Moral facts vs other facts?
I thought I'd have more time to write this, but I've got to get going, and I want to get my thoughts down before I leave.
I think Objective morality makes a lot of sense, I don't remember if there is anyone else here that shares my conviction, but here goes:
Is the question of moral facts, and where they "come from" or what they might be, really any more odd than any other facts? What about if you think there are facts about math? How weird are those?
Edit: okay, I told you I was in a hurry. What I meant to ask, is if the possibility of moral facts are in principle any more odd than any other facts?
I think Objective morality makes a lot of sense, I don't remember if there is anyone else here that shares my conviction, but here goes:
Is the question of moral facts, and where they "come from" or what they might be, really any more odd than any other facts? What about if you think there are facts about math? How weird are those?
Edit: okay, I told you I was in a hurry. What I meant to ask, is if the possibility of moral facts are in principle any more odd than any other facts?
Comments (225)
Commonly, if something is claimed to be objectively so, that is to be a fact, this means that it is inter-subjectively verifiable, most satisfactorily by direct observation. But a claim such as 'the majority of people are social creatures' is not so easily corroborated inter-subjectively; even though everyone knows from personal experience that it is right. The claim that everyone knows this from personal experience is itself a similar case. And yet these, and many like examples, are generally thought to be facts.
So, a moral fact could be, for example, an extension of these kinds of facts coupled with some kind of logic; a logic of practical wisdom, for example. If we accept that (almost) all people are social creatures, and that most of them wish to live in harmony with others, and that it it does not contribute, and in fact works against, the harmonious functioning of societies (the harmonious functioning which we have accepted is what we all want) to have people in that society who want to live with others solely for their own purposes and who have no concern for those others: if we accept that such exploitative-minded people will work against social harmony even if unintentionally, then we might be able to claim that it is a moral fact that we should treat others as we honestly believe they wish to be treated, and that we should expect others to think and behave likewise, and that we should not tolerate flagrant transgressions against this principle (in the pacific sense that we should have nothing to do with such people, buy their products. promote or elect them to positions of power, and so on).
In respect of Cavacava's observation above: there are contingent facts, and a priori truths of logic and mathematics; but is there any ground for 'necessary moral truths'?
As John points out, a major issue in modern ethical discourse is based on the 'is/ought' distinction. This is: that is straightforward enough to make normative statements about matters that can be measured and quantified; in such matters, objective measurement is the basis of objective judgement. As Brian Cox said on Sydney radio last week 'we know, we have a ruler and we measured it'. But what are the norms about 'what is good' or 'what is right?' On what basis are claims of reality or 'objectivity' made in respect to them?
Some will respond: there are countless opinions and schools of thought about those questions, they all seem at loggerheads; it's all too hard to adjudicate or judge. So it's easiest just to default to an 'each to his own' view, which generally tends towards subjectivism and relativism; what is 'right for me', is as far as we can go and the best we can hope for. If you want more than that, you're evangelising!
But I think I could tentatively respond: a necessary moral truth is clearly that all beings wish to avoid suffering, and seek happiness, fulfilment, desireable companionship, and a modicum of physical comfort. Clearly there are behaviours that facilitate those things, and others that undermine them. So the question might be posed in those terms: what kind of attitudes, ways of life, and ethical behaviours, are the most conducive to right living? When put in those terms, you can see a convergence with stoicism and other traditional philosophies.
However I think this approach is undermined by many elements of 'liberal individualism', wherein self-determination, the 'politics of identity' and an emphasis on individual rights undermines many of the tenets of traditional ethical systems.
(Such questions are the the subject of a landmark book, After Virtue, which I have discovered through forums and am in the process of reading. They're very complex questions. )
I am sympathetic to Nietzsche's adage 'There are no facts, only interpretations', which might suggest believing that mathematical facts are no less substantial than moral ones.
But even though I don't find the notion of 'fact' useful, I think there is more substance to the notion of mathematical facts than moral ones, because purported mathematical facts are testable, whereas purported moral facts are not.
I suppose you could assume that. But, how to prove it's anything more than an assumption on your part?
And math fits that paradigm? And you know morality doesn't? It seems to me that just as other facts are not decided by consensus, they are objective in that way, then morality could also be universal, and discovered, not created. I'm not sure how to prove it either way, though.. I'm just pointing out that all facts seem odd. Math certainly has an oddness about it . Numbers not even existing in the real world, and all.
Facts about math are pretty weird really. As one moves away from applications, it's arguably not so different than changing mores. Are numbers sets? Does it matter when it's time to pay the rent?
I don't see how objectivity-in-itself can matter much. We have things like consensus and power. Slavery was legal once. Now racism is bad and will perhaps become illegal. It was bad to be gay. Now it is bad to think that it is bad to be gay.
I had this thought about history recently. Are we taught what really happened, more or less? Then it occurred to me that it was at least as important that we have (or have not) been taught what everyone else has been taught. In short, awareness of the consensus is arguably more important than awareness of what really happened, especially if one could not win over the consensus thereby (had no proof of the time-machine adventure or whatever).
Excepting something like a sacred feeling towards Truth, it's hard to see how objectivity isn't generally boiled down to relationship with others and the power to shape nature according to our desires.
Funny thing about that. I came across John Holbo of the National University of Singapore, who points out that Hume doesn't quite follow his own rules. How did Hume get us to believe reason Ought to be slave to the passions? Because he says so?
To me that's a central question. Why ought we follow this "reason" thing? We have to be "unreasonably" invested in Reason to get the game going. Reason does make sense however as a tool for pleasure, as filthy as that may sound. "Pleasure" admittedly remains elusive, but we stop asking questions as the bliss rises.
I think you know me well enough by now to not be surprised that I don't believe that that, or anything else, can be proven beyond doubt. All of everybody's beliefs rest on assumptions, so it adds no information to say that any particular statement rests on assumptions. One has to either challenge the assumptions by asserting that one considers them to be false, or provisionally accept them.
What we can do is demonstrate a test of a purported mathematical fact, that almost everybody will agree is a valid test, and that it confirms or denies the purported fact. That would satisfy most people's definition of 'testable'.
Whereas with a purported moral fact, we couldn't even find a way to try to demonstrate it.
Unless of course, we want to take a very heuristic definition of 'moral fact', such as 'something that most people in this society would agree is immoral'.
Did Hume say it 'ought to be slave'? I thought he just observed that it is - or at least appears to be - a slave.
I'd be surprised if he said 'ought to be' but will accept correction if precise references are given. I'd look it up myself (in the Treatise, I'd imagine) but I'm a bit distracted this morning so maybe somebody else will do that.
Similarly so for the reverse.
So it's quite possible to accept mathematical facts without oddity while finding moral facts odd. One might say that in the former case we are all already familiar with facts. Facts are known to us. But in the latter case, with moral facts, we can't say the same thing. People dispute even the most basic precepts and prescriptions -- and not just to be an odd duck, but on a regular basis. Where I can settle how many bottles of beer I have in the fridge by opening the fridge and counting the number of bottles of beer that I have, and similarly so with many other actions which I perform on a daily basis with others, I can do no such thing with moral principles. There are those who will agree with my moral principles, but it would not be strange to find those who disagree with them.
What would be strange would be if there was something we could all point to to settle this dispute. One might even say that we would have to have another perceptive power to perceive such things, and so it's like positing the possibility of a demon or other such extra-real entities; in some sense possible but in no sense worth taking seriously until some sort of demonstration has been performed, ala mathematics.
At least, in the world we happen to live in.
Even math can at least be demonstrated. Though I would agree that mathematics is an ontological oddity, at least with respect to some metaphysical presuppositions (and in the sense that I don't quite know how to place it), it would still differ in that math can be demonstrated -- where moral principles can't. There is no calculus where we can prove this or that moral precept as of yet, at least, which holds the same force as mathematics.
So even by that analogy it seems like one could consistently hold that mathematical facts are not odd, while moral facts are odd, since the force of demonstration of math is stronger than the force of demonstration for morals -- at least, while that still remains to be the case.
The 'slave to the passions' is a different subject. The passage I was referring to is this one:
Emphasis added. The underlined phrases are the key to the argument as they point out that the relation implied by 'ought' is of a different kind to the relation implied by 'is'. Whereas statements about 'what is' can be justified by reason and logic, or by observation about relations of particulars, the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded on either.
That is the 'is/ought' problem in a nutshell.
From the Wikipedia article on the subject
I think that's the key point. Unless you can explain what sort of thing would verify or falsify a moral claim such as "X is immoral" then the very notion of a moral fact is vacuous.
You're making assumptions. You're claiming to know that there is nor will there ever be any way to falsify a moral claim.
Maybe there is/will be, maybe not.... I'm saying, "consider the possibility". I don't buy the argument, "we know it's not possible." Especially given the oddness of all facts. Given what I know about the world, the possibility of moral facts doesn't look all that odd.
David Hume
No, because we have a means to test the truth of the claim.
Where did I claim that?
I didn't make such an argument.
Are you sure? How would you falsify the claim that 2+2=4? Is it true because everyone accepts it, or do we all accept it because it is objectively true?
So, right now, I don't know if I believe mathematics is actually falsifiable, or not. But, regardless, there are issues with the entire idea of falsification/verification in the first place. For instance, how do you falsify/verify the claim, "all claims must be falsifiable?" Looks to me like someone snuck in another Ought.
In the end, all we do all seem to assume that "all _____ Ought to be falsifiable." Why do we assume that? Or do we know it? How do we know? How could we know?
Maybe we "know" that all ____ Ought to be falsifiable like we "know" there are moral facts.
It is significant that the ten commandments are couched as future tensed - 'thou shalt...'.
'Thou shalt bring thy wife a coffee in bed in the morning' is a predictive commandment that becomes a fact if and when it is done, in the same way that 'the sun will rise tomorrow' becomes a fact if and when it does rise.
All of which is also closely connected to his claim that reason is the slave of passion, because what he is attacking is not morality or prediction as such, but the attempt to rationalise everything, to derive the world from argumentation alone.
One might say that the world of mathematics is just such a world of pure argumentation, and Hume has no problem with that either; but he points out that one has to add the real world to the mathematical world to arrive at a fact. Thus given the facts that I have £2 in my pocket, and £2 in my piggy bank, pure reason tells me that I have £4.
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Moliere
The idea of moral facts does seem a bit odd, but rather than supporting the case for a moral subjectivism or emotivism, it might rather be evidence that the idea of a fact in general already carries with it an implicit exclusion of morality and the human attitudes and language relevant to it.
We can understand this historically and sociologically, and the imperative to take this approach is supplied by the history of philosophy. In Aristotle, meta-ethics and normative ethics, fact and value, are integrated; but in the twentieth century meta-ethics and normative ethics became separated, and fact and value got divorced some time earlier. So I don't see how one can address the question of moral facts without paying attention to how the question came up in the first place, and like MacIntyre, I think this is a properly philosophical endeavour (it's not so much that philosophy is necessarily secondary to and derivative of history and society, but that philosophy is too rarely historical and sociological).
