It is nicer to think that you are here for some kind of reason that's written into the rules of the universe and that it all is just a happy or unhappy accident. I think that there are very good arguments to believe that there are some kind of foundational principle of the universe, some necessarily existing being, some first cause. But I think that the Judeo-Christian tradition is an imperfect approximation of who that being is.

Nihilism doesn't remove values, it analyzes values and finds them to be essentially groundless, or if they do have a ground, subjective preferences of people. It's a very difficult thing to define concepts like good and bad, but we employ them all the time. Like what is the difference between a murder just occurred and it's wrong that that murder just occurred? If you try to isolate what the actual difference is there, I think it has to just be an attitude, it's an expression, it's the way you feel.

My name's Alex O'Connor. I'm the host of the "Within Reason" podcast. I think I'm best described as a philosophy YouTuber and former edgy atheist.

So I think probably the most powerful argument for the existence of God is the so-called first cause argument, which is quite, like, naive. A lot of people are familiar with the idea that we need a first cause for the universe, but I think people think about it wrong.

There is what you might think of as a horizontal causal argument and a hierarchical causal argument. And a lot of people just aren't familiar with the hierarchical version of the causal argument, which I think is probably best explained with a prop, like this lovely glass of water.

You might ask yourself, "Why is this water here?" And the way that people tend to think about cause is in terms of time and what happened before, what might be called the efficient causes in the Aristotelian sense, which is, well, somebody just poured the water into the glass. And then I might ask, "Well, why did they pour the water into the glass?" "Oh, well because you asked them to." "Oh, well, why did you do that?" "Well, because the glass was empty, because I'm thirsty," so on and so forth, back infinitely. There's just no beginning. It's just as long as every single step is explained by the step before, then everything gets explained back in time.

But there's another way that you can think about causation. I can say, "Why is this water here?" Well, because it's being held up by the glass, right? If the glass wasn't there, the water would just fall out, or at least wouldn't like retain its shape even if we were in space. The water is in the glass right now because it's being held up by the glass. In that sense, the shape and position of the water right now is being caused by the shape and position of the glass.

Okay, so why is the glass there? Because it's being held up by my hand. Why is my hand there? Being held up by my arm. My arm's being held up by my shoulder. My shoulder's being held up by my body. My body is being held up by the chair. The chair is being held up by the ground. The ground is being held up by the foundations of the building and so on. And if you kept going, you might get to the gravity that's pulling the building down. You might get the forces of nature which are holding the earth together. But ultimately all of this is happening now in a time slice and hierarchically. This isn't some causation that goes back in time. It's sort of goes up and down if you can see what I mean.

So there is a reason why that kind of causation cannot go on infinitely. And that is that in each stage of this causal chain, the causal actor doesn't have any causal power except insofar as it borrows it from something more fundamental. I'll try and put that in simpler terms. The glass holds up the water, but it can't do it of its own accord. It's being held up by my hand to the extent that if I took away my hand, the glass would no longer have the power to hold the water here, right? So the glass is power, the causal power to have to cause the water to be where it is right now is literally borrowed from my hand.

But likewise, if I removed my arm, my hand would no longer have the power to hold the water where it is. So my hand doesn't have on its own any kind of power to hold up the glass. It borrows it from my arm. And my arm borrows it from my shoulder. And my shoulder borrows it from my body. To the extent that if I were to remove any of those parts in the causal chain, everything further up the chain than that would instantly lose its causal power to hold the water up where it is, right? Instantly.

So what that means is that there is no actual causal power except for whatever is at the basis of this giving the whole chain causal power. So if you think about that horizontal causation, right? Imagine a series of dominoes knocking each other over. This is causation in time. Domino one is knocked over by domino minus one, and domino minus one is knocked over by domino minus two, minus three, minus four, minus five, and so on back to infinity. In this kind of causation, when domino minus five knocks over domino minus four, and then the dominoes keep falling over, I could take domino minus five that caused all these other do dominoes fall over, I could take that earlier cause, I could take it, I could throw it in the bin. We don't need it anymore. Those dominoes further down the chain would keep on going, right? It's the kind of causation where you don't require the first causes, the earlier causes to remain in existence in order for the causal chain to continue.

So another example of this would be like parents and children. My grandfather caused my father to exist. Then my grandfather died. After my grandfather died, my father caused me to exist. Right, so like you've got cause A, B and C, A causes B, A then just disappears, gets into C, and B still has the causal power to bring about C. You see what I'm saying? You don't need that first cause to remain there. But that's in this so-called horizontal causation, right?

In a hierarchical series of causation, you can't get rid of the earlier cause. And when we say earlier or first or fundamental, we don't mean in time. We mean like sort of further down the chain as it were. So if my grandfather causes my father, then my grandfather dies, my father still has the causal power to bring me about. But if my shoulder causes the position of my arm, then if my shoulder disappears, my arm no longer has the power to hold up my hand. The shoulder needs to stay there causing the arm in order for the arm to cause the hand.

So all of that causation happens all at once, right? Which means that there is no intrinsic causal power. My father has his own causal power to bring about me, but my arm only borrows it from my shoulder. It doesn't have it on its own. But my shoulder only borrows it from my body, and my body only borrows it from the chair. Without the chair, none of this would have any causal power. My hand would not be able to be here. And without the floor, none of that would be able to do anything. So there's no causal power at all in this chair, except insofar as it borrows it right now in this instant from the ground below it.

So if this just goes back infinitely, well, this borrows from this and this borrows from this and this borrows, and that goes back on literally infinitely, then there is no causal power at all because it's not being borrowed from anywhere. It's like everyone is just borrowing from another thing which has no causal power. It only gets its causal power, it's borrowed it from something else which has no causal power. So where did it get it from? It borrowed it from something else, which has no causal power. So where did that get it from? That can't go back forever because then there would be literally no causal power in this instant right now.

So unlike the temporal thing where you can go back in time and imagine that just sort of goes on infinitely and there's no first cause, because each individual causal actor in the chain has its own causal power to knock over the next domino, the hierarchical causation in this time slice right now, this glass being held up right now has some kind of foundational cause which is giving life to this entire causal chain without which the whole thing would would fall apart.

So it's a sustaining cause. It's things to exist and be as they are right now in time, not like a billion years ago set something in motion, but right now sustaining it in existence. In the same way that like the law of gravity sustains all of the objects in this room in position, it's a fundamental cause of why everything is being held up right now. If that just switched off, like the entire thing would fall apart, right? And you need that now, right now, like at the basis of this sort of causal chain of floors holding up chairs and chairs holding up buildings and stuff like that.

And so you might say, "Well, maybe the fundamental cause there then is something like the law of gravity." Fine, but you might wanna ask sort of what's holding the law of gravity in place. What's making sure that it won't stop working tomorrow? And this is this sort of great debate with something like this argument. And there are lots of technical terms that you can throw in there. You can talk about contingency and necessity, and you can talk about per se and per accidens causal chains and stuff, but let's just do away with that for a moment and just think about it in those terms.

What is holding up this invisible microphone that I promise our listeners is above my head right now in place? And, like, the depth of explanation you go to will be context dependent. If I say, "What's holding up that microphone?" our audio engineer might say, "Well, it's the mic stand," right? But the physicist might say, "Oh, it's the floor pressing up against the mic stand." But the philosopher will say it's whatever is at the foundation of that causal chain giving causal power to it all. And that is the strongest version of a first cause argument, I think, one that's insensitive to time and one which requires that first cause to exist right now.

So this alone isn't strong enough to establish the existence of capital G God, right? Like this just establishes that there is some kind of fundamental sustaining principle of the universe. Now there are lots of debates as to the nature of what that thing could be, but the thing that's really important to note is that there's no singular argument for the existence of God. What you have is a kind of cumulative case. You have different arguments that deal with different aspects of God.

