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倫理學 -- 開欄文
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瀏覽9,538 ｜回應35｜推薦3 |
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我讀書的興趣和思考的重點在試圖回答：如何「做人」和如何「待人」這兩個問題。我涉獵文學、哲學、心理學、政治學、社會學、認知科學、文化研究等領域，動機都來自試圖回答以上兩個問題。
二十多年來，我在討論不同議題的文章中，依脈絡表達了我對「道德」的看法(我偏向使用「社會規範」這個概念)。今後我將把和它相關的文章集中發表在本欄。
本欄第2篇文章是2002年舊作。該文討論一個案例；同時，它在批評另一位先生大作的過程中，釐清了一些相關概念與盲點；可以做為討論和思考「道德」或「社會規範」的基礎。所以重刊於此。
本文於 修改第 3 次
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淺談「理性」：《「理性」三重奏》補充
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** 我在2007年曾發表過《淺談「理性」》一文(該欄開欄文)，現在轉貼於此；做為本欄上一篇《「理性」三重奏》的補充說明。
此外，在拙作《「啟蒙」和「啟蒙運動」不是「同義詞」》一文中(該欄2007/05/28)，我對本欄上一篇道璀先生所提及康德大作《「啟蒙」一詞的意義》做了討論；也請參考。
淺談「理性」
0. 前言
0.1 兩種「理性」
我常常使用到「理性」這個概念。網友Dr. Boris Chang曾就此概念賜教(Chang 2006：留言︰#129、130、131、135、和141)，我和他就理性一詞的意義做了一些對談(胡卜凱2006：留言︰#132、133、134、136、和137)。我借這個機會把自己對理性的了解或「用法」做一個比較詳細的說明。歡迎指教和討論。
首先我所用的「理性」不同於哲學中的「理性」一詞的「用法」(1)。
哲學中的「理性」：
「1. 智力。將(事件、事物等)一般化，了解來龍去脈，看出相關性，深思反省，比較同、異等等的能力。2. 推理能力(2)。」
哲學中的「理性論」或「理性主義」：
「一般而言，理性論指認為理性是(人類)知識主要來源的看法。(理性論者)認為(在取得知識過程中)理性先於，高於，和獨立於感官知覺(3)。」
心理分析學中的「合理化」一詞，請看第4.3節 – a中關於「找藉口」的說明。但是在心理分析治療過程中，「合理化」的概念有相當廣泛和複雜的功能，其作用並不限於「找藉口」。這一部分請參考(Horney 1966︰28 - 30頁)。
由於這些術語和相關的(哲學中)「理性論者」過於專門，本文將不討論這些概念。基本上，(哲學中)「理性論者」所說的「理性」這個概念，指人生來就有的一種官能。我所用的「理性」一詞，指人通過經驗而取得或學習到的一種能力。請見以下第1、2兩節的討論。
0.2 我的基本假設
唯物論和經驗論是我接受的許多基本假設中的兩個。我對前者的詮釋請見(胡卜凱2002)。認識論中的「經驗論」：
「1. 所有的觀念來自組織(集合、重組)過去的經驗(觀察到的，直接呈現於感官和感覺的)，並將它們抽象化；2. 經驗是知識的唯一來源；… (4)。」
我正試圖綜合社會建構論和大腦神經網路連接論的說法，來建立一個「唯物人文觀」的論述(胡卜凱2006︰留言#132，第1.2節)。「唯物人文觀」的理論基礎之一，可以用Feldman教授的一段話來說明︰
「思想是有一定條理的神經活動。我們的語言和我們的思想及經驗緊密連結在一起，無法分開。… 我們所有的思想和語言都來自我們的生理結構和經驗(5)。」
這些看法是我了解「理性」這個概念的思想淵源。
0.3 本文結構
a. 第一節討論「理性」一詞的各種用法；
b. 第二節討論社會科學和日常生活語言中，(我所了解的)「理性」一詞中「理」的兩種「意義」或「用法」(5)；
c. 第三節討論我就「理性」所下的定義；
d. 第四節討論和「理性」一詞相關的其他概念；
e. 第五節建議如何批駁我在本文中對「理性」一詞所採取的觀點；
f. 第六節中，我摘譯八段西方學者對「理性」的詮釋，補充我的論述。
1. 「理性」一詞的用法
1.1 「理性」一詞的各種用法
「理性」一詞在中、英文裏都有很多「意思」相近的衍生詞，人們用它們來表達和「理性」相近的一些概念或觀念，例如︰
a. 「理性的」、「合理的」、「講理的」、「有道理的」、「說得通的」、或「務實的」，
b. 「理由」或「判斷依據」，
c. 「『合理』的性質(條件)」，
d. 「推理」，和
e. 「推理能力」
等等以及其他類似的「用法」。以上「『合理』的性質(條件)」︰
一個行動需要或具有這些性質(條件)，才能用「合理的」這個形容詞來描述。
1.2 實質理性和功能理性
Mannheim將社會學中「理性」一詞的意義歸納成兩種，「實質理性」和「功能理性」：
「社會學家在使用『理性』和『不理性』一詞時，有兩種不同的意義：我稱它們為『實質上』和『功能上』理性的或非理性的。『實質上理性的』指在某一個情況下，能睿智的了解到各事件內在關係的思考行為。因此，我以『實質上理性的』來形容睿智思考本身：其他的(思考)行為如錯誤的推理，或非思考行為(例如無論有意識或下意識的欲求、衝動、希冀、和感受等等，我稱為『實質上非理性的』。
另一方面，在社會學和日常生活語言中，我們也用到『理性』的第二個「意義」，例如：這個或那個企業或政府機構已完成『合理化』的過程。…。這一個『合理化』的意思指：為了達到一個預定目標所展開的一序列行動。在這一序列行動中的每一個環節，都有它被預定的功能和角色。更重要的是，當我們能協調規劃這一序列行動，依預定目標，採取最有效的方法來完成這些行動時，『合理化』會發揮它最大的威力。(這就是我所說的『功能上理性的』) (6)。」
1.3 「行動理性」(「工具理性」、「效益理性」)
在當下社會科學和哲學論述中，韋伯的「行動理性」經常被引用。以下是對他這個概念的詮釋之一︰
「行動理性是現代性和資本主義的通性，其特徵是用最有效的方式來達到一個(預定的)目的(7)。」
我認為「行動理性」和「功能理性」是相通的兩個概念。
2. 「理」字的兩種「所指」
在上面各種用法中，「『理』性」、「合「『理』」、和「推「『理』」等詞中的「理」這個「指號」，有兩種「所指」︰
a. 由現實情況(或稱「外在環境」)歸納出來的經驗法則。
b. 在某個社會中，多數人接受或遵從某些約定俗成的「習慣」(規範)或「規則」。
2.1 來自現實情況的「理」
「理性」一詞中「理」字的第一類概念來自現實情況。它相當於日常生活語言中的「務實」。中國古人稱這種處事的方式為「實事求是」；相當於上述曼罕的「功能理性」或韋伯的「行動理性」。這類「理」是人類根據過去某些一再重複或屢試不爽的「經驗」所累積的「法則」。也就是說：
在某種情況下，那種行為模式成功(達到目標或目的)的或然率最大。
所以這類「理」相當於俗話說的「經驗法則」。
以上的「經驗」一詞：
「…，(它)不只指個人經驗，也包括他人經驗(書籍、教育、交往等等)和集體經驗(文化、學問等等)。」(胡卜凱2006︰留言#133)
這是社會科學中「經驗」一詞的通行用法。
此外，「經驗」這個概念本身蘊含它是一個人經歷過某些「現實情況」才得到的記憶或教訓。「現實情況」有兩個部分，「自然環境」和「社會環境」。在本文中，視上、下文的脈絡，「社會」和「文化」兩字有時是同義詞。
a. 「自然環境」並不受「文化」或「社會」因素的「制約」或影響。因此，通過「自然環境」部分而得的「經驗法則」，沒有特別的「文化性」或「社會性」。這是何以不論東、西社會，在大多數情況下，從「現實情況」而來的「理」或「經驗法則」，都有一些「客觀」的判準。例如：一個人為了「失戀」或「輸掉奧運金牌」而自殺；花個500到1,000萬台幣減肥等等，大概都在「非理性」行為之列。至於不要玩火，不要抽煙，不要沉迷於賭博之類也是同一類型的「理性」。因為不論在那個社會，這些行為(自殺、玩火、抽煙、賭博)都會對個人身體或財務帶來具體的負面後果。
b. 「社會環境」則是文化和歷史所建構的環境。歷史在此指有人類以來的活動經過及文字記錄。「社會環境」就是人類意識創造的環境。從這一部分得到的「經驗法則」，雖然也具有「現實性」，但它們受到過去「文化」或「社會」因素的「制約」或影響。也就會或需要被詮釋。
「意識」一詞在這裏完全沒有任何先天或神秘的意涵。(對我來說)它純粹是人類神經系統和外在環境互動的結果。
「社會」一詞在此不但指一個社會當下所面對的種種因素，也包括：一個社會所在地成員的文化和歷史因素，以及和此社會互動的其他社會(成員所建立)的文化和歷史因素。
「主觀性」指個人獨特的經驗。「獨特」除了指一個人的家庭和經歷這些個人因素外，也包括他/她由基因而來的生理結構(包括大腦神經系統的結構及各種神經傳導質)。後者使我們每一個人在相同的外在環境中，有他/她「獨特」的「刺激 -- 反應」模式(8)。我以此解釋何以每個人有其「主觀性」，即個別的「感受」或「主觀性質」。請參考第4.1節「人際相通性」的討論。
用一般語言來說，「社會環境」有其「主觀性」。
2.2 約定俗成的「理」
「理性」一詞中「理」字的第二類概念來自社會和文化，相當於「道理」，它包括：
天理、人情、世故、道德、習俗、和規則等。
這類「道理」是「約定俗成」的「理」，也就是「社會『建構(制約)』」和/或「文化『建構(制約)』」的「理」。換句話說，它們的來源或背景是文化傳統和「社會環境」。因此，它們具有個別的「文化性」或「社會性」。以這類「理」為準則的思考中，被某一個社會成員視為「理性」的行為，在某些情況下，未必被另一個社會的成員視為「理性」。反之亦然。「約定俗成」的「理」通常具有「主觀性」。例如︰
古代中國和日本的將領或武士，有「死節」的行為模式或規範。打仗常常要「戰至最後一兵一卒。」敗軍之將有時也以自殺或切腹來表示負責或擔當；或對自己沒有達到預定目標的自我懲罰。
西方軍事傳統中，在兩軍對峙的情況下，一旦一方認為大勢已去，其統帥就和對方協議「不受屈辱的投降」(9)。在西方社會中，達成這種方式的「投降」來避免無謂(「非理性」)的傷亡，才是一個將領「負責任」和「有擔當」的行為。
3. 「理性」的定義
在我接受的基本假設下(第0節)，加上我對「理」這個概念的詮釋(本文第2節)，(我認為)自然就得到我對「理性」這個概念的定義︰
「使用過去經驗來選擇和規劃當下或未來行動的能力。」(胡卜凱2006︰開欄文，4.3 – 2)節)
我相信在我的前提下，我對「理性」的定義是說得通的，而且這個定義有其實際應用。
這個「理性」的定義和「目的」(「目標」)以及「資源」這兩個概念有相當密切或內在的關係。「行動」的定義是：有「目的」的行為；試圖達到「目的」一定需要使用「資源」；「理性」的功能或使用「理性」的動機，在「有效」的達到這個「行動」的「目的」。
所以，沒有「目的」的行為未必需要使用「理性」。而在不需要講究「有效」的情況下，例如一個擁有無限「資源」的行動者，或只有當下這個(而再沒有其他)「目的」的行動者(如決定自殺的人)，也未必需要使用「理性」(胡卜凱2006：留言#159)。
4. 和理性相關的概念
4.1 「人際相通性」
「人際相通性」指：人能了解彼此的意圖、需求、思想、行為等等。
這個概念有兩個基礎：
a. 人類面對的是近似的「自然環境」，因而受到類似的「刺激」；同時，人類具有同樣或近似的生物性，並由98%相同的DNA組合構成；所以，人類在類似的「刺激」下，也會產生類似的「反應」。因而人類的「經驗」是類似的。
b. 「文化」必定在「現實環境」中建立。因為地理環境和歷史發展的差異，不同地區人類的「社會環境」具有不同的型態，但是由於上述「刺激」 -- 「反應」過程具有相同或高度近似的基礎(「自然環境」和DNA)，則「反應」模式的結構自然也有相當的雷同性。因而人類會建立類似的「制度」。「制度」一詞在此是用它最廣泛的意思，也就是指「文化」。
4.2 「客觀」
在我的論述裏，「客觀」一詞用來描述：
當一個判斷過程，或認知、思考活動，至少具備了「現實性」、「合規則性」、和「人際相通性」這三種性質之一。
第2.1節中提到的「天理、人情、世故、道德、習俗、和規則」等等，是人們在幾萬年到幾十萬年的生活過程中逐漸建立的。這個生活過程是「文化演化」的過程，也是人和自然環境奮鬥、在社會制度中掙扎和發展的過程(「刺激」 -- 「反應」模式)。
綜合以上的說法，約定俗成的「道理」和從「社會環境」而來的「經驗法則」，雖然有強烈的「文化」色彩或個別社會的烙印，但基本上它們都具有某種程度的「現實性」和「人際相通性」。上面已提到，由「自然環境」而來的「理」或「經驗法則」自然而然的具有「現實性」。
這是一般人通常把「理性」和「客觀」當做同義詞使用或將兩詞連用的原因。
4.3 「合理化」
和以上兩類「理」的概念相關的行為有「合理化」。「合理化」有兩個不同的意思：
a. 它相當於日常生活語言中的「找藉口」。它蘊含的意思是︰
一個人為了修飾一個不合天理、人情、世故、道德、習俗、或規則等的行為；不面對現實情況的行為；或違反經驗法則的行為，而舉出一些「理由」(「藉口」)來說明行為者的動機，以取得別人的認可、同情、或支持等。
b. 「合理化」的第二個意思已在以上第1.2節討論Mannheim的功能理性時說明。它指：使得一個制度或組織有效達成其預設目標的行動。我建議用「理性化」來指示這種用法，以免和第一個用法混淆。
5. 相對主義和批駁策略
凡是不接受經驗論、社會建構論、「唯物人文觀」、或以上我所了解的「理性」一詞所指的人，不需要，也很可能不會同意我對「理性」的定義和詮釋。由於我也接受「相對主義」，所以任何根據其他理論做為「前提」而導出的，關於「理性」這個概念的定義，只要能言之成理，即使我未必接受這個或那個「理性」(定義)的內容，我都需要接受它們是「成立」的定義。
由於對「理性」一詞的共識是進行公共論述和執行公共行動的基礎，我歡迎其他人提出自己對「理性」的定義或詮釋，講出一套支持這個定義或詮釋的說法，大家一起切磋琢磨。
如果有人試圖批駁我對「理性」定義，我建議她/他可以從四方面切入︰
a. 指出唯物論、經驗論、社會建構論、「唯物人文觀」、或以上對「理性」的詮釋「不成立」的理由；
b. 指出我的定義不能從a項中的五個論述推出；
c. 指出我的定義和a項中的任何一個論述自相矛盾。
d. 指出我的定義和多數人對「理性」的認知不合。
由於我不接受(目前)有絕對真理或標準的說法，我認為︰
根據我「基本假設」之外的前提來批駁我對「理性」定義的論述，是「不相關」的「批駁」行動。也就是一個「無效」或「不成立」的「批駁」行動。它只能建立一個和我的定義並行，或具有同等「真值」的定義。這個觀點是黑格爾「內部批判」概念的應用(本欄留言#18︰0.2 - 1)節；Stern 2004︰41頁；Rosen 1985︰26 - 30頁)。「真值」指符合既定規則而得到的陳述所具有的性質。
6. 附錄 -- 西方學者對「理性」的詮釋
以下摘譯八位西方哲學家和社會科學家對「理性」的詮釋或觀點，來補充我以上的說明。(雙引號及英文引號都根據原文所用。)
a. 「綜上所述，柯氏認為歷史有四個基本的特性：第一，『歷史是科學的，也就是說，…』；第二，『歷史是人文的，也就是說，…』；第三，『歷史是合理的，也就是說，歷史對歷史問題所提供的答案是基於證據而來』；最後，『…』(10)。」
b. 「在本書中，我將使用韋伯研究新教教義與資本主義關係時，所使用的行動目的論，做為解釋個人層次行動的理論。這一個理論也是大多數社會科學學者，和一般人在使用通俗心理學來詮釋自己和他人的行為時的理論。… 我們說自己了解別人行動的”理由”，相當於說我們了解此人試圖達到的目的，以及何以這位行動者認為其行動能幫助他/她達到這個目的。… (要達到此目的)我將用經濟學中的「理性」概念。這個「理性」概念是經濟學理論中理性選擇者的基礎。其基本想法是行動者認為不同的行動(或物品)對他/她來說，有某些特殊的利得。同時，(此理論)也接受行動者將選擇能達到利得最大化作為這個原則(11)。」
c. 「在Habermas的想法中，理性並不在一個人擁有某些知識，而在此人”如何取得及使用這些知識”(12)。」
d. 「傳統上學者一向把理性分成兩種：『實踐理性』和『理論理性』。實踐理性考慮我們應該做什麼；理論理性考慮我們應該相信什麼(13)。」
e. 「在休姆的思考中，理性只能決定(行動)方式的選擇，它不能決定如何排定兩個不同目的之間的優先順位；在蘇格拉底的思考中，理性也能夠決定如何排定兩個不同目的之間的優先順位(14)。」
f. 「理性選擇論被如此命名的原因是：其基本假設在認為一個人會理性的選擇行動方式，來達到他/她所希望達到的目標(15)。」
g. 「穆勒認為政治經濟學的主題是：它只考慮人唯一的目的在擁有財富，而且一個人有能力判斷這個目的對自己的效用(16)。」
h. 「(理性選擇論者)以一個社會制度對整個社會來說的合理性和功能性，來解釋它何以被建立和可能繼續存在。但他/她們並沒有去考慮個人所做的理性選擇對社會制度可能有的影響(17)。」(此段批判理性選擇論者沒有對個人的「理性選擇」做充分的考慮。)
附註：
1. 請參考Frege對「意思」和「意義」(「用法」)的區分(Frege 1960：57 - 61頁)。
2. 1. The intellect. The capacity to abstract, comprehend, relate, reflect, notices the similarities and differences, etc. 2. The ability to infer. (Angeles 1981：238頁)。Angeles教授然後列舉了13個和reason相關的哲學術語。
3. In general, the philosophic approach which emphasizes reason as the primary source of knowledge, prior or superior to, and independent of, sense perceptions. (Angeles 1981：236頁)。Angeles然後列舉了rationalism的10個要點。笛卡爾和萊布尼茲以後，康德和卻文斯基(或譯為杭斯基)兩位大概是最有名和最有影響力的理性論者。
4. 1. The view that all ideas are abstractions formed by compounding (combining, recombining) what is experienced (observed, immediately given in sensation). 2. Experience is the sole source of knowledge. 3. … (Angeles 1981：75頁)。洛克和休姆是經驗論的開山祖師。古典經驗論和理性論是同屬唯心論下的認識論學說。但近代或現代哲學中的經驗論，則建立在唯物論的假設之上。
5. ... Thought is structured neural activity. Language is inextricable from thought and experience. ... All of our thought and language arises from our genetic endowment and from our experience. (Feldman 2006：第3頁)。我所根據的其他學者著作，散見於我其他相關的文章。
6. Sociologists use the words “rational” and “irrational” in two senses, which we will call “substantial” and “functional” rationality or irrationality. ... We understand as substantially rational as an act of thought which reveals intelligent insight into the inter-relation of events in a given situation. Thus the intelligent act of thought itself will be described as “substantially rational”, whereas everything else which is either false or not an act of thought at all (as for example derives, impulses, wishes, and feelings, both conscious and unconscious) will be called as “substantially irrational”. But in sociology as well as in everyday language, we also use the word “rational” in still another sense when we say, for instance, that this or that industry or administration staff has been “rationalized”. ... but rather that a series of action is organized in such a way that it leads to a previously defined goal, every element in this series of actions receiving a functional position and role. ... a series of actions will, moreover, be at its best when, in order to attain the given goal, it coordinates the means most efficiently. (Mannheim, K. 1940, Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, Harcourt, Brace, and Co., NYC, quoted in Mills 1961：508 - 509頁)
7. the rationality typical of modernity and capitalism - is characterized by the most efficient use of means to reach an end. (Lindholm, Internet)。行動理性：instrumental rationality。
8. 我同意華生或史金勒的「行為主義」有過於偏執的地方。但我接受「行為論」的基本觀點：我們只能透過「可觀察到的行為」來了解人的性質、思想、意向、傾向、和活動等等。根據這個觀點，我也傾向於接受：凡是不能或不可能被「觀察到的」(人的)性質、思想、意向、傾向、和活動，大概沒有什麼被了解(研究)的價值。
9. 不受屈辱的投降︰honorable surrender。此詞在東方文化中不能譯為「光榮投降」或「榮譽投降」。
10. From this there emerges a view of history as having four essential characteristics; first,‘that it is scientific, or …’; secondly, ‘that it is humanistic, or …’; thirdly, ‘that it is rational, or bases answers which it gives to its questions on grounds making appeal to evidence’; and, finally, ‘…’. (Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History, 18頁, quoted in Ayer 1984：210頁) 。上文中以「基於證據」來詮釋「合理的」或「理性的」，就相當於本文第2節中對「理」的第一個詮釋 -- 現實情況的「理」。
11. The individual-level theory of action I will use in this book is the same purposive theory of action used in Weber’s study of Protestantism and capitalism. It is the theory of action used implicitly by most social theorists and by most people in the commonsense psychology that underlies their interpretation of their own and other’s actions. ... We say that we understand the “reasons” why the person acted in a certain way, implying that we understand the intended goal and how the actions were seen by the actor to contribute to the goal. ... For this I will use the conception of rationality employed in economics, the conception that forms the basis of rational actor in economic theory. This conception is based on the notion of different actions (or, in some cases, different goods) having a particular utility for the actor and is accompanied by a principle of action which can be expressed by saying that the actor chooses the action which will maximize utility. (Coleman 1994: 13 – 14 頁)