[quote=MacIntyre, After Virtue]For the middle ages mechanisms were efficient causes in a world to be comprehended ultimately in terms of final causes. Every species has a natural end, and to explain the movements and changes in an individual is to explain how that individual moves toward the end appropriate to members of that particular species. The ends to which men as members of such a species move are conceived by them as goods, and their movement towards or away from various goods are to be explained with reference to the virtues and vices which they have learned or failed to learn and the forms of practical reasoning which they employ. Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics (together of course with the De Anima) are as much treatises concerned with how human action is to be explained and understood as with what acts are to be done. Indeed within the Aristotelian framework the one task cannot be discharged without discharging the other. The modern contrast between the sphere of morality on the one hand and the sphere of the human sciences on the other is quite alien to Aristotelianism because, as we have already seen, the modern fact-value distinction is also alien to it.[/quote]
Aristotle had a teleological view of human beings (and of the other things in nature). For him, it is essential to what a human being is (so we seem to be talking about facts) that it has certain characteristic goals and thus values.
But the Enlightenment rejected teleology to produce a mechanistic understanding of nature and increasingly of human beings as well. This annexed the realm of facts. To take the mechanistic stance on human behaviour is to remove any talk of reasons and purposes, which means that insofar as there are facts about human beings, they cannot involve reasons and purposes, thus they cannot be about morality as traditionally understood. Which leaves the idea of moral facts looking rather...odd.
Thus the alienation of morality from what it is to be human, of values from facts, makes it almost inevitable that morality will then be seen as either eternal, like mathematics, or else illusory or subjective.
The radical upshot is that most modern moral philosophers, paying no attention to this history, don't know what they're talking about. And this is not just about the history of philosophy; it is about the changing meaning of morality in changing historical and social circumstances.
So my answer is: yes and no. On the one hand, moral facts do seem a bit odd to us moderns, but given a different way of living, they need not.
l'd say that misunderstands the shift in moral philosophy significantly. The removal of telos moves understanding of morality from ideal to worldly-- moral value becomes understood not as a fact that rules what we ought to do, but an expression of states of the world. We see this unconsciously manifest "subjective" accounts. A turn away from an ideal morality when which rules from outside our lives, to one which is an expression of the living world.
Aristotle's ethics are ideal. The logical rule of telos governs what ought to done. Despite being virtue ethics, they are backwards-- the moral significance is thought an application of logic to the world, rather than the world expressing a logic(moral) significance. Aristotle is part of the pre-modern view of ethics as alien to the world.
If it weren't human nature to necessarily act in a particular way, then only moral nihlism could obtain. Or so the story goes.
But humans don't have a necessary nature. Part of the significance of ethics is that we enact one possibility over another. A nature such that we necessarily behave (a telos) a certain way is impossible. Moral value is expressed despite the absence of telos. The world has moral significance, even though there is no necessity we will behave ethically.
This particularly points out what I am talking about. If moral value obtains regardless of whether people respect it, how can it be a "reason" or a "purpose?" A murder certainly doesn't have any sort of "reason" or "purpose" to not kill their victim, their intent is the exact opposite, yet their act is immoral. Without reference to their "reason" or "purpose," it's still true they are immoral.
Moral significance has nothing to with a reason or purpose. It's a logical expression of states themselves-- the murder isn't wrong for some reason or purpose, it's just wrong to kill this person. They ought not die. There is no separation between the world and its moral significance.
We find that Aristotle's account of morality is a distant ad hoc justification of ethics. Why is the murder wrong? "It's against human nature" he says, as if being an unjustified killing was somehow not enough to define its immorality. Ideality-- it's only so if formalised and grounded on some particular experience.
It is known to be wrong itself-- the death is harm on the world. Our ethics philosophy becomes about actions and their significance, not defending some idea held be the source of moral value.
If you can't have it both ways, then that just means that only the "is" part of the statement is true and not the "ought" part.
Or are you suggesting that there is some greater contradiction inherent in the is/ought problem?
If you're right, what does it mean?
Maybe you can get ought from is?
What do you think is an example of a moral fact?
I think there are some tautological moral facts.
For example "There is such thing as morals" might be a moral fact.
You cannot. It is a matter of logic. However, this does not preclude telling folks what they ought to do, fortunately. It merely precludes telling them that the facts (the is-ness of things) prove it.
His 'ought' here is a recommendation in order to avoid error. If one is in the business of proving conclusions from premises, one cannot get an 'ought' conclusion from 'is' premises. If one is in the bullshit trade, other considerations apply.
Consider the counter example anonymous66 made.
The fact that "logic is a slave to passion" is not contradicted by the ought of "logic ought to be passion's slave."
If it is a fact that logic is the slave of passion why is it not a fact that logic ought to be passion's slave?
The passion to flourish obligates one to have a passion for correct reasoning, because it helps one to flourish, by avoiding superstition, reaching true conclusions etc. To the extent that such passions are ubiquitous, moral obligations become universal.
I'm not sure if this answers your question, as you have not in fact provided a counter example by way of an argument...
Maybe I am not wording it very well.
I was not making an argument, I was asking a question.
Why does the is statement "logic is a slave to passion" qualify as a fact, whereas the statement "logic ought to be a slave to passion" is not a fact? Why does the is/ought problem apply here.
To me it is interesting, because in order for the ought statement in this example to be a fact. then the is statement would also have to be a fact.
That, to me at least, seems to imply there is some connection between the is and ought statements.I thought it might be a counter example in the sense that in some cases, this example, there is a clear connection between is and ought.
One might argue that the is statement is not a fact and that therefore the ought statement is not a fact either, but that would also imply that the ought statement is dependent upon the is statement.
Or one might argue that the is statement is a fact, but the ought statement is not fact. And to me, that is the most curious option, for there seems to be no reason why the ought statement should not be a fact as well, again implying a connection between is and ought. This is also the question I am asking: if the is statement is fact, then why is the ought statement not also a fact?
The last option is to argue that the is statement is not a fact, but the ought statement is a fact. That is probably an example of when the is/ought problem is deployed and argued that there is no readily apparent explanation as how the ought was derived from the is.
I hope that makes more sense.
Well of course there is a connection. There is a connection between a prediction and a fact too, despite that one cannot derive a will-be from a has-been. Hume does not present an argument, but merely declares that it ''ought to be'. There is a deal of evidence presented that 'it is'.
You ought to think this through. If you do, then the facts will be identical with your obligation just declared.
But if you don't, then they won't, and that is why your obligation is not a fact, but an admonition.
I don't get it?
I am not sure what you are saying here.
Are ought statements moral[/I] statements, and if they are, does that mean that ought statements that are facts are [i]moral facts?
Quoting anonymous66
I don't know if you read the rest of the post where I gave some examples of common claims that are usually considered to be facts, but are not susceptible of easy verification by observation?
Simple math like 2+2=4 is easily verifiable by observation. More complex math consists in formal proofs of theorems; so again it is unlike moral claims because in the latter there is no question of proof being involved.
I would say that instantiations of number exist everywhere in the real world; the difficulties arise since numbers are understood to be independent of their instantiations, and are thus generalities and are not particulars; and it is not clear how generalities or universals "exist"; or indeed if it appropriate to speak of them in terms of existing.
When you say that "facts are not decided by consensus" you are thinking about ostensive facts, and it is true that these are not thought to be decided by consensus, but on the contrary are the very things that drive consensus. But there are also discursive facts, which are decided by consensus. So, the question seems to become about whether purportedly objective moral facts are analogous to ostensive (objective) facts or to discursive (inter-subjective) facts. I'm sure this is a very complex question about which books could potentially be written (and probably have been), so I don't think there's much chance that we'll be answering it satisfactorily here today.
Consider two examples I gave of the kinds of claims that might be taken to support the idea of an objective morality: that people are almost universally social beings that desire to live harmoniously with others and that living with, but having no concern for others, and exploiting them for one's own ends creates disharmony. If these claims are accepted as being objectively true, then it would seem to follow that it is morally wrong to seek to live with others, and yet to, quite deliberately refuse (as opposed to psycho-pathologically fail) to have any concern for them, and to coldly consider them to be merely means to the achievement of one's own ends. But this would seem to be an inter-subjective moral truth, since the exploiter would not be compelled to agree with the majority, because she may have no desire to live truly harmoniously with others, but only to preserve the appearance to the extent that is required to serve her intentions to deliberately and deviously exploit them.
It treats virtue as if it is an outside rule, a logical nature we must necessarily live up to by our existence as humans. Like Kant's duty( "nature" is basically Aristotle's CI), moral value is about living up to a grand outside rule, rather than the moral significance of our lives.
I don't think this is right at all. Kants CI is a purely rational imperative; whereas Aristotle's notion of virtue is bound with the idea of the soul, with the form of the human. This form, for Aristotle, determines the nature of what is it to be human and what it is to flourish as human, It involves the physical, the instinctive, the affective, the volitional, the rational and the spiritual, all of which must function harmoniously within themselves and with the others; for virtue to obtain.
Required for this is phronesis (practical wisdom). Aristotle's conception of practical wisdom could not be more different than Kant's idea of practical reason. The latter is utterly rule-based, whereas the former operates independently of any and all imposed rules and consists in a kind of immediate intuition as to how to act, an ability which cannot be directly taught like a set of rules may be, but develops naturally in those who by nature possess the right qualities (think of athletic ability as an analogy) and receive a proper education.
When it comes to moral behavior there is an unlimited (within the requirement for harmonious function) potential for flexibility in Aristotle's idea of virtue; whereas as Kant's CI is a paragon of rigidity. For Kant the kinds of acts that are wrong are always and in every circumstance wrong; the word 'imperative' says it all!
The point is that they share the same logic of understanding moral value based off a source idea rather than itself. Kant uses the CI as a foundation for ethical value-- moral value is determined by whether it fits with that idea. Aristotle uses nature in the same way. How do we know what is ethical? Not by knowing what is ethical, but rather by understanding this foundational idea of "nature."
But the idea for Aristotle is not that we use a rational principle 'nature', and draw out it's logical, ethical entailments. It is, instead, that we intuitively grasp the form of the human, in ourselves and others, and and then become harmonious to what is intuitively known to us; then we will naturally act in accordance with, and refine our natural capacity for, that kind of intuition or phronesis. The idea is that any purely static, rule based imperative, if followed, would be the death of our natural capacity to have a dynamically alive grasp of virtue.
But this is not true. Not only to we frequently not intuitively grasp ethical action, but we don't grasp it on the basis of "nature."
If we are to be virtuous, we grasp it in the act of being so and know it on those terms-- "nature" is irrelevant. The virtue of action is all that matters. "Nature" is doing no work in the role of understanding ethics. It just an ad hoc justification given to ground ethics, to give the illusion moral value is logically derived-- which is why Aristotle comes into such conflict with modern moral philosophy (i.e. anything that understands the is/ought distinction), despite its individualistic worldly concerns that would seem to fit with modern culture.
