Long time no blog post! I have been away in Berlin for quite some time, and have been extremely grateful for the experience I’ve gotten to cherish this summer - full blog post about my experiences will be on the way soon - but I wanted to write a brief post celebrating a conversation, and realization, I came to while on my last travel of the summer.

The conversation started as an argument about whether a specific thing was wrong, escalated within about ten minutes into an argument about whether anything is wrong, and ended somewhere around the question of whether anything is real. As always, thank you to my friends for entertaining these conversations at hours when no reasonable person should be doing philosophy. I’ve said before that my beliefs would be nowhere near complete without their intellectual company, and this post is more evidence of that: almost none of what follows is a conclusion I walked in with.

There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena. — Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher and cultural critic

the objectivity of morals#

My position, stated as plainly as I can: morals are inherently subjective. A moral is a claim about what one ought to do, which is a fundamentally different category from a claim about what is, and I don’t believe we have ever successfully derived the first category from the second without smuggling in a preference somewhere along the way.

The first thing worth noticing is that this conversation cannot be had alone. If morals are objective, they have to be objective about something, which means they must be derived from something that is itself objectively true. So if morals are not subjective, then truth cannot be subjective either - objective morality is downstream of objective truth, and it collapses the moment the thing upstream does. This is why our conversation slid from the first topic to the second within minutes, and why I’ve structured this post the way I have. They are not two debates. They are one debate, held at two different depths.

Now, the strongest case against me, and the one my friend went to immediately, is murder. Every society we have any record of prohibits killing within the group. There is no culture that treats the unprovoked killing of a neighbor as a neutral act, and the near-total agreement here feels less like a coincidence and more like a discovery, the way the value of pi feels discovered rather than voted on. It’s a genuinely solid counter, and I don’t think you can be honest about this topic without sitting with it for a while.

But I’d argue that what we’re observing there is unanimity, not objectivity, and the two are extremely easy to confuse. The prohibition on killing has never actually been universal in practice: it is bounded, and the boundaries move. We carve out war, capital punishment, self-defense, historically ritual sacrifice, historically the entire category of people a given society decided did not count. A physical law does not issue exemptions. Gravity does not have a legislature that convenes to decide when it applies. The fact that the prohibition on killing comes with an exception structure, and that the exception structure is voted on, is to me the clearest evidence that we are looking at an agreement rather than a law.

This is where the concept of majority becomes the center of everything. In my predestination blog, I argued that our choices are made against a criteria of optimality that is a cumulative summation of our emotions, our beliefs, and some social measure of objectivity. That last term is doing an enormous amount of work, and I think it is the whole ballgame here. It is the majority that creates the idea of optimality. Morality, in this reading, is the majority’s optimum, encoded, enforced, and inherited by everyone born into it, and this explains something that a purely objective account struggles with: why moral progress feels like discovery from the inside. When the majority shifts, we don’t experience it as the group changing its preference. We experience it as the group finally being correct, and we backfill the language of discovery onto what was actually a change in consensus.

The combatting perspective, and the one I want to state as fairly as I can, is that there exists a universal set of morals, authored by some all-knowing power outside of time and space, which people can choose to imbibe or ignore. Under this view, my entire argument above is a description of human failure to follow the standard, not evidence against the standard. That people disagree about the law says nothing about whether the law exists, just as jumping does not refute gravity.

My response is that such a system would also have to be supernaturally reinforced to mean anything. I am not saying it’s not possible - I want to be clear that I’m not making a claim about what exists outside of time and space, because I don’t think I’m equipped to. What I’m saying is that a moral law with no enforcement mechanism is, in its observable effects, indistinguishable from no moral law at all. And history is fairly brutal on this point: things like slavery and the Holocaust occurred largely because a majority spurred them into acting as such. Not a minority of monsters operating against a standard everyone privately felt, but an ordinary majority, with clergy and courts and schoolteachers, that had rearranged its optimum. The universal standard, if it was there, did not intervene. What eventually intervened was a different majority. So even if the objective set exists, the operative mechanism on the ground is still consensus, which means for every practical purpose I care about, we are living inside the subjective system regardless.

the objectivity of truth?#

Truth is where I flip completely, and my friend found this deeply inconsistent, which is fair, so let me try to justify it.

My position is that truth is irrefutable. It can be rejected, and we have a word for rejecting it, which is delusion, but it cannot be proven incorrect. If something is proven incorrect, it was never true in the first place. It was trusted.

That distinction is the single most useful thing that came out of this conversation, so I want to belabor it: trust and truth are different things. Nearly everything I would casually call “true” is actually something I trust. I have never measured the speed of light. I have never been to Antarctica. I have not personally verified a single claim in the entire body of medicine that I would bet my life on tomorrow. What I have is a chain of people, institutions, and repeated results that I have decided is reliable, and that decision is social, revisable, and yes, governed by majority in exactly the way morals are. Trust is subjective, absolutely. But trust is a claim about my confidence, not a claim about the world, and confidence being subjective says nothing about whether the thing I’m confident in is so.

