An inquiry into moral facts
Are there moral facts?
If there are moral facts, how can we know them?
The position affirming the proposition that “There are moral facts,” is known as moral realism and according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy the argument moral realists provide to defend this view may resemble the following:
If there are moral facts, are their truth-making relations contingent upon the 'existence' or 'independence' dimensions of realism?
And lastly, if there are moral facts, please provide an example of one which includes the evidence or proof which grounds the claim, as well as the warrant for drawing the inference between the claim and the evidence.
If there are moral facts, how can we know them?
The position affirming the proposition that “There are moral facts,” is known as moral realism and according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy the argument moral realists provide to defend this view may resemble the following:
Shin Kim:P1. Moral sentences are sometimes true.
P2. A sentence is true if and only if the truth-making relation holds between it and the thing that makes it true.
P3. Thus, true moral sentences are true only because there holds a truth-making relation between them and the things that make them true.
Therefore,
C. The things that make some moral sentences true must exist.
If there are moral facts, are their truth-making relations contingent upon the 'existence' or 'independence' dimensions of realism?
And lastly, if there are moral facts, please provide an example of one which includes the evidence or proof which grounds the claim, as well as the warrant for drawing the inference between the claim and the evidence.
Comments (245)
No, and yes. Most fundamentally, morality is a sense - in terms of which, rightfully, we understand facts about an objective reality. Famously, Hume objects to this - giving rise to the is/ought dichotomy. But he's wrong to object to human reason, poised between is and ought, reconciling objective facts in terms of subjective values. And he's wrong because he assumes moral facts are God given.
In light of modern knowledge, morality is clearly a consequence of evolution. Homo sapiens lived as hunter gatherers for millions of years, and then joined together to form multi tribal groups, societies, leading to civilisations. This wasn't easy. There's around 35,000 years between the occurrence of intellectual intelligence as evident in artefacts like improved tools, cave painting and burial of the dead, and the formation of the first civilisations. Why did it take so long?
Insofar as chimpanzee troops are an adequate model, they are ruled by an alpha male and his lieutenants who monopolise food and mating opportunities. This hierarchical structure makes it difficult for tribes to join together. Any dispute would naturally divide the fledgling society into its tribal elements; unless they had moral laws that applied to everyone. And this is the nature of civilisation.
We objectivised morality by attributing moral laws to God, and insisted everyone believe in the same god, and obey the same moral laws. Religion, law, philosophy, economics, democratic politics etc - are means by which we agree on moral values, in terms of which objective facts "ought" to be understood. These then become, objective moral facts. So now, we return to Hume, who assumes morality is a set of God given, objective moral facts - and so he argues:
"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."
Had Hume known that moral behaviour was an advantage to the individual within the tribe, and advantageous to the tribe made up of moral individuals - such that they share food, defend each other, as they must have done to raise generation after generation of young, he would not have objected to - what he recognises occurs in 'every system of morality which I have hitherto met with.' But morality was objectivised for political purposes, and further, science was declared a heresy to defend religion as an authoritative basis for moral laws. The picture is thus very confused, but in my view, rightfully, science provides objective facts, which are then understood in terms of a subjective moral sense.
What if God in the contexts of many is not a supernatural being or entity but the simple idea of absoluteness. Do you not assume the role of God in this case by asserting what others assert to be as you interpret it? What makes your particular claim here, which you undoubtedly assert as inarguable and absolute, any different from the idea of a God given moral fact?
I don't think so. Can you support this?
And evolution, again. That we have evolved to do such-and-such does not suffice to show that such-and-such is right.
I don't know if God exists, or does not. I'm agnostic. But God exists as a concept in human understanding, and - I believe, that concept enabled hunter gatherers to objectivise morality by attributing moral laws to God. Think of Moses coming down the mountain with his stone tablets. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. These were not new concepts at the time. Man was not running around, before then, killing and stealing with impunity. It's one of the reasons I reject nihilism. Man could not have survived as an amoral ubermensch. Chimpanzees have morality of sorts. They share food, groom each other, defend the troop, and they remember who reciprocates, and withhold such favours in future. Morality is a subjective sense ingrained into the human organism by evolution, made objective for political purposes.
I hope that clears things up for you. I did not understand the majority of your post.
What are facts? There are many theories on the subject, but put in deliberately simple language I'd say the defining characteristic of a "fact" is this:
That it reasserts itself even if you are unaware or even actively opposed to it.
For example: One may be opposed to the idea that the micro scale actually works in the way described by quantum physics. Yet such disagreement cannot escape the reality that if you actually want to predict the behaviour of a system on a micro scale, you have to use them.
Does something similar happen with morality? From a theoretical perspective, the answer seems to be: No. There is nothing about a moral philosophy which reasserts itself regardless of beliefs. You can believe more or less everything you want in the realm of morality, and your efforts to achieve any arbitrary goal will not be hindered.
This changes only if we view morality as a practical question: not an abstract theory of good and bad, but as a set of practical rules under which an end result - a moral world - is achieved. Viewed this way, there are things which reasserts themselves, and indeed have reasserted themselves throughout history and been written down in various texts. You can not believe that you can take whatever you want and keep it, for example, if such a proposition were ever a practical rule for everyone. In that sense, it'd be a moral fact, albeit a negative one.
I'm inclined to do the such-and-such shoe shuffle to Dinah Washington singing Mad about the Boy...
The passage quoted implies Hume assumes morality is God given.
Quoting counterpunch
With regard to his personal beliefs, he was agnostic or sceptical, (not publicly, of course, because that would invite accusations of heresy, and could result in execution by the church, who were burning heretics alive right through to 1792) but he recognises that moral values are attributed to, and maintained by the authority of God.
Quoting Banno
Who said it does? Not I, that's for sure!
...the one in which he rejects that assumption...
Does he? Where?
Thanks for the suggestion. Where?
https://davidhume.org/texts/t/3/1/1
T 3.1.1.27, SBN 469-70.
Odd, that you cited it, but can't check the context.
I cannot forbear adding to these reasonings an observation, which may, perhaps, be found of some importance. In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remark'd, 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 surpriz'd 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 shou'd be observ'd and explain'd; 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 wou'd 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 perceiv'd by reason."
Where in this passage does he refute the suggestion that morality is a set of God given laws? I don't see it. If you do, please indicate it.
"...the thing that makes it true."
I'm not sure that in the case of a moral statements, there is such a thing...
But that's not unusual. Consider: 2+2=4 is true. What is the thing that makes it true? Presumably, that 2+2=4.
(continued after interruption...)
What we can drop is an implicit correspondence theory of truth, such that there is a distinct thing that makes the statement true.
The problem with this is that for most creatures, survival is an imperative that can never be questioned. For h. Sapiens, existence itself is a predicament, and the facts of evolution have little bearing on it.
In the case of morality and ethics, actions always speak louder than words.
Most species that have ever lived; in fact, something like 99% of all species that have ever lived are now extinct. What survives is a marble cut from a mountain - that survives because it's constantly tested by the function or die algorithm of natural selection.
Evolution is profoundly important to h.sapiens - because we evolved. In order to understand our psychology, morality, religion, politics, etc, we need to understand our evolutionary history.
I can show this with reference to Nietzsche, who didn't understand evolution at all - and imagined h.sapiens as Godless amoral animals. Not so. Human beings are moral creatures, imbued with a moral sense by evolution, and religion is a expression of that innate morality.
...is quite acceptable. What I'd reject is the notion that truth is in all cases determined by correspondence. Hence, the example of mathematical truths - where what they correspond to is unclear.
It's the action that counts in moral issues, as you say; It's unclear how truth relates to actions.
Not so. It’s the naturalistic fallacy, that because something occurs in nature, then it’s necessarily good, or a guide to what is good. Evolutionary science is of course a fundamental science, but it has very little bearing on moral philosophy. ( :yikes: Brace for umbrage.)
It’s unclear how truth as an attribute of propositions does. But there’s a lived truth, a truth you feel in your bones, that has a bearing.
An inexpressible truth?
A lived truth can be stated. As can a truth that you feel in your bones.
We will need to be clear about what is true, and how it is justified. "It's true: I feel it in my bones".
I don't take umbrage at people disagreeing with me, but I do if they are unclear - and refuse to clarify what it is they are saying I'm wrong about. Here you are wrong again, but I'm not just going to leave it there. I'm going to explain why.
Morality is a sense. It's not an explicit set of rules - so doesn't constitute a naturalistic fallacy. It's like humour, or aesthetics. There's considerable overlap among individuals as to what's funny, or beautiful, or moral - but no naturally occurring, definitive set of moral rules. That so, I'm not saying, as Nietzsche argued, that man in a state of nature was an amoral brute - and therefore we should be too. I'm saying that evolution has imbued us with a moral sense, that enables us to derive ought from is.
‘Tis not. It’s a reasoned judgement about the correct action. And attributing its development to evolution is indeed very close to the naturalistic fallacy.
Here’s my view of what happened. Of course it’s true that we all passed through the tortuous process of evolution from simian forbears. But what imposes moral necessity on us, is not an instinct, like that by which salmon return to their home stream. It’s because we became independent arbiters of what is good. We could decide, we could judge. We had possessions, things to call our own, and language by which to name it. That is the origin of the moral sense. No doubt, we evolved to the point of developing that sense, but to say it is merely or simply an adaptive necessity is to entirely mistake the existential predicament of the emerging self of h. Sapiens. When we evolved to that point, we also escaped the gravity of biology to some degree. We were no longer simply a creature, but a creature who could ask ‘what am I?’, and ‘what is this world I find myself in?’
I'd add something about the role of language...
Beautiful bit of writing, W, and I'm not sure how Sam Harris/Counterpunch will respond.
But I am curious that you made a point of highlighting possessions as a key element. Our ancestors must have had nascent empathy to even start on this journey - how else can one raise young? And I would have thought that in tribal living being able to support each other would have strengthened survival chances. Reciprocal altruism is just as likely to have emerged in a, shall we say, more transactional expression of behaviour? I feel grubby....
Is it? So if you see a big bloke punching a small woman - do you make a reasoned judgment that it's wrong, or do you feel it? If you hear a joke - is it funny because you identify the ironic reversal of expectations? You see a beautiful painting, is it beautiful because it obeys laws of proportion, perspective and colour? No. Most people have never heard of the golden ratio. It appeals to the eye, or it doesn't. It's a sense. Like humour, or morality.
Quoting Wayfarer
Then how is it that chimpanzees have morality (of sorts.)? They have hierarchies, they groom each other and share food, and they remember who reciprocates, and who doesn't, and punish that individual by withholding such favours in future.
Quoting Wayfarer
Wow, you seem to be coming around! But then - what do you mean by "mistake the existential predicament of the emerging self" ???
It must mean something, but I can't parse it. I don't want to bang on about the emergence of human intellect in evolutionary history, if that's not what you're referencing. But in short, the moral sense is pre-intellectual, as evidence by chimp tribal morality. Explicit or objective moral values are human expressions, (not always honest expressions) of that innate moral sense.
I appreciate the conflation. Thanks. I don't agree with Sam Harris on very much, but I too am charming and handsome!
Thank you. But, what are the first things that the renunciate has to give up? I mean, easy for me to say, in my nice suburban house with cars and pool, but, speaking philosophically....
Thespace baron mykeyboard is sticking and it'sdriving menuts.
Superficially, yeah, but it's like Dawkins. I don't conflate the existence of God with religion. Dawkins does. I'm not atheist. I'm agnostic, because I don't know if God exists or not. Similarly, I'm interested in a lot of the same things as Sam Harris, but there are hugely important, subtle distinctions between my philosophy and his, not least - the moral sense. Sam Harris is a moral realist. I'm not.
Whatever makes 2 + 2 equal 4 or true that it does, it doesn't seem to be our hunches. But in both cases we may not be able to find the 'thing that makes it true', if there is such a thing.
How else to answer his own questions, then to have the conditions for it already resident within himself?
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, but that is not the same as becoming independent arbiters of what good is.
We are no longer merely creatures, we did become independent arbiters, but those evolutionary predicates don’t invalidate the notion of a moral sense as a pre-eminent condition of the human creature.
My two pfennigs....
Quoting counterpunch
Are you saying that which is natural (e.g., biological evolution) is moral?
Quoting counterpunch
Do they agree? There seems to be some agreement but there is conflict and even controversy both between these domains and within.
What is an example of an objective moral fact?
Quoting Echarmion
That seems like a fair enough definition. It seems to exclude certain domains such as aesthetics and ethics though. What about a Cartesian fact? Would you not say that it is a fact that you have an experience? Are there not psychological facts obtaining by virtue of the attitudes, beliefs, and feelings you have at this moment?
I think most people define facts similar to the way they define truth: that which comports with reality. There seems to be multiple dimensions to facts (e.g., an ‘existence’ dimension and an ‘independence’ dimension). I think philosophy conventionally subscribes to a correspondence theory of truth and thus takes a realist stance when speaking of facts. I would define facts as:
The objects or entities that form a specific subject matter within an epistemic or alethic domain that are postulated to be true insofar as we can reason from them to draw valid inferences and to make accurate predictions to what else is true.
I think there should be a delineating modalities of facts: logical facts, physical facts, mathematical facts, etc.
Three popular views of the nature of facts according to the SEP
Quoting Kevin Mulligan
Quoting Echarmion
But ethics necessarily begins as normative theories and from there we attempt to use the practically within applied ethics. This is what we have been doing. Developing theoretical abstractions such as consequentialism and deontology and applying such principles to practical matters such as abortion or capital punishment. These is a meta ethical inquiry. I'm looking to understand the foundations morality.
Says he, against the backdrop of his nice suburban house with cars and pool.
But would you say the above about, for instance, an Eskimo? An African bushman? A factory worker in the textile industry in the early 1800's? How about a worker in a warehouse of a big online company who wears a diaper and pees into it so as to not have to take a toilet break? Those poor sods, eh. Then how about some reality tv star -- would you say the above about them?
Who are the reference group for your description of Homo sapiens? Can you put names and faces to them?
No. I'm saying that evolution imbued human beings with a moral sense - like a sense of humour, or the aesthetic sense. It's not an explicit set of rules - so doesn't constitute a naturalistic fallacy. There's considerable overlap among individuals as to what's funny, or beautiful, or moral - but no naturally occurring, definitive set of moral rules. That so, I'm not saying, as Nietzsche argued, that man in a state of nature was an amoral brute - and therefore, we should be too. I'm saying that evolution has imbued us with a moral sense, that enables us to derive ought from is.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Sure, but then we shouldn't expect people to agree completely, about what is moral, and what isn't - because, while nature gives us a moral pre-disposition, nurture defines moral priorities. It's like, children learn language at a rate that cannot be explained in terms of the "tableau rasa" of John Locke. We are pre-disposed to learn language, and learn the language we hear spoken. Similarly, we are moral creatures and adopt the values that are important to others around us.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Religion, law, politics, economics and so on, are objective with respect to individuals, and so are in effect, objective moral facts. Not in the moral realist sense, but in the sense that we agree upon values, via social structures like democratic politics, and invest them with authority.