The point is that although we must be rational creatures in order to exercise such intuitive judgement; it does not follow from that that the acts of exercising the intuitive judgement, or the intuitive judgements themselves, must be either direct results of processes of reasoning, or actual processes of reasoning.
In an analogous way one must be a rational being in order to exercise aesthetic judgement but this does not entail that all, or even any, aesthetic judgements must themselves be processes of, or the results of processes of, reasoning.
Indeed, we can say such knowledge is never a result the process of reasoning because making such an argument requires that knowledge to be acquired. What is "nature?" We can't present this as a pointer to ethical action, unless we already know virtuous action. It fails to "derive" what is virtuous.
One does not have to be a "rational being (whatever that's supposed to mean)" to exercise aesthetic judgement. They just need to feel/think something is beautiful/ugly. It's worldly-- a being exists with (an) understanding of beautiful/ugly-- not ideal.
I don't understand why you are agreeing with me and yet writing as though you think you are disagreeing. In the case of Kant's CI reasoning is certainly involved, practical reasoning, so what you write is certainly wrong in that context.
A 'rational being' is a being that is capable of reasoning about the nature of itself, others and the world. Do you think animals are capable of making ethical or aesthetical judgements?
More than that: animals make ethical and aesthetic judgements all the time. At least the ones who understand some is ethical/unethical or beautiful/ugly. No doubt some animals would seem to lack such understanding or feelings, but that's no issue for my argument. Then they just aren't aware of ethical or aesthetic significance.
"Rationality" has nothing to do with it. Understanding ethics or aesthetics is a question of existence, not an idea.
I think the question is, which facts are facts even though they can't be verified? The point of this thread is that facts are odd things. And I don't think the statement "you can't get an ought from an is" stands up to scrutiny. An obvious question is "why not?" I'm starting to wonder why Hume didn't notice his own contradiction (he said "you can't" and then he went and did it himself).
I think you must have a different understanding of math than I do. I think you actually just know that 2+2=4.
I'd be very impressed if you could find a way to explain how to falsify mathematical claims (have you never heard the story of how it took Russell and Whitehead 300 pages to show why 1+1=2?). And then you'd have to explain just why it is that falsification itself is important. And after that, you'd have to explain how to falsify the claim "claims must be falsifiable". I think I see a conundrum.
And I wanted to point out that facts are odd things. I'm not convinced that moral facts would be any more odd than "just plain old regular facts".
But, I don't know. These are just thoughts I have after reading/listening to John Holbo.
It's not ethically binding. "You can't get an ought form an is" is a an "is statement." Hume is stating a logical truth.
Whether it is ethical to state or believe that logical truth is a different question. In an ethical sense, we can't state anything without resorting to an ought. If I think we ought to understand , "you can't get an ought from an is," then I have to argue that in terms of an ought. I have to be bound by an ought.
The truth "You can't get an ought form an is" is unaffected by this thought. It's still true even is everyone believes you can get an ought from an is.
Is it binding in other ways?
And you would prove that, how exactly? Is that "truth" falsifiable? Verifiable?
Looks to me that what you mean to say is "we all Ought to accept that you can't get an ought from an is".
As to the proof, that's in the logical discintion between "being true" and "being ethical." If existence made ethics, then simply being so (an "is") would define ethical behaviour. This is not true. Many states are unethical. To be "ethical" is a different meaning than being something that "is."
It looks like you've just found another way to say, "I know there can't exist moral facts".
Utilizing the CI, involves using reason: I'm not taking about "talking and reasoning about the CI".
I'd say that's exactly the issue.
These points about ethical are drawn from reasoning about what we know about ethics. The "is/ought"distinction is shown by that ethics, an "ought," does not mean the same as just being so, an "is."
If you can locate meaning of ethics in the first place, then you won't understand how the discintion is drawn. You won't be able to tell the difference between saying: "X was ethical " and "X is so." I'm sceptical you are really that unsure though.
Let's say someone kills another person going about their daily business in the street. This state "is so." It exists. Does this mean that the person ought to have been killed?
Look at it this way. How long did it take us to figure out some facts about our world? We made estimates of the diameter of the earth for thousands of years before we finally got it right. Seems to me that there might also be a learning curve IF moral facts, as well.
I think the point of that formulation is simply that we can verify and thus objectify 'is's'. If I say, pointing: "Look there is a dog", you can easily verify that there is in fact a dog there. Of I say, "You ought not treat your friends that way"; there is nothing verifiably obvious that can be pointed at in an analogous way. That is the basic way of thinking about the two cases; that it is a fact that there is a dog there (or not) whereas it is not a fact in anything like the the same kind of straightforward way that can be directly indicated, that you ought not treat your friends that way. There are many shades in between, though, and I already gave a couple examples.
Quoting anonymous66
I can place two oranges on the table, and then immediately see that there are two oranges. Then I can place two more oranges next to them, and directly see that there are now four oranges. I can repeat this experiment as many times as I like and the result, it seems obvious will always be the same; for the simple reason that objects do not appear out of nowhere; and even if they did that would not contradict the formula, if I really did put two oranges there both times. This is a matter of direct observation and has nothing to do with the project of the Principia Mathematica; which was to try to show that 1+1=2 can be derived purely logically.
According to Kant one knows that killing is wrong, not by an intuition, but by means of a process of reasoning that determines if it accords with his maxim of universalizability, or produces a contradiction.
Now, if you want to say that it is only by intuition that we can know that logical principles are self-evident; then I would tend to agree with you, logical principles are precisely formulations of what seems incontrovertibly self-evident; but that is another matter altogether.
What's the point of a discussion if you make objections to what I have written, but are not talking about the same thing?
You do this a lot Willow; as I and many others have repeatedly pointed out to you. Perhaps it's time to look at your ways of engaging and try to make sure that what you write stays relevant to the subject under discussion. The first step is careful and charitable reading.
There are claims about ethics in your argument. You are suggesting Hume's "is/ought" distinction isn't known to be a truth about ethics.
I'd say it took us no time at all. Any instance of knowledge is occurs in the moment it exists. No doubt we make estimates all the time, but these either fully capture what we want to know (e.g. Newtonian physics works for certain problems) or they amount to not knowing it at all. Knowing cannot be work.
Getting knowledge can be a lot of work, setting up the right experiments, finding the right environment to inspire new knowledge, studying what's gone before to reflect back against what you know, etc.,etc., but that occurs before we gain an instance of knowledge.
I suspect you don't really have a conflict with the is/ought discintion though, for you appeal to "moral facts" seems to be more about protecting an objective morality. In that sense, there is no conflict with the is/ought distinction. "Ought facts" are just a different sort of truth to "is so facts."
Because you are asserting what I'm not talking about defines what I am talking about.
My point was that Aristotle, Kant and you were misapply rationality in the context of describing how we understand ethics. You made a truth claim about how we understood ethics-- that it was through rationality, the "nature" of Aristotle, the CI of Kant, as if thinking those ideas is how we exist with moral knowledge. I'm pointing out this is not true. It's a fiction.
Are you claiming that all claims Are verifiable, or that all claims Must be verifiable? What do you know of Logical Positivism and why it failed?
You may have a point about how they were working on how to derive 1+1=2 logically. But, do you know why they wrote the Principia Mathematica in the first place? And do you know if their project was considered a success?
You just haven't read what I wrote, or at least haven't understood it, if you think I was claiming that moral actions must be the outcome of following rules. You were arguing that Kant's deontogical ethics and Aristotle's virtue ethics are virtually the same insofar as they both consist in following rational principles. I was pointing out that is not correct, and that Aristotle and Kant are very different on this; Aristotle's ethics consists in intuitively following nature, and meta-ethically speaking his idea is to intuitively follow nature, not to rationally follow principles derived from ideas about our intuitive nature.
If you can't see that distinction, then perhaps that's the problem. So as far as I can see you are interpreting the situation exactly arse-backwards. If you are going to make an objection to what I have written here, then at least take some time and thought to ensure that the objection is actually relevant to what I have written.
I don't know how you got that from my posts. And it seems to me that the only way you could know it is true, is if you know there are no moral facts. What I'm attempting to show is that the existence of moral facts isn't inconceivable, given the strangeness of all facts. I think I already said, "I don't know if there are, or how to prove it one way or the other."
Calling it "human telos" doesn't make it any less an outside rule. Actions don't derive from purposes and intentions. They exist. A purpose or intention does not define any action-- I may think I should do something or think I will do something, but end up not doing it at all.
There is no "logical deriving." Actions and the ethical significance they express are themselves.
No, I am not making that claim at all. Perhaps some things I could claim would be verifiable to me, in the sense that they are intuitively obvious, but would be impossible for anyone else to verify.
When it comes to what we experience, whether it is publicly verifiable or not, nothing is provable, in the sense of being deductively certain. What one person experiences is never empirically verifiable by others unless the experience is of something in the public realm. The exact nature of what I experience can not be known by you, for example, or perhaps even exhaustively known by myself.
Yeah. Facts and knowledge are weird, aren't they? We think we can verify/falsify the things we think we know. But, just try to prove it. And how to verify claims about verification?
I haven't read the work; but from various references to it I have come across I have formed the impression that it was an attempt to determine a set of logical principles form which all mathematical truths could be derived.
They are; but I think in light of that we must be satisfied to trust our best intuitions in matters that are not susceptible of empirical or logical verification or falsification. I just hate the PC idea of following or bowing to the current trends in academic thought when it comes, in particular, to spiritual matters, it is such a stultifying idea.
This is where the issue lies. "Nature" is an idea. In arguing that we intuitively follow nature, Aristotle has introduced a rational principle which supposedly grants us moral knowledge. We will know virtue when we follow our "nature." It functioning in the same way as the CI in Kant. We will know good when we follow the CI.
It's Aristotle's idea to intuitively follow nature is to understand virtue, not an argument that virtue is known intuitively. We're supposed to be relying on the rational ground of "nature" to understand what's virtuous.
Yes, 'nature' is an idea, but nature is not; here you are failing, among other things, to get the 'use/mention' distinction that is so dear to AP.
If you follow your own nature and you are a brutish psychopath; then you might kill people. If you follow your own nature and you are a highly cultivated, educated, compassionate and rational women of virtue, then you will likely commit acts that are morally good. No rules need to be followed in either case.
Nature is an idea.
It a generalised concept that doesn't refer to any particular state of the world. There is no-one who is "nature," no state of the world, no action, no particular expression of ethical significance.
The problem with Aristotle is similar to the issue of equivocations seen science, where the concepts we used to describe the meaning of empirical states are confused with the states themselves.
Indeed, but the problem is it doesn't consider what outside "nature." The brutish psychopath is by definition only considered capable of kill people, whole the rational woman of virtue is by definition only considered capable of moral goodness.
Instances where either one acts otherwise are considered impossible becasue they go against the "nature" which supposedly defines how must act.
If nature is an idea in the sense that you describe here then states are ideas; the world is an idea, actions are ideas, everything is an idea. If that is what you want to claim then you are an idealist.
I got the impression they attempted it, because otherwise, math is only intuitive. Can you really falsify something that is intuitive?
