It occurred to me that although the subject of philosophy is broad and sometimes vaguely defined, maybe it can be summed up in the succinct quesion “How do we know _______?” where the blank is filled in differently depending on the subdiscipline.

Epistemology: How do we know what we know?

Ethics: How do we know right and wrong?

Metaphysics: How do we know what exists?

Religion: How do we know anything about God?

Maybe I’m just rambling, not making sense. But it sounded cool in my head.

I am as yet woefully undertrained in value theory, but the musings below represent an unpolished version of my views on intrinsic and extrinsic goods.

Now, keep in mind that I’m writing this from a strictly materialistic point of view. I’m not interested in going to heaven or finding God, partly because I think those things are fruitless ventures but mostly because I think most people who are religious still have something else they want out of life, even if they consider it secondary. So, setting religion aside for now…

Most everyone you talk to will claim that life is, at the risk of sounding cliché, the pursuit of happiness. I think few of these people realize the philosophical implications of that claim. Granted, what I’m about to say is debatable, but it is my opinion that it all boils down to value theory, and that we, as humans, ought to be united in the pursuit of intrinsic goods. If you are familiar with Value Theory, you may skip a couple paragraphs down. If not, you should know what I’m talking about.

I’m using the term intrinsic good as a technical term. To be an intrinsic good is to be good in and of itself. This is to be contrasted with extrinsic goods, which are good in terms of some other good. Examples of extrinsic goods are easy: Money helps us buy stuff. Food helps us survive and also gives us pleasure. Freedom allows us to reach our full potential, and so on.

Intrinsic goods are harder, perhaps because there are so few of them. Many philosophers have made attempts at uncovering the things that are intrinsically good. This link will provide you with more information than you ever wanted to know on the subject, but in the interest of brevity, I will be narrowing my focus. Some virtues that have been proposed as intrinsic goods have been justice, strength, harmony, love, and honor. However, I take the following to be the two best candidates, happiness and wisdom.

I think that an elegant value theory has just one intrinsic good, to which all other goods eventually boil down. In the article above, this view is taken as a more “conservative” type of value theory, but despite the disparaging language (kidding) I feel that a value theory that lists two, five, eight intrinsic goods is missing something, and that we naturally want to look for the one thing all of them have in common. So I have limited my search of intrinsic goodness to just one feature.

Now we’re ready to talk about happiness and wisdom, which is where my opinion diverges from those of most of my peers. Happiness, they say, is the ultimate goal of life. Now, I can see very good reasoning here, and I will fully admit that I’ve had a hard time fully refuting this in support of my claim that it is in fact wisdom, but I feel very strongly that human happiness is limited, fallible, weak, contingent on too many external factors, and ultimately temporary.

“Aha!” I hear you cry. “Wisdom is all of those things, too.” No. It is not, and I’m going to explain why.

I want to start by making a very clear distinction between what I will call knowledge and wisdom. I recognize that in my conversations with my peers, I’ve been using the term knowledge but I feel as though the alternate term wisdom is more accurate for the following reasons. First, knowledge seems to imply something mundane, brute memorizing. The thing we call knowledge applies just as easily to memorizing the phone book as to learning the meaning of life. I do not wish to make the claim that all knowledge is intrinsically good (although that exact claim has garnered some support in the philosophical community). Instead, I propose a subset of knowledge. Wisdom consists of knowledge + permanence.

Permanence is admittedly a very bad word to use for the property I want to impart upon wisdom. I’m looking for something like lack of contingency. Knowing the phone number for Dominoes Pizza in Shanghai is not wisdom because one day Dominoes, the phone, and Shanghai will all cease to exist. Knowing the laws of nature is wisdom because they are static, unchanging, and relevant to everything else that goes. Logic is wisdom because Modus Ponens will always always always be a valid inference in every possible world, no matter what else may be different.

“Aha!” I again hear you cry. “You’re an atheist! You think that when you die, everything just stops, so why should permanence matter?”

No. I think that when I die, I will cease to exist. The universe, however, will go on after me, and it is by this very virtue that I, as a human, have a moral obligation to do everything in my power to add to the collective wisdom of humanity.

I feel as though this conception of intrinsic goodness explains a huge portion of our natural tendencies. We all desire answers to the big questions (you know which ones I’m talking about), at least at some point in our lives. I am of the opinion that those who do not desire answers feel this way only because they have become jaded on their possibilities of finding them, which is in my ever so humble, not-wishing-to-offend opinion, a failure. These people have failed because they have quit. So these people, for their own psychological reasons, seek a secondary goal: happiness.

Happiness is great. I like being happy and so do you. Happiness is, however, the fool’s gold of intrinsic goods. It is a survival mechanism, and it is only an extrinsic good. Happiness leads to increased chances of survival, which, when applied to humanity as a whole, leads to increased chances of newfound wisdom.

We are evolutionarily inclined to seek happiness. It IS important. It’s one of the greatest extrinsic goods out there. But the fact remains that it means nothing in the grand scheme of things. My happiness can’t stay here after I die, but due to the miracle of human communication and the fact that after I die, life will go on, the wisdom I accrue throughout my life CAN exist after my death, and that, my friends, is what separates the two. It is not all that mysterious. I don’t seek wisdom as an extension of my ‘closeted’ desire to find God, as one of my peers suggested. I don’t seek it because I think I can’t find happiness. I seek it because it’s the only thing worth having. Wisdom is all that matters.

