Seems like this could just as well be an argument against reductionism/smallism, rather than an argument against physicalism per se.


I'm not sure if that solves the issue though. If we're physical, how can we "do" things that none of our more basic, better understood physical components can do? The problem does not seem like it can be waved away with weak emergence, so it leaves us with either a non-physical mind, or strongly emergent conciousness.

Arguably, strong emergence might also be fatal to physicalism, at least as it is commonly framed. That would make the mental physical, and not through some sort of superveniance relation, but rather because the mental is a fundemental, irreducible, aspect of the physical. It would make all the arguments about the causal closure principle moot, because it would turn out that mental events have causal powers, full stop, and there is no possible translation of them into non-mental processes.

My suspicion is that this is why panpsychism doesn't seem to sit well with physicalism, even though physicalism doesn't seem to necessarily preclude panpsychism. If you have panpsychism, then causal closure also seems irrelevant, unless you tack on epiphenomenalism.

But, this would need proof of existence before it became anything more than speculation.

Well, that's what people believe they are demonstrating in their papers. In any event, the converse isn't decisively demonstrated.

Anyhow, spacetime is not mass energy. But if all physical reality did reduce to one thing, spacetime a metric field within a field of fields, the would also be a problem for physicalism. If there is only one thing that everything reduces to, then the concept of substance that physicalism emerged from ceases to do any explanatory lifting at all. Everything is explained by process within the monosubstance. It's unclear how, given a single undifferentiated process that produces mental life and everything else, allows idealism vs physicalism to be a useful distinction. The monosubstance being mental (idealism) or physical doesn't seem to make any difference, the label would lack content.

The proposition that information is as fundemental as matter and energy is not uncommon in physics. There is also the proposition that information is more fundemental than matter and energy, and that the latter emerges from the former ("it from bit.") Being substrate independent, it seems difficult to reduce information to matter and energy, although some people do think it's possible. Sort of an issue of open debate.

But this isn't really a challenge to physicalism, since plenty of people who would claim that information is ontologically basic would also go with Landauer's principle, "information is physical." It might point to Hemple's Dilemma though, the idea that if "physical" = anything we have reason to believe exists, the term become vacuous.

I would start with physicalism re philosophy of mind.

In the body doesn't in some way "produce" the mind, then why does ingesting certain chemicals so radically affect our cognition? Aren't traumatic brain injuries and dementia powerful demonstrations of this fact?

Against the view that an immaterial soul somehow "pilots" the body and that the body being broken simply break this connection somehow, we can consider our own experiences if we've ever been concussed, drunk, etc. and how these physical causes radically affect all aspects of mental life.

Metaphysical physicalism is harder to advocate for. The most convincing argument might be that "physicalism is what science says is the case. Science has given us atom bombs, GPS, the internet, antibiotics, etc. The proof is in the pudding. What other system is so useful at predicting the future or increasing our causal powers? If the world isn't made of atoms, why do nuclear power pants successfully light out homes? If we aren't composed of chemicals, why does biochemistry help heal us from illnesses? Physicalism, in its reductive variety is intuitive, and seems to work extremely well."

I will allow that this is a bad argument, subject to many objections, but on the face of it, not having heard those objections, it seemed convincing to me.

That's a very good point. I didn't mean to portray it as necessarily universal. I wouldn't want to even actually call anyone a "Last Man," as the term is quite derogatory. When speaking of the "Last Men," what I really mean is "the people who are terrified that they are becoming Last Men." This fear is generally accompanied by the belief that most other people, at least in their society, have already succumbed to "Lastmanism." That's what kicks off the drive to struggle.

And I forgot to note in the post above that in recognizing this problem Fukuyama seems to be misreading Hegel. If a contradiction that big truly does exist in society, then it would appear that we actually have not reached the End of History.

Is this Nietzsche' s thesis? Aren't they two different outcomes?

Yes, they are two different outcomes. But the need for the Overman seems to be born out of the condition the Last Man to me.

Fukuyama's only point is that the Last Man prediction seems to have missed something. The Last Men aren't content to be bovine consumers. Global, basic recognition at the End of History collapses into being no better than no recognition at all for them. I would just add that this trend has been increased by the collapse of membership in social institutions and "digital balkanization," since Fukuyama was writing 30 years ago.

The Last Men are, in fact, enraged by their state, and yearn for conflict as a means of transforming themselves. This is ressentiment par excellence. Feelings of inadequacy and emasculation get projected on to a society that is seen as degenerate and oppressive, a tyranny of the weak and feeble minded. Hence, in our modern context, the major preoccupation with "cuckoldry," being an "alpha male" versus a "beta male," or the torrent of "Chad versus Virgin," memes. The idea of the latter is obviously that we should identify with the superior "Chad," and yet clearly the audience is also often supposed to identify with the Virgin to some extent. But the larger point is generally that society — gynocentrism, wokism, consumerism, the welfare state, etc — are what have caused us to degenerate into the "Virgin."

Is the nu-right largely a misunderstanding of Nietzsche? To some degree yes. While I agree with that Rand seems to essentially buy into the superiority of "aristocratic morality," I don't see Nietzsche as advocating a return to aristocratic morality. That said, it's easy to read him that way, and he certainly IS often read that way.

But my point is merely that it does not seem accidental that the concept of the Overman would become immensely popular with the Last Men. Nietzsche's life itself, has a lot of the same threads at the very least. A sense of being a genius who is nonetheless unappreciated, dissatisfaction with society and mainstream culture/politics, lack of any romantic success, low social standing but also the rights of a citizen and freedom from any heavy handed oppression or hard labor, starvation, etc. Biographically, we could consider the long hikes, plunging into a wilderness that one isn't actually well trained or prepared to deal with, to represent a sort of dissatisfaction with "safety net
society."

This doesn't necessarily undermine Nietzsche's philosophy. Bad people can write good moral philosophy, good logicians can act illogically. In Nietzsche's case, the unfortunate comments on women suggest he fell short of overcoming ressentiment, but he doesn't need to be an Overman for the concept to hold water.

IMO, the solution doesn't actually hold water, but that's another story.

But postmodern writers
like Nietzsche see negation as a positive, affirmative power. The influence of this thinking can be seen today in the change of language from the disabled to the differently abled, from normal and abnormal neurology to neurotypical and neuro-atypical, from pathologizing schizophrenia to the affirmative message of the Hearning Voices movement. Oliver Sacks’s positive accounts of people with Tourette’s, autism and other alterations in behavior was influenced by Nietzsche.

Yet those very movements get cited as the tyranny of the weak over the strong. I don't see a way for Nietszcheans to adjudicate these sorts of disputes. E.g., is feminism Nietzschean because it affirms woman as woman, not as some sort of defective man, or is it the weak using slave morality as a cudgel, affirmative action the chains weighing down someone like Vonnegut's Harrison Bergaron?

This leads to the "no true Nietzschean" phenomena re moral norms.

My favorite is Julius Evola titling his book "Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul."

I find esoterica quite interesting, but this facet of it can make trying to discuss it extremely tedious. "Oh, you don't agree with/love x, well then you absolutely cannot have understood it. It wasn't written for you." Ironic, in the esotericists themselves have a tendency to lambast competitors in stark terms.

This is modern esotercism, you don't really see that in Renaissance/Reformation era stuff. Arguably, a lot of the old obscurantism was just functional , aimed at avoiding censorship, although I think it also leads to interesting writing and opportunities for interpretation — "death of the author" and all.

Peterson is talking about both. He, and the movement as a whole, is very hostile to critical theory and critiques of objectivity, even as they also employ these techniques frequently to critique opponents. Others, but not Peterson, tend to embrace grand narratives of history as both a means of building up the concept of "the West," and of slandering their opponents (the parasitic classes destroying the West).

As far as your (or Fukuyama’s) analysis of Nietzsche’s ideas, I don’t think any useful assessment of his thinking can get off the ground until one deals with the basis of the arguments made within such philosophical approaches as phenomenology, poststructuralism, hermeneutics, neo-pragmatism, enactivism, new materialism , the later Wittgenstein, deconstruction and social constructionism countering traditional realism. I dont find Fukuyama’s thinking to be up to the task of effectively grasping what these philosophers are up to.

What does that laundry list have to do Fukuyama or anything I've wrote and why is a big list of terms developed decades after Nietzsche was writing the only way to properly engage with his writing? Surely he can be engaged with on his own terms. And since a good deal of Nietzsche corpus focuses on representations and critiques of prior thinkers, surely the accuracy of these claims can be analyzed without appealing to say, Wittgenstein.

I mean, does someone really need to be steeped in New Materialism and 21st century thought to decide if Nietzsche accurately represents or responds to Plato?

Obviously the no-fly zone is more wishful thinking and will not happen.

:100: , that ship sailed a long time ago.

And the point has been mooted by how ineffective the Russian Air Force has been. Most of their activity is lobbing off missiles from Russian air-space, granted they've had particularly high losses in the last two weeks with more ambitious operations.

The main benefit of a no fly zone at this point would be that Ukraine's Air Force could operate much more freely, which might very well break the stalemate. But such a no fly zone is going to invariably involve striking targets in Russia. You can't tell your pilots to fly SEAD/DEAD sorties and then tell them they need to stop at the border. They need to fire on threats to be successful and radiation seeking missiles don't stop for borders.

Plus, there are lower risk options if NATO was willing to spend the money. Sufficient numbers of old 4th Gen fighters, the F-16, Strike Eagles, and Hornets, which exist in volume and are actively being replaced, would likely allow Ukraine to carry out a sufficent number of CAS sorties. But this would require training a large number of pilots and willingness to spend. If they aren't going to give Ukraine fighters in sufficient quantity, I see no reason to expect that they would use their own.