I agree, I think that in the final analysis, both math and logic must be intuitive. So, the whole project of reducing either to a set of fundamental axioms just pushes the problem back a step. How do we know the posited axioms, which cannot themselves be proven from within the system they are taken to support are true? We can know they are true only because they are self-evident to us. What does it mean to be self-evident? It means to be intuitively obvious.
Our thinking about those states, our descriptions, our categories are always our ideas. Whether we are accurate or not, right or wrong or not, they are our thoughts which are a distinct state of the world-- are descriptions and concepts are not the-thing-itself.
This is the opposite of idealism. Things are defined in themselves rather than by our ideas.
Is the world an idea then?
I'm not saying Aristotle is Kantian in the sense of having a rule thought to be floating above the world constraining what can be done. My point is that, like Kant (and many other moral philosophers), Aristotle treats moral value as ideal.
It is something "we are meant to be" separate to our actions in the world-- in knowing the nature of the psychopath, we know killing will suit him, in knowing the nature of the rational, compassionate woman of virtue, we know moral goodness will suite her. This is not true. The woman might have compassion for Nazi goals and the psychopath might be content to limit or stop their violence.
Yes and no.
Our concepts of the world are ideas. States of the world are things and are not ideal.
2+2=4 isn't as easy to falsify as you think. You're basically appealing to our intuition. You're saying, "we all know 2+2=4, right?" The question you need to ask yourself, is again, "do we all know it because it's true... or is it true because we all agree?"
Remember the white swan problem? Find one black swan, and your theory is shot. You haven't falsified anything. You're just stating, "we all know 2+2=4, right?" "it seems obvious" doesn't work for ethics, why do you use the phrase when it comes to math? It's like you think there some "mathematical facts" out there in the universe somewhere.
But, anyway, I see you admit that math is intuitive in another post above.
Quoting John
That just seems wrong to me in a way that is incrumulating. 8-)
No, he doesn't.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
No, it isn't.
It's shown otherwise with your own example.
You expected, without reference to actions, that the psychopath with be suited to killing and the rational, compassionate woman to morally good actions. Analysis of them in reference to moral action was made on what you expect them to do, based on the concepts you have of them, not on what actions they actually take or what they understand.
He's not too far wrong actually. My position is there is no "ground." Truths are worldly (states of existence) or they are in-themselves (logical). Idealism is false. There is no "ground" of an idea which determines any truth.
(1) is true in the sense my points don't depend on them making sense to anyone.
(2) is also true because ideas don't limit what the world can be. Just because someone thought or said something in the past doesn't mean they can't think something different or even something inconsistent with it. I am always free to take issue with any argument someone makes, even if it were to contradict something I (or anyone else) said.
I'm even free to argue pure nonsense or incoherence if I want (e.g. you are wrong becasue the spade is in the sky and cups sing with dancing lasers on their way to my sister's birthday party). So is anyone.
Ideas to not define which states of the world occur or can occur. The world and logic cannot be reduce to one unified form, principle or idea which accounts for everything. You can't rule the extent of the world or meaning by what you think it is meant to be. Things and meaning always extend beyond you and your ideas.
So all you're saying basically is that 'the world' is an idea but the world is not. So, why, according to you, does the same not apply to nature.
:-}
I'm saying "the world" and the world are ideas-- both are our concepts about the world. The former being our concept of speaking about our concept of the world, the latter being our concept of the world. "Nature" and Nature are similar.
States of the world themselves are neither of these. The world doesn't depend on us thinking about it to be. "The world" and the world are both our concepts, significance in representation, meaning expressed by existing experiences. These are never the "thing-itself." Outside of us, there are many existing states and logical truths which are never any of our ideas, no matter how well or badly we might think of talk about them (if we even do at all).
Well, I haven't actually claimed that it is falsifiable, but that it is, within the limits of our definitions, (and what else do we have to work with?) verifiable as I described.
The black swan analogy doesn't work as far as I can see, because even prior to the discovery of black swans it would have been easy enough to imagine and describe a scenario in which encountering a swan of any colour other than white would falsify the claim "all swans are white".
Can you imagine and describe a scenario in which 2+2=4 would be falsified? I can't.
It's not really apt to say that I have "admitted that maths is intuitive" since I never claimed otherwise.
So, if the world and nature have the same status according to you, then just as there may be states of the world which do not consist in thought, why can there not be a following of nature which does not consist in thought?
I disagree; the former is a word that stands for the concept of the world, or better, stands for the word that stands for the world and the latter is a word that simply stands for the world. If the latter were a word that stood for our concept of the world then the former would be a word that stood for our concept of our concept of the world; and that's just plain ridiculous. In any case what you have said above would place you firmly in the idealist camp, despite any protestations from you to the contrary.
I don't wish to be rude, but the rest of your last post seems like gibberish to me.
The problem is following. That's an idea of what the world is meant to do. You take that meaning (e.g. psychopath) and say it derives a different truth (e.g. suited to killing), without taking into account that the world is distinct from the idea which is our expectation of it.
[quote="John]the former is a word that stands for the concept of the world and the latter is a word that simply stands for the world[/quote]
That's what I said. The world, which simply stands for the world, is our concept.
Our experiences stand in for things which are not them. That's how we know about stuff that's distinct from us. I experience my computer screen, but I am not my computer screen. My experience copies the meaning of the object such that I am awareness of the computer screen (rather than, you know, just being a "third person" computer screen who feel and thinks nothing).
You've already admitted what I'm arguing here. The world stands for the world. It is not, itself, the world. It's concept, our understanding of meaning, not the world itself.
The account of realism and idealism you are giving is backwards. For the realist, experience "stands" for things. For the idealist, experience is all things (i.e. experience=thing-in-itself). That's why things without experience are impossible under idealism.
I think this is an odd way of talking, at least.
I would separate the argument for moral realism from the argument for moral facts. The former is a more general belief where the argument for moral facts is a particular kind of moral realism, but we need not accept the existence of moral facts while still arguing that morality is somehow real.
I would also separate the argument for moral realism from the argument for objective morality. This I would do mostly because "objective" is a slippery word.
Further, I would say there's a difference between "there are moral facts" and "we can not say much without resorting to ought claims" -- since we can dispute the existence of moral facts while still claiming that one ought to do something. Error-theory seems to account for this possibility fairly well; at least, it explains how we can both talk about and make claims about ought-sentences, or with them, while at the same time there not being any kind of entity to back up such talk.
Washington D.C. is the capital of the United States.
What ought-statement has the same quality and force as this statement?
No, I don't admit this at all. Our experience of the world is not the world. Properly speaking we don't experience the world at all, but things, people, events and so on. What we say or think about the world refers to the world, but only the phrase "the world" stands for the world. Now, you've already admitted that the case with nature is exactly the same; in fact the world could be alternatively called 'nature', So there can be states of nature.
So, contrary to what you claim I would say that for the realist experience does not stand for things, rather it is of things. We speak of our experiences, but what we say does not stand for, and is not about, our experiences, rather it stands for and is about the things we experience. In any case the danger here is that of getting caught up in language; inconsistencies and ambiguities may always be found in anything that is said; that's why, for instance Hegel speaks about "the inverted world".
It is also true that without experience things do not appear, but from that it does not follow that things do not exist without experience. If it were possible to get completely discursively clear about all this philosophy would have been finished a long time ago.
That's a strawman. I never claimed that our experiences were always about our experiences. Indeed, I've said the exactly opposite at least twice-- if I thinking about my computer screen, I am not thinking about thinking about my computer screen. I'm just thinking of my computer screen. "Stand for" in my argument means the same thing as "of things" in yours.
My point is not about what the world or nature stands for, but rather that those instances are states of existence. Our thought (e.g. the world), is a state of experience, as opposed to what we are speaking about. I'm talking about how our experience relates to the world logically.
That despite the way our experiences represent accurately (or inaccurately), they are not the brute existence of the world, only what we thinking about them-- our discourse (as Landru would say).
She is a firefighter.
Therefore she ought to do whatever a firefighter ought to do.
This works because a firefighter is defined functionally. There is a function characteristic of a firefighter, and this is what it is to be a firefighter (telos and nature are one).
Or does it work? Discuss...
"Whatever a firefighter ought to do" tells us nothing. It doesn't describe what a firefighter does and its ethical significance. No doubt a firefighter ought to do what, but it doesn't say anything about how a firefighter is virtuous. It gets us nowhere in expressing the firefighter's ethical significance.
The function characteristic of being a firefighter is missing. Of course, those who understand the ethical significance of being a firefighter will know what it means to be virtuous firefighter, but in that case they know ethics. There is no "ought for is" (just "this firefighter ought to" ) and "nature" is irrelevant. Rather than a telos which defines what a firefighter is meant to do, there is an ethic which the world and the firefighter expresses.
Empty rhetoric. The firefighter may be said to express her telos.
On the contrary, I would say all states have a nature.
She doesn't have a telos. In being a firefighter, she is not ordained by logic to be or do anything. Her presence as a firefighter is a state of the world and logic doesn't tell us anything about what sort of firefighter (e.g. good, bad, moral, immoral, virtuous, not virtuous, etc.,etc.) she is. Only her actions can define that. And only the existence of our understanding gives us that knowledge. She not expressing her telos. She's expressing her ethic.
This is not empty rhetoric. You are just ignoring the distinction between telos and ethic.
We can say that, by definition, every person expresses the actions they take, their particular thoughts and movements-- but that's descriptive not normative.
I've tried to read what you write; but to be honest I can't make head nor tail of most it. You seem to be constantly contradicting yourself and disagreeing with things others have written more for the sake of it than anything else.
So. I think I'll leave it there for now.
I said all states have a nature - or form, if you prefer; I haven't said their natures may be adequately characterized by truisms or cliches. You continue, in accordance with your own preconceptions, to mischaracterize what I have argued. The axe you are grinding will never become sharp if you continue with the unproductive method you have been using.
Let's say you see an apple that's red and round. You say: "Ah, apples are red and round. That's the form/nature of apples." You are prejudiced against any apple which is not "red and round." They don't even make sense because impossible for apples to do anything else. Any use of nature of form in this way, no matter how qualified, always closes off discourse to possible meanings, to recognising things which fall outside the form/nature understood.
If I present a green, knobbly apple, you will dismiss it. You will say: "That's not an apple. Apples are only red and round." Assuming I managed to convince you that it is an apple, and you now say: "Apples have the form/nature of red and round or green and knobbly," the closure of meaning repeats. You won't recognise the spotty blue apple. And so on and so on. No matter how many different properties you add to the form/nature of apple, it will not be enough, for meaning expressed in one apple does not define what any existing apple can be.
I'm targeting this shutdown of meaning (which you don't seem to realise) your argument is performing by taking form/nature constitutive of things and states. It's not that I'm mischaracterising your argument, but rather that I'm talking about something, an assumption, an expectation, you haven't realised is there.
I wasn't saying you were arguing any of the crass and unethical examples in my last post, but rather that they function by using the idea/form meaning as constitutive of things and states.
