E.G.

We should not just be in the neighborhood of vegan. For example, we should not be vegetarian. We should not be flexitarian. We should not be reducetarian. We should be vegan, specifically, rather than any of those other things. That's my view.

But veganism—real veganism—is unattractive to many philosophers, because they think it involves restraining yourself in ways that are pointless, or fetishistic, or somehow irrational.

For example, being vegan means not eating leftover turkey sandwiches, even when they're going to be thrown away if you don't eat them, and even when no one (apart from you) will ever know you did it.

And being vegan means not eating bivalves, even though bivalves don't have brains, which means they probably aren't sentient and are incapable of suffering, and are therefore probably similar in morally relevant respects to soybeans, and bananas, and so on.

Broadly, being vegan means following the rules of veganism, consistently and constantly. That turns many philosophers off. Many philosophers will say something like this:

Yes, we should recognize that not all consumption choices are morally acceptable. We should not buy hamburgers from McDonald's, for instance. But no, we should not be fetishistically attached to veganism's rules. Instead, we should be rational. In any given situation, we should do whatever we've got most reason to do. We shouldn't just adopt a set of rules and follow them, come what may, without paying attention to the particularities of the situations in which we find ourselves. Perhaps we should be mostly vegan, most of the time, but being strictly vegan means being rule-governed rather than reason-governed, and that's not a good thing to be.

My view, by contrast, is that we should be vegan and we should be fetishistic about it—insofar as being fetishistic about it means adopting and living by veganism's rules, consistently and constantly, i.e., faithfully. I will explain why I think these things.

***

South Carolina recently killed Mikal Mahdi by firing squad. Here's what reportedly happened after they shot him:

Mahdi let out a loud groan as soon as the bullets struck him, then took several shallow breaths. He let out several softer groans about 45 seconds later, then let out a low moan. Mahdi took one final, heaving breath, in which he expanded, then contracted his chest before he stopped moving, witnesses described. A doctor then entered the room and declared Mahdi dead.

It sounds as if Mahdi's suffering after the bullets struck him lasted for about a minute, at most. A great deal of agony can be experienced in a minute's time.

I believe Mahdi was the only human being who was legally executed in the United States on April 11, 2025. About 25 million animals were slaughtered in the United States on that same day. That's how many animals are slaughtered every day in the United States, on average, year round.

If each of those animals suffers one minute of agony per killing and no more, then we are inflicting 47 years of agony per day (or >17,000 years of agony per year).

Every one of those animals is completely innocent. They trust us; we betray them. I do not believe that Mahdi should have been killed but there was at least a pretense of justice being done, a claim that his killing was deserved. No one claims that the animals deserve to be killed, but we kill them anyway.

Mahdi's killers were able to do their work with a level of care and attention that would be impossible in an industrial slaughterhouse. A target was placed on Mahdi's chest; there were three shooters; they took aim and fired all at once. Three simultaneous chances to directly hit the heart. No such redundancies exist, or could possibly exist, in the places where we are killing animals by the millions.

A common cattle slaughter method is to bolt-gun them in their heads, which is supposed to "stun" them instantly. But we're doing this in assembly-line fashion, so there's plenty of room for error. So, sometimes the animal jerks unexpectedly and the worker misses their mark. Sometimes the bolt goes sideways into the animal's eye, sometimes it crushes her cheekbone, etc.

Similar agonies attend all other commonly used killing methods, e.g., gas chambers. Our methods are designed to cheaply and efficiently convert millions of living bodies into edible flesh. They are not designed to minimize agony.

Our slaughter methods vividly illustrate our callous cruelty, which is why it makes sense to focus on slaughter. But killing the animals is not the most reprehensible thing we do to them. It's what we do to them, and what we take from them, in the weeks and months and years of their lives. Watch Dominion. 

***

If we were to put an end to animal agriculture, then we would no longer be doing the horrible things to animals that I have just described. All of that would finally be in our civilization's rear view mirror. Which would be wonderful.

It is conceivable that we could stop doing these horrible things to animals without putting an end to animal agriculture. For example, one can imagine a world where all of the animals are treated exceedingly well while they are alive, and then are killed as painlessly as possible. But it is not reasonable to hope for that.

As long as animal agriculture exists, it will be a for-profit industry. And cruel treatment of animals is vastly more profitable than good treatment of animals. So there will always be massive economic pressure toward treating animals cruelly, and massive political pressure toward legally permitting animals to be treated cruelly. We should expect these economic and political pressures to be permanently overwhelming.

So, if we hope to stop doing the vile things to animals that we are doing, then we must hope to put an end to animal agriculture. And it is reasonable, in my opinion, to hope for that.

A world without animal agriculture would be a world where almost everything is the same, except (a) farmers don't raise animals for slaughter, and instead do other sorts of work (e.g., grow soybeans); and (b) consumers continue to consume almost all the things they presently consume, except for meat, dairy, and eggs.

It is easy to imagine a world like that. Vegans, who comprise about 1% of Americans, have already preemptively restricted themselves to what would be available in such a world. I assure you: It's not much different.

It was (or should have been) easy for people in 1900 to imagine that they would soon be in a world where cars have replaced horses as modes of transportation, and it is (or should be) easy for us in 2025 to imagine that we will soon be in a world where electric vehicles have replaced gas-powered cars, etc. Many once-huge industries have died out, sometimes rapidly. This will just be another such extinction event.

***

How could animal agriculture be brought to an end in the near term? Here are four imaginable pathways, only the last of which is worth hoping for.

(1) Political agents decide to end animal agriculture

Imagine, for example, that the heroic Senator Cory Booker (who is the only vegan US senator, to my knowledge) uses his considerable powers of rational argument to assemble a bipartisan coalition in Congress to outlaw animal agriculture in the United States.

That would be great, but nothing like that will happen as long as there is a huge market for animal products. The industry can buy enough political influence to prevent it from happening. And as long as 99% of Americans are carnists, they will not put up with their political leaders moving to end, or even substantially limit, animal agriculture.

(2) Business leaders decide to end animal agriculture

This will not happen. Even if Donnie King, the CEO of Tyson Foods, were to try to convert his company into a vegan company, it would not matter. He would simply be ousted, and the company would continue its violence against animals without interruption. And even if King were, against all odds, to succeed in transforming Tyson Foods into a vegan company, this wouldn't stop or even reduce the violence. It would only mean that other companies would step into the industry niche that Tyson Foods currently occupies.

(3) Civilizational collapse

For example, an asteroid could strike, or a nuclear war could happen, etc. These would definitely be ways for animal agriculture to come to end. We should hope for a happier solution.

(4) Voluntary changes in consumer behavior lead to the end of animal agriculture

That is, consumers could decide, in sufficient numbers, that they no longer want to consume animal products. So, the demand goes away, and animal products are no longer produced. So, animal agriculture ends.

This, in my judgment, is something that is worth hoping for, and striving for, and fighting for. I think this consumer-driven route is probably the only feasible way for animal agriculture to end without civilizational collapse.

And I think it is not an outlandish possibility. Perhaps it is unlikely for consumers to make the necessary voluntary changes but I do not think it is extremely unlikely. Crazier things have happened.

Our hope should be founded in the observation that people are already psychologically equipped to care about animals. We do not need to get people to care; they already care.

