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What Does “Good” Mean? On the Meaningfulness of Normative Claims

This is my English translation of my Finnish-language essay “Mitä ‘hyvä’ tarkoittaa? Arvottavien väitteiden mielekkyydestä” published in Paatos on 16 July 2018, found at https://www.paatos.fi/2018/07/16/mita-hyva-tarkoittaa-arvottavien-vaitteiden-mielekkyydesta/.

What do normative terms like “good”, “should” or “wrong” mean? Such words are a very common part of our everyday speech, and everyone can use them without thinking. Hence, it may be surprising to notice that hardly anyone can spontaneously give a good explanation for what they mean, and that philosophers can debate the topic in book after book. However, this is hardly a surprise to anyone who knows some philosophy; besides the fact that philosophers can debate anything in perpetuity, it is often those concepts that are taken the most for granted that are the hardest to explain.

There are of course several ways to speak of something being right or wrong, good or bad. Being the right answer to a question is not the same thing as something being morally right. Some meanings are also harder to explain than others. The right answer to a question might be a very simple matter, but even if it feels obvious that a deed is morally right, it is still more complicated to explain what makes a deed right or wrong. Thus, I will not be able to explain all different normative claims at once. However, most of them have surprisingly much in common, as my article will show. I see moral claims as the most difficult and at the same time most interesting to explain.

It may not sound like a difficult task to define what we mean by, for example, “good”. However, if we try to do it just like that, we easily get caught moving in a circle. Let us try: What does it mean that something is a morally good deed? Maybe it means that it is right to do that thing. But “right” is just another moral term and means about the same thing. What if we instead answer that it means that one may do so, or even must do so? But what does it mean that one “may” do so? Another evaluative, moral term. Maybe it means that it is acceptable to do so. Then what does that mean? That we should accept it? We already mentioned “should” earlier. Perhaps “should”, in turn, means that it would be wrong not to do what you should do. With a little combination, we can make it from here to the conclusion that if something is morally right, it is not morally wrong. It is directly apparent how tautological this answer is.

Maybe what is good is that which is “desirable”? Or somehow “positive”? Or maybe it can be grounded in “rationality”? All of these are still normative terms (at least insofar as rationality is seen as an end and not a means to another end), and we cannot get out of the circle where terms are defined by each other.

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The randomness argument leaves no wiggle room for incompatibilism (translation of “Satunnaisuusargumentti ei jätä liikkumatilaa inkompatibilismille”)

Ville V. Kokko

Author’s translation of: “Satunnaisuusargumentti ei jätä liikkumatilaa inkompatibilismille”, published in Ajatus 81 (2024), pp. 29–60.

Introduction

The philosophical question of free will is often seen as being about the opposition of free will and determinism. However, in the actual philosophical discussion, the most common view seems to be compatibilism, which states that free will is in fact compatible with determinism. (See PhilPapers Survey 2020.) The opposite view is incompatibilism, according to which the two are incompatible. Incompatibilist views include libertarianism, according to which free will is real but incompatible with determinism, hard determinism, according to which free will is impossible because determinism holds, and hard incompatibilism, according to which free will in impossible because it is incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism. Incompatibilist views still have their supporters despite the relative preponderance of compatibilism, and the discussion between these views seems to have been caught in a stalemate.

One thing that could help unravel the stalemate is a certain argument or family of arguments that I will here call the randomness argument. The basic idea behind it is that the compatibility of indeterminism with free will is questioned on the basis that indeterminism in “free” choices would only mean some kind of uncontrolled randomness, and therefore, it would not be free in any way. The broader acceptance of this argument could lead from libertarianism to hard incompatibilism by showing that indeterminism is not compatible with free will either. On the other hand, understanding it more deeply could also lead one to question the incompatibility between free will and determinism, when we see that, in spite of intuitions, there is nothing independently desirable about indeterminism.

Some philosophers have long accepted some version of the randomness argument as a starting point for their conclusions, be they compatibilists (see e.g. Dennett 2015: 2) or incompatibilists (for example, Saul Smilansky (2000) thinks that genuine free will and moral responsibility would require libertarian free will, but its existence is impossible for about the same reasons as the randomness argument as here formulated states, and therefore freedom is inevitably partly illusory). However, others see it as something that can be got around, and (as will be seen below), the discussion about the topic has taken many turns and sometimes been quite complicated. My own view, however, is that the argument at its core is very simple and very robust; the multifarious attempts at disproving it do little else than cover up this truth by directing attention to inessential things.

