What are we doing? Is/ought divide.
Forgive my curt title. I will explain myself.
Part of what ensnared me into this treacherous—albeit gratifying—field of study is that with enough reflection and enough abstraction, we could understand what lies at the core of our normative stances. But it seems after quite some time involved with ethical theory, I have come to one conclusion. That ethics is essentially like euclidian geometry.
We start with some basic axioms, and then to differing degrees of success, end up with intricate systems that we then apply to practical situations. But the axioms themselves are not susceptible to proof, it seems.
I am not claiming I have come to some revelatory conclusion. This seems to have been well documented by many philosophers. But now what? As I understand it, Benthem understood this fact, and therefore opted into making the utility principle, or maybe more concretely, pleasure principle his one self-evident principle, and thus utilitarianism was born. Aristotle claimed the inherent value of virtue was his one unquestionable principle and established virtue ethics as a result (spare me the lecture, I am aware Aristotle did not say this word for word, but I do believe this is the implication of virtue ethics).
Are we doomed—in some perilous loop—to be confined to some perverse version of Kant's hypothetical imperative? Can we not overcome Hume's is/ought divide? I will undoubtedly make another post concerning the is/ought divide some other time, as it aggregates me to no end. I have my doubts about it.
Anyways, what I am trying to ask is this. What is the purpose of ethics, then? Are we to propose our various ethical theories, which are in some senses arbitrary? I am not sure this is a question so much as it is a wish to discuss with people who can sympathize with my concern and perhaps point me to some literature that would be relevant.
Part of what ensnared me into this treacherous—albeit gratifying—field of study is that with enough reflection and enough abstraction, we could understand what lies at the core of our normative stances. But it seems after quite some time involved with ethical theory, I have come to one conclusion. That ethics is essentially like euclidian geometry.
We start with some basic axioms, and then to differing degrees of success, end up with intricate systems that we then apply to practical situations. But the axioms themselves are not susceptible to proof, it seems.
I am not claiming I have come to some revelatory conclusion. This seems to have been well documented by many philosophers. But now what? As I understand it, Benthem understood this fact, and therefore opted into making the utility principle, or maybe more concretely, pleasure principle his one self-evident principle, and thus utilitarianism was born. Aristotle claimed the inherent value of virtue was his one unquestionable principle and established virtue ethics as a result (spare me the lecture, I am aware Aristotle did not say this word for word, but I do believe this is the implication of virtue ethics).
Are we doomed—in some perilous loop—to be confined to some perverse version of Kant's hypothetical imperative? Can we not overcome Hume's is/ought divide? I will undoubtedly make another post concerning the is/ought divide some other time, as it aggregates me to no end. I have my doubts about it.
Anyways, what I am trying to ask is this. What is the purpose of ethics, then? Are we to propose our various ethical theories, which are in some senses arbitrary? I am not sure this is a question so much as it is a wish to discuss with people who can sympathize with my concern and perhaps point me to some literature that would be relevant.
Comments (126)
Which is not to say that both reality and morality are completely subjective and that no opinions on either can be rationally judged as more or less correct than any other. It’s only to say that on neither topic can we demand absolute proof from the ground up before saying that holding an opinion on that topic is warranted.
Instead, on both sides of the divide, we must resign ourselves to perpetual uncertainty, but there is still hope in that that uncertainty can also be perpetually diminished, by constantly weeding out competing answers that are in one way or another problematic. Logical inconsistency is one obvious type of problematicness, for example.
If we are to take “reality” and “truth” to mean something related to the world as it seems that it is to our senses, all of our senses not just any one person’s, then (verifiable) disagreement with (anyone’s) empirical experience is another reason to disfavor some “is” claims versus others. That leaves us with a framework of critical empirical realism in which to work out the details of what is real.
And if we are to take “morality” and “goodness” to mean something related to the world as it seems that it ought to be to our appetites, all of our appetites not just any one person’s, then (verifiable) disagreement with (anyone’s) hedonic experience is another reason to disfavor some “ought” claims versus others. That leaves us with a framework of liberal hedonic altruism in which to work out the details of what is moral.
The alternatives in either case are to either abandon all hope of ever being warranted in holding an opinion of either type, consigning ourselves to have no clue whatsoever about either what is real or what is moral; or else to do as you say, and take some things to just be axiomatically real, or axiomatically moral, as principles of faith beyond all question... and in doing so abandon all hope of ever improving our opinions, if those unquestionable axioms we pick turn out to be suboptimal choices in some way or another.
Welcome to the Forum. I self-identity as one of the forum idealists, so will answer accordingly. The very short version is that ethics must ultimately be grounded in a cosmic philosophy, otherwise they will have, shall we say, very shallow roots.
What, you may ask, is a ‘cosmic philosophy’? I think any of the major philosophical and religious traditions would answer to that description. They are animated by the belief that the world is a stage on which the forces of good and evil, or ignorance and enlightenment, play out. In the Christian world view it is anchored to the incarnation and the hope of the Second Coming. The Buddhist worldview is cyclical rather than linear, with the world depicted as but one phase or station in the everlasting caravan of sa?s?ra. That has many similarities, but also important differences, with the Hindu view.
Of course these descriptions sound grandiose and rather dramatic, but underlying them is the sense that history has some purpose. In the Christian view, that is, again, linear - the ‘myth of progress’ was arguably rooted in a secular vision of the Eschaton, with the tantalising prospect of interstellar travel the sublimated conquest of Heaven. But however these myths are interpreted, they provide a sense of relatedness to the cosmic order, through for example the idea of man as ‘imago dei’. Whereas the ‘desacralised’ vision of modernity sees life, including human life, as a kind of accident of nature, as a consequence of the anti-religious philosophies of the European Enlightenment. The theme of being adrift in the indifferent vastness of space is very common in 20th century art and literature.
So I think some form of modernised spirituality has to be part of the ethical framework, to provide some sense of summum bonum, an ultimate good, without which everything too easily fragments into either competing self-interests, or some form of utilitarianism or pragmatism.
P1: Rape causes suffering
C: Therefore, you ought not to rape people
The argument above doesn’t follow the rules of formal logic. This is because the single premise in the argument doesn’t entail the conclusion. Rather, the argument would have to go like this:
P1: If rape causes suffering then you ought not rape.
P2: Rape causes suffering.
C: Therefore, you ought not rape.
This argument is a valid argument because the truthfulness of premises would necessarily entail that the
conclusion is true. The point that Hume was trying to make is that you can’t argue for an “ought” claim without having a premise with the word “ought” in it. P1 of the argument is needed to make this argument against rape valid. It also happens to be the more controversial premise of the argument and these sorts of premises are the center of most ethical discussions. Contrary to popular beliefs, the is/ought gap doesn’t imply that morality is arbitrary or that moral realism is false. It’s just pointing out a mistake that many people make when they make informal arguments for some ought claim. Really, the logical principle behind the is/ought gap applies to every kind of specific claim. For example, I can’t even argue for a simple claim like the claim that snow is white without having at least one premise that has the conclusion of the argument nested inside of it. Here’s an invalid argument for that claim:
P1: snow appears white.
C: Therefore, snow is white
Here’s a valid argument for this claim that is also more plausible:
P1: If snow appears to be white, then it most likely is white.
P2: Snow appears to be white.
C: Therefore, snow most likely is white.
Notice how “snow most likely is white” is the conclusion of the argument and it is also nested inside P1 after the word “then” and notice how that’s necessarily to make the premises entail the conclusion. That’s the only kind of thing that Hume really expressed with his is/ought gap(except he just limited this principle specifically to ought claims for some reason). It’s not really as sexy of a gap as most people make it out to be. I honestly don’t understand why philosophers who understand the true limitations of Hume’s gap are so interested in this gap. I think it’s just a trend of philosophers fanboying over everything that Hume says. Some people have argued that this modest observation about logic is important to study for some reason but it just seems like something we always understood since the days of Aristotle and the origins of the basic rules of formal logic.
Well you've got yourself into an interesting knot. I would suggest the third chapter (skip the first two if you are familiar with skepticism) of Stanley Cavell's Claim of Reason, but it is pretty Gordian itself. I'll just try to touch on what he sees when we say "you ought".
He starts with "the things we say" (a trademark of the Ordinary Language Philosophy method he uses) about moral arguments: if premises are accepted, we must accept our goal: a conclusion on "what" ought to be done. To say this is "normative" is to answer: what that one thing "ought" to be, with the threat of incompetence or irrationality in a picture of what counts, what is rational. To say "you ought" is to imply I am arguing against an alternative, I take a position for which I offer proof relevant to you.
Yet, as you know, people do not have to agree. After Cavell investigates what is said with "I promise", "enough", "commitment", "belief", etc., he digs out that a claim to knowledge is different than your moral claim to rightness, as we question the position you take, what you are taking responsibility for, with the threat to our relationship; arguing "you ought to ____" with moral reasons for what will benefit me. Then to know what you are doing (the various types of rationality of our individual practices) is to know why you are doing it, where you will stand, what you will be answerable for--to know yourself.
But I think Hume’s point was far more general than you’re making it out to be. Taken in the context of Hume’s overall philosophy, it amounts to a sceptical position vis a vis moral realism of any kind, I think. I don’t recall that Hume devoted much or any attention to the basis for arriving at ‘ought’ decisions - as distinct from Kant, of course, who devoted considerable attention to just this question.
...is a fine guide for moral order in the course of scientific truth and sustainability, as an objective, universal value.
Morality is fundamentally a sense - not a set of axioms; it's like humour or aesthetics. There are identifiable regularities and broad agreement about what is funny or beautiful, but there's no recipe for what is funny or beautiful, and no absolute definition.
It's the same with morality. It's a sense fostered in the human animal by evolution. It was an advantage to the individual within the tribe, and to the tribe composed of moral individuals who would share food and defend each other etc. Morality only became explicit later, with civilisation.
Thus, the hypothetical imperative is perfectly fine. We act morally for reward. I use my natural abilities to know what is scientifically true, and on the basis of what's true, act morally with regard to sustainability, and thereby serve my own interests by securing the future, and so on, in an ongoing manner.
Where the 'is' is scientific truth - and the 'ought' is the moral sense, sustainability is the bridge between the two; and the self interest is served as a consequence of a general betterment of the human condition.
Well, Hume was probably sort of a moral anti-realist but I don’t think the is/ought gap had anything to do with that. He was mostly skeptical of our ability to reason about emotionally sensitive topic where he thought that our passions would likely take the driver’s seat. For example, Hume probably thought that we can reason pretty well about an emotionally sterile philosophy questions like the question regarding whether a hot dog is a type of sandwich. Very few people care who is right about this topic and so we don’t have to worry to much about emotional bias dominating people’s opinion on this topic. On the other hand, questions related to morality, politics, and the philosophy of religion are questions that Hume thinks are answered by our emotional inclinations rather than with our reasoning. So, he would likely think that almost no one bases their opinion on a topic like abortion on reason but they just believe what they want to believe.
Though, I don’t think even this argument implies that moral realism is false as it is possible that almost all people are incapable of reasoning about morality beyond defending a viewpoint they initially accepted because it emotionally touched them and yet this wouldn’t necessarily logically entail that there aren’t correct answers to moral questions. To use an analogy, 99% of the time people’s views on whether or not there is an afterlife are the views that they also happen to wish to be true but it seems quite obvious that there either is an afterlife or there isn’t an afterlife. It seems like you can’t really be a relativist about questions concerning the existence of the afterlife. It may be argued that just as we don’t know if there is an afterlife and we predicate our opinion on the topic from our emotional inclinations, we may also not be able to deduce in an unbiased manner the correct moral opinions to hold but we can reasonably believe that some moral opinions must be correct.
It’s also possible that Hume did think that the is/ought gap implied moral anti-realism but he might simply misunderstand the implications of his own arguments. Though, it’s also worth noting that meta-ethical questions weren’t really a thing in Hume’s day and so it might be kinda strange to assume he even thought about meta-ethics. He probably just had a more down to Earth approach to ethics unlike a philosopher like Kant who thought it was better to lay forward some grandiose foundation to morality.
1. The is/ought problem: Killing is an undeniable fact - predators kill their prey, sometimes in gruesome ways. "Therefore" we ought to kill.
2. The is/ought solution: Killing is an undeniable fact. "Therefore" we ought not kill.
Hume was concerned with moral arguments that have as a premise a known fact about our world and drawing from it, as a conclusion, a normative moral injunction. The normative injunction must, if the reasoning is to make sense, be an affirmation of the known fact i.e. if the known fact in question is x, the normative injunction has to be do x. This is the is/ought problem.
The is/ought solution, however, is an entirely different story. Morality has its roots in a general dissatisfaction with how the world is. Isn't that the very reason why there's an ought, all oughts being nothing more than expressions of our discontentment with the is, the status quo.
The fault lies solely on the ought side in my view. 'Ought's with 'in order to's are much easier to map to 'is's. If one's aim is to stir tea effectively, it is logical to use a tool designed for stirring tea effectively: a teaspoon, not a sponge.
I believe that the abstract quality of moral claims derives from the fact that each of us has moral machinery that operates outside of our consciousness but that spits outputs into that consciousness. We are driven to, for instance, pull a child out of the river, but that drive is in a vacuum: we are not likewise provided with the reasons for doing so, the 'in order to' that would make the action amenable to logic. The reasons we have those drives is down to our evolutionary history: the implicit 'in order to' is that it maximises likelihood of survival, but that's a statistical reason across evolutionary timescales, not a justification of individual actions.
Ethics in this context is an attempt to rationalise and formalise these (sometimes competing) drives (inner oughts iyl) in the absence of apparent justifications. The tautological and ambiguous justification for all moral actions is to be moral: to be a good human being.
A good human being to us is one that does good things, but to, say, the ancient Greeks would be one who is good at being a human, in the same way that a good hammer is one that is good at being a hammer, a good teaspoon is one that is good at being a teaspoon, etc. Goodness in this meaning is a measure of how well the object fulfills its function. Humans don't have an overall function like a hammer, but they do have design, not a teleological design, but an optimisation of biological function to maximise the likelihood of our species persisting.
An antisocial human being is a malfunctioning human being. They are designed to be social, to help others, to be considerate, to cooperate, and to oppose antisocial behaviour such as domination. Someone who is inconsiderate, would whip out their phone if they saw a drowning child to film it, who takes more than they give, who tolerates or champions antisocial behaviour in others, is not a good human being: that is, they do not meet the criteria (quality control iyl) of a well-functioning human.
If you see a child drowning in the river, you ought to try and save them... in order to be a good person.
There is, of course, no 'ought' for being a good person. For most of our history, that ought would have been survivalistic: I ought to share my food, otherwise I will be chased from the group and will likely perish in solitude. That's extremely contingent. Now one is more or less free to be as antisocial as the law permits, so long as one does not care about being judged a bad person: bad at being a human, in the way that a wobbly hammer is judged a bad hammer.
If you look at the way theories of ethics are usually used, it's to judge, condemn, and punish people.
So one purpose of a theory of ethics is that it is used to justfify activities that are intended to bring about social order (a theory of ethics is implied in the content of the laws and in the way the legal system works).
Related to this, but on the level of the individual, they are used to inform psychological and physical boundaries between oneself and other (e.g. a person has a principle of not associating with people who drink alcohol, because they believe such an association is bad and ought not be done).
I agree with on Humes' meaning with the is/ought divide. I would not say that Hume was merely pointing out some logical error or syllogistic fault. But to your credit Hedo you acknowledged this possibility in your later post. In any case, the three of us should agree that contemporary philosophical understanding interprets Humes is/ought divide in this more general sense that Wayfarer speaks of. So it's what we must contend with.
I like the angle you are approaching this from. The conclusion is not novel, but the way you reach it is. Most with your predilections don't acknowledge the uncertainty aspect, or if they do, they handwave it as a foolish thing to be concerned with.
Now, this Agrippa trilemma that you bring up fascinates me, and I'm glad you brought it up. IMO, this is the core problem of ethics. My opinion on this is that the first sort of justification is a "moral" one. I say this because before empiricism or any "ism," for that matter, gets off the ground; you must take some evaluative stance. I could elaborate further if anyone wants me to.
As I understand it, this is the path most moral realists take. They say something like, before you can even make the first step to philosophy, you must tacitly value—in a "moral" sense—the inclination to the truth. I think there's a case to be made that before you can even be skeptical, this inclination to truth must be present. But, not too sure of that, and I am willing to be convinced otherwise.
Any thoughts on this?
Well, it seems like Wayfarer didn’t actually explain how the is/ought divide implies that moral realism is implausible. It’s possible that Hume falsely believed that the is/ought gap implies this but he never explicitly stated that it does to my knowledge. In addition, my whole point is that the is/ought divide doesn’t seem to do anything to threaten moral realism. It seems like believing that you can’t defend an ought claim without making another ought claim is still perfectly compatible with moral realism. Moral realists could just argue that ought claims can be just as objective and factual as is claims are. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious reason to think that they aren’t. It’s also worth noting that just as you can’t defend an ought claim without making another ought claim, it also seems true that you can’t defend a scientific claim without making another scientific claim and you can’t defend a mathematical claim without making another mathematical claims. But, this just wouldn’t imply that science and math are subjective or not real in any way. This is because you don’t need to derive those other claims from other kinds of claims. We just treat those claims as credible and some philosophers have a tendency to dismiss ought claims for reasons that are unrelated to the is/ought distinction itself. It’s not clear to me what the is/ought distinction actually adds to the conversation here.
The is/ought divide threatens the central thesis that Moral Realism attempts to put forward and defend. Moral Realism takes the view that moral values are not simply held by an observing moral agent whom assesses an act in terms of right and wrong, but rather that moral values represent an intrinsic characteristic of an act itself. That an act is either right or wrong in-itself; or, alternatively, that an act possess certain moral properties that a moral agent can intuitively recognize as right or wrong. Either view represents a moral reality that can be objectively considered whether or not the agent is consciously aware of it.
Moral Realism assumes that moral values exist as the constituents of an ontological reality and not as the constituents of a moral agents phenomenological reality.
The central thesis of Moral Realism is committed to four propositions:
1. Moral statements express propositions.
2. Some of these propositions are true.
3. True propositions are made true by objective, mind-independent features of the world.
(A brief digression). Moral Realism diverges into two separate moral doctrines (Naturalism and Non-naturalism) with one (Naturalism) committed to a fourth proposition and the other (Non-naturalism) committed to the negation of the same proposition. I have therefore included both the thesis and antithesis that represent the divergence between these moral doctrines.
4. (Naturalism): These moral features of the world are reducible to some set of non-moral features.
4. (Non-naturalism): These moral features of the world are not reducible to any set of non-moral features.
The first problem that Moral Realism faces is how it can justify the third proposition. Namely, how can moral statements be made true by objective, mind-independent features of the world? Keep in mind that such a problem is raised by attempting to cross the is-ought divide. Moral Realism attempts to cross the divide by claiming that both descriptive and prescriptive statements are true/false propositions and that some are made true by objective, mind-independent features of the world.
According to Moral Realism, it is either the case that objects and events in the world have an intrinsic moral value in themselves (they are either good or bad); or, alternatively, that they possess some moral property of which moral agents innately recognize as being either good or bad. Either way, Moral Realism has committed itself to an ontological central thesis that.
The Non-naturalist is committed to the ontological claim that moral statements correspond with reality insofar as reality contains innate moral properties (such as, an innate human purpose). The Naturalist, on the other hand, is committed to the ontological claim that moral statements can be reduced to a naturally equivalent fact (such as, sensory pleasure (a natural fact) is good (a moral statement).
To flesh out this objection, lets consider the following argument as it attempts to cross the is-ought divide under the interpretation of Moral Realism.
P1. Humans die if you decapitate them (This is a descriptive statement).
P2. John is human. (Another descriptive statement).
C. Therefore, you ought not decapitate John. (This is a prescriptive statement).
It is the case that humans die upon decapitation and it likewise is the case that John is a human. These are both empirically verifiable facts that can be objectively considered. However, nothing about these observations tells us if we ought, or ought not kill humans by virtue of decapitation. This means that the argument is not valid because the premises do not entail the conclusion.
Here, Moral Realists and myself would agree that an additional premise is required in order to make this argument valid. A premise such as "Killing humans is immoral" would suffice, however, here a Moral Realist would be satisfied with her view that such a premise represents an objective fact of the world (an "is" statement), whereas I would remain skeptical and request an argument be provided so that I may see where such an inference is made.
Two arguments would be provided. First, the argument of Semantic Moral Realism that is concerned with our moral utterances and the truth value of the content therein. Semantic Moral Realism states that though moral terms play a role in how we form evaluative concepts which aim to refer to certain properties as objectively prescriptive facts, not all speakers are using moral terms in association with the same properties.
Some speakers may, for instance, use moral terms in some unusual, idiosyncratic way. In short, our evaluative language and concepts could be non-cognitive, anti-realist, and yet the truth of our moral judgements can still represent objective or mind-independent features of the world. Such an argument could be formalized into something similar to the following.
P1. Moral terms such as "right" or "wrong" play a semantic role that an agent uses to refer to the moral properties of "rightness" or "wrongness"
P2. Moral properties of "rightness" or "wrongness" represent the state or condition of being either right or wrong in conduct or judgment.
P3. An agent refers to these moral properties with such terms based on the moral convictions they have formed.
P4. An agents moral convictions are formed through a subjective evaluation of these moral properties.
P5. Subjective evaluations are subject to interpretation and perspective.
P6. Interpretation and perspectives are fallible.
Therefore,
C. Terms such as "right" and "wrong" can be mistakenly applied to a conduct or judgment by an agent.
A Moral Naturalist would think of moral terms as being analytically equivalent to terms referring to natural properties. For example, Hedonism refers to the natural property of pleasure as being analytically equivalent to the moral term "good" whenever they claim that "pleasure is good". A Moral Non-naturalist would take the opposite stand in thinking of moral terms as being irreducible to terms referring to natural properties and would instead suggest that moral terms, if true, purport to report a fact that lie outside of naturalism.
Non-naturalists claim that terms such as "good" or "bad" are indefinable and therefore cannot be substituted with terms such as pleasure or suffering. Both Naturalistic and Non-naturalistic versions of Moral Realism avoid the problem of moral disagreement with the Semantic Moral Realist argument.
Though the argument for Semantic Moral Realism seems to avoid a threat raised by Anti-realist objections, it does nothing to defend the third proposition in question (that true propositions are made true by objective, mind-independent features of the world), that is, besides offering up an excuse of semantic incompetence for the lack thereof. This is where the second argument comes in which is known as the argument for Metaphysical Moral Realism.
The argument for Metaphysical Moral Realism takes two separate construals for its defense. The first construal suggests that there must be some connection between an agents moral convictions and the agents motivations towards a specific action. The argument states that any such moral proposition must necessarily have corresponding motivations built into them. From this premise, it is inferred, that, if an agent were both fully able to rationalize and also possess the knowledge of all the relevant moral facts, then the agents motivations would be guided by objective moral facts towards actions that are objectively "good" or that are, in fact, the "right" thing to do. Such an argument could be formalized in the following manner.
P1. An agents moral convictions are intrinsically motivating.
P2. An agents moral convictions may or may not be fully rational or based on all the facts.
P3. There are objective facts to be known about morality.
P4. An agent may achieve conformity between their beliefs and their reasons to believe such beliefs, as well as between their actions and their reasons for which they act.
Therefore,
C. An agent would be motivated to do what is objectively moral, if and only if the agent was fully rational and knew all of the facts.
This argument, which takes on a more naturalistic construal of Moral Realism, serves only to suggest that the existence of objective moral facts are merely logically possible. It remains a tentative explanation at best for a reason to believe that such objective, mind-independent moral facts do indeed exist.
The second construal of argument for Metaphysical Moral Realism suggests that moral facts are the same as mathematical facts. They are both abstract entities that cannot be fully explained through empirical observations (as natural facts can be) and this places them in a separate ontological category from naturalistic entities.
As a result, what makes some moral statements true propositions that are made true by objective, mind-independent features of the world lie in the relations between it and the features of the world that make it true. Such features need not be natural nor provide us concrete conceptions of the world, but rather need be supported by an a priori appeal to the ontology of concepts they are involved with.
Consider the two analogs of Mathematics and Logic. Both need not rely on empirical correspondence to be confirmed as true because they are systematically supported within their own conceptual reality. The following is an example of how such an argument could be formalized.
