George Pitcher on the Misfortunes of the Dead

Can the dead be harmed - not by their death, but by what happens after their death? It wouldn’t appear so since they are dead and therefore no longer around to be harmed. You cannot harm someone who does not exist. And yet, we may feel that some things that happen after our death are in some unspecified way bad for us. If I had spent my life writing a book that would have been hailed by generations to come as a philosophical masterwork if it hadn’t been destroyed shortly after my death and before anyone could read it, it does not seem to be entirely unreasonable to think that I have been harmed by being denied the posthumous fame that I so richly deserved. But how is that possible if I no longer exist when the supposedly harmful incident occurs? Or is it not possible? Should we say that there is nothing that can harm us after our death?

In his article “The Misfortunes of the Dead”, published in 1984, George Pitcher defends the idea that we can indeed be harmed after our death.[1] This is possible, he argues, because the one who is harmed is not the dead person or “post-mortem person”, but the formerly living person or “ante-mortem person”.

Pitcher first seeks to establish that the dead can be wronged, which appears to be less controversial than that they can be harmed. If I promise to you that I will do a certain thing after your death and then, once you have died, don’t do it, then I have clearly broken my promise to you, and by breaking the promise that I gave you I have wronged you. I would also wrong you if I, say, falsely accused you of a crime after you’re dead. Examples such as these make it “abundantly clear” that the dead can indeed be wronged: “they can be the victims of injustice, slander, betrayal, and so on.” (183) However, it is not, strictly speaking, the dead that are thus being wronged, but the once living. It is you, the person that now exists, that I would wrong if I broke my promise to you after your death, the ante-mortem person (who does or did exist), not the post-mortem person (who does not exist and never did). “All wrongs committed against the dead are committed against their ante-mortem selves.” (184)

Yet just as we can wrong someone after their death, we can also harm them. Pitcher defines harm as a violation of someone’s interests. An event or state of affairs is thought to be harmful (or a “misfortune”) to someone “when it is contrary to one or more of his more important desires and interests.” (184) Since we do have, or at least can have, interests and desires regarding what happens after our death, what happens after our death can clearly be contrary to our interests and, accordingly, harmful to us. If I now wish to be buried rather than cremated - if this, for whatever reason, is really important to me -, then I would suffer a harm if, after my death, my wishes were ignored. The fact that I wouldn’t know about it is irrelevant. It is quite obvious (Pitcher argues, as did Thomas Nagel and Joel Feinberg before him) that we can be harmed without being aware of it. If, for instance, I take a strong interest in my son’s existence and well-being, then his death would harm me as soon as it occurs even if I only learn about it much later, or not at all. Pitcher finds this example so persuasive that he feels justified in confidently declaring that “it is just false that in order to be harmed, the victim must be aware of the harm.” (186)

Pitcher then invites us to consider the following case: Bishop Berkeley had a son called William who died at the age of 14. Let us now suppose that William died of a genetic disposition that made his early death inevitable. In other words, he was always going to die young. If Berkeley had known this, he would have been miserable. Since he loved his son and consequently did not want him to die young, the fact that William was going to die young was contrary to his interests and therefore harmful to him. However, it would also have been harmful to him if he had not known this. What harmed him was, after all, not his knowledge of the fact that his son was going to die young, but the fact that he was going to die young. Now imagine that Berkeley had died before his son. In that case he would not have witnessed William’s death, and would forever remain unaware of both the fact that William did die young and the fact that he was always going to die young. Even then, though, Berkeley would, while still alive, have suffered the misfortune of having a son who was going to die young. In this way, Pitcher concludes, “the shadow of harm that an event casts can reach back across the chasm even of a person’s death and darken his ante-mortem life.” (187)

Even though this metaphor seems to suggest some kind of backward causation, Pitcher denies that this is the case. Believing in backward causation would be just as “absurd” as believing that “instantaneous causation at a distance” (186) would be required for me to be harmed when, unbeknownst to me, something just happened that very much goes against my interests (such as the death of my son, which Pitcher claims harms me the moment it happens, and not the moment I learn about it). The reason why we can accept that I can be harmed by what happens after my death without having to assume backward causation is that what harms me is not exactly the future event itself, but rather the fact that this event is going to take place in the future. In other words, what is going to happen in the future may happen in the future, but it is already going to happen now. “On my view, the sense in which an ante-mortem person is harmed by an unfortunate event after his death is this: the occurrence of the event makes it true that during the time before the person’s death, he was harmed – harmed in that the unfortunate event was going to happen.” (187)