In this article, my purpose is to show that, when formulated correctly, the randomness argument is very powerful and clear, and it can easily stand against both counterarguments raised against it and models of indeterministic free will that might seem to be able to get around it. To show this, I formulate the randomness argument in a manner that shows what is essential about it and eliminates factors that have been used to seemingly circumvent it. This way, the article demonstrates that much of the earlier discussion leading to a stalemate has been sidetracked and that we should instead focus on the solid core of the argument and its consequences.

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Thoughts on applying some philosophical concepts to artificial minds | Exploring Mind: Turku Doctoral Researchers’ Workshop in Philosophy of Mind 2025

This is the draft for my talk at Exploring Mind: Turku Doctoral Researchers’ Workshop in Philosophy of Mind 2025 at December 4, 2025. Included (for download, below) are also my brief slides for the presentation.

Turku mind workshop 2025 Thoughts on applying some philosophical concepts to artificial mindsDownload

Introduction

I just defended my Ph.D. in philosophy about determinism, free will and responsibility. I’ve also been learning about artificial intelligence for years and thinking about how to apply my thoughts in philosophy to it for years. Then again, I have barely got started learning how it works on a technical level, other than on a general abstract level. Anyway, I made my first post doc funding application for a study applying the concepts in my Ph.D. dissertation to AI – that is to say, studying how the concepts of agency, free will and responsibility could apply to it.

Years before, before ChatGPT and others got to the point that I became willing to call them artificial intelligences at all, I was already trying to write something about how to apply thoughts I had about meaning, concepts, thought, and levels of description to making so-called AIs better. The idea was to make them more understandable, but perhaps also to go so far as to as it were “solve thinking” to the point that we could create artificial general intelligence. Even after we created these large language models that I’m willing to grant have some form of intelligence instead of just machine learning, those same ideas still seem valid to me as potential avenues to both explainable AI and less stupid AI, as well as maybe the alignment problem of getting AI not to do something we don’t want.

This means I have a bunch of ideas about the philosophy of AI, and how to apply philosophy to AI, that I haven’t been able to develop properly yet. All of them have to do with how our own minds work too, and with what general principles we have in common with artificial intelligences – or they should have in common with us. As part of the process of working on them, I’m going to try to summarise the different ideas in a row in this presentation. Large parts of this may not seem to be about what goes on in the mind, but that’s prefacing what we need to know about what might go on in the minds of artificial intelligences.

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And my first full-length book is… | Goodreads author blog

From my Goodreads author blog.

…My Ph.D. dissertation, The Paradox of Freedom: Determinism, Free Will and Responsibility.

I’m defending it on Wednesday, but I already have the printed copies, and the online version can be accessed for free at https://www.utupub.fi/handle/10024/19…

This is also the first book in the new series for publications from the Philosophy unit at the University of Turku. That’s one of those things that feels good even though it’s inconsequential.

I’m also planning to imitate Pii Telakivi and get a version of this published by a real publisher later.

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I’m currently working on the layout of my first nonfiction book | Goodreads author blog

From my Goodreads author blog.

That is, a book that is nonfiction and where I’m the sole author rather than a contributor.

This just as a teaser (and maybe for me to bask in the glow of it). It might be possible for you to guess what it is, but I’ll reveal it when it’s out.

I also just filled out my first application for an ISBN.

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We’re starting a new publication: “Ihminen ja maailma” | Goodreads author blog

Originally published on my Goodreads author blog here.

I and a few others have started a new publication for popular philosophical and philosophy adjacent writing. It’s mostly in Finnish, though other languages are welcome if someone offers us something in them and we’re able to handle it. The title is in Finnish: “Ihminen ja maailma”, which is hard to translate into natural-sounding English easily but could be as “The Human and the World”. (Traditional English would say “Man”, but the Finnish version doesn’t have that weird sexist imprecision, and I don’t feel like adding it.)

This is a new step for me – running a publication myself – but I’m looking forward to seeing where it might go. The ideal would be for it to become a major thing nationally.

The site can be found at https://ihminenjamaailma.wordpress.com/