Here’s Why You Should Stop Listening to Jordan Peterson
Part 1 of 2
By rights I should be an admirer of Jordan Peterson. A white, male millennial with a much stronger than average interest in mythology and evolutionary psychology, you’d think I’d be a poster child for his fan club. In fact, just like Peterson, I also wrote a (largely unread) philosophy book about how the mind makes meaning out of experience, and how that should inform our understanding of knowledge and ethics.
But the more I hear from Peterson, the more disappointed I become. In this and a subsequent article, I want to discuss two huge flaws in his reasoning that taint pretty much all of his ideas about religion and politics.
Flaw number 1: The Naturalistic Fallacy
The Naturalistic Fallacy is a fallacy in logical reasoning that holds that if something is natural, it must be good. This confusion lies at the root of Peterson’s philosophical outlook, and infects almost every one of his ideas as a result.
In his debate with Sam Harris, Peterson said “the fundamental axiom that I’m playing with is… if it doesn’t serve life, it isn’t true.” If some idea is destructive of life, then no matter how well-supported it is by scientific experiment, it can’t be true. Harris challenges Peterson on this by asking if…