Against Subjectivism

Introduction

“Things only matter if we care about them.” Of all the attempts to make sense of normativity, of what matters, this is the most intuitive. But you don’t really believe that. Almost no body actually does when pressed.

The thesis of this post is simple: there are things you should do which you nevertheless don’t want to do. This may seem so obvious as to not need to be mentioned, much less defended. But if we think that something mattering is only possible if we care about that thing, then this thesis becomes a real issue. Our options are:

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1. subjective desires, or our caring about something, are the source of normativity
2. things matter objectively so, independent of our desires
3. nothing at all matters

The stakes couldn’t be higher.

To get a grip on what will amounts to nothing less than the foundation of practical normativity, or what we should or are justified in doing, we’ll begin with the foundational concept of a reason for action. We’ll show how all other normative concepts can be defined in relation to this fundamental concept. Then we’ll ask whether Subjectivism is true: the idea that things only matter if we care about them. We’ll iteratively build Subjectivism into its strongest form, then test it.

After steel manning Subjectivism I’ll lay out three arguments against it, distilled from Derek Parfit’s On What Matters.1 These arguments dismantle Subjectivism piece by piece until we’re back to the seed theory, but now full of bullets to bite. Finally, I’ll conclude with possible paths forward.

These arguments matter for two reasons. First, Subjectivism is so prevalent across moral philosophy and various other disciplines like economics and psychology that it is often implicitly assumed, or explicitly presented as if there could be no other possible way for things to matter. If these people are mistaken, clearing up this confusion is important.

But who cares about philosophical academic debates even if they’re tangentially related to other ivory tower disciplines? Despite what many philosophy deniers claim, philosophy is upstream of culture. What start as arguments in the academy often, after years or decades, trickle out into the broader population and into the cultural milieu. Today’s debate is tomorrow’s water supply. This is my attempt to accelerate that process.

Second, if I can convince you that things matter, whether we want them to or not, this may alter much of how you live your life. These are important arguments.

Let’s start with the groundwork.

Reasons First

The central question in practical rationality and morality is

(A) What should I do?

There’s been a steady consensus building among moral philosophers especially since Ross2 that the best way to understand this question is to understand “should” in the a bid for reasons. Call this the reasons-first perspective3. The reasons we’ll be discussing are normative reasons (which justify actions), not explanatory or motivational reasons (which explain actions). We will not be discussing reasons which justify belief, epistemology is a whole other beast*.*

The reasons-first perspective has us understand (A) as really just asking

(B) What do I have most reason to do?

To motivate this translation to (B) consider an answer to the original question (A). Perhaps I should go for a walk, you might say. Why? What reason do I have to do that? Maybe I know it would make me feel better. But on the other hand I know that I have pressing work that needs to get done that I cannot put off any longer. This internal tug of war is hinting at what we do when we reason. We weigh up competing apparent reasons for or against an action. We then consider whether each reason is, in fact, a reason. Finally, after careful consideration, we know that we ought to do whatever we have most reason, or decisive reason to do.4

This applies to all possible acceptable answers to (A). By the very act of asking this question we are implicitly requesting a reason to justify (either to ourselves or to others) what we should do. This is why “reasons provide the deceive battlefield” in ethics (OWM II, 269). The primacy of reasons is inescapable by virtue of playing the deliberation game.

Using your gut to make decisions is simply a coordinate transformation from propositional space to embodied space, perhaps with additional information embedded or taken into account. Embodied decision making is tracking the same process just without conceptual thought. But abstraction is useful. Embodied cogition can’t land a man on the moon or derive general relativity. It’s simply the wrong epistemic tool for the job when we’re establishing foundations, albeit it’s useful in practice.

Embodied cognition is also notoriously full of biases and blind spots. There’s a reason we externalize sensations into concepts and words, it’s because they give us sufficient distance to reason clearly. “Proper nervous system attunement” is not an adequate response, as that’s already latent with normative claims it purports to undermine. So further clarity on what counts as a reason is of interest even for the most vibes-first folks among us.

What’s more, all other normative concepts can be cast in this in terms of reasons. Reasons are, therefore, the most important normative concept. To cash this out explicitly:

• Something is good or valuable or desirable if, or just when, some feature of that thing gives us reason to promote it, preserve it, respect it, or bring it about in some way.
• Something is right if, or just when, we have most or decisive reason to do that thing.
• We should do what we have most or decisive reason to do.

Someone may wish to define all these normative concepts in favor of their favorite, different, fundamental normative concept and then smack me over the head with a copy of Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good while shouting “Kegan stage 4!” but there’s several issues here. First, I see no way out of the inescapability of reasons as the implicitly requested answer format whenever we ask a question which invites deliberation on what we should do.

Second, most other senses of the word should do not help us deliberate. The first option is you define should in terms of some natural fact like happiness-maximization or pareto efficiency, in which case there’s no longer any normative component. If you tell me an action is pareto efficient, I can always respond with “so what?” Without a follow up claim about what I have reason to do, you might as well just point out the color of the sky or some other random fact which has no bearing on me. You need to give me a reason to care. Chances are, you’re implicitly assuming that I have a reason to be efficient, or to satisfy some desire, or to experience some positive state of consciousness. But that’s just reason-first again in a trench coat.

Your other option is to define your terms in Subjectivist ways, to necessarily link should or ought or right with our subjective desires or aims. But this, as we will see below, is a concealed tautology.

