasures are either (ia) intellectual pleasures (e.g., doing or appreciating mathematics,
logic, philosophy, science, etc.), or (ib) aesthetic pleasures (e.g., doing or appreciating art,
literature, music, dance, etc.), or (ic) emotional pleasures that aren’t merely bodily (e.g.,
romantic love as opposed to mere sexual satisfaction, parental love, friendship,
sympathy, empathy, etc.). But by sharp contrast, (ii) lower pleasures are merely bodily
or carnal pleasures of any sort. In turn, Millian utilitarianism morally favors or ranks
higher pleasures ahead of lower pleasures, and also morally requires the maximization of
higher pleasures, first and foremost, although not at the expense of a sufficient quantity of
those lower pleasures necessary for reproduction, survival, good health, or the
production of higher pleasures. Nevertheless, as Mill famously puts it:

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates

dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it
is only because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the
comparison knows both sides.53

This directly implies that there are higher pains and lower pains corresponding to higher
pleasures and lower pleasures, and also that higher pains morally outrank lower
pleasures, not to mention lower pains.
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Mill also distinguishes, at least implicitly, between act-utility and what’s

nowadays called rule-utility. Act-utility is the public or private utility of individual acts.
By contrast, rule-utility is the public or private utility of general rules or policies as
implemented over time. The primary rationale for making this distinction is that
sometimes, even though a given act of mine might be morally required from the
standpoint of public act-utility (for example, if I’m a politician, telling a big fat lie that
makes lots of people happy), if considered from the standpoint of public rule-utility,
then it might not be permitted (for example, because a well-functioning liberal
democratic State requires, as a rule, the probity of politicians—ha, ha).

A prima facie advantage of utilitarianism over other moral theories, from the
standpoint of actually implementing its moral principles, is the calculability of utility. In
other words, utility can be objectively measured—that is, scientifically studied and
quantified—to some non-trivial extent, for example, in the empirical psychology of pain
and pleasure, or in the economics of preference and/or desire satisfaction and goods-
consumption. Therefore, to the extent that utility can be objectively measured, then
correct moral deliberation according to The Greatest Happiness Principle can be
reduced either (i) to calculating the probable utility-consequences of one’s action in a
given historical context for a given population of people vs. the probable utility-
consequences of failing to act, or (ii) to calculating the probable utility-consequences of
various possible courses of action, and then choosing to do whatever calculates out as
maximizing public utility. Therefore, act utilitarian morality bottoms out in the
mathematical models of rational decision-theory, on either public utility assumptions
(public or non-egoistic policy) or private utility assumptions (private or egoistic policy).

It does not follow, however, that I am required by Mill’s act utilitarianism to be a

utility computer in humanoid form, in order to be morally good. For this will be far too
time-consuming and far too complex to calculate for individuals or social groups in
most hands-on, real-world, seat-of-your-pants situations. Millian utilitarianism
therefore explicitly allows for an appeal to learned habits, collective experience, and
imitative models of utility-calculation. So in this respect, Millian utilitarianism is quite
like Aristotelian virtue ethics.

V.2.1 Not-So-Happy Little Campers: Ten Big Problems for Millian

Utilitarianism

If Millian utilitarianism is correct, then we ought to be always choosing and acting so

that as many people as possible are, in effect, happy little campers. But here are ten
important problems for this view.
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1. Can Mill adequately justify his distinction between higher and lower pleasures?

The worry here is that in order to justify the moral ranking of higher pleasures
over lower pleasures, Mill must appeal to a non-utilitarian, non-consequentialist thesis
about the intrinsic value of higher pleasures and higher pains. This appeal, in turn,
directly entails that significantly smaller amounts of higher pleasure or higher pain will
morally override significantly larger amounts of lower pleasure or lower pain, even
though producing these lower pleasures or preventing these lower pains are strictly
required by The Greatest Happiness Principle.

2. Does the Millian distinction between higher pleasures and lower pleasures justify the
mistreatment of non-human animals?

By sharp contrast to Mill, Bentham formulated a version of utilitarianism that

doesn’t distinguish between higher and lower pleasures. Bentham’s basic reason for not
drawing this distinction is the following important worry about the treatment of non-
human animals:

The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which
never could have been witholden from them but by the hand of tyranny. The French
have already discovered that the blackness of the skin is no reason why a human being
should be abandoned without redress to the caprice of a tormentor. It may one day
come to be recognized that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the
termination of the os sacrum are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive
being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the
faculty of reason, or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is
beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an
infant of a day or a week or even a month old. But suppose it were otherwise, what
would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they
suffer?54

In a contemporary context, famously, Singer has reformulated this thought as a full-

blown ethics of animal liberation.55

As against animal liberation, however, Mill’s distinction between higher and

lower pleasures would clearly justify the differential moral treatment of rational human
animals and non-human animals: but is this morally acceptable? Bentham and Singer
would equally clearly say that it’s not morally acceptable, and reject the distinction.
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3. The Problem of Utility-Maximizing Covert Immorality

If utilitarianism were correct, then breaking a promise to a dying friend would be

justified if it maximized utility, and indeed cheating, lying, and trust-breaking of
various kinds would all be morally justified, provided that they maximized utility and
no one ever found out. But, self-evidently, that’s rationally unjustified and morally
unacceptable—not only from the standpoint of intrinsic-value based moral reasoning,
but also from the standpoint of common sense moral intuition—because utility-
maximizing consequences self-evidently don’t morally justify intrinsically morally
wrong choices or acts.

4. The Problem of Utility-Maximizing Serious Human Rights Violations

As per the third problem, if utilitarianism were correct, then also serious human
rights violations would be morally justified, provided that they maximized utility.56 But
again that’s rationally unjustified and morally unacceptable—again, not only from the
standpoint of intrinsic-value based moral reasoning but also from the standpoint of
common sense moral intuition—again because utility-maximizing consequences self-
evidently don’t morally justify human-rights-violating choices and acts any more than
they morally justify intrinsically morally wrong choices or acts.

5. The Problem of Utility-Maximizing Tyrannies of the Majority

If utilitarianism is correct, then if a majority of the people were made happy by

persecuting and violently coercing a minority of the people, then that would be morally
justified because it maximizes public utility. Consider, for example, the sorts of reasons
that were used to (purportedly) justify Southern slavery in the USA prior to The
Emancipation Proclamation, and then restrict the term “the people” to the populations
of the Southern slave states. But that’s rationally unjustified and morally unacceptable,
because utility-maximizing consequences don’t morally justify the tyranny of the
majority.

6. The Problem of Utility Monsters (aka The Problem of Utility-Maximizing Inequality)

If utilitarianism is correct, then if some people were—as seems really possible—

able to derive extremely high levels of utility from certain goods or opportunities (let’s
call them “utility monsters”), as compared to others who derive relatively less utility
from the same goods or opportunities (let’s call them “utility wimps”), then it follows
that it would be morally justified to divert more and more of those goods or
opportunities away from the utility wimps to the utility monsters, even if that entails a
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sharply inequitable overall distribution of goods or opportunities. But that’s rationally

unjustified and morally unacceptable, because utility-maximizing consequences don’t
morally justify the sharply inequitable distribution of goods or opportunities.

7. The Problem of the Super-Clever Unscrupulous Egoistic Utilitarian

If Millian utilitarianism (or indeed any version of act or rule public or non-
egoistic utilitarianism) were correct, then private or egoistic utilitarianism would be
incorrect. But how can a Millian utilitarian rationally convince a super-clever and
unscrupulous egoistic utilitarian—for example, David Hume’s notorious “sensible
knave”57—to choose and act in a publicly beneficial way and, more, generally, to be
socially cooperative? If the Millian utilitarian’s argument is that everyone including the
sensible knave himself will be better off if he doesn’t cheat, lie, manipulate, or violently
coerce other people, then the knave can retort that as long as he doesn’t get caught, then
he’s always better off, that he who dies with the most stuff, wins, and that didn’t the Millian
utilitarian say that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with moral egoism? In other words, it’s
practically impossible for the Millian utilitarian to convince the sensible knave to be
socially cooperative on utilitarian grounds alone.

8. The Problem of Too-Highly-Demanding Morality

If utilitarianism is correct, then the Singer-Unger argument for saving others who
are in mortal danger—for example, the victims of famine—is a sound argument.
Therefore, we morally must always give $100 (or whatever) to famine relief (or
whatever), whenever by doing so we would not be losing anything of comparable
moral value (say, one’s own life). But surely that’s morally too highly demanding, i.e., too
morally strenuous. As I argued in section II.4, it’s clearly and distinctly morally
permissible at least sometimes not to help others who are in mortal danger, provided that
you’re neither the closest one to the mortally threatened ones, nor uniquely capable of
providing life-saving aid for them. Moreover, as I noted—or at least implied by means
of a rhetorical question—in section V.1, it does also seem to be obviously true that at
least sometimes it’s morally permissible or even obligatory for us to favor our own
personal interests and needs, or the interests and needs of our families and other loved
ones, over the interests and needs of larger numbers of strangers.

9. The Experience Machine and the Problem of Shallow Happiness

If utilitarianism is correct, then happiness would be entirely experiential, however

one cashes that out, whether in terms of pleasant experiences, experiences of preference-
satisfaction, or whatever. But then, as per a famous thought-experiment due to Robert
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Nozick,58 living in an Experience Machine for your entire life, together with guaranteed
life-long blissful ignorance that it’s nothing but an Experience Machine that you’re
living in, would be every bit as good as or even much better than a real life, since a real life, no
matter how wonderful, is extremely unlikely to produce the consistent happiness-
results that The Experience Machine plus guaranteed ignorance would produce.

That result, in turn, seems wrong for two reasons.

First, ignorant happiness is intrinsically worse than knowledge-based happiness.

Blindly stumbling into happiness is one thing, but achieving happiness because of
correct judgments and good choices is essentially better.

Second, since the Experience Machine produces the experiences, not you, then
you’re being causally determined, like a mere “biological puppet”59 or “moist robot,”60 to
be happy, yet you lack freedom of the will; and being experientially happy without
freedom of the will is intrinsically worse than being experientially happy via freedom of
the will.

Moreover, both of those reasons can be deployed in the following argument.

Let’s call any kind of experiential happiness that’s both ignorant and causally
determined, shallow happiness. And let’s call any kind of experiential happiness that’s
combined with both knowledge and free will, deep happiness. Then if utilitarianism is
correct, shallow happiness would be just as good as or better than deep happiness, but that’s
self-evidently false.

10. Utility vs. Integrity

If utilitarianism is correct, then non-consequentialist moral reasons can never

rationally justify our choices or actions.

But to the contrary, let’s consider two fictional cases famously described and
critically deployed by Bernard Williams.61 First, there’s the case of George the Chemist
who must decide whether or not to take a job in the biological-and-chemical warfare
industry, and, even though his family will be much worse off if he refuses the job, he
refuses the job. And second, there’s the case of Jim the South American Traveller
who’s forced to decide whether or not he should shoot one Indian in order to save
nineteen other Indians from being murdered by a cruel police officer, and, even though
it means letting twenty Indians be murdered, he refuses to shoot the one. If
utilitarianism is correct, then it follows that George morally must take the job and also
that Jim morally must shoot the Indian (and it’s helpful in this connection to compare
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and contrast this case with the Bystander at the Switch sub-case of The Trolley
Problem). But there are good moral reasons, based on at least some people’s sense of a
life-defining personal integrity that’s expressed in choosing and acting regardless of
consequences, not to take the job and not to shoot the Indian. If so, then utilitarianism
overlooks the moral fact of personal integrity, and it’s false that non-consequentialist
moral reasons can never rationally justify our choices or actions. It’s also crucially
important to note here that Williams is explicitly not appealing to a Kantian version of
non-consequentialism—indeed, as we saw in section II.2, Williams explicitly rejects
rationality-based morality, especially including Kant’s moral theory.

Now we’ll get back into our TARDIS, reverse-jump from the 19th century to the
18th century, and turn to the critical examination of that classical moral theory.

V.3 Kant’s Morality of Persons and Principles62

V.3.1 The Ten Basic Ideas of Kant’s Moral Theory

Kant’s morality, i.e., his moral theory, is often cited as a paradigm of deontology. But that’s
a sloppy conceptual mistake. “Deontology” means the theory of duty, and a moral duty is
just a moral obligation, but Aristotelian virtue ethics and Millian utilitarianism both entail
moral duties in that sense too: duties entailed by moral virtue in view of the highest human
good of happiness, and duties entailed by maximizing utility. So Kant’s moral theory is
neither more nor less focused on duties, or “deontological,” than any other classical
moral theory. Indeed, every actual and possible moral theory that falls under the
standard conception of morality entails moral duties and is a “deontology” in that
sense. Therefore, it’s far more accurate, discriminating, and illuminating to describe
Kant’s moral theory as centrally focused on persons and principles.

Correspondingly, Kant’s moral theory of persons and principles can be

compactly expressed as a set of ten basic ideas, which I’ll formulate and briefly
elaborate, one-by-one.

1. The highest or supreme good is a person’s good (autonomous) will.

Kant says that the highest or supreme good is a good will. Here, willing is the
same as a person’s intention (i.e., a desire, which targets some end + a belief, about the
means that would bring about that end) to do some act X, together with self-conscious
deliberation about doing X, together with a self-conscious decision to do X, together with
self-consciously trying to do X. Notice especially the crucial role of self-conscious
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awareness in this conception of willing. Otherwise put, for Kant, willing X is the same as
practical reasoning about X. So human persons are human animals that are innately capable of
willing, self-consciousness, and practical reasoning.

As such, every human person has dignity, that is, absolute, non-denumerably (i.e.,
uncountably) infinite, non-fungible, intrinsic moral value. In number theory, non-
denumerable infinities are those infinite quantities that can’t be put into a one-to-one
correspondence with the set of integers or natural numbers. For example, the value of pi
is a non-denumerably infinite (non-repeating, non-terminating) decimal value:
3.14159265358323897946264338….,63 and more generally, the sets of real numbers,
complex numbers, and other “transfinite” or “transcendental” numbers (including pi),64
are all non-denumerably infinite. Historically, it’s no accident that the mathematical use
of the term “transcendental” by Leonhard Euler and J.H. Lambert, and Kant’s use of the
term “transcendental,” emerged more or less simultaneously in the mid- to late-18th
century. So according to Kant’s moral theory, since economic value is always
denumerable or countable value, it follows that human persons have a value that
transcends all economic value, and that in turn makes the moral value of human persons
non-fungible.

A good will is volition from, or for the sake of, duty, which is strict moral
obligation, and more specifically, our duty is to obey The Categorical Imperative.
The Categorical Imperative is the absolutely universal objective moral law, aka The
Moral Law: hence we are strictly morally obligated to obey the Categorical Imperative,
aka The Moral Law. Otherwise put, then, to have a good will is to choose and act from, or for
the sake of, the Categorical Imperative, aka The Moral Law.

A good will, for Kant, is also necessarily a free will. According to Kant, as
persons, we possess not only “negative freedom” or freedom-from being compelled,
forced, or prevented from choosing or doing what we intend (whether by external-
coercive or by internal-pathological factors), but more importantly, we also possess
“positive freedom” or freedom-to choose or do what we intend. The highest or supreme
kind of freedom-to for Kant is autonomy, that is, a person’s capacity for self-legislating The
Categorical Imperative, and its freedom-from aspect is practical freedom.

2. What The Categorical Imperative is and what categorical imperatives are.

It’s crucially important to distinguish between The Categorical Imperative and a

categorical imperative. The Categorical Imperative is actually a holistic set of four (or
five, depending on how you count them) significantly different (in the sense of having
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non-synonymous meanings) but still necessarily conceptually interlinked, categorical

imperatives, each of which is a categorical imperative. In order to distinguish
terminologically between The Categorical Imperative, and one or another of the four (or
five) categorical imperatives, it’s convenient to refer to the latter as different
“formulations” of The Categorical Imperative. According to Kant, The Categorical
Imperative—hence also each one of the four (or five) categorical imperatives, or
“formulations” of The Categorical Imperative—is innately specified in persons’ minds,
hence in that sense The Categorical Imperative is in us, not outside us.

Generally speaking, a moral imperative is a moral command, a moral principle that

tells us that we morally ought to choose and do something, i.e., that we’re morally
obligated to choose and do something. But a specifically categorical imperative is a moral
principle that tells us that we ought to choose and do something period, or
unconditionally, which is to say that we must choose and do it no matter what the
consequences, whether or not it is in our own self-interest, and whether or not it makes us happy
(e.g., by experiencing pleasure). So a categorical imperative is a non-consequentialistic
(and in particular, non-utilitarian), non-egoistic, non-eudaimonistic (and in particular,
non-hedonistic) moral command. A categorical imperative is therefore not grounded on
instrumental (i.e., egoistic or non-egoistic benefits-based, means-ends) reasons for choice
and action. Hence a categorical imperative is also a non-instrumental reason for choice
and action. This is to be sharply contrasted with what Kant calls a hypothetical imperative,
which says:

If I desire X, then I ought to do Y (= the sufficient means to getting X) in order to

get X.

Thus a hypothetical imperative is also an instrumental reason for choice and action.

To sum up so far, then, every categorical imperative is a non-consequentialist

(and in particular, non-utilitarian), non-egoistic, non-eudaimonistic (and in particular,
non-hedonistic) absolutely universal objective moral principle that provides a non-
instrumental reason for autonomous (and practically free) choice and action, and is
innately specified in us.

(3) Duty is the necessity of an act done from moral respect for persons and The Categorical
Imperative, aka The Moral Law.

This Kantian thesis says that duty is the moral obligation that’s binding on any
act which is such that only the feeling of moral respect will suffice to move us no matter
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what our first-order desires and feelings might happen to be. Moral respect is the special
moral pro-attitude we take towards all persons, including ourselves, and our/their
dignity, especially in view of our/their autonomous will, which in turn is inherently
capable of choosing and acting according to categorical imperatives and The Categorical
Imperative. In other words, when we do our moral duty, then what’s ultimately
motivating us is respect for persons and our/their dignity, and for The Categorical Imperative,
aka The Moral Law, that’s innately specified in all persons.

4. The highest or supreme human good, and the complete good.

For Kant, “moral worth” is something’s or someone’s intrinsic moral value, as

opposed to its or their extrinsic moral value, which is something’s or someone’s
instrumental moral value, i.e., its or their ability or tendency to provide benefits for
people. Moreover, the highest or supreme good for a human person is not shallow
happiness in the utilitarian sense, because happiness has moral worth only if it has been
inherently guided and secured by a good will, that is, only if it’s deep happiness, i.e.,
human happiness that’s guided and secured by a good will. Furthermore, a deeply
happy human life that’s inherently guided and secured by a good will is what Kant calls
the complete good, which is the all-around best life for a human person. Yet happiness,
whether shallow or deep, even though it belongs to the complete good when it’s deep,
always requires some good luck. But if, sadly, we’re unlucky—if “stuff happens”—and
then unlucky push comes to unhappy shove, a good will necessarily outranks happiness.
That’s why a good will is the highest or supreme good, even though the complete good
necessarily includes deep happiness. But this doesn’t in any way imply that happiness is a
bad thing, since, again, for Kant the best all-around life for a human person is a deeply
happy human life that’s inherently guided and secured by a good will. It’s just that,
morally speaking, happiness isn’t either the only thing or the primary thing, so Kant’s
moral theory isn’t a version of eudaimonism.

(5) We know The Categorical Imperative and other categorical imperatives by means of practical
reason.

The Categorical Imperative—and thus also each categorical imperative that

belongs to the set of four (or five) different formulations of The Categorical
Imperative—is known by our faculty of practical reason, which for Kant (perhaps
surprisingly, for those who mistakenly believe the classical caricature of Kant which
says that he’s an enemy of feelings, pleasures, desires, and passions; and a nasty covert
Pietist Protestant to boot; not to mention short; and really, really boring and mechanical,
especially as he got old, because he walked around Königsburg, aka Kaliningrad, at the
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same time every day, and had many other fixed habits and routines65) is also the same
as the faculty of desire. For Kant, the faculty of practical reason or desire has two proper
parts: (i) a legislative part, which issues practical commands or imperatives, also called
the will (Wille), and (ii) an executive part, which executes practical commands or
imperatives, also called the power of choice (Willkür). In turn, the will or legislative part
has two levels: (ia) a higher level, which is our pure will, i.e., our capacity for autonomy
and choosing and acting according to The Categorical Imperative and categorical
imperatives (aka pure practical reason), and (ib) a lower level, which is our impure will, i.e.,
or our capacity for prudence and choosing and acting according to hypothetical
imperatives. The executive part of the faculty of practical reason or desire, i.e., our
power of choice, is our faculty of effective desires, which are desires that do, would, or
will move us all the way to choice and action.

A psychological faculty for Kant is an innate specialized spontaneous capacity or a

psychological power, which means that it can be properly used, not necessarily that it is
always (or ever, for that matter) properly used. So you can possess the psychological
faculty of pure practical reason, but still choose and do the wrong thing, for which you
therefore have moral responsibility. Correspondingly, another way of defining human
personhood is to say that human persons are animals that possess a faculty of pure
practical reason. So human persons have dignity whether or not they actually (ever) choose or
do the right thing. Therefore, dignity isn’t a moral achievement: it’s a moral endowment.

