A poll on hedonism as an ethical principle
Ethical hedonism on Wikipedia.
And in case it’s somehow necessary to clarify, “pleasure” and “feeling good” are used synonymously here, as are “pain” and “feeling bad”.
And in case it’s somehow necessary to clarify, “pleasure” and “feeling good” are used synonymously here, as are “pain” and “feeling bad”.
Comments (237)
I would count the good or bad feelings one gets from those, and emotional states generally, as well within the domain of pleasure/pain/hedonic experience.
It was many centuries later that philosophers like Bentham, Mill, et al hit upon the idea of founding a theory of morality (utilitarianism) on hedonism and when that happened the need for caveats arose - a morality based on hedonic principles couldn't be based on the unqualified notion of pleasure (and pain) i.e. utilitarians now had to work out the details regarding "...what gives us pleasure and what causes pain..." The reason for this is obvious - the relationship between pleasure/pain and good/bad is, let's just say, complicated in the sense not all things that give us pleasure are good and not all things that cause pain are bad.
But intellect, rational judgement, and aesthetics need to be differentiated from sensation. Otherwise 'ethical hedonism' is reductionist in that it reduces every faculty to sensation and judgement to personal preference. Although of course in a consumer society there's really no alternative.
Yes, these are few among many other elements that need to be incorporated into hedonism simpliciter for it to link up with ethics.
Quoting counterpunch
Isn't that pretty well what we see in the developed nations? Consumer capitalism, after all, thrives on the promotion of individual wants. What was that infamous saying by some counter-cultural figure, I forget who: 'do what you want will be the whole of the law'?
The second question asks “Is it everyone's pleasure or pain that's relevant, or only some people's / your own?”. It’s a followup to the first question: if pleasure (good feelings) and pain (bad feelings) are morally relevant, WHOSE are thus relevant?
Poll questions can only be so long.
“Being happy” or otherwise not suffering is not synonymous with “doing whatever you want”. Hedonism is not necessarily extreme liberalism; consequentialist hedonism can be quite draconian in fact.
“Nobody is relevant” sounds quite selfish. It remembers me when Bakunin wrote a letter to his parents asking why there are people who live alone. He criticised all of those people living alone and not caring about the rest as “selfish” and for him it is impossible reach happiness in this context.
Capitalism is not indiscriminate pleasure seeking. Capitalism is primarily, the production, distribution - and "sale" of goods. Taking a consumer eye view of capitalism, and disregarding the fact the consumer is also a worker; producing chairs all day long, so he can buy a table - so to speak, is less than half the story.
Capitalism begins with work that adds value to resources; which is to say, deferred satisfaction. Work is hard, and often unpleasant. The producer hopes to sell those goods - and so satisfy the wants of others, in order, ultimately, to satisfy his own wants - that's true, but he must first do what he doesn't want to do.
I'm at a loss to say what we have in developing nations. Problems, certainly - but is indiscriminate pleasure seeking one of them? Maybe!
Thing about Skinner is - he didn't believe in free will - or morality. He believed in positive and negative reinforcement, like we're all Pavlov's dogs, salivating to the sound of a bell. I can see why you'd hate that. I don't much like the idea myself.
I'm not sure if I catch your drift but if you're referrring to what can be summed up with the notions of heaven and hell - the carrot of happiness (heaven) and the stick of suffering (hell) vis-a-vis morality - it's proof that hedonism-based morality had an irresistable appeal that people naturally gravitated towards but most such moral theories, religions inclusive, are quite vague and never got down to the nitty-gritty.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Consequentialist hedonism? If the individual is required to take into consideration what other people want; surely you've got something more akin to utilitarianism, than hedonism.
Oh that's right! I'd forgotten where I'd read it. I took it as a sardonic backhander to Augustine's 'Love, and do what you will.'
I don't think capitalism necessarily encourages indiscriminate pleasure-seeking but in the absence of religious prohibitions, there's nothing that acts as a counter to it, aside from common sense, which does count for something. I'm inclined to say that overall the developed nations - UK, Europe, Australia, USA - are pretty hedonistic cultures overall. Not that it's necessarily wrong or deficient, but philosophically speaking, it does raise the question of the overall value of hedonism. And I don't think you can doubt that stoking wants and pleasures is at the centre of a lot of capitalist activity. The very word 'consumer' suggests it.
Quoting TheMadFool
it does have a pull, that's for sure.
I wonder why? I've always been bothered by the fact that happiness and truth are not linked in a way we would've wanted. The truth usually makes us sad (the bitter truth) and lies seem to be very good at making us happy (sweet, little lies) and yet both seem to command equal respect from us. We seek happiness and truth with equal fervor but I believe one reaches a certain point on the journey to acquire happiness and discover truths where one of them has to go; we have to choose one to the exclusion of the other, both can't be had, and the fact that this is a dilemma, a tough choice to make, suggests something, right?
Quoting Wayfarer
Colloquially, I'd agree, that western societies are wealthy enough to produce and sell pleasurable things, and are in that sense, hedonistic. But philosophically, I don't think that's what hedonism is - as an ethical system.
To my mind, as I said above, I think hedonism implies the abandonment of social responsibility - in favour of the individual desire for pleasure. The hedonist claims the pursuit of individual pleasure is a sufficient and rightful condition for society. I don't think so. I think society would collapse and people would be much less happy.
Interesting. I disagree. I think if we accepted truth wholeheartedly, we'd be much happier!
For me it is the only thing that is relevant because feeling bad now may help you feel better tomorrow. It is important from every perspective as what makes me feel good (short/long term) may make several others feel terrible.
The longest lasting good is ... well, ‘good’! The knowledge and knowhow of how to attain the best overall ‘good’ would obviously involve assessing truths and acting as seems best.
Strangely enough the original use of ‘hedonism’ (Ancient Greece) was pretty much in line with what I’m saying. The term has since sprouted into other branches of ethical ideology.
For anyone to say it is irrelevant to morality must have said so with good reason ... I cannot fathom what that is and will be simply down to their personal understanding of what ‘morality’ means. I can understand the view that the ‘pleasure’ is in the journey, but the ‘pleasure’ is still ‘pleasure’ rather than some cold-reasoned way of living morally that may actively pursue pain and suffering ... pain and suffering can be a good longterm goal in seeking out overall good feelings (I’d say suffering and pain are necessary for a healthy and happy life).
As a rather simple analogy saying good ingredients makes a good cake is not true. What makes the cake good is how it tastes.
Truth is bitter. Why say that?
Quoting counterpunch
I don't think it has to be necessarily that egocentric. I can imagine a hedonistic lifestyle that nevertheless makes room for other's wants. What if you were in a care-giving profession, like nursing or veterinary science, but after hours you were into BDSM? Not hard to imagine.
I would have thought that the most obviously hedonist of the Greek schools was Epicurianism: 'The school rejected determinism and advocated hedonism (pleasure as the highest good), but of a restrained kind: mental pleasure was regarded more highly than physical, and the ultimate pleasure was held to be freedom from anxiety and mental pain, especially that arising from needless fear of death and of the gods.'
That state of freedom from anxiety was ataraxia, I believe.
I fully agree that moderation is/should be a permanent fixture in all human affairs - the golden mean and madhyama pratipada make complete sense - but what I'm particularly interested in is hedonism's need for a, to use a computer metaphor, patch to make it morality-apt. Hedonism by itself doesn't cut it so to speak. There are other morally relevant elements as the right/wrong kind of pleasurable activities, the right/wrong kind of pain that are part of the picture of hedonic morality.
Utilitarianism is a kind of hedonism. It's a consequentialist altruistic hedonism. (This poll's two questions are about hedonism yes or no, and if yes, altruism yes or no; I'm not asking about consequentialism yes or not at this point).
Prefer the other way around. ("Cognitivism"? Not that the label matters.)
That's an unusual definition then, and not the one this thread is about, an article about which I linked to in the OP. That definition is, shortly put, "what matters, morally speaking, is that people feel good rather than bad, experience pleasure rather than pain, enjoyment rather than suffering", etc. That could be people generally (altruism) or just oneself (egotism); that axis is a different one from hedonism vs... non-hedonism, for which I'm unaware of a good general word. (Let me know if anyone else is!)
Quoting bongo fury
Not sure what you mean here. "The other way around" from artistic/intellectual/etc pleasure being a proper kind of pleasure more generally would be... pleasure more generally always being an artistic/intellectual/etc pleasure? I don't know what that would mean. That there are no non-artistic/intellectual/etc pleasures?
Quoting Wayfarer
Yep, and that's entirely consistent with the kind of thing I'm asking about in the OP.
Quoting javi2541997
The option reads "Nobody's is relevant"; nobody's experience of pain or pleasure, in context. That includes oneself, so it can't be selfish. It's just a way of saying that pain or pleasure (feeling good or bad, enjoyment or suffering, etc) are not morally relevant, so that people who picked the third option for the first question have an option that applies to them in the second question.
Quoting I like sushi
Myself likewise. I find myself just flabbergasted at the notion of reckoning something as good or bad regardless of (or even in spite of) whether it makes anybody feel good or bad.
Non-egotism, sure: other people matter. But what matters is that they feel good and not bad.
Non-consequentialism, sure: the ends don't justify the means. But what makes a means unjust is a product of the pain it inflicts on others.
Neither of those things (egotism or consequentialism) are part and parcel of hedonism. And if not hedonism, if it's not pain or pleasure, enjoyment or suffering, feeling good or bad, that are the criteria for judging whether something is good or bad, then what is? Just... because someone said so?
Pain a different matter for the ethics, I suppose. Happy to admit the relevance of (any kind of) suffering to ethical analysis. Just not that of pleasure. Agreeing with @Wayfarer there.
Quoting TheMadFool
I think many philosophies and religions have recognised humanity’s two-fold nature, both as a kind of animal, but also endowed with capacities that animals don’t exhibit. Pleasure has often been identified with the animal side of human nature - I think for fairly obvious reasons, as it’s associated with simple sensation. What humans exhibit over and above that is the capacity for reflection and understanding. That gives rise to something above sensation which is the capacity for rational thought. So we share sensation and sensory pleasures with other animals, but the rational capacity is unique to us (something which is nowadays contested).
Seems to me that hedonism always wants to avoid this conclusion - to say there’s no real difference between pleasant sensations and eudomonaic happiness (which is the happiness that comes from the pursuit of virtue.) One can, for example, attain happiness in the contemplation of verities, which surely can’t be reduced to sensation alone, and which only a rational mind can entertain.
(All this, I now realise, is rather Aristotelian in nature, which surprises me a bit, but I’m not inclined to want to apologise for it.)
To go further I feel it was trying to stave off an idea of having a certain amount of ‘pleasure’ due in one’s life. Against the possible thought of ‘I’ve had my pleasure, now for serious business!’ ... I would agree that such a thought is quite silly but humans being humans it is a thought because it relies on guilt.
I’m very much in line with what I’ve read of Aristotle. I basically came to a similar conclusion regarding ‘Virtue Ethics’ - but I’d be more inclined to actively seek out and experience ‘pain and suffering’ and to do risk ‘doing wrong’ rather than becoming stagnated and unmoving.
In common speech ‘hedonism’ means nothing more than an unabated pursuit of whatever pleases you regardless of consequences (I was just pointing out that to view it as that is rather simplistic, yet it is a hard idea to shake off given how the term is predominantly used in modern society even when we understand it as something else).
Without a doubt Judeo-Christian heritage has led to a stringer rejection of anything deemed ‘hedonistic’.
One thing for sue. Ethics is a key aspect of modern philosophical discourse and we’re not much further along today than we were several hundred years ago (perhaps we’ve even gone backwards in our understanding in certain areas - so it seems to me).
My view:
Something that feels good can be immoral, and something that feels bad can be moral.
So whether something feels good or bad does not seem to determine whether something is moral or immoral.
That isn't to say that living morally cannot feel good. It simply is not relevant to it.
To me you’ve just said that whether it feels good or bad is relevant but that it isn’t conclusive evidence of what is or isn’t good or bad. How can we talk about morality without considering what feels good or bad (for me, you or anyone else).
Far too much nuance that can be levered into the questions. I’d be surprised if anyone holds anything like a strongly differing opinion on what constitutes good and bad.
With reason, I suppose. The senses will simply have to follow.
The pleasure/pain system in our bodies is so deceptive, I don't think it can serve as a useful guide.
A guide to what? That is, in trying "make things good", what is it that you're trying to do... if not ensure that nobody's suffering and everyone enjoys life?
One might say that pain and unhappiness are symptoms, and immorality is a disease. One might say it is infectious.
To what end, if not to (set into motion or contribute to some movement to) get said power to behave differently, in such a way that said power hurts less (inflicts less suffering) or helps more (enables more enjoyment)?
Moral conduct, starting with me, an individual.
What makes conduct moral, if not refraining from hurting people (not inflicting suffering), and helping them (enabling enjoyment)?
If I play the lottery, the end is to become rich. If I tell the truth, the end is that the truth be told. I suggest that this is a strong sign of the moral act, that the act itself is its end. You may hear it, or not hear it, but the truth has been spoken.
Let's survey some things that make us happy/unhappy: a full belly, friends & family, good health, to name a few. What do all the items listed above have in common? It's obvious that they're all prerequisites for survival, not "just" survival but as achieving a state of being able to beget, provide for, rear, defend the next generation (our children) - this I'll call the state of wellbeing and it's linked to the emotion we recognize as happiness. Failure to or loss of the state of wellbeing causes unhappiness/sorrow.
As might be obvious to you now, happiness/unhappiness is all about the state of wellbeing which I alluded to above but in what way exactly? Well, being happy and sad - these two emotions alway succeed in grabbing your undivided attention - are like the LED indicators of a car's gas gauge: green (happy) means all ok, red (unhappy) means something's wrong. This rather crude analogy immediately brings to the fore the actual truth about this entire affair - to focus on the LED indicators (happiness/sadness) whichever of them lights up - is to completely miss the point that they light up only to pass on the message of success/failure in attaining the state of wellbeing and beyond that they're meaningless. It's kinda like the mistake you warned me about a while ago viz. mistaking the finger pointing to the moon with the moon.
To sum it all up, we need to move on/away from what, by my analysis, is a rather superficial understanding, perhaps even a total misunderstanding, of happiness/sorrow which is to think that happiness/sorrow are themselves objectives either to attain/avoid and arrive at the truth that the state of wellbeing is the real goal. With this realization we can perhaps get rid of the go-betweens viz. happiness/sorrow and all the complications/paradoxes/problems/dilemmas that go with them. Just a thought...
I can for the most part agree with this idea of moral conduct, however I do not think that those things you named are, in the context of morality, necessarily connected to subjective sensations of pain and pleasure.
I can feed my child all the sugar it wants, and I am sure they will enjoy it greatly, however I would be slowly poisoning them, regardless of their enjoyment.
The obvious example is from monotheistic religions: moral is that which is in line with God's commandments. Acting in line with God's commandments can lead to (other) people's happiness or suffering. But making (other) people's happiness or suffering the reference point for what counts as moral or not would be a grave mistake in the context of monotheism.
The Christian references are relevant for our discussion, because we are discussing morality against Christianity's backdrop and within its conceptual framework.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yet it's an idea that can be found in some major religions. Like when Christians say that believing in God and following his commandments has nothing to do with your happiness. In fact, doing the morally right thing is possibly going to or is even supposed to make you feel crappy (a burden you should gladly accept, given the massive sacrifice God has already made for you).
One thing which I think about in relation to the poll question is that it is so easy to become caught up in finding pleasure for oneself and miss the importance of trying to help others find pleasure. In the harshness of life, I feel that I am sometimes struggling to make life bearable, but feel that finding pleasure makes it bearable. However, in juggling this, I try not to lose sight of thinking about my actions just as a way of satisfying my own needs, but I think that it all has to be balanced carefully and mindfully.
Quoting TheMadFool
Humankind evolves from ignorance into knowledge over time; and similarly, the individual is born knowing nothing. So in both cases, the lies come first. If the truth is bitter by comparison to the lie - the problem is the preceding lie; not the constant truth.
Any particular truth; that people die, for example - (Kierkegaard identifies death as particularly subject to denial) is but one facet of a holistic truth that offers considerable compensations.
For me, the individual dies but the human species lives on; and if we accepted that truth - we might feel like we belong to something, and start governing in the interests of the human species going forward, and that would be better for every individual.
Instead, I find myself dealing with my impending death, very much alone - to maintain the illusion for everyone else, as a member of a species that is headed for a premature demise, because it lives in a state of denial. The comforting lie has only compounded my sorrows.
1. All truths cause happiness
As counterexamples: disease, murder, apathy, corruption, rape, child labor, human trafficking, racism, slavery, discrimination, the list is longer but I'd like to see how you respond to these.
But what would justify this difference?
We evolved in hunter gatherer tribes that then joined together to form societies and civilisations. In order for society to function; for hunter gatherer tribes to live together - it was necessary to make that implicit morality - explicit; and that's religion. God was employed as an absolute, objective authority - to justify ethics of behaviour that would apply equally to all. This wasn't quite Nietzsche's 'inversion of values' - the strong were not fooled by the weak, but rather tribal morality became social morality.
By my definition, hedonism requires the pursuit of my wants, regardless of anyone, or anything else
— counterpunch
Quoting Wayfarer
I do think so; so maybe we're not talking about the quite same thing. I don't construe all pleasure as hedonistic. That slice of cake with your 11 o' clock cuppa is fine - unless, you're clinically obese and dependent on the state to fund your healthcare. Then, eating cake is hedonism, because - I believe, hedonism must necessarily deny the social responsibility required by religion, (law, economics, politics) or must argue that individual pleasure seeking is a sufficient condition for society.
BTW; all vets are into BDSM. They like to be led around on a leash, and spanked with a rolled up newspaper after work! Every single one of them!
This comes across as reductio ad absurdum, but I can only assume you are sincere - so by elimination, I must suppose you haven't understood my proposition; which is, rather - we'd be happier overall if we all just accepted a scientific understanding of reality, as opposed to the sweet little religious, political and economic lies called ideology.
My proposition is not:
"1. All truths cause happiness"
Instead, I'm trying to get to the disenchantment of someone led to believe wonderful, comforting things - that are almost certainly not true. How then can the believer greet the truth, but with fear, denial and disenchantment?
I merely suggest that if it were the practice to tell the truth from the beginning, people would not live in fear of disillusion, and would not have an antipathy to truth of the kind you express.
Not all truths are pleasant, no; but to me - someone who accepts a scientific understanding of reality, truths are what they are. For me, death of the individual is a necessary aspect of evolution; and the life of humankind is what really matters. For the believer, however, raised to expect eternal reward in the hereafter - death of the soul is a doubly terrible thing to contemplate.
It's not about never having been exposed to the truth as you seem to think. It's about not being able to face it.
The explanation is that the species evolves from ignorance into knowledge, and similarly the individual is born ignorant, and learns as they go along. What I think we have - or rather, what we had until the internet was invented, was a sort of intergenerational deliberate ignorance - that in my view, has severely retarded the development of humankind. It amazes me that not one parent had the courage to send their kid to school, to tell all the other kids that Santa isn't real. But now, I suspect, we have experienced the birth of a generation of parents who are not willing or able to lie to their children - because of the internet, and I suspect that can only be good for humankind.
Quoting TheMadFool
"Seem to think" is the right term. My understanding is more nuanced than my rough prose manages to convey. I suspect that the religious believer knows, that there are alternative possibilities to that which they choose to believe. They deliberately close their eyes and ears to those possibilities; but implicitly, they must know - or otherwise, it wouldn't be faith, it would be knowledge.
Quoting TheMadFool
I don't think so. We may become extinct as a consequence of "our innate susceptibility to deception" - but having thought quite a lot about this, and having sought for many years to communicate the potential of adopting a scientific understanding of reality, the world isn't going to trip over the truth and fall into oblivion. I think the truth is coming, and we have to face it. Reality will not be brooked; we will be correct to reality or be rendered extinct, because that's the way the universe was Created!!!
I keep trying to answer your post from 8 hours ago, but then something happens - like someone was responding right now, and I just couldn't get to it. Now I have things to do out in the world. So please don't take this personally, like some sort of snub. It's not that at all. I'll get back to you.
What is bad about being poisoned if not the suffering it causes?
Quoting baker
So like I concluded, the alternative is “because someone said so”.
Quoting counterpunch
No worries, I’m never in a rush for a reply, and I have lots of other things sucking up my time too. At your leisure.
Seems to me, you're asking the wrong questions on the basis of a misconception of morality and ethics. Morality is fundamentally a sense - innate to the human organism, and ethics are essentially, moral rules that reconcile individual behaviour to the social good.
This is why, I maintain, hedonism must either disregard the social good in the pursuit of individual pleasure - or claim that hedonism is a sufficient basis for the social good. (It isn't; as Socrates explains to Protagoras in Plato's dialogue of the same name.)
Once you start qualifying hedonism - it's not hedonism, because not all pursuit of the good is hedonistic. The greatest good for the greatest number is not hedonism. Take rationing food when adrift at sea, for example. Rationing seeks a utilitarian outcome, but it is in no sense hedonistic. The hedonist would eat all the food, for themselves, now - and not worry about other people or tomorrow. A utilitarian would ration the food equally, and make everyone unhappy.
Quoting Pfhorrest
You complained in the OP about having to reference a text, and now you depend on it???
Quoting Pfhorrest
That's the entirety of your definition! Consequently, I feel quite free to express my own views on the subject - which begin with an evolutionary conception of morality as a sense, and ethical principles derived from that sense, to reconcile individual behaviour to the social good. Hedonism therefore, cannot be ethical. Hedonism must disregard the social good in pursuit of individual pleasure!
What I am trying to point out is that someone's subjective idea of pleasure and pain can vary greatly over time. Eating all that sugar may feel good in the moment, but it will not when one develops an illness because of it. Similarly, physical exercise can feel bad when one is doing it, but be very healthy.
So the premise of hedonism that pleasure and pain determine what is good and bad seems to me inherently flawed. Our senses are simply too easy to fool.
I wasn’t complaining of having to reference it, but of having to write anything at all. Linking to an encyclopedia article about the subject was just filler text.
In any case, as the person who wrote the questions it’s my place to clarify what I meant by them. If you wouldn’t have used words that way, you do you, but just know that that’s what I was using them for, and don’t take them to mean something else in that context.
Quoting Tzeentch
My point is: How do we know they have been fooled except by further use of them? Yes, any one particular experience may not tell you the whole picture, but the whole picture is still the sum of all the experiences:
We don't, which is why I think the senses are a bad guide for moral conduct in the way hedonism seems to prescribe.
I voted the middle options on both questions. Other things are relevant, such as future outcomes/consequences (I.e. long term health vs. short term gratification). And not everyone’s pain/pleasure is relevant all the time. The pain a child experiences due to being made to apologize for doing something wrong is irrelevant, imo. There must be limits to this, of course. The aim should be to ensure the punishment fits the crime.
Also, I think it’s worth saying that pleasure (or excessive pleasure perhaps) often leads to pain. So if what is meant by hedonism is to blindly pursue pleasure/avoid pain, then I disagree with that, and would advocate for something like “rational hedonism” where the consequences of pursuing pleasure/avoiding pain are considered prior to acting, and potential unwanted consequences are weighed against potential desirable ones.
Eudomonia in Aristotelian philosophy is linked with virtue and with fulfilling your life's purpose (telos). I don't think it's difficult to differentiate those kinds of aims from the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure. Nor do I find it difficult to differentiate the faculty of reason from that of sensation.
Quoting counterpunch
:lol:
Quoting TheMadFool
We have to consider the religious perspective - that real happiness is not to be found in your worldly circumstances, no matter how propitious, as they are always subject to decay. Of course it's easy to say, but a hard truth to realise, especially when tragedy strikes.
[quote=Nyanoponika Thera]iBuddhists agree with the teachings of other religions, that true lasting happiness cannot be found in this world; nor, the Buddha adds, can it be found on any higher plane of existence, conceived as a heavenly or divine world, since all planes of existence are impermanent and thus incapable of giving lasting bliss. The spiritual values advocated by Buddhism are directed, not towards a new life in some higher world, but towards a state utterly transcending the world, namely, Nirv??a. In making this statement, however, we must point out that Buddhist spiritual values do not draw an absolute separation between the beyond and the here and now. They have firm roots in the world itself for they aim at the highest realization in this present existence. Along with such spiritual aspirations, Buddhism encourages earnest endeavor to make this world a better place to live in.[/quote]
At the very least, a religious worldview allows you to 're-frame' the sufferings of mortal life against a background of sustaining virtue.
Then how do we know that there is any reason to doubt them?
