My foundational philosophy beliefs
Stuff I feel especially confident about that shapes how I approach the world
I’d like people to know where I’m coming from, so in this post, I’ll list beliefs in philosophy that influence basically everything else that I think about the world.
I wrote this by going through the Phil Papers survey and picking out questions I thought were especially important to my general worldview, modifying some of them a bit, adding a few, and then sorting them by how important they are to everything else I believe. There was a lot I have strong opinions about (I’d choose one box in Newcomb’s Problem) but that I wouldn’t describe as especially important. Others apply to specific situations and political questions (race is definitely a social construct, I’m much less sure about gender, I’m very pro-choice on abortion, etc.) which are extremely important and that I don’t expect to change but that I wouldn’t describe as having a really broad application to literally everything else in the way that something like physicalism does. There’s a small cluster of questions from the survey that I consider especially fundamental to my worldview and which shape everything else I believe, each of which I feel especially confident about. There’s a second section of beliefs I feel less sure about but which still guide a lot of my thinking. There’s a third section of beliefs I have no clue about, but seem really important.
Really fundamental beliefs
Big foundational beliefs that affect everything else I think about the world and which I don’t expect to change.
Physicalism: The only things that have any effect on the physical world are other things described by or used by the laws of physics. A good introductory article on physicalism here.
Moral desert does not exist: It is not possible to deserve things in a moral sense based on your actions. Moral desert is a useful societal fiction, but we should remember that it is fundamentally only a fiction and avoid punishing people beyond what would provide solace for victims, rehabilitation and deterrence for the offenders themselves, and safety for society. It is not possible to deserve to suffer, and in an ideal world, everyone would receive the most good we can get them.
Personal identity reductionism: The self does not exist over and above the series of mental experiences and patterns that constitute a person’s mind. This has some wild implications, including that if I were painlessly killed in my sleep and replaced with an exact clone of me with all my same memories and thought patterns, nothing meaningful about the world would change. Emotionally I can’t fully buy this and still find that I intuitively believe very strongly in a Cartesian Self, but Part 3 of Reasons and Persons is extremely convincing on this and it’s hard to go back to intellectually believing in a Cartesian self after reading it.
Mental functionalism: “Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part.” - The SEP. If you are a physicalist, it seems hard not to also be a mental functionalist, for reasons I can go into in a separate post. Among other things, this implies that consciousness and mental activity can be instantiated in any system that is capable of performing the same functions as biological brains, regardless of what material that system is made of.
Political egalitarianism: The ideal society would treat everyone as political and moral equals. There have been many attempts at political egalitarianism which have drastically failed and made the world much less equal (communism, among others), so egalitarianism should be paired with skepticism about specific systems.
Beliefs I’m pretty sure about
But there’s a non-negligible chance I’ll change them.
Some very vague that often converges on total consequentialism: Total consequentialism explained here. All else being equal, more good things are good, and the total amount of good things is what matters. Among other things, this means that (all else being equal) creating an additional happy life is extremely morally positive rather than neutral, and the future matters.
Hedonic and preference utilitarianism are both incorrect: I think Parfit’s objections to both in Appendix I of Reasons and Persons are pretty devastating. A simple 1-axis scale of well-being to suffering with corresponding moral relevance is a bad way to think about what’s valuable in life, and preference utilitarianism implies that if you design a conscious agent with specific silly preferences (say, the agent’s single inner preference is to be in Idaho) then fulfilling that preference is comparably ethically valuable to fulfilling other strong preferences like not being in extreme pain, provided that the agent values it enough.
Value pluralism: While some ways of living are meaningfully worse than others, there are many ways to access the good life.
Free will compatibilism: We do not have ultimate freedom, but everything we consider “us” has causal effect on the world, so we can be said to have some form of freedom. This means that while moral desert is not possible, we are not helpless observers watching our lives unfold.
Atheism: God probably does not exist.
Liberalism: The state should, within reason, avoid commitments to specific visions of the good life. The role of the state is to mediate difference between people’s values and reduce the potential for violence that comes with that difference.
Capitalism: The market seems to be the most effective way for people with drastically different values and interests to coordinate complex action and build spontaneous order together. I’m a pretty normal US liberal on this. Free markets plus a very strong redistributive welfare state is the best form of government currently available to us and will lead to the most people being authentically free and prosperous. The market is often used to undermine pre-existing class and status hierarchies. I see it as at least temporarily compatible with egalitarianism.