12. For Habermas, for example, rationality consists not so much in the possession of particular knowledge, but rather in “how speaking and acting subjects acquire and use knowledge”(Habermas 1984：11頁, quoted in Turner/Roth 2003：97頁).
13. Rationality is standardly divided into the practical and the theoretical. Practical rationality concerns what we should do ; theoretical rationality concerns what we should believe. (Turner/Roth 2003：110頁).
14. On a Humean account rationality determines only the means, and has nothing to say concerning the relative preference ranking of any two ends. On the Socratic account, rationality determines the preference ranking of the ends also. (Turner/Roth 2003：115頁).
15. Rational choice is so called because it is based on the assumption that human beings are rational in their choice of means to reach their preferred ends (see Elster 1986, interpreted in Turner/Roth 2003：143頁).
16. Mill suggests that political economy “is concerned with him [man] solely as a being who desires to possess wealth, and who is capable of judging of the comparative efficacy of that end.” (Mill 1950: 420頁, interpreted in Turner/Roth：144頁)
17. The emergence and survival of social institutions are explained in terms of their rationality, functionality for society, as a whole, but without an account of the rational choice of the individuals, … (Posner 1980: 第5頁, interpreted in Turner/Roth：160頁 n. 8)
參考書目及文章(我沒有直接引用的文獻，不列於此。)：
Angeles, P. A., 1981, Dictionary of Philosophy, Barnes and Noble Books, NYC
Ayer, A. J. 1984, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Vintage Books, NYC
Chang, B. 2006，《「文革」討論 -- 論述方式的分析和檢驗》，http://tb.chinatimes.com/forum1.asp?ArticleID=849041
Coleman, J. S. 1994, Foundations of Social Theory, The Belknap Press of Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. USA
Feldman, J. 2006, From Molecule to Metaphor, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA USA
Frege, G., 1960, Ed., Geach, P. /Black, M., On Sense and Reference, in the Translations from the Philosophical Writings of G. Frege, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, London
Lindholm, C. Internet, Charisma, Crowd Psychology and Altered States of Consciousness, http://www.bu.edu/anthrop/faculty/lindolm/ASCCnotes.html
Mills, C. W. 1961, Ed., Image of Man: The Classic Tradition in Sociological Thinking, George Braziller, Inc. NYC
Rosen, M. 1985, Hegel's Dialectic and Its Criticism, 雙葉書店，台北
Stern, R. 2004, Hegel and the Phenomenology Of Spirit, Routledge, London
Turner, S. P./Roth P. A. 2003, The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Social Science, Blackwell Publishing, Malden, MA., USA
胡卜凱2006，《「文革」討論 -- 論述方式的分析和檢驗》，http://tb.chinatimes.com/forum1.asp?ArticleID=849041
中英名詞對照
以；號分開的是不同的意義；以、號分開的是相同或近似的意思。
「合理」的性質(條件)：reasonableness
「非理性」性質、非理性行為(模式)：irrationality
人際相通：intersubjective
人際相通性：intersubjectivity
不成立：invalid
不受屈辱的投降︰honorable surrender
內部批判︰immanent critique
文化性：culture-specific
主觀性質(或「意識內容」)：qualia
功能理性：functional rationality
合理化；理性化：rationalize, rationalization
成立：valid
有效的：effective
行為主義：behaviorism
行為論、行為學派：behavioralism
行動理性(或譯工具理性、效益理性)：instrumental rationality
制約：condition, conditioning
社會性：society-specific
社會建構論：social constructionism
非理性的(不屬於理性的)、不合理、不合理的、不講理的、沒有道理的、說不通的、不務實的：irrational
經驗法則：empirical rules, regularity, uniformity
推理、講理：reason, reasoning
推理能力：rationality, reasonableness
理由、判斷依據：rationale
理性、務實：reason, rationality
理性的、合理的、講理的、有道理的、說得通的、務實的：reasonable, rational
理性論(理性主義)；合理原則(合理主義)：rationalism
理性論者；理性化者：rationalist
無效的：ineffective
意義(Frege)：sense (Frege)
經驗論：empiricism
實質理性(形式理性)：substantive rationality (formal rationality)
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「理性」三重奏 -- P. D'Autry
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下文作者道璀先生討論「理性」的三個面向和意義，以及它們的功能(請參見全文標題下的子標題)。
1) 「講道理」的能力。
2) 「講道理」的行為。
3) 待人處事時，「講道理」的態度和方式。
旁及康德、韋伯、哈伯瑪斯、和蘇格拉底四位對「理性」概念的詮釋、分析、討論、與實踐。值得一讀。
Being “Rational” Doesn’t Mean What You Think
On Rationality, Reason, and Being Reasonable
Peter D'Autry, 06/29/26
0. 前言
“Rational” has turned into something people say to each other in fights. Tell a friend they are being very rational about their divorce and watch the face go cold. Part of the trouble is that the word never settled on one meaning.
Max Weber famously made the trouble plain by pulling the word into 4 kinds.
There is instrumental or purposive rationality, the means-and-ends calculation behind any piece of scientific or technical know-how, the rationality of working out how to land a probe on a comet.
There is formal rationality, the rule-bound, calculable sort that runs mathematics and account books and bureaucracies, where following the procedure correctly is most of the point.
And there is the practical, and substantive kind, broadly the rationality at work when people argue about what is right or simply try to make themselves understood.
1. Rational, reason, or reasonable?
Three different things, all answering to the same word. Tell someone they are being rational and you may be praising one of these while they hear an accusation about another.
Before going further, it helps to pin down three words, because the rest lean on all of them and they do not mean the same thing.
Rationality is the narrow, practical one, a specific structure of mind that a developmental psychologist can point at and chart, and it is the subject of most of what follows.
Reason is the wider faculty it belongs to, the plain human power to offer grounds and weigh them.
Reasonable is that same power at the kitchen table with the lab coat off, the version that asks what your reasons are and whether they hold.
Keep the three apart and much of the usual complaint about cold, calculating rationality turns out to be a complaint about just one of them.
Cognitive psychologists and anthropologists mean something narrower. They use “rationality” for formal operational cognition, which is a heavy phrase for a small trick: thinking about thinking. It sounds trivial right up until you try it in the middle of an argument. Once you can reflect on your own thoughts, you are no longer entirely run by them. You can step back. You can hold a view that is not your own, run a hypothetical, or watch yourself from the outside.
That last move, watching yourself, is the one that does the work.
Once you can watch your own beliefs, you start asking where they came from. Not the teacher, not the president, not the nation, but the reasons. Did Jesus really turn water into wine? Rationality in this sense is mostly the habit of wanting reasonable reasons. What is the evidence? Why should I believe this? Who says so? Where did you get that idea?
There is a gap between being able to ask for reasons and actually daring to, and Kant handed the gap a slogan. Sapere aude. Dare to know, or closer to the Latin, dare to be wise. He did not coin it, but lifted it from Horace, who had dropped the line into a poem about a man forever putting off the work of living.
Immanuel Kant set it at the center of a short essay in 1784, written to answer a question a Berlin magazine had floated: what is enlightenment? His answer was that enlightenment is a person climbing out of an immaturity he imposed on himself. Not the inability to think, but the failure to think without someone holding the other hand.
What makes the immaturity self-imposed, Kant said, is that the cause is not a missing brain but a missing nerve. It is comfortable to let others do the work. A book can stand in for your understanding, a pastor for your conscience, a doctor for your judgment about dinner, and then you never have to risk being wrong on your own account. The guardians who arrange all this are glad to keep it running. They were never going to talk themselves out of the job.
So the demand for reasons turns out to be partly a demand for courage, which could be a less flattering thing to learn about oneself. It is easy to admire the person who asks. It is harder to be the one who asks it out loud, in a room that would rather you didn’t.
2. The charge that reason is cold
The same move that lets you doubt also lets you imagine. Step far enough back from your own assumptions and other possibilities open up, beliefs nobody handed you, horizons you did not inherit. This is the part people forget when they call reason “cold.”
Reason is what lets you picture the world being otherwise.
Even the mystics knew this, which is why they went through reason instead of around it. Look at how the Buddha’s eightfold path is ordered. Right view and right intention, the second sometimes rendered “right thought,” sit at the front, the seeing-clearly and the wanting-well. Only further down do right mindfulness and right concentration appear, the part we now file under meditation and sell as an app.
You are meant to settle what is true and what is worth wanting before you sit down to quiet the mind. The order is not a strict staircase; the old teaching is that the eight factors prop each other up and, far enough along, arrive together. Still, the sequence makes its point. Contemplation that skips the thinking has not climbed above reason.
It has stopped short of it.
So the old complaint, that rationality is dry and has no feelings, gets it backward. Reason opens a wider room for feeling, feelings not chained to your private appetites or to whatever your culture happens to call real.
It can still go wrong. Like any high capacity, it can clamp down on what sits beneath it, sex and aggression especially, and that clamping congeals into something pathological. You have met the type: the man who never raises his voice and never quite seems alive, who answers a quarrel with a flowchart, then gathers his papers and storms out in perfect silence, which is its own kind of shout. The feeling did not evaporate. It went somewhere colder. Reason makes a poor lid. The congealed version is what earned rationality its bad name, but it is not the structure itself.
If the word “rational” carries too much baggage, its everyday cousin “reasonable” carries the same demand with less of the chill. Same question underneath: what are your reasons, why are you doing that?
3. There is just physics
Notice what reason wants. It wants reasons that hold for more than just me and mine. If my reasons only work inside my tribe, nation, or presidency, they are not reasons; they are loyalties wearing a disguise. This is why there is no Hindu physics, no French physics, and no Greek physics. There is just physics. Its truths are not coerced or ideologically imposed; they sit out in the open for anyone who cares to check the work.
None of this flattens cultures into sameness. It does the opposite.
A universal standard sounds like a flattening machine, one correct way to live stamped on everyone. It runs the other way.
The real flattener is the ethnocentric myth, which meets a stranger with only two moves: convert him or conquer him. A shared standard of evidence asks nothing about your gods or your cult, so those can vary as wildly as they like. The Balinese cremation, the Quaker silence, the city hall wedding with the bad carnations all get to stand, precisely because none of them has to win.
Reason is the room that lets cultures sit side by side, a trick no mythology has ever pulled off in defending its own gods.