The final reason we should be reasons-first comes when we take a pragmatist’s perspective. I would simply invite the reader to put on this reasons-first mask, look around for a while, and ask yourself if it’s a useful frame. Anecdotally, when I first came across this framework a lot snapped into place for me. Various normative concepts started to fit together rather elegantly and I was able to more adeptly use them in domains they were specifically suited for. Perhaps a similar level of clarity will begin to shape up for you. Perhaps it’s already starting to.

So what then is a reason? Well, reasons are… undefinable. I could truly tell you that reasons are facts which “count in favor of” an action, belief, or attitude. But “counts in favor” roughly means “gives a reason for” (OWM II, 272). That may be unsatisfactory but that’s also to be expected of a fundamental concept. Nor is this unusual. Other baseline concepts like space, time, consciousness, possibility, and necessity are similarly non-circularly undefinable. The best we can do is wave our hands around and utter enough noises until the thoughts which contain this concept (or that of space, time, etc.) are elicited in another’s mind. This is true even of colors.

While a normative reason is undefinable, we may still ask

When do we have a reason to act?

For every philosophical question, there’s typically a “common sense” answer, at least from the perspective of Western, usually STEM-educated or otherwise analytical individual. These individual are usually secular, favor reductive explanations, and operate out of a materialist worldview. Perhaps they’ve even read a little philosophy and are familiar with Kant’s idea of a hypothetical imperative which, translating to our reasons-first language, states that one has a reason to X when one has a desire or aim to X. This seems so obvious as to hardly be worth mentioning. It’s an apoditic truth a Kantian would probably say. Wanting to do something counts in favor of doing that thing! Duh! This is the fundamental intuition behind the Subjectivist tradition dating back most famously to Hume5.

Some Subjectivists, however, make some grave mistakes when giving their account of normative reasons.

Analytical Subjectivism

Analytical Subjectivism is the worst offender. Don’t let this terribly named theory spook you, “analytical” is what philosophers in the philosophy factor call “conceptual” or if you’re more honest, “true by definition.”

These subjectivists like to draw a straight line between should, reasons, and desires. We’ll take desires to be “any state of being motivated, or of wanting something to happen and being to some degree disposed to make it happen, if we can” (OMW I, 43). This position makes sense at first glance. If you tell me I should do something and I simply don’t care about the reasons you give me, then those reasons don’t pack a punch. They seem irrelevant! But Analytical Subjectivists make a very sneaky move when they argue for their side.

These subjectivists use words like ‘reason’ and ‘should’ in the internal senses. So they interpret the claim

we have most reason to act in some way

as

this act would best fulfill our present fully informed terminal desires

Fair enough right? But they then go on to claim that

we have most reason to do what would best fulfil our present fully informed terminal desires

Did you catch the slight of hand? It’s easy to miss if you’re spacing out while reading. If we take these two statements together we get

what would best fulfill our present fulfill informed terminal desires is what would best fulfil our present fully informed desires.

Which is a concealed tautology (OWM I, 72). This is not an informative claim. Many people who first hear the theory that the only reasons we have6 end up sleep walking their way into Analytical Subjectivism.

The issue with Analytical Subjectivism is not using reason in the internal sense alone. It’s using reason in the internal sense paired with using “most reason” or “should” in the internal or desire-fulfillment sense. Instead, and to avoid circularity, Subjectivists should use the word “should” in the reason-implying sense, essentially, to mean that we should do what we have most reason to do. This makes reasons alone to be the “key battle ground in ethics.” So if we are to make substantive claims, we need to use “most reason”, “should”, and “ought” in this reason-implying sense.

Non-Analytical Subjectivism

Here are the rules of the philosophy game we’re about to play. I’m going to propose a principle which tells us when we have a reason to act. I’m then going to raise various thought experiments that will prompt your intuitive responses. Some of these thought experiments will be outlandish and some will be tame. The point is to evoke your underlying beliefs about when we have a reason to act or not. If you have a strong intuition that these theories give false prescriptions in these cases, I’ll give you an updated and hopefully improved theory. If you feel the theory doesn’t need updating, then you can hop off this deliberative train there and can consider yourself to have reached Reflective Equilibrium. All theories will be addressed in the critiques.

We can start with the most minimal form of subjectivism, the desire-based theory.

Desire-based Theory: We have reason to do whatever would fulfill any of our present desires (OMW I, 58)

On this theory there is no such thing as an irrational desire, all desires we have in the present moment provide us with a reason to act. The strength of the desire determines the strength of our reason to act in that way. Now consider Snake.

Snake: While walking in some desert, you have disturbed and angered a poisonous snake. You believe that, to save your life, you must run away. In fact you must stand still, since this snake will attack only moving targets. (OMW I, 34).

In Snake you have a strong, present desire, predicated on false beliefs, to run away. Yet most of us would agree that this desire does not provide us with a reason to run. If we share this intuition, we ought reject the desire-based theory. Subjectivist could patch up their theory by incorporating one of two further principles to account for this tension.

(E) reasons are provided only by desires that depend on true beliefs

or

(F) reasons are provided only by terminal desires, or aims

While (E) might seem more plausible at first, we can post-pone any updates to the Desire-Based Theory by appeals to truth. Instead, we can appeal to (F). This would result in the simplest plausible subjective theory. To motivate (F) consider Apple.

Apple: Suppose that I want to eat the two remaining apples that are on some tree. I also want to climb a ladder so that I can reach the higher apple. Suppose next that this tree’s owner allows me to eat only one of these apples, and lets me choose which apple I shall eat. If instrumental desires gave us reasons, I would have more reason to choose the higher apple. If I chose the lower apple, I would then fulfill only my desire to eat this apple. If I chose the higher apple, I would fulfill not only my desire to eat this other apple, but also my instrumental desire to climb this ladder so that I can reach this apple. [So I therefore should choose the higher apple as two desires would then be satisfied]. But this reasoning is obviously mistaken (OMW I, 59).

