This blog post has been in the works for about two months and has undergone many changes. The first draft was written before I announced I'd stop streaming + stop going on panel shows. As such, the tone might be a little bit off, and it's admittedly very rambly.

The start of the blog post also doesn't represent the end of the post. When I began writing this my conclusion wasn't as strong as it ended up being. The arguments I had begun to given seemed to lead to conclusions I ultimately couldn’t deny.

The target is no longer a handful of people on the left, but instead essentially all politically based commentators. I target this more directly, however, at people who claim to be at least remotely interested in theory and/or philosophy, but refuse to do any real research or reading on the subject.

As a brief tl;dr: all political commentators have a moral and rational duty to engage philosophically in the underpinnings of their ideas. My previous argument for basic, shallow understandings of ethics are no longer sufficient. Rather, it necessitates understandings in meta-ethics as well.

The conclusion is prima facie undesirable (even from my point of view), but I don't see any escape from it. What is retained, however, is that the moral imperative scales according to one’s influence.

IMPORTANT: Any objection that says it is 'practically undesirable' or 'cedes too much to the right' is viciously circular and can be dismissed. These objections clearly rely on the very foundations I am calling political pundits to engage with.

Because of the post's rambling nature I've included, in bold, some remarks that try to keep the post on track. Remember, this is a product of a few months under different outlooks. As such, it's beginning and end doesn't match. I wanted to retain this without editing it because it represents the development of my thought process.

Also, as explained at the end, it's written to mimic a famous paper by William Clifford, and that is why it has the 'preachy' tone it does.

Onto the post, which, as mentioned, starts out with a weak goal, and finally ends with a strong conclusion.

——————————————————

I'm going to come out swinging hard. The post is going to rehash a lot of things I've said before, but its target is going to be more direct: people who identify as leftists but decry the project of philosophy.

Who is this specifically targeted at?

Honestly? No one in particular.

This isn't because I'm too worried to start new drama or to burn bridges; rather, the people I have had an issue with on this point have largely already acknowledge the truth of what I'm saying. They recognize the importance for leftist public figures to read ethics and acknowledge the importance of philosophy as a whole. In this sense, I've been successful: I did convince certain people of a very fundamental truth about the nature of political discourse and I suppose I can be proud of that. Yet, as will be mentioned later, there simply was a more diplomatic, rational, effective way to go about doing this.

This post is targeted at those leftists I haven't had the pleasure of speaking to before, or those I've never been able to discuss this with. It's also targeted at those who are interested in joining the group of leftist thought leaders who are currently growing in popularity on Twitch.

Finally, I can also say this is for everyone.

Everyone should read this and take what I say to heart. I couldn't feel more strongly and confident about the truth of a position than this one that I hold. It comes not just from introspection, but also from a variety of other sources.

It comes from my talks with philosophy professors, who, regardless of their views on meta-ethics, acknowledge the dire importance of a through-going analysis of our political positions to identify what values they rest upon. Whether these values are of the Absolute, or whether they are simply means to some arbitrary end, reductive analysis is seen as an epistemic virtue when it comes to normativity.

It comes from my discussions with my dad, who, after I tried for an hour to convince him of scientific anti-realism, finally informed me that I simply differed in values than he. My great pains to explain boring concepts in the philosophy of science like the Quine-Duhem thesis were simply irrelevant to someone who saw the virtues of science as fundamental to their ethical framework, and the realist picture of science was embedded within it.

It comes from my relationship struggles. We all have gotten into fights with our significant others as we butt heads on seemingly meaningless issues. It's an issue that an outsider would tell you to just “move on” from. Yet, both you and your partner know this isn't possible: at the root of this fight about leaving the toilet seat up or being friends with someone you don't like is a conflict of values. A relationship necessitates an agreement on values.

This is not to say that you must share identical values; rather, you must learn to abandon certain values for the sake of your partner (or vice-versa) or must find a commensurable compromise.

All these cases leads me to the fundamental truth of all human discourse: our truths, our interpretations, our standards, and all else, are value-driven.

There is no one statement that exists that all may hold regardless of values.

Normativity, the nature of our values, are the bonds that link together our descriptive world.

It's awfully flowery, but that's because there is no concise, non-vague way to put it. Perhaps that's because the very notions of conciseness and vagueness are value-driven.

What are you arguing for?

I am arguing for the case that everything is fundamentally ethical (in the loosest sense of the word).

[This is not as controversial as it may seem, as will be explained soon.]

How do we manifest our truths? How do we manifest meaning? Through action.

To understand what you are saying, to know what it is you deem to be true, I must interpret your actions.