Things would be much less hopeful if, for example, farm animals looked like scary monsters, or serial killers, or were in some way unsympathetic. But people already like pigs, chickens, cows, goats, and so on. These animals are cute.

So, it will not be particularly surprising if large numbers of people come to a recognition that their consumer choices are massively harmful to these animals, and decide on that basis to stop making those choices.

Actually, an alien observer who understands some of the key biologically-based facts about our species—our evolved disposition to care about cute creatures; our capacity to survive and thrive without eating animal products—might be surprised that we have not already done this.

The fact that some people have chosen to be vegan is not mysterious. It is the stubborn persistence of carnism among the vast majority of people that is mysterious.

We should also derive hope from the fact that our moment is a moment of upheaval. Many longstanding traditions are being transformed or abandoned. Some of the traditions we are abandoning are good, and it is a shame to see them die. For example it's horrible to see America turning its back on its long tradition of welcoming immigrants. Nevertheless, the fact that our society is choosing to embrace various kinds of deep social change should be heartening to those of us who want the death of animal agriculture. It is no longer reasonable to say things of the form "X is a longstanding tradition in our society; therefore, it is certain that X will not go away anytime soon."

***

How could voluntary changes in consumer behavior lead to the end of animal agriculture? Many pathways are imaginable. We should look for a code of behavior C that has these features:

(i) C is effective: If C is adopted and correctly applied by sufficiently many people, then we'll end up in a world without animal agriculture.

(ii) C is contagious: When your associates have adopted C, this can inspire you to adopt C yourself.

(iii) C is easily applicable: People know how to correctly apply C when they are making decisions; people do not regularly make mistakes in applying C.

(iv) C is backed by an already-existing movement, the bigger the better.

All of these features come in degrees. A code with ample supplies of each of these features will be a relatively more feasible pathway to a world without animal agriculture, all else equal.

My general claim is this: If, in the future, we will decide to make voluntary changes in our consumption choices which lead to the end of animal agriculture—then this will most likely happen because we adopt a code of behavior that has high levels of each of these four features. 

And I think I can argue that veganism has a better mixture of these four features than the various often-discussed alternatives to veganism.

***

For example, vegetarianism fails in the effectiveness department. Even if everyone in America were to go vegetarian, we'd still have a massive, and unacceptably violent, system of animal agriculture. Animal agriculture would be transformed, but it would continue. Dairy farmers would still be abusing and killing hundreds of thousands of calves per year; there'd still be millions of egg-laying hens confined in densely crowded sheds; there'd still be hundreds of millions of male chicks being macerated alive, and so on.

Similar points can be made about other commonly discussed alternatives to veganism such as reducetarianism and flexitarianism. A world where we all became reducetarians and flexitarians would still be a world of abominable cruelty to animals.

***

Here's another code to consider: the "ethical" carnism of the philosophers, as it might be called. This is the code of behavior that seems to be popular among animal ethicists and food ethicists (and few others). I think the main rule of this code is something like this:

The case-by-case criterion: Whenever you can see that a consumption choice will result in harm to animals, don't do it. Whenever you can see that a consumption choice will not result in harm to animals, feel free to do it.

Philosophers who mostly avoid consumption of animal products routinely appeal to this sort of criterion to explain why they think they can eat leftover turkey sandwiches, and eat bivalves, and so on. They believe that they can see that these consumption choices do not result in harm to animals, so they feel free to make these choices.

Any code that incorporates the case-by-case criterion will have a very low level of easy applicability. This is because most people are very bad at making judgments about whether their consumption choices cause harm to animals. They're bad at this for many reasons, including: (a) people are bad at economic reasoning; (b) more broadly, people are bad at causal reasoning; (c) people are prone to motivated reasoning, especially when it comes to food; (d) people overestimate their willpower (e.g., they fail to anticipate that consuming leftover turkey sandwiches now might make them less likely to resist purchasing turkey sandwiches later).

For all of these reasons, a typical person who adopts the "ethical" carnism of the philosophers is likely to regularly misapply it. Indeed I suspect that the ability to correctly apply this code in a consistent manner is rare. I have known many philosophers who have adopted this code but who routinely misapply it simply because they are confused about basic facts about economics.

If philosophers have so much difficulty with this then we should not hope that the great majority of people will do better. A person who adopts the "ethical" carnism of the philosophers may well find ways to convince herself that she can continue to engage in many, or even all, of her favorite consumption patterns without doing harm to animals. She will be helped in this by the propaganda of the industry, much of which aims to mislead customers about how the animals are treated.

It is for this reason that I am worried about what the world will be like if large numbers of people are persuaded to endorse the "ethical" carnism of the philosophers rather than to simply be vegan. My worry is that, in such a world, people will engage in a great deal of confused, biased, self-serving thinking about which consumption patterns cause harm and which don't, with the end result being that people simply find ways to give themselves excuses to continue doing most of what they are antecedently inclined to do.

Veganism is much better on this score. Almost all vegans know, with a high degree of precision, what veganism allows, and what it forbids. The rules are simple and it's easy to find out what they are. There is little room for self-serving rationalization.

***

Another problem with the "ethical" carnism of the philosophers is that there is no already-existing movement behind it. About 1% of Americans are vegans. There's already millions of us and we've been growing for decades. By contrast almost no one accepts or is even aware of the "ethical" carnism of the philosophers. The philosophers' code is in an embryonic state.

All else equal, if a code has an already-existing movement behind it, then it is much more likely for it to become widespread. This is so because (a) a code can become widespread only if it is powered by a movement, and (b) it is much harder to build a new movement from scratch than it is to continue and expand an already-existing movement. Movements are like beetles. Almost all of the larvae die before they ever reach maturity. A movement that has reached maturity is a precious thing that should be nurtured—provided, of course, it is a good movement.

***

And I doubt that the philosophers' "ethical" carnism is as contagious as veganism. I've got several reasons for this doubt. I'll mention two of them here.

First, the fact that veganism has already won millions of converts is evidence of its contagiousness. There must be something about veganism that has enabled it to get as far as it has gotten. By contrast, the philosophers' "ethical" carnism has almost no converts so far. It is so unpopular that it doesn't even have a name, which is why I've had to give it one.

Second, veganism is conspicuously principled. It is a flat-out rejection of the use of animals as a food source. Veganism wears its principledness on its sleeve. People say many disparaging things about vegans, but they rarely deny that we are principled.

The philosophers' "ethical" carnism may in fact be principled, but I do not think it will look that way to most people. It is hard to see that there is any principle governing the behavior of someone who, for example, sometimes eats meat and sometimes refuses to do so. The principle that (supposedly) underlies the "ethical" carnism of the philosophers is a restriction against causing harm, but this principle is unobvious in practice. The "ethical" carnist needs to announce her principle, and explain how it permits her to (say) consume meat in a given situation, before observers even have a chance of understanding how her behavior is principled.

In general, I think that a code that looks and feels principled, i.e., is conspicuously principled, is likely to be more contagious than a code that doesn't have that appearance, all else equal. This is because people admire, and are (in the right conditions) disposed to emulate, behavior that they take to be principled.

***

My overall opinion is that veganism is the code that has the best mixture of the above-mentioned features. Veganism is relatively effective, contagious, easily applicable, and backed by an already-existing movement; it has these features to a better degree than any of the other codes that get mentioned in these discussions, including alternatives such as vegetarianism, flexitarianism, reducetarianism, and the "ethical" carnism of the philosophers.