Of course it follows that an uninformed following of an uncultivated nature is also possible but that would not be phronesis ( practical wisdom) it would be practical unwisdom.
Phronesis then is not a "shutdown of meaning" at all, but a virtuous, that is to say a refined and balanced, cultivation of meaning. There would be no room for prejudice, sexual, racial or otherwise for phronesis. Of course, again, I should stress that this does not mean anyone can actually be utterly free of all the prejudices that are inherent to their times; as with Aristotle's attitude to women and slavery, for example. That said, Plato probably did better than Aristotle in that regard; but no one is perfect!
Let's say I cultivated my nature. I understand my self to be someone who cares about a certain ideas, particular issues, has a certain out look on life, who will do certain things. I (supposedly) know what I will will be or do at anytime-- in my mind I am the "red-round apple." I have this nature, this instinct, and (supposedly) nothing else is possible.
But this is not true. I may end up being many other things than are understood in my "cultivated nature." Tomorrow I might wake up and be a Christian Fundamentalist, a Mystic or even a moral naturalist. I might even be wrong in my own appraisal of myself (I'm not, but it's possible) and be a Christian Fundamentalist, a Mystic or a moral naturalist right now.
I am not logically limited to the meaning of "red round apple," to my phronesis, to my "cultivated nature." I never will be.
You're making the mistake of thinking your cultivated nature is some determinate thing that you could conceptualize. It isn't, and you can't; all you can do is intuit in accordance with it, and try to cultivate it further in what your already more or less cultivated instincts tell you to be the right direction. And that 'right direction" is not any externally imposed imperative.
You are limited to your nature for the simple reason that you cannot be more than you are (and just in case you misunderstand this, that does not mean that you cannot in the future be more than you are now).
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
This is a downright contradiction; if you might be wrong about yourself then you have no warrant to say that you are not wrong about yourself.
This is correct-- but it's merely descriptive. It has nothing to with ethics or virtue. All your doing is saying there is now way I act. As a description of ethics of virtue is useless-- if I were to attack or my friends, eat nothing but lollies, throw other people's possession off a cliff without their permission-- it would merely say "That was my direction." Aristotle has more than this in mind when he refer to nature.
Only if you are confused about the relationship of possibility and actuality. Just because something might be, doesn't mean it is or isn't. Knowledge isn't always about showing something is logically necessary. Most of the time it's about what isn't logically necessary. Every morning the sun rises without it being necessary. Each morning is merely one possibility amongst many actualised.
For something to be possible, it doesn't mean it's incorrect or untrue. Indeed, it has no impact on it. The sun this morning is no less actual becasue it was a possible outcome.
The warrant for saying I'm not mistaken about myself does not come from an outside logical idea, such as possibility, but rather from awareness of my what I am. Even though it possible I could be a moral naturalist, I know I'm not. I'm aware of what moral naturalism and that it's not what my ethical philosophy means.
My mistake, I must have misunderstood. Can something be intuitive and falsifiable?
How are you describing "verifiable" in that case? It looks like you must mean, "it agrees with my intuition."
I think the swan analogy does work.
Q: How do you know all swans are white? A:We checked them all.
Q: How do you know that 2+2=4? A:Every time I perform the calculation, I get the same answer.
The second is an example of deductive or a priori logic.
It's a textbook example. You could perform the calculation until the heat death of the universe and get the same answer, which is why it is called a priori.
She is a firefighter.
Therefore she does whatever a firefighter does.
This works. But the obligation only has meaning when there is the possibility of not 'following one's function/nature.
And your example seems to have force because we do not define firefighters functionally. I have fought a fire, but I have never been a firefighter, because that is a matter of uniform, training, qualification, etc. And because one can wear the uniform and ride on the fire-engine and not do what one ought to do, the conclusion has moral force and does not follow from the premise.
She is a firefighter who broke her leg yesterday.
Therefore she ought not to do what a firefighter does for the next few weeks.
Hume's dictum saves obligation from becoming identical with logical/physical necessity.
No, it agrees with our observations and how we define them. If I place two objects, and then add another two objects; what other possible outcome could there be but to end up with four objects? If, for example I ended up with five objects what could I conclude about that? That I had been wrong about placing two objects each time and actually placed three there one time? Or that an extra object appeared out of nowhere, or someone put it there when I wasn't looking, or what?
That's why I said the swan analogy doesn't work, because the observation part of the verification is only a matter of checking to make sure that objects don't appear out of nowhere. But actually even they did that would not change the fact that I had placed two objects each time, and so 2+2=4 would not be falsified even in that case. As I said before it's easy to falsify the swan claim, but what could possibly falsify the math claim? I bet you cannot come up with any hypothetical scenario that could falsify it.
I guess so, since I don't see how math could be falsifiable. Of course particular theorems are falsifiable; but that is an entirely different matter. And math, or at least counting, is only verifiable empirically insofar as objects don't spontaneously pop into and out of existence mucking up our calculations. If, for example I counted out ten ten dollar notes and gave you the hundred dollars I owed you and asked you to confirm that it was indeed ten ten dollar notes by counting it again twice, and you confirmed it, but then later found that there were eleven ten dollar notes there; what would that show? Would it falsify 10x 10 = 100?
Quite right! But imagine this scenario: before becoming a firefighter, there was another choice. Her father was a firefighter, and had impressed on her the worthiness of the occupation and the rewards of public service. But her father's brother - the black sheep of the family! - had gone off and started a very lucrative casino. And he had offered her the chance of working as a croupier, but with a fast track to management. So she had to make a decision between money and glamour, and duty and public service.
Which of those ought she to do?
Yeah, I guess it only works insofar as the ought is understood non-morally.
Immediately what sprang to mind was the passage from A Treatise of Human Nature (which I have marked so it was easy to pop to):
From "3.1.1.27"
Quoting jamalrob
Even defined functionally it would seem to me that we can only get from the first to the second proposition by means of the conditional.
If she is a firefighter then she ought to do whatever a firefighter ought to do.
At least here we're following a logical form commonly accepted. But here the Humean point isn't against plugging in words or definitions as much as it is saying that the relation of the verb "ought" is of an entirely different kind from the relation of the copula -- and specifically that the latter is settled by means of founding the relations of objects or perceiving it by reason. (and said conditional's acceptance, pace Hume, is "derived" from the passions)
Saying that I would also say that moral realism could still be argued for using your approach. But I think that by pursuing the ought/is distinction you'd also be handicapping your account. Working from memory here I thought that was exactly what was so strong about After Virtue; he was calling into question the whole distinction by means of going back to Aristotle and pointing out that our concepts don't need to have this distinction, that it is, after all, a distinction (as opposed to a reality).
One could almost say that we understand "fact" in relation to our understanding of "value" -- that the latter defines the former, and the former the latter. So to speak of moral facts is to smash these together, but by using the language of the very distinction which is being put into question.
Quoting Moliere
Yes. I was just playing with the is-ought thing to see what happened.
It was a good opportunity to try to make my point clearer :D.
Anyway. Facts are true statements. Moral statements are treated as if they are truth apt.
For all practical purposes, true moral statements are facts.
From where I'm sitting, I'm continually being told we can be sure there are no moral facts, that it's actually all "preferences". Why? Because, the argument goes, moral facts are too weird to be true.
And, the reasoning goes, you can't say, "because ___ is true, then you Ought to X",if X concerns morality, because we know there are no moral facts. But, you can say, because ______ is true, then reason Ought to be slave to the passions.
That just doesn't look like it's consistent to me.
I'm saying that I'm not so sure that moral facts are too weird to be true.
That's basically the reasoning that ancient philosophers used to argue for virtue (moral excellence). Man ought to do what is characteristic of a man. Man is rational, wisdom is the good, wisdom is that which makes man morally excellent. Why? Just look at nature...
Predictions are truth apt. Sometimes they turn out to be true. But they are not facts. I buy a lottery ticket; I predict that I will not win anything, but it is not a fact that I will not win anything.
You ought to understand that not all statements are 'is' statements, but this does not entail that they are not true or false. So it is true that a firefighter ought to fight fires (in given circumstances), but it is not true that a slave ought to slave.
Now folks are likely to ask me to justify this pronouncement, and I am going to have to disappoint them. However, Hume tells me that any justification must begin with a moral premise that will commend itself to these folks as in some sense foundational - love thy neighbour, or whatever.
if I recall correctly, what I argued for earlier in the thread, is that math can't be falsified. I did point out that some philosophers claim it can be done.
Perhaps Hume's reasoning for claiming that reason is and ought to be slave to the passions is that he thinks there is no way that pure reason can justify any moral approbation or disapprobation.He believes it is only the passions that can cause us to disapprove of those acts which cause social disharmony. I would say it is moral intuition that leads us to approve or disapprove; but then perhaps that is what Hume means by passion. Haven't read him much, so I can't say...
There may be facts about what is universally approved and disapproved of by humans; well, at least by those humans that are motivated by social considerations and 'normal' levels of concern for others.
Would you call those 'moral facts'?
I also want to add that, as I think I already said, mathematical theorems can certainly be falsified. But it seems to be true that simple counting cannot be falsified. If I pick some number, say 1,379,289,463,826 and claim that it is a prime number; then you would agree, would you not, that that claim may be falsified (or verified)?
Hmmm. I don't know. Aren't you put in the position of just saying, "every time we test it, it works?" But, I haven't read anything by Imre Lakatos.
Seems to me that if moral facts, and if mathematical theorems are falsifiable, then moral facts would be, too.
I'm just repeating myself now. But the main points are, 1. is the possibility of moral facts all that strange? 2. Is the statement "you can't get an Ought from an Is", a universal, or does it only apply in certain cases? 3. Why falsifiability/verification? (and how to argue in it's defense?) 4.Is math itself even falsifiable?
How are you defining facts?
A purported fact is something which is posited as being the case. But as I noted before, there are both ostensive and discursive facts and they are not the same. So the set of ostensive or objective facts are those which are considered to be such independently of anyone's opinion. And the set of discursive facts are those which are, by inter-subjective agreement, purported to be objective facts. Some of these purported facts may turn out not to be objective facts at all. For example it is accepted that Aristotle existed for a certain time and at certain places at certain times, and engaged in certain activities, wrote certain works and so on, according to the evidence we are now in possession of. If new evidence comes to light, then some of the present discursive facts about Aristotle may need to thrown out.
Some facts like 2+2=4 are true by definition or are apriori self-evident, depending on your philosophical position, others like "Paris is the capital of France", although they involve the empirical world are quasi-tautological, or 'kind of' true by definition; I mean think about it: how could you possibly falsify the proposition that Paris is the capital of France?
Of course, there is much more that could be said (and no doubt has been) about facts; it is by no means a straightforward or settled topic.
This works. But the obligation only has meaning when there is the possibility of not 'following one's function/nature.[/quote]I really like that. It's like the converse of Kant's important
'Ought implies can'
This one says
'Ought implies can not'
'can not' here has a very different meaning from 'cannot'
I'd just like to point out that Hume never said those words. What he said was
[quote=David Hume]'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'[/quote]
So he's not saying it can't be done. He just says that if you do it, you need to explain how you did it, and why that's valid.