And in case there is any doubt about what “making true” means in this context, Pitcher adds the following clarification: “If the world should be blasted to smithereens during the next presidency after Ronald Reagan’s, this would make it true (…) that even now, during Reagan’s term, he is the penultimate president of the United States.” (188)

COMMENTARY:

It seems to me that the plausibility of Pitcher’s argument depends on whether or not he manages to safeguard his account against the rather unpalatable implication of backward causation. I don’t think he succeeds in doing that. Why, according to Pitcher, does my being harmed by some event occurring after my death not involve backward causation? Because that event was already going to happen during my life time, and it is the going-to-happen of the event (which is co-existent with the ante-mortem me) that harms me. But consider the example with which Pitcher concludes his paper: Reagan being the penultimate president of the USA. Let’s update the example and use the current president, Donald Trump, and his predecessor Barack Obama. If Trump should turn out be the last American president, it will be true that Obama was the penultimate president. That much is certain. However, what Pitcher is suggesting is that in that case it would already be true now that Obama was the penultimate president of the USA. But it cannot be true now, because if it were, then it would not be possible for there to be another president after Trump. It would mean that everything that is going to happen in future is going to happen necessarily. We would have to commit to a logical determinism (first discussed by Aristotle) that denies the openness and relative indeterminacy of the future. If it still remains to be seen how things develop, if there is still a chance that Trump may end up not being the last American president, then even if he will be, it is not the case that this is what he already is now. That a particular event is going to happen in the future does not imply in any way that that event’s going-to-happen must be already taking place in the present. Whatever happens in the future, in the present it is still only a maybe. Accordingly, even if my great book gets destroyed after my death, then it is still not true now that it is going to be destroyed. So I can only be harmed by that event if the future can causally affect the past, which is backward causation. The problem with backward causation is that it makes no sense: what hasn’t happened yet cannot influence and change what has already happened. If it could, then what has already happened may turn out to not have happened. What I do today, I will have done tomorrow, and if what I do today can be undone by what I do tomorrow, then I won’t have done it, which contradicts the fact that I already have done it. As I said, it makes no sense.

But isn’t it now against my interests that I will be forgotten after my death? Yes, in the sense that I don’t wish to be forgotten. But harm, even for Pitcher, despite his definition, means more than just the thwarting of someone’s interests. Pitcher claims that my life would have been better if my aforementioned masterwork had not been destroyed after my death (thus making sure that I will quickly be forgotten rather than be remembered “as the greatest philosopher who ever lived”). The claim is that it is better for me (i.e., the ante-mortem me) to be remembered as a great philosopher than not to be remembered at all. Yet since the remembering will or will not take place in the future, after my death, how is that not backward causation? Certainly, I would now, while I’m still alive, prefer to be remembered, but it won’t matter to me once I’m dead. So how can my life be made better or worse by what happens after my death? Apart from the backward causation problem, this would mean that my life would never be complete. I may now and right up to my death have every reason to believe that my masterwork will secure me a place in the philosophical pantheon. If that makes my life good, then my life is good now. But then, after my death, the book is destroyed, so my life now has taken a turn for the worse. What appeared to be a good life is now revealed to have been, in fact, a bad life. Now imagine 200 years later someone discovers and publishes a copy of my book that nobody (me included) knew existed (my wife made it, secretly). I become famous. So now my life was a good one after all. Unfortunately, however, even fame does not last forever, so one thousand years in the future I will once again be forgotten, and once again my life will have been wasted (provided I care deeply about still being remembered in a thousand years’ time). And so on and so forth. The point is that if we take Pitcher’s claim seriously, then there is no end to it. If we can be harmed by future events, then something that happens in a million years may still inflict harm on me if my desires reach that far and make my life a bad one. I find this implication very counter-intuitive.

