Friday, February 11, 2011

Living Subjectivism

Yesterday, I wrote about the importance to religious believers of arguing from personal experience. Peter Kreeft's "Twenty Arguments For the Existence of God" has several arguments which hinge on appealing to our perceptions of the world in order to prove that God exists. One, the Argument From Degrees Of Perfection, goes so far as to conclude that there must be an objective facts about value judgments, and one of those objective facts is God's existence.

The argument goes something like this: We notice that things vary in their characteristics, and those variations can be thought of as falling along points on a continuous spectrum. We often make value judgments about a thing based on its position on the spectrum for one of its characteristics. And we can extrapolate from those judgment-making behaviors that there is a fact of the matter at which we're trying to arrive.

This isn't entirely unreasonable. There often is a fact of the matter about whether our perceptions reflect reality, so the assumption that there could be a fact of the matter about our value judgments isn't totally unjustified. Anyone who has ever had a passionate argument about music, art, food, etc. should be able to grasp the reasoning here. If we don't, at some level, think that our judgments are right, what's the point of such arguments?

But that we behave as if there's a fact of the matter doesn't guarantee that there is, and the rest of the argument should make that clear. It continues, and here one can't help but think of the ontological argument, that we also make value judgments about beings. And if there is a fact of the matter about those value judgments, that means that there must be an objective standard against which they are being made--in other words, there must be at least one perfect being. That perfect being is God.

You may want to counter that the argument goes off the rails here--that nothing as grandiose as a perfect being is needed to explain why we value people who treat us well over people who treat us poorly. Kreeft responds that this is further proof of his point, for if there were no fact of the matter, if all value judgments were subjective, we would feel no compulsion to argue. "You can speak subjectivism," he says, "but you cannot live it."

That reply presents a false dichotomy, though. We "live subjectivism" all the time. We might argue about our tastes, and really want to convince others that they should share our tastes. But that doesn't require an objective truth, or at least not an objective truth about value. I might argue that you should appreciate my favorite band because I want you to support them by buying their albums. I also might just like a good argument.

This argument has the same problem that I pointed out about apophatic theology in  an earlier post; to the extent that it sounds good at all, it only sounds that way as long as you're talking about the right things. Point to an area of easy consensus, like whether it's better to be loved or not, and nobody's going to complain too much if you conclude that, yes, it's really better to be loved than not.

The problem comes when you start trying to "live objectivism" about less high-minded topics. For example, if I like cold beer and you like warm beer, we couldn't put it down to different tastes. One of us must have the wrong tastes. The same goes for any value judgment you can think of. The Beatles or The Rolling Stones; chocolate or vanilla; cats or dogs; Halo or Call of Duty. If you can't live subjectivism, then there's an objective fact of the matter in every case. Does anyone actually believe that?

Of course my incredulity doesn't prove anything. Kreeft could always just bite the bullet and say that, yes, absurd as it may seem, there really is a right answer to every question of value, no matter how trivial. But again, consider the consequences of that. Not only would there be a fact about whether warm beer is better than cold beer; there would be a fact about whether a 51.02309340923475 degrees Fahrenheit glass of beer is better than a 51.02309340923474 degrees Fahrenheit glass of beer. Don't even think about saying that there could be a range of right answers dependent upon the ability of beer tasters to actually detect differences. That would be living subjectivism.

That we value some things more than others proves only that we do, in fact, value some things more than others. It doesn't prove that some of our values are right and others wrong, and it certainly doesn't prove that a perfect being exists somewhere out there to validate some of our values and invalidate others.

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