So this kind of causal argument is discussed by Thomas Aquinas in his "Summa Theologica." He gives five famous ways of sort of showing the existence of God to be true, and the first three are kinds of causal arguments. You have to then do more to get the attributes of God. You have to do more to show that this thing is not material, that this thing is certainly more to show that it's like good or loving or anything like that.

But so Aquinas has an argument from change. I mean, it's called the argument from motion, but motion just means change in some sort of older dialect of philosophy. So he leans quite heavily on Aristotle, and it gets a bit complicated, but he'll say something like, "For something to change means that something which is potential becomes actual." That's what change is. Like a hot cup of coffee will cool down because when it was hot, it had the potential to become cool and that potential was actualized.

Potential can only be actualized by something which is already actual. Potential can't be actualized by potential. Like if the coffee cools down because it's in a fridge, the potential coldness of the coffee can't be brought into existence by the potential coldness of the fridge. The fridge has to be actually cold in order to bring about the potential coldness in the coffee, right? It can't just be you've got a potentially cold fridge and a potentially a cold cup of coffee and the potential coldness brings about the potential... No, you have to have an actual thing actualizing the potential in the coffee, right? And that's what he thinks change is.

But you have another kind of causal argument then. Any instance of change where something potential becomes actual, there has to have been something actual to actualize it. But there will have had to have been something to actualize that thing and to actualize that thing and to actualize that thing. And so Aquinas sort of follows this causal chain and says again, at the beginning, there must be a, as Aristotle might have had it, an unactualized actualizer, something which is pure act.

Now this gets really kind of technical and weird, but Aquinas then tries to draw out why it would be that if something has zero potential in it, it can't be material, for example. Because if something is material, you could potentially divide it. You could potentially move it. There are things that are like potential about it, it has potential qualities. And so if the first cause of the universe has to be pure act, no potentiality, pure act, then whatever is the cause of the universe can't be material.

So now we've got an immaterial first cause of the universe, and then we carry on in a similar vein using different arguments to show why this thing must be outside of time, outside of space. And you end up with something like a spaceless, timeless creative first cause of the universe powerful enough to bring the universe into existence. And if you don't wanna call that God, that's fine by me, but I think it will suffice for most people.

The strongest argument against the existence of God as traditionally conceived is undoubtedly the problem of evil. I prefer to say the problem of suffering because a lot of the time being an ethical emotivist, especially a religious person will say, "Well, how can you call anything evil if you've got no standard of goodness?" Okay, let's not say evil then. Let's say suffering.

If you believe that there is a loving God who has the power to do all that is possible and who supervises not just the goings on of the universe, but also supervised its creation and the setting up of its parameters, there are a few questions that jump out, a few mysteries. For example, life on Earth is the result of evolution by natural selection. That is the reason why we have such complexity and such variance of life.

Natural selection is survival of the fittest. Survival of the fittest is the same thing as the destruction and death and suffering of the weakest. For billions of years, there's been life on earth. And for much of that, it's existed in a brutal competition for survival, with predation and disease. And 99.9% of all the species, let alone the creatures, but the species who've ever existed being wiped from existence, usually in a pretty dismal manner. And all of this is built into the very mechanism by which God chose to bring about human life on Earth.

Traditional religious communities believe that humans are very special. They think that we are the reason why this all exists as opposed to other animals and other points in history. Which means that all of this has occurred for our sake. It's built in. It's one thing to talk about suffering as a sort of abstract object. But it is unfathomable, truly, the amount of suffering that these animals, not just like the human species in its 200,000-year history, or I suppose the human species would be much longer than that, a few million years. But the animals who came before us and the animals who existed at the same time as us, it's genuinely unfathomable the depths of despair and misery and suffering and torment, meaningless torment for those animals who don't get to inherit eternal life.

And we're told that for some reason God chose this mechanism to bring us into existence. It just doesn't seem to be what you would expect. Of course, this doesn't disprove the existence of God. It's not like logically contradictory to say that God did this for some reason. But it just seems a little unexpected. And I think for most people it's very powerful.

Of course, this only really does anything to argue against the existence of a good God. And some people will then just say, "Well, maybe God is evil." But this will then just depend on your view of God. Because there are philosophers who, in the course of proving God's existence, have established why he must be perfectly good, for example. There are also people who belong to religious traditions who insist upon the goodness of God. So they would at least have to give up that if they were to accept the plausibility of an argument like this. And I think it's powerful.

I think that there are very good arguments to believe that there are some kind of foundational principle of the universe, some necessarily existing being, some first cause. But I think that the Judeo-Christian tradition is an imperfect approximation of who that being is. I think it probably gets a lot right and is a sort of compilation of human theological wisdom over the past few thousand years, but it will get a lot wrong as well.

I think that if you have just personally apprehended a truth about the universe, you are just convicted that there's some kind of foundational cause, "I don't really know much more than that and I don't want to subscribe to a particular tradition," I say more power to you. I think you're on the right track. In the same way that if somebody is sort of a dogmatic atheist of the new atheist variety, I have a lot of fun posing religious arguments to them and saying like that there might actually be more plausibility to these arguments than you would know from reading "The God Delusion." But that's not enough to say that you are wrong about your atheism or anything.

But I much prefer this kind of person who says either I believe there's some kind of God of maybe of some sort, maybe not even a God, maybe just something like that. But I don't really know what it is. I'm like, "Yeah, yeah, me too, man, I've got no idea." Likewise somebody who says, "I just, you know, there's a lot of mysteries, but I just can't buy the fact that this was designed somehow intelligently." I'm like, "Yeah, I get that too. That's awesome." And then we can just discuss it, you know? And so I quite like that kind of person.

There are also the so-called deists who typically are described as people who believe that God kind of set the universe in motion and then went away. So does not involve himself. I mean, he could have died, he could have gone to sleep and sort of set it all off. And that explains how it got going, but it's not there anymore. I don't think that makes much sense. I think that this is a product of mechanistic thinking that comes about with the sort of scientific revolution. But we think of everything as sort of like a bit of a machine where you twist it up and let it go.

But the argument that I just ran through, the reason I like it so much is because I think it gets rid of this idea of deism. You can't have a God who sets it all in motion and then goes to sleep. He can't knock over the first domino and then go away and the dominoes keep on falling over and he's long dead, because he is not just knocked over a domino and then gone away. He's holding up the microphone above my head right now in this instant. And if he were to disappear, the whole thing would just collapse.

I think that there's a more powerful argument for that kind of God, not to say personal, not to say that he cares about human beings, right? Like, because again, you can distinguish between those things. There's like, people say, "Well, I believe that there is a God, but he has no interest in human affairs." That's fair enough. But someone who says, "Well, I believe in a God, but he's just like not around anymore, like at all," I think that might be true, there might be no God. But if you think there's a good argument for God's existence, I think the best versions of arguments for God's existence require that he does stick around.

And so I think you either kind of have to say there's no God at all, or there's a God who's still here right now holding it all in place as we speak. I don't think this God at the beginning but not anymore makes much sense to me.

Nihilism comes in many forms, and depending on the context can mean many different things. But most broadly it's probably the lack of belief in or belief that there is no such thing as an objective purpose to life, or to the actions that we commit and the behaviors that we portray within life.

Whenever anybody acts in any way, when I pick up a glass of water to have a drink, when I walk to a bus stop or something, there will be a reason why I've done that. These kinds of behaviors don't just spring up ex nihilo. They exist for some kind of reason. And so if you ask me why it is that I'm reaching my arm over there, it might be because I'm trying to pick up a glass of water. Well why am I doing that? I don't just do that randomly. Well, because I'm thirsty. Okay, well why am I thirsty? Well, now we're kind of into some biological science. You might say, "Well, it's been a while since I've last had a drink." And then you might describe what it is about my biology that causes thirst. And you might even give an evolutionary explanation for why it is that we've developed this sensitivity to thirst.