Note that in this respect wronging someone is very different from harming someone. I can wrong you just as I can remember you, talk about you, praise you, vilify you, or do right by you, and I can do all of these things without affecting you in any way, and without requiring you to be there or even to still exist. And I can, in theory, still do these things a million years from now. There is no problem here. But I cannot kick you if you are not there, and I cannot kiss you either. If wronging someone is, in terms of the postulated relation, like remembering them, then harming someone is like kicking or kissing them. They need to be there in order for me to be able to do it. They need to be affected by it. I cannot kick or kiss someone who is dead, and neither can I harm them. (I can of course do these things to their bodies, but that is not the same.) It seems to me that this difference also applies in cases where I am supposedly harmed by something that I am in no way aware of. Let’s say my wife is cheating on me. Does she harm me? No, not if I never find out. This does not make it okay, though, because she most certainly wrongs me. The reason I can be wronged, but not harmed, by her actions is that wronging someone is as much a relation to the (or a) moral law as it is a relation to that other person. I am wronging you because I am doing what is wrong (say, breaking my promise), whether you are aware of it or not. But I cannot harm you if what I do doesn’t do anything to you. Harm and wrong are separate issues. They can even diverge. You may actually benefit me by stealing from me. It would still be wrong to do so. If my wife cheats on me she wrongs me, but need not harm me. In fact, some of our most common moral dilemmas concern the difficult choice we have to make between harming someone and wronging them (or more precisely between ‘doing right by them and harming them’ or ‘protecting them from harm and wronging them’). My wife for instance may want to spare me the misfortune that would result from telling me about it and decide, for that reason, not to tell me. In this she might of course wrong me even more by lying to me on top of the cheating. But at least she wouldn’t harm me. Similarly, if I go against your wishes after your death, I may very well do you a serious wrong, but I won’t do you any harm.

In conclusion: it seems to me that nothing that happens after my death can make my life better or worse than it is (or, for that matter - to finally make the connection to the issue I am currently most interested in, namely meaning in life -, more meaningful or less meaningful). Once my life is over it is everything it can ever be. My life is what it is, whatever happens after I’m gone: good or bad, meaningful or meaningless.

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[1] George Pitcher, “The Misfortunes of the Dead”, American Philosophical Quarterly 21/2 (1984): 183-188.

Richard Taylor on Time, Creativity, and Life's Meaning

Sometimes we change our view of things. Perhaps we had doubts all along, or something happened that made us reconsider, or we have simply thought some more about the issue, so that eventually we reach a different conclusion. Philosophers are no exception. They change their views, too, sometimes dramatically. One example is Richard Taylor, who, in his 1970 paper “The Meaning of Life”[1] argued that all that is required for a meaningful life (and “the nearest we may hope to get to heaven”) is that there is something in it that we pursue energetically, an “inner compulsion” to do whatever it is we do. If this inner compulsion is what makes life meaningful, then it is conceivable that even the endlessly repetitive life of a blind worm in a cave and the endlessly repetitive life of a Sisyphus who desires nothing more than rolling rocks up hills are meaningful. However, in a second paper on the topic, “Time and Life’s Meaning”, published 17 years later,[2] Taylor renounces the claims he made previously and now argues that even the life of a happy, passionately rock-rolling Sisyphus is far from meaningful because it lacks one crucial ingredient: creativity.

Taylor’s new argument starts with a reflection on the reality of time. Contrary to the countless philosophers, from Plato to McTaggart, who have claimed that time cannot possibly be real, Taylor very sensibly insists that it feels far too real to be an illusion. On the other hand, however, the reality of time is very much dependent on us. If there were no creatures like us, Taylor suggests, time would not be (fully) real. Imagine a world entirely devoid of life. Such a world would have no “history or meaning” (297). Time may exist in some abstract way, but it is completely irrelevant because it “makes no difference” what happens when. In that sense, time, in such a world, is not real yet. Now add living beings to this world (but still holding back on rational beings). According to Taylor, time has now been introduced to the world, but still only in a very rudimentary sense. Importantly, a world containing living but not rational beings would still be a world without history because nothing genuinely new ever happens in it. “The sun that rises one day illuminates nothing that was not there the day before, or a thousand or million days before. It is simply the same world, age after age. (…) Every sparrow is just like every other, does exactly the same things in the same way without innovation, then to be imitated by every sparrow to follow. The robin or squirrel you see today does nothing different from those you saw as a child, and could be interchanged with them without discernible difference.” (298)[3] Animals live their lives in “unchanging cycles”, “to be repeated over and over, forever.”