Quoting Banno
That makes two of us. I'm not sure if we can even say moral statements are true.
Quoting Banno
That is what I was thinking. Correspondence theories seem to be constructed for a realist stance on a matter and that would commit us to some kind of moral ontology. What theory of truth do you suggest? Pragmatic? Coherence? According to the correspondence theory of truth, I'm not sure if 2 + 2 = 4 is a true statement. It is certainly consistent with the rest of arithmetic but I'm not sure if 2 + 2 = 4 would remain true in the absence of mathematical agents (i.e., numerate subjects) because there would then be no one to interpret the statement.
Do statements still have a meaning without interpretation?
Quoting counterpunch
That doesn't follow...
P1. If evolution has imbued humans with a moral sense, then humans are able to derive the way the world ought to be from the way the world is.
P2. Evolution has imbued humans with a moral sense.
Therefore,
C. Humans are able to derive the way the world ought to be from the way the world is.
I agree with P2 but P1 offers no warrant for such an inference. The consequent doesn't follow from antecedent.
Quoting counterpunch
I'm not asking for an appeal to a moral authority. I'm asking for an example of an objective moral fact. This would be a moral statement (e.g., genocide is wrong) that is true independent of us. Do you have such an example?
Yeah.....about that: all from THN 3.1.1, 1739......
“....It would be tedious to repeat all the arguments, by which I have prov’d, that reason is perfectly inert, and can never either prevent or produce any action or affection....”
.....and four paragraphs later.....
“....It has been observ’d, that reason, in a strict and philosophical sense, can have an influence on our conduct only after two ways: Either when it excites a passion by informing us of the existence of something which is a proper object of it; or when it discovers the connexion of causes and effects, so as to afford us means of exerting any passion....”
.....from which we see how easy it must have been, to be “awakened from my dogmatic slumbers”.
So there must be something about never producing any action, that is different from affording us the means for producing an action. Either way, reason cannot be both inert, and at the same time, influential.
In lieu of a definition of "fact" set out in the OP, I went with what I consider most close to a layman's understanding of the term. Fact is a common word, and when used usually denotes states of affairs, and what is a fact, as opposed to fiction, is ususally determined empirically.
It seems farily useful to reserve the word "fact" for an empirically determined state of affairs, since for everything else, like what you refer to as Cartesian fact, I feel like simply using the standard "truth" is sufficient. It would seem odd to me, for example to say "it is a fact that I have an experience" because facts are usually part of experience, and so having an experience is true, but not a fact.
That is mostly just semantics though.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Eh, maybe, I'm not versed in the sociology of philosophy. But given that this is one of the main topics of contention in philosophy, I wouldn't use it in an assumption, especially not in a discussion of "moral facts", where, by default, correspondence theory must fail / yield an unambigious "no".
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Would this definition be any different from your definition of "truth" or a "true statement"?
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Well, yes. But then empirical knowledge also begins as a descriptive theory and from there we use experience to determine whether or not the theory is true. I think the question of whether or not there are moral facts, whether there is "objective" morality benefits from a comparison with the field where we are most used to speaking about objectivity and facts: Empirical reality. How do we determine the truth of a claim about the empirical world? We apply a specific method, and if that method does not falsify our claim, it has passed said test. If it passes such tests regularly, we are justified in calling it a fact.
I think Kant was at least on the right track here when he described morality in terms of a method, a test which you could apply to a principle to see if it is falsified. But this requires morality to have a practical goal, just as empirical science has a practical goal (predicting the future).
That they all face moral problems, and that their evolutionary history doesn't necessarily help them to deal with them.
[quote=Richard Polt;https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/05/anything-but-human/]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.[/quote]
Redundancy.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
...and yet they are commonly thought to be so. Further, the basic T-sentence structure holds: "One ought do X" is true IFF one ought do X. From a Davidsonian perspective what is missing is any extensional way of analysing "One ought do X".
So I don't think is will do to off-handedly think of moral statements as extended expletives.
But that is the usual approach for those who think moral statements not truth-apt.
Quoting Echarmion
My statement was that philosophers subscribe to a correspondence theory of truth by convention. You may be surprised to find out how popular the correspondence theory is in philosophy. Consider the empirical data provided by the SEP:
Quoting Marian David
Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, William James, Moore, Hume, Mill, etc, all subscribed to a correspondence account of truth. Furthermore, perhaps the two most influential philosophers of the 20th century, Wittgenstein and Russell, both subscribed to fact-based correspondence accounts of truth.
Quoting Echarmion
Truth seems to necessitate existence-conditions upon statements whereby the truth of a statement is contingent upon existing; whereas facts can obtain their truth-making relations with a statement whether or not the facts exist. Facts can be a thing that exists in the world, such as an object; or, on the other hand, facts can exist in a subset of possible worlds, such as an abstract entity.
As you said, this is largely semantics.
Quoting Echarmion
How do you propose we formulate, test, or modify a moral hypotheses? The scientific method would require systematic observations, recorded data from measurements, and drawing inferences for experimentation on an "objective moral value." I can't even to get a statement conveying an example of such.
I'm more and more leaning towards non-cognitivism (more or less being dragged kicking and screaming). What of the view that moral statements are truth-apt and their truth values are always false? Does error theory have a dog in this fight?
I know that error theory entails insane reductios such that the following statement, “To cause infinite suffering upon an infinite number of universes of beings with infinite level of sentience and sensitivity to pain for an eternity is immoral,” is false. But, is it so much better than saying that that same statement is meaningless and thus an irrational, emotional response? Am I just being dramatic by making such an assertion?
I really do not have an answer here. In that regard it is an ongoing issues.
I'm very disinclined to say outright that morals statements do no have a truth value. Consider:
(Lifted from the article, excluding the question...)
These are surely truth-apt utterances - they are, variously, true or false. But the argument would run something like: these sentences have the same grammatical form as statements, and so superficially we might expect them to be true or false; but this belies a deeper grammatical form, such that they are actually expletives, or compound sentences that include expletives. So "Lying is not wrong" just means "Boo to lying!", "Fred believes that lying is wrong" just means "Fred believes 'Boo! to lying'", and so on.
And "Boo to lying!" is no more truth-apt than "Ouch!".
Now I don't reject this lightly, since it is the view of Wittgenstein, at least in the Tractatus; and I place great trust in his thinking. Nevertheless I thunk it quite acceptable to say that "lying is wrong" is true, and to expect of any reasonable account of ethics that it be able to explain how "lying is wrong" is true.
Quoting Banno
This statement is truth-apt? I can see it being truth-apt as a declarative statement (it is either true or false that you ‘wonder’ about ‘whether [or not] lying is wrong’. (Period, full stop.) But then you say:
Quoting Banno
“...including the question...”
A question is a statement in the form of an interrogative sentence. Interrogatives cannot be truth-apt, right? I understand that interrogatives can be loaded with a presupposed declaration or an embedded premise, such as the case with the following, "Have you stopped beating your wife?", but this is a simple, single clause, sentence. It's just the author (as the subject) and the act of wondering if lying is wrong (as the predicate).
Quoting Banno
Could they not just be relativized down to the predispositions of the individual subject? Could they be subjective though nonetheless cognitive rather than emotive? Could it not be that the subject is merely expressing her personal attitudes and beliefs and under a misconception of the fundamental nature of morality? Analogous to a false sense of libertarian free will or the notion that perceptions offer direct access to objective reality?
I'm sure that I am wrong here. If you could be so kind as to show me which statements or the inferences in which I'm drawing from the statements are false and share your reasoning with me, I would very much appreciate you for it.
Excluding the question...?
Yes, the question was excluded because interrogatives are not truth-apt.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
SO we'd get something like my satiny lying is wrong should be analysed as
'"Lying is wrong" as uttered by Banno at this time is true iff boo to lying!'?
IS that the sort of thing you are suggesting?
I misread the including/excluding, for sure. But, that wasn't what I was saying. I was saying that the statement, “I wonder whether lying is wrong,” is truth-apt and not an interrogative sentence. It is to say “I” (the grammatical subject) “wonder” (the predicate verb) ...whether lying is wrong”. It is either the case or not the case. And, if I am indeed wondering on the issue of the moral status of lying, then the statement should in some sense be true.
Quoting Banno
Not quite. Beliefs are subjective and can potentially require cognition (sometimes quite a bit). So, perhaps it is similar to the case when we state, “Onions taste awful,” that the syntax is configured in such a way to be making a general statement, when in actuality, we are making a particular subjective statement. It could be the case that we are egotistical enough to hold the notion—at least subconsciously—that our perspective of right and wrong should not only matter to everyone else, but that it is applicable to them as well. The fact lie not in reality but within the subjective states of the individual (an abstract entity). Or perhaps it is a realistic truth and our ideas and beliefs are simply streams of synaptic electrochemical nerve signals lighting up the the apparatus of the brain. We just get to interpret them phenomenologically instead of sociologically.
I classify myself as a moral subjectivist. This is because I do not believe that moral facts (values, duties, behavioral standards, etc,) exist in the objective sense. Nor do I believe that there are universal, absolute, non-contingent, or mind-independent moral facts of the world. I'm not entirely sure if moral facts can be said to 'exist' at all. I'll elaborate more on this problem shortly.
I believe there can be moral facts, but if that commits me to say that moral facts exist, then, I stress, that they only exist in the sense that the individuals who hold them believe that they exist. In other words, to say that moral facts exist is to say that they have a mind-dependent form of existence that is contingent upon an individual's subjective states. This would mean that moral facts are simply declarative sentences expressing a descriptive statement conveying information about the subjective states of the individual who is making an evaluative observation.
I do not believe that moral facts are absolute. This is the objectivist view that values are universal, transcending individual, cultural or societal predispositions. That which is good or bad remains so throughout time, independent of the context or the consequences. I believe conversely, that values are relative to individual predispositions. Furthermore, that such predispositions are imposed upon the individual through the normative structures of their society and culture, and that the emergence and development of these structures were and are imposed upon by the cumulative and collective totality of individual impositions held by the population.
In summary, I believe that morality is based on value judgments which seem subjective insofar as they depend upon the sentience of a conscious, observing subject to make an evaluation. There does not seem to be any universal agreement with a particular value, not to mention a universal set of values and there is no evidence of a morally infallible subject, aside from legend or myth, to which we may base a standard for ethics.
What is more, just as aesthetic values appear to be relative to an individual insofar as they change relative to their experience over time and adapt to relative changes in the social and physical environments, likewise moral values follow similar trajectories with paths that can be predicted to correlate with societal structures and cultural/social trends.
The data of such observations provide grounds for argument in favor of a relative form of subjective morality because the evidence and facts indicate individual and cultural ethical diversity, mind-dependence of value judgments, and total subjective moral fallibility, which warrants support to the claim that morality is subjective and relative rather than objective and/or absolute. Therefore, I have provided sufficient warrant to satisfy my burden of proof, whereas proponents of conventional moral realism who either commit to the existence dimension or who otherwise commit to the independence dimension of moral facts have merely attempted to shift their burden via fallacious appeals to ignorance.
And yet, even with regards to a minimalist commitment to the existence dimension of moral facts, whereby the qualifier for moral facts to exist depends upon the truthmaking relation between a truthmaker "x" (something that exists in the world) and the truthbearer "p" (a moral statement), insofar as "p" is true if and only if it is a representation of the existence of "x", such a commitment requires adherence to semantic realism under realism's alethic modalities to truth.
So to elaborate further on the problem I mentioned in an earlier statement regarding the 'existence' of moral facts. To say that moral facts 'exist,' it seems, may be to commit myself to a minimalist form of moral realism. Such a commitment is problematic insofar as I find the general position of moral realism (moderate to robust delineations) to be untenable at best.
Realism is the philosophical stance that is largely concerned with the 'existence' of the objects or entities that form a specific subject matter. Also, as a secondary concern, realism generally holds that there is an 'independence' to which the objects or entities that form a specific subject matter can be said to exist apart from us (aside from philosophically uninteresting empirical dependencies). So, the two main concerns which realism holds about the objects or entities that form a specific subject matter can be distinguished between an existence dimension (having to do with their literal ontological status as contents of the external world) and an independence dimension (having to do with the anthropologically-independent nature of reality).
The problem arises from the dominant influence that realism has had over philosophy and it's conventional alethic modality over our theories of meaning and subsequently over our theories of truth. Terms such as 'fact,' 'exist,' and 'state of affairs' have been heavily influenced by semantic realism throughout their etymological development in traditional philosophy. Even the notion of truth is traditionally defined by the existence dimension of realism prescribed by correspondence theories of truth. That a truthbearer must comport with the 'facts of the world' or the 'state of affairs' which are substantiated by empirical evidence and thus the criterion for truth is restricted to the alethical standards imposed by realism.
The alethic modality of realism (“the truth in the world”) holds a meaning for truth that is restricted to the domains of naturalism such as physics, chemistry, biology, etc. This, however, undermines the meaning for truth held by domains with epistemic modalities (“the truth in an individual's mind”) such as mathematics, linguistics, ethics, etc.
Do you? Why? I don't understand the need to categorise and name - doing philosophy as if it were entomology. It's as if one reached a conclusion and only then looked for the arguments...
I'll read the substantive part of your post and try to formulate a response. But are you looking for such a critique?
This may seem out of nowhere, but do you ascribe to the traditional analysis of knowledge? That of justified, true belief?
If so, then I’m not seeing how moral declarations can be considered facts. How are they justified? It seems self-evident that facts must be true in order to be facts. So, if one is to proclaim a specific statement as fact, it also stands to reason that this fact must be believed/known. And if you agree with TAK, then in order for it to be known, it must also be justified. So it seems any moral declaration (boo lying) must be true in order to be factual, and justified in order to be known.
Language affords one many options for expression, including sentences like "I find onions awful", "I don't like onions" and "I think onions taste awful".
So why is it that some people say “Onions taste awful,” and others say "I think onions taste awful"?
Is this the result of a conscious choice?
Do people less or more mindlessly repeat the types of sentences they've learned in primary education?
But then how do we explain the differences between people? E.g. some like onions and some don't: does this mean that there is something physiologically or otherwise wrong with one of the groups?