And eventually this kind of has to bottom out somewhere. But as soon as we're in this level of like biological science, which seems to be kind of outside of my own volition and desire and control, I suddenly realized that if the reason I'm reaching my arm over right now is ultimately speaking because of some evolutionary principle that I had no control over, that's just a result of animals fighting for survival, then my reaching my hand over there kind of feels a bit silly now. It feels like I'm like beholden to something which is not reasonable, is not some kind of God-given purpose, there's nothing good about about drinking the water or anything like that. I'm just sort of following my evolutionary drives. And a process like that for a lot of people will feel quite devoid of meaning because you realize that you're just beholden to your sort of animalistic instincts essentially with almost everything you do.

The thing that the nihilist recognizes is that the values he or she holds are not grounded in anything other than their own preferences or aesthetic preferences. So to be a nihilist is not to, it's not to have no desire. It's not to have no, no motivation to act. A lot of people think that if you lived like a nihilist, you'd sort of rot away in bed. Some nihilists may do that, and I think there is actually a correlation, a strong correlation between philosophical nihilism and practical depression.

However, nihilism is not about the actual consequences or the things that you're doing. It's about the purpose behind them. It's about the meaning behind them. And so suppose that you are feeling thirsty. I could explain to you that the only reason you are feeling thirst is because of some animalistic drive that you had no control over. And you might go, "Wow, that makes this all a bit ridiculous, doesn't it?" But you're still thirsty. You still have that desire. You still have that value of quenching of thirst, and so you'll still do that. And the same applies in all areas of life, including art and music and poetry, but also including relationships, friendships, that kind of stuff. You're still going to want to do those things.

But the nihilist is someone who sort of takes a bird's eye view of it and realizes that it's all a little bit meaningless. It's like Camus famously describes in "The Myth of Sisyphus" this person who suddenly recognizes the structure of their day, you know, waking up, having breakfast, getting in the car, going to work, taking a break, eating some food, going back home, eating some food, going to sleep, starting again. And you sort of start to notice that you are doing this. And it's not anything about what you're doing, it's realizing, taking a step back and realizing that there's no meaning to any of this, that there's nothing more than just my doing it. It doesn't go any deeper than that.

Meaning, I think, is used synonymously with purpose. To have meaning is to have some kind of purpose. And purpose is something like reason to act or reason to be. So to have meaning or to have purpose, I think, is to have some kind of reason to either act. If you're talking about the meaning in an action, it's the reason to act in that way. If you're talking about the meaning of or in life, it's the reason to live, or the reason that we are alive, right?

Now, like I said before, there always will be some kind of reason, but that reason will be contingent on something else. So the reason why I'm reaching my hand is because I want to get the water, but the reason why I want the water is contingent on something else, that is that I'm thirsty. And the reason that I'm thirsty is contingent on something else. So to find an objective meaning at the root of life would mean finding a non-contingent reason to act or to be.

There would just need to be a self-justifying principle where if you ask "But why?" the answer and the truthful answer would be it just is, or that why is an inappropriate question to ask any further. For there to be something for this to bottom out in it will either have to bottom out in something completely arbitrary, which feels meaningless to people because it could have easily been something else, or this contingent chain of reasoning just essentially goes back forever, which seems implausible, or it terminates in something which is self-justifying.

And when people say that they found their meaning in life, I think a lot of the time they found that self-justifying principle. For some people, their meaning in life might be the raising of their children. And if you ask them, "Why are you getting out of bed?" "To go to work." "Why are you doing that?" "To make money." "Why? "To provide for my family." "Why?" "To bring up my children healthily." "Why?" "Because I want my children to be healthy." "Why?" "What do you mean why? That's it, that's what it's about."

And the philosopher might look at that and say, "Well, you should still probably ask why as a point of interest, why do you care about that?" But in practice, that moment that you reach where that question why just seems inappropriate, that's where you've bottomed out. And if you find some kind of self-justifying principle that ultimately motivates most of your actions, it's what you sort of have in the back of your mind when you're doing anything. And for most people it probably is relational, it's probably got to do with children or spouses or something like that.

For the religious, it will be God. Everything they do, even if they don't cognize it all the time will be for the glory of God. If you ask them to proactively analyze what they're doing, "Well, why are you doing this? Why are you sat here doing an interview with people?" Ultimately they would say something like, "Well you know, it's all for the glory of God." Everybody will have that self-justifying principle somewhere at the basis of their thinking. And if you're a secular person, if you're an atheist, it will likely be something else.

I might say that, "Well, I really enjoy doing this kind of thing. I think it's a meaningful pursuit because I like discussing big questions." And if somebody says, "Well, why are big questions in life important?" Somebody might just say, "What do you mean? Of course they are. That's almost the definition of importance." Now you can pick a hole with that, and a nihilist will. They'll say that you can always go deeper and you will realize that ultimately it's just preference, which is why the nihilist thinks that there's no objective meaning. But most people have some kind of self-justifying principle, it's just usually a subjective one.

Objective meaning would look something like a reason to act that is self-justifying and not because, not dependent on some kind of preference that you have. So if your foundational self-justifying principle is your care for your children, it seems quite clear that your care for your children is subjective, it's dependent on you. After all, you don't care about other people's children in the same way and they don't care about your children in the same way. It seems like if you died and your children with you, there'd be no, like this kind of principle wouldn't exist out there in the ether. It seems completely dependent on your circumstances and your preferences.

It seems a bit crude to describe your care for your children as a preference, but broadly speaking, it is a kind of preference. You prefer the wellbeing of your children over the wellbeing of other children. And in fact, that's a lot of the time what caring for the wellbeing of your children is about, it's providing them with a roof over their head and a stable income, which oftentimes is to the detriment of other people who are competing for the same job, but you have this preference.

But it seems quite clear that that is person dependent. Right, like for there to be an objective meaning would mean that it is insensitive to preference. It would mean that even for somebody who just had different preferences, who just didn't want children, if caring for your children were the objective meaning in life, then if somebody said, "Well, you know what, I just don't want children. It's just not something that appeals to me. I think I wouldn't be a good parent." Then you would say to them, "You are wrong. You are literally incorrect about the meaning in your own life."

And some people think this, but what they mean is something like, "Oh, I think that if you had kids, you'd actually like it," right? But that's just saying that you predict that they will subjectively prefer it too. Like to say it's objective would be, even if you don't prefer it, even if you have children and actually hate the whole process and think, "Gosh, this is awful and terrible," your life will still be more meaningful even if you don't think it is. It would have to be something which provides meaning completely independent of your preferences, of how you actually feel about what it is that you're doing, if that makes sense.

If meaning just means a reason to act or a reason to be, then of course ultimately I do think there is some kind of literal explanation for why we behave in the way that we do. And that will be objective in the sense that that will be the driving force behind our behaviors, whether we like it or not. So if you are an atheist materialist, you might think that evolution by natural selection has simply favored certain traits which produce certain behaviors. And I could say, literally speaking, the reason why you are behaving in this way, the reason why you have these preferences is because of this evolutionary trait, right?

For most people, that's not very fulfilling. But literally speaking, that could be something like an objective meaning in the sense of it being an objective purpose. It is literally the purpose why we all act. But I think people want something a little bit more than that. They want something which feels like it's not quite just a reason to act. It's also something which feels worthwhile, that's somehow sort of justified by some universal principle. There's almost like a moral element, that it's a good thing to be alive, that it's a good thing to live a meaningful life. And that kind of thing I think is very difficult to ground objectively, unless you posit some kind of either supernatural design, or I suppose if you have a kind of philosophy of life, or a metaphysic which says that there is some kind of teleology built into nature itself, which some people believe but I struggle to grapple with.

I think human beings naturally desire certain things and they have values. And I think this is probably an evolutionary trait. I mean, if you had two communities, one of which sort of just didn't care about anything, were completely apathetic, didn't care about their own children, didn't care to have children, didn't care to get outta bed, they're not gonna survive for very long. So I think it is just literally the case that having some kind of sense of motivation for doing things in life is evolutionarily selected for.

