Does Morality presuppose there being a human nature?
This relates to the recent discussions around human nature and morality.
It seems to be the case that the majority of people on here don't think there is a "human nature" as such. And it also seems to be the case that there are a lot of people on here who care about ethics.
BUT If there is no human nature, then in what are our moral theories grounded? This is my first question.
Me personally, I see morality as the glue that keeps culture/society from falling apart. I think the virtues and vices are grounded in how our cultures are organised, and how they function. Is this arbitrary? Not really. However, I think it does entail that I am a cultural relativist.
My second question: If there is no human nature to ground ethical theory, then what other ethical position is left but cultural relativism?
It seems to be the case that the majority of people on here don't think there is a "human nature" as such. And it also seems to be the case that there are a lot of people on here who care about ethics.
BUT If there is no human nature, then in what are our moral theories grounded? This is my first question.
Me personally, I see morality as the glue that keeps culture/society from falling apart. I think the virtues and vices are grounded in how our cultures are organised, and how they function. Is this arbitrary? Not really. However, I think it does entail that I am a cultural relativist.
My second question: If there is no human nature to ground ethical theory, then what other ethical position is left but cultural relativism?
Comments (104)
Really? What do you mean by "human nature," anyway? What would be the difference between possessing and not possessing "human nature?"
Man has a history, which I think encompasses his nature;
To make sure you and I are talking about the same thing. Here's a definition I got off the web - "the general psychological characteristics, feelings, and behavioral traits of humankind, regarded as shared by all humans." I would add that it should be hardwired. There from the beginning before any social influence. Is that what you mean?
By that definition, I think science has established there is definitely a human nature. I'm sure people will disagree. The big one that comes to mind immediately is the brain and mind structure that supports language. I also think our sociality, the fact that we like each other, is built in. Babies recognize human faces from a very early age. There is evidence that babies are making judgments about what's right and wrong and human agency from an age of 3 or 4 months.
After reading Edward O. Wilson's, On Human Nature, I adopted this definition of human nature: human genetic predispositions. These predispositions produce the psychological characteristics and behaviour common to all humans, being innate.
Also, Paul Bloom (Yale University), a moral psychologist, has specialised in research on morality in babies.
I don't disagree with that definition. I think for the purposes of this discussion we are talking those aspects of human nature that affect behavior and mind.
Quoting Galuchat
I'll add that to my reading list. It's getting pretty long.
I wasn't confused by the way you wrote it originally. I just wanted to make sure we all agreed that we were focusing on one aspect.
I think for something to count as human nature it has to be something innate while simultaneously pointing to or articulating what is fundamentally distinctive about us (so DNA is completely useless). Examples of this innate human nature are Plato's tripartite theory of the human soul, Aristotle's claim that man is the rational animal, Chomsky's ideas about language, perhaps Nietzsche's the will to power, etc. The difference between possessing an innate nature and not is that if the former is true then we can ground our moral claims and give them strong normative force. If the latter is true, and there is no innate human nature, then it appears that we have nothing to ground our moral claims in so they have weak normative force; we would be a social construction just like the socially constructed moral claims. Morality would be completely meaningless and arbitrary. To the question why be good? there would be no sufficient answer. I hope this clears things up :)
You might like Rorty. He tackles exactly this in C,I, and S. We can understand ourselves as groundless. We simply want a certain kind of society, one that maximizes freedom and minimizes cruelty, for instance. I don't find Rorty completely convincing, but he tackles exactly the issue you mention.
I would say that the content of the idea of "man" or humanity involves "his" nature. But part of this content is the knowledge that man is the self-transcending being. While his animal foundation is more or less fixed (till he rewrites his genes), his "cultural" or symbolic nature is an "anti-nature" or a potentially permanent revolution. Hegel comes to mind. Philosophy must lag behind a history that is still in progress. Similarly Dasein's individual "nature" remains open while a particular Dasein is still alive, still evolving. So humanity is a "big" Dasein whose story is still in progress. Thus humanities "nature" is not fixed. We have to wait and see, except you and I presumably won't be around long enough. Even then, the aliens who might excavate our bombed-out planet will never be done fixing what we were, for they would have to be done fixing their own nature. The past is "certain but indeterminate."
