Dr. William Vallicella, a professional philosopher, posted a list of principles or standards for philosophy on his blog. (All of them involve absoluteness—interesting to me since he’s politically conservative; I suspect a connection.) The one I thought worth responding to is the following:
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“Nothing matters unless it matters absolutely.”
My response is below.
I consider “mattering” not only to be relative, but to be doubly relative. First, it is relative to one or more conscious entities, and second it is relative to purposes, needs, or wants of those entities. In brief, things matter to people for reasons. (I’m also allowing for things to matter to animals here, but for the sake of brevity am restricting the discussion to people.) Taking this as a starting point raises the question of what could it mean for something to matter absolutely?
One possibility is that the being to whom it matters is an absolute being—shall we say God. Then we could say that something matters absolutely if it matters to God. In this case, S matters absolutely because the person to whom it matters is absolute. Of course, this requires us to posit the existence of God, which not everyone is willing to do.
Another possibility is that something matters absolutely to a given individual. This would mean, I think, that it is of supreme importance to that individual, trumping all other considerations in that person’s life. In this case, S matters absolutely because the reasons are absolute (for the person to whom S matters.)
A third possibility is that S matters to all people, for some reason. (I’m not sure that it quite makes sense to say that S matters absolutely in this case—“S matters universally” is perhaps better.) It’s hard to come up with an example of such a thing, however. Within various contexts certain things operate as though they were absolutes in this sense, but change the context and S may no longer matter to everyone.
It seems to me there are flaws with considering S to matter absolutely in each of the above cases. In the first case, there’s the problem of establishing the existence of the absolute conscious being (God). It also raises the question of how would human beings possibly know what might matter to God? And I’m just blasphemous enough to think that it’s not entirely obvious why something should necessarily matter to human beings just because it matters to God (perhaps the welfare of beings in a galaxy far, far away and long ago, and about whom we know nothing). And if something did matter to God, but not to one or more people, would it still make sense to say the something mattered absolutely?
In the second case, S may matter absolutely to one person and not at all to another—which seems to detract from the absoluteness of S’s mattering. I think that in fact this case often occurs, and is often not problematic. But it becomes problematic when a person or group decides that what matters absolutely to them matters ABSOLUTELY, and this justifies their imposing it on the rest of us in ways more or less oppressive or violent.
In the third case, there’s the problem of coming up with something that would matter to everyone under all circumstances—I suspect there is no such thing, not even life itself.
All of which makes the all-or-nothing proposition that “Nothing matters unless it matters absolutely” problematic. Or perhaps more properly, some problems flow from it. Unless we could establish the existence of something that matters absolutely, we are immediately led to the conclusion that nothing matters—the nihilist’s position. Since empirically, a variety of things do matter to individuals, for a variety of reasons, to say that nothing matters becomes essentially a way of devaluing (other) people–you don’t matter, and what you think is important doesn’t matter.
There’s also a purely logical problem with regard to the original proposition which is posed by the empirical fact that things do matter to people for various reasons. Given the all-or-nothing proposition, we are faced with two choices. The first is to declare that “nothing matters”. Since some things do in fact matter to some people, we would then be declaring something to be nothing. And what’s the logical justification for that?
The second choice is to declare something that matters but not to everyone under all circumstances nonetheless matters absolutely. But how would we decide logically what that something might be? And, since it doesn’t matter to everyone under all circumstances, what would it even mean to say that it matters absolutely?
To me, the only viable solution is to allow that things do matter, there are degrees of mattering, some things matter a lot to a lot of people and may even matter absolutely to some people–but nothing matters absolutely to everyone. It’s perhaps more complicated than “all or nothing”, but I think it’s also more true to life, and is less likely to lead to belief systems that justify violence toward others based solely on differences of opinion about what matters.
I think trying to reason with absolutes often leads to problems, and to me this is but one example of that general principle. Someday maybe I’ll write about that.
It also occurs to me that this is related to this previous post. Once again I’m arguing on behalf of the excluded middle.
Addofio 
There’s a certain comfort in supposing that nothing matters unless it matters absolutely.
People often suffer anxiety about events that might befall them. If we can tell ourselves, “It isn’t a matter of life and death, so ultimately it doesn’t matter,” perhaps that’s a healthy perspective.