Lest anyone accuse Hume of trying to get oughts from is-es himself, let me point out that his 'tis necessary' and 'should' can be understood from the context to be instrumental oughts. They are things you need to do in order to get people to accept that your argument is a logical one. There is no moral obligation to do those things.
I'd say there's a difference between moral statements being truth-apt, and the assertion that there are true moral statements. It's possible for all moral statements to be false, for instance, even if they are truth-apt.
I can go with "facts are true statements"
I'm uncertain that moral statements are truth-apt, but it's not the point I wish to contend here.
It's the demonstration that there are true moral statements that seems to be lacking -- at least if we're using mathematics as our basis of comparison. No moral calculus has the same force as actual mathematical statements when it comes to accepting their truth. So it's at least reasonable to believe in facts while not believing in moral facts, and it's fair to ask the moral realist for some sort of demonstration that there are true moral statements which is at least comparable to the amount of force other, already accepted facts.
She intends to be a firefighter.
To be a fighter you have to get training at firefighters' school.
Therefore she ought to get training at firefighters' school.
Clue: it has been addressed by someone in the discussion already.
I think this is just the right kind of approach. The moral or ethical fact or facts is/ are based on the psychological or empirical fact or facts about individuals or people in general.
So, in a broader context than the 'firefighter' example, if someone wishes to live with, and live in harmony with, others then in order to fulfill that desire, they ought to treat others as they would wish to be treated themselves or as they honestly believe the other wishes to be treated.
If we accept the proposition that most people do wish to live in harmony with others, then it is a moral fact that most people ought to abide by the golden rule.
[i]She intends to live in harmony with others.
To live in harmony with others you have to treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself.
Therefore she ought to treat others as she would wish to be treated herself.[/i]
Some will question whether it's characteristic of a human being to want to live in harmony with others, so that the argument is seen to come down to her own personal desire. And this is probably just a different way of putting the objection that the derivation concerns merely instrumental oughts and not moral obligations. This is the sticking point.
It would be nice if it was.
This raises several associated questions for me:
Is there any way of coherently distinguishing between "instrumental oughts" and moral oughts?
Is there some requirement that moral oughts not be instrumental?
In the context of the example of living harmoniously with others and the like, must the achievement of a desired end be, or is it best characterized as, an example of instrumentality?
What other purpose could there be for moral injunctions than the achievement of some end or other? Or to put it another way; if moral oughts are to have any purpose at all, would that not make them examples of instrumentality, in any case?
Can we coherently think of moral injunctions as imperative and yet serving no purpose at all?
Or question whether that's the only way to live in harmony with others.
I think it is fair to say that most people basically want to live in harmony with others, but very often, due to various psychological issues, difficulties controlling negative emotions, lack of capacity for self-examination, the sub-conscious effects of scotomas and so on; people simply don't know how to achieve it, or find it very hard to do and only achieve partial success and so on.
Yes, you can live in harmony with others by exploiting them, lying to them, robbing them, raping them and their children, killing their friends and loved ones and in general by having no regard for their feelings at all....just as long as they don't mind.
:-$
I was only pointing out a possible logical exception to the reasoning jamalrob forwarded. Obviously, the weakness in all these formulations are the premisses of which he already highlighted the first. The second is logically also problematic.
Unfortunately, harmony does not come cheap. We don't have it because we will not pay for it, and so we moralise instead.
Nowadays, that is regarded as authoritarian.
I used to play music with a chap like that; he was an excellent violinist, but could not play with another, but had always to have others play with him. In the end, such authoritarian harmony cannot be sustained; a mutuality of listening is required rather than a one way affair. Authoritarianism is exactly the demand for harmony alongside the refusal to pay for it by attending to others.
I'd say that there's something important missing from such an account -- namely, that this is just not what "good", in the moral or ethical sense, means. The empirical desires of individuals or people in general are not always good. It's not just the extreme cases that you bring up later. Even in milder cases, people's desires are not always good.
To say that empirical desires predicates moral truths is to miss what we mean by moral obligation, exhortation, and even desire (something we can desire unto itself). So we can say that someone's desires is the sort of truth which morality is concerned with, but it would not make sense to say that this is a truth about morality, much less some kind of moral fact which differs from any other kind of fact.
How else would we know that the example "She intends to live in harmony with others" was itself the right example to use? And what if
"She intends to get revenge"
?
"She intends to break up their relationship"
"She intends to get them fired"
etc.
In some situations we may say the darker side of desire is itself good. But then, that would be right to the point too: We would only say that desire can be good if we first understood, even at a pre-conceptual level, what good is separate from the desires anyone might hold. And we do seem to believe that certain desires are good and certain desires bad, which may vary with circumstances and certainly varies between groups and individuals.
The reason I ask, is because it looked like you were asking, "what if there were moral facts that were determined by social considerations?" And I got the sense you were trying to sneak in some relativity, so that you were essentially asking, "what if there were facts, but they were relative to _____", and then asking, "would those still be facts?"
Think about math. Where did it come from? Is it present in the "real" world? Or is it just something that man made up..... did it essentially just spring up from man's brain?
It's common to treat them as if they're truth apt. This argument is basically from common sense.
[quote=Moliere]
It's the demonstration that there are true moral statements that seems to be lacking -- at least if we're using mathematics as our basis of comparison. No moral calculus has the same force as actual mathematical statements when it comes to accepting their truth. So it's at least reasonable to believe in facts while not believing in moral facts, and it's fair to ask the moral realist for some sort of demonstration that there are true moral statements which is at least comparable to the amount of force other, already accepted facts.[/quote]
The structure of the argument (which isn't mine, btw) is that we treat moral statements as if they're truth apt. Concerns over whether there are true moral statements falls into the same batch of skepticism about whether there are true statements of any kind.
It comes down to your theory of truth, basically. As long as you aren't a truth skeptic, you allow that at least one statement is true and this requires no demonstration. Its just logic. Beyond that... put forward your theory of truth and we can go from there.
As for treatment of the word fact: a slippery factor is that statement can mean proposition. So there's all sorts of hidden goodness there.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. The same force? If math statements (essentially facts about math= facts about morality) are the same types of facts as moral facts, then they would, by definition, have the same force.
If objective morality, then we would know when someone Is immoral (like we know when someone is bad at math)... But, does anyone have the right to "force" another to Be moral? That's another discussion. I certainly don't think I have the right to attempt to force anyone to be good at math.
Just like no one could force you to "do good math", no one could force you to "do good morals". Presumably, there are benefits for those who are good at math. And there are presumably benefits for those who are good at morality. Our society seems to have decided that morality is important. At least when it comes to making laws. But, even they can't "force" anyone. (and no one forces you to stay in any particular society). They can "provide" consequences for those who don't see the benefits of being moral.(would you argue there are no consequences for those who are bad at math?) And then we can also consider that there are the feelings of "guilt" and the concept of "conscience", assuming one believes they exist.
Consider the statement. It is moral to be moral. This is tautological so it has to be true it is also very robust from any mathematical analysis.
.
(of course, if a universal, then it also means that Hume WAS Wrong when he says, "Reason is, and Ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.")
Just because you know math, there is nothing binding about math. No one can say "You Ought to do math well." And I suppose, in the same vein, if objective morality, then we're no closer to saying, "You Ought to be moral."
I am pretty good at math... It's kinda silly to let all that knowledge about how to do good math go to waste. And I usually don't think about them, but there are consequences that come as a result of my doing math poorly.
Again, if laws are any indication, our society does seem to want people to think about whether or not their actions are moral, so much so that it is willing to create severe consequences for those who don't also take them seriously. (and don't forget guilt and conscience). So, if objective morality, Ought you be moral? I guess that's up to you to decide.
But, I'm still considering the possible existence of moral facts, and the possibility that morality is, in fact Objective.
I'm not sure what you are referring to here. Could you state which premises are "logically problematic", and why you think they are?
I certainly acknowledge your point that people's desires are not always good. People are very often "fucked up" as I think any reasonably intelligent person will acknowledge. The fact that it is generally agreed that desires and the acts they lead to range in kind from variably beneficial to oneself and others, to benign, to varying degrees of harmfulness shows that most people have a clear, if not precisely formulated, idea of what it means to flourish or live happily with others.
What else could "good" "in the ethical or moral sense" mean than this? So, I wasn't talking about the whole range of the empirical desires of people in general, but rather the underlying desire to live in harmony with others, which gets distorted by various empirical desires, which are expressions of dysfunctionality insofar as they consist in trying to exploit others to any degree, however subtle. That exploitative tendency is all too often quite unconscious. To exploit others for personal pleasure or gain is also to exploit oneself, in my view. In that I agree with Kant that others should always be treated as ends, not as means. To treat others as means cannot be anything other than to also treat oneself as means. I call this dysfunctional, because it can never lead to truly harmonious living.
So, if this is right it would seem that morality must be seen in functional, which is really the same as to say instrumental, terms. What plausible alternative conception of the good is there?
Well no, I was saying that moral facts are determined by general facts about human beings. Would you really want to deny that most people would wish to live, if they could, in a condition of harmony and mutual love with their fellow humans? Social animals, for the most part, apparently achieve something like this instinctively. But humans are 'fucked up' psychologically speaking; is that really controversial?
I don't understand the question. We are part and parcel of the real world, so if math comes from us it comes from the real world. It is certainly present in the real world insofar as the real world can be mathematically modeled with a great deal of success and practical application. If math "sprang form man's brain" then where did "man's brain" spring from? In any case, given that math is so successful in its practical applications, is it plausible to consider that it could be merely something that "man made up", accepting for the sake of argument that we even know what it means to say maths is merely made up?
There are X's and there are Y's. X's exist in the real world and Y's exist only in the human mind. If there were no humans, would Y's exist? Can Y's be universals, if they only exist in the human mind (or perhaps, can anything concerning Y's be facts?)
(if this isn't your meaning, then it's still relevant to the discussion).
The thing is, it seems like I'm being told (by most people who talk about morality, or maybe just by people who are already sure that morality IS subjective), that they know the possibility of moral facts is inconceivable (and they claim that if there is anything that might be called "moral facts", then because we already know they only exist in the human mind, they're subjective anyway). I'm asking.. "are you sure? how could you know that?" I'm still not convinced that the possibility of moral facts (not pretend moral facts, real moral facts.. universal facts) is any weirder than any other facts...
And of course, that leads to: what is the demarcation between "the things that only exist in the human mind", and "the things that exist in the real world"? (it looks like some people just say something like "well, if they're too weird to be true, then they must only exist in the mind". Or maybe it's more like, "if they're too weird then they Ought only to exist in the mind, and Ought not to be taken seriously".)
And another relevant question may be, if we decide that Y's "only exist in the human brain", then can we tell anything about Y by examining humans, their behavior, and the human brain?
Have you ever tried to make a list of X's and Y's?
