Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash
This essay is also available as a podcast on anchor.fm and other platforms, and as a video on YouTube.
This episode opens a three-episode series, following the structure of my last three episodes, in which I will be exploring moral philosophy from my Satanic perspective. In this particular episode, I’ll be surveying moral philosophy in general and taking a look in particular at the philosophy of perfectionism. On the 16th, I’ll be exploring perfectionism more in depth, especially in terms of its relationship to Satanic religion, and then the 26th will be a more poetic expedition into the subject matter.
“Perfectionism” has a particular meaning in common parlance. I hear it most often used to refer to the perfectionist personality trait, describing a person who holds their efforts to an extremely high, possible unreachable standard. Perfectionism in philosophy has a more specific meaning, describing a moral theory by which moral standards are measured in terms of our essential human nature.
By moral philosophy, I mean the branch of philosophy that deals with moral questions (such as those regarding the nature and existence of good and evil), value questions (such as those about what is good versus what is bad, or what is valuable versus not valuable), and questions about what people should do, both in specific circumstances and in general, and about how we should live our lives. I’ve done some work on ethics before, and while I’m proud of that work, none of it has been especially systematic or thorough in terms of formulating a fully-rounded Satanic moral theory. Mostly I’ve been looking at individual moral questions and reasoning through them without grounding that reasoning in an underlying theory (though my essay “Satan as a Moral Exemplar” approaches an argument for a generalized Satanic virtue ethics). Although I may turn out to reverse some of my earlier conclusions in the course of this essay, I don’t see that as a problem. While it may have been preferable to start with something more systematic and work from there, this project, as I’ve stated before many times, is about my process of figuring things out, not about me having them all figured out from the beginning and then presenting them to you as a finished product. That process is core to the ethos of the Satanist Reads the Bible project: it’s good if my audience accepts my arguments and conclusions, but better if my work inspires your own process of reasoning to your own conclusions, even if those conflict with my own. Or, as Herr Nietzsche would put it:
Lured by my style and tendency,
1974, p. 43
you follow and come after me?
Follow your own self faithfuIly—
take time—and thus you follow me.
Moral philosophy is a broad, difficult, and complex topic. I’ll begin with one of its central questions, which divides moral philosophy into two schools of thought, that question being: what is the ontological status of moral facts?
A fact is something that is the case, and factual claims (claims which represent matters of fact) are called true. The distinction between fact and truth is important to philosophy in general but I don’t think it will bear much on this discussion, so I’ll just add the brief clarification that facts are states of affairs—the way the world is, in other words—and truth is a property of claims about states of affairs. Claims can be true or false; a claim is true if and only if what is being claimed is a fact. So moral facts, then, are moral states of affairs about which true claims can be made. And ontology is the branch of philosophy concerned with existence, involving questions about what kinds of things exist and about the nature of existing, such as what it means for something to exist in the first place. So when we ask about the ontological status of moral facts, we’re asking whether moral facts exist, and if they do, what is their nature?
By way of clarifying all this, let’s say I make the claim, “The American Civil War ended in 1865.” That is a claim of historical fact. Is it true? This claim is generally accepted as being true, but one might argue that the military occupation of the south during Reconstruction and ending with the Compromise of 1877 constituted a de facto continuation of the war. But that’s not a problem; all we need to do is clarify our terms. We (most likely) agree on the fact that the American Civil War happened and, if we define it in terms of the formally-declared state of hostility between the American North and South, we will also (most likely) agree on the fact of when it ended. But even if I’m speaking with someone who believed that the American Civil War never actually happened at all, we likely still agree that there are such things as historical facts; it’s just that this person believes that we’re wrong about at least some of them. One might argue that we’re wrong about all of our historical claims and that the truth of history is unknowable (and this is indeed the position of what is called historical antirealism [Černín, 2019]), but an argument that there are no facts whatsoever as to what happened in the past would transcend the merely irrational and enter the realm of the nonsensical. If the American Civil War happened, that’s a fact. If the American Civil War did not happen, then that’s a fact, but either way, there is some fact of the matter: as long as our terms our clear and we’re not equivocating, exactly one of those claims must be true, and it would be ludicrous to claim that neither of them are.
