The District 9 Objection to Metaphysics
There's something absurd about trying to settle complicated metaphysical questions from the philosophical armchair--but sometimes there's value in trying our best to do exactly that.
In 2009, I was a graduate student in the Philosophy Department at the University of Miami. And yes, typing that sentence makes me feel downright Methuselah-ish but I’m just going to keep going.
I was living in South Beach, a few blocks from the ocean in one direction and the movie theater on Lincoln Road in another. I can distinctly remember walking out of the theater with my grad school friend Michelle after watching the science fiction movie District 9. We were laughing about a scene in that movie—and I suppose I should put in a warning here, this is a mild spoiler for a mostly forgotten movie from 2009—where what’s essentially a small child just sort of intuits how to operate an intergalactic spaceship. After about 30 seconds of being inside it. And there was a point in that conversation when I remember Michelle pausing and saying something along the lines of, “That’s kind of what we do, though.”
What I took her to mean was that using the kinds of arguments philosophers often come up with from their armchairs to try to figure out what’s true about all sorts of aspects of external reality that are incredibly complicated and non-obvious can feel absurd on the level of the alien kid in District 9 figuring out how to operate the ship. I thought it was a fair point then and I still do now. Not quite fair enough to make me swear off thinking about metaphysical arguments or making a few of my own—but certainly enough to give me pause.
It’s worth lingering here on what I mean by “metaphysical.”
Lots of the philosophical issues I talk about on this Substack are in one way or another normative. In other words, they have to do with what people should do (in various senses of “should”), about what would be good or bad, right or wrong, justified or unjustified, etc.
And there’s a roughly David Hume-derived picture of how all this works I find very appealing which says that there’s a fundamental difference between reasoning about values and reasoning about descriptive facts. On this picture, whether we’re talking about moral values or, for example, epistemic values, that we’re doing when we argue about these things is to try to show other people that, given the things they care about (whether or not they realize that they care about them), they should therefore also care about X, Y, and Z. “If justice requires this, then you’d also have to accept that it dictates…” or “if you don’t think that believe is justified given the evidence, then what about…”
Note carefully that saying that I find some picture at least roughly along these lines very appealing is different from “here’s a well-worked-out philosophical theory complete with satisfying answers to all the obvious followup questions about whether or in what sense there can be normative ‘facts,’ whether such facts are robustly ‘objective’ or whether there’s some sense in which they’re ‘relative’ to something else, and so on.”1 I don’t claim to have one of those. (Sorry.) My point here is just that if you suspect that something in this generally Humean neighborhood is correct, the District 9-ish objection to philosophy becomes much less relevant in normative contexts. Trying to hammer your moral or epistemic instincts into an internally coherent picture, unlike flying an intergalactic spaceship, really does seem like the kind of context where the answers are inside of us.
But there are other issues I’ve covered here before that aren’t like that at all.
For example:
Theists believe that the universe was created and is ruled by an all-powerful, all-knowing, and morally perfect immaterial intelligence. Atheists disagree.
Compatibilists and libertarians both believe that we control our actions in whatever way we’d need to in order to be morally responsible for those actions (though they disagree with each other about what way that is). Free will skeptics disagree.
According to the A-Theory of time, there’s an objectively real, constantly shifting present moment. According to the B-Theory of time, what is from our perspective the past and what is from our perspective the future exist in exactly the same way that “the present” does.
I could keep going but those three are good enough to get us started. The point is that these all seem to be pretty solidly on the fact side of the fact/value split, so the justification I floated above for arguments that ultimately rely on normative intuitions seems inapplicable to them. We’re not trying to figure out what we care about. We’re trying to figure out various things about the external world, but without using scientific techniques—because there isn’t any obvious way to deploy them in these contexts.
Many people believe that thinking about issues like these is a waste of time. I don’t. My view is that, much like creating art, philosophical reflection is a worthwhile human activity in its own right. In fact, one of the reasons I want a more equal society is so people will have more free time for all kinds of pursuits—philosophical or otherwise—whose value can’t be boiled down to their practical effects. In everything I say in what follows, I take the desirability of making sound arguments about metaphysical issues for granted.