It is for this reason that I believe that, if voluntary changes in consumer behavior will lead to the end of animal agriculture, this will most likely happen because people go vegan in large numbers. And I think this means that those of us who want to see the end of animal agriculture should support veganism as a social movement. 

Further, supporting veganism as a social movement will almost always require being vegan oneself. I think this is true of pretty much everyone, apart from a few exceptions (e.g., isolated hermits). I think this is especially true of public figures and people who speak in front of large audiences (this includes most professional philosophers).

We should be vegan because:

(1) being vegan is the way to support veganism as a social movement, and

(2) supporting veganism as a social movement is the way to help push our society toward a future in which animal agriculture ends as a result of voluntary changes in consumer behavior, and

(3) such voluntary changes in consumer behavior are our only reasonable hope of ending animal agriculture.

Consider:

The Darwall-Dancy definition of moral reasons: A reason to φ is a moral reason to φ =def it is the sort of reason that can, in the right circumstances, give rise to a moral obligation to φ.

I suspect this definition fits with common talk. For example, I think regular people will say that (a) the fact that you can save lives by donating to the Against Malaria Foundation supplies a moral reason to donate. And I think regular people will also say that (b) the fact that you can save lives by donating to the Against Malaria Foundation can, in the right circumstances, make it the case that you are morally obligated to donate. And I think it's at least not crazy to suggest that, when (a) is said, it's just shorthand for (b).

But my main reason to like the Darwall-Dancy definition is not that it fits with common talk. I am not sure that 'moral reason' has a determinate meaning in common talk. It may be that 'moral reason' is mainly just a piece of philosophers' jargon.

My main reason to like the Darwall-Dancy definition is that I think it is useful. It seems to me that there are certain sorts of reasons that do in fact have the power to give rise to moral obligations, and I think it is handy to have a term for such reasons.

***

In The Moral Universe, BC&S-L offer a different definition of 'moral reason.' They say:

A reason R to φ is a reason of kind K =def [R favors φ] is fully grounded in a fact of kind K, together with R.

And this means that, according to them,

The TMU definition of 'moral reason': A reason R to φ is a moral reason =def [R favors φ] is fully grounded in a moral fact, together with R.

They illustrate the TMU definition of 'moral reason' with the following example:

[C]onsider the fact [The bottle contains poison]. According to the schema, this is a moral reason to keep the bottle from a child just in case its correlative reason-fact,

[That the bottle contains poison favors keeping it from a child],

is fully grounded in the fact that the bottle contains poison together with a moral fact such as

[One is morally required to keep poison from a child].

Suppose the correlative reason-­fact holds, and is fully grounded in the reason in combination with this moral fact. It would follow that [The bottle contains poison] is a moral reason to avoid giving the bottle to a child.

I do not like the TMU definition of 'moral reason.'

What I want to say is that [That the bottle contains poison favors keeping it from a child] is at least partially, and perhaps fully, grounded in facts about children's interests. Poison-containing bottles are dangerous to children. This is the main thing that makes it the case that, if the bottle contains poison, this favors keeping the bottle away from a child. And I am inclined to deny that [That the bottle contains poison favors keeping it from a child] is even partially grounded in any moral facts such as [One is morally required to keep poison from a child].

The TMU definition of 'moral reason' says that, once I've said these things, then I should say that [The bottle contains poison] is not a moral reason to keep the bottle from a child. That seems like a bad commitment to me.

We can, if we want, use 'moral reason' in the way BC&S-L propose but I think that if we do this then we end up with a piece of jargon that is not very useful and may not even refer to anything at all, as I have some doubt that favoring relations are ever grounded in moral facts.

***

I think it is interesting that both the Dancy-Darwall definition of 'moral reason' and the TMU definition of 'moral reason' seem to come along with heavy-duty presuppositions about how different sorts of moral and normative phenomena are interlinked. 

The Dancy-Darwall definition might look useful and attractive to you if you, like me, think that moral obligations obtain in virtue of reasons, and if you think that the reasons that give rise to moral obligations are themselves not moral phenomena and have their status as reasons in a way that is prior to, and independent of, morality.

The TMU definition might look good to you if you believe that moral principles or other sorts of moral facts can be among the factors that turn facts into favorers.

I wonder if there is a way of defining 'moral reason' that will be both useful and substantially neutral about how these different regions of normative reality are interlinked. I suspect there isn't. I suspect that we need to make assumptions about how the moral realm is organized in order to have a useful definition of this particular term.

I saw Mickey 17 in the theater the other day, and it made me worry about whether I might be wrong in my belief that we have relationships (relationships of the folk sort) with ourselves. I won't bother to summarize the scene that made me have this worry, but if you've seen the movie, you might have a guess which scene it is. It's not a good movie, by the way.

Obviously, if 

Relationships require non-identity: S1 has a relationship with S2 only if S1≠S2,

then we can't have relationships with ourselves. The question is whether we've got any reason to believe that relationships require non-identity. The argument that interests me looks something like this:

The distance argument against relationships with ourselves
(1) The Distance Requirement: S1 has a relationship with S2 only if there is a certain kind of distance between S1 and S2.
(2) That kind of distance is impossible if S1=S2.
Therefore, S1 has a relationship with S2 only if S1≠S2.

I'm drawn to the Distance Requirement. We say of some relationships that they are "close" and we say that some of our relationships are "closer" than others. You've got a relationship with your mailman and you've got a relationship with your spouse, and the second relationship is closer than the first. But it seems to me that every relationship, no matter how close, could be even closer. If this is right, it implies that every relationship involves some sort of distance. This is the kind of reasoning that leads me to want to endorse the first premise of the above argument. The key question for me, then, is whether the second premise is true.

***

I suppose we should consider whether the Distance Requirement should be interpreted in spatial terms, like this:

The Spatial Distance Requirement: S1 has a relationship with S2 only if there is spatial distance between S1 and S2.

If the Spatial Distance Requirement is true, then we can't have relationships with ourselves. But I don't think the Spatial Distance Requirement is true. It's too crudely physical. And what about imaginary cases where immaterial beings have relationships with one another? It seems possible for ghosts to be friends with one another, even though there is no spatial distance between ghosts, because ghosts aren't spatially located.

Given that ghost friendship is possible, the Spatial Distance Requirement is false. So I think we should look for ways to interpret the Distance Requirement in non-spatial and non-physical terms.

***

If you are close to someone, you will usually have a good understanding of how they are feeling now, how they have felt at various times in the past, how they would feel in various real and hypothetical circumstances, etc. But we never have a complete understanding of others' emotions, no matter how close they are to us. The same is true of others' beliefs, desires, intentions, and experiences.

Maybe we should say that 

S1 is at some mental distance from S2 if and only if S1's access to, or understanding of, S2's inner life is limited.

And maybe the Distance Requirement should be interpreted like this:

The Mental Distance Requirement: S1 has a relationship with S2 only if there is mental distance between S1 and S2.

This interpretation of the Distance Requirement would be good news for those of us who want to reject the second premise of the distance argument, because it is generally true that we are at significant mental distance from ourselves, i.e., our understanding of our own inner lives is severely limited. In fact there are many cases where we have a much better understanding of others' inner lives than our own inner lives. 

