Benjamin Cain
2 min readMar 24, 2022

--

That's a question about reducibility. Your view here isn't obviously consistent with what you said before about morality being real as a tool. I think what you meant to say is that the extension of "morality" is real, but that intensionally, the philosophical talk of morality is, as you say more plainly in this last comment, "nonsense." These workarounds might be useful as heuristics, but they're misleading if we take them to be real as first causes or as corresponding to an autonomous level of ontology.

Would you regard all of philosophy as a dubious workaround? How about psychology?

For me, it's an epistemic and pragmatic question. If we can't explain what people are doing using only game theory, we need to add levels of discourse to get at the finer distinctions. And we posit ontological domains to match the theoretical vocabularies and explanations.

With morality we have the fact-value dichotomy that stymies attempts at theoretical reductions. For example, you say libertarians fool themselves when they claim to be reasoning from their alleged first principles. But the same point could be made about all conscious experience. Maybe it's all just neurology. Yet precisely because neurologists can't currently explain all psychological phenomena, using only neurological terms, and because most folks aren't neurologists in any case, we add psychology and folk psychology to the mix.

Why isn't the game theorist's deflation of libertarianism a case of the genetic fallacy? If this isn't a scientific reduction, it looks like a distraction, a change of topic from, say, libertarian values and arguments to evolutionary psychology or meme theory or some Darwinian sociobiological context.

By the way, I've written up my article on pragmatic conservatism, and this question of reducibility came out towards the end.

--

--

Benjamin Cain
Benjamin Cain

Written by Benjamin Cain

Ph.D. in philosophy / Knowledge condemns. Art redeems. / https://benjamincain.substack.com / https://ko-fi.com/benjamincain / benjamincain8@gmailDOTcom

Responses (1)