As Apple highlights, instrumental desires do not provide us with reasons. If they did, a life well lived would merely consist in causing ourselves to have many arbitrary desires, and then satisfying them. If you agree at the absurdity of the situation, we can incorporate (F) by updating the Desire-based theory to

Terminal Desire Theory: We have most reason to do whatever would best fulfill or achieve our present terminal desires or aims.

This theory correctly implies that in Snake we have no reason to run away from the snake as our true terminal desire is not to run away from the snake, but rather, to survive. Since running away from the snake would not best satisfy that aim, we do not in fact have reason to make the mistake of running away. So if false beliefs compel us to act in ways that don’t ultimately satisfy our terminal aims and desires, that’s no point against the Terminal Desire Theory, since the Terminal Desire Theory would correctly prescribe that we act in ways that ignore those false beliefs in favor of beliefs that are, if not true, then at least effective.

For all my lovers of wisdom there may yet be a way of incorporating a truth requirement into Subjectivism but it depends on an empirical question.

(1) Can beliefs cause us to have a different set of terminal desires or aims?

For if some false beliefs can cause us to have terminal desires, Subjectivists may feel inclined to add a truth condition to their theory.

There is a separate question which may help us prompt our credence in whether the answer to (1) is “yes” or “no.” We can ask our psychologist friends the following question:

(2) Do all desires converge on a single, unified terminal desire or aim?

For those inclined to answer “yes” to (2) some common suggestions for this unified terminal desire or aim is the desire or aim to maximize:

• positive valence in consciousness
• happiness
• wellbeing
• pleasure
• flourishing
• meaning

This is not a normative question, but a descriptive one. Is this true of you? Of all humans? Of all possible deliberative creatures? I’m inclined to answer “no.” We often want multiple different things “just because.” Psychology is fuzzy. It’d be unusual that such heuristic-reliant machinery would work in clean, perfectly hierarchical manners with all desires being means to other further desires and only terminating once a single, elegant terminal desire is reached. Besides, these are all high level abstractions for what’s more likely a highly messy process which does not lend itself well to clean boundaries. But even if we were, say, variational free energy minimizers, it’s also possible that this process gets cached out, on the level of human abstractions, in the form of multiple terminal desires. The jury’s still out.

What does the number of terminal desires have to do with beliefs? My tentative hypothesis is that whether we have one terminal desire or multiple changes how likely we are to answer “yes” or “no” to (1).

If we only have one terminal desire, it strikes me as plausible that it’s “locked in”, likely downstream of some biological programming. If instead we can have multiple terminal desires at any given time, it strikes me as plausible that, not only can these desires vary across time (i.e. are not “locked in”), but that these desires can vary as we come across new information. The idea is that as we learn new information, we form new beliefs and that these new beliefs in turn cause us to generate new terminal desires. We can be certain that beliefs cause us to have intermediate desires as is highlighted in Snake. It doesn’t seem implausible that beliefs can also influence our terminal desires too. Of course it’s also possible that we have 1 terminal desire that varies, or that we have multiple desires which are “locked in” but this is unlikely. We’re either optimizers or we’re something fuzzier.

Here’s the upshot: if we accept the existence of multiple terminal desires, and buy the thesis that this implies our terminal desires can be influenced by our beliefs, Subjectivists may wish to revise Terminal Desire Theory. Consider Revenge.

Revenge: I want to avenge an injury I unjustly received. I come to believe, falsely, that you were the one who gravely, and unjustly injured me. I now have a terminal desire to have my revenge by harming you in turn.

Do we therefore have a reason to seek revenge based on this false belief? This is unlikely. A subjectivist may therefore wish to improve the Terminal Desire Theory by incorporating (E), the no false belief condition. This would yield the Error-Free Terminal Desire Theory.

Error-Free Terminal Desire Theory: We have most reason to do whatever would best fulfill or achieve our present error-free terminal desires or aims.

With this change Subjectivism seems increasingly plausible but we can further improve the theory. In Revenge my desire may be illegitimate in one of two ways. Either I can believe, falsely, that you were the one who slighted me. Or may be ignorant of the fact that you were actually saving me from some much more severe injury later on that I would have been grateful to have avoided. False belief vs. ignorance. This is not a deep distinction.

Subjectivists can take a further step. Just as we do not have reasons to fulfill our actual terminal desires which we would lose if we knew more, we do have reasons to fulfill the terminal desires that, if we had greater knowledge, we would now have (OWM I, 60). This is also not a deep distinction.

For example, in Revenge if I learned that you had good motives for injuring me I might not only cease to wish you ill, but I may also come to wish you well. Subjectivists may claim that I do in fact have this reason to treat you well. It was only my lack of knowledge which was preventing me from seeing this reason that I had the entire time.

If Subjectivists appeal to what we would want if we knew more, we can take this idea to its limit with the Informed Desire Theory.

Informed Desire Theory: We have most reason to do whatever would best fulfill the terminal desires or aims that we would now have if we knew all the relevant facts.

“Relevant” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What counts as relevant? Some might say any fact that would change our desires. But this is too wide. If we learned about all the injustice in the world in excruciating detail, we may become so depressed that we lose the desire to live. The Informed Desire Theory would therefore imply that we have no reason to live even though we actually do want to. Instead we might say that only facts about our possible acts and their outcomes count as relevant up to a certain epsilon of uncertainty. But if this was the only requirement, the Informed Desire Theory would no longer give the right recommendation in Revenge as our false belief would not be corrected if we knew more only about the effects of our actions.