P1. Moral sentences sometimes represent a statement that is true.
P2. A sentence is true only if there is a truth making relation that holds between its contents being something that exists in the world and the proposition that such contents exists.
(A metaphysical bridging relation between what is true and what exists).
P3. True moral sentences are true only because they are held together by a truth-making relation between their existence and the things which makes them true.
Therefore,
C. The things which make some moral sentences true must exist.
This argument, in the end, also fails to substantiate the ontological premise needed to ground Moral Realism. It is a failed attempt to bridge the is-ought divide, on my view, and an attempt that must be successful in order for Moral Realism to justify its central ontological thesis.
How would Moral Realism achieve this goal?
Well, it would have to substantiate the claim that moral values exist as objective, mind-independent features of the world.
How would it do that?
Well, we could conjecture that human lives have an innate moral property of being Good; or, we could otherwise conjecture that there exists moral properties possessed by things in-themselves — that such things as happiness, pleasure, or honesty are in-themselves morally Good and thus analytically equivalent at a fundamental level — then, if our conjecture is accepted, the problem would be resolved and the gap would be bridged. This is essentially the Moral Realist approach and I do not find such conjecture to be convincing.
My objection to the Moral Realist approach would be that the whole theory seems to be begging the question. If we ask "how are human lives 'Good'", then, most often, the answer given is "because humans possess an innate property of Goodness" — or, "because they possess happiness and pleasures and such things possess natural properties that can be reduced to moral properties — such as Goodness." And just how is that not a premise assuming the conclusion? How do Moral Realists find this to be an acceptable justification?
Perhaps therein lies the problem — in the Moral Realist's justification. Let's touch on this a bit, as it makes for a nice segue into my second objection to your comment.
In epistemology, justification is a concept which describes a belief that is held by virtue of having good reasons and evidence to hold it. Morality is a system of evaluative beliefs used to generate principles that guide our conduct. Justifying moral beliefs is an important part of developing a moral system, because without good reasons for believing moral claims, morality becomes inconsistent. Without a consistent moral system, any behavior becomes justifiable.
With that in mind, it becomes clear why Moral Realism must overcome the is-ought divide in order to develop and maintain a consistent take on morality. Moral Realism, in order to be a consistent view, must derive a prescriptive conclusion from descriptive premises. They must state which claims are actually true and explain what it is about the world that makes those claims true.
The problem is that in order to derive a prescriptive conclusion, it is necessary to construct an argument containing at least one prescriptive premise. In other words, a moral belief can only be justified by another moral belief because prescriptive conclusions cannot be derived from non-prescriptive premises without either begging the question or running into an infinite regression.
Every prescriptive premise placed within the inference structure of a moral argument is attempting to justify another prescriptive claim. Every prescriptive claim, however, must then be subsequently justified itself by providing an additional argument containing an additional prescriptive premise. This would go on ad infinitum and thus such conclusions remain as unjustifiable beliefs.
Any belief that appeals to an unjustified belief for justification can never be justified. If there is no good reason to believe a claim we generally don't believe it. A claim that is begging the question, or a claim that must fall back on an infinite sequence of requisite arguments, is a belief appealing to an unjustified belief.
So, how does this trouble Moral Realism? It does because Moral Realism is making the claim that there exists an ontological grounding for our moral judgements and that requires crossing the is-ought divide. Crossing the is-ought divide requires each moral claim to be justified.
One problem is that the only way a moral claim can be justified is if it is itself justified by another moral claim — this becomes a problem. This problem is known as the infinite regress, wherein a moral claim must be justified by a chain of normative inferences that goes on infinitely. Another problem is known as circular reasoning which includes the concluding moral claim itself to be a built in presupposition within the premises.
So, if we say...
Then we are conceding that Moral Realism is defeated either by virtue of circular reasoning or by falling into an infinite regression.
No one is ever justified in believing any moral claim that uses an argument which includes the same moral claim in its conclusion as the moral claim in its premises. If a moral claim is represented as one of the premises of the argument that is trying to prove the same moral claim as its conclusion, the argument is circular. The premise cannot support the conclusion, since the conclusion is merely restating one of its premises which cannot adequately provide the sufficient justification for a belief.
No one is ever justified in believing any moral claim supported by an infinite chain of inferences. Even though the justification for a moral claim could, in theory, go on infinitely, we nevertheless would never know whether or not such a claim was justified. If the entire chain of justification is not present for us to form a belief, then we can never know if we can be justified in believing it. If a single unjustified claim was present within the entire chain but beyond the reach of our limited scope of knowledge, it would undermine the justification of the entire chain itself.
The reason that "ought" claims cannot be just as objective and factual as "is" claims are is because "ought" claims are prescriptive or normative statements, whereas "is" claims are descriptive or positive statements. There appears to be a lacking appreciation for the fact-value distinction. All "ought" claims represent statements of value, whereas all "is" claims represent statements of fact.
To begin, a "claim" is a type of statement that offers an assertion about an issue that can either be true or false.
Descriptive claims attempt to state the facts and give an account of how the world is through non-evaluative observations. The statement "What happens after we die is unknown" for instance, is a descriptive claim. Whether a descriptive claim is true or false is an empirical question. Empirical questions can only be answered through observations we make as we experience the real world.
Prescriptive claims, on the other hand, express an evaluation and give an account of how the world should be. A statement such as "We should be afraid to die," is a prescriptive claim. Whether a prescriptive claim is true or false is an ethical question. Ethical questions can only be answered by an entity with moral agency (an entity capable of generating personal values, a sense of purpose and who attributes meanings to things).
Some descriptive statements bear the truth for normative or prescriptive statements by describing a set of circumstances from which a value judgment can then be considered. To demonstrate this point, the claim, "Abortion is the deliberate termination of a pregnancy that involves killing the undeveloped embryo or fetus," is a descriptive statement wherein the truth of the circumstance described thereby raises a normative issue — whether or not killing a developing human fetus is desirable. Moreover, it likewise raises a prescriptive issue, namely whether or not abortions should be done. As a result of such a dichotomy, descriptive claims are seen in contrast with prescriptive claims.
Objectivity describes a feature of the world that is independent from the specificities of a mind, whereas subjectivity describes a feature of the world that is conditional on the specificities of a mind. Therefore, for a claim to be objective, it must be empirically falsifiable and describe mind-independent features of the world.
There are claims that make objective statements, such as "The sky is cloudy," that reflect reality and, in contrast, there are claims that make subjective statements, such as "I like a cloudy sky," that reflect a perspective through which a subject views reality.
For a moral claim to be a factual statement, it must contain facts — externally verifiable, demonstrable realities — based on empirical evidence. Furthermore, for a moral claim to be an objective statement, it must have some properties accessible through external reality and not just be privately accessible through an internal, mind-dependent reality.
Why even presuppose an objective moral ontology in the first place? I mean, given the subjective nature of human psychology, it seems that our cognitive and evaluative capacities do not require a philosophically objective foundation.
Well, the first thing that I want to point out is that there actually seem to be some ought statements that cannot be called prescriptive statements. According the first definition of the word “prescriptive” that I could find on the Internet, the word “prescriptive” means “Relating to or making rules, laws, or directions.” I can think of plenty of ought statements that have nothing to do with making rules, laws, or directions. For example, the statement “you ought to brush your teeth” doesn’t seem to have anything to do with making rules, laws, or directions. Also, I think it’s worth asking why couldn’t ought statements be considered descriptive statements. For example, I tend to think that the word “ought” is just a short hand way of expressing complex evaluative propositions. For example, I think the phrase “you ought to brush your teeth” is synonymous with phrases like “brushing your teeth is the best available decision option at this time for you to take” or “having a habit of brushing your teeth is better than not having a habit of brushing your teeth“. A phrase like “brushing your teeth is the best available decision option at this time for you to take” seems to be a descriptive statement and it also happens to be an is statement. If you don’t agree with me that the phrase “brushing your teeth is the best available decision option at this time for you to take” is a descriptive statement because you’re one of those philosophers who doesn’t think that evaluative statements are descriptive statements then it’s worth noting that this disagreement seems to have nothing to do with an alleged is/ought gap.
I think that the phrase “brushing your teeth is the best available decision option at this time for you to take” sometimes means the exact same thing as the phrase “you ought to brush your teeth” kinda how the phrase “John knocked me up” is synonymous with the phrase “I’m pregnant with John’s baby”. There is a psychological explanation that could be given for why the phrase “you ought to brush your teeth” is synonymous with various phrases expressing complex evaluative propositions. Phrases like “brushing your teeth is the best available decision option at this time for you to take” and “having a habit of brushing your teeth is better than not having a habit of brushing your teeth“ are extremely long and wordy. It would be a pain in the ass to always have to say them to express the basic kind of evaluative ideas that we are trying to express. So, the creators of the English language created the word “ought” that could pretty much be substituted most of the time for these long winded evaluative propositions.
It’s also worth noting that other languages like my native language of Russian do not have a word that cleanly translates to the English word “ought”. Instead, “ought” is translated to several words in Russian where one word also translates as the word “need” and the other word also translates to the word “must”. So, the phrase “you ought to brush your teeth” literally translates in Russian as “you need to brush your teeth”. So, it would be very hard to explain what the is/ought gap is to a Russian speaker since they don’t really have the same conventions regarding helping verbs as English speakers have. I have actually read about the is/ought gap in Russian and it was confusing as hell.
Lastly, I want to mention that I am not a moral realist myself so I don’t necessarily disagree with the latter part of your post that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the is/ought divide. I was just suggesting that the is/ought gap doesn’t say anything profound about meta-ethics and it mostly just makes an observation about formal logic and how some people are too quick to draw moral conclusions from basic empirical claims without including that “if x then you ought to y” premise that they really should add in any normative arguments that they might be trying to make. Btw, I learned about this more modest interpretation of the is/ought gap from a moral anti-realist philosopher named Kane B. He makes philosophy YouTube videos and he has a pretty popular series on meta-ethics. I suspect that you might have already heard of him though.
This is extremely interesting and I've been wanting to dig into this properly for ages. I still don't have time unfortunately. I buy the first paragraph but not the second, although I'm not completely sure.
The difference is, I think, that with morality and goodness, the individual appetite reasserts itself even after the abstraction for everyone's appetites has occurred. It has the last word. As a recipe for determining public policy though, I think your account it's fine. But as an analysis of what goodness actually is, it's wrong. I want what's good for everyone, sure. As long as I get a bit more without anyone else knowing. That would be even better. The good just is what is willed, for that agent. And there's nothing in that to say we have to abstract for everyone, although we might want to (or not - depending on what we will).
EDIT: with truth, the abstraction is what we want. The view from nowhere. With goodness, the abstraction is ultimately irrelevant, what is good remains what I want, even after considering others.
I think arbitrariness is the defining feature of the good. What is good just is what we will.
Rewriting of ought: An action is defined by a rule. This rule is in relation to a certain condition. This rule is followed so and so. This rule isn't necessarily fulfilled by the agent who is following this rule.
I think "ought" says this: you have a duty to do, but you can refuse to carry it through. "Ought" doesn't imply necessity and it does include human weakness implicitly. That is, you are likely to do it (as you should), but at times we all break our rules. No?
Dictionary.com:
1. (used to express duty or moral obligation): Every citizen ought to help.
2. (used to express justice, moral rightness, or the like): He ought to be punished. You ought to be ashamed.
3. (used to express propriety, appropriateness, etc.): You ought to be home early. We ought to bring her some flowers.
4. (used to express probability or natural consequence): That ought to be our train now.
The intention is to simply making the reduction of the convention (possibly) of "ought" by "is" statements, is what I want with this.
"Rewriting of ought: An action is defined by a rule. This rule is in relation to a certain condition. This rule is followed so and so. This rule isn't necessarily fulfilled by the agent who is following this rule."
Yahadreas' example: "You ought to brush your teeth"
becomes...
There is a rule that says brush your teeth. This rule is the condition of brushing one's teeth. I follow this rule by brushing my teeth. However, I don't always brush my teeth.
jsidelko's example: "If you have a temperature tomorrow, you ought to visit the doctor."
There is a rule that says that if you have a temperature tomorrow, you visit the doctor. This rule is the condition of having a temperature. I follow this rule by visiting the doctor. However, I don't always visit my doctor when I have a temperature.
Metadigital writes: "There ought to be less oughts in the world, ought there?"
Reiteration: An action is defined by a rule. This rule is in relation to a certain condition. This rule is followed so and so. This rule isn't necessarily fulfilled by the agent who is following this rule.
And so: (1)"An action is defined by a rule. This rule is in relation to a certain condition. This rule is followed so and so. This rule isn't necessarily fulfilled by the agent who is following this rule." and (2)such that there are less "actions that are defined by a rule. This rule is in relation to a certain condition. This rule is followed so and so. This rule isn't necessarily fulfilled by the agent who is following this rule." and (3)is this "an action is defined by a rule. This rule is in relation to a certain condition. This rule is followed so and so. This rule isn't necessarily fulfilled by the agent who is following this rule."?
So this is even more ought-less now, I guess!
Moral claims are not ought claims though. You can make a moral claim without using the word “ought” or even implying an ought claim. For example, you can make an argument for a moral claim that goes something like this:
P1: Everything that violates a categorical imperative is morally wrong.
P2: Murder violates a categorical imperative.
C: Therefore, murder is wrong.
More radically, one can even suggest that one sometimes ought to do things that are morally wrong. For example, someone might say that they believe that stealing is morally wrong in an objective sense but they might also think that they ought to steal in order to become wealthy. Being wealthy might be seen as more important to them than being moral in an objective sense. There is an entire philosophical literature devoted to the question of why should we be moral which kinda implies that moral realism doesn’t necessarily presuppose any ought claims.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
We can never know anything to sure. Even something as uncontroversial as the claim that Earth is round requires you to make certain assumptions in order for you to reasonably accept the theory. I don’t see why moral realists couldn’t claim that we are justified in making educated guesses about which kind of moral claims are most likely to be objectively true. To use an analogy, I can’t ever be justified in thinking that a particular company will go up in value on the stock market. Anything could happen at the end of the day. But, that doesn’t mean that I’m not justified in choosing to invest in companies that I think are the most likely to go in value on the basis on the research that I’ve done on the companies and some speculation.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Why do you think that only descriptive claims can be factual and not evaluative claims? Many philosophers like myself think that evaluative claims are factual claims. It’s also worth noting that there are plenty of scientific claims that seem to contain a value claim. For example, take the claim that Pluto is the 9th planet in the solar system. The word “planet” is used to designate celestial objects that are special and more worthy of study and exploration. So, there seem to be value claims that are nested within many descriptive claims. Given this, I think the fact/value distinction is kinda muddy.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Wait, couldn’t there be mind independent truths that are not empirically falsifiable? For example, isn’t the claim that 2+2=4 true in a mind independent manner and yet it isn’t empirically falsifiable?
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I agree with you on moral anti-realism but I think it’s kinda important for ought claims to be objective or otherwise I’m not sure how we can say that we have reason to do anything as I’m not sure if we can talk about subjective reasons or what subjective reasons are even supposed to be.
While I disagree with your analogy, I do agree that meaningful disagreement and agreement on moral matters is possible, and that some kind of intersubjective consensus is often, perhaps always, possible. It's just a different kind of consensus than the consensus regarding the truth about the world.
This isn't ethics or morality, it's all of philosophy. That being said, you're right. All the meat is in the underlying assumptions. That's why many people say there can be no religion without God. God sets the axioms in an absolute way so we don't have to argue about them. Of course, we still do.
I believe the axioms are written inside us - by God or Darwin. Someone has created us as social animals. We like to hang around each other. It is part of human nature to like other humans. That sets the stage. Of course, this is complicated by other aspects of our humanity which are less positive.
Argument 1.
Premise (is): Murder occurs quite often
Conclusion (ought): We ought not murder
Argument 2.
Not a Premise, just a statement of fact (is): Murder occurs quie often
Premise: Murder makes us sad
Conclusion: We ought not murder
Hume thought that is/ought arguments are like argument 1 where the reason for an ought is an is. That's incorrect, is/ought arguments are actually argument 2 in form and the is statement is simply there as a description of how the world, well, is. The actual premise, like "Murder makes us sad", is, in the above example, a declaration of our objection to the is, to wit, "murder occurs quite often".
In short, an ought/ought not is never obtained/inferred/deduced from an is but from our feelings/impressions towards/of an is. I'm surprised Hume failed to notice this.
The is/ought divide is artificial so there is nothing there that needs to be overcome. In practice what is is always already value laden. Of course we can abstract away from the value-ladenness of things, but that is merely an artifice.
What-is is not subject to infinite regress either; it is simply what appears to us in its concreteness.
Oughts find their justification in intentions and efficacy or in principles. 'If I want to achieve X then the best way would be to do Y'. 'I ought to do X because not to do X would be to devalue people'. So oughts are not subject to infinite regress either, but find their termini in purposes or in deontological principles (two apparently separate things which ultimately should amount to the same thing).
Deontological principles are axiomatic and based on healthy human compassion and conscience, and also, as Kant points out, on rejection of the self-defeating nature of unethical (antisocial) behavior; the ways in which it disrupts social relations and creates conflicts which undermine the very idea of society.
None of this changes the fact that there cannot be any clear-cut answers to many minor moral dilemmas, and sometimes even major ones may be subject to irreconcilable conflicts of interest.
Aren’t our feelings/emotional states also “is’s?” Aren’t they facts about the world like any other?
Quoting Janus
I didn't say that both were doomed by infinite regress, just that they were "just as subject to": a regress argument against one would work just as well against the other, and a defense of such argument would defend both. You've just named the respective forms of that defense: we don't have to justify everything out to infinity first, we can work from what we just happen to think is true/good and justify other things relative to those. Just so long as we remain open to revising those things were just so happen to think are true/good, if reason to think otherwise comes along, and don't take our prima facie assumptions to be some kind of indubitable axioms.
OK, I wasn't saying that you had suggested they were "doomed", so there must be some misunderstanding here.
It seems obvious that if everything had to be justified "out to infinity" in order to be justified at all, then nothing at all could ever be justified. There is a difference between justification in empirical matters and ethical matters, though. In the case of simple empirical claims the truth can be determined by looking. In the case of scientific theories, they are justified if they are consistent with observations and their predictions obtain.
In the case of ethical claims it is not so simple. There is nothing that is subject to direct observation and testing of predictions. Now I personally think it is true that almost everyone agrees that things like murder, rape, child abuse and even theft are wrong, and if almost everyone, cross-culturally, agrees about something then there is a great degree of normative force there. But others will argue flat out that not almost everyone does agree about such things or at least that we would have to do an empirical study to determine if they do or not (a difficult or even impossible task).
It also seems obvious that such acts are anti-social, and this is the deontological point; that it is a contradiction to claim that society is desirable, while not agreeing that acts which tend to destabilize or undermine it are wrong.
But people will still disagree, asking for "hard evidence", and unfortunately nothing definitive can be found. Personally I disagree with asking for hard evidence, because this would be to treat ethics like a science; which it cannot be. It is more akin to aesthetics, more art than science.
Is/ought problem
Hume's is is a bit nuanced in my humble opinion. It doesn't include our impressions/feelings of/about the facts of nature and only refers to the facts of nature minus our impressions/feelings with respect to them. The is/ought problem arises out of the absence of an inferential link betwixt descriptive statements (is) and normative claims (ought) but our feelings/impressions about/of deeds/actions provide the missing link, bridges this gap.
We COULD do for ethics something completely parallel to what we do for physical sciences: see what repeatably feels good rather than bad, take that as our repeatable “observations”, and then strategize plans that might satisfy all those feelings, just like we theorize explanations that might satisfy all observations, and then test them against the same kinds of things we based them on, repeat as necessary.
Of course not everybody AGREES that that would tell us everything or even anything there is to know about morality. But also not everybody agrees that science is the only, or even a, reliable way to learn about reality. Lots of people disagree with scientific results about evolution, cosmology, the brain, race, gender, sex, health care, climatology, even the shape of the planet. Does that somehow count against science?
Perhaps not coincidentally, those who reject both of the above methodologies seem to correlate with each other... and with religiosity.
I don't think that's possible in any way analogous with scientific investigations. What you are talking about is just psychology, and it is only akin to science in it's statistical dimension, and unlike other sciences it is always going to be reliant upon individual reports if it is not merely concerning behavior of people en masse. You might say studying human behavior is analogous to ethology, but it's not really because humans are way more variable in their responses than animals are.
I also don't think such investigations are necessary because we already know that being murdered, raped, robbed, beaten up, exploited, ridiculed and so on makes people feel bad, and not just at the time the acts occur, but such acts can have lasting negative effects on people.
On the side (what makes people feel good) the problem with a hedonistic approach is that much that makes people feel good is not ethical because it is damaging to their health and people may then become burdens on others.
Human life, behavior and moral responses are way too messy and nuanced to be studied effectively by science.
Sorry for replying twice to your concerns regarding the is/ought problem but it seems necessary to evaluate the matter further.
It appears that Hume's worry centers on the connection or lack thereof between facts and values. Indeed, the objection is a valid one for there definitely is a difference between statements about what is and statements about what ought to be. Statements of the former kind are value-independent i.e. can be made in the absence of any values but statements of the latter kind are value-dependent i.e. can be made only within a framework of values. Necessarily then that one can't be used to infer the other without explaining/arguing how the two are logically connected. What strikes me as odd is that moral theories are precisely the systems of values that bridge the is/ought gap and Hume, for some reason, seems to have ignored/overlooked/dismissed that as inadequate.
Is there a reason for this exception? Does he argue that feelings are somehow above/outside of nature? Is it because they’re secondary?
Regardless, couldn’t the argument be made that our feelings are facts about the world, and therefore an is?
Quoting TheMadFool
Saying you feel sad seems like a descriptive statement to me. You’re describing how you feel. Much like saying an apple is red. Certainly there are causes of your sadness, but the same is true for redness or any other feature.
Aren’t they inadequate because they aren’t capable of bridging the gap? It’s funny, because I always felt like it was the moral theories that ignored/overlooked/dismissed the is/ought gap.
I maybe mistaken of course but Hume's issue is with how an ought can't be inferred from an is and justifiably so if there were no reasons/explanations on how normative statements that depend on a value system can be derived from prescriptive statements that don't. I'll try another approach. What is an ought really? Doesn't it express a desire/wish/hope that things could be, well, different but different from what exactly? Well, different from what is of course. It appears from what I've just said that the is-ought relationship is not in any sense a logical deduction and therefore Hume's objection is N/A. The ought isn't deduced from an is, rather an ought is desired from an is.
I see oughts more as commands, or even demands. Supposed justifications for why one act/behavior should be preferable to another, or all others.
Quoting TheMadFool
Then what does justify an ought? How do we arrive at an ought if not by appealing to the current state of affairs? There’s obviously lots of disagreement about what we ought to do, so how do we go about settling these disagreements?
Also, I think part of the point is that we can’t justify desiring things be different. As soon as one is asked why things should be different, either circular reasoning ensues, or the is/ought fallacy occurs.
Not at all what I'm talking about.
Empirical, descriptive, physical sciences depend on first-person experiences, because that's what observations are, but we don't just take somebody's word for what "looks true to me", or vote on what "looks true to me" to the most people, or anything like that. We replicate their experiences (observations) for ourselves when there's any doubt or disagreement about what's true: we go stand in the same contexts and see if we experience (observe) the same things ourselves, and then try to come up with some theory that explains how all of those experiences (observations) can be consistent with the same reality. The people doing the investigations do that, at least, and their consensus gets reported to the public at large. It's the replication and reconciliation of experiences (observations) that makes science what it is.
If we were to do something analogous with that for ethics, it likewise could not depend on taking someone's word about what "feels good to me", or voting on what "feels good to me" to the most people, or anything like that. We'd have to replicate their experiences (of things feeling good or bad) for ourselves when there's any doubt or disagreement about what's good: go stand in the same contexts and see if we experience the same things (good or bad feelings) ourselves, and then try to come up with some strategy to get to a state of affairs where all the good experiences are had and none of the bad ones are, and call that state of affairs the moral one. The people investigating what's moral would have to do that, at least, and we'd report their consensus to the public at large. It's the replication and reconciliation of experiences (of things feeling good or bad) that would make such a method analogous, make it a hedonic, prescriptive, ethical science.
