Humility

There needs to be humility, or else there is no honesty. I am here arguing for philosophical pessimism and there is something inherently absurd about that. Declaring life to be either broadly good or bad is somewhat vague and meaningless. What exactly am I claiming? How could someone acquire the knowledge I claim to demonstrate? Is it consistent? What could disprove it? In particular, how can I make any claims about the world or ethics when I say that knowledge is fundamentally subjective?

The obvious problem with subjectivity is that everything goes. Sure, the case may be that the problem doesn't come up much in the real world. Human values are nearly universal, anthropologists argue for 7 universal values that exist across cultures. 

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family values

group loyalty

reciprocity

bravery

respect

fairness

property rights

https://newatlas.com/seven-universal-moral-rules-oxford-study/58474/

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Human behaviors vary as much as they can. If there is a single defining trait that can define humanity, it might be creativity. The problem is, we often confuse different expressions of values with having different values. Americans, for example, find slurping offensive while Japanese consider it to be a compliment. Both cultures value respect but they have opposite ways of expressing it. Keeping in mind that subjectivity does not mean any value you claim is true just because you say it. In real life, all people have honest, core values. Without any values, there would be no reason to act at all, in any situation. We must choose and why we choose what we do is an expression of those values. 

While the problem of subjectivity is less of a problem in practice than it is in theory, that doesn't mean it never comes up. Some individuals, by way of the accident, will inevitably and honestly have different values. For all of the logic and evidence behind moral arguments for veganism, if someone genuinely does not care about animals, they can simply say that and their position is bullet proof. Likewise, if someone truly does not believe sense data can be reliable, no argument that relies on the validity of sense data can persuade them otherwise. Even if it just so happened that all the people to ever exist did share the same values (ethical and epistemological), it wouldn't not make it so. How do we answer the hypothetical conundrum?

I don't think there is an answer. Most moral philosophers reject subjectivist metaethics for this. So much so that if a view can be reduced to subjectivism, that is enough to consider it refuted. The existentialists had a proper appreciation of the embarrassment. Not only is there no moral progress, as we like to think the end of slavery or universal suffrage represents, history is just a seemingly endless tale of humans fumbling about in a dark room. If progress is a straight line, humanity is eternally swerving; side to side, forwards and backwards, going nowhere at all. Observed by an alien race, human behavior would seem random and chaotic. Whatever organization there may seem to be comes across as robotic and serves purely evolutionary functions. Further, as our life narrative is either largely or fully post facto rationalization for our actions, conscious thought would be a useless side effect of predetermined action. A ripple following the swimming organism. Philosophy itself lies in its tomb.

All of these criticisms apply again to knowledge. Here there is even more embarrassment. Human beings excell at noticing certain patterns and not others. We only have so much bandwidth, especially when it comes to numbers. Emotions heavily influence our ability to think. What are the odds that the reality we find ourselves in also happens to be within the range of things we can understand? Our brains serve a specific function, and while calculus and theology are side-effects of that function, the questions of What? and Why? don't matter. Just as aging and age related diseases do not affect the passage of genetic material (since by the time we die of cancer, we likely already conceived and raised our offspring), whether or not we ever truly comprehend the origins of the universe have no impact on our having children. 

Kant's transcendental idealism is very poorly understood. Materialists often do not distinguish it from true idealism, as associated with Berkley. Berkley took empiricism (the doctrine that knowledge comes through sense data) to an extreme and pointed out that we only ever experience properties, not the objects they are said to be associated with. This substance called "matter" was completely undefined, although we seem to share its common intuition. Further, properties only ever occur in the mind. There cannot even in principle be a property which is not being mentally perceived. This is the meaning of idealism, all that exists is mental. To him, if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, it does not make a sound, nor vibrations in the air. In fact, it would not exist and thus could not fall. Berkeley narrowly avoided this absurdity by claiming that God, being omnipresent, maintained perception of everything.