But let’s give the Subjectivists the benefit of the doubt and pull out old reliable from philosophy of language: “I know it when I see it.” Sure I can’t provide you with a list of the necessary and sufficient conditions for what qualify as “relevant facts” but, I mean, come on. You’d be able to tell me, more or less, what’s relevant in any given thought experiment. Our ability to pick out what’s relevant may even be the key to how we interact with the world (see Relevance Realization). So let’s grant this assumption for the sake of steel manning Subjectivism.

A further issue arises. What if we had all the relevant facts in hand, but we simply made mistakes in deliberating about how these facts actually fit together? In short, what if we failed to think clearly, and weigh all the relevant evidence accordingly and therefore came out with intuitively backwards desires? Consider Confused Revenge.

Confused Revenge: After learning all the relevant facts about how you slighted me for the sake of saving me from some greater harm that I would have wished to avoid, I am grateful to you. I then form the terminal desire to kill my uncle.

This puzzling conclusion is certainly possible. Psychology is weird. People snap in unexpected ways. Even if you explain to them clearly all the contingencies and facts that they, themselves, already know, odd conclusions may yet be reached and new bizarre terminal desires may be formed. To account for these sorts of mistakes we can stipulate a rationality criterion into the Informed Desire Theory thereby yielding the Deliberative Theory.

Deliberative Theory: We have most reason to do whatever, after fully informed and rational deliberation, we would choose to do.

Rational here is not taken to be a substantive, normative form of rationality. It is merely “procedural” rationality whereby “we ought to imagine fully the important effects of our different possible acts, to avoid wishful thinking, to assess probabilities correctly, and to follow certain other procedural rules” (OWM 1, 62). Notice how this theory no longer mentions desires explicitly. But we can assume that in being “procedurally rational” part of following “certain other procedural rules” includes avoiding failing to act due to akrasia. We could instead phrase the Deliberative Theory in terms of the desires we would have after fully informed and rational deliberation and simply subtract out “avoid failing to act due to akrasia” from what we define to be procedurally rational. It makes no difference either way.

The Deliberative Theory is the “final boss” of Subjectivism. It states what is, for many of us, the most plausible formulation of the Subjectivist intuitions. We have reason to do whatever we, in Sharon Street’s wonderful phrase, “have a sound deliberative route” to do given our current, actual motivations as a starting point.

It groups in various requirements of having true beliefs, relevant knowledge, and clear thinking into a single principle. It is elegant in that regard. But perhaps you hopped off this Reflective Equilibrium train earlier in the route. Perhaps you got off at the Terminal Desire Theory station thinking that beliefs can’t change our terminal desires. In any case we can group all these theories together under an umbrella which we will then use to raise objections against as a whole.

Subjectivism about reasons: Some possible act is what we have most reason to do just when, and because, this act would best fulfill our present fully informed terminal desire or aims, or is what, after ideal deliberation, we would choose to do.

Objective Theories

Now that we know what Subjective theories look like, we can briefly explain what an Objective theory is. I will not defend this here as it would take far too long, it took Parfit 1200 pages to do so. I will merely state it so we can contrast it as we work through the objections to Subjectivism.

Objective theories hold that there are certain facts that give us (external) reasons to have certain aims and to do whatever would best achieve these aims. The reasons are not given by the desires themselves, but by the objects of these desires7. It’s not our desire to be happy that gives us a reason to bring about that state of affairs, it’s facts about happiness itself which give us those reasons. We have a reason to bring about this state of affairs whether or not we have, or would have under ideal conditions, this desire (OWM I, 45). It is facts about what it’s like to experience happiness which gives us reasons to bring about that state of affairs.

Now let’s go through various objections to Subjectivism and see how an Objective theory fares in comparison.

The Agony Argument

The first objection to Subjectivism is simple and comes in the form of the Agony Argument.

Case One: I know that some future event would cause me to have some period of agony. Even after ideal deliberation, I have no desire to avoid this agony. Nor do I have any other desire or aim whose fulfillment would be prevented either by this agony, or by my having no desire to avoid this agony (OMW I, 73-4).

All subjective theories would imply that I have no reason to avoid this agony.

We can argue:

We all have a reason to want to avoid, and to try to avoid all future agony.

Subjectivism implies that we have no such reason.

Therefore

Subjectivism is false.

This is the Agony Argument (OWM I, 76).

Objection 1: This example is purely imaginary! Every actual person wants to avoid future agony so we can ignore this argument.

I am somewhat sympathetic to this objection. While Subjectivists can’t give us objective morality, perhaps they can give us universal or near universal morality to the extent that we have convergent ideal terminal desires. But not even this is possible. Many people, including you, are like this much of the time. This presents most commonly in the form of our temporal bias towards the near.

We will typically, knowingly, choose a sooner, smaller, pleasure, at the expensive of a much greater pain later on and in ways that are not justifiable by appeals to how that future person is “less you” than your present self.

While not agony per se, this is still us failing to respond to the prospect of future suffering. Agony is merely an exaggerated form of this suffering. This seeming irrationality is the case for many smokers, unfit, and depressed people. This is the case of you and me.

Further, if a normative theory is to be true it is to have acceptable implications in all cases, even in merely imaginary cases when it is clear enough what such cases would involve. Subjectivist’s claims about what we have reason to do cannot be true in the actual world if they are not also true in possible worlds too. So it’s entirely fair to test subjective theories by considering these cases.