You had a reason to say the words you said, and you had a reason to say the words in the way you said them. The lingustic phenomena of sentence utterances is driven by a human being's intentional states. What does this mean? It means that whenever I aim to say something, I do it for some reason. In those cases where we utter things unknowingly or 'unintentionally', this is simply a manifestation of your ego utilizing the underlying truth-meaning structure that your mind has come to gain through experience.

If all language is action-driven and tied to intention (conscious or unconsciously manifested), then we can (and do!) always ask why?

Why did you say this particular thing on this particular occassion? Why should I believe that what you are saying is at least roughly analogous to my interpretation of what you are saying?

Because to do otherwise is to abandon communication and the fundamental bearer of truth and meaning. Life can have no meaning without language.

We must acknowledge the harsh truth of Quine: we can never know that another person will ever unferstand what we mean. I can never know that the person I'm speaking to is actually capable of grasping the things I'm attempting to tell them.

When I was a kid my general anxiety disorder (in conjunction with my autism) would lead me to have incredible separation anxiety from my parents. One day I was on a walk with my dad when I suddenly began wondering if my dad was really my dad and not just a replacement robot of him. This worry was actually less worrisome than some other worries I had like a tornado killing my parents whenever the sky turned grey, or my parents dying from applying expired sunscreen.

I've come to the conclusion that this is a meaningless worry, because regardless of the nature of the human mind (or of other minds), our entire world has been constructed around our belief in other minds. If I truly found out tomorrow that no one but me had consciousness, I doubt I'd care much: nothing fundamentally changes as I'm the only subject that is capable of manifesting a change in reality upon the world. I get to choose whether that bothers me--of course, it might bother you from an existential perspective.

I think there's a far greater, more legitimate worry to have: that every attempt at communication with someone else is actually failed communication. This might strike you as immediately absurd, so let me give you an example.

I say to my friend, “Would you like to come to my wedding?” They say, “Yes, I'd like that!” This seems like an instance of successful communication until you reflect on the possibility that, from your friend's point of view the word “Yes” actually means “No” in our own language.

This might strike you as ridiculous and garnering an easy response: “If their “yes” meant no, then they wouldn't attend the wedding!” Perhaps.

But maybe the attendance of the wedding is actually a communication of their disdain for you. They have realized they don't want you to attend your wedding, so they go to spite you.

You may reply, “well, if this is so, why did they act so kind to me, smiling and such?” Perhaps a smile in their language is the cruelest act one can perform, and so this person internally lives in a world of agony and despair where everyone hates everyone (except, perhaps, the most miserable in our language!”).

There is the ever-present possibility that all communication fails. We cannot retreat to a restricted 'descriptive' world to provide a solution to this difficulty. We find ourselves face-to-face with the normative.

The Davidsonian Solution

Following Quine, Davidson largely (with some caveats!) accepted the problem of translation. As a result, he posited a necessary requirement on all rational agents: the principle of charity.

Put roughly: at all times in our conversations with interlocutors, we ought to constantly think that the interlocutor's beliefs are, for the most part, true. This is not a descriptive claim being made--Davidson acknowledges complete skepticism is always possible. Yet, he argues, if we want to actually communicate with people, we must apply a set of normative principles to each other.

This applies most clearly in the case of radical translation. Like Quine, Davidson believes that when one is interpreting a foreign (“jungle”) language, one must always obey specific rules. One such rule is that when faced the possibility your interlocutor is speaking in logical contradictions, one must always instead change the translation, rather than ascribe to them inconsistent beliefs. Otherwise, there would be no possibility of understanding or communication between the two interlocutors.

This 'principle of charity’ is not bullet-proof: there are a variety of objections to be made that, I think, are quite convincing. Yet, as with most arguments I put forth, it is the spirit that counts.

Further, the problem of translatability or even incommensurability is often thought to be solved by a later work by Davidson (“On the very idea of a conceptual scheme”), and this is, I think, quite compelling in its own right (though there are many detractors).

Davidson revealed (or attempted to reveal) the normativity of meaning and belief.

It might be thought that this be can be confined to these two domains; everything else can stay descriptive. Not so.

Davidson's attempted unification of action, meaning, and decision theory argued that even the most 'descriptive' domains like the sciences are clearly tainted by normative principles.

When engaging with decision theory, or a series of gambles that underwriters the major theories of probability theory, one must have a theory of meaning.

The Dutch Book argument that aimed to secure the necessary probability calculus of an agent's degrees of beliefs implicitly relies on an agent's ability to meaningfully interpret wagers presented to them. If an agent has no theory of meaning, probability theory cannot get off the ground (at least in its most popular forms).