Clearly, Taylor is still concerned with repetition and futility, the not-getting-anywhere that in his previous paper he ended up defending as posing no obstacle to a meaningful life. Not so anymore. According to the new Taylor, the repetitive world, the world that goes nowhere, is not only a world without history, but also, precisely for this reason, a world without meaning. This is because in a world without history “nothing is ever created.” (299) As a perfect illustration of such a meaningless world, Taylor once again invokes the myth of Sisyphus. Existence is here “reduced to utter meaninglessness”. And in stark contrast to his earlier position, Taylor now claims that what Sisyphus is doing would still be meaningless “even if we imagined Sisyphus to rejoice in it – if we imagined, for example, that he had a compulsive and insatiable desire to roll stones, and considered himself blessed to be able to do this forever.” (299)

Only if we imagine Sisyphus actually creating something (out of all the rocks he rolls up that hill), and doing so consciously and purposefully, something “beautiful and lasting”, something “important” (for instance a “great temple”), only then could we see his life as meaningful because his labour would “no longer be wasted and pointless.” (299) Fully meaningful, however, it would only be if Sisyphus did not have to do what he is doing, but had freely chosen to do it. Whatever he is creating “must be something of his own, the product of his own creative mind, of his own conception, something which, but for his own creative thought and imagination, would never have existed at all.”[4] (300) This is a kind of creative activity that cannot be found in nature: it requires rational beings “who can think, imagine, plan, and execute things of worth”. Everything that may strike us as an example of immense creativity in the non-human world, like “the complex beauty of the spider’s web” or “the ingenious construction of the honeycomb”, is in fact just another example of “endless repetitions”, a “capacity of fabrication”, which discloses “not the least hint of creative power” (301). Genuine creativity brings forth things that are genuinely new. Only humans have that kind of creativity, though not everyone has it in the same degree. It can also be exercised in various different areas of life, not only in art, but also in, e.g., chess-playing, gardening, or woodworking, and even in the “raising of a beautiful family” (302). However, Taylor admits that “creative power is no common possession” (not to speak of creative genius, which is very rare). In fact, the “work of the vast majority of persons does not deviate much from what others have already done and from what can be found everywhere.” (302) Taylor blames this on a certain widespread unwillingness to actually use one’s creative powers. Most people simply don’t care enough about being the creators that they could be. Or they are afraid of standing out. It is in fact often religion that discourages us from using our creative powers, despite the fact that God is conceived as the creator (so that developing our creativity is actually tantamount to developing our divine potential). Creative power has an “indescribable worth”, which is why it gives human existence its significance and meaning: “That a world should exist is not finally important, nor does it mean much, by itself, that people should inhabit it. But that some of these should, in varying degrees, be capable of creating worlds of their own and history – thereby creating time in its historical sense – is what gives our lives whatever meaning they have.” (303)

COMMENTARY:

Taylor argues that without us, or without rational beings, time would not be (fully) real because there would not be any history. I can go along with this, but only because I associate “history” with memory. Things (people, countries, technologies) have a history to the extent that we remember the changes that those things have undergone, thus connecting the past to the present. Memory makes history. Taylor, however, does not even mention memory. Instead, he focuses on the notion of the “new”. A world without history is a world in which nothing new happens. Such a world is declared to be meaningless not because the past is not remembered, but because the past is supposed to be pretty much (that is, in all relevant respects) identical to the present, as the future will be identical to the present. The sun illuminates always the same spectacle. It’s the same world over and over again. But is it really? I guess the answer depends on what we choose to mean by “new”. It seems obvious to me that in many ways there is undeniably newness even in a world without life. Continents form and fall apart, seas dry out, flat surfaces fold into mountains. And there are even more changes, more new things happening, in a world populated by living, though not rational beings. If the sun had eyes to see what is going on here on Earth, what it would see today would be very different from what it would have seen 70 million years ago when the dinosaurs still roamed about. Species come and go; old ones disappear, new ones enter the stage. And those new species could not have been predicted. None of those changes could have. So in what sense exactly is all that has happened in the world since its creation before the arrival of human beings devoid of newness? Perhaps in the sense that even though this particular kind of animal never existed before, animals have, and this one is just more of the same? But couldn’t we say the same about human productions, even highly artistic and original ones? Sure, a new nocturne of Chopin’s (one of Taylor’s examples of true newness) is different from the previous ones, but it would still be a nocturne, and still be a musical composition. And even though Chopin might be different from other composers, he is still a composer who basically does what other composers also do, namely compose stuff. How do we distinguish the genuinely or relevantly new from the ordinary and not really new? I for one am struggling to clearly understand the difference.

Neither am I convinced by the claim that every sparrow is the same as every other, doing exactly what all other sparrows do and have done since the beginning of time (or the beginning of sparrows). To a casual observer this may indeed appear to be the case, but I’m pretty sure that if you looked more closely you would find that even sparrows are individuals and do not generally behave exactly like any other sparrow. (And for each one of them, what they do is very new to them. As if it were in fact the first time that it’s being done. That’s actually the advantage of having no history: an abundance of newness.) Of course, they all do what sparrows do. They live a sparrow’s life, and the general features of that life are fixed. But the same is true for us. We are alike in many ways, and behave alike in many ways. Everything we do is confined by the human life form. We do what humans do and never go beyond that.

In “The Meaning of Life”, Taylor radically democratized the meaning of life. He was willing to grant meaning to every sentient being that took a lively interest in something, and be it only eating and reproducing. Perhaps that took things a bit too far. In “Time and Life’s Meaning”, however, Taylor goes too far again by claiming more or less the exact opposite of what he claimed before. He now basically declares that a truly or fully meaningful life can only be had by the creative geniuses of this world, so in other words by very few. In order to live a meaningful life we need to find something that only we can do. We need to be truly special. Do we really, though, I wonder. Do we have to do something that nobody else has done before and nobody could do the way we do it? Why? Why must a meaningful existence manifest itself as the exceptional rather than the ordinary? Why do I have to be different from others for my life to have meaning? I suspect the answer has something to do with a notion of irreplaceability. If we are not different, if we do not bring something into the world that nobody else could bring into it, then nothing really depends on us being here. With or without us, the world continues unchanged. But what is wrong with that?

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[1] Cf. my summary of, and commentary on, Taylor’s “The Meaning of Life”: https://www.academia.edu/31806748/Richard_Taylor_on_the_Meaning_of_Life

[2] Richard Taylor, “Time and Life’s Meaning”, The Review of Metaphysics 40/4 (1987): 675-686. Reprinted in: Exploring the Meaning of Life. An Anthology and Guide, ed. Joshua W. Seachris, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell 2013, 296-303. I am using and citing the reprinted version.

[3] I’m pretty sure Taylor has this idea from Schopenhauer, whom he, as the editor of The Will to Live: Selected Writings of Arthur Schopenhauer (1967), knew well enough. Schopenhauer claims that the cat I now see sitting on the fence is literally the same cat that was basking in the sun a hundred years ago. But that is of course because Schopenhauer did not believe in the reality of time. As an objective manifestation of the Will, the species cat exists, but the individual cat does not because it is just the way the species appears through the lens of time.

[4] Such a thoroughly re-imagined Sisyphus would of course no longer be a Sisyphus, except in name.

Guy Kahane on why and when it matters to believe that nothing matters

Guy Kahane recently (2016) published a paper called “If Nothing Matters”,[1] which attempts to settle the question whether it matters whether or not anything matters. Kahane’s answer: it doesn’t matter if there is anything that matters, but what does matter is whether or not we believe that something matters.