Objection 2: This is impossible since being in agony means I would have a strong desire to not be in agony.

This objection fails, as it fails to distinguish between present and future desires. The fact that you will have a future desire to change your current state of affairs does not mean you now have this desire. The Subjectivist theories we are discussing are based on either actual or hypothetical present desires.

It’s unclear how a Subjectivist could incorporate future desires given their assumptions. Even if they did, one could always ask “why should I satisfy those desires? I don’t actually desire those things now!” This altered Subjectivist theory would fly in the face of the fundamental intuition behind Subjectivism: that if i now desire something, I have a reason to do that thing. Someone could easily object that those future desires aren’t my desires. They might as well be someone else’s!8 This is a point against Deliberative Theory too. By contrast, Objective theories simply point out that the nature of agony itself, what it’s like to suffer, provides us with reason to avoid that agony.

Objection 3: The Deliberative Theory counts only present desires which are had by anyone who is fully rational. Anyone who is fully rational would want to avoid future agony.

This objection fails as it fails to distinguish between procedurally rational and substantively rational. Subjectivists can only appeal to procedural rationality where “we ought to imagine fully the important effects of our different possible acts, to avoid wishful thinking, to assess probabilities correctly, and to follow certain other procedural rules” (OWM 1, 62). This essentially means “thinking clearly.” Subjectivists cannot claim that it’s irrational to have any desires or lack thereof. That would be a substantive claim about what we have reason to desire, something only an Objectivist can claim.

Objection 4: Having a temporal bias towards the near draws an arbitrary distinction. If Subjectivists update their theory to include this minimal principle of not having arbitrary preferences or desires, most intuitively bad desires can be discarded.

To steel man this objection let’s present an even more arbitrary desire or preference.

Future Tuesday Indifference: A man is a hedonist with a quirk. He is indifferent to any pain that happens on future Tuesdays. He fully acknowledge that pain hurts on Tuesday just as much as other days and that this pain will be his own, not someone else’s. But when choosing between outcomes, he simply doesn’t count Tuesday pains at all. He would prefer to undergo some more painful operation on a Monday than a less painful one on a Tuesday.

If there was ever an arbitrary desire, it would be Future Tuesday Indifference. But are Subjectivists in a position to reject desires on grounds of arbitrariness? The answer is no.

Our preferences draw an arbitrary distinction when what we prefer is in no way preferable. It is arbitrary to prefer one of two things if there are no facts about these things which give us any reason to have this preference. A subjectivist would have to claim:

(1) if some ordeal would be on a future Tuesday, this fact wouldn’t give us reason to care less about it.

Most of us would prefer the less painful operation, all else equal. This preference is not arbitrary as can be explained by

(2) if some operation would be less painful, this fact does give us a reason to care less about it.

Only Objectivists about reasons can claim (1) and (2) (OWM I, 79). Subjectivists cannot. So this objection fails.

Objection 5: Subjectivists can add in a minimal constraint about coherence and unity. Dropping Future Tuesday Indifference or agnosticism towards future agony would result in a desire set that is both more coherent and unified.

First, there’s no reason to assume these desires must be incoherent. Psychology is weird and this set of desires is certainly within the space of all possible desire sets. Second, mere unity is not a merit. If you cared about truth, beauty and the future of humanity and I only cared about stamp collecting, I would have a more unified set of desires than you. Finally, any appeals to coherence and unity itself assume that we have object-given reason to care about these things. Only an Objectivist can make these claims (OWM I, 80).

So the Agony Argument stands and provides a bullet that the Subjectivist must bite. As a reminder that’s:

We all have a reason to want to avoid, and to try to avoid all future agony.

Subjectivism implies that we have no such reason.

Therefore

Subjectivism is false.

Further, Subjectivists must claim

(G) the nature of agony gives us no reason to want to avoid being in agony.

But we can argue:

(H) The nature of agony does give us a reason to want to avoid being in agony.

Therefore

Subjectivism is false.

Subjectivists might claim that in arguing against (G) we are simply asserting (H). But if there is anything that gives us a reason to act, it’s the avoidance of agony. This is a belief everyone who is not a nihilist would endorse. Therefore, these arguments stand.

The All or None Argument

For an Objectivist, every instrumental reason gets its normative force from some other reason. But at the end of this chain of reasons is some fact which gives us a reason to want some possible aim or goal for its own sake. These reasons are provided by the intrinsic nature of the end in question. It is facts about the nature of suffering, for instance, which gives us reason not to act in ways which make us suffer. Put your hand on a hot stove. What that’s like is a pretty good reason never to do that again. This is true whether we have this desire or not.

Subjectivists cannot make similar claims. At the end of their chain of reasoning is a terminal desire. Do we have any normative (not explanatory, we’re not asking if we can explain how these desires came about) reason to have this desire? At first, Subjectivists might be inclined to say that all terminal desires (or all terminal desires after rational reflection) provide reasons. They are self-justifying. Consider Cast Two.

Case Two: I want to have some future period of agony. I am not a masochist, who wants this pain as a means to sexual pleasure. Nor am I [a] repentant sinner, who wants this pain as deserved punishment for my sins. Nor do I have any other present desire or aim that would be fulfilled by my future agony. I want this agony as an end, or for its own sake. I have no other present desire or aim whose fulfillment would be prevented either by this agony, or by my having my desire to have this agony. After ideal deliberation, I decide to cause myself to have this future agony, if I can (OMW I, 83).

If all terminal desires were self-justifying, then so too would this desire to be in a future period of agony. This is hard to believe.