It’s crucially important to note that being a human person isn’t the same as being a
human animal, because some human animals (for example, the unfortunate Baby
Theresa) are human animals, but not human persons, that is, human non-persons.
Moreover, if there were aliens that possessed a faculty of pure practical reason (say,
Klaatu in Robert Wise’s 1951 science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still, or ET in
Steven Spielberg’s 1982 equally sci-fi-classic ET the Extra-Terrestrial), then they’d all be
non-human persons. And many or most non-human animals manifestly don’t possess a
faculty of pure practical reason, hence they’re not persons, i.e., they’re non-human non-
persons. But if there actually are (or were to be) non-human animals that possess a
faculty of pure practical reason (for example, Great apes, dolphins, or the occasional
parrot?), then they’re (or would be) non-human persons too. Nevertheless, either human or
non-human animals that aren’t persons—i.e., that are non-persons—don’t have dignity
and hence they can be permissibly used by persons (for example, for food, clothing, or
labor, as per many non-human animals, or for harvesting their organs, as per Baby
Theresa), but only if The Categorical Imperative is otherwise obeyed. This includes, for
example, a moral obligation binding on us never to torture human or non-human non-
persons, that is, never intentionally to cause them unnecessary and excessive pain.
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6. Ends vs. means, and ends-in-themselves.

For Kant, all ends have intrinsic value, that is, they’ve got value for their own sake,
i.e., inherent value. Means, by contrast, are things that are valued only for the sake of
ends, hence means have only extrinsic value, that is, they’ve got value for the sake of
something else, namely ends. Ends, in turn, can have either a price or a dignity. For an end
to have a price means that it has some equivalent that can be systematically substituted
for it, i.e., it’s fungible. Price can either be market price (in terms of the satisfaction of self-
interest or public interest, for example, economic price) or fancy price (in terms of
disinterested satisfaction). Dignity, as we saw above, is absolute, non-denumerably
infinite, non-fungible, intrinsic moral value, which transcends all price, and indeed
transcends all economics. Correspondingly and more specifically, dignity transcends
the capitalist system of values and every kind of “commodification,” i.e., the capitalist
reduction of the dignity of persons to what can be bought, sold, privately or corporately
owned by industrialists, and/or exploited. (So in this regard, the early Karl Marx’s
conception of our human “species-being” and its irreducibility to capitalist values, can
be regarded an expression of Kant’s dignitarian moral theory.66) Only ends-in-themselves,
which are the same as persons, that is, possessors of the faculty of pure practical reason,
have dignity. So all and only persons (and more specifically, all and only those human
animals that are persons) are ends-in-themselves.

We should notice especially that Kant’s moral theory not only says that all
human persons—which includes rational human animals of any race, sex, ethnicity, and
physical constitution, living anywhere on the Earth, under any set of cultural
conditions—have dignity, but also it allows (as I mentioned above) for the possibility of
non-human persons, for example, aliens. It also allows for human or non-human non-
persons, none of whom, therefore, are ends-in-themselves. But if any non-human
animals are also persons (by virtue of possessing a faculty of pure practical reason), then
they also possess dignity and also are ends-in-themselves. So even despite what you may
have seen written on washroom walls or over the internet, Kant’s moral theory, in and of
itself, is not in any way racist, sexist, xenophobic, ableist, or speciesist.67

7. The moral worth of a choice or act.

Associated feelings (or other conscious mental states) and consequences don’t
determine the moral rightness of a choice or act, which is the same as its moral worth.
Instead, only the choice or intention and its relation to The Categorical Imperative, aka
The Moral Law, and its four (or five) formulations, can determine this. A choice can be
made or an act can be done merely in conformity with The Moral Law, without its being
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made or done from or for the sake of The Moral Law. If and only if a choice is made or an
act is done from or for the sake of The Moral Law, does it have moral worth. But choices
or acts done merely in conformity with The Moral Law, which therefore don’t have
moral worth, still have moral value.

More explicitly, here’s the distinction between moral worth and moral value: (i)
moral worth is either (ia) the deep happiness of persons or (ib) the intrinsic moral
goodness or rightness of their choices and acts, and (ii) moral value is either (iia) moral
worth, as per (i), or (iib) the shallow happiness of persons, or (iic) the moral good of
consequences in terms of their shallow happiness benefits. Correspondingly, Kant
provides four famous (or, if you’re either an Aristotelian or contemporary virtue ethicist
or a Millian utilitarian ethicist, notorious) examples: (i) the shopkeeper who doesn’t cheat
his customers only because he’s afraid he might be caught and punished, and not
because it’s good and right to treat other people fairly (so it’s a case of moral value
without moral worth), (ii) the misanthropic fair-minded man, who treats other people
fairly just because it’s good and right to do so, even though, perhaps because he’s
depressed, or perhaps just because he’s misanthropic by nature, he’s also feeling cynical
and badly disposed towards everyone, including himself (so it’s a case of shallow
unhappiness, and also a case of moral worth, and therefore also a case of moral value),
(iii) the happy philanthropist, who provides charity for other less well-off people only
because he enjoys and gets pleasure from doing it (so it’s a case of shallow happiness,
not deep happiness), not because it’s good and right to be charitable (so it’s also a case of
moral value without moral worth), and (iv) the gouty philanthropist, who provides
charity for other less well-off people just because it’s good and right to do so, even though
he’s in almost constant pain and gets no enjoyment or pleasure from being charitable
(so again it’s a case of shallow unhappiness, and also a case of moral worth, and
therefore also a case of moral value).

The cases of the misanthropic fair-minded man and the gouty philanthropist also
raise an extremely interesting and important question: is it possible to be deeply happy
even if you’re (perhaps even very intensely) unhappy in the shallow sense? In his 1788
book, the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant says yes, it’s really possible, by virtue of the
fact that it’s humanly possible (even if very difficult) to achieve, by means of the
consistent practice of self-controlled good willing, a first-personal coherence of all one’s
beliefs, desires, other feelings, and actions, both at any given time and over time,
experienced as such, that constitutes a special and specifically moral kind of human
happiness.68 This Kantian deep happiness even in the face of (perhaps even very
intense) shallow unhappiness, is essentially the same as what 19th and 20th century
existentialists like Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, and De Beauvoir call
authenticity. There are also some important anticipations of this same notion of authentic
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deep happiness in ancient Greek philosophy, via the Stoic notion of ataraxia, and in the
17th century (as we’ll see in the next section), via what I’ll call Pascal’s realistic optimism.

In any case, many or even most choices and acts with moral worth are
psychologically overdetermined, in the sense that they have two or more motives, each of
which, on its own, is psychologically sufficient for getting the agent to choose and do the act
(for example, in a non-psychological context, wearing a belt and suspenders
overdetermines holding up your trousers). But only the motive of respect (for the dignity
of persons and The Moral Law innately specified in persons) will suffice to guarantee
moral worth, since only that motive is for the sake of what’s intrinsically good and right, and
not for the sake of something egoistic, hedonistic, or beneficial for others, even if
choosing and/or doing the good and right thing is also accompanied by the satisfaction
of self-interest, pleasure, or benefits for others. This means that in order to tell what’s
really motivating a given choice and act, we’ll have to examine, by using our conceptual
abilities assisted by the imagination, counterfactual situations in which the non-respect-
based motives are substantially changed or altogether removed, in order to determine
whether the original overdetermined act was done from the motive of respect and thus
for the sake of the dignity of persons and The Moral Law, or not.

Using our imagination-boosted conceptual abilities, here are the counterfactual

tests for moral worth.

First, let’s suppose that X is the good and right thing to choose and do, and that a
person P chooses or does X. If P had (perhaps even very intensely) felt not like choosing
or doing X, or had felt like choosing or doing something other than X, or if the
consequences of not choosing or not doing X, or choosing or doing something other than
X, were beneficial to P or to others, would P still have chosen or done X? If yes, then P’s
choice or act has moral worth; if no, then P’s choice or act might still have moral value,
but it does not have moral worth.

Second, let’s suppose X is the bad and wrong thing to choose or do, and that a
person P avoids choosing or doing X. If P had felt (perhaps even very intensely) like
choosing or doing X, or if the consequences of choosing or doing X were (perhaps very)
beneficial to P or to others, would P still have avoided choosing or doing X? If yes, then
P’s choice or act has moral worth; if no, then P’s choice or act might still have moral
value, but it does not have moral worth.

But above all, it’s crucial to notice here that for Kant, it’s perfectly acceptable to
enjoy choosing and doing the good and right thing, and also that for Kant, it’s perfectly
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acceptable to bring about beneficial consequences for yourself and others by so choosing
or doing, provided that the choice or act also passes the counterfactual tests for moral
worth. In particular, for Kant, you don’t have to hate choosing or doing the good and right
thing. On the contrary, not only do you really want to perform your duties, precisely
because you’re moved by respect for the dignity of persons and for The Moral Law
innately specified in them and yourself, but also it’s perfectly acceptable to enjoy performing
your duties.

8. Kantian moral duties.

Officially, Kantian moral duties are of two kinds, namely, using Kant’s own
terminology, (i) strict or perfect moral duties, and (ii) meritorious or imperfect moral
duties. The “strict” or “perfect” duties are (ia) the duty to be truthful, not to lie, to be
sincere, and not to make false promises ( in order to preserve the foundations of trust
between human persons), and (ib) the duty to preserve our faculty for pure practical reason,
especially including not killing other persons and not committing suicide, and more generally,
the duty to preserve rational human nature in oneself and others. And the “meritorious” or
“imperfect” duties are (iia) the duty to develop one’s own talents, be happy, and have a
successful and flourishing life (so in essence, it’s the duty to pursue one’s own
happiness in sense of Aristotelian virtue ethics), and (iib) the duty to prevent harm to
other persons and bring benefits to other persons (so in essence, it’s the duty to produce
as much happiness as possible for as many people as possible in the sense of Millian
utilitarianism).

It’s crucially important to note that Kant’s terminology here, to put it mildly, isn’t
especially helpful—indeed, on the contrary it’s extremely misleading. And that’s because
the so-called “strict” or “perfect” duties are, in fact, neither strict nor perfect, just as the
so-called “Holy Roman Empire” was, in fact, neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.
Similarly, the so-called “meritorious” or “imperfect” duties are, in fact, neither more
meritorious than nor less perfect than the so-called “strict” or “perfect” duties. In truth, the
so-called “strict” or “perfect” duties are moral principles that we have to consider in
every possible situation in which it’s possible for “human, all-too-human” creatures like
us to choose and act, whereas the so-called “meritorious” or “imperfect” duties are
moral principles that we have to consider in all and only the situations in which it’s
really possible for “human, all-too-human” creatures like us to choose or act and also
there are relevant opportunities for pursuing happiness in the sense of Aristotelian
virtue ethics or for producing as much happiness as possible for as many people as
possible in the sense of Millian utilitarianism.
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Therefore, there’s no implication whatsoever that so-called “strict” or “perfect”

duties actually have to be followed in every situation in which it’s really possible for
“human, all-too-human” creatures like us to choose and act: on the contrary, they simply
have to be considered by us in every such situation. Nor is there any implication
whatsoever that so-called “meritorious” or “imperfect” duties are less binding on us, or
less morally obligatory, than so-called “strict” or “perfect” duties. On the contrary, all the
so-called “strict” or “perfect” duties and all the so-called “meritorious” and “imperfect”
duties are equally binding, namely, as moral obligations for us to consider them,
respectively, in either (i) every situation in which it’s really possible for human persons
to choose and act, or (ii) every situation in which it’s really possible for human beings to
choose and act and also to pursue happiness oneself or produce as much happiness as
possible for as many people as possible. Moreover, in none of these situations is it
required that we possess moral or rational powers that transcend what’s really possible
for “human, all-too-human” creatures like us: on the contrary, it’s fully built into such
situations that they’re all scaled to the human condition, i.e., they’re all anthropocentric.

Therefore, I’ll call these two types of duties, far more accurately, respectively (i)
anthropocentric moral principles for our universal consideration, period (= the so-called
“strict” or “perfect” duties), and (ii) anthropocentric moral principles for our universal
consideration, but only insofar as happiness is relevant (= the so-called “meritorious” or
“imperfect” duties), even if that terminology is, admittedly, a bit of a longwinded
mouthful. For convenience, then, I’ll chop those terms down, respectively, to the more
easily chewable labels (i) “blah-blah, period duties,” and (ii) “blah-blah, happiness-relevant
duties.”

9. The four (or five) formulations of The Categorical Imperative.

As I mentioned above, The Categorical Imperative is actually a four- (or five-)

membered holistic set of necessarily conceptually interlinked categorical imperatives.
Notice, especially, moreover, that the blah-blah, period duties and the blah-blah,
happiness-relevant duties, are not categorical imperatives, because (i) blah-blah, period
duties and blah-blah, happiness-relevant duties aren’t principles that apply directly to
choices and acts, but instead they apply only to our consideration of principles that apply
directly to choices and acts, and (ii) categorical imperatives are principles that not only
apply directly to human choices and acts, but also apply directly to every actual and
possible human choice and act.
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Against that backdrop, here are the four (or five, depending on how you count
them) formulations of The Categorical Imperative, that is, the four (or five) categorical
imperatives.

First, The Universal Law Formulation:

Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will
that it become a universal law.69

And as a variant on that, The Universal Law of Nature Formulation:

Act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of
nature.70

Second, The Humanity as End-in-Itself Formulation:

So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any
other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.71

Third, The Autonomy Formulation:

The supreme condition of [the will’s] harmony with universal practical reason [is] the
idea of the will of every rational being as a will giving universal law.72

And fourth and finally, The Realm of Ends Formulation:

A rational being must always regard himself as lawgiving in a realm of ends possible
through freedom of the will, whether as a member or as sovereign. 73

What do the four (or five) categorical imperatives mean? A maxim is a first-
person-centered principle of volition or act-intention. So The Universal Law Formulation
says that nothing will count as a morally permissible first-person centered principle of volition,
or act-intention, unless it consistently generalizes. The Universal Law of Nature
Formulation says that nothing will count as a morally permissible first-person-centered
principle of volition or act-intention unless it consistently generalizes in possible worlds that
include our laws of material nature, that is, in worlds in which natural causality is really
possible. The Humanity as an End-in-Itself Formulation says that nothing will count as a
morally permissible first-person-centered principle of volition or act-intention unless it
essentially supports the dignity of persons by never entailing that they are used as mere means to
some end or treated as mere things. The Autonomy Formulation says that nothing will count
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as a morally permissible first-person-centered principle of volition or act-intention unless it

essentially supports the autonomy of persons, where, as per the above, autonomy is a
person’s capacity for freely self-legislating The Categorical Imperative. And finally, The
Realm of Ends Formulation says that nothing will count as a morally permissible first-
person-centered principle of volition or act-intention unless it essentially supports the self-
legislating freedom of persons in a universal intersubjective community, such that each person is
considered equally and impartially in the free choices or acts of every other person.

Now if a maxim satisfies one or another of the categorical imperatives, then

acting on that maxim is morally permissible, but not necessarily morally obligatory. And if
a maxim violates one or another of the categorical imperatives, then it’s morally
impermissible and it’s also morally obligatory not to act on that maxim.

10. Kant’s model of practical reasoning.

It’s deeply important to recognize that Kant’s model of practical reasoning is not
a decision procedure that could in principle be mechanized—for example, calculated on
a digital computer—as in Millian utilitarianism. This is because The Categorical
Imperative in its four (or five) formulations is an absolutely universal objective moral
principle, but neither a logical premise or theorem, nor an empirical thesis, that could
count as an input to a mechanical (for example, digitally computable) process of
calculation. More precisely, for Kant, practical reasoning always requires the use of the
power of judgment, which involves either (i) the context-sensitive application of general
concepts to perceived particulars or individual cases (determining judgment), or (ii) the
context-sensitive construction of general concepts starting with perceived particulars or
individual cases (reflecting judgment), together with (iii) the context-sensitive power of
imagination, which is always needed to mediate between concepts and perceived objects,
but whose use cannot be reduced to rules of any kind and is therefore an art, not a
science.

Here, then, is Kant’s model of practical reasoning as a nine-step process of

judgment, considered from the first-person point of view.

First, I desire some end or another, X.

Second, I postulate a means to that end, Y.

Third, I figure out whether that means Y is indeed sufficient for that end X in
that context, or not.
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Fourth, if so, then I use a hypothetical imperative to formulate a maxim of the

following form:

If I desire X (as my end), I ought to choose and do Y (as the contextually

sufficient means to that end), hence I will (to do) Y.

Fifth, I evaluate my maxim in light of the four (or five) formulations of The
Categorical Imperative.

Sixth, if that maxim is morally permissible, then I can will the means Y to my end
X and thereby choose and do Y.

Seventh, if that maxim is morally obligatory, then I must will the means Y to my
end X and choose and do Y.

Eighth, but if that maxim is morally impermissible, then I must not choose or do
Y.

Ninth, repeat the preceding eight steps as needed.

V.3.2 Three Classical Worries about Kant’s Moral Theory

So far, since, as I mentioned at the outset, this smallish book has a broadly
Kantian (and existentialist) orientation, I’ve done my level best to present Kant’s moral
theory as charitably and effectively as possible. But now we must also carefully and
critically consider three classical worries about it: (i) a worry about the intelligibility and
workability of Kant’s moral criterion of universalizability, (ii) a worry about the over-
strictness and excessive universality of Kantian moral principles, aka Kant’s rigorism, and
(iii) a worry about contradictory conflicts between so-called “strict” or “perfect” duties, aka
moral dilemmas. Let’s look at these worries one-by-one.

1. The intelligibility and workability of Kant’s moral criterion of universalizability.

As I mentioned above, The Universal Law Formulation says that nothing will
count as a morally permissible maxim (i.e., as a first-person-centered principle of
volition, or act-intention) unless it consistently generalizes. A prima facie problem in this
connection is that there are troublesome maxims, of at least three different kinds.

First, let’s consider the maxim,

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I ought to play tennis on Sundays when everyone else is in church,

and then consider its generalization,

Everyone ought always to play tennis on Sundays when everyone else is in

church.

This seems morally perfectly acceptable, yet it’s not consistently generalizable because
then everyone would be on the tennis courts, instead of in church, which would make it
impossible for everyone to play tennis. So not every morally permissible maxim is
consistently generalizable.

Second, let’s consider the maxim,

I ought to be the last person off a sinking ship,

and then consider its generalization,

Everyone ought always to be the last person off a sinking ship.

This again seems not only morally perfectly acceptable but also even in some contexts
morally obligatory—for example, if you’re the captain of the ship, or even if you’re not
the captain but everyone else on the ship is a sick person or otherwise especially
vulnerable—yet it’s not consistently generalizable, because then no one could ever be
the last person if everyone were always trying to be the last person. So again, not every
morally permissible maxim is consistently generalizable, but even worse, some maxims
that in some contexts are morally obligatory, aren’t consistently generalizable.

Third, let’s consider the maxim,

I ought to be an egoistic liar in a world populated exclusively by egoistic liars,

and then consider its generalization,

Everyone ought to be an egoistic liar in a world populated exclusively by egoistic

liars.

Strictly speaking, this is consistently generalizable—we’d simply all be (un)happy little

egoistic liars together—but obviously it’s not morally permissible. So some consistently
generalizable maxims are morally impermissible.
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How could Kant, or anyhow a Kantian, reply to the troublesome maxim

problem? The obvious problem with the troublesome maxims is that the formulation of
the worry presupposes something that’s obviously false, namely, that for every maxim
there is one and only one relevant generalization. In fact, on the contrary, for every maxim
there are at least two substantively different—and in particular, logically non-equivalent—ways
of generalizing them. For convenience, let’s call that The Law of Multiple Generalizations.

So, holding The Law of Multiple Generalizations before us, let’s look again at the
first troublesome maxim,

I ought to play tennis on Sundays when everyone else is in church,

and now consider a non-equivalent alternative generalization of it,

Anyone, in a world populated by lots of other people who are Sunday church-
goers, and also by a few non-church-going tennis enthusiasts, ought always to
play tennis on Sundays with some other non-church going tennis enthusiasts, on
any one or another of the tennis courts that are left empty by all the church-
goers,

which is perfectly logically and conceptually consistent. Now all we need to do, in view
of The Law of Multiple Generalizations, is to assert the general thesis that a maxim is
consistently generalizable if and only if at least one of its relevant generalizations is logically
and conceptually consistent, and that neatly avoids the prima facie difficulty raised by that
maxim.

Correspondingly, let’s look again at the second troublesome maxim, which says

I ought to be the last person off a sinking ship,

and consider the following non-equivalent alternative generalization of it,

Anyone, in a world populated by a sinking ship and other people

(including crew, passengers, stowaways, etc.) on the ship who all desire
not to drown and therefore want to get off that ship as quickly as possible,
ought always to be the last person off that ship,

which is also perfectly logically and conceptually consistent. Therefore, the second
maxim also falls directly under our general thesis that a maxim is consistently
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generalizable if and only if at least one of its relevant generalizations is logically and
conceptually consistent, and the prima facie difficulty with it is also neatly avoided.

Finally, let’s look again at the third troublesome maxim,

I ought to be an egoistic liar in a world populated exclusively by egoistic liars,

and consider the following non-equivalent alternative generalization of it,

Anyone who’s really a non-egoistic truth-teller, even though he may sometimes

be strongly tempted to act like an egoistic liar, ought to live in a world populated
exclusively by people who really are egoistic liars,

which is clearly logically and conceptually inconsistent, since by hypothesis he’s not an
egoistic liar but on the contrary a non-egoistic truth-teller, yet the world he would
supposedly live in contains nothing but people who really are egoistic liars.
Generalizing, from this result, in view of The Law of Multiple Generalizations, all we
need to do is to hold the general thesis that a maxim is not consistently generalizable if
and only if at least one of its relevant generalizations is logically and conceptually
inconsistent, and that also neatly avoids the prima facie problem raised by that maxim.

Another prima facie problem about Kant’s moral criterion of universalizability

concerns its epistemic indeterminacy. The epistemic indeterminacy problem has two sub-
problems.

First, Kant says explicitly that some maxims that turn out not to be consistently
generalizable, do so by virtue of the fact that their generalization leads to a
“contradiction in conception,” which means that they’re logically or conceptually
inconsistent, whereas other maxims that turn out not to be consistently generalizable do
so by virtue of the fact that their generalization leads to a “contradiction in willing,”
which aren’t logical or conceptual contradictions. But what’s the difference between the
two kinds of contradiction? If we can’t spell out the difference clearly and distinctly,
then the moral criterion of universalizability is epistemically indeterminate, that is: then
we can’t know how to apply the criterion.

