Once we accept that we have free will, the next question is simple: Are some choices better than others -- and how can we know?

This is the realm of metaethics, which worries about what terms like 'good' or 'evil' mean, and how to choose the best ethical system from among many competing alternatives.

Now, it's important not to confuse metaethics (often spelled "meta-ethics") with normative ethics, which is the discipline most people are thinking of when they talk about "ethics". In a nutshell (as the graphic at right indicates), normative ethics is concerned with judging specific situations, actions, people, events, etc., according to some set of standards by which we can say such things are "good" or "bad", for example. Metaethics is concerned with deciding what "good" and "bad" (along with other terms of judgment) actually should mean, and also with deciding between competing sets of standards (cultural mores, etc.) accordingly. For a little extra information on this distinction, check this sidebar.

That said, let's move on to what I'm offering with my Metaethical Functionalism.

The crux of my claim is that we can identify and describe a physical property that, upon reflection, deserves to be called "objective" and "intrinsic" value. By "objective" I mean that its nature is open to empirical discovery: we can check it out. By "intrinsic" I mean "in itself" (the standard meaning of the term). Something with intrinsic value has value as a property just by being what it is.

Other philosophers may disagree with this. They might assert that something with intrinsic value has, by its very nature, the property of "seeming valuable" to you or me -- of being something that you or I (or anyone else) may judge to be important or worth obtaining or keeping, or of being a matter of preference for the person in question. This is the attitude to which I refer as subjective, and I think 'subjective value' has an illuminating synonym: 'bias'.

With apologies, I can't take the time here to give a thorough critique of subjectivism (though you can read a reasonably good one toward the end of my M.A. thesis). Subjectivism has reached its acme in "post-modernist" philosophy. Let me just note that such subjectivism is completely incompatible with evolutionary theory. This is a controversial claim, so think about it; challenge it; worry it to death! You'll find (I'm convinced) that subjectivism is a variety of dualism, which treats the mental as being of a completely different kind of "stuff" from the material. This dualism, dating back to René Descartes or before, is simply not supported by the physical sciences. But it is supported by natural biases predicted by evolutionary theory.

Hmmm. This makes two times in as many paragraphs that I've mentioned bias. I'd better explain my concern with the following maxims I've developed over the years.

• Intelligence is more often used to defend biases than to escape them.
• If there is a reason you would tend to believe something even if it isn't true (or to disbelieve something even if it is true), then there is an even more important reason to question your belief in the matter.

Pithy, eh? Feel free to distribute them far and wide ... with proper attribution, of course!

Now, with your new bias filters in place, how do you think you (or anyone else) would naturally be tempted to respond to these questions?

• Is your species the glorious end product of evolution, or just another experiment in the ongoing saga of Life?
• You're either a demigod or a machine. Pick one.
• What percentage of your judgments are produced by reason, and what percentage come from other mechanisms?
• Do you act before or after you're aware of your decision to act?

The first two of these should be easily acceptable illustrations of the human tendency to exaggerate one's importance. You probably recall a time when you, like most people, flattered yourself in these respects -- though you now know better.

Maybe the next example doesn't bother you, either. You might know that even though humans tend to regard almost all their judgments as the products of reason, in fact most of them are really hunches, snap decisions, emotional biases, and other decidedly unreasoned deliverances. There are very good reasons for this, and we shouldn't be too embarrassed by it -- as long as we earnestly work to replace such judgments with reasoned ones. After all, without those more primitive judging processes, our ancestors would never have survived long enough to develop the capacity for reason!

The last example, though, is enough to bring pause even to the most "enlightened" among us. It turns out that recent brain research shows that the brain responds to a "decision" to act before one's awareness catches up! You don't need a conscious decision to act before the action takes place -- even for those actions that we consider to be the results of conscious intention! Now, if that doesn't scramble your beliefs about human nature, I don't know what will! But you shouldn't worry if you're just concerned about behaving aptly. It's only if you want to cling to the illusion that your conscious will causes your actions that you're in for a rocky ride!

With these warnings about subjective bias, we can get back to the business at hand.

How is it that, in metaethics (where we're not supposed to use the vocabulary of evaluation, as explained in the sidebar above), I think I can get away with talking about value as a physical property one can identify and describe? Sure, I'm allowed to identify and describe to my heart's content -- but how dare I smuggle in the term 'value'?

You'll need to read my lengthier online papers (the M.A. thesis and the paper on metaphysical functionalism) to get even a mostly satisfactory answer to that question. In a nutshell, the idea is that human evaluation, resulting in all the normative terms we use, is a collection of evolved responses to the world our ancestors inhabited. If some of that world's features had the property of being comparatively "better than" other such features in promoting the survival and reproduction of our ancestors, it stands to reason that the ability to recognize and "value" those benefits would have been adaptive.

Beginning with a simple, descriptive fact, we can move to a comparative judgment about the physical property I call 'objective value'. Let's back off a bit (being too emotionally involved with an issue is a sure source of difficulty) and consider this from the perspective of a bacterium.

If I say, "Chlorine is bad for bacteria," I'm not making any sort of moral pronouncement. Nor am I saying anything that depends for its truth on whether or not the bacteria know about or care about the effect chlorine has on them. All I'm saying is that chlorine interferes in a very serious way with the process of being a bacterium. It's a purely descriptive statement about a chemical reality.

In this case, the value in question for the bacterium is negative: it is a disvalue. We could have taken the positive approach by saying, "Food is good for bacteria," where 'food' means any substance that is nourishing for the little beasties. Regardless of whether the value in question is positive or negative, though, it's still objective: it's a matter of material fact that we can check empirically.