4. When myth met the question
You can guess what happened when this new habit met the old myths. Someone says Jesus turned water into wine, and someone else asks what that means, exactly, and where the evidence is.
Athens was less gentle about the questioning. The charge against Socrates opened with “refusing to recognize the gods of the State” and closed with “The penalty demanded is death.” Asked, as was the custom, to propose his own punishment, he suggested free meals for life in the Prytaneum, suggesting a reward instead. As such, he turned down an escape that had already been arranged and drank the hemlock. He chose reason over state mythology, and it cost him everything.
Most people did not move that fast.
The first response to the clash was not to drop the myths but to prop them up with reasons, which is a strange hybrid worth its own name: mythic-rational. Jürgen Habermas describes the same move as the rationalization of mythological thought. And propping a myth up with a formal argument already gives the game away. Pure myth never needed defending. It was simply accepted on its own terms.
The universalizing pull of reason showed up early, in an ugly form. Before anyone argued for a shared humanity, empires tried to manufacture one by force. The Incas and the Aztecs, the Khans and the Romans, Alexander and the Aryans: the first planetary move was conquest. Conquered peoples were often handed real citizenship, in some cases extended to women, slaves, and children, but only inside a single mythology.
You could be a citizen as long as you believed in the right god or leader. We still have working examples of this. The faiths offered their own version: equal citizens of the faith, every Christian saved regardless of color, and every Jew damned regardless of anything. Generous and divisive in the same breath.
The empires and the great mythologies eventually hit the same wall. They ran into each other. Two mythologies that cannot argue their case can only fight it, and the only way past the fighting is to give up the particular myth for something that could actually be shared:
A more universal reasonableness.
The bigger change came later, and it was less that reason replaced the gods than that it broke the single sacred world into pieces. The medieval cosmos was one syncretic fabric. Truth, goodness, beauty, law, and salvation hung together under one roof, and the Church held the keys to every room. A comet was at once an astronomical fact, a moral warning, and a hint about your fate, and you could put all three questions to the same authority.
The Enlightenment pulled those threads apart.
Weber called it the differentiation of the value spheres, and Habermas built much of his account of modernity on it: science took the questions of what is true, law and ethics took what is just, and art took what is beautiful, each answering to its own standard and its own specialists.
Once the spheres separate, they can no longer overrule one another by decree. The astronomer settles the comet, and the bishop no longer gets a vote on the orbit. This is messier than the old unity and a good deal less comforting, since nobody runs the whole show anymore.
It is also what lets a believer and an unbeliever share one physics, argue ethics on common ground, and disagree about a painting without anyone getting into a fistfight. The rational philosophies and sciences and even the rational religions (organized according to reason, logical coherence, and ethical consistency) that followed all stood on the same platform, open to anyone of any creed willing to show their evidence and give their reasons rather than shout and claim the gods were on their side.
5. Conclusion
It is a hard thing to sell.
Reason offers no chosen people, no promised land, no enemy to hate on a schedule. All it offers is the slow business of showing your work and letting a stranger check it. That is the whole pitch. It also happens to be the only arrangement under which a Hindu, a Frenchman, and a Greek can disagree about nearly everything and still share one physics, which is more than any god in history ever managed to deliver.
This is also where the three words finally sort themselves out. Rationality is the structure, and reason is the faculty, but “reasonable” is intersubjective, the only one of them you can hand to another person. It asks nothing elaborate, just that you lay your reasons on the table and let someone look.
The man with the flowchart had rationality to spare and was not, for one second, reasonable. The two come apart more often than we like to admit, and when they do, it is the reasonable one you actually want.
Socrates drank the hemlock for it, and the rest of us inherited it for free, which is probably why we hold it so loosely. The habit of asking for reasons took thousands of years to win and can be unlearned in a generation.
It helps to remember what the alternative actually was. Not peace, not brotherhood, just whichever myth showed up with the bigger army.
Reason is the unglamorous thing that finally made violence optional.
Reasonability is what lifts us above ignorance, division, and degeneration.
Written by Peter D'Autry
Skeptical mystic. Amateur mind-mapper. Writing my way through the hard problem of consciousness, depth psychology, and the nature of reality.
Published in Philosophy Today
Philosophy Today is dedicated to current philosophy, logic, and thought.
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《虛無主義者宣言》小評
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0. 前言
《虛無主義者宣言》全長在6,200字上下；我只讀了其中的「全文介紹」、第III、第VII、和第XI這四節(1)。就讀過的部份來說，我大致都能接受該文作者的觀點(請見本欄上一篇)。不過，他/她對「虛無主義」的詮釋，並不是一般人對這個概念的了解(2)。例如，他/她兩次強調：「虛無主義者」把「國家、宗教、意識型態、公司、傳統、和道德」等制度視為「工具」(3)。本文略做說明。
1. 虛無主義
首先，「虛無主義」不是一個「全盤概念」；換句話說，在傳統哲學的三個次領域，「虛無主義」一詞有其個別的主張，互不相涉。
尼切給虛無主義的定義是：
「從根本上否定價值、意義、和對目的的追求(欲望)」(4)。
屠格涅夫給虛無主義的定義是：
「一個『虛無主義者』拒絕承認任何權威；她/他也拒絕接受任何一個未經證實的原則，不論該原則被多少人尊重」。
我的了解：
「最簡單的『虛無主義』定義是：「一種不認為社會中有任何『標準』的觀點。」(淺談「虛無主義」，該欄2018/04/10)
拙作《普通(人的)倫理學》第2節對「虛無主義」有詳細討論(該欄2025/06/03)；請參考。
「工具」的概念蘊含並指示「價值」與「目的」，該文作者既然接受「國家、宗教、意識型態、... 」等等的「工具性」，自然就承認並肯定了它們的「價值」與它們意圖達到的「目的」。因此，我搞不懂：該文作者為什麼要以「虛無主義者宣言」做標題。如果他/她把自己的立場稱為：「唯物論」、「理性主義」、「現實主義」、或「務實主義」，應該更符合一般人的認知。
2. 人為建構
該文「人為建構」一詞的「用法」或思路(5)，跟我「人工概念」的思考邏輯相近(該欄開欄文第0.1小節) 。基本上，它們都是人為了解決當時、當地、和特定情況所「發明」、「設計」、或「建構」出來的工具、機制、制度、或意識型態；其內容自然也只不過是「時間」、「地點」、和「文化」的「函數」；並不具有「真理」或「絕對」這類概念所蘊含的「性質」或「價值」。
3. 結論
1) 根據一般學者的主流意見，一位「虛無主義者」不會接受「價值」或「目的」等概念。
2) 我接受在一時、一地、或一個文化中，經由多數人「約定俗成」過程而得到的「價值」、「目的」、和「規範」等等；因此，我拒絕「虛無主義」，接受(溫和或局部)「相對觀」(該欄開欄文)。
附註：
1. 請參考該文「目錄」。
2. 請參考該文「全文介紹」這一節。
3. 請參考該文第III節第1段。
4. Will To Power (平裝版，第7頁，1-1節)
5. 該文第III節 “human constructs” 一詞。
本文於 修改第 2 次
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虛無主義者宣言--NBM House Books
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THE NIHILIST’S MANIFESTO
A Formal Treatise on Rational Objectivity, Cosmic Indifference, and the Pure Burden of Agency
Stripped of Optimism, Spirituality, and Moral Consolation
Document Version 1.0, Philosophical Studies Series
NBM House Books, 06/14/26
Table of Contents & Structural Blueprint
Introduction: The Anatomy of Misunderstanding
I. Begin With the Void
II. Reject Cosmic Entitlement
III. See Human Systems Clearly
IV. Abandon the Search for Final Answers
V. Accept Mortality Completely
VI. Do Not Confuse Preference With Truth
VII. Take Responsibility for Meaning
VIII. Refuse Self-Deception
IX. Treat Civilization as Temporary
X. Cultivate Competence Over Hope
XI. Face Freedom Honestly
XII. Regard Existence as an Event
Final Principle: The Stage and the Curtain
Introduction: The Anatomy of Misunderstanding
A genuinely nihilistic manifesto is often misunderstood. Most people hear ‘nothing matters’ and imagine despair, apathy, or self-destruction. But if you take nihilism seriously, those responses are not logically required. They are emotional reactions, not conclusions. Here’s a version stripped of optimism, spirituality, and moral consolation.
To approach nihilism with intellectual honesty, one must first dismantle the centuries of cultural baggage and emotional distortion that have obscured its core reality. For generations, the word ‘nihilism’ has been wielded not as a philosophical descriptor, but as an epithet — a psychological diagnosis or a warning sign of imminent moral and existential collapse. The common imagination paints the nihilist as a figure paralyzed by despondency, dynamic only in their leanings toward self-destruction, weeping at the realization of an empty cosmos. This caricature is a product of fear, a reactionary reflex born from humanity’s profound discomfort with absolute silence.
This document seeks to rectify that fundamental error. The knee-jerk slide from ‘nothing matters’ into ‘therefore, I must despair’ is not a sequence of logical deduction; it is an emotional tantrum. Despair requires an anchor in missed expectations; it implies that the universe *ought* to have provided meaning, and that its failure to do so is a tragic betrayal. But the universe has betrayed nothing, because it never promised anything in the first place. Despair, apathy, and nihilistic rage are simply the final, frantic negotiations of a human ego that is unwilling to accept its own cosmic irrelevance.
When we strip away these emotional reflexes, what remains is not an invitation to death, but a cold, clear, and uncompromising description of reality. A rigorous nihilism does not advocate for apathy; rather, it identifies objectivity. It observes that human constructs — values, morals, purposes, and gods — are localized phenomena generated by biological organisms to navigate an unscripted environment. This manifesto is written for those who seek truth over comfort, who are willing to look into the blank architecture of existence without demanding that it smile back.
By systematically removing the layers of optimism, spiritual sentimentality, and moral consolation that dilute human thought, we arrive at a baseline understanding of our situation. This baseline is neither cruel nor kind; it is merely factual. It serves as a clearing of the intellectual ledger, allowing us to proceed through existence with an unclouded vision, operating on tangible principles rather than comforting illusions. The journey through these twelve principles requires an abandonment of cosmic sentimentality and a willingness to shoulder the absolute burden of your own operational reality.
I. Begin With the Void
There is no known cosmic purpose. The universe does not appear to have goals, intentions, values, or meaning. Stars explode. Species emerge and vanish. Civilizations rise and collapse. The universe does not explain itself. Human beings are meaning-producing animals living inside a reality that offers no obvious reason for their existence. Accept this. Do not demand comfort.
The foundational axiom of any coherent worldview must be an acknowledgment of the baseline architecture of reality. When we look out into the macrocosm — across billions of light-years of expanding space, through superclusters of galaxies and yawning chasms of dark matter — we find an absolute absence of teleology. The cosmos does not manifest as a structured narrative; it manifests as a sequence of complex, indifferent physical processes. Chemical reactions proceed according to thermodynamic imperatives; gravity condenses matter into spheres; stars ignite, burn through their nuclear fuel, and violently tear themselves apart in supernovas.
In this vast theatre of cosmic indifference, events occur without moral or narrative justification. A star collapsing into a black hole and destroying an adjacent solar system is not an act of malice; it is an exercise in astrophysics. Similarly, on our localized planetary scale, the biological history of Earth is a brutal, unguided chronicle of emergence and total erasure. Species evolve through random mutations and ruthless environmental pressures, only to be wiped out by asteroid impacts, shifting climates, or the inexorable march of ecological competition. Civilizations rise, achieve staggering heights of complexity, and decompose into dust, leaving behind monuments that will eventually be ground into sand by the slow friction of tectonic time.
The universe does not explain itself because it has no vocabulary, no consciousness, and no desire to be understood. It simply persists. Human beings, however, are evolutionary anomalies: we are meaning-producing animals. Our brains are hardwired to detect patterns, assign causes, invent narratives, and seek intentions even where none exist. We look at the stars and see constellations; we look at history and see destiny; we look at our own lives and see a divine plan. This is a survival mechanism gone rogue, an adaptive trait designed for tracking predators on the savannah that has been erroneously scaled up to interpret the cosmos.
To accept the void means to consciously short-circuit this biological reflex. It means acknowledging that your existence is an unintended byproduct of structural laws, a localized pocket of negative entropy that will eventually be reclaimed by the surrounding equilibrium. To demand that this system provide you with an explanation or a soft bed of cosmic comfort is an exercise in futility. The mature intellect accepts the silence of the void not as a wound to be healed, but as the primary, unalterable background of all possible experience.
II. Reject Cosmic Entitlement
You are not owed: Meaning, Justice, Happiness, Love, Success, Immortality. Reality makes no promises. Many people spend their entire lives negotiating with existence as though there must be some hidden contract. There isn’t. The universe never signed anything.
One of the most pervasive psychological afflictions of the human species is the deep-seated assumption of cosmic entitlement. From early childhood, through cultural conditioning and religious indoctrination, human beings are fed the toxic myth of a hidden contract. We are taught to believe that if we perform certain rituals, adhere to specific moral codes, work diligently, or possess a sufficiently virtuous character, reality will respond in kind. We expect history to bend toward justice; we expect bad actions to be punished and good actions to be rewarded; we expect that our deep desire for happiness, love, and immortality constitutes a legitimate claim on the universe.
This expectation is a collective delusion. The universe is a non-signatory to all human desires. It has never entered into a covenant with humanity, nor has it guaranteed any individual a baseline of safety, fulfillment, or continuity. When a catastrophic earthquake strikes a densely populated city, it does not check the moral ledger of those beneath the rubble. When a terminal illness strikes a child, it is not a calculated punishment or a test of faith; it is a mechanical failure of cellular replication. There is no grand balance sheet, no cosmic judge balancing the scales, and no ultimate vindication waiting at the end of history.
Many individuals spend their entire lives trapped in a cycle of bitterness and resentment because they cannot let go of this imaginary contract. When they experience tragedy, heartbreak, or failure, they do not merely experience the physical or emotional pain of the event; they experience a secondary, meta-crisis of indignation. They cry out to the sky, asking ‘Why me?’, as if they had been uniquely singled out for a violation of terms. This indignation is a symptom of arrested intellectual development. The answer to ‘Why me?’ is always the same: because the physical conditions for this event were met, and your preferences are irrelevant to the mechanics of matter.
A nihilist eliminates this secondary suffering entirely by tearing up the imaginary contract. By fully realizing that reality owes you nothing — not a single shred of justice, not a moment of happiness, not an ounce of love — you free yourself from the tyranny of cosmic resentment. If you experience joy, you accept it as a fortunate arrangement of local variables, not as a reward. If you experience tragedy, you endure it as a structural event, not as a cosmic injustice. You cease negotiating with an empty sky and begin dealing directly with the concrete reality in front of you.
III. See Human Systems Clearly
Nations, religions, ideologies, corporations, traditions, and moral systems are human constructions. Some are useful. Some are harmful. None arrive with objective cosmic authority. Every institution ultimately rests on stories people collectively agree to believe. A nihilist neither worships nor automatically rejects these stories. He examines them as tools.
Human civilization is a dense, layered tapestry of intersubjective realities. We live our lives within structures that feel as solid and immutable as mountain ranges — nations with defined borders, religions with ancient dogmas, economic ideologies like capitalism or socialism, multi-billion-dollar corporations, sacred traditions, and rigid moral codes. To the uncritical mind, these structures appear to possess an objective reality, an external authority that demands absolute obedience and reverence. They are treated as if they were discovered written into the laws of nature, rather than invented by human minds.
A clear-eyed nihilistic analysis dissolves this illusion immediately. None of these systems arrive with a stamp of cosmic endorsement. There is no biological gene for a nation-state; there is no chemical element for a corporation; there is no physical law that mandates a specific code of ethics. If tomorrow every human being on Earth experienced a localized amnesia that wiped out our collective memories, the physical world would remain completely unchanged — the trees would grow, the oceans would churn — but every government, currency, stock market, and religious institution would instantly cease to exist. They are ghosts made real by collective compliance, stories that possess power only because we collectively agree to behave as if they do.