Well, IMO, while the modern nu/alt-right certainly shares a lot with/ in some way grows out of more venerable right wing traditions, it is itself something new. It seems to get it's start in the late 1990s and early 2000s, being a phenomena driven by Gen X and Millennials. The biggest cultural examples I could think of would be the emergence of the "Manosphere" blogs, influencers like Andrew Tate, Roosh V, etc., the emergence of "Pick Up Artist" culture, writers like Jack Donovan, and the resurgence of machismo in more mainstream entertainment post 9/11.

A big part of the new movement is its almost total divorce from Christianity, and outright hostility to neoliberalism, particularly the ideals of free trade and free movement. Also, and embrace of post-modernism, despite often vocally decrying it.

To my mind, the movement is a reaction to a confluence of factors. One, is the cumulative effect of major changes in patterns of migration that began in prior decades, but built up steam since 2000. This led to the realization that many Europeans would indeed likely become "minorities in their own country," sometime this century. There is a similar anxiety in the US, although it is less coherent there.

This normally gets most of the attention, but I would say just as important, if not more, is the fallout of the sexual revolution, which has led to a large number of men who remain perpetually single through most of their adult lives. The decline in marriage, birth rates, and relationships also is tied into the growing academic achievement gap between males and females, which is quite stark. This achievement gap itself has been cited as a major cause for the decline of marriage (in the aggregate, women tend to not want to marry men with less education, and now far fewer men complete post-secondary education). This gap also feeds into the widening gender gap in political preferences, which in turn makes relationships less likely.

Rising inequality plays into this as well, as growing inequality is the engine for status anxiety, which seems particularly acute for young men. Then you have the "overproduction" of graduate degrees; too many highly educated people competing for not enough opportunities. Economics also matters in that it makes sense that men feel more threatened by migration, as they tend to be dominant in fields like construction, which are more affected by the increase in the labor supply, and are dominant in tech, which is easy to offshore.

All this has led to an ideology that is on the one hand
openly hostile to "post modernism," (the constant refrain of folks like Jordan Peterson) while being itself highly post-modernist. For example, there is the idea that the news media and scientific community cannot be trusted because, really, they are beholden to and invariably influenced by whoever finances them while also being enslaved to hegemonic "woke" social factors. There is also an embrace of relativism re morality.

The result is a movement that is nihilistic, without a clear picture of what it wants, but also driven by resentment. The solution to this lack of a cohesive vision to unify the movement? Conflict! Gotta have that civil war, the "Boog." Plus, a civil war dovetails very nicely with the fetishization of "warrior culture," and the consumption of the accoutrements of combat, tactical gear, etc. It's participation in warfare that will be transformative — for the individual as much as it will be for society at large.

This is something it has in common with modern liberalism, which also increasingly defined what it wants to see, and individual virtue, in terms of conflict. Granted that in the liberal vision the conflict is generally more social, speaking truth to power, less kinetic.

With these sorts of social forces becoming increasingly potent, it's interesting to note how completely out of place texts like Porphery's "Life of Pythagoras," or the various Lives of the Saints would be in our current culture. "You mean they just give up on achieving status and go out into the desert and fast?" You couldn't sell "The Life of Saint Anthony," today. Anthony would have to actually fight the demons who attack him, not just get beat up by them. This is ironic, considering these come out of an ancient Roman/Greek culture that was in many ways a lot more martial and patriarchal that ours.

Nietzsche is very popular within the nu-right, but less so than some of those he inspired. Julius Evola and Rene Guenon, and to a lesser extent Aleister Crowley, would be examples here. These guys differ a lot from Nietzsche but I see a significant overlap in tone, and how they flatter the reader. The reader is part of a cognitive elite, and needs to overcome the chains thrown upon them by the "sheep," a motif that becomes pretty common in the 20th century. Past thinkers don't need to be seriously engaged with but can be dismissed in a torrent of abuse.

Anyhow, I think Fukuyama's fusion of Hegel and Nietzsche in explaining this phenomena is pretty apt. The Last Man, having all his basic needs met, and living in a society that gives a sort of base level recognition to all, feels that universal basic recognition is no better than no recognition at all. Thus, he lashes out violently for recognition.

This also explains the huge success of dystopias and apocalyptic stories, where often the apocalypse changes the protagonist from ignored and low status, transforming them. They end up being highly respected leader and hero, whose inner virtues have only been realized through the collapse of civilization.

A popular meme in the movement is Hopf's:

"Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”

The implication being that the liberals, neoliberals, prehaps Baby Boomers in general — the sheep — are the weak men. The movement is the strong men who will create good times. But Fukuyama makes a good point, that people who are enjoying prosperity, security, and liberties unmatched in almost all of human history, who are then lashing out to destroy their societies might actually be the "weak men creating bad times." That said, I think the movement has plenty of good points about problems with modern society.

In this, Fukuyama might have might have a critique of Nietzsche himself, as embodying not the vision of the Overman, but of the Last Man, creating his own phantasm of conflict to deal with the threat of degenerating into a bovine consumer. You could variously take Fukuyama as indicating that Nietzsche was a prophet predicting this crisis, or as the first of the Last Men. Maybe both. In any event, what Nietzsche doesn't seem to predict is that his message might be extremely popular with the Last Men, and that they might all embark on the journey to become Overmen. What does that look like? And how do you sort between true Overmen versus Last Men lashing out for recognition who are convinced they are Overman, without it simply becoming a No True Scotsman situation?

THE REAL PHILOSOPHERS, HOWEVER, ARE COMMANDERS AND LAW-GIVERS

There are a few quotes like this in his corpus. I have a hard time understanding them. Nietzsche is not particularly concerned with political philosophy and the masses. So why must the philosopher rule?

A common critique of Nietzsche is that his philosophy doesn't work in the social dimension. How does a whole community of Overmen interact and actually form a cohesive society? A common rebuttal to this is that Nietzsche simply isn't writing for the masses. He doesn't even want to be understood by most. He's writing for a small elite, the few.

But then why does this self-concerned elite need the reigns of temporal power, which also tend to bind? Can't they do their own thing?

It seems to me it comes out of two things. One, Nietzsche's aversion to asceticism. His ideal can't very well live the life of the fictional ancient philosopher ideal of Appolonius, Porphery's Pythagoras, etc. But then I think Russell is on to something here when he suggests this just seems to be thrown in because leaders = high status = good — which gets to the idea that the Overman is a phantasm born out of the imagination of the Last Man.

Maybe this doesn't preclude transformation into the Overman, but it seems to complicate the picture. After all, the works written for the elite, the few, are now probably the very best selling works if philosophy, and arguably have the most cultural influence of any "philosopher," even if not being as influential in philosophy proper.

If Nietzsche's prophecy of the Last Man is accurate, then we are forced to conclude that the Last Men really dig the idea of the Overman.

But Nietzsche's Ubermensch is not resentful. He does not advocate or feed off of resentment.

:up: This is fundemental, and is restated many times in stark terms. That said, I don't think anyone could convince me that Nietzsche's actual work isn't dripping with ressentiment. Hence the thesis that the Last Man is the father/womb of the Overman. It actually makes sense, in that, who could recognize the deleterious effects of resentment more than the Last Man himself?

And maybe this is even a good thing. The Overman might be exactly the God the Last Man needs. For my part though, I find the lack of focus on the tradition of reflexive freedom fatal to the Overman concept. The fifth book of the Gay Science, added later, after the Genealogy, is a good summation of thoughts on the "free spirit" of the future age. But it is very much Lockean freedom from external constraint that is countenanced, not reflexive freedom.

This certainly shows up in Nietzschean fiction. Miura, R. Scott Bakker, Rand — the heros all have saint-like self control added to their virtues and the villains all embody an essentially Platonic evil, rather than being resentful sheep.

I don't think so. As with other influential thinkers throughout history, his work has been taken and twisted in different ways. Rand claimed that the individual owes nothing to society.

This is certainly true. I feel like philosophers themselves can be more or less culpable in how their work ends up perceived. For example, we end up with so many different Hegels because his work is dense and not written in a way that is particularly easy to understand.

In some cases, a philosopher's work can have implications that they themselves either didn't recognize or tried and failed to get around. For example, I don't think Fichte is guilty of grossly misreading Kant. I think he comes to a conclusion that is largely based on Kant's analysis, even if Kant himself didn't want to go in that direction, and indeed we know from Kant's papers and revisions that Kant was quite aware that he had a dualism / subjective idealism problem on his hands.

With Nietzsche, the fact that so many interpreters have been led variously into "might makes right," egoism or valueless post-modernism, seems to represent the same sort of problem. No doubt, Nietzsche himself seemed to denigrate more "brutish" views, abhor antisemitism, etc. But the question would be whether a substantial challenge to these takes can be mounted from within the philosophy itself. It's just like how scholars' assertions that Kant didn't want subjective idealism (some argue the opposite) don't really do anything to show that his system doesn't lead to subjective idealism, they just show that he would have been unhappy with that conclusion.

But what's the Nietzschean critique of self-described Nietzscheans like Bronze Aged Pervert? I haven't seen one.




It's telling that there are virtually no children in Ayn Rand stories. One wonders how exactly someone becomes a "great person," by oneself. We might ask why no great industrialists existed for the first 200,000+ years of the race's existence.



It's pretty over the top. All the heros are attractive, robust geniuses. All the villains and stand ins for opposing ideologies are corpulent degenerates with no redeeming qualities. It's kind of like old Disney movies, where you wonder why people can't tell that the bad guys are bad just from looking at them.