Let’s look at some examples of the first sub-problem. If we consider the maxim,

I ought to be an egoistic liar in a world populated exclusively by non-egoistic

truth-tellers,
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and then consider its generalization,

Everyone ought always to be an egoistic liar in a world populated exclusively by

non-egoistic truth-tellers,

then that’s obviously logically or conceptually inconsistent, aka it’s a contradiction in

conception: for if anyone were an egoistic liar in that world, then there wouldn’t be
nothing but non-egoistic truth-tellers in that world, but that’s contrary to hypothesis,
which says that the world has to be filled exclusively with non-egoistic truth-tellers.
Again, let’s look at the maxim,

I ought to spend my life refusing charity to others in a world populated by many

other people who are needy and vulnerable, including being mortally
threatened,74 even though I’m comparatively well-off,

and then consider its generalization,

Everyone ought always to refuse charity to others in a world populated by many

other people who are needy and vulnerable, including being mortally
threatened, even though they (i.e., the charity-refusers) are comparatively well-
off,

then there’s clearly no logical or conceptual contradiction in that: but what does it mean
to say that it’s a “contradiction in willing?” Here’s what. Given the generalization of
that maxim, it’s obvious that I’m laying a fatal trap for myself, practically speaking: for
insofar as I myself ever become needy and/or vulnerable, including being mortally
threatened, and want someone else’s charity, then I’m up the creek without a paddle. In
other words, I’m saying,

Help me, I’m starving! (or whatever), but no one should ever provide charity.

Therefore, Kant’s contradictions in willing are simply what are nowadays called
“pragmatic contradictions,” which are not logical or conceptual inconsistencies within
the explicit content of what’s said, but instead are inconsistencies between what’s implicit in
my act of utterance and the explicit content of what’s said by me—in this case my plea for
charity for myself, together with an explicit ban on all charity.

Second, another epistemic indeterminacy sub-problem arises when we realize

that there are different descriptions of the same human body-movement with
categorically different moral values, such that under one description, that body-
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movement is morally permissible, but under the other description, it’s morally
impermissible. For example, suppose that I suddenly move my arm in such a way that
my clenched hand makes forcible contact with another physical object. So,
corresponding to that, consider the maxim,

I ought to move my arm suddenly in such a way that my clenched hand makes
forcible contact with another physical object.

Now clearly, any number of generalizations of that would be logically or conceptually

consistent, and therefore morally permissible. But as the saying goes, “my right to move
my arm freely ends with your nose,” so then what about the maxim,

I ought to sucker-punch some innocent person in the nose,

which also correctly describes the very same human body-movement? Clearly, that’s
morally impermissible, and it’s easy to formulate a generalization of it that’s either
logically or conceptually inconsistent, or a pragmatic contradiction. But how are we to
know which is the relevant maxim?

Here I think that we can follow the same overall strategy as in the case of the
troublesome maxims problem, and note that the problem arises if and only if we make
the false presupposition that for every human body movement there is one and only one
relevant maxim. In fact, on the contrary, for every human body-movement there are at least
two substantively different—and in particular, logically non-equivalent—ways of describing
them in maxims. For convenience, let’s call that The Law of Multiple Maxims. And now, in
view of The Law of Multiple Maxims, all we need to do is to assert the general thesis
that a given human body-movement is morally impermissible if and only if at least one of its
relevant maxims is such that at least one its relevant generalization is either logically and
conceptually inconsistent, or pragmatically inconsistent, and that also neatly avoids the
second prima facie problem about epistemic indeterminacy.

2. The over-strictness and excessive universality of Kantian moral principles, aka Kant’s
“rigorism.”

Quite apart from Kant’s or Kantian moral theory, looking at the various facts and
phenomena of human moral life, we’ll naturally wonder whether it’s always wrong to
lie? And in all likelihood, we’ll answer: no, it’s not always wrong to lie, citing, for
example, so-called “white” or trivial lies that harm no one, and also “polite” lies that
spare people’s feelings. Indeed—as we’ll see shortly—there are also some actual or
really possible situations in which, arguably, it’s morally obligatory to lie. Similarly, we’ll
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naturally wonder whether it’s always wrong to commit suicide? And correspondingly,
in all likelihood, we’ll answer: no, it’s not always wrong to commit suicide, perhaps citing
cases like that of Stephan and Edith Körner. Indeed, there may well also be some actual
or really possible situations in which it’s morally obligatory to commit suicide, perhaps
citing a minor variant on Bernard Williams’s case of Jim the South American Traveller,
mentioned in section V.2.2, which I’ll call Jim the South American Traveller Redux. In
Jim the South American Traveller Redux, again for reasons of life-defining personal
integrity, Jim chooses to commit suicide (perhaps by putting himself forward to be shot
by the cruel police officer, hence a case of suicide-by-police), instead of being forced to kill
one Indian, even in order to save nineteen other Indians. In view of such and similar
answers and examples, this is sometimes also called the problem of Kant’s rigorism.

One simple response that Kant, or at least a Kantian, can make to this prima facie
difficulty is, as I’ve noted above, to point out that Kant’s terminology is extremely
misleading and that Kant’s so-called “strict” or “perfect” duties are in fact only blah
blah, period duties, namely, moral obligations for us to consider them in every situation in
which it’s really possible for human persons to choose and act. And that’s perfectly
consistent with its being at least sometimes morally permissible, or even morally obligatory, to
lie or commit suicide. Indeed, now looking back at our discussion of moral relativism in
section II.1, the Kantian can also quite consistently say that for every blah blah, period
duty, there is a fairly universal and objective moral principle corresponding it, as per the
following two principles: (i) other things being equal, it’s always wrong to lie, but if other
things aren’t equal in some historical context, then it’s really possible for it to be either
morally permissible or even morally obligatory to lie, and (ii) other things being equal, it’s
always wrong to commit suicide, but if other things aren’t equal in some historical context,
then it’s really possible for it to be either morally permissible or even morally obligatory
to commit suicide. So the prima facie worry about Kant’s rigorism can be avoided.

3. Contradictory conflicts between so-called “strict” or “perfect” duties, aka “moral dilemmas.”

So-called “strict” or “perfect” duties, in historical contexts, sometimes lead to

moral dilemmas, aka moral contradictions, and (so goes the worry) any moral theory that
leads to moral dilemmas or contradictions must be rejected, therefore Kant’s moral theory
must be rejected. Consider, for example , the famous fictional case of The Murderer at
the Door, that Kant himself considered in a philosophically unfortunate 1797 essay
called “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy,” which discusses whether

it would be [morally impermissible] to lie to a murderer who asked whether a friend of

ours whom he is pursuing has taken refuge in our house;75
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but in more recent versions, the moral thought-experiment concerns whether it’s
morally impermissible to lie to a Nazi murderer who shows up at your door and
demands to know whether Anne Frank is hiding in your house (and she is), hence it’s
sometimes called The Nazi at the Door. In any case, the prima facie moral contradiction
between so-called “strict” or “perfect” duties is between, on the one hand, the duty to
tell the truth, and on the other, the duty to protect rational human life—in this case,
someone else’s life.

Another example to consider is real-world, and concerns Cassie Bernall,76 an 18

year old born-again Christian high-schooler, who, during The Columbine High School
Massacre77 in 1999 (reportedly—twenty-one years later, this remains highly
controversial), was asked by the mass murderers Eric Harris and Dylan Kliebold
whether she believed in God, and then was shot and killed by them when she said
“yes.” To make this case exceptionally vivid, consider the following CCTV picture:

In 2000, Bernall’s mother published a book called She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of
Cassie Bernall—so I’ll call this case The High School Massacre Martyr. Like the case of
Stephan and Edith Körner, the case of The High School Massacre Martyr has special
emotional force and poignancy for me. When I was teaching one version of the course
on which this book is based in Fall 1999 and discussing The High School Massacre
Martyr in class, one of my students suddenly burst into tears, completely distraught
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and clearly traumatized. Then, sobbing uncontrollably, she told us all that she’d been a
classmate of Bernall’s at Columbine, and a friend of hers, and had only narrowly
escaped being killed herself that day. For me and the other students, it was one of those
real-world, Thomas-Whitaker-like, epiphanies about morality and the human condition,
and, to put it mildly, a class-stopper.

In the case of The High School Massacre Martyr, again, the prima facie
contradiction between so-called “strict” or perfect duties is between, on the one hand,
the duty to tell the truth, and on the other, the duty to protect rational human life. But
in this particular case, even leaving aside its emotional force and poignancy, not only
(i) does the issue of life-defining personal integrity come into play, as in Jim the South
American Traveler Redux, hence also the real possibility of Bernall’s death being a case
of suicide-by-mass-killers, but also, (ii) because in this case the duty to protect rational
human life obviously applies directly to Bernall’s own life, the issue of what I’ll call a
moral right to lie in self-defense also comes into play. What could a Kantian (other than the
76 year old Kant, that is, who already unfortunately had his say in “On A Supposed
Right to Lie from Philanthropy”) say in response to this worry in general, and to these
very hard cases in particular?

Common sense moral judgment clearly and distinctly says that in The Murderer
at the Door/The Nazi at the Door, it’s not only morally permissible, but perhaps even also
morally obligatory to lie to the murderer/Nazi murderer. And common sense moral
judgment also says that, although perhaps slightly less clearly and distinctly, that in
The High School Massacre Martyr, it’s not only morally permissible for Bernall to lie in
self-defense, but also morally permissible for her to tell the truth for reasons of life-
defining personal integrity, and perhaps even also morally obligatory for her to do so,
given her born-again Christianity. I myself am with common sense moral judgment on
these claims.

But the crucial thing for us to see, is that all of those common sense moral
judgments are fully consistent with the Kantian responses to the moral rigorism worry
that I sketched above, as extended to the moral dilemmas worry, according to the
following argument:

(1) Kant’s terminology is extremely misleading and Kant’s so-called “strict” or

“perfect” duties are in fact only blah blah, period duties, namely, moral
obligations for us to consider them in every situation in which it’s really possible
for human persons to choose and act.
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(2) That’s perfectly consistent with its being at least sometimes morally
permissible, or even morally obligatory, to lie or commit suicide.

(3) For every blah blah, period duty, there is a fairly universal and objective moral
principle corresponding to it, and three of these fairly universal and objective
moral principles are:

(3a) other things being equal, it’s always wrong to lie, but if other things aren’t
equal in some historical context, then it’s really possible for it to be either
morally permissible or even morally obligatory to lie,

(3b) other things being equal, it’s always wrong to commit suicide, but if other
things aren’t equal in some historical context, then it’s really possible for it
to be either morally permissible or even morally obligatory to commit
suicide, and

(3c) other things being equal, it’s always morally permissible to act in self-
defense, including telling a lie in order to save oneself from being murdered, but
if other things aren’t equal in some historical context, even when acting in
self-defense and lying in order to save oneself from being murdered are
indeed morally permissible, then it’s also really possible for it to be either
morally permissible or even morally obligatory to tell the truth and be a
martyr.

(4) Therefore, Kant’s or at least Kantian moral theory can smoothly accommodate
all cases like The Murder at the Door/The Nazi at the Door, and The High
School Massacre Martyr without leading to moral contradictions, and the worry
about moral dilemmas is thereby avoided.78

V.4 All-Things-Considered Conclusion of This Chapter

Looking back now at our critical discussions of Aristotelian virtue ethics, Millian
utilitarianism, and Kant’s ethics of persons and principles, all things considered, I
conclude that Kant’s ethics of persons and principles is on the whole superior to
Aristotelian virtue ethics and Millian utilitarianism alike. We’ve already gone through
the basic arguments for and against the three classical moral theories, so I won’t reprise
those. But the essential reason for the on-the-whole superiority of Kant’s ethics of
persons and principles, which I think isn’t generally noticed, is this: All the standard
objections to Aristotelian virtue ethics and to Millian utilitarianism can be fully
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conceded, and at the same time the core truths of those views (namely, the moral
significance of virtue, happiness, benefits-based moral reasoning, and consequences)
can in fact all be accommodated and included, as fairly universal and objective moral
principles, within an overall Kantian moral theory of persons and principles.

—Of course, you’re perfectly free to disagree with me!, and, as reasonable
people, we can also freely agree to disagree, as a “normal condition” of philosophical, and
especially moral-philosophical, discussion. So let’s move on.
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Chapter VI. Pascal’s Realistic Optimism and Schopenhauer’s

Pessimism

So, where are we now?

So far, we’ve carefully and critically looked at (i) the standard conception of
morality (chapter II), (ii) three classical challenges to the standard conception (chapter
III): (iia) moral relativism, (iib) moral skepticism, and (iic) psychological and moral
egoism, (iii) the connection between morality and religion (chapter IV), and (iii) three
classical moral theories (chapter V): (iiia) Aristotelian virtue ethics (section V.1), (iiib)
Millian utilitarianism (section V.2), and (iiic) Kant’s morality of persons and principles
(section V.3). And we did all this in order to provide some answers to what I’ve been
calling the moral question: “Is morality possible, and if so, then how ought we to live?”
What I’ve argued is (i) that the standard conception of morality can be vindicated in the
face of the three classical challenges to it, (ii) that even though God isn’t the answer to
the moral question, nevertheless the question of the existence or non-existence of an
essentially rational God remains an open one, (iii) that Moderate Secularism is the prima
facie best approach to correctly understanding the connection between religion and
morality, and (iv) that, all things considered, Kant’s morality of persons and principles
is on-the-whole superior to Aristotelian virtue ethics and Millian utilitarianism alike.

Now we’re going to shift philosophical gears and focus on the meaning
question: “Does life have meaning, and if so, then how can we live meaningful lives?”

VI.1 Pascal’s Realistic Optimism About The Meaning of Life

To start the ball rolling on this issue, I want to jump into our TARDIS again, travel back
to the 17th century, and consider a short text, lifted from Blaise Pascal’s most famous
work, his 1670 Pensées, that’s generally—and, as I’ll argue shortly, quite mistakenly—
called “The Wager,” but should have been called somewhat less pithily, but far more
accurately, Realistic Optimism About the Meaning of Life. Bounded in a nutshell, in this
text Pascal argues (i) that yes, life has meaning, (ii) that God, as essentially rational and
the highest good, is that meaning, hence God is the meaning of life, (iii) that, as rational
but ineluctably finite and “human, all-too-human” (i.e., ignorant and sinful) animals, we
can’t possibly either know God’s nature, or know or prove whether or not God exists,
hence we do not have a sufficient reason either for knowing or believing that God exists, or for
knowing or believing that God does not exist, but also (iv) that we do have sufficient reason
for living in a realistically optimistic way, that is, in full recognition of our finitude and
humanness, living as if we believed that an essentially rational God exists, therefore (v) that
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our lives have meaning precisely insofar as, and precisely to the extent that, we live in a
realistically optimistic way.

It’s crucial to note here that Pascal’s realistic optimism is radically different from
Leibniz’s unrealistic optimism, according to which this actual world is the best of all possible
worlds (see section IV.2)—which is nothing but (as Voltaire rightly insisted) a cruel joke.
This is because Pascal’s realistic optimism holds even if we hold—as I think we must—
that this actual world is very far from being the best of all possible worlds, hence this actual
world, especially including us, is thoroughly non-ideal: i.e., it’s a complete mess. Even so,
here we are, for better or worse, and generally for the worse, but still possibly for the
better: therefore, we have no rational choice but to deal with this actual world as best
we can, according to our conception of the highest good, i.e., of an essentially rational
God—that’s Pascal’s realistic optimism.

Here are the relevant parts of the so-called “Wager.”

Infinite — nothing. — Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time,
dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature, necessity, and can believe
nothing else.

Unity joined to infinity adds nothing to it, no more than one foot to an infinite measure.
The finite is annihilated in the presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothing. So
our spirit before God, so our justice before divine justice. There is not so great a
disproportion between our justice and that of God, as between unity and infinity.

….

We know that there is an infinite, and are ignorant of its nature. As we know it to be
false that numbers are finite, it is therefore true that there is an infinity in number. But
we do not know what it is. It is false that it is even, it is false that it is odd; for the
addition of a unit can make no change in its nature. Yet it is a number, and every
number is odd or even (this is certainly true of every finite number). So we may well
know that there is a God without knowing what He is.

Is there not one substantial truth, seeing there are so many things which are not the
truth itself?

We know then the existence and nature of the finite, because we also are finite and have
extension. We know the existence of the infinite, and are ignorant of its nature, because
it has extension like us, but not limits like us. But we know neither the existence nor the
nature of God, because He has neither extension nor limits.
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But by faith we know His existence; in glory we shall know His nature. Now, I have
already shown that we may well know the existence of a thing, without knowing
its nature.

Let us now speak according to natural lights.

If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor

limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if
He is. This being so, who will dare to undertake the decision of the question? Not we,
who have no affinity to Him.

Who then will blame Christians for not being able to give a reason for their belief, since
they profess a religion for which they cannot give a reason? They declare, in
expounding it to the world, that it is a foolishness, stultitiam; and then you complain
that they do not prove it! If they proved it, they would not keep their word; it is in
lacking proofs, that they are not lacking in sense. “Yes, but although this excuses those
who offer it as such, and takes away from them the blame of putting it forward without
reason, it does not excuse those who receive it.” Let us then examine this point, and say,
“God is, or He is not.” But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing
here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the
extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you
wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according
to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.

Do not then reprove for error those who have made a choice; for you know nothing
about it. “No, but I blame them for having made, not this choice, but a choice; for again
both he who chooses heads and he who chooses tails are equally at fault, they are both
in the wrong. The true course is not to wager at all.”

Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose
then? Let us see.

Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose,
the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your
knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and
misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you
must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh
the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you
gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He
is. — “That is very fine. Yes, I must wager; but I may perhaps wager too much.” — Let us
see. Since there is an equal risk of gain and of loss, if you had only to gain two lives,
instead of one, you might still wager. But if there were three lives to gain, you would
have to play (since you are under the necessity of playing), and you would be
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imprudent, when you are forced to play, not to chance your life to gain three at a game
where there is an equal risk of loss and gain. But there is an eternity of life and
happiness. And this being so, if there were an infinity of chances, of which one only
would be for you, you would still be right in wagering one to win two, and you would
act stupidly, being obliged to play, by refusing to stake one life against three at a game
in which out of an infinity of chances there is one for you, if there were an infinity of an
infinitely happy life to gain. But there is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to
gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is
finite. It is all divided; wherever the infinite is and there is not an infinity of chances of
loss against that of gain, there is no time to hesitate, you must give all. And thus, when
one is forced to play, he must renounce reason to preserve his life, rather than risk it for
infinite gain, as likely to happen as the loss of nothingness.

For it is no use to say it is uncertain if we will gain, and it is certain that we risk, and
that the infinite distance between the certainty of what is staked and the uncertainty of
what will be gained, equals the finite good which is certainly staked against the
uncertain infinite. It is not so, as every player stakes a certainty to gain an uncertainty,
and yet he stakes a finite certainty to gain a finite uncertainty, without transgressing
against reason. There is not an infinite distance between the certainty staked and the
uncertainty of the gain; that is untrue. In truth, there is an infinity between the certainty
of gain and the certainty of loss. But the uncertainty of the gain is proportioned to the
certainty of the stake according to the proportion of the chances of gain and loss. Hence
it comes that, if there are as many risks on one side as on the other, the course is to play
even; and then the certainty of the stake is equal to the uncertainty of the gain, so far is
it from fact that there is an infinite distance between them. And so our proposition is of
infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of
gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain. This is demonstrable; and if men are capable of
any truths, this is one.

“I confess it, I admit it. But, still, is there no means of seeing the faces of the cards?” —
Yes, Scripture and the rest, etc. “Yes, but I have my hands tied and my mouth closed; I
am forced to wager, and am not free. I am not released, and am so made that I cannot
believe. What, then, would you have me do?”

True. But at least learn your inability to believe, since reason brings you to this, and yet
you cannot believe. Endeavour then to convince yourself, not by increase of proofs of
God, but by the abatement of your passions. You would like to attain faith, and do not
know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it.
Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions.
These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an
ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if
they believed, taking the holy water, having masses said, etc. Even this will naturally
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make you believe, and deaden your acuteness. — “But this is what I am afraid of.” —
And why? What have you to lose?

But to show you that this leads you there, it is this which will lessen the passions, which
are your stumbling-blocks.

The end of this discourse. — Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will
be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. Certainly you
will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have
others? I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you
take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what
you risk, that you will at last recognise that you have wagered for something certain
and infinite, for which you have given nothing.

“Ah! This discourse transports me, charms me,” etc.

If this discourse pleases you and seems impressive, know that it is made by a man who
has knelt, both before and after it, in prayer to that Being, infinite and without parts,
before whom he lays all he has, for you also to lay before Him all you have for your
own good and for His glory, that so strength may be given to lowliness.79

And here’s my step-by-step rational reconstruction of Pascal’s argument for

realistic optimism about the meaning of life, which, for short—I’ll call Pascal’s Realistic
Optimism.

(1) We’re embodied, hence finite and “human, all-too-human,” yet also rational,
animals in space and time, both of them mathematically structured and infinite.

(2) So, as rational human animals, we’re finite beings in the face of the
mathematical infinite, in comparison to which we’re reduced virtually to
nothingness.
(3) God too, as the highest good, the ground of morality, and the meaning of life,
especially including rational human life, is infinite.

(4) But our disproportion to God’s nature, as the highest good, as the ground of
morality, and as the meaning of rational human life, is not as vast as the
disproportion between the number one and infinity, since we’re endowed with
rational capacities.