Psychologically and socially, there is potentially a lot at stake in terms of morality. I think that sometimes (often?) it is because of these high stakes that moral statements become artificially elevated to the level of facts.
Of course, if the stakes being high is itself a fact, then the moral statements related to those high stakes should also be facts or inherit that factness.
But it could also be the other way around, and the stakes are high because the moral statements are facts.
If we were to dress up a tribe of humans into chimp costumes and have them act the way humans usually do, but speak a language that the observers don't understand (say, Armenian): Would we be able to distinguish the behavior of humans-dressed-as-chimps from the behavior of the real chimps? By what markers?
My point is that there is a clear observational bias that favors humans in the research of human vs. animal morality, and behavior and cognition in general.
How can we say that animals seek food instinctively, but that humans do it deliberately?
How can we say that animals seek sex instinctively, but that humans do it deliberately?
Does instinct become irrelevant once one lives in a building with indoor plumbing?
How is eating with a fork and knife not instinctual, but eating with the hand is?
Yeah that's interesting data. Thanks for posting the quote. The percentage of laypeople who (consciously or otherwise) subscribe to some form of correspondence theory is probably even higher. It seem like a very natural assumption to make.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Interesting. I tend to define the two terms more or less the opposite way.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
So, first I don't think the scientific method "requires" systematic observations. Systematic observations are required to get good evidence, but I lean towards bayesianism in the sense that anything can be evidence (if weak). In my mind, the scientific method tells us how to get evidence, and how to judge the quality of evidence, but there isn't necessarily a lower threshold to the quality.
I think an important conclusion from an analysis of the scientific method is that empirical facts are goal-oriented. The method doesn't just establish rules based on some abstract notion of truth, but on the specific goal of understanding and thereby predicting reality.
Now it may be that this is a special case, and only facts about empirical reality are determined by a goal-driven method. But there is a link here with the correspondence theory of truth in general: Because any correspondence theory needs to decide what truth should correspond to, and that decision must be made a priori. It seems the only way to convincingly make the decision is based on what the goal of the truth value is.
He further says:
Quoting Richard Polt
I disagree.
The aristocrats and the wannabe aristocrats who have been popularizing "man is an animal" (or "You're just meat") certainly don't apply this to themselves. They apply it to the poor, the blacks, women, children, the Jews, and to anyone else they don't like or whenever they don't like them. "Man is an animal" is first and foremost an ideological statement, used for ideological purposes. Sometimes, it is covered up with a veil of science.
Polt mentions religion in a positive light. Again, I disagree. It's common for religions to dehumanize outsiders and those insiders who fail to live up to the religion's standards. By the standards of some monotheists, for example, you and I are incapable of any genuine and deliberate good deed (because we're not acting with the intention to please God). Or consider the practical application of the anatta doctrine by Buddhists sometimes, the way it translates into indifference and even violence toward others, justified as "You don't really exist, you don't matter (but I do) ".
A similar dehumanization is carried out by psychology/psychiatry, where, once a person is branded with a psychiatric diagnosis, they cease to be relevant as a person and all that matters is that diagnosis, and the doctors and many interested others see that person only through the lens of that diagnosis.
In short, humans display a tendency to explain away the humanity of others, if doing so serves their agenda, but they don't do so in general or in the absolute, even though they might superficially formulate it that way.
I'd be interested in such a critique.
baker I don't disagree that this often happens, but is not necessarily the problem of a diagnosis or psychiatry as such, it can be a problem of culture or of particular doctors or systems. I have known many people who, once they have a diagnosis and are in treatment, they claim to not only be the happiest they have ever been, but feel a sense of coherent identity for the first time in their lives. Being diagnosed can also be like a form of empowerment; being known and finally understood.
Sure. Thinking of oneself as, "I am defective" -- what's not to be happy about??!
Psychology/psychiatry, like religion/spirituality, prefers compliant, obedient people.
That is not their experience. Calling them 'compliant' would be wrong and patronizing. You seem to be a pessimist, so maybe we should end here.
I very much doubt that. Think through the implications of 'correspondence' and you will see that it must have profound problems: in what sense does an idea or a proposition correspond to a state of affairs? To even ask that question immediately opens up the whole subject of semiotics and theory of meaning - what 'correspondence' entails, and how it relates to facts. The expression that such-and-such a proposition 'corresponds to the facts' is really just a vernacular expression. It is common-sense realism as an epistemological stance.
Quoting Banno
I wonder how you interpret these passages, then.
[quote=TLP] 6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world
everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no
value exists--and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any
value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what
happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is
accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since
if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world.
6.42 So too it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics.
Propositions can express nothing that is higher.
6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is
transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)[/quote]
——
Something unstated in this thread: the implicit assumption that ‘facts’ concern ‘things’, and that if we’re speaking of morals, then what ‘facts’ can we stake a claim on? The crucial distinction to make is that in respect of morality, the chief subject of the discussion is not things but other beings - beings like ourselves.
So there is a form of respect paid to this by allowing that other beings have a right to their own moral judgements - but those judgements are, then, personal or subjective, what another believes, as distinct from oneself. That is the stumbling block in respect of moral judgements, because, unlike the facts that concern things, there is no objective adjudication as to whose view is the correct one. This is exacerbated by the general tacit rejection of any form of moral realism grounded in religion.
Curiously, I found an accurate analysis of this state of affairs in an encyclopaedia article on Adorno which says:
Already in this thread, I think there are examples of exactly the kind of reasoning that Adorno is describing - which is not surprising as it’s endemic to our cultural situation. Hence many of the attempts to resolve the dilemma being completely artificial - wonderings about propositions or goings-on in infinite imaginary universes. But that is never where the problems of morality appear - they generally manifest in our relationships with other beings.
I disagree with what Wittgenstein says there.
This is not so far from what I said here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/537565
What of it? I've said the OP is interesting because the answer is not obvious.
I thought I said that. I must be getting tired.
According to Pierre Hadot:
The reason being that in today's culture, the cosmos could not be conceived as rational, and our place in it is a consequence of chance. No need to 'put lipstick on a pig', as the saying has it.
The problem is much of this kind was gathered up under the general heading of 'religion'. It is well-known that theology appropriated most of the best of Platonism and other ancient philosophies. And then with the Enlightenment, this became part and parcel of what was rejected under the heading of 'religion'. So, arguably, the original problem lies with Christian orthodoxy, for their determination to appropriate whatever was good in the Western philosophical tradition, and make it available only on their terms, which you had to accept, on pain of being deemed heretical (and we know what that meant.)
Anyway that's one persective. I don't know if I think it's the whole truth, but I think there's some truth in it.
Meanwhile, I found a comment from Kant on 'correspondence theory':
[quote=Kant, 1801. The Jasche Logic, in Lectures on Logic] Truth, it is said, consists in the agreement of cognition with its object. In consequence of this mere nominal definition, my cognition, to count as true, is supposed to agree with its object. Now I can compare the object with my cognition, however, only by cognising it. Hence my cognition is supposed to confirm itself, which is far short of being sufficient for truth. For since the object is outside me, the cognition in me, all I can ever pass judgement on is whether my cognition of the object agrees with my cognition of the object. [/quote]
That wiff of Plato is pretty much why I asked.
I need to be shown how you arrive at a moral fact if you don't hold some kind of Platonist account. Well, you could, I guess express a moral fact about your own beliefs.
You can obviously build a kind of objective ethical system if you first make an assumption that, for instance, the flourishing of conscious creatures needs to be the central concern of all moral positions - a kind of 'idea of Good' analogue. But how do we arrive at agreement on this?
But then if you situate the discussion within the context of Platonism in the broad sense, there are ways of framing that issue so that it's less baffling. I mean, after all, up until the early 20th C rejection of idealism, Platonist philosophy was mainstream. The problem is, as I said, that it has generally fallen out of favour, in fact it's violently rejected on the most part. So I think the chance of arriving at agreement is very slight. But the fact remains, in the absence of any kind of foothold in the transcendent, what are we left with? What's worth striving for, or orienting ourselves in regard to? I was referred to a book by Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of the Good, the other day. That is the kind of approach I'm sympathetic to.
I hear you. I meant objective subject to a chosen criterion. The hazards of that word...
Quoting Wayfarer
Yep. I guess you could argue the same about a beautiful art work. How else is this founded? Unless you go by personal taste or a set criterion of value.
Quoting Wayfarer
Objectivity and subjectivity seem simple but they are two concepts that have given me the pip over the years. I need to reacquaint myself with Murdoch's version of Platonism.
Quoting Banno
I have read and thought about metaethics for several months now and I have constructed a bit of a theoretical framework to try and understand morality. I have heard various proponents of both normative and metaethical views and have come to think that moral subjectivism (at least some take of it) seems to more closely describe the concepts I've into developed so far. This is not to say that my concepts are correct.
The concepts that I've built are likely quite flawed If not incoherent, I'm sure. However, they nonetheless provide me a starting point for engaging in metaethical discourse.
Quoting Banno
I would very much appreciate any critique but I must warn you that I'm a bit pedantic when it comes to argumentation insofar as I require the actual grounding propositions that warrant such an inference rather than just an assertion or an empty conjecture, and I am quick to dismiss the lack thereof. I'm just being honest about forming a new belief.
To be honest, I am not familiar with TAK. Is it a theory in epistemology? What it is that I'm trying to say is not so much that moral declarations are facts of the world but rather that moral declarations are representations of our moral beliefs and it is a fact that we hold such beliefs. For example, let's say I have a friend named Lindsay who believes that Earth is flat. I'm not saying that her believing that the earth is flat makes her statements that the earth is flat true or factual, but that it is (at least it seems to be) a fact that she holds a belief that the Earth is flat. Does that not get me anywhere?
I think of facts such as mathematical facts, logical facts, aesthetic facts, etc, and I think that some facts must represent abstract entities as well as entities that exist in physical reality. I think truth more or less is an attempt to understand the fundamental nature of objective reality.
What would you call your conscious experience right now? Is it a fact or a truth that you are having an experience? What about information? It seems that everything comes to us through information and this information is either a distorted representation that our brain and nervous system reconstructs into an interface for interacting with the external world or that all information is internally created by our sensory perceptual systems. I tend to lean towards the former.
If everything must at least come to us through information that is filtered and representative of the world, then how is that only our concepts that are concrete and that we can have a physiological awareness of can be said to be factual or true? I understand that they may not exist in reality but what does that make them? Logic and mathematics leads us independently toward similar trajectories of thought and ideas which alter our interpretations of reality.
I guess it really depends on which theory of truth we are considering, too. A correspondence theory would impose the sort of existence conditions to truth that you are extending to facts as well. I have read much less about facts than I have about truth, which has not been enough to really grasp what it is and what it can be applied to. I'd like to hear your thoughts on both.
This is getting really interesting. Your words, in my humble opinion, get to the heart of the issue in the blink of an eye as it were. Why should moral statements have anything to do with truth? The entire issue of moral realism and its detractors seem to revolve around the relationship between truth and morality but before we get our knickers in a twist and get all bent out of shape over this, shouldn't we ask the simple question, does morality and truth have anything to do with each other? I can't seem to think beyond this point though. All I can say with any degree of confidence is that morality may not be truth-apt, the fact that they're expressed in propositional form may just be a linguistic accident or perhaps is done out of necessity.
What pops into my head are commands like "shut the door!", "put down the gun!", etc. Commands, according to a book on logic that I read some suns ago, aren't propositions and so, can't be true or false. Divine Command Theory?
In a sense I'm envisioning, something that I don't do very often, a moral theory that can be right/wrong but not necessarily true/false.
By definition, nothing lies outside the world.
Begging the question.
Ditto. Also 'value that does have value' is meaningless.
No, most of it is at least partly deterministic.
No, for the reason just given.
And again, there is nothing outside the world.
'Hitler was a bad man' is a proposition of ethics.
'Higher' is meaningless.
See the above proposition about Hitler.
[quoyte] Ethics is transcendental.[/quote]
'Transcendental' refers to nothing and is therefore meaningless.
No, aesthetics is about beauty, which does not come into ethics.
Dear Herr Wittgenstein, we have read with interest your Ethics examination paper, but we feel you have not yet mastered the basics of the subject. Since you seem to prefer talking pretentious and inflated nonsense to logical argument, we suggest you enrol for the priesthood. Yours faithfully, The Examiners.
'Hitler was a bad man' is a true proposition. (He killed 6 million Jews, remember? This is not about a linguistic accident.) The challenge is to explain how it can be true. A good place to start would be to work out what property is referred to by the word 'bad'.
'Hitler was a bad man' is not a command, divine or otherwise.
Quoting baker
I think both can be the case. We seem to recapitulate language both consciously and unconsciously. For instance, we understand the meaning of language from both personal experiences, in which terms have more or less a connotative semantics, as well as analytically, in which terms though still fluid are disambiguation and distinguished with a contextual divergence into a broader range of considered vernacular and established technical, or specialized semantics. The former being more broad and dependent upon interpretation and the latter more specific with a rigidly outlined rubric for our interpretation to follow.
But I do think that as our language evolved it was heavily influenced by the absolute and objective sense of moral values (and to a lesser extent an egoistic sense of aesthetic values) imposed by religious authority and thus retains a theocentric syntactic structure of the vast majority of time that our language's has undergone it's development. It is reflective of a time when divine command was the objective truth and fact of moral value.
Quoting baker
Differences between people stem from a unique genetic and ancestral history and from our unique environmental exposures (both social and physical). It comes from different geographic locations, historical references, familial, social, cultural, societal, political and ideological influence, etc. What makes us unique goes by the things that happened to us a neurological millisecond ago to what happened to our genes an evolutionary four billion years ago.
Not wrong. I don't understand how a moral dimension could apply to biological and aesthetic sensory predispositions. We are relative to individuals who share similar genetic structures and relative to the culture of the group we depend upon and develop under.
Even if our belief that morality is objective was caused by our or our ancestors' belief that objective moral truths came from God, that does not prove that there are no objective moral truths. We're doing philosophy here, not anthropology or sociology.
I'm talking about moral injunctions and not about how adhering to/violating them reflects on one's character. Remember, which comes first - moral codes and these could very well be good but not necessarily true. So, Hitler could be bad but there's a slim possibility that there's nothing true/false about such a pronouncement.
Im not making a claim either way (negative or positive) regarding the issue of whether or not there is an objective morality. I think both sides have a burden of proof and I know that our ignorance doesn't entail that objective morality is false, but there is no reason to think that it is true, either.
I was responding to baker's questions here:
Quoting baker
Not arguing for or against objective morality.
Quoting baker
What do you mean by "artificially"? And, saying that there are "high stakes" presupposes a normative value, does it not?