Is it common sense to treat moral statements as if they are truth-apt, or is it common to perceive people to be treating moral statements as truth-apt when we believe they are truth-apt?
At the very least I wouldn't claim that common sense would use the term "truth-apt".
But even supposing they are truth-apt, I disagree with this:
Quoting Mongrel
Surely not. Suppose astrology. A reasonable person could simultaneously believe that there are, say, statements about plumbing, some of which are true and some of which are not, while simultaneously believing that all statements about astrology (or, perhaps, within astrology, just to be careful about self-reference) are all false without falling into global skepticism.
We can treat whole classes of statements as false without thereby being a global skeptic.
I don't have a position on truth. I find that conversation hard to follow. Also, I'm not trying to summon up propositions. I don't mean statement in any specific way.
How do these relate to the question of moral anti-realism/realism? I just don't see it.
Quoting anonymous66
I mean that when we justify a mathematical statement that it is more persuasive than when we justify a moral statement, and I also mean that when we justify a mathematical statement that people change their beliefs about math whereas when we justify a moral statement people do not change their beliefs about morality. They continue to believe what they thought before.
I'm sure there are instances where you can find a counter-example, so take that to mean "on the whole", rather than as some kind of universal. Usually argument suffices to change a person's beliefs about math, but argument usually does not suffice to change a person's belief about morals.
Now, that does not mean there are no moral facts, mind. But since you were mentioning mathematics, and saying that mathematical facts are just as strange as moral facts, I was trying to argue that it's consistent to believe in mathematical facts while disbelieving in moral facts because of the argument from queerness -- that they are not "just as strange", from certain (not horribly uncommon or abstruse) perspectives.
Quoting John
There is good, simpliciter, and then there's also moral good in terms of a moral agent's proper motivation, just off the top of my head.
I don't think morality must be seen as functional. There's a great deal more opinions on good and evil than instrumentalism.
But to the broader point about empirical psychology -- I think that disagreements about good will come about precisely in designating what is "fucked up", psychologically. These are very broad strokes to be talking in, and I don't think I'd attribute the desire to live in harmony with others as a universal desire, even though it is a plausible desire for some people to have. Exploitation is just too common to believe that this is an underlying, universal desire of human beings.
Which isn't to speak against goodness, per se -- only the formulation that goodness should rest on empirical psychology. This is to confuse what is the case with what ought to be the case, I would say. People should want to live in harmony with others, but they do not as we can see from their behavior. While I sometimes wonder if the fact/value distinction holds water at the ontological level, I believe that we should not lose sight of its strengths (namely, to guard against the belief that because things are the way they are, they are also the way they should be) -- which, perhaps there is a way I'm just not seeing, but it seems to me that if we ground morality in empirical psychology that we are at least in danger of committing the naturalistic fallacy.
What is the "it"?
Morality is morality is a tautology, sure.
Even so, I'd have to say -- even though mathematics can be argued to be tautological -- that I'm not sure I'd find a tautology very convincing on the point that morality as the same persuasive force as mathematics, given the argument I gave to anon earlier.
Doesn't this presuppose that everyone is convinced by mathematical statements? And even if convinced, what's to prevent someone from refusing to understand, or even being contrary and spiteful in math? You may laugh, but I have seen examples of both.
I suppose it may be true that everyone who is subjected to a correct mathematical statement IS convinced... and suggest that if objective morality, then all who are subjected to a correct moral statement would be just as convinced. But, it doesn't follow that they would have to follow through and act accordingly. Knowledge of the correct math or morals, doesn't mean a person will choose to follow through with that knowledge in a way that changes their actions. Is that really all that surprising?
I don't know where you got the idea that if objective morality, and if people know what is moral, then they WILL act morally. What gave you that idea?
But, I think we can say when someone is bad at math, and if objective morality, we can say when they are bad at morals. I think I said as much earlier in the thread.
I tell you that eating sugar cubes is immoral.
1. You can agree or disagree, in which case, you treated my assertion as if it's truth apt.
2. You can tell me that assertions of that kind can't meaningfully be said to be true or false. So I'll assume you're a moral nihilist.
1. is pretty common. In my experience, it's more common that 2.
Quoting Moliere
I think you said something like: assuming that moral statements are truth-apt, how do we know if any of them are true?
We basically make it up as we go.... with various fears and biases thrown in. If you want more than that, as I said... you'll have to lay out a theory of truth to work with. If you don't want to do that, I think you're stuck with the above answer.
If morality is objective, then we definitely don't make it up as we go. We are discovering or beginnig to understand what is the case about morality, in a way that is similar to the way man gradually began to understand math- that is my theory. Not sure if it holds water.
I still get the sense that the general feeling is "morality can't be objective, so we Must be making it up"
And that's what this thread is about. Can we know that morality Can't be objective? Is the entire argument really, "it's just too weird an idea to consider?"
Sorry, I didn't mean that morality is something we make up as we go. It's that question, "How do we know what is true?" There's a lot of on-going negotiating there no matter what sort of assertion we're struggling with.
The court of law could be seen as a symbol of the attempt to know truth in regard to morality.
There's a prosecutor and a defendant. They make their cases. The judge is a symbol of the heart, or emotion, which, having been stalled by the trial, makes a judgment tempered by the calm of that closed sanctum and informed by the facts, and guided by the Law.
In a real court room, the law is a constitution or some statutes. What is the Law symbolically? Don't know.
I'm inclined to say morality is objective and made as we go along. The significance of morality is always tied to the world. It's about how the world matters. We can't set pre-set an objective rule which is going to work in all situations no matter what's going on. With each moment the world is made and moral value is it's expression.
Yet, to be coherent, morality must be objective. The world can't have a significant which is true and false at the same time, in the same context. If the value of the world is such I ought not kill random strangers on the street, it does not work to then say "it's only an opinion" and that such killing is morally fine for someone else who think so.
Isn't it an empirical matter as to what is natural to humans, even if it is difficult, or even impossible to establish what it is precisely? Social animals are observed to live in far greater harmony than humans; but, of course this doesn't mean perfection; conflict is not entirely ruled out; its elimination is perhaps not possible, or even desirable. But the basic thing for humans is to possess good will, and I take that to mean a grounding desire to live in harmony with others, and to the best of one's ability not to exploit them. I can't see what 'the moral good" could possibly be for human beings other than something like this.
This is where I tend towards the idea of human flourishing that underpins virtue ethics. If it is a psychological fact that people cannot be genuinely happy unless they are able to live in healthy relationship with others, then it must be that fact that determines what is good for people, at least in regards to relationships with others.
Also, I am not as convinced as you seem to be that people's behavior shows that they do not want to live in harmony. I think it is more likely the case that everyone tries to live in harmony with others, but for various reasons some people are not able to achieve even a modicum of success at it, and psychological factors probably determine what each persons different notion of harmony is. Some people, for instance, entirely lack an ability to empathize with others, to imagine how they may be feeling; so their version of harmonious living is not likely to be the same as that of others who can empathize to varying degrees.
I don't think the fact/value distinction holds water at all; except as a useful epistemological distinction between modalities of knowing. Phenomenologically speaking, the world is always already suffused with value for humans, as I think Heidegger has convincingly shown.
I don't this musical analogy is so apt; and it isn't true of musical harmony in any case. There is no perfect harmony, and there is no interesting harmony, either musical or otherwise. that does not incorporate some dissonance.
I'm not too sure what you are driving at here 66. I haven't said that morality is subjective. I think there are objective facts about humans' moral natures; it's just that it is not something that can be so easily definitively established.
Would you say that it is an objective fact that social animals other than humans generally live in a more harmonious state than humans do? I do tend to think of morality in terms of something like "healthy functioning" and I do think that healthy functioning requires a robust moral intuition. Objective morality cannot be a matter of any set of rules, because all sets of rules cannot but be arbitrary.
Regarding rules. I suppose it depends on what you mean by rules. Are there mathematical rules? If so, they're definitely not arbitrary.
I doubt there is an agreed on terminology, but I know Pojman suggests a set of objective moral principals that are not arbitrary.
Of course not. It would only have to be the case most of the time to show how one could simultaneously believe that mathematics is factual, while morality is not. It would be reasonable to maintain.
Quoting anonymous66
I'm not talking about, in your case, how people behave, but what they believe. Also, just to note again, I'm more attacking moral facts than I am attacking objective morality.
Not exactly.
Using mathematics is the basis of comparison, since that was brought up prior as a point of comparison for queerness, I maintain that it is reasonable for a person to maintain that mathematical facts are not queer, while rejecting moral facts because they are queer. One need not accept the existence of moral facts simply because they accept mathematical facts, and they can still be rational while both believing this to be the case, and believing this to be the case because of the argument from queerness of moral facts.
Sure, I can accept that. I suppose you could consider that I'm suggesting a premise: Moral facts, if true, would be just as weird as mathematical facts. It's not exactly something I could prove. But there are responses to the argument from queerness.
I assume you don't mean that they're straight. But... philosophy of math is most definitely queer... I mean... really bizarre.
Well, queerness is in the eye of the beholder, 8-) Quantum mechanics is pretty weird, too.
Very well we could restate the tautology.
"Being moral is moral."
My main point was that moral facts, relative to syntax, may be said to exist.
But upon reflection I realize that this would simply mean that moral tautologies would be facts sure, but what people debate is moral semantics.
If there are moral facts the implication of moral facts would simply mean that tautologies are equally valid not mutually exclusive.
Say for example we state the moral fact.
"Being good is good"
It is good to be good no matter what we decide the term good ought to mean.
"You ought to do good, but you will not."
I drop an apple into an empty barrel. I then drop another apple into that same barrel. If you look into the barrel immediately afterward, you will see two apples, which, I gather, would confirm that 1+1=2.
I wait a month and then looked into the same barrel. Both apples have rotted away. There are zero apples there. 1+1 is not 0, so we say that two apples have been subtracted in the meantime. But why did we decide to interpret the rotting away of the two apples as "subtraction?" Beforehand, I would have assumed that "subtraction" meant "taking apples out of the barrel." Presumably, we interpret it that way because, if we did not interpret it that way, then 1+1 would be 0, and we all know that that isn't true.
It was an attempted reference to the notion that due to the 'hyper-subjectivity' of modern ethical discourse, we can't even agree on which key to sing in. And surely, whilst harmony involves dissonance, dissonance can only be effective if it resolves into consonance, unless you're into abstract modernism, which is just noise - and hence my point!
It structures the way we understand - that is why it is an a priori discipline. We see the world through reason, maths, and language - it provides the structure through which we organise our thoughts and actions. So it is neither in the world, or solely in the mind - it is in some sense prior to that division of 'mind and world'.
I know that is a very hard idea get, but it has to do with naturalism and representative realism. Most people nowadays - western culture in general - are naturalistic and assume a stance of representative realism, deeply influenced by John Locke (even people who have never heard of Locke). This worldview comprises a mental model built around 'intelligent subject in domain of objects'. Within that worldview, reality is (roughly) divided up into the mental (in the mind, mental operations, ideas) and the external (in the world, 'out there', objective.)