If by 'human nature' you mean that all humans share some same essential properties, then yes, morality presupposes there being a human nature, for the following reasons:
(1) Morality implies voluntariness, and voluntariness implies free will. Thus if morality applies to all humans, then all humans must possess free will.
(2) Morality is also called practical reason, which implies reason in general. Thus if morality applies to all humans, then all humans must possess reason.
And lo and behold, the essence or nature of humans is traditionally: an animal with reason and free will. Note, this may not be the only part of human nature, but it is a part of it.
If there is a common denominator it appears to create, explore, and learn, and developing a consensus of values to direct this purpose as a group is the what can be called a community morality. However, it does change all of the time depending upon the community and the individuals in the community. So it is very changeable.
I wonder why you think that "DNA completely useless," but let's set aside DNA for a moment. DNA is a specific biological mechanism of inheritance and expression of traits. All we really need to know is that there are inherited traits that humans express at variance with other animals, that set us apart as a distinctive species. Is that all that you are saying? That's rather obvious, and I can't imagine anyone denying it.
Quoting bloodninja
If I understand you correctly, you are referring to general features of human psychology ("psyche," "spirit," "soul," etc.). And to say that people have "human nature" is just to say that there are such generalizable characteristics that are shared by all, or almost all people. Is that about right? That too seems pretty uncontroversial, as long as you don't get into specifics. Does anyone really deny that?
Quoting bloodninja
No, sorry. Here you are just restating your original thesis: that HN (whatever that is) is a necessary precondition for genuine morality. If HN is as I understood you to mean, then HN is such an obvious and uncontroversial fact, so bound up with our background knowledge about the world and ourselves, that it is hard to even separate it out, so that we could evaluate its specific relationship with morality. You may as well say that for there to be human morality there have to be humans.
The idea of human nature is that human beings are born predisposed to certain behaviors and attitudes, or predispositions, in the generalized sense. As opposed to being born blank slates and being formed entirely by the environment. So the whole nurture versus nature debate, but for the human species and not just individuals.
But it's admittedly a nebulous, generalized concept. I would say that human beings have a sort of general nature that differs from other animals in some ways. For example, we weren't born dogs, as a dog trainer might tell a human who's treating their dog like a child.
Or take Project Nim, where a human mother attempted to raise a baby chimp along with her children as part of a study on to what extent Chimps could learn language. It didn't turn out so well, because well, chimpanzees have different abilities and predispositions to humans, despite their similarities to us.
Pretty sure some people have sided rather strongly with the environmental side of the debate when it comes to human behavior and mental characteristics. The concern is that the EO Wilson's and Stephen Pinker's are advocating biological determinism and social darwinism. Alos concerns over sexism and racism.
It's funny. As I write above, I see this as an issue that can be explained by our physical nature and you focus more on our minds, perhaps our souls, but we come out in very similar places about how it affects our idea of what it means to be human.
I agree with what you're saying. Are you implying that our morality is not dependent on our human nature?
I don't disagree in general, but we should acknowledge that we share much of what we call human nature with other animals. I'm reading "The Feeling of What Happens" by [forgot name]. The most interesting thing he's said so far is that consciousness reflects connecting our higher brain processes with a non-conscious self-regulating processes in our bodies which can be thought of as an image of ourselves, which he characterizes as a person within a person. That person is primarily in the "primitive" parts of our brain that we share with many other animals.
I've talked with a lot of parents who share an experience I had with my own children - they were themselves from the second they were born. Obviously they develop as they get older.
This is a very interesting discussion.
Come now, you won't say that nothing distinguishes our cognitive faculties from those of other species, or that there is a smooth transition? But sure, we ought to have a lot in common with other animals, and psychology should not be an exception. I would be careful about the theory of the "primitive brain" overlayed by higher functions though - I understand that contemporary science paints a more complicated and nuanced picture. It's "almost" as if there was no general architectural plan at work, and things rather developed in a messy ad hoc fashion.
No, I'm not saying that, but we share much, most, of our nature with animals.
Smooth transition? I think there is continuity between other animals and ourselves. Yes, we are different, but not different in kind. I don't buy "What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals."