However, I think the Mental Distance Requirement is false. Many people believe that divine omniscient beings can have relationships with one another. But there would be no mental distance between such beings; they would have a complete understanding of one another's minds. In part for this reason, I do not think the Mental Distance Requirement is a good interpretation of the Distance Requirement.

***

I wonder if the relevant notion of distance should be understood not in physical or mental terms, but in moral terms.

Perhaps it is the case that: We say that S1 and S2 have a "close" relationship when S1 and S2 need one another and, in virtue of that fact, have moral obligations to one another, such that they are each capable of seriously wronging the other.

This way of thinking about things could make sense of the fact that we do not want all of our relationships to be extremely close, i.e., we often want to have significant distance from others. We don't always want to need others, or to be needed by others, in morally significant ways.

This could also make sense of the fact that, even when we have a very close relationship with someone, we might not want the relationship to be maximally close. You might be happy to be needed by your spouse in a wide variety of morally significant ways, but you might also want some of your spouse's needs to be her responsibility rather than yours.

This way of thinking suggests a notion of moral distance which might be defined as follows:

S1 is at some moral distance from S2 if and only if S1 is not morally obligated to attend to all of S2's needs.

And we might then render the Distance Requirement as follows:

The Moral Distance Requirement: S1 has a relationship with S2 only if there is moral distance between S1 and S2.

If we understand things like this, then I think it will be possible to save the possibility of relationships with ourselves. I like the idea that you are morally obligated to attend to some of your own needs, but it seems clear to me that you are not morally obligated to attend to all of your own needs, so I think it is highly plausible that you are at some moral distance from yourself.

I'm a fan of the view that

All moral obligations are directed: If S1 has a moral obligation to φ, then there is some individual, S2, to whom this obligation to φ is owed.

The view runs into problems when we consider cases where it seems that there is a moral obligation to φ but it is hard to say who the obligation might be owed to. Here is a case:

The charity case
You have to decide whether to donate to Charity A or Charity B. You have no other options, somehow.

If you donate to Charity A, you'll enable the charity to save the lives of three individuals in Population X. That is, there are three individuals in Population X who will live if you donate and who will die if you do not.

If you donate to Charity B, you'll enable the charity to save the lives of thirty individuals in Population Y. That is, there are thirty individuals in Population Y who will live if you donate and who will die if you do not.

You aren't directly involved with either charity. And you have no way to observe, control, or influence their work. So you know next to nothing about the individuals whose lives you'll save, apart from which population they're in. 

The case can be fleshed out in such a way that it is clear that there is a moral obligation to donate to Charity B. So suppose the case is fleshed out in some such way.

Here's what I'd quite like to say about this case:

The straightforward solution: You have thirty separate moral obligations: one for each of the individuals whose life will be saved if you donate. So, if we say that those individuals are S1, S2,…, S29, and S30, then: You have an obligation to S1 to donate to Charity B, and a separate obligation to S2 to donate to Charity B, and so on, through S30. If you choose to donate to Charity A instead of Charity B, then you violate thirty different obligations all at once.

I'd like to just endorse this straightforward solution and call it a day. But there is at least one problem with this solution that I think requires attention and makes me a bit nervous.

To show the problem, I'll add a few details to the case. Imagine that Charity B is in the business of delivering life-saving medicine to people who are suffering from a certain deadly illness. The medicine is in short supply, so Charity B uses a random number generator to determine who gets it. If you donate to Charity B, they'll use the money from your donation to purchase enough medicine to save thirty people, and then they'll pick thirty members of Population Y at random, and then they'll save those thirty individuals' lives.

In that variant of the case, it may be suggested that, before you've decided whether to donate to Charity A or Charity B, there is no fact of the matter about whose life will be saved if you donate to Charity B. The identities of the individuals whose lives will be saved are determinate only after the random selection process has been completed.

My preferred solution requires me to either deny that plausible-sounding suggestion, or allow that it is possible to have an obligation to an indeterminate individual. And I do not want to allow the possibility of an obligation to an indeterminate individual. So I think I need to be able to say the following two things:

(A) If you will donate to Charity B, then there is a fact of the matter about whose name will be selected in the random process that will be used to determine whose life gets saved.

(B) If you will not donate to Charity B, then there is a fact of the matter about whose name would be selected in the random process that would be used to determine whose life gets saved, were it the case that (contrary to fact) you will donate to Charity B.

I'd say that both of these claims are problematic. But (B) seems especially problematic.

The claim in (B) is that there is a fact of the matter about what the output of a random process would be, even if the process in question has not been and never will be initiated. It is unclear what would fix such a fact.

Suppose that I have a perfectly fair coin in my hand. I consider flipping it, but choose not to. It sounds weird to say that there is a fact of the matter about whether it would have been heads or tails. But it seems that this is precisely the sort of thing that my preferred solution to the present problem requires me to say.

I do not know of any knock-down arguments against (A) and (B). Nor do I know of any knock-down arguments against the view that there is a fact of the matter about what the outcome of a coin toss that hasn't happened, and never will happen, would have been. Until I stumble upon such arguments, I believe I will continue to side with the straightforward solution described above, though I will remain a bit uneasy about this.

To illustrate the distinction between relationship tokens and relationship types, consider: Huck's friendship with Jim is a different thing than Bert's friendship with Ernie. These two things are distinct tokens of the same type.

Relationship tokens are always grounded in further factors. For example, if X and Y are friends, this might be so in virtue of interactions between X and Y (say, X and Y regularly go bowling together); and/or feelings, desires, or beliefs of each about the other (say, X and Y know each other, care about each other, and respect each other); and/or other factors. In general, whenever a relationship exists, there are factors in virtue of which it exists.

According to 

the reductionist view: any given relationship token R just is the collection of factors in which R is grounded,

whereas according to

the anti-reductionist view: any given relationship token R is distinct from the collection of factors in which R is grounded.

I think we should prefer the anti-reductionist view.

***

The factors in which a token relationship is grounded can be irregularly distributed across a time interval over which the relationship continuously exists.

Over the course of, say, a year, Bert and Ernie might meet once a week on Fridays for bowling and might not otherwise interact. And their feelings, beliefs, and desires about each other might change during the course of that year. But this would not mean that their friendship comes and goes during that year. They're not only friends on Fridays, or only when they're thinking of each other, etc. They're friends all the time.

This observation fits easily within the anti-reductionist perspective. The anti-reductionist can say: They're friends because they meet on Fridays, and because they feel and believe certain things at certain times about each other, and so on—but their friendship is a distinct thing, a social reality that exists "over and above" those factors that give rise to it, so it's no surprise that their friendship exists continuously even though these factors don't.

It's like how a solar energy doohickey might (using battery storage) be able to provide a constant voltage at all times even as the sunlight that powers the doohickey comes and goes at different times. There's no mystery in that, because the sunlight is distinct from the voltage.

***

The reductionist might respond to these points by arguing that, once we correctly identify the factors in virtue of which a relationship exists, we'll see that they actually are continuous across time. But there is no good argument along those lines, as far as I can see.

For example, the reductionist might say: Bert and Ernie's friendship is grounded not in their intermittent interactions or in their intermittent attitudes, but is instead wholly grounded in their dispositions: e.g., their disposition to meet on Fridays given such-and-such conditions, their disposition to feel warmly about one another if suitably prompted, etc. These dispositions might not be intermittent even if the behaviors that express these dispositions are intermittent. If so, then it could be said that both the relationship and the factors in which it is grounded are continuous.

