If you look in Comments under part one of this topic (right below this entry), you'll see some back & forth with someone who questioned the cheerfully metaphysicslessness of philosophical pragmatism, charging that pragmatists build their house on sand, proposing a world in which there's no particular reason to do one thing or another, neither for moral purposes nor for any other. My answer:
Here’s why: there is no why.
See, I am one of those hardcore prags, eh?
To be marginally less snarky, ultimately the only “why” is that gene pools with “it”—whatever “it” is—outcompeted gene pools that didn’t have “it.” Or less of “it.” Or a less elegant, less functional kind of “it.”
Our problem, collectively, is that most of us are raised to believe in some kind of Purpose external to reality--such that when people talk and talk without alluding to some such Purpose they seem to be evasive.
Not so though.
I asked my now-spouse-of-28-years to marry me while we were sitting on a log on a beach whose name she still can’t pronounce, with a couple of her very young nieces/nephews playing at our feet, on a glorious California summer day.
Why did I ask her? Why do I remember it to this day, as if it were yesterday? Why am I still in love with her? Why does it not matter to me that we’re devoted members of different political parties?
The answers to these questions are all interesting, and well worth asking, and of course nearly all “Why?” questions are nested Russian egg dolls.
And at the center of every one of these eggs there’s the ultimate answer: namely, something we don't yet (and perhaps won't ever) understand, somewhere in the quantum froth of subatomic physics. We also don’t know all the intermediary steps yet (or maybe ever), but that’s where you wind up in all probability. The best we can do is push the "Whys" farther and farther down into the bowels of reality.
Wolf Larson describes it more poetically in Jack London’s “The Sea Wolf”—something about life being like a vat of yeast, with all the little bits trying to climb over other little bits, but it boils down to the same thing.
I know what you’re going to say now: “So, Mr. Smarty Pants, if it’s all particle physics, and hence the whole universe was once a single virtual particle that went kaboom! or something like that 13.7 billion years ago, why did the Big Bang bang in the first place?
To which I say “How should I know?” Though string theory hints at branes kissing in the Bulk (read Brian Greene if you want more of that).
Humans experience powerful motivation, curiosity, empathy, inspiration yada yada. Hard to imagine that it’s all just quantum froth writ large.
And yet that's my best guess. Which doesn't help a bit with deciding whether to take your next vacation in Fiji or who to vote for or whether to return the wallet you found in the street five minutes ago.
That leads to the reductio ad absurdum argument that if morality is evolutionary it must be piffle and arbitrary and why bother?
But it only seems meaningless if you assume that meaning only comes from some external agency. Meaningfulness is built into our DNA, however. We want to live. We want to do the right thing, however we conceive that, within the constraints of evolution.
In other words, you’re lamenting the loss of something that isn’t lost because it wasn’t there in the first place.
Let me share the Scuba Diver’s Mantra:
1. What matters most to you?
Most people say “good job, good personal life, nice home, nice wheels, safe neighborhood, etc.”
2. Scuba divers say “Air.”
Because without that, all the rest becomes utterly meaningless in a millisecond.
3. So a scuba diver wakes up in the morning and asks himself two questions:
a. “Do I have air?”
b. “Am I in acute physical agony?”
If the answers to these are Yes and No, the diver then says:
“It’s a great day!”
As a diver, I have experienced being without air.
I think Sartre said that the prospect of being hanged focuses one’s mind tremendously.
Being without air does so even moreso, and in that instant when you try to take a breath and discover you can’t, all questions of meaning, of purpose, of “Why?” vanish like morning dew in a hot, rising sun.
I find life intensely, exquisitely meaningful because I’m wired that way. I didn’t wire me. Neither did anyone else. It just worked out that way. It doesn’t even require much intelligence. A hooked fish struggles to live, fights for its freedom. Even an amoeba moves away from negative stimuli.
Life itself creates meaning in a blind universe. Life is the meaning of life, and that innate meaningfulness inheres in every living thing, from a bacterium to a blue whale.
And by the same token, moral behavior is mediated by what works for a species. Vampire bats find it moral to suck other creatures’ blood—but also to share their blood meal with fellow vampire bats that weren’t so lucky that evening. Our core morality is hardwired and, human cultural diversity notwithstanding, not subject to our whims. We are driven to care for our peeps and defend them against our enemies, and we only violate our core directives at great personal expense.
That is, I’ve never met a happy putz. I’ve met rich putzes and poor ones; never happy ones. That's why you'll be happier if you return the wallet (with all the money in it).
We don’t need metaphysical “truth.” To be truthful, it just gets in the way, misleading us often as not.
Camus’ morality, he said, came down to this: “Work hard. Be kind.”
I’d only add “Turn rocks over.”