And so I think the most people are not actually fundamentally apathetic. Even people who seem apathetic actually have certain values, they value their own comfort, for example. Like if you sort of wake up and you just wanna go back to sleep, it's not apathy. That's having a different value to the kind of value that would get you out of bed. You value your comfort, you value sleeping. And so most people have these kinds of values.

Nihilism doesn't remove values. It analyzes values and finds them to be essentially groundless. Or if they do have a ground, the ground is within the subjective preferences of people. And so, like, I understand why, I mean, nihilism might make you act in a way that would be viewed as apathetic. It might make you a bit depressed, for example. And it might mean that you lay around a bit more and you have less motivation for doing the things you formally enjoyed, all of those things that come along with depression.

But you'll still have literal values. You will not enjoy your own pain. If hungry, you will feel that hunger, whether or not you choose to satisfy it. You'll have experiences that you want when experienced and experiences that you don't want when experienced, which I think is a good definition of pleasure and pain.

And so what does nihilism do then? It just removes the meaning in those values. And so I would sort of like to imagine that the person who is suffering, it's helpful to think of a person who's suffering but is not a nihilist. You could have the worst life in the world. You could be depressed, you could be upset every single day. You could think your life is going terribly, but you could believe that there's some kind of reason. You could believe that there's a meaning behind it. Maybe you're religious, maybe you believe in reincarnation, whatever, such that you're suffering but you're not an nihilist.

To be an nihilist is to suffer and suffer all the more from the recognition that the suffering is meaningless. So in principle, you could also be really happy, you could be having the best time in the world and be a nihilist so long as you recognize that that happiness you're feeling is completely meaningless. There's no reason for it. You are just feeling it. You just exist, and you're feeling a certain thing, and that's it.

In practice, nihilism tends to make people more sad than happy. But as a philosophy, let's say, a philosophy of life, there's no inconsistency with being a very motivated, very happy, very content person who yet realizes that there's no meaning behind any of it.

There is the fact that most people, literally speaking, do feel meaning in life. And it does seem a little bit bold to say that everybody who reports that is essentially either lying or deluding themselves. That seems bold. It seems a little arrogant and too confident. Not to say that that makes it false, but I think you should be aware of how radical a claim that is, of course.

But also there does seem to be this universal compulsion towards meaning. It's like, obviously, there is this universal compulsion to think that there is some reason why we're all here. Now, like I said before, that could be explained through evolutionary self-selecting pressures. But in a way you might just say that that's kind of enough, because the only thing that matters is that I feel as though there is objective meaning. Like that might just be enough for people in the sense that nihilism as a lived philosophy, that like informs the way that you behave, you might just sort of, you might just sort of accept the fact that everybody universally has this drive and treat it as if it were objective.

In the same way that like, if you're trying to work out what color to paint a house, and, like, color is completely subjective, but if it just so happened that everybody, for some evolutionary reason, preferred the color blue, like, absolutely everybody just in fact preferred the color blue, you might treat it as an objective fact that a blue is the best color to paint the house. And in that context, that might become a meaningful statement. Even though you recognize it's not technically objective, it's just universally subjectively true. But in practice, that sort of works the same as an objective truth, if you know what I mean.

So you would paint the house blue, and if anybody said you should paint it another color, you might be able to say to them, "You're kind of wrong," even though you're just dealing with preferences. So the universality of felt meaning or desire for meaning or assumption that there is meaning might be enough to raise a few eyebrows when it comes to nihilism.

Nihilism is often seen as a kind of response to the decline of religion. And you get thinkers like Nietzsche, you get thinkers like Emil Cioran. And then a bit later on you get your existentialists and your absurdists, you get your Sartres and your Camus, right? But this goes way further back. Like, nihilism is not a new philosophy in response to the decline of religion. I think that religions emerge as a response to nihilism. I think it's the other way around.

One of the still greatest expositions of nihilism that can be found in the printed word is the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. Just this nihilistic outpouring, "'Meaningless, everything is meaningless,' says the Teacher." Ecclesiastes takes us through the reflections of this man, this anonymous author. Some have tried to identify him, but it doesn't really matter who it is. We know that he was a great man, a king. He lived an illustrious life, but he saw no meaning in it.

And he keeps coming back to this word hebel which means literally something like wind, right? And so it's translated as vanity by the King James, vanity of vanities. Everything is vanity. I've heard some exegetes think that the best modern translation of that word hebel in Hebrew is actually absurd in alignment with Camus' rubbing up of our expectations against the great iconoclast of reality which just shatters all of our expectations. But "Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless," is one translation. "Absurd, absurd, everything is absurd," is my favorite.

because he's describing these things. He's like, "I denied my eyes no pleasure that they saw. If I wanted something, I took it. I drank wine. I partied, I lived life. But in the end I saw that it was all hebel, it was all just wind. It's just nothing. It just happens, and then it's gone. And it doesn't mean anything." And clearly whoever penned this text is struggling deeply with the exact same nihilistic themes that we talk about today.

And for him, this is a piece of religious scripture. So there's this undertone, he keeps saying that under the sun there is nothing, there's no meaning, there's no purpose to any of this. It's where we get the phrase "nothing new under the sun." Under the sun, is this phrase that keeps showing up in Ecclesiastes. And some have suggested that this is supposed to indicate that on Earth separate from the heavenly realm, there's no ultimate purpose to this.

But interestingly, at the very end of Ecclesiastes, there's this passage where someone is, I mean, we've heard the teacher speak, Qoheleth. We've heard this teacher speak and talk about how meaningless everything is. And then at the end there's a commentary on this teacher's sort of treatise. And it says that everything he said was upright and true. Everything he said was correct essentially. But the solution is this, fear God and keep his commandments.

And there's no explanation as to why that would solve the problem. There's no like mechanism as to what that would change. The most interesting thing is that it seems to suggest that everything that this guy was saying was true, that it is all just wind. But that somehow by just fearing God and keeping his commandments, you have somehow solved the problem. I don't think that that's a very satisfying solution. But then I think that that is the great theme of nihilistic literature. People try for a kind of solution, but ultimately, for me at least, they seem relatively unsatisfying.

Fast forward thousands of years and you get Albert Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus," which famously ends with this idea of imagining Sisyphus happy. Maybe that does it for you. I don't know what it does for me. But yeah, Nietzsche is often associated with nihilism. Not a nihilist himself, of course, but discusses a lot of nihilistic themes. And then the existentialists are the sort of go-to figures for discussions of modern nihilism.

In fact, Camus is celebrated for the starkness of the opening line of the "Myth of Sisyphus," that "there is one serious philosophical question, and that is suicide." Because everything else, you know, how many dimensions there are to space, whether abstract numbers exist, all of that is secondary. The most foundational question is whether or not you're going to, as he once put it, have a cup of coffee or kill yourself today. Those are kind of your options.

So nihilistic literature, so to speak, is a broad span. But literally I think it begins with, I think that the term is popularized by Turgenev's novel "Fathers and Sons." Although that's a more, I think, that's a more restricted use of the word nihilism. It's more culturally relevant to Russia, the Russia that he was living in. But that's sort of where we get the term from. And it's in novelistic form. Interestingly, this often shows up in narrative, even in the book of Ecclesiastes it's sort of telling a story.

I mean, broadly speaking, most people will know, there's this distinction between the so-called analytic philosophy, the if p then q, and logical fallacy and modus ponens. And on the other side you've got the so-called continental philosophy, which is more narrative, it's more poetry, it's more grasping at ideas but not directly. So this is where you have your existentialists but also your novelists. You have your Dostoevsky and your and your Tolstoys, and you have your poets. And that's all sort of on that side.

And the nihilistic literature, at least the stuff that people care about, is almost exclusively on the continental side because it does seem to be something that resists discussion in abstract terms. It's very personal, it's very narrative. And it involves, you need to sort of involve yourself in the story of life in order to even understand what the problem is.