The point is, this whole model is also in the mind! But it is in the mind in such a way that we can't get outside of it. (This is, in general terms, the basis of Kant's analysis of reason.) So in this understanding, maths is neither purely 'in the mind' or 'in the real world' - it structures the nature of our understanding of the world in such a way that we see the world through it.
Some modern ethical views are subjectivist and others are objectivity; so I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at here. I would agree with you that modern ethical discourse is mostly rationalistic, and that whether that rationalism is inclined towards logical or empirical analysis it is exclusive, and does not take serious account of, intuition. What is given in intuition has come to be almost universally seen as consisting in nothing more than the socially constructed reifications of linguistically or discursively generated concepts. I do think that is a one-sided view.
I don't agree with you about dissonance and modern music though; I think there is some wonderful modern music, and the idea that dissonance must resolve into consonance is a very Eurocentric view that comes from the structure of the major and minor scales. If you play the same notes of C Major on the piano, for example, but starting on different degrees of the scale you will be exploring the Modes ( Ionian (I) 5.1.2 Dorian (II) 5.1.3 Phrygian (III) 5.1.4 Lydian (IV) 5.1.5 Mixolydian (V) 5.1.6 Aeolian (VI) 5.1.7 Locrian (VII)) and you can here that they do not "resolve into consonance" in anything like what we are used to with most modern popular music. ( there is also a whole other set of modes that can be derived form the harmonic and melodic minor scales). Some of Bach's and Beethoven's, to take just two prominent examples, most harmonically adventurous music (listen, for example to Beethoven's Diabelli Variations) is not characterized by the kinds of resolution I think you are referring to. For another example, there is Debussy's music which uses, among other things harmonies derived form whole-tone scales wherein there is never any resolution of the kind that is so familiar to most people's ears, which is dependent on half-tones.
Also what you say about resolution does not apply to traditional Indian or Middle Eastern music or modern Jazz ( which among other 'Blues' methodologies, explores the modes to find new harmonic ideas). On the other hand, in all good music there is some kind of an overall unity; but I would say that unity consists precisely not in resolution, but in the interplay, which does not necessarily have to resolve in any particular way, or at all, between dissonance and consonance.
Maybe that's some of my hesitancy with the tautological approach that mars is aiming at, too. Even if true, it leaves much to be desired because it doesn't get at (what seems to me, at least) to be the point.
But maybe you had a further thought that I'm not really hearing? Or perhaps my initial thought strikes you as being too dismissive?
This is probably irrelevant to the discussion, but what you say here is not true, unless you want to say that atonal music and unpitched percussion music are not music and that you cannot play music with an unaccompanied non-chordal instrument.
EDIT: I see that you described "abstract modernism" as "just noise", so I guess you would indeed say that atonal music is not music. I don't think that withstands scrutiny, but I won't pursue it.
Quoting Moliere
I'm not one to defend the notion of moral facts, or of mathematical facts for that matter. (The latter because exceptions such as rotting apples and breeding rabbits "don't count".)
Nevertheless, I think moral talk is meaningful and connected to the world. After Hume, is is clear that one needs to start with one or more moral premise, just as mathematics begins with commands - "let x be... "
So one needs a starting premise that lays out the domain of discourse. So the domain is human conduct, you and I acting in the world, and it starts with the division of the individual. It is about intention (will) directed towards the future, and about the conflict of will that arises, such that morality is _ I hesitate because it is liable to drag us into a byway - unnatural.
Briefly, the nature of the beast is, for example, that it nurtures its young, or that it eats its young according to the sentiment of the moment, but does not seek to operate on itself to do one or the other as the good. Whatever a beast does is whatever it deems to be good. The human condition is that it is not good to eat your children, even if you are very hungry, and despite their nutritional value.
So one has to say that the nature of morality is unnatural in that it contradicts human nature - as a beast.
So this is how I start to unpack my statement of principle and set out the realm of discourse of morality, in a way that I think coincides with the way we generally moralise. In this sense, I am seeking to be descriptive and definitive rather than argumentative of moral discourse.
You are quite right though, that there is as yet no moral content, that informs or proves what is the good, it merely establishes that it is not what you want. It is, as it were, a preface to moral discourse that requires filling out with a positive content - that the good is what God wants, what nature as a whole wants, or humanity in general or in the particular other wants, or some other thing.
It's a matter of opinion whether atonal music is good or bad music (I believe in objective standards), but to say that it is simply not music at all seems to be just a casual way of speaking. It's a figure of speech, as in, "Call that a sausage? No, this is a sausage."
So, I could argue that atonal music is not music, in the same sense that thrashing about in the water is not swimming, and speaking in tongues is not discourse.
Well then, allowing that playing tonal music together requires agreement on a key, it does not follow that such agreement requires an authority beyond the authority of the agreement. We can agree on a key without that it is your key or my key. One uses a tuning fork, but it does not exert it's authority to demand that you be in tune with it, it is a simple tool.
What are people's views on Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique? As I understand it, there is no home key in that form.
At the time (1920s) plenty of people protested that it was not music. I think the majority of musicians these days accept it as music.
Actually, that's a good point andrew. Some of the most unconventional Jazz improvisation (Ornette Colemn, for one, springs to mind but I could be wrong) utilizes the chromatic or whole-tone scale, and the harmonies are determined solely by what sounds right, and probably structural ( on the piano at least) contiguities. I like to improvise on the piano this way; and I often ask myself "But is this really music or am I kind of cheating?" But if it sounds good, then that's a sufficient criteria to deem it music, right? Of course, there's no accounting for taste, though...
;).
Do I detect a hint of sarcasm?
Actually I think there is nothing wrong with pleasure, per se; but that the problem lies with attachment to pleasure, and the neurotic search for gratification that it motivates.
Not even that. Attachment to pleasure is fine, sometimes even to a point of a neurotic search for gratification. People function with obsessive hobbies all the time.
Problems only lie in the wider context, in how a search for pleasure is harms themselves or others.
Yeah, attachment to pleasure is fine, until you become addicted to it, until you can't get it, or you tire of what pleasures you, or you kill someone because they are depriving you or standing in your way, or you objectify someone and think of them, even if only subconsciously, as being there for your pleasure, and so on. Sure, if no problems arise from attachment to pleasure, then there is no problem with it; that much is taulogically true.
I saw a sensational free jazz concert one evening (decades back), when a friend had a spare ticket. It was totally improvisational, not "jazz standards", but a virtual cacophony of rythms and sonic experiments by a band I've never heard of before or since called The Art Ensemble of Chicago.
It was a one-of-a-kind experience and it made me realise how powerful 'free jazz' could be.
But in terms of listening to recorded music, or going to the kinds of performances I generally want to see, I have never been able to dig avante garde. It is no doubt a matter of taste, but it also involves judgements as to what constitutes artistic expression, what music really is, or isn't. And that again is analogous to questions of ethical judgement. In fact I think, like other critics of avant garde, that it subverts the artistic endeavour by erasing the distinction between what is artful, and what is not. I suppose, to utilise some of Apokrisis' terminology, it tries to 'do away with constraints' - and in so doing, it does away with meaning. I feel the same way about a lot of abstract impressionism and many other facets of modern culture. (Call me a dinosaur, I've had worse.)
I like some twelve-tone music, such as Berio and Boulez. The claim that it's not music is not one I take seriously.
However, I think its important influence was an expansion of the tools available to composers in terms of technique and expressive range, so that composers now feel free to switch between tonality and atonality even within the same work. Examples might be Nørgård and Penderecki. Certainly, many contemporary composers make great use of atonality or unusual modal structures in a way that is deeply indebted to the twelve-tone movement.
I don't think the technique was all it was cracked up to be, and I can't imagine that music will ever dispense with tonal centres entirely, as some of those composers liked to imagine.
But ethical judgments matter even if only one of you thinks it's ethical. Something will happen, or not happen, and it will count. I remember when I was 16 years old being told by an ardent Communist that some deaths of bourgeois lackeys were a practical necessity. That's not what I call music.
Of course, here we may just be prattling about art and ethics, signifying nothing. But judgments that lead to decisions do matter.
I have heard of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, but I can't remember where from or what their music sounds like. I must admit that when I listen to music, it is usually some form of rock music ( I actually love some music related to the punk and and heavy rock or metal genres; whether proto, pre or post and even some electronic, techno or trance music as well). On of my favorite music of all time is that produced by Radiohead. Or I might listen to one of the older classical composers (I mean up to and including Shostakovitch). While I can appreciate the sheer intellectual inventiveness of some of the most experimental modern 'serious' music, and some of the more intuitive inventiveness, athleticism and rhythmical excellence of the most free jazz; those are not what I usually choose to listen to for musical pleasure or inspiration. I wouldn't generally choose to sit down and listen to Schoenberg or Cage for example for either pleasure or inspiration.
Where I would diverge from your opinion is that I like some of the Abstract Expressionist and other modernist works, and I think the constraints are always there in the form of tonal, chromatic and spatial relationships. The visual arts are interestingly different to music in that there are no strictly formalized structural rules to begin with. The constraints in the visual arts are more to do with the natures of the materials; the grounds, pigments, mediums and so on; and of course the subject to be presented. There is always a subject to be presented in even the most 'abstract' works.
An interesting analogy to free music to look at, in terms of the idea of working under less constraint, is free verse. Milton's Paradise Lost for example, generally considered to be one of the greatest poems in English, is, interestingly, written in free verse form.
Those parameters are (1) the frequency of a reference note - say A4=440Hz, and (2) the standard distance between notes, which in a well-tempered system is determined as a frequency ratio between adjacent notes equal to the twelfth root of two (referred to as a 'semitone').
Sliding and non-fretted instruments, and voice, need not be limited to that, but instruments with keys are, although a very skilled player can 'bend' the notes on a wind instrument.
Bending aside, every note playen in an atonal piece within a well-tempered framework has a frequency of the form 440 x 2^(k/12) for some integer k.
Indian music uses quarter-tones, but that just doubles the richness of the framework, so that any notes of the form 440 x 2^(k/24) can be used. There is still a constraining framework.
I wonder what an 'absolutely free' performance would sound like, in which notes of any frequency were played.
I'll try to defend this post against potential protestations of irrelevance on the grounds that it shows that even when we think we are being completely free of frameworks, we often find that we are still within a framework that we hadn't noticed. That can apply to morals as much as to music.
Yes, the kinds of basic constraints you are referring to here seem to be analogous to the kinds of constraints operating in visual art practice I spoke about. For example, the nature of any musical instrument is constrained by natural harmonics and the way they are modified by the materials the instrument is constructed of, just as the natures of pigmented media are constrained by natural chromatics, and the physical properties of the materials that constitute the medium. The difference though is that in the case of the former the harmonics are more obviously also modified by the form of the construction, in addition to the properties of the material of construction.
I haven't studied Milton, in fact this discussion is making me painfully aware of the many thousands of things that I haven't studied. But I think I'll stick by my general aversion to modernism. Not that I am going to join the Amish, or anything, but sometimes, I can sympathise.