Objection 1: It’s inconceivable that we have a desire to be in agony.

This claim is false. We can want things which are bad for us. This is a quirk of psychology that we are, unfortunately, all too familiar with. Agony is just an exaggerated version of much smaller instances of this that we face all the time. Again, psychology is weird and many odd desires are possible. Further, the fact that this desire is so hard to imagine is precisely because the nature of agony, we believe, gives everyone strong reasons to not want to be in this state. It’s hard to believe that someone could be so irrational, implicitly an Objectivist claim.

A Subjectivist might then be inclined to claim that we only have reason to have or to satisfy some, not all, terminal desires.

Consider Case Three.

Case Three: I want to avoid some future period of agony (OMW I, 84).

A Subjectivist would want to claim, for instance, that we have reason to reject the desire for future agony in Case Two but to accept or prescribe the desire to avoid future agony in Case Three. Can Subjectivists make these claims?

For Subjectivists to reject the desire to be in future agony, they would have to to appeal to some principle like

(I) For some desire or aim to give us a reason, we must have some reason to have this desire or aim.

and claim

We have no reason to want to be in future agony

But for Subjectivists there is no other possible source of a reason to have a desire besides other terminal desires, and we are already stipulating that there are no other relevant desires in play. So (I) cannot help them reject the desire to be in future agony.

With nothing else besides other desires to appeal to Subjectivists cannot claim,

(J) We have reasons to avoid agony

thereby rejecting the desire for future agony, and accepting the desire to avoid future agony. The only way to accept (J) is to appeal to the object of these desires, something only an Objectivist can do. Instead they must admit that on their theories,

we have most reason to do what would best fulfill or achieve our present fully informed terminal desires or aims, whatever we want, and whether or not we have any reason to have these desires or aims.

Alternatively, Subjectivists might claim

we have no reason to accept or reject any terminal desires

But then no actions would be justified as all justification ultimately flows from these desires. All justification would ultimately be arbitrary, no justification at all.

These claims can be summed up in the following argument.

If we have desires-based reasons for acting, all that would matter is whether some act would fulfill the terminal desires that we now have after ideal deliberation. It would be irrelevant what we want, or would be trying to achieve.

Therefore

Either all such desires give us reasons, or none of them do.

If all such desires gave us reasons, our desires could give us decisive reasons to cause ourselves to be in agony for its own sake, to waste our lives, and to try to achieve countless other bad or worthless aims.

We could not have such reasons.

Therefore

None of these desires gives us any reason. We have no such desire-based reason to have any desire, or to act in any way (OWM I. 90).

This is the All or None argument. Given the All or None argument, Subjectivists are faced with a dilemma. Since they cannot coherently accept some terminal desires and reject others which have survived ideal deliberation, they are forced to choose either

(1) All terminal desires provide us with normative reasons

or

(2) No terminal desires provide us with normative reasons.

If Subjectivists appeal to (1), then they have to bite many bullets: the desire for future agony for instance. But also others like the desire to hit a screaming baby, to cause traumatic levels of harm on an innocent, or to eat some food you know will later make you feel miserable.

If Subjectivists instead appeal to (2), then we have no reason to do anything at all since all reasons would end in desires which we do not have any reason to have. Subjectivists like Blackburn might then object:9

Objection 2: “If I want it for its own sake why should I need to scramble for a reason?”.

Simple, because when we reflect on our desires, we will often find some of them to be worthy of question. See the Case Two above. If I desire to punch a baby, or to cause myself to be in future agony, that seems like a desire I might want to investigate further, to see if I have a good reason for having it.

Objectivists, by contrast, make the much simpler claim: we can want things which are bad for us.

The Incoherence Argument

Remember how we ascended a ladder of Subjective theories? The ladder looks something like this:

Desire-Based Theory->Terminal Desire-Based Theory->Error-Free Terminal Desire Theory->Informed Desire Theory->Deliberative Theory

Well it’s time to pull that ladder down, to peel that onion back. This is the Incoherence Argument.

Subjectivists who accept these latter, stronger theories would accept the following principle

(K) what we have most reason to do is whatever would best fulfill, not our actual present terminal desires or aims, but the desires or aims that we would want ourselves to have, if we knew and had rationally considered all of the relevant facts.

In other words, we have reason to fulfill not our actual desires, but our hypothetical desires under idealized conditions. Part of what makes these conditions ideal is that we have more knowledge about our outcomes. Many of these Subjectivists who accept (K) would therefore be committed to accepting the following principle.

(L) when we are making important decisions, we ought if we can to try to learn more about the different possible outcomes of our acts, so that we can come to have better informed terminal desires or aims, and can then try to fulfill these desires or aims.

But Subjectivists cannot coherently make these claims (OWM I, 93). For Subjectivists, it’s only desires which give us reasons to act. For us to think we should discover these additional facts, Subjectivists are implicitly saying that we have reason to discover these facts. They’re saying that there is some feature or fact about the object of the aim of learning more information that is good, or a source of reason to act. They are committed to

(M) these possible outcomes may have intrinsic features that would give us object-given reasons to want either to produce or to prevent these outcomes, if we can.

But (M) is what Objectivists believe! Subjectivists say there are no features of outcomes which give us reasons. They cannot coherently claim (M). And if they cannot claim (M), they cannot claim (L), and without (L) they cannot claim (K) either. Without (K) the more plausible Subjective theories crumble. The Deliberative and Informed Desire theories are incoherent.

Subjectivists might then retreat to weaker claim that

(N) we have reasons to fulfill only those of our present terminal desires or aims that are error-free, in the sense that these desires do not depend on false beliefs.