I mean, you can imagine speaking to an alien. If you sort of tried to describe to an alien or an AI what nihilism is, and you say like, "Well, the problem is I get up and I go to work, and I just don't know why I do it." And the alien might be like, "Well, yeah, you do. You do it to get money and to get a job." "Yeah, but like, why do I do that?" "Well, because otherwise you'd be on the street and you'd be suffering." "But why?" "Well, you just it's just built into your, you don't like suffering. That's like a definition of suffering. You just don't like suffering and you're trying to avoid it." "Yeah, you're right. But it's just sort of, there's something, gosh, I just wish there was more, you know?" The alien's like, "What do you mean? More what? Like more pleasure?" "No, not more pleasure, just like, I wish there were like a reason." It'd be actually quite difficult to just explain in plain terms. It's almost like it's a problem that can only be understood by someone who lives it.

Whereas you could easily explain to that alien the concept of modus ponens. the alien probably wouldn't have a problem with that as long as it's got a rational mind. But nihilism is something that we need to experience ourselves and explore through narrative.

I am brutally agnostic about almost everything. And in fact, if somebody ever asks me how I might console myself in the face of these existential woes, genuinely, at least personally, it is in agnosticism. It's in the fact that I do not know the first thing about, about why any of this exists. Of course, I don't, you know?

And sometimes people ask me in a context on a podcast on a stage or something implicitly as if I'm going to have some answer, as if I've like worked it out and I'm going to be able to communicate that to people. Like, there's just no way. This is obviously a deeply personal story that everybody has to live individually. And I'm like doing the same thing, right? And I'm interested in philosophy. So I might have read something that helps to elucidate a concept, or I might be able to put a word on something that you've been thinking but didn't know was also thought by other people. But we're doing the same thing here. And ultimately I have absolutely no idea what the ultimate answers are.

And so that kind of consoles me. Because like if you are a more certain nihilist, I can understand why that would be very upsetting. If you really just believe that there's no meaning to any of this, then I can see why that would cause you some trouble. But personally, that's just not something that I strongly believe. I think it's plausible. I think there's a lot of, like, it's quite an attractive view in many respects.

You look at the level of suffering of animals in the history of the world. When you look at the seeming arbitrariness of the world around us, the way that the environment and the organisms within it seem to just sort of almost randomly evolve according to literal just battles for survival, it all just seems a little bit like this is all just accidental and meaningless. But then on a more fundamental level, it just seems strange to suggest that it's all just happening for literally no reason. That seems implausible to me too. So I don't really know how to fully make sense of that. And that consoles me.

It's the same on the religious question. It's much easier to be consoled. I mean, if you believe in God, you might be terrified because you're constantly worried about going to hell. If you're an atheist, you might be terrified because you think that this is the only life you have and that it's ultimately meaningless. If you're somewhere in the middle, you kind of just feel like you'll cross that bridge when you come to it, you know?

Like nihilism is an upsetting thing to think about. It's a sad, it would be a sad reality. And so if you're certain of it, if you really are convinced that that's the case, I can see why that would be quite upsetting. Agnosticism literally does just... It's not like I'm choosing to be an agnostic in order to console myself. I just genuinely don't know what the truth of the matter is, and that just doesn't allow me to get really upset.

It's almost like, it's almost like I don't know if it's going to rain on my wedding day. It's like, so long as I have no real conviction that it is going to rain, it's gonna be very difficult for me to get like upset about the rain spoiling my wedding day, right? Like I literally just can't be upset about that unless I've got some reason to think that it's going to happen. Of course, there's literal reason to think this, it's plausible that it will rain on my wedding day, but that's not quite enough. You have to actually be convicted of it in order to be upset by it. And I suppose I'm just not convicted of nihilism, but that's not to say that I think it's false, it's just to say that there's a lot of room for doubt there.

A lot of people don't realize the extent to which their emotions are influencing their thinking. Everybody likes to think that they're thinking objectively and rationally and with a sober mind, but our minds are never sober from emotion. And so when you sort of develop a philosophical view, it's always gonna be informed by the way that you feel. So a lot of people think, "I'm depressed because I'm an nihilist." But I think without realizing it, a lot of the time is actually the case that people are nihilists because they're depressed. It goes the other way around.

Nobody is ever convinced, like, out of nowhere of a philosophical position, right? Like you read a philosopher, and they will put something in such a way that makes you go, "Huh, yeah, you know what, I think that makes sense." And that's usually because they are kind of putting something into words or systematizing something which you already kind of knew. In fact, if you open Wittgenstein's "Tractatus," the very first line of the introduction, it says something like, "This book will be completely useless to anybody who doesn't already agree with his contents." He just admits that the reason he's really writing this is to elucidate something that hopefully his readers had already kind of independently come to.

I think that happens all the time, which is also why, by the way, if you've ever tried to get into philosophy, you might look up like the 50 greatest philosophers of all time. I'm really interested. I wanna see what I can learn. And it will say, "Okay, well one great philosopher is Jean Paul Sartre." And say, "Okay, I'll give that a go," and you pick it up and you read it, and you're just like, "I don't get it. I don't understand, not only do I not understand the context, like even when I looked at the SparkNotes and I got what he was talking about and all, it just doesn't make sense to me. I'm not impressed, like why is this so famous?" And it's because you've just plucked it out of nowhere.

Whereas if you've had like a million conversations with people and Jean Paul Sartre is a name that has come up every now and again, such that you've heard of him and such that just because it's so happens that you are in like conversations and you are in situations that suited his name coming up from people who know who he is, chances are that if you then go and read him, you are actually going to enjoy what he's saying because there's some reason he keeps coming up.

So when people ask me for a recommendation of what to read philosophically, I literally tell them to just read what they've heard of, because there's a reason why you've heard of those philosophers, because they're the people who've come up in the kind of context that you are obviously already interested in. And I think it's important to recognize that you're not gonna be convinced out of nowhere of a philosophy that you don't already have sort of one foot in.

And so for that reason, I think that our predisposition towards the world will influence the kind of philosophies which are attracted to us. I mean, I like all of the nihilistic literature, all of the famous existential nihilistic literature, if you handed that to a confident Christian, they're not gonna be convinced by it. If you hand it to somebody who hasn't really thought about the issue, but maybe has some sort of nihilistic undertones to their life, they might read that and go, "Yeah, he's got a point," right? It's sort of, it's going to be more attractive if you are already kind of attracted to it before you've interacted with the text.

I do think it's not just that. I mean, I just think it's worth pointing out that any kind of radical abandonment of philosophical consolation and principle is going to bring with it distress. But it's not just that, because nihilism is also just quite a upsetting thing for a lot of people. Like, I mean, it is nicer to think that you are here for some kind of reason that's written into the rules of the universe and that it all is just a happy or unhappy accident.

I think it's just a nicer kind of philosophy. But I think we ought be more suspicious of philosophies which are more attractive to us, not because they're less likely to be true, but because we are more likely to accept them on less evidence because we want them to be true. And so I think we need to recognize that bias and be careful of it.

But it does also seem completely bewildering that we would just exist for absolutely no reason. I mean, the nihilist ultimately has to posit that there is either no reason for our existence, which seems completely ludicrous. There needs to literally be a reason why things exist. Or that there is some kind of reason, but it's completely arbitrary, which also just seems a bit bewildering.

I mean, whatever is the answer to the grand mystery of why anything exists at all, it seems a little unsatisfying philosophically to say that it just could have gone the other way and they could have just been nothing. It seems a little, well, on the surface, it seems a little implausible. And so there is an inherent implausibility to nihilism too that people will wrestle with. And whether you are more convinced by the implausibility of meaning in life or the implausibility of it all just happening for no reason I think will ultimately depend on your emotional state.