There is one scene in Atlas Shrugged where an entire trainload of people dies in an accident and we get a kaleidoscopic view of how all of them deserved to die due to embracing leftist parasitism in their various ways.

That alone doesn't totally spoil the books, but it gets old given their collosal length. Closest work I can think of is "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," books, where all the good guys are successful, hyper competent, intellectual feminists, and all the bad guys are almost comic renderings of fat, middle aged, untalented misogynists. Those at least had fairly interesting murder plots though, and to be fair, parts of the plot and tone of Atlas Shrugged were still good.

I think Rorty actually uses something close to the example in the OP. "Cats are animals." But suppose we discover tomorrow that "all cats are actually very cleverly crafted androids introduced by ETs onto the Earth to spy on us." What then? It no longer seems to be true that cats are animals; they are actually androids. Different genus.

Maybe a more realistic scenerio might be the widespread belief that it was essential to triangles to have the angles add up to 180 degrees.

I've always been more interested in the "scandal of deduction," that analytical truths, deduction as a whole, and thus computation as well, should be completely uninformative according to most measures of information. Mill solved this by simply claiming that all deductions are really induction in disguise. Hittinka, and later Floridi tried all sorts of complex formal work arounds — surface versus depth information, virtual information, etc. (a real case of every problem looking like a nail if you're a hammer specialist IMO).

I've come around to thinking the problems with the scandal of deduction, and analytic truths, tends to actually come from mathematical Platonism and our tendency to mistake abstractions as "more real," than reality. E.g., Wittgenstein complains in the Tractus that people misunderstand implication in terms of cause and effect, and this is wrong because eternal implication is the more fundemental. I'd argue this is completely backward; toddlers learn cause and effect first, the idea of implication is just abstracting from this.

Analytical truths are informative because computation always occurs over time. But they are informative for precisely the same reason that sense data is informative, because there is an act of communication and semiosis undergirding the act of understanding either sort of truth. This makes them the same sort of thing from a physical/metaphysical perspective

So I'd rather say the difference with the analytical/deductive is that we work with a different methodology. We tend to be concerned with what is true assuming that other things are true, rather what is true vis-á-vis evidence. The epistemic difference would be one of appropriate methodology then, not one of confidence, as Hume had it with relations of ideas vs matters of fact.

We seem to be going in a circle. We've already acknowledged that the world would be a different, better place if everyone acted morally, or that there can be plenty of consequences due to acting immorally.

You are asking for what "real difference," it makes if acts are moral. When we discuss the various negative consequences of immoral actions, you say "well that isn't non-natural," so it doesn't count. When we discuss the non-natural, irreducible difference of an act's either being moral or not moral, you say that isn't a "real" difference. I'm not sure what you want here, a difference that is not "natural" yet somehow is "meaningful," where meaningful seems to be defined as "makes a difference in the natural world?"

It seems to me that saying that an act's being moral or immoral is, of itself, not a "real difference" is simply to reject the core premise that there are, in fact, discoverable, irreducible, non-natural moral facts in the first place.

Personally, I might be able to get behind that, because the premises seem like the weak part. Perhaps morality is not reducible, but it seems to deeply bound up in other "natural" phenomena to keep separate.

The same is also true of someone who is falsely convinced that they have acted immorally. In which case it isn't the fact that they have acted immorally that has caused them to suffer but the belief that they have acted immorally that has caused them to suffer.

This would seem to apply to almost anything. E.g., it's not my wife cheating on me that makes me unhappy, but my belief that she has been unfaithful. It wasn't her being unfaithful that convinced me of this, but my mental perceptions of her being unfaithful when I came home early from work one day. Likewise, I don't take antibiotics because they will cure my infection, but because I believe they will cure my infection.

However, a full analysis would show that I believe antibiotics will cure my infection because they will actually cure my infection, that I think my wife cheated on my because she actually cheated on me, etc. The possibility of false beliefs here doesn't negate this connection if there are ways to come to true beliefs. If beliefs are properly related to facts, including moral facts, I don't see an issue here.

I guess the Armenians aren't out here flaming down people with the Anti-Armenian League propaganda.

They have been actually, people just pay less attention, but it still goes on. The Armenian diaspora is one of the most effective diaspora groups in terms of lobbying the West. This is how they are able to get disproportionate attention for a country of marginal economic and strategic relevance, and why they have very quickly been able to get Western support against the Azerbaijan despite having alienated the West by being so closely aligned to Russia for so long.

This actually flies in the face of real politick, considering the considerable issues Iran has been having with internal security crises, especially those related to its large minority populations, largely Kurds and Azeris. You could see an argument for US grand strategy doing more to court the Azeris the way they do the Kurds, but they don't do this in part because of the power of the Armenian lobby.

Armenia was also instrumental in throwing up some major road blocks to Turkey's entry into the EU, re demands for recognizing the genocide and paying reparations (which only accomplished having Turkey point a finger at the Greeks). Granted, these were in part more an excuse for people who already didn't want Turkey in the union.

I only point this out because there is this tendency to see Israel has somehow unique in having a powerful diaspora lobby. It isn't, and peoples with significant diasporas often have powerful lobbies in areas in which they've concentrated. And of course, you can have influence without a large diaspora. I would say the Saudis tend to have more influence in the US than Israel for example (or maybe Turkey via cash payments to the NSA, or gold coins given to a certain NJ senator, lol).

People tend to pay more attention to Israel's efforts, due to both antisemitic tropes, the religious salience of the "Holy Land," and the fact that Palestine also has a large diaspora movement. This attention actually makes their efforts less successful IMO. Shining light on foreign influence isn't normally helpful.

Isn't it begging to question to assume the correct moral beliefs are distributed such that being correct about them is a 50/50 proposition? The same seems true with assuming that those who commit immoral acts face no heightened risk of suffering due to later realizing they have acted immorally. It's assuming a scenario where false belief is as likely as true belief, which, if this was the case for all facts, should also make us question essentially everything. But this makes no sense for people who claim that at least some moral principles are more or less "self evident."

I suppose if you assume some sort of historical evolution of morality, e.g. some sort of fusion of this way of thinking with Hegelianism, it might make sense for most people to be wrong about some moral facts at some point, but there the difference made by morality in the world is going to inexorably play out for us in the long run.

So why the motivation to be moral? There are no practical benefits, either for ourselves or for others. Is it entirely a matter of principle?

Doesn't it make a difference to the person who knows they are doing something wrong? The consequences of this seem somewhat inescapable.

Also, consider that moral facts not being reducible to pleasure, suffering, etc. does not entail that they are not connected. There can be "natural" consequences of immoral acts without morality being constituted by these outcomes. It seems prima facie unreasonable to assume that everyone acting morally, as opposed to how they currently do, would have no positive benefits for people. But this is cleared up if "not reducible to," is not understood as "unrelated to."

But this is where the "non-natural," premise really starts to show its weakness IMO. If suffering is "natural" then it seems like the non-natural is ineluctably tied up in the natural, even if it is not reducible to it. It seems to me that this might make us question if they are truly two distinct types. But Moore is writing at a time where reductionism is a lot more popular, so maybe that explains his concern here, since it might be assumed that "natural = reducible."

That's a consequence of acting contrary to moral beliefs. They won't come to see me because they believe I acted immorally. They might be wrong.

This is true only if you assume that people's beliefs about morality have nothing to do moral facts. But if people have the moral beliefs they do because of moral facts (at least in part), then there seems to be a clear connection here between evil acts and social consequences.

This is to say nothing of the effects of someone's own evil acts on their own experiences and well being. I can see an argument for moral degeneracy being cumulative. Cruelty becomes a habit. And even if one sees nothing wrong with their evil acts at the time, people later realizing they have acted in an evil manner in the past has caused people no shortage of grief throughout history.

Suffering is still suffering, so why does it matter if it's moral or not?

I think the more valuable point Moore is trying to make is that morality isn't completely reducible to pleasure/suffering. There is a broader dimension. I agree that no one is going to seek out suffering for the sake of suffering, but they might gladly suffer to do good.

But who is going to argue that suffering is good of itself?

The underlying assumption here seems to be that what is "really good" could be anything, even pointless suffering. But the idea that people have absolutely no equipment for determining moral facts seems at odds with the theory itself. It would indeed be odd to claim that there are non-natural moral facts and that they are unknowable.

Well, the non-natural moral facts would be involved in the consequences of your actions to the extent that your family won't come to see you because they think you acted immorally. If they didn't think what you did was wrong, presumably they wouldn't be upset with you.

But I do agree that the natural/non-natural distinction seems pretty dicey here, because the two "types" seem to flow into one another quite a bit.

It seems like you could get along with just calling them irreducible and living "natural" out of it.

Well, God can't actualize A instead of B AND actualize B but not A. Aquinas is clear that God cannot perform contradictions.

God's freedom is that God actualizes exactly what God wants to actualize and nothing else. This doesn't seem like a limit on divine freedom. In the same way that Plantinga shows that "God cannot create a rock God cannot lift," is equivalent to "God can lift all rocks," "God cannot actualize what God hasn't chosen to actualize," seems equivalent with "God only creates what God wants."

What is the connection between acting immorally and causing suffering? Remember that I'm arguing about the implications of ethical non-naturalism.

That's a question that would seem to deal with causality, which would tend to require a naturalistic answer.

The difference for someone like Moore would seem to be precisely that you have acted immorally versus morally in any situation, independent of any causation downstream of your actions. As I understand him, which isn't very well, moral facts aren't reducible to natural facts, and so asking about what changes "in the world," outside of your having acted rightly or wrongly doesn't make sense given his premises.