(5) We know that the mathematical infinite exists, because we know that there is
no greatest finite number.
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(6) Yet we do know not what the nature of the mathematical infinite is, given our
finite minds.

(7) But in the case of God, we are necessarily ignorant not only of what God’s
nature is, but also of whether God exists or does not exist, precisely because God
is a non-spatial, non-temporal, absolutely infinite being — the highest good, the
ground of morality, and the meaning of life—especially rational human life—all
rolled up into one being, and we are merely embodied finite beings and “human,
all-too-human.”

(8) Still, even if we cannot know that God exists or that God does not exist, we
can still have faith in God, that is, believe in God, that is, believe in a highest good,
the ground of morality, and the meaning of life especially including rational
human life, without a sufficient reason that would logically justify a claim either
to knowledge or to belief that God exists.

(9) Thus, as far as either our knowledge of God’s existence or non-existence, or

our belief that God exists or does not exist, is concerned, we must be radically
agnostic,80 that is, the one thing that we do know about all this, is that we cannot
either know that God exists or does not exist, or believe that God exists or does
not exist, with sufficient justification, one way or the other.

(10) Yet our need for faith in and belief-in a highest good, and our need for our
rational human lives to have meaning, drives us inexorably to the many-headed
question: does God exist or not exist?, is there a highest good in this world or
not?, is there a ground morality or not?, does life especially including rational
human life have meaning or not?, heads or tails?

(11) It’s as if we were forced to gamble literally everything that fundamentally

matters to us as rational human animals on a single coin toss, when all that we
really know is that we cannot know what the outcome of our wager will be.

(12) Given what’s at stake, then, it’s far far better not to gamble at all.

(13) Rational human life is not a mere game that you can decline to play: the
question of faith in or belief-in God vs. the rejection of all such faith in or belief-
in—i.e., existential and moral skepticism to the point of nihilism—and the intense
anxiety that accompanies our need to resolve this question, necessarily drive us
to choose one way or the other.
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(14) In other words, to think of this as a mere bet or wager is absolutely absurd and
fundamentally self-stultifying: that is, it would be absolutely absurd and
fundamentally self-stultifying for us to try to calculate whether it would be more
in my rational self-interest to choose to have faith in or belief-in God’s existence,
or not — after all, it is the eternal salvation of my soul and the difference between

(14i) a world and a life with a highest good, a ground of morality, and
meaning, in them, on the one hand, and

(14ii) existential and moral nihilism, on the other,

that is at issue, a choice that has essentially nothing to do with rational self-interest
and calculation.

(15) In view of radical agnosticism and the self-evident abject failure of any
attempt to apply probabilistic, self-interested reasoning to the most important
question about our rational human existence — and in the face of our intense
anxiety about the question of God, and added to that, the bracing fact of
pervasive natural and moral evil, and The Metaphysical Argument for Atheism from
the Fact of Evil81—the only rational alternative is to act as if you believed that God
exists, which is the same as to have faith in and belief-in God’s existence, which is the
same as living in a realistically optimistic way.

(16) For to live in a realistically optimistic way is precisely to demonstrate, by

means of our actions themselves, that which cannot be known, believed with
sufficient justification, or logically proved, one way or the other.

(17) Therefore, precisely insofar as, and precisely to the extent that, we live in a
realistically optimistic way, then our lives have meaning.

Something that needs to be specially re-emphasized, before moving on, is just

how infinitely far the rational reconstruction of Pascal’s famous text that I’ve just
presented is from the standard reading of that text as a wager, that is, as an application
of rational decision theory and probabilistic reasoning to the debate between theists and
atheists. The standard reading, in effect, treats Pascal’s argument as nothing but a
theological video game for rational decision theorists, as it were, Las Vegas in the Sky
with Diamonds. —To which my considered response, as the character Raoul Duke in Fear
and Loathing in Las Vegas (I mean the 1998 film directed by Terry Gilliam, based on the
1971 Hunter S. Thompson novel) so aptly observes, is: “What the heck82 are these people
talking about?”
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VI.2 Schopenhauer’s Pessimism About The Meaning of Life

Now let’s jump ahead TARDIS-wise to the 19th century again. The philosophical
antithesis of Pascal’s realistic optimism (and of Leibniz’s unrealistic optimism), is the
view presented by Arthur Schopenhauer in his astonishing essay, “On the Sufferings of
the World.” For your reading enjoyment—or if not that, then at least for your reading
astonishment—here’s the complete text of Schopenhauer’s little essay, available for
universal free-sharing by courtesy of the Gutenberg Project.

Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely
fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds
everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life
itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate
misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune in
general is the rule.

I know of no greater absurdity than that propounded by most systems of philosophy in

declaring evil to be negative in its character. Evil is just what is positive; it makes its
own existence felt. Leibniz is particularly concerned to defend this absurdity, and he
seeks to strengthen his position by using a palpable and paltry sophism. It is the good
which is negative; in other words, happiness and satisfaction always imply some desire
fulfilled, some state of pain brought to an end.

This explains the fact that we generally find pleasure to be not nearly so pleasant as we
expected, and pain very much more painful.

The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is
an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this
statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which
is engaged in eating the other.

The best consolation in misfortune or affliction of any kind will be the thought of other
people who are in a still worse plight than yourself, and this is a form of consolation
open to every one. But what an awful fate this means for mankind as a whole!

We are like lambs in a field, disporting themselves under the eye of the butcher, who
chooses out first one and then another for his prey. So it is that in our good days we are
all unconscious of the evil Fate may have presently in store for us—sickness, poverty,
mutilation, loss of sight or reason.

No little part of the torment of existence lies in this, that Time is continually pressing
upon us, never letting us take breath, but always coming after us, like a taskmaster with
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a whip. If at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to
the misery of boredom.

But misfortune has its uses; for, as our bodily frame would burst asunder if the pressure
of the atmosphere was removed, so, if the lives of men were relieved of all need,
hardship, and adversity, if everything they took in hand were successful, they would be
so swollen with arrogance that, though they might not burst, they would present the
spectacle of unbridled folly—nay, they would go mad. And I may say, further, that a
certain amount of care or pain or trouble is necessary for every man at all times. A ship
without ballast is unstable and will not go straight.

Certain it is that work, worry, labor, and trouble form the lot of almost all men their whole
life long. But if all wishes were fulfilled as soon as they arose, how would men occupy
their lives? What would they do with their time? If the world were a paradise of luxury
and ease, a land flowing with milk and honey, where every Jack obtained his Jill at once
and without any difficulty, men would either die of boredom or hang themselves; or
there would be wars, massacres, and murders, so that in the end mankind would inflict
more suffering on itself than it has now to accept at the hands of Nature.

In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theater
before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play
to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we
foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners,
condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence
means. Nevertheless, every man desires to reach old age; in other words, a state of life
of which it may be said: “It is bad today, and it will be worse tomorrow; and so on till
the worst of all.”

If you try to imagine, as nearly as you can, what an amount of misery, pain, and
suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would
be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the
phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state.

Again, you may look upon life as an unprofitable episode, disturbing the blessed calm
of nonexistence. And, in any case, even though things have gone with you tolerably
well, the longer you live the more clearly you will feel that, on the whole, life is a
disappointment, nay, a cheat.

If two men who were friends in their youth meet again when they are old, after being
separated for a lifetime, the chief feeling they will have at the sight of each other will be
one of complete disappointment at life as a whole, because their thoughts will be
carried back to that earlier time when life seemed so fair as it lay spread out before
them in the rosy light of dawn, promised so much—and then performed so little. This
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feeling will so completely predominate over every other that they will not even
consider it necessary to give it words; but on either side it will be silently assumed, and
form the groundwork of all they have to talk about.

He who lives to see two or three generations is like a man who sits some time in the
conjurer’s booth at a fair, and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession.
The tricks were meant to be seen only once, and when they are no longer a novelty and
cease to deceive, their effect is gone.

While no man is much to be envied for his lot, there are countless numbers whose fate
is to be deplored.

Life is a task to be done. It is a fine thing to say defunctus est; it means that the man has
done his task.

If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the
human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the
coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon
himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?

I shall be told, I suppose, that my philosophy is comfortless—because I speak the truth,

and people prefer to be assured that everything the Lord has made is good. Go to the
priests, then, and leave philosophers in peace! At any rate, do not ask us to
accommodate our doctrines to the lessons you have been taught. That is what those
rascals of sham philosophers will do for you. Ask them for any doctrine you please, and
you will get it. Your University professors are bound to preach optimism, and it is an
easy and agreeable task to upset their theories.

I have reminded the reader that every state of welfare, every feeling of satisfaction, is
negative in its character; that is to say, it consists in freedom from pain, which is the
positive element of existence. It follows, therefore, that the happiness of any given life is
to be measured, not by its joys and pleasures, but by the extent to which it has been free
from suffering—from positive evil. If this is the true standpoint, the lower animals
appear to enjoy a happier destiny than man. Let us examine the matter a little more
closely.

However varied the forms that human happiness and misery may take, leading a man
to seek the one and shun the other, the material basis of it all is bodily pleasure or
bodily pain. This basis is very restricted: it is simply health, food, protection from wet
and cold, and the satisfaction of the sexual instinct; or else the absence of these things.
Consequently, as far as real physical pleasure is concerned, the man is not better off
than the brute, except in so far as the higher possibilities of his nervous system make
him more sensitive to every kind of pleasure, but also, it must be remembered, to every
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kind of pain. But then compared with the brute, how much stronger are the passions
aroused in him! What an immeasurable difference there is in the depth and vehemence
of his emotions! And yet, in the one case, as in the other, all to produce the same result
in the end: namely, health, food, clothing, and so on.

The chief source of all this passion is that thought for what is absent and future, which,
with man, exercises such a powerful influence upon all he does. It is this that is the real
origin of his cares, his hopes, his fears—emotions which affect him much more deeply
than could ever be the case with those present joys and sufferings to which the brute is
confined. In his powers of reflection, memory, and foresight, man possesses, as it were,
a machine for condensing and storing up his pleasures and his sorrows. But the brute
has nothing of the kind; whenever it is in pain, it is as though it were suffering for the
first time, even though the same thing should have previously happened to it times out
of number. It has no power of summing up its feelings. Hence its careless and placid
temper: how much it is to be envied! But in man reflection comes in, with all the
emotions to which it gives rise; and taking up the same elements of pleasure and pain
which are common to him and the brute, it develops his susceptibility to happiness and
misery to such a degree that at one moment the man is brought in an instant to a state of
delight that may even prove fatal, at another to the depths of despair and suicide.

If we carry our analysis a step farther, we shall find that, in order to increase his
pleasures, man has intentionally added to the number and pressure of his needs, which
in their original state were not much more difficult to satisfy than those of the brute.
Hence luxury in all its forms: delicate food, the use of tobacco and opium, spirituous
liquors, fine clothes, and the thousand and one things that he considers necessary to his
existence.

And above and beyond all this, there is a separate and peculiar source of pleasure, and
consequently of pain, which man has established for himself, also as the result of using
his powers of reflection; and this occupies him out of all proportion to its value, nay,
almost more than all his other interests put together—I mean ambition and the feeling
of honor and shame; in plain words, what he thinks about the opinion other people
have of him. Taking a thousand forms, often very strange ones, this becomes the goal of
almost all the efforts he makes that are not rooted in physical pleasure or pain. It is true
that besides the sources of pleasure which he has in common with the brute, man has
the pleasures of the mind as well. These admit of many gradations, from the most
innocent trifling or the merest talk up to the highest intellectual achieve- ments; but
there is the accompanying boredom to be set against them on the side of suffering.
Boredom is a form of suffering unknown to brutes, at any rate in their natural state; it is
only the very cleverest of them who show faint traces of it when they are domesticated,
whereas in the case of man it has become a down-right scourge. The crowd of miserable
wretches whose one aim in life is to fill their purses but never to put anything into their
heads offers a singular instance of this torment of boredom. Their wealth becomes a
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punishment by delivering them up to misery of having nothing to do; for, to escape it,
they will rush about in all directions, traveling here, there, and everywhere. No sooner
do they arrive in a place than they are anxious to know what amusements it affords, just
as though they were beggars asking where they could receive a dole! Of a truth, need
and boredom are the two poles of human life. Finally, I may mention that as regards the
sexual relation, a man is committed to a peculiar arrangement which drives him
obstinately to choose one person. This feeling grows, now and then, into a more or less
passionate love, which is the source of little pleasure and much suffering.

It is, however, a wonderful thing that the mere addition of thought should serve to raise
such a vast and lofty structure of human happiness and misery, resting, too, on the
same narrow basis of joy and sorrow as man holds in common with the brute, and
exposing him to such violent emotions, to so many storms of passion, so much
convulsion of feeling, that what he has suffered stands written and may be read in the
lines on his face. And yet, when all is told, he has been struggling ultimately for the
very same things as the brute has attained, and with an incomparably smaller
expenditure of passion and pain.

But all this contributes to increase the measures of suffering in human life out of all
proportion to its pleasures; and the pains of life are made much worse for man by the
fact that death is something very real to him. The brute flies from death instinctively
without really knowing what it is, and therefore without ever contemplating it in the
way natural to a man, who has this prospect always before his eyes. So that even if only
a few brutes die a natural death, and most of them live only just long enough to
transmit their species, and then, if not earlier, become the prey of some other animal—
whilst man, on the other hand, manages to make so-called natural death the rule, to
which, however, there are a good many exceptions—the advantage is on the side of the
brute, for the reason stated above. But the fact is that man attains the natural term of
years just as seldom as the brute, because the unnatural way in which he lives, and the
strain of work and emotion, lead to a degeneration of the race; and so his goal is not
often reached.

The brute is much more content with mere existence than man; the plant is wholly so;
and man finds satisfaction in it just in proportion as he is dull and obtuse. Accordingly,
the life of the brute carries less of sorrow with it, but also less of joy, when compared
with the life of man; and while this may be traced, on the one side, to freedom from the
torment of care and anxiety, it is also due to the fact that hope, in any real sense, is
unknown to the brute. It is thus deprived of any share in that which gives us the most
and best of our joys and pleasures, the mental anticipation of a happy future, and the
inspiriting play of fantasy, both of which we owe to our power of imagination. If the
brute is free from care, it is also, in this sense, without hope; in either case, because its
consciousness is limited to the present moment, to what it can actually see before it. The
brute is an embodiment of present impulses, and hence what elements of fear and hope
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exist in its nature—and they do not go very far—arise only in relation to objects that lie
before it and within reach of those impulses; whereas a man’s range of vision embraces
the whole of his life, and extends far into the past and future.

Following upon this, there is one respect in which brutes show real wisdom when
compared with us—I mean, their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment. The
tranquility of mind which this seems to give them often puts us to shame for the many
times we allow our thoughts and our cares to make us restless and discontented. And,
in fact, those pleasures of hope and anticipation which I have been mentioning are not
to be had for nothing. The delight which a man has in hoping for and looking forward
to some special satisfaction is a part of the real pleasure attaching to it enjoyed in
advance. This is afterwards deducted, for the more we look forward to anything, the
less satisfaction we find in it when it comes. But the brute’s enjoyment is not
anticipated, and therefore suffers no deduction, so that the actual pleasure of the
moment comes to it whole and unimpaired. In the same way, too, evil presses upon the
brute only with its own intrinsic weight; whereas with us the fear of its coming often
makes its burden ten times more grievous.

It is just this characteristic way in which the brute gives itself up entirely to the present
moment that contributes so much to the delight we take in our domestic pets. They are
the present moment personified, and in some respects they make us feel the value of
every hour that is free from trouble and annoyance, which we, with our thoughts and
preoccupations, mostly disregard. But man, that selfish and heartless creature, misuses
this quality of the brute to be more content than we are with mere existence, and often
works it to such an extent that he allows the brute absolutely nothing more than mere,
bare life. The bird which was made so that it might rove over half of the world he shuts
up into the space of a cubic foot, there to die a slow death in longing and crying for
freedom; for in a cage it does not sing for the pleasure of it. And when I see how man
misuses the dog, his best friend, how he ties up this intelligent animal with a chain, I
feel the deepest sympathy with the brute and burning indignation against its master.

We shall see later that by taking a very high standpoint it is possible to justify the
sufferings of mankind. But this justification cannot apply to animals, whose sufferings,
while in a great measure brought about by men, are often considerable even apart from
their agency. And so we are forced to ask, Why and for what purpose does all this
torment and agony exist? There is nothing here to give the will pause; it is not free to
deny itself and so obtain redemption. There is only one consideration that may serve to
explain the sufferings of animals. It is this: that the will to live, which underlies the
whole world of phenomena, must in their case satisfy its cravings by feeding upon
itself. This it does by forming a gradation of phenomena, every one of which exists at
the expense of another. I have shown, however, that the capacity for suffering is less in
animals than in man. Any further explanation that may be given of their fate will be in
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the nature of hypothesis, if not actually mythical in its character; and I may leave the
reader to speculate upon the matter for himself.

Brahma is said to have produced the world by a kind of fall or mistake, and in order to
atone for his folly, he is bound to remain in it himself until he works out his
redemption. As an account of the origin of things, that is admirable! According to the
doctrines of Buddhism, the world came into being as the result of some inexplicable
disturbance in the heavenly calm of Nirvana, that blessed state obtained by expiation,
which had endured so long a time—the change taking place by a kind of fatality. This
explanation must be understood as having at bottom some moral bearing, although it is
illustrated by an exactly parallel theory in the domain of physical science, which places
the origin of the sun in a primitive streak of mist, formed one knows not how.
Subsequently, by a series of moral errors, the world became gradually worse and
worse—true of the physical orders as well—until it assumed the dismal aspect it wears
today. Excellent! The Greeks looked upon the world and the gods as the work of an
inscrutable necessity. A passable explanation: we may be content with it until we can
get a better one. Again, Ormuzd and Ahriman are rival powers, continually at war. That
is not bad. But that a God like Jehovah should have created this world of misery and
woe out of pure caprice, and because he enjoyed doing it, and should then have clapped
his hands in praise of his own work, and declared everything to be very good—that will
not do at all! In its explanation of the origin of the world, Judaism is inferior to any
other form of religious doctrine professed by a civilized nation; and it is quite in
keeping with this that it is the only one which presents no trace whatever of any belief
in the immortality of the soul.

Even if Leibniz’s contention, that this is the best of all possible worlds, were correct, that
would not justify God in having created it. For he is the Creator not of the world only,
but of possibility itself; and, therefore, he ought to have so ordered possibility as that it
would admit of something better.

There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the
successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and, at the same time, all-powerful Being:
firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious
imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be.
These things cannot be reconciled with any such belief. On the contrary, they are just
the facts which support what I have been saying; they are our authority for viewing the
world as the outcome of our own misdeeds, and therefore, as something that had better
not have been. Whilst under the former hypothesis they amount to a bitter accusation
against the Creator, and supply material for sarcasm, under the latter they form an in-
dictment against our own nature, our own will, and teach us a lesson of humility. They
lead us to see that, like the children of a libertine, we come into the world with the
burden of sin upon us, and that it is only through having continually to atone for this
sin that our existence is so miserable, and that its end is death.
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There is nothing more certain than the general truth that it is the grievous sin of the
world which has produced the grievous suffering of the world. I am not referring here to
the physical connection between these two things lying in the realm of experience; my
meaning is metaphysical. Accordingly, the sole thing that reconciles me to the Old
Testament is the story of the Fall. In my eyes, it is the only metaphysical truth in that
book, even though it appears in the form of an allegory. There seems to me no better
explanation of our existence than that it is the result of some false step, some sin of
which we are paying the penalty. I cannot refrain from recommending the thoughtful
reader a popular, but at the same time, profound treatise on this subject by Claudius
which exhibits the essentially pessimistic spirit of Christianity. It is entitled: Cursed is the
ground for thy sake.

Between the ethics of the Greeks and the ethics of the Hindus, there is a glaring
contrast. In the one case (with the exception, it must be confessed, of Plato), the object of
ethics is to enable a man to lead a happy life; in the other, it is to free and redeem him
from life altogether—as is directly stated in the very first words of the Sankhya Karika.

Allied with this is the contrast between the Greek and the Christian idea of death. It is
strikingly presented in a visible form on a fine antique sarcophagus in the gallery of
Florence, which exhibits, in relief, the whole series of ceremonies attending a wedding
in ancient times, from the formal offer to the evening when Hymen’s torch lights the
happy couple home. Compare with that the Christian coffin, draped in mournful black
and surmounted with a crucifix! How much significance there is in these two ways of
finding comfort in death. They are opposed to each other, but each is right. The one
points to the affirmation of the will to live, which remains sure of life for all time,
however rapidly its forms may change. The other, in the symbol of suffering and death,
points to the denial of the will to live, to redemption from this world, the domain of
death and devil. And in the question between the affirmation and the denial of the will
to live, Christianity is in the last resort right.

The contrast which the New Testament presents when compared with the Old,
according to the ecclesiastical view of the matter, is just that existing between my ethical
system and the moral philosophy of Europe. The Old Testament represents man as
under the dominion of Law, in which, however, there is no redemption. The New
Testament declares Law to have failed, frees man from its dominion, and in its stead
preaches the kingdom of grace, to be won by faith, love of neighbor, and entire sacrifice
of self. This is the path of redemption from the evil of the world. The spirit of the New
Testament is undoubtedly asceticism, however your protestants and rationalists may
twist it to suit their purpose. Asceticism is the denial of the will to live; and the
transition from the Old Testament to the New, from the dominion of Law to that of
Faith, from justification by works to redemption through the Mediator, from the
domain of sin and death to eternal life in Christ, means, when taken in its real sense, the
transition from the merely moral virtues to the denial of the will to live. My philosophy
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shows the metaphysical foundation of justice and the love of mankind, and points to the
goal to which these virtues necessarily lead, if they are practiced in perfection. At the
same time it is candid in confessing that a man must turn his back upon the world, and
that the denial of the will to live is the way of redemption. It is therefore really at one
with the spirit of the New Testament, whilst all other systems are couched in the spirit
of the Old; that is to say, theoretically as well as practically, their result is Judaism—
mere despotic theism. In this sense, then, my doctrine might be called the only true
Christian philosophy—however paradoxical a statement this may seem to people who
take superficial views instead of penetrating to the heart of the matter.