But again, (N) would have to appeal to (M) (OWM I, 94). So even the much weaker Error-Free Terminal Desire Theory has to make claims that we have reason to act in ways which correct our false beliefs, that there’s something good about having true beliefs. That’s a claim about the object of error-correcting outcomes being the source of reasons to act. Only Objectivists can make those claims. So the Error-Free domino too falls.

In summation, the more plausible Subjectivist theories we’ve discussed fail by making the following two claims:

(O) Our desires, aims, or choices give us reasons only if we would still have these desires and aims, or make these choices, if we had true beliefs about all the relevant intrinsic features of what we want

(P) These features give us no reasons to want these things.

If these features gave us no reasons, that would undermine the claim that for our desires to give us reasons they must be desires that we would have if we had true beliefs about these features. This is the Incoherence Argument (OWM I, 95). Note that this objection makes no appeals to hypothetical cases or intuitions about reasons.

Objection 1: These possible outcomes do have something which Subjectivists can coherently claim gives us reasons: our idealized hypothetical desires. It’s on the other side of this counterfactual where the source of our reasons lie. These ideal desires reach back in time and across possible worlds to provide us reasons to bring them about so we can then go on to satisfy them.

This objection misunderstands the argument. In the attempt to ascend this hierarchy of desires, the source of reasons for bringing about these changes is not the ideal desires themselves, but the fact that these desires would be better desires. It is the object of this aim, this improvement, that is the source of reasons. Object-given reason cannot be coherently claimed within the assumptions of Subjective theories.

There’s also the question of why we are taking these idealized desires in the first place. The word “ideal” is already value-laden and sneaks in the assumption that these desires are somehow better than non-ideal desires. In other words, we have reason to bring about and to satisfy these hypothetical desires.

Objection 2: Yes, “ideal” is value-laden, but it’s about what we have epistemic reason to do, not practically rational or moral reason to do. Everyone would agree having more relevant information is better than less, or that we should deliberate free from distorting influences. These normative assumptions are purely epistemic ones.

This objection too fails because the reasons we are talking about are reasons to act (i.e. practical reasons), not reasons to believe (i.e. epistemic reasons). In the above mentioned cases, the conclusion of these ideal conditions is not a new belief, but a new aim, or an intended act. So these Subjectivists are making claims about what we ought to do which depend on object-given reasons. They are cannot safely appeal to epistemic reasons for these idealization conditions as the output of this process is not an epistemic reason to believe something new, but a practical reasons to do something.

After all this, the only plausible Subjectivist theory which survives is the Terminal Desire Theory. The Terminal Desire Theory claims

we have most reason to do whatever would best fulfill or achieve our actual present terminal desires or aims.

These people can coherently claim

(Q) we ought to try to discover the facts about how we can best fulfill our present terminal desires or aims.

They can coherently claim (Q) that we should learn this additional information since the object of their actions is not an improved desire but merely the satisfaction of their terminal desires or aims. The hypothetical ideal desire theories, by contrast, were incoherently making claims of this sort. They were claiming that the object of having “improved” desires was an aim worth acting on.

Terminal Desire Theory can also coherently claim

(R) if we want to have such better informed desires or aims, we ought to try to discover the facts about what the different possible outcomes would be like, so that we can have such desires or aims.

But note that (R) only applies in precisely those specific moments where we have this aim. The Terminal Desire Theory still faces all the previous objections which forces us to iteratively improve it into the more plausible theories which we have just shown to turn out incoherent. Namely, the Terminal Desire Theory claims, implausibly, that we can have no reason to avoid future agony, or to waste our lives, or to count blades of grass all day, etc.

Why people are subjectivists

At first subjectivism seems obviously true. If I want something, that’s a pretty good reason to bring it about, all else equal. But this fundamental intuition is mistaken for a very subtle reason.

Subjective theories often coincide with the truth since what we want often coincides with what we have reason to do. Consider an analogy to epistemology where we have two theories. According to

the reason-based theory, we ought to believe what the facts that are known to us give us decisive reason to believe.

According to an implausible, hypothetical theory

the belief-based theory, we ought to believe whatever, after considering the facts, we would in fact believe.

When applied to actual people, this belief-based theory would often have acceptable implications since most of us often believe what the facts give us reason to believe. The fact that we, often and in practice, would have these correct beliefs is not because the belief-based theory is true, but rather because we are correctly responding to the reasons given to us by the facts considered.

Now consider

objective reason-based theories, we ought to try to achieve the aims which the facts that are known to us give us decisive reasons to have.

Compare with

subjective aim-based theories, we ought to try to achieve the aims which, after considering the facts, we would in fact have.

Again, when applied to actual people, these subjective theories often have acceptable implication since most of us have aims which the facts we’ve considered provide us with reasons to have. Subjective theories imply that we ought to achieve these aims. But this is not because having these aims makes them the correct aims. It’s the other way around, we often have these aims because we are correctly responding to the reasons that the facts we are considering provide us with (OWM I, 92).

The fact that our subjective aims often track what we objectively ought to aim at is the source of the fundamental confusion with subjectivists about reasons. They have it precisely backwards. It is not our desires which give us reasons it’s our responses to reasons which give us desires. Once you see the confusion it’s like showing a fly out of the bottle.