Quoting SophistiCat
The guy who wrote "The Feeling of What Happens," Antonio Damasio, is a well-known and respected neuroscientist. Whether or not he is completely right, I don't think we need to be "careful" of his theory.
These are absurd statements for anyone who has even casually observed the behaviour of wolf packs, wildebeest herds, starling flocks, etc., or noticed that human beings are different in kind by virtue of possessing the faculty of language (and the capacity for verbal modelling that affords).
If you want to persuade me that animals have a language faculty, please produce examples of animal technology similar in kind to human technology. Sure, chimpanzees and dogs have been in space, but they haven't been issuing instructions at mission control. So get serious, and don't waste anymore of my time with this bullshit.
Sorry but I have to disagree. Historically, there have been different and conflicting ways that we have understood our own humanity. That our cultural self-interpretation has changed over time, shows that any concept of human nature is highly controversial. Moreover, for a feature to count as human nature, it's not sufficient for that feature to be shared by all, rather it must be innate and it must articulate the being of the human (I hope I haven't made things murky by bringing in being, but being is what this discussion is about, not psychology, or soul, but the being of the human). The general feeling I get from culture today, for example, is that we are fundamentally social/cultural constructions, which is the antithesis of human nature because a social construct is not innate and seems potentially (though not necessarily) arbitrary.
Quoting t0m
Thanks for the suggestion. I have never read Rorty, but I definitely will do. He was interviewed in a Heidegger documentary I watched recently. I really liked his demeanor. BTW I'm quite busy with a another project at the moment. I probably won't be ready to discuss The Concept of Time for another two weeks if that's cool? I plan to read bits and pieces of different texts to try to understand it...
Quoting T Clark
If by soul you mean being. :)
Of course some human capabilities are different from what other animals have. The question that divides us is whether the capacity for language, self-consciousness, opposable thumbs - makes us different in kind. You say yes, I say no.
Whenever this kind of issue comes up, I bring out my list. Thank you for the opportunity to do that now.
Identity, self, soul, mind, ego, heart, self-awareness, consciousness, self-consciousness, spirit, me, myself, I, will, being, psyche, character, personality, essence, brain, mentality.
Please pick one or more.
"Rationality is a form of emotionality"
I mean by that that through experience we learn that the world, physical and social, is governed by rules, and that it is in our interest to at least know and understand them. If not follow them,
Those rules get an emotional charge attributed to them, and we tend to favor some rules above others.
I do not believe there are separate functions that distinguish man from animal.
I would consider the difference rather as a result of the interaction of two levels:
emotion and memory.
It would take us too far and I won't try to prove it, simply posit it as an unproven opinion:
There are no programs in the brain, the whole brain is different kinds of memories, guided by different kinds of emotions.
Do you mean it can't be something we share with other animals? If so, I strongly disagree. Our sociality is a huge part of our nature, but the same can be said for chimpanzees. It seems likely, he said without knowing what he's talking about, that that characteristic comes from the same place, the same physical structures in the brain.
Quoting bloodninja
In my view, the characteristics that make it possible for us to develop social/cultural constructions are inborn and part of human nature.
I do not deny the existence of rationality. I am just placing it in a continuum of emotions, many we share with animals.
I do not believe in the dichotomy emotion/ratio.
At the same time, we need the world to be rational.
Just look at a lab mouse in a maze, trying to make sense of the intentions of the psychologist!
I don't know whether this is true or not, but for some people "human nature" is the hinge on which swings the question of whether we can be more peaceful, more caring, more constructive, more etc. OR whether we're doomed to outbursts of war, cruelty, destruction, and so on. It's the basis of the "constructionism vs. essentialism" debate.
It seems to me evident that humans have a nature, just as it is evident that wolves and apple trees have a nature. One of our problems -- problems that wolves and apple trees don't have -- is that we are capable of contriving very destructive behavior which, had it been unmanaged, would have extinguished us quite a while back. It may yet extinguish us.
Morality is our necessary "crowd control" system. It's our built in (we have to learn it) self-control mechanism. "Built in" but not pre-programmed. It has to be taught and learned. But "taught and learned" doesn't preclude a built in, biologically based capacity for crowd-control and self-regulation.