Recognizing this does not require a nihilist to become a radical anarchist or a destructive iconoclast. Some of these human stories are remarkably useful. The concept of human rights, though entirely fictitious from a cosmic standpoint, provides a highly effective framework for reducing unnecessary suffering and stabilizing complex societies. The construct of a corporation allows for the aggregation of capital to build infrastructure that improves human life. Conversely, many human stories are catastrophic — ideologies that demand the purge of dissenters, religions that stultify intellectual inquiry, and traditions that institutionalize cruelty.
Therefore, the mature nihilist adopts a stance of radical pragmatism toward all human institutions. He neither worships them as divine nor automatically rejects them out of reactionary contrarianism. Instead, he evaluates them strictly as tools. Does this specific story, this institutional structure, or this moral framework serve a valuable function in reality? Does it optimize human capability, reduce structural friction, or protect localized well-being? If it is functional, it can be utilized; if it is dysfunctional or parasitic, it should be bypassed, modified, or dismantled without sentimental regret. The nihilist remains a free agent, operating within human systems without ever allowing himself to be owned by them.
IV. Abandon the Search for Final Answers
The desire for ultimate certainty is one of humanity’s oldest addictions. Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? What is the final purpose of history? Perhaps there are answers. Perhaps there are not. A nihilist proceeds without requiring them. Uncertainty is not a temporary problem to be solved. It may be the permanent condition.
Humanity is an species fundamentally haunted by the ghost of certainty. Since the dawn of self-awareness, we have exhibited a profound, almost addictive craving for ultimate answers. We have built massive intellectual and spiritual architectures to answer a handful of recurring questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the ultimate purpose of our existence? Toward what grand finale is the long, bloody march of human history heading? This demand for finality is driven by a deep psychological vulnerability — the fact that human consciousness experiences absolute uncertainty as a form of existential vertigo.
To alleviate this vertigo, humans have historically accepted almost any answer, no matter how absurd, over the terrifying alternative of admitting ignorance. We have accepted stories of tribal gods, cosmic battles between light and darkness, cyclical cosmic reincarnations, and utopian political endpoints where history finally achieves perfect resolution. These are the placebos of an anxious species, intellectual narcotics designed to numb the pain of living in an unmapped reality.
A nihilist makes a clean break from this addiction. He looks at the questions — Why are we here? What does it all mean? — and accepts the distinct possibility that these questions are themselves category errors, premised on a flawed assumption that reality operates like a human book with a coherent plotline. Perhaps there are no answers; perhaps the universe simply is, an eternal, self-sustaining brute fact that requires no justification. Or perhaps our cognitive architecture is simply too limited, our localized perspective too narrow, to ever grasp the full scope of the system we inhabit.
Crucially, a nihilist does not stall out in the face of this ignorance. He does not sit down and refuse to move until an answer is provided. He proceeds through existence without requiring an ultimate justification for doing so. Uncertainty is no longer viewed as a temporary deficit of data, an inconvenient gap that will be filled by the next scientific breakthrough or religious revelation. It is recognized as the permanent, inescapable condition of conscious life. To operate effectively under conditions of total, permanent uncertainty is the hallmark of intellectual maturity. You do not need to know the end of the script to make a definitive move on the stage.
V. Accept Mortality Completely
You will die. Everyone you know will die. Everyone who remembers you will die. Eventually humanity itself may disappear. Eventually Earth will disappear. Eventually even the stars will disappear. Most human projects end in erasure. This is not tragedy. This is simply the observed condition. Build your life with this fact visible at all times.
Mortality is the ultimate democratizing reality of existence, yet human culture is largely structured as a vast machinery of death-denial. We build monuments, amass wealth, write books, and establish lineages in a desperate attempt to achieve some form of secular immortality — to leave a permanent dent in the universe. We treat death as an enemy to be conquered, an unnatural interruption of an otherwise continuous narrative, or a transition state to an eternal afterlife. We hide our elderly in institutions, sanitize our funerals, and speak of the deceased in hushed, euphemistic tones to avoid looking directly at the corpse.
A genuinely nihilistic perspective demands that we tear down these defensive screens and confront the reality of absolute erasure. The scale of this erasure is total. It begins at the individual level: you will die, your consciousness will dissolve, and the specific neural network that constitutes your identity will cease to exist forever. This erasure expands outwards: everyone who ever loved you, knew you, or crossed paths with you will follow. The memories of your existence will fade, degrade, and ultimately vanish within a few generations. Even if you achieve historical fame, that fame is merely a stay of execution.
On a macro-scale, the erasure is absolute. Human civilization itself is a temporary phenomenon; our species will eventually meet its evolutionary or catastrophic end. The planet we inhabit has a defined lifespan, destined to be incinerated when our sun expands into a red giant. And the universe itself, according to our best cosmological understandings, is sliding inexorably toward a state of maximum entropy — a cold, dark, uniform expanse where all thermodynamic work ceases, all stars burn out, and even black holes evaporate into a thin hiss of Hawking radiation. Every poem written, every empire forged, every war fought, and every scientific truth discovered will be utterly, completely, and irrevocably erased.
To the sentimentalist, this is an unbearable tragedy, an argument for immediate despair. To the nihilist, it is simply the baseline physical law of reality. Finitude is not a design flaw; it is the structural characteristic of all temporary phenomena. When you accept mortality completely, you stop building your life on the quicksand of an imagined permanence. You do not seek validation from a future generation that will also be dead, nor do you demand that your actions echo into an eternity that does not exist. You build your life with the horizon of erasure fully visible at all times, understanding that the value of an event lies entirely within its occurrence, not its duration.
VI. Do Not Confuse Preference With Truth
You can prefer: Kindness, Cruelty, Art, Wealth, Family, Solitude, Knowledge, Ignorance. Preference creates neither objective truth nor objective value. Your values are yours. Their existence does not prove their universality. A mature nihilist acknowledges this distinction.
One of the primary sources of human conflict and intellectual confusion is the constant, structural conflation of personal preference with objective truth. Because human beings experience their emotional states, moral judgments, and aesthetic tastes with intense internal vividness, they naturally assume that these internal states reflect an external, mind-independent reality. When someone states, ‘Cruelty is wrong,’ they rarely mean, ‘I have an intense personal aversion to cruelty.’ They almost always mean, ‘The universe contains a property called “wrongness,” and cruelty possesses that property.’
This is an epistemological illusion. The universe contains atoms, forces, fields, and physical structures; it does not contain value judgments. Value is not a physical property that can be measured with a spectrometer. It is a relational property generated by a conscious observer. Kindness, cruelty, art, wealth, family, solitude, knowledge, and ignorance are options within the human matrix. You are entirely free to prefer any configuration of these options over another. Your biological wiring, your cultural upbringing, and your personal psychological trajectory will inevitably incline you toward certain preferences. You may find yourself deeply moved by kindness and repulsed by cruelty.
However, a mature nihilist maintains a strict, unyielding boundary between their preferences and objective truth. The fact that you prefer kindness does not mean that kindness is a cosmic law. It does not mean that a cruel person is violating a fundamental axiom of physics, or that the universe will punish them for their behavior. Your values are your values; they belong to your localized cognitive architecture. Their existence does not prove their universality, nor does it give you the right to assume that the cosmos is backing your moral plays.
This distinction is liberating rather than paralyzing. When you stop trying to transform your personal preferences into universal absolute truths, you lose the need for self-righteous moral crusade. You no longer need to prove that your enemies are objectively evil or that your lifestyle is objectively correct. You simply acknowledge your preferences, own them, and act on them with full awareness of their subjective nature. You protect what you care about and oppose what you find abhorrent, not because a god or a cosmic moral framework commanded you to do so, but because that is what you choose to do. This is the transition from dogmatic fanaticism to clear-eyed existential agency.
VII. Take Responsibility for Meaning
If meaning exists in your life, it is because you create, adopt, or discover it. Not because reality guaranteed it. Meaning becomes a project rather than a revelation. You choose your burdens. You choose your loyalties. You choose your obsessions. No cosmic authority validates them. They are yours anyway.
The standard critique leveled against nihilism is that it strips life of meaning, leaving behind a cold, unlivable desert. This critique, however, is based on a profound misunderstanding of how meaning actually functions. The critic assumes that for meaning to be real, it must be objective — it must be an external entity waiting to be discovered, like a buried chest of gold or a divine commandment written across the sky. They assume that if meaning is not guaranteed by a cosmic authority, it is a hollow illusion, a childish game of make-believe.
The nihilist turns this dynamic on its head. The absence of objective cosmic meaning does not destroy localized meaning; it shifts the locus of responsibility entirely onto the individual. If meaning is not an inherent property of the universe, then it cannot be passively received through a revelation. It cannot be handed down by a priest, a politician, or a holy text without that hand-off being an act of self-deception. Meaning must be understood not as a discovery, but as a deliberate engineering project.
When meaning becomes a project, the individual transitions from a passive consumer of pre-packaged values to an active creator of existential architecture. You are faced with a completely blank canvas. If you want a reason to wake up in the morning, you must supply it yourself. You must choose your burdens, because a life without weight dissolves into aimless drift. You must choose your loyalties — the people, ideas, or projects you are willing to defend and sacrifice for. You must choose your obsessions — the domains of knowledge, art, or competence that you will pursue with unyielding focus.
Crucially, you must do this with the full knowledge that no cosmic authority will ever validate your choices. The universe will not applaud your artistic achievements, nor will it validate your devotion to your family or your pursuit of scientific truth. Your projects are completely insignificant on a cosmological scale.
But within the localized boundary of your subjective experience, they are absolute. They matter because *you* have decided they matter, and in an unscripted universe, that is the only form of importance that exists. You own your meaning completely; it is your creation, your burden, and your triumph.
VIII. Refuse Self-Deception
Many people survive through comforting illusions. A nihilist attempts to minimize illusion. This includes: Political myths, Religious myths, Personal myths, Historical myths, Myths about oneself. Reality is often indifferent to what feels good. Truth and comfort frequently diverge. Choose accordingly.
Self-deception is the primary psychological survival mechanism of the human animal. Because the raw, unvarnished reality of our situation — our finitude, our insignificance, the indifference of our environment — is difficult for our hyper-evolved egos to tolerate, we have become masters at manufacturing comforting illusions. We wrap ourselves in dense layers of myth, filtering every incoming data point through a series of narrative screens designed to protect our peace of mind and reinforce our sense of self-importance.
These myths manifest at every level of human organization. Religious myths provide an imaginary escape from mortality and a guarantee of ultimate justice. Political myths tell us that our nation is uniquely virtuous, chosen by history to lead the world toward enlightenment. Historical myths sanitize the brutal, chaotic, and opportunistic reality of human movements into clean narratives of moral progress. Personal myths protect our self-esteem, convincing us that we are the protagonists of a grand story, that our failures are always someone else’s fault, and that our underlying motives are purely noble.
A nihilist commits to a discipline of radical intellectual hygiene: the systematic minimization of illusion. This is not an easy path; it requires a willingness to engage in a continuous, painful stripping away of everything that feels safe and comfortable. It means looking directly at historical records and seeing raw power dynamics instead of moral triumphs; it means looking into your own psychological mirror and admitting your petty vanities, your irrational biases, and your capacity for self-serving rationalization.
The core realization driving this discipline is that truth and comfort are fundamentally decoupled variables in this reality. The universe has no obligation to structure its laws in a way that satisfies human emotional needs. A fact does not become true because it inspires you, nor does it become false because it terrifies or disgusts you. Reality is frequently indifferent to what feels good. When faced with a divergence between a comforting illusion and a harsh, objective truth, the mature nihilist chooses the truth every single time. He prefers a clear, unvarnished view of a desolate cliffside over a beautifully painted mural of an imaginary garden.
IX. Treat Civilization as Temporary
Every civilization believes itself more permanent than it is. History repeatedly demonstrates otherwise. Empires collapse. Institutions decay. Languages vanish. Ideas die. Assume impermanence. Build accordingly.
There is a peculiar form of chronological narcissism that infects every human civilization at its peak. We look at our soaring skyscrapers, our interconnected global communication networks, our sophisticated legal frameworks, and our advanced scientific instruments, and we instinctively assume that we have escaped the laws of history. We treat our current socio-economic paradigm not as a temporary, highly contingent arrangement of historical variables, but as the permanent baseline of human existence — the ultimate destination toward which all prior history was merely a prelude.
A nihilist maintains a profound, structurally grounded historical skepticism. He looks at our current civilization through the long lens of macro-history, understanding that we are bound by the same entropic laws that governed every empire that preceded us. History is an elephant graveyard of collapsed civilizations that once believed themselves eternal. Rome, Babylon, the Maya, the Han Dynasty — each possessed institutions that felt permanent to their citizens, languages that were spoken with absolute confidence, and ideas that were thought to be immutable truths. Today, they are archaeological layers, broken pottery, and dead texts studied by specialists.
Complex systems are inherently fragile. They require an enormous expenditure of energy and resources to maintain their internal order against the constant pressure of environmental and social entropy. When the returns on that complexity begin to diminish, or when external shocks — resource depletion, climatic shifts, pandemics, or systemic conflicts — exceed the coping capacity of the institutional architecture, collapse is not a slow degeneration; it is a rapid, non-linear cascade. Our globalized, hyper-efficient, just-in-time civilization is uniquely vulnerable to these dynamics, balanced on an incredibly complex web of fragile interdependencies.
To treat civilization as temporary is to operate with architectural and social humility. It means refusing to invest your ultimate psychological security into institutions, currencies, or political orders that can dissolve within a generation. You do not assume that the current stability is a guaranteed constant of your future. Instead, you assume impermanence as a structural rule. You build your life, your knowledge base, your relationships, and your survival strategies to be robust in the face of volatility. You enjoy the fruits of civilization while they are available, but you never mistake the temporary theater of society for the permanent foundation of reality.
X. Cultivate Competence Over Hope
Hope is uncertain. Competence is tangible. Learn skills. Maintain your health. Acquire knowledge. Develop judgment. Hope may fail. Competence sometimes works.
In the taxonomy of human virtues, ‘hope’ is almost universally elevated to a position of supreme importance. It is celebrated as the ultimate anchor of the human soul in times of trouble, a beautiful, transcendent force that allows us to endure suffering by looking forward to an imagined future where everything is resolved. We are told to keep hoping, to have faith in the future, and to believe that things will get better. From a rational standpoint, however, hope is an emotional deficit spending. It is a passive mechanism that borrows comfort from an uncommitted future to avoid dealing with the structural problems of the present.
Hope is fundamentally characterized by its passivity and its uncertainty. To hope is to admit that you do not have control over an outcome, and that you are relying on external variables — luck, fate, history, or a deity — to align in your favor. It is a psychological waiting room. If you are trapped in a failing system or facing a catastrophic personal crisis, hoping for a positive resolution does absolutely nothing to alter the physical probability of that resolution. It merely sedates your anxiety while leaving the underlying mechanics of the crisis completely untouched.
A nihilist systematically replaces the passive currency of hope with the hard currency of competence. Hope is an unverified projection; competence is tangible, localized optimization. Competence means focusing your finite time and energy on variables that you can directly influence. It means learning concrete skills — mechanical, intellectual, technological, and interpersonal — that allow you to manipulate your environment effectively. It means maintaining your physical and psychological health, because your biological organism is your primary interface with reality. It means acquiring deep, unvarnished knowledge about how the world actually works, and developing the critical judgment required to parse signal from noise.
When the storms of existence hit — whether they are macroeconomic collapses, institutional failures, or personal tragedies — hope dissolves like a mist, leaving its adherents paralyzed and defenseless. Competence, however, provides a real structural foothold. A competent individual does not spend time praying or wishing for a change in the weather; they understand the physics of the storm, evaluate their options, and execute a survival strategy based on their capabilities. Hope may fail, and in an indifferent universe, it frequently does. Competence is not a guarantee of survival, but it is the only variable that genuinely tilts the odds in your favor.
XI. Face Freedom Honestly
Without objective purpose, freedom expands. This sounds attractive until one realizes freedom also removes excuses. If there is no predetermined script: Your life is largely your responsibility. Your failures are often your responsibility. Your choices become unavoidable. Freedom is less a gift than a burden. Carry it.
The realization that there is no objective cosmic purpose is initially experienced by many as a moment of intoxicating liberation. The chains of religious dogma, historical destiny, and ancestral expectations fall away, revealing a vast, wide-open horizon. You are no longer a servant to a divine master, a cog in an inevitable historical dialectic, or a prisoner of a pre-written destiny. You are entirely free. This is the romantic phase of nihilism, the euphoric celebration of absolute personal autonomy.