Now let’s say I make the claim, “It’s wrong to eat babies” (meaning, human infants). If this statement is true, then it it is a fact that it’s wrong to eat babies, which means that moral facts exist. I may encounter someone who believes that eating babies is perfectly fine, and, similar to the person with whom I was discussing the American Civil War, this person may believe that that moral facts exist, but that we’re wrong about some or all of them, or that they exist but they’re unknowable. But I may also encounter someone who may or may not approve of eating babies but who does not believe that it’s wrong to eat babies on the basis of there not being any fact of the matter at all, and such a position is not as immediately far-fetched as the position that there is no fact of the matter as to whether the American Civil War happened.
The position that moral facts exist is called moral realism; the school of thought which denies the existence of such facts is called moral antirealism. Note that this does not neatly bifurcate the world of moral philosophy; there is a great deal of overlap between different schools of thought and not always clear agreement as to how differing ideas should be labeled. Moral skepticism, for example, claims that we do not have moral knowledge, but this position can be predicated on either a realist position (in which moral facts would exist but be unknowable) or an antirealist position (in which we lack moral knowledge because there is nothing to be known in the first place).
I don’t want to get too far into the weeds here, but let’s at least take a look at why there is a controversy between moral realism and antirealism that does not exist between what we might call historical realism and the hypothetical position of historical nihilism.
The claim “It’s wrong to eat babies” seems to me to be intuitively true, and that intuition is indeed quite strong, to the point that even considering other possibilities seems out of the question. The wrongness of eating babies seems to me to be a universal, objective fact. But even our strongest intuitions are not always correct, so we must question everything. What does it mean for it to be wrong to eat babies? Why is it wrong to eat babies? What are the implications of it being wrong to eat babies? Some might not wish to engage in such a line of questioning, fearing that doing so might entail some sort of moral risk, but whatever the outcome of my inquiry, I do not think that my disapproval of eating babies will change. I want to emphasize that point and not be mistaken: I do not approve of the eating of babies. But disapproval is not the same thing as moral wrongness or a belief that something is morally wrong; such a belief does seem to entail disapproval, but it is possible to disapprove of things which one does not consider morally wrong.
When I say that it’s wrong to eat babies, I’m saying that eating babies is a thing that shouldn’t be done, and not because I disapprove of it (though I do) or because anyone disapproves of it but rather for more objective and fundamental reasons. I can justify this assertion in any number of ways, and those various justifications further specify exactly what it is that I mean by “wrong.” But it’s the implications of moral facts that first got me hung up on this question.
It is indeed a fact that the American Civil War happened, and this fact has real-world implications whether or not I’m aware of it. I might see photographs of the battlefields, and if I didn’t know that the Civil War happened I might not know what I’m looking at, but I couldn’t see photos of Civil War battlefields if the Civil War never happened. The Civil War had consequences that affect the contemporary political situation in the United States; if I didn’t know that the Civil War happened, or if I believed that it didn’t, I might not be aware of those effects (or might have other explanations for them), but they would still be there and would still affect my life. My car runs on gasoline; whether or not I know that fact and even I specifically believe otherwise, my car is still going to stop running when it runs out of gas. There is a galaxy 2.5 million light years away from me in the constellation of Andromeda; I can see it in the night sky even if I don’t know what I’m looking at and even if I believe that the Andromeda Galaxy does not exist.
“It’s wrong to eat babies.” Well, now I’m at a bit of a loss. This doesn’t seem to be something I can verify in any objective way. Even if I go so far as to test the matter by acquiring a baby and eating it, what will happen? It seems the most likely outcome is that many people will be violently angry at me. But in certain parts of the world, people would be violently angry with me if I had sex with another man, and that’s not wrong, so it cannot be the case that wrong actions are those which make other people upset. It would cause the baby and the mother a great deal of pain, but I can think of other actions which cause pain which are not wrong. It causes unnecessary suffering… but what if the baby were anaesthetized, the mother deceased, and nobody ever found out about it? It still seems wrong, certainly, and I can continue to find justifications for its wrongness under any number of circumstances, but if this wrongness is a fact, it still clearly lacks the sort of forcefulness that other kinds of facts have. To clarify the matter, imagine that I don’t know that it’s wrong to eat babies, and proceed to eat a baby under the aforementioned circumstances in which no one finds out about it. If I don’t know that bandsaws can sever fingers, I’m still going to lose fingers if I run them through a bandsaw, but what effect exactly does the wrongness of eating a baby have on me regardless of my knowledge of it or belief to the contrary? The philosopher David Hume pointed out a related and generalized principle in his Treatise of Human Nature from 1739, saying that reason alone “can never immediately prevent or produce any action by contradicting or approving of it” (1960, p. 458). As another example, we commonly take it as a fact that slavery is wrong, but if this is indeed a fact, a quick look at human history shows that it has had little to no effect in terms of actually preventing slavery, and when American chattel slavery was ended, it wasn’t because the North was able to convince the South of the truth of slavery’s moral wrongness.