Psychopathy is a proof of how our morality works. People who are extremely psychopathic don't seem to be able to make the neural (biological) connection between "do this and do not do that" and punishment. Most people learn this as children -- because they are predisposed to learn it. Psychopaths can't.
Morality among peoples seems to have a fair amount of commonality. A fair amount, only. We are capable of classifying some pretty ghastly behavior as moral.
I agree. It is through the operation of empathy that ethical knowledge is acquired, and through the operation of conscience that moral conduct is maintained (empathy and conscience being psychological functions which develop in neurotypical human beings).
According to Donald Brown, morality is a human universal.
Brown, Donald E. (1991). Human Universals. New York City: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-87722-841-8.
I think you'll like Rorty. He assimilates Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" and this gives some real content to authenticity, which is otherwise vague if undeniably stirring and resonant. He's a strong writer of English prose, so he's a pleasure to read. I look forward to hearing what you think. Also, two weeks sounds great. It's something to look forward to.
This sounds A LOT like Aristotle in Book 2 of the Nicomachean Ethics:
"Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name (ethike) is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit). From this it is also plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature. For instance the stone which by nature moves downwards cannot be habituated to move upwards, not even if one tries to train it by throwing it up ten thousand times; nor can fire be habituated to move downwards, nor can anything else that by nature behaves in one way be trained to behave in another. Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit."
In other words, the moral virtues are grounded in our nature, according to Aristotle.
Based on your quote, I thought he was saying the exact opposite.
I reread the passage and I agree with your interpretation.
If we go the Levinasian route, it's that ethics is fundamentally originative from a peculiar relationship to the Other. The Other is precisely that which cannot be assimilated into a "Self" worldview, defined and calculated and mixed and organized into a framework. The Other eludes such violence.
So, I think Levinas might have said that trying to pin ethics down to something like a "human nature" is a form of violence to the Other. By doing so, we'd be trying to ground ethics in the familiar and intelligible when the Other is not this way.
Where does the "peculiar relationship" come from?
Why would it need to be "hardwired...there from the beginning" in order to qualify as human nature?
Back to the definition I copied from the web.
Quoting T Clark
If it is not inborn and it develops based on environmental conditions, then it won't be shared by all.
I can't see why characteristics that develop in the process of socialization in all societies would not qualify as natural human characteristics.
There is evidence that the capacity for some human social characteristics - language, morality, sociality - are built in - hardwired. We are not blank slates. There are structures in our brains that provide the potential for many human behaviors.
What do you mean by the process of socialization? How could it be universal if it's dependent on the specific environment that a person is brought up in?
If any human characteristic is only developed through socialization, and is more or less universally (i.e. normally) developed when socialization occurs, then such a characteristic would not be dependent on "the specific environment" but on socialization in general.
Any characteristic or behavior that would not occur in the absense of socialization.
Quoting bloodninja
As you convinced me when you quoted Ari S. Totle, he and I agree that the capacity for a particular behavior or ability is built in. Ari, Janus, you, and I agree that learning is required for it to manifest. I would consider the capacity as part of human nature and not the ultimate manifestation. That's probably a quibble.
Interesting... What does Levinas mean by ethics? I looked up his entry on Stanford encyclopedia which begins: "Levinas's philosophy has been called ethics. If ethics means rationalist self-legislation and freedom (deontology), the calculation of happiness (utilitarianism), or the cultivation of virtues (virtue ethics), then Levinas's philosophy is not an ethics."
I'm not sure what you mean, exactly.
The question implies you have the premise of morals being grounded in human nature.
Yes exactly. How else could they be grounded? Moreover, my current view is that our being is groundless; that there is no human nature in other words. Thus if there is no nature to ground them, then our moral theories appear to be groundless cultural phenomenons. Moralities are entirely relative to one's culture in my current view. I didn't always think this way.
Which part specifically? Otherwise, the view that man is a rational animal with free will comes from Aristotelianism and Scholasticism. Source
To give some examples:
1. God. Which god? Jesus? Allah? Shiva? Buddha? Brahma? Ganesha? Mahavira? etc. etc...
2. Well-being. Okay but how would one know what would count as well-being to begin with? Only by having an idea of the nature of the being in question? For example, The well-being of the human would depend on what it means for a human to live well, which in turn requires something like a description of human nature. It's only upon the basis of some conception of human nature that the idea of "well-being" or flourishing makes sense.