Psychologists/psyhiatrists don't seem to be taking into account that patients will sometimes feign compliance just to get out of the system.
My point is uncomplicated. Many people are resurrected by treatment and become fully human for the first time (in years or ever) when the relentless persecution, voices, self-harm, paranoia, along with sleeping rough, using substances and eating out of rubbish bins ends. I personally have observed this hundreds of times over three decades.
But yes, hospital work can be cursory and bad and some shrinks are patronising and medication without psychosocial support is not great and the hospitals and medical services can treat people like numbers. Sure, I have also seen suicides and murders... None of that is acceptable but this is part of a much more complex story and one that also has numerous triumphs. Life is about perspective.
Some people seem to think that the correspondence theory of truth is unlike other theories of truth in that the correspondence theory of truth makes claims in accordance with facts, while other theories are about making claims in accordance with other criteria (such as consensus etc.) and less or more denying the relevance of facts or ignoring them (while fully knowing that facts exist and what they are).
A common-sense realist proabably cannot even understand what the concept of "theory of truth" is about.
But if morality is about how we treat other beings, and if most people are common-sense realists, then this is something that a theory of morality must take into consideration.
While you're a proponent of virtue ethics?
Can you sketch out your brand of virtue ethics?
What is your virtue ethics based on?
In your virtue ethics, what are other people?
I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about the nature of psychological/psychiatric intervention and treatment as such.
And to tie this to the thread topic:
Psychological/psychiatric intervention and treatment are inherently of a moral dimension. Psychologists/psychiatrists intervene because they believe there is something wrong with the person, that the person is acting wrongly and shouldn't act that way.
How do psychologists/psychiatrists define morality, what do they base it on?
Do they believe in moral facts?
(As for Styron's essay not being particularly nuanced: I gathered that this is so by design. The first thing that struck me about it was how superficial it is; but then I concluded it must be deliberately so.
And as for people who are successfully helped by psychological/psychiatric intervention and treatment: sure, the types you describe are so far gone that only an authoritarian approach can help them. But that doesn't mean everyone who gets charged with a psychiatric diagnosis is in the same category).
You're not the only one.
Dinosaurs are bound to become extinct. You can't stop progress!
None of that is relevant to the thread. But my present view runs parallel with that of Martha Nussbaum.
And again, I happily admit I have no answer to the question in the OP - just a few thoughts that need ordering. Hence my interest.
So was I. It can work and treatment has probably (for all the mistakes) provided more happiness to people than philosophy or pondering moral facts ever did.
Quoting baker
Like any group they are not monolithic and hold diverse beliefs. But I am not all that interested in the moral beliefs people hold. People's actions are more significant. Banno is right on this. Met too many hypocrites. You can tell a good psychiatrist, not by what they say at conferences or by the papers they write, but how they treat people. I think this applies to all folk.
Hey I’m not out by aeons. Only a few centuries.
I've been reading it on and off for more than forty years, and have changed my framework several times. If you will excuse the condescension, you've more nous then most on the forum who deign an opinion.
SO let's consider this:
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Let's contrast taste with morality. That you do not eat onions is perhaps a preference you would not insist applies to everyone. That folk should not lie is presumably a preference that you and I would insist applies to everyone. That is, one of the characteristics of moral statements is that they are not only about how the speaker should act, but how everyone, in comparable circumstances, should act.
Does that mesh with your view?
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
What are the implications of saying beliefs are subjective?
They can be stated. They can be shared. You and I might have the same belief.
I've a certain scepticism towards the use of the term "subjective"; I'd avoid it, if possible, and with it, considerable philosophical baggage.
We might usefully analyse a belief as a relation between an individual and a statement, such that the individual takes the statement to be true. What is gained by describing it as subjective?
Similarly, what is "objective" doing here? How does "I do not believe that moral facts (values, duties, behavioral standards, etc,) exist in the objective sense" differ from "I do not believe that moral facts (values, duties, behavioral standards, etc,) exist"? Do you just mean that we don't stumble across them, the way we stumble across rocks and tables?
Did I miss your further explanation on this?
SO moral statements are no more than extended expletives?
If that's the case, then they do not have a truth value. Are you content to say that it is not true that one ought not lie? That it is false that it is OK to harm children?
Ever one but not the other? Ever one before the other? What if “we” do not analyze, but it is only each “I” that does? Therein, perhaps, lay the transcendental subject, which in turn facilitates the subjective condition itself.
Quoting Banno
Describing is tacit acknowledgement of limitation to specific time and membership. Whether a gain or not, depends on discourse.
Oh? You'd tell Plato to go seek the help of a psychiatrist?
I'm sure some people benefit more from psychology/psychiatry than they do from philosophy. And then there are those who benefit more from philosophy than they do from psychology/psychiatry. Yet only psychologists/psychiatrists have the legal right to interfere with the lives of others. There's a clear power imbalance.
I'm not asking about the moral beliefs they profess to have, I'm asking about those they actually have (which they may or may not speak of openly).
If you look at the DSM, for example, you can infer that it espouses the morality and worldview of the atheist, secular (upper) middle class, even though officially, psychology/psychiatry is supposed to be morally and religiously neutral.
Sounds like a good slogan. But it's quite useless, given that one gets to see only a small fraction of another's actions, and that those one does see are still up to interpretation.
Perspective, contextual placement, relativization, optionality, ownership, responsibility.
The problem is, what makes for "comparable circumstances"?
Comparable age, socio-economic status, sex, race, relative position in the socio-economic hierarchy between the parties involved (e.g. whether one is the boss or the employee, the parent or the child, etc.), relative position in the situation at hand (e.g. a court hearing about a traffic accident with a fatal outcome; parent asking the child about whether she's using drugs)?
Of course, if he was experiencing psychosis and/or suicidal ideation, or other significant distress from mental ill health.
Seems to me that you have made up your mind about mental health treatment and psychiatry. You are perfectly entitled to be a pessimist.
Quoting baker
It's highly useful. The issue is how do we identify moral behaviour in doctors (or anyone)? We only have one way: their actions. The fact that you may not see them at work is irrelevant to the point. The point is ethical behaviour is demonstrated you can't discover it by what someone says publicly or writes about it. In the case of doctors and mental health professionals - given that they work openly with patients every day - it is actually very easy to see what kind of person they are.
Quoting baker
This is factually wrong. Lot's of professions have a right to interfere - police, the military, lawyers, politicians, immigration officials, customs ... etc. I would agree with you if you said this is a responsibility that needs to be used wisely. You think it is not, based on what you have stated and I think it often is (but not always). We should probably get off this so the thread can continue.
Yes. TAK is generally accepted in epistemology, but has some definite issues. So rejecting it completely isn’t unheard of, that’s why I asked.
I understand what you’re saying. I’m asking how can Lindsay justify the claim that she believes the Earth is flat? There’s no verifiable way of determining what exactly it is she believes. People lie all the time, so just taking her word for it doesn’t do much in the way of justifying her claim.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I agree, but the difference with these facts and beliefs are that there are verifiable ways to determine them. There’s established rules of math and logic that can can be consulted. Beliefs aren’t like that. There’s no brain scan that can inform me of your thoughts.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I haven’t read much about this either, it’s all basically just my own thoughts. But, I think facts necessarily have to be true, so they are a subset of truth. But I don’t think all truths are facts. The difference seems to be that facts are objective. There’s definitive solutions to math problems and things of that nature. I don’t really know if facts have to correspond to reality, because it depends on what you consider reality to be, but the have to correspond to something, right? A question about how a chess piece can move is answered by consulting a chess rule book. So whatever the solution is must correspond to whatever is in the rule book. But are some contrived rules written in a book part of reality? I’m don’t really know.
FWIW, I consider myself a moral nihilist, but it doesn’t have much to do with error theory. The inability to bridge the is-ought gap is enough for me to conclude that moral statements, judgements, commands, whatever term you prefer, cannot be logically justified. Additionally, I don’t even think logic or reason have any place in ethics. They’re rooted firmly in our feelings, and therefore irrational. I think our emotional reaction to certain acts is what convinces us that those acts are good/bad. And honestly, I think that’s all there is to it. There’s nothing more to understand. But anyway, your posts indicate a much deeper knowledge than I have, so I figured I’d ask about the things I didn’t understand/agree with and see if I end up learning something.
Presumably you understand the difference between a lie and a truth...?
There can be empirical evidence that you have lied or that you have killed. But that you ought not to do so is a matter of principle. And such principles are validated against ethical systems, not against predictive empirical hypotheses.
I have the idea that normality is bell curve. Those on the left - the mentally ill - are dis-integrated from society and inhibited in normal functioning. It is for them that psychiatry is a cure. The majority of people are in the middle - as with bell curves generally. But the enlightened (in Platonic terms) or the ‘self-realised’ are on the right of the bell-curve; their capacities are on the far side of normality. That is the subject of philosophy proper and the various forms of noetic or gnostic discipline that have existed throughout history. Although modern culture privileges normality so it makes it rather hard to appreciate that.
Do say more.
Philosophy is self-serving nonsense - as Witti showed. It is easy to mythologise the philosopher king, to suppose that the philosopher has something worthwhile to add to the discussion. Mostly this is a mistake.
Yes, the use of the word 'higher' attached to so many things is curious too. I used to kick around with a lot of folk into yoga, Buddhism, spirituality, New Age, Theosophy and such in the 1980's and it often struck me how many of them were vulgar and acquisitive materialists at heart, who had sublimated their 'products' and elitisms into higher consciousness and public shows of deep understanding 'you couldn't possible follow'. But they can't all be like that...
yells the mob.
But it's not elitist. It ended with:
Probably.
But perhaps it's easier for the bungled and botched to 'surpass normality'.
That made me laugh out loud.
After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave - a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. -And we- we still have to vanquish his shadow, too.
Nietzsche: The Gay Science
Quoting Banno
The problem for secular western culture is that it’s kept the equality of individuals, but ditched the moral framework, the covenant, within which it was meaningful. The alternative isn’t Neitszche’s ‘Uber-mensch’ but a return to philosophical spirituality.
Nice words. The devil is in the detail, the myth that will accompany the spirituality, the lie-to-children.
See the Phaedo thread. @Fooloso4 perhaps has something along these lines in mind in his account there.
It seems to me that the Ubermensch is in the ascendence.
A proper understanding of the ubermensch is that it is a return to philosophical spirituality. Only it is not Christian spirituality or any transcendent spirituality. It is Dionysian. A spirituality of the body and the earth.
For Nietzsche it is not the lie to children, but rather the child who has not yet been lied to:
What is necessary is that the deadly truth be hidden. But in truth it is too late. Thus the spirits need to forget and create a new beginning.
I thought they lost in 1944.
There is also the issue of cognitive economy and other issues of practical economy.
In the light of this, a list of commandments like the biblical ten commandments is actually to be read as a bullet point list where each point is intended for further elaboration and where contextual knowledge determines what the proper elaboration is.
Much like a shopping list: when you make for yourself a shopping list, you write just "bread" and not the specific type of bread you intend to buy, even though only a few types of bread are acceptable for you. Someone else who is not familiar with your bread preferences doesn't know this and couldn't adequately shop for you merely from reading your shopping list.
We can surmise from the Old Testament which provides the context for the ten commandments that the ten commandments, even though they are composed in an absolute form, are not to be taken that way. For example, in the OT, there are many God given laws as to who is supposed to be killed, even though a commandment states that one should not kill. So the OT's stance is not "killing is wrong", but, at most, "killing otherwise than stated in laws given by God is wrong."
(Leaving aside for the moment that chiseling all those additional words onto stone plates is rather laborious and would require them to be much bigger and heavier than they are (which is an issue when you travel by foot or donkey).)
Somewhere along the way, by omitting references to the divine source of morality, some people ended up with a simplistic notion of moral commandments that is impossible to live by without such adherence becoming detrimental to one's survival and wellbeing.
Except that the relevance of this observation depends on one's position in the hierarchy. A patient's perception of their therapist's behavior is irrelevant, because the patient has no actual power in the situation. Similar to the way a student's perception of their teacher's behavior is irrelevant, or the employee's of their employer.
Now who's pessimistic?
The pair being discussed was philosophers vs. psychologists/psychiatrists.
Which gets me to my point: In practice, what gets to count as moral has a lot to do with one's position in the hierarchy.
If a child lies to her parents, that is morally wrong. If parents lie to their child, it's generally not. If the child lies to a stranger in a white unmarked van offering her sweets and a ride, it's not wrong.
Taking eggs from a hen is not stealing. Using the company's car for your own private things is.
And so on.
Philosophy as one massive argumentum ad absurdum?
Quoting Wayfarer
Only the elite have the time for philosophy.
Who are the élite?
And how does one verify or falsify an ethical system? Is there a way to show that utilitarianism is false or that the categorical imperative is true?
Quoting Banno
Yes, in such cases where I understand what would verify or falsify the claim. I know what it means for "the cat is on the mat" to be true as I know what to look for to verify the claim. I know what it means for "2 + 2 = 5" to be false as I know how to count to falsify the claim. But something like "I ought not kill"? I don't know what it would mean for the claim to be true or false.
Only in the laboratory of life - but who will be the judge? There's the rub.
If you have to ask, you're not part of it.
This doesn't explain anything!
https://voegelinview.com/
You must be if you have time for philosophy on this site.
And how does the "laboratory of life" show an ethical system to be true or false? What is the criteria by which we measure the truth of an ethical system? It's not a question of who will be the judge but a question of how it is to be judged.
A claim such as "2 + 2 = 5" can be shown to be false by counting; a claim such as "a cat is on the mat" can be shown to be true by looking at the mat. But a claim such as "we ought not kill"? I don't even know what to do with that.
Is a world where "we ought not kill" is true empirically distinguishable from a world where "we ought not kill" is false? Does a world where "we ought not kill" is true have a different logic to a world where "we ought not kill" is false? If the answer is "no" to both then I don't understand the difference between "we ought not kill" being true and it being false, and so I don't understand what it means for it to be either true or false.
Then I trust you do not have a gun.
Not many folk are so willing to admit their sociopathy in a public forum - I supose you ought get some kudos for that.
Isn't this also true for the scientific method? We know it's true because it works. It cannot be checked against anything other than its utility.
Quoting Michael
If the goal is to not be killed, then having the rule "we ought not to kill" makes sense. It follows from instrumental reason.
Is it true that the goal is not to be killed? That's an odd question. It's akin to asking "is it true that we want to understand and predict nature"?
Following a rule to not kill so as to ensure survival isn't the same as the proposition "we ought not kill" being true -- or is it? When we say that "we ought not kill" is true, are we just saying that we choose not to kill as it's in our best interests not to? I don't think that's what the moral realist means.