To be clear, this is not to say that the belief in moral wrongness has no effect. I think that it’s very likely that most people frequently act because they believe that what they’re doing is right, or refrain from acting because they believe that doing so would be wrong. The American South did not enslave people while at the same time believing that slavery was wrong; they believed that the practice was perfectly acceptable and even morally good (as was argued in Aunt Philis’s Cabin, a response to the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin [“Aunt Phillis’s Cabin,” 2020]). But our beliefs may be mistaken or may not reflect matters of fact at all, and in cases of mistaken belief regarding matters of fact, those facts still have consequences regardless of our belief. If I fill up my tank with orange juice, sincerely believing that it will work as fuel, my car will still fail to run, and may become damaged, regardless of my belief. But if slavery is wrong and the slaveholders of the American South believed otherwise, its wrongness clearly had no effect on them.
I remain undecided on the matter of the ontological status of moral facts, but what is clear to me is that this ontological status is unknown to us and is largely or entirely irrelevant in any case.
I’ll present another problem I’ve found with moral facticity: if there are moral facts, then our striving for moral perfection would entail aligning ourselves as far as possible with those facts. This would mean that, should there be a conflict between our morality and our humanity, forcing us to choose between the two, we should (by definition) choose morality. But that seems problematic for several reasons. One such problem is that it seems inherently self-contradictory. Humanity becomes perfected by becoming less human? Indeed, “inhumanity” seems to be a synonym for “immorality,” as it appears in such common phrases as “man’s inhumanity to man.” That may be no more than a linguistic coincidence, but it at least carries the implication that, unless objective morality corresponds perfectly to human nature, human moral perfection requires immorality, which is incoherent. It was this line of thinking that brought me back to the moral theory of perfectionism.
I’ve covered perfectionism in a prior essay (“On the Matter of Becoming a Fucking God: Satanism, Philosophy, and Theater,” 2020) in which I leveraged the philosopher Gwen Bradford’s application of perfectionism to the concept of achievement, but it’s not something I had investigated fully in itself. Perfectionism, as described by philosopher Thomas Hurka (working largely from Aristotle) in his book of that name (1993), describes a moral theory in which the development of our characteristic human capacities is intrinsically valuable.
As I mentioned earlier on, questions of value are part of moral theory as well. In preparing to write this essay, I took various notes using a fountain pen, a clear TWSBI ECO with an extra-fine nib filled with Diamine Aurora Borealis ink. It’s a good pen and good ink, and when I say that, I’m not saying that either the pen or the ink are morally good in any way. I don’t see how it would even be possible for a pen to be morally good. When I say that it’s a good pen, I’m saying that it writes well and is pleasant to use. I wrote those notes in a couple different notebooks, both of them made by the company Minimalism Art, and those are good notebooks. Like the pen, they’re pleasant to use when I write in them, but unlike the pen, I can’t write with them at all, and if I tried to, they would certainly write very poorly. Clearly, what makes a notebook a good notebook is different than what makes a pen a good pen. These are matters of value theory, which divides up the various goods of the world in terms of instrumental and intrinsic value.
I’ve covered instrumental and intrinsic goods before, so I’ll be brief in covering them here. Instrumental goods are good because they accomplish certain things which are also good. Intrinsic goods are good in and of themselves. My pen is a good pen for many reasons, one of which being that I find it pleasant to use. Using it makes me happy, in other words. So the pen is an instrumental good in terms of its bringing me happiness, which is an intrinsic good. Happiness isn’t good only because it’s good for something; among other reasons, it’s good simply because it’s good to be happy.