3. Well-being of any sentient beings. No comment.
4. Culture. Well this is EXACTLY my view. And it means that Morality with a capital M is groundless.
5. Nothing. Interesting... What do you mean? Do you mean: we just do what one does because it's what one does, and it's ultimately meaningless?
I'm providing examples of people's views, not my own ones, so any of them, although I'm not sure exactly which religions base their morals on their deities.
Quoting bloodninja
Randomly picking humans from the group of anything imaginable seems biased as we are humans. I'd rather take a rock or something into consideration. This view goes along quite nicely with teleology.
Quoting bloodninja
Why? Because animals shouldn't be treated well or because of reasons related to discussing the subject?
Quoting bloodninja
Yes. Among with every other way it can be interpreted. Your interpretation, as far as I can tell, is morals not existing, but one could also interpret it as morals existing independently of anything else, or human beings having morals but for no underlying reason, or human beings not existing at all (except me, because cogito, ergo sum).
Sorry I don't understand, can you please explain more what you meant here?
Quoting BlueBanana
No because the idea of sentience grounding morality can't be taken seriously. Morality is far too complex to be grounded in sentience.
Quoting BlueBanana Here is my interpretation:
Quoting bloodninja
Morals can be viewed as a thing much larger than us puny humans. Taking our viewpoint of course does warp our perceptions of the matter. Without considering broader points of view, how do we know the conclusions we draw are correct, and not as warped as the point of view?
Quoting bloodninja
Sentience isn't complex? The most conventional view is that morals only apply to sentient beings, and therefor it's quite logical to say that morals are a property of sentient beings or their sentience.
Quoting bloodninja
By that, I meant your interpretation of what I meant by "nothing", not your opinion of the subject.
How so? Morality is only human. God is dead.
Quoting BlueBanana
Sentience is absolutely irrelevant as far as the grounding of morality is concerned. I think you are also misusing the concept "property". How can morals be a property? Do you understand what morality is? Morality is not a property.
No, humans are the only thing capable of understanding the abstract concept of morality.
Quoting bloodninja
I don't see the relevance.
Quoting bloodninja
What, then, explains morals almost universally apply exclusively to sentient beings, if their grounding is not connected to sentience?
Quoting bloodninja
Might be, English isn't my first language. Would it be more correct to say that morality is a property of sentience?
Sartre says that the fact that humans are put upon when living to define their nature is to understand that there are no external nature to which we can base our lives upon - and that we only can have a nature as creatures if we define the defining of things itself as a presupposition of what human nature is all about. I agree with Sartre here. We are the only animals which have to base ourselves upon a partnership (with a distance) between our external and internal self - it is important to point out that the existence of both aspects is an indicator of a human nature having possibility to exist.
Let's take morals to mean the sorting of actions into good/desirable and bad/undesirable. How did they come to be? I burned my hand on the stove. Mary burned her hand on the stove. You saw both of us do that, and learned not to do that.
An accumulation of such simple memories, forgotten in their specifics but still leaving an impression. A few years down the road and I no longer remember who burned their hand, only that I had two votes against doing what they did and no votes for doing what they did.
This to me looks like the atoms of success & failure that form the molecules of morality.
Also, it's not a genealogical story about how morals came to be that I'm interested in. Rather, I'm asking about their grounding. In other words, what do our morals ultimately appeal to in order to receive their justification?
I'd like to see that.
Me too. I really hope that that is not the case, because if it is true (i.e. babies are making judgments from that tender age), it shows how far fucked the human race is ... how soon the contamination of our true essence begins.
A conclusion can be both sensible and ill-conceived.
It's easy to see how this is grounded in biology and physics, but unfortunately that clashes with the currently-fashionable and authoritarian PC cult, so everyone has to pretend there's no such thing as human nature (and not two genders, etc., etc., etc.).
Without human/world nature, which is the grounding for natural law, then either morality is the result of command (God's command) or it doesn't exist (relativism is basically nihilism). The problem with morality being God's command is that ethics trumps commands (e.g. if God commanded you to eat your firstborn, you would revolt).