Emotivism is an ethical theory. It's also a theory of language really, but it belongs in this discussion around what is good and what is bad. Broadly speaking, people might be familiar that when it comes to morals, what's good and what's bad, there are kind of two schools. You have the objective who think that there are things which are good and bad, whether you like it or not. And there are the subjectivists who say it's kind of just all your opinion. It's your preference. Some people like murder, some people don't, in the way that some people like cake and some people don't, right?

Emotivism is more on this subjective side, but emotivism is something a little different. It suggests that when people make ethical statements, what they're doing is expressing an emotion. When you say that murder is wrong, you are literally expressing an emotional state towards murder. That sounds very similar to subjectivism. In the subjectivist framework, the phrase "Murder is wrong" translates to something like, "I don't like murder."

A phrase like, "I don't like murder" is a claim about my psychology. I could be lying. I could say I don't like murder. But actually I do secretly like murder. It could be something that I'm lying about. It could be true, it could be false that I don't like murder. It seems to be a claim about my brain, about my psychology, about my attitude towards murder.

Emotivism is not that. It's not the reporting of an emotional state or an attitude. It is literally the expression of that attitude. It's the difference between telling you, "I don't like murder," and literally going like, "Ugh, murder," or just like pulling a nasty face. Or as A.J. Ayer's famously had it going, "Boo, boo murder," right?

The emotivist thinks that that is what's going on when we say murder is wrong, meaning that these ethical claims are literally not the kind of thing that can be true or false. There are some kinds of expressions and statements that have what's called truth value. Truth value means that it can be true or false. So a statement like the sky is red has truth value, it's just that the truth value is false.

Whereas some statements like commands, for example, "Go over there," it doesn't have truth value. It's not the kind of thing that can be true or false. A phrase like, "I don't like murder" could be true. A phrase like the objectivist theory that murder is wrong might be true, but for the emotivist, it's literally like going, "Boo, murder," which isn't true. It isn't false, it's just an expression. It's the same as me kicking my foot and going, "Ow." Is that true? Is it false? Am I lying? Like that kind of doesn't apply here. You're just expressing something. That's what the emotivist believes anyway, that's the broad position of emotivism.

It belongs in this category of non-cognitivism about ethics, which means that these statements don't have truth value. There are cognitivists who think that ethical statements have truth value and non-cognitivists who think that they don't. And emotivism is a form of non-cognitivism. So for example, another non-cognitivist school is prescriptivism, which thinks that ethical statements are essentially commands. When I say murder is wrong, what I mean is something like, "Don't murder." That's like the kind of statement that I'm saying. So it's not exactly expressing an emotion, it's giving a command, but it's also non-cognitivist because it doesn't have truth value. You're just sort of saying something that isn't true or false.

Reasoning can be connected to ethical statements on an emotivist framework. There is this idea that if we're emotivists, then suddenly the possibility for all disagreement on moral issues vanishes. Because how can you have a debate if there's no truth value? And that's true to a degree, and I understand the criticism. It's not so much a criticism as an observation. It might just be true that we can't do that, but a lot of people aren't satisfied with that.

But it's way more restricted than people realize. A.J. Ayer pointed out in "Language, Truth & Logic," he sort of is the founder of this emotivist school. He points out that the vast majority of moral debate is not moral debate at all. It's debate about descriptive facts that we then apply our sort of moral intuitions to.

So for example, if you imagine a debate about guns in America and people are having a back and forth. And one person says, "Well, did you know that if we criminalize guns, it would reduce the number of gun-related deaths by 10,000 a year? And another person says, "Ah, yeah, but did you know that you haven't taken into account this statistic that if you get rid of good people with guns, then less people will be saved?" And then someone says, "Oh, but did you know that swimming pools kill more children than guns do?" This is the kind of debate that we're having back and forth.

But none of those claims are moral claims. They're just descriptive, factual claims, they're statistics, you can go and test them. It's either true or false, right? Like a lot of what we think is moral debate is actually just debate about descriptive facts, which once those are settled, we then apply our moral intuitions to.

So for example, in the gun debate, one person has one moral view and another person has another moral view, and they're battling it out. But actually they might have the same moral view, so to speak. For the emotivist, it's some kind of emotional expression. And so what might be the emotional expression? Well, suppose one person says, "If we allow guns in society, innocent people are going to die." And another person says, "But, like, if we don't allow guns in society, then only the bad guys are gonna have guns, and they're gonna kill innocent people, and there's gonna be no one to protect them, so innocent people will die."

Both of them agree, innocent people dying, boo. And what they're debating is a descriptive like truth of of the matter as to whether, literally speaking, more guns, less guns, more deaths, less deaths, right? And so the idea that instantly comes to mind is that we can't have any kind of reasonable discussion about moral issues, like it's true, but I just wanna point out that it's way more restricted. It's not like you can't have this kind of gun discussion. You can't have a discussion about, I don't know about abortion and healthcare. And you can't talk about, I don't know, pick another pet moral issue, speed limits.

You know, like how can we have a moral discussion about speed limits? Well, we can talk about how many people will die, the statistics about increasing by 10 miles an hour and all this kind, that's all just facts. And then we'll apply our moral intuitions. And I think that when we actually break down and isolate the moral element alone, we'll find that there is actually a lot more agreement than there is disagreement.

That doesn't do away with the problem. The challenge is like what if there really is disagreement on the moral stuff? What if two people genuinely just have conflicting boos and yays? And in that case, there are sort of two strategies. You either say, "Well, if you really broke those down further, you'd realize that everybody ultimately has the same emotional, like, expression on fundamental ethical issues. Because we're all human, we all have a shared evolutionary heritage that will have placed within us certain emotional predispositions, that ultimately will be the same if we just break them down far enough."

The other strategy is to say, "No, people do just have fundamental value conflicts. And that's just true. And that's just the way it is. And there's nothing we can do about it." Whichever of those you find plausible is up to you. But obviously the former is a bit more of an optimistic idea. I think people will be more attracted to that because it allows us to sort of say, "Well, everybody agrees that boo innocent people dying, and so we can just in accordance with that."

But it seems more likely the case that that's not true. I mean, on that point, it's quite clear that there are people who do not have an adverse emotional reaction to innocent people dying. And so that can't be the most foundational ethical principle that we all agree on. But it might go deeper than that. It might be, that's not foundational. Innocent people dying cannot be a foundational ethical expression, because it contains too many concepts. The concept of innocent, the concept of death.

The reason why you might think, the reason why you might have that emotional reaction to innocent people dying, it can be broken down much, much further. If somebody thinks that their fundamental ethical principle is innocent people dying, boo, I can think of 10 situations off the top of my head in which you would be perfectly fine with an innocent person dying. It can't be that. It must go deeper than that. And it might genuinely be that if you actually go deep enough into people's moral emotions, they will ultimately outroot the identical across the human species.

And that at a higher level, when someone has an emotional reaction to something, that emotional reaction, you can't say it's wrong because there's no truth value, but you could say that it betrays a mistake that somebody has made. This is really interesting. Like, suppose you were really upset because it was raining on your wedding day. But it turned out it wasn't actually raining. You'd been accidentally watching a tape recording of the news forecast, right? And you believed it was raining, and you're really upset about it. And I come over to you and I say, "Hey, it's not actually raining, right?" And suddenly you are happy again.

Those emotional states, the sadness that the rain and the happiness that it's not raining, they're just emotional states, right? They're not true. They're not false. They're literally just expressions of emotion. But I can still come in and give you information that will change your emotional state and literally convince you to sort of feel the opposite way just based on the information that I've just given you.

So in the same way it might be that people have, so to speak, mistakes in their like emotional expressions at a higher level, right? In the same way that you might be sad that it's raining, even though it's not really raining, somebody might have an emotional reaction to a surface-level moral issue. They might be like, "Oh, I think it's wrong that that gun law passed." But if you actually just explain to the facts to them, they might be like, "Actually, yeah, fair enough. No, I think it's good that that gun law passed."