Carnapian Normativity

Carnap's famous notion of 'internal' and 'external questions’ regarding frameworks equally requires normativity. In fact, one could very well argue the entire system is pragmatic in nature. When faced with problems of ontology, Carnap argued that one need only determine which linguistic framework one is operating within. If the system is one of peano arithmetic, then questions of whether a function exists at a certain time is made relative to that framework. When determining whether a chair exists in our external world framework, we need merely ask if it has a spatio-temporal location. To go beyond this, to go into metaphysics, is to ask largely meaningless metaphysical questions.

If we accept this account (which I certainly would not), then we need some given determinate system for evaluating which linguistic framework is best suited for our purposes. That is, we need a framework to determine which framework is suitable to such and such context. To avoid an infinite regress, one must necessarily posit a categorical framework that pervades over all systems, and this must obviously be a normative consideration. We cannot pretend and say it exists descriptively, for this is to already beg the question; rather, we posit a normative system we impose on all rational agents in order to engage in all questions.

It is for similar reasons that the late Carnap is often called a pragmatist.

The Necessary Normativity of Science

With science, the possible avenues to prove this thesis are endless. One could turn to Kuhnian paradigm-models. One could turn to the Bloor strong programme. One could turn to Latour. To Laudan. To Feyerabend. Instead, I'll turn to a more familiar source of scientific debate: the difference between science and pseudo-science, also known as the problem of demarcation.

Common to all considered demarcation criteria is the fact that scientists and philosophers of science reject them on the basis that they do not match the descriptive enterprise of science itself. They are rejected on a descriptive basis, arguing that this does not meet the current perceptions of what scientists and philosophers of science deem to be ‘scientific’. There is an implicit tension underlying this sentiment: that between a descriptive conception of ‘scientificness’ and a normative conception of ‘scientificness’. However, this will be temporarily set aside to consider what this reaction from scientists to these various criteria means. For one thing, it means that it is factually incorrect, as Popper seemed to posit, to describe the entire enterprise of science as following one methodological set of principles known as the ‘scientific method.’

These cases of vehement disagreement should lead us to the conclusion that science is not unified in any real sense of the word; rather, it is incredibly disunified both across history and within individual sub-fields. This seems to lead one to the conclusion that there is no ‘transcendental’ way to analyse the concept of ‘scientificness’; instead, it appears to be defined at the whims of scientists across history and within their individual research programmes. The scientific method ‘works’ insofar as it seems to conform to the normative standards of scientists and philosophers of science during the respective time period. As an example, in “Objectivity, Value Judgement, and Theory Choice,” Kuhn proposes five criteria that should be utilized in choosing one theory over another: accuracy, fruitfulness, simplicity, consistent, and broad in scope.

It should be noted that he does not use this as a demarcation criteria. However. it allows one to see the issue with selecting these types of criteria: they are too vague, and it is not clear exactly how we explicate the concepts themselves. How are we to determine the simplicity of one theory over another? Is astrology more simple than modern physics because it has less theoretical entities? Or maybe it is less simple because it posits laws that defy scientific intuition? It seems that the interpretations of these five criteria will themselves be subject to the same conventions that are being searched after, so they bring one no closer. Specific criteria are needed so that they can be adequately utilized to select between competing theories and fields without being subject to an individual’s own subjective interpretation of, admittedly, vague concepts.

Does this line of reasoning entail that there is no one correct criterion for scientific demarcation? Yes. Yet, more interestingly, it does not rule out the possibility of the existence of multiple sufficient conditions to fall under the concept of ‘scientificness’. As such, it may be that there are multiple possible sufficient conditions for ‘scientificness’, and that no field or theory need satisfy all of them. This would enable scientists and other academics to properly label those fields that meet their standards as ‘scientific’, while those that do not as ‘unscientific’ without fear that they are either including or excluding too many fields. The primary problem then becomes which conditions should be ruled scientific?

The Connection to Politics

Understandably you might be confused: why are you discussing linguistic phenomena, probability theory, theories of scientific demarcation, etc.? I thought you were here to prove that politics necessitates ethics!

The reason it is relevant is because it's incredibly easy to show that there are necessary underlying values that underpin politics, and that it is this ethical in nature.

Merely look at political discourse: it is full of “we ought to do this” and “we should do that!” This is an easy thing to prove, and nearly everyone I've ever discussed this with have acknowledged the legitimacy of this.

They accept that politics has an ethical component. Yet, this is an issue, because many of these political commentators will then try to skirt the issue by attempting to merely confine themselves to descriptive claims, by arguing that a lot of the time they are merely presenting historical evidence of scientific studies that support this or that conclusion. So, they conclude, I don't need any theory of ethics to do that.