But how would your view incorporate society's moral changes?
It's possible that there might be more profound moral change, in a sense, if human nature itself becomes more malleable through technology though, e.g. genetic engineering. But supposing that happened, then that would just be a new kind of morality for a new kind of being, the moral principles for "good old-fashioned human beings" would stay the same.
If the changes went far enough, morality might not apply at all (as it doesn't with most animals), because to an extent morality as a practice (a thing to do, a way to be) is quite parochial (it depends on us being social animals, for example).
If the biology changes, that's like the position of the stake (to which the tether is tied) changing. Up till now that's only been possible with fairly slow evolutionary changes, but it's possible that technology might enable faster change now.
Essentially, it's like this: a morality is a set of possible social rules, out there somewhere in possible-social-rule space, that maximizes human flourishing, given our biology and the given nature of the world in general. That makes the pattern of rules objective.
However, you could choose any goal to maximize (for example, "maximize what's best for me and my cronies") and another equally objective pattern of possible social rules would fall out. That's the element in morality that's subjective - the choice of that ultimate goal which crystallizes some particular objective pattern of social rules (again, given human nature and the nature of the world).
But there's a fair amount of continuity and crossover between the older maximization goal given us by our biology ("survive and reproduce") and the newer goals we are developing consciously that are more or less built on top of that - which generally fall into a basket of closely-related ultimate goals, something like "maximize human flourishing", or "maximize happiness," or "live virtuously."
There are enough people with innate goodwill and benevolence to make some selection from that basket the type of ultimate goal that most people do in fact tend to have (and encourage/enforce), therefore most moral rules and laws will tend to maximize that generally benevolent goal. But of course that's all debatable, and human beings do debate it all the time.
Quoting gurugeorge
You appear to be grounding morality in biology. That is all I meant by calling your view biological determinism. You seem to be understanding human nature biologically and thus when you say that morality presupposes human nature you ground morality in our biology.
I don't see how biology is relevant to morality. It might help if you give specific examples of how biology is relevant. Also what do you mean by "nature of the world"? The scientific world?
Human Nature
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nature
Critical Thinking
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking
We use both, simultaneously; a trait only seen in humans.
There might be aliens, tho.
I'm not sure if I can explain my position any better than I already did in that last post, so I'll leave it there.
You would still have trouble getting from what is the case about human nature to what we ought do.
Perhaps the right thing to do is to fight our nature.
The naturalistic fallacy.
Not really. Aristotle had no trouble, Kant had no trouble, Schopenhauer had no trouble, Nietzsche had no trouble, etc. etc.... I think you are misinterpreting Human Nature to be something biological when it is not this at all. Human Nature is NOT biological.
Quoting gurugeorge
Words have multiple meanings in different contexts. It is clear that within the context that we are using these words they mean the same thing. By the way, have you ever thought about slavery? Why is owning a slave immoral within our culture but perfectly moral in prior cultures? Do the humans in these other cultures have a different biology? Do they have a different end goal?
It would be a mistake to think it was "perfectly moral" in earlier societies (it wasn't that "you ought to have slaves"), rather it was expedient, and a function of conquest, for a long time, and it became more and more of a moral question as alternative forms of technology started to come along, which made people realize what had always been the case (that it's immoral to use people to do stuff for you, and immoral to ignore their own agency), as other means to do things, like steam engines. etc., came along. (Also we discovered that paying free people to do things got better results than forcing people to do things.)
So there was always the insult against the dignity of the person, and some people always noticed that, but that signal was swamped by more archaic, immoral patterns of expediency and feelings of superiority, and only became more and more salient as the pragmatic value of slavery diminished.
Our biology is at the root of the bad things (habits and ways of life we call "bad") as well as the good things (habits and ways of life we call "good"); the development of morality is the strengthening of the good tendencies and the falling into disrepute and disuse of the bad tendencies. Or in terms of my post above, it's the gradual discerning of an ideal pattern of social rules, and the gradual eliciting of over-arching goals relating to human flourishing/happiness that we're all gradually homing into agreement on.