So you are sort of having this what looks like rational discussion about moral issues, but all you're actually doing is discussing the facts. And it might be the case that if we actually made every human being on earth consistent internally, emotionally with all of their foundational emotional motivations, that there would be a lot more unity than disunity. But we don't know, because, of course, that experiment has not and probably cannot ever be done.

I'm not sure there is a distinction between emotions and attitudes. I think these are essentially synonyms. Simon Blackburn disagrees with me about this. He is an important metaethicist. He founded a metaethical position, which he equals quasi-realism, which is a kind of non-cognitivism about ethics. But he thinks that, for example, you can have an attitude towards something without having an emotional state, like, or being in an emotional state with relation to that thing.

So you might have an attitude that that thing is bad or that you shouldn't do that or something like that. But it doesn't mean that you're like emotionally invested. I'm just not sure that that's possible. I think that to have an attitude towards something is kind of, literally speaking, to have a way that you prefer it to be. And I think that that belongs in the category of emotion.

But this is essentially semantics. Like if you want to draw out a distinction, you could probably do it and say that an attitude towards something is something like your desire for the way that you want it to be. Whereas your emotional state is the reaction you have to it not being the way you want it to be. Yeah, you could draw out some distinction like that, but I think that in practice we're kind of talking about the same thing.

One thing that's important to point out is a mistake that people make. Emotivists don't think that wrongness or badness or something that maps on to a preexisting emotion, like disgust or like anger or upset. It just belongs in that category, but it's its own unique emotion, in the same way that anger is a little bit like sadness, but they're not the same thing. They just belong in the same category. They're just two unique kinds of emotions. Wrong is its own kind of emotion. It's unique, but it's still an emotion, you know? It just belongs in that category.

So well, why might we think that? Well, how do people talk about ethics? Okay, we talk about things being wrong, but when someone does something absolutely awful, like really, really bad, what do we say? "Disgusting." You say, "That's just disgusting. It's despicable." And the sort of emotional reaction just comes up in your face.

Now, some people will say that that emotional reaction is your reaction to the wrongness, right? There is this objective wrongness and you are having this reaction of disgust to the wrongness. I'm more inclined to say that the wrongness in its totality is the feeling of disgust.

A great example for emotivism is the incest taboo. It's the most universal taboo that exists in human societies. Everywhere we look, there is a prohibition against any kind of marital or sexual relation with your immediate family. Some tribes, I think, found have some interesting variants whereby, like, you can marry your older sister but not your younger sister, stuff like that. But across the board there is some kind of incest taboo.

It's quite easy to explain evolutionarily why this is the case. Like, clearly there are all kinds of problems with inbreeding that will be evolutionarily deselected for, right? But evolutionary explanations aren't a justification, right? Like I can also evolutionarily explain why people tend to be a bit racist. I can explain that in terms of your evolutionary biology, but that wouldn't be a justification for racism. That would just be an explanation for it, right?

So I can explain why there is this incest taboo, but most people want to say that incest is wrong. Why? It's a famously difficult thing for any, at least secular ethicist, to do, especially if you're some kind of utilitarian who thinks that the only thing that matters is the minimization of suffering. "Oh, well it's because you can have disabled children." Few questions jump out of that for me. Firstly, what's wrong with having disabled children? Secondly, obviously you can control for these factors.

Okay, so you make sure that it's two women, or it's two men who've been sterilized or something like that. Or a man and a woman who've been sterilized or two men. "Okay, well then it's about the power imbalances in a family that," okay, we'll just control for that. Like, it's so often we waste so much time on these irrelevant factors. You can literally just control for these factors. What's wrong with it?

When it comes down to it, most people, if they search their inner experience, will either, I mean, the sort of enlightened rationalists will go, "Well then, I don't think it is wrong, you know?" And okay, maybe they're right in being consistent there, but even such people tend to still feel uncomfortable with it.

Somebody actually once put me through my paces on this, because I used to be a bit of a utilitarian and I used to talk about this and say, "Well, I suppose like I can't see anything that's subjectively wrong with that." And someone I know like pretended that his new girlfriend, he like introduced her to me as like his cousin or something. And then like later on it became clear that they were an item, and he was just toying with me to see how I'd actually react. Because it's easy to say, "Oh yeah, there's nothing wrong with that," but you're still gonna be like, "What?" because it's so universal.

So what's going on there? We just think it's disgusting. We're just like, "Gosh, no. I mean, that's your brother, that's your sister, that's your mother." It's like that's all you've got, ultimately, when you break it down. There will be people who say, "No, like, I believe in God and God has enshrined into the moral law of the universe that this is wrong." Interestingly, still doesn't tell you why it's wrong, just gives you confidence that it's wrong.

But fine, shelving that at least for the time being, like for at least the secular ethicist among us, like even secular ethicists will say, "No, emotivism is wrong." Okay, well then try to account for what's going on here. Maybe you will just say that in this case people are just having an emotional reaction, and for that reason it's not wrong. But I think that's just what's going on across the board.

Think about the worst, most homophobic person you've ever met. What do they say about gay people? They don't just say abstractly, like completely dispassionately, "I think that is immoral." They say, "It's disgusting. It's disgusting. No, no. No son of mine will be gay, no, no." It's got this emotional component that everybody knows. Everybody knows about this emotional component that these things have, but I think there is just the emotional component. I think that's what this ethics is.

That is the difference between a father saying, "My son is gay," as a matter of fact, and saying, "It's wrong that my son is gay." I think if you isolate what the difference is between those two statements is that, in one case, he's feeling something in relation to that fact about the world. And it's not like another fact that he's adding on. There's only one fact there, which is that his son is gay, and the only thing that's being added on in saying that it's wrong that his son is gay is how he feels about it.

You might remember that I said that emotivism is a, it's a theory about ethics, but really it's a theory about language, right? It's more about what people mean when they say particular words. And so to say that, when someone says like, "The world ought to be this way," what they're doing is they're expressing an emotional state about the world. They're expressing their emotional reaction to the world, that they don't like it. And you can still make sense of what's like going on there.

It's kind of like if we were looking for some food and I said, "Let's go to Wetherspoons." I don't know if you know what a Wetherspoons is, but it's a glorious pub chain in the United Kingdom. And you looked on your phone and said, "Oh, they're all shut." And I went, "Ugh, God's sake." Like I'm expressing a preference about how I wish the world were, you know?

And crucially, I'm not just reporting this, I'm not just saying, "You know, I wish we lived in a world where Wetherspoons were open all night." That would just be a fact about my psychological state. It's the expression itself. And I think that if I said something like, "It's just so wrong that they shut early," or something like that, I use these moralizing terms, that what I'd be doing is expressing an emotion.

So you can still say something like, "The world really ought not be that way," but the emotivist is just translates that language into the language of ethical expression in the same way that like, I don't know, you might translate when... A lot of the time in like relationships with people, you kind of have to translate what they're saying. If your wife says to you like, "Oh, you're back 10 minutes later than you said you'd be." What she's actually saying is, "Stop taking me for a fool. Like, you're lying to me and you're never on time and you're lazy."

But it's sort of this, there's something more going on under the surface. It might even be a kind of expression of emotion. When she says, "Oh, well, oh no, it's just that I thought we could maybe get dinner together tonight." On the surface, she's making a descriptive claim about her psychology. "I'm just reporting to you, I thought, I had a belief that we were gonna get dinner." That's just a fact about the world. But clearly what she's actually doing there is expressing an emotional state to you. She's expressing her upset, but she's sort of disguising it in the language of truth claims about her psychology, right?

And the same thing's going on with ethics. When someone says, "I think that's wrong," what they're doing is having an emotional reaction to something and putting it into descriptive clothing.

I was always already just deeply suspicious of the idea that ethics is this... It's a very difficult thing to define famously, like, concepts, like good and bad, but we employ them all the time. Like, outside of this kind of conversation, if I'm a bit late to this interview, and somebody says, "Oh, I just think that that's really bad, that's really immoral that you were late," like without doing any metaethic, we all kind of get what's being said there, right?