Here is the part I find most interesting. To my understanding (and the joys of CS2050, shoutout Ladha), the first truth was an assumption, and the simple cyclical nature of justification proves this. Every proof requires premises, and every premise requires a proof, so you either regress infinitely, argue in a circle, or stop somewhere and declare a starting point. We stop. Mathematics is admirably honest about this and calls them axioms. Science stops at the assumption that the universe is regular and that observation means anything at all, neither of which can be established without already assuming them. And the supernatural perspective does not escape this either, because revelation still has to be told through someone. It arrives as testimony, and testimony is trust, not truth. There is no route to the foundation that does not, at the very bottom, involve someone choosing to stand somewhere.

So we get a strange asymmetry, and it’s the reason I can hold both of the positions in this post at once. With morals, the consensus is the entire object: there is nothing underneath it that the consensus is tracking, which is why the consensus moving is the same event as the morality changing. With truth, the consensus is only the doorway. It’s how we get access, it’s fallible, it’s absolutely a majority phenomenon, and it has been catastrophically wrong for centuries at a stretch. But the room is there whether or not anyone opens the door, and when the majority was wrong about the Earth’s place in the solar system, the Earth was not participating in the error. Our access to truth is subjective. Truth is not.

Which brings us to the actual question, the one my friend eventually asked, which was whether there is a room at all.

“does any of this really matter?”#

This section is titled exactly as the second-to-last section of my predestination blog, and is done so because of the structure of this passage, and the conversation we had. It was here in the conversation that we began to approach a more fundamental debate, guided by the downstream effects of believing that truth does not really exist.

If truth does not exist, how can you say that anything exists?

My life has been dedicated mostly to solving the great mysteries of our world. At my core, I’d say what drives me is curiosity and perseverance. With these two ideals in mind, I maintain that it doesn’t matter whether our reality exists or not, beyond the idea of answering a very fundamental question.

Fundamentally, regardless of whether we choose to accept or reject this reality, countless generations before us have not communed beyond the dead. For all we know, this is our only chance at feeling this experience, gaining this perception. Whether or not it is true, it is really happening, whether we’re actually physical things in a physical world or hooked up to cells harvesting our bodies for energy (shoutout the Matrix). I maintain that none of this matters. Fundamentally, in this experience, we have the opportunity to feel the things we call fulfillment and satisfaction and happiness, and those are good enough feelings for me to pursue through the things that give me fulfillment and satisfaction and happiness, which, put simply, is answering questions.

I am not saying our lives don’t matter. I am merely saying that it does not matter whether they do or don’t, because this experience, this perception, is all we share. Furthermore, for now, we will only ever live it from our own perspectives.

There’s a line from the Bhagavad Gita that says this better than I can, and it’s one I keep coming back to:

You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction. — Krishna to Arjuna, The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 47

Krishna says this to Arjuna on a battlefield, to a man who has become paralyzed by the consequences of what he is about to do, and the instruction is not that the consequences are unimportant. The instruction is that they were never his to hold. What he actually possesses is the action.

I think the metaphysics works the same way. Whether reality is real, whether truth has a floor, whether my life leaves anything behind, all of that is fruit. It is downstream, it is unowned, and it is unavailable to me from the single perspective I have been given to look out of. The action is the only part I am actually holding. So the question “does any of this really matter” turns out to be a question about fruit, and the answer that makes sense to me is that I am not entitled to it, I am not going to get it, and I can act anyway. Not because I’ve resolved it, but because the resolution was never the thing I had a right to.

q.e.d.#

Shoutout the Kurzgesagt video on optimistic nihilism, which I’d argue a slightly different perspective than. Their framing is that the universe’s indifference is a release, that because nothing matters cosmically, we are free to make things matter locally. I get there by a different route: I don’t think we’re in a position to establish that nothing matters any more than we’re in a position to establish that something does, and I’ve stopped treating that as a prerequisite. But I land in the same place they do, which is that in this highly biased perception of the experience we feel, our actions should chase what gives us joy, purely because in the worst case, we are too insignificant for it to matter to anyone but us.

Generally, shoutout definitions! In the course of this series of conversations, I asked my friend to define truth, to which he admitted that he didn’t have a good definition, only the vibes of one. I want to be clear that this is not a dunk on him, because when he turned it around on me, my first three attempts were circular. But it was the moment the conversation actually started moving, because most of what we had been disagreeing about turned out to be two people using one word for two different things, which is exactly the trust and truth collision from earlier. To me, definitions are crucial in helping us answer the pivotal questions, and I’ve come to believe that most long arguments are definitional arguments that nobody bothered to notice.

Lastly, shoutout being in a society! It’s crucial that we understand the value that being in a society places on us as the citizen, as it spurs confidence and meaning and relevance. It is because we are in a society that certain ethical frameworks take precedence over others, but it is also a strong idea which allows us to, for the most part, take the intellectual prowess of society and properly apply it. I’ve spent this entire post arguing that the majority is what manufactures our morals and mediates our access to truth, and I want to be clear that I don’t think this is a tragedy. Being handed a working moral consensus and a mostly reliable chain of trusted knowledge is the single greatest inheritance any of us receive, and the alternative is deriving physics and ethics from scratch in one lifetime, which is not a thing any of us would survive.

So, in conclusion: morals are subjective, truth is not, our access to truth is, whether any of it matters is a question I am not entitled to the answer to, and I remain roughly as clueless as I was when this conversation started somewhere in the Swiss Alps (again). But I think I’ve stopped needing the floor to be there before I start building on it. It is this choosing, in full view of the fact that we cannot verify the ground, which I find to be the most human thing we do.

- Karthik