Quoting Echarmion
The scientific method isn't "true" in the sense that we're using the word "true". We're using it in the sense of the truth-aptness of a proposition. When I asked how to show that an ethical system is true or false I am asking how to verify or falsify the claims "we ought act only according to that maxim whereby we can will that it should become a universal law" or "we ought maximize happiness and well-being."
I don't have a gun, and I don't understand how your response addresses my comments.
They’re good questions. In traditional moral systems, it was assumed that one was subject to judgement by God, or would endure the consequences of their karma in future lives. In the absence of those regulatory systems, the question has no clear answer, as is exemplified by the diversity of responses in this thread.
Quoting Michael
When push comes to shove, of course you do, but in a forum thread you can say pretty well whatever you like.
I don't know what it means for "I ought not kill" to be true or false, so I can't answer that question.
No, I don't know what it means. I know of no criteria by which to determine the truth or falsity of it, and so how can I know what it means for it to be true or false?
But of course, you are probably manifesting rhetorical posturing rather than sociopathy.
Psychopaths feel no compunction about killing and it is known that psychopathology is common in society. So, have you considered the possibility that you’re a psychopath?
I am engaging in philosophical examination of ordinary claims, not rhetorical posturing. If I am to understand what it means for a statement to be true or false – whether that statement be "a cat is on the mat", "2 + 2 = 5", or "we ought not kill" – then I must be able to recognise its truth conditions. There is empirical evidence to verify or falsify "a cat is on the mat"; there are mathematical principles to verify or falsify "2 + 2 = 5"; but there is nothing I know of to verify or falsify "we ought not kill."
Or he's an atheist. We all know that if there is no God, anything is permitted.
I'm not a psychopath. I sympathise and empathise with the feelings of others. I have a negative visceral reaction to the idea of killing.
What does that have to do with "we ought not kill" being true or false?
What exactly are the truth conditions for this being true?
Well, I'm not saying it's necessarily what a moral realist means. But from an epistemological position, it seems equivalent. A naive realist says the proposition "the cat is on the mat" is true if it corresponds with the objective reality of a cat on the mat. That's the ontological position. Unless you follow a divine command theory of morality, it's obvious that a similar ontological position is impossible for morality. What's the point of even debating something as obviously nonsensical as "objective morality" in an ontological sense?
But from an epistemological perspective, the naive realist does not simply compare two states given to him. The statement would instead look more like this (heavily simplified): "the cat is on the mat is true if the cat being on the mat is a predictive theory that explains all currently available evidence". This is implicitly goal oriented.
Quoting Michael
You're right, that was mistaken.
Quoting Michael
I don't think the categorical imperative would be truth-apt in the same way the scientific method isn't truth apt. It's the method by which we verify or falsify a statement.
A particular kind of physical object standing in a particular kind of spatial relationship to another particular kind of physical object. I can recognise the occurrence of this state of affairs and so know what to look for to verify or falsify the claim.
What do you look for to verify or falsify the claim "we ought not kill"? Is there an empirical difference between it being true and it being false? Or is it like a mathematical statement such as "2 + 2 = 4" where it follows from first principles (and if so, what are the first principle from which "we ought not kill" is derived).
See the way you slid from the truth conditions to the justification for your belief?
So, set out exactly what the truth conditions are for "a cat is on the mat"... what particular kinds of physical object, what relationship.
You can do it - it's philosophy, it's easy.
I didn't. The truth condition is the physical state of the world, and this truth condition is recognisable by the use of our senses. If you tell me that the cat is on the mat, I know what to look for and am (usually) capable of doing so -- and even if I'm incapable of verifying or falsifying your claim, I nonetheless know what the truth conditions are and how to recognize them, and so know what it means for the statement to be true or false, even if I don't know whether or not it is true. And the same for a claim such as "2 + 2 = 4". I know how to count to verify or falsify your claim.
There's nothing I know of to verify or falsify the claim that we ought not kill. I don't understand what its truth conditions are, let alone how to go about showing that they do or do not obtain. So I don't know what it means to be true or false. What difference does it make if "we ought not kill" is true or false? Is a world where it's true distinguishable from a world where it's false? A world where a cat is on the mat is distinguishable from a world where a cat is not on the mat after all. Or in the case of rule-following, a world where pawns can move backwards in chess is distinguishable from a world where they can't.
But as you seem to know what it means for "we ought not kill" to be true, and seem to believe that it is true, can you tell me the steps you took to come to that conclusion? Is there something in the world I need to look for? Something I can see or feel or touch? Or is it derivable from some first principles, like with mathematical equations?
SO - what physical state will that be?
Let me help you out: "a cat is on the mat" will be true if and only if a cat is on the mat.
Do you agree? If not, then exactly what physical state is it you are looking for?
Oh, and while we are here, what is the physical state that is the truth condition for 2+2=4?
You think? Philosophy actually questions that.
Yes, I agree. The cat being on the mat is a recognisable physical state, and as such I know the difference between that physical state obtaining (the cat being on the mat) and it not obtaining (the cat not being on the mat); there is an empirical difference between a world where it obtains and a world where it doesn't. And it is only because of this that I know what it means for the cat to be on the mat and for the cat to not be on the mat.
But as far as I'm aware that we ought not kill isn't a recognisable physical state. I don't know the difference between it being true that we ought not kill and it being false that we ought not kill, and so I don't know know what it means for "we ought not kill" to be true or false.
Quoting Michael
That's not a recognisable physical state though, is it.
SO its not just recognisable physical states that are the truth conditions for propositions, other things can be the truth conditions.
So the truth conditions for "a cat is on the mat" are the cat being on the mat.
The truth conditions for "1+1=2" are that 1+1 is 2.
But you baulk at the truth conditions for "it's bad to molest children" being that it is bad to molest children?
SO, is it truth that you love your mother?
What are the truth conditions for that?
Yeah, you did. That's ok, though. Let me show you.
Quoting Michael
See how the first sentence starts to set out the truth conditions - it elliptically refers to the cat being on the mat using "particular kind of physical objects".
Now look at the second sentence. It sets out what it is you recognise in order to support the proposition that a cat is on the mat; that you justify your believe by making an observation.
But making an observation is not why you believe that 1+1=2; nor is it how you know that you love dear old mum. Different propositions have different justifications.
I didn't say that only recognisable physical states are relevant. I also talked about deriving from first principles, which is what we do with maths. There is a step-by-step method to show the result of adding two plus two, and I can do that to verify or falsify your claim that "2 + 2 = 4". It is only by knowing how to verify or falsify the claim -- knowing how to count -- that I know what it means for "2 + 2 = 4" to be true or false.
But as far as I'm aware that we ought not kill isn't derivable from first principles. I don't know the difference between it being true that we ought not kill and it being false that we ought not kill, and so I don't know know what it means for "we ought not kill" to be true or false.
I've been answering your questions. You haven't yet answered mine. What have you done to verify or falsify the claim that we ought not kill?
It's certainly cruel and harmful to molest children. There are recognisable truth conditions to verify such a claim. And if by "bad" you mean something like "cruel" or "harmful" then I agree. But if the claim that something is bad is the claim that we ought not do that something then I don't know what you mean, as I don't know what the truth conditions for obligation are.
Quoting Michael
Sure, there is no empirical evidence that one ought not lie. Nor is it derived from first principles. But why should we suppose that these two exhaust all the possibilities? Why shouldn't different propositions have different ways of being found true or false?
And again, I think you do know what it means when someone say "you ought not kill", wether you can cite the truth conditions or not.
Same.
They're the only two way that I know of. And it's because I don't know of any other way that I don't know how to verify or falsify moral claims and so don't know what it means for moral claims to be true or false.
But as you are suggesting that there could be different ways of being found true or false, and as you seem to know what it means for "we ought not kill" to be true (and believe it to be true), then what have you done to verify the claim that we ought not kill?
So is that you live your mum determined by empirical evidence or deduction from first principles?
What about that your left foot is in pain - empirical evidence? Well, it's not verifiable by anyone except you, so calling it empirical would be a stretch.
If n is any integer, then either n is even or n is odd.
Killing is wrong. (Except maybe in certain individual or collective cases of self-defence or prevention of even worse outcomes, based on certain criteria as defined in the AppendIixes I-XXXIX.)
It appears to me that it is several categories easier to refute or verify the factual truth of the first and second sentences. The last one will lead to near infinite complications and qualifications - almost as it would not be a hugely factual statement about the nature of our experience of the world.(Obviously there can be many other definitions of a "moral fact" but none appear very useful or very "fact like".)
I know what it means, I just don't know what it means for it to be true. I don't believe that it's truth-apt, despite its grammar. It's meaning (in the sense of its use) is as the imperative "don't kill". The speaker may also intend for it to be truth-apt, believing that it has truth conditions, but I don't know what such truth conditions would be.
I'm partial to Anscombe's analysis: "[the] word 'ought'… a word of mere mesmeric force.… a word retaining the suggestion of force, and apt to have a strong psychological effect, but which no longer signifies a real concept at all."
Now that's much better.
And I'm partially incline to agree. Recall Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy".
But I will baulk at not assigning truth values to moral statements. It's true that one ought keep one's promises, that one ought not kill, and so on.
“Is it true you ought not to kill that guy?”
“Hmmm...lemme think. I ought not to kill that guy, so you want to know if it’s true I ought not to kill that guy? What kinda stupid question is that, anyway? I ought not, but it might be not true I ought not? If it’s not true I ought not, how in the HELL did I come up with ought not in the first place? And if that fool did dirty to my daughter, even if I ought not kill him, I might just do it anyway. So it turns out that dumbass question is moot no matter the consequence of the inclination behind it; I ought not kill the guy whether I let him go with a stern talking-to, or put him in the ground.
....Yeah, and besides all that, considering the contrary, if it is the case that I ought to kill that guy, then it must be the case that I ought possibly to kill any guy, from which follows possibly I ought to kill every guy, which makes me wonder....how lucky are you to be here asking me stupid questions?
....Maybe I was wrong in coming up with ought not.”
(Sigh)
————
Quoting Michael
Correct. Hence, the contingency of a mere “ought, rather than the universality intrinsic to empirical conditions.
Quoting Echarmion
I may very well have it backwards. I picture truth both in an absolute sense that corresponds with the necessary state of existence of a metaphysical simple (a whole with no proper component parts), and in a relative sense that corresponds with a subset of contingent states of existence (a mereological whole with remaining proper component parts).
The former including the totality of all things that must necessarily exist. Everything. All past, present, and future events occurring throughout the universe, multiverse, and the metaphysical beyond (beyond, beyond physical reality). Every arrangement of quantum states within every quantum system throughout every physical locality across every Planck length and over the duration of every Planck time from every observational reference frame (on the assumption that these units represent the state of affairs of actual physical objects existing in spacetime), encompassing therein every existing thing, object, or entity.
Truth in this absolute sense would be an atemporal, aspatial, acausal view of an atomic or simple object with no further composition of proper parts. It is the arrangement of such simples that give rise to the substances, properties, relations, states of affairs and events of the world.
In short, truth can only be a combination of simple objects, things, or entities that actually exist in a particular state of affairs in the world, whereas facts are both such truths of the world and of all the possible states of affairs these simples could form into in every possible world of reality. A compositional whole can only be true relative to the specific arrangements of its parts.
For example, a molecule of water is the state of affairs regarding a specific arrangements of hydrogen and oxygen atoms (H2o). There are many other possible worlds wherein the arrangements of oxygen and hydrogen atoms could of organized differently
than they did in our own. This would make the true atomic state of water in our world, the actual world we live in, just one possible world of many other possible worlds.
This doesn't mean that an infinite range of possible atomic states of water truly exist. Truth, in an absolute sense, must necessarily correspond with the state of affairs of the world it exists in. It must either be the case or not be the case and thus be a binary value of either "true" or "false", however there are possible facts that do not necessarily have to represent the state of affairs in order to obtain a truth value. Possible facts were postulated by Wittgenstein within the metaphysics of the Tractatus.
Wittgenstein statements in the Tractatus:
If a fact is the existence of states of affairs which are the arrangements of objects in relation between parts to whole, then facts are both the actual and possible state of affairs between complexes of objects formed by the changing configurations of simple objects. Simple objects are physical simples arranged in various spatial patterns that complex objects themselves are composed of.
Furthermore, without simple objects there would be no substance to the world and we would not be able to form representations of it. This is because complex objects do not exist but rather they are a particular configuration of interacting simples that do exist. We represent the world through propositions and these propositions are only meaningful if the object they purport to represent actually exists. There are macroscopic objects which we generally agree with whatever symbolic meaning we place upon it. However, these objects cannot be represented as being truths because their existence is dependent upon the configuration of their proper parts that come in and go out of existence. For example, when does a sculptors clay become the statue? It really never has a definite composition to represent the totality of its constituent stare of affairs. Thus it is only a possible fact that the clay is indeed a statue.
In a world without substance propositions would depend on each other for truth value and such is only a particular configuration of possible states of affairs. What is more, if only complex objects existed, the truth value of propositions would dependent upon the arrangement of propositions proper parts at a point in time and location in space.
It is a possible fact that H3o2 is the correct arrangement of atomic states that form water. This is a possible fact because it is a fact that water has an arranged atomic state including a quantity of oxygen and hydrogen atoms and H3o2 is an arranged atomic state of a quantity of oxygen and hydrogen atoms. It is also a negative fact that the arranged atomic state of oxygen and hydrogen atoms that form water is not H3o2.
Possible facts and negative fact are not contingent upon the existence of a corresponding thing, object, or entity as a condition to be factual, but the truth (in the absolute sense) is. Thus, the truth of a water molecule is relative because of its dependence upon a particular arrangement of its parts. Therefore, an absolute truth must be of a whole independent of compositional parts. An absolute truth must be an particular configuration of existing mereological simples.
Whereas the latter relative truth would be any truth derivative from the absolute ontology. Any subsequent system of ontologies, whether previously categorized or yet uncategorized, dividing the totality of all existing entities from a universal whole into a mereological sum of particular parts.
Facts, on the other hand, I don't view as things that exist necessarily but rather as the possible or actual (counter factual) state of affairs. In other words, facts can actually exist, possibly exist, and not exist at all. Things can exist or not exist (e.g., imaginary things ). Objects can exist or not exist. But facts, such as the fact that the moon is not cheese cannot also be true because there is no corresponding relationship to an entity that exists. A non-cheese moon does not exist and cannot be referenced for truth.