But this won't work because relationships are not generally grounded in dispositions. To see this, consider that Bert and Ernie could have the relevant dispositions without those dispositions ever being activated. For example, Bert and Ernie might be disposed to meet for bowling on Fridays if the bowling alley is open on Fridays; but it's never open on Fridays; so they never meet.

In the case where all of the relevant dispositions exist but are never activated, Bert and Ernie would not in fact be friends. In general: Mere inactivated dispositions do not a relationship make.

***

There may be a worry that anti-reductionism about relationship tokens is somehow spooky. But I think this matter is complicated.

I think it's fair to say that relationships are paradigmatic social phenomena. The factors in which we tend to think relationships are grounded will sometimes also be paradigmatic social phenomena. For instance, patterned interactions (e.g., regular bowling on Fridays) might be like this. Sometimes these factors will also, or instead, be psychological phenomena—e.g., warm feelings about one's friends.

If the grounding factors are social, then it's not clear how reductionism is any less spooky than anti-reductionism. Both pictures will be pictures of a world containing social phenomena. So, if one thinks, for instance, that

(a) anything that isn't physical is objectionably spooky (physicalist anti-spookyism),

and

(b) social realities, if any truly exist, are non-physical,

and

therefore, social realities are objectionably spooky,

then it's not entirely clear that a shift from anti-reductionism to reductionism about relationship tokens will result in an overall reduction in spookiness.

The physicalist anti-spookyism expressed in (a) seems to require either relationship eliminativism—the view that, in truth, there aren't any such things as relationship tokens—or some kind of physicalism about relationship tokens—the view that relationships exist but turn out to be physical phenomena.

It seems to me that that latter view (physicalism about relationship tokens) can probably be made to be consistent with some sort of anti-reductionism about relationship tokens. Here's what such an anti-reductionist would need to say: Although relationships aren't reducible to the further social and psychological factors in which they are grounded, relationships are reducible to physical phenomena, and so too are the further social and psychological factors in which relationships are grounded. All of that seems coherent to me. So, I think there is at least one sort of spookiness worry about the anti-reductionist view that can be defused.

I don't see why the following very simple idea isn't good.

The People's Bribe
(1) Key decision-makers (KDMs) in the federal government are guaranteed a large income for life.
(2) Apart from whatever they buy with the above-mentioned guaranteed income, KDMs are strictly prohibited from ever accepting any salary, payments, gifts, or any other things of value. This prohibition is for life, is legally enforced, and if KDMs are caught violating it, they are severely punished (e.g., long prison sentences) and publicly humiliated.

It seems to me that three things can be said for this idea. It would work; it would be a bargain; and it's feasible.

It would work: The People's Bribe would eliminate major sources of corruption (broadly understood here as any sort of government decision-making that is distortively influenced by the prospect or promise of personal financial gain). In the status quo, corruption happens because non-public entities have financial carrots and sticks that they can use to influence KDMs. For example, a US lawmaker who supports (or declines to oppose, etc.) legislation that benefits a particular industry might be rewarded with well-paid consultancy gigs in that industry after she leaves office. In a People's Bribe system, a narrowly rational KDM would not touch such rewards with a ten-foot pole, because the upsides would be relatively insignificant from her perspective (she's already guaranteed lifelong wealth) in comparison with the downsides (risk of severe penalty if caught, public humiliation, etc.). 

It would be a bargain: Let's say that we identify 5000 people in the federal government as KDMs. This group might include all members of the Senate and House (535), all federal judges (1770), and some assemblage of others (say, the president, vice president, cabinet members, heads of executive departments,…). Let's say the guaranteed lifetime salary of a KDM is set at $500,000. Then the People's Bribe would cost $2.5 billion in salary in its first year of existence. As KDMs leave office and are replaced, the cost would grow (since we'd need to pay salaries to all past and present KDMs). There would be further costs too (enforcement, accounting, etc.). All told, the total cost might be tens or hundreds of billions per year. But my guess is that this would end up being small in comparison to the total cost of corruption, which I'd assume should be reckoned in the trillions. Also note that some of the cost is already being paid (these people are already receiving salaries and retirement packages in the status quo, e.g., members of the House earn a bit less than $200k presently). If the People's Bribe would indeed eliminate or significantly decrease corruption in federal government, it would be a bargain.

It's feasible: I'll mention three factors here.

First, in order for the People's Bribe to be feasible, KDMs themselves have to have an incentive to get on board. We would need Congress to pass laws to make this system a reality, and we would need a president to support it, etc. All of this seems very possible to me. I think the People's Bribe would generally be in KDMs' interests. Most KDMs want to be hugely wealthy (that's human) but they would be much happier, I think, if they could get wealthy in an entirely above-board and respected way, which the People's Bribe would enable them to do. I do not think KDMs particularly like having to scrounge for their wealth by bowing down before private interests in shady, borderline-illegal, and/or actually illegal ways. This system would spare them of such indignities while still allowing them to have luxurious lives. Plus, the People's Bribe would give them a guarantee of lifetime affluence; I don't think they always have this in the status quo. If I were a KDM I would see the People's Bribe as a huge boon.

Second, there would need to be public support of this idea. It seems to me that potential for such support exists. There is a common-sense explanation, that regular people can understand, of why this system would prevent corruption. The rationale for it is somewhat cynical, which I see as a selling point, because I think most people are cynical about these sorts of things. And people believe that corruption is a problem and would like to do something about it. Here is something that can be done.

Third, there will be many powerful people who have an incentive to preserve the status quo, and in order for the People's Bribe to work, those powerful people have to be unable to prevent it. I grant that people who benefit from corruption would try to prevent anything that promises to reduce corruption. But many powerful people, including many people in business, would also stand to benefit from the People's Bribe (e.g., if your competitors manipulate the corrupt system better than you do, you might like to see corruption reduced). I think the various powerful factions might end up approximately canceling each other out.

***

I'm not claiming that the People's Bribe would solve all problems. KDMs would still make many bad decisions. Not all harmful behavior is motivated by hope of personal financial gain. Some harmful behavior is motivated by sincere belief, for example. And some of the most harmful behavior in US politics seems to be purely recreational (I think much of what is happening today is like this).

Some of the harmful behavior that is either purely recreational or motivated by sincere belief might be harder to pull off without a rampantly corrupt (hence manipulable) government, so might be curtailed by the People's Bribe. But I grant that the People's Bribe doesn't directly address those forms of harmful behavior. 

And there is a problem of identity corruption, as it might be called, that the People's Bribe does not address. Identity corruption occurs when someone controls KDM behavior by controlling who gets to become a KDM. For example, if you want your industry deregulated, you may be able to accomplish your goal by seeing to it that ideologically libertarian-minded opponents of regulation are the ones who end up in Congress. Then you do not have to influence them while they're in office, as they're already sold on a way of thinking that disposes them favorably to your interests. It's well known that this sort of identity corruption happens. Whether it would increase or decrease in a People's Bribe world is something I shouldn't guess about.

The general point here is that removing personal financial incentives from KDMs' decision-making processes will not by itself ensure good government. But I don't see why it wouldn't eliminate one of the important causes of bad government.