Quoting Pinprick
Quoting Pinprick
That is all within the domain of what I mean. Hedonism can be far-sighted or short-sighted. If the long-term consequences you’re concerned about are still all about whether you will be suffering or enjoying life in the future, then that’s still a focus on feeling good or bad, pleasure or pain, etc; it’s just a smart way to do so, that doesn’t shoot itself in the foot.
Quoting Wayfarer
What is virtue but good character, a propensity to do good things, to bring about a good (or at least better) world?
What is purpose but what something is good for, what good comes as a consequence of it?
And what is good about some consequences, about some state of the world, besides everyone feeling good, nobody feeling bad?
Doing good does feel good, sure, and it is perhaps the highest form of good feeling, the best feeling even, but what is the “good” in “doing good” other than helping people to feel good and not bad?
Aristotelian philosophy generally is teleologically oriented - things have a purpose, a telos, which is the basis for what is considered good - being able to fulfil that purpose is a criterion of what is good. But, of course, teleology was one of the cardinal features of Aristotelian philosophy to be rejected by modernity. So that means that the criterion of what is good is defined by subjective feeling - which leads to ethical hedonism.
Evolutionary biology is intended to provide an account of the origin of species. Evolutionary rationales of religion, music, and other aspects of human culture are too often just so stories.
To show that I am sincerely sorry about the delay, I'll answer your poll:
Is suffering morally relevant?
Yes, suffering is morally relevant. Pleasure, not so much.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I have to assume that everyone's suffering is morally relevant to them - whether or not it is relevant to me. I remember some years ago I was sat watching the news. There was a big train crash in South America. A lot of people were hurt - and I was sat there watching, when I heard the woman next door fall down the stairs, and start screaming.
By the time I got to her front door, it was clear she had help - so I left, but the disparity of concern I felt for the woman and her broken leg - over hundreds of people far away whom I would never meet, struck me at the time as surreal. I'm trying to suggest that even while, everyone's suffering is morally relevant, it's not necessarily morally relevant to me - and that's perfectly natural.
Is there a box I can tick for that?
I get your point but what's the alternative? We have to place "religion, music, and other aspects of human culture" in an evolutionary context, because evolution is undeniably true.
I love this passage from Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Dennett:
"The fundamental core of contemporary Darwinism, the theory of DNA-based reproduction and evolution, is now beyond dispute among scientists. It demonstrates its power every day, contributing crucially to the explanation of planet-sized facts of geology and meteorology, through middle-sized facts of ecology and agronomy, down to the latest microscopic facts of genetic engineering. It unifies all of biology and the history of our planet into a single grand story. Like Gulliver tied down in Lilliput, it is unbudgeable, not because of some one or two huge chains of argument that might–hope against hope–have weak links in them, but because it is securely tied by hundreds of thousands of threads of evidence anchoring it to virtually every other field of knowledge."
:up:
Quoting Pfhorrest
If what's good is fulfilling your purpose and your purpose is what good you can do, we're left with no idea what either "good" or "purpose" mean, other than that they're related -- which they definitely are. But we need more than that, some criterion by which to tell what something's purpose is, what effects of it are good. What is that criterion besides comforting/pleasing/helping rather than hurting?
Quoting counterpunch
If you think it ought to be morally relevant to some kind of super perfectly ethical person, some saint or hero, even though you personally (like pretty much everyone) fall short of that, then I'd say that's answer #1 to the second question.
Well, you're against transcendentalism which doesn't leave a lot of options.
Quoting counterpunch
Not everything about human kind is determined by biology. When we evolved to the point of language, reason, and even (dare I say) spiritual transcendence, then we're no longer definable in purely biological terms; we've 'transcended the biological' is how I put it. And I absolutely don't buy Dennett's ultra-darwinism. He, Dawkins, and several others, personify the tendency of making a religion out of evolution -not in the sense of seeking transcendence through it, but by regarding it as the definition of human possibility. That's as much a consequence of Enlightenment rhetorics than of science as such.
Hopefully one wisens up to this fact as they grow up, through their experiences and gathered knowledge.
Experiences of what? Knowledge of what? That something felt good at first but later lead to greater suffering? That’s information from your senses again, telling you that your earlier senses didn’t give you the full picture. It’s still your senses you ended up relying upon to tell you that, which is what you just said two posts ago can’t happen.
Can you explain what a transcendental criterion would look like anyway?
Yes and no.
Sensory experiences combined with our reasoning faculty, where the latter can provide us with an understanding the sensory experiences cannot.
[quote=Nichomachean Ethics] 7. 1. [1177a11] But if happiness consists in activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be activity in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be the virtue of the best part of us. Whether then this be the Intellect [nous], or whatever else it be that is thought to rule and lead us by nature, and to have cognizance of what is noble and divine, either as being itself also actually divine, or as being relatively the divinest part of us, it is the activity of this part of us in accordance with the virtue proper to it that will constitute perfect happiness; and it has been stated already* that this activity is the activity of contemplation[/quote]
About what, how? So far as I can see, a priori reasoning can only tell us when things are logically impossible because they're contradictory incoherent nonsense. That's useful, sure, but it doesn't get you very far; it can't tell you any contingent things about either what's true or what's good, only about what's (not) possible.
Quoting Nichomachean Ethics
On what grounds can we judge whether or not that claim (that contemplation is the highest virtue) is correct? In virtue of what (pun intended) is contemplation the highest virtue? i.e. what makes contemplation so good?
I disagree. I think such experiences and reasoning can tell us many things that are both true and good for ourselves.
"Do you think that whether things feel good or bad to people is morally relevant at all?" Well, I believe that hurting people is usually bad, and pleasing is often good, so yeah? What else could I say?
I can read your words, but your meaning escapes me. Perhaps if you could explain how - in your philosophy, geographically isolated groups of human beings, all developed music, pottery, jewellery, agriculture, architecture, and so on and on - all the same things done in culturally distinct ways, I could get a better read on what you're implying by denying the role of biological evolution. I think you'd be forced to conclude it makes more sense to extend your idea of evolution, than to suggest some supernatural explanation.
I didn't invoke the existence of a "super perfectly ethical person" - and I could not answer your question for such a person, if I had! If your question can only be answered in the way you wish, by such a hypothetical person, is it not possible that you're asking the wrong question?
Quoting Pfhorrest
I believe the continued existence of humankind matters; and because we're facing global threats we need to cooperate to solve there's no-one who would like to answer "1. Everyone's is relevant" more that I would, but I can't - because philosophically, I'm bound to tell the truth.
I can go so far as to acknowledge that everyone's suffering is morally relevant to them; but for me, morality is an innate sense - not a God given or objective ideal; and from experience, I can tell you that my senses are limited by the horizon. Intellectually, I knew that there were many more people, in the crash in South America, more badly hurt than the woman next door - but the suffering of the woman next door had a greater visceral impact on me.
I don't want to fall into the science v religion dichotomy. My view is that when h. sapiens evolved to the point of being language-using, meaning-seeking beings, those capacities aren't meaningfully viewed through the prism of evolutionary biology. It's an over-reach, due to the fact that evolutionary biology has displaced religion as the kind of 'arbiter of meaning'. But, as I say, that's not it's function, even though that's exactly how the Dennetts and Dawkins treat it.
[quote=Richard Polt]I have no beef with entomology or evolution, but I refuse to admit that they teach me much about ethics. Consider the fact that human action ranges to the extremes. People can perform extraordinary acts of altruism, including kindness toward other species — or they can utterly fail to be altruistic, even toward their own children. So whatever tendencies we may have inherited leave ample room for variation; our choices will determine which end of the spectrum we approach. This is where ethical discourse comes in — not in explaining how we’re “built,” but in deliberating on our own future acts.Should I cheat on this test? Should I give this stranger a ride? Knowing how my selfish and altruistic feelings evolved doesn’t help me decide at all. Most, though not all, moral codes advise me to cultivate altruism. But since the human race has evolved to be capable of a wide range of both selfish and altruistic behavior, there is no reason to say that altruism is superior to selfishness in any biological sense. 1 [/quote]
This is germane to the OP also, as viewing ethics through the lens of biology can only ever yield some form of utilitarianism. And that's because there's really only one criterion for success in evolutionary biology, which is successful propogation. Any other kind of end is out of scope for the theory.
Reasoning PLUS experience can, sure, but you were just doubting the reliability of experience, and when pressed for what grounds we have to doubt it, gave just reasoning alone as an answer.
My point overall is that while the conclusions reached from some experiences can indeed turn out to be wrong, the way we find that out is via more experiences, so it’s still ultimately experience that we’re relying on.
Quoting counterpunch
Quoting counterpunch
This second bit here is why I mentioned the super-person the first bit is about. It sounds to me like you’re saying that if you were a better person, you would care about everyone more than you in fact do; thus, that your idea of what a good person would answer is 1.
I bring that up because what I’m asking about is what you think the morally correct answer is, not just what you’re personally emotionally motivated to act on. Like, if you could be a better person, however you conceive “better” to be, what do you conceive that that better you would care about? And it sounds like you conceive that it would be 1.
That's not your call; you are in the midst of a religion versus science dichotomy dating back 400 years. It's not my preferred condition either - but here we are. It needn't have been so. The Church had the opportunity to embrace Galileo as discovering the means to decode the word of God manifest in Creation. But they didn't do that - and so now we are looking toward human extinction. It's not honest to say you don't want this debate - and then go on to bash science all over again.
Quoting Wayfarer
Could you give an example, because I'm having a very difficult time, pinning down exactly what you mean by "evolutionary biology has displaced religion as the kind of 'arbiter of meaning'" What do you propose instead - as a meaningful prism through which to view human mental capacities? Psychology?
"Evolutionary psychology is not simply a subdiscipline of psychology but its evolutionary theory can provide a foundational, metatheoretical framework that integrates the entire field of psychology in the same way evolutionary biology has for biology."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology
Quoting Wayfarer
Evolution teaches birds to build a nest before they lay eggs. Think about that. Does the bird know - and plan ahead? Almost certainly not. It's a programmed behaviour - what I call behavioural intelligence. And you think evolution cannot have programmed a behaviourally intelligent moral sense into human beings. Do you seriously suggest that morality is a purely intellectual exercise? Or were we all robbing and raping each other indiscriminately until Moses came down the mountain with his tablets?
Chimpanzees have morality of sorts. They groom each other and share food; and then remember who reciprocates - and withhold such favours accordingly in future. Morality is evolutionary - and no, knowing that fact doesn't tell you what is right or wrong in any given situation - but the moral sense does. You know right from wrong - like you know funny from not funny, or beautiful from ugly; instinctively.
What I mean is that evolutionary biology, and science in general, now provides the kind of background guide to what intelligent people should believe - in the same way that religious culture used to in times past.
I don't subscribe to your reading of history viz a viz the Trial of Galileo but it is too large a topic to argue in a forum such as this.
Quoting counterpunch
If it were programmed, you would expect it to be uniform. Birds, after all, build nests pretty much exaclty the same way every time. Instinctive behaviours are very minutely prescribed.
The point about the human situation is that humans get to decide, in large part, how they should live and what they should do. That gives a huge scope to possible outcomes, signified by the vast range of cultures and behaviours and societies. Our choices are under-determined by our biological descent. Sure, biological descent plays a role , no disputing that, but other factors come into play for h. sapiens, new horizons of the possible become visible that aren't even accessible to our simian forebears. See if you can google Darwinism Applied to Man by the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace - he provides a dissenting view.
Quoting counterpunch
So what? Jane Goddall also mentioned that there were frequent murders, infanticide, cannibalism, and so on.
Ideally, I would vote for answer number one - but only on suffering. I don't think pleasure is nearly as morally relevant as suffering. Intellectually, I recognise that suffering matters; whoever it is doing the suffering. But I don't feel it. Instinctually, I find I'm more concerned by the suffering of other people, the closer they are to me. I don't think it a matter of being a better person. I think it stems from the evolutionary prudence of being concerned by things that might afflict me.
Oh, okay. I can live with that.
Quoting Wayfarer
I would merely ask three questions:
1. Was Galileo tried for heresy?
2. Was that because he made scientific discoveries that contradicted Biblical orthodoxy?
3. Why, around 1635, did Descartes withdraw his treatise on physics from publication?
Quoting Wayfarer
I am just trying to give a sense of the complexity of behaviours that can be attributed solely to evolution; as a basis to suggest that human beings are imbued with a moral sense by evolution in a tribal context. Chimpanzees have this proto-morality. It became more complicated when human being developed intellectual intelligence, and began to express morality in intellectual terms; and more complicated still when hunter-gather tribal groups joined together to form societies and civilisations. But morality is based in evolution.
Quoting Wayfarer
Consider Hume's famous is/ought argument, and how his understanding might have been different had he been aware of the evolutionary argument for a moral sense - I have described:
"In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason."
Beyond the part in italics, there would be little to say, because bridging the "is" and the "ought" - is precisely what human beings do. We are capable of appreciating facts, and understand, instinctually, that those facts have moral implications. Galileo's trial insisted, on pain of torture, death and ex-communication - that scientific facts have no moral implications; that moral authority is derived from scripture, and ultimately from a divine source, and 400 years of philosophy has backed that position to the hilt. And it's wrong. Morality is primarily a sense, fostered in the human animal by evolution; and knowing what's true and doing what's right, on the basis of what's true - is where we should be, and we're not. The world is fucked because scientific facts are artificially deprived of moral implication.
‘Merely’? They are very large subjects - topics for a term paper, subject of many books. I will start by saying that I think the trial of Galileo is indefensible and should never have proceeded. But I’ve also learned that there were progressives inside the Roman Curia who said the same, but who lost the argument to the conservatives. Furthermore the arguments revolved around a great deal more than simply religion, there were political and philosophical dimensions to the debate which are largely omitted from the accounts nowadays.
And on the question of why Descartes withdrew his paper - I studied Descartes as an undergrad, wrote a term paper on him, but never encountered this question, can you provide some references for it.
In any case, the conclusion you draw is in line with the conflict thesis. It’s something which is widely assumed but simplistic, in my view. There are many shades of grey on all sides to the debate. Let’s say, there are Catholic intellectuals who would never have dreamed of challenging Galileo, (or Darwin for that matter - Darwinian evolution was never challenged by the Catholic, Anglican or Orthodox Communions, that privilege goes mainly to Southern Evangelicals.)
The upshot is, I don’t accept the ‘science versus religion’ conflict in the black-and-white terms in which you’re attempting to depict it. Sure, there are boneheaded anti-scientific fundamentalists, with whom it is not even worth debating, but there is also secular fundamentalism, which generally manifests as materialism.
I agree with your remarks elsewhere that science is indispensable for saving the planet from climate change. But let’s also not loose sight of the fact that science has developed the means to destroy everything on the planet a thousand times over. It’s a two-edged sword, and it has nothing in it which guarantees morality.
Quoting counterpunch
Indeed we can, but I’m arguing that this ability is only partially explicable with respect to evolution. It’s not ‘instinctIve’ but culturally imbued in us. Bridging in the ‘is’ and ‘ought’ is something human beings often fail to do, both collectively and individually. I’m sure guilty of that.
Quoting counterpunch
Just not buying. This is exactly what I mean by the over-extension of biological evolution to explain faculties which it has little or nothing to say about. Yes, humans evolved, but we can then choose an enormous range of ethical postures, from the diabolical evil to benevolent humanism - all with the same genetic base.
1. Yes.
2. Yes.
3. Fear!
The Church burned heretics alive right through to 1792 - 160 years after the trial of Galileo, and well into the Industrial Revolution. In short, science was deprived of moral authority, and whored out to industry - when it should have been recognised as the means to establish true knowledge of Creation.
Quoting Wayfarer
""The World" rests on the heliocentric view, first explicated in Western Europe by Copernicus. Descartes delayed the book's release upon news of the Roman Inquisition's conviction of Galileo for "suspicion of heresy" and sentencing to house arrest. Descartes discussed his work on the book, and his decision not to release it, in letters with another philosopher, Marin Mersenne."
Quoting Wayfarer
Simplistic is precisely what I was going for. After all, if I can't get you to answer the question: "Was Galileo tried for heresy?" with a simple: "Yes, he was" - then what hope is there of putting across complex ideas? I'm dumbing it down for you - and you still got it wrong!
Quoting Wayfarer
I'd add colour but it might confuse you. If you can't understand the simple black and white outline argument, then how can you possibly appreciate the hugely complex picture from which these threads are drawn?
Quoting Wayfarer
Okay then, let's see if you can get this outline argument. Don't be confused by the lack of detail. We can do the colouring in later!
Because the Church made science a heresy, it was deprived of moral authority - such that, science has been used in pursuit of industrial and military power, without reference to the understanding of reality science describes. Overlapping religious, political and economic ideologies directed the development and application of technology - and that's why:
Quoting Wayfarer
Imagine, if the Church had embraced Galileo - as discovering the means to decode the word of God made manifest in Creation, and science was imbued with the moral authority of God's word. Technology would have been developed and applied in relation to a scientific understanding of reality. We'd have limitless clean energy from magma; and would have avoided or solved climate change. We wouldn't have nuclear weapons and be destroying the planet, because those are the consequences of science used as a tool by religious, political and economic ideologies.
Quoting Wayfarer
If morality is culturally imbued - where did culture get morality from? A burning bush perhaps?
Quoting counterpunch
Quoting counterpunch
Q: What do you call a Greek skydiver?
A: Con Descending! :lol:
Then stop being deliberately stupid!
In Early Buddhism, they speak of the six senses, with the intellect being the sixth. And if you look at the suttas, they talk about taking pleasure in ideas/thoughts as being simply yet another pleasure, like the pleasure of eating or engaging in sex. They do talk about gross and refined pleasures (and gross and subtle forms of suffering); but the point is that these pleasures (or sufferings) are considered as being on a spectrum, not different categories.
As things stand, I'm finding it difficult to relate to the differentiation you make (and which I am aware is very common in Western culture at large).
(In Dhammic religions in general, philosophical pursuits (seeking and taking pleasure in thoughts, ideas) is considered a hedonistic pursuit, mind you, hence the characteristic anti-intellectualism that can be sometimes found among their practitioners.)
But your moral objectivism amounts to the same thing.
Humans also have a social dimension; they are epistemically dependent on other humans; they have internalized and have access to knowledge accumulated by other humans, which can help them navigate individual deficiencies.
Social trust and epistemic dependence on other humans can give us reason to doubt our particular experiences: experiences that can be temporarily pleasurable, but harmful in the long run. Beside that doubt, they can also help us navigate them and endure the temporary displeasure that comes from depriving ourselves from things that are temporarily pleasurable but harmful in the long run.
Left to oneself, one single human doesn't seem likely to be able handle the problem.
- - -
Quoting TheMadFool
How do you think this can be put into practice?
I think we can use reasoning alone to come to conclusions about what is good and bad, without having to experience it first-hand. I think we do this all the time, on this forum for example. Unless you wish to classify reason as an experience in the same way that pain and pleasure are experiences. But I wouldn't agree with such a classification.
There nevertheless must be an element that discerns the meaning of dharma and elects to pursue it. Furthermore it’s a Buddhist dogma that only humans can hear and respond to the dharma - hence the expression ‘this precious human birth’.
It very explicitly does not. That's the point of replicating others' experiences: so we don't have to take their word for it.
You never explained your bizarre "empathy is incompatible with objectivism" comment, but I'd guess from that that you take "objectivism" to mean what I called "transcendentalism", which would require taking someone's word for it, which is why I'm against that, as I explicitly said. The only sense of "objectivism" I support is "universalism", the view that something being good or bad doesn't depend on what anyone thinks or says... because that would just be taking someone's word for it too.
Just like (according to a scientific worldview) reality doesn't depend on what anyone thinks about it, but there's still nothing about reality that's beyond observation: it's not relative, it's universal, but it's also not transcendent, it's entirely phenomenal.
Quoting Tzeentch
Only when we already have some known-true propositions about what's good or bad to reason from. But when we're starting from scratch, or are lost in radical doubt, where do we get any such moral propositions to start that reasoning process from? I can think of nothing other than experience, or else just taking someone's word for it.
Ok, but how does this make a case for hedonism?
Hedonism (specifically ethical hedonism, the topic of the thread) is about appealing to experiences (of things feeling good or bad) as grounds to call something good or bad.
Hopefully I don't need to make the obvious case against just taking someone's word for it.
And we've talked about how these experiences alone are too easy to fool to serve as a guide.
Which is not incompatible with considering the intellect to be a sense.
Why should there be a problem with considering the intellect to be a sense?
(Note a parallel in Western antiquity, what "common sense" originally meant.)
I am in hedonist. I’m also an atheist. People that are religious when they find out I’m atheist say “but you’re so nice”. I have a tendency to give a lot of things away.
Religion tries to explain what we can’t understand. As we will never know what happens after we die there is religion. Religion helps control the population.
Humans are the only species that can alter their environment. However, altering environment is like shitting in your nest. If you don’t understand everything is in connected you understand nothing. A true Zen saying “Nothing is what I want”. Even Buddhist don’t allow women to be in the upper echelon. Humans think that we are morally superior to other species. And we used to think that the universe revolved around us. We are nothing. Everything in this universe is from the big bang. Now it is just devolving into chaos. I believe in math and chemistry. I don’t take a vantage of other people. I dislike seeing people control others. I ask questions. Personally, I can’t wait to die.
What does the Euclidean theorem look like? The ability to grasp a rational idea of that kind is different to a sensory impression, surely.
Also the Buddhist ‘manas’ is something like ‘organ of perception of ideas’. There are other terms for intellect in the Buddhist lexicon, notably, Buddhi, and also Citta, but considering all of those details are out of scope for this thread. The key word in western philosophy was ‘nous’ which has sadly fallen out of use.
True,The transfer of knowledge is no longer genetic (cannibalism, Inbreeding). That’s why the printing press and the Internet are so important. Basic Greek mathematics and principles came from Egypt. But Egypt Restricted that knowledge within their priesthood. Greek philosophers dispersed that knowledge. Knowledge is power. How do we know that other species don’t have ideas? Simply because we don’t see it does not mean it’s not there.
What started off this tangent was this:
Quoting Wayfarer
And we're back to the problem of who gets to be the arbiter of what is virtue and what isn't.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think that depends on the measure of epistemic autonomy that an individual person is assumed to have.
The more epistemic autonomy a person is assumed to have (ie. the more the individual person is identified with their mind), the starker the difference between the first five senses and the intellect. And vice versa.
Quoting Wayfarer
But how does a particular person know what their life's purpose is?
Surely the ancient Greeks weren't individualists who believed that every man and woman (!) is able and should define their own life purpose for themselves, quite divorced from the social roles and expectations placed upon them by other people.
I think it depends on the particular life purpose for the particular person.
Take, for example, a professional culinary connoisseur. A person like that eats, tastes food for a living, it's their telos. Eating, tasting food is also a hedonistic pursuit of pleasure. So where's the difference between such a person's telos and hedonistic pursuit of pleasure? Can this be answered without demoting the profession of culinary connoisseurship to something unvirtuous?
It's not clear how this is the case. Up until stream-entry, such discernment is impossible anyway.
But one cannot replicate others' experiences.
For example, I don't drink coffee, because it makes me sleepy. Many people drink coffee in the morning specifically for the purpose that it "wakes them up". So which is it? Who is right, who is wrong? Who has the right experience of drinking coffee in the morning? I or they? Is there an objectively right way to experience drinking coffee in the morning?
Objectivisms are authoritarian and assume to be impersonal/suprapersonal. Yet, contrary to that, it is always a particular person, a Tom or a Dick who makes the claim that X is really such and such, and that Harry is in the wrong if he doesn't see it that way.
There is no room for empathy in objectivism, because the objectivist already assumes to know better.
But it still comes down to whose observation matters.
The problem you're actually indirectly talking about is the problem of epistemic dependence.
Your comment “ Surely the ancient Greeks weren't individualists who believed that every man and woman (!) is able and should define their own life purpose for themselves, quite divorced from the social roles and expectations placed upon them by other people.”
Isn’t that why Socrates died? He was condemned to death for his Socratic method of questioning.
But we're asking how we know that they are so unreliable. Your answer was "reason". I responded that reason alone can't get you much of anywhere, you need something to reason from to begin with, and I asked "where do you get that, besides experience (or else taking someone's word for it)?". Assuming we agree that taking someone's word for it is no good, that leaves us appealing to experience to tell us that experience is unreliable.
Which works if what we mean is that further experiences can tell us that some limited earlier experiences were not the full picture; I agree with that completely. But in that case you're still relying on experience generally. And if you can't rely on experience generally because experience tells you so... that's circular there.