If you want a safe compass to guide you through life, and to banish all doubt as to the
right way of looking at it, you cannot do better than accustom yourself to regard this
world as a penitentiary, a sort of penal colony, or ergastaerion, as the earliest
philosopher called it. Amongst the Christian Fathers, Origen, with praiseworthy
courage, took this view, which is further justified by certain objective theories of life. I
refer, not to my own philosophy alone, but to the wisdom of all ages, as expressed in
Brahmanism and Buddhism, and in the sayings of Greek philosophers like Empedocles
and Pythagoras; as also by Cicero, in his remark that the wise men of old used to teach
that we come into this world to pay the penalty of a crime committed in another state of
existence—a doctrine which formed part of the initiation into the mysteries. And
Vanini—whom his contemporaries burned, finding that an easier task than to confute
him—puts the same thing in a very forcible way. Man, he says, is so full of every kind of
misery that, were it not repugnant to the Christian religion, I should venture to affirm that if
evil spirits exist at all, they have posed into human form and are now atoning for their crimes.
And true Christianity—using the word in its right sense—also regards our existence as
the consequence of sin and error.

If you accustom yourself to this view of life you will regulate your expectations
accordingly, and cease to look upon all its disagreeable incidents, great and small, its
sufferings, its worries, its misery, as anything unusual or irregular; nay, you will find
that everything is as it should be, in a world where each of us pays the penalty of
existence in his own peculiar way. Amongst the evils of a penal colony is the society of
those who form it; and if the reader is worthy of better company, he will need no words
from me to remind him of what he has to put up with at present. If he has a soul above
the common, or if he is a man of genius, he will occasionally feel like some noble
prisoner of state, condemned to work in the galleys with common criminals, and he will
follow his example and try to isolate himself.

In general, however, it should be said that this view of life will enable us to contemplate
the so-called imperfections of the great majority of men, their moral and intellectual
deficiencies and the resulting base type of countenance, without any surprise, to say
nothing of indignation; for we shall never cease to reflect where we are, and that the
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men about us are beings conceived and born in sin, and living to atone for it. That is
what Christianity means in speaking of the sinful nature of man.

Pardon’s the word to all! Whatever folly men commit, be their shortcomings or their vices
what they may, let us exercise forbearance, remembering that when these faults appear
in others, it is our follies and vices that we behold. They are the shortcomings of
humanity, to which we belong, whose faults, one and all, we share; yes, even those very
faults at which we now wax so indignant, merely because they have not yet appeared in
ourselves. They are faults that do not lie on the surface, but they exist down there in the
depths of our nature, and should anything call them forth they will come and show
themselves, just as we now see them in others. One man, it is true, may have faults that
are absent in his fellow; and it is undeniable that the sum total of bad qualities is in
some cases very large, for the difference of individuality between man and man passes
all measure.

In fact, the conviction that the world and man is something that had better not have
been, is of a kind to fill us with indulgence towards one another. Nay, from this point of
view, we might well consider the proper form of address to be, not Monsieur, Sir, mein
Herr, but my fellow-sufferer, Socî malorum, compagnon de miseres! This may perhaps sound
strange, but it is in keeping with the facts; it puts others in a right light, and it reminds
us of that which is after all the most necessary thing in life—the tolerance, patience,
regard, and love of neighbor of which everyone stands in need, and which, therefore,
every man owes to his fellow.83

I think you’ll agree that, considered purely as a piece of philosophical literary art,
this essay is astonishingly brilliant. But at the same time, Schopenhauer’s argument
itself is very simple; and here’s a brief rational reconstruction of it—

(1) The world is filled with natural evil, moral evil, pain, and suffering: there is
infinitely more bad than good in life, and life is best thought of life as a kind of
penal colony terminating in death.

(2) The will-to-live essentially characterizes all animals, including human

animals, and drives them to seek pleasure and enjoyment and avoid pain and
suffering, but the self-evident fact of the matter is that pain and suffering are to
be found in an infinitely greater quantity.

(3) There are two possible attitudes to take towards the will-to-live: affirmation
and optimism or denial and pessimism.

(4) The correct attitude is denial and pessimism.

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(5) More generally, it’s far better to be a non-rational animal than a rational
human animal or person—and that’s because the non-rational animal cannot
understand that life is fundamentally meaningless.

(6) Finally, to the extent that morality—“the the tolerance, patience, regard, and
love of neighbor of which everyone stands in need, and which, therefore, every
man owes to his fellow”—is possible at all, then it’s grounded ultimately on the
fellowship of sufferers.

VI.3 Pascal or Schopenhauer? Realistic Optimism or Pessimism?

My own view is that Pascal is right, and Schopenhauer is wrong: Pascal’s argument is
sound, and Schopenhauer’s argument is unsound. But at the same time, Schopenhauer’s
simple argument is powerful: the world so manifestly is a vale of tears, and even despite
our being rational animals, we so manifestly are only “human, all-too-human.”

A first line of argument against Schopenhauer’s pessimism and in favor of

Pascal’s argument, however, is to say that only Pascalian realistic optimism fully
vindicates the standard conception of morality, especially if we favor Kant’s (or Kantian)
moral theory over Aristotelian (or contemporary) virtue ethics and Millian
utilitarianism. Indeed, there’s good reason to hold that if one were a Millian utilitarian,
or at least a consequentialist, then Schopenhauerian pessimism would ultimately be the
right view.84 But that counts, in effect, as a reductio ad absurdum of Millian utilitarianism,
which, as we’ve seen, already has various other strong objections against it.

And a second line of argument would be to say that Schopenhauerian pessimism

is existentially self-defeating: if you actually tried to choose and act in accordance with it,
then you’d commit suicide, and therefore annihilate all the innate human capacities for
caring, creativity, and rationality that Schopenhauer himself exercised in order to write his
astonishingly brilliant essay; whereas by a diametric contrast, Pascal’s realistic optimism is
guaranteed to be true by what I’ll call existential bootstrapping: if you really do choose
and act in accordance with it, then your life just is fully meaningful, whether God
actually exists or not.

Correponding to that result, a third line of argument would be to say that since
Schopenhauer himself presents the two options of affirmation-and-optimism (Door #1)
versus denial-and-pessimism (Door #2) as a life-defining choice, then, as per Pascal’s
Realistic Optimism, we have a sufficient to reason to choose Door #1 and live in a
realistically optimistic way. Interestingly, faced with the very same Schopenhauerian
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pair of options and the same life-defining choice, contrary to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche
selected affirmation of the will-to-live. But Nietzsche also rejected optimism, whether
unrealistic or realistic—and especially, he rejected anything that even remotely smacked
of Christianity—because he was a moral skeptic who rejects the standard conception of
morality (see section III.2). Luckily for us, however, we’ve already (at least
provisionally) vindicated the standard conception of morality in section III, and therefore
we can be fully onboard with Pascal’s realistic optimism. And we can also bracket the
whole tangled issue of the moral goodness and rightness vs. the badness and wrongness
of Christianity as a social institution, by simply opting for Moderate Secularism, as per
section IV.3.

In any case, Pascal and Schopenhauer are nowadays both widely recognized to
have been important forerunners of the 20th century tradition of existentialism, and
therefore there’s much more of that still to come—so I’m going to press on.
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Chapter VII. Existentialism, the Absurd, and Affirmation

VII.1 Two Kinds of Existentialism85

In its broadest sense, existentialism is the philosophy of the human condition. It begins with
the idea that human life presents itself as inherently meaningless (aka, “the absurd”)
and filled with natural and moral evil, which leads to a loss of faith in everything and
everyone, including oneself, and thus to a generalized version of anxiety (aka, Angst),
and to the question of whether or not to commit suicide (aka, “the sickness unto
death”), and then ends with an affirmationist-and-optimistic answer to the meaning
question, which says:

We’re radically free, so we must take radical responsibility not only for all our
choices and actions but also for all the brute facts about our lives that we can’t
change, strive to be authentic, establish solidarity (i.e., active empathy and a
fellowship of suffering) with others, and thereby create meaning in our own and
others’ lives!

So the basic concepts of existentialism are (i) the absurd, (ii) Angst, (iii) the sickness unto
death, (iv) radical free will, (v) radical responsibility for choices, acts, and brute facts,
(vi) authenticity, (vii) solidarity, and (vii) the individual and collective creation of
meaning.

Narrowly historically speaking, existentialism is a philosophical movement of

the first half of the 20th century, and its leading (or at least most famous) thinkers are
Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, and Albert Camus.
Nevertheless, existentialism also has extremely important 19th century anticipations and
influences in the works of Sören Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky,
and Franz Kafka, and also pre-19th century, some equally extremely important
anticipations and influences in the works of the ancient Greek dramatists Aeschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides, the early Christian thinker Augustine, the 16th century novelist
Miguel de Cervantes, Pascal in the 17th century, and—perhaps above all, for our
purposes in this book—Kant in the mid-to-late 18th century. Indeed, we can think of
these thinkers as proto-existentialists.

Correspondingly, there are two basic forms of existentialism: (i) theistic

existentialism and (ii) humanistic existentialism. According to theistic existentialism, God
exists and has created the world and us along with it, yet has also apparently infinitely
withdrawn from His/Her/Their creation—so that we find ourselves bereft of divine
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guidance, lost in the arid deserts of the world, and radically questioning our faith. Then,
in the face of an apparently God-less, manifestly pointless, and thoroughly evil world
(see, for example, the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac), in which rational human
animals in particular manifestly have no purpose and have entirely lost their way, then
each individual and everyone together must create a meaningful life for themselves by
fully exercising their capacities for caring and for radical freedom, thereby carrying out
wholehearted choices and acts, by taking radical responsibility for those choices, and by
establishing solidarity with others, thereby recovering that faith and belief-in God. Such
an activity is what Kierkegaard calls the leap of faith—closely related to what I’ve called
Pascal’s realistic optimism, as spelled out in the so-called “Wager”—and a person who
lives their life in this way is what Kierkegaard calls “the Knight of Faith.” The
philosophical and moral standpoint of the humanistic existentialist is essentially
identical to that of the theistic existentialist, except for the burning issue of God. So for
the humanistic existentialist, either (i) “God is dead and we have killed him”(Nietzsche),
because the very idea of God contains a fundamental incoherence that’s exposed by the
Metaphysical Argument for Atheism from the Existence of Evil, or (ii) given our finitude and
our “human, all-too-human” limitations, we must remain radically agnostic about God’s
existence or non-existence. But otherwise, everything else is pretty much the same.

Another and much briefer characterization of humanistic existentialism is the one

proposed by Sartre, which says that existence precedes essence. Or, as Sartre elaborates
that characterization in “Existentalism is a Humanism”:

If God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a
being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and this being is man, or, as
Heidegger says, human reality. What is meant by saying that existence precedes
essence? It means that, first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only
afterwards, defines himself…. Man is nothing but what he makes of himself. Such is the
first principle of existentialism…. Thus, existentialism’s first move is to make every man
aware of what he is and to make th full responsibility of his existence rest on him. And
when we say that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is
responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.

If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference
to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is
free, man is freedom. On the other hand, if God does not exist, we find no values or
commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we
have no excuse behind us, nor justification before us. We are alone, with no excuses.
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There is no reality except in action…. Man is nothing else but his plan; he exists only to
the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his
acts, nothing else than his life.86

Every such plan is also what Sartre calls a fundamental project.

VII.2 Nagel and the Absurd

An illuminating take on existentialism’s basic concept of the absurd was

developed in the early 1970s by Thomas Nagel.87 What’s especially illuminating about
that take is that Nagel places the concept of the absurd fully within the framework of
what, in the 1960s, Wilfrid Sellars very aptly called the scientific image of the human
being in the natural world.88 Nagel writes:

[A]bsurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most
advanced and interesting characteristics. Like skepticism in epistemology, it is possible
only because we possess a certain kinds of insight—the capacity to transcend ourselves
in thought.89

More precisely, according to Nagel, the rational human animal finds itself as an
irreducibly conscious subject, irreducibly capable of free action, and irreducibly capable
of capable of knowing facts and values, in a fundamentally physical natural world that’s, at
least in principle, completely knowable by means of the basic natural sciences: physics,
chemistry, and biology.

This, in turn, directly leads to three dualistic problems: (i) the mind-body problem:
how can there be conscious minds in a fundamentally physical and inherently non-
mental natural world?, (ii) the free will vs. natural mechanism problem: how can there be
free will in a fundamentally physical and naturally mechanized (whether deterministic
or indeterministic) natural world?, and (iii) the appearance vs. reality problem: how can
there be subjective appearances that also count as knowledge in a fundamentally physical
and objectively real (see section III.1) natural world?

According to Nagel, the human experience of absurdity derives essentially from

our failed attempt to occupy both sides of each dualism at once. That is, the human experience
of absurdity arises from our failed attempt to occupy both (ia), (iia), and (iiia) the first-
person or subjective point of view on our mindedness, our choices and action, and our
knowledge (aka the manifest image of the human being in the natural world, aka the view
from here), and also (iia), (iib), and (iic) the impersonal, third-person, or objective point of view
(aka, the scientific image of the human being in the natural world, aka the view from
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nowhere). Then, in the face of a thoroughly meaningless and pointless fundamentally

physical natural world—a world that’s inherently non-mental, naturally mechanized,
and objectively real—what are we, who find ourselves in the very midst of that natural
world as irreducibly conscious, irreducibly free, and irreducibly directly aware of
subjective appearances, supposed to do with ourselves? That’s where Camus’s 1942
existentialist re-thinking of the myth of Sisyphus90 comes in. So let’s get in my
philosopher’s TARDIS again, jump back thirty years to the middle of World War II, and
look at what Camus has to say.

VII.3 Camus and Affirmation

According to Camus, human life is inherently absurd. We live in a world without God,
hence with out transcendent meanings or essences or purposes. We experience
absurdity as our aimlessness, alienation, blind habit, the sleep of our self-consciousness,
and as meaningless matter and motion. And this doesn’t affect only our experience of
ourselves in the natural world: it also pervades our experience of ourselves in the social
world. Who hasn’t looked at people standing at bus-stops, or subway stops, or
anywhere, on the way to work, or on the way to who-knows-where, carrying their brief
cases, and thought, they’re all nothing but hunks of stone in humanoid shape—rock-heads—
and me along with them!

Rock-heads in Reykjavic, Iceland (March 2019)

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And who hasn’t looked at oneself in the mirror at 3am and wondered, is that mannequin
really me?

Our experience of absurdity entails a generalized emotional, practical, and vital

state of anguish or anxiety (Angst), which leads directly to the open question of suicide
(the sickness unto death). According to Camus, human revolt is the right response to this
vital experience of the absurd, our anguish, and our anxiety. This in turn entails an
active, free rejection of suicide: that is, an affirmation of life as it actually is, no matter
how awful the external circumstances, which in turn produces a radical injection of
meaning into an otherwise meaningless and pointless world. In order to elaborate this
thought, Camus considers the Greek myth of Sisyphus: a man who has been
condemned by the gods for some obscure crime, and punished by being compelled to
push a giant boulder up a mountain over, and over, and over again—in fact endlessly,
since every time he gets it to the top, it rolls back down again. The Sisyphean life seems
to be the worst of all possible lives; and yet, in this patently absurd natural and social
world, aren’t we all Sisyphus?, aren’t we all rock-heads?

Ultimately, Camus forcefully recommends that, in the face of the open question
of suicide, in a radically free way, we choose to affirm the absurd, and that we undertake,
in a radically free way, a complete appropriation of the actual world just as it is, with a full
acceptance of personal responsibility for our individual and collective past, present, and future.
So the essays ends with the truly amazing phrases:

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But
Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too
concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him
neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled
mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to
fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.91

But how is this humanly possible? How could anyone in Sisyphus’s condition be
able to say sincerely, “all is well”? How could anyone in Sisyphus’s condition be
genuinely happy? Someone once said to me, semi-jokingly: “I think I could bring myself
to the point of enjoying watching the boulder roll down.” But even as intended semi-
seriously, that only scratches the outermost surface of what Camus is saying. What Camus
is saying, is that Sisyphus not only could but should radically freely choose to make the life of
endless rock-pushing his fundamental project. This profound, life-changing thought, in turn,
can become the foundation of an existential morality, i.e., an existential moral theory: so
let’s now turn to that.
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Chapter VIII. The Morality of Authenticity

VIII.1 Existential Morality and the Concept of Authenticity

We’ve just seen how, in Camus’s hands, Sisyphus’s mythic condition is an existential
metaphor for the human condition in general, and more specifically for the “human, all-
too-human” predicament in a fundamentally physical, mindless, naturally mechanized,
objectively real, and thus utterly meaningless natural and social world. Hence
Sisyphus’s condition and predicament are really our condition and our predicament.
And we also raised the questions: how could anyone in Sisyphus’s condition be able to
say sincerely, “all is well”?, and how could anyone in Sisyphus’s condition be genuinely
happy? That in turn raises the existential question, how could anyone in Sisyphus’s
condition be authentic? And that brings us back to morality, since authenticity is
existentialism’s conception of the highest good, and therefore, according to the
existentialist, everyone ought always to be pursuing authenticity.

VIII.1.1 What is “Authenticity” in the Classical Existentialist Sense?

But what is “authenticity” in the specifically classical existentialist sense of that term?

I say “specifically classical existentialist sense of that term,” because there are
various uses of the terms “authenticity” and “authentic” in popular culture and pop
psychology that are frequently criticized for presenting an approach to human morality
and human life that’s “romantic and slightly self-pitying,”92 self-indulgent, relativistic,
and egoistic, even downright silly.

To be sure, it’s quite true that French Existentialism did have a significant impact
on avant-garde, “beat,” “beatnik,” “cool,” and “hep-cat” popular culture in the USA—
especially New York City and its café scene—during the 1950s.93 And correspondingly,
it’s quite true that some people who belonged to that movement—self-professed
existentialists—were indeed, “romantic and slightly self-pitying,” self-indulgent,
relativistic, and egoistic, even downright silly. See, for example, the popular TV
program The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959-1963), and the slightly earlier Hollywood
send-up of existentialism (called “empathicalism”) in the 1957 movie Funny Face. But as
much as one can appreciate Audrey Hepburn’s dancing in a Hollywood-ized Parisian
café, that’s specifically not what I have in mind by the term “existentialism.”

So, looking at the works of the leading existentialists (Heidegger, Sartre, De

Beauvoir, and Camus) and the proto-existentialists (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides,
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Augustine, Cervantes, Pascal, above all Kant, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,

Dostoevsky, and Kafka), we can form a composite picture of the classical existentialist
concept of authenticity. “Authenticity” in the specifically classical existentialist sense of
that term, then, is (i) radically freely believing-in one thing, as a way of living an
individual rational “human, all-too-human” life, also lived in solidarity with others, or
equivalently, (ii) the radically free self-unification of one’s personality, throughout
(what remains of) an individual rational “human, all-too-human” life, also lived in
solidarity with others, or equivalently, (iii) having integrity in the deepest possible
sense, throughout (what remains of) an individual rational “human, all-too-human” life,
also lived in solidarity with others, or equivalently and somewhat more explicitly, (iv)
the overall coherence of one’s desires, feelings, beliefs, choices, and actions, achieved as
the result of wholehearted radical freedom, and experienced as such, throughout (what
remains of) an individual rational “human, all-too-human” life, also lived in solidarity
with others, or equivalently, finally, and much more explicitly, (v) not merely being
alive, but having a real, complete, and coherent individual rational “human, all-too-
human” life, also lived in solidarity with others, achieved by being true to your own
sub-projects, all of which are organized around a single fundamental project, where this
is achieved by radically freely and fully facing up to the present fact of your own
essentially embodied finitude, by radically freely and fully facing up to the past fact of
your own origins and your own personal history, no matter how bad and awful it has
been, and by radically freely and fully facing up to the future fact of your own death,
thereby taking radical full responsibility for all of them.

VIII.1.2 Authenticity and Radical Freedom

Radical freedom, or the radical human capacity to choose, act, and take fully
responsibility, without any of those choices, acts, and takings-of-responsibility being in
any way either causally determined or probabilistically random (indeterministic) and no
matter what the circumstances, determines our authenticity. Thus radical freedom in the
classical existentialist sense is an act of self-creation: as Sartre puts it, we are nothing but
we make of ourselves. I also want to draw particular attention to the fact that radical
freedom in the classical existentialist sense, and therefore authenticity, entails that at
least sometimes you must take full responsibility for things over which you have (or had, or
will have) no control.

As a case-in-point, let’s briefly consider one striking real-world example of this,

the case of a former Yale Law School student, Ketema Ross:

Early one morning in 2007, Ross heard President George W. Bush [Yale] ‘68 telling him
that his next-door neighbors were traitors who needed to be gotten rid of. Ross broke
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into the elderly couple’s apartment and beat them with a broom handle. (They both
survived the attack.) Charged with assault, he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
Now Ross says he has recovered his sanity, and a court order says he is no longer “a
substantial danger.” And, after seven years of confinement in a psychiatric hospital, he
has regained his freedom, mostly: by court order, he was conditionally discharged on
January 11 [2015].94

What radical freedom entails is that it’s really possible that Ross was radically free even
during at least part of his “seven years of confinement in a psychiatric hospital.” If so, then
Ross had radical freedom even before he “regained his freedom … by court order.” Moreover,
what radical freedom requires is that Ross, whether during his enforced confinement in
a psychiatric hospital, or since 2015, (i) be able to take full moral responsibility for his
violent actions under the grip of his schizophrenia, even though he was not legally
responsible, and also that Ross (ii) be ultimately able to say, like Sisyphus, that “all is
well.”