Quoting Janus
We also know a lot of things about reality just from our common experience of it too. Those aren't the things in question; although sometimes in the course of investigation we learn that everyone's common assumptions were actually wrong in some non-obvious way. Just because we all already know (or at least are very sure) that some common core of things are good or bad, doesn't mean there's not more to learn.
Quoting Janus
What is "damage to health" but some bodily condition of suffering? And what is "being a burden on others" but seeing to your comfort costing someone else their comfort? Those are still hedonistic concerns. Hedonism doesn't mean short-sightedness or selfishness.
The justification of oughts can be found in the system of values one chooses. It's no secret that this is exactly where moral theorists are facing problems as no moral theory is either sufficient or necessary, something that probably is the holy grail of ethics.
What's to be noted however is that an ought isn't inferred from an is as Hume seemed to have believed and if that's the case, Hume's objection is null and void. Oughts do nothing but express our desire for things to be different, that's all there is to it. The bottom line is no argument is being made and if so no fallacy can be committed.
We don't, and can't, do that at all for most of what counts as scientific knowledge; we simply accept or do not accept science on the basis that we trust or do not trust the experts.
Quoting Pfhorrest
What feels good to me is not necessarily what feels good to others. What feels bad to me is not necessarily what feels bad to others except in the most extreme cases, and even then you never know what some might enjoy. There are [people who hire others to murder them and even eat them, for example. I'll grant that for most people, they wouldn't enjoy being murdered, raped and so on. How do I know that when I haven't asked them all? I believe that on the basis of the way such crimes are generally regarded, portrayed in movies, and so on, and on the attitudes of the vast majority of people I have discussed the subject with.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Damage to health most likely leads to suffering in most cases. But people can turn suffering to good account in terms of personal transformation, so the situation is not as simple and clear-cut as you seem to be wanting to portray it. If there was some way to hook people up to "pleasure machines" such that they would feel ecstatic all the time, do really believe most people would want that?
You seem to be using 'hedonism' in a tendentious way that is not in keeping with ordinary parlance. You can probably, with some distortion, squeeze everything through the lens of your tendentious definition, but what would be the point?
You can't make ethics into a science, not without objectifying people, end of story. People simply vary too much.
That’s why I said, in the bit you cut out, that that’s the process said experts use, which makes the consensus of said experts trustworthy for the general public to rely on.
Quoting Janus
How things look or sound etc are not the same between every observer either. There are different kinds of colorblindness, actual blindness in different degrees, tetrachromaticity, different degrees of hearing sensitivity or deafness to different pitches of sound, people who can or can’t smell or taste various things or to whom they smell or taste different, etc.
Observations tell you a relationship between observers and the world; the predictions based on those observations are that certain types of observers will or won’t observe certain things. An ethical science would likewise have features of subjects of experience baked into both its input and its output.
Quoting Janus
What is “good account” if not someone kind of enjoyable experience? e.g. getting hurt then recovering makes you stronger, being stronger makes you less likely to get hurt... the avoidance of pain is still the benefit there.
Quoting Janus
I’m using it in the ordinary philosophical way going back for thousands of years. You may as well complain that I’m not using “begging the question” in the ordinary way because I don’t misuse it like everyone does today. It’s ordinary people who misuse philosophical terms of art, not me who’s misusing ordinary language.
So something like “You ought to be compassionate” is justified by something like “I value compassion?” If so, the issue is that you’re extending, or projecting, your values on to me. What is the justification for that? Why should I, or you for that matter, choose to value compassion? In order for values to be able to justify oughts, they must be justified first, or else they are baseless. Any appeal to some internal state seems incapable of justifying anything.
Quoting TheMadFool
This is where we’re disagreeing. Oughts are much more than expressions of our desires in my view. Besides this, to say you want things to be different than they are, is to say that because things are a certain way we ought to do X. So it still seems to be derived from what is. “The current state of affairs is unsatisfactory, therefore we should do X.” The only thing you seem to be doing is adding an additional premise, while trying to eliminate the first. “The current state of affairs is unsatisfactory. I desire to change the current state of affairs. Therefore I (we?) should do X.”
We can always depend on the fact that we're all human and though there are individual differences, there's something generic about being human - this is evidenced by the fact that despite cultural variations in our sense of right and wrong, within cultures there's, taking into account your concerns, a "miraculous" convergence of moral thought. In short, no individual projects faer idea of morality on another or the entire group, rather everyone arrives at the same moral ideals together.
Quoting Pinprick
My approach to the is/ought problem is simple. When moral theorists state what is and then subsequently make claims about what ought to be they're, contrary to what Hume thought, not inferring the the latter from the former in a vacuum. Rather, what ought to be follows from a background system of values against which what is is set. Granted that the system of values is arbitrary but the point is the necessary inferential link between what is and what ought to be has been firmly established.
It's something like sorting things out on your desk. There's the what is - the state of the items on your desk. Then, based on a system of values (where each item must go), you decide where each item on your desk ought to be.
That is ideally what the experts are doing. There are many who are skeptical about the degree to which the practice meets the ideal. Having said that, we don't have anything else we can rely upon when it comes to what to believe regarding matters that we cannot investigate ourselves.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I think it's reasonable to think there is far more agreement in regards to what is perceived via the senses than there is in regard to all but the most extreme moral questions (i.e. rape, murder, child abuse etc).
Quoting Pfhorrest
I think ethical questions (how best to live) are far more subtle, and not at all simply based on considerations of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. I can see you're trying hard to recast the usual account into a form that will pass through your lens, but I don't find it convincing at all.
Quoting Pfhorrest
There is no "ordinary philosophical way going back thousands of years". This is naive, have you never heard of hermeneutics or anachronism? It's all a matter of interpretation. We read translated texts that inevitably embody, to greater or lesser degrees, the presuppositions and biases of modern translators. It is naive to think we can get inside the heads of the ancients.
The degree of agreement isn’t important if you’re not taking a majoritarian vote (which I’m not advocating) but rather taking every individual into equal account. And also you don’t seem to be differentiating between moral opinions (“this state of affairs is morally good”) and the experiences I’m advocating we take as the grounds for forming moral opinions (“this experience feels good”); it’s the latter we’re talking about here.
I'm basically advocating that we take as the criterion for a state of affairs to be moral without qualification that in said state of affairs everyone feels good rather than bad, like science takes reality to be that which is consistent with all observations. A right or just action is then one that at least preserves the present degree of goodness thus defined, if not increases it; in the same way that valid epistemological inferences are truth-preserving.
Then within that framework, we investigate what in particular actually is good or right in that sense. At no point do we take someone merely thinking that something in particular is good as a reason to think it actually is, just like in the physical sciences we don't care who thinks what is true. All that matters in the physical sciences is the observations and the validity of inferences about them, not what people believe is real; and likewise in an ethical science all that mattered would be the actual experiences people have, and the justification of actions regarding them, not what anybody merely thinks is moral.
Quoting Janus
The point is just that we could do something like science with regard to moral questions if we wanted to. You’re saying here basically that you don’t want to. I’m already arguing why we should in other threads right now so I won’t do that here as well, my only point here is that we could: we could take morality to be all about hedonic experiences and compile and sort through all such experiences in the same way science takes reality to be all about empirical experiences and compiles and sorts through them.
Quoting Janus
I’m using it the way defined by modern philosophy encyclopedias and consistent with the views espoused in modern translations of ancient texts that also labeled themselves thus. Which is not the way is has crept into modern colloquial speech, but that’s the fault of common folks misunderstanding, not philosophers making stuff up.
To take every individual into account is impossible, even if possible in principle.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Strange that you should say that, since it seems to be you who is equating the two.
Quoting Pfhorrest
As I said above it is simply not possible to test everyone in order to find out if everyone feels good rather than bad in any situation. Add to this limitation the fact that you would be relying on the notoriously unreliable medium of self-reporting, and your project appears completely impractical.
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This is, of course, trivially true and tangential to any point that I have made. The is—ought divide expresses skepticism that an inference can be made between a descriptive "is" statement and a normative/evaluative "ought" statement. It is not concerned with descriptive statements that contain the term "ought". The statement that "the road ought to be visible now because the fog has cleared" is not the kind of ought statement we care about here. We don't care about inferences deriving an "is" from a descriptive "ought", but rather we are concerned with inferences deriving an "is" from a prescriptive "ought".
It is, in fact, not a descriptive statement because the term "best" here is evaluative and prescriptive which makes the statement loaded. Try forming an is—ought inference with your examples and see the issue reveal itself.
P1. If you have options, then you ought to choose the option that is best;
P2. Brushing your teeth is the best option you have to choose from;
Therefore, C. You ought to brush your teeth.
Problems
Just because we have options doesn't mean we should choose any of them. For example, if I had the options to burn my hand, cut my hand, or freeze my hand—I would choose none of these options. This makes the premise false. It is not necessarily entailed that we must choose any option at all.
By calling one of the options the "best" we are making a loaded statement. The option of brushing our teeth here is assumed to be the option that we ought to choose. Why should we brush our teeth? How is it morally obligatory? Well, you could make an argument like the following.
P1. Brushing your teeth makes them clean
Therefore, C. You ought to brush your teeth.
This is deductively invalid. The conclusion is not entailed by the premise. It is possible for the premise to be true and the conclusion be false.
Am I in the Twilight Zone rn?
So is taking into account every observation in the physical sciences. Nobody thinks we're going to actually finish doing that. The point is that that's what you're aiming to get as close as possible to; that's the measure of completeness of success, the scale against which you compare two propositions to each other.
Quoting Janus
I'm saying to base the former on the latter, but it's very important to distinguish between them because if you don't, if you've just got the former, the whole process breaks -- just like if you failed to distinguish between beliefs and observations. You'd end up with the equivalent of trying to do physical sciences by polling people about what they believe, rather than going and doing observations, which is (hopefully) obviously not the way to do things.
Quoting Janus
The point of relying on replicable first-person experiences is precisely so that you don't have to rely on self-reporting. You don't just ask everybody what they want, or even ask them how they feel; you go see for yourself how it feels to be in their circumstances. If you still don't agree about how good or bad things feel, then you have to start looking for differences between each other and taking each other's words for things, but that's no different than color-blind people needing to take normal-sighted people's word about how they see color.
The difference is that the behavior and responses of physical substances, biological organisms such as trees, bacteria, fungi and even animals is invariant or much closer to invariant than the behavior of humans. The assumption of this invariance is taken for granted when we claim to have knowledge of the natural world.
The same is not possible when it comes to the so-called human sciences. A human science is more art than science, and that's why the most insightful understandings of humanity are found in novels and poetry.
Quoting Pfhorrest
This accounts only for your own experiences. I thought you wanted to take everyone's experiences into account, so now I'm puzzled as you seem to be contradicting yourself. There is also the point that even when examining your own experience you are relying on the notoriously unreliable process of introspection.
It won't be so unreliable in extreme cases, like how do i feel about being murdered, bu in subtle moral considerations it won't be so clear, and nowhere will it be analogous to empirical observation and measurement. I really think you're barking up the wrong tree here, or tilting at windmills..
It seems like you still don't understand the fundamental idea of what I'm proposing. This sounds like you think I'm talking about observing humans as the object of empirical study, and protesting that humans are more complex than other objects of such study. But what I'm actually talking about is how empirical study is grounded in first-person experience of the world, and that a moral equivalent, a "hedonic study", could in turn be grounded in a different kind of first-person experience of world. The world being studied is the same in both cases, the people doing the experiencing are the same in both cases, it's only the type of experience that differs: an experience of vision, hearing, etc ("senses"), vs an experience of pain, hunger, etc ("appetites").
Quoting Janus
You confirm other people's experiences by undergoing those experiences for yourself, so you don't have to just take their word on it, and then you take into account that people in those circumstances experience that sort of thing (just like you did), including the other people specifically within that general accounting.
If I do an observation, you don't have to take my word for what I saw, much less what to believe because of what I saw: you can go do that same observation yourself. You have to come over here where I was standing while the same stuff is happening and do the things that I did to get the same experience as I did, but you can do that and confirm for yourself what it looks like to undergo such events. And then once we’re in agreement on what things look like from all the different perspectives in all the different circumstances, we can figure out together what beliefs are or aren’t warranted on the grounds of those observations.
I'm just saying we can do likewise with experiences of pain, pleasure, etc. If I claim that such-and-such feels good or bad, you don't have to take my word for how it feels, much less what to intend because of what I felt: you can undergo that same experience yourself. You have to come over here where I was standing while the same stuff is happening and do the things that I did to get the same experience as I did, but you can do that and confirm for yourself what it feels like to undergo such events. And then once we’re in agreement on what things feel like from all the different perspectives in all the different circumstances, we can figure out together what intentions are or aren’t warranted on the grounds of those experiences.
Of course this does depend on you taking feelings other than the ones you are have right now to be relevant to morality—it requires you not be an egotist—but likewise doing empirical science depends on you taking observations other than the ones you are makings right now to be relevant to reality—it requires that you not be a solipsist.
Moral universalism is as basic a supposition as object permanence, the thing toddlers eventually learn about how mommy doesn’t actually cease to exist while she’s hidden and then pop back into existence when she says “peekaboo!” Things continue being real or unreal even when you can see them. Likewise, things are moral or immoral even when you aren’t personally feeling the relevant pains or pleasures.
But we still need to be able to confirm that IF someone IS in such-and-such circumstance they DO experience such-and-such, by undergoing such-and-such circumstances ourselves, even though we don’t them immediate revise our opinions the moment we stop being personally affected. Because if we couldn't confirm it ourselves, we'd have no choice but to take their word on it.
In practice we usually have no choice but to take people's words on a lot of things in both domains, but with the physical sciences we at least have a group of people who aren't just taking anyone else's word on it, whose word we can subsequently take with more confidence.
Yes, but the difference is that in the first case you have commonly precisely identifiable phenomena to study and in the latter you don't.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I don't see how confirming that all people experience some feeling in a certain circumstance is possible, least of all by merely confirming that we experience said feeling in said circumstance. People and circumstances are highly variable.
On the other hand is we place someone right in front of a tree and ask them what they see right in front of them, we can be highly confident that they will answer that they see a tree.
The is/ought divide is not the same thing as the fact/value distinction. The first distinction was briefly mentioned by Hume in literarily just a paragraph or so. It’s probably a distinction that Hume wouldn’t even remember making if he read back his own work. I think it is a trivial distinction at best. The fact/value distinction is a more serious distinction that was made by another group of philosophers called the logical positivists. I think those philosophers sometimes had a tendency to misread Hume and assume that the is/ought distinction somehow provides an argument for the fact/value distinction. I don’t see how it does provide any argument for the existence of a fact/value distinction and Hume himself never said that it does.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Yes, but a statement like “you ought to brush your teeth” is not a prescriptive ought statement either. It is an evaluative ought and I’m claiming that value realists can argue that evaluative claims are factual and that the fact/value distinction is an illegitimate distinction.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Well, who exactly gets the authority to define what a descriptive statement is? It could be argued that evaluative statements are descriptive statements because they describe things related to value. After all, doesn’t it make more sense to say that descriptive statements are statements that describe stuff even stuff related to value? I’m also not sure what you mean when you say that value claims are “loaded” claims. Loaded in what way exactly?
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I think this premise is meaningless because I think it’s basically just saying If you have options, then it is better to choose the best option. It’s kinda obvious that it’s better to pick the best option and I don’t how that’s different than saying that you ought to pick the best option.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Well, isn’t choosing no option an option itself? If you have an option to choose not to have anything bad happen to your hand then isn’t this the best available option in that case?
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Because brushing your teeth causes cavities and the sensations caused by these cavities produce experiences that have a felt quality that you are psychologically compelled to regard as being worse than the felt qualities of most normal experiences that you have in life. An additional consideration is that there doesn’t seem to be any downsides to brushing your teeth.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
It’s not morally obligatory, I just think that it’s objectively better or objectively more wise to brush your teeth under nearly any circumstance imaginable.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Yes, that’s the is/ought divide but I don’t see how it implies the fact/value distinction. Why think that value statements are not factual statements and why think that they have to be derived from non-evaluative statements?
This makes me think you must still not understand what I'm saying, because it's the exact same phenomena I'm talking about in either case, just a different thing about them that we're paying attention to. You set someone somewhere during some event and ask them to record the things they see, feel, etc. Or, you set the same person in the same place during the same event and ask them to record their pains, pleasures, etc. The thing being studied -- the phenomenon of that event happening at that place -- is the same in either case.
Quoting Janus
Those are problems for physical sciences too, and can be overcome in the exact same way. You have to control for variables of both the thing being observed and the observer themselves, the object and the subject.
Even how things look or sound etc are not the same between every observer. There are different kinds of colorblindness, actual blindness in different degrees, tetrachromaticity, different degrees of hearing sensitivity or deafness to different pitches of sound, people who can or can’t smell or taste various things or to whom they smell or taste different, etc.
Observations always only tell you a relationship between observers and the world; the predictions based on those observations are that certain types of observers will or won’t observe certain things. It is those relationships that can be objective (as in universal), not just the object-end of them. An ethical science would likewise have features of subjects of experience baked into both its input and its output.
Quoting Janus
Are the leaves of trees green or red? People will give you different answers depending on the tree, even for the same tree depending on the time of year... some people will even give you different answers for the same tree at the same time, because their color vision differs between them. Yet somehow that hasn't destroyed the possibility of dendrology.
I think it's more a case of you not understanding, or not wanting to accept, the critique. This seems to be the stock response you have for all critiques of your ideas.
It's not the same phenomena: Individual feelings and responses are available publicly only insofar as they can be communicated. The environment is perceptually available publicly tout suite.
Quoting Pfhorrest
This seems like a very minor, pretty much irrelevant quibble to me. Agreement about almost all the detectable features of trees are publicly available with little possibility for disagreement. Dendrology is simply not a controversial science.
Anyway it looks like we are going to have to be satisfied to agree to disagree; which seems to be the usual outcome of our conversations.
Of course I'm not going to accept a critique of an idea that isn't the one I'm putting forth. And I'm often putting forth intentionally new ideas that are purposefully differentiated from all of the more well-known ones, because I found all of the well-known ones unsatisfactory and set out to try something new. So if someone pigeonholes my into one of those more well-known categories instead of engaging with that I'm actually saying, of course I'm going to point that out instead of defending a position that isn't mine.
Quoting Janus
Now you're just denying completely the subjectivity of observation? Or again failing to understand what I'm talking about? "The phenomena" is the stuff that's happening out there in the world: it's the thing we're experiencing, not our response to that experience. All experiences of phenomena are had subjectively, whether those experiences be empirical or hedonic in nature.
Quoting Janus
If you're fine with that then I am too.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
The difference between the fact/value distinction and the is-ought divide is that the former also encompasses aesthetics.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
It doesn't necessarily provide an argument but rather questions if it is possible to derive one exclusively from the other. The arguments that positivism offers are pretty straight forward, however. The premise is simple; if something can be empirically verified, then it is factual and thus descriptive. For example, if I make the statement that "My right hand has 4 fingers with 1 thumb," it provides a description for the way things are. A statement such as this can be checked and verified through empirical observation. It is a fact. It is a description of the world that corresponds with observation and continues corresponding even if an observing agent feels or thinks otherwise.
On the converse, a statement that makes an evaluation, such as, "Murder is bad" seems to be expressing something that cannot be empirically verified. It may be true that an agent holds negative feelings towards the act of murder and that may manifest as a subjective preference against murder, but that would be a fact about the agents attitude. There simply is nothing in the world that we can observe that corresponds with 'badness' and without such a thing we have no way to verify whether or not it is the case.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
The statement "You ought to brush your teeth" is necessarily a prescriptive statement because it is recommending that an action be taken. It implies that a desirable outcome would result thereafter. It contains the term 'ought'. Prescriptive statements are a subset of evaluative statements, which is the only distinction between the two that I am aware of.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Are you making a case against the general consensus amongst analytic philosophers who differentiate between descriptive and prescriptive statements based on the reasons I have thus far offered? Most people understand that there is a very different kind of thing being described when it comes to value judgements. Something that extends beyond merely describing that which corresponds with empirical observation.
Regarding what could be argued, well, it would have to be a semantic argument because the premise "Because they describe things related to value" concedes that there is a distinction between the two.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I suppose if we redefine the terms it could, perhaps. Even so, you seem to be aware that there is a distinction between statements that describe stuff and ones that describe stuff and stuff related to value.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I like how much effort you put into this argument to make it appear purely fact-based. Let's formalize it and see what the statements break down to.
P1. There is a range of possible experiences that scale between two points on a spectrum.
P2. We classify the two points located at each extreme of the spectrum as: 1) the worst possible experience, and: 2) the best possible experience.
P3. A tooth cavity produces an experience that generally registers on the side of the spectrum classified as: 1) the worst possible experience.
P4. Brushing our your teeth reduces your chances of getting a tooth cavity.
Therefore, C. You should brush your teeth.
Now, lets classify the nature of each statement.
P1. Descriptive. (Some experiences vary from others. This is a fact that can be tested and verified empirically.)
P2. Evaluative. (The classification is a fact, since we could observe the proclivity for people to classify experiences as either better or worse. However, each classification is based on two opposing value judgements "worst" and "best" neither which can be empirically observed, but must instead be subjectively expressed by an agent).
P3. Evaluative. (It is a fact that, if a poll was taken, the overwhelming majority would classify experiences related to tooth cavities as: 1) the worst possible experience. But, the term "worst" is both irreducible and non-corresponding to anything empirically observable.)
P4. Descriptive. (This is a fact that can be experimentally verified through empirical analysis.)
C. Prescriptive and evaluative. (It suggests an action by implying a positive value judgement).
Note that just because a premise has been distinguished as evaluative does not mean that it is necessarily false. The distinction is made mainly for the purpose of exposing problems specific to evaluative statements
P1 is something we all grant.
P2 is valid since it follows from P1 but a few problems emerge. First, that it is not entailed that every agent will classify the experience within the same category. Second, the category itself is based on an arbitrary measurement that is phenomenally dependent. Lastly, a premise cannot be true in some cases and false in others.
P3 follows from P2 but runs into the same problems that P2 has. It can be true some of the time and is ultimately relative to the agent.
P4 is sound because it is always the case and there is a wealth of clinical evidence to support it.
C is not necessarily entailed by the premises and it has the same specific problem that P3 and P2 have, in that they can be sometimes be false. It is possible, in fact probable, that certain agents do not classify experiences associated with tooth cavities in the first category. Similarly, it is probable that some do and yet associate the experience as desirable. Many things that are relative to a particular agent can affect whether or not a given premise—or, even the conclusion itself—can be true. This is not a problem when arguing just from the facts.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
It is the other way around, actually. The fact that value statements seem to describe something, not only beyond that which is described by factual statements, but also, something that doesn't correspond with anything observable, as factual statements do, reveals a distinctive problem about them that warrants our appreciation.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Because they do not report something that is observable or falsifiable, and that is what facts are supposed to do. I only think that they must be derived from non-evaluative statements in order to bridge the is-ought divide and establish an is-ought inference. I remain skeptical that this can be done and for you to think otherwise means that the burden of proof lies with you.
I notice there is no mention in your treatment of analytic philosophy’s view of the fact/ value distinction of writers like Quine, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Putnam, McDowell
or Rorty. Do you find any of them useful to your understanding of the fact-value distinction?