Quoting baker
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.
E.g. 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.
An ethical science would likewise have features of subjects of experience baked into both its input and its output.
Quoting baker
Transcendentalisms are, yes, because they demand that you take someone's word for it, because nobody can check the results for themselves. But universalism is not necessarily transcendentalism, just as phenomenalism (non-transcendentalism) is not necessarily relativism (non-universalism).
Quoting baker
On a universalist account, everyone's observation matters; that's what makes it universalist.
Physical science is universalist about reality in that if someone doesn't experience the same phenomena that everyone else does, even after completely controlling for the objects of said experience (the environment / experiment / etc), we go figure out what's different about the subject (the person) such that they experience the same object differently, and adjust our theories to correctly predict what that kind of subject will experience as well. An ethical science would have to do likewise.
In pre-modern cultures, individuals were not expected to 'forge their own destiny', it was handed to them as a result of their caste, social status, and so on. Part of the advent of modern liberalism is just that requirement - to 'find your destiny' as the saying has it. And that can be challenging and daunting but I would like to think it's at least possible. (This essay on Max Weber has some interesting things to say about that.)
In any case, Aristotelian ethics, or virtue ethics, aren't predicated on the idea that we have a pre-made destiny that we ought to fulfill. In that understanding, 'virtue is its own reward', because it instills habits, which become character, which become destiny. (This is the subject of a major book on ethical theory, After Virtue by Alisdair McIntyre.)
Quoting baker
If it were not the case, Buddhism would never have come into existence. Recall the story of the ascetic that walked past the Buddha after the enlightenment and more or less shrugged it off, saying 'it could be' that he had realised the goal. Then at the Deer Park sermon in Benares, five other ascetics took the Buddha at his word and so the Sangha was formed.
That capacity to discern the truth ('viveka' in Sanskrit) is different to sensation.
I think we are indoctrinated by empiricism, that only knowledge based on sensation is for real. That is why it seems so awfully difficult to differentiate rational knowledge and sensation when really the difference ought to be obvious.
Quoting Pfhorrest
In the physical sciences, part of the method is to agree on the nature of the object of analysis, and what should be considered in that analysis. Anything which is not germane to that analysis is then rejected or bracketed out. But that approach s not possible when considering ethical and normative judgement in respect of the living of life, as in that case, we're not outside of or apart from the object of enquiry, 'we are what we seek to know.'
Quoting Pfhorrest
In Buddhist ethical theory, the aspirant is presumed to be able to validate the teachings by first-hand insight, through their attaining of that insight in the living of the principles. The key term is 'ehi-passiko', 'seeing for oneself'. In practice there are obstacles to that, first and foremost the difficulties of realising such goals, but you can't say that in principle nobody it able to do so. (See this verse for discussion of the difference between 'taking on conviction' and 'direct discernment'.)
And there are, or there have been in the past, similar kinds of insights in Western philosophy.
So the results 'can be checked for yourself' although if such possibilities are rejected out of hand, then it remains a practical impossibility. In other words, it requires a certain kind of openness to those modes of discourse. (Maybe it's the case that we've been inoculated against any idea of 'higher truth' by dogmatic religion, specifically Protestantism.)
Indeed! But the principles that Socrates articulated in the Apology were then to become central to the works of Plato, thence Aristotle, and ultimately the whole of Western culture. Of course it's true that over the course of history, the Church then assimilated that classical wisdom and declared themselves the arbiters of virtue. But you can reject the Church without rejecting the Socratic idea of virtue.
I’d say that is as true of reality as it is of morality, precisely because of phenomenalism about reality, empirical realism, like Kant’s. All we can know about is how things appear to us, so we are a part of the object of enquiry there too. Likewise, all we can know about morality is what does or doesn’t feel good to us — all of us, not just one of us, just like in empirical investigations of reality.
Quoting Wayfarer
That would not be transcendentalism in the sense I mean then, since if you can experience it for yourself it is definitionally phenomenal.
Phenomena are ‘what appears’. I think what is supposed to become clear through Buddhism is not necessarily the subject of experience per se, but an understanding about, or insight into, the nature of experience, generally. That is articulated (although rarely so) as the distinction between experience and realisation.
To connect two experiences together and figure out what they mean, one has to rely on reason to tell the relation between the two.
Eating sugar brings pleasure. That is an experience.
Developing diabetes brings pain. That is also an experience.
These two experiences seperately do not tell us anything. We need another element, which I argue is reason, to connect the dots.
That would still not be transcendental in the sense I mean then, because it's not an a posteriori claim about actual particulars of either reality or morality ("this kind of thing exists", "this kind of thing is good", etc) at all, but an a priori claim about the philosophical matters of how to even answer questions about those things (the nature of experience being one factor of that topic).
Quoting Tzeentch
Sure, but I'm not arguing that we don't need to rely on reason, only that we do need to rely on experience. Reason alone gets us nowhere, it just stops us from heading down dead ends. To make actual progress in figuring out any of the particulars, we have to rely on experience as well.
And in the process of doing so, the person gets designated as "abnormal". "Wrong". "Defective". "Inferior".
Once such qualifiers are introduced, we're back to might makes right.
Do you think that the Nazis didn't feel good about themselves and their ideas of what counts as virtue? That they didn't feel rewarded by what they considered virtuous behavior?
If virtue would somehow be something that is baked into the fabric of the universe, so that it would operate by laws similar to those in physics, then there'd be no problem. So, for example, if you did X, you'd feel good, and if you did Y, you'd feel crappy. But it doesn't work that way.
People can kill, rape, and pillage, and feel good about it. Or they can kill, rape, and pillage, and not feel good about it.
It's one's kamma that makes one attracted to the Buddha's teachings. -- So goes the Buddhist reasoning for conversion.
There are extra-Buddhist/non-Buddhist conceptualizations for religious conversion to Buddhism (usually inspired by Western secular anthropology and religiology, or inspired by Christianity somehow). And then there are Buddhism-internal explanations for why a person takes to the Buddha's teachings.
The notion that a person "discerns the meaning of dharma and elects to pursue it" is incompatible with Buddhist doctrine, at least as far as persons with less than stream entry are concerned.
I don't understand what you mean here.
This is a westernized verificationist approach. A cradle Buddhist would never set out to "validate the teachings" or to "verify" them.
It doesn't make your point. Look what Sariputta says:
And as for me, I have known, seen, penetrated, realized, & attained it by means of discernment. I have no doubt or uncertainty that the faculty of conviction... persistence... mindfulness... concentration... discernment, when developed & pursued, gains a footing in the Deathless, has the Deathless as its goal & consummation."
He started off with conviction (!!), and then he did this and that, and then he came to certainty. It's a circular, self-referential, self-fulfilling, self-proving activity. No wonder "it works".
The holy grail -- epistemic autonomy.
IOW, it's about training oneself, developing oneself, cultivating oneself into becoming a particular type of person. This is how one "sees for oneself". It's not about verifying whether some claims are true or not. It's about making oneself be such that one comes to see those claims as true, as good.
It's similar to vocational training. One doesn't engage in vocational training in order to test the claims made by the specific field of expertise. One does it to learn, to earn expertise, a vocation.
You don't test if baking "works". You do it to become a baker.
I think the problem is, rather, that the matter is approached in a pseudoscientific manner of "experimenting, testing, and verifying claims for yourself". Such experimenting etc. is impossible, at least as long as one doesn't have epistemic autonomy. And if one had it, one wouldn't need to test etc. anything anyway.
No, that's quite the opposite. Consider for example recognizing neurodiversity, as in, the non-defectiveness of autistic (etc) experience patterns. Things that please and calm many neurotypical people can be very distressing and displeasing to neurodivergent people. The position you assumed I was arguing would be to call whatever pleases "normal" (neurotypical) people good, and neurodivergent people defective for not finding that good. But what I'm actually advocating is that we say it's good to act one way toward a neurotypical person (the way that they find pleasant and calming), but bad to act that same way toward a neurodivergent person (because they'll find it distressing and displeasing).
Just like a theory of color that makes predictions hinging on "normal" three-color vision needs to make that dependency explicit or else it will end up making false predictions from the perspective of colorblind people. A truly universal theory of color vision will have to make predictions that "normal" people will see one type of thing and colorblind people will see a different type of thing.
It's because we can choose. Not only can choose, but have to choose.
Regarding wether there is a faculty of discrimination, as distinct from mind/manas, I posed this question on Stack Exchange, and was told there is a term Pa?isambhid?: formed from pa?i- + sa?- + bhid, where pa?i + sa? should probably be understood as 'back together', and the verbal root bhid means 'to break, split, sever'. Rhys Davids and Stede propose that a literal rendering would be "resolving continuous breaking up", and gloss this as 'analysis, analytic insight, discriminating knowledge'; moreover, they associate it with the idea of 'logical analysis' (Pali-English Dictionary, p. 400.2). Bhikkhu Nyanatiloka similarly renders the term as 'analytical knowledge', but also as 'discrimination' (Buddhist Dictionary, p. 137). Bhikkhu Ñ??amoli voices a divergent view in a note to his translation of in Buddhaghosa's Visuddhimagga, XIV.8, where he renders pa?isambhid? as 'discrimination':
Cultivation in accordance with the Buddha's teachings leads to a particular and irreversible ability to discern Dhamma. Without this cultivation, a person cannot rightfully be said to be able to choose between Dhamma and adhamma (because they can't tell the difference).
It's similar to the difference between an ordinary person and a trained gymnast: both have a body, both can do some physical exercises, yet the gymnast can do exercises that the ordinary person can't (and can't even conceive how to do them). It's not the case that one would have a body and the other wouldn't; nor that one would have physical prowess and the other one wouldn't.
Quoting Wayfarer
It seems that for the psychologically normal person, morality is never a matter of choice -- such a person "just knows what the right thing to do" is (for such a person, the issue is only whether they are able to do it).
But beyond that, I don't understand where you're going with the way you replied.
This doesn't solve anything, it just shifts the whole burden on the neurotypical vs. neurodivergent distinction, taking it for granted and taking for granted that said distnction can always be reliably established for every person at any given time. As if people would be robots with a make, model, and series number.
For the sake of that illustration I take it for granted, but that is just an illustration. Whenever it is discovered that a person with such and such characteristics experiences such and such phenomena differently that other people, our models have to be updated to reflect that.
:up:
As the late John Lewis would say 'Socrates had it coming because he stirred-up some "good trouble"'. As for virtue, the only one that matters which is indispensable for exercising the others is courage: nothing necessary and truly difficult is ever attempted, or gets done, by cowardice or (banal) conformity. Who decides? Who cares? Reason & experience suss-out what matters most; if there's an argument for another virtue that matters more than courage, I'm very interested in considering it. No surprise, though, that the usual ecclesiastical & sophistical suspects, in theory & practice, remain mostly mute on the subject integral to moral and intellectual integrity.
Quoting Wayfarer
:100:
.
Quoting Pfhorrest
How does 'what feels good is good' work for e.g. sadists, masochists, severe autistics or antisocial sociopaths (e.g. neo-nazi thugs, serial rapists, billionaire ceo union-busters)? :chin:
As I've pointed out on other occasions, Pfhorrest, ethical naturalism, implemented normatively as 'negative hedonic utilitarianism', is more eudaimonic and less relativist than a "ethical (positive) hedonism" because 'what feels good' is mostly arbitrary and weakly correlated with 'what is good for each person'. Each one decides 'what is good' her own way by 'what feels good to her' but 'what is bad for her' is usually independent of how 'good it feels to her'.
Quoting 180 Proof
In other words, informed by e.g. medical sciences, human ecology, moral / cognitive psychology, etc, a baseline of 'what is bad' is readily demonstrable for each and every human animal and, therefore, frames the problematics of anticipating, preventing (net increase of) & reducing harm (misery), both interpersonally and through public policy. The imperative to do so, however, is N O T derivable from scientific data because scientific data only constitute hypothetical explanatory models and, for an ethics to be 'universal' it's insufficient for its grounding to be hypothetical (i.e. relative, or merely possible), therefore it must be categorical. Science, rather, functions as criteria for using empirical data in order to (more) adaptively align judgments & conduct with negating 'what is bad' for human animals. 'Hedonic satisfaction' is just the "pursuit of happiness" treadmill redux, IMO, perennially a fool's errand.
We’re discussing this in another thread right now:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/10539/at-long-last-my-actual-arguments-for-hedonic-moralism
Quoting Pfhorrest
I think the above also answers this:
Quoting 180 Proof
I am not at all advocating consequentialism and thus no variety of utilitarianism per se, though I broadly agree with utilitarianism on what a good state of affairs is. But I don’t think those ends justify any and all means. Hedonism doesn’t mean anything more specific than that pleasure and pain etc are all that’s morally relevant, that if something is good or bad it is for the reason of some (dis)satisfaction it brings someone. Your negative utilitarianism is still within the scope of that, and very close to the methods that I advocate on pursuit of the ends we’re discussing here.
Why on earth would anyone want to do that??
...so that their models would remain accurate in light of new information?
Between this and your say similar question in that atheists thread, you come across as baffled by why anyone would have any concern for truth.
Because it's silly, to say the least! It's not how people generally function!
This is exactly right. Spiritual disciplines are not about coming to see something objectively true for oneself. Adherents may believe, while imaging that they know, that what they take themselves to have come to see is universally and objectively true.
They believe this on account of the certainty which they have attained through self-cultivation; but this is because they don't have an understanding of the clear distinction between knowing and believing, or the fact that no knowledge is context-independent..
So your ethical project is abolitionism (or something (transhumanist) like it)? :confused:
The complete abolition of all pain and suffering doesn't have to be practically feasible for the ethical principles I advocate to hold up. These specific principles here, about hedonism and universalism, are just about establishing the scale against which to measure the comparative goodness of several states of affairs. The complete abolition of all pain and suffering is would be way over at the extreme good end of that scale, but even far from that end of the scale, we can compare two states of affairs and see that one has less suffering than the other, and so is better (or at least, less wrong) than the other.
That doesn't necessarily tell us specifically what we morally ought to do -- on top of this very simple criterion, we also need a more complete methodology by which to apply it, that I'm doing a thread (or maybe several threads) about soon. But it at least tells us the direction to head, even if not how to get there.
I have a lot of contempt for truth. It's extremely over-rated, it needs a lot of scaffolding to emerge, and whenever it really, truly is what it is - it's so small and marginal that the forceps used to grasp it distort it beyond recognition but usher it into utility (and you can always ask "whose?" there). The truth of something does fuck all about that truth, and it's rarely necessary to know the truth to find one's way about. For the same reason as you don't need to know the exact shape of a car to know you should try not to be hit by them. Truth is a needlessly high standard.
Truth needn’t be absolute. It’s important to know that the car is actually a car and not something to else, even if you don’t need to know all the details of the car perfectly. That’s a degree of truth that matters, even if an absolute degree of it doesn’t.
Likewise any other kind of truth. If you have any concern at all for avoiding falsehood, even if that’s not an absolute and all-defeating concern, then you have some concern for truth.
Degree of truth -> truth value is no longer boolean -> doesn't resemble usual conceptions of truth. If you needed to parry the attack on "absolute truth" into a discussion which admits of degrees of truth in its operative concept, we're going to talk cross purposes if I engage without highlighting that. I'm specifically talking about when truth values are being treated as boolean.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I don't really want to play the "pin the assumptions on the philosopher" game. I'm sure we could go around the merry go round for a long time with you portraying that I have some nascent commitment to the truth (in some conception) and me trying to distance myself from it.
If you're willing to assert that it's "degree of truth" that matters and that how the degree matters depends upon practical/epistemic context, we're already dealing with a notion of truth that is more epistemic and pragmatic, and thus probably agree for practical purposes.
:up:
But FWIW, I'm not talking about anything like fuzzy logic or such when I talk about "degrees of truth" here. I'm talking about how one can be concerned with the (boolean) truth of a very general proposition, without having to be concerned with (boolean) truths of any of the many more specific cases of that general proposition being true. E.g. even if it matters whether it's true that there's a car heading toward you, it needn't matter whether it's true that car is a Volvo, or that it's a Honda, or... etc. But the truth of the more general proposition still matters.
Circling back around to the start of this discussion about truth, wherein Baker asked why we should update our ethical models in light of new evidence, or (in a different thread) why I care whether it's true that God exists: in the context of talking about such topics, we're already paying attention to those questions, acting like they matter, at least for the purposes of our discussion here. Since I'm already attending to the question, I care to make sure I don't give a false answer to it.
Baker's question seemed to be "why do you care not to give false answers to things?", not "why are you talking about that topic?" There are lots of good practical reasons not to care to pay attention to particular things, but given that you're paying attention to something already, it's kind of shocking to see someone so explicitly act like it doesn't matter whether they're right or wrong about it.
Maybe?
Hostility to the frame something is presented in can look a lot like hostility to the truth. I think, based on skim reading and brainfarts, that this is the suspicion @baker is leveraging. If someone'(you, or Wayfarer earlier) seems to be presenting what looks like a totalising system that decides what's right and wrong, and to them the system+person appears to purport that they've found the rational kernel/essence of right and wrong... I mean, they're gonna wanna reject that, it's gonna look absolutely nuts.
Systematising ethics (right/wrong) like that can have a very "this drunk came up to me on the street and told me the way to find God" feel to it! That seems quite vindicated to me, as any such system is an attempt to reconfigure how values are seen and norms are related to, a lot like our drunken messiah's aspirations.
This is what you get from my words???!
I was asking you about your motivations for wanting to know the truth about some particular matters, in this case, "God". That was the cue for you to look within and be clear about your motivations. Perhaps also share them with others. Unless you're into rehashing the same old theism-atheism arguments that have been around for millennia, without ever getting resolved. I figured that if you have a formal education in philosophy and aren't a teenager, it would be safe to assume you know better than to go down that road.
Which is what he's doing: Just yet another authoritarian know-it-all with an utopian bent ...
I think that's an uncharitable interpretation of @Pfhorrest, but I do understand the vibe.
You're developing a theory of morality for which there can be no hope of it ever being implemented by humans.
FWIW, I think you manifest a 'will-to-system' that's always going to annoy the opposite anti-systematic temperament. This is something like William James' tough-versus-tender-minded thing. As someone perhaps of the opposite temperament, I'm somewhat allergic to ethical theorizing. 'All that matters, morally speaking, is people not suffering' seems gray and abstract to me, as if 'suffering' can be cleanly separated from non-suffering or as if suffering isn't perhaps necessary for personal growth. But I don't mean to attack you. I'm just speculating on your clash w baker and putting my own spin on fdrake's comments.
[quote=link]
Distinction drawn by James, who found it illuminating to classify philosophers into one of these two camps (Pragmatism, Ch. 1). The tender-minded are: rationalistic (going by ‘principles’), intellectualistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, free-willist, monistic, and dogmatical. The tough-minded are: empiricist (going by ‘facts’), sensationalistic, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, pluralistic, and sceptical.
[/quote]
https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803103046172
Thanks for the insight, though I don't think I fit cleanly into either of James' categories. I'm rationalistic, empiricist, intellectualistic, both or neither idealistic/materialistic in different senses, optimistic in some ways but pessimistic in others, fiercely anti-religious, free-willist inasmuch as that means anti-fatalistic, monistic in some ways but pluralistic in others, and fiercely anti-dogmatic but equally anti-cynical. (I'm not sure what he means by "sensationalistic" there; the usual sense I'm familiar with seems out of place).
What I probably am above all else is tenacious. My personal motto and the literal foundation of my entire system of philosophy is "it may be hopeless but I'm trying anyway". Which circles back to the first paragraph of this post: it doesn't matter if attaining complete good in the sense I mean it here is not possible, all that matters is that that's the direction to push toward. Further that direction is better, and that we might never get all the way there is entirely beside the point, because some progress is still better than none.
Whow, that's a shot of espresso. Dense. :up:
I guess none of fit all that cleanly in such a simple grid, so maybe the issue is the integrative/systematic as opposed to the piecemeal/improvisational approach. I think of the tough-minded type as being more comfortable with a set of facts that haven't suffered too much lossy compression (at the cost of a theory that nevertheless gets something right.) Ethically, I just muddle through. Jokes, anecdotes, aphorisms....
Quoting Pfhorrest
Of course I agree that.......suffering is bad. (?) That's suspiciously easy! I guess my objection is that suffering here is being treated like a gray quantity, an unpleasant homogeneous ooze. One ends up a crystal castle of abstractions, devoid of detail. Even if empiricism is theoretically central to the System, the spirit of the thing is to make it all fit together, perhaps by sanding all of the edges off. Frankly, I found the poll absurd. All these categories, categories, categories. Absurd-to-me discrete variables for continuous and ambiguous issues.
Or that's my temperament's reaction reaction to yours.
But of course it does, because 'we' don't discover anything, individual people do. So absolutely any method which involves applying some fact about how things are or should be is an attempt to lend authority to one's own version of that. It's never just 'we discovered that X causes A to suffer', it's "I believe that X causes A to suffer - and therefore you should refrain from X no matter what you personally feel about it". One does not simply 'discover' facts, one believes them. There are always competing models and, no non-circular way of choosing between them. The reason it comes across as authoritarian is that we can all see the implication (something you're either blind to or disingenuous about). As a system it absolutely requires some authority to determine what is 'true' about what causes more suffering than what and to use that 'fact' to lend weight to prescriptions based on that. Absent of that it's nothing but of purposeless exchange of 'maybe's.
The problem is woven throughout your approach (and that of many others). The conclusions are trivially true given the premises - you want us to focus on the quality of the logic, when that's child's play. The issue is with the premises. People try this sleight of hand different ways, but with you it's forever "That's not what this thread is about, I've dealt with that in another thread" (but when we look to that other thread we just find a whole load of unresolved problems). Basically, the desire to systematise, the neatness of all these analogies and categorisations, just leaves one having to discard or bend out of shape all the stuff that doesn't fit, like packing for camping and leaving the poles behind because they're longer than the box you had for the tent.
If one excludes the religious, then I think it is indeed plausible (trivially so) that "all that matters, morally speaking, is people not suffering", if you want to frame everything that way, you can. (virtues are such because they lead to less suffering, customs likewise, even many religious edicts could be parsed that way if you include the afterlife), but then you gloss over all the complexities of ethics with "therefore we should update our idea of what's moral when we discover that something causes someone to suffer" - which is not trivially true at all, far from it. It packs within that all sorts of assumptions about how to deal with uncertainty (do we act immediately on every 'discovery', or are we cautious about new knowledge?), how we deal with trust ('we' never discover anything, some group does - do we trust them?), and our socially-mediated concepts (what constitutes 'suffering' changes between cultures and generations, what constitutes a 'cause' is bound up with what we see as immutable and what is not). Once you unpack all that you just end up with all the ethical approaches humans have come up with thus far.
Almost all of the many ethical approaches are attempts (even if not consciously so) to deal with some of those issues. Sticking to customs and virtues is a way of hedging against the fragility that 'brand new' data often has, so we update more slowly by following traditions and laws. Egoist systems take the most extreme position on trusting others to have 'discovered' facts about what's best. The many relativist approaches are attempts to deal with the cultural mediation of what constitutes 'suffering' and 'cause' etc. So laying it out this way just re-iterates the debate, it doesn't move it forward.
And before you say "all this is true of empirical studies too", it may or may not be, but that is not an argument in itself. We might well make those compromises for empirical studies, that just shows that we can, not that we ought to in all other situations. Proscriptive domains are about possible states, descriptive domains about actual ones. That's no insignificant difference, the assumption that they should be treated the same just because they can is crazy. Again, I know you've responded in the past that we can make progress this way, 'better try than not', but this begs the question. It's not progress if the wrong approach, it's just movement.
You create this chain of abandoned threads, littered with unresolved issues, which are then treated as foundations for key structures in some new edifice, with an agenda, fixed from the beginning, without any mutual consideration of the issues others raise, when the end result of all this is supposed to be determining how other people behave. It obviously looks very much as though you're determining how other people should behave according to your own private beliefs without consultation. Is it any wonder it's seen as a little potentially authoritarian?
Excluding the religious (and similar) views on morality is the point of this facet of my ethics. The people who object to this ethical view pretty much just are religious people. They’re the ones I’m arguing against.
We’ve been over this before. If you trivially agree with my points, great! Others don’t. Let’s talk about why exactly they’re wrong. Not just congratulate each other on being right, but examine just what subtle errors lead (or excuse) others away from being right.