A standard (I think) story: Before the chemical composition of water was known, people didn't know, and couldn't know, that water=H2O. But they still had the (or a) concept of water. It's just that their concept of water didn't include the fact that water=H2O. So they could deny that water=H2O without thereby manifesting conceptual incompetence. After the science of chemistry got going full steam, evidence that water=H2O accumulated, and then became decisive, and water=H2O became settled science, and eventually, water=H2O found its way into our shared understanding of what water is. So now it is the case that if you deny that water=H2O, your grasp of the concept of water is thereby revealed to be partial at best.

If we're telling this story, then I suppose we should allow that false propositions can be conceptually necessary. Here are two stories to think about:

Story #1: As above, except that the evidence for water=H2O was misleading all along. The truth is that water=XYZ. There's actually no such thing as hydrogen or oxygen, so no such thing as H2O. But there is such a thing as water, and water=XYZ. 

Story #2: The history of chemistry goes differently. People come to believe, falsely, that gold=lead, and this idea becomes so widely accepted that it finds its way into our shared understanding of what gold is.

If we think that, in general, either

(a) P is conceptually necessary if denial of P manifests conceptual incompetence,

or

(b) P is conceptually necessary if there is some concept that guarantees that P,

then it seems to me that we should say that in Story #1, water=H2O is false but conceptually necessary, and that in Story #2, gold=lead is false but conceptually necessary.

***

A moral fixed points-related idea is that some moral propositions are both substantive and conceptually necessary. Let's say that such propositions are moral-conceptual freebies. Here's a claim to consider:

Freebie Factivity: Moral-conceptual freebies are always true.

If Freebie Factivity were true, it would mean either that conceptually necessary falsehoods don't exist anywhere (which I doubt, because of Story #1 and Story #2 above), or that morality is special, such that none of the conceptually necessary falsehoods are moral propositions.

It would be surprising if morality were special in that way. Indeed, if there are any conceptually necessary falsehoods at all, then moral thought might be particularly rife with them. Societies, institutions, and individuals might have both the ability and the incentive to distort moral concepts in ways that serve their interests or reflect their biases.

Here's a claim that I think probably is a moral-conceptual freebie (if there are any moral-conceptual freebies):

(1) It is morally wrong to torture an innocent child just for fun.

I'll happily endorse (1). I'll say that I know it to be true. I'll say that I'm certain it's true. And I'll say again that, if there are any moral-conceptual freebies, (1) is probably one of them. But I don't think the certainty that attaches to (1), and ought to attach to it, has much if anything to do with its status as a moral-conceptual freebie. 

Here's another claim that might well be a moral-conceptual freebie:

(2) Only human beings have moral rights.

It may be that speciesism is so deeply ingrained in us and in our society that it has infected our moral concepts, such that our concept of moral rights guarantees that (2) is true, and denial of (2) manifests conceptual incompetence. Nevertheless I do deny (2), because I believe that chickens, pigs, cows, goats, sheep, cats, and dogs all have moral rights.

It is widely and, I think, correctly thought that if

The desire-satisfaction account of well-being: For any individual S, S's well-being consists in S's desires being satisfied, such that S is made better off by S's desires being satisfied and is made worse off by S's desires being frustrated.

is true, then well-being is not important in its own right. Of course, the things you want are often good for you, and many of the things you want might also be important in their own right. So, it's often great for you when your desires are satisfied, and satisfaction of your desires might also signal that something important in its own right has happened. But in any case it seems clear that desire satisfaction is not itself important in its own right. This is what is shown by cases of pointless desire, such as Rawls's grass-counter case.

There is a common understanding, I think, that well-being is obviously important in its own right. Indeed, well-being may be the only thing that is important in its own right. And even if that's not so, it nevertheless seems clear to many of us (including me) that well-being has a special kind of importance in its own right. If your life is going well for you, that's wonderful: wonderful in its own right, and wonderful in some special way. The desire-satisfaction account doesn't fit with this common understanding, so it's got to go.

***

In view of these points we may decide to give

The hedonist account of well-being: For any individual S, S's well-being consists in S's hedonic state, such that S is made better off by S's enjoyment of pleasurable experiences and is made worse off by S's being subjected to painful experiences.

a chance. But I think this view also fails to fit with our common understanding. 

In a stirring paper, Neil Sinhababu claims that phenomenal introspection reveals pleasure's goodness. He writes:

Just as one can look inward at one's experience of lemon yellow and recognize its brightness, one can look inward at one's experience of pleasure and recognize its goodness. When I consider a situation of increasing pleasure, I can form the belief that things are better than they were before, just as I form the belief that there's more brightness in my visual field as lemon yellow replaces black. And when I suddenly experience pain, I can form the belief that things are worse in my experience than they were before.

And in a footnote he writes:

Occasionally I doubt that pleasure is really good. Seeking evidence, I eat or drink something with a pleasant taste. When I consider my experience, I become convinced again.

I agree with Sinhababu that pleasure is good and that we can see that it is good by attending to it while we are experiencing it. But pleasure seems not to have the special kind of importance that well-being has. I think this is what is shown by reflection on cases like Nozick's experience machine.

It's really, really important that my future will contain stretches of time in which I'm doing well. That this is important is obvious, I think. It's at least important to me. I assume it's also important to those who care about me. Perhaps we should say further that it is important to everyone (whether they know it or not), or important simpliciter (if there is any sense in the notion of importance simpliciter).

Getting clear about how best to characterize the importance in question might be a difficult job. But in any case, that there is some sort of importance in my future well-being strikes me as fully obvious.

By contrast, if my future will contain stretches of time in which I am experiencing some kind of pure, objectless pleasure—let's say I'll be hooked up to an experience machine that will give me this pleasure—this does not seem to be obviously important. In fact, I am tempted to say that it is obviously unimportant, considered in itself, even if the magnitude of the pleasure is large.

I'm tempted to say that. But I think it would be going too far to say that. I think it is safer to say this: If being hooked up to that kind of machine is a way of doing well in life, and if that's the only way of doing well that I've got available to me, then it's important that I find some way to hook myself up to that machine. But if (as I suspect) being hooked up to such a machine isn't a path to genuine well-being, then the pleasure given to me by such a machine might be (probably is) good but is not especially important.

***

In a frequently quoted piece, Kurt Vonnegut recalls something his uncle used to say:

[W]hen we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

Uncle Alex sounds a bit like Sinhababu, but there's a crucial difference. Uncle Alex is observing that this is nice, where 'this' refers to a full scenario that he is currently in. He is not (at least not directly) talking about this or that isolated sliver of the scenario. For example, he's not talking about the pleasurableness of the lemonade.

It's funny, by the way, that both Sinhababu and Vonnegut talk about lemons.

When Uncle Alex says that this is nice, I think he is talking about what I intend to be talking about when I talk about well-being. He isn't analyzing well-being. He is just noticing that well-being obtains in the scenario.

***

In a vignette approach to well-being, we do as Uncle Alex does. We set aside the project of trying to analyze well-being. Instead we look at full scenarios in which it is clear to us that well-being occurs. We use these scenarios as analogical guides, or paradigms. This vignette approach, I think, may be sufficient for most of the purposes that a full analysis of well-being could be fit to serve. For example it may be usable for resolving disagreements about whether a given individual is well off or not.

A vignette approach cannot address certain forms of skepticism about the importance of well-being. Here is an argument:

(1) If there is no plausible analysis of well-being that identifies constituents of well-being that are important in their own right, then well-being is not important in its own right.