Technically speaking, if I asked everybody in this room, "Well, what's your definition of wrongness? What does that literally mean? Do you mean that it causes suffering? Do you mean that it..." Like, people might have different views and whatnot, but like on the surface level, we all sort of use these terms and we kind of get along using these terms and we know what they mean.

So I was just interested in the fact that it's a kind of lexicon that I was already frequently employing, but also deeply suspicious of the idea that there is this thing in the universe called like goodness. It just like where does it exist? How does it exist? Does it exist, like in people, in actions? Like, can something even exists within an act? Like where is it? What is it, you know?

It's like, "Okay, well then let's start paying attention." I mean, this is not an uncommon thought for people to realize that the this good and bad stuff is essentially just, it's just people saying stuff. It's just like viewpoints and subjective preferences. All right, but let's get more specific. What exactly am I saying? Because I use these terms. It's not like I'm using a term without knowing what it means. It's not like I've just used the word obnoxious, but not known the definition of obnoxious. I know what I mean when I say these terms, right?

But when I reflect on it, right? "But what is this, this good, this bad? I must mean something. So what do I mean?" And that's when I sort of do this exercise of really trying to isolate the moral element. What is the difference between it's raining and it's bad that it's raining? What is the difference between a murder just occurred and it's wrong that that murder just occurred?

If you try to isolate what the actual difference is there, I think it has to just be an attitude, it's an expression, it's the way you feel about that particular situation. And so the only thing that can be added by saying that something is wrong is the expression of that attitude. That's sort of the way of thinking about it. That led me to emotivism.

I think it is hard to remember literally how I sort of first started becoming convinced by this, but I suppose I was convinced that there is no objective good or bad. I couldn't even make sense of such a concept. And once that's gone, it's not even like you're really doing ethics anymore. Now you're just trying to work out, "Okay, then what do those words mean? What is the referent for the word good?" It can't be literally meaningless. It must have some kind of referent.

That's what led A.J. Ayer to it in the first place. He had this whole philosophy about meaning in language. He thought that like statements could only be meaningful if they were either something you could verify, so prove or disprove through empirical observation, or if they were just like analytically true, just true by definition, things like two plus two is four, something like that. Or analytically false, you know, two plus two is five. It's a meaningful statement. It's just meaningfully false.

This philosophy, by the way, has completely fallen out of favor, this logical positivism, as it's called, this idea that statements are only meaningful if they are verifiable or analytical, or analytically true or false, which means that any kind of statement which does not belong in that category... It's not just that it's like wrong or false. Ayer thought it was literally meaningless. It was the same as just like going, "Blah, blah, blah," or something. It just literally had no meaning.

And so the big problem in chapter seven of "Language, Truth & Logic" is what about ethical statements? When I say murder is wrong, it doesn't seem like it's something I can empirically verify. I can't go out and like test with scientific experiments whether murder is wrong, but it also doesn't seem analytically true. It doesn't seem true by definition. It seems like I can meaningfully ask, is murder really wrong?

And so Ayer's philosophy led him to this position where he either had to say that ethical statements were therefore literally meaningless, again, like saying murder is wrong would be the same as just saying like, murder is blah, blah, blah. Like, just meaningless statement. But Ayer was like, "No, it definitely means something." So if it's not analytically true and it's not empirically verifiable, then what do these ethical statements mean? Oh, well, they're expressions of emotions. They're not the kind of things that are true and false that we can test like scientifically or might be analytically true. It's not in the realm of truth value at all. It's literally just an emotional expression. So it's meaningful in that sense, in a slightly different sense that the literal meaning of the expression is just that an expression.

The biggest problem for emotivism is this so-called Frege-Geach problem, named after two philosophers. It's also known as the embedding problem. Reason for that is because it deals with this problem that, when you take the meaning of a word or a statement and you embed it in the English language into a larger sentence, the meaning needs to stay the same.

So if I say, "It's raining outside," and then I say something like, "I wonder if it's raining outside," so I've embedded that phrase, "it's raining outside" that atomic phrase inside a larger sentence, that isolated element of "it's raining outside" has to mean the same thing. I'm now saying, "I wonder if it's raining outside," and then "it's raining outside." Well, "I think that it's raining outside." Or, "If it's raining outside, then I will bring an umbrella," right? Like those statements, "I will bring an umbrella" and, "it's raining outside" have meaning of their own, and they retain that meaning when you embed them into a statement, like, "if it's raining outside, then I'll bring an umbrella."

The problem for Frege and Geach is that with emotivism, if ethical statements are just expressions of emotion, that is, when I say murder is wrong, I literally mean something like boo, murder. Then how can I make sense of a statement like, "I wonder if murder is wrong." Like, what does that statement mean when someone says that? Because if murder is wrong, just means boo, murder, that would mean someone saying, "I wonder if boo, murder." That doesn't make very much sense because you are expressing an emotion and then saying, "I wonder." It's almost like you stub your toe and you go, "I wonder if, ah, man." It doesn't make sense.

That's not the kind of... The only way you could make sense of someone saying "I wonder if murder is wrong," is if in that context, in the embedded context, murder is wrong means something different. In that context, it means it's not an expression of emotion. Oh, it's a discussion about their mental attitude or something like that. But meaning doesn't just change like that for sentences.

And so the embedding problem says, "Well, if you look at a statement like, 'I wonder if murder is wrong' or if murder is wrong, then murdering James is wrong," which seems to be a sensible statement that I can make sense of, then given that in that embedded context, those statements can't just be expressions of emotion, means that outside of those embedded context, they also can't just be expressions of emotions.

It's a bit of a technical problem. I hope that kind of makes sense. It's a little bit difficult to explain actually, but I think hopefully that comes across. And people can do further reading on this, but I mean, if you think about an argument like, if murder is wrong, then murdering James is wrong. Premise two, murder is wrong, conclusion, therefore, murdering James is wrong.

That conclusion follows from those premises. We don't know if the premises are true, but we can say that if the premises are true, the conclusion follows. It's a valid argument. But logical validity relies on the truth value of the premises. To say that an argument is valid is to say that if the premises are true, the conclusion is true. Right? That's what it means to say an argument is valid. That's like the definition of a valid argument.

So if we take that argument, if murder is wrong, then murdering James is wrong, premise two, murder is wrong, it follows that murdering James is wrong. That seems valid, but that would require us being able to conceive of premise two, murder is wrong, as being something which is true or false. If we're an emotivist and we say, "No, no, no, that's an expression of emotion, it can't be true or false," then we'd have to say that that argument that I just laid out is not valid.

That doesn't seem right. Seems perfectly valid. I mean, it has to be valid. Surely if you see it written down, it's like that's obviously, the conclusion obviously follows from the premises. So it's as though when you take these ethical expressions and you embed them into bigger contexts like syllogisms or "I wonder if," or whatever, if-then statements, that suddenly they're what, like just not emotional expressions anymore? Suddenly they have truth value and we talk about them differently. That doesn't seem to make any sense. So that's the Frege-Geach problem.

If you're interested in emotivism, the place to start might be A.J. Ayer's "Language, Truth & Logic," which is where this all kind of comes from. It's chapter seven in which he talks about what it means to use moral terms. Like the book as a whole explains his logical positivism as a philosophy, which like I say, no one really believes in anymore. It was kind of popular for a while in the 20th century and then just completely fell out of favor. But that chapter seven is still the origin of this emotivist framework.

But a more modern philosopher to read on this stuff would be Simon Blackburn, I think. Blackburn is famous for his introductions to philosophy. He's written a few sort of popular introductions for just getting into philosophy. But he's also done some important work in metaethics. He's not himself an emotivist, but he's written compellingly about emotivism and non-cognitivism more broadly. He's also compiled or constructed quite an influential response to the best objection to emotivism. Those would be the two names that jump out at me to begin exploring emotivism.