I don’t think that the fact that your right hand has 4 fingers can be empirically verified though. This is because there are many alternative explanations that can be offered for why your hand appears to have 4 fingers when you look at it other than the explanation that you really do have 4 fingers. One such alternative explanation is that you might be living in simulation created by a mad scientist that programs the simulation to make you believe that you have 4 fingers but you only actually have 2 fingers on your real hand that exists outside of the simulation. You would probably find that alternative explanation implausible but this belief would not be based on empirical evidence. Rather, you just have an intuition that the mad scientist theory is a bit kooky. Similarly, I think my intuitions about value can provide me with objectively true answers on questions of value for the same reason you would likely think that you can rely on your intuitions to arrive at objectively true answers about the falsehood of my mad scientist hypothesis. After all, you can’t empirically verify that the mad scientist hypothesis is false because you have no way of observing the mad scientist. Yet, things that we have never observed can still potentially exist.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I don’t think that it’s the only distinction. According to the first dictionary definition of prescriptions that I could find, prescriptions are actions of laying down authoritative rules or directions. I don’t think a statement like “you ought to brush your teeth” is laying down authoritative rules or directions. I think it is just expressing a value judgment. So, the statement you ought to brush your teeth is kinda like other evaluative statements like the statement “John is better at math than Mark”. Just as I think John can possibly be objectively better at math than Mark: I also think that it can be objectively better to brush your teeth than not brushing your teeth.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I’m not aware of there being any general consensus on this issue among analytic philosophers. The fact/value distinction and the distinction between descriptive and evaluative statements has been challenged by plenty of very famous and high profile analytic philosophers such as the philosophers mentioned by @Joshs. If you want to get a brief summary of their reasons for rejecting the fact/value distinction, I would recommend watching a 12 minute video on YouTube called “Fact-Value Entanglement” which is on the Philosophy Overdose YouTube channel. Though, I should warn you that Hilary Putnam who is speaking in this video is expressing his points in somewhat smug and condescending manner which I didn’t appreciate particularly.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Well, that’s what makes your definition of a descriptive statement confusing to me as that you seem to think that descriptive statements describe everything except values. I don’t understand why values and only values are singled out of the definition of the word.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I agree, I don’t think that experiences are objectively better or worse than other experiences. Rather, there are facts about how a particular person would subjectively evaluate the felt quality of a particular experience and from those facts we can objectively conclude that particular decision options are better than other decision options.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
There seems to be lots of factual non-evaluative statements that are also based on arbitrary measurements that are phenomenally dependent. For example, think about the following statement:
S1: There is a sufficient amount of scientific evidence for the theory of evolution.
Is S1 factual? Seems like it to me. Is S1 based on arbitrary measurements? I would say so because we can’t empirically measure the amount of evidence that a given theory has and the word sufficient always seems to be necessarily vague as well. Is S1 phenomenally dependent? This one is a little more controversial but it seems that whether or not a given theory has a sufficient amount of evidence is predicted on our intuitions which do not seem to be necessarily different than the intuitions that we use to make value judgements. Though, it could also be argued that S1 is actually also an evaluative statement but that would pretty much make any kind of belief an evaluative statement and I doubt that this is a conclusion that you are willing to accept.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I don’t think that facts are necessarily supposed to report something that is observable or falsifiable and you will find plenty of academic analytical philosophers who also don’t think about facts in those terms. This way of thinking about facts has largely fallen out of style since the decline of the logical positivist movement in the mid 20th century.
Just to be clear, you are quoting my response to a question asking who the authority is when it comes to defining what a descriptive statement is. It is not a claim stating that analytic philosophy takes a view one way or another when it comes to the fact/value distinction.
I think that Hilary Putnam best encapsulates much of the views put forward by the philosophers in your list with regard to objections to the fact/value distinction, or f/v dichotomy, as Putnam seemed to favor.
Hilary Putnam makes the case that facts and values are entangled. Putnam, under the influence of figures such as Quine, Peirce and William James, argued against the existence of a fact–value dichotomy, or, at least that the distinction between the two weren't as absolute as Hume and the Positivists believed them to be. This rejection was essentially derived from either a premise stating that normative judgments (ethical or aesthetic) can be factual based or a premise stating that there are normative elements to factual statements—even empirical statements such as those expressed within scientific methodology.
Putnam was a well-known figure of analytic philosophy and was especially drawn towards a pragmatic view of morality. I think that he, as with his contemporaries, focused a concerned with what views such as subjectivism, non-cognitivism and internalism seem to entail and that this motivation lead him to take some pretty extreme positions in opposition. He was, at some point, a metaphysical realist, but later adopted his own view known as internal realism, of which he also came to later abandon in favor of the views of scientific realism. He was somewhat of a neo-platonist when it came to his views in ontology. He later shifted to take a pluralistic, meta-philosophical view similar to those of Wittgenstein—even adopting some of the views of continental philosophers in the later years of his career.
His arguments seem to all stem from his work on the mind-body problem, which I think is his best work. It makes a case for a non-physical existence that is based on the causal relationship between psychological states, concepts, language and material objects. Another view deeply embracing pragmatism. In a way, at least in every day life, I take a pragmatic view of the world, but I think that it forces philosophers to over engage in motivated reasoning.
Sorry for the tangent, but I hope it at least gave you some idea of how the figures on your prolific list of philosophers who, in some way, reject the fact/value distinction have influenced my understanding of it.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I think this may be where our differences lie. The distinction that I draw between facts and values is much more current and ubiquitous than a few 20th century philosophical treatises.
Think of how the prosecution and defense teams of a courtroom use statements of fact and statements of value. If I was being charged with burglary, and the prosecution presented its case, which of the following statements do you think the court would more likely engage with?
The suspect left a fingerprint near the window which determined the point of entry of the brake-in.
A neighbor witnessed the suspect exiting the house while carrying the stolen jewelry box.
A footprint that was collected at the scene of the crime which matches the shoe size and pattern that is left by the shoes the suspect was wearing that day.
The suspect hates thieves.
The suspect doesn't think the stolen jewelry looks valuable.
The suspect says that he did nothing wrong that day.
I understand that there are serious problems in epistemology, such as Cartesian examples of radical skepticism (evil demon, brain in a vat, computer simulation controlled by a mad scientist) which are all problems that I appreciate. I think that there are nonetheless distinctive characteristics when it comes to the justification of evaluative statements and statements of fact.
I understand that a statement of value can be a type of fact about the preferences or attitudes of an agent. If you say that you like blue or that you think stealing is wrong, then, I suppose I could concede that it is a type of fact about your color preferences or your attitude towards the act of stealing. The problem with having evaluative facts is that there is no method to substantiate them or evidence to support and confirm them. They necessarily depend upon the agent to express them, either directly or indirectly, for substantiation and the only evidence there is that suggests they are true is contained within the privacy of the agents subjective mental states.
The court would appreciate the statements regarding a fingerprint, eyewitness, and footprint because these statements correspond with how we experience reality. If what is stated has the semantic content that most members of a language associate with a concept which corresponds to the way we experience the world, even with varying degrees of accuracy, arbitrarily defined by human standards such as limited sense perception and inconsistent cognitive processing, it is what we call a fact. The type of fact that is most compelling and that most pressure us to adopt a new belief.
The court would be mostly dismissive of the value statements because of the lack of correspondence between the semantic content of what is stated and the association of conceptual frameworks constructed through our prior experiences and that can be replicated by reproducing a similar interaction with reality. You can't experience values other than your own except for our abilities to relate to the correlation between neurological stimuli and emotive responses. Taking an approach to linguistically appeal to a value judgement has substantially less force and is more likely to fail at changing someone's prior beliefs than taking an approach to linguistically appeal to a coherently shared concept that mutually corresponds with the way we experience the world during particular interactions with it.
On a side note, I find it both funny and ironic that I chose to regard the views of Putnam while you were simultaneously suggesting a reference video featuring Putnam lecturing on the topic. We both seem to view him as a competent proponent of the view.
Well, it seems to me that there is public evidence to support various value claims. For example, when I try to argue for a value claim, I usually make an argument using something like an analogy or a thought experiment or just provide an example. This is why I’m constantly writing “For example” on every response that I give in a philosophy forum. It’s my way of illuminating my intuitions and showing my interlocutor the merits of my philosophical beliefs and theories. I would consider that to be a kind of evidence. It’s a more speculative kind of evidence but we are talking about more speculative philosophical topics here. I think all philosophical opinions are going to have this feature of only being able to be supported by evidence that not everyone will appreciate or take seriously. For example, take the debate around the possibility of an existence of an afterlife. I can provide you a philosophical argument that could be used to support the existence of an afterlife and I can provide you a philosophical argument against the existence of an afterlife. While we can never truly know who’s right, it would quite silly nonetheless for me to say that nobody is objectively right regarding this issue just because the evidence for both sides is highly speculative. I think philosophers shouldn’t be afraid to provide speculative reasons or speculative arguments in an attempt to resolve a philosophical issue because a philosophical issue wouldn’t be much of a philosophical issue if all philosophers just thought that the correct answer was obvious. So, in conclusion, I don’t see how value philosophy is any more speculative than other topics in philosophy as philosophical issues can rarely be resolved with any sort of obvious empirical evidence.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Well, I think there are other reasons why courts would find fingerprint evidence more reliable; the evidence is meant to support a non-evaluative claim that a person performed a particular action like murder. After the non-evaluative evidence gets collected, it then gets evaluated and that’s when the courtroom does start making lots of evaluative claims. The first thing that the court needs to determine is that the suspect is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But, what exactly counts as reasonable doubt? You can’t exactly answer those kinds of questions with empirical evidence it seems. Rather, I think the court has to make a value judgement about the evidence and make an educated guess about the likelihood that the client is innocent. It seems to me that there are objectively better and worse ways to evaluate the empirical evidence that is presented to the court and it seems to me that there are objectively better and worse ways to draw conclusions from the available evidence. Thus, I think it does make sense to think that value judgements can be factual and objective. Otherwise, we can’t reasonably be angry if a seemingly biased jury decided to convict a man of a crime with evidence that we intuit as being weak. We would have to just say that the value judgement of the court here was just an expression of their attitude or something silly like that.
Finally, I want to mention that the value judgements that are present in the courtroom do not end there. Someone also has to determine how a particular convicted person should get punished as well.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I agree with you that we publicly express value claims and, what is more, I would even grant the notion that there are evaluative components entangled within all of a language (as Putnam argues), but I don't think we can safely say that the available evidence for both evaluative statements and non-evaluative statements carry the same force. I think we both agree and can easily draw a distinction between the two based on this. Whenever we argue a value claim, we do provide anecdotal evidence that appeals to our attitudes toward such a value by describing how it personally or mutually impacts our emotional and physical states.
Such arguments only go so far, though. The cultural components that have been evolving, at least, since the emergence of the genus Homo has been the influential force that molds us from our natural, savage proclivities. These forces are learned mostly through empathy and are universal as they appeal to basic instincts such as self-preservation and both fosters and facilitates our desires for well-being in a way that is now functionally dependant upon the social dynamics of the group. In order to enjoy the benefits of society we must participate in the effort to maximize the prevailing values of the society; which means sacrificing a portion of ourselves toward whatever ends are most socially desired. Although, given the random nature in which our environment shapes us, both physiologically and psychologically, and that this process has continued across generations for billions of year's, even the most ubiquitous of human values could easily have evolved quite differently from what they are now.
What we value as a group, culture, society (especially at the level of developed National and Global interaction) has progressed in a very deterministic way. What we value today stems from the imposition, for better or worse, of a history of ancestral values that have, through conflict, been forced into convergence by virtue of a groups evolutionary fitness and influential force. As ancestral groups organized into hierarchical power structures, the cultural components and particular value systems of the dominant groups had a prevailing influence over others. Human populations that developed traits such as: a prominent social cohesion, social efficacy, larger bandwidth and efficiency for social networking, and relative population densities, etc, seemed to be better equipped, and not only to merely survive, but to become a cultural force by influencing the values of other developing groups, as well.
The difference may just come from the lack of knowledge with regard to the human mind relative to our knowledge of the human brain. While we can empirically dissect, explore, and model the brain through interaction with the physical material therein, we do not have such experiential access when it comes to studying the mind. We can analyze the brains structure through a bottom-up perspective that breaks the entire system down to it's individual parts thereby deducing the role of each particular neurological constituent. We cannot however apply such reductive methodologies when it comes to exploring the mind. We are left in the dark, so to speak, to the point where many (especially materialists) refuse to acknowledge such philosophical mysteries as Chalmers, "Hard Problem" because they view the descriptions of science either to encompass all possible knowledge or all relevant knowledge. Values exist in the same way that phenomenal experiences do but by no means do they have the same existence as something empirically accessible or conceptually tethered to physical reality—and that is the meaningful difference that distinguishes language that is concrete and empirically-based from language that is abstract and phenomenologically-based.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I think my language has mislead you, I apologize for my imprecision here. My position regarding both facts and values and the level of epistemic uncertainty between grounding evaluative arguments and non-evaluative arguments is not as strong or explicit as you seem to believe. I hold a more agnostic position. Although, I do undoubtedly lean one way or another between every issue im consciously aware of, I am not necessarily committed either way. I am not convinced that value statements carry the same logical weight as non-value statements. I lean in the direction that they don't, but im not quite ready to commit to that because, though I can articulate an argument supporting the fact/value distinction and the is-ought problem, l cannot derive a contradiction on your view that can, to my satisfaction, avoid some degree of reduction to absurdity. Your points, though speculative, and, IMO, tentative, are not necessarily false, but they are appeals to possibility (essentially, you argument draws an inference between a possibility and a probability). My arguments, on the other hand, seem to fail either by appealing to ignorance (we know of no moral facts therefore moral facts don't exist), or by appealing to personal incredulity (value statements are subjective, thus unfalsifiable, and unfalsifiable statements cannot be factual).
Just as with your example of an afterlife, though I may hastily make a negative claim in such regards, the position I find most convincing would be an agnostic one. I have seen no evidence to suggest an afterlife. This is a true statement regarding my understanding of the matter, however, if I were to use such a premise to infer the conclusion that, therefore, there is no afterlife, it would be fallacious.
With this in mind, would you consider your position to affirm or deny the proposition "Values cannot be empirically proven true or false"? And, just to be clear, the propositions "Scientific methodology cannot prove anything true or false with absolute certainty" as well as "Empirical evidence is not free of evaluative components" do not provide a valid inference for the negation of the proposition in question.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
But the courts do, in fact, treat evaluative claims differently from non-evaluative claims, right? That is my point. There is a distinction between the two and it has to do with the extent to which we attach cognitive success to them and how they rank amongst our epistemic states. Which of the following statements would rank highest among your various epistemic states? Statement a) "Plants release oxygen" or, statement b) "Plants are pretty"...do you hold a belief, do you know, are you unsure, or do possess a complete understanding that the latter claim is true or false—and, what is the justification to hold such an epistemic state?
Well, that seems to be a description of how the currently popular moral values have come about. I agree with you that objective moral values probably do not exist but I think that are probably objective prudential values. I’m talking about things like the value of making yourself have experiences that feel better in the long run by doing things like saving money, eating healthy, brushing your teeth, and shutting toxic people out of your life. I don’t see how your point about human evolution influencing human values can help explain why my kind of values are just a by-product of evolution. They seem to be values that even an intelligent savage can have and I don’t see how humans could have evolved without the proclivity to value making themselves feel better in the long run. Even if the human race evolves for a billion generations, I doubt that people will stop caring about their own pleasure and suffering(assuming that they would still be capable of experiencing pleasure and suffering.).
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I mostly agree with you there. I do think there is a distinction between the concrete and the abstract. Though, I don’t think that abstract understanding is always phenomenological in nature. The issue that I have with the fact value distinction is that it seemed to single out value claims as though they are especially dubious compared to many other kinds of non-value claims. This is why I like the way you framed a more relevant distinction here because there are plenty of non-value claims that are also abstract and non-empirical like mathematical claims for example. There are also non-value claims that are phenomenological and non-empirical like most claims about the dreams that a particular person might be having at night. I was never trying to suggest that value claims are usually just as reliable as empirical claims. I was just trying to suggest that value claims can sometimes be objectively true just like claims about the dreams that someone had at night can sometimes be objectively true.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Well, my understanding of the word “proven” is that something must be true with 100% certainty in order to be proven. This is why I always try to avoid using that word because it seems to set the bar too high for what I consider to be enough evidence for a belief to be reasonable. You have instructed me not to understand the word “proven” as something shown to be definitely true. So, I think I’d have to ask you how you understand the word “proven” and what would suffice as enough evidence to prove something.
On a final note, I should mention that I think empirical evidence can only support certain kinds of value claims.
For example, the claim that brushing your teeth is good at avoiding cavities is empirical in nature and it’s also something I would call a value claim. In addition, a claim that one singer is better than another singer at belting notes in the 5th octave is kinda empirical as you would have to listen to the singer before you can adequately judge her abilities to belt in the 5th octave. Sometimes these sorts of claims about the competence of a singer can actually be objectively true or false. For example, I think it’s objectively true that Celine Dion is better at belting 5th octave notes than Frank Sinatra is. Why? Because Sinatra can’t belt 5th octave notes while Dion obviously can. It’s still kinda like a value claim though as if I was comparing the 5th octave belting abilities of 2 singers that can belt 5th octave notes roughly to an equal degree then the value judgement wouldn’t be so obvious to make anymore.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I’m not sure if they do actually. There is a point that I forgot to make about the alleged facts of value that you mentioned in an earlier post. That point is that it seems to me that many of the facts of value that you mentioned as facts of value are not actually evaluative claims. For example, the claim that the suspect says that he didn’t commit the murder doesn’t claim that anything is better or worse. Rather, it’s just testimonial evidence. You can have testimonial evidence that doesn’t make a value claim and I don’t think value claims are always predicated on testimonial evidence. So, I’m not actually sure how much our legal system treats evaluative claims differently as it is perfectly ok with placing a heavy emphasis on subject matter that is just riddled with value claims like the subject matter regarding what is an appropriate punishment for a particular crime.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Well, I agree with you that Statement A is about as reliable as any kind of statement that a person can make and I think that Statement B is probably completely subjective. I never said that I was a realist about aesthetics after all. Also, I think it’s worth mentioning that I don’t think that Statement B is a value claim. This is because I think you can believe that plants are pretty without believing that this makes them better or worse than other things in any way. There are some people that seem to hold a somewhat unusual opinion that certain kinds of ugly things are better than certain kinds of pretty things. For example, many people who enjoy listening to death metal say that it is the ugliness of death metal that gives the genre it’s emotional significance. I personally have a hard time understanding how ugly music can be better than pretty music but I kinda take their word for it.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I think I may agree with you. A prudential value is a kind of value which is always relative to someone or something. I do think that moral statements are truth-apt in a subjectivist construal. That is, that moral statements are truth-apt, but their truth values are dependent upon the subject they are indexed next to. What this means is that if you were make a value statement or moral statement such as "Apples taste better than oranges" or "Rape is wrong" what you really seem to be expressing is a personal preference for a particular experience or a personal attitude towards a particular behavior. What you are actually saying is "I have a preference for the taste of apples over the taste of oranges" and "I hold a negative attitude towards the act of rape". It is objectively true, it seems, that your subjective states have come to value certain aesthetic preferences and emotional attitudes towards certain behaviors.
We can objectively state that you hold a particular subjective belief insofar as the content of the belief is a property of you, the thinking subject, and not a property of the object of thought. The problem with grounding such statements still remains though. For example, I can make a hedonistic argument for my desire of pleasure "I desire pleasure" (an objectively true subjective statement), "Acting in accordance with x results in the satisfaction of my desire for pleasure" and then a conditional "If I wish to satisfy my desire for pleasure, then I ought to act in accordance with x" then affirm the antecedent "I do wish to satisfy my desire for pleasure" and, finally, the conclusion "Therefore, I ought to act in accordance with x". Everything seems valid and deductively sound, right? Well, there is a problem. Just because we desire something doesn't mean that we ought to act in accordance with our desires. Perhaps we could eliminate the component of free will to support the premises "We have no control over our desires" and "What we desire is pleasure" but the problem remains with how to generate a prescriptive "ought" from all of this. Just because something is out of our control does not mean that it is morally right or ought to happen. We cannot avoid our death. So, does this mean that our death is a morally good thing? Is it a moral obligation to die?
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
What I mean by 'proven' is that a claim is demonstrable or verifiable through empirical evidence or logical necessity. Absolute, 100% knowledge is something only the most naive of people would consider possible. We have systems of knowledge built through rigorous methodologies that get pretty close to certain—that is, insofar as they predict future phenomena and overlap with multiple fields of research. If you can provide me with testable evidence or a logical entailment, that would suffice for me.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
That is actually not an accurate representation of what I said. My exact words were, "The suspect says that he did nothing wrong that day" which means that he believes his actions were either moral or amoral, but not immoral. This means little since many people recognize that an act is illegal or socially unacceptable, and yet do not see it as immoral.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
It is making a value judgment that expresses an approval. To say something is "pretty" is only meaningful because it draws a distinction between other objects with comparable properties. It is to say that, when it comes to visual appeal, object x is more desirable than. If you are speaking to the general view of a thing, of which you feel otherwise towards, then you are making a non-evaluative statement. But not if you are literally expressing your own honest opinions about the thing.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
No. There are people who see beauty in what to them is beautiful, notwithstanding the popular appeal to the contrary. They don't approve of something because of the disapproval they have of it, but rather they have developed an appreciation for something that commonly is not appreciated. It feels as if you are appealing to some external property that objectively has value, which would make you a Realist.
The reason that I think that pleasure is valuable actually has nothing to do with people desiring pleasure. I just think that it’s simply the case that it is better for one to have more pleasure in their lives(all other things being equal.). I agree with you that we have no reason to act on our desires but I do think that we have reason to act on opportunities for hedonistic improvement in our own lives. I think that pleasure and suffering go beyond mere desire in this way. As I have stated earlier, I think that ought statements are indistinguishable from normal value statements. Given this, I don’t think there needs to be this extra step of deriving ought claims from value claims because I think ought claims are value claims. I can reiterate the argument that I gave for that earlier if you want me to but I will assume that you understood the reason that I have for believing this but I can state those reasons in a different way and try to explain them again if you wish me to do that.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Well, I’m not as much of an empiricist as you are. I think that empirical evidence is only slightly better than other forms of evidence. I think this because of the mad scientist dilemma that I had mentioned previously. I don’t think it’s that crazy to think that our sensory capacities might not be as reliable at arriving at truth as we may think that they are. Another problem that I have with radical empiricism is that it seems to be self-defeating in a way since it seems that you can’t defend the Epistemic doctrine of empiricism with empirical evidence. Thus, I think you would have to use other types of evidence to argue that empirical evidence is the only credible form of evidence.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
No, I’m trying to point out that there are some people who say that they subjectively feel as though something is ugly and yet they enjoy that thing because of its ugliness. For example, someone can think that death metal sounds ugly but say that they enjoy the music because it sounds ugly. Given this, I would say that prettiness is kinda similar to something like sweetness. It’s completely subjective and phenomenal and yet it doesn’t necessarily imply a value judgement. I think it’s also kinda hard to define what prettiness is kinda how it’s hard to define what sweetness is.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
This sounds like Hedonistic Utilitarianism, which assumes an act is moral based entirely on a net gain of positive utility (pleasure it produces) or on a net drain of negative utility (pain it prevents). To put it in simple terms, it Is a view that considers pleasure to be the measure of the Good and, conversely, that considers pain to be the measure of what is not the Good. The problem entailed by such logic is that it suggests that we have a justified reason to act so long as the act is of the Good, and that which makes an act an act of the Good is an overall increase of relative pleasure that the act derives; or, to quote you, that we have reason to act on opportunities for hedonistic improvement, is that it provides a justification for acts that, im sure, you would not find just. For example, if a rapist derives a sufficient amount of pleasure from the act of rapping a victim, that it offsets the overall suffering the victim endured, thereby resulting in an overall net gain in hedonic utility, then, on this view, the rape is justified. That is quite a reduction to absurdity, and a bullet that im not willing to bite in order to hold that view consistently.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Ought statements are a derivative of normative value statements. Every ought statement is also a normative statement but not every normative statement is an ought statement. A normative statement is one that proffers a subjective opinion that can, for instance, be only aesthetic in nature, whereas an ought statement contains a prescriptive component that suggests a course of action, which makes it deontological. If you wish to reference a dictionary, I would suggest either considering the OED or the SEP in order to disambiguate from the more colloquial meanings of such terms for their standard meanings within philosophical contexts.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I agree, and would go further still, to say that empiricism utterly fails at capturing a closer truth about reality in many cases. For example, the wave function in quantum physics represents a mathematical description of quantum systems (everything is a quantum system) that predicts future phenomena with extreme accuracy (up to ten decimal places), and yet, it describes the kind of physical phenomena that empiricism cannot (which is why quantum mechanics has been so open to different interpretations).
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
You are quite right. It seems that our senses evolved for reproduction and genetic survival rather than for truth. As an example, consider grabbing an apple. As we observe the apple in our hand, we do not see what the apple truly is (as revealed by the most rigorous scientific research). We do not have access to it as a complex biological system of eukaryotic cells; of which consists of nucleic acids, proteins, lipids, sugars, etc; of which consists of a complex organic chemical system of amino acids; of which contains a complex chemical system, or network of interacting molecules such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, etc; of which each of these elements contain a complex physical, or quantum mechanical system of stable sub atomic particles such as protons, neutron, electrons—including a zoo of elementary particles such as quarks, leptons, antiquarks, etc, that goes on perhaps infinitely. We see the apple as a tasty looking object that produces sensory pleasures and this correlation has to do with the nutritional requisites for our survival so as to increase the capacity to pass on our genes.