Now, one can no doubt make normative pronouncements about the import of such material facts. We can declare that we approve or disapprove of the situation, or that a bacterium with half a brain would value food or abhor chlorine. But these are simply evaluative reactions to the material facts. Indeed, they are precisely the sort of evaluations we can say would be adaptive for organisms to be able to make concerning the normal features of their environment.

That leaves us with two important ideas.

• First, that value is most sensibly regarded as either a physical property (an objective value) or as an evolved kind of reaction to a physical property (a subjective value). We can reasonably talk about either one of these in purely descriptive terms -- the first just as we would describe any other physical property, and the second as a physical, biological process that happens to be psychological in nature.
• Second, if we take evolutionary theory seriously, we have to treat the normative -- subjective values and standards -- as being derivative of and subordinate to the material facts to which they respond.

Now, philosophers have long recognized an important quirk regarding statements of a psychological nature. Truth or falsehood can be seriously twisted when belief enters the equation. Does Lois Lane believe that Clark Kent can fly? No? But she believes Superman can ... and Superman is Clark Kent!

Wouldn't there be a similar problem concerning our beliefs about value? Maybe we can't talk about them in purely descriptive terms. Maybe their truth or falsehood depends entirely on the context of belief.

Yes, there is such a problem. We absolutely, imperatively need to distinguish our beliefs about value from facts about value. Even those who steadfastly insist that value is subjective will accept that value judgments can be mistaken. And that is the logical reef upon which the ship of subjectivism founders: if value is subjective -- merely a matter of belief -- then some things could be simultaneously values and disvalues (given contradictory opinions from different people, thereby making nonsense of the notion of value). Or, perhaps, value is no more than a matter of personal preference -- as subjective as one's tastes or opinions. The existence of the Earth might be valuable to me, but to you it's just a hunk of ugly rock and goo that the universe would be better off without. Maybe one particular bacterium (if we pretend even harder) might think that chlorine is beautiful, and doesn't mind in the least that it must die in order to be near it!

Crazy? You bet. We have no good reason to believe that our attitudes and evaluations have any independent significance of their own, for evolutionary theory explains how our evaluating mechanisms came to operate effectively by generating attitudes and beliefs that seemed to have independent significance. By responding to them for their own sakes, we acted in ways that tended to help us in ways we couldn't understand.

This is important enough to rephrase for emphasis:

Such mechanisms work by deceiving us that they are important in themselves.

Both philosophically and psychologically, then, subjective value is in trouble. On the one hand, we lack any way to distinguish it from bias, prejudice, or even hallucination or pathology. Without some objective basis for our judgments of value, how can we possibly argue persuasively for someone to abandon their view in favor of our own? Where can we find a real ought connected to actions that we expect to promote or damage our subjective values? Normative ethics would be dead in the water -- and that's a high price to pay for insisting that value be subjective.

On the other hand, our psychological explanations of subjective evaluation all come back to the practical objective value I've already mentioned: the matter-of-fact benefits and detriments to survival and reproduction that are determined by our nature as living organisms. From that perspective, then, subjective value is at best derivative of and responsive to objective value -- assuming it is functioning aptly!

Objective value, by contrast, provides just the foundation we need to talk meaningfully about what we ought to do. We ought not gratuitously harm another person. We ought to help those who are in distress, when we reasonably can afford to do so. We ought to be industrious rather than lazy, frugal rather than wasteful, circumspect rather than reckless, etc. Why? Because we can point to beneficial or harmful consequences that matter to us as living organisms because they physically affect the process of living.

No one who understands the mechanism of evolution should be surprised that living, reproducing organisms care about living and reproducing. But people worry about what is called the Naturalistic Fallacy: the fact that something is doesn't mean it ought to be. Your cat may naturally be a bird eater, but should it be one? More to the point, should it scarf up your cockatiel? This worry is often paraphrased like this: "You can't derive ought from is."

The real problem here concerns the nature of "oughtness". People naturally tend to imagine that an "ought" is a cosmic significance, a platonic ideal of sorts. "Oughts" might be imagined to inhabit the same sort of metaphysical space as gods or souls, or perhaps a realm of abstracts such as numbers and idealized geometric shapes. I think it's only natural that it seems this way; after all, would our ancestors evolve a response to objective values that had a quality of mild interest or intellectual curiosity instead of the psychological insistence and imperative force we actually associate with them? Hardly. Ethereal, compelling influence is how they work for us. No wonder they seem mystical!

Ironically, it turns out to be the subjective perspective on value and oughtness that slips into the Naturalistic Fallacy. We are expected to believe that the existence of our valuing and moral judgments is normatively significant and should provide guidance! One could hardly be more blatant about yanking an "ought" from within an "is"!

Instead, considering objectively the role they play in guiding our actions, we should think of "oughts" in two separate ways. One way (the subjective one) is how we experience them: as internal pressures with a strong "feel" to them that might in some ways seem emotional, and in other ways sensory. But, since we realize that our experience of felt "oughts" is important only functionally rather than experientally -- as evolved responses to the sorts of things and situations that were important to our ancestors -- we will naturally turn to the other (objective) way of thinking about them: as the kinds of things to which our responses have been tailored by evolution to seek or avoid -- in other words, as the logical implications of the relationship between our biological nature and our situation.

In a nutshell, objective values and oughts are about how living, reproducing organisms can continue to be living, reproducing organisms.

Our general answer, then, to the question at hand ("What to DO with our free will?") is that we should pursue objective values. We have a pretty good idea at this point that objective values will have something to do with living, reproducing organisms and their needs -- but that needs to be elaborated upon.