However, this euphoria is short-lived for anyone who possesses intellectual honesty. As the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre observed, human beings are ‘condemned to be free.’ When you remove the predetermined cosmic script, you do not merely remove your chains; you also remove your armor, your map, and your excuses. If there is no god defining what is right and wrong, if there is no destiny guiding your path, and if there is no natural order dictating your role in society, then you are completely, terrifyingly on your own.
Absolute freedom shifts the entire weight of responsibility onto the individual. If your life is a mess, if you fail to develop your capabilities, if you make choices that lead to your own stagnation or misery, you can no longer blame a cosmic test, a demonic temptation, or a bad astrological alignment. You cannot claim that your suffering is part of a grander plan that will make sense in the end. Your failures are your failures, your choices are your choices, and their consequences are yours to endure. The realization of pure freedom eliminates the possibility of playing the cosmic victim.
This is why most people deeply fear absolute freedom, even as they pay lip service to it. They spend their lives actively seeking out new forms of captivity — submitting themselves blindly to political ideologies, corporate hierarchies, social trends, or toxic relationships — just to escape the suffocating anxiety of having to decide for themselves.
They crave a script because a script removes the terrifying liability of choice. A mature nihilist refuses this cowardice. He faces freedom honestly, recognizing that it is not a glittering gift, but a heavy, unyielding burden. He does not look for an external authority to tell him what to do; he makes his choices, accepts total ownership of the outcomes, and carries the burden of his agency without complaint.
XII. Regard Existence as an Event
You did not choose to appear. You will not choose to disappear. Between those two boundaries lies a temporary phenomenon called your life. Observe it carefully. Participate in it if you wish. Shape it if you can. But never mistake it for something permanent.
Human consciousness naturally slips into the illusion of possession when it thinks about life. We speak of ‘my life’ as if it were a stable piece of property that we own, a continuous substance that we possess and must guard with frantic anxiety. We treat our identities as fixed monuments, our careers as permanent trajectories, and our daily routines as structural constants of reality. This possessive frame of mind is the source of our deep existential clinging — the desperate fear of loss, the panic of aging, and the constant, underlying anxiety that our property is being degraded by time.
A sophisticated nihilism shifts this paradigm from possession to phenomenology. It demands that we view existence not as a thing we own, but as an event that is occurring. Consider the physical parameters: you did not choose to be born. You did not select your genetic code, your place of birth, your historical era, or the fundamental wiring of your brain. You simply coalesced out of the cosmic dark, a localized thermodynamic anomaly engineered by millions of years of biological replication. Similarly, you will not choose the ultimate fact of your disappearance; your biological system will eventually cross its critical threshold of decay or trauma, and your consciousness will drop back into the dark.
Between these two absolute boundaries of non-existence lies a brief, highly contingent, and temporary phenomenon: the localized kinetic event called your life. It is not a permanent monument; it is a flash of lightning across a night sky, a temporary vortex in a fast-flowing river of entropy. When you shift your perspective to view life as an event rather than a possession, your psychological relationship with reality undergoes a profound transformation. The frantic clinging dissolves, replaced by a stance of radical observation.
You begin to observe the event of your life with the careful, detached curiosity of a scientist or an artist. You participate in the event if you wish, engaging your faculties, tasting its experiences, and exploring its possibilities. You attempt to shape the event if you have the competence to do so, directing its vectors toward configurations that align with your personal preferences. But you never make the fatal error of mistaking this passing phenomenon for something permanent. You enjoy the music while it plays, fully aware that the silence is coming, and you do not demand that the song echo forever for it to have been worth hearing.
Final Principle: The Stage and the Curtain
The mature nihilist does not conclude: ‘Nothing matters, therefore nothing is worth doing.’ He concludes: ‘Nothing matters objectively, therefore the burden of choosing falls entirely upon us.’ The universe supplies no script. No final judge. No guaranteed redemption. No cosmic audience. The stage exists. The play is already underway. Act or don’t act. Either way, the curtain falls.
We arrive at the definitive synthesis of the mature nihilistic position — the pivot point where absolute objectivity transforms into radical agency. The immature, emotionally arrested approach to nihilism reaches the void, panics, and collapses into a passive intellectual paralysis. It looks out at the indifferent cosmos and whimpers, ‘Nothing matters, therefore there is no point in doing anything. Why write a book, why build a business, why love a child, why fight for justice if it will all eventually be erased by entropy?’ This conclusion is a philosophical non sequitur, a failure of logic masquerading as profundity.
The mature nihilist looks at the exact same data — the absolute lack of objective cosmic meaning — and arrives at a diametrically opposed conclusion. He realizes that the phrase ‘nothing matters objectively’ is not a decree of execution; it is a declaration of absolute intellectual independence. If the universe does not supply a pre-written script, then you are completely free to write your own lines. If there is no final judge to evaluate your performance, then you are the supreme arbiter of your own actions. If there is no guaranteed cosmic redemption, then the quality of your immediate experience is the absolute value. If there is no cosmic audience watching from the celestial rafters, then the performance is entirely for the actors on the stage.
The stage exists. This is the brute physical reality of our immediate situation. You find yourself alive, conscious, and embedded in a dynamic environment. The play is already underway; you cannot pause the production, nor can you step off the stage into a realm of pure neutrality. Every moment you exist, you are making a choice — even the decision to do nothing is an active choice to let the environment carry you. You are an actor trapped in an unscripted, improvised performance.
Therefore, the final principle is an invitation to pure execution, stripped of all metaphysical noise. Act or don’t act. Pursue competence or embrace ignorance. Build civilizations or watch them decay. Protect those you love or isolate yourself in the wilderness. The universe is completely indifferent to your choice; it offers no cosmic rewards for heroism and no cosmic punishments for cowardice. There is no final ledger where your name will be written in gold. There is only the immediate, passing reality of the performance. Live your life with absolute clarity, shoulder the magnificent, crushing weight of your own autonomy, and play your chosen role with unyielding focus. Do not look for validation from the sky, and do not beg for a stay of execution from the dark. The play is yours. Act or don’t act. Either way, the curtain falls.
Written by NBM House Books
Writer of philosophical fictions, erotic codes, and symbolic systems disguised as stories. Occasionally mistaken for someone else. Possibly not mistaken.
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家教與社會建構的影響-Elaine Mallon
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請參考：
* Grieving Texas Father Speaks Out After Son Was Stabbed To Death At High School Track Meet
這是一個悲劇，一個可以避免的悲劇。我接受「社會建構論」，自然也就同意巴頓教授所強調：「家教」在塑造一個人行為舉止上的重要性(該欄2026/05/17貼文第4.3節)。轉載下文，在給「社會建構論」提供一個活生生的案例；可惜它牽扯上一條人命和一個少年的前途。
'You failed your son first': Howard prof blames father's values after Karmelo Anthony murdered his son
Dr. Stacey Patton published the Substack opinion piece a day after Karmelo Anthony was sentenced to 35 years in prison
Elaine Mallon, 06/13/26
Key takeaways
* Howard University professor criticizes father of slain teen Austin Metcalf, arguing that parenting style played a role in the murder, insinuating self-defense by the perpetrator.
A Howard University professor tore into the victim-impact statement delivered by the father of slain Texas teen Austin Metcalf, arguing that the teen's death "did not begin with the knife" wielded by Karmelo Anthony but instead that his father's parenting style was to be blamed as well.
Dr. Stacey Patton, a professor at Howard University's School of Communications, penned an opinion piece titled "Dear Jeff Metcalf: Your Son Is Dead Because You Failed to Teach Him That Black Boys Have Boundaries" to Substack on Wednesday on Substack, where she insinuated Anthony was acting out of self-defense.
"YOU failed to teach your boy that Black children have boundaries," Patton wrote. "YOU failed teach humility, restraint, or the sacred fact that another person's body is not your jurisdiction. YOU failed to teach him that another child's space is not a challenge to be conquered. YOU failed to teach him that "community" does not mean white boys get to decide who belongs and who does not."
Patton's piece was published a day after Anthony was sentenced to 35 years in prison for the murder of Metcalf. The case drew national after now 19-year-old Anthony stabbed 17-year-old Metcalf in the heart during a confrontation at a high school track meeting in April 2025. The case has become a flashpoint in broader debates about race, with Anthony's supporters arguing he has been treated differently because he is Black, while critics have rejected efforts to make the murder of Metcalf, a white teenager, about race.
"YOU obviously failed to teach your son that touching, confronting, crowding, testing, or policing another person can have consequences," Patton wrote. "And YOU failed to teach him that the same world that cheers white boys for being bold and aggressive will not always be there to save them when they mistake somebody else's restraint for permission."
She blasted Jeff for saying that Anthony had failed his parents in his decision to murder his son.
"It is easier to stand in a courtroom and call Karmelo Anthony a failure than it is to admit that Austin's death did not begin with the knife," Patton wrote. "It began with every lesson that told your son that he had the right to approach, challenge, and cross a boundary. It began with every adult who smiled at white boy entitlement and called it leadership. It began with every cultural script that taught him Black boys are the ones to be feared, but never taught him that Black boys might also be afraid.
Jeff Metcalf speaks about the stabbing death of his son, Austin Metcalf, at a high school track meet.
She also alleged that Jeff's victim-impact statement was rooted in racism, homing in on Jeff saying that Anthony does "not belong" in the community because of what he did.
"You don't belong in this community" is not just a father's grief spilling over," Patton wrote. "It is a declaration of removal. And it is the language of somebody who believes he has the authority to decide who gets to stay, who must disappear, and whose presence contaminates the social order. Like father, like son."
"Your words landed on top of centuries of Black children being told they do not belong in white schools, neighborhoods, playgrounds, pools, churches, white juries, white imaginations, and white definitions of innocence," Patton continues. "They landed on top of every Black boy this country has turned into a threat before he ever had a chance to be a child."
She claimed that his son was not the only victim in this case and that Anthony' family was also grieving.
"Austin is dead. Your family is devastated," Patton wrote. "That matters. Karmelo Anthony is alive but caged inside a racial imagination that had already convicted him. And that matters, too. Two families are shattered. And a whole country is using the tragedy to rehearse the same old script about Black guilt and white innocence."
In a statement to Fox News Digital, Patton defended her opinion piece as a "critique of racial power" and said that she was not, "blaming a dead child, attacking a grieving father, excusing violence, and rejecting the legal system."
"My argument is simple: Black children are children," Patton said. "They do not become monsters because white America needs one, and their humanity is not up for debate because a verdict has been rendered."
"Now, run along and feed your propaganda machine," she added, declining to answer several of Fox News Digital's questions. "I'm sure it's hungry for another Black woman's words to mutilate. That is my statement."
Fox News Digital reached out to Howard University and Metcalf's family for comment.
Patton's Substack piece is the latest in a growing chorus of voices arguing that the murder case is rooted in race.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, questioned on her podcast whether Karmelo Anthony's race played a role in his conviction. Crockett asked whether Anthony received a fair trial, spreading a false claim that all jurors were white and that could have impacted their ability to be impartial.
"I'm not necessarily convinced — not that I could tell you the name of one person on this jury — that we had 12 impartial white folk out of Collin County sitting on a jury for this young black man," Crockett said.
Crocket also suggested black mothers have faced far greater agony on a day-to-day basis than the victim's family.
"Black women, especially black women who have black male children, live in fear and agony every single day," she lamented. "A fear and agony that I promise you the Metcalfs probably had never spend a day living that way."
Original article source: 'You failed your son first': Howard prof blames father's values after Karmelo Anthony murdered his son
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「前定」-「自由意志」相容論 -- Roberto Suarez
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循例補增原文各節序號和「前言」子標題，以便指涉。
索引
Amor fati：坦然面對命運
Navier-Stokes equations
reasons-responsive：講道理的，理性主導的
reasons-responsive (該論文第2.3節)
The Useful Illusion: An Apology for Choosing
When the brain has already decided and the self is the last to know.
Roberto Suarez, 05/28/26
0. 前言
Watch yourself sit down at a café in slow motion. The seat by the window is empty. So is the one near the door. So is one at the back, partly shaded. You move toward the one by the window without noticing the choice. By the time the “you” that thinks of itself as the chooser turns up, the body is already in position, the bag already lifted onto the second chair, the menu already half open in the hand.
You will report, if asked, that you chose the window seat because the light was nice. You did not. Long before the verbal “I” formed the sentence “I’ll sit by the window,” motor cortex had been bracing for the swing of the chair, parietal cortex had been computing the trajectory, the visual system had been weighing brightness against the proximity of the door. The brain had finished the analysis. The “you” was, as it always is, the last one to know.
The experiment is real. It ran in 1983 and has been replicated for forty years. The hand decides three hundred milliseconds before the conscious self believes it does. With better instruments, the gap widens to ten seconds. The story we tell about who we are, the one in which a sovereign “I” surveys the options and picks, runs always slightly behind the events it claims to author.
The most famous neuroscientist in America has just spent six hundred pages arguing that this gap is the entire story. That there is no chooser. That the philosophers who spent twenty-five hundred years defending a self that could have done otherwise were defending a fiction we can no longer afford.
He may be right. He may not. The question of which deserves a slower answer than the headlines have given it.
1. The Ancient Argument
Humans have argued about this for as long as they have had words for it.
Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book III, separated voluntary actions from involuntary ones. The voluntary agent acts with knowledge of the circumstances and without external compulsion, and is therefore responsible. He did not need a metaphysics of uncaused causes. He needed only the distinction between being pushed and walking forward.
The Stoics took a harder path. Chrysippus and his successors accepted that the cosmos was a deterministic chain, every event the necessary consequence of what came before, and accepted simultaneously that humans were morally accountable for what they did within that chain. Amor fati was not resignation but participation. The free man was the one who recognized the causal order and aligned himself with it. Two millennia later this position remains the most coherent attempt to hold both halves of the problem at once, and the one philosophy has spent the longest trying to escape.
Augustine made the question urgent for an entire civilization by inserting God into the chain. If grace determines salvation, what is left of the free will the Church needs you to exercise in order to be guilty? The doctrine that emerged was a fragile equilibrium between predestination and responsibility, and it cracked four times in the next thousand years.
Hume rebuilt the truce on philosophical grounds. In the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748), liberty became the absence of external coercion, not the absence of causation. A free choice was a choice that proceeded from the agent’s own desires and beliefs, not one that escaped the causal web. The man who eats because he is hungry is free. The man who eats because a knife is at his throat is not. The position is called compatibilism, and most working philosophers since Hume have lived inside some version of it.
Kant tried the last serious escape. He divided the self into a phenomenal one that physics could touch and a noumenal one that it could not. Freedom lived in the noumenal compartment, beyond the reach of the empirical sciences. The compartment was elegant, indispensable to his moral philosophy, and not detectable by any instrument ever invented. It is still where the metaphysical libertarians live.
What every one of these thinkers knew, and what the contemporary debate has mostly forgotten, is that the line between free and determined was never stable. Each generation drew it differently. Each drawing held until the next.
2. The Intrusion of Neuroscience
In 1983, Benjamin Libet at UCSF asked his subjects to do something small. They sat with their right wrist resting on a table and were instructed to flex it whenever they felt the urge. While they waited for the urge, they watched a moving dot circling a clock face. When the urge came, they were to note the position of the dot and report it.
Meanwhile, electrodes recorded the Bereitschaftspotential, the readiness potential, building up over the supplementary motor area. It is a slow negative shift in cortical voltage that precedes voluntary movement.
The result, published in Brain, was that the readiness potential began to rise about five hundred and fifty milliseconds before the movement. The conscious “decision to act,” as reported by the dot position, came about two hundred milliseconds before the movement. Three hundred and fifty milliseconds of brain activity preceded the moment the subject believed they had decided.
The conscious self, it seemed, was a spectator. The brain prepared. The movement happened. Somewhere in the gap, a story formed about who had chosen.
In 2008, a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute pushed the gap further. Using fMRI on subjects choosing between left and right button presses, they showed that activity in prefrontal and parietal cortex could be used to predict the upcoming choice up to ten seconds before the subject reported being aware of having made it. The headlines wrote themselves. The unconscious had been measured making decisions that the conscious mind would later claim as its own.
The interpretation passed quickly into popular culture. Free will, the headlines said, was finished. Sam Harris built a small book around the finding. TED talks proliferated. The story congealed.