The paper starts with a brief description of Richard Hare’s argument in “’Nothing Matters’”, which I have discussed in a previous post. To recall, Hare argued that things only matter if they matter to someone, so that as long as something matters to you, you cannot truthfully say that nothing matters. To do so would be a contradiction. Since for most of us most of the time something matters, it is generally not true that nothing matters. Though I’m not usually a fan of Hare’s, I find this argument rather elegant and quite persuasive in its simplicity. Kahane, however, rejects it offhand - curiously without making any serious attempt to actually refute it. Apparently he thinks that Hare’s argument is so obviously misguided that it doesn’t really need a rebuttal. Hare got it wrong, he simply declares, because “there really are things, like suffering, that objectively matter”. (p. 2) This is, then, what people mean when they say that nothing matters: that nothing matters objectively. Things may still matter subjectively (i.e., we find something worth doing) but if they don’t matter objectively (i.e., it really is worth doing), then they don’t really matter at all. That nothing matters objectively Kahane takes to mean that the universe is “devoid of value” and that, accordingly, even the grandest achievements are actually worthless (p. 1). The view that nothing matters can therefore be understood as a form of evaluative nihilism (i.e., the view that nothing is worth anything).

Kahane contends that this nihilist view is quite common among today’s metaethicists (which supposedly was not the case in the 1950s when Hare wrote his paper). Unlike Hare’s Swiss student who clearly believed that whether or not things matter is a matter of great consequence, today’s nihilist metaethicists do not seem to care very much one way or another. They conclude that nothing matters, but are quite happy to carry on as before and to expect everyone else to do the same. They appear to think that it doesn’t matter whether or not things matter. The lack of objective value in the universe does not seem to bother them, let alone plunge them into despair (as it seems to have happened with Hare’s student). That is because they do not see any reason for it. Now, given their commitment to evaluative nihilism, this actually seems quite consistent. After all, if nothing matters, then this – the fact that nothing matters - doesn’t matter either. Or in other words: it cannot possibly be bad that nothing is really good or bad. Kahane agrees with this: if we “take evaluative nihilism seriously enough, then anxiety about it makes little sense.” (p. 5). Generally speaking, then, nothing follows from evaluative nihilism. What matters to us will continue to matter to us, whether or not it objectively matters. Perhaps, if nihilism is true, we have no good reason to pursue whatever it is that we are pursuing in life, but the point is that we have no good reason not to pursue it either. Things are just the same as ever. Nihilism has, as Kahane says, “no normative implications. It cannot make the world bad or worse, or give anyone reasons to do or feel anything – or, for that matter, not to do or feel something. (…) The truth of nihilism, the total absence of all value, makes no normative difference.” (8)

However, what might make a difference, according to Kahane, is whether or not we believe in nihilism. This is not because believing in nihilism would logically commit us to stop valuing things. As we have seen, it does no such thing. It may, however, still have some causal impact on our attitudes. “What matters is how a person’s psychology would respond to a belief in nihilism.” (p. 9-10) So how would it respond? Kahane thinks it is very likely that belief in the truth of nihilism will result in the loss of our substantive evaluative beliefs. In other words, if I truly believe that nothing really matters, then I will also believe that this (whatever ‘this’ is) does not really matter. To hold that even though nothing matters such and such does in fact matter is as inconsistent as not believing in witches and at the same time insisting that so-and-so is a witch. Consequently, if we believe that nothing matters, we will most likely also believe that, for instance, suffering does not matter, i.e. that it is not really bad (even though it may continue to appear bad to me). But usually our subjective concerns are not independent of our evaluative beliefs. If I think that such and such is really bad, then I am likely to be concerned about it. Conversely, if I don’t think that such and such is really bad, then I am much less likely to be concerned about it. Accordingly, if I don’t think that suffering is really bad (that it matters whether or not people suffer), then I am less likely to be concerned about people’s suffering. We will stop caring, or not care that much anymore. (Note that this effect would ensue even if nihilism was false. This is very important for Kahane’s argument: it is the belief in nihilism that causes our subjective concerns to change and diminish.) Admittedly, some basic animal drives and motivations (like our aversion to pain, hunger, or cold) might survive the nihilist onslaught, but everything else including our “moral principles and ideals, and even (…) our long-term prudential goals” (17) would most likely not.