(2) There is no plausible analysis of well-being that identifies constituents of well-being that are important in their own right.

Therefore, well-being is not important in its own right.

We may feel that this argument needs an answer. If so, then, in order to rebut the second premise, we may feel the need to go on searching for a plausible analysis of well-being that will reveal it as something of importance in its own right.

I am not sure that this argument does in fact need an answer. It may be that, in view of the fact that well-being is obviously important in its own right, we are entitled to simply assume that either (a) well-being is unanalyzable yet still important, so the first premise is false, or (b) well-being is capable in principle of being analyzed in some way that would show the second premise to be false.

Compare and contrast: Curtis Yarvin and Elizabeth Anderson.

Yarvin's signature idea is that the United States should not be a democracy and should instead be a dictatorship. He thinks the country should be governed like a corporation, with the president as CEO.

Anderson's signature idea is that corporations (and workplaces generally) are fundamentally political organizations; political organizations should be democratically governed; therefore, corporations should be democratically governed.

So, in a certain way, Anderson and Yarvin are mirror images of each other. What they have in common is that they both seem to endorse a

Parity thesis: Corporations and the United States should be governed similarly.

The difference is that Anderson advocates democracy for both realms, whereas Yarvin advocates dictatorship for both realms.

Most philosophers are familiar with Anderson's ideas, whereas I would guess that most of us have never even heard of Yarvin. The MAGA world, by contrast, has been absorbing Yarvin's ideas for many years. JD Vance has quoted Yarvin approvingly. I doubt he's ever mentioned Anderson. I'd be curious to know whether he or other members of the Trump administration have ever mentioned any academic philosophers who are alive and working today.

Trump's presidency thus far strikes me as very Yarvin-ish. DOGE, for example, is a distinctly Yarvin-style idea.

There's a possible world where, instead of a Yarvin-esque national effort to turn America into something like a corporation, we have an Anderson-esque national effort to democratize corporations. I wonder how things are going over there in that world.

***

It is at least initially puzzling that America is moving, seemingly quickly, in a broadly Yarvin-ish direction. I would have thought that the idea of a dictatorship would be completely repulsive to most Americans, but at least half of voters seem to be fine with Trump's presentation of an image of himself as a king.

In America, there has never been any shortage of detailed ideas for radical change. There is a diverse selection of such ideas to choose from. Some of these ideas are attractive at a surface level but turn out to be bad upon careful inspection. Some of these ideas look bad at first glance, but turn out to be excellent when deeply considered.

Today we seem to be collectively pursuing a form of radical change that is bad in both ways, i.e., it not only looks bad on the surface but also turns out to be deeply bad in fact. That's puzzling and I don't know why that's happening.

Here's the question I'm thinking about: Why have Americans become so radical all of a sudden? Where have all the conservatives gone?

***

Imagine an island where everyone is blind. They've been this way for generations, or maybe forever. A Country of the Blind-type scenario. So they have strategies for sightless living. They know how to sightlessly grow and harvest crops, how to sightlessly build a house, how to sightlessly dance together, how to sightlessly raise a child, etc.

One day, the gods decide to take away everyone's ears, and give eyes to everyone. All of a sudden, nobody's blind anymore, but everyone's deaf now.

What happens next? To start with, everyone's going to have to re-learn how to do everything.

Also, there's going to be social disruption. After the Great Sensory Transformation, friends and family will now seem like strangers to one another. No one has ever seen anyone before, so everyone's visual appearance is completely unfamiliar to everyone. And no one can hear each other anymore, so they can't recognize one another by voice.

Even after everyone's figured out who's who, they'll need to get to know one another all over again. Many relationships will end. People who got along swimmingly in a world of sound might now discover that they can't stand one another in a world of sight. But also, many new relationships will form. People who didn't like one another, or didn't even know one another, when they were blind, might now discover that as deaf people they can be great friends, colleagues, romantic partners, etc.

***

It seems like the immediate aftermath of the Great Sensory Transformation is going to be one of the worst times for the people of this island society to decide to make dramatic social, politicial, or institutional changes. For example, if the island had previously been governed as a constitutional republic, this would be a bad time for them to change to a different system of government. Managing such a transition amidst all the other disruptions that are already going on is a recipe for disaster.

But also, the immediate aftermath of the Great Sensory Transformation might be a moment in which dramatic social, political, and institutional changes are highly likely, or even unavoidable, for the straightforward reason that there might be no way for people to go on running their society in the same way they did before.

***

It seems to me that from 2010 (to pick a year) to the present day, we've been experiencing something akin to a Great Sensory Transformation. Of course, we haven't lost any of our basic senses, or gained any new ones. But the internet has changed how we communicate with, relate to, live with, and experience one another.

On the one hand, the internet has given us new ways of perceiving one another and our world. On the other hand, the internet has taken away, or at least dulled, some of our old ways of perceiving, e.g., by occasioning various forms of separation from one another, so that people are deprived of all sorts of in-person signals. And our smartphones are rewiring our brains, they say.

I'm not sure that most of us fully grasp just how disruptive all of this is. I suppose the scale won't really be clear except in historical retrospect.

This transformative time seems precisely the wrong time for us to be undertaking dramatic institutional change. We still haven't even fully figured out how to communicate and understand each other in our new internet-saturated environment. Ideally, we'd attend to that acclimation process first, and would put plans for massive political upheaval on hold for a while.

But also, precisely because the internet is so transformative, dramatic institutional changes might be all but inevitable. Like the islanders after the Great Sensory Transformation, there might not be any way for us to go on governing ourselves in the same ways we've done in the past.

In short I think there is a kind of institutional conservatism that the internet has made both particularly desirable and impossible to sustain.

I don't think we should be fighting for that kind of institutional conservatism. It is a lost cause. I think that we should resign ourselves to the probability that cherished institutions are being torn apart.

The situation is scary because bad kinds of radical change that seemed impossible until recently are now on the horizon. But the situation is also hopeful because the possibilities for good kinds of radical change are probably also greatly expanded in this new environment.

Here is the idea of naturalness that I like the most:

A fact F is natural if and only if either (i) F is brutely natural or (ii) F explains (= substantively contributes to the best explanation of) at least one natural fact.

I'll explain how the idea works, and then I'll explain why I like it.

I've written about this idea in public places before, but I want to take another crack at it here, and I think that what I'll write today is probably going to be an improvement on things I've said elsewhere.

***

There is a core set of facts that it is the business of natural science to explain. As is often said, "science begins in wonder," i.e., natural science is a form of inquiry that begins with an inquirer who is wondering why a certain range of facts obtain. The facts in that range are the brutely natural facts.

To illustrate, consider the following familiar example. Long ago, it was noticed that when a ship heads out toward the open ocean, the ship appears to people on shore to descend, as if it were sinking, until eventually even its topmost sail disappears. As soon as people started wondering why that happens, and began to consider and investigate hypotheses to explain it, they were doing natural science. The fact that that happens with ships is a paradigm example of what I'd like to call a brutely natural fact.

Because brutely natural facts are natural facts, they are among the facts that natural science properly investigates and seeks to explain. In other words, all brutely natural facts fall within the purview of natural science. (But not all facts in the purview of natural science are brutely natural.)