The story was, as such stories tend to be, partly wrong.
Alfred Mele, in Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will (2014), did the slow philosophical work of asking what the readiness potential actually measured. The rising voltage, he argued, corresponded to being willing to flex at some point in the next few seconds, not to deciding to flex now. Subjects had agreed to flex when they felt like it. Their brains were warmed up to the task throughout the experiment. The readiness potential might be the noise of that warming, not the trace of an unconscious decision.
Aaron Schurger and colleagues at the Institut National de la Santé went further. In a 2012 PNAS paper, they proposed that the readiness potential was the slow drift of stochastic neural fluctuations crossing an arbitrary threshold. The “decision” was not pre-made beneath consciousness. It was a noise event the brain interpreted, retroactively, as a decision. The accumulator model has held up well in the decade since.
Even Libet, late in his career, walked back the strongest interpretation. He suggested a “veto window” of about one hundred milliseconds during which the conscious self could refuse the prepared action.
3. Free won’t, not free will.
Modest, but not nothing. The clean headline, the brain deciding before you do, turned out to depend on a definition of “deciding” that the experiment did not establish. The neuroscience was real. The metaphysical demolition was premature.
4. The Total Determinist
Then in 2023 Robert Sapolsky published Determined, and the demolition was no longer premature.
Sapolsky is a Stanford neuroendocrinologist who spent thirty years studying baboons before deciding to write the most uncompromising determinist book of the century. He concedes, on page one, the Libet controversy. He concedes Schurger. But he dismisses them both.
His argument is structural. Every neuron that fires does so because of the state of every prior neuron, the hormone bath it sits in, the genes expressed in it, the experiences encoded in it, the culture that shaped the experiences, the evolution that shaped the culture. There is no place along the chain where a “you” could insert an uncaused cause without violating physics.
A second ago you were a different version of yourself than you are now. So was the universe.
The argument is Laplacean updated for biology. Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814 imagined a demon who, knowing every position and velocity in the universe at one instant, could predict everything that would ever happen. Quantum mechanics later closed that door at the smallest scales. Sapolsky’s claim is that for objects the size of a neuron the door reopens, the randomness washed out by the law of large numbers. Macroscopic biology is, for all practical purposes, deterministic. And the “you” that seems to choose is itself the product of the causes that produced the choice. It cannot stand outside them. There is no platform.
Sapolsky’s most provocative move is the moral one. He argues that believing in free will is morally catastrophic. If we punish people for choices they could not have made otherwise, we are inflicting suffering on involuntary actors. The criminal justice system, the meritocracy, the entire grammar of praise and blame, all rest on a fiction so harmful that maintaining it constitutes its own crime.
The book is bracing. Several philosophers also noted, before the reviews stopped coming, that it is deeply uninterested in two and a half millennia of philosophical work on exactly this question.
5. The Compatibilist Defense
Daniel Dennett spent fifty years arguing that Sapolsky’s argument was technically right and humanly irrelevant. He died in 2024, having spent his last year of life defending compatibilism against Sapolsky’s deterministic challenge across reviews and podcasts.
Dennett’s position, developed across Elbow Room (1984), Freedom Evolves (2003), Just Deserts (with Gregg Caruso, 2021), and a thirty-year stack of essays, was that the kind of free will worth wanting was the capacity for reasons-responsive behavior, with no need for metaphysical autonomy from causation. An agent who, under different reasons, would have acted differently. That capacity is fully compatible with determinism. Evolution built it. We are biological devices that compute, and contingently, recently, devices that compute about our own computing. The recursion is what we call deliberation, which in turn is what we call freedom.
Harry Frankfurt sharpened the same intuition with a famous thought experiment, published in the Journal of Philosophy in 1969. Imagine someone choosing freely. Imagine, behind them, a neuroscientist standing by who would intervene to force the choice if the agent showed any sign of choosing otherwise. The agent never shows the sign. The neuroscientist never intervenes. The choice proceeds entirely from the agent’s own reasons. Was the choice free? Almost everyone says yes. The capacity to “do otherwise” in the strong metaphysical sense turns out to be irrelevant to whether the actual choice deserves the name free.
Alfred Mele, in his 1995 book Autonomous Agents, proposed a Modest Libertarianism” that requires only enough indeterminacy at the right scale to keep outcomes open without making them random. The position took thirty years to refine and is mostly absent from Sapolsky’s book.
The Dennett-Sapolsky exchange, when one reads it side by side, is two people talking past each other. Sapolsky means contracausal free will, a self that breaks the chain. Dennett means morally relevant free will, a self that reasons. Both are right within their definitions. The fight is partly over which definition the word should carry, and partly over what we lose if we let one of them go.
6. The Consequences Nobody Wants to Draw
If Sapolsky is right in his strong sense, the architecture of moral and legal responsibility collapses.
Gregg Caruso and Derk Pereboom have spent careers drawing the consequence. Caruso’s Rejecting Retributivism (2021) proposes a “public health-quarantine model” of criminal justice. People who do harm are restrained, treated, rehabilitated, never punished. The analogy is with someone carrying an infectious disease. The carrier is not responsible for being a carrier. They are quarantined only to the extent necessary to protect others, with the lightest possible touch, and released as soon as the danger passes. The retributive impulse, the desire that the wrongdoer suffer because they deserve it, is on this view a moral mistake.
The position is more humane than retributive justice and less politically achievable than almost any reform proposed in the last century. It is also where Sapolsky’s argument logically lands.
The empirical question of what happens when people stop believing in free will has had a complicated decade. Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler reported in Psychological Science in 2008 that subjects who read deterministic passages cheated more on subsequent tasks than controls. The finding was widely cited. It was also part of the larger replication crisis in social psychology. Several follow-ups, including multilab attempts in the late 2010s, failed to find the effect at the original magnitude. Some studies found weak versions of it. Some found nothing at all.
What we are left with is a real worry that the social fabric depends in part on a belief that may not be true. No clean experimental answer settles the question either way. Sapolsky’s response is that we change the belief and rebuild the fabric. Dennett’s response was that we already have the right belief and only need to stop confusing it with the metaphysical fantasy.
Neither of these is a comfortable place to live.
7. The Physicist’s Angle
A third position comes from a discipline the philosophers have mostly ignored. I mean my position.
A climate physicist works every day with deterministic systems that no one can predict. The Navier-Stokes equations are deterministic. The energy balance is deterministic. And yet a climate model, fed with the same initial state but perturbed by a rounding error in the last few decimal places, produces a different weather two weeks out. The discovery was Edward Lorenz’s, in 1963, while he was running a simplified atmospheric model on a Royal McBee LGP-30. He had been rerunning a forecast and entered the starting state with three decimal places instead of six. The trajectory diverged. The butterfly was born.
The lesson the physical sciences absorbed slowly over the next forty years was that “determined” does not imply “predictable in principle by an omniscient observer.” It implies only that, given infinite precision and infinite time, an omniscient observer could in theory compute the trajectory. The qualifier matters. No such observer exists. No physical apparatus could measure the initial conditions with the required precision, because below a certain scale quantum indeterminacy forbids it. Philosophical objection did not banish the Laplacean demon. Werner Heisenberg did, in 1927. Lorenz finished the job in 1963.
Sapolsky’s argument assumes that “determined” means “predictable to a sufficiently powerful intellect.” No working physicist has held that view since their grandparents were young. A self may be a determined system that is also genuinely emergent, self-modeling, and reasons-responsive. None of those properties require uncaused causes. None of them dissolve into Sapolsky’s chain of prior states without remainder. The climate is, in the mathematical sense, free of prediction while remaining entirely subject to causation. That a person might be the same kind of object is the working assumption of one of the better-developed sciences we have.
The dichotomy “determined or free” was the wrong dichotomy from the start.
8. Coda
Aside from my research as a climate scientist, I teach neural networks to mathematicians. Any class can begin with a procedure: trace any output of the model back through its weights, identify the inputs that produced it, and show that nothing along that chain was free in any sense the word still carries.
Does that same procedure apply to the person setting it?
It does. That is the honest answer, and I have spent some time reading Sapolsky and Dennett trying to find a way to give a different one. There is none. There is also no way, when I stand in front of the class on the next Tuesday and the next, to feel that I am running the procedure on a slower instance of the same architecture. The description is true. The experience does not care.
This may be the entire content of the useful illusion.
This post will not ask you to clap. It already knows whether you will. The follow button knows too.
Written by Roberto Suarez
The Devout Agnostic
Published in Philosophy Today
Philosophy Today is dedicated to current philosophy, logic, and thought.
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存在論與人生意義-Max Karlin
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這是一位心理醫生針對存在論的理解和所做的應用；自然與從哲學家立場所做的詮釋或實踐有些差異。可以對照此欄各篇貼文就卡木思想所做的解讀；以及本欄兩篇討論西席弗斯神話的貼文(2026/04/04和2026/03/30)。
索引：
CBT：Cognitive behavioral therapy
glib：此處：(說話)不誠懇的，未深思熟慮的；花言巧语的，油腔滑調的
What’s the Point? What Existential Philosophy Actually Has to Say About Meaninglessness
Max Karlin, 05/05/26
The question most therapists quietly avoid — and what happens when you walk toward it instead
A client sits across from me. Forty years old, successful by most measures, and he asks — not dramatically, not rhetorically — what is the point?
My route into this work was not direct. I studied psychology first, became familiar with person-centred and humanistic approaches, CBT (Cognitive behavioral therapy), psychodynamic thinking — and then left for the business world, where I spent the better part of two decades.
The author reenacting the myth of Sisyphus — a deliberate turn toward the question of meaninglessness. 西席弗斯推巨石上山畫面
The questions that drew me to psychology in the first place did not disappear during those years; they simply went underground, surfacing in the kinds of conversations that happen after meetings end and titles drop away. Eventually I returned — to counselling, and then to training as an existential therapist at the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling (NSPC) and Middlesex University in London, where my understanding of those earlier modalities deepened considerably. But it was the existential approach that finally met the questions I had been circling for years — the ones that sit beneath and prior to distorted thinking or unconscious patterns, and that people like Andrew carry into the room without quite knowing how to name them.
These questions are more common than the diagnostic language suggests. They rarely arrive under their own name — more often wrapped in what presents as anxiety, or depression, or a generalised sense that something is wrong without a clear object. It usually turns out to be something older than any of those labels. Existential philosophy is the one tradition that does not change the subject when this question arrives.
Why “Fix Your Thinking” Only Gets You So Far
I have no quarrel with cognitive-behavioural approaches — they do what they set out to do, and often do it well. My difficulty is with what falls outside their frame. What that frame does not quite reach is the person who is thinking clearly, feeling accurately, and still cannot locate a reason to get out of bed. That person is not distorting reality. They may be seeing it with uncomfortable precision.
What existential thinkers recognised, and what I find increasingly difficult to set aside in my own practice — is that some people are not suffering from a disorder. They are suffering from a question. The cognitive frameworks help with the first. They have rather less to say about the second. Each week I meet people whose distress does not fit comfortably into any diagnostic category and existential perspective here doesn’t try to make it fit.
What Sartre, Heidegger, and Camus Were Actually Arguing About
Sartre’s stance on freedom has always seemed both thrilling and somewhat cruel to me. We are condemned to be free and therefore we are responsible for everything we do. We are deemed to create meaning where none exists by default (Sartre, 1958). That word condemned is doing considerable work. He knows, I think, that for the person who actually has to inhabit radical freedom rather than theorise about it, the experience can be closer to vertigo than to joy.
Heidegger sat at a different angle. His concern was authenticity — whether we are genuinely inhabiting our lives or drifting in what he called the anonymous current of what “one does” (Heidegger, 1927/1962). I find this idea uncomfortable in a productive way. Most of us do rather more drifting than we would like to admit.
Camus looked at the gap between what we want from the universe and what it provides, and called it absurd (Camus, 1955). What is remarkable is that this did not break him. He believed something closer to defiance could grow in that soil. I am not sure that kind of defiance holds over a lifetime. It may. I have not lived long enough with it to know. But the instinct feels right.
Frankl and What Cannot Be Theorised From a Desk
Viktor Frankl did not arrive at his understanding through conceptual argument. He arrived at it through the Nazi concentration camps. That matters.
What he witnessed — the observable differences between those who survived psychologically and those who did not — carries a weight that no seminar can replicate (Frankl, 1963). His central insight is deceptively simple: meaning operates as a compass heading, not a destination. You hold the orientation even when the landscape offers nothing recognisable.
Yalom (1980) took this further — naming death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness as the “ultimate concerns” that therapy must face rather than medicate around. Emmy Van Deurzen (2012) in her turn, mapped the dimensions of existence where meaning accumulates or erodes. And despite their differences, there is a connection between them in a shared conviction that well-being cannot be fully understood through diagnostic categories alone.
Andrew
He was forty, working in digital marketing, and he came to my clinical placement presenting not with anything that fitted a diagnostic framework but with something I recognised immediately. My supervisor and I discussed it at length — this was not depression in any straightforward sense, though it borrowed depression’s clothes.
He had pursued career success and consumer pleasure with real conviction — describing it, with disarming self-awareness, as “a very important and inherent hedonism.” And he had arrived at the other side to find not much. No faith, no partner, no children. He looked at societal injustice and environmental crisis and felt their weight as personal and immovable.
What’s the point? As a genuine question. Not performance.
He was not interested in being told the meaning of life is to search for meaning. He had heard that. It did not land.
What the Work Actually Looked Like
The task was not to hand Andrew a replacement purpose. That would have been a kind of existential prescription, and about as useful as one. Although my practice is grounded in the existential approach, I draw on my broader training to formulate something genuinely individualised for each person. With Andrew, this meant letting the existential frame hold the space while staying alert to what his particular history and circumstances were asking for.
What it involved, practically, was making the room safe enough for him to notice what was already happening when he stopped performing competence or indifference. A certain calm settled over him when he talked about environmental causes. His posture changed. When he mentioned creative projects he had abandoned years ago, something shifted in his voice — not quite enthusiasm, but adjacent. He would not have named it himself.
Merleau-Ponty (1945) argued that embodied perception runs ahead of conscious thought — that we sense what matters before we can say why. I found this true in Andrew’s case in a way that surprised me even though I expected it theoretically. His body knew things his story had not yet incorporated.
What emerged was not a grand purpose but a collection of partial commitments — environmental advocacy, creative work, tentative new relationships that did not require him to play a version of himself he had outgrown. Vos (2018) identifies multiple domains where meaning can reside: hedonistic, social, ethical, philosophical. The implied warning is important. If your meaning is concentrated in a single domain, you are building on ground that can give way. Andrew was learning to distribute the weight.
The Honest Limitations
I would not be doing this tradition justice if I did not sit with its weaknesses.
The emphasis on individual freedom can underestimate how severely structural inequality and economic precarity constrain the choices available. Andrew could volunteer for environmental causes because he had financial stability. Not everyone in existential crisis has that luxury, and the tradition does not always account for the difference. I also keep circling a question about cultural fit — whether the Western insistence on individual authenticity translates into cultures where meaning is primarily communal (Wong, 2012).
The evidence base, it should be said, is more robust than the stereotype suggests. Meta-analyses show meaning-centred interventions achieving outcomes comparable to CBT (Vos, 2018; Roth & Fonagy, 2005). Depth and rigour are not opposites. Though the field could do more to prove it.
What Andrew Taught Me About Sisyphus
Camus imagined Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the hill, watching it fall, and walking back down to begin again — and insisted we must imagine him happy. I used to find this image slightly glib.
Working with Andrew changed that.
He did not leave therapy with his questions answered. He left with a different relationship to the fact that they remain open. The gap between what he wanted from the world and what it provided had not closed. But he had populated it — with commitments, creative work, relationships that asked him to be present rather than impressive. The compass was not pointing at a fixed destination. It was pointing. That turned out to be enough.
Existential therapy does not promise anyone a meaning. It offers something I have come to believe is more useful: a space to sit with the hardest questions honestly, in the company of someone who will not rush you past them, and to discover — slowly, unevenly — a renewed sense of aliveness. Whether that comes for the first time or returns after a long absence, the experience seems to change people in ways I am still learning to understand.
I chose this work because I believe people can navigate life’s difficulties creatively, actively, and reflectively — even when the ground has shifted beneath them. I am still working out what that conviction asks of me as a practitioner. I suspect I will be for some time.