I personally don't know if that premise makes any sense. The premise that right and wrong are simply irreducible (strongly emergent and thus fundemental) seems more defensible than a claim that includes their being "non-natural," especially in our modern context where "naturalism" has been bloated into a concept that seems to cover essentially everything that "is."

Unless you want to say we apprehend moral truths by a faculty such as conscience, perhaps. It just seems there is no role here for moral truths to play - all they do is confer an invisible label that no one can read on actions labelling them 'good' or 'bad'. But for you they are still of practical import, and that's where I am baffled.They play no role in deliberation, they confer no consequences, I'm not sure what function they have.

Don't people make decisions or prefer policies based on what they think is right or wrong all the time? For example, check out the Gaza thread. It seems like people can read the labels, and in turn the labels affect decision making.

You don't need an angle coming down. Treat your wife and kids terribly, only focusing on yourself and you'll end up divorced and no one will come visit you down at the retirement home, where you sit, quite likely tormented by the thoughts of how you could have done things differently. I mean, that scenerio isn't particularly out there, it plays out across the world everyday. You could also consider the drug addict who begins taking advantage of their friends and family, stealing from them, etc. and ends up completely estranged from them. Generally, doing things that people readily identify as evil is going to have very real consequences. People who "get away," with evil to some extent generally have to convince everyone around them that they aren't really being evil.

Of course. My main concern is to uncover the true nature of reality, to fathom the real, the absolute. Inside the machine I will be free from the hustle and bustle of everyday existence, having to work, cook, eat, etc, just contemplation. This will allow me to be focus on the real, intelligible world of eternal Nous without the distraction of the mutable and ephemeral.

Although I suppose I could just as well go the low tech route and become a Carthusian, Anchorite, or Cistercian.




IDK if I could hack it though. I stayed with the Cistercians not long ago and those guys get up at 3:15 am 365 days a year to start the Liturgy of the Hours and then get to contemplating before sunrise prayer at 5:30. Compline, the last communal prayer of the day, isn't until 8 pm, and its very cold at night. Seems grueling.

Given that I already believe that this is immoral, what follows if my belief is true and what follows if my belief is false?

In the case of the dead battery, if I believe that the battery is dead then if my belief is true then the car won't run and if my belief is false then the car will run.

Is there anything like this for the case that I believe that eating meat is immoral? Are there consequences to eating meat that

There might not be any immediately discernible difference. This can be true in the case of the car battery as well. You might actually have a live battery with a broken terminal, and simply attaching the cables is what is allowing the car to start, no actual "jumping," with another vehicle required. Or you can completely erroneous beliefs about how a car battery actually functions and still successfully jump start it.

The consequences of acting immorally would tend to be to make the world shittier, to put it in the simplist terms possible. Because your ordered a veal parm the restaurant is going to order more veal. In the aggregate, the sort of behavior you engage in will lead to many more veal calves leading lives of atrocious suffering, while also contributing to ocean acidification and global warming.

Consider that most people have some public policies they would like to see implemented and some reformed or repealed. If we believe policy reform does any good at all, then we believe that human action, especially collective human action, can radically alter the degree to which humans (and other creatures) flourish during their lifetimes. We could consider dramatic success stories like the Republic of Korea, Iceland, or Finland, where a great deal of the population was lifted out of oppressive poverty in a relatively short period of time as evidence for the effectiveness of reforms in some cases.

The result of collective immoral action is more shitty lives with more suffering and less flourishing. I think we can think of plenty of cases where the aggregate effect of petty cruelty or callous indifference adds up to considerable consequences for a wide swath of people. Plus, plenty of utopian visions seem fairly feasible IF people would act according to certain standards (this of course doesn't preclude their being completely unrealistic, given how we are).

But I don't think you can generally tie minor moral infractions to specific consequences, just as smoking a single cigarette isn't going to be tied to developing lung disease.

(Note: I do not intend to imply that all theories will say something like: "acts that make the world shittier are immoral." The criteria for what makes an act good or bad might vary. However, in general, an observable effect of immoral acts will tend to be a shittier life/country/world.)

It's belief in what is right that affects what we do. What is actually right doesn't. I don't see how it possibly could.

This objection seems applicable to almost all actions. If my car won't start and I attach jumper cables to it, it's my belief that the battery is dead, not the battery's being dead, that is the proximate cause of my actions. The battery might actually not be dead at all, and I could just have a blown fuse or a bad starter, so it's clearly the belief doing the lifting here vis-á-vis my actions.

That said, my belief that the battery is dead doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from the fact that my car won't start. Maybe the battery isn't really dead, in which case, jumping the car won't help. This will in turn force me to investigate deeper into what has gone wrong with my car, and my beliefs will be shaped by the actual condition of my car.

For moral realists, moral propositions are something we can ascertain they truth or falsity of, at least to some extent. Presumably, if "one ought not eat meat," is true, this moral fact is relevant to beliefs because someone's beliefs about whether or not they ought to eat meat are going to be shaped by this fact. That moral facts are more difficult to ascertain than the status of a car battery doesn't really matter here. It's still the case that, given moral realism and given we have the belief that we have some ability to develop beliefs that are more likely to be true than false, our beliefs should tend towards moral realities. This might only be true on historical time scales, which has tended to be true for objective facts in the sciences at any rate.

Granted, it may be quite impossible, given our evidence, to tell "what the right thing to do," was in any specific case. But this tends to be true of history as well, and yet this paucity of evidence is normally not grounds for dismissing the existence of historical facts. Incomplete moral knowledge might still allow us to rule out some things. Just like a doctor might not know how to cure a specific cancer, but knows lighting the patient on fire won't do it.

Moral facts are only unable to affect beliefs (and thus action) if they either don't exist or are impossible to discover. I don't see how moral facts could exist and be discoverable and not effect the world.

:up:

Sorry, I wasn't very clear there. Those questions were more rhetorical questions that came to mind given the topic covered in the OP vis-á-vis what you had said, not direct questions.

However, religions and other beliefs, in terms of logic, are deductive conclusions (e.g. the Ontological Argument presumes the existence of God) without any valid empirical evidence to support their propositions (many times these systems even lack logical validity). On the other hand, nihilism is an inductive conclusion, derived from the observation that so far no belief or religion can adequately prove the existence of an objective meaning independent of the mind.

Well there are inductive arguments for the existence of God, e.g. Saint Aquinas' argument from design, arguments from the Fine Tuning Problem, Leibniz argument from the law-like behavior of the universe, etc. Arguments like Anselm and Gödel's are proofs that aren't supposed to rely on any empirical evidence. That would actually be a perk, depending on who you ask, since we can often be more sure of the results of such arguments, e.g. that two odds added together always make an even number, etc. These would be "relations of ideas," or "analytic truths," if you think the distinction holds any water still post-Quine. These don't "assume God exists," but rather try to show that "God exists," is implied by relatively innocuous premises.

IMO, it is on the one hand surprising that Anselm and Gödel's proofs have held up so long, and on the other, sort of irrelevant since, for all the difficulty in convincingly disproving them, they don't seem to have ever convinced anyone one way or the other on the issue.

But I would question the very premise that the world is somehow "meaningless" if there is not "objective meaning independent of a mind." What after all does this mean? How can there be meaning without a mind in the first place? This seems to set up and then knock down an impossible standard. Am I invisible because I cannot be seen without eyes? Is a rock concert silent "in itself," because it cannot be heard without ears?

The idea of "meaning in itself," makes no sense with popular theories of meaning and communication (e.g. information theory is relational, semiotics as well, Rovelli's Relational Quantum Mechanics and Wheeler's Participatory Universe/It From Bit would make relations, not objects ontologically basic, etc.)

Personally, I feel like philosophy writ large has a bad hangover from the heyday of positivism, when it was assumed that "objectivity approaches truth at the limit." This leads to the weird conception that a thing is "as it is conceived of without a mind." What could that mean?

To my mind, it's led to a problem where "objective" is conflated with "noumenal" or "in-itself." But I don't think this works. In a world without minds, without the possibility of subjectivity, the term "objective" would apply equally to everything. Applying to everything, it would describe absolutely nothing, having no content at all, the same problem Hegel diagnoses re "good' being contentless without the possibility of "bad."

Objectivity, the view of things with biases removed, is only coherent in the context of biases being possible. This is also true of how truth, knowledge, and perception only make sense in the context of minds. So an "objective meaning," would be one everyone could agree on given appropriate information, reasoning, cognitive abilities, etc. That people can disagree about meaning and morality does not, of itself, preclude their being objective. After all, you can find plenty of people online denying that the Earth is round, or the germ theory of disease, etc. However, it is nonetheless an objective fact that the Earth is round.

To my mind, some form of objective meaning seems quite possible. When a store has a sign that says "closed" on its door, that objectively means the store is closed and not taking customers. To be sure, non-English speakers, birds, etc. might not understand the meaning, but in the view with all biases removed, it is still the case that the sign is there precisely to denote that the store is closed.

Maybe this doesn't solve the whole nihilism issue, but it's an avenue worth turning down because if objective knowledge can exist without knowledge of some inaccessible "noumena," that seems pretty important. Likewise, an objective morality grounded in biology, institutions, etc. doesn't appear to be necessarily precluded.

Certainly there do seem to be some objective facts vis-á-vis morality. E.g., "Bob thinks stealing pens from work is wrong," or "Americans are less supportive of stay-at-home dad's than stay-at-home moms." The question is whether these sorts of facts can ever be globalized for all peoples in a rational way.

Nihilism is not a simple affirmation, it is a negation of other affirmations. This is the very reason I included also a weaker version of nihilism, claiming that "even if there exists a meaning or something sublime and superior such that a definition or a providence is indeed bestowed to the universe, it is, nonetheless, most certainly hidden away from the domain of pure reason."

