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What Is Metaphysics?

Earlier this year, I spent a few weeks visiting a school in New Zealand, during which I walked to work, took the bus, crossed the street, and—too prudent to drive—got in other people’s passenger seats. Everything was deeply, systematically wrong: the cars coming at you from the wrong side as you stepped off the curb; having to suppress the reflex to grab the steering wheel that wasn’t in front of you; the cringe-inducing swerve through the traffic circle. And I realized, vividly, that I was having moral intuitions (or anyway, ‘normative’ intuitions): this is what a moral intuition is.

Metaphysical intuitions, too. The roads had a handedness that I noticed, now that it was being callously violated by every vehicle and pedestrian. It was as though the Kiwis were blind, and only I could see, though to be sure, not exactly with my eyes.

If I were in the business of doing what most analytic moral philosophers and metaphysicians do, I’d start reconstructing the moral theory and metaphysics of traffic on the basis of those intuitions. It would almost certainly come out something like this: the sides of roads have orientations, except when they’re one-way; traffic circles have a chirality. These are metaphysical facts, which are intrinsically demanding: we ought to respect these metaphysical facts by driving on the right, and by sitting (when you drive) on the left. I felt there to be genuinely a fact of the matter as to which side of the road to drive on; a metaethical theory, “moral realism,” expresses that feeling precisely, and maybe I would defend moral realism. Because lanes presuppose roads, probably I would write a book about the ontology of roads.

Now, metaphysicians and moral philosophers don’t actually write journal articles and books reconstructing the metaphysics and moral theory of which side of the street to drive on. But as far as I can see, that’s mostly because it’s obvious that the rules of the road are policies we’ve adopted, and that the sense of indelible rightness and wrongness comes from having gotten so very used to those policies. When you look around at the monographs and papers we philosophers do write, it often is just this, only in cases where it’s less obvious what the policies are. Somehow the policies have become hard to notice; somehow we’ve forgotten that there were any such policies.

I don’t think that metaphysics has to amount to turning memory loss into invisible objects, but a lot of it does. I don’t think that moral theory has to be the pretense that habits are ghostly imperatives, but a lot of it is. We have an interest in reconsidering the policies we’ve forgotten; you know, maybe they were bad choices even back then, and maybe circumstances have changed in the meantime. Maybe as a first step, philosophers in both fields ought to be encouraged to go live in New Zealand for a while.

Originally published in Aeon, July 21, 2015.