Quoting Isaac
It explicitly does not, and this is the point you keep missing about all the different threads that are each focused on one narrow part of the big picture. Endorsing hedonistic altruism doesn’t have to mean endorsing consequentialism or authoritarianism or anything like that. It’s just an answer to one little question: what criteria to use when assessing what is moral. The methods by which to apply that are another topic (and on that topic I’m anti-consequentialist), who is responsible for applying such methods is yet another (and on that topic I’m an anarchist), etc. And those are topics I’m getting to.
You always seem so bothered that I’m not addressing ALL of the parts of the WHOLE complex of issues all at once in one thread, but do you have any idea how huge of an OP that would be? I was actually going to have a nicely organized thread with an overview of the whole general structure of my big picture argument back at the start of this, and I though all this time that I had, but I recently realized that the way YOU jumped all over me in the thread that was to precede that one screwed up those plans and I never actually did that correctly. (I made a followup post to that thread recently noting that fact, and elaborating on the stuff that I didn't get to posting back then).
It seems like you want me to start with the big picture conclusion (“hey everyone lets be less authoritarian and hierarchical and work together independently but cooperatively to realize all of our dreams”) and then go into the reasons for that conclusion and the reasons for those reasons etc, going backward through the argument until we get to the deepest premises. I get it, you’re used to psychologically analyzing like that. And that could be a way to do it, sure.
Except then anyone who doesn’t like that conclusion on the face of it is going to dig in their heels and reject any premise that might lead to it no matter how trivially true those premises. So instead I start with the trivially true premises, and build up from them slowly toward the big conclusion, showing along the way why it had to follow from those very agreeable, trivial premises.
Yet when I do that, YOU nevertheless jump as uncharitably as possible straight to what you think my conclusion will be, take reaching that conclusion to be the reason to hold the premises rather than the other way around, and so try to twist those premises, that are MEANT to be trivial uncontroversial starting points, into a hidden form of the conclusion you think I’m going for, and when I clarify that that’s all unwarranted reading-into what I’m actually saying, you call what I’m actually saying “trivial” as though that was a bug rather than a feature.
Bertrand Russell wrote "The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."
I started off with things you think are not worth stating. Good! That's where we're supposed to start! The point is to first get agreement with those no-duh obvious things, and then build up to things nobody wants to believe (like the rejection of all religions and states), on the grounds of those very same trivial obvious things.
So to have you constantly complaining either that those things are trivial and obvious (duh) or else a hidden attempt at authoritarianism (quite the opposite)...
ETA: I wanted to give a brief recap of the series of threads you insist are all on the same topic, and your disruptive influence on them.
- First I did a series of threads on meta-philosophical topics.
Those all went pretty fine and as far as I can remember you didn't participate in them.
- Those were to culminate on a thread about taking a systematic and principled approach to philosophy generally, in which I gave, as an example of the kind of thing I meant, my core principles (just stated, not argued for) and a list of some other positions that I think they imply (again, just stated, not argued for; these were only examples of the kind of thing I wanted to get other people's examples of too).
That got completely derailed into a long argument with you about the implications you assumed must follow from one half of one of those four principles (the moral side of the principle I then called objectivism, now universalism), so I made a different thread to continue the topic that that one was supposed to be about, and turned that one instead into...
- A thread about my basic philosophical principles in general and how they relate to each other in a big-picture kind of way.
Because I was already just trying to get out of the fruitless loop of argument with you, I actually never got around to properly presenting arguments for adopting those principles, or relating them to each other in a big-picture way, as I had planned. (I returned to that thread recently to do so, when I realized that). That completely threw off everything else that was to come.
[s]- I was going to do a series of four other threads, each one on one of those four core principles, elaborating on what I do or don't mean by it, and giving more extensive arguments for it.
But I was so fucking burnt out from you in that previous thread that I just skipped those entirely.[/s]
- Instead I moved on and started a thread on philosophy of language generally, including but in no way limited to moral language.
You took that opportunity to pick up the same damn argument against moral objectivism/universalism (because, yeah, my general philosophy of language implies that both factual and normative types of claim can be equally true) and turned that entire thread into more of the same shit again.
- Then I did a few threads each about rhetoric and the arts.
- And a few more threads eachabout logic and mathematics.
- I did a thread about the criteria by which to judge what is real, and implications of that on ontology more generally.
- I did a thread about philosophy of mind.
As I recall, you didn't participate in any of those (the last of which really surprises me), and they all went pretty fine.
- I did a few threads about different sub-topics within epistemology, i.e. about the methods by which to apply the aforementioned criteria by which to judge what is real, because every thought I have on epistemology would be way too long for one OP.
And you showed up to the first one to attack things I wasn't even arguing for yet, but I had implied I believed since the next thread was going to be about that, and then complained when I dropped that thread to start the one in which I was actually going to give arguments for the thing you were already attacking, and that turned into another shit show because of you. (Yes, others were also participating, but you were the only one being a pissant there.) You thankfully didn't show up for the remaining few sub-topics of epistemology, or if you did I managed to ignore you.
- Then a thread about philosophy of education, sorta crossed with philosophy of religion.
You didn't show up there as I recall, and it generally went well.
- A thread about my approach to the sub-fields of ethics generally, and how that differs from the usual organization of ethics into different sub-fields.
I think you maybe showed up there briefly but I managed to ignore you.
- A few threads about the criteria by which to judge what is moral, and how that's sort of the moral analogue to ontology, which field I refer to as "teleology".
Despite the fact that this is finally the topic that you kept making so many of the earlier threads about, you didn't show up, thankfully.
- I'm currently doing a thread on free will and moral responsibility.
And I'm surprised you haven't shown up there, but please, don't change that.
- Next up will be a thread (or maybe a series thereof) about the methods by which to apply the aforementioned criteria by which to judge what is moral, and how that's sort of the moral analogue to epistemology, which field I refer to as "deontology".
- Then, almost finally, a thread (or maybe a series thereof) about the social institutions to apply such methods, i.e. about governance.
Those are the topics you claim I'm ignoring the implications on, when I'm explicitly not implying anything about them yet, because I'm planning to talk about them each on their own, soon.
- And lastly will be some meaning of life type of stuff you probably don't give a shit about.
So yeah, I guess I just keep on ranting about the same thing over and over again, eh? Or maybe you're just not paying attention?
Well, since religious people accept their ethics on faith, not rational argument, I can't understand why you would put such effort into it. Your argument seems to hinge on "...because X said so" being a conclusion we would want to avoid, yet for the religious, that's exactly the conclusion they have faith in.
Quoting Pfhorrest
You've not quoted a single philosopher who doesn't agree with the basic points you take as premises here. That suffering (when assessed hedonically at the affect level, and in the long term, recognising that it might change over time, and including future generations, plus an afterlife if there is one, including any 'higher' senses like art and music and love...) that long and complicated definition of 'suffering' is a bad thing and we shouldn't impose it on others. Find me a philosopher, scientists, any public academic who disagrees with that. It's just the definition of the 'suffering'. If anything within 'suffering' wasn't bad it wouldn't be called 'suffering'. Anyone who can speak English agrees that 'suffering' (in that long sense) is a bad thing, it's part of knowing what the word means.
Quoting Pfhorrest
It means having an answer to those questions (otherwise you wouldn't even be starting the process).
I'll keep this short because I know how much you dislike my involvement. Humans have been dealing with the question of how we should act toward one another for upwards of 200,000 years, since before complex language even. It's deeply ingrained in our language, culture and possibly even genetics. It's woven so tightly into everything we do that you can't even discuss it without using words, the meaning of which, involves an already present ethical framework.
Thousands of pages have been written about it, with probably in excess of 10 billion people involved in greater or lesser ways. The idea that you out of all of them, have come up with a system finally, after 200,000 years of trying which is not just a re-framing, or restatement of the issues already known, is ludicrous to the point of being messianic. Maybe you have, maybe you are, indeed, the smartest person ever to have lived (in regards to this topic), but for that to be the case you'd surely be unsurprised by the amount of 'pushback' you get from people struggling to believe this fact, yet it seems to constantly alarm you.
Quoting Pfhorrest
You're working with people's intuitions only here. No actual physiological facts. So how are you distinguishing a 'conclusion' from a 'premise'? Our intuitions don't go around with little labels on them. If I have a feeling that everyone should "be less authoritarian and hierarchical and work together independently but cooperatively to realize all of our dreams" and I also have a feeling that "imposing suffering on others is bad", and maybe also a feeling that "some divine being must have made this universe and so whatever He says is right must be right"... What properties of each of those feelings are you using to judge that one is a 'premise' and the others 'conclusions'. Why should one not take one's feeling about God as a premise and one's feeling about suffering as a conclusion - realising that they must be wrong about the whole suffering thing because God can be a bastard sometimes in that respect?
As we've been over already in your thread about epistemology, all you have if some beliefs which seem inconsistent. You can change any one of them to match, or re-frame them so that they're consistent, or postpone doing so (assuming they're all right but you haven't worked out how yet), or treat the whole thing as confusion of language...
...all of which is essentially what ethical philosophers have been doing all these years.
You've chosen one of those feeling to be your starting point and worked logically to support others from there (and thereby argue against those other feelings in other people). But all this does not carry any normative weight. All it does is reflect which of your beliefs you're going to label 'premises' (spoiler alert - it's the ones which make all your other beliefs right and your opponents wrong).
Because there are supposedly rational people (thousands of years of professional philosophers) who give arguments for why that's supposedly the right way to do things, who get copied by the amateurs who use those arguments as cover for their irrationality. The point is to shoot down that cover, and give ammunition for others to do so, to expose irrationality as irrationality and not let it hide behind a veneer of rationality. If people want to stand by irrationality openly as such, then there's nothing more to do.
Quoting Isaac
Plato is the first obvious example, and consequentially pretty much all Platonists, Neoplatonists, and so also most Christian philosophers. Plato in general rejects the importance of pretty much anything experiential, whether that be empirical experience to tell us about reality, or hedonic experience to tell us about morality. To Plato, experience is pretty much all deception and vice, and both truth and goodness can only be found introspectively, by contemplating the Forms, all of which are subsumed within the Form of the Good, the highest form (equated by later Christian philosophers with God himself), which is the source of all goodness and all truth.
Lots of supposedly smart, reasonable people believe some really wacky shit.
SEP also has a list of arguments against hedonism with names if you like.
Quoting Isaac
It really doesn't. I have thoughts on the answers to those other questions, sure, but someone who was philosophically unsure could agree in general that people feeling good rather than bad is probably the only thing that really matters, as an end in itself, but be undecided about whether the ends justify the means, or whether we should trust authority, etc.
Quoting Isaac
I'm very open about how most of the parts of my views are not new things that have never been espoused before. I think my novel contribution to the problem is mostly in taking parts from those different well-known views and connecting them together into a form that escapes their common arguments against each other; basically, agreeing with their best arguments against each other, in every direction, and keeping only what's left of each side. And also, in grounding the resultant structure in the basic pragmatism (itself also not entirely my own invention) I'm about to elaborate on below.
Quoting Isaac
What surprises me is not that some people disagree, but that it seems like nobody at all agrees. I expect a certain type of person (like all those descended from Plato above) to disagree out the gate, but I also expect there to be plenty of people who haven't had their minds ruined by bad philosophy to think it's obviously right, and to be interested in a new line of attack against those who think it's wrong. It was the utter lack of the latter (until this poll showed they were just hiding in the woodwork) that shocked me.
Quoting Isaac
Answering questions like this is the most novel individual point of my entire philosophical system (as opposed to the structural things relating pieces of already well-known positions together). Even this has precursors though, in a lot of pragmatists and proto-pragmatists, going way back to Blaise Pascal.
And that answer is basically to suppose a starting point of absolute radical doubt where you don't even know what there is to know, or how to know it, or if we can know it at all, or if there is even anything at all to be known, and then recognize that in any case you can't help but act on some tacit assumption one way or the other, and ask which of the possible assumptions among those you've got to blindly make in this epistemic darkness are most likely to lead you to figuring out the answers to things, in case it should turn out that there actually are any answers that can be figured out.
The first two such assumptions I argue for from that position are that there is some such answer or other to whatever question is at hand (because if you assumed instead to the contrary, you'd have no reason to try out any potential answers), but that it's always uncertain whether any particular thing is that answer (because if you assumed instead to the contrary, you'd have no reason to check if any other potential answer is better than your present guess).
From there I then rule out other things that run contrary to those pragmatic assumptions, anything that would give reason to give up the investigation in either of those two ways, and run with whatever is left. Elaborating the chain from those core pragmatic assumptions to every other specific position is what all the text I've already written in all those other threads is for, so I'm not going to repeat it all here. But on the topic of this thread about hedonism specifically, I'll give an abbreviated version of that chain:
If you are to remain always uncertain whether any particular thing is the correct answer, you can't just take anyone's word without question; you have to be able to check supposed answers. To check supposed answers, we have two things to test: their own basic internal logical self-consistency, and their accordance with external phenomenal experience. And phenomenal experiences of things seeming good or bad are what is meant by hedonic experiences. So any claim of something being good or bad must be in light of the hedonic experiences associated with it, or else you'd have to just take someone's word on it without question, in which case you'd never find out if you were wrong, which leaves you much more likely to be wrong, which you presumably care to avoid. (And if you don't care to avoid it, okay, go ahead and be probably-wrong.)
Actually, it is trivially false that all commonly held moral beliefs can be construed as being aimed at minimizing suffering. (I am including the "commonly held" qualification in deference to your social/semantic take on ethics.) Take, for example, the imperative to punish offenders. While it can be argued that just punishment, on the whole, tends to reduce suffering (by way of deterrence, for example), this is not so in every particular case. And in any event, minimizing suffering is not what motivates the imperative in the first place, even if it happens to have that side effect - on the contrary, what matters to those who adhere to it is that the offender does suffer.
If we survey current and past moral attitudes, we can find plenty of examples of moral imperatives that are not aimed at the reduction of suffering. I take it that @Pfhorrest and a number of others would not support such attitudes. So people disagree about right and wrong. What else is new? What are we discussing here? What's the point of all these threads and polls? To identify like-minded members?
I think you might be getting the wrong impression of what I meant here. I don't mean the likes of Lane-Craig or some such arguing the rationality of god's existence. I mean having accepted that, they don't then question god's instructions on the basis of whether they think he's doing a good job or not. If you want to argue God doesn't exist then fine, but when arguing that ethics should be based on X, you're never talking to the religious who do not question the ethical proscriptions of their chosen divinity.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I wasn't after opposition to Hedonism, that's not quite as general as your claim, you include suffering of all sorts over all timeframes, to all people and without even taking their own word for it. that's a much wider definition of 'suffering' than most hedonism and thus would simply be encompassed in those arguments.
The non-necessity arguments would all just be subsumed under more long-term or esoteric versions of 'pleasure' rather than the short-term, visceral type more commonly associated with traditional hedonism. Most insufficiency arguments are simply voicing the same long-term approaches, or taking a wider societal view of non-suffering. I'm not here saying that these are frames that the proponents of these positions would use, only that it's a trivial matter to re-frame them in terms of hedonism if you widen the definition of 'pleasure' and 'suffering' sufficiently. But in doing so you've simply re-defined the same dilemma, not solved it.
Quoting Pfhorrest
That's self-contradictory. If they were concerned about justifying means and libertarian concerns about authority, then they would be performatively contradicting a belief that people feeling good rather than bad is probably the only thing that really matters.
Quoting Pfhorrest
You do realise that the humble use of the word "mostly" there does nothing to cover the fact that what you're claiming is to have resolved the common arguments against all philosophical positions.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Impossible right off the bat, so anything done from here is going to be a pretence
Quoting Pfhorrest
The question could be ill-formed, meaningless or nonsensical. assuming there's an answer ignores those possibilities.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Which exemplifies the point I made earlier. there were massive issues with that exposition. virtually everyone taking part in that particular thread raised an issue with your approach. Citing it now as a premise without acknowledging those issues is what comes across as oddly 'authoritarian'. We're the same people who read that previous thread you know. why would you think we'd follow on through the project as if it hadn't happened?
I understand what you're saying, but the manner in which I meant it is the manner in which your first proposition is undermined by your second. You say it is false that all commonly held moral beliefs can be construed as being aimed at minimising suffering and then give an example of exactly that. "it can be argued that just punishment, on the whole, tends to reduce suffering (by way of deterrence, for example)". Whilst I completely agree that to do so would be to miss entirely the motivation and social purpose of punishment, I merely wanted to point out to pfhorrest the triviality in attempting to give such a wide definition of 'suffering' that every position could be viewed through that frame. I shouldn't want to be seen as suggesting that do to so would capture all, or any, of the nuances that other frameworks have to their credit (or demerit), only that such a thing could be done.
Essentially I was trying to say what you've said here with your example of punishment. We could frame it as a long-term suffering reduction method but to do so doesn't get us anywhere because the issues that retributive justice deals with are not captured by such a framing.
What I'd be looking for, if you still think I've missed the mark, is an example of a moral position which cannot be (not just is not) construed in some super-widened sense of reducing suffering. If that makes sense? It's the banality of widening 'suffering' to the point that it just means the same as 'bad' (in a secular sense) and then arguing that this proves suffering is bad.
:up:
Quoting SophistiCat
Well my threads all have different points, as elaborated in response to Isaac two (of my) posts ago. They're just all about parts of the same (my own) philosophical system, so of course they're all compatible with my hedonistic views, but only one of them is actually supposed to be arguing for those views.
This poll is because I was surprised at the apparent total lack of agreement in an earlier discussion, so I thought I would just ask explicitly who does or doesn't agree, to see if maybe there are like-minded people who just aren't commenting because people only comment when they have an objection.
Quoting Tom Storm
Sure thing.
- The meaning of ethical claims is to impress (get someone to adopt) an intention (which is the same thing that might otherwise be called a “moral belief”).
- The criteria by which to judge whether to adopt an intention (to think something is good or bad) are hedonic experiences: pleasure, pain, enjoyment, suffering, etc. Everyone’s such experiences are relevant to such judgement.
- Will is the process of forming such intentions, and freedom of will is having them be effective in the direction of your behavior, i.e. it’s the power to cause yourself to do what you think you should do.
- The method by which to conduct that will, to form such intentions, to decide what is good or bad, is to initially think whatever you are just inclined to think even if you can’t name a good reason to, and to agree to disagree with anyone who thinks differently (i.e. to live and let live, to respect liberty), until one of you can show reason — grounded in those criteria above — why someone or other’s intention is bad. That still doesn’t conclusively settle what is good, but it narrows in on it gradually.
- The social institutes responsible for resolving conflicts about the above process should be non-authoritarian and non-hierarchical, a global cooperation of independent people working together voluntarily; basically a form of anarchism, or libertarian socialism.
- The way to get people to form such institutions is basically to help them, to help them help themselves, to help them to help others, to help them to help others to help themselves, to help them to help others to help others, etc.
There’s a lot more detail that can go into each of those points, which is why I did (or will soon do) a thread on each one, and I haven’t given here any of my arguments for them, just outlined what they are.
I'd suggest a few tweaks to the language because it is a bit unclear. I am unable to understand what below means. Too many ideas running together with double negatives for my brain to decipher.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Maybe this paragraph needs to be in 3 or 4 dot points of itself.
I can probably just trim out a lot of redundancy and external reference to make it better:
The method by which to decide what is good or bad is for everyone to do whatever they like, unless one of them can show reason why another’s intention would hurt someone. That still doesn’t conclusively settle what is the most good, but it narrows in on it gradually by eliminating the bad.
Not entirely undermined. I said that one could try to argue that retributive punishment is conducive to the reduction of suffering, but it wouldn't be a perfect fit, even extensionally (it doesn't always reduce net suffering), not to mention intensionally (it isn't aimed at reducing suffering). Trying to fit examples like punishment into the reduction-of-suffering paradigm is just as you said earlier:
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Isaac
Being a naturalist about morality, i.e. believing that moral intuitions and norms are the outcome of biological and cultural evolution, social dynamics, and other such natural factors, it seems reasonable to expect that common moral principles would be at least somewhat aligned with the imperative to reduce suffering. But by the same token, it wouldn't be reasonable to expect the alignment to be perfect.
Of course, I am not proposing a naturalistic moral principle (moral = natural) in opposition to @Pfhorrest's principle of reducing suffering. But if he is trying to start with widely shared, uncontroversial premises in building up his argument, he has to contend with the fact that, right out of the gate, people's moral intuitions aren't in alignment with his principle.
My point (on this specific issue) is not "God doesn't exist therefore this other thing must be the source of morality", but rather "it doesn't matter what God does or doesn't say, if he even exists". And I'm far from the first one to argue either for or against this: philosophers as far back as Socrates (who did not deny that gods existed, nor that they at least sometimes commanded good things) have argued for it, and many philosophers from then up to some still living today (like Robert Adams) still argue against it.
While writing the above it also occurred to me that there's a much more secular common kind of anti-hedonism: Kant's ethics make no appeal to divine commands, nor to any experience, but to some kind of abstract reasoning. On which note, see also the aforementioned Plato, who didn't directly appeal to any of the gods he believed in (being the one to record the aforementioned argument from Socrates), though later Christians transmuted his "Form of the Good" into just a synonym for their God.
Quoting Isaac
Not so. Just agreeing that people feeling good rather than bad is all that matters doesn't tell you anything about, for example, whether or not it's okay to cause a little suffering now to spare a lot of suffering later, or whether or not it's okay to cause a lot of suffering for a few people so as to spare the suffering of a disproportionately huge number of people. In either case you'd be trying to do good by hedonistic criteria, but is it wrong to do some bad by hedonistic criteria even to achieve that good? Is it obligatory? Just agreeing on the criteria alone doesn't tell you that.
Nor does it tell you whether or not it's wrong to disregard the claims of some particular authority figure about what causes the most or the least suffering, or whether or not it's wrong to disregard the majority opinion about what causes the most or the least suffering. In either case you'd still be aiming to do good by hedonistic criteria, and avoid the bad by hedonistic criteria that you think the alternatives would allow, but the others think the same about you, and do you get to take that responsibility into your own hands? Do they? Just agreeing on the criteria alone doesn't tell you that.
The only point of agreement at that point is that if somehow everything could magically and reliably be instantly made such that everyone felt good and nobody felt bad, that state of affairs would be good without qualification, necessarily and sufficiently. How it's permissible to actually get to that state, and who's responsible for ensuring that that happens, are additional questions on top of that. And then how it's practically possible, within those constraints, to make progress in that direction, is yet another question.
I know you hate these analogies, but it's exactly like how generally agreeing about empiricism doesn't resolve any disagreement between (hypothetico-deductive) confirmationists and falsificationists. Both of them agree that what is real is what conforms to all possible observations, but they disagree on the methodology by which to apply that criterion. Also, agreeing on empiricism wouldn't answer any question about whether it's (epistemically) wrong to doubt scientific authorities, or to doubt observational "common sense", etc. All of those are additional questions on top of empiricism. And even once those questions are answered, that still doesn't tell us any particulars about what is real; it just gives us a method to figure that out. Actual scientific questions are additional on top of even all that.
Quoting Isaac
It doesn't have to be possible to actually get to that state of mind in order for it to be useful in an argument. We've all had the experience of having things we believed thrown into doubt, usually more than once. We can imagine where that might lead, if that kept happening without end -- to the aforementioned epistemic darkness -- and then think about how we'd go about finding a way out of there, as a means of preemptively keeping from getting anywhere close to there.
Quoting Isaac
Then it's not actually a question, but a sentence in the grammatical form of a question which nevertheless asks nothing. Just like "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" expresses no proposition, despite being a grammatically correct sentence. There's nothing actually being claimed, and likewise "Do colorless green ideas sleep furiously?" isn't actually asking anything.
I already foresee that you'll reply "What if all moral sentences are categorically like that?", which is just non-cognitivism, and that's why I have an account of moral semantics that defends a kind of cognitivism and explains what moral sentences categorically mean, though of course it's still always possible to construct a specific meaningless one, like "Colorless green ideas ought to sleep furiously".
Quoting Isaac
I wouldn't think you would. I would think you would drop out as soon as it became clear that we're not going to reach a resolution on something that will be foundational to everything else to come.
If someone was doing a bunch of discussions expounding on a kind of theist philosophy, I might (but probably wouldn't both to) engage in the first one to point out how whatever that topic is rests on something I think is a faulty premise -- the existence of God -- and when it became clear that they were unconvinced by my arguments against that premise, I wouldn't bother following along to remind them that I disagree with their theism every time they posted.
I'm aware that there have been objections along the way in my series of threads. I think I've adequately addressed them. I'm aware that you don't think that. I don't think it's worth the time trying to convince you about them, because I still don't think you're arguing in good faith. (You only ever adopt a position so as to argue against someone else's and never positively endorse any position yourself, making you always playing offense and everyone else always play defense, which is a classic type of bad-faith argument style).