Isn't the fact that something is completely inaccessible a positive affirmation? At least to the extent that it is saying that such things are impossible it seems to be. Quite a few thinkers did think universal meaning, an "intelligible world," could be grasped by pure reason.

Indeed, plenty thought sense perception was fairly useless, except that it directed our attention to the higher hypostasis of the intelligible world. This would be some readings of Plato, as well as Plotinus, Porphery, Proclus, Saint Augustine, Eriugena, Saint Bonaventure (to a lesser extent), etc. For another, more "empirical," road to meaning through reason, there is Hegel's project in both Logics, where we start at attempting to fathom sheer, indeterminate being and see what progresses out of that. We might say all these attempts have fatal flaws, but that wouldn't preclude finding such a road to meaning in the future.

Thus, demanding a religious person to prove the existence of God is not the same with demanding, say, an atheist to prove that God does not exist. It's like demanding a physicist to prove that a fifth fundamental force does not exist.

They wouldn't need to prove that a fifth fundemental force does not exist, but they would need to prove that the scientist claiming to have discovered a fifth fundemental force didn't have good evidence for their claims.

I am not overly impressed by the arguments that non-agnostic atheism requires a significantly different standard of justification. Saying "I have no belief regarding x," doesn't give one any grounds to challenge other beliefs regarding x. What atheists generally charge is that theists' beliefs lack good evidence, are contradictory, etc.

For example, atheists understandably want policy changes in line with their beliefs, e.g. that religious teachings not be taught in schools. For this demand to make sense, it isn't enough to say "I don't believe that x is the case." After all, we couldn't very well demand that chemistry not be taught in schools simply because we never took chemistry and thus have no beliefs about the field. For this demand to be justified we need to show that "there aren't good reasons to believe (and thus teach) x."

A claim that "x does not exist," is not the same as having no beliefs about x. That said, I do think it is true that, in general it is easier to prove not-p than p, simply because there are many more ways to describe the world inaccurately than accurately. So atheists probably do enjoy an easier path to justification, just not a different type of justification. After all, we wouldn't say that the claim that "the Earth isn't round," requires less justification simply because it is a negative claim.

In fact, if we observe the history of physics, we find that scientists always faithfully followed the so called Occam's razor:" entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." Whilst I understand that physicists are able to utilize empirical measures to obtain their results, both physics and nihilism share the same notion that if X is not a logical necessity and cannot be proved empirically, then X can be eliminated from the system of knowledge. Therefore, if an objective meaning or purpose is not a hard necessity for the existence of us and of the world, and such meaning cannot be proved empirically, it follows that this world does not require any intrinsic meaning.

I'm not sure if I would agree with this characterization of the sciences. I think that Kuhn gets at something quite important with the idea of paradigms. Newton's laws were falsified by astronomical observations almost immediately. The scientific community didn't drop them, instead they posited unobserved planets to explain the planetary orbits that failed to conform to what the laws predicted. It turned out that these planets did indeed exist.

Science seems far more abductive to me, less methodologically strict. Right now we have like 9 major, mutually exclusive theories for how quantum mechanics "really," works for example.

Quiddity is merely a nominalistic existence, a product of cognitive abilities. The essence of a rock for humans may be its hardness, but if we were stronger, say being able to smash rocks easily, its essence would consequently change too.

Makes sense, if we accept nominalism. But we have other views, from within the sciences, e.g. Tegmark's ontic structural realism/Platonism.

I think one problem for a strict nominalism is explaining how it is that we can generally agree on which tropes/universals are being instantiated by some object.

Why is it that our minds all work similarly? If we appeal to natural selection, then we seem to be saying that order, law-like behavior — rationality — is "out in the world" posterior to our existence as thinking beings. But if this is true, it would seem to undermine the most strict forms of nominalism, because names would be based on something "out there."

The universe is irrational in the sense that there exists no meaning. I don't see how the rational discoveries/descriptions of science has any connection with an intrinsic meaning.

Well, for thinkers like Hegel, the Stoics, the Patristics, Leibniz, etc. the rational behavior of the world was strong empirical evidence for a Logos, universal reason, at work in the world. After all, why else would we have order and not chaos?

But as I noted above, I don't get how we can say "the universe lacks meaning." We see meaning everywhere. We are part of the universe. If we are monists and take it that man isn't in some way magical/unique, but rather "emerges from nature," then it would seem the universe absolutely produces meaning. You could also consider C.S. Pierce's semiotic view of "a universe of signs," or pansemiotic theories, like Lyon's "Signs in the Dust."

Personally, I'm more inclined towards these views because they don't have the problem of explaining how man uniquely creates meaning, or how we can all be said to live in and experience "the same world."


In any event, that's simply what I meant by "it works with the premises, but there appears to be plenty of other options."

I didn't write that passage. It's by one of my least favorite philosophers, the wonderful Bertrand Russell. It's really a case study in the pitfalls of psychologism as a form or argument, as you could easily come up with a similar argument attacking Russell, and go in circles forever.



Can you have credible explanations of cultural phenomena grounded in a historicism that eschew any sort of commitment to objective history? How then should we prefer any argument grounded in historicism more than any others if they conflict?

Doesn't countering other's arguments require reflecting them accurately rather than beating up on strawmen? But if that's true, then there is a certain sense in which an accurate accounting of the facts of the history of ideas is always essential.

I don't see how it can't hurt the credibility of an argument to claim "here is the history of these sets of ideas," and then to demonstrate a shallow, or inaccurate knowledge of the relevant history, even if the argument is still salvageable on other merits.

Take religion. Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud also developed explanations for religion around the same time as Nietzsche, explanations that also nicely happened to support their particular overarching message. How do we judge between these, in some ways mutually exclusive, versions of history and why wouldn't they be subject to the same charge of "working towards a pre-existing conclusion?"

How so? In what way is Nietzsche's "historical analysis" more actual historical analysis than Hegel or Vico's? I would say Marx actually has a leg up in this department, despite the same charge being easy to level at him.

I don't hold this against them, since even modern political scientists "select on the dependant variable," all the time (e.g. "Why Nations Fail"). The analysis can still be a good vehicle for ideas, even if it's mostly illustrative. But it hardly seems like Nietzsche sets out to do a history of morals and simply "comes across his results." This is even more apparent in light of his publishing history. By the time he is publishing his mature work, he already has the core of what he wants to say laid out, and the analysis seems obviously there to support and develop those ideas, not as a form of "discovery."

And as his critics demonstrate, you can do psychoanalytical explanations in circles. E.g., Bertrand Russell (another famously uncharitable philosopher) on Nietzsche:

In place of the Christian saint Nietzsche wishes to see what he calls the "noble" man... The "noble" man will be capable of cruelty and... crime; he will recognize duties only to equals. ... The "noble" man is essentially the incarnate will to power.

What are we to think of Nietzsche's doctrines? ... Is there in them anything objective, or are they the mere power-phantasies of an invalid?

It is undeniable that Nietzsche has had a great influence...

Nevertheless there is a great deal in him that must be dismissed as merely megalomanic.

He condemns Christian love because he thinks it is an outcome of fear. I am afraid my neighbour may injure me, and so I assure him that I love him. If I were stronger and bolder, I should openly display the contempt for him which of course I feel. It does not occur to Nietzsche as possible that a man should genuinely feel universal love, obviously because he himself feels almost universal hatred and fear...

It never occurred to Nietzsche that the lust for power... is itself an outcome of fear. Those who do not fear their neighbours see no necessity to tyrannize over them....

I will not deny that, partly as a result of his teaching, the real world has become very like his nightmare, but that does not make it any the less horrible.

It is necessary for higher men to make war upon the masses, and resist the democratic tendencies of the age, for in all directions mediocre people are joining hands to make themselves masters… He regards compassion as a weakness to be combated… He prophesied with a certain glee an era of great wars; one wonders whether he would have been happy if he had lived to see the fulfillment of his prophecy.

There is a great deal in Nietzsche that must be dismissed as merely megalomaniac… It is obvious that in his day-dreams he is a warrior, not a professor; all the men he admires were military. His opinion of women, like every man’s, is an objectification of his own emotion towards them, which is obviously one of fear. “Forget not thy whip”–but nine women out of ten would get the whip away from him, and he knew it, so he kept away from women, and soothed his wounded vanity with unkind remarks.

Is this good analysis of Nietzsche? I don't think so; it seems like you could come back with another psychological explanation of why Russell was such an ass all the time to people*. I can only imagine the back and forth that could have occured if both were alive at the same time...


* it did occur to me that this analysis might be satire on Russell's part, but this seems too charitable, based on the rest of his corpus.

Umberto Eco is pretty good on this apparent contradiction in political narratives. His "Eternal Fascism," is a good example.

You see this quite a bit in modern "nu-right," diatribes. These are generally something like: "weak, effeminate, craven, and degenerate Jews, leftists, feminists, immigrants, etc. are all horribly oppressing us strong, clear eyed, powerfully willed hereditary warriors."

How exactly are the strong being endlessly defeated by the weak?

Generally there are two answers.

First, it is because there are innumerable "hordes of subhumans" attacking the numerically inferior "pure." It's just a matter of numbers. However, there is significant confusion on this point, because the movement also wants to claim that the pure are also "the moral majority," and in the US context that, "Trump won in a landslide, if not for the rigging," etc.

I see this bipolar attitude vis-á-vis wanting to be the "moral majority" versus a "small, beset elite," as being a manifestation of the nu-right's increasing ambivalence towards democracy of any form. On the one hand, they increasingly want to dispense with democracy—"Red Ceasarism," and all. On the other, democracy has been "the principle," for so long that they can't help but make appeals to popular opinion and their place in a "true majority."

