Mattering vs Mattering to Me
Why they are not the same
An allegation that has been made repeatedly by people like Lance Bush is that moral realists try to sneak in the concept of mattering. They’ll say things like ‘well, maybe things matter to you, but they don’t really matter’. People wonder what it could be to matter over and above mattering to people. Here, I’ll provide some examples of cases wherein things could matter to people but still not matter. This shows that there’s a coherent concept of mattering over and above mattering to people.
We can consider several examples of cases like this.
World A: There is nothing that exists.
World B: Things exist but all agents will have all of their desires precisely offset by things they don’t desire after death, such that their overall state of desire fulfillment is neutral, all experiences of joy are precisely offset by misery and vice versa such that their overall hedonic state if neutral, and they can’t interact with people or gain significant knowledge, such they can’t fulfill their objective list. Additionally, no agents can causally affect other agents, so there’s no chance of rights violations or virtues. Thus, while entities can affect the trajectory of their lives, on all ethical theories, none of their decisions will affect the total amount of goodness of either their lives or of the universe.
In both of these worlds, it seems clear that nothing matters, in the sense in I am describing. Yet these worlds seem in some sense lower stakes than our world. When compared with these worlds in which nothing matters, it becomes very clear that some things do in fact matter.
One might object that they don’t share this intuition, or even understand what I mean by this world being higher stakes. If this is true then this argument will not be persuasive. Fortunately, the rest of this paper will present other arguments.
However, all of the other responses given by anti-realists to defend the claim that things are worth caring about even if they don’t ultimately matter can be equally used to defend world B. World B would similarly have people caring about things and would have motivation. Agents would still have to act in that world and would still make choices. However, there is some difficult-to-describe sense in which world two is lower stakes than world one.
World C: No being can experience pleasure or pain. However, a lot of beings want there to be an odd number of particles in the universe, despite that not making them happy.
These cases show that a world can be such that no action really matters even if it matters to various people. Thus, mattering is not the same as mattering to people — the concepts are distinct.