The question, I’m raising, though—the worry that to me has always been well-summed-up by Michelle’s jokey observation about District 9—isn’t whether we should but whether we can.
The history of philosophy (very much including the history of “analytic” philosophy) includes plenty of currents of thought that converge on the conclusion that we can’t for much more basic reasons than the District 9 issue. Either these are meaningless pseudo-questions, or they’re real questions but they can only be asked from within “conceptual schemes” that determine what count as the right answers, or human language just never makes contact with objective reality anyway, or, well, etc.
As it happens, I don’t buy into any of that stuff. At all.
Maybe my confidence on these issues is warranted and it’s not. Let’s save that subject for another time. The relevant point for today is that the District 9 objection to making metaphysical arguments is a live concern even if it is.
Some metaphysical debates may turn out to be “verbal disputes.” In other words, the battling theorists might just be talking past each other.
Take “mereological composition”—i.e. the question of when distinct objects form parts of larger wholes. My understanding is that there are people at the extreme end of the spectrum of philosophical opinion on this issue whose answer is basically “never.” They would deny the existence of, for example, chairs and tables—although they’d grant that are quantum particles “arranged table-wise” or “arranged chair-wise.”
It seems pretty plausible that “chair" vs. “a bunch of quantum particles arranged chair-wise” is a distinction without a difference, and for that reason the existence of this particular sub-branch of metaphysics has always been a little embarrassing to me (in my capacity as an apologist for other kinds of metaphysics).
More interestingly, one of the examples above can arguably be “deflated” in this way—at least to a point. Believers in “libertarian” free will are definitely having exactly the kind of argument with free will skeptics that seems very vulnerable to District 9 worries. Remember, “libertarianism” as a position on free will—as opposed to the unrelated “let poor people starve” position in political philosophy—says that (a) the kind of control we’d need to exercise over our actions to be responsible includes freedom from deterministic chains of cause-and-effect, and (b) we actually have this kind of freedom. Free will skeptics agree with them about (a) and disagree about (b). But how are we supposed to adjudicate that disagreement?
The skeptic, at least can make arguments that are ultimately based in empirical evidence—even if those arguments aren’t entirely conclusive. They can argue that the more we learn from the sciences, the more (in general, and inside of human brains) we can explain in terms of those deterministic chains, and that this trend is likely to continue.2 Libertarians often seem to be stuck appealing to metaphysical intuition in exactly the way that seems most dubious—claiming that it’s experientially obvious that we’re free in this way (“I raised my right arm to illustrate the point, but I could have chosen not to”) and working backwards from there to the conclusion that causal determinism is false.3
But the compatibilist denies the libertarian’s contention (a)—and as such, they don’t have to assert (b). In fact, one of the convenient things about being a compatibilist is that you can stay entirely agnostic on whether determinism is true. (“I’m a philosopher, not a physicist, that’s not my department.”) So it now looks like they’re having the kind of debate that can be deflated into a verbal dispute. The free will skeptic is simply setting the bar for what counts as “free will” higher than the compatibilist.
As it happens, I don’t think this maneuver deflates the debate all the way down to the chairs vs. quantum-particles-arranged-chairwise level of uninteresting-ness. If we concede that there a number of different ways in which someone can be “free” or “in control,” e.g.:
They can be free from coercion or manipulation
They can be free from determinism
Their actions can be controlled by their desires/preferences, such that if they want to do X, they’ll do it, and if they don’t, they won’t
They can have a complicated set of capacities to imagine different possible courses of action, understand and be moved by reasons that could be offered for and against those courses of action, etc.—capacities typically lacked by creatures like animals or small human children we don’t regard as “having free will.”
…then there’s still an interesting debate to be had about which of these kinds of control are necessary for moral responsibility. But that’s a normative concept, so maybe we’ve reached a point where a little deflation and a little Hume can combine to immunize the compatibilism vs. free will skepticism debate from the District 9 objection.
So that’s my first and weakest excuse for doing metaphysics. Some metaphysical debates aren’t as metaphysical as they look.