But I do wonder what his definition of “absolutely” is. If one of my children dies, does that matter absolutely? Even the destruction of the whole human race arguably doesn’t matter absolutely, since the world will explore new possibilities, just as it did after the dinosaurs were wiped out.
I’m curious to know what exactly his point is.
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I looked up the definition of the word absolute. I had to clarify my understanding. The definitions of absolute were pure, complete, and perfect.
I the context of philosophy it makes sense to search for purity of thought, completion of an idea, and perfection resulting from the synthesis of thought and action.
Perhaps for something to matter absolutely means that we do our best to think clearly, act appropriately and hope for the best outcome.
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All these considerations about whether something matters “absolutely” or “relatively” assume that there is something that would, in fact, matter absolutely in terms of the entire human race. Individual lives matter subjectively to each individual person, their families, friends, and in more rare cases to the surrounding community (and in very rare cases to a country, or even the entire world). But even if something would matter to all people on this planet, does it make that something to matter “absolutely”? I don’t think it does. The only way that could be the case would be a situation where the universe would be an environment, perhaps a hologram, set up solely for the purposes of the human spirits to experience “life”. But from a less spiritual and more scientific perspective the significance of the human race in the universe likely approaches zero. Yes, perhaps, hopefully, our lives have a deeper significance than the “material” life itself (at least on a “personal” level), but considering the vastness of the cosmos, no matter how important we consider something to be, if this planet ceased existing tomorrow, it would likely make very little difference in the universe and most of its inhabitants would never even know we once existed, let alone be concerned about the things of near-absolute importance that once occurred on our planet.
(I realize I’m responding to an old post, however, I’ve given this issue considerable amount of thought recently and so I thought of contributing my two cents. 🙂
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I want to respond to your last point about the significance of the human race being inevitably essentially zero. There’s an interesting other meaning to “mattering” lurking in your discussion and your use of “significant” and “important”, and that is that something (we) matter iff we matter to, make a difference to, some other entitiy. There are, to me, both positives and negatives to this way of thinking about it. Certainly it would tend to push us in a pro-social direction, assuming mattering matters to us, and that, in my world-view, is a good thing. However, it also makes one’s significance purely dependent on other beings, people, and would imply that the homeless guy out there on the streets that no one cares about really would have zero significance, and that I would reject. And of course, as you argue, if everyone ceases to exist, than ipso facto no one matters, and whatever life we had doesn’t matter.
But there’s still a kind of all-or-nothingness about your argument. Having rejected any kind of absolute significance to the human race or any member thereof, you conclude that our significance is, or approaches, zero. Why? Does mattering, or significance, have to be eternal in order to be said to exist or be meaningful at all?
I’m still shooting for the middle ground here.
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I just don’t think the fact that we matter to ourselves is very significant from the point of view of all that exists.
Things obviously do matter to ourselves and to people our lives touch. A quote from Eckhart Tolle is very good, I think: »Nothing matters absolutely; the truth is: it only matters relatively.» (Searching references for that quote actually brought me to this thread originally.)
Especially Christian faith tends to be very subjective. People are “threatened” with “hell” or some other terribly unpleasant outcome in exchange to deeds that have been deemed unacceptable. But no matter how terrible the consequences for an individual, it really matters – or makes difference – infinitesimally to 99.999999999% (probably way too few nines) of the rest of the cosmos. Yet because people tend to consider what and how things matter from their local, subjective perspective, such threats are very effective.
I believe there are only couple of ways our doings could matter beyond our local, cosmically insignificant sphere (diverging from Eckhart Tolle’s quote): interconnectedness of all living things (or everything?), or — perhaps this is the same thing put in different terms — existence of Brahman / Great Spirit / Life Force, or whatever one would like to refer to it by, that everything is part of. While the experiences of the individual entities would still be rather insignificant, the experiences of all would create the whole and hence an individual experience would actually matter, in a way, quite a lot as without each individual experience there could not be the whole. If I had to place bets, I would vouch for this scenario; so not all is lost – things do matter absolutely, just with a very small significance. And the local/personal perspective matters absolutely much less that many people would like to think.
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What does it mean to matter? To evoke certain “pleasurable” neural chemical changes in the brain? You haven’t really adressed what it means to “matter” only whether or not something might “matter” in an absolute sense. Even if there was a supreme being called “God” what would make them “matter”? The idea that anything “matters” seems to come down to solipsism in the end.
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