The second, more popular explanation is that "strong" have allowed their hands to be tied by a "false morality." It's here that a relation to Nietzsche's ideas is more obvious. Generally, the claim is that economic elites, the "neoliberals," or simply "the Jews," have tricked the strong into a false morality. Once the strong "wake up," and form their own morality, this age of evil will be resolved.

Generally, it is said that this will not occur until some sort of cataclysmic war, which will have the side effect of turning the currently low status practitioners of the ideology into hardened, grizzled war heros. You can't really underplay the extent to which "war will act as a force of self-transformation and self-actualization," plays into these narratives.


This is a fairly popular line of thought. Hence the popularity of (fairly poor) takes on Nietzsche in this space, for example "Bronze Age Pervert," and to a lesser extent Ayn Rand. I don't think these are particularly accurate interpretations of what Nietzsche had in mind, but it's easy to see how his ideas are easy to co-opt here, and it's a potent and popular modern example of this sort of thinking. Eco goes into good detail on why the enemy needs to simultaneously be "so strong and so weak."




You overcome the tedium. :smile:



Always funny how careful analyses of people's true reasons for believing what they do (Nietzsche, Marx, etc.) so often turn out to entail:

Them: weak, cowardly, desperately making up illusions
Us: clear eyed and strong, powerful truth seekers.

Nietzsche has the whole spiel about how others decide where they want to end up re morality, and then invent reasons for getting there. It's a good critique, but it seems like it could easily be turned back on his own work and his fairly rigour free retelling of Jewish history that just happens to paint a picture where the "real story," lines up with his beliefs.

I always felt these had a lot in common with the old: "you only reject the obvious truth of Christ because you want an excuse to do whatever you want." I'm not against arguments from psychoanalysis as a whole, but they seem to easily fall into this problem of being "too neat."

I think sums it up rightly here. It just doesn't make sense to think of God as in any way contingent in Thomism, which the "possible worlds" style of analysis seems to do implicitly.

Arguably, there are problems with Thomistic metaphysics "higher up the chain" — problems with the very concept of divine simplicity itself. However, I think that, if we're accepting Thomistic divine simplicity as a given, then there isn't necessarily a problem here "downstream" of that assumption. God only actualizes what God in God's perfect divine freedom actually does actualize. God is above "normal" properties in some sense, in the way that the Plotinian "One" is above the forms of Nous, being a higher Hypostases and the ground of being. Possibilities, to the extent they exist, must exist within God's essence since they are a part of being in the Aristotlean framework being employed re potentiality.

Plantinga has an influential attack on divine simplicity summed up here that is relevant: https://iep.utm.edu/divine-simplicity/#:~:text=Divine%20simplicity%20is%20central%20to,necessary)%20accruing%20to%20his%20nature

But in part, this is resolved by modern Thomists who have embraced Husserl via Edith Stein, resulting in "Thomistic-Personalism." If personhood is ontologically primitive, and God is a person (or three), the attribute question seems less acute since persons can manifest attributes without being those attributes (since they are fundementally persons, not abstract objects). This also seems to help to quell a long term problem between the extremely abstract thinking of some Christians, e.g. Eriugena, Hegel, on the one hand, and the traditions deep focus on personal experience and the particular individual on the other.

I suppose it depends on how you define "ego" and "conscience." It would seem to me that saying, "people are not free because their actions are dependant on their self and their moral sense," is sort of getting things backwards. We are free precisely when these things determine our actions — when the self determines how it shall act, i.e. it is "self-determining." We would be unfree to whatever extent we are "enslaved to,"/"determined by," things other than the self and our moral sense.

That is, this seems precisely like an inversion of most definitions of reflexive freedom.

That said, there is a sense in which we might be said to have developed a "false" or "inauthentic," sense of self. Many philosophers write on this sort of thing, particularly in the existentialist tradition. But this would seem to be more a problem of the self being constrained by external forces, cultural preferences, etc. than really a problem with the self lacking freedom because its actions are determined by ego/self.

After all, freedom cannot be when our actions are determined by absolutely nothing. If that was the case, freedom would simply be arbitrary and random action, no course being more likely than any other. Following one's conscience, what one really considers to be good, seems more like the fulfillment of freedom than its absence. Ego is important here as well because we can easily be divided against ourselves. We can have conflicting desires, etc. Only a unified self can thus act freely, which is sort of Plato's argument in the Republic.

The way I understand it, divine simplicity is tied to God's total lack of contingency. For Aquinas, God's essence includes existence itself, making God unique among all beings. In contrast, everything else derives its existence from God as the Uncaused Cause.

Contingency involves a reliance on causes and conditions, but God, as the Uncaused Cause and necessary being, transcends such dependencies; God is the foundation of all existence. God can't be a composite being because there is no way for God's "parts" to interact, since everything in the divine nature is necessary.

Aquinas posited that in God, essence and existence are identical. This means that God's nature and His act of existing are one and the same.

The idea that God's act to actualize A is also God's act to actualize B doesn't imply a lack of control on God's part in Thomism. Rather, Thomism suggests that God, in His simplicity, is not composed of separate parts or aspects that might conflict. This makes more sense in the Platonic-Pauline view of freedom that prevailed in the ancient world and medieval period. Rather than Lockean "lack of constraint," freedom was more often defined as reflexive self-determination. So God is free if God isn't acted upon by outside forces/contingencies, which is the case. As Uncaused Cause, nothing can act on God, similar to how downward causality works across the Plotinian Hypostasis in Proclus or early Augustine.

Now we might be more likely to look at necessity as its own form of "logical," constraint, but I think Aquinas was more concerned about God's actions not being determined by either creatures or conflicting parts in the divine nature. God's will is unified and consistent, allowing for a coherent and purposeful exercise of divine freedom; God is not in the state that man is, described by Saint Paul in Romans 7, at war with itself.

If you accept Aquinas' premises re God's essence and existence, I don't think there is necessarily a problem here. God isn't really constrained by God's own necessity. Following Boethius, God is also always present to all moments, so there is no problem with temporal decision making; all decisions to actualize are made eternally. That's how I understood it anyhow.

This certainly seems to be the case in Harris. It doesn't fix the problems re epistemology and scientism though.

Plus, it seemed historically short sighted to me. The Nazi regime was not particularly religious, nor was imperial Japan. The Soviet Union and Mao's China were openly hostile to religion. I never got the argument for atheistic regimes necessarily being any better on the repression and violence front. To be sure, religion has motivated plenty of atrocities, the Thirty Years War, the Crusader sack of Jerusalem, but then you have equally vile acts, Belgian activities in the Congo, the Mongol sack of Baghdad, motivated by simple greed and lack of concern for foreign peoples.

I don't see how no transcendent meaning matters very much. Humans will always generate meaning and values and reasons for participating in life. The question 'is life worth living' is not an abstraction - the answer is found in what you do with your day. A nihilist may have a very rich and rewarding life and, ironically, a happier life than the theist, who may live in quaking fear of divine judgement and understands misery to be god's will.

Right. And if humans generate meaning and value, and humans are part of the universe, then in an important way the universe generates meaning and value. It is clearly not completely hostile to the existence of such things.

Moreover, if conciousness is an example of strong emergence, then it would seem in some way to be "fundemental," not fully decomposable. Further, some primitive form of meaning and value seem essential to the existence of any first person subjective experience. If that's the case, then meaning and value are fundemental elements of nature.

We might also consider the popularity of panpsychism as a solution to the Hard Problem of Conciousness. If panpsychism is true, then the claim that the universe is in any way valueless seems to simply be false. We're in a sea of experience and value.

The claim that the universe is meaningless also seems like it would be refuted if you accept most pansemiotic views of reality. The universe is a sea of signs and meaning given you accept those theories.

Plus, if the Fine Tuning Problem and related issues give us reason to think the conciousness is not only in some way fundemental (irreducible) but also not contingent, then the "valuelessness," claim seems to run into further problems. This is true even following atheistic views of natural teleology (e.g. Nagel) or views where conciousness might be both fundemental and quite central to the functioning of the universe (e.g. panpsychism, Wheeler's Participatory Universe/It From Bit, or the Von Neumann - Wigner interpretation of quantum mechanics). It might even be in jeopardy for views like Tegmark's ontic structural realism, because there conciousness is a necessary, rather than contingent fact of the universe (and this is generally true anywhere eternalism is embraced). Which leads to the question: "if the universe necessarily produces all this meaning and value, in what way is it meaningless and valueless?"

The claim seems to rest on demanding that meaning and value come in some sort of eternal Platonic form, and a conception of the Platonic form that I don't even think is commensurate with how most Platonists have often understood Platonism. I'm not even sure if "goodness and purpose," existing "in itself" as some sort of measuring stick to point to, free from all subjectivity, is a coherent idea. Hell, arguably, trading off concepts in information theory, the idea of things we think of as quite "objective," like length and speed are also incoherent if we insist on some sort of supernatural "in itself," view of them.

Nice article. Seems pretty much to be the common argument for panentheism you see in Plato, the Patristics, etc. However, they generally say things like "God exists," it is just that "existence" is meant differently for God than for material bodies.

Terms like "exists," "is good," "is necessary," etc., when applied to God, are necessarily all forms of analogical predication, as opposed to the standard uniquivocal predication at work when we point to a real tree and say "this tree exists," or "this tree is green." We know of God's "goodness," or "necessity," through finite creatures' participation in an analogically similar, but lower instantiation of the property. That, and/or positive statements about God are, in reality, (largely) reducible to statements about "what God is not," since God is primarily known through what God cannot be while remaining God (Maimonides, e.g. https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/864330).