So I expect that, like a reasonable person, you will abandon the argument against what you perceive as an incorrigible interlocutor. And yet you keep showing up to remind me that you still disagree. Yeah. I know. Move on. I don't care to convince anyone in particular in practice, only to have an argument that is sound so far as I can tell -- even after listening to objections and looking for anything new in them -- and if others are unconvinced by it for what seem to me to be bad reasons, oh well, I didn't convince someone, who cares, move on.
Quoting SophistiCat
The point of that Russell quote on that topic I quoted earlier is pretty much that in doing philosophy, we're always going to start out appealing to some intuitions people have, and showing that other of their intuitions are contrary to the implications of those. If we're doing it well, we'll pick deeper, broader, more fundamental things, the rejection of which would be even more catastrophic, as premises, and show that other less foundational but still common views are incompatible with those, for our conclusions.
People's intuitions of particulars about both reality and morality can be all over the map, and I'm trying to appeal to far broader and deeper things like "there's such a thing as a right answer" and "any answer might be a wrong one" (neither of those only specifically about ethics, just in general) to establish, not even answers about those particulars, but merely a reliable method of finding such answers.
Now that's an interesting difference. I was speculating that one could capture the extensional features of retributive justice in a sufficiently wide definition of 'suffering-reduction', only that to do so would be trivial as the definition thereby allowed would be so wide as to just be synonymous with 'morally bad' anyway. Am I right to think you're suggesting here that no such definition could be made of even the extensional features alone?
If so, what features of retributive justice do you think fall into that category? I tried thinking along lines of your example of ensuring the perpetrators suffer, but even then could frame that as easing the suffering of the victim by schadenfreude. I thought of 'justice served' as a virtue, but any 'virtue' is subject to the argument that it's absence causes psychological 'suffering' - being in an ignoble state. I basically drew a blank, anything 'Good' by definition seems to be open to having its absence framed as a kind of suffering.
Quoting SophistiCat
Yes. This chimes very nicely with my favoured semantic approach. Regardless of my previous niggle about what 'could' be done with ambiguous definitions and re-framings, I'm in broad agreement with you here. What we actually count as 'morally good' is too dynamic, too socially-mediated, too prone to feedback to be aligned with anything permanent and external to that system.
This is my main gripe with any kind of hedonism. It ignores the basic psychological fact that our affects are fabricated, in part, from social cues. Part of why we feel good about some things and bad about others is because we interpret physiological states that way as a result of the models we've learnt from our culture.
If a culture's morality helps define what we feel good and bad about (and it unequivocally does), then it's pointless trying to define a culture's morality on the basis of what we feel good and bad about.
But anyway, I'm re-covering what you've already said really.
Define "suffering".
Yes, and "hedonism" can mean so many things, to the point that the term becomes useless.
There are Buddhist and Hindu dharma teachers who looking at pictures like these would say that those ascetics are practicing "sense indulgence". There are cultural systems where "sense indulgence" can mean a great variety of things, from overeating, getting drunk, to never sitting down or holding up one's arms for years.
A phenomenal experience with negative world-to-mind fit.
What I'm struggling to understand here is how you're forming an argument that hedonism is the only alternative to "...because X said so", yet also arguing that alternative philosophies exist which do not amount to "...because X said so". If Kant's framework relies on reason - ie, only act according to that which you could at the same time wish were a universal law (or something like that), then it seems that the only two conclusions you could draw from that are either a) there exists a non-hedonistic means of judging that which is moral that does not amount to "...because X said so", or b) morality captures more than hedonism and no matter how accurate your measurement of it you'd be missing something if you didn't also measure 'reasonableness' (or somesuch). If you agree that Kant's moral philosophy is based on something no-hedonic, yet also non-authoritarian, then your argument about hedonism being required in order to avoid having to resort to "...because X said so" falls apart.
Quoting Pfhorrest
If that were an issue then temporal nearness or hyperbolic discounting would also 'matter'. Something else other than feeling good or bad would matter - how far removed the feeling is in time.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Again, that just means that something else matters. Here it's the number of people who share in the pleasure/displeasure. That's unarguably something else mattering other than just whether people feel good or bad.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Once more, now something else matters - justness of personal responsibility. Just good/bad are no longer all that matter, but additionally the rightfulness of the authority of the judge.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Questions which cannot be judged on the basis of reducing suffering. Yet they're still moral questions. One of them even contains the term 'permissible' as you've phrased it. The other implies permissible behaviour (who ought to judge and who ought not). If you're denying that these are moral questions, then on what grounds? If not then there are clearly moral questions which cannot be resolved by reference to hedonic values.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Maybe, but your argument relies on us being right about that. We'd 'imagine' it, but replete with all the hard-wired beliefs which we just can't shift still as firmly in place as they ever were. For citation see... every psychological experiment ever. 'Imagining' that you're building your beliefs up from some blank slate is no different to 'imagining' you're an alien from Mars and using it to claim you now have some insight into what Martians think.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I was more thinking of "what if some moral sentences are like that?".
Quoting Pfhorrest
Which I've no doubt already disagreed with, you've already claimed I'm merely misunderstanding you on, and thus you use, as if flawless, as a prop... I'm only trying to see if the argument has more to offer than "these are the things I think". One of the reasons your posts bug me - and you're not the only one - is that this a public forum. Forum being the key word. It's not your personal blog, you can publish that yourself anytime you like, curate responses if you want to, edit, or not, as you see fit. But here is not the place to do that. Here is a forum for public debate, we're here to discuss, not accumulate a database of "stuff people on the internet reckon".
That you think your account of moral semantics "defends a kind of cognitivism and explains what moral sentences categorically mean" is utterly irrelevant here. Great material for your personal website. Publish it, stick it on YouTube, shout about it on your street corner... whatever. But here what matters is what other posters think it defends or explains. It taken as given that you think it does, that's presumably why you posted it. If you publish it here then it becomes the topic for debate, we're not your editors, nor your peer review board. We're not to be dismissed with "thanks for the input but I don't agree so your services are no longer required"
Quoting Pfhorrest
As above, why on earth would I do that? The aim is not to reach a resolution on something such that if that's not possible the project might as well be abandoned. What you're doing is the conversational equivalent of ignoring your interlocutors with "yes, that's all very interesting, but stop interrupting...now, as I was saying..."
Quoting Pfhorrest
It's really not about convincing me of anything. Again, we're a discussion forum, we're not a policy think tank either, we don't have to come up with the answer any time. It's about having a decent amount of respect for weight of human thought that's previously gone into these issues.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Is it? what would be the 'bad' in that approach - It seems again to confuse a discussion forum with your personal blog. The entire point of posting something on a discussion forum is as a topic for discussion (critical, if need be). To say that people who then discuss such an offering are doing so in bad faith is really weird.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Move on to what? You seem to be confusing the forum with a Gallup poll now. "here's my idea", "I agree", "I disagree", "great discussion guys...next". The argument about moral realism probably extends to several hundred thousand pages in philosophical literature...and it's still not resolved. Do you expect Rosalind Hurthouse to object to Robert Louden’s 'application problem' criticism with a paper just entitled "Yes, I get it, you don't agree, move on!" in which she just complains about his constant interjections that non-virtuous agents cannot learn virtue without rules? Of course not. and the debate already spans several thousand words. We've barely exchanged more than couple of hundred on this, yet a handful of posts in you're already wanting to shut down the discussion and move on as if it never happened. You put the ideas out there ostensibly for debate, but you don't seem at all interested in getting into the debate, you just want a quick round of applause so you can move on to post the next in your grand edifice for the same purpose.
We're here to discuss. The issues with your theory (as yet unresolved) are as good a topic as any, there's no good reason at all to 'move on'. Hell, we still haven't 'moved on' from debating Platonic realism and that debate started 2000 years ago. You've fundamentally misunderstood how philosophical discussion works if you think a couple of exchanges is a good reason to ignore the issues and carry on regardless.
Okay, and people don't just naturally know how to get to the top. They may never get off the bottom. What needs to be done for people to move up the pyramid?
What is a social institute? Would that be a school?
Yes, indeed. @Pfhorrest's system is like fitting a line to series of data points (the hedonic affects of each person in each circumstance). It relies on there being such a line. But as I've pointed out several times, the empirical evidence is against him on this. All that we know about affect (which is a cold hard biological feature) is that it is a dynamically modelled state, where things like cultural mores can affect the output of that model. As such the 'data points' are not only not fixed (and so can't have any line of fit put to them), but they are actually moved by the very act of trying to fit a line to them.
Your ascetics there would actually feel differently about their experiences in a culture which viewed them differently.
Western oral tradition held for many centuries that there were four personality types (even some of the Church Fathers mention this): Melancholic, who were more earthly, obsessive, conscientiousness, and cautious. Phlegmatic (water dominated) who were steadfast and supportive, but had a temptation to become hermits. Then there are Sanguine (ruled by the Air element) who are socially useful and inspiring but who can tend to hysteria. Finally there is the Choleric who is ruled by "fire" and like dominance and ruling. They can easily be depressed.
Heraclitus said that fire in the soul was best. The dryer the better
Now I've compared the idea of the "basic elements" among cultures and found that exceedingly contradictory. What China might call wind India might call fire. So trying to learn from ancient civilizations on these matters is thorny. There perhaps is some wisdom in saying there are four fundamental personality types however. This has made some sense to me. But with morality, although it's hard not to generalize, saying anything is objectively wrong confuses people because conscience does not really bear this out. The intellect is weak and can't consistently grasp for sure what is right. Everyone's consciences, likewise, are saying different things. So for me when I see someone say "that is wrong" what they are doing is trying to change someone's behavior, and the Platonic status of the statement is irrelevant
A school is a kind of social institute, but in this case I was referring to a government, though I do draw parallels between education and governance in my overall philosophy.
Quoting Isaac
Two common critiques of Kantian ethics are, on the one hand, that it does actually appeal to hedonistic criteria even while it claims it doesn't (Mill himself argued that), or, on the other hand, that it amounts to "I think this should be a universal rule, I would agree to be bound by this, therefore this is a universal rule, and everyone is bound to it, because I think they should be". I agree with both of those critiques, and think that Kantian ethics either amount to endorsing something because the agent is imagining it would be more pleasurable / less painful for everyone if that something were a universal law, or else (and possibly even simultaneously) saying that its a universal law "because I said so". Of course Kant himself would argue that it's neither of those things, but just because he says it's not doesn't mean it isn't.
The "reason" aspect of Kant's theory basically amounts to non-hypocrisy, which is more or less the same as my universalism; and non-consequentialism like his is also an indirect consequence of universalism, on my account. None of that runs counter to hedonism, but see below for more on that point.
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Isaac
Temporal nearness, hyperbolic discounting, number of people, and so on, are all aspects of a concern about suffering, about which one could decide one way or another without changing that the concern is still about suffering.
My view isn't just hedonism simpliciter: that's a very broad category of views, there's room for a lot of disagreement within hedonism. Hedonism could be egotistic, but mine isn't. Hedonism could be consequentialistic, but mine isn't. Hedonism could be authoritarian, but mine isn't. All of those would still be hedonism though, as is mine.
My total ethical view is the intersection all of my four core principles as applied to ethics. Phenomenalism is one of those principles, and applied to ethics that's hedonism. Universalism is another one of those principles, which narrows in to only a specific subset of hedonism. Criticism and liberalism are two more principles, which narrow in on an ever more specific subset of hedonism.
Quoting Isaac
Critical discussion is not necessarily bad-faith argument, it's just argument simpliciter. What makes your argument style bad faith is that you don't seem to be engaging in a cooperative pursuit of the truth with anyone, since you never even state what your own stance is, much less look into whether or not it might be right. You just look for any way that someone else might be wrong. Looking for ways that a position might be wrong is not in itself bad faith, but if you're just here to tear other people's views down no matter what they are, and (act as though) you don't actually have any views of your own and aren't engaging in the same figuring-out-what-might-be-right mission as others, just a figure-out-how-someone-else-is-wrong mission, then that's not arguing in good faith.
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Isaac
My issue with the way that you engage, including the way you frame the issue above here, is that you act like the fact that you made an objection and then were not satisfied with my response is a reason why I should shut up. I don't have a problem with you having objections in the first place, or anyone else; I'm happy to consider them and offer responses. But if I think they're bad ones, and I say why, and you think my reasons why are bad in return, and we're go back and forth and then around and around in loops over and over without making any progress toward settling anything, that doesn't mean that I have to completely stop talking about anything else, just because you are still unconvinced. Nor does it oblige me to keep going around and around in circles with you until one or the other of us is convinced.
Picture this as a literal forum, a physical space. Someone starting a discussion thread is like someone standing up on a soapbox to say something, and then others can come listen and respond and so a conversation happens. It's not the obligation of the person who stood up on the box and started that conversation to devote all of their attention to one heckler in the crowd who won't shut up and satisfy them completely before they're allowed to continue with anything else that they've come to say. Okay, heckler, I get that you don't agree with the things I have to say, but you are not the entire forum, and maybe someone else might be interested in hearing me continue despite the fact that you disagree already. If you continue standing there shouting your disagreement with earlier points, then you're just being disruptive.
I'd ask how you'd like it if someone did that to you in your discussions, but you never state your own opinions, so that's not possible. You're just here to heckle everyone else. That's why you're arguing in bad faith.
The way a good-faith argument works is that everyone agrees to disagree unless reasons to change the other person's mind can be presented, and then everyone states their opinions and their reasons for holding it, and their reasons to discard the other's opinions, and after everyone's done sharing what they think and why, if there isn't total agreement then whoever still disagrees can continue disagreeing in peace until someone has something new to say.
It is not the case that anyone must respond to all objections to the satisfaction of the objector or else be compelled to change their mind or at least shut up.
And how can you argue that some moral beliefs are broader and more fundamental than others? How can you even argue that there is such a hierarchy of moral beliefs without assuming your conclusion at the outset?
Quoting Isaac
Seeing that retribution and reduction of suffering have different ends, it should be surprising to find that they never pull apart in specific instances. It is a common assumption that as an institution, criminal punishment serves to deter crime, but that is actually a questionable thesis. It is far from clear whether, how much and in what circumstances punishment has that effect. And what about private, non-institutional retribution?
Quoting Isaac
Well, one could say that doing what one believes is right satisfies an "appetite" and thus falls under the hedonism, but I wouldn't want to interpret Pfhorrest so uncharitably.
Then why on earth did you bring it up as a counter-example to the claim/query...
Quoting Isaac
I've still yet to pin down who you're arguing against here. Now you're saying...
Quoting Pfhorrest
...which seems to bring even more ethical positions into the fold. I'm struggling to see who you're arguing against here with the specific point you raise.
Where there are massive differences is not in the existence of any of these four 'core principles' of yours, it's in their interpretation - the nitty gritty of it that you don't want to get your hands dirty with. Even something as divisive like apartheid was not couched in terms of non-universalism, it was presented as treating everyone equally but that because of their various 'natures', the best way to do that was to keep then separate. As FW DeClerk said "What I haven't apologised for is the original concept of seeking to bring justice to all South Africans through the concept of nation states.". If you've ever read the Area Handbook for South Africa in which Apartheid was outlined to world, the whole thing is justified in terms of peace, prosperity, justice etc - a lot of it based on racial pseudo-science, but also on principles of justified colonial expansion and seeing resistance to that as criminal activity. The point is the likes of Botha and DeClerk do not claim to disagree with universalism, they claim multiple contextual details which support their policies. You can't argue against them simply by appeal to these trivially obvious broad brush approaches - everyone will just agree and fit their own agendas to it.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Quoting Pfhorrest
You seem to have two contradictory narratives going on with regards to the process of discussion in this context.
First you have this 'quest for truth' approach which (if it's anything like your epistemology with morality and empirical matters) I take to be a kind of fitting of lines to data points - seeking that theory which fits all observations.
Then you have this 'political project' narrative where it's all about your ability to persuade me and mine you. Here, lines of fit and data points go out of the window and it's some kind of race to gain as many supporters as you can in the most efficient way - "don't waste precious time on the difficult ones when you could be gathering up support from less recalcitrant quarters".
These two narratives a diametrically opposed. If you want to search for 'truth' and consider it to be that theory which best fits all observations, then the main area of focus should be those observations which do not fit. Those which fit quite closely already are the least of your concerns. If there's an observation which doesn't fit right at the heart of your theory, resolving that should be priority number one. And, most importantly, you thinking you've resolved it is completely irrelevant because that's just more of your observations. We already know they fit your theory. It's the observations of others not fitting it that's a problem for it's 'truthiness'.
What I find to be 'bad faith' (not that I'm a fan of that expression) is the pretence that you're on a quest for 'truth' when you're actually on a quest to drum up support for your pet theory, hence the profusion of polls asking for agreement and the skipping over of dissent the moment it can't easily be accommodated into your existing framework. Is it really any wonder that people are concerned about an authoritarian overtone to this 'find a objective which matches everyone's hedonic feelings' when we can see exactly what happens to the observations of those that don't match your pet theories - they're 'misunderstandings', 'bad faith', 'uncharitable', 'questionable motives' and so on... The fear with these systematising of morality approaches is exactly what we see here. You claim a system which attempts to just unbiasedly universally fit all experiences, but what we'll end up with is the preferred morality of whoever proposes the model and anything that doesn't fit is 'misguided', 'dishonest', 'mentally disturbed'...or whatever else you can come up with to explain why the data point isn't matching the line you prefer.
Yeah. I agree that deterring crime doesn't at all capture the objectives of criminal law. My concern (clearly very badly expressed) was with a style of argument which seems to get all of that to fit simply by widening the terms. It's a technique I've seen used elsewhere perhaps more than in this thread, but relevant here, I think.
What I see happening is... one proposes a moral theory based on hedonism... the obvious counters are given -
Virtues and values other than pain/pleasure. "Ah, but those are all about deferred pain/pleasure - they value stuff that's best for everyone in the long run".
Authority of external judgements. "Ah, but those are separate questions, not directly to do with the definition of moral good".
The role of reason and reasonableness. "But that's about how we find out what's in those categories, not what their definitions are"
...and so on.
What we end up with is a re-framing of ethics, presented as if it were an answer. No actual work's being done to resolve any of the issues the previous ethicists have raised, only to re-frame them to fit the language of the new model.
The reason I brought up schadenfreude as an example was to show how pointless the approach is. If we want to defend the retributive justice system within a hedonistic ethic we can do so using schadenfreude (and other wider 'pleasures/sufferings'). If we wanted to attack the retributive justice system within a hedonistic ethical system we could do so too by invoking the suffering of criminals (as you mentioned). Nothing has actually been resolved about the rightness or wrongness of retributive justice. We've just changed the names.
Quoting SophistiCat
As above. I don't think it's uncharitable. I think it's what's happening.
The reality is that we interpret affects within a model which itself is informed by our past experience, culture, language etc. What one believes is right not only satisfies an appetite, it directly plays a role in determining what those appetites are.
I'm not even talking about specifically moral beliefs at the level of detail we're talking about here: narrowing it down to just morality in particular is already less broad than something that has implications on morality and also on other subjects.
But in any case, the breadth or fundamentality I'm talking about here is relative to the sets of intuitions we're discussing, and is basically a measure of how interconnected that intuition is to all the others, as in, how many others depend on that being true, and would have to be rejected along with it if we rejected it.
Again, this isn't anything about morality specifically, but just about how philosophy, or even all argument perhaps, is done in general. If you don't start with something someone will agree with, you'll never get any argument off the ground. But if you don't conclude with something they don't already agree with, you haven't shown anything of note. So you're always just showing some inconsistency in their beliefs. That will then require them, for the sake of consistency, to either reject the premises (that they already believed) or accept the conclusion (that they didn't already believe), in either way changing their beliefs.
People generally won't choose to change most of their beliefs if they could instead only change a few, so if you start from a relatively superficial premise and disprove something fundamental from it, you're probably going to fail; they'll just reject the premise to avoid the catastrophic conclusion. So you've got to start from premises that are really fundamental, really depended upon by everything else, and from those argue that something much more superficial, much more easily rejected without many further consequences, is inconsistent with that.
That's arguments generally. Philosophical arguments more specifically are dealing with relatively deep things even as their conclusions, so you've got to start from something even deeper in order to disprove something itself still pretty deep, which is why it's starting with "something so simple as not to seem worth stating" (such deep premises no one even considers the possibility of their falsity, so never even bothers to talk about them), to conclude "something so paradoxical that no one will believe it" (something not quite as deep as that, but still a cherished belief that many of their more superficial beliefs depend upon).
Quoting Isaac
Because, as I said even in the bit you just quoted, Kant denies the accusation that his theory does appeal to hedonism after all; which, on my analysis, does in fact leave him appealing to a form of "because ___ says so". But the ___ in his position is not God (it's whoever's doing the ethical judging in question), so Kant (and also Plato, as I mentioned before) are anti-hedonists who aren't just religious fundamentalists, at least not in the same fashion you were talking about, divine command theorists.
Quoting Isaac
My point with bringing those up is that ethical positions can be divided up along many different axes, and hedonism vs anti-hedonism is only one of those axes. Two positions that are both on the hedonist side can be completely opposite each other on a different, orthogonal axis, and yet still both be equally hedonists. Having a position on one of those different issues doesn't make one less of a hedonist. If I need to remind you why I'm talking about this it, it's because you were saying that having a position on those different orthogonal axes (like altruism vs egotism, or liberty vs authority) made a position somehow not entirely hedonist.
Quoting Isaac
This ties in to what I was just saying above. Those "contextual details" they appeal to can only be relevant given certain positions on other axes orthogonal to that of universalism vs relativism. In this case, it's liberalism vs authoritarianism: those details are irrelevant on a liberal account, because the white people don't get to make the decisions about what's best for the other races, even in terms of "best" that are universalist and hedonistic as I would agree; everyone gets to make that determination about what's best for themselves, limited only by not harming others. It's when we get to making that determination of when another has been harmed that the universalist and hedonist criteria apply most, but then who gets to make that determination still has to comply with liberalism, and now we're getting into the very complex ground of political philosophy that I'm not going to go into in depth in this thread.
The point is just that one position can be in different places along different orthogonal axes, and just because apartheidists agreed in principle with me on a few axes doesn't mean that their position is broadly within the same range as mine and just differing in little details, because on another axis we're very far apart. It'd be like saying that because New Zealand and Siberia are at about the same longitude they're basically in the same neighborhood, ignoring that they're very very far apart in latitude.
Quoting Isaac
That's because I'm talking about two different axes there as well. Since my overall philosophy is basically all about how to conduct investigations into things, or discussions aimed at figuring things out, it's no surprise that it's pretty directly applicable to the discussions here on this forum.
On the one hand there's an axis about whether there is any truth we are capable of figuring out or not. On this I say yes, there is, and we should be here because we're interested in figuring out what it is, not just to score cheap points or something.
On the other hand there's an axis about whether anybody has a burden of proof against anyone else or not. On this I say no, there isn't, as in, nobody is obliged to prove themselves right or else shut up and quietly accept some alternative, we're all free to hold our separate thoughts about what that truth is until someone says something that changes our minds.
You act like you disagree on both of those points, neither seeming like you're here to figure out what is or isn't true, nor like you're okay to agree to disagree. You seem to be here just to throw a supposed burden of proof at anyone who dares to have any opinion and shut them down, for what I can only imagine is your personal satisfaction. You say it's intellectual curiosity, but it really doesn't come across that way: you don't seem like you just want to know what people think and why they think that, you seem like you want them to 'know' (to accept your judgement) that they have no good reason to think it and should therefore shut up.
Quoting Isaac
This talk of "observation" here has to be metaphorical in this case because we're only exchanging thoughts about things, not verifying actual empirical experiences. In any case, verification is important in actual observational science, and the analogue of it is important in this metaphor as well.
If you say you've made an observation that proves Einstein wrong, physicists are going to have to follow through your observational setup and see if they see the same thing. If they don't see it, too bad for you; they don't have to accept your claim to have observed something and throw out all of physics because you say you saw a problem with it. You've got to show them the problem with it, so they can see it with their own eyes. Then, yes, they're absolutely going to care about this observation going against a core part of their theory and there will be exciting new physics to be done. But of course, in practice, they're not always going to go to a lot of effort trying to figure out why they can't replicate the claimed observations of some kook on the internet.