Bertrand Russell once said:
Quoting Banno
I think there is some miscommunication here. I was talking about how our language has evolved over time and it seems possible that it has been structured in such a way that emotive responses, value judgements, and our moral sense of right and wrong are expressed in ways that seem to be descriptive, objective, or universal when they are much more evaluative, subjective, or particular. Statements such as those which contain aesthetic or normative evaluations (e.g., "sunsets are the most beautiful" or "healthcare should be free") are grammatically constructed in the form of a universal descriptive statements that purport to be reporting something objective and true for every predicate variable within a domain (that every object 'x' has the property of 'y') when it is actually expressing a particular evaluative statement that is referring to something subjective and true only relative to the individual subject indexed to the statement.
If we make a universal descriptive statement such as "All liquid water is wet," we are making a statement that is expressing a fact that all objects "liquid water" have a particular property "being wet." The statement purports to report the state of affairs with an accurate account of the way things exist in the world. This means that the truthbearing statement "All liquid water is wet," has truthmaking relationship to water insofar as the statement is true if and only if liquid water exists and has the property of being wet.
To answer your questions, I think honesty is almost always more likely to produce favorable results in many of today's societies. However, there are many instances where lying is the right thing to do consequentially speaking. For example, if you had a friend over to your house and then a deranged man with a gun knocks on your door. He tells you that he is searching for your friend so that he can kill him and asks you if you know where he could be. Would not lying here be the generally moral thing to do?
I understand that moral statements are structured and generally understood to be objective, universal statements. But how are they true? What truth making relations do they share with the world? What fact or truth does the truth bearing statement "Stealing is wrong" purport to represent in the world? What grounds such a claim? What makes lying bad even if we disagree with the evaluation?
Well explained - I understand, and have great sympathy for the Anscombe/Wittgenstein view you are explaining. See the thread Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy".
However I also have sympathy for the views of Austin, who pointed out that:
So when we notice that
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I'm incline to ask why this should be. Anscombe would have us, at least on a direct reading, think that it is a result of adopting Christianity. There may be something in that.
Running parallel to this is the argument that moral statements do not fit a correspondence account of truth; that there are no facts that can make such statements true. You presented this view in terms of the Tractatus in a previous post. You wrote:
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I'm of the opinion that there is no adequate analysis of what that correspondence consists in. See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-correspondence/#9.2 (I'm less convinced by the slingshot argument).
I much prefer T-sentences as a model for truth, and hence take truth as pretty much redundant. That is, when one say that it is true that water is made of hydrogen and oxygen, one is saying no more than that water is made of hydrogen and oxygen. Nothing substantive has been gained by the inclusion of "it's true that..."
(It is the case that saying "It is true that..." adds a semantic force to the utterance: "the cat is on the mat" is weaker than "It is true that the cat is on the mat"; however, both sentences are true in exactly the same circumstances)
Let's look int that a bit further. The utterance "the cat is on the mat" will be true just in the case that the cat is one the mat. Perhaps we have an extensional account on the right of this T-sentence, so that our acceptance of it is fairly direct - it will be true if the cat is in the relation of "being on" to the mat. But it is not clear that all T-sentences are extensional in this way.
Let's consider a T-sentence with a moral content: It is true that "One ought not lie" if and only if one ought not lie. While I admit that one cannot provide an extensional account of the item on the right of the T-sentence, nevertheless the structure of the sentence sets out the truth conditions for the statement "One ought not lie".
Circling back, I don't see any direct contradiction between this account of truth - which after all says very little - and the Anscombe/Wittgenstein view expressed above.
Which is to say little more than that our emotive responses, value judgements, and our moral sense of right and wrong may be readily expressed in ways that are amenable to being true or false.
This is part of a puzzle I have been working on for over thirty years, of reconciling Davidson's semantic theory of meaning with Wittgenstein. Doubtless much of this remains muddled, but the problem is with analysing that muddle.
The upshot is that I need a better account before I would willingly deny the that moral statements are truth apt.
Quoting Wayfarer
From the SEP:
Aristotle could be interpreted in Metaphysics as prescribing to a primitive correspondence truth by stating that the world provides "what is" or "what is not," and the true propositions or concepts corresponds to the facts provided by the world.
Plato distinguished between believing and knowing as justified, true belief insomuch as he argued that there were objective truths and that they could be known, thus simply believing that 'p' is true cannot by itself be a justification. Plato views of justified knowledge holds three necessary and sufficient conditions: (1) a proposition must form into a belief; (2) a proposition must be true; and (3) a proposition must have good grounds to justify forming a belief.
Plato, on the premise that truth is objective, argued that in order to justify knowledge of true propositions they must be about real things.
René Descartes (1596–1650) ". . .the word truth, in the strict sense, denotes the conformity of thought with its object" (p. 65).
Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) "A true idea must agree with its object" (p. 410).
John Locke (1632–1704) ". . .tacit supposition of their conformity to" [their object] (p. 514). The truth to an idea is "conformable to some real existence" (Locke, p. 515).
David Hume (1711–1776) "Truth is of two kinds, consisting either in the discovery of the proportions of ideas, consider'd as such, or in the conformity of our ideas of objects to their real existence" (p. 448).
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) "The nominal definition of truth, namely that it is the agreement of cognition with its object, is here granted and presupposed; but one demands to know what is the general and certain criterion of the truth of any cognition" (p. 197).
If you want me to dig up the remainder, let me know.
[quote="Cartesian trigger-puppets;539596Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
I can't see anything that supports that in the SEP article. Are there real things in Plato's philosophy? I would have thought that 'things' were only real insofar as they were instantiations of ideas. (See entry on Aquinas below).
Quoting Banno
Indeed.
[quote=Randall, J. & Buchler, J. Philosophy: An Introduction. p133] According to this theory (correspondence), truth consists in the agreement of our thought with reality. This view ... seems to conform rather closely to our ordinary common sense usage when we speak of truth. The flaws in the definition arise when we ask what is meant by "agreement" or "correspondence" of ideas and objects, beliefs and facts, thought and reality. In order to test the truth of an idea or belief we must presumably compare it with the reality in some sense.
1. In order to make the comparison, we must know what it is that we are comparing, namely, the belief on the one hand and the reality on the other. But if we already know the reality, why do we need to make a comparison? And if we don't know the reality, how can we make a comparison?
2. The making of the comparison is itself a fact about which we have a belief. We have to believe that the belief about the comparison is true. How do we know that our belief in this agreement is "true"? This leads to an infinite regress, leaving us with no assurance of true belief.[/quote]
[quote=Beck, L.W. & Holmes, R.L., Philosophic Inquiry, p130.] Although it seems ... obvious to say, "Truth is correspondence of thought (belief, proposition) to what is actually the case", such an assertion nevertheless involves a metaphysical assumption - that there is a fact, object, or state of affairs, independent of our knowledge to which our knowledge corresponds.
"How, on your principles, could you know you have a true proposition?" ... or ... "How can you use your definition of truth, it being the correspondence between a judgment and its object, as a criterion of truth? How can you know when such correspondence actually holds?"
I cannot step outside my mind to compare a thought in it with something outside it.[/quote]
[quote=Hospers, J. An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, p116.] Does a true proposition correspond to a fact in the way that the color sample on the color chart corresponds to the color of the paint on the wall? No, there is certainly no resemblance between a proposition and a state-of-affairs. .
. . . it is not clear that we meet any facts in experience. We meet people, stars, chairs, and other objects, but not facts or states of affairs. And if this is so, and the objection is cogent, it tells against all correspondence theories of truth.[/quote]
I find Aquinas' objection particularly interesting:
[quote=Aquinas, Thomas, Truth, Vol. II, Qs. 10, Article 4.] All cognition takes place through assimilation.But there is no assimilation possible between the mind and material things, because likeness depends on sameness of quality. However, the qualities of material things are bodily accidents which cannot exist in the mind. Therefore, the mind cannot know material things.[/quote]
I think the implication of this is that material things are by their nature or in their own right unintelligible, that their intelligibility is owed to their being of a intelligible form or type.
There's also the Kant quote that I mentioned previously.
[quote=Kant, 1801. The Jasche Logic, in Lectures on Logic] Truth, it is said, consists in the agreement of cognition with its object. In consequence of this mere nominal definition, my cognition, to count as true, is supposed to agree with its object. Now I can compare the object with my cognition, however, only by cognising it. Hence my cognition is supposed to confirm itself, which is far short of being sufficient for truth. For since the object is outside me, the cognition in me, all I can ever pass judgement on is whether my cognition of the object agrees with my cognition of the object”. [/quote]
I can't go along with that. The fact is I know for sure I am typing this on my laptop while sitting on my armchair with the cat besides me. Any philosophical claim that things are unintelligible is simply cause for dismissing that philosophy.
Quoting Wayfarer
Plato, Cratylus, section 385b2–387c5. Truth and Falsity in Names 385b2 - d1 I'm sure you are familiar with regardless of whether or not you have read Cratylus in it's entirety, since it seems to be one of the most discussed passage in the whole dialogue.
Semantically speaking, a noun can be described either as a word that stands for the name of something, or as a referential linguistic term wherein the meaning of the word just is the thing it refers to. They can be either vocalized or inscribed signs that indicate something in relation to the being of a certain object. Names are the agents or subjects of an action or predication, signified by actions and verbs which are performed by a subject or agent.
Names, more broadly, are therefore signs. They are the instruments of inscription or vocalization that signify a thing through a reflection or a reproduction of it's image. A name is a linguistic term that takes the shape of an individual's image, thus revealing their being and give the indication of various things that exist.
Plato, Euthydemus, section 283e7-284c6
Also, for additional insight into Plato's late ontology and philosophy of language, see Plato's account for false judgment with the example statements: Theaetetus sits – Theaetetus flies.
Plato, Sophist, section 256e-263d; or 263B4 f.-263 B11 f. in the chapter "True and False: 262E–263D" In: "Being and Not-Being." Seligman P. (1974)
Quoting Seligman P.
:point:
Quoting Tom Storm
Yes, h. sapiens is an eusocial primate species, which, I think, grounds our 'moral instincts (tendencies)' in our socio-biology and develops, or becomes more nuanced, as our social ecologies become more complex and accelerated.
I recently went to church, Tom, on your "ancestral empathy" sermon here:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/519871 (with additional articles linked)
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Yes. Moral facts are, in effect, truth-makers / warrants for moral claims.
We know moral facts by the specific moral claims for help which they warrant. A moral claim is objective (i.e. subject/pov-invariant) in so far as it is manifested by the in situ-probability that neglecting natural (species) functional defects (e.g. hunger, fear, trust) of an individual will increase and/or prolong gratuitous / net harm to, or dysfunction of, that individual's defects (e.g. starvation, terror, distrust). When it occurs, the harm caused or contributed to by neglecting a fellow human being's natural (species) functional defects is the moral fact of the matter; and, is therefore, an Is that entails what one Ought Not to do.
NB: By neglecting I understand one dehumanizing (i.e. alienating) oneself in so far as one neglects the (in situ-probable) harm & suffering of others.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
You are conflating statements with facts. Why? (The map =/= territory.) I don't think "moral statements" – normativity – when I say 'moral claim'. What am I missing by deviating from the specious ontic premises of (e.g.) "error theory"?
A barefoot little girl cries alone at night on an empty street. Her distress, loneliness & defenselessness constitute a moral claim for help. That those abject conditions can increase and/or be prolonged by neglecting to help her is a moral fact recognized by SEEING (I. Murdoch, E. Levinas, P. Foot) oneself, or anyone else one cares about, in that little girl's "shoes".
Quoting Banno
E.g. Peirce & Dewey ...
Quoting Wayfarer
(re: TLP, 6.41-6.421) :up:
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes, I have a proclivity for thinking and subsequently speaking in tangents, and the passage you are referring to here, I can now see with hindsight is rife with my own idiosyncrasies. I believe that I was attempting to conjecture, as Plato likewise may have, was a relationship between meaning and form in the natural development of language.
Semantic and syntactic development seemed to be, at least for ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato, a tool for identifying the relationships of things, and for recognizing what things make up the differences between statements that are true from statements which are false through advances in dialectic. Syntactic analysis of propositional structures, propositional types, and propositional forms were a means towards an ends: how to draw valid inferences from propositions.
Semantic analysis of symbolic forms and structures of propositions (the semantic description and relations of the content of a clause) expressed as a declarative sentence works by isolating the lexical item with relevant semantic content featured in the denotation. This would include the meaning of the term with those of related words. This would be identified by Plato (Sophist 26le–263) as two phonic signs as referrents for the essence of things: (1) the grammatical subject 'onoma' (name, noun, or noun phrase); and (2) the grammatical predication 'rh?ma' (attribute, verb, action).
The 'rh?ma' denotes action; those who perform actions are signified by onomata. This referrent combination of 'onoma' and 'rh?ma' completes the 'logos' (sentence, proposition, statement, utterance). The logos is a part of the argument named in the 'onoma' about which something is, or is becoming, or has become, or will be.
In other words, the subject or agent is the corresponding referrent indexed to the predicated event in which I have postulated a causal relationship between the two in an attempt to explain the form/meaning correlation in terms of causal relations. We tend to neglect to separate the form from the meanings of the grammatical subject referrents, rather we generally associate their meaning with the predicated denotation (the action referring to something by means of a symbol) wherein the form and the meaning is combined in an arbitrary correlation.
If the correlation between syntax and semantic content of referrent subjects and predicates is arbitrary, then there cannot be any causal relationship between form and meaning, whereas if we isolate the referrents and associate the relationship between form and meaning contained by the entire set of objects or concepts to which the referrent subject of the predicate, truth making relations can derive from the subject if postulated as a 'thing' or a 'being'.
Truth making relations combine symbolic forms with the referrent meanings of words which derives an emergent 'being' between a symbolic form and the 'things' they
denote. This is highly dependent upon my own idiosyncratic interpretation of Plato's treatment of the problem of universals and abstract entities throughout Cratylus and is admittedly tangential to the point you originally called into question regarding whether or not the state of affairs include existent 'things' on Plato's ontology.
This seems to indicate that issues of morality can, to begin with, be meaningfully discussed only in the context of such a moral regulatory system as religion. This points in the direction of moral relativism / moral contextualism. And that answering a question like "Is X moral?" is the same kind of question as "What are the attributes of God?" -- in the sense that like the second question, the first one as well can only be answered with a reference to a particular religious doctrine, but that beyond that, it does not apply.
Whence the idea that morality can be conceived of without reference to religion ...
Quoting Wayfarer
Such an approach becomes questionable when it comes to people who have been stigmatized or ostracized by a society.
How does a stigmatized or ostracized person make moral judgments? They don't have a meaningful and valuable reference group anymore.