Assuming that we have followed Kahane so far and are willing to accept his claim that belief in the truth of nihilism is likely to undermine our subjective concerns, we might be inclined to think that such an outcome is not exactly desirable. People should care, and if believing in nihilism makes people care less about things (including justice and fairness, and our interests in general), then surely we have every reason to dissuade people from such a belief. It would be bad for them, and most likely bad for us, too. Kahane, however, disagrees, on the grounds that if nihilism is in fact true, then nothing matters, and if nothing matters, it doesn’t matter whether or not nihilism affects subjective concerns and what those concerns are. If evaluative nihilism is true, then whatever the actual effects of a belief in nihilism may be, it is all the same because none of it matters.

And now Kahane’s argument is getting really interesting. It takes the form of a variation of Pascal’s famous wager. After denying that the likely psychological effects of correctly believing in nihilism would give us any reason to avoid and discourage such a belief, Kahane goes on to argue that those effects would, however, matter if nihilism were false, i.e, if things actually did matter. Because then we would “no longer recognize the values and reasons out there” (p. 19), and this would be very bad indeed. Such an outcome would be “very harmful”, “disastrous” in fact, because it would lead to “many bad consequences, both prudential and moral, and might be bad in itself”. That is why, while we have no reason to fear nihilism, we have plenty of reason to fear “mistaken belief in nihilism” (p. 19).

To sum up: if nihilism is true, then we have nothing to worry about whether or not we believe that it is true, and if nihilism is not true, then we still have nothing to worry about as long as we don’t believe it’s true. But if we believe nihilism is true while in fact it is not true, then we are in big trouble. Since not believing in nihilism will not harm us either way, it follows that we have good “pragmatic reasons to believe (or to try to make ourselves believe) that nihilism is false” (p. 19) and indeed to avoid and suppress “anything that might lead us to believe in nihilism” (p. 21) Let us call this Kahane’s Wager.

COMMENTARY:

Kahane’s argument is intriguing, but it seems to me that it suffers from a fatal flaw. Right from the start, it is simply assumed that it makes good sense to say that something matters objectively. But what exactly are we saying here? I find this far from clear. Kahane mentions suffering as an example of something that (quite obviously) matters objectively. Let us see whether we can figure out what that means. Clearly, my suffering matters to me. Whether or not I suffer and how much I suffer makes a huge difference to me. I cannot be (or at any rate, I am not) indifferent to my own suffering. Other people presumably feel the same about their suffering. In addition, most people are also concerned about other people’s suffering, though in varying degrees and generally not in the same degree that they are concerned about their own. But it often does matter to them. People, as a rule, are not entirely indifferent to the suffering of other people (or, for that matter, animals). So (my and possibly your) suffering matters to me, and (your and possibly my) suffering matters to you. But that would still only be subjective mattering, wouldn’t it? There is, after all, someone to whom it matters. If it matters to someone, it matters subjectively. Admittedly, it might also matter objectively, but in that case it cannot simply matter objectively because and insofar as it matters to someone, because then what matters objectively would be indistinguishable from what matters subjectively. If there is a difference between subjective and objective mattering, then there must be some way to distinguish the two. It must be, in other words, (at least theoretically) possible for there to be objective mattering without subjective mattering. So what we seem to be saying when we insist that suffering matters objectively is something like this: that my suffering would still matter even if it did not matter to me or to you, or to anyone at all. Suffering would still matter even if there were nobody to whom it mattered. But once again, what does that mean? Perhaps we are tempted to say that it means that even if it does not matter to anyone, it should matter to us. But that does not really get us anywhere. If someone asks us why suffering should matter to us if it does not already do so, all we could say is that it should matter to us because it does matter, namely objectively. We should attach importance to it because it is important (though for and to no one in particular). A prescriptive interpretation of supposedly objective values thus merely begs the question. We have just deflected from the problem instead of solving it. So, one more time, what does it mean that suffering matters objectively? Frankly, I don’t have the slightest idea, and what is more, I doubt that anyone really understands this claim, not even Kahane himself.