Perfectionism merges value theory and normative ethics (which concerns “right” and “wrong”) in a very satisfying way, one which can include or even establish an ontological basis for moral facts, depending on how one interprets the theory on the metaethical level, but which does not require them. My evaluation of my pen, ink, and notebooks as good is based on their being a pen, ink, and notebooks. My pen being a good pen is based exclusively on what it means for something to be a pen at all, as opposed to being some other kind of thing. Similarly, if I am a good human—as opposed to a bad one but not necessarily an evil one or one who does wrong things, but I’ll get to that—that assessment must be based on what it means for me to be human in the first place. We humans have particular capacities which are unique or essential to us as humans. These are the things that make us human, without which we would not be human at all. Perfectionism posits the development of these capacities as being intrinsically good.
Hurka describes perfectionism as being essentially consequentialist (1993, p. 55), consequentialism being the theory of normative ethics that evaluates actions as right or wrong based on the amount of good or harm that they accomplish (or are intended to accomplish, depending on how one interprets the theory). In consequentialism, good (in the value-theoretical sense) is prior to right, and perfectionism likewise proceeds to evaluate what is right based on the intrinsic good of developing our characteristic human capacities.
One might immediately object that human nature is not always beneficent. Humans, for example, are the only living things which actively seek to commit genocide. But before that becomes a challenge for perfectionism, we have to ask ourselves if such a characteristic is truly essential. We can approach such questions through thought experiments, imagining a race of beings who are like us in all respects but lack that characteristic. Would such beings be human? In the case of genocide, or rather, in the case of the absence of genocide, I think the answer is clearly yes. Beings who are like us in all respects except that they do not ever commit genocide would still be human—I would even go so far as to say that such humans would be better humans than we are, which clarifies what our essential characteristics actually are. So, genocide does not make us human and may indeed be inimical to our humanity. It may be unique to us, but it is not essential.
But say that further reflection reveals characteristics that are essential but which are nevertheless morally undesirable. This may indeed become a challenge for the theory, one which Hurka calls the “wrong-properties objection” and which he avoids by defining perfectionism as being restricted to only those properties which are plausibly worth developing on their own (1993, p. 9-10). This is a matter I’ll be examining in more detail in the next essay.
For the time being, let’s focus on the characteristic human capacities that Hurka includes in his account of perfectionism. There are three: our physical essence, our theoretically rational essence, and our practically rational essence.
By “physical essence,” Hurka means that we, as humans, have human bodies. Part of what makes us human is our bodies; if we imagine a race of beings that were like us in all respects except that had very different physical structures, we would intuitively consider those beings not to be human. Indeed, this is what we see in the Star Trek franchise: while Klingons have their own unique culture, it is one that could conceivably be human and that mirrors human culture in many ways. But they’re not human. Why? In part, because they have non-human bodies. So perfectionism places a moral value on such things as physical exercise. Exercise is not only good for us, it is right that we exercise our bodies. Why? Because this perfects our physical essence, which is, according to perfectionism, intrinsically good. This has some telling implications for my own slothful lifestyle, but I’ll ignore those for the time being.
Our theoretically rational essence is our rational formulation of beliefs based on evidence and our practically rational essence is our acting rationally based on our beliefs. By way of example, let’s say I fill up my car’s tank with gas. Why would I do such a thing? Why would I go to this particular place and pay money so that I can pour this particular liquid into a hole in the side of my car? Because I believe that this liquid powers the car’s engine. Why do I believe such a thing? I could probably list a hundred different reasons, but just to take an example, cars need some source of energy because of the laws of thermodynamics; there seems to be a widespread popular agreement that gasoline is the appropriate energy source for this type of vehicle (which also makes sense based on what I know about the mechanics of engines); and the presence of gasoline in the tank has consistently been proven by my experience as a necessary condition (though not a sufficient one) for the car to run. So, by putting gas in my car, I am exercising my theoretical and practical rationality. According to perfectionism, when I refine my beliefs to better accord with the evidence and refine my actions to better accord with those beliefs, I am doing something that is both good and morally right.
To be clear, animals have a practical rationality as well and some may even have a theoretical rationality, but the complexity of human rationality is unique to us.
[Humans] are rational because they can form and act on sophisticated beliefs and intentions, ones whose contents stretch across persons and times and that are arranged in complex hierarchies. These last features distinguish human rationality from that of lower animals. Animals have isolated perceptual beliefs, but only humans can achieve explanatory understanding. They can grasp generalizations that apply across objects and times and can use them to explain diverse phenomena. A similar point holds for practical rationality. Animals have just local aims, but humans can envisage patterns of action that stretch through time or include other agents and can perform particular acts as means to them. By constructing hierarchies of ends, they can engage in intelligent tool use and have complex interactions with others.