Quoting Wayfarer
Such as gut feeling?
Such as might makes right?
Morality is written by winners?
Truth is written by winners?
Moral propositions are to be found true or false in accordance with a particular religion?
Gut feelings?
We should make a list of categories:
1. Propositions whose truth or falsity is determined by gut feeling
2. Propositions whose truth or falsity is determined by consensus
3. Propositions whose truth or falsity is determined by examining empirical evidence
etc.
Now we just need to decide which proposition belongs to which category (and why ...).
(Which brings us to the theory of pramanas, means of knowledge.)
If utilitarian theories of truth do not work for basic statements, then its unlikely they can be made to work for morality.
"P" is true IFF P, where "P" is a sentence spoken of and P is a sentence used.
That's as much as you might have.
And notice that nothing in the T-sentence diminishes from its applicability to moral statements.
I urge you not to judge this in advance, but to try it for yourself. I contend that it will bring you great pleasure.
Half a T must, ipso facto, half not P. Eric would be proud.
No, I don't think there is a generalisation beyond the T-sentence; I suspect such a thing must be a nonsense - how could we set out the truth of a theory of truth, after all? All it could do is talk about itself.
Quoting 180 Proof
Just to be clear, are you making the universal conjunctive statement, "All moral facts "A" are (assuming "/" is a logical or grammatical conjunction) logically equivalent to truth-makers "B" and warrants "C" for moral claims? If so, then both terms of the statement: All moral facts "A" are truth-makers of moral claims "B" and warrants of moral claims "C", have existential import.
("A") All moral facts
All terms "moral facts" are in equivalence with
the terms of ("B") and of ("C"), wherein the terms:
("B") Truth-makers of moral claims; and
("C") Warrants of moral claims.
There is ambiguity whether or not such universal statements of the form: All "A" are "B" and "C" can be considered true, false (or, perhaps meaningless) if there are no instances "B's" and/or "C's". When considered as false in any such cases, then the statement All "A" are "B" and "C" has existential import with respect to "A". And, the statement becomes further problematic insomuch as even the major term "A" in having no clear instantiation as a fact.
I suppose the only solution would be to request further information from you. What are ("B") Truth-makers of moral claims; and ("C") warrants of moral claims, on your view? And, how do they instantiate ("A") as represented by an actual example? If these terms are abstract concepts, then could you provide the set in which such terms can be instantiated? And, furthermore, could you elucidate as to just how the entities contained by the set of abstract concepts share the qualifying properties to such a degree to be categorized within the domain of facts?
Quoting 180 Proof
Forgive my ambiguity, I'm asking for an example of an objective moral fact, as in a truth-making instantiation of the states of affairs, or the fact of the world to which the truth or factuality of a moral statement (such as "genocide is wrong") obtaines. If for everything identified as 'genocide' ('A') has the property of 'being wrong' ('B'), then what is the objective fact, or truth-making entity ('B') of which instantiates the the truth-bearing representation of the moral statement ('A' is 'B')? The truth-making relationship between ('A' is 'B') is 'x' (that all things identified as 'genocide' has the property of 'being wrong') which makes the proposition 'y' (or 'A' is 'B') true iff 'y' is true because 'x' exists.
Quoting 180 Proof
If so, then when you or an interlocutor make a moral claim, do you consider the statement that you or your interlocutor has stated to be truth-apt? If yes, then do you find the truth values of all moral statements to be false? Whether moral claims are meaningless statements, or if they are truth-apt but such that their truth-aptness will never obtain, thus rendering all such utterances false or meaningless by default, would not either derivative truth value (universally false or meaningless) deny such claims as statements of fact?
Quoting 180 Proof
Is not stating her "....distress, loneliness & defenselessness..." simply begging the question by presupposing terms embedded with evaluative denotation? And, by "constitute" do you mean signify? As in, a signal transmitting meaningful information via a message? A sign or signal contains, as with any unit of language, either truth-bearing, or meaningless information potentially encoded by senders as a representation, that once decoded by receivers holds a correspondence with the objects, things, or entities that exist in reality. Why load adjectives such as "abject" upon the conditions of which are under evaluatative investigation?
The rhetorical devices and explicit denotation of normative language only serves to obfuscate such metaethical investigations by embedding a presupposed evaluation into the premises that assumes the evaluation of the conclusion. This serves as a quintessential example for how our biased human tendencies to linguistically romanticize the values we have preferences for, on the one hand, while denigrating the values we have preferences against, on the other.
A moral fact instantiated by our perceptions of (a particular) emotionally charged reaction to an event, or as a result, a prolonged desire to alter the way the world is? I share and applaud your sentiments, alas we yet have no grounds to warrant such sentiment as factual. I understand that (for most) sentient recognition, followed (for many) subsequently by an empathetic relatability and (for few) a sufficient altruistic motivation to offer up the sacrifice of ones own self-interests required to do something about a scenario. There simply has been no justification provided here. Just, and as with myself, predispositions and normative biases.
...and isn't this to compound truth and belief? Or at least to forget about truth and pretend that belief justified by utility will suffice?
No.
Not at all. By way of clarification, or correction, I refer in my previous post to 'truth-seeking' and 'inquiry' as distinct, even separate, from 'truth per se'. It's habits-forming from truth-seeking inquiry that has utility. Also, I don't mention or imply any thing is or needs to be "justified". It's unlike you, Banno, to read so poorly (no matter how poorly written a post may seem); fortified by a few strong drinks this evening / morning out in your parts? :smirk:
I'll maintain my point; you are not talking about truth, you are talking about justifications for belief - habits.
Quoting Michael
Though a few of your interlocutors seem to be either incapable of, or disinterested in, finding a charitable interpretation of your statement, I find your humility and intellectual honesty quite refreshing. This may be the result of me rendering a subjective reality from my biased perception and interpretation, but dissonance notwithstanding I am sympathetic to your agnostic position here. What is more, I hold it with you.
If I lack sufficient data to meet the burden of proof required to defend a proposition or its negation, and my aim is towards truth, then I maintain agnosticism on grounds of insufficient evidence. For example, if I have insufficient evidence to support the proposition "I ought to kill," or its negation "I ought not to kill," then I should hold the only remaining tenable position; namely agnosticism.
This is a matter of having insufficient evidence necessary to ground a deductive argument to warrant logical inferences. This is NOT a matter of practicality and civil respect to the normative values relative to our societies and cultures of which I most certainly share the preference that everyone "ought not to kill," of which (very likely ) and I take such truth for granted in my day-to-day life.
I would welcome any of your critics to attempt to deny the truth of the following argument.
Main argument:
P1. If all (non-innate) human knowledge begins from a position of uncertainty that emerged from ignorance, and a subset of humans want to be intellectually honest, then the subset of humans must by default begin from an agnostic position.
P2. All (non-innate) human knowledge begins from a position of uncertainty that emerged from ignorance, and a subset of humans want to be intellectually honest.
C. Therefore, the subset of humans who want to be intellectually honest must by default begin from an agnostic position.
Argument 2; supporting P2 of argument 1:
P1. If most knowledge is learned through experience, and humans are born prior to experiencing the world, then all (non-innate) human knowledge begins from a position of uncertainty that emerged from ignorance.
P2. Most knowledge is learned through experience, and humans are born prior to experiencing the world.
C. Therefore, all (non-innate) human knowledge begins from a position of uncertainty that emerged from ignorance.
Argument 3; supporting P2 of argument 2:
P1. Innate knowledge functions at the level of reflexes and instincts and excludes learning through experience.
P2. Basic general knowledge functions beyond the level of reflexes and instincts and requires the accumulation of a body of common knowledge learned through experience.
P3. Specialized knowledge (e.g., philosophy) functions beyond the level of basic general knowledge and requires mastering through disciplined investigation and study.
C. Therefore, most knowledge is learned through experience. (Even innatists concede this point in denying tabula rasa)
Argument 4; supporting P2 and P3 of argument 3.
P1. If all knowledge that functions beyond innate knowledge requires humans to use reason to distinguish between accurate information and inaccurate information, then basic general knowledge and specialized knowledge (e.g., philosophy) require humans to use reason to distinguish between accurate information and inaccurate information.
P2. All knowledge that functions beyond innate knowledge requires humans to use reason to distinguish between accurate information and inaccurate information.
C. Therefore, basic general knowledge and specialized knowledge (e.g., philosophy) require humans to use reason to distinguish between accurate information and inaccurate information.
Argument 5; supporting P2 of argument 4:
P1. If humans are fallible, then humans must use reason to distinguish between accurate information and inaccurate information.
P2. Humans are fallible.
C. Therefore, humans must use reason to distinguish between accurate information and inaccurate information.
*sigh*
/note to self: Must grow a dick & balls. Otherwise participating in discussion very difficult./
Absolutely.
(Why didn't anyone else pick this up?)
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
This just goes to show that taboos are still essential to thinking about morality.
Yes, and yesterday, I actually collected those posts and commented on them with "Way to gloss over the issue!"
But taboos exist for a reason.
Reread my preamble for context. Ethics, as I understand it, is fallibilistic (i.e. pragmatic(ist)) and performative, not justificationist and propositional.
Quoting 180 Proof
Could you clarify what you mean with these broad terms? If you could offer your particular disambiguated take rather than me attempting to parce and further extrapolate your view from such broad generalizations? I'll attempt one, if just to measure the difficulties of such an endeavor.
I have a basic understanding of fallibilism insomuch that I am aware of the various levels of force in which such skepticism is applied epistemically. All knowledge is fallible because knowledge requires information to be processed and humans are limited in both accessibility to information and ability to process information. This is because all of our information must first be processed through unreliable sensory perception, depend on unreliable memory, having intellectual and representational limitations, and biased interpretations.
This ultimately renders all evidence and subsequently all justifications in support of our true beliefs as knowledge as merely fallible. I concede to this so far, however I do not see any necessary entailment to the view that all knowledge is impossible, or moreover that there cannot be any truths to our statements or concepts.
Surely we have some knowledge? Even if we may only have inconclusive knowledge which can be merely fallibly obtained on warrants that can never conclusively be justified on the grounds of incomplete information that we have limited epistemic access to, we nonetheless can have fallible knowledge.
Fallible knowledge would thus be a true belief that is less than infallibly justified because any evidence supporting such a belief would fail to provide a conclusive proof and therefore the belief would be inconclusive knowledge, but knowledge nonetheless. Even if you take a fallibilistic position that denies the possibility for there to be fallible, or inconclusive knowledge, would you concede that at least some of our beliefs, dispite their fallibility, could nevertheless in some sense still be true?
We use sentences to express statements which have a clear logical consistency and their fallibility does not entail that such statements are incapable of being true. For example, for the sake of argument, let's assume that I don't believe to have ever been 180 Proof's interlocutor on The Philosophy Forum. The fact that I have been 180 Proof's interlocutor is logically consistent with my not believing to ever have been. This goes to show that with fallible beliefs, even if they lack the justification to be warranted as knowledge, that there can still be truth within ones beliefs.
Let us suppose that such is not the case, that there indeed are no truths anywhere in our beliefs, thoughts or ideas. To begin, how would we ever be able to realizing this? Furthermore, how then could our beliefs, thoughts or ideas (any cognitive components) be truth-conducive (reliable belief forming processes) or truth-indicative (e.g., P???Q "P implies Q")?
Pragmatism, loosely put, would be an (ethical, semantic or epistemic) approach to truth in terms of utility, or practicality. I assume you are referring to a pragmatic theory for truth? Or perhaps a pragmatic approach to ethics which would be a matter more closely related to applied ethics practical use of theories of normative ethics, rather than the metaethical inquiries I've raised here.
Performative, I can only offer speculation based on my colloquial understandings of the term, dedicate an hour or so to internet research of the meaning in multiple philosophical contexts, or request clarify provided by your definition. I'll choose the latter.
Justificationist is an adherent of a (anti-realist or non-realist) perspective on truth? I remember reading an author who called himself a justificationist (Michael Dummett, I believe it was) and described the differences between empirical-based (mind-dependent) knowledge and mathematical-based (mind-independent) knowledge and against the predominant notion that direct justification through empirical observations best serve to extract meaning from a statement. He argued for indirect justification of mathematics as better justifications rather than an obscure realist view which requires a demonstration that could not be understood what it would be for such a statement to be true.
I still am not sure if this captures your meaning and my ramblings are much less efficient than simply requesting further information from you of it's meaning.
Similarly, I don't have a good grasp on propositionalist views, other than as a epistemic theory for justification based on attitudes as the primary bearers of truth-value? Or, similar to my conjecture that a subject or an agent as the grammatical subject referents of clauses wherein a predicated propositional attitude indexes an instantiated relationship to the grammatical objects, which in this case is an abstract entity and thus cannot be substantiated into realist ontology or correspondence theories.
Again, it is more efficient to simply request from you a definition of which to work with.
Your preamble, though eloquent and stylistically appealing, still contains both logic and rhetoric but the latter may be doing much more work than the former. For example, though my empathy is with even such a hypothetical figure as the little girl in your illustrated scenario, and in real life I would not hesitate to render her aid and relieve her suffering, I cannot provide any grounds to warrant the claim that 'I would be acting in a way that I ought to be'. There is no justification because there exists no evidence based in reality, and that seems to be the foundation of all epistemology.
And so I should not be interpreted uncharitably as a sadist or as indifferent to the suffering of others since in such real life cases, when practicable I abandon most reason. In participating in ethics as an exercise in moral philosophy and logic, I try not to abandon much reason. I simply stifle my emotions in realizing that these thought experiments are representations and thus more useful if analyzed mechanistically thus avoiding emotive obfuscation in the moments leading up to potential enlightenment.
Though a few of your interlocutors seem to be either incapable of, or disinterested in, finding a charitable interpretation of your statement
— Cartesian trigger-puppets
Quoting baker
You respond only to the sentiments of my comment shared with Michael regarding the uncertain modality we express regarding a moral proposition and its negation, whiles at the same time you completely ignore the arguments presented in (the substance) my comment. If you wish to to refute my defense of a default agnostic position, then you must address the argument, and since the argument is logically valid, you must deny on of the premises, otherwise the argument stands unchallenged.
The uncertainty and doubt is concerning whether the moral proposition ("I ought to kill") or its negation ("I ought not to kill") is true. What is more, and quite a pernicious notion, is to think that our intuitive preference towards the negation ("I ought not to kill") is somehow tantamount to having a justified belief that it is true.
Agnosticism and gnosticism are claims to knowledge and justified true belief is necessary and sufficient for knowledge. How does one maintain intellectual honesty while holding the untenable position of defending a moral claim to knowledge with no grounds to warrant such an assertion?