It remains an is, from which explanation is needed if you are to derive an ought.
So, do you think it moral?
What does your answer tell us about you?
No of course I don't. That statement doesn't suggest anything about my character. I was only trying to show that morality changes, which is something gurugeorge denies. Another statement I could have made would have been around womens' former inferior socio-political status in western democracies.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
The naturalistic fallacy seems stupid. For example: A clock is a device used to keep time. When one understands the function of a clock, then a standard of evaluation is implicit in the very description of the clock, i.e., because it "is" a clock, it "ought" to keep the time. Thus, if one cannot pick a good clock from a bad clock, then one does not really know what a clock is. Similarly with a knife. If one does not understand that a good knife is sharp, and a bad knife blunt, then they have fundamentally misunderstood the 'is'. Implicit in the 'is' is the ought that the knife ought to be sharp because a knife is used in-order-to cut. In other words, there is a certain teleology in understanding the 'is' of equipment. I would argue that the whole world is made up of these teleological "ought" (in-order-to) relationships, and that the 'is' is only intelligible upon that basis. In a like manner, if one cannot determine good human actions from bad, then one does not really know what the human person is.
Ah. God did it?
Humans are a different being than equipment obviously but by analogy this argument could be extended to humans. How are humans intelligible if you don't account for their teleology, or what they're striving towards/seeking, or how thy understand and interpret themselves in what they are doing, etc.? They are similarly completely unintelligible.
I don't find that argument at all convincing. People are different to knives. The teleology of the knife comes from the purpose for which it was made. If you think people were made for a purpose, then... whence that purpose?
People make their own purpose.
Hi. In my view the notion of the human is a nature of the human. We can only have this discussion because some pre-interpretation of the word 'human' is in play. So for me the issue looks to be how fixed and/or articulated this notion/nature is.
Quoting bloodninja
I suspect you would also agree that how cultures are organized is 'grounded' in our vices and virtues. It looks all of piece, however unstable around the edges (just like the notion/nature of the human and perhaps with this notion/nature.)
Quoting bloodninja
I have nothing against cultural relativism. But what about the usual option of being non- or just barely theoretical on these matters? Clearly I like and have been exposed to fancy theoretical positions (I'm here after all), but more and more I see the gap between the high talk and the low walk. That walk is 'low' not in its being guilty or inferior but rather in that this walk (which includes ordinary conversation) is down in the messy all-of-the-piece that resists our neat categorizations. We can't say what we know. Not all of it. Making it explicit is a fascinating goal, but perhaps that should include an analysis of this drive toward explicitness. Is it a philosophical prejudice that only that that can be made explicit is fully real?
That sounds interesting. How fixed do you think it is?
That's a good question. The 'animal' foundation seems pretty fixed. A certain kind of food is reliably good for a human, while various poisons are reliably bad. The emotional or basic social foundation also seems pretty fixed, if already less so. It feels good to love and be loved, to trust and be trusted. It doesn't feel good to hurt the innocent. But that's perhaps already my adulthood speaking, an adaptation to the changeable world I've found. As a boy I shot snakes for no good reason. I am ashamed now to have been pointlessly cruel. Did it feel right then? Even then it felt evil, but experimenting with evil felt right in some way.
That serpentine digression aside, I suppose technology and language are where the human is especially unfixed. These bodies are terribly important to us. Bad digestion changes who I am. And then language is how I decide specifically to enlarge and sharpen the pre-interpretation that I inherited 'blindly' as the simple truth.
*On the OP. It occurs to me that some thinkers especially want to deny the existence of human nature in order to 'ground' radical freedom. (Sartre). But why not just assert radical freedom? Isn't it really a matter of power? How is some nature binding exactly? As nature it would already be automatic and hence not up for debate.
But human power is finite, so the radical freedom is 'just' an ideological or theological freedom. It just means that I can sleep with lots of women perhaps (or with men in a society that forbids it) and be unashamed on my death bed. Or I can spit on those who spit on me, trade contempt for contempt.
Knifes are intended, by people, to cut. What is it that intends people to some purpose, if not god? evolution? then you do not understand evolution.
Your argument makes no sense.
No, indeed. That purpose is teleology is what undoes your post. You need to argue that teleology is not purpose.
