Pun Salad

[Playing catchup with my neglected book and movie blogging today.]

Last month I noticed that Econlog's Bryan Caplan called Michael Huemer his "favorite living philosopher." That's good enough for me! So I checked out Ethical Intuitionism from the library at the University Near Here, and read it in tiny doses over the loan period.

It's a serious philosophical work by an actual professional philosopher, so when I say I "read" it, what I mean is: I looked at just about every page, honest. Although Huemer is a very good writer, his argument is aimed at his peers, and it's about a topic that's been discussed for centuries. When he responds to the views of others in the field, it's like coming in late to a deep multi-person conversation, where you can only hear one guy, and you're not that familiar with the jargon. But that's the nature of this sort of work.

Huemer's project is to explain and defend an objective ethics based on values that are directly perceived by rational intuition. This is (then) a theory of metaethics; other competing metaethical theories are non-cognitivism, subjectivism, reductionism, nihilism, and naturalism. Huemer criticizes each of these alternate approaches. He then lays out his careful argument for intutionism, considering and rebutting the various objections raised by others.

I was won over! But I'm typically persuaded by any plausible philosophical argument, as long as it's not self-evidently superficial. (But to the extent that I've thought about ethics at all in the past, I've found myself coming down in the same general area as Huemer.)

I find myself distrusting natural language, with all its fuzziness and ambiguity, as being an appropriate tool for philosophical discussion. For example, one of Huemer's refutations detects a fallacy based on his opponent glossing over different ways words can be "misused". Huemer is convincing, but—as far as I know—there could be equivalent fallacies here. I'd never notice.

Michael Huemer's personal web page is here. It contains some good jokes, good advice, and some scary quotes from the Bible.