More abstractly, I think Hegel's idea of the true/good infinite makes the same sort of claim.

It's a fairly widespread conception of God, which makes it stranger that the mentioned authors: Dawkins, Hitchens, (and we could add Harris) do seem to largely ignore it. But it sort of makes sense because the God of fundementalism (a ready made, real-life strawman), some forms of Reformed theology, and, strangely enough, the "classical theism," of a good majority of philosophy of religion articles (a faith hardly any human seems to actually embrace) fit this "finite God," mold. But against this, we could consider that by far and away the two largest denominations of Christianity, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, are officially against this classical theistic view, basing their ideas off Aquinas and Pseudo Dionysius respectively. I know less about the relative popularity of different theologies in Islam, but Avicenna would fall into this bucket too.

It seems to me that the fixation of New Atheism on fundementalism has to do with it being an easy target, and it's an easy target because it makes explicit claims about the types of facts that scientific inquiry is well adapted to explore. This has, however, led to a mistake in New Atheism where there is this idea that all religious/metaphysical claims can/should be explored via the techniques of the sciences. Or, more problematic, the claim that the methods of the sciences are the only ways people can develop rational beliefs (Dennette calls science "the only game in town," when it comes to facts).

However, as noted in the post above, we can have a rational belief in historical facts (historians are not scientists), a rational faith in people or institutions, etc. that isn't grounded in scientific epistemic methods. This being the case, the whole New Atheism project seems to very easily slip into scientism, where we also look to "the popular opinions of scientists," to answer all sorts of questions science cannot answer for us, and to which scientists are not particularly well trained to answer.

Eternalism, which the article alludes to, is another example. "Popular opinion," among physicists is taken as the gold standard for a question that has largely been answered using (IMO bad) philosophical arguments originally developed by philosophers and merely popular with popular science writers. The "illusory" nature of time flow is then used to make all sorts of pronouncements about freedom, "meaning," and even religion — quintessential scientism.

Very well written piece. I think your conclusion probably works, provided you accept a lot of the assumptions it rests on. However, I find the premises shakey, so I'll go through the objections there:

Human consciousness is dictated by rationality and value judgement, whence derived the essence of a human being—a rational being. A rational being does not merely desire an outcome, but rather judges this or that outcome ought to be desired, and therein lies the very distinction between a being qua rationality and being qua animality[1]. The latter simply accepts and obeys to its desires and instincts, and follows them faithfully wherever it is led to; whereas the former, a rational being, seeks additionally to justify and explain and search for reasons in everything it experiences and perceives, for it is bonded by its own creation, its own set of values that insists that whatsoever found in this world ought to be justifiable. For example, a beast would willingly sacrifice itself in exchange for the safety of its offspring simply because it adheres to the raw instinct of motherhood, but a human being—a rational mother—additionally develops an ethical system that would deem such an instinct as a necessity and would punish anyone who disobeys it.

You might be interested in Frankfurt's distinction re second-order desires and second order volitions — the ability to "want to desire x," if you aren't already familiar with it. I've always thought it was a very clear way to define what you are getting at.

However, no matter how firmly a conscious being asserts what the world ought to be, it remains a stranger snared in the chaotic cage of the cosmos, for the reality of the universe is inherently irrational and meaningless; even if there exists a meaning or something sublime and superior such that a definition or a providence is indeed bestowed to the universe, it is, nonetheless, most certainly hidden away from the domain of pure reason.

I mean, that's certainly a popular dogma, but I don't think it's by any means something that has been well demonstrated. Plenty of thinkers have thought they have discovered something quite the opposite, reason and purpose at work throughout the world. The "rock solid" foundations for the claim that the universe is essentially "meaningless and purposeless," seem to be to be grounded by the same epistemic methods that tend to ground religious beliefs.

Existentialism does seem to be a religion of sorts in key ways, so it sort of makes sense, but as with most religions, adherents tend to over estimate how convincing the evidence for their dogma is to non-adherents. Which isn't to say such evidence can't be convincing or rational, but it will tend to have less global validity. Religion tends to work more on the epistemic methods employed by historians and literary critics, or by people when they decide which other people to "have faith in," which makes interpretation highly variable. I don't think those sorts of claims can be demonstrated in the way mathematical proofs or even scientific claims can be.

I personally see evidence for the demonstrable "purposelessness," of reality as quite shakey.

Thus, the universe, for humanity at least, is fundamentally irrational, since the faculty of reasoning is confined by its own rules and delimitations, eternally doomed to remain ignorant pertaining to the quiddity of the cosmos, which most probably is no-existent.

Fundementally irrational how? The world seems to operate in law-like ways that can be described rationally quite well. Indeed, this is often a key empirical fact cited as evidence for universal rationality or even purpose (e.g. the concept of Logos Spermatikos).

I also don't know how this would make the universe somehow lack quiddity. It still is what it is. Is this a claim about our epistemic ability to understand the essence of the universe, or a claim about a lack of essence simpliciter?

In any event, if we understand some essences re created things, e.g. the oak tree, the triangle, or the fox, and these are part of the universe, then it seems to me that the essence of the universe is at least partially understandable.

Indeed, this feeling of nostalgia, the rawest inclination to seek self-transcendence[2]as a means to escape the inevitable end—the total annihilation of consciousness—is embedded within the veins of humanity, whence gods were born to bear the burdens of humans' crave for eternity and reconciliation.

I've always found this old Marixst trope on religion ring quite hallow. Plenty of religions lack an afterlife, and in many there is no immortality of the soul. Others have it that avoiding continued existence in our current form (e.g., reincarnation) should be our chief goal — sort of the opposite of the sentiment you describe re annihilation. Plenty more have afterlives that are completely horrible, such that ceasing to exist would be almost certainly preferable for most people. At best, this sort of explanation from psychoanalysis would only explain a subset of religions/religious beliefs.

But I see no reason to accept it when there are far more compelling naturalistic explanations of the ubiquity of religion. Consider that essentially all documented early human societies are animists and that children are also animists until a certain age, even when raised in modern society.

Why is the sky dark and stormy? It's angry. Why does the rock fall down? Because it wants to. Even as adults, steeped in materialism from childhood, we still use this language when describing how chemical reactions or cars work all the time. Explanation from evolutionary psychology, while also on pretty shaky ground, also seem more compelling here, as do less conventional explanations.

But the idea that religion is some sort of "cope," a flight from the terror of the "meaninglessness and purposelessness," of the universe seems to be somewhat an existentialist dogma. Why would this be the case for people who simply don't believe the existentialist claim the the meaninglessness of existence? If they have never believed that claim, then they will have had no motivation to generate such illusions in the first place. It seems to assume something like: "deep down, everyone knows our claim is true." However, I don't think this is the case at all, and empirically it seems hard to support in light of phenomena like suicide bombers.

It also seems like a narrative that sticks around in part because it is flattering to believe (opponents are child-like, etc.). Any disagreement can be taken merely as evidence of self-serving delusion (the problem with most arguments from psychoanalysis).

In a parallel to the dyophysitism[4]of Christ, our essence is likewise twofold. Despite the lofty heights of our intellectual capacities, our consciousness remains tethered to the primal aspects of natural impulses and bodily experiences. Therefore, we reside within the intersection of two realms, with one foot planted in the irrational world of objective reality, and the other in the rational path of subjective interpretation of reality and meaning creation.

I would ask, how does natural selection produce this sui generis rationality in animals? How does a sense of the rational emerge from the totally irrational, and then why is human rationality so good at predicting and understanding what will happen in an irrational world?

Second, isn't science as good of a candidate of an objective description of the world as we have. But if scientific explanations are rational, often framed in mathematical terms, then why would we say objective reality is "irrational?" It seems to submit to rational explanations quite readily.

Objectivity only makes sense in the context of subjectivity in any case. It's the view of things with relevant biases removed. The claim then would be that removing all biases would also remove all rationality? But why should we accept that?


As for the conclusion, I'm not sure how good the case is for the sort of hard dualism it seems to assume TBH, and the case see to hinge on that.

4]The Christological position asserts that the hypostasis of Christ encompasses both the divine nature of God and the human nature of man; thus, He is recognized as both the Son of God and the Son of Man. This doctrinal stance was officially adopted by the Church at the Council of Ephesus in 431.

I don't know if this is a good analogy. You seem to be
setting up a dualism based on two opposed and incompatible modes of "being in the world." But in orthodox christology, Christ if fully man and fully God in nature. The two aren't like oil and water, where they remain separate despite being mixed (this is an analogy they indeed had major fights over). It's more a mixing of water and wine.

Plus, the conception of subjectivity as in a way illusory would seem more in line with Docetist christology. You might also consider that, if our rationality is truly sui generis, distinct to humanity and a distinct subjective mode of being, people might rightly decide that it is in fact the material world that should be rightly thought of as illusory. That gets you into more of a classically Gnostic response I suppose. After all, how do different minds come to understand the same rationality, given it is absent from the material world? This questions play off Platonist intuitions that night lead you back to the sublime and transcendent.

Most religions attempt to answer the question of human life. Probably the Catholic Church is the best at offering a simple solution. “God Made us to love and serve him”. What the heck does that mean. What could little old me do that would be meaningful to a God? Why would a God want 8 billion of us?

Catholic theology is quite broad, but in general the idea isn't that we can do meaningful things for God, at least not in the way we would do things for friends, for our country, etc. The closest equivalent might be that we can do such things for the church, the immanent body of Christ in the world. This is a trend across Christianity because it is a sentiment expressed fairly clearly in the Bible. For example, in Kings and Chronical, God asks Solomon why God needs a temple made from fine wood and gold; "are these not all the work of my own hands." Humans cannot do favors for God.