I’m reminded of those experiments where a patient’s corpus callosum is severed and they give one hemisphere an instruction, to get up for example. They then ask the other unknowing hemisphere why they’re getting up and a post-hoc rationalization soon follows. This is what I think these secular, Western, reductionist materialist types are doing. They search for a ground to justify normativity, and reach for what’s available and well within the materialist worldview: desires. But in most of their actual deliberations, they don’t use desires to justify their actions. They think they’re justifying actions with their desires, when in reality, they use their intuition to make judgements about what they have reason to do, and then corresponding desires spring up soon thereafter.

Conclusions

Let’s take stock. We built up Subjectivism from a barebones theory into various more sophisticated and plausible iterations. But we just saw how the Incoherence Argument strips away all these upgrades and reduces Subjectivism back down to the barebones theory of Terminal Desire Theory where it’s only our present desires which give us reasons. All idealized desires are now null and void given this Incoherence Argument. But this same Terminal Desire Theory is subject to both the Agony Argument and the All of None Argument.

The All or None Argument paired with the Agony Argument give the Subjectivist a dilemma: accept either that we are justified in having every single one of our present terminal desires, no matter how intuitively horrendous, or we have no reason whatsoever to have any of them and they’re all arbitrary yet immune to interrogation. In either case, the Subjectivist has to bite a bullet. Either we may have horrible desires (e.g. to cause ourselves to be in agony), or we may lack certain obviously good desires (e.g. to avoid causing ourselves to be in agony). This leaves the Subjectivist in a tough spot. Where do we go from here?

To conclude I’d like to share what are the most promising paths forward:

1. Become Objectivists, either Intuitionists or Valence Realists: Intuitionists would look for a principle or series of principles that maximally agrees with and explains the moral intuitions we would have in ideal epistemic circumstances. This could look something like traditional moral theories like Consequentialism and Deontology, or could be a more sophisticated theory like Parfit’s Triple Theory which unifies Consequentialism, Deontology, Contractualism, and Virtue Ethics*.* Another strong contender would be to ground normativity in consciousness, specifically positive valence. This sort of theory would end up a sort of non-dual hedonic utilitarianism.

2. Remain Subjectivists, bite several bullets, lean on meta desires: A diehard Subjectivist may yet dig their heels in but not out of stubbornness. They may think that all other options, especially Objectivism, are untenable and that Subjectivism, for all its faults, is just the best that we can do given metaphysical and epistemic concerns. They may bite the bullets in the cases of coherent eccentrics but still claim that we may be able to recover some semblance of a plausible theory of reasons if we accept certain meta desires that most people, in most cases, and in most periods of reflective thought do, as a matter of fact, have. These may include the desires to:

   1. care about the present desires or aims we would have if we were fully informed and rationally deliberated
   2. care about our future ideal desires, thereby linking our time sliced selves across time like chain-link in a fence, a baton pass between selves across time. This would reduce our temporal bias towards the near. Perhaps there’s even a diminishing weight placed on each successive time slice’s desires decaying at a rate that allows for geometric convergence in our moral calculus. This rate decays because the degree to which that future self is in fact me also decays in time.10
   3. try to avoid agony and promote flourishing or well being in ourselves and perhaps others
   4. Aim, as best we can, at having more true beliefs and relevant information.

3. Become Kantians: We may also decide to reject Intuitionism and bullet biting Subjectivism, or the methodology of seeking Reflective Equilibrium between all our beliefs. We may instead think that the very concepts we use necessitate certain commitments; that for things like duty to even be possible, by virtue of what duty is a priori, we must be committed to following some categorical imperative.

4. Reject principles, become particularists, perhaps with a spiritual component: If principles are “curve fits” around the data points that are our intuitions, why not just abandon the principles altogether and rely on intuition? Perhaps the entire normative project is better aimed at the cultivation of certain virtues or dispositions. Perhaps the right framing isn’t to focus on making right decision, but on becoming the right kind of person. The goal may be internal proper reordering or reduction of inner conflicts to match and flow with outer reality, microcosm reflecting the macrocosm. As within, so without. (Hermeticism, Taoism, Ma’at). This process may involve the ascent of the soul, or anagoge, perhaps as described in stages of psychological development (Neo-Platonism, Kegan stages, spiral dynamics, traditional monotheist religion, Jungian individuation).

5. 4E cog sci reframe: The entire “agent-based ontology” framing is wrong. Talking about agents, actions, and the outside world misses the participatory nature of existence. What we do is done in concert with reality with no sharp boundaries between agent and arena, between action and consequence. Every action is part of a feedback loop whose entire nature does not lend itself to clean distinctions. There are no subject-given and object-given reasons, no internal or external reasons. All reasons are transjective.

6. Reject all normative reasons, become nihilists: Nothing matters, there’s nothing you have to do.

All of these paths forward are compelling. Subscribe to follow as I pull each thread and work out the implications of each view.

1

Derek Parfit, On What Matters. I will repeatedly cite these works in line indicating volume and page number.

2

W.D. Ross The Right and the Good

3

Schroeder, Reasons First

4

Scanlon, What We Owe To Each Other, Chapter 1

5

Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature

6

Williams, Internal and External Reasons

7

Or perhaps, the relation that object has to conscious creatures of a certain type. This is where dualism starts to pose problems. An issue for another time

8

This argument is further supported by most plausible theories of Personal Identity. The degree to which you are you across time is a matter of degree. And if the future is far enough, and your desires different enough, that person might as well be someone else. Bridging that gap would be akin to bridging the “why be moral?” gap, a challenge subjectivists are unique ill-equipped to answer.

9

Blackburn, Simon ed. Singer, Peter. Does Anything Really Matter., 94.

10

This is Parfit’s relation R, psychological connectedness and/or continuity. See Reasons and Persons.