Why?
Heidegger doesn't explicitly use the word teleology as far as I'm aware but he also has a teleological understanding of the human being on many different levels. E.g Being-toward-death is teleological in that this way of being in the world is such that it is explicitly makes sense of itself in terms of the end that it anticipates. And what he calls "potentialities-for-being" are ultimately understood in terms of a for-the-sake-of-which e.g. being a Father. This for the sake of which is teleological in that it kind of points back and structures, or gives sense to various different features and practices in that person's world.
Similarly a knife when understood not as an object, but as equipment, is understood teleologically in terms of its end or what Heidegger calls its 'in-order-to'.
It is up to you to show us what this alternate teleology does...
Nice. In other words we know that our lives won't last. And we live in this knowing and shape our sense of what life is all about in the context of mortality. We can take this back to Ecclesiastes.
[quote=Ecclesiastes]
No one remembers the former generations,
and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow them.
...
I said to myself, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure to find out what is good.” But that also proved to be meaningless. “Laughter,” I said, “is madness. And what does pleasure accomplish?” I tried cheering myself with wine, and embracing folly—my mind still guiding me with wisdom. I wanted to see what was good for people to do under the heavens during the few days of their lives. I undertook great projects: I built houses for myself and planted vineyards. I made gardens and parks and planted all kinds of fruit trees in them. I made reservoirs to water groves of flourishing trees. I bought male and female slaves and had other slaves who were born in my house. I also owned more herds and flocks than anyone in Jerusalem before me. I amassed silver and gold for myself, and the treasure of kings and provinces. I acquired male and female singers, and a harem[a] as well—the delights of a man’s heart. I became greater by far than anyone in Jerusalem before me. In all this my wisdom stayed with me.
I denied myself nothing my eyes desired;
I refused my heart no pleasure.
My heart took delight in all my labor,
and this was the reward for all my toil.
Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done
and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;
nothing was gained under the sun.
Wisdom and Folly Are Meaningless
Then I turned my thoughts to consider wisdom,
and also madness and folly.
What more can the king’s successor do
than what has already been done?
I saw that wisdom is better than folly,
just as light is better than darkness.
The wise have eyes in their heads,
while the fool walks in the darkness;
but I came to realize
that the same fate overtakes them both.
Then I said to myself,
“The fate of the fool will overtake me also.
What then do I gain by being wise?”
I said to myself,
“This too is meaningless.”
For the wise, like the fool, will not be long remembered;
the days have already come when both have been forgotten.
Like the fool, the wise too must die!
[/quote]
So perhaps every social human notion/nature is threatened by individually experienced mortality. In some sense individuality is this distance from what one thinks. We enter the world and find disagreement. We die before the world as a whole has figured it out.
This line from Shakespeare resonates more and more for me. We know how to do what we have to do for the most part, but how deeply do we know any entity apart from the squishy network of this doing? One word we define with still others. Apart from the doing that makes us feel better, it's all fog. Souls and quarks and the physical and the material and blah blah blah. A play of shadows.
"Since no man knows aught of all he leaves, what is it to leave betimes?"
Interesting, I'm not sure I agree with your anthropocentric stance, but I've always solved the Is/ought problem in exactly the same way as you espouse here. That we are already human beings with desires and objectives (no matter where they come from) and therefore certain virtues can be said to be 'good' if they promote those objectives and 'bad' if they frustrate them. I don't see that we have to even know where the purpose came from to reach this conclusion, it is self-evidently there.
What I'm not so clear on in your argument is how your assertion that 'morality changes' doesn't just undermine the very argument you're trying to make about intrinsic purpose. Are you just referring to normative ethics changing rather than the properties of 'good' and 'bad' or are you suggesting that what is 'good' and what is 'bad' are also culturally relative, in which case how do you reconcile that with a defined teleology for a human? To use your knife example, it only works to say a knife 'should' be sharp because we all agree that a knife is 'for' cutting things. If, however, someone were to assert that a knife was 'for' stroking kittens it would not be good that it were sharp.
I have quite strong ethical naturalist views so can use the teleological argument, but I'm intrigued to hear how a cultural relativist squares the two aspects.