I hope it's now clear why I spent so much time showing the fundamental nature of normativity in these types of discourses.

Nothing is free of normativity or values. When someone like Destiny brings up a study about trans people, he necessarily makes a value-laden claim. Facts are value-tainted. Facts are normative. The distinction between 'descriptive' and 'normative' comes only after you've acknowledged that such a distinction rests already on a normative component. (I should note, however, that it's possible their is an a priori foundation that cannot be correctly characterized as normative).

The Harsh Truth. The Unpalatable Truth.

Here's the rub. Everything needs to be justified all the way down as you grow in influence. You must occupy yourself with ethics and perhaps even meta-ethics.

This is a stronger claim than I've ever made before, but I won't hide from it despite how much emotionally I hate to see it.

The objection goes: “if you require this of our political commentators, then you give ammunition to the far-right, since the far-right won't do this.”

To this I ask: “And?”

This is not an argument. And, if it is an argument, it is circular in the most vicious way possible.

Already you've refused to engage with the argument. You have shut your eyes and ears to the truth because you don't want to give up your emotional investment in a position you don't know how to justify. You have already engaged irrationally in the discussion.

It's as radical as it sounds, and pointing out the radical nature of it isn't doing anything, it's just sidestepping the force of the argument.

In this argument no one likes me. No one's value system is going to be conducive to what I'm suggesting. It's because what I ask of people is to engage towards truth rather than feeling (haha). The left will hate it because it asks them to think seriously about how they can justify anything that they say beyond their feelings.

They constantly attack the right by saying they are not thinking critically. This is true: the right definitely thinks less critically than the left. But the real question is: does the left think critically enough?

Their inability to justify their positions shows they don't. In this, they are morally deviant under any system they would like to hold to.

In this I call out every major Twitch (and I suppose YouTuber) who has never bothered to open a book to justify their positions in their life. In this I call them morally deviant and ethically bunk. This isn't a truth I can hide from, and it's a genuine truth I think ought to be shared.

I don't hate most of these people, and I consider many of them friends; however, when we ask seriously after the truth and the good, none can get much further than their political opposition.

For the left to be better, you must engage in this project to be true and good. To object on the basis that you won't like the outcomes is to already beg the question and admit you can't think critically. What one ought to do is either engage with the points I make internally wjthout reference to the consequences of following through on this project (which means engaging philosophically), or you must acknowledge the truth of what I say.

If you can't tell by now, I've taken great inspiration of William Clifford's paper “The Ethics of Belief” and William James' “The Will to Believe.” These are two articles that discuss exactly the problems I raise, but I take it further.

I am very open to being shown why this is wrong, and, in fact, I would implore people to show me why it's wrong. I want the left to win, but I don't think it can unless it does this.

This post has been purposefully designed to be proactive and is written in a preachy tone (to mimic Clifford, as it's tongue-in-cheek). I hope this prompts discussion and I hope being take the time seriously consider these things.

I end this with a quote from Clifford to persuade suade many objectors:

Are we then to become universal sceptics, doubting everything, afraid always to put one foot before the other until we have personally tested the firmness of the road? Are we to deprive ourselves of the help and guidance of that vast body of knowledge which is daily growing upon the world, because neither we nor any other one person can possibly test a hundredth part of it by immediate experiment or observation, and because it would not be completely proved if we did? Shall we steal and tell lies because we have had no personal experience wide enough to justify the belief that it is wrong to do so? There is no practical danger that such consequences will ever follow from scrupulous care and self-control in the matter of belief. Those men who have most nearly done their duty in this respect have found that certain great principles, and these most fitted for the guidance of life, have stood out more and more clearly in proportion to the care and honesty with which they were tested, and have acquired in this way a practical certainty. The beliefs about right and wrong which guide our actions in dealing with men in society, and the beliefs about physical nature which guide our actions in dealing with animate and inanimate bodies, these never suffer from investigation; they can take care of themselves, without being propped up by 'acts of faith,' the clamour of paid advocates, or the suppression of contrary evidence. Moreover there are many cases in which it is our duty to act upon probabilities, although the evidence is not such as to justify present belief; because it is precisely by such action, and by observation of its fruits, that evidence is got which may justify future belief. So that we have no reason to fear lest a habit of conscientious inquiry should paralyse the actions of our daily life.

[The quote here may seem to go against my thesis: and it does. Yet, I don't view this quote as an argument (for none is really given), but instead as a source of comfort for a very scary conclusion.]