Im no radical empiricist.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
That is not the same as saying something is pretty. To say that evaluating a thing as pretty is the same as to say it is enjoyable because it is ugly is not only an equivocation but a logical contradiction, too. It is to say a thing is P and not P, that it both is and is not the case that the object in question is pretty. Saying that you enjoy something is not analytically equivalent to saying something is pretty because you can enjoy something that is not pretty and not enjoy something that is pretty. I agree with you that we can enjoy something we feel is subjectively ugly, however, that was not my point. My point was that the statement "Plants are pretty" is subjective and is a value claim because it is to say of a thing that it is pretty (sensually appealing relative to other things), which implies that its prettiness is a thing of value. It may, nevertheless, have other properties of which we evaluate as unappealing to us that makes us feel that the thing is, overall, unenjoyable.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
It is quite difficult to define such terms in a way that is completely objective, that is to say, in a way that is independent of the subjective opinion of a conscious agent. It is quite simple to define such terms in an otherwise subjective context. You can do so tautologically with the statement "Plants are pretty because they are pretty" if we interpret the meaning implied through the lens of a subjectivist construal, as to say "To me, plants are pretty because that is how I feel about them" since, if nothing else, our current subjective attitude towards a thing is axiomatic.
I want to point out that I’m egoistic hedonistic utilitarian which means that I’m not even sure if the suffering of the rape victim would actually give you any reason not to rape that person. Rather, I would say that almost nobody should ever rape because almost nobody derives pleasure from rape and almost nobody could get away with rape in the long term. You might think this implication is unacceptable but I don’t see why you aren’t more bothered by the bullets that you have to bite as an anti-realist about ought claims. Under your view, it seems that nobody ever has more reason to choose not to rape someone over choosing to rape someone. This is because you don’t seem to think that anything gives people reason to choose any decision option(even a decision option to avoid raping someone). By contrast, I think the vast majority of people have very good reason to avoid raping someone and almost nobody has reason to rape someone. In addition, I can provide a deeper explanation for why raping is bad which seems like a pretty good upside to my view as well. Given this, I must ask you a question. Why do you find your own opinion that raping is not better or worse than not raping more acceptable than my view that raping is almost always worse than not raping.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Ok, I don’t have an issue with your view here. I’m still kinda inclined of thinking of prettiness as a value free description of something but I can understand that maybe some people can’t think of prettiness in that kind of value neutral way.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I don’t think it makes it deontological because that seems to imply that all ought statements are duties(at least I have always thought that deontological refers duty oriented stuff.). It seems like ought statements as colloquially understood do not imply a duty to do something. Rather, it is just a recommendation for the selection of a particular decision option. I think that those Recommendations are basically just normal value judgements though.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Your argument is something like this?
P1. You should rape if, and only if, you both derive pleasure from it and think you can get away with it
P2. Most people neither derive pleasure from rape nor think they could get away with it.
Therefore, C. Most people should not rape.
I believe that accurately captures what your saying. If so, then I would challenge premise 1, because it is not clear to me how the derivation of pleasure combined with the belief that one can escape any negative consequences necessarily entails that one should rape. When you say that almost no one should ever rape, it is as if you are saying that the act of rape is sometimes just and sometimes not just, which is contradictory. Is there some kind of deontological threshold that makes some rapes justified and others not? That was my critique of hedonic utilitarianism.
Also, getting away from the legal consequences seems to imply that rape is not bad, but just happens to entail the risk of some negative impact on ones life.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Quite the contrary, there are many reasons, but they are dependent upon the agents current preference and attitude toward a thing. Many of us have empathy towards one another and can relate to the suffering others feel. On my view, there is no external reference whereby the moral status of an act can be determined objectively right or wrong. We can, however, reason internally based on how we feel towards an act. In fact, many do and reach similar enough conclusions to legislate against such things as rape.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
First of all, your question is loaded with a false premise, as I do not hold that view. I hold the view that moral or aesthetic evaluations are dependent upon the individual subject who is reflecting upon them. I think that raping is almost always considered worse by many and since there is such a majority view, then the act of rape has been institutionalized as a bad thing and this is usually a dogmatically held belief indoctrinated upon us through society (which I think at least brings favorable consequences).
I think that in order to maintain a consistent philosophical view of ethics you must ground moral principles in subjectivity rather than objectivity. I think it is silly to say that something out in the universe informs us as to how we should behave. I think most people do not hold philosophical principles but instead take whatever is normalized for granted. Some, in fact most, who do adopt philosophical principles seem to be struggling with a cognitive hangover left by religious influence that they tend to view morality though an objective lens. I have my reasons for why I view rape as wrong but they do not necessarily make rape wrong for you, though they certainly could persuade you.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I don't think you are appreciating the context of my example. The statement is "Plants are pretty" with the noun "Plants" being the subject of the sentence and "are pretty" being the predicate verb attaching the subject of the sentence to the adjective describing the noun. The statement is talking about plants. (What about plants?) That they are pretty. Now, if you want to express the fact that plants have prettiness attributed to them by others from a third party perspective, then we could say something like "Plants have been considered pretty by many" since otherwise we are describing the plant through our perspective.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Deontology is a normative, rule-based ethic wherein an act, such as rape, is considered wrong by virtue of the character of the act itself and does not factor in the outcome of the act. It is the contrast to consequentialism, which includes theories such as utilitarianism. People who say they would divert the runaway trolley from the track inevitably killing 5 workers, to the track inevitably killing one worker (in the popular dilemma), are taking a consequentialist view, whereas, those who refuse to harvest the organs of one healthy person so to save five in need of organ transplants, on the converse, are taking a deontological view.
With that in mind, consider the statement "You ought not rape" and think if what is being said is "You ought not rape if it results in less than a good outcome" or if what is being said is "You ought not rape because the act of rape is always wrong". I do not view the two as being mutually exclusive. This is where the threshold comes into play. I am deontic when it comes to most cases of rape but do admit that there must be a threshold where the consequences of rape, or the omitting to rape, based on the overall utility, must be justified. For example, if you had to choose between either raping one woman, or, as a consequence of not raping the one woman, all women would be raped, then I would say that you are justified, obligated even, to perform the rape. It is either that or bite the bullet and say that one must never rape even if the consequence of not raping is billions to be raped.
If you expressed the ought as a conditional statement, then yes, of course, it would not be deontological. Such as with the statement "If x threshold is not met, then you ought not rape".
I don’t see anything contradictory about it. In fact, when it comes to the normal and mundane decisions that we make in our life, we pretty much always think that it is conditional whether or not we should do something. For example, I believe that sometimes someone should invest in the stock market and sometimes they shouldn’t. I think deciding whether or not you should rape someone is like deciding whether or not you should invest in the stock market(except choosing to rape isn’t nearly as reasonable of a decision option under the overwhelmingly vast majority of circumstances). I also want to point out that I think it’s not enough for someone to believe that they will get away with rape in order for a rape to be the wiser decision option. People can be highly irrational at evaluating their own odds regarding what they can get away with. Also, getting away with rape isn’t limited to avoiding getting arrested. The consequences of rape extend far beyond that. You can get punished by the victim of rape or the family of the victim as well. In addition, most people would feel guilty or ashamed about raping someone even if they think they are the kinds of people who wouldn’t be guilty or ashamed. This causes suffering and that is hedonistically bad. Also, even a mere accusation of rape could completely destroy your social reputation and future career prospects. Finally, I believe that people who would derive pleasure from rape would only do so if they value having power over another person for its own sake. I think the vast majority of hedonists would probably be really confused about why someone would choose to rape if they could have sex with a partner in relationship or a friends with benefits or a prostitute. Rape just doesn’t make sense if someone is looking for the most efficient way to receive sexual pleasure.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Ok, so how would you classify an action that should pretty much always be avoided because it pretty much always causes a negative consequence in your life? Bad seems like a pretty good word to describe it to me.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Well, I would say that you do believe in at least one objective ought claim then. You seem to think that you have objective reasons to act in accordance to your own preferences. I personally do not understand why I have any more reason to act in accordance to my own preferences than I do to act on the preferences of other people(aside from the fact that acting on my preferences would be more likely to produce hedonistic improvement.). I think a true anti-realist wouldn’t even grant that we have reason to act based on our preferences or attitudes. So, I must ask you, do you believe that we have objective reasons to act on our own preferences or do you think that’s just subjective as well?
I will respond to the rest of your comment sometime later this week .
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
The contradiction would form when the principles with which we construct a framework for our moral system contains both of the following propositions. 1) Rape is wrong; and 2) Rape is not wrong. You either must (a) concede that your moral system produces a contradiction when it comes to evaluating rape; or that (b) it contains some level of arbitrariness by viewing rape as deontologically wrong, even if it produces positive consequences, but nonetheless can be morally justified if the positive consequences it produces surpass a given threshold; or that (c) a rape is justified so long as the rape results in a positive net gain in hedonic utility. I bite the bullet with arbitrariness.
Consider the following statements as they capture a reductio entailed by each.
(a) On pain of contradiction (that you both should and should not rape), according to the principle of explosion, from a contradiction anything follows. In other words, on this view, anything can be justified–including rape.
(b) Rape is wrong in itself, and even if the rape results in positive utility (say the victim was payed royalty that derived sufficient hedonic utility to outweigh the negative hedonic disutility) gained, it remains wrong, but however there must exist some threshold of hedonic utility gained as a result that would thereby justify the rape (if the rape resulted in a galaxy of people being able to avoid infinite suffering for an infinite amount of time).
(c) Rape is justified so long as the pleasure derived from it outweighs the suffering inflicted by it (if the rapist feels more pleasure than the victim feels suffering).
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Then why list it as a reason? You said that most people should not rape (a concluding statement) because (introducing supporting statement 1) almost nobody derives pleasure from rape and (introducing supporting statement 2) almost nobody could get away with rape. I formalized your argument as a biconditional statement, so yes, the 2nd conditional is not sufficient for the entailment alone, since the conclusion is true if and only if both conditionals are true. Are you no longer holding that view? The view that most people should not rape because almost nobody derives pleasure from rape and almost nobody could get away with rape?
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
We aren't talking about the evaluations of other people, we are talking about your position on rape. You said, "I would say that almost nobody should ever rape..." then went on to list the reasons why as both because nobody derives pleasure from rape and nobody could get away with it. Also, as a tangential point, a persons belief that they will get away with something must necessarily mean that they, at least on their rationality, think they have overcome the barrier which prevents most people from raping on your view. People are not omniscient, but they do become certain of things no matter how false they actually are. People are limited by their beliefs and cannot avoid acting on said beliefs while still holding to them.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
What is the argument that the consequence is bad? Let's say prison time is the consequence: what makes a prison bad? Besides, you are naming the consequences of an act that you say is morally bad. This would imply that it is bad even if there are no consequences involved at all. Is rape bad even in the absence of any such consequences one would worry about? If so, how is it bad? What property of badness can we find of it? Because an act has negative consequences does not mean that the act is necessarily bad. For example, is falling in love bad? It can result in very negative consequences. Or, as another example, is driving a car bad? Plenty of negative consequences result from such an action. We must separate the consequences of an act from the moral status of the act itself. If rape is only bad when it results in negative consequences, then we are utilitarian on the matter. If rape is bad in itself no matter what the context may be, then we are deontologically entrenched and would act in accordance with such a rule no matter what the costs may be. If rape is always bad, but certain exceptions can be made in order to avoid results that are far worse, then we are taking the view from threshold deontology.
To answer your question, I would classify the act as bad or undesirable, but only when whichever concepts you are referring to as negative consequences that should almost always be avoided are indexed next to you as the subject of the statement. To you, an action should always be avoided because, to you, it always causes, what you see as, negative consequence in your life. It is completely coherent and easy to defend from the view that considers such evaluative statements to be relative,
thus only be applicable to, the individual subject in which it is indexed beside within the structure of the proposition.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I would say that it is objectively true that I hold a subjective preference towards one thing or another, but not that I should act in accordance with my preferences. It is true that I hold the belief that my pleasure is good, however this does not mean that I can justify an act based on my pleasure, or that my pleasure is necessarily good. I would say that it is a psychological fact that I desire my own pleasure and that I helplessly act towards that goal because my actions are so determined by them and not by my own free will. I may seem to act in accordance with my preferences but such preferences stem from my desires and I am never free to choose that which I desire. Even if I resist my desire to eat a lot of sweets, it is not a product of my free will, but rather the pull of a stronger will, perhaps one of health or fitness, that moves me from a weaker desire—none of which am I the author of. I never choose what I will desire. It emerges seemingly at random and to be undergoing constant fluctuations that I am unconscious of.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Not objective reasons, no. It is an objective fact that we have and experience such preferences, but there is nothing to ground that in other than a subjective tautology. I have a preference for pleasure because I desire pleasure. I can subjectively ground such an axiom, as, "To me, my pleasure is good, therefore, I should act in accordance with that which derives me pleasure and avoids pain." Notice that I can't reason that you should act in accordance with my own pleasure, but we will all nonetheless do so relentlessly if you think about it. It is objectively true that I desire my own pleasure, and from this it is objectively true that if I wish to satisfy my desire for pleasure then I should act in accordance with that which gives me pleasure. I cannot objectively state that my pleasure is good by any measure besides my own preferences for it.
I was referring to your view of ought claims rather than your view on moral and aesthetic evaluations. I’m arguing that it is prudential considerations rather moral or aesthetic considerations that are most relevant to the question regarding whether or not you should rape.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I agree, it’s silly to say that the universe informs us as to how we should behave. Rather, I think there are conceptual truths about how we should behave that go beyond the universe and do not exist in space or time. I think those conceptual truths are objective in the same way that mathematical truths are objective.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I think that the statement “Plants are pretty” is similar to the statement “Cookies are sweet”. The adjective “sweet” doesn’t imply a value judgement and thus the statement
“Cookies are sweet” is value neutral. I also think that the adjective “pretty” doesn’t imply a value judgement in the same sort of way. Thus, just like the phrase “Cookies are sweet” is value neutral, I think the phrase “Plants are pretty” is as well.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Umm.... I don’t think that rape is wrong or “not wrong” in a moral or universalist sort of way. I think it’s incoherent to classify actions is being morally right or wrong because I think moral realism is false. Given this, I don’t have a “moral” system. I consider myself to be a value realist and a realist about ought claims because I think that for any given individual decision that one makes to rape or not to rape, the decision that the person chooses is either objectively right or objectively wrong(but not in a moral sense). The only reason it can be considered right or wrong is because we are dealing with a decision with only 2 possible decision options. I wouldn’t classify decisions as right or wrong if we were talking about a decision making dilemma with more than 2 decision options. Rather, I would say that the decision options have relationships of betterness or worseness towards one another.
Also, I don’t think that you can evaluate the goodness or badness of an action outside of the specific scenario under which the action is performed. For example, it would be silly for me to suggest that either everyone should learn to dance or nobody should learn to dance. Nobody would ever be a deontologist about the act of learning how to dance and you wouldn’t think that it’s contradictory for me to suggest that some people should learn to dance and some people shouldn’t. So, why do you think that it’s contradictory for me to say that some people should rape and some people shouldn’t? Note that I’m not thinking about rape in moral terms here. I’m thinking about rape like I would think about mundane actions like washing the dishes or learning how to dance.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I never said that "nobody derives pleasure from rape and nobody could get away with it”. There are some rare cases where people derive pleasure from rape and some rare cases where they get away with it. It’s true that people are limited by their beliefs regarding how they act but I don’t think that means that people ought to act on their beliefs. Sometimes the decision that you ought to make is the decision that you will psychologically never be compelled to make. For example, suppose that someone is planning on raping someone else. He believes that his victim will be by herself in a secluded cabin on a deserted island with no government or police to protect her. But, you know that her house has an underground police station and he is guaranteed to be arrested. Wouldn’t it make sense to say that he made a mistake and that he should have acted against his beliefs here?
I will respond to more of your comments tomorrow.
I think that going to prison is bad for the same sort of reason that you think that it would be bad for every woman in the world to get raped. Both outcomes seem to be outcomes that lead to lots of suffering. The only difference is that I think we have more reason to avoid things that would cause us to suffer while you seem to think that the suffering of others is often just as relevant to decision making. I do actually think that we should give some credence to the suffering of others as well because I technically hold a more complicated and probabilistic view of ethics and decision making(I try to simplify my views on this in the beginning of the discussion as I don’t want to be too off putting). The most specific description of my view is that I think any sort of final aim in ethics has some probability of being worth pursuing but the job of an ethicist is to create a hierarchy of final aims based on the plausibility of those aims. I can go into more detail about my theories about good decision making if you want me to do that but it will be quite long so I want to respect your time.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I never said that rape is morally bad. I just said it was usually a bad action but more precisely I think it is a bad decision option. I don’t think that rape is bad outside of a particular context but rape can be objectively bad in a context dependent sort of way. Also, trying to look for the property of badness in rape is as silly as trying to look for the property of truthfulness in the Epistemic theory of empiricism. Both of these are conceptual truths that don’t exist in space and time. Nonetheless, if it makes sense to say that the Epistemic theory of empiricism is objectively true then I don’t see why it doesn’t make sense to say that rape is sometimes objectively bad.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Falling in love or driving a car can actually be objectively bad within certain contexts. For example, I think it would be bad for me to fall in love because I think it will make my life more difficult and that would lead to me having more suffering and less pleasure. Of course, I could be wrong about my hedonistic evaluation of the scenario under which I fall in love but I think I’m making a reasonable educated guess. Of course, I should clarify also that what I mean by objectively bad is that anything that is objectively worse than choosing the opposite decision option. This only applies to decisions where you either choose to do something or choose not to do something. It doesn’t apply to more complex decision-making dilemmas where you are choosing between a myriad of options.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I think there is a difference between relativism about value and anti-realism about value. Everybody could be called a relativist in some sense. Even a philosopher like Kant thought that whether or not an act is bad is relative to whether or not it violates a categorical imperative. Oftentimes, he seemed to define something like murder as “the bad kind of killing” which implies that he didn’t think it was always wrong to kill but he just chose to call any kind of killing that he thought was bad as murder which gave the illusion that he thought some action was universally wrong. I could do the same sort of thing technically. I could say that forced intercourse is not always bad but rape is always bad. I could then clarify that what I call rape is any kind of forced intercourse that produces a negative consequence for the agent that commits the act. This would be a pretty silly way in avoiding being a relativist though.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Ok, so it seems to me that you don’t really think that you have any more reason to not rape any particular person than you do to rape that person. You are just not motivated to rape anyone. This is why I think you are biting a much bigger bullet with your anti-realism about ought claims than the bullet that I’m biting with my egoistic hedonism. Ultimately, you don’t seem to think that you have any reason to act on your preferences. You just think that you are psychologically compelled to do so. I do think that you have reason to not rape someone though because I believe the felt quality of your everyday experience is something that has objective value to you and it objectively determines the betterness or worseness of the decisions that you make in your life.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I view ought claims, in ethics, as statements that prescribe (or proscribe for oughtn't claims) a given action; that it should be done. An ought claim is a statement used to express that an agent has a moral obligation to perform a certain action. It is an authoritative statement for a course of action to be followed, however, this authority is based on (as you argue for) the consideration of prudential values relative, and subsequently applicable, to an individual subject.
For sake of clarity, I'll break what I mean by this down into three points. First, allow me to explain what I mean by an ought claim being a statement that prescribes a given action. Secondly, I'll explain what i mean by the authority based on an individual subject. Lastly, I'll explain what I take you to mean by "prudential value" and "prudential considerations" because if what you understand these phrases to mean is as I understand them to mean, then I believe we have found some convergence herein.
The first point, how an ought claim is necessarily prescriptive. An ought claim is a statement that prescribes a given action either because the given action is, in itself, when considered in isolation from the actions surrounding context or the contribution the actions causal influence has towards a resulting effect, morally right to do; or, as an alternative, that a given action should be done because a particular state of affairs is morally right to exist and what gives rise to the existence of such a state of affairs, as an effect thereby produced, is causally dependent upon the influential contribution of the given action thereof.
The second point, how ought claims express a moral authority that is based on an individual subject. An ought claim is an authoritative statement that expresses a demand for a specific way to behave or for a course of action to be followed. An ought claim captures an agent's motivations, which are influenced by the agents values as the agent reflects upon the behaviors or decisions that are consistent with them. An agents values are a unique manifestation that arise and develope as a result of the complex, dynamic interactions between the agents subjective states and how the agent experiences the surrounding physical and social environments.
Though many external factors influence what an agent values and such factors influence populations of beings who share genetic, cultural, and geographic predispositions in very similar ways, there are reasons to view values that are mutually compatible yet individually unique and relative to the agent. If we imagine the sequence of experiences that uniquely unfold throughout the life of each being and consider how each experience influences the beings agency (how agency conforms to structure) which uniquely molds them in a way that gives rise to subjective variation, it becomes clear that every evaluation is dependent upon the authority of the subject.
In other words, an agent evaluates the world through a scope that is constantly developing under the influence and pressure of structures within their environment. The only common denominator between a constantly changing environment and the constantly adapting being occupying it, is the current sum between the external environmental force's actions upon the subject and the internal environmental opposing force's reactions upon the environment. This is realized in every moment by everything and is expressed in way that we, as individual subjective agents, can relate to and interact with. However, we can only do so on the surface level and only seem to understand that whatever lies between our conscious awareness gives rise to compulsive reactionary thought.
Every conscious agent is ultimately motivated to act by compulsive reactionary thoughts. These are the must-thoughts or should-thoughts that an agent is psychologically compelled to act on that manifest through both a conscious intrasubjective reflection and a social intersubjective communication. The former emerges from an underlying awareness of self-desire with egoistic motivations informing us of who we must be and what we should do, whereas the latter emerges from the stress and anxiety imposed by our perception of what the members of our social groups expect us to be and demand of us to do.
In considering this holistically, every evaluation is necessarily an expression of the subjects values and every ought claim represents an agents compulsive motivations towards fulfilling their must-thoughts. The agent is ultimately the authority, though restricted by structures of the environment, of what is of value, what is moral, and what ought to be—in a subjective context that is ascribed by the agent, by their own subjective authority, that is limited to the subjective states of the agent themselves and not to be dictated as objectively the case for others.
Finally, the third point, which will hopefully tie everything else together, what I take prudential value and prudential considerations to mean. A prudential value is a type of value that is only relevant alongside other values and is always relative to a person, a culture, a society, a point in history, etc, and generally refers to the well-being or welfare of a person or group. Prudential reasoning considers values based on calculated gains or losses relative to an individual or a group. For example, the calculated increase or decrease in overall person health resulting from careful dieting; or the calculated increase or decrease in social conflict between two groups resulting from a violation of trade agreements.
Hedonistic and subjectivistic accounts of prudential values are favored by many utilitarian philosophers and calculated as units of pleasure or preference satisfaction. Prudential values are calculated differently within a socio-politico-economic framework of ethics than they are within the framework of ethics as a moral philosophy. While the ethical framework of moral philosophy remains a controversial subject which diverges on many issues such as cognitivism or non-cognitivism, realism and non-realism, metaphysical objectivism or relativism, etc; a socio-politico-economic framework of ethics takes a pragmatic approach that mostly ignores any meta-ethical roadblocks and operates under the same assumptions as normative ethics (that there is only one criterion of moral conduct) for the purpose of establishing moral standards in order to regulate conduct of society.
While few philosophers believe there is any single principle against which all actions can be judged, by instead focusing on the idiosyncrasies, inconsistencies or redundancies entailed by other rival moral theories; a socio-politico-economic take, such as those ascribed to by the social sciences, doesn't focus so heavily on the problem of divergent human values and instead focuses on the few ubiquitous, prudential values that humans share to construct a set of foundational principles of ethics. As a result, such prudential values become institutionalized as a part of the structure of a society (such as culture) that influences the belief systems and value systems of the members therein.