Hurka, 1993, p. 39
One might object that, while humans are indeed rational and that our particular human rationality is indeed part of our essence, there is also an intangible and emotional quality to our existence that is fundamentally arational or even irrational. Hurka addresses this point, saying that this objection
…rests on an untenable contrast between rationality and emotion. Rationality is a property of beliefs and aims, which are present in all emotions. Our fears and loves have as components beliefs about dangers or the merits of our friends, as well as desires to avoid or spend time with them. Like other beliefs and aims, they can be more or less rational; when they are more rational, the emotions they help constitute are by Aristotelian standards good.
1993, p. 44
Hurka is correct that our emotional life can play into our rationality—all things being equal, it is rational to do things that make us happy—and that our emotions can be evaluated rationally. I enjoy cooking food, for example, so cooking food is a rational thing for me to do, and my enjoyment of cooking food is itself rational because it improves the safety and the quality of the food that I need to eat in order to live. However, I don’t find Hurka’s response here at all satisfactory. Not all of our emotions are rational; Hurka’s statement that our beliefs and aims are present in all emotions is, I believe, simply wrong. My emotional reaction to a symphony or a rainstorm contains my beliefs and aims only in the most abstract sense, if at all. What’s more, when our emotions are non-rational, they are not necessarily bad or wrong in any way. But the biggest problem I have with Hurka’s response is this: a race of beings who only experiences and evaluates emotion in a purely rational way would seem to me to be not fully human, meaning that some non-rational part of us is indeed essentially human. But, as long as we’re willing to accept that something non-rational might also be good and right, this is not at all a problem for perfectionism itself; it just means that Hurka is incorrect about its implications in at least one particular respect. I’ll be taking up this matter further in the next essay.
Perfectionism also has appealing implications for what are called other-regarding duties, our duties not towards ourselves but towards others. That perfectionism has self-regarding duties is clear enough, and when we consider that it posits the development of our characteristic human capacities in general as being intrinsically valuable—it is, as Hurka describes, agent-neutral (1993, p. 62-64)—we can see how other-regarding duties come into play. While we cannot develop human capacities for others, we can allow them to develop and create an environment in which such capacities have a greater potential to flourish. This gives us an objective standard by which to measure the morality of our actions that accords with our humanity. If I eat a baby, I have halted the development of that baby’s characteristic human capacities, which is the strongest rationale I’ve found so far for being able to say that eating babies is not only bad and undesirable but also wrong. I don’t believe at this time that this constitutes a morally realist position; while perfectionism is a satisfying and pragmatically useful moral rationale, I don’t think that people who say “Eating babies is wrong” always or even very frequently mean that in terms of a perfectionist rationale. They seem to be intending something more concrete and fundamental and less relative to a particular standard of measurement, however sensible. It may be, then, that people who say “Eating babies is wrong” are wrong in terms of what they think that statement means but correct according to some other (perhaps perfectionist) stance. That would be as if I said, “My car runs on gasoline,” but I think that the word “gasoline” means “orange juice.” While it’s true that my car does run on gasoline, I’m still wrong when I say that it does because I mean something else that is not true.
There remains an interesting tension between our other-regarding duties and our self-regarding duties within the context of perfectionism, as human nature itself exists in tension between our existence as social creatures and our existence as individuals. Hurka explores many of the social implications of perfectionism in his text, but having established the general foundations of the theory, I’ll conclude here and leave such discussions for next time.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited and Referenced
Aunt Phillis’s Cabin. (2020). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aunt_Phillis%27s_Cabin&oldid=975008180
Černín, D. (2019). Historical Antirealism and the Past as a Fictional Model. Organon F, 26(4). https://doi.org/10.31577/orgf.2019.26405
Cohon, R. (2018). Hume’s Moral Philosophy. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/hume-moral/
Hume, D. (1960). A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford University Press.
Hurka, T. (1993). Perfectionism. Oxford University Press.
Nietzsche, F. W. (1974). The gay science: With a prelude in rhymes and an appendix of songs (W. A. Kaufmann, Trans.; 1st ed.). Vintage Books.
Shafer-Landau, R. (2015). The fundamentals of ethics (Third Edition). Oxford University Press.