TB: Knowledge, Reality and Value (Huemer)
Core Thesis
Common-sense first-person intuitions are the appropriate starting point for philosophy. Radical skepticism, truth relativism, and hard determinism all fail against them. Ethical intuitionism — we can know ethical truths through intuition — is the most defensible metaethical view, and its implications are more demanding than most people accept.
Key Takeaways
Intuitions as ground truth
- Philosophy must be grounded in common-sense moral and epistemic intuitions — the bedrock of first-person experience. These are not infallible but are the best starting point we have.
- The alternative — deriving everything from first principles without checking against intuitions — leads to theories that are obviously wrong.
- Determining which assumptions to trust makes philosophy genuinely hard.
The score card (Huemer's conclusions)
- Truth relativism is to be rejected: it actively discourages the pursuit of truth.
- External-world skepticism is wrong: it cannot account for the coherent reality we actually experience.
- Global skepticism is obviously false.
- Knowledge cannot be rigorously defined — but that is true of most concepts outside of technical terms.
- We have free will; we have souls.
- Ethical intuitionism is the most sensible view of metaethics.
- All major ethical theories are problematic: Utilitarianism and absolute deontology are obviously wrong; moderate deontology is arbitrary.
- Factory farming is among the greatest moral catastrophes: "It's possible that all the total pain and suffering we inflict through factory farming, in just a few years, may be greater than all the pain and suffering in all of human history."
Progress in philosophy
- Philosophy makes genuine progress, but slowly and invisibly — by clarifying what was confused, not by revolutionary overturning.
- Benefit of philosophy to other disciplines: it sharpens the conceptual foundations that other fields take for granted.
On free will
- Free will is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism — but this doesn't settle the question.
- Free will is analogous to the collapse of the wave function: both resist easy naturalistic reduction.
- The argument that free will is an illusion is only compelling if there is direct evidence that it is an illusion.
Mental Models
- First Principles Thinking — Huemer starts from intuitions as first principles; this is first-principles thinking applied to ethics
- The Map is Not the Territory — ethical theories are maps; when the map conflicts strongly with the intuition (territory), the map is probably wrong
- Hanlon's Razor — most philosophical errors arise from confusion and bad framing, not from malice or stupidity