1. We can accept the conclusion, accept determinism, and accept that we are never free.
2. We can accept the conclusion, but reject determinism to reach the conclusion that we may sometimes act freely.
3. We can reject the conclusion by finding fault with one of premises 1-5.

Option 1 is fairly simple. It entails accepting the Consequence Argument, and also the following argument.

The Argument against Freedom
1. If determinism is true, then we never act freely. (Conclusion of Consequence Argument)
2. Determinism is true.
——————
3. So, we never act freely.

People who choose this route are known as “Hard Determinists.” A hard determinist may also endorse the following argument.

The Argument Against Moral Responsibility
1. Free will is a requirement for moral responsibility.
2. We never have free will.
—————————-
3. So, we are never morally responsible for our actions.

We will be talking more about moral responsibility later.

Let’s begin exploring option 2. You may recall that the denial of determinism is called, cleverly enough, indeterminism. Indeterminism states that there are some actions that are undetermined. It will be helpful to us to evaluate what this means.

An event E is undetermined =df it is not the case that there is some time t such (i) t is earlier that the time of E and (ii) the conjunction of any proposition expressing the state of the world at t with the laws of nature entails that E will occur.

Indeterminism is supposed to avoid the consequent of the Argument against Freedom by denying premise 2. Indeterminism itself comes in several different ‘flavors.’

Simple Indeterminism: (i) There are some undetermined actions. (ii) An action is free if it is undetermined. (iii) Agents are in general morally responsible for their own undetermined actions.

That all sounds well, until you start to think about it. Think for a moment about the following example. If indeterminism is true, then it seems that certain random events can obtain. So one day you’re sitting at Denny’s with your friend Jeff. Jeff asks you how you did in your Philosophy class last semester. And, although you meant to say “Pretty good,” instead, your arm spasms, and your hand flies into Jeff’s nose, breaking his glasses and making him really mad at you.

Q. Are you morally responsible for punching Jeff?
A. It would seem not. Because the circumstances leading up to your hand flailing outward were indeterministic, it seems like you cannot be held responsible. This idea is clearly spelled out in what we’ll call the Pure Chance Principle.

The Pure Chance Principle: If an event is undetermined, no one is responsible for that event.

One attempt to revise Simple Indeterminism is known as Volitional Indeterminism.

Volitional Indeterminism: (i) Some actions are caused by undetermined volitions within their agents. (ii) An action is free iff either (a) it is itself an undetermined volition or (b) it is caused by an undetermined volition within its agent. (iii) Agents are in general morally responsible for their own undetermined volitions and actions they perform that are caused by such volitions.

This is supposed to get around the “muscle spasm” case above by only including actions that we want to do. But it turns out that we can modify the Denny’s example above to undermine this view. Instead of your arm spasming, instead, when Jeff asks you how you did in Philosophy class last semester, you are suddenly, through an indeterminstic brain event, struck with an overwhelming urge to punch him in the face, even though to do so is completely out of character and you have no reason for wanting to punch him.

Q. Are you morally responsible in this case for punching Jeff?
A. Maybe. Philosophers have argued on both sides of this for a long time. On the one hand, you could say you are not responsible, because to punch Jeff was so out of character, and you wouldn’t do it again if given the chance. On the other hand, some have said that you ARE responsible for punching him, because you wanted to do it, you chose to do it, and you did it.

There is more to say on this matter, but I want to make this brief, so I’ll end with a brief introduction on compatibilism. You may remember option 3 above. To accept determinism and maintain that we have freedom and/or moral responsibility is to be a compatibilist. There are several ways to go about compatibilism, some better than others. In part 3, we’ll begin to look at the following:

• Altered Law Compatibilism
• Altered Past Compatibilism
• Doxastic Compatibilism
• Stacean Compatibilism
• Combo Compatibilism
• Fischer’s Semicompatibilism

Determinism: Everything that happens is causally determined by the past, together with the laws of nature.

Indeterminism: There are some events that are undetermined.

To clarify, determinism implies that if we knew the exact locations of every particle, and we knew all the laws of nature, we could, with 100% accuracy, predict the future.

Q. What reason do we have for supposing determinism?
A. We suppose determinism all the time. If we didn’t, life would be substantially different. When we drop something, we expect it to fall. When we set a pot of water on a hot stove, we expect it to boil. And whenever we do science, we do it under the assumptions that we can draw clear conclusions between cause and effect. We never expect a dropped ball to fly out of our hands, a pot of hot water to spontaneously freeze, or the laws of nature to suddenly change.

Q. Okay, then, what’s the catch?
A. Consider the following famous argument by Van Inwagen.

The Consequence Argument
1. If determinism is true, then our actions are the consequences of the laws of nature and events in the remote past.
2. We’re not able to change the laws of nature.
3. We’re not able to change the remote past.
4. If 1, 2, and 3, then we’re never able to do anything other than what we in fact do.
5. If we’re never able to do anything other than what we in fact do, then we never act freely.
—————————-
6. If determinism is true, then we never act freely.

Oops. We’ve now arrived at a place that most people don’t like. Using a valid argument, the definition of determinism, and a few other fully plausible-sounding premises, we’ve proven that you are not free to stop reading this blog right now. In fact, if this argument is sound, you are never free to do anything other than what you actually do. If you bought a hamburger for lunch today, you had no choice. Your actions were already determined before your birth, your parents’ birth, and the birth of the dinosaurs.

We’re coming to the end of part one. In part two, I will do the following:
• Define indeterminism with more specificity
• Discuss how indeterminism is supposed to get us out of the unpleasant conclusion of the Consequence argument
• Explain why it fails
• Introduce Compatibilism