But what about the ones that are?
You could, I suppose, try to at least partially immunize theism vs. atheism from District 9 concerns by playing up its normative dimension. One of the key arguments for atheism is that a being who’s (a) morally perfect and (b) has unlimited power wouldn’t (c) sign off on various forms of apparently gratuitous suffering by innocents. To the extent that they’re arguing about what “morally perfect” means, it’s a normative dispute. But even when it comes to this particular argument, that doesn’t seem to be all that’s going on.
And in any case, an “atheist” whose only reason for rejecting the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was the problem of evil wouldn’t be much of an atheist. Surely to be an atheist is also to reject the hypothesis that the world was created by some hideous Lovecraftian hell-god. Or a morally mediocre deity somewhere between the two.
To reject these possibilities, at some point you’re probably going to have to bring in considerations about ontological simplicity—the idea that, all else being equal, explanations requiring the existence of more kinds of entities are less likely to be true than ones requiring fewer. At that point, there’s no denying that what you’re doing is sitting in the philosophical armchair and making metaphysical arguments about external reality.
So:
How bad is it do that?
If you feel uneasy acknowledging that the description I just gave fits what you’re doing, I get it. Despite what I’m about to say, I feel that unease.
But:
If the issue is that you’re a science-minded person who instinctively distrusts the idea that we can figure out what’s true about the universe without using the standard tools of empirical investigation, it might help to remember that science itself would be impossible without making structurally similar arguments.
As thinkers like W.V.O. Quine loved to point out, theories are always undetermined by the evidence. If Astronomical Theory A predicts that Celestial Object C will be in Position P a position at Time T, and you point your high-powered telescope toward P at T and there’s no C to be seen, it could be that A is wrong. Or it could be that your theory of how the telescope works is wrong. Or it could be that a massive alien spaceship with the cloaking technology from Star Trek was passing P at T. Probably not, but how can you rule it out without appealing to precisely the kind of simplicity considerations atheists use to rule out the existence of even a morally mediocre god?
So that’s Excuse for Metaphysics #2.
If science is legitimate, the kind of reasoning we have to use to do science is also legitimate. And if it’s legitimate as a general matter, it’s legitimate to use it to think our way through far more esoteric issues.
A different way of using science to make ourselves feel better about doing metaphysics comes into play when we think about the most esoteric of our initial three examples—the ontology of time.
The most popular argument for the B-Theory is that it’s hard to fit the A-Theory together with Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. If Event E1 is happening at ‘the present moment’ and Event E2 is happening “simultaneously” with E1 relative to one reference frame but not according to another, is E2 part of the present or not? That gets confusing very quickly. It’s far easier to fit the STR with the B-Theory.
If you’re comfortable with any metaphysical arguments, you should be comfortable with this one. All the heavy lifting is being done by a well-confirmed scientific theory. But to really see the full scope of the District 9 worry, let’s take a very long step back. The claim that our “well-confirmed” scientific theories—i.e. the ones that do the best job of explaining existing data, generating novel predictions and so on—accurately describe external reality is called “scientific realism.” And that itself is a metaphysical claim. As is the more fundamental claim that there is a mind-independent external reality of some sort out there waiting for us to discover things about it.
Good luck arguing for either of those claims without appealing to metaphysical intuitions.
The Humean excuse for appealing to normative intuitions given above isn’t going to help us while we do that. Intuitions about how the universe is—in respects that are pretty distant from our everyday experience—are the sketchiest intuitions of all.
What is it, after all, about the evolutionary history of human brains that should fill us with confidence that what seems right to us is going to be a good guide in these matters?
OK, let’s acknowledge that all of this is in fact a problem. What are we supposed to do with it?
You can, if you like, decide like Socrates that all you know is that you know nothing. And unlike Socrates, you can therefore give up on trying to figure any of it out. You can take a vow to never engage in abstract thought whenever you can possibly help it. Of course, you probably won’t always be able to help it, but there are things you can do to help stay on the straight and narrow.