In this metaphor, times when I've actually had to make major changes to my philosophy have been exciting for me in the past. I'm not looking to avoid those. I'm eager to learn new things! But you share your "observations" and I take a look for myself and see nothing unexpected by my theory. Perhaps sometimes I see how you could think that something I can actually "observe" for myself would be contra to my theory, but it doesn't look that way to me: what I'm seeing, when I "replicate your observation", is still the same thing I expect by my theory. And in practice, it's not worth the effort of trying to figure out how I might just not be "replicating your observation" properly; you claimed to see something, I looked, I didn't see it, this isn't a high-stakes matter of life and death and I don't trust you as a source of reliable observations anyway, so I'm not going to drop everything and spend inordinate amounts of time trying to prove to myself that you're right. And I don't care at all if you're wrong, so I'm not going to spend that time trying to change your mind either.
Quoting Isaac
Translate this metaphor back out to a discussion about actual actions to see why those concerns are unfounded.
Say I'm doing something that effects only me, and I'm encouraging others to join in and try it too. (:: I'm having an opinion, and encouraging others to share it). Someone objects that that thing I'm doing isn't the optimal thing to do by altruistic hedonistic standards. (:: Someone thinks my opinion is incorrect.) I consider their objection but ultimately disagree. And I'm not forcing anything on the objector; I'm just doing what I think is best (:: thinking what I think is correct), within my own domain, and encouraging others to try doing (:: thinking) likewise. If those others don't want to do (:: think) likewise, that's fine with me, I'm not making them, just giving a suggestion, and reasons why they might like to take it. On my account of ethics (:: discourse), that's how these kinds of disagreement should go, and I'm not in any way obligated to change my behavior (:: opinion) just because someone else thinks it's sub-optimal and I can't persuade them otherwise, nor to stop encouraging others to do likewise. That doesn't in return obligate the objector to do (:: think) like I'm am, if he thinks it's not the optimal choice. We're free to disagree, even though ultimately at least one of us is wrong. Neither of us has the burden to prove to everyone's satisfaction that we're not wrong; the burden is on whoever thinks someone is wrong.
What Kant does and does not deny is not the same category as we were discussing. The point is that when you rebut arguments against hedonism's ignoring values and virtues (such as reason) you do so by appealing to what those values and virtues 'really' mean (long term hedonistic value. So one might argue against hedonism by saying that suffering can actually be character forming and so focussing on virtues would better capture that. You'd respond (actually have responded, in fact If I recall) that 'character building' just ensures a greater lack of suffering in the future, and so virtue ethicists are not capturing anything here hedonism cannot account for. the virtue ethicists themselves would obviously deny that, but you don't take their denial as as indicator that their position is not actually hedonic. that is the sense in which I claimed it was trivially true that positions could be framed that way. what Kant 'says' is irrelevant, his position can be framed as hedonic (Mill, did exactly that). My claim is that all such positions can be likewise framed and so hedonism (in the sense you use it) doesn't resolve and moral dilemmas, merely renames the terms in them.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No. Same would be true there too. I bet both would be able to frame their approach as libertarian, allowing people to be as free as possible - just their definition of 'as possible' would contain restriction they think necessary but we don't. You just don't seem to respect the basic level of intelligence most humans have - we've already thought of all this, we already know 'libertarianism' sounds better than 'authoritarianism', no-one's going to turn down 'liberty'. People's arguments are framed such as to make them sound like they're on whatever axis appeals most to their audience, and mostly that things like freedom, prosperity, etc.
Quoting Pfhorrest
contradicts
Quoting Pfhorrest
If we have an obligation of sorts to be pursuant of truth, then that obligation can only be met by ensuring that one attempt to prove themselves right (or rather not-wrong, since neither of us are verificationists). If someone is potentially wrong, but avoids dealing with that by assuming it's their interlocutor who is mistaken, then they are demonstrably not as interested in 'figuring out what it [truth] is' as they are in avoiding stumbling block to the progress of their presentation.
The only way round this that I can see is to make the argument that the pursuit of 'truth' is an internal quest, one in which the opinions of others don't figure. But then you'd undermine your narrative where the forum acts as a joint quest.
Basically, you're saying you get to ignore fundamental issues with your theory, on the grounds that you think they're irrelevant/misinterpreting, but still don't thus fall foul of your own requirement that we collectively pursue truth. Yet you want also to say that if I don't present my theories for analysis I do fall foul of such a requirement. I can't see the difference.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Where have I even suggested anything of the sort. It's the exact opposite of what I'm talking about. I have never, nor would ever, suggest that anyone should be 'shut down'. I want people to address the issues. It's intriguing that you should accuse me of wanting to 'shut' people down when we're talking here about engaging further (not less), and you yourself are one of the handful of people here who've expressly said that my contributions are not welcome on their threads. Who exactly is try to shut whom down?
Quoting Pfhorrest
Again, in our exchanges you are the only one who has told me to 'shut up', never vice versa. I've only ever wanted to discuss the issues further, so how you're developing this displacement fantasy that I want to shut people down is truly intriguing.
Quoting Pfhorrest
But my main contention with your model is based on the entirely empirical observations of how affect is generated in the brain, so we are talking about observations. I've looked at fMRI scans, lesion studies, experimental results... and I've seen evidence which contradicts your model.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I think that sums it up perfectly. We've worked out the simple stuff already. If the only effort you're willing to put in is to see that which was obvious at first glance then you'll only ever confirm your own theories. None of them are going to be so wrong that the issues aren't apparent at first glance.
Quoting Pfhorrest
...contradicts
Quoting Pfhorrest
Likewise.
But he doesn't seem to care whether his theory of morality actually has the potential for ever being applied by humans.
Well, Pfhorrest, it is my understanding there are two ways to have social order, law and authority over the people, or culture. All mythologies give people cultures for conduct. Culture a good person behaves this way and not that way. With culture, it is social pressure that keeps people in line.
I am reading a book that might say hedonism before the time of Socrates would be different than after the period of Socrates, because of how people, in general, thought, fundamentally changed. When the god Apollo became part of Athenian consciousness, culturally there was much more reasoning. This demand for reasoning followed a period that was chaotic and with much uncertainty.
Without the word generosity, we can not exactly have the virtue of generosity. We might be moved to give but it is not with a perceived idea that we should be giving. With reasoning, hedonism is the result of reasoning, not just impulsive reactions.
Just taking this as an example case for principles to apply more broadly: my objection to the virtues ethicist would be if they claim that virtuous character is the thing that is intrinsically valuable rather than positive hedonic experiences. I concede to the virtue ethicist that virtuous character is instrumentally valuable toward the end of ensuring better experiences, so as to be clear that I am not entirely discounting that virtue matters; but I would argue against it being taken as intrinsically good.
This is just like SophistiCat’s excellent example of retributive “justice”. I could in principle entertain an argument that retribution is instrumentally valuable toward the end of reducing suffering (I still object to that conclusion but the argument is at least trying to appeal to things I agree are good reasons). But plenty of people see retribution as an end in itself. That is where I principally disagree with retributivism: it’s counter to hedonism to value retribution as an end in itself, even if I might possibly agree that it could be instrumentally valuable toward hedonistic ends.
Quoting Isaac
Then the argument would be that they have an incoherent conception of liberty, exactly as I (and most anarchists / libertarian socialists) argue against so-called “anarcho”/“libertarian” capitalists. They can try to frame their positions any way that they want but that doesn’t mean it will hold up to scrutiny as being actually consistently in favor if that. (E.g. capitalists who think the poor being dependent on and so subservient to the rich is not “authoritative” just because it’s not the government commanding them to do something, it’s only the government keeping them away from the necessities of life unless they obey the commands of those deemed the owners of those necessities).
Quoting Isaac
I conceive the quest for truth to be both an independent and a cooperative venture. We’re here to share our different views and our reasons for holding them, so that others can examine those various possibilities and the arguments for and against them, thus giving each other food for thought with which to further examine and shape our own views in pursuit of truth. But none of us is in any way wrong for being unpersuaded by someone else’s reasons, nor for failing to persuade anyone else. Because there is no urgent practical matter that we need to reach agreement on here, just casual conversation, there’s nothing wrong with differences of opinion persistent however long they do. It’s still a long-term goal that eventually everyone reaches the truth, and therefore agreement, but there’s no deadline on that, so nobody is at fault for not making progress fast enough on either updating their own views or convincing others to do so.
Quoting Isaac
The difference is that I share my views, thus making an opening for others to share reasons against them. What I do with those reasons is then on me, but at least I’m subjecting myself to responses about what I believe, and so the possibility of something that might change my mind. By never stating your own views at all, you’re hiding yourself from any possibility of being given reasons to change, of having to decide what to do with those reasons, whether to accept them and change or else on what grounds to reject them. That makes it look like you’re just here to fight, not to learn. I am here to learn (as well as teach; it’s a two-way street), even if I’m really disappointed in the quality of teaching material on offer so far.
Quoting Isaac
You complain that I move on to talk about other topics over your continued objections on an earlier topic, which sounds to me like you think I shouldn’t talk about anything else until you’re satisfied about the first thing. Whereas I don’t see much hope in satisfying you without way more effort than it’s worth, and there are other things I also want to talk about, so I want to disengage from the unproductive back-and-forth with you and move on to other more pleasant discussions.
Because I’m here for casual philosophical discourse, to share my thoughts with anyone to whom they are new and interesting, and to find out if there are any related things that are new and interesting to me that I can mull over and evolve my own thoughts with. I don’t care to fight interminable fights with people who are saying nothing new to me and who find nothing I’m saying new to them, when there’s nothing on the line that we must reach agreement on soon.
The reason why I don’t want to engage with you is not to shut you down, but because every engagement with you becomes that same kind of unproductive fight that goes nowhere, so it seems pointless and merely disruptive to just get into that again and again.
Again, It's these 'plenty of people' who I've never heard of. Retributions as an end in itself - really? I find that very hard to believe, that no amount of probing would get these people to admit that a society with retributive justice is one in which people are overall better off than one in which there's none. I think this goes to what I said about underestimating the intelligence off your interlocutors. Someone extolling the virtue of retributive justice for it's own sake, isn't literally saying that there's no element of being 'better off' as a whole resulting from it, they take that for granted so it drops out of the conversation. The matter at had is always how to get universal 'goods' like prosperity, liberty etc. What's odd about your contributions is that you assume people have missed this important foundation because they don't explicitly refer to it. In reality people don't explicitly refer to it because it's too trivially obvious, we've moved on to the more contentious stuff and our mode of negotiating has moved on too to accommodate that. I'm not even suggesting that everyone is aware of this, we often just engage using whatever mode we've picked up from our social environment, but it's implicit in most of those modes.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, absolutely - which would be the interesting argument to have. That 'liberty' is a good thing is just common ground so trivial that it doesn't even need mentioning. The important argument is about what we can and cannot coherently say about it.
Quoting Pfhorrest
That all sounds very charming (although utterly pointless) but not at all the purpose of a forum. As I said, it think you've mistaken it for you personal blog - where we can read your thoughts if we're interested in them, or some kind of compendium of random opinion. What makes a forum different from either of these is that once a topic is created it is created to be the mutually available topic a community can use to debate the merits of or issues with. You seem to see this space rather as a supply of free web space anyone can dip into if they want a soapbox. Maybe that's what the creators and maintainers intended, I don't know, but it's not what a public forum means to me. Once you open a thread it's not 'your' thread, you haven't rented the space as a publishing platform, it's public space into which you put an idea.
We circle back (thankfully) to the start of this whole sub-thread. The deep suspicion people naturally have of these 'grand systems'. And here we find that suspicion well-grounded. what you describe sounds more like a recruitment drive, not a community venture - put your theory out there, see if anyone bites, if there's any trouble just ignore it, move on and try again later. It's a good scheme. If someone complains about a lack of engagement with the issues you can play the casual, carefree Cassandra of ideas "oh well, if they don't believe me, no bother, move on", but if someone disrupts your sermon with their own ideas you can play the Coeus on your passionate quest for truth so that the dissenter's 'bad faith' in repeatedly disrupting 'your' quest can be held against them.
Well then, he's in good company: e.g. Kant.
I'll let @SophistiCat field this one in particular as he seems on board with this point and I'm tired of staying up way too late every night because of this.
I will just say on the broader theme of people implicitly agreeing with my point and it thus being trivial, that I do expect that people generally start off thinking something at least in the ballpark of agreement with my principles, but then end up philosophizing themselves into wacky nonsense that runs counter to those things, and my aim is to disabuse them of such nonsense. Like I've said before, I think I'm defending a kind of common sense here against bad philosophy, showing that that bad philosophy is not actually superior to the common sense, but rather vice versa, in a way that they then understand why to stick with the common sense and not be tempted by the bad philosophy.
I love a quote from Dogen, the founder of the Soto school of Zen Buddhism: "Before one studies, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters."
That means that the general view of the world that one ends up with after truly mastering philosophy is one that is not radically different from the naive pre-philosophical view that people start out with; but on the way from that naive beginning to the masterful end, one's whole worldview gets turned upside down and inside out as one questions everything. The only thing the master has in the end that the beginner does not is an understanding of why those "obvious" answers are as they are, and why all the craziness they explored along the way was wrong.
Quoting Isaac
It sounds like you read only the first half of the first sentence of the bit you quoted, and overlooked the second half: "...and to find out if there are any related things that are new and interesting to me that I can mull over and evolve my own thoughts with." I absolutely do want to have community discussions here; the two-way exchange of ideas is very important to me, and if anything I'm disappointed at the one-sidedness I've mostly experienced thus far (in that very little anyone has said on this forum in the time I've been here has been something new to me).
My point is only that I'm not here for competitive discussions, where we're fighting to convince each other that "I'm right and you're wrong", but rather cooperative ones, where we're sharing our views and reasons for holding them, but not caring whether or not anyone in particular is persuaded to change their mind because of that, only caring whether anyone in the discourse got any new ideas to chew on. If someone shares an idea that's not new to someone else, then there's no point in going back and forth on that over and over again... unless you're only here to win fights, not exchange new ideas.
That's my issue with the way you engage. It feels like I'm being pelted with the same familiar contrary points of view over and over again, never something new. And I'm not interested in pelting you with my point of view over and over again in retaliation. That's intellectually boring and emotionally tiresome.
What I loved about formally studying philosophy at university, and what I hoped to replicate some semblance of here, was how I was getting exposed to interesting new ideas and the arguments both for and against them without anybody caring whether or not any argument either way on any issue actually convinced me or not. It was all just a bunch of delicious food for thought. And then I could take ingredients from those things and mix my own creative dishes out of them, and share those and see if anyone else liked how they tasted, or better yet, inspired them to cook up something along similar lines.
So far the experience here has been pretty far from that.
Funnily enough, I often repeat the same aphorism. I have no problem at all with the sentiment, only the enaction.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No, I included that. Reading other thoughts to 'mull over' is what we do with books (and the blogs of other people), it's not a forum (again, not to me anyway). What exactly do you see different about this place to a series of personal blogs? You write what you want, others write what they want, you each read and say "oh, that's interesting...". That's not a forum, that's Wordpress.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Again, that's not co-operative, you're mixing your narratives. You've drawn 'co-operative' from the Coeusian search for truth storyline, but the laissez-faire scattergun of ideas from the Cassandrian one. Standing on a soapbox preaching is not co-operative, even if you give everyone a fair go on the box. Co-operation is about a shared part in a shared objective, it's not just a synonym for 'lots of people involved'.
If your 'quest for truth' is already filtered and screened by your own proclivities (what seems right to you), then it can't be a shared, co-operative quest, can it? We can't share in a process that results from your personal filters, that's your quest. You say "A follows from B" and your interlocutor says "No A does not follow from B". You can see if that seems right to you, but unless your claim 'A follows from B' is something you pulled out of your arse (as I believe you Americans put it), then it's opposite is obviously not going to be something that seems right to you, we have to presume you've at least given it that much thought. So anything which calls into question whether A does in fact follow from B is going to be either part of a Web of Beliefs that's radically different to yours, that's going to take some serious work to understand, or it's going to be based off some empirical data you're not aware of and so seems wrong on the face of it. A rare third way might be that someone shares your general Web of Beliefs, and your empirical knowledge, but is wise enough (or you daft enough) for them to spot a fatal error in the logic by which you've connected those beliefs. Holding out for that (and only that) on a public forum like this is vagary.
Quoting Pfhorrest
It seems odd that you would follow this with...
Quoting Pfhorrest
I'm broadly an indirect realist, my morality is part ethical naturalism, part semantic, I take a broadly Wittegnsteinean view of most philosophical issues, I'm mostly deflationist about truths, have a Ramseyan approach to both belief and knowledge... plus whatever I've missed. There's not a thousand different aproaches out there. You post something about morality, I'm going to give a semantic/naturalist response. You post something about epistemology, I'll give a Quinean underdertimism response. Others' will give virtue-based, deontological, egoist, or possibly religious responses... and then that's it. Because that's all there is. You either engage with that to see where it's coming from on that particular issue, or you don't engage at all. We're not going to invent a completely new philosophy every time you post something.
What you seem to be looking for is this goldilocks perfection of an approach that's not so different from yours that it's hard work to understand, but not so similar that it's somehting you've already encountered. All of this in a field that's been around for over 2000 years! Is it any wonder you're disappointed? Back at university it would have all been new, but there's less and less new stuff to choose from as you get older, all that's left, if you want to expand your horizons further, is the hard slog of trying to understand those positions which seemed opaque at first glance.
We can ask each other questions, and respond to those. "I don't understand your view, can you clarify?" - "Sure, I'm saying X, as opposed to Y or Z." etc. That's still friendly and cooperative, not trying to win against each other.
Quoting Isaac
On one hand, I want to respond that we can't help but see things "filtered and screened by our own proclivities". We have no point of view to see things from but our own, so to see things in a new way requires that we be presented with a view from our own perspective first and then walked from there to a new one (and usually people aren't going to follow along on too long of a walk, so at best you can judge them a little). This is what that whole Russell quote about starting with trivial premises to get to paradoxical conclusions is about: you walk someone from where they already are to somewhere that seems really strange and unfamiliar.
On the other hand, though, we also have our memories of our own past points of view, and this I think is where you see my reactions here differently than I do. It's not that I can't imagine why you would possibly think the things that you think. Over the course of the first 20-30 years of my life I went through a lot of perspective changes, I was religious as a kid, almost a nihilist by my late-mid 20s, had communist and (right-)libertarian phases in the middle there, I was an ethical naturalist and then later a non-cognitivist, a utilitarian then a Kantian, a materialist and then an idealist, I've zig-zagged all over the place and tried on a ton of different views.
So usually when someone disagrees with me it's not that I can't comprehend why they would think that, because I used to think something much like that myself. Instead, it's that I have since realized the faults in my own past positions, and now I can't un-see them. So if you ask me to "try on" a position like that again, I don't see anything new, and I see the faults with it that I already found back when that was my own position, so of course I'm not persuaded. I'll give an attempt at walking from that position over toward my own but if the other person doesn't want to come along on that walk, I'm not going to put in the effort to convince them to. If they just need a hand held on that walk, I'm happy to lend it. If they're happy to stay where they are and let me walk back to where I've moved on to, that's okay with me too. It's when they keep insisting that I come look at this view that I'm already quite familiar with as though it's something new and persuasive that I start getting annoyed.
Quoting Isaac
Mostly I'm just looking for anything I haven't already encountered. And to share things others haven't already encountered. If I'm really up in the rarefied enough heights that there's just not much new for me to find, that's disappointing. I assume my own education is not comprehensive and that someone else as well-versed in philosophy as me would either have learned about views I haven't, or come up with their own novel views like I did. But at least I would hope to find out if any of my own positions that are new to me (as in, not things I picked up from someone else, but something I came up with myself) have actually been covered by someone else before (so I can go read about the debates surrounding them), and if nothing else, maybe something I say will be new to someone else, whether it's something I came up with on my own or just a pre-existing position that's not well-known to everyone. Just so long as someone is getting exposed to something new.
The best Ive seen yet is Locke's which was that acting for the greatest good yields the greatest pleasure. That was really good, I'll look up the quote if you like, because it totally implodes the entire concept of 'ethical hedonism.' lol.
Have a nice day )
Quoting Pfhorrest
Quoting Pfhorrest
Quoting Pfhorrest
And here I though we might be dealing with something more interesting than the boring old internet messiah.
My primary objection to your hedonism-as-emprical-data-points approach comes from Bayesian modelling approaches to neuroscience applied to affect states. It was only published a few years ago, and then only in the cognitive science papers. I'm truly impressed that you've read it, understood it, and already rejected it years before it was even published despite having no qualifications in the field at all and there being very few objections to it even now... Truly the work of genius, I'm obviously out of my league even talking to you.
I think I broadly agree that "acting for the greatest good yields the greatest pleasure", inasmuch as I think a feeling of meaningfulness is one of the highest pleasures (and a feeling of meaninglessness conversely one of the worst kinds of suffering), and helping people is one of the primary ways to cultivate that feeling of meaningfulness (along with teaching, learning, and being helped in turn).
I don't quote follow what you mean that that "totally implodes the entire concept of 'ethical hedonism'", though.
Quoting Isaac
And here we are back to boring old name-calling again. This is the kind of thing that makes me eager to conclude bad faith on your part. Just when it seemed like we were actually having an actual polite conversation and coming to at least a productive sharing of thoughts on a topic (if only the meta-topic of how to conduct a conversation on a philosophy forum), you go and say something confrontational like this again.
This kind of thing really gives an air of you just looking to shoot down anyone who is insufficiently meek in your eyes, anyone who's not afraid to say that they think they might have anything new to contribute. You seem to twist that into arrogance. If I was arrogant I would be trying to get real philosophy journals to publish my thoughts. I know I'm not good enough for that. But I also know that I'm not some phil101 freshman just now thinking about these things for the first time. I'm here looking for people on around my level -- not so far above it like a real journal's peer review panel would be, but not so far below it as your random other place on the internet -- hoping we can all get better together.
Your kind of attitude seems to suggest that you think that if someone's not on the level of a professional academic journal, they shouldn't talk to anyone about their thoughts at all; or, if they do, they should treat everyone they talk to as their betters, do as they're told, and never let themselves entertain the possibility that maybe something that looks like a familiar position they've already examined in detail and rejected might be just that.
Quoting Isaac
You already know this, but of course I haven't studied that; and yet nevertheless I can readily say it's not relevant to a philosophy of ethics (any, not just mine), because philosophy is supposed to be logically prior to empirical data. If you're trying to appeal to empirical data in doing philosophy, what you're doing isn't actually philosophy. I don't claim to be doing psychology, or anything where that sort of research would be relevant, and I would be quite ready to defer to the expertise of someone like you if I was talking about that kind of field, because it's not something in which I have any amount of confidence about my knowledge or abilities. Unlike philosophy.
No doubt that research would be useful in the application of any philosophical method of ethics that cared about affect (like mine does), where specific, contingent, empirical facts matters.
I'm not clear if what you're referring to here is the same thing you were talking about before, about the target valence levels people seek to maintain changing over time and with context, and changing those target valence levels being just as if not more effective at satisfying them than changing the external events they're subjected to. If that is what you're referring to, I've already said before that that all sounds perfectly consistent with my ethical principles, which only care that target valences and those effected by external events match.
Changing the target valences to match the external events is a perfectly fine way of achieving that match, on my account. And if one were to take a change-the-external-events approach anyway, and the target valences were unpredictable in advance, one obvious strategy would be to enable the subject to better adjust their environment in real time as their target valences change, i.e. to grant them more positive liberty. (This is pretty much Mill's utilitarian justification for liberalism, and though I have other more logically prior justifications for it myself, that I just posted a thread about yesterday, Mill's argument works fine to illustrate the compatibility of liberal means with utilitarian ends).
These are all specific means to the ends of minimizing suffering, and in debating those means, empirical psychological research is totally relevant, and I'm happy to defer to your expertise in that matter. But none of that is the kind of thing I've been talking about, so if you think I've been saying anything against it then you've misunderstood me. And I would be happy to take time to clarify myself better, for someone who didn't have such a confrontational, unpleasant attitude as yours; for someone who seemed actually curious just to understand what I think and why, rather than someone who's just looking for any way to shoot down someone he thinks isn't spineless enough.
well, if the definition of 'hedonism' is extended to include 'acting for the greater good' it isnt really hedonism any more, it's virtue instead.
If the "good" part of "greater good" is people feeling good, then it is. Hedonism isn't egotism.
Also if the only reason you're acting for the greater good (in any sense) is the pleasure you get from it, that's full-on egotistic hedonism.
