Prim (Maymani) A.

Wrapping up Nature of Values

I’ve just wrapped up my Nature of Values course today (taught by Bin Hui Kwon, really attentive instructor, good explainer, and just a generally fun person to talk to – NYU, give this guy a raise or something).

When I started my summer term I had planned to write weekly posts about each week’s material to ensure I was really absorbing the material and to keep myself accountable. Obviously, this plan did not come into fruition.* I underestimated how intensive the class would be. I also underestimated how much I would like this course! I mean, coming in, I knew I’d probably find most of the course fun – I didn’t think I’d hate it, obviously – but I figured I’d have some attentional slumps. But while I did have days of being tired or distracted (mostly caused by external commitments though), my interest in course material literally never waned.

*(Though I actually did complete rough blog-drafts for the first 1-2 weeks! The course also required us to contribute weekly discussion posts, and I suppose I could’ve altered mine ad-hoc. But after some thought, I decided not to. I don’t think the posts would have been interesting. The writing was either too specifically-indexed to something from a class discussion, or were shoddy, short-hand, Prim-ified CliffsNotes of that week’s assigned papers. Conducive for learning, yes. But definitely not worthy to be read by anyone else.)

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Biggest takeaway from this course

I’ve just realized how cluttered (and sometimes inconsistent) my conceptions of morality and my own moral framework are. I remember talking about this with Bin and a few of my peers in the first week, and he said something along the lines of how taking a new philosophy course always felt like turning a light on in a corner of your ‘mind-room’ and seeing just how disorganized it has always been.

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My own metaethical view, and revising my view

I came into the course with a Constructivist view and left with a Constructivist view. I'm not surprised, I think my psychology background inadvertently biases me towards a view like this. Prior to the class, I’ve liked the quote “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so” from Hamlet (a play I’ve never finished reading, oops… I’ll get around to it), and thought it a good tagline to describe my own metaethical view. Imagine my delight when that same quotation appear in the paper "How to be Relativist about Normativity" from Sharon Street (one of the philosophers we read who endorses a Humean Constructivist view. Her view is the one I’ve found most convincing, and I’ve basically integrated a huge portion of her account into my view).

That being said, the Constructivist view I came in with had extremely holey (def: having many holes) foundations. I’ve done some intensive remodeling these past 6 weeks. And though I find Street’s Constructivism the most sound account, there are parts of me that are unhappy at how thoroughly its convinced me, of how correct it feels. For example, Street has written that, due to their starting positions, some people may simply find no normative reason to not do some morally repugnant act. That really saddens me, that you cannot logically force someone to see something as a reason, even if they were a flawlessly rational agent. Now, this claim may not be true! But I truly think Street is right about this, and that makes me sad because I don’t want to believe it to be so.

Edit (July-1-2026):
Now having turned in my essay, I find that I am considerably less satisfied with holding onto a Constructivist view, so much so that it has had me actively deliberating in my spare time how much of my current view I should keep. This is an immense surprise to me.

Constructivism (a scaffolded, messy version) has been my framework for thinking about knowledge, morality, literally almost EVERYTHING about the world since junior year of high school. This is really the equivalant of deciding whether to rip out 60% of the floorboards in my "mind's room" and just let everything slide through. How am I supposed to think of reasons now? This is the first time I've considered seriously moving to a realist account. There are so many more holes in Constructivism than I had thought, and while I am happy to bite some of the bullets (the Ideally-Coherent Caligula case, I really don't find the worst), but the epistemic reasons bullet (I know Street has an epistemic account for her view, and I only gave it one reading pass, but I don't know if I'm as convinced of the epistemic case as I am for the morality) is a terrible one to bite. I don't think I can do it.

I plan to rethink my view, and hopefully within a few years I can come to a more satisfying personal account. I genuinely can't stand having this sort of unsorted clutter in my head. I know I might be coming off as juvenile here, but I really mean it when I say that I am having a mini-crisis over this. It is kind of fun. I wonder what I will think about this in a few years.

I found Kosgaard’s Kantian approach quite beautiful. For myself personally, Korsgaard’s idea of Self-Constitution and the Moral Principle is something that, while unlikely – in my opinion! – to be the most accurate account of metaethics, most closely captures how I try to go about my life. If I could pick a view to impose upon everyone, it would probably be this. And though we spent the least amount of time on Reasons Fundamentalism, I think I find it intuitive appealing.

Most surprisingly, I’ve become less of a moral-relativist, and more open to accounts of moral realism! Another odd point: as I’ve scrutinized my own metaethical view throughout the course, I’ve come to realize that my view for art saddles the line between a Constructivist and an Aesthetic Non-naturalist! I wonder why I’m slightly more open to the idea of art being objectively something, but not morality. Curious…

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Creative seeds

This course also gave me inspiration for some interesting creative/tech projects. (One of which I’ve almost finished – just working on figuring out the front-end for it.)

One of our papers was a rebuttal to Korsgaard’s view, and contained entities called Schmagents (entities that look and perform like agents, but do not aim towards Self-Constitution and autonomy as agents do; so we have autonomous agents who performs actions, and ‘schm-autonomous schmagents’ who perform ‘schmactions’). Centrally, it uses a chess analogy (ah, chess on the beach you say…) to question a point about Korsgaard’s Self-Constitution. It got me thinking about reinforcement learning and Chess-bots. Wouldn’t it be interesting to make a ‘chess-schmagent’ that doesn’t aim to win chess, but just does through the motions of playing chess, then make it play against a regular chess-bot?

Of course, the chess-agents aren’t actually conscious, so they’re technically both closer to being Schmagents. We’d just get a normal chess-bot, and then a lobotomized chess-bot. I still think it’s still funny and worth implementing for the gag though.

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Where to next

I’ll be taking a philosophy course on Conciousness right after this. I’m also planning to take more philosophy courses in my next year (so beyond the minor’s 4-course requirement) because of how much I enjoyed Nature of Values.

Alright. Now, back to my books. I have an essay for this class I have to finish.