The members of a society who are most motivated are those who share similar prudential values as those that are a part of the structure of society because the majority of people are heavily influenced by the structures of society and will subsequently organize so that what they work towards results in the production of that which is mutually valuable to them. Societal structures reinforce themselves intergenerationally but also evolve over time as values between branching social classes influence one another with the most deviation taking place between generational classes.
Some of the most well-known prudential values to be built into social structures or give rise to the social principles underpinning a society include: the prudential value of personal autonomy, built into the structure of society as the sacred concept of freedom, which gave rise to the principle of liberty; the prudential value of self preservation, built into the structure of society as the belief that life is sacred, which gave rise to the principle of the right to life; and the prudential value of fairness, built into the structure of society the sacred concept of justice, which gave rise to the principles of equality adopted by the Civil Rights Act.
It seems apparent, at least on the surface, that these prudential values universally enhance the well-being of human beings and welfare status of the society's they inhabit. Prudential values can be installed into a socio-politico-economic system of ethics through three different normative strategies. First, as a virtue, or the social proclivity for developing good habits of character. Examples of such virtues include wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. Secondly, as an obligation that comes with being human. This deontological strategy takes prudential values and constructs a system of duties whereby prudential values are held as fundamental principles of obligation. Such obligations include: "Do not kill," "Treat others as you wish others to treat you," and "Take care of your family". Thirdly, a strategy based on the overall outcome that weighs the good and bad consequences of an action. This consequencialist approach uses prudential values as the basis to determine whether or not the consequence of an action is bad or good. Examples of prudential values used to weigh the consequences of an action include following three.
First, egotistic prudential values, which are values that reflect an action is good if it resulted in a more favorable than unfavorable consequences for the agent performing the action. Second, altruistic prudential values, which are values that reflect an action is good if it resulted in a more favorable than unfavorable consequence for everyone except the agent performing the action. Thirsd, utilitarian prudential values, which are values that reflect an action is good if it resulted in a consequence that is more favorable than unfavorable for everyone.
Hopefully this exhaustive explanation at last provides some elucidation of my position with regard to ought claims. Also, just to be clear, I was responding to the view you expressed in the quote below where you explicitly take a consequencialist stance, then flesh out your particular view on rape. You then provide two reasons to support your view, followed by an assumption that I would not accept the implications of your reasoning, subsequently followed by calling into question the level of concern I hold over the implication thereof, in contrast with the anti-realist view I hold of ought claims. You then proceed to flesh out my view, with a caricaturing misrepresentation, by saying that, on my view, people have no reasons one way or another when it comes to choosing whether or not to rape. You further caricature my position as you go on to say that, on my view, there isn't anything that gives people a reason to choose one way or another of any decision option.
On my view, ought statements cannot be logically grounded in facts about the world and thus what is right or wrong cannot be objectively derived from a property of the external world. Ought statements can, however, be logically grounded, though with substantially less persuasive force, in the private facts about our subjective states, which thereby gives us a reason to choose and make decisions. Also, it is important to note that, given that such reasons are predicated on a subjective frame of reference, it followes, then, that such reasons should not be considered or expected to apply to other subjects as if to satisfy an objective path for others to follow. It is subjectively grounded, subjectively limited, and is subjectively applicable within the confines of the individual subject.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I meant to post this earlier today and failed to do so, I apologize for the time delay and will consider you more recent post another time.
It seems to me that I can provide you with plenty of examples of ought claims that are not expressing authoritative statement that an agent has a moral obligation to perform a certain action. For example, suppose that someone were to tell you that you ought to invest in the company Tesla. Would you interpret that person as saying that you have a moral obligation to invest in Tesla? That seems to me like a very silly interpretation of that statement.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Once again, I think I can list several examples of ought claims that do not seem to capture an agent’s motivations. For example, if I was to say that you ought to invest in Tesla, in what way would I be capturing your motivations or my own motivations with that statement?
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Once again, I think there are plenty of ought claims that produce a good consequence but that consequence is good in a non-moral sort of way. I’m sorry to use the exact same example again but it really seems to apply to every kind of claim that you are making here. The example that I’m going to use is of course that of the ought claim regarding investing in Tesla. It seems that one can argue that one ought to invest in Tesla because it will produce a good consequence but it isn’t necessarily morally right to invest in Tesla. There’s actually an entire philosophical debate devoted to the question of whether or not we ought to behave morally. Just Google the phrase “Why be moral” and you will find lots of philosophy articles that try to answer the question regarding whether or not we ought to strive to do the morally good or the morally right thing. This question seems to imply that ought claims are not necessarily connected to moral claims.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I think that might be a good psychological explanation of how the agent comes to value what they value but I don’t think that this gives us any reason to think that the values are subjective rather than objective. In fact, I think this same psychological explanation could be given regarding why agents have any sort of beliefs that they have. For example, I could say that your belief that the Earth revolves around the sun is a unique manifestation that arose and developed as a result of the complex, dynamic interactions between your subjective states and how you experienced the surrounding physical and social environments. After all, you mostly believe that the Earth revolved around the Sun because you were taught that in school and you haven’t actually seen the empirical evidence for this view as this evidence could only be accessed by certain scientists and other such people. You believe that the testimony of those experts is reliable because you experience an intuition in your mind that you can trust those experts but your environment also played a very important role in putting that intuition into your mind. The point that I’m trying to make with this example is that we are pretty much always are influenced solely by our subjective experiences and our environment in literarily every belief that we hold. So, what you are saying about value here literally seems to apply to everything else as well.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I agree but I think evaluations are just educated guesses regarding what are actually better or worse decision options or what are better or worse state of affairs. Given this, I think someone can be wrong regarding how they evaluate a given decision option or state of affairs. For example, suppose that someone evaluated that being a professional boxer would be valuable for them because it would bring about meaningful achievement in their life which they think is valuable in a non-instrumental sort of way in the same way that a hedonist would think that pleasure is valuable. I tend to think that this person would be wrong in their evaluation because I don’t agree that there are objectively meaningful achievements that have value that go beyond the hedonistic improvement that those achievements bring. Given this, I wonder what you think about evaluations that people make which involve them making metaphysical claims about the objective existence of something weird and magical like “meaningful achievements”. It seems to me that you couldn’t believe that evaluations are completely subjective and yet also believe that they are sometimes objectively false because of the metaphysical foundation on which these evaluations rely on is false. I think you either have to claim that everyone is right regarding their evaluations or that evaluations are sometimes objectively false. If evaluations can be objectively false if they are based on a wrong metaphysical claim then it’s not clear to me why they also couldn’t be objectively true if they are based on a correct metaphysical claim.
I will respond to more of your comment later.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
So your basically a platonist when it comes values and morals? I get lost when you say that values exist and are objective. I can agree with you that values exist if I understand what you mean by "exist" to be the same thing as thoughts, language and mathematics, but I would not be able to use the term "exist" in the same way I would use it to describe physical objects without committing an equivocation, and this would require me to define a special kind of existence wherein such entities can be ontologically categorized.
When you describe values that objectivity exist is when my intuitions and understands hit a metaphysical wall. Objectivity requires an existence without minds. Without human minds there can be no conceptualization of mathematical sets. Mathematical sets are defined through human interpretations of objects in space, and thus cannot exist in the absence of our existence. For example, consider an centimeter. The centimeter is a human invention based on how we interpret objects in space, however, a centimeter in and of itself does not exist, although the symmetry of the objects it corresponds with can be said to exist. I have not explored deep enough into the philosophy of mathematics to confidently to make strong claims here. I am operating on a fairly reliable mathematical intuition though.
I would need you to provide an argument to support the claim that certain abstractions such as values or mathematical sets are ontologically mind-independent.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Value judgments such as those of heaviness, loudness, and brightness clearly are dependent upon a particular frame of reference, a context, or a background of information that against which such value judgments can be made. A stimulus that produces "sweetness" as a taste perception does not necessarily mean that the stimulus also produces "pleasantness" as a value judgement. Sweetness depends upon a context against which a value judgment can be made. Sweetness may imply a positive, negative or neutral value judgement all depending on the context of the taste perception. Sweetness corresponds with the relative concentration of sucrose a food contains and while a positive value judgement may coincide with the taste perception of sweetness within a range of varying contexts of modest sucrose concentrations, maximal sucrose concentrations necessarily correspond with maximal taste perceptions of sweetness, whereas neither maximal sucrose concentrations nor the corresponding maximal taste perceptions of sweetness correspond with the value judgement of pleasantness.
Sensory adaptation such as fatigue or adaptation of taste receptors also produce contextual effects with variations in value judgements reported by the same subject rating the pleasantness produced by the same concentrations of sucrose. The term "pretty" implies a positive value judgement that generally refers to the pleasantness experienced by visual perceptions. Brightness is a visual perception, but the relative brightness of a visual perception does not necessarily correspond with the pleasantness produced by the visual perception. Things can clearly be too bright or not bright enough, as well as, unpleasantly bright or pleasantly bright. Similarly, taste perceptions can be too sweet or unpleasantly sweet depending on the context of the stimulus effects on our nervous system.
Words such as "beautiful", "pretty", and "handsome" all describe something which looks good, and are therefore expressing a positive value judgement.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
It is contradictory for you to say that the act of rape, in and of itself, is deontologically wrong and right, immoral and moral, or as a decision option, has a relative worseness and betterness compared with the decision option to not rape. I already illustrated a reductio entailed by deontological logic (that an act, such as killing, is morally wrong no matter what the context or consequences of the act may be. It is immoral to kill one person and we oughtn't kill them, even if the consequence of not killing them means that every person, including the individual we oughtn't kill, will be killed and the consequence of killing the individual results in everyone else being spared of such a death.
It is not contradictory if we make it clear that there is a deontological threshold, even if we are unsure about the precise point at which the threshold is located, and that the moral status of the act depends upon whether or not this threshold is met. For example, I don't think it is morally right to kill one person to save five, such as in the trolley problem, because this logic leads to scenarios such as justified organ theft, and I think it would be immoral to kill a healthy person so to save five lives of people in need of an emergency organ transplant. However, if asked if it is morally right to kill one person in order to save ten, or twenty, or hundreds, or thousands, or millions of people, then, at some point, I would have to change my mind based on consequencialist terms because of the severity of the outcome. I don't know exactly where this threshold is between the range of killing one in order to save four and killing one in order to save a million—but there is definitely a threshold for me between four and a million.
With regards to the rest of what you said in this same post, what do you mean when you say you don't have a moral system? Are you morally indifferent to rape? How would a rape affect you if it resulted in having positive effects for you? What if a rape had a positive effect for everyone? What if a rape had a positive effect for everyone except you? What if a rape had a negative effect for you—or for everyone, or for everyone except you? Would you be indifferent to a rape in every imaginable context? Saying that rape can relate to betterness or worstness is a normative statement that nonetheless makes a value judgement since better implies more good and worse implies more bad. In order to evaluate that something is better, it necessarily must be contrasted against something else and that something else is a standard of goodness in cases where you express something is better than, and conversely, a standard of badness in cases where you express that something is worse than.
What do you mean by an act or a consequence related to "betterness" or "worseness"? How do you hold a system of values if such values do not motivate you towards or against a given action in any context? Are you a non-cognitivist and a value realist? How does egoistic hedonic utilitarianism not factor in such values and calculate a moral perspective for you? If you could destroy a hypothetical box containing the universe (thereby destroying everything in the universe) and by doing so increase your own hedonic utility, would you?
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I am referring to moral ought claims, which it is not apparently clear that your example is expressing without additional context. Nonetheless, whether it expresses a moral ought or not, I have already explained that it is a subjective authority which gives rise to a compulsive motivation to perform a certain action that is only necessarily applicable to the agent themselves. Not to deny that similar values coincide between agents, or that the values that one agent has can be expressed in such a way that compells another agent to perform an action. Such interactions can be common, even ubiquitous, between multiple agents, just not logically necessitated to based of an objective standard that lies outside the agent's subjective states.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
This is incoherent to me. How can a consequence be evaluated as good through your perspective but good in a non-moral sort of way? I can think of nothing other than a play, or misuse of words, removing any meaning assigned to them by anyone other than yourself. The example that you repetitively offer is an example where you, a separate agent, expresses a vague ought claim that may or may not be moral in context, as if the subjective force compelling you to act or to hold such a belief, is necessarily applicable to compell me. I have said many times that this is possible but not necessary and utterly dependent upon the subjective states of the agents in question. We do not have the the ability to compell every other person to be motivated towards a particular means based on an ends that we value.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Your example is a claim that is objectively tethered to objects of our observable reality, thus it has empirical force which is much more compelling than the emotive or subjective force behind evaluative claims that express an attitude towards a thing, and one that is not necessarily mutually compatible with the values of others. If construct a geometrical model with the sun at the center, and the planets rotating around it, the model will make an empirical prediction that as Earth travels around the sun it would overtake the more distant plants and this would be an observable phenomenon from earth of a retrograde motions of the planets. Later, more empirical evidence was gathered with a new understanding of motion (known as Newtons laws of motion), that made precise empirical predictions for the positions of the planets as they orbit the sun. As we came to realize the vastness of the distance between us and the stars, we came to realize that there was indeed an observable parallax effect seen in the stars, however tiny due to the much greater distance between us and them than that which was previously calculated.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
An untested evaluation of where your physical limitations lie, or what you can physically endure most certainly can be right or wrong because it depends upon the information gained through actual experience. This however does not contradict the feelings towards meaningful achievement that the subject attaches to the feat of overcoming yet untested challenges that very few have overcome. The subject will evaluate what it would be like to be a professional boxer from a perspective that values what can be seen from an external point of view, of which such value are merely reflections of the social values that are attributes to certain characteristics of a professional boxer that makes them so attractive for so many. Be it fearlessness, intimidation, physical ability, mental and physical endurance, fame, life-styles, etc, all of which would remain attractive features leading up to the realization of the sacrifices required gained through actual experience. These values may slowly fade or reverse over time as new information comes in to inform us of other potentially valuable things, or even much more quickly as a result of a realization to the extreme demands required for what was viewed as modest values. For example, many young boys hold an untested evaluation that values what it would be like to be a police officer, though as experience and additional information come in, the value many boys once held becomes disillusioned and with the possibility of reversing such a value.
If someone says "I think boxers are cool" and you think that they are objectively wrong in their evaluation, then offer proof beyond the fact that such a view is likely to change over time as new information from new experiences come in. The evaluation is temporally bound to a specific time and place where the totality of experiences that informed and values that influenced the subject were in a certain order and arrangement specific to that moment and the series of moments that lead to it. You cannot prove an evaluation wrong by removing it from its appropriate contexts such as the time or the configuration of values that influence such things at a specific moment in time.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I'm happy to share my thoughts here as that is a very interesting question to think about, but the example of "meaningful achievements" doesn't quite capture the essence of what it is you are asking about. I think people who make evaluative judgements of a metaphysical existence about something they believe to be objective and magical is completely and transparently true if the express themselves sincerely and there is usually little reason to doubt that they are.
As a case in point, consider the Christian God. This is a belief of many that is metaphysical, objective and magical in nature. The fact that the Christian God almost certainly doesn't exist, or the fact that there is little reason to hold such a belief, for some, does not mean that the subjects who hold the metaphysical belief that the Christian God does exist cannot value such beliefs. Likewise, if someone truly believed that they could have control over future events, and they truly valued this belief, then their evaluative judgment would be true despite how erroneous the belief is.
The value is a property that resides within the subjective states of the agent and is not a property of some external source. The value is attached to the belief that the subject holds and thus is not dependent upon the metaphysical truth that the belief expresses. If you believe you have a guardian angel protecting you, then you likely value the comfort and ease of mind that such a belief is likely to bring. The fact that you feel comfort and ease of mind by virtue of holding this belief is an objectively true assessment of your subjective states.
So, yes, it is possible to have an objectively true evaluation of a belief that is metaphysically false. Of course everyone is right regarding their evaluations, as long as you keep in mind that their evaluations are based in subjectivity, contextually bound to a moment in time and the set of values which arose as a result of the one's totality of experiences that lead up to the moment, is not necessarily compatible with others, and is not applicable outside of the subjective state of an agent—though it may be similar enough to be compatible between any number of agents that hold similar values.
I think you misunderstood what I meant when I was talking about prudential values. Prudential values are often an umbrella term that is used in philosophy to describe values regarding mundane and non-moral decisions that we make in our life. For example, there are financial decisions that we make in our life like the decision that we might make to invest into Tesla. It doesn’t seem to be a moral decision because it is outside of the scope of what is considered to be moral philosophy. For example, if I was to write an article about why you should invest into Tesla, it would very likely get rejected by a journal that deals with moral philosophy because they would tell me that it’s not moral philosophy. Rather, they would tell me that this article belongs in the personal finance journal or an investment journal. Another type of prudential and non-moral category of ethics is self-help ethics. Self-help philosophers give advice on how you should improve your life and the advice is often similar to the advice that a therapist might give. Epicurus was an Ancient Greek self-help philosopher. He made lots of ought claims and claims about how you ought to behave. Nonetheless, he wasn’t really a moral philosopher as what we might call moral philosophy seemed to have been popularized and started by medieval Christian philosophers like St Augustine. Ethicists before then were mostly just prudential and self-help kinds of ethicists.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
No, I wouldn’t say that I’m a Platonist about when it comes to value. I don’t believe that there is an actual world of concepts where all concepts are located. Rather, I think that truthfulness of concepts exists without a location because I don’t think things need to necessarily have a location in order to exist. You expressed your belief that even mathematical claims are not objectively true so I will provide you with another example that I think it will be more difficult for you to bite the bullet on. Take the Epistemic claim that our sensory organs give us access to objective truth. You seem to believe that it is objectively the case that our sensory organs give us access to objective truth. But, the truthfulness of the Epistemic claim couldn’t be found anywhere in the Universe and the universe doesn’t inform us that our sensory organs give us access to objective truth. So, if it’s objectively the case that our sensory organs give us access to objective truth then the objective truthfulness of that claim has to exist outside of space and time.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
This is the part that I disagree with. I think most people do derive positive experiences from looking at something pretty but I don’t think that it is necessarily the case and thus I wouldn’t say that prettiness implies a positive value judgement. For example, I think it makes sense to say that a particular house is too pretty and that it would be better if it had more blemishes.
What you do you mean by “morally” in the last sentence of your post? The way that I understand what people mean when they say that something is moral or immoral is that they are talking about the kinds of considerations that a typical moral philosopher would wish to discuss. I’m not emotionally indifferent to rape as rape makes me upset but that doesn’t mean that I like to talk about ought claims like a typical moral philosopher would want to talk about ought claims. If someone were to ask me for advice regarding whether or not they should rape someone, I would probably just call the police on them but if I wasn’t able to call the police on them for some reason then my instinct would be to persuade them not to rape like a self-help philosopher would try to persuade someone to do something rather than trying to persuade them like a moral philosopher normally tries to persuade someone.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Then that rape would be good because it wouldn’t even have a victim. I don’t know if you could even call it rape anymore.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Then, that rape would constitute a bad state of affairs for me and a good state of affairs for everyone else. I would probably have reason to prevent that rape from happening but I think there’s some probability that the positive effect that the rape has on everyone else would give me enough reason to decide to allow the rape to happen. As I have mentioned earlier, I subscribe to a probabilistic theory of truth so I tend to think that each value claim has a certain probability of being true and a certain probability of being false. My job as a decision making philosopher is to create a hierarchy of plausibility regarding a given decision making dilemma. The judgement call that I would make is that I should probably prevent this rape from occurring because I’m the one that would have to endure the suffering of that rape and I wouldn’t get to enjoy the pleasure that others receive from the rape. I think whether or not we have reason to pursue pleasure or suffering is probably dependent on who is the person that gets to experience that pleasure or suffering. I also recognize the possibility of me being wrong about that and this is why I’m at least a little tempted to think that maybe if there is enough hedonistic benefit for others then maybe it’s worth a little hedonistic harm for myself.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
No, I never said that I was indifferent to rape.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I think decision options exist on a hierarchy by which each particular decision option is in relation with all the other possible decision options. Those relations are that of betterness and worseness. Let suppose that you are deciding whether or not you should date your friend named Sue. You have the decision option of dating Sue and you have all the other things that you might be thinking about doing instead of dating Sue. Let’s suppose that you figure that if you don’t date Sue, then you will decide to go the bar with your friends instead during the time that you would have spent dating Sue. Or, you figure maybe you would spend that time on this philosophy forum instead. So, there are 3 decision options that you are considering here.
I think that how you ought to evaluate those decision options will depend on what final aims you think are most likely to be objectively true. So, now I think it makes sense for you to create a hierarchy of plausibility regarding all the possible final aims that you can pursue. Final aims are things that you pursue for their own sake with no deeper instrumental explanation for why that thing is worth pursuing. It seems to me that the most reasonable candidate for a final aim worth pursuing is the final aim of minimizing suffering in your life. There doesn’t seem to be any deeper instrumental explanation for why minimizing suffering in your own life is good and it seems most obvious that it’s better to have less suffering than more suffering and this is obvious to most people because they know what suffering is and what it feels like so they have a kind of introspective evidence for their own suffering being something that is worth avoiding. The 2nd most plausible candidate for a final aim is pursuing pleasure in your own life and it seems to be a plausible candidate for much of the same reasons that suffering is a plausible candidate. I think it’s slightly less plausible and less important as a final aim as I think it’s easier for us to be indifferent about pleasure than it is for us to be indifferent about suffering. Then, there are myriad of other possible final aims further down the plausibility hierarchy of final aims. I don’t think we have to go any further down that hierarchy to resolve this particular decision making dilemma.
Now, it is time to evaluate how each of the decision options that we have considered will help us minimize suffering and maximize pleasure in our own life. Let’s start with how each decision option will impact the amount of suffering in our own lives. Dating Sue might cause suffering because there seems to be a decent chance that you might get rejected after a few dates and you might get heartbroken. There’s also a small but realistic chance that you might get her pregnant after having sex with her a few times after dates. Having children seems very likely to cause quite a great degree of suffering especially if it’s with a partner who you have only dated briefly(though, that might depend on your psychology). There are also other ways that dating Sue could cause you to suffer like maybe the dates will be boring or paying for those dates will require to work more in the future. There is also some suffering that could be caused by choosing to go to the bar with your friends. There’s probably a high probability that you will get hungover. There might be a small chance that you will get arrested for drunk driving or accidentally get a girl that you met at a bar pregnant. The “sit at home and go to philosophy forum” option also has some potential for suffering. You might get frustrated while trying to explain a point to someone or you might get stuck talking to a rude asshole. Also, you might feel loneliness or despair from not having a social life depending on your psychology. Then, you would do the same sort of analysis regarding what kind of pleasure you might receive from all three decision options. I personally think that avoiding suffering is quite a bit more important than getting pleasure so I would really just end my analysis here.
I would then open up a document program on my phone and assign what I call a significance factor to each consideration. This is basically meant to be an educated guess regarding how much weight you should assign each consideration. For example, let’s say you think that the probability of you getting rejected by Sue and you suffering as a result of that is something like 3% and we will assign the significance factor of 10 to the total unpleasantness of that suffering. We then follow the same process with each consideration that we have listed. We make an educated guess about the probability of each event happening and we assign a significance factor. The first significance factor that we have assigned is meant to be the comparison point that we should use to determine the significance factor for the other considerations. So, we might say that getting Sue pregnant would be roughly 10 times worse than getting rejected by Sue would be. So, the significance factor of getting Sue pregnant will be 100. After we figure out the probability of each consideration occurring and the significance factor of each consideration, we then multiply those 2 variables together to get what I call the “probability-adjusted significance factor”. We then add up all the probability-adjusted significance factor scores and we get a pretty good educated guess regarding how each decision option will contribute to suffering in our own lives. We can then put these 3 decision options in a hierarchy of betterness and worseness.
Of course, there’s still a pretty much guaranteed chance that the hierarchy that we have constructed here isn’t the best possible hierarchy regarding this decision dilemma. There are so many additional factors that we haven’t analyzed and it’s possible that some of our probabilities were way off or that the significance factors that we have assigned underestimated or overestimated the badness of certain experiences. Nonetheless, I think it’s more likely than not that we end up making better decisions if we take the time to do a thorough analysis of each decision option rather than just rely on our desires and emotions to make the decision for us. I think there is theoretically a perfect analysis of that decision dilemma that could be made and that there are different levels of plausibility to each given approach to this decision making dilemma. This is why I would consider myself to be a value realist
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
I'm not as familiar with that particular term. I think we need to do some semantic unpacking because we seem to be arguing past one another. First, let's agree upon a definition for what makes a statement moral. Would you agree that the essence of morality lies in it's connection to action? For example, when making a moral judgment, it seems we are fundamentally concerned with an evaluation of an action. Every moral philosopher considers morality in terms of what you 'should' do or how things 'should' be. What most compells us to explore morality comes as we reflect upon our actions, asking ourselves, "What should I do?" or "What is the right thing to do?". As a result of such questions, what we are motivated towards achieving in ethics is to provide ourselves with answers. So, when making a moral claim, we are actually providing an answer, such as "You ought to do this," or "You should do what you ought to do", that, if true, establishes that someone has a reason to act or be a certain way.