Hedonism strictly referred to pleasure, and avoidance of pain, in classical times, including by Epicurus. Locke was rather unique in saying that the greatest happiness arises from acting for the common good. It was the reason Jefferson included the right to pursue happiness as a natural right, but despite over a decade now trying to point that out, all universities and politicians deny it because, as Locke also pointd out, acting for the greater good rarely gives rise to happiness in this life. One must accept the existence of an afterlife for it to be justly rewarded. Therefore to accept Jefferson's original definition of pursuit of happiness as a natural right, one has to accept the right exists as a consequence of the USA being a Christian nation. That is too objectionable for many to accept, so now 'the pursuit of happiness' is considered more hedonistic, or if you are Epicrus, egoistically hedonistic.
No, we were nowhere near there... same old, same old...
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, pretence pisses me off far more than perhaps it has any right to - one of my many flaws.
Quoting Pfhorrest
You're confusing arrogance with blind denial. Abandoning one's chances of being lionised by one group isn't an indicator of humility in one's attempts with another.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Logical priority is irrelevant. As is whether you choose to call what you're doing 'philosophy' or not. You are making prescriptions for human beings, who are cold hard biological entities. 'Good' is a thought in a brain, as is 'pleasure', 'pain' and any other metric you seek to use. Are you suggesting that a doctor is dealing with a different subject when he prescribes pain medicine than you are when you say that 'suffering' is bad and should be avoided? Like it or not, you're dealing with states of a human being, and that means biology, neuroscience, psychology...
But then you know that really; you're not slow to correct dodgy physics when it's part of playing a role in some philosophical enquiry.
There's simply no way you can claim that one could construct an entire approach to morality based on hedonic values like affect without actually knowing how affect works in the brain. It's like writing a treatise of foxes without knowing what a fox is.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No. What you're missing is that we are part of that environment, including your philosophy, Mill's philosophy, this internet forum... you can't have a philosophy that stands apart from the environmental variables that effect our target valences such that it can be merely 'about them'. The very act of having philosophy will affect your target valences.
But not only that, the very affects you're modelling are themselves models of physiological states which, prior to that modelling, stand uninterpreted. One's philosophical view will be a significant part of what forms that interpretation.
Your system relies on static data points of hedonic value (in context) such that a world maximising those values (or minimising negative ones) can be imagined such as to act as an answer to moral dilemmas. I'm telling you that those data points are not static, they change over time (and, most importantly with the culture - including the moral philosophy - one is brought up with). As such the 'right' world to aim for (which satisfies them) will change over time too. All of which means that there is no answer to the moral dilemma. You can say what the answer was yesterday, but by the time you've worked out what the answer is today it's already not the answer any more.
You can only talk about how moral beliefs are interconnected with and depend upon other beliefs after you put them into a theoretical framework. But we haven't agreed on a framework - that is still your argument to make as a theorist. We haven't even agreed that there must be a framework (your attempt to beg that question notwithstanding).
With empirical beliefs we have shared ways of establishing facts and validating theories. We have shared intuitions about the object of study, such as its objectivity and permanence, and that allows us to agree on how to conduct investigations, make progress and settle conflicts. None of that seems to apply to moral beliefs. We certainly share a good deal of our moral beliefs and tendencies, we have shared ways of transmitting and enforcing our morals, but I don't think that we have anything like shared intuitions about metaethics.
There are people whose moral beliefs conflict with yours (e.g. they value retribution, regardless of whether it increases your hedonistic metric of good). What are you going to tell them? That they are wrong because their beliefs don't fit into your moral theory? But they aren't buying your moral theory - why should they?
[quote=Wikipedia on Utilitarianism;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism]Although different varieties of utilitarianism admit different characterizations, the basic idea behind all of them is to in some sense maximize utility, which is often defined in terms of well-being or related concepts. For instance, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, described utility as "that property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness...[or] to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered."
[...]
...the seeds of the theory can be found in the hedonists Aristippus and Epicurus, who viewed happiness as the only good...
[...]
...Bentham introduces a method of calculating the value of pleasures and pains, which has come to be known as the hedonic calculus...[/quote]
[quote=Wikipedia on Hedonic Calculus;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_calculus]Bentham, an ethical hedonist, believed the moral rightness or wrongness of an action to be a function of the amount of pleasure or pain that it produced.[/quote]
Quoting Isaac
A doctor (rightly IMO) takes as given that reducing pain and suffering is an end goal, and then concerns himself with the means to do so. If someone was self-harming because they thought they morally deserved it, a doctor would see that as a sign of poor mental health, because it's causing them to suffer, and someone who thinks they morally ought to suffer is just wrong (and wrong in a practically harmful way, not just some intellectual disagreement) according to the doctor's presumed end-goal of reducing the patient's suffering.
A doctor would not debate the patient about whether he (or anyone) actually morally deserved to suffer. If he did that, he would no longer be practicing medicine, but philosophy. And though the means of alleviating pain and suffering obviously depend on particular contingent facts, whether or not to aim for that as an end cannot. The doctor qua doctor needs to appeal to contingent facts to achieve the ends of reducing pain and suffering, but the doctor qua philosopher (were he to deign to be such) could not appeal to them to decide whether to take that as an end or not.
Quoting Isaac
Sure, and like you just quoted me saying:
Quoting Pfhorrest
I completely acknowledge that certain kinds of philosophies dramatically change one's target valences. A large part of the last thread in this series I have planned is about that: how making "what is the meaning of life?" a philosophically meaningful question to yourself actually generates unpleasant feelings of meaninglessness and vice versa in a vicious cycle, and conversely just feeling pleasantly meaningful (regardless of philosophy) makes that "what is the meaning of life?" type of question seem pointless, and vice versa not caring about that question better allows one to feel pleasantly meaningful.
Quoting Isaac
I literally just said otherwise in my last post, and you even quoted it:
Quoting Pfhorrest
I'm absolutely not saying that we need to be able to predict perfectly exactly what everyone's target valence will be so as to preemptively prepare a static, unchanging world that will perfectly satisfy everyone's target valences. You're reading that static-ness in where I don't mean to imply it. A world that dynamically responds to people's changing target valences is perfectly consistent with my views.
Quoting SophistiCat
Sure, and as I just said:
Quoting Pfhorrest
We're talking about whatever theoretical framework our interlocutors already have. Whatever beliefs they have, some will be logically related to others, such that changes to some would logically require changes to others, and some changes would require subsequent changes to many more other beliefs than other changes would. The beliefs that, if changed, logically require more changes to other beliefs, are the more fundamental ones, out of whatever set of beliefs the person we're talking to has.
Quoting SophistiCat
I agree that we have much broader social agreement on the methods of investigating reality than we do on the methods of investigating morality, but that isn't even close to absolute consensus even today, and historically was even further from it, in pre-scientific eras. And if anything we're now once again getting further from social consensus on how to investigate reality lately; there's a reason it's sometimes said that we're living in a "post-truth era" now.
I hope you would agree that those post-truth type of people are epistemically wrong, and that in principle philosophical arguments could be given as to why they're wrong, and why the scientific method is better than their unsorted mess of relativism mixed with dogmatism. And that those arguments hold sound even if it comes to pass that most of the world abandons science and devolves into epistemic chaos.
I view my arguments about ethics as like that. I know there's not broad consensus on them, but that's beside the point, just like it would be beside the point of arguments for science to say that most of the world rejects science. What's philosophically right or wrong, true or false, sound or unsound, etc, is not dependent on how many people accept it.
Quoting SophistiCat
I try to appeal to things that they and I already agree on that are more fundamental (in the sense further clarified just above) in their set of beliefs than the ones we disagree on, and show how those beliefs of theirs that I disagree with are logically contrary to their own more fundamental beliefs. If I can actually convince them of that logical relationship successfully (and that's the big "if" that everything hinges on), they've then got the choice to either reject the belief I'm arguing against, or else reject another belief they already hold much more dearly, that many other of their beliefs depend upon.
You've misunderstood the analogy. I'm saying that the 'pain' a doctor deals with is psycho-physiological and responds to medicines based on it's psycho-physiological properties. Those properties are facts of biology and psychology.
If you claim, as a philosopher, to be dealing with the reduction of 'suffering' you're either dealing with something entirely different, or the subject of your enquiry is a physiological event with biological properties. If you don't know what those properties actually are you're philosophising about an entity you know nothing about. If that seems fine to you, then you crack on, build your air castles as grotesque or grandiose as you like, but they will have no more normative force than a rival book about the natural history of unicorns.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I'm not disputing what you said, I'm disputing the soundness of it. You understand that merely making a claim is not sufficient to have other assume it's soundness, yes? The point I'm arguing, which you've failed to answer is quite clearly written...
Quoting Isaac
You understand the difference between first-person experience of mental phenomena and third-person observation of the physical processes correlated with (and [rightly IMO] assumed to cause) those mental phenomena, right?
I'm saying that philosophy only needs to deal with suffering as a first-person experience: we don't need to know anything about brains to discuss whether or not it is the case that suffering and suffering alone (as a kind of experience, in the first person) is intrinsically a bad state of affairs.
But of course we need to know about brains to properly discuss how to reduce suffering, since it turns out upon third person observation of the physical world that the experience of suffering is a product of brain function.
The first is a philosophical matter, the latter is a scientific matter. You'll find that in pretty much all of my philosophical views, the philosophy is just laying the groundwork for why and how to go do a science of some kind, rather than some ineffectual non-science that will at best yield non-answers.
Quoting Isaac
I directly responded to that, immediately after the bit you quoted:
Quoting Pfhorrest
I'm simply not advocating that we should aim to do the thing you say we can't do, so there's no problem there. You're just assuming that I mean that, even after I've clarified that I don't, which as usual just seems like a purposefully uncharitable reading.
Unstructured sets don't have such relational properties. And even if they are structured, they can be structured differently from yours, as evidenced by every other moral theory in existence. Absent shared epistemic standards for evaluating such structures, how can you argue for yours?
Quoting Pfhorrest
I don't know if empiricism can be philosophically justified - I doubt it. Fortunately for empiricists, there isn't much need for that, despite what you just said. Empirical intuitions are deeply ingrained, and social institutions for conducting investigations and accumulating knowledge will emerge and persist in the right circumstances.
Moral theorists are not so fortunate. We don't have much in the way of shared epistemic standards for evaluating moral theories, besides simply comparing particular first-order beliefs.
Quoting Pfhorrest
So what is philosophically right about your moral theory, as opposed to others, besides its being your theory?
Propositions have logical relations to each other whether or not the person assenting to all of them is aware of that. The process of argumentation is all about highlighting such relations that had previously been overlooked. If they hadn't been overlooked then there wouldn't be anything to argue about.
Quoting SophistiCat
If all the inferences making up my theory are correct, what makes it right is that to do otherwise ends up implying merely giving up on trying to answer moral questions, in one way or another; so every attempt at answering moral questions is at least poorly or halfheartedly doing the same things I advocate, and what I advocate is to do what's already being done some and working some, just better and more consistently, and avoid altogether the parts that, if people were consistent about them, would conclude with just giving up.
FWIW that is the same way that I justify critical empirical realism, i.e. the scientific method.
Of course we do. 'Bad' is not synonymous with 'feels bad currently'. So in order to know whether first person experiences of suffering are 'badly we need to know something of the future consequences of first person suffering. These are not given as part of the first person experience but rather as results of empirical investigations.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Right. And any moral theory (of your negative hedonistic type) is a means of reducing suffering. If you start any proposition with "One ought to..." you're talking about a method, not simply a logical fact.
Quoting Pfhorrest
What you think you're doing is immaterial to issue.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No. You responded as if to a suggestion that we could not achieve perfection in our predictions. That's not the issue I raised. I didn't say "We shan't be able to get it perfect", I said we shan't be able to do it at all.
Edit (for clarity) -
The affect resulting from finding oneself in some set of circumstances changes with the model that each person has of those circumstances and the likely affect they would cause. This model is itself effected by one's own moral thinking and that of one's culture. To resolve a moral dilemma (using positive affect in all people in all circumstances as a target) one would need to know what affect each option of the dilemma was likely to result in, not just now (that would be the cliched hedonism you deny) but in the future and for future generations. At least to a level of probability capable of significantly distinguishing between options.
But the feedback inherent in the fact that your decision will change the affects felt in the future means that you cannot possibly have a clue in any but the most obvious of cases. Anything remotely complex and the chaos effects of the multiple feedbacks would quickly render the likelihood incalculable. So only simple, clear cut cases could be decided this way.
And then you remind us that your model is not meant for simple clear cut cases as we've already worked these out.
You might argue that the rate of change in affect is slower than the rate at which we could discover the effects of acting on such a change... But the rate of change in affect (and the rate at which we can calculate the effects) are both empirical matters, and you've assured us that your approach here does not rely on empirical data for its soundness.
The problem with idealistic ideologies like yours is that they are an all-or-nothing, now-or-never kind of deal. Anything that is less than the perfect application of an idealistic ideology is still a complete failure.
You and your comrades definitely can apply your methodology at least sometimes, at least to some degree, and as long as that is viewed by some people as wrong/aberrant/defective/pathological, and those people are in positions of enough power, then those applying your methodology will simply be deemed criminals, losers, or at least defective in some way -- and you, because of your commitment to equality, will have to value their judgment. If you don't, you yourself have failed to apply your methodology.
I don't understand what this means.
What is a "negative world-to-mind fit"?
I didn't say anything about only considering present first-person experiences. Future suffering or enjoyment is still a first-person experience. True, we can't know the relationship between present and future experiences entirely in the first person, we have to do a third-person study of the world to establish that, but that's once again a question of particular means, not of general ends, and so not something I'm saying anything about here when doing philosophy, but a subject for some logically posterior scientific investigation.
Quoting Isaac
This whole paragraph seems confused. The part of moral theory we're discussing here is deciding on what are good ends. That's not in itself a means to achieving those ends, it's just deciding what ends to try to achieve. How to achieve them is a separate, later question. And "method or logical fact" is a strange and false dichotomy. The dichotomy here is between ends and means: a means is a method, sure, but an end isn't just a "logical fact", whatever you mean by that.
Quoting Isaac
So you get to tell me what my views are, and I don't get to clarify that what you think I'm saying or doing isn't actually what I'm trying to say or do?
For someone who hates pretense as much as you say you do, you sure seem to practice it a lot. (Projecting much?)
Quoting Isaac
You're taking too much emphasis on the "perfect" part, unless you want to deny that even something so vague as "certain kinds of people in certain contexts will tend to find certain things pleasant and certain other things unpleasant" is impossible to predict, which it doesn't sound like you mean in your clarification.
The intended target of emphasis was on the "predict" part, and how that relates to static vs dynamic solutions to the problem of satisfying all appetites. I've already said it but I'll say it again: I'm not suggesting that we have to make the world one exact unchanging way that will make everyone satisfied forever, and so figure out exactly what exact unchanging static state of the world that would be. Just that we have to (do our best to) ensure that the world and people's target valences always align, which can (and probably would best) be done in a dynamic way, enabling people to adjust the part of the world around them to satisfy their appetites in real time.
Quoting baker
I just can't comprehend how you could say that in response to this:
Quoting Pfhorrest
I'm explicitly saying not to make perfect the enemy of good. Do whatever we can, and even if that's not doing it all, that's still better than doing nothing. All I've laid out is what direction "doing it all" lies in, so that we know what we're trying to get closer to. Even if we can't get all the way there, that's no reason to not go as far as we can. You are the one who seems to be saying "we can't possibly get all the way there, so let's not try". Would you have us pick some more accomplishable goal, try to get there, and then if we do get there, just stop trying to improve? Or wouldn't you have us keep trying to improve as much as we can? The latter is what I advocate, and I wouldn't have even thought it needed to be specified if you hadn't implied that you think to the contrary. All I've specified is what direction "improvement" is.
Quoting baker
Commitment to equally valuing everyone's experiences is not the same as equally valuing everyone's judgements.
I've said this a lot before to clarify the difference: in doing physical sciences, we absolutely do not just take a poll on what people believe. Nevertheless, every replicable observation counts. Observations are a kind of experience, and beliefs are a kind of judgement. That someone disbelieves something is no evidence against it at all, but any replicable observation to the contrary is.
Quoting baker
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direction_of_fit
Well, all you've told me so far is "if I am right, then I am right." I still don't have any idea of where your moral philosophy gets its purchase.
I'm talking about the defence of @baker's accusation that
Quoting baker
To counter that you'd have to show that your system is, in fact, possible to apply. A system which relies, for its execution, on facts which are impossible to obtain with sufficient accuracy to yield results better than guesswork is not applicable. This third-party data on which your system relies changes too rapidly with too strong a feedback from the system itself for any scientific-like investigation to yield its answers in time for their enaction to bring about the desired result. Hence your system is not one that can be applied by humans.
Quoting Pfhorrest
That's where your system fails. What's the point in deciding that Xs are 'good ends' if later analysis of how to achieve those ends shows us that doing so is impossible? We have a choice here, we can set up our 'good ends' such that they are practically achievable, or we can set them up such that they are entirely useless at any pragmatic level. If you ignore the issues with method, you are just building pointless sky castles. Ethics is about real action among real humans.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Again, what you're trying to say is immaterial, this is a not a database of things people think, so the accuracy of your personal entry is not the main concern. You said (in the paragraph to which I responded "philosophy is just laying the groundwork for why and how to go do a science of some kind, rather than some ineffectual non-science that will at best yield non-answers." That is an empirical claim. Either your philosophy does lay such groundwork, leading to effective science, or it does not. That you think it will has no bearing on that fact. I'm not questioning your motives, I'm questioning the pragmatism of your methods. Hence what you think you're doing is irrelevant to the argument. It's not about pretence here, I'm making no claim to have all the answers about the pragmatism of your methods, I'm only making th point that the relevant debate is there, not in this pointless theorising.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No, That is possible to predict, already has been predicted, and is something no-one but a psychopath generally struggles with. So no new method is required to assist with it.
Quoting Pfhorrest
You've just completely ignored the argument I've already given against the pragmatism of this. I'll just repeat it, in case you're confused into thinking that ignoring it makes it go away.
Quoting Isaac
I'm not sure I can make it much simpler, but
Clear cut cases are already clear and no new method is needed to decide them. Only complex cases currently yield dissimilar strategies we need to choose between.
Responses to complex cases affect the long-term satisfaction brought about by the strategies themselves in difficult to predict ways (that's why they're complex cases).
The time it takes to work out how every person would react, in real time, to the execution of some strategy, is longer (by a long way) than the time it takes for that reaction to move on to some new difficult-to-predict state.
As such, a meta-strategy of working out how every person would react to individual moral strategies in order to inform them is unworkable in complex cases.
No, I've said that if I am right, then every difference from to my view, if applied consistently, is tantamount to "just give up" (on answering moral questions). So, presuming one would care to answer moral questions if it should turn out to be possible, one must (if I am right) act in a way that tacitly assumes the premises I start from, and therefore (on pain of inconsistency) accept all that's logically implied by them.
That's just the big picture overview. If you want the full argument, I've done a huge series of threads on it here over the past year. Foundational principles, semantics, ends, agents, means, and institutes, for your reference.
Quoting Isaac
You are again assuming that I'm aiming to create a static world that permanently satisfies everyone exactly how it is, rather than a dynamic world that adapts to satisfy people's changing appetites in real time.
Quoting Isaac
This sounds like exactly the thinking I was just charitable enough to assume Baker wasn't engaging in, when I responded to him:
Quoting Pfhorrest
I'm just saying that we should be trying to reduce everyone's suffering as much as we can manage -- that perfection would be total elimination of all suffering, that's the ultimate shoot-for-the-moon goal, and the closer we can get to attaining that, the better. We can certainly sometimes reduce some suffering. That's a step in the right direction on my account, and not to be discounted just because it didn't eliminate all suffering forever. Would you at some point say "that's enough suffering eliminated, we can stop now", and just give up on even attempting to get rid of even more? Where is that line to be drawn, and why?
The whole method of verifying people's hedonic experiences that you're contesting to vehemently is just a way to tell reliably if something consistently causes certain types of people to suffer in certain contexts, so that we can know to stop doing that. It doesn't need to tell us exactly what we must do; outside of those known-bad things, anything is permissible.
This is exactly analogous to falsificationism and in my overall system is a direct application of the very same principles: we're not even trying to pick out exactly what the right thing is -- whether "right" here means "true" or "good" -- because that would be impossible. We're just trying to narrow down on the range of possibilities wherein it might still be.
Quoting Isaac
And yet we're still discovering more and more things about that as time marches on, recognizing the different challenges that different kinds of people have and adapting our social world to accommodate those differences. How are we discovering these things? Basically by "emic" sociology: we're paying attention to the first-person lived experiences of different people, and accounting for those different perspectives in our models of what is good and bad. Just like I'm advocating. Yet some of these recent adaptations are the things met with the fiercest social and political resistance. I guess just half of everyone are sociopaths? Or, maybe, we're just not all in good habits regarding updating our moral views? Maybe someone should advocate those kinds of habits some more, try to get everyone on board with that program...
Quoting Isaac
I don't know where the miscommunication is happening here, because the part you repeated sounds like it's arguing against trying to come up with a static, unchanging world that forever satisfies the appetites of everyone, when what I wrote that you're responding to is an explicit denial that that's what I'm trying to do. I'm not disputing that the thing you say is impossible is impossible; I'm disputing that I'm advocating that impossible thing.
See a few paragraphs up ("The whole method of..." and "This is exactly analogous...") for elaboration on how what I'm advocating is different from that.
Don't be ridiculous. Everyone is answering moral questions, no thanks to your theory.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No, thanks. I entered one of those discussions once, and it went nowhere (just as it's not going anywhere here). I never got any answers from you, just a repetition of the same pitch.
No, I'm well aware of the fact that you're talking about a dynamic world adapting to satisfy people's changing appetites in real time. I'm saying that such an aim is impossible. the fact that you're prepared to update your world as people's appetites change does not have any bearing on the problem of people's appetites changing faster than you can update your 'ideal world' to accommodate the change. If your 'ideal world' is permanently several years behind the appetites it is supposed to satisfy then what exactly is its purpose?
Quoting Pfhorrest
It's not your objective that's in question, it's your methods, but to answer your question directly, yes, I would at some point in time say "that's enough suffering eliminated, we can stop now" I don't hold the elimination of all suffering to be the only goal in life, and if suffering were eliminated to a degree where I found it to be less important than other goals, then I would suggest we stop there.
As I said before, you could argue that the frustration of these other goals was a form of suffering, but then you end up saying nothing at all because reduction in suffering become de facto the only goal there is.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No it isn't. I've (quite exhaustively now) explained why it doesn't do that. whether or not something causes certain types of people to suffer in certain contexts is, in part dependant on the very actions we take to prevent it and so will already have changed the very moment we enact any strategy to prevent it. As such it is not "a way to tell reliably if something consistently causes certain types of people to suffer in certain contexts, so that we can know to stop doing that." It is only such a thing if we don't make any changes to our culture as a result of the data we glean - which is exactly the opposite purpose.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No. Again, despite your frequent nods to it, this is just ignoring the complexities of long-term satisfaction. Most people who object to these changes do so from economic, societal or religious reasons - ie they think that pursuing them may bring satisfaction now, but the effects of doing so in the long term will bring less satisfaction overall. since such long-term satisfaction cannot be tested, the arguments are all moot and we end up deciding democratically. as I said on the other thread, you're not an unprecedented genius, we have all been here before and the system we have is largely the result of having been through all this.
Quoting Pfhorrest
See a few paragraphs up for how it's irrelevant whether you're talking about a static or a dynamic idealisation. What matters is the fact that the very act of idealisation effects the appetite data it was idealised to meet, and as such it is rendered immediately inaccurate. Saying that you'll update it as appetites change is pointless. All you'll have is record of what appetites were at the time of survey and no reason to believe they'll be of any use trying to satisfy whatever appetites will be by the time a strategy is devised and finally has its effect.
And to the extent that they are genuinely trying to answer those questions and not throwing up their hands and saying "because ___ said so!" or "it's all just opinions anyway!", they're doing things as my theory recommends. I'm not saying that my theory is an entirely new thing completely unlike anything anyone else has ever done. It's mostly just taking bits of other approaches and putting them together, leaving out any bits of those other approaches that (if I'm right, and if they were applied consistently) would end up at one of those two thought-terminating cliches above.
You're asking where my views "find purchase". That reduction of the particular things I disagree with to just giving up is where that happens. If I'm right about all the inferences between things, of course. But that -- "don't just give up" -- is what I'm ultimately appealing to to support everything else.
Quoting Isaac
This still sounds like you think like my proposal is that we re-run through the whole elaborate process of "peer review" every time anyone's appetites change, to come up with an updated picture of exactly how the world will be that will then be forced on everyone -- too late, now that everyone's appetites have changed again. That's not what I'm proposing. As I've already said several times before, the "dynamic" solution to the problem I'm talking about is a liberal/libertarian one: let everyone control their own surroundings in real time. No long roundabout multi-year process required for those constant day-to-day fluctuations.