This radical freedom defies comprehension in terms of merely instrumental

reasons, whether egoistic or utilitarian; and it requires, in effect, deep happiness. Ketema
Ross’s being able to say that “all is well” in this sense is categorically not the same as an
ordinary “feeling good about things” or an ordinary “feeling good about yourself.” On
the contrary, it’s a wholehearted, activist version of what the classical Stoics call ataraxia,
what the Buddhists call nirvana, Pascal’s realistic optimism, what Kant calls
Selbstzufriedenheit, “contentment,”95 and what Nietzsche calls amor fati, the “love of fate.”
In achieving such a state of mind via your radical freedom, you do not merely passively
accept things exactly as they are: instead, you actively affirm or, in effect, actively love
things exactly as they are, and thereby change your life around them—as per Wallace
Stevens’s “man with the blue guitar”:

The man bent over his guitar,

A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,

You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar

Of things exactly as they are.”96
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So, since authenticity according to classical existentialism is the highest human good,
then according to its moral theory, we ought always to exercise our radical freedom in this
Stoic, Buddhist, Pascalian, Kantian, Nietzschean, and Stevensian sense.

VIII.1.3 Inauthenticity, Freedom-Refusers, and Freedom Deniers

In the brilliant opening sentences of her book, Humanistic Existentialism, Hazel Barnes
writes that

[f]or almost a century now, prevailing psychologies and the literature written under
their influence have agreed that men cherish the illusion of freedom while being in fact
determined by heredity, by environment, and by early childhood experiences [and
more generally, by fundamentally physical facts about the past together with the laws
of nature]. Humanistic existentalism challenges this doctrine and claims that exactly the
reverse is true: every man is free, but most men, fearing the consequences and the
responsibilities of freedom, refuse to acknowledge its presence in themselves and
would deny it to others. So radical a shift in point of view can be effected only when
accompanied by a reorientation of all human attitudes. It requires a specific psychology
to support it; it demands a reappraisal of the human situation.97

What Barnes is specifically emphasizing is this: that the classical existentialist thesis that
radical freedom is the source of authenticity, the highest human good, and therefore
that we ought always to exerise our radical freedom, directly entails an equally
profound truth of existential moral theory, namely that

every man is free, but most men, fearing the consequences and the responsibilities of
freedom, refuse to acknowledge its presence in themselves and would deny it to others.

The “human, all-too-human” refusal to acknowledge radical freedom in oneself, and the
resolution to deny it to others—freedom-refusal and freedom-denial—is the same as
inauthenticity, which in turn is morally impermissible. Inauthenticity thus expresses our
half-heartedness or double-heartedness, our conflicted personality, our lack of integrity,
our psychological incoherence, our self-conflict, our self-deception, our “bad faith,” our
phoneyness, our failure to be true to ourselves, and above all our resentfulness towards
those who would be radically free, and our cruelty in denying them the exercise of their radical
freedom, especially by means of coercion.
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VIII.2 Two Important Problems for Existential Morality

Now for some critical analysis. In so doing, let’s leave aside the worry that existential
moral theory is false because some self-professed existentialists are (or anyhow, were)
“romantic and slightly self-pitying,” self-indulgent, relativistic, and egoistic, even
downright silly, as a good example of the ad hominem fallacy.98 Nevertheless, there at
least two important problems for classical existentialist moral theory.

First, it’s self-evidently obvious that existential morality (just like Kant’s and
Kantian moral theory) requires an intelligible and defensible robust metaphysics of free will
and practical agency, aka free agency, but—so the objection goes—no existentialist (or for
that matter, neither Kant nor any Kantian) has ever provided such a metaphysics. But
this objection can be directly rebutted by any contemporary existentialist (or Kantian, or
existential Kantian) who works out a robust metaphysics of free agency, explicitly
defends it against actual and possible critics, writes all that up, and then publishes it.
And, for better or worse, actually I’ve already done that, in my book, Deep Freedom and
Real Persons.99 So I’ll leave the critical evaluation of that theory as another “task for the
reader.”

The second important worry about existential morality is whether authenticity in

the classical existentialist sense, on its own, suffices as the highest human good and as
the ground of morality. It’s true, as classical Existentialism insists, that inauthenticity,
freedom-refusal (i.e., the refusal to acknowledge the presence of freedom in oneself),
and freedom-denial (i.e., the denial of freedom to others, especially via coercion) are all
morally impermissible. But it’s equally true that there’s an important distinction
between (i) moral duties to oneself (aka, “what we morally owe to ourselves”), and
(ii) moral duties to others (aka, “what we morally owe to others”). Correspondingly, it’s
clear that inauthenticity and freedom-refusal are violations of duties to oneself, whereas
freedom-denial is a violation of duties to others. Moreover, the violation of duties to others
that consists in considering or treating other people as mere means or as mere things, is
arguably the essence of moral evil. This in turn harks back to Kant’s second categorical
imperative, The Humanity as End-in-Itself Formulation:

So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any
other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.100

And that leads to the following worry: Since authenticity falls on the side of moral
duties to onseself, then isn’t it really possible for someone to be authentic in the classical
existentialist sense, such that they’ve fulfilled all their basic duties to themselves, yet also
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such that they’ve violated their basic duties to others? And if so, then someone could be
at once authentic and also morally evil, hence authenticity couldn’t possibly be the highest
human good, and existential moral theory is fatally flawed.

Another, more concrete, real-world way of putting this critical point is to ask:
Couldn’t there really be (or really have been) such a person as an authentic Nazi? And an
authentic Nazi does seem to be at least really possible. Indeed, at least arguably, the
early 20th century existentialist Heidegger was an authentic Nazi.101 But if so, then either
(i) classical existential morality is false and should be rejected, or (ii) classical existential
morality can be saved only by means of a morally enhanced conception of authenticity
that explicitly rules out the real possibility of authentic Nazis.

In other words, in order to avoid the authentic Nazi problem, what existential
moral theory needs is a conception of authenticity that’s as much about duties to others
as it already is about duties to oneself, and therefore a conception of authenticity that’s
inherently guided by categorical imperatives, and more specifically that’s inherently guided
by the The Humanity As an End-in-Itself Formulation, thereby morally prohibiting
considering or treating people as mere means or mere things. Let’s call this morally
enhanced conception of authenticity, principled authenticity. In turn, the adoption of this
morally enhanced conception of authenticity by classical existentialism effectively
transforms classical existentialist moral theory into existential Kantian moral theory.102
Indeed, it’s existential Kantian moral theory that I’m ultimately defending in this book.

VIII.3 Sartre on Principled Authenticity

But it’s also arguable that Sartre had already made this existential Kantian move,103 for
example, in “Existentialism is a Humanism”:

[W]hen we say that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is
responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men…. When we
say that a man chooses his own self, we mean that every one of us does likewise; but we
also mean that in making his choice he chooses all men. In fact, in creating the man that
we want to be, there is not single one of our acts which does not at the same time create
an image of man as we think he ought to be…. [T]he image is valid for everybody and
for our whole age. Thus, our responsibility is much greater than we might have
supposed, because it involves all mankind. If I am a workingman and choose to join a
Christian trade-union rather than be a communist, and if by being a member I want to
show that the best thing for man is resignation, that the kingdom of man is not of this
world, I am not only involving my own case—I want to be resigned for everyone. As a
result my action has involved all humanity. To take a more individual matter, if I want
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to marry, to have children: even if this marriage depends solely on my own

circumstances or passion or wish, I am involving all humanity in monogamy and not
merely myself. Therefore, I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am
creating a certain image of man of my own choosing. In choosing myself, I choose
man.104

In other words, we are radically free if and only if we choose and act in such a way as also to
choose and act for everyone else at the same time and in the same respect. So Sartre’s
“existential imperative” is essentially the same as Kant’s first categorical imperative, The
Formula of Universal Law:

Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will
that it become a universal law.105

In the same essay, Sartre also provides a very famous concrete, real-world
example of a moral dilemma in which

[a] boy was faced with the choice of leaving for England and joining the Free French
Forces—that is, leaving his mother behind—or remaining with his mother and helping
her carry on…. Who could help him choose? … Who can decide a priori? Nobody. No
book of ethics can tell him. The Kantian ethics says, “Never treat any person as a means
but as an end.” Very well, if I stay with my mother, I’ll treat her as an end and not as a
means; but by virtue of this very fact, I’m running the risk of treating the people around
me who are fighting, as means; and conversely, I go to join those who are fighting, I’ll
be treating them as an end, and, by doing that, I run the risk of treating my mother as a
means. If values are vague, and if they are always too broad for the concrete and
specific case that we are considering, the only thing left is to trust our instincts. That’s
what this young man tried to do; and when I saw him, he said, “In the end, feeling is
what counts. I ought to choose whatever pushes me in one direction…” But how is the
value of that feeling determined? What gives his feeling for his mother value? Precisely
the fact that he remained with her.106

For my purposes in this chapter, and in this book more generally, the most important
point is that Sartre explicitly frames this example as a moral dilemma about how to apply
Kant’s second categorical imperative, The Humanity as an End-in-Itself Formulation. So no
matter what the boy decides to do, his particular moral dilemma concerns whether, on
the one hand, staying with his mother (and not joining the Free French forces), or, on
the other hand, joining the Free French Forces (and abandoning his mother), is the most
authentic and principled thing to choose and do in that historical context. In point of
fact, the boy did choose to stay with his mother, and didn’t join the Free French Forces.
But did the boy choose and do the most authentic and principled thing to choose and do
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in that historical context, or not? By way of concluding this chapter, I’ll leave that
amazingly hard question as yet another “task for the reader.”
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Chapter IX. The Nature of Death

Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply the
capacity for sensation, and death is the privation of all sentience; therefore a correct
understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by
adding to life a limitless time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For
life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly understood that there are no terrors for
him in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not
because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever
causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the
expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when
we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then,
either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no
longer.107

Look back at time … before our birth. In this way Nature holds before our eyes the
mirror of our future after death. Is this so grim, so gloomy?108

IX.1 The Ambiguity of “Death”

The upshot of this book so far is existential Kantian moral theory. But now let’s apply
this to an ultimate fact about the human condition: our own deaths.

What is death? Minimally, the English word “death,” and correspondingly the
concept of death, mean “the cessation or end of life.” But unfortunately for those of us
who live and die, and are also conscious and self-conscious, therefore able to think
about our own lives and deaths—that is, all mature human persons—the concept of
death is crucially ambiguous, in at least five different ways.

The first crucial ambiguity about the concept of death concerns the type of life we
are talking about when we say that life ceases or ends: (i) inorganic life, (ii) organic life,
(iii) sentient human or non-human animal life, and (iv) sapient human personal life.
Correspondingly, there are four different sub-types of death: (i*) inorganic death,
(ii*) organic death, (iii*) sentient human or non-human animal death, and (iv*) sapient human
personal death. I’ll now unpack those distinctions a bit.

Many things have inorganic lives. This includes artificial or humanly-fabricated

machines like automobiles, dishwashers, and refrigerators—indeed, these are often sold
along with a legally binding “lifetime warranty”—but also more or less large scale non-
artificial natural mechanisms like weather systems, tropical storms, mountains,
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mountain ranges, planets, stars, and galaxies. Principles of physics—and especially the
principles of non-equilibrium thermodynamics—and evolutionary theory apply to their
cosmic emergence, development, and eventual destruction. Such things therefore all
encounter inorganic deaths at the end or cessation of their inorganic lives. Indeed, even
the universe as a whole can, at least in principle, have an ultimate inorganic “heat-
death,” via entropy. In this sense, death is the cessation or end of something’s
characteristic mechanical operations or, more generally, the cessation or end of its
inorganic non-equilibrium thermodynamics.

Let’s further suppose that organic activity, and especially organismic activity, is
distinct from the activity of natural mechanisms.109 As Kant compactly puts it,

a mere machine … has only a motive power, while the organized being possesses in
itself a formative power, and indeed one that it communicates to the matter, which does
not have it (it organizes the latter): thus it has a self-propagating formative power,
which cannot be explained through the capacity for movement alone (that is,
mechanism).110

Then all organisms have categorically and specifically organic lives, including micro-
organisms, plants, and animals. It is not inconceivable that there could even be entire
planets possessing organic lives, like the one imagined in Stanislaw Lem’s brilliant 1961
science fiction novel Solaris, and represented visually in Andrei Tarkovsky’s equally
brilliant science fiction 1972 film Solaris, the eponymous Solaris. In any case, all sentient
animals, as living organisms, have specifically organic lives. And since all human
persons are also sentient animals, so too do all human persons have such organic lives.

But, obviously, not everything that has an organic life—say, a unicellular micro-
organism, or a plant—has either a sentient animal life or a human personal life. So there
is an important difference between, on the one hand, the cessation or end of an organic
life, per se, and on the other hand, the cessation or end of either a sentient animal life or
a human personal life. In particular, the personal life of a human animal can
temporarily or permanently cease or end, while its organic life or sentient animal life
continues: (i) temporarily, for example, in cases of fainting, unconsciousness, or a coma,
(ii) permanently in one sense, while organic life but not minded animal life continues,
for example, in cases of persistent vegetative states produced by an artificially-induced
or disease-based brain-trauma, as in the famous Karen Ann Quinlan,111 Nancy
Cruzan,112 and Terry Schiavo113 cases, and (iii) permanently in another sense, while
organic life and sentient animal life both continue, e.g., in cases of degenerative diseases
like Alzheimer’s, as in the also-famous case of the philosopher-novelist Iris Murdoch.114
By contrast, at least in principle, human personal life can continue across even very long
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temporary gaps in organic life and sentient animal life, for example, in cryogenic re-
animation.

Inorganic death, organic death, and the death of the sentient animal per se, while
philosophically important for various reasons, and by no means irrelevant to morality
and the human condition, nevertheless are not of primary moral importance for our
purposes in this book. Only the deaths of human persons are of primary moral
importance for existential Kantian morality.

The second crucial ambiguity about the concept of death concerns the temporal
duration of the cessation or end of life, and in particular, whether it is (i) temporary or
(ii) permanent. Now it’s obvious that there can be temporary cessations or endings of
rational human consciousness—for example, fainting, unconsciousness, or a coma—that
are not also permanent. Correspondingly if, as seems easily conceivable, were the
technology and science of cryogenics to be developed somewhat further, then there
could be even very long temporary cessations or ends of the organic lives human
persons—the temporary deaths of their living bodies—that are neither the permanent
deaths of the sentient animals they are, nor the permanent deaths of the human persons
they are. For in these easily conceivable scenarios, when the body of the (temporarily)
dead human person is reanimated, then the human person’s life is also resumed, just as
it would be after a fainting fit, unconsciousness, or coma. What seems far less easily
conceivable is the supposed possibility of reincarnation, that is, the possibility of human
person’s body’s suffering a permanent organic death, therefore also being temporarily
dead as a real human person, but then resuming their human personal life in a new
body. For the purposes of discussion in this and the next chapter, I’ll bracket any further
discussion of reincarnation. In any case, the basic point I am making here is secured by
the real possibility of reanimation.

Again, for our purposes, in this and the next chapter I’m going to concentrate
almost exclusively on the permanent deaths of human persons like us; that is, I’m going
to concentrate almost exclusively on the permanent annihilation or extinction of
rational, conscious, and self-conscious, embodied, “human, all-too-human” persons. I
say “almost exclusively,” because in the next and final chapter I’ll also critically
consider the concept of immortality, or more precisely, I’ll also critically consider the
concept of an sempiternally endless (“sempiternal” means beginning at a certain point in
time, but lasting forever) or infinite human personal life. But aside from that discussion,
and unless otherwise specified, I’ll be talking only about the permanent deaths of
human persons like us.
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The third crucial ambiguity about the concept of death is in many ways the most
important one. This concerns the moral and metaphysical distinction between (i) the
state of my actually being dead (which, for convenience I’ll call “deaths”), and (ii) the
process of my dying (which, again for convenience, I’ll call “deathp”). The state of my
actually being dead, my deaths, necessarily occurs immediately after the process of my
dying, my deathp. Since I am concentrating almost exclusively on the permanent deaths
of human persons, then my kind of deaths, once it has occurred, lasts forever. The
process of my dying, my deathp, by sharp contrast, necessarily occurs during my life as a
human person. Otherwise put, deathp is necessarily infra-life, whereas deaths is
necessarily post-life.

Many serious philosophical, existential, and moral confusions have been created
by failing to distinguish between deaths and deathp. For example, as per the second
epigraph of this chapter, the Roman philosopher-poet Lucretius argued that since (i) the
time prior to the beginning of my life and the time after the permanent cessation or end
of my life are perfectly symmetrical and in effect metaphysical mirrors of one another,
and since (ii) we’re never (or at least almost never) concerned about the fact that we
didn’t exist before we were born, then (iii) we shouldn’t be concerned about the time
after we die, that is, we have no good reason to fear our own deaths. But Lucretius was
simply wrong about the symmetry or mirroring thesis, so his argument is unsound. The
pre-natal non-existence of a human person is essentially different from her deaths,
precisely because her deaths is necessarily post-life, and therefore it inherently presupposes
her actual deathp, whereas her pre-natal non-existence is necessarily not post-life, and
therefore it does not inherently presuppose her actual deathp.

But that’s by no means the worst of the confusions that have been created by
failing to distinguish between deaths and deathp. As we’ll see later in this chapter, the
participants in some of the leading recent and contemporary philosophical discussions
of the nature of death have consistently failed to draw the distinction between the state
of actually being dead and the process of dying, and have therefore fallen into serious
confusions about whether death is a always a bad thing for the one who died, or not.
Sometimes they are talking about deaths; sometimes they are talking about deathp; and
sometimes it is crucially unclear precisely which kind of death they are talking about. In
any case, as we will also see, it’s entirely possible and perfectly coherent to hold (i) that
a human person’s deaths, by its very nature, is necessarily neither a good thing nor a bad
thing for the one who dies (hence never a good thing and never a bad thing for the one
who dies), while at the same time also holding (ii) that a human person’s deathp, by its
very nature, is sometimes a good thing for the one who dies and also sometimes a bad
thing for the one who dies.
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These points lead on naturally to the fourth crucial ambiguity about the concept
of death. This concerns the fact that a human person’s permanent death, whether this is
her deaths or her deathp, can be considered and/or evaluated either (i) from the inside,
that is, from the first-person point of view, or (ii) from the outside, that is, from the third-
person or impersonal point of view. Following David Suits, who originally discovered
this deeply important distinction—or in any case, who was the first to formulate it
clearly115—I will say that whenever human person’s deaths or her deathp is considered
and/or evaluated from the first-person point of view, then this is considering or
evaluating some fact that is for the one who died, and therefore an intrinsic or internal
fact with respect to that human person. But by sharp contrast, whenever a human
person’s deaths or her deathp is considered or evaluated from the third-person or
impersonal point of view, then this is considering or evaluating some fact that is only
about the one who died, and therefore at best an extrinsic or external fact with respect to
that human person. The main reason this distinction is so important, as we’ll see, is that
although a human person’s deaths or deathp can involve various good or bad facts about
her, from the third-person or impersonal point of view, it does not follow that any of
these facts is a good or bad fact for her.

So apart from Suits, few recent or contemporary philosophers who have

discussed the nature of death have been able to recognize that although there may be
good arguments showing that the permanent deaths of a human person is always, or
almost always, a bad thing about that person—because, had she lived, she would have
had more good experiences, hence her permanent deaths, in a certain sense, is a
“deprivation” for a counterfactual counterpart of that person—nevertheless it does not
follow that the permanent deaths of a human person is ever a bad thing for that person.
This is simply because deaths has no personal subject for whom anything can ever be a
good thing or a bad thing.

Moreover, not even Suits has recognized that although it’s quite true that the
permanent deaths of a human person is never either a good thing or a bad thing for the
one who dies, simply because deaths has no personal subject, nevertheless it does not
follow that the deathp of that very person is not also a good thing or a bad thing for that
very person. By its very nature, deathp has a living personal subject who is also in the
process of dying; and, as I will argue, very often or even usually, the deathp of a human
person is, tragically, a bad thing for that very person.

And this brings us to the fifth and final crucial ambiguity about the concept of
death. This concerns the question of whose death is at issue, and in particular whether it’s
(i) our own death or (ii) someone else’s death that’s at issue. The difference between our
own death and the death of another human person is fundamental, whether we are
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thinking about deaths or deathp. This, in turn, is because although we necessarily have
first-person access to the contents of our own lives, we necessarily do not have first-
person access to the contents of the lives of other human persons. Otherwise, we would
be those other human persons. Differently put, what philosophers have called “the
problem of other minds” applies every bit as directly to the deaths of human persons as
it applies to the lives of human persons. Necessarily, by the nature of our own conscious
and self-conscious minds, we’re both consciously and also self-consciously directly
aware of our own human personal lives, but not of anyone else’s human personal life.

It follows that our own death, whether it’s our deaths or our deathp, necessarily is
no one else’s death. In this sense, we necessarily die alone, just as we necessarily live our
lives alone. We are, to be sure, always living our lives alongside others’ human personal
lives, and in more or less direct interaction and solidarity with others’ human personal
lives. So in that sense, we always live our lives with other human persons’ lives. But we
do not live those lives, only our own. Similarly, we’re always dying alongside the deaths
of other human persons like us, in more or less direct interaction and solidarity with
those others’ deaths, and in that sense we are always dying with the deaths of others.
But we do not die those deaths, only our own.