That said, they can love God and love each other, which is what God wants, for reasons that would require a good deal more space to fully flesh out.

Nor do we ascend towards God through our doing. Everything, our very existence, and talents we might have, are come from God after all. The world might be a ladder up to God (Saint Bonneventure), but it is a ladder provided by grace.

I think where people get tripped up here is in comparison to Protestant Reformed/Calvinistic theology, where any faith in God must be the product of a supernatural miracle, the working of the Holy Spirit. In Orthodox and Catholic theology, we can come to know God through "natural" means (Romans 1:20), but this doesn't allow us to "boast" in our salvation, since nature itself is a gift from God — grace.

The meaning of life in Catholic and Orthodox theology isn't that different, despite being framed in different terms. Man's nature of fulfilled in the contemplation of God. The purpose of life is theosis and diefication, the adoption of man into the family of whom Jesus Christ is the first born son. "Ye shall be Gods." The sacraments and holy life lead towards a progressive justification (salvation from the consequences of sin) and sanctification, the transformation of the individual, and moreso the corporate body into the divine. The end goal is to be "filled onto the fullness of God," mystical union whereby "Christ lives in us and we in Christ. As Jesus puts it in John 17, we will be one as Christ and the Father are one; finite copies of the infinite divine nature.

Protestant theology tends to separate justification and sanctification, which tends to shift the focus towards justification, avoiding punishment. This is true in the Catholic tradition, but to a much lesser extent. The Catechism includes Saint Athanasius' "God became man that man might become God." The Orthodox patrimony,.or Eastern Rite Catholics, tend to put more focus on theosis and healing than on moral behavior vis-á-vis justification.

In some ways, theosis, illumination, and diefication are akin to ideas about enlightenment, or "attaining gnosis," although they tend to go beyond special knowledge into a more general transformation of the person.

Probably nearly infinitely wealthy, since ideally we'd live in some sort of Star Trek, post-scarcity society where we can just replicate things, beam vast distances in an instant, and go on holodeck vacations.

I'm currently reading the book below. It advances a fairly plausible, though highly modified variation on Saint Aquinas' "intention in the media," to argue for a sort of pansemiosis. I've found it fairly convincing so far.

Basically, the argument is that signs, which would correspond to ideas/universals we attribute to objects (e.g. triangularity, greenness, etc.), exist everywhere in nature (C.S. Pierce's assertion, but also an idea one can find in medieval thinkers and arguably even in Saint Augustine vis-á-vis his understanding of the "material hypostasis" of reality).

Take for example the experience of walking into a forest clearing and seeing a eucalyptus tree. There, ambient light is reflecting off the tree. The tree reflects some wave lengths more than others, and the result is an implicit sign in the pattern of energy that results. This pattern is readily recognizable by us (through our eyes and nervous system) as the shape of the tree, the greeness of its leaves, etc. Thus, we can say that the intentional sign (what the pattern of matter/energy means to living creatures) is implicit in the "medium," i.e., the relevant volume of space-time/fields.

What the author points out is that the move to limit signs to only involving living things, (something seen in Deacon, etc.) tends to involve on trading off Chinese Room intuitions. But this means that arguments about the special sui generis sign-interpreting powers of life also tend to fall victim to all the arguments against the Chinese Room, primarily that the thought experiment cashes out due to a hidden homunculus/dualism at its core.

Against this, we can set the equally intuitive proposition that words in a book do not cease to be signs when the book is closed and no living creature can see them. The letters "cat" in this post don't cease to mean what they mean when no one is reading this post.

From this intuition, we can develop the idea of virtual signs. These are patterns of matter/energy, or perhaps better yet, "physical information" that contain intentional signs, signs which are implicit in the medium in which they exist.

This is an appealing idea in that it seems to jive better with the idea that consciousness is strongly emergent. If it is strongly emergent, then it should be fundemental in some sense. But at the same time, consciousness should still "follow from" the nature of what it emerges from. It shouldn't be a black box, and indeed the triumphs of modern cognitive and neuroscience would caution against any totally "black box," view of the emergence of conciousness.

The key point is that signs already exist for conciousness to engage with as an essential part of nature.

I think this gets something important right. However, it still seems to be missing things. There is some good work on how relative indiscenibility, "perspective" essentially, plays a role in basic non-living physical phenomena (e.g. Scott Mueller). Rovelli's work on describing entanglement can also be tweaked into a semiotic understanding. It would be nice to see these ideas brought to bear too, because I think a theory of pansemiosis needs to better clarify what is unique in life, and what is not so unique, but rather builds on the nature of non-living systems.

There are also some intriguing references to the idea of semiosis in non-living complex dissipative systems I might follow up on.

Just got another way of looking at it, we could consider Maimonides argument for the via negativa re: statements about the Divine Nature.

Following Aristotle, all our concepts come from sense experience — sense experience that is necessarily of only finite, created things. So, when we make affirmative statements about God, such as "God is living," what we are actually doing is making a negative statement about "what God is not." God is not living in the way that creatures are living. Rather, the statement is really meant more along the lines of "God is not dead."

Likewise, "God's attributes are necessary," can be taken as "there are no contingent facts vis-á-vis God in the way that facts about creatures can be contingent." Saint Aquinas doesn't buy into the need to hew to the via negativa as strictly as Maimonides, but I do think this jives with his explanations of how facts about God are necessary if I am remembering correctly. Contingency applies to creatures, by definition.

In the language of Saint Thomas, we would say that predicates assigned to God are a form of analogical predication as opposed to uniquivocal.

One way I've heard Meister Eckhart paraphrased on this is that God "boils over" in love and creates. In this way, creation is necessary, although it's unclear if "what is created" is necessary.

I think that's a nice bit of imagery. This sort of idea gets developed more in Jacob Boheme's vision of a God who necessarily creates because the existence of something that is not God is required to define God. This entails that God must create to have self-knowledge. A single, undivided unity existing alone becomes no different from nothing at all existing. Any description of such being would be contentless.

Anyhow, if I recall the Thomistic definition of contingency correctly, then God's choices are sort of necessarily not contingent. Only created things are contingent, since only they can have created causes.

Building off Saint Augustine, one could argue that God is necessarily tripartite because meaning itself is necessarily tripartite. God cannot have self knowledge without this tripartite nature, for the conveyance of meaning always required an object known, the sign through which it is known, and an interpretant.

As Augustine shows in De Trinitate and De Doctrinal, there is some solid pieces of Scripture to work with in supporting a mapping of the object/sign/interpretant to the Father/Word/Spirit as well.

Returning to the original question, I'm not sure exactly how to conceptualize God as actualizing A versus B. The Logos is itself the ground of cause and effect, before and after. We tend to think of freedom entirely in terms of before and after, cause and effect, so this makes thinking of divine freedom tricky.




Our freedom is part of God's freedom. Created beings are, in a way, like subsystems within the universal system that is God. These subsystems can have relative amounts of freedom, since they can be more or less self-determining. I think it would be fair to call most pre-Reformation Christian thinkers panentheists, and the problems of God's sovereignty versus human freedom seem less acute in panentheism.

In the Summa, Saint Aquinas argues that God is present to/in everything as cause (and effects are signs of their causes). This jives with the older Augustinian view that God is "within everything but contained in nothing."

Some languages certainly seem more suited to rhyme. The Inferno sounds far better in the original for example. English is not a particularly great language for poetry. Shakespeare succeeds in beating it into iambic pentameter, but only with great skill and flexibility, and because he is using an old dialect. Chaucer also sounds better in the original, but really needs to be in translation for modern English speakers to understand it. I truly envy those whose native language hasn't changed as much over the ages, and can still read ancient and medieval works (e.g. Fus-ha).

Other languages can be adapted to a greater variety of meters. Dactylic hexameter isn't really an option in the same way for example, especially not for great epics.

The nuance of Hebrew, and especially Greek is famously crushed by Latin, where you are stuck either adding a bunch of words or making clauses ambiguous in what they are referring to in a sentence. But Latin is also a pretty language.

Syllabus per second vary, with Germans being on the low end with 5 or 6, versus 9 for Italians. But I recall that the bit rate computed for languages varies very little despite this.

Lots of people spoke out against the Iraq WMD claims and the claims of a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. If this was a short term liability, it was a long term benefit. Folks who had been sceptical of the claims were tended to be those who were elevated in Bush's second term shake up, while the hardliners got the boot in 2005-2006. The IC was certainly not unified in promoting the Bush administration's interpretation of intelligence, sort of the opposite.

And it was even more of a boon to have spoken out against the war come the Obama years.

Ritter's problem had more to do with his claims and the manner in which he made them. For instance, he sometimes takes credit for pointing out that the US would "lose the war."

Now, the government the US set up, with its same constitution still rules Iraq, so it's debatable if the war was wholly "lost," although it's certainly fair to say the US did not attain its nation building goals in Iraq. But this is aside the point. Ritter's claims were that the US wouldn't be able to remove Saddam or take Baghdad, that it would face atrocious losses, etc. That is, Ritter was predicting a military defeat. In reality, the US routed the Iraqi military easily. It's problem wasn't defeating Saddam's military, but rather policing the civil war that broke out due to their inflexible, and awful occupation planning.

I think this, like the assertion that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was going "splendidly" months into the war, shows either dishonesty or incompetence.

Fears about policing Iraq were well warranted. Fears about overcoming the Iraqi military given the outcome of the Gulf War were sort of nonsense. The US had already defacto partitioned a third of the country, and the Iraqi military had been significantly degraded by 2002-3.