Names and identifying details have been changed to protect client confidentiality.
About me
I’m a counsellor and trainee existential therapist. I work face-to-face and online under supervision with people who are facing difficulties and challenges arising from significant life events and changes. These include issues such as loss of meaning, anxiety, stress, depression, anger, relationship difficulties and questions of self-esteem and self-worth. I help clients deal with difficult family relationships, partnership tensions and break-ups, personal difficulties in finding a more ‘stable’ life, and the conflicts and anxieties that accompany these challenges.
Written by Max Karlin
Psychologist & Existential Therapist-in-training: Exploring and helping uncover purpose, resilience, and meaningful connections through therapy and writing.
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務實道德與佛家的虛無傾向 -- Benjamin Cain
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我只花了大約兩到三年的時間讀佛經，自然不敢自稱「懂」佛家學說。雖然我一向一邊讀書也一邊思考，即使有所得，大概也就在「瞎子摸象」之列。不過，下文作者肯恩博士對佛家思想的詮釋，應該屬於：他自以為在「摸象」，其實摸到的是一頭牛或一匹馬。
別的不說，佛家的「無我」跟「自私」與否沒有半毛錢關係(1)。這也說明：從肯恩博士下文中對「涅槃」概念的理解來判斷，他大概連佛家門檻都還沒有邁過。
其次，佛家的「倫理觀」跟儒家和斯多噶學派相近，其重點在「修身養性」；嚴格的說，它並非「倫理學的『虛無主義』」。在「本體論」或「認識論」上，佛家學說，尤其「中觀學派」的理論，則跟「虛無主義」相近。
附註：
1. 我不知道佛經中的「無我」在梵文或巴利文中是什麼「意思」，或指示什麼「境界」；但是，如果它被翻譯成英文的"selfless"，則肯定不夠「信、達」。
Pragmatic Morality and the Buddha’s Nihilism
The Noble Eightfold Path is a tool you throw away when you’re awakened
Benjamin Cain, 02/25/26
When we think of a Buddha, we likely think of someone who’s spiritually awakened and thus radically different from your average egotist who suffers disappointment in clinging to unrealistic desires.
Yet our conception of a Buddha also hampers this figure since we presume that such a sage would be saintly. For some reason, we presume that the sage would renounce or outgrow selfish desires but not selfless ones, so this awakened figure would be altruistic.
Buddhist pragmatism
In the Alagaddūpama Sutta (《蛇喻經》), from the Pali canon (「巴利藏」), the Buddha points out that his teachings are supposed to be pragmatic. They’re entirely devoted to achieving the goal of attaining nirvana (「涅槃」), the release of psychological attachments or cravings. Once achieved, the awakened mind wouldn’t cling to Buddhist teachings since they’d have fulfilled their purpose.
He shows this with the famous raft analogy, in which he speaks of “the Teaching’s similitude to a raft: as having the purpose of crossing over, not the purpose of being clung to.” Someone builds a raft with great difficulty to cross a perilous body of water. Once this person crosses, what should he or she do with the raft?
Should the crosser think, “This raft, indeed, has been very helpful to me. Carried by it, laboring with hands and feet, I got safely across to the other shore. Should I not lift this raft on my head or put it on my shoulders, and go where I like?”
Or instead, should the crosser think, “This raft, indeed, has been very helpful to me. Carried by it, and laboring with hands and feet, I got safely across to the other shore. Should I not pull it up now to the dry land or let it float in the water, and then go as I please?
The second option, of course, is the preferred one. You stop using a tool when you no longer need it because the tool is no longer useful under your new circumstances.
One such tool is Buddhism’s Noble Eightfold Path, which outlines right conduct for anyone undertaking Buddhist training or therapy. Thus, Buddhists should be pragmatic about morality itself. A Buddhist-in-training emphasizes selfless conduct to counteract his or her egoistic impulses. You learn to snuff out the fires of egoism by doing the opposite of what you’d naturally do.
For instance, with right speech, the Buddhist abstains from lying, gossip, slander, and harsh language, and with right intention, he or she commits to ethical and mental self-improvement, including compassion.
Yet if the Noble Eightfold Path itself is supposed to be like the raft in the analogy, we shouldn’t expect a Buddha to emphasize right conduct in those eight ways (unless the Buddha is speaking about what’s needed for the unenlightened). Morality is what you need when you’re trying to overcome your selfish cravings. Once you extinguish that natural bias towards benefitting yourself at the expense of others, you needn’t be as moralistic as a Buddhist-in-training.
For Buddhists, morality is a tool that’s supposed to destroy egoism, the selfish clinging to myopic desires that don’t take into account our existential standing in life. Once that goal is achieved, morality is as useless for the awakened mind as a boat on land.
Buddhist nihilism
More than that, a Buddha would obviously have no psychological basis for favouring selfless goals over selfish ones. If the Buddha learns to avoid clinging to selfish goals, why would he or she make an exception for selfless ones? The Buddha himself said that his very teachings shouldn’t be clung to. His very teachings are supposed to be like the raft, and his teachings include the Noble Eightfold Path of right thought and conduct.
Friedrich Nietzsche said the Übermensch is beyond good and evil. I see no Buddhist reason for thinking that the state of nirvana would be otherwise. Nirvana is supposed to be freedom from cravings. That must include moral, altruistic cravings.
And for the very same reason that a Buddha would lack selfish desires, he or she would lack selfless ones, because a Buddha regards all selves as illusory, empty, inessential clusters of passing mental states. Instead of clinging emotionally to any of them, a Buddha (awakened one) learns to passively watch his or her mental states flow by. Again, tha must include moral thoughts and feelings.
Just as a Buddha may nevertheless have selfish desires, he or she may have moral ones. But none would matter much to this sage. A Buddha would appreciate the existential tragedy that all things come and go because they dependently arise from other conditions. Moral desires would pass just like selfish ones, and since the self is metaphysically inessential (since there’s no immaterial, immortal soul in foundational Buddhism), we too come and go.
Why obsess over helping someone else, then, when that other person is inessential? If you’re enlightened, why cling to the fear, shame, or disgust that might make for a moral impulse to sacrifice yourself to help someone else in need? Even if it’s a family member in need, why expect a Buddha to help this other person out of love? How could love be anything other than a selfish or moral craving that a Buddha is supposed to have outgrown?
We should imagine that a Buddha’s condition of nirvana would be transhuman, not defined by unenlightened preoccupations. Again, as Nietzsche said, common morality is a “slave’s” way of rationalizing resentment towards the dominant, master class. Slave morality is for an underclass that’s locked in a culture war, whereas a Buddha would be free of tribal attachments, including familial ones and the duties of wannabe superheroes who tirelessly sacrifice themselves to aid precious victims.
No one is precious in the Buddhist picture, which is why the ninth-century Zen master Linji Yixuan (臨濟義玄) said in the Record of Linji, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” If even a Buddha isn’t precious, because everything is transient in the field of becoming, surely an unenlightened victim of circumstances isn’t so important that his or her plight would force a Buddha to act. If a Buddha has no mental attachments, nothing could psychologically compel a Buddha to take action, not even a moral principle.
How to escape Buddhist nihilism
We must keep in mind Buddhism’s purpose, which is to relieve us of pointless suffering by changing our erroneous perspectives. For Buddhists, we’re the causes of our most absurd suffering, the kind that we needn’t endure. We disappoint ourselves because we’re selfish, so we always want more than the world is likely to provide. Modern existentialists would later call that mismatch life’s “absurdity,” and the point of Buddhism is to undergo therapy to relieve us of our naturally evolved myopia and biases.
Once we broaden our minds and train ourselves to think and feel selflessly, we’re awakened to our existential condition. How would a Buddha, or an awakened one, be expected to behave in response to that understanding? Morality might seem to enter the picture in two ways.
First, a Buddha might be altruistic because selfless feelings somehow replace selfish ones. From a neutral observer’s standpoint, morality might become a simple utilitarian act of measurement: the plight of the many outweighs the plight of the few or the one, so what a Buddha wants for himself or herself is outweighed by the suffering undergone by the slumbering masses.
The problem with this is that emotions don’t easily attach to alienated calculations. Sure, there may be more non-buddhas than buddhas, but so what? Why would the greater quantity outweigh anything in a normative sense? Why would anyone’s suffering matter, from an awakened standpoint in which there’s no emotional attachment to any outcome?
Indeed, the utilitarian calculus would be dwarfed by the cosmicist one, which would note that most of the universe doesn’t suffer because it’s not alive. So would that entail that lifelessness is more important than life’s existential condition? Should a Buddha give more credence to inanimate things than living ones because the former greatly outnumber the latter?
Second, there’s the more cynical question of promoting and even selling a religion or philosophy by presenting it in the best light, meaning one that doesn’t alienate potential adherents. Here, the role of a moral interpretation of Buddhahood is straightforward. Potential adherents to Buddhism care about morality because they have mental attachments. For instance, they may suffer, so they want a hero to rescue them, or they’re emotionally attached to their family members, so they deem those individuals to be more important than everyone else. If Buddhism is promoted as being consistent with morality, this religion or therapy won’t threaten non-Buddhists or Buddhist initiates.
We can call this the Leo Straussian interpretation since he emphasized the intellectual’s need to hide what are typically the antisocial, countercultural implications of his or her philosophy. This would have been especially true in premodern, illiberal times, in which you could have been killed for heterodox thoughts. But even in the late-modern period, unenlightened Buddhists have a clear incentive to appeal especially to moralistic Westerners by portraying Buddhism as an inoffensive bit of self-improvement. Buddhism wouldn’t threaten social conventions, but would merely allow Buddhists to be their best selves.
The moralistic presentation of Buddhism would be akin to neoliberal propaganda, an ideology in something like a Marxist sense, one that secretly prioritizes economic factors, as in the earning of profit with rationalizations of gross economic inequalities.
Again, the alternative is just that Buddhism is countercultural because enlightenment is a scary business, one that threatens all exoteric compromises. What lies at the other end of philosophical and developmental awakening might be horror.
If that’s so, Buddhism should be supplemented with something like secular humanism, cosmicist existentialism, or aesthetic pantheism, a philosophy that acknowledges the horror of our existential predicament while independently motivating a progressive course of conduct to stave off nihilism.
Further reading
* Buddhist Nirvana and The Consolation of Nihilism
* The Incoherence of Basic Buddhism
* Buddhas are Nihilist Observers, Not Compassionate Saints
* Buddhas Aren’t Slaves to Saintliness
Written by Benjamin Cain
Ph.D. in philosophy/Knowledge condemns. Art redeems. /https://benjamincain.substack.com/https://ko-fi.com/benjamincain/ benjamincain8@gmailDOTcom
Published in Philosophy Today
Philosophy Today is dedicated to current philosophy, logic, and thought.
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行為「對」與「錯」的來源 -- Rational Badger
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下文從宗教信仰、社會互動、和生物演化三方面探討：行為「對」、「錯」之分的原因和源頭。值得參考和進一步釐清。
Where Does Morality Come From?
Tracing the Roots of Right and Wrong
Rational Badger, 03/23/26
0. 前言
My interest in this topic is rooted in my instinctive reaction to people like Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro invoking the phrase "Judeo-Christian values" to argue that morality, particularly in Western and American societies, is somehow a special brand above all other moral frameworks.
But this claim simply doesn’t hold up. Even just intuitively, without research, a few strong arguments come to mind.
Firstly, morality existed long before Judaism and Christianity, and it has evolved independently in virtually every religious and cultural tradition. We can certainly compare moral frameworks and debate their strengths, but no tradition holds a monopoly on goodness.
In fact, it makes far more sense to speak of an evolving human morality, a long journey shaped by culture, empathy, power, and reason, than to locate a complete ethical framework in any religious system. After all, both Judaism and Christianity, at various points in history, have tolerated or endorsed practices we now find morally abhorrent: slavery, genocide, religious wars, the subjugation of women, capital punishment for adultery or homosexuality, and the persecution of dissenters.
And here’s an irony: Christianity, in many ways, shares more ethical and theological common ground with Islam than with Judaism. I don’t hear much talk of a Christian-Islamic tradition.
It should be obvious that the term “Judeo-Christian values” isn’t a religious or philosophical category. It’s a political invention, most commonly used in American culture. When figures like Shapiro use it, it’s usually to construct a unified moral identity between Jews and Christians, distinguish the West from secular or non-Abrahamic cultures, and — this one is interesting — criticize progressive values as eroding moral tradition.
But let’s put the punditry and politics aside for now. The real question that interests me is far deeper:
1. Where does morality come from?
How did humans develop a sense of right and wrong? Why do so many cultures converge on surprisingly similar moral principles despite beliefs with vastly different origins, structure, and contents?
Let’s dive in.
We share a strong sense that some actions are right and others wrong. We praise kindness and condemn cruelty. We prohibit murder, unjust murder without cause. We strongly oppose taking what’s not yours — stealing. We enforce protections for children and the vulnerable. We value fairness and keeping promises. Lying is frowned upon, especially if deceit causes harm or betrayal. We value hierarchical respect for elders, leaders, and traditions.
But why? Is it cultural learning, biological instinct, or rational reflection? Was conscience taught to us by the gods, or did the gods arrive after the conscience?
2. The Religious Perspective
It is true that for much of history, people have believed that morality ultimately comes from the divine. God sets the rules. Moral obligations are duties owed to God. The classic example is the Ten Commandments in the Bible. Believers see these not as human conventions but as divine instructions.
Religious advocates often argue that without belief in God, moral rules would lose their foundation. Dostoevsky famously expressed this fear with the line that if God does not exist, “everything is permitted”. In fact, The Brothers Karamazov, reflects Dostoevsky’s position expressed through one of the characters, that in a world without God or immortality, concepts of good and evil would have no binding force. This is the typical theist argument — if moral laws are merely human opinions, then who’s to say murder, for example, is truly wrong? Objective morality, they claim, requires a higher authority. Our conscience — the inner voice telling us to do good and avoid evil — is seen as the voice of the divine within us, or at least a God-given faculty. In short, morality comes from above.
Scriptures and religious teachings thus play a central role in instructing moral behavior. A devout Muslim, for example, looks to the Quran and Hadith for guidance on ethical choices in daily life. A Christian may ask, “What would Jesus do?” Religion also promises ultimate accountability: a divine Judge who sees all our actions and will reward good and punish evil, if not in this life then in the hereafter.
Of course, religious morality is not without its complexities and controversies. Without going into detail, different faiths (and even denominations within a faith) often disagree on exactly what God commands. Still, the core idea remains: morals come from God.
Religion’s contribution to morality is not just theoretical. Historically, religious teachings have inspired profound altruism and reform. On the other hand, religion can also instill problematic or outdated morals, as it has. Acts of cruelty have been done in the name of religion. The spectrum is complex. And this very complexity, at the very least, does not allow us to conclude that religion is, indeed, the sole source of morality.
3. The Secular Perspective
On the opposite side of the argument are secular theories, which hold that morality is a human construct. That it is a product of our own reason, emotions, and social interactions, and has evolved as such, rather than being handed down from above. Morals come from within. They emerge naturally from our human nature and our lived experience. We do not need divine tablets of commandments. We can work out (or feel out) right and wrong for ourselves using our minds and our empathy for others. We learn from millennia of human history and human thought.
There are various secular traditions in ethics. Immanuel Kant’s ethics are based on the foundation of universal moral law, or the categorical imperative. Basically, you should act only according to principles that you would want to become a universal law for everyone. David Hume rejected rationalism and contended that humans did not use reason alone to decide whether an action was right or wrong. Instead, moral judgements depended significantly on sentiment or feelings. For Hume, there is no morality without feelings. Baruch Spinoza viewed morality as based on rational self-mastery and on an understanding of the natural order. John Stuart Mill and other utilitarians proposed that morality boils down to maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering — what is best for the majority of the people. Proponents of virtue ethics (inspired by Aristotle) suggested that morality originates in human aspirations to live well and flourish. Virtues like courage, honesty, and compassion are cultivated because they lead to a fulfilling, admirable life for individuals and communities.