This is the difference between transcendental idealism and idealism proper. Kant would still claim that something happens when the tree falls without anyone around. Observers, he pointed out, do not passively take in reality. Our minds actively shape it. We paint the colors, orchestrate the music, and prepare the cuisine of reality. What exists outside of our minds is incomprehensible to us, but it is there. Quantum physics only seems weird to us because we did not evolve to understand reality, we evolved to pass on our genes. The software in our brain is really good at that specific function. The quantum world, if anything, is normal while this mid-scopic world of conscious beings is strange and insignificant. Even the rate at which we perceive the passage of time is arbitrary, if the block universe suggested by general relativity is true. Kant's contribution to philosophy is to be analogous to Copernicus' contribution to astrology. Humanity is not the center of metaphysics, we should not expect reality to conform to the arbitrary way we perceive it.

The term "objective truth" is an oxymoron. Not because truth does not exist but because we can never conceive of it. We construct knowledge through our epistemic values and the eternally unfinished data we have of the world. Already we are like ants, no individual ever fully comprehending what the colony seems to comprehend. No one human ever had the complete knowledge to send someone to the moon, although a collective of humans did. Yet even the collection of all humans do not possess complete knowledge of reality. To some this sounds like the beginnings of mysticism. Mystics talk of God as an incomprehensible unknown and while reality is certainly that, its violent indifference gives it more the character of Lovecraft's nuclear chaos, Azathoth. A human attempting to understand pure reality would have a similar effect as jamming a VHS into a DVD player. Such a thing would drive us mad if we could even survive it.

Anyway, we still make appeals to science. The implication, if transcendental idealism is true, is that scientific realism is false. Scientific theories do not progressively bring us to the truth. Theories cause behaviors which we find desirable. Someone who believes hand washing exercises disease causing ghouls receives the same benefits as someone who understands germ theory. Germ theory has the advantage of explaining the things we observe under a microscope and ghoul theory lacks important evidence, which is why we prefer it. This is part of the problem with interpreting quantum physics. No interpretation has any obvious advantages and they all make nearly identical predictions. This problem is not unique to our age. In "The Rationality of Scientific Revolutions" Karl Popper explains the cycle of scientific discoveries. A paradigm shifting idea comes about in an environment of established dogma. Eventually, as older scientists retire and as the new paradigm gains empirical support, it becomes the new dogma. However, the new paradigm eventually becomes exhausted as new problems arise and the cycle begins again. It is likely that we will never reach the point a new paradigm will effectively explain everything. It is also likely that such a theory will have multiple interpretations. Which one individuals, or even the whole of humanity, prefers will come down to how much weight is given to various epistemic values and background assumptions. 

We assume there must be a reality because it is impossible to think otherwise. Frankly, we have nothing more than a very stubborn intuition that this must be so. Reality by definition is real and there is at least something that exists, right? We can say nothing of what this reality is in of itself. We cannot define matter, we cannot explain what a particle is, we can't explain what space or time is without making recourse to synonyms. These concepts and others, like good and evil, are so primitive in us that we can communicate the ideas effectively even though they are undefinable. You and I both experience blueness, but cannot explain it to a blind man. Likewise, a creature without the conception of what a point is cannot understand what a particle is. Likely, the objects we refer to as particles are nothing like the impressionistic images we hold when we think of them. All knowledge is merely conceptual tools for interacting with reality.

Morality, too, is another impressionistic dream, perhaps even more so modern than impressionist. Ethical ideas are not just tools for interacting with the world, but tools for creating it. Even if our philosophies function merely to justify our actions after they have been decided, ideas also factor into the myriad gears of causal influences. Ethical memes spread and influence behavior. The inescapable truth is that even reducing suffering is meaningless. It does not represent moral progress which, like objective truth, is an oxymoron. This is where philosophy becomes useless. Even though moral nihilism may be the case, I still value the reduction of suffering. I wish to create the world in my own image, to that extent. I cast my will into the ocean of wills, hoping it will turn the tide. The dominant moral ideology is ultimately a function of power, which I admit I have relatively none of. I am not God and the fact that my values mean nothing does not change anything for me. I must still choose. I must still act. My flawed understanding of the world and the values I happened to absorb from my environment are both sorry guides, but they are all I have.