Even with your statement, though I agree it is does not seem to be, there are moral underpinnings and presuppositions embedded in our meaning. Any statement that prescribes an action (or suggests an action) be taken, if called into question, will reveal moral assumptions. A Socratic approach would elucidate this, but that requires you to follow line of questioning and that is not easy done through text. But, i could give it a go, I suppose.
1. Why should I invest in Tesla?
I appreciate the effort of explaining how you approach decision options and analyzing future outcomes, but that is a bit too much for me, and a bit of a stretch for you too, I think. I mean, we can't foresee the future and there are way too many variables to speculate that far. I would much rather like to understand your view rather than your assessment regarding the views of others. In your example, both dating Sue, going to the bar with my friends, and interacting on the philosophy forum, all seem to be too vague to evaluate, but nonetheless, the acts in and of themselves seem to be, at best, moral, and morally neutral, at worst. Instead of analyzing the unforeseeable future, we should of analyzed the broader context of each scenario. For example, what are my intentions for going on a date with Sue? What are her expectations? What kind of girl is she? What is the context of her life? And the same with the bar of philosophy forum, a broader context is needed in order to evaluate one action to another and weigh outcomes and reasons for each action, in order, and within a more cognitively accessible duration whereby this sequence of events takes place.
All this is further complicating things. I still don't understand your position on matters such as rape, or killing, or how you lack a moral system, etc, and I understand that you need more context, but a general take would actually quite well inform me. I just want to ask you a few questions to fill in the gaps for myself.
What is your view on rape, in general?
If you had the ability to stop a typical rape from occurring, without risking any personal harm, would you stop it? If so, why? If not, why?
If you had an opportunity to save five women from getting raped, by taking action with no risk to yourself, but at the cost of another woman getting raped, a woman who would have otherwise not been had it been for your involvement, would you?
Please answer from your point of view, what you would say and what you think the right thing to do would be.
I actually wouldn’t agree with that because it seems that there are plenty of moral philosophers that focus more on consequences or personality traits when thinking about what constitutes moral behavior. For example, Jeremy Bentham was a moral philosopher and he didn’t believe that actions were universally right or wrong and he also didn’t necessarily think that we had moral duties. He instead thought that we should try to maximize happiness and that constituted moral behavior. In addition, many religious thinkers would morally judge someone based on how much their personality is characterized by virtue rather than sin. Sin would often be understood by the intentions and desires of the person rather than the actual actions performed by the person. Intuitively, it seems possible for someone to believe that they ought to act immorally. For example, imagine a scammer that scams people to make money. They believe that they ought to scam people but they also probably believe that what they are doing is immoral. Those people just don’t care about morality and they care about their financial welfare more. Their financial welfare falls under the umbrella of what academic philosophers call “prudential values”. I would recommend searching for the term “prudential” on a website called philarchive.org if you want to get a verification that this is a legit term that gets used by academic philosophers. You will find some academic essays that are written regarding things related to the concept of prudential values. Also, you can search for the term “prudential” into the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy and you will see how it usually gets used in the many articles that are written with this concept in mind.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I agree that a broader context will be ideal and that would help us create a better analysis. My whole point is that I think that taking the time to analyze each decision option will generally lead to better decision making. Obviously, having more information about each decision option leads to a more accurate analysis and better decision making as well. I’m arguing that we can’t just reduce decision making down to people’s desires and the social influence that they receive. We also have to take into account the amount of time that they spend analyzing their decision options and how competent they are at analyzing their decision options.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I find the idea of raping someone to be repugnant on a personal level because I don’t understand why someone would prefer non-consensual sex over consensual sex. It seems that it feels so much better to have sex with someone that is enthusiastic about having sex with you and actually tries to make you feel good. I don’t understand why some people would want to have sex with someone that doesn’t want to have sex with them if it would actually be always easier to find someone that does want to have sex with you. Also, I find the idea of forcing someone to have sex with you to be disgusting. It causes me suffering to think about such stuff.
If I could stop a typical rape then I obviously would since this would likely get me to viewed as a hero and it would be quite likely that I would get a financial reward for it as well. Though, even if I don’t get a financial reward, I would still want to stop the rape because it would give me pleasure to help someone who is being raped and I wouldn’t feel guilty about harming a rapist.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
It depends on what would give me the most pleasure and the least amount of suffering. Which decision option would make me look more heroic in the eyes of my family and society? What reward or punishment would I receive for choosing either decision option? I would have to know the specific scenario to answer this question most accurately. If all those other considerations were equal, then I think it would be better to prevent the 5 women from being raped at the expense of the single woman who does get raped. It seems to me that this is the prima facie better outcome.
I want to point out that it seems that people would abandon many of their evaluative beliefs if they abandoned the metaphysical beliefs that are grounding those evaluative beliefs. For example, it seems to me that I don’t value having “meaningful” achievements because I think the concept of meaningful achievements is incoherent and I think believing in the existence of objectively meaningful achievements is like believing in unicorns. So, I don’t think it has anything to do with my emotional predispositions or my desires. Rather, it is because I lack the cognitive intuition that would allow me to believe in meaningful achievements that makes it impossible for me to value meaningful achievements. Also, most people who do value having meaningful achievements value having those achievements because they believe those achievements have a metaphysical existence. If they didn’t believe those achievements had a solid metaphysical basis to them then they would probably not value those achievements because they wouldn’t even understand what people are referring to when they speak of meaningful achievements.
Now, my question was very specific and I don't believe that your objection accurately represents what it is that I'm trying to get you to concede to. Here is my exact statement:
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Take notice of what it is that im specifically suggesting to be the primary focus of morality. I'm saying that the focus of moral philosophy is, in essence, centered around human activities; the focus is upon an intimate connection to actions or behaviors. This connection to action is best captured by the ethical modalities represented by each of the three normative approaches: consequentialism, virtue ethics, and deontology.
There is a particular mode of action, a mechanism, or a means whereby the ethical framework of each of these three normative approaches is either focused upon, or is making a fundamental connection to, actions or behaviors. For example, within a deontological framework (i.e., a duty framework), the focus is on moral duties and obligations with the ethical modality towards performing the correct action. You appear to concede to this point within the language used to express the reasons supporting your very objection—as seen in the following.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
"...many moral philosophers that focus more on consequences or personality traits **when thinking about what constitutes moral BEHAVIOR**."
Your argument implies that much of the attention of moral philosophy is either focused through the lense of consequential ethics, or focused otherwise through the lense of virtue ethics. I would agree, however, only upon the inclusion of the omitted lense of deontological ethics. Your statement appeals to a proportion of moral philosophers represented by two of the three classes of normative ethical theories.
First, the consequencialist (i.e., outcome-based) approach, wherein philosophers pay particular attention to the results of an action or a behavior in order to make a moral judgment. As you might put it, the proponents of consequentialism represent many moral philosophers who focus more on consequences when thinking about what constitutes moral behavior.
Second, the personality trait-based or character-based approach of virtue ethics, wherein virtue ethicists assume that we acquire virtue through practice. That an action is moral if, and only if, it is an action which moral exemplars (i.e., a virtuous person) would carry out in an identical scenario. Virtue ethics is agent-based rather than action-based (i.e., focusing on the person rather than the action), but it nonetheless focuses on the virtues possessed by an agent (i.e., the moral character—which includes personality traits—of a person) based upon the type of actions an agent is carrying out. In other words, and in anticipation of the foreseeable objections to a connection between virtue ethics and action: though virtue ethics focuses on a virtuous person, a virtuous person, as defined by virtue ethics, is a person who ACTS virtuously.
Virtue ethics, in contrast with deontology or consequentialism—that otherwise focus on the ethical duties of the agent; the rules to guide the agents behavior (as with the former), or (as with the latter) that focus on the consequences of the agents particular actions; the outcomes subsequently produced by an agents particular behavior—may, initially, be seen as the exception to my universally stated proposition ("the essence of morality lies in it's connection to action"), and thus form its negation on pain of contradiction (e.g., "All moral theories are connected to action" and "There exists a moral theory that isn't connected to action"). This is not necessarily the case.
Upon further inspection, it becomes clear that, while virtue ethics is a normative ethic that emphasizes the moral character of an agent, rather than emphasizing the duties (deontology) or the consequences (consequentialism) that either dictate or result from our actions or behaviors, virtue ethics nonetheless remains intimately connected to action. Virtue ethics, the agent-based rebuttal notwithstanding, remains a normative ethic that despite lacking an emphasis with regard to action, as is the case with action-based theories, is nonetheless connected to action, and thus represents a normative ethic that is consistent with the view that morality is *CONNECTED to action*. Virtue ethics is connected to action because a moral exemplar, or virtuous person, is defined as such by practicing such acts as being honest, being just, being benevolent, being generous, being wise, etc, thereby developing the requisite behavior and moral character necessary to be a virtuous person.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Bentham was a consequencialist moral philosopher, as a hedonic utilitarian who evaluated actions based upon their consequences. Bentham regarded the morality status of actions as 'good' based on their tendency to promote happiness or pleasure and 'bad' based on their tendency to promote unhappiness or suffering. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are the quintessential developers of the principle of utility and the consequencialist derivative of utilitarianism as a normative ethical theory. Utilitarianism is necessarily connected to action because measures various actions based on their outcomes with imaginary units known as utils—representing the amount of utility an action provided.
(Unrelated)
I appreciate your references to sources that can better educate me with regard to terms such as 'prudential' and phrases such as 'prudential values' for their meanings within the lexicon of philosophy or as philosophical nomenclatures.
I would like to emphasize that my question which shortly follows this statement is a meta-ethical one and as such I will point out the problems I have with your answer.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
As a meta-ethical question, we cannot properly answer it with such terms as "Repugnant" as you did here:
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
We cannot appeal to such normatively-loaded terms because in doing so we are begging the question. If I ask what makes rape immoral on your view and you reply thereafter with something along the lines of, "Rape is immoral because rape is repugnant", then you are simply assuming the immorality of rape by using a term that is synonymous with 'Bad' within your premise. It is reducible to a tautology since the term 'Repugnant' can easily be defined as: "Unpleasant or disgusting" and thus to say something is repugnant is to describe something with an adjective that is synonymous to 'Bad' or similar adjectives that likewise evaluate a noun in negative or otherwise implicitly immoral terms. It is analytically equivalent to the argument "Rape is bad because rape is bad".
Your reasoning, as shown by the following, exhibits another problem that I would like to point out.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
If asked for reasons to support your view that rape is immoral, the above premise represents an error in your reasoning. It is a fallacy in informal logic known as, Argument from incredulity, because what you are asserting is, essentially, that the proposition "Rape is moral", or in other words, "Rape is good", must be false because you cannot understand how it could be true since it goes against your personal expectations or beliefs (that someone would prefer non-consensual sex over consensual sex).
(Brief digression)
On a separate note, whether or not someone prefers non-consensual sex over consensual sex has nothing to do with the issue of whether rape is good or bad. One could prefer consensual sex over non-consensual sex and still perform the act of rape. Furthermore, such a preference one way or the other doesn't provide us any information about whether rape is good or bad.
(End of digression)
This way of reasoning is fallacious because your inability to understand how a statement such as, "Rape is good" can possibly be true gives us no further information about whether the statement is actually true or false. For example, if a fundamentalist Christian asserts the proposition, "God exists" predicated on their inability to understand or imagine a world wherein God doesn't exist, provides no additional information other than appealing to their own ignorance and obstinacy.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
To make another tangential point, this is a very naive understanding of why people sometimes rape. It fails to consider the perspectives of those unfortunate individuals who are extremely unattractive in either physical appearance, social demeanor, or both. Also, people who suffer from pathological afflictions that prevent them from participating in otherwise normal social interactions necessary for sexual relationships, yet experience normal, or even hyperactive sexual drives. It also fails to consider rape through a psychopathic perspective or a sadistic personality or under the influence of schizophrenic delusion, etc. Please prioritize my main points over my tangential ones.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
This is another instance of begging the question with the term "Disgusting" followed by an emotive response in place of actual reasoning.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
This commits you to a consequencialist position with regard to this scenario. It also commits you to hold the position that a rape can be justified so long as it results in an approximately more favorable outcome of at least one order of magnitude or greater. We can imagine a scenario such as human organ trafficking or the forced organ harvests of humans where one human is sacrificed in order to save five or more other humans who would otherwise die without acquiring the organs of the human who is being sacrificed. Since according to such consequentialist logic, one such reductio that would be necessarily entailed would be the view that such actions are justified so long as it results in favorable results (such as sacrificing one to save five). Such logic promotes the notion that some humans are worth less than others and that human life is just another commodity with a price.
This commits you to support forms of slavery and forms of genocide so long as the end results in a net positive gain that measures at least in a 5:1 ratio. So, it follows, then, that a majority of a society's population consisting of at least 80 percent of the society's members could justifiably enslave the remaining 20 percent of the society's members who make up a sufficient minority of the society's population, so long as there are favorable results gained by the 80 percent thereby compensating for the unfavorable results endured by the 20 percent. Moreover, it additionally follows, then, that an entire nation or ethnic group could justifiably be completely exterminated, holocausted, or genocided, so long as the unfavorable outcome endured by the single group also resulted in favorable outcomes for at least five other nations or ethnic groups with a relatively equivalent number of individuals contained within or with a relatively equivalent capacities to experience suffering or pleasure in totality.
Putting these normative ethical dilemmas aside, I want to know what your answer is with regards to the meta-ethical question: is rape moral, immoral, or amoral—or otherwise under your evaluations considered to be good, bad, or neutral? For context, consider the previous ethical dilemma of causing the rape of 1 woman in order to prevent the rape of 5 women—with just that information to work with. What is your decision? Why is rape, in general, moral—otherwise considered good or immoral—otherwise considered bad on your view alone?
I apologize for the lapse in time between my responses, but my intellectual resources were entirely needed elsewhere in my personal life.
What on Earth are you even trying to begin to talk about? Cool name btw, was wondering where it came from/what it meant to you?
A criminal action is a criminal action and will be neutralized and/or punished to the fullest extent of the law. Any person who does not believe this is a savage and will be punished.. heh, even if they try to duck out and think death will save them.. I am proud to say, this is not so.
Quoting Outlander
This is a variation of a series of popular thought experiments known as "The trolley problem". It illustrates a hypothetical scenario that presents an ethical dilemma that has become a common exercise in moral philosophy. I used a similar thought experiment here but instead of illustrating a classical variation of the hypothetical scenario, I framed a nuanced variation based on the contexts of examples both @TheHedoMinimalist and myself have presented to one another in our attempt to understand and represent each others, as well as our own, positions and disagreements with regard to normative and meta-ethical beliefs. Excuse the provocative nature of such illustrations as they are merely rhetorical devises intended to tease out emotive responses underlying ethical presuppositions.
Quoting Outlander
In reading "Neurology and the Soul" by Oliver Sacks, wherein he mentions that "Even in the work of C. S. Sherrington, the founder of modern neurophysiology, we find an explicitly Cartesian viewpoint: thus Sherrington regarded his decerebrate dogs as "Cartesian trigger-puppets" deprived of mind; he felt that physiology—at least the sort of reflex physiology he set himself to study—needed to be free of any "interference" by will or mind; and he wondered whether these, in some sense, did not transcend physiology and might not form a separate principle in human nature."
http://danbhai.com/rsns/sacks_neurology_and_the_soul.htm
Quoting Outlander
This is a discussion in normative ethical theories and a meta-ethical analysis of the semantic content of moral language as well as the logical force behind normative, moral, and prescriptive statements in comparison with the logical force exerted by positive, or non-evaluative descriptive statements when inserted into the framework of an argument as the constituents (premises and conclusion) therein.
Law is what a society creates for a basic system of governance in order to enforce some standard of behaviour necessary for the success of the community. There is very little attention to detail in law which is very sloppy and prone to make mistakes. You seem as if you represent a judge, jury and executioner in your statements. A lack in belief makes someone a savage in need of punishment? Laws are under construction and destruction all the time and this is a result of fluctuations in what we believe in as a society. Does this make every well organized body pushing for legislative change savages?
On your view, is an act such as murder always wrong? This would be a deontological view on normative ethics, but deontology alone takes us to absurd conclusions on its own. Consider the famous trolley problem. Imagine yourself near a train station wherefrom you are observing two sets of workers on two divergent tracks; five working on the main track and one working on a side track nearby.
Suddenly, you notice a runaway trolley barreling down the main track towards the five workers who are unaware and busy with their work. The trolley is sure to kill all five of them in seconds, this you are certain of. However, you then just happen to notice that you are standing by a lever that if pulled would divert the trolley away from the main set of tracks, thus saving the five workers, but the one worker on the side track would then be killed instead. Do you pull the lever?
You have two options:
1. Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five workers on the main track.
2. Pull the lever, thus diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill the one worker.
Murder is murder right? If you pull the lever you are committing a murder. A person who would have otherwise had been just fine will die as a direct result of your actions if you pull the lever.
Do you pull it?
Earlier in our discussion, I believe that you have stated that you think someone has to think that rape is always wrong or rape is always not wrong. This is confusing to me because pretty much every consequentialist thinks that rape is usually bad but it can sometimes be good if it produces a good consequence. My whole point is that it’s perfectly common for moral philosophers to say that the wrongness of a particular act like rape is dependent on something else that is entirely separate from the action itself.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I want to point out that I think there is an important distinction between actions and behaviors and you asked me earlier if I agreed that morality was based on actions. Well, I think it’s a lot more plausible to think that it might be based on something more broad like behaviors. But, I don’t think that means that morality is based on actions. Also, I’m not understanding how you are able to smuggle the concept of moral duties into your understanding of morality if there are plenty of moral realist philosophers that don’t believe in the existence of moral duties. They think that an act can be morally wrong but you don’t have a duty to avoid performing that act. Rather, performing the act is bad in a supererogatory sort of way. This is kinda similar to how most people think that it is moral to donate to charity but you are not morally obligated to donate to charity.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I wouldn’t call being honest or being benevolent an act. Rather, I think it’s more like a behavior pattern or even something like a thought process as I think these characteristics do not always even need to manifested in behavior. For example, “being benevolent” might be understood as having compassion for others and wishing others the best. I don’t think this requires you to do anything as I think a person can be compassionate with their thoughts alone. In addition, I must ask you. Do you think that believing something or desiring something is an act also? You seem to be defining acts in a very broad way that is counterintuitive to me. Like, there are Epistemic ought claims that could be made like the claim that “you ought to believe that the Earth is round”. Believing that the Earth is round isn’t an act and yet there are actually academic philosophers out there that would go as far as saying that it’s immoral to believe that the Earth is flat. I’ve actually just looked through a collection of titles of academic essays about the topic of duties and I found quite a bit of essays that talked about the possibility of there even being Epistemic duties. Epistemic duties are basically duties that you might have to believe certain things and avoid believing other things. You actually find something like this in most mainstream religions like Christianity it seems. For example, most Christians seem to believe that you have something akin to a duty to believe that Jesus was the son of God who died for your sins. But, that seems to imply that they believe that you have a duty to hold a particular mindset rather than perform an action(at least based on my understanding of what actions are).
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I wasn’t trying to use this as a reason for thinking that rape is bad universally. Rather, it is just a psychological description of how I feel about rape. That psychological fact about me influences whether or not I experience pleasure or suffering from watching a rape take place.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Whether or not I prefer consensual sex or non-consensual sex effects whether or not I would take pleasure watching a rape and whether or not I would take pleasure in rescuing someone from being rape. Once again, I think that whether or not a particular rape is bad is determined by a myriad of factors and it seems that we can’t just say that rape is always bad. That’s not what I was trying to say. I was trying to tell you that I would stop the average rape because I think that stopping that rape would cause a hedonistic improvement in my own life.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Well, those people could get a prostitute or an escort it seems. That seems to be a way better option for them than trying to rape someone. Also, there’s plenty of really good pornography on the Internet and plenty of great ways to experiment with masturbation. Also, they could experiment with buying women’s dirty underwear and that could also add an important olfactory dimension which I think can greatly enhance one’s sexual satisfaction.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Well, I would just say that you ought not have any of those personality traits either. I think that sadistic and psychopathic individuals do not have a very good hedonistic welfare. Rather, I think a person with a personality similar to someone like Epicurus would likely find the best success at having a high degree of hedonistic welfare.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
No, I don’t think that it does because I think that the first thing that I need to analyze before deciding whether or not I should prevent the rape of the 5 women is which decision option would be hedonistically better for me. You seemed to have asked me to set those considerations aside and because of this I chose to answer the dilemma with consideration that I ultimately consider to be of secondary importance.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Well, I would first want to consider how this organ harvest would effect my own hedonistic welfare but if you are asking me to set those considerations aside then I must point out that I actually don’t think that saving the lives of 5 would necessarily produce a good consequence. This is because I have a much more positive opinion of death than most other people do mainly because if I allow the 5 people to die then I might actually be preventing those individuals from having to undergo the potentially painful organ transplant and any suffering that might come afterwards. In addition, I think allowing the 5 people to die would pretty much ensure that nothing in life can make them suffer again if we assume that they wouldn’t be suffering in an afterlife or something like that. So, I think this case is quite different from the rape case because the badness of death seems to be much more speculative than the badness of the suffering that will very likely be caused by rape.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I don’t think that it does. I think it actually supports the logic that all human lives are pretty equal as you wouldn’t allow the 5 people to die just because you have to keep that one person alive. I actually think it’s kinda discriminatory to value the life of this single person over the life of the 5 people.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Well, I don’t think there could ever realistically be a genocide that would be beneficial to a majority of people. At the very least, there would be probably be a more efficient way of benefitting a majority of people than a genocide. Which kinda brings up another problem that I have with these sorts of trolley problem scenarios. I think they leave out an important 3rd option that people have to just say “I don’t have time to resolve this moral dilemma, I need to spend my time helping a world in a more significant way”. This would basically translate to the person not committing the genocide only because that person determined that the time and effort that it would take to commit
the genocide could be spend helping the overall population in a better way.
I’m assuming that you’re going to want me to assume that the hypothetical genocide in question is the absolute best way to help the world(which is extremely unlikely I must add). If there really was some kind of a super magical genocide that is the absolute best way to help the world, then why wouldn’t I support such an amazingly supernatural genocide(assuming that it also doesn’t harm me)? This case would seem to bypass every reasonable explanation that one could give for a genocide being bad. I think you might as well talk about a hypothetical genocide that doesn’t violate a categorical imperative or talk about a hypothetical genocide that happens to be virtuous for some reason. I think every ethical theory has these cases where you can posit an extreme hypothetical to say that something like genocide is acceptable. Unless you think that genocide is bad by definition like some sort of analytic truth like the analytic truth of bachelors being unmarried men, I don’t see how being a deontologist necessitates that genocide is always wrong because it wouldn’t be wrong presumably if a hypothetical genocide is such that you don’t have a duty to avoid performing it. Such hypothetical genocides does not seem to me to be as far fetched as the hypothetical genocide that happens to produce the best consequence possible.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I guess I would say that rape is amoral because I’m not a moral realist but I think it’s almost always bad from the standpoint of general decision theory.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
My first consideration is how each decision option would impact my own hedonistic welfare. If all things are completely equal by that criteria(and they probably won’t be), then I would choose to save the 5 women from being raped. Though, I suspect that if allow that one woman to get raped then I would get condemned by my loved ones and society and this would make my life hedonistically worse. Given this, I would probably realistically choose to just do nothing.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Actually, I was describing the moral perspectives of a strict deontologist, not what I, myself, think, but a particular view in normative ethics. A consequencialist, as the name implies, focuses on the outcomes that occur as a result of an action when it comes to moral evaluations, whereas the evaluations of a strict deontologist would only focus on the action itself. I was trying to explain how making statements such as "Rape is bad" or "One should never rape", while pragmatically advantageous (many would assume—myself included) as a general heuristic for a society, it presents a problem in the much less practical field of meta-ethics when we analyze the syntactic and semantic relationship between the subject and the predicate of such statements. It both yields logical contradictions when making such a universally generalized claim "Rape is wrong" followed by a particular claim "Rape is almost always wrong" whereby the latter claim stands as the negation of the former. This can be worked around however as I tried to explain by establishing consequencialist thresholds surrounding the deontological framework. Threshold deontology.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
There is a difference but I'm not sure that it matters too much. I'm not sure if behaviors are broader than actions—I guess it depends on the particular context and frame of reference. The way I distinguish actions from behaviors is that an action is singular either in response or by initiation, and furthermore an action that is repeated over a prolonged period of time would then be considered an activity; whereas, a behavior can likewise be described as repeated actions, it otherwise has to do with a particular pattern in which a collection of such actions seems to possess. For example, if someone burps at the table that would be a single action (that may or may not have a behavioral contexts depending upon the way in which the act was done), one of many one will inevitably make upon a dinner table, but the overall pattern in which their collective actions is what makes up their behavior which could be otherwise proper table etiquette.