A special mention of Stoic morality, my personal favorite. Stoics argued that virtue — not pleasure, wealth, or social status — is the only true good. Human beings are uniquely capable of reason and self-awareness, and thus have a duty to cultivate virtues such as wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance. A central principle of Stoic ethics is the idea that we must distinguish between what is within our power (our thoughts, actions, and attitudes) and what is not (external events, other people’s behavior, fortune). Moral responsibility lies only in the former. This has later been referred to as the dichotomy of control. Another important concept is sympatheia — the idea that everything is interconnected, and because of that, we should work for the common good and treat others with empathy. Stoicism offers a rigorous and antifragile moral code rooted in reason, self-discipline, focus on continuous growth, and a profound sense of interconnectedness.
One can see, then, that secular thought provides multiple sources for morality: reason, emotion, and social utility all play a role. Often, these intertwine. For instance, our empathy might tell us that hurting someone is wrong because we can feel their pain. Our reason might independently conclude that if we wish to live in a peaceful society, we’d better have a rule against harming others. And our experience shows that societies respecting that rule tend to prosper. None of these requires a deity. They arise from common human capacities and interests.
A simple way to appreciate the secular perspective is Hitchens’ challenge. I have seen Hitchens often ask his opponents in debates to name a single moral action that only a religious person could perform and not an atheist; he offered that no such uniquely religious moral act exists, whereas plenty of immoral acts (like holy wars or inquisitions) have been done explicitly in the name of faith.
Of course, secular morality is not without its weaknesses. Critics often point to atrocities committed by the likes of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao as evidence that removing religion leads to moral collapse. The argument goes like this: without belief in God or a divine moral order, nothing restrains human cruelty. Ideologies that rejected religion — like Soviet communism or Nazi fascism — became totalitarian and murderous because they lacked a transcendent ethical anchor. From this perspective, lack of religion leaves a dangerous moral vacuum.
But the secular response is that these regimes didn’t fail because they lacked religion — they failed because they replaced it with dogmatic, authoritarian ideologies that functioned like religions themselves. Stalinism and Nazism were not grounded in free thought or reasoned ethics but in cult worship, suppression of dissent, and absolute power. Secularism, rooted in human rights, open inquiry, and ethical reasoning, opposes such tyranny. The real danger isn’t secularism or religion per se — it’s any unchecked ideology that places power above people and silences moral reflection.
4. Evolutionary Perspective
Which brings us to the evolutionary perspective. Many contemporary thinkers — biologists, psychologists, anthropologists — argue that the roots of morality lie in our evolutionary past. In this view, morals come from nature, crafted slowly by natural selection. It is, essentially, an adaptation: a set of social instincts and learned norms that enabled humans to cooperate and coexist, and therefore, survive and thrive.
Modern evolutionary scientists have fleshed out and supported this idea with abundant research, essentially confirming that humans are hard-wired for certain moral emotions. We are born with the potential for ethics, though how it develops depends on culture and upbringing.
How exactly could being “moral” help our ancestors survive? One key mechanism is kin selection. The basic idea is that if an organism helps its relatives, it may be increasing the chances that genes identical to its own are passed on. While no animal does this conscious math, evolution may favor a predisposition to protect and care for kin. We see this in nature: social insects like bees will sacrifice themselves for the hive (all are close genetic kin), and mammals fiercely defend their offspring. In humans, blood ties often create powerful duties — “family first” is a common moral sentiment.
Another extremely powerful mechanism is reciprocal altruism — essentially, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. If individuals can remember past interactions and are likely to meet again, helping someone now might result in them helping you later. Indeed, human society is steeped in reciprocity: we feel obligated to return favors and to express indignation toward freeloaders.
Reputation-building (being seen as generous brings social rewards) and signaling (showing off one’s ability to give as a display of strength or status) are some of the other mechanisms, and along with reciprocity and kin selection, these can make helping others strategically advantageous in evolutionary terms. For example, an individual known for kindness and fairness might attract more allies, mates, or cooperative partners — a payoff for moral conduct.
These evolutionary processes could have endowed humans with genuine moral emotions that feel instinctive. We inherited, it seems, a capacity for empathy — to viscerally feel something of what another feels — which makes us capable of compassion. We also have a sense of fairness; even children and monkeys exhibit outrage if they see others getting an undeservedly larger share of goodies. We feel loyalty and righteous anger, which likely tie into our primate heritage of living in coalitions and needing to defend the group. All these emotional instincts form the raw material of what we call morality.
In our evolutionary past, individuals who lacked these prosocial tendencies may have been ostracized or left fewer descendants, whereas those who balanced self-interest with social interest succeeded. Over time, natural selection didn’t just shape sharper claws or bigger brains — it also shaped social instincts.
Beyond individuals, evolution operates at multiple levels, and some scientists argue that morality has also been shaped by group selection. The idea here is that groups of early humans with more cooperative, altruistic norms could have outcompeted groups driven by selfishness and strife. This group advantage hypothesis is debated among biologists, but the general sense is that human morality reflects a balance between individual-level selection (which rewards selfishness) and group-level selection (which rewards altruism within the group). Psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes that humans are “90% chimp and 10% bee.” By that, he means we are mostly like chimpanzees — driven by individual goals and kin loyalties — but we have a dash of hive-like nature, a capability to become supersocial. Under certain circumstances (think of mass rituals, patriotic fervor, or communal endeavors), our “hive switch” can flip, and we behave like bees in a hive, subordinating self-interest for the sake of the group. This analogy suggests that morality has an almost tribal or collective dimension ingrained in us. It binds us into teams and tribes, enabling large-scale cooperation. As Haidt puts it, morality binds and blinds — it binds people together around shared values, but in doing so, it can also blind them to alternate perspectives.
This insight reveals how our evolved moral psychology has both glorious and troublesome potential: it yields group loyalty and self-sacrifice, but also inter-group conflict and self-righteousness. Our species is capable of incredible unity and kindness within groups, yet also distrust or hostility toward perceived outsiders and other groups, which likely stems from evolution in a world of competing coalitions.
Haidt’s research identifies several core moral intuitions — what he calls moral foundations — that seem to be part of our natural equipment, shaped by evolution. These include care/harm (compassion for the vulnerable), fairness/cheating (justice and reciprocity), loyalty/betrayal (group solidarity), authority/subversion (respect for hierarchy and rules), sanctity/degradation (a sense of purity or sacredness), and liberty/oppression (hatred of tyranny).
Crucially, different cultures emphasize different foundations, but all cultures have them in some mix. If you want to dig deeper into this, I highly recommend Jonathan Haidt’s excellent book The Righteous Mind (my takeaways here).
So, having examined (briefly) the religious, secular, and evolutionary perspectives, what is the conclusion?
5. Morality = Evolutionary Foundation + (Culture and Religion)
One point of conclusion is that our minds appear to be predisposed to feel certain things are right or wrong before we ever read a holy book or attend a philosophy class. In that sense, morality is as much a part of us as language or music. Culture (versions of religion or secularism mixed with a local moral framework) then builds on those innate foundations, creating the rich mosaic of moral codes we see around the world.
Richard Dawkins, while deeply appreciative of evolution’s explanatory power for our moral tendencies, observes that humanity has been gradually moving beyond some of our evolutionary baggage. He notes that over our history, humans have widened our “moral circle” — we now apply moral concern to people of other races, other nations, even to animals, much more than our distant ancestors did.
Religious thinkers, unsurprisingly, push back on these secular claims. Christian apologist William Lane Craig, for example, contends that if atheism is true, we have no reason to trust our moral intuitions as valid, since they’re just products of survival, not aimed at truth. He maintains that only if God created us with a moral purpose can our moral convictions be more than subjective feelings. Plus, of course, the vast majority of people worldwide continue to derive moral guidance and inspiration from their faith traditions.
Ultimately, the origin of morality is likely PLURAL. Human morality is woven from our genes — the empathy, biases, and social instincts shaped by natural selection — AND from the cultural stories, religions, and philosophies that we ourselves have spun over millennia to make sense of right and wrong. It’s both innate and learned. A newborn child arrives with potential for compassion and anger; how those impulses are cultivated into adult virtues or vices depends on family, society, and personal choices. Religion has certainly been a major influence, carrying crucial ideals such as the “Golden Rule” (which, one can argue, is nothing but a version of reciprocity). At the same time, secular thought has refined moral principles through reason, giving us concepts like human rights and universal dignity that transcend any single faith.
One useful way to think about morality is as an ongoing conversation. A conversation with ourselves, where we bounce between our evolutionary instincts, which shape our emotional responses to fairness, or suffering, or cooperation; religious or spiritual traditions that frame morality in sacred terms; and rational reflection, where societies reconsider inherited norms and adjust them to new knowledge and circumstances. We, human beings, are therefore actively shaping our moral landscape.
Morality is a mishmash of biology, culture, religion, philosophy, and lived experience. It is a living, dynamic system. However it began, morality today is a shared human project, continually refined as we strive to live better together. Which means the question, “Where does morality come from?” is not only a backward-looking question, but also a forward-looking one.
So, there isn’t a simple answer. Still, here is my version of a one-sentence response: Morality comes from being human.
Ah. Almost forgot. Let’s now, in light of this broader exploration of morality’s roots, get back to the term “Judeo-Christian values”. It is not a moral foundation and is more of a recent cultural shorthand. It obviously and selectively highlights elements of two faith traditions. It overlooks both the differences between them, as well as the global, evolutionary nature of ethical development. While Judaism and Christianity have certainly contributed to moral thought, they are only a part of a much larger picture. Framing morality as uniquely or primarily “Judeo-Christian” ignores the moral insights of other traditions, and politicizes ethics in ways that exclude rather than unite. Morality is a shared human project. It has been shaped by biology, experience, and reason. And that being the case, no one (or two merged into one) tradition owns it. The phrase “Judeo-Christian values” is a meaningless moral category. A rhetorical tool. Cultural gatekeeping. Morally questionable. Even immoral. Not because the said values are inherently bad, but because the phrase is deployed to claim moral authority while ignoring other (secular or non-Abrahamic) perspectives.
When you cloak a narrow identity claim in the language of virtue, and use it to divide, I am going to call this IMMORAL USE OF MORAL LANGUAGE.
If you enjoyed this read, be sure to visit my homepage for articles on philosophy, learning, self-improvement, literature, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and more. Here are some you may be interested in:
* On Power. A Stoic Reflection
* My 7 Takeaways from The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
* Leadership Without Rank. Lessons from Ellen Ripley, Aragorn, and Optimus Prime
* Service: The Purpose of Power
* Advice from Your Future Self. Applying a Japanese Social Experiment to Personal Growth
* My 7 Takeaways from Awe by Dacher Keltner
* It Is Supposed To Be Hard
* Rise Above Daily Drift
* My 7 Takeaways from Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
* Carpe Diem Revisited
* My 7 Takeaways from Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
* My 7 Takeaways from the Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday
* My 7 Takeaways from Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
* My 7 Takeaways from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Written by Rational Badger
I am a humanitarian worker fascinated about helping people reach and exceed their potential. I write about learning, self-improvement, BJJ and much more.
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年輕一代缺乏「道德」的原因 – J. S. H. Riley
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下文作者有他見解不俗之處(該欄2026/04/29)。由於我對「倫理學」和「道德」議題很感興趣，在看到此文標題後，想從它得到一些啟發。讀過之後，甚是失望。不過，還是轉載於此；以便日後拿它當做「方法論」反面教材的個案。
Why Does the Younger Generation Lack Morality
The hollowing out of civil society and the death of meaning, love and family
Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley, 03/30/26
Quote by Jill Blakewat Dnevnik 一段話
When it comes to any sense of right or wrong and where that comes from, it is not something we are just born knowing; it does not arise from a vacuum; it comes from the society we are raised in, from our parents, or even from our faith.
What the younger generation lacks is a sense of right and wrong and morality that extends beyond the self. For the younger generation, there is no sense of right or wrong or of the public good; there is only good and wrong applied only to the individual.
As for how that works in our day-to-day lives, it is that doing the right thing has been replaced with boundaries, or if you are in a bad relationship, there are no longer words there to describe the wrongness of the situation, because we live in a society where we are told that we must not judge people.
Morality in society is possible only if society provides an implicit definition of what is good and what is bad. If there is no morality in society, then there can be no social norms or boundaries, for lack of a better word.
It means it’s harder for a woman to say no to sex on a first date, or that it’s not okay to wait before having sex because sex did have a meaning, now it means nothing anymore because the language of sex being special has gone due to social change, which we had no choice in or say.
If you are from the generation born after the 1960s and 1970s, we don’t know anything different.
Furthermore, it means it’s okay for men to get a woman pregnant and not do the right thing and be there for the mother and the baby, because in our society, there is no judging anymore, and it’s seen as the woman’s fault for getting pregnant when there is the contraceptive pill.
How the Internet Ruins Young People — by Freya India 相關視頻
For me, I am not saying that an adult man and woman should not go out there and have sex as adults and that they have the right to have fun, I am talking about the context of finding love, not a woman I would like to fuck or a man I would like to fuck, romance, love and life are much more complex.
I am not a Religious American conservative or that kind of social conservative who thinks modern women are slut or that we need to bring back the chastity belts.
Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley is a classic liberal with the spirit of Benjamin Disraeli and Edmund Birk. I don’t want to wait for marriage before having sex. Only that for me, sex is not the equivalent of shaking somebody else’s hand.
I am a Patriot and believe a person should show love and respect for their country, and that, in turn, we should show goodwill and brotherhood to our fellow man/woman/human or alien overlords.
It’s just that we have a society where sex is not linked to children anymore, and where some people believe that we should be liberated from the very concept of the human body and gender.
But for me, that’s due to people spending so much time online and outside of our physical world, and that it’s strangers sleeping with strangers, and who would want to tie themselves to somebody they don’t really know or care for?
In the UK, there is a TV show called Married at First Sight, and a lot of couples, after they get married within the show, have sex straight away, then after a few days, they want nothing to do with each other.
That in itself tells us how society has got it wrong about sex and love. I am not saying don’t have sex, but at least spend 8 hours doing some serious talking to each other, and after that amount of time, you can tell if somebody is a good person or an asshole.
As for my generation, which is the generation born between millennials and Generation Z, in terms of life experience, we grew up as kids without social media, but we did grow up as teenagers with social media and the internet.
We also have the memory of actually playing outside.
I remember building dens and running in the cornfield behind my childhood home, playing hide-and-seek; now it’s a housing estate.
My small town of Featherstone is now a small city that has lost much of its feeling of being its own small world, which I can only liken to the Shire from the Hobbit movies and Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books.
It’s not helped that we are getting a lot of people from the South of England and London moving to the North with their southern ways, without the Yorkshire charm and happy attitude; the Hobbit way would be the only way to describe it to a layperson.
I think for an American reader, the best way to describe it is as a transplant moving from New York or California to Texas or Montana.
People reading this from my generation and time, born between 1997 and the early 2000s, have never known a world where literally brothers and sisters are just strangers, and where our communities are long dead; we are just people who occupy the same place.
I remember talking and knowing my neighbours, now we are just a town/city of strangers, and I don’t see anybody as my people anymore. I have no love, no hate, and no feelings for my town and its people. It’s as if we are just shells with nothing inside.
As for how that impacts our relationship, and that’s all relationships are: everything has become a commodity and a convenience. It’s about getting things from other people, and relationships are not about being there with another person; it’s about how much you can take from each other.
I have felt that when I go Speed Dating in Leeds, at bars such as Lost and Found and others in the city, I sit down opposite a woman. It’s not a nice experience; it’s all about money, about work, and it’s as if I am going for a job interview.
For me, I have done that myself; I am not perfect, it’s just what our society has taught us all to value.
Everybody is doing the same on all the tables; it’s like we are all dancing monkeys.
A lot of the issues in the Western world stem from how weak family structures are; there are no longer any communities, and we are all just individuals.
It’s no wonder we have no concept of the collective good, because it’s something we have never had and only learn much later in life, and by then it may be too late, because it’s hard to break the habits and behaviours of a lifetime.
When it comes to morality from the conservative tradition in the UK, not the USA Religious Right, what was seen as being good and being an upstanding moral person, what was good, you did not just for yourself but for your community, how you treated others, and doing good for your nation.
In Britain, that’s all gone now; all we have left is liberalism that is unconstrained by society because civil society is dead.
Written by Jonathan Stephen Harry Riley
I have been writing from 2014 to the present day; my writing is focused on history, politics, culture, geopolitics and other related topics.
Published in E³ — Entertain Enlighten Empower
Putting the reader first
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