There is a

Negative condition: For any given brutely natural fact F, the fact that F falls within the purview of natural science is independent of whether F explains any other natural facts.

This means that if F is a brutely natural fact, then F can be rightly recognized as a natural fact even before F is shown to have any explanatory utility. Take the phenomenon of the disappearing ships: Early natural scientists investigated and tried to explain the fact that ships disappear when they head out to sea because they saw that that fact called for natural-scientific explanation in itself, as it were, and not because it was needed or thought to be needed to explain any further facts.

Beyond that negative condition, there will be various ways of spelling out a positive understanding of the brutely natural. On this point, we have a lot of options and, for reasons I'll explain momentarily, it might not matter that much which option we choose. But I'll mention six of the options here.

Before I do that, I need to define something. Let's say that a fact F is treated as brutely natural by a given natural scientist S if and only if (a) S makes it her business to explain F, and (b) S does so for reasons that are independent of whether F explains any other natural facts.

With that definition in place, here are the six options I'll offer for consideration:

The actual-history criterion: A fact F is brutely natural if and only if F is the sort of fact that the earliest natural scientists treated as brutely natural.

The state-of-the-art criterion: A fact F is brutely natural if and only if F is the sort of fact that natural scientists today treat as brutely natural.

The correctness criterion: A fact F is brutely natural if and only if F is the sort of fact that ought to be treated by natural scientists as brutely natural.

The individual-empirical criterion: A fact F is brutely natural for S if and only if F has been observed by S.

The collective-empirical criterion: A fact F is brutely natural for S if and only if S is part of a scientific community that has observed F.

The relativist criterion: A fact F is brutely natural, relative to a given actual or hypothetical natural-scientific practice P, if and only if practitioners of P treat F as brutely natural.

Some of these criteria (the first three) will allow us to talk about a fact being brutely natural without qualification, while others (the second three) will require qualification.

There are many (indefinitely many) further criteria that could be considered here. 

***

According to the idea of the natural that I put at the top of this post, the natural realm is populated by (a) brutely natural facts, and (b) further facts that substantively contribute to the best explanations of those brutely natural facts, and (c) still-further facts that substantively contribute to the best explanations of the further facts mentioned in (b), and so on.

I claimed above that it might not matter very much what criterion of the brutely natural we choose. Here's why. Consider two facts:

F1: Ships seem to disappear as they get further away,

and 

F2: Our planet is round.

If we choose the actual-history criterion, F1 will be a brutely natural fact. F2 presumably won't be brutely natural (since the earliest natural scientists didn't even know about F2) but will nevertheless get to be a natural fact by virtue of the fact that it substantively contributes to (indeed, is the centerpiece of) the best explanation of F1.

If we choose the state-of-the-art criterion, F1 and F2 might both count as brutely natural (hence natural). That is, it may be that present-day scientists treat both the disappearing ships phenomenon and the roundness of our planet as facts that, in and of themselves, call for natural-scientific investigation.

So, although the actual-history criterion and the state-of-the-art criterion may have different implications about whether F2 is brutely natural, they will likely converge on the implication that F2 is, in any event, natural.

I think this is how things will generally go. I think the actual-history criterion and the state-of-the-art criterion will generally disagree about which facts are brutely natural but will generally agree about which facts are natural. Further, I think most of the different positive criteria of the brutely natural that might be seriously considered will be like that. There will be broad convergence about what is and isn't in the natural realm.

I shouldn't overstate the present point. There are ways of designing a criterion of the brutely natural which are such that one ends up with (what might be called) a deviant natural realm.

To illustrate, suppose it is really the case that

F3: God exists.

Suppose it is also the case that God does not interact with any physical objects, and in general leaves no empirically detectable trace for us to find; God is a causally impotent "thought thinking itself," such that F3 does not substantively contribute to the best explanation of F1, or F2, or any other facts needing explanation.

In that case, if we were to adopt some criterion of the brutely natural that includes F3, we would end up with a natural realm that differs, in terms of its population, from the natural realm that we'll end up with if we choose to adopt, say, the state-of-the-art criterion (because the state-of-the-art criterion will never result in F3 being included in the natural realm). 

So, our selection of a criterion of the brutely natural does matter to some degree. It matters somewhat. If one has a weird idea of which facts get to be brutely natural, then one will end up with a weird idea of which facts get to be natural. That said, I suspect that most of the criteria of brute naturalness that will be regarded by most of us as reasonable will end up yielding similar, or even identical, pictures of the population of the natural realm. 

***

Here's what I like about this way of thinking about the natural. First, it can be used to capture what is attractive (or what I, for one, find attractive) about moral non-naturalism. Second, it can be used to capture what is particularly problematic about moral non-naturalism.

The following claims all seem endorsable to me: (1) There are moral facts; (2) on any reasonable criterion of the brutely natural, moral facts will not count as brutely natural; (3) moral facts do not substantively contribute to the best explanation of any brutely natural facts or any other natural facts. From these points, I conclude, via the view of the natural that I have outlined in this post, that moral facts exist but are not natural facts, which is the core commitment of the version of moral non-naturalism that I want to be associated with.

This form of moral non-naturalism is attractive to me, but I also see it as problematic, because it engenders certain kinds of justifiable suspicions and worries about moral reality.

Many philosophers in the broad tradition of moral non-naturalism have tried to find "partners in crime" or "companions in innocence" for non-natural moral facts. They have observed, for example, that mathematical facts seem to be causally impotent in a way that resembles the causal impotence of moral facts. The wrongness of torture has never collided with a billiard ball, but 2+2=4 has never collided with a billiard ball, either. So if moral facts' causal impotence is supposed to make their inclusion in our ontology problematic, then inclusion of mathematical facts in our ontology should be equally problematic—or so goes a common line of reasoning.

But that line of reasoning fails to home in on what's most worrying about morality, I think. The reason why morality as it is understood from a non-naturalist perspective is particularly problematic has little to do with the causal impotence of moral facts, and much to do with the fact that moral facts do not explain anything in the natural world.

It is on that point that moral facts differ from mathematical facts. Whether or not mathematical reality is in any way causal, mathematical facts substantively contribute to the best explanations of natural facts. For example, mathematical facts are crucial in explanations of why our planet is round; why birds in flight rarely collide; why arched bridges stay upright, etc. Mathematical facts are, in this specific way, natural facts, according to the view of the natural that I'm laying out here.

Moral facts, by contrast, do not do any such explanatory work (I claim). I believe that there are no explanations of natural facts that can be improved by inclusion of moral facts, i.e., moral facts do not substantively contribute to any such explanations. That's why natural scientists need training in mathematics but not in ethics, etc.

In general, I think, the following will be a mostly good rule:

Knowers as natural scientists: S knows that p only if either (a) the fact that p is brutely natural, or (b) the fact that p substantively contributes to the best explanation of a natural fact, or (c) there is some natural fact that entails p.

I think that, if we are moral non-naturalists, and if we don't want to be moral skeptics, then we have to say that the above rule has at least one exception, namely an exception for moral knowledge.

Making that exception is a cost. The above rule seems good and it is a shame to have to break it. Additionally, it will be necessary to find a way to make an exception to the above rule without opening the floodgates, i.e., without giving license to everyone who wants to claim to have unscientific knowledge (angels, astrology, what have you) and this may be hard work. These are reasons why moral non-naturalism should be regarded as particularly problematic.