IX.2 The Nature of Our Own Death

Now I’m going to explore the nature of our own death by critically analyzing two of the
most important and influential recent discussions of the nature and value of death,
Thomas Nagel’s justly famous “Death,”116 and David Suits’s important critical reply to
Nagel, “Why Death is Not Bad for the One Who Died.”117

IX.2.1 Nagel On the Nature of Our Own Death

The core moral-existential question raised by Nagel’s essay is this:

If we assume that death is the unequivocal and permanent end of our personal
existence, so that any question about immortality is ruled out for the purposes of
argument, then is death a bad thing for the one who dies?

And Nagel’s strong concluding answer to his own question is that yes, under the
assumption that the life of a human person is finite and terminating, then death is
always a bad thing for the one who dies. In turn, Nagel’s argument for his strong
conclusion has ten basic steps.
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First, if death is bad, this is solely because of what it deprives us of, not because
of any positive features it has, unlike life.

Second, what is fundamentally good about life are certain states, conditions, or
types of activity: being alive, doing certain things, and having certain experiences. We
could call this having-a-life or being-the-subject-of- a-life. So what is fundamentally good
about life is having-a-life or being-the-subject-of-a-life. Even if the contents of a life are
bad, perhaps very bad, the very fact of having-a-life or being-the-subject-of-a-life is
intrinsically good.118

Third, these two theses imply a distinction between (i) the essentially positive
character of the goodness of life, and (ii) the essentially negative character of the
badness of death.

Fourth, as to the essentially positive character of the goodness of life, we can say
(i) that life has various benefits whether intrinsic, instrumental, or otherwise relational,
(ii) that the value of life does not attach to mere organic survival, since mere organic life
in a coma is valueless, and (iii) the goods of life can be multiplied by time—although not
necessarily continuously over time, since suspended animation or cryogenic
preservation of the body, together with reanimation, seems perfectly consistent with the
multiplication of goods during the reanimated period—so more of the goods of life is
better than less of those goods.

Fifth, as to the essentially negative character of the badness of death, we can say
that death is an evil because it consists in the deprivation or loss of life, rather than in the
state of being dead. For personal nonexistence, as such, is not necessarily a bad thing. The
temporary suspension of life is entails no disvalue, so long as it does not reduce the total
lifespan; and most of us are not bothered by the fact that we did not exist before we
were born.

Sixth, corresponding to the first five points, here are three hard questions about
the badness of death: (i) how can anything be bad for someone without its also being an
unpleasant experience for her?, (ii) the state of being dead is without a subject or first
person to experience it, so how could it ever be bad for anyone?, and (iii) how can death
be bad if pre-natal nonexistence is not a misfortune (i.e., Lucretius’s question)?

Seventh, here’s the answer to question (i). Many goods and bads for persons are
not directly attributable to the intrinsic character of their momentary or durational
states of mind but instead to their entire life-histories, including various diachronic (i.e.,
over time) extrinsic relations to their earlier and later selves, as well as both diachronic
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and synchronic (i.e., at the same time) extrinsic relations to other persons, events, and
things. So, since many goods and bads are extrinsic relational and not (merely) intrinsic
features of persons, then someone can suffer misfortune in a purely extrinsic relational
sense even when he is not in a position to recognize that misfortune, and experience it
as unpleasant—e.g., when ignorant, asleep, fainting, unconscious, in a coma, non-
rational, or dead.

Eighth, here’s the answer to problem (ii). The subject of death is the human
individual, the subject of a single life, which may or may not include his or her
personhood but necessarily includes his or her personhood if he or she has ever actually
been a human person. And this person is someone who can suffer extrinsic relational
harms even if she is not in a position to experience those harms as unpleasant. For
example, someone could suffer all sorts of extrinsic relational miseries (betrayal, the
death of his loved ones, theft of his property, slanderous damage to his good name and
reputation, the loss of his rational faculties through disease or injury, etc.) without
experiencing these as harms as unpleasant. Hence the very same subject can also suffer
these extrinsic relational harms after death.

Ninth, here’s the answer to question (iii). The time before a human individual’s
actual birth is not a time when that individual could have been alive, because a human
individual’s actual beginning or birth is a necessary condition of his or her
individuality, so nothing can really matter to the human individual until after birth.
Therefore, only post-natal nonexistence can count as the death of the individual and be
a misfortune to the individual.

Tenth and finally, the badness of death consists in the non-realization (or
deprivation) of future possibilities of having-a-life or being-the-subject-of-a-life,
including both intrinsic goods and extrinsic relational goods. Hence the earlier one dies
the worse it is, and the later one dies the better it is. Even despite the fact that our lives
have natural limits, since one’s own life appears from the first-person standpoint to be
essentially open-ended and unlimited, and provided that there is no limit to the amount
of life it would be good to have, then death is always a bad thing for the one who dies.

IX.2.2 Suits Against the “Deprivation” Account of the Badness of Death

In his critical reply to Nagel, Suits argues that a dead human person can neither know,
appreciate, or in any possible way experience, any effects of death. As Suits puts it,
“death is a singularity for each of us.”119 Thus death is the terminal limit of a life, not a
part of a life. But the only way a human person can be harmed is by actually suffering
pain (primitive intrinsic harm) or prospectively suffering pain (derivative intrinsic
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harm) of some sort. Therefore, a human person like us cannot be harmed by death. So
Lucretius was correct when he said that “death is nothing to us.” Moreover, death is not
a deprivation on any reasonable understanding of what deprivation is. Deprivation is
failing to get some good things that were in some sense expected, and then knowing,
appreciating, or somehow experiencing the failure to get these things. But the dead
human person never feels deprived either primitively or derivatively, precisely because
they never feel anything at all. If we have interests and they are defeated or frustrated,
then we suffer pain and are harmed. Yet death is not the defeat or frustration of our
interests: it is merely the permanent disappearance or permanent vacating of our
interests. And if we do not have any interests, then they cannot be defeated or
frustrated. Hence we cannot be harmed by the permanent vacating of interests caused
by death. And therefore the deprivation account does not show that death is bad in any
recognizable sense for the deceased. Furthermore, while Nagel’s deprivation account
relies on an actual-life vs. a counterfactually-longer-life comparison, this comparison
does not entail that death can be bad for the human person who died, because the
human person who dies has an actual life, not a counterfactual life. Counterfactual
comparisons can show something about someone who dies, but they are nothing for the
human person who dies. Thus death is never anything for the person who dies, either a
bad thing or a good thing. And as a consequence, death is never a bad thing for the one
who dies.

IX.2.3 Some Critical Worries About What Nagel and Suits are Saying
About the Nature of Our Own Death

As we’ve seen, Nagel’s account of the nature of our own death says that death is always
a bad thing for the person who dies, whereas Suits’s account says that death is never a
bad thing for the person who dies. The fundamental problem with both views is that
neither Nagel nor Suits distinguishes carefully between (i) the state of being dead, deaths,
and (ii) the process of dying, deathp.

On the one hand, then, I think that Suits is absolutely correct about death s. Since
deaths has no subject or first-person, then deaths is neither a good thing nor a bad thing
for the real human person who dies. Hence deaths is never a bad thing for the person
who dies. So Nagel is wrong about deaths. But on the other hand, when we consider
deathp, things come out somewhat differently, in two ways.

First, it’s true that sometimes more life will inevitably lead to person-destroying
suffering, for example, degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s. Similarly, sometimes
more life will inevitably lead to some irremediably or irreparably monstrous evil or
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evils being freely committed by that person, for example, Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov in
Crime and Punishment shortly before he axe-murders the old lady pawnbroker and her
sister. And sometimes more life will inevitably lead to the irremediable or irreparable
self-destruction of someone’s own integrity, for example, an otherwise decent person
shortly before he freely succumbs to some terrible temptation—say, knowingly and
without being forced, allowing an innocent person to be tortured to death by others,
simply in order to move ahead in the Nazi command-hierarchy, or simply in order to
receive some sum of money by a Mafia payoff, etc.—and irrevocably compromises
himself. Then in all such cases, an earlier deathp would be a good thing for the person
who dies. So Nagel is wrong that deathp is always a bad thing for the person who dies.
On the contrary, deathp is sometimes a good thing for the person who dies.

Second, for the purposes of my argument here, we can suppose that it’s true, as I
argued in chapter VIII, that existential Kantian moral theory is the all-things-considered
best moral theory, and that as a consequence we’re morally obligated to pursue
principled authenticity. And we can also suppose further that an authentic principled
human life is necessarily a finite or terminating life with an internal narrative structure
and closure. Then if you’ve failed to achieve or realize principled authenticity, at least
partially and to some degree, by the time you die, then deathp is a bad thing for the
human person who dies. So Suits is wrong that deathp is never a bad thing for the one
who dies. On the contrary, deathp is sometimes, and indeed all-too-frequently, a bad thing for
the human person who dies.

But is it the case that human persons like us must die?, or, on the contrary, is
human immortality possible? That’s what I’ll critically investigate in the next and final
chapter.
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Chapter X. The (Im)Possibility of Human Immortality

The greatest stress. How, if some day or night a demon were to sneak into your loneliest
loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have
to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but
every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably
small or great in your life must return to you—all in the same succession and
sequence…” Would you throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the
demon who spoke thus? Or did you once experience a tremendous moment when you
would have answered him: “You are a god, and never have I heard anything more
godly.” If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you, as you are,
or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you want this once
more and innumerable times more?” would weigh upon your actions as the greatest
stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave
nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?120

6.431 [I]n death … the world does not change, but ceases.

6.4311 Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is
understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who
lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that the visual field is without limit. 121

Is human immortality possible? By way of wrapping up this smallish book about

morality and the human condition, I’ll address this amazingly hard question by briefly
unpacking and then criticizing two of the most important and influential recent
discussions of the nature and value of immortality, Bernard Williams’s “The
Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality”122 and John Martin
Fischer’s reply to Williams, “Why Immortality is Not So Bad.”123

X.1 Williams on the Tedium of Immortality

In his justly-famous paper, Williams wants to argue for two theses: (i) other things
being equal, death is a bad thing for the person who dies, and (ii) immortality would be,
where conceivable at all, intolerable. His argument for thesis (i) has three steps.

First, there are certain desires, that Williams calls “categorical desires,” which are
desires that are unconditional with respect to rational human life, in that we want them
to be satisfied whether or not we are alive to experience them. For example, rational
suicide, understood as the reasonable desire to be deads, is such that the rationally
suicidal subject wants this desire to be satisfied even though he will not be alive to
experience that state. Although Williams does not use this term specifically, let us call
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any similar inherently deaths-related or rationally suicidal desire—for example, the

desire that event X happens N days after one’s own suicide—a negative categorical desire.

Second, correspondingly, a rational human subject can categorically desire

things in a positive way, beyond his own death. For example, I could intensely desire to
be the Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 2057, exactly 100 years after Camus won his
prize in 1957, and, assuming that no other philosopher wins it in the meantime, thereby
becoming the first philosopher to win the Prize since Sartre in 1964—even though the
likelihood of my actually living until 2057 (which would make me exactly 100 years old)
is extremely small. More generally, positive categorical desires can include the desire to
go on living after one’s own actual death, so that many future desires will come into
existence and be satisfied.

Third, therefore, as long as the rational human subject has positive categorical
desires, then it’s a bad thing for that human person to die. Importantly, according to
Williams, categorical desires are inherently contingent in that we do not have to have
them, or at least we do not always have to have them. Indeed, on the supposition that as
a matter of contingent fact someone has no positive categorical desires, or that any
positive categorical desires that person previously had have now been extinguished,
then deaths could be a good thing, and one could have a good reason to die, in that it
satisfies a negative categorical desire. For example, Elina Makropulos, the fictional
protagonist of Karel Čapek’s 1922 play, The Makropulos Case, aka The Makropulos
Affair124—later turned into a 1926 opera by Leoš Janáček—has been granted immortality,
but within the first three centuries of her sempiternally endless or infinite life, starting at
age 42, she’s also lost all her positive categorical desires. So then, at age 342, she
negatively categorically desires to be deads, and therefore has a good reason to die. This
provides the conceptual segue to Williams’s argument for his thesis (ii), which has four
steps.

First, it’s a necessary condition of my being immortal that the very same
person—namely, I myself, as I am now, with a certain set of memories, and a certain
character—goes on living, and does not change identities over time. The idea that I
myself am continually being reborn as a new person, as opposed to merely being
reincarnated in a new body, is incoherent.

Second, as time passes, all of the experiences it would be possible for me to have,
are eventually had. Then after that time, necessarily, a state of boredom, indifference,
and coldness—in Williams’s nice phrase, “joylessness”—sets in. Presumably, joylessness
consists in having no desires that must be satisfied either (i) as actually experienced by
me with joy, hence conditional on my being alive to experience them (i.e., joyful-life-
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conditional desires), or (ii) as would be experienced by me with joy, if, contrary to

highly probable fact, I continued to live (i.e., positive categorical desires per se).

Third, for this reason, living forever would be infinitely joyless, and, in
particular, infinitely boring.

Fourth, therefore human immortality would be intolerable.

X.2 Fischer on How Human Immortality Could Be a Good Thing

According to Fischer, by virtue of his argument for the intolerability of human

immortality, Williams’s account negatively implies two necessary conditions on the
tolerability of human immortality: (i) the identity condition, which says that the person
who lives on must remain the same person over time, and (ii) the attractiveness condition,
which says that the person’s future life must be appealing, that is, not filled with pain
and/or suffering, and not joyless—in particular, and perhaps most importantly, not
boring.In view of those necessary conditions, Fischer then claims that Williams’s
argument makes three questionable assumptions, and fails to recognize one crucial
distinction, hence it is an unsound argument.

The first questionable assumption that Williams makes is that in order for
human immortality to preserve identity over time, future activities cannot be
completely absorbing, since then the subject would lose herself, and therefore her self, in
them, and could not preserve her identity over time. But as Fischer correctly points out,
it’s one thing for the content of an experience to be completely absorbing, and quite
another for an experience to be unowned by a distinctive, synchronically and
diachronically identical self. More generally, completely absorbing experiences in the
content-sense can also be owned by the very same self at any given time and over time.

Williams’s second questionable assumption is that in order for human

immortality to be attractive, it must consist in one single activity that in turn would
eventually become joyless and boring. But on the contrary, Fischer plausibly argues,
immortality could consist in a plurality of activities, and it is not at all clear that this
plurality would itself ever be joy-exhaustible or become boring in the way that a single
activity could.

And Williams’s third questionable assumption is that in order for immortality to

be attractive, all experiences in the subject’s future sempiternally endless or infinite life
have to be pleasurable, even though they all would eventually become joyless and
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boring. But on the contrary, according to Fischer, since finite or terminating human lives
can be overall very good even if there is a certain amount of pain/suffering, joylessness,
and boredom in them, then there is no good reason to think that a sempiternally infinite
or endless human life could not be similarly composed.

In addition to these three questionable assumptions, according to Fischer,

Williams also fails to recognize a crucial distinction between (i) self-exhausting pleasures,
which aesthetically and/or hedonically terminate themselves and are inherently non-
renewable for the subject, either (ia) because they turn out, in the event, to be
disappointing (for example, the prospectively amazing New Year’s party that’s not so
very amazing after all, indeed quite the contrary) or (ib) because they are complete in
themselves (for example, the intense thrill of climbing Mount Everest, that one never
needs or wants to repeat, having “been-there, done-that”), and (ii) repeatable pleasures,
that don’t exhaust themselves and are inherently worth experiencing again and again.
Self-exhausting and repeatable pleasures can, to some important extent, be relativized
to individuals and contexts: what counts as self-exhausting or repeatable for one
individual or in one context, need not count as self-exhausting or repeatable for another
individual or in another context. Moreover, repeatable pleasures should not, in general,
be obsessively or mechanically repeated, but instead require appropriate distribution or
patterning over time. Now Williams seems to assume that all pleasures will ultimately
be self-exhausting in the condition of human immortality. But, on the contrary says
Fischer, there’s no good reason to believe that there cannot be endlessly or infinitely
repeatable pleasures in a sempiternally endless or infinite life, provided that these
pleasures are appropriately distibuted or patterned over time.

So, taking Williams’s three questionable assumptions together with his failure to
recognize the category of repeatable pleasures, his conclusion does not follow. On the
contrary, Fischer concludes, human immortality could be a good thing.

X.3 Some Worries About What Williams and Fischer are Saying About
Human Immortality

For the purposes of my criticism of Williams and Fischer alike, by the term “a finite or
terminating rational human life” I’ll mean a human personal life, with permanent deaths at
the end of it. Then, correspondingly, by “human immortality” I will mean a sempiternally
endless or infinite human personal life. Granting that, then we need to distinguish between
(i) a finite or terminating human personal life that’s relatively short, say, lasting up 120
years in duration as an absolute maximum, but no longer than that, (ii) a finite or
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terminating human personal life that’s super-long, say, any finite number of years
greater than 120 in duration, including of course Elina Makropulos’s 342 years, and
(iii) a human personal life that’s sempiternally endless or infinite.The deep issue raised
by this threefold distinction is how precisely we are to understand the concept of
endlessness or infinity when it’s applied to the concept of a human personal life.

Now a human personal life like ours, simply by virtue of its being human and
therefore having a necessary connection with organismic animal life, occurs in rather
limited portions of space, and also has a certain temporally definite biological
sequencing related to growth, maturation, aging, eating, sleeping, breathing, blood
circulation, heart activity, neuronal activity, hormonal activity, ranges of body
temperature, and so-on. In other words, a human personal life is inherently filled with
spatial and biotemporal parameters of various kinds. By sharp contrast, the only well-
defined concept of endlessness or infinity we have is fundamentally mathematical, and
here there is an important distinction between (i) denumerable infinities, involving one-
to-one correspondence with the set of natural numbers/positive integers), and (ii) non-
denumerable infinities, which systematically outrun one-to-one correspondence with the
natural numbers/positive integers, for example, the power set (i.e., the set of all sub-
sets) of the set of natural numbers, but, as Georg Cantor showed, can all be put into one-
to-one correspondence with the real numbers. We can meaningfully add this dual
mathematical concept of endlessness or infinity to the concept of sempiternally
successive time, and then understand the idea of a sempiternal endlessness or infinity
that’s either denumerable or non-denumerable. But, supposing that we do have some
conceptually competent grasp of the temporal-mathematical concept of sempiternal
endlessness or infinity, nevertheless I don’t think we have the slightest idea of how this
concept meaningfully applies to the concept of a human personal life, given the necessary
connection between such a life and an inherently spatially-limited and temporally
definite biologically-sequenced organismic life of a specifically human sort.

For example, in an endless or infinite amount of time, since (as Cantor showed),
every denumerably infinite series has the same cardinality (i.e., counting-number-osity)
as the natural numbers, and also every non-denumerable infinite series has the same
cardinality as the real numbers, and in turn since (according to Cantor’s “continuum
hypothesis”) either the natural numbers or the real numbers, but no number system in
between those two, captures the quantitative structure of the spacetime continuum,
then the very same immortal human person could visit every single point in any
denumerably infinite space or the transfinite spacetime continuum. And even though,
necessarily, every human person, by virtue of their specifically human organismic lives,
grows, matures, and ages throughout those lives, that very same person, as immortal,
could also somehow exist for an endlessly or infinitely long time without growing,
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maturing, or aging, like Elina Makropolus. But none of this makes any sense! How
could the constitutive moments of a single human person’s life map one-to-one to all the
points of any denumerably infinite space or the spacetime continuum? Does Elina
Makropulos need to eat, or not? If so, what are her digestive processes like? Does she
need to sleep, and if so, why? Is she constantly exchanging heat, energy, and matter
with the environment, like every other non-equilibrium thermodynamic system that’s
also an animal? Is she subject to entropy? And so-on. Hence I don’t think we have the
slightest idea of what the concept of “human immortality” really means.

Correspondingly, on the charitable assumption that they are actually making

sense, I think that Williams and Fischer are actually talking about a finite or terminating
human personal life that’s super-long, and not about human personal immortality, which
is in fact an incoherent notion. On the one hand, then, Williams is absolutely right that
there’s something deeply questionable about the very idea of immortality for creatures
like us. But also Williams is wrong that a finite or terminating higher-level human
personal life that is super-long would be intolerable, for all the reasons that Fischer
gives. And on the other hand, Fischer is absolutely right that Williams’s argument for
the intolerability of human immortality is unsound. But also Fischer is wrong that he’s
shown anything about how human personal immortality could be good, since the very
idea of such a thing is incoherent.

X.4 Human Life Without Immortality

In fact, immortality for creatures like us, human persons, is simply impossible because its
very idea is incoherent, and more precisely because its possibility is ruled out by the
very idea of human personal life like ours. Our rational lives as human persons are finite
but unbounded, like the surface of a sphere. Or to make the same point slightly
differently, since every such rational human life necessarily has egocentric centering, it’s
like the shape of the visual field, which is the interior of a finite sphere projected
perspectivally outwards from a single oriented region on that interior surface. Our
subjective experience of the finite unboundedness of the interior of this perspectivally-
projected human-life-sphere—a sphere that’s completely filled up with all the things we
experience, and ourselves at the center, as conscious and self-conscious rational animals,
fully embedded and fully embarked on our lives in a thoroughly nonideal world (i.e., a
world that’s a complete mess) and in solidarity with all other human persons—is as close
to immortality as we’ll ever get, because it is as close to immortality as it’s possible for “human,
all-too-human: creatures like us to get.
 141

Furthermore, and perhaps most poignantly, for us to hope for human

immortality, or for us to desire and long for immortality, is a tragic conceptual,
metaphysical, moral, and existential mistake, a serious cognitive illusion. As per the
second epigraph of this section, Ludwig Wittgenstein clearly saw—his attention having
been duly concentrated by the horrors of front line action on the Eastern Front in the
Great War—that this hope, desiring, or longing for a sempiternally endless or infinite
life in effect just endlessly or infinitely puts off till tomorrow what you can, really
necessarily, only ever feel, choose, or do right here and right now, today, over and over
and over again, until, inevitably, you die. “He lives eternally who lives in the present.”
For us to hope, desire, or long for human immortality is therefore a fundamental refusal
of our own innately-specified capacity for principled authenticity, and in this way it
constitutes a special form of nihilism that Simon Critchley aptly calls passive nihilism.125
So here’s where Kantian morality and Wittgenstein’s 1921 logico-philosophical
masterpiece, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, meet up with Nietzsche’s existentialist
philosophy. Indeed, in my opinion, Wittgenstein’s thought about living eternally in the
present is essentially the same as the one Nietzsche had about “the greatest stress” and
eternal recurrence. Both of these thoughts express a profound dual insight about the
nature of principled authenticity for rational but also “human, all-too-human” animals
like us, and about the self-undermining passive nihilism that constantly tempts us in the
form of the seemingly benign and natural desire for endless or infinite life.