Move to an agricultural commune and do exhausting physical labor all day every day. Sing simple songs with your commune-mates as you work. Come up with some mental exercises to do whenever you catch yourself wondering about something abstract.
I don’t know about you, though, but I’m not actually going to do any of that.
And this brings us to the best excuse I know of for engaging with metaphysical issues, which is just this:
We can’t help it. Obviously no one has to get so deep into this stuff that they know what the “A-Theory of Time” is, but on some level people are pretty much inevitably going to form basic beliefs about external reality. And the more curious types are going to have a lot of those beliefs.
And if we want to reflect in a more rigorous way on those beliefs, we have to lean on what seems true—even knowing all the reasons not to be overly confident about the reliability of those seemings. We can train ourselves to ruthlessly sacrifice our metaphysical intuitions every time they come into conflict with the discoveries of actual science, but that’s not the same thing as doing without them entirely. We’re trapped in our sense-of-how-things-seem-to-be.
Or, to switch back to the original metaphor:
We may just be small ridiculous alien children who have no business trying to fly this thing, but we’re never getting off this spaceship. So, even knowing that our attempts are likely to be hilariously incompetent, we might as well try to figure out the controls.
Certainly, the idea that moral truth is relative to culture (much less the inclinations of particular individuals) is, as I discussed here, completely insane. But taking that much for granted is compatible with any number of very different meta-ethical positions.
There are other kinds of free will skepticism, but for the sake of simplicity, I’m assuming “the skeptic” is a hard determinist—someone who (i) thinks cause-and-effect determinism is true, and (ii) concludes from this that free will doesn’t exist.
To be fair, some libertarians (like Robert Kane) try to ground their position in quantum indeterminacy. I’m skeptical for standard reasons about the idea that this will help.
You describe only half of the modern meta philosophical dilemma. The part you mention is that at some point in the seventeenth century it became clear that there was a way to make progress on questions of how nature worked in a way that undermined faith in intuition, armchair theorizing and old books. Modern science is too successful for most philosophers just to reject. One possibility is that a certain training with old controversies and making certain kinds of conceptual distinctions will prove useful on the margins to this enterprise. Another is to try to create a specific science of semantics (which is where the bizarre interest in how undergraduates would use the word “know” in contrived examples about barns comes in).
The second half you don’t confront though. Modernity wasn’t just about science it was also about formal human equality. This undermines the idea that there is a normative expert. This is tied to the scientific revolution in that the latter avoids Aristotlean final causes in favour of efficient ones. But it also is represented by the bourgeois revolutionary idea that authority is never given by nature but only as a matter of voluntary representation.
So while natural science is of no help at all in making moral progress, it doesn’t follow that philosophy has any use here either. Hume concluded that normative premises are really just a matter of sentiment. Even Kant could just see them as formal, not substantive.
Intuition seems to matter here not because we can conclude that something is desirable because people desire it but because we have no epistemically-respectable alternative. I don’t think it will really do to say the contribution of philosophy is to make these intuitions more “coherent” because there is also no reason to prefer coherence to incoherence in this domain.
What philosophy could do is explore how scientific discourse and ordinary discourse can “hang together” as Sellars put it. It seems to me that is what compatibilism really is about. Is there a way of reconceiving our moral or even religious ways of talking that avoids conflict with science? That isn’t hoping to contribute particularly substantively to either but it seems like something where conceptual analysis and knowledge of the old controversies might come in handy.
If the question of theories of time can be reduced to differences in how we talk, then we could say this is a matter for a science of semantics/pragmatics and philosophy could be a branch of linguistics. It could perhaps be shown that there is no genuine conflict between general relativity and our ordinary sense of the flow of time. And maybe some limited role for undergraduate intuition would be respectable. In linguistics, it is relevant how competent language speakers use words. But if you view this as a real issue of fact, then it is really hard to see why the intuitions of PMC Anglophones in the twenty first century are of any interest at all.
Ben, it seems like the “philosophy” you are defending here is the form of analytical philosophy that is heavily reliant on how undergraduates respond intuitively to far out thought experiments. I still don’t see how that could ever inform you about anything other than undergraduate intuition.