Quoting Isaac
You're the one putting that claim in my mouth, not me. I've tried to be very clear that my views are mostly just a combination of other already well-known views, minus the parts of those that are usually objected to, usually substituting those parts with parts of other views instead, but without importing the parts of those other views that are usually objected to, etc.
This altruistic hedonism part of my view is basically just the normal ends of utilitarianism, there's nothing new there. But there's several objections to utilitarianism, including the question of on what grounds we can claim that minimizing suffering / maximizing pleasure is good, and the objection about the ends justifying the means. So I give a pragmatic argument for the first of those that's grounded in something like a secularized version of Pascal's Wager; and for the second thing I separate questions about means and questions about ends in the same way we normally separate epistemology and ontology, and while I agree with utilitarianism about the ends, I don't claim that that justifies just any means, and instead give a deontological account of the acceptable means to those ends, modeled after a falsificationist epistemology, which of course is nothing new of my own, though I do give what so far as I know is a novel argument for it again grounded in that secularized version of Pascal's Wager.
The only reason I'm even putting forth these views myself is because I am unaware of anyone having put forth quite this combination of these facets of these views like this before, after having looked for someone who did. I know that pretty much all of the parts are unoriginal, but I've not seen anyone put them all together like this.
If someone has, and I just don't know, I'm hoping to find out about that. (Like with my meta-ethics: I hadn't heard about anyone combining non-descriptivism with cognitivism, in a way almost but not quite like Hare's universal prescriptivism; but I eventually found out that there had been a paper on just that, inspired by Hare, published just shortly before my philosophy education, which is why it wasn't in my curriculum yet).
And if nobody has, then hey, maybe this is an idea worth sharing, and not just keeping to myself.
You seem to want to force upon me a dichotomy of either me saying nothing new and so nothing worth saying, or else me arrogantly thinking I'm some kind of unprecedented genius because (so far as I can tell) I've had a new idea. What would be an acceptable (to you) thing to say somewhere like this, if neither "I (dis)like this old idea" or "I think this might be a new idea" is allowable?
Again what difference does that make to my argument? An individual doing it is no quicker than an institution doing it, they're no more able to predict what every future human's appetites are going to be for the rest of human existence as that dynamic future changes in real time in response to their emerging strategy. Either you're saying that everyone can do anything they like without hindrance, or else the nature of that hindrance is crucial to your ethics It's the hindrance that we're talking about here, the calculation of that which you'd like to do but should refrain from doing because of the consequences on the suffering of others. The whole debate is about how to work out what those things are, so saying that you can do what you like absent of those restrictions is irrelevant. We started out that way, one already can do what one likes absent of the restrictions laid down by whatever moral code one follows.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No, there's having a new idea but having the humility to recognise that each step is complex and fraught terrain which has been trod before. The only thing I object to about your posting style is the manner in which you text-dump your entire completed world-view, and when anyone questions some part of it you say "that's not what we're discussing here, I've dealt with that elsewhere", then when we look to the thread in which you've dealt with it you say "well, I don't want to waste time with people whom I can't convince (after five minutes) so I'm moving on to the next thread", issues are raised in that next thread and are referred back to the previous one... and so it goes on. Nothing ever gets dealt with because all you want to do is blurt out the entire edifice, but in doing so never deal with any of the issues that arise.
Every single step you take might well be new, exiting and world-shattering (unlikely of course, but not impossible), but you'll not find out if only a short while into the issues you abandon the debate in favour of just assuming you're right and moving on to the next step. The reason philosophy (and science, for that matter) deals with small issues in great detail is that most authors and scientists are humble enough to know that if no-one else has come up with their grand world-view it probably because the issues are extremely complex and so are best tackled one at a time in great detail. Bit by bit we make progress.
If you are not with me, then you are not genuinely answering moral questions? One can disagree with the answers that other people give to moral questions (as well one must), but to deny that they are being genuine is extremely presumptuous, not to say insulting. You have not earned the right to this stance.
Everyone makes moral valuations. Everyone decides what is right and what is wrong. As a moral theorist, what you are proposing goes above and beyond genuinely answering moral questions. It is incumbent upon you to explain why this theoretical superstructure is needed in the first place, and how we can know if it's any good.
Quoting Pfhorrest
You keep repeating this pitch, but it is unconvincing, because it is empty. If you can give us the motivation - What are we looking for? Why do need it? How will we know when we've found it? - then the rest is a no-brainer. No Pascal's Wager is needed to additionally convince us to go searching for answers. But I have not seen the answers to these questions from you.
You want to have a science of morality, but absent the motivating principles that underlie science, this is just a simulacrum, a pseudo-science. It's technical, but ultimately pointless.
If we have a generally libertarian society where everyone gets to be master of their own little domain instead of being subject to the whims of others then we don't run into those kinds of conflicts nearly so much and so don't need to predict huge numbers of tiny details far in advance. The only issues that remain are in public spaces, where e.g. Alice is doing something in a public park that Bob claims harms his equal right to use the park, and Alice rebuts that Bob is being an over-sensitive crybaby and she's not doing anything harmful, and we need to decide whether Bob's claim is legit or not. For that we don't need to predict a ridiculously complex dynamic system of all people everywhere years in advance. We just need a "today's forecast", to use your weather analogy from the other thread. We just need to know that Bob and Alice are people with these relevant features in this relevant context and what the research says about the experiences of such kinds of people in such contexts, to resolve that particular conflict. And of course we need to know the analogue of "climate science" for big-picture long-term policy, which of course you know is different from long-term weather prediction, and which you've already admitted is something (the equivalent of which) is possible, i.e. general ethical trends.
Quoting Isaac
The reason I'm doing a bunch of threads is precisely to focus in on specific narrow issues, but you keep jumping the gun to complain about implications you think I'm making on topics I haven't even spoken about yet. Let me recap once again a history of our conversations here over the past year, this time narrowed down to just ethics-related things:
- I started a thread that was supposed to be about just having broad philosophical principles with far-reaching implications in general, not specifically about my principles, though I mentioned what my principles were and some far-reaching implications I think they have, as an example of the kind of thing that thread was trying to solicit from others. (a la "What are your principles and what implications do they have?") I mentioned my principles there without presenting any arguments for them, because that thread wasn't supposed to be about them in particular, that was a thread about meta-philosophy more generally, and I was going to do another thread about my principles in particular later.
But you made that thread entirely into an argument about one half of one of those principles (the moral half of universalism), and as a consequence of that disruption I never actually got around to doing a thread giving a proper argument for those foundational principles. I realized that last bit a month ago and went back and made a new post with that argument in that thread, but you ignored that. Maybe go back and read that now? I can link it if you want.
- I did a thread about philosophy of language, including within it an account of moral language, and you once again made the entire thread about the implications of that on moral universalism. That account of moral language doesn't even entail moral universalism, it just leaves it possible, but that was enough to get you riled up. Plus I thought at that point that I had already presented my argument for universalism generally -- forgetting that you had disrupted the thread(s) where I had meant to do that, resulting in me not getting around to it until I realized that 9 months later -- so it seemed like you were just bringing up an argument I had already said everything I had to say on again in a mostly-unrelated place.
- Months later after numerous threads unrelated to ethics, I did a thread with the main thesis that there are two parts to an ethical investigation, the philosophical part of figuring out what we’re asking, what would make an answer correct, and how we apply such criteria (meta-ethics); then the part where we actually do that application and come up with specific answers for the real world based on those philosophical principles (applied ethics); and how normative ethics as usually conceived doesn't really fit in there anywhere. Of course in elaborating upon that I assumed my own general ethics for illustration, and once again you focused entirely on the same points of objection to what I'd had to explain to you of my views in earlier threads (after repeatedly trying to get you to wait until I actually opened a discussion about that specifically, so it wouldn't derail other threads about other things only tangentially related).
- Then I finally did that thread to discuss that issue specifically, giving my more detailed arguments for hedonistic altruism -- with references also back to the disrupted earlier thread on general principles where I had since added the arguments that I never got to because of you -- and you ignored it entirely. Maybe go back and read that now? I can link it if you want.
- I did a thread on free will and its relation to moral responsibility that you ignored, thankfully.
- I did a thread on the libertarian and deontological aspects of my ethics that I'd previously promised would address many of your concerns based out of your assumption that I was some ends-justify-the-means authoritarian, but you ignored it entirely. Maybe go back and read that now? I can link it if you want.
- And most recently I did a thread on how to build a justified government in light of that kind of ethical system, but once again you ignore the specific narrow focus of that thread to fixate on the one thing you just can't let go of, completely ignoring 90% of the OP.
Do you see the pattern here?
If not for your disruptions, I would have done that first meta-ethical thread as planned, then given my actual arguments for my general principles where we could have hashed a lot of the groundwork for this out -- those general principles are supposed to be the boring obvious things that everyone will agree with, to use as a starting point for all the later arguments. That would have spared the disruption of the language thread, and then when I got around to doing actual ethics threads again, maybe you could have actually engaged in the ones that were supposed to be about the topics you kept interrupting every other thread with.
It's like I'm trying to do specific focused threads on various topics in astronomy and you're just hung up on how these all just assume a background of heliocentrism, even if none of them are actually about heliocentrism -- except the one that is, which you ignore.
Quoting SophistiCat
Other way around: if you are not genuinely (attempting to) answering moral questions, then I'm not with you.
It's not about whether or not they agree with me. I'm stating my (dis)agreement with them to the extent that what they're doing, if done consistently, would(n't) boil down to giving up, by saying either "because ___ said so!" or "it's all just opinions anyway!"
I think many people are doing a lot of things right, but also, often, at least some things wrong (when it comes to figuring out what's right and wrong, I mean). I'm calling out what looks wrong with those approaches and why, and saying hey, let's not do that, let's just do the other stuff, that many of us are already doing, but without this stuff that just gums of the works of all that.
Quoting SophistiCat
My "wager" isn't to convince anyone to go searching for answers, but rather assumes that people are already interested in answers if they may be available to find, and then argues why certain broad approaches would generally impede that search, and so are to be avoided.
If someone just doesn't give a crap about what's good or bad at all, I don't know how to reach them. But I presume that most people do give at least some crap about that, that they'd like to know what those answers are, if there are any to know.
From that basic premise, and the followup that you don't stand much chance of accomplishing anything if you don't try (so therefore anything that undermines the motive to try should be rejected), I argue that both "it's all just opinions anyway!" (relativism) and "because ___ said so!" (dogmatism) would constitute reasons to give up trying (because success is either impossible or guaranteed, respectively, no matter what we do), and so should be rejected.
Not because they are definitely false (and here comes the "wager" part), but because if they're true then it doesn't matter whether or not we believe them (as in that case we'd have no power to figure anything out anyway), but if they're false we're better off (for the purpose of figuring things out) in disbelieving them, so the pragmatic thing to do is always assume they're false.
That gives us the negation of relativism (universalism) and the negation of dogmatism (criticism) as starting principles. Criticism in turn demands that we reject any claims that can't be tested, since we'd have nothing to go on but someone's word for such claims, which gives us a principle I call "phenomenalism", the ethical side of which is hedonism.
So there we have universalism (including moral universalism, i.e. altruism) and phenomenalism (including hedonism).
Liberalism (of both thought and action, belief and intention) likewise follows from universalism, because its negation that I dub (for lack of a better term) "cynicism", by which I mean the rejection of all claims until they are conclusively proven from the ground up, would necessitate nihilism, which in practice amounts to solipsism or egotism, which are just the most extreme forms of relativism. So rejecting relativism for univeralism (as above) demands rejecting cynicism for liberalism as well.
On what basis do you make this claim?
Quoting Pfhorrest
That's literally all of morality. Morality is about how we treat others. If there are no 'others' being affected by our actions, there's no morality.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Nonsense. Take Alice's wish to buy a new car and Bob's desire that his air remain free from diesel fumes. alice will claim that the economy will suffer if she doesn't, Bob will claim the environment will, Alice will claim that prosperity has brought about environmental benefits, Bob will claim that it's destroying the environment in the long-run... Even your trite example of using the park has implications for the moral character of subsequent generations, obedience to authority, slippery slope etc...
I sincerely doubt you could come up with a single moral dilemma which could be solved by reference only to the two people involved.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Sure, I'd be interested to read it.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Well, yes, but it's obviously quite a different pattern from my point of view. As I said before it reads to me as if you keep making new threads which rely (in part) on premises from old threads which have numerous outstanding issues. That comes across as being more interested in proselytising than in discussing - proselytise for two thousand words, have brief discussion, shut that down and then proselytise for another two thousand words without even so much as acknowledging the numerous issues with the premises.
The problem, as I see it, is that you're too ready to duck the issues by referencing some other part of this bible you've written without actually having to make the argument there and then about how exactly it resolves the problem. You're doing it here. Instead of outlining how you think...
Quoting Pfhorrest
... you just allude to that fact that it would, but when we turn to that thread, no mention is made of how it addresses the issues we were previously discussing. I've no doubt it all makes sense to you, I kind of presume that from the outset, so there's little point in writing anything publicly unless you address what other people say about it.
I don't read all of your threads, nor all the replies in the ones I'm involved in, but from what I have read so far, this isn't confined to me. I'm one of the few people who reply to your threads at all (in any long-term engagement) and of the few others who do, most seem to raise similar issues (namely that your premises are the problematic part, and what you assume is self-evident is not so)
Now I remember why my earlier attempt to engage you on this topic was a failure. Bye.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/513602
Quoting SophistiCat
Because...Quoting Pfhorrest...?
To quote James 1, 2-3.
"Consider it all joy, my brothers, when you encounter various trials, for you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. And let perseverance be perfect, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing."
Why is perseverance good? (NB that I agree that it is, and I have my answer to that question; I just want to hear yours).
There are four reasons.
I. The practical material. It's a tough world and the weak are trampled under foot. Negative feedback works as a learning mechanism, oftentimes better than positive stimuli. If you don't learn to grind, or to stand up for yourself in uncomfortable stations, embracing negative feelings, you'll end up worse off in the long run.
II. Human's positive feedback mechanisms adapt over time, requiring greater stimuli for an equal subjective experience. Chasing hedonism can land you in a world of hurt.
III. Connected to II, joy, versus happiness, requires long term psychological development (dare I say spiritual at times). This is work. Philosophy is work. Confronting your past can be negative. Opening up emotionally and being vulnerable is like pulling teeth for some people. Their also all necessary for a deeper joy and level of conciousness. The way Robert A. Johnson puts it, there are three levels to man. Simple two dimensional man, embodied by Don Quixote, three dimensional.man, where most modern people end up, embodied by Hamlet, and enlightened four dimensional man, embodied by Faust, who has faced his demons and been redeemed at the last.
IV. Aesthetically, hedonism is pretty skin deep. Art made purely for the sake of "looking good" generally only gets so far. Not that I don't appreciate cool sci-fi landscapes, or colorful glass sculptures, but you're not going to understand Giotto or Michaelangelo without some pain in your life. An aesthetic experience that is worth the trade off.
In (I), the reason perseverance in the face of suffering is good because it helps to overcome suffering, shortening and lessening that suffering, which is still a hedonic concern.
In (II), you pretty much spell it out: the bad being avoided is hurt, i.e. suffering.
In (III), the good that comes of perseverance is a kind of heightened, refined, deeper or multi-dimensional enjoyment, where once more enjoyment, like suffering, is a hedonic concern.
And in (IV), the aesthetic experience is enjoyable because of the catharsis of speaking the truth of some suffering you've had yourself, a kind of emotional unburdening and relief; where relieving suffering is, again, a hedonic concern (and in any case, so is aesthetic enjoyment).
This is similar to arguments about whether the senses can be deceptive. We know that we can't always believe the things we think we see because we later find out that what we thought we saw was false. But how do we later find it out? By seeing something to the contrary. So it's still our senses telling us that our earlier senses were wrong. The lesson to be learned is not that all of the senses always lie (and so we need to turn to something beside the senses), but that no one bit of sensation tells the complete truth, and we have to attend to all of them -- which we can only every asymptotically approach -- to get at that complete truth.
Likewise with the appetites and goodness, on my reckoning. Sometimes doing something that feels like it's good now can lead us to doing things that we later learn are actually bad, but we learn about them being bad by the same mechanism we thought they were good before. The lesson to be learned is not that all appetites will always all lead us astray (and so we need to turn to something beside the appetites), but that none of them ever tell us the complete picture of what is good, and we have to attend to all of them -- which we can only every asymptotically approach -- to get at that complete good.
You do a good job of stretching the concept. I am concerned, though, that psychological hedonism, like psychological egoism, ultimately says too little. If everything is X, nothing is X (in practical terms.)
A man can get himself burned alive to rescue his family from a burning house, and we can say that he does some calculation where the death of his family is even worse than his skin melting off. But does this satisfy us? There's also the problem of death, which may throw a wrench into all calculations.
Finally there's the issue of using 'subjective' terms. Do we give surveys?
Exactly the point I raised earlier about triviality. If we extend hedonism to all and any future pleasures/sufferings, and then we add to it the pleasure/suffering one gets from other people's pleasure/suffering... no actual real moral dilemma is helped in any way by such an analysis. We could still follow anything, from classical utilitarianism (my pleasure derives from knowing I've maximised all pleasures - utility monster included!), to Divine Command Theory (God invented pleasure so probably knows best how to maximise it).
It's an approach which restricts only those with insufficient imagination to re-frame their narrative in new terms, anyone else has five minutes of mental gymnastics to do before they can carry on with exactly the solution they had in the first place but now with the benefit of a whole fresh post hoc justification.
Well said. I'd just add that it's easy to get sucked in if one is not wary. I once found psychological egoism plausible, until it finally clicked that it was empty (pragmatists, Wittgenstein, and others helped.)
As far as "if everything is X, nothing is X", I see it similarly to my view on naturalism, which I consider equivalent to empirical realism and thus the descriptive analogue of altruistic hedonism.
In saying that everything is natural and nothing supernatural exists, what we end up saying is along the lines of "something 'existing' in some way yet not meeting the criteria to be natural is an incoherent idea"; to be natural and to be real are just the same thing, and so "supernatural" just means "unreal".
Likewise, in saying that all goods are hedonic goods, what we end up saying is basically the the idea of something being "good" in some sense independent of hedonistic concerns is incoherent; to be altrustically hedonistic, to bring enjoyment or pleasure to at least some while bringing pain or suffering to none, just is the same thing as being good, and so if there were a simple word for the opposite of altruistic hedonism the way "supernatural" is to "natural" (and please let me know if you know one!), it would just be a synonym for "immoral".
I'm somewhat attracted to this view and have even expressed and argued for it before. I picture a continuum from familiar to postulated entities that are taken more or less seriously. For instance, I don't believe in ghosts, but surely something strange enough could happen to make me reconsider. I'm familiar with the concept which could come into play during an anomalous experience.
Currently, though, I'm a little more wary of going against the grain of everyday language. 'Supernatural' is already taken, already suggests gods and ghosts, not simply the nonexistent or even the postulated, less likely entities.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Perhaps you would soften this so that bringing pain to none is a sort of impossible target. As I've seen life, there's just no way around hurting others. For instance, should I drive a car when I know that I might destroy someone's life because I have a heart attack on the interstate? But maybe I'm a doctor rushing to the hospital to save someone's life. There's so much fuzzy calculation in life. We can't be sure of our methods or even be sure of our motives at times. I do think 'be nice = cause pleasure' and 'don't be mean = don't cause pain' are pretty universal, at least in the context of a global humanism.
It's good (has been perceived a good) to hurt the tribe's criminals or enemies. It's good to be evil to the evil, and it's bad to be good to the evil. Revenge is still a popular theme in action thrillers. The bad guys are presented as so cruel that the viewer delights even in their torture. What do you make of 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth'? Obviously I don't expect that you embrace it, so I'm asking how you classify that paradigm, which seems outside yours. [I'm not advocating for this eye-for-an-eye stuff.]
Your description is quite good, but I don't think it follows that the reasons are reducible to hedonism. For example, my wife has grown in her faith and experienced "joy" in knowing her brother was at peace after his suicide. That doesn't mean anything about the experience was desired or pleasant. It's a joy in faith, which is qualitatively different from, and often absent in pleasant experiences.
When Paul talks about being indifferent to life or death in Philippians, a letter written from prison, he isn't talking about pleasant qualia, but an enlightened state of faith outside such things. It's hard to say these things reduce to positive experience, especially since Paul and Peter did not recant as they were variously beheaded and crucified. A longing for execution does not seem hedonistic to me.
From Philippians I, 21-23
"For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If I am to live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account."
Sure, making a choice that unintentionally ends up hurting someone doesn't reflect any kind of character defect on your part. You may have been doing the best you could and just couldn't avoid all bad consequences. It's just that if something bad did happen, the thing that bad it bad was that someone got hurt; and that you couldn't have prevented it doesn't make it a bad thing, something that it would have been better to prevent, if possible.
Quoting j0e
I think that that kind of paradigm is just straightforwardly wrong, though I understand the emotional motive for it, and why it would be game-theoretically a successful evolutionary strategy.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
So would she say that it's better that her brother died, since it brought her this joy through her process of getting past it? Or rather that such joy is merely something good that was able to be taken away from a bad situation? I expect that it's the latter, and that her joy in faith doesn't justify her brother's suffering; that it's not the case that his death ought to have happened, to bring her that opportunity for joy, but merely that, given that something awful did happen anyway, it's good that she was able to find some good as a consequence of that.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I agree that such a state, as the Stoics called it "ataraxia", is a good thing, but still for hedonistic reasons: being indifferent to suffering or enjoyment is a means of reducing suffering, and is good on that account. (It can also reduce enjoyment, however, and so can be bad on that account: when people don't care about things that used to bring them joy, and are just waiting to die, we usually call it depression today, and don't think of it as a good thing. Whether emotional withdrawal like that is good or bad depends on the context).
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Factoring an afterlife into things just kicks the ball down the street. If there's a life after this one that is expected to be beyond all suffering, then a desire to get there instead of suffering in this life is still driven by hedonistic concerns. If staying behind is for the sake of helping over people to get there too, then that's out of hedonistic concern for them.
For me the point is that I know that getting in a car puts others at risk. Another question: should Bono take a private jet if it helps him fight climate change? Should I continue to feed my beloved, carnivorous cat? Should I threaten to divorce my wife if she doesn't embrace vegetarianism? Recently, my dog had dental surgery under general anesthesia. I asked myself: do vets charge when they accidentally kill clients' pets? Should they charge? I could argue both sides. I don't pretend to have an answer here.
I won't go so far as the condemn the study of ethics at an abstract level, but questions like these at least suggest the poverty of abstract theorizing in the face of ordinary life. Do you have any comments on this? Let me stress that I grant that ethical abstractions may be helpful, at least indirectly.
This analysis still sounds like psychological hedonism. Or some strange version of it where every ethical system is revealed to be ethical hedonism, except the eye-for-an-eye system which is just wrong. I'm not arguing the eye-for-an-eye system but just trying to clarify this issue.
I acknowledge that those are all difficult questions to decide. My only point on this topic is that the grounds on which to decide them, the costs and benefits to weigh, are in terms of enjoyment and suffering, pleasure and pain. Picking the least bad out of many bad options may of course be the only known-available choice many times. I'm only on about what is it that makes such a choice less bad or more bad.
Quoting j0e
The relevant difference between accepting death because you expect heaven and retributive "justice" is that the latter is not necessarily rationalized in terms of its expected hedonic benefits (like deterrence, etc), but can be just for the sake of making bad people suffer; while the former is explicitly for the expected enjoyment / absence-of-suffering of heaven. By this account one of those is hedonistic and the other isn't, so this account is not of psychological hedonism (some times people do do things for non-hedonistic motives); but the one that isn't hedonistic is just straight up immoral, so it is an account of ethical hedonism.
I haven't studied metaethics with any seriousness, unless reading lots of Nietzsche counts (for reasons hinted at by the example problems.) I think we both reject the eye-for-an-eye scheme as crude. Do you have any second favorite approaches? Which ideological opponent of yours do you most respect while not agreeing? What is Pepsi to your Coca-cola?
Basically, such a model holds that we can minimize suffering for everyone by following rules that enable each of us to maximize our own preference satisfaction within our own co-equal domains.
You're correct if you expand the definition of "pleasure" under hedonism to "everything that is good." It seems like you're expanding your definition too far in that case though. "Everyone should seeks that which is good, and what is good is pleasurable," doesn't ring true to me.
If pleasure is your only unit of analysis, then everything will seem to lead back to that, but I don't think it's that simple.