X.5 The Be-All and The End-All

In this book, I’ve argued (i) that the standard conception of morality can be
vindicated in the face of the three classical challenges to it, (ii) that even though God
isn’t the answer to the moral question, nevertheless the question of the existence or non-
existence of an essentially rational God remains an open one, (iii) that Moderate
Secularism is the prima facie best approach to correctly understanding the connection
between religion and morality, (iv) that, all things considered, Kant’s morality of
persons and principles is on-the-whole superior to Aristotelian virtue ethics and Millian
utilitarianism alike, (v) that Pascal’s realistic optimism about the meaning of life is
superior to Leibniz’s unrealistic optimism and Schopenhauer’s pessimism alike, (vi) that
existential authenticity is a rationally defensible version of the highest good only if it is
combined with a Kantian morality of persons and principles, (vii) that existential
Kantian moral theory is arguably the best and truest moral theory, hence principled
authenticity is the highest good that we all always ought to be choosing and acting for
the sake of, hence the meaning of a life like ours is the pursuit of principled authenticity,
(viii) that a human person’s death in the sense of the permanent state of their being
dead (deaths), by its very nature, is necessarily neither a good thing nor a bad thing for
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the one who dies, (ix) that a human person’s death in the sense of the process of dying
(deathp) that terminates in the permanent state of their being dead, by its very nature, is
sometimes a good thing for the one who dies and also sometimes a bad thing for the
one who dies, and finally (x) that human personal immortality is impossible, therefore
this “human, all-too-human” life is all there is, so we’d all better get our acts together, and
wholeheartedly pursue principled authenticity, before it’s too late.

And that seems like enough for one short book.

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NOTES
1Wikipedia, “Thomas Bartlett Whitaker” (2020), available online at URL =
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bartlett_Whitaker>.

2 See R. Hanna, Preface and General Introduction, Supplementary Essays, and General Bibliography (THE
RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 1) (New York: Nova Science, 2018); R. Hanna, Deep Freedom and
Real Persons: A Study in Metaphysics (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 2) (New York: Nova
Science, 2018); R. Hanna, Kantian Ethics and Human Existence: A Study in Moral Philosophy (THE
RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 3) (New York: Nova Science, 2018); R. Hanna, Kant,
Agnosticism, and Anarchism: A Theological-Political Treatise (THE RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol.
4); and R. Hanna, Cognition, Content, and the A Priori: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind and Knowledge (THE
RATIONAL HUMAN CONDITION, Vol. 5) (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015).

3That hope, in turn, is very much in solidarity with, and indeed fully in the spirit of, Evan Mandery’s
excellent article, “What Teaching Ethics in Appalachia Taught Me About Bridging America’s Partisan
Divide,” Politico Magazine (13 October 2019), available online at URL =
<https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/10/13/america-cultural-divide-red-state-blue-state-
228111>.

4See also J. Rachels and S. Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy (7th edn., New York: McGraw-Hill,
2012), esp. ch. 1; and R. Shafer-Landau, The Fundamentals of Ethics (3rd edn., Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
2015), esp. the Introduction.

5 See, e.g., B. Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985); and B. Williams,
Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1972). The ethics vs. morality =
Sittlichkeit vs. Moralität contrast has also had some impact in contemporary philosophy. For example,
essentially the same distinction is replicated in the titles and basic topics of the first two divisions of
Shafer-Landau’s widely-used and influential Fundamentals of Ethics: “The Good Life” and “Normative
Ethics: Doing the Right Thing,” which sets it interestingly apart from the bog-standard tripartite division
of moral philosophy into meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics.

6See J.C. Calhoun, “Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions: Revised Report,” U.S. Senate (Feb. 6,
1837, at Wake Forest University), available online at URL =
<http://users.wfu.edu/zulick/340/calhoun2.html>.

7 Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, ch. 10.

8 See, e.g., F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966); F.
Nietzsche, “ The Genealogy of Morals,” in F. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. W.
Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), pp. 13-163; M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the New
Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1975); M. Foucault, The Order of Things (New York:
Vintage, 1973), ch. 9; and J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1977).

9 Rachels and Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, p. 13.

 144

10See P. Foot, “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect,” in P. Foot, Virtues and
Vices (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1978), pp. 19-32; J.J. Thomson, “Killing, Letting Die, and the
Trolley Problem,” in J. Fischer and M. Ravizza (eds.), Ethics: Problems and Principles (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, and Jovanovich, 1991), pp. 67-77; J.J. Thomson, “The Trolley Problem,” in Fischer and Ravizza
(eds.), Ethics: Problems and Principles, pp. 279-292; and Wikipedia, “The Trolley Problem” (2020), available
online at URL = <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem>.

11 Thomson, “The Trolley Problem,” in Fischer and Ravizza (eds.), Ethics: Problems and Principles, p. 288.

12See, e.g., M. Clary, “Baby Theresa’s Gift: Debate Over Organ-Harvesting Laws,” The Los Angeles Times
(16 April 1992), available online at URL = <https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-04-16-mn-888-
story.html>.

See, e.g., J.F.O. McCallister, “Kill Mary to Save Jodie?,” Time (10 September 2000), available online at
13

URL = <http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,54436,00.html>.

See, e.g., Wikipedia, “Robert Latimer” (2020), available online at URL =

14

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Latimer>.

15Wikipedia, “Stephan Körner” (2020), available online at URL =

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephan_K%C3%B6rner>.

16Wikipedia, “Edith Körner” (2020), available online at URL =

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_K%C3%B6rner>.

17 A. Ahuja, “An Organized Death,” London Times (4 September 2000).

18S. Mudd, “What Moral Philosophy Tells Us About Our Reactions to Trump’s Illness,” The New York
Times (9 October 2020), also available online at URL =
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/09/opinion/trump-covid-schadenfreude-ethics.html>. Underlining
added.

19See, e.g., A. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003); and A. Vitali, The End of
Policing (London: Verso, 2017).

20See, e.g., Wikipedia, “The Emancipation Proclamation” (2020), available online at URL =
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_Proclamation>.

21See, e.g., A. Shafer, “Why Robert Latimer Deserves a Pardon,” The Globe and Mail (20 July 2018),
available online at URL = <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-why-robert-latimer-
deserves-a-pardon/>.

22 Ahuja, “An Organized Death.”

23
See, e.g., Wikipedia, “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (2020), available online at URL =
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Apocalypse>.
 145

24See, e.g., C.C.W. Taylor and M. Lee, “The Sophists,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2020
Edition), E.N. Zalta (ed.), available online at URL =
<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/sophists/>.

25See R. Hanna, Rationality and Logic (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), ch. 7; and Hanna, Cognition, Content,
and the A Priori, ch. 7.

26See, e.g., Wikipedia, “Beyond Good and Evil” (2020), available online at URL =
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil>.

27See, e.g., Wikipedia, “Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong” (2020), available online at URL =
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics:_Inventing_Right_and_Wrong>.

28 And in fact I’ve tried to do that: see, e.g., Hanna, Cognition, Content, and the A Priori, ch. 7.

29See, e.g., Wikipedia, “Ayn Rand” (2020), available online at URL =

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand>.

30
A. Rand, as quoted in Rachels and Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy pp. 73-74. See also J. Burns,
Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2009).

31L. MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help (New York:
Penguin Books, 2016).

32
R. Bregman, Humankind: A Hopeful History, trans. E. Manton and E. Moore (New York: Little, Brown, &
Co., 2020); see also R. Hanna, “On Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: Optimism For Realists, Or, Neither
Hobbes Nor Rousseau” (September 2020 version), available online at URL =
<https://www.academia.edu/43631182/On_Rutger_Bregmans_Humankind_Minor_revisions_22_Septemb
er_2020_>.

33See also, e.g., Wikipedia, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (2020), available online at URL =
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Famine,_Affluence,_and_Morality>.

34 P. Unger, Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996). See
also R. Hanna, “Must We Be Good Samaritans? On Unger’s Living High and Letting Die," Canadian Journal
of Philosophy 28 (1998): 453-470.

35 Unger, Living High and Letting Die, pp. 24-25.

P. Singer, “The Singer Solution to World Poverty,” in J. Rachels and S. Rachels, (eds.), The Right Thing to
36

Do: Basic Readings in Moral Philosophy (4th edn., New York: McGraw-Hill, 2007), pp. 138-144, at p. 144.

37See also, e.g., Rachels and Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, ch. 4; and Shafer-Landau, The
Fundamentals of Ethics, ch. 5.

38From here on in, in order not to restrict my argument to monotheistic religions, but also for
convenience, I’ll assume that the term “God” is shorthand for “God (or the complete collection of gods).”
 146

39See, e.g., S. Nadler, “Baruch Spinoza,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition),
E.N. Zalta (ed.), available online at URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/spinoza/>.

40 See, e.g., Hanna, Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism.

41See, e.g., G.W. Leibniz, “A Vindication of God’s Justice Reconciled with His Other Perfections and All
His Actions,” trans. P. and A.M. Schrecker in G.W. Leibniz, Leibniz: Monadology and Other Philosophical
Essays (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), pp. 114-147.

42 Hanna, Kant, Agnosticism, and Anarchism.

43See, e.g., Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. T. Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1985); Rachels and
Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, ch. 12; and Shafer-Landau, The Fundamentals of Ethics, ch. 17.

44See, e.g., M. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986).

45 In the massive recent and contemporary philosophical literature on moral responsibility, such cases are
known as “Frankfurt-style counterexamples,” named after Harry Frankfurt’s highly influential essay,
“Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” in H. Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 1-10. Actually, Frankfurt’s own example is more science-
fictional than The Fanatical Utilitarian, and involves a mad scientist who can manipulate your brain so
that you end up doing his bidding, no matter what you’ve already chosen—but the basic point is the
same.

46
See also Shafer-Landau, The Fundamentals of Ethics, ch. 16.

47See, e.g., Rachels and Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, ch. 11; and Shafer-Landau, The
Fundamental of Ethics, ch. 18.

48 Rachels and Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, pp. 170-171.

49See, e.g., J.S. Mill, “Utilitarianism,” in Rachels and Rachels, The Right Thing to Do, ch. 8; Rachels and
Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, chs. 7-8; and Shafer-Landau, The Fundamentals of Ethics, chs. 9-
10.

50See, e.g., Wikipedia, “TARDIS” (2020), available online at URL =

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TARDIS>. I watched the earliest episodes of Dr Who on TV in 1963, and like
most viewers my age, was scared witless by them. Nevertheless, I’ve always wanted a TARDIS of my
very own—a philosopher’s TARDIS—and this book enables me to have that.

51 See, e.g., URL = < http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/files/2010/04/Auto-Icon.jpg>.

52 See, e.g., MacFarquhar, Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help.

53 Mill, “Utilitarianism,” p. 74.

54 J. Bentham, Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Hafner, 1948), p. 311.
 147

55See, e.g., P. Singer, “All Animals are Equal,” in P. Singer, Unsanctifying Human Life (Oxford: Blackwell,
2002), pp. 80-94; and P. Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), ch. 5.

56Consider, e.g., the famous fictional “rape-&-race-riots” case described by H.J. McCloskey and quoted by
Rachels and Rachels, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, pp. 112-113, and also the real-world Peeping Tom
case cited by them at pp. 113-114.

57 D. Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1983), p. 81.

58 See R. Nozick, “The Experience Machine,” in Rachels and Rachels, The Right Thing to Do, pp. 262-264.

59That’s the professional popular philosopher Sam Harris’s deflationary, mechanistic epithet for human
persons and other animals relevantly like us. See S. Harris, Free Will (New York: Free Press, 2012).

60 And that’s the professional academic philosopher Daniel Dennett’s equally deflationary and
mechanistic epithet—borrowed from the comic strip Dilbert—for creatures like us. See, e.g., J. Schuessler,
“Philosophy That Stirs the Waters,” New York Times (29 April 2013), available online at URL =
<http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/books/daniel-dennett-author-of-intuition-pumps-and-other-tools-
for-thinking.html?emc=eta1&_r=0>.

61 See Williams, “Utilitarianism and Integrity,” in Rachels and Rachels, The Right Thing to Do, pp. 145-150.

62See I. Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. M. Gregor, in I. Kant, Immanuel Kant: Practical
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), pp. 43-108; Rachels and Rachels, The Elements of
Moral Philosophy, chs. 9-10; Shafer-Landau, The Fundamentals of Ethics, chs. 11-12; and Rachels and Rachels,
The Right Thing to Do, ch. 9.

63 When I was in elementary school—a few years after being scared witless by Dr Who in 1963—I
memorized the first 26 digits of the decimal expansion of pi as a sort of party-trick. Needless to say, it was
a laugh riot.

64See, e.g., Wikipedia, “Transcendental Number” (2020), available online at URL =

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_number>.

65For an artistically brilliant cinematic expression of the classical caricature of Kant, see Phillippe Collin’s
1993 “Les Dernier Jours d’Emmanuel Kant,” aka “The Last Days of Immanuel Kant,” available online
with English sub-titles at URL = <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYGGHlgpdlw>.

66See, e.g., K. Marx, Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology & Social Philosophy, trans. T.B Bottomore (New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); E. Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966); and J.
Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013), pp. 31-32.

67Whether this is true of Kant the man is another question entirely, and currently the target of much
controversy and debate. For the definitive biography of Kant, see M. Kuehn, Kant: A Biography
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001); and for an equally excellent discussion of Kant’s opinions on
these matters, see P. Kleingeld, Kant and Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012).
But even supposing that Kant himself, at some point(s) in his long philosophical career, expressed some
racist, sexist, xenophobic, ableist, or speciesist opinions by today’s standards, and never substantially
 148

changed his mind (which, as Kleingeld ahsows, actually turns out to be false as regards racism),
nevertheless to argue from Kant’s own personal prejudices, to the falsity or wrongness of his moral
theory, is a classic example of the ad hominem fallacy: criticizing a person, not their arguments or theses.
Philosophers, like everyone else, are “human, all-too-human,”and therefore they (we) are all finite,
imperfect, miserable sinners, and all-too-easily criticized; but historically-informed existentially-oriented
moral philosophy is about their moral theories and their moral world-views, and their implications for basic
problems of human existence, not a moral critique of their lives.

68See I. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. M. Gregor, in Kant, Immanuel Kant: Practical Philosophy, pp.
139-271, at pp. 231-235).

69 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 73.

70 Ibid.

71 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 80.

72 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 81.

73 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 83, translation modified slightly.

74Here, of course, we can think back to Singer’s and Unger’s argument for famine relief, and my critical
analysis of it, in section III.4.

75 I. Kant, “On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy,” trans. M. Gregor, in Kant, Immanuel Kant:
Practical Philosophy, pp. 611-615, at p. 611. It’s philosophically unfortunate for two reasons. First, in that
essay, Kant doesn’t in fact consider whether it would be morally permissible to tell a lie in that context per se,
instead he actually considers whether it would be morally permissible to tell the lie for consequentialist (and in
effect Utilitarian) reasons alone, which is an importantly different question. And second, in that essay, the
76 year old Kant (he died in 1801) clearly shows himself to be, at least in his old age, a moral fanatic about
truth-telling.

76See, e.g., Wikipedia, “Cassie Bernall” (2020), available online at URL =

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassie_Bernall>.

77See, e.g., Wikipedia, “Columbine High School Massacre” (2020), available alone at URL =
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre>. Our daughter was in elementary
school that year, also in Colorado and not too far from suburban Denver, and there were serious fears for
the next few days about copy-cat shooters at any school in the area. That scared me witless too.

78 For purposes of philosophical full disclosure, I should also mention that in Kantian Ethics and Human
Existence, ch. 2, I develop a somewhat different, five-step response to the worry about moral dilemmas,
which is (i) to reject a presupposition of the worry, namely that any moral theory that leads to moral
dilemmas or contradictions must be rejected, (ii) to accept the existence of “local” moral dilemmas or
contradictions in some historical contexts, (iii) show how the moral dilemmas or contradictions that arise
in such contexts don’t logically affect Kant’s absolutist moral generalism, which applies only to The
Categorical Imperative, (iv) show in particular how the four (or five) formulations of The Categorical
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Imperative are all generally objectively valid and non-contradictory even when we allow for “local”
moral dilemmas or contradictions, and finally (v) show how this version of the Kantian theory of moral
principles captures certain profound existential insights about our “human, all-too-human” moral lives.
But all that’s too longwinded, somewhat philosophical strenuous, and therefore, again, “too much like
hard work,” for a short book.

79B. Pascal, Pascal’s Pensées (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1958), with an Introduction by T.S. Eliot, pp. 65–69,
available online at URL = <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18269/18269-h/18269-h.htm>.

80 See also section IV.2 above.

81 See section IV.2.

82 —Or something that effect.

83A. Schopenhauer, “On the Sufferings of the World,” trans. T.B. Saunders, in A. Schopenhauer, The
Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer: Studies in Pessimism, available online at URL =
<https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10732/10732-h/10732-h.htm>.

84 See, e.g., D. Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence (Oxford:
Clarendon/Oxford Univ. Press, 2006). See also J. Rothman, “The Case For Not Being Born,” The New
Yorker (27 November 2017), available online at URL = <https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-
interest/the-case-for-not-being-born>; Rothman’s very interesting article kicks off with this: “David
Benatar may be the [contemporary] world’s most pessimistic philosopher.”

85See, e.g., H. Barnes, Humanistic Existentialism: The Literature of Possibility (Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska
Press, 1959); R. Solomon (ed.), Existentialism (New York: The Modern Library/McGraw-Hill, 1974); and S.
Crowell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2012).

86See J.-P. Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” trans. B. Frechtman, in S. Cahn and P. Markie (eds.),
Ethics: History, Theory, and Contemporary Issues (3rd edn., Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2006), pp. 396-402, at
pp. 397, 399, and 402.

87T. Nagel, “The Absurd,” in T. Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), pp.
10-23.

88W. Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in W. Sellars, Science, Perception, and Reality
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 1-40.

89 Nagel, “The Absurd,” p. 23.

90A. Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” trans. J. O’Brien, in A. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
(New York: Vintage, 1955), pp. 1-91.

91 Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” p. 91.

92 That’s Nagel criticizing Camus’s take on the absurd. Nagel, “The Absurd,” p. 22.
 150

93See, e.g., G. Kotkin, Existential America (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2003), esp. chs.
5-7.

94C. Bass, “By Reason of Insanity,” Yale Alumni Magazine (May/June 2015): 48-53, at p. 49, available online
at URL = <http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/4076/by-reason-of-insanity>.

95Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 235. A less colloquial but more philosophically accurate translation
of Selbstzufriedenheit might be “self-realization,” since “contentment” seems to imply passivity.

96 W. Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” Poetry 50 (May 1937), canto I.

97 Barnes, Humanistic Existentialism, p. 3.

98The ad hominem fallacy consists in criticizing people instead of criticizing their arguments or theses. See
also note 67 above.

99 Hanna, Deep Freedom and Real Persons.

100 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 80 (GMM 4: 429).

See, e.g., H. Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA Harvard
101

Univ. Press, 1993).

102 See Hanna, Kantian Ethics and Human Existence.

103
See, e.g., S. Baiasu, Kant and Sartre: Re-Discovering Critical Ethics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011);
and S. Baiasu (ed.), Comparing Kant and Sartre (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

104 Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” pp. 397-398.

105 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, p. 73 (GMM 4: 421).

106 Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” p. 400 (underlining added).

107
Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus. Available online at URL =
<http://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html>.

Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, as quoted in S. Luper, “Death,” section 3.2, The Stanford Encyclopedia of
108

Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition), E.N. Zalta (ed.), available online at URL =
<http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/death/>.

109 See, e.g., Hanna, Deep Freedom and Real Persons, ch. 2.

110
I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2000), p. 246.
 151

See, e.g., Wikipedia, “Karen Ann Quinlan” (2020), available online at URL =
111

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Ann_Quinlan>.

See, e.g., Wikipedia, “Nancy Cruzan” (2020), available online at URL =

112

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruzan_v._Director,_Missouri_Department_of_Health>.

Wikipedia, “Terry Schiavo Case” (2020), available online at URL =

113

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo_case>.

114 See, e.g., J. Bayley, Elegy for Iris (London: Picador, 1999).

115D. Suits, “Why Death is Not Bad for the One Who Died,” American Philosophical Quarterly 38 (2001): 69-
84.

116 T. Nagel, “Death,” in Nagel, Mortal Questions, pp. 1-10.

117 Suits, “Why Death is Not Bad for the One Who Died.”

118So, other things being equal, it is not better never to have existed. For an opposing view, see Benatar,
Better Never to Have Been, and section VI.3 above.

119 Suits, “Why Death is Not Bad for the One Who Died,” p. 79.

120
F. Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, trans. W. Kaufmann (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1983),
pp. 101-102 (Gay Science, # 341), italics in the original.

121L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1981), p. 185.

122B. Williams, ““The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” in B. Williams,
Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 82-100.

J.M. Fischer, “Why Immortality is Not So Bad,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 2 (1994): 257-
123

270.

See, e.g., “The Makropulos Affair” (2020), available online at URL =

124

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Makropulos_Affair>.

125 S. Critchley, Infinitely Demanding (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 3-6.