Animals have morally relevant experiences: This seems extremely likely based on our evolutionary history, physicalism, and functionalism. It has intensely radical implications for how different the world ought to be, both for farmed and wild animals.
Scientific structural realism: The purpose of science is and should be to attempt to model the way the world actually is rather than coming up with useful pragmatic games that yield correct predictions without actually correctly modeling the world.
The B-Theory of Time: Article here. The present is a subjective illusion, and the past, present, and future are equally real. This seems to be required for relativity to work, and I doubt that relativity will be disproved.
Philosophical zombies are not metaphysically possible: Thought experiment explained here. Physicalism plus functionalism mean that whatever is happening in our minds is ultimately physical.
Semantic externalism: The meaning of a sentence is determined by facts outside of the speaker’s mind and intentions. The Twin Earth Thought Experiment is one of the most convincing in philosophy to me.
Entering the experience machine would be a bad decision: Thought experiment explained here. What makes life valuable to the person living it is not only the quality of the series of experiences the person has.
Surprisingly challenging/have no idea
This is stuff I think about a lot but have basically no idea about.
Moral realism vs. anti-realism: Are there moral facts in the world beyond our minds available to discover, or is morality a useful social game we play with each other? This seems like a straightforward question but actually cuts at some foundational questions about the philosophy of language, the meaning of facts and existence, and other things that I do not feel equipped to answer and have never gotten a satisfying account of after a decade of reading about it.
Mathematical realism vs. anti-realism: Similar to moral realism vs. anti-realism, I have no idea how to explain mathematical entities. Math does not seem either invented or discovered, but there does not seem to be a third possible answer.
Correspondence vs. epistemic theories of truth: Again, this comes up against the limits of what I know about language and ontology, and I feel kind of useless, but it seems important!
Objective vs. subjective aesthetic value: This would probably hinge in some way on whether I think moral statements are statements of fact.
Qualia: Given physicalism, I should not believe in qualia. And yet, I just can’t shake not only an intense sense that they exist but also an intense worry that defining them away would miss something fundamentally valuable and important about the world. This is one of the biggest holes in my worldview.
Hey! Stumbled on your blog b/c of the great essay on liberalism. But I'm also puzzled reading this because I'm it's not obvious to me how these views cohere.
I know some philosophers think you can be agnostic about meta-ethics while still holding convicted first-order ethical views (e.g. about moral desert, animal welfare, egalitarianism, etc.), but it's never been clear to me why they think that. Seems pretty straightforward that you've got to reject anti-realism if you want to make sense of normativity. In a similar vein, it's puzzling how one could be a convicted physicalist while being agnostic about moral realism. Insofar as physicalism is a reductive view, I'm not aware of any successful attempt to reduce normative properties to natural ones — most philosophers I knew came to regard this as a category mistake.
The possibility that philosophy might just be riddled with category mistakes is a prior that I see a a lot of my EA friends discounting. Many of them arrive at their special distinctive views because they can start with apparently innocent premises and arrive at radically unintuitive conclusions, "because inference, bro." And fine, philosophers have done that as long as there's been philosophy.
But this ignores the possibility that Wittgenstein and the ordinary language philosophers introduced last century which fundamentally changed how we should think about the role of the philosopher's apparently-innocent premises in their conjuring tricks. If it's possible that well-formed english sentences purporting to make some sort of important philosophical claim might actually be meaningless or trivially true when pressed (language gone on holiday), then we should spend considerable amount of time investigating whether those premises actually make sense before we start seeing where they lead. We should be especially suspicious if we find that they lead to strange or unintuitive places.
Thank you for writing this post Andy, I've been thinking about views on personal identity recently, and agree with what you've written here on it here. I just bought the audiobook of Reasons and Persons, which I've been meaning to read but kept putting off, thanks to this post. I actually do find myself emotionally affected by my skepticism about personal identity though, I think that it has made me less fearful of death.
Overall I agree with a large proportion of the items on this list. The item I most disagree with is your confidence in physicalism, where I am much more agnostic. Shouldn't substantial uncertainty about qualia be at least enough to downgrade confidence in physicalism from fundamental to pretty sure?