Let us now turn to the argument itself or that crucial portion of it that I have called Kahane’s Wager, which relies heavily on the notion of objective mattering (that is, things being objectively valuable). More precisely, the argument relies on a distinction between two levels of reality: the subjective and the objective. These two levels of reality are thought to be ontologically independent of each other. It is possible that things matter to me subjectively even though they do not matter objectively. It is also possible that things do not matter to me subjectively while they do matter objectively. It is even possible that they matter both subjectively and objectively, but that I am completely mistaken about how they matter. I may for instance think that suffering is bad, while in fact (objectively) suffering is good. (Kahane explicitly allows for this possibility, but thinks – for, as far as I can see, no compelling reason - that such a value reversal is rather unlikely.) This separation explains why, as Kahane puts it, “the truth of nihilism makes no normative difference.” Whatever matters or does not matter objectively, it has no effect whatsoever on what matters subjectively.

Now, Kahane’s Wager is modeled on Pascal’s wager. Pascal’s wager works because it is assumed that it may make a huge difference whether or not we believe in God. There is a lot at stake here, a lot to be gained and lost. Eternal rewards and eternal punishments are both possible. If I believe in God and there is no God, I don’t lose much, but if there is, then the rewards are immense. If I don’t believe in God and there is no God, then I don’t really gain anything, but if there is, I may have to face eternal damnation. So I’d better play it safe, do the rational thing, and believe. For Kahane’s Wager to work, we likewise need to assume that the consequences of believing in nihilism are potentially disastrous, while we don’t really stand to lose anything if we do not believe in it: if it is not true, then our subjective concerns are justified, and there is nothing bad about that, and if it is, then nothing matters anyway, so that wouldn’t be bad either. But if we do believe in nihilism even though it is not true (which would be the equivalent of not believing in God even though God exists), then this would result in great harm.

The problem with this argument is that it is hard to see in what way exactly mistaken belief in nihilism would be harmful. Remember that nihilism itself is supposed to be not only not harmful: it does not make the slightest difference for how we experience the world. If things did matter objectively and suddenly stopped mattering objectively, or did not matter and then suddenly started to matter, in neither case would we be able to tell the difference. The world as we know it would remain unchanged. (This alone should be sufficient to reject the notion of objective value: following William James’s excellent pragmatist principle that there can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere,[2] the claim that certain things matter objectively is simply meaningless.)

Now, believing that nihilism is true may certainly have consequences: people may get depressed and commit suicide, they may start hurting other people, and do all kinds of other things that we may feel are bad. Obviously, however, if belief in nihilism really does have such consequences, it has them whether or not nihilism is true. Yet Kahane argues that those consequences would only matter (i.e., be bad) if nihilism were not true. Exactly the same consequences would not matter at all if nihilism were true. Therefore, belief in nihilism cannot be thought to be harmful because it has those consequences. It must be harmful for other reasons. But the only difference between correctly believing in nihilism and falsely believing in nihilism seems to be that in the first case our subjective concerns would correspond to objective values (“the value around us”), while in the second case they would not. Everything else would be exactly the same. But then again, a lack of correspondence between subjective concerns and objective value cannot be what makes things bad either, because if nihilism were true and we believed it wasn’t, there would also be a lack of correspondence between subjective concerns and objective value, but that, according to Kahane, would not be bad. So then the only possible reason for thinking that it would be bad if we falsely believed in nihilism, but not bad if we correctly believed in it, is that in the first case the consequences of believing in nihilism would be really (i.e., objectively) bad whereas in the second case they would not be really bad, but only appear to be so. That is, they would only be subjectively bad. But if I mistakenly believe in nihilism, then of course those consequences would not be subjectively bad at all. Since I now believe that nothing matters, whatever results from my belief does not matter to me either, and if we all believed in it, then it would matter to no one. It follows that the consequences of our mistakenly believing in nihilism would be only objectively bad, which leads us right back to our original problem: to understand what we can possibly mean when we say that something matters objectively or does not matter objectively.

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[1] Published in Nous (2016), online first: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nous.12146/pdf

[2] William James, Pragmatism. A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, New York/ Bombay/ Calcutta: Longmans, Green, and Co 1907, p. 50.