I think nonetheless that you are correct since these terms are not entirely interchangeable, but for the sake of progress, could we not be a bit more charitable, please?
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Again, I am not describing my understandings of morality but rather providing examples of normative ethical approaches that are "Duty-centered". Would you not agree that deontology is a duty-based ethic?
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Not based, in essence intimately connected to actions.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
No, it would be a character trait, which is earned through repetitive behavior, which is based on specific patterns of activity, which is entirely based on sequences of actions. This is where my confusion comes in with your framing of behavior as more broad. Broader in overall complexity, perhaps, but that would be a top-down perspective and I'm more of a reductionist so I prefer breaking it down bottom-up.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
You appear to be waffling a bit here. So, you take the view that we should deny people with an immediate need for organ transplantation? Or do you just emergency transplants as not worth the risk? The patients will certainly die without them and your positive opinions of death will likely offer them little comfort. I think that you are probably right about egoistic hedonic utilitarianism being likely what best describes you. You just don't seem to know that you are.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
And exactly how do we select which ones get to live and which ones get to die? The five people are unfortunately in bad shape but that doesn't mean that a completely healthy individual should therefore die in an effort to save them. The logic is clear in the act itself.
P1. If we kill the one individual, then five individuals will survive.
P2. Five lives are more valuable than one life.
C. Therefore, we should kill the one individual.
How is this not placing a value upon the fives lives over the one? Also notice that the argument is not crossing the is-ought divide by assuming an evaluative statement in P2, which is unfounded in my opinion.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Then you haven’t studied history.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Again, your waffling. You don't get to defeat the thought experiment by manipulating it based on practicality—it is a thought experiment and not limited to practicality. You also cannot hand wave away the dilemma without appreciating, first, the fact that it is a genuine problem in philosophy, and through conceding that, second, you don't know how to interact with it. At least you cannot do such things and still consider yourself a philosopher. Be a volunteer or whatever it is that your implying to be more significant (which sounds a lot like a meaningful achievement, btw), as you are free to do so if you please and I certainly have nothing but admiration for such self sacrifice.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
You don't get to alter the thought experiment. This is not how philosophy works.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
No. It only has to benefit five groups per each group that is being genocided in order to remain consistent with the logic. Again, the unlikely nature not withstanding, it is a hypothetical thought experiment and can be as absurd as we can imagine. It just can't be impossible, which means it cannot contain a logical contradiction. And it doesn't. Also if you were apart of the five beneficiary groups, then you would almost certainly be a part of the necessary majority that committed the lesser whole to take part in this. You would, not because I assume to know you or because it fits your moral system that you have offered me so far, but rather, and obviously so, you would as a sheer matter of probability. The five groups approve, thus the majority of each population would approve (assuming the groups are democratic) and you would most likely be a part of the majority in a matter of probability.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
There are ethical theories that do a much better job than the ones that have been mentioned thus far. This is of course not a fact of the world but a fact of my attitude towards such, but I can offer quite compelling arguments for my moral system.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
This is where threshold deontology shines. Remember that i was referring to a strict form of deontological ethics.
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
So, if you could have it your way, then I suppose that you would release all of the individual rapists that we have been unjustly detaining within our correctional systems and halt any further actions from taking place within our judicial systems? I mean, it cannot be just to punish people for committing an amoral act, can it? If you were to witness such a rape, then, of course, you would see nothing for better or worse?
Quoting TheHedoMinimalist
Well, luckily for you we are within the reality of the make-believe! I will propose a hypothetical scenario wherein only you and the six women exist (and I suppose some rapist but they disappear from existence shortly thereafter) and the only condemnation that could possibly exist would have to be that of your own conscience one. The women are real, their suffering or lack thereof is real in this thought experiment, but they are unable to gain any information about your involvement. Its you and them. One suffers or five suffers. The choice is your. Which choice seems best for you and why?
Why should one invest in Tesla?
:point:
Seems right, except I'm not sure we even apply such intricate systems to practical situations in our personal lives. Or I'd have to see it to believe it. I suspect that such systems are more like works of art.
BTW, Bentham seems to have been a fascinating chap.
Those moral standards are quite universal, I think. My own opinion is murder, rape and child abuse are very bad crimes. Theft is wrong also, but in my opinion there´s huge difference comparing for those forementioned crimes.
Quoting Janus
That is also true. But even so, that there is a situation where everybody totally agrees about ethical values (maybe there is also scientific empirical study that proves that all humankind agree with about every ethical value) it does not tell about values as such.
There could be naturalistic fallacy. Everybody could agree with the values, but that doesn´t prove them right.
If every human agreed about a moral value, how could it be wrong? Values are just human values; my values are right according to me, but may be wrong according to others; and in such cases there is no clear right and wrong.
Take sex before marriage as an example; it is simply a matter of opinion as to whether it is right or wrong, that means it is right to leave it to the individual, and wrong to claim to univeralise it, since there is no universal agreement.
But if everybody agrees to a moral value then it cannot be wrong by definition. It could become wrong, though, if general opinion swung the other way, and everyone came to disagree with it.
Couldn’t another option be that values are simply not truth-apt? Saying something is true because everyone agrees is just an appeal to popularity.
What’s the difference? Doesn’t “right/wrong” depend on “true/false?” If you answer “4” to the question “what is 2+2,” it is right because it is true, right? So if valuing life is right, wouldn’t that have to mean that it’s true that we should value life?
Quoting Janus
None, but that is precisely why they’re not truth-apt. They’re merely opinions, regardless of how many people agree/disagree.
We are discussing moral values, not arithmetic.To say that a value is right for a person is not necessarily to say it is true for that person; the person could be mistaken. This is because values come down to opinion. Note, I'm not saying there is any absolute right or wrong, in the way we might think there is an absolute truth or falsity.
So, I am agreeing they're not truth apt, but pointing out that truth and correctness in this context don't equate.
Do you mean a value could be right, yet false? Quoting Janus
This..
Quoting Janus
seems to claim that if everyone agreed, then the value would be right in an absolute sense.
Quoting Janus
What I’m not getting is how opinions can be right/wrong? Especially if you’re not counting their truth value as criteria to judge them as such. For example, I value life, which is to say that it’s my opinion that life is valuable. Is this value/opinion right or wrong, and how can you tell?
Not at all; I'm only saying that it would be right in the sense that everyone agrees with it, and that there could be no more encompassing criterion for its rightness.
Oh, ok. I think I see what you were meaning. I was just confused. Carry on.
I think about an option, when people don´t know what is best for them.
For example, everybody can think that mass suicide is best for everybody and for whole humankind.
And same time is possible that is not the best possible option for humankind.
I, personally, don´t make evaluation is mass suicide the best option for humankind, or is it not. My point of view is irrelevant, in this particular question.
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-question_argument
The reality, though, is that only a vanishingly small percentage of humankind thinks that; so I'm not sure what your point is. If everyone felt life was not worth living, just as if an individual feels life is not worth living (after long and hard consideration, mind, not impulsively) then would not suicide be best for them in either case?
I have never thought much of Moore's argument in any case. "moral properties" do not have to be identical to "natural properties" in order to be plausibly thought to be justified by them.
I think, that if there is situation, when everybody thinks that suicide is good option, it still is not necessarily good option.
There´s some religious cults, with manipulative leaders, who could get everyone think that mass suicide is best way to go higher place, Heaven. And maybe it is not.
And there could be also be that kind of situation in the future, that all the people in the world belongs to this kind of cult. There could be post-nuclear war situation etc. Perhaps that will not happen in billion years, but I think it is still possible.
Manipulative leaders might get some small, credulous percentage of the populace to think it is a good idea to commit suicide, but even then not by convincing them that life is not worth living, but by means of some beguiling promise of salvation.
In a post-apocalyptic world, if conditions were horrible enough, then all the remaining people may indeed think life is not worth living, and they wouldn't need any manipulative leader to convince them of that. But even in such a situation, I think it is likely that many people would still want to continue living. Never underestimate the human spirit.
Mix those two things together, religious suicidal cult and post-nuclear war situation.
It is at least possible that everyone agrees on mass suicide. And it is possible, that this mass suicide is not the best option.
But I was thinking more of G.E. Moore´s views on the topic.
"The open-question argument claims that any attempt to identify morality with some set of observable, natural properties will always be liable to an open question, and that if this is true, then moral facts cannot be reduced to natural properties and that therefore ethical naturalism is false. Put another way, Moore is saying that any attempt to define good in terms of a natural property fails because such definitions can be transformed into closed questions (the subject and predicate being conceptually identical, that is, the two terms mean the same thing); however, all purported naturalistic definitions of good are transformable into open questions, for it can still be questioned whether good is the same thing as pleasure, etc. Shortly before (in section §11), Moore had said if good is defined as pleasure, or any other natural property, "good" may be substituted for "pleasure", or that other property, anywhere where it occurs. However, "pleasure is good" is a meaningful, informative statement; but "good is good" (after making the substitution) is an uninformative tautology."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-question_argument
Quoting Janus
In any case you still haven't explained what you think the relevance of the Open Question Argument to what we have been discussing is.
I think that the relevance is in the question is that we define as a "good" really "good". We have values, but we don´t know is it good that we have those values. According to Moore, we could never know.
It is also reasonable to think that what undermines social relations, trust and security, which child abuse, murder, rape and theft, among other things do, is bad. It is natural for those kinds of acts to undermine social relations. In fact it seems impossible to imagine how it could be otherwise, and so that would be an example of the existence of a natural state of affairs justifying belief in the moral reprehensibility of certain acts.
If something is natural - or unnatural also - it doesn´t yet tell a thing about its valueness/antivalueness. But I agree, human mind has its limits, but that is all we got. And we have to get along with it.
There could be some options.
Some religious people would say, that there is some divine, supermundane values. As an atheist I don´t personally believe in them, but I accept the possibility that values like that could exist.
And like you said, other animals may value different things.
I´ve said this before, but I want to underline the fact that there could be some things that humans don´t value - or they don´t value them enough - but they should. There could be things that are good for people, but they don´t recognize them.
I don't deny that in relation to health. but in relation to morals I think we've had plenty of time to figure out the broad picture in relation to most human acts. There won't be any controversy about the morality of murder, rape, child-abuse, theft etc. Suicide is still being worked out. There are likely some things in relation to which consensus will never be reached.
As for command theory, that is a matter for the religious; in any case the religiously conceived morality of acts like murder, rape and so on agree with the secular; at least I can't think of any exceptions. Of course there will be disagreements when it comes to the subtle details involved in considering the morality of minor acts like sex before marriage, masturbation, gay relations and so on. People with different starting premises will never agree on those issues.
Some religious movements believe that even masturbation is wrong (like you mentioned). And Catholics don´t accept contraception, but often Catholic Church understate the child abuse that Catholic priests have done.
I don't think 'pleasure is good' is informative to any being that has experienced pleasure. I think it's something every being that has experienced pleasure knows to be true, even if they don't have language in which to express it. My dog knows pleasure is good. He also knows pain is bad, which is why he cringes if he thinks I'm going to hit him. (I never do, but he's a rescue, and I think he probably had a bad start in life.)
Moore got it wrong, I think.
I think nature comes with some built-in values.
Why do we think it is wrong to be cruel to animals? Presumably because it causes the animals pain. We know from our own experience that pain is bad, and we think it is generally wrong to do things that have bad results. That pain is bad is a fact of nature. It is also a value judgment, which shows that there is not such an absolute break between fact and value as some philosophers have claimed.
I think I understand your point of view. But I also think that "pleasure is good" is a meaningful, informative statement, while it is even a truism perhaps to all beings at the same time. So It could be true or even truism for every being, but I don´t think that was Moore´s point. I think Moore´s point of view is more metaphysical or ontological, we have statements like "pleasure is good" and at the same time we would never know what is "good" for sure.
I suppose another way of putting that would be to say that Moore thought we can't know what 'good' refers to - what property it denotes. But it seems to me that we can't decide that issue until we have worked out what the word 'good' actually means, i.e. what function it performs in ordinary discourse. R.M.Hare, whose lectures I attended long ago when life was simpler and we all had more and longer hair (well, I did), reformulated Moore's open question and thought that in so doing he had made it unanswerable (https://www.jstor.org/stable/2252015?seq=1).
However, Hare's argument only succeeds if we agree with Hare on two points: that descriptions can never also be evaluations, and that the sole function of the word 'good' is to commend. The first of these is what we are trying to establish, so Hare's argument begs the question; and I think 'good' does more than just commend. When we say 'that was a good dinner', I think we are not just commending the dinner, we are also saying something about it, i.e. we are attributing to it some property. It would be closer to the truth if we said that we are claiming that the dinner was commendable, i.e. deserved to be commended (and of course we would then be commending the dinner by implication). However, I would want to cast the linguistic net somewhat wider, and point out (a) that commending is an activity which displays a positive attitude to something, and (b) that there are several other activities which display positive attitudes, such as approving, desiring, seeking out, etc.. It seems to me that 'good' gestures to all of these kinds of activities without specifically selecting any one of them; so I would claim that when we say 'that was a good dinner', what we actually mean is 'that dinner was such as to merit a positive attitude or activity', where the set of available positive attitudes and activities includes approval, commendation, desire, seeking out, etc..
Having established that, the next question is: is there something in nature that intrinsically has this property? I think pleasure does. By 'pleasure' I mean, strictly speaking, pleasantness. Many things can have the property of pleasantness, but it is the property of pleasantness that I think has the property of meriting a positive attitude, rather than the thing that is pleasant. So, for example, I find Beethoven's 6th Symphony pleasant, but it is the pleasantness of my experience in listening to it that has the property of meriting a positive attitude, not the symphony itself. Making someone who doesn't like Beethoven listen to the 6th Symphony would not result, for them, in an experience that merited commendation or desire or seeking out; but if I could give them my experience of listening to the 6th Symphony, then their experience, like mine, would merit those attitudes and activities.
So I think Moore had it all wrong. My metaphysical and ontological thesis about 'good' would be that pleasantness is good, and unpleasantness is bad, and therefore we do not have to look to non-natural properties (whatever they may be) to find what 'good refers to or denotes'; what it denotes is the meriting of positive attitudes and activities that is a property of the pleasantness of our own, entirely natural, experiences.
I want to agree with you, but I think you are making a naturalistic fallacy.
I also want to say I value pleasure as a good thing, but if we look just what is pleasurable and always favor that kind of experiences, acts etc. we are coming to unbearable problems. Somebody could have pleasure, when she/he is torturing someone else. I don´t regard that kind of a pleasure as good.
So, when valuing pleasure I think is important what kind of circumstances it occurs.
Georg Henrik von Wright has written on "goodness", on the deontology of goodness (The Varieties of Goodness, 1963). For example, when the chair is considered as a good chair, it have to had certain features (some would say it has to be good to sit on - of course that criteria is also arguable, but that is not the point). But maybe this is a sidetrack.
It would help if you would explain why you think that. I've been careful to defend my view against Moore and Hare, so what now is your objection? Or, if you don't think I've successfully defended myself against them, can you say why?
I haven't claimed that pleasure is the whole of ethics. I'm simply claiming that it's a fact that pleasure is good.
I find it hard to believe that the pleasure of the torturer could be so great that it would outweigh the pain of the tortured, so I think a simple utilitarian-style pleasure/pain calculus can deal quite easily with this objection.
I think that's basically it, yeah. I'd just add that the axioms (or principles) are generally not even thought. Most of our activity (read: behavior, morality, actions, etc) is unconscious and non-rational. It doesn't really follow rules, recipes, and algorithms -- that is abstracted after the fact, constructed and projected on what happens. But these rules and principles -- these axioms -- are extremely useful, and even though they tend to be "absorbed" through experience and development in one's culture (like language) in a kind of reflexive/habitual way, doesn't mean they're not "real."
In the end, it does seem to be based largely on "faith." You accept these axioms (consciously or not), as beliefs or assumptions, and operate on the basis of them. Long before the formulation of "gravity" people were still avoiding walking off of cliffs, and long before the formulation of the "Golden Rule" people were still treating each other in ways they would want to be treated. Rationality, logic, abstract thinking, and even conscious awareness only goes so far.
The "lived world" seems much more fluid and, in a way, groundless than what philosophers and scientists (especially in the West) have wanted -- in the sense of making everything explicit, abstract, rule-based, theoretical, mathematical and measurable.
And no -- I'm not advocating or trying to open a door for "religion."
There could be some important nuance in your defending, and I don´t reach it. Are way speaking of the same thing? Moore simply says that "goodness" can not reduced to natural properties of some.
I think that Moore thought that every value´s, that is naturally (or supernaturally) found to be good, relation to good itself is quite similar than the nature of mathematical theorems to completeness.
Those theorems are incomplete by their very nature (every formal axiomatic system capable of modelling basic arithmetic). I have to admit right after, that my knowledge of mathematics is very limited and some may say that this comparison is bad or even ridiculous.
According to Moore, we could never reach the state where we just can define something for pure and absolutely good. There´s always question about is that what we defined as good, really good.
The name of this topic is What are we doing? Is/ought divide. Do you consider also, that David Hume was wrong?
"I also want to say I value pleasure as a good thing, but if we look just what is pleasurable and always favor that kind of experiences, acts etc. we are coming to unbearable problems."
— Antinatalist
Quoting Herg
I assumed that that it is your point of view, I just wanted bring into focus that with pleasure could come some bad. I just wanted to make that point clear, I assumed correctly that you think like you said (that pleasure is not the whole ethics).
Quoting Herg
Yes, I think usually that is the case. Anyway, I find utilitarian ethics untenable.
Yes, that is the Open Question argument. I think it fails because Moore fails to define what we mean by 'good'. He basically just gives up on trying to define it, and assumes that good is indefinable, that it is just a word that refers to something we can't find in nature. This is where I disagree with him, because I think we can define 'good', indeed I think I have defined it, and I expect I shall continue to think that until someone proves me wrong.
Quoting Antinatalist
Yes. If I'm right about the meaning of 'good' and 'bad', then if an action causes pain, then that action, other things being equal, is a bad action. The fact-value bridge has been crossed, and I think we should ask ourselves, in that situation, which is more plausible: that the fact that the action is bad means we ought not to do it, or that the fact that the action is bad has no moral significance at all, and we are morally free to do it if we wish despite its badness. I think the former position is more plausible than the latter, because we are now in value territory, and there's what seems to me a compelling congruence between the good/bad split, the right/wrong split, and the ought/ought not split. This isn't a watertight argument, but it seems to me that once we have crossed the fact-value divide, there's little reason not to go the whole hog and accept that we ought not to do bad things (such as causing pain).
Quoting Antinatalist
Well, again, supporting reasons for this position would be nice. But having been told off by Gregory for being too demanding, I'm not going to push.
You are making a naturalistic fallacy by its definition. Of course the naturalistic fallacy can be itself a fallacy. Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson thinks that way, so you are in good company.
Quoting Herg
There´s a misunderstanding. The "no ought from is" -statement does not tell what is a morally good thing, or morally bad thing - or even what is morally permissible. So it does not say anything about what we are morally free to do.
Quoting Herg
Of course. I just assumed - obviously wrong - that this was just a sidetrack of the topic.
In utilitarianism human being will and should - at least in some cases - treated as a mean, not the end.
While I´m neither Kantian, I agree on this with him, that we should treat human beings as end in itself rather than (merely) as means to other ends.
And I think also that Fyodor Dostoevsky was a great philosopher and some parts of his The Brothers Karamazov are very valid argumentation against utilitarianism.
I slightly disagree.
I quote Edward O. Wilson and my response for him in my essay from 2004. This is long quotation, but I think necessary.
Biological world-view and religious naturalism
"The time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized." (Edward O. Wilson, 562, 1975. Sociobiology. The New Synthesis. Cambridge, Belknap 1975.)
...some slightly irrelevant "jargon" from ought/is -perspective...
”...Many philosophers will respond by saying, But wait! What are you saying? Ethicists don’t need that kind of information. You really can’t pass from is to ought. You are not allowed to describe a genetic predisposition and suppose that because it is part of human nature, it is somehow transformed into an ethical precept. We must put moral reasoning in a special category, and use transcendental guidelines as required.No, we do not have to put moral reasoning in a special category, and use transcendental premises, because the posing of the naturalistic fallacy is itself a fallacy. For if ought is not is, what is? To translate is into ought makes sense if we attend to the objective meaning of ethical precepts. They are very unlikely to be ethereal messages outside humanity awaiting revelation,or independent truth vibrating in a non material dimension of the mind. They are more likely to be physical products of the brain and culture.
From the consilient perspective of the natural sciences, they are no more than principles of the social contract hardened into rules and dictates,the behavioral codes that members of a society fervently wish others to follow and are willing to accept themselves for the common good. Precepts are the extreme in a scale of agreements that range from casual assent to public sentiment to law to that part of the canon considered unalterable and sacred." [Wilson, CONSILIENCE. The Unity of Knowledge 1998, 249-250. New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1998.] I believe the solution to the is/ought dichotomy is that it is a false dichotomy—‘ought’ entails ‘is’, for what is the case is what ought to be the case given the available evidence and the powers of our understanding. And the truth ultimately aids us in doing the right thing. ‘Is’ is therefore an outgrowth of ‘ought’."
To this, my response is that "ought" is the will, desire or intention of a being, and in this sense it truly "is". From this intention of a being, or from the normative attitude of ”should”, no obligation can be drawn. This is purely analytic. The issue is very simple if, generally speaking, the normative attitude of "ought" is a product of the brain and culture and it is required in order to maintain human life; the occurrence of this attitude is common amongst the living. No evolutionary process can even give a probable estimate as to why life would be a value over non-life. However, Wilson is admittedly correct in stating that, when assessing the possibilities and ethicality of actions, one must consider what is possible and what is not. But to assess life as a value over non-life, there is no material produced by the rational mind or empirical data (during, for example, the evolution of billions of years). Among evolutionary biologists,organized religion has often been seen as a contemporarily meaningful adaptation of natural selection. In the modern world, however, the popularity of religion has decreased. This has been seen both as an advantage and as a handicap; a fruitful phenomenon for the scientific world-view, but also the risk of falling into a meaningless spiritual void. Religions have responded to the spiritual needs of people and, even if they were to disappear, the need for sacred narratives remains. Wilson sees this both as a problem and as a challenge for the future.
"If the sacred narrative cannot be in the form of a religious cosmology, it will be taken from the material history of the universe and the human species. That trend is in no way debasing. The true evolutionary epic,retold as poetry, is as intrinsically ennobling as any religious epic. Material reality discovered by science already possesses more content and grandeur than all religious cosmologies combined. The continuity of the human line has been traced through a period of deep history a thousand times older than that conceived by the Western religions. Its study has brought new revelations of great moral importance. It has made us realize that Homo sapiens is far more than a congeries of tribes and races. We are a single gene pool from which individuals are drawn in each generation and into which they are dissolved the next generation, forever united as a species by heritage and a common future. Such are the conceptions, based on fact from which new intimations of immortality can be drawn and a new mythos evolved." [Wilson 1998, 265]
The end of the last sentence is especially intriguing: “new mythos evolved.” However, regarding life as an axiomatic, dogmatic value can hardly be regarded as a new idea.