Taboos are an obfuscation of which I make systematic efforts to reduce and that many who express emotional responses to such meticulous considerations of these hypotheticals, as if an anathema to them, seem to be the ones most affected.
I have no such wish. You misread my tone: I'm actually agreeing with and .
People typically do it with a reference to "gut feeling" and by stigmatizing/ostracizing anyone who lacks such a gut feeling or questions it.
At most forums, if someone said what Michael did, they'd get accused of psychopathy/sociopathy (which is what happened here), but they'd probably get banned as well. So strong is the taboo against probing into the origins of moral intuitions. Taboos aren't to be underestimated.
My apologies for the misinterpretation, I misattributed a comment from Banno to you earlier in the thread. You are correct about the intolerance of taboo topics in most forums and online communities. I may be new here but I hold this one to a much higher standard. This especially so when it comes highly technical, complicated and sometimes graphic hypothetical illustrations of ethical dilemmas because there should be sufficient exposure to such topics to be familiar with and thus an acceptance to issues raised with axiomatic moral statements in a metaethical, epistemological, philosophy of language and logical contexts. I apologize again.
If you think it would help. I don't see how.
Our disagreement is pretty simple. I find the narrative shared here concerning reincarnation is unconvincing. You think otherwise. I don't see a roll for testicles in the discussion.
"Treat others as you would like others to treat you."
Perhaps I wasn't quite clear, but I wasn't just arguing that I don't know whether or not particular moral claims are true; I was arguing that I don't know what it means for moral claims to be true. I think that the sentences "thou shalt not kill" and "don't kill" mean the same thing, and I don't know what it means for "don't kill" to be true.
I understand what physical facts are, I understand what mathematical facts are, I understand what logical facts are, but I don't understand what moral facts are supposed to be.
Then that's the crux. What makes you think I "think otherwise"?? Because I'm not feistily enough against it, don't show enough contempt for it??
I don't find it convincing. Jesus, this is tiresome.
For keeping up with you guys.
You are not obligated to contribute.
Quoting baker
I don't know - your repeated replies to my posts, perhaps?
Are we done?
It's pretty clear that there is no account of reincarnation in which what is typically called the self comes, after death, to be found in a different body, because the things that go together to make the self do not survive death. Even were we to take on board the evidence cited by @Wayfarer, the conclusion could only be that reincarnation was a very, very rare event.
Quoting Michael
You are saying that you don't understand their meaning in a cognitive sense? As in they are more emotive than rational statements? Or, are you saying that you find their meaning completely incoherent even within the context of preference and attitudes? If you say "pain is bad" I at least take that to mean you have a preference against pain, perhaps with regards to just yourself or that of others, and also perhaps within specific context (e.g., perhaps you have a tolerance or even a preference for some pain in certain scenarios).
You understand the semantic content of the sentence and the referrent subjects and objects relationship instantiated through predicating clauses but you don't understand the grounds in which such a relationship can be substantiated? If so, I too relate.
Quoting Michael
I see. The term 'facts' must then make reference to the state of affairs of possible worlds. Since otherwise facts are said to be that which occurs in the real world insomuch as they can be demonstrated to correspond with our experience of it.
I wouldn't hesitate to agree with you if we spoke in terms of sets and the consistency in which the entities within each set can be arranged, rather than facts. Im not sure if by "physical facts" whether you are talking about empirical facts (e.g., that sunlight heats the earth) or facts about the properties of matter and energy (e.g., E = Ks × ?R?^2: "the total amount of energy intercepted by Earth").
I understand that within the sets of physical possibilities that the mass of an electron cannot exceed the mass of a proton, for instance. And, I understand that within the set if logical possibilities that P implies not-P is impossible. In mathematical sets such as arithmetic the value of the sum of 2 + 2 cannot equal 5. If this is what you mean then I agree.
And you don’t see the inherent nonsense in that?
You may very well have no issue in treating me as a big fat ugly slob, under the assumption such is my wish regardless of how foolish it seems to you. But it is so much more offensive than foolish, that I shall treat you as a big fat ugly slob, when you reject the insinuation explicit in the treatment.
Morality is never in the treatment, but only and always in the reason for the treatment.
Well, you can put it another way, "Treat others as you would NOT like others to treat you."
Wouldn't such behavior result in immoral actions?
Isn't that the reason?
Quoting Mww
Sure, but first I would have to imagine my self as being a big fat ugly slob, and then assume how would others treat me for being an idiot?
My point is that if you're a big fat ugly slob then you're immoral toward yourself, and as such nobody is going to help you.
That doesn’t seem to solve anything, when I elect to treat you as a big fat ugly slob simply because I wish not to be treated as such. Hell, I could just as well treat you like I would Ho Chi Minh, Alan Jackson, or Bugs Bunny for that matter. In other words, the mere negation of a rule is no less a rule, and if the affirmative of that rule is faulty, so too is its negation.
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Quoting SpaceDweller
So the proper criteria for morality is...appearance? Attitude? I should think you’d be the epitome of immoral if you willfully fail to help me merely because I am judged as offensive to your sensibilities. It follows from that, that one should help that ubiquitous lil’ ol’ lady cross the busy street, so long as she doesn’t smell bad.
I’m inclined to say, on the other hand, if one is immoral, as opposed to merely committing a circumstantial error in judgement from ignorance or accident, no one can help him, for his disposition is given and hence the ground of his actions is already set.
Moral philosophy is a tough business, no doubt.
What is a correspondence theory? On the one hand, facts. On the other, statements. If they correspond, then truth results. Problems: truth of counterfactual statements and negative 'facts', where there is ex hypothesi no corresponding fact; individuation of facts and statements and deciding when one statement or fact is the same as or different from another when setting up a supposed 'correspondence'.
What is Aristotle's theory? Like a lot of Aristotle's words, each word counts. “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true” This formulation does not have the problems of correspondence theory. If it's true that I might have eaten an egg for breakfast (though I did not) then I might have eaten an egg for breakfast. If the doorway is clear and there is no fat man in the doorway then it's true that there is no fat man in the doorway and since there is no thin man in the doorway it is also true that there is no thin man in the doorway. It helps to understand that he is challenging the Parmenidean view that no truth is to be obtained from reference to 'what is not' and that truth may only be generated by speaking of what is and saying that it is. Parmenides was closer to 'correspondence' theory than Aristotle, as was Plato.
All the above is contrary to received wisdom which may be greater than my wisdom. If you write in an essay that Aristotle did not subscribe to a correspondence theory of truth you may lose points. You may lose them justly for all I know, but I would like to know why.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-correspondence/
I disagree that there are moral facts.
There are two thoughts I can't quite decide between.
Thought 1 was a defense of moral error theory, but I'm not sure if I have anything more to say on that than I've already said in other threads before... (also tempted to fuck around with Moore and the naturalist fallacy)
Thought 2 is to criticize the notion of moral facts from an orthogonal direction -- to say that the framework sort of misses what's more interesting in ethics. I mean, if someone were to point to some moral fact, say in a book of all moral propositions, that said something you disagreed with would you really change your mind? Aren't we committed to our ethics more than we are convinced of them through the evidence? We shouldn't care about what the true moral propositions are, but concern ourselves with how to live a good life -- the good, not the true, is the aim of ethics.
Whether or not I believe in moral facts depends on many variables that I have considered both here and in other posts. The main idea is whether or not propositional attitudes, as in the subjective psychological states held by an agent toward a proposition (a linguistic, truth-bearing entity), could be postulated as an implicitly embedded clause containing the actual referent within moral statements. In the moral statement [1.1]"Hating people based on their race is wrong," for instance, there seems to be no particular thing (being, object, entity, etc.) in which the sentence refers to, thus no obtaining states of affairs.
An obtaining states of affairs requires at least one referent (a thing, object, entity), as in that which the words and phrases of a sentence are referring to and conversely what the words and phrases are representing. In the sentence [1.2]"Moliere disagrees with me," for example, the referent of the noun (name) 'Moliere' signifies a particular person, a fellow member of The Philosophy Forum, who is being spoken of; whereas the referent of the pronoun 'me' signifies the person who is uttering the sentence (namely, I, Cartesian trigger-puppets). We are the referents to which the sentence denotes and thus by virtue of our very being, as truth-makers, our truth making relations relative to the statement, as the truth-bearer, are the obtaining states of affairs.
Now, rewind back to the example moral statement, [1.1]"Hating people based on their race is wrong," and try to identify the referents. The term "Hating" represents a universal property regarding all things predicated as 'having hate;' the term "people" is the universal property of all things predicated as 'being a person;' the term "race" represents the universal property of 'being a member of a social construction based on skin-tone and ancestral phenotypes;' the term (and moral predication) "is wrong" is a universal qualitative property which is left ambiguously ungrounded.
Attempted grounds are based either on an agent-based relativeization to which the evaluative predication is indexed to the subject who is an individual with subjective psychological states; or, one the other hand, on a reality-based absolution, to which an attempt to ground the predicated evaluation as either a natural or unnatural property of externality (a-thing-in-itself), indexed to the objective states of the world.
This is because the referents of such moral statements are (hypothetically) contained within an implicitly embedded clause. Take the example [1.1], for instance, if we postulate and make explicit an implicitly embedded clause, similar to an expressivistic form of metaethical semantics, such as the subordinate clause "according to Moliere and Cartesian trigger-puppets," embedded within the main clause [1.1]"Hating people based on their race is wrong," we extrapolate moral referents (you and I) and relativize the evaluative properties within the moral predication to be indexed to the subjective psychological states of the referents in the subordinate clause. The final statement would be ""Hating people based on their race, according to Moliere and Cartesian trigger-puppets, is wrong."
The use of referents, which are the abstract or concrete entities represented in moral statements, to warrant an obtaining states of affairs on the grounds of individually relativized subjective psychological states, as the pragmatic truth-makers which have been implicitly embedded within our former semantic theories, would enable a fully-functional, internally consistent and subjectively self-contained metaethical theory.
Quoting Moliere
Hopefully, given the content of my previous reply, you can make an accurate presumption with regards to my answer. In short, no-and-yes. My answer depends on contextual variables.
I've said as much a long time ago. If it could be proved that moral realism is correct and that the proposition "it is wrong to murder children" is false or even that the proposition "one ought murder children" is true then I still wouldn't murder children. My actions are motivated in part by my wants/feelings and in part by what's pragmatic; they're not motivated by some reasoned understanding that there are something like moral facts.
Quoting Cartesian trigger-puppets
Carrying on from my previous comments about not understanding the meaning of moral claims, what still needs to be explained for this to be a fully-functional metaethical theory is an account of this "is wrong" universal qualitative property. What does it mean to have (or not have) this property? How does the proposition "Hating people based on their race, according to Moliere and Cartesian trigger-puppets, is wrong" differ from the proposition "Hating people based on their race, according to Moliere and Cartesian trigger-puppets, is X"?
Quite the opposite! :D I am lost at times, I'm afraid, but I'm trying to follow along.
I will state what I think I can understand from your post.
It seems to me you're saying whether your believe in moral facts depends upon certain variables whose values change or vary, and depending upon the value of those variables your belief with respect to moral facts also changes. And, if I read you correctly, you're stuck between deciding whether the entities to which moral statements refer are either psychological or in some sense a property that is, at least in some sense, independent of psychological entities.
I want to note that I could not tell you what a fully-functional, internally consistent and subjectively self-contained metaethical theory is, or why it is a desirable end such that it would convince me to use referents as pragmatic truth-makers in the particular manner you're espousing. This is not to say that I am against it, even, but that I am noting where I am not grasping. Honestly I get the sense that I am out of my depth. But if you're still getting something out of replying, then I'll respond in kind.
This is a guess on my part but I'm wondering if your focus on reference is because of me mentioning moral error theory? -- that moral error theory would be incorrect as long as you could identify a way of parsing moral sentences into ones which have a definite reference which are, thereby, truth-evaluable due to their being entities we can check.
Am I right about that?
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I take a fact to be a true statement.
A statement is any sentence within our language which follows the form of a proposition. It is this form which makes a statement truth-apt.
Moral statements, then, are sentences that follow the form of a proposition that are also in some way meaningfully related to morals.
By "the form" I only mean the subject-predicate form, where some subject has a predicate attached.
The main predicate that comes to mind here for me is ". . . is wrong" or ". . .is right" -- with any successfully referring name ". . . is wrong" forms a sentence that is both moral and truth-apt.
Keeping things general you may pick any event you feel is not controversial to evaluate with the ". . . is wrong" or ". . . is right" predicate. Whether the analysis is correct is not here interesting.
To me what's interesting is that there's simply an obvious difference between --
Richard Nixon was wrong when he lied
Richard Nixon was right when he lied.
Richard Nixon lied.
And whether the first or the second is true differs from whether the third is true.
Meaning, sure, we can start to parse all this ethical-talk into a logic of truth. But the difference between sentence 3 and sentence 1 or 2 remains, and should even be apparent, regardless of using the same predicate ". . . is true".
For many circumstances it can even be rational for a person to hold either 1 or 2, in spite of them being contradictories, insofar as they at least believe 3.
I guess I'd gauge to see what you feel about there being a difference between these sentences, and whether or not that difference is apparent -- because that's sort of the whole crux right there. If you don't think there's a worthwhile difference then that's where'd I'd be stuck.
I suppose it just depends on the person. The Holy Book is still at least claimed by people as a moral guide, which is certainly more ambiguous than the book of moral propositions, but pretty close in comparison I think. Abraham was already mentioned in this thread, but he was good because he bowed before God's will in faith. I asked the question rhetorically, but it's not too far from what people do sometimes.
Further, I'd say there's a difference between what your actions are motivated by and what is the correct thing to do. Like, one is a psychological fact about you, and the other is just what people should do or something -- and in general I don't think anyone here is espousing some kind of bare-bones Pure Rationalist Being or something. But it's still meaningful to ask if your actions should be so motivated.
After all, there are people motivated by all kinds of things. But that doesn't mean that just because Richard Nixon wanted to lie that Richard Nixon should have lied, even if it were a pragmatic thing.
So moral facts could, for all the lack of motivation to think of morality in these terms, still exist. This is only to say that while you wouldn't change, your refusal to change wouldn't demonstrate that there are no moral facts or that there is such a fact.
Sorry to hear that.
[quote=Sir Robert Hutchison (1871 - 1960)]From inability to let well alone, from too much zeal for the new and contempt for what is old, from putting knowledge before wisdom, science before art and cleverness before common sense, from treating patients as cases and from making the cure of the disease more grievous than the endurance of the same, good Lord deliver us.[/quote]